"Band Of Angels" by Robert Penn Warren, A Wonderful Old Novel And Still Worth Reading!

 

"Band Of Angels" is a 1955 novel by Robert Penn Warren, one of the handful of American writers who was never awarded a Nobel Prize and probably should have been.  But he was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel "All The King's Men", and the second for his poetry.  He was also a Rhodes Scholar and taught at both Vanderbilt University and Yale.  He also worked as a Consultant In Poetry for the Library of Congress.  He was an amazingly prolific writer and produced 12 novels, 15 non-fiction books on a variety of subjects, 3 children's books, 2 major dramatic versions of his novel "All The King's Men", 1 short story collection, and 21 collections of poetry.  

 

"Band Of Angels" was made into a 1957 movie which starred Clark Gable, Sidney Poitier, and Yvonne de Carlo.  The heroine and narrator of the book is Amantha "Manty" Starr, a woman who was raised by her father on a Central Kentucky plantation in the years preceding the Civil War.  Her mother is dead and buried near the house instead of in the plantation cemetery some distance farther away.  Her father who pampers her, apparently loves her deeply, and regularly takes her to Cincinnati to meet his friends there.  He also enrolls her in Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.  But he never tells her much about her mother, and the primary female influence in her childhood is an older slave woman.  The father dies suddenly while Manty is still in college and, when she returns to the plantation just in time to see the end of his funeral proceedings in the cemetery, she learns that her mother was a slave, that she was never freed by her father, and is seized, as part of his personal property, at the graveside by a local loan shark who has loaned her father large sums of money.  She is shipped to New Orleans to be sold as a slave in the slave market there and bought by an older man who pays $2,000 for her to keep her from falling into the hands of a young southern ne'er do well.  She becomes the mistress of her owner who turns out to be a former slave trading ship's captain.  He also owns a unique male slave who is the actual overseer of his plantations but has been raised much like his son and holds a great deal of power over the other slaves.  

This book is full of one surprise twist after another and flows with wonderful prose which is the trademark of Robert Penn Warren.  Modern readers, especially readers of color, are likely to be deeply offended to the prolific use of racial slurs in the book which are not just limited to the "N" word.  But it is an accurate book for the times which it describes in the slave holding south both before and after the Civil War.  Manty is eventually set free, marries a former Union Army captain, and lives for a time in New Orleans high society.  She also eventually joins her husband in a long westward migration as he seeks a career as a lawyer but finds one reason after another to fail in town after town.  There is a great deal to love in this book along with a somewhat sizeable portion of things some readers will hate.  But it has survived, as every word Robert Penn Warren published has and should have survived.  It's arguable weaknesses are clearly overcome by its powerful strengths.  Put aside any negative emotions you might have for Warren's broad usage of language which is historically accurate but despised today and read the book.  In fact, I would say that any reader who likes to read broadly of the best writers in the world would be remiss to avoid reading Warren as broadly as possible.  He is one of America's great masters of literature.  

Reflections On "The Man Who Fell To Earth" by Walter Tevis

 

 A little more than a year ago, I watched a documentary on KET about the life of Walter Tevis who had suddenly risen once again to a high profile in the media because of the success of a television miniseries based on his book "The Queen's Gambit" which is about a young female character who becomes a chess champion.  I have to admit I have still not read that book despite its having been on my large To Be Read Shelf for over a year.  But I did read his science fiction classic, "The Man Who Fell to Earth" and loved it to the degree that it prompted me to order most of his published works and add them to my long list of books I "will get around to someday". But let's talk about the actual subject of this blog post, "The Man Who Fell To Earth".  Tevis's work on that book is as good as any science fiction I have ever read.  It is one of those rare works of science fiction which also falls solidly within the larger and more important body of what we know as "Great Literature".  It is a masterpiece and deserves every accolade it has ever received. It is masterful science fiction which is solidly based in the minds of both its characters and the author and not in ray gun shoot 'em up scenes which are cheap copies of some bad John Wayne western as much of ordinary science fiction is today.  

 

The main character in the book is Thomas Jerome Newton from the planet Anthea who has been sent to earth to determine if it is possible for the occupants of his doomed planet to emigrate to earth in order to save their lives and their much more advanced culture.  His spaceship is destroyed on landing and it is determined that he will not be able to return to his home planet.  He is humanoid in appearance with some odd features which he is able to disguise well enough to "pass" as human for quite some time.  He becomes a very wealthy individual because he is able to patent many ideas which his culture has produced that are much more scientifically advanced than anything on earth.  But his obvious intelligence and scientific acumen are soon recognized the government as being impossible for an ordinary human to have achieved and "the jig is up" to use common vernacular.  But in the end, he is allowed to remain on earth, still disguised as a human, living in quiet semi-poverty with a Social Security check and a small apartment.  This is a book which no aficionado of science fiction can claim expert status in the field without having read.  The book was made into a movie starring David Bowie in 1976 for which Bowie recieved rave reviews playing the truly unique alien.  It was also made into a 2022 Showtime miniseries which "The Guardian" panned as "a misbegotten and poorly paced attempt to update the 1976 cult sci-fi classic".  I have to admit that I have never seen either production of the work, but I will go so far as to say that I won't bother with the Showtime effort based on "The Guardian's" review.  When the time comes that is available somewhere again on television, I will definitely watch the 1976 work with David Bowie.  

J. D. Vance, "Hillbilly Elegy", And The Defamation Of Appalachian Character

 Let me say unequivocally that the fact that I chose to read this book and write about it on this blog should never be considered a recommendation that anyone read the book, watch the movie, or waste your time, money, and mind on such efforts. 

Several years ago when I wrote the blog post at this link, I sincerely hoped that it would never again be necessary to write another word about J. D. Vance, his horrible and horribly ignorant book "Hillbilly Elegy", or his defamation of the character of every native of Central and Southern Appalachia who ever lived.  But now, after  the release on November 11, 2020, of Ron Howard's movie version of the Vance diatribe, I find myself once again wasting my time writing about J. D. Vance and his stupid but popular attacks on Appalachia and Appalachians in general.  Just as happened with the book, reviews of the movie are nearly universally negative.  And, just as happened with the book, a sizeable portion of the population of Appalachians, the people who should be universally incensed at this trash, are oohing and ahing at the movie which critics are using their most negative words to attempt to describe.  On several Facebook groups which are, theoretically, populated by natives of Appalachia, people are identifying with the aberrant, ignorant, criminal, and dysfunctional characterizations of the members of Vance's immediate family which both he and Ron Howard are attempting to pawn off on the general public as shining examples of the deviants whom they claim populate the entire Appalachian region.  I said in the November 2017 blog post about the book:

In my twenty years of practice as an Appalachian mental health professional, I never had a client walk into my office seeking professional therapy and carrying a biopsychosocial of their own composition.  If one ever had, that biopsychosocial very well could have carried the title "Hillbilly Elegy..."  The book is a wonderful piece of work if one were working with a single client or family unit in a mental health setting in an altruistic attempt to successfully intervene in the mental health and substance abuse problems within that particular family unit.  As a piece of literature intended to be considered as a blanket analysis of a culture, and particularly the Appalachian Culture, the book is garbage.  The fact that the book was seized upon by mainstream American critics and readers as a legitimate assessment of the overall Appalachian Culture is a great miscarriage of both justice and common sense. It is also an indictment of the decision making capacity of that general readership.(R. Hicks, Blog Post Cited And Linked Above, 2017)

I also said that earlier blog post that I had sworn when the book was released and I had read the early reviews of the book by legitimate Appalachian scholars and intellectuals that I had no intentions of ever reading the book until a copy had been given to me by my dear friend, Warene Hobson, after she and her husband, P. J. Laska, had chosen not to read it.  I swear to each of you who read this post and to the heavens above that I will never waste my time, money, or mind watching the movie, not even if some well meaning fool offers to pay me well to do so.  In a review in "Rolling Stone", David Fear and his editors chose the sub-headline "J.D. Vance’s story of growing up poor gets the prestige-drama treatment — and ends up as a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing".  I commend them in their choice of verbiage and I could not have said it better myself.  If David Fear and "Rolling Stone" had been the only major outlet to eviscerate the movie, his review could be discounted as false.  But nearly ever major writer, magazine, newspaper or press outlet which have wasted ink on reviewing the movie have concurred with David Fear in most opinions they express.  In a "New Yorker" review, Richard Brody states that 

"the film’s stagings, images, and tones are as formless and as vague as its characters’ mental lives, and that vagueness replaces elements of Vance’s book which are politically and ideologically quite explicit—and which have been criticized for the simplistic lessons that they extract from his experience." (Richard Brody, "The New Yorker", November 23, 2020)

Richard Brody is just as accurate in his assessment of the work of Ron Howard and J. D. Vance as was David Fear.  J. D. Vance, in his malignant narcissism and the resultant wounded response to the familial trauma which caused it, attempted to blame the entire world, Central and Southern Appalachia, in which his mother and grandparents grew up for his damaged psyche.   And, Director Ron Howard, who has spent the majority of his life 3,000 miles or more away from Appalachia, chose to take Vance at his word as have many of those mislead individuals who have read the book or watched the movie.  In my 2017 response to the book, I discussed the use of the cultural and ethnic epithet "hillbilly" in this manner: 

"The word "hillbilly" is just as much an ethnic and cultural epithet as the "n" word, the "q" word, the "k" word, or the "s" word.  It is just as inflammatory and derogatory as the "c" word.  Any person who would use such a word in reference to themselves, their extended family, and their dominant culture and ethnicity is both defaming and denigrating those to whom they refer.  For an excellent film discussion of the use of the word "hillbilly" to discuss and describe Appalachia and Appalachian Culture, please acquire a copy of the Appal Shop documentary "Strangers And Kin: A History of the Hillbilly Image". It is particularly enlightening to learn about the history of the mascot of Appalachian State University, a character named Yosef who is dressed as a "hillbilly" in overalls, a flop hat, and no shoes. That character is the one occasion I can remember in which anything positive ever came out of the creation of a "hillbilly" character.  If J. D. Vance had held any respect for his homeland and its people, he would have never allowed the word "hillbilly" to cross his lips, his pen, or his keyboard. And he certainly would not have used it hundreds of times, as he does throughout the book, to describe his closest family members and alleged role models.  The book is no more an assessment of the overall Appalachian Culture than it is a re-examination of "War And Peace"."(R. Hicks, 2017, Cited and Linked Above)

 I find it truly disheartening in this time when the general public is much more cognizant and enlightened about cultural stereotyping and defamation that the same cannot be said about a large portion of the natives of Central and Southern Appalachia.  If the average Appalachian were as aware of our culture and our history as is the average member of most other minority ethnic and cultural groups in America, those people like J. D. Vance who choose to defame, shame, and denigrate us could not succeed to the degree they do in achieving success in their endeavors.  In perhaps the most easily understood example of the flawed and erroneous pseudologic which Vance uses to press his argument about the negative nature of Appalachia and Appalachians, in an early chapter of the book, he makes the statement that in spite of the large number of men with whom his drug addicted mother kept company none of those men was abusive.  In the very next chapter, he tells the story of how, as a teenager, a physical fight between his mother and one of those men awoke him and he had to come from his bedroom in order to intervene in the altercation.  An error in logic of that nature would not have been well received by Vance's law professors at Yale.  Neither should it be well received by his readers. He also proudly tells the story of how, after he fell asleep on a funeral home pew, his grandparents lost awareness of where he was, assumed he had been kidnapped, and, at gunpoint, assailed the departing mourners at the edge of the parking lot in an attempt to locate him before someone, presumably funeral home staff found him asleep on the pew.  Such behavior is not admirable.  It is not exemplary of any human trait of value.  It is criminal and it is also a typical example of the behavior Vance's family members engaged in and which he attempts to pawn off as typical of all Appalachians.  

I have begun and will end this discussion of J. D. Vance, the book, and the movie, which I once again sincerely hope will be my last, as I began and ended that earlier blog post about the book in 2017.  

Let me say unequivocally that the fact that I chose to read this book and write about it on this blog should never be considered a recommendation that anyone read the book, watch the movie, or waste your time, money, or mind on such efforts.