Notes on rereading Storm of Steel

Ernst Jünger as a Private early in the war, as an Iron Cross recipient in 1916, as a highly decorated officer wearing his Pour-le-Merite postwar, in 1920

Last week I ran across the following meme. It perfectly captures the chief contrast between two of the great authors produced by the First World War—Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, and Ernst Jünger, author of Storm of Steel—as well as the perspectives of their books:

I laughed, of course, and gleefully reshared it with the caption “I never get tired of recommending Jünger to students precisely because they aren’t prepared for this.”

The “this” being the fundamental mismatch between what they expect thematically, didactically, from a harrowing war story and what they actually get from Storm of Steel. They’ve all gotten the canned antiwar messaging of high school reading lists (All Quiet being one of the books that created the template for a genre that hasn’t changed much in a hundred years), and have absorbed the structure or arc of any basic antiwar story without even realizing it.

But here’s a memoir, I tell them, in which the author essentially spends 300 pages telling you: The war was a continuous, 24/7, 365-day-a-year horror show. It was terrible from beginning to end. It was hell. And I loved it.

They don’t know what to do with that. And yet they always end up responding strongly to the long excerpt I have them read from the chapter on Guillemont.

But beyond being amusing, this meme got me wanting to reread Storm of Steel, something I’ve been intending to do for years. So the day I ran across this, I got exactly that edition* off my shelf and started reading. Four days later, I had already finished.

The following isn’t exactly a review, more a series of notes or observations as I reread it all the way through for the first time in ten years.

Tone

The most striking thing about Storm of Steel is its tone. I say striking because it takes hold of the reader immediately and strongly affects him all the way through—and yet it is difficult to describe. Google Ernst Jünger or Storm of Steel and take a few minutes looking at the jarring difference of opinions on his work. You’ll find people accusing it of being pro-war or jingoistic and others describing it as clearly antiwar. Neither opinion is based on any overt statement in the book, because Jünger never raises political questions and has nothing to say about the causes of the war or the justness of the techniques with which it was waged.

And so readers have to fall back on what he describes and how he describes it. That’s where his remarkable tone comes in.

I struggle to describe it myself. There is no one word for it. I’ve seen people describe it as cold or inhuman. These are flatly wrong, and critics who describe the book this way are usually assuming something about Jünger personally and projecting that onto the book. Dispassionate suggests itself, though Jünger describes plenty of high emotion, from elation to terror, and even describes himself weeping on multiple occasions.

Perhaps the best word is forthright. Jünger’s narration and descriptions, analytically observed and cataloged with his entomologist’s eye,** are bracingly, disturbingly forthright. He tells but does not explain, much less praise or condemn. These concerns lie outside his purpose, which is to relate what he lived through and what it was like. And he narrates everything in the book with the same unflappable forthrightness, whether his rookie mistakes on sentry duty, the miserable conditions of trench life, the joy of finding an abandoned store of wine, the variety and effects of British and French grenades, the corpses of the dead, the death of a little girl killed by British shrapnel, the excitement of going over the top, the terror of hand-to-hand combat, the experience of being hit by shell fragments, caught in barbed wire, shot through the chest.

All of these are narrated so bluntly, so matter-of-factly, that they seem to need no literary adornment, though Jünger was a skilled craftsman and carefully worked over his diaries to produce this book. The result is uniquely horrifying—and thrilling.

That’s the subject of the meme above, in which Remarque reacts to the horror in the expected, clichéd way, and Jünger decidedly does not.*** I think that’s also why so many people interpret Jünger so differently. War described this unflinchingly shouldn’t be exciting… should it? What do we make of someone who finds that he enjoys and excels at something so horrible? Hence the accusations of coldness or inhumanity, or, further, of jingoism or fascism or social Darwinism or worse.

Sympathy

But actually reading the book, one finds enjoyment of danger and conflict without bloodlust. Jünger describes killing plenty of enemy soldiers—often point-blank, intimately—but just as often he passes up the chance to kill an enemy. Interestingly, this happens more often in the later, wilder, more violent passages of the book from Operation Michael (Spring 1918) onward, and, in one episode late in the war, Jünger explicitly contrasts himself with a ferocious stormtroop leader he joins in an attack. Jünger, you might be surprised to learn by this point of the book, is invigorated by someone yet more eager than himself.

Similarly, Jünger takes no joy in destruction for its own sake. While never editorializing or effusively emoting over it, it is clear that the destruction of whole towns and villages and the annihilation of landscapes is a bad thing. And every time he encounters his enemies outside combat, he looks upon them with sympathy and even respect. Likewise with the French or Flemish civilians in the rear—he shows no disdain, no exploitative greed, no animosity whatsoever, and always interacts politely and even familiarly. Most often the civilians appear as friendly or affectionate figures, and Jünger presents their evacuation when the war reaches their homes as unfortunate. Again, without explicitly saying so.

Thrilling or horrifying? Ja.

All of which only brings us back, again and again, like Jünger himself, to the combat. And it is thrilling. Seldom have I read a true story with as much continuous excitement as when Jünger goes into the line with his company, endures British and French bombardment, gets stranded far ahead of the German lines and shoots his way out, is surprised by but manages to defeat a British Indian colonial unit far larger than his own, or, especially, when he begins the breathtaking, overwhelming assaults in the Spring 1918 offensive, with his men rushing over battlefields that have sat immovable for three years.

It is also horrible, with the destruction of lives by shrapnel, bullets, gas, infection, artillery—powerful enough simply to vaporize some men—and dumb accident all presented bluntly, in unstinting detail, like a naturalist describing lions taking apart a zebra. It could provoke what some on the internet call mood whiplash, but somehow Jünger conveys all of this to the reader as a sensible, coherent, unified experience.

One suspects that it really could not be thrilling without being horrible—and vice versa. This is a tension Jünger clearly felt and that Storm of Steel makes the reader feel like no other book, all of which is part of Jünger’s forthrightness. Most other war novels and memoirs skew toward the horrible; a few, mostly from long ago, toward the thrilling or exciting or even the morally uplifting.

Jünger refuses easier understandings of what he lived through. His work suggests that the people horrified by war are right. And so are the people thrilled by it. Throughout Storm of Steel, Jünger is describing a state, a condition, and how do you rage against a state? War just is.

Philosophizing

One gets all of this from reading between the lines, from letting the Storm pass over you, so to speak, and listening to the lightning and feeling the wind and the pelting rain. Jünger describes bluntly but doesn’t preach, at least not most of the time. There are isolated passages of reflection in which Jünger drifts into what Mark Twain—brutally but, to be frank, accurately—described as “the sort of luminous intellectual fog” of German philosophizing,† but he avoids the world-historical opining of Remarque or other explicitly antiwar authors.

One thinks of Dalton Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got His Gun, which begins as a brilliant modernist stream-of-conscious story and ends as a straightforward Marxist sermon, or the unfortunate Willy Peter Reese, who was killed on the Eastern Front during World War II and left behind an unfinished memoir so densely packed with philosophical and poetical musings as to be almost unreadable for long stretches.‡

The edition of Storm of Steel I read this time includes a short foreword by Karl Marlantes, veteran of Vietnam and author of the brilliant novel Matterhorn based on his experiences as a Marine platoon commander. Marlantes is the perfect person to introduce Jünger. Like Storm of Steel, Matterhorn is vividly and painstakingly descriptive and avoids overt philosophizing or didactic messaging, deriving its power from the forcefulness with which it presents what happened. Both have an absorbing, dreamlike quality once they take hold of the reader. In some places, both are a fever-dream.

Marlantes’s verdict on Jünger, with whom he feels an affinity despite also being separated by a vast gulf: he was “a different breed of man: the born warrior.”

Conclusion

Like I said, this is more a grab-bag of notes, observations, and meditations than a straightforward review. Like the war Jünger fought in and wrote about, Storm of Steel is fundamentally impossible to summarize and can only be described, and is therefore prone to misinterpretation. One has to experience it. And I strongly recommend experiencing Storm of Steel to everyone.

Notes:

*I do not own any German edition of the original, In Stahlgewittern, though that is on my wish list. This edition is the Michael Hofmann translation of Jünger’s last revision of the book in 1961. There is an online fan culture for the “original” 1929 English translation of Jünger’s second revision, though that translation is rife with inaccuracies and most widely available in a print-on-demand reprint that is apparently loaded with typos.

**The memoir that I think offers the closest point of comparison in tone and style to Storm of Steel—while still being a very different book—is EB Sledge’s With the Old Breed. Tellingly, both men became zoologists after the war.

***A further contrast between the two books that I’ll just drop here: Linguistically, their titles also suggest a key difference in tone and perspective. Remarque’s book, in German, is Im Westen nichts neues, i.e. “Nothing new in the West.” Im Westen is in the dative case, suggesting stasis and therefore pointlessness. Nichts neues, nothing new, is the book’s central, bitter irony. But Jünger’s title, In Stahlgewittern (a Gewitter is a thunderstorm), is in the accusative case, which in German suggests movement (one stands in a room datively, but goes in[to] the room accusatively). Grammatically, the title could just as accurately be translated Into the Steel Storm. This is precisely Jünger’s journey in the book, and where he takes the reader.

†To see more of Jünger in this mode, read Copse 125, a memoir in which he expanded upon one specific monthlong stretch in the trenches in the summer of 1918. The contrast is striking. I read it this past spring.

‡I read Reese’s book A Stranger to Myself a few years ago, also in a translation by Hofmann. Interestingly, where Hofmann includes as footnotes passages from Reese’s diaries—which, like Jünger, he had used as the raw material to construct a memoir—they are much more vivid, direct, and concrete than the memoir he based on them.

Devotion and Glass Onion

Jonathan Majors and Glen Powell as Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner in Devotion, and Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion

My family’s Thanksgiving Break arrived just in time this year, giving both my wife and I some much-needed rest and our kids a lot of good time at home, all together. As an added bonus, the break started off well for me when my father-in-law took me to see a movie, and then my wife and I spent the evening of Black Friday on a date that included steaks and another movie. And what is more, both movies were good. After months of nothing interesting in cinemas, this has been a good couple of days.

The films are Devotion and Glass Onion. I intended to review Devotion the morning after seeing it, but just because I’m on break doesn’t mean I’m not busy. After seeing Glass Onion last night with my wife and wanting to review that, too, I decided to put together a joint review of both. I hope one or both of these will sound appealing to y’all, and that you’ll find something here to enjoy.

Devotion

Devotion, based on the book by Adam Makos, tells the true story of Ensign Jesse Brown and Lieutenant Tom Hudner, naval aviators who saw action in the Korean War. The movie transpires over the course of 1950, when Hudner was transferred to a naval air station in Rhode Island and met Brown, the first African-American naval aviator and therefore still a curiosity to outsiders despite being mostly accepted by his fellow pilots. When their commander assigns them as wingmen for fighter training, Hudner and Brown test each other in skill and daring, slaloming through the masts of sailboats and buzzing a house in the nearest town. It’s friendly and professional, but they’re also clearly feeling each other out.

The early tensions of the Cold War loom in the background, and after their squadron is issued powerful and dangerous new aircraft—the F4U Corsair—Brown and Hudner deploy to the Mediterranean and finally to Korea. Here, late in the year, after the Chinese intervene and stream across the Yalu River into North Korea, overrunning American and UN positions and surrounding and pinning down Marine units at the Chosin Reservoir, Brown and Hudner provide close air support, attacking ground targets, strafing Chinese units as they mass for attack, blowing up bridges. It’s facing MiGs and anti-aircraft fire in Korea that will most sorely test Brown and Hudner’s skills and friendship.

As played by Jonathan Majors and Glen Powell (also of Top Gun: Maverick, making this his second naval aviation role this year), Brown and Hudner are a study in contrasts. Brown is stolid, stoic, but with something simmering just below the surface; Hudner is gregarious and upbeat but by no means naïve. Brown is a married family man and a teetotaler; Hudner is single, on the prowl, and doesn’t mind throwing one back with the boys.

One could call this standard buddy movie material but Majors and Powell play it with great skill and subtlety, making Brown and Hudner feel like real men with real depth to them, and so what begins as a professional relationship with some low-key rivalry grows into a friendship that takes on great weight and meaning by the end. The more they get to know each other, the more each grows. Iron sharpeneth iron.

The acting is good across the board, especially Majors and Powell but also Christina Jackson as Brown’s wife Daisy, who takes the usually thankless role of the wife waiting for her husband back home and gives it serious heart. As strong as Brown and Hudner’s relationship becomes over the course of Devotion, it’s Hudner’s relationship with Daisy that gives the film is greatest emotional weight. Fittingly, they have a coda together.

The main draws for me were the aviation and the Korean War setting. Both are excellently done in Devotion. Korea doesn’t get much attention nowadays—it has really earned its nickname of “The Forgotten War”—and I’m glad to see a good film that provides a small but clear window into the topic. The film stresses both the continuities of this conflict with World War II (having fought in that war gives an aviator an authority that even rank doesn’t) and change (the integration of the armed forces, most obviously, as well as a change in opponents). The handful of battle scenes showing the ground conflict are well-executed—a nighttime attack in which more and more and more Chinese troops appear in the flickering, wavering light of flares was even scary.

The aviation also proved excellent. I’ve learned since watching Devotion that director JD Dillard insisted on practical effects, real aircraft, and real flying wherever possible, and the film has a strong sense of verisimilitude and authenticity as a result. The filmmakers’ painstaking attention to detail makes everything feel real. Devotion’s flying sequences may not have quite the palpable sensory thrill of Top Gun: Maverick, but they’re close, and for the same reasons. The combination of practical effects and real planes with Erik Messerschmidt’s rich, moody, classically styled cinematography also means that Devotion looks great, far better than a comparable film like Midway.

Furthermore, the aviators in this film act and talk like real pilots, worrying over things like weather, visibility, maintenance, windspeed and direction, the approach when landing on an aircraft carrier, and more. Brown, for example, excels in his F8F Bearcat but worries about the overwhelming torque and limited cockpit visibility in the Corsair. This is not just about verisimilitude, but sets up important events later in the movie. It’s just good, solid filmmaking.

I have not yet read Makos’s book and can’t vouch for the truthfulness or accuracy of every detail of Devotion’s story. Certainly some aspects of the film feel like stock Hollywood elements, especially a racist Marine who keeps reappearing and challenging Brown. But the rest strikes me as true to the source material. I especially liked that a crucial moment in the plot is motivated by the respect Brown and a white aviator have for each other because they’re both Southerners. The respect afforded all the characters in all their particularity gives the film a complexity that makes not only the action but the situation feel real.

Devotion’s refusal to make sweeping statements, avoiding political grandstanding or simplistic caricature in favor of closely examining the friendship between two wingmen, makes it a more subtle, nuanced, mature examination of racial division and healing—not to mention comradeship, courage, professionalism, and love—than I’ve seen anywhere in a long time. But more than that, it’s a well-crafted and moving telling of an important true story, and that alone makes it worth seeing.

Glass Onion

Following up my review of Devotion with a review of Glass Onion means going from the sublime to the ridiculous. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Glass Onion opens (in May 2020, the last halcyon days of the pandemic before society started eating itself) with a series of oddballs receiving an elaborate puzzle box. Communicating with each other by phone, they work their way through the puzzles to receive a signed invitation to a private island getaway from an old acquaintance, tech billionaire Miles Bron (Ed Norton). They convene in Greece for the boat ride to the Glass Onion, Miles’s elaborate, showoffy mansion where he keeps a Porsche on display on the roof (since there are no roads on the island) and has rented the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. The guests are Claire (Kathryn Hahn), an annoying liberal politician from New England; Birdie (Kate Hudson), an annoying fashionista with a talent for saying stupidly offensive things and is being kept from her phone by her assistant (Jessica Henwick); Duke (Dave Bautista), an annoying manosphere Twitch streamer who arrives with his girlfriend, Whiskey (Madelyn Cline); and Lionel (Leslie Odom Jr), who is just a scientist.

But two unexpected guests arrive as well. One is Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who has no connection with Miles but has dark forebodings about unexplained invitations to gatherings like this. The other is Andi (Janelle Monáe), a cofounder of Miles’s tech company who was elbowed out of her leadership role, her fortune, and more. She was invited, but it was clearly pro forma. No one expected her to come, and they are disturbed that she has. Blanc notes, observes, hypothesizes.

Blanc is also greatly bothered. Miles has planned this get-together as a murder mystery roleplaying game. Why would he suggest the idea of himself, murdered, to a house full of people who wouldn’t mind doing exactly that?

I can’t write much more without giving anything away, and I certainly don’t want to do that. But a clue as to what to expect from Glass Onion arrives early, delivered by Yo-Yo Ma, of all people, at a bizarre Covid party held at Birdie’s penthouse apartment. When a music box in Miles’s puzzle begins playing a classical tune, Yo-Yo Ma explains that the tune is Bach’s Little Fugue in G Minor, a fugue being a seemingly simple tune that, when played back and layered over itself, changes, revealing extraordinary complexity and unexpected surprises. The central metaphor of a glass onion, which is both layered and clear at the same time, also suggests a great deal about the way the film works.

And that is one of the joys of Glass Onion—the complexity, the careful construction, the doubling back and revelation. It had a lot of genuine surprises and was brilliantly crafted. I’d even rate its plotting as better than Knives Out. The other joy is the humor. Glass Onion is hilarious from beginning to end, with a lot of well-earned laughs deriving from character and well-executed setups and punchlines, not just references and allusions as in a lot of other comedy these days. There’s also plenty of pure silliness, but the fact that a lot of the jokes also work as plot points or signposts for the viewer points back to the quality of the film’s construction.

The cinematography is good, the costumes and sets are great, and the performances—cartoonish as the characters are—are good. Craig is especially good as Blanc. In the first half of the movie I wondered why Blanc, who was mostly cool and collected in Knives Out, was so befuddled and buffoonish in this one. But in the second half… And Janelle Monáe, whose natural sanctimony I usually find off-putting, was truly brilliant in a role that turns out to be a bit of a fugue or glass onion itself.

I did have a few misgivings about Glass Onion. The setup and middle act were brilliant, but the film missteps tonally in the end. Some of the climactic action is bothersomely childish. Again, I can’t elaborate without giving too much away. And while the characters were all wildly entertaining and well-performed, they were still broad caricatures whose foibles and flaws felt like familiar types and some of the jokes at their expense were low-hanging fruit. Dave Bautista’s manosphere influencer, for instance, rants about masculinity and is obsessed with guns but lives at home with his mom. Got it. One suspects Rian Johnson spends way too much time online. Fortunately, almost all of the characaters reveal more about themselves as the film goes on, doubling back, layering.

But these are minor problems. Knives Out, the first Benoit Blanc mystery, was one of my favorite movies of the year when it came out in 2019. I wrote that it “was the most fun I’ve had at the movies this year.” That’s probably also true of Glass Onion.

Conclusion

I’m glad to say that after a long cinematic dry spell this year, I’ve gotten to see two good films in just a matter of days. Devotion and Glass Onion are solid, well-constructed movies and well worth seeing in theatres. Glass Onion in particular is a Netflix film and as far as I know will only be in theatres for a week. I hope y’all will check it and Devotion out.

Happy Thanksgiving!

After-action report: 15th International Conference on World War II

John “Lucky” Luckadoo, 100-year old veteran of the 100th Bomb Group, at the National WWII Museum

Over the weekend, the National WWII Museum in New Orleans hosted the 15th International Conference on World War II. The theme this year was “Resistance,” and the Museum had an excellent lineup of sessions, panelists, and speakers. Unfortunately, tickets were prohibitively expensive, and when I first looked at the program back in the late spring I wrote it off as something that wouldn’t happen. So I’m especially grateful to an old classmate who now teaches history at another college here in South Carolina for telling me about the Museum’s free streaming option just a few days before the conference started.

I wasn’t able to “attend” every session, but those that I did were exceptionally good and I wanted to catalog them here, along with a few notes, thoughts, and book recommendations—either books by the panelists or books recommended during a panel discussion. I hope this will provide a good resource for y’all as well.

Thursday, November 17th

Resistance from Within: Germany and Austria, chaired by Jason Dewey, panelists Nathan Stoltzfus and Günter Bischof

Stoltzfus described resistance movements within Germany while Bischof, an Austrian, concentrated on the wide array of Austrian anti-Nazi activity in the years immediately following the Anschluß in 1938. Both emphasized mass support for the Nazis—for whatever reason, including the restoration of national glory, economic revival, militarism or revanchism, or, the elephant in the room, anti-Semitism—as a major obstacle for resisters.

Living Under the Rising Sun, chaired by Richard Frank, panelists Ricardo Jose and Ethan Mark

I was unable to attend this session as it straddled my back-to-back classes Thursday morning classes, but a colleague told me it was excellent and passed along Richard Frank’s recommendation of the book below. I’ve had this on my to-read list since it came out, but this recommendation will bump it up in priority. Frank, by the way, is a name I’ve been familiar with for a long time (I have his most recent book, Tower of Skulls, on my desk waiting to be read right now), and he proved a highlight of every panel he either chaired or participated in.

Book recommendations: Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific, 1944-1945, by Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio

Between Hitler and Stalin on the Eastern Front, chaired by Jennifer Popowycz, panelists Robert Citino and Alexandra Richie

Perhaps my favorite academic panel. I’ve known Citino’s work a long time—his study The German Way of War was immensely helpful to me when I first started studying modern German history and German military history specifically. I was unfamiliar with Richie, though reazlied I had heard of her book Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler, and the Warsaw Uprising. Both were impressive, and together they had an eloquent, nuanced conversation about the extremely complicated and tricky subject of resistance in Eastern Europe.

Citino specifically critiqued the “Manichean” view of the war common to Americans, a view in which one sorts all participants into simplistic “good” and “evil” categories. This is dangerous, Citino implied, because it does not prepare the student of history for things like, for example, Latvian partisans who were anti-Nazi (good!) because they were ardent nationalists (hmm…) who wanted a Latvia for Latvians, specifically one free of Jews (uh-oh). The war was considerably more complicated for the occupied in the East than the Allies vs Axis global-strategic perspective many hold by default.

Richie especially impressed me with her encyclopedic and carefully explained view of Polish resistance to both the Nazis and Soviets, whether predicated on nationalism, Catholicism, Communism, something else, or some combination of these. Her closing remarks on how the Polish experience of World War II and the Cold War has given the Poles a keen sense of the value of freedom—and the worthiness of sacrifice to preserve it—was moving.

Book recommendations: Irena’s Children: A True Story of Courage, by Tilar Mazzeo

Missed sessions:

• Living Under the Rising Sun, chaired by Richard Frank, panelists Ricardo Jose and Ethan Mark—Included discussion of the Philippines and Indonesia under Japanese occupation.

• Fighting a Common Foe in Asia, chaired by Allan Millett, panelists Xiaobing Li and Dixee Bartholomew—Included coverage of the “united” effort of Nationalist Chinese forces and Mao’s Communists against the Japanese and the American OSS’s assistance to Ho Chi Minh’s Communist guerrillas in Indochina.

• External Threat, Internal Struggles: Europe Under Occupation, chaired by Mark Calhoun, panelists Sarah Bennett Farmer and Jason Dawsey—Included discussion of the French resistance and Italian partisans.

• Conference Opening—Richard Overy presented on his newest book, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945, which is another book high up in my to-read list.

The Museum has the entire day’s sessions in one video file on Vimeo here.

Friday, November 18th

Losing at War: Battlefield Blunders and the Men Who Made Them, chaired by John Curatola, panelists James Holland and Conrad Crane

I missed the first few minutes of this panel owing to office hours obligations, but the rest of it was quite excellent. James Holland (Tom’s brother), well-spoken as usual, with a startlingly precise command of figures and statistics, paired well with Crane, who made the point early on that while tactical decisions are more exciting to study, logistics and preparation are usually more important overall to the outcome of battles. “Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics.” Crane also warned against “theoritis,” the neglect of real-world conditions in favor of theories that could only work under impossibly ideal conditions.

The Q&A proved especially fun, as everyone who studies World War II for even a few minutes comes to firm conclusions about who won, who lost, and why, and Holland and Crane were particularly good off-the-cuff here.

I took exception to one minor offhand remark by Holland re. the production of the Tiger tank as a “strategic” error considering how many resources each Tiger gobbled up. Holland made the valid point that, given Germany’s logistical situation, it made sense to focus on quality rather than quantity (cf. Soviet tank production), but that the Tiger was overcomplicated to produce, difficult to maintain or repair, and hard to drive. “This was like putting an eighteen-year old who doesn’t know how to drive in a Lamborghini,” or words to that effect. The points on design, production, maintenance, and repair I agree with, but the Tiger was not actually difficult to drive or learn how to operate, having intuitive controls, a well-positioned internal layout, and—unlike many other tanks including the Sherman, which Holland specifically described at one point—a steering wheel.

I gave up on arguing with people about the Tiger a long time ago—I think it’s cool and impressive, and I’m just going to enjoy it—but this was fresh on my mind thanks to this video essay on the Tiger’s strengths in “soft factors” from the inimitable Lazerpig. I feel a little silly recommending that, but it’s good.

Well, there I go coming to firm conclusions. At any rate, this was a fun and excellent panel.

Book recommendations: Hell in the Hürtgen Forest: The Ordeal and Triumph of an American Infantry Regiment, by Robert Rush

Asia Aflame, chaired by Richard Frank, panelists Xiaobing Li and Ethan Mark

A good, wide-ranging panel on Imperial Japan in Korea, China, Burma, India, and other mainland Asian territories that covered everything from strategy and resources to the experiences of ordinary soldiers, civilians, Korean “comfort women” pressed into prostitution for the Japanese army, and the long-lived after effects of the war in all of these places. (A nurse with experience in China pointed out during the Q&A that she struggled to impress upon some elderly Chinese grandmothers in the late 90s that childhood obesity was a serious problem, the assumption among that generation being that fat babies were healthy—because it was fat babies that survived the Japanese.) There was also an interesting side discussion of Japan’s actual longterm goals. Did they want to conquer North America in a “Man in the High Castle scenario”? Short answer: No.

Book recommendations: Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders, by Gerhard Weinberg

The Old Breed, K Company and Eugene Sledge, chaired by Richard Frank, panelists Saul David and Henry Sledge

One of the outstanding sessions I was able to attend. David has recently published a unit history of K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, the unit in which Eugene Sledge served on Peleliu and Okinawa. Henry Sledge is Eugene’s son. David provided lots of interesting context for K/3/5’s experience of the war, including on campaigns like Guadalcanal and New Britain before Sledge joined the unit, and Henry Sledge gave a wonderful child’s perspective on his father’s later life, his writing of With the Old Breed (“I’d see him up late at night, writing on a yellow legal pad, and ask ‘What are you doing, Dad?’ ‘Nothing! Go to bed.’ He was nicer than that, but…”), and the special place that memoir has in the lives of veterans, veterans’ families, and the public’s understanding of what it was like to serve in World War II. Lots of insight and some profoundly moving stories.

Book recommendations: With the Old Breed and China Marine, by EB Sledge; Devil Dogs: King Company, Third Battalion, 5th Marines: From Guadalcanal to the Shores of Japan, by Saul David

Missed sessions:

• Women at War: Resistance, chaired by Steph Hinnershitz, panelists Elizabeth Hyman and Lynne Olson—Included discussion of women who participated in the Warsaw Uprising and the archaeologist Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the subject of Olson’s most recent book.

• “I Was There”: WWII Veteran Conversation, chaired by Michael Bell, guest Z Anthony Kruszewski, a veteran of the Polish resistance and the Warsaw Uprising.

The Museum has the entire day’s sessions in one video file on Vimeo here.

Saturday, November 19th

Final Resistance—July 20th and its Legacy in Germany, chaired by Alexandra Richie, panelist Levin von Trott zu Solz

This was the first of two outstanding sessions that I watched featuring speakers with direct personal connections to the war. Levin von Trott zu Solz is the nephew of Adam von Trott zu Solz, an ardent anti-Nazi who gained an important position in the Third Reich’s Foreign Ministry and who became a key associate of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg in the Officers’ Plot. How closely did Trott zu Solz and Stauffenberg work on the plot? The night before the attempt on Hitler’s life, Stauffenberg’s driver recorded visits to two places: a church and Adam von Trott zu Solz’s house. And it was the driver’s logs of these visits that got Adam arrested.

Richie and Trott zu Solz talked through the course of Adam’s life and education (Rhodes Scholar, graduate of Balliol College, Oxford), his work in China, and finally his determination to carry on resistance to the Nazis from “inside,” at home, which he felt was an inescapable duty. His patriotic motivation was quite movingly explained, though I would like to have learned more, as in the panels on Austrian and Polish Catholic resistance, about Adam’s devout and outspoken Christianity (something Adam had in common with Stauffenberg). Trott zu Solz’s narrated his uncle’s arrest, trial, and execution straightforwardly and without embellishment, making it all the more powerful—especially as he explained how Adam and others of the conspirators attempted to outmaneuver the Gestapo and other authorities even in the midst of interrogation and torture.

An informative personal look at just what “resistance” really demands of people.

Masters of the Air, the Bloody 100th, and John “Lucky” Luckadoo, chaired by Donald Miller, panelist John Luckadoo

The second session I watched on Saturday, and the last overall I was able to catch, featured another person with a direct connection to the war—the 100-year old John Luckadoo, the last living original B-17 pilot from the 8th Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group. Luckadoo was astonishingly sharp and expressive, despite admitting that he had trouble hearing questions during the Q&A, and offered up lots of long-view perspective as well as specific details about what serving aboard a B-17 meant. It was so cold at bombing altitude over Germany, for instance, that when flying through flak or attacked by Luftwaffe fighters he would start sweating in fear and the sweat would freeze—which would then block oxygen flow to his mask. Miller also noted how young the pilots and crews were: Luckadoo was 22 years old when the war ended.

Luckadoo also described a briefing with General Curtis LeMay himself, a planned mission over Berlin that would have amounted to a suicide run but was only aborted after they had crossed the Channel into Occupied Europe, and the worst mission in his experience, a raid on Bremen. Throughout, Luckadoo was also self-effacing, pointing out that surviving all of his missions did not make him exceptionally skilled or special but simply lucky—“Damn lucky,” as in the title of Kevin Maurer’s recent book about him.

The Q&A was especially interesting, as many older members of the audience mentioned having fathers or other relatives who served as crewmen on B-17s. Others had good questions about things like the likelihood of survival when bailing out of a stricken bomber. The cockpit of the B-17 was so cramped, Luckadoo answered, that you had to put on your parachute and other equipment after you got aboard. But if you were hit, “You could go through a knothole and you wouldn’t touch either side.”

This was one of several sessions I wish could have gone on even longer.

Book recommendations: Damn Lucky: One Man’s Courage During the Bloodiest Military Campaign in Aviation History, by Kevin Maurer

Missed sessions:

• Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom—Rob Citino in conversation with Andrew Nagorski, author of the titular book, which covers the effort to help Sigmund Freud emigrate to England following the Anschluß.

• A French Teenager in the Resistance—Steph Hinnershitz in conversation with Nicole Spangenberg, who was 12 at the time of the German invasion of France.

• Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad—Marcus Cox in conversation with author Matthew Delmont on his newly released book.

• Closing Banquet Presentation—Ben Macintyre, author of Operation Mincemeat, one of my favorite reads last year, presented on his most recent book, Prisoners of the Castle, a history of British POWs in Colditz.

The Museum has the entire day’s sessions in one video file on Vimeo here.

Conclusion

I was able to “attend” just under half of the Conference’s panels, interviews, and presentations, but what I saw was excellent. I learned a lot and was encouraged by the palpable enthusiasm for the topics. I was also glad to discover that the Museum has made available, at least for now, the recordings of each day’s sessions. I’ve linked all of them above. I plan to revisit several of these and catch up on the ones I missed. And I’m looking forward to next year’s conference.

I hope this has been a help, and that y’all will check some of these panels out, not to mention the many excellent books recommended over the course of the conference. Thanks for reading!

Two notes on craft from Poe

Or, perhaps, one note on convincing storytelling or believability from two different but overlapping angles.

Having read last year about Poe and science and a few weeks ago about Poe and American cities, right now I’m reading a pretty straightforward short biography called Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living, by Paul Collins. Despite its brisk pace and short length (107 pages), the book takes care to track Poe’s development as a craftsman—of poetry first, then fiction and journalism. Two early passages that caught my eye:

First, from a passage on Poe’s famously savage book reviews:

Poe could also lavish praise; indeed, his appreciations feature some of his most careful thinking about craft. In a generally positive review of Robert Bird’s satirical identity-shifting novel Sheppard Lee, Poe explained that a fantastical narrator must speak “as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished with the immensity of the wonders he relates, and for which, professedly, he neither claims nor anticipates credence.” The author must commit to his conceit, in other words—and yet must also perform a sleight of hand, and not overexplain or make the reader conscious of when the story has shifted into the improbable. Poe was, in fact, airing a central tenet of his own fiction: “The attention of the author, who does not depend upon explaining away his incredibilities, is directed to giving them the character and the luminousness of truth, and thus are brought about, unwittingly, some of the most vivid creations of human intellect. The reader, too, readily perceives and falls in with the writer’s humor, and suffers himself to be borne on thereby.”

Second, on one of the short stories that marks Poe’s maturity as a writer:

“Ligeia” returns to two of Poe’s signature themes—liminal states of life and death, and the fluidity of identity—and continues a brilliant use of gothic settings that were curiously old-fashioned even by 1838. Yet Poe does not jest with or even acknowledge these as fictional conventions . . . Instead, “Ligeia” was Poe’s first story to absolutely sustain the voice of the narrator and a belief in the conceit. He never breaks character—not to slip in an ostentatious scholarly joke, not for a sly nudge to the reader, not for grotesque description for its own sake. This disciplined internal logic would become a hallmark of Poe’s craft, and the defining characteristic of the stories that we still read today.

This latter is in contrast to some of Poe’s early stories, which were stylistically accomplished but inconsistent, narrated by nonentities or full of sly asides, wink-wink-nudge-nudge allusions, or showoffy jokes. They do not, in Collins’s words, commit fully to their conceits, and their narrators do not sustain the fevered, convincing voice Poe describes in the first passage because they step back from the dream they’ve created in the mind of the reader to gesture, comment on, or joke about it. The result is inconsistency and a lack of believability.

Consider the intensity of the Poe narrator par excellence, the anonymous narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or even a more sane, ordinary character like Arthur Gordon Pym. Both describe outlandish, shocking events and horrible violence with a matter-of-factness that makes them instantly convincing, and Poe, master of tone and pacing, does not pull away or relax his narrators’ hold on the reader. Now compare these to any of the recent Marvel movies—an extreme and probably unfair comparison, but I’m sticking with it. Jokey, unserious, pandering, self-aware and self-deprecating, their drama and emotion diluted by a steady drip of flippancy, their stories are weak as a result.

In sum: in writing a story, commit totally to selling what’s happening as true, and don’t blink or flinch—even once.

To paraphrase Chesterton, who was himself well familiar with Poe, fiction is a game of chicken which no man of honor should decline.

Looking for the big W

Jonathan Winters as Lennie Pike in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)

Over the weekend I finished watching It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World with my kids. First time for them, zillionth time for me. The movie has grown up and aged with me the way a lot of other comedies haven’t, and part of the reason has to be the density of its jokes—slapstick, sight gags, visual puns (Jimmy Durante literally kicking the bucket), comedy of manners, observational humor, wordplay, banter, innuendo, shock, celebrity cameos, pop culture allusions, over-the-top situational comedy… every trick in the book. My kids were delighted by all the slapstick, especially Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett’s airplane antics and every time Ethel Merman got knocked upside down.

But the older I get the more I appreciate the film’s generous leavening of pure irony. The film is shot through with it from the start, the most fundamental irony being the situation itself—a small group of people witness an accident and, by doing the right thing and stopping to help, become privy to a secret (there’s $350,000 buried under “a big W” in Santa Rosita State Park) that sets them all at each other’s throats and precipitates the entire manic, frantic, madcap race to find stolen money. It’s as if the Good Samaritan stopped to help the victim of bandits and ended up taking off to Jericho to find Achan’s buried treasure.

This irony is neatly bookended by one character: Dorothy Provine’s Emmaline Finch. Emmaline firmly opposes going after from the beginning and spends most of the movie fed up with her feckless, incompetent husband (Milton Berle), her domineering mother (Ethel Merman), her idiot brother (Dick Shawn), and everyone else she meets and talks to along the way, including the most seemingly decent of the original group, trucker Lennie Pike (Jonathan Winters). She oozes disgust toward all of them and their low, vulgar, unethical, and illegal quest.

Until, that is the entire bunch arrives at Santa Rosita State Park. At first she refuses even to get out of the (stolen) truck they arrived in, but eventually leaves to find a water fountain to freshen up—and spots “the big W.”

Within minutes, she has told a complete stranger (Spencer Tracy’s Police Captain Culpeper, undercover) what is buried there and has hatched a plan to split the money with him and run away by herself. Emmaline’s standoffishness, it turns out, has always been more about maintaining a certain moral posture against everyone else than about actually doing the right thing. Everyone is a crook when the opportunity presents itself. There is none righteous.

Of course, Emmaline’s plotting is short-lived. Almost immediately, Pike finds one Otto Meyer (Phil Silvers), a schemer who had abandoned him in the desert to go after the money himself, and chases him, intending to settle the score. It’s in the middle of this sub-sub-sub-pursuit that Pike runs through the palm trees that form the big W, and he has his big epiphany.

That’s the irony that got me thinking about all of this: the two people who find the big W—Emmaline, stewing in her own self-righteousness, and Pike, furiously chasing his betrayer—are the ones who aren’t actively looking for it at the time. Sometimes, when you’re looking for something, you have to give up on it to find it.

Some kind of deep spiritual truth? I don’t know. It is first and foremost finely crafted irony. But like all good humor, it resonates with life and existence—that is, it rings true—as does the movie’s larger, climactic irony: all the men who wind up on a fire escape ten stories up, wrestling each other for the suitcase containing the stolen cash, lose what they’re striving so desperately to keep.

On the term "Anglo-Saxon"

Last week, when I took exception to the great Tom Shippey’s arguments for the continued use of the term “Dark Ages” to describe post-Roman or early medieval Europe, I had in mind a counterexample for a follow-up post: “Anglo-Saxon,” a term that tends not to suggest much to the ordinary person and to which very few preconceived notions are attached.

Unless you’re a particular kind of academic.

Briefly, in a technical sense the term Anglo-Saxon is most commonly used three ways:

• Describing a period, it applies to England from roughly the mid-5th century to the Norman Conquest in the late 11th century.

• Describing people, it applies to the Germanic peoples who invaded Britain during the “migration period” c. AD 450 and who originated in modern-day Germany, Denmark, and Frisia.

• As a noun, it is synonymous with Old English, the language spoken in many regional dialects by the people described above.

Other uses, such as for the material culture found at sites like Sutton Hoo or the literature produced by these people, are elaborations on these three basic uses. But Anglo-Saxon as a term for a period in a particular place and the people typical of that period and place has been in common usage for a very long time, right up until today. Just looking at the shelves I can see from my desk, I can see the great medieval historian Frank Stenton’s volume for the Oxford History of England, Anglo-Saxon England (1943), Hilda Ellis Davidson’s great study The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England (1962), Kevin Crossley-Holland’s literary anthology The Anglo-Saxon World (1982), John Blair’s Very Short Introductions volume The Anglo-Saxon Age (1984), and Marc Morris’s excellent The Anglo-Saxons (2021). Even the Nature study regarding Anglo-Saxon genetics that I linked to above uses the term to describe the migration, the period, and the cemeteries excavated as part of the study. This is a respectable term with a long history.

There has, recently,* however, been a move to stop using the term “Anglo-Saxon” within the study of the Middle Ages because of some of the ways the term has been used outside the field. I almost said “popularly used” but, again, I’ve found that very few people have any firm associations with the term. A vague, historical sense of Englishness attaches to it sometimes, and a very few might think of the term WASP, about which more below, but that’s about it. Nevertheless, because the term was sometimes used to designate certain subsets of “Nordic” or northern European racial types by 19th century scientific racists or casually used for people of a certain ethnic background (like the much, much, much vaguer and more insulting “white people” today), it is now “problematic.”

You can find all the kinds of arguments for this view that you’d expect in this piece from Smithsonian last year, which is where I first learned that there was any controversy about it. A few points raised in the essay:

• The Anglo-Saxons didn’t use the term Anglo-Saxon “much.” The authors try to have this both ways, pointing out that they did use it, but mostly in Latin documents like charters (or the Welsh chronicler Asser’s Life of King Alfred, which uses it in the very first sentence) and hoping you don’t realize that if someone uses a specific term of themselves in a second language they are still describing themselves using that term.

• The Anglo-Saxons more commonly called themselves Englisc or Angelcynn. True, but historians refer to historical peoples using terms they didn’t themselves use all the time. Witness the Egyptians or Greeks. There are even whole civilizations for whom we have had to make up names, like the Minoans. (It’s also worth noting that the cynn in Angelcynn is our word kin, as in kinship, raising the dread specter of blood-relationship that these authors clearly abhor. Naturally they don’t dwell on this.)

• The “Saxon” part of Anglo-Saxon is inaccurate because it “was not widely used and only for the Saxon groups,” not all the related Germanic peoples who invaded Britain in the 5th century. Flatly false, as any Welsh or Scottish person (or binge-viewer of “Outlander”) could tell you. The Welsh refer to their Angle enemies as “Saxons” in the 7th-century poem Y Gododdin and, to this day, the Welsh and Scots Gaelic words for “foreigner” or “English” are Saesneg and Sassenach. Who’s being ethnocentric now?

• The term obscures or erases ethnic minorities living in Britain at the time. There are whole libraries’ worth of controversy about the specific example the authors cite, of the presence of some sub-Saharan Africans in Britain during the period in question, but any argument along these lines is specious. Marginal cases cannot define the whole, and the presence of outsiders among a people group doesn’t make terms describing the predominant people or culture inaccurate. This is akin to some arguments I’ve seen that the term “Norse” is inaccurate because Scandinavians occasionally intermarried with the Sami.

• There are “more accurate” terms available. There are not. All the terms on offer in the essay are actually less precise and more awkward than Anglo-Saxon. And I’m astonished that one proposed alternative is “early medieval English,” since although “Anglo-Saxon” was never a problem when I was in grad school (see note below) I was specifically cautioned away from the term “English” for this period because of its anachronistic connotations.

• Racists used it. This is what the authors really want to argue—the kind of guilt-by-association cooties talk that somehow gets respect today—and most of their Smithsonian essay is taken up with examples of Bad People using the term. They even use the phrase “dog whistle,” and you know what I think of that. But the authors’ problem with many of the examples they offer is, tellingly, not really with the use of the term itself but with the motives of the people using it. The authors are practicing Bulverism.

Well, I didn’t intend to get into that much detail here, but that essay annoyed me so much when friends sent it my way last summer that it was hard not to.** I could go on, but I’ll conclude with its crowning stupidity, the opening sentence of what the authors clearly believe to be a trumpet blast of a final paragraph: “Historically speaking,” they write, “the name ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has more connection to white hoods than boar-crested helmets.”***

Let us now turn to intelligent people, and the reason I’m returning to contested terminology a week after I mulled over the Dark Ages.

This week on The Rest is History Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook presented a wonderful two-part series on Alfred the Great, and among the many topics they touched on was the term Anglo-Saxon. What began as an aside early in the episode, when Holland noted out that the term could not have been invented as a racist codeword because it was in use in Alfred’s lifetime, turns into a more pointed discussion later on (at approximately 39:45 if you listen here) regarding why there would be any controversy about the term in the first place:

Sandbrook: So, you mentioned earlier on—some people might have found that a bit weird if you don’t follow academic disputes on Twitter—which I advise you not to do—is you mentioned the phrase “Anglo-Saxon” which has now become… incendiary in America. In American academia. People don’t want to call them, they don’t even want to call them the Anglo-Saxons, do they?

Holland: Yeah, so, the word “Anglo-Saxon” has different significations in different countries. So, here it means the Anglo-Saxons. It’s the period—

Sandbrook: Yeah.

Holland: It’s shorthand for the period between the Roman withdrawal from Britain and 1066. It’s been that for a long time. And in France or Germany or the Continent Anglo-Saxon basically means the English-speaking world—

Sandbrook: Well in France it means Margaret Thatcher and McDonalds, doesn’t it? [laughs]

Holland: Exactly. Kind of liberal free-market economics. But there is the use of Anglo-Saxon as, you know, Britain, American, or Australia, New Zealand, and so on, Canada—“the Anglosphere” might be another way of putting it. In America, the word WASPs, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, um, there’s a sense there that it is used to connote a kind of 19th-century, well, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant hegemony. And because that is now seen as something oppressive, therefore there’s a desire to get rid of the very word. It’s seen as providing succor to racists in America. But because America is an imperial country and preponderant, there is an absolute assumption among, I think, too many American academics that their use of a word should have global resonance, and they don’t acknowledge the fact that, firstly, in England “Anglo-Saxon” has the connotation that it does. It does not connote racist supremacy.

Sandbrook: No no no.

Holland: We have the English Defence League, we don’t have the Anglo-Saxon Defence League. And they want to call it “early English.” English is a much more problematic word in the context of Early Medieval History. But the other problem with banning the word Anglo-Saxon is that it ignores the fact that, as we said, that Alfred is using Anglo-Saxon in his charters, and its a word that underpins his entire sponsorship of the entire idea of the Angelcynn, the idea of Angles and Saxons being part of a unitary kingdom, a unity people, that in the long run will give birth to England. And this is looking forward to the future, but it’s also rooted in the past because it’s drawing on Bede’s great work, you know, and he’s writing in Northumbria, the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria, a long time before Alfred. So the word Anglo-Saxon seems to me to be by far the best description of this very complicated period and it seems insane to try to get rid of it. Anyway, that’s my rant.

Sandbrook: No, no, Tom, I couldn’t agree with you more. You’ve never had a better rant on this podcast in this series. As so often, why get rid of—it’s bonkers to get rid of the term that is natural to most people.

Holland: It think there’s a certain, a kind of cultural cringe on the part of too many academics in Britain to truckle to American hegemony. They are—in a way, they need to decolonize themselves, to coin a phrase. They need to stop behaving like colonial subjects, and assuming that what happens in America should automatically determine what happens here.

Sandbrook: I couldn’t agree with you more, Tom.

Me neither.

Anglo-Saxon poses a problem nearly the opposite of Dark Ages—it’s a term not commonly used by ordinary people, allowing it to retain most of its technical precision, but objected to by academics on grounds that only bother academics. These are not good reasons, and the continued American export of American neuroses to other countries and, worse, to the past should not extend to the Anglo-Saxons.

My favorite passage of Mark Twain comes from A Tramp Abroad and is a footnote to the phrase “pretty much”: “‘Pretty much’ may not be elegant English, but it is high time it was. There is no elegant word or phrase which means just what it means.” Anglo-Saxon may not be the preferred term of the elegant in American Humanities departments but it means something specific in a way no other term quite does, and most especially to people outside the university.

Let me conclude by heartily recommending any of the books I mentioned at the top of this post, and by commending to you Part I and Part II of The Rest is History’s Alfred the Great series. It’ll be well worth your time.

Footnotes:

*How recently, I wonder. While I’m sure you could trace objections to Anglo-Saxon further back than the last few years, when I wrote and defended my MA thesis in 2010 neither the two medievalists nor the military historian on my committee ever raised even a question about the term, which I not only used throughout but included in the subtitle to indicate the time, place, and culture I was researching.

**I’ve also been horribly sick all this week, so caveat lector throughout.

***Let me here urge the formulation of a corollary to Godwin’s Law for stupid invocations of the Klan.

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.