Wiley Junction

Near the house where I grew up stood a long, low, thin strip of stores we collectively called “Wiley Junction.” This included a Gulf station—later BP—the old one-room Wiley Post Office, and one shop where you could buy NASCAR trading cards, rent a movie, or lie in a tanning bed. But the store attached to the gas station was always Wiley Junction’s main draw.

The “junction” proper was the awkward joining of Old Highway 441, a two-lane road built to parallel the long-defunct Tallulah Falls Railroad, and New 441, a two-lane highway built in the 1970s with a more aggressive approach to the terrain—cutting through hills and banks and leveling off hollows to drive straighter through our county. In Wiley (unincorporated) Old and New 441 curved toward each other, like dancers bumping rears, and offered a natural location for a connector road. We drove through Wiley Junction literally every day. And most days we stopped at Wiley Junction—the store.

The Wiley Junction store was typical of the now-endangered local country stores throughout the South. Long and narrow, one entered through a glass door in the middle with the cash register at your right elbow, visible through the bunker-like gap between the lottery ticket stands on the counter and the overhanging racks of cigarettes. There was no bulletproof glass but there was a “need a penny, take one” dish. I wondered why I couldn’t take one every time—an informal education in courtesy.

To the left were three narrow aisles of goods: Slim Jims, pork rinds, chocolate bars, Big League Chew, and Lance crackers foremost, with bait, tackle, Styrofoam coolers, and basic hardware necessities hooked to a pegboard wall in back. The aisles led to the coolers, which had a smaller selection than today’s mega gas station chains but were always amply stocked. I bought many, many Cokes and Mello Yellos there, especially during those mid-90s summers when you could win prizes directly from the bottlecap. I never got that Coca-Cola Mustang but it was a great day when I won a second, free 20 oz bottle.

That was one half of Wiley Junction. Turning from the coolers and walking back to the register, you entered a bottleneck between the checkout counter and the short-order kitchen—which is the part of Wiley Junction I miss most.

You can identify this kind of country store not just by its thin, low-slung appearance, but by the smell. Wiley Junction had that smell. Clean, but not sterile. Lived-in. A faint hint of the concrete floor under the brown tile. A suggestion, somehow apparent to your nose, that the place was built by hand. But the kitchen added to that scent and elevated it. Wiley Junction smelled always, richly and warmly, of its signature offering: biscuits.

Even a short trip into the store to pick up one item left you smelling like biscuits the rest of the day. That happened to my sister one morning when she went into the store for perhaps two minutes, and I tormented her for years by calling her “Biscuit.” The thing is, the smell was wonderful. It was a greasy smell, sure, but with a sharp sweetness to it that I struggle to describe. The smell had texture—smooth and floury and warm.

Wiley Junction’s breakfast kept the place hopping in the mornings. Local tradesmen, construction workers, highway crews, state troopers with the odd local businessman thrown in during the week; local families, fishermen, hunters, and vacationers who had gotten wise to a good thing on the weekends. Sometimes it was hard to find parking.

From the narrow space between the kitchen and the cash register one could pass into an open dining area that somehow felt larger than the rest of that skinny building. There were particle board booths with one-piece benches contoured to the country rump and a bay window opening toward New 441. It was good to eat there. You would almost certainly see someone you knew. Often, for me, that was my granddad.

I’ve written about him a lot here. He was a plumber-electrician and frequently picked up biscuits at Wiley Junction on his way to construction sites all over Rabun County. On special occasions, when we had a church car wash or when the whole extended family was setting forth on a fishing trip to Tugalo, he’d pick up a big white sack of biscuits for everyone. But on weekdays, running into him during the few minutes when he’d be sitting in one those booths, eating his biscuit, was a treat—no matter that we saw him almost every day anyway. Something about Wiley Junction and the biscuits made it special.

Yesterday was the 27th anniversary of his death, aged just 65, in 1998. A few years later the Georgia DOT bought up Wiley Junction and bulldozed it to widen the New Highway. It’s a four-lane now with a grass median and is safer for the traffic it has to handle between Atlanta and Western North Carolina, little of which stops in Wiley any more. But when I visit home I can’t pass that weedy, angular patch of land without thinking about what was lost.

My granddad has now enjoyed just over a quarter century of the life everlasting, and so I can hope to see him again. Wiley Junction, a happy blip in a fallen world, is not coming back in any form. But if seeing my granddad again proves to be anything like it was to see him in real life, that first moment of recognition and reunion will bear with it, before it fades away forever in light of unimaginably better things, the lingering scent of breakfast in a country store.

A dialogue tag oddity

I’ve mentioned before that reading out loud is part of the bedtime routine for me and my wife. We’ve enjoyed this as long as we’ve been married, and have read dozens of books by now. Very few of the books we’ve chosen have been stinkers, but reading aloud does have a way of spotlighting authorial quirks or tics even in the good ones. One area where tics most frequently appear is in dialogue tags.

I’ve written here about dialogue tags a few times in the last few months (see here, for example). Again, I believe strongly in Elmore Leonard’s rule of never using a verb other than said for dialogue, though I—following Leonard himself—allow for a lot of flexibility. I’ve read two novels recently, Hill 112, by Adrian Goldsworthy and The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers, that approach ascribing dialogue in plenty of other ways without calling attention to themselves.

That said, reading aloud before bedtime has only entrenched my opinion that a simple “he said” or “she said” is best.

This has been on my mind because of our recent bedtime reading: Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. Alexander is a good and imaginative writer and these books have been favorites for a long time, but in reading them aloud I grew increasingly exasperated with a pattern in his dialogue. See if you can spot it:

As he made to leave the chamber, however, Doli took him by the arm. “Gwystyl,” said the dwarf severely, “you have a skulking, sneaking look in your eyes. You might hoodwink my friends. But don’t forget you're also dealing with one of the Fair Folk. I have a feeling,” Doli added, tightening his grip, “you’re far too anxious to see us gone. I’m beginning to wonder, if I squeezed you a little, what more might come out.”

“It’s not that we're starving,” Eilonwy said. “Gurgi did remember to bring along the wallet of food. Yes, and that was a gift from Gwydion, too, so he had every right to take it. It’s certainly a magical wallet,” she went on; “it never seems to get empty. The food is really quite nourishing, I’m sure, and wonderful to have when you need it. But the truth of the matter is, it’s rather tasteless. That’s often the trouble with magical things. They’re never quite what you'd expect.”

“We have a lovely view of the fens from the hilltop,” Orwen put in with such enthusiasm that her necklace bounced and rattled. “You must come and enjoy it. Indeed, you’re perfectly welcome to stay as long as you want,” she added eagerly. “Now that little Dallben’s gone, and found himself a beard, too, the place isn’t half as cheery as it used to be. We wouldn’t change you into a toad-unless you insisted on it.”

“I don’t mean that,” Taran said. “What I believe,” he added thoughtfully, “is that Adaon understood these things anyway. Even with his clasp, there is much I do not understand. All I know is that I feel differently somehow. I can see things I never saw before—or smell or taste them. I can't say exactly what it is. It’s strange, and awesome in a way. And very beautiful sometimes. There are things that I know…” Taran shook his head. “And I don't even know how I know them.”

“I think you see many things,” Taran replied quietly, “many things which you tell no one. It has long been in my mind,” he went on, with much hesitation, “and now more than ever-the dream you had, the last night in Caer Dallben. You saw Ellidyr and King Morgant; to me, you foretold I would grieve. But what did you dream of yourself?”

“Go on,” Gwystyl said, “put him on your shoulder. That’s what he wants. For the matter of that, you shall have him as a gift, with the thanks of the Fair Folk. For you have done us a service, too. We were uneasy with the Crochan knocking about here and there; one never knew what would happen. Yes, yes, pick him up,” Gwystyl added with a melancholy sigh. “He’s taken quite a fancy to you. It’s just as well. I'm simply not up to keeping crows any more, not up to it at all.”

Alexander’s characters are always going on and adding and continuing, which we already know because they are still talking. A few of these, especially the last two above, hint at stage directions Alexander is trying to give his characters—sighing, hesitating—but this would work better broken out of the flow of dialogue and directly described, which would also give the narration, the characters and action, and the reader’s imagination space to breath. Look at how much better the simple “Taran shook his head” works near the end of the fourth example.

But this habit of breaking into the dialogue for these secondary tags is not only awkward and unnecessary, it’s annoying to read aloud. If dialogue tags should be as close to invisible as possible, annoying the reader may be worse than a lot of clumsy, highly noticeable Tom Swifty adverbs.

I selected these at random from the second book, The Black Cauldron. We’re several chapters into the fourth book, Taran Wanderer, and these interrupting tags are much less common than in the first couple volumes of the series. Someone must have had a talk with Alexander sometime around The Castle of Llyr. The books, already very good—The Black Cauldron and The High King won Newbery honors and a Newbery Medal back when that meant something!—are better for it, and I, as my wife’s reader, am grateful.

We’ve come to resemble them

The latest School of War episode dropped yesterday and featured historian Sean McMeekin, whose book Stalin’s War I’ve quoted and recommended here before. McMeekin discussed his latest, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, a book that’s been on my to-read list since it was announced.

The interview was insightful and wide-ranging despite coming in under an hour and is well worth a listen. But the conclusion was especially pointed. Speaking of Communist regimes that not only survived the fall of the USSR but have become globally ascendant—note carefully the subtitle of his book—McMeekin assessed the present dangers not only of external Communist enemies but of threats from within. These threats are not the Hollywood pinkos of Cold War anxiety but our own inbuilt mimetic tendencies, through which we gradually become like the thing we resist, and, even more to the point, the uncritical embrace and celebration of technologies that enable tyranny:

I don’t think the kind of threat, let’s say, to either Western values or our way of life is quite the same as you might have seen from the years of high Stalinism or high Maoism, even as far as people being fellow travelers or kind of trying to embrace those ideas, but some of it I still think—and I guess this is what I was trying to get at in my epilogue—certain elements of Communist practice which have in some ways actually you might even say been streamlined or improved that is to say: the repression, the censorship, the state control of information, social credit system. . . .

I remember back in the 90s when I was in Model UN among other things there were all these debates about US policy vis-à-vis China and the idea of opening up China, and back then the argument was that we should trade with China, we should open up to China . . . because that way we’ll make them more like us. That is to say, “You know, it’s true they crushed the rebels, the student protestors at Tiananmen Square . . . they obviously crushed and suppressed them, they obviously did not introduce any kind of genuine democracy or accountability to the public, however, if we trade with them they’ll be a little bit more like us and eventually they’ll develop liberal political institutions.”

That doesn’t seem to have happened. If anything, the opposite seems to have happened. I mean, if anything I think we’ve come to resemble them more than they resemble us, that is to say, our own public life is increasingly kind of taken over by social controls. And, you know, the early euphoria about the internet, maybe we should have been suspicious because the internet was originally ARPANET, a project of basically the Pentagon and the Defense Department. Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised that, in the end, these tools of social or political liberation could also be turned against us by governments, large corporations, etc.

I think it’s something to worry about. I think, you know, we just have to stay vigilant, and make sure our own traditions are upheld.

Host Aaron MacLean ends the episode by inviting McMeekin back someday to discuss “the global designs of universal liberalism.” I’d be there for that. Not exactly uplifting but necessary. Listen to the full interview here.

Food for thought, especially when it comes to discerning what “stay[ing] vigilant” means and just which of “our own traditions” we wish to preserve. For some related thoughts about the warping effect of the technologies used against ideological opponents, see this post from three years ago.

Ian Fleming on writing good reports—and fiction

The Amazon/Bond film series news I responded to earlier this week was an interesting coincidence, as I’ve been reading Nicholas Shakespeare’s new biography Ian Fleming: The Complete Man for about a month and a half now.

As assistant to the head of Naval Intelligence during World war II, Ian Fleming had to read and write many, many reports. Fortunately for him, he brought some natural talent as well as prior experience as a reporter for Reuters to the job. Here, excerpted from a classified memo in Shakespeare’s book, are three essentials Fleming insisted upon for the reports he received:

A report should aim at three virtues. First, it should have impact; the reader must be made to know at once what it is about; the opening sentence is therefore of great importance. Second, it should be unambiguous; it must leave no room for doubt or ignorance other than the doubt or ignorance which the writer has himself expressed. Third, it should have the brevity which comes only from clear intention; the writer must know what he wishes to say before he begins to say it; otherwise he will hedge and be verbose. He should imagine himself in the position of one who will have to act, and act quickly, on the information which his report contains.

With regard to clear and unambiguous meaning, compare one of CS Lewis’s bits of writing advice from a 1956 letter: “Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.” This is not to say ambiguity has no place in fiction, of course, but that must be the author’s purpose—just like an intelligence officer who must leave room only for those doubts he himself wants to convey about his report.

Directness or immediacy, clarity, and concision born of precision and purpose: as Shakespeare notes, “lan wrote his novels in this manner.” Good writing is good writing regardless of form, genre, or content.

Whither 007, again?

“Always makes me feel a little melancholy—grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap.”

— Q in Skyfall

Last week Amazon announced “a new joint venture to house the James Bond intellectual property rights” with MGM and Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, who had previously controlled the Bond film series. Lest that opening statement come across as too vague and businessy, the next sentence clarifies that Amazon “will gain creative control of the James Bond franchise.”

This news has been pretty roundly greeted with doomsaying. Amazon, after all, has previously dropped a billion to scrabble up rights to some of Tolkien’s work, resulting in “The Rings of Power.” Projects like this as well as Amazon’s general ethos fueled justifiable distrust on the part of Wilson and Broccoli, who briefly made the news a couple months ago, following a meeting with an Amazon exec who called Bond “content,” for describing Amazon leadership as “f—ing idiots.” But the “impasse” between Broccoli and Wilson and Amazon is at an end, something that cost Amazon a billion dollars. The heirs of Cubby Broccoli’s six-decade film series have been bought out, ousted. Wilson has stated clearly that he’s retiring while Broccoli has gestured toward working on “other projects.”

Some “joint venture.”

I’m pretty sure I’m in the doomsayers’ camp. Though every internet comment section on this story is full of people saying “What about ‘Reacher’?!” it should be indisputable that Amazon has a poor track record with literary adaptations and a well-deserved reputation for milking “IP” dry for “content.” That Deadline article offers the clearest reporting on this story when it describes Amazon spending that billion “to ensure that they could fully steer and exploit” Bond. And that’s not even to get into the woke Hollywood stuff that will inevitably intrude.

Indeed, it already has. Broccoli and Wilson might have guided the film series for decades but Ian Fleming’s estate still controls the books—and I use the word control deliberately. It was the estate’s official statement on the Amazon takeover that finally got me feeling something about all of this. After writing that the estate is “enormously excited about the next phase of the James Bond story on film under Amazon’s creative leadership,” whatever that mythical creature is, the statement praises the Broccoli family, who “have always respected the legacy of Ian Fleming and his words and his original depiction of Agent 007.”

This is pretty rich coming from the estate that has commissioned new books like On His Majesty’s Secret Service and Double or Nothing, which are not only tediously politically pandering but artistically weak, and that—most galling of all—authorized censorship of Fleming’s originals and moved to make sure only the bowdlerized versions are available. Fleming’s words—precisely what the estate praises Broccoli and Wilson for protecting.

Thine own mouth condemneth thee, and not I.

I have no particular loyalty to Broccoli and Wilson and have written in annoyance about them before, but to dedicate decades to the maintenance of a film project begun by their father is unique in a business governed by algorithm, merchandizing, profit margins, and the vicissitudes of political expediency. We shall not see their like again.

If you’re interested in some gossip about all of this, here’s a piece at the Daily Mail that claims to have scuttlebutt provided by an Amazon insider. For a more sober consideration of what all this means, pro and con, than what you’ll pick up from screechy YouTubers, I recommend this piece at IGN. And for an underrated former Bond’s opinion, let me conclude with a bit of Timothy Dalton’s reaction:

The movies have taken different courses over the years, but there is something very good about the original and I hope Amazon latch onto that and give us the kind of film that’s brought so much excitement and fun to so many people. . . . Anyway, good luck to them.

The masculine urge to zap space bugs

This week on my commute I’ve been taking a break from podcasts to revisit a novel I last read in college, Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. It’s been about twenty years.

I faintly remember being disappointed by it, but not much else. I still wish it had more action, but with the benefit of twenty years of growing up, studying, reading, and learning from life, I can see that the problem with my first read was me. Under the sci-fi adventure premise and WWII-memoir-in-space style, Starship Troopers is an uncommonly rich and complicated book.

This passage from relatively late in the story struck me especially sharply. The protagonist, Johnny Rico, joined the Mobile Infantry straight out of high school, during peacetime. While training, war broke out with the “bugs,” the most notorious early incident of which was a bug attack on Buenos Aires that “smeared” the entire city—including Johnny’s parents. Or so he thinks. As he departs his original ship for OCS, he bumps into his father, now an NCO despite being in his mid-40s.

Johnny’s father had strongly disapproved of joining up, so not only his survival but his about-face on military service surprises Johnny. He assumes his father joined to avenge his mother. Not so. Johnny’s enlistment awakened something long dormant in his father:

“Your mother’s death released me for what I had to do… even though she and I were closer than most, nevertheless it set me free to do it. I turned the business over to Morales—”

“Old man Morales? Can he handle it?”

“Yes. Because he has to. A lot of us are doing things we didn’t know we could. I gave him a nice chunk of stock—you know the old saying about the kine that tread the grain—and the rest I split two ways, in a trust: half to the Daughters of Charity, half to you whenever you want to go back and take it. If you do. Never mind. I had at last found out what was wrong with me.” He stopped, then said very softly, “I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal… but a man.”

There’s a lot going on here. Running through it is a strong strand of Ernst Jünger—who like Heinlein proved controversial for being clear, unsparing, and uncategorizable within the permissible simplistic divisions—and the word “man” means Johnny’s father is not only making a statement about himself, masculinity, and courage, though that is the obvious surface-level meaning, but about what people are and ought to be.

What I immediately thought of was a short but poignant line from Dr Johnson, who has been much on my mind lately. In his Life of Samuel Johnson Boswell quotes him as saying, on the topic of war:

“Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.”

— Samuel Johnson

An apt description of Johnny’s father, who is a fairly minor but memorable character, and a lot of the rest of us. I had my own abortive brush with the service after grad school, the kind of thing that was clearly not meant to be (a little too old, a little too slow) and worked out well in the end. I wouldn’t change a thing. But thinking back on it still causes me a pang of “what if” every so often. Fortunately we have imagination and stories, and the examples of the men who did soldier, who did go to sea.

Starship Troopers might be a “controversial classic,” as the most recent paperback calls it, but that it resonates so strongly with itself, with other great literature, and with a powerful impulse inside most men, an impulse either fulfilled for felt forever as accusation, is a clear mark of its worth.

For a recap of some of the controversy, a good examination of some of the nuance in the book, and a very good critique of the film adaptation, which was an deliberate act of vandalism, see this piece from American Reformer. For a similar premise with different themes and a strikingly different tone but similarly powerful social critique and more action, read The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman, a novel I’ve read or listened to a number of times.

Butler, Palmerston, and the soldiering menace

Each week on Substack I publish a clerihew, my favorite form of light verse: a quatrain in AABB with intentionally awkward scansion and forced rhyme. The subject is always a person, whose name constitutes the first line. My clerihews usually concern historical figures. My subject last week was General Benjamin Butler.

The joke in the poem itself had to do with something tawdry that Butler, playing the part of the moneygrubbing Yankee to the hilt, supposedly did while dining at a wealthy lady’s home while in charge of the Union occupation of New Orleans. But in my brief historical note afterward I mentioned something for which he was infamous: General Order No. 28 of May 15, 1862, which reads:

As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.

The women of occupied New Orleans had not welcomed the Union army or navy into the city and had shown repeated disrespect to them. One story has a lady emptying a chamber pot onto Admiral David Farragut. Cartoons depict them spitting at Union soldiers. One suspects simple snubs and insults were most widespread. But Butler could allow none of this to stand. In case it wasn’t clear, General Order No. 28 calls for any woman (he denies them the title “lady,” an obvious dig) disrespecting his troops to be considered and treated as a prostitute.

The reaction was predictable and swift. Here’s Confederate General PGT Beauregard, who issued a general order of his own in response, a straightforward appeal to gallantry and the protection of women’s honor:

Men of the South! shall our mothers, our wives, our daughters and our sisters, be thus outraged by the ruffianly* soldiers of the North, to whom is given the right to treat, at their pleasure, the ladies of the South as common harlots? Arouse friends, and drive back from our soil, those infamous invaders of our homes and disturbers of our family ties.

Political authorities weighed in as well. President Jefferson Davis condemned Butler. The Governor of Louisiana, Thomas Moore, published a longish open letter in which he echoed Beauregard, defended the women of New Orleans as reacting naturally to an invading foreign force, and, interestingly added force through historical argument:

The annals of warfare between civilized nations afford no similar instance of infamy to this order. It is thus proclaimed to the world that the exhibition of disgust or repulsiveness by the women of New Orleans to the hated invaders of their home and the slayers of their fathers, brothers, and husbands shall constitute a justification to a brutal soldiery for the indulgence of their lust. . . . History records instances of cities sacked and inhuman atrocities committed upon the women of a conquered town, but in no instance in modern times, at least without the brutal ravishers suffering condign punishment from the hands of their own commanders. It was reserved for a Federal general to invite his soldiers to the perpetration of outrages at the mention of which the blood recoils in horror.

Unable to penetrate deeper into Confederate territory or to break the spirit of civilian resistance, Moore suggests, Butler “sees the fruits of a victory he did not help to win eluding his grasp, and nothing left upon which to gloat his vengeance but unarmed men and helpless women.”

There’s a lot going on here, and more I could have quoted.

Over the years I’ve seen this incident downplayed as Confederate hysteria, with everything from “Lost Cause” mythology to “the patriarchy” playing a role. The short version: Southerners were ninnies upset about nothing, and anyway they deserved it. Sometimes the fact that Butler’s order did not result in a wave of rapes is adduced in support, but this is post facto justification. No one living through this could have known how it would turn out. The example of history gave them plenty to worry about.

And the historical dimension is what most piqued my interest. Reading up on Butler ahead of publishing that clerihew, I discovered in Library of America’s great four-volume set of primary source materials a British reaction to General Order No. 28. Here’s a note delivered by Lord Palmerston, then prime minister, to American ambassador Charles Adams (son of John Quincy, grandson of John) on June 11, 1862:

My dear sir,—I cannot refrain from taking the liberty of saying to you that it is difficult if not impossible to express adequately the disgust which must be excited in the mind of every honorable man by the general order of General Butler given in the inclosed extract from yesterday’s Times. Even when a town is taken by assault it is the practice of the Commander of the conquering army to protect to his utmost the inhabitants and especially the female part of them, and I will venture to say that no example can be found in the history of civilized nations till the publication of this order, of a general guilty in cold blood of so infamous an act as deliberately to hand over the female inhabitants of a conquered city to the unbridled licence of an unrestrained soldiery.

If the Federal Government chuses to be served by men capable of such revolting outrages, they must submit to abide by the deserved opinion which mankind will form of their conduct.

Adams asserted that he would not “recognize” Palmerston’s note—which was marked Confidential—“unless he was assured it was official.” Palmerston replied that it was, and publicly condemned Butler in a speech in the Commons. Adams, according to his secretary’s journal, “was much offended,” considering Palmerston’s note an “impudent” act of “insolence” and its arguments “sophistical.” Adams’s secretary, who viewed Adams as the winner of the tangle, thought Palmerston was projecting:

Knowing the brutality of his own officers and soldiers he readily imagined ours of the same stamp, and insolently presumed to lecture Mr. Adams on a thing which was not his business. His ill-manners were properly rebuked. American soldiers, he will find out, are not beasts, tho’ English soldiers are; and he will also learn that it is only a debased mind that would construe Gen’l Butler’s order as he has done.

If there is anything “sophistical” in this exchange, it is this. The explicit insult and implicit threat in General Order No. 28 were clear, hence the outrage. This is perhaps the first move in the long game of pooh-poohing the outrage at Butler.

At any rate, the women of New Orleans, Southerners generally, and foreign observers like Lord Palmerston knew what was up. So did Lincoln. Whether out of principle, canny strategic considerations, or for reasons of pure PR, Lincoln removed Butler from command in New Orleans in December 1862.

I was struck by the similarity of Palmerston’s appeal to that of Moore. Both correctly observe the dangers of a population of soldiers toward civilians in an occupied area. Both correctly observe that part of the long, slow evolution toward an ideal of “civilized” warfare involved the responsibility of leadership to protect civilians, even enemy civilians, and “even when a town is taken by assault,” which in the ancient world and much of the Middle Ages was understood to give the victor carte blanche to loot and rape.

Here’s something I’ve had to work hard to make my students understand given our “thank you for your service” culture of trust and admiration for soldiers: historically, soldiers were a menace. Even your own soldiers. (Perhaps especially your own soldiers, since if all was going well you would never see the enemy.) Discipline, martial law, flogging and the firing squad, and the inculcation of chivalrous ideals were partial solutions to the threat posed by large bodies of bored, strong, regularly paid young men to the civilian population, but only partial solutions. And these crumbled following the French Revolution which, as David Bell makes clear in The First Total War, rejected limited “civilized” warfare as an irrational fiction and embraced ruthless pragmatic brutality.

So, what to make of all this? Far from hysteria or Lost Cause mythologizing, the outrage was justifiable and the concern real. To pretend otherwise is partisanship.** Palmerston knew his history, and how thin and artificial the barrier between civilization and barbarism is. Adams imagined Union soldiers to have transcended history. One of these men is, at best, a deluded optimist.

A few years ago, quoting the Oxford History of Modern War, I wrote about the Civil War as a psychological conflict. Butler’s General Order No. 28 is a good example of what this looked like before the “frankly terrorist” campaigns of Sherman and others, campaigns that had more than a little of Jacobin total war in them. In addition to military victory, Butler needed to crush the enemy psychologically. Nothing short of abject subjugation would do, which is why Butler became a darling of the punitively-minded Radical Republicans. No “hearts and minds” here. In that way it’s of a piece with other nationalist wars.

* Appropriately, ruffian comes into English from Italian, in which it means “pimp.” Dante uses it in Inferno XVIII, the circle of panderers and seducers. Moore plays on the same theme when he writes that Butler can “add to infamy already well merited these crowning titles of a panderer to lust and a desecrator of virtue.”

** As a measure of the extent to which these events are still subject to purely partisan interpretation, why do we hear so much about the Southern desire to protect women being “misogyny” and “patriarchy,” but not Butler’s expressed intention to treat Southern women as prostitutes out of political spite?

The Mooch takes Dealey Plaza

This week on The Rest is History Club bonus episodes Dominic Sandbrook hosted Anthony Scaramucci, whom you might—might—remember as Donald Trump’s White House communications director for a week and a half in 2017. They talk through presidential history and their picks for the best of the lot. Despite my disagreeing with a lot of their choices it’s a generally fun conversation and Scaramucci is a smooth talker with a certain oily New York charm, like an ingratiating mid-tier Corleone enforcer who desperately wants you to know how many Douglas Brinkley books he’s read.

In the course of discussing JFK, Sandbrook teased that Scaramucci disagrees with the conclusions Sandbrook and Tom Holland laid out in their excellent series on Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. After a bit of puffing insinuation—“Remember I was in the White House, so I’m not really at liberty to talk about it,” as if the staffer who holds press conferences is going through highly classified FBI files in his off hours—Scaramucci says:

“But I would just ask you to look at the Zapruder film very closely—look at those three or four frames—and you tell me where the shot came from. Okay? Take a look. And if you believe the ‘magic bullet’ theory—”

Okay. The shot came from behind. Take a look at the Zapruder film however closely you want, but that’s not going to transform what you see in frame 313 into anything other than an exit wound.

Most of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, for me, founder upon a few immovable physical facts:

1. The first shot to strike Kennedy passed through him into Governor Connally. You can see both men react to the shot simultaneously in the Zapruder film.

2. No “magic” is necessary to explain the effects of that shot, as bullets do not move in straight lines, especially when passing through solid objects like human bodies. Read even a little bit about combat medicine and this should be obvious.

3. Regardless of which direction Kennedy’s head moves, the shocking head wound visible in the Zapruder film is an exit wound, meaning, again, that the bullet struck Kennedy from behind.

4. Shooting from behind was easier than the shot from the grassy knoll that Scaramucci and so many others either suggest or insist upon. A shooter on the grassy knoll would have to traverse left-to-right to hit a target moving across his line of fire. For a shooter above and behind Kennedy—in, say, the upper floors of the Texas School Book Depository—his target would be sitting almost motionless in his sights as the presidential limo moved down and away from him.

Argue all you like about Oswald, the Mafia, the Cubans, the CIA, or whatever, but no theory that contradicts these facts is credible.

I come down, like Sandbrook and Holland, firmly in the camp that it was Oswald acting alone in a politically motivated crime of opportunity, but I am willing to entertain some alternative that fits within the physical limits imposed by 1-4 above. For a detailed example worked out in fiction, see Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger novel The Third Bullet. Hunter, who actually knows something about guns, ballistics, and marksmanship, posits a second shooter in the building across the street from the Texas School Book Depository firing along almost the same axis as Oswald, who is still in his historical position and still fires at Kennedy. I can’t remember who or what is behind this convoluted backup plan in Hunter’s story, but it works within the known facts.

I don’t believe it, but this is far more likely than whatever it is Scaramucci wants impressionable listeners to think he knows.

Circumlocution-using people

Two relevant entries in Dr Johnson’s dictionary from the Internet Archive here

On my commute this morning I listened to a short podcast interview with a historian who has recently published a biography of one of the less appreciated Founding Fathers. I’m being cagey about the details because she came across as a good scholar doing the hard work of revising historical oversights and misrepresentations, and I don’t want this post to be about her. But read the following, her response to a question about this Founder’s views on slavery, and see if you notice what I did:

I would say that [he] is the only one of the leading Founders who actually took that phrase in the Declaration of Independence seriously, that all people are created equal. He understood that line much more as we do today, as opposed to how his contemporaries saw it. So, yes, he was an enslaver, and he inherited the enslaved people he had from his father, and he started to have—really, he never liked it, but he started to have very serious qualms about it in the early 1770s, and then at his soonest opportunity after the passage of the Declaration of Independence he returned to his plantation . . . and he began the process of freeing the people he enslaved. So he first wrote a manumission deed in the spring of 1777 and it conditionally manumitted all of his—the, the people he enslaved. And then in 1781 he freed a few unconditionally and then in 1786 he freed the remainder unconditionally. And then he really became an abolitionist.

There’s the emphatic but tediously predictable revision of the phrase “all men are created equal,” but that’s a post for another time. No, my concern is the now omnipresent phrase enslaved people and several related words and derivatives.

I’m not sure when I first noticed the prevalence of this phrase but I’m certain it originated in academia and became widespread through legacy media. An article I read in Smithsonian a few years ago was riddled with it, and it is now ubiquitous in books and online articles written by the bien pensants. It’s even turning up in my students’ writing, proof of a successful Newspeak campaign.

I’ll speculate more about how and why this originated, but I have two primary complaints about the phrase enslaved people. The first is that using it results in awkward, contorted English. That Smithsonian article got my attention because in the effort to use enslaved people exclusively in reference to chattel labor in the Carolina low country, the author bent and twisted to accommodate two words where one, which works as both noun and adjective, would have done.

And that’s my second complaint: the phrase enslaved people is unnecessary. English already has a word that means “enslaved person.” That word is slave.

I have seen no mandate or overt push for the use of enslaved person or enslaved people but it is of a piece with other present-day circumlocutions—like “people experiencing homelessness”—meant to emphasize the humanity of certain groups, downplay stereotypes, and not let certain states or behaviors define them.

This is sentimentalism, especially in the case of slavery. Slave is an ugly, unpleasant word. That’s entirely appropriate because slavery was an ugly, unpleasant thing, and it totally defined the existence of slaves. Which raises another potential reason some might use enslaved person—the supposed dehumanizing effect of the word slave. I’d argue the opposite. Slaves are, by definition, human. You cannot enslave animals; that’s what makes treating a person like an animal horrible. That is and always has been the key to the horror of slavery both in reality and as a metaphor. Awkwardly working in people just so we’re clear we mean humans when we talk about slaves is unnecessary. And are we sure we want a gentler way of talking about slavery?

On top of those problems, the word enslaved is also inaccurate. As I’ve kicked this rant around in my head I’ve wanted to argue about connotations: that enslave, as a verb, suggests going from a state of freedom to a state of servitude; it implies a change of status. But arguing about connotations wouldn’t work because that is not implied by the verb enslave, that is what it means. Here’s Dr Johnson defining enslave:

To reduce to servitude; to deprive of liberty.

One of the worst aspects of American slavery specifically was its heredity—the children of slaves being slaves themselves, automatically. A person who was born into slavery has not been enslaved; he is a slave and always has been. A person who has been enslaved, definitionally, used to be free. This was not true of most American slaves, which makes their condition worse.

The fiction deepens when we refer to a slaveowner as an “enslaver” or talk about “the people he enslaved.” Again, with rare exceptions this is untrue. The Founder who was the subject of the interview above did not capture and force anyone into slavery—he inherited slaves who were already slaves.

I think that this is where some ideological ulterior motives begin to show. What enslaver implies is that a slaveowner—a word fastidiously avoided, as are all possessive pronouns (notice that the historian in that interview actually stopped herself when she was about to say “his slaves”)—carried out a continuous act of enslaving on people who should have been free, a Derrida-level word game meant to make the slaveowner sound worse and to muddy the waters.

How has this come about? Some of it, the majority of it, is probably just standard tone policing. This is how all right-thinking people recognize each other. But even for those upon whom the philosophical word games are lost, this is part of the postmodern tendency described by Sir Roger Scruton as attempting to use language “not to describe the world as it is, but to cast spells.” Academics would prefer slavery not exist—understandably!—and so the facts of the past must be rewritten, redefined in light of a metaphysic of equality. And so slaveowners didn’t actually own slaves, and slaves weren’t property. We have to jettison those realities—the things that, through all of history, made slavery an object of horror and slaves the object of compassion—and suggest instead that slavery enforced elaborate socially constructed fictions using the great modern boogeyman, Power.

I’ve written and rewritten this rant over and over in my head for years. That podcast interview finally gave me a useful point to build on. But I’ve gone on longer than I intended or wanted. Enslaved people is an unnecessary circumlocution, the language not of reality but of the faculty lounge. Avoid it. The truth is simpler, blunter, and more powerful.

The Magic of Silence

As I’ve previously noted, since reading Rembrandt is in the Wind late last year I’ve been making an effort to learn about some of my favorite artists more deliberately. Having grown up with an artist grandmother, surrounded by her art and that of the artists who inspired her, and learning from an early age to love and appreciate it, I discovered through that book how much I’ve taken for granted through simple complacency.

This book by Florian Illies, The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey through Time, came my way at exactly the right time. Recently translated from German, this is a study of the great German Romantic landscape artist.

A native of the Baltic port city of Greifswald, Friedrich was the son of a candlemaker and only slowly achieved success as a painter. He unsuccessfully sought the patronage of Goethe, who apparently found him annoying, but eventually sold paintings to the Prussian and Russian royal families. Quiet, deeply religious, and a staid creature of habit, he spent most of his life in Dresden, from which he traveled back and forth to his hometown on the Baltic coast and such islands as Rügen, and married late. By the time he died in 1840 he left behind a widow and three children as well as hundreds of sketches and canvases.

Friedrich was then, for over sixty years, almost totally forgotten.

Illies approaches Friedrich’s life and work thematically, through the four classical elements: fire, earth, water, and air. This proves a stimulating and surprising approach. “Fire,” quite movingly, opens with the loss of hundreds of German Romantic paintings in a gallery fire in Munich, and Illies provides numerous other examples of Friedrich works lost to fire, whether an accidental housefire at his family’s tallow rendering shop back home in Greifswald or in the RAF bombing of Dresden. “Water” examines this Baltic coast native’s use of the sea, especially at dusk—or is it morning?—and “Earth” the power of his landscapes, which pieced together landmarks from real places to create imaginary forests, ruins, and mountain ranges more real than their antecedents.

Certain themes recur: loss, faith, nature, the melancholy of Friedrich’s work, which features so many stark landscapes, cemeteries, and ruins, and his place in the nascent German nationalism of the time, for which he later, unwittingly, became the posterboy. The personal stories are especially moving, such as a childhood incident related in “Water”; one winter as a child, Friedrich fell through the ice on a frozen river. His brother jumped in to save him and, despite hauling Friedrich to safety, was himself drowned beneath the ice.

What can this have done to Friedrich the boy? How did it affect Friedrich the man? Illies speculates cautiously, but makes it always clear that there is much about the reticent, closed off Friedrich that we cannot know. But knowing about this incident affects us—read Illies’s account of Friedrich’s near-drowning and his brother’s death and then look at The Sea of Ice or a pensive later seascape like Stages of Life.

What also proves moving is the story, told piecemeal throughout the book, of how Friedrich’s work was rediscovered, which we can credit to the enthusiasm and hard work of a handful of art historians and collectors. Thanks to their efforts, within the first twenty years of the 20th century a forgotten artist had become a sought-after icon. The many stories of lost Friedrichs surfacing here and there—a gallery, a country house, the retirement home bedroom of an elderly noblewoman—many of them initially misidentified or simply anonymous, are an important part of the book’s appeal. Even recent history enriches the story, as in a years-long case involving stolen Friedrich canvases hidden in a stack of tires and a mafia lawyer’s legally dubious negotiations to return them.

While The Magic of Silence says much about Friedrich’s life, work, rediscovery, and legacy, it does not focus as much on composition or interpretation. Only a few major works like Friedrich’s early altarpiece Cross in the Mountains, which became surprisingly controversial on its exhibition, or The Monk by the Sea, which has been interpreted variously as a nihilistic image of a hopeless, godless world or the first great abstract painting, or the magnificent, justly famous Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog receive in-depth attention. Illies’s subject is Friedrich’s life and mind and the afterlife of his work, not the mechanics of how he executed them.

My only real complaints are that the thematic organization broke up Friedrich’s life story so totally and that only four of his paintings were included in the book. The former problem is not insurmountable, and reading the book quickly created a powerful cumulative effect that suggests the shape of Friedrich’s life without sticking to it chronologically.

The latter is a bigger problem. Illies names and describes many of Friedrich’s works—whether as he completed them or as they were rediscovered in the early 1900s—but most of them are not available to look at in the book itself. I ended up mentally noting a lot of titles and browsing Wikipedia’s impressive (if still incomplete) collection of articles on them later, as well as ordering this more thoroughly illustrated book. This does not detract from the value of Illies’s study, but it is a curious oversight in a book about art.

Those two quibbles aside, this was a strong place to start in my project to give more proper attention to art. The Magic of Silence is a deeply researched, engrossing, insightful, and beautiful read. I especially appreciated occasional insights into Friedrich’s theological view of his art as well as the picture of the artist’s personality that emerges over the course of the book. I’m glad to recommend it to anyone interested in Romanticism, German culture and history, or art generally.

Gabriel’s Moon

Gabriel Dax has two problems. The first is that, after a childhood incident in which his nightlight apparently burned down the family home, killing his mother, he cannot sleep. He drinks and medicates but these stopgap solutions bring their own problems. The second problem is that MI6 is after him. They want him to do a job. And then another.

Gabriel’s Moon, a new spy thriller from William Boyd, begins in 1960, as English travel writer Dax gets a scoop. He’s researching his next book and has stopped in the newly independent Congo, where he is approached by an old college friend with the offer of an exclusive interview with Patrice Lumumba, the controversial president. Gabriel accepts, has a pleasant chat with Lumumba, who insinuates that somebody—he names three men unknown to Dax—is out to kill him. Gabriel packs up his tape recorder and his notes, flies home, and thinks little of it.

Then, as Dax tries to get his interview into publishable form for a magazine, the magazine kills the project. Old news, his editor tells him. Lumumba has been overthrown and imprisoned. Dax should move on.

Not long after, Dax is approached by Faith Green. He recognizes her as a woman who had been reading one of his books on the flight back from Congo, and is flattered. Only gradually does he realize that she’s an intelligence agent. She’s trying to root out a “termite,” a Soviet agent in the service, and has something small for him to do. She has approached him because his older brother, a functionary in the Foreign Office, has used him as a private courier before, and this job will not be much different—fly to Spain, meet an aging modernist painter, purchase a sketch, return it to England.

Simple enough, but one job leads to another and Dax finds himself thrust deeper and deeper into espionage work. He makes new contacts—a veteran diplomat, the editor of a radical leftwing journal, an American who makes dark threats—suspects his house is being searched while he travels, and learns from Faith that Lumumba has been assassinated. This she lets slip long before the press makes it public. Who are these people? How do they know what they know? What are they using him for? And why does everyone want the tapes of his interview with Lumumba?

And on top of all this lie Dax’s personal struggles: his slumming relationship with a Cockney waitress, his psychoanalysis sessions, his personal investigation into the fire that claimed his mother, and his slowly dawning attraction to Faith, his handler.

This might sound like a whole lot of novel, all brooding interiority and intricate, cynical conniving, but the book comes in at just over 260 pages. As I mentioned several weeks ago, the review that brought this book to my attention compared it favorably to the best of John Buchan. That is certainly true in terms of pacing and structure. Gabriel’s Moon develops its many interwoven strands of story—Congo, MI6, Dax’s past, Dax’s personal life, Dax’s anxieties—with great subtlety and an effortlessly brisk pace. The story engages the reader from the opening pages and never lets up. It’s rich and complex but neither sluggish nor over-engineered. It’s masterfully done.

But the classic thriller author that Gabriel’s Moon reminded me of even more than Buchan was Eric Ambler. Both were masters of plotting and pacing, but where Buchan’s heroes were often principled adventurers who, if not seeking it out, embraced danger when a threat arose, Ambler’s were ordinary men of no great distinction who stumbled into danger. Already unwilling participants in whatever nefarious activities they uncover, they are often manipulated by more canny parties and bridle at being used, making foolish mistakes as a result. Gabriel Dax fits the Ambler mold perfectly.

The result, a Cold War novel with Buchanesque pacing and suspense and Ambleresque characters, evokes a feeling of paranoia better than any other spy thriller I’ve read. Alongside Dax, the reader feels Faith’s hooks sinking in deeper, dragging him further and faster into the world of espionage than he expected. Who is a friend? Who an enemy? Dax comes to suspect everything.

The only previous William Boyd novel I’ve read is Solo, a James Bond novel taking place in the late 1960s, after The Man With the Golden Gun. I don’t remember caring for it but I’m going to take another look at it soon, and I plan to check out Boyd’s other spy novels. In an interview about Gabriel’s Moon Boyd said that he intends to write two more Gabriel Dax books, rounding this story out into a trilogy. I look forward to those, and in the meantime can recommend Gabriel’s Moon highly to anyone who likes both a fast-paced globetrotting spy yarn and good character drama.

The illusion of insight

A quick follow up from last week’s post about the overemphasis on “themes” as part of English education.

People may rebel against their middle- and high-school English classes out of frustration with things like themes and symbols, but the same oversimplifying impulses are alive and well in pop culture. Where the wannabe intellectual discussing his favorite books online might still talk about themes, the more populist, mystical type will gravitate toward “archetypes” and, the thing that has introduced legions of precocious readers to this kind of talk, the Hero’s Journey.

I don’t know enough about Jung qua Jung to judge the validity of his ideas as an approach to psychology, but I abhor the Jungian “archetypal” approach to literature, and for the same reasons I abhor overemphasizing themes.

An example, and one of the things that alerted me to and turned me against archetypal readings:

Years ago I read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, a book on “the masculine archetypes” recommended in a blog series at The Art of Manliness. The authors, Jungian analysts, use the four titular archetypes to develop a taxonomy of the male personality and to examine the ways deficiencies and excesses—to put it in Aristotelian terms—warp it. Where the “mature masculine” balances all four, too little or too much of any of the archetypes result in various forms of bad character. The king, if insufficiently strong, becomes a weak puppet; if too strong, a tyrant. The warrior must use the wisdom of the magician to balance his propensity for violence, lest he become either a cruel sadist or a passive masochist. And so on.

All well and good. What has always been most interesting and appealing to me about Jungian archetypes is their usefulness in taxonomy—in sorting and categorizing. (There’s the Aristotelian in me again.) But the authors of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, in their effort to support their thesis, plunder history and world mythology for examples and badly misuse the ones that aren’t flatly wrong or made up.

Thus, in discussing the “generative,” fertility-related traits of the lover archetype, they give us Abraham and… Zeus. The father of two nations and the ravisher of mortal women and, in at least some traditions, little boys. Sure, both fathered children, but focusing on that similarity and ignoring the differences between these two “generative” archetypes is morally incoherent.

Which brings me to Jungian archetypes in literature and to the Hero’s Journey specifically. (Somewhere inside me I have a 5,000-word essay called “Against the Hero’s Journey,” but until I find the time and patience to write that, a post like this one will have to suffice.) There are plenty of problems with the Hero’s Journey—not least its artificiality, oversimplification or misinterpretation of other myths, and its rarity in the wild—but my primary objection to it is the temptation to treat an observation about structure as some kind of insight into content. Time and time again, I’ve seen stories dissected as examples of the Hero’s Journey and its characters labeled with various archetypes as if this says anything at all about them beyond pointing out the shape of their plots.

I can provide a very direct example. A few years ago I was surprised to see a new review on Goodreads for my first novel, No Snakes in Iceland. The review was fairly positive but what stunned me about it was seeing the author label No Snakes in Iceland an example of the Hero’s Journey. Is that actually true? I wondered. I had a good, long think about it and had to conclude that, yes, it mostly fits the shape proposed by Campbell.

But does that actually say anything about the story? No.

Borrowing from John Gardner and others, I’ve emphasized over and over and over particularity—the preeminence of concrete specifics—as a creative principle. It seems to me to be a good interpretive principle as well. So, to look at just one element of the Hero’s Journey with that in mind, the hero himself, what is this comparison ignoring that matters to the story?

The hero of No Snakes in Iceland is Edgar, a middle-aged Anglo-Saxon nobleman and close associate of King Æthelred, who has served the king for years as gofer and chronicler. Edgar is educated, intelligent, dutiful, and brave, if self-effacing and preferring to work behind the scenes. He is also bitter in the extreme at the loss of his only child to an accident and the loss of his wife in a Viking raid a few years before. He is in Iceland by the order of an archbishop as an act of penance and longs for home. Edgar’s story then—if you’re looking for a theme or character arc—is one of repentance.

Compare him to the specifics of a few other purportedly Campbellian heroes:

• Luke Skywalker—a young single man in an out-of-the-way place with no prospects and apparently undistinguished background. He is brave but petulant and ignorant of the world and mostly wants to get away from the family farm and make something of himself.

• Harry Potter—a child of exalted background who has been orphaned, deprived of his inheritance, and kept in total ignorance of who he is. Longsuffering and not ambitious, he is rescued from his predicament rather than escaping from it and placed in a situation where his natural goodwill can develop.

• Bilbo Baggins—a comfortably situated middle-aged bachelor who enjoys a quiet, undistinguished rural life in his ancestral home. Unambitious to a fault and utterly unaccustomed to danger and hardship.

• Neo—a twenty-something cubicle drone by day and computer hacker by night, who lives in total isolation and with no apparent drive and no prospects of improvement. He is ignorant and apathetic and important mostly by dint of being “chosen.”

• Hamlet/Simba—an actual prince who is deprived of his inheritance by his uncle and actively and knowingly avoids his calling until confronted by his father’s spirit.

Are there points of similarity? Yes! But focusing on these obscures more than it reveals. The dissimilarities matter immensely, not only in terms of the specifics of each story but for message, moral import, and, yes, theme. Does it actually mean something that these heroes’ stories play out in a similar structure? No, I don’t think so. Does it mean something that Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter are young and undistinguished while Bilbo and Edgar are older, successful, and well-connected? Yes. So why don’t we focus on that instead? Similarities might draw your attention but you’ll get more understanding from looking at dissimilarity.

As I hope I’ve suggested above, there’s a place for archetype talk in the discussion and study of good stories, but more often than not, without a counterbalancing focus on the particulars of a given story, it offers only the illusion of insight.