Book: Women in Their 20s

 Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties by Marion Meade, Harcourt Books, 2004

Provenance: Unsure, but from the pencil marking on the inside cover, I'd guess Half-Price Books. It looked like an overstock as opposed to a truly used book. 

Review: First off, bad title. The hair style of the title make is only glancingly noted, and references to bootleggers and speakeasies are mostly incidental. It doesn't exactly scream 1920s, but maybe. The secondary title is kinda incomplete as well, since we're going to be talking about four women who write as opposed to everyone else in the field. Only when we get to the third sub-title down do we address who we are talking about - Edna St. Vincent Milay, Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, and Zelda Fitzgerald. Important female writers of the era.

OK, quick summary for those under 100 years old: Edna Ferber was a popular and award-winning novelist who is best remembered for her Broadway adaptations (like Showboat, which you may have seen in high school productions). The other Edna - St. Vincent Milay, known here as Vincent, was a popular poetess. Dorothy Parker made her way on essays, short stories and sniping reviews in the nascent New Yorker. And Zelda labored in the shadow of her husband F. Scott, who wanted to be more successful than he was. 

They were not a group. They were not a movement. They worked in different spheres. They attended some of the same parties, but direct encounters between them were few and unmemorable. They all worked in the hothouse environment of New York City literati in the 20s, a neatly-compacted decade that ran from the creation of Prohibition to the Crash. 

And we have a lot of information about these writers because they were wrote everything down - diaries, notes, letters, and stories on things based on their lives. Moreso, since they ran about with a bunch of other writers, we have all of their notes, diaries, letters, and stories as well. The end result here is a chatty, gossipy, personal, and in places honestly bitchy presentation of the 20s in New York City. And Europe. Because post-war France was a great, cheap place to escape to if you were a member of the Lost Generation and had the petty cash. 

The book itself travels through the decade year by year, and concentrates on the lives and adventures of its subjects. Alcohol and abortions. Insights and illnesses. Trysts and travails. It gives a good scan of their growth and success as writers, but also the pitfalls of their craft - writer's block and problematic relationships and too many house parties and summer homes. 

All of the writers have their own arc and some sense of resolution. Ferber got a Pulitzer and showed you could succeed both commercially and literarily and ended the decade hosting small parties at her penthouse. Milay ascended into poetic godhood, retreated to the country, and pursued a young muse with her husband's permission. Zelda suffered under F. Scott (who comes off as complete asshole here), who only started to support her when she went into physical and mental decline. And Dorothy kept plugging along through boom and bust times, just writing. Of the group she's probably the best-remembered, owing the wit and meme-worthiness of here poems and short works.

The past is a foreign country - they do things differently there. I'm a fan of the 20s, which dovetails neatly with my interest in the Call of Cthulhu RPG. From this volume I've picked up that a trans-Atlantic cruise was not THAT big a thing if you had the money, and at the time, writers were actually being paid more (An easy conversion was to multiply any figures within by ten). There are a lot of bits and bobs here that I may find use for elsewhere, and you might as well. 

In the meantime, I've excavated a collection of Dorothy Parker's short stories from the basement library, and intend to curl up with that. 

More later,

Plague Book: In the Blood

Blood Royal, or, The Son of Milady by Alexandre Dumas, Edited and Translated by Lawrence Ellsworth, Pegasus Books, 2020

Provenance: Christmas book, 2020

Review: These books have quickly become mental comfort food. I had read an excellent translation of the Three Musketeers long ago and far away, but fell into the Ellsworth translations with the Red Sphinx and kept coming back. Ellsworth is better known in gaming circles as Lawrence Schick (D&D module S2 - White Plume Mountain, among other things), and his spirit of adventure carries through here in his translation.

This volume is the back half of the original publication of Twenty Years After, which originally appeared as a serialized novel. In it, Dumas deals with two different civil wars - one in France called the Fronde, and the English Civil War. In the first half, the four inseparables are separated through loyalties and responsibilities, Mordaunt, the son of Milady plots his revenge, and two of the group (Aramis and Athos) debark for England to help King Charles, on the ropes from Cromwell's revolution.

We pick up this volume with D'Artagnan and Porthos also heading for England, with instructions to help Cromwell and assigned to aid  Mordaunt, who plots all of their demises. They soon switch sides and work to save King Charles (noble but doomed), who had been betrayed to Cromwell's forces. 

And here's the thing: they have to fail (spoilers). Historically, Charles was beheaded (real spoilers), and while Dumas will be kinda fast and loose with the facts and timelines to suit his fiction, he cannot keep the King of England alive. So we have a long section where the crafty Gascon (D'Artagnan is given that sobriquet a number of time) comes up with a plan that just ALMOST works, before time or fate or the presence of the Son of Milady foils it at the last moment. Mordaunt pops in a number of times,and the crew also fails to dispatch him, and ultimately the group has to flee England in a boat rigged with explosives.

Back in France, the four split up, and D'Artagnan and Porthos are imprisoned by the current evil cardinal (Mazarin, not the ruthless but effective Richelieu) for trying to save the English King. Athos and Aramis witness the machinations to overturn the revolutionary Frondeurs by splitting off its various factions, but rescue D'Artagnan and Porthos, and get enough leverage to get what they themselves ultimately want (which is not what the revolutionaries were after). It all ends in a riot, much as it began in the previous volume.

D'Artagnan is no longer an innocent, but is crafty and the man with the plan throughout this book. Porthos lusts after his peerage and respect, and is the most broadly-fashioned of the group. Aramis is the Sexy Priest, only moreso. Athos has in my brain changed over the passing of 20 years - the fact that he has a son (who will be more important later) has made him more of a worrier and fretter, both on behalf of his son and in general. That son in turn sort of vanishes in this volume, after a good start in the previous volume.

The swashbuckling is hard and heavy, ranging from battlefield maneuvers to very D&Dish duels, and in one section, a dungeon exploration. Dumas reserves his sharpest tongue for the politicians of all shapes and factions. Queen Anne of France is sleeping with Cardinal Maturan, who is more comic and less capable than his predecessor Richleau. The upper class leaders of the Frondeur are easily bought off by the Monarchy. The former valets of the Musketeers have established themselves with the greater society, to a variety of effects. All have their moments, but the center of the action are on the four musketeers.

Yeah, I'm bought in on that. There are three more volumes to come, which make up the Vicomte of Braelonne series, which ends in The Man in the Iron Mask. Yeah, I'm going to be there for them.

More later,

 

My Year in Books: Ant Farm

[This year, I was curious about what I was reading, so when I finished a book I put it on an ever-growing pile by my desk. This is the last one in the series.]

Le Livre Des Fourmis (The Book of Ants) by Robin D. Laws, Pelgrane Press, 2014.
Provenance: Purchased at GenCon from Robin D. Laws, who also gave his autograph with the note: Vive la Revolution Surrealiste!

I don't review game products here. Wait, let me back up and clarify that on two points. I don't review game products that I have not actually played. Reviewing a game based on the printed word is sort of like reviewing a play by reading the script - it doesn't tell the full story. There are numerous reviews of adventures that I have run for our Call of Cthulhu group. The other clarification is that I promote other people's games without fear, particularly if they've just released something. For me to delay a review due to my slow reading habits should not stand in the way of you finding out about cool and new stuff.

Anyway, this is bit of fiction in that it ties into a recently published adventure setting called Bookhounds of Paris, which uses the Trail of Cthulhu game system. I've played Trail of Cthulhu, though have not run it (the amazing Steve Winter was the GM), and don't have the game product that might illuminate this further. But it stands on its own as a nicely weird merger of the Cthulhu Mythos (in particular the Dreamlands) with the avant garde artists of the interwar period.

The volume is presented as a diary (in the form that CoC players know well) by Henri Salem, a supposedly minor player in the artistic politics in Paris between the wars. He hangs with Andre Breton, Jacques Vache, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dali (yeah, keep your Wikipedia open - I knew about half these guys before I started in on the work). They are a cliquish and diverse group, continually squabbling and factionalizing as they try to move forward (or backwards, or sidewards) the cause of Surrealism and thereby change the world. In the midst of this Salem's bunch discovers how to access the Dreamlands.

The Dreamlands were a Lovecraftian creation, a setting for many stories and in particular poems. Expanded and explored over the years in stories and games by other hands, they have their own parrallel existence. The surrealistic movement of the 20s and 30s worked to break down the walls between the conscious and unconscious nature of man, between dreams and reality. They considered what they were doing a form of enlightenment, a philosopher of which its art was considered mere artifact, by-product of the process of awakening and overturning the world. They are perfect candidates for exploring the Dreamlands.

The cool thing is, that in discovering the Dreamlands, the surrealists begin to change them. As opposed to a traditional fantasy domain, these Dreamlands are more fluid, responding the power of the dreamers themselves. So the Surrealists do change the world, only not the one they are thinking of.

I really like this for this effect, and by Laws way of threading the reality of the movement and its petty politics in with the arcane and mystical. Being Lovecraftian, things end badly for those involved, as it does in the real world for many of the participants. The book is an engaging, twisted melding of two great flavors, and now I suppose I must hunt down the game product to see what they did with it there.

More later,