Sir Quixote of the Moors

The first John Buchan June ended with Buchan’s final novel and one of his masterpieces, Sick Heart River. In a pleasing bit of symmetry, this fifth John Buchan June concludes with his first published book—and the last novel I hadn’t read since beginning this event: 1895’s historical novella Sir Quixote of the Moors.

Ten chapters and barely eighty pages long, Sir Quixote of the Moors is a brisk historical romp designed to pose the hero an unsolvable dilemma. I usually avoid major spoilers in these posts, but since this is a brief story aimed inexorably at its climactic chapter, I will reveal the ending. Avoid spoilers if you choose. But it’s a good story and good stories are spoiler-proof, and I’ve tried to leave out some of the details that make reading it rich and enjoyable.

Set in the Scottish Borders in the 1680s, Sir Quixote is a story of “The Killing Time,” when the Scots Covenanters were subject to pursuit and slaughter by forces loyal to King Charles II. The narrator is an outsider: Jean de Rohaine, a French Catholic nobleman who has come to Scotland on the invitation of an old Scottish schoolmate, who had promised military adventure. After days of carousing, Jean departs with his host on their first assignment, which turns out to be burning Covenanter farms and killing women, children, and old people. Jean, his sense of chivalric honor outraged, leaves his host on the spot.

He has acted on principle but his choice proves foolishly imprudent—a dynamic that will return. He doesn’t know his way back to the port where he entered Scotland and gets hopelessly lost on the moors. He is betrayed by an innkeeper working as an informant for the authorities and only the honorable conduct of one of his pursuers allows him to escape. Lost, hungry, on the run, and exhausted by the wind, cold, and rain, he throws himself on the doorstep of the next house he comes to.

This proves providential. Jean has cast up at the manse of an aged minister of the persecuted Covenanter church, who lives there with his daughter Anne and her fiancé, a laird named Henry Semple. They care generously for him in his distress but no sooner has he begun to recover than the minister and Henry are forced to flee into the wilderness. They leave Jean to protect the house and Anne, trusting in the sense of honor that first brought him to them.

Jean is as good as his word, driving off a party of government thugs hunting for Henry in one scene and attempting, through his charm and skill in the courtly arts of music and dancing, to help Anne pass the time while she awaits Henry’s safe return. The latter has an unintended effect, though. In trying to help Anne cope with Henry’s absence, he wins her over, and he feels himself falling in love with her as well.

When Henry reappears, starving and crazed, on the run again after his hiding spot has been betrayed and with news that Anne’s father is nearing death, Jean reaches a crisis. He cannot honorably act on his feelings for Anne, and remaining with her will only deepen the affection and attraction growing between them. But leaving her orphaned, her likely future a marriage to a madman—if Henry even survives—seems to be a failure in his duty to take care of her. Memories of his own lost love arise to accuse him, and in the final pages he makes his terrible decision. He flees.

There is more to it than that, but that’s the main arc of the story. In her introduction to the edition I read, Buchan scholar Kate Macdonald interprets Sir Quixote as a story about religious extremism. I think that’s a necessary element of the setting but not Buchan’s point. Jean’s dilemma pits his passion against his honor, the opportunities his situation opens to him against his constancy and good faith, his feelings for Anne against promises made to the one she, in turn, had promised herself to.

If this story were told today—and it has been, over and over—it could only end, with utter, tired predictability, one way. Buchan does something more interesting, but without comforting platitudes. Jean’s honor runs deeper than slogans, and when he makes the hard and unsatisfying choice Buchan does not ignore or conceal the pain of his decision: “‘But honour is more than life or love,’ I said, as I set my teeth with stern purpose.” And, in the next paragraph: “though all my soul was steeled into resolution, there was no ray of hope in my heart—nothing but a dead, bleak outlook, a land of moors and rain, an empty purse and an aimless journey.”

Virtue may be its own reward, yes, but that reward is not gotten lightly. Buchan makes the reader feel it. This, as with so much else in Buchan’s work, was surprising and refreshing.

Sir Quixote of the Moors is clearly an early work. The twenty-year old Buchan’s style has not yet balanced the sturdy clarity, archaism, and dialect he so skillfully intermingled later, and the characterization is—unsurprisingly in a book of less than eighty pages—thin. The characters are believable but not deep. But Sir Quixote also foreshadows much of the mature Buchan’s strengths as a writer: fast pacing that doesn’t feel rushed, smoothly incorporated historical detail, the palpable “moral atmosphere” praised by Sir John Keegan, and, most especially, beautifully and vividly described settings. The Borders locations familiar from so many of his other novels have never felt colder, more miserably rainy, or less forgiving.

This is an enjoyable romp and a piece of juvenilia most writers could be proud of—or at least not embarrassed by. But Buchan himself consistently denigrated it, beginning with the pre-publication proofs, which he found unsatisfying to read. Thirty years later he attempted, unsuccessfully, to prevent its being republished. Part of his attitude toward Sir Quixote may be the result of lessons learned. No good author looks back at early work without seeing tics and habits one is grateful to have grown out of. Buchan similarly dismissed his next book, his first full-length novel, John Burnet of Barns.

But another, more intriguing dimension of Buchan’s attitude toward this book may be the path it took to publication. Buchan, a young author (an “intimidatingly precocious” one, per Macdonald), had his title changed by the publisher. Originally called Sir Quixote, they added of the Moors and the cumbersome subtitle Being some Account of an Episode in the Life of the Sieur de Rohaine. Buchan also complained of the poor binding.

That’s bad enough, but then the American edition—which may have been pirated, though the details are still murky 130 years later—added two sentences to the final page. In this extra paragraph, Jean reverses himself and heads back for Anne.

This addition, apparently meant to give the book a happy ending, must have come from an illiterate editor because it completely undoes Jean’s story and misunderstands Buchan’s purpose behind it. At least one biographer has suggested that Buchan may have been asked to provide the extra lines, but it’s impossible to imagine Buchan accepting this change. With all this in mind his later attitude toward the book is suggestive.

The book’s background is interesting, and it also reveals a young author with enough tenacity to weather a bad first experience in publishing and keep going, but Sir Quixote of the Moors is still worth reading for its own sake. Simple, short, not especially deep but emotionally involving, and with many of the virtues of its author’s later work, it is more than a curiosity. It’s a fun and moving short story and, knowing as we do what treasures its author would gift us over the next forty-five years, an invitation and a preview. Sir Quixote is a worthy final read in this five-year journey.

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Thanks again for another great John Buchan June. It’s both fun and a little melancholy to read the last unread Buchan novel after five years. As I said recently in a podcast interview about this project, if I had planned to read and write about all of them I never could have done it. But this has been a wonderful five years and, with all of the novels read and a handful of the non-fiction, I need to decide how to continue.

Likely I will read Buchan’s major biographies. As I mentioned at the beginning of the month, I had intended to read Oliver Cromwell but daily life impinged and I didn’t have time. That may be a good place to start for next year. I may also revisit the small handful of books I found underwhelming—Mr Standfast, The Courts of the Morning, The House of the Four Winds—and give them another shot.

But be assured, John Buchan June will return. Thanks for joining me. Your readership, notes, and e-mails have meant a great deal. I hope y’all have a good July and can enjoy at least one of the books I read this year!

Dialogue, dialect, and expectations

Back at the end of last month I made a dumb joke on Substack that went viral. A classical educator I follow shared this meme, which he captioned “Finally, dealing with the real issues…”

I restacked it and added, on the spur of the moment, “Muse, sing of a guy who was wicked smart…”

I don’t keep close track of my Substack analytics but I think this is now the most widely viewed thing I’ve shared on there. That was May 31st, and June is about to end and I still get multiple notifications a day that someone has liked it or restacked it or—the point of this post—commented on it. And the people commenting on it have made the same highly original joke over and over for a month. Maybe it’s already crossed your mind as you read my silly invocation above:

That should say “wicked smaht.”

I haven’t counted but I’ve gotten at least a dozen, maybe two dozen, versions of that joke. It’s actually given me cause to think, again, about writing dialect.

My abortive series of long-form posts on Elmore Leonard’s ten rules of writing ended with a single post about dialect. Leonard’s rule: “Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.” After examining several long passages from different novels featuring different approaches to writing dialect, I arrived at six general guidelines, my personal approach to the problem. What I think is one of the most important is: “Keep phonetic spelling to a minimum, using it always to suggest a broader pattern that you don’t render.”

I have striven to follow this guideline, letting syntax and vocabulary suggest the way a character pronounces words—so that the reader hears it in his head—rather than spelling the pronunciation out. Heavy use of phonetic spelling becomes difficult to read, distracting, or, at worst, insulting to the dialect being rendered. But.

But sometimes some words are so distinctive to the way a dialect is spoken they become emblematic of that dialect. The result is that writing even a line of dialect speech that does not spell a distinctive word phonetically will be interpreted by the reader as a failure. An unforeseen pitfall, one I fell straight into.

In the 2004 film The Alamo, Billy Bob Thornton’s David Crockett only wears his buckskins and coonskin cap for what amount to PR appearances. When questioned by Jim Bowie about his hat later (“What happened to your cap? Crawl away?”), Crockett confesses to wearing it only because of his popular image: “People expect things.”

A useful point to keep in mind when writing dialect. Even as a joke.

The Long Traverse

This year’s John Buchan June enters the homestretch with another curiosity. When I wrote about The Magic Walking Stick two weeks I go I was careful to note that it was Buchan’s only children’s book published during his lifetime. That’s because, at his untimely death in February 1940, in addition to having just completed his memoir Memory Hold-the-Door and his final novel, Sick Heart River, he was working on a new children’s book: The Long Traverse.

The young hero of this novel, Donald, is the son of a Canadian mining engineer. When the story begins, he has just left school on holiday and is excited to reach his family’s cabin in the forests of Quebec. His parents have given him permission to go a week early to prepare for their stay, which means a week of riding, hunting, fishing, playing in the woods and streams with his friends Simone and Aristide, local Indian children, and hearing stories from their uncle, Father Laflamme.

Donald is especially excited because he hates school. He resents his Latin lessons and finds history confusing and boring. He prefers the outdoors or, failing that, the movies.

When Father Laflamme learns about Donald’s lack of interest—especially his indifference to history—he discusses it with the family’s beloved Indian hunting and fishing guide, Negog. Descended from the priestly caste of the Cree, Negog thinks Donald should be open to learning from his ancestors and knows a secret method for commanding attention and teaching the stories of the past.

Every evening, after the day’s adventures, Negog ensures that Donald is near a body of water. As the sun sets, the fish rest, and the waters still to a mirror the cloudless golden sky, Donald experiences La Longue Traverse—visions of past events.

Day by day Donald meets the heroes of early Canadian history. He sees Jacques Cartier on his expedition to explore the St Lawrence River, Adam Dollard and his companions holding out against the Iroquois at the Battle of the Long Sault, voyageur Jean Cadieux and his last-stand against Indian attack, forgotten trappers, explorers, missionary priests, prospectors and miners, and ordinary people. My two favorite chapters concerned—unsurprisingly—the Norse exploration of the Canadian coast, in which Donald witness the long, hard expeditions of the fictitious Hallward, and a chapter set in the plains far from European settlement, where an Indian tribe, faced with enemies newly armed with the horse, trade for a yet deadlier weapon: the gun.

In The Long Traverse, Buchan combines the magic of his earlier children’s book with the story-made-of-stories setup of The Path of the King. Each story is engaging and exciting, and in the frame story that structures them Donald slowly learns more—and takes more and more pride and ownership—of his and his country’s past. Though he forgets the visions as soon as they end, the stories stay with him. In flash-forwards, his parents are astonished by the things he knows.

The subject matter is the stuff of adventure, but the true star of the book is the Canadian landscape. As with the best of his adventure fiction, Buchan conjures vivid settings and realistically describes them. The forested hills and lakes of Quebec are the most frequent locations, but the canyons and whitewater rapids of the Canadian Rockies, the endless plains, and the frozen coasts of Arctic islands also feature. Buchan describes all of this beautifully but does not leave out the unpleasant: heat, avalanche, dangerous rapids, and clouds of biting black flies. (The cover of the first edition, above, shows Donald sheltering by a lakeside fire built by Negog to keep the flies at bay.) The wildness and scale of the country, the hardships of daily life, and the hazards of travel—on foot, by horse, by canoe, by longship—demanded heroism of the people who lived there, and Buchan makes both feel real.

The Long Traverse ends suddenly after the story of a missionary priest’s eerie encounter with the Toonit, a population of relict prehistoric people not unlike the Picts of Buchan’s early short story “No-Man’s-Land.” Buchan was almost finished with the book when he died, and though the individual stories are wonderfully absorbing and readable—I read the book in two days—Donald’s story is left unresolved. A note by Buchan’s widow, Lady Tweedsmuir, explains the original conception and purpose of the book and a little of what Buchan left in outline at his death.

During his time as Governor-General of Canada Buchan came to love the country, not only its vast and varied landscapes but the peoples who lived there. (This comes across quite clearly in this 1937 New Years’ greeting.) He found its history fascinating, full of romance and figures worthy of emulation, and Canadian schools’ methods of teaching that history abominable. The textbooks, as he saw it, were more likely to kill than to encourage interest in the past. One sympathizes.

Donald is Buchan’s imaginary typical Canadian schoolboy, full of talent and potential but lacking direction and already let down by the schools. Negog and Father Laflamme sense that Donald is vulnerable, that, on the verge of manhood, his character is at a crucial moment in its growth, and that the cities and movies strive against the rootedness in the past that Donald and all of us need. Negog, as a Cree a figure of the past and as a Christian Canadian a figure of the present, puts him directly in touch with that past. Understanding one’s history, Buchan forcefully shows, is not only a duty but an important step in moral formation.

It is also interesting and fun. The stories Donald sees in The Long Traverse are all exciting, and Buchan envisioned them as a way to awaken the imaginations of young students. Thus awakened, they would be open to instruction. (It certainly worked on me; I learned a lot either reading or reading about the subjects of these stories.) He rightly understood that telling interesting stories about the people of past beats any state-approved textbook. The imagination must come first—a lesson still worth learning and remembering.

Latitude and the borders of the possible

For Father’s Day my wife gave me a gift card to a brand-new local bookstore. I used it to pick up, at long last, a copy of AS Byatt’s Possession, first recommended to me years ago by my best friend at Clemson. The novel’s epigraph, a passage from Hawthorne’s preface to The House of the Seven Gables, struck me:

When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former—while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.

“Romance” here hewing closer to its original medieval meaning of “adventure.”

As it happens, just yesterday I finished rereading The Thirty-Nine Steps for the fifth or sixth time—and the first time I’ve revisited a book for John Buchan June. Buchan’s dedication, to his friend and publisher Tommy Nelson, includes this oft-reprinted explanation of the kinds of books Buchan liked—and wrote:

You and I have long cherished an affection for that elemental type of tale which Americans call the “dime novel” and which we know as the “shocker”—the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible.

There’s that word romance again.

Just the other day I saw an ordinarily thoughtful Substacker assert that condemning TV while reading “plot-driven genre fiction” was hypocritical, as the latter was no different from the former; the reader just holds his head in a different position from the TV viewer. This is not the stupidest thing I’ve seen online recently but it wasn’t far off.

First, there is nothing wrong with reading for entertainment. I’d even argue, as I will momentarily, that a book should at the very least entertain, whatever its subject. But the romance, the story that stays “just inside the borders of the possible” and for which the reader must—but most often quite gladly—grants “a certain latitude,” need not be mere entertainment. A good plot and a little excitement open the imagination to truth and argument better than any bluntly stated thesis. If genre fiction is nothing more than brainrot, why have our most gifted writers turned their hands to it over and over for centuries? Why did Jesus tell pointed, engaging, and surprising stories in popular forms?

Per CS Lewis, for whom the fantasy stories of George MacDonald “baptised” his “imagination” long before the arguments of his friends Tolkien and Hugo Dyson could reach him, “every book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less.”

Buchan and Hawthorne could hardly be more different, but I appreciated the consonance between their explanations of what the novelist who aims for something more striking than kitchen-sink realism—Hawthorne’s “very minute fidelity”—dull modern or postmodern rumination, or pure didacticism must do. The reader willing to grant that latitude and march with the author on the ragged edge of believability should, if the author knows what he’s about, be amply rewarded.

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Our new bookstore is a small local brand of M Judson of Greenville. Check them out here. I reviewed The Thirty-Nine Steps for the very first John Buchan June in 2022. You can read that here. Last year I reflected on the duty of the good writer—in this case, Len Deighton and Ian Fleming—to entertain as a prerequisite to doing more here. And yesterday I recorded a podcast with a longtime reader about Buchan and The Thirty-Nine Steps specifically, a conversation I’m excited to share with y’all. Be on the lookout.

A historical philosophy quotation master list

History, a mosaic by Frederick Dielman, Members Room at the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building

Since shortly after I started teaching I’ve begun every semester with three quotations meant to explain to my students what my approach to both learning and teaching history is and, by extension, what they should be looking for as we go. I’ve always used the same three but sometimes expand on a given point with another, related line from a slightly different angle. I’ve found this approach does a good job of setting expectations, and gives me a few key ideas I can call back to for the rest of the semester.

Taken together, these three quotations are the basis of my philosophy of history. Today is the halfway point in this summer semester, and as I reflected on these again I decided, in the commonplace book spirit of this blog, to share them here. I’m including some other quotations that I may only occasionally bring up in class but that inform my understanding of history on some deep level.

I intend to expand this post in the future as I remember more quotations that I’ve found useful or inspiring.

The big three: Bloch, Hartley, Cicero

Bloch: history is about people

Marc Bloch (1886-1944), in The Historian’s Craft, written in 1941-42 but published posthumously in 1949:

“The good historian resembles the legendary ogre. Where he senses human flesh, he knows there lies his prey.”

Alternate translation: “The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there is quarry lies.”

I include this line to explain that the focus of the course will be humanity—both individual people and their characters, strengths, and failings as well as anything broadly construed as human. That is, culture. Anything cultural is fair game: war, politics, literature, religion, economics, etc.

For the last few years I’ve explicitly set this in opposition to the kind of history emphasizing abstract “forces” or “trends,” whether the hoary economics-is-everything models of Marx and friends or of modish bestsellers like Sapiens, which attempts to contextualize all of humanity on a grand cosmic scale by presenting all of human history in the last few pages. That’s not history, I argue, but geology, astronomy, physics, and the other sciences (not to mention a ton of speculation). Real history involves humans and human choices.

Hartley: history is about difference

From LP Hartley’s (1895-1972) novel The Go-Between, published in 1953:

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

I share this to set up the expectation that people in the past thought and behaved differently, and the example of a foreign country is extremely helpful in this regard. I’ll describe the stereotype of the “ugly American” abroad—loud, rude, judgmental, refusing to learn even a few phrases in the local language, expecting everyone to accommodate him, comparing everything unfavorably to the way we do it back home—and suggest to my students that we want to avoid doing the same on a trip into the past. Just like in a foreign country, I say, you’ll see things you don’t like or disagree with, but we’re only there to observe and try to understand.

Related: from Herbert Butterfield’s (1900-79) crucial 1931 study The Whig Interpretation of History, a line I’ve quoted here several times before:

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

If I have time, I’ll often make an excursus on the two kinds of differences between ourselves and past people. The first is the obvious difference: a lot of medieval people thought and did things that seem straightforwardly strange and barbarous to us now. It’s easy to fixate on the strange and decide they are entirely unlike ourselves. But the second, more dangerous difference is the invisible kind, usually hidden by a superficial similarity: the Greeks had democracy, the Romans had a Senate! This one recognizable point can lull one into missing details like the prevalence of pederasty in ancient Greece, of gladiatorial combat in Rome, and of slavery in both. Be on the lookout for deep cultural differences especially where the past seems familiar.

Cicero: history is memory

I end the introduction to my approach as a student and teacher of history with my favorite Roman, Cicero, (106-43 BC) and this line in Orator ad M Brutum, section 120:

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the worth of a man’s life unless it is interwoven with the memory of ancient things from a greater age?”

Studying the past is a way to expand our understanding and wisdom beyond the brief window of time we’ll actually experience. With five kids, I can offer plenty of examples of childlike ignorance and how my kids have grown out of it partly through the stories Sarah and I have told them. (Cf Polybius below.) A simple point but one that always seems to work well.

I’ll often expand on this by paraphrasing the following from CS Lewis (1898-1963) in An Experiment in Criticism (1961):

“In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.”

Lewis is writing about literature but this line works just as well for history. And remember that history was traditionally—until the late 19th century, anyway—understood as a literary pursuit, an art.

I loathe the word empathy, but if I feel it would click with a given class I might invoke it here.

Others: approaches, priorities, and purpose

Butterfield: teaching and writing about history is a balancing act

Another from Butterfield’s Whig Interpretation of History:

“The historian is never more himself than when he is searching his mind for a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity.”

A small insight but an important one. This is one of the things that makes history an art, and the times I’ve enjoyed classroom lecture or discussion most are when I’m trying to strike precisely this balance—finding a way to say something generally true while suggesting complexity and exception. It’s a skill I admire enormously in the historians who have it.

Colonel Stonehill: history is what happened, not what didn’t

From the Coen brothers’ 2010 adaptation of Charles Portis’s True Grit, a line that they invented for the peevish, frustrated cotton factor and horse trader Col Stonehill:

“I do not entertain hypotheticals, the world as it is is vexing enough.”

I keep this one ready in my back pocket for alternate history questions. History, in my view, is far too complex to even begin to guess what might have happened had one or two variables been changed.

Related: from the late Australian political philosopher Kenneth Minogue’s (1930-2013) 2010 book The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life:

“The future is largely inscrutable; indeed we may count ourselves exceptionally fortunate if we acquire much of an understanding of the past”

A good single-sentence line not only on the impossibility of predicting the future but also the difficulty involved in studying the events that have actually happened.

Polybius and Dr Johnson: the purpose and responsibility of studying history

Two more. The first is a line I don’t think I’ve quoted in class but that I’ve reflected on for many years. From Polybius’s Histories, I.35:

“There are two roads to reformation for mankind—one through misfortunes of their own, the other through those of others: the former is the most unmistakable, the latter the less painful.”

The above pairs well with Cicero’s line on history as memory above.

Second, a quotation I included in the design of a poster I printed for my office door and classroom corkboards. In his Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Samuel Johnson (1709-84) uses the poet-philosopher character Imlac to voice his ideas on the inevitability (“The truth is that no mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments”) as well as the importance and value of studying history:

“If we act only for ourselves, to neglect the study of history is not prudent. If we are entrusted with the care of others, it is not just.”

Given all the other insights above—expanding one’s own memory, learning lessons the easy way, learning what to study and how and even how to teach others—the responsibility inherent in knowing the past is a good place to leave off.

A Lodge in the Wilderness

Last week I reviewed a unique entry in John Buchan’s bibliography—the only children’s book he published in his lifetime. This week John Buchan June continues with another unique item, this one more a curiosity than anything: part novel, part philosophical dialogue, part political treatise, the 1906 book A Lodge in the Wilderness.

The book first introduces us to eccentric multi-millionaire Francis Carey, who after making his fortune in various business and government concerns throughout the British Empire, has established himself in a lavish country house in Kenya called Musuru. Every summer Carey invites eighteen people—nine men and nine women—to join him at Musuru for dinners, hunting, and intellectual conversation about the pressing issues of the day. A Lodge in the Wilderness is an account of one of these events.

Buchan briefly describes all eighteen of Carey’s guests, including a Conservative lord, a big game hunter, an ex-soldier with long experience of the Empire, a journalist, a Jewish financier, and a representative of the intelligence service. The female characters are mostly the wives of influential men but show themselves politically well-connected and informed and, as both Buchan biographers Andrew Lownie and Ursula Buchan point out, their contributions to Carey’s conversations are taken seriously. Nevertheless, most of the characters are ciphers and, after a chapter or two, become hard to distinguish. They are, as Lownie puts it, “merely mouthpieces for the book’s ideas.”

The two that give the story personality are Hugh Somerville and Lady Flora Brune, apparently based on Buchan himself and Susie Grosvenor, whom he would marry a year after the book’s publication. Hugh and Lady Flora become friends and the first hints of a romance kindle between the two, and their flirtations and conversations, which serve as interstitial episodes between the long dinner-time discussions, provide the most story A Lodge in the Wilderness has to offer.

Over the course of a month or so, Carey treats his guests to lion hunts, tours of his beautiful and seemingly endless mountainside gardens, field trips to missions and other colonial points of interest, and many intensely academic discussions of Empire.

And that’s about all there is to it. Though A Lodge in the Wilderness makes concessions to the novelistic form, especially small episodes of excitement like Hugh’s near-miss during the lion hunt, nothing resolves. I was prepared for this in the philosophical dimension of the book—which can only raise questions and suggest ways forward, and to which I’ll return shortly—but it was disappointing that, having developed Hugh and Lady Flora’s young romance so successfully, they do not get any kind of last-chapter send-off suggesting what will become of their relationship. A rare loose end for Buchan.

This is a reminder that the entire purpose of the book is philosophical and political. Written in Buchan’s early thirties after his return from the Transvaal in South Africa, where he had served as private secretary to colonial governor Lord Milner, A Lodge in the Wilderness is a response to changing policy and cultural attitudes toward the Empire back home. Better attuned critics than I, especially those who were alive at the time, have seen in the book’s characters stand-ins for real-life political figures, not least Cecil Rhodes. Buchan’s goal in the book is to lay out and examine the problems facing the British Empire as it stood during the Edwardian period, charitably work through opposing ideas, and suggest an ideal to strive toward—an ideal both of form and function.

Among the topics of discussion are the political basis of the Empire, its potential future structure and the role subject peoples will play democratically, and even—perhaps most interestingly—the aesthetic effects of imperialism on British culture. All of this is examined in excruciating detail. I wrote above that A Lodge in the Wilderness is “part philosophical dialogue,” and Hugh even reads Plato in the garden at one point, but there is really very little back-and-forth at dinner. The characters mostly make speeches, sometimes reading long poems or newspaper articles aloud to the whole party, with occasional pushback from someone else and an eventual attempt at synthesis. (Hegel is invoked more than once, an infallible sign one is in danger of being bored.)

Buchan seems to have known that not everyone would enjoy this. Halfway through, Lady Flora tells Hugh, “I do so wish . . . that they wouldn't all talk in paragraphs.” One sympathizes, as well as appreciating the self-aware laugh.

Some recent readers, to judge by reviews on sites like Goodreads, take some of the characters’ viewpoints as Buchan’s own and object to what they see as promotion of eugenics or a lust for conquest. Buchan, charitable to a fault, allows his characters to have opinions he disagreed with in order to offer a better alternative. His own views are sometimes difficult to parse but a number of important points show through clearly.

The view of the Empire that Buchan presents is benevolent and idealistic but hard to understand in the specifics. Negatively, he explicitly rules out conquest for its own sake, the equation of largeness and territorial size with goodness, the suppression and subordination of subject peoples, and the exploitation of the Empire for profit. Violence in an empire is inevitable but not to be sought out, enjoyed, or glorified. He also makes it clear that any backwardness or primitivism among non-European peoples is due not to race but to culture and opportunity, and he cautions against both denigrating native peoples and exaggerating their primitiveness as unspoiled goodness. He is neither jingo nor Social Darwinist.

What Buchan envisions instead is an ennobling enterprise that will make high moral, spiritual, and even physical demands of the imperialists, who will set an example for the complacent bourgeoisie at home. (Buchan’s critique of the middle class as apathetic and compromised is surprisingly sharp.) The purpose of the Empire is the spread of improvement—technologically, economically, and morally—and the eventual advancement and participation of all the peoples within its reach.

This view is essentially globalist, undergirded by a whiggish view of history. What sets Britain’s apart from other imperial projects, he suggests, is its long accidental development of the rule of law and the importance accorded to liberty. Having come into world power without plan or direction, the Empire is Britain’s opportunity deliberately to spread the good of liberty through order. In a phrase of Chesterton’s—who, no imperialist, would probably disapprove of me using it—the Empire at its best would “make room for good things to run wild.”

All of this should suggest to you that A Lodge in the Wilderness is now almost entirely of historical significance. It’s the only Buchan book I’ve read that I’d call a slog. (It doesn’t help that the cheap paperback I read has numerous text-recognition errors and formatting problems. If you do check this book out, avoid the edition whose cover I used above.) A Lodge in the Wilderness is informative as the dream of empire held by one principled, hopeful, well-intentioned man, and interesting as a strange outlier among Buchan’s fiction, but it is unsatisfying as a novel and will be unrewarding for the casual reader. I’m glad I read it but I very much doubt that I will ever revisit it.

Machine Man and the danger of AI

Max Barry is an Australian sci-fi novelist. My friend JP Burten introduced me to Barry during college when he recommended Jennifer Government, Barry’s satirical near-future comedy in which the world is governed (more or less) by big businesses. I fondly remember reading Barry’s followup, Company, another satire in which an office drone discovers that the company he works for produces nothing—it’s a lab for the publisher of business management books to field-test new techniques. I still think about some of the scenarios Barry came up with for that one.

But the novel that both amused and moved me is Barry’s 2011 Machine Man. The following is a more detailed version of an appeal I made to some of my online students earlier this summer.

Machine Man concerns Charles Neumann, a scientist developing advanced cybernetic prosthetics. One day he loses a leg in a lab accident and, after recovering, builds himself a sophisticated robotic leg. The leg proves so good and, Charles thinks, so superior to his biological leg that he voluntarily amputates the other and replaces it with an identical model.

This begins a cycle of Charles replacing his organic body parts with seemingly more powerful, efficient mechanical ones, tinkering and tweaking as he goes. His physical therapist and love interest, Lola Shanks, looks on in mounting apprehension. In Charles’s final “improvement,” he dispenses with his physical body entirely and ends the novel as a small black box with an output screen for text. LOLA I MISS YOU, he says through the text output. But of course he has sacrificed the gift of embodiment—everything he needs even to touch Lola.

Barry wrote Machine Man when the transhumanist movement, which, in most forms, sought to “improve” humanity by shedding the limited, physical, and human, had temporarily peaked. This is a comedy and Barry has some thematic fun with the names: Charles (from Karl, “man”) Neumann (German: “new man”) and Lola Shanks (an archaic word for “legs”). There is also some corporate satire that I probably scoffed at at the time but that feels increasingly realistic, perhaps even too optimistic.

That Machine Man starts off funny makes the tragedy all the more pointed. I remember the agony of reading Charles’s voiceless LOLA I MISS YOU vividly. I’ve thought about Machine Man a lot since I read it over a decade ago, but never more often than in the last few years as more and more of the writing I grade is instantly recognizable as AI generated. The pity and horror of Charles’s descent fits just as well in the age of increasing AI dependence.

The intellect, I told my students, is one of the things that makes us human. If you’re religious, it is one of the most important parts of the Image of God from Genesis. And every time you outsource your judgment to AI instead of using it to think and learn and remember, you sacrifice part of your intellect. Inevitably, whether, as with Charles’s robotic legs, it seems easier or more powerful or you buy into the cutting-edge allure of the technology, you give up more and become dependent. Sooner or later, depending on your reasons for using AI in the first place, the dependence is so strong that you give up your intellect voluntarily, bit by bit, and replace it with a bot. By the time you realize you miss it, it may be too late.

And if you use AI to cheat, you only compound the intellectual damage you do to yourself with vice and dishonesty.

Barry’s Machine Man is an excellent and prophetic warning. I take a hard line on AI in my courses not because I’m a spoilsport or a Luddite—though I can certainly be both in other areas—but because I don’t want to see that happen to anyone. Making things easier, faster, or more efficient is not always an improvement, and certainly not with the things that make us human, our bodies and minds.

The pods bursting in air

Detail of A View of the Bombardment of Fort McHenry by John BOwer

I was returning from vacation when they dropped, but I’ve enjoyed catching up on The Rest is History’s series on national anthems so far. The episode on the “Deutschlandlied” was especially good, and though I enjoyed Holland and Sandbrook’s discussion of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I do have two notes I have to get out of my system. (I almost titled this post “Key notes.”)

For context, they do a good job with the poem’s origin as an account of the unsuccessful British naval bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. Eyewitness Francis Scott Key’s poem was published as a broadside ballad under the title “The Defence of Fort McHenry,” a title that might helpfully clue modern singers in to what’s going on in Key’s contorted verse but doesn’t catch the imagination quite like “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Holland and Sandbrook, however, turn the bulk of the episode into yet another discussion of American slavery due to the presence, in Key’s seldom-remembered third verse, of the lines “No refuge could save the hireling and slave, / From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.” This line has provoked its share of controversy (less, I’m guessing, than the words “the land of the free,” but that’s not our focus here), including the suggestion that the song “glorifies slavery.”

Sandbrook quotes a Key biographer who pointed out that the word hireling is a giveaway—the phrase “hireling and slave” refers to paid soldiers and mercenaries in the service of a tyrant. This is pretty obvious to anyone who knows the period and the importance of the citizen-soldier image to a newborn republic. In parsing the intent of the poet himself, Sandbrook notes that Key, a Marylander, was a slaveowner but also represented slaves in suits for freedom but also opposed abolitionism and also that the invading British in 1812 fielded a regiment of runaway slaves that Key may have been aware of. So he and Holland conclude that the contested line probably has at least some tangential but problematic connection to slavery-slavery, not simply the metaphorical slavery of British soldiers.

One thing neither host does is quote the entire third stanza:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,
[Refrain]

This is clarifying. Read in its entirety, Key’s poem is a narrative, albeit a convoluted one. Where the first two stanzas narrate the worry and aftermath of the unsuccessful bombardment, the third sees the British in retreat and their unwanted presence expunged. Every line supports this reading. The fourth, which is the only other stanza the average person might know, wraps up the story with a reflection and peroration.

Sandbrook and Holland concede entirely too much to the argument that the third stanza is about literal slavery, for what I think are two reasons:

First, they seriously underrate not only the importance of the citizen-soldier image to Americans but also the contempt with which paid soldiers were held at the time and the suspicion of Americans toward professional armies. Remember that people haven’t always admired soldiers. Read the Anti-Federalists and their hostility toward a paid standing army in the employ of the President stands out as one of their most important objections to the Constitution. And the myth of Hessians as bloodthirsty warriors-for-hire, a myth important enough and provocative enough to be explicitly invoked in the Declaration of Independence, persists to this day. That aspect of the Revolution is still taught with a whiff of disdain for people who would hire themselves out as mercenaries, a disdain that survives in popular culture (as in The Crossing, a mostly good TV movie about Washington at Trenton).

Second, the excessive focus on Key’s personal and political opposition to abolitionism in the second half of the episode leads Holland and Sandbrook into the trap of assuming—or at least talking as if—only two positions were available on the issue: support for slavery and abolitionism. This is hard to keep in mind and even harder to get students to understand, but especially in the early decades of the 19th century, before the fringe positions of radical, John Brown-style abolitionism and James Henry Hammond-style support for slavery came to dominate the debate, there were lots of intermediate, moderate positions. Many of the Founders favored gradualist plans of slow emancipation, as did figures from Key’s generation like Henry Clay—also a slaveowner—and Key supported the colonization movement, which Sandbrook mentions but pooh-poohs. That’s a mistake. Colonization enjoyed widespread favor despite proving unworkable and being written out of the story by the radical abolitionists valorized in the present. Key’s opposition to abolitionists was opposition to extremism and public disorder, not the end of slavery itself.

Again, a good and mostly enjoyable episode, but skewed in its coverage by a couple crucial points where Holland and Sandbrook’s usual nuance is missing. Perhaps, per Alan Jacobs, another anti-American blindspot? Or is it just that Brits will necessarily have to work harder to get into the would-be Roman republican mindset of this era?

The Magic Walking Stick

The fifth John Buchan June continues with a true outlier in Buchan’s vast and varied body of work. In the more than one hundred books published in his lifetime, Buchan wrote history, thrillers, historical fiction, poetry, and short stories—including weird fiction and supernatural horror—but only one children’s novel. That novel is 1932’s The Magic Walking Stick.

Thirteen-year old Bill is home from his boarding school and eager to go hunting. On the eventful day narrated in the first chapter, he sets off from his family’s country home with one of the gamekeepers. A storm is brewing up and they’re in a hurry, but Bill falls behind when he can’t find his walking stick. The gamekeeper and dogs leave without him and Bill, giving up on finding the stick, hurries to catch up.

In a wonderfully atmospheric opening, signs and portents appear suggesting something uncanny is about to happen, but Bill is too rushed to pay proper attention. He is stopped, however, by the sight of a old man sitting under a hornbeam. The old man is curiously dressed and has a strange, high-pitched voice, but offers to sell Bill a new walking stick from the bundle of sticks he carries. He offers a peculiar one—of a reddish wood with a white, crescent-shaped handle at the top. Bill accepts and pays a farthing.

When Bill catches up to the gamekeeper and tells him about the old man, they turn back to look but the man—hornbeam tree and all—is gone.

What Bill discovers that day is that the stick, if set in the ground and twirled while one wishes to be in another location, will transport him there instantly. He learns this by accident during their hunt: to his great delight when he lands in the middle of a flock of ducks and to his gratitude and relief when he is saved from a flash flood.

This begins the most fun and adventurous part of the story, as Bill experiments with the stick and discovers more of what it can do. He visits exotic places in the Pacific and Africa and plays a bold trick on his family’s obnoxious neighbors. He also learns more about the stick itself. By happenstance, his father is reading a medieval chronicle and relates one of those curious side-stories so many medieval scribes included without elaborating on the details we’d love to know now. Two ancient staves named Beauty and Bands had made their way to Charlemagne’s court. They could, if used properly, transport their owners anywhere, but each observed certain limits: one could be used only for serious work, the other for amusement. Misuse them and they would, somehow, disappear—as, indeed, they had later in the Middle Ages.

Bill decides his stick must be one of these but, not knowing which it is, disciplines his use. He doesn’t want to transport himself to the Solomon Islands on a lark only to be abandoned there by the stick. As in so many good stories of magic and fantasy, his exploration of what precisely he can do is a lot of the fun.

I won’t go into all of Bill’s adventures, but by the middle of the book he has learned how to honor the purposes of both sticks and work within their limits, first by saving an uncle who had disappeared why flying over the Sahara and finally, in the novel’s longest and most consequential series of adventures, by helping young Crown Prince Anatole, the heir to the throne of a troubled eastern European kingdom called Gracia, escape his anti-monarchical enemies and claim his throne.

This second half is pure Ruritanian romance and, as noted by Buchan biographer Andrew Lownie, thematically meshes with other Buchan novels of the time, especially the Dickson McCunn books, which entangle the retired Scottish grocer in the dynastic disputes and revolutionary upheavals of Evallonia. But where The House of the Four Winds, especially, falls apart as a novel, The Magic Walking Stick captures the lightness and swashbuckling high spirits of books like the original Ruritanian romance, The Prisoner of Zenda. Gracia’s political situation is not over-elaborated, Bill’s pluck as well as his friendship with Anatole make their escapades fun and engaging, and Buchan throws in enough twists and reversals to keep it suspenseful.

I think it’s safe to call The Magic Walking Stick a minor Buchan work. The two biographies I have, those of Lownie and Ursula Buchan, each mention the book only two or three times, and only Lownie explains anything about its story and reception. In trying to run down a copy for John Buchan June, even the cash-grab print-on-demand versions available on Amazon were few, and I ended up reading it in e-book form through our local library. A Buchan book being hard to find was a new one for me. (I’ll note that the entire thing is available from Project Gutenberg.)

This is too bad, because The Magic Walking Stick has the lightness of touch, the brisk pace, and the winsome young hero common to much classic children’s fantasy. The situations Bill gets himself into are varied and cleverly executed, and the many settings—including tropical places continents away, the moors and forests of Buchan’s beloved Scotland, and the fields and hills of southern England, which are clearly based on the Oxfordshire landscapes around Elsfield, where Buchan lived with his family at the time—are simply but beautifully described. Buchan makes Bill’s leaps from the thorny scrub of Africa back to the cold and damp of England palpable.

I also enjoyed the glimpse this book provides into the world of a well-to-do English boy of the early 1930s. Bill goes hunting and angling with the family keeper, knows his way around the servants’ quarters and back passages and can use them for mischief, and can visit London where, at the age of thirteen, he buys his friend a rifle for £25. A totally lost world. If Buchan’s original readers could thrill to imagining themselves traveling anywhere instantly, a modern reader of any age might just relish imagining having the kind of freedom Bill enjoys.

The Magic Walking Stick was a welcome surprise. As children’s fantasy, it is not of the same rank as The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia but, as both Tolkien and Lewis were fans of Buchan, it is difficult to imagine those books existing without books like this one. It is not deep, but it is fun and exciting, and still worth a read for both adults and kids.

Numbers come from somewhere

Yesterday on Substack, a young Orthodox Substacker whose work I usually appreciate, feeling perhaps a bit too eager to pause over and reconsider what felt like an epiphany, shared the following:

Caesar was declared divine for killing a million Gauls and enslaving a million more. In the pagan world, Hitler would have been numbered among the gods.

There are a lot of factual problems (not least that this is not why Caesar was divinized) and dubious assumptions built into this note, which is framed as an even more dubious hypothetical (“would have”) anyway, and it was handled pretty thoroughly by responses like this one.

But what proved unexpectedly helpful to me was its use of the one million figure. I’ve seen this statistic repeated over and over again by people trying to paint Caesar as a war criminal—a category that would have been nonsensical in the ancient world—or guilty of genocide, which is itself a loaded and dubious term. I’ve idly wondered where they’re getting this number, statistics from the ancient world being so totally, notoriously unreliable. This time I decided to look into it.

The claim that Caesar “kill[ed] a million Gauls and enslav[ed] a million more” ultimately comes from three passages in sources that post-date Caesar by a generation or more. Here are all three relevant portions in approximate chronological order:

• Valleius Paterculus (19 BC-AD 31), Roman History, II, 47: “During this period, including the years which immediately followed and those of which mention has already been made, more than four hundred thousand of the enemy were slain by Gaius Caesar and a greater number were taken prisoners.”

• Pliny the Elder (c. AD 23-79), Natural History, VII, 25: “In addition, too, to the victories gained by him in the civil wars, one million one hundred and ninety-two thousand men were slain by him in his battles. For my own part, however, I am not going to set it down as a subject for high renown, what was really an outrage committed upon mankind, even though he may have been acting under the strong influence of necessity; and, indeed, he himself confesses as much, in his omission to state the number of persons who perished by the sword in the civil wars.”

• Plutarch (c. AD 50-c. 120), Parallel Lives: Caesar, 15: “For although it was not full ten years that he waged war in Gaul, he took by storm more than eight hundred cities, subdued three hundred nations, and fought pitched battles at different times with three million men, of whom he slew one million in hand to hand fighting and took as many more prisoners.”

That’s it. Whatever sources these historians used, if any, are long since lost. Of these, the closest to Caesar’s own lifetime gives by far the lowest casualty figure. All of them are approximations, a point made especially clear when they write about prisoners.

I ran these sources down thanks to the bibliography in Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar: Life of a Colossus. After summarizing the statistics we get from the three sources above, Goldsworthy notes that:

It is hard to know the basis for any of these numbers. The figures given for enemy casualties in the Commentaries on the Gallic War do not add up to such a great total, while Caesar’s account of the Civil War often did not mention such things. It is questionable that numbers for losses amongst the Gaulish tribes were known with precision, although it may just have been possible to calculate from records the number of prisoners taken and sold into slavery. Probably these numbers are exaggerated, but still give some indication of the appalling human cost of Caesar’s victories.

Goldsworthy is a careful scholar and an expert military historian—an area often lacking in other classicists—and his Caesar is the book on this subject, as far as I’m concerned. His caution in accepting the one-million figure is warranted and well-explained.

There are other surviving figures that can indicate something of the devastation of the Gallic Wars; Goldsworthy notes in the same passage that the total tax Caesar levied on his entire province in 50 BC was lower than the funds required for a forum he built. But is that because of devastation or disparities in property values and population density? With factors like these unknown, the surviving numbers can only suggest. Absent our sources’ sources, we can only speculate about demographics and statistics, and even that speculation must be based on what the sources do tell us, however little we choose to trust them. (Here is a very skeptical take on the numbers in Caesar’s Commentaries specifically that should give you some sense of the scope of the problem; it’s not just about battle casualties.)

The obvious point of comparison—the one invoked by our Substacker in the first place—is the death toll of the Holocaust. Certain kinds of skeptics operating under ulterior motives will question the standard figure of six million Jews, but for the Holocaust we have mountains of data available—prewar and postwar population figures, logistical documentation, military and industrial reports, and the Nazis’ own plans and records. (Read Nikolaus Wachsmann’s excellent KL for a deep dive.) For Caesar’s Gaulish victims we have this handful of sources.

One might call ancient historians’ stats and figures “vibes-based.” But lest we feel too proud of ourselves, that’s essentially what that Substacker was doing, too. That note was designed as a zinger, not to provide an accurate picture of history. Which is too bad, because the Christianity-shaped chasm separating even secular modern ethics from Caesar’s is important to acknowledge.

Numbers come from somewhere. It is worth finding out where and, even more importantly, the limits of their usefulness—especially when they are consistently deployed as some kind of gotcha.