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.

On greatness

On my first Western Civ exam this semester I was required to include an essay question concerning Alexander the Great. The essay asked students to explain some of Alexander’s achievements and, having done so, to consider the question of “whether he deserved the title ‘the Great.””

It’s interesting that the essay’s instructions raised the question of desert. The students’ answers interested me further. The good ones fell into three broad groups. The first group suggested that Alexander did not deserve to be remembered as great because of his accomplishments: namely, spreading war and disorder over the known world in pursuit of his own glory and the establishment of an empire. Others argued that he did deserve to be remembered as great, and for the same reason: his accomplishments, namely the creation of a metropolitan, polyglot culture that facilitated the spread of commerce and ideas from Europe to India. The last group argued that regardless of whether we approve of what Alexander achieved—whether we focus on the bloodshed or the unification—the scale and consequences of his actions more than earn him the title ‘the Great.”

The latter, I think, are correct.

The concept of greatness has become entangled with the moral question of goodness. This must partly be the result of casualness and sloppiness. “This pizza is great” and “That was a great movie” or “Have you heard this great new Taylor Swift song?” all suggest approval as the essential grounds of greatness. It was striking to me that among the many reactions to Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, no few condemned the movie for tarnishing the reputation of “a great man.”

Premodern people suffered no such illusions. Greatness, in the ancient and medieval worlds, suggested not goodness but size or strength. In his own language, Alexander was Alexandros Megas—Alexander the Big or Alexander the Mighty. The Latin equivalent was magnus, a clear cognate, Pompeius Magnus being Pompey the Big or Grand or Mighty. Alfred the Great was, in Old English, Ælfred Micela, literally Alfred the Much. Other languages still reflect the idea of size rather than goodness. In Irish, Alexander is still Alastar Mor, Big Alexander, and in German Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus in Latin) is Karl der Große—Charles the Big.

But recall that, for most of my students, Alexander’s greatness was bound up with what he did, which could, in good utilitarian fashion, be weighed in a moral scale. This is certainly the most common modern way of assessing greatness. Andrew Roberts, a historian I admire and whose biography of Napoleon is titled Napoleon the Great in the UK, rather gushingly asserts that Napoleon was great and argues this on the grounds of his accomplishments—unification, standardization, modernization. I disagree that these are inherently moral goods, and I find Napoleon’s personal character morally reprehensible and his philosophy heinous. But I can’t disagree with the assertion that he was great.

Because greatness, the size and power necessary to achieve great and consequential things, necessarily means that a great man can do a lot of damage. And a lot of the great men of history—Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler—did so. Think of how many acres a giant destroys simply by walking.

Of the men named in this post I’d consider only Alfred a good man. Something that ought to temper our ambitions.

Much of the confusion, controversy, and furor surrounding the way we remember history and the consequential men of history would evaporate if we could simply remember that greatness is not a moral quality. Separating the two would allow us to see both greatness and goodness more clearly. And the more pressing of these two concerns is certainly to better understand goodness.

Dr Strangelove versus technocracy

Peter Sellers as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake in Dr Strangelove

Last week I showed my US History II students one of my favorite movies: Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. While the usual points of discussion of Dr Strangelove are the Cold War policies and theories that inspired it—the arms race, brinkmanship, deterrence, paranoia, and most especially mutual assured destruction—for years now I’ve noted a more subtle strain of critique running through the film: the false promise of technology and technocratic leadership.

Having gone rogue and radioed his wing of nuclear-armed B-52s “the go code” without authorization from the President or the Pentagon, Gen Jack D Ripper can wait in satisfaction for his men to breach the peace and commit the US to all-out war because he is the only person in the world who can communicate with the bomber crews. This is thanks to the CRM-114 “discriminator” on the radio, which blocks out any transmission missing a three-letter code prefix. While the bomb is the most obvious technological threat in the film, it is communications technologies, technologies meant to connect and to facilitate greater understanding, that most stymie the characters in their efforts to recall Ripper’s bombers.

Kubrick plays with some rich irony here. Radio communication with the bombers is blocked thanks to the CRM-114, but Ripper also barricades himself inside his headquarters, won’t answer the phone, and impounds even the privately owned radios on his base. During the US Army’s frantic attempt to shoot their way in, capture Ripper, and put him on the phone with the President, the phone lines are cut.

All but one: a Bell pay phone, through which Group Captain Mandrake—perhaps the only sane character in the film, and who spends most of the movie frightened out of his mind in Ripper’s office—attempts to call the Pentagon only to be blocked by an unhelpful operator.

Technology surrounds every character, insulating them from each other and limiting not only the options available to them but even the options they can imagine. Not for nothing is Mandrake introduced in the midst of a massive bank of IBM computers (see the imagine above), staring at a continuous feed of printed data. The President and the Joint Chiefs in the War Room depend entirely on “the big board,” an electronic map of Russia marked with the bombers’ targets and flight paths, for information about what’s happening outside. The film’s climax begins when they learn that some the information presented on the board is incorrect. And Dr Strangelove both enters and exits the film talking about computers—first to explain how the Soviet doomsday machine works, and at the end to describe a potential method of selecting suitable survivors to go into hiding. The latter comes after the doomsday machine has already been triggered and everyone on earth has mere minutes to live.

The saddest aspect of the film is the way the technological trap US leadership has walked into rubbishes the virtues of the men in their charge. Rippers’s men and the US Army troops sent to capture him shoot it out with each other and even die, both in the belief that they’re the good guys.

But the point is made clearest with B-52 pilot Maj Kong. Though played by comedic actor Slim Pickens, Kong is the film’s straight man. (Supposedly Kubrick never told Pickens that the movie was a comedy and Pickens treated the role as a serious thriller lead.) He is visibly bothered to receive the go code and treats his mission in deadly earnest. As far as he knows, flying in a vast sky of ignorance thanks—again—to the communication blackout, the US is under attack and he and his men may be the country’s only defense. He unironically invokes patriotism and pluralism to buck up his crew and navigates his plane with immense ingenuity and courage. In any other story Kong and his men would be the heroes. But their flight is ironic comedy gold because of the situation created for them by leaders that trusted too much in technology to do their judgment for them.

The ideology and amoral strategizing of the Cold War creates the scenario depicted in the film, but it is technology that keeps it moving toward destruction regardless of the characters’ increasingly panicked attempts to prevent it. Dr Strangelove’s most famous attribute—alien hand syndrome, which allows his right hand to operate independently, not to mention embarrassingly—works as a neat visual metaphor for the entire situation: an amoral genius who cannot control his own body. The machines are in charge.

Perhaps the most telling line in the film comes from Gen Buck Turgidson, when he is first briefing the President on the situation: “I admit the human element seems to have failed us here.” Pesky humans.

If not an intentional critique, Dr Strangelove at least gives pride of place to technology as one of the causes of the accidental nuclear war that obliterates the world at the end. Given the realistic short-sightedness, love of technology for its own sake, and self-serving foolishness of most of the characters, it presents a good argument against depending technology to make our decisions for us.

But then again, Dr Strangelove came out sixty years ago. The bombers are probably already past their fail-safe points.

Pilgrimage back to Bunyan

“Someday you will be old enough to read fairy tales again.”

— CS Lewis, in his dedication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

I’m finishing work on a “life story” project for a church group today, which has got me in an even more than usually reflective mood as I consider family history, personal debts, and the things that have made me who I am. Among these are the books that have most shaped me. Ages and ages ago, sometime early in grad school, I wrote a multi-part series of blog posts on precisely this topic. One of the most important early books I mentioned was Dangerous Journey, a lavishly illustrated adaptation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

This came to mind because just a few days ago Alan Jacobs wrote about teaching The Pilgrim’s Progress and the “great joy” it gives him—not only teaching it, but the mere fact that “so utterly bonkers a book was so omnipresent in English-language culture . . . for so long.” He goes on, in a strikingly incisive paragraph, to note how

One of the “tough” things about [The Pilgrim’s Progress] is the way [it] veer[s] from hard-coded allegory to plain realism, sometimes within a given sentence. One minute Moses is the canonical author of the Pentateuch, the next he’s a guy who keeps knocking Hopeful down. But the book is always psychologically realistic, to an extreme degree. No one knew anxiety and terror better than Bunyan did, and when Christian is passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and hears voices whispering blasphemies in his ears, the true horror of the moment is that he thinks he himself is uttering the blasphemies. (The calls are coming from inside the house.) 

This captures both the strangeness and the power of Bunyan’s book, as I’ve lately been rediscovering.

I grew up with Pilgrim’s Progress as a load-bearing component of my imagination. My parents had Dangerous Journey at home and I pored over the incredible, grotesque, beautiful, frightening illustrations (by Alan Parry in a style reminiscent of Arthur Rackham) over and over again. My friends and I read a children’s version—with an excellent map—in school. Another time we acted out Christian and Faithful’s trial at Vanity Fair for a school music program. (I played Lord Hategood, the judge.) Occasionally during our church’s summer Bible school the nightly story would be a version of Pilgrim’s Progress in five short installments. I taught this version of it myself once shortly after graduating from college. There was even a two-part “Adventures in Odyssey” adaptation I listened to many times on cassette tape.

I knew Pilgrim’s Progress thoroughly without ever having read it cover to cover.* But you know what they say about familiarity.

Then, late in high school, I discovered Dante. I was on my first medieval literature kick and wanted all the epic poetry I could get ahold of. Dante’s Comedy struck me as both 1) a proper classic, the kind of thing a kid like me should be reading and 2) lurid enough to be interesting and entertaining. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into—it blew my mind. I ended up reading Dante over and over again for several years straight, right through college, and Dante has been a profound influence on me ever since.

But discovering Dante also led me into an easy contempt for Bunyan. Dante, I thought, had fashioned a real allegory. Bunyan—in addition to his other faults, like his Calvinism**—seemed cloddish and simplistic by comparison. What were the ad hoc, making-it-up-as-I-go plot points and symbols of Pilgrim’s Progress worth when I had the masterful intricacies of the Comedy as an alternative?

It’s a typical fault of immaturity to set in opposition things that should really complement each other, but there I was, pooh-poohing Pilgrim’s Progress. I’m bothered even to remember this attitude. And yet, Pilgrim’s Progress stayed with me. And now I’m rediscovering it, having grown old enough to read it again.

Two things have helped rekindle my interest and reopen me to the story, which I freely acknowledged was fundamental to my imagination even when I was most disdainful of it. The first is John Buchan. Anyone who’s followed my John Buchan June readings will know that Pilgrim’s Progress was his favorite book, and that it informed and influenced everything in his fiction from his novels’ stern moralism, hardy sense of adventure, the fact that many of their plots are journeys, and even character names and motivations. Buchan’s love of Bunyan started to bring me back around, the same way a good friend might convince you to give one of their friends another chance despite having made an awkward introduction.

But more important has been revisiting Pilgrim’s Progress itself. A few years ago I broke out my parents’ copy of Dangerous Journey to look at with my own kids and, like me thirty-odd years before them, they found the pictures mesmerizing, horrifying, and impossibly intriguing. They wanted to know more, to find out what’s going on in the story behind these images. The pictures cry out for the story to be told.

And then, right now a year ago, I read Little Pilgrim’s Progress to them a few chapters at a time before bed. Little Pilgrim’s Progress is a children’s adaptation of Bunyan by Helen Taylor, first published in 1947, that abridges, simplifies, and somewhat softens some of the original. The edition I read was a new, large-format hardback illustrated by Joe Sutphin. In Sutphin’s pictures, the characters are all adorable anthropomorphic animals: Evangelist is an owl, Christian is a rabbit, Great Heart is a badger, Giant Despair is a genuinely terrifying hare, Apollyon—rendered “Self” by Taylor—is a wolf, and others are otters, squirrels, toads, dogs, and more. I was worried it would all be a little too cutesy, but I wanted to introduce this story to my kids and I was glad to find the pictures and the adaptation perfectly suited for their ages. It’s brilliantly done.

What I was not prepared for was the way Bunyan’s story, even filtered through an abridgement and fuzzy animals, would wreck me. I had to stop reading Little Pilgrim’s Progress several times—most especially as the characters approached the River of Death and their final, long-awaited but fearful entry into the Celestial City—because I couldn’t hold back my tears. The raw emotional and, as Jacobs notes, psychological power of Pilgrim’s Progress ambushed me. The fear, guilt, anxiety, doubt, grief, and—above all—hope were so real, so true to life in our fallen and wounded state, that the story cut deep. All the more so because I was so familiar with Pilgrim’s Progress that I was, ironically, unprepared to meet it again. I’m glad I did.

I’ve had a long history with Pilgrim’s Progress, a history I should cap by finally reading the whole thing. I think that will be a good post-Buchan summer project. Until then, check out Dangerous Journey and Taylor and Sutphin’s Little Pligrim’s Progress, especially if you have kids and you want something that will really shape their faith and imaginations.

* A lesson in just how literate people who don’t read a book can still be when they have a culture to support their knowledge and understanding of it, something I often think about with regard to medieval people.

** Thank you, I will not be taking questions at this time.

I’m just a Poe boy from a... chosen family?

Edgar Allan Poe was orphaned just a month before his third birthday, when his actress mother Eliza died in Richmond, Virginia. Her husband and Edgar’s father, David Poe, had abandoned the family some time before and died the same month in obscure circumstances. The three Poe children were divvied up: the eldest son, Henry, went to live with David’s parents in their hometown of Baltimore. The youngest, Rosalie, was adopted by a Richmond family. Edgar, the middle child, was fostered but never adopted by the wealthy John and Frances Allan, also of Richmond.

Edgar’s relationship with his foster father was famously volatile, at least once Edgar reached adolescence and especially after the death of Frances. Eventually, John Allan cut Poe off from all contact and assistance and did not even mention him in his will.

I note all this by way of introducing this passage from A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, an otherwise good Poe biography by Mark Dawidziak that I’m currently reading. Here the author quotes the director of a Poe museum to illustrate the important changes brought about by Poe’s relocation to Baltimore after having left the army and intentionally flunked out of West Point:

“The idea of your chosen family is a more modern idea, but you see that with Poe. . . . In Richmond, he ultimately finds rejection. The message is, ‘You don't really belong here.’ Then he goes to Baltimore and finds the family that says, ‘You’re one of us.’ He finds his chosen family here. This is the house where Poe sought refuge. Maria, no stranger to poverty, welcomed him into her household. He goes dark here and begins to write those short stories. This tiny little house is where a huge literary career has its real start.”

This is a truly bizarre bit of sentimentalism since Poe’s “chosen family” in Baltimore is, in fact, his actual family.

Poe—as the author describes immediately before that paragraph—moved in with his paternal grandmother, his aunt (the Maria mentioned above, his father’s sister), his older brother, and two cousins, one of whom, Virginia, he would eventually marry. “You’re one of us” is not just a statement of group affinity, it is literally true. If anything, Poe’s return to Baltimore and the love and support he found among the Poes there shows the power of real blood relation rather than the self-fashioned groups championed by so many in this atomized age.

To be fair to the person quoted here, the passage above comes not from a scholarly article or a book but from a taped phone interview, so it’s likely she was speaking off-the-cuff and blundered in trying to make Poe’s changing fortunes relatable. But it’s still a good object lesson in the danger of letting twee modern sentimentality color your view of history.

On the term “assault rifle”

German troops in the Battle of the Bulge carrying (inset) The Sturmgewehr-44, the original assault rifle

Years ago* I wrote an Amazon review for a book on the militarization of American police forces, and among the biggest surprises that came my way when lots of people chose to comment on that review was the accusation that I was “liberal” or otherwise anti-gun because, in the course of describing the military equipment increasingly adopted by even small local police forces, I had used the term assault rifle.

This struck me as an odd reaction. Assault rifle, I thought, may be an awkward politics-adjacent term with probably too-broad connotations but it still denotes a specific thing as precisely as possible. I found it entirely appropriate to use, not least since the author of the book I was reviewing used it, but I still found myself avoiding it over the next few years. Eventually, I became annoyed enough by online arguments about guns—all of which, on both sides, shared a highly emotive imprecision in how they talked about the subject—that I started a blog post with the same title as this one, only to abandon it in incomplete draft form a year or two ago. Why bother?

Well, over the weekend Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons** posted an excellent “mild rant” on precisely this topic: “What is an ‘assault rifle?’” Like me, he was surprised to find himself getting flamed for using the term; like me, he discerned that this had a lot to do with political rather than technical, definitional factors; but unlike me, he took a firm line and expressed it well.

McCollum starts with an assault rifle’s three basic characteristics:

• It has select-fire capability, i.e., it can fire in more than one mode, e.g. fully automatic, semi-automatic, and/or burst

• It feeds ammunition from detachable magazines, as opposed to a belt or internal magazine

• It fires an intermediate rifle cartridge, i.e. a cartridge larger than a pistol cartridge but smaller than full-sized rifle cartridges

This is succinct and technically precise. Stray from these parameters, he notes, and what you have is not an assault rifle. Civilian AR-15s, for instance, that fire an intermediate rifle cartridge and use detachable magazines but can only fire in semi-automatic are not assault rifles—they are simply semi-automatic rifles. An automatic weapon fed from a belt is not an assault rifle, but a machine gun—even if it fires an intermediate cartridge, like the M249 SAW.

Because that third factor—the intermediate cartridge—is decisive. For example, a select-fire weapon with detachable magazines that fires a full-sized rifle cartridge is a light machine gun (like the BAR or Bren); a select-fire weapon with detachable magazines that fires pistol cartridges is a submachine gun (like the Thompson, the MP40, or the UMP). In fact, the term submachine gun was coined to distinguish the smaller, one-man “trench brooms” developed near the end of and immediately following the First World War from the big crew-served belt-fed machine guns—the Maxim, the Vickers, the Spandau—that had already become horribly familiar. Take a look at when the term submachine gun originates and becomes more common. Firearms terminology can be messy, but as in so many other things, a little understanding of history helps.

This is especially true of the term assault rifle. As McCollum points out, assault rifle is a translation of the German Sturmgewehr, a term coined—according to some stories by Hitler himself—to distinguish a newly developed service rifle from its predecessors. The rifle was the Sturmgewehr-44 or StG-44. It was select-fire, fed from a detachable magazine, and it fired an intermediate cartridge, a shortened version of the 7.92mm Mauser rifle round. This proved its key innovation, both for practical reasons (modern infantry combat typically occurs within a few hundred yards, making a rifle that can hit a target 2,000 yards away a waste for all but snipers) and economic ones (reducing the amount of raw materials per round, giving Hitler’s war machine literally more bang for its buck).

Whoever coined the term, it was a helpful designation for a new thing—no previous weapon did precisely what the StG-44 did in the way the StG-44 was designed to do it, and it set the standard for a whole new variety of firearms. Whatever their design, military rifles ever since have been defined according to the StG-44’s characteristics.

And yet there’s that pesky Sturm.***

The word had appealing propaganda value to the Germans and retains it in English, assault being “scary military language” to a large class of politically active people. This has laden a useful and specific term with political connotations. As McCollum notes, assault rifle is often mentally bundled up with assault weapon, virtually meaningless verbiage used for legislation intended to create a “blanket prohibition on firearms that had a military appearance” (emphasis mine), usually related to accessories that don’t materially alter the lethality of the weapons in question.

The result is two political camps: one that, operating either in ignorance or bad faith, makes sweeping statements about vaguely defined “assault weapons” in pursuit of even more sweeping legislation, and another camp that has reacted to this rhetoric by avoiding the term assault rifle in the belief that it using it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. As McCollum puts it, they think calling an assault rifle an assault rifle is “surrendering to the people who want to ban guns.”

But the opposite is actually true. McCollum:

We should use the term assault rifle in its technically proper context because to do otherwise would be to essentially surrender the use of language to people who are deliberately misusing it in an attempt to pass legislative agendas.

McCollum is right. If our language is to have any set meaning, it depends on knowledgeable people of good faith to insist on precise definitions and careful usage. Changing our vocabulary to avoid words tainted by political debate is to play an Orwellian game that those of good faith can’t win. And, as should be clear anywhere you care to look, there is far more at stake in this than a single firearms term of art.

More if you’re interested

CJ Chivers’s The Gun is a deeply researched and authoritative history of automatic weapons from the Gatling gun through the first truly automatic weapon, the Maxim gun, through the submachine gun and light machine gun eras until settling into the dueling developments of the AK-47 and AR-15/M-16. Along the way he gives brief space to the StG-44 and notes its crucial role in the rise of the assault rifle. I highly recommend it.

Speaking of the StG-44, Forgotten Weapons has done several great videos on the rifle over the years. You can check out two good ones, including a range demonstration, here and here, and a comparison with a more famous early assault rifle, the AK-47, here.

Notes

* By a weird coincidence, I posted that review ten years ago today.

** I think I discovered Forgotten Weapons while researching the Griswold and Gunnison revolver for Griswoldville. I had seen demonstrations of reproduction pistols but McCollum offered a solid history and technical breakdown that proved very helpful. You can watch that here. Subsequently, when casting about for names for minor characters in my most recent book, The Snipers, I settled on “McCollum” for a member of the team that makes the climactic assault.

*** Apparently some people want to translate Sturmgewehr using the most literal cognate available in English: storm. But as several native German speakers point out in the comments on McCollum’s video, assault is a standard, unremarkable, accurate translation for Sturm. The “storm” the German word is related to is not the kind predicted by the local weatherman, but the kind undertaken by medieval infantry scrambling up siege ladders or Washington’s Continental regulars at Yorktown—storming the ramparts. This obviously means “assault.”

An effect of sense

When I reviewed Rob Brotherton’s Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories earlier this week I mentioned the pattern-finding processes built into our minds, the necessary, natural, and helpful instincts that can also lead us into error unless we carefully discipline our thinking. As it happens, I’ve run across two good examples of this kind of aberrant pattern-finding in the last few days (Coincidence??? Yes!), which I’ve decided to supplement with one more that I’ve personally encountered several times.

An ambiguous provocation

One of the pitfalls of writing fiction is the possibility of mistakes creeping in during revision, the stage when you’re supposed to be fixing mistakes. (I generate more typos in my own work during revision than at any other point of the process.)

This week I finally started reading The Name of the Rose, the great historical novel by Umberto Eco in which William of Baskerville, a Franciscan friar, investigates a series of murders in an Italian monastery. Assisting him is Adso of Melk, a young German Benedictine, and opposing him is Bernard Gui, a real-life Dominican inquisitor. In his lengthy postscript to the novel, Eco relates the following anecdote:

As I read the reviews of the novel, I felt a thrill of satisfaction when I found a critic . . . who quoted a remark of William's made at the end of the trial . . . “What terrifies you most in purity?” Adso asks. And William answers: “Haste.” I loved, and still love, these two lines very much. But then a reader pointed out to me that on the following page, Bernard Gui, threatening the cellarer with torture, says: “Justice is not inspired by haste, as the Pseudo Apostles believe, and the justice of God has centuries at its disposal.” And the reader rightly asked me what connection I had meant to establish between the haste feared by William and the absence of haste extolled by Bernard. At that point I realized that a disturbing thing had happened. The exchange between Adso and William does not exist in the manuscript. I added this brief dialogue in the galleys, for reasons of concinnity: I needed to insert another scansion before giving Bernard the floor again. And naturally, as I was making William loathe haste . . . I completely forgot that, a little later, Bernard speaks of haste. If you reread Bernard’s speech without William’s, it becomes simply a stereotyped expression, the sort of thing we would expect from a judge, a commonplace on the order of “All are equal before the law.” Alas, when juxtaposed with the haste mentioned by William, the haste mentioned by Bernard literally creates an effect of sense; and the reader is justified in wondering if the two men are saying the same thing, or if the loathing of haste expressed by William is not imperceptibly different from the loathing of haste expressed by Bernard. The text is there, and produces its own effects. Whether I wanted it this way or not, we are now faced with a question, an ambiguous provocation; and I myself feel embarrassment in interpreting this conflict, though I realize a meaning lurks there (perhaps many meanings do).

Here, the accidental repetition of a distinctive word creates “an effect of sense” in the reader, the feeling that there is some significant linkage between the two characters. And because its meaning is not immediately clear, it provokes the reader, who feels intuitively that there is something here that must be investigated and uncovered. Its very ambiguity suggests significance, so much so that a reader went to the trouble of asking Eco for an explanation.

It turns out there is no such linkage at all, but the feeling remains. Not a bad parallel to the kind of suspicions, arising seemingly out of nowhere, that commonly lead to conspiracy theories.

Cui bono?

I decided to follow up Suspicious Minds by reading the new revised edition of Conspiracy Theories: A Primer, by Joseph Uscinski and Adam Enders, a short academic study of conspiracy theories and other “anomalous beliefs.” In its chapter on the psychology and sociology of conspiracism, the authors introduce intentionality bias, which Brotherton covers well in Suspicious Minds, as well as a concept the authors call cheater detectors: “the willingness to suspect others of cheating,” especially when those others are perceived to benefit from an event. This can lead to “a tendency . . . to make an inferential leap from incentive to conspiracy.”

They continue:

For a real-world example, we could look to the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. Scalia's passing gave then-president Barack Obama the opportunity to shift the balance of the Court in his favor. Since he and his party had something to gain, some (including former president Trump) jumped to the conclusion that Obama had Scalia murdered. A more sober interpretation might be that an overweight, seventy-nine-year-old smoker with diabetes and heart problems isn’t exactly unlikely to die from natural (i.e., non-homicidal) causes. If we assumed that every time a grandmother passed away the grandchildren expecting to receive an inheritance murdered her, then every grandchild who inherits money must be a murderer! Such a view is obviously untenable.

That last example is a good takedown of one of the most annoying hermeneutical principles in modern popular discourse: the cui bono? (Who benefits?) principle. The question of cui bono? is staple of conspiracist thinking, which is a problem because of its simplifying, reductivist effect. Just because someone benefits in some relative way from an event does not mean that they intended or even wanted it to happen.

Kingfish

I’ve taught both halves of US History for eleven years now, and still use, with occasional updates and modifications, the PowerPoint slideshows I designed for my lectures during my first year. When I teach the Great Depression and introduce left-wing critics of the New Deal, one of the major figures I describe is Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana and eventually one of its two US senators. Long, a populist autocrat and vocal proponent of public spending and wealth redistribution, viewed FDR and the New Deal as insufficiently left-wing and vocally criticized both the policy program and the president himself.

I include some photos and usually take a detour to YouTube to show clips of Long giving speeches, but here are the points on my one slide about Long in a subsection I call “New Deal Backlash”:

• Huey Long of Louisiana

• Radical democratic populist

• “Share the Wealth” plan to make “every man a king”

• Popularity a challenge to FDR

• Possibility of presidential campaign, but assassinated

I’ve been meaning to modify these last two points for years, because do you know what a consistent minority of students immediately suspect when this information is presented in this way? Again—the effect is instantaneous. Such patterns seem to suggest themselves.

As it happens, Long’s assassination also offers a good example for how to discipline this kind of thinking: by simply delving into the details. In the last few years I’ve shown my classes an “Unsolved Mysteries” segment on the Long assassination from 1992. It’s as fun and sensationalistic as you’d expect (I vividly remember watching Long’s bodyguards blow the assassin away as an eight-year old), but it does a good enough job of conveying the complexity in the lives of Long and his aggrieved assassin, Dr Carl Weiss, to put a hypothetical FDR hitman firmly out of mind.

To me, one of the most fascinating aspects of two fruitful fields for conspiracy theories—the JFK assassination and Hitler’s suicide—is the way the very possibility of conspiracy dissolves the more specifically you look at the details. Each event involved not only the major names but hundreds of other people, all of whom can be studied and charted individually and all of whose stories interact with each other’s and hundreds more. And there are tons of documentation. It’s often possible to know, minute by minute, who is in which room of the Führerbunker at any given time in the days surrounding Hitler’s death, and the same is true of the people inside the Texas Schoolbook Depository on the day Oswald shot Kennedy. (Here’s an excellent recent video on precisely this topic.)

All of which shows that conspiracy theories are easier to formulate and to believe—these dots are easier to connect—when you forget that the figures involved in them are people with lives and attachments living in complex communities, not game pieces.

Conclusion

In all three of these cases you have patterns naturally detected and suggested by the mind. Merely noticing them is not enough. A pattern is not evidence of the truth of any conclusions you may draw from them—the pattern may not even exist. Our thinking has to be subject to standards of truth outside its own natural processes.

More if you’re interested

Definitely check out that Lemmino documentary on the people inside and near by the Texas Schoolbook Depository on November 22, 1963. It’s excellently done, and if it weren’t so long I would certainly show it to my students. Here’s one I always show them, about one of the individuals whose behavior on that day never could have been predicted. I especially like the interviewee’s macro vs micro view of history. For what really happened in Hitler’s busy, crowded bunker in April and May of 1945, I always recommend the sixth edition of The Last Days of Hitler, by Hugh Trevor-Roper, and the more up-to-date Hitler’s Death, by Luke Daly-Groves, which I reviewed here long ago. If you’d like to hear from one of the many people present, Heinz Linge’s memoir is a worthwhile read. And Umberto Eco was no stranger to conspiracy theories. His satirical novel Foucault’s Pendulum concerns academics who invent a wild conspiracy theory for fun, only to have the theory start coming true.

Finally, I can’t pass over the actor playing Huey Long in the “Unsolved Mysteries” reenactment. This is Coen brothers veteran John McConnell (“And stay out of the Woolsworth!”), who also originated the role of Ignatius J Reilly in a stage version of A Confederacy of Dunces.

A Coffin for Dimitrios

Having read and reread a lot of John Buchan, Ian Fleming, John Le Carré, and Len Deighton—some of the great names in spy novel and thrillers—I noticed another name that often came up when, between their books, I would read about these authors: Eric Ambler. Ambler, an English novelist with a career stretching from the 1930s to the 90s, is often fitted into a crucial place in the history of the thriller between the more romantic adventure style of a Buchan, the hardened but still exciting sensibility of a Fleming, or the grey workaday espionage of a Le Carré or Deighton. Ambler’s name came up often enough, and with serious enough admiration, that it stuck in my mind, and when I ran across a copy of his 1939 novel A Coffin for Dimitrios I eagerly seized the chance to read it.

A Coffin for Dimitrios begins with Charles Latimer, a former academic now subsisting on his surprisingly successful mystery novels, aimlessly whiling away a trip to Istanbul as he prepares for his next book. When he meets Colonel Haki, a Turkish police officer, at a party and Haki expresses admiration for his novels, Latimer is given the chance to look into a real crime, to see the disorder of crime, violence, and death, the incompleteness of real mysteries.

Latimer, intrigued, agrees, and Haki takes him to the morgue. On the slab is the body of Dimitrios Makropoulos, a Greek master of organized crime. The police had fished him out of the Bosporus that morning, stabbed and drowned.

Haki briefs Latimer on Dimitrios’s record: theft, blackmail, murder, espionage on behalf of parties unknown, conspiracy to assassinate the president of a fragile Balkan state, drug smuggling, sex trafficking. Dimitrios’s crimes, Haki makes clear, are not the equivalent of a tidy poisoning in an English country house, and Dimitrios himself was thoroughly nasty. Unredeemable. And terribly powerful.

After Haki’s tour of the morgue and reading of Dimitrios’s file Latimer tries to move on, to return to work on his next book, but Dimitrios’s true story nags at him—especially its incompleteness. Haki’s file had long gaps in it, with Dimitrios disappearing from Izmir or Athens only to appear again in Belgrade or Paris years later, working another racket. Latimer decides to find out the whole story. He tells himself it’s research for a book.

Latimer’s search takes him from Istanbul to Athens, Sofia, Geneva, and finally Paris. At first he doesn’t realize what he’s got himself into. Questions about Dimitrios provoke icy silence or outright hostility. Local authorities obligingly try to help, but it’s clear that they have only the thinnest understanding of Dimitrios’s career. Latimer gets his best information from Dimitrios’s former collaborators—a Bulgarian madam, a Danish smuggler, a Polish spymaster—but he must work to convince them to talk and only slowly realizes that they have angles of their own to play now that Dimitrios is dead.

There is much more to A Coffin for Dimitrios, but to explain more would be to reveal too much. One of the pleasures of Ambler’s sprawling detective tale is the manner in which it unfolds, with Latimer picking up clues, chasing leads, and often stumbling across information that is more meaningful to the criminals he meets than to himself. Simply understanding what he’s uncovered makes up a large part of his work, but his sense that he’s onto something important keeps him searching even as his research grows more dangerous and the surviving members of Dimitrios’s criminal network start to ensnare him in their own schemes.

The novel’s setting proves another of its strengths. This is eastern Europe twenty years after the catastrophe of the First World War, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the creation of new states like Yugoslavia out of the rubble of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Memory of the war and the violence and chaos that, rather than ceasing, grew worse in the aftermath haunt every place Latimer visits and every person he meets. Cops, customs officers, nightclub dancers, and even strangers on trains all have stories to tell. This is the bustling, seedy, multilingual, darkly cosmopolitan world of international crime—imagine Casablanca crossed with The Third Man—and Ambler evokes it brilliantly.

And, like all of the other writers I began this review with, Ambler is an excellent writer. Strong, direct prose and precisely observed descriptions immediately draw the reader in, and, despite the globetrotting plot, Ambler does not waste time on travelogue. In addition to The Third Man, which I enjoy just as much in Graham Greene’s novella as the noir film based on it, A Coffin for Dimitrios reminded me a lot of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, another thriller whose plot bestrides Europe just before the Second World War and one of my favorite reads last year. This is a spare, tense story of obsession and revelation, of an ordinary man drawn by his own curiosity into a dark world standing just out of sight in the streets of Europe’s most important cities.

If A Coffin for Dimitrios has any flaw, it is that the pacing flags somewhat in the middle as several characters in a row retell their stories of falling in with Dimitrios, but these chapters are entertaining and interesting in their own right and set up a suspenseful and satisfying final confrontation between Latimer, one of the many crooks he has met along the way, and a figure he never expected to meet when he began his search.

If you like any of the other authors I’ve mentioned above—and if you follow this blog you must surely like a few of them—or if you simply enjoy solid, well-crafted, fast-paced, and suspenseful thrillers, check out A Coffin for Dimitrios. Having read this one, I’ll certainly read others by Eric Ambler.

Werner Herzog on psychoanalysis (and the 20th century)

Coincidental to my reading and review of Bill Watterson’s The Mysteries last weekend, today I ran across this passage on psychoanalysis from filmmaker Werner Herzog’s recent memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All*:

“I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become ‘uninhabitable.’ I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.”

As in Watterson’s book, Herzog suggests here that the drive to illuminate and resolve—and, inevitably, to control—can only end in catastrophe. Food for thought.

Last year I read Herzog’s short novel The Twilight World and greatly enjoyed it. I haven’t delved deep into his filmography, which I keep meaning to correct, but his movie Invincible has proven uniquely haunting to me ever since I first watched it twenty years ago. I recommend it.

*German title: Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle. The German-language audiobook is the only version currently available through my library. Might be a good opportunity to scrub some of the rust off my German.

How fragility honors the dead

I’m currently reading and almost finished with Ron Rash’s latest novel, The Caretaker. One of the main characters, Blackburn Gant, is a disfigured polio survivor and the titular caretaker of a church graveyard in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn, owing to his occupation, his outsider status in the town, and the events of the novel, has a mind consumed with death, regret, and his quiet duty to render proper respect to the dead in his little patch of ground.

Late in the novel, as the plot builds toward a climactic confrontation, Blackburn walks into town and has this small moment:

“As he neared Middlefork, Blackburn saw to the left where, among broken slabs of stone, small blue flowers bloomed. If you came upon periwinkle in woods or a meadow, Wilkie said a graveyard likely had been there. It had always struck Blackburn how something fragile as a flower could honor the dead longer than stone. Longer than memory too, a lot longer.”

A beautiful and evocative passage. Sarah has told me that daffodils, which might surprise you in scattered clusters or even great bright patches in the middle of the woods as you drive through the rural South, often mark the sites of old homeplaces. Ever since she pointed that out I’ve noticed them everywhere, vanished homesteads, without even the usual stone marker of a lonely chimney, and I’ve often felt something of what Blackburn feels here.

At least in the South, businesses that cut tombstones describe themselves as selling monuments. One wonders just how much of our purposeful effort to remember or be remembered—no matter how monumental—will survive while the small, accidental, fragile things with which we’ve marked a loss or even just the passing of time will outlast both them and us.

Great-Uncle Harry

The church at Linton, where Harry Palin’s father served as vicar; ANZAC Cove at Gallipoli; soldiers going over the top at the Somme

This week was another week spent sick, with a sick wife and two sick kids, which was a challenge but also meant a bit more time to read than has been the case lately. Among the most pleasurable books I finished—one of the most enjoyable and moving reads in quite a while—was Great-Uncle Harry, a recently published biography by Monty Python’s Michael Palin.

The Harry of the title is Harry Palin, whom Michael Palin never knew as anything more than a younger son of the family who was lost in the First World War, decades before he was born. An older aunt gave Palin papers and memorabilia many years ago, but it wasn’t until touring the Somme battlefields and noting Harry’s name on a memorial wall that he felt the need to learn more about Harry. This book, after years of travel, consulting the archives of English public schools, tea importers, colonial newspapers, and the British army as well as Harry’s own war diaries, is the remarkable result.

Harry was the youngest child of a bookish English country vicar and his Irish-American wife, and Michael is able, through his thorough exploration of the existing records, to piece together a picture of an amiable but directionless young man. Harry quit school and worked two abortive jobs on tea plantations in India before decamping for New Zealand, where he was working as a farmhand when war broke out in 1914. He joined up in a New Zealand unit and deployed to Egypt before fighting in the sweltering, claustrophobic campaign at Gallipoli and, finally, fatally, at the Somme in France. There he fell in September 1916, the last man killed in a small attack on a crossroads. The location of his death is quiet ploughland today. He has no grave.

That Michael Palin was able to construct even this thorough a picture of an ordinary, undistinguished, and relatively unsuccessful young man more than a century after his death is surprising. Palin draws not only on the archival records I mentioned above—including lackluster performance reviews from the tea planters he worked for—but on broader research into Harry’s context, including the memoirs, both published unpublished, of other men in Harry’s unit, like the experienced sergeant who saw and reported him killed. He was even able to track down descendants of the girl to whom Harry proposed, unsuccessfully, before his final deployment to France.

Even more strikingly, Palin consulted with Peter Jackson, whose documentary They Shall Not Grow Old is one of the finest tributes to the men of this generation. Jackson consulted his extensive and well-catalogued collection of New Zealand First World War photos to find several from Gallipoli that very likely show Harry in action. These appear in the book’s photo inserts, remarkable candids of the young man described, often at the great distance imposed by the kind of records available to Palin, in the book itself.

This level of care and research marks Great-Uncle Harry as a labor of love, and the sense of duty Palin owes to Harry is evident throughout. So too is Palin’s charity and generosity to Harry’s generation, one easily and frequently scoffed at and more and more often impugned, but presented here on its own terms and with great understanding. This is a work not only of recovered memory but of profound pietas.

But Great-Uncle Harry is not only one man’s story. Palin also provides a portrait of Harry’s entire family, paying special attention to Harry’s parents and their unusual love story, as well as Harry’s older and seemingly more respectable siblings, as well as his nieces and nephews—including Michael’s father. If there is any flaw in this well-researched, briskly and engagingly written book, it is that Harry’s parents take up too great a proportion of the story in a book about Harry. But this is a minor criticism, and by the time Harry arrives as one last, late child of this most Victorian couple, one has a clear, strong feeling for his family and the world they live in. And, as we already know Harry’s fate, a note of poignancy enters with him.

That note runs through the remainder of Palin’s book, deepening with each chapter. The result is a uniquely intimate and moving look at a man whose memory time and fate and the sheer numbers slaughtered in the war should have annihilated, but which has been rescued by a generation he never lived to know. “Harry and I,” Palin reflects in his conclusion, “are not so far apart.”

Agatha Christie on historical perspective

Coincident to my recent posts about the “right side” of history and how our understanding of what happened in the past changes and, ideally, grows more thorough and accurate as time passes, here’s Agatha Christie in the short story “The Coming of Mr Quin,” which I’m reading in the collection Midwinter Murder: Fireside Tales from the Queen of Mystery.

Briefly, a New Year’s Eve party at a comfortable home is interrupted just after midnight by the arrival of a Mr Harley Quin, whose car has broken down. Quin says that he knew the house’s former owner, one Derek Capel, who unexpectedly killed himself a decade prior. Notice how Quin invites the partygoers to revisit what they know about the incident:

‘A very inexplicable business,’ said Mr Quin, slowly and deliberately, and he paused with the air of an actor who has just spoken an important cue.

‘You may well say inexplicable,’ burst in Conway. ‘The thing's a black mystery—always will be.’

‘I wonder,’ said Mr Quin, non-committally. ‘Yes, Sir Richard, you were saying?’

‘Astounding—that's what it was. Here's a man in the prime of life, gay, light-hearted, without a care in the world. Five or six old pals staying with him. Top of his spirits at dinner, full of plans for the future. And from the dinner table he goes straight upstairs to his room, takes a revolver from a drawer and shoots himself. Why? Nobody ever knew. Nobody ever will know.’

‘Isn’t that rather a sweeping statement, Sir Richard?’ asked Mr Quin, smiling.

Conway stared at him.

‘What d’you mean? I don't understand.’

‘A problem is not necessarily unsolvable because it has remained unsolved.’

‘Oh! Come, man, if nothing came out at the time, it's not likely to come out now—ten years afterwards?’

Mr Quin shook his head gently.

“The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion.”

— Mr Quin

‘I disagree with you. The evidence of history is against you. The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion. If you like to call it so, it is, like everything else, a question of relativity.’

Alex Portal leant forward, his face twitching painfully.

‘You are right, Mr Quin,’ he cried, ‘you are right. Time does not dispose of a question—it only presents it anew in a different guise.’

Evesham was smiling tolerantly.

‘Then you mean to say, Mr Quin, that if we were to hold, let us say, a Court of Inquiry tonight, into the circumstances of Derek Capel’s death, we are as likely to arrive at the truth as we should have been at the time?’

‘More likely, Mr Evesham. The personal equation has largely dropped out, and you will remember facts as facts without seeking to put your own interpretation upon them.’

Evesham frowned doubtfully.

‘One must have a starting point, of course,’ said Mr Quin in his quiet level voice. ‘A starting point is usually a theory. One of you must have a theory, I am sure. How about you, Sir Richard?’

Simple and tailored to the mystery genre, but not a bad explanation of how the greater perspective afforded by historical distance can lead to a more accurate understanding of important events. There are, certainly, parts of my own life I understand much better now than when I was an eyewitness living through them.

I’ve been trying to read more of Agatha Christie the last year or so after having made it to my late thirties with Murder on the Orient Express as my sole experience of her storytelling. My wife, on the other hand, has read a lot of Christie, and has done so over many years. But even she was unfamiliar with Christie’s Mr Quin, who is the subject of several short stories collected as The Mysterious Mr Quin. I’m enjoying him in this story so far—especially with this kind of sharp historical aside—and plan to check that out.