The Daughter of Time

The Daughter of Time, the final novel by Josephine Tey (1896-1952), concerns Scotland Yard detective inspector Alan Grant. Having fallen into an open manhole while pursuing a suspect, Grant lies recovering from his injuries in a hospital bed, morosely memorizing the cracks in the ceiling above him, nursing jocular grievances against his two nurses, and longing for something good to read rather than the drivel that friends have provided him.

For lack of anything better to do, he goes through a stack of portraits of historical figures. Grant prides himself on his ability to judge character by “physiognomy,” a gut instinct based on a lifetime of looking at faces, but he is brought up short by the portrait of a man in late medieval clothing, with a sensitive face full of suffering.

A judge? A soldier? A prince? Someone used to great responsibility, and responsible in his authority. Someone too conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist. A man at ease in a large design, but anxious over details. A candidate for gastric ulcer. Someone, too, who had suffered ill-health as a child. He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it, less positive than the look on a cripple’s face, but as inescapable. This the artist had both understood and translated into terms of paint. The slight fullness of the lower eyelid, like a child that has slept too heavily; the texture of the skin; the old-man look in a young face.

The man in the portrait turns about to be King Richard III.

This gives Grant pause. All he knows of Richard III is Shakespeare’s murderous, usurping hunchback, the murderer of the Princes in the Tower, a tyrant risen up against by his own outraged people and justly struck down at Bosworth Field. How could Grant have erred this badly in his instincts and judgment?

The question nags at him. He asks everyone who comes to visit—friends, nurses, the occasional doctor—what they know about Richard III. He gets the same responses: Hunchback, wasn’t he? Stole the throne? And, over and over, Didn’t he kill his nephews, those poor boys in the Tower?

The cold-blooded murder of the Princes is the sticking point for Grant. He seeks evidence for the story in the written record. The one history book available to him in the hospital is an old elementary school textbook kept by one of his nurses, a well-intentioned but half-educated bore. The book contains nothing about Richard beyond what everyone seems to know already. Grant’s sense that something is off deepens. He becomes suspicious. How does everyone know the same rote story about this man? How is everyone so sure of it?

Grant has friends browse London bookshops for biographies and big fat historical surveys and orders specialist titles. He traces Shakespeare’s version of Richard III back to a posthumous book by St Thomas More and digs back further still. More was a child when Richard fell at Bosworth Field; where did he get his information? Marta, the actress friend who first suggested going through historical portraits to pass the time, puts him in touch with Brent Carradine, an unemployed student who does the shoe-leather work in Grant’s investigation—visiting archives, digging through contemporary records, comparing secondary sources with what can be known from the primary sources.

Still supine in his hospital bed, Grant assesses each new item of evidence critically, as a detective, establishing a timeline of events, looking for motive, trying to look beyond hearsay. What was Richard’s relationship with his elder brother, the father of the Princes, like? When were the Princes last seen alive? Where? By whom? What did people say at the time? And if Richard wasn’t responsible for the disappearance of the Princes, who was?

I’m not giving too much away to say that Grant concludes that Richard III was not guilty of the crime. Tey, through Grant, makes a compelling case for his innocence. Who Grant determines is the actual culprit, and why and when he had the Princes killed, is a bit more tenuous, but I’ll leave that to you to decide.

After all, the joy of The Daughter of Time is not the conclusion but the detective work—that is, Grant’s historical research into virtually every assumption behind the popular story of Richard III and every detail of what actually happened. The obsessive quality of the work, of sensing that you’re on the right track, that you’re this close to finding something forgotten or hidden, of getting to know a small set of sources so well that you can mentally play them by feel like the strings on a harp, is vividly conveyed in Grant’s hospital bed investigation. Ideas and theories nag at him until he does something to find out the truth. He can’t sleep. He talks of nothing else. He is so consumed with his investigation that the a continuous, driving source of the novel’s suspense is Grant’s helpless, fevered waiting for the arrival of new sources. And when, after following a trail of evidence, he discovers something, makes a connection between two seemingly disparate facts…

I have read no other book that captures so well not just the work but the thrill of really studying the past.

All of which makes The Daughter of Time not just a remarkably exciting mystery—again, about an injured cop who can’t get out of bed—but a model for how historical research works. Like Grant, you may start with a story that interests or entertains you. Like Grant, you should certainly want to know the truth behind it. And, like Grant, this desire will lead you further back into the past, through generations of secondary sources—many of them endlessly quoting each other and repeating versions of the same stories—to the primary sources, the raw material. Hopefully, to the truth.

However—

This novel is also a case study in the dangers inherent in trying, definitively, to solve thorny historical questions. Grant demands too much of his primary sources, wanting greater consistency and clearer explanatory power than any primary sources can hope to provide. His critical eye and skepticism toward potentially biased sources turns into outright contempt for those that contradict his thesis and toward past historians who have weighed the same evidence and reached different conclusions. And, in the end, he has far more certainty in his theories than is warranted. What Grant is in danger of becoming—like many an historian before him, both professional and amateur—is a crank.

Lightly paced, deftly plotted, well-written, witty, and continuously engaging from beginning to end, The Daughter of Time is a delight. I don’t want to undersell this aspect of the story; it is one of the best, most enjoyable novels I’ve read this year. That it is also a brilliantly designed introduction to how to study the past more deeply and truthfully and, seemingly by accident, a study of the tensions inherent in investigating and correcting historical myths is a wonderful bonus.

There are locked-room mysteries and closed-circle-of-suspect or “country house” mysteries. Here is a mystery that takes place in a single bed and across four and a half centuries, where the country house is all of England, past and present, and the locked room the historical record. I highly recommend it. This is no ordinary mystery and, fortunately for us, and for Richard III, Grant is no ordinary detective.

Leaders unworthy of their people

Tsar Peter the Great awaits the condemned at the gallows in The Morning of the Streltsy Execution, by Vasily Surikov (1881)

From AN Wilson’s Tolstoy: A Biography, on the spiritual tensions inherent in “being Russian,” as quoted by Alan Jacobs at his newly renamed blog here:

“How can it be that the country chosen by God, or by the destiny which moves nations, or by the unseen inevitability of dialectical materialism, should have produced, in each succeeding generation, a political system which made life hell for the majority of inhabitants and which, every so often, threw up tyrants of truly horrifying stature?”

Is there any group of leaders anytime, anywhere, as unworthy of the sacrifices of their people as the leaders of Russia?

This realization was a long time coming for me. In the histories of most of the countries I routinely study—Germany, Finland, or, at a greater distance, Britain—the Russians appear as rivals, enemies, invaders, or some combination of all three. But there, in history after history of World War II or Finland’s heroic resistance to Stalin or even the accident at Chernobyl, below the world-historical dimensions of wars and global strategy and ideology, like neglected grains waiting to be gleaned by inference, lie the ordinary Russian people: used, starved, deprived, lied to, placed over and over again in harm’s way, and treated as raw material for daft projects of overnight modernization from Peter the Great with his beard clippers to Stalin with his labor camps and hand-dug canals and collectivized farms. Time and again, the feckless, corrupt, incompetent, and just as often criminal leadership of Russia creates a crisis and, time and again, are only saved through the efforts of anonymous soldiers and civilians.

Putin’s wicked war against Ukraine—and the Russian government’s bungling and mismanagement of everything from logistics and equipment maintenance to a conscription program so dreaded that young men are willing to maim themselves to avoid it—only throws this unworthiness into sharper relief. Here is a regime squandering and perverting the virtues of its people in pursuit of victory in an unjust war.

And yet, somehow, when the time comes and the cause is worthy, these people are willing and able to embrace suffering and sacrifice themselves and do so in appalling numbers.

All of this is an oversimplification, of course (as are the very terms Russia and Russian the way I’m using them), but what I’m describing should be instantly recognizable. And that dogged ability and deep reserve of willingness have to stem from something transcendent, something that renders the relationship of Russians to Russia not cognitive dissonance or Stockholm Syndrome but something so close to the soul as to be beyond human leaders, beyond words, something I might not even be able to grasp. As Wilson puts it later in this passage:

Today [i.e. 1988], we read precisely similar tensions in the utterances and writings of Soviet dissidents, and in particular Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose hatred of his country’s Government seems almost equally balanced by a fervent patriotism, a tragic knowledge that a Russian can only be himself when he is on his native soil.

That, for what it’s worth, describes any real patriotism worth fighting for. Food for thought.

On the term "Dark Ages"

Tom Shippey, in his recent book Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings, which I’m currently reading and enjoying mightily but have not finished yet:

Modern historians do not like the term “Dark Ages” for the post-Roman centuries. Oxford University Press has even banned its authors from using the phrase, presumably because it seems disrespectful. There are two good reasons for keeping it, however. One is that it’s dark to us. We know very little about the post-Roman period in western Europe: one of the first casualties of the failure of empire was widespread literacy.

The other is that it must have felt pretty dark for many people, as the result of—to quote Professor Ward-Perkins of Oxford’s book The Fall of Rome—“a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries.” Many voices will be raised immediately, pointing for instance to the discoveries at Sutton Hoo, and saying, “how can you say such a thing? Look at all that lovely jewelry!” Ward-Perkins’s point, however, is that civilization does not depend on an ability to produce aristocratic luxury items, but on low-cost, high-utility items like pots, tiles, nails, and, of course, coins—all of them familiar in the Roman world but scarce, poor-quality, or non-existent in places like Britain for centuries after.

There is much to both admire and quibble with here, but mark me down at the outset as one of those modern historians who hates the term “Dark Ages.” An old friend once told me about a professor of his at Western Carolina who threatened to dock any student a letter grade for using the term. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a good start.

Nevertheless, Shippey is indisputably correct about these two technical points: there is a clear economic and material downturn during the later centuries of the Roman Empire and the centuries following the Western Empire’s demise; and the period’s dearth of sources, or the simple incompleteness or inherent limitations of our surviving sources (e.g. Gildas, who tantalizes as much as he informs), makes this period dark to us. The latter of these is the stronger argument for using the term.

But again, these are technical points in favor of the term. I think it should also be indisputable that this is only rarely how ordinary people use or understand it. That’s because, in both its origins and its continued common usage, “Dark Ages” is straightforwardly and intentionally pejorative. It is a slur, a fact given away every time the “Dark Ages” are invoked as a byword for everything bad. How often, when a political candidate promises us that his benighted opponent’s policies will “send us back to the Dark Ages,” does that candidate mean “We will return to a period covered by few or no primary sources”? When the devoutly religious are accused of “living in the Dark Ages,” do their attackers mean “You do not produce enough tiles or nails and you use debased or badly minted coins”?

Oxford UP is right—it doesn’t just seem disrespectful, it is.

I admire Shippey for being brazen enough to argue for the continued use of the term (he goes to bat for it at least once in Laughing Shall I Die, one of the best books I read last year), but this is a case where any value the term has for technical precision is cast into impenetrable shadow by its popular usage.

In the meantime, Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings is an excellent study of Beowulf as a much-neglected historical source so far. I hope to review it here once I’ve finished it.

The Thing on City of Man Podcast

This year’s Christian Humanist Radio Network Halloween crossover ends today! This year the topic is the filmography of John Carpenter, and I volunteered for an episode of The City of Man covering the only John Carpenter movie I’ve seen—The Thing.

My friend David Grubbs hosts, and with Carter Smith-Stepper and I he leads us through not only the movie itself but also its source material, the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W Campbell Jr, and we discuss how the film adapts and improves upon the original. We also dig further back into the history of Antarctica as a scary place and threat to the existence of humanity, with Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, and spend a good while pondering just what it is that makes The Thing so special and so intense: acting, special effects, music, cinematography, and, above all, atmosphere.

The Thing combines a lot of things I love in a genre I don’t usually like, and so I was excited to talk about this movie for this event. Other movies covered on other shows in the CHRN include Halloween, Prince of Darkness, They Live, and The Fog. Definitely check those out—Michial and Danny’s discussion of Halloween actually convinced me to give that movie a try sometime soon.

You can listen to The City of Man on iTunes or any other fine podcasting platform. You can listen to this episode at its very short show notes page at the CHRN website here or—next-day update!—you can listen on the Castos podcast player embedded in this post.

Happy Halloween!

The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City

The life of Edgar Allan Poe seems made to be picked apart. Poe tried and failed at so much, crossed paths (and swords) with so many people, told so many different stories about himself and had so many different stories told about him, and wrote so much in so many genres that topical examination not only suggests itself as an approach but can prove unusually fruitful.

Last year I read John Tresch’s new book The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, which reexamines Poe’s life and work in the light of his deep interest in science and his connections to both the scientific establishment and popular perceptions of science in his day. It was a great read, one of my favorites of the year. This year I stumbled across a book I missed when it came out in 2020, The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City, by Scott Peeples. I read it with great interest.

The Man of the Crowd is both a short biography of Poe and an analysis of the urban contexts in which he lived almost his entire life and produced all of his work. Peeples divides the book into five chapters, each of which details one of the four cities in which he lived longest: Richmond, where he was fostered by the Allan family after the deaths of his parents; Baltimore, where he had family connections and got his first halting start in the publishing business; Philadelphia, where he came into his own, wrote a great deal of his fiction and poetry, and made a name for himself as a critic willing to start literary spats; and New York, his last stable long-term abode, where his wife died and his work and projects began to collapse around him.

The fifth and final chapter, “In Transit,” follows Poe’s last year and a half, a period spent almost entirely on the road between these cities—still writing, still publishing, still unsuccessfully striving to start his own monthly journal and now unsuccessfully courting a series of new brides.

In each chapter, Peeples captures not only the phases of Poe’s life—a complicated enough task, given its wild ups and downs—but the story of each city. Poe lived at a time of runaway urban expansion, of mass immigration and rapid industrialization, and Peeples succinctly charts how these cities had changed by the time Poe arrived and how they were changing while he lived there. Philadelphia, for example, had grown away from the Delaware River as it industrialized, shifting the city’s cultural and political center of gravity inland and outward, to the suburbs. Poe lived in both parts of the city at various times.

The Man of the Crowd balances this kind of sociological history with Poe’s personal and literary lives remarkably well. Peeples never allows his examinations of each city to overwhelm Poe and his family’s story, nor does he lose sight of the landscape in following Poe. This is the best kind of topical or analytical history, in that the big picture and small picture complement each other perfectly.

So, for example, when looking at how often Poe or the Poes moved (over thirty times in his short forty years), we see the interaction of artistic, commercial, and economic considerations with purely personal ones. Poe often moved his family from neighborhood to neighborhood to save on rent, or because they could not pay the rent, or to be nearer the offices of publishers or journals, but he also moved away from city centers to provide Virginia, his consumptive wife, a healthier environment.

It is the effect of the city on Poe’s personal and family life that proves most poignant. Peeples notes that at the time the Poes lived in Philadelphia and Poe, despite the quality of his work, struggled to hold down a job due to his alcoholic binges, “there were over nine hundred taverns” in the city, “including one [only] a block away” from the Poes’ house. For Poe, crime and disease were not the only hazards of walking across town. Unsurprisingly, he stayed sober longer when living on the outer edges of a city.

Peeples is also alive to the tragic symmetries of Poe’s urban life. Of Poe’s final business trip in 1849, a journey from which he never returned, Peeples writes:

The year before, Poe had tried to die in the city where he was born [Boston]; instead, he died in the city where he had found a career and family. But, in light of his peripatetic life, the location of his death seems less significant than the fact that he died “on the road.” Appropriately, the journey he had begun should have taken him to each of the four cities that shaped his career and where he lived most of that life: leaving Richmond, bound for New York by way of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Like so much of his life, though, this trip didn’t go as planned.

One of the charms of his relatively short study (180 pages not including notes, bibliography, and the like) is the wealth of telling detail Peeples includes. The familiar outlines of Poe’s life story are rounded out and given finer shading by the reminiscences of neighbors, friends, and would-be fiancées. The story of a young boy from one of Poe’s Philadelphia neighborhoods rowing him out to a quiet spot on the Schuylkill to shoot waterfowl was both unexpected and touching, as were details of Poe’s family life as observed by visitors. And, of course, the numerous little things that gave and give each city its unique tone and attitude are well integrated with Poe’s story. By the end you feel you know not only Poe, with all his good qualities as well as his tendency toward pride and self-sabotage, but four major cities as well.

I’ve barely even mentioned Poe’s work or any of The Man of the Crowd’s literary criticism, but that is not the book’s main focus. Peeples mostly avoids deep literary interpretation or speculation about the specific ways a given city or event may have influenced Poe’s work. Mostly. Where he does, he largely cites other scholars, almost as a formality. Was Poe’s later fiction is so violent because he grew up in a city with slave auctions? Or is “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” somehow racially coded because Philadelphia, where he wrote and published it, had a large population of free black barbers? These theories seem obviously silly, and while Peeples doesn’t say so he is also refreshingly non-dogmatic and even openly skeptical about this kind of interpretation. What is most interesting is to note what Poe was working and where and when, and how the disparate pieces of his work fit together in time and place.

Like The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, this study of Poe is a study of his context, and works as a striking dual character sketch: of urban America in the first half of the 19th century—striving, rumbustious, commercial, confidently opinionated, prone to both grandeur and petty strife, and not a little dingy even in its better quarters—and of Poe himself, with all of the same adjectives applying.

The Man of the Crowd is an absorbing and well-written study of a great writer from an unexpected and informative new angle. If you have any interest in Poe or in the history of the United States during Poe’s lifetime, I heartily recommend it.

Shatner, Dante, and the overview effect

In his recently released memoir, William Shatner recounts the unexpected emotional experience of going to space and seeing Earth:

I thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. . . . It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

Later, he writes, he learned that this profound feeling was his experience of the “overview effect,” something commonly felt by astronauts. As summarized by NPR: “The overview effect is a cognitive and emotional shift in a person's awareness, their consciousness and their identity when they see the Earth from space.” Smallness, delicacy, beauty—the overview effect, per its name, gives perspective to a place too big to comprehend in ordinary life.

As is my wont, I immediately thought of Dante, who describes precisely this effect in Canto 22 of Paradiso. Flying through the highest reaches of the heavens with Beatrice, she tells him to look down.

My eyes returned through all the seven spheres
and saw this globe in such a way that I
smiled at its scrawny image: . . .
I saw Latona’s daughter radiant,
without the shadow that had made me once
believe that she contained both rare and dense.
And there, Hyperion, I could sustain
the vision of your son, and saw Dione
and Maia as they circled nearby him.
The temperate Jupiter appeared to me
between his father and his son; and I
saw clearly how they vary their positions.
And all the seven heavens showed to me
their magnitudes, their speeds, the distances
of each from each. The little threshing floor
that so incites our savagery was all—
from hills to river mouths—revealed to me
while I wheeled with eternal Gemini.

This is not only Earth but the entire solar system, from moon (“Latona’s daughter”) to Saturn (Jupiter’s father), and Dante—working purely from imagination six hundred years before the advent of space travel—correctly predicts the shrinking and sharpening perspective that a sight of Earth as a tiny blue orb between his feet would impart. All “our savagery” plays out in nothing but a “little threshing floor.”

“Everyone's overview effect is unique to them,” according to NPR, and Shatner’s, sadly, is a formulaic mélange of environmental admonitions and therapeutic bromides:

The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. . . .

[The overview effect] can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart. In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware—not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant. That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance.

Dante, by contrast, has no call to action, no language of collectives or harmony or nurturing or “human entanglement” or false humility about “our planet.” He offers pure, unflinching perspective. Confronted with the Earth in all its smallness, Dante

smiled at scrawny image: I approve
that judgment as the best, which holds this earth
to be the least; and he whose thoughts are set
elsewhere, can truly be called virtuous.

Real hope begins with a properly oriented overview effect—it should begin with not only a sense of physical, planetary scale but of eternal perspective, so that even the things Shatner both laments and praises will be seen in their true smallness.

You can read a longer excerpt from Shatner’s Boldly Go at Variety here. NPR talked to him and got more disappointing soundbites, with outside commentary by the man who coined the term “overview effect,” all of which you can read here. The translation of Paradiso XXII is that of Allen Mandelbaum; you can read the whole thing at Columbia’s Digital Dante.

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.