“Indian Camp” (1924)

This story brings us to the somewhat confusing welter of the In Our Time collection featuring Nick Adams, with its multiple versions and quasi-sense of being more than just a collection of short stories, on the order of some kind of interconnected cycle. My version (from the Finca Vigia Complete edition) is prefaced by a single paragraph labeled “Chapter 1” with a war scene. One of these vignettes shows up between every story. I’m more prone to take the stories as standalones and the vignettes as unrelated prose poetry flourishes. “Indian Camp” is very short and very good. It’s the first appearance of Nick Adams, seen here in Michigan as a kid. He is accompanying his father, a doctor, on a late-night call. The occasion is a problem childbirth for a Native American woman. The baby is coming out feet first and ultimately the doctor has to perform a caesarean using a jackknife and no anesthetic. The husband, meanwhile, in the upper bunk, has killed himself by slashing his own throat. He’s not discovered until after the birth. There’s blood everywhere. The brutality here surprised me, but what is perhaps more surprising is that little about it feels overdone. It comes close, and some might disagree. The suicide was particularly gruesome. The doctor hurries Nick out of the cabin, sorry now that he brought him. In general, the story is racist toward Native Americans, but more by way of ignorance than hate. Certainly Nick is getting a life lesson out of this—about life and death, about men and women, about whites and minorities and the realities of poverty. It’s Nick’s point of view through the story. Much of the focus is on the father and son relationship as the father provides a stream of soothing explanations about the situation, at least until the point when it becomes clear what he has to do. We learn about the jackknife in a conversational aside later. Hemingway’s self-serious tone works well here. The best Hemingway—even including some of the vignettes—bears a sense of dismay and devastation, as if captured at the moment innocence is shattered. He often seems to prize stoicism above all else in the face of calamity, but it’s apparent he’s trying to protect the side of himself that believes in the goodness of humanity and life. As must we all. At the same time, a more cynical side of him appears to believe everything is worth nothing, and thus the basic internal conflict of Hemingway. He is just starting to discover it in these Nick Adams stories from In Our Time, which can be gripping, vital, and immediate. The suicide here may be a slightly false note, reaching too far to make an impact, but it’s not hard for me to believe these events could have all happened just this way. The story is shocking but poignant and altogether done well.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Sherlock Jr. (1924)

USA, 45 minutes
Director: Buster Keaton
Writers: Jean C. Havez, Joseph A. Mitchell, Clyde Bruckman
Photography: Byron Houck, Elgin Lessley
Editors: Roy B. Yokelson, Buster Keaton
Cast: Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Ward Crane, Joe Keaton, Erwin Connelly

Buster Keaton's parody of both detective fiction and romance movies of the era finds him in good form. What is this Buster Keaton thing? Something about his very face and posture is somehow funny over and over—the stoic fool who never gives up hope. His strings are pulled by the movie magician stunt man who will try anything: fake mustaches everywhere you look, a banana peel gag (likely old even in 1924), poolroom trick shots in the service of proto-Hitchcockian suspense. He makes us think a doorway is a mirror and then that a doorway is a vault (a portrait of George Washington looks askance at the deception). He leaps through a window and into a dress and shortly after that he leaps through the body of his accomplice and a wall behind. It's impossible, don't you see, a special effect. He does these things because he can. His character, Sherlock Jr., is pure confidence in the breach, absurdly swaggering in top hat and tails. That confidence may bend but it is never broken. He is a nitwit, of course. Our man is actually a film projector who only dreams of becoming a detective. Most of the movie takes place as a movie-within-a-movie dream, which features him stepping in and out of the screen of the romance movie Hearts and Pearls, or The Lounge Lizard's Lost Love, which is playing at the movie theater where he works. Our point of view is from the seats in the audience (Woody Allen lifted and paid homage to it 60 years later in The Purple Rose of Cairo). At first, because the gag is about all the places he keeps finding himself with the cuts in the movie-within-a-movie, the movie-within-a-movie briefly no longer makes sense, roaming for no apparent reason from cliffsides to African jungle with lions and so forth. Soon enough it remembers itself. The dry and gently acerbic tone of the whole thing is captured in an intertitle: "By the next day the mastermind had completely solved the mystery—with the exception of locating the pearls and finding the thief." The best is saved for last, as Buster Keaton was a filmmaker who always knew what he was doing, and more so in his prime. A spectacular and often very funny chase scene with a motorcycle and cars and many stunts is set in motion by a signature grand stunt, vaulting off a second-story rooftop into a moving automobile using a railroad crossing guard (somehow the driver never notices). No doubt Keaton really did it and lots of other stuff here too—he spent months learning the pool shots, for example. He was like that. That stone face tells everything and nothing.

"The Most Dangerous Game" (1924)

I recall Richard Connell's chestnut as being taught in high school. I wonder if that wasn't how the Zodiac serial killer was exposed to it, who made oblique references to it in one letter to Bay Area newspapers. Operating just behind the Zodiac in the '70s and '80s, in Alaska, was Robert Hansen, who kidnapped women, raped them, flew them to remote wilderness areas, and hunted them. "The Most Dangerous Game," alas quaint now at best after such true-crime episodes, is further weakened by being full of absurd convenience. A man falls off a yacht in the Caribbean and swims "the blood-warm water" to the nearest island. His name is Sanger Rainsford and he happens to be a big-game hunter. He also happens to be an author. The owner of the island happens to know his work. That owner is General Zaroff, a Czarist loyalist, who I imagine having a scar on the side of his face like Fearless Leader from Bullwinkle. It's a reasonably good idea, this horror of humans formally hunting one another (what next, cannibalism?!), but it's a little too impressed with its awesomeness to work out the details and make it credible. It's still fun to read as a sort of adventure story with a tang of existential dread. It's mostly setup and then the last third is a lot of chasing around the jungle making booby traps and/or avoiding them. It reads like a story that is still a little shell-shocked from the Great War. Indeed, our hero, besides being a big-game hunter and author, also happens to be a veteran of that war. His experience quickly digging trenches comes in handy. The story is haunted by human brutality even as it seems to have little idea how bad it can get. I appreciate the dark spirit but by the time I was reading it in high school movies like Night of the Living Dead and Last House on the Left were more the latest word in human brutality. Interesting that those movies are likely not yet taught in high school, and this Connell story might still be, but the reasons are obvious and understandable. An interesting curiosity but not that much to see here, folks.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Outstation" (1924)

Story by W. Somerset Maugham not available online.

I thought this story by W. Somerset Maugham was pretty good, though unfortunately marred by comparison with an earlier and better story in the collection with similar themes by Joseph Conrad, "An Outpost of Progress." Both are set in British colonies across the globe and involve conflicts encountered by the white men stationed there. Conrad is concerned with the violence and barbarism of colonialism, whereas Maugham appears to have more the portability of the British class system on his mind, with an exotic background that somehow forces the conflict. It's as effective in its way as the Conrad, but not as visceral. Maybe that's what I miss. Maugham's story has the more interesting characters. It's told third-person omniscient, mostly from the point of view of the ranking white man, Mr. Warburton, at a Malaysia station of a private trading company. Warburton is an effete upper-class toady, a carefully defined "snob." His new assistant, Mr. Cooper, is a blustering fellow on the rise from the working class. He is competent in his work, but rejects the dress and manner of Warburton as phony. Cooper knows well on a blunt level the injustice of the class system, but it is Warburton who is more capable of kindness to "inferiors." Cooper beats and mistreats his servants, calls them "niggers," and can't understand Warburton's objections any more than he can understand the requirement to dress for dinner. Warburton is caught by the situation, as Cooper is too good at his job to move him elsewhere and replace him. They modulate from being strained with one another, to hostile, to quarreling, and finally they stop speaking altogether. "Each lived in his own house as though the other did not exist." I don't think I'm giving too much away if I let you know that going from bad to worse is the basic narrative arc here. But here also is where the comparison with Conrad becomes apt again. Maugham continually erects a stiff upper lip British sensibility around the details that leaves things just a little more distanced than I think is called for. These characters are complex and interesting and in vital conflict with one another. I wanted it all more out in the open—or perhaps a better view of the inside—and the result of the disaffection is that the conflict feels slighted a little, as if it were something proposed as a thought experiment of some kind. Or is that just the comparison with the Conrad again?

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

Greed (1924)

USA, 129 / 239 minutes
Director: Erich von Stroheim
Writers: June Mathis, Erich von Stroheim, Frank Norris, Joseph Farnham
Photography: William H. Daniels, Ben F. Reynolds
Music: Robert Israel
Editors: Joseph Farnham, June Mathis, Glenn Morgan, Frank E. Hull, Rex Ingram, Erich von Stroheim, Grant Whytock
Cast: Gibson Gowland, Zasu Pitts, Jean Hersholt, Tempe Pigott, Dale Fuller, Chester Conklin, Sylvia Ashton

Life is short and the story of Greed is long—the original cut delivered by director, cowriter, and coeditor Erich von Stroheim was pretty long itself, on the order of seven to 10 hours. Accounts differ, but many agree it's one of the great lost masterpieces of cinema. Fifty years ago it was on the short list of the greatest films ever made, according to the Sight & Sound poll of 1962, after only Citizen Kane, L'Avventura (?!), and The Rules of the Game. In 1924, the studio figuratively thanked Stroheim for his work and assigned the recut to June Mathis, who got it down to a little more than two hours. I might have something close to that version—mine, from a Turner Classic Movies broadcast, is 129 minutes. On YouTube there is access to versions (usually on dubious pay sites) running 104 minutes, 90 minutes, 83 minutes, and 60 minutes—probably others too if you dig enough. I didn't bother with them. At Amazon, the best I could find available for purchase was a single used Region 2 DVD of a 129-minute version for $30.

Greed is thus truly a lost movie at this time, and more so than others in the category such as The Magnificent Ambersons or Metropolis. Indeed, by happy circumstance, Metropolis has been nearly entirely restored since just 2010. People keep hoping a complete version of Greed will turn up too but so far it hasn't. As it happens, I also have the reconstructed version put together by producer Rick Schmidlin in 1999 for TCM, using Stroheim's original shooting script, extant footage, and production stills. That version comes in just under four hours, which puts us closer to Stroheim's original but still well short. Greed has only the most modest commercial value now. It flopped even its time, not least because its story is a total bummer. Certainly it's one of the harder movies even to see from the top 100 films on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?

Is it worth seeing? Oh geez, I knew you'd ask.

A Passage to India (1924)

I had the impression E.M. Forster was a bookish type of stylist of manners, but reading his best known and most celebrated novel more gives the impression of another British school of letters, the adventurer-writer with Kipling or T.E Lawrence. Not that I know exactly what I'm talking about. Forster's novel seems precise, almost clinical, about the relations between Muslims and Hindus in India and fully aware of the rot that underlay their occupation by Britain. The characters all seem types at first, Britons and various Indians, all of whose individual humanities gradually disclose even as vast and entrenched social and cultural networks introduce more and more complexity. It teases and probes away at several strains of cultures attempting to accommodate and understand and live with one another. Everything comes to revolve around an incident on a pleasure excursion, a young British woman accusing an Indian of assaulting her. The incident itself takes place in a dark cave; it's ambiguous and hard to know exactly what happened. Forster seems more interested in the reverberations abstracted that would be caused by such an incident or accusation in such a fragile society. He understands the strange balance of power too, with the Britons wielding so much power and yet so vastly outnumbered by the Indians, who are deeply divided themselves. This is two decades or more before Pakistan would separate itself from the maelstrom, which took place shortly after World War II, removing itself from India as a country primarily for Muslims. Forster is very good at helping us understand how much we don't know—we, as Westerners—about the overwhelming complexities of this seething mass of humanity with all its divergences of ethnicity and creed and language and God knows what else. Yet it also feels somewhat occluded too, closer to the British viewpoint than it sometimes seems to think it is. Forster is painstaking to maintain his objectivity, such as it is, but his attitude feels patronizing just a little, toward the Indians, as though his real beef and source of motivation is something in him about the grand experiments of the British Empire itself.

In case it's not at the library.

The Magic Mountain (1924)

Initial hefting of this 700-page+ opus might lead to feeling as if one faces the prospect of climbing a literal mountain itself, but I say have no fear and take the trailhead. I like the classic H.T. Lowe-Porter translation almost as much as the more recent John Woods, but ultimately favor the Woods if only for going the extra service of translating a long passage in French that Lowe-Porter leaves in French. I have probably mentioned before that I am a monoglot, so I need all the help I can get. I can't even speak to Mann in the original German, of course, but holy cow, if he reads this slick and knowing and elegant in translation I can only imagine. The Magic Mountain tells the tale of a naive yet mostly sincere young man at the turn of the 20th century, one Hans Castorp, who pays a visit to a cousin who is recuperating at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, finds himself incidentally diagnosed as symptomatic, and ends up remaining there for years himself. Is Castorp actually sick? Well, tuberculosis even now is notoriously difficult to gauge and treat, and surely even more so a century ago, but the short answer is probably no, not so much, and in any event it's a bit off the point. Once there, Castorp discovers that the routines of the place, the simplicities afforded by having his everyday needs ministered to, eventually even the boredom itself, along with the fascinating cast of European characters into whose orbits he falls, serve to liberate him in any number of enviable and exciting ways as he embarks—or, more accurately, stumbles—on various adventures of the modernist intellect, whether sociological, religious, or political: attempting to comprehend the experience of time, pondering the vagaries of how we are affected by music, and so forth. It all gets a bit allegorical, standing in for a Europe unwittingly rotting from the inside in the run-up to World War I. There are wizened, effete, dare I say decadent intellectuals mixing it up with would-be proletariats posturing for the revolution, radical Christians, dedicated hedonists, louts and the well-mannered, the innocent and the predatory and the utterly oblivious, there are even objects of heartbreaking love, and all of it taking place snug as a bug at the glorious remove of a remote outpost in the Swiss Alps. You say I'm not making this sound interesting? I can't explain exactly why this works so well—maybe it's as simple as the sheer seductiveness of Mann's language, which works so well even in translation. Maybe it's the masterful allusiveness with which he approaches and backfills his plot points. Whatever it is, this powerful and slyly humorous novel grabs hold and doesn't let go until the very end, and it rewards rereading too.

In case it's not at the library.

Studies in Murder (1924)

By my calculations, Edmund Lester Pearson was 12 and living in Newburyport, Massachusetts, less than 100 miles away, at the time of the murders in Fall River for which Lizzie Borden was accused. The murders obviously made an impression on him. They are not only the subject of the longest and most detailed piece, "The Borden Case," in this first collection of crime accounts by the meticulous librarian, but are mentioned in the other pieces here as well—and, if I understand correctly, come up frequently in his other collections, most of which are unfortunately out of print and not readily available, and indeed were the subject once again of his last book. As with the Scotsman William Roughead, of the late 19th century, the New Englander Pearson is a gifted amateur criminologist with a knack for thoroughness, relentlessly uncovering the relevant documents, reading them closely, and then telling the tales straightforwardly and politely, arguably glossing some of the unpleasantness but never shying from communicating the realities. It's the kind of thing, bowing to tender sensibilities of the reader, that most crime journalists of the past 50 years or so don't bother with any longer—in fact, the shocking and the lurid is pretty much what they unfailingly play to. Pearson picks his cases carefully, with an eye for those that remain most mystifying, either in terms of whodunit itself or, more interestingly, in terms of the motivations that produced or could have justified them. He proceeds smartly, with a deceptively soothing, studious tone that relentlessly examines everything in reach. The Borden murders would appear to stand as Pearson's ur-example. It's not hard to see that Lizzie Borden, in her early 30s at the time, has to be considered the most likely perp, though she was acquitted by a jury and remained in Fall River until her death in her 60s. It's not even hard to see, at least on some basic level that accepts the degree of fury against one's parents in the first place, what may have motivated her. What is most unsettling, however, and what seems to affect Pearson most about it, though he never quite expresses it so explicitly, is how perfectly forces of the universe seem to align and conspire in order to make the case against her such a difficult one—all circumstantial, and thus so eternally strangely allusive and indeterminate for such a savage crime, committed on a lovely summer midday in a house full of people coming and going.

In case it's not at the library.