Downton Abbey

Over the weekend my wife and I got to see Downton Abbey, the film continuation of the great British TV series.

I'll start off by saying that it was a perfect date movie—definitely so if you've watched the entirety of the show and especially so if you love it. My wife and I had a great time. But I'm honestly not sure how much someone with no familiarity with the show would get out of it. One of the things I liked about the movie was that it wasted almost no time bothering to introduce characters fans will already know. That means fans get a lot of bang for their buck but I imagine newbies may well be lost.

The film takes place over a few days at Downton Abbey, the estate of Lord Grantham and his family. A letter from Buckingham Palace that informs the family of an impending visit from the king and queen sets the house in motion and the plot follows the family, the household staff, and the guests through the labyrinthine progress of a royal visit.

The Grantham family faces the myriad pressures of properly accommodating the royal family—including everything from clean and comfortable rooms to a well-executed military parade—and the household staff find themselves sidelined by specialists brought in from London to prepare the house according to arcane royal protocols, which they find insulting. Taking especial offense are Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol) and Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan), the cook and housekeeper, who bristle at the condescending intrusions of the outsiders.

You’d be forgiven for thinking so based on this poster, but Downton Abbey is not a horror movie

In Downton Abbey fashion, some characters misstep in trying to make things easier and further complicate matters. Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) asks her old favorite Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) to come out of retirement (a last minute development in the finale of the series) to act as butler just for the royal visit, an insult to Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier), who is clearly proud of his new position as butler and, apparently, handling himself well. Furthermore, interpersonal drama looms as the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) learns that an estranged cousin (Imelda Staunton) whom she believes is scheming to cheat the Grantham family out of an estate rightfully theirs will be returning as one of the queen’s ladies in waiting.

And there’s much, much more, including subplots about a handsome young plumber who flirts a smidge too much with Daisy (Sophie McShera), provoking jealousy in her intended, Andy (Michael Fox); the prying and questioning of a mysterious army officer (Stephen Campbell Moore); and the embarassing eagerness of Mr. Molesley (Kevin Doyle) to return to staff just long enough to wait on the king and queen; and of course the inevitable secrets that every character refuses to divulge until things have gotten very complicated indeed.

It’s a lot of fun, and while a few of the subplots show off a little too clearly the soap opera that’s always been a part of Downton Abbey’s DNA—for instance, one involving the identity of a mysterious lady’s maid who also immediately turns into a love interest—some of the subplots are very funny. Perennial sad sack Mr. Molesely gets some especially British cringe humor at one crucial moment of the film.

The entire cast is excellent, especially considering that with well over thirty speaking roles in multiple intersecting plotlines and only two hours to work with, each performer had to make an impression with a very small amount of screentime. In fact I find it hard to say who the star of the film is, but the meatiest parts belong to Tom Branson (Allen Leech), erstwhile Irish socialist chauffeur, for whom the film seems to be trying to find a love interest, and to the great Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess, who invests her small slice of the plot with a sense of long history and hurt and, in the end, enormous pathos.

The film left a number of its many subplots underdeveloped or too little explored. An Irish Republican plot against the king doesn't get quite enough time to breath, and neither do a few following incidents involving Tom Branson, though they do have a nice payoff at the end. Similarly, an very important subplot involving the Dowager Countess only plays out secondhand, like events happening offstage in a Greek drama. By contrast, the most noteworthy and time consuming subplot involves Thomas Barrow taking a first trip into the gay underbelly of York, a subplot that reminds us how Barrow's issues have usually served as the vehicle for the show's most anachronistic and pandering messages. A little less time on this and a little more to set up—to choose one thing—the Dowager Countess's big revelation at the end of the film would have been a better use of screentime and felt a little less cloying.

But those are minor complaints. What needs to work works. The rivalry between Downton Abbey's staff and the royal staff is fun and has some delightful moments and all of the plot threads are nicely woven together and intertwined. Almost everyone has a moment or two. A favorite of mine: After Barrow has angrily stormed out of an interview with Lord Grantham, Lady Mary, and Mr. Carson in which he learns he’s being temporarily replaced, Lord Grantham chooses to ignore his insubordination with: “I never thought of him as a man of principle before.” And of course the Dowager Countess gets a heaping share of zingers, including “I never argue. I explain.” My wife noted that the film couldn't have been more carefully calculated to satisfy lovers of the show. I think she's right.

I thought a few times that the film could have used a little more substance. I had just recently watched Gosford Park, screenwriter Julian Fellowes’s first foray into this kind of storytelling (Downton Abbey was apparently originally intended as a spinoff) and marveled at the dramatic potential in a story with that many plots and side stories and such a huge cast. Compared with Gosford Park, Downton Abbey didn’t seem especially weighty.

But I realized that one of the things I most liked about Downton Abbey the film was its relatively low stakes. Royalty and status aside, the plot boils down to We’re having guests over for dinner. And after almost twenty years of the whole world threatened by rings of power or Decepticons or Sith lords or—especially—Infinity Stones, this was a refreshingly human-sized story. This has been the strength of Downton Abbey all along—its human proportions have allowed for delicate interplays of deference, respect, courtesy, and decency that remind us of what it means to live among others and connected to others. In a movie like this, not hurting the grocer’s feelings offers more personal meaning than any number of sci-fi MacGuffins and CGI battle scenes. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed that change of pace.

So definitely check out Downton Abbey, especially if you are at least passingly familiar with the show or simply want to a pay a visit in which your relationships with other people matter.

The Iliad V-VI on Core Curriculum

Diomedes casting his spear against Ares, illustration by John Flaxman

Episode three of Core Curriculum is here! I was honored to be a guest on this episode with host Victoria Reynolds Farmer and my friend and sometime host on the City of Man Pocast, Coyle Neal. In this episode we continue Core Curriculum’s slow walk through the Iliad by looking in detail at Books V and VI of Homer’s masterwork. We talk about the nature of the war dramatized by Homer, the gods, the heroes, arete and the aristeia, and the unforgivable fecklessness of both Paris and the movie Troy. Coyle and I also sing the praises of a criminally underrated character, the ferocious god-fighting hero Diomedes.

You can read the shownotes at the CHRN website here. You can listen in on the web here or in the embedded Stitcher player in this post. Please also add Core Curriculum to your usual lineup of podcast listening, which you can do via iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting services. Thanks for listening!

Summer reading 2019

Samuel Johnson reading, a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds

This has been a busy summer. My wife and I welcomed our third child, which I reflected upon briefly here, and I also chose that time to begin my newest book. I actually just hit 100,000 words this morning! But despite the busyness and exhaustion I did get in a lot of good reading.

So here’s a quick post to recap my summer reading, with a few superlatives I’d like to mention. For the purposes of this post, “summer” corresponds to the period beginning May 11, just before the beginning of our summer academic session, and ending with Labor Day week, about two weeks into the fall semester. The only organizing principle is that the books on this list are presented in the order in which I finished reading them.

Finally, anything I’ve reviewed, whether briefly on Goodreads or in more detail on my blog here, I’ve hyperlinked. Enjoy!

Summer reading, May-September 2019

• The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyer

• Normandy ‘44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France, by James Holland

• Homer: A Very Short Introduction, by Barbara Graziosi

• C.S. Lewis: A Very Short Introduction, by James Como

• Big Trouble, by Dave Barry

• Beowulf, trans. R.M. Liuzza

• Three-Ten to Yuma and Other Stories, by Elmore Leonard

• Grendel, by John Gardner

• Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett, by Georges Simenon, trans. Daphne Woodward

• This Dark Road to Mercy, by Wiley Cash

• Cain at Gettysburg, by Ralph Peters

• Pronto, by Elmore Leonard

• The Reckoning, by John Grisham

• The Holy Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction, by Joachim Whaley

• Mr. Popper’s Penguins, by Richard and Florence Atwater

• Two Little Confederates, by Thomas Nelson Page

• Mr. Monk Gets Even, by Lee Goldberg

• The Iliad, by Homer, trans. Robert Fagles

• Modern Culture, by Roger Scruton

• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis

• Blood Money and Other Stories, by Elmore Leonard

A few superlatives, just because

Best reread: Beowulf. What else could beat it? This time around I read the Liuzza translation, which I first heard recommended by my friend David Grubbs on the Christian Humanist Podcast. It was very good, though I will always have a soft spot for the Irish-inflected cadences of Seamus Heaney’s translation, which was the first I ever read all the way through.

Biggest surprise: Ralph Peters’s Cain at Gettysburg. Peters’s Civil War series, of which this is the first, has won a lot of awards, but I was unprepared for how strongly written and how good, how in-your-face this novel was. I had also gathered that Peters had set out to write a sort of anti-Killer Angels, and since that’s one of my favorite books (and still is) I was hesitant to indulge in Cain. Never mind. While I feel like it lost something near the end as the various point-of-view characters cycled out of the story to be replaced by newcomers, the first half was so powerful it carried the rest of the book. Cain at Gettysburg is as wonderfully evocative of the wider world of Civil War America as Andersonville, as intimately personal and reflective as Shiloh, and as harrowing as The Black Flower. (For more on those, see my post about Civil War fiction from last summer here.)

While reading Cain at Gettysburg—which I began to coincide with the anniversary of the battle—I wrote this short reflection on our attitudes toward and memories of warfare, inspired by a passage in Peters’s book. I look forward to reading the next in the five-volume series, Hell or Richmond.

Best history: There isn’t a lot of competition in this category, as I read a lot of shorter stuff or fiction this summer, but I wanted to give a special mention to James Holland’s new history of the Normandy campaign, Normandy ‘44. It’s excellent—well researched and wide-ranging, providing a full view of the battle for Normandy beyond the actual D-day landings. Worth checking out.

Best general non-fiction: I’m a great fan of Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series, and discovered late in the spring that they had a new entry on the life and work of CS Lewis. I snapped it up. Written by James Como, a university professor at CUNY and founder of the New York CS Lewis Society, the book astonished me with how much of Lewis’s life, thought, and work it covered, and in what concise and insightful depth. It’s an impressive little book worthy of Lewis himself, who thought that only when you could explain something simply and elegantly had you really mastered it.

Favorite classic: The Iliad, our first and last poem. It had been some years since I last read the Iliad in its entirety and I’m grateful for the nudge to reread it that I got from the folks who started Core Curriculum, which started posting episodes last week. Check it out! Or at least read the Iliad. This time around I read the Robert Fagles translation again. It’s excellent. And because I didn’t give the non-fiction superlative to Barbara Graziosi’s Homer: A Very Short Introduction, let me plug it here—it’s a wonderful, evocative short book that does an excellent job of explaining and introducing Homer and his two epics, and I highly recommend it.

Biggest letdown: The Reckoning, by John Grisham. I like Grisham quite a lot, but this book was a horrible slog. A revenge story and family drama set in the Deep South in the aftermath of World War II—this has my name written all over it. But alas. It reads like a first draft, with unforgivably weak and lazy writing, cliches, poor structure, a constantly recurring tone of condescension toward its characters, and not a bit of tension to get you through its almost 600 pages.

If you want a Deep South revenge story, read Grisham’s A Time to Kill instead. If you really want a gripping World War II drama set in the Pacific, read The Naked and the Dead. Avoid The Reckoning at all costs.

New to me: Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett, the short novel that introduced French detective Jules Maigret. Big, gruff, taciturn, and longsuffering, Maigret was the hero of a whopping 76 novels by Georges Simenon and, having seen stacks of old Maigret stories on the shelves at my local used book store, I decided to give one a try. My wife and I really enjoyed it—I particularly enjoyed the shoeleather aspects of Maigret’s investigations and was impressed by his patience, waiting for hours in the rain sometimes—and I’ve picked up a few more of the books since then.

Currently reading:

What I’ve got on my bedside table for now:

• Lee, by Douglas Southall Freeman

• The Face of God, by Sir Roger Scruton

• Last of the Breed, by Louis L’Amour

• Teutoburg Forest AD 9: The Destruction of Varus and his Legions, by Michael McNally, illustrated by Peter Dennis

• Strong Convictions, by G.P. Hutchinson

• Britain After Rome, by Robin Fleming

Happy reading!

Fall semester is shaping up to be busy, busy, busy again but, as always, I’ll be making time to read, even if it’s in snatches of twenty pages here or there, as it has been for the last few weeks. It’s worth it. God willing, by the time I put together my year-end reading list and some recommendations, I’ll have a completed rough draft of my new novel—which I’m calling The Wanderer—and possibly a smaller palate-cleansing project besides. Here’s hoping.

As always, thanks for reading!

Screwtape on flippancy

In addition to reading Letters to an American Lady for myself and Prince Caspian as a bedtime story for my daughter, last week I started listening to John Cleese’s great audiobook performance of The Screwtape Letters again. While a coincidence and not even remotely by design, I’m now getting a triple dose of CS Lewis—two of them in epistolary mode. This is not a bad thing.

Lewis’s cutting, brutally honest insights into human behavior and sinfulness make Screwtape a revelation and a joy and a disturbing challenge every time I read it. Uncle Screwtape is particularly good at creating taxonomies of human badness, sorting basic kinds of sin into more specific subcategories that still ring true. Consider this, from Letter 11, in which Screwtape explains that while human laughter qua laughter is not necessarily useful to the devils, certain kinds absolutely are. The “patient,” the young tempter Wormwood’s human victim, has recently made fashionable friends with a penchant for certain kind of knowing laughter. After parsing a number of ways humans can amuse themselves and laugh together, Screwtape concludes with a description of hell’s favorite kind of humor:

But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it.

The key line here is, I think, Screwtape’s succinct explanation that “Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made.” This kind of flippancy is mostly a matter of tone: simply invoke a particular person or group or idea and wait for the laughter as if it’s inherently funny or worthy of mockery. We’ve all seen this.

But flippancy also relies on a certain in-group disdain for outsiders, and it’s this tendency, as the full letter in the broader context of Screwtape makes clear, that gives flippancy its real danger—the inherent danger of bad company, of cliques. Lewis called such cliques “the inner ring” and was particularly attuned to the temptation offered by inner rings. The bad influence of an exclusive set—especially one perceived as fashionable—appears repeatedly in his fiction and non-fiction work throughout the 1940s, probably most notably in That Hideous Strength, in which Mark Studdock strives for and is seduced into a prominent place in a diabolical circle of scientists.

“Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made.”

— Screwtape

In “The Inner Ring,” a 1944 lecture, Lewis gave a good description of such cliques and their dangers, but what concerns me here is his description of the kind of language and humor that marks membership in the group: “There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks.” The more unthinking disdain you can pour into your flippant references to opponents or enemies, the more you mark yourself as a member of the group and the more the group affirms you.

(Take away the jocular element and you get something even worse—pure virtue signaling. Virtue signalers are almost invariably humorless people, so even among the flippant there is still hope.)

I think we have a surfeit of this kind of laughter nowadays—exacerbated as always by our internet bubbles and media that are inimical to serious thought or discussion—and it’s exactly as destructive as Screwtape implies. Flippancy borders on mockery but without the potentially salutary moral effect that well-deserved mockery can supply, leaving only the self-satisfaction of the mocker and his audience. Flippancy is also lazy, relying on no more cleverness or wit than a child in a schoolyard pointing and laughing. At least the child gets the exercise of lifting his arm.

You can read the entire letter (Letter 11) here or listen to Cleese’s performance of it here.

The Core Curriculum arrives

I’m pleased to announce that the latest show from the Christian Humanist Radio Network, The Core Curriculum, has arrived! This podcast will work through Columbia University’s list of core texts in the Western literary canon book by book, starting, in this series, with the Iliad.

This show is set up like a seminar or panel, with a stable of rotating hosts and guests for each of the eleven episodes in which we work through Homer’s masterpiece. I was honored to participate in a few episodes. Homer provoked great conversations among us and I’m excited to hear what everyone else talked about. If you’ve been looking for an excuse or a prompt to read through one of the great books of both Western and world literature, this is your chance for a deep dive into the story with some good company.

As with other shows on the CHRN, you can subscribe to the Core Curriculum and listen via iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting apps. I’ve embedded the first episode in this post via the network’s flagship show, The Christian Humanist Podcast. You can also download the episode directly here or look at the episode’s shownotes at the CHRN’s website here. I’m honored to have participated and really excited about this project’s future. Listen in and enjoy!

Southern meanness, Southern politeness

James Dickey as the Sheriff of Aintry in the film adaptation of his novel Deliverance

Over the weekend I ran across Florence King’s With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy while browsing my favorite used book store. King (1936-2016) was a Southern humorist, author of Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, and longtime columnist for William F. Buckley Jr’s National Review. Her specialty was misanthropy—the dislike of mankind.* I had heard her name invoked quite often by other writers for that magazine, and they always spoke with immense affection and admiration for her razor wit and savagely keen eye for human stupidity. So when I saw her name on the spine I grabbed it and started flipping through it.

This passage hooked me. Near the end of a lengthy description of Ty Cobb’s famous temper and general gruffness, King writes:

The Southerner’s famous mean streak is usually attributed to a murky sadomasochism involving fears and fantasies of interracial sex, but I suspect it is really a reaction against the demands of Southern hospitality.

This caught my attention for two reasons. First, it is the fashion, in our sex- and race-obsessed age, to ascribe everything weird or distinct about the South and Southerners to anxieties surrounding miscegenation. This is seldom invoked as a sole causal factor but it is more and more often the first line of explanation, though it fails for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it was not unique to the South. Second, King’s suspicion jibes precisely with an observation made by the Coen brothers some years ago, about which more below.

King, delightfully, goes on:

South Carolina novelist Blanche McCrary Boyd writes: “Southerners are as polite as cattle, except when they’re not. When they’re not, they might shoot you or chase you around the yard with a hatchet.”** Living up to a reputation is an exhausting business. It is humanly impossible to be as gracious as Southerners are supposed to be, but we long ago got in too deep. The rest of the country came to believe our propaganda and, fatally, we came to believe it ourselves.

In consequence, we produced monsters of hospitality who cast a pall of incessant, unbearable niceness over the entire region. All classes participated in the torture. The aristocratic prototype of hospitality is the crystalline great lady of whom it is said, “She’s kindness itself.” The plain-folks prototype was my grandmother, the miles gloriosus of the spare cot, constantly braying, “We’ll make room!” and issuing jocular threats about what she would do to a guest who even thought about leaving too soon. (“I’ll just tie you right up and keep you here!”)

Hospitality carried to such extremes is bound to create its opposite, and so we produced the misanthropic good ole boy who greeted out-of-state travelers with speeding tickets or unmarked graves, depending upon his mood. If Ty Cobb had not been a ballplayer he would have made a great Georgia sheriff.

In his first book The Southern Tradition at Bay, Richard Weaver briefly describes the some noteworthy elements of the famous caning of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks. Sumner, in a speech laced with sexual innuendo (there’s that projection, again), had insulted Brook’s dying uncle, Senator Andrew Butler. Weaver notes that, as Brooks prepared to avenge this insult, he “deliberated for two days over whether to use the horsewhip, the cowhide, or the cane for his assault upon Senator Sumner because a different degree of insult was implied by each.”

That’s the same care taken in seeing to the comfort of guests applied to the avenging of an insult. The Coen brothers once said that part of their inspiration for Fargo was their observation that “the most polite societies are also the most violent societies.” Compare the courtliness and cold-bloodedness of Arthurian chivalry or the Nibelungenlied, the oathbound rules of host and guest in the Eddas or Beowulf, or the brutal vengeance of Odysseus upon the suitors—the latter a straightforward case of redressing an abuse of hospitality.

The key factor in all of these examples is honor, of course, and King’s observation should ring true the moment you dip into the study of any honor culture. Understand the seemingly paradoxical relationship between mild-mannered courtesy and violence, and how honor adjudicates these conflicting impulses, and you’ll have grasped something important about Southerners. Until then you can only misunderstand and dismiss.

Ty Cobb’s meanness, by the way, has been grossly exaggerated. He was tough, competitive, and extremely aggressive, but as Charles Leerhsen demonstrates in his excellent recent biography A Terrible Beauty, most of the stories of Cobb’s frothing-at-the-mouth psychosis and racism are either caricatures or lies. Check that book out for sure, especially if you love baseball. Here’s a sample of Leerhsen’s findings from Hillsdale College’s Imprimis.

Oh—and I bought King’s book. Can’t wait to read the rest.

Notes

*I am a wannabe misanthrope, too lily-livered and obliging to embrace the lifestyle. I therefore find people like King wonderfully amusing. We need them the same way Lear needed his Fool.

**True story—An aunt of mine, one of the saintliest, kindest, most hospitable and charitable people God ever graced me in knowing, quite famously chased my grandfather around the yard with a hatchet when they were children. His offense? He had eaten a piece of watermelon she had claimed for herself.

CS Lewis on blame

Over the weekend I started reading Letters to an American Lady, one of a few books by CS Lewis that I hadn’t gotten to yet. This book was published posthumously and consists of the letters Lewis sent an American woman—addressed as “Mary,” a pseudonym, in the book—over the course of about thirteen years, from 1950 until shortly before his death in the fall of 1963. While they never met, the correspondence was regular and warm and friendly, and ranges over a charmingly wide array of subjects.

(I was interested, for instance, in Lewis’s take on the coronation of Elizabeth II: “I didn’t go . . . I approve of all that sort of thing immensely and I was deeply moved by all I heard of it; but I’m not a man for crowds and Best Clothes.”)

In one of his early letters to Mary, a Catholic convert, Lewis, an Anglican, addresses the widespread perception that failings in the Church and erroneous beliefs among the faithful are always the fault of the clergy. In the middle of this reflection, he writes:

“I am rather sick of the modern assumption that, for all events, ‘WE’, the people, are never responsible: it is always our rulers, or ancestors, or parents, or education, or anybody but precious ‘US’. WE are apparently perfect and blameless. Don’t you believe it.”

— CS Lewis, May 30th, 1953

Hear hear. We could call this scapegoating, but that word has a surviving connotation of formality that I think Lewis was right to avoid evoking. That’s too grand; formally trying to assign blame in a rational way is too much work. The more pernicious habit is apathetic, inactive refusal to see any blame in oneself.

I began to add my own glosses to Lewis’s list of the blameworthy, but I think his words speak for themselves. He has perceptively listed almost all of the things we prefer to fix blame on, including the totemic magicians we elect, the wicked dead we prefer to remember with moral hauteur if at all, organic institutions or artificial systems that have broken down, or, failing all of those, anybody else. Our family. Our friends. Our neighbors. Our enemies. Especially the last, where we can make it stick.

Last week I ran into Walmart on an errand and passed by the little island of “inspirational” books that are always for sale there. Among the devotionals and self-help books and paperback Bibles was a book called Living Successfully with Screwed-Up People. I don’t want to malign a book I haven’t read, but if it doesn’t begin with a chapter about oneself, the reader, and one’s own screwups, the book has already failed.