On bookmarks

Someone on Substack recently posted an open question about bookmarks—why and how do we use them? When? What do we use for bookmarks? It was a neat bit of engagement farming that I avoided replying to, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about bookmarks and wanted to jot a few notes about mine for this commonplace book.

The history: I used to pride myself on not needing bookmarks. I could pick up a book I was reading and find my place right away, down to the word in the paragraph where I’d left off. (A mostly idle boast: I pathologically avoid stopping mid-anything, preferring not to stop until I’ve at least finished a paragraph—preferably a chapter.) I maintained this attitude through high school and into college, but at some point during undergrad I started marking my place more often. I suspect this was out of convenience and because of the number of books I was reading at any given time, not to mention the number of books I’d be using to research a paper.

Since then I’ve habitually used bookmarks. Found them indispensable, really.

The what: It started with receipts from Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, the campus bookstore—wherever I’d bought a book. I still enjoy running across these, as they record a long-ago selection I’ve forgotten. Sometimes I would use an unrelated receipt, something within grabbing distance. I’ve found the receipts for DVDs purchased at Walmart twenty years ago inside old books. Sometimes I’d buy an actual bookmark, usually something Lord of the Rings-related with a tassel and some kind of gewgaw like a fake One Ring dangling from it. I never got used to these, as the tassel tended to get in the way, and ended up throwing most of the tassels away. The Rings passed out of all knowledge.

I still occasionally use a receipt, but I now have a large stock of purpose-made bookmarks. An literal drawer-full of them.

Some are gifts or souvenirs. I have a prized one from the Mark Twain House in Connecticut, which Sarah and I visited when we were dating, so the bookmark itself signifies more than it might seem. Another is from Librairie Galignani on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris, the oldest English-language bookshop on the Continent. I keep this one inside the Penguin Classics edition of A Tale of Two Cities I bought there.

A few are from old magazines, some I didn’t even subscribe to but which rightly thought a free bookmark would be a good promo. I have a few novelty bookmarks, too, like an all-metal gilt-edged Robert E Lee with a crimson tassel. I don’t think I’ve ever put it in a book.

My favorite right now was a Father’s Day gift from my wife this year: a cartoon T-rex skeleton on rugged transparent plastic. Cheers me up just to look at it.

But a lot—a big, colorful majority in my nightstand drawer—are from bookstores. Mr K’s Used Books has free bookmarks by the register, and I usually grab one when I check out. A few have lasted for years, stained, faded, and soft and fibrous at the edges.

I also have a promo bookmark or two for my own books from Local Author Expos past, a Lost-themed promo for a friend’s senior art show twenty years ago, a laminated birth announcement for my eldest son that ran in my hometown newspaper and, from the same paper, a laminated obituary for my grandmother. I almost never use those two.

Two significant categories are bookmarks drawn and colored by my kids and bookmarks from defunct bookstores: Bentley’s Bookshop in Greenville, The Book Mark in St Simons, and Prater’s Main Steet Books in my hometown. I prize these because they are personal in some way. The shuttered stores, even the ones I didn’t spend that much time in, like Bank Square Books in Mystic, Connecticut, which I visited twice years and years ago, are parts of the past that I can’t go back to.

The bookmarks from my kids mean even more, naturally. My daughter made bookmarks for everyone she knew a few years ago. Those she gave me are both adorable (one shows a caterpillar reading one of the Squirrel Diaries books my daughter wrote and illustrated with the legend “Be a bookworm!” while another shows a peaceful bike ride through the woods with “Take a good book with you everywhere!”) and creations of love. She still writes and draws, but not quite the same way or with the same pure passion to share. Her story isn’t over, but neither of us can fully return to that past.

The result: Picking up a book and either grabbing a bookmark from my stash or opening the book to see the one I left inside stirs all kinds of memories, often briefly, but just as often with great emotion.

Also: I’m getting older, and I appreciate the help.

A Defence of Slang

John Gardner begins his posthumously published On Becoming a Novelist with a consideration of the things that constitute “the writer’s nature.” The first item on his list is “verbal sensitivity.” This is not, Gardner points out, the same thing as grammatical accuracy: “Good grades in English may or may not go with verbal sensitivity, that is, with the writer’s gift for, and interest in, understanding how language works.” On either side of the verbally sensitive lie the dangers of the “tin ear” and the prescriptivist “stickler,” whom it is easy to imagine as a schoolteacher with a ready red pen:

given this distaste for linguistic change, or perhaps distaste for certain classes of humanity, the sophisticated stickler may dismiss without thought an ingenious and sensitive use of the suspect word or phrase. The true artist's verbal sensitivity may well be different, in other words, from that of the usual “writer of good English.” Black street kids playing “The Dozens”—piling up ingenious metaphorical insults of one another’s mothers, not all of the metaphors grammatical or unmixed—may in fact be showing more verbal sensitivity than the speechwriters who helped create the image of John Kennedy.

A point that has stuck with me since first reading this twenty years ago. And eighty years before Gardner, Chesterton made much the same argument in “A Defence of Slang.”

Consideration of class is only an aside in Gardner, but Chesterton’s starting point. The upper classes of his day, he asserts, have abandoned their duty to be vivacious and interesting. By comparison with their medieval forbears, who “could not write three legible letters, but . . . could sometimes speak literature,” their talk is lifeless and limited: “it is like the formless cries of animals, dimly indicating certain broad, well-understood states of mind. ‘Bored,’ ‘cut up,’ ‘jolly,’ ‘rotten,’ and so on, are like the words of some tribe of savages whose vocabulary has only twenty of them.”

The duty and privilege of bold and poetic language has, according to Chesterton, passed to the lower class. Where the wealthy might speak in “a mere string of set phrases,” the working man, “being filled with the Muse,” might “burst out into a solid literary effort”:

“You’re a gen’leman, aren’t yer… yer boots is a lot brighter than yer ‘ed... there’s precious little of yer, and that’s clothes... that’s right, put yer cigar in yer mouth ‘cos I can’t see yer be’ind it... . . .” and so on. It is evident that this mode of speech is not only literary, but literary in a very ornate and almost artificial sense. Keats never put into a sonnet so many remote metaphors as a coster puts into a curse.

One thinks of the elaborate facility with swearing of the military man. Watch the boot camp scenes from Full Metal Jacket again sometime and keep track of the rhetorical devices Gunnery Sergeant Hartman uses: irony, simile, synecdoche, anaphora, parallelism, and especially hyperbole, all with vivid, concrete images that both register immediately and are remembered. The endless invention of slang—often effortless and energetic, and the more energetic the more effortless—is art. To return to Gardner’s example, it’s not hard to imagine Chesterton enjoying the verbal play of “The Dozens,” especially the classic: “Your mama’s so fat, when she sits around the house she really sits around the house.”

Chesterton’s one serious point in “A Defence of Slang”—that the aristocracy lost its color when it ceased being a warrior class, and the lower classes now have have become colorful because they “live in a state of war”—is something of a truism. Affluence and artificiality sap the vitality of a society. Its manners, enjoyments, and its language degrade, and as I argued when writing about Heretics over the weekend, Chesterton loved the organic, the intuitive rather than the purely rational, and the lively. While highbrow poetry would enter a permanent state of recursive self-awareness not long after Chesterton wrote, the poetic instinct survived elsewhere: “The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.”

Not that all slang is wholesome—far from it. And perhaps the starkest difference between Chesterton’s world and our own is the degraded, unimaginative quality of slang at all levels of society. Even the operatic constructions of Gunny Hartman have given way to pervasive use of monosyllables.

But “[a]ll slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry,” and, like penny dreadfuls, the crude slang of the lower classes of Chesterton’s day and—where it survives—in the present meets a human need:

It is unfortunate that the poetry which is developed by this process should be purely a grotesque poetry. But as the higher orders of society have entirely abdicated their right to speak with a heroic eloquence, it is no wonder that the language should develop by itself in the direction of a rowdy eloquence. The essential point is that somebody must be at work adding new symbols and new circumlocutions to a language.

As Chesterton famously wrote elsewhere, “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” You could even take that line as the belated thesis statement of The Defendant.

This particular essay is mostly Chesterton having fun, praising the lower classes for their “light, living, and flexible slang” and calling on our betters—either by birth or by presumption—to get over themselves and be more interesting, but his perceptiveness and insight also reflect well on himself as the appreciator of just such slang. As Gardner would write eighty years later, “though some great writers may at times write awkwardly, it is nevertheless the case that one sign of the born writer is his gift for finding or (sometimes) inventing authentically interesting language.”

Not a bad description of Chesterton, and this essay is good evidence for it.

Heretics

Critics and even some fans of Chesterton have tried to fault him with many defects in the ninety years since he died, but I’ve never seen anyone call him a coward. The early nonfiction work with which this abbreviated Chestertober continues today, Heretics, published when he was only thirty-one, offers an excellent sample of his willingness to disagree, to argue, and to name names.

Heretics is a bold title. The Edwardian world, Chesterton thought, was beset with harmful doctrines embraced by the powerful and influential. These are not merely differences of opinion but heresies, partial apprehensions of the truth that prove more damaging than indifference to it. Chesterton attacks many of these by focusing on the work and views of their most prominent spokesmen or on their manifestations in popular culture like painting and novels.

There are twenty essays, and they range widely. Among the heretics are names that remain famous like Rudyard Kipling, HG Wells, James McNeill Whistler, and George Bernard Shaw, and many more that have been forgotten to most of us: George Moore, Joseph McCabe, Olive Schreiner, Lowes Dickinson. Among their heresies: a deracinating globalism, a Nietzschean worship of power and will, journalism that substitutes cheap sensationalism for the real sensationalism of telling the truth, praising the metaphorical “youth” of “young nations” that already show signs of decay, the prideful assumptions of anthropology, novelists toadying to the rich, novelists presuming to represent the poor, scientific reductivism, pragmatism, militarism, nationalism, neopaganism, atheism, lack of a sense of humor, pride.

Heretics is much too complex and diffuse to summarize easily. A chapter-by-chapter breakdown, especially if including asides and subordinate arguments, would run to thousands of words. But what all of Chesterton’s critiques have in common regardless of target is an objection to the simplifying tendency of ideologies. Each view, whether the scientism of Wells or the art-for-art’s-sake amorality of Whistler, offers to make sense of the world according to some easy-to-use heuristic, and each fails either because it is founded on a misapprehension of the truth that warps one’s entire perception, or because it forces fragments of the truth to stand in for the whole.

And so those trying, in Chesterton’s day, to revive a pagan ethic do so out of a belief that ancient pagans were unencumbered with the guilt imposed by Christianity and “were continually crowning themselves with flowers and dancing about in an irresponsible state.” Actual paganism was diffuse, devoted to inscrutable gods, and sad, the pagans ironically being “praised as disobedient when they had only one great virtue—civic obedience” and “envied and admired as shamelessly happy when they had only one great sin—despair.” Remove religion and ethics from the question and focus on genetics and race, and one has the jingoist ethno-nationalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “that silly Teutonism which knows as little about England as it does about anthropology, but which is always talking about Vikings.”

Sometimes the heresies seem to be opposites—a point Chesterton does not draw attention to, but which would go on to be an important part of his argument in the sequel to Heretics, Orthodoxy. In two interesting chapters on the fiction of his day, Chesterton criticizes novelists who flatter the pretentions of millionaires and aristocrats by making them sharp, witty, and urbane and their seeming opposites, novelists who explore the plight of the lower classes and depict them as degraded, helpless, even monstrous. Chesterton will abide neither obsequiousness to the rich nor condescension to the poor, neither of which is democratic in the sense of men conceiving of themselves as equals or brothers. Even “hereditary despotism” is to be preferred to managerialism under such types, “because with that you have the ordinary man misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect for him at all.”

In addition to being untrue, these heresies also—as the above examples demonstrate—tend to make their adherents pretentious. This comes across clearly in perhaps the most entertaining and purely Chestertonian essay, “On Mr McCabe and the Divine Frivolity.” Former Catholic priest turned freethinking gadabout Joseph McCabe had, in an aside in one book, reproached Chesterton for writing about serious subjects lightheartedly. Chesterton’s opening salvo is still laugh-out-loud funny:

It is quite useless to talk about profane jesting. All jesting is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so very solemn after all. . . . It is not I; it is not even a particular class of journalists or jesters who make jokes about the matters which are of most awful import; it is the whole human race. If there is one thing more than another which any one will admit who has the smallest knowledge of the world, it is that men are always speaking gravely and earnestly and with the utmost possible care about the things that are not important, but always talking frivolously about the things that are. Men talk for hours with the faces of a college of cardinals about things like golf, or tobacco, or waistcoats, or party politics.

Tellingly, it is humorlessness and pride that provoke Chesterton’s sharpest jabs. He respects all the other heretics in this book—and names them because he respects them as sincere men—but the puffed up, he implies, lack the honesty and humility to argue with him, or be saved.

First published in the summer of 1905, Heretics was assembled from some of Chesterton’s columns for the London Daily News. They vary greatly in length and detail and the subject changes sometimes dramatically from chapter to chapter. What keeps them from becoming a hodgepodge, a mere collection of essays, is Chesterton’s inimitable cheery tone, consistent conceptual overlap and recurring themes between chapters, and his already coherent worldview.

Chesterton’s highest formal schooling before becoming a journalist was the Slade School of Art, which is worth remembering because his sensibilities are above all artistic. He knew the marriage of hard work and pure enjoyment that sets the artist apart from the dabbler (“[t]he artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs”) and hates the squandering of natural talent on self-serious intellectual projects—as when he praises the “violent vision” of Wells’s early science fiction novels before tracing his descent into drab works of “scientific” history and social theory—and the blinkered imagination of the ideologue. Where Chesterton critiques the abstractly rational, the scientific, and the calculated, he favors the humble and common sense and argues for the organic, traditional, and intuitive, all of which are neighbors to the mystical.

Again, these points prefigure key elements of Orthodoxy.

The joy of his personality is key in a book like this, which in other hands would be twenty chapters of invective. Chesterton is charitable toward his “heretics” throughout, even to the humorless, and does not attribute base motives to them or suggest they are part of a conspiracy to bring down Western Civilization. A true happy warrior, he weighs them case-by-case, praises them where they deserve it and criticizes in a spirit of friendly correction. Their errors have helped him see the truth, and he wants to share.

Heretics is a lively critique and a perceptive survey of informed, fashionable opinion in Chesterton’s time. Though not straightforwardly an apologetic work, its arguments against the heretics and their heresies suggest the outline of an alternative, which he names in the introductory and concluding chapters: orthodoxy.

Heretics was well-received in its time even if, 120 years later, we agree with Chesterton biographer Ian Ker that it is a “major, if not great work.” What keeps it from being among the shortlist of Chesterton’s greatest hits and what poses the book’s biggest obstacle for the latter-day reader is precisely his strength as a journalist and a critic of his peers—his topicality. Kipling, Shaw, and Wells may still be familiar names to modern readers, but their social and philosophical ideas are likely to be less well-known. Lesser lights like McCabe or Moore or Dickinson, the politicians Chesterton namedrops (of whom probably only Arthur Balfour may now ring a bell, and likely not for good reasons), or those, like Whistler, known purely for images, are mostly forgotten.

I last read Heretics during grad school at Clemson sixteen or seventeen years ago. Many of the names were unfamiliar then but I got the gist. Rereading it now I know much more about Chesterton’s world, but there were still many names that sent me to Google for more detail. To get the most out of Heretics, one needs an annotated edition—with the disruption to the flow of Chesterton’s argument that that potentially entails—or preexisting knowledge of the period.

And yet—no matter what, Chesterton’s wit and fundamental arguments shine through. A modern reader may not know or remember much about Teutonism or Celticism now, but they’ll recognize the simplifying impulse of racial or class or gender essentialism of all kinds and all political stripes. A modern reader may not recognize the trend of novels about witty aristocrats, but they’ll know movies and books that flatter a certain kind of knowing irony or cynical, unsmiling flippancy, especially among our present elites—office drones, politicians, techbros. Try to read the following without thinking of Aaron Sorkin’s characters:

This new frivolity is inadequate because there is in it no strong sense of an unuttered joy. The men and women who exchange the repartees may not only be hating each other, but hating even themselves. Any one of them might be bankrupt that day, or sentenced to be shot the next. They are joking, not because they are merry, but because they are not; out of the emptiness of the heart the mouth speaketh.

The heretics have changed but the heresies haven’t. As Michael Ffinch argues in his biography of Chesterton, the book is “at its best . . . not so much when he was attacking the ideas of men like Shaw,” whom readers may or may not know much about, “but more when he was attacking some of the fads of the time, and in as much as some of these have remained fads until our time, Chesterton’s comments are still relevant.”

Heretics seems an unlikely book to remain relevant, but it’s true. It is also, like all of Chesterton’s books, immensely quotable. I’ve tried to avoid quoting the most famous passages here, but one in particular suggests itself for the end of this review:

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and, eclipse. . . . For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

A paradox worth remembering both in Chesterton’s age of heretics and ours.

The uses of pedantry

Here’s a bizarre video from a literature YouTuber whose work I usually like. The thesis (as near as I can tell): through some murky combination of commercialism and progressivist malice, what we’ve been sold as “classics” is undermining both the real classics—the foundational literature of the Greeks and Romans—and Western Civilization. The title is literally conspiratorial: “‘The Classics’ Are a Plot to Destroy Western Culture.”

There are a lot of problems with the video, not least its confused potted history of classics publishers; its ad hominem attacks (generally on people who deserve it, like André Gide, but still irrelevant to the subject); a few unexplained asides that aroused some uncomfortable suspicions (why go out of your way to point out that the oldest current member of the Académie Française is related to the Rothschild family?); its presentist and whiggish assumptions about what the ancients thought their literature was for; its apparent lack of understanding of translation work; its strange attack on Penguin Classics for starting its eighty-year run with the Odyssey; its even stranger and contradictory arguments (at the midpoint) that classics publishers have erred in making ancient literature accessible and (at the end) that what they should have been doing is making literature accessible; and its pervasive attitude of suspicion bordering on paranoia.

But the biggest problem, which bothered me through the entire first half of the video, is its insistence on an extremely narrow meaning of the word “classics.” The clearest definition provided in the video is still vague in application: “the body of work that serves as a foundation of Western civilization, the archive of a people, the blood of a culture.” Functionally, judging by the examples used throughout, this means only Greek and Roman literature.

Certainly anything new is pointedly declared “not a classic.” 19th-century novels? Austen and the Brontës? Not classics. 20th-century novels? Get real. Even CS Lewis’s essay “On the Reading of Old Books” is singled out for talking merely of “old books” instead of sticking to our YouTuber’s preferred understanding of classics.

I’d recommend caution when preparing to cross swords with CS Lewis over any literary topic. You’re unlikely to win.

I spent the first half of the video thinking this was a needlessly pedantic argument, insisting on a needlessly pedantic definition of classics and going on at needlessly pedantic length. But then I realized that the problem—well, the main problem—with the video and its argument is not that it’s pedantic, but that it isn’t pedantic enough.

To be pedantic, then: classics and the classics are two separate things. A classic according to any dictionary is a preeminent, respected, and therefore influential example of its kind, whatever it is: a classic sci-fi novel, a classic Scots ballad, a classic ghost story. This is clearly what publishers like Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics have in mind, which is why they distinguish themselves as Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics. The classics—with a definite article and perhaps even a capital C—or classical literature is Greek and Roman literature, literature in the classical languages, Greek and Latin. That’s everything from Homer and Hesiod to Bede and the Byzantines.

Our YouTuber could have avoided a lot of annoyance and effort simply by observing this obvious distinction. Not every classic is one of the classics.

Being pedantic can have its uses, but drink deep, or taste not. A classic insight.

A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls

It’s been a busy fall, and despite my best hopes for a revived Chestertober the month is already two-thirds over. I nevertheless hope to put out at least a few posts on some of Chesterton’s non-fiction, including a few of his earliest essays and one of his most famous books. Here’s the down payment.

* * * * *

Recently on Substack a post from someone who has made a career out of lamenting the state of modern literature accused the culture of a “seriousness crisis.” We are not all reading Dostoevsky in our leisure time, you see. It seems sublimely appropriate, then, that the first essay in GK Chesterton’s first published volume of essays is so writerly, so populist in attitude, and—in keeping with Chesterton’s well-earned reputation as a prophet—still so relevant.

When Chesterton wrote “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” he was responding to much the same criticism. The penny dreadful, cheap exciting fiction for the masses, but especially young men and boys, was a wildly popular medium in the late Victorian period and prefigured the rise of pulp fiction. Critics scoffed at the novels’ vulgarity and sentimentality, decried their simplistic artistry and bad writing, and warned that their romanticized, action-packed stories of bandits, swordsmen, knights, cowboys, and other adventurers promoted violence and immorality.

Chesterton defends the penny dreadful with an appropriate tu quoque. “Bad story writing is not a crime,” he argues, pointing out that Hall Caine, a well-regarded novelist whose books trafficked in socially conscious moralizing, “walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax.” More damningly, he argues that fears of penny dreadfuls leading to crime—an accusation familiar to us in arguments about video games—are overwrought and misplaced. The heroes of both highly praised modern novels and the classics do the same things, and more:

Among these stories there are a certain number which deal sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates, which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely the same thing as Scott’s Ivanhoe, Scott’s Rob Roy, Scott’s Lady of the Lake, Byron’s Corsair, Wordsworth’s ‘Rob Roy’s Grave,’ Stevenson’s Macaire, Mr. Max Pemberton’s Iron Pirate, and a thousand more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents. Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in Ivanhoe will lead a boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; no one thinks that the incautious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will set him up for life as a blackmailer.

A lot of this worry, as belied by the frequent accusation that penny dreadfuls are “vulgar,” is simple class bias. A businessman, lawyer, or aristocrat thrilling to Sir Walter Scott in his drawing room is acceptable but a delivery boy enjoying a cowboy novel during his lunch break is cause for concern.

It is easy to point out this kind of hypocrisy but Chesterton does not stop at rubbishing the critics’ arguments. Although frankly admitting their lack of artistry—they embrace hero and villain cliches, stock situations, and adventure tropes—Chesterton asserts that they meet human needs. Two, in fact.

First, the stories in penny dreadfuls, despite centering on bandits and pirates and other dodgy sorts, presented characters adhering to and living according to codes of honor, acting as though life were precious and worth living, and believing in right and wrong. Their thieves were more careful about morality than the protagonists—definitely not heroes—of tasteful realistic fiction:

It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables. . . . And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German Professors) whether morality is valid at all.

For all their airs of seriousness, it is the highbrows who are the moral threat and the lowbrows who are embracing and reinforcing morality, in however backward a fashion. As Chesterton would put it a few years later in Orthodoxy, “The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal.” This moral aspect is what keeps Chesterton’s defense of popular fiction from devolving into the tired “At least they’re reading!” argument. We’ll return to that.

Second, and more deeply rooted in human nature: regardless of the artistry or content of the penny dreadfuls, that they excite and stir the reader at all is worthwhile. “[P]eople must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories,” he writes. “The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important.” Decry the cheap novel’s poor writing and simplistic plot and characters all you want, but “it is not vulgar intrinsically—it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.”

“A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls” is one of my favorite Chesterton essays, not least for the reminder in that last line quoted above—which actually comes from the first paragraph of the essay. (Chesterton, patron saint of topsy-turvydom, was turning everything on its head right from the beginning.) Seriousness is not the only reason to read fiction, or even the strongest one. Chesterton offers an excellent answer to the kind of po-faced critic I began this post with, the kind of person who thinks their tastes are serious and that everyone else is goofing off, but it is also worth considering what has changed since Chesterton’s day.

Of the two crucial points in the essay, the second is best and remains truest. We are storytelling creatures, understanding and remembering our lives as stories. We need stories to make sense of the world, and meeting this need is more vital to the mind and soul than good taste. After all, taste changes with the age. (Who among us doesn’t encounter the name Hall Caine and have to look him up?) Chesterton suggests that the imagination is fundamental, not an artifact, and we must attend to it—especially now, when our imaginations are continuously threatened with dullness by screens, passive entertainment, and machines that aim to take over what little bit of our thinking is left to us.

It’s Chesterton’s first point that requires emendation. Whatever fumes of morality the boys of Chesterton’s examples picked up from the “vulgar” examples of Dick Deadshot or Robin Hood is long gone from popular fiction. The excitement of the bestselling fiction today is not provided through action, danger, and suspense but through pornographic titillation—blunt, artless, explicit, and geared toward self-absorption and self-indulgence if not self-abuse—and in increasingly extreme forms. Vulgarity ain’t what it used to be.

While the culture pays lip service to the imagination and the appetite for stories is alive and being fed, we cannot trust even vulgar literature to excite it in helpful ways anymore. As CS Lewis, a noted Chesterton fan, would write later, “spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

The threat of technologies that compete for control of the imagination—addicting it and then dulling it—means the task of storytelling is as important as ever, with the added pressure that the culture has turned against the morality even cheap fiction used to instill. The burden writers today must shoulder is not to feed the storytelling instinct but to shape it well, and to worry less about seriousness or elite taste and more about setting imaginations aflame.

Not quite a confession

Item: At First Things, George Weigel writes about a certain right-wing* podcaster and her thriving traffic in anti-Semitic conspiracism.

Item: At WSJ Free Expression on Substack, Jack Butler writes about the small but vocal and perverting presence in the Republican Party of the Groypers, who also traffic in anti-Semitism.

My first year teaching, a brand-new adjunct and newly married, I volunteered to emcee the Holocaust Remembrance Day event organized by the Humanities department at the college where I was working. I introduced a panel of History instructors who did a good job providing broad coverage of everything from the Einsatzgruppen (the “Holocaust by bullets”), the Wannsee Conference, and the extermination camps, and a few instructors from other fields covering things like the debt Hitler owed to Nietzsche.

The event was well-attended and informative and—with the exception of the Nietzsche talk, which was confusing even to me and during which I heard a lot of shifting in seats—engrossing and moving. Afterward, I stood talking with two of the senior History instructors. I felt proud to have contributed even a little bit to the event’s success, and was glad to see a lot of my students present for it.

But as we stood talking, a middle-aged man approached us. I don’t remember an introduction or a greeting, though I doubt he would have been rude to us, but I clearly remember his agitated gestures and the way he fought to control the tone of his voice.

“I just have to say, this was very good,” he said, “but you’re treating this all as if it’s ancient history, as if it’s over. I still get hate mail, anonymous letters saying ‘Die, Jew!’”

He talked quite a bit more, but that’s all I remember. One of the other instructors simply nodded along and thanked him for his feedback. I recall the man walking away but, thirteen years later, nothing else from the rest of that night.

I remember it because it was awkward, but also because I struggled with what he said. I was sorry he had had such experiences, and I didn’t doubt that there were still benighted people out there who would give him a hard time because he was Jewish, but I felt our historical presentation had to be just that—historical—and couldn’t address an outlier like one Jewish man living in 2013 frustrated by a handful of racists.

That’s how I thought of it for a long time: an outlier, something that should be avoided. Should be, which implies that it could be.

I’m sure that man would have disagreed. I’ve come to see that I was wrong and he was right.

I learned about the Holocaust at a young age—I recall hearing stories about it from my Mom in second or third grade—and anti-Semitism has never been part of my life. That prejudice simply didn’t exist in my family or church. It was wrong, simpliciter. Anti-Semitism was something Hitler and the Klan did, but Hitler was long dead and the Klan was irrelevant, the one suspected Klansman in our area being a feeble old man more pitied or mocked than feared.

As I got older and developed an interest in conspiracism, I ran into anti-Semitism everywhere. At first it piqued my interest in historiography, Holocaust denial being a historiographic non-starter but an instructive example of bad research and argument. Then I started to realize the Satanic role anti-Semitism played. A conspiracist could be an amusing nutter no matter how many theories they swallowed, but introduce even a hint of anti-Semitism—maybe a little “international bankers” here, a little “Zionist plot” there—and things turned darker and much more obsessive quickly.** The Truther friend urging you to “follow the money trail” during an uncomfortable lunch could be something much more wicked the next time you saw him.

And yet these were still fringe beliefs as far as I was concerned. Weirdos on the internet ranted about them, and half the time it seemed like a joke. But after the last few years, and especially since the perverse response to October 7—which has proven genuinely bipartisan—I have no such illusions. I regret ever thinking even a little bit badly of that man at the Remembrance Day event.

In a short reflection this summer I quoted Walker Percy with regard to the sinking feeling I get when I discover that yet another person I know, have merely met, have interacted with online, or simply observed, is infected with this kind of thing. If it is true—and I strongly suspect it is—that, as Weigel says, anti-Semitism is “always a sure sign of cultural decay,” the frequency with which I am disappointed is more disheartening to me than any electoral outcome or culture war battle or fearmongering headline.

* I try to avoid right-left labels, but I won’t say “conservative” in this case.

** When I did a podcast on Jack Chick with Danny Anderson years ago, the one kudos we could agree to give Chick—the anti-Catholic, anti-Mason, Satanic Panic paranoiac par excellence—was that despite everything he never went down the anti-Semitic rabbit hole.

Notes on Goldfinger

Jill Masterton (Shirley Eaton) Falls foul of Auric Goldfinger in Goldfinger (1964)

While last week’s Book Club episode covering Goldfinger did a good job covering Fleming’s life and career and this particular entry in the Bond series, Sandbrook and Tabby did unfortunately cave to the temptation to jeer a bit too often for my taste. It’s not as bad as the discussion I once heard on another podcast, in which a couple of vegetarian Mormon hipsters snickered at and completely misunderstood it for a half-hour, but it did make me want to jot down a few items if only for my own sake.

Goldfinger is not my favorite of the Bond series but it has one of its best villains and served as the basis—with some actual improvements by the screenwriter—of one of the best Connery films. So, a few notes and observations:

• Goldfinger isn’t the best place to dive into Fleming’s novels. I enjoy it, but as I noted on Goodreads my last time through the book, it’s the first novel of the series to feel like one of the Bond movies: a little more outlandish, a little more exotic, a little more extreme in its sentiments. The original reader approaching Goldfinger did so through six previous novels, all of which—per Buchan, whom Dominic rightly credits as an influence—“defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible” but were still more grounded adventures. Fleming intended the books to work as standalones but I think Goldfinger is best served by approaching it in publication order, or at least after first reading Casino Royale and From Russia, with Love to see the baseline from which Fleming was beginning to depart.

• Dominic and Tabby make a lot of the “Bond formula” but as I’ve mentioned many times here and elsewhere, the formula is a convention of the movies. Fleming liked to experiment with form and no two Bond novels are structured exactly the same. Read Goldfinger alongside the book immediately preceding it, Dr No, and the book immediately following it, Thunderball, and you’ll see this clearly. The contrast with some of the great volumes in the series, like Casino Royale, From Russia, with Love, or On Her Majesty’s Secret Service or the handful of Bond short stories is especially strong.

• A lot of Dominic and Tabby’s scoffing has to do with Bond’s attitudes about… everything. I’ll simply point out two mistakes here: First, it is a great mistake to take the things Bond says when angry or frustrated as his normal perspective. Like most people, Bond says things he either doesn’t mean or regrets later. He lashes out. (The best example has to be the closing line of Casino Royale. That’s not misogyny or whatever, it’s pain.) Second, it is an even greater mistake to assume that Bond’s opinions are always Fleming’s. Fleming intentionally designed Bond to differ from himself in a variety of ways—Fleming preferred scrambled eggs to fancy food and readers often wrote to correct him on details of cuisine (or, most famously, firearms)—though Bond’s fundamental discouragement and sense of purposelessness as the Empire crumbles are certainly his creator’s.

• I also think it’s a mistake to dismiss Bond’s suspicion of Goldfinger as classist because Goldfinger cheats at golf. Petty cheating is a character flaw in several Bond villains (like Hugo Drax in Moonraker) and suggests deeper corruption and a pragmatic, predatory tendency. The members of M’s club in Moonraker or the caddy in Goldfinger may scoff at Goldfinger’s new money tackiness, but Bond sees beyond this.

• Goldfinger is underrated as a villain. Bond resents his cruelty and especially his parasitic character—a big contrast to other Bond villains, who often have genuine skills and accomplishments to their credit. Goldfinger is just a thief and a hoarder, a dragon sitting on his pile under a mountain. See my Goodreads notes linked above for more on this score.

• Re. the stuff in the Bond novels, it’s a bit much to call Fleming’s use of real brand names “product placement.” Fleming was after verisimilitude. Ditto the details of Bond’s travel. I’ve seen it pointed out that under postwar austerity, the British reading public especially was starved for travel and enjoyed even the mundane details of airport lounges and hotel accommodations. It’s another sign of Fleming’s art that he could use Bond sitting silently at an airport to establish—from the first page—mood, tension, and character. This is the not the only time Fleming does this.

• Related: Dominic and Tabby are quite right to praise Fleming’s writing. I don’t fault them for leaving it out—the episode is about the book, not every detail of Fleming’s life—but Fleming’s time working for Reuters in the 1930s was formative. Both then and in his wartime work he learned to be clear, concise, and to precisely calculate the emphasis he wanted to impart.

• Finally, about Pussy Galore’s backstory: a lot of the women in the Bond series are damaged or wounded, as Bond himself is. Pussy’s background isn’t given space to breathe—though it is worth noting that it’s the hard, flippant Pussy herself who is relating it, which must have something to do with the tone—but it’s not unlike the much more detailed and sympathetically related story of Honey Rider in Dr No.

Again, it’s still mostly a good discussion but these items nagged at me. The best tribute I can pay to Dominic and Tabby is that, even though some Bond discussion on Substack and gotten me eager to reread the novels again, their episode convinced me it’s time. I have Casino Royale on standby. (As I tried to finish writing this last night, one of the kids came down with a croupy cough and we made a late-night visit to the ER for some oral steroids. I took Casino Royale with me. It’s great.) I’m just afraid that once I start I’ll ignore everything else I’m reading. (Too early to tell: I’m mostly just tired today. Stay tuned.)

The Book Club continues to be a good listen. My hope is that, having done a good job on Buchan and a reasonable job on Fleming—though I hope they’ll cover more of both—they might get to Eric Ambler sometime soon.

A problem with the bomb

Tracy Daugherty’s new biography Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited opens with a striking line from McCarthy’s penultimate novel, The Passenger: “I didn’t have a problem with my father. And I didn’t have a problem with the bomb.”

The bomb being the atomic bomb, narrator Bobby Western’s father having worked for the Manhattan Project. This sets up a surprising dual focus: family and science. Family makes sense in a biography—already in the first two chapters McCarthy’s parents, especially his TVA lawyer father, and younger brother feature in ways that suggest their significance for the rest of the story—but science is the surprise in a biography about a novelist. It shouldn’t be, given McCarthy’s widely reported love of science and preference for scientific rather than literary company late in life, but it is a striking note upon which to begin.

McCarthy was born in Rhode Island but spent most of his childhood and youth in East Tennessee, in rural neighborhoods outside Knoxville where he could still explore the woods, trap muskrats, and wander alone. But as a six-year old he was shown glimpses of a proposed future:

Reluctantly, he was occasionally forced into crowds: in Providence, Washington-and in New York in 1939, when his parents took him to the World's Fair. He was just six years old then but remembered it “vividly.” He recalled that in one pavilion “were . . . freeways, only the cars were automated. Nobody walked. Robots did all the work, and everybody had helicopters. And that’s what people thought of the future.” To him, it was unappealing and he couldn't understand the optimistic mood of the crowd. (30-1)

Automation, industry, machinery, urbanism. McCarthy’s bewilderment at why anyone one want this is powerfully suggestive. Daugherty leaps ahead to a postwar visit to New York that appalled McCarthy because he envisioned what could happen to it in the age of the bomb:

The futuristic New York of freeways and automated cars had given way to a rain of ash, and the contrast always made McCarthy long to flee the crowds and return to the forest . . . McCarthy loved the lore of hunting—the isolation, the concentration—and later compared the activity to writing, another discipline requiring focus and time away from others. Above all, it called for trusting one’s instincts. He once told the literary scholar John Sepich a story about a dove hunter. The hunter “could hit any bird that flew.” One day, “a farmer, on whose land he was hunting, stopped him and asked did he keep his left eye open when he shot, or did he hold it closed? And [the hunter] said he didn’t know, but he’d think about it. And McCarthy said the man never hit another dove again.” (31)

The story about the dove hunter is suggestive. Picking something apart, making the artful and intuitive the object of scrutiny, risks destroying the thing to find out how it works.

McCarthy was by no means hostile to science, but recognized limits to its reach and application. According to Daugherty, McCarthy early developed a sense of guilt about his father’s role in modernizing Appalachia through eviction, eminent domain, damming, and flooding, and his rejection of a techno-optimist vision of a fully-automated robotic future is of a piece with that. And it feels familiar. ChatGPT had been available to the public for just over seven months when McCarthy died. One wonders what he would have made of it had he had time to observe its rise and spread.

And what would we sacrifice when we destroy things in favor of the automated and robotic? Daugherty:

He spent much of his early childhood sleeping on a screened-in porch, feeling the cool mist on his face, listening to cricket song, away from the rest of the family. At night he’d sneak through a second-story window to explore the woods, where, just south of the house, down a dirt road, an abandoned peach orchard dropped its skinny leaves[.] (30)

As it happens, a screened porch, the cool mist (of a creek, in my case), and the sound of crickets is a good description of some of the most important—and most missed—parts of my own childhood. McCarthy could sense not only the environmental threat but also the dehumanizing tendency of technocracy even as a boy. Daugherty concludes this memory with the pregnant detail that the peach orchard abutted “some fenced-off TVA property, frustrating his freedom to roam.”

Death Comes as the End

Last night I finished reading Agatha Christie’s only historical novel, Death Comes as the End, to my wife. This was my second reading of the novel and, although I had picked it as our bedtime read because I remembered enjoying it, I was pleasantly surprised just how much I enjoyed it the second time through. A shortish sick-day review: 

Death Comes as the End takes place on the country estate of Imhotep, a ka-priest who lives near Thebes in Upper Egypt during the 11th Dynasty, over 3,000 years ago. As a ka-priest Imhotep is responsible for the maintenance and regular offerings and rites performed at a nearby tomb, where he also has an office managed by Hori, his trusted scribe. Thanks to the endowment of the tomb and the prestige of his position, Imhotep, now entering old age, enjoys authority and wealth—including estates downriver, in Lower Egypt near the mouth of the Nile. 

Not that his wealth has brought him happiness or stability. His household includes three sons: the slow, dutiful Yahmose, the hard-partying and womanizing Sobek, and Ipy, the teenaged son of Imhotep’s old age. The two older sons have wives—shrewish, domineering Satipy and slow, plain, child-obsessed Kait, who tolerates Sobek’s philandering because of the benefit their marriage guarantees to her children—and Imhotep’s aged mother, Esa, the rarely-heeded brains of the family. Also skulking around the house is Henet, an old servant and companion of Imhotep’s long-dead wife. Henet is a Wormtongue-like flatterer who prides herself on gathering and using information. Her obsequious fawning just barely conceals her resentments.

The last member of the household, and the novel’s main character, is Imhotep’s only daughter, Renisenb. Newly widowed with one child, Renisenb has returned after eight years away with her husband and is still mourning—though, despite the freshness of her grief, she is bothered to find herself already forgetting her husband’s face, and has turned to the old rhythms and routines of her childhood home as a comfort. But it is precisely these that Renisenb will see demolished, and be forced to reckon with why. 

Christie expertly introduces the reader to this family and its foibles—weak, status-conscious father, henpecked eldest son, pompous younger brothers, jostling and jealous daughters-in-law, wry grandmother—before injecting the element that will explode it and start the novel’s mystery: Nofret, the concubine Imhotep brings home from a trip to the richer, more glamorous north.

Nofret is beautiful, manipulative, and spurned in love. The details emerge slowly, but it is clear from the moment she arrives that she views becoming Imhotep’s concubine as settling. She heaps scorn on the family members, probes for weaknesses and disagreement between them, and exploits them for maximum discord. She forces Hori to send letters to Imhotep with false complaints against his sons, and—in a fatal decision—moves to have them disinherited. It is not long before Nofret is dead.

As so often in a Christie story, everyone had good reason to want her dead. Renisenb, without ever consciously thinking of herself as a detective, discusses the situation with Hori and her grandmother Esa, the two people she most trusts and who are least blinded by greed, envy, and foolishness.

Unlike many other Christie stories, the body count climbs. Whoever killed Nofret does not stop with her, killing off other family members and even a servant. Rumor that a vengeful Nofret is cursing the family from her chamber in the tomb run rampant, aggravated by missing jewelry turning up and at least one sighting of a woman in Nofret’s clothing just before someone else drops dead. Hori and Esa assure Renisenb that, based on her standing within the family and her attempts to be kind to Nofret, she cannot be a target. But as more and more die, Renisenb worries both for her family and friends and for herself.

I mentioned that I’ve jotted this review down during a sick day. In a nice coincidence, I first read Death Comes as the End three years ago, when I was sick and quarantined to protect our newborn twins and just in time to make the 2023 year-in-review. I’ve remembered it fondly, recommending it as a good short mystery read last year, and it didn’t disappoint on a reread. In fact, it passed that most difficult of hurdles for a mystery: upon rereading it, I couldn’t remember the solution to the mystery, who the murderer was and why they were doing it. All of the characters still seemed likely suspects, and the atmosphere of dread and suspense were just as palpable and enjoyable.

And Death Comes as the End is not only a satisfying mystery, it is a good historical novel. Christie, whose second husband was an archaeologist, based the novel on his research and her visits to Egypt as well as the extant letters of a similar Egyptian family. It has been a long time since my grad school Egypt course—which mostly focused on the 18th Dynasty anyway—so I can’t vouch for every detail, but Christie authentically evokes the mood and mental atmosphere of ancient Egypt. The story flows with the Egyptian calendar and the rhythms of the Nile and farm work, and the ordinary routines and worries of a well-off but not elite Egyptian priestly family is well imagined. One especially nice note, and a good spot of Christie’s wry dark humor, was Imhotep’s escalating concern about the cost of embalming.

Even in her English country house mysteries Christie was always adept at conveying the workaday concerns of the people who lived there, and without modernizing them or treating them as if nothing has changed in the 3,000 years between Renisenb’s time and ours, she makes these characters’ lives and concerns recognizable. This is a challenge for any historical novelist, and Christie, in her first and only foray outside the twentieth century, did it brilliantly. I was impressed, on that first reading three years ago, both with how well she created Egypt in the fictive dream of her story and with how economically she did so. There are no laborious explanations, no info dumps, no tedious piling on of detail. I’ll be returning to it for lessons in craft.

Death Comes as the End has much more going on in it than I can lay out here. I haven’t even nodded toward Renisenb’s interest in Kameni, an envoy from Lower Egypt who may offer her a better life away from the striving, petty jealousy, and death of her home, or the way their attraction eventually forces Renisenb into a dilemma. The plot is engaging, the characters well imagined and surprising—especially as the deaths begin to reveal more of what each has suppressed in their lives so far—and the historical setting effortlessly realized. This is not Christie’s most famous novel, but it is one of ones I have most enjoyed.

Chesterton and the Pout-Pout Fish

In case you aren’t familiar with it, The Pout-Pout Fish is a rhyming kids’ picture book about a glum fish who is so downbeat and pessimistic he makes everyone around him miserable. Mr Fish fatalistically assigns his attitude to his frowny appearance: “It’s just the way I am.”

Over the course of the book, Mr Fish encounters four friends—a clam, a jellyfish, a squid, and an octopus—who show decreasing amounts of patience with his sad sack ways. Finally, having rebuffed even the friend who is willing to tell it to him straight, Mr Fish is approached by a newcomer. A “bright and brilliant swimmer,” she doesn’t even say hello, just kisses him on the cheek and swims away. Mr Fish is transformed, and dedicates himself to spreading love and cheer to everyone around him.

Our twins have picked The Pout-Pout Fish for their bedtime story almost every night for what feels like months. I don’t actually mind, because it’s fun to do Mr Fish’s voice and the boys enjoy his repeated refrain of “Blub, bluuub, bluuuuuub.”

But it has also brought Chesterton to mind every time I’ve read it. In Chapter IV of Orthodoxy, “The Ethics of Elfland,” Chesterton meditates on the truth we learn from fairytales. As a child, he writes, he was “fed on fairy tales” and derived an “ethic and philosophy” from them. He mentions several examples, but one in particular has always stuck with me:

There is the great lesson of “Beauty and the Beast”; that a thing must be loved before it is loveable.

As silly and fun as The Pout-Pout Fish is, this is the drama at the center of it. Mr Fish’s friends try sweet-talking, cajoling, playing on his sympathies as a friend, and bluntly telling him he’s a drag to be around, and all fail to reform him. Rational appeal, social convention, and force don’t work. But the newcomer’s wordless act of love converts him.

Chesterton notes that the “certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, . . . has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.” There are plenty of ideas vying for attention and space in our children’s imaginations. Only a few will be “ratified” by real life experience. Love as the ultimate tool of redemption, making lovable what was once intolerable, is an important one.