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.

The Penistic Advantage

Okay, Brian and Stan.

If neither of you certified insanists, bolstered by non-existent credentials other than an invitation by some descript editor to vulture down

upon those who dare to artistically create,

want to talk about this awful poetry, then it’s gotta be me.

I’ll go first.  Because we’ve got less than two months left, and we seem to be hung up on Poems by Arthur Henry Ward Jr. 

Yes, it’s a shameful piece of work, and the polite thing would be to just move on.  But a deal’s a deal, and Reading Richard Rohmer means blogging them all.  We knew the risks when we stared, and I, for one, haven’t forgotten what inspired us in the first place:

the venom of green

jealousy that which shekels motivates the artistic

eunuchs dedicated to the death of the talented.

Who is Arthur Henry Ward Jr.?

Let’s say you didn’t know “AHW Jr.” was a pseudonym for a paperback writer, a political hack, and the most decorated military man in Canada.  What would you think?  If I sent you a link to these things, and your only clue was: “This person is sort of famous, but not for poetry.”

I know my first guess:

School shooter.

Arthur Henry Ward is seriously pissed off.  Poem #1: Critics.  Poem #2: Smokers.  Poem #8: Women.  Poem #10: Politicians.  He’s also had it up to here with phonies, television, nuclear war and trade unions.  He even gives us a poem (“Patience”) about losing his.  Arthur Henry Ward is a fuming virgin crank.

And he writes like a twelve-year-old.

What’s the difference between a poem and an angry diary entry?  A poem has arbitrary line breaks.  Also, in a poem, whenever you get to something you know two other words for, use all three.

That way people know you won’t be silenced, censored, cowed.

But, thanks to Brian, we know that Arthur Henry Ward (the name even sounds like a spree killer) is really Richard Rohmer.  The then 56-year-old best-selling author of How to Write a Best Seller.

So it’s illuminating to encounter his – no better word for them -- “issues” in verse.

Critics

First of all, Richard Rohmer doesn’t like taking shit from critics.  They’re just jealous, they don’t know anything, and they’re only in it for the money, cash, dollars.  So, in “Critic” these “certified insanists” are blinded by “green-eyed greed” and usually (but not always) not

thinking at all except

about his money and the next review

Brian, you run with insanists: Does literary criticism pay better than I think? Was I wrong to go into oil exploration and contract law?  Critics love the long green.  And that’s why they oughta be locked up… in the bathroom? (I think I’m reading that right.) And

prohibited from stirring either his body or his

witches brew of non-splendid, money-grubbing prose

Critics get theirs again in the poem “Private Person” – shekels-motivated artistic eunuchs, I think you know who you are – and in “Visionary”:

selective editorial synthesis masquerading as valid, shining

truth, cruel, cutting to the bone

Presumably, these are the guys getting between the author and the dream we all dream of.  (No, not "boy vs. girl in the World Series of Love.")

distant beacons of unreachable desires wealth,

recognition, promotion, conquest, emulation,

appointment, honor, employment, independence

You know, like what Richard Rohmer... uh... I mean Arthur Ward deserves.

It’s hard to say who is allowed to comment on Richard Rohmer’s work.  But if you can’t say something nice you should obviously keep it to yourself.

Politics

Months ago, when we were reading Triad, Stanley noticed that Rohmer presents the novel’s big idea -- America, Russia and China should run to the world – as a good thing, without any supporting evidence.  Arthur Henry Ward’s on board, though, in “Visionary,” dreaming of 

…the coming together of the

political leaders of all the nations of the world

to surrender their sovereignty in whole or in

part to a weaponless Universal Government

That sounds kind of “big government” to me, but I’ve lived in America for a long time.  And it’s hard to reconcile with Ward’s other poems, where he complains about

socialism swamped

nations dedicated to redistributing wealth

and

the bloating

blinding-spending public employee masses

and the government Canada already has…

spending far beyond the financial resources

it collects

and

the stench… of trade unions

What do you think now, Stan?  How can Rohmer and Ward hate government and pine for more government?  Would taxes have gone down if the United States had merged with the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China in 1985?  Would trade unions have had more power or less?  Is it possible that Rohmer/Ward hasn’t thought this all through?

Sex

In How to Write a Best Seller, Richard Rohmer advises his students to use sex scenes sparingly.  The reader probably expects at least one, but yeech.  Don’t do any more than you have to.  In his own work, Rohmer tends to keep it down to about one three-line incident per blockbuster, and it’s probably just as well, judging by Arthur Henry Ward.

Because, thanks to Poems, I now know the phrases “penistic advantage,” “countless predecessor copulators,” “the intended inserter,” and “whether willingly or unwillingly… open mindedly but close leggedly.”  Wish I didn’t.