The two basic ways history is going wrong

Last year, when Joel Miller asked me to introduce the subject of historiography over on his Substack, I noted the existence of modern schools of history that “deny even the possibility of Herodotus’s work.” Against this was a countervailing anxiety about “revisionism,” which is undermines the discipline of historical understanding.

Last night I finished reading Robert Tracy McKenzie’s book The First Thanksgiving. McKenzie explains the historiography of that event and the broader context of the Pilgrims and post-Reformation Europe excellently, and it got me thinking about those two opposed errors in the approach to history again.

It seems to me there are two basic ways history goes wrong in the present:

The first, which I’ve railed against plenty of times here on the blog, stems from the hermeneutic of suspicion. This could be an ideological postmodernism that regards all historical sources as equally fictional “text,” feminist or postcolonialist or other intersectional assumptions about power and oppression, or—most commonly among the half-educated—a reflexive suspicion based on a cliche like “History is written by the winners.” In its elite form, with cultural cachet including glowing writeups in legacy print and endcap displays at Barnes & Noble, this is The 1619 Project; in its vulgar form, this is the TikTolk explainer that slices and dices to reveal to the viewer the dark forces behind great moments in history or, yet simpler, the Henry Ford or Napoleon attitude: history is “bunk,” history is “lies agreed upon.”

The second basic error is often a reaction to the first, and that’s resistance to any form of “revisionism.” Where the first error stemming from suspicion, whether in New York Times or neckbeard Redditor form, is leftist-coded, this is very much a conservative phenomenon. (It is also much more proportionally popular or vulgar, conservatives and their ilk having less purchase in elite taste-making institutions.) This error seeks to preserve the past in aspic, a complete, uncomplicated display piece. Questioning or correcting even the small details of an historical event as popularly understood—pointing out, for example, that the Pilgrims probably did not eat turkey and certainly did not have bread at the first Thanksgiving—is received as a profanation. That’s because, as with the first error, understanding the past isn’t actually the point for those making the error.

Though seemingly opposites—and you’ll certainly see the people doing this sneering at the others, especially imaginary others—both approach history more as a symbolic extension of themselves, both have a simplifying instinct (“Well, we know what’s actually going on here is…” vs “Just teach the facts!”), and both need a usable past, an instrumental version of history oriented toward achieving some goal. That is, they’re presentists.

McKenzie’s Thanksgiving book is excellent. I hope to review it in full here soon, but as I haven’t finished anything I’ve started writing for over a week, don’t hold you breath—and definitely give thanks for me if I do.

Ruritanian notes

A few years ago I realized that, for the most part, I don’t actually like time-travel stories. I, who spend most of my waking life thinking about what it was like in the past! I finally decided it was because a lot of time-travel stories, under the influence of various kinds of nitpicking, get so fixated on the mechanics of time travel and its resulting theoretical problems like the grandfather paradox that actually visiting the past—traveling through time—ceases to be the point.

Something similar is at work in Ruritanian fiction. Ruritania is the imaginary Central European kingdom invented by Sir Anthony Hope for his great adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda. Hope’s story was so popular that it spawned a long-lasting subgenre of adventure fiction, the “Ruritanian romance.” Note the word romance carefully there. We’ll come back to that.

Last night I finished The Dark Frontier, Eric Ambler’s first novel, published in 1936 when he was 27. It’s at least partly a parody of British spy fiction at the time—including the work of John Buchan—and follows a mild-mannered English physicist who, having revisited some pulpy spy novels on a trip, gets into a car accident and wakes up thinking he’s a spy. He winds up involved in industrial espionage in the Eastern European republic of Ixania, a corrupt state that has just developed the first atomic weapons.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, but despite my love of Ambler I didn’t enjoy it very much. Even as I was reading the climactic action I was wondering why The Dark Frontier and Ixania weren’t working when Ambler’s Judgment on Deltchev and its unnamed, fictional Eastern European state did. Then I started thinking about all the Ruritanias I’ve visited over the last few years, and which ones I enjoyed and which ones I didn’t.

Here are several novels set in fictional countries that worked, and worked well (links will take you to reviews here on the blog):

• The Prisoner of Zenda, by Sir Anthony Hope (1894, Ruritania)

• Castle Gay, by John Buchan (1930, Evallonia)

• Black Mischief, by Evelyn Waugh (1932, Azania)

• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh (1938, Ishmaelia)

• Judgment on Deltchev, by Eric Ambler (1951, unnamed Eastern European country somewhere near Bulgaria)

Here are several that did not work:

• The House of the Four Winds, by John Buchan (1935, Evallonia)

• The Dark Frontier, by Eric Ambler (1936, Ixania)

And here’s an outlier, a novel that I think illustrates both the weaknesses of Ruritanias and how they’re best overcome:

• The Courts of the Morning, by John Buchan (1929, Olifa)

I’ll stipulate here that when I talk about Ruritanias, I mean fictional countries that nevertheless are meant to exist in our world, not a fantasy world or alternate universe. Much of what I lay out below could also be helpful in thinking about fantasy worlds—though I have no time for alternate universes, much less multiverses—but that isn’t the subject here.

In mulling these stories after finishing The Dark Frontier last night, I found something in common between those that actually work. Judgment on Deltchev, the most obvious point of comparison being a later Ambler novel, is an indictment of Soviet show trials and Western acquiescence to the Stalinist takeover of Eastern Europe, all acted out through one confused, put-upon reporter’s moral struggle with the situation he’s been placed in. Ambler doesn’t even name the country in question. In a quite different vein, Black Mischief and Scoop are savage, blistering satires of modern journalism and efforts to “modernize” African nations. Castle Gay, which takes place in Scotland but concerns the upheavals of the faraway Evallonia, is straightforwardly a story of moral transformation through hardship. And the ur-text of the genre, Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda, is an adventure testing a man’s honor, loyalty, physical courage, and moral strength. In all cases, you get just enough detail about the fictional country to make it believable, but the heart of the story are the characters’ moral and ethical conflicts.

In short, the best Ruritanian stories work because Ruritania is not the point—it’s a convenient setting where real-world locations won’t distract and that allows the outworking of moral or character drama and action. Ruritania is a device. The “romance” or adventure comes first. Tellingly, all of these novels work as genre stories: Deltchev is suspenseful, Black Mischief and Scoop are unbelievably funny, Castle Gay and Zenda are fun and exciting.

When Ruritanias don’t work it’s because the nitty-gritty details take over from the characters. Following the climax of The Dark Frontier we get several pages about the events of a peasant revolution in Ixania, including which leaders took control of which government ministries and how many army officers were placed under arrest, and I realized I just didn’t care. And I didn’t care because I was not sufficiently invested in the main characters—physicist-turned-master-spy Professor Barstow and his sidekick American reporter Carey. (The first half of the novel, which is more character-driven, is much more interesting.) Likewise with Buchan’s House of the Four Winds, which has isolated episodes of thrills but mostly staggers along through over-detailed explanations of Evallonia’s tottering interwar government and the uncertain role of its populist movements. Buchan is telling a similar story of moral formation, but that gets lost in the details.

To bring the fantasy genre back in, you might recognize some of what bedevils these novels as “world-building.” This is the danger of making the world you’re building more important than the story, or of having a story too weak to support the world you invent for it to take place in.

The Courts of the Morning, the Buchan novel I suggested straddles the good-bad divide in this genre, is an instructive counterexample. As noted even at the time it was published, it occasionally bogs down in explanations of the geography, industry, and economy of Olifa, the South American republic where it takes place. But it balances this with a strong, intricate plot of great moral weight and redemptive arcs for several characters, all of whom are vividly realized. These mostly work well, and mostly counteract the overwhelming effect of industrial sabotage and train schedules.

This is by no means the last word on such a topic—the novels that don’t work have problems beyond their setting, for instance, and there are plenty of other Ruritanias I haven’t traveled to—but consider this post notes toward a fuller understanding of how best to use a fictional country in a story.

Ambiguous bowdlerization

Last Friday I reviewed Game Without Rules, a great collection of spy stories by Michael Gilbert. Some spoilers ahead for the last story in the book, “A Prince of Abyssinia,” but also an important and vexing question.

Though appearing in most of the eleven stories in the book, Mr Calder’s beloved and intelligent Persian deerhound Rasselas has the spotlight in this story, as evidenced by the title: Rasselas being named after the title character in Dr Johnson’s novella The History of Rasselas: A Prince of Abyssinia.

The plot of this story concerns the return of a former Nazi agent who, captured and tortured by Mr Calder during World War II, wants revenge. In the climax, this agent captures and traps Mr Behrens to prevent him from intervening, then appears disguised at Mr Calder’s cottage. Rasselas senses his intentions and attacks but is killed, and the agent is killed in turn. After a moment in which Mr Calder and Mr Behrens grieve, here’s how the story ends:

Between them they dug a deep grave behind the woodpile, and laid the dog in it and filled it in, and patted the earth into a mound. It was a fine resting place, looking out southward over the feathery tops of the trees, across the Weald of Kent. A resting place for a prince.

Colonel Weinleben they buried later, with a good deal more haste and less ceremony, in the wood.

At least, that’s how my Herald Classics copy from Union Square & Co concluded. But in looking later at Mr Calder and Mr Behrens’s hodgepodge of a Wikipedia article—haphazardly put together even by Wikipedia’s standards—I saw that last paragraph quoted at greater length. I checked the passage on Wikipedia against the recent Penguin paperback published as part of their Modern Classics Crime and Espionage series. Here’s the original last paragraph:

Colonel Weinleben they buried later, with a good deal more haste and less ceremony, in the wood. He was the illegitimate son of a cobbler from Mainz and greatly inferior to the dog, both in birth and breeding.

Odd—not only that the American edition from Union Square omits the concluding sentence of the story—and the entire book!—but that it omits such a thematically important one, explicitly juxtaposing the noble dog with the duplicitous agent, a worthy animal against a scummy, murderous man.

I’m not sure how or why this happened. A copyediting mistake? Carelessness? Or censorship? If the latter, why this sentence? I call this “bowdlerization” in the title of this post but I can’t be sure preventing Gilbert from being mean about a fictional Nazi spy’s parentage is the reason the sentence disappeared. There is no note on the copyright page about changes to the text, no butt-covering editor’s note, nothing in Alex Segura’s introduction or on Union Square’s website—no notice whatsoever that the text is different from what Gilbert originally wrote.

If this is intentional, it would not be the first case of stealth editing, a problem that has already afflicted e-books, often without the knowledge or permission of even living authors.

It also bothers me that I cannot be sure that the cutting of the final sentence is the only such instance in the book. It will take a while to look through and find others, though there is, in fact, at least one other omission at the very beginning. The Union Square edition cuts Gilbert’s dedication:

To Jacques Barzun, of Columbia University, an amateur of detection

Is it significant that a tribute to a famously conservative-leaning historian was deleted? Without any kind of acknowledgment from the publisher that anything at all has been cut, who can know? But whether this was simply editorial sloppiness or intentional cutting—and whether there are more such cuts to the texts of the stories—it is a troubling incident. And here I was daring to be hopeful about publishers rejecting censorship.

I hope I’m wrong. The Penguin Modern Classics edition appears to be unexpurgated, at any rate, and this gives me an excuse to reread these excellent stories soon.

Game Without Rules

I can’t remember where I first saw Game Without Rules recommended, though I think it was John Wilson recommending it, but I’m glad I sought it out. I’ve read a lot of great espionage fiction over the last several years—Buchan, Ambler, Fleming, Le Carré, Deighton—and this collection of stories by Michael Gilbert offers some of the most intricately constructed, surprising, suspenseful, and plain enjoyable spy stories I’ve come across.

Published in 1967, Game Without Rules collects eleven short stories about Mr Calder and Mr Behrens, agents for a British intelligence service during the early-1960s height of the Cold War. Now retirement-age, they live near each other in a quaint Kentish village where Mr Behrens lives with his aunt and keeps bees and Mr Calder spends quiet days with Rasselas, his Persian deerhound. They have pints in the village and drop in on each other once a week to play backgammon. And just occasionally their handler, Mr Fortescue, a seemingly unremarkable bank manager, calls them up to London on a mission only their organization can complete.

The missions are classic spy stuff. In the first story they discover a corpse left over from World War II that hints at a deep-cover mole they must identify. Later, Mr Calder and Mr Behrens bring down a ring of drug and pornography smugglers. In another, they track the progress of a young agent along a Soviet exfiltration route through Europe, hoping to uncover its operations but risking detection and death. In another, the two take part in an urgent Christmas Eve assignment in Bonn—recovering equipment, helping a defector escape—with a snowstorm threatening from the sky and East German operatives moving in on the ground. In yet another, they provide security for the young boarding school student who has unexpectedly inherited the throne of his father’s unnamed Middle Eastern kingdom and who must be shielded from kidnappers and enemy agents seeking kompromat. In the final story, they confront a German agent with a decades-old grudge and no remaining reasons to hold back from revenge.

Double agents, enemy tech, infiltration, exfiltration, and assassination may seem familiar, but these stories are intricately plotted and written with effortless economy—some are rich enough for novels but run a tight twenty pages—and always surprising. They’re also witty. Humor—wordplay, wry observations, and frustrated sarcasm between the two—works throughout to dissolve tension and reveal character, not least that of Gilbert’s two aging operatives.

Mr Calder and Mr Behrens are now some of my favorite spy characters. Gilbert characterizes them minimally. One is short and bald, the other barrel-chested. It’s sometimes hard to remember which is which, but they have distinct personalities that make their missions together fun to read. Both are in their late 50s at at the youngest (a dossier at the beginning lists them as born in 1910 and 1913, but there is an ambiguous allusion in one story to Mr Calder having served in World War I) and have both spent decades in espionage, being recruited in the 1930s and serving in important intelligence and special operations roles during World War II, so they’re in their early 60s at least. They’re experienced, capable, skilled—in multiple languages, marksmanship, and practical tradecraft—and utterly dependable. Their friendship is revealed through their professionalism with each other rather than in spite of it.

Imagine the cozy bonhomie of Frog and Toad combined with the ruthlessness of Fleming’s Bond and the most hard-bitten pragmatism of Le Carré. “In this job,” Mr Behrens tells another agent after a high-stakes assignment that was nearly botched, “there is neither right nor wrong. Only expediency.” One senses this is bluff, as this expressed coldbloodedness is belied by his dedication to fighting Communism—the Soviets are, refreshingly, always presented as evil—and by his actions in other stories, especially when it comes to saving Mr Calder.

One realizes just how much one has come to feel for the pair in the penultimate story, in which Mr Fortescue worries that Mr Calder, who has started plotting the genealogy of Prometheus on a giant paper chart, is going mad—an unsurprising turn for someone who has lived so much of his life under cover. Dispatched to London to look for him, Mr Behrens takes Rasselas with him. Their genuine distress over Mr Calder is moving, and makes the revelation at the end of the story all the more surprising and satisfying.

I’ve looked back through Game Without Rules and, of the eleven stories, can’t select any of them as in any way weak or unsatisfying. This has been some of my most purely enjoyable reading in a while, especially in the spy genre. I read it aloud to my wife before bed over the last four weeks, and we both loved it. If you’re looking for some strong, well-crafted stories that combine mystery, thriller, and espionage with some subtle character work, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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.

Vastness, might, and self-destruction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The damned and the blessed

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

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

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

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

These souls are joyful and eager.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hobbit on The Rest is History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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