An exclusive excerpt from Griswoldville

In case you missed it, a few days ago I made an excerpt from my newest novel, Griswoldville, available on my website. Click here to read it, or click here for more information about the novel.

The excerpt is two short chapters from Part III: Miles Gloriosus. The narrator, Georgie Wax, has been conscripted into the Georgia militia along with his grandfather, Lafayette “Fate” Eschenbach, and his cousins Wes and Cal. While their grandfather has experience in a wartime militia from decades before, Georgie, Wes, and Cal have a lot to learn, and find that war is not as glorious or as fun as its reputation suggests, and the cost of war is enormous.

If you’ve been following this blog, the excerpt includes the section about heraldry I wrote about here several months ago.

Give the excerpt a look! I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please do get yourself a copy of Griswoldville. It’s a story that’s been interesting and important to me for a long time, and I’m excited to have finished the book and finally made it available.

As always, thanks for reading!

LOL—Leonard, Orwell, and Lewis on writing

While I’m always reading about writing, or trying to learn about writing by reading, I have most benefited and gotten the most food for thought from the lists of personal rules and guidelines great writers have set for themselves. While it’s possible to divine a writer’s personal rules simply by reading their work—who didn’t realize, before his Oprah interview, that Cormac McCarthy wouldn’t touch a semicolon?—I’m always interested to see a writer lay out his or her rules for others.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I’ve finally gotten around to reading some Elmore Leonard. I recall reading Leonard’s celebrated ten rules for writing in college, when I didn’t even know who he was, and I recall objecting to several of them. Older and wiser now, and finally familiar with his work—in the last month I’ve read Valdez is Coming, Freaky Deaky, Last Stand at Saber River, Hombre, Out of Sight, and the short story “Three-Ten to Yuma”—I can see the wisdom of his rules and the way he used them to form his writing. I also appreciate, based on interviews I’ve watched with him before he died, how undogmatic he was about the ten rules—a trait that we’ll see he has in common with these other two writers.

Leonard’s rules were originally published in The New York Times as “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle” in 2001. You can read the whole article online at the NYT—or the Guardian if that’s paywalled—but here are the ten rules themselves:

1. Never open a book with weather.

2. Avoid prologues.

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

“My most important rule,” Leonard goes on, “is one that sums up the 10. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

Again, I appreciate how unassuming Leonard is about his rules—they’re his rules, he reiterates, not universally applicable Newtonian laws of good writing. “There are certain writers,” he says in this interview from 2002, “who can write all the weather they want.” It’s all about proportion, achieving a desired effect, and getting out of your own way.

To move from fiction to non-fiction, George Orwell, in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” which I’ve blogged about a couple times before, similarly concludes with a list of six rules that should govern any writing that aims at arguing a point and telling the truth, particularly in the political essays Orwell mastered.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Again, a final law that sums up the rest, and again, an insistence that “one could keep all of [these rules] and still write bad English.” Rules are important, but the rules won’t save your writing.

Finally, to turn to a writer superbly skilled at both fiction and non-fiction, CS Lewis actually provided guidelines or rules on a couple of occasions, two of which are collected in this 2010 post from Justin Taylor. From a letter to a young American fan in 1956:

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.

3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”

4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the things you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us the thing is “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please, will you do my job for me.”

5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

And from his final interview in the spring of 1963:

The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that.

The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him.

I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.

You can see a variety of concerns in these lists of ten, six, and five respectively, but what do Leonard, Orwell, and Lewis share?

First, I see a particular concern with clarity. Several rules relate to this, from Lewis’s insistence on concrete rather than abstract to Orwell’s warning against foreign vocabulary. I’ve heard Orwell accused of being a “linguistic chauvanist” because of this; what he’s concerned with is clarity, concreteness, and the avoidance of abstraction. Bureaucratese and journalistic flimflam tend to shroud things in a luminous fog of latinate jargon. Lewis’s example of “mortality rose” is a good example of what Orwell, who had plenty of experience with socialist and Communist verbal shenanigans, had in mind.

Second, I also see a related concern with directness. Leonard, as an author of fiction, is perhaps the best on this point. Whether avoiding clumsy, amateurish dialogue tags—one of the surest marks of the hack—or not bogging down the narrative in stylistic frippery or elaborate descriptions, his rules are all about his “attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing,” which extends even to the rules of grammar: “if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.” Orwell seconds that motion, explicitly advising the writer to “break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” Orwell gives some of the most precisely mechanical advice in these three sets of rules, down to the old active-passive voice debate. Perhaps the biggest weakness of passive voice is that it doubles the grammatical logic of a sentence back on itself—in other words, it’s indirect. In Lewis’s deceptively simple formulation, write “exactly” what you want to say.

Third, all share a concern with what I’ll call liveliness. Orwell warns us away from cliche; Leonard shoos us away from long descriptions, unnecessary details about weather or setting, and any “part that readers tend to skip.” Not for nothing are cliches, in what is now a bit of a cliche itself, called “dead metaphors.” Clear, direct writing will have a living quality to it—the images will simply appear in your mind without coaxing. Witness Lewis’s image of driving sheep down a road.

Finally, I see these three writers, in the lack of dogmatism I’ve already noted on their part, trying to give advice but leaving open space for art. Despite their emphases on clarity and directness, all three are aware of the subjectivity of language and all three urge their readers to take care. They realize that all the sweat and blood a writer can possibly pour out in pursuit of precision can still result in failure, and so they all conclude by saying: drop the rules when you need to. And you will need to.

Perhaps more later, and perhaps I could gloss a few of these things from examples of where I’ve tried—tried—to implement them in my own writing. For now, read these three lists of rules, read these three writers to see where their rules led them, and learn.

Elizabeth I: A Study in Insecurity

One of my favorite series of books right now is the Penguin Monarchs, an ongoing set of short biographies of (almost) every ruler of England since the tenth century. The series includes forty small, handsomely designed matching hardbacks with custom jacket art and, underneath, the relevant monarch’s signature embossed and gilded. The dynasties are color-coded in bands across the spines. No set of books could have been more carefully calculated to appeal to me. It’s a little short on the Anglo-Saxons and Danes—including only Athelstan, whose story is excellently retold by Tom Holland; Æthelred, a forthcoming volume by Richard Abels, a biographer of Alfred the Great; Cnut; and Edward the Confessor—but otherwise wonderful.

The series has also interested me because the books are so short—90-120 pages maximum for the body of the text, with a few pages of endnotes or further reading and a small index. For some of these rulers, the relative dearth of sources lends itself to a terse, concise treatment. Despite the immense power he wielded, Cnut, for example, simply goes missing from the available historical record for years at a time, so that an honest biographer must pass over large parts of the man’s life in silence.

But for other monarchs, especially those nearer the present, the writers’ questions must be different: How do I get everything in? or, better, How do I get in enough to suggest the whole picture without leaving out so much that I do violence to the subject? which is really two interlocking concerns.

It’s a tricky balance, and I think of the eighteen volumes from the Penguin Monarchs I’ve read so far, none has managed it quite as well as Helen Castor’s Elizabeth I: A Study in Insecurity. In this brisk, elegantly written life, Castor covers all the major conflicts, events, and personalities of the queen’s life and reign, having taken as her organizing principle Elizabeth’s insecurity or, put another, slightly more psychological way, her anxiety. And justly so—Castor begins with the execution of Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, shortly after Elizabeth’s birth.

When the present queen ascended the throne in 1952, prime minister Winston Churchill noted that she, “like her predecessor,” Elizabeth I, “did not pass her childhood in any certain expectation of the Crown.” Indeed, that is one of the attractions and points of interest of the lives of both women. But it’s an otherwise superficial parallel. Elizabeth I lost her mother to the axe on her own father’s orders when she was only three months old. Through her girlhood her father, his cronies, and parliament strove publicly to declare her legally a bastard and deprive her of the rights of succession. As a teenager she had to duck and weave through a series of political and religious upheavals, first one direction under her younger brother Edward, then another under her elder sister, the Catholic Queen Mary. She was, on top of everything, a woman in a world driven by men. By the time she came unexpectedly to the throne aged 25, she was already a veteran, a canny survivor, a hunted outsider, and she brought those instincts to a position of immense but tenuous power.

Castor takes these early circumstances and deftly builds a character study of an Elizabeth defined by her insecurities. Furthermore, she does so without resorting to cheap psychoanalysis, romanticism, or any more guesswork than necessary with such a famously reticent subject, a woman whose mottoes included Video et taceo—“I see and keep silent.” Elizabeth, as Castor depicts her, is both calculating and guarded; keenly, almost painfully conscious of public image and political theatre, which she uses to her own advantage and for her own survival; silent on her father’s role in her mother’s death, but willing to use his memory to shore up her power; alive to the dangers of suitors, rivals, fanatics like the Puritans among her own subjects, and larger predators like the King of Spain, and active in espionage to forearm against these threats; heavily reliant upon a tiny handful of totally trusted advisers for political advice, military intelligence, and emotional support; and cautious in the extreme, preferring procrastination and purposeful inertia to rash decision making. Not for nothing could she be painted calmly resting her hand on a globe while storms wreck Spanish fleets outside her window, or wearing a magnificently tailored dress with a coiled viper on her sleeve and her cape covered in eyes and ears—a powerful and deadly queen of spies.

Throughout Elizabeth I: A Study in Insecurity, Castor shows us these character traits in action, but in no crisis are they more pronounced than during the long imprisonment of Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. For a book of this size, Castor gives a remarkably clear and understandable synopsis of the events that pitted these two women against each other, and when the fatal moment comes and Elizabeth signs Mary’s death warrant, the reader almost feels her desperation at having been forced into such a decision.

Castor handles all of this very well, but I would, perhaps, like to have seen more of a moral reckoning with Elizabeth’s execution of Mary beyond the quandary into which Elizabeth was forced. The Penguin Monarchs volume on her elder sister Mary points out that while she could have had Elizabeth executed as a threat, she did not, and that Elizabeth, though she hemmed and hawed, did not scruple to spare her cousin when the time came. That’s a striking contrast, and a potentially damaging one. I would also like to have seen more on Elizabeth’s preemptive invasion of Ireland and some of England’s early efforts at colonization in Virginia. But I would hate to see such a trim, carefully constructed narrative bogged down by extra side stories.

Otherwise, I have no complaints. This short biography is fast-paced, readable, well written, and insightful. It’s a model of the kind of historical writing Herbert Butterfield described in the quotation I shared recently: “The historian is never more himself than when he is searching his mind for a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity.” Elizabeth I: A Study in Insecurity, in under a hundred pages, gives the reader a real sense of the Tudor era’s complexity and danger and a sympathetic portrait of a sophisticated, secretive, and great queen. It’s magnificently done.

Do check it out if you can get ahold of it, and look into the other volumes of this excellent series.

Talking John Birch with Sectarian Review

Sterling Hayden as General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Hot on the heels of our discussion of Alex Jones on the Sectarian Review Podcast, I rejoin Danny—and old podcasting compatriot Jay Eldred—for a chat about the John Birch Society. We cover its Cold War origins, its ejection from mainstream conservatism in the early 1960s, the patterns it set for conspiracist political perspectives down to the present, and the real John Birch—a man whose complicated and fascinating story was eventually lost in the mix of partisan politics and paranoid rhetoric. Great talk. Hope y’all enjoy!

A Coen brothers miscellany

Buster rides into town

The trailer for latest Coen brothers movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, dropped last night. While it had been announced as a miniseries to premier on Netflix (that’s our second Netflix-distributed film this week, incidentally), it’s apparently been retooled as a single film, an anthology telling six separate but apparently interrelated western stories.

The Coens have had an clear affinity for the West and westerns since the beginning of their careers. True Grit and No Country for Old Men are the obvious examples, but Blood Simple, despite its modern setting, spends a lot of its runtime on lonely Texas roads and in a saloon; Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski have plenty of cowboy elements, including a bank robbery by bandits in dusters and the great Sam Elliott himself as the semi-divine Stranger; and, not accidentally, the ultimate hero of Hail, Caesar!—the man most aligned with his telos, the man least comfortable in the corrupt world of Hollywood, and the man who helps Eddie Mannix recover his own teleological role in the world—is a singing cowboy. Whenever a man in a cowboy hat appears in a Coen brothers movie, you can bet something big is about to happen.

The film has a stellar cast. Liam Neeson and Brendan Gleeson, two of my favorite actors, pop up in the trailer, along with Coen veterans Stephen Root and Tim Blake Nelson, who so wonderfully played Delmar in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Also interested to see Ralph Ineson, the weak but determined father in The Witch. I could do without James Franco, but I trust the Coens to do something good with him.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs looks appropriately weird for the Coens: a combination of humor, violence, surrealism, and glimpses of beauty that no one else can blend.

Throughlines

Here’s an interesting video essay on the Coens I watched recently. To cut through the clickbaity titles, “The Theme of Every Coens Movie” or “How Every Coen Brothers Movie is Connected” is money. Or, to be more precise, greed.

I’m sure I’m not the only person to notice an identical black briefcase full of money as a plot element of both Fargo and No Country for Old Men, or a similar briefcase (and one ringer) in The Big Lebowski, or Linda’s this-wordly striving for cash for elective cosmetic surgeries as the driving force behind Burn After Reading, or the obvious greed of Paul Newman and M. Emmett Walsh in The Hudsucker Proxy and Blood Simple. You can grab examples from every Coen brothers film, which this video essay does. It’s thorough and very well done.

My one quibble is that with the essay’s language about the Coens critiquing “capitalism.” That’s just too ideological for the Coens. It’s the kind of language the Commies use in Hail, Caesar!, a bunch of Marxist neckbeards who ignore the one working class person they encounter, their cleaning lady (remind you of anyone else?). They’re the targets of none-too-subtle ridicule, something I think the essayist should have taken into consideration. While the Coens show a deep concern with greed, I don’t think their problem is with money generally or capitalism specifically.

You might be in a Coen brothers movie if…

One more video tidbit, a YouTube listicle about some of the recurring tropes, plot elements, and themes running through the Coens’ films. This touches on a few of the other things I’ve mentioned above—especially the corruption wrought by the love of money, which is the root of all kinds of evil—and also examines the morality of the Coens’ stories. It’s a fun watch, and worth the fifteen minutes.

The Coens and personality

I have a theory that, with now eighteen films under the Coens’ belts, you could create a pretty comprehensive personality test just by having a person pick their favorite—or two of three favorites—from the Coens’ filmography.

My own favorite is Barton Fink, while my wife’s is Raising Arizona, my brother’s is Burn After Reading, and I have friends who swear by Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, No Country for Old Men, and others. Their films are so varied in subject matter and tone that there’s something in there for everyone, and with a proper method of analysis you could use a list of favorites to learn a lot about a person.

Somebody jump on that.

Most of What Follows is True

Fisherman drying cod in St. Johns, Newfoundland, c. 1900.

I’ve posted before about the CBC Ideas Podcast, a series I discovered when they devoted two episodes to the Icelandic sagas. I hope they do more of those, but in the meantime I’ve listened to some very good episodes. One of the latest covers a topic near to my heart: historical fiction.

The talk, “Most of What Follows is True,” takes its name from the opening of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a film much loved by author Michael Crummey, the lecturer. Crummey, now a writer and an author of several historical novels, describes catching documentary on TV about the real Butch and Sundance, and his disappointment at the pair’s real-life fate: no Bolivian army, no glorious final moment, guns blazing, but a murder-suicide after being cornered in a miserable hovel. Which raises the question of what most means when you say that “most of what follows is true.”

Crummey, a native of Newfoundland on the Atlantic coast of Canada, considers several novels that purport to be historical but mangle the time and place in which they take place, and presents his own approach to some of his own writing. How much, he asks, does the historical novelist owe the past? How far should the historical novelist go in massaging history to make a compelling story? These are questions I’ve been thinking about for years and, with Griswoldville freshly released and still very much on my mind, I appreciated Crummey’s sensitive and thoughtful discussion, especially as it applied to accurately depicting a specific place and authentically evoking another time. Place and time are, of course, connected, since the past itself is a foreign country.

I’ve embedded Crummey’s talk in the post, above. It’s well worth your while to listen to! And do check him out on Goodreads. I’ll be looking for some of his work. River Thieves sounds particularly interesting.

Outlaw King—an anti-Braveheart?

A few weeks ago, the trailer for Outlaw King, a new film distributed by Netflix, dropped online. Somehow I had never even heard of this project until the trailer hit, and while my first impression was that this would be another one of those low-budget, direct-to-Netflix releases with a cool poster and not a lot of substance, actually watching the trailer completely upended that assumption.

Outlaw King tells the story of Robert the Bruce and his bloody quest to unite Scotland into a single kingdom under his rule. As I summarized in my Historical Movie Monday post about Braveheart, by the time Outlaw King begins in 1304, Scotland had been in political chaos for thirty years. The death of a king with no direct heir, the death of the best potential heir to the throne on her journey back from Norway, and the interference of England’s King Edward I as a (at first) neutral arbiter spawned the anarchy and wars depicted so memorably (and inaccurately) in Braveheart. Robert spends this film reducing castles and strongholds one by one to secure his rightful rule and, in the climactic battle, fights the English at Loudon Hill, a small but important Scottish victory that came just before Edward’s death.

The cast looks great. Chris Pine is an unexpected choice for such a role, but based on early reviews he acquits himself admirably. Stephen Dillane, whose cunning gravitas has been exploited to good effect by HBO several times (as Thomas Jefferson in John Adams, which I’ve seen, and as Stannis Baratheon in Game of Thrones, which I haven’t) looks like a wonderfully ruthless Edward. The cast is also full of great faces like James Cosmo, who played Hamish’s father in Braveheart, Tony Curran, and Sam Spruell.

Netflix will release Outlaw King both streaming and in theaters. Some see this is as a bid for prestige and a place at the Oscars table. I don’t know about that, but I’m glad we’ll be able to see this in theatres, as this kind of film—with its sweeping landscapes, sumptuous costumes, widescreen cinematography, and large-scale battle scenes—needs to be seen on the big screen. Imagine streaming Lawrence of Arabia on your phone. Blech.

But these aren’t the primary reasons I’m excited. As my post on Braveheart probably makes clear, medievalists and historians have a love-hate relationship with that film. We love it for all the things I just listed in describing Outlaw King, but we hate the liberties it takes with the past—from small stuff like the Scots wearing kilts centuries too soon or the use of woad centuries too late, to big things like the early death of Edward I or Wallace’s completely fictional sack of York. As you can imagine, the Scots—real, present day Scots, not tenth-generation Appalachians who think of themselves as Scottish—feel a similar ambivalence. Great movie, terrible history, and, unfortunately, that movie is how a lot of people perceive the history.

So it looks to me like Outlaw King is positioning itself to be the anti-Braveheart, a movie more rigorously dedicated to the past as the past, taking liberties and streamlining when necessary for the purposes of the medium. The fact that it restricts its story to a span of about three years also helps.

Here are two early responses to the trailer from people who seem to know their stuff. This video essayist points out that the clothing and weapons are pretty much spot-on for the era as opposed to Braveheart’s medieval Mad Max aesthetic. He includes some addenda in his comments. This video essayist, despite advertising his video as “Crimes Against Medieval Realism,” doesn’t say much more critical than that a castle’s crenelations are too small for the period and that the movie bows to the temptation to include a fiery arrow scene. Both videos point out some minor problems, but both end on positive, hopeful notes about the authenticity of the film. And to me, the fact that the biggest problems we can spot in the trailer are unthatched roofs, unwhitewashed castle walls, and minor anachronisms of gear or dress are positive signs compared to a lot of the problems in other medieval films.

Finally, here’s the Outlaw King review from Medievalists.net. You can read the full review there, but I wanted to pull out this excerpt specifically:

The strength of the film in its retelling of history is that it allows for the tangle of relationships between families, clans, and the aristocracy that made the Anglo-Scottish wars so complex. The characters (as the real historical people) are caught in a vast web of conflicting loyalties, which makes anything as simple as “unite the clans” a Herculean task. No one’s duty is clear cut . . . There is space made in the dialogue to allow for these relationships to be uncovered, which gives the audience a clearer picture of how difficult Robert’s task to bring Scotland together under one crown really is.

That—“allow[ing] for the tangle of relationships between families, clans, and the aristocracy”—is a tall order. A lot of movies fail at it, because, like or not, the relatively slow pace at which information is conveyed visually in a film does not easily allow for great complexity. Even good historical films, like Valkyrie, one of my favorites, have a streamline a lot. The art lies in balancing streamlining with the suggestion of complexity. And that’s an essentially historical act. As Herbert Butterfield put it, “The historian is never more himself than when he is searching his mind for a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity.” That Medievalists.net highlights this as a strength of Outlaw King makes me hopeful.

If Outlaw King can give us a good movie, like Braveheart, but approach the film’s history with a care for accuracy, authenticity, and real-life complexity, it will give medievalist film buffs what we’ve never had before—a movie of our own!

Talking Alex Jones and Facebook with the Sectarian Review

Last week I got to sit down with my friend Danny Anderson of the Sectarian Review Podcast to talk about a news item that caught the attention of both of us: the apparently coordinated "deplatforming" of InfoWars host and conspiracy nut extraordinaire Alex Jones by Facebook, YouTube, and iTunes. 

Despite our mutual loathing of Jones and the mindset—and harassment—he promotes, neither of us has found an adequate or satisfactory response to this news, and in our conversation we try to work out our thoughts the best we can. We cover a little of Jones's history, his embrace and promotion of a particularly wild-eyed brand of conspiracism, and talk about the events leading to his ejection from those social media platforms as well as some responses to the news. While I come at the topic from my own more Burkean conservative position and Danny approaches it with a more Marxist materialist perspective, we arrive at roughly the same conflicted non-conclusions. 

It was a fun if ultimately troubling conversation and, we think, an important one.

Look up and subscribe to Sectarian Review, and leave Danny a good review on iTunes! I'm grateful, as always, to be a guest there. I've embedded our talk in this post via Stitcher but you can also look it up and listen to it on iTunes—unlike Jones.

Griswoldville has arrived!

I'm thrilled to announce that the long-awaited day is come: my latest novel, Griswoldville, is now available! You can find it in both paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon.

A lot has happened since I started working on this project several years ago and in the two years since I began the actual writing. Work has slowed almost to a stop several times, especially with the birth of our second child last summer. But I'm thankful to say that with a little time set aside and with the support and encouragement of my family, especially my wife, Sarah, I've gotten the thing written, revised, designed, and published, and I'm excited to make it available to my readers.

The story is set in my home state, Georgia, during the American Civil War, and follows a family of the yeomanry—the class of small family farmers that made up the vast majority of white Southerners—through the travails of the war. That narrator, Georgie Wax, is the eldest of three brothers and is tasked with looking after the family farm when his father leaves for the war in the summer of 1861. His maternal grandfather, Fate Eschenbach, moves in with them, and together they take care of the hard work necessary to survive, right up until they are drafted into the state militia.

With Sherman's western army closing in from the north in the summer of 1864, Georgie, his grandfather, and their friends and family are set on a collision course with the ugly truth of war, combat, and the toll taken by both on ordinary people.

The book's description, from the back cover:

Madison Co., Georgia, 1864—14-year old Georgie Wax has spent the three years since his father left for the war looking after the family farm. With his mother and young brothers, Georgie and his grandfather Lafayette “Fate” Eschenbach have brought in the crops every fall, slaughtered the hogs every winter, and kept the farm running as the faraway war stretches on longer and longer and his father seems ever farther and farther away.

But when the enemy reaches their own state, Georgie and his grandfather are called up to the militia to protect Georgia against the invaders. Drilled mercilessly, mocked for lack of experience, and put to work at manual labor, Georgie finds war isn’t the adventure he imagined it to be. Only with Atlanta fallen and the enemy on the move will Georgie, Fate, and their fellow Georgia militiamen find a chance to prove themselves and save their homes from destruction—at a railside factory town called Griswoldville.

I hope y'all enjoy Griswoldville! If you do, please do me the favor of writing a short but honest review. As always, thanks for reading!

Above the Waterfall

This week I read my second Ron Rash novel of the year, Above the Waterfall. I got through it in two days—it's excellent. 

Like most of Rash's fiction, Above the Waterfall takes place in the western North Carolina mountains, but unlike his historical novels Serena, One Foot in Eden, and The Cove, this story takes place in the present: a horribly real, recognizable present. This is the Appalachia of dependence—on distant relations to care for the children of failing families, on big-city resort developers and tourist dollars, on chemicals like painkillers, pot, and meth.

Les, a 51-year old Sheriff on the verge of retirement, and Becky, a middle-aged park ranger and Les's sometime romantic attachment, narrate the story in alternating chapters of present and past tense. Becky survived a school shooting as a girl and is still haunted by it in her mid-forties. She tries to dull the memories of the tragedy, her permanently disrupted family life, and her difficulty forming relationships by retreat into the wilderness and meditation on the beauty of the world. A devotee of Gerard Manley Hopkins, her chapters brim with his kind of allusive, fragmentary poetry as she pieces together her memories with her present struggles, particularly her difficult feelings for Les and the pain of a recently failed relationship with another nature lover, a man who turned out to be an eco-terrorist. 

While Les is an artist too—a painter of watercolors—his career in law enforcement has imparted to his narration a directness that sits uneasily with his artistic inclinations. After decades arresting drug addicts and wife beaters, identifying corpses, and bearing bad news to the parents of meth-addicted children, his matter-of-factness even seems like a coping mechanism, as if he can only deal with the horrors he sees by describing them without polish.

“What more might we recover if open to it? Perhaps even God.”

— Above the Waterfall

What unites Les and Becky, other than a brief fling, an interrupted love affair, is an elderly man named Gerald. Becky has struck up a friendship with Gerald who, bereft of his wife and only son, lives alone on ancestral land abutting a new but struggling mountain resort. Gerald's meth-addicted nephew takes advantage of his generosity every chance he gets. While Becky tries to help Gerald however she can, Les, pestered by the resort's owner, has to try to persuade Gerald not to poach the trout living in the resort's stretch of the creek that flows through both properties. 

The morning after an altercation in the resort parking lot that almost sends Gerald to the morgue, scores of fish wash up on the banks of the creek—poisoned with kerosene dumped into the stream above a waterfall where, according to Gerald, now rare speckled trout have returned. Gerald insists he's innocent, and Becky takes his side. Les, juggling the resort's problems and a harrowing series of meth busts, is just trying to keep the peace during his last days on the job. It's not enough.

This is my new favorite from Rash. What gripped me in my old favorite, One Foot in Eden, were the strongly drawn relationships—between the young couple at the beginning of the book, between the couple and a roguish neighbor, between the couple and their son many years later—and the threats that tested them—betrayal, adultery, lies, murder. Above the Waterfall shares these strengths but outdoes One Foot in Eden. With its cast of middle-aged characters, each of whom harbors hurts and secrets, each of whom struggle to overcome past sins and earn forgiveness, and with its setting in a dying world, this novel adds a thick layer of poignancy and theologically inflected melancholy. It moved me, and it made me think.

Above the Waterfall is a powerful portrait of a world in which all are guilty and the law is inadequate to mend such brokenness. It depicts a world in need of redemption, and Rash suggests, that redemption is available if the sinners just look for it. In Becky's words:

The next morning as I'd hiked out, I started to step over a log but my foot jerked back. When I looked on the other side, a copperhead lay coiled. Part of me not sight knew it was there. The atavistic like flint rock sparked. Amazon tribes see Venus in daylight. My grandfather needed no watch to tell time. What more might we recover if open to it? Perhaps even God.

The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun

The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, edited by Verlyn Flieger, is the latest Tolkien napkin doodle to get its own book.

I'm being jocular, of course, and this Lay is a welcome edition to the available work of Tolkien, but when I turned it up online that was the first thing to cross my mind. Christopher Tolkien and the Tolkien Estate have taken some flak for mining the master's unpublished papers, presumably as a cash grab.

Delving too greedily and too deep, if you will.

As it happens, I don't think this criticism is fair, and I'm glad that even slender volumes like this one (just 106 pages) and The Story of Kullervo continue to come out, for reasons I'll get into later.

The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun is a 506-line poem based on Breton myth, particularly Celtic stories about witches and changelings. It's a lay, meaning a narrative poem longer than a ballad and shorter than an epic, composed in iambic tetrameter couplets, a format most famously used in the lais of Marie de France, a twelfth-century poet. Tolkien wrote this poem in 1930, apparently in the middle of writing The Lay of Leithian, which the editor has established thanks to Tolkien's own careful notations of the dates of completion of several different manuscripts. 

Tolkien wrote the poem following a period of intense study of Celtic myth and legend, and the Lay is rooted in the stories of Brittany, a continental outpost of the Celtic Fringe. Gwyn Jones, familiar to anyone who has studied the Viking Age, published the Lay in Welsh Review in December 1945.

The Lay tells the story of a Breton king and queen who cannot have a child. The king eventually seeks out an enchantress who gives him a potion which, after he spikes his wife's drink with it, allows the couple to conceive and bear twin children. The witch accepts no payment—always a danger sign in this kind of story—and a short time later the king, pursuing a white deer to help satisfy a strange craving of his wife, stumbles upon the witch, who now demands payment. He refuses, insists he will be immune to her vengeful witchcraft, and slowly succumbs and dies over the next three days, after which his wife dies as well. 

The story is slight but evocative, and Tolkien's poetry is wonderful to read. Here's the king pursuing the deer (ll. 259-276), just before he encounters the witch for the second and final time:

Beneath the woodland's hanging eaves
a white doe startled under leaves;
strangely she glistered in the sun
as she leaped forth and turned to run.
Then reckless after her he spurred;
dim laughter in the woods he heard,
but heeded not, a longing strange
for deer that fair and fearless range
vexed him, for venison of the beast
whereon no mortal hunt shall feast,
for waters crystal-clear and cold
that never in holy fountain rolled.
He hunted her from the forest eaves
into the twilight under leaves;
the earth was shaken under hoof,
till the boughs were bent into a roof,
and the sun was woven in a snare;
and laughter still was on the air.

Beautiful, eerie, atmospheric, expressive of the king's character—his own desire to run down this deer is about to ensnare him—and not a little unsettling, with that laughter hanging in the air behind him as he unwittingly leaves the ordinary world behind.

The main text itself is about twenty pages long. The rest of the book is taken up with antecedents: two ballads, a fragment, and earlier handwritten and typescript versions of the final published poem. The ballads, which are thematically linked (Christopher Tolkien refers to them as a diptych), tell two stories of corrigans—female nature spirits that seek to replenish their dwindling ranks by either seducing mortal men or stealing human children. Here are the first three quatrains from The Corrigan I, in which a woman finds her child swapped for a changeling: 

'Mary on earth, why dost thou weep?' 
'My little child I could not keep:
A corrigan stole him in his sleep,
And I must weep.

To a well they went for water clear,
In cradle crooning they left him here,
And I found him not, my baby dear,
Returning here.

In the cradle a strange cry I heard.
Dark was his face like a wrinkled toad;
With hands he clawed, he mouthed and mowed,
But made no word.'

I particularly enjoyed the two ballads. They're short, atmospheric poems that evoke the dangerously blurry boundary between the everyday and supernatural worlds, a theme not so much running through as saturating Celtic myth.

The editor, Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, helpfully lays all this out in her introductory material, explanatory notes, and critical apparatus. By printing the published version of the Lay first and following it with the ballads and earlier drafts, Flieger shows how Tolkien dabbled with some ideas he had encountered in his reading of Celtic myth at the time and, gradually, reworked some Breton legends and made them his own. She offers particularly keen insights into the ways in which Tolkien, in the final version of the Lay, pitted pagan and Christian elements against each other—the witch's laughter versus hymns, the witch herself versus the Virgin—to shape a powerfully resonant but economical story. 

Which is why I appreciate works like The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun being made available. If you have an interest, like I do, in the ways writers and artists consider, rework, and riff off of their inspirations until something original emerges, books like these and the aforementioned Story of Kullervo—also edited by Flieger and also worth reading—are opportunities to see that artistic process in action.

Because what Tolkien did with the myths he loved was not simple regurgitation, which tends to be how people talk about his medieval influences. While a case can be made that the corrigan of the ballads or the fay or witch of the Lay proper are the literary grandmothers of a character like Galadriel, these poems are important on their own, not just as raw material for The Lord of the Rings. It is interesting in and of itself to see how Tolkien read voraciously—whether Celtic, Germanic, or Finnish legend—absorbed what he was interested in, and let it inform his creativity. His was a mind awake and open, endlessly curious, receptive to ancient storytelling traditions, and he didn't mind a lot of hard work.

As an aside: Ted Nasmith, the illustrator whose paintings graced the paperback copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that I read in high school, has three works based on Aotrou and Itroun that you can look at on his website.

Seinfeld and Dante on art

The New York Times as a fun, interesting Q&A with Jerry Seinfeld to promote the latest season of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. It's short and worth reading for its own sake, but I wanted to draw attention to this passage.

New York Times: You turned down an offer from NBC of $5 million an episode to do one more season of “Seinfeld.” Nobody in TV has ever made even close to that money before or since. Did you ever second-guess that decision? 

“The most important word in art is ‘proportion.’”

Jerry Seinfeld: No. It was the perfect moment, and the proof that it was the right moment is the number of questions you’re still asking me about it. The most important word in art is “proportion.” How much? How long is this joke going to be? How many words? How many minutes? And getting that right is what makes it art or what makes it mediocre.

That's dynamite artistic advice right in the middle of his answer. Proportion. No matter what your field or medium, proportion is key. He's absolutely right and, as he points out, his show has the legacy to prove it. 

Consider my own favorite sitcom, The Office, which outlasted its best material by several years. What was funny in small doses early on dominated the show by the middle of its run and could only get wilder in its quest for more laughs, with diminishing returns. By season six, the characters were wildly out of proportion, Flanderized caricatures, and the plots spent disproportionate time on ludicrous side stories. And it lasted another three seasons. 

Seinfeld's insight jibes with something I read long, long ago and have returned to many times to guide and correct my own work. In explaining Dante's art in constructing the Comedy, translator John Ciardi wrote that "Poetry is, among other things, the art of knowing what to leave out." Throwing in the kitchen sink, stuffing your work, can be the equivalent of white noise unless you have a good sense of proportion. It's hard to think of a literary locale more crowded than Dante's hell, but thanks to his gift of proportion you never lose sight of his purpose as an artist. Like Dante—like Seinfeld—have to develop a good sensibility of what does and doesn't belong. See also "Omit needless words" and "Murder your darlings." 

And of course, art being art, there are always good reasons to violate these rules—again, in the interest of maintaining proportion. To give Orwell the last word on this topic: "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous." Don't let even grammar throw you out of proportion.