No Time to Die

Daniel Craig as James Bond in No Time to Die

It’s clear to me now why No Time to Die’s release was delayed so often and for so long—who, at any point last year, could have really enjoyed a movie about an invisible microscopic threat that originated in a secret lab, that spreads person to person by close contact, that could potentially infect the whole world, and that you can’t remove once it’s tainted you?

The lab, in this case, is not in Wuhan but in London, and the microscopic threat is not a virus but a nanobot technology codenamed Heracles.

The story

At the beginning of No Time to Die, as highly proficient and heavily armed agents infiltrate the lab with the aid of a turncoat scientist, Heracles is referred to only as “the weapon.” Only later does it become clear what the weapon actually is, what kind of damage it’s capable of, and, crucially, who is stealing it.

Following the breach of the lab, M (Ralph Fiennes) sends for 007—but he doesn’t mean James Bond. Bond is five years into a long overdue retirement, whiling away his days fishing and sailing out of a luxury bungalow on the Jamaican coast. He has dropped off the grid following the film’s cold open, a bifurcated tale that is one part flashback for erstwhile Bond paramour Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux, returning from Spectre) and one part resolution to Bond’s leftover affection for Vesper Lynd of Casino Royale. We learn some of Madeleine’s tragic backstory, and we see an attempt on Bond’s life by agents of Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) in the Italian town where Vesper is buried. Bond assumes that Madeleine had something to do with Blofeld’s men finding and almost killing him, so he puts her on a train and disappears from her life—or so they both think.

When we catch up to Bond he’s had an unexpected visit from Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) and an even more unexpected visit from the new 007—Nomi (Lashana Lynch). Leiter wants Bond to help him find the missing scientist from the lab heist scene. Nomi wants Bond to stay out of it. Bond can’t resist getting involved, and so he’s off to Cuba.

In Cuba it becomes clear that much more is going on than a simple laboratory theft, and even clearer that Blofeld and SPECTRE are not behind it. Bond and his contact in Cuba, Paloma (Ana de Armas), walk into a trap, and after extricating themselves from that and swiping the scientist from Nomi, Bond and Leiter are betrayed.

From here Bond returns to London and M’s office—now wearing a “Visitor” ID badge—and applies himself to some detective work. He gains an interview with the imprisoned Blofeld but must be accompanied by Blofeld’s psychiatrist, who turns out to be Madeleine. Her discomfort at seeing Bond again after several years is not all down to failed relationship awkwardness. She has recently been approached by an ominous figure from that flashback in the cold open, Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), who has a special request for her.

Events in London don’t end well, and so while Nomi tracks down a lead on a double agent, Bond is off to Norway to reconnect with Madeleine and learn more about the threat that is slowly and lethally revealing itself.

I can’t say much more about the plot without giving things away, but suffice it to say that the movie clips along brilliantly from Norway to its final destination, slowly gathering speed until the final confrontation and revelation.

The good

No Time to Die is a whole lot of movie. It’s two hours and forty-three minutes long but (mostly) keeps moving, helped along by a lot of traditional Bond globetrotting, energetic and well-staged action scenes, Hans Zimmer’s score, good performances, and a (mostly) intriguing plot.

The film is brilliant on the technical side. The costumes and sets look great, especially the concrete bunkers where Safin and Bond face each other down at the end, and the special effects and stunt work are outstanding. All of the action scenes are good, not only enjoyable but exciting. I particularly liked a fight in a foggy Norwegian forest, in which Bond is forced to improvised in much the way he did at the end of Skyfall, and the climactic sequence, set in a repurposed Cold War-era missile silo, feels like a level from GoldenEye for N64 in the best possible way. I really thrilled as the film approached the conclusion.

No Time to Die is also beautiful to look at, as it was shot on 65mm film and mostly in the real places where the film takes place—Italy, London, Jamaica, Norway, and finally the Faroe Islands standing in for “disputed islands” between Japan and Russia. The cinematographer, Linus Sandgren, makes full use of the format for Lawrence of Arabia-scale landscapes and beauty shots. The lab heist at the beginning, taking place high on a London skyscraper at sunset, is stunning.

The cast perform well from top to bottom, though I felt Ralph Fiennes could have used more screentime and Christoph Waltz needed either more or none at all. Like some others, I was worried about the direction the film would take Nomi as a “new” 007, but I was quite pleasantly surprised. Nomi’s got a big attitude, but after some genuinely enjoyable rivalry in the early going she and Bond learn to respect and work with each other. They even have some of the film’s best banter, with Bond often getting the last word. It’s also in this snipping back-and-forth with Nomi that we get the clearest glimpses of the Bond from the early Craig movies rather than the sleepwalker from Spectre.

And while I’ve seen a few people criticize Rami Malek’s Safin as a “weak” Bond villain, I disagree. I found him a real threat, and his first appearance since the cold open, in which he is masked, is genuinely menacing. What I do wish is that he had more time in the film and that his motivations regarding his ultimate plans for Heracles—moving from wiping out certain bad people to spreading it worldwide—were clearer. Is this a eugenics project? Racially motivated genocide—as his pet scientist hints he could do if he wanted? Pure nihilism? I’ve seen the movie twice and I’m still not sure about this.

The film also features some nice nods to previous films and even Fleming’s original stories. The porcelain bulldog willed to Bond by Judi Dench’s M in Skyfall shows up, for example, and Safin’s garden of poisonous plants comes straight from the novel You Only Live Twice.

The bad

I’ve hinted at a few misgivings about the movie. I’m not completely sure the plot involving Blofeld leading SPECTRE from prison makes sense. I got more of it on a second viewing—for example, how one of Blofeld’s henchmen wound up working as one of Safin’s henchmen later in the film—but I think the plot moves quickly through this to conceal its basic implausibility.

Unusually for Bond, he is also prone to speechifying in this film. Two scenes stand out—one about halfway through in which he opens his heart to Madeleine, and one in which he berates Safin as an “angry little man” who is “playing God.” Bond can care deeply about women he loves and loathe a hubristic enemy, but this has seldom been something laid out for the audience in soliloquy. This is not a big problem, but an oddity of the writing and one that doesn’t jibe with what we know of Bond. (The movie overexplains things elsewhere, too, as when the scientist, having gone rogue, says to himself what is happening, or when Q’s computer announces “Blofeld’s bionic eyeball unlocked,” a system message that deserves to become immortal.)

No Time to Die is overlong, and it is overstuffed. Its fast and well-managed pacing doesn’t fully resolve either of these problems (I’ll have a lot more to say about that below). When I write that M or Safin could use more screentime, I’m not arguing for a longer movie but a re-proportioned one, one that trims away or removes some sidestories and subplots that, while contributing to the plot, also add to the sense of bloat and diffusion.

And I think I know why this is, but I can’t examine that without giving things away. So if you’ve seen the movie, feel free to continue into the spoiler territory below.

My biggest misgiving—spoilers ahead

I need to set this complicated but ultimately rather mild criticism up with two spoilers: Bond and Madeleine have a five-year old daughter, Mathilde; and, at the end, Bond, infected with Heracles nanobots that would target and kill Madeleine and Mathilde if he so much as touches them, dies stopping Safin’s plan.

I think No Time to Die missteps by bringing Madeleine back from Spectre—and in giving her and Bond a child. The film would be shorter, tighter, and—in Bond’s death—more powerful without Madeleine.

Some of my criticism is purely practical. With the exception of Sylvia Trench, who disappeared after the first two Connery films, Bond has never had a girlfriend carry over from one movie to another. It’s out of character.

Furthermore, Madeleine being the daughter of Mr White requires the audience to recall who Mr White is and some of what he’s been responsible for if they want to understand Safin’s motivation. This is a tall order for casual fans. (My wife, for instance, was mystified by the connection.) While there have always been some continuities in the Bond series, the films mostly stand alone—for a reason.

(Also: I’m not usually the type to make internet neckbeard arguments about believability, but I did have to question the wisdom of Her Majesty’s government in clearing Madeleine to meet regularly with Blofeld, given that she’s the daughter of a known terrorist financier with ties to two other terrorist leaders. There are surely other psychiatrists in London.)

It also seems like the screenwriters never quite decided what to do with Mathilde, Bond and Madeleine’s daughter. After Safin kidnaps her, he uses Mathilde as a powerful bargaining chip, manipulating both Madeleine and, in one of the film’s tensest scenes, Bond. But when Mathilde becomes even slightly inconvenient he abandons her. Thereafter, Mathilde becomes what TV Tropes calls The Load, a helpless human cargo for the hero to heft along while also fighting the bad guy.

And that, the conclusion, with Bond facing his death, is the root of my biggest misgiving. As Bond, wounded and bleeding out and also infected with Heracles, calls in a missile strike to obliterate Safin’s stores of Heracles but that will also surely kill him, too, he has a tearful conversation with Madeleine by radio. She confirms that Mathilde is his child. He tells her he loves her. He smiles. The missiles home in and Bond dies a glorious death.

And it doesn’t quite work—at least not for me.

What the movie gets right is that Bond can’t grow old and harmless, withering into senescence in retirement. If Bond is ever to die, it must be in the line of duty, because it has always been duty—Queen and Country—that drives him, and he has always endured, with a stiff upper lip and a wry comment, as a result. Men like Bond come and go but England is forever, even with the collapse and irrelevance of the Empire. A brief exchange between Safin and Bond nails this. Called “redundant” by Safin, Bond begs to differ: “Not as long as there are men like you around.”

What the movie gets wrong is its diffusion of our investment in Bond’s sacrifice. Are we pulling for Bond to succeed and weeping at his sacrifice because he’s defeating an enemy of Britain and saving the world? That works. Are we pulling for Bond to succeed and weeping at his sacrifice because he’ll save but never again see Madeleine and Mathilde? That also works. Either of these things could have been fine, but not both together. Ironically, by bringing Madeleine back and giving her and Bond a child, presumably to give Bond a more intimate, personal stake in the plot, the screenwriters actually lower the stakes. This might have worked, because Skyfall did it—and did it better, because there the personal and the patriotic were united in the figure of M. Here, the two halves of Bond’s motivation are separate and distract from each other.

Trimming these subplots, especially replacing Madeleine with another character with no tie to the events of previous films, could have untangled some of the middle of the film’s plot complications and, in the conclusion, allowed the audience to focus solely on Bond’s confrontation with Safin.

The result, ultimately, is a fast-paced but overcomplicated plot that also doesn’t quite work tonally or in terms of Bond’s character.

Conclusion

That’s a lot of explanation about what I think doesn’t quite gel in No Time to Die, but there I’m minutely examining the difference between a B+ and a B- movie. Most of the film works, and works well. I just think it could have been even better. Even if long, slightly overcomplicated, and taking one too many missteps in the conclusion, its fast pace, excellent action, and great performances will keep the Bond name alive for a long time to come. It’s a worthy conclusion for Daniel Craig’s run as Bond.

I’m going to miss Craig as 007. For me, No Time to Die ranks below, but not too far below, the two masterpieces from his tenure—Casino Royale and Skyfall. I don’t know what will come after Craig, but I’m hopeful, and I appreciate what he brought to the character for fifteen years.

Thank you, 007. That’ll be all.

Robert E Lee: A Life

Allen Guelzo’s new biography of Robert E Lee could not have been better timed. Begun eight years ago, Guelzo worked on it from the late years of the Obama administration, through the Trump years and the Charlottesville riot, finished it during the COVID-19 epidemic and the social upheavals of the summer of 2020, and it appeared in bookstores just a few weeks after Richmond’s monumental equestrian statue of Lee and Traveller came down. The time is ripe for a well-researched, well-argued, measured look at the real man behind the many propaganda versions of Robert E Lee.

And Guelzo’s Robert E Lee: A Life almost perfectly—almost—fits the bill.

The life

Even before examining Lee’s Virginian ancestry, the standard way to begin a life of Lee, Guelzo opens with an admission: his bias. Guelzo is “a Yankee from Yankeeland” and can only, in the end, regard Lee as a traitor. This would seem to close off certain sympathies or lines of questioning from the start, but Guelzo is intellectually honest enough to work through and against his bias most of the time (about which more below), and, frankly, I can get along with someone who is upfront about his bias. Charitable but not uncritical, this is a long way from the smears and hatchet jobs—here’s the worst, a mendacious piece from The Atlantic that just will not go away—that commonly circulate today.

With this off his chest, Guelzo begins with Lee’s father, “Light Horse Harry” Lee. Light Horse Harry was an eager young cavalryman during the Revolution who impressed no less than George Washington and Nathanael Greene with his vigor, but proved an utter failure in post-war political life—not to mention his private life. He made many political enemies and just as many disastrous investments. He twice married into wealth, and the second time it was only a legal provision by his in-laws prohibiting him from having access to his wife’s money that kept the family from going completely broke. By the time Robert was born, the eighth of nine children, the family was in dire financial trouble. When Robert was six, Light Horse Harry left for the Caribbean in a scheme to recoup his losses and return in triumph. Instead he fell ill and died in Georgia on the return trip, when Robert was still only eleven.

The character and death of Robert Lee’s father, a politically inept wastrel who more or less abandoned his family, is, for Guelzo, one of the seminal moments in Lee’s life. For the rest of his life, Guelzo convincingly argues, Lee was motivated to be the man his father—and several other older male relations—failed to be: to pursue independence, scrupulous financial solvency, and personal moral perfection. The negative example of his own father was ever before him. Guelzo notes that right up until the Civil War, Lee was often identified as the son of Light Horse Harry Lee. The constant reminder, he suggests, was Lee’s hairshirt.

Guelzo spends a good amount of time on Lee’s youth, education, and early military career. Following his graduation from West Point, Lee spent decades as an army engineer, working on east coast fortifications like Fort Pulaski and Fortress Monroe or western “improvements,” like a project to redirect the Mississippi in order to prevent the port of St Louis from silting up. A chapter on Lee’s performance in the Mexican War, in which he began as an engineer on the staff of General Winfield Scott but ended up as Scott’s favored reconnaissance officer and military protégé, is especially good, as Guelzo notes what Lee learned by example from the United States’s shameful perfidy toward Mexico and Scott’s high-minded and idealistically honorable conduct of the war.

These chapters, covering approximately the first two hundred pages, are well spent and give proper proportion to the Lee’s life before the Civil War. Throughout, Guelzo takes careful note of Lee’s uprightness and strength of character—already remarked upon in his teens and twenties—and his gravitation toward older male mentors, a series of army officers culminating in General Winfield Scott. He marks also Lee’s constant fretting about money despite being, by the standards of the time, apparently well situated; his marriage and family life (which can easily go missing in military biographies); and even the development of his religious beliefs, which began as what Guelzo characterizes as a noncommittal “genteel low church Episcopalianism” that gradually, especially during the war years, grew more open and more fervent.

Guelzo also carefully examines Lee’s political ideas—what there are of them—an inherited Federalist sentiment that evolved toward a preference for the anti-populist, anti-Jacksonian Whigs over the Democrats. But, most importantly, Guelzo notes Lee’s early apolitical stance, a stance maintained with greater and greater tenacity as political strife became more and more difficult to avoid.

Crucially, Guelzo brings the reader into the first great test of Lee’s resolve on all of his goals—personal independence, care for family, financial stability. This is the death of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, a gregarious dabbler and, as lord of Arlington plantation in Alexandria, one of the largest slaveowners in northern Virginia. When Custis died in 1857, he left behind a poorly managed and run-down estate and seemingly impossible provisions in his will—generous legacies for his grandchildren, the payment of his many creditors, and the manumission of the Custis slaves within five years—and named Lee as executor. Seeing the provisions of the will carried out to the letter consumed Lee’s life into the early years of the Civil War and still caused problems in the years afterward.

When the crisis of the Union comes, Guelzo gives a thorough and detailed examination of Lee’s competing instincts and loyalties—the will to avoid politics, his loathing of slavery and secessionism, his fear of the federal government’s use of force against other Americans, and his loyalty to family and, by extension, home state. He also lays out, before, during, and after the war, the legal difficulties involved in the Constitution’s ambiguous (and, I would argue, factitious) definition of treason. (A reviewer at National Review also notes that, at the time, the oath sworn by army officers was written with “United States” grammatically plural and was only changed because of the Civil War. Guelzo includes the text of the oath but does not draw attention to this.)

The chapters on the Civil War proper, what I imagine a lot of people will read the book for, are excellent. I may not agree with all of Guelzo’s perspectives on the fighting or the personalities involved, but this offers an engaging—even exciting and moving—and authoritative tour of the conflict through Lee’s involvement as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. Throughout, Guelzo never loses sight of Lee the man, and keeps the reader abreast not only of the campaigns but of Lee’s personal life. Lee lost not only the property bequeathed to his children during the war, but a daughter and a grandson, and one of his sons was captured and threatened with hanging by his Union captors. He also had at least two heart attacks.

The final chapters follow Lee’s postwar years as president of Washington College in Lexington. Here Guelzo gives much more thorough coverage than is typical of Lee biographies, and this attention is welcome. Much more than a famous name or a figurehead, Lee oversaw a revival and expansion of the college that helped it survive the lean years following the war.

Perhaps the highest praise I can give the book is to note my hesitation to read the final few chapters. When one reads a biography one knows the end must come, but as I sensed its approach in the onward march of Reconstruction and Lee’s steeply declining health, I read with trepidation. Guelzo’s description of Lee’s death, coming at the end of this involving and intimately personal look at the man, moved me deeply.

The value

Guelzo, despite his openly stated bias in favor of a nationalist vision of a divinely ordained and indivisible Union—a bias and vision I don’t share—does a great deal to help Lee’s reputation in this hostile age. He brings an intellectual honesty to much of his account that pokes holes in a lot of simplistic versions of Lee and simply debunks others.

He demonstrates, for example, that Lee’s regard for slavery as an “evil” was not mere rhetoric. Did Lee benefit from slavery? Yes—who didn’t in that age? Did Lee have modern attitudes toward race? No—who did in that age? Guelzo does not conceal these facts, but he also points out where Lee was exceptional in this regard. The only slaves Lee ever personally owned were a single family inherited from his mother, a family whom he liberated when he didn’t have to. He worked especially hard to see to it that all of his father-in-laws’ slaves were freed by the stipulated deadline—again, as Guelzo points out, at great inconvenience to himself and despite the chaotic early years of the war, the occupation of Arlington by the Union army, and the ready availability of Confederate judges who could have voided that provision of the will. Guelzo also shows how, after the war, Lee used his position as president of Washington College to prevent racial violence in Lexington, handing out harsh penalties or outright dismissals from the college to students who assaulted or antagonized freedmen.

Militarily, Guelzo also has insightful critiques and reassessments of Lee’s capabilities as a general. While a commonly repeated consensus is that Lee was a master tactician but a poor strategist, Guelzo makes a very good case for the accuracy of Lee’s strategic vision, that Lee understood early that the war would have to be won quickly, and virtually within sight of Washington, DC, in order to prevent the triumph of the Union through sheer scale and manpower. This was a refreshing and interesting perspective.

Guelzo also, in the book’s complex and challenging epilogue, deflates the commonly repeated cliché that Confederate monuments were put up as subtle semiotic violence toward African Americans, using the Lee monument in Charlottesville as an example. By the time Guelzo reaches latter day conflicts, the comparison with the life so meticulously laid out in the preceding 400 pages renders the present appropriately small, tawdry, and depressing. Guelzo also pushes back against some of the more unfair misrepresentations of Lee’s character popularized by Thomas Connelly in his 1977 book The Marble Man.

Overall, the portrait Guelzo presents the reader is of Lee as a flawed but good and principled man burdened with impossible personal standards, a man characterized more often than not by frustration—with the army, with newspapers, with the US government, with the Confederate government, with the slaves of his father-in-law’s plantation, with Arlington itself, the apple of his homebody wife’s eye—and a man who, from his return from Mexico onward, was deeply unhappy. I would dispute some of this. Guelzo gives us some glimpses of the deep affection Lee felt for his children, his charm and gentility toward women generally, and his sense of humor and fun, but these dimensions of his personality are often missing.

This may not be a complete portrait of the man, but it is a good portrait.

Quibbles

Nevertheless, I have quibbles, mostly relating to places where Guelzo betrays his bias. I want to point out three, with examples, so pardon the length. If you’re not here for the long haul, you can jump straight to my conclusion below. Otherwise, look at these three narrative tics and notice how they overlap.

The first is simply stylistic, relating to how Guelzo incorporates quotations, especially from letters and other primary sources, and what in fiction are called “dialogue tags.” Here are a few samples:

But [a steamboat] could carry many times the commercial load of the rafts and barges, and unlike the flatboats and keelboats it could turn around and breast the Mississippi’s current for a trip upstream, making possible a complete circuit of the entire river highway between New Orleans and Pittsburgh. “What a prospect of commerce is held out to the immense regions of the west, by the use of these boats!” drooled Niles’ Weekly Register (67).

“The rumor which has reached me of this distressing event, I could not before credit, nor can I even now realize its truth,” Lee wailed in a letter to Gratiot on December 23 (74).

The first was President Polk’s political jealousy of General Zachary Taylor, whose modest victories were already “giving great uneasiness to the administration” and leading to discussions about a presidential bid by the old planter-general. “These officers are all Whigs and violent partisans,” Polk spluttered (89).

I don’t think there’s much in these quotations to warrant the verbs drool, wail, or splutter. These are the wildest examples, but throughout—and clustering noticeably in the two early chapters I pulled these from—Guelzo overdoes it with these tags. It’s distracting and sometimes comical, and while I don’t think Guelzo intended this, but they also carry a faint air of derision wherever they appear.

Similarly, Guelzo occasionally editorializes in the middle of his narrative, often with a “it never seems to have occurred to him,” a tic I noticed early on, as here:

“I seem to think that Said opportunity is to drop in my lap like a ripe pear,” he admitted. Nevertheless, he persisted in believing that it was “remarkable that a man of my Standing should not have been Sought after by all these Companies for internal improvement.” It seems never to have occurred to Lee to go looking for those companies and opportunities on his own, or that the coastal engineering projects that had consumed his career thus far were of little interest to the infinitely more lucrative inland projects of railroads, real estate, and bridges (73).

Even Rob, at ten years old, remembered that Lee made a fetish of being “punctual” and on Sunday mornings would “appear some minutes before the rest of us,” ready to proceed to the academy chapel, and “rallying my mother for being late, and for forgetting something at the last moment.” If [Mary Lee] strained his patience, “he was off and would march along to church himself, or with any of the children who were ready.” (It never occurred to her husband that Mary Lee’s slowness might be due to some other cause than forgetfulness.) (132)

“These people [the Union army] delight to destroy the weak, and those who can make no defence,” Lee fumed, as if the wounds of Arlington and White House had been reopened by the destruction of Fredericksburg; it never occurred to him that Fredericksburg’s enslaved population might look on the arrival of the Union Army in a very different light (274).

There were other issues, too, that fueled [Lee’s] bitterness over Union conduct, which seemed to diverge so wantonly and destructively from the scrupulous pattern Winfield Scott had set long ago in Mexico. (It never seems to have occurred to him that the barbarities of slavery were worth weighing in the balance, or that those barbarities and the men who excused them were precisely what he was, objectively, protecting.) (310)

Again there is that faint whiff of derision or scorn. Some of this Guelzo just can’t know (about which more below), and some of it represents an abandonment of his quest to understand the man. The latter two examples are especially frustrating, as Guelzo otherwise devotes so much time and effort to exploring and explaining Lee’s negative view of slavery, his rigorous soldierly avoidance of political questions, and his scrupulous attempts to uphold honorable and civilized standards of warfare. But here, instead of trying to integrate all of this understanding and interpret these events or passages in light of it, he simply gives up in favor of hectoring Lee for failing to be Allen Guelzo.

Finally, there’s not much of it, but there is, crucially, more psychologizing than I prefer in a historical work. Two examples:

Mary herself maintained an informal Sunday school at Arlington for slave children, teaching them (in quiet violation of Virginia law but mostly to satisfy her own sense of a white woman’s obligation to lesser beings) to read in “a little school house” in the woods (145).

Again, how can Guelzo possibly know this? Is obligation utterly incompatible with a sincere desire to help? Is this not a species of what modern people rather cheaply call “giving back”? And this comes in the same paragraph as a description of Lee purchasing Mary a lifetime membership in the American Colonization Society and paying the way for manumitted slaves to migrate to Liberia at his own expense.

Then there’s Guelzo’s handling of the notorious Norris incident, in which three of Mary’s father’s slaves, including a man named Wesley Norris, ran away from Arlington, were returned, and whipped. A lurid denunciation of Lee, as the executor of his late father-in-law’s will, appeared shortly afterward in Horace Greeley’s anti-slavery New-York Tribune and, after the war, when Radical Republicans were looking for excuses to prosecute or hang ex-Confederates, a yet more elaborate version appeared in an explicitly abolitionist newspaper. My point here is that our sources for these details had plenty of motivation to exaggerate or fabricate. (Arlington’s official account of this incident, appropriately cautious, hedges its bets, concluding on a note invoking what one might call “emotional truth.”)

While Guelzo accepts more of the story than I tend to (I’m disinclined to think it’s a complete fabrication, but that’s a debate about historiography and sources for another time), he follows his account with this:

A week later [after the appearance of the Tribune story], he wrote to Custis Lee . . . wondering whether “you have been told that George Wesly and Mary Norris absconded some months ago, were captured in Maryland, making their way to Pennsylvania, brought back, and are now hired out in lower Virginia.” He said nothing about the whipping, except to acknowledge that “the N.Y. Tribune has attacked me for my treatment of your grandfather’s slaves.” He added, cryptically, “I shall not reply.”

But he could not bring himself actually to deny that he had done what the Tribune described, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that when his fury had cooled, he was sickened at himself, as much for the damage done to his own self-image as for the cruelty inflicted on the three fugitives. In that moment, he had reverted to Light Horse Harry, spiking a deserter’s head on a pole (157-8).

This is a lot to read into Lee’s refusal to write a rebuttal to a hostile newspaper, and even gets into the cheap father complex stuff that mars a more popular-level biography like Roy Blount Jr’s. This bit of psychological speculation—because it is, after all, only speculation—is especially egregious since Guelzo notes many other instances in which Lee, protective of his and his family’s honor and cognizant of how degrading political debate and newspaper mudslinging could be, refused to descend to the level of his critics—both north and South, and before, during, and after the Civil War. Even today Southerners of a certain background are raised neither to answer nor even acknowledge unfair criticism, an ideal that, as in Lee’s lifetime, is becoming harder and harder to live out. In cases like these it appears—it never occurs to him?—that Guelzo is simply unwilling to or incapable of fully understanding his subjects or allowing their actions to speak for themselves.

Or perhaps it’s simply his bias again. Just a few too many times Guelzo gives in to an impulse to hold Lee at arm’s length and superficially critique him, forgetting for a moment some of his own carefully researched insight into the man. Though he capably unpacks many of the factors that made Lee into the man he was, most especially the lifelong negative example of Lee’s own father, Guelzo never entirely overcomes cultural blindspots like this, and his picture of Lee, though strong, deeply researched, and mostly fair, never completely coheres.

Imperfections—precisely what Lee dreaded.

Nevertheless

If I have dwelt at length on these flaws—which are more nagging interpretive tics suggestive of an underlying unwillingness to comprehend than narrative-wrecking errors—it’s because Guelzo’s book is otherwise so good. Guelzo’s standards of research are extraordinary, his coverage is meticulous, his account is fair and openminded toward Lee most of the time, and his writing is excellent. I finished the 430+ page body of the work in just over a week, and not only because of my interest in the subject.

And most importantly, Guelzo’s commitment to research and to finding the human being underneath the partisan versions of Lee helps puncture a number of useful misconceptions—or outright fictions. And this in spite of a bias that can lead Guelzo to clearly lay out Lee’s understanding of his own situation, the ambiguity and uncertainty of his position, and his reasons for resigning from the US Army and going with Virginia—which had not yet seceded at the time of his resignation—and still write in the book’s conclusion what amounts to a “Meh—treason.” Again, that clearly stated bias. Nevertheless, this is the fairest shake I expect Lee to get anytime soon.

But in a way, despite the nagging issues I’ve examined, Guelzo’s bias—honestly admitted from the get-go—may prove to be a strength. This book, coming from this author with this perspective but still striving both to understand and to make Lee comprehensible, may get a hearing older biographies by previous biographers would not. And an attempt at an honest account, one that seeks however imperfectly to explain Lee on his own terms, is welcome in this day and age.

My recurring thought over the history, monument, and naming debates of the last several years has been Go read a book. For those honest and openminded enough to do so, Guelzo’s Robert E Lee: A Life may be the right book at the right time.

More if you’re interested

In the epilogue, Guelzo graciously refers to Emory Thomas’s biography of Lee as “the best and most balanced of any single-volume Lee biography,” and I think I agree. I recommend it. I also recommend William C Davis’s Crucible of Command, which is a dual biography of Lee and his opposite number, Grant. It’s one of the best books I’ve read on either man or the Civil War generally. Guelzo is mildly dismissive of Douglas Southall Freeman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning four-volume RE Lee, but Freeman’s research is still unparalleled and his perspective less “worshipful” than it is often accused of. (Ironically, Freeman was praised at the time for presenting a realistic and human portrait of a man long “viewed by [other] biographers through the rose-tinted glasses of romance.”) The one-volume abridgement Lee is still worth reading.

If you’re pressed for time, some good essays (a couple of which I recommended before, in a post for the sesquicentennial of Lee’s death a year ago today):

• from just before the release of Guelzo’s book, the review mentioned above at NR Online;

• from back in the spring, Christopher Caldwell’s “There Goes Robert E Lee,” a long-form engagement with his life, legend, and modern recriminations;

• from April, art and architecture critic Catesby Leigh on the controversy surrounding Monument Avenue in Richmond;

• from last year, Helen Andrews’s “A Lesson from Robert E Lee,” which strikingly compares Lee with Charles Sumner, a man more superficially suited to modern mores;

• from 1948, Richard Weaver’s “Lee the Philosopher,” which examines some of Lee’s gnomic one-liners;

• and Guelzo’s own “The Mystery of Robert E Lee,” which looks at some of the complications and contradictions of the man.

And several of y’all sent me a link to theologian Kevin DeYoung’s interview with Guelzo, which is a good one-hour introduction to the topic with, again, Guelzo being quite upfront about his biases.

Chesterton on Poe

I’ve been thinking a lot about Edgar Allan Poe for, oh, the last twenty-seven years or so, and so I was struck yesterday to catch the following in the first chapter of GK Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, a book I’ve read many times:

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical.

For comparison, here’s a really interesting review of The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, by John Tresch, a new biography that approaches Poe—who had spent time in the army at Fort Moultrie and a very short stint at West Point, which was then primarily an engineering school, and who went on to influence both science fiction and “ratiocination”-based detective stories as genres—as a frustrated scientist. Here’s the reviewer on Poe’s Eureka: A Prose Poem, published a year before his untimely death. I quote at length to make a point:

As the reviews–which were overwhelmingly savage–pointed out, it contains no actual scientific research: Poe reaches his conclusions by ‘ratiocination’, the method also favoured by his fictional detective Auguste Dupin. In its grandiose and disorientating shifts of perspective, it bears a closer resemblance to the diorama shows of New York’s entertainment palaces than it does to a scientific treatise.

Yet Tresch finds method in the madness of Eureka. Poe conceives the universe in terms of an eternal flux between the forces of attraction and repulsion. Matter and soul, time and space are all manifestations of the same essence. Attraction is the force that manifests in matter and gravity, while repulsion imbues electricity, life and spirit. The universe began in a spasm of repulsion, diffusing outwards to create multiplicity out of unity, before the forces of attraction–as described by Newton’s theory of gravity and Laplace’s nebular hypothesis–drew it back into clumps of matter. The process cycles constantly through microcosm and macrocosm, at every scale from the microbial to the galactic. It is the breath of life, the heartbeat of the universe, and will continue until a final collapse in which all life and consciousness will merge into the unity from which they arose.

Solipsistic and extravagantly overreaching, Eureka was nonetheless a sincere attempt to formulate a holistic science in opposition to the narrow specialisms that Poe saw hardening around him.

“Morbid . . . not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical” is tough but fair. It also fairly neatly illustrates a passage from later in the same paragraph of Orthodoxy, in which Chesterton writes that

To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

This aside about Poe got me poking around looking for other places where Chesterton had written about him. While I found several offhand remarks and allusions, the longest reference, one that indicates intimate familiarity with Poe’s work, comes in chapter two of Chesterton’s literary study Robert Louis Stevenson. Here Chesterton contends with the basic artistic sensibilities of Stevenson and Poe, who were often at that time—Chesterton thinks unjustly—compared:

Now in the same manner there is at the back of every artist's mind something like a pattern or a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscapes of his dreams; the sort of world he would wish to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing that he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or structure of growth, governs all his creations however varied; and because he can in this sense create a world, he is in this sense a creator; the image of God. Now everybody knows what was in this sense the atmosphere and architecture of Poe. Dark wine, dying lamps, drugging odours, a sense of being stifled in curtains of black velvet, a substance which is at once utterly black and unfathomably soft, all carried with them a sense of indefinite and infinite decay. The word infinite is not itself used indefinitely. The point of Poe is that we feel that everything is decaying, including ourselves; faces are already growing featureless like those of lepers; roof-trees are rotting from root to roof; one great grey fungus as vast as a forest is sucking up life rather than giving it forth; mirrored in stagnant pools like lakes of poison which yet fade without line or frontier into the swamp. The stars are not clean in his sight; but are rather more worlds made for worms. And this corruption is increased, by an intense imaginative genius, with the addition of a satin surface of luxury and even a terrible sort of comfort. “Purple cushions that the lamplight gloated o’er” is in the spirit of his brother Baudelaire who wrote of divans profonds commes les tombeaux [divans as deep as tombs]. This dark luxury has something almost liquid about it. Its laxity seems to be betraying more vividly how all these things are being sucked away from us, down a slow whirlpool more like a moving swamp. That is the atmosphere of Edgar Allan Poe; a sort of rich rottenness of decomposition, with something thick and narcotic in the very air. It is idle to describe what so darkly and magnificently describes itself.

When I say that Chesterton finds the comparison of Stevenson to Poe unjust, I think he finds it unjust to both men. Because while this is a vivid, meticulous, and incisive riff on “the atmosphere and architecture” of Poe’s stories and verse, I don’t read it as necessarily condemnatory. Chesterton’s whole point is the simple unlikeness of Stevenson and Poe. Where Poe is morbid, he is nevertheless good at what he does. And some of us certainly respond readily to the “dark wine, dying lamps,” and “dark luxury” of Poe’s vision.

Elsewhere in my cursory search I ran across the following from Jorge Luis Borges, from “On Chesterton” in an essay collection called Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952. After describing several fantastical scenarios from Chesterton stories, Borges writes:

These examples, which could easily be multiplied, prove that Chesterton restrained himself from being Edgar Allan Poe or Franz Kafka, but something in the makeup of his personality leaned toward the nightmarish, something secret, and blind, and central.

This consonance of Chesterton’s and Poe’s imaginations at one point had never occurred to me. Both have something high-flown, florid, and larger than life in the wild and fevered incidents of their stories. Compare the violence in any two of their stories, especially in the way the violence is conveyed by the operatic horror of observers (or narrators); and look at the frantic tone of headlong pursuit—or is it flight? who can tell?—in The Man Who Was Thursday with any number of Poe tales. And keep in mind that The Man Who Was Thursday’s subtitle is A Nightmare.

Food for thought. There’s a lot there, and I’m surprised it took me this long to connect two of my favorite writers in this way. I hope to write more on this later.

In the meantime, here’s a good short TED-Ed video on Poe.

Men of Terror

Imagining what it was like—Angus McBride’s depiction of Olaf Tryggvason’s final moments at the Battle of Svolder

Old friends or longtime readers of this blog will know that one of the most important questions I bring to my historical study, and the question that bridges the gap between my academic work and my love for writing fiction, is What was it like? Instinctual and unarticulated, this question drove my earliest interests in history, and my formal study always ran parallel to my imagining being there. Then I read John Keegan and, later, Victor Davis Hanson, and their work gave substance and form to those instincts, allowing me to shape my work, from my graduate thesis onward, deliberately to pursue answers to What was it like? in addition to everything else of big-picture importance in historical research.

William R Short and Reynir A Óskarson’s Men of Terror: A Comprehensive Analysis of Viking Combat fits snugly into that important interest of mine, pursuing the same question—or set of questions—with regard to warfare in the Viking Age.

I say set of questions because Short and Óksarson don’t stop with imaginative you-are-there reconstructions or interpretations, but collect as much empirical, scientific data as possible on as wide an array of topics as possible in their research into Viking combat. This includes not only collecting archaeological evidence about, say, the build and strength of Viking Age people, but also mining the literary sources, most especially the Sagas of Icelanders but others where necessary, for information on what kinds of weapons and gear were used, and how.

So, for example, based on the numerous violent incidents described in the sagas, Short and Óskarson are able to show that Viking swords were used for slashing or cutting an overwhelming majority of the time and only rarely for thrusting. Furthermore, these data correlate with the design of the thousands of surviving Viking Age swords, which almost always have cutting edges on both sides—some of which, they note, are still sharp a thousand years later—but less tapered, more spoon-shaped points that would be less suitable for stabbing. Here the archaeology and literature back each other up.

Short and Óskarson are also, however, alive to the limits of the available sources and data, and are rightly cautious in their conclusions. They frequently invoke what they call “the coin-toss problem.” Imagine flipping a quarter three times and attempting to derive reliable statistical conclusions about the results of coin tosses from those three examples. While the vast number of surviving swords make conclusions based on attacks described in literary sources more reliable, in many other areas their conclusions have to be much less certain. There is, for instance, exactly one surviving example of a Viking Age helmet, making extrapolation and sweeping conclusions about the design, use, and commonness of helmets unwise. Here one must look more closely at descriptions of helmets in literary sources—all the while keeping in mind that many of these post-date the Viking Age by centuries.

This is a delicate balancing act, but Short and Óskarson are admirably judicious in their use of all available sources and refuse to draw unwarranted conclusions. I have to say that this was enormously refreshing, especially when it comes to contentious topics like Hollywood’s favorite Viking, the “shield-maiden.”

But their willingness to embrace the difficult work of squaring what we know from often fragmentary archeological knowledge with the literary sources and all their potential flaws is not the only strength of Short and Óskarson’s book. They also bring a great deal of practical, empirical knowledge to their analysis. Through research conducted through Short’s “experimental archaeology” group Hurstwic, the authors tested their conclusions using reconstructed Viking Age weapons, armor, and clothing. This includes measuring the force of sword blows using scientific instruments, the cutting power of various Viking weapons using animal carcasses, and even much simpler experiments. The sagas recount great heroes swimming fully armed and armored. Is this possible? Short and his collaborators found out by suiting some swimmers up and dumping them in the water. Inexperienced swimmers sank almost immediately, but some Scandinavian participants accustomed to cold water swims carried on just fine. Fascinating, even exciting stuff.

After early chapters on sources, methodology, and their attempt to understand the Vikings from the inside out (about which more below), Men of Terror settles into a series of chapters exploring specific topics—the numerous kinds of weapons used throughout the Viking Age as well as armor, shields, dueling, raiding, naval combat, mass infantry battle, and grappling or “empty-hand” combat. Each chapter is lavishly illustrated with pictures of surviving archeological examples, drawings or reconstructions based on research, maps and photos of actual locations of fights and ambushes in Iceland, pictures of Hurstwic experiments and reenactments, and charts laying out all kinds of data—average blade length of surviving swords, the causes and results of duels in the sagas, the relative lethality of attacks with different kinds of weapons, and more.

These weapon by weapon and tactical chapters, with their mix of literary and archaeological research as well as real-world experiment, make up the bulk of the book. But one early chapter is perhaps the most valuable and sets the tone for all the rest: Short and Óskarson’s chapter on “the Viking mindset.”

This, too, is speaking my language. I’ve invoked Chesterton’s vision of “the inside of history” here time and time again. Short and Óskarson drive straight at this, seeking to understand the warriors of the Viking Age on their own terms rather than importing the ideals of the present day to the past. I use the phrase their own terms deliberately: Short and Óskarson work through some key Old Norse vocabulary—most especially drengskapr, manliness, and orðstirr, word-glory or fame—to establish why Vikings did what they did. They follow this up throughout the book by staying on guard for the intrusion of their own modern mindsets, always aware that what strikes them as most “efficient” or “likely” may never have occurred to a man of the Viking Age. This is a selfless, genuinely openminded approach to understanding a long-departed culture, and it’s one of the things that makes Men of Terror especially good.

I could go on much longer, but hopefully this has given you a taste for this excellent book. I highly recommend it if you have any interest in the Viking Age or medieval military history at all.

More if you’re interested

I discovered Short and his organization Hurstwic through Jackson Crawford, who has interviewed Short on his YouTube channel. These interviews are excellent resources in and of themselves. Here are Part I and Part II. If this “mindset” or “inside of history” approach resonates with you and you have an interest in the Viking Age, especially the literature thereof, let me also recommend Tom Shippey’s Laughing Shall I Die, which I read this summer.

Eaters of the Dead

“When Eaters of the Dead was first published, this playful version of Beowulf received a rather irritable reception from reviewers . . . But Beowulf scholars all seem to enjoy it, and many have written to say so.”

— Michael Crichton, "A Factual Note on Eaters of the Dead," 1992

I first read Eaters of the Dead in high school and didn’t know what to do with it. I sought it out primarily because it had a famous name attached to it and because many of my friends were gaga for its film adaptation, The 13th Warrior. (I hadn’t yet taken my plunge into early medieval northern Europe, a plunge I still haven’t come up from.) I got ahold of a copy with the movie tie-in cover and alternate title somewhere and started to read it.

My reaction, per Crichton’s later comments above, wasn’t so much irritable as bewildered—and slightly disturbed. What was this? A novel? A translation of a medieval manuscript? Are all these footnoted manuscripts real? Is any of it real? It couldn’t be real—I knew enough of the story already to know that—but if not then what was this thing?

Bewilderment

What’s funny is that, at the time I was reading Eaters of the Dead, I was doing much the same thing as Crichton. I just didn’t have it published. Besotted with half-formed pictures of the Middle Ages, my recent discovery of the riches of Dante, and certain artistic preoccupations that haven’t gone away (snow; almost all my books have snow in them), I was spending my free time hammering out line after line of an epic poem about the Teutonic Knights, a brutal war, and forbidden romance made the sweeter by vows faithfully kept—and liberally peppering the manuscript with footnotes, dates, alternate translations of contested terms, and excerpts of related text from other poets and chroniclers. I had discovered the fun part of scholarship, the digging and puzzle-piecing.

I finished high school and went on to college and Eaters of the Dead mostly receded from my mind. But some part of it, the part that had unconsciously jibed with my artistic and intellectual sensibilities, stayed on. While I had been confused and unimpressed with the book at first, I never hated or disdained it—a sure sign that there was something there I had missed.

Then 2020 happened, and to pass part of last summer teaching remotely and sheltering in place with family, I revisited it. Wow.

The story

Eaters of the Dead purports to be a translation of a text by Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, a real 10th century Arab courtier and diplomatic envoy. On a journey north (up the eastern side of the Caspian Sea to modern-day Russia) on behalf of the caliph in 922, Ibn Fadlan encounters a wild pagan people called the Rus or the Northmen. While staying with them he observes their customs, witnesses a chieftain’s funeral involving brutal human sacrifice, and is present for an emergency meeting following the arrival of a high-status messenger from the north.

The messenger is Wulfgar, son of King Rothgar, and he seeks the help of the local chieftain Buliwyf in dealing with a literally nameless threat. Ibn Fadlan observes the usually cheerful Northmen’s distress and foreboding and asks for an explanation, but his translators offer little and he senses it would be unwise to inquire much further. All he learns is that, in accordance with the decree of the Angel of Death, an elderly female shaman who had assisted in the sacrifice of a slave girl at the earlier funeral, he must go with Buliwyf and his warriors on their journey as a thirteenth, and foreign, member of the party.

Ibn Fadlan therefore unwillingly joins the Northmen on their long, circuitous trip northward by river. They portage between rivers, avoiding nameless threats in certain forests and riding as swiftly as possible through others, until they reach the Baltic and sail to Denmark. Finding Buliwyf’s home destroyed—again, by a threat the Northmen refuse to name or explain except to say that it comes with “the mists”—they journey on to Rothgar’s kingdom.

Everywhere in this kingdom there are signs of violent, grisly attack, and the only clues left behind by the attackers are grotesque figurines of uncertain meaning. Ibn Fadlan’s dread only grows.

Buliwyf and his men, including Ibn Fadlan, defend Rothgar’s hall against repeated attacks by a host of bearskin-clad savages that, Ibn Fadlan finally learns, are known as the wendol or “the mist monsters.” Short, ugly, stinking horribly, but powerfully built and apparently fearless, the wendol attack en masse, kill indiscriminately, and take the heads of their victims, never leaving any dead or wounded behind—until Buliwyf takes the arm of one of their number. The fighting is ugly and the losses heavy, and Ibn Fadlan is sorely tested. He also grows to admire the Northman and forms friendships with them, especially Herger, who interprets for Ibn Fadlan until the Arab can speak the language well enough to be understood. Ibn Fadlan also learns to drink and wench—a lot.

After an nighttime wendol attack in which the monsters assault the hall on horseback while carrying torches—an attack dubbed by the Northmen “the glowworm dragon Korgon”—Buliwyf and his band ride out in search of the wendol homeland across “the desert of dread,” visit a colony of dwarves living on the fringes of Northman society, and finally infiltrate the central wendol stronghold, where Buliwyf slays “the mother of the wendol” and is in turn mortally wounded by her. He holds out long enough to repulse a final, desperate wendol attack before he himself dies, and Ibn Fadlan witnesses a second, more moving funeral. The text ends abruptly as Ibn Fadlan journeys home.

The rest of the story

So much for the plot. If you’re just reading Eaters of the Dead for the story, you should finish it satisfied—it’s a real rip-snorting adventure tale, a classic quest full of exotic locales, strange customs, plenty of action, and a splash of horror.

But don’t some elements of that story sound familiar?

The movie tie-in edition I read in high school

It’s Beowulf. Crichton, as he writes in “A Factual Note on Eaters of the Dead” included in some editions of the book, wrote Eaters of the Dead on a dare, as a demonstration that, viewed with fresh eyes or from a new angle, the “bores” of English literature survey classes are still exciting, dramatic, and meaningful.

To do so, Crichton took an actual text about a real journey by the real Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, deftly interwove elements of fiction into the early parts, and from the first funeral scene forward constructed an entirely new, fictitious story for the cosmopolitan Arab narrator. This story positions Ibn Fadlan as the foreign observer in a party of warriors led by a brave and charismatic nobleman responding to a crisis in a faraway kingdom beset by bloodthirsty attackers. Later, our reading of Ibn Fadlan implies, these events would become the story of Beowulf saving Hrothgar and his people from the depredations of Grendel.

All of this makes Eaters of the Dead, in addition to an adventure story:

• a euhemeristic take on Beowulf, a “real” version of what happened “before” the development of the mythic one that has come down to us in the poem;

• a parallel story, one retelling familiar events from a different perspective; and

• a fictional book, a version of Ibn Fadlan that, according to the story, Crichton and previous scholars cobbled together from multiple fragmentary manuscripts in several languages.

There are plenty of other examples of all of these things, but what I notice about many others is their often po-faced ideological didacticism. Witness the recent rash of deconstructive parallel novels about “marginalized voices” (i.e. minor characters) in famous stories. What sets Eaters of the Dead apart from so many of these is how much fun it is. Not only is it, again, a rip-snorting adventure, but it’s a fun send-up of scholarship, containing as it does an introduction, information on the provenance of Ibn Fadlan manuscripts, parodically pedantic footnotes (some of them much longer than the passages they seek to illuminate), explanations of variant readings, a bibliography, and an appendix on the “predictable debate” surrounding the wendol.

Jazzing around

Crichton is—as John Gardner, author of another parallel novel about Beowulf, put it in one of his books on writing—“jazzing around.” And it’s a hoot.

It’s even more of a hoot if you know the period or something about history and anthropology generally. Crichton tucks away lots of “Easter eggs” as bonuses for those in the know to enjoy. He has Buliwyf’s party visit the ring fortress of Trelleborg, which Ibn Fadlan describes in unmistakable detail, and of course the wendol are relict headhunting Neanderthals who worship bears and shamanic fertility goddesses, as evidenced by the instantly recognizable figurines they leave behind.

This is an anachronism stew—whatever historical events lie behind Beowulf probably occurred in the 6th century and Trelleborg wasn’t built until at least sixty years after Ibn Fadlan’s real journey, and that’s not even to address the survival of Neanderthals—and Crichton admits as much in his “Factual Note.” What makes all of these things fun is the little thrill of recognition you get when they come along, a bit of authorial irony that stays fun by never coming at the characters’ expense. Crichton knows and enjoys this stuff and wants us to play along.

Again—jazzing around.

What was most remarkable to me about Eaters of the Dead, as I reread it last year and listened to the audiobook this week, is how many levels it works on. It’s a satisfying historical action adventure. It’s a genuinely creepy horror story, with a carefully structured buildup and wonderful atmosphere and tension. It’s an engaging, vividly imagined, and just-barely-realistic-enough science-fiction story—the kind of book Crichton would become famous for—pitting Vikings against prehistoric headhunters. It’s a fun—and sometimes hilarious—pastiche of modern scholarship. And it is, in the end, a great celebration of Beowulf, definitive proof of Crichton’s assertion that great literature isn’t boring.

It took me twenty years to grow into, to see what Crichton was doing and to enjoy it, but I’m thankful that I did. Check out Eaters of the Dead sometime soon and see what level it works on for you.

More if you’re interested

There is, of course, the film adaptation, The 13th Warrior, which I haven’t watched since high school and can’t really comment on except to say that it has one of the best cinematic attempts to tackle the language barrier I’ve seen. I intend to rewatch it soon.

You can read the real Ibn Fadlan’s account of his travels among the Rus in a recent translation for Penguin Classics, Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North. Jackson Crawford has an excellent short video on the “Viking funeral” witnessed by Ibn Fadlan, described in his writings, and dramatized in both Eaters of the Dead and its film adaptation, The 13th Warrior. You can watch that here.

I reread Eaters of the Dead for the first time since high school last year. As I mentioned above, I just revisited it again in the form of Simon Vance’s excellent audiobook performance. Vance narrates Ibn Fadlan with a slight accent, which actually sounds more Indian than Arab but that helps differentiate Ibn Fadlan’s narration from the footnotes. I didn’t know how well this work work going into it, but I greatly enjoyed it.

Likelihood: an addendum

Yesterday I started reading David Horspool’s entry in the Penguin Monarchs series, Cromwell: The Protector. So far it’s excellent. Considering my recent meditation here about “likelihood” and imagination in historical interpretation and writing, I found this aside (emphasis mine below) particularly striking:

Cromwell’s early biographers, permanently on the lookout for signs of future greatness, seized on the story of a childhood encounter between the young Oliver and the future Charles I, James’s son, on one of these royal visits to Hinchingbrooke. Naturally, the toddler-prince and his slightly older nemesis are meant to have fought at this play-date pregnant with historical significance, and Oliver is meant to have won. If the tale is too good to be true (which is no argument against its being true), then it is still a reminder that, as a guest in his uncle’s house, the young Oliver is likely to have been in the presence of royalty. Despite the gulf in upbringing and expectation that separated Prince Charles and Oliver Cromwell, they did not occupy entirely different worlds.

This is an eminently sensible approach.

I don’t know if it’s the postmodern or literary turn of historical interpretation, deconstructionism, or the generalized hermeneutic of suspicion pervading everything today, but the common assumption about textual evidence seems to be that if a source draws a didactic lesson from an incident, or if an incident conforms to a literary pattern, or has parallels to a commonly known story from the time the source was written down, the incident can and must be treated as invented.

I think that approach is wrong, not only for the reasons of enjoyability and interest—or pure oddity and surprise—that I’ve already written about, but for implicit human reasons: this is not how we experience our own lives. We constantly tell others about odd or surprising things that have happened to us, and we very often enlist shared stories for comparison’s sake. (There was a time in my life when everything that happened to a friend and I was fitted into an incident from “The Office.”) And of course we revisit our memories—finding foreshadowing after the fact in light of later events or drawing lessons from the things that have happened since—all the time. Identifying every instance of these natural human traits as fiction or lies not only betrays and demeans our ancestors, it leaves us with very little to work with.

But then again, based on the way history is used and abused these days, that’s probably the point.

Sticks and stones... so to speak

Speaking of odd and colorful stories that you wouldn’t be able to make up—or that might strike you as unlikely—here’s an, er, oddball anecdote from the memoirs of Heinz Linge, With Hitler to the End, which I read earlier this week.

Heinz Linge was Adolf Hitler’s valet or body servant for ten years. He interacted with Hitler daily, often being the first to see him in the morning, and accompanied him everywhere (in an introduction, historian Roger Moorhouse notes that millions of people probably recognize Linge’s face without even knowing it, so often is he standing just behind Hitler in photographs). He was also the first man into Hitler’s chambers in the Führerbunker following Hitler’s suicide, and the man who personally lit the fire to cremate Adolf and Eva Hitler’s bodies.

The point is that Linge was really, really close to Hitler, in the way of personal servants. When he was captured by the Russians during the attempted breakout from Berlin, his proximity to Hitler made him a person of intense interest. Which leads to this unexpected item:

In Russian captivity under interrogation I was often asked if I had seen Hitler’s genitals, and if so had they been normal. I had no idea why the Russians wanted to know this, but I told them what I knew. Naturally I had not seen Hitler fully naked even once. When the Russians interrogators [sic] alleged that Hitler ‘had only had one ball’ I had to laugh, and for doing so they gave me a whipping.

Anyone who was once a fourth-grade boy with an interest in history and a healthy appreciation of potty jokes will recognize here a joke that, for Linge, has gone horribly wrong. Stalin and the Soviets really had no sense of humor.

Again—you couldn’t make this stuff up.

I conclude with a hilarious Armstrong and Miller sketch on this very topic that, like so much of their stuff, brings together formal perfection with lowbrow humor in a way that hits my comedy sweetspot.

Make history interesting again

St Dunstan tweaks the devil’s nose with a pair of blacksmith’s tongs

Here’s something I’ve been chewing on for a while—a seemingly minor irritation that has a lot of real significance.

My point will require some context. The following comes from a book I recently read that has otherwise excellent standards of research, interpretation, and writing. I don’t want my thoughts to be a knock on the author, whose books I’ve both enjoyed and learned from, so I omit the title and the author’s name here. The passage below is the author’s paraphrase of a story in the medieval Vita S. Dunstani or Life of St Dunstan, a saint’s life ascribed to the otherwise nameless scribe “B.” The story concerns the relationship between Dunstan, a Benedictine monk, abbot, and royal adviser and Edmund, the newly ascended teenaged King of the English:

When [King] Æthelstan died in October 939, the crown passed to . . . Edmund, who was eighteen years old. The dowager queen, who was probably around forty, returned triumphantly to court, where she appears to have played a dominant role. It seems fairly certain that she was behind the decision to summon Dunstan to her side, intending that he should become one of her son’s principal advisers.

Edmund, alas, did not share his mother’s high estimation of his new monastic counsellor, and nor did his aristocratic companions. Some of the king’s thegns, says the Life of St Dunstan, admired the saint for his way of life, but many of them soon came to detest him, and eventually Edmund himself lost his temper. One day, when the royal household was at Cheddar, about twelve miles north of Glastonbury, the teenage king exploded in rage, and ordered Dunstan into exile. Distressed at this development, the holy man sought the protection of some foreign visitors who happened to be at court, and made ready to leave the kingdom.

Happily, God soon intervened to redress the situation. Cheddar, which lies on the edge of the Mendip Hills, was a royal hunting lodge, and, a day or so after banishing Dunstan, Edmund and his men rode out to amuse themselves in the surrounding forests. When they came across a group of stags they chased them in different directions, the king charging off in pursuit of one particular animal, accompanied only by his braying pack of hounds. Caught up in the thrill of the chase, he was oblivious to a hidden hazard, described in the Life of St Dunstan as a cleft in the hill that ‘drops to an astonishing depth’. This must have been the famous Cheddar Gorge, where the ground does indeed fall away vertically for over 400 feet. The frightened stag ran headlong into his ravine, plummeting to its death, as did the excited dogs running close behind it. Edmund, suddenly realizing the danger, tried to restrain his horse, but it stubbornly refused to slow. In what seemed to be his last few seconds, the king recalled his treatment of Dunstan, and vowed to make amends if his life was spared. ‘At these words,’ says the saint’s biographer, ‘the horse stopped on the very brink of the precipice, when its front feet were just about to plunge into the depths of the abyss’.

Having recapped and glossed B’s short version of the story from the Vita (you can read B’s entire account of the events above here), our author offers some commentary:

It is a good story, not least because it gives us an early glimpse of an English king engaged in a favorite royal pastime. Naturally, we do not have to believe that it is true in every respect, or that it reveals ‘some secret plan of God’s’ as Dunstan’s biographer insists was the case.

Fair enough, but does it really need to be said that we don’t have to accept every particular detail of a source’s story? There’s also a faintly dismissive, condescending tone here that rubs the wrong way. Some English historians never really get away from the baleful influence of Gibbon.

But here’s where we get to the specific subject of this post. Emphasis mine in the passage below:

A more likely explanation for Edmund’s change of heart would be an intervention on the part of his mother, or by another of Dunstan’s supporters at court: it is shortly after this episode that we learn the saint had an older brother, Wulfric, who witnesses royal charters as a king’s thegn. The essential point is that, whatever influences were brought to bear on him, divine or otherwise, the young king recalled Dunstan and proposed a new way of resolving their differences.

My concern is the “more likely” and what follows. Two things I’ve been mulling since first reading this (again, otherwise excellent) book during the summer:

First, to invert the perspective in that paragraph, what precisely is unlikely about this story? Teenaged boys, especially those with a degree of privilege and power and not a lot of experience using the two responsibly, are not known for their piety or patience, and they are known for irresponsibility, disrespect toward spiritual authorities, reckless behavior, inattention to danger, wild emotional highs and lows, and sudden and highly public religious experiences. In other words, for sudden changes of heart.* What happened to Edmund during his hunt makes plenty of sense—why bother searching for a “more likely” explanation?

Second, why bother searching for a “more likely” explanation that is so… boring? As I hope is clear, this backroom wheeling-and-dealing explanation is no more likely than the one B gives us, so what we’re looking at is not a matter of likelihood but of preference.

A certain kind of historian develops a kneejerk skepticism toward anything colorful—that is, anything human and interesting—they come across in their sources, especially if that color plays a role in causal explanations for events. That backroom string-pulling and calling in favors sounds “more likely” to the author than the fearful repentance of a teenaged boy in danger says more about the author and his or her ability to imagine other minds than it does about the likelihood of B’s story.**

Likelihood is in the eye of the beholder.*** So work hard to broaden your subjective sense of what is likely the same way a novelist works to develop his ear for dialogue. Otherwise, it would be wise not to argue over a story’s likelihood and reflexively second guess sources unless:

1. contradictory evidence demands it, and/or

2. one exercises one’s imagination outside the faculty lounge a little more often.

Footnotes:

*I had a friend in high school who destroyed his collection of rap CDs as penance after losing a big basketball game.

**See also: People who prefer the “realism” of Game of Thrones, which is really just a bland, incessant, enervating cynicism, to The Lord of the Rings.

***I wrote about likelihood as a matter of people’s subjective judgments of “realism” earlier this year.

Norm Macdonald on subversion, suffering, and art

Comedian Norm Macdonald died of cancer earlier this week aged 61. Yesterday I came across this long, wide-ranging, and surprisingly poignant interview with him by a writer at Vulture in 2018. The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a couple insightful moments on matters I care a lot about.

Art and subversion

From a discussion of Bob Dylan, who began to “say things” with his music rather than simply sing love songs, Macdonald and the interviewer move into a discussion of satire, parody, and political messaging in comedy:

Macdonald: Comedy has a specific thing about it. I don’t really like satire. I think it’s very minor; I think parody is very major comedy. Like, Nabokov to me is the highest form of parody. But that stupid Jonathan Swift thing that everybody talks about—I read that. It sucked.

Vulture: Gulliver’s Travels?

Macdonald: Yeah, it’s horrible. So I don’t like satire that much, and also these guys [contemporary talk-show hosts] are nightclub comics. They’re not Bob Dylan. They’re just guys, and they get talk shows and suddenly they’re telling me how I shouldn’t be sad because of the Manchester bombing and I can escape the horrors of life because they’re going to interview someone from Two Broke Girls or whatever the fuck they do. When I was a kid, if I’d heard Red Skelton talking about the government I would’ve thought, This is fucking weird. To me, it hurts the comedy any time anything real creeps into it. I know people have different thoughts. I keep hearing how great Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks and Mort Sahl are. People have their own taste, but to me, all three of those people are just shit. They’re not comedians in my mind.

There’s a digression about a particular stand-up comic—including Macdonald, true to form, making a phone call in the middle of the interview—before they return to the idea of artists trying to get a message out:

Vulture: I guess my larger question is if you think this shift in the kind of attention paid to comedy, and the work that’s held up as a result, is a bad turn for comedy as a whole or if you just think this is not for me?

Macdonald: It’s hard for me to say . . . but anybody that tells me that stand-up is no good—I take that personally because I’m a stand-up. But I understand these people are trying to be heard and, you know, I was guilty of having that stupid idea that Drew Michael already did. I probably wouldn’t have done it anyway.

Vulture: Why not?

“Because stand-up is a form and to subvert something, you have to do it perfectly first.”

— Norm Macdonald

Macdonald: Because stand-up is a form and to subvert something, you have to do it perfectly first. I remember somebody showed me a talk show with “subversion” in it—the guy chainsawed his desk. It was so stupid. Why did you build a desk in the first place if you were only going to chainsaw it? Don’t have a fucking desk! You just want little drops of subversion. Letterman in the ‘80s would be 90 percent a great talk show and then 10 percent subversion. If you get to 30 percent subversion, you’re in Andy Kaufman land. If you get to 70 percent, you’re a guy on the streets screaming at people. What are you trying to subvert anyway? Entertaining people? It’s absurd.

Vulture: And you see the kind of subversion we’re talking about as a form of intellectual grandstanding?

Macdonald: Certainly. And for stand-up, a lot of it is bragging.

Too much art today tries to subvert its own form without first mastering it, and thereby earning the right to poke at the form. You could say such an artist is sawing off the branch he’s sitting on, but that cliché assumes there’s already a tree there. These artists are sawing off limbs that were never growing from trees. Per Macdonald, a great deal of this trend is down to political messaging and intellectual pretension.

(The classic example of subversion done right is Picasso, who could actually paint but made conscious artistic decisions to depart from more realistic representational traditions. Also: Monty Python, who as a group knew the Arthurian legend backwards and forwards when they set out to spoof it.)

Art and self-revelation

I mentioned that the interview is poignant, because Macdonald mentions cancer as the kind of suffering that self-consciously self-revelatory, soul-baring comedians and performers think makes them authentic. “They seem to think they’re singular in their story when their story is the most common story that could possibly be, which is suffering and pain.” Simply feeling pain and talking about it is not art, Macdonald suggests. Art requires more.

Questioned on this by the interviewer, who notes Macdonald’s admiration for Canadian writer Alice Munro, Macdonald replies: “But Alice Munro doesn’t wallow in self-pity.” An important difference. “Munro finds beauty in what she writes, and that’s what every artist does because life sucks, you know?”

And then the other passage of Macdonald’s comments that I really appreciated:

“I guess there came a time . . . when revealing everything started to be considered art. I’d always learned that concealing everything was art.”

— Norm Macdonald

I guess there came a time, and I missed it, when revealing everything started to be considered art. I’d always learned that concealing everything was art. And I still believe that, because comedy is a vulgar art; it’s an art that’s just beginning to take form because it’s so young. But I can look at other art forms and see how postmodernism has destroyed them, and now threatens to destroy stand-up. It’s the height of narcissism to write meta-comedy, because people aren’t interested in comedy. They’re interested in going home after shoveling shit all day and then seeing some fool perform. That’s not to say that comedy can’t make a greater point, because it can. But it can’t make a greater point by screeching to a stop in the middle of the comedy show, making a point, and then going back to the jokes. You’ve got to craft the point into the joke. I always bristle when people say, “The comedian is the modern-day philosopher.” There are modern-day philosophers.

And, again, Macdonald is making these comments while suffering from cancer.

That’s a real authenticity that places Macdonald in the company of Chadwick Boseman, whose untimely death from colon cancer last year came as a shock. For Macdonald and Boseman, their personal suffering—much less their political views—wasn’t the stuff of art, and they wanted what they presented to their public to be the best they could make it. An admirable and selfless devotion to craft.

Deathbed confessions

I’ll conclude with the excerpt—little more than a quip—that brought the interview to my attention yesterday when Alan Jacobs shared it on his blog:

Vulture: I can imagine being on my deathbed and thinking, Why did I waste so many meals on yogurt?

Macdonald: Absolutely. You know, I think about my deathbed a lot.

Vulture: What do you think about it?

Macdonald: I think I should never have purchased a deathbed in the first place.

Norm Macdonald, RIP.

Summer reading 2021

Paramilitary infantry of the Freikorps gather around an armored car in Berlin, 1919

This was a great summer for reading. I got through 37 books before my more or less arbitrary cutoff date of Labor Day, including a lot of very good history, and almost all of the 37 were worthwhile. Here are my favorites, sorted broadly into non-fiction (all of which are history this time around), fiction, and some old favorites I revisited.

Favorite non-fiction

My ten favorite books of history from this summer, presented in no particular order:

The Bomber Mafia, by Malcolm Gladwell—An interesting short look at the tension between two different philosophies of technology, warfare, and bombing during World War II—and the horrible consequences of the debate—told in the distinctive Gladwell style. A good, brisk introduction to these topics for newcomers. I read it in two days and reviewed it in much more detail here.

Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England, by Michael Livingston—In the Venn diagram of famous battles and consequential battles, Brununburh falls in the consequential circle but far, far outside the overlap. Fought in 937 between the army of King Æthelstan of England and a coalition army of Vikings from Dublin, Scots, and the Britons of Strathclyde, Brunanburh was a resounding Anglo-Saxon victory and helped preserve Athelstan’s united kingdom, a fact celebrated in a short alliterative poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and later remembered in chronicle and saga. (The battle plays a large role in the story of Egill Skallagrímsson, for instance.) But despite this, and because of the trickiness of interpreting those sources, we don’t know nearly as much about the battle as we’d like, with even the location being in dispute for a long time. In Never Greater Slaughter, Livingston, a professor of history at the Citadel, makes a compelling case not only for a specific location for where the battle took place, but for a lot of other disputed or uncertain aspects of the battle. His judicious use of an enormous variety of evidence, his care not to push too hard on tenuous or speculative evidence, his thorough investigation of the ground of the likeliest candidate for the battlefield, and his clear and vigorous writing make this not only an excellent narrative of an important battle, but a good case study in how to do this kind of difficult history.

Battleground Prussia: The Assault on Germany’s Eastern Frontier, 1944-45, by Prit Buttar—Research for a future project. A long and well-researched narrative history of the battles for East Prussia and Pomerania, German territories brutally conquered by the Soviets, at the end of World War II. This is one of the handful of times and places in history, in my opinion, where people experienced literal hell on earth. A grim and brutal story but one Buttar presents well here, with many telling quotations from the memoirs of participants and survivors on both sides. If I have any criticism, it is of the inadequacy of the book’s maps—a minor quibble but a constant bother in trying to place what you’re reading about geographically. Otherwise an excellent book.

Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy, by Earl J Hess—A finicky, difficult, brusque, and gloomy man who could dish out harsh criticism even of his benefactors, Braxton Bragg made enemies in the pre-Civil War US Army and continued his parade of unpopularity right through the war. His difficulties commanding subordinates and coordinating campaigns did not help his reputation either, and post-war writers of the so-called “Lost Cause” school found in him an easy scapegoat for the failure of Confederate armies in the Western Theatre. I’ve always been curious about Bragg, as I’ve always had my curiosity piqued by what are obviously whipping boys, and so I’ve looked forward to Earl Hess’s reassessment of Bragg for some time. It didn’t disappoint. While not airbrushing any of Bragg’s manifest failures and flaws, Hess demonstrates that Bragg was also the subject of unfair, politically motivated criticism and backbiting and was a capable organizer and planner. His untimely death after the war also contributed, as only his widow remained to defend him against an continuously mounting tide of criticism and blame. A very good analysis of a controversial figure.

The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, 400-1066, by Marc Morris—An excellent narrative of my favorite period of English history. Morris ably describes the years from the Roman abandonment of Britain to the Norman Conquest by focusing on several key figures—kings, abbesses, churchmen, and others—as windows into the cultural, political, religious, and military changes wrought in those roughly seven centuries. Like Livingston’s more narrowly focused study above, Morris has authoritative command of the sources and makes judicious, careful use of them. It’s also a pleasure to read—not something you can always count on in a book on this topic. Highly recommended.

A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940, by William R Trotter—An excellent narrative history of the Winter War, the massive Soviet invasion of Finland that was thwarted by the Finns over the course of several months of desperate and costly fighting. Trotter capably describes both the big-picture strategic and diplomatic side of the war as well as the gritty, grunt’s-eye level, which saw some of the most brutal and wasteful combat in the Second World War. A highly readable testimony to Soviet duplicity and Finnish guts. For a good two-book combination, read this alongside Jonathan Clements’s Mannerheim, which I read back in the spring.

The Hitler of History, by John Lukacs—A deep dive into the historiography of Hitler as it stood in the late 1990s, I recognize this book is not for everyone, but Lukacs’s encyclopedic grasp of the literature surrounding his subject, his historical and moral judgment, and the oceans of footnotes and asides made this an endlessly intriguing and surprising read for me. I based two blog posts on it—one on the popular conception of Hitler as insane and another on what Hitler has in common with the spirit of Antichrist.

Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11, by Mitchell Zuckoff—An amazing feat of research and organization, this is a comprehensive look at the events of September 11th through the experiences of several hundred individuals ranging from businessmen at the World Trade Center and Army staffers at the Pentagon to pilots, air traffic controllers, firefighters, paramedics, cops, priests, and ordinary people who either ran toward the danger to help, barely survived, or did not make it out of the day alive. A hard book to read at times, but powerfully moving. I highly recommend it.

Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings, by Tom Shippey—A wide-ranging work on the Vikings—not early medieval Scandinavians generally, the majority of whom were farmers, but the seafaring warrior class specifically. Shippey, one of the great Tolkien scholars, displays encyclopedic and authoritative command of Old Norse literature and other sources to examine the Vikings on their own terms, from the inside. I read this immediately after another study of the Vikings, one that claimed to do what Shippey does here but that had constant recourse to the language of the modern sociology department and woke identity politics—an annoying trait that will also instantly date it. So reading Shippey, who treats his written sources seriously and examines them on their own terms, was a breath of fresh air. This is an engaging presentation of how the Vikings viewed the world and themselves.

America’s War for the Greater Middle East, by Andrew Bacevich—A sweeping and comprehensive look at forty years of American warfare, from Jimmy Carter’s botched Iranian hostage rescue through Lebanon, Somalia, the Balkans, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq (twice) to the very eve of the 2016 election. (A source of bitter historical irony: as Bacevich winds down the book he mentions the frontrunners for the Republican nomination as of late 2015, a who’s who of the critics of Obama’s waning days but with not a New York real estate mogul to be seen.) I read this immediately after Zuckoff’s book above and as our final withdrawal from Afghanistan was turning into an embarrassing catastrophe, and Bacevich’s narrative of multi-generation mishandling of resources, misapplication of force, and constant, total misunderstanding of the enemy, the region, and the purpose of these conflicts was damning. Of course Afghanistan would end the way it did—it was ever thus. A grim but important read, and one I’d be very interested to see updated with all that has happened in the last five years.

Honorable mentions:

• After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, by Samuel Goldman—An excellent Conservative critique of three different varieties of American nationalism.

• Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, by Jeffrey Bilbro—Right up my alley. An incisive and constructive critique of the dominant and largely negative role news media play in our lives.

• Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, by Tom Wolfe—Elite promotion of radical political causes and the patterns of failure built into bureaucracies notionally designed to help the poor, acidly observed. Still relevant. Goodreads review here.

• Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, by John Lukacs—Meditations on the inherent failings of democracy, populism, and nationalism by a learned and witty reactionary. Worth reading in our present state of confusion about… everything.

• The Decadent Society: America Before and After the Pandemic, by Ross Douthat—An incisive and balanced look at our tired, cynical, and above all repetitious culture. I just wish Douthat had the killer instinct of someone like Helen Andrews to make this accurate critique really sting. Been thinking about this one a lot ever since I read it.

Favorite fiction

Like the works of history above, these are presented in no particular order, though I have to say the first one is almost certainly the best fiction I read this summer.

In the Valley, by Ron Rash—A very good collection of short stories, plus a novella that continues a few stories from Rash’s novel Serena. Among my favorites were “Neighbors,” a Civil War story pitting a widow against a North Carolina Home Guard commander; “Sad Man in the Sky,” a profoundly moving story about a unusual helicopter tour of the mountains; “L’homme Blesse,” a story about a family mystery involving an inexplicable reproduction of the Pech Merle cave paintings in a mountain cabin; “The Baptism,” a wonderfully ironic historical piece about a violent ne’er-do-well and the preacher who unwillingly agrees to baptize him; “The Belt,” in which an elderly Civil War veteran struggles to save his infant grandson from a flash flood; and “In the Valley,” the novella featuring many of the characters from Serena. The novella steadily builds in tension and in gothic grandeur until a final, fatal confrontation. I read the novella in one go, late at night—the best possible circumstances for this kind of story. I mean to revisit Serena soon.

Beowulf, Dragonslayer, by Rosemary Sutcliff—A very good novelistic adaptation of Beowulf for young readers which, like Sutcliff’s version of the Iliad I reviewed during the spring, does not soft-pedal its subject or condescend to its readers. Goodreads review here.

Peace, by Richard Bausch—A handful of American GIs on patrol in Italy, probing for the retreating Germans, during a harsh winter in completely unknown territory. A well-realized setting, steadily mounting tension, strongly drawn characters who, like real people, are at first easy to place and then surprise you, and a compelling series of moral questions make this very short novel worth reading.

The Dig, by John Preston—The basis of the Netflix film, which I still haven’t seen, The Dig is a fictionalization of the real-life archaeological dig at Sutton Hoo in Essex, a dig that uncovered one of the most important finds of the early Anglo-Saxon period. The novel is narrated in long chapters by a handful of important characters, and is told with apparent simplicity but great subtlety. It was only after I read it and explained some of what it was about to Sarah that I realized how carefully constructed and meaningful it was. I aim to reread it sometime in the future—it will definitely reward it.

The Outlaws, by Ernst von Salomon—Ernst von Salomon was a 16-year old cadet in a Prussian military academy when World War I ended and he was almost immediately swept up in the post-war violence—pummeled by Reds on the day he learned of the armistice, joining the paramilitary Freikorps units and taking part in the suppression of the communist Spartacist uprising in Berlin, war against sundry enemies in the Baltic states, war against Polish nationalist forces in Silesia, and finally an abortive Putsch. From there he joined an organization called the OC that operated like the mafia and plotted the assassinations of members of the Weimar government whom the OC’s members viewed as traitors. Because of his minor role in the successful assassination of Walther Rathenau, von Salomon found himself tried, convicted, and imprisoned at 20. War, terrorism, prison—these are the three acts of his drama. By the time a despairing von Salomon was released, his world seemed gone forever, with figures like Hitler—whom von Salomon, a nationalist but not a Nazi, rejected—in the ascendant. Though von Salomon does not stop for the usual novelistic conventions like characterization and his more obscure references may fly over a modern reader’s head, the cumulative effect of this sort-of memoir, sort-of novel is staggering. One feels the weight of the disaster that has swallowed Germany, as well as the reasons someone like von Salomon—young, patriotic, angry and aimless, devoted to honor rather than to the imported liberal politics reshaping his country—would strike back against it. A gripping, chilling, and challenging book.

The Encircling Sea, by Adrian Goldsworthy—The second in Goldsworthy’s first trilogy (he’s just released the first book in another) about Flavius Ferox, a Briton in the Roman army. The plot is a bit more diffuse and harder to follow, and the writing isn’t quite as good as in Vindolanda, the first book, which I read last year, but it’s a gripping adventure nonetheless and I greatly enjoy Goldsworthy’s characters, not to mention the realistic look at a workaday polyglot army on a farflung and dangerous frontier.

A Most Dangerous Innocence, by Fiorella De Maria—A British boarding school drama about a young half-Jewish Catholic girl attending a school on the southern coast of England in the early days of World War II. She darkly suspects the headmistress of being a German spy; the woman is certainly an anti-Semite. The schoolyear starts badly and only gets worse—and more mysterious. Fast-paced and well-written, I really enjoyed this and intend to read some of De Maria’s crime mysteries in the future.

Honorable mentions

• The Glass Bees, by Ernst Jünger, trans. by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer—An idiosyncratic work of science fiction in which a former soldier seeks out a job with a world-renowned manufacturer of robotics, including microscopic robots we would now call nanotechnology. An odd but eerily prescient novel. One observation based on a passage from this book on my blog here.

• Touch, by Elmore Leonard—An intriguing departure for Leonard, a novel following a young man possessed of seemingly miraculous powers. I felt like the story lost its way somewhat in the final act, but until then it is a touching and often startling meditation on what miracles might look like in the modern world.

• Life for Sale, by Yukio Mishima, trans. Stephen Dodd—Another idiosyncratic but incisive work, a darkly humorous story of a young Japanese man who, utterly stricken with ennui, offers himself for sale in a classified ad and goes on a series of sometimes funny, sometimes grim adventures as a result. Commodification, atomization, the false hopes of a liberal society—it’s all satirized here with hallucinogenic immediacy.

Rereads

Old favorites freshly revisited. Audiobook listens marked with an asterisk.

• The Spy Who Loved Me, by Ian Fleming*—The worst of the original Bond series, albeit not for lack of effort. Short Goodreads thoughts here.

• On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, by Ian Fleming*—Perhaps the last great book in the Fleming Bond canon, but certainly the most moving. Short Goodreads thoughts here.

• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh—Reread aloud to my wife a bit at a time before bed. Still hilarious. Short Goodreads review here.

• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by CS Lewis—Read for a second time to the kids for a bedtime story. One of the greats, and adored by both parents and children—something you shouldn’t take for granted.

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—Reread for the umpteenth time ahead of the release of The Green Knight, which apparently impressed a lot of people who haven’t read the poem, but not me so much.

• You Only Live Twice, by Ian Fleming*—The penultimate Bond adventure, and the last Fleming lived to see through the revision and publication process. Detailed Goodreads review here.

• The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway—Last read my freshman year of college, a time when I was utterly unimpressed with Hemingway. I now see that this is a work whose riches and meaning are utterly lost on young readers.

• The Man with the Golden Gun, by Ian Fleming*—The sad end to the Bond novels, a clearly unfinished novel that nevertheless has moments of the old Fleming pizzazz. Detailed Goodreads review here.

• Octopussy and The Living Daylights, by Ian Fleming*—A very good collection of Fleming’s Bond short stories. Goodreads review here.

• Grendel, by John Gardner*—At least my third trip through. An old favorite. Short thoughts on Goodreads here.

Coming up this fall

Since my summer cutoff date I’ve already read the early medieval Welsh elegy Y Gododdin and I’m a good way into a couple of other books, both fiction and non. I’ve got more big histories ahead and I’m reading whatever fiction strikes my fancy at a given moment, though I do have one massive modern classic that’s been waiting in the wings the whole year. I hope to get to that before the year is out, and you’ll certainly hear about it here.

Hope y’all can find something good to read from among these. I’d recommend any of them. Enjoy, and thanks as always for reading!

Chesterton on cave art

This week Michial and Josh of the Before They Were Live podcast, a monthly show working its way through the Disney Classics canon, dropped their latest episode. In it they discuss Brother Bear, which I have never seen, but a part of their discussion that I greatly enjoyed was a rabbit trail on cave paintings.

Any mention of cave paintings is going to bring Chesterton’s 1925 book The Everlasting Man to my mind, and just after I thought of this Michial raised exactly the passage I was thinking of. (I actually did a fist-pump in my car this morning.) I quote at length—from Part I, Chapter 1, “The Man in the Cave”—to give Chesterton space to make his point, which is a critique of the nasty modern assumptions a lot of people bring to the life of the “cave man”:

A priest and a boy entered sometime ago a hollow in the hills and passed into a sort of subterranean tunnel that led into a labyrinth of such sealed and secret corridors of rock. They crawled through cracks that seemed almost impassable, they crept through tunnels that might have been made for moles, they dropped into holes as hopeless as wells, they seemed to be burying themselves alive seven times over beyond the hope of resurrection. . . . This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of ages, the movement and the gesture of a man's hand. They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural.

In discussing the stylization and artistic judgment evident in cave paintings, recall that Chesterton was himself a trained artist, and many of his books, notably The Man Who Was Thursday, which begins and ends in a garden at sunset, have a painterly quality in their description. He recognized artistic sensibility when he saw it.

Chesterton continues from the paintings’ artistic merit to the character of the artist:

Now it is needless to note, except in passing, that there is nothing whatever in the atmosphere of that cave to suggest the bleak and pessimistic atmosphere of that journalistic cave of the winds, that blows and bellows about us with countless echoes concerning the cave-man. So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane. It is certainly not the ideal of an inhuman character, like the abstraction invoked in popular science. When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, ‘Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick’s brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,’ the novelist’s readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall. When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, ‘The submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,’ he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things. In other words the cave-man as commonly presented to us is simply a myth or rather a muddle; for a myth has at least an imaginative outline of truth. The whole of the current way of talking is simply a confusion and a misunderstanding, founded on no sort of scientific evidence and valued only as an excuse for a very modern mood of anarchy. If any gentleman wants to knock a woman about, he can surely be a cad without taking away the character of the cave-man, about whom we know next to nothing except what we can gather from a few harmless and pleasing pictures on a wall.

But this is not the point about the pictures or the particular moral here to be drawn from them.

Here is where Michial begins quoting Chesterton on this month’s Before They Were Live:

That moral is something much larger and simpler, so large and simple that when it is first stated it will sound childish. And indeed it is in the highest sense childish; and that is why I have in this apologue in some sense seen it through the eyes of a child. It is the biggest of all the facts really facing the boy in the cavern; and is perhaps too big to be seen. If the boy was one of the flock of the priest, it may be presumed that he had been trained in a certain quality of common sense; that common sense that often comes to us in the form of tradition. In that case he would simply recognise the primitive man's work as the work of a man, interesting but in no way incredible in being primitive. He would see what was there to see; and he would not be tempted into seeing what was not there, by any evolutionary excitement or fashionable speculation. If he had heard of such things he would admit, of course, that the speculations might be true and were not incompatible with the facts that were true. The artist may have had another side to his character besides that which he has alone left on record in his works of art. The primitive man may have taken a pleasure in beating women as well as in drawing animals; all we can say is that the drawings record the one but not the other. It may be true that when the cave-man's finished jumping on his mother, or his wife as the case may be, he loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, and also to watch the deer as they come down to drink at the brook. These things are not impossible, but they are irrelevant. The common sense of the child could confine itself to learning from the facts what the facts have to teach; and the pictures in the cave are very nearly all the facts there are. So far as that evidence goes, the child would be justified in assuming that a man had represented animals with rock and red ochre for the same reason as he himself was in the habit of trying to represent animals with charcoal and red chalk. The man had drawn a stag just as the child had drawn a horse; because it was fun. The man had drawn a stag with his head turned as the child had drawn a pig with his eyes shut; because it was difficult. The child and the man, being both human, would be united by the brotherhood of men; and the brotherhood of men is even nobler when it bridges the abyss of ages than when it bridges only the chasm of class.

And Chesterton concludes this paragraph with:

But anyhow he would see no evidence of the cave man of crude evolutionism; because there is none to be seen. If somebody told him that the pictures had all been drawn by St. Francis of Assisi out of pure and saintly love of animals, there would be nothing in the cave to contradict it.

Following this is my own favorite part of this passage, which I mention on the first day of every Western Civ course I teach when I show pictures of the cave paintings at Lascaux, Altamira, and Chauvet:

Indeed I once knew a lady who half-humorously suggested that the cave was a creche, in which the babies were put to be specially safe, and that coloured animals were drawn on the walls to amuse them; very much as diagrams of elephants and giraffes adorn a modern infant school.

A wonderfully human suggestion, without an ounce of condescension in it. Chesterton goes on to complete one strand of his critique of uncharitable modern assumptions about “cave men”:

And though this was but a jest, it does draw attention to some of the other assumptions that we make only too readily. The pictures do not prove even that the cave-men lived in caves, any more than the discovery of a wine-cellar in Balham (long after that suburb had been destroyed by human or divine wrath) would prove that the Victorian middle classes lived entirely underground. The cave might have had a special purpose like the cellar; it might have been a religious shrine or a refuge in war or the meeting place of a secret society or all sorts of things. But it is quite true that its artistic decoration has much more of the atmosphere of a nursery than of any of these nightmares of anarchical fury and fear. I have conceived a child as standing in the cave; and it is easy to conceive any child, modern or immeasurably remote, as making a living gesture as if to pat the painted beasts upon the wall. In that gesture there is a foreshadowing, as we shall see later, of another cavern and another child.

That other child is the subject of Part II, Chapter 1, “The God in the Cave.”

There’s a lot going on here that I won’t belabor. Chesterton’s goal throughout “The Man and the Cave” is to question and critique recent archaeological and anthropological speculations, especially those he saw as grounded in assumptions of cave man crudity and inferiority. (This was later called “chronological snobbery” by CS Lewis and Owen Barfield. I’ve blogged about that before here.) It’s a great passage, and one that has profoundly affected my own approach to studying the past.

The Everlasting Man was published too early for this to be a reference to Lascaux (discovered in 1940) or Chauvet (discovered in 1994), though his reference to a priest and a boy’s explorations is strikingly close to the story of Lascaux, probably the most famous group of cave paintings in the world and, indeed, discovered by some boys, who then brought in priest-archaeologist Fr Henri Breuil through their schoolmaster. Chesterton may be referring to Pech Merle, also in southern France, which has a similar story of discovery from 1922, and was therefore still recent news when he wrote The Everlasting Man in 1925. Pech Merle was opened to the public a year later. Chesterton’s descriptions of the paintings themselves as accomplished works of art are very broadly applicable, though, as are his summaries of scholarly uninterest in the actual human reasons the painters may have done their work. (Cf. the early controversy around the cave paintings in Altamira, Spain.)

I recently got the early reader Discovery in the Cave and read it with my kids. It’s a nice retelling of the story of the discovery of Lascaux, and gave me a chance to talk about some of what Chesterton brings up above. I highly recommend it if you want a kid-friendly introduction to cave art.

And check out Before They Were Live. I’ve enjoyed plenty of Disney cartoons in my time, but I’m by no means an aficionado. Michial and Josh bring an enthusiasm and charity to their discussion—both celebration and criticism—that makes their show a joy to listen to.

They and their hidden knowledge

Someone recently brought this to my attention: back in April, a socialist MP in the UK tweeted out this map, showing the division of territory in Africa among the powers attending the Berlin Conference of 1884:

Her gloss on the map: “This map has been hidden from you all your life. This is how they carved up Africa”

Punctuation aside, I have questions. First of all—and a useful question with which to begin any discussion of paranoia—who is “they”? I ask because, based on my reading of both professional and amateur conspiracists, I’ve been impressed with how much “they” have been able to accomplish over the centuries.

But also, note that the first sentence above is passive: “This map has been hidden.” Who is the subject doing the hiding? Is that “they”? Is it the same “they” in the next sentence? Or did one “they” carve up Africa knowing another “they” would hide the evidence?

But the kicker is the idea that the Berlin Conference—which lasted over three months and had fourteen countries in attendance, which brought about results that were manifest immediately and for decades afterward, which has been taught as one of the most important geopolitical events of the Victorian era ever since, and which has Britannica and Wikipedia articles and many nicely designed maps readily available right there in Google Images—was somehow “hidden.”

The best response I saw to this set of vague insinuations: “So hidden that it was in my 8th grade social sciences classroom.”

But of course, insinuation and outrage bait is the game now, because people are ignorant and the frisson of discovering secret gnosis is everything. It’s the ignorant, the people who didn’t pay attention in school, that this kind of thing—everything from Howard Zinn to the 1619 Project and its supposedly patriotic counterparts to that deconstruction of the “heroic Anglo myth” of the Alamo I mentioned recently, none of which brings in any new information but relies on the reader’s ignorance to effect shock—is designed to work on.

So, a pro tip: Just because you haven’t been paying attention doesn’t mean someone is hiding something from you.

This is a cultural problem—starved of the revealed and transcendent, we crave occult knowledge and this-worldly insights—but it is also a failure of our educational system. Per CS Lewis, in a quotation I can’t believe I haven’t used on this blog before: “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.”