The two basic ways history is going wrong

Last year, when Joel Miller asked me to introduce the subject of historiography over on his Substack, I noted the existence of modern schools of history that “deny even the possibility of Herodotus’s work.” Against this was a countervailing anxiety about “revisionism,” which is undermines the discipline of historical understanding.

Last night I finished reading Robert Tracy McKenzie’s book The First Thanksgiving. McKenzie explains the historiography of that event and the broader context of the Pilgrims and post-Reformation Europe excellently, and it got me thinking about those two opposed errors in the approach to history again.

It seems to me there are two basic ways history goes wrong in the present:

The first, which I’ve railed against plenty of times here on the blog, stems from the hermeneutic of suspicion. This could be an ideological postmodernism that regards all historical sources as equally fictional “text,” feminist or postcolonialist or other intersectional assumptions about power and oppression, or—most commonly among the half-educated—a reflexive suspicion based on a cliche like “History is written by the winners.” In its elite form, with cultural cachet including glowing writeups in legacy print and endcap displays at Barnes & Noble, this is The 1619 Project; in its vulgar form, this is the TikTolk explainer that slices and dices to reveal to the viewer the dark forces behind great moments in history or, yet simpler, the Henry Ford or Napoleon attitude: history is “bunk,” history is “lies agreed upon.”

The second basic error is often a reaction to the first, and that’s resistance to any form of “revisionism.” Where the first error stemming from suspicion, whether in New York Times or neckbeard Redditor form, is leftist-coded, this is very much a conservative phenomenon. (It is also much more proportionally popular or vulgar, conservatives and their ilk having less purchase in elite taste-making institutions.) This error seeks to preserve the past in aspic, a complete, uncomplicated display piece. Questioning or correcting even the small details of an historical event as popularly understood—the Pilgrims probably did not eat turkey and certainly did not have bread at the first Thanksgiving—is received as a profanation. That’s because, as with the first error, understanding the past isn’t actually the point for those making the error.

Though seemingly opposites—and you’ll certainly see the people doing this sneering at the others, especially imaginary others—both approach history more as a symbolic extension of themselves, both have a simplifying instinct (“Well, we know what’s actually going on here is…” vs “Just teach the facts!”), and both need a usable past, an instrumental version of history oriented toward achieving some goal. That is, they’re presentists.

McKenzie’s Thanksgiving book is excellent. I hope to review it in full here soon, but as I haven’t finished anything I’ve started writing for over a week, don’t hold you breath—and definitely give thanks for me if I do.

Dorothy Sayers, Steven Pressfield, and soldier slang

Alan Jacobs has an interesting post today on how Dorothy Sayers and WH Auden, at roughly the same time, approach the same problem: “How might one portray, for a 20th-century audience, the life (or part of the life) of Jesus Christ in a manner that is artistically and religiously serious?” Both, albeit in different ways, strove to make the story fresh and immediate through the use of contemporary language.

Read Jacobs’s whole post for more, but this chunk of Sayers’s apologia for her technique in The Man Born to Be King stuck out to me:

The technique is to keep the ancient setting, and to give the modern equivalent of the contemporary speech and manners. . . . We may make a Roman officer address his squad with modern military words of command, since some similar verbal technique must always and everywhere have been used to start and turn and stop bodies of soldiery, or to inspect their kit and parade-order. We may make a military policeman or a tax-collector lard his speech with scraps of American slang; for the local speech must have been full of catch-phrases picked up from the foreign soldiers and merchants who swarmed along the great trade-routes of the Empire; and for these bits and pieces of vulgar Latin, bastard Greek, and Syriac dialects the language of Hollywood is the modern equivalent. 

The military examples are well-chosen for the precise reasons Sayers lays out. The jargon and slang of soldiers’ speech offers riches to be mined in archaeological layers: antiquated vocabulary surviving in specialized senses, foreign technical terminology, foreign borrowings from campaigns that may have occurred before the current generation was born, myriad protean shortenings, acronyms, and euphemisms, and a huge stock of inventive, poetic, and almost always highly vulgar slang.

Mastering it is probably impossible if you’ve never served. Time intensifies the challenge. Marines now and Marines during World War II both swore a lot and used a lot of slang, but the precise words used and the way they were used, the posture of the language, so to speak, are going to be different. The further back in time—and the language—that you go, the bigger the problem.

I find that, as with regional dialect, suggestion, hinting at a system of slang or way of speaking, works much better than overwhelming the reader with every term one can dig up. My biggest experiment in this regard so far is The Snipers, in which, to a greater extent even than Dark Full of Enemies, I tried to give my young, unrefined, casual, but hard-bitten GIs a distinct, period-authentic linguistic posture that would both evoke the period while being instantly understandable through use and context. I tried to do this minimalistically, with specifically selected lingo. I gather from a handful of readers that it worked.

No credit to me, necessarily. Just like you train your ear for realistic contemporary dialogue by listening and talking, you can do something similar with historical sources. I have a WWII slang dictionary, which can be helpful, but the best method is simply to read lots of lots of contemporaneous writing by people who were there—the less formal the better. I listed three books I found helpful in the case of The Snipers at the time I published it; there are plenty of others.

But I also had the advantage that my characters, regardless of the changes wrought over eighty years, were still speaking modern English. What if, like Sayers and Auden, you’re trying to suggest the distinctive patter not only of a foreign language, but one from 2000 years ago?

Someone who does this exceptionally well is Steven Pressfield. His novels The Afghan Campaign, which tells the story of part of Alexander’s conquests from the perspective of a squad of grunts, and the incomparable Gates of Fire both excel in this regard. Perhaps its Pressfield’s varied experience in lots of fields, including serving as a Marine, but his ancient Greek and Macedonian characters have a distinctive, contemporary-feeling, lived in argot that sells itself as authentic immediately. Some of it accurately translates ancient Greek, some of it is contemporary military equivalents to ancient concepts, some of it is pure invention. But it works exceptionally well.

I’ve wrestled with this problem of capturing the tone or texture of a dead language plenty of times and am trying to figure out a looser, livelier approach for a project I’m outlining now. I’ll probably return to some of Pressfield’s work for inspiration.

Plot holes in reality

By far the most tedious complaint about any given movie today is that it has “plot holes.” Technically, a plot hole is a contradiction or discrepancy in the actual storytelling that makes some part of the story logically impossible. These are not necessarily insurmountable—plenty of good movies have plot holes. But, in the way that the democratic spread of a technical concept always makes it stupider, the popular understanding of plot holes is that 1) they totally ruin entire movies and 2) consist of any unexplained detail in the story, no matter how minor.

This last point is key. Modern movie audiences both need everything spelled out for them and don’t pay attention, so even leaving out characters traveling between two points is sometimes called out as a plot hole. I wish I were making this up.

It occurred to me this morning while reading comments on the latest episode of an Unsolved Mysteries-type podcast that the plot hole has a close cousin in popular conspiracism—the “anomaly.”

Basic dictionary definitions of anomaly emphasize deviation from norms or expectations. Statisticians and scientists routinely talk about anomalies in their data, i.e, results they didn’t expect or that contradict the findings of similar research. But, as with plot hole, anomaly has a broader, looser, darker popular meaning. Read discussions of any recent event that has a conspiratorial angle on it and “anomalies” will pop up not as outlier data or unexpected details, but as trace elements of coverup, alteration or fabrication by Them, and evidence of hidden truths. This usage of anomaly is not coincidentally well suited to insinuation.

Both plot holes and anomalies may be minor unexplained details. The difference is that plot holes exist within the limited worlds conjured by storytelling or filmmaking and, unless the author invents an explanation as a patch, are simply mistakes or information too unimportant to bother about in the first place. An anomaly—as understood by the internet type scrubbing through footage of, say, the Charlie Kirk assassination one frame at a time—admits of explanation because it occurred in reality, limitless and limitlessly complicated. One only has to do good-faith research.

But, in actual practice, calling something an anomaly usually just creates permission to discard valid evidence because it isn’t perfect, to speculate and point fingers, or to venture entirely into a theory the conspiracist has already settled on. X is unexplained or unexpected, therefore A, B, and C.

Just an observation—perhaps more later. The aforementioned podcast episode was disappointingly weak for a generally good show, so this will probably be on my mind for a while. More than usual, anyway.

Addendum: An anomaly in written accounts or eyewitness testimony will usually be called a discrepancy, with almost identical results.

Against director’s cuts

Here’s a very good Substack essay that dares to say something I’ve thought for a long, long time: the theatrical cuts of The Lord of the Rings are better than the extended editions.

The author, Ryan Kunz, offers several good arguments in support of this unpopular opinion, not the least of which are the pacing problems introduced with the extra footage but largely absent from the theatrical cuts. This is what initially disappointed me about the extended editions twenty-odd years ago. In The Fellowship of the Ring’s climactic battle against the Uruk-hai, Howard Shore’s excellent music is chopped and stretched to accommodate additional action and orc blood, leaving seams in the soundtrack that I was never able to ignore. I actually resented the changes for breaking up the music. Fellowship, which is still my favorite and, I think, the best-crafted of the three movies, does not benefit much simply from being longer.

Few movies do. The movies that have actually been improved by a director’s cut are few and far between. Das Boot and Kingdom of Heaven come to mind.

But these are rare exceptions. Most often a director’s cut is a sign of bloat, of creative restlessness, or a studio cash grab. Sometimes a director in the grip of an obsessive spirit of experimentation simply won’t leave a movie alone, as in the multiple competing cuts of Blade Runner and Oliver Stone’s Alexander. Much more commonly, a director’s cut simply offers more movie without actually integrating the extra footage well—quantity over quality, the whole problem with the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings. Apocalypse Now: Redux and the director’s cut of Gettysburg, which has many of the same pacing faults I complained about in Fellowship, also fit the bill. The cheap, vulgar version of this is the spate of unrated DVDs from the early 2000s—especially in the horror genre—which were excuses for a volume of gore and nudity that would have precluded theatrical release.

And yet that spirit is not entirely absent from the Lord of the Rings extended editions. I remember when each came out, year after year, the first two were announced with a breathless promise that they would be not only longer but R-rated. This suggested a prurient interest in gore for its own sake that bothered me at the time. (Remember Peter Jackson’s background.) One almost sensed the disappointment as each extended edition, year after year, was slapped with the same PG-13 as the theatrical cuts.

In addition to bloat and pacing problems, the footage included in director’s cuts often consists of already inferior material. Most of the additional footage in Gettysburg is clunky talk, as when Pickett’s Charge is stopped cold for a monologue from General Trimble, complete with awkwardly looped score. Kunz also notes the cringey, anachronistic humor in The Two Towers. Théoden’s line in the same film, improvised to Jackson’s delight by Bernard Hill, that “No parent should have to bury their child” is similarly cringeworthy. A parent burying their child, not a father burying his? And in what world before our own would this be a reasonable expectation? The filmmakers betray their sentimentalism here. This is a scene that undermines its own sense of the tragic and the tone of the movie.

The ready availability of the director’s cut or extended edition, especially when it becomes expected, can also be a crutch, as I noted regarding Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. This was a disaster of a movie that Scott—notice that he’s popped up three times now—was already asserting would be improved by a longer cut before it even hit theatres.

There is also a fanboy dimension to all of this. As Substacker and fantasy author Eric Falden noted in his restack of Kunz’s essay, there is a certain maximalist “mimetic” quality to some fans’ devotion to the extended editions that feels purely performative. The way this is communicated is usually the giveaway: “Watching The Lord of the Rings again—extended editions, of course.”

That’s off-putting and sets off my anti-joining reflexes, but the artistic considerations have always been most important to me. Jackson, like any good filmmaker, worked really, really hard to make Fellowship, the trial balloon, the best movie it could possibly be, taking the fullest possible advantage of the medium—tight structure, fast-pacing, telling exactly as much story as it needed to in a surprisingly light and economical three hours. Its runaway success led to perceptible slackness in The Two Towers and The Return of the King, a slackness that turned to bloat by piling on additional footage for the extended DVDs.

This may have proven good fanservice, but it is not good filmmaking—or, lest we forget, adaptation. The Lord of the Rings excels as a novel. The movies should excel as movies.

Food for thought. I’m not against director’s cuts per se, of course, and I don’t hate The Lord of the Rings extended editions, but I think director’s cuts have to do much more to justify their existence—and fans’ devotion to them—than simply be longer.

Ruritanian notes

A few years ago I realized that, for the most part, I don’t actually like time-travel stories. I, who spend most of my waking life thinking about what it was like in the past! I finally decided it was because a lot of time-travel stories, under the influence of various kinds of nitpicking, get so fixated on the mechanics of time travel and its resulting theoretical problems like the grandfather paradox that actually visiting the past—traveling through time—ceases to be the point.

Something similar is at work in Ruritanian fiction. Ruritania is the imaginary Central European kingdom invented by Sir Anthony Hope for his great adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda. Hope’s story was so popular that it spawned a long-lasting subgenre of adventure fiction, the “Ruritanian romance.” Note the word romance carefully there. We’ll come back to that.

Last night I finished The Dark Frontier, Eric Ambler’s first novel, published in 1936 when he was 27. It’s at least partly a parody of British spy fiction at the time—including the work of John Buchan—and follows a mild-mannered English physicist who, having revisited some pulpy spy novels on a trip, gets into a car accident and wakes up thinking he’s a spy. He winds up involved in industrial espionage in the Eastern European republic of Ixania, a corrupt state that has just developed the first atomic weapons.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, but despite my love of Ambler I didn’t enjoy it very much. Even as I was reading the climactic action I was wondering why The Dark Frontier and Ixania weren’t working when Ambler’s Judgment on Deltchev and its unnamed, fictional Eastern European state did. Then I started thinking about all the Ruritanias I’ve visited over the last few years, and which ones I enjoyed and which ones I didn’t.

Here are several novels set in fictional countries that worked, and worked well (links will take you to reviews here on the blog):

• The Prisoner of Zenda, by Sir Anthony Hope (1894, Ruritania)

• Castle Gay, by John Buchan (1930, Evallonia)

• Black Mischief, by Evelyn Waugh (1932, Azania)

• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh (1938, Ishmaelia)

• Judgment on Deltchev, by Eric Ambler (1951, unnamed Eastern European country somewhere near Bulgaria)

Here are several that did not work:

• The House of the Four Winds, by John Buchan (1935, Evallonia)

• The Dark Frontier, by Eric Ambler (1936, Ixania)

And here’s an outlier, a novel that I think illustrates both the weaknesses of Ruritanias and how they’re best overcome:

• The Courts of the Morning, by John Buchan (1929, Olifa)

I’ll stipulate here that when I talk about Ruritanias, I mean fictional countries that nevertheless are meant to exist in our world, not a fantasy world or alternate universe. Much of what I lay out below could also be helpful in thinking about fantasy worlds—though I have no time for alternate universes, much less multiverses—but that isn’t the subject here.

In mulling these stories after finishing The Dark Frontier last night, I found something in common between those that actually work. Judgment on Deltchev, the most obvious point of comparison being a later Ambler novel, is an indictment of Soviet show trials and Western acquiescence to the Stalinist takeover of Eastern Europe, all acted out through one confused, put-upon reporter’s moral struggle with the situation he’s been placed in. Ambler doesn’t even name the country in question. In a quite different vein, Black Mischief and Scoop are savage, blistering satires of modern journalism and efforts to “modernize” African nations. Castle Gay, which takes place in Scotland but concerns the upheavals of the faraway Evallonia, is straightforwardly a story of moral transformation through hardship. And the ur-text of the genre, Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda, is an adventure testing a man’s honor, loyalty, physical courage, and moral strength. In all cases, you get just enough detail about the fictional country to make it believable, but the heart of the story are the characters’ moral and ethical conflicts.

In short, the best Ruritanian stories work because Ruritania is not the point—it’s a convenient setting where real-world locations won’t distract and that allows the outworking of moral or character drama and action. Ruritania is a device. The “romance” or adventure comes first. Tellingly, all of these novels work as genre stories: Deltchev is suspenseful, Black Mischief and Scoop are unbelievably funny, Castle Gay and Zenda are fun and exciting.

When Ruritanias don’t work it’s because the nitty-gritty details take over from the characters. Following the climax of The Dark Frontier we get several pages about the events of a peasant revolution in Ixania, including which leaders took control of which government ministries and how many army officers were placed under arrest, and I realized I just didn’t care. And I didn’t care because I was not sufficiently invested in the main characters—physicist-turned-master-spy Professor Barstow and his sidekick American reporter Carey. (The first half of the novel, which is more character-driven, is much more interesting.) Likewise with Buchan’s House of the Four Winds, which has isolated episodes of thrills but mostly staggers along through over-detailed explanations of Evallonia’s tottering interwar government and the uncertain role of its populist movements. Buchan is telling a similar story of moral formation, but that gets lost in the details.

To bring the fantasy genre back in, you might recognize some of what bedevils these novels as “world-building.” This is the danger of making the world you’re building more important than the story, or of having a story too weak to support the world you invent for it to take place in.

The Courts of the Morning, the Buchan novel I suggested straddles the good-bad divide in this genre, is an instructive counterexample. As noted even at the time it was published, it occasionally bogs down in explanations of the geography, industry, and economy of Olifa, the South American republic where it takes place. But it balances this with a strong, intricate plot of great moral weight and redemptive arcs for several characters, all of whom are vividly realized. These mostly work well, and mostly counteract the overwhelming effect of industrial sabotage and train schedules.

This is by no means the last word on such a topic—the novels that don’t work have problems beyond their setting, for instance, and there are plenty of other Ruritanias I haven’t traveled to—but consider this post notes toward a fuller understanding of how best to use a fictional country in a story.

Ambiguous bowdlerization

Last Friday I reviewed Game Without Rules, a great collection of spy stories by Michael Gilbert. Some spoilers ahead for the last story in the book, “A Prince of Abyssinia,” but also an important and vexing question.

Though appearing in most of the eleven stories in the book, Mr Calder’s beloved and intelligent Persian deerhound Rasselas has the spotlight in this story, as evidenced by the title: Rasselas being named after the title character in Dr Johnson’s novella The History of Rasselas: A Prince of Abyssinia.

The plot of this story concerns the return of a former Nazi agent who, captured and tortured by Mr Calder during World War II, wants revenge. In the climax, this agent captures and traps Mr Behrens to prevent him from intervening, then appears disguised at Mr Calder’s cottage. Rasselas senses his intentions and attacks but is killed, and the agent is killed in turn. After a moment in which Mr Calder and Mr Behrens grieve, here’s how the story ends:

Between them they dug a deep grave behind the woodpile, and laid the dog in it and filled it in, and patted the earth into a mound. It was a fine resting place, looking out southward over the feathery tops of the trees, across the Weald of Kent. A resting place for a prince.

Colonel Weinleben they buried later, with a good deal more haste and less ceremony, in the wood.

At least, that’s how my Herald Classics copy from Union Square & Co concluded. But in looking later at Mr Calder and Mr Behrens’s hodgepodge of a Wikipedia article—haphazardly put together even by Wikipedia’s standards—I saw that last paragraph quoted at greater length. I checked the passage on Wikipedia against the recent Penguin paperback published as part of their Modern Classics Crime and Espionage series. Here’s the original last paragraph:

Colonel Weinleben they buried later, with a good deal more haste and less ceremony, in the wood. He was the illegitimate son of a cobbler from Mainz and greatly inferior to the dog, both in birth and breeding.

Odd—not only that the American edition from Union Square omits the concluding sentence of the story—and the entire book!—but that it omits such a thematically important one, explicitly juxtaposing the noble dog with the duplicitous agent, a worthy animal against a scummy, murderous man.

I’m not sure how or why this happened. A copyediting mistake? Carelessness? Or censorship? If the latter, why this sentence? I call this “bowdlerization” in the title of this post but I can’t be sure preventing Gilbert from being mean about a fictional Nazi spy’s parentage is the reason the sentence disappeared. There is no note on the copyright page about changes to the text, no butt-covering editor’s note, nothing in Alex Segura’s introduction or on Union Square’s website—no notice whatsoever that the text is different from what Gilbert originally wrote.

If this is intentional, it would not be the first case of stealth editing, a problem that has already afflicted e-books, often without the knowledge or permission of even living authors.

It also bothers me that I cannot be sure that the cutting of the final sentence is the only such instance in the book. It will take a while to look through and find others, though there is, in fact, at least one other omission at the very beginning. The Union Square edition cuts Gilbert’s dedication:

To Jacques Barzun, of Columbia University, an amateur of detection

Is it significant that a tribute to a famously conservative-leaning historian was deleted? Without any kind of acknowledgment from the publisher that anything at all has been cut, who can know? But whether this was simply editorial sloppiness or intentional cutting—and whether there are more such cuts to the texts of the stories—it is a troubling incident. And here I was daring to be hopeful about publishers rejecting censorship.

I hope I’m wrong. The Penguin Modern Classics edition appears to be unexpurgated, at any rate, and this gives me an excuse to reread these excellent stories soon.

Game Without Rules

I can’t remember where I first saw Game Without Rules recommended, though I think it was John Wilson recommending it, but I’m glad I sought it out. I’ve read a lot of great espionage fiction over the last several years—Buchan, Ambler, Fleming, Le Carré, Deighton—and this collection of stories by Michael Gilbert offers some of the most intricately constructed, surprising, suspenseful, and plain enjoyable spy stories I’ve come across.

Published in 1967, Game Without Rules collects eleven short stories about Mr Calder and Mr Behrens, agents for a British intelligence service during the early-1960s height of the Cold War. Now retirement-age, they live near each other in a quaint Kentish village where Mr Behrens lives with his aunt and keeps bees and Mr Calder spends quiet days with Rasselas, his Persian deerhound. They have pints in the village and drop in on each other once a week to play backgammon. And just occasionally their handler, Mr Fortescue, a seemingly unremarkable bank manager, calls them up to London on a mission only their organization can complete.

The missions are classic spy stuff. In the first story they discover a corpse left over from World War II that hints at a deep-cover mole they must identify. Later, Mr Calder and Mr Behrens bring down a ring of drug and pornography smugglers. In another, they track the progress of a young agent along a Soviet exfiltration route through Europe, hoping to uncover its operations but risking detection and death. In another, the two take part in an urgent Christmas Eve assignment in Bonn—recovering equipment, helping a defector escape—with a snowstorm threatening from the sky and East German operatives moving in on the ground. In yet another, they provide security for the young boarding school student who has unexpectedly inherited the throne of his father’s unnamed Middle Eastern kingdom and who must be shielded from kidnappers and enemy agents seeking kompromat. In the final story, they confront a German agent with a decades-old grudge and no remaining reasons to hold back from revenge.

Double agents, enemy tech, infiltration, exfiltration, and assassination may seem familiar, but these stories are intricately plotted and written with effortless economy—some are rich enough for novels but run a tight twenty pages—and always surprising. They’re also witty. Humor—wordplay, wry observations, and frustrated sarcasm between the two—works throughout to dissolve tension and reveal character, not least that of Gilbert’s two aging operatives.

Mr Calder and Mr Behrens are now some of my favorite spy characters. Gilbert characterizes them minimally. One is short and bald, the other barrel-chested. It’s sometimes hard to remember which is which, but they have distinct personalities that make their missions together fun to read. Both are in their late 50s at at the youngest (a dossier at the beginning lists them as born in 1910 and 1913, but there is an ambiguous allusion in one story to Mr Calder having served in World War I) and have both spent decades in espionage, being recruited in the 1930s and serving in important intelligence and special operations roles during World War II, so they’re in their early 60s at least. They’re experienced, capable, skilled—in multiple languages, marksmanship, and practical tradecraft—and utterly dependable. Their friendship is revealed through their professionalism with each other rather than in spite of it.

Imagine the cozy bonhomie of Frog and Toad combined with the ruthlessness of Fleming’s Bond and the most hard-bitten pragmatism of Le Carré. “In this job,” Mr Behrens tells another agent after a high-stakes assignment that was nearly botched, “there is neither right nor wrong. Only expediency.” One senses this is bluff, as this expressed coldbloodedness is belied by his dedication to fighting Communism—the Soviets are, refreshingly, always presented as evil—and by his actions in other stories, especially when it comes to saving Mr Calder.

One realizes just how much one has come to feel for the pair in the penultimate story, in which Mr Fortescue worries that Mr Calder, who has started plotting the genealogy of Prometheus on a giant paper chart, is going mad—an unsurprising turn for someone who has lived so much of his life under cover. Dispatched to London to look for him, Mr Behrens takes Rasselas with him. Their genuine distress over Mr Calder is moving, and makes the revelation at the end of the story all the more surprising and satisfying.

I’ve looked back through Game Without Rules and, of the eleven stories, can’t select any of them as in any way weak or unsatisfying. This has been some of my most purely enjoyable reading in a while, especially in the spy genre. I read it aloud to my wife before bed over the last four weeks, and we both loved it. If you’re looking for some strong, well-crafted stories that combine mystery, thriller, and espionage with some subtle character work, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Jones on Scott on the Middle Ages

For the anniversary of Agincourt over the weekend I started reading Dan Jones’s Henry V, a biography released late last year. I’m enjoying it so far, though I am still skeptical of the stylistic decision to write the story in present tense. I may have thoughts about here if and when I review it.

I began reading with some wariness but I came around quickly when, in the introduction, Jones strongly, straightforwardly argued for Henry’s greatness, something he aims to prove in his book, and several chapters in, when Jones dropped this footnote about a high-profile incident of trial-by-combat in France just before Henry’s time:

This case was the basis for the 2021 film The Last Duel, which made the 1386 battle between Carrouges and Le Gris a vehicle for a ponderous meditation on the politics and ethics of twenty-first-century sexual abuse.

The Last Duel was a Ridley Scott movie, of course, which means that it was only ostensibly, superficially historical. And “ponderous” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Don’t take my word for it.

I love many of Scott’s movies but this presentism afflicts every one of his historical stories except, perhaps, his first feature, The Duellists, where the point is very much the look and technical perfection of the visuals. Style over substance may be Scott’s other besetting sin, but when he caves into that temptation there at least he’s not indulging in middlebrow navelgazing. I first wrote about this here with regard to Kingdom of Heaven way back in 2019 and—more recently and specifically on Scott’s cavalier disregard for history—before the release of the disastrous Napoleon. And of course I wrote about The Last Duel here. In the years since I saw it, my positive impressions have faded a great deal but my misgivings remain.

It’s just nice to see such succinct confirmation of the problem. Jones knows how to use a footnote.

The most helpful marginalia in my library

I mentioned this on a podcast once upon a time and recently told one of y’all about it in correspondence, but I want to jot it down for easy future reference in this commonplace book: the most helpful item of marginalia I’ve ever run across in a used book.

The book is JE Lendon’s Soldiers and Ghosts, an excellent history of war and combat in the Greek and Roman worlds. In an early chapter, Lendon writes of the heroic ethos of Homer’s Mycenaean characters and the role of competition therein:

But by far the most important arena for competition is the individual heroic fighting itself. It is in battle that a hero wins the admiration, the glory—the kleos, the kudos—that conveys high rank, honor, worth, or worthiness: timē. In the epic formula, battle is “where men win glory.”

Heroes compete in public performance in war and battle, performance which is constantly evaluated by their peers. A hero’s high birth and high deeds in the past create a favorable expectation in the eyes of observers, but the hero must uphold his reputation by the continual display of merit in action. Heroes compete in the display of Homeric virtues, aretai, which include strength, skill, physical courage, and fleetness of foot, but also cunning and wisdom and persuasiveness in council. The heroic epithets the poem applies to heroes reflect many of the Homeric excellences:

…the son of Tydeus, the spear-famed, and Odysseus,
and Ajax the swift-footed, and the brave son of Phyleus.

I got my copy of this book used. The previous owner never wrote his or her name on the flyleaf and made very little marking or underlining in the book at all, but the last sentence of that first paragraph has a long squiggle of felt-tip pen underneath it, and the entire second paragraph is in a big bold bracket with the following in the margin:

Reputation, pedigree, expectations based on past performance, peer evaluation—that scrawled Sports offered me a one-word epiphany. I remember reading Soldiers and Ghosts eleven years ago, in the breakroom during my weekend shifts at the sporting goods store where I was picking up extra work between my two adjunct jobs. I don’t know if I slowly looked up from the page with a wide-eyed look of realization but that’s how I remember it feeling.

The next time I taught Ancient Greece I used precisely this comparison. I still do. It makes the alien world of Homer legible to my students instantly and, with the benefit of that understanding, offers a good point of departure for talking about what was distinct about the world.

Soldiers and Ghosts is an excellent book and one I benefited greatly from, but I wouldn’t have benefited quite as much as I did without my copy’s previous owner. I’m still grateful. I don’t write in my books very often. I probably should. If I can offer even a fraction of the insight of this one note for some future reader, it’d prove worthwhile.

Himmelfarb on Butterfield

In “Does History Talk Sense?” an essay on philosopher Michael Oakeshott in The New History and the Old, Gertrude Himmelfarb pauses to compare Oakeshott to Herbert Butterfield and his classic of historiography The Whig Interpretation of History:

Published in 1931, . . . Butterfield’s little book has long been the most influential critique of the practical, present-minded, progressive, judgmental mode of history; indeed, its title is the accepted, shorthand description of that mode. Although Butterfield himself took the Whig historians as the classic exemplars of the Whig interpretation or “Whig fallacy,” the concept is now understood generically to apply to any present-minded or future-minded reading of the past. The fallacy, as he describes it, has two sources: the distortions that come from the processes of selection, abridgment, generalization, and interpretation that are inevitable in the writing of history; and the natural tendency to read the past in terms of the present—to select, abridge, generalize, and interpret in accord with the knowledge of hindsight and the predisposition of the historian.

That’s just about the best one-sentence summary of the main points of Butterfield’s book. Himmelfarb follows up with a couple of important caveats:

In both respects the fallacy pertains to the writing of history, not to the past itself. And while Butterfield adjures the historian to be wary of that fallacy and to avoid it as far as possible, he does not take it as vitiating the independence and integrity of the past. The evidence of the past, the historical record, is inadequate and inaccurate, and the historian’s use of it inevitably aggravates these flaws. Yet the past itself is real and objective, and it is this past that the historian tries to discover and reconstruct. If the ideal always eludes him, it never ceases to inspire him.

“The evidence of the past . . . is inadequate and inaccurate, and the historian’s use of it inevitably aggravates these flaws. Yet the past itself is real and objective, and it is this past that the historian tries to discover and reconstruct.”

“History” in the sense of historical records—documents, inscriptions, and the stuff we find in the dirt—is flawed, partial, and incomplete but, unlike the postmodernist, who takes imperfection as permission to regard all sources and reconstructions of the past as equally invalid fictions, Butterfield avoids the gravitational pull of this hermeneutic black hole by pointing out that even with all its flaws, history is reflective of real things that actually happened.

That they must be pieced together by scholars with their own limitations and that their work and our knowledge will inevitably be flawed in no way changes that. If anything, it increases the responsibility of the student of history. The past has its own “independence and integrity.” We do not construct it but attempt to seek, find, and recover it. Modern and postmodern theories—call them legion, for they are many—are in this way too puritanical. Failing to find perfection, they take the easy way out by writing off all of it.

A good summary by Himmelfarb an important part of The Whig Interpretation of History, a book I’ve seen badly misunderstood by those who—like this high-profile evangelical preacher and educator—grasp the first half of Butterfield’s insight but not the second. About time to reread it—and more of Himmelfarb’s essays.

(Oakeshott, Himmelfarb, Butterfield—what a great bunch of names!)