Thomas vs Thomas vs Thomas

My wife got me a membership in The Rest is History Club for Christmas, so for the last four months or so I’ve been enjoying the back catalog of Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s bonus episodes as well as the regularly released new ones. These are great fun, and offer a lot of food for thought.

This past week’s club episode ended with an intriguing counterfactual game submitted by a listener: “Of the three executed Tudor-era Thomases—Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer—you have to execute one, imprison one for life, put one of them back in power. How would you decide?”

Holland’s answer:

• Execute: Cromwell

• Back in power: Cranmer

• Imprison: More (“but I’d let him write”)

Sandbrook’s answer:

• Execute: More

• Back in power: Cromwell

• Imprison: Cranmer

My verdict: Holland’s answers are good, not great. Sandbrook’s are wrong at the two most crucial points.

Sandbrook expressed some hesitation about imprisoning Cranmer, preferring to “let him crack on” as Archbishop of Canterbury if he could, but was firm on one answer: “Definitely execute More.” Shortly thereafter:

Sandbrook: I mean, Thomas More’s ultimately disloyal, Tom.

Holland: Not to his God. Not to his God.

Sandbrook: No, but to put God above your king, and your country, is unbe—it’s to put your petty prejudices—

The discussion continues in what I think is a tongue-in-cheek tone. I hope so. Because More had his priorities exactly right.

I was surprised at Sandbrook’s reasoning. Given his jocular John Bull way of playing up his English Protestantism since the show’s Martin Luther episodes I was prepared for some kind of invocation of John Foxe, the slanders in his Acts and Monuments (aka Foxe’s Book of Martyrs) being what I most often see presented as grounds for criticizing More. But the view that More, a good classicist and Christian Humanist, should have been more loyal to the City of Man than to the City of God is a strange one.

It’s funny to me that, given that I probably agree with Sandbrook’s perspective about 90% of the time, whenever I blog about the show I seem to be taking exception to something he’s said. Regardless, kudos to Holland for—again, lightheartedly—sticking up for More.

My own choices:

• Execute: Cromwell, this being the only proper fate for a hatchet man

• Back in power: More, because the state needs more people who are obstructively “disloyal” to tyrants and keep God in his place above state and nation

• Imprison: Cranmer, but, as Holland would for More, “let him write,” since despite my misgivings about him his religious rhetoric in the Book of Common Prayer is second only to the King James Bible in its value to English

Fun stuff, and fun to discuss with my wife afterward. It also occurred to me that, if we could loosen the “execution” requirement, we could make things even more interesting by throwing Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey into the mix.

Might be time to break out my old DVD of A Man for All Seasons.

In the meantime, let me recommend Peter Ackroyd’s Life of Thomas More or, if you’re in a more fictional and speculative frame of mind, RA Lafferty’s Past Master, in which More is saved from the scaffold by agents of a far distant human space colony and asked to untangle their political problems. If you’re curious about the space I carve out for Cranmer’s masterful religious language, definitely read Alan Jacobs’s The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography.

Was John Buchan an anti-Semite?

John Buchan (1875-1940) at work

Several weeks ago I ran across a curious Instagram post about a favorite novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan. In the course of summarizing and praising the novel, the poster added a trigger warning: “The word ‘Jew’ appears ten times in this book.” An oddly specific and ambiguous note. At any rate, I forgot about it about until a few days ago, for reasons I’ll lay out below.

This morning Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s The Rest is History released the last episode in its excellent four-part podcast series on British Fascism. These were magnificent episodes, some of the most enjoyable and informative I’ve listened to. I know a lot more about Weimar and Nazi Germany and the United States in the interwar period than I do about Britain, so it was nice to have my understanding of Oswald Mosley, the British Union of Fascists, and even the Mitford sisters—who frequently and unexpectedly intrude into my reading from that period—so thoroughly and enjoyably expanded.

But there was one coincidental detail presented repeatedly in the historical context for the series that I objected to. As the show set the stage for the emergence of British Fascism and the rise of Mosley and Nazi hangers-on like Unity Mitford, Sandbrook invoked John Buchan’s fiction twice—along with Agatha Christie, GK Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Sapper, the creator of Bulldog Drummond—as examples of British culture’s pervasive atmosphere of anti-Semitic paranoia. In the second episode, he recapped this point, namedropping Buchan again, treating him as a byword for this kind of vulgar conspiracism. The third episode repeated this a final time, but with greater detail and a pretty grim supporting quotation.

Reflecting on a BBC radio interview she gave in 2015, John Buchan scholar Kate Macdonald noted that “far too often, talking about Buchan means talking about The Thirty-Nine Steps, and anti-Semitism, and then the conversation stops.” Thus with The Rest is History.

To be fair, Buchan isn’t the subject of the series, but the accusation that Buchan and his work were anti-Semitic is common enough and unfair enough that it warrants looking into.

As I mentioned, in the third episode Sandbrook quotes from The Thirty-Nine Steps to illustrate the kind of garden-variety anti-Semitic prejudice that notionally fed the rise of fascism. Sandbrook quotes a character called Scudder, an American investigative journalist, who believes he has uncovered a plot by a shadowy group to use an assassination to foment war between Germany and Russia. Sandbrook only quotes one or two lines but here’s more of the conversation for context. The first-person narrator is Richard Hannay:

When I asked why, he said that the anarchist lot thought it would give them their chance. Everything would be in the melting-pot, and they looked to see a new world emerge. The capitalists would rake in the shekels, and make fortunes by buying up wreckage. Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland. Besides, the Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated Russia worse than hell.

“Do you wonder?” [Scudder] cried. “For three hundred years they have been persecuted, and this is the return match for the pogroms. The Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him. Take any big Teutonic business concern. If you have dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von und zu Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English. But he cuts no ice. If your business is big, you get behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the manners of a hog. He is the German business man that gives your English papers the shakes. But if you’re on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now, and he has his knife in the Empire of the Tsar, because his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse location on the Volga.”

This passage is the one most often trotted out as evidence of Buchan’s anti-Semitism, and understandably so. It certainly seems damning, unless you remember that Scudder is a fictional character—and unless you keep reading.

Because Hannay is skeptical from the start. Immediately after the above passage, he wryly observes that, for all their plotting, Scudder’s conspirators don’t seem very successful: “I could not help saying that his Jew-anarchists seemed to have got left behind a little.” Hannay suspects that Scudder is “spinning me a yarn” but takes a liking to him in spite of it and offers the frightened man shelter. When Scudder is killed and Hannay goes on the run to avoid being framed for the murder, Hannay takes Scudder’s diary. Reading it confirms not Scudder’s suspicions, but Hannay’s: “The little man had told me a pack of lies. All his yarns about the Balkans and the Jew-Anarchists and the Foreign Office Conference were eyewash.”

And just in case we missed it, Sir Walter Bullivant, a British intelligence chief and Hannay’s savior and future boss, drives the point home again later:

If only I had more confidence in Scudder’s judgement. The trouble about him was that he was too romantic. He had the artistic temperament, and wanted a story to be better than God meant it to be. He had a lot of odd biases, too. Jews, for example, made him see red. Jews and the high finance.

The plot, as it turns out, has been orchestrated by German military intelligence. In fact, Hannay will contend with German spies in the two novels that followed his debut, Greenmantle and Mr Standfast, in both of which the menace is explicitly Prussian.

So much for this example—and for judging a book by counting words. Context and authorial intent matter. But if it were just a matter of quoting The Thirty-Nine Steps’s deranged journalist out of context, why does the accusation persist?

In John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier, biographer Andrew Lownie notes that Buchan’s fiction is “certainly scattered with disparaging comments about Jews.” Ursula Buchan, in her excellent Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps, is more specific: “the charge of anti-Semitism . . . surfaces from time to time, mainly as a result of about a dozen unfavourable comments by fictional characters, mostly to be found in the Hannay books.”

The fact that these comments almost always come from the mouths of fictional characters—often Americans—is important. Beyond these, which shouldn’t be construed as Buchan’s own opinions, there are a few stereotyped Jewish characters and slangy references. Something expensive might have “a Jewish price,” for instance. As unfortunate as these are, they are merely trading in the stock elements of the fiction of that time, just as Chinese laundry workers, black Pullman porters, and Irish beat cops show up in comparable American fiction. But even judging by that standard, Lownie argues that “Buchan was no worse and a great deal better than many of his contemporaries such as Dorothy L Sayers and Sapper.” He also points out, as does Roger Kimball in an excellent 2003 essay at The New Criterion, that the stereotypes and negative comments disappear from Buchan’s fiction as the Nazis rise in prominence—a detail suggestive of Buchan’s searching moral self-reflections.

For of Buchan himself, rather than his stories, there can be no doubt. Lownie understates things when he writes that “It is difficult to find any evidence of anti-Semitism in Buchan’s own personal views.” He notes the close, long-lasting friendships he shared with Jewish friends like financier Lionel Phillips, to whom he dedicated Prester John, and his commitment to Zionism. Ursula Buchan notes that he maintained this support “at a time when Tory politicians were thought to damage their chances of preferment” by doing so and that he was one of only fifty MPs who signed a 1934 motion denouncing the treatment of Jews in Germany. The next year,

he spoke at a rally in Shoreditch organised by the National Jewish Fund, describing Zionism as “a great act of justice. It was reparation for the centuries of cruelty and wrong, which had stained the record of nearly every Gentile people.” His name was inscribed in the Golden Book of the Jewish National Fund of Israel. It also appeared in a Nazi publication, Who’s Who in Britain (Frankfurt, 1938), the entry reading: ‘Tweedsmuir, Lord: Pro-Jewish activity.’

“If anything,” she writes, the evidence shows that Buchan “was a philo-Semite. How could it be otherwise for a man deeply imbued in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and in Jewish historical culture?” Lownie, Allan Massie, and others have also noted the special cultural affinity Buchan felt for the Jews.

If Buchan is personally unimpeachable in this regard, it is worth returning to Sandbrook’s point in using Buchan as a stand-in for all the anti-Semitism in the literature of his age. Sandbrook describes Buchan’s books as being filled with Jewish conspiracies. (Sandbrook is definitely accurate to ascribe to Buchan suspicion of flappers and the general Roaring ‘20s lifestyle. I think it’s meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek but, frankly, I find his scorn for it fun and refreshing considering how much that period has been romanticized.) Lownie and Ursula Buchan both deal with this handily, as I hope I’ve shown. But it’s worth considering just what kind of threats he did fill his books with.

Certainly Buchan’s thrillers teem with conspiracies, but the enemies of a Buchan hero are typically foreign or politically radical. The most frequent culprits are Germans—The Power-House, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, and Mr Standfast all concern German plots against Britain. There are also the Bolshevik kidnappers of Huntingtower and the Irish extortionist and mystic Dominick Medina of The Three Hostages, one of whose victims is Jewish. Often these foreign villains operate disguised as upper-class Brits—the implication being that it’s an easily convincing cover.

But just as often the villains really are British, as with The Dancing Floor’s dissipated pervert Shelley Arabin, who abused the population of a remote Greek island to the point of turning them to paganism, or, most chillingly, the devil-worshiping parishioners of a quiet Scottish village in Witch Wood. And in at least two novels, the hero is part of the conspiracy! Midwinter concerns a Jacobite spy preparing the way for Bonnie Prince Charlie during the ‘45 and The Blanket of the Dark is about a young man, snatched from an obscure monastery, at the center of an attempted coup against Henry VIII, who himself appears as a sinister villain.

Christopher Hitchens once noted Buchan’s powers of sympathy across the lines ordinarily drawn between factions, and in most of his stories the heroes find honorable and sympathetic enemies they can respect and who remind the hero that the enemy is human, too. The best and most moving example is the German woman who shelters Hannay in Greenmantle. Hannay even feels sympathy for the Kaiser in that novel.

“It is quite impossible to imagine him doing somebody an injury or an injustice on the grounds of their social or ethnic origin.”

— Christopher Hitchens

By the same token, the villains are often assisted by Englishmen, either out of pure venality or because they have been ideologically compromised—both signs of moral weakness. But even among these a rare man can prove himself courageous and upright, as the leftwing pacificist Launcelot Wake in Mr Standfast or the testy modernist poet John Heritage in Huntingtower convincingly show. “It is quite impossible,” Hitchens writes in his introduction to The Three Hostages, “to imagine [Buchan] doing somebody an injury or an injustice on the grounds of their social or ethnic origin.” What matters to Buchan is not ethnicity, class, or even political persuasion, but personal character, honor, and virtue, and of the latter most especially courage.

Why does any of this matter? Why go on about this for however many words this post has reached at this point?

First, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Buchan it’s the honor of fairness, and I hate to see a man I admire used as a byword for a fault of which he is innocent. Second, because Buchan is one of the kind of patron saints of this blog. I’ve enjoyed the last two years of John Buchan June and felt like I owed it to any of my handful of readers who have wondered about Buchan and anti-Semitism to sort through this.

And lastly, to bring it back around to The Rest is History, ever since their excellent episodes on Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, and Tolkien, I’ve thought that Buchan would make a marvelous subject for their treatment. He led a long, full, eventful life connected to many other remarkable people—including Sandbrook’s beloved Stanley Baldwin. Just recently I was reminded that it was Buchan who first told American journalist Lowell Thomas that he should look into the desert guerrilla activities of one TE Lawrence. Such a life deserves to be remembered well, and his stories to be appreciated.

More if you’re interested

The BBC radio piece on Buchan’s life and work linked above is an excellent short introduction and features interviews with literary scholar Kate Macdonald, novelist William Boyd, and two of Buchan’s grandchildren, James Buchan and the aforementioned biographer Ursula Buchan, whose book I strongly recommend. For John Buchan June for I’ve been reading the nicely designed paperback Authorised Editions from Polygon, which are endorsed by the John Buchan Society and feature excellent introductions by writers including Hitchens, Allan Massie, Hew Strachan, and former director of MI5 Stella Rimington. Buchan’s books are in the public domain and can be found for free online or in many poorly turned out print-on-demand editions on Amazon, but these are worth seeking out.

A good visit with Bookish Questions

Last week I was honored to talk to Alan Cornett of the excellent Cultural Debris podcast about my latest book, The Snipers. This video interview is part of a new short-form author interview project called “Bookish Questions.” I had a great time and hope y’all will enjoy this ten-minute chat.

Among the topics of conversation were not only The Snipers but also some of my other work, what I’m reading, what I recommend, what I’m working on and planning ahead for right now, and why it is that I gravitate toward writing historical fiction.

Be sure to check out Cultural Debris on the podcast platform of you choice. If you want good episodes to start with, I’ve enjoyed Alan’s interviews with Eduard Habsburg, Archduke of Austria, Tolkien scholar Holly Ordway, medievalist and CS Lewis scholar Jason M Baxter, author and literary scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson, and CS Lewis scholar Michael Ward.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for watching!

Price and Keegan on walking the ground

Yesterday on my commute I listened to the latest episode of The Rest is History, “Viking Sorcery,” in which Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook interview archaeologist Neil Price, author of Children of Ash and Elm, a massive archaeological and historical study of the Norse, which I read two summers ago.

Holland begins by reading a striking passage from Price’s earlier book The Viking Way. Having relocated from Britain to the University of Uppsala, Price realizes how the landscape of the Norse homeland is reshaping his understanding:

I was disturbed by the fact that the ancestral stories of the North should seem so much more intelligible when looking out over those Swedish trees than they had done while sitting in my office in England.

Price himself elaborates on this point not long into the interview:

“[W]hatever you’re studying about the past, it really does help to go to the places that you’re talking about to see the landscapes.”

I was conscious when I wrote The Viking Way—it came out in 2002 originally, so it’s twenty years old now—that sort of sentiment that you quoted about me being disturbed by the fact that those ancestral stories seem so much more intelligible when looking out over Swedish trees, there’s a risk that that’s a kind of romanticizing view. There’s me thinking, ‘Wow, I’m in touch with the Viking Age,’ and of course I’m not. So you have to guard against that as well. But I do think that, whatever you’re studying about the past, it really does help to go to the places that you’re talking about to see the landscapes, to experience what a Scandinavian winter is like. When you look at, say, reconstruction drawings, it’s always summer. They’re never sort of hunkered down in a snowed-in building, and yet that’s a very large part of the year. So to sort of try and get that kind of experiential aspect of things I think is quite important.

What Price calls the “experiential” dimension of historical understanding is what Chesterton called “the inside of history”—a recurring theme of my work as a historian, teacher, and novelist, and of my reflections on this blog. Getting at this dimension is not just a matter of trying to grasp alien minds or dressing up in a lost peoples’ clothing but in feeling and understanding the actual physical places where they lived and died.

Price’s discussion immediately reminded me of one of the passages that first brought this home to me as a grad student and reshaped how and why I study history. From Sir John Keegan’s great study The Face of Battle, first published in 1976:

Anecdote should certainly not be despised, let alone rejected by the historian. But it is only one of the stones to his hand. Others—reports, accounts, statistics, map-tracings, pictures and photographs and a mass of other impersonal material—will have to be coaxed to speak, and he ought also to get away from papers and walk about his subject wherever he can find traces of it on the ground. A great pioneer military historian, Hans Delbrück in Germany in the last century, demonstrated that it was possible to prove many traditional accounts of military operations pure nonsense by mere intelligent inspection of the terrain.

This passage took root in my mind as “walking the ground,” something I have few resources to do but which always, always helps when I can. My writing of Griswoldville was based closely not only on the specific locations around Macon where the battle takes place—which I walked in appropriate winter weather—but on the landscapes of north and central Georgia generally: the hills, farms, fields, orchards, pecan groves, and the weather. The land and what it is like is a fundamental part of that story. And, naturally, that understanding transferred to my historical narrative of the battle for the Western Theater of the Civil War Blog a few years ago. I work hard on everything I write, but my own best work always has walking the ground behind it.

A small but important point in Price’s chat with Holland and Sandbrook, but the entire interview is excellent. I strongly recommend it.

The Vinland Sagas on City of Man Podcast

It’s a been a somewhat slow month here on the blog. Work, travel, illness, and some exciting personal developments have conspired to keep me from blogging much apart from announcing the publication of The Snipers and my commitment to John Buchan June. Fortunately there is plenty of that, and I hope y’all have enjoyed that as much as I have my reading and writing for it.

But mercifully I did find time last week to record another episode of City of Man’s ongoing Medieval Times series with my friends Coyle and David. The subject: the Vinland Sagas, concerning the family of Eirik the Red and their discovery and brief, violent settlement of North America around the year 1000.

In the episode we cover the background, including a refresher on just what exactly sagas are as a genre of literature, the Norwegian and Icelandic antecedents to the continuous westward sailing of the Norse, the personalities involved, the events of The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red’s Saga, what to make of the sagas in historiographical terms, and geography, outlawry, ghosts, polygamy, religious conversion, sword-wielding pregnant women, and much, much more.

We conclude by asking why it was that the Norse settlements on Iceland lasted while those in Vinland didn’t. We also make plenty of recommendations for further reading and viewing, both good and bad.

Listen to the episode on iTunes, Google, Spotify, Sticher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or by listening in the embedded player in this post. You can find the episode’s page at the Christian Humanist Radio Network site, including links to our viewing recommendations, here.

Thanks for listening! I hope y’all enjoy.

Theatre chauvinism

Back in February I wrote in praise of an episode of the military history podcast School of War in which film critic Sonny Bunch appeared as a guest and talked about war movies for an hour. This morning, Bunch popped up on another show I sometimes listen to, The Charles CW Cooke Podcast, to talk about film, film criticism, and the state of filmmaking and cinema-going. It was an enjoyable short discussion and I commend it to y’all.

The part I was left thinking most deeply about during my morning and inter-campus commutes today concerned movie theatres. Bunch, in the course of talking about the artistic difference between films produced to be shown in theatres and those produced for streaming services, says: “Look, I’m a theatre chauvinist, in the sense that I think that if you don’t see a movie in theatres, it is—you’re watching TV.”

I don’t know that I’d go quite as far as Bunch, but I endorse the basic sentiment.

Like Cooke—who says something on the topic near the end of the discussion—I’ve been hearing about the death of movie theatres for a long time. I’ve also been thinking a lot about why I hope that doesn’t happen.

First, we may not put on suits and ties for a trip to the cinema any more, but there is something special about seeing a movie as an event. I don’t mean the mindless blockbuster “event” movies that studios have built their budgets around, I mean making an event out of seeing a movie—any movie. Watching a movie at home with my wife is different from taking her to a movie, and I hope the latter remains an option.

Second, for purely technical reasons, seeing a film on a big screen and with a theatre sound system is far beyond anything most people can afford or would be willing to set up for themselves at home. Seeing it in theatres makes a big difference, and even if you only see a film that way once and watch it dozens of times on home media later, the theatrical viewing will form the basis of how you see it again later. And if you do only see it once, as will almost certainly be the case, for me, with Glass Onion or the new All Quiet on the Western Front, it’s better to have seen it in a form that allows the filmmakers to make their best case for their work.

Third, for all the understandable complaints about the way people behave in theatres now, there is something good about seeing a film with a large group of strangers. As I noted when I saw Dune, a movie I wasn’t really looking forward to and was pleasantly surprised by, my enjoyment was enhanced by seeing it with an appreciative crowd. Ditto Top Gun: Maverick and The Batman. Ditto my very first visit to a theatre, The Fellowship of the Ring, an experience I still think about. There is something about communal, in-the-flesh entertainment that can’t be attained watching the same film at home in your pajamas. It’s the difference between a live concert and an .mp3 on your iPod.

Finally, and—to me—most importantly for the sake of the art, theatres demand something of the moviegoer. Virtually every other form of entertainment in the Dominion of Content today is tailored to the consumer and his habits and convenience and this, as I’ve mildly suggested, is a bad thing. Seeing a film in a theatre, on the other hand, is a discipline. You see it at the scheduled time, not whenever. You can’t pause it. You can’t leave and come back to it without missing something. And with a big screen and the lights properly dimmed you can’t see or do anything else. It’s one of the few places left to us that demand real attention, and going to a movie and doing so trains you in a liturgy of attention.

It also demands certain behaviors of you vis-à-vis other people. To go back to my third point, the fact that we recognize talking, texting, doom scrolling, or being a general distraction during a movie as rude is a sign that something important is happening to us, something too important to be disrupted, regardless of what the film is. And when it’s a good movie, one worthy of the attention we give it (and there is a give-and-take between filmmaker and audience), that discipline is all the more rewarding.

That’s what I think we risk losing if theatres die, and why I think a little of Bunch’s “theatre chauvinism” is more than justified.

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.

Corroboration

A few weeks ago when I reviewed the new All Quiet on the Western Front I faulted the filmmakers for thinking they could improve upon the original when the improvements came at the expense of the novel’s characters, themes, and subtlety. There’s a lot of that going around.

Yesterday The Critic had an interesting review of a new BBC miniseries adaptation of Great Expectations, an adaptation the reviewer describes as “extensive literary vandalism.” In omitting much and adding much else, prolific screenwriter Steven Knight claims he “tried to . . . imagine if Dickens was writing the story now and had the freedom to go to those darker places, what would he do? If he had been liberated to write the things that were going on that he wasn’t allowed to write about.”

The Critic’s reviewer rightly takes Knight to task for this tired excuse to “read between the lines”—which being translated is “make stuff up”—and provides a short description of the series’ departures from Dickens. But the penultimate paragraph broadens her scope from this particular bad adaptation to the current wave of them:

Unsurprisingly, the first episode of BBC’s Great Expectations has been reviewed badly. Many commentators have pointed to “wokeness” as the problem. The rot actually runs deeper: it is simply bad, and it’s bad because Steven Knight doesn’t understand Dickens. To junk Dickens’ striking dialogue, captivating plots and nuanced characters is to entirely miss the magic and meaning of the original. Knight isn’t alone in his hubris. Netflix recently took a sledgehammer to Persuasion, replacing Austen’s profound meditations on “perpetual estrangement” with lines like: “we’re worse than exes. We’re friends”. Despite its popularity, nothing incenses me quite as much as the glossy makeover Baz Luhrmann gave to The Great Gatsby. I’ve no doubt that we must brace ourselves for hundreds more of these heavy handed remakes, as director after director imagine themselves better placed to explore the human conditions than artists of old, artists whose works have endured centuries longer than any of these adaptations will. 

“Miss[ing] the magic and meaning of the original,” all in a misguided effort to be gritty. Netflix’s All Quiet fits this description quite snugly. Read The Critic’s whole review here.

A second, smaller point of corroboration of some of what I muddled through in my review came from James Holland and Al Murray’s We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast, in a “USA” episode in which historian John McManus joined them to discuss Saving Private Ryan. These three chatting about that movie was a sure way to get my attention.

At approximately 13:00, Murray makes an interesting aside about the film’s horrifying vision of Omaha Beach and the way that vision was seized upon for promotion:

Al Murray: Have you read William Goldman on um—the screenwriter William Goldman wrote about Saving Private Ryan and he wrote some very interesting stuff about it. Because when it was being promoted, all the PR was: This is the most realistic war film ever made. It’s all true. True to life in its depiction. Yes, it’s a story, but the depiction is entirely true-to-life, was the pitch. And get this—war is hell. War is horror. And Goldman kind of—who wrote A Bridge Too Far, of course—he sort of says, Well, come on, I thought we all knew that. Everyone knows war is hell, war is horror. What are you taking us for, here?

As I wrote regarding All Quiet on the Western Front, platitudes aren’t enough to sustain a movie. No need belaboring the obvious. Fortunately, Saving Private Ryan has more to offer.

A great episode. Listen to the whole thing here.

I wrote about Saving Private Ryan for its twentieth anniversary back in the early days of this blog. The film turns 25 this summer. Holland’s Normandy ‘44, a comprehensive history of Operation Overlord and the Normandy campaign, and McManus’s The Dead and Those About to Die, a study of the 1st Infantry Division at Omaha Beach—a book I would have given anything to have back when I was writing about Corporal Phillips in high school—are both excellent and well worth your while.

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.

Clarity and confusion in war movies

Tom Hanks and Gary Sinese in Forrest Gump’s ambush scene

Happy St Valentine’s Day! Let’s talk about war movies.

One of my favorite podcast discoveries last year was School of War, a military history podcast hosted by Marine veteran Aaron MacLean. School of War gets fantastic guests and covers a wide array of topics—just recently I’ve listened to episodes about Gaius Marius, Erich Ludendorff, the Battle of Crécy, the Anglo-Zulu War, and the myth of Spartan invincibility. This morning the show’s latest episode covered “something a little lighter,” as MacLean puts it: the best of American war movies with guest Sonny Bunch, film critic for The Bulwark.

This episode was a great surprise, and exactly the length of my commute this morning. After an initial discussion of what precisely constitutes a “war movie,” MacLean and Bunch talk through a series of great films in chronological order from Last of the Mohicans and Gettysburg (MacLean sounds like he had a childhood very similar to mine) to Zero Dark Thirty and The Outpost. Along the way they consider a lot of recurring themes as well as the manifold problems of telling war stories on film.

One exchange that particularly struck me relates to a tension running through all war movies. MacLean and Bunch raise this topic a couple of times, but perhaps in greatest detail (at approximately 21:00) as they discuss another old favorite of mine, Sergeant York:

Bunch: That is classic [Howard] Hawks, just pure visual storytelling. The sequence where he’s running essentially from, like, hole to hole taking out German forces, you’re never confused about where he is. There’s a perfect spatial understanding of what is happening in the picture. Again, Howard Hawks is one of the greats, and that is a great movie.

MacLean: Which actually—if I may make a thematic observation—is the thing about war movies that is probably, you know, necessary to making a good movie but the least truthful about the actual battlefield. From time to time, you’ll hear people say, you know, who were in combat, “That was just like a movie on some level,” or we’ll get asked, “Is it like the movies?” And the answer is “In some ways Yes and in some ways No,” and the principal way in which it’s “No” is that, in the movies, you know, as you just pointed out, in a good movie you’re not confused about what’s happening in the action. So in, take Black Hawk Down, for example. Right before the RPG hits a truck, what do you see? You see a bad guy on the roof pop out with the RPG launcher and fire the thing. But if you’re in real life, you’re the kid in the truck, you don’t see the guy pop out with the launcher nine times out of ten, you just see Boom! So the actual battlefield is a place of genuine confusion, where a lot of your energy is going into the most simple tasks of, like, Where are they? Who is shooting at me? From where? You know, those things are what you’re spending a lot of your time doing. But if you made the audience do that in a film you would alienate them very quickly. So even in—I’m curious to know your view on this—even in films that—maybe we’ll talk about this one in a minute—like Saving Private Ryan, where famously the chaos of Omaha Beach is a major subject of the film’s first thirty minutes, even there you’re pretty well oriented, actually, as the viewer. You’re not hiding behind something looking at the back of that thing, like, peeking out from time to time trying to figure out what the heck is going on. You actually have a pretty mobile eye that gives you some sense of orientation to what’s happening.

The discussion moves on from there, but MacLean nicely expresses the tension between the needs of film as a medium and the actual experience of combat. Every war movie has to make decisions about how to handle this. The classic war movies often err in the direction of clarity, with alternating scenes of crisp, clearly shot combat and generals pushing flags around a map table. The choice here is explaining a narrative. Alternately, and more rarely, some films err on the side of chaos and bewilderment, but these often do alienate the audience (and, as MacLean and Bunch discuss later, they tend to have explicit political aims). The best war movies manage a little of both.

One that I think balances this expertly is Forrest Gump. Every year in US History II I show my students the film’s Vietnam ambush scene. Among the things it does well:

• the scene goes from tranquil to chaotic instantly;

• Lt Dan’s platoon returns fire—somewhere. Despite the immense firepower they’re spraying out there’s little indication of what they’re shooting at or whether they’re having any effect, and that’s because

• the enemy is invisible. There are muzzle flashes in the distant treeline, and that’s just about it.

After I show this clip, I ask my students how many enemy soldiers they saw in the scene. Very rarely one student will have caught the movement, out of focus in the extreme lower lefthand corner of one shot near the end, of a few VC, though even after viewing it dozens of times myself I’m not sure precisely how many there are. This situation, I explain, was typical. Hollywood action—or the kind of clarity and control you get in Call of Duty—was not.

Anyway, a great discussion in a great episode, and I heartily recommend listening to it. I’ve seldom wanted to jump in and participate in a podcast more. If I could have—and since I’m on the subject anyway—here are two war movies from periods they skipped over that I would strongly recommend:

• Revolutionary War: The Crossing, a cheap TV movie about Washington’s crossing of the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton, but a solid short dramatization that I sometimes show US History I classes.

• Texas Revolution: The Alamo, the Billy Bob Thornton one. I wrote about this some years ago and I show it every time I teach US History I.

In the meantime, MacLean and Bunch have got me wanting to revisit a lot of old favorites. If you need me, I’ll be trying to convince my wife to celebrate St Valentine’s Day with a viewing of Glory.

I’ve written about war movies here plenty of times before. Last summer I considered the difference between Hollywood action and actual combat footage. Two summers ago I considered what “realism” means in a genre often tasked with depicting already unbelievable events. I also reviewed Sergeant York in some detail for the same defunct Historical Movie Monday series in which I reviewed The Alamo back in the first months of this blog.

High-profile targets

Which one do more people recognize? Which one are more people mad about? Which one deserves it?

More than four years ago, in the early days of this blog, I reviewed a short biography of Raphael Semmes, captain of the Confederate commerce raider Alabama. In passing, I noted that despite his success and notoriety during the Civil War, he was now obscure enough that an announced demonstration at his monument in Mobile attracted no protesters. A vision of a vanished world, surely, but this was despite continued and well-publicized protests at monuments to General Lee and other figures.

On a recent episode of his excellent new podcast Uncancelled History, Douglas Murray interviewed historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, author of Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan and many other books on Spanish history and the Age of Exploration. After thorough comparisons of the much-maligned Columbus to other figures from that era—specifically Magellan, who actually did some of the heinous things Columbus is only accused of doing—Murray and Fernández-Armesto turn to the question of why some historical figures attract outrage, protest, and cancelation and others don’t:

DM: How is it all of these reputations, these very different people with very different attitudes, have sort of got wrapped up together? I mean, Magellan, for instance, I suspect that of those who know him today, relatively few will know what a kind of villain he was, but he gets wrapped up with Columbus. Everything in the Age of Explorers has got merged, somehow.

FFM: The paradox is, it’s got nothing to do with the facts! It’s very hard to say that about Magellan. And yet, you know, Columbus—the guys are tearing down his statues, they’re besmirching his reputation, they’re smattering him with obloquy, they’re treating him as if he were some kind of proto-fascist, and yet Magellan, who really was a bad guy, has escaped all that! You know? His statues are intact! Nobody is saying, Let’s tear down his statues. Nobody is saying, Let’s, you know, revise his reputation, et cetera—except me. No one is saying, Why don’t we right the injustices that have accrued from Magellan’s voyage. In fact, quite the contrary. There are all these scientific prizes and university programs and whole species and constellations named after Magellan, and nobody is saying Lets, you know, change those names. So it’s quite amazing that the relatively good guy gets all the brickbats and the relatively bad guy gets all the praise. And I think the reason—you know, it’s very hard to explain that—but I think it’s an example of how prejudice is inviolable by fact and that no matter what the truth is of an episode in the past, people decide what they think about it on the basis of their prejudices and on the basis of what it does for their own programs and agendas, and it’s very unfortunate that Columbus has become the victim of specifically American agendas to do with Native American identity and slavery, things that he really had nothing to do with but which have become associated with him historically in the course of the long—oh, I don’t know—sort of unfolding historiographical story between his day and ours. Whereas Magellan didn’t make any contribution to the United States, never even got anywhere near here, and is therefore pretty much ignored by public opinion in America.

In short, Columbus is well-known—for reasons specific to American pathologies—and Magellan is not. Columbus conjures strong associations and vivid if inaccurate mental pictures, and Magellan does not. So if the historically ignorant are going to attack an explorer—again, for reasons specific to American pathologies—they will attack Columbus.

But activists can take an alternate tack, as this discussion suggests. Murray calls it “wrapping up.” One might also call it “guilt by association” or simply judging all by the example of the worst. Being too ignorant to be specific, and to make specific, historically literate arguments about people like Columbus, it is easier to judge according to broad categories carefully presented—usually through cherrypicked evidence or simply shouting—as inarguably evil.

So while some poor sap somewhere might be tempted to argue the merits of “canceling” Columbus, it is harder to argue against a sweeping condemnation of all “colonizers.” Assuming these arguments are presented in good faith in the first place—an assumption I am unwilling to make.

This is clearly the case in the category of “Confederates.” Lee is famous in the first place and has intractable defenders today because he was a genuinely good and great man, and so efforts to attack this high-profile target, one of the few Confederate leaders anyone could name, were always going to be difficult. But shift the discussion to “Confederates” writ large, oversimplify and ignore context and specifics—striving always for “the clarity of caricature”—and even the obscure figures whom activists could never have otherwise named or recognized can be swept up in the net and liquidated.

Which brings me back to Raphael Semmes, whose statue did come down in just such a trawling approach in the summer of 2020. Like Magellan, he could never bring out mobs of protesters the way Lee (or Jefferson, or Washington, or Lincoln) could, but “wrapping up,” attacking categories, showed that actually knowing something about targets doesn’t matter. (Tellingly, an article on the removal of Semmes’s statue was headlined “Who was Confederate Adm. Raphael Semmes?”)

Food for thought, something this podcast is good for. I certainly recommend Murray’s interview with Fernández-Armesto, but perhaps the best episode I’ve listened to so far is the most recent, in which Murray talks to Thomas Chatterton-Williams about the woke campaign against the classics.

The Thing on City of Man Podcast

This year’s Christian Humanist Radio Network Halloween crossover ends today! This year the topic is the filmography of John Carpenter, and I volunteered for an episode of The City of Man covering the only John Carpenter movie I’ve seen—The Thing.

My friend David Grubbs hosts, and with Carter Smith-Stepper and I he leads us through not only the movie itself but also its source material, the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W Campbell Jr, and we discuss how the film adapts and improves upon the original. We also dig further back into the history of Antarctica as a scary place and threat to the existence of humanity, with Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, and spend a good while pondering just what it is that makes The Thing so special and so intense: acting, special effects, music, cinematography, and, above all, atmosphere.

The Thing combines a lot of things I love in a genre I don’t usually like, and so I was excited to talk about this movie for this event. Other movies covered on other shows in the CHRN include Halloween, Prince of Darkness, They Live, and The Fog. Definitely check those out—Michial and Danny’s discussion of Halloween actually convinced me to give that movie a try sometime soon.

You can listen to The City of Man on iTunes or any other fine podcasting platform. You can listen to this episode at its very short show notes page at the CHRN website here or—next-day update!—you can listen on the Castos podcast player embedded in this post.

Happy Halloween!