Palma’s Divine Comedy

Considering how much space his work takes up in my mind, I don’t write about Dante often enough here. Some books you read so early, and at such a formative time, that they become part of the foundation of one’s taste, worldview, and imagination, informing everything without always being seen. The Divine Comedy is one of those for me, and I want to make a rare comment about it here, specifically in praise of the recent English translation by Michael Palma.

One of the commonplaces of writing about Dante in English is the difficulty—in English—of terza rima, the rhyme scheme Dante created for the Comedy. This is a “threefold rhyme” of aba-bcb-cdc-ded-efe etc, with each tercet linking ahead and behind. It’s elegant, beautiful when done well, and theologically significant. (Dante’s three-part epic ends with a vision of the Trinity, after all.) All well and good, but it’s also a bear to work with. As many, many translators have noted, the lack of inflected endings on English words severely limits possible rhymes in comparison with a Romance language like Italian.

What’s an English translator to do, then? The solutions depend greatly on a given translator’s priorities, which usually boil down to choices between the following:

• Accuracy of wording or sense

• Accuracy of tone

• Accuracy of form, including rhyme

Wording, of course, is the most flexible of the three. Dante wrote in medieval Italian. The particulars of how one renders that in English is going to depend greatly on the latter two priorities. Most translators go for tone, capturing Dante’s force and directness while using an unmetered or loosely metered line and little or no rhyme. The most literal translations—Hollander and Singleton, for example—do this successfully. Dante comes through even if a notable aspect of the form doesn’t.

But there are rare translators who do chase the white whale of rhyme. The most successful have typically done so only when natural-sounding rhymes present themselves, like Anthony Esolen, long my favorite for reading, or by limiting or altering the rhyme scheme in some way, like John Ciardi, who rhymes the first and last lines of each tercet and doesn’t worry about the rest. Both suggest what Dante sounded like without straining.

Much more rare is the translator who tries to do the entire Comedy in Dante’s rhyme. Dorothy Sayers is the most famous example. While her notes are rightly praised and valued, her translation, in retaining terza rima, lengthens the poetic line to accommodate involuted English constructions, the contorted grammar of which is larded with archaisms. One feels at all times the effort she is putting into achieving end-rhyme. While she manages to keep the rhyme, she loses Dante’s concision, energy, and wording. I’ve never found that a worthwhile sacrifice.

I mention all these technical considerations and poetic hazards to highlight Palma’s achievement in his Divine Comedy. He has successfully translated the Comedy in terza rima from start to finish—one hundred cantos!—without strain or contortion, without reaching for rhymes, and while accurately capturing both Dante’s wording and his forcefulness, directness, and every subtle emotional register. Words, tone, and form all align effortlessly. I didn’t think it was possible.

The greatest pleasure of this reading of the Comedy, which I undertook at leisure over the last five weeks, was to glance up from the page and realize I’d been reading English terza rima without even noticing. Palma has made this great work, which I’ve read umpteen times over the quarter century since I discovered it in high school, fresh and powerful again. Dante’s final vision in Paradiso XXXIII, which I read this afternoon while giving an exam, was vivid to me in a way it has never been before.

Given recent receptiveness to formalism in translation—such as Emily Wilson’s blank verse Iliad and Odyssey—I hope Palma’s Comedy will find enthusiastic widespread appreciation. It will certainly take its place on my Dante shelf alongside Esolen, Musa, and Ciardi as one of my favorites. If you’re looking for a good opportunity to reread Dante or to read the Comedy for the first time, I heartily recommend it.

Epistolary authority, uncertainty, and mystery

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Create uncertainty

• Engender a sense of discovery

• Establish the illusion of authenticity or reality

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

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

THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The epistolary and the gothic

Speaking of letters, here’s a second epistolary topic I came across last week but didn’t have time to write about when I briefly returned to Emma on Friday:

One of the items I included in Quid, my Substack digest, over the weekend was this handy short guide to the gothic by literary historian Rebecca Marks. She opens by quoting the note at the beginning of The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole’s ur-gothic novel from 1764, and highlights the role of framing devices in gothic literature. She returns to this topic about halfway through:

Gothic novels are filled with letters, diary entries, found manuscripts, dreams, and reported speech, and Gothic paintings are full of so-called ‘liminal’ or negative spaces (windows, graveyards, ruins, dungeons, corridors, shadows). The idea is that we, as consumers of the Gothic, can never be sure about the truth because it’s always shrouded in degrees of separation.

Having just picked up Dracula to read for the first time (minus an abortive attempt in college) as well as being a fan of MR James and especially Poe—one of whose earliest stories was literally titled “MS. [manuscript] Found in a Bottle”—this rings true. Marks compares the way the gothic uses such framing devices to modern found footage horror like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity and credits their prevalence in the gothic to “the sense of uncertainty” they create.

No argument here. What I’d add is that these forms come with a not insignificant sense of discovery built in. This creates not only the “sense of uncertainty” Marks describes, but enhances it with a sense of chronological distance. That means getting the story will require assembling it bit by bit, slowly revealing the shocking truth. If one finds an epistolary horror novel scary because of the uncertainty created by the form, one keeps reading because of the tingling sense that one is slowly uncovering what’s really going on, a feeling we usually ascribe to whodunnits.

Not all gothic stories are mysteries, but I’d say all gothic stories have an element of mystery. In both, the construction of the real story in the reader’s mind is an important part of the storytelling process. In mysteries this involves clues; in the gothic it involves atmosphere and suggestion.

And to return to a pet theory: this fits well with my sense that UFO and alien stories are the modern replacement for the gothic. The same thrill offered by the pretense that The Castle of Otranto or one of MR James’s stories are old manuscripts dug up in dark archives is to be had from the grainy photographs, blurry film footage, photocopies of redacted Air Force files, or an especially juicy eyewitness interview many years after the fact. Any good UFO story is going to involve forgotten secrets revealed by carefully reconstructing the truth from old files.

Letter-writing in Emma revisited

Back in July I shared some observations on the moral significance of letter-writing in the early chapters of Emma. In short: the way characters communicate in writing and interpret others’ writing reveals significant aspects of their virtue—or the lack thereof. I’ve been thinking about that ever since, and as my wife and I near the end of the book I find that Austen, great writer that she is, has bookended the story with a few more letters and reflections on language.

After the revelation that the dandyish Frank Churchill and the shy, tortured Jane Fairfax have been secretly engaged the entire time, Frank writes a letter to explain himself. Notably, he writes to his stepmother, who is the most unreasonably receptive audience possible, and not to the father he spent years ignoring or neglecting or the girls he led on in order to conceal the engagement. As for the letter itself, it is unusually long* (Austen specifically notes how thick the envelope is), and, like Frank himself, smooth, plausible, self-congratulatory, and deftly spun to exonerate himself.

It works—at least temporarily. Mrs Weston, the recipient of Frank’s letter, is satisfied by his explanations, and Emma herself finds most of his excuses convincing. It’s Mr Knightley who sees through it, and offers an entertaining commentary during his reading. He can find only one point of agreement with Frank:

He has had great faults, faults of inconsideration and thoughtlessness; and I am very much of his opinion in thinking him likely to be happier than he deserves: but still as he is, beyond a doubt, really attached to Miss Fairfax, and will soon, it may be hoped, have the advantage of being constantly with her, I am very ready to believe his character will improve, and acquire from hers the steadiness and delicacy of principle that it wants. And now, let me talk to you of something else.

This is the transition to Mr Knightley’s proposal to Emma, an occasion Austen uses to contrast the character of these two men as seen through the character of their communication. Austen summarizes his speech thus:

The subject followed; it was in plain, unaffected, gentlemanlike English, such as Mr. Knightley used even to the woman he was in love with, how to be able to ask her to marry him, without attacking the happiness of her father. Emma’s answer was ready at the first word.

And rightly so. Where Frank is evasive, Mr Knightley is direct. Where Frank’s letter reveals self-absorption, Mr Knightley’s proposal shows consideration—both for the woman he hopes to marry and her needy, hypochondriac father. But note as well the way he speaks: “plain, unaffected, gentlemanlike English.” This description is a chiastic echo of Mr Martin’s letter to Harriet near the beginning, which Austen describes with the same three laudable qualities:

[A]s a composition it would not have disgraced a gentleman; the language, though plain, was strong and unaffected, and the sentiments it conveyed very much to the credit of the writer. It was short, but expressed good sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feeling.

That Austen bookends her story with these reflections on virtue and communication is significant, I think, and brilliantly done. There’s a reason we go back to her work.

As I noted in that original post, one’s writing may not be an infallible guide to the content of one’s character, especially if we get stuck on the nuts and bolts: grammar and spelling, both of which are poorly taught now. But what one writes—and how, stylistically—are revealing. Something worth considering in an age of casual, instantaneous, unceasing, and almost universally unvirtuous communication.

*Years ago I read through and transcribed boxes full of mid-19th century letters for the antique auction where I worked. I still remember noting that most of them were confined to a single sheet, perhaps but not always filled on both sides.

Erzberger

After recent events I decided it was time I finally read up specifically on Weimar Germany. I started Frank McDonough’s recent year-by-year history The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918-1933. It’s good so far. Night before last I read through McDonough’s account of 1921, one of the most famous and disturbing events of which was the murder of Matthias Erzberger.

Erzberger was a politician of the Catholic party Zentrum and had the dubious distinction, following revolution on the homefront and the abdication of the Kaiser in November 1918, of signing the armistice with France. This was a thankless and humiliating role that earned him the hatred of German nationalists, militarists, and anyone else upset by the outcome of the war. Erzberger soldiered on, embracing the new Republic and taking an active role in trying to help it survive. For this—and for being the man who signed the armistice—he was targeted by the Organisation Consul, a group of former military officers dedicated to avenging their defeat by killing off the men they held responsible.

On August 26, 1921, two members of the OC approached Erzberger while he was on a walk with a colleague. They “fired two shots at Erzberger’s head and back. He fell down an embankment, and the assassins followed him, finishing him off with two head shots.” They afterward fled to Hungary.

McDonough turns to the response to the murder with a damningly succinct introduction:

“Such was the toxic nature of Weimar politics that the brutal assassination of Erzberger produced a mixed reaction.”

As if assassination is not enough, the response itself is proof of the rot in the body politic. Read McDonough’s summary of the “mixed reaction” and see if it is not reminiscent of recent events:

On the centre left, there was a tremendous outcry. Numerous protest rallies were organised by the Social Democrats, the USPD and the Communists. In Berlin, 100,000 people turned out to express their outrage. Among the other mainstream parties, the murder was also unambiguously condemned. On the Right, however, a substantial minority greeted the murder with shameless glee. Hitler gave a tasteless speech in Munich in September which, identifying Erzberger as a November Criminal, essentially saying he got what he deserved. The Magdeburgische Zeitung (Magdeburg News) expressed ‘abhorrence’ for the murder, but added that Erzberger had been a ‘political racketeer and gambler’ who had made numerous political enemies.

Outcry on one side, glee on the other, and, in between, a certain amount of mealy-mouthed hemming and hawing about politically-motivated murder.

Weimar Germany is not 2025 America and 2025 America is not Weimar Germany. One could point to a thousand specific differences. But human nature, being unchanging at its core and bent toward evil, falls into familiar ruts whenever it finds sufficient excuse or opportunity to do so. According to the old saw, variously attributed but which I repeat often in class: history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Erzberger wasn’t the first and was by no means the last victim of such political violence in the Weimar era. (Less than a year later, the OC would assassinate Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, an event you can read about from inside the conspiracy in Ernst von Salomon’s novel/memoir The Outlaws.) It’s worth considering, for all the people rightly shocked and grieved by such acts, what it will take to break the rhyme scheme.

Notes on Christopher Nolan’s best movie

Alley (Andy Serkis), Nikola Tesla (David Bowie), and Angier (Hugh Jackman) in Tesla’s Colorado laboratory in The Prestige (2006)

A few days ago I started rereading The Prestige, by Christopher Priest, a World Fantasy Award winner about Victorian magicians locked in a mutually destructive rivalry. I last read it as a senior in college almost twenty years ago. It’s very good—much richer and more absorbing than I remembered—and rereading the book has also got me thinking about Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation.

The book and the film are quite different (Priest was, it’s worth noting, in awe of the movie) but I don’t intend to examine those differences here. The movie has been one of my favorites since it came out and has rewarded years of viewing. But what I’ve realized now, to my surprise, is that after almost two decades and seven more films, The Prestige remains Nolan’s best movie.

I write this as a fan of Nolan—not a fanboy, but a fan, someone who likes and appreciates what he does and looks forward to each new Nolan project. I don’t intend to disparage his more recent movies, most of which I’ve liked. I just think that, with hindsight, The Prestige stands out as a work produced 1) at the height of Nolan’s powers and 2) before he became distracted by some of the qualities that have defined—and occasionally weakened—his subsequent movies.

Some notes toward refining my argument:

• Technically The Prestige is pretty much perfect. Wally Pfister’s anamorphic cinematography is beautiful and atmospheric and incorporates handheld work for a subtle contemporary feel without succumbing to the Bourne-style chaos of the mid-2000s. It also, like Barry Lyndon and Amadeus, allowed for shooting by candlelight. (Read American Cinematographer’s article on The Prestige; I ate this up when the movie came out.) The film feels real and authentic, a mood enhanced by the costume and set design, which establish the easily-caricatured Victorian London as a real place.

• Also on the technical side: the editing (by Lee Smith, who has cut several other Nolan movies) is excellent, probably the best of Nolan’s career. It’s really the editing that makes this movie. Though The Prestige tells its story along multiple chronological timelines, jumping forward and backward in time with occasional flashes forward or backward as characters remember or reflect, it does so effortlessly. Despite its complexity it is easy to follow and requires almost no internal explanation.

• The music by David Julyan is, as so often with Nolan’s films, there to enhance atmosphere and mood rather than to soar on memorable leitmotifs. It does its job perfectly, without distraction or—as in the last few Nolan films—drowning out dialogue.

• The performances are also excellent, the standouts being Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, both of whom play two roles. This is where rewatching The Prestige most pays off—once you know what’s going on with Alfred Borden it’s easy to see, through Bale’s performance, that he’s two people with distinct, conflicting personalities: one cautious and softspoken, one aggressive and brash. This has the unique effect of making the ending more powerful after the twist has been revealed.

• Of course, all of this technical and artistic craft is in the service of a good story, which is the best reason to watch any movie. There are plenty of technically admirable movies that are not interesting, entertaining, or meaningful. The Prestige is all of these.

Why The Prestige stands out so much in retrospect: it has, on paper, a lot of Nolan’s tics and preoccupations—multiple identities, family tragedy, crime, deception, the nature of reality, and memory—but allows them to arise naturally from the story. By contrast:

• Music: I enjoy some Nolan movie soundtracks (Interstellar is perhaps the last great one), but since Inception they have gotten more bombastic and intrusive. This is, perhaps, emblematic of the rest of my complaints below.

• The Prestige was the last of Nolan’s movies to be shot before he began his ongoing experiment with large-format filmmaking, especially IMAX. He has used this as more than a gimmick—like 3D, which he rightly avoided—but it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the form has started to overwhelm the story. The frequent switching between formats and aspect ratios in his more recent movies is also just distracting. I find myself wishing more and more for a film with a single consistent visual technique, especially one as wonderful as what Nolan and Pfister created in The Prestige.

• More seriously, even if we disregard form or technique, the structure of Nolan’s movies since has become a more and more overt, obvious part of the story. Where The Prestige smoothly moves the audience back and forth through several different timelines, both trusting the audience enough to understand and expertly editing the film to make its structure intuitive and invisible, his movies since Inception call attention to their structure and require frequent, heavy-handed exposition. (Despite these efforts, the “[Nolan movie] ending explained” genre on YouTube continues to thrive.)

• Related: The Prestige uses, like many of Nolan’s movies before and since, non-linear storytelling. Again, it does so effortlessly and without calling attention to itself. More recent movies like Dunkirk, Oppenheimer, and most obviously and incomprehensibly Tenet use it as a flourish. When some critics wonder whether this kind of chronological tossed salad is necessary for these stories, they’re not being unreasonable.

• I wouldn’t call The Prestige a special effects movie, but several sequences rely heavily on effects—Tesla’s lab, Angier’s transporter machine, and subtle shots of the Borden twins working together. They’re seamlessly integrated, even the digital effects Nolan now has a reputation for shunning. Nolan’s insistence on practical stuntwork and in-camera effects is laudable, but it sometimes feels—like the large format film—like a gimmick that is taking over his movies. Witness all the jokes online about Nolan finding real cyclopes or having his actors throw real thunderbolts for his Odyssey project.

• Finally, The Prestige is rich, dense, intricately plotted, but tight, running just over two hours. With the exception of Dunkirk, which Nolan said he wanted to feel like the third act of a much larger story, every movie from The Dark Knight on has been two and a half hours long or longer. I like or love several of these, but the feeling of sprawl and self-indulgence is palpable, especially when the increasingly showy plots require multiple scenes of people talking about what’s going on for the audience’s benefit.

In short, The Prestige perfectly unites story and form. Nolan continues to make good movies, but with their increasing emphasis on spectacle, teasing structure, and technical gimmickry, he has never quite struck the same balance he did in The Prestige.

Again, these are note and observations. Perhaps more thoughts later, especially once I’ve finished rereading the novel and watched the movie again.

I’ll end by noting that Nolan and his brother Jonathan, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay, did an excellent job adapting Priest’s novel. This second reading impresses upon me more than the first just how difficult this story would be to construct for the screen. I’m glad they took the effort—and over several years, which I think may be yet another factor distinguishing The Prestige from the films since—because the story is brilliant, surprising, suspenseful, and moving, and deserved to be told well.

Casting Chesterton

Last week on his microblog, Alan Jacobs shared the news that the BBC has ordered a new series called “The Detection Club.” Per the BBC’s press release, the show will follow Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and GK Chesterton as they team up to solve mysteries in 1930s London. The show is set to shoot next year.

Jacobs briefly considers the cast, which is as yet unknown. I have little or no opinion on who would make a good Sayers or Christie, but the idea of someone playing Chesterton in a drama immediately caught my interest. A few informal thoughts if I were the one casting Chesterton:

Prerequisites: Chesterton was unusually tall (6’4”), fat (fluctuating but often near 300 lbs), and had a mustache. These, plus a small pince-nez spectacles, a crumpled hat, and a cape and walking stick should factor into a bare-minimum visual impression. (Cf my old Churchill-in-a-box post.)

Chesterton late in life, c. 1931

Jacobs notes with regret that, with the death of Richard Griffiths a few years ago, “the ideal for GKC” is lost. I’m not sure I agree. My perception may be skewed by having only ever seen Griffiths as Uncle Vernon in Harry Potter, but though matching some of the superficial particulars for Chesterton—tall, fat, wild-haired, mustachioed—he had a sinister air that I’d find insurmountable. The attitude or air or even vibe of an actor playing a real person is as important as appearance, I think.

Someone adept at capturing a historical figure’s vibe without looking much like him is Timothy Spall. He came to mind on the strength of his performances as Churchill (in The King’s Speech) and David Irving (in Denial). It’s a commonplace to call a gifted character actor a chameleon, but Spall is the real deal. He’d have a lot to work against—he’s too short and, at least in the last few films I saw him in, too thin for Chesterton—but I think he could convey the strange combination of puckishness and intelligence that a Chesterton should have. He may also be too old but, if the series is set in the 1930s, that may be appropriate for the end of Chesterton’s life.

Similar: Eddie Marsan, another favorite of mine. Marsan is a smidge taller than Spall and looks a smidge more like the actual Chesterton. (He’s also a London native, like Chesterton.) That said, he tends to play either intense or petulant men, which wouldn’t work, as a Chesterton needs generosity of spirit and literally enormous bonhomie to be believable.

A somewhat obvious choice—who would probably resist the potential typecasting—is Mark Williams, who has played Father Brown since 2013. Williams is taller than either Spall or Marsan, heavyset (sometimes, anyway), and can do friendly absentmindedness better than just about anybody. Playing Chesterton would be a natural extension of his Father Brown, not least since he has always played Father Brown more like Chesterton than the Father Brown of the short stories, anyway.

An unusual possibility that occurred to me almost immediately: Nick Frost. Frost is about the same height as Spall but I wouldn’t have guessed it—he looks bigger onscreen. With a mustache and pince-nez I think he could very well look the part, and I think he’d sell Chesterton’s good humor.

A final serious suggestion: Mark Addy, who is tall, heavyset, looks more like Chesterton in the face, and can do both comedy and drama well. That said, he tends to be more restrained—or at least less manic—than some of these other options, though that might work well for an aging Chesterton.

All of this is predicated on the BBC treating the project seriously, of course. The presence of Christie as a character gives me pause, as I just recently noted the habitual malice toward her work among those adapting it for TV and film. Christie, Sayers, and Chesterton were all serious Christians and one hopes the show doesn’t avoid, downplay, or simply ignore that fact in favor of whatever the progressive posture du jour is when the series goes into production. The casting will show the BBC’s hand.

What I most hope they avoid is obvious Funny Fat Man stunt casting: James Corden or whoever. A fun mystery centered on affectionate, respectful portraits of three great writers sounds immensely appealing to me right now. One more farce sending up the dead and their vanished world does not.

On “not sucking”

Two things I saw early last week that I thought a lot about even at the time, but that not long afterward took on much greater weight:

First, after a social media algorithm served up an amusing comedy routine about Christian rock, I explored the comedian’s other work. His brand is explicitly “exvangelical,” and in addition to the usual contemptible rants, complaints, and progressive exhibitionism of that demographic, he has an ongoing series of videos called “Christians Who Don’t Suck.” The most recent video at the time profiled Nat Turner.

Turner was a slave preacher in Southampton County, Virginia. Inspired by visions he claimed to have received from God, in the late summer of 1831 he led a slave revolt that killed around sixty people. In his master’s house, where he began the uprising during the night, his men killed a baby sleeping in a crib. At another house they killed a bedridden old woman. At another a three-year old boy recognized the slaves riding into the yard and ran to greet them; they decapitated him. At a farm where a schoolhouse had been built for local children, his men arrived just as the children were being told to flee. Turner’s men—by this time riotously drunk on hard cider—rode them down and dismembered ten of them with axes.

This, apparently, is “not sucking.”

Second, a history account that I follow on Instagram shared something related to abolitionist terrorist John Brown. In the comments, when someone mentioned Brown’s Pottawatomie massacre, in which Brown, his sons, and some accomplices hacked five men to death with custom-made broadswords, someone who thought himself very clever indeed replied: “Thus always to slaveholders.”

Here’s the thing: none of Brown’s victims owned slaves. They were family farmers who had a mere difference of opinion with Brown, who settled on them as suitable targets for retaliation following what he perceived to be recent pro-slavery victories in the news. For this, they were roused from bed in the middle of the night, led away from their farms over the wailing and pleading of wives and mothers, and hacked to pieces, with Brown personally administering coups de grâce with his revolver. He would go on to plot a rebellion that, had it been successful, would have killed tens of thousands. It failed, but not before sixteen had been killed.

This is, presumably, also “not sucking.” Indeed, to go by that commenter’s words, it’s apparently a standard to be striven for.

I don’t remember the order in which I saw these two posts, but I ran across them on Monday and Tuesday of last week. I found the gloating tone, the posturing and virtue signaling, and especially the moral blindness of both annoying but not especially surprising. The self-congratulatory upright can talk a lot of smack about the long dead, especially when they’re ignorant of the details.

Then Wednesday happened.

I don’t have anything new to say about last week’s public political murder, but the gloating, posturing, and moral blindness of the responses following the event brought these posts about Brown and Turner back to mind, albeit more sharply and painfully defined.

One of my favorite history professors in college mentioned, as an offhand comment during class one day, that one should always beware of those willing to murder on principle. (He may even have been talking specifically about John Brown.) It took me a long time to grasp fully what he meant. One should also beware of those willing to excuse murder on principle.

This is why one’s perception and interpretation of history matter. One’s understanding of the past inevitably informs the present, and excusing the violence of a Turner or a Brown because they had the correct opinions creates the same incentive structure in the present. The person who can celebrate the long-ago slaughter of ordinary people in the name of high-minded political principle can also—it is abundantly clear—celebrate and excuse murder today. They even get the added joy of revisiting the moment over and over on video.

If only there were a way to describe these people.

I teach both of these events—Nat Turner’s revolt and John Brown’s career of bloodshed in both Kansas and Virginia—in detail as part of US History I. Both stories are well enough documented and complicated enough to rubbish easy celebration. Students will all agree that slavery was bad, but they almost always recoil from what Turner and Brown did about it—a salutary moral challenge offering a moment of genuine openness. I’ve linked to decent online articles about both above, but the books I routinely recommend to students on these topics are The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, by Stephen Oates, which is sympathetic to Turner’s plight as a slave but doesn’t soften or excuse the violence at all, and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz. I’ve written about both here.

Crucially, while both books are about the evil men at the center of these stories, they also offer small points of hope, of people who actually “don’t suck.” During Turner’s revolt, a slave named Nelson saved the life of Lavinia Francis and her unborn child by hiding her from Turner’s men, and on the night of Brown’s Pottawatomie Creek massacre, Mahala Doyle’s stalwart defense of her sixteen-year old son John spared him from Brown and his men’s swords.

May we have more Nelsons and Mahala Doyles, people saving lives amidst slaughter, and fewer self-righteous, self-proclaimed heroes embracing it.

Vastness, might, and self-destruction

Near the end of Count Luna, Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s eerie postwar novella about an Austrian businessman who believes he is being stalked by a man he accidentally sent to a concentration camp, Lernet-Holenia includes a lengthy excursus on Rome, its history and especially its subterranean architecture, in the course of which he breaks out into this apostrophe:

O happy days of long ago when the city was still young! O early, rural Rome! Your sons, a sturdy race of peasant warriors, tilled their own ancestral soil; with their own hands, they yoked the oxen, and when the evening sun cast long shadows from the hills, they bore home on their own shoulders the wood from the forest. Food was simple, clothing plain, and people still honored the gods, the children their parents and the woman the man. Women did not paint their faces, nor did married people break their vows; friend did not betray friend. But when, on the pretext that all this was too rustic, too coarse, too old-fashioned, they strove to make everything bigger and better, their lives at once began to deteriorate. The more the nation’s power grew the more did its inner force diminish. The talons of the legions’ eagles might stretch to the borders of Latium, might hold all of Italy in their grasp, might reach out toward the ends of the earth; the city which had been built of clay and brick might clothe itself in gilded stone; the peaks of the Capitol might bristle with temples and pillars of Pentelic marble, with triumphal arches and bronze chariots with effigies of its own and conquered gods, with statues stolen from Greece, with the captured banners of foreign peoples and with countless trophies; but the moral decency, the strength of mind and of spirit, in short, the very qualities that had enabled the Romans to build up their vast empire, were destroyed by the vastness and the might of their own creation.

The key sentence, the hinge point in the story told here, comes near the middle, when the Romans themselves come to regard their own origins as “too rustic, too coarse, too old-fashioned.” This is the self-loathing oikophobia of new money enticed by old decadence and trendy ideas.* The moment they shift from the pious duty of preservation to a quest for improvement and raw power, their corruption has already begun. Their contempt for their own past means there can be no course correction.

In the end, success proves enervating and self-defeating, not simply by inviting logistical overextension and military defeat—the inadequate material explanations for Rome’s collapse—but for hollowing out the spiritual and moral qualities that had made the Romans successful in the first place.

Lernet-Holenia puts all this quite pithily, and though he is reflecting on the final collapse of the Roman Empire, the way he tells the story is strikingly similar to the argument of Cicero’s final, impromptu speech about the collapse of the Republic in my novella The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Decline appears in many ages, but never in disguise.

I wrote Cicero nine years ago, mostly as a way to tell a story I find interesting and inspiring but also because some broad cultural trends were bothering me. A lot has changed since then but the circumstances that somewhat inspired it have only gotten worse. I stand by it.

For more on early Rome’s “sturdy race of peasant warriors,” see the Kenneth Minogue quotation here. And I didn’t post about it at the time, but I reviewed Lernet-Holenia’s haunting novella Baron Bagge at Miller’s Book Review last month. Check that out here.

* Sketch idea: A bunch of Romans from, say, the 2nd century AD protest a statue of Cincinnatus. A reporter interviews a pedagogue, who lays out how problematic the story of Cincinnatus is. His farm stood on land stolen from the Etruscans, and the Senate didn’t even allow women. In the studio, a panel of pundits expand the scope to condemn Scipio Africanus, Augustus, and both ends of the line of Brutus. While they fulminate against the ancients, a band of mustachioed Cherusci from the Praetorian Guard enter the studio and, well…

The damned and the blessed

Dante’s Comedy has three parts, but people commonly read only Inferno. I can somewhat understand why—Inferno is dramatic, fast-paced, and gossipy, with passages of seemingly straightforward horror. I think modern readers can also mistake Dante’s meditation on sin for salacious wallowing. But even if they read it in good faith, those who read only Inferno shortchange themselves.

I had already read the Comedy several times by the time I took Classical and Medieval Lit as an elective in college. (The chance to read my favorite book for credit was one reason I took it.) I’ve always been interested in structure as a part of storytelling, but it was in this class that my professor first drew my attention specifically to Dante’s use of parallelism across the three parts of the Comedy.

Case in point: I’ve been reading Michael Palma’s new complete translation of the Comedy and began Purgatorio last night. In canto II, Dante kneels to wash the smut of hell from his face—a requirement before he can enter Purgatory—and encounters a shipload of saved souls arriving to begin their purgation. They’re singing Psalm 114 as a hymn of deliverance and, before Dante can speak, greet him:

. . . with every face
turned toward us, the new people raised the cry:
“You there, do you know this mountain? If you do,
then show us the right road to climb it by.”

These souls are joyful and eager.

The contrast with the vestibule of hell, which parallels it in Inferno III, could not be more striking. There, instead of singing, there is pure, unrelenting, cacophonous noise. (“We will make the whole universe a noise in the end,” Lewis’s Screwtape asserts.) Instead of greeting Dante, the damned are too consumed with their tortures to do anything but flee the wasps that sting them. And where the souls arriving in Purgatory have a goal and direction, the damned run in circles—the central image of Inferno—forever.

The contrast extends through both books. In Purgatorio, souls repeatedly speak to Dante before they are spoken to. In canto IV, where I left off last night, the soul of Belacqua actually calls out to Dante and Virgil to get their attention; they wouldn’t have noticed him otherwise. The redeemed are as eager to share how God has saved them as they are to begin their sanctifying journey up the mountain. Here’s Manfred, a secular ruler who was excommunicated by multiple popes and only repented as he lay dying on the battlefield, in canto III:

After two mortal wounds had done for me,
weeping, I placed myself into the care
of Him who gives forgiveness willingly.
My sins were horrible beyond compare,
but the arms of Infinite Goodness open wide,
and all who return to It are gathered there.

The shades of the damned in Inferno, by contrast, are famously reluctant to give their names and are often identified by other souls out of pure spite. Grace gives direction and continues to unify and open, even after death; sin, aimless, turns in on itself and closes, especially after death.

Dante is one of the rare writers who can make goodness desirable, not least through contrast. After the thirty-odd cantos of ever deepening evil in Inferno, the opening of Purgatorio is the same splash of cool dew that cleanses Dante’s face. That tiny moment—a single tercet of dialogue—in which the new arrivals ask Dante where they must go to find the path upward filled me with an inexpressible yearning for grace.

Again, if you only read Inferno, you miss more than you might guess.

The Hobbit on The Rest is History

Earlier today The Rest is History debuted a new Friday feature, “book club” episodes in which the hosts will talk about favorite or otherwise worthwhile books. Dominic Sandbrook and producer Tabby got things off to a good start with a wonderful discussion of The Hobbit. Their insight into the book, Tolkien’s life, and the historical context—especially the First World War and the Somme—that informed his writing made for good listening, but hearing their personal histories with the book was a joy and their evident love for it infectious. Dominic thinks he was about six when he discovered The Hobbit; I was sixteen, as I’ve recently related. (Dominic is also exactly right that The Hobbit is one of those books where you always remember where and when you first read it.)

I enjoyed this discussion especially enthusiastically, as I just finished reading The Hobbit to my kids for the second time earlier this week, on the anniversary of Tolkien’s death in 1973. A couple of nice coincidences.

Or are they? Dominic quotes Gandalf’s wry and powerful final words in the book:

Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand bringing them about yourself? You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!

This is, as Dominic suggests, a poignant reminder right at the end of the story of the breadth and depth of the world in which the story takes place, something palpable even to a young reader. But it’s also a hint of grace and providence in Middle-Earth. There are things afoot none of the characters can know much less comprehend, and they are more consequential than returning the King Under the Mountain to his throne or getting Mr Baggins home to his larders and spoons. Thanks to The Lord of the Rings we know some of what that is.

I was an adult reading The Hobbit for the nth time before I really grasped the import of Gandalf’s words. It was longer yet before I understood the humble wisdom—and accidental precision—of Bilbo’s reply: “Thank goodness!”

I also enjoyed Dominic and Tabby’s discussion of Smaug, who, in the novel, is more a silken Bond villain than the rather obvious, overdone villain in Peter Jackson’s movies, their noting the linguistic hint in the Sackville-Bagginses’ name that they’re striving and pretentious, and Dominic’s rightful critique of those who claim Tolkien’s moral vision is one of simplistic black-and-white. Tolkien believed in Original Sin and the Fall, after all, and had seen their results firsthand—not only in the trenches but in his own heart. Would that more modern novelists had that insight.

I’m a great fan of The Rest is History but I can’t recommend this episode enough. Do check it out on whatever podcasting platform you use. Their next read is The Handmaid’s Tale, which I’ll almost certainly skip out on, but I’m quite excited about this feature and loved this first installment.

I wrote about reading “Riddles in the Dark,” the best chapter in the book, to my kids early this summer, and reflected in more detail on my first reading of the book as a teenager for the fiftieth anniversary of Tolkien’s death two years ago this week. I’m also excited to say that, following some relatives’ recent trip to Switzerland, I have a German-language edition (Der Hobbit) on its way to me soon. A great way to brush up my German.

Summer reading 2025

My reading has tipped more toward fiction than non-fiction for the last couple years, and this summer may be the most fiction-heavy season yet. I try to read at whim, but I plan to correct that a little this fall. I have a lot of good history and biography sitting around, waiting. In the meantime, I enjoyed a lot of good books this summer, and the following—presented in no particular order—are my favorites. As always, I hope y’all can find something here to enjoy.

For the purposes of this blog post, “summer” runs from mid-May to Labor Day. And, as usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite fiction

The Cannibal Owl, by Aaron Gwyn—A short, beautifully written Western novella based on a real person, an orphan boy taken in and raised by Comanches who nevertheless becomes their destructor. This story defies easy summary but is totally absorbing and breathtakingly dramatic. One of the rare short books I’ve actually wished were longer.

A Deadly Shade of Gold, by John D MacDonald—An old friend of “salvage consultant” Travis McGee pays a visit after several years’ absence and shows him a solid gold Aztec idol. He also asks McGee to set up a meeting with Nora, the girlfriend he unceremoniously abandoned, and is unceremoniously killed. In the aftermath, Nora hires McGee to investigate the provenance of the idol, where the rest of the treasure his friend mentioned has disappeared to, and who had him killed. McGee, eager to avenge his friend, travels to luxury villas in Mexico and the estates of pervy millionaires in California and gets entangled with the illicit antiquities trade, killer guard dogs, multiple women, and Cuban exiles along the way. Gripping throughout.

Judgment on Deltchev, by Eric Ambler—Ambler’s first postwar novel. A British playwright is recruited to report on the Stalinist show trial of a leftwing anti-Communist in an unnamed Eastern European state just after the end of World War II, as the Iron Curtain falls and Soviet puppet governments consolidate control and eliminate rivals. Intricately plotted and, unfortunately, all too realistic. Full review on the blog here.

The Schirmer Inheritance, by Eric Ambler—Ambler’s second postwar novel, a legal thriller in which American lawyer George Carey attempts to find the heir to a fortune with tangled roots the Napoleonic Wars. The last surviving descendant of a Bavarian soldier who deserted following a battle against Napoleon has died intestate, and before the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania seizes the inheritance they must first confirm that there are no other potential heirs. As it turns out, there may be one—a German soldier who went missing in Greece near the end of World War II, but hasn’t been confirmed dead. Carey must either him or confirm that he was killed by guerrillas. His search will take him across Europe and closer and closer to danger. I read this one before Judgment on Deltchev, and while that is clearly the superior novel, The Schirmer Inheritance offers a solid, atmospheric slow-burn and the vintage Ambler pleasure of a glimpse into a complicated, unsettled, dangerous underworld.

The Looking Glass War, by John Le Carré—After a British agent retrieving a canister of film is run down by a car in Finland, the small, understaffed, impotent agency behind him attempts to run an infiltration operation in East Germany. The followup to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which Le Carré—somehow—feared made espionage look too glamorous and exciting, this is a story of confusion and futility. Be prepared for that. It sags just a bit in the middle but has exceptionally gripping opening and closing chapters. Le Carré at his best still astonishes me with how effortlessly his novels read.

The Properties of Rooftop Air, by Tim Powers—A powerfully creepy novella set in the subterranean world of Regency London before the events of The Anubis Gates, which I read this spring. A satisfying and meaningful self-contained story.

The Oceans and the Stars, by Mark Helprin—A subtle and clever Odyssey for the age of presidents (instead of gods) and terrorists (instead of monsters). A US Navy officer in a dead-end career oversees the construction of a last-of-its-class small ship, and falls in love with a lawyer whose husband has abandoned her. His daring and courage and her commitment will be tested when he and his new ship, the USS Athena, deploy to the Indian Ocean to fight Iran, Somali pirates, and ISIS. Full review on the blog here.

Favorite non-fiction

Cooler than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, by CM Kushins—After Nicholas Shakespeare’s recent Ian Fleming biography and an older Poe biography back in the spring, I read two more big literary bios this summer, both new. One I had been anticipating, but this one, a new authorized biography of Elmore Leonard, was a great surprise. I learned about it only the week before it was published, and was gifted a copy by the publisher. It’s excellent—a comprehensive cradle-to-grave account that pays close attention to Leonard’s life, career, and craft. I especially appreciated the latter: Kushins notes key influences on Leonard’s imagination and writing at different stages of his life (especially crucial: All Quiet on the Western Front as a boy, For Whom the Bell Tolls as a young writer, The Friends of Eddie Coyle just as he pivoted from Westerns to crime) as well as his writing process. The book is also full of delightful stories: Leonard the Seabee sending coy letters to an old friend from the South Pacific, Leonard the ad man writing longhand in his desk drawer at work, Leonard, in mounting frustration, working on film adaptations with the mercenaries and prima donnas of Hollywood. The one area I wish were covered in more detail is the personal. Kushins pays close attention to the young Leonard’s devout Catholic faith but, though we sense a change comes during his divorce in the early 1970s as well as his struggle toward sobriety, why he ended up agnostic is left unclear. That said, the otherwise solid coverage of his life and the thorough attention to his work is wonderful.

Sidney Reilly: Master Spy, by Benny Morris—From Yale UP’s Jewish Lives series, this is a short biography of the Russian-born Sigmund (or possibly Solomon) Rosenblum who, as Sidney Reilly, spied off and on for the British before becoming a professional agent during the First World War and committing himself to the defeat of Bolshevism. This is an extraordinarily complicated story with lots of points of confusion, myth, and missing information, but Morris tells it well. There are longer biographies of Reilly out there, which I am going to seek out, but this offered a solid introduction to a tumultuous life.

Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, by Richard Kopley—The other of the two big literary biographies I read this summer, Kopley’s Edgar Allan Poe is comprehensive, sweeping, exhaustively researched, and combines a thorough account of Poe’s life with criticism of his work. Kopley demonstrates mastery of both, but has not grown too close to his subject; though charitable, especially toward Poe’s drinking and his feuds with other authors, which to some biographers smacks of jealousy or mere trolling, Kopley is not uncritical. He is especially good on Poe’s personal relationships, not only his fraught relationship with his foster father John Allan and his doomed wife Virginia, but also his friendships with other writers, childhood friends from Richmond, and the various women he loved both before and after Virginia. Kopley’s literary criticism is also insightful and thought-provoking. Though some of his interpretation is perhaps too autobiographical for my taste, I benefited greatly from his emphasis on structure and allegory, especially in Poe’s early work. This is probably the most thorough life of Poe that I’ve read, but is also probably too long and detailed for the casual Poe fan. But for anyone with more than passing interest in the subject I highly recommend it.

Julius Caesar: A Biography, by John Buchan—A succinct overview not only of its subject but of his life and times, with a special concern for the decline and collapse of republican institutions. See below for a link to the full John Buchan June review.

John Buchan June

This year for John Buchan June I emphasized Buchan’s short fiction, reading three collections of stories. I also read one of his short biographies and three novels, including his first full-length historical adventure. Here are all eight of this year’s reads, each linked to the full review here on the blog, in order of reading:

• The Runagates Club (1928)

• John Burnet of Barns (1898)

• Julius Caesar: A Biography (1932)

• The Watcher by the Threshold (1902)

• A Prince of the Captivity (1933)

• The Courts of the Morning (1929)

• The Path of the King (1921)

Of these, The Path of the King, particularly its early stories set in the Middle Ages, may be my favorite, though “No-Man’s-Land” in The Watcher by the Threshhold is a stellar bit of creepiness. Of the full novels, I think the early, flawed, overlong, but hugely enjoyable John Burnet of Barns was my favorite.

After four years of this event I’m running low on Buchan novels but there’s more short fiction and I’ve barely touched his biographical work. Looking forward to next year!

Rereads

Reading Cooler than Cool got me to revisit a few of my favorite Elmore Leonard novels on my commute. I’d recommend any of these. And though I’m not sure how many times I’ve read The Hobbit, this is my second time through with the kids. A joy.

• Mr Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard*

• Hombre, by Elmore Leonard*

• Freaky Deaky, by Elmore Leonard*

• The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien

Looking ahead

I’m glad to say I’m already well into a couple of good reads for the fall, including Michael Palma’s recently published terza rima translation of my favorite book, The Divine Comedy, and I have a lot of classics lined up. I’m sure you’ll hear about some of them in the end-of-year recap. In the meantime, I hope y’all will check some of these out, and thanks as always for reading!