Secret of the Andes

This children's novel won the Newbery Medal in 1953 "for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children". The author, Ann Nolan Clark (born 5 December 1896), spent many years teaching literacy in the indigenous Tesuque Pueblo communities of her home state of New Mexico. She wrote 15 books about her experiences with these Native Americans. In 1945 the Institute for Inter-American Affairs sent her to Latin America and she lived and worked there for five years. She wrote several books about this period of life, including this coming-of-age novel set in highland Peru.

The significance of the choice of a boy, Cusi, as the central character in the story is reflective of the author's nurturing and loss of her only child, Thomas Patrick Clark Jr., who, as an Army Air Corps pilot, was shot down over the West Pacific in January 1944. Her husband, too, had died at a young age, leaving her to bring up her son alone. Cusi has been brought up by an old man, Chuto, in a hidden valley in the Andes and has no knowledge of his father or mother. Cusi had taken the place of another boy who had chosen not to return from his first visit to a town.

The novel sensitively deals with the destruction of a traditional society and the preservation of its culture by those left behind determined to pass on the historical values and way of life to future generations. This made me think of the nations that experienced genocide during the First World War, such as the Armenians, the Assyrians and the Greeks, and the way in which the survivors have been determined to preserve generation after generation of cultural memory and tradition. At the end of the novel, Chuto tells Cusi about the destruction of the Inca culture. We're told that “the words were precise... were deadly and cold” and that Cusi, listening, shivered:

“They, the Conquerors, came.
They came swarming into the land
with hate and with weapons.
They came.
They captured the mighty Inca,
holding him with chains.
They captured him.
Down the trails of the Andes
the Indians sent ten thousand llamas,
carrying bags of gold dust
to ransom their King
but they, the Conquerors, killed him.”

Inglorious Soldier

The author, William Monk Gibbon (born 15 December 1896), claimed that he did not wish to write this memoir of his experience as a soldier in the First World War. He referred to it as “a book which I did not want to write because it would disinter so much that was painful.” While a student at Oxford, he volunteered for the army and was given a commission in January 1916 as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Army Service Corps.

Published in 1968, Inglorious Soldier is perhaps more famous for its account of the author’s role in opposing the Easter Rising and his encounter with Francis Sheehy Skeffington, executed by an army officer without any trial, than it is for its description of military life on the Western Front. His description of winter hardship in northern France is both colourful and miserable:
“We were approaching one of the wettest spells in this harshest and coldest of war winters. As long as the frost lasted, wagon wheels, crashing across ruts and over ancient shell-holes, might crack in half; wagons might need an extra pair of horses traced up to get them up a hill; but at least the air was fresh and the surface of the ground clean: but as soon as the thaw came the roads, patched with Somme chalk, quickly dissolved into a thick glucous cream.”

In the summer of 1917 Monk Gibbon submitted a pacifist letter to his commanding officer in France. His argument was conscientious and rational:
“I have ceased to believe in either the justice or the efficacy of a death peanlty. War is the most monstrous of all death penalties — being indiscriminate. Individual hatred may to a certain extent be logical: collective hatred is well-nigh impossible. So far from being able to condemn a whole nation I would not feel justified in saying of any single individual even that he had forfeited his right to live... To say that I hate a man seven miles away I have never seen and about whom I knew nothing save that he happened to be born in one part of Europe and I in another — is a psychological impossibility. To say that... I should want to kill him is preposterous.”
This letter could have placed him in danger of being court-martialed for cowardice or disobedience; he understood that he might face a firing squad. Instead, however, his concerned parents in Dublin wrote to the War Office asking that he could come home on leave. While there he was admitted to hospital and diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia (a.k.a. shell shock). His family had been appalled by his stance but drew comfort from an article in The Spectator which maintained that one of the ways in which shell shock manifested itself was as “morbid conscientiousness and exaggerated scrupulosity”. The remainder of his service during the First World War was in England and Ireland rather than on the Western Front where his conscience would have interfered with his duties.

Spaceward Bound

As a special treat to coincide with Science Week I have been reading the 1955 novel of astronautics, Spaceward Bound. The author, Slater Brown (born 13 November 1896), was imagining a pioneering space flight programme some years in the future while drawing upon the trends in current science that were leading up to the beginning of the space race in 1957. Brown had served in France for several months during the First World War, having volunteered in early 1917 for the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. He was, however, arrested in September 1917 on suspicion of espionage along with his friend, the poet E.E. Cummings, because of Brown's pacifist letters home. They were held in a detention camp for several months. Cummings wrote about their incarceration in his memoir, The Enormous Room.

Brown's pacifism informs many aspects of this novel. The vision of the Young Astropolitans, the organisation behind the space flight programme, was of a future civilisation far removed from the destructive forces of the world. Rusty Brick, one of the visionaries, read from the organisation's constitution:
“We, the Young Astropolitans of America, alarmed by the sad state of the world today with its constant wars and its overcrowded cities, convinced that it is beyond repair or redemption, hereby take oath that we will not rest until we have established upon a distant star or planet, under the flag of the United States, a new land where we can raise our children in peace.”
Brick goes on to explain to the central character, a lecture in astrophysics at his university, that the overpopulation of the Earth is the root of global conflict:
“War. Constant war. And what brings it about? Overpopulation. The world has become an overcrowded slum. In 1950 the population of the world was two billion and a half. It's increasing at the rate of 25 million a year — 70,000 births every 24 hours. By the year 2000 there will be at least four billion people on the earth to feed. And the earth won't be able to feed them. Even at the present time half the children of the world are undernourished.”
(In fact the world's population was well in excess of six billion by 2000.)

Brown does not prove to the reader that the novel offers a solution to the world's problems. The academic who narrates the novel outlines the vast difficulties facing any space settlement, describing the scientific challenges of space flight and the harshness of living on the Moon or any known planet:
“Temperature on Mars? Good to middling. In the Martian tropics it rises to well above freezing point at noon and may reach 50 degrees or more. Quite enough to sustain life. Water? Water vapour at least is certainly present in the atmosphere.”
Brown was wise in understanding that any space programme based on ethics and conscientious vision might well be hijacked by others for the purposes of world domination. Homberg, the villian of the story, imagines a space station orbiting the Earth:
“A satellite dictatorship! There lies the solution. A satellite station circling the Earth at bombing range and manned by a staff of scientists who will rule the world... all problems will be solved on this satellite island of brains. Peace, war, overpopulation, economic problems, will all be settled by this staff of scientists circling the globe every two hours.”

The author depicts the Young Astropolitans (and the central character who joins their programme) as holding fast to their vision in spite of the danger and rivalry that threatens their success. He concludes with the hope that “everything will turn out all right”.

The Eye of Purgatory

This novel about death and decay was published in 1945 in the context of mass destruction of life. Its author, Jacques Spitz (born 1 October 1896), is regarded as the most important French writer of science fiction of his generation. He was born in Algeria where his father, a military officer, was stationed. Having completed his engineering studies at the École Polytechnique in Paris, he joined the army. He also served in the army in the Second World War and was awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur for this service to his country.

The two key characters in The Eye of Purgatory are a self-proclaimed German genius, Christian Dagerlöff, and an artist that he befriends, Jean Poldonski. Dagerlöff, having observed that Poldonski has lost interest in life, decides that he would be a suitable guinea pig for his experimental use of Siberian hare bacillus. He infects Poldonski with this. Poldonski’s initial response is ecstatic, considering himself to have recovered from his worldweariness:
“Something extraordinary has happened to me. I woke up cured!
My resumptions of consciousness on emerging from sleep are always immediate. When I woke up, this morning, I initially experienced a diffuse sensation, a sort of internal inflation of unknown nature, which surprised me until — at the moment when my misty gaze, encountering a pool of pale sunlight displayed on the wall facing my divan, recovered therein the magic of colour — I recognised  the sensation that is inflating my bosom as happiness: the happiness of which I had lost even the memory, the very idea; the joy of existence, quite simple, quite bald, given gratuitously, without cause or reason, accompanied by an appetite for life that multiplied my strength tenfold and made everything appear to me with a stupefying facility.”

Soon, however, he realises that the cure is more like a poison. From his experience of daily life, he concludes:
“I see things in the location where they are but in the state they will be in subsequently.”
His observation of the world is dominated by visions of decay and death, dust and ashes. A letter from Dagerlöff explains the process:
“In this bacillus, the advancement of time — the same one that confers upon the Siberian hare the presentiment of the boyar shotgun or the muzjik snare and ensures its salvation by flight or a clever detour — is a few seconds. In the improved conditions of culture that sufficed to secure the glory of the all-too-mortal Pasteur, the gene corresponding to the specific character of advancement is transmitted to the next generation in such a way that the advancement in time of the microbial colony increases with every generation.”
Poldonski has been infected with presentiment in his optic nerve and the condition is progressive, forcing him to see further and further into the future. He sees more and more decay, more and more death.
With this concept, Spitz enables the reader to look at the society shaped by war and genocide and observe no beauty and instead continuous degradation, disintegration and annihilation.

The Red Right Hand

This thriller, published in 1945, is regarded as a classic of crime fiction. Not only does it keep the reader in suspense as to who the murderer is, it also plays a trick on the reader by allowing them to make presumptions based on class prejudices.

The author, Joel Townsley Rogers (born 22 November 1896), was a prolific writer. Apparently at his peak he could write 40 pages a day. He launched his writing career while a student at Harvard. He left Harvard a year early in order to join the navy air corps. He undertook training as a pilot in Virginia and was keen to go to Europe to serve in the war but the armistice came before he could be sent overseas.

The plot centres on wealthy Inis and his young fiancé, Elinor, who drive from New York to find a state where they quickly can get married. On their journey, they stop to give a lift to a tramp. When they stop for a picnic in a secluded location, a murder takes place. The author enjoys being playful with language, such as the subtly macabre:
“They weren't going fast, just idling along well below the wartime speed limit, enjoying the wind and sunlight and the sight of the blue hills stretching roll on roll ahead. There was time enough to kill before they reached Vermont.”
Another example of this linguistic playfulness is that the murder is being investigated by a physician by the name of Dr Riddle. He happens to be on the lonely road when the murder takes place and finds himself embroiled in the aftermath. He desperately tries to piece the mystery together by drawing on one of the popular textbooks from college, Homicidal Psychopathology. Autobiographically, the author has Riddle, as narrator, explaining he was “scheduled for flight surgeon in the Navy air arm, two stripes and a half, next month, after battling for three years to get my release from St John's and S. and P.”