The Cruel Sea

Several years ago I read CS Forester’s 1955 World War II novel The Good Shepherd, a short, intense story about an American destroyer captain as he attempts to protect a convoy through the worst of the U-boats’ hunting grounds in the North Atlantic. Though told in the third person, it is intensely, claustrophobically internal, bringing the reader into intimate contact with both the calculating mind and physical punishment of its protagonist over the worst 72 hours of his career. It’s excellent, one of my favorite reads that year. The Cruel Sea, published in 1951 by Royal Navy veteran Nicholas Monsarrat, is even better.

Beginning in a Scottish shipyard in the fall of 1939, The Cruel Sea introduces the captain, Commander George Ericson, a dedicated but undistinguished officer who already has a long career behind him, as he takes command of a newly constructed corvette, the HMS Compass Rose. He also meets his three junior officers—the untried Lockhart and Ferraby, a journalist and bank clerk fresh out of officer training, and the experienced but boorish Australian Bennet.

As the Compass Rose is fitted for anti-submarine duty in the North Atlantic, the reader gets to know the ship, its crew, and these central characters. Ericson is well-trained, disciplined, and eager. Lockhart, an unattached former freelancer, begins the war single and with few connections to make him fearful of combat; he’s cool and a quick learner. Ferraby, only twenty, utterly inexperienced and with a new wife at home, is uncertain and often unmanned by his lack of skill. Bennet, cowardly and lazy, pounces on that. Testing the new ship and undertaking its first missions into the warzone strains and exposes weak points in Compass Rose’s leadership. New officers and crew, like the posh, university-educated Morell, who has a flighty actress wife back home in London, and Baker, a young man obsessed with women despite his lack of experience with them, further complicate matters.

I don’t want to give much away about the plot. The Cruel Sea is not plot-driven. Having established its characters and their task—a task they’ll labor at almost without pause for six years—the story hums along on two brilliantly combined storytelling elements.

The first is the day-to-day reality of convoy duty and actual combat, both of which Monsarrat describes unromantically and with startling clarity. The drudgery and physical misery come through palpably, as do the horrors Compass Rose’s crew confront on nearly every mission. Sailors incinerated by the burning oil leaking from a torpedoed tanker, survivors discovered floating in their lifejackets weeks too late, a man dying of third-degree burns as a hapless officer rubs ointment on his exposed muscles, men wounded, drowned, frozen, blown to pieces—Monsarrat never embellishes or wallows in his descriptions, and the simplicity and directness of his narration makes it all the more disturbing and moving.

The second key element is the character of the men themselves, especially leaders. War, The Cruel Sea impresses upon us firmly, depends as much on relationships and leadership as it does on technology. This is a character study spread across six years of danger, combat, and death, and the smooth functioning of superiors and subordinates, their mutual trust, and the judgements each is empowered to make are as crucial as sonar, signal lamps, or depth charges.

Personal character matters. More than one man is wrecked by a bad relationship with a woman. The book’s title emphasizes the cruelty of the sea, but the torture some characters are put through by unfaithful wives rivals the sea for unfeeling destructiveness. Other men lead dissipated lives ashore or lives otherwise marked by moral weakness. Compass Rose’s greatest trial—again, I don’t want to spoil any specific incidents—painfully exposes the strong and the bad.

One incident I will describe, one of the most famous in the book and one included in the trailer for the 1953 film adaptation, combines the stress and danger and technical demands of combat with the problem of personal character and responsibility. In Compass Rose’s worst mission, a convoy to Gibraltar that is almost annihilated by U-boats, Ericson steers the corvette toward a group of men who survived the sinking of their ship and are struggling in the water. As he approaches he learns that Compass Rose has picked up a strong sonar signal directly underneath the survivors. It is almost certainly a U-boat. Ericson must decide in an instant: pick up the survivors and let the U-boat get away—and possibly even torpedo Compass Rose—or drop depth charges into the middle of the struggling men. He orders the depth charges launched. He lives with the consequences for the rest of the book.

The novel’s six-year span, with characters coming and going and the scene occasionally shifting to the homefront, to the Arctic convoy route to Murmansk, or even to Brooklyn, gives the reader a sharp sense of the experience of the war, especially its long years of struggle before success and the escalation of the violence. The first two-thirds are a bleak grind. The harshness of the work, the unrelenting danger, and the horrors and personal stresses the characters are subjected to hardens or dulls them by turns. They feel they have not only been caught in a machine, but worry about becoming machinelike themselves. Ericson struggles with memories of a softer, more flexible earlier stage of the war; a young sailor who went AWOL to check on his wife might have been let off with a warning in 1939, though by 1944 the same man committing the same offense would be sent to prison, and Ericson feels he must shut down even good-natured joking among his offers in order to maintain discipline. Lockhart, self-protective, closes himself off to all but his captain, but finds himself falling in love with a beautiful Wren and must decide whether to commit with the war unfinished.

Only late in the book do the characters realize that there is an end in sight, a sense that brings its own anxieties with it. By the time two of the central surviving characters stand together on the bridge of a different ship, different men from those they began the novel as six years before, we feel their gratitude that the war is over but understand why it is a muted, subdued gratitude—exhaustion, and much more besides.

I don’t want to give the impression that The Cruel Sea is especially dour. It has frequent moments of wit and levity of the best British kind—wry, understated, often dark—and its characters are a pleasure to spend time with. But precisely because Monsarrat has peopled his novel with such lifelike, sympathetic characters, when they suffer and die it is as powerful and agonizing as their good times were enjoyable. By the end the story has reminded us, in case we forgot, that every life has shares of joy and loss. Monsarrat makes us feel both.

Despite overlap in subject matter, the comparison I began with is not entirely fair. Both are excellent novels. But where The Good Shepherd concerns one man, a captain, over three days, The Cruel Sea follows multiple members of a ship’s crew across the entire duration of the war. The Good Shepherd is a minutely focused portrait of a leader in his most acutely stressful moment. The Cruel Sea, on the other hand, vast, changeable, dangerous, and beautiful like the sea itself, is an epic.

Jenkins on regionalism and contingency

One of the best perks of teaching is the opportunity to review examination copies of textbooks. This morning I received a copy of the new sixth edition of A History of the United States, by Philip Jenkins, part of Bloomsbury’s Essential Histories series. Jenkins is a historian of religion whose work I’ve greatly appreciated over the years, and I was excited to discover that he’s also written a short, one-volume American history text. I’m reading it with a view to replacing the late Robert Remini’s Short History of the United States in one of my online adjunct courses.

So far it’s off to a good start. One of the challenges of teaching history is trying to draw attention to recurrent patterns or themes. The standard multi-author committee-produced textbook—what you think of when you hear the word—usually does this clumsily, if at all. A single-author text that pays a bit more attention to literary qualities, like Remini’s Short History or Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope, can develop these themes and throughlines narratively as it goes—which is also, not coincidentally, how I teach the subject.

Jenkins begins by explicitly laying out the themes he wants the reader to notice in a dedicated introductory chapter. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be my favorite approach, but it allows Jenkins to describe some of the peculiar parameters of American history very specifically, priming the reader to detect them. I especially liked what he had to say about two in particular:

First, having established “the tyranny of distance” as one of the key factors in the story, he points toward the differing trajectories and cultures of the US’s many regions, the two earliest and most important of which are the north and the South:

Different regions produced their own distinct cultures, the exact nature of which has given rise to much debate. The question of “Southern-ness” has been a popular topic for such works, though the very term betrays the prejudice that it is the south that is untypical from an American or even world norm. In terms of its history of slavery and racial hierarchy, the American South closely resembles the worlds of the Caribbean and of much of Central or South America. We could equally well argue that it was rather the north of the early nineteenth century that produced a set of cultural and intellectual assumptions that were bizarre by the standards of the contemporary Western world, while the aristocratic, rural, and deferential south was a much more “normal” entity than its egalitarian, urban, and evangelical neighbors. For anyone acquainted with the astonishing social turbulence of the Northern cities before the Civil War, it is startling to hear claims that it was the south that had a peculiar tendency to violence.

This is not just about geography but about culture and historiography. For a long time, the extent to which New Englanders have portrayed their story as normative, as the story of the US to which recalcitrants and rebels have to be brought into conformity, has been invisible. (Why, for example, did the entire country just celebrate a holiday inspired by the Pilgrims?) This can lead to especially warped interpretations since, as Jenkins points out, the culture that arose in the northeastern US is such a weird historical outlier. Restoring a broader perspective creates a better understanding not only of north and South, but of the whole.

Even more crucially, Jenkins pushes back against whiggishness, the assumption that history moves determinedly along toward a particular endpoint, both of the present and the past:

Yet when we tell the story of US expansion, it is tempting to describe a natural and even inevitable process, by which the Lower Forty-Eight acquires its predestined dimensions and natural borders. That was certainly how Americans thought, and how they recorded events, and we still use the phrase that was commonly cited to describe this process. . . . 

The speed and seemingly irresistible weight of American expansion make such a narrative of Manifest Destiny tempting. US histories can look like a map on a television documentary, with an illuminated core region along the East Coast, which spreads swiftly and inevitably over those hitherto dark regions, which in turn become lit up as they achieve their authentic destiny of being included in that United States. It is hard not to write the story backward, as if the ending was always predetermined. The problems with such an account are many[.]

Among these problems is the implied sense of inevitability Jenkins mentions, a sense rooted in the most subtle and insidious bias of historical study, historian’s fallacy, which erases the fog in which historical figures operated. Jenkins emphasizes contingency and the fact that historical actors didn’t know the end of the story. Here’s an example I mentioned, with reference to this piece by Jeremy Black, in my Substack digest over the weekend:

For much of American history, many Americans were convinced that the lands that became Canada would inevitably fall into the possession of the United States. That was a real prospect during the War of 1812, and frequent later tensions between the United States and Great Britain made it highly likely that Canada would someday be a theater for American conquest and annexation.

There’s what word inevitably again. (A helpful rule: when trying to understand a past culture, look at what the movers and shakers thought was inevitable at the time.) Jenkins expands on the problems of assuming inevitable outcomes, of “arcs” “bending” toward particular results:

Quite apart from any cultural or racial biases, the whole idea of “inevitability” is shaky. The emergence of the continental United States with its boundaries, that Lower Forty-Eight, was contingent, dependent on the outcome of political struggles and social movements. It is easy to imagine scenarios when the United States would have acquired a very different shape, and this is no mere issue of speculative alternative history. We are dealing with what well-informed people believed or hoped in those earlier eras. Most basically, it was far from obvious to contemporary observers that the United States would have resisted multiple serious efforts at secession or partition, which reached their peak during the 1860s. In retrospect, we know that the nascent Confederate States of America created in 1860 would not endure as a major New World power, or that the remnant United States of America would not be confined to the north-east and Midwest; but Abraham Lincoln could not take that fact for granted.

What happened was not inevitable, things could have turned out differently, and uncertainty is an important part of every historical story. Conveying these facts is an important part of my approach to teaching, and I’m hopeful that the rest of Jenkins’s book will underscore these themes.

For what it’s worth, I’d still recommend Remini’s book, but Remini’s narrative is a little too complacently satisfied with the postwar liberal consensus—the idea of America as an idea, gradually developing its doctrines to ever fuller and broader degrees—which is itself a kind of whiggishness. And when initially selecting a text for this course I considered McClay’s book, but its otherwise excellent narrative has a few too many major omissions (the Plains Indians Wars)—yet another historiographical and teaching problem.

Five basic typesetting fixes for self-publishing

I’m currently reading The Cruel Sea, a 1951 novel about the Battle of the Atlantic by Nicholas Monsarrat. A few days ago on Substack I shared a few pictures of the interior of the book, simply but beautifully designed and set in Janson, a readable typeface still in wide use today.

In my note I called this kind of mid-century design “typographical comfort food.” A number of people agreed, noting the “visual delight” of the look of the page and that good typesetting makes it feel “like I can breathe through my eyes” reading it. Another, very much to the point, described the reassurance that comes with good type design: “You know you’re in good hands.”

This last comment is particularly important because at least two others remarked on self-published books in this context. One, an author of sci-fi, said he took this aspect of books for granted until he started publishing his own work, at which point he realized “it really does make a difference!” Another, slightly more dourly, wrote of the need to undo the damage done by desktop publishing.

I don’t know so much about widespread damage, but self-published books very often look bad at the page level. I’ve certainly put books back on the shelf after looking at an unreadable interior. But I’ve been doing desktop publishing of one kind or another as an amateur for thirty years, and—through a lot of trial and error and, crucially, just looking at a lot of books—have learned a lot about what makes the interior of a book look like a book. I’m no expert, but what I hope to offer here are a handful of specific things people designing their own books can do to make sure readers focus on the writing and not on shoddy typography.

Paragraph spacing

A lot of the problems I see with self-published books come from designing the interior of the book in a program like Word. This by itself is not a problem—I’ve laid out all of my books in Word. The problem is leaving Word’s often moronic default settings in place.

Among the worst of these is Word’s automatic insertion of a space between paragraphs. No professionally published book does this, and to a potential reader, even one who doesn’t know much about design or publishing, it won’t look right. Something will feel off.

This setting can be corrected in the paragraph formatting menu. Under the “Spacing” section, you’ll want to make sure that both “spacing before” and “spacing after” are set to zero.

Level up: Word’s default indentation is set to half an inch (.5”). Finished books don’t indent paragraphs this much. Reset it to .2” or .25”.

Line spacing

Manuscripts may be double-spaced, but a finished book should be single-spaced. You may occasionally see a professionally published book fiddle with the line spacing a bit—1.1 or 1.2 between lines, for instance—but the lines will always be closer to single-spaced than otherwise and precisely how this looks on the page will depend somewhat on the typeface or font (about which more below). Again, too much space between the lines won’t look right.

Like paragraph spacing, this is adjustable in the paragraph formatting menu.

Faith through justification

“Alignment” is how the text in a manuscript lines up with the margins. Word’s default is the entirely sensible “left aligned,” meaning the text will be flush with the left margin but not the right. Professionally published books are “justified,” meaning the text reaches all the way to the right margin on every line (except for the last sentence of a paragraph). This used to be a painstaking task for old-fashioned printers, who had a variety of ways to scootch and squish the text to fit the length of a line, but computers adjust the text to fit the margins automatically. Simply highlight the text and, out of the four alignment buttons, click “justify.”

Caveat: publishers do occasionally get artsy and toy with unjustified text with “ragged” edged paragraphs (my CSB Reader’s Bible has unjustified text), but I’ve never met anyone who actually likes this when they see it. Err on the side of traditional standards.

Level up: Be aware that, once you’ve justified the text of your manuscript, you’ll probably want to go through it looking for places where justification has opened huge gaps between the words on a line. You can manually control hyphenation or letter spacing to fine-tune this.

Stay out of the gutter

Even competently designed self-published books sometimes misstep when it comes to setting up the margins of the page. This is not typically a make-or-break aspect of page design but can be off-putting to readers.

Pick up a dozen or so books at random and flip through, looking at the margins, and you’ll see a wide variety of designs and widths. What you won’t see, however, are margins so narrow that they allow the text to stretch all the way across the page, or margins that allow the text dip into the gutter, the middle of the book where the pages join. If the line is too long, it can tiring to the eye and difficult to see into the gutter, and you want your book design to eliminate as many physical obstacles to the act of reading as possible.

This is slightly more relative than some of the other tips I’m giving here, but in a normally sized paperback book (say 5x8”) the outer margin should be about half an inch. This can be the narrowest margin. The top of the page should be a bit wider, the bottom wider still (to accommodate a page number in the footer, for instance), but the inner margin by the gutter should be around half again as wide as the outer.

I’m still unsatisfied with the margins I laid out in my first published novel. My most recent book and the one I’m most pleased with in regard to margins, has an outer and bottom margins of .7”, a top margin of .6”, and an inner “gutter” margin of .9”. When setting this up in the margins menu in Word, be sure to select “mirror margins” to get the facing-page format of a published book.

Appropriate typefaces

Word’s default typeface or “font” all the way through my school and college years was 12-point Times New Roman (single-spaced, I’ll add). At some point when I was in graduate school someone somewhere at Microsoft decided to goof all of this up. They added that automatic line after a paragraph and reset the default font to 11-point Calibri.

The other defaults in this post are mostly basic manuscript format things you’ll need to adjust to make your book look like a book, but these default font settings are mindbogglingly stupid.

The best size for your text is going to depend on a few factors like the length of the book and how that affects the cost of manufacture. Like margins, what looks best is going to be partly a matter of judgment.

What is and is not an appropriate typeface for the text of a book is not. The problem with Word’s Calibri is that it’s sans-serif. (Here’s a quick primer on serifs.) Professionally published books may use a sans-serif typeface for chapter headings or other design elements, but the actual text itself should always be in a serif font for readability.

Fortunately, there are many, many of these available. A few of my personal favorites, what I like about them, and where you might sample them:

• Bembo—a classic old-style typeface with a slightly old-fashioned look and elegant italics. You may see it in older Penguin Classics, religious books from Ignatius Press, or many John Grisham paperbacks.

• Sabon—a modern typeface with well-balanced letters; it is also highly readable at all sizes, even down to footnote sizes like 6 points. Very widely used both for fiction and non-fiction now.

• Dante—nicely balances old-style design with readability. You may see it in the Walt Longmire mysteries, Penguin Modern Classics fiction, or a variety of non-fiction books.

• Minion—a relatively recent but widely used font that is highly readable but, in my opinion, a little bland. Frequently used for non-fiction but you will sometimes see it used for novels—like the Tor Essentials reprint of The Prestige that I read this fall.

• Caslon—a nicely weighted typeface with elegant italics that suggests the old-fashioned printing press (it is often used for books on the American Revolution, and there are some varieties that look artificially weathered, like 300-year old pamphlets).

• Baskerville—another classic, widely used by university presses and fiction publishers a few decades ago. Like Bembo and Caslon, it has as suggestion of class and history about it. You can see it in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

There are plenty of other good typefaces commonly used for professional typesetting, but any one of these will look better than Calibri, Times New Roman, or whatever Word’s default is tomorrow. If these don’t come pre-packaged with your edition of Word, they’re available online in either licensed or free generic versions.

Avoid:

• Sans-serif fonts

• Typewriter fonts like Courier

• Slab-serif fonts, thick, heavy typefaces that are better used for titles or headings than the main body of text

• Fonts designed to look like calligraphy or other handwriting

• Whimsical fonts, of which there are many available

If what you’re after is professionalism and readability, you should pick something unobtrusive and clear.

Level up: With those strictures in mind, experiment with typefaces a bit. A choice of font doesn’t have to be strictly functional, it can suggest tone, add texture, or, like Caslon for those American Revolution books, suggest a time and place.

Conclusion

One of the challenges—or, if you enjoy this stuff like I do, one of the fun things—about self-publishing is that there are always things to fine-tune and improve. Again, the above is a list of basics that, even if they won’t give your self-published book perfect interior and type design, they’ll at least eliminate some of the most obvious mistakes or problems. As that one Substack commenter put it, you want potential readers to feel that they’re “in goods hands” just by looking inside. I hope y’all find it helpful.

On proportionality bias

This week The Rest is History dropped an excellent five-part series on Jack the Ripper. I managed to listen to all of it in two days. I strongly recommend it if you have any interest in that case, Victorian England, or the history of crime investigation, but also because Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook several times mention—albeit not by name—a useful concept for thinking about how we look for causes in past events: proportionality bias.

I’ve written about this briefly before, in a review of Rob Brotherton’s Suspicious Minds, on the cognitive aspects of conspiracism. Briefly, proportionality bias is our built-in tendency, when trying to explain something important, to look for something equally important as the cause. A cause that is, subjectively, incommensurate with the results is unsatisfying and tempts us toward identifying something else—usually something we are already suspicious of. Again, this is a built-in tendency, not a pathology, but while proportionality bias may be a helpful heuristic on the personal level, it does not scale to world events.

The go-to example is the JFK assassination. Many still can’t accept that the president of one of the most powerful states in history—a man involved in international intrigues at the highest levels including espionage, covert assassination programs, proxy wars, and near nuclear war—was killed by an unsympathetic loser who happened to have temporary work in a building his limousine happened to drive past. It happens to be true but is narratively unsatisfying. The conclusion that it must have been something or someone else comes first, and not necessarily consciously; arguments against Oswald are only meant to confirm it.

Something similar has been happening among certain types with regard to Charlie Kirk. It can’t have been a terminally online loser who killed him out of some half-formed, privately nursed political grievance; it must have been (insert fantasy villain of your choice, though one, the subject of a million crank fixations, keeps coming up).

In the case of Jack the Ripper, this is how we get theories of vast royal machinations or secret Masonic rituals—or some combination of the two—as the force behind the Whitechapel murders. That it was likely a still-unidentified local pervert who was skilled with a knife would, to many, prove disappointing. The imagination would prefer a dark cabal of willing actors, or at least a colorful weirdo, to the anonymous forces of poverty, deviance, and insanity.

Again, Holland and Sandbrook do a good job explaining this, even tying it back to their JFK series. The one point I would add to the above is the role that subjectivity of proportionality bias.

When I reviewed Brotherton’s book, I mentioned the assassinations of JFK and Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914. The former is still the subject of fevered speculation and conspiracy theory; the latter, though part of a flourishing conspiratorial worldview in the 1920s, not so much. Why? Because JFK’s murder still feels important to people in way Franz Ferdinand’s, having become something we learn about in middle school rather than discuss casually, does not.

By the same token, Jack the Ripper is important—to us, for reasons Holland and Sandbrook explain well. In the same way that protesters will show up to vandalize the statues of high-profile targets like Robert E Lee or Christopher Columbus but not for Magellan or Raphael Semmes, or that ancient aliens enthusiasts will fixate on famous landmarks like the Pyramids but not much more complicated ancient construction projects like Roman aqueducts, preexisting cultural cachet matters perhaps more than the arguments themselves. This should, by itself, raise our suspicions.

The most helpful marginalia in my library

I mentioned this on a podcast once upon a time and recently told one of y’all about it in correspondence, but I want to jot it down for easy future reference in this commonplace book: the most helpful item of marginalia I’ve ever run across in a used book.

The book is JE Lendon’s Soldiers and Ghosts, an excellent history of war and combat in the Greek and Roman worlds. In an early chapter, Lendon writes of the heroic ethos of Homer’s Mycenaean characters and the role of competition therein:

But by far the most important arena for competition is the individual heroic fighting itself. It is in battle that a hero wins the admiration, the glory—the kleos, the kudos—that conveys high rank, honor, worth, or worthiness: timē. In the epic formula, battle is “where men win glory.”

Heroes compete in public performance in war and battle, performance which is constantly evaluated by their peers. A hero’s high birth and high deeds in the past create a favorable expectation in the eyes of observers, but the hero must uphold his reputation by the continual display of merit in action. Heroes compete in the display of Homeric virtues, aretai, which include strength, skill, physical courage, and fleetness of foot, but also cunning and wisdom and persuasiveness in council. The heroic epithets the poem applies to heroes reflect many of the Homeric excellences:

…the son of Tydeus, the spear-famed, and Odysseus,
and Ajax the swift-footed, and the brave son of Phyleus.

I got my copy of this book used. The previous owner never wrote his or her name on the flyleaf and made very little marking or underlining in the book at all, but the last sentence of that first paragraph has a long squiggle of felt-tip pen underneath it, and the entire second paragraph is in a big bold bracket with the following in the margin:

Reputation, pedigree, expectations based on past performance, peer evaluation—that scrawled Sports offered me a one-word epiphany. I remember reading Soldiers and Ghosts eleven years ago, in the breakroom during my weekend shifts at the sporting goods store where I was picking up extra work between my two adjunct jobs. I don’t know if I slowly looked up from the page with a wide-eyed look of realization but that’s how I remember it feeling.

The next time I taught Ancient Greece I used precisely this comparison. I still do. It makes the alien world of Homer legible to my students instantly and, with the benefit of that understanding, offers a good point of departure for talking about what was distinct about the world.

Soldiers and Ghosts is an excellent book and one I benefited greatly from, but I wouldn’t have benefited quite as much as I did without my copy’s previous owner. I’m still grateful. I don’t write in my books very often. I probably should. If I can offer even a fraction of the insight of this one note for some future reader, it’d prove worthwhile.

Palma’s Divine Comedy

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

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

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

• Accuracy of wording or sense

• Accuracy of tone

• Accuracy of form, including rhyme

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epistolary authority, uncertainty, and mystery

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Create uncertainty

• Engender a sense of discovery

• Establish the illusion of authenticity or reality

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

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

THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hobbit on The Rest is History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judgment on Deltchev

Eric Ambler’s career as a novelist has two distinct phases. The first began in the mid-1930s with tense thrillers set in a Europe still coping with the effects of the First World War, not the least of which was the rise of dictatorships and authoritarian movements and the hulking influence of Soviet Russia. The second, in which Ambler resumed writing fiction after a break taken during the Second World War, began in the early 1950s and continued until his death.

Judgment on Deltchev is the first of this second phase, Ambler’s first novel since Journey into Fear eleven years before.

Published in 1951, Judgment on Deltchev takes place in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. Foster, an English playwright, has been hired as a kind of stunt correspondent to attend the trial of “Papa” Deltchev in an unnamed Eastern European country. Prior to the war, Deltchev had been a mildly leftwing agrarian. During the war he had refused to collaborate with the Nazi occupiers. Following the war he attempted to prevent Soviet takeover and the installation of a Communist puppet government. Having failed, he is accused of conspiring with foreign powers against his own people.

The novel begins as Foster arrives. His contact is Georghi Pashik, a shabby, unkempt international press agent whom Foster immediately dislikes. Foster feels guilty, telling himself that he is only repulsed by Pashik’s smell. But Pashik is shifty, passive aggressive, and manipulative, and his air of forced geniality both irritates and conceals much. It is not the first time Foster will delude himself.

The trial is a transparent fraud—a show trial. Foster, alive to the need of the new Stalinist regime to demolish Deltchev with lies and agitprop in order to prevent him being seen as a martyr, observes the scripted denunciations for a few days. At first Foster is impressed by Deltchev’s resolution in the face of mistreatment—he has been denied his diabetes medication by his jailers—but he gradually stops attending. Something about the trial suggests something in the charges is true. That bothers him. Further, it slowly becomes clear to Foster that the real story is outside the courtroom.

Foster meets Deltchev’s family: an impressive, haughty wife and a beautiful daughter, both under constant military guard. The daughter asks him to deliver a private message to a friend. When Foster arrives at the address, he finds a corpse, and someone else who has been stalking him.

Who is the dead man? Why was he killed? What has Foster gotten himself into? Intrigue, betrayal, an assassination plot—against whom? by whom?—the last remainders of a pre-war military secret society bent on revenge, spies for the regime among the other journalists, the lurking, looming influence of the Soviets, the inescapable threat of imprisonment, torture, and deportation, Pashik’s deceptive behavior, and attempts on Foster’s own life further complicate his simple reporting assignment.

Judgment on Deltchev is a good book. Well paced, suspenseful, its plausibly drawn fictitious environment creates an oppressive atmosphere of paranoia that steadily builds, from the first chapter, through expert foreshadowing. It is striking that Ambler, after a decade away from novels, returned so immediately to form. That first phase of Ambler’s career described above, it must be said, produced the classics—Journey into Fear, Epitaph for a Spy, The Mask of Dimitrios. The second phase begun by Judgment on Deltchev never quite approaches those heights of tension and excitement. And yet, from this novel on, they have something those earlier novels did not: perspective.

In Ambler’s novels of the 1930s, Soviet agents sometimes appear as allies. Never quite straightforwardly good guys, they still help the protagonists and are presented sympathetically—unlike the Nazi and Fascist agents or the cosmopolitan gangsters who oppose them. These characters are conventional anti-Fascist elements of the time. But as for so many others, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the partition of Poland clarified things for Ambler. Participation in the war and observation of Stalin’s brutal swallowing of Eastern Europe strengthened his convictions. Judgment on Deltchev reckons with the lies, envy, backstabbing, and tyranny imposed upon millions, ostensibly in their names, and the hollow legal theatre that consolidated these regimes.

The books following this one, the second-phase books, often have a more sweeping scope, suggesting the upheaval of entire regions—the wreck of post-war Germany and Greece in The Schirmer Inheritance and post-war Malaya and Indonesia in Passage of Arms, the Middle East of Palestinian terrorism in The Levanter—and taking place across longer, more intricate timelines. They also have an extra guardedness about them, seldom ending neatly, often with the protagonist’s name smeared as part of an agitprop campaign. The scale of the danger, somehow, has increased. This perspective, gained over Ambler’s decade away from his novels, enriches Judgment on Deltchev and even those later novels that quite don’t measure up to his greatest.

In Here Lies, Ambler reflects on his “happy return to writing thrillers” in this book. American reviews were mixed—readers there just wanted a rehash of The Mask of Dimitrios, apparently. His fellow Britons had a different reaction

In England, the letters I received about the book were all more or less abusive. I was a traitor in the class war struggle, a Titoist lackey and an American imperialist cat’s-paw. One message was a single piece of used toilet paper. The single piece was a delicate touch, I thought; it spoke of careful premeditation.

Ambler had struck a nerve. He was doing something right.

Judgment on Deltchev feels a lot like one of Ambler’s earlier thrillers—the everyman protagonist who gets in over his head in a complicated foreign place—but crossed with Darkness at Noon and a dash of Animal Farm in earnestness and import. This is not just a good thriller, it has a clear-eyed vision of a time and place about which too many still deceive themselves.

The Oceans and the Stars

A skilled mariner, gifted with leadership, cunning, and physical tenacity, longs to return home from a long and dangerous wartime voyage. Unaccountable powers hinder and undermine him and his stouthearted resistance brings down their wrath. They throw extra hazards and unreasonable anathemas in his way. Men die. He may never see home again. Meanwhile, the woman he left behind, a woman as smart and tough as him, is surrounded and menaced by men who see little in her but advancement for themselves. And every day they spend apart they grow older, that time together lost irrevocably.

One of the most remarkable things about Homer’s work and the Odyssey in particular is that no matter how familiar it becomes, it is always fresh. The Oceans and the Stars, the latest novel by Mark Helprin, clearly demonstrates that. Though not a retelling—Lord knows we don’t need any more of those—it draws inspiration from the Odyssey in new and exciting ways.

After a short prologue in which the Navy prepares a court martial against Captain Stephen Rensselaer on capital charges, The Oceans and the Stars flashes back to the moment that set him on course for this fate. Fifty-two years old, overdue for promotion to admiral and retirement, Rensselaer has been appointed to a cushy advisory job under the Secretary of the Navy. A SEAL during Operation Desert Storm and commander of a patrol coastal or PC, the smallest class of ship in the US Navy, Rensselaer learns that the unnamed president plans to scrap the PCs simply because they’re small and, in an Oval Office meeting to which his boss has brought him as an expert advisor, speaks his mind. The president has him transferred to New Orleans to oversee the construction of the final commissioned PC. It’s not a demotion, but it’s meant as an insult. Rensselaer takes the job seriously.

It’s in New Orleans that he meets Katy Farrar, a tax lawyer whose husband left her and whose children sided with him. Cut adrift and lonely, she and Rensselaer meet on a streetcar and fall in love. Both intelligent, good at what they do, but abandoned and railroaded into career dead-ends with not enough years left to start over, they are ideally matched. Rensselaer plans to complete this final, cutting-edge PC—which he has named USS Athena—turn it over to the Navy, cut his losses, and retire. Then war breaks out.

Interestingly, as The Oceans and the Stars was published two years ago, the war pits the United States against Iran. With the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean aflame, Rensselaer finds himself with a war command. He takes aboard supplies, ammunition, and a half-squad of SEALs and steams out of Norfolk. He has just enough time before he ships out to ask Katy to marry him.

The bulk of the novel concerns Rensselaer and the Athena’s combat cruise, which I don’t want to spoil by summarizing here. Pitted against an Iranian battleship equipped with new Russian technology, a band of ISIS pirates operating out of Somalia, hazardous seas, inhospitable terrain along the coasts, and a chain of command reaching all the way up to the president who booted Rensselaer from the Pentagon, Rensselaer, the Athena, and her crew are sorely tested. And, as that prologue reminds us, there looms on the horizon a court martial—final judgment.

I led off with the Odyssey and though Helprin models the story on Homer, it is not a slavish retelling or adaptation. This makes his actual use of the themes and rhythms of Homer as well as specific episodes not only feel organic to this modern story but much, much more clever. One example from early in the book: as the ship passes through the Straits of Gibraltar, so many men crowd the port rail to ogle the load of topless women aboard a British millionaire’s yacht that the Athena rocks underfoot. Rensselaer has to call them back to themselves and remember their duties as American sailors. Their unseriousness and lust is a threat not only to good order but to the entire ship—the sirens, transferred effortlessly to our world.

Helprin, a veteran of the IDF, renders the voyages, shipboard life, and military culture realistically. And as in any good war novel, he prepares both his characters and readers so carefully for combat that the action offers a breathtaking release of tension. Athena’s confrontations with her enemies, whether the more powerful Iranian vessel or the more ruthless ISIS pirates and the hostages they take aboard a cruise ship, are intensely suspenseful and both horrifying and exciting once they spill over into combat. I’ve seldom been as absorbed in a character’s situation as I was in Rensselaer’s confrontation with ISIS, whose tactics are accurately and disturbingly portrayed.

Though The Oceans and the Stars is a good war story and treats its military setting and technological aspects seriously, with well-explained detail that doesn’t bog the story down, it is also character-driven in a way that similar novels often aren’t. Rensselaer and Katy (her first name is Penelope, by the way) are the most fully formed characters, but supporting characters like Holworthy, the disgruntled Texan commander of Athena’s SEALs, who nurses a childhood wound that drives his service in the Navy, or Movius, Rensselaer’s Jewish XO, who falls in love with a girl while in port at Haifa on the way to the Indian Ocean, are excellent supporting characters. And looming above and at the edges of the story is the president, a capricious autocrat behind much of the misery Rensselaer endures—and overcomes.

There is politics in this novel, but of a refreshing kind. The president is an almost perfect blend of the worst qualities of the last several, and even his political party is not mentioned. The words “Republican” and “Democrat” are used once apiece, by my count, and in no way affect the plot. Rensselaer’s voyage takes place during an election cycle, and just as the lofty machinations of the gods change things for Odysseus, the election matters in unexpected ways for Rensselaer.

What matters to Rensselaer is his duty as a sailor, as an officer of the US Navy, and his love for Katy. He is clear about this. (If The Oceans and the Stars has any fault, it is a tendency toward speechifying in the characters—Rensselaer offhandedly lectures his crew on several occasions—but this is a vestige, I think, of that classical imprint on the story.) As with the nonpartisan politics, it was refreshing to read a story in which courage, duty, and love of country were straightforwardly and unironically spoken of an acted upon. Helprin doesn’t explicitly draw a contrast between Rensselaer and his crew and the gods in Washington, but it’s there, and it’s razor sharp.

While I enjoyed The Oceans and the Stars for its sailing, strategizing, and combat, it most moved me in its love story. I just turned forty-one, perhaps too young to be feeling this way, but Rensselaer and Katy’s predicament—alone, adrift, failed, and unable even to look forward to children—filled me with a powerful wistfulness I still find hard to describe. This is the nostalgia of Homer’s original—nostalgia being the pain of longing to go home. Like Homer, Helprin makes us feel it achingly. And like Homer, he brings his characters redemption in surprising and beautifully satisfying ways.

I’ve heard a lot about Mark Helprin over the years but this is the first of his novels that I’ve read. I will read others. Suspenseful, exciting, realistically and disturbingly violent without getting lost in the horror, The Oceans and the Stars is also powerfully moving—one of the most vivid and engaging novels I’ve read so far this year.