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.

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.

Where now the rider?

I mentioned in my summer reading recap that I’m currently reading Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, which my daughter thoughtfully picked out for me from her classroom’s library. Here’s a passage from about a third of the way into the book, the first time Joey, the horse, and his second owner, a British cavalry officer, see combat in the fall of 1914:

The gentle squeak of leather, the jingling harness, and the noise of hastily barked orders were drowned now by the pounding of hooves and the shout of the troopers as we galloped down on the enemy in the valley below us. Out of the corner of my eye, I was aware of the glint of Captain Nicholls’s heavy sword. I felt his spurs in my side and I heard his battle cry. I saw the gray soldiers ahead of us raise their rifles and heard the death rattle of a machine gun, and then quite suddenly I found that I had no rider, that I had no weight on my back anymore, and that I was alone out in front of the squadron.

A simply narrated but powerful moment, and presented believably from the point of view of an animal. Having seen Spielberg’s film adaptation several times, I had a good idea what the outcome of this attack would be, and yet when I read “quite suddenly I found that I had no rider, that I had no weight on my back anymore,” I choked up. I was moved.

Part of it is the fate of the kind, noble, courageous Captain Nicholls, and part of it is the finely wrought dramatic irony of Joey not realizing at first what has happened. (Another novel to do the same thing extremely well is Richard Adams’s Traveller.) But another factor is surely the image that the passage creates—the riderless horse.

The movie, in one of its most beautifully shot and stirring scenes, makes dramatic and stirring use of this image, but for my money the subtlety and simplicity of the original in Morpurgo’s novel cuts deeper.

Reading this passage brought to mind another riderless horse, this one from Michael Shaara’s great Gettysburg novel The Killer Angels. Just before Pickett’s Charge, the climactic Confederate assault on the last day of the battle, General Lewis Armistead cautions a fellow brigade commander named Richard Garnett against participating in the attack. Garnett is ill and can’t march in with the infantry; he’ll have to ride, and that means he’ll be a huge target. Garnett will not be dissuaded—an officer’s job is to lead.

The attack commences and Pickett’s division, including Armistead and Garnett’s brigades, moves out and comes under heavy artillery and finally rifle and canister fire. As Armistead, coming up with his men behind Garnett’s brigade, nears the Union line, we read:

Armistead thought: we won’t make it. He lifted the sword screaming, and moved on, closer, closer, but it was all coming apart; the whole world was dying. Armistead felt a blow in the thigh, stopped, looked down at blood on his right leg. But no pain. He could walk. He moved on. There was a horse coming down the ridge: great black horse with blood all over the chest, blood streaming through bubbly holes, blood on the saddle, dying eyes, smoke-gray at the muzzle: Garnett’s horse.

A gut punch of a conclusion to an already apocalyptic paragraph. Armistead briefly looks over the field to see if Garnett is still alive, unhorsed and on foot somewhere, but the reader knows immediately. The riderless horse tells the whole story.

The same horse reappears once later, after the attack has failed, as General Longstreet, the overall commander of the assault, responds to the destruction of his men:

There was nothing to send now, no further help to give, and even if Lee on the other side would send support now it would be too late. Longstreet hugged his chest. He got down off the fence. A black horse rode up out of the smoke: familiar spot on a smoky forehead, blood bubbling from a foaming chest: Garnett’s mount.

If the first passage is an apocalypse, with the horse a sign in the midst of catastrophe, here the horse is the final, mournful sign of defeat, a single, hollow death knell.

As with War Horse, the film adaptation Gettysburg uses this image to good effect. I think the purely visual language of film may even improve it. First, the film expands the point of view of Shaara’s novel by actually showing the viewer what happens to Garnett. He charges the Union line, trying to lead by example, and rides directly into the sights of a Union cannoneer who fires at him point-blank.* Garnett disappears instantly. We get a stunned reaction shot from General Lee, who watches from afar through his field glasses, and then this shot:

Soon after we cut to Armistead’s brigade following behind, and Armistead sees the horse and knows. No words are necessary.

And later, after Armistead has briefly breached the Union line, been shot down and captured, and the attack has collapsed, the horse reappears a final time—not for Longstreet as in the novel, but for General Pickett, who had insisted that Garnett be allowed to ride at the head of his brigade, a poignant double reminder.

The film does this wordlessly, in one of its most powerful shots.** First, as the walking wounded straggle back to the Confederate line the horse passes among them at a trot:

The camera follows, both panning and tracking with it from right to left—away from the fighting and the failed objective—to end on a poignant medium shot of Pickett, pushing in as he lowers his field glasses. The usually vivacious and fiery Pickett has been stunned into silence:

The riderless horse goes back much further than War Horse and The Killer Angels, of course. Consider the plaintive questions of The Wanderer. When the poem’s speaker turns from describing his lonely fate to ask where everything that once mattered and made life a comfort to him has gone—genap under nihthelm, darkened under night-helm—the very first pair in the list is:

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?

“Where is the horse? Where the young man?” Or, in a more famous but slightly less literal rendering by Tolkien, “Where now the horse and the rider?” These are paired in a way that doesn’t scan with most of the rest of the poem, suggesting their inseparability even in the loss of both.

And if we go back to the foundation of Western Literature, the last word of the Iliad, in a sentence that closes out Hector’s funeral and ends the action of the poem with thousands dead and the Trojan War still unwon, is the slaughtered Hector’s epithet: ἱπποδάμοιο, breaker of horses.

Is there any more poetic and immediately mournful image than the war horse with an empty saddle? Geared for war but aimless, it instantly suggests a whole tragedy. The riderless horse is a brave man, lost forever. The saddle is the gap he has left in the world.

* I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone else mention this, but it’s pretty clear from the action around the gun that the filmmakers mean this to be Alonzo Cushing’s battery. Just watch what’s going on with the gunner and the dead officer right before Garnett charges.

** It’s not appreciated enough just how well shot Gettysburg is.

How often do I think about Ancient Rome?

Cicero Denounces Catiline, by Cesare Maccari—a favorite painting, inaccurate in detail but capturing the spirit and drama of the moment

Every day.

Seriously—every day. And really, what did you think my answer would be? When my wife heard about this online trend she just laughed. She didn’t even bother asking me.

Why do guys think about the Romans so often? I can’t speak for every man—and I may be especially unrepresentative because I teach history for a living—but I think that while it must have something to do with the rich mixture of drama and violence, the personal and the political, the depraved and the philosophical, the great crowd of examples both to emulate and condemn, and the momentous and long-lasting consequences and sheer range of events encompassed by Rome’s history, another part of it must surely be how familiar Rome sometimes feels.

That’s true not only in the sense that we in the West are, in a sense, part of a cultural familia with many branches and in-laws but a clear lineage all the way back to Rome, but in the more usual sense. On some level, no matter how strange they are, you know these people. I often tell my students that one of the joys of studying the Late Republic is the soap opera feeling that not only does everyone in this rather upstart city know everyone else, we can know them all, too, and vicariously participate in their upheavals. Some enterprising guy out there could make a fortune with a Roman fantasy league.

That’s my two denarii, anyway. I could say a lot more, but that would be less fun.

Instead, since I lured y’all here with what is basically a meme, let me offer something of more value. If you too think about Rome and want more to think about, more deeply and fully and with more of that delicious detail, let me offer a short list of my favorite books on Rome. This is by no means exhaustive and I could have made the list much longer; these are just my personal favorites and the books that have benefited me most over the years.

General histories and biographies

Roman Realities, by Finley Hooper—My college Rome class’s textbook, this is an older survey but it holds up, being well-written, comprehensive, and judicious in its judgments.

Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, by Lesley Adkins and Roy A Adkins—This is a reference work rather than a proper history, but it’s a fantastically rich resource, covering everything from the gods, the structure of the Republic’s government, and the organization of the army to town names, baby names (a pretty short section), and holidays. I’ve consulted my copy regularly for nearly twenty years.

Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity, by JE Lendon—This is a broad study of Greco-Roman warfare from Homer to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, so only half of it is about the Romans, but it’s excellent—one of the most helpful and insightful books I’ve read in this area.

The Punic Wars and Cannae: Hannibal’s Greatest Victory, by Adrian Goldsworthy—Two excellent books on the period that first got me hooked on Roman history. The former is an excellent study of all three wars by a master military historian, and the latter is a good short book about the most famous battle of the wars and possibly of all of Roman history. I recommend either depending on how long you like your books.

Scipio Africanus: Greater than Napoleon, by BH Liddell Hart—A short older biography of one of my favorite Roman figures, the victor of the Second Punic War, who is often overshadowed by the enemy he defeated.

The Spartacus War, by Barry Strauss—An excellent short history of the greatest slave rebellion in the Republic. Strauss writes engaging, approachable prose and exercises masterful command of the sources, making this a book I often recommend to students.

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician, by Anthony Everitt—A favorite biography of my favorite Roman. Deeply researched, well written, and admiring but measured in its portrait of Cicero. Because Everitt situates him in his complicated historical context so well, and with such precision and clarity, I often recommend this book as an introduction to the end of the Republic.

Caesar: Life of a Colossus and Augustus, by Adrian Goldsworthy—Two magnificent biographies of the two men, father and adopted son, more responsible than anyone else for the destruction of the Republic and the longevity of the Empire. Goldsworthy, in addition to being an excellent researcher and writer, has good judgement and avoids extremes in his interpretations.

The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination, by Barry Strauss—Another excellent book from Strauss, this time covering the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, the assassination and its aftermath, and the fates of the conspirators, only one of whom died a natural death.

Pax Romana: War, Peace, and Conquest in the Roman World, by Adrian Goldsworthy—A sweeping but detailed study of how the Romans built their empire and carved peace out of chaos. I reviewed this book for University Bookman some years ago, one of my first paid writing jobs. You can read that here.

Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, by James Romm—A look at the irony of one of Rome’s most selfish and perverted emperors having studied under one of its greatest apostles of reason and moderation. A really fascinating and engaging book.

How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy—A detailed study of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the emergence of the early medieval world. Preview of coming attractions.

Rome for kids

Pompeii: Buried Alive! by Edith Kunhardt, illustrated by Michael Eagle—A very good Step Into Reading chapter book with great illustrations and a narrative that builds a palpable but kid-friendly sense of dread. Includes a little bit about the archaeological discovery of Pompeii and the fact that Vesuvius is still active.

The Romans: Usborne Starting Point History, by Phil Roxbee Cox, illustrated by Annabel Spenceley—I think this one may, sadly, be out of print, which is a shame. I got a used copy for my kids years ago and it’s a favorite. Includes nicely-illustrated two-page spreads about many facets of Roman life and some nice cutaways of Roman buildings.

The Traveler’s Guide to Ancient Rome, by John Malam, illustrated by Mike Foster—Another used acquisition, this one is from Scholastic and has even more extensive coverage than the Usborne book, plus a lot more attention to overall historical context with timelines, maps of the city and empire, and more.

Rome in Spectacular Cross-Section, by Stephen Biesty—Having grown up on books of plane schematics, Usborne books, and David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work, I adore cross-sections. Biesty’s books are among the best I’ve ever seen. This is a huge picture book with vast, intricately detailed illustrations of major Roman buildings including the Colosseum, the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter, a Roman bath, and more. It’s amazing. Unfortunately it also appears to be out of print, but your local library may have a copy. That’s how we enjoy it.

Detectives in Togas and The Mystery of the Roman Ransom, by Henry Winterfeld—Two of the books that first introduced me to Rome, these are children’s novels about a group of Roman schoolboys who solve mysteries. Set in a vaguely defined period of the early Principate, they’re not rigorously historically accurate but are leavened with nice period details and a good sense of the spirit of the era. They’re also a lot of fun—I remember devouring them sometime around 4th grade.

Rome in fiction

Pompeii, by Robert Harris—A brilliant historical thriller that uses dramatic irony—we all know exactly what’s going to happen even as the characters struggle to figure it out—to devastating effect. This is the Roman novel I recommend most often to students.

Vindolanda, The Encircling Sea, and Brigantia, by Adrian Goldsworthy—This trilogy set in Roman Britain in the first years of the reign of Trajan follows the adventures of centurion Flavius Ferox, a native Briton of the Silures. Goldsworthy uses his mastery of the Roman world, the Roman army, and Roman Britain specifically to great effect, setting his dramatic action-mystery stories in a rich, complicated, detailed world.

Augustus, by John Williams—An epistolary novel covering the life of Augustus from his rise to power to his final years, with all the ups and downs and personal tragedies in between. I don’t agree with Williams’s interpretation of some things (his take on Cicero is pretty cynical) but this is a brilliantly executed novel.

I, Claudius and Claudius the God, by Robert Graves—Everyone knows and loves these, but what can I say? These are brilliant, fun, dramatic, and moving novels written with great energy, wit, imagination, and a love for the details and the larger-than-life characters of Roman history. They’re classics for a reason.

Helena, by Evelyn Waugh—A profound, moving, and thematically rich historical fantasy about the mother of the first Christian emperor of Rome that follows her from girlhood in Britain to old age in quest of the True Cross.

And before I hand the reins over to the Romans themselves, let me mention my own modest Roman fiction, the novella The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero, about the final hours of my favorite Roman.

The Romans in their own words

Aeneid, by Virgil—The pinnacle of Latin epic and a stirring story of family, nation, and manhood, the Aeneid has been justly admired by everyone from Dante to CS Lewis, who wrote of it: “With Virgil European poetry grows up.” I’ve most recently read the translation by David Ferry but would also recommend those of Robert Fagles, Allen Mandelbaum, and Stanley Lombardo. I have Sarah Ruden’s well-regarded translation on standby for my next readthrough.

Metamorphoses, by Ovid—Most of the “Greek” myths you’ve heard come, in some form, from Ovid. Not my favorite epic but a striking experiment with many beautiful and moving episodes.

The Early History of Rome and The War with Hannibal, by Livy—These are the titles of two of the four extant volumes of Livy as published by Penguin Classics. I’m particularly attracted to these stories of formative catastrophes, whether of a village hanging on to existence by its fingernails or a republic weathering the worst storm yet in its history.

The War Against Catiline, by Sallust—A short history of a crucial moment in the careers of Cicero, Caesar, and Crassus and in the death throes of the Republic. A fresh new translation for Princeton UP’s Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series titled How to Stop a Conspiracy is a great read.

The Gallic War, by Julius Caesar—When Jordan sat down to write this list, Caesar’s commentaries were among the very first things he thought of.

On Duties, On Old Age, and On Friendship, by Cicero—Three excellent long essays on philosophical, moral, and ethical topics that are all full of wisdom and mean a lot to me. There’s much more Cicero I could recommend, but these three are my absolute favorites. The latter two, retitled How to Grow Old and How to Be a Friend, are two of the best volumes in the Princeton UP series mentioned above. I reviewed How to Grow Old on the blog here.

The Twelve Caesars, by Suetonius—If the myths you vaguely remember come from Ovid, the stories of debauched and greedy emperors almost certainly come from here. Robert Graves, author of I, Claudius, translated Suetonius for Penguin Classics.

Agricola and Germania, by Tacitus—I love all of Tacitus but I have read and reread these short treatises for pleasure many times. Agricola is a story of native rebellion and a successful Roman campaign in Britain and Germania, by some assessments the first work of ethnography in history, is of particular interest to me, with its fascinating and tantalizing catalog of different German tribes.

The Golden Ass, by Apuleius—A hilarious romp in which a Greek merchant named Lucius is transformed into a donkey by a witch. Lucius, who is immediately stolen by bandits, then spends years observing the behavior and listening to the stories of ordinary people in the age of the Empire. Stories within stories, absurdity, violence, tragedy, a handful of over-the-top poop jokes, and a happy ending make this some of the most fun Roman literature that has survived.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope you find something good to read here. In the meantime, keep Rome in your thoughts and establish peace, spare the humbled, and conquer the proud.

Swuster sunu

Peter Dennis’s depiction of the Battle of Maldon for Osprey’s Combat: Viking Warrior vs Anglo-Saxon Warrior

One of the noteworthy aspects of The Battle of Maldon is the large number of named individuals, presented as real people, included in what we have left of the poem. Byrhtnoth, the Ealdorman of Essex, is the central figure in the poem’s action and themes, but there are many others like Æthelric and Offa, members of Byrhtnoth’s retinue; or Dunnere, “a simple ceorl” or non-noble freeman; or the brothers Oswold and Ealdwold. Many, like the latter, are given just enough biographical information to identify them to an audience presumably familiar with the event and the men who, overwhelmingly, died in it.

And the poet is careful to distinguish men with shared names, noting the presence of both a Wulfmær and a “Wulfmær the young” and, most damningly, Godric Æthelgar’s son who died fighting as opposed to “that Godric that forsook the field.” Others offer pure tantalization: Æschferð, Ecglaf’s son, from Northumbria, who “showed no faint heart,” is a “hostage” (gysel) of Byrthnoth’s household. Who is he? Why is he a hostage? What’s the Northumbria connection? And is it a coincidence that his name is so similar to Unferð Ecglaf’s son? We’ll probably never know—the poem is concerned only with recording his bravery.

In his notes on Maldon, Tolkien writes this of the first Wulfmær, Byrhtnoth’s nephew specifically by his sister (his swuster sunu): “The relationship was one of special import in Germanic lines and the especially close tie existing between uncle and sister’s son is motive in several legends (notably Finnsburg).”

Tolkien then makes a broader point about the relationship of stories like this to actual historical events and their treatment by modern critics and historians:

“Things do not become legendary unless they are common and poignant human experiences first.”

There is however no reason to suspect that Wulfmær was not actually swuster sunu of Byrhtnoth, and this is a good caution to that kind of criticism which would dismiss as falsification actual events and situations that happen to be [the] same as familiar motives of legends. Things do not become legendary unless they are common and poignant human experiences first. The traditional affection of the relationship (whether or not it be a last survival of matriarchy or not!) may however have been the cause of the poet’s special mention.

I have complained before about the tendency of a certain kind of historian to doubt or dismiss any story that has even the rudiments of a literary shape. According to these, this represents the intrusion of fiction into reality, or perhaps some shadowy figure reshaping raw material to suit a literary design. At worst, it represents deliberate falsehood with a political purpose—that is, propaganda.

Tolkien here correctly inverts that suspicion. The kind of historian or critic he describes has gotten the relationship of legend to reality backwards, and, more specifically in the case in question, they have ignored many other possible explanations for the inclusion of details like Wulfmær’s kinship with Byrhtnoth—not least that it might actually be true.

Later in his notes, Tolkien writes this of Byrhtwold, the old retainer (eald geneat) who gives the famous final speech of the poem, in which he declares his intention to die avenging Byrhtnoth: “We have here another instance of old traditional situation and actual occurrence coinciding. We need not doubt that Byrhtwold was an eald geneat, and that he actually spoke memorable words not unlike the remarkable ones here enshrined. Yet it was traditional for the eald geneat to be relentless and dauntless and ‘speak winged words.’”

Historians and critics would do better to accept that the literary and the actual “coincid[e]” a lot more often than they suspect.

I’ve previously written about a related problem, the tendency of suspicious historians, having seen through everything that strikes them as literary falsehood, to make history boring, here. (Cf CS Lewis on “seeing through” things.) For my thoughts on describing ancient and medieval works as “propaganda,” see here.

Deliverance: a recommendation and a detail

James Dickey and Burt Reynolds on the set of the film adaptation of Dickey’s novel Deliverance

This morning the latest episode of John J Miller’s Great Books Podcast dropped and I was excited to see its subject: James Dickey’s first and greatest novel, Deliverance.

Miller’s guest is Cat Baab-Muguira, who has previously appeared for an episode on Poe and written a book about Poe’s unlikely self-help guidance, which is high on my to-read list. Miller and Baab-Muguira have a really excellent discussion not only of the plot and extraordinarily rich characters, writing, and themes of Deliverance, but also of the film adaptation and Dickey’s life and reputation. (I have some secondhand Dickey stories of my own, courtesy of a neighbor and former coworker.) They discuss the novel’s masculinity especially well, refusing to drop into the oversimplification du jour of “toxic masculinity,” and they handle the most infamous elements of the story deftly, not parking on the sensationalism of it but digging into the layers of meaning Dickey applied to his story. This is one of the best episodes of the show I’ve heard.

But—every time they said that the novel takes place in “northwest Georgia” I yelled at the radio, “northeast!”

This was a really strange detail to goof up, but they repeated it five or six times and so confidently that I began to worry that I’d gotten it wrong. But nope, here’s the novel itself, as Ed talks with his wife the morning of the big canoe trip’s departure for the mountains:

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go okay.

Even Wikipedia has this wrong. Which, as I said, is strange, because every carefully chosen detail of the novel suggests the northeast Georgia mountains. (And there’s no disputing where the film was shot.) The drive northward from Atlanta seems pretty clearly to be that toward Gainesville and points north—I’m old enough to remember changing landscapes and roadside scenes very much like those Dickey describes—and the small towns, mountains, rivers, woods, vegetation, and especially the massive gorge described by Dickey match those of my neck of the woods. And this is important because the setting was important to Dickey and the story. Northwest Georgia is my friend Sam at All the Biscuits in Georgia’s territory and, with all due respect to that area, it’s an entirely different region from “the mountains.”

Again, this is an otherwise excellent episode of The Great Books Podcast. I just had to get that down in writing somewhere before I could move on with my day. If you’ve read Deliverance you know us hillbillies can’t let things go.

You can listen to the episode at the link above or in the podcasting app of your choice, and I strongly recommend you do. Baab-Muguira’s book on Poe is called Poe for your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least Likely Self-Help Guru. It’s on my birthday wishlist and I hope to read it soon.

I wrote about Deliverance here a couple times last year: first in reference to outsiders’ prurient interest in what Flannery O’Connor called the grotesque; second, having been moved to reread the novel, as an illustration of John Gardner’s idea of the “vivid and continuous fictional dream;” and finally in my reading year-in-review, in which I decided it was the best novel I read in 2022.

Charles Portis: LoA and two good appreciations

Yesterday was the official publication day of Charles Portis’s Collected Works in the Library of America. This is an 1100-page one-volume anthology that includes all five of Portis’s novels, four of his short stories, four essays, his autobiographical essay “Combinations of Jacksons” (which I quoted here last week), and a selection of his Civil Rights reporting.

I’ve been anticipating the release of this book ever since LoA announced it online a few months ago. I gather from a few reviews I’ve read that it is worth acquiring even for those of us who already own all of Portis’s novels and Escape Velocity, a “miscellany” edited by Jay Jennings, who has also edited this new collection. I’m curious to look at it; the LoA description says it includes all of Portis’s short stories but his earliest, “Damn!” is not in the table of contents. It also doesn’t include his play Delray’s New Moon. Regardless, it’s going on my wish list.

With the release of the Collected Works I have run across several reviews and appreciations. Here are two exceptionally good ones that I hope y’all will check out.

First, in an review titled “Gringos and Gnomons” in The American Conservative, John Wilson, a great Portis devotee, offers a wonderful appreciation of Portis’s capacious, idiosyncratic, and above all precise body of work from the “deliciously weird” Masters of Atlantis to Wilson’s favorite—and the one vying with True Grit to become my own—Gringos. Wilson:

Why is Gringos my favorite? It has everything I love in Portis’s fiction, all entwined in a single book. Human self-deception, comedy, wickedness and goodness, quotidian joys and sorrows and mostly unspoken consolations of faith, deep absurdity, betrayal and friendship, a sympathetic narrator/protagonist who sees a lot but misses so much: you get that all in Gringos. I was terribly disappointed when no more novels followed, but in retrospect maybe that wasn’t surprising. Sentence by sentence, it is (so I think) easily among the best American novels of the last fifty years.

Wilson’s review is paywalled online but I was able to read the whole thing in the print edition. It’s worth seeking out. When I read it to my wife she said, “This sounds like something you would have written.” Not because I’m as good a writer as Wilson, who is always a delight, but because my repeated praise of Portis has always fallen along the same lines.

The second review I’d recommend is “Signs and Wonders,” a longer essay by Will Stephenson in Harper’s. Stephenson includes not only a good overview of Portis’s novels but some great anecdotes about Portis the man, opening with a great bit about Portis’s visit to Buckingham Palace in the early 1960s. The whole essay is too full of good material to summarize, so please accept this sample paragraph and go read the whole thing:

And just as “recluse,” as Pynchon once said, can be code for “doesn’t like to talk to reporters,” so too can “cult writer” be code for “doesn’t live in New York.” After his fishing-shack sojourn, Little Rock would remain Portis’s home for the rest of his life—“as much as I can call anyplace home,” he clarified to a Memphis newspaper in a rare interview after True Grit’s release. “I guess I don’t really have one.” His regional association can confuse this point. In fact, Portis spent years living out of his truck, as well as in trailers and motels and non-descript apartment complexes. He spent a substantial portion of each year in Mexico. Even True Grit was written, he said, in a village about two hundred miles north of Mexico City; he seemed to consider San Miguel de Allende a kind of second home. His books are as much about being away from Arkansas as they are about being there. The Dog of the South and Gringos are both set predominantly south of the border, Norwood draws on his fish-out-of-water experience of living in New York (and traveling the country), and True Grit’s action takes place largely in the Choctaw Nation, present-day Oklahoma; it is a journey into the past and into historical research, his serious commitment to which is everywhere in evidence in the non-fiction pieces included in this book.

As it happens, this exilic aspect of Portis’s work—journeys to and from, with home seldom glimpsed outside the rearview mirror—is one of the most Southern things about him. One of these days I’m going to get around to writing an essay about that.

Portis’s novels rather famously went out of print during the 1990s (or earlier) until brought back by Overlook, which was seriously doing the Lord’s work there. But even since it became available again, the delight of Portis’s work has most often spread by word of mouth and the occasional paean in places like Oxford American, The Believer, and Esquire. Nevertheless, the covers of his books had to settle for blurbs that often felt faintly dismissive. The most irritating to me, reprinted again and again, was Roy Blount Jr’s: “Charles Portis could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.” Blech.

So it’s gratifying to see Portis getting this kind of recognition. Per Wilson again:

Only long after [a friend] introduced me to Portis did it occur to me that one of the charms of his work was that his name had never even been mentioned when I was in grad school, nor was it bandied about in the lit mags and such I routinely read.

Ditto. I discovered Portis, as I imagine many others did, through True Grit, which I read when the Coens’ film came out just after I finished grad school at Clemson. Very soon I moved on to The Dog of the South and Masters of Atlantis. I certainly felt like I had discovered something—maybe not the last precious Atlantean manuscript but dang close. And I, too, hoped for just one more novel. I think Gringos was the last of his novels that I read, just a few months before my wife and I married. That was ten years ago. Rereading it a third time this spring was a joy—better than ever. And you know how Flannery O’Connor said you can tell when a book is good.

The LoA is a nonprofit publisher and $45 may look steep, but you can’t get all five novels that cheaply in individual paperbacks. All five—and I agree with Wilson, if only through experience, that you can jump in anywhere. If you’re intrigued by Portis, have read True Grit and want to read more, or just like good stories, the LoA’s Collected Works will be worth your while.

Agatha Christie vs the dominion of content

Near the end of the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, hitman Anton Chigurh breaks into his employer’s office and shoots him. The reason? Professional betrayal. His unnamed boss had not only hired him but put a group of cartel killers on the same job without telling him. The result was half of the chaos in the film. As Chigurh watches the light go out of his boss’s eyes, a hapless accountant explains the reasoning behind the betrayal: “He feels—he felt that the more people looking—”

Chigurh cuts him off. His reply is a line I often think of: “That’s foolish. You pick the one right tool.”

Up until now I haven’t written about the Roald Dahl fiasco, a story that has turned into a slowly unfolding revelation of widespread censorship of long-dead novelists. Since Puffin’s silly, craven, artless changes to Dahl’s stories were revealed earlier this year, changes to other authors have come along including Ian Fleming and now Agatha Christie.

Still, I felt like I had actually anticipated this and said all I had to say about it two years ago, when a small but loud number of book influencers on Twitter, Goodreads, Instagram, and TikTok demanded the cutting of individual lines from several popular authors’ latest books. Then, while reading about the Agatha Christie revelations this week, I saw this:

I had heard that Oates is a bit of a… character on Twitter. I can’t judge based on one screenshotted tweet, but even if this were the first strange, ill-informed, and thoughtless thing she had said it would still belong in the Condescension Hall of Fame.

There’s the backhanded compliment of “clever,” the kind of word used of a precocious toddler or a dog that answers more than six or seven commands; the sniffy invocation of style and “sociological realism” as standards of excellence that poor Mrs Christie simply can’t afford; the scare quotes around the idea of a plot twist, as if this is some kind of outlandish and distasteful feature of primitive storytelling; and of course comparison with “more literary” authors, whatever “literary” means here. Probably arbitrarily difficult, though that doesn’t describe Twain, who certainly wrote to entertain, and only some of Faulkner, who still had a connection to a reading public in a way most latter-day “literary” types do not. This is the kind of blithe snobbery more likely heard from the mouths of clichéd British aristocrats in bad movies than in real life.

Last week I finally got (most of) my thoughts about the dominion of “content” out of my system. Read that if you haven’t so you can see where I’m coming from. But note Oates’s last and presumably most important argument: “changing her language will hardly matter.”

Oates’s snobbery is nasty enough, but the implications of this idea are abominable. A good writer is a craftsman. He selects his words carefully and precisely. As he writes he looks for—to bring Chigurh back in—the one right tool, the exact word expressing what he intends and that no other word can. Each word matters. Each must be right. A good author will find it regardless of whether he’s trying to be “literary” or not, and Agatha Christie was a good author. She paid attention, planned carefully, and worked hard at what she did. So did Ian Fleming, something I’ve taken pains to point out.

What Oates is arguing here is the logical endpoint of storytelling as mere content production. She suggests that some gnostic form of Christie’s stories exists independent of the words with which Christie, their author and creator, constructed and told them. As long as you get that, it doesn’t matter what particular words are used to deliver it. They’re interchangeable and replaceable and can be tailored to the consumer. All of this reduces Christie’s careful work to branding on content. The snobbery is a cheap justification of vandalism.

I go into this not because I have an animus toward Oates—I’ve never read any of her presumably “more literary” work and don’t really know anything about her—but because the sentiment she expresses here is representative. I’ve seen many variations of it, usually something like: “They’re just changing a few words so that modern audiences can continue to enjoy them.” Enjoy what? Christie’s books? Because that’s what the editors and sensitivity readers are fooling with.

It’s not Christie’s books that need to change. Oates—a writer!—and everyone who agrees with her or supports the alteration of old books should be ashamed. Not because Christie was the greatest writer who ever lived, though she was a good one, and not because purportedly offensive things must be left in print, but because to treat a writer’s tools, his words—every one of them, even those of which we disapprove—as irrelevant is to undermine the very idea of writing as a craft. It’s an ugly and destructive betrayal.

As it happens, the changes to Christie’s books were not news to me. Last year after Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s The Rest is History episode on Christie I dropped by Barnes & Noble to browse her books. On the copyright page of the very first one I picked up I read a note from the publisher stating that “minor editorial changes” had been made to “outdated cultural representations” but that “for the most part this classic work is reproduced as originally published.” For the most part is doing a lot of work there.

I didn’t buy that book. It wasn’t the one Christie wrote and I was not going to pay for one some grubby failure of a sensitivity reader had gotten ahold of. If you care at all about stories or the art and craft of writing, I encourage you not to settle for bowdlerized, compromised editions, either. And I hope publishers take note.

*****

Addendum: The commonly repeated and mindless rejoinder to the specific example of Agatha Christie is: “What about And Then There Were None? AKA Ten Little Indians? AKA Something Much Worse?” If you can’t tell the difference between changes to a book overseen and approved by the book’s author and those undertaken long after the author is dead, you don’t belong anywhere near someone else’s work.

Against value in literature, for delight

An interesting exchange from near the end of the latest episode of John J Miller’s Great Books podcast, with translator David Slavitt talking about Orlando Furioso:

Miller: What is the value of reading Orlando Furioso today?

Slavitt: None whatever! There’s not a value of reading anything. I mean, there’s a value of reading instructions when you have a new electronic device, but reading by itself does not make anybody better, certainly doesn’t make anybody wiser, it just refines your sensibility. Now, a refined sensibility you would think is an advantage, but what it does is it allows you to be assaulted and affronted and outraged over and over again, probably fifty times more frequently than somebody who has no refinement whatever. The notion that reading is “good” or poems are “great”—all of that seems to me defensive without anybody having attacked. The reason for reading is that it entertains you. I can’t remember which medieval guy it was—Pound quotes him—[wrote that] the purpose of literature is . . . that it may move, that it may teach, that it may delight. And the delight part is more important than the other two. And without that, there’s no sense in undertaking the effort.

Miller: Does Orlando Furioso move and teach?

Slavitt: Well, it teaches because it gives you confidence to turn on any text or any saying, any utterance, and ask of it, “Are you kidding? Do you mean that? Is this true? Is it useful? Is it nonsense?” And “Is it nonsense?” is a question that all readers should bring to whatever they’re reading all the time.

Two things:

First, Slavitt is clearly responding to the instrumental use of literature, which is borne of a widespread viewpoint that to be of “value” a text must inform or persuade in a particular way. Literature must have a function; it must get you something. This is a commodification of literature, and pretty typically American in its pragmatism and evangelicalism. And Slavitt’s point that praising great literature smacks of protesting too much, of trying too hard to convince the unsympathetic that it’s worth their while, highlights the same problem. Note the metaphors this discussion has to fall back on: value, worth, etc.

I might quibble with Slavitt’s hyperbole here, but I agree that stories and literature must be enjoyed for their own sake before they can be “used” for anything. As it happens, delight will also give a good story staying power, and as Slavitt hints in his answers, delight will open you up to be taught and formed—the “useful” parts. Writers who entertain will continue to entertain and teach long after their “usefulness” has expired. Who do people still talk about more outside the classroom: Shakespeare or Upton Sinclair?

Second, Slavitt, in arguing that reading per se does not necessarily make a reader better or wiser (again, an instrumental assumption), brought to mind what might be my least favorite popular slogan: “Fight evil, read books.” Google that phrase and just see how much garbage merch you turn up. Beyond being a comma splice, this sentiment shouldn’t withstand even ten seconds of reflection. Have no evil people written books? Have no evil people been influenced by books? Do evil people not read, too? Are there no books modern people think are evil?

As with so much other nerd culture, the “Fight evil, read books” t-shirts and totes and bookmarks and memes are just so much self-serving gloating. Congratulations, you’re literate. But goodness—before you even get to “fighting evil”—takes more than a library card and an addiction to YA novels.

One of the delights of the above exchange is the 88-year old Slavitt’s wry crustiness and the usually unflappable Miller clearly struggling to recover from that first answer to a pretty standard wrap-up question. The episode doesn’t actually cover much of what Orlando Furioso is about, but it’s certainly piqued my interest to finally read this Renaissance epic and Miller and Slavitt’s discussion is great fun. Check it out.

Addendum: Coincidentally, after listening to this episode on my long Thursday commutes I tuned into the latest episode of Alan Cornett’s Cultural Debris, in which Holly Ordway discussed CS Lewis’s distinction between “using” and “receiving” literature. A helpful parallel line of thought.

The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City

The life of Edgar Allan Poe seems made to be picked apart. Poe tried and failed at so much, crossed paths (and swords) with so many people, told so many different stories about himself and had so many different stories told about him, and wrote so much in so many genres that topical examination not only suggests itself as an approach but can prove unusually fruitful.

Last year I read John Tresch’s new book The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, which reexamines Poe’s life and work in the light of his deep interest in science and his connections to both the scientific establishment and popular perceptions of science in his day. It was a great read, one of my favorites of the year. This year I stumbled across a book I missed when it came out in 2020, The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City, by Scott Peeples. I read it with great interest.

The Man of the Crowd is both a short biography of Poe and an analysis of the urban contexts in which he lived almost his entire life and produced all of his work. Peeples divides the book into five chapters, each of which details one of the four cities in which he lived longest: Richmond, where he was fostered by the Allan family after the deaths of his parents; Baltimore, where he had family connections and got his first halting start in the publishing business; Philadelphia, where he came into his own, wrote a great deal of his fiction and poetry, and made a name for himself as a critic willing to start literary spats; and New York, his last stable long-term abode, where his wife died and his work and projects began to collapse around him.

The fifth and final chapter, “In Transit,” follows Poe’s last year and a half, a period spent almost entirely on the road between these cities—still writing, still publishing, still unsuccessfully striving to start his own monthly journal and now unsuccessfully courting a series of new brides.

In each chapter, Peeples captures not only the phases of Poe’s life—a complicated enough task, given its wild ups and downs—but the story of each city. Poe lived at a time of runaway urban expansion, of mass immigration and rapid industrialization, and Peeples succinctly charts how these cities had changed by the time Poe arrived and how they were changing while he lived there. Philadelphia, for example, had grown away from the Delaware River as it industrialized, shifting the city’s cultural and political center of gravity inland and outward, to the suburbs. Poe lived in both parts of the city at various times.

The Man of the Crowd balances this kind of sociological history with Poe’s personal and literary lives remarkably well. Peeples never allows his examinations of each city to overwhelm Poe and his family’s story, nor does he lose sight of the landscape in following Poe. This is the best kind of topical or analytical history, in that the big picture and small picture complement each other perfectly.

So, for example, when looking at how often Poe or the Poes moved (over thirty times in his short forty years), we see the interaction of artistic, commercial, and economic considerations with purely personal ones. Poe often moved his family from neighborhood to neighborhood to save on rent, or because they could not pay the rent, or to be nearer the offices of publishers or journals, but he also moved away from city centers to provide Virginia, his consumptive wife, a healthier environment.

It is the effect of the city on Poe’s personal and family life that proves most poignant. Peeples notes that at the time the Poes lived in Philadelphia and Poe, despite the quality of his work, struggled to hold down a job due to his alcoholic binges, “there were over nine hundred taverns” in the city, “including one [only] a block away” from the Poes’ house. For Poe, crime and disease were not the only hazards of walking across town. Unsurprisingly, he stayed sober longer when living on the outer edges of a city.

Peeples is also alive to the tragic symmetries of Poe’s urban life. Of Poe’s final business trip in 1849, a journey from which he never returned, Peeples writes:

The year before, Poe had tried to die in the city where he was born [Boston]; instead, he died in the city where he had found a career and family. But, in light of his peripatetic life, the location of his death seems less significant than the fact that he died “on the road.” Appropriately, the journey he had begun should have taken him to each of the four cities that shaped his career and where he lived most of that life: leaving Richmond, bound for New York by way of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Like so much of his life, though, this trip didn’t go as planned.

One of the charms of his relatively short study (180 pages not including notes, bibliography, and the like) is the wealth of telling detail Peeples includes. The familiar outlines of Poe’s life story are rounded out and given finer shading by the reminiscences of neighbors, friends, and would-be fiancées. The story of a young boy from one of Poe’s Philadelphia neighborhoods rowing him out to a quiet spot on the Schuylkill to shoot waterfowl was both unexpected and touching, as were details of Poe’s family life as observed by visitors. And, of course, the numerous little things that gave and give each city its unique tone and attitude are well integrated with Poe’s story. By the end you feel you know not only Poe, with all his good qualities as well as his tendency toward pride and self-sabotage, but four major cities as well.

I’ve barely even mentioned Poe’s work or any of The Man of the Crowd’s literary criticism, but that is not the book’s main focus. Peeples mostly avoids deep literary interpretation or speculation about the specific ways a given city or event may have influenced Poe’s work. Mostly. Where he does, he largely cites other scholars, almost as a formality. Was Poe’s later fiction is so violent because he grew up in a city with slave auctions? Or is “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” somehow racially coded because Philadelphia, where he wrote and published it, had a large population of free black barbers? These theories seem obviously silly, and while Peeples doesn’t say so he is also refreshingly non-dogmatic and even openly skeptical about this kind of interpretation. What is most interesting is to note what Poe was working and where and when, and how the disparate pieces of his work fit together in time and place.

Like The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, this study of Poe is a study of his context, and works as a striking dual character sketch: of urban America in the first half of the 19th century—striving, rumbustious, commercial, confidently opinionated, prone to both grandeur and petty strife, and not a little dingy even in its better quarters—and of Poe himself, with all of the same adjectives applying.

The Man of the Crowd is an absorbing and well-written study of a great writer from an unexpected and informative new angle. If you have any interest in Poe or in the history of the United States during Poe’s lifetime, I heartily recommend it.

All Quiet on the Western Front trailer reaction

Felix Kammerer as Paul Bäumer in All Quiet on the Western Front

Update: I finally watched this new version of All Quiet on the Western Front, and in theatres! I had mixed feelings about it. You can read my long, ambivalent review here.

Here’s a movie I’ve been hoping for and imagining for myself for more than twenty years. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was one of my two great high school discoveries—the other being The Lord of the Rings—and the very first book I ever ordered from Amazon. (The listing for the mass market paperback, which has been through at least two cover redesigns since I was in high school, helpfully informs me that I last ordered a copy on February 8, 2000, a date that might as well be written in cuneiform.) All through college I fiddled with screenplay adaptations and filled notebooks with storyboards, especially for the sweeping crane shots of no-man’s-land I envisioned. I watched the 1930 and 1979 adaptations. But most importantly I read and reread the book. It absorbed me every time.

This new adaptation has been in the works for a long time, and, having a fan’s proprietary interest in it, I’ve checked in on it regularly for years. Directors came and went. Most recently I learned that it had been reimagined as a German-language adaptation—the first time this German novel has been filmed in the author’s native language—with Daniel Brühl attached to star. I was skeptical about the casting—Brühl was around forty when I first heard about his casting, and though youthful in a Matthew Broderick way I thought he’d still be a hard sell as high schooler-turned-soldier Paul Baümer.

And, two days ago, a trailer finally appeared.

I don’t have much to say in this initial “reaction,” except to encourage y’all to check the trailer out and, of course, to read the novel if for some reason you haven’t. But I do have a few notes and observations.

The trailer is a teaser, and so above characters, plot, or message it is selling a mood. It works. What Netflix has chosen to give us here is both eerie and beautiful—not to mention intense. Previous film versions have never shied away from the violence described in the novel but this version appears to make it very direct and personal, and the attention to atmosphere—the wet, the cold, the textures of clothing and earth and mud and steel, the darkness splintered by the light of flares—gives even this minute or two of footage a tactile quality that could make its action hit very hard.

Brühl, as it turns out, is not playing the protagonist, Paul Baümer. Wikipedia lists him as Matthias Erzberger, a politician who signed the armistice on behalf of Germany’s interim government in November 1918 and was eventually assassinated by the nationalist Organisation Consul. (I read an autobiographical novel by a former OC member last year.) Erzberger does not appear in the novel, which maintains a pretty cynical and mistrustful stance toward all politicians of whatever stripe. What role Erzberger and his appearance will play in this version of the story is unclear to me.

The actor who does play Baümer, Felix Kammerer, is appropriately young and fresh-faced. He even looks strikingly like the infantryman on the jacket of the first English edition of All Quiet. His youth and the youth of his friends, a “generation destroyed by the war” as Remarque puts it in the novel’s epigraph, is an important aspect of the story. The contrast between young, eager Paul and his classmates and Paul as the last, numb, embittered survivor lends the novel a lot of its power, as evidenced by the way just about every war novel since as imitated it.

I’m not sure yet, based on this trailer, who is who among the boys who enlist with Baümer, but the group looks good and short clips of hijinks behind the lines convey some of the fun the novel occasionally brings in—which is also a reminder of these men’s relative youth and immaturity.

One standout, and potentially a big improvement over both previous adaptations, is the actor playing “Kat” Katczinsky, an older soldier and mentor to the youths of Paul’s generation. The 1930 adaptation cast the gruff, burly, bulldog-faced fifty-year old Louis Wolheim as Kat, and the filmmakers behind the 1979 version clearly had Wolheim in mind when they cast Ernest Borgnine—who was over sixty and looked and acted like it—in the same role. Wolheim was brilliant in the part, but as portrayed in both films so far Kat is a far cry from the character in the novel: an unassuming reservist of about forty whose thin frame, stooped shoulders, and drooping mustache disguise his capability and good sense. Albrecht Schuch is the right age and has the right unassuming appearance (including the mustache this time!) to give us the character readers have imagined for nearly a hundred years. Here’s hoping.

I said I didn’t have much to say, so I’ll stop there. Judging just by the two minutes we have, this adaptation looks good. Its cinematography and attention to detail and atmosphere look to be on par with those of 1917, the best World War I film in a long time, and if it tells the novel’s story well it could refresh Paul Baümer and his doomed schoolmates for a new audience.

In the meantime, read the novel. Watch one of the previous adaptations, too, as both have their strengths. The 1930 one starring Lew Ayres is by far the better, and has some really intense pre-Code battle scenes, and the 1979 one has a brilliant turn by the late Ian Holm as Corporal Himmelstoß, Paul’s drill instructor. And for some bracing counterprogramming that will enrich both All Quiet on the Western Front and itself, read Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, which is the German war classic that I’ve been imagining as a movie for the last several years. Maybe they’ll get to that one next.