Len Deighton on writing to entertain

Apropos of my thoughts on the false divide between literary and genre fiction last week, here’s a great 1977 interview with Len Deighton that I happened across over the weekend. This interview takes place after the success of The IPCRESS File and its sequels as well as Bomber and Fighter but before the Bernie Samson novels I’ve recently mentioned here.

Asked whether or not his heroes are not less concerned with thoughts than with actions, Deighton replies:

Well, I think that’s true, and I think that people who write the sort of books I write are essentially in the entertainment business, and they will be judged according to how successful they are at entertaining the reader, and anything else that they want to do has to be done in a way that is subordinate to the main task of entertaining the reader. And I think that the sort of books I write are essentially action books, that people move, that they do think but that they don’t spend too many pages in thinking if you sell many and there has to be pace with it.

The literary-genre divide is nothing new, of course, as interviewer Melvyn Bragg’s followup question makes clear: “When you say ‘I’m in the entertainment business,’ you’re separating yourself from people you’d call ‘novelists,’ is that…?” Deighton:

Well, depends how you use the word novel. I mean, I think novelists at one time were people who wrote the sort of books that Victorian housemaids took to bed at night and read. Well, I’d be very happy to identified as a novelist in that context. But I’m afraid that the way that the word is used nowadays, to mean profound and philosophical, well now I wouldn’t want to frighten anyone away from a good read by attaching a label like that to anything that I do.

Deighton gently but firmly disputes not the status of his own books but the artificiality and pretention built up around what it means to be a “novelist.” His happiness to align with the books that entertained even the lowly (Deighton’s parents both worked in service), the sort defended by Chesterton in “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” is of a piece with his insistence that messaging, argument, and “anything else” a writer might “want to do” with a book must come after entertaining the reader.

Proper priorities, I think.

I’m struck in this interview by Deighton’s confidence in sticking up for himself as an entertainer. Perhaps it’s born of his background. The posh and well-connected Ian Fleming, by comparison, right from the publication of his first Bond novel adopted a defensive crouch about his writing. This posture comes through in his 1963 essay “How to Write a Thriller.” A sample:

I am not “involved.” My books are not “engaged.” I have no message for suffering humanity and, though I was bullied at school and lost my virginity like so many of us used to do in the old days, I have never been tempted to foist these and other harrowing personal experiences on the public. My opuscula do not aim at changing people or making them go out and do something. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes and beds.

Despite including some good advice, Fleming severely undersells himself throughout this essay. But read on for a story Fleming tells about a conversation with a young relative writing self-consciously literary novels, and note the way in which Fleming defines himself as “a writer” rather than “an author,” a difference only of connotation, and asserts that his only goal is “to get the reader to turn over the page.”

Both Fleming and Deighton aim to avoid pretention; both simply want to tell stories. Both ended up doing much more. Again—proper priorities.

Deighton, who is still with us at age 96, by the way, is always great in the old interviews I’ve been able to turn up on YouTube. (Here’s another one from 1983 that’s quite good albeit not as in-depth.) His interview style—open, straightforward, down-to-earth, making no fuss and creating no Oz-the-Great-and-Powerful mystery around his trade—reminds me of Elmore Leonard. Both are always refreshing to listen to. Check out the interview quoted above and give one of Deighton’s books a try if you haven’t yet.

A Bloody Habit, Brother Wolf, and Wake of Malice

I’m excited to have a review of Eleanor Bourg Nicholson’s three historical horror novels—A Bloody Habit, Brother Wolf, and Wake of Malice—published online at Catholic World Report this weekend. These books concern Fr Thomas Edmund Gilroy, OP, a Dominican vampire hunter, and the various scrapes he gets into with vampires, werewolves, and, most recently, leprechauns—and worse. A sample from my review:

Those who enjoy Gothic atmosphere—gaslit streets, full moons, windswept moorlands, big dark houses, old families with terrible secrets—will find something to love in all three novels. Nicholson creates and maintains palpably tense and moody settings, and the mysteries at the heart of each story unfold with maximum dread and suspense. That the stories take place in painstakingly realized historical periods provides yet another pleasure.

But the stories prove especially powerful because of the well-drawn, lifelike, and likable characters with which Nicholson has peopled them. Father Thomas Edmund, the only character to recur in all three books, is the best example, but each has a strong cast, all of whom have their own goals and worldviews, all of which clash and compete. This is compelling in all three novels, not only because pitting rival philosophies against each other works so well in horror fiction but because Nicholson has the rare gift of being able to make goodness attractive.

I’ve mentioned Eleanor’s novels here on the blog several times before, including here and here, and A Bloody Habit was my favorite fictional read of the year in 2019. They’re a lot of fun and counterbalance their unromanticized depiction of sin and evil with an appealing and theologically sound vision of the good. Give my review a read and check these fine novels books out!

Literary vs genre fiction, craft vs content

Item: This week at The Spectator, novelist Sean Thomas bids “Good riddance to literary fiction,” arguing that “it was a silly, self-defeating genre in the first place, putting posh books in a posh ghetto, walling itself off from everyday readers.” Readers want stories, not beautiful but aimless style.

Item: This week 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back announced their next read, Colleen Hoover’s BookTok bestseller Ugly Love. In discussing their choice, Mike and Conor brought up this passage from a Texas Monthly article on Hoover’s success and recent writer’s block:

Hoover is often approached by readers who tell her that her books are the first they’ve finished in years, but her success has puzzled some fellow authors. “A lot of writers will read my books, and they’re like, ‘Why is this so popular?’ ” she says. “I don’t want to use big words. I don’t want to use flowery language. I hate description. Hate it. I’m a very ADD reader. I have ADD in my real life. And if I have to read more than two paragraphs without dialogue, I will skip it.”

That Spectator column celebrating the near-irrelevance of literary novels is odd and frustrating, not only because the magnificent work of popular art that awakened Thomas to the pointlessness of literary fiction was, ludicrously, The Da Vinci Code, but because the image he sets up of literary fiction is a straw man. Gorgeously written, navel-gazing novels on Important Themes in which nothing actually happens? This describes a recognizable prententious award-bait type but is not characteristic of all literary fiction. Certainly not the kind that has lasted.

But I agree entirely with Thomas at one point: stories are what matter. This is why, to me, the division of fiction into literary and genre fiction has always felt uncomfortable if not downright false. Good fiction is good fiction, as far as I’m concerned, and so my interest has steadily drifted toward care and craftsmanship and a compelling story wherever you may find it.

So I’d rather read a good literary novel than The Da Vinci Code, not because the latter is low-brow or too popular, but because it’s abominably written. And by the same token, I’d rather read a good crime or sci-fi novel than self-absorbed high-brow bilge—anything by the Bloomsbury group, for example, the prototype of what Thomas is condemning in his Spectator piece. What traditionally separates Evelyn Waugh from John Wyndham or Graham Greene from Ian Fleming is reputation, which is fickle and easy to manipulate. What these all have in common is that they’re excellent writers, which is all that should matter.

The real dividing line in modern fiction runs between stories and content, between craft and indiscriminate consumption, between good stories told well, with the mastery of all available creative tools, and mere utilitarian delivery systems for specific kinds of (increasingly pornographic) audience-demanded stimulation. As Mike, baffled, spoofed Hoover’s explanation of her approach, “You know, this whole writing thing—I’m not a fan of the prose, or…”

If the words don’t matter, you’re not writing.

My guess is that rumors of the death of literary fiction, like Mark Twain’s, will turn out to be greatly exaggerated. What will die will be pretension—MFA-in-crowd stories of the kind mocked by Thomas in his column. What will survive—what must survive—are good stories told with care in any genre. Only that will outlast fads and keep imaginations rather than appetites alive.

Black Bag

Transparent barriers—Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett in Black Bag

My spring break last week didn’t go as expected, but fortunately I got a break from my break Friday evening when I met a friend for Black Bag, a new spy thriller written by David Koepp and directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Black Bag concerns George Woodhouse, a British intelligence officer who specializes in interrogation and polygraph testing. He is happily and faithfully married to Kathryn, a fellow intelligence operative. When the film opens, he’s meeting a fellow agent who gives him a list of five names within the intelligence service who could be the party responsible for the leak of a secret program called Severus. All five are known to George.

One, Freddie, is an old friend, a chummy but loutish and borderline alcoholic lad. Freddie’s much younger girlfriend Clarissa works in signals intelligence and likes to play the innocent and aggrieved ingenue but is much more canny and manipulative than she lets on. Colonel Stokes is an upright, physically fit, perfectly composed agent in a relationship with Zoe, a service psychologist who regularly evaluates all of them. The fifth and last suspect, to George’s dismay, is Kathryn, his wife.

George invites the other four to a dinner party where he mildly drugs them and sets them up in a game designed to provoke uncomfortable conversations through which the four will reveal themselves. Tempers flair. George forms hunches. He also discovers a discarded movie ticket in his wife’s bathroom trash. The same night, the agent who provided him the list dies, poisoned in his own home.

By his late comrade’s reckoning, George had only a week to uncover the traitor and stop the leak of Severus, an act that could kill thousands. Now, with a few days already elapsed in feeling out the others and with new suspicions surrounding Kathryn’s sudden trip to Zürich, George, a meticulous, precise man, must act fast, improvising and bringing pressure to bear on the other agents, playing them against each other, bending the rules, and exploiting gaps in service procedure in an attempt to draw the traitor out without revealing what he’s up to. In doing so, and especially in trying to discover if Kathryn specifically is guilty, he makes a potentially catastrophic mistake.

I’m being vague on purpose. What Severus is, why it can’t be released, and what will happen if it does—these are secrets Black Bag only slowly reveals. The story’s steady escalation as George unwinds more and more of what is going on within the service is one of its joys.

Another is Black Bag’s emphasis on character, which is also where it shows its unusual place among recent spy stories. With the exceptions of George and Kathryn, the spies of Black Bag lead loose, dissipated, unfulfilling lives: drinking too much, taking drugs, putting up with too much from their significant others, cheating behind their backs. These are not just personal flaws—what used to be called sins—but security risks. George’s conspicuously faithful monogamy, which baffles his fellow agents, turns out to be the only reliable thing in their chaotic world.

This, along with some of the real-world implications of the Severus plot, gives Black Bag a moral dimension that, it not unique in latter-day Hollywood, is as unusual as George and Kathryn’s marriage.

George’s name, his chilly interiority, his hunt for a traitor, and even his eyeglasses might call John le Carré’s greatest character to mind, but Black Bag’s interest in personal relationships and the ways they are compromised by weakness feels much more like Len Deighton. In Deighton’s novels, tradecraft and technology play an important role but the personalities and beliefs of the characters are prior to and motivate the spy activity. Knowing a person’s true character proves as important as drones, satellites, code words, dead drops, and secret documents—a refreshing change from the tech- and action-heavy spy films that have proliferated in the twenty-odd years since The Bourne Identity.

Another nice change: Black Bag is lean and well-plotted, coming in at just over an hour and a half with not a wasted moment in it. The performances are excellent across the board, especially Michael Fassbender as George. Fassbender has been my choice for the next Bond ever since seeing him don a tuxedo for another tight, well-paced Soderbergh spy thriller, Haywire. He may never get to play Bond but his performance here is a classic. Tom Burke as the boorish Freddie, Marisa Abela as Clarissa, and Naomie Harris as Zoe, a lapsed Catholic who still acts on her beliefs, are further standouts, as is Pierce Brosnan in a small role as an intimidating and inscrutable intelligence chief.

With a smart, intense, and often funny script, good pacing and plotting, and excellent acting, Black Bag was a welcome surprise. If you enjoy spy drama as much as spy action and are looking for a thoughtful, suspenseful film that doesn’t overstay its welcome, this is well worth your time. And as the big-budget studio movies and superhero series show steadily diminishing returns, I hope to see more like Black Bag.

Wiley Junction

Near the house where I grew up stood a long, low, thin strip of stores we collectively called “Wiley Junction.” This included a Gulf station—later BP—the old one-room Wiley Post Office, and one shop where you could buy NASCAR trading cards, rent a movie, or lie in a tanning bed. But the store attached to the gas station was always Wiley Junction’s main draw.

The “junction” proper was the awkward joining of Old Highway 441, a two-lane road built to parallel the long-defunct Tallulah Falls Railroad, and New 441, a two-lane highway built in the 1970s with a more aggressive approach to the terrain—cutting through hills and banks and leveling off hollows to drive straighter through our county. In Wiley (unincorporated) Old and New 441 curved toward each other, like dancers bumping rears, and offered a natural location for a connector road. We drove through Wiley Junction literally every day. And most days we stopped at Wiley Junction—the store.

The Wiley Junction store was typical of the now-endangered local country stores throughout the South. Long and narrow, one entered through a glass door in the middle with the cash register at your right elbow, visible through the bunker-like gap between the lottery ticket stands on the counter and the overhanging racks of cigarettes. There was no bulletproof glass but there was a “need a penny, take one” dish. I wondered why I couldn’t take one every time—an informal education in courtesy.

To the left were three narrow aisles of goods: Slim Jims, pork rinds, chocolate bars, Big League Chew, and Lance crackers foremost, with bait, tackle, Styrofoam coolers, and basic hardware necessities hooked to a pegboard wall in back. The aisles led to the coolers, which had a smaller selection than today’s mega gas station chains but were always amply stocked. I bought many, many Cokes and Mello Yellos there, especially during those mid-90s summers when you could win prizes directly from the bottlecap. I never got that Coca-Cola Mustang but it was a great day when I won a second, free 20 oz bottle.

That was one half of Wiley Junction. Turning from the coolers and walking back to the register, you entered a bottleneck between the checkout counter and the short-order kitchen—which is the part of Wiley Junction I miss most.

You can identify this kind of country store not just by its thin, low-slung appearance, but by the smell. Wiley Junction had that smell. Clean, but not sterile. Lived-in. A faint hint of the concrete floor under the brown tile. A suggestion, somehow apparent to your nose, that the place was built by hand. But the kitchen added to that scent and elevated it. Wiley Junction smelled always, richly and warmly, of its signature offering: biscuits.

Even a short trip into the store to pick up one item left you smelling like biscuits the rest of the day. That happened to my sister one morning when she went into the store for perhaps two minutes, and I tormented her for years by calling her “Biscuit.” The thing is, the smell was wonderful. It was a greasy smell, sure, but with a sharp sweetness to it that I struggle to describe. The smell had texture—smooth and floury and warm.

Wiley Junction’s breakfast kept the place hopping in the mornings. Local tradesmen, construction workers, highway crews, state troopers with the odd local businessman thrown in during the week; local families, fishermen, hunters, and vacationers who had gotten wise to a good thing on the weekends. Sometimes it was hard to find parking.

From the narrow space between the kitchen and the cash register one could pass into an open dining area that somehow felt larger than the rest of that skinny building. There were particle board booths with one-piece benches contoured to the country rump and a bay window opening toward New 441. It was good to eat there. You would almost certainly see someone you knew. Often, for me, that was my granddad.

I’ve written about him a lot here. He was a plumber-electrician and frequently picked up biscuits at Wiley Junction on his way to construction sites all over Rabun County. On special occasions, when we had a church car wash or when the whole extended family was setting forth on a fishing trip to Tugalo, he’d pick up a big white sack of biscuits for everyone. But on weekdays, running into him during the few minutes when he’d be sitting in one those booths, eating his biscuit, was a treat—no matter that we saw him almost every day anyway. Something about Wiley Junction and the biscuits made it special.

Yesterday was the 27th anniversary of his death, aged just 65, in 1998. A few years later the Georgia DOT bought up Wiley Junction and bulldozed it to widen the New Highway. It’s a four-lane now with a grass median and is safer for the traffic it has to handle between Atlanta and Western North Carolina, little of which stops in Wiley any more. But when I visit home I can’t pass that weedy, angular patch of land without thinking about what was lost.

My granddad has now enjoyed just over a quarter century of the life everlasting, and so I can hope to see him again. Wiley Junction, a happy blip in a fallen world, is not coming back in any form. But if seeing my granddad again proves to be anything like it was to see him in real life, that first moment of recognition and reunion will bear with it, before it fades away forever in light of unimaginably better things, the lingering scent of breakfast in a country store.

A dialogue tag oddity

I’ve mentioned before that reading out loud is part of the bedtime routine for me and my wife. We’ve enjoyed this as long as we’ve been married, and have read dozens of books by now. Very few of the books we’ve chosen have been stinkers, but reading aloud does have a way of spotlighting authorial quirks or tics even in the good ones. One area where tics most frequently appear is in dialogue tags.

I’ve written here about dialogue tags a few times in the last few months (see here, for example). Again, I believe strongly in Elmore Leonard’s rule of never using a verb other than said for dialogue, though I—following Leonard himself—allow for a lot of flexibility. I’ve read two novels recently, Hill 112, by Adrian Goldsworthy and The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers, that approach ascribing dialogue in plenty of other ways without calling attention to themselves.

That said, reading aloud before bedtime has only entrenched my opinion that a simple “he said” or “she said” is best.

This has been on my mind because of our recent bedtime reading: Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. Alexander is a good and imaginative writer and these books have been favorites for a long time, but in reading them aloud I grew increasingly exasperated with a pattern in his dialogue. See if you can spot it:

As he made to leave the chamber, however, Doli took him by the arm. “Gwystyl,” said the dwarf severely, “you have a skulking, sneaking look in your eyes. You might hoodwink my friends. But don’t forget you're also dealing with one of the Fair Folk. I have a feeling,” Doli added, tightening his grip, “you’re far too anxious to see us gone. I’m beginning to wonder, if I squeezed you a little, what more might come out.”

“It’s not that we're starving,” Eilonwy said. “Gurgi did remember to bring along the wallet of food. Yes, and that was a gift from Gwydion, too, so he had every right to take it. It’s certainly a magical wallet,” she went on; “it never seems to get empty. The food is really quite nourishing, I’m sure, and wonderful to have when you need it. But the truth of the matter is, it’s rather tasteless. That’s often the trouble with magical things. They’re never quite what you'd expect.”

“We have a lovely view of the fens from the hilltop,” Orwen put in with such enthusiasm that her necklace bounced and rattled. “You must come and enjoy it. Indeed, you’re perfectly welcome to stay as long as you want,” she added eagerly. “Now that little Dallben’s gone, and found himself a beard, too, the place isn’t half as cheery as it used to be. We wouldn’t change you into a toad-unless you insisted on it.”

“I don’t mean that,” Taran said. “What I believe,” he added thoughtfully, “is that Adaon understood these things anyway. Even with his clasp, there is much I do not understand. All I know is that I feel differently somehow. I can see things I never saw before—or smell or taste them. I can't say exactly what it is. It’s strange, and awesome in a way. And very beautiful sometimes. There are things that I know…” Taran shook his head. “And I don't even know how I know them.”

“I think you see many things,” Taran replied quietly, “many things which you tell no one. It has long been in my mind,” he went on, with much hesitation, “and now more than ever-the dream you had, the last night in Caer Dallben. You saw Ellidyr and King Morgant; to me, you foretold I would grieve. But what did you dream of yourself?”

“Go on,” Gwystyl said, “put him on your shoulder. That’s what he wants. For the matter of that, you shall have him as a gift, with the thanks of the Fair Folk. For you have done us a service, too. We were uneasy with the Crochan knocking about here and there; one never knew what would happen. Yes, yes, pick him up,” Gwystyl added with a melancholy sigh. “He’s taken quite a fancy to you. It’s just as well. I'm simply not up to keeping crows any more, not up to it at all.”

Alexander’s characters are always going on and adding and continuing, which we already know because they are still talking. A few of these, especially the last two above, hint at stage directions Alexander is trying to give his characters—sighing, hesitating—but this would work better broken out of the flow of dialogue and directly described, which would also give the narration, the characters and action, and the reader’s imagination space to breath. Look at how much better the simple “Taran shook his head” works near the end of the fourth example.

But this habit of breaking into the dialogue for these secondary tags is not only awkward and unnecessary, it’s annoying to read aloud. If dialogue tags should be as close to invisible as possible, annoying the reader may be worse than a lot of clumsy, highly noticeable Tom Swifty adverbs.

I selected these at random from the second book, The Black Cauldron. We’re several chapters into the fourth book, Taran Wanderer, and these interrupting tags are much less common than in the first couple volumes of the series. Someone must have had a talk with Alexander sometime around The Castle of Llyr. The books, already very good—The Black Cauldron and The High King won Newbery honors and a Newbery Medal back when that meant something!—are better for it, and I, as my wife’s reader, am grateful.

We’ve come to resemble them

The latest School of War episode dropped yesterday and featured historian Sean McMeekin, whose book Stalin’s War I’ve quoted and recommended here before. McMeekin discussed his latest, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, a book that’s been on my to-read list since it was announced.

The interview was insightful and wide-ranging despite coming in under an hour and is well worth a listen. But the conclusion was especially pointed. Speaking of Communist regimes that not only survived the fall of the USSR but have become globally ascendant—note carefully the subtitle of his book—McMeekin assessed the present dangers not only of external Communist enemies but of threats from within. These threats are not the Hollywood pinkos of Cold War anxiety but our own inbuilt mimetic tendencies, through which we gradually become like the thing we resist, and, even more to the point, the uncritical embrace and celebration of technologies that enable tyranny:

I don’t think the kind of threat, let’s say, to either Western values or our way of life is quite the same as you might have seen from the years of high Stalinism or high Maoism, even as far as people being fellow travelers or kind of trying to embrace those ideas, but some of it I still think—and I guess this is what I was trying to get at in my epilogue—certain elements of Communist practice which have in some ways actually you might even say been streamlined or improved that is to say: the repression, the censorship, the state control of information, social credit system. . . .

I remember back in the 90s when I was in Model UN among other things there were all these debates about US policy vis-à-vis China and the idea of opening up China, and back then the argument was that we should trade with China, we should open up to China . . . because that way we’ll make them more like us. That is to say, “You know, it’s true they crushed the rebels, the student protestors at Tiananmen Square . . . they obviously crushed and suppressed them, they obviously did not introduce any kind of genuine democracy or accountability to the public, however, if we trade with them they’ll be a little bit more like us and eventually they’ll develop liberal political institutions.”

That doesn’t seem to have happened. If anything, the opposite seems to have happened. I mean, if anything I think we’ve come to resemble them more than they resemble us, that is to say, our own public life is increasingly kind of taken over by social controls. And, you know, the early euphoria about the internet, maybe we should have been suspicious because the internet was originally ARPANET, a project of basically the Pentagon and the Defense Department. Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised that, in the end, these tools of social or political liberation could also be turned against us by governments, large corporations, etc.

I think it’s something to worry about. I think, you know, we just have to stay vigilant, and make sure our own traditions are upheld.

Host Aaron MacLean ends the episode by inviting McMeekin back someday to discuss “the global designs of universal liberalism.” I’d be there for that. Not exactly uplifting but necessary. Listen to the full interview here.

Food for thought, especially when it comes to discerning what “stay[ing] vigilant” means and just which of “our own traditions” we wish to preserve. For some related thoughts about the warping effect of the technologies used against ideological opponents, see this post from three years ago.

Ian Fleming on writing good reports—and fiction

The Amazon/Bond film series news I responded to earlier this week was an interesting coincidence, as I’ve been reading Nicholas Shakespeare’s new biography Ian Fleming: The Complete Man for about a month and a half now.

As assistant to the head of Naval Intelligence during World war II, Ian Fleming had to read and write many, many reports. Fortunately for him, he brought some natural talent as well as prior experience as a reporter for Reuters to the job. Here, excerpted from a classified memo in Shakespeare’s book, are three essentials Fleming insisted upon for the reports he received:

A report should aim at three virtues. First, it should have impact; the reader must be made to know at once what it is about; the opening sentence is therefore of great importance. Second, it should be unambiguous; it must leave no room for doubt or ignorance other than the doubt or ignorance which the writer has himself expressed. Third, it should have the brevity which comes only from clear intention; the writer must know what he wishes to say before he begins to say it; otherwise he will hedge and be verbose. He should imagine himself in the position of one who will have to act, and act quickly, on the information which his report contains.

With regard to clear and unambiguous meaning, compare one of CS Lewis’s bits of writing advice from a 1956 letter: “Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.” This is not to say ambiguity has no place in fiction, of course, but that must be the author’s purpose—just like an intelligence officer who must leave room only for those doubts he himself wants to convey about his report.

Directness or immediacy, clarity, and concision born of precision and purpose: as Shakespeare notes, “lan wrote his novels in this manner.” Good writing is good writing regardless of form, genre, or content.

Whither 007, again?

“Always makes me feel a little melancholy—grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap.”

— Q in Skyfall

Last week Amazon announced “a new joint venture to house the James Bond intellectual property rights” with MGM and Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, who had previously controlled the Bond film series. Lest that opening statement come across as too vague and businessy, the next sentence clarifies that Amazon “will gain creative control of the James Bond franchise.”

This news has been pretty roundly greeted with doomsaying. Amazon, after all, has previously dropped a billion to scrabble up rights to some of Tolkien’s work, resulting in “The Rings of Power.” Projects like this as well as Amazon’s general ethos fueled justifiable distrust on the part of Wilson and Broccoli, who briefly made the news a couple months ago, following a meeting with an Amazon exec who called Bond “content,” for describing Amazon leadership as “f—ing idiots.” But the “impasse” between Broccoli and Wilson and Amazon is at an end, something that cost Amazon a billion dollars. The heirs of Cubby Broccoli’s six-decade film series have been bought out, ousted. Wilson has stated clearly that he’s retiring while Broccoli has gestured toward working on “other projects.”

Some “joint venture.”

I’m pretty sure I’m in the doomsayers’ camp. Though every internet comment section on this story is full of people saying “What about ‘Reacher’?!” it should be indisputable that Amazon has a poor track record with literary adaptations and a well-deserved reputation for milking “IP” dry for “content.” That Deadline article offers the clearest reporting on this story when it describes Amazon spending that billion “to ensure that they could fully steer and exploit” Bond. And that’s not even to get into the woke Hollywood stuff that will inevitably intrude.

Indeed, it already has. Broccoli and Wilson might have guided the film series for decades but Ian Fleming’s estate still controls the books—and I use the word control deliberately. It was the estate’s official statement on the Amazon takeover that finally got me feeling something about all of this. After writing that the estate is “enormously excited about the next phase of the James Bond story on film under Amazon’s creative leadership,” whatever that mythical creature is, the statement praises the Broccoli family, who “have always respected the legacy of Ian Fleming and his words and his original depiction of Agent 007.”

This is pretty rich coming from the estate that has commissioned new books like On His Majesty’s Secret Service and Double or Nothing, which are not only tediously politically pandering but artistically weak, and that—most galling of all—authorized censorship of Fleming’s originals and moved to make sure only the bowdlerized versions are available. Fleming’s words—precisely what the estate praises Broccoli and Wilson for protecting.

Thine own mouth condemneth thee, and not I.

I have no particular loyalty to Broccoli and Wilson and have written in annoyance about them before, but to dedicate decades to the maintenance of a film project begun by their father is unique in a business governed by algorithm, merchandizing, profit margins, and the vicissitudes of political expediency. We shall not see their like again.

If you’re interested in some gossip about all of this, here’s a piece at the Daily Mail that claims to have scuttlebutt provided by an Amazon insider. For a more sober consideration of what all this means, pro and con, than what you’ll pick up from screechy YouTubers, I recommend this piece at IGN. And for an underrated former Bond’s opinion, let me conclude with a bit of Timothy Dalton’s reaction:

The movies have taken different courses over the years, but there is something very good about the original and I hope Amazon latch onto that and give us the kind of film that’s brought so much excitement and fun to so many people. . . . Anyway, good luck to them.

The masculine urge to zap space bugs

This week on my commute I’ve been taking a break from podcasts to revisit a novel I last read in college, Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. It’s been about twenty years.

I faintly remember being disappointed by it, but not much else. I still wish it had more action, but with the benefit of twenty years of growing up, studying, reading, and learning from life, I can see that the problem with my first read was me. Under the sci-fi adventure premise and WWII-memoir-in-space style, Starship Troopers is an uncommonly rich and complicated book.

This passage from relatively late in the story struck me especially sharply. The protagonist, Johnny Rico, joined the Mobile Infantry straight out of high school, during peacetime. While training, war broke out with the “bugs,” the most notorious early incident of which was a bug attack on Buenos Aires that “smeared” the entire city—including Johnny’s parents. Or so he thinks. As he departs his original ship for OCS, he bumps into his father, now an NCO despite being in his mid-40s.

Johnny’s father had strongly disapproved of joining up, so not only his survival but his about-face on military service surprises Johnny. He assumes his father joined to avenge his mother. Not so. Johnny’s enlistment awakened something long dormant in his father:

“Your mother’s death released me for what I had to do… even though she and I were closer than most, nevertheless it set me free to do it. I turned the business over to Morales—”

“Old man Morales? Can he handle it?”

“Yes. Because he has to. A lot of us are doing things we didn’t know we could. I gave him a nice chunk of stock—you know the old saying about the kine that tread the grain—and the rest I split two ways, in a trust: half to the Daughters of Charity, half to you whenever you want to go back and take it. If you do. Never mind. I had at last found out what was wrong with me.” He stopped, then said very softly, “I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal… but a man.”

There’s a lot going on here. Running through it is a strong strand of Ernst Jünger—who like Heinlein proved controversial for being clear, unsparing, and uncategorizable within the permissible simplistic divisions—and the word “man” means Johnny’s father is not only making a statement about himself, masculinity, and courage, though that is the obvious surface-level meaning, but about what people are and ought to be.

What I immediately thought of was a short but poignant line from Dr Johnson, who has been much on my mind lately. In his Life of Samuel Johnson Boswell quotes him as saying, on the topic of war:

“Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.”

— Samuel Johnson

An apt description of Johnny’s father, who is a fairly minor but memorable character, and a lot of the rest of us. I had my own abortive brush with the service after grad school, the kind of thing that was clearly not meant to be (a little too old, a little too slow) and worked out well in the end. I wouldn’t change a thing. But thinking back on it still causes me a pang of “what if” every so often. Fortunately we have imagination and stories, and the examples of the men who did soldier, who did go to sea.

Starship Troopers might be a “controversial classic,” as the most recent paperback calls it, but that it resonates so strongly with itself, with other great literature, and with a powerful impulse inside most men, an impulse either fulfilled for felt forever as accusation, is a clear mark of its worth.

For a recap of some of the controversy, a good examination of some of the nuance in the book, and a very good critique of the film adaptation, which was an deliberate act of vandalism, see this piece from American Reformer. For a similar premise with different themes and a strikingly different tone but similarly powerful social critique and more action, read The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman, a novel I’ve read or listened to a number of times.

Butler, Palmerston, and the soldiering menace

Each week on Substack I publish a clerihew, my favorite form of light verse: a quatrain in AABB with intentionally awkward scansion and forced rhyme. The subject is always a person, whose name constitutes the first line. My clerihews usually concern historical figures. My subject last week was General Benjamin Butler.

The joke in the poem itself had to do with something tawdry that Butler, playing the part of the moneygrubbing Yankee to the hilt, supposedly did while dining at a wealthy lady’s home while in charge of the Union occupation of New Orleans. But in my brief historical note afterward I mentioned something for which he was infamous: General Order No. 28 of May 15, 1862, which reads:

As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.

The women of occupied New Orleans had not welcomed the Union army or navy into the city and had shown repeated disrespect to them. One story has a lady emptying a chamber pot onto Admiral David Farragut. Cartoons depict them spitting at Union soldiers. One suspects simple snubs and insults were most widespread. But Butler could allow none of this to stand. In case it wasn’t clear, General Order No. 28 calls for any woman (he denies them the title “lady,” an obvious dig) disrespecting his troops to be considered and treated as a prostitute.

The reaction was predictable and swift. Here’s Confederate General PGT Beauregard, who issued a general order of his own in response, a straightforward appeal to gallantry and the protection of women’s honor:

Men of the South! shall our mothers, our wives, our daughters and our sisters, be thus outraged by the ruffianly* soldiers of the North, to whom is given the right to treat, at their pleasure, the ladies of the South as common harlots? Arouse friends, and drive back from our soil, those infamous invaders of our homes and disturbers of our family ties.

Political authorities weighed in as well. President Jefferson Davis condemned Butler. The Governor of Louisiana, Thomas Moore, published a longish open letter in which he echoed Beauregard, defended the women of New Orleans as reacting naturally to an invading foreign force, and, interestingly added force through historical argument:

The annals of warfare between civilized nations afford no similar instance of infamy to this order. It is thus proclaimed to the world that the exhibition of disgust or repulsiveness by the women of New Orleans to the hated invaders of their home and the slayers of their fathers, brothers, and husbands shall constitute a justification to a brutal soldiery for the indulgence of their lust. . . . History records instances of cities sacked and inhuman atrocities committed upon the women of a conquered town, but in no instance in modern times, at least without the brutal ravishers suffering condign punishment from the hands of their own commanders. It was reserved for a Federal general to invite his soldiers to the perpetration of outrages at the mention of which the blood recoils in horror.

Unable to penetrate deeper into Confederate territory or to break the spirit of civilian resistance, Moore suggests, Butler “sees the fruits of a victory he did not help to win eluding his grasp, and nothing left upon which to gloat his vengeance but unarmed men and helpless women.”

There’s a lot going on here, and more I could have quoted.

Over the years I’ve seen this incident downplayed as Confederate hysteria, with everything from “Lost Cause” mythology to “the patriarchy” playing a role. The short version: Southerners were ninnies upset about nothing, and anyway they deserved it. Sometimes the fact that Butler’s order did not result in a wave of rapes is adduced in support, but this is post facto justification. No one living through this could have known how it would turn out. The example of history gave them plenty to worry about.

And the historical dimension is what most piqued my interest. Reading up on Butler ahead of publishing that clerihew, I discovered in Library of America’s great four-volume set of primary source materials a British reaction to General Order No. 28. Here’s a note delivered by Lord Palmerston, then prime minister, to American ambassador Charles Adams (son of john Quincy, grandson of john) on June 11, 1862:

My dear sir,—I cannot refrain from taking the liberty of saying to you that it is difficult if not impossible to express adequately the disgust which must be excited in the mind of every honorable man by the general order of General Butler given in the inclosed extract from yesterday’s Times. Even when a town is taken by assault it is the practice of the Commander of the conquering army to protect to his utmost the inhabitants and especially the female part of them, and I will venture to say that no example can be found in the history of civilized nations till the publication of this order, of a general guilty in cold blood of so infamous an act as deliberately to hand over the female inhabitants of a conquered city to the unbridled licence of an unrestrained soldiery.

If the Federal Government chuses to be served by men capable of such revolting outrages, they must submit to abide by the deserved opinion which mankind will form of their conduct.

Adams asserted that he would not “recognize” Palmerston’s note—which was marked Confidential—“unless he was assured it was official.” Palmerston replied that it was, and publicly condemned Butler in a speech in the Commons. Adams, according to his secretary’s journal, “was much offended,” considering Palmerston’s note an “impudent” act of “insolence” and its arguments “sophistical.” Adams’s secretary, who viewed Adams as the winner of the tangle, thought Palmerston was projecting:

Knowing the brutality of his own officers and soldiers he readily imagined ours of the same stamp, and insolently presumed to lecture Mr. Adams on a thing which was not his business. His ill-manners were properly rebuked. American soldiers, he will find out, are not beasts, tho’ English soldiers are; and he will also learn that it is only a debased mind that would construe Gen’l Butler’s order as he has done.

If there is anything “sophistical” in this exchange, it is this. The explicit insult and implicit threat in General Order No. 28 were clear, hence the outrage. This is perhaps the first move in the long game of pooh-poohing the outrage at Butler.

At any rate, the women of New Orleans, Southerners generally, and foreign observers like Lord Palmerston knew what was up. So did Lincoln. Whether out of principle, canny strategic considerations, or for reasons of pure PR, Lincoln removed Butler from command in New Orleans in December 1862.

I was struck by the similarity of Palmerston’s appeal to that of Moore. Both correctly observe the dangers of a population of soldiers toward civilians in an occupied area. Both correctly observe that part of the long, slow evolution toward an ideal of “civilized” warfare involved the responsibility of leadership to protect civilians, even enemy civilians, and “even when a town is taken by assault,” which in the ancient world and much of the Middle Ages was understood to give the victor carte blanche to loot and rape.

Here’s something I’ve had to work hard to make my students understand given our “thank you for your service” culture of trust and admiration for soldiers: historically, soldiers were a menace. Even your own soldiers. (Perhaps especially your own soldiers, since if all was going well you would never see the enemy.) Discipline, martial law, flogging and the firing squad, and the inculcation of chivalrous ideals were partial solutions to the threat posed by large bodies of bored, strong, regularly paid young men to the civilian population, but only partial solutions. And these crumbled following the French Revolution which, as David Bell makes clear in The First Total War, rejected limited “civilized” warfare as an irrational fiction and embraced ruthless pragmatic brutality.

So, what to make of all this? Far from hysteria or Lost Cause mythologizing, the outrage was justifiable and the concern real. To pretend otherwise is partisanship.** Palmerston knew his history, and how thin and artificial the barrier between civilization and barbarism is. Adams imagined Union soldiers to have transcended history. One of these men is, at best, a deluded optimist.

A few years ago, quoting the Oxford History of Modern War, I wrote about the Civil War as a psychological conflict. Butler’s General Order No. 28 is a good example of what this looked like before the “frankly terrorist” campaigns of Sherman and others, campaigns that had more than a little of Jacobin total war in them. In addition to military victory, Butler needed to crush the enemy psychologically. Nothing short of abject subjugation would do, which is why Butler became a darling of the punitively-minded Radical Republicans. No “hearts and minds” here. In that way it’s of a piece with other nationalist wars.

* Appropriately, ruffian comes into English from Italian, in which it means “pimp.” Dante uses it in Inferno XVIII, the circle of panderers and seducers. Moore plays on the same theme when he writes that Butler can “add to infamy already well merited these crowning titles of a panderer to lust and a desecrator of virtue.”

** As a measure of the extent to which these events are still subject to purely partisan interpretation, why do we hear so much about the Southern desire to protect women being “misogyny” and “patriarchy,” but not Butler’s expressed intention to treat Southern women as prostitutes out of political spite?

The Mooch takes Dealey Plaza

This week on The Rest is History Club bonus episodes Dominic Sandbrook hosted Anthony Scaramucci, whom you might—might—remember as Donald Trump’s White House communications director for a week and a half in 2017. They talk through presidential history and their picks for the best of the lot. Despite my disagreeing with a lot of their choices it’s a generally fun conversation and Scaramucci is a smooth talker with a certain oily New York charm, like an ingratiating mid-tier Corleone enforcer who desperately wants you to know how many Douglas Brinkley books he’s read.

In the course of discussing JFK, Sandbrook teased that Scaramucci disagrees with the conclusions Sandbrook and Tom Holland laid out in their excellent series on Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. After a bit of puffing insinuation—“Remember I was in the White House, so I’m not really at liberty to talk about it,” as if the staffer who holds press conferences is going through highly classified FBI files in his off hours—Scaramucci says:

“But I would just ask you to look at the Zapruder film very closely—look at those three or four frames—and you tell me where the shot came from. Okay? Take a look. And if you believe the ‘magic bullet’ theory—”

Okay. The shot came from behind. Take a look at the Zapruder film however closely you want, but that’s not going to transform what you see in frame 313 into anything other than an exit wound.

Most of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, for me, founder upon a few immovable physical facts:

1. The first shot to strike Kennedy passed through him into Governor Connally. You can see both men react to the shot simultaneously in the Zapruder film.

2. No “magic” is necessary to explain the effects of that shot, as bullets do not move in straight lines, especially when passing through solid objects like human bodies. Read even a little bit about combat medicine and this should be obvious.

3. Regardless of which direction Kennedy’s head moves, the shocking head wound visible in the Zapruder film is an exit wound, meaning, again, that the bullet struck Kennedy from behind.

4. Shooting from behind was easier than the shot from the grassy knoll that Scaramucci and so many others either suggest or insist upon. A shooter on the grassy knoll would have to traverse left-to-right to hit a target moving across his line of fire. For a shooter above and behind Kennedy—in, say, the upper floors of the Texas School Book Depository—his target would be sitting almost motionless in his sights as the presidential limo moved down and away from him.

Argue all you like about Oswald, the Mafia, the Cubans, the CIA, or whatever, but no theory that contradicts these facts is credible.

I come down, like Sandbrook and Holland, firmly in the camp that it was Oswald acting alone in a politically motivated crime of opportunity, but I am willing to entertain some alternative that fits within the physical limits imposed by 1-4 above. For a detailed example worked out in fiction, see Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger novel The Third Bullet. Hunter, who actually knows something about guns, ballistics, and marksmanship, posits a second shooter in the building across the street from the Texas School Book Depository firing along almost the same axis as Oswald, who is still in his historical position and still fires at Kennedy. I can’t remember who or what is behind this convoluted backup plan in Hunter’s story, but it works within the known facts.

I don’t believe it, but this is far more likely than whatever it is Scaramucci wants impressionable listeners to think he knows.