A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not quite a confession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes on Goldfinger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A problem with the bomb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death Comes as the End

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chesterton and the Pout-Pout Fish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pale Faulkner

Last week I finished reading Pale Fire, my first and long overdue Nabokov. It’s the best possible version of what John Gardner described as a skilled writer “jazzing around,” a novel constructed of the implications within the text—which, superficially, is a long commentary on a long poem—and the inferences of the reader. A story told entirely between the lines, so to speak.

There’s a lot going on in Pale Fire and I look forward to a future second reading, but one of the most poignant aspects of the book is the way the painful personal reflection in the poem—which concerns the poet John Shade’s family life, including the apparent suicide of his only daughter—is ignored by the poem’s editor and commentator, Charles Kinbote (or, perhaps, “Charles Kinbote”). Kinbote, in notes that inevitably drift into tangents, spins or misinterprets every possible line and word of Shade’s poem as allusions to the imaginary kingdom of Zembla and its exiled king, about which he tells verbose, self-indulgent stories that the reader gradually infers are about himself—another layer of the story.

As TV Tropes puts it: “While Pale Fire is about a lot of things, one of the biggest is literary commentators who can't help but use other people's work as mirrors onto their own neurotic obsessions.” Or, even better, Man Carrying Thing (in a genuinely brilliant video): “It’s a hilarious maneuver watching this commentator wrangle a sincere poem about art and grief into something about his favorite subject.”

Nabokov parodies this brilliantly, and so this was all fresh on my mind when, having finished Pale Fire Friday, I picked up a book that I last read probably twenty years ago: The Sound and the Fury.

I didn’t bother with the introduction to this edition, a nice new paperback that I got for my birthday, but after a few days I flipped through it and was struck by the academic ability to Kinbote basically anything— “maneuver[ing]” a book into a discussion of one’s “favorite subject” or “their own neurotic obsessions.” We’re all aware of the way kooks like Kinbote do this, but he’s just more obvious about it because he is a kook. The tendency is present in all academics, and tolerated when the “favorite subject” is some kind of fashionable ism.

Faulkner’s novel, apparently, is mostly about racism, the legacy of slavery and white supremacy, and the Lost Cause (that bugbear, which I’m less and less sure actually means anything), or at least so thoroughly infused with the above that it becomes functionally about them. This TED Ed video, since the latter apparently wasn’t enough, adds Absalom, Absalom!’s supposed concern about “the region’s intolerable* history of genocide” to the mix.

But is this really what The Sound and the Fury is “about”? I’ve written several times in recent years about the prevalence of theme over story. As annoying and distracting as that tendency is for genre fiction (not a distinction I pay much mind to, but bear with me), the way it dominates discussion of literary fiction is intolerable.

The Sound and the Fury is first and foremost a family drama. The alcoholic father and bedridden mother; the promiscuous daughter; the brothers—one jealous, another hardworking and embittered,** yet another mentally handicapped—the help, themselves by turns loyal, impatient, entitled, detached, but never deceived; the loss of patrimony and the entire bunch’s financial straits; the sense of decay and decrepitude and judgment hanging over everyone—this is what The Sound and the Fury is about. The characters themselves impotently fume or resign themselves and more than one talks of afflictions, of curses on the family. Quentin moons around Boston feeling the weight of his own sin, not the legacy of slavery. And it is hard to read the long opening section, told from Benjy’s perspective, and see how different people treat him when no one is looking, and think that Faulkner was animated or even cared about these big social themes. If you must have something more abstract and high-falutin’ than these, decline, disappointment, and guilt are still better options than those buzzword themes because they’re closer to the characters.

Not that the themes cited above and so beloved of critics and tastemakers—who want to shepherd us into the correct interpretation of Faulkner’s story just as surely as Benjy’s caretakers want to keep him off of the golf course—don’t matter at all. They are trappings, necessary component parts of the setting and its history. A story like The Sound and the Fury that did not have Jason Compson lashing out at the family’s black help in frustration would be unrealistic and lack an important means of revealing character, and the burden of defeat in the Civil War is an appropriate part of the atmosphere of Faulkner’s world. But these trappings are not the point, and making them the point is to turn Kinbote on Faulkner.

The difference is that, in Pale Fire, Kinbote is a lonely weirdo. Today the Kinbotes hold conferences.

* Thank goodness for that “intolerable,” otherwise I wouldn’t have known what to think!

** There is a strong sense of the elder brother in “The Prodigal Son” about Jason Compson—despite being the Compsons’ second son—that I haven’t really seen explored. Something for the future, perhaps.

All of us undomesticated writers

John Mahoney as W.P. Mayhew in Barton Fink (1991)

In Barton Fink, one of my favorite movies, put-upon playwright Fink has relocated from New York to LA to work “in pictures” as a screenwriter. He’s overawed and unsure of himself. Then, in a chance encounter in the bathroom of a swanky Hollywood restaurant, he meets WP Mayhew, an acclaimed Southern novelist of modernist gothic literary fiction (and a souse—a great souse) clearly modeled on Faulkner. They have this exchange:

Barton: I had no idea you were in Hollywood.

WP [producing a flask]: All of us undomesticated writers eventually make our way out here to the great salt lick. Must be why I always have such a powerful thirst.

Annoyingly, this line has been recorded on the internet—at IMDb, in the Google AI summary, and elsewhere—as “make our way out here to the Great Salt Lake.” This is annoying not only because it’s inaccurate, but because it makes nonsense of a nice bit of dialogue, one that demonstrates the Coens’ powers of specificity.

Mayhew could simply have said that he’s working for Hollywood because he needs the money. That’s the import of his line, and his personal problems will have an important role to play later in the movie. But phrasing it this way does several things at once:

First, it reveals character. Remember, this scene is his introduction. On the most superficial level, he is a Southerner. The self-deprecation, implying that he is in some way untamed, a sort of unapologetic apology, and the agricultural image sound right in his mouth. The Coens have always been minutely attentive to dialect and, paired with John Mahoney’s performance and accent, their writing here makes WP an instantly and utterly believable character.

Related—a subpoint of the above—WP’s ability to switch registers from high to low, which we get more of throughout the rest of the scene, is indicative of his education and literary talent. He’s capable of both rhetorical flight and the prosaic or crude. This duality will came back later in the movie.

Thematically, WP’s cattle metaphor plays into the movie’s already established satirical theme of the way Hollywood treats writers and, in WP’s specific case, reveals his dismissive attitude. He recognizes what Hollywood is doing, feels above this sort of thing, and can be wry about it. (And wry understatement of this kind is, in character terms, exactly right for this kind of Southerner.)

Finally, it introduces WP’s drunkenness, which, like Hollywood’s treatment of him, he shows he is aware of while treating it as a joke. The nice construction of the joke (salt… thirsty… ha!) also downplays just how bad his problem is. And like his treatment by the studio, he is content to do nothing about it.

That’s a lot going on in two sentences. (At least, if you understand and record them accurately.) Masterful work—not least because it seems so natural and effortless when you watch it—and something to strive for in one’s own writing.

I’ll also add that it’s funny—the whole scene is, including WP’s introduction barfing in a toilet stall while kneeling on a monogrammed hankie and Fink’s awkward, starstruck gushing once he realizes who he’s talking to. Unfortunately I can’t find anything more than a shot or two in trailers or video essays, so I’ll just have to encourage y’all to watch Barton Fink if you haven’t. Just be sure, as I advised in my Coen’s ranking post linked above, to watch it knowing as little about it as possible.

Scruton on nostalgia, the search for home

This week First Things published a fascinating long-form essay on the late Sir Roger Scruton’s youth and education. I’ve been reading it in batches and am not quite finished with it, but I’ve already returned to this passage—from a review of a Milan Kundera novel quoted about halfway through the essay—several times:

“What place is there, in the modern world, for the old experience of homecoming—the nostos evoked by Homer in the story of Odysseus? . . . Nostalgia, [Kundera] reminds us, is intrinsic to the human condition and afflicts us in many ways. But it is never more painful than when the home that is yearned for has vanished for ever and when that home was in any case rejected.”

“The central theme of Scruton’s work,” the author of the essay notes, “is the search for home.” Late in life one of his primary concerns was the self-loathing of the Western intelligentsia and political establishment, which he termed “oikophobia”—oikos being the Greek word for household or home. He warned of the impoverishment wrought by losing one’s home and, as the passage above indicates, knew well what that impoverishment would mean, especially for people who haven’t simply lost a home but deliberately rejected it.

And of course the nod to Homer and Odysseus is perfect. Perhaps an upshot of the imperfect Nolan Odyssey will be an awareness—or at least a gut feeling—among the public of what they’ve lost or are in danger of losing. One hopes.

The First Things essay does a good job showing how complicated “home” was for Scruton, and therefore, given how much he overcame in order to appreciate it, how necessary. The review is presumably this one of Kundera’s Ignorance, from November 2002. It’s paywalled but I’m going to keep trying to find the whole thing.

I’ve previously meditated on nostalgia—also with reference to Odysseus—here.

Theo of Golden

An elderly Portuguese man arrives in a picturesque Georgia college town. He is cultured, courteous, friendly but meditative, and clearly independently wealthy. Taken with the pencil portraits hanging in a coffee shop along the downtown thoroughfare, he buys them up in batches, finds the subjects one by one—janitors, accountants, musicians, a homeless woman—and gifts them to them, soliciting their life stories and changing a few lives along the way. And he has secrets, several of them.

The old man is Theo, the town, closely based on Columbus, is Golden, and his “bestowals” of the portraits to the people of the city are the story of Theo of Golden, the runaway word-of-mouth bestseller of the last year.

Theo of Golden the novel has, like some other famous books, become entangled with its publication history. Its author, Allen Levi, a musician and former judge from Georgia, self-published the book several years ago. Its reputation grew slowly thanks to the praise from readers who loved it and exponentially increasing word-of-mouth sales. I first heard of it last year at GJ Ford, our favorite local bookstore in St Simons Island, where the owner urged my wife to read it—and this was before it had been picked up by a traditional publisher. By the last time I checked a few weeks ago, it had sold millions of copies. Millions. This is one of the great self-publishing success stories, and I’m genuinely glad for Levi.

And I’m also glad to say it’s enjoyable. Theo is a well-drawn character and the story’s hook, the “bestowals” of local artist Asher Glissen’s portraits, is intriguing. Levi evokes the thriving New South town, with its shaded riverwalk, tree-lined main street, and seasonal rhythms built around tourism and college semesters with precision and affection. The story, with its emphasis on art, loss, family, faith, and redemption, aims to uplift and inspire.

That surely accounts for the book’s success. In a field crowded with trauma and grievance and general self-absorption, a book about living for others and bringing beauty into darkness has met a need the traditional publishers didn’t even know was there.

As soon as I finished reading it to my wife last week I set the book aside and, even through the drowsiness our bedtime reading is supposed to ease us into, we mulled over what we thought of it for probably twenty minutes. I’m thrilled for Levi’s success, did not mind reading it, and recognize why people love it, but it’s good, not great. Theo of Golden—enjoyable, uplifting, gentle to a fault—is fine. What my wife and I were trying to figure out is exactly why that is.

Whatever criticisms I have come from liking the book and seeing how it could have been better, not hating it. But even before finishing the book I saw a few savage negative reviews, perhaps the beginning of the kind of backlash all such successes provoke. I want to start with those, because I found the most negative reviews the most wrongheaded and oblivious to what keeps Theo of Golden from greatness.

First, Theo of Golden is not terribly written. I was prepared for that, self-publishing being what it is, but Levi’s straightforward, mostly unadorned style is perfectly clear and readable and better than plenty of traditionally published books I’ve read. There are none of the usual tells for amateur fiction: no bad strings of adverbs, clunky overreliance on participle phrases, embarrassing dialogue tags, or spatially incomprehensible descriptions of settings. Even the rare passages that strain themselves reaching toward lyricism fail not out of tastelessness but in overreach. He’s not Evelyn Waugh, but no one was asking him to be.

Then there’s hyperbole. Theo of Golden is not—cannot be—the worst book anyone has read in twenty years. (This writer also thinks there’s only one black character in Theo of Golden. I’m not sure why that would be a mark against it in the first place, but while Levi isn’t explicit about most of the characters’ races there are at least five black characters, including two of the core group that grows up around Theo. Pay attention, even to books you hate.)

Then there are matters of taste. I’ve seen reviews calling it predictable, its final revelations about Theo and his mission obvious. I didn’t find it so, though my wife guessed Theo’s identity about a quarter of the way through. Others objected to the novel’s Christian themes, but that is not an artistic critique and changing or omitting those themes would have gutted the book.

I hate to see a book criticized for bad reasons—or even praised for the wrong reasons—so I decided to review Theo of Golden out of a desire to defend it. But I also wanted to sort out exactly what I think doesn’t work in the book. Potential spoilers ahead.

The fairest criticisms I’ve seen are that Theo of Golden’s characters are too thin and the whole book is too sentimental. These two problems are linked, but one is more serious than the other.

I want to point out that not all of the characters are thin or flat. A number of the major characters who become Theo’s friends are well-realized, the best—or at least my favorite—being Tony, the bitter old Vietnam vet who owns the downtown bookstore. A wry skeptic, his talks with Theo deepen realistically from banter to heart-to-heart vulnerability, and he follows a subtle but believable arc prompted by their friendship. A late chapter in which Theo and Tony share a bottle of port may be the best in the book.

Other characters are less rounded, but that’s normal. Novels concentrate on a central set of major characters with side characters of diminishing importance and complexity. In all his cast, Levi only gives us one bad character: Pearce, Asher Glissen’s younger brother and the father of a young professional who receives one of Theo’s first gifts. Pearce is a caricature of a selfish businessman—loud, rude, constantly glued to his phone. He stands out among Levi’s cast because the others, if not complex, are believable and recognizable types.

No, Theo of Golden’s most serious fault is its sentimentalism. I don’t mind the sentimental myself, Lord knows, but sentimentalism weakens this novel in two interrelated ways.

First, by trying too hard to tug at the reader’s heartstrings. Another of Theo’s early bestowals goes to Kendrick. See if you can feel the point at which his situation starts to feel manipulative: Kendrick is a janitor at the local university and a young single father, his wife having been killed in a car accident that also injured their daughter, a faultless angel who is only ever sweet and who may be permanently disabled if she cannot get a necessary surgery soon. In case that’s not enough, we learn later that the car accident was caused by an illegal immigrant, and Kendrick, who must testify at the man’s sentencing, asks Theo for advice. It turns out the immigrant was only in Georgia illegally because his daughter in the US was in the hospital with cancer. Kendrick sees himself in the man and asks the judge for leniency.

Or consider Ellen, the middle aged homeless woman Theo befriends. She has a non-specific mental problem, sleeps under a bridge, and obsesses over her bicycle, which she refuses to let out of her sight, even in church. She is also a bookworm and—almost unconsciously—peppers her conversation with quotations and literary namedrops. Theo learns that, decades before, she had given birth in South Carolina and had her baby taken away by the state. You can probably guess what the end of her arc is.

Both of these situations present a lot of dramatic potential, only some of which is followed through on. In Kendrick’s case, the sentimentalism extends not only to himself but to the illegal immigrant who killed his wife. Of course Kendrick will forgive him. This is supposed to be a moment of grace, but Levi makes the man so sympathetic and pitiful that it becomes easy for Kendrick to forgive him. Imagine if, instead of an illegal immigrant with a cancer-stricken daughter, a local white trash boy high on meth had caused the accident. If grace means anything, it means forgiving the undeserving, but that’s not the situation Theo of Golden invites us into.

Similarly, Ellen is only ever a lovable eccentric. Her bicycle and her quotations and her sudden lurches in conversational topic are the severest symptoms of her illness. Levi gives her none of the off-putting, difficult, even dangerous qualities of real homeless and mentally ill people; she is simply there to be funny and affecting and to jerk tears with her backstory.

On a number of occasions I called this “overegging the pudding” or “laying it on too thick,” and this is nowhere more obvious than in the novel’s Calvary moment. (Again, spoiler warning.) Theo, awake with insomnia after a triumphant concert by the young cellist he has taken under his wing, hears Ellen being attacked outside by drunk college students. They steal her kooky hat and try to throw her bicycle in the fountain where Theo has carried out his bestowals. The cellist comes to the rescue, but the college boys beat him, smash his cello, and break his hand. Theo, distraught, trying to get their attention from the balcony of his apartment, falls to his death.

It is both moving and simply too much. Just as Kendrick’s situation would be more compelling if it were harder for him to forgive—a scenario we’d all be more likely to encounter—Ellen’s victimization would be more moving if she had proven harder to love, if Theo and everyone else had had to struggle more to bring her into their lives, and if Simone the cellist weren’t so carefully, icily calculated a victim, too.

That’s my biggest problem with Theo of Golden. I’ve dwelt on these subtle but fundamental flaws, but it is a good read and worthy of its success. I do not begrudge anyone their enjoyment of it the way I would a book by Dan Brown or the latest scummy romantasy, and I’ll certainly read the next book Levi writes. This is a smooth and easy read, vividly imagined, peopled with mostly believable and recognizable characters, emotionally involving, and, as Nadya Williams argues here, beautifully dramatizes the way mere mortals can help each other grow in saintliness simply by loving God and each other. But, as I wrote above, it’s gentle to a fault, and if it were to challenge a bit more than it endears, it would make its point much more powerfully.