Chesterton and Orwell on long words

GK Chesterton (1874-1936) and George Orwell (1903-50)

In Orwell’s celebrated essay “Politics and the English Language,” which I’ve revisited several times recently, he concludes by offering the writer a set of six “rules that one can rely on when instinct fails.” Among them is:

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

Orwell’s concern here is with clarity—both of expression and of thinking.* Earlier in the essay he writes:

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

Compare this passage from Chesterton (in Orthodoxy Chapter VIII, “The Romance of Orthodoxy”), which I’ve just rediscovered thanks to my Facebook memories:

But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle. Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars; but this is not due to human activity but to human repose. There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply walking about. Our world would be more silent if it were more strenuous. And this which is true of the apparent physical bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect. Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration.”

Chesterton and Orwell’s concerns neatly overlap here.** And the example provided by Chesterton also helps make clear (I almost wrote “clarify”) another of Orwell’s rules:

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

I’ve heard this rule dismissed as “linguistic chauvinism,” an odd charge to make against a man like Orwell, but the truth is that most of our bureaucratic jargon, especially the legalese and pseudoscientific managerial talk that passes for political discourse and social critique now, comes into English from other languages. To take just one example, Latinate words, which tend to be longer, with more syllables to go rattling by, have been an occasional feature of English since before the Conquest,*** but have grown like wisteria all over the solid oak of the language’s basic Germanic grammar and vocabulary. It can certainly be pretty, but if there’s too much of it it will obscure the tree underneath—and even kill it.

And our brains know this: Old English words are gut words, bone words, the words we learn at our mother’s breast, while the multisyllabic vocabulary ported into English from specialist fields—medicine, science, law, theology—tends toward the abstract. It is clinical language. Phrases like capital punishment, lethal injection, execution of sentence all hold the fact that a man is being killed at arm’s length. And consider how much the adjective of the decade, systemic, muddles and covers up.

I could go on, but Orwell’s own famous example is enough. In his essay, he quotes Ecclesiastes 9:11:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

And reimagines it as a modern man might be tempted to express it:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

None of which is to say never to use Latin-rooted words. It’s impossible—which is itself of Latin origin. But if you want to write clearly and forcefully, you’ll hew as closely as possible to the clear, hard Germanic words we learn first, as babies.

And to kick it back to Chesterton, in a passage from The Everlasting Man that I’ve written about here before, “No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world.”

Footnotes or, if you prefer Latin, citations:

*I’ve written about Orwell’s rules here before, examining their overlap, especially that concern with clarity, with the rules of two other celebrated but quite different writers—Elmore Leonard and CS Lewis. Read that here.

**Interestingly, Orwell’s first published essay appeared in Chesterton’s own newspaper, GK’s Weekly, in December 1928.

***The Norman Conquest gave us the first big spate of French and Latinate vocabulary in English, but lots of theological jargon had already made its way in. One example: bishop is a modern spelling of bisceop, which is what you get when an Anglo-Saxon cleric tries to pronounce the Latin episcopus, which had already been borrowed from the Greek ἐπίσκοπος.

HHhH

HHhH is an unusual novel. The title is the first hint. An abbreviation of a German phrase purportedly current within the upper echelons of the Third Reich, HHhH stands for Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich—Himmler’s Brain is called Heydrich. The Heydrich in question is Reinhard Heydrich: disgraced naval officer; violinist, champion fencer, and connoisseur of the arts; model Aryan; object of admiration from no less than Hitler himself; head of the Gestapo, Criminal Police, and Security Service, and other powerful instruments of Nazi order; and one of the architects of the Final Solution. He is one of the most powerful and evil people who ever lived, and HHhH tells the story of his assassination by agents of the Czech resistance.

Sort of.

The author, French novelist Laurent Binet, begins with an image of one of the assassins, Slovak commando Jozef Gabčík, trying to sleep in his safehouse in Prague ahead of the assassination attempt. From there the novel backtracks, backtracks all the way to Heydrich’s family and birth, his upbringing and abortive naval career—cut short after he seduced the daughter of Admiral Raeder—and his entry into the world of Nazism and the SS. The novel tracks, in often surprising detail—crucial context, the author assures us, and he’s right—the career of Heydrich and his steady, implacable rise. From the annexation of the Sudetenland and the subsequent dismantling and takeover of Czechoslovakia and its transformation into the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, to the invasion of Russian and the deployment of the Einsatzgruppen—mobile death squads that could shoot over 30,000 Jews at a time at places like Babi Yar outside Kiev—to Heydrich’s scourging of even the mildest resistance and his hosting of the infamous Wannsee Conference, over and over again he is the right man at the right place at the right time to take advantage of new developments, of new positions, of the frequent changes in the Nazi hierarchy, and he uses his positions to advance the cause of Nazism ruthlessly. And the nicknames he garnered along the way reveal much: Himmler’s Brain, The Butcher of Prague, and, from Hitler himself, The Man With the Iron Heart.

By the midpoint of the book Binet brings us back to the assassins, the Slovak Gabčík and his Czech partner, Jan Kubiš. Having escaped Europe by circuitous routes—which Binet notes would make smashing adventure novels of their own—they find themselves training in England and assigned to Operation Anthropoid, the plot to drop into Bohemia, infiltrate Prague, and murder Heydrich.

From this point forward the novel, already compulsively readable, proves difficult to put down. It’s over 300 pages and I read it in two days. Binet deftly interweaves the stories and, even with asides, detours, admittedly unrelated information, and reflections on the craft of historical fiction (about which more below), HHhH thunders along like a freight train—or like Heydrich’s Mercedes convertible on that fatal day in 1942. We know what’s coming from the beginning, and it approaches inexorably, with mounting dread and, yes, excitement.

But here’s where the “sort of” above comes in. HHhH not only tells the story of the assassins and of Heydrich’s life but the story of the author himself: how he came to the story, how his interest grew and deepened, and, throughout, how he decided to write this story, decided he couldn’t, and decided he must regardless. The result is a very postmodern combination of historical fiction, memoir, and commentary on historical fiction and memoir.

A sample: Binet steps back at one point to comment on the title of his manuscript, the manuscript that became the novel I read and that you’re reading about now:

Whenever I talk about the book I’m writing, I say, “My book on Heydrich.” But Heydrich is not supposed to be the main character. Through all the years that I carried this story around with me in my head, I never thought of giving it any other title than Operation Anthropoid (and if that’s not the title you see on the cover, you will know that I gave in to the demands of my publisher, who didn’t like it: too SF, too Robert Ludlum, apparently).

Later, in a passage that makes up the entirety of the novel’s Chapter 205, Binet reflects that, “I think I’m beginning to understand. What I’m writing is an infranovel.”

The distance, the authorial intrusion, the holding of one’s craft at arm’s length—all these deconstructive or self-consciously “meta” effects usually irritate me. Usually. But you might have picked up as well on Binet’s utter sincerity, the quality most often lacking in postmodern fiction. Where the last few generations of literary novelists handle fiction like a bauble they are inspecting for flaws, finally judging the enterprise meaningless, Binet is grappling with the tools at hand for the best way to tell a story that needs to be told. What he wants to do, however much his world, the French literary establishment, has called the very idea of fiction into question, is pay tribute to Gabčík and Kubiš and everyone who helped them on their way and suffered for it.

In other words, to pay tribute to heroes.

That motive infuses HHhH with heart. For all its self-consciousness, postmodern literary effects, its pauses to reflect on everything from trips to museums to love affairs to actors who have played Heydrich on film, and its open admission that the author is not up to the task, HHhH is a riveting, suspenseful, uncommonly rich, and finally—in relating the sad fates of Lidice, a village incorrectly implicated in the assassination, or of the parachutists who took on Heydrich and of everyone who helped them—profoundly moving. HHhH is an excellent example of what an historical novelist, moved by the proper love of his subject, can still accomplish in the postmodern age, and I highly recommend it.

More if you’re interested

HHhH was adapted into a film called The Man With the Iron Heart, starring Jason Clarke as Heydrich and Rosamund Pike as his ardent Nazi wife Lina. I haven’t seen more than clips from it, but it looks decent. That film came out a year after Anthropoid, which focuses on Gabčík and Kubiš, played by Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan respectively, and on the plot itself, relegating Heydrich to an ominous background presence. Anthropoid is excellent, an overlooked masterpiece, and even if you don’t read HHhH you should do yourself the favor of watching Anthropoid at least once. Here’s the meticulously reconstructed assassination scene, an extraordinarily tense three minutes.

Related: I have written here before, in this blog’s early days, about the film Conspiracy, which Binet ponders over early in the novel. Conspiracy dramatizes the Wannsee Conference in real time, with Kenneth Branagh playing Heydrich. Binet: “Branagh’s portrayal of Heydrich is quite clever: he manages to combine great affability with brusque authoritarianism, which makes his character highly disturbing.” Read my examination of the film here.

Lukacs on how not to talk about Hitler

Hitler in conference with senior commanders of the Eastern Front, March 1943

From the late John Lukacs’s 1997 historiographical study The Hitler of History, which I quote from at length because it is so good:

I must devote a few lines to a grave misunderstanding that has affected historians less than it has people at large. This is the popular view that Hitler was mad. By asserting—and thinking—that he was mad, we have failed twice. We have brushed the problem of Hitler under the rug. If he was mad, then the entire Hitler period was nothing but an episode of madness; it is irrelevant to us, and we need not think about it further. At the same time, this defining of Hitler as “mad” relieves him of all responsibility—especially in this century, where a certification of mental illness voids a conviction by law. But Hitler was not mad; he was responsible for what he did and said and thought. And apart from the moral argument, there is sufficient proof (accumulated by researchers, historians, and biographers, including medical records) that with all due consideration to the imprecise and fluctuating frontiers between mental illness and sanity, he was a normal human being.

This brings me to the adjective (and argument) of “evil.” (Again, there are people who are interested in Hitler because they are interested in evil: the Jack the Ripper syndrome, if not worse.) Yes, there was plenty of evil in Hitler’s expressed wishes, thoughts, statements, and decisions. (I emphasize expressed, since that is what evidence properly allows us to consider.) But keep in mind that evil as well as good is part of human nature. Our inclinations to evil (whether they mature into acts or not) are reprehensible but also normal. To deny that human condition leads to the assertion that Hitler was abnormal; and the simplistic affixing of the “abnormal” label to Hitler relieves him, again, of responsibility—indeed, categorically so.

It is not only that he had very considerable intellectual talents. He was also courageous, self-assured, on many occasions steadfast, loyal to his friends and to those working for him, self-disciplined, and modest in his physical wants. What this suggests ought not to be misconstrued, mistaken, or misread. It does not mean: lo and behold! Hitler was only 50 percent bad. Human nature is not like that. A half-truth is worse than a lie, because a half-truth is not a 50 percent truth; it is a 100 percent truth and a 100 percent untruth mixed together. In mathematics, with its rigidly fixed and immobile numbers, 100 plus 100 makes 200; in human life 100 plus 10 makes another kind of 100. Life is not constant; it is full of black 100s and white 100s, warm 100s and cold 100s, 100s that are growing and 100s that are shrinking. This is true not only of the cells of our bodies but of all human attributes, including mental ones. In sum, God gave Hitler many talents and strengths; and that is exactly why he was responsible for misusing them.

This is exactly right. I have cautioned my students for years against thinking of or describing Hitler—or other figures like him—as insane or monstrous. Lukacs lays out the best case against this line of attack—if Hitler was mad then his evil is merely pathological and it is pointless to investigate, much less criticize it. This attempt to condemn Hitler ends by exonerating him. Furthermore, treating Hitler as in some way morally exceptional ends the same way.

If I can dare gloss what Lukacs has to say here, an additional danger is that calling Hitler mad or a monster lets us off the hook. The temptation to call Hitler mad, to label him a monster, places him in a separate category from ourselves—which I think is often the root of the temptation. Hitler is, to our consciences, less scary as a monster, because there is a universe of separation between us and him. He believed and said X, did Y, killed Z millions of people; we never could, never would, cannot even understand it. We thank the Lord that we are not as other men, even as this dictator.

And suddenly we are guilty of the sin of pride.

It is uncomfortable in the extreme to consider that we are capable, under the right circumstances, given the right temptations, and presented with the right choices, of doing the things Hitler and the members of his regime, from its most ideologically committed leadership right on down to ordinary men in the ranks, were capable of doing—and did. It’s easy to deny this, but it’s important not to.

Lukacs died two years ago aged 95. I’ve written in appreciation of him here before. The Hitler of History is excellent so far, if you’re into historiography as much as I am, but let me recommend Lukacs’s book The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler to you if you’d like something a little more approachable to read. It’s excellent.

The National Medal of Honor Heritage Center

Last week was my spring break, and my wife and I took the kids to Chattanooga for a long weekend. We had two sites we wanted to make sure to visit: Chickamauga battlefield, about which more later, and the Tennessee Aquarium. We also obeyed the classic command to see Rock City and, as an extra treat, visited Chattanooga’s National Medal of Honor Heritage Center.

The museum

The Charles H Coolidge National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, named for a Chattanooga native who is currently the only living Medal of Honor recipient from the ETO during World War II, is a stellar little museum. We visited on a whim following our morning at the Tennessee Aquarium; the Heritage Center is located right next door on the same plaza.

After paying a modest entrance fee the tour begins upstairs with an interactive media room. Computers set into tables allow visitors to search a database of Medal of Honor recipients, and digital banners on the walls display continuously changing photos of recipients both well known and obscure. My favorite feature of this room was a wall-sized touchscreen display featuring a 3D globe dotted with the locations of Medal of Honor actions, each of which you could tap on to bring up a box with a photo of the recipient, the date of the incident, and the citation. The clusters of dots, especially around the battlefields of all theatres of the Civil War and in western Europe in both World Wars, as well as scattered across the Pacific and other often surprising out-of-the-way places, gives you a graphic sense of where the United States’ wars have been fought, as well as the scale of the fighting.

From the interactive room you enter a theatre for a short film about the Medal and its history. From here, you continue through the best part of the museum, a carefully designed series of exhibits walking you through American wars since the Civil War. Each exhibit has a life-size diorama of two or three Medal of Honor recipients from the conflict. These are exceptionally well done, with great attention to detail. Others are featured in large-scale photographs or well-designed displays with uniforms, artifacts—the museum preserves over 6,000 items related to the Medal of Honor—and some element of the environment in which those profiled earned the medal: the cliffs at Hacksaw Ridge, a sandbagged hootch for three Vietnam recipients, a dusty road for one who fought in Iraq. A few have video reenactments that play in screens set into the walls, and at several points a multimedia station features interviews with living Medal of Honor recipients.

Among those profiled are Dr Mary Walker, the only female Medal of Honor recipient; Civil War officers James Andrews (of the Great Locomotive Chase) and Arthur MacArthur (father of Douglas); Buffalo soldier George Jordan; World War I soldiers Charles Whittlesey, Joseph Adkison, and Alvin York; conscientious objector turned medic Desmond Doss; Marine officer Alexander Bonnyman; and Kyle Carpenter. There are a great many others as well.

While I didn’t have the luxury of stopping to read every sign or piece of information—touring with a six- and a four-year old keeps you moving—the displays offered lots of opportunities to tell stories and talk to the kids about what they were seeing. It’s hard to know what sticks, but they came away seeming to appreciate more what being brave and sacrificing for others means.

This was especially true of the Vietnam display. While many of those profiled in the dioramas lived to fight again or to tell their stories to future generations, the men whose stories were selected to represent Vietnam—Marine Rodney Davis and Navy corpsman David Ray—were killed in action, both by taking the blast of enemy grenades in order to save others. A recurrent theme of the museum, a quotation displayed in several places, is John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” The museum shows vividly what this means on the battlefield.

Other notes

The museum has a good gift shop with well-selected items that are relevant to the museum’s topic and don’t reduce its theme to kitsch (something you can’t always count on with museum gift shops). There’s an especially good selection of books; I picked up Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary, which I’ve been looking forward to reading since it was reissued for the centennial of his actions in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.

The staff and volunteers were friendly, helpful, and very accommodating to a dad touring with two children six and under. I especially appreciated their work; they represented the museum and its mission well.

In conclusion

The Medal of Honor Heritage Center offers an excellent introduction to US military history and the virtues the medal represents: patriotism, citizenship, courage, integrity, sacrifice, and commitment. While informative and moving for adults, it’s also a good place for kids to visit—the dioramas are helpful visuals, and the stories, while presented soberly and realistically, are not prohibitively graphic. I highly recommend visiting if you’re ever in the Chattanooga area.

Breakout at Stalingrad

German prisoners march out of the ruins of Stalingrad, January 1943.

Three years ago I read Unknown Soldiers, by Väinö Linna, one of the best and most powerful war novels I’ve ever come across. Unknown Soldiers follows a company of Finnish machine gunners through the Continuation War, a three-year war against the Soviets that ran parallel to the German invasion of Russia. Following some initial successes and some years of sitting tight in trenchlines, in the final third of the book the war turns against the Finns and the story becomes one of pell-mell retreat, of sacrifice to buy time and save lives, and ever increasing desperation. The characters suffer, fight and run, scrape together whatever they can to survive, and all too frequently die.

Take that feeling of desperation, the weight of unavoidable, inescapable impending defeat, stretch it out to six hundred pages, and shift the scene from a largely forgotten war to one of the most famous battles in history, and you have Heinrich Gerlach’s Breakout at Stalingrad.

Encirclement

Gerlach’s novel tells the story of a handful of men from the intelligence section of a German division’s staff. The most prominent among them is Lieutenant Breuer, whom we meet in the first chapter as he returns to the front outside Stalingrad after a trip to the rear. Through Breuer we get to know various other officers in the middle rungs of divisional leadership, and through his driver, the kindhearted and optimistic Lakosch, we meet a number of the enlisted men who work as drivers, cooks, and mechanics for headquarters. The cast is large and wide-ranging, including the divisional commander, a newly promoted colonel; haughty Sergeant Major Harras, a man more concerned with the finery of his uniforms than with discipline or combat effectiveness; Padre Peters, a hardworking chaplain; and the officers who distribute food and pay and who command the division’s small contingents of tanks, antiaircraft guns, and other defensive measures. The commander of the Sixth Army himself, General—later Field Marshal—Paulus, even appears a few times, as does Hitler, a faraway figure in more than one sense, a man detached from and cold to the reality of what is about to happen at Stalingrad.

Our meeting with Breuer comes at an inauspicious time—mid-November 1942. The rumor, to which Breuer is privy as a member of the division’s intelligence section, is that the Russians are massing their forces along the Don River north of the city with the apparent intent of cutting off the German army there and encircling them.

Exactly that happens. The Russians attack in overwhelming numbers, and despite manful resistance, Breuer and the rest of the German army begin a constant retreat. In a skillfully described series of incidents through the middle of the book, Gerlach describes the Germans pulling up stakes and falling back to new defensive lines only to have these collapse, leading them to repeat the process. Little things go awry, and thanks to the slow accumulation of details with each retreat, we first sense and then see these tactical withdrawals turn into chaotic routs.

The Russians complete their encirclement quickly and the supply lines fail. The Germans run short of food, ammunition, and medical supplies. They eat their draft horses and every farm animal they come across before turning to civilians’ pets and strays. The Luftwaffe attempts an airlift that proves only partially successful, bringing in not nearly enough supplies and flying out only the most desperately wounded, the most important, and the most devious. As the Russians close in on the airfields the planes themselves come under attack, and even getting a pass to board a flight out is no guarantee of escape. At one point Breuer, having been wounded in the eye, finally has a chance to get out via cargo plane, and the suspense and desperation of the scene is unlike anything I’ve read in other war novels.

The final act of the novel takes place in Stalingrad itself, which Breuer and company have slowly withdrawn toward for weeks before they actually enter. The city is a tomb, full of the shells of buildings, which are themselves full of wounded and dying men. The conclusion plays out here, in these contested ruins, and even the clearly approaching end of the siege can prove no comfort—the men go on dying right up to the moment they are captured, even after the city’s surrender. Plans to escape, using German-allied Romanian troops or Russian collaborators for cover, come to nothing. The wounded linger and die. Soldiers freeze to death in their foxholes. Others go insane. And those that live to be captured can look ahead and see nothing but Soviet captivity.

What makes Breakout at Stalingrad great

You might notice that, while I describe a broad sequence of events above, I do not exactly summarize a plot. Like many other war novels, Breakout at Stalingrad is episodic, a reflection of the actual experience of these events—about which more below. What makes this a great novel is not its plotting, but Gerlach’s attention to three things.

First, Gerlach peoples this novel with vivid and interesting characters. Breuer, the character with whom we spend the most time, is an effective everyman, a dedicated soldier without much interest in politics and a whole lot to live for, and who is nevertheless burdened by terrible premonitions. His driver, Lakosch, is a hopeful true believer in the Nazi cause—which, as he understands it, is anti-Bolshevism, a cause to which he is committed owing to his miserable youth as the child of Socialist parents. The disillusionment of both characters—symbolized by different things for each man, like the moment Lakosch has to abandon his beloved but now broken down Volkswagen field car—provides two of a dozen or so fully realized character arcs in the novel.

A few of these arcs prove surprising. In the final chapters of the novel, Breuer finds himself awaiting his fate with an officer of a much more ideological mindset than himself, and in the quiet before catastrophe they have a chance to reflect that their conversation would have been impossible for both of them when the siege began. Stalingrad has changed both of them, a wry realization. But not all of these arcs are redemptive or result in any kind of epiphany. Sergeant Major Harras leads a two-month career of utter villainy, and like him some of the convinced Nazis among the German officers only fall lower and lower as the siege gets worse and they commit themselves more and more totally to either victory or annihilation.

The most powerful and haunting character to me was the chaplain, Padre Peters, a rare religious character in this kind of fiction who is treated seriously and depicted as sincere, who works himself to exhaustion and psychological collapse. The incident that awakens him from his fugue state near the end of the novel is one of the most moving and haunting depictions of religious devotion and the power of the scriptures and the sacraments that I’ve ever read.

Second, Breakout at Stalingrad abounds in vivid, carefully selected details, which is the lifeblood of realistic fiction. Gerlach’s descriptions of combat, of the sudden appearance of Russian tanks or the steady approach of a horde of Russian infantry across the snow, of the wounds and frostbite and infections and ramblings of the pitiful final survivors of the battle, of the way a half-mad crowd of men press forward toward the hatch of a cargo plane, and—throughout—the rapidly changing mental states of these exhausted and overextended men are gripping. This novel does what all the best war novels do—shows what it was like—and does it exceptionally well.

Finally, Breakout at Stalingrad is full of terrible irony. This is not to say that Gerlach’s tone is cynical, though he certainly presents the entire story as a bitter critique of Hitler’s leadership, Nazism, and the whole Nazi project. The characters, who are so vividly drawn, will be marked by this experience for life, provided they survive.

Gerlach’s irony does not stem from his tone or treatment of the story but from the story itself. Unwelcome surprises and awful turns of events occur throughout. A general who is thankful that his pilot son is flying cargo planes in some other part of Europe, Lakosch and his love for a stray dog he has adopted and keeps miraculously well fed, Harras and his attempt to blow up a wrecked aircraft to deny its use to the Russians, the trust of the more fervently Nazi or simply patriotic officers in their leaders back home—all have terribly ironic outcomes brought about by the situation at Stalingrad itself. Even the very first chapter, in which we meet Breuer and Lakosch driving through the night, is by the end an ironic memory: their trip down that road is the last time that that road into—or out of—Stalingrad will be open to any of them. It’s masterfully done, and the irony with which Gerlach generously sews the story only adds to the weight of the characters’ impending doom.

The story of Gerlach’s novel

A final, external factor that makes Breakout at Stalingrad interesting is the story of the novel itself. Gerlach was, like Breuer, a low-ranking intelligence officer at Stalingrad and was among the hundreds of thousands of men captured when Paulus capitulated. Held in prison camps in Russian for years even after the war’s end, Gerlach spent time with many other survivors of the siege and, by the end of his captivity in 1950, he had written the manuscript of Breakout at Stalingrad. But before he could be released and repatriated, the Soviets went through his papers. They confiscated the manuscript.

Following his return, Gerlach eventually decided to write his novel again, and used hypnosis to assist his recall of the original manuscript. This second “remembered” version of the novel was published in Germany as Die verratene Armee in 1957, as The Forsaken Army in 1958. It was a hit, and enjoyed great success throughout his lifetime. He died in 1991.

Then, in 2012, a German professor of literature doing research on leftist German writers in a Moscow archive stumbled upon something remarkable—the confiscated original manuscript of Gerlach’s novel. The professor, Carsten Gansel, edited and published the newly rediscovered novel in 2016, a quarter century after Gerlach’s death.

The English translation I read includes a 150-page appendix by Gansel recounting Gerlach’s wartime experiences and imprisonment and discussing the rediscovery of the manuscript itself. The chief draw of Breakout at Stalingrad is and must be the novel itself, and so while you won’t be missing anything if you don’t look into this remarkable background story, it is worth reading for its own sake. I, for one, am thankful that Gansel happened across the manuscript and that he saw it into print.

Conclusion

Is Breakout at Stalingrad an anti-war novel? I don’t know. Certainly no one would choose to live through the things Gerlach describes, and certainly Gerlach depicts the battle as a waste of brave men caused by the cruelty of far-off leaders. But the strength of whatever message Gerlach has for us lies in its story, in its characters and the things that happen to them. It condemns the war without sermonizing, like Johnny Got His Gun or All Quiet on the Western Front in its more hamfisted moments; shows the disintegration of human minds and souls without filling the story with men who are already degenerates, like The Thin Red Line or The Naked and the Dead and their casts of perverts and psychopaths; and brings us into moments of extraordinary pathos, tragedy, camaraderie, and—just occasionally—heroism without the cloying phoniness or sentimentality of so many war movies.

As I mentioned above, Breakout at Stalingrad accomplishes one of the most important things a novel of any kind, but most especially a war novel, sets out to do: create that dreamlike state of vicarious experience that conveys what it was like. Drawing on his own experiences and those of his fellow survivors of Stalingrad, Gerlach carefully constructed this novel around a diverse set of believable characters and freighted their stories with shocking and often bitterly ironic incidents that show us, the readers, the brutality and waste of the battle. Like Linna’s Unknown Soldiers, the result is not only a great war novel, but a great novel, a story we could all stand to learn from—and can be grateful we didn’t live through.

The danger of do-gooders

Helen Andrews, whose very good Lytton Strachey-inspired book Boomers I read just last week, has an energetic and fantastically cutting review of a new biography of Eleanor Roosevelt at the Claremont Review of Books. The review, entitled “Do-Gooder in Chief,” begins with an anecdote about Hillary Clinton’s attempt to contact Mrs Roosevelt via medium and leads into the subject with this incisive paragraph:

The irony of Eleanor Roosevelt, feminist political icon, is that her career was a 50-year vindication of every misogynist cliché about women in politics. Her politics were sentimental rather than rational. She was impulsive and easily swayed, a busybody who meddled in every issue under the sun without bothering to master anything intellectually. She honestly believed we could end poverty and war by all being a little nicer to each other.

While nodding to Eleanor Roosevelt’s better qualities, such as her self-sacrificial longsuffering and concern for others, which would have been commendable if put to other uses, Andrews catalogs her chain of blithely attempted failures—social, political, philosophical, and even, in her marriage to Franklin and her mismanagement of the White House, personal and domestic—and the doggedness with which she pursued solving intractable real world problems despite having no insights of any particular value to offer. All she had was a sentimental pity for the downtrodden and the optimism to try things, not to mention a name and position that afforded her plenty of guinea pigs. Andrews:

Her inability to graduate from sentimentality to principle meant that Eleanor was easily blown hither and yon by the gust of events. When Neville Chamberlain signed the peace deal at Munich, she applauded as a pacifist. When her husband advocated war against Hitler, she applauded as a humanitarian, with no sense of inconsistency.

So what? one might ask. Today Eleanor Roosevelt functions primarily as a talisman—like the portraits of Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright that Leslie Knope, another insufferable do-gooder, kept in her office—and an icon of sentimental goodwill, and there are certainly more pernicious activist figures one could invoke. Here are kids’ books about John Brown and Che Guevara, and a YA graphic novel about Emma Goldman.

But when all one has to offer is compassion and innocent goodwill, and these mere inclinations are never subjected to hard questions or challenged by the wisdom of experience, the results can be worse than if no one had meddled in the first place and all the more far-reaching precisely because they seem to be, in the person of the do-gooder, so unobjectionable. And worst of all, the do-gooder is an easy mark, something that every panhandler and swindler knows.

All of which brought to mind this passage from Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Leftism, a book perhaps even more scathing than Andrews’s review:

Was Mrs. Roosevelt deeply imbued with pro-Communist ideas or merely naive? Probably both. Witness an article she published in McCall’s (February 1952) about the President’s unease with Stalin at the Teheran Conference. “My husband was determined to bend every effort to breaking those suspicions down, and decided the way to do it was to live up to every promise made by both the United States and Great Britain, which both of us were able to do before the Yalta meeting. At Yalta my husband felt the atmosphere had somewhat cleared, and he did say he was able to get a smile from Stalin.” Indeed, how many people would not sell millions into slavery to get a smile from that dear old man?

Per Andrews, Franklin Roosevelt was a “glib charmer whose emotional default was to take and take without giving back,” a quality exemplified by his relationships with Churchill, the American people, and Eleanor herself. Between Franklin’s reliance on superficial charm to get by and Eleanor’s warm-and-fuzzy nicety, they were the perfect marks for an aloof and canny con-man like Stalin, and it was Eastern Europe that paid the price.

Scruton and the Preacher on foretelling the future

The first book I recall reading by Sir Roger Scruton was The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope—a title and theme that are right up my alley. In the introduction of the book he explains his purpose:

My concern . . . is with certain fallacies that seem to justify hope, or at least to make disappointment bearable. My examples come from many areas, but they share a common characteristic, which is that they show, at the heart of the unscrupulous optimist’s vision, a mistake that is so blindingly obvious that only someone in the grip of self-deception could have overlooked it. It is against this self-deception that pessimism is directed. A study of the uses of pessimism will reveal a most interesting feature of human nature, which is that obvious errors are the hardest to rectify. They may involve mistakes of reasoning; but their causes lie deeper than reason, in emotional needs that will defend themselves with every weapon to hand rather than relinquish the comfort of their easily-won illusions.

He begins the next paragraph with this devastating line:

“The belief that human beings can either foresee the future or control it to their own advantage ought not to have survived an attentive reading of the Iliad, still less of the Old Testament.”

— Sir Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism

That particular line—and especially its allusion to the Old Testament—came back to me yesterday morning during church, when, as I leafed through one of my oldest Bibles, I came across the following verse from Ecclesiastes (which, me being the pessimist that I am, is one of my favorite books of the Bible, along with Job and Jonah). Some version of myself in years past had underlined it in heavy black ink.

“A fool also is full of words: a man cannot tell what shall be; and what shall be after him, who can tell him?”

— Ecclesiastes X, xiv

A lesson that, per Scruton’s observation above, should be obvious from even a cursory familiarity with history or literature. But as the Preacher reminds us near the beginning of his book, “There is no remembrance of former things,” and, lest we get on our high horse, presentists that we are, “neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.”

The reminder we may need most in our technocratic and unscrupulously optimistic age.

Cicero on friendship and falsity

Kevin D Williamson, in his newsletter today, has a trenchant examination of disordered priorities. Specifically, when we mistake “second things” for “first things” we fail to attain either, as in discarding principles for political expediency. He reflects at length on lying and invokes Cicero’s De Amicitia, “On Friendship,” from which we get the principle Esse quam videri—To be rather than to seem. Cicero, speaking through the main character of the dialogue, Laelius:

“Many wish not so much to be, as to seem to be, endowed with real virtue. Such men delight in flattery, and, when a complimentary remark is fashioned to suit their fancy, they think the empty phrase is proof of their own merits. There is nothing, therefore, in a friendship in which one of the parties to it does not wish to hear the truth and the other is ready to lie.”

— Cicero, De Amicitia, XXIV

Those who don’t want to hear the truth, and those who are prepared to lie—a familiar arrangement, but not friendship. It’s more akin to prostitution, as Cicero makes clear in an allusion to a comedy by Terence, in which a prostitute uses hyperbole to praise the prowess of a recent john. The same example was picked up Dante, who placed the prostitute in the circle of the flatterers in Inferno.

These are perversions of friendship. Elsewhere in De Amicitia, Cicero, through the speaker, Laelius, writes prescriptively:

“Therefore, let this law be established in friendship: neither ask dishonorable things, nor do them, if asked.”

— Cicero, De Amicitia, XII

Truth is both the basis and the fruit of real friendship, which is founded on virtue. “Virtue,” Cicero writes, “both creates the bond of friendship and perserves it,” but can’t be gotten by a mercenary pursuit of either virtue or friendship.

“But [friendship] is nothing other than the great esteem and affection felt for him who inspires that sentiment, and its is not sought because of material need or for the sake of material gain. Nevertheless even this blossoms forth from friendship, although you did not make it your aim.”

— Cicero, De Amicitia, XXVII

Williamson also invokes CS Lewis in this passage of his newsletter, and while he did not mention this particular line of Lewis’s, the following from Mere Christianity inevitably came to mind:

Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more—food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilisation along as civilisation is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.

Be, don’t seem, and you might find that, simply by being, you begin to seem.

The translation of De Amicitia above is that of WA Falconer, from Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library. You can read the whole thing here. An excellent recent translation is that of Philip Freeman for the Ancient Wisdom of Modern Readers series. Read the entirety of Williamson’s newsletter here. Come for the dachshund puppy story, stay for the razor sharp Cicero-inspired examination of the sacrifice of truth for political gain. It’s worth your while.

Three quotations on the artificiality of civilization

Detail of A View Through Three Arches of the Third Storey of the Colosseum, by CW Eckersberg

First—by artificial I do not mean fake, but rather the product of art in the old sense or craftsmanship, the result of creativity and hard, skilled work.

From Chapter 10, “Primitivism and History,” of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s 1930 book The Revolt of the Masses:

Nature is always with us. It is self-supporting. In the forests of Nature we can be savages with impunity. We can likewise resolve never to cease being so, without further risk than the coming of other peoples who are not savages. But, in principle, it is possible to have peoples who are perennially primitive. Breyssig has called these “the peoples of perpetual dawn,” those who have remained in a motionless, frozen twilight, which never progresses towards midday.

This is what happens in the world which is mere Nature. But it does not happen in the world of civilisation which is ours. Civilisation is not “just there,” it is not self-supporting. It is artificial and requires the artist or the artisan. If you want to make use of the advantages of civilisation, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilisation—you are done. In a trice you find yourself left without civilisation. Just a slip, and when you look around everything has vanished into air.

Ortega’s concern throughout The Revolt of the Masses is with the “mass-man,” the creature of the West’s middle class following the explosion of industry, technology, and prosperity in the 19th century, and most especially with the fact that the mass-man takes civilization and everything that has made his life possible for granted:

The mass-man believes that the civilisation into which he was born and which he makes use of, is as spontaneous and self-producing as Nature, and ipso facto he is changed into primitive man.

When I read these passages they reminded me of the following from CS Lewis’s essay “The Necessity of Chivalry,” which I have revisited many times over the last few years. Having begun with a quotation from Malory on the character of Sir Launcelot, “Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; thou wert the sternest knight to they mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest,” Lewis meditates on the fusion of meekness and sternness:

The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop.

Like Ortega, Lewis has a clear picture of the consequences of neglecting, of not maintaining this artificial work:

If we cannot produce Launcelots, humanity falls into two sections—those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be ‘meek in hall’, and those who are ‘meek in hall’ but useless in battle—for the third class, who are both brutal in peace and cowardly in war, need not here be discussed. When this dissociation of the two halves of Launcelot occurs, history becomes a horribly simple affair. The ancient history of the Near East is like that. Hardy barbarians swarm down from their highlands and obliterate a civilisation. Then they become civilised themselves and go soft. Then a new wave of barbarians comes down and obliterates them. Then the cycle beings over again. Modern machinery will not change this cycle; it will only enable the same thing to happen on a larger scale. Indeed, nothing much else can ever happen if the ‘stern’ and the ‘meek’ fall into two mutually exclusive classes. And never forget that this is their natural condition. The man who combines both characters—the knight—is a work not of nature but of art; of that art which has human beings, instead of canvas or marble, for its medium.

Finally, the line from the late Sir Roger Scruton that served as the keystone of his thought:

Good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.

I’m reading the authorized English translation of Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, which is available in its entirely online here. You can watch CSLewisDoodle’s rendition of “The Necessity of Chivalry” here. It is collected in Present Concerns, which is where I first read it. Perhaps the best place to start with Scruton’s thought as encapsulated in that last line is Culture Counts: Faith & Feeling in a World Besieged, which I read last year.

Chesterton on the besetting sin of progressivism

In GK Chesterton’s 1906 book Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, Chesterton, an admirer of Dickens, nevertheless points out some of Dickens’s flaws. One of the most characteristic was his chronological parochialism, a tendency typical of the “sturdy, sentimental English Radical with a large heart and a narrow mind”—a recognizable activist type even today. In Chapter VII, “Dickens and Christmas,” Chesterton observes that

“[Dickens] could not help falling into that besetting sin or weakness of the modern progressive, the habit of regarding the contemporary questions as the eternal questions and the latest word as the last.”

— GKC

Chesterton spoofs the progressive tendency to read current politics into every past event with a funny (but dated) example, writing that Dickens “could not get out of his head the instinctive conception that the real problem before St. Dunstan was whether he should support Lord John Russell or Sir Robert Peel.” The political crises of these two sets of men—an Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury and two of Victoria’s prime ministers—were separated by almost a thousand years.

Dickens “could not help seeing the remotest peaks lit up by the raging bonfire of his own passionate political crisis. He lived for the instant and its urgency.” This weakness is not limited to the modern progressive’s view of the past, either. The problem with such a politically informed perspective, writes Chesterton, is that one ends up, like Dickens, “liv[ing] in an eternal present like all simple men.”

As I’ve noted here before (re. Donald Hall’s warning that “the penalty for ignoring two thousand years is that you get stuck in the last hundred”), such narrow-mindedness can cut an artist off entirely from artistic tradition and strangle his work. The consequences on a society-wide scale, a political scale, are manifestly more serious. Fortunately for Dickens, he lived in an age that was still deeply enough informed by the past and by tradition not to neglect it entirely—unlike some other periods I could mention—and after his death he had a cheerleader—Chesterton himself.

Chesterton’s Charles Dickens helped revive interest in and critical appreciation of Dickens’s work. It’s a worthwhile read, especially if you enjoy both men’s work and want an incisive but appreciative appraisal of Dickens. The whole book is available from Wikisource here.

The Odyssey XXII-XXIV on Core Curriculum

Odysseus killing the suitors in an illustration by John Flaxman (1755-1826)

Our journey is ended! This morning the final episode of Core Curriculum’s slow read through Homer’s Odyssey dropped, concluding the show’s fourth series. It’s been great.

In this episode, host David Grubbs talks to Coyle Neal, Jay Eldred, and me about the three climactic books of the Odyssey. Among the topics we discuss are Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors and the numerous action movies it reminds us of; whether justice was served in the killing of the suitors and, especially, the slave girls who had collaborated with them; the duel of wits and cunning between Odysseus and Penelope upon their reunion; and the final restoration of order, with a little assist from Athena. There’s much, much more, but this is a good précis of a very rich discussion.

I had a great time on this episode and on all the Odyssey episodes I got to participate in. If you haven’t been following along, I hope you’ll go back to the first episode of the series. These are great discussions and have only deepened my appreciation of some of my favorite books.

You can listen to Core Curriculum on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. You can look at this episode’s detailed shownotes on the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site here. Be sure to subscribe to the show so you can catch up on previous episodes of Core Curriculum and won’t miss future episodes.

Thanks for listening! And stay tuned for the forthcoming fifth series of the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s Core Curriculum!

James Fenimore Cooper on demagogues

About a week and a half ago—the timing is important—I was rearranging some shelves in my library and riffled the pages of an oft-forgotten book on politics. I stopped and flipped back to a chapter heading I thought I had seen. Ten minutes later I had finished reading the chapter; I’ve revisited it several times since.

The book is 19th century novelist James Fenimore Cooper’s 1838 treatise The American Democrat, and the chapter that arrested my attention is entitled “On Demagogues.”

Cooper begins with a basic definition:

A demagogue, in the strict signification of the word, is “a leader of the rabble.”

This is, he notes, “a Greek compound.” The word’s specific component parts are demos, “the people” or “the mob,” and agogos, “leader,” from a proto-Indo-European root for words meaning “to draw out” or even “to drive.” Compare pedagogue, ”leader of children,” i.e. a teacher.

Cooper considers what demagogues might be after:

The peculiar office of a demagogue is to advance his own interests, by affecting a deep devotion to the interests of the people. Sometimes the object is to indulge malignancy, unprincipled and selfish men submitting but to two governing motives, that of doing good to themselves, and that of doing harm to others. The true theatre of a demagogue is a democracy, for the body of the community possessing the power, the master he pretends to serve is best able to reward his efforts.

How does one identify a demagogue? Cooper is particularly attentive to this topic, since “it is all important to distinguish between those who labor in behalf of the people on the general account, and those who labor in behalf of the people on their own account.”

The motive of the demagogue may usually be detected in his conduct. The man who is constantly telling the people that they are unerring in judgment, and that they have all power, is a demagogue. Bodies of men being composed of individuals, can no more be raised above the commission of error, than individuals themselves, and, in many situations, they are more likely to err, from self-excitement and the division of responsibility. The power of the people is limited by the fundamental laws, or the constitution, the rights and opinions of the minority, in all but those cases in which a decision becomes indispensable, being just as sacred as the rights and opinions of the majority; else would a democracy be, indeed, what its enemies term it, the worst species of tyranny. In this instance, the people are flattered, in order to be led; as in kingdoms, the prince is blinded to his own defects, in order to extract favor from him.

The demagogue always puts the people before the constitution and the laws, in face of the obvious truth that the people have placed the constitution and the laws before themselves.

The local demagogue does not distinguish between the whole people and a part of the people, and is apt to betray his want of principles by contending for fancied, or assumed rights, in favor of a county, or a town, though the act is obviously opposed to the will of the nation. This is a test that the most often betrays the demagogue, for while loudest in proclaiming his devotion to the majority, he is, in truth, opposing the will of the entire people, in order to effect his purposes with a part.

The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners, and avoids open and manly expositions of his course, calls blackguards gentlemen, and gentlemen folks, appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects, a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning and management, instead of manifesting the frank, fearless qualities of the democracy he so prodigally professes.

Also dangerous are the demagogue’s enablers, men who deliberately take on the traits of the demagogue or of the people whose support they covet by debasing themselves:

There is a large class of political men in this country, who, while they scarcely merit the opprobrium of being termed demagogues, are not properly exempt from the imputation of falling into some of their most dangerous vices. These are they, whose habits, and tastes, and better opinions, indeed, are all at variance with vulgar errors and vulgar practices, but, who imagine it a necessary evil in a democracy to defer to prejudices, and ignorance, and even to popular jealousies and popular injustice, that a safe direction may be given to the publick mind.

“Such men deceive themselves,” Cooper comments.

How, then, to identify sincere leaders when democracies breed demagogues like a basement breeds mildew?

The man who maintains the rights of the people on pure grounds . . . does not flatter the people, even while he defends them, for he knows that flattery is a corrupting and dangerous poison. Having nothing to conceal, he is frank and fearless, as are all men with the consciousness of right motives. He oftener chides than commends, for power needs reproof and can dispense with praise.

And:

The considerate, and modest, and just-minded man, of whatever social class, will view all this differently. In asserting his own rights, he respects those of others; in indulging his own tastes, he is willing to admit there may be superior; in pursuing his own course, in his own manner, he knows his neighbor has an equal right to do the same; and, most of all, is he impressed with the great moral truths, that flatterers are inherently miscreants, that fallacies never fail to bring their punishments, and that the empire of God is reason.

Why does this matter? Because the truth matters, and these questions are not of merely temporal importance. Cooper:

All good men desire the truth, and, on all publick occasions on which it is necessary to act at all, the truth would be the most certain, efficient, and durable agency in defeating falsehoods, whether of prejudices, reports, or principles. The perception of truth is an attribute of reason, and the ground-work of all institutions that claim to be founded in justice, is this high quality. Temporary convenience, and selfish considerations, beyond a doubt, are both favored by sometimes closing the eyes to the severity of truth, but in nothing is the sublime admonition of God in his commandments, where he tells us that he “will visit the sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth generations of their children,” more impressively verified, than in the inevitable punishments that await every sacrifice of truth.

There’s more. You can read the entire chapter at the link above, and you can find the the entirety of The American Democrat online at Wikisource here. I first learned about Cooper’s political writing in a chapter of Russell Kirk’s study The Conservative Mind, which is worth your while.