Book Review & Analysis: Jamaica White by Harold Underhill

Jamaica White

by Harold Underhill

      According to Jamaican folklore, the plantation mansion of Rose Hall in Montego Bay is haunted by the ghost of Annie Palmer, also known as the White Witch of Rose Hall. As the story goes, Annie Palmer murdered three of her husbands, practiced occult rituals in secret chambers under the mansion, and was finally executed during a slave rebellion in the 19^th century. Now her ghost, hungry for revenge, is said to wander around the plantation grounds.

Rose Hall, in more recent times, was bought by an American businessman who renovated the mansion and turned it into a museum. Night time tours, for those willing to fork over enough cash, are given. These excursion come complete with Scooby Doo style explorations of secret passageways splashed with blood, underground tunnels, and seances. These tours would not be complete without scary stories about Annie Palmer. So some people in the Jamaican tourist industry have a vested interest in keeping the legend of the White Witch of Rose Hall alive.

I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for gothic horror. I don’t literally believe in ghosts or haunted houses, but when gothic horror is at its best, such things function as metaphors anyhow. So when I found Harold Underhill’s historic novel Jamaica White, purported to be the story of Annie Palmer and her life at Rose Hall, I thought I was in for an interesting creepshow. This novel did turn out to be creepy, but not for the reasons I expected.

James Arthur is the novel’s protagonist. He arrives on the docks of Montego Bay after a voyage from Manchester, England where he grew up in poverty. In a desire for power, wealth, and a ticket out of the working class slums, Arthur takes on a job as a “buckra”, an overseer, on a Jamaican sugarcane plantation named Rose Hall.

Arthur meets up with Broderick at the wharf. Broderick was once an Irish murderer, living on death row in an English prison. The jailers struck a deal with him. If he agreed to work as a colonial plantation boss, they would spare his life on the condition that he never return to England. After arriving at Rose Hall, Broderick’s self-discipline, sadism, and sociopathy made him rise in the ranks to become the head buckra of Rose Hall.

Arthur is taken to his bungalow where he meets two other characters of lesser importance in the plot. One is Mary Lou, a slave woman who cooks, cleans, and does sexual favors for him. The other is Wilson, a rum-drinking alcoholic who used to be a school teacher. He got fired for protesting the use of corporal punishment in the classroom and so got sent to work in Jamaica to get rid of him. Wilson acts as a voice of conscience in the story. He doesn’t like slavery, but he depends on it for work. Convinced that it will eventually end, he holds educational classes for slaves who want to learn how to read.

So far so good. The characters are distinctly drawn and effectively introduced. The world building is of high quality with vivid descriptions of the plantation and surrounding jungle. The narration goes step by step to draw the reader into this world and the story with all the elements building on each other to create a fantastical literary space. Despite being a place of slavery, the plantation and its surroundings are described as enticing, sensual, and elysian. Underhill has a definite talent for using language to create mood, atmosphere, character development, and plot. But at a certain point in the novel, I begin to feel his talent is wasted.

When Broderick first shows Arthur around the plantation, the new buckra gets a first taste of what is to come. One of the slaves gets a severe whipping for stepping out of line. Arthur is initially shocked by this, but gets over it quickly. After dark, Broderick brings Arthur to a dungeon where the house servant named Venus is chained to the wall. Broderick gives Arthur a whip and commands him to flog her as part of the training. Arthur obeys and again feels disgusted before silencing his conscience and continues learning how to be cruel.

There are multiple scenes of tirture throughout the story. They are vivid in their detail and go on for longer than they need to in order to get the point across. Broderick is also sexually promiscuous with the slave women and even indulges in pedophilia. On one hand you can say that this descriptive writing needs to be so detailed to show how inhumane slavery truly is. It also serves the purpose of building Broderick’s character as a psychopathic sadist. One the other hand, the descriptions of torture are so indulgent that they read like passages from the Marquis de Sade. What I mean to say is that Underhill writes about slavery as though it is a fetish. He writes as though he takes delight in all the fine details of the torture. I’ll come back to this later.

All of this builds up to Arthur’s meeting with Annie Palmer, the owner of the Rose Hall sugarcane estate. Up until that point, Arthur only hears about her through other characters. Her reputation precedes her as stories circulate about her frequently having sex with Broderick and the strongest of the male slaves. It is also said that she murdered her husband to inherit control over the plantation. But before they meet, Broderick commands Arthur to kill a slave who tries to sabotage the machinery in the sugar mill. After the killing, Arthur goes through the same cycle of disgust and suppression of his conscience. Then he gets incapacitated by an illness.

Annie Palmer demands that he be brought up to her mansion so she can nurse him back to health. In the process of Arthur’s recovery, they get emotionally close and begin a sexual relationship. Arthur falls madly in love with her, but of course she is only playing with him. He is too naive to see that. After he becomes healthy again, Annie takes him to a waterfall in the jungle where they have sex. The eroticism in this novel is just as graphic and indulgent as the passages where slaves are tortured. At this point the writing becomes outright fantasy and it is easy to forget the story has anything to do with slavery. In fact it reads like a description of paradise. As the narrative goes on, it becomes more apparent that the practice of slavery is a deliberate part of that paradise.

At this point, I can reiterate that the writing in this novel is great. The sequential progression leading up to the meeting between James Arthur and Annie Palmer is effectively handled even if it isn’t entirely original. The description and character building are consistently strong. Annie Palmer is an especially well-drawn character combining elements of sensual beauty, intelligence, and social charm all wrapped up in a woman with a strong and commanding personality. If you ignore her darker side, her role as slave owner and her ability to be cruel without mercy, you could be forgiven for finding her attractive. In fact, if you like strong, commanding women it would be surprising if you didn’t.

In the course of Arthur getting to know Annie Palmer, he appears to be building up to a moral awakening. He feels disgusted by the violence used to control the slaves. He agrees with the alcoholic Wilson, the man who tries teaching the slaves to read, that slavery is morally wrong and must end sometime in the future. But as he continues working as buckra on the plantation, he gets closer to Annie as their sexual trysts become more common. Annie Palmer, as it turns out, thinks of herself as a visionary. She acknowledges that slavery is terrible, but she justifies the practice by saying that great empires can only be built through cruelty. Her long range dream is to turn Jamaica into another Roman Empire. This could well be a delusion of grandeur, but Arthur swallows it whole. This is the point where the novel loses my sympathy. Any moral awakening that Arthur may have been on the verge of having is crushed as he becomes more fanatical about his love for Annie Palmer.

As Arthur becomes increasingly more devoted and less concerned with the welfare of the slaves, she loses interest in him, begins to humiliate him, and eventually shuns him. Meanwhile, a slave rebellion is brewing up with Venus, the house servant, playing a major role in it. The entire plantation, including the mansion, is set on fire and all the white people are killed except for James Arthur who is saved by his sexual servant Mary Lou. The rebellion is arbitrary. It functions more as a means of climaxing a plot rather than delivering poetic justice. It is an explosion to distract the reader from the mundane plot in which the relationship between Arthur and Annie Palmer fizzles out. The key to understanding this is in the final passage when James Arthur is returning to England on a ship. As he lies face down on his bunk, he is crying because he lost Annie Palmer, the woman he was madly in love with and the one he pinned his fantasies of future wealth and power on. He has no gratitude, or even any thoughts for Mary Lou, the slave woman who saved his life. James Arthur’s story ends without any moral redemption.

That’s the whole problem with this novel: it just doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t make a statement. It doesn’t take any definite moral stance. The message is vague and weak. Sure there is something to the slave rebellion, but the slaves aren’t fully humanized in any way. They are mostly in the background or else used as objects for labor, torture, or sex. Venus does have her own monologue at the end, but it does little more than explain the plans for the rebellion. Her subjectivity is only suggested. Mary Lou is entirely objectified too. She appears to like Arthur but it’s never made clear why. And the only white people who have any pity for the slaves are pathetic losers who don’t have enough will to do anything aside from continuing to work as buckras, sustaining the practice they claim to hate.

It’s possible the author is attempting to examine the nature of power and domination in the character of Annie Palmer. If so, it’s not clear what he is trying to say. Her flippant attitude that slavery is a necessary evil when doing great things is sickening, but she isn’t written as a villain. In fact she’s written as desirable and seductive. In fact, she bears some resemblance to Wanda von Dunajew, the dominatrix in Sacher- Masoch’s Venus in Furs. And James Arthur isn’t far from Severin in the way he worships her. Actually Annie Palmer reminds me a bit of Elon Musk and his belief that empathy is a weakness that prevents great men from doing great things. Arthur is like the kind of shlubs that admire Musk for his ruthlessness and power even though Musk has made it clear that he despises the entire human race. That is an all inclusive hatred and the shlub fans are a portion of the humanity he despises. But if this is the point of the book, it is weakly stated and too vague to be of any value. In any case, if empathy is nothing more than an obstacle to great achievements, I’d say that great achievements are not important. I’d choose empathy over greatness any day.

Again, I will restate my opinion that this novel is excellently written on a technical level. But the content is such crap that the form gets overshadowed. The over-indulgence in sex and violence is a big part of that. It’s not that I’m, squeamish. I’ve read and sometimes enjoyed my share of transgressive writing. I’d even say there is a time and place for detailed descriptions of the cruelties of slavery. You could argue that such excessive description is necessary to show how cruel it actually is. When written into the proper context that is true. But there is a problem of proportion in this story. The passages about torture and sex are longer and given far more attention than any other elements in the narrative. The author seems to take great delight in his scenes of sadism and then takes just as much delight in pairing them with long and detailed passages of erticism. After seeing what Annie Palmer is responsible for on the Rose Hall plantation, you’d have to be a really sick person to want to fuck her over and over again, let alone fall madly in love with her and worship the ground she walks on. I think Harold Underhill’s intentions are to indulge in a sick, racist fantasy while throwing in some insincere details about moral conflicts so that readers don’t outright dismiss him as a complete piece of human shit. If he has some other intention, I’ve missed it because he didn’t articulate it clearly enough.

If you want a Caribbean twist on the gothic horror genre, Jamaica White isn’t a good choice. It does have a castle, but there isn’t any witchcraft and there aren’t any ghosts. The only thing scary about it is the passe attitude the author has towards the brutality of slavery. It’s nothing but an eroticized fantasy of white supremacy, power, domination, and violence. It might appeal to people who are indifferent to racism. It might appeal even more to Nazi pigs who sexually fetishize racism.

Jamaica White doesn’t even incorporate any of the Jamaican folklore surrounding the White Witch of Rose Hall. Academic folklorists have traced the legend’s origin back to an early 19^th century novel about a slave rebellion set in Cuba. Over the years, details about a female plantation owner were added; they derived from a real woman, who didn’t live at Rose Hall, but had three successive husbands. They all died of natural causes and she never killed any of them. It is true that Rose Hall once had a slave rebellion, but Annie Palmer never existed except as a fictional character in ghost stories told around campfires by Jamaican storytellers late at in the night. The current owners of Rose Hall have a vested interest in keeping the legend alive since their profit margins depend on it. I didn’t like this novel, but if I ever get to listen to the the legend of the White Witch of Rose Hall being told by a Jamaican person in the flickering lights of a campfire, I’d be fascinated.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Democracy by Joan Didion

Democracy

by Joan Didion

      The lifestyles of the rich and well connected aren’t all they are cracked up to be. Take it from Joan Didion, the author who reveals how mundane people actually are by stripping away all the explanatory psychology and decorative frills that go along with literature. Her novel Democracy is about a political family that lives in the public eye. But when it comes to understanding them, the political life is little more than some details in the background.

Joan Didion herself speaks directly to the audience as the narrator in the first person. Her literary persona is immediately collapsed since her role as narrator is the same role she plays in life. Joan Didion was a journalist and as a journalist she plays the part of covering the protagonist, Inez Victor, writing articles about her for magazines and then piecing them together to form this novel which traces her life up to 1975. This postmodernist style isn’t any different from the fragmentary and non-linear style of Didion’s other novels. Along the way, the narrator provides a meta-narration, commenting on how a work of fiction is written and how choices in descriptive language are used to communicate emotions and information about characters and situations. In this way, Didion doesn’t break through the fourth wall by addressing the audience directly; there is no fourth wall to begin with.

Inez grows up in Hawaii with her sister Janet. Both of them marry into powerful families. Inez marries Harry Victor and Janet marries Dick Ziegler. The Zieglers are wealthy and well-connected members of the business class in Hawaii. And Harry Victor is a rising star in the Democratic party. His involvement catapults him into the Senate and in 1972 he runs in the Democratic primaries for president but loses. Because of this, Inez, who bears a passing resemblance to Jacqueline Kennedy, is a glamorous socialite in the public eye. In her home life, Inez is a mother of two.

There is a darker undercurrent to her marriage though. During her younger days, she falls in love with Jack Lovett, a CIA agent and arms trafficker. Throughout their lives they admire each other from a distance. But during a family vacation in Jakarta, Indonesia the two run into each other. The family vacation coincides with anti-American riots breaking out in Jakarta, mirroring the point where Inez and Harry begin losing interest in each other. Jack Lovett helps the family to escape to a cabin in the mountains outside Bandung and while there, Inez and Jack rekindle their interest in each other.

Jack Lovett subsequently gets deeply involved in espionage activities as the Vietnam War escalates and Harry Victor runs his presidential campaign on an anti-war ticket, similar to George McGovern who, as we now know, also lost the election, unfortunately giving Nixon another term in office. Inez’s heart is torn between an anti-war politician and a CIA agent with no political or ideological affiliation. This symbolizes her weak identity and it is something that her persona, fed to the public by the media, in incapable of seeing.

The relationship between Inez and Jack comes to the forefront of the novel when Inez’s father kills Janet and a Hawaiian man in her home. After the murder, the Ziegler family gather for dinner. During the meal, Jack Lovett walks in and from there he reconnects with Inez. The murder is the turning point where Inez and Harry’s shaky relationship falls apart, revealing it to be more a marriage for the public eye as opposed to one of domesticity. As Inez’s sister dies in the hospital, it is Jack who is there for her emotional support.

Other details get revealed through the murder. One is that Janet might have been cheating on her husband and the affair complicates the relationship between the Ziegler family and the established political and economic order of Hawaii. The Hawaiian man killed by Inez and Janet’s father is tied to a powerful Hawaiian family who were about to close a deal selling low-grade swamp land to the Ziegler family for development. Because of the murder, the deal will fall through. Jack Lovett is connected with all this because his arms dealing is somehow tied in with the Ziegler family’s businesses. But all of these interconnections are murky and not fully explained. The whole mess serves to underline the disconnection between Inez’s family and the Zieglers who are all white settlers and intruders in the Hawaiian islands. The theme of disconnection among the wealthy elite is a theme that runs throughout the novel.

Another theme that gets brought into the foreground because of the murder is the dysfunctional relationship between the parents and children in the Victor family. The son Adlai, no doubt named after Adlai Stevenson though I’m not sure why, is an underachieving student who is getting involved in the anti-war movement on his campus. The daughter Jessie works in a fast food restaurant in Seattle after a suicide attempt. She has just gotten out of rehab for heroin addiction. When Harry Victor arrives in Seattle to take his kids to Hawaii for Janet’s funeral, Jessie decides on a whim to move to Vietnam. Her motivations aren’t clear, but she seems hungry for excitement and hasn’t put any thought into her decision.

After arriving in Vietnam, Jessie gets a job as a cocktail waitress in a country club for Westerners just as the embassies begin evacuating all Americans from Vietnam due to their losing the war. Jack Lovett flies to Vietnam to retrieve her, using his CIA connections to find her and transport her out, utilizing a string of secret military bases in the South Pacific and eventually leaving her in Hawaii. Soon after, Jack Lovett dies in the swimming pool of the hotel in Jakarta where he mysteruously met up with Inez and her family while they were on vacation several years before. The important part of Jessie’s naive escapade is that she would have gotten stuck in the danger zone of post-war Vietnam if the Victor family didn’t have connections in the CIA through Jack Lovett. Jessie most likely would have been imprisoned or executed as North and South Vietnam reunited under the communist government.

The murder also brings one other issue out into the open in the character of Billy Dillon, a man whose job it is to manage the public personae of the Victor family. He works behind the scenes to advise the Victors on what to say in order to minimize controversy and maximize their positive public image. When Inez’s father commits murder, Billy Dillon is called in to first help negotiate a lenient sentence with the Hawaiian judiciary and second to control messaging in the media to cut down on the perceived severity of the crime. Didion demonstrates the efficacy of this in the text by making it unclear why the killing happened and what it meant to the killer. There is a direct connection between the first person meta-narrative of Joan Didion, who explains her literary technique in the course of telling the story, and Billy Dillon who uses the same semantic tricks to manipulate a receptive audience’s perceptions. Billy Dillon again carries the theme of disconnection since he symbolizes the fracture between media image and the private life reality of the Victors. On a private level he is even further a representative of disconnection because he is secretly in love with Inez even though she appears not to be aware of it.

Inez, in the end, drops out of American society. She only becomes her true self after the failure of her marriage and the death of Jack Lovett. She can no longer depend on others, especially men, to support her. Her epiphany comes when Jessie runs away to Vietnam and Inez’s privilege is used to rescue her. This is paired in the story with televised media images of Vietnamese refugees desperately clinging onto American helicopters as they lifet off from military bases. It is important that these images are shown on TV since this demonstrates how cut off Inez is from the real world. She only knows about the refugees through the news media, just as the public only knows her through the same channel. The refugees don’t have the luxuty of being rescued by their own personal secret agents. They have to risk their lives en masse to even have a hope for survival. And Jessie simply gets rescued because her family has powerful connections. This drives Inez to find self-actualization by running a refugee resettlement program from a mosquito-ridden bungalow in Kuala Lumpur. She abandons her life of wealth, privilege, and fame and finds herself by saving the Southeast Asian people without privilege, wealth, or connections who are becoming displaced from their homelands and way of life. Inez ends up being no longer disconnected, no longer living an empty domestic life, and feeling fulfilled and integrated by using what privilege she has to benefit others.

This novel is not exactly a political drama. In fact, the political drama mostly happens in the background and only emerges into the main narrative at certain points. It is really about how mundane the problems of an elite ruling class actually are. Being wealthy and connected, they have powerful mechanisms to help them manage their dysfunctional relationships, but these mechanisms fracture them as human beings. Incapable of knowing themselves, they become vapid, empty husks without any true purpose. Inez and her familial relations are socially disconnected from the state of Hawaii they have chosen, as intruders, as a place of settlement. Inez is disconnected from her public media persona which is managed by Billy Dillon. She is disconnected from her husband and family. She is also disconnected from Jack Lovett who she loves, but only at a distance. She has no sense of identity because she lives through other people who have only fragmentary ties to her. It is only when she clears away all the debris of her social life and media image that she can begin to relate to herself as herself. If this isn’t a simplified version of Hegelian philosophy, I don’t know what is. The political sides of the story are like shadows in the background, partially shaped by the Victor and Ziegler family relations. The background politics are distorted shapes and only vaguely connected to them. The real politics are those internal to the nuclear and extended families. And their problems aren’t any different from the kinds of problems families outside the ruling elite have on a regular basis.

Stripped of all the political noise, this familial drama is basically a soap opera. It’s a surface level plot with superficial twists about people without much depth. Even more so, it is a soap opera because where else would you find such WASPish rich people with names like Dick Ziegler, Harry Victor, or Jack Lovett? They are such wonderbread bland characters that even the name Inez sounds exotic in comparison. Even the tropical location of Hawaii does nothing to enhance their character. This novel could be set in Ohio, Nebraska, or Iowa and it wouldn’t make a difference. Like all of Joan Didion’s novels, this one takes place almost entirely on the surface, but the interplay of those surfaces reveals something about the hidden truths of the people inhabiting a Didion world. A lot of times the hidden space that gets revealed is filled with little more than emptiness. Until the end of the story, this is true of Inez.

Democracy is the type of novel that needs to be read more than once if you want to pick up on all the subtle nuances. It is also the type of novel that needs to be thought about after you’ve finished reading it. Although its simple plot isn’t hard to follow, it was difficult to connect with during while reading. After finishing and allowing for some distance, it was easier to piece all the fragments together into a whole for clarity so that its themes could be considered. This might be a frustrating process for readers who wish to be spoon fed information with clear explanations. This is too bad because if you take a step back and allow the pieces to fall into place, it makes for a challenging but provocative novel. This isn’t Joan Didion’s best work, but it is good enough and certainly deserves a second reading.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

 

Play It As It Lays

by Joan Didion

      There’s an old joke that goes, “How do you say ‘I love you’ in New York? Fuck you. How do you say ‘fuck you’ in California? I love you.” That’s the cultural climate in which Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays takes place. But while that cultural climate is important for the story, it isn’t the main point the author addresses.

Maria is one problem of a woman. She addresses the reader directly in the first person during the opening monologue. From that we learn about the novel’s two elemental metaphors: gambling and rattlesnakes. Maria approaches life as a game of chance. The gambler at the roulette wheel acts without agency over the ball; it just lands where it lands and the player has to accept the result whatever that may be. The gambler “plays it as it lays”. The other, more subtle metaphor is that life will bite you whether you like it or not. Rattlesnakes are hiding, biting anyone who is unlucky enough to cross their paths. But rattlesnakes don’t ordinarily attack people. They only bite when provoked so the best way to avoid getting bitten is to play it as it lays. Just avoid getting involved. Knowing this puts Maria into a permanent state of anxiety. After getting bit once, she is expecting another bite to come at some random time. One other detail we learn from Mariah’s opening monologue is that she doesn’t care at all about motivations or explanations. What happens happens and the reason behind it doesn’t matter. Everything is on the surface. Joan Didion, as a master of irony, uses Mariah’s monologue to explain what motivates the protagonist to approach life without the understanding of her own motivations.

Maria’s opening monologue is followed by two other monologues. One is that of her closest friend Helene. The other is that of her husband Carter. From these two we learn that neither of them understand Maria, but they both perceive her as mentally unstable. And although they are the two closest people in her life, both of them are emotionally distant and more like caretakers who put up with her out of a sense of duty more than from genuine interest. There are also subtle foreshadowings of the affair between Helene and Carter, as well as the death of Helene’s husband BZ, all of which culminate at the end of the story.

As a writing technique, the three separate introductory monologues function effectively in presenting three separate perspectives on Maria. This may sound too obvious to be worth mentioning, but what is unique about it is the way the novel shifts back to Maria in the first person throughout the rest of the book. Keeping this in mind, the reader follows Maria’s subjectivity through the lens of two other characters who see her from inaccurate perspectives she can not see herself. Considering that Didion’s style in this novel is called minimalist by some, the perception of depth and multi-dimensionalism in the narrative are heightened. This minimalist irony is taken a step further in that the people surrounding Maria in her life aren’t much more introspective than she is. They aren’t deep thinking. They aren’t analytical people. They just do what they do and when Maria doesn’t make sense to them, they leave her to herself and do soemthing else.

So who are these people? Carter is a film maker. Maria is his wife. They live in Los Angeles. Maria has starred in two movies, but mostly she doesn’t do much. In a haze of tranquilizers and alcohol, she lays by the pool or drives endlessly on the LA freeways in her corvette while listening to the radio. The main source of meaning in her otherwise pointless life is her daughter who lives in a home for mentally disabled children.

One movie Maria starred in was a short experimental film made by Carter. The whole film is close up shots of Maria going about her daily life. She is the only element of the film. The other movie she starred in was made by BZ, Helene’s husband who is also a film maker who sometimes delves into directing pornography. The latter movie stars Maria as the woman in a biker gangbang. BZ describes it as a movie where the female subject is nothing more than a prop since the gangbang is all about the bikers using her body to fulfill their homosexual desires for each other.

Both films are pivotal in understanding Maria because they negate her as a human being in two fundamentally opposing ways. Carter’s film is entirely about her surface, showing only how she appears and what she does with no examination of her subjective life. In the other film, her humanity is negated because, as BZ describes it, she disappears in a screen full of cocks. Inexplicably, Maria claims that BZ’s biker movie is her favorite because it is the one in which her character has the most agency. It is an ironic statement coming from a woman who convinces herself she is refusing to exercise agency in her own life. I say “convincing herself” because she actually does display agency all throughout the book.

Maria does exercise agency when she goes to visit her daughter unannounced at the home for disabled children. The caretaker at the home, however, berates her for not making an appointment because a spontaneous visit like that disrupts her routine and can upset the girl’s stability. Maria also chooses to take her daughter to a Christmas celebration at her ffriends’ mansion, but this results in disaster when her daughter becomes violent.

Maria also exercises agency when she takes trips to Las Vegas to escape from the miseries of life in Los Angeles. On one trip, she randomly encounters her godfather in a casino. The man gives her his phone number and post office box address so she can contact him later. On another trip back to Las Vegas, she tries calling him only to find out the number is invalid. She tries to contact him again by waiting at the post office for several days in hopes he will show up to retrieve his mail from his PO box. But after waiting, Maria learns that the box is rented, not by her godfather, but by an insane woman who doesn’t know him.

Another significant example of Maria exercising agency is when she gets pregnant while cheating on her husband. Carter gives her a choice between having an abortion or divorce. He qualifies the latter option by telling her that he will get custody over their daughter if she chooses to break up with him. Although Carter’s intention is manipulative, he does offer a choice. Since Maria’s daughter is the only thing she cares about in her life, she chooses the abortion. That procedure, illegal at the time of publication, proved to be psychologically traumatic for Maria. Here we see how a pattern in her life emerges: every time Maria tries to exert control over her circumstances, something rotten happens as a result. Every time the rattlesnake bites.

That is a pattern that explains why Maria is the way she is. She runs away from choices and responsibilities because every choice she makes damages her. She numbs the pain with drugs and alcohol in an attempt to erase her mind and emotions. She becomes anhedonic, unable to feel pain or pleasure, living the life of a lobotomy victim or a zombie. For her this is a defense mechanism against the entanglements of the world; for the others in her life, it is a sign of mental illness in a woman having a nervous breakdown. Probably both perspectives are accurate.

And yet another side of Maria is revealed when she visits the supermarket. In the store, she recognizes a crowd of other Southern Californian women whose lives are just as empty and pointless as hers. She recognizes them because they all pirchase the same grocery items. Therefore she consciously chooses to buy groceries that differ from them in an attempt to differentiate herself. It is a form of camouflage. She wants to conceal her similarities to the other lonely shoppers, but there is also a touch of pride in her cover as though she wants to individuate herself in some way. Since the other people in the store can’t see her motivations, if they even notice her at all, this can be little more than a private pleasure. No matter how trivial it is, it is still an attempt at clinging on to some sense of self-worth. Maria also takes a small turn in her rejections of casual sex in Las Vegas towards the end of the novel.

But any subtle changes in Maria are destined to go unnoticed by Helene, Carter, BZ or anybody else around her because they are inattentive to her feelings to begin with. Her husband and friends go out to a remote location in the desert of Nevada and drag her along with them because Carter worries she is losing her grip on reality. Once there, they leave her in the hotel room during the days when they are on a movie set filming a western. Maria mostly stays in a drugged stupor while staying in bed. She finds common ground with BZ who comes to her in despair because Helen and Carter are having an affair and not trying to hide it. Both BZ and Helene have hit rock bottom and BZ tries to convince Maria to overdose on pills with him. He dies in bed beside her but she lives because she refused to kill herself. Suicide would entail taking control over her situation so she does nothing. Ironically, playing it as it lays is what saves her in the end.

On one level, this novel is about the shallow lives of rich people in Hollywood working in the film industry. Maria is surrounded by friends and family acting out of self-interest and brute instinct without any awareness of what is going on with the people around them. Maria’s relationship to them is toxic and dysfunctional. It is through their ignorance that they negate her humanity, treating her like little more than an appendage. And yet they say they love her. Joan Didion’s opinion of the upper crust in California is made clear. On another level, this novel is a character study of a woman who doesn’t have much character whilE in the middle of an existential crisis. But Maria isn’t really on a downward spiral because she was at the bottom to begin with. That’s a shocking statement about somebody with wealth, privilege, and an endless amount of leisure time. She also tries to negate her own humanity by refusing to take control by avoiding choices and letting life happen to her. Despite that, her humanity keeps emerging. Her attempts at self-negation are deliberate, but what I think Joan Didion is demonstrating is that there is something about humanity that can’t be submerged, negated, or denied out of existence no matter how hard people may try. Maria attempts to delude herself into thinking she has no self-awareness or capacity to choose, and yet she keeps making choices in matters that reveal she does have some kind of self-knowledge, albeit self-knowledge that is partially hidden from her conscious mind.

Play It As It Lays could be a 1970s American echo of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, the novel I would argue is the most sadly misinterpreted book of the 20^th century. Maria is a lot like Mersault in that she lives the life of a nihilist. It is a life that lacks quality because, like Mersault, she avoids taking control and minimizes her willingness to make choices. Both characters live a pointless, empty existence. But just as so many readers misinterpret Mersault as being some kind of hero, I fear a lot of readers will misinterpret Maria as being a woman who is hopelessly lost in the world. It all depends on how conscientious you are in paying attention to subtle details. If you pay close enough attention, you will notice the abundance of times Joan Didion mentions rattlesnakes in this story. If you read quickly and don’t pay attention, you won’t. If you read carefully enough to be aware of all the rattlesnakes, you should be able to see all the subtle signs that Maria has more agency than you realize. In that there is humanity and in that there is hope. If you only see Maria through the eyes of Helene and Carter then you haven’t understood Joan Didion’s message. The less like them you are, the better off you will be in life anyhow.

Book Review & Analysis: Baby by Robert Lieberman

Baby

by Robert Lieberman

      Can good intentions lead to harmful choices? Can bad intentions result in good things happening? When faced with an unprecedented situation, it may be impossible to tell what the right action to take is. Maybe all you can do is fall back on yourself and act out of instinct, even if that instinct leads you astray. This is a dilemma posed by Robert Lieberman’s 1981 novel Baby.

It all starts with Doris Rumsey, a middle aged grammar school librarian in Ithaca, New York. As she approaches retirement she has to live with the unfortunate truth that she will never marry and have children. Aside from being post-menopausal, she also has a hunchback. But she is a kind woman who has a way with children who see through her deformity and love to visit her in the library.

In the depths of her depressing existence, Doris’s life turns around when she miraculously gives birth to a girl. Doris starts calling her Baby and so the name sticks. Even more unusual than the anomaly of the birth by parthenogenesis, is what she learns one day when she takes Baby to a city park. Even though she is only a few days old, Baby starts to sing. Her singing is enchanting and uplifting and an audience is attracted to listen. Baby continues to sing on a daily basis and it isn’t long before crowds show up for every performance. This is where trouble starts.

Irwin Shockley is a jaded music composer and professor at Cornell University who lives with his family in the hills on the outskirts of Ithaca. He scoffs when he first hears about Baby, but after listening to her sing, he decides her talent needs to be shared with the world. Through tactics of questionable legality, he takes Baby on a tour around America, trying to get the attention of scholars in prestigious schools like Eastman and Julliard. This he does and then gets approached by the devilish Danish businessman Jacobsen. They strike a deal to take Baby on an American tour. The deal is not in the favor of either Baby or Shockley, but the naive composer knows nothing about business and reluctantly goes along with Jacobsen. This also involves more tricky legal maneuverings to have Doris declared too mentally unfit to care for Baby and custody is given over to Shockley.

As the infant Baby sings for audiences all over America, a religious cult forms in which the followers believe the child to be a new messiah. This also arouses a violent mob of angry Christians who want to destroy Baby for being a false prophet.

At this point, all the major themes have been introduced. Doris fights to maintain custody of her daughter and when she loses it, she devotes the rest of her life to getting Baby back. Shockley is an artist who is motivated by the desire to bring beautiful music into the world above anything else. But this catches him in a trap between the moral purity of Doris and the greedy commercialism of Jacobsen. His ambition hurts Doris by robbing her of the only thing she loves and alienates him from his family. He can do nothing but follow Jacobsen to achieve his ambitions. But Shockley isn’t all bad. He thinks the money he makes with Baby should mostly be given to Doris and even proposes that the old spinster live comfortably with his family. He also tries to hold his family together even though he is blind to how he is hurting them. Shockley attempts to navigate a path between right and wrong, but he only does so at the expense of his own awareness. His myopia isn’t a moral flaw, but rather a personal lack of understanding. And he truly does admire Baby more for her ability to sing than the money she brings in. His belief in the power of art and music is what matters most.

More trouble comes when Baby is performing in New York City. Shockley and the whole entourage get stuck there when a snowstorm hits, making it impossible to leave. He takes a woman up to his hotel room for an affair, but he realizes afterwards that she has disappeared and taken Baby with her. We later find Baby in an abandoned apartment building in the Bronx. The kidnapper, named Fay, and her boyfriend Sloane are holding Baby hostage and demanding an outrageous amount of ransom money. While the police try to hunt the kidnappers down, the matronly Fay cares for her and Shockley brainstorms ways to raise the money. Jacobsen suggests broadcasting a Jerry Lewis style telethon on Christmas day. But on Christmas Eve, Fay brings Baby to an emergency room because Baby has gotten sick. Fay’s conscience leads her to save Baby’s life and turn herself in for the sake of redemption. Meanwhile the telethon goes on even though the public is unaware that Baby has been found and rescued. Jacobsen disappears with all the money and proves himself to be an evil character in the story along with Sloane.

But then again, is Jaobsen purely evil? He went out of his way to produce the telethon that would have raised enough money to retrieve Baby. And what about Fay being evil? After kidnapping Baby, her caring instincts came out when she tried to keep Baby healthy and safe from Sloane’s violence. Her crime forced her to confront the better side of herself and she finally did find redemption in prison. And is Shockley evil? Despite being egotistical, selfish, and callous towards everybody in his life, his intentions to bring music into the world are pure and even at his worst moments, he never stops caring for Baby and wanting to make life better for Doris. While it is cliché to say that everybody is a combination of good and evil, the author extends this idea just a bit by showing how it is possible that some evil may be necessary to arrive at a good end.

So finally, who is Baby supposed to be? At the most basic level, she is a doppelganger for her mother Doris. Baby represents the purity of Doris’s soul. She is the beauty and inspiration that Doris wishes to bring into the world but can’t; because people judge her according to her physical deformity, they won’t accept who she really is as a person. Therefore she externalizes Baby to fulfill her desire. This point is driven hard in the conclusion because Doris dies when Baby loses her ability to sing.

Beyond that, Baby is an innocent toddler thrown into a world of corruption and tossed around the narrative like a football. She has to maintain her innocence by first being dragged into the tacky world of show business and then surviving the ordeal of vulnerability in the hands of the kidnappers. Finally she loses her ability to sing when she gets old enough to begin talking. If that isn’t a statement about the corrupting power of language, I don’t know what is. Aside from some basic symbolism though, Baby appears to mostly be a MacGuffin. The novel is all about the characters surrounding Baby more than it is about Baby herself.

The story does present us with some moral questions, but they aren’t questions that will shake up the way you think about motivations, desires, or pragmatics. This is not a commanding investigation of ethics. It is more plot and action driven than anything and actually succeeds on a technical level more than a thematic one. The characters are well-drawn even if they are a bit ordinary. The author also weaves together a lot of plot and sub-plot elements effectively. Suspense is built up well although the outcome of every conflict introduced to the novel is predictable. It is a tightly wound novel that doesn’t leave any loose ends in its resolution. It is far fetched though and stretches your ability to willingly suspend your disbelief. Maybe you can’t buy the premise of the virgin birth and the singing infant, but it is fiction after all. But the legal proceedings and courtroom drama were outside the limits of plausibility, especially when it comes to how easily Shockley pried Baby from the arms of Doris.

Robert Lieberman most likely wrote Baby for the best-sellers audience. It’s actually better than most best sellers, but it’s also not good enough to be a great work of art. But Baby is fun to read. It could possibly serve as an accessible introduction to existentialism and its relation to moral relativism, but if you’ve studied the classic existentialist authors, the morality of this book won’t be anything mind blowing. As for existentialism in general, the author leaves the question of what or who Baby is unanswered. Is Baby a messiah sent by some god or a false prophet? Is Doris telling the truth about the virgin birth or is something else going on? Is Baby’s singing a deception? Or is she nothing more than a literary device? By leaving these questions unanswered and unanswerable, Lieberman forces the reader into existentialism since the only way an answer is possible is through the reader making their own choice. Whatever you may choose, it is impossible to verify the truth or falsity of the choice. The answer can not absolute. That’s because we live in a world of uncertainty and that means we can only guess at what is right or wrong when it comes to questioning meaning. Making moral decisions based on uncertain truths means you can only do what you and hope it is for the best.

 

Book Review: Havana Nocturne by T.J. English

Havana Nocturne:

How the Mob Owned Cuba...and Then Lost It To the Revolution

by T.J. English

      In The Godfather Part II, a famous scene is set in Havana, Cuba. Michael Corleone is taken by his brother Fredo and some friends to a nightclub where they watch a live sex show. It is in that sleazy establishment that Michael realizes Fredo has betrayed him. At the same time, communist revolutionaries are taking to the streets to fight and soon after the Mafia flies back to America. While this is a fictional story, it isn’t far from what the situation truly was in Havana, 1959. Fidel Castro’s revolutionary 26^th of July Movement was destined to clash with the American Mob because the presence of American organized crime gangs was one of the reasons the revolution happened. It’s all explained in T.J. English’s Havana Nocturne.

This book follows two main threads, that of the Cuban revolutionaries and that of the high level Mafia operations. The latter begins with two well-known characters in Mafia lore, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. At the end of World War II, Luciano was released from prison and ordered to leave the country. And Lansky was ambitious after having successfully opened the Flamingo hotel and casino in Las Vegas. With big plans in their minds, the two National Crime Syndicate bosses arrived in Havana and moved into luxury suites in the Hotel Nacional.

Meyer Lansky had a vision of turning the entire island of Cuba into a luxury resort packed with casinos from Matanzas to Oriente. Ex-president of Cuba. At the same time, Fulgencio Batista, was living exiled in Florida when he came into contact with Lansky who talked him into running for a second term. During the election of 1953, Batista slid behind in the polls so he launched a coup that ousted then president Carlos Prio, canceling the elections and becoming Cuba’s next dictator. The party leading in the polls was the Ortodoxos, running an anti-corruption campaign. Although unknown at the time, he most famous member of the Ortodoxo party was a young lawyer who would become the most polarizing figure in Latin American history. His name was Fidel Castro.

When Batista seized the governor’s palace, he brought the American mobsters in with him. A new era of greed, graft, tourism, and crime was initiated in Cuba. Meanwhile the common people were stuck in the redundant cycles of poverty and illiteracy, reinforced by state control through the mechanisms of torture, police brutality, and censorship. While the citizens suffered, bribery ensured that the Mafia got special treatment.

When the US government learned Lucky Luciano was comfortably living in Havana, they put pressure on the Cuban government to deport him. After Luciano made one last move to his final home in Italy, Santo Trafficante moved in to take his place. Trafficante rose to power as a Mob boss in Tampa by running the bolito racket. As a trilingual speaker of English, Italian, and Spanish, he was well suited to be a crime lord in Cuba. Even better, he was well-acquainted with Cuban cultural ways through his running of illegal gambling operations in Florida. He wasn’t on good terms with Meyer Lansky though. Despite their differences, the two oversaw a growing casino industry that was linked to the nightclub scene and the tourist trade. Lansky had an honest streak and he caused his casinos to flourish by cleaning up the business, kicking con men and corrupt pit bosses out. He knew from experience in Las Vegas that casinos where customers are treated fairly draw bigger crowds. Lansky also didn’t like violence so he kept his gang’s assassinations and strongarm tactics to a minimum. He preferred to do business the gentleman’s way through financial favors and tax evasion. He was a macro level gangster who didn’t concern himself with small rackets. Under Lanksy’s and Trafficante’s guidance, the Cuban branch of the American Syndicate also made inroads into banking, real estate, and hotels.

The narrative alternates between the story of the Mob in Havana and the story of Fidel Castro and his rise to power with the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Castro started out as a young boy with ambitions of becoming a Catholic priest. In college he joined a political gang. Later he became a lawyer then led an attack on the Moncada military barracks. The failed coup landed Fidel and his brother Raul in prison where they plotted a bigger venture in seizing power from the unpopular Batista regime. After their release, the Castro brothers fled to Mexico where they organized a militia, bought a boat, and sailed for Cuba. While hiding in the Sierra Maestra mountains and training for guerilla warfare, Fidel Castro was interviewed by a journalist from The New York Times. He also bought arms from the American Mob who possibly acted as middlemen and traffickers for the American government. Clandestine connections between American intelligence agents and Castro are hinted at by the author but never fully explored. Word of the Revolution spread rapidly throughout Cuba and soon Batista was on a plane to the Bahamas after being persuaded by the CIA to step down. This meant the end of American organized crime in Cuba as Lansky, Trafficante and pals were chased out of the country.

Aside from these main threads, there are a lot of side stories. A brief but detailed account of the history of the Mafia from the Castellamarese War to the forming of the National Crime Syndicate to the Kafauver Committee congressional hearings and beyond are all told. A lot is also said about the Cuban music scene and the culture of hotels, casinos, and nightclubs like the legendary Tropicana. Also of legendary Cuban lore is the unregulated underworld of vice that mostly catered to tourists. During the Prohibition era in America, Havana became a haven for lushes. Along with that came a seedy underbelly of whorehouses, cocaine dealers, hit men for hire, and pornographic movie theaters. Slightly more respectable were the fully nude dancers and live sex shows. The character called Superman, who gets it on with a lady tied up on a stage in The Godfather Part II, is actually based on a real person. The real Superman was an Afro-Cuban man who was hung like a horse. He made a living by perfoming in sex shows, pornos, and working as a gigolo to pleasure white female tourists from El Norte. And he did all this for a living even though he was gay. According to the author, the Mob didn’t actually having anything to do with this kind of sordid, street level sleaze. Their sights were set higher on bigger fish to fry like gambling, hotels, and politics.

These side story passages are interesting, but they amount to little more than padding to fill in a thin story. Most of these passages aren’t directly related to the Lansky-Trafficante activities. However, they do give some context and information that isn’t easily available in other sources. These are some of the most vivid and detailed accounts of Havana night life before the Revolution that I’ve encountered so far. But actually the Mob wasn’t in Cuba long enough to do anything too exciting. Fidel Castro killed Meyer Lansky’s dream of a gambling and offshore banking paradise long before he got a chance to build anything more than one ultramodern hotel on the Malecon. The strongest part of this book is its account of the Cuban Revolution which is short on fine details, but direct and comprehensive enough to be of value to someone who wants to learn what happened without plowing through dense historical tomes like those of Hugh Thomas or Tad Szulc.

There are a number of stray details I find questionable. T.J. English, for example, claims Fidel Castro was a Marxist from the start. A lot of other sources that go into greater detail about the dictator’s biography say otherwise. While Castro had studied Marx, he didn’t actually embrace communism as a political system until after he seized power. In the beginning he wanted to maintain trade and diplomatic relations with the USA, but John F. Kennedy snubbed him so he turned to the USSR for support and recognition instead. Fidel Castro was a puritan, a moralist, and an orator, but he was no ideologue. He was an adventurist, a man of action, and a narcissist more than anything else. Tad Szulc covers this extensively in his biography of Castro, which English uses as a source for this book, so it is surprising that this error was made.

Also questionable are some anecdotes about Frank Sinatra and John F. Kennedy. English claims Sinatra worked as a courier fro the Mob, carrying suitcases full of money and guns from New Jersey to Havana. He also claims that when Kennedy was a senator, Meyer Lansky arranged for him to have an orgy with three Cuban prostitutes in a hotel while Lansky watched through a two-way mirror in the next room. Given Kennedy’s reputation as the Don Juan of the Democrats, it wouldn’t surprise me if he went to Cuba for sex, but the part about Lansky watching doesn’t ring true. These stories sound like yellow journalism or conspiracy theory fodder more than fact, but of course I can’t know what’s actually true. In these days of the Epstein files being released, it’s hard to know what to believe about people in power. Still, stories like this seem too sensationalistic to be true.

This book also leaves a giant gap in accounting for the relationship between Lansky and Batista. The exact nature and depth of their relationship is not disclosed. Nor is Batista’s relations with American corporate businessmen, American intelligence agencies, and the American government. The details of why the Americans persuaded Batista to abandon his dictatorship are murky by all accounts, especially considering they had supported him for so long. Also murky are details about Fidel Castro’s relations with the USA; he went on fundraising campaigns up north, but details of who actually gave him money for the Revolution haven’t been examined in any books I’ve read.

Havana Nocturne isn’t great, but it’s interesting. There is a lot of filler, but at least the filler is informative even though the bulk of it isn’t directly related to the story. It is good for filling in some details about organized crime in Cuba before the Revolution. While books on that particular turning point of the Cold War in the Caribbean always mention the Mob presence in Cuba, the actual story of what they were up to hasn’t been thoroughly examined in any book I know. It’s also a good read for Cubanophiles and those who want to understand how a small group of underworld criminals had a major impact on world affairs. But is there a moral to this story? Yes. The next time you are at a live sex show, be aware that commies might be coming to chop off your head. Be careful and don’t be a Fredo.

 

Book Review & Analysis: I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

by Harlan Ellison

      I’m trapped and there’s no way out. That’s the common theme in Harlan Ellison’s collection of short stories, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream. It is possible that even death won’t end your problems.

The titular story is one that resonates well today. We stand in the shadow of a looming AI tech revolution. Silicon Valley wants to create sentient supercomputers that can think, act, and calculate in mass scales too big for our tiny human brains to comprehend. The thought that computers might dominate and even destroy us is improbable as of now, but it is plausible enough to cause dread and fear in the minds of anybody who thinks about it for a few minutes. In Ellison’s story, an omniscient and omnipotent computer called AM has been created. It learns to hate the human race and kills everybody save for a small group of people. AM keeps them alive simply to torture them. They are imprisoned inside the computer and spend their lives searching for food. None of them like each other. They are also prevented from dying because AM doesn’t want to allow them to escape their pain through death. Since the narrator can’t commit suicide, he does the only thing he can think of to hurt AM. Read it for yourself to find out what happens.

This story is short and direct. It’s like the horror of learning that your head and body will continue living after being guillotined, even though the two are no longer attached. It’s emblematic of a man who feels imprisoned by his own mind and sees no way of solving his problems. The theme of an omnipotent computer isn’t the point of the story; this is really just an allegory about a man who feels overwhelmed by his own self-loathing and mental instability. A deep analytical dive isn’t necessary to understand this. If it has any definite message though, it is that mortality is a necessary part of life.

In one way or another, all the other stories in this collection are about entrapment anddeath. “Big Sam Was My Friend” is about a circus performer who goes in search of his true love. The search makes him miserable and when he finds her, she doesn’t want him. “Eyes of Dust” is about a boy living in a world where anybody who isn’t beautiful gets put to death. The boy is born blind and his parents hide him away in a secret cellar room where he has visions of beautiful things that other people on the planet can’t see. “World Of the Myth” tells the story of a middle aged man who lives a mundane life as an office worker. He fantasizes about an afterlife where he is a heroic dragon fighter, but when he dies he is denied access to this paradise because he hadn’t earned it. He spent his life dreaming instead of pursuing his dreams and so he gets nothing in the end. “Lonelyache” involves a divorced man who seeks liberation from the prison of marriage in extreme promiscuity only to find that sleeping with tons of woman is nothing more than another kind of prison. In “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes”, a prostitute dies in a casino and her spirit enters into a slot machine. One man begins playing the possessed machine and finds it to be the loosest slot in Las Vegas. He hits the jackpot every time he pulls the lever. Since he is a lonesome drifter with no money, this is like a dream come true. But winning against the odds is just another trap with no way out except death.

Two of these stories, “Eyes of Dust” and “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes”, have a bit more depth than the other three which are more surface level and self-explanatory. “Eyes of Dust” is set in a city named Light located on the planet Topaz. Initially the city and its people are described as being purely beautiful. The aforementioned blind boy, hidden away in a cellar, is physically unattractive, therefore his parents keep him secret to prevent him from being killed. He is more soulful and able to access beauty through education and imagination. But when the house he is hidden in burns down, the people of Light discover him and burn him at the stake for not being good looking. This appears to be a direct reference to the way the medieval Catholic church burned heretics and witches during the Inquisition.

At the end of the story, Light is described as an ugly place even though the city itself has not changed, When the existence of the blind boy is revealed, the ugliness of the people of Light is revealed since the execution shows how they are possessed of no inner depth. The blind boy has inner vision which allows him to find inner beauty, but the others lose that possibility by sacrificing him for the sake of maintaining the shallowness of the status quo and the over-valuation of surface appearances. Their exterior beauty is only achieved by suppressing their inner ugliness. At the end of the story when Light is described as ugly, the inner darkness of its inhabitants, as revealed through burning the boy at the stake, causes the subjective perception of ugliness to override the superficial appearance of perfection. We see how the people of Light are trapped by their own lack of depth just the blind boy is trapped because of his blindness even though he can actually see a lot more than they can. Beauty is only skin deep. It’s a cliché, but it is a cliché that is well articulated in this allegory.

“Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” tells the story of Kostner, a loser who rolls into Las Vegas to spend his last bit of money gambling, and Maggie Moneyeyes, a Native American prostitute who crosses his path in a sense. After growing up in poverty, Maggie enters the world of prostitution as a means of class mobility. When she finishes serving a repulsive client in a Las Vegas hotel, she goes down to the casino to spend her money on the slots. But she dies and her spirit enters the machine she is playing.

This can be interpreted as a bit racist since the association of Native people with mystical powers if a way of fetishizing and exoticizing them. Endowing Maggie with magic powers by turning her into a spirit that possesses a slot machine could be a way of denying her humanity. White people have a tendency to write about non-white people as though they are mysterious creatures found in some distant galaxy in a show like Star Trek. But then again, many Native Americans openly embrace their spiritual traditions and culture. The question to ask is if this story would still have the same impact if Maggie Moneyeyes was written as a white character. I’ll allow you to answer that for yourself.

Anyhow, Kostner enters the casino and plays the slot machine that is possessed by Maggie Moneyeyes’ spirit. And he wins. In fact, he wins big. Then he wins big again and again. Every time he plays he hits the jackpot. Kostner becomes a media sensation and attracts large crowds who watch him win repeatedly. The casino management is suspicious that he is cheating, but they believe the attention to be good publicity for drawing in more gamblers and let him stay. But when Kostner stops playing, he dies.

Maggie and Kostner are thematically linked by their poverty. Both of them end up in the casino because they see having money as a way out of their problems. For them, money is a magic key that opens the doors of their figurative prison cells. I recall Karl Marx saying in Capital that money is a kind of magic that makes people believe they can get whatever they want. But while money may relieve the two main characters from their poverty, it just moves them into another prison cell rather than freeing them. Kostner loses everything when he stops playing and ends up dead; Maggie can only live by being entrapped inside a slot machine. Kostner is the body and Maggie is the soul and through the medium of the slot machine the two are joined.

Maggie is sexualized in her role as a prostitute and Kostner, pulling the lever and depositing coins into the machine, could easily be interpreted as sexualized as well. The big payoff at the end of every attempt could be interpreted as the sexual climax. Playing the slot machine almost has an element of Pagan fertility folk magic in the way that ceremonially seeding an agricultural field field brings forth a harvest. The stronger the magic, the bigger the harvest. Both Kostner and Maggie are sexual outsiders. Remember that Kistner’s marriage failed. It is through their erotic connection, sublimated through the act of playing the slot machine, that they fulfill their needs for both money and companionship. This fulfillment is possible for Kostner in his interaction with Maggie who is both sexualized and supernatural, a meeting place where magic is believed to be possible. But without the slot machine they no longer connect. Therefore their luck and their lives end. The only way out of their trap is death.

Ellison writes an introduction to each story in this short collection. He explains that these were all written as therapy during a time of crisis in his life when he struggled with failed relationships, heavy drug and alcohol use, and other unspecified mental health issues. The connection between his frustrations and the themes in these stories is easy to see. I do, however, find it anooying when an author explains the meaning of their own work as a part of the work. He tells you about the sources of these stories without giving the reader a chance to encounter them on their own terms. This is a small annoyance though. In any case, I think Ellison, with his prickly personality, enjoyed annoying people.

I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream doesn’t offer any profound thoughts. These stories aren’t philosophical screeds. More than anything they are brief outbursts of anger from a man who feels there is no way out of the problems he has. In that sense it succeeds. If you’ve been there before, you can relate. Existence is a prison, but the worst prison of all is the one inside your own mind. Maybe Harlan Ellison could have followed George Clinton’s advice: free your mind and your ass will follow. Sometimes music and dancing are all you need.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Freddie Prinze Story by Maria Pruetzel & John A. Barbour

The Freddie Prinze Story

by Maria Pruetzel & John A. Barbour

      The 1970s were a golden era for television sitcoms. People got nightly doses of half hour comedies about working class people or upwardly mobile minority groups that worked hard to raise themselves above the status they were given. These shows were socially conscious, using humor and sympathetic characters to show that, despite our differences, people from all walks of life can solve problems and learn to live together. Norman Lear was a major driver of this pop culture trend, bringing us shows like Sanford and Son, The jeffersons, Good times, and the now monumental All In the Family. Other shows like Barney Miller and Welcome Back Kotter worked along a similar line but emphasized workplaces that were more ethnically integrated as opposed to Norman Lear’s productions that focused more on white and African-American familial relations. Looking back now, it is obvious that although Latino communities were present in those shows, they were also underrepresented. So in the mid-1970s, producer James Kornack saw the gap in the market and created Chico and the Man, the first TV show in history to be set in a Mexican-American neighborhood. It was the story of a cranky, elderly white garage owner who hires a young Chicano to work as an auto mechanic. The show was a hit so when the star, Freddie Prinze, took his own life, a dark cloud came over the lives of television viewers across America.

Immediately after the shocking suicide, the networks were quick to cash in on the tragedy and aired a made for TV movie about the actor and comedian’s life. But the family were unhappy with the production which they thought was sensational, inaccurate, and commercially motivated. Therefore Prinze’s mother Maria Pruetzel in collaboration with John A. Barbour, to put together The Freddie Prinze Story giving her version of what happened.

As this biography opens, Freddie Prinze is lying on his deathbed in the ICU of a Beverly Hills hospital. His parents are there along with his closet friends and colleagues along with medical professionals who try to save his life while holding a rabid gang of journalists at bay. With a gunshot wound to his head, the chances of survival aren’t great. It’s a maudlin scene with heightened emotions and lots and lots of praying and talk about God. As a non-religious scholar of the literary arts, this was off-putting to me at first, but saw the necessity of suspending my previously formed prejudices and admitting to myself that this is how some people are in real life. One thing I can say in this book’s favor is that its realism cut through all my preconceptions and brought me out of the boxes I think inside to a grounded place that reminded me of the varieties of ways people deal with grief in this terrible world we live in. After clearing away the fog of my intellectualism (some might call it pseudointellectualism but I’m not the one who gets to decide if that’s correct or not), I was ready t move on.

In contrast to the deathbed scene, the shift to the story of Freddie Prinze’s childhood came in like a ray of sunshine. He was born as Freddie Pruetzel to immigrant parents, his mother coming from Puerto Rico and his father coming from Hungary as a refugee from the communist government. While his mother was proud and compassionate, constantly gushing with love and admiration for her son, his father was quiet and distant. Freddie maintained a close relationship with them throughout his brief life. The family raised him in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, straddling the line between the working class and the middle class. They weren’t rich, but Freddie was a little bit spoiled as his hard working parents went out of their way to give him whatever he wanted.

In his teenage years, Freddie Pruetzel got accepted into a performing arts high school, the same one that later became the basis for the TV show Fame. He was popular, charismatic, and smooth with the ladies and also a bit precocious. He flunked out of school because he was spending all his nights on stage doing routines as a stand up comic, something he had a natural talent for. Some of these venues he worked, like Catch a Rising Star and the Improv are now legendary for being the place where many famous comics were discovered. Freddie Pruetzel was discovered by David Brenner who immediately saw his talent. Brenner took him on as a friend and mentor, helping guide him towards the show business big time before he got out of his teenage years.

Freddie Pruetzel moved to Hollywood, changed his name to Freddie Prinze, and continued working on the national stand up comedy circuit. After his move, he made one of the biggest errors of his career: he ditched his agent in New York and took on a local agent who had more contacts in the West Coast entertainment industry. This contract break would come back to bite Prinze financially later on.

But things were on the up and up for Prinze. He got cast as Chico in the TV show Chico and the Man and television brought him into the homes of people all across America. The show was not without controversy though. A lot of Mexican-Americans objected to him playing a Chicano mechanic because of his Puerto Rican and Hungarian ethnic background. This might seem trivial to some, but from a Chicano point of view there were few Mexican people in Hollywood story lines and fewer chances for Mexican people to enter the mainstream entertainment industry. Historically Mexican people were often played by white people wearing make up to make their skin look brown. So the conflict, like so many other conflicts in the world, was over access to a limited resource. If you come from an underrepresented community, this can make a difference. But otherwise the show was a hit and Prinze’s stand up performances consistently drew huge crowds too.

Flush with money, Prinze bought a house for his parents in Los Angeles and that was probably the best thing he did with his newfound fame and wealth. Otherwise, he got hooked in a cycle of drug addiction where he sniffed cocaine to feel energetic then took valium and quaaludes to calm himself down. With alcohol and weed added into the mix, his brain became foggy and it wasn’t long before he felt lost in the world. Prinze made the mistake of thinking that getting married and starting a family would bring him out of his depression, but it didn’t. Then the parasitical agent in New York ,who he dropped the contract with, sued and won, thereafter being entitled to a significant chunk of Prinze’s earnings. The comedian wandered around in a suicidal daze until one night, in the presence of his business manager, he shot himself in the head.

Freddie Prinze’s suicide flies in the face of everything we are told about how to help people who want to end their lives. They tell us that religion and communal bonds are what prevent people from offing themselves, and yet Freddie Prinze was deeply religious to the point where he had considered leaving show business to become an Evangelical minister. And up until the hour of his demise he was surrounded by friends and family who were literally begging him not to kill himself. Something was wrong with him on a much deeper level than community and faith. His mother the narrator makes it look like his drug abuse was the ultimate problem. The drugs certainly didn’t help, but simply blaming the drugs doesn’t answer the question of why this happened because this kind of drug abuse is often a symptom and not the causal illness of depression. As an armchair psychologist, my opinion is that Freddie Prinze got into too much too soon. He got swept up into a life of fame at a young age and then found himself lost and disoriented without any maps or reference points to guide him along the way. He was 21 when he committed suicide; he was still a child. I feel like he was too young and immature to handle all the pressures of fame and wealth that were put on him before he had developed a strong inner core of self. He hadn’t developed enough sense of identity or psychological stability to be able to handle the burdens of a whirlwind career where he had the world at his fingertips and had no idea what to do with such responsibility. He was just a kid when he died and the close relationship with his mother, and his emotional dependence on her, shows that he hadn’t matured to the point necessary to continue on with the life he had gotten himself into.

For the kind of book this is, it’s surprisingly well written. It does leave out a few details though. This was written by Prinze’s mother in collaboration with an actual writer so it’s taken for granted that she will be selective in what she does and doesn’t include. And regardless of how close a mother is to her son, there will always be things he did that she will never know about. But as it is the story feels complete. There should have been more commentary on Chico and the Man and hat it represented in American culture. If anybody reads this book in the future without having seen the show, its significance might be lost on them.

It’s also written from a unique angle. Biographies written by the subject’s mother are rare and those written by Puerto Rican mothers are even more rare. As can be expected, Maria Pruetzel gushes with motherly love for her son no matter how bad life gets for him. The writing is often sentimental and dramatic so it might be considered over the top by conventional literary standards, but as I said before many mothers are like this in the everyday world and the sentimentality makes this book hit home as a quality work of realism. And I don’t want to indulge in stereotypes of Puerto Rican people, but the way that Maria Pruetzel idolizes and dotes on her boy is common among the Puerto Rican mothers I’ve encountered in my time. There is a certain kind of bond between mother and son here that borders on religious devotion which makes the death of Freddie Prinze at the end so much more painful. This is as much a portrait of the central role a son plays in his mother’s life as it is a portrait of a tragic celebrity suicide. It must have been extremely painful for her to tell this story.

There is a list a mile long of comedians who were miserable and suicidal. Comedians entertain people by making jokes about the things that bother them and audiences are entertained by laughing at the jokes about things that bother the comedian. At some point this feedback cycle makes a lot of them snap. The Freddie Prinze Story is an account of one of them and it’s one more story in a long line of stories that are a lot like it. Even though memories of Freddie Prinze and Chico and the Man may be fading, this book is still timeless enough in theme to be worth reading in our present day. It might be of especial interest to people who are fascinated with the dark and tragic side of Hollywood.

The death of Freddie Prinze didn’t have to happen. But it did. That’s how the world is. So it goes.

 

Book Review: Voice Of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba by Ivor L. Miller

Voice Of the Leopard:

African Secret Societies and Cuba

by Ivor L. Miller

     The general public is familiar with African diaspora religions in the Caribbean and South America via popular culture. Most of what people think of in association with Voudou (voodoo) or Lukumi (Santeria) involves skulls, drums, zombies, and black magic. It isn’t hard to see how film makers, artists, writers, and musicians have appropriated elements from these religions since mystical and sometimes dark imagery can easily capture the imagination. But not so many people realize that African diaspora religions are complex social systems that exist within broader historical, socio-political, and economic systems and thereby have function and meaning as groups within those larger systems. One of the lesser acknowledged African diaspora religions is Abakua, a secret society that began in Cuba in the 19^th century and continues to thrive today. Voice Of the Leopard, by the American anthropologist Ivor L. Miller, gives a broad overview of this group and the role they played in Cuban history.

When West African people were brought to Cuba as slaves, their religious practices accompanied them. While these religions were mostly forbidden in the United States, slave owners in places like Brazil, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Cuba allowed them to flourish, mostly because they relieved some psychological pressure that built up under the living conditions of slavery. This may have worked to some degree, but the number of slaves who escaped to live in isolated communities in the Sierra Maestra mountains, called “cimmanrones” or “maroons”, proves their situation was not one to envy. Nonetheless, Cuba was unique in that the colonialists allowed slaves to earn and save money which they could use to buy their way to freedom. That is one reason for Cuba having a small population of free African criollos who survived by working as craftsmen. According to members of Abakua societies, there was even a smaller number of West African immigrants who voluntarily came to Cuba to give slaves guidance on how to safeguard their religion in the new land. The accuracy of that belief is of no importance in this book because that is what the Abakua believe and it influences how they see the world.

Using linguistics and cross-cultural comparisons along with historical records, Miller has traced the origins of Abakua back to the Cross Rivers region along the border of Nigeria and Cameroon. In that part of Africa, fraternal societies called Ekpe have existed since times long before colonialism. The language, rituals, and mythologies of Abakua and Ekpe bear too many similarities to be coincidental. This is especially true because Abakua initiates have their own language that is only spoken with Abakua members and, although time and distance have caused morphological changes, it is essentially the same language spoken by Ekpe initiates. A similar linguistic analysis has been used to trace the origins of Roma (Gypsy) people to Rajastan in northern India, a significant discovery since that ethnic group existed for centuries without knowing precisely where they originated. The mapping of the human genome has recently justified these ancestral histories.

Miller gives some brief explanations about what Abakua members do. He starts by analyzing what kind of a group they are. He prefers the term “initiate society” over “secret society” since membership in the group is not kept secret, only their beliefs and practices are. Readers hoping for a detailed explanation of those beliefs and practices will inevitably be disappointed since such information is only transmitted to initiates who have risen through s series of degrees and offices to widen their scope of Abakua. Some basic information is shared with the public though, for example various motifs from the Ekpe/Abakua mythology, their transmission of historical narratives through call and response chanting done to the accompaniment of drumming and dancing, and the presence of the fundamento in every juego (lodge). The fundamento is the ceremonial centerpiece, or omphalos, of each juego. The original is said to have been brought over from Africa by the aforementioned voluntary immigrants from the Cross Rivers region who taught the slaves how to practice Abakua in Cuba. The Abakua juegos are open to men only. There is no discussion as to whether Abakua is actually a religion or not. From my limited knowledge of the society, I prefer to think it doesn’t fit easily into any category, containing elements of religion, magic, political secret societies, social clubs, and mutual aid fraternities.

Abakua juegos serve various functions. One is that of a mutual aid society. Dues collected by each juego can be used as health or life insurance for each member. Money is also collected for charity or educational funding. During the 19^th century, illiterate slaves who joined Abakua could receive some education they wouldn’t get elsewhere. At a local level, lodges provided a means for upward social mobility in a colony where such mobility was limited for free Afro-Cubans and usually unobtainable for slaves. Membership in a lodge required the mastery of knowledge, commitment, and responsibility. Money could also be raised in an Abakua society to help a slave buy their own freedom. Plus, the hierarchical nature of the juegos gave motivated individuals a means for moving up a social ladder thereby growing and maturing as people.

Abakua was also important for historical reasons. Since juego activities were secret and only accessible to initiates, they served as near-perfect places for clandestine political activity. Afro-Cubans who sought for an end to slavery were deeply committed to the two Cuban Wars of Independence and used their gathering places for planning military and political strategies. The Independence leader and national hero Antonio Maceo was a member of Abakua for this reason. Freemasonry also had a strong presence in 19^th century Cuba and pro-Independence Masons collaborated with Abakua to fight against the Spanish crown. The Wars of Independence also led to the establishment of Abakua juegos for both white and Chinese members who were dedicated to the Cuban nationhood cause.

Other topics covered by Miller include the reasons why Abakua has not spread further geographically than it already has and the influence Abakua has had on Cuban music and art. In the latter case, Abakua drum rhythms have a strong presence in the syncretistic styles of mambo and son. The chapter covering music is not highly detailed so deeper insights into the subject should be looked for elsewhere. In the former topic, the explanation is that strict and complicated protocols for establishing new lodges has made it nearly impossible for Abakua to spread much farther than the regions surrounding Havana and and the nearby city of Matanzas. If you want to join, your only option would be to move to Cuba. Miller also writes about recent contact and collaboration between Ekpe initiates in Nigeria and Abakua members in Cuba who have traveled to Nigeria recently with assistance from the author who is an Ekpe initiate himself aside from being an anthropologist.

Since the practice of Abakua is kept secret and only accessible to members, this book is mostly historical in nature. However, some of their ceremonies, including dances, drumming, and call and response chanting, are publicly accessible since some ceremonies are done in the yards of juegos were neighbors can observe them or hear them from a distance. I speculate that this is done as a means of proselytizing and arousing the curiosity of potential recruits. Despite not providing much information about the inner workings of this society, its influence on Cuban history is a fascinating story to learn about, especially because mainstream historians have given so little space to Abakua’s role in achieving independence and building national identity. Unfortunately, there is nothing said about Abakua in their relation to the Cuban Revolution of 1958 and Fidel Castro’s subsequent dictatorship. Abakua survived throughout all of that so there must be something to be said about them during those times.

Voice Of the Leopard gives a good overview of Abakua and its history. It serves the purpose of demonstrating how such a secret society can maintain social stability and mental health in the midst of a chaotic and ever-changing world. By giving members a sense of participation in history and having roots in an antiquarian culture, a direct line between past and present is maintained which contributes stability to the community. In this way, Abakua has acted as a positive force in Cuban society. Up until recent times, America had societies based around common interests in much the same way that the Cubans have Abakua. In 2025, fraternal orders like the Masons or the Elks, hobbyist groups, bowling leagues, labor unions, social clubs, and other societies in which people create social bonds and a sense of belonging are mostly on life support if they still exist at all. As a result of the internet, people spend more time looking at screens on laptops and cell phones then they do in the presence of others. As a result, the rates of loneliness, depression, mental illness, and suicide have spiked, especially among young people. It would be interesting to research what the rate of these ailments are in African diaspora religions. My educated guess is that they would be far less frequent than in American society. Maybe a few more groups like the Abakua could save us from ourselves.