Jean Toomer (#poetry)

November Cotton Flower

Boll-weevil's coming, and the winter's cold,

Made cotton stalks look rusty, seasons old,

And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,

Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,

Failed in its function as the autumn rake;

Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take

All water from the streams; dead birds were found

In wells a hundred feet below the ground--

Such was the season when the flower bloomed.

Old folks were startled and it soon assumed

Significance. Superstition saw

Something it had never seen before:

Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,

Beauty so sudden for that time of year.

 

-Jean Toomer

 

This is from Jean Toomer's novel Cane of 1923; it's written in a mix of poetry and prose. This poem is in heroic couplets, but it is fourteen lines and can be viewed as a sonnet, though the turn comes after the ninth line. Brown eyes, as with Chuck Berry's 'Brown Eyed Handsome Man', stand in for brown skin, and loving without a trace of fear would probably be considered a rare enough moment for Blacks in rural Georgia (where the novel is set) at the time.

 

My mother was born on a farm in Texas, though my grandparents lost the farm during the depression and she barely remembered it. But she picked cotton during World War II. She was fairly tall and always said it was the most miserable job imaginable.

 

Poking around for pictures of cotton fields, I discovered that Marion Brown, the alto saxophonist, titled his album of 1979 'November Cotton Flower' and I have to assume he was thinking of this Jean Toomer poem. The title track from the album:

 

 

H. R. F. Keating's Inspector Ghote Draws a Line

     "'Threats to my life, Doctor? And how old am I? Eighty-two years of age. No, it is Allah himself who threatens my life now.'

     'Nevertheless, sir, the issuing of a threat to a person's life is a criminal offence.'"

It's the 1970s and Sir Asif Ibrahim is a former judge receiving death threats. He's long since retired, and is living in a falling down house a bullock's cart ride away from some place in India that's already nowhere. Sir Asif would just as soon live--or die--with no fuss. But his cousin is a member of parliament and the daughter who lives with him is worried. So Inspector Ghote is sent to see what he can do. He can expect no assistance from Sir Asif.

The threats reference the Madurai Conspiracy Case. Forty years earlier, just before the British finally quit India, a group planned to assassinate the governor of Madras but failed. Nevertheless, Sir Asif convicted and issued the death penalty for the conspirators. The death threats reference that ancient case.

 

There are servants in the house, but the main suspects are four: that daughter, still living at home; an itinerant Buddhist mystic who comes and goes; an American left-wing Catholic priest, foisted on the judge by a different cousin; and a local journalist who publishes the judge's musings, and is in love with the daughter. Remember that the house is remote. No one else could drop off those notes.

 

Is one of these four connected somehow to the Madurai Conspiracy Case? Or is that ancient case just a cover for some other motive? Or is it not even one of the four obvious suspects? And does Ghote save the judge in the end? Well, I'm not going to tell you any of that...😉 I will only note that the book does violate at least two of S. S. Van Dine's rules for writing mysteries...  

 

Despite those violations I found this pretty entertaining (though not amazing). Once upon a time I read Keating's list of the hundred best mysteries and like any serious reader of books approaching such a list I gobbled it down, while at the same time quibbling at the margins--The Green Ripper is the best Travis McGee book? How can you say that when it's actually the worst! etc., etc.--but this is the first of his mysteries I've read. If you've read him, how does it rank? 

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Silver Age (1979). Spooky House or Mansion.

And the winner is... (Classics Club Spin #43)

 ...number 2!

 

That's George Gissing's New Grub Street for me. I've read Charles Dickens: A Critical Study and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft by him before and liked them both, especially Henry Ryecroft. (Wonderful and underread.) This is supposed to be his masterpiece. 'Trials and tribulations in the lives of literary hacks' says the back of the book.

Have you read it? Did you spin and did you get something good?