Dickens, Whish-Wilson and loud lawyers

Does anyone love the sound of his or her own voice as much as a lawyer does? (I add her advisedly. One of the loudest, most obtrusive lawyers I've ever run into, whose clownish antics destroyed my quiet efforts to enjoy a baseball game on television, was a woman, and a public defender, no less, just as high on adrenaline, self-importance, and lack of sleep as her more mercenary male colleagues.) From my experience in bars, cafés, and other places of public relaxation, I'd say actors, salesmen, and political operatives give them a run for their money, but lawyers win on sheer weight of numbers; there are so many of them.

Two of the books I'm reading now note this vocal brand of lawyerly self-love. Charles Dickens' Bleak House tells us that the deliciously named Chancery lawyer Conversation Kenge

"appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own voice. I couldn't wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and gave great importance to every word he uttered." 

And this, from Line of Sight, by David Whish-Wilson, about a lawyer's son who takes after Pop:

"The same class as Cooper [a lawyer] too, no doubt, western suburbs all the way. A consideration in the speaking; a pleasure in hearing the sound of your own voice. ... Cooper himself came from an old settler family, whose generations had increased their wealth and power despite bouts of bankruptcy and madness and the occasional imprisonment for fraud."

Bleak House is all about a legal case of infernal length and is thus full of gibes at lawyers and their profession:

"...that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar."

and

"This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means."

and

"I expect a judgment. Shortly. On the Day of Judgment."

I can pay Charles Dickens no higher compliment than to say that he gives lawyer jokes a good name. But, as advertisers like to say, it's all about you. What are your favorite fictional depictions of loud or self-important lawyers? How about your (least) favorite real-life loud or self-important lawyers?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Canada, the civilized

I made a caustic post in 2008 about Philadelphia fans' destructive rampage after the Phillies won the World Series. It's only fair that I report fans in my native Montreal are no better, and they have no championship to show for it — yet.

(Back in 2008, an acquaintance tut-tutted and brushed aside my complaints about those Philly fans, who overturned cars and looted a luggage store. "Just having a little fuuuuuun," he insisted in his infuriatingly condescending nasal drone. This was the same pirla who insisted that English is not a Germanic language.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Un pirla* al club Pen & Pencil

I was having a glass of wine at Philadelphia's press club the other night when I learned, loudly and repeatedly, from one of my fellow visitors that English is not a Germanic language. Where are the rowdy airline crews when you need them?

===============

* Pirla.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Andrea Camilleri's humor

I stopped by Philadelphia's press club after a bad night of work at my newspaper this week (though "bad night of work at my newspaper" is a pleonasm – unless one works there during the day). An acquaintance of mine from Italy's Lazio region sat at the bar chatting with two friends who the bartender told me were from Rome.

I understand enough Italian to pick out a word here and there and even to follow the thread of a conversation if I concentrate hard enough, which I could not do because a vacuous blowhard with an extremely loud voice sat across the bar from the Romans commiserating with his female friend about cruise ships and Jamaica.

Not only did he hear what she was saying, but he knew where she was coming from. If he had decided to not even go there, I would have slapped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, ordered him to shut up, and paid for their drinks and their taxi home.

What does this have to do with Andrea Camilleri and his protagonist, the unparalleled Inspector Salvo Montalbano? Montalbano also hates clichés and psychobabbling banality. Here's Montalbano on the phone with his lover, Livia, in The Smell of the Night (titled The Scent of the Night for delicate-nosed U.K. readers):

"`Come on Livia, don't get upset, try to be patient.'

"`You would try the patience of a saint!'

"Oh, God, not another cliche! Sow your wild oats, count your chickens before they hatch, or eat like a horse, when you're not putting the cart first!

"He realized he couldn't put up with this conversation much longer. Aside from the clichés and stock phrases, he couldn't stand the sallies of cheap psychoanalysis that Livia all too often liked to indulge in -- the kind of stuff you get in American movies ... "

This by itself would be good enough to make Montalbano an enjoyable version of the gruff but loveable old uncle. But what follows elevates him to something like a great comic creation. As he and Livia argue, parry, thrust, and make plans, Montalbano muses upon their strange contentiousness of their phone conversations:

"The best of it was that this animosity remained independent of the unshakable intensity of their relationship. But then why, when talking on the phone, did they quarrel, on average, at least once every four sentences? Maybe, thought the inspector, it was an effect of the distance between them becoming less and less tolerable with each passing day, since as we grow old ... we feel ever more keenly the need to have the person we love beside us."

That's lovely, I think, an aching and tender insight, and its resonance grows when one reflects that Camilleri was about eighty years old when the novel was published in 2005. But the scene gets better:

"As he was reasoning along these lines (and he liked this line of reasoning, as it was reassuring and banal, like the sayings one finds on the little slip of paper inside Baci Perugina chocolates) ..."

Bellissimo! What a perfect topper! Montalbano is irritable, Montalbano is wistful, and Montalbano slips with comfort into banalities just as bad as those he finds so maddening in Livia. What a perfect little parable of human relations! Has anyone written about love with such tenderness and humorous understanding?

(For more rhapsodizing about Andrea Camilleri and Salvo Montalbano, read Uriah Robinson, the King of Camilleri, on his Crime Scraps blog.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007Technorati tags:
Andrea Camilleri
Italian crime fiction