Caged Eagle

Caged Eagle starts out as promising as anything we've read yet - it sets itself out to be a story that spans a long sweep of time, from the second world war till the dawn of this century.  It starts out in familiar territory - a squadron of Recce pilots towards the end of the war.  A lot of old friends/references/tropes are back - The Mackenzie Delta, the Falaise Gap, the Otter, a sighting of Rommel by air,  the requisite shots at Monty.  But the story's WW2 section takes up fully two thirds of the book before we are catapulted into the 21st century with a note from the main character that says "I tried to tell the story of my life in Canada from 1944 to 1998 but it was simply too much.  I couldn't hand the detail."  Oh right - why would a writer want to get into anything as time consuming the details of a story?  By this point, implausibility piles on implausibility, the characters become shrill and irritating and any sense of a story with historical sweep gets left behind in 1944.

Meta-what?

The main character of the book, Gator Peters, is a thinly-disguised version of a young Rohmer - brash, cocky, a short 20-year-old who looks 16 and is already a Mustang Pilot.  Okay so far.  But then Rohmer takes a darker turn - makes him devious, ruthless, callous.  Okay, this gets more interesting - Rohmer starts with himself and and his experiences as a template then imagines it through a black mirror.  An anti-hero - a thoroughly unlikable main character.  This isn't something he's attempted before (well, at least intentionally).  And then, and then ... we get to page 64.  Page 64 contains a photograph of a young Richard Rohmer and identifies it as a photo of Gator Peters.  What??  What kind of weird turn is that?  Is Rohmer identifying himself with his most despicable character?  Is this a wish fulfillment for a life of greed and double-crosses not lived?  Or is it just the impossible-to-resist temptation of ego gratification with no thought given to the, er, psychological undertones of writing a book featuring a character based on yourself that is nothing if not evil and then using a photograph of yourself to illustrate what he looks like?  Yeesh.

Do two EPs make an LP?

One of the characters in the book is a rich Canadian named E.P. Tyler.  Okay, you think, Rohmer has done a biography of E.P. Taylor, so that makes sense.  The thinly-veiled Tyler has many of the same details of Taylor's life - raises horses for example, which kind of make sense.  But then late in the book, Rohmer tells us that E.P. Tyler is friends with E.P Taylor.  And then it's explained that the two were often confused!  Why in the world would you create a fictional counterpoint if you're going to drag in the real thing?  At this point I expected Gator Peters to walk into a bar and run into Richard Rohmer.

Twisting by the Pool (or do I mean Telegraph Road?)

If Rohmer was to revise How to Write a Be$t $eller, he'd tell you that the only thing a reader wants in a best-seller is a twist.  No, many twists.  As many as you can squeeze in.  And you should telegraph them clearly so the reader knows they're coming.  Examples:

- Mark Tyler's "secret" background, pretending to be a poor farm boy rather than the heir to the biggest fortune in Canada.  The observant reader will know something is up when no one can mention him without commenting on how poor his farmer father must be and how little he must have to go back to.  That's because his father is a poor farmer.  Which means he has nothing to go back to.  Because his father is a poor farmer.

- Gator and his wife and son have a plane crash that (spoiler alert!!!!) Gator survives.  You'd never know it.  Perhaps the fact that Gator writes the intro to this book a couple of years after the plane crash happens may be a clue, but you'd likely miss it, as you will be busy worrying about poor Mark Tyler and how he will have nothing to go back to after the war.  Because his father is a poor farmer.

-Louise's parentage.  Brian already guessed this in an e-mail to me at the halfway point. You will too.

- The final twist (it's the last paragraph): Spoiler Alert:  Quebec votes against separation!

Caged Heat

Without a doubt, Caged Eagle is Rohmer's most sexually explicit book.  By far.  Gone are the days when he added a little to spice things up - Gator's rampaging lust not only defines his character, but sets in motion events that will take the story to it's conclusion some 50 years later.  And with this unbridled attitude towards sex, I'm happy to report he's found the perfectly suitable metaphor to add panache to the scenes:

- "He had time for a quick bath in the common tub down the hall. Had to be sure all appropriate working parts - his wing tip and the two big bombs that hung from it - were clean and fresh if the evening's operation sortie was to be successful"
- "(Julie was) flying a little close formation with his wingtip which was already showing signs of getting airborne"
- "eager Garth whose wingtip was in full extension after being flown straight onto and flattened against the moving target of Julie's hard responsive belly"
- "I'd make your wingtip fly at a speed, a slow excruciatingly wet and sucking speed it's never flown before"  (wait - what?)
- "(Jane Knight) What a gorgeous creature and, boy, did she ever know what to do with his wingtip and bombs."
-"Suddenly his bare wingtip - long, large and pulsing with his young blood - was in her caressing hands"

And FYI - yes, the first occurrence quoted above treats it as two words, the rest as one.  Surely the book's only typo.

And in case the flying metaphors soar over your head, he reassuringly uses a standard lock-and-key example like so:  "Peters did not fumble with the room key. He thrust it directly into the lock, penetrating fully and turning it immediately".

Doors in London are notoriously hard to open.

Last Friday I snuck out of work to see Fury – the movie where Brad Pitt shoots people with a tank while conveying a lot of ambiguity and/or stoicism.  Whatever it is Brad Pitt is doing.  It’s certainly made him weary. Sometimes he just has to look.  You know those scenes in Brad Pitt movies where the audience or the other characters might expect Brad Pitt’s character to say something, but instead he just looks?  Powerful.

The movie isn’t terrible or anything, it’s just sort of childish.  A war comic with extra gore, plus looking.  But late in the exercise, our stoic and ambiguous tank crew are all sitting around with The New Guy (after he’s ambiguously raped a stoic German girl) and you might think they’re a bunch of assholes, but no.  This is when they tell him some of the Things They've Seen.

And what they've seen is the aftermath of closing the Falaise Pocket. 

Just talking about it makes Shia LaBeouf’s character cry.

It’s all very Quint from Jaws tells you about the USS Indianapolis.  The point is, these guys love killing Germans, but there are limits. And remember, it’s not just Shia who felt that way about Falaise. Look, here’s Ike, from Wikipedia:

“Forty-eight hours after the closing of the gap I was conducted through it on foot, to encounter scenes that could be described only by Dante. It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.”

And I thought: David Ayer, the guy who wrote Fury, is a smart guy. And he’s done a lot of period research, to gussy up this sort of lame star vehicle/ego trip/action movie.  And the truth he’s laying on you – the deep, dark, hard, war-is-hell truth – is that you may think World War Two was all fun, but if you were as stoic and ambiguous as me, you’d know there was place called Falaise…

And the only person alive who hears “Falaise” and thinks: “The time we let all those Germans get away? We really bungled that one!” is Richard Rohmer.

He’s an interesting guy.

And that's that

Before we move on from Rommel & Patton, I’ve told Brian and Chris in e-mails what bothered me about the book, so I figure I should just blog about them. First, the haphazard structure of the book

drove me crazy. From the title and premise, what you would expect is a book that interweaves fictionalized accounts of the two title characters against the backdrop of post-D-Day Normandy and speculates on a plan to, without Hitler’s knowledge or consent, attempt to negotiate an armistice to save Germany from total defeat when things looked bleakest on the Third Reich’s Western Front.   

You’d also expect character portraits of the two that created some sense of their personalities. Humanizing them, if you will. How this is accomplished is to plod day-by-day through the story, meaning Rommel’s story takes place in the first half of the book; Patton’s the second. The trouble with this is that Rommel gets gravely injured, but the story (and premise for the book) have to play out. This means for the second half of the book, Feldmarschall Hans von Kluge has to take over as the main German character. It undercuts the whole idea of Rommel being considered a main character – and by extension also undercuts any contrasts/parallels you were drawing to Patton. 

The dialogue also sinks it for me.  Once again, people speak in facts. The British cannot say anything without a “jolly good” or “my dear chap” or “chop, chop” thrown in. I’m aware this might be legitimate idiomatic speech; it just feels strained and forced.

I will say this though – Patton’s Gap was written to assign blame to Montgomery and to portray Patton in an heroic light for the incident of the Falaise Gap; Rohmer has not forgotten this, and here that is taken to the extreme. Rohmer’s prejudices are transparent; Montgomery is portrayed as petty and petulant – and unable to get over the fact he wasn’t getting credit for the Allied offensive. Rohmer can’t resist having him whine about it at every opportunity and to describe him that way: As Monty is speaking, his assistant listens like so: “Corby sat listening intently, fascinated as always by Montgomery’s high-pitched, nasally voice with it’s peculiar lisp.”  In the same paragraph he is described as “the scrawny general”. A bit later – in case you didn’t get the message – Monty goes on a rant about how he’s being slighted: “And who’s getting all the kudos for my planning? Bradley and Eisenhower and now Patton. The great and glorious Georgie, racing across France but only because I made it possible. And what do I get? Nothing but criticism. So here is my chance Freddie, my chance to demonstrate to the world that I brought this off, not the bloody Americans.” All we need is him chortling evilly to complete the scene.

By contrast, Patton can do no wrong. During a conversation when Churchill and Roosevelt are ostensibly talking about a possible armistice offer from Hitler – when the fate of the war is at stake – Roosevelt can’t help but turn into a gushing fanboy. He wants Patton to negotiate with Kluge instead of Montgomery – seemingly because he looks so cool: “When Patton presents himself in front of Kluge for the first time, that poor Prussian bastard will be overwhelmed by what he sees.  Patton will have on his best shiny steel helmet, his battle-dress jacket will be flowing with ribbons, he’ll have on his cavalry jodhpurs, riding boots and spurs, and his riding crop will be tucked under his arm. And on each hip will be a beautiful ivory-handled revolver. And Patton’s tall Winston, he’s tall. Kluge won’t be faced by some little sparrow general in a beret and sweater, no sir. If he was here now, I’d give his knee a manly pat.”  Okay, I added that last line. But they are discussing something of vital importance that could end the war and save countless lives and Roosevelt feels it’s appropriate to describe how Patton looks and take a shot at Montgomery?

Thoughts Upon Finishing Part One

You're way ahead of me, Chris. I could offer all sorts of excuses, throwing in a couple of gruelling drives between London and Montreal into the mix, but in truth blame falls on the general himself. I was brought down by his Foreword… No, wait, that was by Sir William Stevenson. I mean after the Foreword, and after the Acknowledgements, and after “German Military Titles and Terms". What I'm referring to is the Prologue, in which Rohmer introduces the idea of an armistice attempt in the Falaise Gap.

Oh, man, the Falaise Gap. Again? Do I have to?

I admit that I found it surprising, but in no way intriguing, that Rohmer used "Falaise Gap" instead of "Patton's Gap". You know he wanted to.

About Patton's Gap – the book, not the space between two consecutive elements proceeding on the same route – in Rommel and Patton Rohmer writes:

By the time I had finished I had discovered several very important pieces of evidence suggesting that there had indeed been a secret armistice attempt.

Had he? Had he, really?

Rohmer's discoveries consist of an unsupportive half-sentence pulled from Allan Dulles' 1947 New York Times bestseller and an old Time article that Rohmer himself acknowledges is inaccurate and unreliable. He tries to shore these up with quotes from Udo Esch and Adolf Hitler. From whence come they? Rohmer won't tell you, but I will. Both are lifted translations made of original documents found in Anthony Cave Brown’s The Bodyguard of Lies (1975).

In short, Rohmer discovered nothing. What he should have written is:

By the time I had finished I had read several previously published, highly accessible writings that led me to believe there had indeed been a secret armistice attempt.

This brings to mind the “four unusual research ‘accidents’ that allowed" Patton’s Gap to be written:

1. Rohmer discovers the 430 Squadron log book. Because it's on display.
2. Rohmer asks the widow of a squadron member whether she might have copies of two photographs. She does.
3. Rohmer reads Dirk Bogard’s Snakes and Ladders and learns that the actor was likely the man who interpreted his photographs. Bogard agrees.
4. Rohmer tells the Director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Historical Research Foundation that he is researching a book. The director shares some old notes.

I'm probably taking things too personally, spending so much of my time researching and all… when I'm not driving between London and Montreal.

Bloomer :

Naturally he [Patton] would seize the opportunity to speak to these young boys, pump them up.

I'm back from a week at the Jersey Shore and I find that you guys have posted a lot of great stuff about Patton's Gap - much more than I would have expected.  Congratulations all around.

Now about the book:  "...founded on years of painstaking research" promises Ivor Williams in his back cover blurb.  Brian, I was happy to see your posts that essentially call the book for precisely lacking that very thing.   The sources cited and quoted were more an attempt to praise Patton and bury Montgomery so that the final line of the book carried some sense of shock.  As if you couldn't see that coming.

Brian: your point about the title bothered me the whole time I was reading - to make it work it should have ended with a question mark, but since no one else seems to have ever referred to it as Patton's Gap, even that wouldn't have made sense.

Chris: halfway through the book I started doing some searching to find out more about the Falaise Gap - was it really such a contentious part of the Normandy Invasion?  No one else thinks so - I couldn't find anything outside this book that makes such a deal out of it.  Not that this is the first book to try and stake a claim for a historical moment and sell a new take on it, but in this case it just added to the dullness.

I have nothing much more to add, since you both said it so well. 

And the name of that “youthful reconnaissance pilot”?

Richard Rohmer.

I really wanted to like this book. I expected to like this book. So, why didn’t I like this book? Mostly it's because it's not being the book I wanted. My fault entirely. I wanted to read Rohmer’s wartime reminiscences, but instead got something about how “flamboyant” George S. Patton was done wrong by “frail” Bernard L. Montgomery.

I take issue with Rohmer’s contention that the Falaise Gap renders everything achieved on D-Day a dismal failure. Is he right that Montgomery's bruised ego was at fault? Could be. He doesn’t present much of a case because he doesn’t present much. Yeah, I’m going on about the lack of original research again.

Rohmer is pretty quick to dismiss anything that contradicts his argument as the product of a “faultiness of memory”, which is how we get this:

Bradley, in A Soldier’s Story, attempted to recall verbatim conversations and the line of reasoning that led him to the decisions he’d made seven years earlier.

Well, A Soldier’s Story was published in May 1951, not even six years after D-Day. Bradley wrote the memoir with the aid of his World War II files, which are currently held at the Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania… which is a place Rohmer didn’t visit, but should have.

Rohmer’s own memories of the war are heavily reliant on that the Squadron 430 logbook, which in some ways explains the bland, emotionless prose that makes very nearly each and every one of his flights the same as the last. The most memorable is that in which Rohmer writes that he was scared… there's emotion, you see.

What does it say about Patton's Gap that most vivid scene is the one in which Richard Rohmer is slugged by a madam for being an asshole? What does it say about the author that he feels no shame, after all these decades, at having slugged her back?

Q: Shouldn’t the title be Monty’s Gap?

I don’t know, for sure, that the natural gas business is any less boring in reality than it is in a Richard Rohmer paperback.  I don’t know any international gas buccaneers.  The most exciting thing I do with natural gas is turn on the broiler and hope it doesn’t explode.

I’ve met super-nice CIA assassin Robert Baer a couple of times, but the conversation at the table never turned to CIA assassinating, so I don’t know if that’s boring either, like it is when Rohmer writers about it.

Canadian politics? I only know what I don’t read in the paper. But the real politicians must talk more like human beings than Rohmer politicians do.  They’re human beings.  At least in private.

Aerial combat?  I'm the wrong guy to ask.

But if war really was as boring in real life as it is in Patton’s Gap, it would have died out.  

Setting aside Rohmer's style, the core problem with Patton’s Gap is that it seems to believe that it’s blowing our minds about a conundrum that’s been driving us crazy:

Who let more theoretical Germans get out of the Falaise Pocket than might have escaped otherwise? 

I’ve read a certain number of books about World World II – I am a dad, that’s what we do – and this isn’t one of the top 1000 unexplained mysteries.  It’s not exactly “Why Didn’t We See Pearl Harbor Coming” or the Katyn Forest or “What Was Hess Up To?”  It’s revisionist history about an event that was barely visioned in first place.

Which isn’t to say that the Battle of Caen isn’t worth writing about.  The opposite.  It’s history.  It’s fascinating, and inspiring, and horrible. And awesome, in the old-fashioned sense of the word: Inspiring awe.  Nice young men, the sons of farmers and factory workers, who believed in democracy and basic decency, fought horrible monsters, who believed in slavery and thuggery and racism and genocide. 

  

And it’s still morally complicated.  What is war good for?  Let me think… absolutely nothing. The expression “We sure liberated the hell out of this place” was coined in Normandy.  They destroyed Caen while they saved it.  70,000 French civilians were killed by Allied bombs in the course of the war, which is more people than were killed in England by Nazi bombs, and on D-Day the same number of French civilians and Allied soldiers died.

Which doesn’t take away from the sacrifices made – and he heroism exhibited – by the Canadians (for instance) who did it.  They’re braver than me every day.

We should think about Caen.  Every time a politician suggests a problem could be solved with a little bombing.  You know, as long as good people are doing it to bad people.  For instance in Fallujah.

But the mystery of why the Falaise Gap wasn’t closed faster?  I’m sorry, but unless there’s some sort of larger message about management or something – or anything -- who cares?  Whose hash is being settled? Why is this a book?

James Jones’ books are too long.  But here’s Patton’s Gap, in 100 words from James Jones:

“Good old Sir Bernard Law.  He was always great copy for the newsmen.  His men adored him (newsmen said) because he had once whipped Rommel at El Alamein, he was the needed popular British hero, and he could be depended on to grab for more than his fair share of notoriety.  But this time he had really fucked up seriously.

Asking for, and getting, an advance meeting line with Bradley and more territory than he could in fact take and hold…

In spite of the mistakes, the Allies took fifty thousand prisoners and counted ten thousand German dead.”

There.  How hard was that?