Betraying that they’ve never had a friend

Everyone once in a while the benighted YouTube algorithm serves up a winner. Here’s an excellent short video essay that was recommended to me this afternoon. I watched it based on the thumbnail alone. The subject: the deep friendships of great literary characters being interpreted as sexual relationships, a terminal cultural cancer that never fails to annoy me.

The host, of the channel Geeky Stoics, a channel I’ve never previously come across, invokes several examples of this internet-fueled trend* but mostly focuses on two: Frog and Toad,** heroes of Arnold Lobel’s warm, gentle, very funny children’s stories, and Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee of Lord of the Rings. These are apposite choices, since both are great favorites in the Poss household and both have been subjected to this perverted eisegesis for some time now.

From there he advances to latter-day male loneliness and the generally sorry state of friendship in the modern West, topics I care deeply about and that he treats with extraordinary concision and care. It’s a solidly presented, thought-provoking little video, and I strongly recommend it.

But what made this video especially good was the use of CS Lewis’s book The Four Loves to frame the discussion. Just last week on Substack I made the case for The Four Loves as an underrated Lewis book, a late work brimming with his mature thought on the different aspects of love—its forms, objects, and enactments as affection, friendship, eros, and the theological virtue of charity. The video essay begins with a line from the chapter on friendship that I’ve thought about many, many, many times, especially when some smug terminally online type starts not so much insinuating as narrating the imaginary deviance of characters like Frodo and Sam:

“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.”

— CS Lewis

As I said, I have plenty of occasions to remember this line, but never as a gotcha—what it reveals is too sad for that.

The one point where I think the video misses a potentially fruitful nuance relates to class: while Frog and Toad are quite obviously peers, similarly situated in life, Frodo and Sam are a master and servant—Tolkien explicitly compared them to a British officer of the First World War and his batman. This does not preclude deep genuine friendship, something moderns struggle to understand and that the Peter Jackson movies mostly obscure. Just as we moderns have lost much with our condemnation of exclusivity or discrimination in relationships, so our suspicion of rank, hierarchy, or any other form of “inequality” has closed off whole dimensions of human experience to us.

But that’s a relatively minor point. There’s much more to the video, including more of Lewis’s discussion of the distinctions between friendship—a side-by-sideness oriented toward a common interest or mission—and other forms of love. Check out both Geeky Stoics’ video and The Four Loves, which is even available in a shorter, earlier version narrated by Lewis himself.

* Related: See this recent long video by Hilary Layne on the widespread deleterious effects of fanfic, not the least of which is the “shipping” of often inappropriate combinations of characters. Layne has a companion piece on Substack here.

** Often described by people on social media with the strangely specific phrase “canonically gay.” There is no mention of Frog and Toad being anything other than friends in the stories, the first collection of which is called Frog and Toad are Friends, making me wonder what these illiterates think the adverb canonically means.

Epistolary authority, uncertainty, and mystery

When I wrote about the epistolary form and other framing devices in gothic storytelling earlier this week I forgot to mention The Screwtape Letters. I want to correct that. But first, check out this short Substack piece, which looks specifically at the opening “Author’s Preface” of Dracula.

In the essay I quoted Monday the author argued that framing devices like letters and diaries create a metanarrative “uncertainty” that tinges the reader’s perception of the story, building suspense and horror. The form itself generates the gothic’s sense of the uncanny. I agreed, and added that the epistolary or found document form also contributes the sense of discovery or unveiling that digging through old documents produces, heightening the genre’s feeling of mystery.

The above piece from The Middling Place about Stoker’s preface looks at another aspect of the form, namely the authority and veracity established by presenting a story’s “sources” in the manner of non-fiction:

This is not a fictional story written by an author. In fact, the author has nothing to do with the story. . . . Because they were found, they must be fact and not fiction. Obviously, we know that these are indeed works of fiction, yet it is a technique used by the author to make it seem less so.

In other words, they “substantiate authenticity.” The verb “seem” near the end is especially important, as while all fiction is an illusion of sorts—or a dream, as I prefer to think of it—the gothic relies upon and exploits the seemingness of the illusion more than usual.

So, what framing devices like letters or diary entries do for a gothic tale, in brief:

• Create uncertainty

• Engender a sense of discovery

• Establish the illusion of authenticity or reality

The Middling Place author does a good job examining how this works through a close reading of Stoker’s preface to Dracula. Consider two other cases.

First, the Coen brothers’ Fargo opens with this notorious title card:

THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987.

At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed.

Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

I say “notorious” because some people think this crossed a line, but considered in relation to Dracula and the other examples provided in those two Substack essays, the Coens don’t seem to be doing much different here. Leaving that aside, those who view this opening text as a violation or lie confirm the ability of this kind of preface to sell the strange and unbelievable as authentic—which was the whole point, according to the Coens.

But Fargo poses as a low-key true crime story. The gothic asks its readers to accept much more, which brings me back to The Screwtape Letters.

Lewis’s opening note to this epistolary novel is often forgotten—it’s not even included in the sample on Amazon—but look at these sentences and, in light of the above, think about what they accomplish for Screwtape:

I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.

Like Dracula, The Castle of Otranto, or what have you, this one sentence both 1) tells the reader that what he is about to read is real and 2) suggests immediately the mystery of its origins and contents. Not only can the editor not explain what we’re about to read, he won’t. Lewis reinforces these effects throughout the note while maintaining what seems, on a literal reading, the dry, dispassionate language of the textual critic. Consider this line from the final paragraph:

In conclusion, I ought to add that no effort has been made to clear up the chronology of the letters.

The authenticity or reality of the story—one can picture the scholar, frustrated, working into the night to compile and arrange Screwtape’s correspondence—as well as the mystery are reiterated one last time, and lines in the middle like “The reader is advised to remember that the devil is a liar” develop the aforementioned uncertainty. The whole effect is powerfully tantalizing, and though I’ve never heard anyone describe Screwtape as gothic, Lewis uses these effects masterfully.

By a nice coincidence, I just started Dracula last night. It’s engrossing. The gestures toward authenticity, uncertainty, and mystery embedded in Stoker’s preface are not the whole reason for this—plenty of bad books open with similar notes (pick up any Dan Brown novel)—but they have a subtle power worth learning from.

The light on the leaves and so on

An aside about language, especially speech, giving shape to intelligence in a podcast I listened to over the weekend brought to mind the following exchange from “Unreal Estates,” the transcript of a discussion about science fiction between CS Lewis, Kingsley Amis (whose Lucky Jim I finally read back in the spring), and Brian Aldiss. Having brought up Lord of the Flies, which does not at first appear to be sci-fi but takes place in a World War III scenario, Lewis, Amis, and Aldiss continue:

AMIS: ‘Science-fiction’ is such a hopelessly vague label.

LEWIS: And of course a great deal of it isn’t science-fiction. Really it’s only a negative criterion: anything which is not naturalistic, which is not about what we call the real world.

ALDISS: I think we oughtn’t to try to define it, because it’s a self-defining thing in a way. We know where we are. You’re right though, about Lord of the Flies. The atmosphere is a science-fiction atmosphere.

LEWIS: It was a very terrestrial island; the best island, almost, in fiction. Its actual sensuous effect on you is terrific.

ALDISS: Indeed. But it’s a laboratory case——

AMIS: —isolating certain human characteristics, to see how they would work out——

LEWIS: The trouble is that Golding writes so well. In one of his other novels, The Inheritors, the detail of every sensuous impression, the light on the leaves and so on, was so good that you couldn’t find out what was happening. I’d say it was almost too well done. All these little details you only notice in real life when you’ve got a high temperature. You couldn’t see the wood for the leaves.

I seldom dare to disagree with Lewis’s critical judgment, but I think what he describes as a failure in The Inheritors is actually part of the point. Golding’s Neanderthal characters have alien minds, more passively attuned to nature: observing, scavenging, improvising. The Homo sapiens who wipe them out are active. Their approach is exploitive: they see, control, and make use of.

The third-person narration reflects this. Lok, the viewpoint character for much of the novel, struggles even to see the potential resources that the Homo sapiens use, and then cannot understand how they are using them against him. Cf every instance in which the humans shoot arrows at him, an event he never understands but learns to fear. The “signal” in his signal-noise ratio is easily lost because that is how he perceives the world. His senses are less discriminatory. He is part of nature in a way modern man—who can compartmentalize, think abstractly, and then use—is not.

It’s interesting that Lewis used the example of “the light on the leaves,” given prevailing theories about the human eye’s capacity for differentiating shades of green and the fact that Lok spends the most horrific passages of The Inheritors hiding in a tree, seeing but not understanding. The book’s feverish tone is part of the nightmare.

“Unreal Estates” is collected in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature—an old favorite, and well worth your time. I reviewed The Inheritors here two years ago. It’s a great novel and one I’d very much like to revisit soon. I have to wonder whether Lewis ever gave it a second reading as he was, by his own admission in “Unreal Estates,” much more perceptive of an author’s intentions upon multiple readings.

Lewis and Poe (sort of) on originality

In his magisterial new biography Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, Richard Kopley quotes several early reviews for Poe’s Poems, published in New York following his expulsion from West Point and partially financed by his fellow cadets (who were famously annoyed that the finished book didn’t include the satirical verses he had composed about their instructors). There were a few negative reviews, but some mixed to favorable ones noting Poe’s potential. Here’s the New-York Mirror with a backhanded compliment:

“Every thing in the language betokens poetic inspiration, but it rather resembles the leaves of the Sybil when scattered by the wind.”

The “scattered” quality of an author’s early work is recognizable and relatable.

A short notice in the Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, which Kopley credits to Poe benefactor John Neal (but the Poe Society of Baltimore maintains is only “possibly” Neal), applauds Poe’s “fine genius,” mixes this praise with criticism of “[s]heer nonsense” scattered throughout (“Pure poetry in one page—pure absurdity in another”), and ends with both praise and warning:

“He has a fine genius, we repeat it, and may be distinguished, if he will not mistake oddity for excellence, or want of similitude to all others, for superiority over them.”

By coincidence, I had recently come across this observation from CS Lewis in Mere Christianity:

“Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

I was going to say that a striving that turns to strain is a common affliction of young writers, but Lord knows it’s a trap you can fall into no matter how long you’ve been writing. Stop trying so hard! Do your thing and let originality emerge organically, almost spontaneously. Oddity is not distinction, and uniqueness is not quality. Always a good reminder for myself.

Screwtape reviews a book

It isn’t often that you can say unequivocally that an artistic judgment is wrong. De gustibus, etc. And yet here are coauthors Philip and Carol Zaleski in their quadruple-biography The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings discussing CS Lewis’s 1942 novel The Screwtape Letters. After half a paragraph of tepid praise, they write:

For all the clever satire, however, the book does, as Lewis feared, begun to smother the reader by the end. It is a one-joke affair, however inventive the variations. The devils’ names—Screwtape, Slumtrimpet, Slubgob, Scabtree, Triptweeze, Toadpipe—and their use of inverted epithets—“Our Father Below” for Satan, “The Enemy” for God—delight and then grow tiresome; so, too, do Lewis’s repeated slaps at favorite targets, including psychoanalysis, proponents of the “Life Force,” and overly spiritualized conceptions of prayer (Coleridge’s “sense of supplication” takes a direct hit). It all comes off as terribly clever but a bit sophomoric. The Screwtape Letters is a good, short book; if it were half as long and half as clever, it might have been twice as good.

N.b. most editions of The Screwtape Letters come in at or below 200 pages even with reader-friendly large type.

This is so wrong it is hard to know where to begin. Should one not take swipes at psychoanalysis, one of the stupidest and most damaging theories to run riot in the last century and a half? And sophomoric? “The Miller’s Tale” and Candide are sophomoric. Screwtape is funny but treats its subject seriously, since its subject is ultimately damnation and salvation, a fact underscored by the time and place in which it was written. One infers from Screwtape’s comments that the story takes place, in human terms, during the Blitz, and it is made clear in the final letter that our human protagonist, the object of the devils’ torments, is killed by German bombs—a real fear for the book’s original readers, and one Lewis treats reverently. And artistically, Screwtape is a model of concision. Lewis gets exactly the right amount out of the book’s conceit and epistolary format and ends it with a chilling bang.

And this is not even to address the insight—into everything from prideful self-delusion to the danger of snark to simple carnal lust—that Lewis’s topsy-turvy perspective offers. Its carefully observed portrait of human nature is rightly Screwtape’s greatest appeal and gives it its most lasting power. The attentive reader will see himself more clearly having read The Screwtape Letters, and probably won’t like the view.

I could go on. One suspects that for these authors, Ivy League-connected editors of anthologies of “spiritual writing” for many years, Lewis’s bracing devil’s-eye view of temptation, one in which he dramatizes firm orthodox opinions and depicts devils as real and predatory and sin as real and damning, is rather strong drink. Their suggestion that an unfunny pamphlet-length version of Screwtape would be better only reinforces that impression.

This critique smacks of distaste rather than any legitimate line of literary or artistic criticism. And one can feel the authors’ disapproval when they continue by noting that

The public . . . roared its approval. The book sold very well upon release and remains one of Lewis’s most popular works. The Manchester Guardian (February 24, 1942), eager to canonize it, declared that it “should become a classic,” while The Times Literary Supplement (February 28, 1942) more temperately warned that “time alone can show whether it is or is not an enduring piece of satirical writing.” Endured it has; whether that makes it a classic, the next century or two will judge.

The Zaleskis’ book is a finely researched and written biography—though despite invoking “the Inklings” it focuses, predictably, only on Lewis, Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. (Where is our Hugo Dyson or Roger Lancelyn Green biography? Warnie Lewis has only recently gotten one.) But the Zaleskis’ judgments on specific works are lacking. That passage on Screwtape has bugged me since I first read it nine years ago, and their treatment of Tolkien betrays similarly poor understanding and judgment.

This morning, realizing that I hadn’t cracked open The Fellowship in almost as many years, I put it in a box to trade in at the local used book store. But The Screwtape Letters is still on my shelf.

GKC and me

Last week Paul Kingsnorth, a writer I’ve enjoyed and admired since reading his experimental historical novel The Wake almost a decade ago, posted an appreciation of Chesterton and The Everlasting Man on his Substack. The Everlasting Man vies with Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday as my favorite Chesterton book so I was interested in Kingsnorth’s thoughts, but it’s his introduction, in which he describes how he came to read Chesterton, that I found most arresting.

Briefly, Kingsnorth discovered Chesterton almost by accident as a godless environmental activist, finding in his work—beginning with The Napoleon of Notting Hill—a salve for the “push-and-pull of apparently conflicting tendencies and views” inside himself. He learned to love Chesterton for his localism and rejection of both socialism and capitalism but had no time for Chesterton’s Christianity. Only after his own conversion did he find that it was Chesterton’s Christianity that undergirded and gave shape to the rest.

Though the specifics are different, the trajectory of Kingsnorth’s story resonates with me—as does the feeling that Chesterton was, at first, a private discovery: “I liked G. K. Chesterton before anyone else did.”

My first GKC—The paperback reprint of Orthodoxy that I read in college

My own story with Chesterton begins, like I suspect many people’s does, with CS Lewis. I started reading Lewis as a freshman in college and somehow became aware of Chesterton as an influence on him. When I stumbled onto an Image paperback of Orthodoxy in Barnes and Noble one day as a sophomore or junior, I snapped it up. At some point I bought matching paperbacks of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox. I still have all three.

I ended up reading Orthodoxy the same summer I took my deep dive into the Icelandic sagas, the reading of which resulted in No Snakes in Iceland a few years later—that was one formative summer—and read the other two as a burgeoning medievalist sometime before I graduated.

At Clemson I dug into The Everlasting Man, which I even managed to work into my master’s thesis, and from there I read everything else I could get my hands on—What’s Wrong with the World, Heretics, Eugenics and Other Evils, Magic, A Short History of England, Charles Dickens, The Ballad of the White Horse, the Autobiography, Father Brown, and criticism and essays galore. Chesterton’s work startled, amused, confused, and stretched me. I marveled at his range. I collected quotations by the bushel. I remember testing the longsuffering of a friend by texting—in the primordial texting days, with only a ten-digit keypad to type on—a whole paragraph of Eugenics and Other Evils during an argument.

Like Gabriel Syme in The Man Who Was Thursday, I had deeply felt but essentially shapeless and purposeless convictions in college, and the chaotic environment of opinion and argument into which I was thrust after a pretty tranquil upbringing as well as personal upheaval in grad school proved difficult for me. Lewis helped over those years, as did Peter Kreeft. Chesterton continued their work and challenged me even more than they did. He tested many of my assumptions, forcing me to rethink or abandon some and affirming and reinforcing others. He helped give my beliefs a consistent shape. It took years for me to recognize just how much he changed me.

Only much, much later did I become aware of the subculture—or, when I’m feeling less charitable, the industry—that has grown up around Chesterton. And by then that world’s Chesterton didn’t feel much like the Chesterton I had sat at the feet of for a decade. Kingsnorth nods unmistakably toward the kind of Chesterton cosplayer I’m thinking of. I’m not knocking those Chesterton fans—I’m glad he still has enough readers to keep his books in print—but I feel like we’re adoring different Chestertons. Theirs is all tweedy whimsy and cigar smoke and strained cheerfulness and the same endlessly repeated decontextualized quotations and really bad attempts to write like Chesterton. (Don’t attempt to write like him, ever.) Their Chesterton strikes me as a cartoon, a simplification, without the thread of darkness and lifelong self-examination running through the real man.

And yet, their Chesterton is present in the real Chesterton. He contains multitudes. Like the undercover detectives in The Man Who Was Thursday, we’re all pursuing the same gigantic, surprising, seemingly unknowable man, and there is healthy unity in that. As Kingsnorth puts it, “I don’t resent their incursion on my turf, though. Indeed, I welcome them into the fold of true believers.”

But that feeling of difference and my natural un-clubbableness has kept Chesterton a somewhat private love. Which has, with a completely appropriate sense of paradox, made it that much better when I discover that a new acquaintance is also a fan. To bring Lewis back in, he wrote that “[t]he typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too?’” That feeling is a joy when shared with anyone who stumbled into Chesterton the way I did, and cherishes his work the way I do.

I greatly enjoyed getting Kingsnorth’s perspective, especially his story. You can read all of his reflections on GKC as well as his takeaways from The Everlasting Man here. You can read his conversion story, which came as a great and welcome surprise to me when I stumbled across it, at First Things here.

Chestertober concludes later this week with The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. The subtitle is important. Stay tuned for that.

Martin and Lewis, envy and fascism

No, not that Martin and Lewis!

This morning a friend passed along an insightful Facebook post from science fiction author Devon Eriksen regarding George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. The series, Eriksen argues, is unfinishable because what Martin wants to do with it clashes with the form. His story naturally inclines in a direction he refuses to take, leading to the current yearslong stall-out.

And why does Martin refuse to follow his story where the form leads it? “Because he’s a socialist,” Eriksen writes. “And a boomer.”

This combination, part deliberate, part instinctual, gives Martin an inflexible cynicism toward heroes and heroism, a cynicism that has always clearly marked his work. And not just cynicism: people like Martin

want to convince themselves that anything which appears good is secretly evil, actually, and that anyone who makes them feel or look bad is obviously evil because reasons. So when they see a hero, they tend to call him a fascist. . . . [I]n George's world, heroism must be a sham or a weakness, because then George's own bad character is wisdom and enlightenment, instead of just lack of moral virtue.

I seem to remember some very old admonitions against calling good evil and evil good.

I’m less convinced by the generational dimension of this critique—generational labels being a kind of materialist zodiac as far as I’m concerned—but I think Eriksen is onto something with regard to Martin’s vocal leftwing politics. One line in particular struck a chord with me: “Socialism’s motivational core is envy, and its one underlying rule is ‘thou shalt not be better than me’.”

This brought to mind one of the concluding lines of CS Lewis’s essay “Democratic Education,” which was published in April 1944, at the height of World War II: “Envy, bleating ‘I’m as good as you’, is the hotbed of Fascism.”

Envy also leads to bad art, or to no art at all.

Lewis’s insight is especially ironic given what prompted Eriksen’s post in the first place. In a blog post from late August, Martin lamented “war everywhere and fascism on the rise,” leading to this slightly unfair but funny riposte:

Dissidents in the Soviet Union composed entire books in their heads until they could scribble them down on toilet paper and smuggle them out despite the threat of torture and imprisonment. But then again, writers like Solzhenitsyn were geniuses, and actually believed in something.

You can find Lewis’s “Democratic Education” online or in the slim paperback Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays, which is one of my favorite collections of his work. And for a writer with a stellar work ethic, who got his books done 350 words at a time come hell or high water (or fascism, presumably), here’s historian Thomas Kidd on the slow-burn success of Mick Herron, whose Secret Hours I’m about halfway through right now. As if to underscore the contrast between Herron and what we’re considering here, Kidd titled his post “Writing When You Have No Time to Write.”

More writing advice from Lewis

Years and years ago I collected lists of writing advice from three authors—CS Lewis, George Orwell, and Elmore Leonard—and shared them here, both for my own reference and for anyone else who might benefit from them. The Lewis advice came from two separate sources, a letter from the 1950s and his final interview in 1963, and came to eight interrelated points about clarity and precision.

This morning I came across the following, from a 1959 letter to an American schoolgirl collected in Letters of CS Lewis. I own this book, so I don’t know how I’ve missed this set of writing advice before, especially since it may be the best and most systematic that I’ve seen from Lewis. I reproduce it here in full:

It is very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here’s my attempt.

(1) Turn off the Radio.

(2) Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines.

(3) Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You shd. hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.

(4) Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about. . . .)

(5) Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn’t, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding. In a story it is terribly easy just to forget that you have not told the reader something that he wants to know—the whole picture is so clear in your own mind that you forget that it isn’t the same in his.

(6) When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier.

(7) Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.

(8) Be sure you know the meaning (or meanings) of every word you use.

Excellent, generally applicable advice. I’d say his attempt succeeds. A few of my own glosses:

#1 is a good caution against technological or media distraction. Most of the advice from the last few years will have something about staying off Twitter or putting your phone in another room while writing. Same principle.

#2 is evergreen but perhaps even more important now thanks to the exponential proliferation of trash reading material on the internet. AI-generated textual “content” will only aggravate the problem. Read old books of a wide variety.

Speaking of Elmore Leonard, he’s a good illustration of #3. His dialogue always sounds natural and his third-person narration is so effortlessly conversational that one is not conscious, after a while, of reading it. Great writers can achieve this effect in a variety of ways, not necessarily Leonard’s.

My worst experience with #5 is simply leaving a detail out. Attentive readers of Griswoldville might note the word musketoon in the glossary at the back, though the word appears nowhere in the novel. Well, it was supposed to. One character, a cavalryman who encounters the narrator just before the climactic battle, rests a musketoon on his thigh in my head, but that detail either never made it onto paper or was trimmed and never reinserted in a better place. Fortunately this omission affects nothing in the scene negatively, but it has always bothered me—and cautioned me to make sure I know which details I’ve actually written.

This is where revision and having other people read your manuscript proves most helpful. When writing The Snipers, I had a clear, concrete picture of all of its locations in my head, but I didn’t effectively describe all of them on paper. JP Burten (whose second novel has just come out, by the way) pointed out that the geography of one early scene was totally unclear. I worked hard to fix that, and it strengthened that scene.

#8 has been on my mind a lot recently thanks to YouTube. Listening to—rather than watching—a lot of aspiring YouTube documentarians (I have specifically American YouTubers in mind) has made me wonder whether they know how English works or what words mean. Malapropisms abound. Most often they misuse words as they strain to sound more serious and intellectual than necessary. Basic attention to meaning is sacrificed for a pretentious (or portentous) tone. Which becomes self-defeating, in the manner of Michael Scott trying to use big words.

The mercenary aspect of seeking views by producing videos on the same handful of sensational stories—how many Dyatlov Pass documentaries does a man need?—also plays a role. Per #4, someone who isn’t interested in material for its own sake will not take the care over it that Lewis’s advice requires.

Tim Powers on chronocentrism and conformism

For the last week I’ve been reading Tim Powers’s 1987 pirate fantasy On Stranger Tides, a book that everyone seems to agree Pirates of the Caribbean couldn’t have come into existence without—even before Disney optioned the title for the fourth one—and that got me watching Powers interviews on YouTube again.

In this interview with a channel called Through a Glass Darkly, host Sean Patrick Hazlett asks, as a wrap-up, “What advice would you give to new writers?” Powers responds with a list of “the old, traditional advice, which is solid-rock true,” and that I have to add is still good advice for people who’ve been writing for years or decades. Here’s the first part of his answer in bullet-list form:

• “Read very widely, read outside of your field, read outside of your time, don’t restrict yourself simply to stuff published since 2000 or 1980 or whatever. You don’t want to be chronocentric.

• “Have as wide a base as you can, chronologically and [in] subject matter. Read mysteries, read plays, read poetry, non-fiction, et cetera.

• “Write a lot. Set yourself a schedule and keep to it. Even if it’s only a thousand words a month, stick to it. Use guilt and fear as motivators. Tell yourself you’re worth nothing if you don’t get the writing done.

• “Get it in front of editors, send it out. Don’t get trapped in a revision whirlpool. A story doesn’t exist until an editor has looked at it. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat.”

He follows this up with an elaboration on his first point of advice:

“Don’t be a conformist. Don’t bend your writing to fit what you see as trends, even if they seem to be mandatory trends. They’re not.”

— Tim Powers

Okay, all that’s true. Then I would say—goes back to chronocentrism—don’t be a conformist. Don’t try to clock what’s selling now, because even if you could correctly gauge that and then write a story, it’s very likely not to be what’s selling now by the time your story comes out. Don’t be a conformist. Don’t bend your writing to fit what you see as trends, even if they seem to be mandatory trends. They’re not. If you say, “Oh this is what they’re buying now. This is what you have to do now in order to get published. There’s some boxes you have to check.” No. Be different. Be a nonconformist. Because if you go along that conformist road, even if it gets published your work is just going to be one more of that generic type, and what’s the value in that? So I would say, ignore trends.

Hear hear.

Powers has said versions of this before—here’s a blog post I wrote last October based on a similar interview conversation—but it’s stated more firmly and in more detail here.

I especially like Powers’s framing of the problem in terms of “chronocentrism.” As I recently told one of my classes, the most neglected form of diversity in our diversity-obsessed age is chronological diversity. Powers is steeped in CS Lewis and loves his non-fiction, so he’s probably got Lewis’s concept of “chronological snobbery” and passages like this from “On the Reading of Old Books” at the back of his mind:

Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. . . . None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

For a similar concept, see Alan Jacobs’s “temporal bandwith.”

Orwell’s failure

I’ve almost finished reading George Orwell biographer DJ Taylor’s new guide to Orwell’s work, Who is Big Brother? It’s been an excellent short read so far, capably tracking the changes in Orwell’s life, views, and writings and insightfully linking them to each other as well as judging the man’s character fairly but not uncritically.

Of special interest to me, considering the way Orwell’s dystopian novel is so often compared to Aldous Huxley’s, was a line Taylor quotes from Orwell’s review of Brave New World. Faulting Huxley for his overemphasis on shameless hedonism in the society of Brave New World, Orwell asserted that “A ruling class has got to have a strict morality, a quasi-religious belief in itself, a mystique.”

This comment made sense of an aspect of Nineteen Eighty-Four that I’ve puzzled over since first reading it in college twenty-something years ago. Reading CS Lewis’s 1954 review of that novel a few years later focused and sharpened that puzzlement. Here’s Lewis on what he regards as the biggest flaw in Orwell’s dystopia:

In the nightmare State of 1984 the rulers devote a great deal of time—which means that the author and readers also have to devote a great deal of time—to a curious kind of anti-sexual propaganda. Indeed the amours of the hero and heroine seem to be at least as much a gesture of protest against that propaganda as a natural outcome of affection or appetite.

Now it is, no doubt, possible that the masters of a totalitarian State might have a bee in their bonnets about sex as about anything else; and, if so, that bee, like all their bees, would sting. But we are shown nothing in the particular tyranny Orwell has depicted which would make this particular bee at all probable. Certain outlooks and attitudes which at times introduced this bee into the Nazi bonnet are not shown at work here.* Worse still, its buzzing presence in the book raises questions in all our minds which have really no very close connection with the main theme and are all the more distracting for being, in themselves, of interest.

Lewis, in a rare moment of Bulverism for him, chalks this up to Orwell’s coming of age in the “anti-puritanism” of the DH Lawrence era. Maybe. But Lewis is right that the sexual repression of Big Brother’s state does not mesh organically with everything else—the state-mandated calisthenics, the brainwashed children, the mass surveillance, and most especially the manipulation of language.** Why would Big Brother care who’s doing it to whom and in what way as long as neither party engages in wrongthink?***

He wouldn’t. What Orwell failed to see is that the “strict morality” required of a tyrannical ruling clique need not be sexually traditionalist. It could indeed be the opposite, granting total sexual license but fastidiously and ruthlessly policing the terminology surrounding it, or by concentrating on some other occasion of sin—the accused’s carbon footprint, perhaps, or how much privilege they have, or what kind of ancestral sins they owe amends for. “[T]hough Brave New World was a brilliant caricature of the present (the present of 1930),” Orwell wrote, “it probably casts no light on the future.” On the contrary, George.

But to return to the point of comparison between Huxley and Orwell, a tyranny is, in fact, often better served by an out-of-control libido, which more than just about any other appetite has the power to distract and enervate. This is what Huxley saw that Orwell could or would not.

I should have more to say about Who is Big Brother? in my spring reading list later this month. In the meantime, check out Theodore Dalrymple’s review at Law & Liberty, which is what convinced me to read the book.

* “At times” is the right way to address this. The Nazis were not much concerned about sexual morality beyond guarding racial boundaries. Look into the private lives of Ernst Röhm, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, and especially Joseph Goebbels sometime.

** The Soviet-style manipulation of language is, I think, the real point of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but a point easily lost among the book’s other terrifying visions. Cf. Fahrenheit 451, which Bradbury intended as a critique of TV rather than censorship.

*** Combining licentious sexual behavior with mass surveillance is also a useful source for kompromat, something the Soviets knew and that Orwell surely must have as well.