Athens and Sparta... Georgia

The Temple of Hephaestus and the Athenian acropolis c. 1870

Maybe it’s my background in British history, or just growing up in northeast Georgia, but I love placenames and the layers and layers of history you can discern as you dig through them.

The Georgia connection is important. Long ago, I noticed that not only did my homestate have an Athens, the city where I was born and where my family has deep roots, but a Sparta, too. And a Rome. And a Smyrna. And a Cairo.

When I began teaching US History almost ten years ago and regularly explaining the Founding generation’s love, admiration, and emulation of the classical world to students, I remembered these observations and connected them to things I had learned about other states since then—that Cincinnati, Ohio is named after a heroic dictator from the early days of the Roman Republic (and, implicitly, George Washington), that New York has even more Greek and Roman placenames, and so forth. And I developed a pet theory I would occasionally expound to students.

Give someone a lot of spare time and grant money, I thought, and the ability to map the locations and dates of founding of American cities with classical placenames, and I bet they’d cluster noticeably along the frontier of the Early Republic, roughly from the Washington to the Jackson administrations.

And, lo and behold, this week I came across a piece from Antigone, an online classical journal, entitled “Classical Place-names and the American Frontier.” This essay concerns upstate New York specifically, where the author notes 130 classical placenames in use by 1860:

An upstate New York itinerary could take you on a drive from Troy to Ithaca via Utica and Syracuse, with stop-offs off in Camillus, Manlius, Cicero, and Pompey. One could be buried under four feet of snow in Rome. The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, lived in a log cabin in Palmyra. You can read the works of Homer or study the military tactics of Marcellus in places that bear their names.

And the author confirms precisely the guess I made about Georgia’s classical cities: “Classical place names were given to frontier settlements there in the years immediately following the War of Independence. As the frontier moved west, so too did the practice.” He goes on to explain the shady buyout of the Iroquois Confederacy’s land in the upstate and the influx of settlers coming northward and inland from the coast.

Looking at Georgia’s considerably fewer such names, you can still note the same pattern: an early city like Sylvania, founded in 1790, lies in well-established territory between Savannah and Augusta, itself a classical name by way of the Princess Augusta, King George III’s mother. Sparta, founded in 1795, is farther north and west. Athens, founded in 1806 as a college town with a name intentionally meant to evoke Plato’s Academy, is yet farther north and west of that.

The displacement of Indians plays a role here, too, albeit a generation later than in New York. Following the Indian Removal Act in 1830 you get Smyrna (1832) and Rome (1834) in former Cherokee territory in the northwestern corner of the state, beyond the Chattahoochee, and Cairo (1835) in the far southwest.

Look at these cities on a map and mark them in the order they were founded and you see a clear march upcountry from General Oglethorpe’s original enclave on the coast and the Savannah River.

Even Atlanta (1847), with its complicated history, fits this pattern, given its cod classical name (part feminine tweak of Atlantic, which is itself derived from Atlas, and part nod, probably coincidentally or indirectly, to Atalanta). Before taking the name Atlanta, the city was Marthasville (1843), and before that it was Terminus (1837). As the New Georgia Encyclopedia notes, Terminus “literally means ‘end of the line,’” an appropriate name since Terminus was established as mile marker zero on a new railroad built to connect the western interior of the state to the coast (there’s that westward, inland movement again). But it only means that because Terminus was originally a Roman deity who protected boundaries and property lines, a god of ends.

I’ve already started recommending this essay to students, not only because it gratifyingly confirms a pet theory but because it makes abundantly clear the pride of place the classical world had in the imagination of the Early Republic. And not only for obviously learned showoffs like Jefferson and Adams.

“It was part of a wider cultural movement to align the new Republic with Classical ideals,” the author notes, “but it was neither as organized nor as calculated as one might think.” Such naming conventions were not part of a top-down agenda but grassroots:

What is interesting about the Classical place names of upstate New York—and what previous historians who have addressed the subject have overlooked—is that many of them were chosen by the pioneers themselves. Except for the town names of the Military Tract, there was no government initiative or evident persuasion that lay behind their selection. The pioneers in their rough-hewn settlements—far from the centres of education in the coastal cities—were choosing to align themselves with the Classical past.

Even the hardbitten types moving to edge of civilization were well-versed in the classical past and its republican ideals and made those cultural priorities clear in the names they gave their settlements.

And their children. Georgia has both a Homer (1859) and a Homerville (1869). These were founded later than the other examples I’ve given and were named for prominent local men, and so only indirectly for the great blind bard, but consider when these men were born.

Of course, me being me, I couldn’t help but reflect on the change since then—given the option of naming things, Western civilization has gone from Utica and Troy and Ithaca and Rome to Boaty McBoatface and friends in two centuries.

I’ve marked a few cities on a Google Map and embedded it above. If you click through to the full map you can see the dates of each city’s establishment arranged in chronological order. Mouse over the list and the pins will light up in exactly the pattern described. I don’t have the time to do that with with all the New York and Ohio placenames mentioned in the Antigone piece but I hope someone will someday. An animated map would be a stellar classroom resource.

In the meantime, definitely read the entire essay. It’s a concise and insightful look at ordinary the relation Americans from an earlier era had to the classical past and should give us cause to reflect on our own relation to them.

Inadequacy of response

This week one James Harris published an incisive short essay entitled “Criticising the critics” at The Critic. Harris notes the hyper-ideological quality of most artistic criticism today: its obsession with politics and social justice, its “excessive critical emphasis on who is making an artwork,” its resulting attempts to game the system of quality and popularity in the interest of favored art and artists, and its jargon-laden, blinkered, grad school-educated, essentially elitist hivemind.

In 2022, it sometimes feels like all art reviewing has become the World Socialist Web Site—only in that case at least it had the honesty to make its politics explicit in its name. . . .

The whole thing is like encountering a slightly tortured undergraduate who, whilst having some interesting ideas, hasn’t quite worked out how to organize them, and is pretty much useless as a review to anyone who does not think it is the primary role of a Game of Thrones prequel to advance anti-colonialist discourse. It’s a show about dragons.

I recently read Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem, an interesting biography of the great Sumerian epic by Michael Schmidt. In charting modern responses to this 4000-year old story, Schmidt includes these from a British feminist poet: “I didn’t like [Gilgamesh], on the whole. I hate male Hero stories: the big axes, the (implied) big penises and the big egos: a big turn-off.” And: “I’d only read it again if a woman poet translated it, and, in doing so, radically ‘critiqued’ it.”

Because that’s what translators are supposed to do, of course.

More recently, I finally read Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, in which a young man stows away aboard a whaling ship, survives mutiny, shipwreck, starvation, and cannibalism, and finally penetrates beyond the Antarctic icefields and the terrifyingly alien natives of the South Pole almost to the Pole itself. It concludes with a genuinely nightmarish and haunting cliffhanger. In reading more about it, I dug up this clip from the otherwise excellent PBS documentary Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive, in which the narrator and interviewees summarize the novel as “a dark maritime adventure that ends in a violent battle between blacks and whites in the South Seas.”

Well, that is kind of what happens, though the “blacks” in the story are not Africans, as the narration implies.

The talking heads elaborate: “I think one thing that was very much on Poe’s mind was the explosiveness of the slavery debate that was going on in the United States at that time.” And: “That’s probably the thorniest text from Poe on the issues of race and slavery. The story can be read as a kind of racist allegory or as an allegory that is a cautionary tale against the imperialist mentality.”

What struck me most about these responses, beyond the dismissive cod Freudianism of the one and the knowing faculty lounge political deconstruction of the other, was their sheer inadequacy. They do not account for these stories in any substantial way. In both Gilgamesh and Arthur Gordon Pym we read stories told on a mythic scale, full of primal violence, prayers for deliverance, monsters in strange lands, and confrontations with the greatest of all mysteries, Death with a capital D, and… this is what you got out of it?

Years ago on a special Halloween podcast we talked about the “Twilight Zone” episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” in which William Shatner, having just recovered from a mental breakdown, tries to explain away the otherworldly things he’s seeing on his cross-country flight using the therapeutic psychological jargon of the sanitarium he has just checked out of. This unsuccessful attempt reminded me of one of the stories in Shelby Foote’s Shiloh, in which a young Union army private tries to explain why he ran away during the battle with a repeated refrain: he is not a coward, no, just “demoralized through loss of confidence.”

These are attempts to tame the mystery each has encountered—in both of these cases, fear. In the cases of Gilgamesh and Arthur Gordon Pym, they are much deeper and more complex, though fear plays a prominent part. Adventure, danger, the unknown, God or the gods, and the fear of death are what these stories are “about,” not “issues,” isms, critiques, or genitals.

I am all for interpretation and deep examination of good stories (and a good story can withstand good study indefinitely), but I think it has to begin with a proper response to the story the author is trying to tell. And that requires a kind of openness—a willingness to be overwhelmed by the force of a story running wild in its natural habitat, the imagination, rather than the taming, sorting, and caging instinct of ideological interpretation—that is in unfortunately short supply.

Particularity redux

A few weeks ago, in asking what it is that novels are supposed to do, I brought up the particularity of storytelling. Particularity—specifics, details, “proofs” that the story “is actually happening”—is one of the non-negotiable necessities of good storytelling. Even minimalist fables or didactic stories like Jesus’s parables begin with “a certain man.”

Yesterday I came across this episode of “What’s the Difference?” a YouTube series comparing books to their film adaptations. It’s a relatively new one covering Dr No, the sixth of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels but the first in the film series. The first half of the video impressed me, doing an excellent job of explaining Bond’s physical, psychological, and—one might suggest—spiritual degradation by that point in Fleming’s novels as well as the reserve of endurance that keeps Bond going.

But then the video’s two narrators, whom I call A and B below, introduce Honey Rider (Ryder in the film) this way: Upon arriving on Crab Key in the film,

A: Bond discovers Honey Ryder collecting seashells on the beach in what would become one of the most famous bikinis of the twentieth century.

B: In the book, Honey Rider is completely nude, save for the knife belt at her waist, and sports a badly broken nose. It’s a real sticking point with her character that she’s ashamed of the nose, and just really wants to be pretty? She also shares with Bond her ambition to move to the US and be a prostitute until she’s rich enough to move back to Jamaica and get married, so… it’s just real in line with what a dude writing a sexy spy novel in the fifties thought of women.

A: Right. But the movie in the sixties wasn’t much better.

There’s a lot going on here—not least the dismissive reference to Fleming as “a dude,” which has become a noticeable leftwing verbal tic—but I want to focus on the idea of Honey Rider as what Fleming “thought of women.” Women, categorically.

I’m not here to defend Fleming’s beliefs or attitudes about sex or the sexes—though I probably have a completely different set of objections to his morals than the people who made this video—but I have to point out one major problem with his facile take on the character: Honey Rider is not women. She is a specific, particular woman.

Honeychile Rider has an entire personal history that she gets to relate, herself, in the course of the novel, and her own independent set of motivations, goals, and needs, and these are specifically her motivations, goals, and needs. She’s smart, tough, and capable even if ignorant of much of the rest of the world, but that’s only because she was orphaned at a young age, left essentially homeless to be raised by an old nanny, and finally sexually assaulted by a violent drunk—which is how she got her broken nose and why she’s so self-conscious about it. She has few options, but she’s doing what she can to get by. She is one of the most well-realized, compelling, and tragic of Fleming’s characters, and that is all down to the specifics of who she uniquely is.

But the video’s creators ignore all this. It’s funnier to pass over this well-rounded, compassionately-presented, and interesting character as just another bimbo dreamed up by an old-timey misogynist. It also fits an acceptable narrative and a particular style of online posturing.

A few months ago I ran across a line from Malcolm Muggeridge in which he presciently criticized “thinking in categories, rather than thinking.” This kind of thinking, especially about storytelling, elides the specifics that are “the life blood of fiction” and collapses the particular into the general, so that you end up the kind of person who sees Honey Rider and thinks only “woman” before moving on to condemn Fleming and Bond. Or perhaps “white,” and then condemning all three.

Talking about specific characters as avatars of entire classes of people is lazy, incurious, unfair to both art and artist, and—perhaps worst of all—destructive of the imagination. If you find yourself talking this way, especially to make a flippant joke, stop.

I wrote a longish Goodreads review of Dr No when I last listened to it about two years ago. You can read that for more on one of Fleming’s most suspenseful, action-packed novels here.

Three great sages on talking to oneself

Point: CS Lewis in chapter VIII of A Preface to Paradise Lost, writing of self-referential and -reverential modern “poetry which exists only for the poet”:

“There is nothing especially admirable in talking to oneself. Indeed, it is arguable that Himself is the very audience before whom a man postures most and on whom he practises the most elaborate deceptions.”

Counterpoint: GK Chesterton in a tongue-in-cheek review of his own short comedy play Magic, a quotation I once shared in the very early days of this blog:

“If a man does not talk to himself, it is because he is not worth talking to.”

Case study for your consideration: This exchange from “Tankin’ it to the Streets,” an episode from season six of “King of the Hill”:

“Hank: You know, Dale, sometimes I think you say things just to hear yourself talk.
Dale: What do you want me to do, ignore myself?”

Project for synthesis: In what ways is Dale Gribble A) the self-deceived man described by Lewis and B) a man worth talking to, as described by Chesterton? Is he either A or B or both A and B? Is he B despite or because of A?

File under either “Silliness” or “Questions Hank would never ask.”

What are novels for?

From “More like a lecture,” a review of Lessons, acclaimed British novelist Ian McEwan’s “overly long and self-reverential” most recent book:

At times it feels as if this is one very long in-joke by McEwan: an extended self-satire of his own writing style and preoccupations. Is McEwan, in his description of Roland’s ex-wife’s award-winning novel as “Tolstoyan in sweep … Nabokovian … in the formation of pitch-perfect sentences” a hopeful self-commentary on Lessons? Possibly. He is, in this, his most autobiographical of novels, aware that his generation of writers have less credibility than ever (“Screw the lot of them. Comfortable white men of a certain age. Their time is up,” Roland writes). McEwan is comfortable in writing this because he knows it’s not true.

Inevitably, his adoring fans in the liberal left media have fawned over the novel, with the New York Times describing his reference to events including “Chernobyl, Hitler, Nasser, Khrushchev, the Cuban missile crisis, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, John Major, the Freedom of Information Act, 9/11, Enron, Karl Rove, Gordon Brown, Nigel Farage, Covid” as “judicious”. For that critic McEwan’s political longueurs are convenient reminders that “history is occurring”. She concludes, “maybe some readers do, in fact, require that reminder”. But do we? When did telling the reader what to think, what to believe, what to support and campaign for, become a novelist’s primary role? Why the need to teach us lessons on every page? Shouldn’t a novelist tell us stories about people?

Emphasis mine.

The reviewer, David James, continues with a quotation from Philip Roth: “politics is the great generalizer and literature is the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship with one another—they are in an antagonistic relationship.”

A trend I’ve noticed, both in the higher levels of official, paid criticism (of both books and films) and among we groundlings, especially on platforms like Goodreads: Reviews that praise a given work, often emphasizing how important it is, not because of its story or even its style or technical merits but because it features X, Y, or Z or, worse, is written by X, Y, or Z. Call it criticism by checklist. I’ve seen numerous Goodreads reviews that actually say things like, “OMG, I love the X representation!”

Okay, I always think, but how was the story?

I haven’t read Lessons—I’ve found Atonement, Saturday, and the odd but brilliantly executed Nutshell quite enough McEwan for me for the foreseeable future—so I can’t say whether or not James’s review is fair, but it is worth reading as a primer on how not to incorporate current events, didacticism, or messaging into one’s fiction. That is, how to avoid turning your novel into a series of lessons.

Connoisseurs read for technique. Bores read for the message. Fanatics read for ideological validation. For everyone else, the story—in all its particularity—must come first.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn on hillbillies

Austria, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s homeland

Allow me a moment of pure parochialism. I have many irons in the fire right now—including on this blog, where I’m currently working on several different posts at the same time—and I’ve also been sick this week, consistently distracted by divers aches. So this is an unexpected post, one I didn’t plan for but couldn’t resist.

At National Review, the redoubtable Jack Butler has published a response to an article on European conservatism by Michael Brendan Dougherty. These are quite different writers, both of whom I like, but I was most excited to see the topic Butler took issue with and wanted to elaborate upon—Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, author of this immortal line, which I quote every time I teach modern history:

“For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.”

— Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

You probably haven’t heard of Kuehnelt-Leddihn. His books are very hard to find and he is unjustly neglected. Here’s a short introduction from Butler:

Born in Austria-Hungary in 1909, the Catholic nobleman lived a fascinating life. He began working as a journalist at age 16 and continued as a serious writer and thinker until his death in 1999. He visited dozens of countries, and all 50 U.S. states. He spoke eight languages and could read eleven others. He claimed to have once seen the Devil himself. William F. Buckley described him as “the world’s most fascinating man”; he could quite easily have competed with the Dos Equis guy as “the most interesting man in the world.”

“His thought was as interesting as his life,” Butler writes, and goes on to give a very good précis of Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s fundamental ideas, assumptions, and suspicions. “He was an Austrian monarchist* . . . who believed that monarchy and aristocracy (and Catholicism!) could be better safeguards of liberty than democracy was.” And he “was skeptical not only of democracy, but also of nationalism. He viewed them as related phenomena.”

Reading Kuehnelt-Leddihn was a watershed for me. Up until discovering him during graduate school, whatever ideas I had about politics, culture, religion, and history were separately and often haphazardly formed, and influenced more often than not by whatever neocon happened to be expressing himself most pithily at the time. Kuehnelt-Leddihn challenged me at every point, and won me over in pretty much every category Butler mentions above. He reshaped me.

An uncredited reviewer of The Menace of the Herd, which I quote below, writes at the Mises Institute that “[T]o read [Kuehnelt-Leddihn] is to experience something of an intellectual liberation from every sort of conventional wisdom.” This was precisely my experience. Only Chesterton has struck more deeply into me.

I highly recommend Butler’s short article. (I haven’t yet read the one by Dougherty that provoked this; I was too excited to dive back into Kuehnelt-Leddihn.) Butler includes many good passages to give you not only the basics of Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s particular inflection of conservatism, but a feel for his writing and the manner—you could almost say texture—of his thought.** Among them is this passage on a crucial but often neglected distinction:

Patriotism, not nationalism, should inspire the citizen. The ethnic nationalist who wants a linguistically and culturally uniform nation is akin to the racist who is intolerant toward those who look (and behave) differently. The patriot is a “diversitarian”; he is pleased, indeed proud of the variety within the borders of his country; he looks for loyalty from all citizens. And he looks up and down, not left and right.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn, the polyglot polymath, was nothing if not conscious of words and their etymologies,† the subtle shadings of meaning between concepts so closely related that they tend to be carelessly lumped together and used interchangeably. Patriotism and nationalism are both ultimately Latin loanwords, but with an important gap between their roots—a nation is a people with shared lineage, a patria is a homeland.

So on the topic of homeland and patrimony, here’s a passage that’s been a favorite of mine for a long time. I quote it at length to capture that texture and because I’m tired and just having fun. This is Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in his 1943 book The Menace of the Herd, or: Procrustes at Large—written under a pseudonym‡ after having fled the Nazis, who had annexed his mountain homeland in 1938—writing about the culture and characteristic qualities of both his and my people: mountain people.

Many people see the “real” Europeans in these mountaineers. In these parts of the world traditions have been better preserved; patriarchalism, piety, loyalty, altruism—all the truly “romantic” virtues are here more at home than in the progressive plains. Other manifestations, such as the blood feud, also exist. Of course, the mountains are poor and bravery alone does not secure collective political influence. Thanks to the greater resources of the plains the mountaineers were always defeated in the long run but they regularly revenged themselves by producing a proportionately large number of political and military leaders.

Mountain culture is not “advanced.” It is nevertheless aristocratic and “democratic” (demophil) at the same time. It is patriarchal by nature and we have mentioned the fact before, that serfdom practically never existed among the mountaineers. The mountains were essentially free. “Freedom thrives in the mountains,” Schiller exclaims justly. Yet it is also interesting to see how violently the mountain peasant was attacked by the urban writers of the second half of the nineteenth century, attacked and vilified for his loyalty to traditions. Having no social grievances (lack of large estates) he was the very despair of urban, leftist agitators.

The thwarted intellectuals, slaving in the gigantic cities under heaviest pressure, developed often an almost sinister grudge against the mountains and the snow-covered peaks; he at least considered himself to be a “modern” while the mountaineer dwelt in darkest superstition. Yet the mountaineer always despised the people from the plains and the large cities and regarded them as miserable wretches, as proletarians and collectivized rabble, with an utter lack of personality.

The age of the rule of the plains and the cities, which put an end to the rule of the mountains and castles, was indeed the beginning of the decline of Europe. The association of Berlin with Moscow, of nationalism with socialism, was, even in a geographical sense, a league of monotony against diversity.

It must be admitted though that there is a great strength in the collective onslaught of the people of the plains—from a military, political, and economic point of view. The first half of the nineteenth century produced the most spectacular victories of the French arms, the second half the victories of Prussia and of the Germanies led by Prussia. The great soldiers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were the Spaniards and the Swiss, but technical civilization and industrial progress necessitated a soldier with a minimum of personal initiative and a maximum of obedience, cooperative spirit and lack of originality. The virtues of the sixteenth-century soldier are still necessary prerequisites of alpine warfare, but for the war in the plains—“total” wars and not “little wars” (guerrilla)—fight, to think, to decide. In the plains officers used to ride at the head of their troops and directed the solidly advancing carrés with stentorial commands. Nothing of that kind is possible in the mountains where personal initiative is of greater importance than mere discipline and drill; even modern warfare in these parts is still individualized and numbers play a less important role than in the Lowlands.

Today it seems that European culture and civilization, once conceived and born in the craggy hills of Crete, Greece, and the Apennines, will be drowned in the monotonous, muddy plains between Paris and Moscow.

I feel this deeply. These are my people, recognizable across divides of time, culture, and an ocean. Kuehnelt-Leddihn calls us “mountaineers.” I call us “hillbillies,” a term I use with pride.

Read Butler’s piece, and seek Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s work out sometime and let him challenge you—especially if you’re a conservative. The Menace of the Herd is bracing and full of great passages but not my favorite of his books; another early one, Liberty or Equality, is on the same level, and helpfully set two incompatible abstractions in opposition for me for the first time. I’d recommend Leftism: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse for its scope and trenchant historical argumentation. The sort-of sequel, Leftism Revisited, is better remembered and seems more readily available, but I’ve yet to read that one. If you’d like a shorter read, seek out his early essay “Credo of a Reactionary,” which takes a bit of digging but can be found free online.

As a final measure of my appreciation for Kuehnelt-Leddihn, a character in several stories and a novel that I’ve been planning is based directly on him. You’ll know him if and when I ever write these—just look for a version of the above remarks about the mountains, delivered as a speech by a man in khaki standing on a precipice in the Holy Land.

But that’s for another time. Meanwhile, get to the mountains.

Footnotes

*The Austrian aspect of this is crucial to understanding Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Butler: “In 1990, EKL lamented in National Review that the ‘democrats’ prevailed in urging the dissolution of the Habsburg empire. This left its former subjects ‘to their unhappy, and in some cases truly gruesome, fates.’” Just yesterday I was reading about Peter Lorre, a German-speaking Hungarian Jew born in a majority Slovak region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A vision of a lost world.

**Including many, many asides and discursive tangents in his footnotes. I excised the footnotes from the passage in The Menace of the Herd that I quote but include my own in this post as a tribute.

†William F Buckley’s Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription, an anthology of National Review letters to the editor and his responses, includes a genuinely hilarious exchange in which Kuehnelt-Leddihn spends several pages cataloging the linguistic, cultural, and historical errors and miscalculations in Buckley’s latest spy thriller. Buckley replies: “Dear Erik: Forget it. Am resigning, going back to school. What can I pay you not to read my next book?”

‡Anglophiles and Scots will get some sense of Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s loyalties and beliefs from his pen name: Francis Stuart Campbell.

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.