I’m a big fan of narrative-style history books, and it’s always fun to see a heavily researched piece of history that floats along like a novel. The problem with Erik Larsen’s The Devil in the White City is that it fails, at times, to feel like a strong account of historical events. The book follows two and a half storylines that intertwine, if only geographically, but never intersect. The backdrop is the World’s Fair held in Chicago in 1893, a now forgotten event that transfixed the world at the time. Daniel Burnham is the renowned architect of the Fair, beset by meddlers and bureaucrats; H. H. Holmes, whose torturous schemes are at times hard to fathom in their cruelty, is a serial killer who haunts Chicago during the Fair; and Patrick Prendergast, to whom the book only gives over two dozen or so pages, is an increasingly delusional man whose obsession with Chicago’s showy political scene leads to tragedy. The plotlines in the book are fascinating, both because Larson lends them a cinematic flair and because there is a continual sense of wonder that history has managed to forget such vibrant characters. Despite, or perhaps because of, Larsen’s ability to craft such a readable story, the book does inspire some raised eyebrows at times. A scan through the notes at the end of the book reveals the times when Larsen speculates about his characters in the absence of hard facts. While I don’t necessarily disagree with this practice, these moments in the book tend to feel transparent. Likewise, the structure of the book is a bit flimsy as the three characters within share little but being in the same city during the same period of time, and the strenuous effort put forth by Larsen to connect these three characters tends to detract from the stories themselves, as each character is certainly worthy of his own book (even the poor, bewildered Prendergast). Despite these flaws, the book was still a delight to read, especially on my daily rides on Chicago’s elevated trains which still snake through the city as they did when the World’s Fair was held here in 1893.
My review of The Devil in the White City by Erik Larsen
Drinking at the End of the World: Lars Iyer’s Exodus
Black and Proud: James McBride on James Brown
Three years after his National Book Award, I am pleased to report that James McBride has outdone himself. His new book, a delicious stew of styles called Kill ’Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul, is part memoir, part biography, part history, part journalistic investigation, and part musical exegesis. But mostly it’s a scorchingly honest examination of the racial divide that explains why America continues to be a bloody and schizophrenic place.
As its subtitle suggests, this book is a quest both for a man and for how he helped shape our national soul through his music and politics and personal style. McBride goes to some lengths to state the case for Brown’s importance. “For African Americans,” McBride writes, “the song of our life, the song of our entire history, is embodied in the life and times of James Brown.” He adds, “James Brown was our soul” and “one of the greatest American forces in modern musical history.” But importance does not always lead to understanding, and McBride acknowledges this as a further reason for writing this book: “[James Brown] is also arguably the most misunderstood and misrepresented African American figure of the last three hundred years, and I would speculate that he is nearly as important and influential in American social history as, say, Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass.”
One reason Brown was misunderstood, as McBride reveals, is because of the nature of the world that made him. He grew up poor and parentless in an impoverished swath of the Jim Crow South, raised mostly by relatives, largely unloved, frequently despised, and clearly headed nowhere good. He was busted for stealing car parts and served three years in juvenile prison before he was out of his teens. He was no stranger to loneliness. As Brown said of his early years in the first of his two memoirs, The Godfather of Soul:
I was left by myself a lot. Being alone in the woods like that, spending nights in a cabin with nobody else there, not having anybody to talk to, worked a change in me that stayed with me from then on: It gave me my own mind. No matter what came my way after that — prison, personal problems, government harassment — I had the ability to fall back on myself.
Shortly after his release from juvenile prison, Brown formed a group called The Famous Flames, and in 1955 they cut their first record, Please, Please, Please. There were to be major bumps in the road, but the fledgling singer was on his way to becoming The Star of the Show, Mr. Dynamite, America’s Soul Brother Number One, The Hardest Working Man in Show Business — Jaaaaaaaames Brown!
McBride plays saxophone and leads the gospel/jazz/blues Good Lord Bird Band, and his understanding of how music gets made is a key to this book’s power. He offers a deft dissection of the differences between jazz and funk, likening jazz to basketball and funk to baseball. “Jazz requires a blend of split-second timing, skill and training,” he writes, while funk requires “specific learned skills that have to be exercised flawlessly [and] can only be learned through years of practice.” He adds, “That’s why funk is as challenging as jazz. You must know when to enter the groove, and what to play [as well as] when not to play.” I would venture to take McBride’s sports analogy a step further into the realm of visual art and say that jazz, with its soloists’ squabbling improvisations, is akin to abstract expressionism, while funk, with its pared-down precision and stress on what to leave out, is more akin to minimalism. Compare Jackson Pollock’s volcanic eruptions to Donald Judd’s simple plywood boxes. Compare John Coltrane’s lushly rambling “Traneing In” to James Brown’s precisely chiseled “The Payback.”
Though it’s a celebration of a remarkable life and career, Kill ’Em and Leave is also a sad book. Brown’s lonely and largely loveless childhood produced a grown man who was deeply suspicious and withdrawn. He routinely hid money and carried thick wads of cash because he didn’t trust banks. He drove his musicians mercilessly. A long-time friend said of Brown: “I’ve never met anyone in my life that worked harder to hide his true heart.” And Brown himself admitted to his trusted manager, Charles Bobbit: “Mr. Bobbit, you’re the only one I let know me. You’re the only man that knows I don’t know how to love.”
But mainly Brown was driven by fear. McBride describes it with this marvelous mash of metaphors:
That fear – the knowledge that a single false step while wandering inside the maze of the white man’s reality could blast you back home with the speed of a circus artist being shot out of a cannon — is the kryptonite that has lain under the bed of every great black artist from 1920s radio star Bert Williams to Miles Davis to Jay Z. If you can’t find a little lead-lined room where you can flee that panic and avoid its poisonous rays, it will control your life….Keeping the pain out was a full-time job, and Brown worked harder at it than any black star before or after.
Here’s Henrietta Shackleford, the narrator of The Good Lord Bird, speaking in his/her wised-up vernacular about the source of this fear and pain:
Being a Negro means showing your best face to the white man every day. You know his wants, his needs, and watch him proper. But he don’t know your wants. He don’t know your needs or feelings or what’s inside you, for you ain’t equal to him in no measure. You just a nigger to him. A thing: like a dog or a shovel or a horse.
Like many who bring themselves up out of poverty by force of will, talent, and hard work, Brown was disdainful of handouts, any hint of shiftlessness. He became an icon of the civil rights and black pride movements, and “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” became an anthem during the incendiary summer of 1968. I saw James Brown perform in Detroit that summer, and the crowd’s delirious shouting of the title lyric nearly popped the roof off of Cobo Hall. For Brown, the civil rights movement was all about getting equal opportunity, not special treatment. He summed this up nicely in the lyric: “I don’t want nobody to give me nothing. Open up the door, I’ll get it myself.”
Brown was demanding, prickly, impossible, and eventually just about everyone abandoned him — wives, lovers, musicians, family — and he wound up isolated, in physical pain, hounded by the IRS, with a mean streak and an angel dust habit to boot. The lonely boy in the cabin in the piney woods wound up walled away inside his mansion, alone with his genius and his irascibility. As a crowning insult, greed and legal wrangling have seen to it that, a decade after his death, not one dime of his $100 million estate has yet reached its intended beneficiaries, the impoverished schoolchildren of South Carolina and Georgia. This may be the true tragedy of James Brown’s life.
I already knew that McBride was a gifted writer and musician, but this book proves that he’s also a tireless shoe-leather reporter. He does the legwork, finds the right people, gets them to open up to him. These writing and reporting skills dovetail to produce some startling insights, including an epiphany about race that McBride has while eating in a soul food joint called Brooker’s in Barnwell, S.C., not far from where James Brown was born and where he died. This epiphany is worth quoting at length because it captures the essence of McBride’s unorthodox method:
They laugh and smile and make you feel good. But behind the laughter, the pie, the howdies, and the second helpings, behind the huge chicken dinners and the easy chuckles, there’s a silent buzz. If you put your ear to a table, you can almost hear it; it’s a churning kind of grind, a rumble, a growl, and when you close your eyes and listen, the noise is not pleasant. It’s nothing said, or even seen, for black folks in South Carolina are experts at showing a mask to the white man. They’ve had generations of practice. The smile goes out before their faces like a radiator grille. When a white customer enters Brooker’s, they act happy…and howdy ’em and yes ’em to death. And you stand there dumbfounded, because you’re hearing something different, you’re hearing that buzz, and you don’t know if it’s coming from the table or the bottom of your feet, or if it’s the speed of so much history passing between the two of them, the black and the white, in that moment when the white man pays for his collard greens with a smile that ties you up, because you can hear the roar of the war still being fought — the big one, the one the northerners call the Civil War and southerners call the War of Northern Aggression, and the more recent war, the war of propaganda, where the black guy in the White House pissed some people off no matter what he did. It’s all about race. Everybody knows it. And there’s no room to breathe…
If you wait till the white man leaves and ask about that space, the space between white and black folks in South Carolina, the black folks say, “Oh, it ain’t nothing. Such-and-so is my friend. I’ve known him forty years. We all get along here.” Only at night, when they get home, when the lights are down and all the churchin’ is done and the singing is over and the TV is off and the wine is flowing and tongues are working freely, only within the safety of home and family does the talk change, and then the buzz is no longer a buzz. It’s a roaring cyclone of fury laced with distaste and four hundred years of pent-up bitterness.
Kill ’Em and Leave is full of such tough truths. Every person living in America today needs to hear them, fruit of the hard work of one of our most gifted and important writers.
People Are Strange: Diane Williams’ Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty
Style and the Man: On Adam Begley’s Updike
The Long Way Home: A Review of Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express
The plan is simple. Get on the train in Boston, just like all those other folks heading to work, except when they get off, keep going. And going and going and going until you can’t go any more. You’ll end up in Patagonia, at the far tip of South America. Such is the conceit of Paul Theroux’s 1979 book, The Old Patagonian ExpressThis, like many of Theroux’s books, is not a story of a place, but of all the places and people on the way to that place. The destination is of no consequence, merely a lodestar to set one’s bearings by and each layover, turn-off, and station platform bench is the reason to leave home. As Theroux himself puts it, in the opening chapter of Express,The convention is to telescope travel writing, to start – as so many novels do – in the middle of things, to beach the reader in a bizarre place without first having guided him there… My usual question, unanswered by these – by most – travel books, is, How did you get there? Even without the suggestion of a motive, a prologue is welcome, since the going is often as fascinating as the arrival. In Express, there is much to be fascinated by, thanks to the peculiarity of Latin American rail systems and Theroux’s desire to stick to his plan. Throughout the region, rail systems have been almost universally neglected. They are slow, old (he rides a steam train at one point), and out of the way (Theroux often notes how the stations are placed on the outskirts of towns rather than in the centers.) The interiors aren’t much better – heat, dust, insects, odors. Bouts with altitude sickness as he heads across the Andes only heighten the discomfort. More orthodox travelers take buses and planes, modes of transport that Theroux only stoops to when the rails are impassable thanks to jungle, landslide, or political strife. And so Theroux contrives to give us a book that is all prologue, all “going” and no arrival (or only a very small one, anyway).There is a very enjoyable tongue-in-cheek element to Theroux’s travel books, wherein he bemoans the dull and sometimes capricious people he encounters as well as the unpleasant traveling conditions and muses at how foolish he was to even think that such a quest was a good idea. These complaints are both sincere and immensely entertaining thanks to Theroux’s skill as a storyteller. For example, there is Theroux’s detour to Machu Picchu, when he has occasion to ruminate on the student traveler (and those masquerading as student travelers):There were advantages to being a student: student fares, student rates, student hostels, student entry fees. Great, hairy middle-aged buffoons complained at ticket counters and shouted “Look, I’m a student! Do me a favor! He doesn’t believe I’m a fucking student. Hey–” They were cut-priced tourists, idlers, vagabonds, freebooters who had gravitated to this impoverished place because they wanted to save money. Their conversation was predictable and was wholly concerned with prices, the exchange rate, the cheapest hotel, the cheapest bus, how someone (“Was he a gringo?”), got a meal for fifteen cents, or an alpaca sweater for a dollar and bunked with some Aymara Indians in a benighted village. They were Americans, but they were also Dutch, German, French, British, and Scandinavian; they spoke the same language, always money. Their boast was always how long they had managed to hang on here in the Peruvian Andes and beat the system.This is not to say that Theroux looks down upon these backpackers because of their thriftiness – he travels in much the same way they do – mostly just their insensitivity.Theroux’s many complaints, entertaining as they are, set us up for the moments when his trip is worthwhile. Unlike basic cable travel and food shows, on which the hosts coo with glee at every sight and taste, when Theroux is impressed by something, the reader knows it is impressive, and when he is pleased, one knows his experience is sublime. The highlight of the book, at least for this bibliophile, is his series of visits with Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires. Theroux reads to the blind Borges almost nightly for a stretch, and mischievous Borges takes Theroux to dinner at the local restaurant. Theroux’s peek into Borges’ life and mannerisms is fascinating, and the episode epitomizes the the best elements of travel, when surprise encounters can lead to friendship. Similarly rewarding are the friendships Theroux makes with many other less well known locals throughout the two Americas. So too are the simple moments of exhilaration, when Theroux has disembarked from a rickety train in a place that is new and closer to his ultimate goal. In these moments, all the painful, stuffy, dusty rides are worth it. And home, however far away, isn’t missed quite so much.See Also: Andrew’s Travel Writing by Train and Mrs. Millions’ thoughts on the book.