Mea Culpa

(Image: Shedunnit podcast)

Last week I finished The Silk Stocking Murders by Anthony Berkeley, one seventh of a 99-cent seven-novel Kindle package I recommended in my last newsletter. I had found Berkeley to be an entertaining, fast-paced, and witty writer, even if he used adverbs too liberally. I wondered why he wasn’t more well-known, and then I wondered if my knowledge of British mystery writers didn’t have a hole in it.

I had read the last two of the seven novels first. They were entertaining, fast-paced, and the narrative character indulged in self-deprecating humor. Then I read the very disturbing Silk Stocking Murders.

That novel, published in 1928, betrays the callous anti-Semitism of the British educated classes between the wars, a national bad habit that contributed to Hitler’s delusion that he could depend on an Anglo-Saxon fifth column when he was planning his invasion of Britain.

I don’t know that the novel was written as Nazi race propaganda, but it aligns with it.

Berkeley lived until 1971, which means that what looks like blind prejudice in this book had certainly been called to his attention. His mystery novels stopped being published in 1939. The Second World War may have put his bigotry front and center in the eyes of his colleagues. It’s the sort of thing that can bring an unwelcome self-consciousness to previously unexamined attitudes, which can cause the words to cease flowing.

One thinks of Carl Orff and Carmina Burana, a great work of music still in long-term rehab for its author’s connections with the Nazis.

It’s a timely note of caution for artists these days, when the world seems bent on reenacting the first half of the 20th century. Fascist bully-boys are spreading fear and misery and death everywhere they go. They are succeeding by appealing to the strength of the tribe and the Homeland. They are spreading the fear of racial and cultural contamination by the Other, in a world of billions of Others, most of them innocent human beings just trying to get through life as best they can.

An artist always deals with the demonic, but hopefully that demonic doesn’t take the form of fascism. You don’t want to create anything that you’ll see as an abomination once you gain a wider and more compassionate perspective.

I’m withdrawing my recommendation of Anthony Berkeley’s 99-cent murder mystery extravaganza. I can still recommend Orff’s Carmina Burana, as long as I can distinguish Carl Orff the genius composer from Carl Orff the musical entrepreneur who did quite well as a citizen of Hitler’s Germany.

Currently on Broadway is the disturbing play Giant, about Roald Dahl, another British anti-Semite and misogynist and otherwise thoroughly unpleasant man. Dahl wrote wonderful, intricate stories that delighted me when I first read them and delight me still.

Pablo Picasso was not a decent human being, particularly in his treatment of women, although he was a decent visual artist for most of his life.

Time removes the moral problem that these geniuses present. They’re dead, but their art, good and evil, conscious and unconscious, lives on. It’s not that hard to separate good art from bad.

It’s much harder, and much more important, to recognize evil when it masquerades as a human being.

I’m working on another journal entry, one having nothing to do with British Murder Mysteries. Stay tuned.

Julie and I have been taking advantage of the dry but closed road to Redfish Lake to skate up to the Lodge and back. Note that our skates are antiques. We’ve decided to get new skates and amortize them over another three or four decades. There may be a mortal flaw in that plan.

The ice came off Redfish Lake a couple weeks ago—almost two months earlier than usual.

Hope everyone is watching the weather these days, for phase-changes and other hazards.

Best,
John
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