The World's End series, eleven books that span history of the era from the WWI to the cold war, with its stage expanding from Europe to cover much of the globe, begins with World's End; the ominous title notwithstanding, the book begins steeped in the leisurely beauty of Europe that had no clue it was perilously at edge of an era it was going to be thrown headlong into, with wars, revolutions, massacres and genocides forming only a few of the horrors, millions losing lives and more. Think the opening scene of the first episode of Downton Abbey - not literally of course, but in spirit. Europe, most of it anyway, was at peace in 1913 and the author describes it so superbly, reading it for only the second time one is enchanted all over again.

The first time was over four decades ago, just after finishing a second degree at another university and finishing reading plays of George Bernard Shaw, and looking forward to another beginning again, a beginning of a serious career choice. Perfect time to immerse oneself in this, then a serendipitous find in - the now heritage - David Sasson Library where we were life members. At that young age, it was the perfect time indeed to get to know the world and the recent history, through the eyes and writing of this author who presented truths and horrors without putting beauty and love aside, and was real without cynicism. Reading it again, about the young teen who is looking forward to much, to everything, of life and world, one has the author say at the end of second chapter:-

"What was the use of thinking about religion and self-dedication and all that, if men were shrimps and crabs, and nations were sharks and octopi? Here was a problem which men had been debating before Lanny Budd was born and which it would take him some time to settle!"

And despite knowing the whole series, the beauty of writing of this author has one almost wonder if one ought to hold oneself back from indulging in the pleasure!
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Having meanwhile read several, but not finished yet the most famous, works of William Shirer, its all the more evident there is a deep connection between the two writers of seemingly very different genre - Upton Sinclair's prose borders on poetry in all but rhyme, and William Shirer seems to act and think so very like Lanny Budd the protagonist of this series as he writes about the same era, that one has to wonder, did they ever meet? Perhaps not, and perhaps it's a deeper connection of spirit that needs no meeting of persons in physical terms, or even of them having any correspondence.
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One of the delights of this series is that while the characters in front stage, so to speak, mostly are recognisable prototypes, and some of them at centre ideals, famous names of the era are woven into the story via encounters and relationships with those in forefront, and these are from most areas of life, from politics of every sort to artists, businessmen and society, literature and more. Early on Lanny meets Barbara Pugliese, and it's a very moving description, of the woman who chose to live amonst poor and is emaciated. Later in this volume, after WWI as Lanny is a secretsry at the peace conference, Lanny meets Lawrence with Emir Feudal, and a page by the author sums up Lawrence of Arabia. Later volumes of course have almost everyone worth naming!
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World's End is the beginning of a series of books, about the world with Europe centre stage with time spanning from end of world war I to cold war.

A young boy who is coming of age as the first war, then called the great war, is ending, and he happens to be in place where he can be useful as an interpreter - his father is from a US family with a gun manufacture business, and the mother - Beauty Budd, Budd being the name of the family that no one can be sure she legally does have a right to, but most find it more convenient not to challenge her on the point - living in southern coastal France is from US too, a beauty and an ex-model who worked with artists including her own brother in Paris before having a son.

Lanny Budd is growing up with Riviera for home and Europe for a playground, and the education he receives from various sources - his New England austere and wealthy Budd family, his mother with her genial and loving, kind and compassionate character and her coterie of friends who are wealthy and of upper class; his friends from England and Germany, whom he has mutual visits with, and his extended family with various half brothers and sisters, is all giving him a base from which he grows to be a man of education and learning and a good conscience and a good heart. He is the protagonist and in some sense the soul of the world he inhabits where much is to happen - and the future of humanity is at stake.

World's End is the first volume of the series that has ten volumes or eleven in all - I always forget the number but do wish one day to have them to read again. It was fortunate to stumble across them in the first place, in a library that was a refuge and a retreat all those years, and incidentally is now a landmark and a preserved heritage structure.
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The author's addendum given at the end of the tenth volume in the kindle version is the extended version of what he wrote for publication of the first volume, which stood on its own, and as he says, the characters wouldn't let him stop, so the next volumes of rest of the series kept coming.

He gives his reasons for why most of the centre stage characters are expat Americans living in Europe, and it's quite natural and reasonable.

What he doesn't say is how they generally are representatives, especially when not American but most often even then, of types or nationalities or movements, ideologies or businesses or so on, when they are not actually historical characters included in the series and written about generally faithfully by him. He might give dialogues between such historic characters and his centre stage ones which are of necessity written by him, but sometimes they are historic too, only they happened with actual other people he may or may not have included in the series.
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Sometimes, too, one comes to suspect that those not famed in history are real ones with perhaps names changed, as it happens when their stories don't fit the normal tone of his story for them, which is on the whole comfortable; if there are pains and tragedies, one suspects they are from life, they did happen yo real characters, and he changed little other than names. This is so especially when the said tragedies are not a consequence of their actions, or deserved by them or something necessary for development of the story.

Greatest example of this is the story of Lizbeth Holdenhurst who is half Lanny's age, very in love with him and pursuing him until she realises he might be in love with her cousin who is older than her; she in fact tells them so herself, brushing aside their honest protestations of innocence. Why the lovely Lizbeth had to then die in Japanese bombing at Hong Kong instead of marrying a younger suitor such as, say, Rick's son, or the officer she met the night before the said bombing, can only be because it's about real people whose story haunted the author, and he made them live forever by writing about them.
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But the ones that intrigue a reader are often those centre stage with an undue importance, of which Kurt is the most pain in the neck example. He's stiff, authoritative, ever taking and giving little or nothing in return of almost everything he receives from Lanny, his family and his friends, and yet Lanny saves him repeatedly, keeps giving, and goes after him even when he knows Kurt's implacable cold hatred of democracy and allies and his utter contempt for most people stemming from his adhering to Nazi ideology long after the German defeat and vanquishment of nazis is rooting him firmly in saboteur activities against them in a counterfeit currency operation linked to the ideological propaganda operation. Knowing all this, Lanny pleads with him to recall their youth, and see Lanny as the young boy who looked up to him. Kurt promises to try, but firmly states that he'll hate his ideology of democracy and humanity, and have contempt for American everything, always.

So one suspects that Kurt, while not unlikely to be based on a real person, is a type, of which all too many did and probably do go on existing, even nearly eight decades later.

Certainly Marcel Detaze is a representative of his nation and his class, his being an artist and his determination to fight the invading German forces fiercely.
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The author shows his abrahmic roots and upbringing that his consciousness is steeped in, whether he's aware or not, in the way his centre stage characters who are to portray something negative are women, and this compounds with his bias towards European and American caste systems when amongst such typecasting of characters, those representing aristocracy or more money or high positions for whatever reason, including nazis, get a softer treatment than they deserve, while those not quite that high up the ladder are selected to bear the brunt of the typecasting for a negative facet of the history and society he portrays.

To a lesser extent, this is done even to British and Jews in comparison with Germans, but his most disdain and contempt is reserved for India, culture of India that is inherent in what's named Hindu, and any reference to India right until early parts of the eleventh volume are so flippantly derogatory and irrelevant that one has to wonder why he thought he wasn't prejudiced and most horribly so. But then his treatment of Jews isn't better, despite his repeatedly referring to ancient Judea and the son of god, to various prophets and quotes.

Johannes Robin for example gets to be referred to derogatorily as schieber, justifying his treatment at hand of nazi regime as far as most Germans go, but as the author points out early, Lanny notices that the same activities carried on by the non Jewish German persons don't get them either the epithet or the treatment meted out to Johannes Robin. So much so, when later he's reduced to working for his one time partner and is content to be not so rich any mire, this is seen as just moral lesson, rather than the result of the trauma the elder relative never got over. Others centre stage, speculating in U.S. or in Germany, don't suffer quite anywhere close, even in terms of money, much less the horrors that the Robin family suffered.
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And worse.

Often the women bear the brunt of his negative stereotype casting, in more than one way. In fact, with few exceptions, hardly any escape this.

Beauty, Lanny's mother Mabel Blackless who arrived at a very young age to join her artist brother in Paris and was given the new name Beauty by the artists in Paris due to her luminous, joyous, placid beauty, is forever described as conscious of the said beauty and painstaking in preserving and showcasing it, even though it's far from just for vanity. She has independence achieved only due to her beauty as a model, met Robbie Budd only due to her beauty, Robbie who fell in love so much he was willing to give up his family and wealth to marry her, and is subsequently forever is an invaluable help in his business as the hostess that sees to taking care of his clients as any respectable wife would; and she does that for her son too. She's selfless enough in love to refuse to marry when her suitor is threatened by his father with disinheritance and severing off of all relationship, and bears the brunt of being seen even by her son as not entirely proper, albeit not explicitly.

Lanny loves her and stands by her through his marriage with the heiress, Irma Barnes, that Beauty and her friends helped make a match of, and lives with her most of those years at the home, Bienvenu, at Juan Les-Pins, on French Riviera, that has been his home, rather than take to the palatial Shore Acres in Long Island for good. But after that, as his work takes him away from his home for longer periods of time on continuous circuits of N.Y., London, Paris, Berlin, and later Washington, Vichy, North Africa and much more, he sees to her safety and being taken care of, but finally makes his home in NYC and eventually in New Jersey, not returning to Bienvenu with his family, even though she's pining to see her new grandchildren. He gravitated instead towards Newcastle home of his father with the stepmother Esther and her son's with their families with homes on the estate, forever describing Esther as daughter of puritans, who has come to accept the first born of her husband's who is forever over and above all else, including business when it comes to it, for Robbie.

Is it subtly due to marriage with Laurel Creston, whom the author always describes as very proper lady from Baltimore, or is it the deeply buried embarrassment of the son, finally able to establish himself, about the mother? He's familiar with the Budd clan, but has never sought his mother's relatives in U.S., except her brother Jesse Blackless whom he met early on in France and was influenced by and stayed connected with. He cares about Bess the half sister he met in Newcastle, but gives up on Marceline Detaze the other half sister who perhaps yearned for his attention and never had it beyond teaching her to dance when she was taking her first steps. She saves his life risking her own, but he's content giving up on her.

And Irma Barnes whom he married and was in love with, but never took seriously in any capacity as someone who could have an independent mind, who gave him a warning, an ultimatum and finally severed ties with only due to his inescapably going against it all despite being aware of her ultimatum and seriousness thereof, she is described by him forever thereafter as someone who traded up to being Countess Wickthorpe with a blue eyed golden haired tall aristocrat English earl for a husband, but he overlooks the part about those two being of one mind, even though he lauds his own various affairs and marriages when love is involved or being of the same mind or both, and lauds his refraining from marrying any of the endless parade of beautiful young heiresses that his mother's friends bring for him to marry.

Neither Irma nor Marceline nor Beauty are less than good, nor is he unquestionably superior or better. He's more than willing to let old women - Madame Zyszynski, Emily Chattersworth - and a very young sister, Marceline, suffer nazi torture, but sees himself as better because he's leftist. That's until Hansi and Bess have serious differences, and then it's Bess who's wrong.

One cannot help questioning if it's all biblical, after all, mere misogyny in exemplifying every fault with pinning it on a woman, if not on another race.
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The Lanny Budd Novels:

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World's End,

Between Two Worlds,

and

Dragon's Teeth

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Volume 1, 2 and 3.

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"If the slums of the Riviera were ever to be razed and decent housing provided, it could only be through the action of the workers themselves; the rich wouldn’t make any move unless they were forced: The question was whether it was to be done by the method which the world had seen in Russia and didn’t like so well, or whether it could be carried out by orderly democratic process, such as the workers of Vienna and other Socialist cities were proceeding to apply. Which way you chose determined whether you called yourself a Communist or a Socialist; whether your opponents named you Red or Pink. Raoul Palma, idealist and something of a saint, persisted in advocating the patient and peaceful way. His hobby was what he called “workers’ education”; he wanted to get the tired laborers to come to school at night and learn the rudiments of modern economic theory: just how their labor was exploited and just what they could do about it. He wanted a Socialist Sunday school, to which the workers’ children might come and learn those facts which were not taught in schools conducted by their masters."

Here hidden in plain sight is a prejudice the author shares with not only his nation but most of the West. They forget, and are unable to see, subjects or vanquished of colonial conquered lands as humans not only on par but possibly, often, superior in everything other than brutal killing weaponry. And they are unable to see that Russian revolution, or the French for that matter, differ from American revolution or U.S. war of independence only in not involving such colonising of another land and vanquished original residents forgotten as humans on par.

Caste systems of Europe including Britain thus survived in their original lands despite the revolutionary systems of equality and opportunities for all men - that is, those of European ancestry; others didn't get recognition till much later, often but not always before women - precisely because the two systems were parallel in lands separated by the big pond.

In Asia, of course, there was no pretense of equality. Churchill was honoured with Nobel prize despite his deliberately starving millions of farmers and other rural people to death, and not only writing in favour thereof but turning away the ships filled with grain that FDR sent for aid to India, when they arrived at Australia. U.S. wasn't seen with horror when the explicit written policy instructing "let India go" (starve to death, all of them) was public knowledge, yet false propaganda against India continues almost on par with that against Jews by church, despite theft of knowledge from India every day for decades in applications for patents in U.S. to things known to India for millennia and used commonly in most homes.
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The author has gone on and on about starving children and poor of Germany, and unfair demands for war reparation by France, along with similar and much worse problems in Russia merely making allied powers refrain from helping since they won't deal with Bolsheviks. Here are two contradictory quotes not too far separated:-

"Germany did really feed her children, and care for her aged, and build decent homes for the workers, all of which practices Beauty praised ardently—never dreaming that they had anything to do with the dreaded Socialism."

And, apart from the constant references to Kurt despising Johannes Robin because he made money while post WWI German starvation was going on,

"Thus in one way or another Kurt was meeting Germans. They had been coming back to the Riviera, and now with the new spirit of peace there arrived German steamers, brand-new and beautiful models of what a steamer should be, full of large and well-fed passengers desiring to put on bathing-suits and expose their fat ruddy necks and shaven bullet-heads to the semi-tropical sun. They brought with them rolls of money which had mysteriously become more stable and desirable than the franc; with it they could eat French food and drink French wines and put up at the best hotels; French waiters would serve them, and French couturiers would labor diligently but for the most part vainly to make their women chic."

Now those tourist from Germany on Cote d'Azur were definitely not Jewish! So most of that not paying reparations was as much fraud as refusing to give up armaments by hiding them in Catholic monasteries and claiming France was unreasonable! As for the previous quote, Germany has had policies actively, financially supporting large scale reproduction by German people, while the same people look at France and talk of Germany needing the land that France has - although they no longer use the term 'lebensraum' when speaking to non Germans in English on a train through France to Paris in 2001!
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"The author of Mein Kampf had a dream of a tall, long-headed, long-limbed, vigorous man with blond hair and blue eyes whom he called “the Aryan.” This seemed funny, because Hitler himself was an average-sized dark man of the round-headed Alpine type. His dream Aryans didn’t exist in Europe; for the Germans, like all the other tribes, were mixed as thoroughly as a broth which has been stewing on a hot fire for a thousand years. Hitler had got his emotions out of Wagner’s Siegfried mythology, plus a bit of Nietzsche, who had gone insane, and of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who didn’t have to go. This provided him with reasons for hating all the other varieties of mankind. He hated the yellow ones as a kind of evil gnomes; he hated the Russians, calling them sub-human; he hated the French because they were lewd and decadent; he hated the British because they ruled the seas and blockaded Germany; he hated the Americans because they believed in democracy. Most of all he reviled the Jews, obscene caricatures of human beings who had crept into Germany and corrupted her heart and brain, and had got so much of her property away from her, and filled so large a share of the professions, crowding out the noble blond Aryans.

"The Jews must be driven from the Fatherland and ultimately from the world. The Jews were the international bankers who had a stranglehold upon the poor; the Jews were Marxist revolutionists who wanted to destroy all Aryan institutions. That they could be both these things at the same time didn’t surprise Adi because he himself could believe and be all sorts of opposite and incompatible things. He loathed the Marxists because they laughed at his Aryan myth and all others. He hated the people with money because he had never had any. He hated the department stores because they took the trade away from the little merchants, his kind of people. He hated the Catholics because they were internationalists and not German; he hated the Protestants because they taught the Christian ideals of brotherhood and mercy instead of the noble Aryan ideals of racial supremacy and world domination."

And Upton Sinclair's missing the obvious is due to disdain for India, where both the term "Aryan" and the symbol Swastika were borrowed from, but given completely false meanings and connotations that had nothing to do with the real meanings of the names, terms, symbol. Aarya is a Sanskrit word just as Swastika is; the former literally has to do with Light, and is used as epithet for the civilised, righteous, regardless of any physical colours of skin or eyes or hair; the latter, used in India routinely for home protection and welcome, literally means "well-being symbol" and is one of the several occult symbols (such as the six-pointed star), and may not be used inappropriately as nazis used it without the disaster they wrought turning on the perpetrators.

This mistake of borrowing from an ancient culture while maintaining disdain for the said culture due to having colonised the land and people by brute force is as common a stupidity as the disdain bestowed on women, especially rape victims, by cultures of West that are mainly abrahmic in thinking; but the shame belongs to the brute, not the victim, and this is still not understood in cultures that either consider women fair game for any male, or worship bullies and right to weapons whether of mass destruction, or used exclusively for murder of humans; that covers unfortunately the two chief later abrahmic religions and U.S..

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Zoltan Kertezsi proposed, and set up, an exhibition of Marcel's work, and it was a success. Budd family from Connecticut visited Paris while it was on, and Robin boys were in Paris, too, and Hansi played. Hansi and Bess fell in love, and this was a strong pairing for life, not a flight of fancy. Hansi confessed to to Lanny, and Lanny spoke to Bess, in confidence - Esther Budd could see the pair in love, but couldn't object, since neither gave any ground for objection!

Upton Sinclair's romance is total and complete in the classical sense, involving not merely love affairs, but far wider and deeper. Paradoxically that is precisely and in this case very conveniently why his protagonist doesn't have the classical romantic love story, but every other kind of involvement. He can appreciate every good quality in any person, and doesn't limit his view of opposite gender to physical and utilitarian qualities, but is a noble soul and wouldn't hurt anyone. On the other hand if such a young man found a perfect and complete romance early in life, his circle would possibly be limited, or risk a tragic outcome, since he is to be involved in much to come.

So while Lanny has a series of involvements where he is perfectly involved and faithful while it goes on, despite other options (as every man always has), they end sooner or later with a good reason that isn't his fault, or the other people's either. Until, that is, the author has him ready to settle for good, and finds a partner appropriate enough, despite risks.

And almost as if to counterbalance Lanny finding happiness in a perfect match, that is where the traditional exotic rose garden romance of this couple, Hansi and Bess, has a turn. But that is a long way off, come cold war era.
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"Say the very simplest and most obvious things, say them as often as possible, and put into the saying all the screaming passion which one human voice can carry—that was Adolf Hitler’s technique. He had been applying it for thirteen years, ever since the accursed treaty had been signed, and now he was at the climax of his efforts. He and his lieutenants were holding hundreds of meetings every night, all over Germany, and it was like one meeting; the same speech, whether it was a newspaper print or cartoon or signboard or phonograph record. No matter whether it was true or not—for Adi meant literally his maxim that the bigger the falsehood, the easier to get it believed; people would say you wouldn’t dare make up a thing like that. Imagine the worst possible about your enemies and then swear that you knew it, you had seen it, it was God’s truth and you were ready to stake your life upon it—shout this, bellow this, over and over, day after day, night after night. If one person states it, it is nonsense, but if ten thousand join in it becomes an indictment, and when ten million join in it becomes history. The Jews kill Christian children and use their blood as a part of their religious ritual! You refuse to believe it? But it is a well-known fact; it is called “ritual murder.” The Jews are in a conspiracy to destroy Christian civilization and rule the whole world. It has all been completely exposed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the party has printed these, the Führer has guaranteed their authenticity, the great American millionaire Henry Ford has circulated them all over America. Everybody there knows that the charges are true, the whole world knows it—save only the Jew-lovers, the Jew-kissers, the filthy Jew-hirelings. Nieder mit den Juden!"

Funny, how relevant it is almost a century later, when a so called young leader descended half from axis lineage, from both mafia Sicilian and fascist, and nazi, ends of the axis, applies that technique of blatant huge lies to not only people of poorer families who haven't deposited stolen money banked in Swiss accounts, stolen from a poor nation, but abuses and lies to and about the very people, culture, and country he claims a right to rule due to the other half of his lineage of bushes of their country. Will this ancient culture prove smarter than Germany of a century ago, despite appearances to the contrary? Which did happen to his grandma's great shock, within two years of a dictatorship when she was assured nobody would vote against her if she went to polls. If the people are still that smart, this scion shall be kept out from now on, and his other half axis DNA clan too.
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"The couple went to a reception at the home of the Frau Reichsminister Goebbels, where they met many of the Nazi great ones. Lanny, who had read history, remembered the Visigoths, who had conquered ancient Rome with astonishing ease, and wandered about the splendid city, dazed by the discovery of what they had at their disposal; he remembered Clive, who had been similarly stunned by the treasures of Bengal, and had said afterward that when he considered what his opportunities had been, he was astonished at his own moderation."

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Lanny and Irma were invited by Lord Wickthorpe and visited his castle.

"The Dowager Lady Wickthorpe kept house for her bachelor son. There was a younger brother whom Lanny had met at Rick’s, and he had married an American girl whom Irma had known in café society; so it was like a family party, easy and informal, yet dignified and impressive. It was much easier to run an estate and a household in England, where everything was like a grandfather’s clock which you wound up and it ran, not for eight days but for eight years or eight decades. There was no such thing as a servant problem, for your attendants were born, not made; the oldest son of your shepherd learned to tend your sheep and the oldest son of your butler learned to buttle. All masters were kind and all servants devoted and respectful; at least, that was how it was supposed to be, and if anything was short of perfection it was carefully hidden."

And yet they perpetrate the fraud of identifying the very word "caste" with the very colony they looted so much it was The Jewel In The Crown.

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"Their conference was a long one, and their drive took them into the country; beautiful level country, every square foot of it tended like somebody’s parlor. No room for a weed in the whole of the Fatherland, and the forests planted in rows like orchards and tended the same way."

Germany is still exactly like that. Beautiful when one sees it, and one falls in love with the beauty, but then if one is there for any length the regimen and its lack of natural quality makes escaping across border not merely delightful but necessary for breathing, and when the border is Swiss the beauty across isn't trivial, nor is cleanliness or convenience or order, but the forests aren't tended like a shop's front window.

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Wide Is the Gate

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Volume 4.

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"“Because I am the child’s father, and I think that every child needs a father’s influence as well as a mother’s. I have done nothing to forfeit my rights in the matter and I would not.”

"“Let us talk about it frankly, Lanny.”

"“Certainly. I have nothing to hide, and Irma gave me every assurance that she respected my rights and trusted me to make a wise and proper use of them.”

"“Just what use would you expect to make, Lanny?”

"“I came to see the child recently and spent some time with her. I should expect to do that from time to time, as might be convenient to me. If you find it awkward to have me at Shore Acres, I’ll be entirely willing to take Frances elsewhere.”

"“No, indeed; that is what Irma fears most of all. She feels that she has made a place where the child is safe. You understand her fear of kidnapers, blackmailers; journalists, and what not.”

"“Irma knows I did everything to help relieve those fears. But as Frances grows older I might feel that those restrictions were hampering her proper development. A human being has to be something more than a safe-deposit box for bonds.”"

"“Irma desires to inquire whether there is any sum of money within reason which might induce you to let her have full control of Frances.”

"Lanny replied without hesitation: “There is no such sum. I would not sell my daughter.” And then: “See here, Uncle Joseph, why do we have to be so mealy-mouthed? What is it that is worrying Irma? Is she afraid that Frances might some day come to agree with my ideas instead of with hers? That is a chance that every parent has to take. If our children always thought exactly as we do, how would the world ever make any progress?”

"This was a field of sociological speculation into which a grown-up messenger-boy had never ventured. He replied: “You must know, Lanny, the Barnes fortune is much more to Irma than just a lot of money. It is the heritage which her father left her and to which she owes a duty.”

"Lanny decided that the time had come for him to take the aggressive: “Tell me, is Irma thinking of marrying again?”"

Uncle Joseph was instructed not to say, but refuted possibility of Forrest Quadratt and did not deny Wickthorpe, so Lanny assured him that was fine.

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Throughout so far, and with rare exceptions later, Irma has been proper in most trying circumstances, but here is the most shocking exception when she attempts to get sole custody of Frances, denying Lanny his daughter, despite there being no fault in his conduct or of treatment of his family, relatives or friends, or indeed anyone.

This is chiefly due to a fear that he might influence her with his thinking. Which matters because Frances is seen as the heir to the Barnes millions, and Irma so far hasn't intended having more children, or indeed even spent much time with Frances, despite being a rich woman in her own right with no claims to her time, energy or attention other than her child, if it comes to it. Her attempt at getting sole custody is definitely not protective instinct or even love, it's possessive ego and a concern for Barnes property that Frances so far is the sole heir to.

And that condemns her, as his refusal to grant sole custody without a fight is a redemption of Lanny as a father. Irma has an ace that she hasn't used so far, but could have, in threatening to expose his political stance and activities. But Lanny didn't even stop to think of this possibility, and flatly refused to give up his rights to his daughter. This is quite in accord with his actions in saving the Robin family, Trudi, and so on.

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Lanny met Hansi and Bess who had a new baby; they had named him Freddi.

In later volumes, last two, the author renames Johannes Robin, son of Freddi Robin, changing his name to Freddi, while the names of sons of Hansi and Bess are changed too.
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He thought over the problem of getting a plane for Alfy and it wasn't possible without every Nazi and fascist agent finding out through the publicity that would hit him, but even then, it would be impossible to get it to Alfy. In N.Y. he saw Spanish Relief Committee advertised, heard the pastor heading it speak, and sent the money to him anonymously with a request for speaking in church about effect of religion in Spain. He invited Robbie and Esther to attend with him, and they heard the pastor acknowledge the donation before speaking about Spain. They were deeply moved, and thanked him.
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The author writes here about propaganda war going on in N.Y. with nazis and fascists beating up reds, but the account of Jews being beaten to death by nazi goons hiding iron rods in newspaper rolls, whether later in this volume or another one further, remains in memory after over four decades.
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The author's description of Franco's faith sounds as if it were from a page from any jihadist manual. But of course, inquisition was no different. The connection is all the more evident, when the author describes the church in spain supporting the wholesale massacre by Franco, and not just with sermons but huge funds too. And the author explicitly describes the factor of using moors to massacre Spanish populace.

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Presidential Agent

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Volume 5.

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"“Years ago I made a remark in a woman friend’s hearing: ‘There will be nothing to do but kill them.’ The remark horrified her so that I promised never to make it again. But it is literally true; they are a set of blind fanatics, marching, singing, screaming about their desire to conquer other peoples; it is their God-given destiny, and they have no room for any other idea in their heads. They have a song: ‘Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world.’ The German word for belongs is gehört, while the word hört means hears; so in Germany they sing ‘belongs to us’ and abroad they sing ‘hears us,’ which sounds less alarming. That is typical of the Nazi technique. Hitler has written in his book that you can get any lie believed if you repeat it often enough; and especially if it’s a big lie—because people will say that nobody would dare to tell one as big as that. It is no exaggeration to say that he has made Germany into a headquarters of the Lie; he has told so many and so often that nobody in his country has any means of distinguishing truth from falsehood.”"

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"Lanny drove them all in to the concert, which was held in a hall on the East side, its purpose being to collect funds for the aiding of Jews who had escaped into the countries bordering on Hitlerland. The place was packed to the doors with Jewish men and women, some of them old but most of them young, a few bearded but most smooth-shaven, a few well-to-do, but most poor. Jews of all sorts and sizes, but mostly undersized; Jews with dark curly hair and some with red; Jews with Jewish noses, but many who might have been taken for Russians or Poles or Hungarians or Italians or Spaniards. They had been mixed up with all the European tribes for a thousand years, but alas, it hadn’t done them any good."

Here the author goes into a diatribe that's church propaganda from pulpits for most of two millennia, for a convenient handshake with Rome around seventeen centuries ago, to escape persecution by turning on the relatives of the one god church was attempting to enforce by every possible means including lying, cheating, fraud and mass murders called inquisition. This propaganda coupled with terror has succeeded so well, most under its spell never stop to think how obvious a fraud it is, but it's nothing less. Fact is, Rome occupied Israel and Judea, and people were executed via crucifixion every day for very little, and blaming the occupied colonial subjects or vilifying them while exculpating the invading colonial regime is the most convenient game, no different from blaming females for being victims of physical attacks including murders. In both cases it's merely convenience of targeting the weaker, blaming the vanquished and generally a prejudice in favour of the bully.

Funny the author doesn't see it, whether about Jews regarding the crucifixion blame or about India, particularly Hindus, regarding anything; in the previous volume he repeatedly refers to Hindus as strange while describing Buddhist monks of Ceylon as dark Aryans, but Buddha was a Hindu and a Prince from India and never separated as such from either the land or it's culture any more than most - who weren't converted by invaders - ever did, and Buddhismis counted as separate from mainstream India only for convenience of the conversionist invaders who adopted the Macaulay doctrine of using every possible lie to decimate India so 1857 war of independence does not recur. And Aryan is a term borrowed by West and deformed to the extent of twisting it to mean something never originally meant, from Indian word in Sanskrit, Aarya, which has to do with enlightenment of inner self and civilised conduct, with no regard to any physical colours.

But of course West has only a contempt for any people subjugated as much as for women for the same reason, and respect for non colonial occupied people such as China is generally greater, hence the lack of recognition by this author that Hindu is where the very word Aarya and therefore Aryan stems from, and neither Ceylon nor Buddhism nor dark physical skin are relevant more than India and Hinduism as the mother culture.
.....................

"Gerald Albany, the embodiment of propriety, would probably not have mentioned this delicate subject in the presence of an American; but Lanny let it be known that he had heard about it. So then they talked. Ceddy declared that the trouble was due to the inability of some statesmen to face frankly the fact that Hitler had made Germany into a great power, and that she was again entitled to cast her full vote in the councils of Europe. Irma supported him, speaking with that new assurance which had come with her title. It was her idea that her new country should make a gentleman’s agreement with Hitler covering all the problems of Europe, and should use this as a lever to force France into breaking off the Russian alliance. Thus, and only thus, could there again be security for property and religion. Lanny, listening to her emphatic phrases, thought: “She is still quarreling with me in her heart!”"

Here the author is obliquely establishing a little Cliveden Set.
.....................

"Russia now had an alliance with France, but didn’t know whether to trust it or not, and the British didn’t know whether the French meant it, and whether they should be encouraged to mean it or to sabotage it. French policy, unlike the British, did change with the government, and that was a bad thing for the French, and for their friends and backers. Many persons in Britain took the position that the question of Russia was not merely a political issue, but a moral one; they refused to “shake hands with murder.” Gerald Albany, a clergyman’s son, was among these; but Ceddy spoke cautiously, saying that in statecraft it was not always possible to be guided by one’s moral and religious ideas. “We should have had a bad time at the outbreak of the last war if we hadn’t had the aid of Russia; and surely the hands of the Tsar had bloodstains enough.”"

Funny how convenient it is for the author and his aristocratic British characters, both, to forget that British massacred far more in India than the reds in Russia did their own aristocracy; whether that's racism or merely a question of being recognised by Europe as aristocracy is a matter of making excuses, since there is Wickthorpe admitting that the Czar's regime did kill people, and those were poor. Hence too the lack of a vigorous denunciation of nazis by West until discovery of the concentration camps post WWII, for Jews were just as Asian as India, and so West understands racism against them.
.....................

"The British Indian ruler, Aga Khan, reputed to be the richest man in the world, was to be chosen President of this Eighteenth Assembly. He was a Moslem god, but the most modern of divinities, owning a famous racing stable and contributing twenty-five hundred quarts of champagne for the Geneva festivities. He spent most of his time on the Riviera, where Lanny had met him many times; he had admirable manners, and gave priceless jewels to the ladies who won his favor."

Worth note for multiple subtle layers ignorance and prejudice woven in racism, colonialism and assumption of a misogynistic religion underlying a patriarchal culture that conquered by force equals vanquished and of no value.
.....................

Lanny wrote the speech and sent it through Gus, and visited Newcastle. Later he checked what Zaharoff had said in a seance, about gold buried in ocean, a keymaster, etc, and to his surprise found a locksmith whose name checked, and was the very person who had dealt with the treasure buried under the ocean, most of it still there.

The author repeatedly goes on about seance, mediums and there being something more than mere clever tricks or even telepathy, without saying so; even at this point, he has Lanny wonder how an illiterate polish servant could have known any of the story. This forced stand of straddling the fence gets tiresome.
.....................

Lanny had invited Rörich and reminded him, asking him to bring a friend. He entertained the two young SS officers with champagne and more, pretending to be drunk and steering the conversation to where he got them to admit they took prisoners and tortured them in Paris, including women.

This, amongst his other meticulous preparations that have taken longer than a month, seems like the author was copying a U.S. law enforcement agency pattern where one has to show reasonable doubt for a search warrant, rather than a conspirator and a husband in love who would rush to break in and rescue the poor wife immediately.

And this is only matched by the author and the protagonist repeatedly sympathizing with Germany against France regarding Versailles treaty, even though the author shows the German side to be fraudulent as far as the posing goes - they spent gold on spies distributing it to cause disturbance in France, but did not pay reparations to France; they forced far harsher treaties at every victory against every land they conquered, but protested vociferously at a fraction of it imposed on them; they screamed about the allies being unfair about disarmament but had their own caches hidden in Catholic monasteries, and brought it out for fascists to beat everyone else to death.

One has to wonder what exactly he is defensive against, a charge by the German population of U.S. that he was anti German, which is a primary cardinal ultimate sin according to German mindset, however much they insist on superiority of German everything which is supposed to be the only faith?
.....................

He was told to drive Mary-Ann Everly, and he told her he was pledged and not free to fall in love with her. He spoke to her seriously.

"“I am taking a great liberty, I know; but I have lived most of my life on this old continent, and I really know what I am talking about—far more than I am able to tell. Take my advice, see all you can while you are here, and try to understand what you see, but then go home and don’t come again. And above all, don’t ever think of marrying any European man.”

"“You really think they are that bad?”

"“There are noble exceptions, but your chances of finding one of these, or of recognizing him if you found him, would be slim. In general, European men do not feel about women as you would expect, nor about love or marriage. But that is not the main thing I have in mind; I mean what is coming to Europe and its people. Don’t tie your fate to it, and don’t give your heart to anyone whose fate is already tied to it, as mine is.”
.....................

"This fat Hermann had been trained for killing since early youth, and probably through his childhood had been taught worship of the old German heroes who had made killing their sole business on earth and had then been carried off to Valhalla to have their reward in the form of unlimited barrels of beer and barrel-shaped maidens."

If this description by the author is the authentic German mythology, it must have been copied to the other abrahmic religion's concept of rewards in paradise, with added proviso of exact number of maidens and their virginity stipulated in the promise of heaven.

.....................

"Hitler told what he would do to the members of the Austrian government if they compelled him to use force. It bore a startling resemblance to what the son of Budd-Erling had just been reading in the encyclopedia under the title “Islamic Institutions.” Unbelievers were invited to embrace Islam, and if they did so, their lives, their families, and their property were protected. If they refused, they had to fight, and if they were defeated, their lives were forfeit, their families liable to slavery, and all their goods to seizure. Such was the code, ..."

Jihadists have been enforcing the code for well over a millennium and half, including through the timeline described here.
.....................

"The Nazi religion was for one nation, one Herrenvolk, which aspired to rule all others. They called themselves a “race,” but that was just a piece of nonsense which their fraudulent scientists had invented to make themselves more important; there was no such thing as “Aryan”; there was only German, and even that was open to question. The correct word was Prussian, or more precisely East-Elbian—a little group of proud and bigoted aristocrats whose power was based upon the ownership of huge estates, in a part of Europe where the armies of Napoleon had not penetrated to break up land monopoly. These proud Junkers, nearly all of them high-ranking military men, were using Adi Schicklgruber the gutter-rat as their newest tool, their rabble-rouser and mob-deceiver, and when they were through with him they would send him to join his tens of thousands of victims.".
....................

In the episode where Lanny drove the car given by Aaron in trust while they were to meet later in Amsterdam, and Aaron never turned up, Upton Sinclair refers to Aaron not coming.

"Silence like this, a complete blackout, could mean only one thing—that the Nazis had grabbed the unfortunate Jew as they had grabbed his father-in-law at the outset of their Regierung. There just wasn’t any possibility that with all that treasure at stake, its owner would have failed somehow to get word to its trustee. ... In the case of Johannes and his family Lanny had gone into Germany and worked hard to help them; but he couldn’t do that again. His situation had changed and he was no longer a free man."

Aaron, however, isn't a son-in-law of Johannes Robin, but a brother of Rahel, the daughter-in-law.
.....................

"“Tell me what’s coming next, Lanny.”

"“Undoubtedly the Sudetenland.”

"“Was that taken from Germany?”

"“No, it belonged to Austro-Hungary; but Hitler tells the world that it was Germany’s, and that he is determined to have it back.”

"“What has it got?”

"“Minerals and forests, and positions vital for military defense. His excuse is a lot of Germans there.”

"“A majority?”

"“It varies from district to district, from village to village; it’s all mixed up as if it had been shaken out of a pepper-pot."

The President asked how long before it happens, and lanny said six months, during which the nazis could digest Austria, get ready and threaten to lay Prague to waste, having practiced in Spain and knowing exactly what they could do, as they did to Guernica and other cities of Spain.

"“Horrible, horrible!” exclaimed F.D.R..

"“The whole civilized world will say it, but that won’t worry Adolf Hitler. He would love to destroy Prague, because it is full of monuments of Czech culture, which he despises. But he won’t bomb Pilsen.”

"“On account of the beer?”

"Lanny smiled. “On account of Skoda, which is probably the biggest munitions plant in Europe. Hitler is going to have that, and poor Baron Schneider has guessed it by now, and is sitting in Le Creusot worried sick.”"

But of course, the myth or lie about it being all about German speaking population of Czechoslovakia goes on!
.....................

This is where part of the description about Nazi public meetings in NYC and beating up Jews in Times Square, with iron pipes hidden in rolled newspapers, right in plain view with police watching, occurs.

.....................

Lanny meets Laurel Creston for the first time, at Sophie's, on French Riviera, within short distance of Bienvenu.

On the way home, Lanny asked about her, Beauty said she was a writer from N.Y. related to people she'd arrived with. Beauty told him it was like him to fall for her instead of the sweet relative of Sophie they had tried to get him to fall for, and he said one never knew how sweet young ones would turn out, for example Marceline - who promptly demanded her third of Detaze inheritance.

Later, when they are married and he's talking to her in NYC, the author makes a mistake stating Marceline was the only member of his family Laurel had never met.

.....................

Here follows the part where Marceline, having come to learn of her husband's perfidy, rebounds with a determination to stand on her own, although Lanny has controlled doling out her one third of the proceeds of paintings of Marcel Detaze, lest Vittorio gamble it all away. So she becomes a professional dancer in clubs.

Lanny could and should have arranged for the money to be put in a trust she or any man couldn't touch without valid reason, instead of keeping a third for himself and doling out her third slowly; even though Marcel Detaze had willed it so, he ought to have not kept the third. After all, it was her father's legacy, and his father is not only alive and wealthy but has supported him throughout and refused to stop sending the allowance.

What's more, but for the money he and his mother have due to sale of Marcel Detaze's works, Lanny couldn't have helped his father at the onset of Wall street crash.

So later when Lanny refuses money from for as an agent, his magnanimity or whatever is more than wiped out by this debt he owes his baby sister who never had anything of a family or security, not even as much as he did, of which he's completely unmindful in every way. And the author calls her selfish, with no thought about what family, what upbringing or examples she ever had.

.....................

Reading this series, sometimes it's hard to keep history separate from the characters that are devices, but here in this part the author says, speaking of all that had already gone on and suffered by Europe and Asia,

"And now it seemed that what had happened so far was merely a shadow of holocausts and desolations ahead."

Which is startling, since this volume was published in midst of WWII, and most of U.S. or even Europe wasn't quite so aware of the scale yet. Not until the liberators witnessed the concentration camps post WWII were anyone other than Jews and nazis aware of the holocaust, and it took the meticulous German paperwork not yet destroyed as per orders due to their fighting and carrying on till end, that made the allies aware of the scale.

But this author was aware, albeit only mentioning a few characters suffering directly, and his protagonist likewise is aware, despite just a glimpse here and there.

.....................

Here's one of those incidents author repeatedly portrays about occult arts.

Riminescu cast his chart and looked worried. He held Lanny's hand, closed his eyes, and then told him a number of things, that he was American but born near, that he was wealthy, and that he'd been married twice. The last was known only to four people, and lanny denied it. Riminescu told him he would die in Hong Kong, and they argued about whether he would go there, having been told. Lanny discussed his work, and Riminescu needed help, so Lanny suggested he might send a person of influence who could help. He returned to Berghof and told Hess.

And this is about things either in future or not known outside less than a handful people who've no likelihood of talking about it to anyone; yet the author goes into long diatribes about defensive explanations lest anyone intellectual and rational call him names writing him off in those capacities.

.....................

Czechoslovakia ultimatum.

The author mentions here the news about Lindbergh and the Cliveden set in their being pro German, the news about their affecting the policies or attempts thereof, and their denials of it all. Lindbergh being impressed with state of the art and ready for war air force of Germany, and people generally being against war, whether British people or German, parliament or Cliveden or generally U.S. or Lanny, is but natural though, especially in post air warfare era, and Upton Sinclair does mention that as well.

And whether in those times with Hitler taking advantage thereof, or most other epochs when jihadists and Mongol hordes did the same, the dilemma faced by anyone peace loving is the same, whether one gives in to the war monger, the noisy party neighbour, the screaming brat, the provocative manipulating shrew, or descends to their level to war, scream, and win on their terms. Battles forced on Gods by warring demons are always of this nature.

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................................................................................................

Dragon Harvest

................................................................................................

Volume 6.
................................................................................................

The author mentions Lanny meeting various people at “Château de l’Horizon”, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and too Winston Churchill, who was yet to be catapulted out of his enforced retirement. Presumably the author is correct about the ex royal couple and Churchill both having been guests of Maxine Elliott, and one wonders how they reconciled to presence of one another. They were familiar, back in England, before he abdicated and was almost forever in enforced exile, but was he aware Churchill wasn't quite sympathetic, or would he have cared if he were?

Presumably the following is historical:-

"There were seldom fewer than thirty persons sitting down to lunch, and often twice that many gathered round the pool; when Churchill denounced Nazism the hostess would look up from her backgammon—or maybe six-pack bézique—and exclaim: “Winston, you are a social menace!” The guest would reply, most amiably: “Don’t worry, my dear Maxine, there isn’t a single person here who knows what I am talking about.”"

.....................

"One of the greatest dangers was the concentration of airplane manufacture in and about Paris. This would be fatal in wartime, and “decentralization” was endlessly talked about, but nothing was done. In the southwest of France were great numbers of quarries which offered excellent places for the concealment of aircraft manufacture; surveys had been made and plans drawn, but no steps had been taken to run power lines and railroads to these places. Also, and worst of all, was the neglect to promote the manufacture of motors; anybody could make planes in a hurry, but motors required foundries and machine tools, and France was a second-class nation where these were concerned."

The author's description here of the effect of nationalisation on the state of factories, specifically of air plane manufacturing plants, could be the take off for Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged! Here, though, the opposite side is immediately provided, in what Lanny has been told but Robbie wouldn't say, or admit.

.....................

"These hordes of Polish Jews had been gathered from all over Germany in the previous autumn. Many had never been in Poland and didn’t know a word of the language; but because their parents had come from that land, they were Polish, and were loaded into cattle cars and transported to the border and dumped across with only such possessions as they had been able to carry in their hands or on top of their heads. Poland didn’t want them, and wouldn’t admit them into the country; they were existing in the most incredible destitution in a sort of No Man’s Land along the border—always the Polish side, because armed Nazis marched on the German side of the barbed wire, ready to shoot anyone who ventured across. The exiles had sheltered themselves in tents, or in hastily built sod huts, many of them half underground, and roofed with poles, old boards, and scraps of tarpaper and tin. Where they got food the travelers had no chance to ask."

The description above is unique, in that most other descriptions of Jews transported or ordered away from their homes, town, neighbourhood are about either a ghetto or a concentration camp, not about refugees allowed to survive in tents and sheds across a barbed wire patrolled by Nazi guards. One has to wonder if it is factual, and did all these people get murdered so no memoir mentions this, or was it the naive imagination supplying the plight in the then absence of precise information about the far more inhuman, ghastly reality, when the author wrote and published it in midst of the war?

.....................

"There is a German saying: “When you are with the wolves you must howl with them.”

.....................

He came upon Reubens, Indiana, on a detour driving back from Chicago, and recalled Ezra Hackabury and the yacht trip to Greece with the group including Marcel and Beauty and her friends. He looked up Ezra Hackabury and they had a good time talking of past, and Ezra asked about his ex wife Edna.

Here the author seems to forget that in an earlier volume Edna was again alone, Fitzlaing having passed on, and was revisiting Margy, perhaps around the time of Marceline having her debut in England. Here he has Lanny tell Ezra that they are in Brighton, and Fitzlaing must have a desk job now. A rare discrepancy, but then Upton Sinclair does have so many characters enter and exit.

.....................

The descriptions of destruction of cities, towns and generally civilian populations by German onslaught seem, not due merely to the scope but much more so due to the intentional and deliberate nature of it, and of the aim to subdue via terror, almost a copy of the tactics of Mongols, especially Chingis Khan, sweeping through Asia and Russia to border of Central Europe, and if this copy were deliberate it's hardly surprising, but if not, it takes a more menacing but real aspect.

.....................

The description of Dunquerque here is from a point of view of an outsider joining in to help, rather than a journalist or reporter able to take in a wide view of everything going on, and as such is in line of Tolstoy's descriptions of war in the epic War And Peace, or that of George Orwell, another contemporary author, whose first hand account of description of Spanish civil war that was Hitler's practice round, is quite personal.

.....................

"The ceremony took place on the 21st of June. Lanny didn’t attend because, for one thing, he was sick of Nazi glory, and for another, he didn’t want to make himself conspicuous."

"Kurt and Lanny strolled across the Place to the group of buildings constructed by the Sun King for his invalid soldiers. It includes the royal church, a golden-domed building to whose crypt the bones of the dead Emperor had been brought, exactly a century ago."

.....................

A goosebumps moment was finishing this volume, while reading the series the second time, after a four decade gap, on an anniversary of the date the story ends, 21st June, and this wasn't by design. Reading on June 21st that Lanny watched Hitler stand in silence at Napoleon's tomb in Paris on one hundredth anniversary of the entombment of Napoleon, stupifying.
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................................................................................................

A World to Win

................................................................................................

Volume 7.
................................................................................................

Volume six had descriptions of Dunquerque and of invasion of Paris. This one has London blitz descriptions, again, from a point of view of first hand account of someone experiencing, rather than a wide angle view of a whole.

.....................

Early on in thus volume the author mentions Rick junior, the younger son of Rick, also joining RAF. Later, in volume nine or so when Lanny and Laurel are sent to Jerusalem via Cairo, the baby of the family is mentioned, named Scrubham and called Scrubbie; he has a slightly larger role later, but there is no mention then on of Rick junior. It isn't clear if the author forgot the name, or these are separate sons. Presumably Nina has four children, for there is no mention of there being no daughter.

But one can't be certain in this series, since there are many such mixes and glitches. Freddi Robin's son's name changes from Johannes in his baby years to Freddi later, while Hansi and Bess having named their firstborn Freddi is forgotten later. And Edna Hackabury's second husband Fitz-Laing is dead, the reader is informed, when Marceline has her debut in England at Margy's, but later Lanny tells Ezra during war that Fitz-Laing has a desk job.

.....................

One of the thrilling parts is Lanny learning atomic physics by memorising material so he could go to enemy territory to get things, and that's only beginning of an adventure that goes awry with the plane crashing in arctic waters after Newfoundland, and subsequent drama of Laurel's presence on the Oriole where Lizbeth Holdenhurst is supposed to be one he should be courting. So much so, subsequent adventures aren't quite another high, even with Hong Kong and journey across China, and across Russia from Mongolia to Siberia to Moscow, where the author ends it with a recreation of Tolstoy's War And Peace scene of Pierre looking at the comet. Here of course it's everything but the comet, and Lanny has actually had a talk with Stalin, rather than Pierre having a glimpse of Napoleon, in Kremlin.

.....................

He saw FDR and after a moment they talked about the proposed trip to Europe for Lanny.

"“You won’t let me put up your expenses for this trip?”

"“I have just sold a bunch of my former stepfather’s paintings and I am flush. What troubles me is how I’m going to get into Britain without making myself known as your agent.”

Did Upton Sinclair never realise the impropriety of Lanny taking money from sale of works of Marcel Detaze and striking selfleas nobility pose refusing money from the President of U.S. for the honest work of being the agent? Not because it's not his father, but because his own father has always sent him and his mother money enough, while Marceline the baby sister who lost her father when a baby, has little else her own?

.....................

Upton Sinclair waxes eloquent about the revolution in China. The author here is living, and writing, in the era when various supposed ideals were making a great many people see things with rosy tinted vision, and we've since come to know of the horrors perpetrated by totalitarian regimes that were supposedly leftist but in effect not different from right wing, except for this - the right wing might have a few privileged who were safe for the time being due to money, and the left had similar privileged due to political status. Other than that, the genocide toll of left is estimated above twenty and a hundred million respectively in the two single largest leftist regime nations of twentieth century.
........................

Lanny and Laurel were flown over to Ulan Bator by two Chinese guys in the plane intended for goods transport and not equipped with any comfort for passengers. Laurel was lying down, and Lanny thought she was dreaming, so he bent to hear, and it was Lizbeth. He talked to her, and she said that Japanese had shelled and sunk the yacht, among many others, the morning they left Hong Kong. There had been no time to get into boats and other ships around had steamed away. When Lanny asked her what he could tell her mother, she talked of a rag doll in the trunk in attic and said mice had made a nest in it. Laurel woke up, and Lanny didn't tell her just then about it.

Here, as in every other instance that the author mentions about any such phenomena, the author goes into, has Lanny go into, rigmarole about whether it was subconscious or telepathy, and after a dozen or so such declarations by them, one gets pretty fed up with the stance of both the author and his protagonist in this regard. It compares quite well with the stance of flatearthers going on justifying their stance with alternative descriptions of reality that would fit in with the church accepted view.
.....................

They wanted to see everything and began with the museum that had been the palace of residence of The Living Buddha whose "customary reincarnation had not been permitted by the Soviets", to paraphrase the author. When communication came from Kuybyshev they were treated as more important, but saw hurts by choice rather than all the modern buildings that the guide was proud to invite them to see.

Here again it's the hubris of West that's evident in the attitude of the author and characters, in describing the primitive character of everyone else and lack of hygiene thereof, although the prejudice held by the author and by his characters about cleanliness of Europe is based in little more than racism - several decades after the war, when most of West Europe is modernised as to central heating and plumbing, bathing habits of Europe remained weekly at best, and monthly in Bavaria as told proudly to colleagues from India whose daily routine of bathing was seen by the Bavarian colleagues as evidence of lack of cleanliness of India by said Bavarian colleagues, and of strange quirks by the English landlords who were quite puzzled at the bathroom of the rented house being not good enough, since they themselves declared they rarely showered.

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................................................................................................

Presidential Mission

................................................................................................

Volume 8.
................................................................................................

This one has Lanny add North Africa to his by now routine round of Paris, Bienvenu, London and NYC - Washington - Newcastle, with Vichy, Toulon and Geneva tacked on; for a while Germany is kept at bay.
.....................

The author waxes beautifully eloquent about Lanny's mother, Beauty,

Beauty was there to receive him, glad and thankful to see him alive after the uncertainty she had more than once of seeing him ever again. They exchanged news. Beauty was happy about Laurel expecting, and said she was right for him. They drove home in the horse carriage Beauty used now.

Beauty knew her son well, and wasn't the dumb chatterbox concerned only with fashion et al that most people take beautiful woman to be, which few are, and the author describes it beautifully, movingly, from time to time. Beauty knew her son's heart and knew if he was in love with a woman long before he did, if she met her, as in case of Marie De Bruyne and Laurel Creston, but sometimes even when she had never met her and didn't even know her name, as in case of Trudi.

"There was something that called Lanny away, and it hadn’t taken her shrewd mind many years to guess what the thing must be. Always the call came by mail; there were letters postmarked Toulon which took him westward, and others from Geneva which took him northward. Beauty had studied the handwriting and guessed that the former came from Raoul Palma, whom she had known for twenty years or more as one of Lanny’s Leftist friends; the other writing she did not know, but it had peculiarities which were German, and she had noted that Lanny generally went into Germany after getting one of these letters.

"She knew much more about this strange son than he guessed. She had become certain that he had never changed his political coloration, as he gave the world to understand; if he had, he would never have become a friend of Laurel Creston’s—to say nothing of marrying her. The idea that he was a secret Leftist terrified her, for she knew what danger it meant in times like these. The fact that he refused to take her into his confidence hurt her, but she had to accept his cryptic statement: “A promise is a promise, old darling.” She had kept these speculations hidden in the deepest corner of her mind, and even her best friends believed that she believed her son to be an art expert, traveling about the world only in search of beautiful paintings.

"Beauty’s instructions were never to forward his mail, because of the uncertainty of his movements and of communications in wartime. She put the papers and magazines on a closet shelf and locked the letters up in her escritoire. There was a considerable packet after a whole year, and she didn’t make him ask for them, but put them into his hands without delay. He would not look at them in her presence, but would take them off to his study to read and perhaps answer. He would never entrust the replies to the postman who delivered mail at the estate every day, but would find some excuse to go into Cannes and there presumably drop them into an inconspicuous box. All this she had observed for years and had tactfully pretended to observe nothing.

""According to Beauty’s expectation, Lanny came to her, saying: “I have to go into town to attend to some matters at the bank. If you don’t mind, I’d like to take the buggy, because I’ll buy some presents for our friends whom I have been neglecting.” The generous-hearted Lanny, so the friends would all think; but he didn’t fool his keen-minded mother, who had been Robbie Budd’s side-partner in munitions deals for a couple of decades and knew all there was to know about intrigue. She had observed this business of giving presents to people who needed them and to others who didn’t, and she had managed to figure out what it meant. Lanny must be needing money in small denominations which could not be traced through the bank, and this was his way of getting large bills changed. She had even noticed that his pockets were bulging when he came home! Now she said: “All right,” and didn’t offer him the pleasure of her company on the expedition. She knew that when he had got the money, he would be leaving shortly."
.....................

The first thing he saw on a lighting the train was Marceline, since the telegraph he'd sent had arrived. They talked about their lives, Marceline going first, asking about Laurel and why he hadn't brought her, and why couldnt he sell more Detazes.

"“I am not going back into Germany,” she declared, and there her questioning of Lanny halted and his questioning of her began. Had she ceased to love Oskar? She made a sort of moue and said that she loved him as much as she was willing to love any man, but she couldn’t stand the Germans, especially since America had entered the war. Graf von Herzenberg, Oskar’s father, had used his influence to make it possible for her to go on dancing and to enjoy complete freedom, but he couldn’t keep the German women from making snide remarks whenever she came near them, and asking her how her countrymen dared to bomb the most beautiful cities in the world and to kill the most cultured people in the world.

"“You know, Lanny, I never had the least idea of being patriotic. I’m only half an American, and that by accident; nationalities meant nothing to me, and I hardly bothered to know where the countries were. This war has been horrid, I just didn’t want to know about it. But now some Germans have cut me dead, and Oskar can’t bring himself to blame them, and I’m not supposed to blame him, and I don’t—only I do.”"

In short, Marceline was tired of her Prussian aristocrat. Oskar was brave and had been wounded in the war, and Marceline was proud of him, but war was messy, not her business. She'd wanted to go to Moscow since Russians loved dance, but that wasn't possible now, and she asked about N.Y., was she an American citizen?

Social life of Riviera was pretty much at a stop. Americans had gone and the few British left were interned, and those French who attempted to mix with Germans were seen with suspicion by their fellow French.

"Marceline had a raging appetite for pleasure, and to be in what she called the “social whirl.” She hated the war, not because it was killing millions of men and reducing other millions to destitution, but because it was destroying that brightly shining world in which she had won a place by much effort of body and brain. To be an artist did not mean to the daughter of Marcel Detaze what it had meant to her father, to express the deep longings of the human soul for beauty and understanding; it meant to be “somebody,” to have a place in the world of wealth and fashion, to be talked about, and to have eyes turn to follow her when she entered a public place. Now the public places were mostly dark because fuel was so scarce, and a dancer at the height of her career was expected to be content with sitting at home and making up a bridge four with people who had formerly been elegant but now were dependent upon her mother for a place to lay their heads."

Marceline was enraptured to play with her little son who was named after her father, his name legally changed to Marcel Detaze when she divorced Vittorio, but she tired of it when he asked questions and decided it was a grandmother's job. She asked Lanny about all the people they knew, and wanted to know about only the fashionable circle. She wasn't political, but fascists were the only ones who'd take care of the reds.

The author seems to have set up the two half sisters of Lanny as counterbalancesto one another, representing extremes of types that did and do exist politically, and often in the same family. That they were not related to one another, but only to Lanny who is the balanced half brother to each, is the perfect representation, since it avoids the mess of families in agony divided due to such extremes. Also, since they are both sisters, and one brought up wealthy while other brought up in fashionable society and aspiring to that life, any possibility of actually coming to blows is neatly avoided, whether with one another or with Lanny.

"The idea had occurred to him that she might be an excellent person to go into Germany and collect secrets among the military and governmental classes. She would be paid well for it, and she would like that; but after watching her, he decided that he couldn’t trust her. Whether she went to Germany or stayed here on the Riviera she would meet some new man, and whatever his political coloration, she would adopt it, as the way to please him. Doubtless it would be some man of wealth; for after her experience with Vittorio di San Girolamo she had vowed that she would “make them pay.” If she broke with Oskar von Herzenberg she would surely decide that two “romances” were enough, and that next time it must be business."

All the same, it's this apolitical, non-thinker half sister whose love for her brother is exempt of any similarity of character, is the one that would save him at risk to herself at a critical juncture coming up.

Lanny would have liked to stay on, but had to go off for work, this time to Algiers and Morocco. He'd seen these places on the cruise as a boy on the Bluebird, Ezra Hackabury's yacht, in company of Marcel Detaze, along with Beauty and her friends.

"Marcel had made it not merely a pleasure cruise, but a culture cruise, a floating university. He had opened the sensitive lad’s mind to the mysteries of human existence on this planet, to awe as well as beauty. For Lanny’s then stepfather had been not merely a painter, but a student and thinker. When he painted the ancient ruins of Greece and Rome he tried to make you feel the sorrow of great things vanished forever. When he painted a Greek shepherd in his rags or a Biskra water carrier in his gray burnoose, Marcel was not just getting something exotic and unusual; he had a heart full of pity for lonely men who lived hard lives and did not understand the forces which dominated them."

.....................

Never occurred to him that the benefits he had of his stepfather Marcel Detaze, apart from those from his own, were lacking completely from life of his baby sister Marceline, who was not even a toddler when Marcel died. She never knew him, and it was up to Lanny to pass on to her the benefits and pleasures of company of Marcel Detaze that he'd had. No, and what's more, it never occurred to him to pass on the one third of share of proceeds of sales from works of Marcel in favour of this daughter of the painter, not even though Lanny had a separate allowance of three hundred dollars a month from his father apart from the one thousand dollars Robbie always sent Beauty every month, and what's more, not even when Lanny married Irma Barnes, an heiress so rich Lanny got social recognition from German aristocracy.

No, even during the years he was married to Irma, and till the end of series when he's about forty eight, he has never thought he should pass on to Marceline that one third, or keep it in trust for her. He thinks he's very clean and selfless for refusing money from Irma's estate at the divorce, and even from U.S. government when he works for years as the President's secret agent and subsequently as agent of OSS, Monuments and Alsos.

No, he keeps the one third share of Marcel Detaze's works that was willed to him by the generous stepfather, and call Marceline names because she asks him for money because she was neither raised to work for money nor married for money.

.....................

Lanny heard about his stepfather Parsifal Dingle's seances with Madame Zyszynski where the Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka was replaced by one Jain monk from ninth century from southern coast of India - the author is rather careful to even use the word India, and says Travancore, which was a small state, for instance comparable to Belgium in Europe. And perhaps for the same reason the author has racist prejudice agaisnt the mainstream Indian culture termed Hinduism by West, which is not that different from the name india given to the subcontinent by West. Lanny tried, but didnt succeed, and the suthor wonders if its because he was sceptical and tried to interpret spirits as subconscious minds of the medium and others, which the author does at length every single time there is any such phenomena.

.....................

Lanny was negotiating for art purchase in Casablanca and heard of treasures to be had in Marrakech, and thought it worth a look, especially in view of negotiations in Casablanca. He drove through aloe and giant cacti along the road, similar to what he'd seen in and around his home in Provence and in California, respectively. The scenery was dominated by Atlas mountains to the SouthEast, taller than alps and perpetually snow covered. As it melted, streams cut great chasms through the land, and life of earlier civilisations had depended on bringing this water to cities and to land.

"Aqueducts were everywhere, built out of the stones of the earlier ones. Those in Marrakech were low and appeared like swift-moving brooks. Approaching the city you passed over a bridge a thousand feet long, with twenty-seven graceful stone arches built by the Almohades, rulers of this country some eight hundred years previously.

"Marrakech is a vast city, an oasis of palm trees, spread out so that it seems bigger than it is. It has immense estates with high walls, and the owners were living in comfort untroubled by war."
......................................

The author here goes into paens to the co-abrahmic religion of the region, stating it's superior to the idol worship of prior era; he fails to realise that this statement is founded really on a twisted racism with no foundation whatsoever connecting the two parts of the statement.

The Greek and Roman civilisations that Europe is founded on and is proud of, with reason, weren't monotheistic, nor was the Egyptian civilisation, and the disdain or contempt or worse heaped on pre abrahmic religions by the phrase 'idol-worship' is as baseless, hypocritical and fraudulent as the usages of terms such as 'grotesque' for objects not placed in a grotto, whence the latter word originates.

There are no proofs of existence of any deities, nor of non existence thereof, nor can there be other than personal experiences that remain so; and to claim that your own faith in doctrines of a supposedly historical figure is faith justifying your own concept based on the said doctrine of a particular deity, while others about another or many other are all false and amout to worship of mere idols and devoid of deities, is the fraud perpetrated by faiths that were adopted by political powers as help towards subjugating the populations they conquered, breaking down their spirits by destroying their places of worship and everything contained therein, as evidence of non existence of the Gods and Goddesses of the conquered.

But burning a library does not disprove the knowledge contained in the books, or even destroy it, it merely reduces the generations who can no longer access the knowledge ignorant and illiterate, easy to subjugate. The same is true of destruction of temples and deities by various monotheistic conquistadores perpetrated against the lands conquered and subjugated.

Funny, the protestants do hold Catholic faith among the idol worshipping, and worse, since some of the non Catholics hold worship of any woman abhorrent, a doctrine of misogyny and little else that's deep embedded in all abrahmic faiths.

This fundamental chasm prevalent in general consciousness of people in West is not that different from the attitude almost forced about Santa Claus in U.S. or xmas in general in West - if you let anyone suspect you don't melt at the mention, you are a brunch without a heart, but if you let anyone suspect you aren't urbanely above any real belief therein, you are hopelessly stupid, ignorant, and incapable of bearing any real adult responsibility.

And it's even more openly, hopelessly entangled hypocrisy the author fails to see in himself, when he has his art expert protagonist think and himself state that such monotheistic faiths are superior to previous idol worshipping cultures, after Lanny has gone inspecting the ruins at Timgad and Constantine, of an impressive Roman civilisation left in ruins by Arabs who sacked and plundered and left it in ruins, by his own description, where his protagonist isn't exactly dancing on the ruins celebrating the destruction, but is gone to silently pay respect to the earlier civilisations and is generally an art dealer whose work, which he respects, is preservation of art and culture.
......................................

.....................

Lanny arrived home next morning to the new larger apartment he'd insisted he'd pay for, where the three of them were to share it, Agnes staying on sharing home with them so Laurel wasn't left uncomfortably alone for uncertain amounts of time when Lanny travelled. They spoke first about Laurel and her occupation, and she asked about everyone at Bienvenu.

"He told about Marceline, whom Laurel had never met; a curious nature, quietly cold, pleasure-bent in a silent, incessant, almost vegetative way. Some day Laurel would meet her and probe her secret soul and put it into a story."

Here the author is being so horribly insensitive it's beyond comprehension.

Beauty's children were each brought up in Bienvenu, the big house on the estate in Juan Les-Pins, mostly by servants, while the mother was busy with various things apart from fashionable life with friends, and neither child went to school.

They were moreover eighteen years apart in age, so Marceline was lonely as a child, and perhaps this taught her to contain emotion and be self sufficient, and as to pleasure seeking, what other value did her family impart her other than bearing pretty was everything?

The one thing she did learn as a baby from the one sibling she met as a toddler was dancing, and while he was not that often around, this is one thing she did hold on to, rather than the more common theme amongst the society taught women, which was to find a rich match.

If she were more like Irma she'd be safe, accepting the match made for her by her family with Alfy and be a Countess some day, meanwhile with a home in each country and no worries to speak of.

But being half French and half American child of two people each of whom rebelled against their family and found their own way to one another, she is independent, and is attempting to find her wings, asking but one thing from the world, to be loved for herself.

If Lanny doesn't understand all this, he is only a brother who hardly ever knew her. But the author commenting thus is truly callous.

.....................

Frances was thrilled to hear about his North Africa adventures, and later Lanny spoke to Irma and Ceddy and their company, letting everybody assume he'd come directly from North Africa. He spoke to Irma privately next day about a concern.

"“There is something serious that I ought to tell you, Irma. I know you have information that the Germans are preparing new weapons against Britain—jet-propelled missiles, rockets—that may develop a speed greater than any airplane and may carry a warload ten times as heavy as the present bombs. There will be no defense against such weapons, so far as I have been able to learn. I don’t know when they will begin coming, it may be a long time or it may be this year. One thing is certain, they will come suddenly, probably some night, and surely without warning. So I do not like to think of Frances being in England.”

"Irma’s face went white. “You think they will be aimed at places as unlikely as Wickthorpe?”

"“My guess is they will be aimed at the biggest target in this war, which is London. But they may be flying hundreds of miles, and they may not always be accurate. I think Newcastle would be a much safer place for our daughter than Wickthorpe. I am not proposing to take her now. I am asking you to think it over, as something to be done when I come again.”

"Irma drew a deep breath, and her voice betrayed her emotion. “Lanny, she has never been separated from her mother. I cannot bear the thought!”

"He tried to divert her with playfulness. “There is another aspect of the matter. If the bombs begin failing on London, you will have what you had before—hundreds of refugee children having to be put up and cared for here. You found that so inconvenient, you remember; Frances was associating with children of whom you disapproved.”

"Irma saw no humor in the idea. “All this is dreadfully hard for me to face,” she exclaimed.

"“Hard for you, Irma, but best for Frances. She would have Robbie’s and Esther’s other grandchildren for playmates. And it would please Robbie and Esther to have them all together for a while. She would have everything a child wants, just as she has here. It would be good for her in many ways, as you will realize once you have thought it over.”

"“But what about the danger of such a trip in wartime! It seems a terrible idea to me.”

"“The Germans are not troubling the planes to Lisbon—they need to use the same port themselves. From there to the Azores and Bermuda; hundreds of planes are making that trip every day; it is like one of the ferries across the Thames.”

"“You say that after having two crashes in a year and a half!”

"“In one of them I was shot down over enemy territory; and the other was in a storm near the Arctic. There is nothing like that to be expected by the southern route.”"

She had a fear of kidnappers and gangsters in U.S., but Lanny made light of it, and said she could write to Robbie and Esther, or to him.

.....................

At this point one does get the suspicion that the pattern repeated from generation to next is that of unquestionable right of patriarchy to have children raised by their mothers only as long as it suits the father, and then claim them, whether in name of safety or respectability.

Not that Robbie taking Lanny to Newcastle was wrong, nor is Lanny taking Frances away to Newcastle is wrong for that matter; far from it. Their looking out for safety of life of a child who's so far entrusted to the mother they aren't married to at the point, is quite laudable.

But then, Lanny advised Beauty and arranged for her to go as a traveller on vacation - to North Africa, and told her to leave Madame Zyszynski and Emily Chattersworth behind, saying nothing to them; he didn't help save Marceline's life when she asked for his help, never mind before; and he merely claimed Frances, leaving her in care of Budd family at Newcastle. That both these fathers' actions resulted eventually in separating the thus protected child from the mother, and gravitating him and her respectively towards the father and the Budd clan, is the point.

For that matter, what was Marceline's one act of selfishness that Lanny holds her so very accountable for? Not marrying Alfy as arranged by Lanny at her birth, and subsequently refusing to carry out his plan of using her and Vittorio to rescue Alfy from fascist prison, is another.

And yet, is Lanny any less guilty, in not helping either Marceline or Rosa Diamant, to escape nazis, when they asked for his help? For that matter, he went for one match arranged by his mother and her friends, and subsequently refused all else, having wrecked it due to differences of temperament. Isn't it only fair that Marceline even at a young age needs a security of heart before she'd consent to the match arranged for her?

Patriarchal ego it is that blinds Lanny, and the author, in abusing the women one way or another.

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................................................................................................

One Clear Call

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Volume 9.
................................................................................................

The title is from a Tennyson verse, "Sunset, and evening star, and one clear call for me."

.....................

"Along the shore, lined with palm trees and small houses of white, blue, and coral pink, flew a procession of pelicans, gray birds which moved their wings with slow dignity and permitted nothing to disturb their course."

Wonder if anyone else waxed quite so lyrical about Florida.

.....................

Lanny is invited by Jim Stotzlmann to a party at Evalyn Walsh McLean's, and he mentions his wife is with him. Jim has Evalyn send a formal invitation.

Her first remark was, “I have no clothes!”

"Lanny said, “Go and get yourself an outfit this morning. This is a show you mustn’t miss.”

"“I’m nobody to those people, Lanny.”

"“Yes, but they’re somebodies to you. Someday you’ll be writing a novel about Washington, and Evalyn Walsh McLean is made to order for you. Get yourself the right things so that you can look like one of them and feel at home.”

"“That might cost a thousand dollars, Lanny.”

The figure did not startle the son of Beauty Budd. “It’ll come back to you in royalties,” he declared. “Cast your bread upon the waters!”"

"When the P.A. came back, toward seven o’clock, he found his wife transformed. She was wearing a lovely pale blue evening gown, of that kind of simplicity which costs like smoke. She had followed his instructions and gone to a “good” place; she was proud of herself because she had found a dress that became her and had cost only three hundred dollars. Fortunately you didn’t wear a hat to an evening party, and all she had had to buy were shoes and gloves to match, and, of course, stockings, and a little handbag that had cost fifty dollars, and a handkerchief for thirty-five. She would not attempt to compete with Mrs. McLean’s Hope diamond, said to be worth several millions; Laurel would appear without jewels.

"When the pair came down to the lobby, Jim took one glance at the lady, whom he had never met before; he saw that she was “right,” and Lanny saw that he saw it. That is the way matters go in the smart world; you are “right,” and your woman is “right,” and if you’re not you don’t go but once."

.....................

This is the beginning of Lanny veering back, not in theory but in practice. In theory he knew, when he was with Trudi, that however much he loved her and she loved him, however much they were in accord in mind and work, he was comfortable with women of fashion - those necessarily brought up in wealth and who kept themselves up, looking beautiful in latest fashion and well groomed, perfumed and elegant. He might ever so much rail about rich versus working poor, but he hasn't managed to bridge the deep wide chasm in his mind, much less practice.

.....................

"Marceline Detaze, like the Germans who had money and were free, had removed herself to the country, as far as possible from bombing objectives. Being the daughter of a Frenchman and deriving her citizenship from him, she was not classified as an enemy; being the cherished Freundin of a Prussian nobleman and Wehrmacht officer, she had obtained permission to come and go as she pleased. An hour’s drive from the city she had found what had been a school for young ladies and now was a hospital for wounded officers. The extensive grounds had been turned into potato fields; but one corner had been spared because of big shade trees, and there was a gardener’s cottage which Marceline had leased for a year. She lived with an old woman for a maid, and read fiction from the school library—every afternoon she read aloud to the patients, because it was a bore to be alone. She said this apologetically, not wanting her brother to think that she had turned into a humanitarian or anything of that pretentious sort.

"Marceline had been born in the middle of World War I, and everything she had heard in later years had caused her to hate it. Now she hated World War II, for one sufficient reason, that it had ruined the career of a girl who had worked hard to have her own way, and now in the midst of her triumph had been knocked out. It was all right to talk to soldiers about Frederick the Great, but that had no meaning to a night-club dancer; the clear-sighted Marceline knew that there would be no more dancing in Germany for a long time, and that by going into Germany she had made herself hated in most of the countries that had money.

"Here she was, compelled to do her practicing in a room about fifteen feet square, and to music that came over the radio; at first she had had the use of a small stage at night, but now it was filled with beds; everything in Germany was being filled with beds for wounded men, and Marceline had to hear their stories and write letters for them. “And of course when they get anywhere near well, they want to sleep with me,” she said, having the European frankness on this subject. Lanny knew as well as she the code of the Hitlerites, that it was every woman’s duty to give sexual comfort to a soldier, and to bear a future soldier or mother of soldiers for the Fatherland whenever and however that might be possible. “I tell them that I have a lover,” she went on, “but that doesn’t mean much to them. I am afraid the doctors of this institution consider me an alien and disturbing influence.”

"It was easy enough for Lanny to believe that she was disturbing. She was twenty-five and at the height of her carefully cultivated charms. She had been fashion’s darling from the age when she had learned to stand in front of a mirror, to turn this way and that and survey herself. At the age of five she had sat at her mother’s dressing table, examining her hair, her skin, her eyes, and applying a variety of substances out of ornate expensive bottles. Later, when all these operations were completed, she went among the right sort of people, those who were wealthy and socially prominent, and when they turned to look at her the purpose of her life was achieved."

They talked about her son Marcel, their mother Beauty, and Marceline's lover Oskar, the Prussian aristocrat and war hero.

"“Tell me,” said the P.A., always on the watch to do business, “what does Oskar think about the war?”

"“Until recently the idea never occurred to him that his wonderful Army could meet defeat. But Stalingrad broke his nerve, I think; he was there, and barely got away, and lost three of his toes from frostbite. He was here a month ago, and defeat made him easier to get along with. He is sure that the Americans are going into Italy, and that the Italians will turn traitors. Do you think that will happen?”"

Lanny said anything could happen, with his neutral facade, but she had known him all her life and suddenly, lowering her voice, David he didn't have to pretend with her, and asked how he managed to get about in Germany despite being enemy alien. He replied by talking of dealing in art for high up nazis including Göring.

"“Listen,” she said, “you ought to know that you don’t have to give me any double-talk. I know you haven’t any love in your heart for this set of low-caste fellows who have thrown the world into war.”

"“Marceline, you mustn’t talk like that,” he whispered, and looked all around him and even up into the tree.

"“Mais c’est à toi que je parle,” she said, and after that she spoke French and so did he. “I like gentlemen,” she went on, “and I hate noisy rowdies, and I never had any reason to think that your taste differed from mine. I can tell you something that ought to be of interest to you, and you don’t have to say that you got it from me.”

"“No, of course not; and for your part, don’t say that you told it to me.”

"“I don’t ever talk about you. Rightly or wrongly, I’ve been convinced for some time that you are not just buying and selling objets d’art. If you get into any trouble I don’t want it to be my fault.”

Lanny warned Marceline not to mention him to Oskar, and asked if such a group would be interested in point of view of enemy, and they established a code using paintings, and the postal route via Swiss friends that Marceline had been using to write to their mother, Beauty. There were some paintings in the hospital, and when Hard returned they went together to inspect them, and they were Defreggers, so Lanny discourses about them at length, including his buying some for Berghof.

.....................

The author has a pattern of being surprisingly blind to the characters he himself has penned, and one has to wonder if this is because they are not created, or prototypes, but in fact different names and circumstances provided in the story to people who were real and close to him. This is all the more so in the circle around and close to Lanny, his beloved protagonist whose faults begin to be apparent even in the first volume. But it becomes impossible to push it under the rug by the time he gets here, ready to justify the sacrifice of Marceline, a beautiful younger sister, in an attempt to save Lanny. And it isn't the first time he finds women imperfect while males are exalted, but is a pattern despite the often glaring faults repeatedly shown in the same males.

Marceline and Lanny were brought up by their mother Beauty eighteen years apart, with very similar upbringing - she was off to fashion grooming or holidays with her set wherever the season took her, and they were mostly left to servants when not observing their mother and her fashionable set. Lanny had a father who visited and gave him what company he could, but Marceline's father died early and she was either lonely while Beauty was busy saving a German spy from French by taking him to Spain, or later had his strict Prussian values imposed on the little French-American daughter because he was Beauty's lover. Lanny took his side because he was Lanny's friend and Lanny had initiated the project of saving the German spy, so Marceline had no one on her side looking out for her really.

Calling her selfish as the author does, repeatedly, raises serious questions about his mindset and values. Does he think Beauty and her friends, busy mostly with fashion and parties, are not selfish? The other example set for Marceline was Irma, no better at any point, except when required to help people due to her position, which she does most part either for a price or setting her terms or both, and she certainly isn't an example in bringing up her daughter who is left as much to servants while Irma is holidaying about the world, as Beauty did with her children. What's more she wishes at her divorce to deprive Lanny of custody only because her daughter is to be sole heir to millions, the latter being the point most important.

One gets the impression that despite his appeal of social equality, the author is as steeped in abrahmic lore or myth abou eve being evil as any staid believer, and hence the rights of most evil males to be seen as deserving some credit, while his women in most part are seen by him as useless and frivolous if not worse. The one angel, Trudi, had to die, as did her opposite the young and beautiful heiress Lizbeth who was calm, home loving unlike the fashionable Irma, and more.

.....................

Lanny went to meet Marceline who was close to Berlin, taking care of Oskar who was wounded, and she wanted nothing to do either with war or politics.

"“Could you take me with you to America?”

"“No, old dear, I couldn’t. Your position is a peculiar one: under American law you have the right to choose the citizenship of your mother, but you would have to be in American territory to have that right recognized. Under both French and German law you are French because your father was. I suppose that if you could get to Sweden, the American Ambassador would have power to recognize your status; but I doubt if he would, because you came into Germany after the war broke out and you have performed here after Germany declared war on your country. You will remember that I warned you at Juan.”"

Oskar came, he'd lost an arm and was suffering. Lanny needed to steer him to the topic of conspiracy and spoke about Göring's views. Oskar asked for names of people whose views were different from following nazis, and Lanny retreated saying he coukdn t break confidence, wondering if Gestapo had gotten to Oskar to watch Lanny. After he went to rest Lanny and Marceline spoke again outside.

"Marceline promised, “I will take more interest in what he is doing and he will tell me more. If he asks about you, I will assure him he can trust you.”

"“You mean to stay then?”

"“Stay? Where can I go?”"

.....................

It's heartbreaking, that this big brother fails to care for her, to teach her, to be the father figure he ought to be to the sister who's eighteen years younger and lost her father whom he knew and she didn't, and now fails her the one final time she asked for help. Next but one time they talk, she's called him to warn him, and that saved his life; she risked hers in the process, got caught and tortured, and was lost until Monck found her. Lanny gave her up for dead, and never had a qualms about having not helped her, or gratitude about her saving his life and risking her own, or even about having not cared about her or understood her. No, he goes on calling her selfish.

.....................

In the morning Lanny called Marceline and asked if he could see the painting, mentioning no names, and left after checking out of the hostelry. He took a train this time and a horse drawn vehicle from the station to the Garnison-lazarett.

"Marceline was waiting for him, seated under a tree in the garden, reading a German translation of Gone With the Wind; it antedated the war, and the Regierung found nothing in it to object to."

She talked about Oskar, and then brought him out. They talked under the tree.

"The invalid officer expounded his thesis that his country had been brought to this plight by a set of gutter rats—“ignorant, low-class fanatics,” he called them—and surely the outside world could not blame the German people for this calamity."

Marceline had told Oskar about American newspapermen referring to Mr Big, and Oskar talked about Herr Grosse, which was a Jewish name. He said the problem was Herr Grosse had taken to himself all responsible military positions and issued detailed orders impossible to carry out, and asked what allies attitude would be if he were gone.

"Lanny was in position to say that he had discussed this question with persons of the highest authority and could state that the formula of unconditional surrender was meant for a criminal Regierung and not for a government of responsible persons with whom agreements could be made. Germany would be occupied in any case, but the purpose of the occupation would be to see a representative government firmly established. After having had opportunity for free and open discussion the people would be called upon to say what sort of government they wanted. “If you want official assurance on that point,” added the P.A., “it can be arranged for you to get it through one of our diplomatic offices—I suppose Switzerland would be the most convenient.”

"This pleased Oskar von Herzenberg, and it moved him to confidences. He told an extraordinary story, of which no hint had come out to the Allied world. Only two months previously a group of men had made a carefully planned effort to remove Herr Gross from the scene, and the effort had failed through the merest accident. Oskar did not say who the men were, but it became clear that they were Reichswehr officers, and that Oskar himself had had knowledge of the affair."

Here the author relates the brandy bottle bomb in plane affair, the previous attempt of the Stauffenberg group.

Lanny suggested the two visit a mountain resort in Switzerland, the Trois Rois hotel, and said they'd be contacted; he said he'd call, and Marceline could use the name of Holbein and describe an unlisted work using her imagination. Marceline was thrilled.
.....................................

In the morning he had breakfast in room, unwilling to leave until there was a call. There was a knock on door and he went down to take the call.

"There was no booth, but it didn’t matter, for he didn’t expect to have much to say; just “Sehr gut, ich komme,” or else “Schade. Auf Wiedersehen.” He took up the receiver and heard Marceline’s voice, asking if he had had a pleasant night and if he was still interested in the Holbein painting. He answered that he was still interested. He knew that she was giving him a chance to make sure who was speaking, and he said, “I would like to take it to Bienvenu”—so that she could be sure who was her auditor.

"She began a speech, slowly and very distinctly, so that he might get every word. This was the speech: “I have seen the painting. It is a grim and rather frightening thing, but there can be no doubt of its power. It is called ‘Death in the Twilight.’ I urge you to see it at once; somebody else may get it, so don’t delay a moment. I am no longer at home and cannot take you to see it, but don’t fail to take my advice. Promise me.”

"“Yes, of course. Where can I see it?”

"“It is at Neuschloss.”

"“Neuschloss?” he echoed. He wasn’t usually dumb, but this quiet yet terrible series of sentences had set his heart to pounding and thrown his mind into confusion.

"“Surely you remember!” exclaimed the voice. “The place where your translator lives.”

"Lanny’s translator! He had no such person and had never needed one, except years ago in Russia. But he caught on: Marceline wanted him to translate Neuschloss. Newcastle! And that meant: Get out of Germany! It meant get out at once. Death in the Twilight! “Ja, ich verstehe,” he said. “Ich werde mir das Bild ansehen—noch heute. Wie geht es Dir?”

"“Heil Hitler!” came the response. “Lebe wohl!” And that was all; the phone was dead."

Lanny walked away from the telephones where there was no privacy, to think.

"His thoughts were in a tumult. Marceline had given him a warning that his life was in danger; that could be the only meaning of her words. “Death in the Twilight” had nothing to do with any painting by the younger Holbein. “Grim and rather frightening!” Rather, indeed! Marceline meant the Gestapo; she could mean nothing else. She had fled from them, and it might be that she had risked her life in order to warn her half-brother. Did it mean that Oskar’s plot had been discovered and that Oskar himself had been caught? Or did it mean that Oskar was a spy and had betrayed the half-brother of his Freundin? Or that Himmler had found out something else about Lanny Budd and had sent his men to arrest him? Somehow or other, Marceline had found out about it; perhaps a servant had warned her, as four years ago one had warned Laurel Creston in this same Hauptstadt of terror!

"One thing was certain, Marceline would not have given such a warning unless she had been sure that Lanny was in dire peril. She had made it as plain as words over the telephone could be; and there was no other possible meaning for the words. If Marceline herself and Marceline alone had been in danger, she would have had no reason to risk talking. But it was Lanny who was to see the painting “Death in the Twilight,” and Lanny who was to go at once to Neuschloss! That being true, it must follow that the whole machinery of the SS and the Gestapo was at work to find Lanny Budd and arrest him. That was what the machinery was built for. A lesser offender might have called for a lesser effort; but for a man who had dared to worm his way into the Führer’s heart, to come into the Führer’s home and try to steal his secrets, such a man would constitute a supreme challenge, and all the dreadful power of the Geheime Staats-Polizei would be set to work."

.....................

So Lanny was able to escape using Monck's network, Hilde Donnerstein and partisans in Italy, while Marceline was captured by Gestapo and tortured for his whereabouts; he had a honeymoon driving across U.S. to Hollywood and Hearst castle, while he knew she could be dead or worse. If he cared about her even one millionth as much as he did about his friends, the author is silent on the topic. Lanny never mentions to even their mother Beauty about Marceline saving his life, nor share her worry about her; the author has him telling Beauty that Marceline is capable of taking care of herself, and telling himself and the readers that he didn't wish to burden Beauty.

.....................

"“I hope you agree with me,” said the propagandist lady. “I ask the world, what right have the British to talk about freedom when they refuse freedom to the people of India? Don’t you think I am right, Mrs. Budd?”

"“It’s a complicated question,” responded Laurel. “I am troubled by the possibility that if the British set the Indians free, they may soon be flying at one another’s throats.”

"“Well, let them; that’s their business if they want to.”

"“Don’t you believe in a police force, Miss Rector?”

"“Yes, but I wouldn’t want a British policeman in my home and neither would you, I am sure. I see that you haven’t thought these matters out, Mrs. Budd. You must let me introduce you to some of my Hindu friends and let them explain their cause.”"

.....................

"The next person Lanny wanted to talk to was Johannes Robin, wise man of the world, who knew the Jews in the only way it was possible really to know them—by being one. ... He had bought a comfortable old house about halfway between New York and Newcastle, and there he had assembled his family: his devoted old wife, whom they all called Mama; the son of the murdered Freddi, who bore his father’s name; the mother of that son, who had remarried and had a husband and three children; and, for the past two years, the two children of Hansi and Bess. They all stayed together, because they had learned so dreadful a lesson of the world’s cruelty; they had been taught love by their fear of hatred."

The author tells here about the sixteen years old young son of Freddi Robin, and makes his third noticeable mistake about his own characters; here he gives the boy's name, which had until now always been Johannes after his grandfather, as Freddi.

The first of such mistakes was lanny telling Ezra Hackabury that his ex-wife was still married and her current husband Fitz-Laing was working at a British military desk job, although this was after Marceline's debut in England when he mentioned that Fitz-Laing had died and Edna was a widow of small means, helping her rich friends of yore.

In between the author said Lanny told his third wife Laurel about Marceline, the only member of his family she hadn't met; but Marceline was present at their first meeting at house of a friend of their mother, Beauty, as was Beauty, and the two had commented with dislike about the sharp Laurel's calling Lanny a troglodyte.

.....................

Lanny met another Jewish family through Johannes in preparation for his trip.

Here again the comments of the author show a mindset that has Europeans as a universal people, just as he does in dealing with India and her population, more specifically those adherents of indigenous culture and traditions, not converted by invaders.

.....................

They met Hansi and Bess after they'd arrived home and seen the baby. Hansi and Bess had been performing all over Russia since it was attacked.

"The news of what the Nazis were doing to wipe out the Jewish race had been reported everywhere, but it was something so monstrous that most people in America were unable to believe it. Hansi knew that it was true, and there was death in his soul; in Russia he had put such sorrow into his music that tears ran down people’s cheeks as they listened. He didn’t know if that would happen in America, and talked sometimes of playing only for Jewish audiences. Only a people which had been persecuted for a score of centuries could understand what he was saying. “Even Bess cannot understand,” he said."

"“I love the Russian people,” he declared; “they are a great people, warmhearted and generous, and their response to music is instinctive and overwhelming. But I can’t bring myself to tolerate their government.”

"“Would you like any government, Hansi?” asked the brother-in-law.

"“You have to be there to understand the difference, Lanny. It is not like anything in our world. You meet some official, you visit in his home, you like him, and play music for him; and then someday you go to his office and find his desk vacant; you ask where he is and nobody knows; you discover that you are troubling them by your questions. You go to his home and learn that he has disappeared off the face of the earth; his own family doesn’t know what has happened.

"You can see that they have been weeping, but also you see that they wish you wouldn’t press them; they are afraid to talk to you. You discover that they are afraid to be known to associate with a foreigner; they are embarrassed to say so, but they don’t invite you to their homes any more. All their lives are dominated by fear.”

.....................

Lanny and Laurel were flown via Brazil to Marrakech where they met his family and told about Frances and Newcastle. Beauty was worried about Marceline, but Lanny said nothing.

.....................

They returned to Jerusalem, returned the car and settled to art business.

"Mostly it was the Jews with whom they would deal, for the Prophet of Islam had forbidden his followers to make images—this in order to save them from idol worship. Apparently he had been right—if you had art you would have idols. The innumerable statues and paintings of madonnas and saints which the Catholics had in their shrines were idols in every sense except a quibble. The Mohammedans, forbidden to have paintings and statues, worshiped shrines and tombs and two hairs from the beard of their Prophet—they were here in the Mosque of Omar, kept in a golden box and exhibited to true-believers on special occasions. Here, also, was the stone from which Mohammed had ascended into heaven."

.....................

Worshiping hair and stone, apparently, isn't idol worship!

.....................

"The world was being rent by the most dreadful of all wars, and the task of keeping this nascent nation alive through the storm was one which engaged the attention of every man and woman in it. The Jews were in a state of agony over what was happening to their brethren in Central Europe; fugitives were continuing to put in appearance, telling ever more frightful tales—the most merciless slaughter of a race in recent times and perhaps in all history. To save as many as possible was the desire of every Jew, and it was hard indeed for them to face the fact that the British government and military would not permit them to admit and care for the refugees.

"According to the so-called Balfour Declaration, issued before World War I, the Jews were to be permitted to establish their homeland in Palestine. Why had the British backed down and violated this pledge? The answer was written plain for all the world to read—written in a substance that was thick and black and greasy, and very difficult to erase. Every Jew, and also every Arab, knew that the oil from the great Mosul field, British-owned, was pumped through a pipe-line across the deserts of Transjordan to the port of Haifa, on the Mediterranean near the top of Palestine. To that port came a constant stream of tankers, and the oil was essential to the operation of the British Navy, the British Merchant Marine, and even British industry at home.

"Jewish immigration had stirred up the Arabs and led to the forming of the Arab League and the financing of a swarm of agitators, calling for united action by the seven states which made up the Arab world. First Mussolini and then Hitler had taken up this cause, proclaiming themselves near-Muslims and friends of all followers of the Prophet. That, no doubt, was why Adi Schicklgruber had taken the son of Budd-Erling up to his mountain hideout and there informed him that he considered the onetime camel driver the greatest man who had lived, prior to Adi himself. Anything whatever that would cripple the British Empire and enable Adi to get down to the Mediterranean and the Dardanelles ahead of Stalin!

"Now the issue was being decided by war, and all the Jews with whom Lanny talked wanted the Allies to win; but there were a few who could not see very far and hated the enemy who was nearest to them. The British were here, governing in their rather cold impersonal way. In order to keep from driving the Arabs to frenzy and causing them to destroy the pipe-lines, British officials had to keep Jewish refugees from pouring into Palestine. These refugees came in wretched rubs, likely to fall to pieces in the first storm; the passengers would try to get ashore, even by swimming; and what a hideous thing to send them back to sea with no destination—and after having caught a glimpse of the land which the Lord their God had given them!

"So a wartime truce was being broken, and there was an underground war between the British troops and a Zionist organization called the Irgun. Some refugees were always getting in, and the Arabs took note of that, and their agitators fanned the flames of hatred. ... A young Jewish engineer, no fanatic but a man of science, compared it to the situation between the Indians and the white settlers on the American continent. The Arabs were a primitive people, ignorant and helpless, with a culture many centuries out of date; the Jews brought machinery and machine techniques, and modern knowledge of a thousand sorts. Was it not in the interest of progress that they should replace the inferior culture?

"Lanny assented, but pointed out that the Americans had come to be troubled in conscience over the way they had treated the Indians, and that you could not do in the twentieth century what your forefathers had done in the sixteenth and seventeenth. To this the Jew answered that his people were prepared to grant the Arabs full political rights and all the benefits of education. The trouble was, the Arabs didn’t want to be educated, at least not in modern ideas; they were content to have their children sit on a dirt floor and scratch fleas and learn to recite texts out of the Koran which had no remotest relationship to modern life.

"Lanny, trying to draw the man out, said that he had seen Jewish boys at school in Poland under precisely the same conditions, only the book from which they were learning was the Talmud instead of the Koran. Yes, that was true, the other admitted; but modern Jews had a different sort of education and the Palestine they built would be different from the old.

"In New York you didn’t find Jews voting against Gentiles; in Detroit and Chicago you didn’t find Negroes voting against whites; all over the North you found New Deal Jews and Negroes and whites voting against reactionaries of the same races.

"But the trouble was, you couldn’t tell that to the Arabs: few of them had ever heard of either Socialism or the New Deal. The Arabs held it as their creed that everything was predetermined by Allah, and that there was no use trying to change anything. They lived under a primitive tribal regime, in which the sheiks and their relatives and friends absorbed all the surplus value and left the masses hungry, ragged, and sunk in superstition. All that immense wealth which the British and American oil companies paid for drilling and pipe-line concessions went to kings and shahs and regents, and was spent for palaces and motorcars, jewels and banquets; the toiling masses got little or no benefit from it. Here in Palestine the British were just, but entirely capitalist-minded, and they left the rich to go on exploiting the poor as they had done from ancient times in spite of all the scolding of their prophets.

"The two explorers had been sent not merely to observe these phenomena, but to advise what should or could be done about them; and so, each night before they slept, they spent an hour discussing what they had seen and what they made of it. The longer they stayed, the more clearly they realized the complexities of this problem. It would be hard indeed to persuade the Arabs to dwell in amity with the Jews in a democratically controlled state; also, there were many Christians, Roman Catholics, Eastern or Byzantine Catholic, Armenian, Coptic, and even some Protestant sects who were scarcely less unwilling. Jerusalem was the Holy City of all these groups; they had their shrines here, and the trouble was, so many of them wanted the same shrines, and to decorate them with their own kind of tinsel and jewels, and perform their own kind of exclusive rites in front of them.

"Every Church organization fought for its own, and made a virtue out of excluding the others; so Jerusalem, the Holy City of God, had become a caldron of seething hatreds, a nest of vipers—even worse, for vipers do not sting one another. Here as elsewhere Lanny observed that it was the young Socialists, many of whom called themselves materialists, who were preaching peace and reconciliation, and it was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who was proclaiming a holy war throughout all the Arab world. The rabbis and the priests passed one another on the streets and glared with hatred hardly to be restrained."

.....................

Lanny and Laurel took their time in Cairo to see the sites, and unexpectedly met Scrubbie, a nineteen year old veteran flyer of British military, and a grandson of Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson, Bart., who was happy to see an old friend of the family, having been grounded after having been on maximum number of missions permitted to anybody. He spoke freely over lunch, about his raids and Egypt now being a training centre, about family and more. Lanny explained that he didn't get to England as much since he had taken his daughter to U.S. to live with the family of her grandfather.

.....................

Here's where Scrubbie is introduced without mentioning even Rick, so it's unclear if it's a still younger son, younger than Rick junior mentioned a volume or two before this.

.....................

"One thing tormented Beauty’s soul, and that was the continued silence of her daughter. She besieged Lanny on the subject, and all he could tell her was that he could think of no circumstance under which friends of Marceline in the Allied world could do anything but harm to her in the Axis world. If she was dead, or in a concentration camp, she was equally beyond help for the present. If she had gone into hiding—as many people in Germany had done—the last thing she would want was any effort to find her. If she got out, she would surely let them know; meantime she was one of many millions lost, missing, displaced, or whatever the word might be, on the tormented Continent. Lanny pointed out to his mother that Marceline had a powerful friend in her Junker lover; she had made many other friends by her art. It might well be that the friend in, Switzerland who had been relaying messages for her had died, or that some law had been passed forbidding the practice. Beauty’s daughter was a capable young woman and would surely not be wanting help from enemies of the land where she had chosen to make her home."

.....................

In short, select convenient arguments to convince oneself to do nothing to help; or even to acknowledge debt, guilt and repentance. Why then blame Irma who didn't offer all her millions for Freddi, and wasn't happy her husband risked his life for Freddi or Trudi? Surely Lanny owed more to Marceline than Irma did to Trudi!

.....................

"Frances was well, going to school with the other children, and entirely happy. Nobody had tried to kidnap her, and the town had got over its excitement at having an heiress come to stay. She had kept her promise to write every week to her mother, and after long delays there came replies; Frances read the latest to her father, and it contained a sentence: “No bombs have fallen anywhere near us, and there are fewer of them every day.” That implied, possibly, a hint of rebuke for the father, the idea that he had taken the child away under false pretenses. The flying bombs, the V-1’s, were still only a rumor among the insiders, and Lanny said nothing. It could be that the British and American flyers had found the launching sites and destroyed the hellish things. Only time could tell."

.....................

If Lanny was content to let Irma be home for Frances all these years, never even bringing her to visit Bienvenu for holidays, can one blame Irma if she saw this taking Frances away to Newcastle as an offence with a lie for an excuse?

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................................................................................................

O Shepherd, Speak!

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Volume 10.
................................................................................................

Over and over including in this part, the author reiterates Marceline having been of no use to anyone, until this part where she has lost herself due to the torture she underwent, and now will do anything anyone tells her to, or join in anything anyone is doing.

And yet, his false accusation is all too obvious. Marceline could have, instead of saving her half-brother's life by calling him, let him be caught while she saved herself. She could have denounced him to the authorities to save her torture, and she went through it rather than save her skin and let him suffer the results of risks he'd chosen to undertake. What's more she stuck be her lover and returned to care for him rather than select to be safe and relocate to U.K. or U.S. when it was war, even after having returned to Bienvenu.

And that's only the topping of the concoction. One look at the babyhood, the childhood that Marceline went through, the bringing up she received, and it's only too obvious she's the heroine of the piece and not the lesson her creator meant her to be.

Lanny benefited by having not only his own father Robbie set up an estate and a more than adequate allowance in addition to more help and gifts from time to time, but learning from him by example and proximity, as much as he did from the mother and the tutor, the stepmother and grandfather and great uncle, the various friends and visitors and more.

Moreover, Lanny had the benefit of learning from Marcel Detaze, in his company and from his life. But Marceline the daughter lost her father when she was a baby, and her mother promptly went to Paris, leaving her to the care of servants at Bienvenu, hiwever good and loving; Beauty chose to take a German spy for a lover and relocate to Spain for a significant amount of time to save him from French law, rather than let him suffer consequences of his choices whik e she returned to care for the baby.

When she did return, it was with the German lover, who despised everyone not German, and his harsh discipline was imposed on the baby who wasn't his own. Lanny took his side, and neither took Marceline as the recipient of benefits of their care or education, as Robbie and Marcel had with Lanny, but subjected her to male disdain for a female, especially for the little girl who looks to her mother for a role model. Lanny wrote her off early for having aspired to be like her and his own mother.

Did he expect her to aspire to be a fisherman, a cook, or even himself, only accidentally saved from being the useless playing that he's taken for by most, especially by most Germans?

He was, in fact, the reason why Marceline was subjected to the harsh discipline of Kurt, since it was he who had hidden Kurt in his mother's hotel suite, leading to their involvement, and later made and helped her execute the plan whereby she went to Spain with him and not back to Bienvenu to be with the baby.

Funny, the author offers far more leniency to almost every Nazi, compared to the poor little half sister who was an orphan for all practical purposes.

What's more, Lanny is set up by his father with a home and an allowance, but Marceline has only a one third share in her own father's paintings. Beauty and Lanny could have realised they had Robbie's money sent them regularly and they could have put money from sale of Marcel Detaze's works in a trust for her, but no, they divide it in three equal parts, so Marceline has always had needs nurtured by the life shes brougyt up in, with Beauty and her friends and Irma for examples, but no way to achieve it except by marrying money cold heartedly.

And they did set it up, by arranging a match with a future baron, Alfy, except Marceline is too proud, too upright. She wants to be loved and wooed, and makes her own mistakes because others have only paid her a superficial attention. But she's the raw diamond that the author had set up to be crushed.

............................................................................

Nina and Laurel visited John Haynes Holmes, a pastor of a fashionable set who'd made his Unitarian church a "community church"; he advised them to go see Gandhi. Nina argued that British deserved credit for achievements attributed to Gandhi, for treating him humanely unlike nazis who'd have finished off him and every follower. The pastor said ideas don't die, and gave the example of his son of god; Nina said this wasn't ages, it was atomic era. The pastor said the fault was of mechanical era, and machines have taken over souls; Nina thought this was fraud if he used a car or a subway, and there was no need to see Gandhi, Holmes was holy enough.

Therein another example of the author's racist and colonialist mindset - his contempt for India is along the British lines, of attitude and thought; no ranting a la Hitler's pronouncements about Jews and others, only a chopping off any credit accorded to anyone of India, especially if they weren't of a non Jewish abrahmic faith.

So much so, one has to infer at this point that independence of India has come about, and the author who waxed eloquent about Mao hasn't seen it fit to mention this, or the millions starved to death due to Churchill policy of simply taking the harvest away, and refusing to allow ships full of grain sent by FDR for India to proceed further West of Australia; Churchill did wax eloquent about letting Indians die in millions, but Upton Sinclair chooses to criticise him for his British accent, leaving this murder of millions due to theft of their harvest by British go unmentioned.

Actually, the author has Nina discuss the question of credit for independence of India, as if it's a done deal, but this point but he story is shortly after the end of war in Pacific, which is still 1945; the author wrote this, however, presumably after India was independent, so there is confusion. In 1945 it wasn't yet a done deal, albeit Churchill had planned, the day Russian tanks rolled into Berlin, to break up India, so he along with allies could have permanent use of military bases in the northwest part of India broken off from heartland in name of communal strife; this isn't different from what was done by the same british to Ireland, separating a piece to keep control. For that matter the so called potato famine of Ireland, when millions starved, including babies, was repeated by Churchill in stealing harvest while millions starved to death, and declaring openly that india starving to death was preferable for him.

............................................................................

"Meanwhile American boys in forces wanted to go home, and they were holding meetings with that slogan.

"“We wanna go home,” and this movement was spreading to India, Korea, Japan, Italy, and France.""

Here it's unclear if Upton Sinclair is forgetting India was invaded and occupied by Britain without any justification as in case of occupation of Germany by American forces, or is he simply being so racist he doesn't realise it, as in another instance before in this volume where he refers to natives of his land as Indians, which is fraudulent and incorrect in every way except by holding racism as superseding humanity.

............................................................................

On way back from giving testimony at Nürnberg, having visited Frances who was thrilled, Lanny saw Alfy in town and went with him to BBC, who interviewed him; Scrubbie arrived, and had the effect of having BBC broadcast several Peace program interviews.

Lanny called Laurel to tell her, and then called Irma to to have Frances visit him in town; Irma couldn't say no, and Scrubbie was there, someone whose family was known to hers, whose home was close to hers, and who himself was a war hero telling enthusiastically about his war exploits. The two couldn't take eyes off one another, and later Lanny gave him his blessings if he could win her. Scrubbie was most grateful, and would call on her; he wanted to join Peace program and wanted to come over, so he'd meet Frances in Edgemere and visit in Newcastle. Irma might not get a title for Frances, but younger sons counted.

On the way to Moscow, going to meet Stalin as emissary of Truman, Lanny stopped in London.

In England he had one day, so he called Irma asking her to send Frances to him in London, and called Scrubbie. The young couple had been meeting, and were thrilled with going to U.S..

Here one recalls how the author had branded Irma bordering anti-Semite, for being worried bout her daughter being brought up in intimate setting with the then little Johannes, as the son of Freddi Robin had been named in the first few volumes. The author changed his name to Freddi in later volumes 9 and 10, and has Lanny neatly circumvent such an outcome of having Frances live with his household in Edgemere where Freddi is working for their enterprise, by having Scrubbie the son of Rick - an English aristocrat and a friend from boyhood until middle age - already in life of Frances.

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................................................................................................

The Return of Lanny Budd

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Volume 11.
................................................................................................

Here the author makes yet another mistake, that of saying that Rick and Nina had their eldest son, Scrubbie, in Edgemere with them; the eldest is actually Alfy, who was born close to when Lanny's half sister Marceline was, and she's ten to twelve years older to Frances, Lanny's own first child from his first wife Irma; Scrubbie might not be the youngest of Rick and Nina, but eldest he certainly is not. This is probably fourth or fifth such mistake by the author, after Lanny telling Ezra Hackabury that his ex wife was still with her second husband who was working at a desk job due to war, when in a previous volume of the series he'd mentioned that Edna was helping Margy at Marceline's debut and was herself in impecunious circumstances due to death of Fitz-Laing. In between the author has changed the name of son of the victim of nazis. Freddi Robin, from Johannes as he was mentioned in the third volume and further, to Freddi as he's reintroduced as a youngster joining the U.S. armed forces. There's probably at least one more such mistake.

..........................................................................

The author gives here a brief introduction of the Budd family of Lanny, the other side being that of his mother Beauty who brought him up in Juan Les-Pins on French Riviera. Funny how easily Lanny has given up not just that home, Bienvenu, but the larger one, France! That was his home not just of childhood and boyhood and years before marriage, but long after, until he married the third wife Laurel. True, he couldn't take Trudi, his second wife, there, but the whole marriage and her identity was a secret not known to even his parents, only to those few whom he told for a reason, until his testimony at Nürnberg. But Bienvenu remained his home until he bought an apartment in NYC where Laurel lived with Agnes Drury, her roommate of years who was a nurse, and the three shared it until the move to Edgemere.

And yet, he isn't divided in his heart at all, seemingly, much less in his loyalty, between the only home he knew growing up and the only home he could call home until he was in his forties, France, and the nation of his ancestors where his father's family and clan lives, U.S.! Even during the years when his now elderly mother was living with her third or second husband who's no spring chicken and taking care of her little grandson Marcel Detaze, named after his grandfather who was her second or first husband, when Lanny could have been more help to her especially during the years when Marceline wasn't known to be alive and war was over, Lanny merely visits Bienvenu when suitable but doesn't consider his childhood - and until as recent as six years ago - home as home at all!

One has to wonder, isn't the author confusing Lanny with himself?

Upton Sinclair lived in Europe in 1911, 1912, 1913, as he mentions in the addendum to the first volume, and moved back when he expected a war. But Upton Sinclair was born and brought up in U.S., not Europe! Lanny was not only born in Switzerland and brought up on Cote d'Azur, he chose to return after WWI which was only natural, choosing France and Beauty over security of Budds and New England. Surely he isn't so heartless as to have forgotten it!

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The author gives a nice but brief description of Andrew Carnegie, occasion being Lanny went to Carnegie Hall to hear Hansi Robin play; and perhaps there is another mistake here. He describes Hansi as German born Jew. But if one read the first volume, the family lived in Holland, were wealthy enough, and only moved to Berlin because the boys, especially Hansi, deserved the best music teacher and training possible, and that was arranged in Berlin. There certainly was never any mention of the family having lived in Germany before, else it would have not been moving but returning to what was once home.

Hansi is depressed after the concert, and he told the family about Bess being too busy. The author discussing communists and Soviets of that era brings very vividly to mind jihadists and other invaders bent on convert-or-kill sprees with an aim of conquering the world and destroying every civilisation, and that's as true today as it has been for well over a millennium and half.

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"The German Socialist told how the Russians had proceeded to strip Berlin of all its manufacturing machinery; they had also rigged the currency so as to draw most of the products of the country to themselves. Only now were they beginning to realise that by this means they had doomed the East Berliners to perpetual poverty and had sacrificed all chance of winning the West Berliners over to their side. If the East Berliners remained poorly dressed while the West Berliners became well dressed, how could you persuade either side that communism meant prosperity and capitalism meant misery?"

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At this point, for no reason one can attribute, there is another reference by author that points to his prejudice, and even more profound ignorance that the prejudice is based in, against India.

Lanny told Monck about his meeting Truman who wanted to know how to make Soviets jeep their promises, and Bernhardt Monck told him Truman might as well have sent him to India to find out how to make tigers stop eating meat.

And yet, neither is eating meat so strange as to be limited to tigers, in fact neither European nor most of the world outside India have so widespread a culture of vegetarian diet as India does, and nor are tigers limited to India, they exist from Siberia to India to southeast Asia, and if they are missing in China it's because few things are not eaten in China. So this is merely a very unlikely place to use so ridiculous a place to insert so racist and colonial imperialist a mindset - it's a supposedly socialist from Germany saying this, not a Brit disdainful about a colony - for no apparent reason.

Or is it because Upton Sinclair was so much an Anglophile, so admiring of British empire and so enamoured of British aristocracy that he would find every possible occasion to insert an insult to India in a book, a series of eleven volumes, because India was struggling for freedom from the imperialist colonial rule that had been looting India, with deaths of millions of Indians on their heads because Churchill deliberately forced them to starve literally to death, first by stealing the harvest, and to clinch it by refusing to allow ships filled with grain sent by FDR for saving Indians dying of starvation enforced by Churchill, to proceed further West after Australia, and declare openly that he saw no reason why Indians should be allowed to survive? Upton Sinclair does criticise Churchill, but not for this, only for having an English rather than American accent!

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"‘You think that the Politburo wants war?’ Lanny asked.

"‘No, they don’t want war. All they want is the mastery of the world. They have set their programme forth in a whole library of books’."

Over and over, what Lanny or others say about totalitarian ideologies of that time, whether communists or nazis, find an echo in jihadists of today and their invading marauding looting ancestors of a millennium and half, set on a conquer, convert or kill, and loot program across the globe.

Lanny said that he said the same to Truman, but he was too overburdened to read so much.

"‘What you should do is to take him one book and mark the passages for him. Get him Stalin’s Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. That book is the bible for every Russian diplomat and representative abroad. In it Stalin deals with every country of any importance, and he analyses the conditions in that country; he has all the facts and is clear and precise about what he is going to do and how he is going to do it—to undermine the government of that country and place his own kind of people in control. He hasn’t the faintest doubt of his ability to do it. It may take a long time, but he has the patience of a cat watching at a rat hole. He bides his time, and when the time comes he pounces. He makes promises, but they don’t mean a thing—except that the time for the pounce hasn’t yet come. When friendship is to his advantage he can be as charming and warm as a house cat; and he can order the murder of a million human beings without the faintest qualm’.

"‘I suppose’, Lanny ventured, ‘he is really more dangerous to the world than Hitler’.

"‘Hitler was a blusterer and a fool; he was impatient and hysterical. Stalin is quiet and watchful and wise. Also, his camouflage is much better than Hitler’s. Hitler was a nationalist and hater of all other peoples—even of the British and the Americans whom he secretly envied. Stalin is an internationalist and a friend of the oppressed workers, all the oppressed races of the world. He loves them all, his heart bleeds for them, and he sets his poets to writing odes to them and his composers to singing songs for them. He tells the oppressed peasants to kill the landlords and take the land; and when they have done this he invites them to form co-operatives under his guidance; he promises them the benefits of machinery and mutual aid and then sets one of his commissars over them and takes away a part of their product—and lo and behold, they are paying more taxes to Stalin than they ever paid to any landlord. He tells the workers to seize the factories, and when they have done so he sets a commissar over them, abolishes the unions, establishes the death penalty for strikes, and pays such wages that it takes a month’s labour to buy a pair of poorly made shoes. If any peasant or worker ventures to murmur a complaint he is shipped off to Siberia to labour in the gold mines on a diet of eight hundred calories a day. Such is Marx-Lenin-Stalin in action’."

Again,

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Lanny has brought a bunch of quotes from Stalin's writings for Truman to hear.

"Even before the war came to an end the Politburo held a meeting, with Stalin present, and threshed out the problems of their policy. There was some opposition, I am told, but Molotov and Malenkov carried the day, and the Bolshevik tempo, as they call it, was ordered to be resumed. What that means is the deadliest kind of war, open and secret, to be pushed on every front and by every device. It means that the whole force of the Communist machine in every country of the world is to be devoted to the spreading of hatred for America. .... You would be willing to die to teach men to love one another, and the Communists are willing to die in order to teach men to hate you. In the process they are willing to tell any lies, and they employ the most highly skilled psychologists to invent the lies which are most plausible and most harmful. It was Hitler who said that the bigger the lie the easier to get it believed; it was Mussolini who taught Hitler that maxim, and it was from the Bolsheviks that Mussolini learned it’."

So very reminiscent of the jihadists, ISIS, and others out to invade, loot, convert or kill, from few centuries ago till date.

After Xmas 1946,

"There came a letter from Bernhardt Monck, telling how the Reds were still looting their sector of Berlin, regardless of the fact that they had to feed the people; they were looting the peasants of the surrounding country and using the food for their army in Berlin."

Copy of Churchill starving India, except Churchill managed to kill millions of this starvation due to loot, and openly declared that this was of no consequence.

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One day there was a personal letter for Lanny, with letters cut from printed material and glued on paper, saying "BESS IS COURIER FOR RUSS SPY". Normally they'd ignore it, but there were too many signs - her being busy with party work and disappearing. There was only one curious mistake, the N in the address had the diagonal stroke go left bottom to right top. Lanny discussed The lettet with Laurel and said he had to report Bess. Laurel said he should talk it over with Robbie, and Lanny consented.

This is another example of the author's abrahmic misogyny so deeply rooted he doesn't see it. When it's Bess, he promptly wants to report her to FBI, and expects Hoover would be fair. But when he saw Kurt spying in Paris, he saved his life at great cost to his own family, mostly to Marceline, while Kurt took charge of the household discipline after Beauty returned from Spain with him, so Marceline was an orphan with no one in her quarter. And yet Germany had been not only implacable enemy of France through history but Kurt himself had been indulging in activities damaging France while they were inclusive of false propaganda and disruption of French law and order; and he not only repeated it, but was indulging in it, against U.S., last time Lanny met him. Yet Lanny pleaded with him to think of him kindly, but with Bess he must report her and with Marceline he pretends he saved her life, rather than the fact that's completely opposite. Marceline risked her life to save Lanny's, and the author is an ungrateful wretch.

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Professor Alston came for the program, and they talked to him apart from the broadcast; he was very worried about Europe.

"He said that Europe had not been in such peril since the days of Tamerlane in the fourteenth century; or perhaps not since the fifth century when the Huns had got to France."

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Here in the following paragraph is the author's camouflaged racism in a nutshell.

"In August the British set India free, and that was one of history’s great acts of statesmanship. It was the action of the British Labour party and the Socialist intellectuals who had been for two generations its leaders and guides. If the Soviet Union had been a real Socialist state, with a real belief in democracy and freedom, this action would have met with thunderous applause; but instead there was thunderous silence. The Reds hated Ernie Bevin even more than they hated Churchill; for Churchill was a foe they felt they could beat in the end, but Bevin was the man they really feared, the man who could win the workers of the world away from Stalinism."

So he hasn't mentioned millions in India starved to death by Churchill, or more millions that died due to partition of India planned by Churchill for keeping control of military bases for use of UK and U.S. against Russia in The Great Game of control of the region, and he only mentions independence of India as if on par with freeing a pet from a collar and set free so the master no longer need spend time, money or attention; truth being it was nothing of the kind he states, statesmanship or freeing, but as Clement Attlee told at a public function when asked in India, Brits were scared of the effects of Bose; Gandhi they didn't pay attention to, and would have kept India much longer, but for Bose.

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Legal wrangles of the case proceeded, and judge denied new trials, granted bail for fifty thousand dollars each saying they'd been disappearing, and sentenced others to eight and Bess to ten years. Hansi filed for divorce, and Bess agreed to everything he asked for including custody.

"So once more the conscientious Lanny had to revise his judgments and realise that he hadn’t been accurate when he identified a Communist with a criminal. Bessie Remsen Budd was in truth what he had been calling her since long ago, a granddaughter of the Puritans. She was acting from what to her appeared to be the highest motives; she had convinced herself that the way to end poverty and war forever was for all the peoples of the earth to submit themselves to the dictatorship of the Politburo in the Kremlin. In exactly the same way Torquemada, chief of the Spanish Inquisition, had convinced himself that the way to save millions of souls from burning in the eternal fires of hell was to seize all teachers of heresy and torture them until they confessed and named their fellows, and then to hand all the lot over to the ‘secular arm’, to be burned at the stake with a fire that was soon over."

Funny, Lanny is unable to see his injustice against treatment of Marceline by him and his mother, the deprivation she suffered as a child; he's unable to admire the resilience she developed early as a necessity, or see that he didn't provide her a good role model by marrying Irma either, and no one paid attention to her development of mind, including him, unlike Bess who grew up in New England and went to school.

He is conscientious about not taking money even from U.S. government, let alone Hearst or Göring or Hitler, but he has no thought about taking the one third of proceeds from sales of works of Marcel Detaze, father of Marceline whom he knew and she didn't, even though his own father is rich and sends both him and his mother money apart from the estate and gifts. He fails to appreciate her sensitivity and independence in not bowing to an arranged match with a future earl but want to be pursued for herself, and her spirit in taking charge of her life when she discovers her husband cheating.

He accuses her of being selfish, but doesn't see that she went and stayed to nurse Oskar who was wounded, instead of escaping to U.S. from France when she could. When she did ask him for help, he refused, when he could have easily brought her out of Germany to see their mother and let her stay on.

He constantly belittles or berates Marceline, but isn't appreciative of her saving his life and risking her own. On the contrary he's given credit by the author for helping her recovery from the Nazi tortures she survived, no help from him until she was discovered alive.

Is his preference for Bess and disdain for Marceline all part of a whole slate, his heart and Beauty, his mother, France and his taste for upper class women of fashion, Dalcroze and dance and Marceline, all on one side, as against U.S. and New England, his father and the Budd clan, great uncle Budd's library and Budd-Erling plant on the other? He takes one whole side for granted, and respects the other.

He weeps for Bess who has always had everything, never suffered deprivation much less horrors such as Marceline did, but hasn't any place in his heart for Marceline, so much so he still hasn't admitted gratitude to Marceline despite her risking her life to save his, even though he didn't save her life when he could so easily have. No repentence, no thought about the only person he'sobliged to without any acknowledgements, not a thought about taking one thirds of money from her father's works.

Ingrate or snob?

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At the end of the last volume, Lanny is rescued from a Russian prison in East Berlin where he was brought after being knocked down and kidnapped, and tortured non stop for a week. He takes a few days to recover, flies via England to U.S., and after reporting in Washington and broadcasting his story, goes to rescue Bess from similar fate.

If he's given a thought to meeting his mother, or even calling her, it's not mentioned. Nor is there the slightest recognition by either the author or the protagonist of Marceline having undergone far worse, only due to having saved Lanny's life by warning him. It's as if his current marriage has severed his ties with his childhood home, France, mother and the younger of the two sisters. And they did nothing to deserve any of it.

While he was married to Irma, travelling between the two homes was kept up despite the natural inclination of Irma and her mother to keep him at the long island estate. Lanny preferred Bienvenu and Irma was happy enough to live there part of the year because he wanted to.

When he married Trudy, she and the marriage were secrets, but he did go home to Bienvenu. When he married Laurel he still was an agent and travelled in France and Switzerland, later Germany and Africa, and until U.S. was at war, did go to Bienvenu. But he seems to have cut off with Bienvenu after it was recovered post war, even before Marceline was found alive.

What is even stranger is that he could very well have conducted his Peace program far more efficiently from Bienvenu or, since Emily Chattersworth willed him her estate at Sept Chenes, from there, French franc being far cheaper and the bequest being in dollars. But no, he chose New Jersey over his childhood home, and not because he was still an agent or needed to be in proximity of washington.

It's almost as if, having lived a couple of years in Newcastle and met the Budd clan, he is ashamed of his mother however suppressed the embarrassment, and now having risen through Professor Alston to working for FDR and meeting Einstein and Hearst and more, and moreover having married Laurel, he'd rather have Newcastle for extended family than his mother and sister. He does repeatedly mention Laurel being a proper lady, although so are most in the circle of his mother and he only associated very rarely with anyone not affluent as far as women go; in fact, while married to Trudy he does realise his love for her is worship, and if anything she's far more proper than Laurel, only not brought up wealthy and fashionable, and he prefers those!

Or is it political, and having had Europe for a picturesque background of his growing years while two world wars happened, he now sees his ancestral land as wealthy victor and prefers it? Or is this an easy solution to the question of what a true leftist should do, shouldn't he work for the downtrodden of Europe and other continents, going around teaching them school and hygiene rather than debating on radio? From safe wealthy environment of New Jersey, with holidays in Connecticut?

One somehow cannot help suspecting that somewhere along the line the young Lanny who, budding with heart and mind, had chosen Europe and his mother, had since gone conservative slowly, perhaps not so much politically as socially, and craves a social respectability that would be threatened by association with his mother and her remaining family, and so he seeks to sandwich himself with Laurel and the Budds, the Pomeroy-Nielson family more than the Robins, who are now separated as completely as possible from the Budds - Bess has returned to bosom of her parents, her sons are with their father off in CA and might or might not see her, so Budd and Robin families connection is again distant. If Lanny never brings his wife and children to visit Beauty, much less live at Bienvenu, he need never acknowledge the guilt of his choices that changed somewhere during the last war.

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But being half French and half American child of two people each of whom rebelled against their family and found their own way to one another, she is independent and is attempting to find her wings, asking but one thing from the world, to be loved for herself.

If Lanny doesn't understand all this, he is only a brother who hardly ever knew her. But the author commenting thus is truly callous.
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Reviews - Books I Read - DRJG

Saturday, August 24, 2019

World's End series, by Upton Sinclair.

The Lanny Budd Novels:

World's End,

Between Two Worlds,

Dragon's Teeth

Wide Is the Gate

Presidential Agent

Dragon Harvest

A World to Win

Presidential Mission

One Clear Call

O Shepherd, Speak!

The Return of Lanny Budd

Light Explodes Across Heavens

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Serene, Reflecting

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