Entertaining hypotheticals

Dakin Matthews as Colonel Stonehill in True Grit

The Coen brothers’ adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel True Grit hews very closely to the source material, with the dialogue often coming from the novel verbatim. But one of my favorite lines is a Coen creation, inserted seamlessly into Mattie Ross’s haggling with Colonel Stonehill, licensed auctioneer, cotton factor.

When Stonehill insists that he is not liable to Mattie’s family for a horse stolen from his stables, Mattie argues, “You were the custodian. If you were a bank and were robbed you could not simply tell the depositors to go hang.”

Stonehill replies with this immortal line:

“I do not entertain hypotheticals, the world as it is is vexing enough.”

I have used this line many, many times in the classroom. I commend it to other history teachers.

Entertaining hypotheticals, musing over What ifs, is the great trap of historical study. Leaving behind the already “vexing” question of what actually happened to pursue imaginary alternate histories based on decisions never made, accidents that never happened, or outcomes that one would simply prefer—this is almost always a waste of time. Such histories are fundamentally unknowable precisely because they never happened. Per the late Kenneth Minogue:

“The future is largely inscrutable; indeed we may count ourselves exceptionally fortunate if we acquire much of an understanding of the past.”

Stick just with what happened and you’ll be busy the rest of your life.

Alternate history can, however, be fun. During a sick day this week I started Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland, which takes place in Berlin in 1964, but a 1964 in which Nazi Germany won World War II and the city is preparing to celebrate Hitler’s 75th birthday. And it’s a great novel—an engaging, well-paced, suspenseful, carefully imagined mystery thriller. Harris has done his research and made this setting as plausible and as deeply rooted in reality as it can possibly be.

But there are the nagging details—foremost among them, how likely is it that Hitler, whose health was disintegrating by 1944, could have lived to the age of 75? (Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle does this slightly better, since Hitler is dead and Martin Bormann is the Führer by the time that one begins.)

This is less of a problem for a mystery thriller, of course. But then some people play the hypothetical game in deadly earnest. Yesterday, yet another Instagram story from a hugely popular law, government, and history “explainer” who bills herself as “American’s Government Teacher” came my way. Writing to celebrate a flute solo at the Library of Congress as a significant moment in American racial politics, the author attacks James Madison thus:

He was one of the reasons we have something called the 3/5 compromise, which permitted people who owned other humans to count them as 3/5 of a person in an effort to increase their political power.

Without the 3/5 compromise, slavery would have ended at least 60 years before it did.

Ignore the fact that the Three-Fifths Compromise was effectively stricken from the Constitution by the 13th and 14th Amendments, so that this should read “we had something called the 3/5 compromise;” that who exactly benefited from the compromise was hotly debated then and is, among honest historians, hotly debated now; and that the compromise did not assert that certain unspecified people were only “3/5 of a person” but stipulated that only three-fifths of their total population would count toward apportioning congressmen. This last is a self-congratulatory, politically useful, and therefore ineradicable myth, but a myth nonetheless.

No, ignore all that. Look at the “would have” in the second part. Whether slavery would have ended in 1805 as opposed to 1865 is unknowable. There is no way of knowing whether this is true, because it did not happen. This is pure speculation—an uninformed, irresponsible hypothetical. And the true story, God knows, is vexing enough.

So much for being an “explainer,” but keep celebrating that flute.

If you must entertain hypotheticals, think of it as a parlor game, or a delicate fictional trick that should only be attempted by a master craftsman. Otherwise, Col Stonehill’s advice should serve us all well.

Whither 007?

James Bond pauses to reflect in Scotland’s Glen Etive in Skyfall (2012)

It’s been a little less than a year since Daniel Craig’s final performance as James Bond arrived, and thanks to an interview with the Bond series’ producers in Variety, 007 was briefly back in the news this week. So, much like Bond in the final act of Skyfall, I’m cleaning house. The following is a grab-bag of thoughts on the future of the Bond film series, most of which I’ve been mulling over since No Time to Die came out last fall.

The search for a new Bond

The Variety piece in question is based on an interview with Eon Productions heads Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson and primarily concerns the hunt for Craig’s replacement.

Naturally, since internet memes now rule the world, it takes only two paragraphs for Idris Elba to come up. Variety calls him a “long-time Bond candidate” when it would be more accurate to say “a Twitter favorite,” but Broccoli and Wilson are noncommittal. In what they must have known would be seized upon by the purveyors of clickbait, they say only “He’s great. . . . We love Idris.” Sure enough, this is what got Bond back in the public eye for about five minutes. But given the way movie studios and film producers intentionally stir the pot for publicity now, this may have been the whole point of the interview.

Elba is a talented, imposing actor with great natural gravitas. (I wish he’d had more time to inject a little reality back into “The Office,” for example.) But he’s inappropriate for Bond. The character as created by Ian Fleming is a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed, Anglo-Scottish-French man. Invoke diversity and all the other usual bromides, but all literary characters must have some immutable properties and traits. Change too many of them, reduce the character to a name that you can apply to whatever set of fashionable traits you like, and you give away that what you’re talking about is a brand, not a character.

The satanic temptation of treating art as “content” is the endlessly interchangeable parts. Call Bond the Spy of Theseus.

Most of the rest of the Variety interview is pap. I’m not sure how seriously to take a lot of what Broccoli and Wilson say; they’re old pros, having inherited the Bond franchise from their father, and they know how to say what people want to hear even if it doesn’t make sense. For instance:

Both Wilson and Broccoli, who is a director of the U.K. chapter of women’s advocacy org Time’s Up, have left their mark on Bond, particularly in humanizing the once-womanizing spy and ensuring more fulfilling, meatier roles for the female stars of the franchise. These are qualities that will continue in the next films, says Broccoli.

“It’s an evolution,” she says. “Bond is evolving just as men are evolving. I don’t know who’s evolving at a faster pace.”

Pardon me, but I thought womanizing was a human quality. And there’s the standard pablum about men “evolving.” This is content-free rhetoric.

I’ve been thinking about this more deeply for a while, especially since reading this humorous but incisive piece by James Lileks written during virtually the same tedious, self-congratulatory debates about race-lifting and gender-swapping and other “reimaginings” a year ago. Here Lileks reflects on the evolution Broccoli invokes above:

The old days of swank Bond are long gone. The modern series is worthy; Daniel Craig has an unruffled precision that summons up the classic Bond, and he adds a bit more steel than Connery had. But for the rest of our days we will have an endless debate about whether Bond should be a woman next, or black, or both, or biracial and gender-fluid. Their name’s Bxnd. Jxmxs Bxnd.

(As a measure of how predictable these controversies are, I remembered Lileks’s piece as coming in response to all the “non-binary Bond” clickbait last year. But that story broke after Broccoli—remember that bit about saying things people want to hear?—floated the idea on a podcast in December, and Lileks wrote this two months earlier.)

More constructively, Lileks has an answer both to the question of changing Bond’s race (“The answer is, of course, no. That would be Scottish erasure”) and the implicit question of diversifying stories like the Bond series, the answer I’ve been shouting for years: “Another British secret agent who’s not a white male would be fine. They just can’t use the Bond inheritance. Make someone new! We’ll watch.”

Yes! Create your own things! That’s how we got Indiana Jones. And where would the fantasy genre be if everyone insisted on endlessly repurposing Tolkien’s creations rather than coming up with their own? (Okay, bad example. But the point stands.)

Of course, creating your own things requires creativity, and in our age of envy, fanfic, and Melkor-like vandalism everyone wants to control but not to make. As Lileks puts it, “The old characters have to be remade by a form of cultural parasitism that burrows into the host and consumes it completely.”

Let’s hope something survives. In the meantime, those of you who can, be creating new things.

Learning from Craig

Lileks is right about Craig’s “unruffled precision” and his “bit more steel than Connery,” who had quite a lot of steel. But revisiting his essay, I couldn’t help but connect it to this other comment from the Variety interview:

With [Craig], when we had the conversation at this very table about, you know, [whether he was] going to do it, he said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it. I really want to be a part of it, the whole thing.’ And he lived to regret that,” says Broccoli with a burst of laughter.

When Craig was committed to the part, his Bond was fantastic. I rank Casino Royale and Skyfall in my top five Bond films. But he quite publicly struggled with caring about the character and somnambulated through Spectre, which has scenes in which he visibly doesn’t give a crap. (Watch this scene. Imagine the panache Connery or Moore could have brought to the sly salute Bond gives the villains. Now compare everything Craig does in the plane to how well he sells annoyance at the beginning of the scene.)

Broccoli and Wilson act lighthearted about it, but it appears—and one certainly hopes—that Craig has taught them that they need to convey what a huge commitment the role is, and that they will look for someone who doesn’t treat it with contempt after three films.

More seriously for both the series and its individual movies, I think the continuity built into Craig’s films, most especially through Mr White and Madeleine Swann, was a mistake. Departing from the series’ historically episodic structure overcomplicated the stories, required a more casual audience to remember who characters like Mr White were, and led to the unconvincing, tone-deaf love story that No Time to Die relied upon for its emotional power. This also retroactively cheapened Bond and Vesper Lynd’s relationship in Casino Royale, as well as undermining the transformation Bond undergoes at the end of that story.

I felt something of this when I reviewed No Time to Die but I believe it firmly now. With the standard exceptions of recurring characters, Bond’s status as a hardened veteran, and just two women—Vesper Lynd and Tracy Bond—everything else should be episodic, with each film standing alone. This was the model from Connery onward and both makes the series easier and more fun to watch and—if you need to go deeper—reflects the way Bond actually lives his life.

Finally, stripped-down, lower-stakes stories may be in order. Part of the appeal of Casino Royale was its grounded feel: an international crook screws up, loses an African warlord’s money, and is trying to get it back before anyone notices. By the end of the Craig run we have murderous DNA-reading nanobots spreading across the world via rocket. The series has laudably stayed true to its tradition of good action, real stunts, and practical effects where possible, but scaling the threats back can only help the next man to don 007’s tuxedo and shoulder holster.

My contenders

Everyone has their list of actors they’d like to see as the next James Bond. Since everyone’s doing it, here are mine.

For years—ever since I gave up on Clive Owen, my go-to imaginary Bond in college—my favorite for the part has been Michael Fassbender. I’ve thought this for a decade now, ever since he put on a tuxedo to go undercover with Gina Carano in Haywire—which is also an excellent example of the kind of no-frills, small-scale, but well crafted spy movie the Bond franchise would do well to learn from. Fassbender is how I imagine Fleming’s Bond, matching him closely in appearance as well as carrying himself with the kind of simultaneously attractive and scary attitude that Fleming describes. He can do action, he radiates intelligence and hidden depths, and can be both charming and menacing at the same time.

However, he is only five years younger than the much-ballyhooed Elba, so unless he were to crank out a movie every other year I doubt his tenure would result in many movies. Alas for my imagination, Fassbender’s time may have passed.

I’ve seen a lot of other proposed Bonds on the internet, and, cutting through the trolling and I-dare-you-to-object candidates, a few good options include Dan Stevens, who did a marvelous Casino Royale audiobook reading, and Henry Cavill, who was misused as Superman but exuded a lot of Bond-like charm in The Man from UNCLE. He’s also only 39, so that decade that Broccoli and Wilson are demanding of their next Bond would be easier on him.

The only other serious candidate I’ve mentally entertained is Tom Hiddleston, who is apparently another internet favorite for the part. I’ve been open to the idea since watching “The Night Manager,” based on a novel by the anti-Fleming, John le Carré. Hiddleston is smooth, charming, and intelligent in that series but also convincingly tough. His Bond would be lighter than Fassbender’s, which is also where the challenge for a Hiddleston Bond would lie: Hiddleston is a very, very funny man—probably one of the traits that gives him such precise timing as an actor—and that wit and comedic sensibility would have to remain securely in its proper place. Letting it run wild would turn a Hiddleston Bond into late-70s Roger Moore self-parody.

But who knows? If the search goes anything like the one that landed Craig in the role, we’ll never predict the final choice.

A modest proposal

In their interview with Variety, Broccoli and Wilson emphasize that the Bond series is and will remain theatrical, seemingly ruling out any kind of streaming series for Bond. I was glad to read this and support their position completely.

But…

If they want to carry on with Bond as a theatrical film franchise and dip their toes into prestige TV, streaming or not, I’ve thought for several years now that Ian Fleming’s Bond short stories, collected in For Your Eyes Only and the posthumous Octopussy, would make an excellent limited series.

As I noted in my essay on Fleming last year, the Bond short stories are among Fleming’s best work and are each expertly crafted little masterpieces. They are set in numerous interesting locations—the Caribbean, unsurprisingly, but also the Alps, the Seychelles, the mountains of Vermont, downtown Manhattan, the border of divided Berlin—and vary dramatically in form, tone, style, and genre. It’s an anthology series just waiting to be made.

Set them in their original mid-1950s to early 1960s period, keep them faithful to the source material—complete with the callousness and the seventy Morland cigarettes a day—and craft each as a standalone 60-90 minute episode, and I think they would not only play well for audiences but breathe some fresh life into the character by putting him back in touch with his origins. Everything old becomes new again.

For what it’s worth, it’s this idea in which I’ve most clearly seen Hiddleston as Bond (perhaps because he read the excellent audiobook version of Octopussy), but if they wanted to get really experimental with it they could change the casting from episode to episode. Or perhaps the strengths I pointed out in Fassbender above could be put to use here, as the aging World War II veteran of Fleming’s later novels.

Just a thought. Though I’m always open to receiving a finder’s fee.

Orbis non sufficit

Why does any of this matter? It probably doesn’t, except insofar as it reflects how and why people tell and enjoy stories today. And I think enjoyment is key. We’re storytelling creatures, so that matters. Hollywood, in its rush to make “important” movies—which being translated is propaganda—seems to have forgotten the basic craft and purpose of storytelling.

But Bond specifically continues to appeal because, with all his flaws, he has stood at the center of seventy years of compelling action adventure. A mere man from a past age will die; a literary character from a past age has the advantage of immortality in decades and even centuries of imaginations.

I want to give Lileks the last word. Here, reflecting on the charge that Bond is old-fashioned, too old-fashioned and problematic for the precise and delicate tooling and microscopic tolerances of the modern imagination, he reaches the same conclusion I did last summer:

Of course Bond is archaic. The very idea of a highly competent, serious intelligence agency that protects national interests seems quaint, at least to those of us in the West. A white guy who does secret-missiony things to preserve the stability of Western nations is just an exercise in justifying the colonialist order, no? There was that scene in Casino Royale where Bond really got worked over, and you hear bones crack—talk about your white fragility. But Bond endures, because he embodies necessary things.

More if you’re interested

You can read the whole piece with Broccoli and Wilson at Variety here and James Lileks’s humorous piece on Bond here. (If you only read one of them, read Lileks. It’s hilarious and insightful and even a little moving.) I wrote about Ian Fleming’s superb craftsmanship at the University Bookman almost exactly a year ago here, and reflected on the pervasive melancholy of Fleming’s stories here.

I’ve mentioned several of the excellent audiobook performances of Fleming’s original novels. Each is read by a superb British actor. I mentioned Hiddleston and Stevens, but among the other readers are Bill Nighy, Damian Lewis, Kenneth Branagh, Jason Isaacs, Hugh Bonneville, and Rosamund Pike. They’re great. Check them out here.

The kind of fiction I don't want to write

I just read The Daughter of Time, a wonderful old detective novel by Josephine Tey, for the first time over the weekend. I greatly enjoyed it and hope to write a proper review, but for now I wanted to share a short passage from the first chapter.

The protagonist, a police inspector named Alan Grant, lies immobile in the hospital following an accident during his pursuit of a thief. Well-meaning friends have given him a huge stack of novels to read, but he finds himself utterly bored by all of them. The passage in which Tey describes the books is a hilarious litany of still-current genre types:

• A high-minded historical novel, “earthy and spade conscious all over seven hundred pages,” full of intrigue, psychological torment, sex, and manure.

• A fashionably “elegant” literary novel in which the author, “being arch about vice,” winks and insinuates and fills his pages with so much “cheap and convenient” wit that it becomes boring.

• A hardboiled crime novel full of gun-toting hoods speaking in “synthetic American.”

• A lighter detective novel, perhaps the ancestor of the cozy mystery, in which Grant finds “three errors of procedure in the first two pages.”

Grant has read a thousand books like these, and you probably have, too. He decides that there needs to be a moratorium on publishing any new books for a generation, just to spare him the “lot of fool nonsense” people have been sending him.

What made me pause and think in the middle of his funny and sharply observed passage was an aside, a reflection from Grant coming at the end of his forlorn tour down the stack of unfinished books at his bedside:

“Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays thirled to a formula?”

He could not remember what the thin blue book at the bottom of the pile was. Something earnest and statistical, he thought. Tsetse flies, or calories, or sex behaviour, or something.

Even in that, you knew what to expect on the next page. Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays thirled to a formula? Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about ‘a new Silas Weekley’ or ‘a new Lavinia Fitch’ exactly as they talked about ‘a new brick’ or ‘a new hairbrush.’ They never said ‘a new book by’ whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.

First, here Tey anticipates the rise of “content.” Down with content. I have a 5,000-word essay on this topic in my head that I will “produce” someday, though not as content.

More seriously, though, Grant’s impatience with this stack of fiction comes down to sameness and predictability. These traits unite all the works across their disparate genres and subject matter. The authors write the same story—with the same characters, the same themes, the same deeply-rutted plot beats—over and over. It’s their brand. Most of the authors you see in the book section at Walmart or the bestselling new releases at Barnes & Noble, authors whose names are printed larger than the titles on their covers, are guilty of this. I could name names (and so could you, I’m sure) but that’s not why I or this blog are here.

Let Grant’s impatience and tedium be a goad—don’t write books like these. Don’t be predictable. Change your record now and then. It’s my hope, at least, that if anyone is talking about my novels in years to come, it’ll take more than my name to answer the question “What’s it about?”

EIIR, RIP

We talk quite glibly of “making history” these days. To describe someone as “making history” now is so banal it is beneath cliché. So when a moment of actual, immediate, discernible historical significance comes along we are without words. Or should be.

Queen Elizabeth II is a great loss. While I have never loved someone I don’t actually know, I admired the Queen and deeply respected the qualities everyone rightly comments upon: the dutifulness, the grace, the unstinting work ethic. That she carried on for so long only made these qualities more remarkable. As I noted on Instagram, her entry in the Penguin Monarchs series is perhaps the most appropriately titled volume: Elizabeth II: The Steadfast.

I cannot add much of substance to the outpouring of commemoration and grief of the last week, but since one of goals with this blog is to treat it as a commonplace book, I’ve collected the best things I’ve seen or read to preserve here. Fragments shored against ruin; for myself, at least.

Not only was her seventy years a record in the British monarchy and a monument to continuity, her reign bridged a much greater sweep of history than is immediately obvious. Several factoids that circulated in the days following her death make this point especially well:

• She was the last serving head of state who had served in the military during World War II.

• When she succeeded her father George VI, the Queen’s first Prime Minister was Winston Churchill, then serving his second term as PM. Two days before she died she met with Liz Truss, the new Prime Minister. Truss was born in 1975, Churchill in 1874.

• Her seventy-year reign accounts for 30% of the entire existence of the United States.

For yet more perspective, the President of the United States upon her succession was Harry Truman, who wrote the following to her upon learning of the death of her father:

The tragedy of this dispensation is made even more poignant by the fact that you were far from home when so worthy a life came to its peaceful close.

We pray that the God of all comfort will sustain you and keep you and that the King of Kings, under whose ruling hand all nations live, will give you fortitude and courage, strength and wisdom to fulfill the responsibilities thrust upon you as you assume your place in the long line of British sovereigns.

You can read the rest here. I’d say Truman’s prayer was answered.

On a lighter note, watch this short reminiscence from Richard Griffin, one of the Queen’s former bodyguards, of meeting some hikers in the Highlands near Balmoral. This is probably my favorite story about her.

Following the announcement of her death, this passage from one of CS Lewis’s letters made the rounds and captures something beautiful and stirring from the beginning of her reign seventy years ago. Writing of Elizabeth’s coronation ceremonies to a friend in Washington, DC (correspondence collected as Letters to an American Lady), Lewis said:

You know, over here people did not get that fairy-tale feeling about the coronation. What impressed most who saw it was the fact that the Queen herself appeared to be quite overwhelmed by the sacramental side of it. Hence, in the spectators, a feeling of (one hardly knows how to describe it)—awe—pity—pathos—mystery. The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be His vice-regent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate. As if He said “In my inexorable love I shall lay upon the dust that you are glories and dangers and responsibilities beyond your understanding.” Do you see what I mean? One has missed the whole point unless one feels that we have all been crowned and that coronation is somehow, if splendid, a tragic splendour.

Exactly right, and the point of “the sacramental side.” As Lewis writes elsewhere, it is right to be not a little awed by it: “The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite.”

Relatedly, Lewis has an answer to those people who have decided that now is the time to sound off with their deeply considered and highly original objections to monarchy and tradition, in a line I’ve quoted here before:

[A] man’s reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked’; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach—men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, of film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

De te fabula narratur.

Relatedly, read Capel Lofft, a name familiar to anyone who listens to The Rest is History, on the Queen’s old-fashioned virtues in the face of modern emotional incontinence and exhibitionism; Sebastian Milbank, who quotes part of that CS Lewis passage above, on what the Queen and the monarchy preserve; Carl Trueman on the Queen’s devout faith; and Theodore Dalrymple on the deeper lesson of the grief people feel at the passing of so worthy and virtuous a person.

All of those are good pieces, but the one that inspired this commonplace miscellany was this succinct post from Alan Jacobs, who summarizes much of what I feel and would say about the life and example of Elizabeth II, though in far fewer words than I would be capable of:

The late Queen Elizabeth II played the hand she was dealt about as well as it could possibly have been played, and this required her to exercise virtues that few of our public figures today even know exist: dutifulness; reliability; silence; dignity; fidelity; devotion to God, family, and nation. We shall not look upon her like again; her death marks the end of a certain world. Its excellences, as well as its shortcomings, are worthy of our remembrance.

Hear hear.

And, finally, to give the Queen herself the last word, consider this passage from her 1957 Christmas message, the first ever to be televised:

That it is possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us. Because of these changes I am not surprised that many people feel lost and unable to decide what to hold on to and what to discard. How to take advantage of the new life without losing the best of the old.

But it is not the new inventions which are the difficulty. The trouble is caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery. They would have religion thrown aside, morality in personal and public life made meaningless, honesty counted as foolishness and self-interest set up in place of self-restraint.

At this critical moment in our history we will certainly lose the trust and respect of the world if we just abandon those fundamental principles which guided the men and women who built the greatness of this country and Commonwealth.

Today we need a special kind of courage, not the kind needed in battle but a kind which makes us stand up for everything that we know is right, everything that is true and honest. We need the kind of courage that can withstand the subtle corruption of the cynics so that we can show the world that we are not afraid of the future.

It has always been easy to hate and destroy. To build and to cherish is much more difficult.

You can watch the whole thing here.

Queen Elizabeth II, champion of duty, goodness, and faith in a changing world bent on discarding such vestiges of the past, RIP.

Summer reading 2022

Well, that went by fast. The summer of 2022 is gone and I’m well into my fall semester now, so the time has arrived much more quickly than anticipated to recap the best of my summer reading. I read a lot of good stuff this summer and hope y’all can find something here to enjoy for yourselves.

As always, for the purposes of this blog “summer” constitutes the time between some point in May between the end of my spring semester and the beginning of my college’s summer session and Labor Day, an arbitrary but convenient cutoff point.

Favorite non-fiction

This was a fiction-heavy summer for reasons I’ll discuss below, so the pickings in history and other non-fiction reading are pretty slim. But I did have favorites and, in no particular order, these were the five best non-fiction reads of my summer:

Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, by Carl Trueman—The discipline of history began 2400 years ago with one Greek’s inquiries, an examination of the past best summarized by the question “How did we get here?” This is the most fundamental and profitable question a historian can ask, especially in times of upheaval—whether militarily, as in the days of Herodotus, or on the scale of an entire civilization’s understanding of reality, as today. Strange New World is Carl Trueman’s short approach to answering this question for we 21st-century folk, when 300 years of skepticism, hostility to tradition, a hermeneutic of suspicion, individualism, and relativism are bearing their most poisonous fruit. Light and well-paced, this is an excellent popular introduction to some important intellectual history and I look forward to reading Trueman’s longer, more scholarly treatment of the same subject, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, this fall.

The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind, by Jason M Baxter—I read this on the strength of Baxter’s excellent previous book, A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy. His new book examines how particular medieval authors—Boethius, Dante, Nicholas of Cusa, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and many others—shaped Lewis’s thinking on a variety of topics. A good short guide not only to Lewis’s worldview but to a variety of important medieval writers.

The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, by Max Adams—Caveat lector: the emphasis here is much more on the “times” than the “life.” Covering the century or so around the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, Adams’s history focuses on Northumbria, a kingdom often overlooked in the rush to study Mercia or especially Wessex, and makes a strong case for the importance and uniqueness of the Northumbrian achievement. But as the author is an archaeologist, the human narrative is sometimes hard to track (it’s borderline “pots not people,” the besetting sin of archaeological writing), the archaeological material is thoroughly but sometimes laboriously presented, and Adams is unduly skeptical of much of the written evidence. My views on such skepticism are well known. Nevertheless, this was an interesting and deeply researched read and I found it well worth my while.

A Brief History of Germany, by Jeremy Black—A handy short history focusing primarily on “Germany” since the late Middle Ages and especially the 19th century, when Napoleon demolished the Holy Roman Empire and the nation-state we think of when we hear the word Germany was formed through revolution, nationalist upheaval, and war. The publisher advertises this book as “indispensable for travellers” but you’d better be a traveler who remembers some of your college Western Civ, as Black assumes a certain level of familiarity with the subject on the part of the reader. Nevertheless, this is a solid, well-organized overview covering a lot in a little space, with especially good chapters on the World Wars, interwar politics, and postwar divided Germany, plus plenty of room left over for some fun and informative sidebars on all kinds of cultural topics.

General Lee, by Garnet Wolseley, 1st Viscount Wolseley—A short, engaging biography of Lee, primarily focusing on Lee’s campaigns from 1862-5. Wolseley was a British soldier with vast experience across the British Empire and met Lee while in Virginia as an observer in late 1862. His personal anecdotes of Lee as well as his outsider’s insights into the peculiarities of the American military situation—not only in the material, strategic, and logistical domains but in broader political and social conditions—are especially interesting and make this very old book a worthwhile short read even today.

Honorable mentions:

The Holy Roman Empire: A Short History, by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, trans. Yair Mintzker—A good concise history of the latter half of the Empire’s existence primarily focused on its continuously mutating political and religious institutions and the way they adapted to numerous changes and pressures, both internal and external. Dry but well-structured, informative, and insightful.

Being Wagner, by Simon Callow—This was my first historical/biographical reading this summer and I greatly enjoyed it. Callow’s writing is elegant and witty and I came away with a solid grasp of Wagner’s terrible personality—which Callow represents honestly and without excuses—and the broad outline of his life story. However, in reading about the book afterward and trying to run down more information on a few interesting side topics myself, I found that the book has some problems with accuracy and interpretation. I don’t think these problems are severe enough to ruin the book, but if you decide to check it out—whether as a fan of art, music, German history, 19th century Europe, or just good writing—be aware.

Favorite fiction

I read a lot of fiction this summer, but most of it was for a special project—about which more below—and even though those were some of the best books I’ve read in a while, I’m excluding them from consideration here. That narrows the field considerably. So here, in no particular order, are my five other favorite fiction reads of this summer:

And the Whole Mountain Burned, by Ray McPadden—There are a few ways one can approach a war novel. One is to minutely and exactingly create an entire unit and study the whole through a few focal characters, as in The Naked and the Dead or Matterhorn. The other is to focus narrowly on a few key characters and study their interactions and the effects of the war upon them, as in All Quiet on the Western Front. This novel takes the latter approach and does it brilliantly, presenting the stories of two soldiers, the veteran Sergeant Burch and the raw Private Shane, and one local Afghan kid, Sadboy, over the course of a year’s deployment in the most remote mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan. The result is a taut, economically written, but absorbing character study that proves powerfully moving.

McPadden is a veteran of the US Army Rangers and this novel won the ALA’s WY Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction in 2019. Deservedly so.

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie—I somehow made it to the age of 38 having only ever read one Agatha Christie mystery, Murder on the Orient Express. After watching Kenneth Branagh’s blah adaptation of Death on the Nile, I decided it was time to read more of Christie herself. I started here, and was not disappointed. Intricately plotted but briskly paced, I read this in a day—a rewarding read.

Spook Street, by Mick Herron—The fourth entry in Herron’s Slough House novels, Spook Street is perhaps the best of them yet. Like the previous volumes, it has a meticulously plotted story that unfolds in complicated layers over the course of a day or two. Like the others, it takes Slough House’s familiar cast of characters and puts them through challenging arcs as they variously cope with grief, addiction, failure, lack of recognition, or Slough House chief Jackson Lamb’s flatulence. But Spook Street also has some major twists and revelations that complicate not only this novel’s plot, but the stories and backgrounds of major characters as well. All four of the novels I’ve read have been good or great so far, but this one is worth beginning the whole series just to get to.

Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams—A brilliant slow-burn survivalist tale set in western Kansas and the Rockies about a decade after the Civil War. Will Andrews, a Bostonian reared on the high-minded nature- and self-worship of Emerson and Thoreau, heads west to find himself and falls in with a team of buffalo hunters whose expedition into a remote mountain valley he agrees to fund—if they let him tag along. Part Moby-Dick, part Deliverance, but with all the best traits of the Western, Butcher’s Crossing is engagingly written from the first page and slowly draws the reader into a hypnotic and absorbing quest for more, with a story and conclusion that feels both inevitable and surprising. I’ve been meaning to read this since I read Williams’s Augustus six years ago and am glad I finally got around to it. A genuine classic.

Last month I blogged about Williams’s use of sensory detail to create a “vivid and continuous fictive dream” in the mind of the reader. You can read that here.

Portuguese Irregular Verbs, by Alexander McCall Smith—The first in McCall Smith’s series of Prof Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld “entertainments,” this is a collection of short stories that form a loose biography of the good professor’s life before the Institute of Romance Philology. Light, humorous, with lots of good cultural and academic gags and some well-crafted cringe comedy, but often with a touch of heart, too.

John Buchan June

This was my special project, an intensive thirty days meant to do a few things for me: first, reclaim my birth month from tedious activism; second, give me a huge booster shot of good classic fiction in genres I love; and third, force me into a discipline to write about all of what I read before the month was out, with no room for slacking. It was a great success for me, being both good practice and a daily pleasure, and I hope y’all enjoyed reading along.

Here are the eight novels I read by John Buchan (the first technically being a spring read), with a link to the reviews I wrote for each.

• A Lost Lady of Old Years (1899)

• Prester John (1910)

• The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)

• John Macnab (1925)

• Greenmantle (1916)

• The Power-House (1913)

• Midwinter (1923)

• Sick Heart River (1941)

Among these eight my favorite reread was Greenmantle, only barely edging out the first Richard Hannay adventure, The Thirty-Nine Steps, and I have to admit a tie for my favorite new read between two Sir Edward Leithen novels: the thrilling John Macnab and the reflective and moving Sick Heart River.

I greatly enjoyed this inaugural John Buchan June and am already planning ahead for next year. In the meantime, y’all should certainly check out some of his work if you haven’t before.

Children’s books

I read a lot of books with my kids, but these three were fresh new standouts among this summer’s bedtime stories:

Basil of Baker Street, by Eve Titus—I stumbled across a nice hardback copy of this little children’s novel at Bin Time and picked it up. It was a fun, short, easy bedtime read for my two older kids, who greatly enjoyed it and Basil’s investigation of the central mystery (while also noting how different it was from Disney’s very loose adaptation The Great Mouse Detective). The Sherlock Holmes-related stuff was fun for adults and could prove an effective gateway to Conan Doyle for kids. We’ll certainly be seeking out others in the series.

James Oglethorpe: Not for Self, But for Others, by Torrey Maloof—A kids’ picture book about one of my heroes, the founder of my home state? I bought this on impulse when I ran across it on Amazon and wasn’t disappointed. This is a good child-friendly introduction to the life of an overlooked hero in American history and the story of the founding of the last of the thirteen colonies.

(And let me note in passing that one of the many pleasures of John Buchan June was Oglethorpe’s appearance in a small but important role in the novel Midwinter.)

Myths of the Norsemen, by Roger Lancelyn Green—I first read this children’s adaptation of some Norse myths and legends for my own enjoyment several years ago. This summer I reread it aloud for my seven- and five-year olds’ bedtime. Green very effectively melds the sprawling but fragmentary stuff of Norse poetry into a loose but coherent narrative that incorporates a lot of the best stories of the Æsir from both the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson. My kids greatly enjoyed it, and I enjoyed revisiting it. If you’re looking for a briskly written introduction to Norse mythology written at a kid-friendly level that nevertheless does not soft-peddle the Norse gods and is deeply rooted in the original sources, forget Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and read this instead.

Rereads

What I revisited this summer (excluding a few from John Buchan June), all part of my ongoing project of making myself return to good books I’ve enjoyed before:

• How to Stop a Conspiracy: An Ancient Guide to Saving a Republic, by Sallust, trans. Josiah Osgood

• Deliverance, by James Dickey

• Gisli Sursson’s Saga and the Saga of the People of Eyri, trans. Martin Regal and Judy Quinn

• Das Nibelungenlied, trans. Burton Raffel

Looking ahead

I’m three weeks into my fall semester and a week into my fall reading, and all is going well on both fronts. I’ve already finished a couple of interesting books and look forward to more. I hope y’all enjoyed some good books this summer and that this list has given you a few options for the fall and winter ahead. Thanks for reading!

All Quiet on the Western Front trailer reaction

Felix Kammerer as Paul Bäumer in All Quiet on the Western Front

Update: I finally watched this new version of All Quiet on the Western Front, and in theatres! I had mixed feelings about it. You can read my long, ambivalent review here.

Here’s a movie I’ve been hoping for and imagining for myself for more than twenty years. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was one of my two great high school discoveries—the other being The Lord of the Rings—and the very first book I ever ordered from Amazon. (The listing for the mass market paperback, which has been through at least two cover redesigns since I was in high school, helpfully informs me that I last ordered a copy on February 8, 2000, a date that might as well be written in cuneiform.) All through college I fiddled with screenplay adaptations and filled notebooks with storyboards, especially for the sweeping crane shots of no-man’s-land I envisioned. I watched the 1930 and 1979 adaptations. But most importantly I read and reread the book. It absorbed me every time.

This new adaptation has been in the works for a long time, and, having a fan’s proprietary interest in it, I’ve checked in on it regularly for years. Directors came and went. Most recently I learned that it had been reimagined as a German-language adaptation—the first time this German novel has been filmed in the author’s native language—with Daniel Brühl attached to star. I was skeptical about the casting—Brühl was around forty when I first heard about his casting, and though youthful in a Matthew Broderick way I thought he’d still be a hard sell as high schooler-turned-soldier Paul Baümer.

And, two days ago, a trailer finally appeared.

I don’t have much to say in this initial “reaction,” except to encourage y’all to check the trailer out and, of course, to read the novel if for some reason you haven’t. But I do have a few notes and observations.

The trailer is a teaser, and so above characters, plot, or message it is selling a mood. It works. What Netflix has chosen to give us here is both eerie and beautiful—not to mention intense. Previous film versions have never shied away from the violence described in the novel but this version appears to make it very direct and personal, and the attention to atmosphere—the wet, the cold, the textures of clothing and earth and mud and steel, the darkness splintered by the light of flares—gives even this minute or two of footage a tactile quality that could make its action hit very hard.

Brühl, as it turns out, is not playing the protagonist, Paul Baümer. Wikipedia lists him as Matthias Erzberger, a politician who signed the armistice on behalf of Germany’s interim government in November 1918 and was eventually assassinated by the nationalist Organisation Consul. (I read an autobiographical novel by a former OC member last year.) Erzberger does not appear in the novel, which maintains a pretty cynical and mistrustful stance toward all politicians of whatever stripe. What role Erzberger and his appearance will play in this version of the story is unclear to me.

The actor who does play Baümer, Felix Kammerer, is appropriately young and fresh-faced. He even looks strikingly like the infantryman on the jacket of the first English edition of All Quiet. His youth and the youth of his friends, a “generation destroyed by the war” as Remarque puts it in the novel’s epigraph, is an important aspect of the story. The contrast between young, eager Paul and his classmates and Paul as the last, numb, embittered survivor lends the novel a lot of its power, as evidenced by the way just about every war novel since as imitated it.

I’m not sure yet, based on this trailer, who is who among the boys who enlist with Baümer, but the group looks good and short clips of hijinks behind the lines convey some of the fun the novel occasionally brings in—which is also a reminder of these men’s relative youth and immaturity.

One standout, and potentially a big improvement over both previous adaptations, is the actor playing “Kat” Katczinsky, an older soldier and mentor to the youths of Paul’s generation. The 1930 adaptation cast the gruff, burly, bulldog-faced fifty-year old Louis Wolheim as Kat, and the filmmakers behind the 1979 version clearly had Wolheim in mind when they cast Ernest Borgnine—who was over sixty and looked and acted like it—in the same role. Wolheim was brilliant in the part, but as portrayed in both films so far Kat is a far cry from the character in the novel: an unassuming reservist of about forty whose thin frame, stooped shoulders, and drooping mustache disguise his capability and good sense. Albrecht Schuch is the right age and has the right unassuming appearance (including the mustache this time!) to give us the character readers have imagined for nearly a hundred years. Here’s hoping.

I said I didn’t have much to say, so I’ll stop there. Judging just by the two minutes we have, this adaptation looks good. Its cinematography and attention to detail and atmosphere look to be on par with those of 1917, the best World War I film in a long time, and if it tells the novel’s story well it could refresh Paul Baümer and his doomed schoolmates for a new audience.

In the meantime, read the novel. Watch one of the previous adaptations, too, as both have their strengths. The 1930 one starring Lew Ayres is by far the better, and has some really intense pre-Code battle scenes, and the 1979 one has a brilliant turn by the late Ian Holm as Corporal Himmelstoß, Paul’s drill instructor. And for some bracing counterprogramming that will enrich both All Quiet on the Western Front and itself, read Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, which is the German war classic that I’ve been imagining as a movie for the last several years. Maybe they’ll get to that one next.

Polarization

Chapter 8 of The Holy Roman Empire: A Short History, by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger describes how rivalries and warfare between the Empire’s members (most importantly Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, and Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II, Habsburg rulers of Austria), philosophical trends like Enlightenment liberalism, and external events like the French Revolution fatally atrophied the Empire, turning its institutions sclerotic and captive to the ulterior interests of its own elite.

The chapter is called “Political Polarization.” Here’s Stollberg-Rilinger’s concluding paragraph:

With the deaths of Frederick II in 1786 and Joseph II in 1790, the political situation in the Holy Roman Empire became thoroughly polarized. The Austrian-Prussian dualism affected every aspect of the Imperial constitution, and its opposing gravitational pulls, combined with the cynical confessional politics of both sides, tore apart the Empire’s institutional fabric. The weaker Imperial members could not extricate themselves from this polarization and had to choose sides. The powerful Imperial members had long ceased to base their authority and legitimacy on the Empire and consequently had no interests in the Empire as such. Thus, when the continuing existence of the Empire served their particular goal, they supported it, but when it did not, they showed no qualms in attacking or abusing it. At the end of the eighteenth century, all that was needed for the ultimate collapse of the Empire was one final external push.

Let the reader understand.

Andvari's ring vs Sauron's ring

A happy coincidence: Yesterday morning saw the arrival of the latest episode of The Rest is History, in which Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook talk through Tolkien’s life and work. This was the morning after I read my two older kids the story of the cursed ring and the tragedy of Sirgurð and Brynhild in Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen.

So I was primed to think about magic rings. (Not that it takes much.) Holland and Sandbrook’s discussion is excellent and thought-provoking, especially as they point out the ways in which Tolkien was essentially modern. Tolkien came of age among the World War I generation, and Holland and Sandbrook point out some interesting resonances of his work with that of more obviously modern writers like Eliot and Joyce, with whom Tolkien shares some surprising interests, sympathies, concerns, and suspicions—not least his suspicion of technology. That suspicion permeates Tolkien’s work but he articulates the dangerous allure of technology most fully and clearly as the Ring, and thanks to Green the original was already on my mind from the night before. That’s Andvaranaut, the cursed ring of the dwarf Andvari.

In the Volsunga saga, Regin relates a story to the hero Sigurð regarding the origins of the treasure guarded by the dragon Fáfnir. Having unwittingly killed Ótr, one of the three sons of Hreiðmar, the god Loki agrees to pay Hreiðmar for the killing and funds the repayment by stealing it from Andvari. He captures Andvari and will only ransom him for his entire hoard. Here’s the key moment in Jackson Crawford’s translation:

Loki saw all the gold that Andvari owned. And after he had taken all of it, Andvari still had one single ring, and Loki took that from him as well. The dwarf then hid inside a stone and said that this ring and the gold would cause the death of everyone who owned it.

In Reginsmál, a poem in the Poetic Edda, Andvari utters this in verse:

This gold
that Gust used to own
will cause the death
of two brothers,
and cause grief
for eight kings.
No one will enjoy
my treasure.

True to Andvari’s curse, the ring immediately works its baleful magic upon Loki, Óðin, and Hreiðmar and goes on to cause, in Green’s phrase, “ruin and sorrow” for many more.

This may be the original inspiration for Sauron’s One Ring, but, as I noted recently, Tolkien was annoyed by suggestions that his ring was merely the sum of his inspirations. (Per Tom Shippey, “People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. ‘Both rings were round’, he snarled, ‘and there the resemblance ceases.’”) These passages highlight the key difference.

Both rings work evil: Andvari’s ring because it is cursed and Sauron’s ring because of what it is—what it was designed and made to do. It is an instrument, a technology designed to achieve certain ends. And like any technology, its relationship with its users is not one-way. As all technologies subtly warp their users’ needs and preferences to conform to what the technologies can provide, Tolkien brilliantly depicts the way the ring foreshortens and limits the options of those who use it, so that they only begin by using it and end up desiring it. As he wrote in 1944 regarding the methods used even by the Allies during World War II: “[w]e are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs.”

Technologies are not neutral. The danger of technologies to all who use them rather than the danger of a curse—this insight is both the most modern thing about Tolkien and among the greatest lessons he can still teach us.

You can read some related thoughts—on the possibility of using Twitter for good—from back in the spring here, and here’s an excellent essay on Tolkien by Sandbrook at UnHerd. Here’s a seven-minute summary from Crawford of the whole complicated Andvari incident. And Roger Lancelyn Green is, for my money, the most underappreciated Inkling and his Myths of the Norsemen has been the ideal bedtime read for my seven- and five-year old. Do check it out.

The senses, "preferably all of them"

This week I’ve been reading Butcher’s Crossing, a great Western by John Williams. This novel tells the story of Will Andrews, a young dropout from Harvard College who takes part of his fortune West, where he expects, being a wealthy New Englander and fan of Emerson, to find himself in nature. That’s the big picture.

Last night I came across this paragraph describing a party of snowbound hunters’ long-overdue trip back down from the Rockies with a wagon overloaded with dried buffalo hides:

Before midday they found a level plateau that extended a short way out from the mountain. They took the bits from their horses’ mouths and unyoked the oxen and let them graze on the thick grass that grew among the small rocks that littered the plateau. On a broad flat rock, Charley Hoge cut into equal portions a long strip of smoked venison, and passed the portions among the men. Andrews’s hand received the meat limply, and put it to his mouth; but for several minutes he did not eat. Exhaustion pulled at his stomach muscles, sickening him; tiny points darkened and brightened before his eyes, and he lay back on the cool grass. After a while he was able to tear at the tough leather-like meat. His gums, inflamed by the long diet of game, throbbed at the toughness; he let the meat soften on his tongue before he chewed it. After he had forced most of it down his throat, he stood, despite the tiredness that still pulsed in his legs, and looked about him. The mountainside was a riot of varied shade and hue. The dark green of the pine boughs was lightened to a greenish yellow at the tips, where new growth was starting; scarlet and white buds were beginning to open on the wild-berry bushes; and the pale green of new growth on slender aspens shimmered above the silver-white bark of their trunks. All about the ground the pale new grass reflected the light of the sun into the shadowed recesses beneath the great pines, and the dark trunks glowed in that light, faintly, as if the light came from the hidden centers of the trees themselves. He thought that if he listened he could hear the sound of growth. A light breeze rustled among the boughs, and the pine needles whispered as they were rubbed together; from the grass came a mumble of sound as innumerable insects rustled secretly and performed their invisible tasks; deep in the forest a twig snapped beneath the pad of an unseen animal. Andrews breathed deeply of the fragrant air, spiced with the odor of crushed pine needles and musky from the slow decay that worked upward from the earth in the shadows of the great trees.

This is an extraordinarily rich and beautiful description, and it is impossible to read through it without sensing the place where Andrews and company have come to rest.

About a month ago I wrote in some detail about John Gardner’s concept of the “vivid and continuous fictive dream” as the thing that makes good fiction work. In that post I quoted a passage from The Art of Fiction in which Gardner describes how the writer “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.” Emphasis mine. I wrote at some length about the vivid, closely observed, concretely described details that make good fiction absorbing in the way that Gardner describes, but glided over that key phrase: “preferably all of them.” That is, our senses.

Incorporating details that play on all of the senses can be tricky, and most writers fall back on one or two that they are good at conveying. But that paragraph from Butcher’s Crossing is a small masterpiece of exactly what Gardner calls for. Go back and reread it with Gardner’s “preferably all of them” in mind.

Here are a few things I observed:

• Sight—Williams presents specific visual details from the beginning (the layout of the plateau where the team stops) to the end (“the shadows of the great trees”). Note especially the many gradations of spring color in the middle of the paragraph, and the play of light through the trees so that it seems to come from everywhere at once. And through Andrews, the novel’s protagonist and viewpoint character, the reader gets the subjective sight of “tiny points darken[ing] and brighten[ing] before his eyes” in his pain and exhaustion.

• Touch—Note not only the “cool grass” but “the tiredness that pulsed in his legs” and the entire description of Andrews eating, in which we feel not only the texture of the venison but how Andrews holds (his “hand received the meat limply”), chews, and swallows it. More on this below.

• Taste—Again, most obviously the description of eating the venison, through which this category will also overlap with touch above and smell below. But note that this sense does much of its work indirectly; we never get adjectives to describe the precise taste of the venison. Andrews in his exhaustion is beyond that.

• Smell—The paragraph concludes with a sentence almost totally devoted to smell, invoking “fragrant air” that is “spiced” and “musky,” a word I also find strongly tactile. (Describe a basement as “musky” and I can feel the air down there.) But anyone with experience of smoked meat and venison in particular will be able to smell Andrews’s meal as well as feeling and tasting it.

• Hearing—Williams gets especially creative here. Rustling leaves and whispering pine needles are unsurprising, but the “mumble” of insects in the grass is inventive and just right. And Andrews hears not only small, nearby sounds but the faroff (somewhere, a twig snaps) and the borderline metaphysical (“He thought that if he listened he could hear the sound of growth”). This sense more than anything conveys the space that Andrews and company occupy, high and remote and empty in the mountains.

These are just the most obvious things, but one could examine that paragraph in considerably more detail. I think it might be a good exercise to go through it merely cataloging sensory words. But there are three ways Williams uses the senses, as a matter of technique, that I think give this passage its potency.

First, onomatopoeia. This includes not only auditory effects (the bugs in the grass “rustled secretly”) but control of the rhythm of the sentence to suggest Andrews’s tiredness and the languor of slowly coming to rest in a quiet place (look at how Williams drops the word faintly into his description of the light in the trees). Writers of prose fiction should absolutely read poetry for training in the use of tools like this.

Second, as I’ve already hinted above, Williams overlaps these sensations. One can see this most obviously as Andrews eats his venison, but many other details simultaneously involve multiple senses. Consider this: “the pine needles whispered as they were rubbed together.” That’s not only about sound but touch. In nine words the reader not only hears the pine needles but feels the minute friction beneath the sound.

Third and closely related, Williams creates many of these effects through precisely selected verbs—verbs that carry some suggestion of sensation. I’ve already mentioned the rubbing of the pine needles, but look back at Andrews’s unsatisfying meal again. Andrews has to “tear at” the meat and then let it “soften,” twice suggesting its texture, and does not swallow but “force[s] most of it down.” These three verbs do as much to tell the reader about what eating the venison is like as the adjectives bluntly describing its texture.

The result of all of this detail—so carefully arranged and presented and, per Gardner, appealing to all five senses—is a beautiful but unshowy paragraph of immediately involving and vivid description and action. And Butcher’s Crossing is full of passages like this.

You can read that piece on Gardner and the fictive dream here. For more on the important role vivid sensory verbs play in action and description, see here. And it occurs to me that this is the second time the noble bison has been the thumbnail for a post here; so, speaking of verbs and buffalo, here’s the first time both showed up on this blog.

Tolkien and true tradition

Jackson Crawford’s video on The Hammer and the Cross yesterday morning got me leafing back through my Tom Shippey, and having recently reread the Nibelungenlied got me looking for it in the index of The Road to Middle Earth. The most interesting reference to the poem in this particular book came in an appendix, “Tolkien’s Sources: The True Tradition.”

Shippey begins with a caveat:

Tolkien himself did not approve of the academic search for ‘sources’. He thought it tended to distract attention from the work of art itself, and to undervalue the artist by the suggestion that he had ‘got it all’ from somewhere else.

This is exactly right. Understanding the sources, inspirations, and influences behind a work of literature can be instructive, but the Quellenforschung too easily turns from an inquiry into the past of a living specimen to the dismemberment of a corpse. The once-living creature—not to mention its creator—is often lost from sight in the process.

Before turning to the sources, inspirations, and influences of Tolkien’s work, Shippey elaborates upon the difference in Tolkien’s attitude toward the use of sources for modern retellings and the way he used them for that work:

He was also very quick to detect the bogus and the anachronistic, which is why I use the phrase ‘true tradition’. Tolkien was irritated all his life by modern attempts to rewrite or interpret old material, almost all of which he thought led to failures of tone and spirit. Wagner is the most obvious example. People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. ‘Both rings were round’, he snarled, ‘and there the resemblance ceases’ (Letters, p. 306). This is not entirely true. The motifs of the riddle-contest, the cleansing fire, the broken weapon preserved for an heir, all occur in both works, as of course does the theme of ‘the lord of the Ring as the slave of the Ring’, des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht. But what upset Tolkien was the fact that Wagner was working, at second-hand, from material which he knew at first-hand, primarily the heroic poems of the Elder Edda and the later Middle High German Nibelungenlied. Once again he saw difference where other people saw similarity. Wagner was one of several authors with whom Tolkien had a relationship of intimate dislike: Shakespeare, Spenser, George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen. All, he thought, had got something very important not quite right. It is especially necessary, then, for followers of Tolkien to pick out the true from the heretical, and to avoid snatching at surface similarities.

This is a remarkably insightful passage, and helped give me the language for something I’ve felt within myself for many years: that same irritation with modern reinterpretations that “get something important not quite right,” that are “failures of tone and spirit.” This might as well be the thesis statement, for example, of my review of The Green Knight a year ago, and it also helps me understand why despite my love for Tolkien I’ve hardly ever liked any other fantasy fiction I’ve read. The few I have—The Lord of the Rings, The Prydain Chronicles—are animated by at least something of a discernible “true tradition.” The ones I have not—A Song of Ice and Fire, The Wheel of Time—have the trappings but not the tradition, the form but not the spirit. If only Tolkien could see the use his work has been put to, now.

Devotion to a true tradition demands hard work and a lifetime of dedication, but it’s worth it. Food for thought.

If you want to dive into some of Tolkien’s true tradition, the version of the Nibelungenlied I just reread is the verse translation of Burton Raffel. I also recently read the prose translation of William Whobrey, which was quite good and included excellent scholarly apparatus. And the two translations of the Elder or Poetic Edda, also mentioned by Shippey above, that I have most enjoyed are those by Carolyne Larrington and the aforementioned Jackson Crawford. These are good places to start in the tradition that informed Tolkien.

I posted a meditation on the perversion of virtue in the Nibelungenlied two weeks ago here. And as it happens, I wrote something about misleading “surface similarities” just yesterday.

Elementary historical mistakes

Anthony Hopkins, Danny Huston, and Disney with wildly different takes on King Richard I

During the spring semester I picked up a used copy of John Gillingham’s Richard the Lionheart, the first of his two biographies of the great English king. Gillingham engages vigorously in the many debated aspects of Richard’s reign—among them, a few I’ve blithely assumed in that opening sentence: In what sense was this French-speaking heir of the Angevin throne English? Was he great? And was he homosexual?

I don’t intend to answer the first two questions here, but for the last the short answer is No. Gillingham notes that “the earliest reference to Richard’s homosexuality dates from 1948” and, despite this suspiciously recent vintage, had within thirty years (Gillingham’s Richard the Lionheart was published in 1978) become “generally accepted as fact and often referred to in passing—as though it were common knowledge—by historians,” including many prominent ones who should have known better but simply picked up and repeated this salacious new tidbit. “[S]uch thoughts did not occur to earlier generations of historians—though they knew the evidence better than anyone else.”

If it isn’t true, then where did this idea come from? In digging into the historiography of this controversy, Gillingham not only debunks the myth but also makes broader points about mistakes in the study of the past.

The primary piece of evidence presented for this relatively recent interpretation is the alliance and friendship Richard formed with Philip II, King of France in 1187, while Richard’s father Henry II was still on the throne. Here’s medieval chronicler Roger of Howden reporting Richard and Philip’s public procession to Paris:

Philip so honoured him that every day they ate at the same table, shared the same dish and at night the bed did not separate them. Between the two of them there grew up so great an affection that King Henry was much alarmed and, afraid of what the future might hold in store, he decided to postpone his return to England until he knew what lay behind this sudden friendship.

Aha! a prurient modern cries. Richard and Philip spent all their time together and slept in the same bed! But this, Gillingham notes, was clearly political theatre: “Gestures of this kind were part of the vocabulary of politics.” Richard was actually fighting a war with his own father at the time and the meaning of this public display—the King of England’s eldest and most warlike son allying with the King of France—was abundantly clear to Henry, as Roger himself indicates. Further, it was not at all uncommon for people of the same sex to share beds in the Middle Ages (Gillingham also points out that Henry II and William Marshal are known to have slept in the same bed when staying together), and Roger would have “had no fears that his audience would misunderstand him” on this point. .

The other bit of evidence also comes from Roger, in a story he relates about the visit of a hermit sometime around 1195. The hermit rebuked Richard, now King of England, for the childlessness of his marriage to Berengaria of Navarre, admonishing him to “[r]emember the destruction of Sodom and abstain from illicit acts, for if you do not God will punish you in a fitting manner.” Aha again! Sodomy, plain as day! But what the medievals meant by sodomy was far broader than modern legal definitions (as John Ciardi writes in his notes to Inferno, Canto XV, Dante “would probably have classed as sodomy oral and anal sex between heterosexuals”), and note as well that the hermit invokes not the sin of Sodom but its destruction.

Gillingham elaborates on the reception of such a warning by a medieval rather than a modern mind:

[T]he magnificent maledictions of the Old Testament prophets are rarely complete without a reference to the destruction of Sodom and, more often than not, this phrase carries no homosexual implications. It refers not so much to the nature of the offences as to the terrible and awe-inspiring nature of the punishment. The picture which chiefly interested the prophets and preachers who followed in their footsteps was the apocalyptic image of whole cities being overwhelmed by fire and brimstone. In the days when people read their Bible all the way through and when they appreciated the value of a good sermon no one understood the hermit’s words to mean that Richard was a homosexual.

The source of Richard and Berengaria’s childlessness, as far as the hermit was concerned, probably owed more to the frat house than the bath house. Richard had at least one bastard son, and Gillingham notes near the end of his book that he had women brought to him on his deathbed (dying of an infected crossbow wound on his neck!) against doctor’s orders. Richard’s appetites were well known, and so, Gillingham writes, “Thirteenth century opinion was in no doubt that his interests were heterosexual.”

And there are other yet weaker bits of circumstantial evidence: the childlessness of Richard’s marriage per se (as if infertility is not a thing), or his male-only coronation banquet (the usual form for such things in England up to that time).

Looking over the errors that led to and sustain this spurious story about Richard, one notes several recurring tendencies:

• Ignorance of or indifference to the ideas and attitudes of medieval people

• A reading of medieval sources through strictly modern interpretive schemes

• Interpretation of medieval customs and gestures based on false modern equivalents

There’s a lot of overlap between these items. All of them prove a judgment on the modern historian and his own society rather than the historical subject. “In the last thirty years,” Gillingham notes, “it has apparently become impossible to read the word ‘Sodom’ without assuming that it refers to homosexuality. This tells us a good deal about the culture of our own generation: its unfamiliarity with the Old Testament, and its wider interest in sex.”

But the thing that most clearly connects and unites these errors and fuels stories like the one in question is superficiality. Such an interpretation of these sources (n.b. two short passages in one chronicler, a problem of its own) is only possible through a shallow, surface-level engagement with the past. In relation to the last of the three items I noted above—the kisses, affection, ceremonial processions, and shared beds of the young Richard’s trip through France with his new ally Philip—Gillingham writes:

“It is an elementary mistake to take it for granted that an act which has one symbolic meaning for us today possessed that same meaning eight hundred years ago. ”

This superficiality is not a technical or even ideological distortion of the evidence, but an elementary mistake, and either because of or despite this it has become an exceedingly common one. Precisely the same accusation based on sharing a bed has been made about Abraham Lincoln, for instance. Ideology only makes it easier to make this mistake. Why bother understanding context when you have an ideological framework that will make sense of a few pieces of evidence for you?

Witness the persistent attempts of moderns to read Joan of Arc—a fervently religious Catholic peasant girl who sometimes attended Mass multiple times daily and, as a general, banned blasphemy among her men, expelled prostitutes from her camps, and even threatened to attack the Hussites for their heresy, sacrilege, and vandalism—as a gender-bending warrior against not England but the patriarchy. The most recent manifestation is a play to be performed at the Globe in London in which Joan uses they/them pronouns and appears in a chest-binder. All of which should be an obviously inappropriate imposition of the modern on the pre-modern, and all of which, presumably, rests upon Joan’s practicality in wearing men’s armor, something she insisted she was commanded to do by God. It would be easy to populate a very long list of such elementary misinterpretations. You can find just such a sample list here.

The point of all of this should be pretty clear. Think of it as a hermit’s warning. If historical difference is to matter, if it means anything that “the past is a foreign country,” a certain humility and openness is required of the student of history. The key is to avoid superficiality, which in history as in anything else is the death of understanding.

Drink deep, or taste not.

More if you’re interested

Gillingham’s biography of Richard is good—now over forty years old, but excellently researched and well-written. More recent is Thomas Asbridge’s Richard I: The Crusader King, a concise biography for the Penguin Monarchs series (for which Gillingham wrote the entry on William II, another English king commonly accused of homosexuality). Asbridge offers the same answer to the question of Richard’s sexuality as Gillingham. Both are good historians, and I strongly recommend their books.

I’ve been fiddling with this post since February, and the play I, Joan is a recent development that paralleled some of what I’d been sorting through in this post. Regarding the Globe’s new play, this week I read two interesting pieces by quite different writers—Madeleine Kearns and Victoria Smith—both of whom arrive at similar conclusions about the the play, its ideological motives, its elementary historical mistakes, and what it means for women. Also, I’ve been dipping into medieval military historian Kelly DeVries’s Joan of Arc: A Military Leader this week, which is an excellent look at Joan in her own terms: as a devoutly religious soldier.

And I’ve written before about the way even elementary mistakes about historical figures can enter the popular consciousness and become ineradicable thanks to pop culture. You can read that here.

De Maistre on the fog of war

In a short break from my fall semester prep this morning I went back over my Goodreads highlights in The Executioner, a small selection from arch-conservative reactionary Joseph de Maistre‘s St Petersburg Dialogues. I’d love to run down a complete edition of this late work someday, as in addition to its central subjects de Maistre, the original Trad Chad, also makes characteristically trenchant and incisive remarks on a host of tangential topics.

Here’s one that I’d forgotten about. How, I don’t know, as it’s an observation very close to my personal, artistic, and academic interests:

“People talk a lot about battles without knowing what they are really like.”

— Joseph de Maistre

People talk a lot about battles without knowing what they are really like. In particular, they tend to consider them as occurring at one place, whereas they cover two or three leagues of country. They ask you seriously: How is it that you don’t know what happened in this battle, since you were there? Whereas it is precisely the opposite that would often have to be said. Does the one on the right know what is happening on the left? Does he even know what is happening two paces from him?

De Maistre takes a moment to imagine what it was like:

On a vast field covered with all the apparatus of carnage and seeming to shudder under the feet of men and horses, in the midst of fire and whirling smoke, dazed and carried away by the din of firearms and cannon, by voices that order, roar, and die away, surrounded by the dead, the dying, and mutilated corpses, seized in turn by fear, hope, and rage, by five or six different passions, what happens to a man? What does he see? What does he know after a few hours? What can he know about himself and others? Among this crowd of warriors who have fought the whole day, there is often not a single one, not even the general, who knows who the victor is.

Compare Sir John Keegan’s observations throughout The Face of Battle on the experience versus the reconstructed God’s-eye view of combat, or David Howarth’s imaginative reconstruction of what command and control, much less communication, must have meant during the Battle of Hastings:

How could [Harold Godwinson] have controlled a line eight hundred yards long and eight men deep? How much of it could he have seen, over the heads of the crowd? How long would an order have taken to reach the ends of it—an aide on foot shoving his way through the ranks to search for some captain who was also on foot? Could even a bugle call in those days . . . have carried such a distance among the other sounds of battle?

This principle, evoking “the fog of war,” is applicable from the ranks of foot soldiers and company runners all the way up to commanders of corps and armies. Good histories, military or not, will at least suggest some of this. The most famous example may be Douglas Southall Freeman’s RE Lee, which narrates Lee’s command of the Army of Northern Virginia based only on what he could or did know at any given time. I’ve recently seen some writers criticize or even mock Freeman’s technique, suggesting it is… artificial? too forgiving? something?

I’ve honestly never understood this criticism. If history is to have any meaning or applicability, it needs an understanding of in-the-moment contingency as well as our later omniscience. This, as I posted last week, is the place of imagination in historical study. Fail to imagine how historical figures—whether a private in the front line or a commander at a map table—both did and did not understand what was happening to them, and you will ultimately fail to understand what did happen.

I read The Executioner in an inexpensive Kindle edition from the Penguin Great Ideas series. It’s worth checking out, especially as de Maistre’s work is so hard to find in affordable English editions.