Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies by Ross King

As a girl I scoured the public library for art books. My love of the Impressionists, especially Monet, came early. I requested Ross King's new book on Claude Monet as soon as I saw it on NetGalley. 

Although I was very familiar with Monet's paintings, especially those in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I knew very little about his life.

King focuses on Monet's later years as he struggled to realize his Grande Decoration during WWI while dealing with failing eyesight. The trials of the artistic life, how genius copes with human limitations, and the horrendous impact of WWI on France is vividly portrayed.

Nympheas, Japanese Bridge,
1918-1926, Claude Monet, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Although it took me a few chapters to get into the book I became swept up in Monet's story. I recall complaining, "I can't stop now, Monet's undergoing eye surgery!" 

Claude Monet Water Garden in Giverny, photo Ariane Cauderlier

The book begins in April, 1914 with Monet's dear friend Prime Minister Clemenceau coming to Giverny, the rustic hamlet where Monet built an 'earthly paradise'--the gardens now famously preserved in his paintings.  

L'Agapanthe, Monet 1920-22

The concept of Monet's Grande Decoration was born after the death of his son Jean in 1914. His water lily pond would be recreated through a series of massive paintings to be displayed in an oval room. He spent years obsessed with capturing ephemeral beauty. Monet promised Clemenceau he would give the water lily paintings to France. 

"Many people think I paint easily, but it is not an easy things to be an artist. I often suffer tortures when I paint. it is a great joy and a great suffering." Claude Monet

Cataracts and blindness plagued Monet and compromised his belief in himself. He knew what he wanted to achieve but felt his limitations. 

Monet was a passionate man who would rave at life's limitations. He was his own worse critic, destroying canvases that he considered failures. He stalled handing over the paintings. As long as he had his great work he had a reason to live. The delay strained his friendship with Clemenceau. 

At his death in 1926 the paintings were put on display in the Orangerie at Tuileries. Go on a virtual visit to here.

Monet the man and the artist was brought to life in King's book and I have a better appreciation of the impact of WWI on France.  

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Mad Enchantment
Ross King
Bloomsbury
Publication Date: Sept 6, 2016
$30 hard cover
ISBN:9781632860125

War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans

The "battle between the transcendent" and the "memory of death and destruction" is eloquently shared through the life of Urbain Martien, the author's grandfather, in War and Turpentine, a book called a "future classic" by the Guardian.

Thirty years after inheriting his grandfather's papers Stefan Hertmans finally read the memoirs. Urbain's early life in poverty drove him into the Ghent steel mills as a teenager. Then came the sudden epiphany that he, like his father who restored church murals, must be an artist. Urbain joins the Flemish Military Academy and is called up to service and into the horror of The Great War.

"How far I have strayed from what I once hoped to become."

Germany wanted a quick route to Paris, and neutral Belgium was in the way. When Belgium resisted, the German army invaded, murdering whole villages. The Rape of Belgium left 6,000 civilians dead, 1.5 million refugees, and 120,000 civilians used as forced labor. The military lost 100,000 or more dead.

Hertmans' retelling of his grandfather's story is in three sections: the author's personal memories and his grandfather's early life; the brutal war years; the post-war years as Urbain cobbles together a life. The war section, for me, was most powerful with its vivid descriptions of death and suffering, the piles of human waste in the trenches, Urbain's honorable bravery and multiple injuries, the absurd carnage of human lives.

                       "We're all cannon fodder together."

And yet there are moments when Urbain sees nature's beauty, the artist's eye still seeking out the inspiration of color and form and association.

After the war Urbain cobbles together a life: love, loss, and loneliness; the frailty of the body; and the accomplishment of one great original painting.

"What mattered most to him was something he could not share with others. So he painted trees, clouds, peacocks, the Ostend beach, a poultry yard, still lifes on half-cleared tables--an immense, silent, devoted labour of grief, to put the world's weeping to rest in the most everyday things. He never painted a single war scene."

The novel is an international best seller.

I received a free ebook through Penguin First to Read in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

War and Turpentine
Stefan Hertmans

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Eric Larson

On a beautiful morning with a calm sea, it took eighteen minutes for the Lusitania to sink.

Of all the stories of the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, it is the image of a woman giving birth in the frigid waters that haunts me. And how one surviving passenger, a child, always carried the fear that the woman was his pregnant mother. I am angry to think how nothing was done to protect this family. Instead, information was withheld with secret hopes that American deaths would bring the United States into WWI.

There are certain synopsis of history that we hear over and over again, easily memorized history in one sentence. People who lived the history didn't need more to conjure up stories and memories about it. The one-line history gets passed on through the media or in books or in the classroom to following generations who have no further information. Part of my reading life is finding out the story behind these snippets.


I knew the passenger ship Lusitania was sunk by the Germans, and there were Americans on board, and that people were appalled. I heard that the sinking brought America into WWI. I vaguely thought the ship was American with mostly American passengers. I had heard that Elbert Hubbard was among those who died in the shipwreck.

I chose to read Eric Larson's Dead Wake through Blogging for Books because I enjoyed his Devil in the White City and because I wanted to learn more about the Lusitania.

It was interesting, then tense, then harrowing, then enraging, and finally enlightening. Larson is a masterful story teller.

We get to know the passengers on that fatal voyage--the charming, the famous, the wealthy, the captain and crew. And we also get to know the U-20 commander, his dedication and skill, and how the horror of seeing the disaster he wrought upset him but did not deter him from doing his duty for his country. Meanwhile, President Wilson was a broken man after the loss of his wife, detached and depressed until he meets the vibrant and sympathetic widow who revives his hopes of love and companionship.

Larson exposes several myths of the sinking: the early belief that two torpedoes hit the ship, and that Capt. Turner was at fault.

Why wasn't Cunard warned about the U-20's previous hits and location? Why didn't Britain offer protection to the Lusitania? Why was Captain Turner not warned to take the safer northern route?

Churchill had written a letter to the Board of Trade commenting that it was important to attract "neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes of especially embroiling the United States with Germany." The British military were decoding every message sent by U-20 and knew where it was.
The Lusitania was in the right place at the right time, a sitting duck. And yet so many things could have prevented the tragedy.

As for the revision of my received history: The Lusitania was a British ship of the Cunard line, like the Titanic. Like the Titanic it was thought to be too big to sink, plus it was so fast it could outrun a sub. 114 American citizens lost their lives, including millionaire playboy Alfred Vanderbuilt who died a hero's death assisting other passengers to safety. The ship was carrying secret military cargo. It was sunk by a German submarine. It took two more years before America entered the war and meantime the Germans stepped back from attacking passenger ships for fear of involving America.

*****

A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.  Elbert Hubbard.

That quotation was in my Sixth grade English textbook. I memorized it and took it to heart. It was all I knew about Elbert Hubbard for a long while.

When my grandfather Lynne O. Ramer passed I was given his library. It included a complete set of Hubbard's Roycroft set Little Journeys into the Homes of the Great. The series was published in 1916 after Hubbard's death. I have carted it around for 40 years. My grandfather collected books in the 1920s, even though he had little money and was working in the kitchen to pay his way through Susquehanna College (now University). Hubbard was one of the most famous men in America when Gramps was growing up. When my grandfather was ten Hubbard set sail on the Lusitania.

There are only two respectable ways to die; One is of old age. the other is by accident. All disease is indecent. Elbert Hubbard

Elbert and his wife Alice retreated to a Boat Deck room and closed the door. He followed his own advice: "We are here now, some day we shall go. And when we go we would like to go gracefully." Their bodies were never identified.

Learn more about the Lusitania at

http://www.rmslusitania

https://wwionline.org/articles/complex-case-rms-lusitania/

Learn more about the book at

http://eriklarsonbooks.com/the-books/dead-wake/

http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/98118/dead-wake-by-erik-larson/9780307408877/

http://www.npr.org/books/titles/390474945/dead-wake-the-last-crossing-of-the-lusitania

I received a free book through Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson

"I may be progressive, but I would never hire a pretty teacher." 

On the eve of WWI, with the death of her scholar father, Beatrice must find her way in the world and accepts a position as Latin teacher in Rye, England. Used to traveling across Europe and staying in top-notch hotels, she is reduced to three pair of gloves, a shabby room, and one hot bath weekly. To keep her position she must battle prejudice and ancient class snobbery. Beatrice is intelligent and highly educated. And vastly under valued and unappreciated. Her new world is peopled by two young men, cousins and best friends although opposites, grand dames who rule society, and powerful titled men willing to do anything to protect their "good name".

I was swept into the novel, in love with the Austenesque quips and nods. "A country living room holds no terrors for me," Beatrice remarks. Beatrice has much in common with Fanny in Mansfield Park in her worthiness and powerlessness. A proposal scene matches the ridiculous Mr. Collins or Rev. Elton. True love grows between friends who are perfect equals. It begins a novel of social manners, which I dearly love to read.

Then war breaks out. The horrors of war come to reside in their village. Men are pressured to enlist by white feather-bearing girlfriends, fathers, and career mentors. Grand houses are prepared for hospitals, but only to house convalescents of the best quality. The city provides for Belgium refugees including a professor and his beautiful daughter Celeste, who are much lionized. While Beatrice is socially alienated, Celeste is smothered with dresses and invitations.

The final indignation comes when the publisher refuses to allow Beatrice to write the book about her father's work and gives her manuscript to a male writer. She had hoped to earn a little income from the book and begin a career as a writer.

Although very entertaining, the plot develops slowly as Beatrice endeavors to make it on her own. In the middle the plot leveled off and was not progressing, but part four was a roller coaster ride. The role of women, class prejudice, and the ill conceived idealization of war are addressed. Additionally, darker aspects of life 100 years ago appear when Celeste's victimization in war makes her a social pariah and the deep bound between two college chums brings forced separation, with tragic results.

The world of 1914 is presented in detail and will delight historical fiction fans. Set 100 years after Jane Austen, and 100 before the present day, one can note that class and gender issues have advanced more in the last 100 years than in the previous century. The Great War altered the world irrevocably, for better and worse.

I received a free ARC from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Advance praise:
Annie Barrows (The Truth About Us and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society) : "At once haunting and effervescent...as lingering and lovely as a long summer sunset."
Paula McClain (The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun) :"...[a] radiant follow-up to Major Pettigrew's Last Stand..vividly drawn...like a Jane Austen for our day and age, she is that good..."

The Summer Before the War
by Helen Simonson
Random House
Publication: March 22, 2016
$28.00 hard cover
ISBN: 9780812993103

New Hanky Finds: WWI Souvineers

At the Royal Oak Flea Market I found some hankies that had to come home with me.

 This souvenir handkerchief includes hand stenciled poppies and "Keep Smiling," "For Ever," and "Remember Me" slogans. It is silk with a machine attached lace edge.

 WWI soldiers sent these handkerchiefs home to sweethearts, mothers and sisters.

Remarkably fine embroidery of the flags of Great Britain, France, and Brussels grace this fine silk handkerchief.

I have a small collection of these hankies.

Memories of Working at Standard Steel Works 100 Years Ago

In 1962 my grandfather Lynne O. Ramer wrote a list of 'remember whens" which was published in his hometown newspaper, the Lewistown Sentinel in Pennsylvania.

Gramps was a teenager when he worked at the Standard Steel Works in the Machine Shop during WWI when the works was booming. Gramps went on to college at age 16.

Lynne O. Ramer, age 15 in 1919, with his uncle Charles Smithers. Charles married Annie Verona Ramer, sister of Lynne's mother and the Smithers helped raise Lynne after his mother's death. Here he is wearing his FIRST long pants!

Gramps wrote,

Remember when... 

• You walked to the paymaster’s window and got an envelope filled with gold eagles and silver, with an occasional $2.50 “gold dime” in it too?
• You walked to the company store to draw the “balance” of your pay—after “early deductions” for food and canvas gloves and shoes?
• You got the first check, with accounting attachment, perforated for easy tearing? Then cashed the stub and threw the check in the waste basket. (Only for you to be called in to the bank later!)
• You got an IBM stamped statement, full of cryptic deductions, and found that SS meant “safety shoes” and not “Social Security?”
• You began to get a check and stub full of so many holes that the remaining cardboard was wobbly?
• When your envelope was filled with scrip which you hoped the grocer would honor?
• A smiling lass from accounting handed you the sealed envelope, marked “strictly personal,” and you’d anxiously tear it open to see if it were a raise or a dismissal?
• When your check was withheld until all final attendance reports, grades, etc., were completed?
• When you received by mail your first Social Security check, and wondered if it would last until the next one arrived?
• When you got one for $1,000,100 and it should have been key-punched $100?
• Can you foresee the time when the deductions will exceed the earnings? If you do—then you’ll REMEMBER!

I researched those gold Eagle coins for my post on the 1866 arithmetic book which you can read here. But the $2.50 "gold dime" was new to me. I learned it was an Indian Head Quarter Eagle worth $2.50 and minted between 1908 and 1929. Gramps was born in 1905 and in the 1920s was at college and starting his career. It is hard to believe he was paid in GOLD and SILVER, which had he been rich enough to save could have paid his grandson's way through college!

Company scrip was given in lieu for cash. The employee used it at the company stores.

I would guess the withholding of pay until all grades, etc. were in happened when he taught in the public schools.

Gramps wrote to Ben Meyers of the Lewistown Sentinel who published his articles in his column, We Notice That.  Here Gramps remembered his time at the Standard Steel Works:

Mill Workers have Fun, But Sometimes It Backfires 

He was an ancient mill worker
Who had a tale to tell
About the pranksters he had met
And how their victims fell 

(Tune of Ancient Mariner)

‘Don’t We Have Fun?’ 

“I’m not naming names or telling places, but all the events I’m about to tell you, Ben, really happened,” said the vet. “I’ve worked in the local mills in the years gone by. They could have happened there but none of these ended in any tragic note like those out of town where I was employed. Industries frown upon pranks, but still after all these years the pranksters play merrily on. I’ll mention some that backfired and somebody got hurt as a result. 

"Everyone, at some time or another, has gone in search of “left-handed monkey wrenches” and “outside wire cutters” or other various odd tools, he continued. Well here’s an incident that wasn't so funny: 

"In a steel works one noon hour a very heavy sleeper napped in a steel borings [remains from drilling or shaping steel] charging sled [or car]. His pals gleefully heaped boring about him, leaving only his face uncovered. The high-powered crane operator tied onto the sled and carried it to the open hearth. Of course the widow was given a block of steel to be placed in his coffin, but in their dreams the pranksters long remembered the nightmarish screams of the poor victim as the borings and he slid into the molten steel open hearth furnace. 

"A tablespoon of dynamite under a chunk of clay, a 16-pound sledge and a challenge, “bet you can’t hit it the first time,” carried many a boy apprentice high or buried a sledge hammer splinter into his innocent palm. Once was enough for the first lesson. 

"An electrified third rail, a nearby corrugated iron roof. And “see who can shoot the farthest stream from this hose” usually left a writhing victim in a certain steel plant. 

"At noon hour, a sleeping apprentice on a cast iron tool chest, a smoldering oily canvas glove, one deep breath and the nap ended quite suddenly as he ran blindly into a bull gear [gear that drives smaller gears on a machine] that stripped the shirt from his back. It could have stripped the arm from the shirt or the head from the boy. 

"This one was not so tragic. The new teen-aged clerk was told by a senior clerk to “go down to the yardmaster and bring back a way-bill stretcher.” He went. The yardmaster told him to call his boss and ask “for the rate on a carload of feathers loose.” He did. Over the phone he could hear his boss rustling through the rate-book pages when suddenly—the receiver clicked off."

No wonder Gramps was determined to get a college education! I am assuming Gramps was the 'teen-aged clerk in the last story. 

During WWII Gramps worked at the Chevrolet Aviation Engine Division of GMC in Tonawanda-Kenmore, N.Y. After the war he was a stress engineer of frames, suspensions, brakes, etc. on Chevy trucks in Detroit, Mich.

1952 when Gramps worked at Chevy Avaiation

He also taught at Hartwick Academy in Cooperstown, NY and at Kane High School in Kane, PA. He received his MA in Mathematics at University of Buffalo and taught trig and calculus at Lawrence Institute of Technology in Southfield, MI. He also was a Deacon in the Episcopal church!

Kane High School yearbook

War Wounds: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

I have just read The Sun Also Rises, which I last read perhaps 30 or more years ago, and which I first encountered as a girl, perhaps 12 years of age, when I watched the movie version on Bill Kennedy's Showtime. As a girl I was moved by the story without understanding it. As a teen I bought the book and read it quite a few times. Now it is 2014 and I am over sixty, and the book seems profoundly sad and I understand it is not a love story, it is a war story.

For those who have not read this classic book, it is the story of men who had been soldiers in World War I and a woman who had been a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse. They meet up in Paris and plan to meet again at the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. In the interim, Jake is joined by his friend Bill for a fishing trip in Spain, a time of lyrical and idyllic beauty.

Lady Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes fell in love when she was his nurse during the war. Brett's first love died in the war. Jake's wounds prevent him from normal sexual function. Brett flits from one joyless, meaningless encounter to another, while depending on Jake to pick her up when things go wrong. Brett is engaged to a bankrupt drunkard who is very aware of her alliances with other men.

Their friends include Robert Cohn, whose Jewishness was targeted at Princeton so that he took up boxing. Robert was Jake's friend before he fell for Brett, who takes him up for amusement then discards him. Robert's jealous stalking of Brett leads him to beat up his rivals. Brett goes off with a beautiful and talented bull fighter half her age, unable to deny herself anything even when she knows it is wrong. The forward by Sean Hemingway refers to the "carnage" left in Brett's wake. When I read of the bulls tossing human bodies, I immediately thought of Brett.

"I can't help it. I've never been able to help anything."
"You ought to stop it."
"How can I stop it? I can't stop things....I've always done just what I wanted."

In the end Brett calls for Jake to rescue her from herself. Brett muses on what their life may have been like, and Jake replies "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

Hemingway's readers would have understood the background shared by these characters. The war is always present, although rarely discussed.

"It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening."

WWI saw 4,734,991 U.S. men in service. Of the 116,515 dead, 53,403 died in combat. Men dug trenches, then were sent 'over the top" into "no man's land" through a barrage of machine gun bullets, trying to reach the enemy trenches. Today we refer to "cannon fodder." Men going into the hail of bullets, no protection. Bodies piled up between the trenches.

204,002 men were wounded. And the wounds were horrible. Mustard gas blistered the skin and destroyed men inside and out and death could take weeks. Every war brings technological and medical advances. Plastic surgery was honed in this war, and the development of prosthesis and artificial noses and masks. Smithsonian Magazine had an article about The Faces of War  and the people who endeavored to restore a human face to the disfigured WWI soldiers.

Then there was Shell Shock, originally believed to be concussions caused by exploding shells. Men were given a few days R&R then were sent back to the front. By 1918 the condition was called War Strain, and later War Neurosis. Today we call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Depression, anxiety, flashbacks, egocentric behavior, emotional withdrawal, and addictive behavior are all symptoms. 80,000 cases of "shell shock" were diagnosed during WWI.

Brett and Jake met when he was hospitalized and she was a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment. Women of the middle and upper classes, between the ages of 21 and 48, who wanted to help in the war effort joined the VAD. They worked in primitive circumstances. And they were exposed to gruesome wounds and maimed bodies, suffering and pain, and death. Brett would have understood what her first love had suffered.

The picture came back to me of myself standing alone in a newly created circle of hell during the 'emergency' of March 22, 1918, gazing half hypnotized at the disheveled beds, the stretchers on the floor, the scattered boots and piles of muddy clothing, the brown blankets turned back from smashed limbs bound to splints by filthy bloodstained bandages. Beneath each stinking wad of sodden wool and gauze an obscene horror waited for me and all the equipment that I had for attacking it in this ex-medical ward was one pair of forceps standing in a potted meat glass half full of methylated spirit.
Vera Brittain, describing a field camp hospital in Etaples in 1918

"Funny, how one doesn't mind the blood," Brett says about the bull fights.

Gertrude Stein's famous epitaph "You are all a lost generation" described the cohort generation who reached adulthood during WWI, known as The Lost Generation. Rereading the book, I realized that being lost was not a lack of direction and purpose. This cannon fodder generation was suffering from PTSD, self medicating with alcohol, and fearlessly seeking thrills. They were emotionally impaired, unable to truly connect in any meaningful way. It is pretty to think that true love could save anyone, but we know that if Jake's physical wounds were healed,  Brett's emotional ones would have destroyed any possibility of a happy ending.

Hemingway started the book in 1925 and in 1926 the manuscript was sent to Maxwell Perkins, legendary editor at Scribner who also worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Alan Paton, Erskine Caldwell, and James Jones. Hemingway and Fitzgerald had met in Paris and Hemingway was impressed by The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald offered advice, including careful editing of the opening chapters which are offered in the appendix in this edition. The rewrite reads vastly superior.

The original opening chapter began with Bill and Hem ( Jake) meeting the young bull fighter. Duff (Brett) is with her fiance and cast off lover but is lusting for the bull fighter. Chapter II describes Duff (Brett) as having "had something once" but was pretty much a drunk now. In the final version she was "damned good looking." Her first husband was an abusive drunk who had tried to kill her. She was waiting for the divorce to come through for two years. Hem/Jake was the first person narrator in the original Chapter II.

"I don't know why I have put all this down...but I wanted to show you what a fine crowd we were." from the deleted chapter II

"To understand what happened in Pamplona you must understand the Quarter in Paris." from the deleted chapter II

The original draft ends, "Cohn is the hero." What a different book that would have been. Hem/Jake
as the sidekick to Cohn, like Gatsby's Nick Carraway. (Published in 1925, Nick is also a WWI veteran.)

How men respond to the stuff life throws at them reveals their character. Hemingway uses Brett as the stuff thrown, and her willing victims all react differently. Her fiance Mike makes rude comments, stays drunk, and carries on. Jake finds solace in his work, fishing, and tries to find peace in what little faith he still possess. Jake is a rock in public, but feels like hell in private. Each veteran in the group finds their own way to cope, with alcohol being the main way.

"It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing."

Robert Cohn takes it all very badly, and his comrades, and Brett, get mighty sick of his mooning about. "I hate his damned suffering," Brett tells Jake. Cohn has no war experience. He can't accept that Brett treats what they shared so lightly, and takes on the White Knight role trying to protect her from herself. He does not fit in. His Jewishness becomes an easy slur, but it is really his old fashioned values that set him apart.

Enter Pedro Romano, the bullfighter. He is the most beautiful boy anyone has seen. He has integrity in the ring, not stooping to the showmanship tactics of some bull fighters. He is unsullied and nothing like these Lost Generation men. Brett can't help but be attracted to this boy who stands for everything she has lost. She feels 'a bitch' and knows she will ruin him but still goes off with him. They are followed by Cohn, the boxer.

The novel is almost 100 years old! Today we may snicker at Brett's dilemma, we know there 'are ways' to overcome Jake's limitations. We abhor bull fighting and the mistreatment of animals. But do not underestimate the novel's relevance to today's problems. War still maims our sons and daughters. During WWI shell shocked men were ostracized as slackers, even shot by their own generals. Today we evade responsibility for treatment. There is nothing new under the sun. A generation comes, a generation goes, the sun rises and the sun sets, and we still send our youth into war and they still return to us wounded.

The e-book I was given access to read is part of The Hemingway Library Edition from Scribner. Supplements include early drafts and deleted chapters and prefaces by Hemingway's son Patrick and grandson Sean. It will be published July 15.