Bad Southern accents and bad history

Earlier this week, as I wrapped up listening to the recent Rest is History series on the first and second iterations of the Ku Klux Klan, I joked on Substack that Tom Holland’s Southern accent “would count as a hate crime in many jurisdictions.”

That was just a couple days ago, so when Alan Jacobs posted yesterday that the accents and, finally, a remark about American cheese in the new samurai series—which I haven’t even started yet—had driven him to the nuclear option of canceling his Club membership and deleting the show, I was surprised by the coincidence and actually a little shocked that he had gone so far.

I am not, however, surprised by the annoyance. I was joking about Tom’s Southern accent and realize that it’s done at least partly in jest, but it is genuinely painful to listen to. And Jacobs points at a deeper problem evinced by Tom and Dominic’s resort to this kind of parody, what he describes as

a low-level but constant sniping and sneering at virtually every element of American culture. For instance: recently, in a series of episodes on the Ku Klux Klan, Tom decided that the Southern accent he wanted to imitate, in reading Klan speeches or newspaper editorials, was that of Cletus from The Simpsons, AKA Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. A more pompous diction would’ve been more appropriate, but Tom wasn’t interested in reinforcing the point that these people were evil (which they were); instead he wanted to indicate that they were stupid (which, alas, they were not). I’m a Southerner, I’m used to this sort of attitude—it’s almost universal among non-Southerners, and especially common among Brits—but when it goes on and on and on, it gets wearisome.

Also worth noting: the second Klan may have started at Stone Mountain but was a huge Midwestern phenomenon. Tom and Dominic acknowledge this several times, but guess what kind of dialect they (attempt to) use for quotations? Per Drive-By Truckers, “it’s always a little more convenient to play [racism] with a Southern accent.”

Jacobs’s primary complaint is “the compulsive mocking” of American culture on the show. I don’t feel much of a need to stick up for American culture because “American culture” is so vast and I’m at heart a provincial, with a much narrower window of loyalties than anything “American.” You have to get more specific and intrude on my patch to rile me. But of course, being a Southerner with a chip on his shoulder, I have lots of opportunities to get riled.

I also haven’t had quite the experience Jacobs has with British attitudes toward the South. My interactions have been msotly positive. I’ve met Brits who love the South—or at least find it endearing—and even some who have noted the South’s vestigial affinities with the mother country: the fossil Englishness preserved in our dialect and culture. But there are exceptions that match Jacobs’s observations. One British literary guy I follow on Substack spent a good bit of a trip to Virginia expressing dismay every time he saw a house flying a Confederate Battle Flag. He never showed any curiosity about what these people meant by flying the flag and even wrote sneering rejoinders to commenters who suggested he may be overreacting.

What both British Lit Guy and Tom and Dominic show in these examples is an unrealized and therefore unexamined incuriosity. The easy mockery of the accents and the finger-wagging tourism reveal a blind spot; you can’t learn what you think you already know. That’s a flaw with serious repercussions for any critic or historian, and the episodes in which Tom and Dominic give in to the inclination to mock tend to be those with the least insight into whomever they judge the villain. Even the Klan deserves to be understood—dismissing or misapprehending groups like them is dangerous and results in bad history.

That’s the truly annoying aspect of all of this. As Tom and Dominic might say, they’ve let themselves down.

Read Jacob’s entire post. He has many more complaints, some of which I agree with, including the perceptible difference between topics in which Tom and Dominic are intellectually engaged and those in which they aren’t, though I am nowhere near ready to go as far as he did in remedying what to me are still minor annoyances. But he’s absolutely right that putting up with a lifetime of mockery of your home—whether you construe that as America or the South—gets old.

The Raven: The Classic Poem

A representative two-page spread from The Raven as illustrated by Chloe bristol

Opportunities to share Edgar Allan Poe, one of my favorite authors, with my kids are vanishingly rare. Even good modern works meant to make his stories accessible to new readers, like graphic novelist Gareth Hinds’s excellent collection of Poe stories and poems, skew creepier and darker than necessary. As a result, I’ve told my kids a lot about Poe, summarized some of his best stories for them, and we’ve listened to audio performances of some of his work, but I haven’t found much visual media that can introduce Poe’s work to them without inducing nightmares.

I was excited, then, to discover this hardback picture book of “The Raven” at our used book store over the weekend. The Raven: The Classic Poem is a single Poe work given a thorough artistic treatment. Beginning with the poem’s speaker—depicted as Poe himself—drowsing in his armchair, the pictures follow the events stanza by stanza as he first wakes to a tapping, investigates its possible source, and finally admits the raven, which flits across the study to perch on the bust of Pallas. First the name “Lenore,” her shadow, and finally her ghostly form emerge with the narrator’s ruminations, and the pictures leave the narrator at the center of a giant, abstracted black shadow with one burning red eye.

This sounds simple and straightforward, but illustrator Chloe Bristol’s pictures imbue the familiar refrains of the poem with great weight and establish a wonderfully spooky and mournful mood. I can’t stress enough the perfect balance she strikes: atmospheric without being scary, gothic without veering into self-parody, faithful to the words of the poem while still being inventive and surprising.

I found Bristol’s artwork so good and such a support to Poe’s own words that I bought a copy on impulse. I read it aloud to my three oldest that night, and they were suitably engrossed in the pictures and chilled by the poem without finding it disturbing. I enjoyed reading it—and appreciating, for the first time in a good while, what a good poem “The Raven” is for performance—and together we enjoyed talking about it. Bristol notes on her website that the project’s stated aim was to make the poem “digestible” for younger audiences. She did exactly that.

The book ends with a one-paragraph biographical sketch of Poe that emphasizes the role of “The Raven” in his late-career fame. This is the one place I wish the book included more detail, but that’s a niggle. There’s a note explaining or clarifying some of what’s going on in the poem that should be helpful for parents, educators, or precocious kids picking up the book. It also includes some insight into Bristol’s approach to the illustrations, some of which are based on the rooms at Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia, one of the handful of surviving Poe houses.

But the main draw is Poe’s poem, which Bristol’s pictures beautifully showcase. Whether you love Poe and want to introduce him to your kids with an appropriate amount of spookiness or you simply enjoy good poetry and good picture books, The Raven: The Classic Poem is ideal for both purposes and well worth seeking out. I’m certainly glad I stumbled across it.

Something special and small

I mentioned last month that I’ve been doing a leisurely reread of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. I finished it last night which, being Maundy Thursday, the evening before Good Friday, turned out to be perfect timing.

I did a blog event I called Chestertober a couple years ago but wasn’t able to follow it up last fall. I’m considering reviving it this year. If I can manage it, Orthodoxy will be one of the major books I mean to review. It was my introduction to Chesterton twenty years ago—I recall reading it during the summer of what must have been 2006—and proved genuinely revelatory. It’s frequently quoted for a reason. I could pull out a dozen passages per chapter, minimum, and comment on them at length and still find more to consider and work through on another reading.

For now, as part of observing and thinking about Good Friday, here are two that leapt out at me in the final chapter last night.

First, near the end, as Chesterton ties together the book’s arguments, he narrows his focus briefly from broad philosophical and cultural conflicts to the mischaracterization of Christianity as “something weak and diseased” and the character of Christ himself, who has often been portrayed as “a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly”:

“The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque”

Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god—and always like a god. . . . The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence.

A brilliantly concise summary of the moralistic “be nice” Jesus manufactured out of a variety of ulterior motives and the man we actually encounter in the Gospels. The contrast is perhaps most striking if one returns to the Gospels after several years, or reads them straight through in a reader’s Bible—a topic I intend to write about one of these days—rather than parceling them out in discrete episodes or tidied up storybook versions. And the “extraordinary” quality of Christ is nowhere more apparent than in the events of Holy Week.

Second, and most personally moving to me, was the book’s penultimate paragraph. Having considered the way paganism, for all its strengths and admirable qualities, still left men in despair, the state to which Christianity’s critics threaten to return the world, Chesterton closes Orthodoxy with his most important point:

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. . . . Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small.

I did not recall this passage from previous readings; it had not stuck out to me or stuck with me. That changed this time.

“Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.”

I’ve mentioned before the struggle that this winter and spring have been, of the insomnia and depression and paranoia and exhaustion. The melancholy of January grew so deep during our back-to-back weekends of ice and snow that I picked up Orthodoxy precisely because of its early passages on madness. Chesterton has a reputation for rescuing diseased minds from the brink and, though whatever I was going through wasn’t that severe, I reckoned I needed it. And it worked.

But to begin with madness—reaching for an old favorite as a comfort at a time when I felt like I was losing my mind—and to end with the above passage… that felt truly providential. Reading last night, I recognized myself from two months ago. Grief, melancholy, pessimism—these are my natural bent anyway but had somehow become “the fundamental thing.” Something had gone badly wrong. But far from mere description, this passage is also prescriptive. It can feel like this state lasts forever, but thanks to Christ these will only be temporary.

Already they have been lifting. Good Friday is a chance to remember that they will, if not now, be lifted forever. They’ve already been conquered, reduced to “something special and small.”

I hope this is an encouragement to y’all as it has been to me. If you haven’t read Orthodoxy, do so. I first picked it up because I had learned, somewhere, somehow, of Chesterton’s influence on CS Lewis. But I’ve read and reread it over the years on its own merits. Every time I enjoy my favorite parts again, and every time some part I had never noticed before touches something in me that I never knew needed help.

The art (and danger) of inference

I’m currently reading David Woodman’s new book The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom. It’s excellent so far, despite Woodman having to do a significant amount of the endemic hazard of Anglo-Saxon history: parsing, in sometimes excruciating detail, the available sources, squeezing them for every drop of potentially helpful information. This is always a laborious bit of reading, but where some books make this a chore, Woodman keeps it moving and interesting.

One of the difficulties of reconstructing the past in a period like Anglo-Saxon England is the incompleteness of the literary record. The historian must place great weight on documents originally intended for specific limited purposes, like royal writs (letters to members of local courts), diplomas (short records of land grants made by the king), and law codes. Early in the book, Woodman points out that in the typical diploma

[t]hose who were present at the meetings of the royal assemblies at which various grants of land were made are listed as witnesses at the end . . . These lists are set out hierarchically, beginning with the name of the king himself, from the form of whose title (known as his ‘royal style’) various kinds of important information can be gleaned; then there follow, most often, the names of the archbishops of Canterbury and York, then the bishops of the kingdom, then the ealdormen and thegns (both types of royal officials). Because of this hierarchical structure, and because the diplomas themselves are dated, they provide crucial detail for the realpolitik of tenth-century England, of the peaks and troughs of individuals’ careers.

It is possible to note, for example, that a particular family member may be listed higher than another in a witness list in one year with their positions reversed later—or one of them disappearing entirely. This suggests—one can infer—a change of status or favor. Æthelstan himself shifted up and down in his father Edward’s lists, and Woodman gives attention to a bishop from the north who, judging from his presence in such lists and the broader political situation at the time, must have gone over to supporting northern rivals to Æthelstan for a time.

This kind of thing is not stated outright, of course. Woodman points out that, as important as Æthelstan’s reign is, there is no good contemporary narrative source for it. Much must be reconstructed from later sources—like William of Malmesbury, writing after the Conquest—or the spotty annual narrative of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, or simply inferred from documents like these.

You can learn a lot this way. Inference is a powerful tool, especially with a large body of such legal texts to work from. But it also has dangers. Here’s Woodman later, first recapitulating the potential use of diplomas before exploring their dangers:

From the lists of attendees included in royal diplomas . . . quite a lot of detail can be reconstructed about the composition of the royal assembly, not least the peaks and troughs of individuals’ careers, since the lists are set out hierarchically according to status. But these lists require a certain circumspection. Most of the diplomas in question survive only in later copies, made long after the original grant of land had been issued. The copyists responsible could make mistakes—for example, in the spelling of names, in the order in which the names should have been listed, or in the omission of names that should have been recorded. We should also be aware that there may have been individuals present who went unrecorded.

One might also add: individuals who were not present but were still important.

The modern historian has a wealth of tools at his disposal, but his most important may be judgment. He can only infer so much from the composition of such a document, and he should not press his inferences further than the documentary evidence will allow. Less prudent historians have read entire imaginary histories into such sources. Woodman avoids that, which is one of the things that has, so far, made The First King of England a valuable read.

A good reminder of why, despite all the technical tools available now, history is an art, not a science.

Heir to the Empire

Well, here was a pleasant surprise. Though I’ve been aware of the legion of Star Wars novels that have been available since I was in elementary school, I’ve never read any, suspecting that their quality would lie somewhere between a Wookieepedia article and the usual movie tie-in novel. But over the years Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy has gotten consistent enough praise for me to notice, and the strong recommendations of several of y’all whose taste I trust finally convinced me to check out the first volume, Heir to the Empire.

This novel picks up a few years after the original film trilogy ended. Han Solo and Princess Leia have married and are expecting twins. Leia, slowly undergoing her own Jedi training under Luke, learns that the twins will be especially strong with the Force. Luke begins the story troubled by the division with the Rebellion—now billing itself as the New Republic—especially internal factions attempting to assert themselves against the Rebellion’s more established leaders. Like many rebellions, success may prove to be the worst thing that could happen to it.

This vulnerability of the New Republic, struggling for both legitimacy and unified purpose as the Empire crumbles, arises as the Empire calls up a new leader to deal with the threat to its hegemony. Grand Admiral Thrawn, a blue-skinned, red-eyed being who has spent years campaigning in imperial backwaters, replaces Darth Vader. Thrawn views his predecessor as an unhinged mystic who catastrophically failed the Empire. He approaches defeating the New Republic with a combination of icy rationality and art. A connoisseur of painting and sculpture from worlds all over the Galaxy, Thrawn believes that understanding an opponent’s cultural background is as important in defeating them as pure logistics.

Not that the logistics don’t matter. The destruction of the second Death Star has created a manpower shortage across the Empire. Thrawn’s recruits are young and inexperienced, their training rushed and their discipline and protocol incomplete at best. Further, there is a shipping shortage across the Galaxy.

It’s this logistical problem that slowly becomes the center of the plot and draws the different characters together, as the New Republic dispatches Han to negotiate hiring smugglers as ad hoc transport—including some familiar characters from Han’s past—and Thrawn lays plans of his own for commandeering the vessels the Empire needs.

The one important plot element I haven’t mentioned here is the wild card: Mara Jade, a woman employed by one of the crime lords Han approaches about working for the New Republic. Mara is cagey about her past even with her boss, has an impressive breadth of technical skills she picked up who knows where, is familiar with the Force and lightsabers, and yearns to kill Luke Skywalker. But the less revealed about her, her background, and her quest to confront and kill Luke the better.

There’s much more going on in the story than even the above may suggest—including a trip to the Wookiee home world, a rogue leftover Jedi with a taste for mind control, and a race of brutal assassins Thrawn puts on the scent of Leia and her twins—and the richness with which Zahn evokes the world of the original trilogy is one of its pleasures. Heir to the Empire gives us a situation that believably continues that seen at the end of Return of the Jedi and introduces new complexity and depth to both the Rebellion and the Empire. But best of all, it provides an excellent villain. Thrawn is coolheaded, canny, skilled in both long-term strategy and tactical improvisation, and his insistence that culture matters combines menacingly with a typical Imperial willingness to use force. He proves a genuine threat to both the New Republic and to the familiar characters we care about.

But Zahn also manages to do what Disney failed at twenty years on: using the originals and their world to drive off in new directions that aren’t mere pastiche. Everything in Heir to the Empire feels truer to the original films and—perhaps even more importantly—plausible and true to real life than anything in the Disney trilogy. As I’ve noted elsewhere, it’s no wonder fans of books like this are ticked off with Disney.

But if Heir to the Empire stands out in comparison with something like The Last Jedi, that’s because it was already good in its own right. The quality of the writing itself is middling, improving over the course of the novel, but the plotting, characterization, and thoroughness of the world imagined by Zahn is outstanding. Heir to the Empire is solid genre fiction, which I’ve argued before no one should turn up their nose at, and enjoyable from beginning to end. I look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby as Reed Richards and Sue Storm in The Fantastic Four: First Steps

I recently watched The Fantastic Four: First Steps with the kids. It was okay—enjoyable without thrills, funny without big laughs, suspenseful without surprises. But it was also inoffensive, had a creative retro-futuristic look that took me back to The Incredibles, and had one compelling subplot that held the entire movie together and made it just a bit more than the sum of its parts. This won’t be a proper review of the entire movie, but a recommendation on the basis of its straight-down-the-middle quality and this one surprising aspect of the story.

The movie begins with husband and wife Reed Richards/Mr Fantastic and Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman discovering that, after two years of trying without success, they are finally expecting a baby. This might seem an odd place for a superhero movie to start, but the pregnancy and baby subplot—which I heard a lot about when the movie came out—turns out to be central to the story. The film’s villain, Galactus, who means to devour the Earth, offers to spare the planet in exchange for the Richards’s unborn child. They refuse. The public turns on the Fantastic Four.

This was a refreshing surprise for two reasons:

First, the baby, even before birth, is presented unquestioningly as living and important. The most moving scene in the film comes when Reed wants to scan the baby in utero and Sue, in an attempt to show that his science is distracting him from the truth of the situation, uses her powers of invisibility to reveal their son in her stomach. He squirms, kicks, and responds to them—all stuff I’ve seen on ultrasound monitors many times, that my wife has felt many more. In a culture that persists in dehumanizing the unborn—for pernicious, devouring reasons of its own—this lingering meditation on their life and value stunned me.

Second, the film explicitly positions the Richards’s refusal to give up their baby against a utilitarian, consequentialist ethic. Saying no to Galactus means he will eat the Earth. The fickle public, who adore the Four one moment and revile them the next, want to know why the fate of one baby should doom the entire planet. This is the Caiaphas argument: it is more expedient for one to die than the whole nation.

Reed and Sue steadfastly refuse to give in. It is wrong for parents to sacrifice the life of the child gifted to them. They won’t give up on saving the world, but that route—the path of least resistance, of giving in to the pressure of numbers and a short-term vision of salvation—is closed to them. I can’t think of the last time a film made such a deontological move, presenting something as morally wrong under any circumstances. Their refusal in the face of public pressure and the threat of Galactus makes them more heroic.

The latter aspect of the film not only drives the events of the climax, it reinforces the message of the former. If Sue and Reed, in their joy at the news, their preparation for the baby’s arrival, and their refusal to give him up show that life is too precious to bargain, the climactic action, in which all four demonstrate their willingness to die for the innocent, shows us that they mean it. Life is valuable. How valuable? This valuable!

Again, The Fantastic Four: First Steps is not an earth-shattering movie. It’s enjoyable entertainment with a unique aesthetic and more thought put into it than the last several Marvel movies combined—a low bar. What sets it apart is its wholehearted commitment to a vision of the value of human life—even in the womb—and its courage in allowing the characters to live that out without compromise. This was a great surprise, and I hope we can see more like this.

I shall not reply

In the summer of 1859, the New-York Tribune accused Robert E Lee of having three of his late father-in-law’s slaves, who had run away about a month before, caught and whipped, with Lee personally whipping a woman when the man administering the beating refused to. Horace Greeley’s Tribune was an anti-slavery paper and the accusation was made in an anonymous letter by a writer clearly unfamiliar with the provisions of Lee’s father-in-law’s will—of which Lee was the executor—and ended with a pointed political message. It was propaganda calculated to invite outrage—and provoke a response.

Lee’s only statement on the matter came in a letter to one of his sons: “The N.Y. Tribune has attacked me for my treatment of your grandfather’s slaves, but I shall not reply.”

One of the most annoying and unseemly aspects of online and social media culture is the endless calling-out of haters. Public figures of whatever level of fame, influence, and authority inevitably end up spotlighting and condemning their critics, which prompts fans to voice their support and dog-pile the enemy.

I’ve unfollowed a number of writers and thinkers I otherwise like precisely because of this. One popular evangelical literary scholar eventually made her presence on Instagram entirely about screenshotting hate mail and sharing it with a dismissive, above-it-all caption. An up-and-coming novelist on Substack has recently lashed out at a few people poking fun at her pretentions in a long essay describing them as anti-intellectuals and misogynists. I could multiply examples. The comments on these posts are always full of praise and affirmation, which is surely part of the point. It betrays a neediness and fragility I find not merely off-putting but embarrassing.

The technology doesn’t help, of course. The perverse incentives of social media demand response, immediately, and the knowledge that the fans will have your back against the haters only intensifies the pull toward the reply button. A mob can make anything feel righteous. Then follows the well-known dopamine rush of the zinger. And once the habit is formed, there’s no going back. You’ve fed the trolls. You’re ensnared, no better than the haters, slinging mud in the notes or reels or comments and basking in the praise of your yes-men. It’s this scene from “Community” all day, every day.

What I would like to see much, much more of is detachment. I shall not reply. Rather than acting like you’re above it all, rather than saying the criticism doesn’t matter, why not be above it all by ignoring it, not even mentioning it? Answer not a fool. That might mean letting the opinions of idiots stand but it wouldn’t degrade your own character. But as was clear even 2,000 years ago, most people would rather seem than be.

Lee understood this even in the newspaper era. There is some criticism not worth responding to, to which responding would only validate and encourage your critics by lowering yourself to their level. What must it have taken a man like him, of his background and character, facing such an accusation in such a difficult personal situation, not to reply? Discipline, for one thing, which the technology actively works to erode. He had avoided entanglement in journalistic controversies before and that habit didn’t fail him now. I doubt many of us could have made the same choice in 1859. I know even fewer could now.

The writing rule everyone misses

A recently popular genre of Substack note—judging by what the algorithm sends my way, anyway—is complaining by writers about “rules” for writing. These frequently take the form of fulminations against old advice to avoid adverbs. To paraphrase one note, which if I remember correctly was originally much ruder, “Every adverb I write is a little screw you to Stephen King.” More broadly, some will argue that the there are no rules for good writing and even to formulate rules is a kind of tyranny or imposition or—for a special subset of writers who self-consciously posture as independent outsiders—the mark of the dreaded “MFA writing.”

I can’t speak for every writer who has ever laid out a list of rules for their own writing, but these Substack warriors could save themselves a lot of time and lower their blood pressure by noticing one all-important caveat or disclaimer in every good list of rules I’ve ever seen: break the rules if breaking them will produce better writing.

In the early days of the blog I collected three sets of writing rules from three favorite writers: CS Lewis, George Orwell, and Elmore Leonard. They have areas of broad overlap, especially a concern with precision and clarity, but here’s perhaps the most important:

• Orwell: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

• Leonard: “If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules.”

Orwell’s rule comes at the end of his list; Leonard’s before he even lays his out. They’re emphasizing that these are their rules for how they write, a set of strictures that they have found effective, but space must remain for artistic judgment. This rubbishes another species of Substack complaint about rules, one often leveled at Orwell specific: that of hypocrisy.

Most of the complaints I’ve seen about rules for writing stem from a misapplication of or unwarranted rigidity in a using particular set of rules. This is a legitimate problem. The rule against adverbs exists not because adverbs are inherently bad, but because they become a crutch for weak writers. Most of the items prohibited by lists of rules have this temptation about them: overuse of adverbs can cause verbs, where the action happens, to atrophy; overspecific dialogue tags can, in addition to reading clumsily, bear more of a burden of information than the dialogue itself; passive voice can become an unthinking habit until the involuted relation of subject and verb in repeated passive sentences kills the pace of writing. Noticing and controlling these effects is necessary for strong prose; never, ever using an adverb or passive voice is something a high school English teacher might enforce (indeed, I know specific examples), but is an overreaction.

Again—the authors who lay out these rules usually say exactly that. These rules aren’t hard and fast. These rules aren’t universal. Sometimes you must break them. After all, they’re my rules.

One would think that would settle it, but some of these complaints also seem born of willful misunderstanding or mere resentment. This isn’t limited to Substack writers: I was surprised several years ago to see Ursula Le Guin taking an obvious potshot at Leonard in her book on writing. She took much the same tack, talking about his rules as if they are obviously phony and accusing him of hypocrisy. She was wrong, and the complainers are wrong.

Most crucially, rejecting or refusing even to consider rules and constraints will warp a writer’s artistic judgment. Any attempt to be bold or daring must begin at a baseline, because without that one cannot make judgments about what does and doesn’t work, and a writer who never works within constraints will never grow. Writing without rules is no more feasible than living without them.

* * * * *

Addendum: Even Strunk and White, who are the object of a Two Minutes Hate that comes in almost predictable cycles, were trying to train the sensibilities of beginners, not lay down eternal laws of good writing. One can write well while ignoring their advice, but not until it’s become a conscious decision, not a habit one slips into.

Preliminary notes on worldbuilding

Over the weekend I started reading my first Star Wars novel, Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn. This isn’t my usual fare but it came highly recommended enough by enough trusted friends that I finally picked up a copy last year. I’m enjoying it.

What I’ve found especially enjoyable is the convincing post-Return of the Jedi situation Zahn imagines: the Empire struggling to recoup its losses, especially in manpower, and calling in reserves from the outer edges of its reach, and the Rebellion threatened by diverging priorities, in-fighting, overconfidence, and poor choices leading to bad PR. Grand Admiral Thrawn is not unlike “Hitler’s Fireman,” Field Marshal Walter Model, being rushed from one doomed campaign to another on the strength of his tactical acumen, and this outcome for the Rebellion will be familiar to anyone who saw Lawrence of Arabia or who has studied the American Revolution in real depth. (It is, in fact, the better outcome, since the members of most resistance movements end up like the protagonists of Rogue One, the most realistic Star Wars movie.)

That is, Heir to the Empire has good worldbuilding.

I hate the term worldbuilding.

It was cute as a term for what novelists, especially those dealing in fantastical or unfamiliar worlds, have to do to make their stories believable the first 10,000 times I heard it. But the more I heard it the less I liked it, or at least the way it was used—especially when it was used as a single criterion for praise of condemnation of a novel.

At any rate, Heir to the Empire got me thinking about this topic again, and I wanted to get some of my thoughts and misgivings about it down in writing. Consider the following informal preliminary notes toward a full account of worldbuilding.

As I conceive of it, “good” worldbuilding works along or toward the following aspects of a story:

• Plausibility

• Complication

• Depth

• Thoroughness

In addition to their obvious purposes—any story should be plausible, right? and “deep” is always preferable to “shallow”—the first three should all suggest the fourth.

This brings me back, as so often, to John Gardner’s “fictive dream.” I’ve written about this in much more detail before, but the short version is that fiction works like a dream in absorbing the dreamer’s attention with a situation and story that are unquestionably real as long as the dream endures. It should be “vivid and continuous,” with the reader’s senses convinced by carefully selected concrete details and nothing to distract and “awaken” them.

Gardner’s conception of fiction as a dream is key to my own understanding of writing, but if it is missing or fails to account for anything it is the strangest and most uncanny aspect of dreaming. In a real dream, we simply know a lot of things beyond the specific events and details of the dream itself. A dream comes prepackaged with unexplained context. This is often the most difficult part of a dream to explain to whatever patient person you’re telling about it: “I was in the lobby at work, but it wasn’t really the lobby, it was an airport terminal, and I was there to…”

Worldbuilding’s best and most proper function, I think, is to fulfil this role, to provide context for what is assumed by the characters within the story. Because really vivid characters will seem to have existed before your story begins, in a world that was carrying on without waiting for you, the writer, or the reader to show up.

I have two basic problems with worldbuilding as it is popularly talked about. The first arises with the verbs I keep using: seem just now, and suggest above.

There is no law governing how much worldbuilding an author should or must do for a given story. It’s going to depend on the story. A novel about ordinary people with nine-to-five jobs set last year will not need a lot of deliberate, calculated explanation. A story set in, say, the marches between the native Britons and the invading Anglo-Saxons in AD 550, or in a fantasy world, or in a galaxy far far away, will require much more. In writing a novel like these, some authors will lay it on with a trowel, and some readers will complain if they don’t.

But worldbuilding works best by suggesting thoroughness. The full world imagined by the writer should come through organically, without a lot of direct explanation, and “build” through allusive power that also characterizes and advances the plot. This requires skill and art. The infodump—which is not the same thing as exposition—does not. The writer must resist to urge to put every detail on the page. They must know what to leave out.

Pro and con examples: Tolkien is the paradigmatic example of allusive, suggestive worldbuilding done well. People who complain about the long songs or mentions of “irrelevant” legends of historical characters miss this dimension of his storytelling and read an impoverished version of his work. Robert Jordan, on the other, hand, actually does most of the things people accuse Tolkien of doing: going off on tangents, bringing the story to a halt for extraneous info, overexplaining, overdescribing, overstuffing.

My second problem with worldbuilding is that, as much as it is discussed as some special characteristic of fantasy, science fiction, or some other genre, it is something all writers of all fiction should be doing. Indeed, if they’re doing a good job of writing fiction at all, they’re already doing it. It is inseparable from imagination and good craftsmanship and is, ultimately, a meaningless subcategory of creativity. See again Gardner’s fictive dream.

Again, these are notes on the subject, not an exhaustive treatment. I may revisit the topic again soon, especially if having gotten this into writing I’m able to refine my thoughts.

Len Deighton, RIP

I was sorry to learn yesterday that novelist Len Deighton had died Sunday, aged 97. Deighton has an important place in the history of the spy novel and the thriller and a well-earned reputation for style, precision, and craftsmanship in his fiction. His excellence in these areas sets him apart from many of his successors in both genres.

I can’t remember when or where I first heard Deighton’s name. I seem to always have been aware of it. As my interest in the thriller genre deepened, his name came up more and more often as an innovator, an influence, and one of the masters. Shortly after Sarah and I married—when I had the first draft of Dark Full of Enemies on ice—I found a used copy of his name-making first novel, The IPCRESS File, and dove into it.

Here’s where my story may depart from other fans’: I didn’t care much for it. I found it disjointed and hard to follow. But it stuck with me—I still can’t say why. When I finished it I was dissatisfied but wanted to read more, and suspected that not getting The IPCRESS File was due to some failure on my part. I had to be missing something.

Fast forward some years and, after almost picking it up at the used book store many time, I splurged on Grove Atlantic’s new paperback of Berlin Game, the first in his Game Set Match trilogy centered on British spy Bernie Samson. I loved it from the first page, and followed it quickly with Mexico Set and London Match. I was irrevocably a Deighton fan. Bomber was one of my three favorite fiction reads last year. And I was delighted to learn, as I started collecting the new reissues, that Deighton was still alive in his late nineties.

He hadn’t published much more than afterwords to his previous work or this short, gossipy memoir of Ian Fleming and Kevin McClory in thirty years, since the final Bernie Samson novel, Charity. As one of his obituaries put it, he simply “appeared to switch off his word processor and, without fanfare, retire.” As was his right. But, just like with Charles Portis, I wonder what further joys we might have had of him.

You can get further details of Deighton’s life from the articles and memorials I’ve gathered below. What I most appreciate about Deighton is his work, of course, which is detailed without being overstuffed, technical without getting bogged down in irrelevant minutiae or wrecking the pacing, intricately plotted without turning his characters into automatons, character-driven without navel-gazing. Few thriller writers since have struck such a precise balance.

And his tone: I’ve seen his voice or characters or storytelling called “cynical” in a number of places, often in an attempt to belittle the thriller writers who came before him, but I don’t see it. Bomber may reflect bitterly the waste and confusion of modern war but it is intensely earnest. Deighton’s work is characterized not so much by cynicism as a studied wryness, an awareness of the tragedy and futility of the world that is often appropriate to the situations in his books, and just as often a life-saving skill. Not that his stories are grim or nihilistic. His ironic sense of humor pervades his books, adding an edge where needed and taking the edge off when things get grim. Deighton was an artist and brought a sharp sense of proportion to his craft.

Beyond the books, I appreciated his self-effacing manner in the handful of interviews he gave and his unmysterious nuts-and-bolts approach to his work. He had no pretensions, just dedication and skill. In this he was like another favorite writer: Elmore Leonard. Listening to both was a pleasure, and I’ve learned a lot from both. We all could. We shall not see their like again.

The Guardian had an unusually but justifiably long obituary that is well worth your time to read. Here’s a shorter BBC obit that is also worthwhile, and a sweet personal reminiscence by food journalist Tim Hayward on his surprising chance to interview Deighton. You can listen to the interview here or, if you can’t get that link to work (I couldn’t), on Apple Podcasts here. Finally, here are two older interviews that I’ve enjoyed and revisited several times—one with Melvyn Bragg for the BBC in 1977 and a studio interview for Thames TV in 1983. I blogged about a few comments from the former, about the writer’s duty to entertain, almost exactly a year ago.

Len Deighton, artist, entertainer, and exacting literary craftsman, RIP.