Nolan’s Odyssey

I dashed off some initial thoughts on the first teaser trailer for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey just before Christmas. I concluded with this: “Even from this teaser it’s clear that [Nolan has] put his unmistakable stamp on the story. My hope is that, even without material fidelity to the original’s world, Homer himself will once again prove so strong that his power will shine through despite the filmmakers.”

This is more or less exactly what I thought of the film, which I finally saw this Wednesday. Homer’s power and that “despite” both feature strongly in my opinion.

I won’t bother to summarize the story. Everyone knows a little bit of it and if you’re here, bothering to read this, you probably know it even better than most.

To begin with what I liked, The Odyssey is hugely entertaining. That’s the basic standard a good movie must meet, and as a movie The Odyssey is astonishing. (Its quality as an adaptation of a great work of literature is a separate question, which we’ll return to.) The film is technically accomplished, the IMAX cinematography and the staging of the many action scenes expertly done, and the special effects seamless. The vast, cast-of-thousands scale of sequences like the Fall of Troy is overwhelming in the best sense. And for all his practical effects street cred, Nolan wisely used CGI in a number of appropriate places, a lesson seemingly learned from the underwhelming attempt to mimic the atomic bomb with a practical gasoline explosion in Oppenheimer. And I’ll go ahead and say here that I think The Odyssey is a much better movie than that one.

The film’s pacing is strong but not flawless. I’ve heard a lot of people say the movie didn’t feel three hours long. That wasn’t my experience—it actually felt enormously long to me, but in a way that conveyed the scope of the story rather than simply being boring. The Odyssey’s strongest sections are, unsurprisingly, those depicting Odysseus’s wanderings. The cyclops scene is a small masterpiece, tense, terrifying, and suspenseful, and makes the familiar one-eyed giant strange and scary again. Likewise the passage between Scylla and Charybdis and, in an episode from the poem I always forget about, the monstrous Laestrygonians, depicted here as plate-armored giants who can turn the very trees against intruders. The most disturbing scene in the movie is certainly that involving Circe, whose transformation of Odysseus’s men using half-glimpsed body horror is both frightening and unspeakably gross.

My favorite sequences were certainly Odysseus’s encounter with the cyclops and his journey to Hades to speak to the shade of Tiresias. In mood, atmosphere, and technical execution they were flawless and totally absorbing. These sequences were also allowed to breathe, lingering and building tension in a way some others, though exciting, were not.

Another favorite, coming at the climax, is Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors. Though not the film’s best action scene, it draws together many expertly prepared strands of the story—Odysseus’s bow, Antinous’s treachery, Telemachus’s arc toward manhood, and the utter loathsomeness of the suitors—in a satisfying explosion of violence. When Odysseus, having revealed himself to the crowd gathered in his palace by stringing his bow and shooting through the twelve axes, puts his next arrow into the throat of the first suitor to die, the audience at my showing clapped and cheered.

This climactic resolution is a good example of the dimension is which Nolan has most successfully adapted the Odyssey to the conventions of film—structure and resolution. The setups and payoffs necessary for a film to make sense and satisfy as a narrative are well done, likely his best work in this regard since The Prestige.

But easily the best aspect of Nolan’s Odyssey is just how much of the original is in here. It’s impressive for a movie that, though long, still comes in under three hours. While in most cases deviating from the plot of ancient literature in adaptation is accepted as necessary, Nolan hews very close, including things left out of other adaptations (the Laestrygonians, the sirens, Odysseus’s dog Argos) and leaving out little. Some of these omissions, like Nausicaa and the Phaiakians and the almost total absence of the gods, require reshuffling of other plot elements. We’ll return to this, but as an adaptation Nolan has chosen mostly wisely and with attention to narrative concision without sacrificing much.

As for The Odyssey’s flaws: with a couple exceptions I was unimpressed with the acting. Tom Holland had a welcome earnestness as Telemachus but felt stiff much of the time, and Zendaya performs Athena like a slightly less angry version of Chani in Dune, all frowns and glares. Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway were good in their roles as written by Nolan, but—again, a point we’ll return to—the cunning and wiliness of this eminently well-matched couple was missing. Damon’s Odysseus has blunt-force persistence but not much in the way of guile, and he lacks the glory-seeking and boastfulness that attract the destructive attention of Poseidon. Homer’s Odysseus had charisma. Damon’s is dogged, but one is not left wondering why his men would rebel against his authority.

The two exceptions—scene-stealers both—are John Leguizamo as Eumaeus and Robert Pattinson as the suitor Antinous. These two elevate the film, and Pattinson, who imbues Antinous with an awful oleaginous magnetism, is largely responsible for how satisfying Odysseus’s slaughter is.

The material culture I was so uncertain about in my trailer reaction didn’t end up bothering me much. Yes, the armor is ridiculous fantasy Greek armor (that also doesn’t seem to stop or turn aside any weapons whatsoever), and yes, the ships are all wrong (they are literal Viking ships, the largest of which I got to look at in Mystic, Connecticut some years ago). The film’s approach to material culture is to shrug and say “whatever,” which makes it no different from any of the other Odyssey or Trojan War epics made since the silent era. I wish we had gotten a movie more firmly rooted in the Bronze Age of Odysseus, but we didn’t and that’s fine.

Which raises the dread spectre of the controversies surrounding Nolan’s Odyssey, including “historical accuracy.” It is not, as some internet types congratulate themselves for believing, ridiculous to want the film’s ships, sets, and costumes to reflect either the world of the Trojan War or the world Homer may have imagined in his own context. Just because Homer’s Odyssey is fiction—at least, that’s how we think of it—doesn’t mean its original context is valueless.

That’s not the path Nolan chose, unfortunately, but it is also true that the Nolanesque look he decided on isn’t inherently wrong, either. It’s worth judging on its own merits, and I think his brutalist matte black tactical imagination is somewhat self-limiting—a theme to which we’ll return. The look of The Odyssey is fine, but not a surprise. A surprise, whether rigorously historically sourced or even more archly fantastical, like 300, would have been nice.

However, Nolan himself undermines the argument that accuracy of whatever kind doesn’t matter by including numerous mentions of the Sea Peoples, mysterious raiders from the central and western Mediterranean who relentlessly attacked the east and brought on the Bronze Age Collapse. This is an unnecessary gesture toward real historical context that doesn’t mesh with the fantastical elements and doesn’t work historically—Homer’s characters wouldn’t have been aware of impending civilizational collapse and Homer himself didn’t include it because, though he lived in its long aftermath, he didn’t know about it. A strange choice but one clearly made for thematic reasons.

As for the casting controversies that generated a seriously annoying amount of internet bloviation: they proved a massive nothingburger. I’ll focus on Helen of Troy here. On one hand, as Homer translator Daniel Mendelsohn put it recently in a Rest is History Club episode, “it’s a little disingenuous to assume that Nolan wasn’t being consciously provocative in his choice” of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen. It’s not ridiculous—much less racist—to notice. On the other hand, Helen appears only briefly, and I didn’t find her presence jarring at all given what I’ve already said about the film’s historically unmoored approach. Something else bothered me much more.

The worst flaw of Nolan’s Odyssey reminded me of the recent adaptations The Green Knight and All Quiet on the Western Front. In both of those cases, I wrote much longer than normal reviews—as here—trying to strike a balance between appreciating the filmmaking and decrying the vandalism of the originals. The Odyssey is a much better movie than either of those and more faithfully presents the events and even the structure of the original, but it still fails to understand and present the original’s worldview.

In place of the deep concern with piety and hospitality in Homer’s poem, something almost every incident from the cyclops and Laestrygonians (uncivilized bad host, civilized bad hosts) to the Phaiakians (the ideal of civilized good hosts) illustrates, Nolan’s film foregrounds what he calls “Zeus’s law,” a watered down form of hospitality that amounts to the Golden Rule—almost directly quoted at one point—and a strange nonviolence. Despite what the suitors have spent years doing to Odysseus’s wife, son, servants, and palace, Odysseus for some reason can’t retaliate without going into exile. (Exiled by whom? I saw someone ask online. Is he not the king?) One of the few major departures from Homer is the film’s ending, in which Odysseus and Penelope, rather than restoring Ithaca through Athena’s help, leave, sailing west as in Dante and, later, Tennyson, but for twenty-first century reasons.

This strange, confused theme grows out of the film’s larger point about war and violence and the destruction of civilization. This is where the Sea Peoples come in—at the end, Penelope explicitly connects their threat with the Greek victory in the Trojan War. And for Odysseus himself, this is manifested in his guilt and trauma over the sack of Troy. Nolan’s Odyssey is about processing trauma and atoning for sin.

This leads to a running undercurrent of resentment. Antinous’s wickedness stems from his resentment of Odysseus and Telemachus much more than greed, Circe vents years, possibly centuries of resentment on Odysseus when thwarted, Sinon, in Hades, grouses at Odysseus for leaving him ignorant of his designs, and everyone resents Agamemnon. The biggest problem with Nyong’o’s Helen isn’t Nyong’o, it’s the seething resentment at being returned to Menelaus that Nolan has imparted to her.

This is not unique to this film, of course. I’m struck that in updating or making relevant an old story, the go-to modern method is to import and emphasis grudges and resentments. This reveals more about us than Homer, certainly.

Like Nolan’s matte black and concrete visual style, all of this is both ultramodern and—worse—uninteresting.

It’s strange, but The Odyssey makes the same mistake here as the The Return, which squandered a brilliant performance by Ralph Fiennes—whose Odysseus had obvious cunning—in simplifying and deconstructing the story. The Odyssey is a far better movie than The Return, but its psychologizing and therapeutic themes have the same flattening effect, a fact noted by no less a light than Emily Wilson, whose iambic pentameter translation I would not recommend but has been unfairly blamed for what a lot of online rage-baiters perceive as Nolan’s failings. Per Wilson: “The film presents an Odysseus who feels very bad about things that he’s done in war, and is struggling to process them in a very modern, psychiatrized way—and needs drugs to do so!” Fuss about helmets, ships, and casting all you like—this is the real, most serious departure from Homer.

Do we need another PTSD therapy fable? Is there not something in the alien world Homer’s imagination has kept alive for 2700 years that speaks to us without thinking we have to modernize it? Homer is brilliant on his own—dramatic, funny, terrifying, suspenseful, and moving by turns. It’s a fool’s errand to think one can improve him by making him relevant.

So this is not Homer’s Odyssey; it’s Nolan’s, for better and for worse. It’s riveting entertainment on a massive scale and worth seeing just for that. It also succeeds better than any other film version at covering most of the epic’s plot and events. But its worldview is not the original’s, and what it substitutes—or, rather, clumsily adds onto—is predictable and unsatisfying.

And yet, whatever misgivings one might have about Nolan’s imprint on the story, he was smart enough to get as much of Homer into the film as he could, and that’s the film’s saving grace. As I had hoped back in December, Homer’s power is much greater than any limitation or miscalculation on Nolan’s part, and so The Odyssey excites and moves precisely where it’s truest to the poet.

Watcher in the Shadows

As I noted when reviewing Geoffrey Household’s A Rough Shoot back in the early spring, Household knew how to open a thriller. In Watcher in the Shadows, another Cold War-era shocker, he sends a postman to Charles Dennim’s front door on page one and blows him in half on page two. The novel barely slows down from there.

Dennim lives a quiet life in a rural English village. He’s an expert zoologist specializing in squirrels and shares the house—now missing most of its windows—with his widowed aunt. What presumably only he, a friend in British intelligence, and the unknown person who sent him a mailbomb know is that he is actually Charles von Dennim, scion of an aristocratic Austrian family and, during the Second World War, a double agent working undercover as part of the SS staff at Buchenwald concentration camp.

Now, ten years on from the war and in his early forties, Dennim prefers not to think about all this. He carries on his research into small mammals and enjoys his leisurely outdoor pursuits, including hunting and horseback riding with Aunt Georgina, an accomplished riding instructor. The abortive mail bomb gives him pause. Perhaps it was meant for someone else, though none of his neighbors strike him as the likely targets of assassination. But a few days later he receives a postcard—a photo of Buchenwald with a X marked over one building, the officers’ mess.

His past is known to someone, somewhere, albeit not in full. Dennim had successfully fed intelligence to the British during his time at Buchenwald and arranged the escapes of several important female political prisoners. He risked his life and his sanity—the moral damage done not only to his mind but to his sense of honor by the secrecy of his role comes up several times—in order to undermine the Nazis, though the nature of his work means neither he nor the British government can acknowledge it.

Dennim investigates and finds that several other men associated with Buchenwald—two officers and a truck driver—had recently been murdered in mysterious circumstances. One was tortured for days, hinting that the killings are motivated by something highly personal. Dennim, not least because he is not guilty of the crimes his enemy apparently seeks to avenge, determines not to be next.

This leads into the bulk of the novel, a series of removes from place to place in the English countryside as Dennim tries to lure the killer into a trap. Thinking of himself as a goat staked out for a hidden tiger, Dennim learns quickly that his enemy is smart, observant, and supremely cautious. A misstep on his own part might send the assassin into hiding for months, long enough to drive Dennim mad or render him complacent, an easy target. He must proceed carefully if he wants to force a confrontation.

Along the way Dennim finds allies in unlikely places—a retired admiral, a pub landlord, a sharply observant working class laborer—as well as, for the first time in his life as a bachelor spy-cum-zoologist, love. Benita, the admiral’s daughter, is no merely obligatory love interest but proves especially important, as by the time Dennim confronts his enemy one-on-one at a remote Cotswolds barn, he has much more at stake in his life than when the hunt began.

Watcher in the Shadows has many of the hallmarks and strengths of the other Household novels I’ve read so far: strong, lean prose, energetic pacing, continuously building tension and suspense, and beautifully realized outdoor settings. But a number of other factors set it apart and make it unusually rich and thought-provoking.

The first is Dennim’s romance with Benita. Household, as I’ve noted about Buchan before him and Ambler, his close contemporary, is not an author one would normally associate with a romantic subplot, but like both he can evoke newly kindled love simply and poignantly, in ways that both enrich the characters and matter to the plot.

The next is the depth of Dennim’s prior experiences undercover. Without giving too much away, Dennim’s secret is known to more people than himself, his enemy, and his few contacts in British Intelligence, and his postwar history is more complicated than his simple career studying squirrels may at first suggest. Buchenwald and secrecy damaged him, and coming to understand this both reveals hidden depths in other characters and plays an important role in learning how to defeat his enemy.

The last is the enemy himself. Again, I want to avoid spoiling the book, but the man trying to kill Dennim has a surprising connection to Buchenwald and to Dennim—that is, to the von Dennim family, now reduced to a widowed aunt and a bachelor squirrel expert but once a powerful noble dynasty. This connection and the mostly vanished world it evokes leads Dennim and his enemy backward in time, past genocide and the amorality of the nation state to the chivalric code of honor shared by those of noble blood. It is blood, in fact, that helps save Dennim’s life at the end.

Plenty of spy novels acknowledge or ruminate on the damage done by the secrecy, deceit, and pragmatism of espionage, but few offer an alternative, much less an alternative rooted in the past. By the end of Watcher in the Shadows, honor and honesty have given two irreconcilable enemies common ground in which to resolve their differences. Dennim’s duel with the enemy moves from the metaphorical—chess, cat and mouse, tiger and goat—to the literal. Their long fight at the barn is a sustained masterpiece of suspense and, thanks to the contrast between old world honor and modern technocratic nihilism running through the book, a challenging moral contest.

I read Watcher in the Shadows for the thrills and suspense and Household, true to form, didn’t disappoint. But the novel reaches a moral and cultural depth I found surprising—and inspiring. This is as good a thriller as any Buchan, Ambler, or Ian Fleming produced, and is well worth reading.

My one Lindsey Graham story

This is not a political post—at least not in the sense of partisan politics and policy debates. I have opinions about all that stuff, but for today: de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

One evening early on in our marriage, Sarah and I were walking down Main Street in downtown Greenville. As we crossed Broad Street in front of the Peace Center, two men in suits passed us in the crosswalk and headed uphill, talking and nodding as they went. I glanced at them and didn’t think anything of it, but after a few steps Sarah said, “Did you see that?”

“What?”

“That was Lindsey Graham.”

I realized that one of them had looked familiar. I looked back and watched Graham and the other man walk on, still talking. We had just walked past a United States senator.

Not much of a story, but the incident stuck with me. I’ve told it in class ever since to illustrate a specific point when I teach ancient Rome in Western Civ.

After explaining the expulsion of Rome’s Etruscan kings, the creation of the Republic, and something of the divide between patricians and plebs and patron-client relationships, I put a picture of a Roman consul entering a Senate meeting onscreen. It’s a Victorian engraving and despite including some good details it’s not well composed artistically, so the subject of the picture is not immediately apparent. I ask the class who the most important person in the picture is. They’ll often guess one or other of the senators because they’re seated. I then point out the consul, his signs of rank, and especially his retinue: clients, political allies, advisors, soldiers, slaves, even some bearded Gauls.

That’s when I tell my Lindsey Graham story. It would have been unthinkable in ancient Rome, even when the republic was strongest, to pass a man of that importance on the street without noticing, without seeing his gaggle of attendants and hangers on.

That little incident offers a useful contrast and helps build an understanding of Roman social life in my students’ imaginations. It’s also a good reminder—as much as I love the Romans—of what an American republic is supposed to be like. We have neither monarchy nor patricians and plebs, but as political culture and politicians themselves have become progressively more imperial, complete with retinues and armies of bodyguards—seriously, look at the vast apparatus used just to move the president, ostensibly a fellow citizen, by car—this ideal, however imperfect and never fully realized, is worth remembering. As long as a national politician can walk down the street more or less unnoticed, as even such Caesarian presidents as Jackson and Lincoln would and did, something of that republican culture still lives.

I suppose this did turn out to be a political post, though about politics at a more fundamental level.

As for Lindsey Graham himself, he was undoubtedly a devoted son of South Carolina. I was surprised to learn that, having been born in Central, where I spent some time during my Clemson years, he lived in Seneca, town of more than a dozen redlights. For all I know we could have sat in traffic near each other many times long before that crosswalk encounter. RIP

The scouring of the Shire and unconstitutionalism

Last week YouTuber Feral Historian posted an excellent short reflection on the often-overlooked final conflict in The Lord of the Rings: the Scouring of the Shire. After a brief summary of the ways Frodo and company find the Shire changed upon their return and what they do about it—bold activity rather than passivity being one of the marks left upon them by their journeys—Feral Historian unpacks just what is so devilish about Saruman’s achievements there.

It’s an excellent video with lots of good asides—about bureaucracy, the depersonalization of authority, a bit about historiography, and even the fundamental error of reading racialist meanings into Tolkien’s work—so by all means watch it. It’s well worth your eleven minutes. I want to focus on one important detail.

Feral Historian quotes a famous letter from Tolkien to his son Christopher (Letter 52 in the original edition of The Letters of JRR Tolkien, also quoted in full here), written in November 1943 as Christopher trained at an RAF based:

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy.

In light of Feral Historian’s analysis, Tolkien’s phrase “‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy” brought to mind Joseph de Maistre’s 1809 Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions.

This is a short but dense work of political philosophy, but one of the chief arguments of the Essay is that the only authentic constitutional orders arise organically from a people’s way of life, and that the act of writing the laws down destroys it. Written constitutions lose their authenticity immediately, not, as Rousseau would argue, by being left behind by the march of generations, but by replacing organic and proven institutions with artificial constructions that can be manipulated by the unscrupulous,* and naturally generate more and more “law,” eventually smothering the people. On this point, the Essay is an elaboration of Tacitus’s observation, in a sweeping account of the history of law and its perversion, “Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges”—the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. Indisputable.

Let the reader understand.

The Essay was a great challenge to me when I first read it but I think de Maistre is basically correct.** The question is what to do about it—if it is even possible to do anything about it.

As Feral Historian notes near the end of his video, Tolkien’s monarchism is already foreign to American thinking. Devolution and decentralization to the point of actual local self-governance—the kind Saruman sought to vandalize—are already something neither side in bipartisan politics would support since it would mean relinquishing even the possibility of “bossing other men,” as Tolkien puts it elsewhere in his letter. Going as far as de Maistre by stripping written constitutions of the sacred mythology built up around them in favor of “unconstitutionalism”—tradition, courtesy, and custom—would take us from fiction to fantasy.

But one can hope, perhaps.

Watch Feral Historian’s video, and take some time to explore his back catalog. Here’s a bit more about de Maistre and his context. You can read de Maistre’s Essay in its entirety in an 1847 translation here and here. It’s short and to the point and worth reading, even if only to argue about it.

* Hamilton makes a similar argument in Federalist 84, in which he asserts that a clearly elucidated bill of rights would be grist to the mill of legal shenanigans. Naturally I suspect Hamilton of mendacity, but the basic point is sound.

** I have a parable illustrating the basic argument in my head that, ironically, I need to get written down one of these days.

Not once but whenever he wants it

The Battle of Gettysburg was in its second day right now in 1863. This justly celebrated passage about the third and final day from Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust has been making the rounds again:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago[.]

Faulkner’s vision of the instant before Pickett’s Charge on July 3 powerfully evokes both the anticipation and the what-might-have-been of the moment, but I think an overlooked parenthetical right at the beginning is especially important for his point: “not once but whenever he wants it.”

This moment, with “all in the balance,” is not just remembered but lived in. The imagination can dwell for years in an instant like the one Faulkner describes. The poignancy and suspense of the minutes before Pickett’s Charge are irresistible, not despite but because of the result. Neither Faulkner nor his Southern boy, as they are sometimes accused, “romanticize” the war; far from it. What critics of the romantic fail to understand is that romance acknowledges and embraces danger. If it didn’t it wouldn’t be romantic. This moment’s very bitterness and danger, the last instant before the plunge, is part of the allure. One returns to it again and again—Faulkner’s “This time” does not mean merely “a second time”—to relive it. “Whenever he wants it” is often.

This bit of Faulkner has lasted because it is true. It captures precisely not just the potential and inevitability and weight of July 3, but the feel of a Civil War-obsessed Southern boy’s Sehnsucht. Ask me how I know.

By the way, Georgie Wax, the narrator of Griswoldville, is fourteen at the time of the novel’s climactic action. I wrote it that way, with Faulkner far from my mind, to be true to the boy-soldier aspect of the late-war Georgia militia, and because that age corresponds with the peak of my own Civil War obsession and was the age at which I lost my grandfather. A coincidence better than anything I could have planned.

Sir Quixote of the Moors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dialogue, dialect, and expectations

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

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

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

That should say “wicked smaht.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Long Traverse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Latitude and the borders of the possible

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

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

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

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

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

There’s that word romance again.

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

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

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

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

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

A historical philosophy quotation master list

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

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

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

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

The big three: Bloch, Hartley, Cicero

Bloch: history is about people

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

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

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

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

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

Hartley: history is about difference

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cicero: history is memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Others: approaches, priorities, and purpose

Butterfield: teaching and writing about history is a balancing act

Another from Butterfield’s Whig Interpretation of History:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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