Above the Waterfall

This week I read my second Ron Rash novel of the year, Above the Waterfall. I got through it in two days—it's excellent. 

Like most of Rash's fiction, Above the Waterfall takes place in the western North Carolina mountains, but unlike his historical novels Serena, One Foot in Eden, and The Cove, this story takes place in the present: a horribly real, recognizable present. This is the Appalachia of dependence—on distant relations to care for the children of failing families, on big-city resort developers and tourist dollars, on chemicals like painkillers, pot, and meth.

Les, a 51-year old Sheriff on the verge of retirement, and Becky, a middle-aged park ranger and Les's sometime romantic attachment, narrate the story in alternating chapters of present and past tense. Becky survived a school shooting as a girl and is still haunted by it in her mid-forties. She tries to dull the memories of the tragedy, her permanently disrupted family life, and her difficulty forming relationships by retreat into the wilderness and meditation on the beauty of the world. A devotee of Gerard Manley Hopkins, her chapters brim with his kind of allusive, fragmentary poetry as she pieces together her memories with her present struggles, particularly her difficult feelings for Les and the pain of a recently failed relationship with another nature lover, a man who turned out to be an eco-terrorist. 

While Les is an artist too—a painter of watercolors—his career in law enforcement has imparted to his narration a directness that sits uneasily with his artistic inclinations. After decades arresting drug addicts and wife beaters, identifying corpses, and bearing bad news to the parents of meth-addicted children, his matter-of-factness even seems like a coping mechanism, as if he can only deal with the horrors he sees by describing them without polish.

“What more might we recover if open to it? Perhaps even God.”

— Above the Waterfall

What unites Les and Becky, other than a brief fling, an interrupted love affair, is an elderly man named Gerald. Becky has struck up a friendship with Gerald who, bereft of his wife and only son, lives alone on ancestral land abutting a new but struggling mountain resort. Gerald's meth-addicted nephew takes advantage of his generosity every chance he gets. While Becky tries to help Gerald however she can, Les, pestered by the resort's owner, has to try to persuade Gerald not to poach the trout living in the resort's stretch of the creek that flows through both properties. 

The morning after an altercation in the resort parking lot that almost sends Gerald to the morgue, scores of fish wash up on the banks of the creek—poisoned with kerosene dumped into the stream above a waterfall where, according to Gerald, now rare speckled trout have returned. Gerald insists he's innocent, and Becky takes his side. Les, juggling the resort's problems and a harrowing series of meth busts, is just trying to keep the peace during his last days on the job. It's not enough.

This is my new favorite from Rash. What gripped me in my old favorite, One Foot in Eden, were the strongly drawn relationships—between the young couple at the beginning of the book, between the couple and a roguish neighbor, between the couple and their son many years later—and the threats that tested them—betrayal, adultery, lies, murder. Above the Waterfall shares these strengths but outdoes One Foot in Eden. With its cast of middle-aged characters, each of whom harbors hurts and secrets, each of whom struggle to overcome past sins and earn forgiveness, and with its setting in a dying world, this novel adds a thick layer of poignancy and theologically inflected melancholy. It moved me, and it made me think.

Above the Waterfall is a powerful portrait of a world in which all are guilty and the law is inadequate to mend such brokenness. It depicts a world in need of redemption, and Rash suggests, that redemption is available if the sinners just look for it. In Becky's words:

The next morning as I'd hiked out, I started to step over a log but my foot jerked back. When I looked on the other side, a copperhead lay coiled. Part of me not sight knew it was there. The atavistic like flint rock sparked. Amazon tribes see Venus in daylight. My grandfather needed no watch to tell time. What more might we recover if open to it? Perhaps even God.

The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun

The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, edited by Verlyn Flieger, is the latest Tolkien napkin doodle to get its own book.

I'm being jocular, of course, and this Lay is a welcome edition to the available work of Tolkien, but when I turned it up online that was the first thing to cross my mind. Christopher Tolkien and the Tolkien Estate have taken some flak for mining the master's unpublished papers, presumably as a cash grab.

Delving too greedily and too deep, if you will.

As it happens, I don't think this criticism is fair, and I'm glad that even slender volumes like this one (just 106 pages) and The Story of Kullervo continue to come out, for reasons I'll get into later.

The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun is a 506-line poem based on Breton myth, particularly Celtic stories about witches and changelings. It's a lay, meaning a narrative poem longer than a ballad and shorter than an epic, composed in iambic tetrameter couplets, a format most famously used in the lais of Marie de France, a twelfth-century poet. Tolkien wrote this poem in 1930, apparently in the middle of writing The Lay of Leithian, which the editor has established thanks to Tolkien's own careful notations of the dates of completion of several different manuscripts. 

Tolkien wrote the poem following a period of intense study of Celtic myth and legend, and the Lay is rooted in the stories of Brittany, a continental outpost of the Celtic Fringe. Gwyn Jones, familiar to anyone who has studied the Viking Age, published the Lay in Welsh Review in December 1945.

The Lay tells the story of a Breton king and queen who cannot have a child. The king eventually seeks out an enchantress who gives him a potion which, after he spikes his wife's drink with it, allows the couple to conceive and bear twin children. The witch accepts no payment—always a danger sign in this kind of story—and a short time later the king, pursuing a white deer to help satisfy a strange craving of his wife, stumbles upon the witch, who now demands payment. He refuses, insists he will be immune to her vengeful witchcraft, and slowly succumbs and dies over the next three days, after which his wife dies as well. 

The story is slight but evocative, and Tolkien's poetry is wonderful to read. Here's the king pursuing the deer (ll. 259-276), just before he encounters the witch for the second and final time:

Beneath the woodland's hanging eaves
a white doe startled under leaves;
strangely she glistered in the sun
as she leaped forth and turned to run.
Then reckless after her he spurred;
dim laughter in the woods he heard,
but heeded not, a longing strange
for deer that fair and fearless range
vexed him, for venison of the beast
whereon no mortal hunt shall feast,
for waters crystal-clear and cold
that never in holy fountain rolled.
He hunted her from the forest eaves
into the twilight under leaves;
the earth was shaken under hoof,
till the boughs were bent into a roof,
and the sun was woven in a snare;
and laughter still was on the air.

Beautiful, eerie, atmospheric, expressive of the king's character—his own desire to run down this deer is about to ensnare him—and not a little unsettling, with that laughter hanging in the air behind him as he unwittingly leaves the ordinary world behind.

The main text itself is about twenty pages long. The rest of the book is taken up with antecedents: two ballads, a fragment, and earlier handwritten and typescript versions of the final published poem. The ballads, which are thematically linked (Christopher Tolkien refers to them as a diptych), tell two stories of corrigans—female nature spirits that seek to replenish their dwindling ranks by either seducing mortal men or stealing human children. Here are the first three quatrains from The Corrigan I, in which a woman finds her child swapped for a changeling: 

'Mary on earth, why dost thou weep?' 
'My little child I could not keep:
A corrigan stole him in his sleep,
And I must weep.

To a well they went for water clear,
In cradle crooning they left him here,
And I found him not, my baby dear,
Returning here.

In the cradle a strange cry I heard.
Dark was his face like a wrinkled toad;
With hands he clawed, he mouthed and mowed,
But made no word.'

I particularly enjoyed the two ballads. They're short, atmospheric poems that evoke the dangerously blurry boundary between the everyday and supernatural worlds, a theme not so much running through as saturating Celtic myth.

The editor, Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, helpfully lays all this out in her introductory material, explanatory notes, and critical apparatus. By printing the published version of the Lay first and following it with the ballads and earlier drafts, Flieger shows how Tolkien dabbled with some ideas he had encountered in his reading of Celtic myth at the time and, gradually, reworked some Breton legends and made them his own. She offers particularly keen insights into the ways in which Tolkien, in the final version of the Lay, pitted pagan and Christian elements against each other—the witch's laughter versus hymns, the witch herself versus the Virgin—to shape a powerfully resonant but economical story. 

Which is why I appreciate works like The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun being made available. If you have an interest, like I do, in the ways writers and artists consider, rework, and riff off of their inspirations until something original emerges, books like these and the aforementioned Story of Kullervo—also edited by Flieger and also worth reading—are opportunities to see that artistic process in action.

Because what Tolkien did with the myths he loved was not simple regurgitation, which tends to be how people talk about his medieval influences. While a case can be made that the corrigan of the ballads or the fay or witch of the Lay proper are the literary grandmothers of a character like Galadriel, these poems are important on their own, not just as raw material for The Lord of the Rings. It is interesting in and of itself to see how Tolkien read voraciously—whether Celtic, Germanic, or Finnish legend—absorbed what he was interested in, and let it inform his creativity. His was a mind awake and open, endlessly curious, receptive to ancient storytelling traditions, and he didn't mind a lot of hard work.

As an aside: Ted Nasmith, the illustrator whose paintings graced the paperback copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that I read in high school, has three works based on Aotrou and Itroun that you can look at on his website.

Seinfeld and Dante on art

The New York Times as a fun, interesting Q&A with Jerry Seinfeld to promote the latest season of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. It's short and worth reading for its own sake, but I wanted to draw attention to this passage.

New York Times: You turned down an offer from NBC of $5 million an episode to do one more season of “Seinfeld.” Nobody in TV has ever made even close to that money before or since. Did you ever second-guess that decision? 

“The most important word in art is ‘proportion.’”

Jerry Seinfeld: No. It was the perfect moment, and the proof that it was the right moment is the number of questions you’re still asking me about it. The most important word in art is “proportion.” How much? How long is this joke going to be? How many words? How many minutes? And getting that right is what makes it art or what makes it mediocre.

That's dynamite artistic advice right in the middle of his answer. Proportion. No matter what your field or medium, proportion is key. He's absolutely right and, as he points out, his show has the legacy to prove it. 

Consider my own favorite sitcom, The Office, which outlasted its best material by several years. What was funny in small doses early on dominated the show by the middle of its run and could only get wilder in its quest for more laughs, with diminishing returns. By season six, the characters were wildly out of proportion, Flanderized caricatures, and the plots spent disproportionate time on ludicrous side stories. And it lasted another three seasons. 

Seinfeld's insight jibes with something I read long, long ago and have returned to many times to guide and correct my own work. In explaining Dante's art in constructing the Comedy, translator John Ciardi wrote that "Poetry is, among other things, the art of knowing what to leave out." Throwing in the kitchen sink, stuffing your work, can be the equivalent of white noise unless you have a good sense of proportion. It's hard to think of a literary locale more crowded than Dante's hell, but thanks to his gift of proportion you never lose sight of his purpose as an artist. Like Dante—like Seinfeld—have to develop a good sensibility of what does and doesn't belong. See also "Omit needless words" and "Murder your darlings." 

And of course, art being art, there are always good reasons to violate these rules—again, in the interest of maintaining proportion. To give Orwell the last word on this topic: "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous." Don't let even grammar throw you out of proportion.

St. Thomas Aquinas, virtue, and fireplace implements

Coincidental to my post on Thomas Aquinas and charity in debate, I discovered this delightful post from Christ and Pop Culture about my second favorite Thomas story: "How to Practice Virtue (by Chasing Hookers Away with Red-Hot Pokers)." It's a fun introduction to some of the basics of virtue ethics as demonstrated early in the monastic career of the Angelic Doctor. Thomas, who came from a noble family in southern Italy, joined the new and controversial Order of Preachers or "Dominicans" against his family's wishes, so his brothers abducted him, locked him in a tower, and threw a prostitute into the room with him to test his commitment to his vow of chastity. Read the piece to learn how that ended.

I say this is my "second favorite Thomas story"; it used to be my favorite, but the reality of lecturing a classroom of sleepy students on Western Civ at 8:00 AM moved the one I recounted earlier this week—about his startling interruption of a banquet with the king of France—to the top. I usually hold students' interest even if I'm not exactly a flamboyant lecturer, so this story,  the one time I pound on the lectern and shout during the semester, always gets hilarious and entertaining reactions. For me, anyway.

I'm not saying it was aliens

Giorgio Tsoukalos on The History Channel's Ancient Aliens. The pose that launched a thousand memes.

This morning I read a very interesting essay at The Atlantic in which the author, after summarizing some widespread beliefs, related scientific data, and modern attempts to reconcile the data with the beliefs, recounts wrestling and coming to terms with his unbelief—in extraterrestrial intelligence. Aliens. 

The title of the piece, by Michael Clune, a professor of English at Case Western University, is "I Don't Believe in Aliens Anymore." Clune's primary interest is in finding meaning and significance in a universe in which humanity, as a conscious intelligence, is alone. And we almost certainly are. Clune notes that:

“Humanity shouldn’t be surprised that we haven’t found aliens, because most likely there aren’t any.”

Earlier this year, a group at the University of Oxford released a paper arguing that our knowledge of the universe and of math should lead us to assume that intelligent life is most probably an extremely rare event, depending on a series of fortuitous circumstances . . . that are so unlikely as to almost never happen. Humanity shouldn’t be surprised that we haven’t found aliens, because most likely there aren’t any.

This is a realization I had myself some years ago. If, as we are often assured, the chance of intelligent life evolving anywhere is so infinitesimally small, the odds so impossibly long, then how can we assume it has happened more than once? 

But this is, in fact, what a lot of people will say if asked about extraterrestrial life. It's become a platitude: "The universe is so big there just has to be other life out there." Some people even take such questions as an opportunity to show how very 'umble they can be, by turning the question back onto ourselves: "I think it's arrogant to believe we're alone in the universe." But if you accept the premises above—the vast and dangerous complexity of the universe, the fragility of the conditions where life could emerge, and, given everything else, the long odds of life actually appearing and evolving—you must return to the question: If we're alone, now what? 

That's the question that animates Clune's essay, and I recommend reading it. But it was an offhand expression, not even an argument or line of thought, that caught my attention near the end, in this line from the conclusion: "Now looking back on that moment from the perspective of the Oxford study’s revelation, I wonder if giving up gods and aliens will lead people to the weird singularity of the human mind." Gods and aliens, lumped together. This follows from Clune's introduction, in which he posits religion as an earlier, now outmoded attempt by humanity to find a cosmic Other with which to communicate and through which to understand ourselves and our place in the universe. 

I don't know anything about Clune's religious beliefs—if he has any, and he seems to dismiss religion, albeit gently, in his essay—but I am religious, and this passing turn of phrase affirmed something about belief in aliens that also occurred to me some time ago: Belief in aliens is a substitute religion, and aliens are substitute gods.

You don't have to dig far or be intimately familiar with believers to see this, and once you've had that realization, you can't unsee it. Enthusiasts of spiritual esoterica and belief in aliens have a religious fervency and conceive of aliens in very religious ways: guides, protectors, sometimes even creators. The premise of everything from Ancient Aliens to 2001: A Space Odyssey is that aliens are responsible for the greatest human achievements, the greatest human wisdom, and the greatest historical leaps forward. Alien encounters almost always take the structure of a religious experience, so much so that some of the believers who have gone farther down the rabbit hole speculate that religious experiences are in fact alien abductions. The "kinds" of close encounters pretty clearly mirror the kinds of religious experiences people have, whether simply seeing a miracle, having visions, directly encountering saints or angels, more intense encounters that leave physical marks, and, the most awesome of all, being caught up into the heavens for a beatific vision. These encounters change the often unwilling witnesses and they long to reconnect with the intelligences that came to them. One of the most famous alien abduction books, which you may remember being repeatedly shilled on Unsolved Mysteries in the early 90s, is even called Communion.

One way to view these correspondences is as two iterations of the same nonsense, the attitude Clune, more tactfully, seems to assume in his essay. As he writes, "human culture never left the non-secular world behind." Aliens and belief in them "were just a modern version of religious literature." The old temples aren't being torn down; new ones are going up. Whether it's aliens (but I'm not saying it's aliens) or abstractions like humanity, spirituality, nature, Progress or, the ultimate abstraction, the Universe, new gods are crowding in with the old. And aliens and God are hardly mutually exclusive—there are embarrassing Christian spins on all of these things. It may be the most widespread but least noted form of modern religious syncretism.

“Spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison”

— CS Lewis

Which brings me to my point. I do agree with Clune to an extent, especially about the non-existence of alien life. But I disagree that belief in aliens is simply one more sincere but vain attempt to find meaning through false mythologies; I think belief in aliens bespeaks a deep human need to believe that has gone awry. As CS Lewis put it in an entirely different context, "spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison." 

The answer to UFOs isn't to give up faith in every transcendent belief system as equally erroneous, but to take away the poison of conspiracy theory and substitute truth. That, as it happens, is the path to meaning.

St. Thomas Aquinas on charity in debate

Catholic priests and Eastern Orthodox patriarchs in debate, from a late 13th century manuscript

From one of St. Thomas's commentaries on Aristotle: 

“We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth and both have helped us in the finding of it.”

Surprisingly for anyone who believes medieval people all marched in theological lockstep, in ideological thrall to the Pope, one of the most cherished methods of education during the Middle Ages was debate. This passion for debate included not only debates before audiences (but with considerably more intellectual rigor than our political "debates" now) but debates carried on by correspondence. Debate was, in a way, part of one's own education, as students often had to argue opposing sides of issues using set texts like the Sentences of Peter Lombard. This was the purpose of his contemporary Abelard's Sic et Non, which set conflicting opinions of the Church Fathers against one another with the student's task being to argue both sides and/or resolve the seeming conflict. Not everyone received Abelard's book enthusiastically, especially since Abelard burned a lot of bridges during his career, but such a project—using preexisting authorities, compiling glosses, adding commentary, and, throughout it all, debating—was typical of medieval education.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) was himself no mean debater. As a student and teacher at the Universities of Paris and Cologne, he both hosted and participated in debates and wrote extensively in preparation for them. His Disputed Questions on Truth is one such work, in which Thomas introduces a controversial topic like predestination, knowledge, justification, or the relation between human choice and God's will, considers them from multiple angles, proposes his own answers, anticipates responses and answers those, and, via dialectic, works his way toward the truth of the topic in question.

This format, the posing of thesis and antithesis in a disputatio, was itself a form of debate and mirrored the disputationes of the medieval university. Thomas wrote most of his heavy theological and philosophical work this way, including his magnum opus, the unfinished Summa Theologica, and his Summa contra Gentiles, apparently an apologetic work meant to help Christians both defend their faith and present it to Muslims in understandable terms. Thomas's use of the disputatio makes for incredibly tedious reading, but that reading will also be profoundly instructive if one sticks with it. It takes a serious amount of intellectual honesty and—to use a buzzword—empathy to work this way, presenting the strongest arguments of one's opponents rather than setting up armies of straw men to knock down. One has to respect one's opponents to work this way. It requires the virtue of charity.

Thomas took debate seriously, especially when theological truth was on the line. One of the weightiest issues of his day was the Cathar heresy, a revival of the dualistic Manichean spiritualism of late antiquity. Briefly, the Cathars held that one's spirit is pure, the material world—including one's own body—was evil, and only by purifying oneself of attachment to the world and its attendant appetites could one be saved. (This heresy has by no means been expunged from modern Christianity, by the way. How many people do you know who look forward to release from "this body" and "eternity in heaven" instead of the resurrection?) The founder of Thomas's order, St. Dominic, traveled through the area of southern France where Catharism had most firmly taken root and repeatedly debated Cathar leaders.

The controversy continued into Thomas's day. According to a famous anecdote, when Thomas was invited to a banquet with Louis IX, the Crusader king of France, he sat mostly silent through dinner, apparently lost in thought. Suddenly, long after the partygoers had gotten used to his silence, Thomas pounded on the table and shouted, "And that will settle the Manichees!" Supposedly, Louis had a secretary fetched so Thomas could get his idea down while it was still fresh.

The story may or may not be apocryphal, but it illustrates something true about Thomas: the debate was never far from his mind, and the more serious the disputed question the more that was the case. But again—this care for the debate was always infused with charity. Charity was not, to Thomas, mere affection or the bundle of feelings and lusts that passes for love today, but specifically the habit of "friendship of man for God" which unites man to God, who is charity. This divine friendship, as God works through us, reflects like sunlight off of us onto those around us:

“The aspect under which our neighbor is to be loved, is God, since what we ought to love in our neighbor is that he may be in God. Hence it is clear that it is specifically the same act whereby we love God, and whereby we love our neighbor. Consequently the habit of charity extends not only to the love of God, but also to the love of our neighbor.”

Loving your neighbor is loving God. So debate, but debate charitably, because bringing your neighbor to the truth is the loving thing to do. After all, that's what God is doing to us.

Abelard offers an instructive counterexample. Famous for his arrogance, Abelard was seldom content to defeat someone in debate on points—he wanted an intellectual knockout. He tried to humiliate his opponents and pointedly criticized major theologians and philosophers, including his old teachers, saying of one that he was famous out "of long established custom" and not because of "the potency of his own talent or intellect." After impregnating a student, whose relatives caught and castrated him, Abelard fled to the Abbey of St. Denis outside Paris—until he insulted the abbot and fled again. For the rest of his life, he resurrected old controversies and picked new fights. Like Galileo, who also provoked most of the hostility he encountered himself by being rude and pigheaded, Abelard found himself accused of heresy and facing excommunication by the time he died. A number of Abelard's ideas, particularly his dabbling in rationalist deconstructions of the Trinity, would still have put him beyond the pale doctrinally speaking, but his reception may have been warmer—more forgiving, more charitable—had he practiced a little charity himself.

I reflected a few weeks ago on the difference between quarreling and arguing. I think charity is the difference; it's the oil that reduces friction and overheating. We might be tempted simply to disengage, to shut off the engine, but that's a mistake. The truth is real and worth pursuing, and it's worth persuading others to join you in the pursuit—what's the point of debate if not to persuade? Charity makes debate, rather than screaming, tribalism, and virtue signalling, possible. Assume the best of your opponents, assume their good faith, and always give them yours.

If we can learn anything from Thomas right now, we can start there.

My top nine Civil War novels

For the upcoming release of Griswoldville, here’s a list of my personal favorites from the vast body of Civil War literature. This is by no means an exhaustive list—there's a lot of good stuff out there and plenty I still haven’t read, like Thomas Keneally’s Confederates, Mackinlay Kantor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Andersonville, or even Gone With the Wind—but simply a list of the books I’ve been most moved by, have most enjoyed, and have most often returned to over the years.

So here, in no particular order, are my nine favorite Civil War novels, with a few honorable mentions or bonuses thrown in just because:

Rifles for Watie, by Harold Keith

My mom ordered Rifles for Watie from the God’s World Book Club flyer when I was in fourth or fifth grade. I remember plowing through the novel, simultaneously disappointed that it did not take place in the Civil War I was familiar with—the Eastern Theatre—and fascinated by the war it did depict. Rifles for Watie is a story of intrigue, in which Jeff Bussey, a young Union soldier, infiltrates the Confederate Indian cavalry of Stand Watie, a Cherokee leader. Watie hopes to acquire repeating rifles for his cavalry troopers, and Jeff, despite the friendships he has formed, must stop him. The novel respectfully depicts the Cherokees, their attitudes toward the war, and the chaotic Western Theatre, and is unusually realistic for children’s fiction thanks to the author’s many interviews with elderly Civil War veterans. Rifles for Watie won the Newbery Medal in 1958. 

Also recommended: The Perilous Road, by William O. Steele, about a young pro-Confederate Tennessean who discovers his brother has joined the Yankees; G. Clifton Wisler’s Red Cap, the story of a drummer boy imprisoned in Andersonville; and Brotherhood, by Anne Westrick, a daring novel about a boy in post-war Richmond who finds his humanity tested when his brother joins the Ku Klux Klan.

Shiloh, by Shelby Foote

If you find yourself daunted, as I do, by the sheer size of the late Shelby Foote’s three-volume, 2,900 page, 1.2 million word The Civil War: A Narrative, start with Shiloh instead. Shiloh is a short, beautifully written and poignant novel taking place across about three days but encompassing the beginning of the war, the secession crisis, and the conflicts within the United States as a whole. Told through multiple points of view, from commanding generals on down to yeoman privates and a squad of volunteers, Foote’s novel gives you glimpses of all the major events of the battle through several perspectives and hints broadly, because of the battle’s course and results, at what the outcome of the war must be. More importantly, it brings you into the battle, giving you that difficult to achieve feeling of what it must have been like, to make you understand the experiences of the soldiers themselves. A great book.

Also recommended: Shelby Foote also edited Chickamauga and Other Civil War Stories, a collection of short stories from authors including Ambrose Bierce, Thomas Wolfe, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Eudora Welty. More about Bierce below.

The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara

I came to The Killer Angels through Gettysburg, the 1993 film adaptation. As a kid I had a VHS copy of the movie, recorded off TNT, which I watched on a near endless loop, but when I finally read the novel I found the only thing superior to the film. Shaara’s book is much like Foote’s Shiloh in that it is the dramatic, beautifully written story of a single battle that, through its multiple points of view, offers a sweeping look at the whole war. But it differs from Shiloh in its scope thanks to the sheer scale of the battle, the largest ever fought in North America, and in the thoughtful, melancholy introspection of its major characters, especially James Longstreet, Lewis Armistead, and Joshua Chamberlain. One of the most popular Civil War novels ever published, justifiably so, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975.

Also recommended: Promise of Glory, by C.X. Moreau, covers the September 1862 Battle of Sharpsburg (Antietam) and owes a lot to The Killer Angels in terms of structure, focus, and tone. Promise of Glory doesn't reach the heights of Shaara's work, but it’s a solid fictional recreation of another important moment of the war.

The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane

Justly regarded as a classic, The Red Badge of Courage suffers somewhat from its near constant presence in high school reading lists. This is the story of Henry Fleming, a young Union army private, and his experiences during the (unnamed) Battle of Chancellorsville in the spring of 1863. While Crane was not a veteran of the war, he did his homework and crafted a short novel of unflinching psychological realism, capturing every vicissitude of dread, cowardice, and reckless courage over the day or so that Fleming wanders through the battlefield. While this novel clearly made later works of grim, realistic war fiction like The Naked and the Dead possible, Crane’s story is apolitical, unembittered by ideology, and narrowly focused on one thing—courage—and what it means. Actual veterans praised Crane’s work, and it’s still worth reading a century on.

Also recommended: Ambrose Bierce, an older contemporary of Crane and a veteran of the war's western theatre, wrote a number of short stories based on his experiences. “An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge” is an early stream-of-consciousness story about a Confederate saboteur who is about to be hanged, and “Chickamauga” depicts the horrific aftermath of battle as seen by a child. Bierce’s image of the wounded and their terrible suffering still haunt me from reading this as a kid.

Traveller, by Richard Adams

Probably the strangest book on this list, and one of the strangest I routinely recommend, Traveller is the story of Robert E. Lee—as told by his horse. Adams, who is most famous for his other animal epic, Watership Down, retells the course of the war through a goodhearted but ignorant animal witness. Through Traveller we get a narrative of the majority of the major campaigns of the Eastern Theatre from an unusual perspective. It sounds goofy, but the story works well because it brings a fresh sense of pathos to the war through a narrator who only half understands what is going on. In a half-comic, half-tragic irony, Traveller ends the war thinking his side has won, and the note of triumph he brings to his storytelling only deepens the reader's sense of loss. Surprisingly engaging, and even more surprisingly moving.

Also recommended: For another outside angle on a major Civil War figure, read A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, by Stephen Harrigan. This novel offers a portrait of Abraham Lincoln as a young, ambitious frontier lawyer and brims with colorful real life characters and incidents even if the narrator, a failed New England poet, is fictional. Though the story transpires decades before the war, this novel, like Traveller, is freighted with irony and sadness because of what we know is coming.  

Woe to Live On, by Daniel Woodrell

Like Rifles for Watie, mentioned above, Woe to Live On tells a story from an out-of-the-way corner of the war, one where most of the usual narratives and assumptions about North and South don’t apply. Set in Missouri, the novel follows Jake Roedel, son of a German immigrant, his best friend Jack Bull Chiles, their planter friend George, and George's slave Daniel as they fight with a group of Bushwhackers, Confederate guerrillas led by Col. William Quantrill, in the confused, morally grey irregular warfare of the back country. Rivalry with other fighters, the Lawrence Massacre of August 1863, liberation, friendship, love, death, and birth all play a part in this dramatic, surprisingly funny, and moving novel. Woe to Live On is also the basis of Ride With the Devil, a film adaptation directed by Ang Lee.

Also recommended: While taking place postbellum, True Grit, by the great Charles Portis, is deeply informed by the war. The narrator Mattie's father was a Confederate veteran, as is Texas Ranger LaBoeuf. Marshal Rooster Cogburn, who refers to hanging Judge Parker as “an old carpetbagger,” lost his eye while fighting with Quantrill’s bushwhackers in Missouri, an often overlooked bit of characterization.

Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier

A combination of Homer and Appalachian family lore, Cold Mountain tells the parallel stories of Inman, a Confederate soldier returning to his home in western North Carolina as a deserter in late 1864, and Ada, his beloved, who is working desperately to keep her farm afloat after the unexpected death of her minister father. Episodic in the manner of the Odyssey, with grotesque and monstrous dangers along the way, Cold Mountain is full of brilliantly realized characters and evokes both a real time and place—and their dangers—as well as the world of myth. It’s a magnificent novel, full of longing, hope, melancholy, and meditation on danger and death, and deservedly won the National Book Award in 1997.

Also recommended: The Second Mrs. Hockaday, by Susan Rivers, tells the story of the teenage wife of a Confederate officer who is recalled to his regiment the day after their wedding. Through letters, diary entries, and court records, a mystery involving adultery, slavery, hidden pregnancy, and murder uncoils across the decades following the war. I didn’t quite buy the ending, but the novel is a powerfully evocative and brings postbellum piedmont South Carolina to life.

The Black Flower and The Judas Field, by Howard Bahr

These are the books I’ve most recently discovered, and how I missed them until two years ago I don’t know. The central event of each is the disastrous 1864 Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, a few hours of appalling waste that shape the rest the characters’ lives. The Black Flower, Bahr’s first novel, takes place over the day of the battle and follows Bushrod Carter, a teenage private, and Anna Hereford, a young woman staying with cousins at a house near the center of the battlefield. The Judas Field is the post-war story of Cass Wakefield, a middle-aged veteran, as he accompanies a dying friend on her quest to find the bodies of her brother and father. Both are powerful, beautifully written works that evoke the time and place well and bring home the war’s horror, pain, and overwhelming loss—the war’s fruits for most of the ordinary people who took part.

Also recommended: The Year of Jubilo, by Howard Bahr, the second book of this loose trilogy, centers on the return of Private Gawain Harper to Mississippi after the war. Harper hopes to marry his sweetheart, but her father will only consent if he helps kill the brutal leader of the local Home Guard. Another vivid evocation of early Reconstruction.

Griswoldville is in the final stages of proofing and will be available soon. I hope you'll read and enjoy it, and that you'll check out some of these other great books as well. Thanks for reading!

Addenda

Since writing this post I have read Andersonville, which may not quite crack my top nine but is an epic of the kind American writers don’t produce any more. You can read my review here. I’ve also read the first two novels in Ralph Peters’s Battle Hymn series, Cain at Gettysburg and Hell or Richmond, and both are excellent. I hope to review the entire series once I’ve finished it.

Also, Griswoldville came out just over a month after I published this post. My readers have given it generous reviews. Please do check it out! It’s available in both paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon. Click here to shop for it, or read more about it, including a collection of reader comments, by clicking here. I’ve also published two excerpts on my website that you can read here and here. Thanks again!

Ancient Asides 6 on City of Man

Yesterday morning I recorded another episode of "Ancient Asides," a now eleven-part series on Roman political history, with my friend Coyle Neal of the City of Man Podcast. Yesterday afternoon, episode six of the series, "The Final Background to the New Testament," dropped, and I listened to it on my commute this morning. This episode jumps backward in time a bit to catch our discussion up on the history of the Jews and Judaea since the time of Cyrus, with attention given to Alexander and the Successor Kingdoms, the revolt of the Maccabees, the establishment of Roman hegemony, Judaea's fluid and changing relationship with Rome, and much more. Always a pleasure to sit down and talk Roman history with Coyle.

I've embedded the episode below via Stitcher, but you can listen on iTunes and other podcast apps. Be sure to subscribe to City of Man to get their excellent usual content as well as the semi-regular Ancient Asides episodes on which I'm proud to be a guest. As you can guess, there are several more waiting in the wings. Enjoy! 

Previous Ancient Asides episodes, in case you want to catch up:

Ancient Asides 5: The Roman Crisis—On Roman imperial government through the end of the third century.

Ancient Asides 4: The Roman Emperors—On the successors to Augustus and their relative merits, demerits, and craziness

Ancient Asides 3: The Roman Revolution II—On the death of Julius Caesar and the aftermath for Cicero, Antony, Octavian, and the Republic.

Ancient Asides 2: The Roman Revolution—On the Republic in crisis, from the Punic Wars to the death of Julius Caesar.

Ancient Asides 1: Roman Government—On the birth, early history, and development of the Roman Republic and the culture that undergirded it.

Richard Weaver on toughness and heroism

From Weaver's great Ideas Have Consequences, published in 1948, seventy years ago:

“Since he who longs to achieve does not ask whether the seat is soft or the weather at a pleasant temperature, it is obvious that hardness is a condition of heroism. ”

This passage comes from a chapter entitled "The Spoiled-Child Psychology," in which Weaver documents the degeneration of virtue in the modern world and ascribes our afflictions, crises, and upheavals to an essentially immaturity: a discontent, a raving for a norm of comfort and self-fulfillment that is both unattainable and–the real root of the problem–materialistic. Without the transcendental, an idea he develops later in the same chapter, heroism is meaningless struggle and discomfort. And with the transcendental stripped out of our cultural imagination–so that every human endeavor is nothing but economics, or competition for resources, or, our explanation du jour, simple power–all we can do with the leftovers is squabble like toddlers over the choicest bits.

Richard M. Weaver (1910-63)

I don't entirely agree with some of Weaver's diagnoses. He sees Aristotle as part of the problem, for instance, which is a notion I vehemently disagree with. But few writers have lamented the modern world as thoughtfully or eloquently or with as little hysteria or mordant self-pity as Weaver did in Ideas Have Consequences.

The quotation above, in a bit more of its context. Note Weaver's explicit references to World War II as symptomatic–even on the Allied side: 

The trend continues, and in a modern document like the Four Freedoms one sees comfort and security embodied in canons. For the philosophic opposition, that is of course proper, because fascism taught the strenuous life. But others with spiritual aims in mind have taught it too. Emerson made the point: "Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its body. What shall it say, then, to the sugar plums and cat's cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards, and custard, which rack the wit of all human society?" Since he who longs to achieve does not ask whether the seat is soft or the weather at a pleasant temperature, it is obvious that hardness is a condition of heroism. Exertion, self-denial, endurance, these make the hero, but to the spoiled child they connote the evil of nature and the malice of man. 

The modern temper is losing the feeling for heroism even in war, which used to afford the supreme theme for celebration of this virtue. 

I last read Ideas Have Consequences four or five years ago and have been meaning to reread it since. Do check it out–it's a short, punchy book full of challenging ideas, and it will be well worth your time. Weaver's Southern Essays is also a wonderful collection on a favorite topic of mine, and also worth reading. You will also see a quotation from Weaver as an epigraph to my soon to be released Civil War novel Griswoldville.

A warning for fellow bookworms

From Leftism, by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, a word of caution to those with lots of theories and little experience:

“The distance of a bookworm from reality can be considerable.”

Kuehnelt-Leddihn is making this point to explain the failure of Karl Marx's theories to come true, the failure of Marxists once they come to power, and more broadly why revolutionaries tend to be bourgeois autodidacts or pure cranks rather than actual members of the classes they claim to represent. Those oppressed peoples–be they the workers, the peasants, or something else–are too busy in the real world for sloganeering. Plumbers rarely throw bombs at the Tsar's troops. College dropouts often do. And once they come to power, millions starve precisely because of this teething problem in their intellectual-real world transmission.

I include myself in this word of caution. Work with the concrete. Avoid abstractions. Get out in the world and get dirty. It's good for your intellectual immune system.

Saving Private Ryan at 20

Saving Private Ryan came out twenty years ago today. For a long time this was my favorite film. It grew with me; I recall watching it for the first time in a while, after having had two years of German in college, and reacting with shock as I realized I could understand the German commands and insults shouted during the battle. 

I don't call it my favorite movie now, simply because I don't think I can narrow my favorites down to one any more and not because I've lost my appreciation for it or it hasn't aged well. Quite the contrary. 

This film came out in a different world. Bill Clinton was president and had two years left in his second term. This was nearly three years before September 11th; before the eight years of the Iraq War or the seventeen and counting in Afghanistan; before George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump; before the great recession and the bailouts; before not only Parkland or Sandy Hook, but before Columbine; ten years before the first Marvel MCU movie; before iTunes, Netflix, Facebook, and MySpace; before Twitter. There were five and a half million World War II veterans alive then. There are about half a million now.

In a smaller context, as a small measure of the changes that have happened in the intervening decades: I was fourteen when Saving Private Ryan came out and, since was rated R, I didn't see it until a few years later, when a teacher loaned me her VHS copy. I had to get my parents' permission, and I'm grateful that they gave it.

STEVEN SPIELBERG AND TOM HANKS ON THE OMAHA BEACH SET IN IRELAND

I was a Stephen Ambrose-devouring WWII geek, slowly establishing a serious interest that has lasted to the present, and had begun collecting World War II movies (again, on VHS), which I watched over and over again. I particularly liked A Bridge Too Far and The Longest Day, large-scale, top-down epics of major campaigns, and the narrower fictional stories in The Guns of Navarone and The Bridge on the River Kwai. I still like—or love—these movies to a greater or lesser degree, and appreciate them on a much deeper level as an adult.

But Saving Private Ryan was different. Saving Private Ryan changed me.

It changed movies, too. If you're wondering where the last twenty years of desaturation and handheld shaky cam came from, look no further. But Saving Private Ryan outshines its many imitators, and still shocks and thrills, because it wasn't aping another film's style. Far from it; Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, both of whom won Oscars for this film, were aping the combat camera footage of the war itself, where the shaking was an artifact that the cameramen sought to reduce as much as possible given the horrible conditions in which they filmed, at risk to their own lives. Another measure of the changed world: this movie was shot on film and photochemically desaturated. The digital intermediate, allowing computer-controlled fine-tuning of a film's color, was still two years off. And because Spielberg and Kaminski adopted the style they did purposefully, for a carefully calculated effect, it still works. It's organic to the picture, not a stylistic tic. 

This style was integral to the effect the film had on me as a kid. Saving Private Ryan was the first film to immerse me, to present to me not just meticulously staged action scenes with authentic period detail, but to show me what it was like to live through the events it depicts. I still remember the first time I watched it; during the lead up to the final battle, when the characters know the Germans are approaching and can only wait for the inevitable, I found myself desperately thinking up alternatives. I know the film backwards and forwards now, but it still involves me that much.

It also moves me, and often in unexpected ways. As a kid, my heart went out to Hanks's Captain Miller, especially as he dies fighting at the end, for a mission even he has struggled to believe in, or Vin Diesel's Caparzo, bleeding out in the rain. Jeremy Davies's Corporal Upham enraged me, as it doe so many viewers. Now my heart breaks for Mrs. Ryan, glimpsed only in one dialogue-free scene, or the French family Caparzo was trying to help, or Wade, begging for his mother as he dies. Even the cowardly Upham I can sympathize with, if only as a fellow human being who has also felt overpowering fear.

Spielberg is often criticized or outright mocked for his sentimentality or schmaltz, but I don't think Saving Private Ryan's ending detracts at all from the film. If the purpose of any war is simply to protect lives and ways of life, Private Ryan's humble, common man attempt to "earn this" was the point all along. So in addition to teaching me that war is not fun, that combat has consequences, that human lives are senselessly wasted even in worthwhile conflicts, and that the good guys will inevitably sin too, Saving Private Ryan reaffirmed something my parents had taught me from childhood: human life matters.

In an era of entertainment offering cynical, prurient depictions of violence and suffering, self-congratulatory political platitudes, or messaging that simply affirms us where we are without challenging our comfortable vision of the present, we could all stand to revisit this brutal war film.

Chesterton (and Orwell) on careless language

From "New Religion and New Irreligion," an April 4, 1908 piece in the Illustrated London News:

“It is difficult to believe that people who are obviously careless about language can really be very careful about anything else.”

In its fuller context: 

Our generation professes to be scientific and particular about the things it says; but unfortunately it is never scientific and particular about the words in which it says them. It is difficult to believe that people who are obviously careless about language can really be very careful about anything else. If an astronomer is careless about words, one cannot help fancying that he may be careless about stars. If a botanist is vague about words, he may be vague about plants. The modern man, regarding himself as a second Adam, has undertaken to give all the creatures new names; and when we discover that he is silly about the names, the thought will cross our minds that he may be silly about the creatures. And never before, I should imagine, in the intellectual history of the world have words been used with so idiotic an indifference to their actual meaning. A word has no loyalty; it can be betrayed into any service or twisted to any treason. 

Chesterton goes on to give examples, 110 years old now, of one of my least favorite moves in the political rhetoric playbook: claiming one's position is the truer form of one's opponents' position, e.g. this recent op-ed asserting that supporting abortion is more pro-life than opposing it. This is surely an iteration of "no true Scotsman," but if it's been named I'm unaware of it. "Of all the expressions of our current indifference to the meaning of the words," Chesterton writes later, "I think that the most irritating is this cool substitution of one kind of definition for another." That, as it happens, does have a name. 

Before moving on to the religious controversy surrounding the "New Theology" of R.J. Campbell, Chesterton concludes:

“The fact is, that all this evasive use of words is unworthy of our human intellect.”

"Mr. Campbell has excellent brains," Chesterton continues, "but thinks it more advanced and modern not to use them. . . . He is guided in his choice of phrases by mere aimless sentimentalism." We cheat ourselves when we cheat with our language. We were made for finer things. Our minds are precision instruments.

Chesterton here anticipates some of the arguments in Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" by almost forty years. Writing in 1946, Orwell argued that "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought," and devoted the bulk of his essay to examples which he surgically dissects. Compare: 

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Slovenliness is a good word for it. Not chaos, not anarchy, but an utter "you know what I mean" indifference to good order–a linguistic dorm room. A pervasive slovenliness degrades not just political discourse but all communication today. I'm not talking about emojis, slang, and memes, but rather the intellectual path of least resistance onto which all of us route our thoughts, "gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug." The appeal, Orwell writes, is that this mode of communication, this way of thinking, is easy.

But will it lead us to truth?

Quick: What is the difference between a country and a nation? Between enhanced interrogation and torture? Between racism, prejudice, and bigotry? Between faith and a faith? What is love? What is violence? What does the word free mean in free speech, free country, free love, free will, free with any purchase?