Where now the rider?

I mentioned in my summer reading recap that I’m currently reading Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, which my daughter thoughtfully picked out for me from her classroom’s library. Here’s a passage from about a third of the way into the book, the first time Joey, the horse, and his second owner, a British cavalry officer, see combat in the fall of 1914:

The gentle squeak of leather, the jingling harness, and the noise of hastily barked orders were drowned now by the pounding of hooves and the shout of the troopers as we galloped down on the enemy in the valley below us. Out of the corner of my eye, I was aware of the glint of Captain Nicholls’s heavy sword. I felt his spurs in my side and I heard his battle cry. I saw the gray soldiers ahead of us raise their rifles and heard the death rattle of a machine gun, and then quite suddenly I found that I had no rider, that I had no weight on my back anymore, and that I was alone out in front of the squadron.

A simply narrated but powerful moment, and presented believably from the point of view of an animal. Having seen Spielberg’s film adaptation several times, I had a good idea what the outcome of this attack would be, and yet when I read “quite suddenly I found that I had no rider, that I had no weight on my back anymore,” I choked up. I was moved.

Part of it is the fate of the kind, noble, courageous Captain Nicholls, and part of it is the finely wrought dramatic irony of Joey not realizing at first what has happened. (Another novel to do the same thing extremely well is Richard Adams’s Traveller.) But another factor is surely the image that the passage creates—the riderless horse.

The movie, in one of its most beautifully shot and stirring scenes, makes dramatic and stirring use of this image, but for my money the subtlety and simplicity of the original in Morpurgo’s novel cuts deeper.

Reading this passage brought to mind another riderless horse, this one from Michael Shaara’s great Gettysburg novel The Killer Angels. Just before Pickett’s Charge, the climactic Confederate assault on the last day of the battle, General Lewis Armistead cautions a fellow brigade commander named Richard Garnett against participating in the attack. Garnett is ill and can’t march in with the infantry; he’ll have to ride, and that means he’ll be a huge target. Garnett will not be dissuaded—an officer’s job is to lead.

The attack commences and Pickett’s division, including Armistead and Garnett’s brigades, moves out and comes under heavy artillery and finally rifle and canister fire. As Armistead, coming up with his men behind Garnett’s brigade, nears the Union line, we read:

Armistead thought: we won’t make it. He lifted the sword screaming, and moved on, closer, closer, but it was all coming apart; the whole world was dying. Armistead felt a blow in the thigh, stopped, looked down at blood on his right leg. But no pain. He could walk. He moved on. There was a horse coming down the ridge: great black horse with blood all over the chest, blood streaming through bubbly holes, blood on the saddle, dying eyes, smoke-gray at the muzzle: Garnett’s horse.

A gut punch of a conclusion to an already apocalyptic paragraph. Armistead briefly looks over the field to see if Garnett is still alive, unhorsed and on foot somewhere, but the reader knows immediately. The riderless horse tells the whole story.

The same horse reappears once later, after the attack has failed, as General Longstreet, the overall commander of the assault, responds to the destruction of his men:

There was nothing to send now, no further help to give, and even if Lee on the other side would send support now it would be too late. Longstreet hugged his chest. He got down off the fence. A black horse rode up out of the smoke: familiar spot on a smoky forehead, blood bubbling from a foaming chest: Garnett’s mount.

If the first passage is an apocalypse, with the horse a sign in the midst of catastrophe, here the horse is the final, mournful sign of defeat, a single, hollow death knell.

As with War Horse, the film adaptation Gettysburg uses this image to good effect. I think the purely visual language of film may even improve it. First, the film expands the point of view of Shaara’s novel by actually showing the viewer what happens to Garnett. He charges the Union line, trying to lead by example, and rides directly into the sights of a Union cannoneer who fires at him point-blank.* Garnett disappears instantly. We get a stunned reaction shot from General Lee, who watches from afar through his field glasses, and then this shot:

Soon after we cut to Armistead’s brigade following behind, and Armistead sees the horse and knows. No words are necessary.

And later, after Armistead has briefly breached the Union line, been shot down and captured, and the attack has collapsed, the horse reappears a final time—not for Longstreet as in the novel, but for General Pickett, who had insisted that Garnett be allowed to ride at the head of his brigade, a poignant double reminder.

The film does this wordlessly, in one of its most powerful shots.** First, as the walking wounded straggle back to the Confederate line the horse passes among them at a trot:

The camera follows, both panning and tracking with it from right to left—away from the fighting and the failed objective—to end on a poignant medium shot of Pickett, pushing in as he lowers his field glasses. The usually vivacious and fiery Pickett has been stunned into silence:

The riderless horse goes back much further than War Horse and The Killer Angels, of course. Consider the plaintive questions of The Wanderer. When the poem’s speaker turns from describing his lonely fate to ask where everything that once mattered and made life a comfort to him has gone—genap under nihthelm, darkened under night-helm—the very first pair in the list is:

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?

“Where is the horse? Where the young man?” Or, in a more famous but slightly less literal rendering by Tolkien, “Where now the horse and the rider?” These are paired in a way that doesn’t scan with most of the rest of the poem, suggesting their inseparability even in the loss of both.

And if we go back to the foundation of Western Literature, the last word of the Iliad, in a sentence that closes out Hector’s funeral and ends the action of the poem with thousands dead and the Trojan War still unwon, is the slaughtered Hector’s epithet: ἱπποδάμοιο, breaker of horses.

Is there any more poetic and immediately mournful image than the war horse with an empty saddle? Geared for war but aimless, it instantly suggests a whole tragedy. The riderless horse is a brave man, lost forever. The saddle is the gap he has left in the world.

* I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone else mention this, but it’s pretty clear from the action around the gun that the filmmakers mean this to be Alonzo Cushing’s battery. Just watch what’s going on with the gunner and the dead officer right before Garnett charges.

** It’s not appreciated enough just how well shot Gettysburg is.

How often do I think about Ancient Rome?

Cicero Denounces Catiline, by Cesare Maccari—a favorite painting, inaccurate in detail but capturing the spirit and drama of the moment

Every day.

Seriously—every day. And really, what did you think my answer would be? When my wife heard about this online trend she just laughed. She didn’t even bother asking me.

Why do guys think about the Romans so often? I can’t speak for every man—and I may be especially unrepresentative because I teach history for a living—but I think that while it must have something to do with the rich mixture of drama and violence, the personal and the political, the depraved and the philosophical, the great crowd of examples both to emulate and condemn, and the momentous and long-lasting consequences and sheer range of events encompassed by Rome’s history, another part of it must surely be how familiar Rome sometimes feels.

That’s true not only in the sense that we in the West are, in a sense, part of a cultural familia with many branches and in-laws but a clear lineage all the way back to Rome, but in the more usual sense. On some level, no matter how strange they are, you know these people. I often tell my students that one of the joys of studying the Late Republic is the soap opera feeling that not only does everyone in this rather upstart city know everyone else, we can know them all, too, and vicariously participate in their upheavals. Some enterprising guy out there could make a fortune with a Roman fantasy league.

That’s my two denarii, anyway. I could say a lot more, but that would be less fun.

Instead, since I lured y’all here with what is basically a meme, let me offer something of more value. If you too think about Rome and want more to think about, more deeply and fully and with more of that delicious detail, let me offer a short list of my favorite books on Rome. This is by no means exhaustive and I could have made the list much longer; these are just my personal favorites and the books that have benefited me most over the years.

General histories and biographies

Roman Realities, by Finley Hooper—My college Rome class’s textbook, this is an older survey but it holds up, being well-written, comprehensive, and judicious in its judgments.

Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, by Lesley Adkins and Roy A Adkins—This is a reference work rather than a proper history, but it’s a fantastically rich resource, covering everything from the gods, the structure of the Republic’s government, and the organization of the army to town names, baby names (a pretty short section), and holidays. I’ve consulted my copy regularly for nearly twenty years.

Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity, by JE Lendon—This is a broad study of Greco-Roman warfare from Homer to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, so only half of it is about the Romans, but it’s excellent—one of the most helpful and insightful books I’ve read in this area.

The Punic Wars and Cannae: Hannibal’s Greatest Victory, by Adrian Goldsworthy—Two excellent books on the period that first got me hooked on Roman history. The former is an excellent study of all three wars by a master military historian, and the latter is a good short book about the most famous battle of the wars and possibly of all of Roman history. I recommend either depending on how long you like your books.

Scipio Africanus: Greater than Napoleon, by BH Liddell Hart—A short older biography of one of my favorite Roman figures, the victor of the Second Punic War, who is often overshadowed by the enemy he defeated.

The Spartacus War, by Barry Strauss—An excellent short history of the greatest slave rebellion in the Republic. Strauss writes engaging, approachable prose and exercises masterful command of the sources, making this a book I often recommend to students.

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician, by Anthony Everitt—A favorite biography of my favorite Roman. Deeply researched, well written, and admiring but measured in its portrait of Cicero. Because Everitt situates him in his complicated historical context so well, and with such precision and clarity, I often recommend this book as an introduction to the end of the Republic.

Caesar: Life of a Colossus and Augustus, by Adrian Goldsworthy—Two magnificent biographies of the two men, father and adopted son, more responsible than anyone else for the destruction of the Republic and the longevity of the Empire. Goldsworthy, in addition to being an excellent researcher and writer, has good judgement and avoids extremes in his interpretations.

The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination, by Barry Strauss—Another excellent book from Strauss, this time covering the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, the assassination and its aftermath, and the fates of the conspirators, only one of whom died a natural death.

Pax Romana: War, Peace, and Conquest in the Roman World, by Adrian Goldsworthy—A sweeping but detailed study of how the Romans built their empire and carved peace out of chaos. I reviewed this book for University Bookman some years ago, one of my first paid writing jobs. You can read that here.

Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, by James Romm—A look at the irony of one of Rome’s most selfish and perverted emperors having studied under one of its greatest apostles of reason and moderation. A really fascinating and engaging book.

How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy—A detailed study of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the emergence of the early medieval world. Preview of coming attractions.

Rome for kids

Pompeii: Buried Alive! by Edith Kunhardt, illustrated by Michael Eagle—A very good Step Into Reading chapter book with great illustrations and a narrative that builds a palpable but kid-friendly sense of dread. Includes a little bit about the archaeological discovery of Pompeii and the fact that Vesuvius is still active.

The Romans: Usborne Starting Point History, by Phil Roxbee Cox, illustrated by Annabel Spenceley—I think this one may, sadly, be out of print, which is a shame. I got a used copy for my kids years ago and it’s a favorite. Includes nicely-illustrated two-page spreads about many facets of Roman life and some nice cutaways of Roman buildings.

The Traveler’s Guide to Ancient Rome, by John Malam, illustrated by Mike Foster—Another used acquisition, this one is from Scholastic and has even more extensive coverage than the Usborne book, plus a lot more attention to overall historical context with timelines, maps of the city and empire, and more.

Rome in Spectacular Cross-Section, by Stephen Biesty—Having grown up on books of plane schematics, Usborne books, and David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work, I adore cross-sections. Biesty’s books are among the best I’ve ever seen. This is a huge picture book with vast, intricately detailed illustrations of major Roman buildings including the Colosseum, the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter, a Roman bath, and more. It’s amazing. Unfortunately it also appears to be out of print, but your local library may have a copy. That’s how we enjoy it.

Detectives in Togas and The Mystery of the Roman Ransom, by Henry Winterfeld—Two of the books that first introduced me to Rome, these are children’s novels about a group of Roman schoolboys who solve mysteries. Set in a vaguely defined period of the early Principate, they’re not rigorously historically accurate but are leavened with nice period details and a good sense of the spirit of the era. They’re also a lot of fun—I remember devouring them sometime around 4th grade.

Rome in fiction

Pompeii, by Robert Harris—A brilliant historical thriller that uses dramatic irony—we all know exactly what’s going to happen even as the characters struggle to figure it out—to devastating effect. This is the Roman novel I recommend most often to students.

Vindolanda, The Encircling Sea, and Brigantia, by Adrian Goldsworthy—This trilogy set in Roman Britain in the first years of the reign of Trajan follows the adventures of centurion Flavius Ferox, a native Briton of the Silures. Goldsworthy uses his mastery of the Roman world, the Roman army, and Roman Britain specifically to great effect, setting his dramatic action-mystery stories in a rich, complicated, detailed world.

Augustus, by John Williams—An epistolary novel covering the life of Augustus from his rise to power to his final years, with all the ups and downs and personal tragedies in between. I don’t agree with Williams’s interpretation of some things (his take on Cicero is pretty cynical) but this is a brilliantly executed novel.

I, Claudius and Claudius the God, by Robert Graves—Everyone knows and loves these, but what can I say? These are brilliant, fun, dramatic, and moving novels written with great energy, wit, imagination, and a love for the details and the larger-than-life characters of Roman history. They’re classics for a reason.

Helena, by Evelyn Waugh—A profound, moving, and thematically rich historical fantasy about the mother of the first Christian emperor of Rome that follows her from girlhood in Britain to old age in quest of the True Cross.

And before I hand the reins over to the Romans themselves, let me mention my own modest Roman fiction, the novella The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero, about the final hours of my favorite Roman.

The Romans in their own words

Aeneid, by Virgil—The pinnacle of Latin epic and a stirring story of family, nation, and manhood, the Aeneid has been justly admired by everyone from Dante to CS Lewis, who wrote of it: “With Virgil European poetry grows up.” I’ve most recently read the translation by David Ferry but would also recommend those of Robert Fagles, Allen Mandelbaum, and Stanley Lombardo. I have Sarah Ruden’s well-regarded translation on standby for my next readthrough.

Metamorphoses, by Ovid—Most of the “Greek” myths you’ve heard come, in some form, from Ovid. Not my favorite epic but a striking experiment with many beautiful and moving episodes.

The Early History of Rome and The War with Hannibal, by Livy—These are the titles of two of the four extant volumes of Livy as published by Penguin Classics. I’m particularly attracted to these stories of formative catastrophes, whether of a village hanging on to existence by its fingernails or a republic weathering the worst storm yet in its history.

The War Against Catiline, by Sallust—A short history of a crucial moment in the careers of Cicero, Caesar, and Crassus and in the death throes of the Republic. A fresh new translation for Princeton UP’s Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series titled How to Stop a Conspiracy is a great read.

The Gallic War, by Julius Caesar—When Jordan sat down to write this list, Caesar’s commentaries were among the very first things he thought of.

On Duties, On Old Age, and On Friendship, by Cicero—Three excellent long essays on philosophical, moral, and ethical topics that are all full of wisdom and mean a lot to me. There’s much more Cicero I could recommend, but these three are my absolute favorites. The latter two, retitled How to Grow Old and How to Be a Friend, are two of the best volumes in the Princeton UP series mentioned above. I reviewed How to Grow Old on the blog here.

The Twelve Caesars, by Suetonius—If the myths you vaguely remember come from Ovid, the stories of debauched and greedy emperors almost certainly come from here. Robert Graves, author of I, Claudius, translated Suetonius for Penguin Classics.

Agricola and Germania, by Tacitus—I love all of Tacitus but I have read and reread these short treatises for pleasure many times. Agricola is a story of native rebellion and a successful Roman campaign in Britain and Germania, by some assessments the first work of ethnography in history, is of particular interest to me, with its fascinating and tantalizing catalog of different German tribes.

The Golden Ass, by Apuleius—A hilarious romp in which a Greek merchant named Lucius is transformed into a donkey by a witch. Lucius, who is immediately stolen by bandits, then spends years observing the behavior and listening to the stories of ordinary people in the age of the Empire. Stories within stories, absurdity, violence, tragedy, a handful of over-the-top poop jokes, and a happy ending make this some of the most fun Roman literature that has survived.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope you find something good to read here. In the meantime, keep Rome in your thoughts and establish peace, spare the humbled, and conquer the proud.

Summer reading 2023

This proved to be a pretty momentous summer. I published my fifth book and my wife and I welcomed twins, our fourth and fifth children, a few weeks ago, not long after I first announced it here. And somewhere in there were work, looking for more work, preparing for the babies’ arrival, a little bit of travel, and reading. I’m glad to say it was all good, the reading included. So here are my favorites from this busy but blessed summer.

For the purposes of this post, “summer” is defined as going from mid-May to last week, just before fall late-term courses began at my school. The books in each category are presented in no particular order and, as usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite non-fiction

Looking back over the summer, I read a pretty good and unintentionally wide-ranging selection of non-fiction—history, biography, memoir, literary criticism, and, most surprising for me, self-help! Here are the best in no particular order:

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919, by Mark Thompson—A well-written and comprehensive history of the Italian Front in the First World War, a front fought over unforgivingly rugged mountain terrain. Thompson focuses primarily but not exclusively on Italy: its history from the Risorgimento to 1914, the role of nationalism and irredentism in its rush toward an unpopular war of aggression against Austria-Hungary, its appalling mismanagement of the war, and the effects of the war on its politics, military, culture, literature, and, most painfully, its people. Though little-known or understood in the English-speaking world today—outside of high school lit classes forcing A Farewell to Arms down a new generation of unreceptive throats—the Italian Front was a continuous shambles, with proportionally higher casualties per mile than even the Western Front. Thompson gives less detailed coverage to the Austrian side, which is what I was actually most interested in when I picked up this book, but the book is so solidly researched and well-presented that this is not a flaw. Highly recommended if you want to round out your understanding of the war in Europe.

Cheaper by the Dozen, by Frank B Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey—A charming, funny, and genuinely sweet memoir of a unique family and its colorful, larger-than-life father. I read this to my wife a chapter at a time before bed and we both loved it.

The Habsburg Way: Seven Rules for Turbulent Times, by Eduard Habsburg, Archduke of Austria—A short introduction to a great old family, its history, its faith, and its methods. Far from a relic of a bygone, outdated world of monarchs and arranged marriages, the Habsburgs still have things to teach us, especially as the world since the demise of Austria-Hungary has so spectacularly lost its way. The “rules” in this volume range from the dynastic and political to the individua and spiritual: marriage and childrearing, the principle of subsidiarity, living a life of devout faith, courage, dying a worthy death. Habsburg writes with warmth and humor, using his family’s rich past as a mine of stories supporting his points, making this one of the best surprises of my summer.

Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least-Likely Self-Help Guru, by Catherine Baab-Muguira—This book’s thesis might have been Chesterton’s line that “anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” That a figure like Edgar Allan Poe—born into and marked by tragedy all his days, with a doomed love life and bottomless wells of both self-promotion and self-sabotage—could still be the object of admiration over 170 years after his death is a sign that he did something right. Baab-Muguira, in a series of wry how-to chapters, lays out both Poe’s tragicomic life story and how he succeeded despite his failures. I had hoped to write a full, more detailed review of this wonderful and fun little book—and maybe I’ll have the time sometime soon to do so—but please take this short summary as a strong recommendation.

Crassus: The First Tycoon, by Paul Stothard—A good short biography of an important but elusive figure from the end of the Roman Republic. Considering the role Crassus played in the careers of Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, and even Catiline, it is striking that his life does not have the extensive coverage accorded to any of those other men. Stothard gathers what information we have about Crassus and interprets it judiciously, leaving plenty of space open for the unknowable, and concludes with a good detailed history of Crassus’s fatal campaign into Parthia.

The Battle for Normandy 1944, by James Holland—The ninth entry in the beautifully illustrated Ladybird Expert series on the Second World War, this little book covers everything from the Allies’ preparations to breach Fortress Europe through D-Day and the bloody battles in the intractable Norman countryside that followed to the breakout in late summer. It reads like a fast, sharp precis of Normandy ‘44, Holland’s much longer history of the campaign. This is a great little series and Holland has done a good job of summarizing such vast and complicated events. I look forward to the three remaining volumes.

The Battle of Maldon: Together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, by JRR Tolkien, Peter Grybauskas, Ed.—A wonderful new addition to my Tolkien shelf, this volume collects a miscellany of texts related to the fragmentary Anglo-Saxon epic The Battle of Maldon, which relates a tragic defeat at the hands of the Vikings in 991. Included are Tolkien’s own translation of Maldon, a selection of his notes on the poem, relevant excerpts from a number of his critical essays, and “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son,” a verse composition for two voices designed as a sequel to Maldon. Whether you love Tolkien, Anglo-Saxon history and poetry, or all three, this is a welcome treasure trove. I blogged two excerpts here: one about the transmission of poetry or any other tradition across generations, and one about those times—more common than skeptics care to admit—when the literary and the real coincide.

No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men, by Anthony Esolen*—Part paean, part elegy, part polemic. Esolen forcefully argues that saving masculinity—and, inextricably, femininity—from gender ideology is not only desirable or correct but a necessity. I think I agree with everything Esolen sets out, but I kept wishing for more effort toward persuasion for the many who will be hostile to his message. Then again, simply reaffirming the obvious and reinforcing those struggling to live out the truth is a difficult enough task now, and quite necessary and welcome on its own.

Favorite fiction

My summer was pretty light on good fiction—with the exception of John Buchan June, which I summarize in its own section below—but here are five highlights in no particular order:

Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne, trans. Frank Wynne—A fun diversion, and the first Verne I’ve read since childhood. And it also prominently features Iceland! This is a convincing and involving if not remotely plausible adventure, and the effort Verne puts into situating the story within the cutting-edge scientific knowledge of his day made me realize his place in Michael Crichton’s DNA. I began by reading a reprint of the original English translation but switched to the new translation available from Penguin Classics, which is more accurate and apparently restores a lot of material cut from or modified by the original translators.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by GK Chesterton—An early Chesterton novel I’ve been meaning to read for years. Worth the wait. Taking place in a near-future London in which very little has actually changed, the one major difference is that the monarchy has become a randomly elected lifetime position. When the eccentric and flippant Auberon Quin is elected and decides to refortify the neighborhoods of London, prescribe feudal titles and heraldic liveries for their leaders, and insist on elaborate court etiquette—all purely ironically, as a lark—he doesn’t count on one young man, Adam Wayne, becoming a true believer in this refounded medieval order. All attempts to crush Wayne end in cataclysmic street violence, and the novel concludes with a genuinely moving twilight dialogue on the field of the slain. This is Chesterton at his early energetic best, with some of the verve and freshness of The Man Who was Thursday about it. I reflected on a short passage from the beginning of the novel here.

The Twilight World, by Werner Herzog, trans. Michael Hofmann—A hypnotically involving short novel about Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese officer who carried on a guerrilla campaign in the Philippines from 1945 to 1974—decades after the end of World War II. Herzog evokes the isolation and paranoia of Onoda and his handful of comrades, who always manage to find a reason to believe the war has not ended, as well as the passage of time. An epic story briskly and powerfully told. Full review on the blog here.

The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw* and Real Ponies Don’t Go Oink,* by Patrick F McManus—Two collections of hilarious articles and tall tales from the late outdoor writer Patrick McManus. His stock of humorous characters like cantankerous old time outdoorsman Rancid Crabtree or childhood buddy Crazy Eddie Muldoon is especially rich, and all of his stories are written with a wry, self-deprecating irony that makes them doubly enjoyable. The title story in The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw is still one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. My wife and I listened to the excellent audiobook versions performed by Norman Dietz during 1:00 and 4:00 AM feedings for the twins.

John Buchan June

For the second annual John Buchan June I didn’t manage to make it through as many of Buchan’s novels as last year, reading only seven, but they were a solid assortment from the middle of his career and included serious historical fiction, espionage shockers, a wartime thriller, a borderline science fiction tale, and the first of the hobbit-like adventures of retired grocer Dickson McCunn.

The seven I read, in order of posting about them, are below. My full John Buchan June reviews are linked from each title.

• Witch Wood (1927)

• Huntingtower (1922)

• The Dancing Floor (1926)

• Mr Standfast (1918)

• The Blanket of the Dark (1931)

• The Gap in the Curtain (1932)

• The Three Hostages (1924)

Of these, I think my favorite was certainly Witch Wood, a seriously spooky historical folk horror novel set in 17th-century Scotland. The two Sir Edward Leithen adventures The Dancing Floor and The Gap in the Curtain, with their own hints of the supernatural or uncanny, as well as the first Dickson McCunn novel, Huntingtower, were strong contenders as well, but Witch Wood also has great depth and therefore that much more power. I hope to reread it sometime soon.

Kids’ books

A Picture Book of Davy Crockett, by David Adler, illustrated by John and Alexandra Wallner—A short kids’ biography of Crockett with fun storybook illustrations that manages to give a surprisingly detailed and nuanced version of his life story and historical context. I was pleasantly surprised by this book and intend to seek out more in Adler’s series of picture book biographies.

The Little Pilgrim’s Progress, adapted by Helen L Taylor, illustrated by Joe Sutphin—An adaptation of John Bunyan’s classic for children, with simplified language, a streamlined plot, and anthropomorphic animals instead of people, this still powerfully evokes the richness and pathos of the original. I wept at least twice while reading it out loud to my kids, who loved the whole thing and still talk about the characters. Sutphin’s illustrations are also beautiful and kid-friendly. I very much look forward to his graphic novel adaptation of Watership Down, which comes out this fall.

The Phantom of the Colosseum, by Sophie de Mullenheim, trans. Janet Chevrier—The first volume of the In the Shadows of Rome series, this is a fast-paced, suspenseful story set during the reign of Diocletian. Three Roman boys—Titus, Maximus, and Aghiles, Maximus’s Numidian slave—break into the Colosseum in search of a thief and find themselves involved in the efforts of Christians to survive persecution. Though none of the main characters converts—a rarity in a Christian novel—they find their assumptions about the believers challenged and their consciences pricked. My kids greatly enjoyed this adventure and we’re now reading the sequel, A Lion for the Emperor.

The Go-and-Tell Storybook, by Laura Richie, illustrated by Ian Dale—The third in a series of beautifully illustrated picture books by Richie and Dale, this one covers a large part of the Book of Acts and tells the stories of the first apostles and the spread of the Church beyond Judaea all the way to Athens and Rome. It’s rare to get such detailed coverage of this material in a children’s book, which I greatly appreciated, and it afforded many opportunities to talk about history and the Church with our kids.

Looking ahead

You won’t be surprised to learn that my reading has slowed down a bit over the last month or so, but I’m glad to say I’m still enjoying plenty of good stuff. In addition to the historical kids’ adventure novel set in Rome I mentioned above, right now I’m working on a supernatural espionage thriller by Tim Powers and War Horse, by Michael Morpurgo, which my daughter thoughtfully brought me from her classroom library. There’s more, and there’s always the to-read list. You’ll hear about the best of it after this semester ends, a respite I already look forward to.

Until then, I hope y’all will check some of these out and that whatever you find, you’ll enjoy. Thanks for reading!

A good visit with Bookish Questions

Last week I was honored to talk to Alan Cornett of the excellent Cultural Debris podcast about my latest book, The Snipers. This video interview is part of a new short-form author interview project called “Bookish Questions.” I had a great time and hope y’all will enjoy this ten-minute chat.

Among the topics of conversation were not only The Snipers but also some of my other work, what I’m reading, what I recommend, what I’m working on and planning ahead for right now, and why it is that I gravitate toward writing historical fiction.

Be sure to check out Cultural Debris on the podcast platform of you choice. If you want good episodes to start with, I’ve enjoyed Alan’s interviews with Eduard Habsburg, Archduke of Austria, Tolkien scholar Holly Ordway, medievalist and CS Lewis scholar Jason M Baxter, author and literary scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson, and CS Lewis scholar Michael Ward.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for watching!

The Great Locomotive Chase

Conductor William Fuller (JEffrey Hunter) flags down the locomotive Texas in The Great Locomotive Chase (1956). That’s Slim Pickens in the cab of the engine.

Last night for family movie night I got to share a movie with my kids that I had previously seen only once, probably thirty years ago, but wanted to rewatch ever since. It’s an action-packed Civil War story and, best of all, was shot in my home county in northeast Georgia. It’s Walt Disney’s 1956 spy thriller The Great Locomotive Chase, starring Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter.

The Great Locomotive Chase is a bit of a legend back home. For years the Clayton Cafe on Main Street had a photo of Disney himself, enjoying a post-breakfast cigarette in one of the booths, framed on the wall behind the register. It seemed like everyone I knew growing up had some connection to the film. A cousin of mine claimed a grandfather on his dad’s side was visible on the station platform in one scene. Others who didn’t appear as extras remembered the filming, or seeing Disney and his cast and crew around. There have been plenty of movies shot in Rabun County, but none remembered quite as fondly as this. It certainly doesn’t provoke the shame or hostility that Deliverance still does.

As for me, after years of hearing about it and having developed a powerful interest in the Civil War in elementary school, I finally got to watch it one afternoon when my dad rented a VHS from the now-defunct Movie Time Video next door to the now-defunct Bi-Lo. I watched it eagerly, and we returned it, and I never saw it again. Until this weekend.

I’d forgotten a lot about it. I mostly remembered the standard old Hollywood Confederate uniforms—gray with blue infantry collars, cuffs, and hatbands—that struck me even at the time as unrealistic. And I remembered a railroad tunnel and, at the end, the Yankee spies walking circles in a prison yard. But that was about it. When I ran across an unopened DVD at our local used book store I snapped it up.

I’m glad to say it was an enjoyable adventure, and much better than I even remembered.

The Great Locomotive Chase is based on the true story of the Andrews raid of April 1862, in which twenty Union saboteurs led by civilian spy James Andrews infiltrated north Georgia, boarded a train at Marietta north of Atlanta, and hijacked it. The plan was to steam northward to Chattanooga vandalizing the tracks, cutting telegraph wires, and burning bridges and causing as much destruction as possible to cripple a key link in the Confederacy’s flimsy rail network.

Unfortunately for Andrews and his men, they were held up several times by southbound freight trains. Worse, and fatally for them and their mission, they were doggedly pursued by employees of the railroad, who at first assumed the train had been stolen by deserters. One of the pursuers, a young conductor named William Fuller, chased them for 87 miles, starting on foot before working through three locomotives, the last of which he drove backwards up the tracks.

As for Andrews and his raiders, Fuller’s pursuit cost them the time needed to take on fuel and water. When they ran out of steam they abandoned the locomotive and were swept up by Confederate cavalry. Eventually, eight were executed as spies, including Andrews. But the raiders became the first recipients of the new Congressional Medal of Honor.

Disney’s film tells this story straightforwardly, framing it with the presentation of the Medal of Honor to some of the raid’s survivors. Among them is William Pittenger (John Lupton), who serves as narrator. Parts of the first act feel rushed, as Andrews (Fess Parker) is introduced quickly, briefs a Union general, requests a team, and instantly receives one. Only as the group travels south to infiltrate the Confederacy do the raiders get characterization. The most notable after Andrews and Pittenger, who mostly works as an observer for the audience, is Campbell (Jeff York), a nationalist hothead who becomes fed up with the “bowing and scraping” of his spy cover and wants nothing more than to murder Southerners. His temper and desire to fight present a constant danger to the secrecy of Andrews’s mission.

But once the raiders are aboard the train and put their plan into motion, the film is continuously propulsive, suspenseful, and well-paced. The train action, almost all practical, staged aboard real trains on the Tallulah Falls Railroad, is genuinely impressive. Andrews and Fuller (Jeffrey Hunter) engage in a stream-driven game of cat and mouse, with Andrews sabotaging the line ahead of Fuller in numerous creative ways and the tenacious Fuller using his expertise as a railroad man to counteract them and keep up the pursuit. Adding appreciably to the quality of the action, it appears that Hunter did most of his own stunts. The final leg of the chase, in which he shouts orders to the engineer from the back of a locomotive racing along in reverse, is especially exciting.

Based on some of what I’ve read online, people at the time and since have found the film’s final act anticlimactic or even too depressing. I thought it fit the structure of the story perfectly, allowing the action-heavy first parts of the film to conclude on character-driven notes of respect if not reconciliation.

The ending serves Parker especially well, as for most of the movie he is stoic, manly, and brave, but not much else. In this film he lacks the charisma that made him famous as Davy Crockett, and so—without giving too much away—a heartfelt speech in his final scene gives him a belated depth that was very moving. The rest of the cast ranges from mediocre to fine. One confrontation between Campbell and the more patient members of the raiders has some noticeably wooden acting, but I was pleased to see how many locals got bit parts in the film and how well they did. Among the rest of the professional cast, I especially liked seeing Slim Pickens in an early role as one of Fuller’s engineers.

But performance-wise, The Great Locomotive Chase belongs to two secondary characters—Campbell and Fuller. It’s easy to see why. York and Hunter are certainly excellent in their parts, especially Hunter, whose physicality and sympathetic performance make him a worthy adversary but not a bad guy, but the characters themselves are more compelling than the lofty and distant Andrews. Both Campbell and Fuller are tough, tenacious, and physically brave, both are driven by implacable hostility toward their enemies, and both reliably follow through in a crisis. Both also have full character arcs, with their intense aggression transformed into respect in the conclusion—which, again, I don’t want to give away.

Disney put a lot of effort into this movie, shooting it in Technicolor CinemaScope like the more special effects-heavy 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which had come out two years before, so it’s a shame it wasn’t as financially successful as he had hoped. More to the point for us nowadays, it’s a shame that Disney’s successors haven’t given this film a decent home media release. It’s currently available to rent in HD on Amazon Prime, but as far as I can tell the 20+ year old, non-anamorphic DVD I found a few weeks ago is the sole home video release since the VHS days. A restored Blu-ray would be nice, especially since this film meant as much to Disney—and the people of my county—as it did.

The Great Locomotive Chase is a simple, straightforward film, but a fine example of classic Hollywood filmmaking. If you haven’t seen it before or haven’t even heard of it, I hope you’ll check it out.

More if you’re interested

The Walt Disney Family Museum has a good “making of” article on The Great Locomotive Chase that gives good attention to Rabun County and the technical side of filming. For local resources and memories of the film, here’s a Rabun County Historical Society newsletter with behind the scenes photos and detailed captions, and here’s a Foxfire podcast interview with locals who appeared as extras.

If you’re interested in the true story of the Andrews Raiders, see the New Georgia Encyclopedia article above for a good overview. Here’s a short volume from Osprey’s Raid series on the Andrews Raid, and here’s the primary source behind the film: William Pittenger’s memoir Capturing a Locomotive: A History of Secret Service in the Late War, available for free at Project Gutenberg.

Woke Bond is boring Bond

Earlier this week I read a short piece by Niall Gooch at the Spectator called “The terribleness of a progressive Bond.” It’s a review of a new Bond novella by Charlie Higson, On His Majesty’s Secret Service, which was written to coincide with the coronation of Charles II. The story, insofar as it has one, involves Bond traveling to Hungary to infiltrate a nationalist plot to overthrow Charles and install a pretender claiming direct descent from Alfred the Great.

Gooch was not impressed. In addition to poor plotting and writing (“It makes Dan Brown look like a master of nuance, understatement and subtle characterisation”), Higson’s novella is overtly political, with a menagerie of baddies gathered from the most fevered imaginations of left-leaning Twitter types. The villains are cartoonishly anti-immigration, anti-EU, and vaccine-skeptical, and needless to say they’re all inarticulate white men who like guns and beer. Gooch:

None of them is a genuine character. Instead they are mere empty vessels, onto which he projects his bizarre fantasies about the motivations and beliefs of conservatives. People who are sceptical about mass immigration or transgenderism or the erosion of free speech are simply itching to engage in mass terror attacks in the heart of London, apparently.

But long before this becomes explicit, you’ll feel it. They’re interested in Anglo-Saxon history? They like Hungary? If you are left wondering why a London businessman calling himself Athelstan of Wessex would organize his plot in Hungary, you are not part of Higson’s political bubble, and On His Majesty’s Secret Service is not written for you. It is, Gooch writes, “clearly a work of propaganda.”

As it happens, I read On His Majesty’s Secret Service this summer, and there’s a reason you didn’t hear anything about it here. Gooch’s review is wholly accurate.

I thought it perhaps better written than Gooch did, but that’s damning with faint praise. My one thought through the entire first half of the story was “Okay, I see what you’re doing,” which was personally irritating and, artistically, meant that the second half held no surprises. And I agree entirely that the staid “Centrist Dad” Bond of this novella—a man who is in a carefully worked out and consensual open relationship; whose self-satisfied inner thoughts range across a litany of studiedly correct leftwing opinions on everything from English nationalism and Viktor Orban to sweatshops and gut health; and who is comfortable dropping terms like “toxic” and “far right”—is a diminished Bond. For Gooch, this is “cringeworthy.” My word was “annoying.”

It’s also boring.

Why? The key word comes in Gooch’s final paragraph:

It is perhaps some consolation that there must eventually be a reaction against the smug, complacent tone of of the contemporary cultural scene. Until then, it seems like we may be in for some very bad films, books and TV shows, praised not for any artistic merit but for their ideological conformity.

Complacent. You could never call the original Bond complacent. He was not a happy man. Despite his smarts, skills, strength, love of the high life, and success with women, Bond was always a bit out of step with the modern world, ever more so as time went on. When Judi Dench’s M calls Bond a “dinosaur” in GoldenEye it is meant as an insult but accurately captures a fundamental aspect of the original character. This is because Fleming’s Bond—and, to a lesser but still palpable extent, the Bond of the films—was a relic of the Empire. His fate all the way through Fleming’s series is to risk all and suffer much on behalf of something that was crumbling anyway, often preventably and therefore pointlessly.

And so Fleming’s Bond grows more bitter and the novels more poignant and reflective as the series goes on. By the time of You Only Live Twice, the penultimate original novel, Bond is so alienated, so disillusioned with his work and what Britain has become, that the only person left who can understand him is a former enemy, a Japanese kamikaze pilot. Both know not only what it means to lose, permanently, but to survive to no apparent purpose.

By contrast, a Bond who shares the views dominant in media and academia is comfortable, static, and smug in a way Fleming’s Bond never could be. The original Bond is fighting what Tolkien called a “long defeat,” a doomed but heroic defense of something that will perish but is worthwhile anyway. Higson’s Bond critiques everything he sees from the lofty height of his own detached correctness. He would be more likely to process his trauma with a therapist than find a friend in a past enemy. He has nothing to learn, nothing to lose, and nothing to die for. He is right where he—and, indeed, everyone else—should be.

Blame the author. Fleming put a lot of himself into Bond; hence not only the womanizing and love of scrambled eggs but the bitterness, weariness, and disillusionment. Fleming was a dinosaur, too, and he knew it. Higson, on the other hand, and his Bond belong. Gooch:

I admit to being somewhat surprised by quite how leaden and didactic this book was. Are there no editors left, I asked myself as I waded through the underpowered, hectoring prose. Perhaps, however, that is a function of how hegemonic Higson’s views are among the creative classes.

After all, goldfish do not know they are wet, and people who conform instinctively and wholeheartedly to contemporary pieties—about borders and gender and free speech and identity—find it very difficult to understand the extent of their epistemic bubbles. We seem to be entering an age when didactic pro-establishment propaganda with little merit is not only everywhere, but goes unremarked and uncriticised because the people with cultural power generally agree with each other about almost every issue of importance.

If a literary or even cinematic Bond is to retain any shred of his antiheroic character—or even to remain merely interesting—he’s going to have to become ever more an outsider in his behavior and opinions. He can do that simply by remaining himself. Whether the people at the levers of publishing and filmmaking will allow that is another question entirely.

Gooch’s entire review is worth reading, not only for its critique of Higson’s book but for its insight into the present cultural hegemony. I’ve written about Bond along similar lines several times before: here on the blog about the vein of melancholy running through Fleming’s stories as Bond watches the disintegration of the world he is defending, and at the University Bookman about Bond’s arc and Fleming’s craftsmanship. I’ve also speculated about what is to become of the film series and its Bond here.

JRR Tolkien, 50 years later

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the death of JRR Tolkien, an occasion for reflection and appreciation. A few impromptu thoughts on Tolkien’s work and what it—and Tolkien himself—have meant to me over the years:

Part of Tolkien’s legacy for me is purely philosophical. Writing at The Critic yesterday, Sebastian Milbank considers the unlikely success of Tolkien’s storytelling in a literary environment under the Sauron-like dominion of irony, cynicism, amorality, and the tortured solipsism of post-Freudian psychology. Milbank:

More than anything else Lord of the Rings communicates a sensibility utterly at odds with the spirit of the age in which it was written. It is one of profound, tragic loss, of the vulnerability of irretrievable, ancient beauty, that must desperately be conserved and defended. It is of the inherent heroism of standing against destructive change, of hope beyond all reason, amidst the logic of history, which Tolkien named “the long defeat”.

Further, there is no “authorial wink,” no signaling or messaging for fellow bien pensants of the kind typical of elitist, politically motivated modernist art. In its morality (not moralism), earnestness, and total commitment to the act of storytelling and the sub-creation of imaginary worlds, Tolkien’s legendarium has become perhaps the anti-modernist myth par excellence, and not by taking any conscious stance but simply by being utterly and sincerely itself.

And yet this philosophical and religious understanding of the drama of Tolkien’s stories came to me later, after long thought and even longer thoughtless basking in his world and words. And I do mean words quite literally.

During college I moved from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to some of Tolkien’s essays. This proved a fortuitous time to do so. I read “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” at about the same time I was taking British History I and British Literature I, a one-two punch of subjects that have become lifelong passions. Reading and rereading Beowulf, and learning about the Anglo-Saxons, and rereading The Lord of the Rings, and then giving intense nuts-and-bolts attention to language, style, tone, and technique in my Creative Writing minor classes, aided by the insights and example of John Gardner, revealed much that was at work beneath the surface of Tolkien’s stories. For the first time I perceived the purposeful deliberation behind his choice of words and the structure of his sentences and poems, and the careful use of allusion to expand the world in which a small story takes place.

This was heady stuff and, emboldened with the enthusiasm of discovery and youthful experiment, I plunged into my Novel Writing class in my final semester of college armed with new and exciting tools. The eventual result was No Snakes in Iceland. It may be that I belong to that class of “mediocre imitators,” as Milbank calls them in his piece, but my first published novel would not have come to be without Tolkien’s example.

And Tolkien’s example extends beyond the literary. Milbank does not delve far into Tolkien the man in his essay, but Tolkien’s actual life story stands as just as strong a rebuke to modernism as his novels. A child of hardship, orphaned at an early age, raised in a teeming industrial city, a soldier in some of the worst combat in history, here is a man who lived through all the blights that should have embittered and driven him to misery and indulgence nevertheless living quietly and faithfully with his wife and children and working just as happily in his professional field as on his private hobbies. He is not the tortured, arrogant literary scribbler of modern myth and his protagonists are neither whiners nor degenerates. Geniuses don’t have to be jerks. A man of faith, duty, family, close friendship, rigorous and honest scholarship, and devotion to the small and parochial and workaday, Tolkien was in every way a candidate for a saintly “hidden life.” And yet everyone knows who he was.

This is perhaps the starkest irony of Tolkien’s life: that a man so contented with his lot and so unambitious (in the way of the worlds of commerce, politics, or celebrity) should become the author of the twentieth century. The more I have studied his life the more I admire him and wish for the grace to emulate him.

All of these things matter to me—the philosophy, the aesthetic, the man himself—but at the root of Tolkien’s meaning for me lie the stories. As it should be.

I can actually date my love for Tolkien. I read The Hobbit in high school at a friend’s urgent insistence (thanks, Josh!) and—again, fortuitously—my county’s brand-new Walmart had the book in stock. On July 10, 2000, I was reading it while my family sat in Atlanta traffic on our way to Turner Field for the home run derby. I had reached a chapter called “Riddles in the Dark.” We drove through a tunnel, one of those places where the interstate runs under a major street like Jimmy Carter Boulevard, and I was hooked. I had enjoyed The Hobbit up to this point but now I loved it, and knew I would read the rest and move straight on to The Lord of the Rings as soon as I could. I’ve never looked back and that love and excitement has never flagged or diminished.

That’s the power of a good story told by a great artist. In Chesterton’s words, Tolkien became for me the “center” of a “flaming imagination.” That imagination has remained aflame for twenty-three years because Tolkien not only told a good story, which plenty of people can do, but because his work is rich and deep and loving and, most of all, true enough to return to again and again for more. No burglar can diminish this hoard by even a cup.

I’ve used the word “fortuitous” twice in this reflection despite knowing that Tolkien would not himself think of it that way. Rightly so. Tolkien believed in Providence and it is largely through his example that I can grasp and trust in that idea. So when I do think of those coincidences, the circumstances and strong confluences and old friendships that kindled and kept my love for Tolkien burning, I hear Gandalf’s closing admonition to Bilbo: “You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?”

No, I don’t. Thank goodness.

JRR Tolkien, artist, scholar, elf-friend, and faithful servant of God, from whom all creativity descends, RIP.

More if you’re interested

Milbank’s essay at The Critic is excellent—one of the best recent pieces on Tolkien that I’ve read. Check out the whole thing here. For more on the religious and philosophical underpinnings of Tolkien’s world, all worked out organically through his storytelling rather than imposed as a moral, read Peter Kreeft’s The Philosophy of Tolkien. I’ve written about Tolkien here many times before—just click the Tolkien tag below for more—but in the early days of this blog I reviewed a delightful and beautifully illustrated children’s book called John Ronald’s Dragons that I want to recommend here again.

Chesterton on the arrogance of civilization

detail from The Course of Empire: Desolation, by Thomas COle

Last night I finally started reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill, an early Chesterton novel that I’ve just never gotten around to. The opening chapters are vintage Chesterton, and probably even a little more fresh and brisk than his later fiction. The novel is set in the London of far-distant 1984 (another underrecognized Chesterton-Orwell connection?), a sort of dystopia of efficiency where everything is regulated, everything is chugging along successfully, and everything is dull.

In the opening chapter, two bureaucratic functionaries, both dull men in black suits, are walking to work in the pre-dawn twilight when they run into the deposed President of Nicaragua. They are immediately drawn to the President not just because of his elaborate and brightly colored costume, but because of his magnetic air of regal authority. That he produces a pocket knife and soaks his handkerchief in his own blood, next pinning the bloody rag to his breast as a flag to commemorate the loss of Nicaragua, only cements their interest in him.

Nevertheless, the two fall into an argument with the President. Barker, the intellectual of the two (“He had a great amount of intellectual capacity, of that peculiar kind which raises a man from throne to throne and lets him die loaded with honours without having either amused or enlightened the mind of a single man”), condescendingly argues that the President’s overthrow and the absorption of a once-independent Nicaragua into a North American superstate is not a bad thing, because Progress. That absorption brought education, science, and progress even if it meant the decline of the things that made Nicaragua unique.

The President, understandably, assumes that Barker’s sympathies are with the unnamed larger nation that took Nicaragua over. “My sympathies are with no nation,” Barker replies. “We moderns believe in a great cosmopolitan civilisation, one which shall include all the talents of all the absorbed peoples.” Consumed, assimilated, brought up to some external standard, scientifically progressed into a deracinated copy of every other “absorbed people,” the Nicaraguans have lost even their once famous ability to capture and tame wild horses.

“‘I never catch a wild horse,’ replied Barker, with dignity.”

Such folk skills are, to him, “a mere barbarian dexterity.” But the President cannot help but feel “that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilised.” 

“Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”

“Something, perhaps,” replied Barker, “but that something a mere barbarian dexterity. I do not know that I could chip flints as well as a primeval man, but I know that civilisation can make these knives which are better, and I trust to civilisation.”

“You have good authority,” answered the Nicaraguan. “Many clever men like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”

It is not the point of Chesterton’s novel, but this is a striking preview of the globalist blender—well before it was set to puree by the internet—complete with the self-satisfied moral superiority of the big as they wield their bigness against the small. And the President’s final line is a good reminder of the fate of all civilizations, no matter how confident, successful, and progressive. At the very least it is a warning against the tyranny of the present.

As for the President, he departs the story with an even sharper and more evocative line, and possibly one to live by:

“Every man is dangerous,” said the old man without moving, “who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.”

And with a pleasant smile he finished his coffee and rose, bowing profoundly, passed out into the fog, which had again grown dense and sombre. Three days afterwards they heard that he had died quietly in lodgings in Soho.

For those of us who sense the going of “something” from the world with the advance of “civilization,” see this reflection on Paul Kingsnorth from back in January. For the “theological task” of the present age, that of making modern man have even “an inkling of what has been taken from him,” see this passage from Jünger’s The Forest Passage that I posted last year.

A quick personal update

Books and Bede—a favorite gift from my wife and kids

The hot but unhurried days of the summer gave way, right at the beginning of this month, to the haste and chaos of preparation for the fall semester. In my case, I am preparing for three fall semesters, as I have picked up adjunct classes at two other colleges in addition to my full-time teaching. Just keeping deadlines straight will be an adventure.

The reason for all of this is a happy one that I’m not sure I’ve directly addressed here—my wife and I are expecting twins, our fourth and fifth children. I’ve taken on this extra work for the time she will be out following their birth. These adjunct courses were mercifully easy to find. One was even offered to me sight unseen thanks to a recommendation from a colleague. How often now does someone need work and have it dropped into his lap like that? We are blessed and have had a lot of cause this summer to reflect on God’s provision—in time, in work, in material needs—for these babies and for us.

That said, when exactly the twins will arrive is up in the air. Were they to go full-term they would arrive three weeks into September, but my wife’s OB doesn’t let twins go past 38 weeks. So we were looking toward the second weekend in September. Now, though, the doctor may decide to induce around 37 weeks, bumping the twins’ arrival another week nearer. There is also the possibility—just a possibility, but a possibility that has a startling way of focusing one’s attention—that they may induced this week, depending on how my wife’s checkups go. She spent last night at the hospital under observation, a common enough occurrence for women at this stage of expecting twins but still a reminder of how near we are. Fortunately all signs were good and she’ll be released this morning.

And of course the babies could do their own thing and come at any time now, something we’ve been working to prepare for for the last couple weeks. We have a “go bag” in the back of the van, waiting.

All of which is to say that my writing here, already spotty since the end of the summer session, may be more sporadic in the coming weeks. I may not, for instance, have the time or stamina to complete a summer reading list. Then again, being able to work on something one paragraph at a time might be just the thing. There’s no way to tell at this point. But I hope y’all will keep checking in and stay in touch, and most of all that y’all will celebrate with us.

In the meantime, here’s a short reflection on birth and life inspired by an offhand metaphor in Beowulf that I wrote following the birth of our third child four years ago. Please check that out.

Further notes on Indy and Oppie

July was a big movie month here on the blog, with three reviews of movies ranging from “adequate compared to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” to “great.” Two of them I’ve reflected on continually since seeing them and reviewing them here, especially as I’ve read, watched, and listened to more about them.

Here are a few extra thoughts on my summer’s movie highlights cobbled together over the last couple of weeks:

Indiana Jones and the Curse of Woke

When I reviewed Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny a month and a half ago, I didn’t dwell on the malign influence of woke ideology in its storytelling, only mentioning that I had justifiable suspicions of any Indiana Jones film produced by Disney. I wanted to acknowledge those doubts without going into detail, because after actually watching and, mostly, enjoying the movie, I found that the problems I had with Dial of Destiny weren’t political at all, but artistic. It isn’t woke, it’s just mediocre.

That didn’t stop a certain kind of critic from finding the spectral evidence of wokeness in the film and trumpeting their contempt for it. I’m thinking particularly of a caustic YouTube reviewer I usually enjoy, as well as this review for Law & Liberty, which comes out guns blazing and attacks Dial of Destiny explicitly and at length along political lines.

The problem with these reviews is that in their hypersensitivity and their mission to expose ideological propaganda they do violence to the object of their criticism, not just misinterpreting things but getting some thing completely wrong. Here’s a representative paragraph from that Law & Liberty review:

Next, we cut to 1969, the Moon Landing. Indy is an old tired man, sad, alone, miserable. The camera insists on his ugly, flabby naked body. His young neighbors wake him up with their rock music and despise him. His students don’t care about his anthropological course. His colleagues give him a retirement party and soon enough they’re murdered, by Nazis working secretly in the government, with the complicity of the CIA or some other deep state agency. We see the wife is divorcing him; we later learn, it’s because his son died in war, presumably Vietnam—Indy told the boy not to sign up.

What was remarkable about this paragraph to me is how much it simply gets wrong. Indy’s hippie neighbors wake him up by blasting the Beatles, yes, but they also treat him perfectly amiably. (In fact, it’s Indy who knocks on their door armed with a baseball bat.) It is never clear that Voller’s men have help from the CIA or any other “deep state agency;” I kept waiting for that connection but it never came. And Indy did not try to stop his son from joining the army, a point made so clear in the film—Indy’s one stated wish, were time travel possible, would be to tell him not to join—that it’s staggering to think a critic went to print with this.*

From later in the same review: “But turning from obvious metaphors to ideology, Indy is replaced by a young woman, Helen [sic—her name is Helena], daughter of his old archaeological friend Basil, but the film suggests you should think of her as a goddess to worship.” One of my chief complaints about Dial of Destiny was its failure to deal with Helena’s criminality, giving her a half-baked or even accidental redemptive arc that spares her a face-melting, as befitted all similar characters in Indy’s inscrutable but always moral universe. That bad writing again. But how one could watch her character in action and conclude that the audience is meant to “worship” her is beyond me. This is anti-woke Bulverism.

What these hostile reviewers describe is often the opposite of what is actually happening in the film. I’ve seen multiple critics assert that Helena has “replaced” Indy and “controls” and “belittles” him. The Law & Liberty reviewer describes Indy as just “along for the ride.” Helena certainly intends to use him—she’s a scam artist and he’s a mark. This is all made explicit in the film. But it is also made explicit that Indy does, in fact, keep taking charge and leading them from clue to clue and that he is much a tougher mark than Helena was counting on.

Dial of Destiny’s actual problems are all classic artistic failures—poor pacing, overlong action sequences, plodding exposition, weak or cliched characters,** slipshod writing, and a misapprehension of what matters in an Indiana Jones movie that becomes clearest in the ending, when Indy is reunited (for the third time) with Marion. Here the filmmakers make the same mistake as the team behind No Time to Die by giving Indy, like Bond, romantic continuity and attempting to trade on sentimentality when that is not what the character is about.

Again—these are artistic problems. Helena Shaw isn’t a girlboss or avenging avatar of wokeness; she’s a poorly written villain who doesn’t get her comeuppance. But I saw little such criticism among the fountains of indignation from the reviewers who pursued the “woke Disney” line of criticism.

Perhaps this is the greatest curse of wokeness: that it distorts even its critics’ minds. Once they’ve determined that a movie is woke, they’ll see what they want to see.

Call it woke derangement syndrome and add it to all the other derangement syndromes out there. Woke ideology is real, even if the ordinary person can’t define it with the precision demanded by a Studies professor or Twitter expert, and it is pernicious, and it produces—even demands—bad art. It is a kind of self-imposed blindness, as are all ideologies. But zeroing in on wokeness as the explanation for bad art can blind us to real artistic flaws, and if any good and beautiful art is to survive our age we need a keen, clear, unclouded vision of what makes art work. We need not just a sensitivity to the bad, but an understanding of the good.

Douthat on Oppenheimer

On to better criticism of a better movie. Ross Douthat, a New York Times op-ed columnist who writes film criticism for National Review, has been one of my favorite critics for the last decade. Douthat begins his review of Oppenheimer with an abashed confession that he feels guilty saying “anything especially negative about” it, but that as brilliantly executed as it is, he is “not so sure” that it is “actually a great film.”

Fair enough. What gives Douthat pause, then? For him, the problem is Oppenheimer’s final third, which he sees not as a satisfying denouement but simply a long decline from the height of the Trinity test, a decline complicated by thematic missteps:

There are two problems with this act in the movie. The first is that for much of its running time, Oppenheimer does a good job with the ambiguities of its protagonist’s relationship to the commonplace communism of his intellectual milieu—showing that he was absolutely the right man for the Manhattan Project job but also that he was deeply naïve about the implications of his various friendships and relationships and dismissive about what turned out to be entirely real Soviet infiltration of his project.

On this point I agree. As I wrote in my own review, I thought this was one of the film’s strengths. Douthat continues:

But the ending trades away some of this ambiguity for a more conventional anti-McCarthyite narrative, in which Oppenheimer was simply martyred by know-nothings rather than bringing his political troubles on himself. You can rescue a more ambiguous reading from the scenes of Oppenheimer’s security-clearance hearings alone, but the portions showing Strauss’s Senate-hearing comeuppance have the feeling of a dutiful liberal movie about the 1950s—all obvious heroes and right-wing villains, no political complexity allowed.

The second problem, as Douthat sees it, is that the drama surrounding Oppenheimer’s political destruction and Strauss’s comeuppance is unworthy of the high stakes and technical drama of the middle half of the movie concerning the Manhattan Project: “I care about the bomb and the atomic age; I don’t really care about Lewis Strauss’s confirmation, and ending a movie about the former with a dramatic reenactment of the latter seems like a pointless detour from what made Oppenheimer worth making in the first place.”

There is merit here, but I think Douthat is wrong.

I, too, got the “dutiful liberal” vibe from the final scenes, but strictly from the Alden Ehrenreich character. Ehrenreich is a fine actor unjustly burdened with the guilt of Solo, but his congressional aide character’s smug hostility to Strauss as Strauss is defeated in his confirmation hearing feels too pat, too easy. It’s Robert Downey Jr’s sympathetic and complicated portrayal of Strauss, not to mention the fact that the film demonstrates that, however Strauss acted upon them, his concerns about espionage and Oppenheimer’s naivete were justified, that saves the film from simply being standard anti-McCarthy grandstanding.***

Regarding the seemingly diminished stakes of the final act, I too wondered as I first watched Oppenheimer whether Nolan might have done better to begin in medias res, to limit himself strictly to the story of the bomb. But that story has already been told several times and Oppenheimer is very much a character study; this specific man’s rise and fall are the two necessary parts of a story that invokes Prometheus before it even begins.

The key, I think, is in the post-war scene with Oppenheimer and Einstein talking by the pond at Princeton. Nolan brings us back to this moment repeatedly—it’s therefore worth paying attention to. The final scene reveals Oppenheimer and Einstein’s conversation to us:

Oppenheimer: When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world.

Einstein: I remember it well. What of it?

Oppenheimer: I believe we did.

Cue a vision of the earth engulfed in flames.

A technology that can destroy the entire world is not just the literal danger of Oppenheimer’s project, but a metaphorical one. The Trinity test proves fear of the literal destruction of the world unfounded, but the final act of the film—in which former colleagues tear each other apart over espionage and personal slights and former allies spy and steal and array their weapons against each other and the United States goes questing for yet more powerful bombs, a “chain reaction” all beginning with Oppenheimer’s “gadget”—shows us an unforeseen metaphorical destruction as it’s happening. The bomb doesn’t have to be dropped on anyone to annihilate.

This is a powerful and disturbing dimension of the film that you don’t get without that final act.

Finally, for a wholly positive appraisal of Oppenheimer as visual storytelling—that is, as a film—read this piece by SA Dance at First Things. Dance notes, in passing, the same importance of the film’s final act that I did: “The two threads are necessary to account for the political paradox of not just the a-bomb but of all technology.” A worthwhile read.

Addenda: About half an hour after I posted this, Sebastian Milbank’s review for The Critic went online. It’s insightful well-stated, especially with regard to Oppenheimer’s “refusal to be bound” by anyone or anything, a theme with intense religious significance.

And a couple hours after that, I ran across this excellent Substack review by Bethel McGrew, which includes this line, a better, more incisive critique of the framing narrative than Douthat’s: “This is a weakness of the film, which provides all the reasons why Oppenheimer should never have had security clearance, then demands we root against all the men who want to take it away.”

Tom Cruise does the impossible

The most purely enjoyable filmgoing experience I had this summer was Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part I. To be sure, Oppenheimer was great art, the best film qua film of the summer, but this was great entertainment. I enjoyed it so much that, after reviewing it, I haven’t found anything else to say about it except that I liked it and can’t wait for Part II.

Leaving me with one short, clearly expressed opinion—a truly impossible mission, accomplished.

Endnotes

* In fairness, the review has one really interesting observation: in reference to the film’s titular Dial being Greek in origin, unlike the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, “Jews are replaced by Greeks in the Indiana Jones mythology, since our elites are no longer Christian.” The insight here is only partially diminished by the fact that the elites who created Indiana Jones were not Christian, either. Steven Spielberg, Philip Kaufman, and Lawrence Kasdan—key parts of Raiders—are all Jewish.

** Here is where Dial of Destiny drifts closest to woke characterization. The agents working for Voller in the first half include a white guy in shirt and tie with a crew cut and a thick Southern accent and a black female with an afro and the flyest late 1960s fashion. Which do you think turns out to be a devious bad guy and which a principled good guy? But even here, I don’t think this is woke messaging so much as the laziness of cliché. Secondary characters with Southern accents have been doltish rubes or sweaty brutes for decades.

*** A useful point of comparison, also involving a black-and-white Robert Downey Jr, is George Clooney’s engaging but self-important Good Night, and Good Luck. Watch both films and tell me which is “all obvious heroes and right-wing villains.”

Poe on Progress

The capital P above is intentional. Here’s a passage by Poe that I’ve run across in excerpt several times, from an 1844 letter to fellow poet James Russell Lowell, who had requested “a sort of spiritual autobiography” from Poe. In the course of laying out his beliefs and opinions, Poe writes:

“I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active—not more happy—nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary—and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain—that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future—that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves—nor are we with our posterity.”

— Edgar Allan Poe, July 2, 1849

I’ve written often enough about the myth of Progress—whether applied to politics as Progressivism, to the study of history as Whig or Progressive history, or in the popular imagination as the constant general improvement of everything over time—but Poe captures both my beliefs and my mood just about perfectly. Not only does the myth of Progress blind us to our own potential for failure, it rubbishes and belittles our forebears. It is not only incorrect, but impious.

You can read Poe’s entire letter to Lowell, which is full of personal asides and opinions, here. It’s available as part of a great archive of Poe correspondence made available online by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, an act of service that I deeply appreciate. You can peruse that here.

A thesis

The following started as only semi-serious off-the-cuff pontification in my Instagram “stories.” I’ve expanded on it and fixed a lot of autocorrect “help” along the way.

A favorite web cartoonist, Owen Cyclops, shared the following on Instagram this morning:

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A post shared by owen cyclops (@owenbroadcast)

If you’re unfamiliar with semiotics, which I discovered via Umberto Eco late in high school, here’s the first bit of Wikipedia’s intro:

Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a meaning, to the sign's interpreter. The meaning can be intentional, such as a word uttered with a specific meaning; or unintentional, such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical condition.

The phrase “usually called a meaning” should give you some sense of how arcane, abstract, and high-falutin’ this can get. Emphasis on abstract. But semiotics is not really my point, here. Owen’s cartoon brought Dr Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley to mind. Per Boswell:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.”

This is the “appeal to the stone.” Wikipedia classifies it as “an informal logical fallacy.” I don’t care. When confronted with academic disciplines that have descended to this level of abstraction, I join Dr Johnson’s stone-kicking camp.

At some point, something has to be real. Argument divorced from concrete reality simply turns into sophisticated dorm room bickering.* That’s what Owen’s cartoon captures so well—argue about the “meanings” of “signs” like carrot tops and foxholes all you want, the real carrot and the real fox are going to present an inarguable ultimate meaning to those rabbits. I refute it thus.

I was struck that Wikipedia’s article on Johnson’s stone-kicking compares this appeal to the reductio ad absurdum, which it also treats as a fallacy. Its full article on the reductio is more circumspect, classifying it as a legitimate line of argument, though I’ve always regarded the reductio more as a useful rhetorical device, a way of comically** setting the boundaries to an argument or of twisting the knife once the logic has worked itself out as impossible. But, tellingly, the article’s “see also” points us toward slippery slope. This is, of course, described not just as an informal fallacy but “a fallacious argument.” I contend that slippery slope is not a fallacy but, at this point, an ironclad empirical law of Western behavior.

And that’s what brought the late Kenneth Minogue to mind. In my Western Civ courses I use a line from his Politics: A Very Short Introduction, to impart to students that the Greeks and Romans were different from each other in a lot of fundamental ways. Chief among these differences was the Greek and Roman approach to ideas:

The Greek cities were a dazzling episode in Western history, but Rome had the solidity of a single city which grew until it became an empire, and which out of its own decline created a church that sought to encompass nothing less than the globe itself. Whereas the Greeks were brilliant and innovative theorists, the Romans were sober and cautious farmer-warriors, less likely than their predecessors to be carried away by an idea. We inherit our ideas from the Greeks, but our practices from the Romans.

Succinct, somewhat oversimplified, sure, but helpful to students who mostly assume the Greeks and Romans were the same, just with redundant sets of names for the same gods. It’s also correct. Minogue goes on to note that this mixed heritage manifests differently culture to culture, state to state, but that “Both the architecture*** and the terminology of American politics . . . are notably Roman.”

Were, I’d say.

So, a thesis I’ve kicked around in conversation:

Given Minogue’s two categories of classical influence, as the United States was founded along (partially but significantly) Roman lines by men who revered the Romans, a large part of our cultural upheaval has arisen as the country has drifted more Greek—becoming progressively more “likely . . . to be carried away by an idea.”

The emphasis has shifted from the Founders’ “Roman” belief in institutions governed by people striving for personal virtue to a “Greek” pattern of all-dissolving ideologies pursuing unachievable ends. This reflects both political and social changes. Like Athens, the US became more aggressive and more inclined to foreign intervention the more it embraced democracy not just as a system but as an end. And note the way that, when an ideal butts up against an institution in our culture, it’s the institution that’s got to go—as does anything that stands in the way of the fullest possible fulfilment of the implicit endpoint of the ideal. How dare you impede my slide down this slope, bigot.

And this is not a new problem. A whole history of the US could be written along these lines.

* During my senior year of college I once listened to two roommates argue over whether the Trix Rabbit was a “freak of nature.” This lasted at least an hour. Take away the humor and you’d have enough material for several volumes of an academic journal.

** Comically, because what’s the point of arguing if you can’t laugh the whole time? That’s not an argument, but a quarrel. See note above.

** Not always for the best, as I’ve argued before.