The Long Traverse

This year’s John Buchan June enters the homestretch with another curiosity. When I wrote about The Magic Walking Stick two weeks I go I was careful to note that it was Buchan’s only children’s book published during his lifetime. That’s because, at his untimely death in February 1940, in addition to having just completed his memoir Memory Hold-the-Door and his final novel, Sick Heart River, he was working on a new children’s book: The Long Traverse.

The young hero of this novel, Donald, is the son of a Canadian mining engineer. When the story begins, he has just left school on holiday and is excited to reach his family’s cabin in the forests of Quebec. His parents have given him permission to go a week early to prepare for their stay, which means a week of riding, hunting, fishing, playing in the woods and streams with his friends Simone and Aristide, local Indian children, and hearing stories from their uncle, Father Laflamme.

Donald is especially excited because he hates school. He resents his Latin lessons and finds history confusing and boring. He prefers the outdoors or, failing that, the movies.

When Father Laflamme learns about Donald’s lack of interest—especially his indifference to history—he discusses it with the family’s beloved Indian hunting and fishing guide, Negog. Descended from the priestly caste of the Cree, Negog thinks Donald should be open to learning from his ancestors and knows a secret method for commanding attention and teaching the stories of the past.

Every evening, after the day’s adventures, Negog ensures that Donald is near a body of water. As the sun sets, the fish rest, and the waters still to a mirror the cloudless golden sky, Donald experiences La Longue Traverse—visions of past events.

Day by day Donald meets the heroes of early Canadian history. He sees Jacques Cartier on his expedition to explore the St Lawrence River, Adam Dollard and his companions holding out against the Iroquois at the Battle of the Long Sault, voyageur Jean Cadieux and his last-stand against Indian attack, forgotten trappers, explorers, missionary priests, prospectors and miners, and ordinary people. My two favorite chapters concerned—unsurprisingly—the Norse exploration of the Canadian coast, in which Donald witness the long, hard expeditions of the fictitious Hallward, and a chapter set in the plains far from European settlement, where an Indian tribe, faced with enemies newly armed with the horse, trade for a yet deadlier weapon: the gun.

In The Long Traverse, Buchan combines the magic of his earlier children’s book with the story-made-of-stories setup of The Path of the King. Each story is engaging and exciting, and in the frame story that structures them Donald slowly learns more—and takes more and more pride and ownership—of his and his country’s past. Though he forgets the visions as soon as they end, the stories stay with him. In flash-forwards, his parents are astonished by the things he knows.

The subject matter is the stuff of adventure, but the true star of the book is the Canadian landscape. As with the best of his adventure fiction, Buchan conjures vivid settings and realistically describes them. The forested hills and lakes of Quebec are the most frequent locations, but the canyons and whitewater rapids of the Canadian Rockies, the endless plains, and the frozen coasts of Arctic islands also feature. Buchan describes all of this beautifully but does not leave out the unpleasant: heat, avalanche, dangerous rapids, and clouds of biting black flies. (The cover of the first edition, above, shows Donald sheltering by a lakeside fire built by Negog to keep the flies at bay.) The wildness and scale of the country, the hardships of daily life, and the hazards of travel—on foot, by horse, by canoe, by longship—demanded heroism of the people who lived there, and Buchan makes both feel real.

The Long Traverse ends suddenly after the story of a missionary priest’s eerie encounter with the Toonit, a population of relict prehistoric people not unlike the Picts of Buchan’s early short story “No-Man’s-Land.” Buchan was almost finished with the book when he died, and though the individual stories are wonderfully absorbing and readable—I read the book in two days—Donald’s story is left unresolved. A note by Buchan’s widow, Lady Tweedsmuir, explains the original conception and purpose of the book and a little of what Buchan left in outline at his death.

During his time as Governor-General of Canada Buchan came to love the country, not only its vast and varied landscapes but the peoples who lived there. (This comes across quite clearly in this 1937 New Years’ greeting.) He found its history fascinating, full of romance and figures worthy of emulation, and Canadian schools’ methods of teaching that history abominable. The textbooks, as he saw it, were more likely to kill than to encourage interest in the past. One sympathizes.

Donald is Buchan’s imaginary typical Canadian schoolboy, full of talent and potential but lacking direction and already let down by the schools. Negog and Father Laflamme sense that Donald is vulnerable, that, on the verge of manhood, his character is at a crucial moment in its growth, and that the cities and movies strive against the rootedness in the past that Donald and all of us need. Negog, as a Cree a figure of the past and as a Christian Canadian a figure of the present, puts him directly in touch with that past. Understanding one’s history, Buchan forcefully shows, is not only a duty but an important step in moral formation.

It is also interesting and fun. The stories Donald sees in The Long Traverse are all exciting, and Buchan envisioned them as a way to awaken the imaginations of young students. Thus awakened, they would be open to instruction. (It certainly worked on me; I learned a lot either reading or reading about the subjects of these stories.) He rightly understood that telling interesting stories about the people of past beats any state-approved textbook. The imagination must come first—a lesson still worth learning and remembering.

Latitude and the borders of the possible

For Father’s Day my wife gave me a gift card to a brand-new local bookstore. I used it to pick up, at long last, a copy of AS Byatt’s Possession, first recommended to me years ago by my best friend at Clemson. The novel’s epigraph, a passage from Hawthorne’s preface to The House of the Seven Gables, struck me:

When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former—while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.

“Romance” here hewing closer to its original medieval meaning of “adventure.”

As it happens, just yesterday I finished rereading The Thirty-Nine Steps for the fifth or sixth time—and the first time I’ve revisited a book for John Buchan June. Buchan’s dedication, to his friend and publisher Tommy Nelson, includes this oft-reprinted explanation of the kinds of books Buchan liked—and wrote:

You and I have long cherished an affection for that elemental type of tale which Americans call the “dime novel” and which we know as the “shocker”—the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible.

There’s that word romance again.

Just the other day I saw an ordinarily thoughtful Substacker assert that condemning TV while reading “plot-driven genre fiction” was hypocritical, as the latter was no different from the former; the reader just holds his head in a different position from the TV viewer. This is not the stupidest thing I’ve seen online recently but it wasn’t far off.

First, there is nothing wrong with reading for entertainment. I’d even argue, as I will momentarily, that a book should at the very least entertain, whatever its subject. But the romance, the story that stays “just inside the borders of the possible” and for which the reader must—but most often quite gladly—grants “a certain latitude,” need not be mere entertainment. A good plot and a little excitement open the imagination to truth and argument better than any bluntly stated thesis. If genre fiction is nothing more than brainrot, why have our most gifted writers turned their hands to it over and over for centuries? Why did Jesus tell pointed, engaging, and surprising stories in popular forms?

Per CS Lewis, for whom the fantasy stories of George MacDonald “baptised” his “imagination” long before the arguments of his friends Tolkien and Hugo Dyson could reach him, “every book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less.”

Buchan and Hawthorne could hardly be more different, but I appreciated the consonance between their explanations of what the novelist who aims for something more striking than kitchen-sink realism—Hawthorne’s “very minute fidelity”—dull modern or postmodern rumination, or pure didacticism must do. The reader willing to grant that latitude and march with the author on the ragged edge of believability should, if the author knows what he’s about, be amply rewarded.

* * * * *

Our new bookstore is a small local brand of M Judson of Greenville. Check them out here. I reviewed The Thirty-Nine Steps for the very first John Buchan June in 2022. You can read that here. Last year I reflected on the duty of the good writer—in this case, Len Deighton and Ian Fleming—to entertain as a prerequisite to doing more here. And yesterday I recorded a podcast with a longtime reader about Buchan and The Thirty-Nine Steps specifically, a conversation I’m excited to share with y’all. Be on the lookout.

A Lodge in the Wilderness

Last week I reviewed a unique entry in John Buchan’s bibliography—the only children’s book he published in his lifetime. This week John Buchan June continues with another unique item, this one more a curiosity than anything: part novel, part philosophical dialogue, part political treatise, the 1906 book A Lodge in the Wilderness.

The book first introduces us to eccentric multi-millionaire Francis Carey, who after making his fortune in various business and government concerns throughout the British Empire, has established himself in a lavish country house in Kenya called Musuru. Every summer Carey invites eighteen people—nine men and nine women—to join him at Musuru for dinners, hunting, and intellectual conversation about the pressing issues of the day. A Lodge in the Wilderness is an account of one of these events.

Buchan briefly describes all eighteen of Carey’s guests, including a Conservative lord, a big game hunter, an ex-soldier with long experience of the Empire, a journalist, a Jewish financier, and a representative of the intelligence service. The female characters are mostly the wives of influential men but show themselves politically well-connected and informed and, as both Buchan biographers Andrew Lownie and Ursula Buchan point out, their contributions to Carey’s conversations are taken seriously. Nevertheless, most of the characters are ciphers and, after a chapter or two, become hard to distinguish. They are, as Lownie puts it, “merely mouthpieces for the book’s ideas.”

The two that give the story personality are Hugh Somerville and Lady Flora Brune, apparently based on Buchan himself and Susie Grosvenor, whom he would marry a year after the book’s publication. Hugh and Lady Flora become friends and the first hints of a romance kindle between the two, and their flirtations and conversations, which serve as interstitial episodes between the long dinner-time discussions, provide the most story A Lodge in the Wilderness has to offer.

Over the course of a month or so, Carey treats his guests to lion hunts, tours of his beautiful and seemingly endless mountainside gardens, field trips to missions and other colonial points of interest, and many intensely academic discussions of Empire.

And that’s about all there is to it. Though A Lodge in the Wilderness makes concessions to the novelistic form, especially small episodes of excitement like Hugh’s near-miss during the lion hunt, nothing resolves. I was prepared for this in the philosophical dimension of the book—which can only raise questions and suggest ways forward, and to which I’ll return shortly—but it was disappointing that, having developed Hugh and Lady Flora’s young romance so successfully, they do not get any kind of last-chapter send-off suggesting what will become of their relationship. A rare loose end for Buchan.

This is a reminder that the entire purpose of the book is philosophical and political. Written in Buchan’s early thirties after his return from the Transvaal in South Africa, where he had served as private secretary to colonial governor Lord Milner, A Lodge in the Wilderness is a response to changing policy and cultural attitudes toward the Empire back home. Better attuned critics than I, especially those who were alive at the time, have seen in the book’s characters stand-ins for real-life political figures, not least Cecil Rhodes. Buchan’s goal in the book is to lay out and examine the problems facing the British Empire as it stood during the Edwardian period, charitably work through opposing ideas, and suggest an ideal to strive toward—an ideal both of form and function.

Among the topics of discussion are the political basis of the Empire, its potential future structure and the role subject peoples will play democratically, and even—perhaps most interestingly—the aesthetic effects of imperialism on British culture. All of this is examined in excruciating detail. I wrote above that A Lodge in the Wilderness is “part philosophical dialogue,” and Hugh even reads Plato in the garden at one point, but there is really very little back-and-forth at dinner. The characters mostly make speeches, sometimes reading long poems or newspaper articles aloud to the whole party, with occasional pushback from someone else and an eventual attempt at synthesis. (Hegel is invoked more than once, an infallible sign one is in danger of being bored.)

Buchan seems to have known that not everyone would enjoy this. Halfway through, Lady Flora tells Hugh, “I do so wish . . . that they wouldn't all talk in paragraphs.” One sympathizes, as well as appreciating the self-aware laugh.

Some recent readers, to judge by reviews on sites like Goodreads, take some of the characters’ viewpoints as Buchan’s own and object to what they see as promotion of eugenics or a lust for conquest. Buchan, charitable to a fault, allows his characters to have opinions he disagreed with in order to offer a better alternative. His own views are sometimes difficult to parse but a number of important points show through clearly.

The view of the Empire that Buchan presents is benevolent and idealistic but hard to understand in the specifics. Negatively, he explicitly rules out conquest for its own sake, the equation of largeness and territorial size with goodness, the suppression and subordination of subject peoples, and the exploitation of the Empire for profit. Violence in an empire is inevitable but not to be sought out, enjoyed, or glorified. He also makes it clear that any backwardness or primitivism among non-European peoples is due not to race but to culture and opportunity, and he cautions against both denigrating native peoples and exaggerating their primitiveness as unspoiled goodness. He is neither jingo nor Social Darwinist.

What Buchan envisions instead is an ennobling enterprise that will make high moral, spiritual, and even physical demands of the imperialists, who will set an example for the complacent bourgeoisie at home. (Buchan’s critique of the middle class as apathetic and compromised is surprisingly sharp.) The purpose of the Empire is the spread of improvement—technologically, economically, and morally—and the eventual advancement and participation of all the peoples within its reach.

This view is essentially globalist, undergirded by a whiggish view of history. What sets Britain’s apart from other imperial projects, he suggests, is its long accidental development of the rule of law and the importance accorded to liberty. Having come into world power without plan or direction, the Empire is Britain’s opportunity deliberately to spread the good of liberty through order. In a phrase of Chesterton’s—who, no imperialist, would probably disapprove of me using it—the Empire at its best would “make room for good things to run wild.”

All of this should suggest to you that A Lodge in the Wilderness is now almost entirely of historical significance. It’s the only Buchan book I’ve read that I’d call a slog. (It doesn’t help that the cheap paperback I read has numerous text-recognition errors and formatting problems. If you do check this book out, avoid the edition whose cover I used above.) A Lodge in the Wilderness is informative as the dream of empire held by one principled, hopeful, well-intentioned man, and interesting as a strange outlier among Buchan’s fiction, but it is unsatisfying as a novel and will be unrewarding for the casual reader. I’m glad I read it but I very much doubt that I will ever revisit it.

The Magic Walking Stick

The fifth John Buchan June continues with a true outlier in Buchan’s vast and varied body of work. In the more than one hundred books published in his lifetime, Buchan wrote history, thrillers, historical fiction, poetry, and short stories—including weird fiction and supernatural horror—but only one children’s novel. That novel is 1932’s The Magic Walking Stick.

Thirteen-year old Bill is home from his boarding school and eager to go hunting. On the eventful day narrated in the first chapter, he sets off from his family’s country home with one of the gamekeepers. A storm is brewing up and they’re in a hurry, but Bill falls behind when he can’t find his walking stick. The gamekeeper and dogs leave without him and Bill, giving up on finding the stick, hurries to catch up.

In a wonderfully atmospheric opening, signs and portents appear suggesting something uncanny is about to happen, but Bill is too rushed to pay proper attention. He is stopped, however, by the sight of a old man sitting under a hornbeam. The old man is curiously dressed and has a strange, high-pitched voice, but offers to sell Bill a new walking stick from the bundle of sticks he carries. He offers a peculiar one—of a reddish wood with a white, crescent-shaped handle at the top. Bill accepts and pays a farthing.

When Bill catches up to the gamekeeper and tells him about the old man, they turn back to look but the man—hornbeam tree and all—is gone.

What Bill discovers that day is that the stick, if set in the ground and twirled while one wishes to be in another location, will transport him there instantly. He learns this by accident during their hunt: to his great delight when he lands in the middle of a flock of ducks and to his gratitude and relief when he is saved from a flash flood.

This begins the most fun and adventurous part of the story, as Bill experiments with the stick and discovers more of what it can do. He visits exotic places in the Pacific and Africa and plays a bold trick on his family’s obnoxious neighbors. He also learns more about the stick itself. By happenstance, his father is reading a medieval chronicle and relates one of those curious side-stories so many medieval scribes included without elaborating on the details we’d love to know now. Two ancient staves named Beauty and Bands had made their way to Charlemagne’s court. They could, if used properly, transport their owners anywhere, but each observed certain limits: one could be used only for serious work, the other for amusement. Misuse them and they would, somehow, disappear—as, indeed, they had later in the Middle Ages.

Bill decides his stick must be one of these but, not knowing which it is, disciplines his use. He doesn’t want to transport himself to the Solomon Islands on a lark only to be abandoned there by the stick. As in so many good stories of magic and fantasy, his exploration of what precisely he can do is a lot of the fun.

I won’t go into all of Bill’s adventures, but by the middle of the book he has learned how to honor the purposes of both sticks and work within their limits, first by saving an uncle who had disappeared why flying over the Sahara and finally, in the novel’s longest and most consequential series of adventures, by helping young Crown Prince Anatole, the heir to the throne of a troubled eastern European kingdom called Gracia, escape his anti-monarchical enemies and claim his throne.

This second half is pure Ruritanian romance and, as noted by Buchan biographer Andrew Lownie, thematically meshes with other Buchan novels of the time, especially the Dickson McCunn books, which entangle the retired Scottish grocer in the dynastic disputes and revolutionary upheavals of Evallonia. But where The House of the Four Winds, especially, falls apart as a novel, The Magic Walking Stick captures the lightness and swashbuckling high spirits of books like the original Ruritanian romance, The Prisoner of Zenda. Gracia’s political situation is not over-elaborated, Bill’s pluck as well as his friendship with Anatole make their escapades fun and engaging, and Buchan throws in enough twists and reversals to keep it suspenseful.

I think it’s safe to call The Magic Walking Stick a minor Buchan work. The two biographies I have, those of Lownie and Ursula Buchan, each mention the book only two or three times, and only Lownie explains anything about its story and reception. In trying to run down a copy for John Buchan June, even the cash-grab print-on-demand versions available on Amazon were few, and I ended up reading it in e-book form through our local library. A Buchan book being hard to find was a new one for me. (I’ll note that the entire thing is available from Project Gutenberg.)

This is too bad, because The Magic Walking Stick has the lightness of touch, the brisk pace, and the winsome young hero common to much classic children’s fantasy. The situations Bill gets himself into are varied and cleverly executed, and the many settings—including tropical places continents away, the moors and forests of Buchan’s beloved Scotland, and the fields and hills of southern England, which are clearly based on the Oxfordshire landscapes around Elsfield, where Buchan lived with his family at the time—are simply but beautifully described. Buchan makes Bill’s leaps from the thorny scrub of Africa back to the cold and damp of England palpable.

I also enjoyed the glimpse this book provides into the world of a well-to-do English boy of the early 1930s. Bill goes hunting and angling with the family keeper, knows his way around the servants’ quarters and back passages and can use them for mischief, and can visit London where, at the age of thirteen, he buys his friend a rifle for £25. A totally lost world. If Buchan’s original readers could thrill to imagining themselves traveling anywhere instantly, a modern reader of any age might just relish imagining having the kind of freedom Bill enjoys.

The Magic Walking Stick was a welcome surprise. As children’s fantasy, it is not of the same rank as The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia but, as both Tolkien and Lewis were fans of Buchan, it is difficult to imagine those books existing without books like this one. It is not deep, but it is fun and exciting, and still worth a read for both adults and kids.

The Half-Hearted

This fifth John Buchan June continues with The Half-Hearted, Buchan’s earliest novel with a contemporary setting, a story that ranges from Scotland to the mountains of northern India and concerns politics, espionage, love, and the tragedy of missed opportunities.

The Half-Hearted, appropriately, takes place in two parts. In the first, a young Scottish laird named Lewis Haystoun returns to his homeland after years abroad. He is beloved on his estate and among the locals and famous throughout the British Empire for his recently published travel book about the uncharted mountains of Kashmir. While fishing one day he meets Alice Wishart, the daughter of a successful merchant who has moved to the area. Alice had read Lewis’s book before moving to Scotland and has heard great things of him from his family and friends. Lewis and Alice are both smart, adventurous, and independent, and their attraction to each other is immediate.

And yet they never quite synchronize their attraction. Every time they meet some awkwardness intrudes—a misstep in manners, or Lewis, not wanting to appear too forward, erring on the side of formality, which suggests indifference to Alice, or some other misunderstanding. Their interest in each other survives, but only barely, and each missed opportunity further damages their shared hopes and Alice’s high regard for Lewis.

Further complicating matters, Lewis has a rival, Albert Stocks. Alice meets Stocks when she first arrives in Scotland and he shows immediate interest in her, but Stocks, a Radical politician, is a dull, unimaginative plodder. He is unattractive without being repellant, boring without being rude, and, above all, persistent.

Worse, Stocks defeats Lewis in an election. Lewis had only been convinced to run as a candidate by his more political friends, who appealed to his sense of duty. His obvious unwillingness to run and poor performance while campaigning almost convince Alice of his lack of courage and commitment—what she refers to as half-heartedness.

The story of Alice, Lewis, and Stocks reaches its climax during a picturesque country outing. While climbing a headland above a moorland pool, Alice and Lewis begin to connect at last, but the bank gives way beneath Alice and she falls into the river. Lewis, startled, does not react in time. Stocks does. Plunging instantly into the river, he hauls Alice to safety. Lewis, though thankful for Alice’s rescue, resents Stocks and blames himself intensely for that moment of unpreparedness and hesitation. Perhaps he is a coward, one of the half-hearted.

It’s this event—and that moment—that drive the first half of the novel to its conclusion and lead Lewis into the second.

In Part II, some of the geopolitical problems Lewis’s friends discuss offhandedly in Part I bring Lewis back to Kashmir. Thanks to his previous travels and familiarity with the area, he has been recruited for an intelligence-gathering mission. The authorities have already heard rumors of tribal disturbances and potential frontier uprisings and the Russians on the other side of the impassable, as yet unmapped interior mountains are reportedly massing troops. With the British army spread thin and consisting mostly of sepoy troops in small, vulnerable outposts, the imperial authorities need to know what precisely is going on, and need to know soon.

Forlorn and hopeless, as Lewis and Alice were only able, at last, to speak plainly to each other about their love once it was too late, Lewis hopes to redeem himself here, to show himself driven and courageous and capable of the unhesitating self-sacrifice required of the full-hearted man. Kashmir, where he made his name, will give him ample opportunity. This time he will not miss it.

The Half-Hearted was published in 1900, when Buchan was twenty-five and recently graduated from Oxford. It is shorter and more tightly plotted than his two previous books, the historical adventures John Burnet of Barns and A Lost Lady of Old Years, and is unusually psychologically acute. Buchan’s characters were always believable but seldom presented with such scrutiny of their thoughts. The vicissitudes of Alice and Lewis’s failed courtship, especially the reversals of Alice’s feelings with each new obstacle and misunderstanding, are realistically painful. These two people would be perfect for each other—would be.

The first half of the novel, though well-plotted, moves slowly, while the second half blazes past. Neither of these observations is a criticism—I enjoyed The Half-Hearted at a leisurely pace (which is why there was an uncharacteristic delay between this month’s first review and this one). Buchan’s nature writing is especially beautiful and the comedy of manners playing out in the upper class drawing rooms and moorland picnics of Scotland was enjoyable to imagine. There is even some humor, as when a nouveau riche visitor proves herself a bigger snob than the actual aristocrats. Fans of Richard Hannay will also appreciate the brief appearance of a Lady Clanroyden, whom one must assume is Sandy Arbuthnot’s mother.

That said, Buchan’s abilities as an adventure and thriller writer are apparent in the shift from Part I to Part II. Once Lewis has returned to Kashmir and received his mission, the novel steadily intensifies right up until the moving final pages. The intricacies of frontier espionage, the grueling nature of long-distance travel, the hazards of mountaineering, and the heroism of the desperate last stand all factor in, and all are thrilling.

It’s striking how much of Buchan’s later work is prefigured in The Half-Hearted. With a brave, noble character who willingly takes a loss for the sake of a woman and enters into realistically dangerous espionage work, I was reminded of Buchan’s underappreciated interwar novel A Prince of the Captivity. Its emphasis on the role of the lone, capable, honorable man racing against time is familiar from any number of other novels, from Prester John and The Thirty-Nine Steps to Midwinter and even Buchan’s more literary work like Witch Wood. Most resonantly, its plot of a man seeking redemption from his failings on a selfless task in a far-off rugged land bring to mind Buchan’s final and most moving novel, Sir Edward Leithen’s swansong, Sick Heart River.

The Half-Hearted is not as good as any of those later books but still has unique qualities that recommend it, not least its doomed romance. It is impossible to read about Alice and Lewis without feeling the agony of their near miss. While not rising to the level of Buchan’s best work, The Half-Hearted is an enjoyable read and an interesting early meditation on themes Buchan would elaborate and improve upon for the next forty years.

Buchan’s Augustus

To my surprise and joy, today marks the beginning of my fifth John Buchan June here on the blog. When I began this project five years ago it was a bit of a lark, a way to reclaim my birth month from other, more obnoxious themed celebrations. Since then it’s become a major part of my reading and intellectual life, has put me in touch with some wonderful people, and has become one of my favorite seasons of the writing year.

As I’ve run short on Buchan’s novels—I hope to cover the last few I haven’t read this month—I’ve branched out into his short stories and non-fiction. In the last couple years I’ve read two of his short biographies: a literary-critical introduction to Sir Walter Scott and a pithy, elegant little life of Julius Caesar. Today I start John Buchan June with one of Buchan’s best full-size biographies: Augustus.

I won’t recapitulate Augustus’ life in detail here. Buchan begins with the boy Octavian, whose background of an unassuming equestrian ancestry and close relation to the most charismatic and powerful man of the day would prove surprisingly advantageous in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination. Named his adopted son and heir in Caesar’s will, Octavian seemingly came from nowhere but was well-connected enough—thanks to those family ties to Caesar—and sober enough—thanks to that middle-class upbringing—to step into the role and navigate its numerous immediate hazards.

Among these were the courting of his favor and largesse by numerous people with ulterior motives and the rivalry created with Mark Antony, one of Caesar’s most trusted subordinates, the moment he was named as heir. Caesar’s assassins were still at large and fellow-travelers like Cicero, respected by the senatorial partisans and implacably hostile to Antony, hoped to use moral suasion and appeals to tradition to bring young Octavian to their side. But Octavian and Antony reconciled, revoked the amnesty given to the assassins, and proscribed political enemies they had formerly shielded from each other. A bloodbath ensued, “the darkest stain upon Octavian’s record.” Cicero was murdered, Brutus and Cassius killed themselves following military defeat, and Rome passed beyond the possibility of restoring the Republic.

Perhaps, anyway. That’s a what-if game that Buchan doesn’t really play, which is appropriate to his subject. He presents the future Augustus as canny and cautious, a man whose lack of imagination served him well in a situation too complicated and treacherous to treat with romance or fantasy.

This becomes most apparent in the latter half of Augustus, after civil war has again broken out, Octavian has defeated Antony and Cleopatra, and offered to relinquish his dictatorial power only to have it reaffirmed and expanded by the Senate. Now the Princeps, first citizen, he begins what to Buchan is his true work—rebuilding, restructuring, shoring up, and strengthening for the long haul.

Two things distinguish Augustus as both a biography and a work of literature. The first is Buchan’s scholarship. Those who rate Buchan as a mere entertainer and skilled craftsman of adventure stories miss an important aspect of the man. Deeply educated in and passionate about the classics, his knowledge of Greek and Roman literature informed his entire life and undergirds even his fiction—most obviously in novels about relict paganism like The Dancing Floor or Witch Wood but also in the education, moral framework, and long historical perspective shared by his heroic characters.

But his love of the classics was not limited ready quotations or the encyclopedic familiarity of the amateur. He had a sharp understanding of historiography. In the preface of Augustus he explains his use of the available sources, their biases and limitations, and makes his judgments clear throughout. He uses them critically, carefully dissecting and comparing in order to construct as a true a picture of events as possible—not with the intense ideological skepticism to which we have grown accustomed in many of our classicists—and complements the literary sources with the latest findings from the still-growing fields of archaeology and papyrology. Augustus, as a work of history, is meticulously constructed and judicious in its use of evidence. It holds up, and would pair well with a more recent biography by a scholar of similar sensibility, like Adrian Goldsworthy’s Augustus: First Emperor of Rome.

Buchan’s scholarship, like his writing, is excellent but not showy. Several chapters late in the book offer thematic looks at the Empire under Augustus. One examines Augustus’s family and friendships, another the social and religious reforms Augustus, with limited success, attempted to institute, but the most interesting is an imaginary tour of the Empire from east to west. Buchan impresses upon the reader not only the geography of the Augustan world but the immense variety encompassed by it—ancient, thriving, desirable Egypt; the slightly past-prime glories of Greece; the villages and smithies of Gaul; rugged, fragmented Spain; the difficulties and dangers of travel by sea; and rumors of other faraway places like Britain and future troubles among the Germans beyond the Rhine and, much more subtly and of an entirely unprecedented kind, Judaea.

The second great strength of Buchan’s Augustus, and one of the traits that most distinguishes it from modern histories of the same period, is its pervasive emphasis on character. Personality, virtues, and vices matter to Buchan, as do the cultures that produce them. People are not ciphers moved about by sociological forces and statistical trends beyond anyone’s understanding. Choices are not an illusion, but reveal character and have consequences.

Augustus therefore abounds in incisive character sketches. I wrote last month about Buchan’s final assessment of Cicero, but his portraits of other key players like Brutus, Agrippa, Cleopatra—whom he rightly takes down a peg—the poets Virgil and Horace, Augustus’s wife Livia, his ne’er-do-well daughter Julia, the brutish, shortsighted Antony, and, late in the story, Varus enliven the story and drive its events.

Perhaps the two best are of Augustus’s lifelong friend, ally, and lieutenant, Agrippa, and of Augustus himself. Upon Agrippa’s death, Buchan sums him up not only as a skilled combat leader but an able logistician and administrator whose friendship with Augustus made everything the latter achieved possible and yet nursed no resentments or private ambitions. Indeed, Buchan notes that even “gossiping Roman annalists, who found specks on every other sun, never suggested scandal or criticism about his public or private life,” living simply and honestly even after victory over Antony and the rise of Augustus to undisputed preeminence. That Augustus could enjoy the friendship and loyalty of a man like Agrippa, Buchan writes, reflects well on both.

“Close-lipped, tenacious, cautious and yet intrepid, he is amazing, but he is not attractive. . . . He took desperate risks, but only after meticulous calculation. He is the least romantic of great men.”

As for Augustus, the book is his, and Buchan’s most compelling character sketch is that which emerges over the course of the entire book. The contrast with Julius Caesar, whose late career and death drive the early chapters and first bring Octavian to prominence, is striking. Where Caesar was stirring, robust, magnetic, and driven by almost visible flashes of genius, Augustus was physically brittle, cagey, cautious, and lacked imagination in the way one might enjoy poetry while never being carried away by a daydream. Crucially, this son of the workaday equestrian class was always ready for the long, arduous work of building and lacked the aristocratic Caesar’s ego and destructive simplifying impulse. The difference between the uncle and adopted heir was that between boldness and prudence. Buchan explicitly invokes Aristotle’s phronesis. “Close-lipped, tenacious, cautious and yet intrepid,” he writes, Augustus “is amazing, but he is not attractive. . . . He took desperate risks, but only after meticulous calculation. He is the least romantic of great men.”

Buchan published Augustus in 1937, shortly after being appointed Governor-General of Canada by King George V. Buchan’s long concern for the fragility of civilization and the hard work of governing, unblurred by any illusions about human nature, are at the forefront of this work. Having reluctantly accepted his new position but dutifully embraced its burdens, it is easy to see why the principled, nose-to-the-grindstone character of Augustus appealed to him. (I will also not be the first to point out that, like Augustus, Buchan suffered immensely from recurrent lifelong illnesses, another point of kinship.) The result is one of Buchan’s best non-fiction books. Augustus was both critically well-received, even being adopted as a classroom text by one of the classicists he consulted, and commercially successful.

Last year I took some issue with Buchan’s presentation of Julius Caesar. I think his portrait of Augustus, which is sympathetic and admiring but by no means uncritical, especially with regard to the compromises Octavian made to survive early on, is impeccable. Where Caesar manipulated and destroyed, Octavian inherited a mess and, as Augustus, made the best of it. Buchan’s assessment that it was only because of Augustus that something of Rome remained to be destroyed by the barbarians centuries later is traditional but surely correct.

Buchan avoids making Augustus about his own time—“History does not repeat itself except with variations, and it is idle to look for exact parallels,” a point I wholeheartedly endorse—but he does pause over the present in the final paragraphs. “Once again the crust of civilization has worn thin,” he writes, in words that will be familiar from early in his fiction career, “and beneath can be heard the muttering of primeval fires.” The problems of Buchan’s day were not new; Augustus had faced them before in different form. But what troubled Buchan was the willingness of many moderns to cast off the hard work of self-governance, to “experiment with unknown forces” like shameless wars of aggression as a means of strengthening society and the hitherto undiscovered science of racial purity, and to embrace mob politics and dictatorship.

Imagining a resurrected Augustus surveying the world in 1937, Buchan concludes on a chilling note: “when this expert in mechanism observed the craving of great peoples to enslave themselves and to exult hysterically in their bonds, bewilderment would harden to disdain in his masterful eyes.”

The same must certainly be true—with variations—ninety years later. This is reason enough to read Augustus, but that it is also a fine work of history, an insightful study of human character, and a brilliantly readable narrative from a great author are the chief reasons to seek it out, enjoy it, and learn from it.

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As mentioned previously, I read Augustus in a reprint by House of Stratus, a publisher that seems to be defunct, but the entirety of Buchan’s book is available in a carefully presented online version from the University of Chicago, with helpful additional commentary and footnotes by the scholars who transcribed it, here. This by itself is a testament to the virtues of Buchan’s book.

I hope to read another of Buchan’s major biographies—likely Oliver Cromwell, which will make even tougher demands on my sympathies than Julius Caesar—before the end of the month. Stay tuned, and thanks for joining me for another John Buchan June.

Buchan on Cicero

As previously mentioned, I’m already working toward this year’s John Buchan June. Right now I’m reading Buchan’s excellent 1936 biography Augustus. Last year I enormously enjoyed his concise and insightful Julius Caesar while dissenting from his overall positive interpretation of Caesar’s character and career; Augustus, which was published a few years later, I’m enjoying more wholeheartedly.

This is despite my misgivings about the fall of the Republic and Octavian’s role in it, of course. Buchan covers that well, including an incident I am especially interested in: the betrayal and murder of Cicero. Following an explanation, in Book II, Chapter 1, of Octavian and Antony’s reconciliation and their agreement to proscribe formerly protected political enemies—“the darkest stain upon Octavian’s record”—Buchan relates Cicero’s death this way:

Among the first to die was Cicero. He had little estate, only debts, but Antony could not forgive the lash of the Philippics. Plutarch has told the tale of that winter afternoon in the wood by the sea‑shore when the old man stretched out his frail neck to the centurion’s sword, and of that later day in Rome when the head was fixed by Antony's order above the Rostra, and “the Romans shuddered, for they seemed to see there, not the face of Cicero but the image of Antony’s soul.” He met his death in the high Roman fashion—the only misfortune of his life, says Livy, which he faced like a man. The verdict is scarcely fair; juster is the comment of the same historian that he was so great a figure that it would require a Cicero to praise him adequately.

A succinct but evocative description, and a good defense against Livy’s jibe. If you haven’t read Plutarch’s account, you can read that starting at section 47 here. And of course I dramatized this moment in my first novella.

Buchan continues with a broader reflection on Cicero’s character and times:

In the wild years when the Roman Republic fell, the thinker and the scholar does not fill the eye in the same way as the forthright man of action, and Cicero is dim in the vast shadow of Julius [Caesar]. His weaknesses are clear for a child to read, his innocent vanity, his lack of realism, his sentimentality about dead things, his morbid sensitiveness, his imperfect judgment of character, his frequent fits of timidity. The big head, the thin neck, the mobile mouth of the orator could not dominate men like the eagle face of Julius. He failed and perished because he was Cicero. The man of letters in a crisis, who looks round a question, cannot have the single-hearted force of him who sees the instant need. Yet it is to be remembered that he could conquer his natural timorousness and act on occasion with supreme audacity, a far greater achievement than the swashbuckling valour of an Antony.

Buchan is always attentive to personal character and this is an excellent insight. Cicero’s courage was rarer and of a different kind than that of a fearless brute like Antony, and therefore more virtuous. Physical confrontation cost Antony nothing; but Cicero knew, when confronting a Clodius or especially a Catiline, that he was in real danger and acted anyway.

Buchan continues his ascent to a final, sweeping consideration of the moral framework Cicero prefigured:

And let it be remembered, too, that it was Cicero’s creed which ultimately triumphed. His dream came true. His humanism and his humanity made him the prophet of a gentler world. The man to whom St. Augustine owed the first step in his conversion,⁠ who was to St. Ambrose a model and to St. Jerome “rex oratorum,” the scholar whose work was the mainspring of the Renaissance, has had an abiding influence on the world. While others enlarged the limits of the Roman empire, he “advanced the boundaries of the Latin genius.”

As much as I love Cicero, this is perhaps stretching it a bit—but only a bit. St Augustine, in a passage from the Confessions, Book III, that Buchan footnotes, invokes Cicero’s philosophical work as a praeparatio evangelica:

In the ordinary course of study, I fell upon a certain book of Cicero, whose speech almost all admire, not so his heart. This book of his contains an exhortation to philosophy, and is called Hortensius. But this book altered my affections, and turned my prayers to Thyself O Lord; and made me have other purposes and desires. Every vain hope at once became worthless to me; and I longed with an incredibly burning desire for an immortality of wisdom, and began now to arise, that I might return to Thee.

When I wrote my novella about Cicero’s death I was unaware of or had forgotten Cicero’s role in St Augustine’s life, but my narrator too ends with a nameless hope that Cicero’s example has seeded in him, a hope for a world purified by self-sacrifice. I’m heartened, all these years later, to know I wasn’t trying something too outlandish.

Buchan concludes the chapter covering Octavian and Antony’s rapprochement with a reflection on the relationship between Cicero and Octavian, concluding that the two had merely been using each other for political ends. I’m not sure it was strictly cynical, and I was surprised by this passage because Buchan’s own account suggests mutual respect if not affection between the older and younger man. But in the following chapter, reflecting on Brutus, whom Buchan views as entirely overrated thanks to Shakespeare, Buchan pays his final and finest tribute to Cicero:

Brutus was a rarer species, who both impressed and puzzled his contemporaries. . . . Brutus had a solemn condescending manner, a hard face, a pedantic style in speech and writing, and a stiff ungracious character. He was capable of extreme harshness, as he showed in his treatment of the Asian cities before Philippi, and he was to the last degree avaricious. There was little principle about him when his investments were in question, and he extorted forty-eight per cent from one wretched Cypriote community.⁠ His philosophy of life was not profound, and he died abjuring his creed.⁠ He was an egotist and a formalist, yet he won an extraordinary prestige, for to his contemporaries he seemed the living embodiment of certain ancient virtues which had gone out of the world. . . . History has by one of its freaks perpetuated this repute, and he remains the “noblest Roman” when in truth he was a commonplace example of aristocratic virtues and vices. Cicero was in a far truer sense the last republican.

Greatly enjoying this so far. I’ve emphasized Buchan’s insight into character here, but his lifelong interest in statecraft—heightened, no doubt, by becoming Governor-General of Canada during the writing of the book (the preface is signed and dated from Government House, Ottawa)—is also clearly on display and entirely appropriate to its subject.

I’m reading a paperback reprint from Stratus House, but you can find the entirety of Buchan’s Augustus online here.

Dr Johnson and General Oglethorpe

This week’s batch of The Rest is History is a four-episode series on Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and their world. So far it’s a delight, and reflects well on Johnson. It also got me thinking about Johnson’s friendship with one of my heroes: soldier, humanitarian, and founder of Georgia James Oglethorpe.

I can’t recall how I first discovered their connection but it may have been through reading John Buchan’s Midwinter, a novel set during the Jacobite Rising in ’45 and in which both men appear. Possibly because of that, I dug into my copy of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson and turned up a number of charming and tantalizing anecdotes about Johnson’s dinners at Oglethorpe’s house (and one in which Johnson unexpectedly hosts Oglethorpe).

I’ve been meaning to research this further but haven’t gotten around to it; what I can do is copy a few choice excerpts into this, my commonplace book, something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. I hope y’all enjoy these as much as I have.

Here’s Boswell’s first mention of Oglethorpe, in the context of the publication of Johnson’s neoclassical poem London in 1738:

One of the warmest patrons of this poem on its first appearance was General Oglethorpe, whose ‘strong benevolence of soul,’ was unabated during the course of a very long life; though it is painful to think, that he had but too much reason to become cold and callous, and discontented with the world, from the neglect which he experienced of his publick and private worth, by those in whose power it was to gratify so gallant a veteran with marks of distinction. This extraordinary person was as remarkable for his learning and taste, as for his other eminent qualities; and no man was more prompt, active, and generous, in encouraging merit. I have heard Johnson gratefully acknowledge, in his presence, the kind and effectual support which he gave to his London, though unacquainted with its authour.

A good sketch of Oglethorpe’s character and virtues. I’d like to look into this further (this GHQ article is where I’ll start), as Oglethorpe was in England recruiting for his regiment in 1738 but Johnson’s London was initially published anonymously.

Boswell’s first account of a dinner at General Oglethorpe’s has Boswell provoking conversation with a question about the morality of dueling. Oglethorpe leaps in before Johnson can reply: “The brave old General fired at this, and said, with a lofty air, ‘Undoubtedly a man has a right to defend his honour.’” Not one to break character, the General.

There’s a bit of back-and-forth with Oliver Goldsmith before Boswell presses Johnson on the question of “whether duelling was contrary to the laws of Christianity.” Johnson gives a “masterly” and lengthy answer in favor of dueling as a form of self-defense. Oglethorpe chips in with an anecdote about accidental insult diplomatically avoided:

The General told us, that when he was a very young man, I think only fifteen, serving under Prince Eugene of Savoy, he was sitting in a company at table with a Prince of Wirtemberg. The Prince took up a glass of wine, and, by a fillip, made some of it fly in Oglethorpe’s face. Here was a nice dilemma. To have challenged him instantly, might have fixed a quarrelsome character upon the young soldier: to have taken no notice of it might have been considered as cowardice. Oglethorpe, therefore, keeping his eye upon the Prince, and smiling all the time, as if he took what his Highness had done in jest, said ‘Mon Prince,—’. (I forget the French words he used, the purport however was,) ‘That’s a good joke; but we do it much better in England;’ and threw a whole glass of wine in the Prince’s face. An old General who sat by, said, ‘Il a bien fait, mon Prince, vous l’avez commence:’ [He did well, my Prince; you started it] and thus all ended in good humour.

Dr. Johnson said, ‘Pray, General, give us an account of the siege of Belgrade.’ Upon which the General, pouring a little wine upon the table, described every thing with a wet finger: ‘Here we were, here were the Turks,’ &c. &c. Johnson listened with the closest attention.

An evening of war stories with General Oglethorpe!

There are several other mentions in the Life of dinners at Oglethorpe’s house, but not as much conversation. We do get observations of Oglethorpe’s character, though, such as Boswell’s note that “[t]he uncommon vivacity of Oglethorpe’s mind, and the variety of knowledge . . . sometimes made his conversation too desultory.” That is, he rambled. Johnson glossed this by saying of that Oglethorpe “never COMPLETES what he has to say.” One imagines him as an interesting conversationalist who leaps quickly from subject to subject.

There’s also the anecdote alluded to above, when Oglethorpe apparently assumed Johnson was having him over for dinner—entirely unbeknownst to Johnson. How this mixup occurred Boswell doesn’t say, but when he

mentioned this to Johnson, not doubting that it would please him, as he had a great value for Oglethorpe, the fretfulness of his disease unexpectedly shewed itself; his anger suddenly kindled, and he said, with vehemence, ‘Did not you tell him not to come? Am I to be HUNTED in this manner?’ I satisfied him that I could not divine that the visit would not be convenient, and that I certainly could not take it upon me of my own accord to forbid the General.

Boswell found Johnson talking to some ladies that night, morose because of a poorly performed play, but when Oglethorpe arrived Johnson was “was as courteous as ever.” A glimpse both of Johnson’s regard for Oglethorpe—which Boswell mentions almost every time he comes up—as well as some of Johnson’s mental troubles.

A final detail with regard to Johnson’s respect for Oglethorpe: one evening at Oglethorpe’s for dinner, Johnson “urged [him] to give the world his Life. He said, ‘I know no man whose Life would be more interesting. If I were furnished with materials, I should be very glad to write it.’”

It’s a shame we never got that book.

Again, a topic for further research one of these days. In the meantime, check out The Rest is History’s series on Johnson, and definitely give Buchan’s Midwinter a look. I glanced back through the parts mentioning Oglethorpe—Johnson is a major character throughout while Oglethorpe lurks in the background—and greatly enjoyed the novel’s final chapter, in which Johnson and Oglethorpe finally meet. The novel’s protagonist, Jacobite spy Alastair Maclean, who has befriended Johnson over the course of the uprising, arrives at Oglethorpe’s headquarters but

was not prepared for the sight of Oglethorpe; grim, aquiline, neat as a Sunday burgess, who raised his head from a mass of papers, stared for a second and then smiled.

“You have brought me a friend, Roger,” he told the young lieutenant. “These gentlemen will be quartered here this night, for the weather is too thick to travel further; likewise they will sup with me.”

When the young man had gone, he held out his hand to Alastair.

“We seem fated to cross each other’s path, Mr Maclean.”

“I would present to you my friend, Mr Samuel Johnson, sir. This is General Oglethorpe.”

Johnson stared at him and then thrust forward a great hand.

“I am honoured, sir, deeply honoured. Every honest man has heard the name.” And he repeated:

“One, driven by strong benevolence of soul,
“Shall fly like Oglethorpe from pole to pole.”

The General smiled. “Mr Pope was over-kind to my modest deserts. But, gentlemen, I am in command of a part of His Majesty’s forces, and at this moment we are in the region of war. I must request from you some account of your recent doings and your present purpose. Come forward to the fire, for it is wintry weather. And stay! Your Prince’s steward has been scouring the country for cherry brandy, to which it seems His Highness is partial. But all has not been taken.” He filled two glasses from a decanter at his elbow.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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Addendum: After posting this yesterday I listened to the end of the second episode, which mostly concerns Boswell, and Tom Holland quoted—in part—a charming passage from Boswell’s journals about his starstruck astonishment to be sitting and talking with Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith: “I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind.”

As it happens, I had just read the same passage in The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, by Leo Darmosch. For my purposes, Holland left out an extremely important bit. Here’s the whole passage from Darmosch:

In 1772 Boswell was flattered to be invited to dinner by General James Oglethorpe, then in his seventies, who had been a pioneer in prison reform and co-founder of the colony of Georgia. In his journal Boswell noted, “Mr. Johnson and Dr. Goldsmith and nobody else were in the company. I felt a completion of happiness. I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind. Here I am in London, at the house of General Oglethorpe, who introduced himself to me just because I had distinguished myself; and here is Mr. Johnson, whose character is so vast; here is Dr. Goldsmith, so distinguished in literature. Words cannot describe our feelings. The finer parts are lost, as the down upon a plum; the radiance of light cannot be painted.” (283)

I read this while browsing Mr K’s, our local used bookstore. I didn’t end up taking The Club home—I’m trying, however feebly, to thin our library out—but I did pick up Trevor Royle’s Culloden, which includes several pages on Oglethorpe’s role in suppressing the Jacobite Rising.

The Path of the King

This year’s John Buchan June, in which I’ve tried to focus more on Buchan’s short fiction, draws to a close with a book that is both a collection of short stories and a coherent novel and may be my favorite read this month, a sweeping set of interconnected tales spanning a thousand years: The Path of the King.

Beginning in the 9th or 10th century with the son of a Norse king, Buchan follows his descendants through multiple countries and widely varying fortunes. In the first story, the king gifts his son Biorn with a golden arm-ring. Biorn has just come of age to sail to war with his father, and in the year the story takes place famine and bad weather have placed greater than usual pressure on the outcome of their Viking raids. They strike west, avoiding Britain because of the hard-earned vigilance of its kingdoms, and settle on pillaging Frankish lands along the English Channel. When they are ambushed, Biorn is one of the only survivors, snatched out of the fight by a foreigner in his father’s war band and left in the woods. He wanders until he finally begs help at a peasant’s hut, where the story leaves him—alone, bereft, with nothing left to him but his arm-ring and an old woman’s prophecy that a great kingdom would one day arise from him.

The ring reappears in the next story on the finger of one of William the Conqueror’s more principled knights, and then on the finger of an impoverished descendant, a girl who escapes England by marrying a Bruges cloth merchant and making a fortune in commerce. One of her descendants goes on Crusade with St Louis and departs on an ill-fated mission to meet the Mongol Khan Houlagou, a mission from which only his arm—still wearing the ring—returns. One of his descendants hosts Joan of Arc, who convinces her to marry a good knight when she has doubts about the future, and one of their children becomes a Renaissance Humanist scholar and, finally, a voyager with Columbus.

A generation on, the ring returns to England with an aristocratic Huguenot refugee following the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, is on the hand of one of Sir Walter Raleigh’s men during one of Raleigh’s last voyages to Virginia, and on the hand of one of the regicides who signs Charles I’s death warrant at the behest of Oliver Cromwell.

This marks the beginning of a descent in the line, and the next generations we meet are skulkers and spies. One, the regicide’s grandson, works half-heartedly as a Catholic spy in England and, fearing he will be exposed by a judge who has discovered his secret, has decided to murder him when someone else does it first. Caught in an arcane plot, he is himself killed and used as manufactured evidence of a Catholic plot to invade England. His grandson, spying on the Jacobites for the Duke of Marlborough, is caught by Jacobite agents and forced to admit that, though he comes “of an ancient house” it is “somewhat decayed.” The ring is his only proof.

Spared, he vows to change his way of life, though the decay of the house seemingly continues. The next story finds one of his descendants in the wilderness of Kentucky with Daniel Boone. Like the ancestors who populate the previous stories, he is bold, intelligent, and restless. Also like them, he is ill-fated. Boone retrieves his ring and we next find it, in The Path of the King’s next-to-last story, in the possession of Nancy, a dying frontierswoman in a rickety cabin. In her final day of life, her beloved son Abe loses the ring while using it as a sinker on a fishing line and she has a vision of all the boys through her ancestry who had desired and proudly worn the ring. Whatever the ring signified, she decides, has reached its end.

The final story, told in four vignettes spanning four years of war and upheaval, follows her son Abe as President of the United States.

The first story in the first book covered this month, “The Green Wildebeest” in The Runagates Club, is introduced by Richard Hannay as a meditation on the way ancient things survive and recur in groups of people. The Path of the King is a book-length elaboration on this theme as well as many other familiar Buchan motifs, especially providence. Denied his father’s throne, Biorn and all of his descendants nevertheless keep the kingliness of their blood alive, and all of their actions and decisions—from the Conquest, the Crusades, and the Hundred Years’ War to the Reformation, English Civil War, and the American frontier—prepare the way for the man who will close the circle and fulfil the promise made to Biorn, ruling as “the last of the Kings.”

But as I’ve written before, a theme by itself is nothing. The power of a theme grows from particularity, the concrete specifics with which an author dramatizes it. The great strength of The Path of the King lies in Buchan’s vividly imagined historical vignettes. Each is populated by distinct characters in well-realized historical scenes that, despite their brevity, breathe the spirit of each story’s age strongly and authentically. It is totally absorbing. The book’s thematic connecting tissue, much like the ring itself, is always present but never the point, which gives The Path of the King both subtlety and a staggering cumulative effect.

Also crucial to this effect is the elegiac tone of much of the book. Though a few of the stories at the beginning and end span years and are long enough to be subdivided into chapters, many of them are vignettes—single historical moments. Most of them concern death. The stories, small instances in the thousand years of this family line, are moments of handing over and transition. Epiphany plays an important role, especially as the family’s fortunes rise and fall—and fall and fall—and more than one character has a deathbed vision, a glimpse of past and future. All of this, rooted as it is in the lifelike detail of the individual stories, creates a profound sense of the passage of time and the brevity of life. Ubi sunt?

I could quibble with a few things. The historical tone in places is a bit whiggish, but Buchan, ever fair-minded, does not present a straightforward progressive picture of upright Protestant modernizers triumphing over the backward. The Puritans and Parliamentarians of the Civil War and the anti-Catholic Whigs of the Restoration come off looking especially bad and Buchan presents the Jacobites, as in A Lost Lady of Old Years and Midwinter, as noble, principled, but doomed—more obsolete than evil. A bit more galling is the celebration of Lincoln as a ruling like a king. For a Southerner and an Anti-Federalist sympathizer, this is not the endorsement Buchan thinks it is.

But those are quibbles. The final story about Lincoln is of a piece with the others in its imaginative qualities, in its portraits of real people—Lincoln’s story is told from the perspectives of Edwin Stanton and William Seward, who are as vividly drawn as St Joan of Arc, Raleigh, Cromwell, Titus Oates, and Daniel Boone in others—and in its emotional strength. The scenes of Lincoln’s death, at least when Stanton is not opining on his majesty, are a fittingly moving conclusion to the story.

Perhaps my favorite stories in The Path of the King were the first two, “Hightown under Sunfell” and “The Englishman,” which is unsurprising since they’re set in my beloved Early Middle Ages. Buchan imagines the Viking Age and the defeat of Anglo-Saxon England brilliantly. “Eyes of Youth,” the Crusader’s adventure into Central Asia, and “In the Dark Land,” with Daniel Boone, offered the most adventure of the lot, with men striking into vast wildernesses full of alien dangers. The two spy stories, “The Marplot” and “The Lit Room,” offer some quality Buchan espionage in a historical vein. The most moving, for me, may have been “The Maid,” in which a young noblewoman who has just rejected an offer of marriage receives a visit from Joan of Arc and, a year later, has a vision of her on the day of her martyrdom. Buchan’s Joan is refreshingly both pious and human, an earthy farm girl in armor fired by love of God and France. And the penultimate story, “The Last Stage,” in which Nancy Hanks Lincoln is gifted a vision of her ancestors and her son’s future, has a similarly mystical power.

The Path of the King was serialized over a year from the fall of 1920 to 1921 and published in book form in 1921. It was Buchan’s first historical fiction since Salute to Adventurers before the First World War and would be followed not only by more great thrillers but by the best of his historical novels—Midwinter, Witch Wood, The Blanket of the Dark, and The Free Fishers. Elegantly constructed, rich in meaning, and beautifully imagined throughout, The Path of the King is a fitting beginning for the peak of Buchan’s literary career.

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Thanks for joining me for another John Buchan June. I’ve greatly enjoyed the four years of this project, most especially because of the people it’s brought me into contact with. I’m looking forward to next year, though with twenty-nine books under my belt—including the overwhelming majority of Buchan’s novels—I’m already trying to plan what to read. I may have read all of his most famous books by now, but as The Path of the King, The Watcher by the Threshold, and John Burnet of Barns show, there is still plenty of wonderful reading among the more obscure Buchan.

I hope y’all have a pleasant July, and that these posts can guide you toward something good to read in the long hot evenings. As always, thanks for reading!

The Courts of the Morning

This year’s John Buchan June enters the home stretch today with one of Buchan’s later thrillers, a South American adventure featuring filibustering European adventurers, American big business, kidnapping, regime change, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and two favorite recurring characters—The Courts of the Morning.

After a introduction by Richard Hannay in which he explains some of the background to the novel’s events, The Courts of the Morning picks up with Sir Archibald Roylance and his new bride Janet as they begin an overdue honeymoon. They decide to visit the small, prosperous Republic of Olifa on South America’s Pacific Coast. Meanwhile, Sandy Arbuthnot, now Lord Clanroyden, has grown restless in peacetime Britain—always the first tremor of adventure in a Buchan novel—and set off into the wild as a knight errant.

Olifa impresses Archie and Janet. Economically booming thanks to its copper deposits, the republic boasts a thriving capital city with both picturesque Latin American charm and every modern convenience, a smooth, charming president with modern ideas, a modern transportation network, and a modern, motorized army and air force staffed and advised by officers collected from around the world. Modernness—their guide insistently emphasizes it.

And yet, the more Archie and Janet see of Olifa, the more unease they detect. It takes enormous effort to get permission to tour the copper mines in the arid Gran Seco region near the mountains, as if someone is hiding something, and the presence of the mining company’s paramilitary guards and police forces strikes a discordant note. Castor, head of the mining conglomerate and de facto ruler of the Gran Seco, strikes Archie and Janet as superficially charming and cultured but cold, methodical, and ruthlessly pragmatic toward his workers, who sometimes end up in cities looking like the used up husks of human beings. The old families of Olifa, people who can trace their ancestry back to the soldiers of Pizarro, are unhappy. They resent the protection of a class of international mercenaries, and Castor’s mining has gained the unwelcome attention of the United States, which has begun to throw its weight around in Olifa in order to protect its interests in the mines.

Olifa sits poised between two fates: to become a commercial satellite of the United States or to become a vestigial attachment to Castor’s mining company.

Sandy and another old Buchan stalwart, the American spymaster John S Blenkiron, reappear. They’ve been spying on Olifa and Castor both as outsiders and, having infiltrated Castor’s operation, from the inside. They have uncovered extensive abuses by the company, which has functionally enslaved the local Indians and used a powerful local narcotic to keep employees like Castor’s bodyguards compliant, as well as Castor’s personal ambitions: to sweep away “the debris of democracy” in Olifa, establish himself as ruler, and use economic power to sow discord in the divided, restless United States.

With this intelligence in hand, Sandy and Blenkiron convince Archie to join them in a plot to foil Castor and shore up Olifa’s independence through revolution. Having kidnapped Castor and whisked him into protective isolation in the remote coastal plateau known as the Courts of the Morning, Blenkiron leads the mines and the Gran Seco in open revolt to Olifa’s government while Sandy takes to the hills and wages a guerrilla war with the help of the Indians. Castor, watched over by Janet and Barbara Dasent, an old acquaintance from America who has fallen for Sandy, bides his time, waiting—and slowly being transformed.

Even this thin summary covers only the first part of The Courts of the Morning. The civil war sparked by Sandy and Blenkiron goes on for weeks and becomes more and more complex. Castor’s drug-addicted “Conquistadors” reenter the story, kidnapping Janet Roylance in one of the novel’s most suspenseful scenes, and become the most dangerous, unpredictable element in the plot against Castor. This is a rich, detailed, busy novel.

Perhaps too busy. Buchan’s fictional Olifa is convincingly imagined—much better than the Evallonia of his later, more straightforwardly Ruritanian novel The House of the Four Winds—and the war unfolds plausibly. An extended passage late in the book in which Olifa’s commanding general surveys the military situation is thoroughly thought-out and casts what we’ve already read of Archie and Sandy’s adventures into realistic relief. But, as multiple Buchan biographers, the John Buchan Society, and contemporary reviewers have pointed out, this level of detail sometimes overwhelms the novel. JB Priestley, in his review at the time, captures exactly my experience of the novel:

It begins very well indeed with a convincing South American republic, mysterious copper mines in the mountains and a first-class villain on the grand scale. Somewhere about halfway through I found myself losing interest. To begin with, there is no longer any mystery. Then the villain begins to change character, and nobody effective takes his place. And the long and involved accounts of guerrilla warfare that take up most of the later chapters seemed to me below the usual Buchan level of interest. In many ways this is a more ambitious tale than most of his old ‘thrillers’ but it does not seem to me so successful.

With the outbreak of the revolt, the mystery and espionage end, and the novel follows parallel tracks of war and spiritual transformation. It is good—I was not as disappointed as Priestley professed himself earlier in that review—but does not fully deliver on the promise of the absorbing opening chapters.

I’m struck that Buchan returned so often in his later fiction—here, in Castle Gay a year later, in The Blanket of the Dark a year after that, and in A Prince of the Captivity in 1933—to the kidnapping of a villain as a plot element. In all of these stories there is some hope that, cut off from their power and networks of cronies and henchmen, the villains can reconnect with something they have forgotten and repent and use their gifts for good—transformed by the renewing of their minds.

It doesn’t always work. In The Courts of the Morning it does, but this development is only partly convincing. Would Castor, under the influence of a woman like Janet, really turn from his greed, ruthlessness, and lust for power and embrace the cause of Olifa? I have my doubts, but was carried along by the story despite them. Others have flatly rejected it. You’ll have to read The Courts of the Morning for yourself to decide.

And read it you should. Despite the ponderous campaigning of the second half and its debatable conversion of Castor, The Courts of the Morning is good entertainment. There is intrigue and action aplenty, kidnappings and rescues, airplane crashes and sabotage campaigns, and many near misses. And however convincing one finds Castor’s change of heart, the climactic chapter, a nighttime assault on an old Olifero family’s home and a showdown between the last remaining groups of antagonists, is suspenseful and moving.

The Courts of the Morning is, in its way, a fantasy novel, and Buchan’s attention to sub-creating Olifa is one of the book’s joys. Discovering the country alongside Archie and Janet in the first chapters of the novel is almost as fun as the emerging mystery itself. And this vivid, realistic account of Olifa gives weight to the struggle in the majority of the book—whether Olifero nationalists who wish to wrest control of their homeland back from both the mining tycoons and the Yanquis, the Indians who wish to be left alone, or even the déraciné, mercenary henchmen of Castor’s company, the stakes are clear and important. It matters who wins.

The story is also thematically rich. The characters at various points discuss the laxness that comes with affluence, the dilution or corruption of national cultures by wealth and globalism, the abuse of power when centralized in a single man, the fleeting, fallible natures of all governments, and, as mentioned, the need not only for political but for spiritual transformation. Without the latter the former will mean nothing.

But my primary interest in this book, and perhaps the best reason to read it beyond enjoyment, is to see two favorite characters as the protagonists of their own novel. One of the delights of reading through Buchan’s vast body of fiction is the large cast who drift in and out of each other’s stories. Archie and Sandy are two of the most frequent supporting characters. Both appear in Richard Hannay’s First World War adventures (Greenmantle, Mr Standfast) and Archie plays a crucial role in the Sir Edward Leithen adventure John Macnab, which is where he meets and falls in love with Janet.

Blenkiron also appears and others are namedropped, but Archie and Sandy, so often side characters, did not disappoint. Archie and Janet turn out to have a much more eventful honeymoon than they could have imagined, with their devotion to each other as well as their courage tested, and Sandy again proves himself a master of disguise, of irregular warfare, and—for the first time—of a woman’s heart. He also faces a challenge he has never faced before: the allure of earthly power.

The Courts of the Morning has its flaws, but it is an engrossing adventure with enough suspenseful set pieces to satisfy any Buchan fan. It may not be top-tier Buchan, but it is entertaining, and it offers a rare glimpse of two favorite characters on their own, embracing danger, and emerging triumphant and beloved.