Lewis on periodization

I spent a lot of time trying to come up with the most simpleminded and stereotypical timeline possible for this image, so please appreciate it as you scroll by

Over my Independence Day break I read The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis, an excellent short study by Jason Baxter of the literature that most shaped Lewis’s academic interests and worldview. I especially appreciated Baxter’s in-depth look at the influence of Boethius and Dante on Lewis, but what struck me most forcefully was a section quoting a lesser-known lecture of Lewis’s on how we divide and categorize past era—that is, periodization.

Periodization is one of my special interests and annoyances as an historian. I toy with and fuss over periodization the way motorheads used to sweat over their valves and plugs and carburetors. When I teach Western Civ I have to resist the urge to park on the topic every time we begin a new unit and move from the ancient to the medieval worlds, for example, or when we cross the especially blurry line into the modern.

Here’s how Lewis describes the problem in “De Descriptione Temporum,” his 1954 inaugural lecture as the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, a position created for him by Cambridge University:

From the formula “Medieval and Renaissance”, then, I inferred that the University was encouraging my own belief that the barrier between those two ages has been greatly exaggerated, if indeed it was not largely a figment of Humanist propaganda. At the very least, I was ready to welcome any increased flexibility in our conception of history. All lines of demarcation between what we call “periods” should be subject to constant revision. Would that we could dispense with them altogether! As a great Cambridge historian has said: “Unlike dates, periods are not facts. They are retrospective conceptions that we form about past events, useful to focus discussion, but very often leading historical thought astray.” The actual temporal process, as we meet it in our lives (and we meet it, in a strict sense, nowhere else) has no divisions, except perhaps those “blessed barriers between day and day”, our sleeps.

This comes quite close to an example I give my own students about periodization. Every time you have a birthday, I say, some tedious person will ask “Do you feel any older?” and the answer is almost always No. That’s because the changes brought by age creep up one day at a time, regardless of the actual yard-markers of birthdays and years. Ditto the changes from historical period to historical period.

Lewis continues:

Change is never complete, and change never ceases. Nothing is ever quite finished with; it may always begin over again. . . . And nothing is quite new; it was always somehow anticipated or prepared for. A seamless, formless continuity-in-mutability is the mode of our fife. But unhappily we cannot as historians dispense with periods. . . . We cannot hold together huge masses of particulars without putting into them some kind of structure. Still less can we arrange a term’s work or draw up a lecture list. Thus we are driven back upon periods. All divisions will falsify our material to some extent; the best one can hope is to choose those which will falsify it least.

“Continuity-in-mutability” is exactly right, and by pure coincidence exactly how I approach teaching the transition from ancient to medieval. And that last sentence is one of the watchwords of my studies and teaching.

Periods are historians’ conveniences. Treat them any more seriously or concretely than that, and you begin the falsification Lewis warns of here.

From here Lewis goes on to examine and challenge some of the points usually raised as indicative of the change between these periods, and even gets in a few good digs at the present along the way. (Re. the supposed loss of learning with the onset of the Middle Ages, “if one were looking for a man who could not read Virgil though his father could, he might be found more easily in the twentieth century than in the fifth.”) The whole thing is worth your while.

“De Descriptione Temporum” is collected in Selected Literary Essays, a posthumously published Cambridge UP volume edited by Walter Hooper. Despite being an important and insightful work, I think it’s lesser known (I read it years ago and had virtually forgotten it before reading Baxter’s book this month) because it hasn’t crept from its place in a university-published anthology into the more popular collections from religious publishers. You can read this lecture online here or in a .pdf here, though be aware that both of these online versions are riddled with typos and/or text recognition errors.

And definitely check out The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis if you’re interested in Lewis, medieval literature, or good books and great minds generally.

On the appeal of Southern grotesquery to outsiders

The film adaptation of Delia Owens’s novel Where the Crawdads Sing came out this weekend. I’ve been curious about the book since I heard it described as Southern gothic, but haven’t gotten around to reading it. My wife did, though, and mostly enjoyed it, so she was curious about the film and yet more curious when its wave of negative reviews washed in ahead of opening day. The opening line of Kyle Smith’s (paywalled) review in the Wall Street Journal especially piqued her interest, and so she shared it with me:

“Ten years ago, the Southern-Gothic film “Beasts of the Southern Wild” swept up four Academy Award nominations by pandering to the affinity of Northern intellectuals toward Romantic portrayals of poor folks living in a kind of fascinating harmony with cruel nature.”

Smith’s not so implicit critique here, about the favoritism awarded “Southern” stories that flatter the ineradicable preconceived notions of Yankee audiences, naturally brought to mind this favorite passage from Flannery O’Connor’s essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”:

“Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

Both of these lines deal with Southern stereotypes, with Smith connecting them to a kind of noble savage trope and O’Connor noting especially astutely their persistence and flexibility. Her own work is a case in point, often taken literally as a representation of the bigotry and violence of the South when O’Connor was making broader, explicitly theological points in as bold a fashion as she could. In her own words, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Perhaps the paradigmatic example is Deliverance. The movie is a searing piece of survival drama but James Dickey’s novel, a brilliant, intense, exhausting masterpiece, goes even deeper—into the psychological, the spiritual, the fundamental good and evil secreted in the ignorant deeps of even civilized man. There’s a lot going on there. But its grotesquery, its “large and startling figures,” has been received superficially as meme-worthy objects of prurience or titillation by an audience too satisfied with its assumptions about hillbillies to hear its message. Look at what those people are like, a lot of otherwise smart people have said in response. Paddle faster! I hear banjos.

I suppose in the end you can only write with St John’s injunction in mind: “He that hath an ear, let him hear.” Write for the ones who have ears to hear.

I can’t read much more of Smith’s review, but from the subtitle’s use of the word “charmless” and the headline “Unfevered Swamps” I think I can guess its overall tenor. I have no idea if it’s fair to the film or not. You can read O’Connor’s essay in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, which is a must-read for fiction writers and anyone interested in writing or the South. It is perhaps her most quotable work of non-fiction, and includes this other magnificent zinger:

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

God help us if we ever lose that.

On actual combat footage

US Marines on Tarawa, November 1943, and Nicolas Cage as a Marine on Saipan in Windtalkers (2002)

One of the movie reviews I’ve returned to again and again is Stephen Hunter’s review of the 2002 war film Windtalkers. This film, which purports to tell the story of US Marine Navajo code talkers during the Battle of Saipan, is a turkey. It fails on many levels. Hunter faults it primarily for its over-the-top, balletically choreographed, fireball and stunt-heavy action: “the movie’s stylizations . . . seem singularly wrong. . . . [I]t’s almost an opera, declamatory and dramatic, and the body language has more to do with dance than actuality. It’s highly theatricalized and to a certain extent martial-articized.”

In the middle of this criticism, Hunter pauses to deliver this aside, a passage that has stuck with me for twenty years now, contrasting the film with reality:

I am always amazed at actual combat footage: The soldiers appear so informal and undramatic. They never seem to be in any heroic poses; their minds, if you can infer from their body postures, are concerned with very small things, like “Let’s get over there” or “Let’s get down” or “Gosh, I wish I wasn’t here.” They are beyond rhetoric or exhortation. They look sad and weary, not charged with blood lust. They look like the homeless, and in a sense they are, for whoever would be at home on a battlefield?

I’ve had occasion to think about this many times since (it crosses my mind at least once with the release of any new war film regardless of conflict or period), but especially so with the regular release of combat footage from Ukraine. Witness this trench combat between a group of Russian raiders and Ukrainian defenders as captured by drone. Now watch Nicolas Cage destroy a bunker in Windtalkers. The latter seems insulting by comparison, not only to an audience’s intelligence but to the men for whom the film was marketed as a tribute.

The best war films capture some of what Hunter describes above through a combination of bluntness and understatement. I’m all for making sure the costumes, equipment, and jargon are correct (Hunter rightly credits Windtalkers with getting a few persnickety details right). But without capturing the attitude of real combat—weary, methodical, narrowly focused, “informal and undramatic,” and “beyond rhetoric or exhoration”—a war film will still wear its artificiality right where everyone can see it.

The combat footage still in the banner above comes from With the Marines at Tarawa, the combat documentary par excellence. Watch it at the National Archives YouTube channel here for a twenty-minute example of what Hunter’s talking about.

Likelihood and cynicism revisited

Æthelberht, King of Kent, listens to the preaching of St Augustine of Canterbury

I’m wrapping up a blessedly long and relaxed summer vacation, my college’s Independence Day break and an annual family get together having finally coincided this year. I’m thankful for some time away with family.

As has become my wont during the summer, I’ve been reading some books on Anglo-Saxon England and the Early Middle Ages more generally. Last year’s mostly excellent reading inspired this post on modern historians’ tendency to strip the weirdness and human interest out of history, a post that was part of a longer, multipart reflection on the roles of “likelihood” and cynicism in historical judgment. This year one of the books I read at the beach caused me to revisit those themes—which are never far from my mind, anyway.

As with last year’s post on likelihood and keeping history interesting, I’m quoting from a good book that I’ve certainly benefited from reading, and so I omit the title and author’s name. These are simply recurring niggles, signs of a broader pattern undergirding the otherwise excellent research and writing.

At the beginning of a chapter on the efforts of Oswald of Northumbria to convert his people to Christianity, the author quotes a longish passage from Bede (Ecclesiastical History III, 3) on Oswald’s request to the elders of the Irish church to provide a bishop for his kingdom. The man chosen for the task is Aidan, “a man of outstanding gentleness, devotion, and moderation…”

The author breaks in thus:

This is all very well. It sets up Bede’s account of Lindisfarne, of Colm Cille and the founding of Iona and Aidan’s ministry. But two chapters later Bede admits that Aidan was not, in fact, the first missionary of the Irish church to Northumbria; that the original mission had not gone according to plan.

He goes on to summarize Ecclesiastical History III, 5, in which Oswald, prior to Aidan’s arrival, had requested and received an Irish bishop who disliked the Anglo-Saxons and returned to Iona.

The word admits caught my attention here, especially since Bede does not claim that Aidan was “the first missionary of the Irish church to Northumbria” and therefore seems to me to have nothing to “admit.” He’s telling a story and backtracking to fill in context, not shamefacedly confessing a coverup. But this kind of narrative rouses the suspicions of a certain kind of contemporary scholar, and so we get a thorough examination of Bede’s arrangement of the material, especially Bede’s motives:

Bede, I think, told the story about the initial failure [i.e. of the bishop before Aidan] for two reasons. First, he took his duties as a historian seriously; he knew the story and felt he ought to tell it. Second, it redounded to Aidan’s great credit that he overcame the difficulties of the challenge, just as Augustine [of Canterbury] had forty years previously. It made that mission, and Aidan, all the more special. As to how these two accounts came into his possession, the questions to pose are these: in whose interest was it to cultivate a story about a failed initiative, and in what circumstances did that earlier mission try its hand?

The first reason given above should be where the paragraph stops. That reason—that Bede was a good historian and did the best he could, sincerely and seriously—also answers the two questions the author poses at the end, especially the tedious cui bono? speculation. As I’ve written before, imposing this hermeneutic of suspicion smacks of the faculty lounge, of a limited hothouse world obsessed with power, and of a failure to imagine other minds.

One more example, and the first serious one to catch my eye as I read. This comes earlier in the book, in a passage on Bede’s account of St Augustine of Canterbury’s mission to the heathen king of Kent:

Æthelberht, he says, was at last persuaded to convert although the suggestion that he was ‘attracted by the pure life of the saints’ does not really ring true.

To you, perhaps. Get out and talk to some religious converts, sometime.

Sick Heart River

Today is the last day of John Buchan June. All along, my plan has been to end the month by reading and reviewing Buchan’s final novel, the posthumously published Sick Heart River, which he completed only days before his unexpected death in the early weeks of 1940. In keeping with the best of his work that I’ve written about this month, this novel tells of a rousing adventure undertaken by a stalwart and upright hero in a beautiful and dangerous landscape, and in keeping with the end of a beloved project, it is a profoundly moving and melancholy story. Buchan’s final novel may just be his best.

Sick Heart River begins with Sir Edward Leithen, now a quarter century past his first adventure in The Power-House and fifteen years on from his poaching exploits in John Macnab, settling his affairs in London. He has learned he is dying. Lung damage incurred when he was gassed during the war—the last war, as Europe is edging closer and closer to another war as the story begins—has belatedly turned into tuberculosis, and his doctors have given him a year to live.

Leithen has taken stock of his life. He has a London flat and a country house, a personal library of 20,000 books, a thriving law practice, and a good reputation. But he has no wife, no children, no close living relations. He has friendly but strictly professional relationships with his colleagues at his legal practice. Even his handful of real friends—old allies like Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot and his confederates in the John Macnab escapade, Charles Palliser-Yeates, Sir Archie Roylance, and the Earl of Lamancha—he finds himself refusing to inform about his illness. He is alone, dying, in a world in which he has achieved every kind of success but that has become suddenly unrecognizable to him. How will he face death, and what is his death—after all these years and adventures and all this worldly success—to mean?

All Leithen knows is that he will not waste away in a nursing home. He wants to die “standing up.” That, in itself, will mean something. To him.

He refuses to take his club friends into his confidence, and so by chance he receives a visit from John S Blenkiron, the American intelligence operative and former comrade-in-arms of Hannay. Blenkiron notes that Leithen is not well but can’t draw him out, and so tells him about bad news of his own—his niece Felicity’s husband, Francis Galliard, an industrious, successful, and wealthy French Canadian transplant to the high society and banking worlds of New York City, has disappeared. Leithen, sensing his opportunity, asks to know more.

Thus equipped by Blenkiron with a mission that will give his final days purpose, allowing him to die “standing up” and perhaps even “making his soul,” Leithen travels to America. He interviews Galliard’s friends, associates, in-laws, and wife, and intuits a familiar malaise in Galliard, a dissatisfaction and despair that cannot be assuaged by worldly success. From New York he travels to Quebec, to the ancestral Galliard lands overlooking the St Lawrence River, and hires Johnny Frizel, the half-Scottish, half-Indian brother of the guide who was last seen leading Galliard northward, toward the Arctic.

Together, Leithen and Frizel travel thousands of miles by boat, plane, dog sled, and on foot in their quest to find Galliard. As they travel, it becomes clearer and clearer that Galliard and the elder Frizel aim to reach the remote, unmapped, nearly mythic valley of the Sick Heart River in the most rugged mountains of the Northwest Territories. In addition to adventure, exploration, and survival, mystery pervades this first half of the novel. Why has Galliard fled his life, and what is driving him—or, as seems more likely the more Leithen follows them, his guide—so relentlessly toward the Sick Heart River? To reach this valley might kill Galliard. Following Galliard, trying to catch up to and convince him to return to civilization and his wife and friends, is killing Leithen.

I read Sick Heart River in three days. A gripping, beautifully written, well-paced but introspective novel, it is perhaps Buchan’s finest achievement. He based the landscapes and the journey closely on some of his own travels in the northwest as Governor-General of Canada, and the book reflects clearly the immensity and variety not only of Canada’s landscapes but its peoples. Buchan’s keen eye and descriptive powers make the forbidding mountain and wilderness settings, as well as Leithen and the other characters’ struggles, so vivid and involving that, as with John Macnab, when I set the book down I felt as if I had really been somewhere else and that not only my attention by my body and spirit would need time to adjust to my return.

That feeling proved even more profound owing to Sick Heart River’s confrontation with mortality, which is the real point of the novel. Melancholy suffuses the novel from the first page, and one feels with Leithen the spirit of Ubi sunt? felt so keenly by those whose own civilizations have passed them by, not always to the better. Despite or perhaps because of their successes, the characters have become detached and sick at heart—Leithen through the clarifying moment of his diagnosis; Lew Frizel, the elder brother of the pair of guides, through the madness of the North; and Galliard through the slow effects of his deracination, his removal from his roots and the people and places who made him. All of them sense their need to atone and to return to something; all of them come up short.

And all of this is dramatized in Leithen himself. Leithen is a dying man, and Sick Heart River, in three stages, tells of his wrestling with this fact, of the paradox of how he saves his life.

In the first third, Leithen determines to die “standing up,” facing the inevitable and embracing his fate with a resolve and courage hardened by reason. Closed off, implacable, reliant entirely on his own (failing) strength, protected only by what another character calls “the iron armour of his fortitude,” he is a Stoic with all the courage and coldness of the ancients.

In the second, having found the wounded and desperate Galliard, pursued Galliard’s maddened guide Lew Frizel into the valley of the Sick Heart, and almost died in the attempt, Leithen finds himself awed into a reflection of not only the infinite power but the infinite goodness of God and trusts himself to his care. Wintering in the mountains, nursed by the Frizels and slowing getting to know and understand Galliard, Leithen not only survives his trek to the Sick Heart but even begins to recover. For the first time since his diagnosis he finds himself entertaining thoughts of the future, of reuniting Galliard and his wife, returning to his practice, buying back his country house… But, should he fully recover, is this really what he will have survived the Sick Heart for?

The last third presents Leithen with his final crisis. As Leithen, Galliard, the Frizel brothers, and their Hare Indian crew work their way back down from the mountains, they learn that the Hare tribe has also been afflicted, like Leithen, with an outbreak of tuberculosis and, like Galliard, with despair. They will not act to help themselves, and they die in droves at their camp near a Catholic mission. As with so many of Buchan’s heroes in the best of his stories, it comes down to a choice. Should Leithen pass on and return to the world and to the success of his mission, or stay and help other sick and despairing creatures like himself?

Leithen stays. The final word is given to Father Duplessis, one of the French priests ministering to the Hares, who speaks Matthew 10:39 as both Leithen’s epitaph and the theme of the book: “He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”

Sick Heart River is much more than an adventure novel; it is, as Buchan’s granddaughter and biographer Ursula Buchan puts it, “a spiritual testament, wrapped around by a gripping story of survival and self-sacrifice in the far north of Canada.” It is in many respects very similar to Leithen’s lark into Scotland in John Macnab, but with far greater dangers and higher stakes than being caught poaching and forced to pay £100. Not only is Leithen’s life on the line, so is his soul.

Even by the standards of the other novels I’ve reviewed this month, Sick Heart River is an engaging, well plotted, well paced, and surprising adventure with a strong cast of characters in brilliantly realized settings. It is also an uncommonly rich and poignant philosophical and theological story. That it moves so briskly despite the depth of its themes and ideas and that the themes harmonize so well with the action is a testament to Buchan’s skills, and that meditates so profoundly on life, death, and grace makes it not only a fitting end to my John Buchan June, but to the great man’s life as well.

Thanks for reading along this month! I hope y’all have a pleasant and restful July, and that these reviews and recommendations will give you something good to read.

Midwinter

This penultimate entry in John Buchan June concerns the second of Buchan’s novels to be set during the Jacobite Rising of 1745, a novel that in many ways mirrors aspects of 1899’s A Lost Lady of Old Years but with lessons learned from more than two decades of fiction writing since, including several immense successes. The novel is 1923’s Midwinter.

Midwinter tells the story of Alastair Maclean, a Scots mercenary who has previously fought for the French and been wounded at Fontenoy. Having recovered, he has returned to Britain to work for Bonnie Prince Charlie as the Jacobites prepare an invasion of England aimed at gaining the throne for the prince’s father. When Midwinter begins, it is late fall and Maclean is traveling through England as a spy and courier, delivering messages and assessing the preparedness of the prince’s English supporters.

In the midst of his travels, Maclean has a strange run-in with a gamekeeper and a boy poacher. Through Maclean’s intervention in the beating the gamekeeper is administering, the boy escapes and introduces Maclean to a band of seeming outlaws. Dwellers in swamps, woods, and byways, relicts of what they call “Old England,” they call themselves the Spoonbills, and their leader is an ungainly but charismatic old man named Midwinter. Midwinter tells Maclean about “Old England” and the Spoonbills’ secret network of allies and how to summon their aid. Having sheltered and fed him, Midwinter and his men help Maclean on his way.

Maclean’s next stop brings him into contact with both Whig and Jacobite nobles, as well as another ungainly figure, an awkward middle-aged tutor who searching for a runaway student, Claudia, a teenaged girl who has eloped with one of Maclean’s aristocratic contacts. The tutor is a loud, twitchy, ill-dressed, but loquacious and wise man named Samuel Johnson.

From here, Maclean travels northward. But his work becomes more dangerous—he senses he is being followed, he escapes traps and capture by men with an uncanny knowledge of his movements, and he learns that there are traitors among the prince’s men in England. In the terms of a modern spy novel, he uncovers a mole. Two, in fact.

Meeting Johnson’s student Claudia, now married to one of the prince’s English supporters, complicates matters further. A convinced Jacobite, she befriends Maclean and wholeheartedly offers her support. Maclean is smitten. Unfortunately for him, as he discovers with harrowing and near fatal consequences, one of the moles is most likely someone in her circle.

Time is short. The invasion is coming, the King of England’s army is moving north to meet it, and Maclean knows not only the identity of the mole but also what the mole has done to sabotage the invasion. Maclean also feels a sense of personal betrayal and the need to satisfy his and others’ honor by confronting and killing the traitor.

Go to the prince and let the traitors escape? Or catch and punish the traitors and risk the success of the revolt? As the armies close in on Derby in early December, Maclean—with Midwinter and the Spoonbills as hard-to-find help and Johnson in tow as friend, mentor, and little-heeded counselor—must choose.

I don’t want to reveal much more of the plot. Midwinter is a sprawling high adventure across beautiful and dangerous landscapes, with all the familiar aspects of the spy thriller thrown in and made fresh by the novel’s well-realized historical setting. Like A Lost Lady of Old Years, the Jacobite Uprising adventure Buchan wrote during college, Midwinter wears its research lightly and is strongly written. Unlike A Lost Lady of Old Years, this novel is excellently paced, with Maclean’s mission and backstory carefully doled out bit by bit as he continues on his dangerous work, and—as I hint in the paragraph above—Maclean himself is an active, engaged, canny character whose decisions matter.

Midwinter is also peopled with well-realized characters, not least two real historical figures. I chose Midwinter for this project when I learned that one of the real people in this novel is General James Oglethorpe, founder of Georgia and a personal hero of mine. At the time Midwinter takes place, Oglethorpe had only recently returned from fighting the Spanish in Georgia and he appears in the novel as a noble English officer mustering troops to repel the coming Jacobite invasion. He only appears in a handful of scenes, but those scenes are crucial, vibrantly written, and capture a great deal of the energy, rectitude, and guts of the man. Pitting the fictional Maclean against him heightens the tension, especially as the two men, though divided by politics and the war, come to like and admire one another.

But the standout in the novel is Samuel Johnson. This Johnson is not yet Dr Johnson, being a tutor in his mid-30s with great knowledge but humble prospects. He cannot even afford to live with his wife, he tells Maclean near the end, and is treated as a figure of fun by some of the other characters in the early going. (And Johnson does offer genuine comic relief; his attempt to start a fistfight near the beginning is hilarious.) But Johnson’s intelligence, wit, insight, staunch belief in virtue, and insistence on doing right make him stand out even among his more polished aristocratic betters. He proves both a frustration and a boon to his friend Maclean. Witness this exchange as Johnson presses Maclean toward self-knowledge about his mixed motives:

Alastair had a sudden flame of wrath. “Do you accuse me of lying?” he asked angrily.

Johnson's face did not change. “Sir, all men are liars,” he said. “I strive to make you speak truth to your own soul.”

Johnson is not merely a real person stuck into a fictional story, but the heart and conscience of the novel.

All of this makes Midwinter both the best kind of adventure and the best kind of thoughtful novel. Only as I have worked on this review have I begun to understand the novel’s parallel secret networks—the political network of Jacobites and the traditionalist network of Spoonbills—and its deep themes of divided loyalties and undivided truth. It is, as so much of Buchan’s fiction is, seemingly effortless, but rewarding not only to read but to reflect upon.

Midwinter is neither Buchan’s best nor most famous novel, but it is a rich and well-paced historical adventure with good characters and two striking historical portraits, and for those reasons it is well worth reading. For myself, I plan to return to this one soon.

The Power-House

We have entered the last week of John Buchan June. Today I’m writing about a lesser-known “shocker,” one first serialized the year before Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps, a novel that is in many ways a precursor to that most famous of Buchan thrillers, and that introduced the world to Sir Edward Leithen—The Power-House.

Let me begin with this: The Power-House defies easy summary. One can describe this novel, but only in the broadest genre terms. It is a thriller, certainly, and its hero, Sir Edward Leithen, unravels a vast conspiracy and exposes a criminal mastermind just like Bulldog Drummond, James Bond, George Smiley, Jack Ryan, and untold others would later do. The difficulty comes with the novel’s form.

The story is a frame tale in which Sir Edward Leithen recounts how he once had an exotic and dangerous adventure without ever leaving London. (This limit, as he later admits, has one important exception.) The novel begins with Leithen learning of the disappearance of an old acquaintance, Charles Pitt-Heron, who has “bolted” with no warning and no word of his intentions or destination. Leithen takes an interest, and as others investigate and put together a search party that will eventually pursue the man into central Asia, he digs at the mysterious root of the man’s disappearance. Leithen does this through his intuition, sharpened by his work as a barrister, his dogged willingness to investigate, his courage to face the unknown, and through a remarkable series of coincidences that give him the pieces necessary to begin his work.

“It is understood and accepted,” one essayist has written, “that a Buchan plot relies absolutely on a level of coincidence that Dickens would have dismissed as improbable.” This is not fair to all of Buchan’s work, but it not only fits The Power-House but may even be a bit of an understatement. The chief events of the book, in which Leithen stumbles upon clues and into the lair of the villain, are all coincidental. The rest of the “action,” so to speak, is interior—Leithen mulling, putting together information, having epiphanies. And always just in the nick of time.

In her introduction to the edition I read, former MI5 chief and novelist Stella Rimington refers to The Power-House as “a tale without a plot.” The plot, as she goes on to suggest, is not the main attraction the way it is with later novels about Hannay or Leithen. Instead, The Power-House is “pure essence of Buchan.” It relies entirely on pacing, atmosphere, a charming and tenacious main character, and a strong villain to succeed.

The Power-House is the shortest of the Buchan novels I’ve read and moves briskly. I read it in a matter of a few hours across several leisurely vacation days. It is also the first instance in my reading of Buchan’s use of in media res to kick off the action, a technique you can see repeated in thriller after thriller from this point on. (The very first line of both The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle sets the tone, gets the plot moving, prepares both the reader and the hero for adventure.)

From the moment one of Leithen’s colleagues tells him about Pitt-Heron’s disappearance, Buchan spreads a series of seemingly disconnected incidents before us and stitches them together with Leithen’s straightforward and thoughtful narration. Not only does Leithen’s voice and intellect hold the novel together, it also draws the reader downward with Leithen into a more and more oppressively paranoid mood. By the midpoint of the novel Leithen sees dangers everywhere—in shops, in his own neighborhood, among the anonymous crowd jostling him in the streets of London—another technique that, as I wrote a few weeks ago, would be exploited to even greater effect in The Thirty-Nine Steps.

If The Power-House is not plot-driven but moved along by pure pacing and atmosphere, the main draw must be the central conflict between Leithen and the villain. In this case, the villain is Andrew Lumley, a wealthy, well-connected man of immense intellect—and a strong vision of the future of Europe and the human race. Leithen happens upon him during a drive in the country following Pitt-Heron’s disappearance, and Lumley opens up to him. In expressing his vision, Lumley produces one of the most famous passages in Buchan’s fiction:

“Did you ever reflect, Mr Leithen, how precarious is the tenure of the civilisation we boast about?”

“I should have thought it fairly substantial,” I said, “and the foundations grow daily firmer.”

He laughed. “That is the lawyer’s view, but, believe me, you are wrong. Reflect, and you will find that the foundations are sand. You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.”

Lumley is an anarchist of the kind found in the uppermost echelons of society—an elite educated into arrogant oikophobia, a Nietzschean with an appetite for the will to power. But what makes Lumley dangerous is that he is not just an armchair radical fulminating against the establishment from inside it, but the quiet head of an entire organization dedicated to undermining Western civilization in secret. This organization is called the Power-House.

Only later do we realize that Lumley’s explanation of his perspective was not just a monologue but a seduction, an attempt to recruit Leithen. And that others—like Pitt-Heron—who have resisted Lumley and the Power-House have disappeared or met untimely or embarrassing ends.

Fortunately Leithen proves himself a capable opponent to Lumley. He is also his perfect foil—where Lumley is a wealthy and respected elite, Leithen is a workaday lawyer and politician known mainly to friends. Where Lumley uses a network of likeminded and similarly-placed anarchists to foment the collapse of civilization, Leithen must work. Where Lumley is an arch-rationalist ideologue committed to chaos, Leithen works intuitively within tradition and custom on behalf of order. And, perhaps most fundamentally, where Lumley is ambitious, Leithen is content.

While this confrontation lends to The Power-House a curious excitement and distinctive flavor, it is not my favorite of the Buchan novels I’ve read so far. Though well paced, the framing narrative erases most of the doubts you might otherwise entertain about whether Leithen will succeed. The conclusion, in which Leithen wraps up his story of rooting out conspiracy without leaving London by explicitly contrasting it with his friends who chased Pitt-Heron halfway across Eurasia, ends the story on a witty punchline but also draws attention to the fact that a potentially more interesting and exhilarating story has played out entirely in the background. And while Lumley is a compelling and even frightening antagonist, what he’s actually planning to do is never made clear. This is not necessarily a problem—as long as the reader doesn’t stop to think about it.

Though I enjoyed The Power-House a great deal, it does have its weaknesses and is perhaps more interesting as a trial run of techniques and themes—especially the fragility of the good things civilization has bequeathed us—that would make Richard Hannay’s first adventure such a smashing success. Nevertheless, in introducing Sir Edward Leithen Buchan gave his readers one of his best and most important characters, a more thoughtful and methodical hero who would return in the magnificent John Macnab. The Power-House is worth reading just to make his acquaintance.

Eugenics and Other Evils

One of GK Chesterton’s lesser-known works is the 1922 treatise Eugenics and Other Evils. This is a shame, as it was and is an insightful and challenging polemic on a topic that has changed its rhetoric and outward forms but has grown no weaker in the century since he wrote it. I first read this over a decade ago—I would guess around 2009 or 2010—and revisited it via audiobook in the late spring of 2020. The following is not a proper review, but the notes I posted to Goodreads when I finished. I hope this will encourage y’all to read this book.

—————

Chesterton at his most lucid and persuasive, arguing forcefully against post-WWI British schemes to establish legal eugenics regimes. (The same thing was going on in the US at the same time, culminating in the Eugenics Society’s notorious 1927 test case Buck v. Bell, which went all the way to the Supreme Court and resulted in a decision upholding mandatory sterilization laws for the “feebleminded,” a decision encapsulated in one of the most mean-spirited court opinions in the Court’s history, authored by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Chesterton argues that eugenicist advocates are overenthusiastic about an untested and highly theoretical “science,” that they cannot possibly have the iron grasp on heredity that they claim, and that the legal measures proposed for the implementation of their plans will create a division of haves and have-nots more cold blooded and brutal than anything established by the spoliations of late nineteenth century industrial capitalism. Urban industrialism and the cruelties of commercialism have already robbed the poor of their dignity and their private property, he argues, so the plans of the eugenicists to take away even the family and the freedom to choose a mate and be fruitful—one of the only licit pleasures left to the proletariat, he notes—is both of a piece with modern social Darwinism and an unprecedented monstrosity.

If the hubris and cruelty of the eugenics movement are staggering, even more so are their condescension to the poor, whom they propose to help by slowly winnowing them, and their lack of awareness of their own elitism, as they are never the object of their proposed plans but, should they get their way, the autocratic enforcers. Chesterton rightly discerns that the cult of the expert—a fin de siecle obsession that has never really left us—is ultimately about establishing an unaccountable new hierarchy of powerful elites.

Chesterton’s arguments strikingly anticipate the shape of much modern argument about issues like abortion on demand and other bioethical questions—not to mention the rise of divorce, the establishment of intrusive state-mandated medical regulations, and the confiscation of children by the state on grounds of hygiene or ever-shifting psychological criteria—and his arguments against “scientific” interference with birth as well as birth control and the ever more intrusive top-down government control of everyday life feel very prescient indeed.

Not everything in the book is on target. His lengthy tangent on capitalism—a favorite Chesterton hobbyhorse—feels too much like a tangent, but where he strikes home, he’s excellent, and his feel for the larger underlying assumptions of the issues of the day make this lesser known book still shockingly relevant.

I first read this probably a decade ago. I’ve just listened to the excellent audiobook read by Derek Perkins. I recommend it, though a print edition with minor annotations to explain who some of the now more obscure figures of the Edwardian eugenics movement may be preferable.

—————

I first read Eugenics and Other Evils in Volume IV of Ignatius Press’s Collected Works of GK Chesterton. It is also available as an audiobook—the one I refer to in these notes is a really excellent reading—and for free online at Project Gutenberg and Wikisource. This is a short and punchy book that is still important, and is well worth your while.

Greenmantle

Today for John Buchan June, we look at the sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps, a novel that expands upon everything that made that rousing, fast-paced, and timely thriller successful into a tale that is part spy novel, part man-on-the-run thriller, part travelogue, and part war story—Greenmantle.

Greenmantle begins with hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Richard Hannay, resting and recuperating back home in England. It is December of 1915, Hannay is now Major Hannay, and he has been wounded leading an attack on the Western Front. Hannay receives an urgent invitation to meet Sir Walter Bullivant, the man with whom, in the previous story, he had finally been able to find refuge and to confide in after weeks on the run from German spies.

Bullivant tells Hannay that a British agent, staggering wounded into a British outpost in the Middle East, had delivered a message consisting of only three words before he died, three words that Bullivant believes may be clues to German strategic intentions in the east. The agent, Bullivant reveals, was his son, and Bullivant asks Hannay to use the same skills that had helped him unravel the Black Stone’s plot against Britain a few years earlier to infiltrate German intelligence and uncover their plans. Hannay hesitates but, duty-bound and not one to shrink from task just because it’s impossible, agrees.

Bullivant pairs Hannay with John S Blenkiron, an eccentric but brilliant intelligence operative—and an American, and so theoretically neutral. Hannay also asks his brother officer Sandy Arbuthnot, also recuperating from wounds received on the Western Front, to join them. Arbuthnot has years of experience in the Balkans and Middle East gained before the war and is a master of languages and local customs. He will prove a crucial part of operation, though not in any way they could have predicted.

Hannay, Blenkiron, and Arbuthnot agree to split up, infiltrate enemy territory, and reconnect in Istanbul in the new year. Hannay takes ship for Portugal, where he runs into his old friend Peter Pienaar, a Boer hunter and outdoorsman, and together they pass themselves off as German sympathizing South Africans seeking revenge against the British. Clandestinely sent to Germany, they are interrogated by Colonel von Stumm, a brutish intelligence officer tasked with assessing their usefulness. He separates Hannay from Pienaar, and, following a brawl at Stumm’s secluded home in Bavaria, Hannay flees. He is a hunted man once more.

Hannay’s situation is desperate, but he has already begun to decipher the first of the clues Bullivant’s son had revealed—the identity of a dangerous female operative in the Middle East, Hilda von Einem.

At the midpoint of the novel, Hannay, Blenkiron, Arbuthnot, and even Pienaar manage to link up pool the information gathered in their travels. What emerges from their observations and disparate bits of intelligence is the outline of a German plot: Hilda von Einem, acting as handler, has cultivated a prominent Muslim cleric called Greenmantle, a figure prophesied in old mystical poetry and whom the Germans intend to use. The Germans hope that, fired by the simplifying and purifying spirit of revival and following the banner of Greenmantle, Muslims will make a potent insurgent force in the region and decisively shift the balance against Britain, France, Russia, and their allies. In short, they hope to provoke jihad.

Unfortunately for Hilda von Einem, Greenmantle has terminal cancer. His time is short—and so the Germans are moving quickly. This was the information Sir Walter Bullivant’s son gave his life to get to the British.

Hannay and his team travel eastwards, into the heart of the Ottoman Empire and to the headwaters of the Euphrates in the mountains north of Mesopotamia. They travel under cover, with Hannay as a member of Hilda von Einem’s entourage, but are identified and pursued by Rasta Bey, an arrogant and powerful Young Turk whom Hannay has crossed and humiliated several times en route to Istanbul. And as an added threat, the dreaded Colonel von Stumm reappears. This section of the novel is a tightrope walk of aliases and concealed identities, cross-country chases, captures and escapes, and, finally, the brutality of modern trench warfare. Here individual initiative, resourcefulness, and guts confront the overwhelming, indiscriminate destructive power of artillery.

By the end, Hannay and the others have blown their cover and are on the run for a final time, hopelessly outnumbered and desperately trying to deliver details of a forthcoming German and Ottoman attack to the Russians so that they can break the siege, push the Ottomans back, stop Hilda von Einem, and, just possibly, win the war.

Greenmantle has all the strengths of The Thirty-Nine Steps that I wrote about a few weeks ago—strong writing, excellent pacing, interesting characters, thrilling episodes (the conclusion is one of the best last stands I’ve read in fiction), as well as all the genre-defining features that that novel pioneered, especially the plot tied to plausible real-life politics and world events. TE Lawrence, who was in a position to know, later wrote that “Greenmantle has more than a flavour of truth.” But it also broadens and deepens what The Thirty-Nine Steps accomplished so masterfully. In this respect it is a true sequel, both building upon and improving upon all the best elements of its predecessor.

And like all good sequels, it is also different enough to avoid retreading the same ground. In his introduction to the authorized edition, Buchan biographer and literary critic Allan Massie writes that where The Thirty-Nine Steps is a “chase” novel, Greenmantle is a “quest” novel. I think that’s just about right. Greenmantle is much longer than The Thirty-Nine Steps but maintains the same excitement and brisk momentum. In the first half, Hannay ends up on the run first from Stumm and then from Rasta Bey. He faces personal dangers at every turn and his courage and resourcefulness are sorely tested. In the second, Hannay and his team end up on the run from pretty much everyone. What holds this pattern of infiltration, exposure, and flight together, though, is Hannay’s mission, his quest—to divine German intentions.

But Hannay’s work is not done once they have discovered Hilda von Einem and Greenmantle; the stakes are even higher than in the first half, and Hannay and the others, in true quest fashion, confront their dangers not individually but as a team: Hannay the principled leader and jack of all trades, Pienaar the unflinching survivalist genius, Blenkiron the brains of the operation, and Arbuthnot the heart and soul. They would not succeed without all of them, and all of them is what their mission will require.

John Buchan in uniform, May 1917

Greenmantle is also a more sweeping story than its predecessor. Hannay begins the story in England before traveling to Lisbon and traversing the whole breadth of Europe by rail, on foot, and by river barge before arriving in Mesopotamia. Buchan successfully conveys the scope and intensity of the First World War and not a little of its complexity and pathos.

This pathos is only possible because of Greenmantle’s scope—it is both a panorama of the entire war in Europe and the Middle East and a series of strikingly intimate episodes informed by the experiences of not only of spies but of ordinary soldiers, civilians, tribesmen, sailors, bandits, and the leaders of nations. Buchan’s immense powers of sympathy, which I wrote about when I reviewed Prester John, are on full display. Regardless of which side they are on, almost all of Greenmantle’s characters have admirable qualities, and almost none is presented as irredeemably evil. Even the Kaiser, whom Hannay meets in one of the most surprising and interesting incidents in the novel, is presented sympathetically. (It is worth recalling that Buchan wrote this novel at a time when all Germans, but the Kaiser especially, were quite literally demonized.) Only those like Stumm and Rasta Bey, functionaries so compromised by ideological nationalism and pragmatism and personal cruelty, seem to be beyond hope, but it is they who have given the war the exceptional prolonged savagery that Hannay and his fellows must navigate.

The sympathy with which Buchan writes allows Hannay staunch loyalties while seasoning and softening them. The most striking example comes during Hannay’s flight across Bavaria to the Danube. On foot in the snow, he falls ill and risks capture to ask for help from a German woman living in an isolated hut. She takes him in despite having to care for her three children alone. One night after Christmas, he learns more about her:

As we sat there in the firelight, with the three white-headed children staring at me with saucer eyes, and smiling when I looked their way, the woman talked. Her man had gone to the wars on the Eastern front, and the last she had heard from him he was in a Polish bog and longing for his dry native woodlands. The struggle meant little to her. It was an act of God, a thunderbolt out of the sky, which had taken a husband from her, and might soon make her a widow and her children fatherless. . . . She was a decent soul, with no bitterness against anybody, not even the Russians if they would spare her man.

That night I realized the crazy folly of war. When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard hideous tales of German doings, I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword. I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Huns some of their own medicine. But that woodcutter’s cottage cured me of such nightmares. I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free. It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany’s madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children’s bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.

To be “better than the beasts”—for the sake of people like this woman and her children, for the personal honor and character of men like Hannay, and for civilization itself despite temptations to domination, cruelty, and ruthless pragmatism—would work as the guiding principle of all of Buchan’s heroes. And it is ultimately what’s at stake in Hannay’s mission.

I could say much more—alongside its artistic merits, Greenmantle has been credited with predicting the rise of Islamist extremism—but I think what gives this novel its peculiar staying power is the excitement of its plot and action, the involving multidimensional characters and their varying skillsets, and, again, its pathos. Greenmantle takes all that made Richard Hannay’s first adventure thrilling and deepens it. It is not just an adventure of murder, espionage, and the threat of war, but of the testing of the soul.

John Macnab

John Buchan June, my personal project to read and write about as many of the great author’s classic adventure novels as I can, continues with a novel I hadn’t heard of until fairly recently, but that many Buchan fans regard as one of his absolute best: John Macnab.

It is striking, reading this many of Buchan’s books in such close succession, to note how many of his heroes are smart, capable, energetic men who suffer intolerably when they have nothing meaningful to do. They begin the book bored—utterly, irremediably bored. Thus Richard Hannay begins The Thirty-Nine Steps, which I wrote about last time, “pretty well disgusted with life,” so disgusted he tempts fate by challenging placid, affluent London to give him something interesting to do within twenty-four hours.

But imagine three such men—all smart, all capable, all energetic, none with any kind of meaningful work to do. Imagine that they learn of each others’ horrible ennui. Imagine that, unlike Hannay, nothing stimulating presents itself. Imagine, then, that they take curing their boredom into their own hands.

John Macnab begins with lawyer and politician Sir Edward Leithen receiving bad news from his doctor: nothing is wrong with him. Not physically. Leithen ennui is a symptom of peacetime (this novel was written and takes place in the early 1920s) and, moreover, success. Britain won the war, Leithen is good at his job, everything is right with the world—and it is completely enervating. The doctor’s prescription for Leithen: steal a horse. Leithen needs to challenge himself, to do something dangerous, something he might fail at, something that is mildly illegal. That, the doctor suggests half-ironically, will get the blood pumping.

Leithen scoffs, but the advice sticks with him. That evening, still listless but now frustrated as well, he cancels his dinner plans and goes to his club to eat alone. There he runs into two friends: John Palliser-Yeates, a banker, and Charles Lamancha, a nobleman and politician. Leithen tells them about his boredom and his doctor’s unhelpful prescription, and Palliser-Yeates and Lamancha reveal that they, too, feel the same affliction. At this point a fourth friend, the young war veteran and aspiring politician Sir Archie Roylance, who owns an estate in the Scottish highlands, tells them a story: a man called Jim Tarras, similarly struck low with boredom before the war, “invented a new kind of sport.” Tarras, Roylance says, would send anonymous notes to the owners of large highland estates announcing his intention to poach one of their deer, and the excitement of both stalking game and evading the landowners’ gamekeepers proved exhilarating.

Archie, who is young and brave (he limps painfully from a wound gotten in the war) but a bit oblivious, thinks that this story will amuse his friends. It does not have the intended effect.

Leithen, Palliser-Yeates, and Lamancha make a pact on the spot—they will undertake the same “new kind of sport,” as Tarras, sending notes to three highland estates near Archie’s announcing their intention to poach two deer and a salmon and challenging them, defying them, to stop it. If the three friends succeed, they will present their game to the landowners with £50. If caught, they will forfeit £100. They draft the letters and adopt a collective pseudonym: John Macnab.

Archie is chagrined by all this but, having given his friends the idea, agrees to host them at Crask, his somewhat shabby home near the three great estates they have chosen as targets—Glenraden, a well-forested tract which has been in the Raden family for nearly a thousand years and has a barrow reputed to be the tomb of a Viking warlord; Strathlarrig, where an American amateur archaeologist is staying while he excavates the barrow at Glenraden; and Haripol, the new faux-Tudor manor home built on staggeringly rugged land by the vulgar nouveau riche Lord Claybody.

The three men known as John Macnab reconnoiter from Crask and gain intelligence not only on the lay of the land and the obstacles they will face on the hunt but, perhaps more importantly, the character of the opponents. Colonel Alistair Raden is a tough old Scot who views himself as the steward of his land and responded to John Macnab’s letter with brusque defiance. Acheson Bandicott, the American, is too busy with his digging and cataloging to worry much about poaching, but his smooth young son seems a bit too cheerfully keen to stop John Macnab. And the Claybodys, upon receiving their note from John Macnab, contacted their lawyers.

And so Leithen, Palliser-Yeates, and Lamancha lay their plans, ready their guns, practice their casting and fly-tying, and keep a weather eye on local events. And Archie, having met Janet Raden, one of the Colonel’s daughters, finds himself falling for her—and wondering what to do about John Macnab now.

This is a lot of setup. It is a testament to Buchan’s grace and skill as a writer that only in trying to explain the story have I realized how complex the novel is. All of this occurs before John Macnab’s hunt begins, and all of it is handled with artful characterization and brisk pacing. The introduction of Janet to the plot is only the first of several wonderful complications; eventually Bandicott’s excavations, local politics involving Archie and Lamancha, and a legion of reporters impinge on John Macnab and his sport. What begins as a more genteel and sporting version of “The Most Dangerous Game” builds in intensity and complexity as it goes, both the hunters and those trying to stop them improvise and change course as the situation changes, and nothing turns out as you might expect. It is a wonderfully written and surprising novel.

The two great strengths of John Macnab—beyond the expert pacing—are the characters and the scenery. When I posted on Prester John I noted Buchan’s extraordinary capacity for seeing things from others’ perspectives; that trait is clearly on display in John Macnab, as he renders every character distinct, well-rounded, and understandable. They are also fun, the whole lot of them. Particular favorites of mine were Sir Edward Leithen, who gets the plot rolling and gamely essays every impossible new task that comes John Macnab’s way, the put-upon but well-meaning Sir Archie, and Janet Raden, one of the most arresting and attractive female characters I’ve encountered outside Jane Austen. Archie’s infatuation with Janet begins as comedy but ends with a genuinely sweet, fun, and surprising romance—as well as delicious plot complications.

But Buchan’s ability with character is not limited to giving his characters charming personalities or quirky character traits, and his evenhanded attention to each character’s opinions, priorities, and beliefs proves a key part of the story. Even the comic characters, like the coarse and litigious Claybodys, are treated fairly, and the way their personalities inform their choices makes a difference to the story. These characters feel like real people. Indeed, character—as in ethos, as in personality, virtues, and vices—matters as much to the plot as any event or deed. I’ve seldom seen it done so well.

The characters also deepen the plot, adding meaning, thematic resonance, and pathos in unexpected places, as when Janet tells Archie that Colonel Raden will be the last of the Radens, that Glenraden, the land he loves so much, must inevitably pass out of his family since he has only two daughters. Archie (and the reader) knows these things intellectually, but Janet gives them meaning. While the two look for John Macnab, they reflect on the way civilization kills the people that build it, softening them, robbing them of fighting spirit, turning them into vegetables that merely exist and consume. The old must make way for the new, unless the old shows it still has the strength to fight. It’s a delightfully multi-layered passage, the thematic key to the whole book, but it is made fun and memorable by arising from two good characters.

Second, when I write that scenery is a great strength of John Macnab, I really mean scenery. Buchan describes not only the geography of the plot’s action but the visual splendor of Scotland beautifully. Buchan was no mean outdoorsman and loved to tramp through the hills and wilderness, and his keen observation and firsthand knowledge of this kind of environment give the hunting and fishing scenes—or even a simple scene of a young man and woman walking through the countryside and talking—a vividness and immediacy often missing in more recent fiction. Each time I set John Macnab down, I really felt as if I were returning from somewhere else. This fictional region of Scotland is engaging while you read it. By the end you’ll have come, like the Radens, like Archie, and, in his own way, like John Macnab, to love it. When you finish, you’ll miss it.

With an intriguing premise, lively and surprising characters, an expert mixture of humor, action, and suspense, and just the right touch of thought, John Macnab is a richly imagined and beautifully written story and a joy to read. It may not be the most famous of Buchan’s novels—again, that’d be The Thirty-Nine Steps—but it may well be his best.

Two good reads on the dangers of whiggishness

One of my special historiographical bugbears is whiggishness in all its forms: whether Whig history proper, with its tidy story of freedom and individual rights and the ebbing tide of tyranny; modern Progressive visions of the onward and upward march of Progress (or the arc of the universe, or whatever); or the generalized assumption, the attitude, that Things are always Advancing. Long ago CS Lewis and GK Chesterton, in their similar but distinct ways, had alerted me to the threat of chronological snobbery—the generalized attitude. But it was Herbert Butterfield who gave me, historian to historian, master to student, an understanding of Whig history as a vision of the past and warned of this vision’s dangers.

By a happy coincidence, I ran across two good pieces on whiggishness on the same day last week. At The Critic, Jack Nicholson (no, really) argues that Butterfield’s Whig Interpretation of History, the 1931 study that rubbished the unchallenged assumptions behind more than a century of biased scholarship, is overdue a revival, especially as an answer to the vexed question “What went wrong with liberalism?”

Butterfield warned against consigning historical characters on the wrong side of history to the historical trash; he encouraged the historian to engage with them and present their views fairly.

Why “whig”, anyway? The white, male, Protestant Whigs—the political party—were on the winning side of history from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to 1689, in England and beyond. The triumphant Whigs swept aside the royalist Tories and the further marginalised British Catholics.

However, Butterfield saw more than a 18th century political movement—he drew a connection between the Whigs and the modern culture of perpetual and inevitable progress. Blending enlightenment rationalism with Protestant triumphalism, they demonised the “mediaeval” past and fetishised the supposed sophistication of their own era.

Today that attitude lives on amongst academic progressives. Chasing the next orthodoxy, whiggish scholars infiltrate established fields, ultimately draining them of originality. Too many people will say the same things, over and over again, whether they are Whigs or “whigs” in the sense that they commit the same historical sin: present-mindedness on an industrial scale.

Present-minded history narrows and warps, and ultimately renders the study of the past pointless. Butterfield saw the purpose of history as “precisely to rediscover history as a challenge to our present assumptions, thus broadening our political and conceptual horizons.” Present approaches to the past are the exact inverse of this healthier—and humbler—one.

Second, in a short essay for First Things my old acquaintance Miles Smith, a careful and thoughtful historian, warns against the dangers of whiggishness in the specific context of American religion—namely, the much-maligned evangelical community, which has “drunk deeply from the well of Whig history.”

The result in the late 18th century—the period that birthed the Whig disposition and, not coincidentally, the United States—was counterintuitive sympathies: the hyper-religious post-Great Awakening Christians of America taking the side of the Jacobins. This was despite “attacks on French Catholics and Protestants . . . occurring regularly” and the revolutionary regime’s eventual enshrinement of atheism as the new republic’s official religion. Whiggish prejudices were responsible for this odd misalignment: “because American evangelicals believed traditional France was benighted, and that a cleansing of French society was necessary, the fate of French Christians was of secondary importance to them.”

But these prejudices and Americans’ whiggish belief in Progress are still bearing fruit:

In the twenty-first century, some evangelicals still draw upon the same Whiggish reading of history as their eighteenth-century forebears. In the early 2000s, the cause of democracy and regime-change in Iraq trumped the historic stability of Iraqi Christians—much as the cause of progress and revolution in 1780s France trumped the stability of French Christians. Whiggish optimism typified the views of George W. Bush’s evangelical speechwriter Michael Gerson, who proposed unambiguously that “the unity of our country depends on idealism at home.” Attacks on America and American values, he argued, should be countered with “restless reform, idealism, and moral conviction.” Evangelical Whigs confidently know history ends in their eschatological victory through cycles of constant socio-ecclesiastic re-creation.

Gerson echoed Linn’s image of the French Revolution as an uncontrollable blaze of liberty. Only this time, the source of the revolutionary blaze was not Revolutionary France, but George W. Bush’s United States. Gerson helped write Bush’s second inaugural address, which justified the Iraq War in idealistic terms. Because the United States invaded Iraq “in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it.” The United States, according to Gerson, “lit a fire as well—a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.” Revolutionary France and Bush’s United States both, with evangelical support, marched the fires of liberty to Earth’s supposedly darkest corners at the cost of the lives of many French and Arab Christians.

And what is more, allying faith with a false picture of how history works has left American Christianity supine before the forces of change, and especially Change™. Christians should, Smith argues, “know that freedom is not inevitable, social change is not always good, and civilization is fragile.”

How we think about the past matters.

You can read all of Nicholson’s essay, “Herbert Butterfield: A prophet for our age?” at The Critic here. You can read Smith’s essay “Evangelicals and Whig History” is at First Things here.

I’ve previously written about Butterfield, present-mindedness, and his admonition not to put faith in humanity here, here, and here. For more from Chesterton on chronological snobbery, see here, and for Lewis against “the judgement of History,” see here.

The Thirty-Nine Steps

I’ve christened this month on the blog John Buchan June, and I’m reading and writing about as many of Buchan’s classic adventure novels as I can. Today I tackle what is far and away the most famous of them all—The Thirty-Nine Steps.

In a review of American political philosopher Russell Kirk’s thriller Old House of Fear a few years ago, Douglas Murray wrote that while “there are many jokes that the roulette wheel of publishing can play on those who spend their lives at its table . . . one of the finest is when a writer toils away at their magnum opus only for some tossed-off trifle or jeu d’esprit to go into multiple editions and risk overtaking their whole life’s work.” This doesn’t precisely describe the situation of The Thirty-Nine Steps in John Buchan’s corpus, but it gets close.

Buchan wrote this novel while recuperating from an illness in the late summer of 1914, during the early weeks of the First World War. In his dedication to his friend and publisher Tommy Nelson, who would later die on the Western Front, Buchan writes that he had run out of a supply of “that elementary type of tale which Americans call the ‘dime novel’ and which we know was the ‘shocker,’” a genre toward which he had “long cherished an affection,” and with an indefinite amount of time to while away until his recovery, he decided to entertain himself by writing his own. This genre, “the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible,” we now know as the thriller, and the novel Buchan wrote as he battled illness and the world went to war helped more than any other to give the thriller its earliest definitive shape. Twenty years later, Alfred Hitchcock’s very loose film adaptation would stamp the same imprint onto the cinematic thriller. It would not be until Ian Fleming and Casino Royale in the 1950s that another novel, another hero, and another author would exert such a stylistic and tonal force on the genre.

Fortunately, in addition to being successful, recognizable, and influential, the most famous of all of Buchan’s two-dozen novels and scores of books, The Thirty-Nine Steps is also really, really good.

The novel introduces us to Richard Hannay, a Scots mining engineer who has lived in South Africa since the age of six. Now 37, he has returned to what is notionally his homeland but feels ill-suited to life in London and has come to hate it. He vows to give the capital one more day to give him something interesting to do before he abandons it for the colonies, never to return.

It is that day that he meets Franklin P Scudder. Scudder intercepts Hannay at his front door, and Hannay recognizes the nervous, voluble man as his upstairs neighbor. Scudder tells Hannay that he’s a freelance spy, that he’s been digging into the “subterranean” networks of powerful people manipulating Europe and the world, that he’s dug deep, that he’s dug too deep. He has intelligence of vital importance and a looming deadline—June 15, the day only a few weeks hence when an organization called the Black Stone will assassinate a crucial European leader during his visit to London, pin the blame on a rival power, and drive all sides into war.

Hannay finds himself liking Scudder but still treats his claims with polite skepticism. He allows Scudder to lie low in his flat for a few days and carries on with his own business, right up until the night he comes home from dinner to find Scudder dead: “a long knife through his heart . . . skewered him to the floor.”

Scudder’s murder presents Hannay with a quandary: at least some of what Scudder had told him has turned out to be true, and the powerful people Scudder feared have proven powerful enough to find Scudder at Hannay’s flat, and it is the clear intent of whomever killed Scudder to frame him for the murder. Hannay flees.

But before he flees, embarking upon weeks of adventure, he finds Scudder’s encrypted notebook hidden in his tobacco jar. If this notebook was important enough to get Scudder killed, it’s important enough for Hannay to preserve. So he goes to ground in Scotland, the place in the British Isles still wild and empty enough to give him, with his decades of frontier experience and veld-craft, some kind of advantage over his pursuers. And Hannay is pursued—by the police, by locals, by a foppish old acquaintance from whom he steals a car, and by mysterious men who speak perfect English but confer among themselves in German.

What else is coming? How can he prove that he didn’t murder Scudder? What will happen on June 15? What do the coded messages in Scudder’s notebook mean? What else did Scudder discover that was so dangerous? And what can Hannay do about it?

The Thirty-Nine Steps is still tremendously engaging and exciting to read. This is thanks in great part to Buchan’s usual strengths as a writer—good strong prose, briefly sketched but believable characters, continuously escalating tension, and perfect pacing—now honed after two decades of professional writing to the tools of a master craftsman. But several elements distinguish it as a masterpiece even from the rest of his own work, and help us understand why it has had the success and influence it has in the century since.

First, Buchan helped establish the place of modern technology in the thriller. Hannay has to contend not only with hostile and inscrutable enemies but with the advantages that technology gives them. He is tested continuously by the speed with which his enemies can pursue and even anticipate him. The technologies in question—the airplane, the telegraph, the automobile, the submarine—may seem quaint now, but it is impossible to imagine a similar thriller today that doesn’t involve a hero working against the latest in transportation and communications technology.

Second, Buchan roots the plot in recognizable real-world politics. This, too, has become a commonplace of the thriller, but Buchan avoids making the story so dependent on the nitty-gritty of his own day that it’s unintelligible to later readers. The geopolitics is not really the point. It’s realistic flavoring, it raises the stakes in universally understandable terms, and, ultimately, it’s an excuse to get Hannay on the run.

Third, while Buchan does not make knowing the real-world intricacies of, say, the Second Balkan war indispensable to the plot, he does cleverly play on his readers’ assumptions to misdirect and surprise. Compare the way that Agatha Christie, as Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook recently pointed in a great episode of The Rest is History, manipulates her readers’ prejudices as a form of misdirection. I don’t want to give too much away, but not everything Scudder tells Hannay turns out to be true, which reveals quite a lot about Scudder and the Black Stone—and about modern readers who read no further and accuse Buchan of anti-Semitism. There is much more yet to be discovered after Hannay flees into the highlands, and the man on the run unraveling the mystery of his own flight has become another staple of the genre.

Fourth, in one of the real strokes of genius in the novel, Buchan makes his hero an outsider in his own home country, rendering the familiar threatening. A quiet London street, a genteel manor house, a man fly-fishing in a stream—hidden dangers lie everywhere in a landscape that is supposed to be safe, and Hannay never knows whom to trust. In a word, Buchan invents the thriller’s sense of paranoia.

Finally, Richard Hannay is a winsome and compelling hero—tough, capable, resourceful, brave, and honorable, but not without a sense of humor and of the absurdity of his situation. He is also restless, a man with strengths that must be used. As the late Sir John Keegan put it in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition:

The frustrated energy, the impatience with convention, but also the fundamental deference towards Imperial Britain’s great and good ring absolutely true. So too does Hannay’s personal integrity. He may look up to grandees [but] at his centre, . . . Hannay believes in himself, as a successful professional . . . and in his own simple but unswerving code of right and wrong. Moral certainty, which Buchan possessed in abundance, was one of his strengths as a writer. It gave him the power to achieve something particularly elusive: moral atmosphere.

One of Buchan’s great but underappreciated strengths as a writer—all the more remarkable in the age of anti-heroes and pragmatists that has arisen since his time—is his ability to make goodness not only believable but desirable. His heroes, as Keegan implies, feel like real people, not puppets in a morality play or bloodless avatars of a didactic message. Hannay is a great early showcase of Buchan’s abilities, a model of honorable behavior in a crisis who is portrayed sincerely but unromantically. Having missed the attack on Scudder, Hannay must escape. Having escaped, he must clear his name. Having cleared his name, he must help prevent the Black Stone from succeeding. Hannay does all of these things because they are the right thing to do, and does them in only the most honorable ways possible.

This “moral atmosphere,” as Keegan puts it, elevates The Thirty-Nine Steps from a mere thriller or adventure yarn into “a story of good and evil.” A striking accomplishment for so short and vigorous and thrilling a book, and for one dashed off as entertainment during an illness.

While The Thirty-Nine Steps has proven the most famous and enduring of all of Buchan’s work, the difference from the situation described by Douglas Murray above is that, while Buchan may have conceived and executed this novel quickly only for it to find runaway success, there was no later high-minded magnum opus that it outshone to his chagrin, and The Thirty-Nine Steps was never a mere “trifle.” It is a small masterpiece, and was followed by decades of steady, quality work, including twenty more novels, that have often been unjustifiably neglected while The Thirty-Nine Steps has remained justifiably famous. I’ll be digging into more of those as John Buchan June continues, and I hope you will, too.