On “not sucking”

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

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

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

This, apparently, is “not sucking.”

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

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

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

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

Then Wednesday happened.

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

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

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

If only there were a way to describe these people.

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

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

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

Vastness, might, and self-destruction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scare quotes and Poe

Last night I finished a major new biography of Edgar Allan Poe. It’s by an important Poe scholar—a name I recognized as the editor of my Penguin Classics edition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym—and published by a university press. It’s excellent—comprehensive, insightful (I had never noticed Poe’s use of chiasmus before), well-researched, and fair. I’m not going to name the book or the author because I don’t want what follows to be construed as an attack on either.

What I want to criticize and wonder about is also not characteristic of the rest of the book, which is what made me notice it in the first place. Think of it as an editorial or rhetorical tic.

Poe might have been born in Boston but he grew up in Virginia, considered himself a Virginian, and nursed recognizably Southern resentments toward northerners, especially New Englanders. He also died sixteen years before the passage of the 13th Amendment, just as the sectional debate was reopened by victory in the Mexican War, leading to failed compromises, mudslinging, vigilantism, and war. Slavery was a fact of life.

The author approaches these topics within the context of Poe’s life with laudable charity and nuance. He takes pains to defend Poe from glib accusations of racism, especially in misinterpretations and misrepresentations of his work—while acknowledging that Poe was still a man of his time.

And yet the book’s own context as the product of a 21st century university press shows through. There is the predictable gesture of capitalizing “black” and the clumsy circumlocution of “enslaved people,” which I complained about back in the spring. Odder, though, are the two passages following, both of which concern Poe’s lifelong best friend John Mackenzie:

Clearly the hard work of the farm was done by enslaved labor. According to tax records, John H. Mackenzie “owned” eleven slaves at this time.

and

John and Louisa’s abundance—in the house, on the 193 acres, even in John’s tobacco warehouses and stables in the city—was made possible by the African Americans whom John “owned”: in 1849, six of them over twelve years old, and another six over sixteen years old.

There’s not really a factual problem here—though I will note that small-scale slaveowners like this very often did do a lot of hard labor and that pointing out the role of slaves in the economy is a truism. My real question: why the scare quotes?

Putting scare quotes around owned suggests some kind of falsehood in the word, that slaveowning was some kind of socially constructed fiction, but John H Mackenzie’s ownership of these slaves as property was an actual and legal fact. That’s the whole problem. Those uncomfortable with slavery—which included far more people for far longer than the abolitionist movement that Poe hated—were uncomfortable with it precisely between of the tension created by treating people as property. Handwaving this tension, “They weren’t really ‘owned’ by someone else,” is insulting. As with the dubious “enslaved people,” treating harsh reality this way undermines one’s own disapproval.

This is a tiny thing in a 700-page book, but a noticeable part of an repeated posture of disapproval that the author does not display elsewhere. Three times the reader is treated to a mention of the Mackenzie’s mantlepiece picture of the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea with a heavily ironic gloss that someday it would be the slaveowners who would be drowning. The author seems desperate in these passages to let you know he thinks slavery is bad and that it is good that it was abolished. A stunning opinion.

The final odd note comes in the conclusion. Concerning John Mackenzie’s brother Tom, a doctor who championed Poe’s reputation, we read:

Although Tom Mackenzie would have been on the right side of Poe, he was on the wrong side of history.

He served as a surgeon in the Confederate army, you see. “The wrong side of history” is a cringeworthy cliche, and stupid because history doesn’t have sides. This is also an odd thing to throw in at the end of a book about Poe, who famously and vocally denounced the myth of progress.

My own stance on historical writing is that it should be descriptive most of the time—as this book generally is. Opinion and moralizing may have a place occasionally, sure, but not for opinions that are universally approved. In twelve years of teaching college students—who are typically less guarded and studiedly correct in their opinions than professors emeriti—I’ve never had a student even suggest that slavery was okay. Condemning slavery and celebrating slaveowners’ downfall feels performative. Forcefully declaiming obvious, widely shared opinion is not argument, but liturgy. Here the author wants us to know he can recite the creeds of the liberal consensus, too.

Well, perhaps it’s the author. My suspicion, based on the inelegant way these passages fit with the rest of this careful, balanced book, is that these originated as editorial demands. Poe, himself a sometime editor in a time of political polarization, probably would have understood, but not approved.

Adventures in Rebranding

Two seemingly unconnected things from last week that I couldn’t help connecting, however tangentially, both of which have political valence for many people but not necessarily for me:

Item: Cracker Barrel CEO rolls out minimalist update to restaurant chain, is jeered and hooted (and stock marketed) into a reversal.

Item: Dr James Dobson, Christian psychologist and founder of Focus on the Family, dies aged 89.

I’ll start with the latter. Dr Dobson was a staple of my fundamentalist upbringing. My mom listened to him every day in the car on WRAF (along with Tony Evans and Larry Burkett, the Dave Ramsey before Dave Ramsey), we got regular mail from Focus on the Family, and my parents read his books. He held great authority in our circles.

But much more important—to me, as a kid—than anything related to childrearing, Christian psychology, and the political advocacy associated with Dr Dobson was Adventures in Odyssey, the Focus on the Family-produced radio drama that aired every Saturday morning. Briefly, this half-hour show took place in a small middle-American town with a cast of colorful characters, adults and kids. Well-written, richly imagined, moralistic without being preachy, and kid-friendly without being condescending, it was also fun.

An early episode (from 1990!) that has always stuck with me: Mr Phillips, a big-city consultant, swoops into Odyssey offering his services to its small family-owned businesses. What he does, it gradually becomes clear, is strictly rebranding. He takes a local convenience store, gives it a snappy new name, and hands the owner an invoice. Ditto the curmudgeonly window cleaner, whose one-man janitorial services are rebranded as “Hygienic Maintenance and Engineering.” The consultant finally runs aground at Whit’s End, the local ice cream parlor and arcade run by the show’s moral center, WWII vet and inventor John Avery Whittaker, who sees through the charade and won’t buy in.

This story offered a very simple lesson: changing nomenclature doesn’t change substance. Spin, exaggeration, and slick branding live right next door to lying.

This episode also accurately characterized a specific kind of hustler. Mr Phillips is not from Odyssey, doesn’t understand the town or its people, and doesn’t care. This is not just my hillbilly prejudice against outsiders speaking—it is entirely possible for someone to move to a new place and work with the locals and become part of their community—but Mr Phillips’s project is fundamentally dishonest and exploitive. The businesses he solicits are objects to him, to be “improved” according to a formula, with little effort on his part and no actual changes to beyond new signage, before extracting payment and moving on.

I’ve thought of this story many times over the years. (It’s probably a key part of my lifelong suspicion of word games.) I thought of it again last week when the Cracker Barrel kerfuffle broke. It’s probably clear why.

Though the story almost instantly took on political spin (succinctly parodied here), I don’t think the Cracker Barrel rebrand and redesign is really about politics. By far the most insightful thing I read during the whole debacle was this piece pointing out the CEO’s long history of hopping from company to company, serving some executive role for sometimes less than a year—a sort of C-suite gig economy. The rebrand and the boring, deracinated, beige redesign of the restaurants isn’t woke, it’s the result of a mercenary executive who, like Adventures in Odyssey’s Mr Phillips, has no history with the company, no understanding of its appeal, no connection with its customer base, and no incentive to ensure its long-term success.

And—more importantly, and the real story as far as I’m concerned—her much ballyhooed update does nothing to change the actual business. Cracker Barrel has actual problems, the kind that sink restaurant chains: declining quality in both service and food. A minimalist logo and a truckload of beige shiplap, a superficial update in the name of “relevance” designed to hypothetically draw in some theoretical new demographic, is a corporate version of the same con Mr Phillips is pulling in Odyssey.

I hate the aesthetics of the rebrand, but I hate even more the problem it represents. It’s culture-wide, as that Substack piece makes clear. (Another recent example: Goodreads got a new logo but no improvement to its clunky design.) As long as inconstancy and gun-for-hire practices are accepted and our culture continues to value using language to conjure more than the hard work of change and improvement—in short, as long as real life is treated as a marketing project—it will continue.

From the Themes Files: political novels

In his inaugural Substack post last month, Tim Powers recounted this story:

I was on a panel about vampire stories one time, and one of the panelists said, “Well you know, Dracula is actually about the plight of 19th century women.” And I said, “No, it’s actually about a guy who lives forever by drinking other people’s blood. Don’t take my word for it, check it out.”

“Dracula wasn’t a metaphor,” Powers continues. “He was a vampire.”

That’s been on my mind because, earlier this week, a Substack note by novelist Aaron Gwyn—whose novella The Cannibal Owl I read last week and loved—turned into yet another Substack tempest in a teapot. Gwyn’s claim:

The political novelist is a fiction writer in diminished form. The great novelist’s intentions, motivations, and biases are forever obscured behind a rhetorical mask. The great novelist doesn’t aspire to be a political actor, but a ventriloquist.

I would tend to agree. See this post from last year about “the novel of ideas,” in which the novelist as artist becomes subservient to his message.

Well, Gwyn’s note got a lot of Substack litterateurs huffing and puffing. When Gwyn supplied a list of novelists who didn’t “engage politically,” one scandalized response read “You can tell someone hasn’t read Proust when he’s included on a list of writers who didn’t ‘engage politically.’” This observation is only slightly marred by the fact that no one should read Proust.*

More to my point, consider these comments by others:

Blood Meridian is about the military conquest of the west, whats more political than that?

Gilead is about religion and war and race and how all the above affect a family and has characters openly discussing whether or not they support Eisenhower.

The core conceit of Moby-Dick is treating the disrespected working class with the same dignity as the nobility. . . . it’s explicitly an interrogation of American society and values.

Is it, though? Is that actually what any of these—novels in which ill-fated filibusters and scalphunters kill and are killed in the desert, in which an old man faces his mortality and yearns to leave something behind for his son, in which an obsessed sea captain dooms his entire crew—is “about”?

This topic sits squarely at the intersection of several of my driving interests and concerns, including two I’ve written about several times this year already: themes and particularity. Back in the spring I wrote about the overemphasis on “themes” in the study of literature, and this is what I mean. These specific examples, provoked by what I suspect is a bit of trolling on Gwyn’s part, are politically inflected and therefore even less tolerable than the usual.

Take Moby-Dick. Is that really “about” the working class and is it really “interrogating” anything? Or is it about one man’s obsession? To ask a question I asked back in the spring again with Moby-Dick in mind, would you rather read a novel about “treating the disrespected working class with the same dignity as the nobility” or a novel about a maimed captain so bent on revenge against one whale that he drives his entire crew to their deaths in a round-the-world hunt? Which one of those sounds more interesting as a novel?

Let me put it this way: Visit Barnes & Noble and look at the many different editions of Moby-Dick that they will have in stock. What’s on the cover? Socioeconomic interrogation? Or a white whale large enough to endanger a ship?

Perhaps Melville, to stick with this example, really is doing what Gwyn’s politically-minded commenters say he is—though his thematic interests strike me as much more theological than economic or political. I don’t know. But whether Moby-Dick is actually “about” anything political, it would fail if it were not first about the captain and the whale. Particularity.

This is what I think Gwyn meant in his original note. A respectable theme must emerge organically from what is purposefully, deliberately a novel, a work of art. Approaching the work with a programmatic message in mind simplifies or sells out the art. It is “diminished” and “obscured” behind the rhetorical pose required of the message. Politics is the Procrustean bed of any form of art. It imposes on stories a shape that requires distortion.

Perhaps the paradigmatic example is Ayn Rand. Read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged with an open mind and you can’t help but be struck by 1) the talent she had in imagining and constructing vast stories and 2) the way she contorted and butchered her own art in the service of her risible messaging.

Gwyn, puckishly pressing one critic for his definition of a “political novel,” was answered with: “Presenting a view of how society and culture is organized through power structures, war, socioeconomics.” Gwyn rightly replied that “If you define ‘politics’ in that way, you’ve constructed a definition that’s sufficiently broad enough to encompass everything. In other words, you’ve emptied the term of all meaning.”

That’s what theme talk, especially of a political variety, does. Its vagueness is as much an enemy of good interpretation as the political is of honest art.

* What I have written, I have written.

Lewis and Poe (sort of) on originality

In his magisterial new biography Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, Richard Kopley quotes several early reviews for Poe’s Poems, published in New York following his expulsion from West Point and partially financed by his fellow cadets (who were famously annoyed that the finished book didn’t include the satirical verses he had composed about their instructors). There were a few negative reviews, but some mixed to favorable ones noting Poe’s potential. Here’s the New-York Mirror with a backhanded compliment:

“Every thing in the language betokens poetic inspiration, but it rather resembles the leaves of the Sybil when scattered by the wind.”

The “scattered” quality of an author’s early work is recognizable and relatable.

A short notice in the Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, which Kopley credits to Poe benefactor John Neal (but the Poe Society of Baltimore maintains is only “possibly” Neal), applauds Poe’s “fine genius,” mixes this praise with criticism of “[s]heer nonsense” scattered throughout (“Pure poetry in one page—pure absurdity in another”), and ends with both praise and warning:

“He has a fine genius, we repeat it, and may be distinguished, if he will not mistake oddity for excellence, or want of similitude to all others, for superiority over them.”

By coincidence, I had recently come across this observation from CS Lewis in Mere Christianity:

“Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

I was going to say that a striving that turns to strain is a common affliction of young writers, but Lord knows it’s a trap you can fall into no matter how long you’ve been writing. Stop trying so hard! Do your thing and let originality emerge organically, almost spontaneously. Oddity is not distinction, and uniqueness is not quality. Always a good reminder for myself.

Austen on seeing nothing

In Volume II, chapter IX of Emma, Emma and Harriet Smith got shopping Highbury. When simple, pliable Harriet takes too long over her muslin purchase, Emma gets bored:

Emma went to the door for amusement.—Much could not be hoped from the traffic of even the busiest part of Highbury;—Mr. Perry walking hastily by, Mr. William Cox letting himself in at the office-door, Mr. Cole’s carriage-horses returning from exercise, or a stray letter-boy on an obstinate mule, were the liveliest objects she could presume to expect; and when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.

This is a striking moment to me, because Austen includes few such slice-of-life moments in her novels. And yet here we have the ordinary goings-on in the village of Highbury. I can easily imagine this scene painted by George Caleb Bingham, who was five years old when Emma was published or, if he could rein in his instincts for meanness and satire, Hogarth.

So there’s the surprising social realist note to the passage, and the affectionate homeliness of the scene, but it was the last line that struck me:

“A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.”

I read that three times and my wife and I stopped to talk about it. I had struggled earlier in the day to express some of what I worry about as a generation raised on constant technological stimulation ages. What will those lulled by constant noise do with the long final silences of their lives? What will those with no attention span do with endless inactivity? Will they have anything of their own to fill that time?

Here Austen sums up the best alternative: a mind sufficiently self-furnished to be comfortable in “boredom,” a mind capable not only of encountering but of embracing and enjoying “nothing.”

Because Emma is not really bored watching her neighbors in Highbury, and what they are doing is not really nothing. Per Chesterton, “There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.” My fear is that modern technology and our culture of content consumption and ceaseless stimulation will render many minds void even of the ability to be interested. And what happens then?

I have recently grown uncomfortable even with my own habit of listening to podcasts on my commute. Ages ago I used this time to think. I got ideas and worked on them later. Now I fill it with other people’s talk—good talk, talk I engage with and learn from, but still other people’s talk. I’ve begun to suspect that more silences would be good for my mind and imagination.

Emma famously starts with a list of the heroine’s strengths—“handsome, clever, and rich.” She can’t really take credit for these things, and she also has significant flaws. Part of the point of the novel is her growth in maturity and virtue, which brings her character into alignment with her natural gifts. And I think she owes no small part of that growth to the formation of her mind—not book-smart, as Mr Knightley points out early on, but sharpened and receptive, even when “at ease.”

The Ambler paradox

Last night I finished reading Judgment on Deltchev, Eric Ambler’s first postwar novel and a masterpiece of plotting, tension, and especially foreshadowing. (Seriously—if I ever teach creative writing in any capacity, I will assign this or another of Ambler’s early thrillers to teach foreshadowing.) It also has many of Ambler’s sharp, wry observations.

Here’s one from near the end. The narrator, Foster, an English playwright commissioned to report on a show trial unfolding in an unnamed Balkan country, finds himself entangled like many another Ambler protagonist in the preexisting schemes of people much more nefarious and capable than he is. Gradually he becomes a pawn.

In a passage foreshadowing some of what is to come, Foster notes that the Stalinist puppet regime, later, will scapegoat him, condemning him as an agent of British intelligence (among other things), an accusation he finds painfully hard to deny:

With the newspapers it was not difficult; I did as I had been asked and referred them to the Foreign Office. With friends and acquaintances it was less simple. It is, I find, extraordinarily embarrassing to be described in print as a member of the British secret service. The trouble is that you cannot afterwards convince people that you are not. They reason that if you are a member you will still presumably have to say that you are not. You are suspect. If you say nothing, of course, you admit all. Your denials become peevish. It is very tiresome.

A bit of coy reverse psychology suggests itself but is both dangerous and unattractive for the fundamentally honest man:

Probably the only really effective denial would be a solemn, knowing acknowledgment that there might be some truth in the rumour. But I can never bring myself to it. Foreign Office or no Foreign Office, I have to explain what really happened.

There’s a threshold of secrecy and paranoia beyond which all denials are confirmations. This kind of ambiguity offers security for the professional but proves an inescapable trap for the passerby who blunders into this world. It’s a dangerous place for the mind and soul. Witness the conspiracy theorists who go down the rabbit hole deep enough to get into this everything-proves-my-theory mindset. Per Forster, “it is very tiresome.”

It is also a great device for creating irony and tension. Ambler’s thrillers are built on the overlapping realities of the professional intriguer and the bourgeois amateur, and his characters, ordinary people tainted by their contact with these other worlds, have to live with the paradox that their good-faith denials sink them deeper in suspicion. More than one of his narrators uses the telling of the story to try to clear their name and strike back at critics.

The first of Ambler’s novels that I read was The Mask of Dimitrios (aka A Coffin for Dimitrios) early last year. Here’s a similarly trenchant set of observations I quoted from that book at the time, and here’s my full review. Back in the spring I also read and reviewed The Levanter, which features another strong dose of the paradox.

Contemptuous adaptation

Earlier this month I noted the “fraught” relationship between novels and their film adaptations as exemplified by Elmore Leonard’s struggles to get good movies made from his books—a story that eats up a considerable part of his new biography (which I hope to review in full soon). A lot of Leonard’s struggles were down to the usual Hollywood problems that bedevil novel adaptations: bad casting, indifferent directors, hack screenwriting, producers who don’t understand the material, and budget.

But what about film adaptations of novels that, while they may or may not have these problems, are made with contempt toward their source material? And what if the author, unlike Leonard in the 70s and 80s, is dead?

Agatha Christie biographer Laura Thompson recently addressed this in a multipart essay on what she thinks are the worst Christie film and TV adaptations. The competition is fierce. Between the flashy but pandering Kenneth Branagh Poirot movies and a string of wannabe prestige BBC adaptations, the last few decades have given us a slew of films that treat Christie’s stories as mere raw material to be chopped up and rearranged at will, the better to load down with fashionable social and political messaging. Read through Thompson’s posts to see just how bad some of these can get.

When Thompson reaches the penultimate of her ten worst, the 2016 adaptation The Witness for the Prosecution (which doesn’t even get Christie’s title right), she notes as a long aside:

What I dislike about these twenty-first century adaptations . . . is how much they seem to dislike the reason that they were commissioned in the first place: Agatha Christie.

They want, they need us to know that they despise her conservatism, her class, her structured restraint, her respectability, her reverence for the facade (almost everybody in these adaptations is openly frightful, which means that the tension between seeming and being is entirely lost: a deep distortion). There is a violent urge to expose, to denigrate, to remove human dignity. Everything looks greasy, grimy, filmy; food glistens repulsively; sex is slathered in deviancy; blood of dirty blackish-red drawls across the screen.

Most art today is politicized, and this is the politicizing of Agatha Christie. Her world is a privileged one, and for this she must be judged. Her characters belong, in the main, to about the only class of person who can be attacked with impunity, and there is no holding back. . . . The actual target of this mockery is Agatha, her Golden Age aspect, depicted as resoundingly hollow alongside the ‘reality’ of these adaptations. Of course she was not real, as such; but when it came to people she was never untrue, as these adaptations are.

This is sharp, not only as an account of what these adaptations get wrong and how, but of what they reveal about the filmmakers.

Sooner or later I’m going to get an essay on the recent spate of “retellings” of famous novels from the villain’s or a secondary character’s point of view. What these novels, especially those that seek to undermine the original, like Wicked or James, or those trying to force a currently correct opinion into an old story—usually feminism, for whatever reason—like Julia or Circe, have in common with film adaptations that approach their source material with open contempt is a fundamentally parasitical relationship with the original. Branagh’s Poirot, which is more insipid than insidious, or the ideological BBC adaptations Thompson more severely dissects, rely on Christie for prestige and name recognition and then abuse her work. The result is artistically diminished, “untrue” both to the source material and to good art. Their contempt has led them to make something contemptible.

But when this approach proves profitable, as it often does when the author has the kind of long-term popularity that Christie still does, the filmmakers do it again. And again. See also Fleming, Ian and Tolkien, JRR.

I realized a few years ago that, for the first time in my life, I live in a period in which I dread the announcement that a book I love is being made into a film. This is why. If it is not treated as mere “content” for the system—the hungry volcano god of that earlier post on Leonard’s Hollywood struggles—it will be hammered into the correct ideological shape by hacks before being turned loose, diminished and untrue.

Thompson is the author of Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life. You can read all three parts of her Christie film adaptation breakdown here (a top 11 best), here, and here. The modern slicing and dicing instinct hasn’t stopped a film adaptations of Christie’s work, of course; her books themselves have suffered as well, as I noted here two years ago.

It was all a dream

I’m currently working on a review of an old book that successfully pulls off the “it was all a dream” twist. The revelation that all or a significant part of a story was actually a dream is one of the oldest and most venerable conventions in fiction. Or, if you’re not a fan, it’s a hoary cliche. There’s a reason both that it eventually became a sitcom staple and that writers keep coming back to it.

That the book I’m reviewing did it well got me thinking about the difference. What separates stories that do “it was all a dream” well from those that only exasperate the reader? I can think of a few things:

One approach is to avoid making the reader feel like they’ve been tricked by a cheap twist by not making it a twist at all. This can be done in two ways by:

• Stating explicitly that it’s a dream from the beginning. Pilgrim’s Progress does this.

• Suggesting that it’s a dream from the beginning. Subtler than Pilgrim’s Progress. The narrator of The Great Divorce hints in the first line (“I seemed to be standing in a busy queue…”) that his story is, if true, then still not quite real.

It helps that both of these stories are obviously dreamlike, so the revelation that they are dreams is not a shock. The point of these stories lies elsewhere. Ditto A Christmas Carol, which plays skillfully with this convention.

But if you still want that sense of surprise, I think the detective novel concept of “fair play” is important. The book I’m reviewing, in which a soldier wounded in battle “lives” several days in a limbo state between life and death before awakening in the spot where he was shot, does several things that keep the surprise from feeling like a cheat:

• It is heavily foreshadowed.

• Dreamlike elements are present from the moment the dream begins, but presented in such a way that the narrator is both surprised by them and can think of perfectly reasonable explanations for them.

• The dreamlike qualities intensify toward the end, when the narrator wakes up. This is a common enough feature of bad “it was all a dream” twists, but seldom done skillfully.

• Double entendre—throughout the story, both the narrator’s own foreshadowing as well as the things other characters tell him have different meanings depending on whether you know he is dreaming or not.

• Related: other characters, who have also been wounded but will not survive, know what has happened and tell the narrator, but he misunderstands them.

• Despite all of the above, until the narrator awakens from the dream, the dream feels real—just like real dreams.

On a second reading, I was stunned to see that the narrator tells the reader almost from the beginning what happened but still manages to make the revelation a surprise. But beyond the specific techniques above, the most important aspect of the successful use of “it was all a dream” is that:

• The dream is thematically relevant.

The dream, in this story, is the whole point. It is not a twist, a final surprise for the reader, but the undiscovered center of the story. A second reading is the best proof. This one not only held up, unlike some of the schlockier Shyamalan movies, but improved upon a second reading. Every moment was loaded with a dramatic irony that made it profoundly poignant. A really remarkable achievement.

I haven’t named this story but hope to have a review written for it and posted on Substack soon. Once I do, I’ll be sure to update this post with a link. In the meantime, I’ll be trying to think of other stories that successfully end with “it was all a dream” for comparison.

The Butt-Covering Chronicles

Simon & Schuster has just published a new 75th anniversary paperback of The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. This edition includes a short essay by Bradbury detailing his process of drafting and revising the stories that make up the Chronicles and expounding some of the philosophical assumptions behind them. It’s an interesting short introduction to the book—especially for anyone interested in a writer’s process and craft—but even more interesting is the “Editor’s Note” that precedes it.

The note begins with some information about the provenance of the essay, which was written shortly after Bradbury submitted the manuscript for The Martian Chronicles in the fall of 1950 and was rediscovered in his papers in the 2000s, but concludes with this, where the real purpose of the note becomes clear:

“How I Wrote My Book” refers to cultural touchstones (e.g., authors, books, music, politics) that may not resonate with today’s reader. Perhaps more disturbing will be some of the words and phrases Bradbury uses. Simply put, the language of the 1950s was not politically correct. Yet “How I Wrote My Book” offers fascinating insight into Bradbury’s creative process and is, at the same time, a powerful, at times urgent, commentary on Bradbury’s beliefs, thoughts, and fears about humanity and our world. And while expressions used by Bradbury in this essay may be anachronistic, his message is timeless and rings as true today as it did seventy-five years ago.

After reading it with mounting contempt I told my wife about it. Had I misunderstood? she wondered. Maybe the note was referring to the stories, not Bradbury’s essay. So I checked again today and, no, the note is very specifically getting defensive about Bradbury’s introductory essay.

And what shocking material in Bradbury’s essay prompted this note? Having gone through the essay twice, I’m still not actually sure. One reads a note like this expecting to run into racial slurs, but there is nothing obviously offensive in anything Bradbury writes. He even goes out of his way to condemn fascism, Stalinism, and Joe McCarthy and to praise imaginative freedom in the kind of stirring, well-intentioned liberal peroration formerly beloved of English teachers.

My best guess is that Bradbury’s frequent use of “man” and “mankind” in discussing human exploration of space, the use of “his” as a generic pronoun (as opposed to now, when every imaginary writer or student is always pointedly “she”), a hypothetical “Mr and Mrs Joe Smith from Ashtabula,” and one sympathetic comparison of his Martians to Indians are the “disturbing” language the editor wants to prepare us for.

(Also, how can expressions you use in your own time be “anachronistic”? Bradbury didn’t slip into Old English or some future Anglo-Martian creole. This is just silly.)

At least the publisher didn’t censor or rewrite Bradbury’s essay. The irony of past attempts to censor Fahrenheit 451 probably ruled that out. But I was left wondering what kind of mealy-mouthed weenie wrote this, or even thought using up a whole page for it was a good idea in the first place. Notably, while an “editor’s note,” there is no editor named anywhere in the book. No one wanted to put his name on this—or, more likely, hers.

Last year I looked at some publisher’s notes and copyright page notices in recent reprints of Agatha Christie as a way to chart the hopeful trend away from “updates” and the “removal of offensive terms” toward their unexpurgated publication. Such notes are an improvement over stealth edits and censorship, but as long as this butt-covering instinct remains the work of authors who are no longer here to defend themselves will be in danger.

I ran across this new copy of The Martian Chronicles in Walmart. Just around the corner on an endcap were boxes of those cheap, faux-leather reprints of public domain classics. (Curiously, these are also published under the Simon & Schuster umbrella.) After reading this note I picked up a few of those that were likely suspects for censorship—Treasure Island, a fat volume of Lovecraft—and saw this in 8-point type at the bottom of the copyright page:

These works have been published in their original form to preserve the author’s intent and style.

Exactly right. Simple, to the point, and all the explanation necessary. More of this, and less of the editor’s note above.

Keep reading, stupid

This week on my commute I took a break from podcasts for the audiobook of Mr Majestyk, one of Elmore Leonard’s leanest, grittiest thrillers from his early days of crime writing. Having wrapped that up yesterday, I caught up on a promising-looking episode of The Charles CW Cooke Podcast posted on my birthday earlier this month, in which Cooke interviews Christopher Scalia about his new book 13 Novels Conservatives will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read).

They have a fun, wide-ranging discussion, but late in the episode they turn to the question of why so many people don’t read now, in the course of which they talk about Silas Marner. Cooke wonders whether he didn’t enjoy it because it was assigned in school. Scalia agrees:

“That’s why it’s important for people to keep reading, to keep reading fiction later in life, because you are stupid in high school. Let’s just face it.”

I think that’s what it was for me. I have no memory of it. It’s possible—I know I was assigned it—and I know what it was about but I don’t have memories of a specific passage or anything like that. And I think that’s why it’s important for people to keep reading, to keep reading fiction later in life, because you are stupid in high school. Let’s just face it. Novels don’t change, but your reactions to novels change because you learn more, you have more experience and, yeah, novels that went over my head when I was younger mean much more to me now. Of course, I can’t think of a single example at the moment, but I’m sure that’s the case. Even novels you’ve always loved you love for different reasons when you go back to them.

Straight talk, and certainly true. Having not read The Great Gatsby until my late thirties, for instance, I had to wonder upon finishing it what a high schooler was supposed to get out of such a story. I gather the usual focus is on obvious symbols—the eyeglass billboard, the green light—and, of course, Themes. But the heart of the novel, a story of hidden pasts, severed roots, lust, and mountains of regret, depends for its resonance on similarly long, difficult experience—precisely the thing high schoolers don’t have.

The novels typically assigned in high school are likely chosen 1) because of the perception that they’ll meet teenagers where they are and 2) because they’re easily teachable and testable. Books subjected to this are diminished in one way or another, whittled and sorted and oversimplified. I haven’t read The Catcher in the Rye in many years, but I suspect Salinger’s work in Holden Caulfield’s narration is much more ironic than usually understood. Ditto Grendel, which is usually presented as a straightforward deconstruction of heroism when it is really a stripping away of the self-serving illusions of nihilism. A high schooler would get none of that.

Going in the opposite direction—and it gives me no pleasure to say this—having revisited All Quiet on the Western Front many times since high school, I’ve gradually recognized more and more its essentially juvenile perspective on war, politics, and suffering. And yet it is often the last word on the matter for high schoolers who, again, have no other perspective on the subject.

That doesn’t mean that challenging books shouldn’t be assigned in school. Students need that challenge in order to grow. Per Tolkien, “A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one’s age group. It comes from reading books above one.” How much more so for intellectual and spiritual preparation? But we should be alive to the unintended consequences of assigning books and the inevitable consequences of dumbing down their interpretation.

As for Scalia’s last point, that even novels you love mean more and mean them differently the more you read them, that’s indisputably the case, and one of the only tried and true methods of determining whether a book is good. Even a thriller with no literary pretensions, simply a good story written at the height of its author’s craft, like Mr Majestyk, changes and reveals more of itself upon a second reading—or a third or a fourth or…

A few other books with which I’ve had that experience:

• No Country for Old Men and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

• The Great Divorce and That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis

• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

• True Grit and Gringos, by Charles Portis

• The Iliad

• Beowulf and, as mentioned above, John Gardner’s Grendel

• The Divine Comedy, by Dante

The Road stands out particularly strongly in this regard. This harsh, minimalistic survivalist tale from the master of the unflinching stare into darkness became a completely different book after I had children. I wasn’t stupid anymore. At least not completely. I wrote a little about that experience here.

Check out the episode of Cooke’s podcast and Scalia’s book at the links above. The discussion is fun and worthwhile, and the novels Scalia selected for his book are nicely varied, ranging from Dr Johnson and Scott to Waugh and PD James. And, to Scalia’s last point, keep reading!