Gilgamesh and Job

Sam Kriss, in an essay at The Lamp that is ostensibly a review of Sophus Helle’s new translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh but is really an extended meditation on death, summarizes the value of Gilgamesh’s 4,000-year old refusal to answer:

The Epic of Gilgamesh is here to confront you with the problem of death, not to solve it. It is not therapy. It was not written to make the world any less cruel. But this is precisely why, against myself, I do find it comforting.

This naturally brought to mind Chesterton’s most powerful and challenging paradox, from his “Introduction to the Book of Job,” the Old Testament book that is “chiefly remarkable . . . for the fact that it does not end in a way that is conventionally satisfactory”:

This, I say, is the first fact touching the speech; the fine inspiration by which God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them. . . . Job [is] suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

And I happened to read Kriss’s essay this morning before heading to church for a sermon from Ecclesiastes 3, part of an ongoing series about the book which, with Job, is my favorite in the Bible.

Less therapy. More ancient Near Eastern confrontation of enigmas.

Read both essays at the links above. They’re well worth your while.

On historical imagination

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, by Rembrandt

As the summer semester wrapped up I came across this piece by James Hankins at Law & Liberty, a critique of American Birthright, a set of proposed standards and reforms for social studies education put together by the conservative-leaning Civics Alliance. Though sympathetic to the proposal’s good intentions and goals, Hankins finds that American Birthright is “not . . . beyond criticism.”

Let me note that this is, as far as I can recall, the first I have heard of the Civics Alliance and this project, so I can’t comment on that. But Hankins made some interesting and more broadly applicable points regarding the teaching of history in the modern academic environment.

First, on a neglected question—what is history for?

As an intellectual historian of the premodern world, what struck me the most, as I read through statement after earnest statement on the aims of social studies pedagogy, was the almost complete lack of interest today in what was always the chief rationale for writing and reading history from the time of Herodotus until the blessed advent of the Educational Testing Service in 1947. State departments of education, the National Council for Social Studies, and even the Civics Alliance speak of acquiring reading and writing skills; learning how interpretation is based on sources; learning how to summarize, analyze, and criticize historical accounts; how to gather evidence and evaluate it; how to assess historians’ arguments; how to ask questions, form hypotheses, and test them. All of these are immensely valuable skills, to be sure, but they sidestep the traditional goal of history in the premodern world: acquiring the virtue of prudence or practical wisdom—Aristotle’s phronesis. It’s worth asking why this is the case. After all, practical wisdom is the virtue we most need if our civic life is ever to be restored.

The disadvantage is that prudential judgements cannot be machine graded. This poses, first, a practical problem in that standardized testing is the great bronze image before which education bows down today—ignore it at your peril—and, second, a philosophical and ethical one in that teaching to an exam that tests only unambiguous right-wrong answers undermines the very purpose, “the traditional goal . . . in the premodern world,” of learning about the past: “the best [test] questions, to be ‘objective,’ have to be stripped of implicit moral judgements, contingencies, or imponderables—the very stuff of phronesis.”

Hankins offers a concrete example that couldn’t have been better calculated to get my attention:

Hence the Civics Alliance wants your child to know what year Robert E. Lee invaded Pennsylvania, who won at Gettysburg, and what Lincoln said after the battle. You can test for that. Progressive pedagogy will want your child to evaluate five different interpretations of why Lee invaded Pennsylvania and identify their ideological motivations. You can test for that too, though it’s easier to insert ideological messaging into the questions (for progressives, a feature, not a bug). A teacher concerned with phronesis, by contrast, will put you in command of the Army of Northern Virginia in the summer of 1863 and ask you whether, without benefit of hindsight, you would have invaded Pennsylvania and why. But your answer won’t be right or wrong; it will be wise or foolish. It can’t be machine-graded. It won’t produce metrics the Department of Education or ambitious parents can use to evaluate your teachers and your school. A wise answer won’t help you get into Harvard.

What Hankins reveals here is the place of imagination in historical study—imagining what it was like. This is “the inside of history,” as Chesterton put it, in a phrase that might as well be one of the mottos of this blog.

Imagination is severely underrated as a component of historical study—largely owing to the discipline’s scientific pretensions since at least the late 19th century—but that imagination should have a role should be clear, since history began as a literary exercise, was written almost exclusively as narrative, and, among Greek and Roman historians, written with a literal audience in mind. (The big difference between your textbook and ancient historians, I tell my students, is that ancient historians read their work to a live audience and were thus obliged to be interesting.) The fathers of history wrote so that their audience could put themselves in the shoes of the people they wrote about.

Hankins’s insistence on phronesis and wisdom is also crucial, as these virtues are impossible without imagination. A certain kind of killjoy uses “imagination” (perhaps overactive, vivid, or simply big) as a putdown, but we all intuitively recognize imagination’s practical, prudential value when we criticize someone as “unimaginative.” We recognize this not merely as a lack of appreciation for movies or fiction, but as a moral weakness.

To put my point in negative form, unimaginative people can be many things, but they are never wise.

But I’m finally putting these thoughts into some kind of coherent form because of David McCullough. McCullough died Sunday aged 89, a great loss to readers and lovers of history. I haven’t read nearly as many of his books as I’d like, but I have, God willing, years to fix that, and I regret that we’ll have no more from him.

So it was with great interest that I read a blog post by Samuel James entitled “What David McCullough can teach us,” which several of y’all sent my way this week. Let me commend the whole post to you. It’s excellent. But I want to highlight one paragraph that will tie my ramblings together, and that helped me think through yet more concretely some of what Hankins set in motion.

James contrasts McCullough’s work with the modish Jesus and John Wayne, purportedly an historical exposé of the role toxic masculinity has played in the rise of evangelicalism (I’m old enough to remember when the real culprit was The Corporations), and the exvangelical crowd’s biggest hit in the last couple of years. In this book, James writes, its author “wanted me to see the subjects of her history the way she sees them, not as how they saw themselves. How they interpreted their lives and beliefs was of little consequence. How the generations after them interpreted them was everything. This is the kind of history that gets people angry and eager to deconstruct whatever they sense is tainted by moral failure.”

McCullough, on the other hand,

doesn’t do this. McCullough clearly has positive feelings about John Adams, George Washington, Harry Truman, etc. But these are not hagiographies. One of the most memorable parts of John Adams is the way that McCullough fleshes out Adams’s penchant for vanity and insecurity. This shows up throughout Adams’ life and in his presidency, including, crucially, the ill-chosen Alien and Sedition Acts (that all but dismantled his friendship with Thomas Jefferson). McCullough is up front and lucid about how Adams’ personal flaws came out in his relationships and his policy. But McCullough is also extremely careful about letting Adams, and especially Abigail, live these flaws out themselves. We come away feeling as if we know about Adams’ vanity the way we know about the vanity of a close friend or even a spouse: that particular way we process the failings and flaws of people we nonetheless believe in. To reach this point with a subject of a biography is not just a wonderful reading experience. It’s an exercise that strengthens a Christian’s moral imagination.

I can’t put it better than that.

David McCullough, writer and historian, a model for the engagement of the heart and the strengthening of the imagination in a discipline of the mind, RIP.

Virtue twisted

Siegfried’s death in a promotional still for Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924)

For the past several days I’ve been rereading the Nibelungenlied in Burton Raffel’s verse translation. This Middle High German epic, the story of the hero Siegfried, his marriage to Kriemhild and murder at the hands of her brother Gunther and his henchman Hagen, and her ruthlessly exacted revenge, is an adaptation of ancient Germanic legends for the age of chivalry. An earlier Norse version is preserved in The Saga of the Volsungs. But more on that below.

People rightly emphasize the roles of honor, vassalage, loyalty, and treachery when they look at the story of the Nibelungenlied. Knowing Siegfried’s fate from the beginning—the author makes heavy, Moby-Dick-style use of foreshadowing—it is easy to read Gunther, Hagen, and company as thoroughgoing villains, evil from the start. But what has struck me most on this reading are the admirable qualities of virtually everyone—at first. Even the awkward confrontation between Siegfried and Gunther’s court upon his arrival in Worms, when Siegfried greets the man whose sister he hopes to marry by asserting that he will take over his kingdom, is resolved without bloodshed. Game recognize game. Genuine friendship, celebration, and chivalrous and honorable victory over old enemies is the result.

Only later, when Gunther enlists Siegfried’s aid in a hopeless attempt to win Brunhild as his wife, do things start to go wrong. But what exactly, other than the famous hatred that erupts between Brunhild and Kriemhild, has gone wrong? And why do things continue worsening right up until the slaughter that ends the poem?

Here’s the passage that really got me reflecting, the opening quatrain of Adventure 16, “Wie Sîfrit erslagen wart”—How Siegfried was slain:

Usually bold, now brazen, Gunter and Hagen set
their treacherous trap, pretending a hunting trip to the woods.
Their knife-sharp spears were meant for boars and bears, they said,
and great-horned forest oxen. Clearly, these were courageous men!

“Usually bold, now brazen” is the half-line that caught my eye. It turns out to be Raffel’s gloss or amplification of the original (“Gunther und Hagene, || die réckén vil balt” is straightforwardly “Gunther and Hagen, the very bold knights”), but it neatly underscores the role of perverted—that is, twisted—virtue in the Nibelungenlied.

The villainy that runs through the poem runs through it from beginning to end, but only because the villainy morphs out of what begin as the characters’ virtues. When we meet them, Siegfried is powerful, courageous, and a loyal friend; Gunther is a generous and trusting (and trustworthy) lord and host; even Hagen’s bluntness is an asset. And all of them are mighty men, not only physically strong but vil balt, as they demonstrate over and over.

But these virtues, improperly subordinated, begin to twist and warp with the poem’s central act of deception—the winning of Brunhild. Gunther, like Siegfried, has heard of a beautiful and wealthy woman far away whom he desires to marry. Unlike Siegfried, Gunther has neither the confidence nor the abilities necessary to survive the warrior triathlon the superhuman Brunhild demands of all her suitors. And so he asks Siegfried for help, implying that he will allow Siegfried and Kriemhild to marry if he does. Once arrived in Brunhild’s kingdom, Siegfried pretends to be Gunther’s servant and dons his cloak of invisibility, beating Brunhild handily at all her games while Gunther pantomimes the actions required. An aggrieved Brunhild returns to Worms to be married to Gunther, and Siegfried and Kriemhild happily wed.

You can already see a downward spiral here, and, sure enough, this deception requires yet further deceptions—not only on Gunther’s embarrassing wedding night but for years to come. The heroes’ virtues buckle and twist under the pressure of their repeated bad choices until they become vices.

Thus Siegfried’s loyalty to Gunther and love for Kriemhild allow him both to exploit and to be exploited and end with him seeming, to us, hopelessly naïve, literally racing into the trap his enemies have set for him on that hunting trip. The prudent, generous, and courtly Gunther transforms into a cowed, easily swayed, guilt-ridden man willing to countenance murder to appease his wife. Kriemhild’s love for her dead husband leads her to abandon their son and to seek the utter destruction of her brothers’ kingdom. And Hagen’s intelligence and forthrightness twist into power-obsessed cunning and utilitarian cruelty. In the alchemy of the plot, boldness transmutes into brazenness and honor into brutality. The last casualty listed in the poem, even after Kriemhild herself has been struck down, is êre—honor.

The role of virtue, especially the destructive power of virtue twisted, is the thing that most substantially sets the Nibelungenlied apart from an earlier version like The Saga of the Volsungs. This stems from the circumstances of its composition. In The Mind of the Middle Ages, Frederick Artz describes how the anonymous author of the Nibelungenlied

worked over early Germanic legends and other tales about the Burgundians and the Huns of the fifth and sixth centuries and combined with these the style of chivalric romance newly introduced from France—a strange mixture. There is more here of court manners, of women, of love, and of Christian ideas than in Beowulf, the Norse stories, or the French chansons de geste. The poet was a man of genius and from these divergent materials he produced a masterpiece.

There is a lot to be said for this summary, but for the purposes of this post I want to concentrate on the role of “Christian ideas.” Where the Norse stories of Sigurð feature doom or fate, an unyielding destiny to which the heroes must conform and willingly surrender themselves when the time comes, the murders and climactic bloodbath of the Nibelungenlied are unambiguously the result of character and choice—of strong men and women whose virtues have been twisted out of shape by deception. pride, and hatred. This is a thoroughly and vibrantly imagined picture of a world that is itself twisted under the weight of sin.

The Nibelungenlied, viewed from this angle, can be taken as a thoroughly Christian synthesis of the old Germanic stories imbued throughout not with the fatalism of the Norns but with an understanding that the world is fallen and sin has tainted everything, even our virtues.

More if you’re interested

Raffel’s verse translation is good, not least since it is one of the only recent attempts to render the odd, complex verse of the original into an English equivalent. I first read the Nibelungenlied in AT Hatto’s prose translation for Penguin Classics, which is still worthwhile and has some good appendices. Most recently I read a new prose translation by William Whobrey for Hackett Publishing, which has more scholarly apparatus than either Raffel’s or Hatto’s and includes the Klage, a short sequel to the Nibelungenlied by another unknown poet.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Nibelungenlied, don’t rely on knowledge of the Volsungs or Wagner, both version of the story being quite different from this one, as I mentioned. You might check out this fun summary of the poem I discovered a few years ago, which reenacts the story 1) surprisingly thoroughly and 2) hilariously using Playmobil.

Old men shall dream dreams

Jacob’s Dream, by Jusepe de Ribera (1639)

Final exams have ended, final grades are in, and summer graduation was yesterday—a fast and busy capstone on a fast and busy semester.

Coincidental to completing and sharing my post on John Gardner’s “vivid and continuous fictional dream” last week, John Wilson had an interesting reflection on dreams and dreaming at First Things. He writes that, like me, he has had a peculiar “fascination” with dreaming since childhood and that, like me, on first encountering Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams he “digested his interpretations of dreams, and pronounced him ridiculous, a judgment I was never required to modify.” Hear hear.

What most interested me was the way Wilson, who is about twice my age, meditated on the way his dreaming has changed with the accumulation of years: he and his wife Wendy “seem to dream as much as we always have, so far as we can tell, but—as I reported—the quality of our dreaming is markedly inferior.”

And what are they like? He offers “a few mostly firsthand reports”:

It’s interesting that in my dreams, I am never old (nor am I very young). I honestly can’t remember even a single exception. Rather, I am an indeterminate age, neither “old” (as I am now in truth) nor “young” (as I once was). Wendy [Wilson’s wife] says much the same, though now and then she has a dream in which she is a girl. My dreams now tend to be much more fragmentary, less “well-shaped,” than they used to be; often I can hardly remember them when I wake up, whereas in the past I could often remember them in some detail. I do not have as many truly “good” dreams as I used to, but blessedly they do come now and then, leaving a sense of great felicity and thankfulness.

There is more in this fun, thoughtful reflection (fun and thoughtful are the chief characteristics of most of Wilson’s writing, an admirable combination), and you should definitely read it. Having so recently written about the writer’s quest to create, to craft—with meticulous and exacting hard work—a fictional dream in the mind of the reader, Wilson’s piece turned me toward my own dreams. For whomever is interested (“we all know that sinking feeling when someone is about to recount a dream to us,” Wilson writes), I thought I’d work out a few firsthand reports of my own.

My own interest in dreams originates in personal experience. As long as I can remember, I have dreamed vividly and often, pretty much every night. I still remember a few from very early childhood quite palpably—probably because, like a good fictional dream, they included good sensory details to assure my mind that this is really happening.

Though I had nightmares often enough as a kid, I never experienced sleep terrors or sleepwalking, though my brother and sister did. I have also never experienced sleep paralysis and can only remember ever having one lucid dream.

Like Wilson, I’ve had a few dreams come true, though never any of consequence—though the accurately foretold death of my favorite goldfish hit pretty hard when I was ten.

Also: A song that used to play on our local Christian music station, late at night when I was trying to go to sleep (see below), paused between stanzas for a quotation from the Book of Acts: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” Your old men shall dream dreams, among the most poetically rich and eerie lines ever written, has stuck with me ever since.

While I’ve never been an outright insomniac, I have often struggled to sleep. Dreaming seldom helps. As I’ve aged, I’ve dreamt more and more; while I know it’s an illusion, it sometimes feels as though I’ve dreamt all night and I wake up exhausted.

I have occasionally thought of keeping a dream journal. I never have because it would be too time-consuming.

That feeling of exhaustion, of having worked at something all night, occurs irrespective of what happens in the dreams. I seldom have real nightmares. When I was a kid, an episode of “The Real Ghostbusters” inspired one recurring one, and I had a few in high school and college that involved moments of pure, horrifying epiphany, which ended in trying to release a scream for which I could never have mustered enough breath. The last time I remember a movie or book affecting my dreams was in college, when reading Flags of our Fathers for a historiography project made me dream that I was walking around campus with my right arm blown off. The nightmares I have nowadays are exclusively about failing to protect my children.

But more often, my “bad” dreams are either work, or getting some concept stuck in an endlessly repeating loop—like a conversation that keeps coming back to the same thing, like one bar of a tune or half a line of a pop sung stuck in the head. When Sarah asks how I slept after a night like this, I always call it “busy busy busy.” Other times I dream of catastrophic disruptions to our household: flooding, storm damage, black mold, ineradicable weeds (that is, weeds), and, in one particularly vivid dream, fire ants fountaining out of the floor of our master bedroom, streaming clean through the carpet. One thing that hasn’t changed in the form of my dreams is that horrifying moment of epiphany I described above.

Back to the struggle to sleep. Getting hot makes me dream. So does having to go to the bathroom. So does soft ambient light shining on my face. (Once during college the blanket I had hung over my bunk fell during the night, and I woke from bad dreams to the soft green glow of the power button of my roommate’s desktop, beaming onto my face like a searchlight in the dark.) It is a commonplace in my family that the phase of the moon affects our dreams. It used to be full moons that had the starkest effects, but now, nearing forty, I seems to be full moons and new moons and most of the phases in between. I’m less sure of its role, now, but a full moon is still a virtual guarantee of weird dreams.

Did I mention I didn’t sleep well last week?

Regarding form: My dreams are rarely long narratives. More often they are snapshot moments with the backstory somehow built into my consciousness of that moment. Often they affect me deeply, though not necessarily negatively, and take a while to dissipate when I wake. This is despite often staggering absurdity. I woke the other night dreaming that a self-checkout card machine had declined a purchase with the onscreen note “It appears you have no money left.” This was the night after payday, and I nevertheless spent a while tossing and turning, fighting the urge to check my balances on my phone.

But every once in a while I have a continuous dream, which doesn’t have a story so much as an improvisatory complexity, continuously and spasmodically uncoiling into new phases that seem in the moment to relate to each other but disintegrate like a sandcastle under the high tide of waking.

Another recent one: There was a noted haunted house on my campus (which wasn’t really my campus). I and a colleague, a presence as indeterminate and generic as Wilson’s age in his dreams, opened the trap door into the tunnel with the intention of investigating but had to go away for something. Here there was an interval explaining the history of this house as the model home for some kind of old development planned by a famous industrialist. When we returned, students were lounging around the trapdoor and had broken the rungs off the ladder leading down. I reamed them out—something I would never do in real life and that stressed me out in the dream. We entered, climbed up into the haunted house (haunted houses apparently not having front doors), and on a second-floor landing I started hand cranking a Victrola-like record player that emitted either 1) old music or 2) the voices of the dead. It wasn’t even clear during the dream.

And it went on from there. Absurd in toto, but moment by moment real and believable and important and absurd. This is where my nights mostly muddle along, in dreams of this quality, much of the night (or so it feels).

All of which has influenced my artistic sensibilities about dreaming. I have a “writing notes” post on crafting dreams in fiction (as opposed to Gardner’s fictional dream) that I’ve been fiddling with for a year or so. Realistic, effective dreams in fiction are short, hard-hitting, emotionally simple but thematically complex. Here’s one I believe 100%, from eight hundred years ago:

Living surrounded by splendor Krimhild dreamed a dream:
she had trained a falcon, glorious, strong-winged, fierce, and wild,
and a pair of eagles tore it apart in front of her eyes.
No pain, no sorrow in all the world could be worse than what she’d seen.

That’s from the very first “Adventure” or canto of the Nibelungenlied, and turns out to be prophetic. I believe and accept this dream totally, as I do some of Winston’s pained dreams of Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four or Sheriff Bell’s dream at the end of No Country for Old Men. I do not believe or accept the long, complicated, coherent dreams, heavy on dialogue and obvious symbolism, of Robert Jordan’s Eye of the World.

Let me conclude with good dreams. Like Wilson, for me these are rarer and a real mercy when they come along, shining out in the middle of a crowd of busywork, annoyingly repetitive dreams, bad dreams, and a scattering of nightmares. They mostly have to do with home, or family. Contentment and relief are a recurring theme. Stillness is their motif. Here’s one for which I only changed the names and location (and century) before importing it into Griswoldville:

A dream worth recording last night: I was at home—both here and at the farm where I grew up, as is the manner of dreams—of an evening. I sat on the porch in the quiet watching the sunset and the younger children playing in the yard beside the shade tree, and was somehow aware of a get-together going on in the house. Eliza was there, and all our children, and James and Jefferson and Bit and their children, even Fayette. What is more, my mother and father were there, not as ghosts but as I recall them from my childhood, before the war, far younger than myself now—and finally my grandfather. After a time he came out of the house where the sound of cheer and fellowship was going on and joined me on the porch. We sat in the rockers Eliza and I used to rest in of an evening. It was, in the dream, not that strange that he should be there with us, these generations gathered from the quick and the dead of the better part of a century, but I nonetheless sat shamefaced for a time. For as long as I have missed him, as long as I have had to live without him, I could not now—with him here, with all the evening before us to converse and commiserate—find anything to say. Such, once or twice a decade ever since the war, have been my dreams of him. This one seemed no different, until at last he, seeming to know my thoughts, patted me on the shoulder with his warm earth-smelling hand and chuckled in his old raspy laugh, a sound I recall as if it were yesterday. My shame lifted in an instant.

The narrator, Georgie Wax, is an old man dreaming dreams. That’ll be me soon enough. I pray they are mostly good and restful ones.

If you overmastered that “sinking feeling” Wilson so aptly described and put up with me, the “tedious person” from my post on the fictive dream, thank you for reading. This won’t be my last reflection on dreams and dreaming. Perhaps soon I’ll dust off that note on crafting dreams in fiction.

Notes on the fictive dream

John Gardner (1933-82)

After mentioning James Dickey’s Deliverance here last week, I decided it was finally time to reread it. I’m glad I did. Not only is it a great and challenging story—both harrowing and rich, absolutely dripping with menace and meaning—Dickey wrote it brilliantly. Rereading proved not only enjoyable but instructive.

When I read Deliverance, both twelve years ago and last week, I was absorbed. Utterly. Each time I finished a chapter I felt as though I were not simply setting a book aside but returning to the real world, like swimming up from a deep green pool in the Cahulawassee. And if you regularly read this blog, you might recognize that I’ve had this rare experience several times this year. I’ll return to the other books that have given me this sensation, but Deliverance is the one that got me thinking more specifically and precisely about this feeling. How did Dickey achieve it?

I don’t like calling stories “immersive,” since dunking something isn’t particularly hard, and instead prefer older terms of praise like “involving,” “engaging,” and especially “absorbing” that suggest the work behind creating such a state. The image of absorption works particularly well for a good story; like a sponge taking in water, a good story absorbs the reader’s imagination quickly and gives it shape and color (and, if you have one in mind, a purpose), and can hold onto it quite a long time. But there’s an even better metaphor for the writer’s goal.

The dream

The effect I’ve been describing here is what John Gardner called “the fictional dream” or “the fictive dream,” and creating a fictive dream was for him the ultimate, overriding goal of the fiction writer. In The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, Gardner gives one of his most detailed explanations of the fictive dream:

The most important single notion in the theory of fiction I have outlined—essentially the traditional theory of our civilization’s literature—is that of the vivid and continuous fictional dream. According to this notion, the writer sets up a dramatized action in which we are given the signals that make us “see” the setting, characters, and events; that is, he does not tell us about them in abstract terms, like an essayist, but gives us images that appeal to our senses—preferably all of them, not just the visual sense—so that we seem to move among the characters, lean with them against the fictional walls, taste the fictional gazpacho, smell the fictional hyacinths. In bad or unsatisfying fiction, this fictional dream is interrupted from time to time by some mistake or conscious ploy on the part of the artist. We are abruptly snapped out of the dream, forced to think of the writer or the writing.

The goal: create a dream. The two guiding principles: vividness and continuity. These are important for the writer first. Elsewhere in The Art of Fiction, Gardner describes the way a writer, when everything is going well, becomes so enraptured by the dream he is creating that he becomes unconscious of the physical process of writing. The writer can’t depend on these moments to come, of course, but when they strike they are important: not only for the writer, who “when the dream flags . . . can reread what he’s written and find the dream starting up again,” but, once the story is finished, for the reader. The dream is contagious.

Waking the dreamer

But in this post, and as a result of experiencing several such fictive dreams this year, I’m more concerned with the dream created on the reader’s end—which is the decisive end. If the dream doesn’t work here, the story will fail on some level. Possibly totally.

The long passage from The Art of Fiction above introduces a chapter called “Common Errors” in which Gardner outlines a number of ways the writer can inadvertently awaken the reader from the dream. Among them:

• Lack of concrete detail (the fundamental requirement for vividness according to Gardner)

• Abstraction instead of specificity or concreteness

• Basic mechanical mistakes or overreliance on weak sentence structures (e.g. passive voice, participle phrases)

• Faulty, distracting, or inappropriate diction

• Needless explanation or “cloddishly awkward insertion of details”

• “Faults of soul,” i.e. in the attitude of the writer toward his subjects, including the opposing extremes of frigidity and sentimentality

Fiction characterized by these errors only ever works in spite of them. Avoiding these errors—which, again, are common—is partly a matter of taste and instinct, but also a matter of discipline: of the training of the writer’s taste and instinct and most especially the discipline of sharp-eyed and exacting revision. The writer needs his tastes and instincts trained in order to notice these errors and be unsatisfied until they’ve been corrected; he needs discipline to actually do it, and to continue the training that will sharpen his eye and his craft.

But if these are the ways in which the writer, as a builder of dreams, can fail, how can he succeed? This is both easier and more difficult to say. The best answer is to learn by example.

Exempli gratia—four good dreams

One of the things I’ve appreciated most about Gardner’s Art of Fiction, as well as On Becoming a Novelist, which is also excellent, is the way he both sets stringent standards for writers of fiction and refuses to give hard and fast rules about writing. His counsels are demanding but flexible. What matters is constructing the vivid and continuous fictive dream, and any rule that stands in the way of creating that dreamlike state must bow to this greater purpose.

This flexibility of means can be seen clearly in the books I mentioned near the beginning of this post. These are the novels I’ve read this year that created exactly the kind of fictive dream Gardner describes, that totally absorbed me into their dreams, that vividly and continuously sustained their dreams to the point that I really felt as though I were waking up when I set them aside. They were:

• Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy—A searing highbrow postmodern Western about American scalphunters in Mexico in the early 19th century. Bleak, often accused of nihilism. Third person, told in what Gardner would call a “mannered” style.

• John Macnab, by John Buchan—An adventure novel in which well-to-do politicians challenge themselves to poach deer and salmon in the Scottish highlands without getting caught despite telling the landowners what they intend to do. Serious and suspenseful but fundamentally lighthearted, appreciative of the outdoors, and life-affirming. (Full review here.) Third person, unflashy but rock solid diction.

• Sick Heart River, by John Buchan—An adventure novel in which one of the characters from John Macnab sets out on a final adventure in the Canadian wilderness following a terminal diagnosis. (Full review here.) Elegiac and melancholy, meditative, deeply but not obviously religious. Third person, with passages of first person presented as found documents.

• Deliverance, by James Dickey—A survival novel about a bunch of middle class suburban businessmen and their ill-fated canoe trip through the north Georgia mountains, during which the narrator must shed the trappings of civilization in order to survive. Both introspective and physical, beautiful and shocking. First person, lushly and poetically descriptive (but never purple).

Despite a shared vague outdoor adventure motif, these novels differ quite strikingly from each other, and their authors’ sensibilities diverge even more sharply than their stories. So after finishing Deliverance, I reflected on what these four actually had in common, writing-wise, that made them so totally absorbing.

First, there are the essentials of fiction:

• Masterful control of the language; no mechanical errors whatsoever regardless of style.

• Good characters vividly realized regardless of the size of the cast (from Deliverance, which has four central characters and only a handful of others, few of whom appear in more than one scene or even have names; to John Macnab, which has dozens of named characters).

• Solid, well-constructed plots with interesting complications. (Possible exception: Blood Meridian, which is more of an open-ended quest as befits a story based on real life, however loosely, but never feels directionless.)

• Related: good pacing, introducing the story quickly and steadily escalating in intensity. Buchan is exceptionally skilled at this, though Deliverance is the most obvious example to read for this technique.

As I said, these are essential to all good fiction, but it is possible to have these without conjuring the vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind as these four novels did. So what distinguishes these four from others I’ve read that had the same mastery of the fundamentals but not their powerful dreamlike quality? I kept returning to the following four traits:

• In narration, not only error-free mechanical control of the language but a musicality and tone that complemented the story. This is what the poetry of Deliverance, the byzantine and operatic diction of Blood Meridian, and the strong, straightforward narration of Buchan’s novels have in common despite all their superficial differences. Their narrative voice—regardless of perspective—creates atmosphere.

• Carefully and precisely described action. Throughout these novels, all of which feature complex dramatic action, often with multiple sets of characters operating parallel to or at odds with each other (e.g. the scalphunters’ pursuit by Indians at multiple points in Blood Meridian; the converging of friends, hostile gamekeepers, and others on the poachers in John Macnab; the terrible wait for help during Deliverance’s rape scene), the action remains comprehensible. The reader is never left trying to figure out what’s happening, who is doing what, or what he’s supposed to be seeing.

• Precisely described sensory details. When Gardner writes above that the writer should engage the senses, “preferably all of them,” he could have been writing with these novels in mind. The reader feels the heat of the desert and recoils from the noise and smell of combat and gore in Blood Meridian; he labors for breath in the snow alongside the protagonist of Sick Heart River; and, most vividly for me, having experienced this firsthand back home, he feels the chill and damp of the river in Deliverance and the otherworldly coolness and lightness of his own flesh after stepping out onto solid ground again.

• Last, most obviously and strikingly—and, I think, most importantly for the sake of the fictive dream—a pervasive, uninterrupted, sensuous, tactile sense of place. The geography of these books, their authors’ descriptions of location, are among the best I’ve ever read.

I think setting may be the most important of these for three reasons. First, in our own experiences of actual nighttime dreams you’ll have noticed that when you or some tiresome person (me, all too often) insists on describing a dream you usually begin by setting the scene: “I was in the airport, sort of” or “I was at church, but not really” or “I was in the hallway at school and then…” This should make clear to us the fundamental role of setting in storytelling, even the literally unconscious kind.

Second, by way of a negative example, I’ve noticed that poorer quality fiction—not only obviously bad airport thrillers and ponderous wannabe literary fiction but even otherwise clever, inventive novels—suffer from a lack of a sense of place. When a novel tries to get by on its action, theme, or ideas without dramatizing them in a believable place, the dream it creates will fail either the vividness or the continuousness test—if it creates a fictive dream at all.

Third, setting unites all of the other points in that bullet list: it provides the scene of the action, many of the sensory specifics, and, through the way the author describes it, a great deal of the atmosphere of the story.

And atmosphere is everything in a dream. It’s the difference between a sweet dream and a nightmare.

The life blood of fiction

You’ll have noticed that my four major points above overlap pretty generously. If you imagine them as a Venn diagram—four circles labeled The Language or The Atmosphere, The Action, The Sensory, and The Setting—the point at which all four overlap could be labelled The Details.

As I mentioned near the beginning of this post, the details are, for Gardner, the fundamental element in creating the vivid and continuous fictive dream. From earlier in The Art of Fiction:

In all the major genres, vivid detail is the life blood of fiction. Verisimilitude, suspension of disbelief through narrative voice, or the wink that calls attention to the yarn-teller’s lie may be the outer strategy of a given work; but in all major genres, the inner strategy is the same: The reader is regularly presented with proofs—in the form of closely observed details—that what is said to be happening is really happening.

This doubles as a pretty good description of dreaming.

Again, one of the hallmarks of Gardner’s teaching on writing is his steadfast avoidance of ironclad rules. Notice that he does not say how much detail the writer should include—a vexatious point. That’s where the writer’s training in taste and artistic sensibility should come in. The rules can be bent or even broken according to the well-trained writer’s judgement; what matters is whether it helps create and sustain the fictive dream. Hence Gardner’s reference to the writer’s “outer” and “inner” strategies above. The outer can differ dramatically from author to author and even from book to book—which is the point of my examination of those four novels—but the inner must not deviate from the goal outlined by Gardner.

The writer ignores Gardner’s advice at his own peril. If you’d like to see the results, there are plenty of bad books out there. But if you want to know how well the conception of fiction as dream can work, or why and how the books that have affected you most strongly—the books that absorbed you—did so, I recommend any of the four novels that prompted this post.

They absorbed me, to my great benefit and enjoyment. I hope they’ll do the same for you.

More if you’re interested

I call longish posts like this one “writing notes,” and I do them as much to work through aspects of craft for myself as I do for anyone who may chance to read them. If you’ve stuck with me this long, I hope you’ve found these reflections helpful. I’ve written briefly about Gardner and the use of details before, in this post about vividly realized minor characters. If you’d like an example of how faulty, unimaginative diction in the form of weak verbs can fatally wound the fictive dream, you can read about that here.

Finally, Gardner himself is worth your while. Check out The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist if you have any interest at all in the craft of writing fiction (and On Moral Fiction if you have any interest in what good fiction should do). And while they’re vanishingly rare online, interviews with Gardner are like a splash of icewater to the face. Here’s a good one from the mid-1970s in which the interviewer can’t quite bring himself to believe that Gardner means what he says.

Y'all. OMG. Not okay. I can't even.

This short piece from Kit Wilson says a lot of what I’ve been thinking about the shallowness and especially the infantilization of modern political discourse for a long time, and much more.

Have you noticed that strange new verbal tic going around: that everything we once considered “wrong” or “evil” is now simply “not okay”?

Spend an hour online and you’ll see what I mean. Overturning Roe v Wade was “not okay”. Church sex abuse scandals are “not okay”. Body-shaming is definitely “not okay”. The more somebody disapproves of something, the more “not okay” it is—perhaps warranting a firm “Not Okay” or even, under exceptional circumstances, “NOT OKAY”.

Yes, I have noticed. He also invokes “Normalize X” and “Do better” (both, tellingly, imperatives) from the nearly infinite supply of available clichés.

Welcome to the new, strange, mealy-mouthed vocabulary of true emotivism. All of the above, you’ll notice, deliberately avoid communicating any kind of moral content whatsoever—they could, indeed, be talking about anything. It’s “not okay” to jaywalk in certain American cities. I can “normalise” a snazzy new hairstyle. You can “do better” at throwing socks into your clothes basket blindfolded.

Wilson’s piece is not only funny but insightful. He chalks this decay in our language up to the triumph of ethical emotivism, to the hollowing out of the idea of objective moral truths that can be invoked, argued about, and even occasionally agreed upon. Believing that all ethical judgments are “mere personal preferences” eliminates the ability to talk about good and evil, right and wrong, truth and lies, and leaves one attempting instead to impute negative connotations or “emotional association[s]” from one concept to another (as in “such-and-such is violence”), a sloppy process, or to dig through the pockets of dead ideologies looking for useful rhetorical bludgeons (as in “fascist,” every time). The result is,

perhaps, a more appropriate form of morality for an age in which we no longer believe we have souls, but like to think of ourselves as rational biological computers. Notice that “not okay”, as the negative form of “okay”, suggests a binary switch that can only ever be on or off—just as there are only two options between legal and illegal, acceptable and unacceptable, or permissible and impermissible. We reduce the messiness of morality to simple 1s and 0s. It isn’t surprising that our behaviour towards one another follows suit. People are simply “okay”, or they aren’t. And if they are “not okay”, that’s the one strike—they’re out.

Wilson invokes AJ Ayer, logical positivist, as one of the roots of this trend, and Alasdair MacIntyre and Elizabeth Anscombe as important but unsuccessful countervailing forces.

I think there’s a lot to this, and you should certainly read Wilson’s piece. But I also think there a lot of other, simpler culprits. I’ve already used the word infantilization. You could also call it memeification. It used to be called shallow, dumbed down, childish. I recall the time someone I know called an argument against certain gun control measures “weak sauce.” In all caps. And I’m struck that the people I’ve most often seen lament “adulting” are the most vitriolic in their reaction to Dobbs.

Memeified discourse is marked by (simultaneously) sloppiness and staggering oversimplification, expressed through the most ephemeral, unserious, and substance-free set of formulae and clichés on offer. Being bite-sized, it lends itself readily to incantatory repetition and achieves through repetition—the blunt force trauma of argument—what actual reasoning can’t. And it is almost always purely declaratory and often hyperbolically emotional, as in the title of this post.

Let me offer both an aside and an example: Y’all. My dialect is not your slang. #culturalappropriation

Repeat ad nauseam.

This is the language of memes, but it was the language of AOL Instant Messenger, and talk radio, and televised presidential debates, and bumper stickers, and the commercial before that. Did Ayer and emotivism cause the rise of not-okayese, or simply prepare the minds of people to be degraded by technological developments like Twitter? Probably both, with a host of other contributing factors like laziness, as a generalized sloppiness of rhetoric and argument is useful cover for both bad ideas and bad thinkers, who thrive upon imprecision.

Final notes:

Here I have to invoke Orwell again, specifically his remarks on carelessness of thought and language: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” I blogged about this long ago here.

And the results of Ayer’s approach to ethics, framing ethical judgements as nonbinding statements of preference, were anticipated if not outright predicted in CS Lewis’s critique of The Green Book, his lectures published as The Abolition of Man.

You can read all of Wilson’s excellent short essay at The Critic here.

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.