One of Our Submarines by Edward Young

Woe to he (or she) whose only taste of submarine warfare comes from movies like U-571 or even the masterful Das Boot.  No disrespect to the big screen, but you can’t beat a book for digging out the details.  And the details feel even better if the author is someone who’s been there.  So, at least take the time to read Das Boot, the autobiographical novel by Lothar-Günther Buchheim.  And, for the British perspective, read One of Our Submarines by Edward Young.

In fact, read Young’s memoir first.  Life is a messy thing.  One never knows whether a movie, a history, a biography, or an autobiography will strike first, generating interest in a subject.  However, in a perfect world, our understanding of the past would come first from primary documents written by people who experienced the time.  This would be followed by biographies and histories by professional historians, then by well-researched historical novels and, finally, TV and movies.  It is frightening how many young peoples’ entire knowledge of history comes from the screen.

Of course, television and movies have their place.  Documentaries like The Civil War and movies like Das Boot, Schindler’s List, and Platoon add color and flavor to our mental landscape of history, but the framework of our understanding should be primary documents.  Time alters our view of the past, and historians can recover what was lost and synthesize what can be the narrow view of experience.  Moviemakers can take the dull remembrances of observers and mold them into an artistic statement the masses can care about.  Still, we take serious risks when we stray too far from the observations of one who was there.  We must always be willing to read a memoir like One of Our Submarines.

One of Our Submarines by Edward Young
(First Penguin Edition, 1954)

A little back story on Mr. Young: he comes from the world of publishing.  He is, in fact, remembered for being the publishing manager at Penguin Books when it started in 1935.  It was he who designed the famous striped covers and drew the Penguin that is the emblem of the company.  And, like many men of his age and era, when the Second World War got underway, he abandoned what was a very successful career and joined the military.  In his case, he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve (R.N.V.R.).  Four months after joining up, he volunteered for the submarine service.  It is here that his memoir begins.

There are many things to like about a story like this.  What is most impressive is actually what might seem least likely: the non-battle material.  In the first section of the book there is hardly an engagement with the enemy.  We first get taken through what it’s like to train on a submarine, what the duties of the various men are, and what living on a submarine is like.  It’s easy to forget in the clear memory of a submarine battle scene from a movie that dozens of men spent weeks and months at a time living in these cramped spaces underwater.  It could take weeks or more simply to sail to the patrol area.  Then, on patrol, it often happened that a submarine wouldn’t even come across a good target before having to turn around and sail back to base.  Mr. Young doesn’t try to hide these facts.  He merely tells us of his honest experience.

Over the course of a couple years, Mr. Young is promoted to First Lieutenant (“Number One”), and is ultimately offered command of his own submarine, H.M. Submarine “Storm”.  We then get to see the process of a submarine under construction.  We get to see how Mr. Young gathers his crew and gets to know his ship.  We get to share his excitement as he takes her out for the first time and shakes her down.

Mr. Young deserves commendation, too, for not trying to hide mistakes.  He discusses the difficulties of being in command.  There are problems of navigation.  There are problems of choosing targets.  There are problems of deciding whether or not to fire one of the tiny supply of torpedoes.  After a hit, there are problems of choosing to take prisoners or not.  (Where does one keep prisoners on a submarine?)  Not to mention that even basic commands can lead to disaster.  For example, diving before making sure the deck is clear.  It’s a challenging thing.

After a trip to Gibraltar and brief work in the Mediterranean, most of the last part of the book takes place during patrols in Southeast Asia.  Here we get most of the action.  Storm does good service—taking out some targets while occasionally having to hide from submarine chasers.  There is plenty of well-written tension of the sound of depth charges and the firing of torpedoes.

If there is a flaw in the book, it is how suddenly it comes to an end.  At the beginning of 1945, Mr. Young’s submarine heads for home and, at that point, he quickly makes an end to his story.  There’s little reflection; merely a list of crew and commendations.  Still, the story itself tells us so much about wartime submarine experience that perhaps the desire for reflection is overkill.  It is our engagement with this commander that instills the desire to know more about him.  This memoir is clearly bracketed by Mr. Young’s wartime service.  We learn no more about him, and we want to know more.  But this is a book about submarines and, for that, it is a success.

Until Next Book…

The Redemption of Tycho Brahe by Max Brod

This will come as no surprise to avid readers, but one of the best qualities in a good book is that it leads to another good book.  In Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography of Albert Einstein, Einstein: His Life andUniverse, he describes how Einstein became involved in “a literary and musical salon for Prague’s Jewish intelligentsia” while on a visit in 1911 (p. 166).  There, he met Franz Kafka and Max Brod.

Kafka is now, of course, a legendary writer whose very name has become part of our language, though this would not have been apparent at the time.  Even now, however, Brod is less well known.  If he is remembered, it is mainly for being a friend and biographer of Kafka for whom he was also literary executor, saving many of Kafka’s writings from being destroyed.  (Consider this from A Universal History of the Destruction of Books by Fernando Baez (p. 231): “Franz Kafka asked Max Brod to burn his notebooks: ‘Dear Max: My last request: Everything I’ve left behind…is to be burned without being read.’ Brod did not do it.  Kafka asked Dora Diamant to do the same thing and, faithful to Kafka, she burned the final part of his diary.  Tongue in cheek, Borges suggests that anyone who wants his books burned should not leave the task to someone else.”  What did Brod’s refusal save for us? The Trial and The Castle, for starters.)

And yet Brod himself was a writer too.  Again, from Isaacson (p. 166-167): “In his book The Redemption of Tycho Brahe, Brod seemed to use (though he sometimes denied it) Einstein as the model for the character of Johannes Kepler, the brilliant astronomer who had been Brahe’s assistant in Prague in 1600.  The character is devoted to his scientific work and is always willing to throw away conventional thinking.  But in the realm of the personal, he is protected from ‘the aberrations of feeling’ by his aloof and abstracted air.  ‘He had no heart and therefore nothing to fear from the world,’ Brod wrote.  ‘He was not capable of emotion or love.’  When the novel came out, a fellow scientist, Walther Nernst, said to Einstein, ‘You are this man Kepler.’”  This is a rather intriguing recommendation for a novel first published in German in 1915 as Tycho Brahes Weg Zu Gott, as is its being dedicated to Franz Kafka.  (The first American Edition was published in 1928.  The novel is also known in English as Tycho Brahe’s Path to God.)

Einstein likely needs little introduction; however, the reader might appreciate a little background on Kepler and, certainly, Brahe.  Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician who is famous for his laws of planetary motion.  It was Kepler who determined that planets actually travel in elliptical paths around the sun rather than the circular paths that had been a cornerstone of astronomy for millennia.  Coupled with Copernicus’ heliocentric solar system, this laid the foundation of our modern understanding of the universe.

Sadly, what is little remembered is the important role that the Danish nobleman and astronomer Tycho Brahe played in this leap forward, in its own way as much a breakthrough as Einstein’s relativity theory.  Night after night, for more than 20 years, without the aid of a telescope, on a small island off the coast of Denmark, Brahe and a cadre of assistants measured the positions of the stars and planets to a degree of accuracy never before achieved.  Then, with the ascendency of a new Danish king, Brahe was forced to move to the court of Prague.  He hoped to set-up a new observatory and start again, but Brahe did not long survive his move.  And yet, it was in this last year at Prague that Kepler became one of Brahe’s assistants.  It was in this year that Kepler first encountered the heft of Brahe’s data.  A number of years would pass and Brahe would be long dead before Kepler worked out the details, but it all began here.

The Redeption of Tycho Brahe by Max Brox
(First American Edition, 1928)

In The Redemption of Tycho Brahe, Brod gives us a fictional glimpse of that brief period when Kepler and Brahe were together at Prague.  Dominated by Brahe’s giant personality, this novel shows us the spirit of a nobleman with brilliance and temper (he lost his nose in a sword duel as a young man and had various prosthetics) who was simultaneously trying to manage a huge household and understand the secrets of the universe.  What action there is in the story centers on various problems within the Brahe family: a knocked-up daughter engaged to one of Brahe’s assistants whose jealousy of Kepler’s growing status drives him into a literal rebellion against Tycho, whose two sons mismanage a situation their father refuses to address.

But the real story here is Tycho’s various rages against the dying of the light.  He senses that, despite his years of labor, he has not been granted the ability to penetrate the secrets of the universe.  He also senses that Kepler has the power.  He wants Kepler to work with him, to justify his life’s work, but Kepler’s eye always seems to be turned inward.  Kepler skulks through this novel as a near silent shadow against the wall, his entire attention apparently on the scientific problems he’s bent on solving.  Ironically, both men glide through this novel basically unaware of the family drama swirling about them and, ultimately, both men have their eyes opened.  Brahe steps up, settles his family disputes, and sets Kepler up for success despite political intrigues and obstacles.  Kepler comes to understand the importance of what Brahe has given him and where it will lead.

Brod’s novel is not perfect.  Modern scholarship has changed our view of Brahe and Kepler somewhat from what Brod gives us.  (See Tycho& Kepler by Kitty Ferguson for a good dual biography and Heavenly Intrigue by Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder if you like conspiracy theories.  Modern forensics appears to show that Brahe was poisoned and who is the main suspect?  You guessed it—Kepler!)  Still, it’s aged fairly well, especially for those of us who appreciate more formal prose than readers tend to get these days.  And this is a book of ideas rather than plot, which can be trying at times.  Fortunately, Brod’s Brahe is a pleasure to behold: big, if a bit bipolar and long-winded on occasion.  And Kepler is intriguing, even if you don’t try to see Einstein in him.  If you do, you can start to imagine what the genius must have been like to know in life.

And therein lays great value.  How many of us have known scientific geniuses on the order of an Einstein, Kepler or Brahe?  It’s rare in literature to have an opportunity to get a real sense of the struggles of high order science.  In creating Brahe and Kepler in this novel, Brod has given us a peek at their passions.  It’s worth hunting this one up and giving it a read.

Until Next Book…

Welcome to The Mouldy Book

I do not fear the domination of the electronic book.  I have never bolted awake in sweaty fear and misery from dreams filled with Kindles, Nooks, and iPads, backlit from the flickering glow made by a pyre of burning books in the distance.  My wife has a Kindle, as do my nieces.  I have even been known to read a classic or two from the screen of my Android on the rare occasion I am stuck someplace without access to appropriate reading material.

I do not abhor progress.  Notched sticks and clay tablets gave way to papyrus, parchment, and paper.  Now paper is giving way to chunks of silicon that can store entire libraries, which may ultimately give way to some kind of electro-technical cloud that can store the entire history of human thought.  There is value in that, and excitement, too, at the possibilities.

I welcome change.  But not with fully open arms.  I ruminate on the dangers of new technologies and the possibilities of misuse.  Without doing so we cannot take full advantage of the new.  Most importantly, I respect the gifts of the things we leave behind.  I write e-mail and use Facebook to keep in touch, but I also pick up a pen and write letters.  Something about choosing a stationery and a stamp, something about taking the time to script ink onto paper, something about that patient labor makes my writing more considered and personal.  I enjoy it.  And I think my correspondents appreciate it.

I can foresee a future where paper is a thing of the past and the printed book is no more, lest they be exhibits in museums.  It’s not necessarily a bad future.  But, as I sit here in my library, surrounded by thousands of books, I know I would not be happy in that future, nor do I expect to see that future in my lifetime.  Though the words on the page are most important, as it is the words that contain the ideas and stories, for me and for too many of my peers I think, the tactile experience of boards and glue, dust jacket and paper is important.  The old book will survive for awhile yet.  And I am thankful for that.  I breathe in, and I can smell a forest.

As a happy caretaker of this particular grove, I try to be a good Johnny Appleseed and sow my seeds; that is, spread the word.  For more than a decade, I have been posting book reviews on amazon.com.  But I have certain self-imposed, idiosyncratic rules about what I post on the amazon site.  With very rare exception, I only post reviews of new, recent books that I am reading for the first time.  There are a number of reasons for this but, mainly, I just don’t want to get bogged down in trying to map out the entire history of my reading.

Recently, however, I’ve been aching to stretch my wings a bit more.  I’ve wanted to talk about my mouldy books.  What is a mouldy book, you ask?  These are the books that when you bring them to your nose you can detect a faint whiff of spores, when you turn the pages you can sense the swelling from decades—sometimes centuries—of humidity, and when you read the pages you can see the yellowing and foxing that give ageing books their patina.

So, I’ve started this blog.  This is where I’m going to take the opportunity to discuss older books, out-of-print books, books that need a bit of an airing out—my mouldy books.  This is not meant to be a gilding of books that are already classics (though I may stoop to that from time to time).  Nor is it my intention to focus a lot on current literature (though I may stoop to that as well).  Rather, it is my hope to bring back the work of lesser-known authors, or lesser-known works of well-known authors:  books of some age and obscurity that have surprised me or pleased me in some way.

Note my use of the phrase “pleased me”.  I like books and try to find value in everything I read.  A reader looking to find vitriol splattered against these old books should look someplace else.  That’s not to say that I’m not critical or that I never spew venom.  In general, however, I focus on the positive with the understanding that books, like most everything in life, usually gravitate toward the mean in quality and only occasionally rise to the level of truly magnificent.  Still, even an average book by a deft writer often contains wonderful things.  That’s why I try to find and on which I focus my attention.

Certainly, this is an exercise in personal taste and some pretention.  The fact that these books are mouldy and not moldy illustrates that.  I’ve chosen to use the word “mouldy” not just because this Anglophilic phrasing adds some colour to my prose, but also because, in my mind at least, it indicates a book that deserves to be saved from the obscurity of the second-hand store shelf and not left to mold away in some damp corner or, God forbid, get tossed into a recycle bin somewhere.  Mouldy indicates quality.

If any of what I’ve said here appeals to you, I invite you on this journey with me.  Like most of you, I have the slog of earning a living and many other life commitments, but I’ve set myself the goal of updating this blog at least once a week with a new title.  We’ll see if I can manage.  Please come back and check in from time to time.  And let me know what you think.

Until Next Book…(which on this sole occasion will be the first book…)