The Art of The Soldier's Art

The title for the eighth volume of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time comes from Robert Browning’s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came:

I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart.

As a man calls for wine before he fights,

I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights

Ere fitly I could hope to play my part.

Think first, fight afterwards—the soldier’s art;

One taste of the old time sets all to rights.

Charles Stringham has wandered his way back in to Nicholas Jenkin’s life, this time as a waiter on the base where our narrator is stationed.  Stringham has sobered up and has entered an introspective period, wanting to do little more than think about life, both in general and his in particular.  Nick has worried a great deal about Stringham and worked what little influence he has to try to help his friend, but in the end Stringham is doing exactly what he wants.  It is Stringham who reads this passage from Browning to Nick near the end of the novel (Stringham has been reading Browning because he is one of Tuffy’s favorite authors, Tuffy Wheedon being his old caretaker, one-time lover, and the woman who helped him give up alcohol).

As I've said before, one of the challenges of reading each book in this series is to figure out what sort of guiding principles, if any, Powell uses to decide which stories he will tell in any given volume.  While he is certainly forced by the chronology of events and the need to set up narratives for later reaping, Powell of course has total control over his fictitious world and can reasonably do as he pleases.  So why these stories?  Why these stories in this volume?    I often turn to the title as an aid in determining Powell’s principles. 

In this case, everything about the titular line seems fitting.  In mid-1941, we are deep in Britain’s involvement in the Second World War.  Nick and all the other men in his life are involved in the war effort, most of them as soldiers, even if their posts are not glorious ones.  Even those who are not wearing a uniform are contributing.  Barnby is painting camouflage on buildings to preserve them from the raids, and Moreland’s musical career is tied directly to the war efforts.  Soldiers and arts.   

Art also has the meaning of deception and artifice, and part of the art in this novel are the maneuverings of Widmerpool, Farebrother, Stevens, and the other officers using their own arts to further their military career and hoped-for corresponding glory.  It is great fun getting to see Widmerpool in this new environment and to witness his strained relationship with Nick.

Of course the real meat of the Browning line is the first half: “Think first, fight afterwards,” which is the noble opposite of our American version, “shoot first, ask questions later,” or “kill them all, and let God sort it out.”  This is above all a book about thinking.  Nick’s experience with the war is not on the front lines.  We are not in tanks or in the thick of battle.  We experience the whole war so far on the home front—only not on the front at all.  The war touches the characters of the novel through the unpredictable raids and bombs dropped from unseen planes by unseen Germans.  The destruction arrives without warning and lives are snuffed out without ceremony.  There is no “fight” at all in these narratives.  Bombs fall and Aunt Molly dies.  Bombs fall and Bijou dies.  Bombs fall and Chips Lovell dies.  Bombs fall at Priscilla dies.  Bombs fall and whole buildings are erased from existence.  All there is to do in the world of the novel is think.

As Browning describes it, the art of the soldier is to be able to use the power of his pre-war memories to charge his batteries for the fight ahead, to use the memories of home to “set[] all to rights.”  This particular interpretation seems more like a theme for the entire series than for this particular volume.  The past revisits Nick again and again as people pass in and out of his vision, and his thoughts as a narrator are free to move forward and backward in time, jumping ahead to an untimely death, and back to recall similar and contrasting times to breathe new meaning into the present. 

Returning briefly to Stringham, his new incarnation is mesmerizing.  While his changes seem to unsettle Nick, they are brought to life so compellingly by Powell that the character is in turns heartbreaking (as when he says that he no longer falls in love with the world or anyone now that  he is permanently sober) and charming.  Powell is at his best bringing the little motions that define a character into sharp focus, and this novel has that power at every turn.  This is one of the better novels in the series.

The Valley of Bones - Book VII of A Dance to the Music of Time

With book VII in the twelve-part series of A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell brings us into the beginning of the war years.  It is early 1940, and Nick Jenkins, our narrator, has joined the British army where he begins his service as a platoon leader.   

The trouble with an epic tale that attempts to kick off the shackles of traditional plot is that it’s very hard to feel the import of any particular occurrence.  In fact, the whole idea that happenings have import at all is challenged by Powell’s series.  In a traditional novel, there are arcs in both plot and theme that shape the events.  In this series, Powell replaces those arcs with the crossing of paths.  The unifying force of the novel is the cast of characters that dance in and out of the narrator’s life.  As I’ve said in my other blogs about this series, this makes for both very interesting reading as well as  what sometimes feels at least like pointless reading.  Will all this add up to anything?  Is it critical in the long run to remember who is who and who did what?

Naturally, some of the books in the series are more riveting than others.  The Valley of Bones is one of the less riveting books.  It feels like Act One of a larger drama about to unfold throughout the three books of the third “movement” of the series (the edition I have groups the series into four sets of three and calls each set a “movement”).  The stage has been set for army life and for a new group of characters to come in and out of Nick’s life.    As for actual doings, not much that is exciting transpires.  Nick meets Jimmy Brent and learns about why Jean left Nick those many years ago.  There is a military exercise.  Nick is set up in Aldershot at the Anti-Gas school.  His brother-in-law Robert Toland dies in the war.  Priscilla is hit on by one of Nick’s military acquaintances, Odo Stevens.  Charles Stringham’s mother has left Buster in favor of Norman Chandler.  Dicky Umfraville becomes engaged to Frederica Budd.  I feel like I’m spreading gossip more than summarizing events in a novel.

To me, the weight of each book exists in relation to each other.  I find it hard to imagine someone reading the books as they were individually published over the twenty-plus years it took to write them.  Each book can technically stand on its own, but I can’t imagine what an uninteresting read it was when read by itself.  The writing is admirable and intelligent, and Nick is a fun guide through the world, but each book on its own has only a few wow moments and very little narrative drive.

So what’s Powell doing in this seventh book?  I don’t know.  The title, The Valley of Bones, is taken from a sermon delivered at the end of the first chapter.  Ironically the titular valley is not about those fallen in battle, but about the breathing of life into men already dead who will come together and build up an army.  Both life and death are sewn together in the one title—but what that adds up to, I can’t tell you.  Are the men here given new life by the coming of the war?  I don’t think so.  Is this about the romanticism of war in the early years?  That seems more likely, especially since Nick does not find army life especially agreeable to him. 

Age seems to be a recurring theme in the novel.  Nick is older than he should ideally be to join the army, and he engages either with other men in the same boat where age is concerned, like Captain Gwatkin, or with youthful men full of energy and zealousness, like Kedward.  Why is this age stuff here, beyond the general demands of realism?  Just as the war thrusts Britain into a new age, are Nick and his generation transitioning into a new stage of life, the middle age?

The same issues of class seem to be at play, as the army elevates those business minded individuals like Widmerpool, Sunny Farebrother, and the staff of erstwhile bankers.  Those who were once miners are now foot soldiers, however, and do not seem to be flying up the ranks.  There is movement in some quarters then and stagnation in others.

I’m not even at all sure that Powell thinks in terms of themes, though he does seem to know how to milk symbols and meaningful moments, so I can’t help believing that he is “saying” something in the end.  But I’m afraid I won’t have a handle on that until, appropriately enough, the end.

A Not-Working-for-Me Orange

A Clockwork Orange is a book that wears its moral on its sleeve:  we must be free to choose between good and evil, or we cease to be human at all.  It is a simple tale of the struggle between the individual and the capital-s State.  Burgess’s brilliant twist is to make the protagonist a fantastically despicable human being, and to give him a first-person voice.

In the first 7 chapters of the novel, Alex bullies a homeless drunk, leads the attack on an old man coming home from the library, robs a store and beats the owner, strikes up a battle with a rival group of teens, leads the gang rape of a woman and beats the tar out of her husband and makes him watch, rapes two ten-year-old girls, fights with his own gang to exert his dominance despite being the youngest member at 15 years old,  and breaks into an old woman’s home to rob her but ends up killing her instead.  At one moment, we think that there may be some hope for Alex as he tells us of his love for classical music, but our thinking is corrected when we learn that Alex loves the music because he fantasizes about all sorts of violence and rape as he listens to it.  Alex never displays sympathy or empathy for another human being, repeatedly portraying himself as the victim and disowning any responsibility for his own behavior when discussing it with others.  He is a sociopath and an awful human being.

But as the narrator, he brings us into his head and forces us into a kind of alignment with him.  After he undergoes the Ludovico Technique, he is at the whim of everyone he encounters, and of course he is but one font of violence in a world of violence.  Every character who is not busy being raped shows flashes of violence and a thirst for revenge, so the ability to commit an act of violence is necessary for survival in the world.  Even having witnessed all the horrors Alex committed, we feel uncomfortable with his powerlessness in the final sections of the book.  To his credit, Burgess never lets us forget Alex’s nature even as we are made to squirm by his punishment.  That is really where the power of the book lies, in the tension created by the conflict of two evils.  To protect the individual from the State, we must accept that we have to protect what is vile and rotten inside the individual.

I found the world interesting and the slang oddly compelling.  Alex has a great voice.  But in the end, the book felt flat to me.  Perhaps it is the baldness of its moral.  Perhaps it is that testosterone-filled narratives never do much for me even under the best of conditions.  Perhaps it was the inclusion of the 21^st chapter that Burgess uses the entirety of the 1986 introduction to the novel to discuss.  The final chapter of the book was not included in the original printing of the book in America, and Kubrick’s movie ends on the 20^th chapter as well.  This exclusion really chaps Burgess’s hide, because he feels the final chapter raises the novel from a “fable” to a “novel.”  In this final chapter, Alex, the sociopath who nevertheless has the right of moral choice, suddenly outgrows his childish ways, puts rape and murder behind him, and longs for a baby and a wife and a quieter life.  Ahh.  Isn’t that nice? Apparently if the state just gave him a little more time, he would have outgrown rape and murder, as all boys do.  Ugh.

I finished the book on the same day the Supreme Court ruled on the Hobby Lobby case, deciding that a closely held company can practice a religion and can deny basic medical rights to its female employees in the name of that very religion.  Judge Alito’s dismissal of what he characterizes as a vague issue of “gender equality” struck home for me what was so tiring about reading A Clockwork Orange today.  The men of the novel are doers and thinkers, the philosophers and subject of philosophy.  The women—well, they get raped and are the object of rape fantasies.  The only exception is Georgina in that final chapter, who is a giggling empty character, the object of a settling-down fantasy.  Hell, the two ten-year olds who are plied with alcohol and then raped serve no purpose whatsoever in the larger narrative.  They do not come back to visit Alex.  Indeed, while Alex seems to meet up in the final section with every man he met in the opening section, all the women are dead and gone.  In my current state, I find it hard to care about the moral Bugess tattoos on his novel’s chest  as I stand among the discarded and silent female bodies of the dead.  It’s the same vonny cal that’s been shoveled for years.  While Burgess’s novel is interesting and well written, I conclude that it lives on primarily because it (and Kubrick’s adaptation) made such an impact at the time of its release.

A Love for Mr. Biswas

Mr. Biswas is probably the most finely delineated character in all the books that I have read for this list.  My edition of A House for Mr. Biswas  is over 560 pages, and almost everyone of those pages is spent in the presence of Mr. Biswas, covering the entire scope of his life, from the day of his birth to the day of his death 46 years later.  V.S. Naipaul puts aside a large character arc in favor of what feels like a most detailed character study.  As readers, we are allowed unlimited access to Mr. Biswas, no matter how ugly his behavior or how sweet his motivations.   The end result of this access is that Mr. Biswas takes on all the dimensionality of someone made of flesh and blood.

Mr. Biswas struggles his whole life to find his own way in the world, and usually without grace or gratitude toward those around him.  “Born in the wrong way,” Mr. Biswas is up against great odds from day one.  He is apprenticed out to a few professions and gets booted from each of them.  Eventually he becomes a sign painter, which leads him into the store run by the Tulsi family.  Before he knows it, he is married to one of Mrs. Tulsi’s daughter, Shama, and he is sucked into the vortex that is the Tulsi homestead.  Determined to make his own way in the world, he fights against the dominating ways of the Tulsis, much to his wife’s embarrassment.  He moves from opportunity to opportunity, always ending in failure that lands him back in the arms of the Tulsis.  The final symbol of freedom and independence for Mr. Biswas is a house of his own, not one of the mud shacks that the poor construct as shelter, but a fine home of wooden beams and concrete steps.  In his search, he is nearly driven to madness before he winds up in Port of Spain and becomes a journalist.

The book is simultaneously hilarious and painful.  Mr. Biswas feels smothered by the Tulsis and lashes out at them and his wife whenever he feels defensive and worried, which is most of the time.  His children are at first strangers to him, when Shama takes them to the Tulsis to escape her husband’s various failures.  We watch him work his way into their hearts in his own awkward way, and we watch as he parents in fits of kindness and unrelenting discipline.  We the readers are eventually put in the position of family members, sharing their embarrassment at Mr. Biswas’s  antics.  At the same time, there is a genuine love for Mr. Biswas, and we can clearly see the accomplishments hidden in the failures.  He does, as he says, “paddle his own canoe” under the watchful eyes of those who actively wish to see him fail.  We cannot help but admire his tenacity and determination, rooting for him and feeling for him, wanting him to find some peace and success before he dies.

I know that Naipaul drew inspiration from his father in creating Mr. Biswas and his story.  To what extent he drew on his father’s biography is unclear to me, but the novel feels like an exploration, a searching to understand a man who was a tremendous force, but a complicated one.  There is a lot to dislike in Mr. Biswas, and the strength of Naipaul’s narrative is his refusal to shy away from any of that ugliness.  Mr. Biswas is neither romanticized nor vilified, which makes him take on the third dimensionality of real life.  As Anand, Mr. Biswas’s son, becomes a more prevalent character in the final part of the novel, the relationship between father and son is beautifully drawn, and in the end quite touching and painful.

There is so much to admire and analyze in this book.  Naipaul brings Trinidad through the first half of the twentieth century to full life in a fantastic feat of world-building.  He has themes that bind the narrative and  connect the larger cultural shifts in Trinidad and the world to the Tulsi family.  There is of course the larger theme of the colonizer and the colonized, how British and U.S. culture imposes itself on the people of Trinidad.  But the thing that is at the heart of it all, the thing that makes this book such a compelling read, is the dynamic character of Mr. Biswas.

The Golden Notebook: A Portrait of the Artist as an Artist Portraying an Artist

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is the perfect companion piece to Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  They were both published in 1962, and both are concerned with madness in the modern world and the role that sexual relations play in the growth of that madness.  But where Kesey’s novel traffics in the easy and common notion that modern men suffer from feminine influences that unman them, Lessing goes after the whole twisted knot that lies at the heart of men and women.  Moreover, she puts the pressures of sexes in context by simultaneously addressing the political world faced by men and women in the late 1950s.  In addition to sex and politics, above and through both of those things, Lessing is saying something about art and fiction and the role the human imagination plays in making us and our world whole.  Lessing’s attempt to get at the capital-t Truth of the matter takes her into the messiness of life as we live it, and that messiness is startlingly well presented,  beautifully and painfully laid out.

The basic structure of the novel is to give us a stand-alone narrative called Free Women in five parts.  At the end of each section, we read from the notebooks of the main character, Anna Wulf.  She keeps four separate notebooks in an attempt to compartmentalize all the areas of her life.  The black notebook attempts to focus on the business of writing, concentrating primarily on her experiences in Africa in her twenties that formed the basis for the now-famous novel she published in 1952.  The red notebook details her experiences in the Communist Party in England, laying out her inner turmoil and struggles with the party.  The yellow notebook is a place for her to fictionalize events in her life and note story possibilities.  The blue notebook is set up as a traditional diary.  So as the story of Free Women unfolds, we read in the notebooks all the history and concerns that lie beneath the narrative we are reading.  In the penultimate section of The Golden Notebook, Anna puts aside her four notebooks in an effort to bring all the disparate parts of her life, the parts that she consciously tried to make disparate, together.  She has a new notebook, a golden one, in which she writes about everything at once, bringing all the threads of the story to a climax, which is then resolved in the final section of Free Women.  It is a beautiful and innovative way to tell a story, but it is not just for the sake of novelty.  The structure is itself integral to what Lessing is saying with her book.

In the second paragraph of the novel, Anna tells her friend Molly that “the point is, as far as I can see, everything’s cracking up.”  With that, Lessing lays out her main theme, which is not only the state of the world during the political tensions of the cold war but the state of Anna’s individual psyche.  Trying to keep her thoughts and the parts of her inner life separate from each other (as emblematized in her notebooks), Anna is feeling the strain as though she is intellectually and spiritually being drawn and quartered.  Her goal in the keeping the notebooks is three-fold.  First, she wants to get at the capital-t Truth of life.  She wants to find some way of representing life as lived that does not then make that real experience false in the retelling.  How can language, which is always representative and both filled with meaning and utterly devoid of meaning, capture reality?  Second, she wants to understand herself and the times she lives in, and she hopes that by writing everything down in its appropriate place, she might be able to come back to the notebooks and see the landscape of her life laid out like the roads and fields of the country as seen from an airplane tens of thousands of feet above.  She wants to find the patterns of her life to make sense of what she is experiencing.  Finally, and this is related to the first goal, Anna, unconsciously, is trying to find her way out of the writer’s block that has plagued her since her first novel became famous.

The Golden Notebook is very much a philosophical novel.  Through it, Lessing meditates on life in London in the 1950s, mining every aspect of human relations and personal struggles that she can.  Lessing discusses sex, romance, self-delusion, and psychological impulses, leaving nothing of Anna’s inner life untouched.  Lessing’s writing is amazing.  She has such clarity of vision and such preciseness of language, that she is able to untwist all the tangled ends of any situation and lay them out for us to see whole before letting them coil back into each other and regain their natural knotted existence.  Complex issues are made clear without ever being simplified.  It is no wonder the novel shocked the world by laying out the inner workings of Anna’s mind and laying bare the systemic sexism in the modern world and the secondhand status of women.  Her portrayal of politics is every bit as insightful and uncompromising.   In the wonderful forwards to the 2008 edition that I have, Lessing notes that her book was talked about more than it was read.  Moreover, those that read it reduced the book into one of two things: a book about feminism or a book about politics.  Because the book is so large and casts such a wide net, readers responded to and focused on the part that resonated with them most, ignoring the other parts.  Ironically, this mirrors Anna’s struggles through her notebooks as she segregates out the different issues of her life.  Anna’s fate when she compartmentalizes herself is a slow disintegration into madness, and the only way she can come out the other side is by bringing everything together in a messy heap and being everything she is.

The thing that she makes no mention of in her forward, and the thing that does not seem to have been discussed much at the time or its release (though scholars may have made much of it since—admittedly, I have done no research)  is the role of art and fiction that is, for me, both the heart that feeds the novel and the skin that holds it all together.

The main arch of the narrative is Anna overcoming her writers block.  Through the novel, it becomes apparent that Anna’s block is the result of feeling convinced that she cannot write anything truly important, and to write unimportant things in such dreadful times is offensive and a waste.  Her political beliefs dictate that she use her talents to help the causes she believes in, even as her belief and hope go into freefall.  Unwilling to write but incapable of not writing, Anna turns to her notebooks.  In those notebooks, she again and again recasts the events of her life into parallel narratives creating an Escher-like layering of artists and events.  Here we have Lessing the author writing a story about Anna the author who in turn has written about Ella the author who is working on a book of her own.  Individual facts may change, a daughter may become a son, names and particulars of personality shift—but through it all we have the telling and retelling of the same set of events.  In fact, the big twist in the novel (and this is a big SPOILER, so steer clear if you don’t want to know) is that in the golden notebook itself, we learn that the book Anna writes after breaking through her block, is Free Women.  That may not sound like a big revelation, but to me it was story-shattering.  Here, I thought that the Anna with the notebooks was the Ann of Free Women, that the notebooks revealed the back story of the novel.  But after reading the golden notebook, Free Women and the notebook switched places, making the notebooks the actual story and Free Women the subordinate tale.  Free Women went from being the factual world told by Lessing to the fictional world told by Anna.  The Golden Notebook is the equivalent of a narrative Moebius strip in which the two sides are revealed to be the one and only side.  To make another analogy, it is like a three-dimensional box drawn on a two-dimensional surface where first one facet and then the next is interpreted by your eye as being in front of the other.

It is, I believe, Anna’s visiting and revisiting of her own situation that eventually helps her unify all the parts of her life.  And it is only when this decompartmentalizing occurs that Anna can save herself from the brink of madness and write her next novel.  In all the craziness, it is art and the artist’s unflinching examining and re-imagining that allows progress and understanding to be made.

The Golden Notebook is an epic tale told in a limited scope.  It is beautifully written and impressive in its thinking.  When this reading list is completed, I will be seeking more novels by Lessing , and given how prolific she was, that shouldn’t be a problem.

One Flew over the Sexist Nest

I groove on the transcendentalists as much as any other red-blooded American.  Give me a story about the individual pitted against the society that is trying to grind all individuals to an undifferentiated paste, and I’ll cheer on the individual as much as anyone else.  Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is just such a story.  Chief Bromden, the half-breed Native American who narrates the story, reveals to us a world of individuals who have rejected and been rejected by the unstoppable “Combine” that hums smoothly along.  The machinery of the Combine has human cogs and pistons that twirl and pump with precision to make the device run smoothly and perpetuate itself. 

In any story about the machinations of society, the author must create representatives of the machine, caretakers that keep it running smoothly, people who aren’t afraid to take a metal file to the gears that don’t fit right and clog up the whole works.  It is in selecting who represents the machine that an author makes his or her specific claims about society and the nature of its woes.  Politicians, millionaires, Big Brother—there are so many targets and causes to choose from!  For Ken Kesey, the caretakers and brutal filers are women and the culture of femininity that they use to crush the spirits of the would-be men.

Yes, Chief suggests that the Combine is much bigger than women, but Kesey focuses his attention obsessively on the women of his world.  Nurse Ratched is the obvious villain, but the concern about masculinity and women who emasculate their men goes way beyond her.  Ruckly’s one phrase, “fuck da wife!”, seems to be an appropriate motto for all the men in the novel.  Harding’s wife, when we meet her, attacks Harding for his laugh, saying, “when are you going to learn to laugh instead of making that mousy little squeak?”  Billy’s mother is a dominating woman who manipulates her son.  Chief recounts the story of his childhood to McMurphy and notes that his mother  played a key role in reducing his father from being a big man: "He was real big when I was a kid.  My mother got twice his size. . . .   She got bigger all the time” and “made him little.”  Moreover, when Chief is talking about how some men escape the Combine, he makes a list of things that men need to avoid.  At the top of the list is “no wife wanting new linoleum.”  The female demands on the man for consumer goods forces men to play by the rules of the combine. 

Amongst all these back stories is the main focus of action and concern: the ward.  The story of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the story of how McMurphy enters the ward and, like a testosterone-filled Mary Poppins, helps the “rabbits” become “men” again.  After seeing how Nurse Ratched controls the men, McMurphy has a long talk with Harding and declares Ratched “ain’t peckin’ at your eyes”!  He and Harding agree that Ratched is a ball-cutter.  And all efforts to overthrow Ratched center around her sex.  McMurphy warns her to behave properly on his first day in the ward by telling a story of his uncle Hallahan: 

It’s okay, Doc.  It was the lady there that started it, made the mistake.  I’ve know some people inclined to do that.  I had this uncle whose name was Hallahan, and he went with a woman once who kept acting like she couldn’t remember his name right and calling him Hooligan just to get his goat.  It went on for months before he stopped her.  Stopped her good, too.

The threat is clearly sexual in nature.

Ratched’s attempts to nullify her own sexuality seem to frustrate all the men, and the suggestion keeps recurring that if she would just be a real woman, she’d stop ball cutting.  In describing her, they call her “impregnable,” that she has “too-red lipstick and . . . too-big boobs,” even though she tries to disguise them in her uniform.  McMurphy says to Harding,

So you see my friend, it is somewhat as you stated:  man has but one truly effective weapon against the juggernaut of modern matriarchy, but it is certainly not laughter.  One weapon, and with every passing year in this hip, motivationally researched society, more and more people are discovering how to render that weapon useless and conquer those who have hitherto been the conquerors— 

Yep, the only true answer to female power is a good raping, and the problem with modern society is that they are figuring out how to unman the most virile of men and make them victims instead of victors.  Later in the novel, McMurphy postulates that “the solution to all your problems would be to just throw her down and solve her worries,” but no one wants to be the one to have sex with such an unappealing creature.  Every attempt to undermine Ratched involves reminding her that she is a woman.  McMurphy “destroy[s] her whole effect” by asking her about the size of her bra cup.  He pinches her ass to belittle her, and the guys on the ward mock her for those pinches in order to take away her power.  And in the end, when McMurphy attacks Nurse Ratched, he first tears off her clothes, and it is unclear if he merely strangles her or rapes her simultaneously.  When she returns to the ward, her power is gone because her sexuality has been revealed:  her uniform “could no longer conceal the fact that she was a woman.”

The solution is not just to sexually dominate Nurse Ratched, but to make the men men again.  After McMurphy arrives, Chief reflects on what McMurphy has brought into the ward:  for all the smells he smells while cleaning the ward, “never before now, before he came in, [was there] the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work.”  Thank god for the “man smell”!  Baseball on TV, basketball on the ward, blood and fighting, and a great fishing trip with beer and relaxation, the replacing of McCall with Playboy—all good manly things—these are the building blocks by which McMurphy restores the masculinity of the men on the ward.  When he promises to build Chief back up to his original sizes, Chief’s first sign of growth is an erection: “You growed a half a foot already.” 

The open laughter of men is pitted against the manipulating smiles of women, and it’s the machinations of women that make the combine grind out the laughter.  Ratched works by insinuation instead of anything direct that the men could answer to.  When the government folks came to take the land from Chief’s tribe, the two men want to talk directly to Chief’s father, but it is the woman with them who proposes they work by rumor and a letter addressed to the Chief’s wife to reach their ends.  The men on the ward can’t manfully confront Ratched without punishment, so they learn the wily womanly way of being “cagey” and “sly.”

I know that is an annoyingly long list, but even at that it is only a sampling of the instances in the novel in which the fault of society is worked onto the shoulders of women.  

The bemoaning of the feminization of culture is as old as culture itself.  It is a fantasy embraced by some men to explain all their problems on a convenient other, and it seems to crop up every few years along with calls for getting in touch with our primal masculinity.  It’s a worn out attack, and I have zero point zero interest in it.

Kesey’s obsession is all the more upsetting because he is such a great writer.  He deftly handles character and has a keen ear for conversation.  I love the way McMurphy comes off the page, and I think he is a wonderful character all around.  He comes from a long tradition of American tricksters, harkening back I believe to the slave stories of John, who outsmarts Master and the Devil at every turn.  He is a rebellious force whose wit is his most powerful weapon, in the mold of Tom Sawyer, playful and smart and fun.  He has a brain for business and a heart that even though it appears cold is actually warm and caring.  But every time I was enjoying the novel, Kesey would throw a wrench in the works with his ringing accusation that America is being pussified. 

So, if you like excellent writing, fantastic characters, a vibrant world, and a well placed plot, and believe that America is being destroyed by the feminization and unmanning of our virile men, then this is the book for you.