CS Lewis on angels in art

Yesterday I ran across the following meme. I can’t remember exactly where I found it—somewhere deep, deep within a rich mine of contrarian anarcho-trad neo-reactionary memes—but it made me laugh out loud:

That was a laugh partly at the joke and partly of recognition, because this meme makes a point identical to one made by CS Lewis in his 1961 preface to The Screwtape Letters. Speaking of traditional descriptions or images of angels, Lewis moves from the symbols to their representation in art:

These forms are not only symbolical but were always known to be symbolical by reflective people. The Greeks did not believe that the gods were really like the beautiful human shapes their sculptors gave them. In their poetry a god who wishes to “appear” to a mortal temporarily assumes the likeness of a man. Christian theology has nearly always explained the “appearance” of an angel in the same way. It is only the ignorant, said Dionysius in the fifth century, who dream that spirits are really winged men.

In the plastic arts these symbols have steadily degenerated. Fra Angelico’s angels carry in their face and gesture the peace and authority of Heaven. Later come the chubby infantile nudes of Raphael; finally the soft, slim, girlish, and consolatory angels of nineteenth century art, shapes so feminine that they avoid being voluptuous only by their total insipidity—the frigid houris of a teatable paradise. They are a pernicious symbol. In Scripture the visitation of an angel is always alarming; it has to begin by saying “Fear not.” The Victorian angel looks as if it were going to say, “There, there.”

The literary symbols are more dangerous because they are not so easily recognized as symbolical. Those of Dante are the best. Before his angels we sink in awe. His devils, as Ruskin rightly remarked, in their rage, spite, and obscenity, are far more like what the reality must be than anything in Milton. Milton’s devils, by their grandeur and high poetry, have done great harm, and his angels owe too much to Homer and Raphael. But the really pernicious image is Goethe’s Mephistopheles. It is Faust, not he, who really exhibits the ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self which is the mark of Hell. The humorous, civilised, sensible, adaptable Mephistopheles has helped to strengthen the illusion that evil is liberating.

An illusion now firmly fixed in place, I think.

I like this passage for a lot of reasons—not least its forceful and beautiful praise of Dante, which I think of every time I encounter the power of his angels and the sick wickedness of his devils—and it always prompts me to reflect on how a symbol can either teach or mislead a reader. I can only wonder what Lewis would have made of Touched by an Angel, the apex of the therapeutic angels that were a mid-90s fad, or other, more recent and yet more twisted depictions.

This preface—inexplicably, criminally—has not been included in Screwtape since the first Harper paperbacks that came out when I was in college. I have redundant copies of the book solely so that I can keep a physical copy of this preface on hand. You can find it in most older editions of Screwtape; I have it in the 1996 Touchstone/B&H edition, which my parents bought me from our church bookstore in middle school. You can read the whole preface in a rather clunky Internet Archive version here.

In searching for the full text I ran across this fascinating piece revealing that, apparently, Lewis had originally conceived of Screwtape’s correspondence as having been discovered and translated by his friend Elwin Ransom. Probably better that he went another direction with the introductory note to the Letters, but a fun idea.

I return to Screwtape often, and it vies with The Great Divorce as my favorite of Lewis’s books. I’ve written about it here before—specifically, about hell’s preferred form of humor.

Pericles and September 11

Pericles: “The entire world is the tomb of ilLustrious men.”

Last year on September 11 I happened to be reading How to Think About War, a new collection of speeches excerpted from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, selected and translated by Johanna Hanink. That day, just before my afternoon Western Civ class, I read the famous funeral oration of Pericles.

Some context: Pericles was an Athenian demagogue and a fervent anti-Spartan who, through the power of his oratory and his popularity among the demos, the mob of Athens, helped provoke war with Sparta. Pericles gave this speech—or a version of it, as this is Thucydides’s reconstruction—at a public mass funeral for the first Athenian dead of the war.

It was a coincidence to have read that speech with that anniversary on my mind, but it proved a gut punch. I started class that day by reading the selection below, which I dedicated to those men and women who, on the morning of September 11, 2001, turned toward danger and gave their lives for others. I hope you’ll read this 2400-year old text with men like that in mind.

Having begun his speech with a lengthy explanation of what makes Athens unusual and worth fighting for (Athenian exceptionalism?), Pericles pivots to his eulogy for the dead hoplites of the city:

That, in fact, is the reason I have gone on at such length about the city: as a lesson in why this struggle means something different to us than it does to those who have no such good things to lose, and also to establish that there are manifest proofs for the eulogy that I am delivering over these men.

My most important points have now been covered, for it is the virtues of these men, and of others like them, which shed luster on those aspects of the city that I have praised.

In other words, rather than these men being heroes simply because they came from Athens, Athens is praiseworthy because it produces such men.

There are very few Greeks who would be capable of actually living up to their reputation as these men did. I think that what befell them offers both the first indication and the final confirmation of their worth, as it is only fair that valor displayed in war waged for the fatherland outweigh all other shortcomings. This right has cancelled out any past wrongs, for the service that they rendered collectively means more than any harm they did as individuals.

“Their bodies stood fast in action and, in one brief and fateful moment, they gave up their lives at the very height not of fear but of glory.”

None of these men’s resolve grew weak at the thought of their wealth and the sustained pleasures it promised, nor did any of them attempt to stave off danger because of poverty and their aspirations of one day escaping it and becoming rich. Instead they desired, more than anything else, to have vengeance against their enemies. And because they saw the risk that this would require as the most glorious one of all, with that thought in mind they resolved to seek their satisfaction and put off any other concerns. They consigned the uncertainty of success to hope and decided it best to have faith in themselves in the matter that was at hand. Understanding full well that their lot was one of resistance and suffering and not one of survival purchased by surrender, the one thing they fled was dishonor itself. Their bodies stood fast in action and, in one brief and fateful moment, they gave up their lives at the very height not of fear but of glory.

And later, on the same theme:

Though they gave their lives together, they each receive undying praise and the most conspicuous of all tombs—I do not mean the tomb in which they lie, but the one where their glory remains always unforgotten, whenever the occasion for words or deeds arises. For the entire world is the tomb of illustrious men, and it is not only the inscriptions on monuments at home that attest to this. Even in foreign lands there dwells an unprinted memory, carved not in stone but in people’s hearts.

This day, for me at least, has only grown more sobering the farther these events have retreated into the past. A lot has changed since then—much for the worse, if I’m being honest. But we have the tombs, the monumental memory, of the policemen, firefighters, EMTs, soldiers, and even ordinary civilians who gave their lives saving others that day. Now more than ever, as Pericles continues, we

must aspire to these men’s example: understand that happiness is freedom and freedom courage, and do not shrink from [danger]. After all, it is not true sacrifice when the dispirited lay down their lives, for they have already abandoned hope. Instead, the finest sacrifice issues from those who wager their continued happiness and have the most to lose if they fail. To a sensible man, at least, the disgrace incurred by cowardice is far more painful than death which comes imperceptibly, at a moment of great might and shared aspirations.

Do not abandon hope, and live in courage rather than fear. Hope and courage produced heroes like those who died nineteen years ago today. They can produce them again.

YouTube readings of Griswoldville

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve created a YouTube channel, where I’ve uploaded two readings from Griswoldville. I don’t plan to become a YouTuber—at least not on the level of some of the more active ones—but you can subscribe to the channel for readings from my books and other reading and writing related videos. I am working on short recordings from each of my novels and hope to have some more up in the following weeks.

In the meantime, I’ve embedded my first two in the post below. They come from parts I and II of Griswoldville, including scenes from the homefront while Georgie’s father is away fighting in Virginia and in the rear of the Confederate army in Georgia itself once Georgie and his grandfather and cousins Wes and Cal have been called up to the militia. I hope y’all enjoy.

Here’s a longish passage from Part II:

And here’s a couple of chapters I have read several times at public events, passages covering Georgie’s grim, dusty summer on the road with the militia during the battles for Atlanta:

As always, thanks for listening—or, in this case, watching—and please check Griswoldville out if you like what you’ve seen. You can find out more at the book’s page on my website or at Amazon.com, where you can purchase it in both paperback and Kindle formats.

Heimweh

The photo above is one of the best I’ve ever taken. I snapped it during a flight with my dad over Rabun County, and it shows, from a position just southwest of Lake Burton, the lake, Charlie, Glassy, Tiger, and Black Rock Mountains, and other points north just as golden hour settles in over the folds of the mountains. Just looking at it gives me a powerful case of Heimweh.

I’ve been rereading the Odyssey for the first time in years in preparation for a podcast. The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus’s nostos—his homecoming. This Greek word, combined with the suffix -algia (from algos, pain), gave us nostalgia, the pain and suffering felt when wanting to go home. The word nostalgia was coined in a medical school dissertation in 1688 as a scholarly form of the German Heimweh—literally “home-woe,” later borrowed and Anglicized in our tongue as homesickness.

Note that nostalgia and Heimweh were therefore medical terms. Indeed, nostalgia—homesickness—was regarded as a literal sickness until relatively recently. The original patients zero for Heimweh were Swiss mercenaries who, having left the fastnesses of their mountain homeland, often came down with the otherwise irremediable illness and had to take leave in order to recover. Without at trip home they would pine away, and even die. Being myself a child of the mountains, and having been at times homesick enough to feel it as a genuine illness, I’ve always felt a deep kinship with those long ago pikemen. I feel it even now. I ache to go home.

The word nostalgia today is a weak, bastardized ghost of what it once meant, and is the easy target of criticism. Nostalgia, we continuously hear, elides, obfuscates, or deliberately lies about the past, or offers cheap, commodified, kitsch versions of a tidied up past that is as good as a lie. There is indisputably some truth to this, but it is not the whole truth, and the corollaries that critique of nostalgia almost inevitably leads to—that there were no good old days, that the past must be remembered with scorn or a know-it-all attention to its failings, that there is only the present, that even the present is inadequate compared to the future toward which we march—are genuinely dangerous.

But the Odyssey gets nostalgia right. I have been struck, on this read-through, by Odysseus’s continuous, vocal Heimweh. But his pain and his desire to go home are not rooted in cheap reproductions of the past or self-aware cosplaying of previous decades, but in the real, concrete goods that he has lost—is losing—so long as he remains a maroon on a goddess’s island.

“Mine is a rugged land but good for raising sons—
and I myself, I know no sweeter sight on earth
than a man’s own native country. . . .
So nothing is sweet as a man’s own country,
his own parents, even though he’s settled down
in some luxurious house, off in a foreign land
and far from those who bore him.”

Rereading the Odyssey now has been a revelation. Now, with sons I pray fervently to raise well and settled in a luxurious house (much nicer than I ever expected to live in at this stage of life, anyway) in a foreign land, far from those who gave me life in the rugged place where I was born… What is this pang in my chest? This sudden melancholy? Why do I feel so listless? Why does even a hazy glimpse of the mountains on the horizon, seen from a highway in the Piedmont, overpower me so?

Nostalgia can be false, undoubtedly. But real nostalgia, real Heimweh, is a sweet pain that can lead you back to goodness. It’s the call of rootedness, of the past and the future together in chorus, of restoration. Homer ably dramatizes that in the Odyssey, which, perhaps, is why Western literature, in the nostos of the canon, keeps trekking back to it.

The translation above is that of the late great Robert Fagles for Penguin Classics. I highly recommend it. The lines quoted after from Book IX, ll. 30-41 in Fagle’s translation.

Bede on a medieval Scrooge

From Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, V, xii, a chapter in which he relates the story of Dryhthelm:

About this time, a noteworthy miracle, like those of olden days, occurred in Britain. For, in order to arouse the living from spiritual death, a man already dead returned to bodily life and related many notable things that he had seen, some of which I have thought it valuable to mention here in brief. There was a head of a family living in a place in the country of the Northumbrians . . . who led a devout life with all his household. He fell ill and grew steadily worse until the crisis came, and in the early hours of one night he died. But at daybreak he returned to life and suddenly sat up to the great consternation of those weeping around the body, who ran away; only his wife, who loved him more dearly, remained with him, though trembling and fearful. The man reassured her and said: ‘Do not be frightened; for I have truly risen from the grasp of death, and I am allowed to live among men again. But henceforward I must not live as I used to, and must adopt a very different way of life.’ Then he rose and went off to the village church, where he continued in prayer until daybreak. He then divided all his property into three parts, one of which he allotted to his wife, another to his sons, and the third he retained and distributed at once to the poor. Not long afterwards, he abandoned all worldly responsibilities and entered the monastery of Melrose, which is almost completely surrounded by a bend in the river Tweed. There he was given the tonsure and entered a separate part of the house allotted him by the abbot, where he entered upon a life of such physical and spiritual penance to the day of his death that, even if he had kept silence, his life would have witnessed that he had seen many dreadful and many desirable things that remained hidden from others.

First, because I am me, I cannot read Bede’s account of Dryhthelm’s shocking return to life without thinking of Ray Stevens and his Uncle Fred.

Second, one of the stranger lines of criticism I have heard of Dickens’s Christmas Carol is that no one, especially not a hardened moneygrubbing capitalist like Ebenezer Scrooge, would change his ways because of one night’s bad dreams. This critique has always struck me as odd—and is probably more ideological than artistic anyway—but in case any proof were needed that Dickens’s fable has some truth to it, here is a real world example. Even if you explain away Dryhthelm’s death and resurrection and his vision—which I am disinclined to do, though this story seems tailor made for the kind of pop debunking common today—we’re still left with someone who radically reordered his entire life on the basis of what he saw over the course of one night. And Bede goes on to tell us that Dryhthelm “forwarded the salvation of many by his words and life.”

One side note—a big difference between Dryhthelm and Dickens’s Scrooge is their starting point, as Dickens takes pains to show just how much of a wretched miser Scrooge is while Bede notes that Dryhthelm already “led a devout life with all his household.” A good example of how the devout are not necessarily holier than anyone else, just more aware of their own need for repentance—as Dryhthelm would have been the first to admit.

If you want to find out what, exactly, Dryhthelm saw of hell, purgatory, and heaven during the hours he lay dead, you can read the rest of this passage at Project Gutenberg here. It’s striking. The translation above is that of Leo Sherley-Price for Penguin Classics, from which I’ve quoted here before.

Come and See

Flyora (Aleksey Kravchenko) witnesses German reprisals in Elim Klimov’s Come and See

Come and See is one of the great war films, made the greater by dramatizing a slice of World War II rarely remembered—if known at all—by Western audiences. Released in 1985 after years of trouble in the writing and production stages—all owing to Soviet censorship—Elim Klimov’s film is a harrowing depiction of the war in Byelorussia (now Belarus). It is a surreal, dreamlike, but utterly real and horrifying film, and it should be required viewing.

And I looked, and behold

Two striking group portraits, just about half an hour from both the beginning and end of the film, bookend Come and See.

The first portrait

The first features a band of colorful Soviet partisans, guerrilla fighters with whom the main character, a teenage boy named Flyora (Aleskey Kravchenko) has joined up. He is a babyfaced youth eager to fight, to strike back at the Nazis, who in the early parts of the film are present only as a single scout plane, enemies as distant from Flyora and his world as fairytale giants. Having dug up a rifle from the abandoned trenches of the earlier years of the war, he leaves the family farm despite the frantic and tearful protests of his mother and joins up. The partisans are bluff and vigorous, exuberant men and women with patchwork uniforms and castoff equipment. As they pose for their photo they spot Flyora, wearing one of his father’s far too large suits and carrying his oversized rifle, and they gleefully work him into the front of the group—a hilarious adornment. He beams.

And then he is put to work scrubbing pots, forced to trade his new boots for a veteran’s disintegrating ones, and left in the camp while the others march out to fight.

With the fighters in the band gone, Flyora goes off by himself to weep and meets Glasha (Olga Mironova), whom we intuit is the teenage lover of the partisan band’s leader, Kosach (Liubomiras Laucevicius). Flyora and Glasha bond, albeit uneasily, and Glasha shares her hopes and dreams—a husband, a home, and motherhood. Like Flyora, she aspires to step into a meaningful role and to belong. Then the scout plane returns.

Come and See takes its title from Revelation, from one of the eeriest and most powerful passages in Western literature, and immediately following the return of the German plane we see the film’s own version of the four horsemen—four paratroopers descending into the forest, the vanguard of a German assault on the partisans’ camp. Their arrival, as in Revelation, brings conquest, war, famine, and death. Hell follows with them.

German artillery pounds the forest and Flyora, shellshocked and deafened, reunites with Glasha. They flee. His village is nearby and he means to shelter with his family. When they arrive, the village, which we have already seen crowded and full of life—from the village elder to children and animals—stands empty and silent. Flyora’s mother and sisters are not home, though there is uneaten food on the table and his sisters’ dolls lie lined up on the floor. Flies crawl over everything; their buzzing fills the barnyard and the house.

Glasha seems to catch on before Flyora, who excitedly suggests that his family has hidden on an island in one of the million forest marshes of Byelorussia. That must be it, he thinks, and he leads Glasha there. In one of the film’s most chilling moments, Glasha takes one last look back at Flyora’s farm. She cries out and they run on.

After wading through the muck of the bog Flyora does meet survivors of his village, which has been destroyed by the Germans in retaliation for partisan attacks—exactly what Flyora’s mother had predicted. Flyora is by now almost mad. He is also filthy, and a camp barber snips his hair down to untidy shocks that have already begun to lighten and turn grey.

For lack of anything better to do he joins a few partisan stragglers, scroungers led by the chipper but experienced Rubezh (Vladas Bagdonas), who intends to steal a cow to feed the refugees. The scout plane returns, and Rubezh, Flyora, and the others’ errand, which plays out almost comically for nearly half an hour, does not end well.

A pale horse

It is after the failure of this mission that Come and See’s most excruciating sequence plays out. Flyora, waking stunned in a pasture, wanders until he comes upon an elderly farmer from whom he tries to commandeer a haycart, but the Germans arrive. The old man helps Flyora hide his rifle and equipment and insinuates Flyora into the population of his village—the village that will provide the backdrop for the second group portrait to feature Flyora as a prop.

The Germans have come on an anti-partisan mission, there to exact a reprisal for a vaguely described “insult” to German soldiers. They arrive in force, approaching out of the morning fog as shadows that resolve into a large, heavily armed unit of SS men and collaborators. They empty every house in the village and call for everyone to assemble before an old church. More men arrive by truck. They set up speakers and play festive music. The villagers turn out, ready for the bureaucratic negotiation they expect from the Germans. (The old man suggests a family that Flyora can hide with, as they have lost one family member whose death might not appear on the Germans’ records.) The Germans tell them to bring toothbrushes, towels, and other goods so that they can be relocated, but almost immediately the true nature of the SS unit’s purpose manifests itself as they gleefully herd the entire population into the church and bolt the doors. The people cry out in terror and frustration and fall silent only once—when the Germans offer to let any able-bodied man live if he will leave his women and children in the church. Not a man moves or speaks—the most heroic silence I have ever seen in a film. Flyora climbs out the window and is hauled away by the Germans. A mother climbs out with a child. She is dragged away by her hair; her childr is thrown back in through the window, and then the Germans throw in grenades.

And the sequence does not end. Will not end. It seems to last forever. The soldiers use grenades, Molotov cocktails, machine guns, and finally flamethrowers, and the Germans—many clearly drunk—laugh and applaud at the antics of their inept Ukrainian collaborators, who for their part clown and pratfall and abuse their handful of prisoners. Flyora—now grey-haired, trembling with bottled up screams, his face prematurely wrinkled and his eyes set in an agonized ten-thousand-yard stare—watches.

Finally, with the screams silenced and the burning church collapsing in on itself, the Germans’ carnival atmosphere abates. They load the trucks and set off on foot. Just when we think Flyora has been forgotten, he is hauled to his feet by one of the collaborators and a group of German soldiers force Flyora to his knees. One puts a pistol to Flyora’s temple. Another casually walks up and joins them and we understand—they are posing. Flyora waits, kneeling, as another soldier indifferently winds his camera and snaps a photo. Then they push him aside and leave.

His name that sat on him was Death

The second portrait

This is not the end of Come and See, but it feels like an end—for Flyora at least. How can relief from the dread we have been experiencing through him be so cruel? How can being spared make things worse?

Flyora, when he rouses from his coma-like faint in the smoldering village, wanders again. Just outside the village he comes across the wreckage of the German column. The partisans have ambushed them and now have a handful of survivors at their mercy.

I will leave it for you to find out what happens there—as I have, despite the length and detail of this review, have still left out a lot—but this final passage leads us to the most powerful and surreal and disturbing moment in a film that is full of them.

Staggering away with his broken and still unused rifle, Flyora comes across a poster of Hitler lying in a puddle. The people of the village had produced it before the massacre as evidence of their cooperation with the Nazis, to no avail. Flyora shoulders his rifle and in an agonized fit of anger and trauma shoots the poster. Between each shot we see Hitler’s career play out in reverse, from the corpses of the Holocaust to the beginning of the war to the Nuremberg rallies to the Beer Hall Putsch to his time in the army during World War I to—

Each time Flyora fires we rush further backward through the life of the author of Flyora and his people’s suffering until Flyora is, finally, brought up short. This moment is perhaps the most famous in the movie—meaning I was expecting it—and it still wrecked me. It is the most pointed challenge to the audience I’ve ever seen in a war film and one of the few really serious moral statements I’ve ever seen played out in a movie, a seriousness made only more emphatic coming at the end of two hours of unstinting atrocity.

And Hell followed with him

Come and See is almost impossible to describe or explain without simply relating what happens, which I think is part of the point. But even a barebones recapitulation of its events—it doesn’t really have a plot, certainly not one of the Hollywood stamp—cannot convey what it is like to watch it.

A lot of that has to do with its style, which the director, Elim Klimov, very carefully designed to draw the viewer in without allowing the viewer to become comfortable. The cast are mostly amateur actors; the lead, Alexsey Kravchenko, was cast after accompanying a friend to the film’s auditions, and his performance is indescribable—the thing that holds the movie together tonally. The costumes and props, especially the weapons, look lived-in and much used, and many were apparently real World War II surplus from both sides. Several combat scenes included live ammunition, and the actors respond accordingly. This top-to-bottom authenticity is abetted by the film’s cinematography. Shot mostly with natural light and often beautiful, it sometimes wanders, following the characters via Steadicam, or holds still, waiting, allowing the viewer’s dread to build. The prolonged massacre scene is the film’s most powerful example, as documentary-style handheld blends seamlessly with carefully composed static shots. I cannot imagine that, when Spielberg came to shoot the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto in Schindler’s List, this film wasn’t on his mind.

And yet for all its realism in many regards the film is also surreal, with extended sections of impressionistic, dreamlike filmmaking. Characters stare into the camera, making eye contact with the viewer and seeming to address us directly; animals take center stage, as when a stork follows Flyora and Glasha in their wanderings or when a cow, the picture of gentle ignorance, faces death; and we get many, many closeups of Flyora’s anguished face. All of this works to unsettle the viewer, so that even the moments of relative calm thrum with foreboding. The result is apocalyptic—dreading the inevitable, we can only await its revealing.

This is the kind of film that people, because of what it portrays, rather lamely call “hard to watch.” I didn’t find it so—at least not in the sense of struggling to stay interested. It is bleak, filled with a steadily gathering and unremitting dread punctuated with indescribable horrors. It is eerie, as character after character looks unblinking into the camera, the soundtrack drones tonelessly, as utterly real imagery dissolves into the otherworldly. And it is deeply disturbing, as any film set in the bloodlands of eastern Europe during the war should be. But I did not find it “hard to watch”—which was part of its terror. Come and See arrests you from the very beginning with that dread, those images, and the world it recreates. You can’t look away, and the film doesn’t let up. It is no more hard to watch than it is to sleep through the worst kind of nightmare.

What is awful about Come and See is precisely that nightmare, which you do not so much watch as live through. The film brings us into a world in which the people live with an unimaginable burden of dread, fear, and grief and makes us feel it without offering any phony hope of rescue or relief. There is no attempt to explain or make sense of it, no theodicy or catharsis, and the ideologies and politics behind the war feel so remote from the war’s reality that the only time they intrude, near the end of the film, we feel just how unreal, how inadequate they are. And what is more, all these things actually happened to real people. An overwhelming reminder of what World War II was like for millions.

Come and See is a masterpiece, a film everyone should see once, especially those of us for whom discomfort is alien, and who would react with self-justifying rage if their world were upended. Like the scriptures it invokes, it is a challenge, and like a nightmare—or a vision, the kind of nightmare that we occasionally need—it should wake us up changed. True to its title, the film commands us to come, to see, and we behold.

CS Lewis against the judgement of history

From CS Lewis’s 1950 essay “Historicism,” in which Lewis takes on “the belief that men can, by the use of their natural powers, discover an inner meaning in the historical process”:

“Some who in general deserve to be called true historians are betrayed into writing as if nothing failed or succeeded that did not somehow deserve to do so. We must guard against the emotional overtones of a phrase like ‘the judgement of history’. It might lure us into the vulgarest of all vulgar errors, that of idolizing as the goddess History what manlier ages belaboured as the strumpet Fortune.”

For “the judgement of history” see also “Progress,” the direction of “the arc of history,” being on “the right side of history” or its opposite, etc. etc. etc.

Greyhound

Burial at sea in Greyhound

Last week I finally had the chance to see Greyhound, a film I’ve been anticipating ever since I read the book two years ago. When the first trailer dropped in the Spring I was optimistic, albeit with some questions or reservations, and eager for June to come. Then COVID-19 did its thing and with theaters closed Sony lateraled to AppleTV+—a service I don’t have. So it took a get-together with family to give me the opportunity. I’m glad I finally got to see it.

Greyhound tells the story of Cdr. Ernest “Ernie” Krause (Tom Hanks), a career US Navy officer in command of a destroyer during World War II, and the roughly three days it takes to lead a convoy of merchant ships through “the black pit,” the zone of the North Atlantic out of reach of air cover from Canada, Iceland, or the British Isles, a zone infested with U-boat wolfpacks. More specifically, Greyhound takes place just months after Pearl Harbor, in the grim days when it was unclear whether the Allies would or could win the war, and Krause, despite his long career, is new to command. He has never seen combat. Appropriately, the film opens with the devoutly religious Krause on his knees by his rack, praying.

Krause and his destroyer, the Keeling—radio callsign “Greyhound”—will make contact with the Germans before the end of that day. Despite an early victory over this first U-boat, the wolfpack closes in and contact is unrelenting. The U-boats harry the convoy, whose four escorts—an American, a Canadian, and two British destroyers—shuttle continuously back and forth to oversee rescue operations for stricken ships, locate and pursue the U-boats, and—above all—provide coverage to the vulnerable cargo ships.

These competing duties stretch Krause and his crew, but Krause most of all. He does not eat or sleep for forty-eight hours and only occasionally stands still. By the final night his feet bleed and his speech slurs. But always he returns to the same problems—looking for and locating the U-boats, engaging them with a supply of depth charges that immediately runs low, conserving fuel, looking out for slower cargo ships or damaged stragglers, calculating and recalculating the time it will take to reach air cover and help.

And here I should mention the thing that holds the whole movie together—Tom Hanks. Hanks wrote the screenplay himself, adapting CS Forester’s novel The Good Shepherd, and it’s clear that this is a film he’s thought a lot about. All of the pressure and stress of command, even Krause’s short murmured prayers or quotes from the Bible at crucial moments in the story, come to us through the smallest changes in Hanks’s face. We read his decisions in his expressions, in the anxious glances he throws toward a damaged ship or the set of his jaw as he sweeps the horizon with his binoculars. It’s a powerful and gripping performance, but not a flashy one. Krause finds himself confronted with the first real test of his career, a career in which he has been “fitted and retained” for years—that is, good enough not to be let go from the peacetime Navy, not good enough to be promoted—and now he is eager to do the right thing, make the right decisions, and lead the men and vessels that depend on him through the wolfpack to safety. He wants to be a good shepherd, and the earnestness of Hanks’s performance as Krause is one of the film’s greatest strengths. (Tellingly, in the novel he is George Krause. In Hanks’s adaptation he is Ernest.)

A few critics have knocked Greyhound for its underdeveloped supporting characters, but I think the film makes up for this in casting. The film is full of interesting and—importantly—distinct looking faces, so that even as a new officer of the watch rotated to the bridge to join Krause I could remember his face if not his name. The cast also convey a lot about their characters without words—much of the dialogue is, after all, the spare and precise language of military command—through meaningful glances and small looks exchanged behind Krause’s back. We understand that one young lieutenant questions Krause’s leadership and judgement, and another is as eager to do well in his subordinate position as Krause is as the captain. So while these secondary characters may not be fully fleshed out, we feel who they are by watching them work together, which I will always prefer to those scenes in which happy-go-lucky GIs talk about their Ma or their Best Girl back home over a game of cards.

A few supporting characters do stand out. Krause’s XO, LtCdr Charlie Cole (Stephen Graham), is Krause’s second-in-command and confidant, the only one Krause briefly opens up to with his doubts—a moment they quickly downplay when they note a rating listening to their conversation. Krause relies on Cole; Graham, in a performance that makes the most of his limited dialogue and screentime, makes us understand why. We also get to know one of the ship’s mess attendants, Cleveland (Rob Morgan), one of only two black men shown aboard the ship, and Cleveland and Krause’s relationship leads to one of the most moving moments in the film.

The film has its problems. There is some dodgy CGI, something I was concerned about when I first saw the trailer, but I don’t know how the filmmakers could have overcome this without a worldhistorical Christopher Nolan-sized budget. The special effects mostly look good, especially one evocative shot that rises from the Keeling into a night sky illuminated by the flares and tracers of the convoy and the exploding torpedoes of the U-boats and higher and higher into the clouds, which flicker and glow with the combat beneath. It’s mostly CGI, but it provided a moment of repose and poetry in this otherwise efficient and machinelike war thriller. Other shots, especially frenetic shots of digital close combat between the various ships and the U-boats, don’t look as good.

The film also feels overedited in some portions, as if, in the long delays between shooting and releasing Greyhound, the filmmakers or the studio (not unlikely given Sony’s history of meddling with productions) were unsure of some stretches of the film. This is particularly the case at the very beginning, in a short scene that establishes Krause’s thwarted love for Evelyn (Elisabeth Shue), and in the final battle, which feels like something is missing in the buildup to the climax.

But the CGI and editing are not insuperable problems. More questionable to me is the decision to show the audience some of what the U-boats are up to. We get occasional cutaways to the subs surfacing or rising to periscope depth to target the convoy. While I think this is meant to give the audience an Oh no, look out! feeling of tension, waiting for Krause and crew to spot and react to the threat, for me they more often deflated the building tension. One of the most powerful aspects of the book was that its point of view was utterly confined to that of Krause, and his continuous scrabble for mere knowledge of his situation made it exhausting and unbearably tense. By providing the viewer of the film with more information than Krause, it separates us from him at a few crucial moments when I think it would have been better to stick with him and watch and wait. Fortunately, the strength of the storytelling and Hanks’s performance carry us through the film, so this is another issues that doesn’t sink the film. (Sorry.)

The only outright artistic misstep, I think, is the decision to have a U-boat commander (voiced by Thomas Kretschmann) hijack the frequency of the Keeling’s ship to ship radio to taunt Krause—and occasionally howl at him. While surely intended to be creepy or threatening, it felt like neither and more like another slip in the filmmakers’ confidence in the foreboding mood that they had created.

(It was also impossible with the technology available and, moreover, inadvisable for a sub trying to hide and escape depth-charging.)

So, those issues aside, here are a few other things I appreciated about Greyhound:

• It’s short and fast-paced. Critics used the word “efficient” repeatedly, something I think a few of them intended to be condescending. I think it’s a strength. The film clocks in at just over an hour and a half and there’s not an ounce of fat on it.

• It’s got an enviably authentic feel. Greyhound shot some scenes aboard a surviving Fletcher-class destroyer that has been maintained in WWII-condition as a museum piece, and the sets, equipment, and uniforms look great. The characters also act like men from the period, which is always a plus.

• Greyhound includes some aspects of the war that don’t often make it into movies. The Keeling catches ricochets from another ship’s anti-submarine fire and there is at least one straightforward friendly fire accident. The men also show their inexperience and make mistakes—a big problem in a military trying to grow quickly from its minuscule interwar size to something that could take on the Axis.

• The film is subtle. I’ve mentioned the power of Hanks’s quiet, unshowy performance, but the film brings in a lot of other things without calling attention to them or giving us an exposition dump. This is particularly the case with the mess attendants, Cleveland and Pitts (Craig Tate), a nod toward the racially segregated roles in the US military at the time that allows us to see it in context without derailing the story for a sermon.

• The film also treats Krause’s religion seriously, allowing him to be specifically and meaningfully Christian. A rare thing in films today. This also provides a few little moments of kinship with Cleveland.

• Greyhound was shot digitally by DP Shelly Johnson. I prefer and always will prefer the look of film, but Johnson’s work looks fantastic and the dreary blues and greys of the wintertime North Atlantic set the mood exceptionally well. Look for the return of sunshine as the film’s hope spot.

• The film is also pretty clean, language-wise. This isn’t usually a concern for me, but the film’s relative lack of profanity, its short running time, and its attention to details of life aboard ship and background issues like segregation mean I’m already thinking about this film for classroom use. The characters’ own attention to policing their language also hints at the elaborate traditional protocols of the Navy, something I appreciated.

• Finally, as I’ve already hinted, Greyhound doesn’t spoonfeed the audience. One of my favorite things in any historical film is for the filmmakers to drop us into an unfamiliar world and trust us enough to keep up and learn (cf. Valkyrie, The Alamo, and the masterpiece of this kind of storytelling, Master and Commander). Greyhound does that admirably, establishing how things are done and why without the use of clumsy exposition. The first U-boat attack and Krause’s countermeasures do an excellent job of this.

Greyhound may not make it into the top tier of World War II films, but it is a finely-crafted film that tells a good story well, and it gripped me from beginning to end. It’s clearly a labor of love for Tom Hanks, and I think his efforts in shepherding this film into existence have proven worthwhile.

If you get the chance to see Greyhound, its availability limited as it is by streaming on AppleTV+ rather than having a theatrical release, do so. For myself, I hope to see this on the big screen someday.

My least favorite trope in historical fiction

Well, perhaps not my least favorite trope in historical fiction, but certainly in the top three.

From a Chicago Tribune review of a recent historical novel about the great Anglo-Saxon abbess St Hild of Whitby. I haven’t read the novel in question and don’t intend to critique it or its author, but this paragraph raises an important issue:

[The author] does not always seem to understand how deadly cheap authorial irony is to historical fiction. There is a clumsy scene in which the Irish priest Fursey tells Hild of a dragon’s skeleton he saw embedded in a cliff. The sole purpose of the exchange, as with certain scenes in the first season of “Mad Men,” is to make the reader feel smug for understanding something the characters do not and could not: in this case, that Fursey has stumbled upon a fossilized dinosaur. To make sure we don’t miss the point, [the author] has Fursey reveal his ignorance of sedimentation and the tremendous age of the earth: “It must have been a cataclysmic event: such a beast hurling itself into solid rock.” The past on the page is a fragile reality, and the more distant the more fragile.

We’ve all encountered this: a few characters stumble across or discuss something someone else told them about, and through their faltering if not dumbfounded speculations we recognize something that we, Scientific Man of the 21st century, easily recognize. The characters misinterpret what they see and either credulously accept some ridiculous explanation for the phenomenon or, especially in a certain kind of fiction, superstitiously flee from or moralistically denounce it. And then the characters move on. The scene is purely there for us, we future-dwellers.

I don’t know if this has a name on TV Tropes, but if it doesn’t, it should. Let us call it “past forwarding.”

Hitting the “past forward” button

I could populate a very long list of examples. The simpleminded version is the time-traveler whose every accessory, from his watch to his zippers, is interpreted as witchcraft. (Blame this on Mark Twain.) Often these are not as threatening and intended to be humorous asides, as in a scene in the terrible World War II film Windtalkers in which Ox (Christian Slater) describes his plans to go into business after the war selling a Scandinavian confection called… yogurt. His buddies scoff, but we know better, and say, Hey, I know what yogurt is! and chuckle.

But just as often these little scenes are there to do precisely what the critic above says—flatter the reader at the expense of the characters in the story, characters who would all be long dead were they real people and thus unable to defend themselves. The critic’s mention of “Mad Men” is apt; the first several seasons are full of unsubtle moments in which the characters say and do cartoonishly offensive or thoughtless things—a girl pulls a plastic dry-cleaning bag over her head and her mother nonchalantly scolds her for messing up her dress, a family has a picnic and dumps their trash on the side of the road, leaving it there in a lingering wide shot as we, with Iron Eyes Cody, weep—not so much to illustrate the period but to settle the viewer comfortably in a position of moral superiority.

Now, “past forwarding” can be done well—I can think of good examples from two of Frederick Buechner’s novels, Godric and Brendan, and “past forwarding” of a peculiar kind in Walter Miller’s great novel A Canticle for Leibowitz—and it is not always used for the self-satisfied back-patting I describe above. But, as with any form of irony, it is a delicate tool so often misused that I think the writer of historical fiction is better off not attempting it without a really, really good reason. Certainly, if you’re confident that your planned case of “past forwarding” with be entertaining or amusing or offer the reader a good laugh, you should cut it.

Why? “Past forwarding” annoys me for three reasons, and writers of historical fiction would do well to avoid it for the same reasons:

It’s condescending

The characters in a story almost never come out of a moment of “past forwarding” looking good. The joke is almost always at their expense, leaving them looking credulous or stupid or, worse, dogmatic. (See the Evil Priest in virtually every medieval novel out there.) It casts your characters in an unnecessarily negative light—unnecessary because these things so seldom matter to the plot or the story. Allowing your characters to live and breath on their own terms and in their own context without this kind of intrusion—which amounts to their own narrator heckling them—will make them more fully human, their world more real and meaningful, and your story better. Treat your characters with charity, as equals, and your readers, receiving and responding to that charity, will take them more seriously, as they should.

It’s self-congratulatory

“Character defects fed by self-congratulation are the hardest to shed.”

— John Gardner

Note that I said the joke is almost always at the characters’ expense. There is often a character who, finding himself in an incident of “past forwarding,” gets it—or at least knows that no one else is getting it. This character is often the author surrogate or meant to be the most sympathetic (read: most mentally and philosophically modern) character in the story. In one of Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred novels, the characters meet an elderly hermit. The Christians ooh and ahh over the holy man as the drooling maniac paws at and gropes the women who have come to receive his blessing, and not one of them realizes they’ve been had by an insane pervert except aloof, pragmatic, cynical Uhtred—and us.

Self-congratulation is perhaps the most distasteful aspect of “past fowarding” to me. It undermines the moral dimension of storytelling, as rather than challenging or at least broadening the reader through an encounter with the strange and different world of the past, it flatters modern sensibilities, conflates the familiar with the superior, and offers up straw men to mock or scapegoats to blame. This is a dangerous tendency in any art, but especially storytelling. As John Gardner writes in On Becoming a Novelist, “Character defects fed by self-congratulation are the hardest to shed.”

It’s bad art

Implicit in the first two criticisms—that “past forwarding” reduces your characters, even if only momentarily, to punching bags and flatters the reader rather than telling them truth—is that “past forwarding” is bad art. It calls attention to itself, and necessarily—by design—breaks the reader’s “vivid and continuous fictive dream.” As the Tribune critic quoted above writes, “[t]he past on the page is a fragile reality, and the more distant the more fragile,” and so to make asides or jokes at the expense of our characters and their period “jostles our belief in the world [the author] has constructed.” Just as you wouldn’t put modern slang into the mouths of Attila’s Huns or buttons on Roman clothing or potatoes on the plate of a Viking, don’t mock the characters in the dream—it will wake the dreamer.

Conclusion

“[O]ur own age is also “a period,” and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions.”

— CS Lewis

I’ve written about topics adjacent to what I’m calling “past forwarding” here many times before: flippancy, presentism, chronological snobbery, bigotry as a failure of the imagination, and pietas. Let me commend those posts to you, as well as two others. This post from earlier this year offers up some of the benefits of studying the past as expressed by historian Christopher Dawson, and this essay from CS Lewis (quoted in the latter) makes similar arguments. Perhaps most important of all is Lewis’s assertion that one must reach

the realization that our own age is also “a period,” and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.

The result should be a certain charity toward those who lived before us.

While neither Dawson’s nor Lewis’s arguments touch on the writing of historical fiction per se, they do overlap with a concern that runs through this post and those I linked above: character, or virtue. Charity, pietas, humility—both a humble recognition of one’s own contingency in time and a humble receptivity to the past—all of these are crucial to a writer’s exploration and recreation of the past, and putting in the work to discipline and shape your own character will inevitably shape and enrich your fiction. It will make it better—or at least keep you from making cheap jokes.

Bede on corruption and plague

In that order.

From St Bede the Venerable’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book I, xiv, describing the situation of the British in the early 5th century just before the invasions of Germanic peoples (the English, eventually) from the Continent:

St Bede at work, from a 12th century manuscript of his Life of St Cuthbert in the British Library

When the depredations of its enemies had ceased, the land enjoyed an abundance of corn without precedent in former years; but with plenty came an increase in luxury, followed by every kind of crime, especially cruelty, hatred of truth, and love of falsehood. If anyone happened to be more kindly or truthful than his neighbors, he became a target for all weapons of malice as though he were an enemy of Britain. And not only the laity were guilty of these things, but even the lord’s flock and their pastors. Giving themselves up to drunkenness, hatred, quarrels, and violence, they threw off the easy yoke of Christ. Suddenly a terrible plague struck this corrupt people, and in a short while destroyed so large a number that the living could not bury the dead. But not even the death of their friends or the fear of their own death was sufficient to recall the survivors from the spiritual death to which their crimes had doomed them. So it was that, not long afterwards, an even more terrible retribution overtook this wicked nation.

I am not one to argue that natural disasters, pandemics, and other misfortunes are God’s punishments meted out to particular groups or for particular sins—that leads by a short road to callousness, boorishness, and buffoonery. I don’t doubt that God has his reasons and that he judges and punishes the nations, but that lies deep within the “for me to know and you to find out” zone of his will.

But the parallels between Bede’s description of post-Roman, pre-migration Britain and our own day are hard to set aside. A time of unbelievable plenty filled with discontent, licentiousness, consumption, and brutality, in which even the Church—both its people and its leadership—has proven complicit, and a culture actively hostile to truth and goodness and so smitten and hungry for its own evil that nothing can dissuade the people from pursuing it. And what phrase seems more pointedly relevant than Bede’s description of the people’s “hatred of truth, and love of falsehood”?

But notice that the plague only comes when the people are already corrupt. While God may have sent the plague upon the 5th century British as punishment or “retribution”—something about which Bede, notably, carefully avoids being dogmatic—they had already created many of their own problems. They had already compromised their own spiritual immune systems long before physical disease struck them down. And worse was coming, brought on by their own corrupted will:

For they consulted how they might obtain help to avoid or repel the frequent fierce attacks of their northern neighbors, and all agreed with the advice of their king, Vortigern, to call on the assistance of the Saxon peoples across the sea. This decision, as its results were to show, seems to have been ordained by God as a punishment on their wickedness.

Food for thought.

The translation above is that of Leo Sherley-Price for Penguin Classics. You can also read public domain translations at Project Gutenberg and Fordham’s excellent medieval source site. It’s worth your while. Penguin has another good volume called The Age of Bede that includes Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert and other saints’ lives and religious texts from his lifetime.