The Rocketeer at 30

Here’s an appreciation that’s been a long time coming—growing off and on for thirty years (thirty years exactly on the 21st of this month), through nearly every phase of my own life from childhood to middle age and now extending into the childhoods of my children, and finally prompted by video essays by two of my favorite YouTubers. The subject: a modest action adventure from Disney, back when Disney still produced modestly sized movies, that is nonetheless masterfully crafted and rich with detail, not to mention a ripping good story. That film is The Rocketeer.

The movie

If you haven’t seen The Rocketeer, go and do yourself a favor and watch it. If you have seen it, a summary shouldn’t be necessary, but I’ll provide a short one here out of a sense of duty.

The film takes place outside Los Angeles in the fall of 1938, with Europe a year away from war (the Munich Agreement would have been signed just before our story takes place) and America rather insistently at peace. Our hero is Cliff Secord, a young pilot. When we meet him, he and a bunch of buddies at a rural airfield are taking their brand-new racing plane out for a spin after years of scrimping up what they can from crop-dusting and performing stunts at airshows. A police chase involving the FBI and gangsters with stolen merchandise—some kind of secret “gizmo”—intrudes, wrecking Cliff’s plane and almost killing him. He and his pals, right on the cusp of long-awaited great things, have just been set back years.

But then Cliff and his mentor Peevy discover something hidden in the cockpit of a superannuated biplane that they use for the humiliating “clown act” at airshows: a rocket pack. Cliff and Peevy intuit quickly that it’s designed to be strapped to a pilot’s back for rocket-speed flight. They test it, Peevy tinkers with it, and at the next airshow they are forced to give it a trial run to save an elderly and ailing pilot’s life. It’s a glorious success—but it also brings Cliff and his pals to the attention of the gangsters who were after the thing in the first place, the federal authorities who are hunting them, the industrialist who designed the rocket pack and is trying to recover it, and the highly-placed money behind the gangsters—and even his bosses far, far away.

The plot also sweeps up Cliff’s aviation buddies, including Peevy, Cliff’s beautiful girlfriend and aspiring actress Jenny, and their friends from around the airfield.

From this point forward The Rocketeer is a chase, a swashbuckler, a Flash Gordon adventure, an espionage thriller, a ritzy Hollywood chamber drama, and a gradually unfolding and ever escalating mystery. It’s great.

What makes The Rocketeer great

Why is it great? I can give you a short answer in three words: love, fun, and craftsmanship. Let’s start with the latter two.

First, The Rocketeer is a ton of fun. The period setting, the cast of characters, the heinous and varied villains, the combined dash of classic aviation and romance of classic Hollywood, the high stakes conflict boldly attacked by a spirited young hero who is still finding his calling and learning what is best in life—all contribute to the fun. All tell us, unequivocally, this is an adventure.

For me, the setting is a big part of the appeal. The trappings of the late 1930s are fun—the cars, the clothes, the hats, the planes, the music, the slang (“He hangs one on my kisser and you let him waltz?”), the guns (see below), the payphones and hatchecks and rumble seats, the look of the buildings from the hangars to the nightclub, and, relatedly, all that Art Deco design. The whole movie has a canvas, leather, and steel rivet chic that I’ve heard called dieselpunk. It’s beautiful. All the best of late 1930s material culture is here, and if you’ve ever fancied wearing a fedora (a real fedora, not the hipster hat, which is actually a trilby) and a trenchcoat under the cool light of the moon on a dark street corner, there’s something in The Rocketeer that you’ll like to look at.

But the setting also enriches the tone and dramatic subtext of the film. This is America late in the Depression, on the cusp of World War II but still at peace. This is also an era of change and potential. Everywhere we see the old alongside the new: Peevy’s truck and Cliff’s motorcycle, the biplane Miss Maibel and the Gee Bee, the oil derricks and orange groves of rural Los Angeles and the encroaching glitz of Hollywood. You can see this clearly in the film’s villains. The early villains, an Italian mob, are a known quantity—part of the status quo. Everyone knows who they are and what threat they represent. Howard Hughes is even a bit dismissive of them, calling them “hired muscle.” The film’s brilliant third act revelation of the real villains, the Nazis, points toward a terrifying new unknown.

And that’s another aspect of the setting that works gangbusters—there may have been more evil people or more lethal regimes, but there is no better screen villain than the Nazis. Just ask Indiana Jones.

The revelation of Nazi involvement in the plot also points toward the second thing that makes The Rocketeer so great, which is its craftsmanship.

The plot is perfectly structured, with a steady series of revelations that raise the stakes. Look at how the story progressively intensifies. First we have Cliff just trying to get ahead, then he and his friends are set back by unrelated mob crime, then he publicly rescues a friend using the rocket pack, then not only the mob and the FBI but an unstoppable ogre of a man begin pursuing Cliff, then not only Cliff but Jenny are endangered as Neville Sinclair tries to seduce her, and, the final revelation—the rocket pack isn’t just a MacGuffin for Cliff or the mob or even Neville Sinclair himself to chase, it’s the chosen tool of world domination by the Nazis. By the climax of the film all of the various plot threads have come together and the tension is at fever pitch, the stakes as high as they can go. It’s brilliantly done.

Furthermore—and this is especially important—nothing in the film comes out of nowhere. Everything that matters to the story, from plot points and important props (e.g. chewing gum) right down to jokes and incidental details, is properly set up earlier in the story. Consider Eddie Valentine and his gangsters’ turn on Neville Sinclair at the end. The film has already shown us the tensions in this patron-client relationship and the threat presented by the Nazis, so Eddie’s change of heart isn’t so much a change as the natural and rational step for his character to take given what he has just learned. For this moment to work so well takes the craft and dedication not only of the screenwriter but the director and editor. The Rocketeer, like Cliff’s jetpack, is a well-engineered and smoothly running machine.

So there’s the craftsmanship put into the story, but everything else in the film is finely crafted, too. The production design is stellar. The sets and costumes, from the dingy overalls at the airfield to the black tie and ballgowns at the nightclub, and most especially the Rocketeer’s costume—everything looks fantastic, helped along by Hiro Narita’s beautiful and classically-styled cinematography. The special effects, by ILM, for whom director Joe Johnston had previously worked on the first two Indiana Jones films and all three Star Wars films, are also the best possible for their time, with the climactic Zeppelin sequence being especially convincing and thrilling.

And, of course, there is the cast. The Rocketeer is perfectly cast, not only with good actors from the stars to the extras but with actors who are right for their roles. Even here all of The Rocketeer’s parts fit together smoothly. Billy Campbell is pitch perfect as Cliff, with just the right dash of cockiness and daring to complement his earnestness and naivete; Jenny could easily have been an eye-candy role, but Jennifer Connelly imbues her with life and drive, not to mention her own kind of daring and a radiant, classic Hollywood femininity; Timothy Dalton proves an outstanding villain, showing depth and layers of deception without simply being a caricature of a snobbish actor; and Alan Arkin is wonderful as Peevy (about which more below).

The supporting cast is also excellent, and rather than gush for another thousand words let me focus on three standouts. First, Coen brothers regular Jon Polito, a natural for period films, makes a strong impression with his handful of scenes as Bigelow, the penny-pinching owner of the airfield. Polito also gets one of the best lines in the film (again, see below). Second, Terry O’Quinn as Howard Hughes exudes authority and intelligence and is a natural fit for the story, Hughes being someone Cliff and Peevy would respect enough to make their continued “borrowing” of the rocket pack a real dilemma. And finally, seven-foot-tall Tiny Ron as Lothar, Sinclair’s henchman, is a wonderful old Hollywood type and presents a real threat. I remember dreading his appearance onscreen as a kid. The scene in which Lothar murders injured gangster Wilmer in the hospital, which Johnston and Narita stage in chiaroscuro shadows borrowed straight from black-and-white horror films, is genuinely terrifying and disturbing.

It’s that connection to classic Hollywood that brings me to the final and most important thing that makes The Rocketeer great—love.

I don’t just mean the love story between Cliff and Jenny, but the love the filmmakers had for everything about the movie. It’s apparent that they loved their work, and that love made the story infectious. It’s the root of both the craft and the fun of the movie.

The filmmakers’ love of old Hollywood comes through not only in the setting but in the camerawork and editing. I’ve mentioned the 1930s horror style of Lothar’s first murder, but The Rocketeer also employs classic tools like match dissolves—the best being the transition from Cliff flying over the moonlit mountains outside Los Angeles to the rumpled satin sheets on the bed where Neville Sinclair has deposited the drugged and kidnapped Jenny. That love also extends through every aspect of the look of the film, which I’ve already described but warrants mentioning again.

There’s also the music, an unapologetically heroic and beautiful score by James Horner. Horner was himself a pilot, and his score brings out the adventure, romance, and awe of flight. Look at the way the music during the airshow rescue moves naturally between all of those emotions. This is what flight would feel like if set to music, and it complements the movie perfectly. The Rocketeer is almost certainly my favorite of Horner’s many excellent soundtracks.

And there’s the filmmakers’ love of the story and of adventure for its own sake. The Rocketeer has dangerous villains who wish real evil upon the world, a genuine hero who behaves with integrity despite still having a lot to learn, and a community of people who matter to each other. It’s about courage and boldly facing danger to defend others, about the power of friendship and love and learning that those things are worth taking pains to protect. It’s about a man reaching adulthood and accepting responsibility and learning to think of others, and about the right use of skill, intelligence, and strength. It’s a sincere, heartfelt, uncynical movie of the kind Hollywood doesn’t produce any more, and I think that’s a shame.

Observations

As I’ve hinted above, The Rocketeer isn’t only about its characters, plot, and action, it’s rich with side details and the unnecessary grace notes that show creative people enjoying their work. Here are a few things I want to draw attention to:

• Peevy is a great mentor. His tough-love speech to Cliff about losing Jenny being his own fault is exactly the kind of thing that young men don’t want to hear but need to. Whatever happened to wise older male characters like this?

• Comic relief: I’m sick of Marvel-style quips and gags and pop culture references, especially where they undercut the sincerity of the drama. The Rocketeer is funny throughout without throwing shade at itself, its characters, or its story, and it roots its humor in character, character relationships, and the characters’ responses to their situation. They’re serious when they should be and funny when it’s appropriate to be and the humor isn’t just there to make people laugh but to make the story feel real.

• Cameos: I Like that two big names in 1930s Hollywood show up at the South Seas Club; I also like that the movie didn’t overdo it and turn that scene into one of those Looney Tunes shorts with all the celebrity caricatures. As with so much else, The Rocketeer got this just right.

• Speaking of the South Seas Club, that’s Melora Hardin singing “Begin the Beguine.” You might, like me, know her better now as Jan Levinson of “The Office.” This is one scene in the film that has aged weirdly for me.

• One more thing about the South Seas Club: to this day when I hear the word nightclub I imagine something like the South Seas Club—black tie, big band music, and elegant dining. I’ve gathered that modern nightclubs… aren’t like that.

• Guns: This movie is a smorgasbord of great-looking classic firearms. As I mentioned when reviewing The Highwaymen, I’m a total sucker for interwar and World War II-era hardware like this. The M1928 Thompson submachine gun, one of the most beautiful guns ever designed, is most prominent, and a nighttime shootout at Cliff and Peevy’s house—a gloriously over-the-top use of excessive firepower by the FBI (one of the film’s unintentionally realistic touches)—takes full advantage of the distinctive muzzle flash created by that model’s Cutts compensator. But there are some great automatic handguns, too. Lothar carries two .45 Colt M1911A1 pistols; Sinclair, once fully revealed as a Nazi spy, produces a then-new 9mm Walther P38; but the best of them is the Mauser C96 that Cliff picks up off of one of the German commandos at Griffith Observatory—a pistol he carries for about five minutes and never fires, but that looks fantastic. Those commandos’ main weapon is clearly the MP40 submachine gun, an anachronism as the MP40 wouldn’t be manufactured until 1940. But because the early MP38 looked almost the same (it had milled rather than stamped parts), the MP40 is so cool-looking, and, like the Thompson, its lines are so iconic, I’m happy to give this a pass—and have since I was about ten. You can browse a pretty thorough catalog of the film’s guns at the IMFDB.

• Cussin’: This movie feels squeaky clean now, but as a kid I fretted about watching this when we had a babysitter over and wondered why people in the 1930s and 40s said damn so much. (Another point of reference was my mom’s repeat viewings of Fried Green Tomatoes.) This may also be where I learned the expression son of a bitch—which, if you’ve read Dark Full of Enemies, you may know is McKay’s go-to exclamation.

• This is also where I learned the word fascist. Kudos to my dad for actually trying to explain this concept to seven-year old me.

• This was my first exposure to former 007 Timothy Dalton. I’m in a minority of Bond fans in liking The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, but because I had years and years of The Rocketeer to my credit ahead of watching either of those I always have a hard time shaking my impression of him as a villain.

• Nitpick: Why does Neville Sinclair kind-of, sort-of have a German accent once he’s aboard the Zeppelin at the end? Is he actually German and has been concealing it his whole career? I always took him to be a British Nazi-sympathizer—there were plenty of those in Britain and America in those days—rather than an actual German.

• I’ve mentioned that the cast are perfect from top to bottom, but let me point out one more thing about the bottom here—The Rocketeer is full to the brim of great faces. Pause the film sometime and look, really look, at each of Cliff and Peevy’s friends at the airfield, or the folks at the diner, or the film crew of The Laughing Bandit. It’s easy to fill the small roles and bit parts with just anybody, but I always like a film that gets interesting faces, faces that hint at their own histories and lifestories behind them. (Mel Gibson as a director has this talent in spades.)

• Quotability: This movie supplied and still supplies a lot of one-liners and allusions to my family. To this day my dad will say “It’s all part of the show!” in reference to any oddity that disrupts the regular flow of things. Also, the first time Cliff suits up: “How do I look?” “Like a hood ornament.” This line also has the virtue of feeling period-correct. The director of Neville Sinclair’s movie to the well-connected actress who got a speaking part over Jenny: “Acting is acting like you’re not acting. So act, but don’t act like you’re acting.” Millie, the owner of the diner, after Cliff’s date with Jenny goes down in flames: “Well, go after her, ya dope.” And Peevy after the shootout: “We don’t got a house, we got a gazebo.” I could populate a long list of good lines, but I’ll stop with this immortal line from Eddie Valentine: “I may not make an honest buck, but I’m 100% American and I don’t work for no two-bit Nazi.” I couldn’t type that without smiling.

• Aviation stuff: Last but not least, I have to mention the planes. The Rocketeer is a love letter to flying. The movie is full of beautiful vintage planes—real planes, not computer generated ones—and takes aviation seriously, including the gearhead culture of pilots and mechanics, and serves up a beautiful sample of what it is that lovers of aviation care so much about. It helps that Billy Campbell read up on flying ahead of playing Cliff and that composer James Horner was himself a pilot (see above).

Conclusion

The Rocketeer’s “critics’ consensus” on Rotten Tomatoes rather dismissively describes it as “anachronistic.” If this film is an anachronism then I don’t want to be up-to-date. It’s old-fashioned in the best sense of that term—fashioned as in made, shaped, crafted the old way—and it still works.

More fun and craftsmanship motivated by love and untainted by cynicism or—especially now—political partisanship, please. In the meantime, The Rocketeer, even after thirty years, holds up. Watch it if you haven’t.

More if you’re interested

I own the single-disk 20th anniversary Blu-ray of The Rocketeer. It’s of excellent quality; the picture is sharp and the digital transfer is very filmic, with a wonderful texture to the image, only further enhancing its old Hollywood appeal. Alas, it totally lacks special features. (See the episode of “Re:View” below.) The movie is also available on Disney+ with a subscription and to rent from Amazon Prime. James Horner’s magnificent soundtrack is, unfortunately, out of print if you’re a dinosaur who, like me, still likes to buy CDs, and YouTube recently removed a complete playlist of the score. An MP3 album based on a 2020 remaster is available for download on Amazon, albeit at a bit of a stiff price.

The two YouTube essays I mentioned above are Mike and Rich’s episode of “Re:View” from RedLetterMedia and a shorter video from Scots novelist Will Jordan, aka The Critical Drinker. Mike and Jay got me thinking about writing this appreciation when their video posted a year ago. Jordan finally got me writing about it.

The Bomber Mafia

The Sandman, a B-24 Liberator, flying through the smoke above the Ploiesti oil refineries in Romania, August 1, 1943

War is hard on idealists. It proves especially cruel to those modern idealists who have turned so often to technology, inventing new weapons or instruments of war, in hopes of saving lives. One thinks of Richard Gatling, inventor of the first practical machine gun, who developed his weapon after seeing thousands of men on both sides of the Civil War wasted with wounds, disease, and in the stand-up slaughter of battle itself. The firepower his Gatling gun offered, he believed, would “supersede the necessity of large armies.” He could not have foreseen how wrong that hope would be.

Gatling died the same year that the Wright brothers first flew, and just over a decade later both tools—the machine gun and the airplane—would raise the scale of slaughter in modern warfare to unimaginable heights. The devastation of the First World War, with twenty million dead to little perceivable gain, shocked the sensibilities of a world confident in its so far uncontested forward progress.

Idealists and theorists

The Bomber Mafia, half of the subject of Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book, came along in the aftermath of that war. Surveying the destruction of the war and cognizant of the possibilities of more war in the future, a band of renegade pilots at the out-of-the-way Maxwell Field (now Maxwell-Gunter AFB) in Alabama gradually built a new doctrine of air power. These pilots noted the knock-on effects on the American aviation industry after the destruction of a ball-bearing factory in Pittsburgh and theorized that, by precisely targeting industries critical to an enemy’s military production, fleets of heavy bombers could cripple the enemy and end the war quickly and with little—or at least less—battlefield bloodshed.

Their fervency—Gladwell refers to members of this inner circle as the “true believers”—and their insistence on their as yet untested theories earned them their nickname, which was not meant to be flattering. But the Mafia stuck with it, and the key to their strategy was a piece of technology, a top secret precision instrument called the Norden bombsight. The bombers of the First World War dropped bombs pretty much indiscriminately, and sometimes even by hand. For the Mafia’s idea to work, they would need to be able to drop bombs accurately onto specifically selected targets; the Norden bombsight promised to deliver that.

The bombsight was the invention of Carl Norden, a Dutch engineer who fervently believed in the possibilities opened up by his work. The bombsight was an extremely complex analog computer that factored in speed, altitude, windspeed, and even the rotation of the earth on its axis to enable a trained bombardier at high altitude to site, aim at, and hit targets on the ground—an unimaginable feat during the First World War. The Norden required only clear skies and daylight.

Norden is another of the idealists in Gladwell’s book, and offers a striking contrast to the hotshot pilots of Maxwell Field. Where one of Gladwell’s other focal points, Haywood Hansell Jr, was a chivalrous Southerner, a career Army officer, and scion of six generations of leaders in both the US and Confederate armies, Norden was a private, hard-driven, exacting technician, and a deeply religious man. What the two had in common—through Hansell’s chivalry and Norden’s Christianity—was a moral concern to make warfare as quick, humane, and bloodless as possible. Precision daylight bombing could take the ever-expanding scope of modern warfare and reduce it, shrinking it back toward the old ideal of warriors fighting only other warriors, a throwback to the centuries before Sherman or Napoleon.

Tellingly, Gladwell notes, Hansell’s favorite book was Don Quixote.

Reality ensues

The Bomber Mafia’s doctrine was the result of this confluence of theory and technology, and they finally got their chance to test their ideas with American entry into the Second World War. Members of the Bomber Mafia held key strategic positions in the Eighth Air Force in Europe. These men resisted pressure from the British to join the RAF in “de-housing” or “area bombing”—euphemisms for indiscriminate nighttime bombing of heavily populated urban areas—in favor of carefully planned large-scale daylight raids on key factories, exact implementation of the Bomber Mafia’s dearly held doctrine.

But reality intervened. The fleets of bombers required for these raids had difficulty coordinating their attacks and were vulnerable to flak and German fighters, and weather proved a persistent problem, either fog delaying the start of bombing missions in England or clouds obscuring the targets over Europe. Worse, and more fatally for the Mafia’s doctrine, high altitude flight plunged the crews and equipment of American bombers into temperatures as low as -60° F, causing the oil in Norden’s precision instruments to congeal ever so slightly, introducing just enough friction and throwing off their tolerances just enough to rob the bombers of their vaunted accuracy.

The peak of the Bomber Mafia’s career came with two raids on Germany on August 17, 1943. The first raid targeted the Messerschmitt aircraft factory at Regensburg and was a diversion meant to draw off the fighters that would inevitably attack any large formation of Allied bombers. If the Messerschmitt plant could also be destroyed, so much the better. But the second raid, timed for slightly later in the day, was the main effort and aimed at a ball bearing factory in Schweinfurt—precisely the kind of industry-crippling target the Mafia had developed their ideas around. After weather delays, the two missions launched, now several hours apart, leaving plenty of time for the Germans to regroup and attack again.

Both raids were savaged. Here’s Gladwell’s description of just one B-17 on the mission to Regensburg; the bomber was

hit six times. One twenty-millimeter cannon shell penetrated the right side of the airplane and exploded beneath the pilot, cutting one of the gunners in the leg. A second shell hit the radio compartment, cutting the legs of the radio operator off at the knees. He bled to death. A third hit the bombardier in the head and shoulder. A fourth shell hit the cockpit, taking out the plane’s hydraulic system. A fifth severed the rudder cables. A sixth hit the number 3 engine, setting it on fire. This was all in one plane. The pilot kept flying.

Between them, the two raiding forces lost sixty bombers—meaning over 550 airmen—with many more heavily damaged. The Schweinfurt ball bearing factory was damaged but quickly repaired. Civilians were killed anyway. A second raid two months later met with similar results and took similar losses.

Tinkerers and pragmatists

The failure of precision bombing brought other characters with opposite qualities to the fore.

Carl Norden and his meticulously crafted bombsight gave way to a team of chemists working for the NDRC, the National Defense Research Committee, the same government agency that would produce the atomic bomb. Rather than the high-minded principles and moral qualms of Norden, these chemists were simply curious. They heard about an odd chemical reaction at a paint factory that produced intense fires and started poking into it, looking for ways to amplify the effects of the reaction—hotter, more intense, longer burning fires. They brought in architects to mock up German and Japanese towns and repeatedly bombed them, carefully assessing the relative effectiveness of different flammable compounds. They tinkered with and tested these new incendiaries and eventually produced a weapon far more destructive than the fire-starting bombs dropped on German cities by the British—napalm.

Pragmatist Curtis LeMay (left) arrives in the Marianas to replace idealist Haywood Hansell (right) in early 1945

In the air, the Bomber Mafia came to the end of its run. Hansell had transferred to the Pacific to lead precision bombing of Japan from the Marianas, and tried carefully to target Japanese industry the same way and for the same reasons he had in Germany, and with the same limited results. In the incident with which Gladwell opens his book, after several months of this Hansell was brusquely notified of his replacement by a former subordinate and philosophical opposite, the commander of the Regensburg raid—Curtis LeMay.

LeMay, a hardbitten and taciturn Ohioan (the murderous Midwesterner is something of an American military tradition, it seems), had embraced area bombing in Europe and, with the new technology of napalm at his disposal and knowledge of the highly combustible materials used in traditional Japanese architecture, immediately launched a campaign of firebombing in Japan. The “longest night of the Second World War” alluded to in the subtitle of the book is the night of March 9-10, 1945, in which LeMay’s long-range B-29 Superfortress bombers targeted Tokyo—not an industry or war-critical facility or defensive installation, the city of Tokyo itself. More than 300 bombers hit the city over the course of

almost three hours; 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped. LeMay’s planners had worked out in advance that this many firebombs, dropped in such tight proximity, would create a firestorm—a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system. They were correct. Everything burned for sixteen square miles.

As many as 100,000 people were killed—burned alive. And LeMay would go on to bomb a total of sixty-seven Japanese cities with similar effects, all months before the atomic bombs that ended the war were even ready.

Why? Because it worked. LeMay believed so, and Gladwell even quotes Japanese historians who express a grim gratitude for the bombing in the belief that it shortened the war and prevented either Japan’s annihilation or its partition by the Soviets. The failure of the Bomber Mafia to circumscribe the destruction and provide a surgically precise ending to the war by destroying enemy logistics opened the door to the cold-blooded and amoral pragmatists, the people who care only about what works—a lesson in the amorality of technology.

But at what cost? This is a profound question that Gladwell raises but to which he refuses to provide easy answers, because there are none. The terms of the question itself, and the real-life consequences to which it alludes, should bother us.

Praise and criticism

For such a slender book there’s still a lot I’m leaving out in my description of The Bomber Mafia. Gladwell’s account of American pilots flying “over the hump” from India to China on their way to Japan is harrowing, and points to his strengths as a writer and storyteller—the hook, the unusual angle, the seemingly out-of-place but illuminating side topic, and above all the telling detail. His writing is also exceptionally brisk and vivid. See the block quotes above for a couple examples.

I appreciated that Gladwell did not succumb to the easy accusation of racism in the bombing of Japan that is prevalent in a lot of discussions of the war today. I also liked the sense of moral, philosophical, and even theological seriousness Gladwell brought to the topic. He even frames “the temptation” of the subtitle—the question of whether to use indiscriminate area bombing just to get results—as equivalent to the deals for power that Satan offered to Jesus in the wilderness. Jesus, famously, said no. The Allies and the US military, on the other hand…

Tokyo burns again, May 26, 1945

Furthermore, Gladwell brings human character and personality to the fore in this book in a refreshing way. I’ve seen a few reviewers fault Gladwell for supposedly reducing the tensions within the US military over targeting civilians to a personality clash. That’s not really what’s going on; Gladwell uses Hansell and LeMay and others as avatars of the deeprooted philosophical differences, of two different approaches to the use and morality of technology in warfare, and what’s refreshing about it is his recognition that, on top of all this, personality still matters. Character may not be destiny, but it is nonetheless a large part of it.

But The Bomber Mafia is not a perfect book, of course. While imminently readable, it sometimes reads like the transcript of a podcast—which, in a way, it is, as Gladwell first developed this story as an audiobook. That genesis shows most clearly in how Gladwell uses sources: rather than quoting or citing books, he always introduces outside information by way of interviews (e.g. “I talked to so-and-so about such-and-such, and he said…”). Gladwell has clearly done a lot of research into this topic and found a striking way to present it, but the approach of the writing is sometimes a little too informal. But that’s a relatively minor nitpick.

Some reviewers have faulted Gladwell for insufficient coverage of the issues involved in strategic bombing. Certainly The Bomber Mafia is in many ways a cursory look at the subject, but Gladwell in no way means this story to be exhaustive. He has done what he’s good at—found enough loose threads and unusual approaches to bring fresh insight and raise good questions. More seriously, I’ve seen at least one review accusing Gladwell of glorifying and promoting more recent American bombing. Such a reviewer can’t have been paying much attention; Gladwell clearly presents the horror and death resulting from area and firebombing, and goes out of his way to note the hesitations and sometimes outright refusals of American pilots to participate, incidents he presents as indicative of a troubling change in American air strategy.

These are issues worth considering, but The Bomber Mafia is mostly excellent—a great surprise in my reading. Most surprising to me was the sympathy Gladwell evoked in me for Curtis LeMay (I am ever more the old-fashioned anti-pragmatist as I get older and as I study more and more what warfare since the collapse of chivalry has meant for the innocent). And there is again the set of questions Gladwell advances, both explicitly and implicitly, about morality, technology, warfare, and what it takes to win.

Conclusion

Thanks to its readability, its vivid attention to personality and what it was like for those who lived through these events, its exceptionally lucid explanation of complicated ideas and technologies, and its clear-eyed awareness of the consequences of the technologies it describes, The Bomber Mafia is an outstanding introduction to an important historical topic that still raises hard questions about morality and technology, about ends and means. I look forward to recommending this to students not only in my US and Western History classes, but in a course like Technology & Culture as well. This is worth checking out, and the Memorial Day weekend might just be the best time to do so.

Lukacs on Hitler as Antichrist

Several weeks ago I shared a longish passage from the late John Lukacs’s 1997 study The Hitler of History in which Lukacs warns against thinking of or describing Hitler as insane or mad. Doing so, he argues, absolves Hitler from responsibility for his actions. Likewise with thinking of Hitler as demonic.

I finally finished The Hitler of History today. It’s excellent, and I highly recommend it if you’d like a deep dive into some of the history of the study of Hitler. But a passage in the final chapter—indeed, in the very last pages—jumped out at me. In concluding the book, Lukacs returns to his warnings against the folly of ascribing madness or demonic power to Hitler but notes that there is one spiritual parallel that can, in some circumstances, be appropriately applied—and not only to Hitler, but to other populist leaders in the age of mass politics, a point he makes clear in this chilling footnote:

In this respect we ought to, again, reject the “demonization” of Hitler, or the temptation to attribute to him the qualities of being “diabolical” or “satanic.” To the contrary, we can see elements in his career that bear an uncanny reminder of what St. John of the Apocalypse predicted as the Antichrist. The Antichrist will not be horrid and devilish, incarnating some kind of frightful monster—hence recognizable immediately. He will not seem to be anti-Christian. He will be smiling, generous, popular, an idol, adored by masses of people because of the sunny prosperity he seems to have brought, a false father (or husband) to his people. Save for a small minority, Christians will believe in him and follow him. Like the Jews at the time of the First Coming, Christians at the time of the Antichrist—that is, before the Second Coming—will divide. Before the end of the world the superficial Christians will follow the Antichrist, and only a small minority will recognize his awful portents. Well, Hitler did not bring about the end of the world, but there was a time—not yet the time of the mass murders but the time of the Third Reich in the 1930s—when some of St. John’s prophecies about the Antichrist accorded with this appearance and this appeal. And it may not be unreasonable to imagine that in the coming age of the masses he was but the first of Antichrist-like popular figures.

Let the reader understand.

Gladwell and Lewis on transactive memory

I’m currently reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, about the tension between the ideals of precision bombing and the pragmatic and brutal reality of “area” bombing within the US Army Air Forces. It’s very good so far.

As is his wont, Gladwell includes many interesting asides to buttress his story. Among them is the following:

The psychologist Daniel Wegner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love. You don’t need to remember your child’s emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because you know your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people’s minds. Wegner has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will often say when the other one dies—that some part of him or her died along with the partner. That, Wegner says, is literally true. When your partner dies, everything that you have stored in that person’s brain is gone.

“Transactive memory” gives me a term for a phenomenon described quite memorably and movingly by CS Lewis in his 1960 book The Four Loves. Though Gladwell focuses on romantic or spousal relationships (via the modish but vague “partners”), Lewis’s context is a discussion of friendship. The concept applies to both. Lewis:

Lamb says somewhere that if, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should die, then B loses not only A but “A’s part in C,” which C loses not only A but “A’s part in B.” In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say to Dante, “Here comes one who will augment our loves.” For in this love “to divide is not to take away.” Of course the scarcity of kindred souls—not to mention practical considerations about the size of rooms and the audibility of voices—set limits to the enlargement of the circle; but within those limits we possess each friend not less but more as the number of those with whom we share him increases.

Is there any more wonderful mystery than friendship? “Transactive memory” names just another facet of the way, through relationship, mere individuals enrich each other.

By the way, the “Charles” and “Ronald” in the passage from Lewis are not substitutes for Tom, Dick, and Harry but real people—Charles Williams and JRR Tolkien, members with Lewis of the writers’ group the Inklings. Charles Williams died suddenly in 1945 at the age of 58, unexpectedly reducing the Inklings by one.

In praise of cows

Detail from Grazing Cows, by Daniel Strain

Four items in praise of cows, occasioned by my browsing of photos from Scotland and the Alps on Instagram:

• First, dairy and beef, against which I will hear no ill spoken. I invoke this not in a sense of gluttony but of sincere appreciation.

• There are a great many regional varieties of cow, all of which have interesting histories, all of which have rich local traditions bound up with them, and all of which, viewed in their home context, adorn their landscapes or, viewed in isolation, suggest them. Look at the Highland without feeling a cool breeze, the Braunvieh without hearing cowbells, or the Texas longhorn without hearing the dry rustle of the mesquite, and I’d suggest checking your imagination for fault.

• Very few landscapes cannot be improved by a scattering of grazing cows. They provide a sense of both scale and restfulness, the latter of which you do not get from the presence of human figures.

• Bovine—from Latin bovus, “cow”—literally means “cow-like” but is often used metaphorically for, as Dictionary.com puts it, “stolid, dull.” As the cow, to me, radiates a humble equanimity, I’d love to see bovine rehabilitated as a term of praise.

One addendum, after I had already pondered the above silliness:

• On cowbells: these are intensely annoying at high school graduations but, heard at a distance in a meadow, as good as windchimes for relaxation.

Spring reading 2021

These seasonal reading lists kind of fell by the wayside last year, another victim of COVID, the shutdowns, and systemic whatever. I’m resurrecting them, both for my own sake and for y’all’s. I’ve had an unusually good spring of reading—43 books by my admittedly arbitrary cutoff date for the season—and I hope this recap of my favorites (and a few I did not like) will give y’all at least a few ideas if you’re looking for something good to read.

Before I start listing things, for the purposes of this reading list, “spring” will be defined as the period from New Year’s Day to the middle of my college’s break between the spring and summer semesters, May 8.

Non-fiction

Here, in no particular order, are my favorite non-fiction reads of the spring, with a few near-favorites that I’d still recommend highly:

This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga, by Peter Cozzens—A massive, exhaustively researched, and dramatically written account of the second bloodiest battle of the Civil War. Cozzens gives extensive coverage both to the high-level planning and maneuvering of the commanders on both sides, an important part of his narrative as Chickamauga was a terribly confusing battle, as well as the experiences of the soldiers themselves, many of whom lived through hair-raising and horrific firefights. Read this ahead of my family’s visit to the battlefield at the beginning of March. Really excellent.

Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy, by Jonathan Clements—A well-written and lively biography of Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim: soldier, cavalryman, world traveler, secret agent, personal acquaintance of Tsar Nicholas II and Hitler, commander in chief of the Finnish military, president of Finland, and stalwart and implacable defender of his country. A Finn of Swedish ancestry who served in the Russian military, went to war against the Japanese, spied on the Chinese, narrowly avoided murder at the hands of the Bolsheviks, and fought both against and with the Germans in multiple wars, Mannerheim is an excellent life to study if you’d like to see some of the manifold complexities of the twentieth century. Clements does an excellent job of keeping this complicated story understandable and well-paced. It’s also lavishly illustrated with high-quality photographs. Highly recommended.

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, by Neil Postman—Another good cultural critique from Postman, building on his more famous Amusing Ourselves to Death. In this book Postman further develops his argument that our prioritization of technology and innovation has gotten the cart before the horse, meaning that we now let the technology dictate our needs rather than simply using it. This fact was clear in the early 1990s, when Postman published this book, and should be indisputable now. Deftly written and argued, thought-provoking, and bracingly frank.

George III: Majesty and Madness, by Jeremy Black—A very good short biography of a king mostly (mis)remembered in America as an insane tyrant. Black does an especially good job illuminating George’s complicated but upright personal character and the influence that it had on his approach to policy and the tone of his rule. Blog review forthcoming.

The Revolt of the Masses, by Jose Ortega y Gasset—An incisive and scathing critique of the era of mass culture—its origins, tendencies, prejudices, and its probable destiny—from the years just before Europe and the West blew itself apart. I blogged briefly about some of Ortega’s insights earlier this year.

The White Sniper, by Tapio Saarelainen—A very short biography of Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä, who during the Winter War of 1939-40 killed an estimated 500 Russians. Saarelainen, who got to know Häyhä in his old age and is himself a Finnish army sniper, supplements Häyhä’s story with appendices on sharpshooting, the locations of Häyhä’s deeds, and the rifles and ammunition used. This last may be a deeper dive than most general readers want, but Saarelainen’s portrait of Häyhä—a quiet, modest farmer, hunting guide, and dog breeder who proved skilled and tenacious under unimaginably bad conditions, who suffered mightily but uncomplainingly from his severe wounding late in the war, and who made no fuss about his heroic exploits in later life—is inspiring and worth your while.

Runners up:

• The Politics of James Bond, by Jeremy Black—A wide-ranging and masterly examination of how real-life politics—especially the global politics of the early Cold War era, in which Britain seemed to play an increasingly marginal role—shaped the fictional James Bond both in book form and onscreen. This book only covers up to the release of The World is Not Enough in 1999. Black has recently published an updated edition which I hope to read soon.

• Ship of Fate: The Story of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, by Roger Moorhouse—A short, briskly written, well-researched history from beginning to end of the Wilhelm Gustloff, the Nazi cruise liner whose sinking in 1945 was the deadliest in history. A horrific tragedy carefully and vividly presented. More detailed Goodreads review here.

• CS Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law, by Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J Watson—A very good scholarly look at Lewis’s political thinking and how natural law philosophy informed it. My friend Coyle of City of Man Podcast interviewed the authors a few years ago, which you can listen to here and here.

• St Patrick of Ireland: A Biography, by Philip Freeman—An excellent short biography, especially helpful in describing the world in which Patrick lived and worked. Read more in my St Patrick’s Day reading recommendations here.

Fiction

Here, in no particular order, are several of my favorite fictional reads of the spring, plus a few near-favorites. Several of these I have already written about in my reflections on my COVID quarantine reading. I’ve linked to that post in the relevant places below.

The Son of Laughter, by Frederick Buechner—An earthy and poetic retelling of the biblical story of Jacob. Buechner succeeds in making this familiar story alien and fresh again. One of the best books I’ve read this year. Read more about it here.

Breakout at Stalingrad, by Heinrich Gerlach—A sweeping story of one of the biggest and bloodiest battles of World War II told through the lives of a handful of characters who begin on the periphery of the battle and are pulled—or, in many cases, pushed—deeper and deeper into the German collapse. Thrilling, disturbing, and very moving. I wrote a full review of this novel here.

Through the Wheat, by Thomas Boyd—Based on the author’s experiences as a Marine on the Western Front in the spring and summer of 1918, Through the Wheat is an engrossing, frenetic read and really draws you into the exhaustion and delirium of war—not only in combat, which is harrowing enough, but in the hard work and tedium of the before and after, too. As brutal, realistic, and direct as All Quiet on the Western Front, though perhaps—perhaps—not quite as bleak. Critically acclaimed upon its publication in the 1920s, Through the Wheat has been forgotten by the broader public but remained a classic among military men. It deserves to be better remembered.

HHhH, by Laurent Binet—Both the story of Czech resistance fighters plotting to assassinate one of the most evil men in the Third Reich and the story of the author’s struggle to tell the story. Brilliantly done. I wrote a full review of this novel here.

The Eighth Arrow: Odysseus in the Underworld, by J Augustine Wetta, OSB—Odysseus and Diomedes, finding themselves temporarily freed from their place in hell, must find a way out. Forces Odysseus can’t even begin to understand work on him throughout his journey, and he finds himself slowly changed. A thrilling, moving, mythic, funny, and theologically rich riff on Homer by way of Dante. This has been my biggest surprise of the year. Read more about it here.

The Shootist, by Glendon Swarthout—A short and strongly written novel about a gunfighter’s confrontation with mortality. The frontier has closed, the age of the Wild West is passing, and JB Books learns that the pain he has been in for weeks is advanced prostate cancer. He settles down in an El Paso boarding house to await the end, mulling what he has to show for his life, whether he knows anyone at all who doesn’t want to use him for their own ends, and whether he can make something of himself yet. Poignant and unsparing, one of the best Westerns I’ve read.

Runners up:

• The Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo—Read to my kids. A fun fantasy adventure that isn’t afraid to let in some real darkness, the better to show how brightly hope and grace shine. Inspired this blog post about writing dialect in fiction.

• A Man at Arms, by Steven Pressfield—A Greek mercenary formerly of the Roman legions is recruited to track down a messenger carrying a seditious letter written by one Paul the Apostle. Read more about it here.

• Glitz, by Elmore Leonard—A wounded cop on medical leave falls hopelessly in love with a doomed hooker and finds himself stalked by a vengeful ex-con he once arrested. The book got off to a confusing start but the story came together very quickly after the first few chapters. Worth sticking with.

• 52 Pickup, by Elmore Leonard—A Detroit businessman crosses swords with murderous extortioners. One of the most involving and fast-paced of Leonard’s crime novels that I’ve read. Read more about it here.

• The Great Gatsby, by F Scott Fitzgerald—My first time ever reading this classic. It’s great. Read more about it here.

Rereads

Here are a few books I revisited this spring, most of which I listened to as audiobooks on my commute. These are marked with asterisks.

• The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh

• Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming*

• For Your Eyes Only, by Ian Fleming*

• The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope*

• Animal Farm, by George Orwell

• Thunderball, by Ian Fleming*

I’ve been listening back through the original James Bond series for about a year and a half now thanks to some excellent audiobook performances on Audible. Goldfinger is read by Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville; the short story collection For Your Eyes Only, one of my favorites in the series, by Samuel West; and Thunderball by Jason Isaacs of The Patriot, the Harry Potter series, and many other movies. I’ve been keeping fairly detailed notes on these as I finish them; you can read these short reviews on Goodreads via the hyperlinks above.

Three to avoid

Most of what I got to read this spring was good, but, alas, not all of it. There were a number of good-not-great or mediocre books in there, but the following three actively annoyed me:

• Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners, by Dane Ortlund—An overlong, plodding, extremely repetitive meditation on two or three New Testament references to Jesus’s heart. Explicitly modeled on Puritan navelgazing. Recommended for Calvinists who are easily impressed by parallel sentence structure and clumsy metaphors. Goodreads review here.

• Indiana Jones and the Peril at Delphi, by Rob MacGregor—That the adventure in this novel is somehow both dull and too complicated is bad enough, but the character referred to throughout as “Indiana Jones” does not feel like any plausible younger version of the man we know from the movies. There are several more books in this series but I doubt I will move on to any of them, which is a shame.

• Later, by Stephen King—One of my quarantine reads. A briskly written supernatural adventure that unfortunately falls back into too many of King’s well-worn ruts. Nevertheless reasonably enjoyable until the ending, which is utter crud. More in my blog post about quarantine reading.

Of these three, only the last may be worth your while as pure entertainment. But I would recommend avoiding all of them.

Special mention—a worthy picture book

I want to give specific attention to Rosemary Sutcliff’s Black Ships Before Troy, a picture book illustrated by Alan Lee that tells the story of the Trojan War, specifically focusing on the events in Homer’s Iliad. I read it to my kids at bedtime over several weeks—it was wonderful. Full review here.

Currently reading

I’ve got several books I’ve been plugging away at for the last several weeks that I didn’t finish in time to count as “spring reads,” but which I nevertheless want to acknowledge. These include:

• Battleground Prussia: The Assault on Germany’s Eastern Front 1944-45, by Prit Buttar—A massive history of one of the grimmest and most unremittingly brutal phases of World War II. Research for a project I’ve been mulling over for four years now.

• Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, by Jordan Peterson—The follow-up to Peterson’s first book, which I read a couple years ago.

• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh—One of the first novels by Waugh that I read, this is a blistering and hilarious satire of the news media. Currently reading it to my wife before bed every night.

• Politics, by Aristotle—Reading for the forthcoming season of Core Curriculum.

• The Hitler of History, by John Lukacs—An excellent historical and historiographical study of Hitler and aspects of the study of Hitler’s life. I’ve blogged about this book before here.

These have all been good so far, especially the two historical works by Buttar and Lukacs, and I’d recommend any of them.

Coming up this summer

After a trying and difficult spring I’m hoping for a somewhat more sedate and relaxed summer. We’ll see about that. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to some more good reading, particularly the first in a popular fantasy series that I’ve finally been persuaded to try. We’ll see about that, too.

Thanks for reading! Hope y’all have a great summer and have found something here to enjoy.

Frictionless news

Apropos of nothing: pre-prepared headlines in Citizen Kane

Two more thoughts, which are really one thought, in my ongoing meditations about the baleful influence of news media on our culture and our minds.

First, I have returned several times to this post from Alan Jacobs, written in the aftermath of the riots on Capitol Hill. Jacobs begins by noting two facts:

1. During a crisis one turns instinctively and desperately to the internet for news;

2. During a crisis the worst thing one can do is turn to the internet for news.

Jacobs notes that with something as (seemingly) monumental as those riots going on, it is natural and understandable that so many people tried to keep track of it in real time. However:

But you know what? It did me no good. I got mixed messages, unreliable reports, rapidly changing stories; and I heard repeatedly from fools and knaves. If I had waited a day, or two days, or three, I wouldn’t have had all the emotional upheaval and I wouldn’t have missed anything significant. What possible difference could it make to me to learn about the Capitol Disgrace on Wednesday or on the following Monday (which is my usual news-reading day)? The only answer: None. None at all.

Instantly available information is often bad information. Which brings me to a possible partial solution—friction.

Last year on his blog, novelist Robin Sloane wrote that “Browsing Twitter the other day, I once again found myself sucked into a far-off event that truly does not matter, and it occurred to me that social media is an orthographic camera.” This refers to a system of 3D projection that renders objects the same size regardless of their distance from the viewer. Social media functionally “standardiz[es] all events, no matter how big or small, delightful or traumatic, to fit the same mashed-together timeline.” By contrast:

Before electronic media, news was attenuated by the friction and delay of transmission and reproduction. When it arrived on your doorstep, a report of a far-off event had an “amplitude” that helped you judge whether or not it mattered to you and/or the world.

That’s not the case with social media, where even tiny, distant events are reproduced “at full size” on your screen. This has been true of electronic media for a long time—I’m thinking of all the local TV news broadcasts that have opened with the day’s grisliest murder—but/and there was, before social media, at least an argument that it was important to have good “news judgment” if you were responsible for putting events on screens, particularly at the highest levels.

Indeed, working out the relative importance of events was, and is, a big part of what newsrooms do. The front page of a print newspaper was, and is, the tangible result: its allocation of paper and ink to different stories a direct and costly indication of their relative weight.

Note the roles of distance, elapsed time, and judgment required here. All forms of friction that can scour away the useless, the trivial, and the merely controversial.

Compare my thoughts on a very different social media flap from two years ago here, or the line from Neil Postman that I’ve been invoking since I first started these reflections shortly thereafter. After the invention of the telegraph and its capacity for the near-instantaneous relay of news, “the whole world became the context for news. Everything became everyone’s business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.” The result? “[W]e have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.”

Sloan offers two helpful thoughts in conclusion, the most helpful being a set of questions we could constantly and deliberately ask ourselves as we take in items presented to us as news:

I think a practical and healthy thing that any user of social media can do when confronted with a free-floating cube of news is ask: how big is this, really? Does it matter to me and my community? Does it, in fact, matter anywhere except the particular place it happened? Sometimes, the answer is absolutely yes, but not always—and these platform[s] don’t make it easy to judge.

Restore a bit of friction to your news consumption—most of all, give it time—and see what burns away.

I wrote about the news and our consumption of it earlier this year here and here. I discovered Sloane’s excellent post (read the whole thing when you can) via this article from The Hedgehog Review, which offers an interesting application of friction to our own writing. And I’m fixing to read a specifically theological examination of these issues in Jeffrey Bilbro’s Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, a book I’ve been looking forward to for some time. Should be worth your while if you’re interested in this topic, too.

Black Ships Before Troy

Odysseus leads a peacemaking delegation to Achilles in Black SHips Before Troy, illustrated by Alan Lee

One night last week I closed our copy of Black Ships Before Troy and set it aside. It was bedtime, and I had just read to my six-year-old daughter and four-year old son about the long-fated duel of Achilles and Hector, of Hector’s death, his father King Priam’s pitiful trip into the night to beg for his son’s body, of the weeping of Troy’s women as they washed and dressed the body for the pyre, and the funeral rites performed for the dead prince.

We sat quietly for a moment. At last my daughter, who had watched me intently throughout this chapter, said, “I’ve never seen a daddy cry before.” And then, “That was weird.”

I picked up Black Ships Before Troy for three reasons: first, my lifelong love of the story of the Trojan War and my constant search for good ways to introduce my kids to these stories; second, the fact that it was written by Rosemary Sutcliff, author of much classic children’s historical literature, like her novel The Eagle of the Ninth; and third—and decisively—the illustrations by Alan Lee, one of the great illustrators of Tolkien. The book proved excellent on all three counts.

Despite its subtitle, Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad tells the story of the whole Trojan War. Sutcliff gives special attention to the events of the Iliad—which takes place across only a few weeks near the end of the ten-year siege—but Sutcliff bookends the story of Achilles’s rage with chapters that explain the backstory and the war’s ultimate outcome, from Eris’s fatal wedding gift and the judgment of Paris to the construction of the Trojan Horse and the final sacking of the city. Along the way she also incorporates incidents like the arrival of Penthesilea’s Amazons, Odysseus and Ajax’s dispute over Achilles’s armor, and the story of Philoctetes. It’s very well done.

I appreciate two things especially about Sutcliffe’s treatment of the war:

First, she doesn’t oversimplify the parts based on the Iliad. Black Ships Before Troy teems with characters and the plot rises and falls with the tidelike motion of the armies in Homer’s poem, in which the heroes on both sides first drive and then are driven by the enemy. She also includes the actions of the gods—Aphrodite saving Paris’s bacon during his duel with Menelaus, Apollo striking the Achaian camp with plague, Thetis rising from the waves to comfort her sulking son—and thereby preserves a lot of the tone and integrity of Homer’s original.

Second, and relatedly, she doesn’t soften the characters or the action. Her descriptions of things like the capture and enslavement of Briseis or the sacrifice of captive Trojans on Patroclus’s funeral pyre are neither gratuitous nor apologetic; she simply presents Homer’s heroes as Homer presented them, warts and all. This gave me with lots of opportunities for conversation with my kids, especially where deceit and cruelty factored into the plot as it does in so many places. Relatedly, Sutcliff does not stint on the violence of the combat. Again, it is neither gratuitous nor euphemized, but it is clear in this story that this terrible war ends lives in terrible ways, including those of characters we love.

Hence the anecdote at the beginning of this post. Although I was ready for it, revisiting Hector’s death and reading about the grief of a father, a wife, and a whole city while flanked by my children was overwhelming. It made the most moving moments in Homer newly fresh and impressed that story that much more upon my kids.

The upshot is that Black Ships Before Troy presents, on a kid-friendly level, the same themes of heroism and excellence and the same sense of tragedy as the Iliad itself. I had some great conversations with my daughter in particular about the relative virtues of Achilles and Hector—who was more of a hero, and why, and what we thought might happen when the two of them finally met. By about the midpoint of the book she had stopped asking which side was the good guys and which the bad guys but had decided opinions about which characters were good and which bad—a sign of Homer at work.

This is a children’s version but it is not a modernization or ideological reinterpretation, thank God. This is as close as I’ve seen it get to pure Homer for kids. We loved it.

Finally, Alan Lee’s illustrations. The book is lavishly illustrated. There are pictures on almost every page, from dramatic action scenes teeming with characters—picking out who was who in the battle scenes became a fun game, a Mycenaean Where’s Waldo? for the kids—to halcyon scenes of the peaceful times before the war. A recurring statue of Aphrodite proves particularly poignant. Lee clearly worked hard to make the figures, landscapes, architecture, and equipment as authentic feeling as possible, striking a balance in style between what we’ve recovered from Trojan War-era archaeological sites and later Greek fashions. It’s beautiful, and it works magnificently. The pictures evoke a feeling both of gritty reality as well as of heightened myth. Of one scene in which Achilles, newly armed by Thetis in a panoply forged by Hephaestus himself, charges across the blood-flowing river Scamander toward the gates of Troy, my daughter said, “He looks glorious!”

The publisher recommends Black Ships Before Troy for ages 7-10 or older. That’s probably about right if the child is doing the reading, as the language is slightly elevated and consciously old-fashioned. I read it aloud to my two older kids, which gave me a chance to stop and explain new words and refresh them on who was who. My six-year-old got a lot out of it and really responded to the story. My four-year old enjoyed the pictures and the fighting and had favorite characters (Hector especially) but didn’t seem to track with the story. But that didn’t seem to bother him. Both enjoyed it, and I savored the chance to share this with them.

Black Ships Before Troy is an excellent children’s retelling of the Trojan War. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a beautifully illustrated way to introduce Homer to and enjoy one of the great legends of Western civilization with your kids.

Addendum: The illustrated edition of Black Ships Before Troy was apparently out of print for a long time before being reissued recently. This can make it difficult to find the correct edition on Amazon, where used copies are currently listed for over $300. I’ve linked to the correct hardback reissue, which is less than $20, in this review.

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.