Jünger and the homo religiosus revisited

At the beginning of last year I posted a passage from Ernst Jünger’s short series of interrelated essays The Forest Passage about the homo religiosus—man as a religious animal, with a need for religion that will be filled by something. Now, just over a year later, I’m reading his allegorical novel On the Marble Cliffs, and unsurprisingly given the novel’s context the same concern is manifest.

On the Marble Cliffs takes place in the Marina, an idyllic Mediterranean region by the sea. The unnamed narrator tells the story of how the tyrannical host of the Head Forester, a warlord in the forests far to the north, infiltrates and turns the Marina to the Head Forester’s will. Unlike the Marina, which seems to exist in a placid mix of genteel paganism and the gutsy but learned Christianity of the Church Fathers or the early medieval Benedictines, the northern forests are the home of brutal idol worship and crude nature gods. The narrator mentions the Æsir explicitly, as well as a grotesque bull god worshiped in a sacred grove.

As the narrator tells his loose, dreamlike story, the avenues through which the Head Forester gains control over the Marina become more and more clear, but the religious one proves particularly striking:

Yet who would have believed that the gods of fat and butter who filled the cows’ udders would gain a following in the Marina—of worshippers, at that, who came from houses in which offerings and sacrifices had long been mocked? The same spirits who deemed themselves strong enough to cut the ties that bound them to their ancestral faith became subjugated to the barbarian idols’ spell. The sight of their blind obedience was more repugnant than drunkenness at midday.

Per CS Lewis, whom I also quoted in last year, “spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served.” The scoffing abandonment of the old religion does not leave the apostate unreligious; it just leaves an opening that must be filled by something else, probably something worse.

On the Marble Cliffs was completed in 1939, just before the German invasion of Poland. When it was published it was pretty quickly interpreted as a fabular broadside against the Nazis, an interpretation that is certainly hard to avoid. It was even taken seriously enough by the Nazi regime that Goebbels tried to have the book suppressed.

And yet Jünger insisted that it is not just an anti-Nazi parable but more broadly applicable, and the insight offered above—that irreligion, especially the elite ability to see through it and treat it with derision, leaves the scoffer open to far worse in the form of ideology and political contagion—is certainly relevant in our day and age. I have certainly seen plenty of acquaintances abandon religion as closeminded and oppressive only to embrace far more shrill, narrowminded, intolerant—and, not insignificantly, much less fun—political ideologies, and with a “blind obedience” that makes me feel pity for them more than anything else.

I’m reading Tess Lewis’s new translation of On the Marble Cliffs for NRYB Classics. It’s excellent so far and I hope to finish it this evening, after which I’ll read the introduction and other apparatus. For those interested, Thomas Nevins also gives the novel pretty extensive treatment in his book on Jünger, which I mentioned a few weeks ago in a much more lighthearted context.

Johnson's rhino

One of my longtime favorite writers, historian and journalist Paul Johnson, died earlier this month aged 94.

I discovered his work in grad school when I read his notorious volume of character studies, Intellectuals, a searing takedown of destructive know-it-alls from Rousseau onward. My appreciation deepened not long before I got married and began teaching with A History of the American People, a massive narrative account of the origins, founding, and ups and downs of the United States written explicitly as an answer to the mendacious Howard Zinn. These two books demonstrate Johnson’s foremost gifts—polemic and grand narrative, the one with sharp elbows and cutting voice and the other with wide, eager eyes trained on far horizons.

In the first years of my marriage and teaching I enjoyed Johnson’s late-career venture into short biographies of great historical figures: Jesus, Napoleon, Churchill, Darwin, Socrates, Washington, Mozart. I have especially fond memories of Eisenhower: A Life, a little book I smuggled into the warehouse area of the sporting goods store where I worked to read furtively during the rare downtime of the retail Christmas season. My wife and I were expecting our first child and I was supplementing my adjunct paychecks from two colleges and a once-a-week tutoring gig. Stealing away to be with Ike for a page here, two pages there, and in Johnson’s brisk and elegant prose, was a great encouragement amidst the cold, the customers, and all the uncertainties of that time.

But I noticed after I finished Eisenhower that no more Johnson books were forthcoming. I looked off and on for years, checking in on Johnson via Google and hoping always for a newly announced title. I regretfully concluded that he was in decline. His death a few weeks ago makes my memories of those books all the more special.

Of the obits and appreciations published after Johnson’s death one stood out to me: a shambling, unstructured, and therefore endearing reminiscence by National Review’s Jay Nordlinger. Amidst the anecdotes and interesting tidbits (at Oxford, Johnson studied under AJP Taylor) Nordlinger included a mention of Johnson’s “Rhino Principle,” which Johnson explicated in a 2006 essay for Forbes. Here’s the principle:

Now, the rhino is not a particularly subtle or clever animal. It’s the last of the antediluvian quadrupeds to carry a great weight of body armor. And by all the rules of progressive design and the process of natural selection the rhino ought to have been eliminated. But it hasn't been. Why not? Because the rhino is single-minded. When it perceives an object, it makes a decision—to charge. And it puts everything it’s got into that charge. When the charge is over, the object is either flattened or has gone a long way into cover, whereupon the rhino instantly resumes browsing.

Few people think of learning from a rhino. But I have. And when I hear of an author who cannot finish or get started on a book, I send him (or her) a rhino card. I paint a watercolor of a rhinoceros on the front of a postcard—something I do well, as I’ve practiced it a great many times. And in the space next to the address I write: “Stop fussing about that book. Just charge it. Keep on charging it until it is finished. That’s what the rhino does. Put this card over your desk and remember the Rhino Principle.”

And the crucial point:

Now, the Rhino Principle may not produce the perfect book, but it does produce a book. And once a book is drafted, it can be improved, polished and made satisfactory. But if the Rhino Principle is ignored, there is no book at all.

Like Johnson’s Ike in the chilly shipping area of the Academy Sports warehouse, this was precisely the encouragement and inspiration I needed right now, and I’m grateful to Johnson for it.

To the ranks of the great proverbial possessives out there—Buridan’s ass, Morton’s fork, Hobson’s choice, Chesterton’s fence—let us add Johnson’s rhino.

Paul Johnson, journalist, critic, commentator, controversialist, and guide to the epic sweep of the past, RIP.

What are you doing here?

I’m currently reading Thomas Nevin’s Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-45. In his chapter on the Weimar Era, Nevin describes how, after several years of writing for nationalist military magazines and other right-wing outlets, Jünger branched out in the intellectual company he kept:

He was friendly to the national Bolshevist Ernst Nieckish, to the Bohemian anarchist Erich Mühsam, to the putschist Ernst von Salomon, to the national socialist Otto Strasser, to the communists Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Toller. These men could get together in a room and talk in a civil way. It is facile to conclude they were united in opposing the republic. In fact, strong in intelligence, they were political weaklings.

One sympathizes.

This is a rich cross-section of Weimar political persuasions, with these men belonging to groups that were sometimes literally fighting each other in the streets. Indeed, the left-wing Nazi Otto Strasser and the anti-Nazi nationalist Ernst von Salomon were veterans of the Freikorps. (Von Salomon lightly fictionalized his experiences in The Outlaws, which I read two years ago.)

Nevin goes on to describe the regular salons Jünger and others would hold throughout 1929:

Regularly on Friday evenings . . . Jünger and brother Fritz met at the home of Friedrich Hielscher on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse. These gatherings usually included von Salomon, the publisher Rowohlt, Otto Strasser, the expressionist writer Arnolt Bronnen, and Vormarsch illustrator Paul Weber, soon famous for his prophetic drawings depicting Nazism as a cult of death.

Again—so far, so Weimar, especially when you look into some of the lesser-known figures and find that peculiar cocktail of playwrights, businessmen, and neopagans that could only make sense in that time and place. But then, just before describing how Joseph Goebbels himself began attending these meetings with the express aim of winning Jünger over to the Nazis, Nevin casually tosses this in:

The American novelist Thomas Wolfe also attended.

I, like Jim Halpert, have just so many questions.

In all seriousness, this was a great surprise, and something unexpected and new to look into. I’ve already had this out-of-print Wolfe biography, which gives good coverage to the years he spent in Germany, where Look Homeward, Angel was apparently a huge hit, recommended by a co-worker and Wolfe relation.

A reminder that one of the purest and strangest delights of studying history is stumbling across connections between seemingly separate things you’re interested in, connections that throw both subjects suddenly into a strange new relief—in this case, Ernst Jünger and interwar Germany and the Southern literary world of the same period.

Joel Coen on movies vs TV

In my 2022 movie year-in-review I mentioned my exhaustion with TV and my preference for movies. Joel Coen, from a 2020 podcast with longtime cinematographer Roger Deakins on why he and brother Ethan have stuck to movies and not ventured into TV, explains a little of what goes into my preference:

[L]ong-form was never something we could get our heads around. It’s a different paradigm. Not to be shitty about it, but you can look at stories that they have a beginning, middle, and end. But so much of television has a beginning, a middle, a middle, a middle, a middle, until the whole thing dies of exhaustion. It’s beaten to death and then you find a way of ending it.

We’ve all watched TV shows like this. Even some of our favorites fit the arc Coen describes here.

One of the reasons I hope movies and movie theatres survive is that the discipline of the form makes moviegoing better than binge-watching even a good TV show. The discipline of the filmmakers to turn out a compact, well-crafted, self-contained jewel—rather than giving themselves permission, as so many TV showrunners do, to sprawl all over the place—and the discipline of the audience starting a story and not being able to stop it, having to receive it continuously in the form intended by the filmmakers; these are virtues that dissipate in the size and potential aimlessness of a TV series.

There are exceptions, of course, but who has time to find them? And I’ll carve out space for mini-series, which demand some of the same beginning-middle-end discipline as a two-hour drama. Not for nothing is the five-episode Chernobyl and the six-episode The Night Manager the best TV I’ve seen in the last few years.

I’m currently listening to the full Deakins-Coen interview on my commute between campuses. I discovered it and the passage above thanks to this short post from World of Reel.

On ancient and medieval “propaganda”

It is commonplace among certain kinds of historians to refer to some ancient and medieval sources, especially anything produced at the behest or under the patronage of a king or nobleman, as “propaganda.” Among those that come to mind from my reading in the last couple years are Asser’s Life of King Alfred, the anonymous Life of King Edward (the Confessor), and Augustus’s Res Gestae Divi Augusti. And this is without taking into account the purely literary works that critics occasionally label propaganda, like the Aeneid.

Calling these sources “propaganda” seems to me wrongheaded and misleading for several reasons, foremost among them the anachronistic connotations embedded in the word itself.

While the word has innocent origins (and a quite interesting and revealing evolution) and it can, technically, still mean only “official information,” its technical sense, as with “Dark Ages,” has been almost entirely swamped by negative connotations. Labeling something “propaganda” immediately freights it with insinuation as to its origins and the ulterior motives of its creators. To me, the word propaganda suggests:

1—the direct involvement or oversight of a state or ruling power,
2—a carefully crafted and controlled programmatic message,
3—ideological motivation and rationalization for either distorting the truth or outright lying,

and, in terms of material conditions,

4—a means of mass production or at least mass dissemination, and
5—a corresponding mass readership.

I think this is a pretty fair assessment of where propaganda comes from, what it’s for, and what it needs to do its work, and yet by these standards most ancient and medieval texts offhandedly labeled “propaganda” by modern historians would fall far short.

Just the culture of widespread literacy required by 4 and 5 would eliminate almost all sources before Gutenberg and from most of the following two or three centuries, and 1 and 2 are seldom as obvious from a face-value reading of such sources as some historians would like you to believe.

To take the examples I gave at the beginning of this post:

• In Asser’s Life of King Alfred, Asser himself asserts authorship, openly acknowledges his personal connection to his subject, and explains why he wanted to write about him. What is not clear is that Alfred was directing Asser (1) or dictating how he was to be presented (2). And what certainly is clear, given how books were produced during the 9th century, was that Asser could not publish or widely disseminate his version of Alfred’s life (4) and that only a small number of people like Asser—clergy, religious, and a small number of educated laymen like Alfred himself—would ever read it, nixing (5).

• Ditto the Life of King Edward, with the added uncertainties of who precisely commissioned the book and who wrote it, so that it is even more speculative to argue for (1) and (2). Further, the Life survives in one manuscript, which is empirical proof that even if whoever commissioned the book aimed at (4) and (5), they did not achieve it.

• Of the unscientific sample I referred to at the top, the one that comes closest to fitting the definition of propaganda suggested by the term is Augustus’s Res Gestae or The Deeds of Augustus. Here you have the emperor himself dictating the text (1), much of which is political in nature (2), and widely reproduced as a monumental inscription (4). But even here it is not clear how many people could read the Res Gestae even when it was available inscribed in a public place.

So much for the anachronistic implications of the term. But there is a deeper level of error to which calling an ancient or medieval source “propaganda” leads.

What is missing from all of the sources I worked through above but fundamental to all modern propaganda is (3), an ideological framework that either allows or requires lying. This is not to say that these sources are 100% truthful, but flattery, omitting awkward or controversial topics, or simply not knowing things and not recording them are not the same thing as ideologically motivated suppression or fabrication of facts.

Assuming ancient and medieval sources to have the same pragmatic relationship to the truth as modern propagandists (or, increasingly, historians) is a clear case of projection. Their ways were not our ways. As Orwell wrote on this topic in a passage I posted last year:

Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. . . . A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it. . . . Some of the facts . . . were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such thing would be possible now.

Further—and this is especially the case for sources like the Life of King Alfred and Life of King Edward—the dearth of alternative or parallel sources for many of the events they describe means that even the forms of non-propaganda bias listed above can only be inferred. Guessed at. Speculated.

Which I think gets at what’s really going on with accusations that such sources are “propaganda.” Calling a source propaganda grants the historian permission to read between the lines and construct alternate histories purely negatively, with a kind of kindergarten “opposite day” hermeneutic that ends up as a license to fabricate. And the problem is only more pronounced in those periods when we have precisely the lack of sources that requires us to rely on those commissioned by kings or abbots or emperors.

By all means, approach sources produced through some connection to or the patronage of a king or ruler or other authority with caution, and always, always look for bias. (It’ll be there, though that doesn’t mean anyone is lying.) But avoid dragging in words with such strongly modern associations and implications, and certainly don’t use that as an excuse to concoct the “real” story behind the sources we actually have. That way lies bad history.

If only we had a word for that kind of untruthful, selective, ideologically motivated storytelling.

High-profile targets

Which one do more people recognize? Which one are more people mad about? Which one deserves it?

More than four years ago, in the early days of this blog, I reviewed a short biography of Raphael Semmes, captain of the Confederate commerce raider Alabama. In passing, I noted that despite his success and notoriety during the Civil War, he was now obscure enough that an announced demonstration at his monument in Mobile attracted no protesters. A vision of a vanished world, surely, but this was despite continued and well-publicized protests at monuments to General Lee and other figures.

On a recent episode of his excellent new podcast Uncancelled History, Douglas Murray interviewed historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, author of Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan and many other books on Spanish history and the Age of Exploration. After thorough comparisons of the much-maligned Columbus to other figures from that era—specifically Magellan, who actually did some of the heinous things Columbus is only accused of doing—Murray and Fernández-Armesto turn to the question of why some historical figures attract outrage, protest, and cancelation and others don’t:

DM: How is it all of these reputations, these very different people with very different attitudes, have sort of got wrapped up together? I mean, Magellan, for instance, I suspect that of those who know him today, relatively few will know what a kind of villain he was, but he gets wrapped up with Columbus. Everything in the Age of Explorers has got merged, somehow.

FFM: The paradox is, it’s got nothing to do with the facts! It’s very hard to say that about Magellan. And yet, you know, Columbus—the guys are tearing down his statues, they’re besmirching his reputation, they’re smattering him with obloquy, they’re treating him as if he were some kind of proto-fascist, and yet Magellan, who really was a bad guy, has escaped all that! You know? His statues are intact! Nobody is saying, Let’s tear down his statues. Nobody is saying, Let’s, you know, revise his reputation, et cetera—except me. No one is saying, Why don’t we right the injustices that have accrued from Magellan’s voyage. In fact, quite the contrary. There are all these scientific prizes and university programs and whole species and constellations named after Magellan, and nobody is saying Lets, you know, change those names. So it’s quite amazing that the relatively good guy gets all the brickbats and the relatively bad guy gets all the praise. And I think the reason—you know, it’s very hard to explain that—but I think it’s an example of how prejudice is inviolable by fact and that no matter what the truth is of an episode in the past, people decide what they think about it on the basis of their prejudices and on the basis of what it does for their own programs and agendas, and it’s very unfortunate that Columbus has become the victim of specifically American agendas to do with Native American identity and slavery, things that he really had nothing to do with but which have become associated with him historically in the course of the long—oh, I don’t know—sort of unfolding historiographical story between his day and ours. Whereas Magellan didn’t make any contribution to the United States, never even got anywhere near here, and is therefore pretty much ignored by public opinion in America.

In short, Columbus is well-known—for reasons specific to American pathologies—and Magellan is not. Columbus conjures strong associations and vivid if inaccurate mental pictures, and Magellan does not. So if the historically ignorant are going to attack an explorer—again, for reasons specific to American pathologies—they will attack Columbus.

But activists can take an alternate tack, as this discussion suggests. Murray calls it “wrapping up.” One might also call it “guilt by association” or simply judging all by the example of the worst. Being too ignorant to be specific, and to make specific, historically literate arguments about people like Columbus, it is easier to judge according to broad categories carefully presented—usually through cherrypicked evidence or simply shouting—as inarguably evil.

So while some poor sap somewhere might be tempted to argue the merits of “canceling” Columbus, it is harder to argue against a sweeping condemnation of all “colonizers.” Assuming these arguments are presented in good faith in the first place—an assumption I am unwilling to make.

This is clearly the case in the category of “Confederates.” Lee is famous in the first place and has intractable defenders today because he was a genuinely good and great man, and so efforts to attack this high-profile target, one of the few Confederate leaders anyone could name, were always going to be difficult. But shift the discussion to “Confederates” writ large, oversimplify and ignore context and specifics—striving always for “the clarity of caricature”—and even the obscure figures whom activists could never have otherwise named or recognized can be swept up in the net and liquidated.

Which brings me back to Raphael Semmes, whose statue did come down in just such a trawling approach in the summer of 2020. Like Magellan, he could never bring out mobs of protesters the way Lee (or Jefferson, or Washington, or Lincoln) could, but “wrapping up,” attacking categories, showed that actually knowing something about targets doesn’t matter. (Tellingly, an article on the removal of Semmes’s statue was headlined “Who was Confederate Adm. Raphael Semmes?”)

Food for thought, something this podcast is good for. I certainly recommend Murray’s interview with Fernández-Armesto, but perhaps the best episode I’ve listened to so far is the most recent, in which Murray talks to Thomas Chatterton-Williams about the woke campaign against the classics.

Material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys

Yesterday I started reading John Buchan’s Huntingtower, a 1922 adventure novel that introduced recurring character Dickson McCunn, a Glasgow “provision merchant” or grocer. Newly retired at the age of fifty-five and with his wife out of town, taking a cure at a Continental spa, McCunn decides to go on an adventure. Buchan informs us that “Mr McCunn—I may confess at the start—was an incurable romantic.”

The source of this incurable romanticism? His imagination, as fueled by decades of reading:

“He . . . sought in literature for one thing alone. . . . material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys.”

He had had a humdrum life since the day when he had first entered his uncle’s shop with the hope of some day succeeding that honest grocer; and his feet had never strayed a yard from his sober rut. But his mind, like the Dying Gladiator’s, had been far away. As a boy he had voyaged among books, and they had given him a world where he could shape his career according to his whimsical fancy. Not that Mr. McCunn was what is known as a great reader. He read slowly and fastidiously, and sought in literature for one thing alone. Sir Walter Scott had been his first guide, but he read the novels not for their insight into human character or for their historical pageantry, but because they gave him material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys. It was the same with Dickens. A lit tavern, a stage-coach, post-horses, the clack of hoofs on a frosty road, went to his head like wine. He was a Jacobite not because he had any views on Divine Right, but because he had always before his eyes a picture of a knot of adventurers in cloaks, new landed from France, among the western heather.

C’est moi. Like McCunn, what I wanted out of anything I read as a kid was to feel these things—to fall in with dangerous pirates, to narrowly escape kidnapping and murder, to wait in the cramped dark to spring a surprise attack, to go undercover among enemies, to fight monsters and elude giants, to witness the unfolding of world-shattering battle—and the exhilaration of living through it all. I would not just “watch” in my mind’s eye but imagine myself there thanks to all the raw, vivid, concrete sensory detail good writers provided, and would go on “to construct fantastic journeys” of my own. Like McCunn, I was a daydreamer. Still am. And like McCunn, I sympathize with the desperate, the uncertain, the underdog—with adventurers.

Recently the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore shared a list of the historical novels that inspired his love of history. I may have to put together just such a list of my own. In the meantime, here’s his list (or this screenshotted version to avoid the paywall). And Huntingtower is a delight so far, much the kind of adventure McCunn himself would have enjoyed.

We better not

Reviewing a new mini-series adaptation of Ben MacIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends, the story of notorious Communist agent Kim Philby, Charlotte Gill takes issue with an invented character named Lily Taylor who is scrupulously designed to appeal to certain sensibilities—a working class woman who don’t take guff off of nobody. Gill argues that Taylor’s intrusion into what is meant to be a dramatization of a true story is evidence of the filmmakers’ ideological capture. I don’t disagree.

Gill briefly outlines many other problems with the series from an historical and storytelling standpoint, but the fictional Lily Taylor highlights a problem with the storytellers themselves, and with modern storytelling more generally. Gill:

But what is most perplexing—not just with [A Spy Among Friends], but every drama or book that sees the past as a canvas that can be reworked—is why writers think their fiction (which they call history) is better than reality. It takes a certain arrogance to believe that you can improve it, worse still that you have the moral responsibility to erase parts you find objectionable. There is a reason people come back to the Philby story; because it is fascinating in itself—without the need for Lily Taylors. Sadly, as in the case of Kim Philby, ideology will remain paramount for some.

Spot on. And I have often wondered by filmmakers and all the others “reworking” historical stories or great literature for “modern audiences” don’t grasp that the appeal of most stories, whether historical or literary, is the story as it stands. It’s already interesting. It takes ideological capture, arrogance (but I repeat myself), and—it should be added—a startling lack of creativity not to see this.

Some years ago that great YouTube seer, Mr Plinkett, reviewed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in his inimitable style. Near the end, in considering whether it was a good idea to make a fourth installment in the series at all, he laid down a good prudential principle: “We all love Indiana Jones, yes, but everybody needs that part of their brain that says ‘We better not.’”

Ditto those who would “improve” the past to suit their own preconceptions.

Naturally, I have a lot of thoughts about the use of fictional characters in true stories or settings, as they are often an important tool in adaptation. I may delve into those here sometime soon.

2022 in movies

I almost named this year of movies The Year of Indifference. After struggling along for several years, I finally turned a corner in the spring and just stopped caring about most of the movies that came out.

I can remember the moment. It was April, the year barely begun. I was sitting in a theatre waiting to watch The Northman when the non-stop pre-trailer fluff turned toward the mandatory Disney agitprop. Two youthful people announced—as if any of us could have forgotten—that next month Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness would arrive in theatres. Fine. Whatever. But their second sentence was something like, “Here are all the movies and Disney+ shows you need to catch up on before the movie!”

I’m still not sure if I said it out loud, but I certainly thought, “Well, the hell with that.”

I had most looked forward to three movies in the spring of 2022. As it turns out, those were my three favorite movies of 2022. From the last of those in late spring right up to New Year’s Eve, I slid downhill into utter apathy. Movies came and went and I did not care. I did not see the new Dr Strange, or Jurassic World, or Thor, or Black Panther, or any edgy A24 stuff, or any prestige movies about movies like The Fabelmans or Empire of Light or Babylon, or anything that came out on any streaming service, and I probably will not in the future. Not that I felt any hostility toward these movies—the only one I bestowed hate upon was Avatar: The Way of Water, which I certainly will not see—I just did not care. Even the things I felt some flicker of interest in I could not be motivated to go pay money to watch. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover.

But I hope so, because while the lows of 2022 were, for me, very low, the tiny handful of high points were most high indeed.

So having explained how I came to be even more pessimistic than usual about the state of filmmaking, let me focus for the rest of the post on the purely positive. Rather than The Year of Indifference, I’m taking a cue from a coincidental symmetry in the titles of my top three films and dubbing 2022:

The Year of The _____man (and Top Gun: Maverick)

Top Gun: Maverick

The hype is real.

I have little personal attachment to the original Top Gun, but grew more and more interested in Maverick as it kept getting delayed and as I learned more about it. By the time it arrived in theatres I had even allowed myself to get excited, and boy was that excitement rewarded. A carefully crafted, well-executed action movie with clear stakes, straightforward old-fashioned storytelling, solid if not deep characters, some resonant themes of guilt, mentorship, hard work, and courage, and genuinely awesome action, Top Gun: Maverick thrilled me.

What is more, the movie holds up. I saw it twice in theatres in the late spring. My wife gave me the Blu-ray for Christmas, and my dad set up a great family movie night in his office’s conference room over Christmas break—massive TV, loud, bassy speakers, and plenty of pizza. The movie was just as exciting as the first time I saw it on the big screen.

You can read my full review from May here.

The Batman

The Batman was my first big movie of the year, but one I had looked forward to with some trepidation. I intentionally avoided reviews and information about the movie because I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I went in almost cold, with few expectations though admittedly some hopes that it would be good.

Those hopes were fulfilled. The Batman proved a legitimate crime movie, serial killer mystery, police procedural, action thriller, and detective story all at the same time, with a good script, excellent acting, a wonderfully detailed Gotham City—the best I’ve seen in a Batman movie, in my opinion—just oozing and dripping the gloomy atmosphere I’ve always imagined, and a subtle but effective coming-of-age story for Batman. Like Top Gun: Maverick, The Batman takes familiar material and elevates it not only through its surehanded and expert storytelling but through the mature, old-fashioned themes it dramatizes.

You can read my full review from March here, with some further notes, thoughts, and observations here.

The Northman

The Northman is the best Viking movie ever made, and perhaps the only thoroughly good one. (Though I do have a soft spot for one very old-fashioned one.)

Robert Eggers’s stated intention in The Northman was to make a film that felt and worked like an undiscovered saga, one of the many Old Norse stories of outlaws, heroes, revenge, and the supernatural recorded in Iceland a few centuries after the end of the Viking Age. He succeeded brilliantly. This film drops the viewer into an alien world, one utterly indifferent to our modern values or pieties and one in which strength, victory, and the ruthless fulfilment of personal obligations—most notably revenge—offered the only guiding morality. It is a bracing vision, simultaneously breathtaking in its boldness and courage and disturbing in its bleak callousness. Again—accurately capturing the spirit of this lost world.

The Northman is the movie I was most excited about going into the spring of 2022. And while I might have enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick more as rock-solid entertainment, The Northman satisfies my most niche historical and cinematic interests like no other film. It’s brilliantly executed and deserves a watch.

You can read my full review from April here.

Three runners-up

In addition to my three favorites, all of which came out in the late winter or spring, here are three good, solidly-made movies I saw that didn’t quite rise to the top. Like my top three, I happen to have already reviewed all three of these in greater detail here on the blog. Links are included with each short recap below.

Devotion—The story of two fighter pilots in the newly integrated US Navy, Devotion follows wingmen Lt Tom Hudner and Ens Jesse Brown—one white aviator, one black—as they get to know each other, testing and pushing one another until a deep bond of friendship grows between these two quite different men. All this plays out as the Cold War slowly escalates, culminating in Hudner and Brown’s deployment to an aircraft carrier providing close air support to Marines in the first terrible winter of the Korean War. It’s here that Hudner and Brown’s skill as aviators and their devotion to one another as wingmen and friends will be tested.

Glenn Powell, who plays Hudner here and another naval aviator, Hangman, in Top Gun: Maverick, was a producer on Devotion and clearly learned a lot of lessons about how to shoot aerial sequences with real aircraft from his experience on Top Gun. So it’s unfortunate that Devotion and Top Gun: Maverick ended up coming out the same year, as I’ve heard several unfavorable comparisons between the two. Devotion is a different kind of movie, with a statelier pace and a greater emphasis on character drama, but it is well-crafted, well-acted, and handsomely shot and both deserves and rewards viewing.

You can read my full review of Devotion—a dual review with Glass Onion—here.

The Tragedy of Macbeth—Joel Coen’s solo adaptation of my favorite Shakespearean play is a fast-moving but stately and intensely moody film. The acting is excellent, but the real draw is the film’s style, an atmospheric throwback to impressionistic black-and-white silent films complete with stagey sets and dramatic high-contrast lighting, all of which intensifies the drama of murder and deception and the pervasive eeriness of the story. This adaptation captures the mood of Shakespeare’s play better than any of the other film versions I’ve seen.

You can read my full review of The Tragedy of Macbeth from January here.

Glass Onion—This is the one exception to my statement above that I saw nothing released on any streaming service, but that’s only because Netflix gave this a short theatrical run ahead of its streaming release. This is apparently a trend, and I hope it continues. Glass Onion is a lot of fun (though I erred in my review when I wrote that it was probably the most fun I’d had at the movies that year, as that distinction obviously belongs to Top Gun: Maverick), with the same whimsical, trickster style of Knives Out but more outright comedy. Writer-director Rian Johnson deftly satirizes the fatuity and self-congratulation of modern day influencers—whether tech billionaires, do-gooder leftist politicians, celebrity fashionistas, or the rise-and-grind types hawking male-enhancement drugs—and the intricate overlapping construction creates genuine mystery, surprise, and humor. I have a few reservations and misgivings about Glass Onion, but as pure entertainment it was a rare treat.

You can read my full review of Glass Onion—a dual review with Devotion—here.

New to me

While most of the movie year was a bust for me, I did see some great old films for the first time. These were the best—or at least most entertaining—of the lot:

The Beast—This is a lesser-known 1988 film directed by Kevin Reynolds, who would go on to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves a few years later. The Beast (aka The Beast of War) takes place during the Soviet war in Afghanistan and begins with a platoon of Russian T-55 tanks destroying an Afghan village. The tankers wantonly murder civilians and try to torture information out of a tribal elder by slowly rolling over him—from the feet up—with one tank. After the massacre one tank becomes separated, and its efforts to escape hostile territory as well as violent disagreement among the crew form one half of the film’s story. The other half follows Taj (Steven Bauer), now the Khan of the tribe attacked at the beginning of the film, as he and a band of mujahideen seek revenge. The two stories intertwine suspensefully, converging on the character of Koverchenko (Jason Patric), a Russian tanker tested both by his commander, the violent Daskal (George Dzundza) and the mujahideen. Both a harrowing small-scale war film and an intense, well-acted character drama, The Beast was the best surprise of my year and deserves to be much better remembered.

Dunkirk—Not to be confused with the more recent Christopher Nolan film, this 1958 Ealing Studios film starring John Mills, Richard Attenborough, and Bernard Lee retells the title story of collapse, retreat, desperation, and rescue in the traditional style one would expect from the late 1950s, and it’s excellent. Well-acted, told on a grand scale, and moving between multiple stories that converge in the evacuation, Dunkirk gives the real events well-rounded and unsentimental treatment and represents old-fashioned war movies at their best. Far from being superseded by Nolan’s more stripped-down modern action-thriller, this Dunkirk holds its own. The result is two movies about the same events in two dramatically different styles. The two complement each other well and would make a great double-feature for fans of film history, action, or war movies. Regardless, this Dunkirk is well worth seeing for its own sake.

The Mummy—I have a set of the classic Universal monster movies on Blu-ray and have been working through them for Halloween over the last few years. I had seen Frankenstein and Dracula before, but this year I finally got to the original 1932 version of The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff. Slow, quiet, and straightforwardly told, The Mummy nevertheless achieves a wonderfully eerie atmosphere—helped in no small part by Karloff’s creepy and tightly controlled performance as Ardeth Bey—and steadily builds tension from beginning to end. This was one I didn’t expect to enjoy nearly as much as I did, and I look forward to revisiting it.

Grizzly—I’m not going to pretend that this movie is good, but it was highly entertaining. (See my carefully qualified introduction above.) Grizzly is an obvious, beat-for-beat knockoff of Jaws, but instead of a shark in the ocean the threat is a bear in the woods. The woods in question are those of Rabun County, Georgia, and part of the fun for me was spotting all the recognizable local places used in the film (e.g. the Rock House in downtown Clayton, an intersection on the Tallulah Gorge Scenic Loop used as the entrance to a fake national park, and the driveway and lab room of my childhood doctor’s office, a moment that gave me the willies because the perspective in the film was exactly that of a patient sitting down to get a finger prick). Also, my dad is in it as an extra. I gather that RiffTrax has done one of its commentaries on Grizzly, and that sounds like it’d be worthwhile. I’d recommend this as a potential Lousy Movie Night classic.

Special commendations—TV

I long ago gave up on most TV shows, not out of the indifference I plummeted into this spring but out of the inability to pick where to start. There’s so much TV out there. And a TV show takes up hours and hours and hours of time I’d rather spend on reading, or playing with my kids, or watching multiple movies. But, given the dearth of good stuff at the theatre, this year my wife and I did get into two excellent shows that provided some of the highlights of our 2022.

“Ghosts”—This is the original BBC series, though there is a recent American adaptation. “Ghosts” follows the centuries’ worth of dead people who have, for whatever reason, not departed the once-stately Button House in the English countryside. There’s a decapitated Tudor nobleman, an early 1990s Conservative MP who died in a compromising situation and so dwells in eternity with no pants, an infantile Georgian lady, a genteel Edwardian lady who falls screaming from an upstairs window every night, a Scoutmaster who died in an archery accident, a Romantic poet killed in a pistol duel, a stalwart British Army officer from the Second World War, a basement full of medieval plague victims from a mass gave under the foundation, and—reaching way, way back—perhaps my favorite character, a caveman.

As befits a show developed by and starring the “Horrible Histories” team, “Ghosts” is hilarious, packed with wit, slapstick, and lots of great historical humor. All these characters from many time periods, plus the two new owners of the house, make a wonderful ensemble, with a rich variety of personal foibles, conflicts, affections and rivalries, and running gags. The show also proves surprisingly moving at times, as in an episode in which the Scoutmaster’s now-elderly widow and son make their annual visit to the house.

My wife found “Ghosts” on DVD at our local library and we watched the entire first season in a few days, stopping ourselves after two episodes each night so that we didn’t stay up until the wee hours binging it. I can’t attest to the other seasons of the show, but season one was a great show that was funny without being mean-spirited, dirty, or insulting to your intelligence. We look forward to watching more.

“Bluey”—Let me repeat what I said about Top Gun above: the hype is real. “Bluey” is a pure delight—a kids’ show that isn’t insulting or annoying, that prizes playfulness and imagination, that showcases a loving, functioning family in which all the members love and respect each other, and that is beautifully animated. It’s also so well-crafted and -written that it works on multiple levels, so that in my family, all three kids—ranging in age from three to seven—as well as my wife and I can enjoy the show together and get different things out of it. (Favorite line: Bandit, the dad, while plunging the toilet: “What are these kids eating?” Based on a true story.)

And speaking as a father, I appreciate seeing a show in which the dad is fun but not an idiot, and has a relationship of mutual love, respect, and hard work with the kids’ mom. That’s vanishingly rare in modern entertainment, and one of the many, many things that make “Bluey” special.

What I missed in 2022

Movies from this year that I wanted to see but, for various reasons—including not wanting to pay for a half-dozen streaming subscriptions and finding Redbox a bit of a pain—I didn’t get to. I’m hoping to see these in the new year.

• Operation Mincemeat—Based on the excellent Ben MacIntyre book, a fascinating true story performed by a great cast.

• Munich: The Edge of War—Based on Robert Harris’s novel, a political thriller with personal stakes in a crucial historical setting. Jeremy Irons looks like an inspired choice to play Neville Chamberlain.

• See How They Run—Looks like a charming historical whodunnit. My wife and I actually made plans to see this but it was gone from cinemas before we could make the arrangements for a date night.

• Nope—I still haven’t seen any of Jordan Peele’s films, but this one involves—or at least appears to involve—UFOs, and is supposed to have smart and hard-edged satire.

• Amsterdam—An intriguing premise and kooky characters hooked into a fictionalized version of a fascinating true incident—the “Business Plot” to overthrow the US government.

• Weird: The Al Yankovic Story—I love Weird Al and, far from a straightforward musical biopic, this looks like an appropriately irreverent parody of what is perhaps the most cliché-ridden genre in Hollywood.

• The Banshees of Inisherin—Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, two favorites who have previously starred in one of my favorite films, In Bruges, reunite with that film’s director for this dark comedy about a man from a small Irish village who inexplicably but very pointed ends his long friendship with another.

• The Menu—This didn’t look like my kind of thing when I first read about it, but I’ve added it to the get-around-to-eventually list on the strength of favorable comments from friends.

• All Quiet on the Western Front—A new adaptation of one of my oldest favorite novels, and the first in the novel’s original language. I eagerly anticipated this when the first trailer finally dropped but, since then, have had a number of the film’s major departures from the book spoiled, so I’m somewhat more hesitant about it now. Still hoping to see it at least once in the days to come.

So, again, there may be several more great movies out there leftover from 2022 that I’ve simply missed, but I’m going to have to overcome quite a lot of weariness and inertia to seek some of these out.

What I’m looking forward to in 2023

I’m afraid my superhero burnout and general apathy continues as I look ahead at 2023’s release schedules, but the few films I look forward to I really look forward two. In order of anticipation, from highest to lowest, they are:

• Mission: Impossible—Dead Recoking Part I—I don’t see how this could be terrible. Cruise, McQuarrie and company have been on a roll for the last several films in this series. I’ll be there opening weekend.

• Oppenheimer—It’s striking to me that Christopher Nolan, out of his twelve films, has made three superhero movies, three near-future sci-fi thrillers, three crime films, and three historical films. And out of this last category, two out of the three have centered on crucial events from World War II. I’m very curious to see how he approaches the seemingly uncinematic story of the Manhattan Project’s R&D of the atomic bomb and J Robert Oppenheimer’s role in it.

• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny—Please don’t be terrible. At least be better than the CGI in the trailer.

• Dune: Part Two—Villeneuve’s Dune was one of the most pleasant surprises for me at the movies in the last several years, and as a result I am, to my continuing surprise, quite looking forward to Part Two.

• Napoleon—Ridley Scott has a shaky relationship with historical fact but his movies are always breathtaking to behold, and Joaquin Phoenix, who brings a nigh-insane sense of drive and intensity to every part he plays, should do something interesting with old Boney.

These are the ones I am actually excited for, but let’s hope that, as in any moviegoing year, there will also be some nice surprises along the way.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the top, despite my overall negative impression of film and the film industry in 2022, the good things I saw weren’t just good, but excellent. I gladly recommend any of the films praised above. Here’s hoping for much more like them in 2023!

2022 in books

I read a lot of good books in 2022, and I had a hard time narrowing them down in the “best of” categories I typically use for these posts, and once I had done that I still had a lot to say about them. So let me end these introductory remarks here and get you straight into the best fiction, non-fiction, kids’ books, and rereads of my year.

Favorite fiction of the year

This was a fiction-heavy year of reading thanks in no small part to two wonderful series recommended by friends, about which more below. I present the overall favorites in no particular order:

Wait for a Corpse, by Max Murray—A really charming and witty mystery from the early 1950s in which the mystery is not who killed the narrator’s awful Uncle Titus but who is going to. A genuinely romantic will-they-won’t-they love story, a variety of humorous and farcical plot complications, and a dash of small-town political shenanigans round out this fun story. Long out of print and probably hard to find, but worth seeking out.

John Macnab and Sick Heart River, by John Buchan—This year I declared my birth month John Buchan June and read and wrote about as many of his novels as I could. I squeezed eight in, and these two were my favorite new reads. One a high-spirited outdoor heist caper set in the Scottish highlands, the other a moody and contemplative outdoor odyssey through the furthest reaches of the Canadian Rockies, both are excellent, gripping, absorbing reads, albeit in dramatically different ways. You can read my full John Buchan June reviews of John Macnab and Sick Heart River here and here.

Fatherland, by Robert Harris—A Kripo detective in Berlin investigates the murder of an obscure Nazi Party functionary as the city prepares to celebrate Hitler’s 75th birthday—in 1964. I’m not usually one for alternate history, but Fatherland approaches a fantasy world in which the Nazis won World War II through a brilliantly structured mystery-thriller, giving the reader two levels of investigation and discovery that interlock with and complement each other. It’s vividly imagined, plausibly detailed, and briskly written. “I couldn’t put it down” is a hoary cliché, but in this case, for me, it was true.

And the Whole Mountain Burned, by Ray McPadden—A strongly written and hard-hitting novel about two soldiers—one experienced, one green—in the United States’ war in Afghanistan.

Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams—The story of a buffalo hunt in a remote pass of the Rockies, Butcher’s Crossing balances a gritty, sweaty, bloody plot with intense character drama, pitting the naïve and sentimental New England boy Will Andrews against the Captain Ahab-like Miller, the guide and trigger-man leading the expedition. Beautifully written and gripping. I blogged about Williams’s use of the senses in Butcher’s Crossing here.

The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey—A severely injured police inspector tries to solve a 450-year old mystery from his hospital bed. It’s better than it sounds—astonishingly good, in fact. Full review from last month here.

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie—The work of Agatha Christie is a weird lacuna in my reading, and until this year the only one of her novels I’d ever read was Murder on the Orient Express way back in high school. I fixed that this fall with one of her other most famous books, And Then There Were None. This review will be short: it’s regarded as a masterpiece for a reason.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, by Edgar Allan Poe—Poe’s only novel, Arthur Gordon Pym purports to be the journal/memoirs of a New England youth who stowed away on a ship and got considerably more than he bargained for, including mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism, ghost ships, and a final voyage into terra incognita, violent encounters with undiscovered peoples, and… something far worse. Poe combines Moby-Dick-style kitchen sink realism, a Robinson Crusoe-style spirit of adventure, and plenty of his own trademark feel for the uncanny and terrifying for an engaging and uniquely thrilling tale. I had only ever heard bad or dismissive comments about Pym up until this time and was very pleasantly surprised by it.

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy—Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since The Road sixteen years ago starts as a sort of New Orleans No Country for Old Men in which Bobby Western, the brilliant son of a Manhattan Project physicist who is now a salvage diver, starts his own investigation into the mysterious crash of a private jet in the Mississippi River only for terrible unseen forces to array themselves against him. This storyline is interspersed with that of Bobby’s sister, a child prodigy afflicted with intrusive schizophrenic hallucinations, whom we know from the opening pages eventually hangs herself. But neither storyline goes anywhere, exactly. Long, talky, meandering (none of which are intended as criticisms), The Passenger is as vividly written as any of McCarthy’s other work but clearly has much more going on in it thematically than the straightforward plot elements, and I knew even while reading it that it would stick with me and reward me more later through simply letting it sit in the back of my mind for a while, and that has proven to be the case. But that doesn’t make it a completely satisfying read. So, caveat lector. The companion volume focusing primarily on Bobby’s sister and her institutionalization, Stella Maris, is already out but I haven’t gotten to it yet. We’ll see how this informs and recasts the events of The Passenger in the new year.

Witch Wood, by John Buchan—I read this just a week or so ago, so you can expect a full, thorough treatment this coming John Buchan June, but for the time being let me recommend it as a strongly written, engaging, atmospheric, suspenseful, and genuinely spooky historical novel in which a young minister discovers the existence of a devil-worshiping cult in his seemingly upright Scottish parish. A favorite of CS Lewis, who wrote of it, “for Witch Wood specially I am always grateful; all that devilment sprouting up out of a beginning like Galt’s Annals of the Parish. That's the way to do it.”

Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy—This was a reread, but it was a special reread for me. This was the first novel by McCarthy that I read as a callow college student more than fifteen years ago, and I was unprepared for it. (I’ve described starting McCarthy’s corpus with Blood Meridian as “jumping into the deep end first.”) But it stuck with me, haunting me, and steadily grew in my regard, and within a year or two I had read almost everything else McCarthy had written up to that point. This year it was finally time to revisit Blood Meridian, and with the intervening years and maturity and experience it was like reading a different novel, or the fulfilment of the novel I struggled with one summer in college—gripping, bleak, and overwhelmingly powerful. So I’m including this reread among my favorite fiction reads of the year, and giving it a stronger recommendation than ever.

Discoveries of the year

Let me here thank my friends Dave Newell and JP Burten (whose novels Red Lory and Liberator y’all should check out) for introducing me to the following two series, of which I read too many volumes to include in the usual “favorites” format above but which I have to acknowledge as highlights of the year:

The Professor Dr von Igelfeld Entertainments, by Alexander McCall Smith—An absolute hoot, these short stories and novellas follow the marvelous philologist Prof Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, an aristocratic German scholar of the Romance languages and proud author of the seminal 1200-page study Portuguese Irregular Verbs. Von Igelfeld is a brilliant creation, simultaneously pompous and polite, rigid and kindhearted, humorless and eager to please, tone-deaf to social niceties but ostentatiously courtly, jealous of his own honor and childishly naïve. (He does not understand, for instance, why so many other prominent professors have such attractive graduate assistants, or why so many students are so obliging about coed room assignments on what is supposed to be a scholarly reading retreat in the Alps.) This is a charming combination of foibles that consistently lands him in uncomfortable situations ranging from awkward silences to high farce, situations from which he is either too proud or too oblivious to extricate himself. Pure, unalloyed fun.

• Volumes read: Portuguese Irregular Verbs, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, Unusual Uses for Olive Oil

• Volumes remaining: Your Inner Hedgehog

The Slough House series, by Mick Herron—An excellent series of spy thrillers featuring the outcasts, losers, and screwups of MI5 who, rather than being fired and creating public embarrassment, are shunted into dead-end jobs at a site called Slough House under the management of the slovenly former “joe” or field operative Jackson Lamb. Each volume is intricately plotted, engagingly and suspensefully written, and—what sets it most apart from the novels the series is most often compared to—funny. I’ve enjoyed these so much that I’ve forced myself to space them out so that I can squeeze in other reading.

• Volumes read: Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules, Joe Country

• Volumes remaining: Slough House, Bad Actors, and Standing by the Wall

Best of the year:

My favorite fiction read of the year is, for the first time in one of these lists, a reread. I had thought that rereading The Road in 2019 was my favorite that year, but it turns out I had misremembered. The novel is James Dickey’s Deliverance.

Deliverance is notorious in my hometown because John Boorman’s film adaptation was shot there and the movie hangs brooding over us like a specter. Plenty of cultures have to live with unflattering stereotypes, but toothless hillbilly sodomites has to be among the worst. Certainly, the “paddle faster, I hear banjos” bumper stickers got old pretty quick.

But as I discovered when I finally read it during grad school, Deliverance the novel is something else entirely—an involving, horrifying, thrilling, deeply and disturbingly beautiful novel with a rich narrative voice and strong, poetic writing.

If you’re familiar with the movie you already know most of the story; the film adapts the novel quite faithfully. But by the nature of its medium, the film has to deal in visuals, actions, and sounds—externals, surfaces. Dickey’s novel is internal, with deep, swift, very cold currents flowing beneath the surface. Its characters, chief among them narrator Ed Gentry, are all psychologically rich, and the seemingly simple actions of the plot—the drive north, the canoe trip, the horrible encounter with the moonshiners, the flight downriver, ambush, killing, and the final lie meant to flood and hide the events of the canoe trip forever—are complicated and intensified by the characterization and by Ed’s transformation from soft suburbanite to killer, a transformation we witness.

Deliverance is a brilliant novel, an intricately crafted prose poem, a haunting evocation of real environments, a thrilling tale of survival, and a weighty morality play concerning sin, guilt, and the thin layer of civilization far too many trust to keep them from the darkness in their own hearts.

Rereading Deliverance after well over a decade of reflecting on it made this the best fictional read of my year. Though it is not for the faint of heart, I strongly recommend it.

After finishing it this summer, I blogged here about John Gardner’s principle of using vivid, concrete detail to create a “fictive dream” in the mind of the reader and used Deliverance as a major example, comparing it to several other favorites from the spring and summer—Blood Meridian, John Macnab, and Sick Heart River. You can read that post here.

Favorite non-fiction of the year

While fiction threatened to take over my reading this year, I plugged away at a number of good works of history, biography, literary study, and cultural commentary. In the best of these those categories overlapped generously. The following handful of favorites are presented, like the fiction, in no particular order:

In the House of Tom Bombadil, by CR Wiley—An insightful and warmly-written literary, philosophical, and theological look at the meaning and significance one of the most perplexing characters in all of Tolkien’s legendarium. Full review from earlier this year here.

Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, by Katja Hoyer—A very good short history of the German Empire (1871-1918) with attention to its origins in post-Napoleonic nationalist movements, political intrigue, and military victory; its politics, finances, and imperial ambitions; its culture and key personalities; and, inevitably, its downfall in the catastrophe of the First World War. Well-structured and balanced and highly readable, this is the best book of its kind that I’ve come across.

The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City, by Scott Peeples—An engaging and insightful short study of the life of Edgar Allan Poe and the chaotic, striving, rumbustious landscape of antebellum America through the prism of the cities where Poe lived most of his life. Full review from October here.

Poe: A Life Cut Short, by Peter Ackroyd and Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living, by Paul Collins—Two elegantly written short biographies of Poe that complement each other nicely. Collins’s biography gives extraordinarily good coverage to Poe’s work for such a concise book, and Ackroyd’s gives greater depth to Poe’s tragic personal life. I’d readily recommend either of these to someone looking for an introduction to Poe that cuts through the manifold myths (insanity, drug abuse, etc etc) and fairly represents the man’s life and work. Short Goodreads reviews here and here.

A Preface to Paradise Lost, by CS Lewis—I have tried and failed many times to love Paradise Lost, so I’ll let CS Lewis love it for me. This is an outstanding introduction not only to Milton’s great epic, but to the origins and history of epic poetry generally and to Milton’s place in the story of this genre. Being a fan of epic from Homer to Dante, I most savored the earlier chapters that explain its history and contextualize Milton’s work, but the entire short Preface is an excellent piece of scholarship and worthwhile whether you love Milton or not. (Side note: While I have a very old paperback copy of this book from Oxford UP, I read the nice recent hardback reprint from HarperOne. My only criticism is some slipshod typography, which turned the letters ash (æ) and thorn (þ) in Old English quotations into Œs and Ps.)

The War on the West, by Douglas Murray—A bracing look at the climate of skepticism and outright hostility to Western civilization and the past, with many thoroughly documented examples and a strongly argued case for preserving, maintaining, and celebrating our inheritance. Would pair well with a read of Murray’s longer, more detailed, but more general The Madness of Crowds, one of my favorites of 2020.

Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, by Carl Trueman—Both a summary and extension of the key themes and arguments of Trueman’s longer and more scholarly The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self—which is high on my to-read list for this year—Strange New World is an excellent guide for general readers to how we got to where we are today, a world in which the transcendent is regarded as an oppressive myth and personal identity and sexuality are market commodities subject to infinitely recursive individual self-revision. A demonstration that ideas have consequences.

Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, by Sean McMeekin—A trenchant reappraisal of World War II with Stalin and the USSR as its central focus. McMeekin reminds the reader that Stalin was as much an aggressor as Hitler—indeed, the two allied to invade and divide Poland, a fact that was memory-holed during the war and has only seldom returned to public consciousness since—and demonstrates that even when Stalin could justifiably claim to be a victim following Nazi betrayal in the summer of 1941, he was a master manipulator who brazenly played the Allies to get what he wanted. And he got everything he wanted. Most damning are the book’s long middle chapters recounting in punishing detail the Lend-Lease bounty continuously heaped upon Stalin, entirely on Stalin’s terms, with Stalin offering almost nothing in return but contempt and ever larger demands, all while dealing high-handedly with Allied leaders and waging war with the same brutality he had brought to the invasions of Poland and Finland. FDR turned a blind eye and forced all around him—from anticommunist members of his administration who found themselves ousted all the way to Churchill himself—to do the same. Stalin’s War both reinforced some conclusions I had already intuited from years of studying and, especially, teaching the war, and placed Stalin at the center of a truly global picture of the conflict and how its results guaranteed decades of Cold War and continued bloodshed. A worthwhile corrective to rosy pictures of World War II—its aims, and prosecution, and its results.

Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Michael Hofmann—Sharply observed, unflinching, disturbing, and utterly exhilarating, this is one of the greatest war memoirs ever written. Like Blood Meridian, this is a reread of an old favorite that has exercised a profound influence on me, but the rereading experience was so gripping, so bracing, that it deserved to be among my other top non-fiction reads of the year. At the beginning of December I typed up some thoughts, observations, and reflections inspired by this second reading, which you can find here.

Best of the year:

If I cheated a bit by naming a reread as my favorite fiction of the year, I’ll do same here by picking two titles to share a best-of distinction for non-fiction. In this case, both books are fascinating, readable, deeply-researched works of scholarship in Anglo-Saxon history and literature.

The great Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey’s Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings is a short monograph that makes a strong case on a contentious topic.

Less than a century ago, Beowulf was wrongly looked at as a difficult, fatally flawed historical source for the centuries between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of Charlemagne’s Frankish empire, a frustrating farrago of myth and vague allusion to things 19th-century scientific historians wanted straight data about. This viewpoint changed with Tolkien’s 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” which argued that Beowulf is first and foremost a work of great poetic genius and unsurpassed thematic power, and that the historical elements are there to ground a fantastical story in what, for its original audience, felt like a real world.

Now, Shippey argues, the pendulum has swung too far the other way, with Beowulf viewed only as a poem or myth and neglected as a historical source. Marshaling an impressive array of literary, linguistic, and especially archaeological support from sites like Lejre in Denmark, Shippey argues that Beowulf is not only a great poem but also a broadly accurate and trustworthy window into the region, period, and culture in which it is set—the tribal Germanic peoples of early 6th-century Denmark and Sweden.

Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings is an indispensable read for anyone interested in Beowulf or this time period, and a boon to anyone who, like me, intuited Beowulf’s importance and authenticity as a representation of this world but lacked the archaeological clout to make such a strong case for it.

Just as readable and well-researched but probably of greater general interest is Eleanor Parker’s Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year. In this book Parker, a medievalist who maintained the the excellent Clerk of Oxford blog and has an extraordinary talent for making foreign minds understandable, tackles the nature of time itself—how Anglo-Saxon people thought about and reckoned it, and how they marked and celebrated the passage of it, season by season, year by year.

Parker draws from a huge array of Anglo-Saxon literature—part of the book’s purpose, she writes, is to introduce this literature and encourage people to seek out more of it—to describe first how the heathen Anglo-Saxon peoples’ understanding of time, years, and seasons changed with their conversion to Christianity, and then how they lived their lives within this new understanding. She gives good attention to everything from the number and names of the seasons (originally, it seems, only two: winter and sumor, with spring and fall by many other names imported from the Continent along with Christianity), the months, the work and pastimes of people from all walks of life at different times of year, and, perhaps most importantly, the intricate liturgical calendar and its many, many feasts, rites, and holidays. What emerges through this carefully arranged study is a holistic picture of a lost people and its lost way of life.

Appropriately for a culture whose poetry is so thoroughly tinged with elegy and ubi sunt reflection, I ended this book both delighted and saddened: delighted at the richness of this harmonious yearly cycle and the vividness with which Parker narrated and explained it, and saddened at what has been lost since that time. Winter, and specifically the early days of the twelve days of Christmas, unsurprisingly proved the perfect time to read Parker’s book.

I give my highest and strongest recommendations to both Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings and Winters in the World for anyone interested specifically in the Early Middle Ages and Anglo-Saxon England or for anyone willing to venture out and explore times, places, and minds alien to our own. You’ll find both books richly rewarding.

Rereads

In addition to a lot of good reading this year, I did a lot of good rereading. Rather than pick and choose and then burden y’all with more one-paragraph summaries, I’ve simply listed all of them as usual. But by virtue of my having taken the time to revisit these this year, please understand all of them to rank somewhere between good and excellent. Audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks*

• Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism*

• After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, by Samuel Goldman

• Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy

• Socrates: A Man for Our Times, by Paul Johnson*

• The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien

• The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman*

• The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan

• Greenmantle, by John Buchan

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

• Deliverance, by James Dickey

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

• Das Nibelungenlied, trans. Burton Raffel

• Beowulf, Dragon Slayer, by Rosemary Sutcliff

• Life of King Alfred, by Asser, trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge

• Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Michael Hofmann

• The Third Man, by Graham Greene

Kids’ books

All of the books listed below were read-aloud favorites for myself and our kids this year. I had a hard time narrowing this selection down, but these are certainly the favorites, and I’d recommend any of them without hesitation.

• Caedmon’s Song, by Ruth Ashby, illustrated by Bill Slavin. A beautifully illustrated children’s version of an important Anglo-Saxon story related by Bede. Short Goodreads review here.

• Myths of the Norsemen, by Roger Lancelyn Green—An old favorite of mine that proved an excellent introduction to these stories for my seven- and five-year old.

• Alexander the Great and The Fury of the Vikings, by Dominic Sandbrook—Two volumes from Sandbrook’s Adventures in Time series that I read out loud to my kids this fall and winter. Perfect for our seven-year old, who thrilled to Alexander’s campaigns and the various Viking Age figures (e.g. Ragnar Loðbrok, Alfred the Great, Leif Eiriksson, and Harald Hardrada), and though our five-year had a somewhat harder time tracking with the stories he still enjoyed them. I strongly recommend both and look forward to other entries in the series.

• Basil of Baker Street, by Eve Titus—A fun, light, nimbly paced adventure with a clever mouse-level perspective on Sherlock Holmes and just enough of the trappings of Conan Doyle’s stories to hook new fans.

• Read-n-Grow Picture Bible, by Libby Weed, illustrated by Jim Padgett—A childhood favorite, a surprisingly thorough and serious illustrated Bible, read to my kids over several months. Short Goodreads review here.

• A Boy Called Dickens, by Deborah Hopkinson, illustrated by John Hendrix—A delightful and beautifully illustrated short retelling of Charles Dickens’s childhood and the influence growing up among the workhouses and debtors’ prisons of industrial London had on his imagination.

• The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson*—A hilarious and genuinely moving Christmas tale that combines farce, nostalgia, and remarkable depth, especially on one of my favorite themes: the foolish things of the world confounding the wise. My whole family enjoyed this greatly on our car trip to Georgia for Christmas.

Conclusion

If you’ve read this far, thank you for sticking with me, and I hope you’ve found something enticing to seek out and read during the new year. Thanks for reading, and all the best in 2023!

The world of the day after tomorrow

As we close out 2022, here’s Ernst Jünger in 1922:

We have become old and comfortable like the elderly. It has become a crime to be or to have more than others. Now, unaccustomed to the strong intoxicants, men and power have become an abomination to us; our new gods are the masses and equality. If the masses cannot become like the few, then let the few become like the masses. Politics, theater, artists, cafes, patent leather shoes, posters, newspapers, morals, the Europe of tomorrow, the world of the day after tomorrow: the thundering masses. Like a thousand-headed beast, crushing all that does not allow itself to be swallowed up, envious, parvenu-like, cruel. Once again, the individual was defeated, and didn’t his own representatives betray him? We live too close to each other, our great cities are grating millstones, rushing torrents that grind us against each other like pebbles. Too hard, the life; don’t we have our flickering life? Too hard, the heroes; aren’t these flickering screen heroes enough for us? And how beautifully they flow, smooth and silent, these stories. You sit in the cushion and all the nations, all the adventures of the world swim through your brain, as light and gestalt as an opium dream.

This comes from War as an Inner Experience, a short collection of essays elaborating on some of the themes latent in Storm of Steel, and it is striking how closely in anticipates the concerns and arguments of the longer and more sophisticated The Forest Passage, published almost thirty years later. It is also striking how closely this description of Jünger’s world before and after the war resembles the world of a century later with its angry levelling, its conformity, its politics of envy, its proud and corrupt urbanism, and most especially its retreat from the real and the difficult into the easy and imaginary. Excessive screentime is not a new problem.

This passage prompted a lot of thinking on my part, but I only have time for a little of it here. It occurs to me that one could respond a couple ways to what Jünger writes here:

• A person of one persuasion might—ignoring the present-tense in the passage—say, “How prophetic! Look at how bad things have gotten!”

• A person of the opposite persuasion might say, “Things haven’t gotten worse! That you perceive this as applying to 2022 just proves that some people will always be speaking doom no matter how good things get.”

To which I say You’re both right—things have gotten bad, and we have not fallen from a golden age—because a century is too short a perspective from which to be viewing the trends between Jünger’s time and our own. Things have been bad in many of the same ways for a very long time. The problems of 2022 are different from those of 1922 not in kind, but in degree.

The Forest Passage was the first book I finished reading in 2022, making this passage of War as an Inner Experience a nice thematic bookend. So that I don’t end this year of blogging on too dour a note, let me refer back to a post from January about The Forest Passage, where I quote Jünger’s 1951 prediction of what kind of men the modern world would produce—as well as the beginnings of a remedy:

[M]an is suffering a loss, and this loss explains the manifest grayness and hopelessness of his existence. . . . Giving this man an inkling of what has been taken from him, even in the best possible present circumstances, and of what immense power still rests within him—this is the theological task.

I’ve returned to this line and meditated on it many times this year. Living so that the gray and hopeless modern man will feel “what has been taken from him”—let this be our hope, motto, and prayer for 2023.

Butterfield, Elton, and what historians are for

Earlier this week, while recharging my batteries back home in the mountains with Christmas, friends, and family, I read a good short piece at The Critic titled “What are historians for?” What immediately got my attention was the picture of Herbert Butterfield, a now lesser-known but influential historian and philosopher of history. His Whig Interpretation of History was an especially strong influence on me at a crucial time in my growth.

The author, Jack Nicholson, begins with latter day historian David Cannadine as an example of a historian trying to create a “usable past” for pragmatic political purposes (on this side of the Atlantic, compare Joe Biden’s court historians Jon Meacham, Michael Beschloss, and company, who have provided both dubious history-flavored PR for the administration as well as even more dubious historical raw material with which to browbeat opponents).

For contrast, and for a glimpse of the historian’s proper purpose, Nicholson reaches back to invoke first Geoffrey Elton and then, more pointedly, Butterfield. A sample:

Another historian, Herbert Butterfield, remarked just over fifty years ago: “Sometimes I wonder at dead of night whether, during the next fifty years, Protestantism may not be at a disadvantage because a few centuries ago, it decided to get rid of monks.” He saw the emerging postmodern condition which we still grapple with, and the way in which Western civilisation and the Protestant world in this country, specifically, was beginning to wane. Elton saw many “faiths”, many ideologies, people divided. Butterfield feared the absence of monks who would bear witness to objective truth for others. 

It could be that the task of the historian remains in effect to be like a monk. That is what Butterfield and Elton seemed to be driving at in their life’s work—and now we are fifty years down the line. Within the five decades which have elapsed, Britain’s growth problems have not been resolved nor its constitutional dilemmas, and politicians offer quick-fix solutions. Others suggest that we should be tearing down statues and denouncing our forebears. Do something. Anything.

Historians should tell us, if anything, to stop and think. We should be challenged and humbled by the past before acting. 

Compare Butterfield’s words of warning from The Whig Interpretation of History:

[T]he chief aim of the historian is the elucidation of the unlikenesses between past and present . . . It is not for him to stress and magnify the similarities between one age and another, and he is riding after a whole flock of misapprehensions if he goes to hunt for the present in the past.

Fortunately, there are plenty of historians who resist the easy, facile, superficial comparisons and quick-fix propositions, but it is the others who are in demand—for soundbites, for specious comparisons, for fuel for grievance politics, for dodges, excuses, and rationalizations of radical change. In other words, that’s what sells.

Reading Nicholson’s whole short piece, and if you can’t be an Elton or a Butterfield, at least seek them out.

I discovered Elton during my graduate school historiography survey and was intrigued by how angry he made more postmodern or deconstructionist classmates—those who didn’t believe there was such a thing as objective truth. I recommend his book The Practice of History. I’ve written about Butterfield a few times here before, on the foolishness of having “faith in human nature” here and on presentism here. And to be fair to Cannadine, I am only familiar with him from his volume on George V in the Penguin Monarchs series and Victorious Century, volume eight in the Penguin History of Britain, so I cannot say whether he has been accurately represented or was simply a handy example for Nicholson.