Buechner on the challenge and blessing of children

Jacob wrestles the angel by the ford of Jabbok in this engraving by Gustave Doré

A good friend of mine and his wife had their third child yesterday. When he texted me to let me know, after the initial round of pleasant surprise (“It’s time already?!”) and congratulations we reflected on how his life is about to change—has, in fact, already changed. Having three children is a delight and a challenge. A new member has joined the fellowship and new adventures are about to unfold that would have been unimaginable even a few weeks ago. And of course some of these adventures are the children themselves.

It’s hard and it’s an unceasing joy. I never understood, prior to becoming a father, how both could be true. A challenge, a struggle, and a blessing?

Reflecting on this later I remembered a passage from The Son of Laughter that moved me terribly. As I wrote a few weeks ago, Frederick Buechner’s novel is a poetic, imaginative retelling of the story of Jacob and his lifelong struggle with God, whom the characters reverently refer to as “the Fear.” It is part of Jacob’s lot to live in the promises made by the Fear to his grandfather Abraham, something it proves exceedingly difficult to do in the hurly-burly of life in the tribal world of the Patriarchs.

In this passage, Jacob, so who has run away from his father Isaac (translated literally as “Laughter” throughout, hence the title of the book) and his brother Esau; taken up with his shifty uncle Laban; worked long years to earn marriages first to Leah and then to Rachel, his beloved; and fathered ten children (so far), sits among his tents and flocks and wives and teeming brood, overwhelmed:

I was like a man caught out in a storm with the wind squalling, the sand flailing me across the eyes, the chilled rain pelting me. The children were the storm, I thought, until one day, right in the thick of it, I saw the truth of what the children were.

One boy was pounding another boy’s head against the hard-packed floor. Another was drowsing at his mother’s teat. Three of them were trying to shove a fourth into a basket. Dinah was fitting her foot into her mouth. The air was foul with the smell of them.

They were the Fear’s promise. That is what I suddenly saw the children were. I had forgotten it. They were the dust that would cover the earth. The great people would spring from their scrawny loins. Kicking and howling and crowing and pissing and slobbering food all over their faces, they were the world’s best luck.

I started to weep. Just a trickle at first, the tears hot on my cheeks, salty at the corners of my mouth. Then it was as if I couldn’t catch my breath for weeping. Laban came over and pounded me between the shoulders. He thought I was choking to death. Rachel took my head in her arms. Leah held my feet. It was as close as the two sisters had come to each other for years.

A deep hush fell over the children. They stopped whatever they were doing. Their eyes grew round in their heads.

“You are so—so noisy,” I choked out at them.

They were the Fear’s promise to Abraham, and I had forgotten it.

It was with Abraham’s ancient eyes that they were watching me. “You are—so hopeless,” I said. “So important.”

Their silence, as they listened to my sobs, was Abraham’s silence as he waited all those years for the Fear to keep his promise.

While I and my friend are obviously not the recipients of the specific promise the Fear made to Abraham, this is the truest and most succinct depiction of the challenge and the blessing—and how wonderfully overwhelming both are—of children that I’ve come across. Thank the Fear for these noisy, hopeless, important ones.

God is good, and he remembers even when we forget. Rachel—who has had to see child after child born to her older sister and rival, Leah—reflects on this later in the same chapter:

Rachel’s womb was opened at last, and when she gave birth to my son Joseph, I told her it was Reuben and his mandrakes that she had to thank. Still exhausted from her labor, she reached out and placed her hand across my lips. “No,” she said. “No, no, my dear.”

They had laid the child at her breast though it was still too weak to drink from her. Her cheek was grazing his round, bald head. His head looked too big for him, as though already it was full of dreams.

“I thought he had forgotten me, but he remembered me,” she said. “At last he remembered Rachel.”

Like my mother, she rarely if ever named his name, but I knew the one she was thanking without naming him.

The Son of Laughter makes these promises and hopes feel real, lived in, and I hope you’ll read it sometime. It’s one of the best things I’ve read so far this year, and the passage above is only one of several that moved me to tears.

Adding the third to your family—so that you and your wife are outnumbered—is exciting for all kinds of reasons, and I’m excited for my friends and praying for them. After the birth of our own third child I also reflected on the miracle of birth and life, that time with reference to Beowulf and GK Chesterton. You can read that here.

A Night to Remember

Kenneth More as Officer LightOller in A Night to Remember

I mentioned last week that my wife and I had recently watched A Night to Remember. Despite the film’s age—it premiered in 1958—this was a first for both of us. I had gathered through the ether that the film was a classic and even that it was, in fact, the most accurate and serious Titanic movie. (Did you know there are others? Naturally you have in mind the 1943 German Titanic produced a the behest of Joseph Goebbels.) I was finally able to sell my wife on the idea of watching it thanks to Kenneth More in the lead role—a man we know primarily as Father Brown.

When we settled in to watch it I was expecting A Night to Remember to be good. To my surprise, it proved overwhelming.

More plays Second Officer Charles Lightoller, the highest ranking Titanic officer to survive the sinking. The film begins with him aboard a train on his way to join the ship’s crew. When he wryly comments on a newspaper ad that uses the Titanic to shill soap, we get a reminder of the remove at which this story takes place from us when he is loudly reprimanded by another passenger for mocking the pride of Britain. Lightoller gently corrects him, and the man apologizes. It’s a simple scene, but economically sets the stage—this is a world of unironic national pride, of fiercely observed courtesies, of rank and custom, and especially finery. It’s also a threatened world. It’s impossible to watch any film about the Titanic without its fate—and the fate of all of Europe two years later—haunting your imagination.

We meet other characters, most of them real historical figures—Captain Edward Smith, shipbuilder Thomas Andrews, passengers Molly Brown, Benjamin Guggenheim, Archibald Gracie, radio operator Harold Bride, and many others. (A few, like White Star Line executive J Bruce Ismay and a wealthy British couple, who behaved dishonorably during the sinking, are never explicitly identified for legal reasons.) Other characters—Murphy, an Irishman who falls instantly in love with a Polish girl in steerage; Mr and Mrs Lucas, a young couple with three children; and Mr and Mrs Clarke, newlyweds sailing off on their honeymoon—are composites of multiple real-life people meant to streamline the narrative, part of the film’s light but judicious fictionalization. We also meet the crews of two other ships, the Californian and the Carpathia, in what will prove to be the most infuriating subplot of the movie.

You know what happens next. Throughout, the filmmakers do an excellent job imparting the geography of the ship to the viewer so that this vast, complex event is visually comprehensible—no mean feat. And even where you may not know the names of particular characters—many of them are not introduced in the traditional Hollywood manner—their faces remain familiar and so it is easy to distinguish the many converging and interweaving storylines.

The film is beautifully shot in black and white, with excellent sets (albeit not on the scale of Cameron’s ridiculously overindulgent mid-nineties film) and costumes. The special effects are good for their time, an effective blend of miniatures, matte paintings, and optical composite shots. Furthermore, in pacing and editing, and via a series of shots capturing the ship’s increasingly steep angle down into the sea, the filmmakers build unbearable tension. The joke with all Titanic movies is that we know what happens—here it remains suspenseful, with dread steadily rising into panic, not because we doubt what will happen but because we sense the inevitable catching up to the characters.

And A Night to Remember is excellently cast from top to bottom—something especially important in a film with so little traditional characterization. More is a standout in a type of role he played several times—just a few years later in Sink the Bismarck! for instance—the stalwart and principled British mid-level leader. The man who quietly gets the job done. A very, very young David McCallum (The Great Escape, “The Man from UNCLE,” and “NCIS”) plays Harold Bride, one of Titanic’s two radio operators who remain at their posts far longer than duty requires. Michael Goodliffe as Andrews and Laurence Naismith as Captain Smith are also excellent as two men who are doomed and know it. There are many other bit players who put in good turns in one- or two-scene parts—Arthur Rostron, captain of the Carpathia, rushing determinedly toward a disaster from which he may be able to save no one; the ship’s band, playing to set the mood whether anyone notices them or not; the stokers in the boiler room; the drunken baker; an old man who tenderly tries to comfort a lost boy as the ship begins its plunge.

Perhaps the best performance is that of John Merivale as Mr Lucas, who learns the terrible truth about what is happening to the ship and then downplays it to his wife (Goldfinger’s Honor Blackman) and children—all while gently urging them to hurry to the lifeboats—so that they won’t be scared. The moment he hands his sleeping son into a lifeboat and says goodbye, knowing full well that it’s the last time he will see any of them, is the purest heartbreak you can put on film. My wife and I wept.

After all, the story of the Titanic must always be a story about death. Two-thirds of the people who sailed aboard her from Europe died that night, and despite its age and whatever stereotypes we may have about films from the 1950s, A Night to Remember never looks away from that fact. And, what is more, it does so without cheap sentimentality, without caricaturing real people, and without the kind of cheap Hollywood gimmicks—love triangles, lazy class politics, manipulative music—meant to pull at the heartstrings. This is a film that tells its true story as straight as possible and remains beautiful, gripping, horrifying, and finally a reverent and deeply moving tribute because of it.

We watched A Night to Remember on an excellent Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection. I highly recommend it.

More if you’re interested

The film is, of course, based on the classic book by Walter Lord, who interviewed scores of Titanic survivors in the process of researching it. With the exception of a few questions only settled by the discovery of the wreck in 1985—such as whether or not the ship broke in half as it sank—it remains highly accurate. Its engaging writing is another draw.

Two books that I’ve used to introduce the story of the Titanic to my kids are Titanic: Lost and Found, a short Step-Into-Reading illustrated chapter book by Judy Donnelly which my daughter has enjoyed many times, and Robert Ballard’s Exploring the Titanic, which includes an interesting narrative of the loss and rediscovery of the ship by Ballard as well as many, many excellent illustrations. As a kid I pored over this book’s cross sections of the ship, the schematics of its sinking, and the before-and-after illustrations of the ship’s bridge. It also has many period photos as well as photos from Ballard’s dives to the wreck.

Leonard's rules: No. 7, regional dialect

I’ve written here before about Elmore Leonard’s ten rules of writing, and have for some time been mulling a series of occasional posts in which I take each rule and consider it from a few angles, adding glosses and commentary. Here’s the first, inspired by a book I read to my kids every night before bedtime last month: The Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo.

Leonard’s seventh rule states:

“Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.”

Leonard adds:

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

Leonard provides a further gloss on the rule in a 2002 interview.

Such the disappointment

I have not read any Annie Proulx, but this rule came to mind as I read Despereaux because of DiCamillo’s expertly written dialogue for Despereaux’s mother, Antoinette. Antoinette is a French mouse who has never settled comfortably into life wherever the story takes place. “Disappointment” is her watchword. Here’s Antoinette arguing with her husband Lester about Despereaux’s strangely un-mouselike behavior:

“He cannot, he simply cannot be my son,” Lester said. He clutched his whiskers with his front paws and shook his head from side to side in despair.
“Of course he is your son,” said Antoinette. “What do you mean he is not your son? This is a ridiculous statement. Why must you always make the ridiculous statements.”
“You,” said Lester. “This is your fault. The French blood in him has made him crazy.”
“C’est moi?” said Antoinette. “C’est moi? Why must it always be I who takes the blame? If your son is such the disappointment, it is as much your fault as mine.”
“Something must be done,” said Lester. He pulled on a whisker so hard that it came loose. He waved the whisker over his head. He pointed it at his wife. “He will be the end of us all,” he shouted, “sitting at the foot of a human king. Unbelievable! Unthinkable!”
“Oh, so dramatic,” said Antoinette. She held out one paw and studied her painted nails. “He is a small mouse. How much of the harm can he do?”
“If there is one thing I have learned in this world,” said Lester, “it is that mice must act like mice or else there is bound to be trouble. I will call a special meeting of the Mouse Council. Together, we will decided what must be done.”
“Oh,” said Antoinette, “you and this council of the mouse. It is a waste of the time in my opinion.”

Leonard championed the kind of dialogue that, invisibly styled—he spoke often of the “attitude” or “sound” of his writing—indicates character and action through suggestion. This is partly being able to imagine what the characters are doing—with gestures, body language, and facial expressions. Read a conversation written by Leonard, like the one I sample below, and you can see what the characters are doing just by the way they talk. Likewise with Antoinette and Lester above. The stage directions economically indicate telling gestures, gestures that only underline the attitudes the reader already picks up from the two characters’ spoken words.

The power of suggestion

I think the key word in Leonard’s rule is sparingly. He does not rule out phonetic spellings but using them sparingly means you’ll have to rely on the power of suggestion, which I think is the most important aspect of writing dialect. Reread the passage above and look for what, precisely, indicates Antoinette’s Frenchness in her speech. Here’s what sticks out to me:

• One French phrase, “C’est moi?” spoken in high dudgeon immediately after Lester draws attention to her Frenchness.

• Misplaced or unnecessary definite articles, a part of speech that differs dramatically even within related languages (disappearing entirely in others) and trips up a lot of people. Notice how consistent the misuse is—this is a verbal habit.

• More subtly, the short declarative sentences indicate someone proficient in a second language but probably still thinking in her mother tongue.

All of which suggests Antoinette’s accent and even her tone very precisely without littering her dialogue with phonetic spellings.

Counterexamples

It’s instructive to imagine how else this might have been done. Below are three samples pulled more or less at random from a few other books I’ve read. I’ll reflect on them collectively afterward.

At the time I read Despereaux to my kids I also started an old war adventure, Patrol, by Philip MacDonald, in which a squad of British troopers are ambushed in the desert. The characters are well done but broad types—the old sergeant, the Cockney, the Jew, the Scot—and their dialogue reads like this:

Brown . . . scrubbed at his lips, first with his naked forearm, then, more usefully, with a foul but at least not sand-covered handkerchief. “Thank God!” he said.
“Ah,” Morelli agreed. “An’ a gink can’t even spit. Christ! I’m dry.” . . .
“What about a swig?” Brown spoke doubtfully, feeling with tentative fingers at the string of his water-bottle cork.
“Shouldn’t,” said Morelli.
“‘Spose not.” Brown reluctantly lifted his hand back to the reins again.
Both men, on a common train of thought, turned to look behind them. There, ten yards away, rode Hale. He had no companion, but led a spare horse across whose back was a pack-saddle of curious shape: at each side of this saddle, below other cases, was strapped a long leather case like a bolster.
“We’re windy!” Morelli said.
“Oy!” called Hale. “Wot yer worryin’ abaht? Fink I’ve drunk it all!”

Later in the same chapter, the Sergeant talks to MacKay and Cook, the two Scots in the squad, as they attend to the horses:

MacKay, the nostrils done, slipped the reins of Cook’s black up over his arm, and, with both hands thus free, opened the chestnut’s mouth and scrubbed with the damp sponge at the gums and tongue and roof. . . . The horse pushed its head against the man’s shoulder, then fumbled with caressing lips at his ear.
“Ye great carrl!” said MacKay gently. He turned to Cook. “Matlow,” he said, and held out the sponge. “Ye just gi’ yon a drop out ye’ boatle.”
“Ar,” Cook said. He took the sponge, held it over the neck of the bottle, and shook water on to it.
MacKay repeated his work upon the black. When he had finished, the Sergeant spoke.
“It does brighten ‘em up,” he said.
“Ay.” MacKay took his rifle from Cook’s arm, slung it by its webbing band over his shoulder, and surveyed the two horses. They stood noticeably more alert than their fellows. Their heads hung, but not with such utter dejection. They had not, now, that appearance of being upon the point of lying in the sand. “Ay,” said MacKay again. “‘F there waur ony ither so’jers heere, horrses wud a’ be like yon.” He tilted back his topee and wiped at the sweat on his forehead with his forearm: the action showed the white hair at his temples and the radiating mesh of wrinkles about his bloodshot eyes. He added: “So they wud, too, ‘f Ah waur in charrge.”

American writers have experimented with elaborate phonetic spellings of their characters’ many dialects forever. Here’s a passage pulled at random from Norman Mailer’s 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead, in which rural Southern and urban Yankee soldiers argue:

Ridges . . . had a lively discernment of injustice toward other men and toward himself, and thought it was decidedly unfair for Goldstein and him to work more than the other pair. “Ah done the same work you done,” he would complain. “Ah went up the same river you did, an’ they ain’t no reason ‘tall why Gol’stein and me gotta be doin’ all yore work.”
“Blow it out,” Minetta shouted back.
[Sergeant] Croft had come up behind them. “What’s the matter with you men?” he demanded.
“Ain’t nothin’,” Ridges said after a pause. He gave his horsy guffaw. “Shoot, we jus’ been talkin’.” Although he was displeased with Minetta and Roth, he did not think of complaining to Croft. They were all part of the same team, and Ridges considered it heinous to complain about a man with whom he was working. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong,” he repeated.
“Listen, Minetta,” Croft said with scorn, “if you an’ Roth ain’t the meanest wo’thless shiftless pair of bastards I ever had. You men better get your finger out of your ass.” His voice, cold and perfectly enunciated, switched them like a birch branch.
Minetta, if harried enough, was capable of surprising courage. He threw down his machete, and turned on Croft. “I don’t see you working. It’s pretty goddam easy . . .” He lost all idea of what he wanted to say, and repeated, “I don’t see you working.”

Looking further back, here’s a passage from the 1923 novel Two Little Confederates, by Thomas Nelson Page, who based this story on his childhood in wartime Virginia sixty years before. Here two young white Virginians, scions of the planter class, talk to an elderly slave who has found an intruder in his cabin:

The boys could see that [a man unknown to them] was stretched out on the floor, apparently asleep, and that he was a soldier in uniform. Balla stepped inside.
“Is he dead?” asked both boys as Balla caught him by the arms, lifted him, and let him fall again limp on the floor.
“Nor, he’s dead-drunk,” said Balla picking up an empty flask. “Come on out. Let me see what I gwi’ do wid you?” he said, scratching his head.
“I know what I gwi’ do wid you. I gwi’ lock you up right whar you is.”
“Uncle Balla, s’pose he gets well, won’t he get out?”
“Ain’ I gwi’ lock him up? Dat’s good from you, who was jes’ gwi’ let ‘im out ef me an’ Frank hadn’t come up when we did.”
Willy stepped back abahsed. His heart accused him and told him the charge was true. Still he ventured one more question:
“Hadn’t you better take the hens out?”
“Nor; ‘tain’ no use to teck nuttin’ out dyah. Ef he comes to, he know we got ‘im, an’ he dyahson’ trouble nuttin’.”

Before I examine these samples, note two things: they are all realistic renderings of closely observed dialects and they all come from good books. One could find much, much more badly handled dialect elsewhere. And yet they illustrate abundantly the danger Leonard’s rule is meant to help us avoid.

So what’s the problem?

There are two basic problems with the samples above.

The first is that, as Leonard implies, dialogue written this way is next to impossible to read, especially when the dialect in question is something as foreign to the reader as a early 20th century Scots packhorse wrangler or an elderly 19th century American slave. The meaning, even the thread of the story or the import of the conversation, becomes lost as the reader puzzles out what the characters are saying.

In the case of MacDonald’s characters, perhaps the bit of dialect that works best is the simple line “What about a swig?” This is regionally distinct—an American would probably say “How about a swig” or even “You want a swig?”—but rendered directly and simply, making it easy both to read and understand. The rest of the passage overdoes it.

In the case of Page’s Uncle Balla, without getting into the politics of this kind of writing—which was immensely popular in the late 19th century but has a bad rap nowadays—even where Uncle Balla’s dialogue is an accurate representation of antebellum black dialect it is almost impenetrable, especially in that final line. How long did it take you to figure out that Uncle Balla’s dyahson’ is the word doesn’t? Page is being very careful to capture precisely how Uncle Balla speaks and—as with MacDonald’s various Brits—it kills the rhythm of the scene dead. More about rhythm later.

But that care brings me to the second, closely related problem. Look again at the passage from The Naked and the Dead. Mailer doesn’t go as far as either other writer in terms of phonetic spellings or apostrophes, but look at all the stage direction surrounding and glossing each line of dialogue. This bespeaks either a lack of confidence in the reader to perceive what is happening or a control freak concern to describe it as exactly as possible. (This is also part of the problem with over-specific dialogue tags and adverbs generally, a topic for the future.) It feels worked at, overproduced. It smells of the lamp. This is especially the case when things that have been made clear—Croft’s fury, Minetta’s sudden courage and just as sudden collapse—are elaborated upon in the narration. And there’s the further danger of contradiction: note that what I certainly read as an angry and obscene harangue from Croft is then described as “cold and perfectly enunciated,” despite including words like an’ and ain’t and wo’thless.

Whatever the reason behind it for each author, it’s this concern with absolute precision—capturing exactly how someone speaks down to the last dropped g—that all three samples have in common. As Leonard hints in his rule, the danger for writers is fussiness or overindulgence or getting lost in the effort to capture dialect this way. It can prove an inescapable trap. The danger for readers is giving up on the story.

Speech tunes

As I mentioned above, DiCamillo nails this in The Tale of Despereaux. A lot of that has to do with her skill in looking past mere accent to the rhythm of a character’s speech. Here, in his Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures published in 1985 as The Language of the American South, Cleanth Brooks describes how much more there is to a person’s speech than accent:

“Of course pronunciation is only one aspect of a language. Its vocabulary, its characteristic figurative expressions and sayings, its idioms and locutions, its rhythms and ‘speech tune’ are very important. They are particularly important to the writer of fiction, poetry, or plays.”

— Cleanth Brooks, The Language of the American South

“Speech tune” is apt; there is a musical quality to speech that we neglect to our peril. Look again at Brooks’s examples of elements that harmonize to create these tunes:

• Pronunciation—This is only the most noticeable and superficial aspect of a character’s speech, and is also highly variable. For some characters—like those moving between cultures—pronunciation and accent can change depending on the situation.

• Vocabulary—Here we go a layer deeper. How do a character’s words reflect their background, education, and age? What words does a character commonly use (or misuse)? How deftly do they use their words? Where did they learn them and how? How much jargon do they use? How much and what kind of slang? How much—to return to our topic—specifically regional argot?

• Characteristic figurative expressions and sayings—Going yet deeper into the foggy cultural side of a character’s speech to the shared body of proverbs, cliches, and mental pictures that characterize how or from what direction a group approaches thought and expression.

• Idioms and locutions—Here we get into style, the often unpredictable particulars of the way people use all of the previous elements together.

• Rhythms—This is the overall sound of a person’s speech and how it flows movement by movement, slowing or quicking and especially responding to the introduction of other people’s speech.

Here are a few other examples of dialect done well: three short ones to show how economical the use of suggestion can be, and three longer passages to look at how a sparing use of dialect, trusting instead to the rhythms of regional speech, can play a character’s speech tune to good effect.

Getting it right—the short version

Here’s a very short example—not even dialogue, really. In The Magician’s Nephew, by CS Lewis, the main character’s haughty Uncle Andrew, a dabbler in the black arts, meets the evil witch Jadis and is overwhelmed with her. Smitten. Here Uncle Andrew talks to himself after their encounter:

Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind. At this moment Uncle Andrew was beginning to be silly in a very grown-up way. Not that the Witch was no longer in the same room with him he was quickly forgetting how she had frightened him and thinking more and more of her wonderful beauty. He kept on saying to himself, “A dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman. A superb creature.” He had also somehow managed to forget that it was the children who had got hold of this “superb creature”: he felt as if he himself by his Magic had called her out of unknown worlds.
“Andrew my boy,” he said to himself as he looked in the glass, “you’re a devilish well preserved fellow for your age. A distinguished-looking man, sir.”

Two things I want to point out: First, note how well this passage illustrates the sparing aspect of Leonard’s advice. We have one very precisely selected phonetic spelling—how long did it take you as a kid to realize Uncle Andrew was saying damn fine woman?—that not only tells us how Uncle Andrew talks but even a little bit about his attitude. It’s not just dialogue, it’s characterization.

Further, almost as a bonus, dem fine even gives us Uncle Andrew’s oral posture—say it out loud and you’ll find yourself flaring your nostrils, pursing your lips rather preciously, and perhaps even sticking your nose in the air. You can both see and feel how he speaks, and the whole time you’re learning about the character—and laughing at him.

In this passage from Charles Portis’s Gringos, Jimmy Burns, an American expatriate from Arkansas now living in the Yucatan, talks to a Mexican friend who, though fluent in English, is drunk:

A few minutes later there was more rapping at the door. It was Nardo again. He had to brace himself with both hands against the door jambs. “I forgot to tell you something,” he said. “Did you notice I was feeling low tonight?”
“No, I thought you were in good form.”
“It was off just a little, my natural charm, you know, that everybody talks about. You must have noticed. A touch of opresión. I wanted to explain.”
“I didn’t notice anything.”
“But you already know, don’t you?”
“Know what?”
“Is there any need to explain? I think you can guess why I’m feeling low.”
“No, I can’t.”
“The yanquis took half my country in 1848.”
“They took all of mine in 1865. We can’t keep moping over it.”

Not the difference in expression between Jimmy Burns and Nardo, which clearly distinguishes them without calling attention to itself. Jimmy Burns’s speech is direct, colloquial, and simple. Nardo speaks in considerably more high-flown, periodic style, and while one might assume he has a trace of an accent he uses only two foreign words. The rest is pure suggestion—we hear this conversation accurately in our heads without a lot of phonetic spelling or apostrophes to render it exactamente.

That passage is also, you’ll note, a perfectly structured joke. One of Portis’s many skills.

Here’s another model of economy, one that I’ve shared before in reflecting on creating distinct and memorable minor characters, from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men:

[Anton Chigurh, the novel’s main antagonist] drove down and parked in front of the [trailer park] office and went in. Yessir, the woman said.
I’m looking for Llewelyn Moss.
She studied him. Did you go up to his trailer?
Yes I did.
Well I’d say he’s at work. Did you want to leave a message?
Where does he work?
Sir I aint at liberty to give out no information about our residents.
Chigurh looked around at the little plywood office. He looked at the woman.
Where does he work.
Sir?
I said where does he work.
Did you not hear me? We cant give out no information.
A toilet flushed somewhere. A doorlatch clicked. Chigurh looked at the woman again. Then he went out and got in the Ramcharger and left.

I’ll note briefly what I noted in that previous post. We don’t get much information about Chigurh but his directness is unsettling. The lady working in the trailer park office, whom we only “see” in this passage, is economically but vividly drawn. And while McCarthy draws no attention to her dialect, we perceive it with one aint, one yessir, and careful attention to her syntax and “speech tune.” I especially admire her recognizable blend of informality and officiousness. McCarthy’s writing is full of dialect like this.

An aside on italicizing foreign words

Here’s a more minute mechanical note: Something else I picked up from McCarthy was his refusal to italicize words or speech in foreign languages. (Portis also does not italicize or otherwise draw attention to Nardo’s opresión or yanquis.) In No Country for Old Men and other novels, English and Spanish are exchanged with no typographic indication to indicate the difference.

This is matter of pure preference, I think, but I really like that. I think it more accurately depicts the way we hear each other, and I’ve also grown increasingly distrustful of any writing that is dependent on typography to be comprehensible. I haven’t gone the whole hog and given up even quotation marks yet, but I have stopped italicizing foreign speech in my own writing. For example, depending on the viewpoint character in a given passage, the German characters in Dark Full of Enemies speak untranslated and unitalicized German.

Getting it right—letting the rhythms play out

Now for the deep dive. I include these three longer samples to show how a skilled writer can bring out the rhythms of regional speech and let them play out across a scene, creating new rhythms of their own as they harmonize with the speech of other characters.

In this passage from from Chapter IV of The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald presents us with two Midwesterners—one of whom is putting on airs—and a New York Jew having a conversation over lunch:

Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the restaurant, whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he was starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.
“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.
“This is a nice restaurant here,”’ said Mr. Wolfshiem, looking at the Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. “But I like across the street better!”
“Yes, highballs,” agreed Gatsby, and then to Mr. Wolfshiem: “It’s too hot over there.”
“Hot and small—yes,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, “but full of memories.”
“What place is that?” I asked.
“The old Metropole.”
“The old Metropole,” brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily. “Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can’t forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us at the table, and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all evening. When it was almost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and says somebody wants to speak to him outside. ‘All right,’ says Rosy, and begins to get up, and I pulled him down in his chair.
“‘Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don’t you, so help me, move outside this room.’
“It was four o’clock in the morning then, and if we’d of raised the blinds we’d of seen daylight.”
“Did he go?” I asked innocently.
“Sure he went.” Mr. Wolfshiem’s nose flashed at me indignantly. “He turned around in the door and says: ‘Don’t let that waiter take away my coffee!’ Then he went out on the sidewalk, and they shot him three times in his full belly and drove away.”
“Four of them were electrocuted,” I said, remembering.
“Five, with Becker.” His nostrils turned to me in an interested way. “I understand you’re looking for a business gonnegtion.”
The juxtaposition of these two remarks was startling. Gatsby answered for me:
“Oh, no,” he exclaimed, ‘‘this isn’t the man.”
“No?” Mr. Wolfshiem seemed disappointed.
“This is just a friend. I told you we’d talk about that some other time.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, “I had a wrong man.”
A succulent hash arrived, and Mr. Wolfshiem, forgetting the more sentimental atmosphere of the old Metropole, began to eat with ferocious delicacy. His eyes, meanwhile, roved very slowly all around the room—he completed the arc by turning to inspect the people directly behind. I think that, except for my presence, he would have taken one short glance beneath our own table.
“Look here, old sport,” said Gatsby, leaning toward me, “I’m afraid I made you a little angry this morning in the car.”
There was the smile again, but this time I held out against it.
“I don’t like mysteries,” I answered, “and I don’t understand why you won’t come out frankly and tell me what you want. Why has it all got to come through Miss Baker?”
“Oh, it’s nothing underhand,” he assured me. “Miss Baker’s a great sportswoman, you know, and she’d never do anything that wasn’t all right.”
Suddenly he looked at his watch, jumped up, and hurried from the room, leaving me with Mr. Wolfshiem at the table.
“He has to telephone,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, following him with his eyes. “Fine fellow, isn’t he? Handsome to look at and a perfect gentleman.”
“Yes.”
“He’s an Oggsford man.”
“Oh!”
“He went to Oggsford College in England. You know Oggsford College?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“It’s one of the most famous colleges in the world.”
“Have you known Gatsby for a long time?” I inquired.
“Several years,” he answered in a gratified way.

Notice how Fitzgerald makes each man’s dialect distinct enough that he doesn’t have to rely on dialogue tags to tell us who’s speaking. Carraway and Gatsby, the two Midwesterners, speak very similarly, despite Gatsby’s pretensions. Wolfshiem’s speech is the most obviously regional. (I pause here to note the usual arrogant Midwestern assumption that their English is normal English.) Fitzgerald uses more phonetic spellings here than the other writers we’ll look at, but by doing so he gives us a distinct sense of the overall tone of Wolfshiem’s speech. We intuit that his voice is deeper and throatier than Gatsby or Carraway’s. And while no one would characterize his English as broken, some of the rhythms of his speech are foreign—“It was six of us at the table” is how you would phrase that idea in German or Yiddish, not English—and this slightly more florid idiom, especially the grandiloquent circumlocutions in his remembrance of “the old Metropole,” give us a good sense of his character. This is the speech tune in action.

In this early passage from Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” a family on a roadtrip stops at the Tower, a barbeque joint run by a man named Red Sammy Butts, for lunch:

“Ain’t she cute?” Red Sam’s wife said, leaning over the counter. “Would you like to come be my little girl?”
“No I certainly wouldn’t,” June Star said. “I wouldn’t live in a broken-down place like this for a minion bucks!” and she ran back to the table.
“Ain’t she cute?” the woman repeated, stretching her mouth politely.
“Arn’t you ashamed?” hissed the grandmother.
Red Sam came in and told his wife to quit lounging on the counter and hurry up with these people’s order. His khaki trousers reached just to his hip bones and his stomach hung over them like a sack of meal swaying under his shirt. He came over and sat down at a table nearby and let out a combination sigh and yodel. “You can’t win,” he said. “You can’t win,” and he wiped his sweating red face off with a gray handkerchief. “These days you don’t know who to trust,” he said. “Ain’t that the truth?”
“People are certainly not nice like they used to be,” said the grandmother.
“Two fellers come in here last week,” Red Sammy said, “driving a Chrysler. It was a old beat-up car but it was a good one and these boys looked all right to me. Said they worked at the mill and you know I let them fellers charge the gas they bought? Now why did I do that?”
“Because you’re a good man!” the grandmother said at once.
“Yes’m, I suppose so,” Red Sam said as if he were struck with this answer.
His wife brought the orders, carrying the five plates all at once without a tray, two in each hand and one balanced on her arm. “It isn’t a soul in this green world of God’s that you can trust,” she said. “And I don’t count nobody out of that, not nobody,” she repeated, looking at Red Sammy.
“Did you read about that criminal, The Misfit, that’s escaped?” asked the grandmother.
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he didn’t attact this place right here,” said the woman. “If he hears about it being here, I wouldn’t be none surprised to see him. If he hears it’s two cent in the cash register, I wouldn’t be a tall surprised if he . . .”
“That’ll do,” Red Sam said. “Go bring these people their Co’-Colas,” and the woman went off to get the rest of the order.
“A good man is hard to find,” Red Sammy said. “Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.”
He and the grandmother discussed better times.

O’Connor’s dialect is always good, and here we see her introducing multiple layers of character—class most obviously but generation throughout—through the way each character speaks. Everyone in this scene is “a Southerner,” but notice how different each is, how vividly we can picture all of them, and how clearly we can hear. This in spite of O’Connor’s very spare use of a few dialect words—Co’-Cola, attact, fellers. This is owing to her attention to the differing rhythms of each character’s speech. Look back at Red Sammy’s wife’s dialogue in particular, and compare it to the prim and proper eluction of the grandmother.

You can listen to O’Connor herself read this story here. Listen to the whole thing, and pay close attention to how natural the dialogue sounds as O’Connor—whose accent reminds me a great deal of my late grandmother, an Athens native—reads it.

Finally, it would be bad form to work through some examples of this rule in action without looking at what Leonard himself does with it. Here’s a longish chunk from the opening chapter of his crime novel Freaky Deaky. Members of the Detroit PD bomb squad have been called to the home of Booker, a lowlife gangster, who has been told there is a bomb in his armchair that will explode if he stands up. (Language warning for those concerned.)

Chris said most of the squad was out on a run, picking up illegal fireworks, but there was another guy coming, Jerry Baker. Chris said, “You know what today is?” And waited for the guy from Narcotics to say no, what? “It’s my last day on the Bomb Squad. Next week I get transferred out.” He waited again.
The guy from Narcotics said, “Yeah, is that right?”
He didn’t get it.
“It’s the last time I’ll ever have to handle a bomb, if that’s what we have, and hope to Christ I don’t make a mistake.”
The guy still didn’t get it. He said, “Well, that’s what Booker says it is. He gets up, it blows up. What kind of bomb is that?”
“I won’t know till I look at it,” Chris said.
“Booker says it’s the fucking Italians,” the guy from Narcotics said, “trying to tell him something. It makes sense, otherwise why not shoot the fucker? Like we know Booker’s done guys we find out at Metro in long-term parking. Guy’s in the trunk of his car, two in the back of the head. Booker’s a bad fucking dude, man. If there was such a thing as justice in the world we’d leave his ass sitting there, let him work it out.”
Chris said, “Get your people out of the house. When my partner gets here, don’t stop and chat, okay? I’ll let you know if we need Fire or EMS, or if we have to evacuate the houses next door. Now where’s Booker?”
The guy from Narcotics took Chris down the hall toward the back of the house, saying, “Wait’ll you see what [Booker] did to the library. Looks like a fucking tent.”
It did. Green-and-white striped parachute cloth was draped on four sides from the center point of the high ceiling to the top of the walls. The Jacuzzi bubbled in the middle of the room, a border of green tile around it. Booker sat beyond the sunken bath in his green leather wingback. He was holding on to the round arms, clutching them, his fingers spread open. Behind him, French doors opened onto a backyard patio.
“I been waiting,” Booker said. “You know how long I been waiting on your? I don’t know where anybody’s at, I been calling—you see Juicy Mouth?”
“Who’s Juicy Mouth?”
“Suppose to be guarding my body. Man, I got to go the toilet.”
Chris walked up to him, looking at the base of the chair. “Tell me what the woman said on the phone.”
“Was the bitch suppose to be in love with me.”
“What’d she tell you?”
“Say I get up I’m blown up.”
“That’s all?”
“Is that all? Man, that’s final, that’s all there is all, nothing else.”
Chris said, “Yeah, but do you believe it?”
“Asshole, you expect me to stand up and find out?”
Chris was wearing a beige tweed sportcoat, an old one with sagging pockets. He brought a Mini-Mag flashlight out of the left side pocket, went down flat on the floor and played the light beam into the four-inch clearance beneath the chair. The space was empty. He came to his knees, placed the Mini-Mag on the floor, brought a stainless Spyder-Co lockback pocketknife from the right side pocket and flicked open the short blade with one hand in a quick, practiced motion.
Booker said, “Hey,” pushing back in the chair.
“Cover yourself,” Chris said. “I don’t want to cut anything off by mistake.”
“Man, be careful there,” Booker said, bringing his hands off the chair arms to bunch the skirts of the robe between his bare legs, up tight against his crotch.
“You feel anything under you?”
“When I sat down it felt… like, different.”
Chris slit open the facing of the seat cushion, held the edges apart and looked in. He said, “Hmmmmm.”
Booker said, “What you mean hmmmmm? Don’t give me no hmmmmm shit. What’s in there?”
Chris looked up at Booker and said, “Ten sticks of dynamite.”
Booker was clutching the chair arms again, his body upright, stiff, telling Chris, “Get that shit out from under me, man. Get it out, get it out of there!”
Chris said, “Somebody doesn’t like you, Booker. Two sticks would’ve been plenty.”

There are only three characters here but each has an utterly distinct attitude, even “the guy from Narcotics” who we won’t see again. As with the sample from O’Connor above, there’s a lot going on here—with the added layers of race and whether or not one is on the right side of the law, Chris being a white cop and Booker being a black gangster—and though Leonard tells us one or two of these things we really get to know them through the dialogue. Notice how little actual narration or exposition or even dialogue tags there are, and yet we understand these characters and can even hear them.

You can see Leonard himself read the whole first chapter here.

What all three of the above excerpts have in common:

• Minimal and precisely applied phonetic spelling.

• Careful attention to syntax and rhythm.

• Use of dialogue not only for characterization but for action

Building on Leonard’s rule

As I’ve said before, one of the things I appreciate about Leonard’s ten rules is his frequent emphasis that they are his rules and may not work for others. In fact, there are several that I take exception to. In the original article in which he published his ten rules he even provides examples of writers who “break” some of his rules but do so with excellent results—but not this one.

This is perhaps the one of the ten that I agree with most strongly. Having thought a lot about dialect in fictional speech, both before and after discovering Leonard’s rules, let me offer my elaborations or glosses on this one:

• Use dialect-specific words judiciously, selecting them for maximum impact rather than sprinkling them in randomly.

• Ditto foreign words used in English. Don’t settle for oui oui or si, Señor or jawohl or nyet! Make meaningful choices about which native words your character will still use—especially if they slip into them when emotional.

• Use context to make regionalisms or dialect words clear. Even if a given word or expression is unknown to the reader, he should be able to infer the meaning from the context.

• Keep phonetic spelling to a minimum, using it always to suggest a broader pattern that you don’t render.

• Pay more attention to syntax and rhythm than accent. Render the “speech tune” properly with standard spelling and the reader’s imagination will supply the accent.

And, finally, for the sake of flexibility and adaptability:

• However you choose to render regional speech, be consistent.

Suggested exercises

Here are two possible exercises for working out the mechanics of regional dialect and finding your own best way to render it.

• Watch a movie with strong regional dialect and transcribe the dialogue twice. First, do it as exactly as possible, with phonetic spellings, apostrophes for dropped letters—the works. Then, transcribe it using those features as sparingly as possible while still preserving what Brooks calls the “speech tune” or Leonard calls the “flavor” of the dialect. I’d suggest any of the Coen brothers’ movies, but perhaps start with Raising Arizona, Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou? or The Big Lebowski, all of which have very specific and very carefully observed regional speech. An alternative might be any of the slew of Boston-based crime movies of the last fifteen years.

• A second possible exercise, and probably the better of the two, is field work. Wherever you live, go to the places the locals—that is, people who have always lived there—hang out. Restaurants, especially non-chain restaurants serving regional cooking (see Red Sam’s barbeque joint above), are your best bet. Talk to people, but most especially listen. Listen to your waitress, to the kitchen staff (in a real local dive you’ll certainly hear them), and especially to the other customers. But don’t just listen for accent, listen through the accent for the components of each individual’s speech tune as described by Brooks above. Later try to write as much of what you heard as you can remember (being able to hear and remember dialect is a key part of developing an ear for it) without using phonetic spellings.

Conclusion

It should be obvious by this point that dialect is a topic I care a lot about. Perhaps too much. But if you’ve stuck with me this far, I hope you’ve found this deep dive into the topic helpful. Dialect is a powerful tool for fiction writers and getting it right will strengthen your characters, your work generally, and your readers’ enjoyment.

If you’d like to see how I’ve tried to practice what I’m preaching here, I’ve written two novels set in the modern era. The aforementioned Dark Full of Enemies is my earliest serious experiment with some of what I set out here, and my Civil War novel Griswoldville is the book I worked hardest on in this regard. I hope you’ll check them out, and certainly you should check out the books I’ve sampled above. There’s more good writing where those came from.

Thanks for reading!

Tuchman's Law

Yesterday evening my wife and I watched A Night to Remember. About midway through the film, as the decks started to slope and the Titanic’s passengers grew truly frantic for the first time, my wife turned to me and said, “I don’t think I’m ever getting on a boat again.”

I had to agree. The ocean bothers me anyway, and I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about sinkings lately—from teaching the Lusitania earlier this semester to passing the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic earlier this month to reading up on the deadliest sinking in history, that of the Wilhelm Gustloff, last week, which led me to revisit the Goya and the the Cap Arcona and the General von Steuben and…

But is this really reasonable? Don’t most ships make it safely to port? Aren’t these noteworthy precisely because of how much went wrong on their voyages, placing them well outside the norm?

All this brought to mind something else I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially in relation to the way we keep up with the news: Tuchman’s Law.

The Tuchman there is Barbara Tuchman, author of The Guns of August among many other bestselling works of history. In the introduction to her book A Distant Mirror, about “the calamitous fourteenth century”—a century I revisited twice in my Years Worse than 2020 series in December—Tuchman examines the formidable obstacles faced by modern people seeking to understand the Middle Ages. In addition to the vast cultural differences—differences in belief and worldview, imagination and priorities, among others—there is the inherent bias of all written records:

A greater hazard, built into the very nature of recorded history, is overload of the negative: the disporportionate survival of the bad side—of evil, misery, contention, and harm. In history this is exactly the same as in the daily newspaper. The normal does not make news. History is made by the documents that survive, and these lean heavily on crisis and calamity, crime and misbehavior, because such things are the subject matter of the documentary process—of lawsuits, treaties, moralists’ denunciations, literary satire, papal Bulls. No Pope ever issued a Bull to approve of something. Negative overload can be seen at work in the religious reformer Nicolas de Clamanges, who, in denouncing unfit and worldly prelates in 1401, said that in his anxiety for reform he would not discuss the good clerics because “they do not count beside the perverse men.”

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman’s Law, as follows: “The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold” (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

Or the way I often explain this concept to students: the mere fact that something is given media attention makes it seem X times more common than it actually is.

I appreciate the way Tuchman herself applies her law to the news media. Clearly we are wired to build probably scenarios out of the stories we hear, especially when they bring to light shocking dangers—however remote. There’s a natural pattern-seeking at work there which will inevitably skew your perceptions of what is normal, especially when overwhelmed with information.

What Tuchman clearly does not anticipate is the manipulation of this tendency, the artificial construction of narratives out of the news media’s vast sea of white noise—so aptly described by Postman, who I’ve mentioned in this connection before. These narratives may or may not actually reflect real world trends, but the mere fact that stories supporting the narratives are reported makes it that much harder to determine. And this is not even to factor in deliberate dishonesty, of which there is plenty.

I’ve found Tuchman’s Law a helpfully specific way to apply skepticism when looking at a news story, especially one, as the news is wont to do, meant to shock, disturb, or scare you—or, increasingly, call you to some kind of righteous indignation. In addition to basic questions like those proposed by Alan Jacobs here, ask something like: Barring intentional dishonesty about this story, how common is what it describes? It has a salutary effect on the intellect not unlike getting away from the computer and taking a walk in the sunshine and fresh air. You know—the real world.

I’ve critiqued the news and especially our consumption of it before here and most recently here.

What I watched in quarantine

SeriOusly, what are you wearing? The noblemen of Wessex “armed” for battle in Alfred the Great (1969)

As I noted in my previous post, near the end of March I caught COVID and had to spend two weeks in quarantine. Despite the illness and fatigue I got a lot of reading done, which I covered in that post. I was also able to watch or rewatch quite a few movies, documentaries, and TV shows, some of them I’d been hoping to see for a long time, some new to me, and most of them good or great. But not all of them.

Here, for your edification, is what I watched in quarantine:

Milius

This feature-length documentary on the life and career of screenwriter and director John Milius was a delight. It’s brisk, informative, surprisingly moving, and features an amazing stable of interviewees speaking remarkably candidly—Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are two standouts, since they were quite close to Milius for a long time, and Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Mann, Walter Murch, James Earl Jones, Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and many, many other big names put in appearances.

Milius does a good job outlining the man’s career, from film school, where he first developed the Milius persona—confident, gun-toting, anarchistic, full of tall tales, dedicated wholly to artistic integrity, and brooking no nonsense about any of the above—through the many ups and downs of his career and personal life. And what a career! Screenwriter for Apocalypse Now, Jeremiah Johnson, Magnum Force, and Clear and Present Danger; creator of HBO’s Rome; director of The Wind and the Lion, Conan the Barbarian, and Red Dawn. He penned the lines “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” and Conan’s answer to “What is best in life?” and Quint’s haunting Indianapolis speech in Jaws.

Virtually all of the interviewees comment on Milius’s talent for dialogue, particularly the big speech. One of the producers of The Hunt for Red October reveals that Sean Connery, who had worked with Milius in the 70s, insisted that Milius rewrite all of his dialogue specifically for him; among the results was Connery’s Hernan Cortes speech. Indeed, after the controversy surrounding Red Dawn—a considerably more ironic and tragic movie than the received wisdom portrays it, in my opinion—sent Milius’s career into a tailspin, he developed a sideline in script polishing and dialogue rewrites for his old friends.

It’s that personal dimension that makes Milius surprisingly poignant. Schwarzenegger quite movingly credits Milius with the first big boost of his career; he had been told that because of his body and his accent he would never be a leading man, but Milius saw potential in him and brought that out for the first time in Conan. Spielberg is visibly upset to describe the stroke that nearly killed Milius, a stroke that, even though Milius survived it, robbed him of speech: “The worst thing that has ever happened to a friend of mine,” Spielberg says.

At the time Milius came out he had partially recovered from his stroke and was continuing work on a passion project, a film about Genghis Khan. That project is still in development. Time will tell. But until then, Milius stands as a great tribute to a strange and wonderfully interesting man and filmmaker.

Haywire

All the laboratory-and-focus-group-concocted Strong Female Heroes that Hollywood has thrown at us the last couple years have nothing on Mallory Kane, the heroine of this underrated espionage action thriller from Steven Soderbergh. When the Gina Carano tempest brewed up in the social media teapot a month or so ago—remember it?—I recalled enjoying this movie when it came out and decided to give it a second look.

Carano plays Kane, a former Marine now working as an intelligence contractor for government types that are up to… something. I’m not convinced that the conspiracy that is slowly revealed to us is completely coherent. But that’s not really the point. This is a lean, economical, fast-paced action film that emphasizes tension, practical stuntwork, and startlingly brutal fighting, and Carano’s Mallory plays a genuinely strong female action hero who is, even better, believable. I don’t believe for a minute that Brie Larson, as Captain Marvel, could win a fight with anybody; I believe 100% that Gina Carano, as Mallory Kane, could.

Haywire also has a great cast including Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and Ewan McGregor. Three standouts: Channing Tatum as another special ops type, who seems like a brutish thug at first but is allowed to have a surprising arc; the late Bill Paxton, showing subtle cleverness as Mallory’s father; and Michael Fassbender as the smooth, handsome contact for an operation that goes wrong. This is the movie that made Fassbender my favorite for the next Bond.

This is not a deep movie, but it’s extremely well crafted, not to mention fun and effective, especially if you like your action rooted in reality. Worth your while.

The Grand Tour

I was a big fan of “Top Gear” some years ago, but stopped following it when Clarkson, Hammond, and May left for Amazon and only occasionally dipped into their new show, “The Grand Tour.” I finally got around to watching a good bit of it while I was sick, concentrating in particular on the multipart specials in which they go on long road trips—a two-part trip through the deserts of Namibia, which has stood in for Iraq in a number of movies if that gives you a sense of the terrain involved; a two-part trip through Colombia; and their most recent feature-length specials, Seamen, in which they pilot boats from Cambodia to the mouth of the Mekong, and A Massive Hunt, which follows them on a ridiculously contrived treasure hunt from Réunion to Madagascar.

It was all a hoot—beautifully shot scenery, interesting locations, a nonstop parade of mechanical troubles, and of course the appeal of hanging around with these three. The show is fun and hilarious and even manages to gin up a real frisson of adventure, and their wry British humor and the merciless ribbing they give each other always hit me exactly right. These were the best laughs I got for two weeks.

Journey’s End

Based on a stage play from the 1920s, Journey’s End is a character-driven war drama about the officers British infantry company during their week on the front line. Rumor has it that the Germans are preparing a big push—the big push—and even fixes a date for the attack. We follow freshly minted Lt. Raleigh through his first days in the combat zone, where he eagerly reunites with an old school friend, Captain Stanhope, now the company commander, and finds him a horribly changed man. Other small dramas play out, and always the rumor of attack hangs over them.

This is really excellent character study and features fine acting by a lot of great British actors. Asa Butterfield is realistically young and babyfaced for a new lieutenant in 1918 (recall that CS Lewis reached the front line as an infantry lieutenant on his nineteenth birthday) and his struggle to cope with his new surroundings and the changed Stanhope is affecting. Stephen Graham is solid in a supporting role as another platoon commander, as are Toby Jones as the cook for the officer’s mess and Sam Claflin as Stanhope, now a tormented alcoholic coming apart at the seams. But my favorite character was the fatherly “Uncle,” an older man offering stability and sobriety at a crucial juncture in the war and played with exactly the right measure of warmth and intelligence by Paul Bettany.

Journey’s End is not without action or suspense—a fatal trench raid scene is particularly tense—but its strengths are its evocation of the weary world of the front lines and its examination of character under stress. A very good movie.

Dillinger

Having watched Milius not long after one of his overlooked films, Farewell to the King, I was interested in checking out a few more of his movies that I hadn’t gotten around to. Dillinger was one of those. Milius’s first directing job, Dillinger stars Warren Oates as the titular bank robber and has a solid supporting cast including Ben Johnson as a way-too-old Melvin Purvis, Harry Dean Stanton as Homer van Meter, and a very young pre-Jaws Richard Dreyfus as Babyface Nelson.

Don’t go to Dillinger looking for accuracy. While it broadly follows the outline of Dillinger’s career of robbery, Milius freely invented or even inverted real events. As in Michael Mann’s more recent Public Enemies, the chronological order of events is out the window. But what Milius captures in Dillinger that makes it worth watching is the spirit of the thing; this movie feels like Dillinger’s career should, unlike the cold and clinical Mann movie, and has a huge personality—fast-paced, boisterous, over-the-top, with some ugly quirks that are neither apologized for nor explained away, and just subtly tongue-in-cheek—not unlike the title character. And Oates looks so much like Dillinger it’s spooky.

I don’t know if we’ll ever get an accurate movie about this particular wave of bank robbery and interstate crime, but Milius’s Dillinger is the one I’d go to for the feel of the period and the man himself.

13 Minutes

A movie I’d looked forward to for a long time, 13 Minutes was directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, director of Downfall, and tells the story of Georg Elser, a lone-wolf assassin who almost killed Hitler at the very beginning of World War II.

13 Minutes opens with Elser’s attempt on Hitler’s life. An industrial worker with a complicated past, Elser had devised and constructed his own bomb using stolen or homemade parts and explosives smuggled out of the quarry where he worked at the time. He designed the complex timing mechanism himself and planned to fit the bomb inside one of the roof-supporting pillars inside Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller, the beer hall where every year Hitler would return to commemorate his first failed attempt to seize power in Germany. Elser snuck into the building after hours for several weeks, slowly hollowing out a space inside the column behind the speaker’s platform. Elser finally planted the bomb, set the complicated clockwork mechanism for a time several days hence and in the middle of Hitler’s scheduled speech, and attempted to flee to Switzerland. The bomb exploded precisely as designed, bringing down a large part of the beer hall’s roof, killing seven people outright and injuring over eighty. Elser was caught at the Swiss border.

During his interrogation he found out that he had failed. Hitler had left the beer hall uncharacteristically early and in the middle of his speech—thirteen minutes before the explosion. Elser had missed his target, and his imprisonment had begun. He would remain there until the very end of World War II, when he was shot in Dachau.

13 Minutes dramatizes all of this very well, though it never quite recovers the excitement of the opening scene. The rest of the film leaps back and forth between Elser’s interrogation—realistically brutal and often hard to watch—and Elser’s past. We learn that Elser was a charmer, a ladies’ man, a man who voted Communist but didn’t want to join the Party, a lapsed Protestant who nevertheless relied upon prayer, and we see as well at least one of his love affairs and how life in his small town was reordered and corrupted by the rise of the Nazis. All of this gives us some glimpse of who this complicated man was and why he might have attempted what he did without trying to explain it fully—a wise choice.

Some of Elser’s background, particularly related to his love life, is fictionalized or simplified for the film, but 13 Minutes hews closely enough to the facts to be worth watching—especially since it’s also a well-acted, suspenseful thriller and procedural. It tells an important and compelling story well and, like another movie I’ll review below, doesn’t flinch from the unpleasant and disturbing truth of its subject matter.

The Lighthouse

An incredible artistic achievement, from its moody and beautiful black and white film cinematography to its eerie and ominous sound design and its authentic 19th century New England dialogue, marvelously acted by both Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, and compulsively, deliberately, quietly creepy, like The Shining. Director Robert Eggers builds an all-pervading, hypnotic gothic atmosphere that draws you in and keeps you there. It’s excellent. It’s also way, way too weird for its own good.

While I love and appreciate gothic settings—and The Lighthouse checks all the boxes: isolated, dark, windy, foggy, rainy, full of tales and secrets, possibly haunted, possibly the regular hangout of supernatural creatures, possibly the site of a hidden murder, &c.—the thick thematic larding of Freud and his simplistic, dirtyminded humbug led the film off in directions that just weren’t interesting. All the psychosexual and homoerotic stuff feels cheap. And the hunt for phallic symbols is the easiest game in the world to play; enlist a middle school boy sometime and you’ll be telling him to shut up inside ten minutes. And while I like and enjoy ambiguity, especially where the uncanny and spooky are concerned, ambiguity for its own sake—in this case, a storyteller introducing, developing, and repeatedly revisiting questions to which there are no answers because he doesn’t have any himself—is a weakness.

So I wanted to love The Lighthouse but could only admire it. It’s a masterpiece of mood and atmosphere that incompletely explores themes unworthy of its execution. But I’m still looking forward to Eggers’s next film, set in Viking Age Iceland—familiar territory for me.

Mr Jones

A beautifully shot, atmospheric, and grippingly told dramatization of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones’s investigation into Stalin’s manmade famines in the early 1930s. James Norton plays Jones, a former adviser to David Lloyd George, who uses his connections and his clout from once having gained an interview with Hitler to visit Russia in hopes of interviewing Stalin. How, Jones wants to know, has Stalin wrought his miraculous program of modernization? How has he created all the widely ballyhooed progress and prosperity? And where is all of the money for these programs coming from? Jones will be stunned by the answers—or non-answers—that he discovers and dedicate the rest of his life to getting the truth out.

Though streamlined and lightly fictionalized (e.g. Jones visited the Soviet Union three times, not once, was not arrested, and probably never met George Orwell, who appears throughout as a kind of Greek chorus), Mr Jones does a good job presenting the stranglehold Stalin kept not only on his people but even on the Western media during his reign, especially with active collaborators—like New York Times Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty, vividly played as an oleaginous pervert by Peter Saarsgard—colluding to cover up the mass starvation of Ukrainians and smear the reputations of journalists like Jones or Malcolm Muggeridge, who very briefly appears. It’s often a hard movie to watch, but a worthwhile one.

This film not only evokes the evil and paranoia of Stalinist Russia and Depression-era leftism but also offers a sustained indictment of would-be revolutionaries’ willingness to turn a blind eye to the damage that they’ve done—and continue to do—in the name of their unrealizable ideals.

Alfred the Great

An incredibly corny late 1960s epic starring David Hemmings as the only English king styled “the Great,” this film may leave you wondering why anyone would call him that. The costumes veer between interesting and terrible—especially the armor and weaponry—and “dark ages” stereotypes abound, but where the film really fails is in finding some way to make Alfred comprehensible to its audience. The filmmakers try some kind of psychologically tormented business—Alfred seems to spend more of the movie (comically) struggling against his own horniness than against the Vikings—but it’s inconsistent, incoherent, and falls flat. (Compare Patton, produced about the same time, which pitched Old Blood and Guts as a rebel to its counterculture audience and succeeded.)

Nevertheless—I found Alfred the Great immensely entertaining. Not always for the reasons the filmmakers intended, but from start to finish nonetheless. It has beautiful landscapes nicely shot, some striking visuals including a large-scale recreation of one of England’s chalk horses, and a few good scenes of medieval Saxon politicking in the king’s hall. Maybe, like John Dillinger, King Alfred is someone Hollywood just can’t get right. But this is a commendable effort, clumsy as it is.

The 12th Man

Den 12. mann is a Norwegian film telling the true story of Jan Baalsrud, a Norwegian commando who fled the Nazi occupation and, in 1943, tries to infiltrate his home country with eleven other men. The plan fails immediately, leading to the German interception of their fishing boat, its scuttling, and their capture. Only Baalsrud escapes—soaked to the skin, with only one shoe, and, after the Germans shoot at him as he flees, the big toe on his bare foot shot off. The other eleven men, tortured and interrogated, are eventually executed. Only the twelfth man remains to be captured, a task to which SS officer Kurt Stage, whose reputation is on the line, dedicates himself totally.

What follows is an astounding survival story, as Baalsrud swims between islands in below-freezing seawater to escape, makes hesitant contact with sympathetic locals, and, in a scene guaranteed to make stress sweat pop out on your forehead, performs surgery on himself to save his foot from gangrene. He is both sheltered and shuttled along from hiding place to hiding place by the locals, small acts of bravery with very, very high stakes. And the initial failure of Baalsrud’s mission isn’t the only thing that goes horribly wrong—for just one example, if you’ve ever thought surviving an avalanche would be no big deal, prepare for an education. It’s amazing Baalsrud survived everything he went through.

The 12th Man is well-acted, has beautiful location cinematography in the fjords and snowy mountain plateaus of Norway, and exciting and realistic action. It also makes clear how aggressively the Nazis would move to repress resistance, showing what a real resistance movement entails and how badly it can and often does turn out for its scattered and vulnerable members. But The 12th Man also shows what it takes to succeed, especially courage and tenacity—the sheer guts to endure.

This is an excellent movie that I highly recommend, and it was a good movie to end my quarantine on.

Conclusion

With a couple exceptions, this was a good batch of movies. My favorites of the bunch were Haywire, 13 Minutes, and The 12th Man—with a nod of appreciation to The Lighthouse for its craft—but I thoroughly enjoyed all of them and am thankful to have had the chance to watch them while I was out sick. I hope y’all will find something good to watch here, and if you view and enjoy any of these let me know what you thought!

Thanks again for reading. Stay healthy!

Further notes on bureaucratese

Last week I wrote here about Chesterton and Orwell’s objections to long words, especially the typically Latin-rooted jargon of the bureaucrat or the man with something to hide. I’m currently reading Prit Buttar’s history Battleground Prussia: The Assault on Germany’s Eastern Front 1944-45, and, via some reading adjacent to that book, came across a perfect example of the kind of obfuscating bureaucratese that Chesterton and Orwell had in mind.

Buttar has mentioned Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg several times so far, always in the context of Ehrenburg’s popularity among Red Army troops and the influence his writing—in Soviet rags like Krasnaya Zvezda—had on the troops. Look Ehrenburg up on Wikipedia and you will find this in the article’s introductory paragraphs:

His incendiary articles calling for vengeance against the German enemy during the Great Patriotic War won him a huge following among front-line Soviet troops, but also caused controversy due to perceived anti-German sentiment.

Emphasis mine.

Both Chesterton and Orwell note how the roundabout, euphemistic vocabulary of the bureaucrat or journalist—or Wikipedia editor?—can obscure simple truths we’d rather not acknowledge. So how much can be obscured by a phrase like the one italicized above? Here are some of the passages from Ehrenburg’s pamphlets and columns that Buttar quotes.

Writing in Krasnaya Zvezda in 1942:

We know all. We remember all. We have understood: the Germans are not human beings. From now on the word German means to use the most terrible oath. From now on the word German strikes us to the quick. We shall not speak any more. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. . . . If you kill one German, kill another—there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses. Do not count days, do not count kilometers. Count only the number of Germans killed by you. Kill the German—that is your grandmother’s request. Kill the German—that is your child’s prayer. Kill the German—that is your motherland’s loud request. Do not miss. Do not let up. Kill.

And from a leaflet distributed to the Red Army in October 1944:

Kill! Kill! In the German race there is nothing but evil; not one among the living, not one among the yet unborn is anything but evil! Follow the precepts of Comrade Stalin. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German women. Take them as your lawful booty. Kill! As you storm onward, kill, you gallant soldiers of the Red Army.

“Perceived anti-German sentiment,” indeed.

Buttar cites the latter passage in connection with the atrocities committed at Nemmersdorf in East Prussia the same month. The Red Army would go on to rape as many as two million German women, an estimated quarter million of whom died as a result.

What I read in quarantine

“Will you think me affected if I number a small illness among the minor pleasures of life? Work is impossible and one can read all day for mere pleasure with a clear conscience.”

— CS Lewis to his father, 1926

Having opened with that line from Lewis, which came back to me again and again as I quarantined with COVID a few weeks ago, let me offer two caveats: First, COVID was no joke. My throat burned, my head ached, I coughed until I threw out my back. (Oddly, I never lost my senses of taste or smell, the one symptom almost everyone experiences.) It was a small illness in the ultimate sense—I was never in danger of death or even hospitalization—but still painful and wearying. I’m still working against the fatigue from it. Second, I couldn’t read with a totally clear conscience. Unlike the thirty-year old Lewis who wrote this letter, I have a wife and three kids, and it was a struggle to listen to her feeding, keeping up with, and cleaning up after them in another part of the house and do nothing.

But I did read—and read and read. And that was a pleasure.

I read eleven books while I was in quarantine at home. I include here the nine works of fiction I read in hopes there will be something here to pique your interest if—God forbid—your quarantine time ever comes.

HHhH, by Laurent Binet

This novel dramatizes the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most evil and feared men in the SS, the man Hitler himself praised as “the man with the iron heart,” in Prague in 1942. HHhH is also a novel about the author’s interest in, research into, and despair over the story, and how he grapples to make it comprehensible as a novel. Compulsive, suspenseful, hypnotically written, and—for something so postmodern—sincerely and surprisingly moving. One of the best novels I’ve read so far this year. I wrote a full review on the blog here.

A Man at Arms, by Steven Pressfield

The latest from one of my favorite novelists, Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire. This novel revisits Telamon, a minor character who recurs across several of Pressfield’s other books regardless of time or place: Telamon shows up in the Peloponnesian War, in the campaigns of Alexander, and even in a speculative future in which an American Caesar returns from abroad to take over as dictator. Here, Telamon is an ex-legionary at large as a mercenary in first century Judaea, where he finds himself pulled into a mission to track down and stop a messenger sent by the notorious Paul. The messenger carries a letter with subversive contents, and Telamon’s pursuit, capture, and his dramatic change of attitude toward his mission clips along at a very fast pace.

There is vintage Pressfield here—the blunt violence, the evocation of a faraway time and place, the vivid sensory quality of his descriptions of heat, exhaustion, and pain—but in its pacing, its spareness, and its willingness to keep the characters mysterious to us it also reads like late Cormac McCarthy. This is a good thing. I enjoyed A Man at Arms immensely, and if a cross between Ben Hur, Gates of Fire, and No Country For Old Men sounds good to you, you probably will, too.

52 Pickup, by Elmore Leonard

Harry Mitchell, a prosperous factory owner, a veteran who worked his way to the top, cheats on his wife once and suffers the consequences—blackmail. And it gets worse from there. The blackmailers have film, they have the girl, and they make it clear that they have no qualms about killing. But they’ve also underestimated Harry and how hard he’ll fight back.

The setup doesn’t sound terribly original, but Leonard’s execution is impeccable. This is one of the best and most suspenseful of his crime novels that I’ve read. It’s also the sleaziest, as it takes its hero into the underbelly of 1970s Detroit in his search for the blackmailers. These are a uniformly wicked lot—stoners and pornographers and murderers-for-hire—who, like so many of Leonard’s teams of bad guys, eventually fall foul of each other through jealousy, backbiting, and greed. Eventually, they start murdering each other. Only the most evil of them will remain, by that point a desperate and deadly threat to Harry and his wife. When the various strands of plot developed through the novel come together at the end, the tension is magnificent.

In the insightful University Bookman review that first convinced me to check Leonard’s work out, writer Will Hoyt notes Leonard’s focus on “moments of truth” in his fiction as well as the influence of Leonard’s Catholic upbringing on his work, an influence one can feel palpably in his Westerns, to be sure, but elsewhere once you’re attuned to it. Read 52 Pickup with the sacrament of confession in mind—and what is confession but a literal moment of truth?—look at the role that the confession of sin plays in the plot—not only for our compromised hero Harry but for the other characters as well—and you begin to understand why Leonard’s highly commercial crime fiction can also be so thematically rich.

This is a great work of genre fiction and, like all of Leonard’s best work, it’s elevated by his style—his sound—and the difficult proving that he puts his characters through.

Later, by Stephen King

A young boy who can see ghosts, a mother at her wits’ end, messages delivered from beyond the grave, and a crisis that must be resolved—to the possible detriment of the boy himself. Later is The Sixth Sense as told by Stephen King. This is not a put-down; it’s vividly imagined and the scenarios dreamed up by King are engaging, with the narrator’s gifts always employed or used in inventive ways.

But the story lagged or proved predictable in places, especially the climax, and I found myself most interested in the middle chunk of the plot, in which the narrator’s mother—a literary agent teetering on the brink of bankruptcy owing to the 2008 crash—recruits him to take dictation from a recently deceased author who died with the final book of his series left unfinished, a long episode that proved genuinely original and even funny. I was also annoyed by some of the inevitable Stephen King attitudes he just can’t help throwing into the mix: the too-breezy narration he’s relied on for the last twenty years, a galumphing structure, and especially the simplistic characters. For example, you know one character is bad because she owns a gun, once harbored suspicions about Obama’s birthplace, and likes John Boehner (has anyone ever liked John Boehner?). Further, the narrative voice, so often a strong suit in King’s first-person narration, slips from believability all too often; I just did not believe the narrator was a teenage boy of the early 2010s.

It also—and I doubled back to make sure I mentioned this—has an utterly atrocious surprise revelation at the end. It’s not really a twist as it’s not plot-related, but it’s so ludicrous and has implications so appalling that King’s casual handling of it, an “Oh, by the way” approach incommensurate with what he’s revealing, is the biggest surprise of all.

But Later was still a fast-paced and enjoyable read. I blitzed through it in two days and didn’t regret it, even with King’s annoying tics on display and that terrible final act surprise.

Animal Farm, by George Orwell

I last read Animal Farm my freshman year of college, in the fall of 2002. I reread it in an evening. A masterpiece. This novella is richer and more meaningful, more deeply steeped in history and human nature than I could possibly grasp at the time, and is probably the best-conceived and executed allegory in modern English literature. Furthermore, Orwell’s message—and it is a message novel—is still relevant in our age of wannabe revolutionaries.

The Great Gatsby, by F Scott Fitzgerald

I somehow made it to the age of 37 without ever having read The Great Gatsby, which, if not the Great American Novel, is certainly the Great American High School Reading Assignment.

Do I need to summarize the plot? Probably not. But I approached it already knowing the broad outlines and was still drawn in thanks to the economy and power of Fitzgerald’s writing and especially thanks to the world he evokes, the tides of emotion and personal history flowing through each character as part of a larger scene. It’s evidence that a good story is essentially spoiler-proof.

In a way, I’m glad I didn’t read it until now, as Fitzgerald is doing things here that I’m not sure high schoolers can fully comprehend at their age and with their lack of experience. A friend on Instagram suggested that the best parts of Gatsby would be lost on them, and I suspect he’s right. This is a carefully crafted and powerful novel, beautifully and evocatively written, and I can understand now why it has become a classic.

The Eighth Arrow: Odysseus in the Underworld, by J Augustine Wetta, OSB

The best surprise and perhaps most enjoyable read of my quarantine, The Eighth Arrow follows Odysseus in a last-chance bid to escape Hell. Yes, that Odysseus, and yes, that Hell.

The novel begins just after Dante and Virgil have passed by Odysseus and his old comrade Diomedes where they burn together in the circle of the frauds. A mysterious woman, a Parthenos but explicitly not Athena, responds to Odysseus’s cry for deliverance and the pair find themselves back at the gate of Hell, armed and armored. For food they have a bag of bread that the denizens of Hell—be they the damned or the demons guarding them—all react to violently. All they know, thanks to one fallen angel, is that “It isn’t just bread.” It also has the strange property of restoring to bodily form any of the shades who eat of it. And the Parthenos sends them on their way with one command: to prefer mercy over justice.

There’s a lot going on here.

The Eighth Arrow draws deeply on Homer, on Dante, and on Christian theology in this energetic and wildly inventive new story of grace and salvation. Odysseus barely knows what’s happening to him, why he has gotten this second chance and to what end he is being drawn, and he only slowly becomes aware of the transformation taking place in him as he climbs lower and lower, a man of violence and guile forced to work differently and slowly, through no power of his own, becoming able to.

This is one of the best fictional depictions of grace at work that I’ve ever come across. But it’s not just a theological treatise, a basket of Easter eggs for mythology nerds, or another iteration of a great Christian allegory. The Eighth Arrow is also a blast—a gripping adventure story, a brilliantly imagined fantasy, and a profoundly moving meditation on death, loss, and our relationships to each other. Odysseus’s reunion with Penelope moved me almost to tears, and the Odysseus and Diomedes of this novel are one of the best realized male friendships I’ve come across in fiction.

A great novel on many levels. I hope y’all will check it out.

Under the Lake, by Stuart Woods

This novel came recommended on the basis of its setting—an artificial lake in the northeast Georgia mountains, a setting with which I am intimately familiar. And I have heard rumors that the fictional Lake Sutherland in Woods’s novel was inspired specifically by Lake Burton in my home county. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but Woods writes well enough that I could see his imagined lake and even smell the old cabin his protagonist retreats to at the beginning of the story.

The setting is well done, as is the setup. A Pulitzer-winning former newspaper reporter takes an unwanted commission to write the memoirs of a fried chicken restaurateur and heads to the lake to work on the project. As soon as he arrives, strange things happen. He is greeted brusquely by the grand old man of the town, who is no kind and gentle soul but seems unnecessarily hostile. He hears bits and pieces of rumor from various folks in town, none of which they are willing to elaborate upon. He recognizes a young secretary at the sheriff’s office as an up and coming Atlanta reporter. A friendly gas station employee lets slip that he wouldn’t be caught at that cabin after dark. A blind albino repairs the cabin’s piano, the boy’s mentally handicapped brother brings him firewood, and both speak mysteriously of their mama and her powers. And, late one night, he has a vision of a young girl standing in his cabin, staring out at the cove beyond the cabin’s dock.

This is a brisk page-turner, and though it transforms from a Southern Gothic tale—Woods really lays this on thick at the beginning, as you can probably tell—into a pretty standard detective story about midway through, there’s still enough of the eerie and uncanny to keep you reading. The characters are interesting but largely one-dimensional, and I didn’t for a minute believe that so many nubile and licentious young women would throw themselves at the balding middle-aged protagonist the way they did. And the final act goes totally off the rails, with twist upon twist coming one after the other and revelations so over-the-top that I just couldn’t believe it any more. At this point it becomes a melodramatic potboiler and doesn’t look back.

But even with its silly final act—including, oddly, a revelation with parallels to that in King’s Later above—Under the Lake was a fast and enjoyable read. I’ll probably check out more of Wood’s fiction one of these days.

The Son of Laughter, by Frederick Buechner

One of the best for last. I’ve recommended Buechner’s fiction here before. His novels Godric and Brendan shaped my artistic sensibilities at a pivotal moment, and I got The Son of Laughter years ago meaning to read it. I’m sorry it took COVID to make me get around to it, but I’m not sorry to have read it when I did or to have ended my quarantine reading on such a high note.

The Son of Laughter retells the biblical story of Jacob. That’s all I’ll say about the plot. If you know Genesis you know Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. This is a multigenerational character study and an exploration of a family’s covenant with the Fear—which is how Buechner’s Jacob refers to God throughout. It’s incredibly powerful, and succeeds especially well at perhaps the most difficult challenge facing a novelist who dares retell such a familiar story—it makes the story strange, unexpected, and surprising again. It even made me admire Esau, something I never would have expected.

The strangeness especially is crucial. These characters are not flannelgraph cutouts or 1950s Hollywood types in bathrobes. These are flesh and blood people from an utterly alien time and place doing what people of that time and place must—fighting, sacrificing, making vows, marrying and procreating, and, especially, working—and all under the promises made to them by the Fear. Buechner brings this world to life in vivid detail, from the omnipresent idols to the startling way men seal their vows to one another, making this story real and powerful in a way I haven’t before experienced. Especially powerful is his emphasis on—to repeat myself—the flesh-and-blood lives of these people. A late section in which Jacob suddenly realizes that the rowdy brood he is raising, offspring of four women and begotten on the backside of the desert, is the Fear’s promise moved me to tears. Jacob’s three reunions—first with Esau, then with his father, and finally with Joseph—are equally moving.

This is only the third of Buechner’s novels that I’ve read, but it may be the best. I highly recommend it, especially if you’d like to see an old story in a new way or desire a vision of how God uses real people, flawed as they are.

Conclusion

So of the nine works of fiction I read during my two weeks of coughing, sleeping, and drinking Earl Grey, the following are the three best: HHhH, by Binet; The Eighth Arrow, by Wetta; and The Son of Laughter, by Buechner. Animal Farm and The Great Gatsby are classics that it feels pointless to judge against the others. 52 Pickup and A Man at Arms, in the middle tier, are solid entertainments that offer a bit more substance to them than you might expect. Under the Lake and Later stand at the bottom, though I enjoyed and read rapidly through both. Perhaps I should say you aren’t missing anything if you miss those, but you’d be foolish not to read the ones at the top.

Thanks for reading! I’m glad to be mostly recovered from that bout with the ‘rona and grateful to have been able to read so much. I hope y’all have enjoyed these short reviews and that you’ve found something here you’ll enjoy.

Moore and Dante on the state of the modern church

Virgil and Dante encounter Ugolino and Ruggieri in this engraving by Gustave Dore

Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission recently shared an incisive, searing post regarding the current state of the church. Moore is responding to the results of a recent Gallup poll that showed church membership in the United States has fallen below 50% for the first time since demographers began collecting those data.

Data, as I am always at pains to point out to my students, are one thing. Figuring out why this has happened is another. This happens to be something I have a lot of thoughts about, but let’s stick to Moore. His searing and quite clearly pained critique—a voice crying in the wilderness—stems from the church’s failure to live up to its own ideals, to walk the walk. A not uncommon critique, but well expressed and coming from an authoritative voice.

But there was one passage near the beginning that stood out to me in particular. Writing of his own adolescent crisis of faith, a crisis rooted in the obvious mismatch between many Christians’ stated beliefs and their actions, particularly where politics and the culture war are concerned, Moore notes:

I heard prediction after prediction after prediction tying current events to Bible prophecy that was all “just about to happen.”

But nobody ever said, “Remember when I said ‘Gog and Magog’ of the Bible is the Soviet Union? I was wrong about that” or “Mikhail Gorbachev, I told you was probably the antichrist, but, my bad” or “Now that I also am using these supermarket scanners, maybe they’re not the Mark of the Beast after all.” These folks just moved on with the next confident assertions, as though the last never happened at all. 

Moore only notes this in passing as he relates his own story and returns to the why of America’s decline in church membership, about which he has many sharply observed and compelling things to say. But this passage stood out to me in particular because it harmonizes with so much of my own life story.

I remember wondering as a kid where the Gog and Magog connection with Russia came from. It’s just not there in Revelation. But I never got a clear answer; it was simply a given that Gog and Magog were Russia. I was too young for the barcode freak-out, but I do remember the introduction of the BI-LO Bonus Card and the high dudgeon of a few when a handful of the cards happened to have 666 in the long number printed on the back. I wondered why, if the advent of the Mark of the Beast meant Jesus was coming back, we were trying to stop the Mark of the Beast. I heard the Onion article that generated the entire Harry Potter controversy read from the pulpit. And I remember very, very well the day my private Christian high school showed us an end times prophecy video in class, a video in which the preacher, building to what was meant to be a dramatic and chilling climax, noted that “the fasted growing currency in the world today is the German mark!” We watched this video in 2001, two years after Germany had officially switched from the Deutsche Mark to the Euro.

You can say that these are fringy or outside the norm. Certainly they do not reflect anything actually in the Bible. But as Moore goes on to argue, people lose their faith over this stuff—either because they infer from this nonsense that the entire Christian message is nonsense or because, like Moore, like myself, they believe so fervently in the truth that the nonsense creates an irresolvable tension within our belief. It’s even more discouraging if some well-meaning person takes you aside and tells you you’re just “thinking too much.” True story.

But we’ve been here before. After I read Moore’s post last week I pondered over it for a while and went on my way. But a few days later, three lines from Dante that have stuck with me for years came unbidden to my mind:

“Christ did not say to his first company:
‘Go, and preach idle stories to the world’;
but he gave them the teaching that is truth.”

— Dante, Paradiso XXIX, 109-11

The scene is heaven, the primum mobile, the outermost reaches of God’s creation, shortly before Dante moves into the presence of God himself. The speaker is Beatrice, Dante’s beloved, giving one of Paradiso’s many speeches on topics both temporal and eternal—because the two are intertwined. In the middle, she goes off on a rant against foolish earthly preachers and the damage they do. The fuller context, which I quote at length to make a point:

“…below [i.e. on earth], though not asleep, men dream,
speaking in good faith or in bad—the last,
however, merits greater blame and shame.
Below, you do not follow one sole path
as you philosophize—your love of show
and thought of it so carry you astray!
Yet even love of show is suffered here
with less disdain than the subordination
or the perversion of the Holy Scripture.
There, they devote no thought to how much blood
it costs to sow it in the world, to how
pleasing is he who—humbly—holds it fast.
Each one strives for display, elaborates
his own inventions; preachers speak at length
of these—meanwhile the Gospels do not speak.
One says that, to prevent the sun from reaching
below, the moon—when Christ was crucified—
moved back along the zodiac, so as
to interpose itself; who says so, lies—
for sunlight hid itself; not only Jews,
but Spaniards, Indians, too, saw that eclipse.
Such fables, shouted through the year from pulpits—
some here, some there—outnumber even all
the Lapos and Bindos Florence has;
so that the wretched sheep, in ignorance,
return from pasture, having fed on wind—
but to be blind to harm does not excuse them.
Christ did not say to his first company:
‘Go, and preach idle stories to the world’;
but he gave them the teaching that is truth,
and truth alone was sounded when they spoke;
and thus, to battle to enkindle faith,
the Gospels served them both as shield and lance.
But now men go to preach with jests and jeers,
and just as long as they can raise a laugh,
the cowl puffs up, and nothing more is asked.”

A familiar situation: pride, ostentation, cheeseball humor, dogmatism on topics where the Scriptures are silent, prioritization of pet theories over the Gospel, and pointless—and erroneous—scientific arguments. Who hasn’t heard the “NASA found Moses and Joshua’s missing day” myth at church at some point? (Here’s Answers in Genesis if you’re skeptical of Snopes.) And the results are the same: ignorant believers, “fed on wind.” And the ignorant are vulnerable to other, yet more dangerous winds.

Some people were surprised to learn that American Christians are so susceptible to conspiracy theories. I wasn’t.

It’s easy to despair over the situation the Gallup poll reveals, but both Moore and Dante point to possible solutions—indeed, the only solutions we can trust. Moore:

I came through it with my faith not just intact but deepened. That’s due, ultimately of course, to the grace of God. But, in terms of secondary causes, it’s due to the fact that I found a copy of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity on a bookstore shelf and, having read to the point of memorization The Chronicles of Narnia as a child, I recognized his name. 

And it’s due to the fact that listening to Christian music led me to a Christian bookstore where I found, amidst all the kitsch, a copy of Christianity Today magazine, where I found columns by Philip Yancey and J.I. Packer and John Stott and Chuck Colson. These people seemed to take the reader seriously as someone who could think, and they seemed to be filled, not with anger and outrage and manipulation, but with what I recognized as the fruit of the Spirit—peace, joy, kindness, gentleness, self-control, etc. There seemed to be something there that bore witness to a Jesus who was not a means to an end but who was the Alpha and Omega of everything. 

And Dante, as in that passage from Ephesians I linked to above, distills Moore’s insight into one word: truth. A casual relationship with the truth is perhaps the area in which American Christians have conformed most closely to the world and departed furthest from God, who, after all, is truth. For a terrifying word study, just search for “truth” in the Gospel of John and 1 John. Consider as well God’s attitude toward those who authoritatively make incorrect predictions.

A scrupulous attendance to whether things are true or not, whether it is convenient for us or not, must be a fundamental part (“the teaching that is truth” above is, in Dante’s Italian, verace fondamento) of any hoped for revival of the American church.

Read the entirety of Moore’s newsletter reflections on the Gallup poll and the state of American Christianity here. The long passage of Dante quoted above is from Paradiso, XXIX, ll. 82-117. The translation is Allen Mandelbaum’s, which you can read here.

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.