Keeping adventure within hailing distance

John Buchan on the quality that makes a story “romantic”—i.e. an adventure—in Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Works:

Scott transforms life, as is the duty of a great artist. He enlarges our view and makes the world at once more solemn and more sunlit, but it remains a recognisable world, with all the old familiar landmarks. He has that touch of the prosaic in him without which romance becomes only a fairy tale and tragedy a high heeled strutting.

That’s Buchan on Scott specifically, but Buchan continues with a more general observation on storytelling:

“For the kernel of romance is contrast—beauty and valour flowering in unlikely places, the heavenly rubbing shoulders with the earthly. All romance, all tragedy, must be within hailing distance of our humdrum lives.”

Better authors and critics than I have pointed out that, in the best and most vividly realized fantasy or adventure stories, the protagonist ventures away from an ordinary life into one of excitement and danger, in which everything is different. As Buchan lays out here, that link to the ordinary provides contrast and keeps the story grounded no matter how wild it may get.

One thinks immediately of the hobbits who, as Tom Shippey has noted in detail, Tolkien made just about as characteristically English as he could—Bilbo with his tobacco and brass buttons and greedy cousins, Frodo going off to war with his gardener-turned-batman, and the whole Shire with its tavern gossip and detailed genealogies. Or perhaps the Pevensies, swept from a stately—or, to them, boring—country house during an unfortunately ordinary total war through a seemingly ordinary piece of furniture into another world. One could multiply examples. Buchan’s own books offer plenty.

Neglecting contrast will result in stories that are all weirdness, all bleakness, or mere chaos. Think of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies’ descent into the maelstrom. The first film had an actual toehold in reality that made the intrusion of a ghost ship, voodoo, and cursed Aztec gold exhilarating, but by the third film the fantasy elements had completely overwhelmed anything “humdrum”—Will Turner’s blacksmithing, say—and this combined with its visual grotesquery robbed the series of what made it feel like an adventure in the first place.

Carefully providing contrast, on the other hand, will not only keep the reader grounded but suggest to him that adventure—the dangerous, the uncanny, even the “heavenly”—is nearer to him than he may have thought.

On Ian Fleming’s prose rhythm

Ian Fleming (1908-64)

I’ve made the case for the strength of Ian Fleming’s writing in the James Bond novels before, usually emphasizing his concrete word choice, his concise and vivid descriptions, and his strong, direct, active narration. These are all characteristic virtues of his style. But one I haven’t paid much direct attention to is the cadence or rhythm of his prose—in poetry, meter.

This week I started reading Casino Royale to my wife before bed every night. I’ve read Casino Royale several times before and even listened to the excellent audiobook narrated by Dan Stevens, but this is my first time reading it aloud myself. Going through it in this way, I noticed Fleming’s attention to rhythm immediately.

Here’s a paragraph from the first chapter. Bond, undercover at a French casino, has just received a telegram from M via a paid agent in Jamaica. He’s thinking about the process of relaying information to headquarters when this paragraph begins:

Some of this background to his cable passed through Bond’s mind. He was used to oblique control and rather liked it. He felt it feather-bedded him a little, allowed him to give or take an hour or two in his communications with M. He knew that this was probably a fallacy, that probably there was another member of the Service at Royale-les-Eaux who was reporting independently, but it did give the illusion that he wasn’t only 150 miles across the Channel from that deadly office building near Regent’s Park, being watched and judged by those few cold brains that made the whole show work. Just as Fawcett, the Cayman Islander in Kingston, knew that if he bought that Morris Minor outright instead of signing the hire-purchase agreement, someone in London would probably know and want to know where the money had come from.

Fleming shows a lot of his skills here, including variety of word choice and sentence length. Both of those tend to be treated as boring mechanical aspects of writing (“Vary your sentence length” is a pretty rote piece of writing advice that is seldom elaborated upon) but, as this paragraph should show, both skills are crucial to rhythm and, ultimately, mood.

The rhythm of the words and phrases controls the pace of the paragraph, which rises and falls. It begins with two short, simple sentences followed by a slightly longer, slightly more complicated one expanding on the meaning of the first two. Then comes the centerpiece of the paragraph. Read this again, aloud:

“He knew that this was probably a fallacy, that probably there was another member of the Service at Royale-les-Eaux who was reporting independently, but it did give the illusion that he wasn’t only 150 miles across the Channel from that deadly office building near Regent’s Park, being watched and judged by those few cold brains that made the whole show work.”

This is a marvelous sentence, 61 words long and almost musical. It starts slowly, building momentum as Bond considers his situation before plunging into a downhill run that begins at the conjunction but and slows again, ominously, in the final dependent clause.

Here’s where word choice comes in. Fleming didn’t write poetry but he understood how to use its effects. The long vowels in the last several words, almost every word of that last clause—“those few cold brains who made the whole show work”—as well as the heavy emphasis the most important words require metrically—“those few cold brains who made the whole show work”—have a braking effect, slowing the reader and bringing him back down to the reality of Bond’s situation. Right alongside Bond.

All of which points to the purpose of this kind of rhythm: setting tone and mood. Narratively speaking, little happens in this paragraph. Bond stands holding a telegram slip, thinking. A lesser writer would turn this into pure exposition. But the way Fleming narrates Bond’s thinking imparts to the reader what it feels like to be Bond in this situation.

The same is true of the entire chapter. In Casino Royale’s first chapter, Bond 1) realizes he is tired, 2) receives a message, 3) sends a message, and 4) goes to bed. But through Fleming’s writing, we get exhaustion, self-loathing, a degree of paranoia (who wants to be “watched and judged” by “cold brains,” even those on your own side?), and a great deal of unexplained danger.

Here’s how the first chapter ends. Read this aloud with these things in mind:

His last action was to slip his right hand under the pillow until it rested under the butt of the .38 Colt Police Positive with the sawn barrel. Then he slept, and with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold.

Great stuff, and subtly done.

Equipped to be a novelist

From John Buchan’s Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Works, as Buchan narrates Scott’s turn from the craft of poetry and long ballads to historical fiction in his early forties:

“Few men have been better equipped than Scott for the task of novelist. To begin with, he had been from his earliest youth a skilled storyteller. Again, from his huge antiquarian reading, he was perfectly equipped for the reproduction of historical scenes and an older life. Moreover, his easy friendliness with every class and condition of society, his love of the ordinary man, his quick perception of everyday humours and oddities, made him an adept in the drawing of character.”

Writers—especially beginning writers—often worry whether or not they have what it takes to write novels. What Buchan writes of Scott is not a bad description of the fundamental tools, foremost among them a built-in talent for telling stories and the desire to do so. (It’s also a decent description of Buchan himself.)

Scott’s deep love of history provided plenty of raw material for stories and his familiarity with people—both through his “easy friendliness” with them as well as his work in the law—kept his stories true to life. But had he lacked a natural disposition and knack for telling stories, these latter qualities would have been moot.

Buchan wrote two biographies of Scott. This passage comes from the first, shorter one, originally published as The Man and the Book in 1925. I’m reading a nice recent paperback edition from Luath Press, a Scottish publisher. Buchan published a longer biography titled simply Sir Walter Scott in 1932. That one is available for free from Project Gutenberg.

Scruton on what children can teach us about art

From the late Sir Roger Scruton’s documentary “Why Beauty Matters”:

“Art needs creativity, and creativity is about sharing. It is a call to others to see the world as the artist sees it. That is why we find beauty in the naïve art of children. Children are not giving us ideas in the place of creative images, nor are they wallowing in ugliness. They are trying to affirm the world as they see it and to share what they feel. Something of the child’s pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.”

— Sir Roger Scruton

Scruton makes this aside as a point of contrast with modern art—which is intentionally insular, confrontational, transgressive, and over-intellectual if not ideological—but in doing so he makes a broader point about what art is and what it’s for. This description of children’s art is also honestly and accurately observed.

I’ve thought of this passage many times over the last few weeks, ever since my eldest son eagerly presented me with a picture he had drawn. It was a pencil and highlighter drawing that showed me holding my youngest son at the dinner table—a picture of his dad and one of his little brothers. It was drawn from life without my noticing, and joy he took both in drawing and giving it to me, the joy in and care taken over the details, including the stubble of my beard, and the simple, straightforward, honest love in the picture itself have stuck with me. My kids have drawn many things for me, but this one in particular struck me as a clear example of Scruton’s “pure delight” in “sharing.”

Last week I tacked it to the wall of my office at school. May any art I create be motivated as purely as my son’s.

“Why Beauty Matters” is worth your while, as I wrote here almost four years ago following Scruton’s death. You can watch the whole thing on Vimeo here.

Wildcat trailer reaction

Maya Hawke as Flannery O’Connor in Wildcat

As I noted in my 2023 movie year-in-review, Wildcat is one of the films I’ve been looking forward to this year. Though it was completed and premiered at a film festival last year I hadn’t heard any news about its distribution or release until yesterday, when a great trailer appeared on YouTube.

Wildcat takes place over a short stretch of the early 1950s, when young writer Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) moves back home to Milledgeville, Georgia and is diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that had killed her father when she was sixteen. While struggling with her illness and its severe effects she tries to sell her first novel, a searing Southern gothic religious fable called Wise Blood. Like her short stories, it’s deeply Catholic and Southern and poignant in the sense of sharp, cutting. It’s a hard sell.

It’s unclear from the trailer precisely how much of O’Connor’s life Wildcat covers, but there are scenes suggesting her time among the literary elite in the northeast in the late 1940s, after she had graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and when she was laboring over Wise Blood. The trailer suggests a strong contrast between the world O’Connor leaves behind and the clay-banked roads and nosy church ladies back home in Georgia—a contrast O’Connor was certainly aware of and wrote about.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing in the trailer are the scenes from several of her short stories—”Parker’s Back,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Revelation,” and especially “Good Country People”—in which O’Connor and her mother Regina (Laura Linney) play major characters like the cynical Hulga or the self-righteous Mrs Turpin. Catching even short glimpses of scenes I’ve imagined many times—a crowded doctor’s office waiting room, a Bible salesman running across a field carrying a prosthetic leg—got me excited in a way I haven’t felt for a movie in a while. Apparently these are intricately intertwined with the events of O’Connor’s real life. I’m curious to see how this works, especially since it’s so easy for a film about a writer to slip into the biographical fallacy (or what CS Lewis called The Personal Heresy): the idea that everything a writer writes is based on his or her actual experiences.

But I’m most pleased to see that Wildcat takes O’Connor’s Christianity seriously. Apparently Ethan Hawke, who directed and co-wrote the film, was inspired to make it when he read the Prayer Journal that O’Connor kept as a writing student in Iowa. O’Connor, in addition to being a brilliant writer, was prickly, hard-edged, had a chip on her shoulder as an outsider in the postwar literary world, and was fervently orthodox and devout. Her faith suffuses her work not only coincidentally but by design. Wildcat’s trailer manages to evoke all of this. Here’s hoping that the full film delivers.

A few other notes:

• The Southern accents sound pretty good. O’Connor was originally from Savannah and, though recordings of her remind me a lot of my paternal grandmother, an Athens native, O’Connor’s speech has some peculiarities that must be down to her roots, Savannah having some distinctive dialect features even by Southern standards. Listen to her read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” sometime.

• I’m interested to see how the film explores what some people perceive as O’Connor’s cruelty (“Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to stick pins in your readers,” her editor says in the trailer). The question of just how unpleasant a writer can or should make the reader feel in order to make a point has concerned me for a long time.

• Maya Hawke looks a lot more like O’Connor than I would have guessed was possible based on what I’ve seen of her in “Stranger Things” and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Kudos to her and the film’s hair and makeup folks.

• I like the cinematography a lot. It’s clearly digital but has some creative composition choices and lens work—e.g. the way the focus and bokeh fall off at the edges off the frame, which reminds me of The Batman. A distinctive look will probably help support O’Connor’s story and give it the otherworldly feel it will probably need.

• Wildcat was apparently shot mostly in Kentucky rather than Georgia. From what I can see in the trailer it looks like a good stand-in, though it’s funny to me that, with so many movies shooting in Georgia as a substitute for more expensive locales, such a Georgia-centric story wound up being shot elsewhere.

It’s striking, having watched the trailer several times now, how present O’Connor’s crutches are. The final “coming soon” shot of O’Connor at the family mailbox, which has been one of the only images available for a while, has them plainly visible but I never noticed them. And there they are behind her as she types up a manuscript or struggles even to walk around the house. Some early film festival reviews I’ve read suggest that Wildcat is not just a story about a writer publishing a novel but a meditation on suffering, the threat of death, and God’s grace. I’m here for it.

Wildcat is currently scheduled for a big-city release on May 3 with wider availability to follow, though I haven’t been able to find any details about that yet. Hopefully we can look forward to a time in the late spring or early summer when we can catch Flannery O’Connor in theatres.

Scruton on style

Last week I revisited the late Sir Roger Scruton’s Beauty: A Very Short Introduction via audiobook on my commute. It’s an excellent precis of much that is fundamental to his thinking and, true to the subtitle, a wide-ranging introduction to many topics that bear further thought. Here’s one.

From a discussion of the role proportion plays in the creation of vernacular architectures by launching the builder on “a path of discovery” to what “fits” and is “suitable” for each detail in relation to the others in Chapter 4, “Everyday Beauty”:

One result of this process of matching is a visual vocabulary: by using identical mouldings in door and window, for example, the visual match becomes easier to recognize and to accept. Another result is what is loosely described as style—the repeated use of shapes, contours, materials and so on, their adaptation to special uses, and the search for a repertoire of visual gestures.

I like the idea of a style as mastery of a discipline’s “repertoire,” the selective, purposeful use of a shared vocabulary. Scruton’s example is architectural, but he also refers throughout the book to painting, sculpture, cinema, and most especially music. My mind naturally suggested literary style, with its literal shared vocabulary and the many effects and fine shades of meaning that a firm control of English can yield.

Scruton himself raises the idea of control as a component of style in the next chapter, “Artistic Beauty”:

“True artists control their subject-matter, in order that our response to it should be their doing, not ours.”

True artists control their subject-matter, in order that our response to it should be their doing, not ours. One way of exerting this control is through style . . . Style is not exhibited only by art: indeed, as I argued in the last chapter, it is natural to us, part of the aesthetics of everyday life, through which we arrange our environment and place it in significant relation to ourselves. Flair in dressing, for example, which is not the same as an insistent originality, consists rather in the ability to turn a shared repertoire in a personal direction, so that a single character is revealed in each of them. That is what we mean by style, and by the ‘stylishness’ that comes about when style over-reaches itself and becomes the dominant factor in a person’s dress.

The tension between originality and a common vocabulary and the need for balance is an important topic and one Scruton returns to later in the book, but he continues by introducing another consideration:

Styles can resemble each other, and contain large overlapping idioms—like the styles of Haydn and Mozart or Coleridge and Wordsworth. Or they might be unique, like the style of Van Gogh, so that anyone who shares the repertoire is seen as a mere copier or pasticheur, and not as an artist with a style of his own. Our tendency to think in this way has something to do with our sense of human integrity: the unique style is one that has identified a unique human being, whose personality is entirely objectified in his work.

This passage in particular offers a lot for the writer to think about. Every writer has heroes and idols and role models, other writers whose control over their work has influenced our own technique, consciously or not. This starts young. It’s been more than twenty years since I read Stephen King’s On Writing, but I still remember and think often about this passage:

You may find yourself adopting a style you find particularly exciting, and there’s nothing wrong with that. When I read Ray Bradbury as a kid, I wrote like Ray Bradbury—everything green and wondrous and seen through a lens smeared with the grease of nostalgia. When I read James M Cain, everything I wrote came out clipped and stripped and hard-boiled. When I read Lovecraft, my prose became luxurious and Byzantine.

All of which is, for King, a crucial developmental stage in the writer’s life, one that should be refined through constant reading and writing, so that eventually one is no longer writing in imitation but in “one’s own style.”

But if you’re aware of what you’re doing and working hard at it, particularly in order to achieve a certain specific effect—so that, per Scruton, the readers’ response will be my doing, not theirs—it’s hard not to become anxious that one is working merely in pastiche or even accidental parody. Have I sacrificed my integrity to sound like someone else? Inconsistency doesn’t help. I’ve worried more about this on some projects than others. Why am I confident that I can use tricks learned from Charles Portis but not those from Cormac McCarthy? Food for thought.

I think, naturally, of John Gardner and his description of “mannered” prose, a term he’d certainly have applied to McCarthy. “Mannered” suggests artificiality or phoniness, the lack of integrity Scruton suggests above, which is how every good writer hopes not to come across. But I also think of Elmore Leonard, another author whom I’ve quoted here many times, and who worked hard to make his style the absence of style. Scruton contends that that is impossible:

Style must be perceivable: there is no such thing as hidden style. It shows itself, even if it does so in artful ways that conceal the effort and sophistication . . . At the same time, it becomes perceivable by virtue of our comparative perceptions: it involves a standing out from norms that must also be subliminally present in our perception if the stylistic idioms and departures are to be noticed. Style enables artists to allude to things that they do not state, to summon comparisons that they do not explicitly make, to place their work and its subject-matter in a context which makes every gesture significant, and so achieve the kind of concentration of meaning that we witness in Britten’s Cello Symphony or Eliot's Four Quartets.

This is exactly right, and Leonard would agree. Leonard’s style, which was precisely designed to “conceal the effort and sophistication” of his writing and make it seem effortless, was immediately recognizable because it was distinct from the “norms” described above in particular ways—something Leonard himself noted. Those “norms” or context are the broader shared vocabulary we began with—which gives shape to one’s work through contrast.

And that final sentence on what a firm, controlled, purposeful, precise style can do, using the power of allusion, implicit comparison, the subtle significance of every detail to “achieve . . . concentration of meaning”—is there a writer who wouldn’t die happy having that said of his work?

Melancholy in the outfield

A few weeks ago I revisited a childhood favorite with my own kids. Angels in the Outfield came out when I was ten years old and an enthusiastic baseball fan. I must have watched it fifty or sixty times over the next few years, before I aged out of it and the real-life drama of the mid-90s Braves gently edged it out of my imagination.

What I remembered most about Angels in the Outfield was the comedy, the slapstick baseball action, the standard sports movie joys of becoming a team and winning the big game, and the music. (I noticed, though very young, that composer Randy Edelman’s score had a lot of cues suspiciously similar to his work on the previous year’s Gettysburg, one of my favorite soundtracks.) What I was not prepared for upon rewatching it as an adult just how firmly the plot’s foundation was built upon pain, sorrow, and longing.

Roger, the main character, lives in foster care because his mom has died and his dad is a negligent, uncommunicative deadbeat. When the film starts his father has already signed over his rights to his son and has shown up just long enough to tell Roger, a job he performs badly. Is that guilt we see in his eyes, or just awkwardness in performing the unwanted duty of talking to his child? When an oblivious Roger asks when they can “be a family again,” his dad replies with a “when pigs fly” scenario that Roger takes literally. And Roger’s younger friend JP seems bright and happy all the time but collapses into grief when another boy is moved out of the foster home, an emotional response the movie suggests is always ready just below the surface. This is clearly a child struggling with abandonment.

But the vein of sadness runs through the adults, too. California Angels manager George Knox seethes with grievance, not only having had his career cut short when a dirty player slid into him cleats-first, but also becoming a manager only to be saddled with the worst team in the league. The man who injured him, Ranch Wilder, is now the Angels’ radio announcer and loathes the team as well as Knox. His entire demeanor suggests he resents being kept down when he is meant for greater things. And Mel Clark, a former star pitcher who developed a pain pill addiction under Knox’s managership at Cincinnati and who has the film’s clearest redemption arc, is revealed at the end to be only six months away from death. He has lung cancer and doesn’t even know it yet. And so even the longed-for victory in the playoffs is tinged with loss.

I’m not going to pretend that Angels in the Outfield is a great movie or serious drama; it’s simply well and honestly crafted and it treats all of these scenarios seriously. None of it feels forced, none of it is used merely to jerk tears, and none of it is tidily and painlessly resolved. In fact, most of the characters don’t actually get the specific thing they want at the beginning of the film.

This brought to mind two things I had reflected on long ago. The first is an essay from Film School Rejects called “The Melancholy of Don Bluth,” an excellent read on animated films like The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven, or An American Tail—all three of which were in constant rotation in the Poss household when I was growing up. Bluth’s movies have a reputation for going to dark places Disney typically balks at, to the point that they’re sometimes the subject of internet memes about “trauma.” Please.

The artistic upshot of Bluth’s willingness to include death and—perhaps more importantly—mourning in his films is a truth and richness often missing from comparable animated films:

Thematically, there is an ever-present air of death about Bluth’s work that is profoundly sad. Bones litter certain set-pieces; illness and age are veritable threats (shout out to Nicodemus’ gnarly skeleton hands); and characters can and do bleed. Critically, Bluth films don’t gloss over grief, they sit with it. From Littlefoot’s straight up depression following the on-screen death of his mom, to Mrs. Brisby’s soft sorrow at finding out the details of her husband’s death. There is a space for mourning in Bluth’s stories that feels extra-narrative, and unpretentious. Critically, this is distinct from, say, wallowing. Bluth’s films have a ridiculously productive attitude towards mourning, most lucidly articulated through Land Before Time’s moral mouthpiece Rooter: “you’ll always miss her, but she’ll always be with you as long as you remember the things she taught you.” Disney meanwhile, tends to treat death as a narrative flourish, or worse, a footnote. And in comparison, even notable exceptions like Bambi and The Lion King seem immaturely timid to let palpable grief linger for longer than a scene, let alone throughout a film’s runtime.

The other thing that came to mind was a podcast conversation on The Sectarian Review concerning Hallmark Christmas movies. At some point during the conversation I drew a comparison between Hallmark romantic comedies and older romcoms by pointing out that films like You’ve Got Mail, as fun and bubbly and appealing as they are, also have vein of genuine pain running through them. Kathleen Kelly takes her mom’s little bookshop up against the big chain store and loses, an event the film doesn’t gloss over and doesn’t paint as some kind of moral victory. Who doesn’t feel the pang of her loss as she closes up shop for the final time and walks away into the night, her mom’s shop doorbell jingling in her hand?

Only Pixar, in older movies like Up and Toy Story 2 and Inside Out, has recently attempted to include such real pain in their stories. By comparison, most of the recent crowd-pleasing PG-13 action fare or animated kids’ movies in theatres or the mass-produced dramas of the Hallmark Channel are pure saccharine—thin, fake, and probably carcinogenic.

I have no firm conclusions to draw on this topic except to note that, for whatever reason, even in our simplest and cheapest stories we’ve lost something important. And if you feel some of this and hope for catharsis, one of the oldest reasons for watching a drama that there is, you’ll have to go to older films for it.

Sturgeon Wars

Last week some of the staff writers at National Review, of all places, had an amusing exchange of views on the current state of Star Wars. It began when one wrote of being “Star Wars-ed out.” Another seconded that feeling and drew an analogy with the Marvel movies: both are series that have decreased in quality as the suits behind them have produced more and more “content.” Yet another followed up specifically critiquing the trilogy produced by Disney while rightly reserving some small praise for Rogue One.

But the best and most incisive perspective came from Jeffrey Blehar, who with aggressive indifference toward everything since Return of the Jedi forty years ago, mildly suggested that not much of Star Wars is any good. Dissect and fuss over the prequel trilogy, the sequel trilogy, the Disney+ shows, and cartoon shows and novels and comics and video games however you want, none of it is as good as the original trilogy and most of it is terrible. In fact, the best thing to come of Star Wars since 1983 is Mr Plinkett.

I mostly agree (and wholeheartedly agree about Mr Plinkett), and that’s because I’m a big believer in Sturgeon’s Law. In its simplest formulation, Sturgeon’s Law states that:

“90% of everything is crap.”

For several years now I’ve been saying that Sturgeon’s Law applies just as much to Star Wars as to anything else, it’s just that Star Wars got its 10% of quality out of the way first. What they’ve been producing ever since is, well…

I have ideas about why this is, including but by no means limited to Disney’s desperately overvalued purchase of the rights to the series and—probably more importantly—its merchandising, executive mismanagement, ideological capture of the filmmakers, oversaturation (speaking of Marvel), and of course simple artistic failure. But there are three more fundamental problems that I’ve seen with Star Wars over the last couple decades.

One is that everyone forgot that Star Wars was lightning in a bottle. The original film didn’t emerge fully formed from George Lucas’s head like a nerd Athena, it was the product of a difficult production, a demanding shoot, and a host of other limitations. The many points of friction in the production required genuine creativity to solve, not least from a brilliant editor and one or two real creative geniuses like Ben Burtt and John Williams. But the very success of Star Wars meant that the circumstances that shaped the originals have not recurred. Everything since has been greased by money, money, money, and the synthetic smoothness of the prequel and sequel trilogies allowed bad or incomplete or incoherent story ideas to slide straight through into the finished films.

Second and relatedly, with one or two exceptions the fans and producers of Star Wars drifted into a category error regarding what kind of stories these are. Star Wars since Return of the Jedi has been treated like fantasy set in space. Mr Plinkett, among many others, has noted the ridiculous and gratuitous multiplication of planets, species, vehicles, and everything else since The Phantom Menace. But Star Wars wasn’t originally fantasy—it was a Boomer pastiche of westerns, Kurosawa samurai films, World War II movies, Flash Gordon serials, and a film school dweeb’s skimming of Joseph Campbell. As Star Wars quickly became the cultural remit of younger generations and more and more Star Wars “content” was churned out, those referents were lost to all except the buffs and nerds. The galaxy far, far away came to be treated as an infinitely expandable object of “world-building” when it is and always was an assemblage of spare parts.

I don’t mean that dismissively. Being made of spare parts is not necessarily a bad thing. The originals are greater than the sum of their parts, and it’s worth pointing out that the handful of new Star Wars material that tried to tap directly into some of what inspired Lucas—war movies about ill-fated missions in Rogue One, westerns in the first season of “The Mandalorian”—were good. Eventually ruined by committee-think, but good.

The final problem, which brings us back around to Sturgeon’s Law, is that the fans allowed it, even demanded it. Having had that 10%, they gobbled up that 90% we’ve been getting since and kept wanting more. I know plenty of people have complained about the storytelling, the filmmaking, the behind-the-scenes drama, the ideological drift of the Disney films, and everything else, but for every Mr Plinkett or Critical Drinker on YouTube there are a thousand people who are satisfied with anything as long as it has the Star Wars logo on it. From archetypal storytelling to lifestyle brand—that’s the real Skywalker saga.

This is by no means unique to Star Wars fans, as some trends among purported Tolkien fans have made clear in the last couple years. But if people want to enjoy their favorite things again they need to regain their suspicion of corporations as well as remember the difference between quantity and quality.

Poetry of reinforcement

From Tom Shippey’s preface to his new translation of Beowulf, in which he notes some of the strange poetic artifacts of the poem’s alliterative form and explores their deeper implications—both for the poem’s original audience and for us:

King David as Anglo-Saxon bard in the Vespasian Psalter

One may sum up by saying that, rather oddly, the words in the poem which receive the greatest sonic emphasis are sometimes the ones which carry the least information. They are there to help the poet with the first of his major aims: which is, one might say, to maintain the beat and the meter of his poetic lines.

This seems a rather humble aim to us, for our idea of poetry is that its wording should be exact, unexpected, provocative—to paraphrase the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, who has just been introduced to Shakespeare—words which make you feel like you'd sat on a pin. But we emphasize novelty, originality, surprise: and accordingly we fail to feel the power of reinforcement, familiarity, recognition. And it is this which satisfied the poet's second major aim: to express the ethos of a social group.

The modern vision of the poet as an outsider speaking truth to power and challenging norms is not only historically recent but a sadly narrow and limiting vision of what poetry does. It requires a posture of continuous antagonism to everything that grows both tedious and phony. The stereotype of the tiresome and hypocritical modernist poet and his or her predictably transgressive free verse exists for a reason.

But worse, this vision of poetry and the poet warps the interpretation of the great poetry of the past. People go galloping off in search of the hidden subversion in Homer or Beowulf and, having searched long enough and screwed their jeweler’s loupe of critical theory tightly enough into their eye, find it. Turns out these poets were just like the longhairs at the campus poetry slam. But, satisfied with presentist political interpretations, they miss what’s actually going on—and the chance to encounter people radically unlike themselves.

Good poetry can challenge, certainly. But I’d argue that the most effective and lasting prophetic verse challenges from within a culture—thus the entire power of the Old Testament prophets—rather than from some self-congratulatory political margin. But just as often, if not more so, good poetry reminds its audience of who they are. Remember, it says, This is us. This is what we love. This is what we must protect. And, with striking frequency, This is what we have lost. Consider the worlds in which the Iliad and Beowulf were composed and the poetry of reinforcement and shared love and loss makes much more sense.

Recovering the ability to “feel the power of reinforcement, familiarity, recognition” may prove a crucial part of the modern man’s great spiritual task.

Shippey has an online Beowulf “masterclass” coming up at the beginning of December. I’ve already signed up. It should be well worth your while if you’re interested in this period and its poetry. You can find information about the class here.

That's not how any of this works

Director Ridley Scott talks with Dan Snow about Scott’s forthcoming film Napoleon

Yesterday History Hit released a 16-minute talk with Ridley Scott covering some aspects of his epic drama Napoleon, which comes out in three weeks. The interview is mostly interesting even if host Dan Snow doesn’t dig very deep, but Scott got strangely testy when Snow—over a clip of cannonballs smashing up the ice of a frozen pond beneath the feet of retreating Russian infantry at Austerlitz—raised the question of historical accuracy:

Snow: What about historical accuracy? When a historian says, “Uh, sorry, Sir Ridley, it didn’t quite happen like that,” you say, “Listen, I’ve done enough with you.” You have to have artistic license, right?

Scott: You know, I would say, “How would you know? Were you there?”

Snow: [laughs]

Scott: They go, “Oh, no, right.” I say, “Exactly.” So I said, You know, Napoleon [?] had four-hundred books written about him. So it means, maybe the first was the most accurate. The next one is already doing a version of the writer. By the time you get to 399, guess what—a lot of speculation.

Oof. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

Historians don’t know things because they were there, they know things because they study. It’s work. They’ve read and researched and compared notes and argued and walked the ground. Scott’s rejoinder is surprisingly childish for such a sharp and accomplished man.

Further, his breezy explanation of how history works as a discipline and a profession is simply bizarre. The implication of what he says about how books cover a subject over time is that historical facts are established at the beginning, and the rest is just eggheads batting ever more intricate theoretical interpretations back and forth.

The truth is that, as I’ve had cause to reflect here recently, the first accounts of an event are fragmentary or partial even if they’re accurate. It takes diligent study, the perspective of time, the synthesis of all available sources, and a good bit of luck to piece together a big-picture account of what actually happened. And with big, heavily-documented subjects—like, say, a French emperor—new material is being discovered all the time. There is no substitute for a primary source or eyewitness account, but if you want accuracy qua accuracy, you will absolutely want a secondary source, a book written later.

I’m all for allowing responsible artistic license—I’m always interested to hear filmmakers explain how and why they choose to change what they change—but Scott doesn’t stop at artistic license. His arrogant dismissiveness toward truth in historical storytelling is breathtaking. Maybe he picked up more from Napoleon than he’s aware.

To be fair, Scott was speaking off-the-cuff, and is 85 years old. I’m not even absolutely certain he said “Napoleon” when he cited the figure of 400 books because he was mumbling. (The real figure, if he was talking about Napoleon, is tens of thousands, more than 300,000 by one old estimate.) But given his track record with using history for his own purposes—I stand by my thoughts on Kingdom of Heaven from the early days of this blog—and the forcefulness with which he said this, I have to assume he means it. I can’t say I’m surprised.

At any rate, I’m cautiously optimistic about Napoleon, but I’m not hoping for much more than interesting performances and exciting spectacle.

Literary cameos

Yesterday Alan Jacobs posted a longish recommendation of Francis Spufford’s latest novel, an alternate history detective noir titled Cahokia Jazz. I’m intrigued. But I especially enjoyed this minor note from the end of Jacobs’s post:

At one point, late in the story, our hero is at Cahokia’s railway station and happens to see a family, “pale, shabby-grand, and relocating with their life’s possessions”—including, curiously enough, butterfly nets: “white Russians on their way to Kodiak, by the look of it.” One of them, “a lanky twenty-something in flannels and tennis shoes,” is called by his family Vovka, and he briefly assists our hero. Then off they go, leaving our story as abruptly as they had arrived in it. Assuming that they made their way to Kodiak—or, more formally, as our map tells us, NOVAYA SIBIRSKAYA TERRITORII—it is unlikely that their world ever knew Lolita or Pale Fire.

This is “one of several delightful cameos” in the novel, and Jacobs’s recommendation and praise got me thinking about such cameos in fiction.

I haven’t read Cahokia Jazz yet, though I intend to, but I’m willing to take Jacobs at his word that Spufford does this well. The example he cites certainly sounds subtle enough to work. But done poorly, such cameos awkwardly shoehorn a well-known figure into the story and call unnecessary attention to themselves. Think Forrest Gump in novel form. They can also, if used to denigrate the characters in the story, turn into the kind of wink-wink presentist authorial irony that I deplore.

I think the best version of the literary cameo functions much like a good film cameo—if you spot the cameo and know who it is, it’s a nice bonus, but if you don’t it doesn’t intrude enough to distract. And, ideally, it will work with and add to the story and characterization of the main characters.

A good and especially subtle example comes from Declare, which I’m almost finished reading. Early in the novel we read of protagonist Andrew Hale’s background, specifically where he was in the early stages of World War II before embarking on his first espionage assignments in occupied France:

In November he successfully sat for an exhibition scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, and in the spring of 1941 he went up to that college to read English literature.

His allowance from Drummond’s Bank in Admiralty Arch was not big enough for him to do any of the high living for which Oxford was legendary, but wartime rationing appeared to have cut down on that kind of thing in any case—even cigarettes and beer were too costly for most of the students in Hale’s college, and it was fortunate that the one-way lanes of Oxford were too narrow for comfortable driving and parking, since bicycles were the only vehicles most students could afford to maintain. His time was spent mostly in the Bodleian Library researching Spenser and Malory, and defending his resultant essays in weekly sessions with his merciless tutor.

A Magdalen College tutor ruthlessly grilling a student over Spenser and Malory? That can only be CS Lewis.

They’re not precisely cameos, but I have worked a few real-life figures into my novels in greater or lesser supporting roles: David Howarth in Dark Full of Enemies, Gustavus W Smith and Pleasant Philips in Griswoldville. I’ve aimed a little lower in the name of realism, I suppose. But the precise dividing line between a cameo of the kind described here and a real person playing a serious role in a story is something I’ll have to figure out.

At any rate, a well-executed literary cameo is a joy. Curious to see who else might surprise us in the pages of Cahokia Jazz.

Tim Powers on the danger of chasing trends

Over the last few weeks I’ve been (very, very slowly) reading Declare, a supernatural Cold War espionage thriller by Tim Powers. I reached the halfway point the other night and it’s so continuously involving and intriguing, so brilliantly imagined and deeply realized, and so different even from the science fiction that I occasionally read that I looked for some interviews with Powers. I found several recent ones on YouTube and they haven’t disappointed.

Here’s an excellent exchange from a 57-minute interview with a channel called Media Death Cult. After discussing Powers’s love of Robert Heinlein and the contemporary obsession with how “problematic” he is, Powers and the interviewer consider whether it is possible to write old-fashioned fiction in a world that adheres so dogmatically to the prevailing political pieties:

Media Death Cult: I think it’s easy to pick on [Heinlein] because his heart was in the right place. You know what I mean?

Powers: Yeah, and he suffers from, uh, being dead, uh, in that the current standards of acceptability move on. Harlan Ellison was certainly progressive, liberal, cutting edge in his time, but now being dead, the standards, acceptable norms, have moved on.

MDC: So you think someone like Heinlein or Ellison, if they were to pop up now and want to write like that, it’s just not going to stick because of this weird situation that the Western world seems to be in with the microscope that you’re put under? I think you’d be a fringe writer, wouldn’t you? Which I think is a shame. I think if we can’t get that kind of thing going again it’s a bit of a shame.

Powers: Yeah. I mean, there’ve always been trends, which I think any writer is wise to ignore. Cyberpunk, nanotech, steampunk, uh, have all been flurries that briefly inspired lots of imitations and, you know, follow-alongs, and I always think it’s a big mistake for a writer to do that—to clock what is acceptable right now, what’s popular right now? I will do that. Because at best you’re going to be one of a crowd following along, and, more likely, by the time you finally get on the bandwagon the wheels will have fallen off and it’s overturned in a field somewhere.

MDC: Yeah.

Powers: And I think these days—and I speak from the advantage of complete ignorance—

MDC: Me too.

Powers: Ha! I think there are a number of bases to touch, boxes to check, especially in current science fiction and fantasy, which I think would be detrimental for a writer to pay much attention to. I think we’re going through a sort of tunnel. I think it may not be related but I think it’s alarming that Roald Dahl, RL [Stine] who did those sort of spooky stories for kids, and Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie are having their works retroactively revised to be acceptable to 2003 [sic] standards.

It’s definitely related. Powers’s choice of the tunnel as a metaphor for our cultural moment is fitting, tunnels being narrow, dangerous, and impossible to escape in any way but getting through it.

Just don’t live unto the tunnel, or take on its shape. Do your own thing. Be your own man, write your own stories, and don’t chase the latest trend—especially if that trend is writing to appease the legion of scolds who want to dictate how you must write your story and what you must include. Bowing to this kind of political orthodoxy is the worst way to fit in and be trendy. After all, recent events have demonstrated that you can toe the line—touch every base and check every box, in Powers’s terms—and still fall afoul of the mob. A lesson anyone familiar with Bolshevism should know.

Powers and his interviewer do, however, offer a hopeful vision of the future:

MDC: You got this kind of weird landscape where everybody is—you’re right, you’re writing through this tunnel. I think we’ll come out of the other side of it, though. There is pushback.

Powers: Oh, yeah.

MDC: And it’s not just the old school who are old enough to have enjoyed these things before the world started turning woke or whatever it is. I think there is a movement, there is pushback on it. We don’t want art to be that way. We don’t want it.

Powers: Yeah, yeah. And certainly, you think, ‘Well, it’s old now, the original text of Fleming and Agatha Christie.’ But then, when I was reading Heinlein, Sturgeon, Leiber, Murray Leinster, Henry Kuttner, those were all before my time. Those weren’t new writers. I was, you know, digging around used book stores and, yeah—I don’t think the readership is going to confine itself to the new editions. I think readers are hungry enough to dig widely.

The used book store may well prove to be the ashes from which literature will resurrect itself. But first we have to pass through the tunnel.

Good stuff, and there’s more I could have included. There’s a lengthy section in which Powers talks about his friendship with Philip K Dick that was especially good. Check out the entire interview at the link above or in the embedded YouTube player.

Special thanks to those of y’all who’ve recommended Declare to me at some point, especially David and Chet. I’m enjoying it so much that I’ve already picked up Powers’s supernatural pirate epic On Stranger Tides, which looks amazing, and I’d be glad to hear from other Powers fans which of his other books would be good to look into after that. I’ve already heard good things about Last Call. In the meantime, I’m trying to make time between work and the commute and feeding babies all night to finish Declare. Looking forward to all the big revelations along the way.