When authors throw shade at each other

Novelists Ursula K Le Guin (1929-2018) and Elmore Leonard (1925-2013)

Last month I read the sci-fi novelist Ursula Le Guin’s book Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story. It’s a brisk, delightful book of practical writing advice for those who already have some experience and are dedicated to refining the mechanics, the nuts and bolts, of their writing—hence her emphasis on craft. It was very good.

A small thing that caught my eye, especially coming in “An opinion piece on paragraphing” at the tail end of a chapter on sentence length and syntax:

“Rules” about keeping paragraphs and sentences short often come from the kind of writer who boasts, “If I write a sentence that sounds literary, I throw it out,” but who writes his mysteries or thrillers in the stripped-down, tight-lipped, macho style—a self-consciously literary mannerism if there ever was one.

This is an obvious dig at Elmore Leonard, an author of westerns and crime thrillers. I happen to be a fan.

In a famous 2001 piece in the New York Times titled “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points, and Especially Hooptedoodle,” Leonard published his rules for writing. There are ten. His rules include things like “Avoid prologues,” “Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue,” “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters,” and “Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly,” and at the end of his ten rules, Leonard includes another “that sums up the 10”:

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

LeGuin apparently interprets this as pretension, a phony posture of unmannered prose—as if Leonard is claiming to pick his sentences off a tree somewhere and do nothing to them. But it’s clear from the piece itself—and from the rule itself!—that Leonard too is talking about craft, about the rules he sets himself “to remain invisible” and how many tries it may take to achieve the desired effect. It takes conscious effort, something Leonard himself, who was unfussy about his craft and refused to make it mysterious in the manner of some writers (usually hacks), freely admitted. From an interview with Charlie Rose about the rules (and his short story collection When the Women Come Out to Dance):

Rose: A lot of people say that great writers never let their technique show. Does your technique show?

Leonard: Well, I say that my style is the absence of style. And yet, it is obvious, because people say they can tell by reading a passage that I wrote it. I mean when they read one of my books they know it’s my book and not someone else’s book.

Rose: Is that good?

Leonard: Sure. I think it’s good.

Rose: Because it has a certain… style, a certain zing.

Leonard: Because it has a certain sound. Whether it’s a zing or… I think of style as sound.

Leonard goes on to describe how a writer’s sound originates in his attitude, which brings to mind LeGuin’s accusation that Leonard writes in a “macho style,” something I’ve seen repeated elsewhere. I’ve read a bunch of Leonard’s novels now and honestly can’t say where this comes from. My sense of his narration is that it is terse, detached, and matter-of-fact; masculine perhaps, if we’re going to have this argument about omniscient third person narration, but by no means the bro-ish tough guy grunting that LeGuin implies.

(And for what it’s worth, Leonard has written a lot of compelling female characters. Read Out of Sight and Rum Punch for two of them. Both were adapted into films with strong female leads.)

A final thing about Leonard’s rules, and something I’ve noted here before, is that everywhere Leonard wrote or talked about his rules he made it clear that they were his rules. They were not for everybody. In the opening paragraph of the New York Times piece he writes that

If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

This is a pretty weak and genial “boast,” especially considering the number of counterexamples—Tom Wolfe, Jim Harrison, Margaret Atwood, and others—he offers in the same piece, often immediately following one of his own rules. One of the things I’ve enjoyed about listening to Leonard in interviews is his straightforwardness about his work and his self-effacing attitude about it. I think that bespeaks a humility about his craft that comes through in that most difficult piece of advice to give—What works for me works for me and might not for you. Do what works.

So is LeGuin’s criticism fair? No. It’s strikingly uncharitable. But it got me to revisit a favorite writer and really pore over his advice, and made me appreciate it more—which also made me appreciate her book more. Because even with this short, one-paragraph jab LeGuin offers much of the kind of advice I think Leonard would have appreciated, too, and much of it comes down to that difficult piece of advice above.

More if you’re interested

Steering the Craft was very good. You can find it on Amazon here. The New York Times sometimes paywalls Leonard’s original piece; you can also find almost all of it here—with a delightful illustration of the opening scene of Freaky Deaky—or the rules themselves at the Guardian here. You can also buy the article as a lavishly illustrated hardback gift book. By all means read the older blog post I linked to above, in which I compare Leonard’s rules with those of George Orwell and CS Lewis and find some helpful commonalities. And I highly recommend watching Leonard talk through his rules in some detail here.

The Odyssey VIII-IX on Core Curriculum

Odysseus and Polyphemus, by Arnold Böcklin (1898)

The Core Curriculum Podcast’s odyssey through Homer continues! This morning the fourth episode of the season dropped, in which David Grubbs and I discuss books VIII and IX of the Odyssey.

These are two of the most well-known parts of Odysseus’s story, relating the feast and games held in Odysseus’s honor by his host Alcinous, who finally prompts the mysterious stranger—who may or may not be a god in disguise—to tell his story. This gives us the beginning of Odysseus’s story of woe and perhaps the most famous incident in the book, his story of his encounter with and narrow escape from the cyclops Polyphemus. Along the way David and I talk more about the poem’s rich theme of hospitality as well as a possible cameo by Homer himself, the (mostly) bloodless and (totally) sacred aristeia of athletic competition, and whether or not Odysseus is a bad guest.

Had a great time hosting this conversation with David and talking about one of the great works of the Western canon. I hope y’all will enjoy listening as much as we did recording.

You can listen to Core Curriculum by subscribing on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. You can look at this episode’s excellent shownotes on the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site here. Subscribe to the show—and the other shows on the CHRN—so you can catch up on previous episodes of Core Curriculum and won’t miss future episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Andrew Roberts on how to write history

History, a mosaic in the Library of Congress by Frederick Dielman

National Review recently published an excellent short piece by British historian Andrew Roberts entitled “How to Write History.” Roberts—an accomplished military historian who has written studies of Waterloo and the Second World War and, most recently, big fat biographies of Napoleon and Churchill—offers a surprisingly simple reminder of what makes good historical writing:

When our forefathers sat around the fire in their caves telling stories about the famous mastodon hunts of yesteryear, they found it easy to do, because their listeners always wanted to know the answer to the eternal question “What happened next?” When the veterans of the Trojan War enthralled their grandchildren, and the Vikings told their sagas of long-ago raids, they knew they had their audiences riveted because they could tell them the next stage of the story. Nobody ever asked them to tell the tale thematically or in modules or in a postmodernist format; they just wanted to know what happened next.

He goes on to write about mankind’s innate sense of story and chronology. At the beginning of every semester, when I explain to my students how I approach history and how I will present it, I point out that if I asked them “How did you get to class this morning?” they would almost certainly tell me a story—they could craft it instantly, in fact, without thinking about it. Telling stories comes naturally to us (one of the many ways in which we are subcreators) both as explanation and entertainment. Ideally as both.

But Roberts notes one other serious advantage to narrative history:

The chronological approach also has the great advantage over other ways of writing history in that it is true (something the postmodernists ignore, since they despise the concept of truth in history per se).

We explain ourselves chronologically because that is how we experience our lives and literally everything else.

The inside of history

Roberts goes on to address something I care very, very deeply about: “To try to immerse oneself in the mindset of the long-dead is easily the hardest part of the historian’s craft, and the most treacherous. The further one goes back in history, the harder it is.” I’ve written about this before here, here, here, and here, for starters.

Alas, Roberts gives one good example, and then missteps into stereotype:

Reach back much earlier than the Western Enlightenment and one must be good at theology, because educated people spent what is to us an inordinate amount of time thinking about God and how He should best be worshiped. Go back much further than the Renaissance, and people spent a good deal of their time simply being scared. Recall the very earliest moments of COVID-19 a year ago, when we didn’t know how lethal it was but a lot of people were starting to die. That was what it was like living in the Dark Ages all the time, only with a good deal less information.

This is hardly giving the medievals their due; anyone even casually acquainted with the literature—of any variety—of medieval people can’t help but think of the exuberance, the piety, the joy with which they embraced life. Even their horror or mourning, as in the accounts of the plague in the 14th century, have a gusto to them that stands in marked contrast to our own time. Modern people have proven a good deal gloomier, even with all their information. Food for thought.

But Roberts’s overall point stands. I strive every semester to get my students inside the departed people we study, “to immerse [them] in the mindset” of our subjects. Every semester I see some successes but also conclude discouraged. As it happens, the very last item I graded today was a paper heavily salted with social justice platitudes, that roundly condemned members of several long-gone societies for their racial prejudices and inequality, and that overlooked the manifest evidence to the contrary. So Roberts’s essay, and this point particularly, struck me especially hard. Roberts:

Trying to impose our mindset—let alone our values—upon the past is self-evidently ludicrous, however often it is tried and however well intentioned. There is no such thing, for example, as “the right side of history.” We might want people in the past to be more like us, but they resolutely refuse to be, and we must respect their right to be different.

To understand the dead is difficult work, but worthwhile. The work must continue. And in the meantime, I may save that paragraph to copy and paste into student feedback in the future.

Words, words, words

Roberts also indulges in one of my favorite pastimes—hating on specific words:

Any book with too great a reliance on the words “perhaps,” “maybe,” “possibly,” or—the worst—“probably” is usually one to approach with caution. When the great Oxford historian Martin Gilbert saw the word “probably” in a history essay, he would circle it in red and write in the margin “Probably not?”

Similarly, never, ever use the word “inevitable,” because nothing is inevitable in history. (Except, as my Cambridge professor Norman Stone used to say, for German military counter-attack.) Marxists and other determinists will disagree, but unless you are one of them, beware the word as profoundly philosophically unsound.

This is fun to read but also excellent advice. Watch out for probably and bayonet every inevitable you come across.

Conclusion

Roberts touches on several other big topics—conspiracy theories, tendentious monocausal explanations of history like the 1619 Project, and woke or intersectional history and its popularity in the academy—before bringing his essay back to its starting point: Answer the question What happened next? and you’ll be on your way to good history.

None of which, I should add, is to suggest that analysis or the deep dive into the archives, German-style, is irrelevant. Roberts is no stranger to the archive, having dug up previously unknown or unpublished sources for his history of the Second World War and having read every single one of Napoleon’s 33,000 letters for his biography of the man. But all of that was in the service of chronology, of keeping the pages turning and the reader asking that question.

To keep readers or students interested, to make your history true, it should be a story.

Addenda

You can read the entirety of Roberts’s essay, which appears in the December 17 print edition of National Review, at NRO here.

A few months ago I quoted a longish excerpt from Land of Hope, a one-volume narrative history of the United States by Wilfred McClay. (I am, in fact, still reading it, the Gilded Age having had its usual effect on me by killing my interest for a few months.) McClay makes similar and, as the introduction to a book rather than an essay, deeper arguments in the same vein. You can read that excerpt and my glosses on it here.

Ancient Racist Aliens on the Sectarian Review

Last month I posted some thoughts on the implicit, and sometimes not so implicit, racism of the assumptions behind ancient astronaut theories of the kind peddled by authors Erich von Däniken and Zechariah Sitchin and, most recently and popularly, by the History Channel via the series “Ancient Aliens.” That post got a lot of traffic, including my friend Danny Anderson of the Sectarian Review podcast. Danny read and enjoyed it and suggested we discuss the post itself and the broader implications—and dangers—of ancient astronauts theories.

That episode dropped today. Joining us is David Grubbs of the Christian Humanist Podcast, whom you might remember from our discussion of CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy on City of Man earlier this year.

Between the three of us we have enough interest in the “weird and old” to sustain a spirited and fun discussion of ancient astronauts, racism old and new, the mystery of existence, and good old fashioned chronological snobbery. I had a great time and hope y’all will enjoy this as much as we did.

The Sectarian Review is a show on the Christian Humanist Radio Network. You can listen to the episode via iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or via the MixCloud player embedded below. Be sure to subscribe for future episodes, and dig through Danny’s extensive back catalog. You can read the blog post that inspired our episode here or at the link in the first paragraph above. Take a look at Danny’s shownotes for the episode here. And be sure to visit the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site and Facebook page for more.

Thanks for listening. Hope y’all enjoy!

The Odyssey I-II on Core Curriculum

Athena, disguised as Mentor, leads Telemachus in one of John Flaxman’s illustrations for The Odyssey (1810)

Series 4 of Core Curriculum has arrived! Previous seasons have tackled the Iliad, Plato’s Republic, and the selected poetry of Sappho. This season we’re talking through Homer’s Odyssey book by book.

In the first episode of this series, Michial Farmer of the Christian Humanist Podcast hosts my friend Coyle Neal, of the City of Man Podcast, and myself in a discussion of Books I and II of the Odyssey. We discuss the Odyssey’s relationship to the Iliad and even touch on the vexed and unanswerable question of authorship as well as talking about the events of these books, which follow the title character’s son Telemachus as he begins a journey in search of his missing father. We discuss the poem’s theme of hospitality and honor and, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, compare Homer’s work to everything from blatant parodies or homages like O Brother, Where Art Thou? or “Duck Tales,” to the perspectives of modern war movies, to other heroic poems like Beowulf, and to less obviously related stories like Home Alone and Back to the Future.

It’s a ton of fun. As much as I adore the Iliad and loved talking through that a year ago, I think I enjoyed our discussions of the Odyssey even more and am excited to listen to all of them as they come out.

You can listen to Core Curriculum by subscribing on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. It appears Stitcher will no longer allow me to embed the episode, so if you’re looking for a web player you can listen to it on the episode’s page there. You can look at Michial’s detailed shownotes, including all of our references and allusions to outside material, on the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site here. Subscribe to the show—and the other shows on the CHRN—so you don’t miss future episodes.

Thanks for listening! Hope y’all enjoy.

I’m not saying Ancient Aliens is racist…

…but it’s racist. Or can be.

The other day I ran across this excellent short post by Michael Heiser. Heiser is an Old Testament scholar and expert in ancient Semitic languages who has side interests in UFOs, cryptozoology, esotericism, and pretty much “anything old and weird,” as he puts it. A lot of his work in these areas is to correct or debunk the pseudoarchaeology of “ancient aliens” theorists like Zechariah Sitchin, who popularized the Annunaki as the extraterrestrial explanation for everything, or the godfather of the whole movement, Chariots of the Gods author Erich von Däniken. In this post he addresses some of the racialist assumptions behind these “ancient aliens” theories.

Bad assumptions

Like Heiser, I’ve had an interest in “anything old and weird” since childhood and, like Heiser, I have an interest in learning why people believe things like “ancient aliens” theories. My main concern, as an historian, has usually been to expose the chronological snobbery behind theories like this. As Heiser summarizes it:

some presume that humans in antiquity were so primitive they could not build these things without the assistance of non-human intelligence.

The presumption, inherited from the Enlightenment and given a scientific gloss by Darwinism, is that our technological sophistication somehow indicates our superior position in the eternal upward climb from barbarism. We today are superior technologically, scientifically, and—skipping over a number of premises—therefore morally.

With this assumption fixed firmly in place by years of progressive education, crude and condescending depictions of the past in popular media, and now historically illiterate activist messaging on social media, the recipient of “ancient aliens” theories is primed to believe that the pyramids, the Nazca lines, Stonehenge, etc. are too carefully constructed, too perfectly aligned with things “we” only understand now through “science,” to be the work of ancient man. Heiser:

All (and I mean “all”) of the examples of “impossible” architecture foisted on viewers of shows like Ancient Aliens were indeed built by humans. They weren’t primitive savages just because they didn’t have cars, cell phones, or the internet. Their technology solved their problems and met their needs, not ours. All the techniques they used are demonstrable from applied physics (which isn’t a physics that needs atom smashers).

Side note: I’m struck that aliens seem to have assisted all the fantastically remote civilizations of antiquity with projects like pyramids—a pile of stones with a square base, laborious to build but by no means difficult to design—but not the Romans with their extremely sophisticated hydro-engineering projects or the medievals with the gothic cathedral. The gravitation of these theorists to things that already have a certain mystique should be suspicious.

The race card

I’m a fanatic on the topic of chronological snobbery, but Heiser’s post directs us to another dimension of “ancient aliens” theories: the racial. A number of such theories rely on a narrative proposing that

an elect super-race taught by aliens could mediate that esoteric knowledge to poor savages in the New World by a select / advanced super-race descended from the Atlanteans, the original inheritors of alien knowledge.

Or something similar. Call such theories legion, for they are many.

Heiser links to two longer posts by archaeologists Jason Colavito and Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews. Both concern a specific book by the aforementioned von Däniken in which he apparently makes a lot of assertions about prehistorical races that are cartoonishly off-base, and both provide good examples of racism in discredited archaeology like Nazi racial theory (based on the work of Madison Grant, which gave us the notion of “Aryanism” we associate with the Nazis) or the racially-motivated misreadings of sites like Great Zimbabwe. Colavito even notes how von Däniken’s alien theories lead him not only into racialist ideas of human development but to eugenics and all sorts of other mad scientist projects:

Von Däniken asserts that the “extraterrestrials did choose a specific race.” He won’t say what that race is, but he leans heavily on Jewish claims to be the chosen people, which we have just seen him connect to the white (European) race. There can only be one conclusion, even if unstated. He then advocates eugenics, suggesting that modern genetic research will advise which combinations of races “are beneficial and which should be eliminated.” He seriously asks whether the aliens want “strict segregation” of the races, and he advocates human cloning to perpetuate the very best superior specimens in the event of disaster.

Both posts are worth reading, but Fitzpatrick-Matthews—whose post “Is pseudoarchaeology racist?” prompted the other two—demonstrates how the chronologically snobbish assumptions behind “ancient aliens” theories can bleed over into racialist thinking. Fitzpatrick-Matthews:

In part, this is a reflection of the discredited view that human history follows a linear progression from technologically unsophisticated to sophisticated . . . Bad Archaeologists are unwilling to do the background research into the societies that produced the monuments they present as mysterious, so either they do not appreciate the evidence for ancient complex societies or they deliberately withhold this evidence from their readers. What is more pernicious, though, is that while they can accept that locals (Greeks, Romans and so on) were responsible for the ancient monuments of Europe, they are unwilling to countenance the same explanation for people on other continents, especially Africa and South America.

He concludes by noting the use such theories have been put to by radical racialist groups. Having both personal and academic interests in early medieval Germanic peoples, Anglo-Saxon England, the Norse, and similar topics, I run across these people all the time. The unwitting aid given to racists by bad historical theories—whether they involve aliens or not—only muddies the waters and casts doubt on those with a legitimate interest in these fascinating peoples and their lives.

In short: ideas have consequences.

The ultimate failure

To take it back to Heiser, who brought all this to my attention:

I’ll point out again that there are no Bible verses that have the nephilim building anything, or possessing super-knowledge. . . . The reason is simple: books like 1 Enoch were concerned with the idea of intelligent evil lurking behind the human propensity toward self-destruction and idolatry, not architectural prowess or tyranny of the less enlightened savages through technology. Books like 1 Enoch and material in the Bible never put forth the idea of advanced human technology being bestowed to a master race for control of inferior races, or to condescendingly pass on their super knowledge. The concern is theological or moral, not the singling out of an elite race “blessed” by such knowledge.

And that’s the ultimate irony. Chesterton described bigotry as “the failure of the mind to imagine any other mind.” People who adopt “ancient aliens” explanations for our history don’t just demean the past through their assumed superiority, they show that they are not even interested in the past for its own sake. “Ancient aliens” theorists don’t do the hard work of trying to perceive what the people who built the pyramids or took the effort to write ancient texts were themselves interested in or why they chose to do what they did. See Heiser’s comment from near the beginning of this post that ancient peoples’ “technology solved their problems and met their needs, not ours.” The theorists, having lost sight of the humanity of the ancients, can only see these things as evidence for their own pet theories of extraterrestrial influence.

Whether for reasons of chronological snobbery or racism, whether naively or knowingly, their fault is a lack of charity.

More if you’re interested

Read Heiser’s full post here and the longer posts by Colavito and Fitzpatrick-Matthews here and here, respectively. Heiser also runs an excellent video channel at Vimeo (though he still uploads most of his videos to YouTube as well) in which he briefly investigates popular esoteric theories and sheds some critical light on them. For a good sample, here are his videos on the Annunaki and supposed depictions of aliens in Egyptian art. Erich von Däniken also gets namedropped in several of the late great Charles Portis’s novels, notably Gringos, which you should definitely read. And I’ve written about chronological snobbery many times here before, notably here.

How to Run a Country

Detail from Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes, by Benjamin West

Yesterday I read How to Run a Country, a wide-ranging collection of excerpts from the political writings of Cicero and part of Princeton UP’s Ancient Wisdom of Modern Readers series. I’ve reviewed another volume from the series, Cicero’s How to Grow Old, here before. While How to Grow Old translated a single long treatise, How to Run a Country anthologizes bits and pieces from Cicero’s works and organizes them thematically, covering such topics as leadership, corruption, and war.

So far I haven’t found the anthology or selection volumes of the series as fulfilling as those that translate a complete single text—those like How to Grow Old, How to Win an Election, a practical treatise by Cicero’s brother Quintus, or another favorite, Cicero’s How to Be a Friend—and as How to Run a Country was one of the very first volumes published in this series it’s clear that the series hadn’t nailed the format yet. But it’s still very good. How to Run a Country, thanks especially to the short, thoughtful introduction by editor and translator Philip Freeman, gives the reader a good precis of Cicero’s political thought in a format that can be read in about forty-five minutes.

Cicero as traditionalist, moderate, and statesman

In his book Roman Realities, Finley Hooper writes that

Cicero was a man of the middle class all his life. He opposed the selfish interests of a senatorial oligarchy and the selfish interests of the Populares, who had their way in the Tribal Assembly. When one side appeared to have the upper hand, he leaned toward the other. He was very conscious of a decadent ruling class which insisted on its right to rule regardless of whether it ruled well or not. The demagogues of Clodius’s stripe were even more frightening to him, and most of the time their activities kept him estranged from the people.

Freeman, in his introduction to How to Run a Country, describes Cicero as “a moderate conservative,” though I might have said traditionalist instead of or as well as moderate, and notes that this is “an increasingly rare breed in our modern world.” Cicero “believed in working with other parties for the good of his country and its people. Rather than a politician, his ideas are those of a statesman, another category whose ranks today grow ever more diminished.”

I emphasize the traditionalism of Cicero’s thought because, as we will see below, he was keenly aware of the collapse of tradition and his existence as a relict in a decaying republic. As Hooper notes elsewhere in his book, “The old Roman days of honor and virtue were almost beyond recall to all save men like Cicero.”

Freeman’s ten lessons to take from Cicero

In his introduction, Freeman offers the following ten-point summary of Cicero’s key political ideas. I only explore a few of them in the quotations below, but it should be clear how each reflects Cicero’s broader philosophy. I include the ten points without the paragraph-length explanations Freeman provides after each:

1. There are universal laws that govern the conduct of human affairs.

2. The best form of government embraces a balance of powers.

3. Leaders should be of exceptional character and integrity.

4. Keep your friends close—and your enemies closer.

5. Intelligence is not a dirty word.

6. Compromise is the key to getting things done.

7. Don’t raise taxes—unless you absolutely have to.

8. Immigration makes a country stronger.

9. Never start an unjust war.

10. Corruption destroys a nation.

Rather than write a longer, more traditional review—and because this is election day—I want to give most of the space here to Cicero himself, and I’ll conclude with the ten lessons in politics that Freeman argues we can learn from Cicero’s thought. Despite the often vast differences in cultural climate and basic assumptions about the world, the specific issues Cicero and his contemporaries faced are still relevant, and still offer us something to learn and reflect upon.

All quotations below are Freeman’s translations from How to Run a Country.

What we fight for

To continue on the thought of tradition and custom, in Pro Sestio (In Defense of Sestius), a legal case defending a friend of his brought up on charges by political enemies, Cicero describes the purposes for which the Republic was founded, what kind of dangers threaten it, and what kind of men it takes to defend the Republic:

The founding principles of our Republic, the essence of peace with honor, the values that our leaders should defend and guard with their very lives if necessary are these: respecting religion, discovering the will of the gods, supporting the power of the magistrates, honoring the authority of the senate, obeying the law, valuing tradition, upholding the courts and their verdicts, practicing integrity, defending the provinces and our allies, and standing up for our country, our military, and our treasury.

Building on these “founding principles,” in De Officiis (On Duties), a philosophical treatise from late in his life, Cicero describes the job of the state and the things it should and should not handle—especially when it comes to the perennial interests of the revolutionaries and demagogues:

Whoever governs a country must first see to it that citizens keep what belongs to them and that the state does not take from individuals what is rightfully theirs. When Philippus was a tribune, he proposed a ruinous law to distribute land, though when his bill was voted down he took it very well and accepted defeat graciously. However, when he was defending the bill he pandered shamelessly to the common people, saying that there weren’t two thousand people left in the city who owned any property. That kind of hyperbole must be condemned, along with any proposals advocating an equal distribution of land. . . .

As for those politicians who pretend they are friends of the common people and try to pass laws redistributing property and drive people out of their homes or champion legislation forgiving loans, I say they are undermining the very foundations of our state. They are destroying social harmony, which cannot exist when you take away money from some to give it to others. They are also destroying fairness, which vanishes when people cannot keep what rightfully belongs to them.

On a similar note, from Pro Sestio again:

For among the crowds are those who would destroy our country through revolution and upheaval, either because they feel guilty about their own misdeeds and fear punishment, or because they are deranged enough to long for sedition and civil discord, or because of their own financial mismanagement they prefer to bring the whole country down in flames rather than burn alone. When such people find leaders to help them carry out their wicked plans, the Republic is tossed about on the waves. When this happens, those helmsmen who guide our country must be vigilant and use all their skill and diligence to preserve the principles I mentioned above and steer our country safely home with peace and honor.

What it takes

Cicero uses the “helmsman” metaphor over and over again in his writing on politics; it appears multiple times just in this short collection, and it is a useful one, evoking as it does the manifold and constantly shifting dangers that threaten the body politic and the myriad skills required of the captain of a vessel. In Pro Sestio, Cicero provides the following shortlist of necessary skills: “Those who would be guardians of such important principles must be people of great courage, great ability, and great resolve.”

To return to the helmsman metaphor, Cicero develops the picture in greater detail in discussing the art of compromise in a letter to his friend Lentulus Spinther:

In politics it is irresponsible to take an unwavering stand when circumstances are always evolving and good men change their minds. Clinging to the same opinion no matter the cost has never been considered a virtue among statesmen. When at sea, it is best to run before a storm if your ship can’t make it to harbor. But if you can find safety by tacking back and forth, only a fool would hold a straight course rather than change directions and reach home. In the same way, a wise statesman should make peace with honor for his country the ultimate goal, as I have often said. It is our vision that must remain constant, not our words.

And what else? Naturally the most gifted and influential speaker of his day has ideas about the ability of a statesman to communicate. From De Oratore (On the Orator):

If a person has not acquired a deep knowledge of all the necessary disciplines involved in oratory, his speech will be an endless prattle of empty and silly words. An orator must be able to choose the right language and arrange his words carefully. He must also understand the full range of emotions that nature has given us, for the ability to rouse or calm a crowd is the greatest test of both the understanding and the practical ability of a speaker. An orator also needs a certain charm and with the cultured ways of a gentleman, and the ability to strike fiercely when attacking an opponent. In addition he needs a subtle grace and sophistication. Finally, an orator must have a keen mind capable of remembering a vast array of relevant precedents and examples from history, along with a thorough knowledge of the law and civil statutes.

This goes deeper than mere rhetorical technique—the speaker’s manner and style of speaking not only should be but is illustrative of his character. Food for thought.

Why we fail

Good men are made, not born, but in some generations it is easier to cultivate virtue. Elsewhere in De Officiis, he writes “Indeed, when you praise the integrity of a man you are also praising the age in which he lived.”

As I mentioned, Cicero lived among a decayed and corrupted generation in a decaying and corrupted Republic, and bore with him a lifelong cognizance of the fact. In De Re Publica (On the State), which only survives in fragments, Cicero takes this line from the Roman poet Ennius—“The Roman state is founded on ancient customs and its men”—and meditates on how the Republic has failed and who is to blame:

The poet who wrote these words so brief and true seems to me to have heard them from a divine oracle. For neither men by themselves without a state based on strong customs nor traditions without men to defend them could have established and maintained a republic such as ours whose power stretches so far and wide. Before our time, the cherished customs of our forefathers produced exceptional and admirable men who preserved the ways and institutions of our ancestors.

But now our republic looks like a beautiful painting faded with age. Our generation has not only failed to restore the colors of this masterpiece, but we have not even bothered to preserve its general form and outline. What now remains of the ancient ways of our country the poet declares we were founded upon? These traditions have so sunk into oblivion that we neither practice them nor even remember what they were. And what shall I say about the men? For the reason our customs have passed away is that the people who once upheld them no longer exist. We should be put on trial as if for a capital crime to explain why this disaster has happened. But there is no defense we can give. Our country survives only in words, not as anything of substance. We have lost it all. We have only ourselves to blame.

Freeman titles this excerpt “Cicero’s Epilogue: The Fallen State.”

More if you’re interested

I recommend How to Run and Country and all of the other volumes of the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series, especially those by Cicero. I return to Cicero again and again because of the truths—the “permanent things”—that he tapped into and related both in word and example. I think it is especially important to return to the thought of men like Cicero as our culture goes more and more overtly to war with the truth. As you might gather from the quotation I chose to end on—and the one that Freeman ends his collection with—I am not sanguine about the future. But I do not despair, either.

I explore this poignant mixture of grief, resignation, and paradoxical hope—and hint a bit at where to look for hope—in my novella The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero, which dramatizes the day politics and tyranny finally caught up to this champion of the Republic. I hope you’ll check it out, and that you’ll read it in light of the real man’s thought.

I also recommend Anthony Everitt’s Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician, and any of the works by Cicero quoted here, especially De Officiis.

Chesterton on monuments

More from Chesterton’s essay collection The Defendant, specifically “A Defence of Publicity.” In response to criticism of the public monuments of his day as “pompous,” Chesterton writes:

Properly speaking, of course, a public monument ought to be pompous. Pomp is its very object; it would be absurd to have columns and pyramids blushing in some coy nook like violets in the woods of spring. And public monuments have in this matter a great and much-needed lesson to teach. Valour and mercy and the great enthusiasms ought to be a great deal more public than they are at present. We are too fond nowadays of committing the sin of fear and calling it the virtue of reverence.

I think the trend he describes is still current—quite clearly—though we have other euphemisms for this sin, reverence being a largely unknown concept nowadays.

Later, on the purpose of memorializing anything (a live question now as then):

It is not enough for a popular monument to be artistic, like a black charcoal sketch; it must be striking; it must be in the highest sense of the word sensational; it must stand for humanity; it must speak for us to the stars; it must declare in the face of all the heavens that when the longest and blackest catalogue has been made of all our crimes and follies there are some things of which we men are not ashamed.

These observations may pair well with this, which I recently recommended, and most especially this.

Signs on City of Man Podcast

Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) and his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) looking for the titular signs in M Night Shyamalan’s film

This year’s Christian Humanist Radio Network Halloween crossover event begins today! The theme of this year’s event is the films of M Night Shymalan and the first episode comes from City of Man. On this episode, Katie Grubbs, Marie Hause, and yours truly—hosting for the first time ever—begin the crossover with a discussion of Shyamalan’s 2002 film Signs.

Graham Hess (Mel Gibson), a former minister who abandoned the faith after his wife’s untimely death, wakes one morning to find mysterious, impossible symbols pressed into his cornfields. Is this a prank? The appearance of similar crop circles around the globe suggests… something more sinister, or certainly something more complicated. Confronted with the growing evidence of alien invasion, Hess, his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), and his children Morgan and Bo (Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin) retreat to the family farm, where they’ll confront not only whomever made the signs in their fields but the lingering signs of their past. Is this all random? Or does all of this mean something?

Katie, Marie, and I discuss the plot of the film, its place in Shyamalan’s filmography, what Signs does and does not have in common with other alien invasion movies, and just what there is to learn from the film’s message about grief, faith, and providence. I had a really great time both revisiting this film—after more than fifteen years—and hosting this discussion. Tune in to hear more. It’ll be worth your while.

City of Man is a show on the Christian Humanist Radio Network. Visit the network’s website for shownotes for this and the other episodes in the crossover. You can subscribe and listen to City of Man via iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting services and you can listen to this episode on those platforms or via the Stitcher player embedded in this post.

Thanks for listening! I hope y’all enjoy, and have a happy Halloween!

Not to be

Mel Gibson struggles with the infinitive of be in Hamlet (1990)

Last summer I read a novel by a well-known author of good genre fiction, whose books I have read and enjoyed before. This one proved terrible—abominable. Though its story, with a bizarre cold-blooded murder in a small Southern town and a subplot involving one of the most brutal and important campaigns of World War II, should have appealed to me and kept me reading, it was a slog. I had to make myself finish it.

One sure sign of a bad book is that you begin performing an autopsy on it before you’ve finished. You’ll never ask How is this working? or, more pointedly, Why isn’t this working? while reading a good book. In this case, I settled on a number of obvious problems—poor structure, an almost total lack of tension, terrible dialogue, clichéd narration, and even elementary mistakes like misused homonyms—but a more subtle problem made the book an almost unbearable bore: it just wasn’t well written.

Writing can go wrong in a lot of ways—just listen to Michael J. Nelson’s 372 Pages podcast for some exotic varieties—but good writing is not just about adhering to the rules of grammar. Perhaps the worst way writing can go wrong is to be entirely grammatically correct but, nevertheless, not good. This problem takes us over the frontier of the mechanics of language and into style, which is the domain of art.

Case studies

Even as I read the book last summer I pulled samples with a view to looking at what’s wrong with them. Here are three from different parts of the novel.

The first comes from a lengthy flashback relating one of the main character’s dramatic experiences in the Philippines during World War II. In this passage, he and his unit face off against the invading Japanese early in 1942:

Late in March, 150 big guns were positioned near the American line and began a ferocious bombardment. The assault was continuous, around the clock, and the results were devastating. Many Americans and Filipinos were blown to bits in their foxholes. Bunkers thought to be bombproof disintegrated like straw shacks. Casualties were horrendous and the field hospitals were packed with the injured and dying. On April 3, after a week of nonstop artillery fire, Japanese tanks and infantry poured through the gaps. As the Americans and Filipinos fell back, their officers tried to rally them into defensive positions, only to be overrun within hours. Counterattacks were planned, attempted, and destroyed by the vastly superior Japanese forces.

Here’s another passage from just a few pages later, a passage that ostensibly gives us a closer, more personal look into what the character experiences in the aftermath of defeat:

They were approached by Japanese soldiers waving rifles and barking in their language. Every rifle was equipped with a long bayonet. The prisoners were directed to a field, lined up in rows, and told to remain silent. One by one, the prisoners were told to step forward and empty their pockets. They were frisked, though it was obvious the guards wanted little contact. Punching and slapping were okay, but nothing that required finesse around the pockets. Almost everything was stolen, or “confiscated,” by the Japanese. Fountain pens, pencils, sunglasses, flashlights, cameras, mess kits, blankets, coins, razors, and blades.

And here’s a short one from after the war, relating the events following the protagonist’s inexplicable murder of a prominent local minister:

The police were called and Dr. Hilsabeck was notified. Everyone was alarmed, but not panicked. Liza was not deemed a threat to anyone else, and she was stable enough to take care of herself, for a few hours anyway.

All three passages struck me, even while reading, as weak, only barely conveying the drama that these events—an assault by the Japanese army, capture by the enemy, and the aftermath of a shocking murder—should have. While, as I mentioned, there are a lot of other problems with this novel—you’ll note that all of these passages violate the classic show, don’t tell rule—I want to look closely at the stylistic choices (or, more likely, non-choices) that made these passages lie so flat on the page.

Did you notice anything common to all three samples? One verb, a word so indispensable to us that it is almost invisible: to be.

The classic scapegoat

Let me start by saying that I do not mean passive voice, the classic bad writing scapegoat. Here’s William Strunk in the original 1918 edition of The Elements of Style. In Rule 10, the third of his “elementary rules of composition,” Strunk advocates using the active voice as opposed to the passive voice:

The habitual use of the active voice makes for forcible writing. . . . Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a verb in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is or could be heard.

The example of passive voice we all learn in school is:

Active: The pitcher threw the ball.
Passive: The ball was thrown by the pitcher.

Passive voice is often singled out as a serious no-no in writing, and for good reasons. Passive constructions often lead to awkward, inside-out expression that weakens and distorts the flow of ideas in writing. Avoiding passive voice is preferable for all of the reasons Strunk cites above—forcefulness, emphasis, directness, liveliness, and what a professor of mine in college called “felicity of expression”—but it is entirely possible to write good passive sentences. Some meanings can only be expressed using the passive voice. Like that one!

What I’m concerned with in the examples above is the verb to be generally, whether “helping” as an auxiliary verb in a passive construction or standing on its own.

To be a villain

While to be helps us identify passive constructions, overreliance on to be even in active sentences can prove fatal to your writing. Good writing—really good writing—starts in the verbs. A vivid verb can tell you not only what someone is doing but even how they are doing it, and the perfect verb will carry some kind of sensory information as well.

But if the verb around which all of your sentences are constructed is to be, the weight of action and sensory experience, the qualities that make fiction vivid, have to be picked up and carried by other parts of the sentence. The burden usually falls on adverbs, the clumsiest means of specifying detail, or adjectives, which can rapidly purple your prose or smother the reader under a steadily accumulating pile of modifiers. In the worst case, the adverbs and especially the adjectives will not be well-chosen either, and convey… nothing.

And that kind of vagueness is fatal.

The samples were revisited by us

To see how overreliance on weak verbs like to be can hamstring your writing, look at the samples from that novel again. Here is the first sample above, with the verbs (mostly omitting verbals like gerunds and infinitives) in boldface:

Late in March, 150 big guns were positioned near the American line and began a ferocious bombardment. The assault was continuous, around the clock, and the results were devastating. Many Americans and Filipinos were blown to bits in their foxholes. Bunkers thought to be bombproof disintegrated like straw shacks. Casualties were horrendous and the field hospitals were packed with the injured and dying. On April 3, after a week of nonstop artillery fire, Japanese tanks and infantry poured through the gaps. As the Americans and Filipinos fell back, their officers tried to rally them into defensive positions, only to be overrun within hours. Counterattacks were planned, attempted, and destroyed by the vastly superior Japanese forces.

That’s nine uses of to be in this paragraph, three of which are passive. In order to convey the terror and drama of this event, the author relies on other devices like parallelism, as in the final sentence, in which to be has to “help” three other passive verbs in an attempt to achieve a sense of dramatic escalation. Notice especially the continuous stream of adjectives and how vague they are—ferocious, devastating, horrendous, vastly superior. As compared to what? The reader needs a concrete demonstration of why the bombardment was ferocious, why the results were devastating, and exactly how many and what kind of casualties count toward the battle being horrendous.

Here’s sample two again:

They were approached by Japanese soldiers waving rifles and barking in their language. Every rifle was equipped with a long bayonet. The prisoners were directed to a field, lined up in rows, and told to remain silent. One by one, the prisoners were told to step forward and empty their pockets. They were frisked, though it was obvious the guards wanted little contact. Punching and slapping were okay, but nothing that required finesse around the pockets. Almost everything was stolen, or “confiscated,” by the Japanese. Fountain pens, pencils, sunglasses, flashlights, cameras, mess kits, blankets, coins, razors, and blades.

Almost every verb in this passage is a passive construction, and those that aren’t mostly cluster in subordinate clauses. The author even reduces the most vivid verbs in the paragraph to adjectives or nouns by using them as participles and gerunds: waving rifles, barking words, punching, slapping. And there is the vagueness again: “Punching and slapping were okay” for whom? In what way? The Japanese were permitted to do it? Or the prisoners found it tolerable? And why was it “obvious the guards wanted little contact” with the prisoners? Even one curled lip or nauseous gag would help make this paragraph feel real.

(This is not the point of this post, but obvious is a word one should always, always, always avoid. Make it obvious, and then you don’t have to say that it is.)

And the final sample:

The police were called and Dr. Hilsabeck was notified. Everyone was alarmed, but not panicked. Liza was not deemed a threat to anyone else, and she was stable enough to take care of herself, for a few hours anyway.

This last, short sample includes several passive constructions—made the more noxious by coming along in a conga line, with two in the first sentence alone—but it is the vagueness that I want to highlight. Liza, the wife of the murderer in the story, “was not deemed—” by whom? Liza here would be the object of an ordinary sentence; in this passive sentence the subject has dropped out entirely. Most of the other be verbs lead us to foggy predicate adjectives. Stable, of course, is a piece of vague medical jargon that only raises more questions and leads us to another infinitive, the awkward to take care of. But vaguest of all is “alarmed, but not panicked.” The author invites us to understand that the wife and family of the man who just murdered someone are in some intermediate state of upset, and helpfully provides us a range. They were all somewhere between these two points, he tells us, but provides no details, no concrete sensory images, no facial expressions, no voices raised in shock or stunned silent.

Again: vagueness is fatal.

For comparison’s sake

To see how writers can do all of these things more skillfully, look at these passages from other novels. I’ve excerpted these from similar genre fiction, and each passage does what one of the above samples is trying to do, but better.

From Ralph Peters’s Civil War story Cain at Gettysburg, a short flashback passage about a moment during the Confederate bombardment ahead of Pickett’s Charge:

Instead of the Virginian and his men, Longstreet appeared, a black-miened man on a black horse. At the height of the artillery duel, Alexander had watched him ride calmly through the fields behind the gun line, showing himself to the men waiting in the trees, exposing himself with no regard for his safety, an inspiring figure, daring the Yankees to kill him, almost as if he would have welcomed death.

From Donn Pearce’s World War II novel Nobody Comes Back in which the protagonist, Toby Parker, a teenaged enlistee who has arrived in Europe just in time for the Battle of the Bulge, has been captured by German paratroopers:

One rammed a gun in his back. Another dug around in Parker’s pockets, took his watch and his wallet, shook one hand, and whistled in fun at the two grenades and the clips of ammo in the bandolier. The trooper stretched out the ripped, bloody ribbons of his pants with one finger and whistled again. He unwrapped the piece of K-ration dessert bar Parker had saved, nibbled at it, smiled, took a bigger bite, and poked the rest of it into Parker’s mouth.

In this excerpt from The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty, a doctor examines a young girl who exhibits mysterious symptoms:

He repeated the procedure several times but without any variance in the result. He seemed dissatisfied. When Regan abruptly sat up and spat in his face, he instructed a nurse to remain in the room and returned to his office to talk to Chris.

Notice how vivid each of these is. In each of the three excerpts we, the readers, can see what happens. While the three authors use a widely varying amount of concrete detail and descriptive imagery, including adverbs and adjectives and the odd archaism or poetic effect, everything that works well in these passages does so because they are set up to do so by strong verbs.

What verbs should do

A well chosen verb does at least three things, things that set the counterexamples above apart from the vague, dull, plodding samples I quoted at the beginning of this post:

• They convey action—Peters’s description of General Longstreet is apt here. Unlike the bombardment described in the novel that provoked this post, in which things just are ferocious or devastating or horrendous, in Peters’s book Longstreet appears and rides, setting up a series of verbals that work brilliantly as Longstreet shows and exposes himself and dares the enemy as Alexander, the reader's viewpoint character, watches. The characters do things, and they affect each other—and the reader.

• They convey specifics—Pearce’s book does this especially well. The German who searches Parker after his capture remains continuously active through the whole paragraph and we not only learn what he does to Parker but can see how he does it, ramming with his rifle and digging and shaking and nibbling at Parker’s chocolate and whistling in amusement. We get a sense not only of the energy and menace of the scene but also of the German’s personality. I’d say to compare the originally sampled passage in which the Japanese search their prisoners, but there is no comparison. There is a difference between dashing and trotting, between chuckling and belly laughing, between shouting and roaring, and the writer who is attentive to the fine shading in the many, many verbs we have at our disposal will set himself far apart from the writer who settles for he was fast and he was good-humored and he was angry.

• Finally, they allow subjects to act upon objects—Of the three counterexamples I offer, Blatty’s is almost journalistically straightforward. He uses one adjective and one adverb in these two sentences, which are otherwise a march of nouns and verbs. But there are no passive clauses, and not even one instance of to be, and notice how much he manages to convey: not only the businesslike professionalism of the doctor and the mechanical routine of the medical exam, but even that there is something… off… about the results.

The remedy for vague and weak writing is vividness and specificity of detail, and in good writing these will begin in the verbs.

A reminder and conclusion

I want to reiterate that to be is an integral and useful part of English and, like the passive voice constructions that rely on it as an auxiliary, it arose organically in our language as a way to express an important concept—being. I do not advise never using it. I’d even say it’s impossible in any long piece of prose.

But is it a mistake to lean too heavily on to be, and dangerously easy to do so. Writing as bad as the stuff I sampled from that novel results from habit. The writer who penned that book filled it with information—with all the characters, settings, events, and dialogue necessary to craft a gripping and emotionally powerful story—but made it an absolute chore to read because of the vague and lazy manner in which he wrote it.

I don’t mean to be cruel or disparaging—which is why I have not identified the book or author—but I use the word lazy purposefully. One can fall into an unthinking rhythm of it was and there were and he was and she wasn’t and end up wondering why one’s writing has turned out so lifeless. I suggested at the beginning of this post that the terrible style in that novel was the result of non-choices, and this book showed just such a lack of intentionality and care at the level of word choice—and not just in the author’s choice of words generally, but the words that matter most to the liveliness and vigor of fiction sentence by sentence. The results speak for themselves.

Some practical suggestions

I speak from experience. One of the most helpful notes I got on the rough draft of my novel Dark Full of Enemies came from my friend Dave Newell, who noticed a tic I had developed in the early chapters of that manuscript. Many of my descriptions began with There was or There were, with precisely the effect I’ve described. So as I revised the book I went through the manuscript with an orange highlighter and marked every instance of that construction, as well as every instance of to be in yellow for good measure. I struck as many of them as I could. Sometimes it required rewriting and restructuring entire paragraphs, or even more work. But it improved the narration, and, what is more, forced me to think about the words. I had to be purposeful—that is, I had to be an artist.

So let me end with a few practical suggestions and even what you might call exercises, challenges I have occasionally set myself when working on a piece of fiction:

• Write a long paragraph describing a character without using to be.

• Write a page-length description of an outdoor setting without using to be.

• Write a long scene of action, whether as vigorous as a fight or sedate as a walk to the store, without using to be.

• Write an entire chapter of any kind using to be less than five times.

• During revision, use the highlighter method I described above. You may end up making decisions entirely different from mine—and more power to you!—but if you see highlighter marks clustering in different parts of your manuscript, you can be sure those sections need improvement.

If you’ve stuck with me this long, I hope you’ve found this post helpful. Thanks for reading!

Robert E Lee, 150 years later

A visibly exhausted Robert E Lee poses for Matthew Brady with one of his sons and a member of his staff just after the end of the Civil War

This has been a big week for my historical passions. Yesterday was the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, and Monday was the sesquicentennial of the death of Robert E Lee, who died October 12, 1870 in his home on the campus of Washington College in Lexington, in the mountains of his native Virginia. He was 63.

I originally had a much longer post on the topic prepared for Monday, the anniversary proper, but it proved much, much too long and self-indulgent. So, with apologies to the General for my tardiness, let me recommend the handful of items I had originally intended to share and let them speak for themselves.

Three good essays and a bonus

This month historian Allen Guelzo, author of Gettysburg: The Last Invasion and Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President among many other books, published “The Mystery of Robert E Lee” in National Review. Guelzo’s article attempts to get at the real man beneath the oceans of criticism and vitriol directed toward the strawman version of Lee that was the object of one of this year’s Two Minutes Hates. I don’t agree with all of Guelzo’s conclusions, but it’s a more measured and scholarly primer on some key aspects of Lee’s life, personality, and historical context than has become the norm.

To travel backward in time a bit—to July, as the fury of the early summer’s iconoclasm peaked—Helen Andrews published a really gutsy and thought-provoking piece in The American Conservative entitled “A Lesson from Robert E Lee.” This essay includes a strikingly drawn comparison of the characters of Lee and one of his contemporaries, a creature of pure politics and pragmatism, and goes on to suggest that the accusations flung at Lee say more about we moderns than him. It’s excellent.

As a bonus, you can read the text of the exchange Dwight Eisenhower had regarding the portrait of Lee he kept in the Oval Office—an exchange which Andrews quotes above—here. You can also watch a fun short clip of Ike talking about Lee at a 1957 Washington press conference here.

(And what’s this? A president deeply informed by history, with respect for tradition and the virtues that founded the Republic, and able to communicate civilly and coherently with those who question him? A vision of a lost world.)

For the last of the three essays I want to recommend, let me leap even further back in time to an old favorite, a classic essay I have briefly written about it here before—Richard Weaver’s 1948 essay “Lee the Philosopher.” Weaver takes Lee’s handful of almost gnomic dicta from during the war and mines them for what they can reveal about Lee’s worldview. An apropos sample:

I would not represent Lee as a prophet, but as a man who stood close enough to the eternal verities to utter prophecy sometimes when he spoke. He was brought up in the old school, which places responsibility upon the individual, and not upon some abstract social agency. Sentimental humanitarianism manifestly does not speak to language of duty, but of indulgence. The notion that obligations are tyrannies, and that wants, not deserts, should be the measure of what one gets has by now shown its destructive power. We have tended to ignore the inexorable truth that rights must be earned. Fully interpreted, Lee’s “duty” is the means whereby freedom preserves itself by acknowledging responsibility. Man, then, perfects himself by discipline, and at the heart of discipline lies self-denial. When the young mother brought an infant for Lee to bless, and was told, “teach him he must deny himself,” she was receiving perhaps the deepest insight of his life.

This essay is anthologized in the out-of-print collection The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver but you can read it at the link provided above (caveat lector: that version has a number of typos resulting, it seems, from a scan with faulty text recognition software). You can also find a longish excerpt here.

For a deeper dive

Finally, I want to recommend a slightly different way to learn about Lee if you are interested in a detailed account. There have been a number of good biographies of Lee, among them that of Douglas Southall Freeman (often dismissed as hagiography now but a monumental four-volume feat of scholarship and more measured than Freeman gets credit for), a more recent one by Emory Thomas, and an interesting study of Lee’s life in light of his religious views by R David Cox. I’d recommend both of those, but perhaps my favorite is that published a few years ago by historian William C Davis. Davis is a prolific author of history and biography and a careful and thorough scholar, and his dual biography Crucible of Command pairs Lee with the man who became his opposite number in the final year of the war, Ulysses S Grant.

For some reason we have had a glut of worshipful Grant biographies in the last few years, but this dual biography excels them all. By presenting these two strikingly different men together, Davis compellingly contrasts their virtues, their flaws, and the careers that led them to opposite sides of the bloodiest war in American history. Well-researched and written and scrupulously evenhanded, allowing the reader to get to know both men on their own terms, Crucible of Command is the kind of measured, thoughtful, and thorough account we need more of today.

Tom Wolfe on what novels do better than movies

Journalist and novElIst Tom Wolfe (1930-2018)

A few weeks ago, while waiting on my ancient laptop to do something, I pulled down Tom Wolfe’s essay collection Hooking Up and read one of his most famous and controversial pieces, “My Three Stooges.” The essay is one part a defense of his technique, especially as used in his novel A Man in Full, and one part a strike back against a gang of literary establishment figures who had led the charge against the novel, Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving. I’m not going to relitigate that controversy (you can watch Wolfe talk about the novel and the controversy here), and Wolfe himself uses the kerfuffle with his literary elite Larry, Curly, and Moe as a jumping off point to describe the poor state of the novel in late 20th century America and what he sees as the solution.

Near the end Wolfe includes a striking passage on the strengths of different media in telling stories, and outlines his argument for the superiority of the novel over films as a storytelling medium. I love both books and movies and am keenly aware of both media’s limitations, so I was especially interested in what Wolfe had to say.

First, Wolfe explains the four specific devices “that give the naturalistic novel its ‘gripping,’ ‘absorbing’ quality.” The four devices are:

1. the author’s construction of the story as a series of scenes;

2. realistic dialogue, especially as a means to reveal character;

3. interior point of view, that is, “putting the reader inside the head of a character and having him view the scene through his eyes,” commonly achieved either through direct first-person narration or third person limited omniscience;

4. and, finally—and certainly the most Wolfean device of the four—what Wolfe calls “status details,” the myriad “cues that tell people how they rank in the human pecking order, how they are doing in the struggle to maintain or improve their position in life or in an immediate situation, . . . the entire complex of signals that tell the human beast whether it is succeeding or failing and has or hasn’t warded off that enemy of happiness that is more powerful than death: humiliation.”

With these four narrative devices in mind, Wolfe compares the effectiveness of the novel as a medium and the film as a medium:

In using the first two of these devices, scene-by-scene construction and dialogue, movies have an obvious advantage; we actually see the scenes and hear the words. But when it comes to putting the viewer inside the head of a character or making him aware of life’s complex array of status details, the movies have been stymied. In attempting to create the interior point of view, they have tried everything, from the use of a voice-over that speaks the character’s thoughts, to subtitles that write them out, to the aside, in which the actor turns toward the camera in the midst of a scene and simply says what he’s thinking. They have tried putting the camera on the shoulder of the actor (Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend), so that the audience sees him only when he looks in the mirror, and having him speak his thoughts in voice-over. But nothing works; nothing in all the motion-picture arts can put you inside the head, the skin, the central nervous system of another human being the way a realistic novel can. The movies are not much better with status details. When it comes time to deal with social gradations, they are immediately reduced to gross effects likely to lapse into caricature at any moment; the house that is too grand or too dreadful, the accent that is too snobbish or too crude.

Which brings us to another major shortcoming of movies as a technology: they have a hard time explaining . . . anything. They are a time-driven medium compelled by their very nature to produce a constant flow of images. Three movies have been made from things I’ve written, and in each case I was struck by how helpless perfectly talented people were when it came time to explain . . . anything . . . in the midst of that vital flow, whether it be the mechanics and aerodynamics of a rocket-assisted airplane or the ins and outs of racial politics in the Bronx. When a moviegoer comes away saying, “It wasn’t nearly as good as the novel,” it is almost always because the movie failed in those three areas: failed to make him feel that he was inside the minds of the characters, failed to make him comprehend and feel the status pressures the novel had dealt with, failed to explain that and other complex matters the book had been able to illuminate without a moment’s sacrifice of action or suspense. Why is it that movie versions of Anna Karenina are invariably disappointing? After all, Tolstoy put enough action, suspense, and melodrama into Anna Karenina . . . for ten movies.

For a big splash of icewater in the face on Wolfe’s last point, about the difficulty of visual media to explain, read Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. I think Wolfe is expressing the same concern about the transition from a culture shaped by print to a culture shaped by images that animates Postman’s book.

Allowing for Wolfe’s characteristic overstatement, Wolfe is onto something when he cites the “constant flow of images” necessary to narrative momentum in a movie as a “major shortcoming.” (Postman makes similar arguments about TV news and other “educational” visual media, which can’t hold still without boring the audience.) Novels can pause, can draw out even a moment—sometimes for pages and pages—and give us space to process things characters notice. A novel can, I think, more accurately recreate the flow not of events but the flow of perception and thought. Films, by the nature of the medium, have a harder time doing that.

I happen to be reading Vindolanda, a novel by historian Adrian Goldsworthy that does all of these things exceptionally well. The novel takes place in Roman Britain during the reign of Trajan and concerns the danger of life on the frontier of the Empire. I’d love to see it as a movie—but even as I read I have puzzled over how a movie could possibly convey the delicate, carefully managed interplay of military politics, rank, ethnicity, and especially language that creates so much of the drama of each scene of Goldsworthy’s book.

Which, of course, is why adaptations of books for film are exactly that—adaptations.