Why Liberalism Failed

This week my friend Nathan Gilmour of the Christian Humanist Radio Network posted his interview with Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at Notre Dame and author of Why Liberalism Failed, a bracing new book from Yale UP. I was excited to listen since I read Why Liberalism Failed just a few weeks ago. It's a great interview—take the time to listen to it.

First things first—by liberalism Deneen does not mean the progressive politics of the Democratic Party. Instead, he is critiquing the centuries-long project of liberalism as an Enlightenment philosophical project. Liberalism, in this definition, is an all-encompassing philosophy based on the pursuit of pure liberty—defined, for the first time in history, as the mere freedom from restraint—as the greatest good and the autonomous individual as the agent of that pursuit. Individuals pursuing the maximum liberty possible should be a recognizable political ideal whether your end goal is gay marriage and abortion on demand or free market capitalism and totally legalized drugs. By this definition, Democrats, Republicans, progressives, conservatives, libertarians—their fights are all infights, because they're all liberals, and Deneen positions his critique to cover them all.

I've been thinking about Why Liberalism Failed a lot since I finished it, and I still haven't completely digested it. I agree in principle with Deneen's arguments; I arrived at a rejection of Lockean liberalism a long time ago, and his bipartisan criticisms appeal to my a-pox-on-all-your-houses attitude, but I do think he overstretches his catalog of what problems are and are not caused by liberalism a bit. But that's a quibble.

Deneen is at his best when describing liberalism as an anti-culture, a system that breaks down and dissolves all competing identities and, in a seeming paradox, requires the absorption of free individuals into the state. Again, regardless of your particular political goals, pursuing maximum liberty as the means to those ends results in the strengthening of the state. With nothing but atomized, free-floating individuals, culture—real culture of shared traditions, virtues, ideals, and stories—is impossible, because no one will limit their freedom by fettering themselves to it. And so you are left with nothing but isolation, consumerism, and vacuous pop culture. (In a disturbing bit of coincidence, the book I read immediately after this was Ready Player One, which provides the best possible accidental illustration of the world Deneen describes.) Deneen also has a strong chapter on the damage done to education by liberalism, an issue of particular concern to me.

I'll stop there. As I said, I'm still working through some of Deneen's ideas. Do listen to Nathan's interview with Deneen, or this one from John J. Miller at the Bookmonger, and check out the book for yourself. It's short and straightforward, and even if you ultimately disagree with Deneen, his challenge to our prevailing worldview is long overdue.

Happy St. Valentine's Day!

“And I to him: ‘I am one who, when Love 
inspires me, takes note and, as he dictates
deep within me, so I set it forth.’”

— Dante, Purgatorio XXIV, 52-4

As a brief St. Valentine's Day greeting, I want to encourage y'all to pick up Dante this year. But why Dante—grim, vengeful medieval poet, the "great master of the disgusting" according to one 19th century poet—and why on the most romantic day of the year?

Poet of love

Beatrice leads Dante into the heights of heaven, an engraving by Gustave Doré 

While he's most famous now for Inferno, that book represents only the first third of his masterpiece, the Commedia, or Divine Comedy. So if you've ever been assigned the Inferno by itself or simply read it on your own (in which case, well done!), you've only read a third of his vision of love. 

Yes, love. Dante's Comedy has as its theme all kinds of love. His love of his hometown, Florence, from which he was exiled in 1302, is a poignant strain throughout, and the wicked so memorably punished in hell, we are reminded often, sinned because they loved the wrong thing or loved a good thing in the wrong way. Paolo and Francesca, adulterers punished together in the circle of the lustful, shift the blame for their sin to a bawdy love poem. And the mover and focus of much of Dante's journey is his famous beloved, Beatrice.

That's just a sampling. Love, as a theme, as a plot point, as a subject of conversation and debate, is present throughout. But all of these loves are subordinate to and—if rightly ordered—derive their ultimate meaning from "the love that moves the sun and other stars," the love of God. 

It's God's love for a fallen man that dispatches Beatrice—on behalf of St. Lucy, on behalf of the Virgin Mary, on behalf of God— to Dante as he wanders lost in sin at the beginning of Inferno. It's love that created Hell—a thought that makes moderns squirm—and love that sends sinners there and keeps them there. And it's love that changes and saves Dante, and grants him, in the last passage of the book, a vision of God himself. 

Dante's Comedy is the story of salvation, which means that it's the story of love.

So enjoy your chocolate (Lord knows I already have), enjoy time with your beloved, and celebrate love and the relationships that give us human creatures meaning, but consider as well the source of all love. And give Dante a shot. I think you'll be glad you did.

Happy St. Valentine's Day!

My recommendations

My favorite translation for pleasure reading is that by Anthony Esolen, available from Modern Library, but I've read and enjoyed many other good ones, including Mark Musa's heavily annotated one for Penguin Classics and Allen Mandelbaum's excellent but underappreciated translation for Bantam Classics. These are all readable, affordable, and easy to find. Enjoy!

A Man for All Seasons

Robert Shaw as King Henry VIII and Paul Scofield as St. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons

St. Thomas More's birthday was last week, and this provided me with an excuse to inaugurate a new, semi-regular feature for this blog: Historical Movie Monday. This week, I write about a favorite of mine, a film I happened to be rewatching as More's birthday rolled around: A Man for All Seasons.

“I am commanded by the King to be brief, and since I am the King's obedient subject, brief I will be. I die his Majesty's good servant, but God's first.”

The history

A Man for All Seasons is the story of Sir Thomas More, a London lawyer, writer, philosopher, and renaissance humanist scholar. After the Archbishop of Canterbury helped him get into Oxford, More became a lawyer and statesman, worked for Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord High Chancellor, and communicated with some of the greatest humanist scholars of his time, including Erasmus, compiler of the Textus Receptus, the first critical edition of the Greek New Testament. Erasmus even stayed with More and his family when he visited London. They entertained themselves by translating Lucian together.

More was well-educated, intelligent, a man of wide experience, a prolific writer, and dedicated to his family and, above all, to his faith. He personally oversaw the education of his children. This included, atypically for the time, his three daughters, the eldest of whom, Margaret, became famous for her intelligence and command of Greek and Latin. He was also a good-humored wit. According to Erasmus, "from earliest childhood [he had] such a passion for jokes, that one might almost suppose he had been born for them." His sense of humor comes out most clearly in Utopia, published in 1516—in which he describes an outlandish society meant to satirize the Europe of his day—and, perhaps, in his death.

Sir Thomas More, by Hans Holbein the Younger

More traveled often with Cardinal Wolsey on diplomatic missions to the continent. He eventually became a secretary to King Henry VIII himself, and in 1529, with Wolsey dying and out of Henry's favor, he became the first layman to serve as Lord High Chancellor, a position he held for two and a half years before resigning.

More was a slightly older contemporary of Martin Luther, and the schism within the Catholic Church that resulted from Luther's 95 Theses defined the later part of his career. He wrote on numerous theological and philosophical topics and conducted literary debates with Luther and William Tyndale. As Lord High Chancellor, he was charged with prosecuting heretics in Henry's kingdom. While the Protestant propagandist John Foxe's accusations that More tortured prisoners not only in the Tower of London and but in his own home are false, More did preside over numerous heresy trials, six of which resulted in the condemned being burned at the stake. 

It is against this background that the final crisis of More's career played out. When Henry, who had earned the title Defender of the Faith from the pope for his sparring with Luther over the sacraments, became convinced that his wife Catherine could not bear him a son, he had a sudden change of mind about the sacrament of marriage. Henry had worked with Cardinal Wolsey to get an annulment from the pope on the grounds that Catherine had previously been married to Henry's elder brother Arthur. The marriage was therefore incestuous according to canon law, and had only been permitted with a special dispensation from a previous pope. Henry hoped that this, with Wolsey's intercession, would allow him to weasel out of his 24-year marriage and allow him to marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn. 

Every attempt by Henry to gain an annulment failed. More, Wolsey's replacement as Lord High Chancellor, refused to cooperate, as the Church's teaching and laws were clear on the matter. Nevertheless, beginning in 1532, Henry pushed forward a series of parliamentary acts that separated the English church from the Catholic Church, made Henry the head of the Church of England, declared his children by his new wife his legitimate heirs (cruelly cutting off his one surviving child by Catherine, Mary), required a loyalty oath on all of these matters, and set a penalty of death for anyone who refused. Early on in this series of acts, More resigned.

“Thomas More, who seemed sometimes like an Epicurean under Augustus, died the death of a saint under Diocletian. He died gloriously jesting.”

— GK Chesterton, A Short History of England

More had too high a profile to ignore, even though he refused both to take the oath and to denounce it. Enemies, including Henry's enforcer, Thomas Cromwell, and Richard Rich, an ambitious young courtier, conspired against him, accusing him of a variety of crimes but the charges didn't stick. Henry's ministers eventually forced the issue, interrogating More several times, ordering him repeatedly to swear the oath of loyalty, and imprisoning him in the Tower of London. At his brief trial on July 1, 1535, perjured evidence was used to convict him of treason, and the court sentenced him to death.

More was beheaded five days later. According to witnesses, he joked on his way up the scaffold.

The film

A Man for All Seasons is a film adaptation of a critically acclaimed play by Robert Bolt, who had previously scripted Lawrence of Arabia and would later write The Mission. Bolt adapted the play for film himself, and the film was directed by Fred Zinnemann, director of critical favorites High Noon and From Here to Eternity.

Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More on trial

Zinnemann's High Noon offers interesting points of comparison. Like that film, A Man for All Seasons pits a principled authority figure against a seemingly unstoppable opponent. The hopelessness of his situation causes even those nearest him to waver and withdraw their support, and he faces the ultimate threat alone. Unlike Marshal Will Kane, Sir Thomas More gives up his authority as part of his resistance, fights back with words and reason, and—at least to the purely pragmatic eye—loses. A Man for All Seasons dramatizes a resistance to tyranny that does not rely on meeting force with force.

The sets, locations, costumes, and cinematography are beautiful. Scenes of the natural beauty of the Thames—always associated in the film with More against the crenelations and gargoyles paired with Henry and his yes-men—are particularly striking. The film came out in 1966, during an awkward transition from the stagy interior set design of the 1950s to the harder realism of the 1970s. It's perfectly poised between the two; the locations in the film feel real, even the sets, and at least a few scenes were shot in period-authentic locations. The trial scene was supposedly shot in Westminster Hall, where More was actually tried, but I haven't been able to confirm that.

The performances are uniformly excellent. Robert Shaw, in a supporting role, is a young, energetic Henry VIII whose tyrannical inclinations are barely contained at the beginning of the film. "He is no caricature," Alison Weir writes, "but an attractive, intelligent man whose every whim has hitherto been gratified." Susannah York plays a charmingly erudite and devoted Margaret More, the only one of More's children depicted. You feel and believe the affection between More and his daughter, which raises the stakes in the final act. An obese Orson Welles is very good in a handful of scenes as Wolsey, ill and world-weary. Leo McKern is a bluff and formidably cutthroat Cromwell, and a very young John Hurt plays Richard Rich as an object lesson in virtue ethics. Rich begins the film an ambitious young man, begging More for preferment, and proves willing to debase himself further and further in his quest for position and recognition. 

The standout performance is, of course, Paul Scofield as More. Scofield originated the role on stage, and he fully inhabits the part on film. It's a finely tuned, subtle performance, built out of minute gestures, flickers of emotion in his eyes, and the carefully controlled intonation of every syllable of his speech. It helps that he's working from a magnificent script, with wonderful dialogue and speeches, but without Scofield More could come across as a tedious scold or an out of touch fanatic. There are, indeed, elements of both in other depictions of More.

There's not a careless moment in the film—technically, artistically, or in the performances—and Scofield is its centerpiece.

The film as history

A Man for All Seasons covers approximately six years of More's life, from just before his appointment as Henry's Lord High Chancellor to the moment of his death. For a two-hour film with a limited cast of characters, A Man for All Seasons does remarkable justice to the complexity of the political and religious situation of the time and remains extraordinarily faithful to the facts. Luther lurks in the background—Will Roper, Margaret's suitor and eventual husband, is shown with a boyish enthusiasm for Lutheran doctrine—and this seemingly arcane theological issue finally erupts in the person of the king. 

“It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales, Richard?”

— Sir Thomas More

The film's characterizations of More and others are very good. One must allow for artistic license, but nothing in A Man for All Seasons cuts against the record. More really was keen-witted, eloquent, and with a savage wit; Henry really was full of bustle and machismo at this stage of his life; Cromwell really was Henry's cynical hatchet man; Rich really was a slave to his own ambition. Again, More is the best character in the piece, and he has all the best lines—especially his one-liners, like his celebrated zinger to the perjured Rich—but the film's depictions all ring true.

The trial and sentencing hew very close to the record. Peter Ackroyd, in his biography of More, reprints the entire transcript. You can read it in about ten minutes. Most of the changes Bolt makes to the trial are in the interests of streamlining, saving screentime, and simply updating the 16th century English for modern audiences. Even More's last words, spoken moments before his beheading, are taken essentially verbatim from the historical record. Only the jokes—as he ascended the rickety scaffold, the ailing More asked someone to help him up and promised to shift for himself on the trip back down—are omitted.

One man faces the power of the state.

One could nitpick, something More, a lawyer, would probably enjoy. There's no solid evidence that Henry VIII died of syphilis (see below). And it is not entirely true that More was silent. He refused to take the oath, but during these years he produced a constant stream of writing that, while never naming Henry or Anne Boleyn or directly addressing the controversy, clearly critiqued it. But the play does depict a larger truth about conscience and state power. As Paul Turner writes in his introduction to Utopia:

in Tudor England there was no freedom of speech; there was not even freedom of thought. More himself was executed not for anything that he had said or done, but for private opinions which he had resolutely kept to himself. It was not enough to abstain from comment on Henry VIII's astonishing metamorphosis into Supreme Head of the Church: More's very silence was a political crime.

How much more should these these events trouble us in a democratic age? Instead of the conflict of one's conscience with the will of a monarch, one now, in order to obey God or the dictates of conscience, must go against the majority. We've given up trying to please a king for trying to please everyone. It's a question More would have us consider, and seriously.

The film concludes with the narrator describing the fates of the major players: 

Thomas More's head was stuck on Traitors' Gate for a month, then his daughter, Margaret, removed it and kept it till her death. Cromwell was beheaded for high treason five years after More. The archbishop was burned at the stake. The Duke of Norfolk should have been executed for high treason, but the king died of syphilis the night before. Richard Rich became chancellor of England and died in his bed.

That final sentence, which tells the audience that the film's scummy young striver lived a life of position and success, is the film's stinger, and masterfully brings one of the story's latent themes to the fore. Unlike High Noon's Will Kane, who does defeat his enemies in physical combat and does restore his reputation and standing and his relationship with his love interest—and then rejects everything but his love in disgust—More models a success of conscience. He is physically and materially defeated, stripped of rank and property, separated from his wife and children, and finally killed. And yet he succeeds, because faith, conscience, and truth are more important than the kind of success so eagerly grasped after by Henry, Cromwell, or Rich. And longer lasting.

A Man for All Seasons is a story we always need, perhaps especially now.

More if you're interested

My DVD of A Man for All Seasons includes this 18-minute Life of Saint Thomas More documentary. This short features a number of prominent historians and biographers, including John Guy and Alison Weir (see below). It's worth the time to watch for a capsule summary of the real More with reference to the film.

Peter Ackroyd's biography The Life of Thomas More is highly recommended as both well-researched and readable. It's also still widely available and easy to find. Tudors, the second volume in his ongoing multi-volume history of England, also covers the controversies surrounding Henry's divorce, remarriage, and Act of Surpremacy succinctly but with good detail in a readable narrative.

Historian John Guy has a number of books you might consult. First is Thomas More, which attempts to separate the man from the legend. Guy's entry in the Penguin Monarchs series, Henry VIII: The Quest for Fame, is a very short, readable biography of More's king, with good attention given to Henry's divorce, his split with the Church, and his eradication of dissenters, including More. Guy has also written The Tudors, part of Oxford UP's Very Short Introductions series.

Alison Weir, who has done a great deal to popularize the Tudors with her voluminous biographies, covers More well in Henry VIII: The King and His Court. Recent paperback editions include a short essay in which she compares various film depictions of Henry and his life.

Charlton Heston played More in a TV adaptation of A Man for All Seasons, which I haven't seen. Neither have I seen his portrayal by Jeremy Northam in The Tudors, which I gather is sympathetic but inaccurate. I have seen the BBC's Wolf Hall, based on the novel by Hilary Mantel, in which More is played by Anton Lesser opposite Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damian Lewis as Henry VIII. Mantel is violently anti-Catholic and Wolf Hall is an admitted attempt to tear down More's reputation. I haven't read the novel, but I understand the miniseries to have toned down her attack, even if it includes Foxe's false accusations of torture. More comes across as an educated doofus, a man stupidly committed to principle instead of expedience (Cromwell, throughout, is held up as his pragmatic opposite). I still recommend Wolf Hall because it's excellent storytelling and filmmaking, but understand that its depiction of More is overtly hostile.

And of course there are the works of More himself. Utopia is readily available in a variety of editions and translations. I'm currently reading Paul Turner's translation for Penguin Classics. Vintage Spiritual Classics offers a modest Selected Writings anthology. Other works are readily available elsewhere, including free digitized texts online at places like Project Gutenberg. Check out More's Dialogue Comfort Against Tribulation, written while More awaited his death in the Tower.

A Handful of Dust

My trip through the works of Evelyn Waugh continues with A Handful of Dust, one of Waugh's most autobiographical and hard-edged works. Sharp readers may intuit spoilers in the review below. It shouldn't really harm the reading experience, but be forewarned.

The man who loved Hetton

A Handful of Dust tells the story of Tony and Brenda last, an aristocratic couple living a quiet and apparently contented life with their son John Andrew in Tony's ancestral family home, Hetton. Hetton is an unfashionable Victorian gothic mansion that Brenda cordially dislikes. Tony adores it. It's not just his home, it's his family's home, the seat of the family legacy, and the symbol of his responsibilities as a family man and aristocrat. 

Tony and Brenda cross paths with John Beaver, a shallow cipher of a man who bums his way from one party and country house to another, living off of wealthy friends. He's everyone's second choice for filling seating arrangements. This is simply unthinking parasitism—he's too full of nothing to be malicious. When Beaver shows up at Hetton mostly uninvited, Tony, a quiet man who dislikes intruders and prefers his routines, fobs him off on Brenda, who is a more skilled entertainer. 

Beaver makes an impression on Brenda, not for any strengths or attractive qualities, but for his very emptiness and pliability. She begins an affair with him, absconding to London more and more often under the guise of studying economics. Brenda, perhaps owing to a guilty conscience, even tries to lure Tony into his own affair with a succession of vacuous and self-absorbed acquaintances. Tony, oblivious, and loyal to Brenda to the end, ignores them all.

The crisis comes when, with Brenda skipping out on an actual opportunity to entertain guests at Hetton, Tony and Brenda's son John Andrew has a terrible accident. When a friend tracks down Brenda and tells her that something has happened to "John," she misunderstands at first and, when she realizes it's her son John and not her lover John, she blurts out, "Thank God." Then she breaks down weeping.

After this Brenda seeks a divorce, and Tony is stunned not only at the tragedy that has befallen the family, but at his wife's betrayal. He nevertheless—because he has "contract[ed] the habit of loving and trusting Brenda"—agrees to grant her grounds for a divorce, which leads to a series of comically inept attempts to stage an infidelity involving hired detectives and a good-time girl with an annoying daughter.

Finally, Tony, fed up, drops the divorce suit, refuses to cooperate with Brenda's efforts to secure alimony, and joins up with an explorer setting out to find a lost city in the Amazon. The ending—with Tony hopelessly trapped in the jungle, Brenda remarried to one of Tony's only friends, and Hetton in the hands of distant cousins—is a shock.

The savages at home

Those in the know place A Handful of Dust at a crucial joint in Waugh's body of work, a transition from straightforwardly farcical satires of university and boarding school life, imperialism, or the "bright young things" of fashionable London, to the more reflective and sharper Catholic novels of his maturity.

Waugh's first wife—also named Evelyn—divorced him after having an affair, and Waugh, as oblivious as Tony, was devastated. He obviously drew on these experiences in constructing the story, which was an expansion on a previous short story, "The Man Who Loved Dickens," about an eccentric illiterate who lived deep in the Amazon basin and loved nothing more than to have Dickens read to him for two hours daily by a hapless prisoner. "After the short story was written and published," Waugh wrote later, "the idea kept working in my mind. I wanted to discover how the prisoner got there, and eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savage at home and the civilized man’s helpless plight among them."

A Handful of Dust is a more difficult read than the other books I've read so far. Not because of its style or technique—it's as effortlessly elegant as any of the others—but because its protagonist, the "civilized man" Tony, faces a conga line of tragedies and betrayals at the hands of merciless savages and his virtue goes unrewarded. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the film: 

there are passages where we cannot quite believe how monstrously the characters are behaving. We Americans like to see evil in terms of guns and crime and terrorists and drug smuggling—big, broad immoral activities. We rarely [tell stories] about how one person can be personally cruel to another, through their deep understanding of what might hurt the other person the most.

It's a hard read, but a powerful indictment of shallow society and the destructive selfishness of modern people. I recommend it highly.

More if you're interested

Charles Sturridge directed a film adaptation of A Handful of Dust, which was released in 1988. It stars James Wilby and Kristin Scott Thomas (Clemmie Churchill in Darkest Hour) as Tony and Brenda, with Rupert Graves (Lestrade to Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes) as John Beaver, and Judi Dench, Anjelica Huston, Stephen Fry, and Alec Guinness in supporting roles. I found a copy at our local library and plan to watch it this weekend.

Here's novelist Joseph Kanon discussing the book with the Wall Street Journal Book Club.

John Mahoney, RIP

John Mahoney died three days ago at the age of 77. Everyone remembers him—justifiably—as "Frasier's dad," a part he performed wonderfully opposite Kelsey Grammer for eleven seasons. I want to pay tribute to two other performances Mahoney gave before Frasier took off, the two performances I always associate with Mahoney, and to a aspect of his life I've only learned about since his death.

Eight Men Out

Mahoney as Kid Gleason in Eight Men Out

One of my favorite movies—and, in my opinion, the best baseball movie out there—is Eight Men Out, the story of the 1919 World Series scandal that ended the careers of eight players for the Chicago White Sox. Mahoney plays Kid Gleason, a veteran ballplayer and now the manager of the Sox. Mahoney doesn't have a lot of scenes in the film, which gives much more attention to the players involved in the bribery scandal—Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn), Buck Weaver (John Cusack), Chick Gandil (Michael Rooker), and Shoeless Joe Jackson (DB Sweeney). But in his handful of scenes, Mahoney evokes enormous pathos. Gleason is a father to his players. He's proud of them and trusts them, not just to win ballgames but to play to the standard he has seen them set.

As the World Series unfolds, we see Gleason confronted with evidence he doesn't want to believe. He goes to his players, tries to get them to open up to them, and when they won't, we see, in a wonderfully subtle performance, his heartbreak. During the court case that follows, we see Gleason try to salvage his boys' reputations by standing up for them in the face of all the evidence against them. It's hopeless, and we know it even if he doesn't. It's tragic, and Mahoney plays it excellently. His pride, his disbelief, and finally his disappointment—who hasn't felt their heart pricked upon hearing "I'm disappointed in you" from their father?—command your sympathy and sadness.

Watch Mahoney in his handful of insert shots in the Game 3 montage, at the emotions he takes the viewer through in just a few seconds of screentime. 

Barton Fink

Mahoney as W.P. Mayhew in Barton Fink's memorable introduction

The second film—and my favorite Coen brothers movie—that has made me respect Mahoney is his comic turn in Barton Fink. As in Eight Men Out, Mahoney does a lot with a relatively small supporting part. Barton Fink is the story of a socialist playwright who makes the move from New York to Hollywood just before World War II. There, with an enormous opportunity to spread his message and make some good money, he develops writer's block. While Barton is still trying to adjust to the Hollywood lifestyle, he encounters Mahoney's character, WP Mayhew, for the first time—a dapper Southern gentlemen puking his guts out in a restaurant bathroom. His first line to Barton, while washing his hands: "Sorry 'bout the odor."

Mayhew is an alcoholic writer whose critically acclaimed modernist novels have, like Barton's plays, attracted the attention of Hollywood, where he's been slumming ever since leaving the South. (Mayhew is, incidentally, loosely based on William Faulkner, and Mahoney in his bowtie and mustache is a dead ringer for the man.) With just a handful of scenes, Mahoney creates a character whose magnificence lies well behind him, and contributes mightily to Barton's disillusionment with Hollywood in general and writing in particular. After the initial shock of meeting Mayhew wears off (almost immediately, given the circumstances), Barton has almost nothing good to say of his one-time idol: "He's a big fat phony!" and, after Mayhew's put-upon secretary and lover weeps over a drunken Mayhew and says how sorry she feels for him, "He's a son of a bitch!" And, thanks to Mahoney's performance in what could have been a straightforwardly slapstick role, you can see why both characters feel the way they do.

Mahoney the man

Since his death a few days ago, I've learned a little about Mahoney the man. I try to avoid reading about the personal lives of actors since they're usually sordid and disappointing, but I was happy to learn a bit more about Mahoney. The respect and humility he brought to his craft were remarkable, and I think, in hindsight, that it shows in the finished product. He viewed acting as his vocation and approached it as an outgrowth of his faith: 

I’ve always prayed to the Holy Ghost for wisdom and for understanding and knowledge. I think he answered my prayers when I stopped in the church that day. My life was totally different from that day on. I saw myself as I was, and I saw into the future and saw what I wanted to be. And I sort of rededicated myself to God and begged him to make me a better person. It wasn’t fear of hell or anything like that. I just somehow knew that to be like…what I was, wasn’t the reason I was created. I had to be better.

And the prayer he would pray before each performance he gave:

Most glorious blessed spirit, I thank you for all the gifts and talents that you’ve given me. Please help me to use all these gifts and talents to their fullest. And please accept this performance as a prayer of praise and thanks to you.

Not a bad approach to our daily work, whatever it may be. Nor is this humble prayer a bad way to approach our fellow man:

Dear God, please help me to treat everybody—including myself—with love, respect, and dignity.

Actor John Mahoney, RIP.

Fad-proofing yourself

"I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old." —CS Lewis

This morning I rediscovered an old column called "Reading Old Books," by the late political commentator Joseph Sobran. In it, Sobran describes the best reason to read old books by long-dead authors; not because they will teach us any particular lesson—far from it—but because our contact with them and their distant mentorship will help us resist the currents of our own age. 

These are perhaps my favorite paragraphs of the piece: 

There are no particular classics, not even Shakespeare, that you “must” read. But you should find a few meritorious old writers you find absorbing and not only read them, but live with them, until they become voices in your mind—a sort of internal council you can consult at any time.

When you internalize an author whose vision or philosophy is both rich and out of fashion, you gain a certain immunity from the pressures of the contemporary. The modern world, with its fads, propaganda, and advertising, is forever trying to herd us into conformity. Great literature can help us remain fad-proof.

As Sobran cites CS Lewis as one of these voices, these internal councils of his own later in the piece, I have to assume he had Lewis's great essay "On Reading Old Books" in mind when he chose his theme and title. Lewis's essay was a preface to a new edition of St. Athanasius's On the Incarnation, itself an old book, one of the oldest in the Christian literary tradition. Compare Lewis's more detailed observations about fad-proofing:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. . . . None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

This is one reason people used to quote Shakespeare, Milton, or the Bible so much. They had read them often enough that the authors' perspectives became internalized, as familiar as household words, independent perspectives that could be consulted at will. The fact that the phrase "household words" has become a cliche is a measure of at least Shakespeare's influence. It's part of what separates living within a tradition from political tribalism or mere pop culture.

Lewis is certainly one of the "internal councils" I have absorbed and that continue to speak to me, a council I've kept alive by reading and rereading his books. Add to him his friend Tolkien, GK Chesterton, Dante, the Beowulf poet, Homer, and Aristotle and you've got a handful more. 

What internal councils have you cultivated in order to fad-proof yourself against "the thought-factory we call public opinion"? 

Teen Dantexting

Friend of this blog Jay has posted a fun parody of those guides to teen texting abbreviations. Parents, use his guide to find out if your teen has been texting about Dante.

A few samples:

NSFW: Ninth sphere for win
SMH: Saw Malebolge, horrible
YMMV: You must meet Virgil

A few of my own suggestions of what to look out for as you monitor your kids' High Medieval literature texting habits:

TTFN: Take that, Farinata
BC: Berate Ciacco
OMFG: On my flying Geryon or Only Malacoda farts—gross!
BBL: Burning Brunetto Latini
SMFH: Simony makes feet hot
ROTFL: Remember only things following Lethe
ICYMI: In Cocytus you meet icicles

No Man's Land

Soldiers of the Wiltshire Regiment attack across no-man's-land at the Somme, August 1916.

It's the last day of January. How many New Year's resolutions lie in smoldering ruins? I've managed to give new life to two of mine—losing weight and reading seventy books—through a simple change of routine. I'm spending half an hour on the stationary bike every day, half an hour to exercise, clear my mind, and read. I've already managed to blister through three novels this way: Evelyn Waugh's hilarious Scoop, Ready Player One (about which more at another time, perhaps), and the subject of today's post, No Man's Land, by Simon Tolkien.

I haven't actually finished No Man's Land yet, but I already want to recommend it. It was a breath of fresh air, after the empty ephemera of Ready Player One, to read a novel that, while imperfect, wants to grapple with real life, with things that matter. 

No Man's Land is the story of Adam Raine, a London boy whose father, a socialist labor activist, moves himself and Adam to a coal mining town in the north of England. There, Adam's father, a changed man after the tragedy that drove them from London, struggles as a union negotiator to balance the demands of his fellow workers with the realities of mining life and the claims of the mine's owner, Sir John Scarsdale. Adam struggles to fit in; he's a bright, bookish boy and his father works hard to keep him in school and out of the mine. Demagogues and agitators threaten Adam's father's position and the safety of everyone in the mine, and local boys show a natural hostility to Adam. Another tragedy brings the two halves of this story together, and sets Adam's life on a new and unexpected course.

When Adam is taken in by Sir John with the promise of seeing that he completes his schooling and has a chance at an Oxford scholarship, Adam becomes close with Seaton, Sir John's elder son, a principled, good-humored army officer, but falls foul of Brice, Seaton's younger brother, a boy Adam's own age. Brice is conceited, self-absorbed, and entitled. He also aims to marry Miriam, the beautiful daughter of the local parson and the object of Adam's admiration since the day he met her. 

The novel begins in 1900, when Adam is a small boy, and, as the title suggests, the First World War is the ever-present, looming threat to all of this—to Adam's romance with Miriam, to the mine and its workers and their families, to Sir John and his heirs, to Britain, and to the lives of all the characters. When war comes, most of them end up in the trenches. Adam, Seaton, and their peers from Scarsdale end up at the Somme.

I have less than 200 pages to go, and the story has just brought us to July 1, 1916, the awful first day of the British assault on the Somme, a day that saw over 19,000 British soldiers killed, most within the first few hours, and another 38,000 wounded. The author depicts the battle in all its horror, without flinching or holding back. Not all of the characters made it out of that first day--and the Battle of the Somme lasted until mid-November. 

With its class struggle, romantic rivalries, and large cast of workers, housewives, butlers, country parsons, lords, and ladies, No Man's Land teeters on the brink of melodrama. Comparisons to Downton Abbey suggest themselves, but the novel reminds me more of Dickens than contemporary TV. The characters are sympathetically portrayed and well-drawn, and their conflicts with each other feel real. This is especially refreshing in a Games of Thrones era in which everything is resolved with murder, rape, or some combination of the two. 

Most interestingly, and something the publishers have taken full advantage of in promoting the book—the novel is dedicated to JRR Tolkien, the author's grandfather. Simon Tolkien drew on his grandfather's experiences at the Somme as an inspiration, and certain elements of the narrative, such as Adam's chaste, dutiful pursuit of Miriam, reflect real moments from Tolkien's life. The novel is mostly fiction, the plot and characters mostly fictitious, but its connection to a remarkable real life man lends the novel a richness that elevates the book.

I may have more thoughts when I've finished the book. As I've said, it's imperfect, but it's very, very good, a refreshingly old-fashioned novel that realistically and sympathetically depicts a crucial historical moment through the lives of ordinary people. 

What readers say about Dark Full of Enemies

Dark Full of Enemies has been out for a month now and the first reader reviews are coming in!

John, reviewing the book on Goodreads, describes the novel as

An Alistair MacLean-style, World War 2 commando mission story. It follows McKay, a clandestine super Marine called on to form a team of expendables and blow up a Nazi dam in Norway. McKay is sleep-deprived, guilty, unsure of himself--yet focused and cold-blooded once the bullets start flying. 

When the novel revs up, it's simple to the point of poetry. Plans go awry; friendships are tested; trust is annihilated and restored; many things explode and get shot up in ways the reader will find satisfying. At its core, Dark Full of Enemies is the story of a man's search for meaning in the back alleys of a world at war.

Steven, a reader reviewing the novel on Amazon, writes that 

The action occurs in a place I had not heard of before and adds another dimension to the story. . . . The story helps make the characters come alive and the events move quickly. I would recommend this to those who like novels based on history but appreciate some action. 

In a starred review at Goodreads (four out of five), Jay writes: 

In McKay, Poss writes a soldier in conflict with his senses of loyalty to country, duty to his mission, concern for his men, and dignity as an individual. The resolution to the conflict is satisfying, even if it has a whiff if blockbuster drama/thriller about it. 

Though Dark Full of Enemies is fiction, the war it takes place in was all too real. I would recommend this book to those interested in World War II and/or historical fiction. Personally, Poss' book has encouraged me to learn more about the Scandinavian campaigns. 

In an unsigned Amazon review, a reader writes: 

What an awesome read that has you from page one immersed into the story. He has the ability to make you part of the plot and to paint with words the environment you are in. The dark, the extreme cold, the danger surround you. I highly recommend Dark Full of Enemies!!!

Reader Jared, also reviewing the book at Amazon, writes: 

Once started, I couldn't put this book down. It takes the harsh realities and impact of war and pulls it glaringly into the light. . . . Doesn't matter if you are a history buff or just an adventure addict, this is the book for you.

Check out the above reviews, and stay turned for more. If you've read Dark Full of Enemies, I'd love for you to share your opinion of the book on Amazon, Goodreads, or elsewhere. If you haven't, check it out and let us know what you think!

The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes

This is a good time for Norse myth—or at least it should be. Thor is one of the most popular parts of the central cast of the Avengers series, TV is loaded with Viking or Norse-themed programming, and last year geek darling Neil Gaiman released Norse Mythology, his own retelling of some Norse legends. 

Unfortunately a lot of this pop culture is just Norse-flavored. The Thor, Odin, Loki, and Asgard of the Marvel franchise are entertaining but considerably different from their original versions. TV shows like Vikings have serious historical problems. And even Gaiman's Norse Mythology, an entertaining enough read, limits its focus to the gods—and not just to the gods, but to the subgroup of the Æsir—and his depictions of their personalities owe more to the characterizations of Anthony Hopkins and Tom Hiddleston than to the dark and often inscrutable gods of the eddas. 

An excellent short introduction

I was really pleased, then, with a new book I read last week by Carolyne Larrington: The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes, from Thames & Hudson. I found the book on the recommendation of Dr. Jackson Crawford of UC Boulder, about whom more below.

I was already familiar with Larrington thanks to her excellent recent translation of the Poetic Edda (a.k.a. the Elder Edda) for Oxford World Classics. She's an accomplished expert in the field and clearly loves the material, which is a good combination when approaching something as diffuse, arcane, and incomplete as Norse myth.

What we know is based almost entirely on the Poetic Edda and another work by Snorri Sturluson, the Prose Edda, and it is apparent from both that we don't have all the stories the Norse told about their gods and heroes. What we do have is episodic, allusive, and varies wildly in tone, sometimes within the same stories. Larrington retells the myths carefully, noting often what we do and do not know about the fuller mythology, and retelling them mostly on their own terms, without a lot of modern reinterpretation. Where she does offer "explanations" of certain tales, she is appropriately undogmatic.

A few things I appreciated about Larrington's book:

• Short, well-told summaries of the major myths, with good explanations of things first-time readers of Norse mythology would need to know.
• Larrington uses the original spellings of the gods' and heroes' names throughout, including the letters eth and thorn: thus Oðinn instead of Odin and Þorr instead of Thor. This seems like a minor detail, but I think it helps distance the reader from comic books or modern interpretations and open them to the originals.
• Sidebars on interesting side stories or other topics.
• Over 100 illustrations, many from Romantic era books with anachronisms like winged helmets, but the pictures are a welcome help in imagining the stories. Many others are photographs of archaeological finds like the Lewis chessmen, rune stones, or the Oseberg ship or reproductions of original medieval or early modern Icelandic drawings.
• Larrington is refreshingly frank about the unappealing nature of the Norse gods. Where Marvel's Thor is a well-intentioned but arrogant young warrior who learns humility and self-sacrifice and Odin is a wise—and, well, godlike—old man, the real Þorr is an unapologetically violent bruiser who kills people for humiliating him and Oðinn is a malevolent trickster who first favors then traduces mere mortals in order to stock his hall with warriors.
• Larrington includes excellent summaries of several major human heroes, including Volsung, Sigurð the dragon-slayer, and Ragnar Loðbrok. 

All in all, an excellent short book, and a great introduction to the topic. I recommend this heartily as a first stop.

More if you're interested

Check out all of the books I mentioned above, but especially the original sources for our understanding of Norse mythology, the Poetic Edda and Snorri's Prose Edda.

In addition to Larrington's translation of the Poetic Edda, the aforementioned Jackson Crawford has an excellent new translation available from Hackett Publishing. As a bonus, he includes his adaptation of the Hávamál, "The Sayings of the High One," the Cowboy Hávamál, a western-inflected interpretation inspired by his grandfather. You can listen to Crawford read it here.

Another book Crawford recommends in the video linked above is the longest and most complicated of the Icelandic sagas, Njals saga, or The Saga of Burnt Njall. I read the Robert Cook translation he recommends while I was working on the first draft of No Snakes in Iceland after college. It's a wonderful book, one I've been meaning to reread for years.

Fortunately, Crawford has just completed a six-part summary retelling of Njal's Saga for his YouTube channel. You can watch all six parts below. Check it out!

Part I: Hrút and young Hallgerð
Part II: Gunnar's rise
Part III: Gunnar's fall
Part IV: Njal's sons
Part V: The burning
Part VI: Kári

Darkest Hour & Churchill in film and history

Yesterday I saw Darkest Hour, the latest in a welcome—to me—spate of Winston Churchill films. 

Those who complained of Dunkirk's crucial lack of generals pushing flags around map tables have the movie they wanted in Darkest Hour—this film takes place almost entirely in smoky conference rooms and halls of power. That's not a criticism—there should be room for both kinds of movies. But Darkest Hour is much, much more than a recreation of grand strategy and the decisions of powerful men. It's an excellent dramatization of determination in the face of defeat and the crucial role one man can play.

The film

When Darkest Hour begins in May 1940, Nazi Germany, flush with diplomatic victory in Czechoslovakia (1938) and military conquest in Poland (1939), Denmark, and Norway (April 1940), has invaded France. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, once lauded as the savior of world peace, is now derided and mocked to his face in Parliament. Chamberlain recognizes that he must step down, and that political and military necessity require the formation of a coalition government between rival parties. Chamberlain nominates Lord Halifax as his successor, but it rapidly becomes clear—to the immense exasperation of Chamberlain, Halifax, and King George VI—that the only member of their party that the opposition will accept as head of a coalition is Winston Churchill.

Darkest Hour follows Churchill—65 years old, outspoken political pariah and flipflopper, veteran of many failed imperial and military ventures, the most prominent of which is the Gallipoli campaign—through roughly the first month of his premiership, into but not quite through the crisis at Dunkirk, which plays out, off-screen, through the last third or so of the film. Throughout, Churchill must battle rivals within his own government, especially Chamberlain and Halifax, who want to pursue negotiations with Germany in order to avoid further bloodshed and the total destruction of the British army in France.

The performances throughout are excellent. Gary Oldman, in heavy prosthetics and a fat suit, is very good as Churchill. His voice never quite loses that familiar Gary Oldman timbre, and he sounds whinier than Churchill when reaching into the upper registers, but he captures a great deal of the spirit and especially the energy of the man—the real man, not the icon. Oldman ably walks the line between caricature and character assassination, about which more below. 

Other standouts include Stephen Dillane (Thomas Jefferson in HBO's John Adams) as Lord Halifax, depicted here as perhaps oilier and more conniving than in real life but a powerful opponent to what Halifax perceives as Churchill's recklessness with the lives of British soldiers and civilians. Ronald Pickup is good as a politically disgraced and physically failing Chamberlain. Kristin Scott Thomas is good as Clemmie Churchill and Ben Mendelsohn is good as a standoffish George VI who must warm up to Churchill over the course of the film. Lily James brings the luminous innocence of her characters from Downtown Abbey, Cinderella, and Baby Driver to the small—probably too small—part of Elizabeth Layton, Churchill's new secretary. Crucially, all of these performers work well together, and especially with Oldman, who is willing to share his scenes with other characters rather than grandstand.

The film is beautifully scored by Dario Marianelli, and beautifully shot by Bruno Delbonnel. Especially stunning are scenes set in Parliament or Churchill's underground war cabinet. A radio broadcast lit by the red On Air bulb is particularly striking. The cinematography has a digital sheen that I don't care for, but digital cinematography is in the ascendant; you won't see many more Dunkirks going forward.

Darkest Hour as history

A brief word about the film's historical accuracy, something I've mentioned before that I care a lot about. 

Darkest Hour depicts an intensely busy and chaotic month in one of the most dramatic events of world history. Naturally, the screenwriter and filmmakers have massaged the material to fit within a two-hour runtime. Characterizations are mostly accurate, and the events themselves are largely true to the historical record.

I was underwhelmed by the famous and apparently controversial scene in which Churchill travels one stop on the tube and talks to ordinary Londoners. One reviewer, who apparently didn't pay much attention to the movie, claims that Darkest Hour "dishonors Winston Churchill's memory." The tube scene is charming and sentimental—and extremely restrained compared to the sentiment in historical films by Steven Spielberg—but hardly dishonors the man. Oldman, in an interview linked below, described it as "lyrical," a poetic scene that aims at "emotional truth" rather than literal, events-based drama. I'm fine with that.

Like those of another great World War II film, Valkyrie, the events of Darkest Hour are well known. What the film succeeds at brilliantly is portraying the doubt and fear of living through those events ignorant of the outcome. That's always a worthy achievement.

But the film Darkest Hour reminded me most of was Lincoln, with its dramatic depiction of how ideals and determination must force their way through the realities of political life: compromise, cooperation, wooing, and sometimes abject failure. Like Lincoln, Darkest Hour is held together by a great central performance. And through those perfomances both films show us leaders who can accurately parse what is and is not important, which hills to evacuate and which to die on, and, rather than succumbing to defeat or cynicism or mere jockeying for power, see the big picture and drive toward it.

Dueling Winstons

As I mentioned above, there have been a number of films about or prominently featuring Churchill in the last few years. While waiting for Darkest Hour to start, I was able to tick off seven others:

The Gathering Storm, starring Albert Finney
Into the Storm, starring Brendan Gleeson
Churchill's Secret, starring Michael Gambon
Churchill, starring Brian Cox
The King's Speech, with Timothy Spall as Churchill
The Crown, with John Lithgow as Churchill
Inglourious Basterds, with Rod Taylor making a cameo appearance as Churchill

And there are surely more.

Oldman is a powerhouse in Darkest Hour, but as I've hinted above, I never quite overcame my sense that I was watching a really good performance. The voice, for me, was the giveaway. This is not to detract from Oldman's performance or the film—go see it—but Oldman will ultimately come up second or third in my favorite cinematic Churchills.

Albert Finney's performance in The Gathering Storm is a longstanding classic, a handsome and well-acted TV movie that gives you a very good sense of Churchill out of power. This is Churchill during his "wilderness years," politically ostracized and barely making ends meet through his writing. Finney is excellent. The best sound-alike I've come across is certainly Timothy Spall in The King's Speech, where he has a small and not particularly accurate role in the abdication crisis. Into the Storm boasts one of my favorite actors, Brendan Gleeson, as Churchill, but Gleeson is too burly for Churchill and the film is a rather cheap-looking TV production. Michael Gambon, the second Dumbledore, was miscast in Churchill's Secret, which also missteps by devoting a lot of its time to a fictional nurse's personal struggles. I haven't seen last year's other Winston movie, Churchill, but I love Brian Cox and he apparently gave a solid performance in a film that was—speaking of character assassination earlier— otherwise garbage.

To the surprise of no one more than myself, perhaps the best Churchill performance I've seen recently—vying with Finney's classic and the bold new Oldman—is John Lithgow in The Crown. 

Lithgow is too thin and tall—by eight inches—for Churchill, and he's American to boot. So what a wonderful surprise to see a nuanced, carefully balanced and real portrayal of Churchill. To me, Lithgow's unlikely Churchill perfectly blends the traits that make it easy to caricature the man in one direction or the other: the crankiness and amiability, the cold blooded determination and maudlin sentimentality, the confidence and bouts of depression, the devotion to honor and tradition and the political calculation, the high-flown grandiosity and candid self-deprecation. Churchill was both a frustrating man and one who inspired intense devotion. I haven't seen both sides of him portrayed quite as well.

More if you're interested

A few books and other resources that I've enjoyed and benefited from on the topic of Winston Churchill in World War II:

Winston's War: Churchill 1940-1945, by Max Hastings is a comprehensive look at Churchill's wartime leadership, including much, much more than the month covered by Darkest Hour, including Churchill's ill-fated courtship of American help (carefully and subtly portrayed in Darkest Hour), his obsession with commando operations and opening a front in the Mediterranean, and his eventual marginalization by Roosevelt in favor of Stalin and his fall from power. It's a triumphant and tragic story brilliantly told. I highly recommend it.

The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill & Hitler, by John Lukacs, is a short, brisk history that frames May and June of 1940 as a battle between two titanic personalities at the height of their powers. Both Churchill and Hitler struggled with recalcitrant subordinates and military setbacks, and both traveled extensively back and forth between command centers and points of crisis as the invasion of France unfolded. Lukacs, with pointed insight, does an excellent job of laying out the parallels but also, more importantly, explaining the deep differences between the two men and their sides and foreshadowing the different courses Churchill's and Hitler's wars would take. As I watched Darkest Hour, I was reminded again and again of The Duel, and when I watched the end credits I realized why—Lukacs served as the film's historical advisor. 

Lukacs has also written Five Days in London: May 1940 and Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning, Churchill's First Speech as Prime Minister, two short books on even narrower slivers of Churchill's early leadership: a few days during the collapse of the Allies in France and a single speech to parliament. 

Winston Churchill: A Life, by the late Sir John Keegan, is a short biography from the Penguin Lives series. Keegan manages to compress Churchill's massive life into a brisk 200 pages, with good attention given to his wartime years. I recommend this biography to anyone setting out to study Churchill for the first time.

Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Great Speeches is a wonderful Penguin Classics collection of Churchill's oratory from across his long career, including the three immortal speeches dramatized in Darkest Hour.

Finally, Dan Snow of the History Hit podcast has two excellent interviews on Darkest Hour available: one with Anthony McCarten, the film's screenwriter, and another with Gary Oldman himself, who is remarkably humble and candid about his approach to portraying Churchill. Each interview is around twenty minutes long, and well worth the time to listen.

In conclusion

Go see Darkest Hour. It's a very good film and an excellent look at one month of history. Pair it with Dunkirk to get a sense of those events from the top down and the bottom up. And check out some of those other Churchill films. If you already have and have a favorite film version, let me know which it is with a comment. But above all, dig into the history and learn from it. It's something Churchill himself, no mean historian, would heartily endorse.

Writing Rules

John J. Miller, who teaches journalism at Hillsdale College and hosts the excellent Bookmonger and Great Books podcasts, offers five pieces of writing advice inspired by great advice from other writers.

Be sure to follow Miller's links to Elmore Leonard's ten rules for writing and the great Orwell essay "Politics and the English Language," which is always worth a read. Orwell's final piece of advice is crucial.