A really solid Tennessee excursion

Chickamauga: Cannon and monuments at the site of the Confederate breakthrough

Pardon the title. The kids put on Glenn Miller this morning during breakfast and I have “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” stuck in my head. That’s appropriate, though, because I’d already been planning to write about what we were doing five years ago right now: visiting Chattanooga. I wrote a review of one of the places we visited at the time: The National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, which is right next door to the Tennessee Aquarium. The kids greatly enjoyed both. I notice now that I had promised to write more about my highlight of the trip later.

I suppose five years to the day is “later.” The highlight was a tour of the battlefield at Chickamauga.

The second bloodiest battle of the Civil War and the second bloodiest battle ever fought in north American occurred in September 1863 on the Georgia side of the state line just south of Chattanooga, part of the broader Union campaign to capture that city preparatory to invading Georgia and capturing the railroad hub at Atlanta. The battle began as a piecemeal, raggedy fight through dense forest along a broad front with a ridge at the Union’s back. The arrival of greater and greater numbers on both sides gradually allowed the battle to coalesce into a massive contest of frontal assaults.

The most dramatic moment of the battle came on the second day, when General James Longstreet hit a massive gap that had opened in the Union center with a sledgehammer blow of 10,000 men attacking in column. Eyewitnesses to the assault, who later described the massed Confederate troops pouring into the open fields of the Brotherton farm under streaming battle flags, were staggered by the sight. The attack broke the Union army, which fell back into the foothills and fought a series of heroic delaying actions as the army began its retreat to Chattanooga.

It was a massive victory for the Confederacy. The Confederate commander, the prickly, inscrutable Braxton Bragg, had a momentary lift in his reputation. The Union commander, William Rosecrans, whose confused orders resulted in the gap that Longstreet had blown apart, ended up resigning. His military career was over.

The losses were also massive. Four generals were killed, including Benjamin Hardin Helm, Mary Todd Lincoln’s brother-in-law. The Lincoln White House went into quiet, unpublicized mourning. And thousands of ordinary soldiers were killed and wounded—the casualties were second only to Gettysburg in the whole war and the heaviest by far in all of the Western Theatre—including someone whose last words I’ve written about here before: South Carolina Sergeant Richard Rowland Kirkland, “the Angel of Marye’s Heights.”

It’s a huge, important, fascinating battle that is often overshadowed by Eastern Theatre battles like Gettysburg and Antietam or Union victories in the West like Vicksburg or Atlanta. For more, here’s a good short guide and an excellent animated map from American Battlefield Trust. For a book-length treatment, I’d recommend Peter Cozzens’s This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga, which I read ahead of our visit.

The battle itself is significant and interesting, but visiting the battlefield meant much, much more to me.

The Civil War was the first historical event or period that I developed a serious interest in, somewhere about third or fourth grade. By fifth grade it obsessed me. I read everything I could get my hands on—fiction and non-fiction, Rifles for Watie and The Boys’ War among many others—and borrowed every Civil War documentary available at the Rabun County Library. For years I got multiple Civil War coffee table books and atlases for Christmas.

But growing up in northeast Georgia did not leave me a lot of options for seeing places from the Civil War. We only visited Atlanta by necessity and its battlefield has been buried under urban sprawl for decades. I did get to visit the Atlanta Cyclorama in its original location by the zoo—I could barely contain myself—but found it disheartening when the guide pointed out that the road running through the middle of the action is now Jimmy Carter Boulevard. (It occurs to me that this must be one of the roots of my interest in historic preservation.)

I learned of the Battle of Griswoldville from one of my library books, but I had no idea where that was and it was a pitiful Confederate defeat to boot. The seeds planted there would take twenty-odd years to sprout. But there was one other option in Georgia, a big one, that I knew about from our encyclopedias: Chickamauga.

The Battle of Chickamauga was big, it was a smashing Confederate victory, and it was fought in north Georgia! I begged to go, for a chance to see a real battlefield.

The problem is that “north Georgia” is a big place and, living in the mountains, it is not fast or easy to travel east-west. The few times I had been out that way—to Space Camp with my dad, or on church trips to camp—we had actually looped up into Tennessee to get to our destination. Places like Rome, Cartersville, or Chickamauga might as well have been on the moon. I don’t remember any specific answers I got from my questions about seeing Chickamauga, but the sense I remember is “We’ll see.” Meaning not for a long time, if ever.

But one person did promise me a visit: my granddad.

He was someone I could always talk to about my Civil War obsession. I barely remember any of those conversations, but I vividly recall him promising to take me to Chickamauga someday. The memory is still vivid because I could imagine the trip in one of his old trucks—the feel and smell of the seats, the road noise, the gas station snacks we’d certainly pick up (circus peanuts for him, Lance Gold-n-Chees for me), the talk with him we’d enjoy on the long drive.

We never got to make that trip, though. About that time, as I wrapped up elementary school and entered middle school, he was diagnosed with melanoma. He held on for a good while but, after Christmas 1997, declined quickly. He died March 13, 1998. 28 years ago today.

And five years ago today, on the 23rd anniversary of his death, I got to visit Chickamauga. I didn’t get to see the battlefield with him, but I did take my wife and three oldest kids, the dearest people in the world to me and the people I would most have liked him to meet. My oldest son, who was three and a half, at the time, is named after him.

That trip to Chattanooga, with its loop down to Chickamauga and Rock City—more on that in another five years, maybe—was a good trip all-around, but the best moment came there on the battlefield. We stopped the car to see the monument to my homestate. Georgia monuments on a lot of Eastern Theatre battlefields are pretty modest, usually a square granite column with the state seal. The one at Chickamauga, though, is a monument—almost ninety feet tall, surmounted by a bronze flagbearer and with lower pedestals commemorating Georgia’s infantry, cavalry, and artillerymen. It’s beautiful.

We got out of the car and the kids, with no idea yet of how much this visit, here, with them, meant to me, charged across the field to get a closer look. As I followed with Sarah and our youngest, my heart swelled, and I said a prayer of thanks: for them, for my homestate, that we could make this trip, and most of all for my granddad.

23 years is a long time, but it was worth the wait.

No aristocracy worth its salt

This week Before They Were Live dropped a new episode on Moana 2, which I haven’t seen, but Michial and Josh’s discussion of the film’s manifold weaknesses got me thinking about one of the biggest flaws in Frozen.

A few years ago I ranted about the dam in Frozen II—a badly imagined piece of infrastructure that has no use beyond serving as a cack-handed metaphor for the film’s political message. But that dam is not the first useless thing affecting the plot of a Frozen movie. I want to look at the first film’s villain, Prince Hans, and more specifically Arendelle’s useless aristocracy.

Here’s the rub: Prince Hans arrives early in the film and he and Anna, Queen Elsa’s younger sister, fall instantly in love. He swans around in a secondary role for a while until the climactic twist: Hans does not love Anna and, as the youngest son of another kingdom’s dynasty, as deliberately insinuated himself into Arendelle’s royal family to await an opportunity to take over. With Elsa feared and effectively outlawed and Anna mortally wounded by Elsa’s ice powers, Hans refuses Anna the kiss that will save her life, tells the handful of nobles hanging around the court that she’s dead, seizes control of Arendelle, and leads the attempt to eliminate Elsa. Boo, hiss.

I’m heartened to learn that I’m not the first person to criticize Hans as a villain. Others have pointed out the thin to nonexistent foreshadowing of his ulterior motives and the fact that his actions earlier in the film are counterproductive to his plot. (He’s also, in keeping with the political valence of the dam in Frozen II, more of a feminist device than a character, but more on that later.) These are legitimate complaints but not my chief problem with him.

The biggest problem with Hans, his plot, and Frozen’s climax is Arendelle’s useless aristocracy. I actually use this as a negative example when lecturing on the medieval nobility in Western Civ. Imagine: the youngest son of a foreign royal family shows up in a kingdom just emerging from a regency and ingratiates himself with the princess who is second in line to the throne. And consider the climax, when Hans, the only person allowed to talk to the severely ill princess, appears and tells the leading men that Anna is dead. Somewhere else. Trust me, bros. And they do.

A real aristocracy would have sniffed out Hans’s intentions in about ten seconds. No aristocracy worth its salt would have missed this, or failed to act against it. They would have sworn oaths to Elsa and her family and had roles to play under her rule and with respect to each other, roles they would fiercely protect. They would have duties and prerogatives. If they had somehow let things get to the point of Hans announcing Anna’s death, they would have demanded evidence. Immediately. He would have been an object of suspicion from beginning to end. A Bismarck, a John of Gaunt, a William Marshal, an Eorl Godwin, or your pick of the Percys, Hohenzollerns, or Carolingians would have eaten Hans alive.

But Arendelle does not have an aristocracy worth its salt. There are only four other men in the room when Hans makes his bid for control and one of them is a foreign diplomat. The rest are nameless drones in uniforms and sashes. This curiously empty kingdom must be either an absolute monarchy, with Elsa at the top and no mediating ranks between her and the people, or have an unseen, unmentioned parliament that has reduced the monarch to a figurehead—which I strongly doubt, if Elsa’s throne is as desirable as Hans thinks it is.

You could try to excuse this as the necessary simplicity of a children’s film, but children’s films don’t have to be simple. It’s more a cliche born of a typical American incuriosity regarding nobility, Americans being incapable of imagining aristocrats as having functions and not just being privileged people who are excusable as targets of scorn and envy. Frozen’s feminist underpinnings are also a factor, feminist ideology—whatever the movement’s other merits—being a universal machine for making complex reality stupidly oversimplified. Google Prince Hans and see how often the cliche “toxic” comes up. He’s a powerful man and other powerful men are just going to trust him and follow him.

Again, study history, even a little bit.

Hans and the Arendelle nobility aren’t just unrealistic—though it’s fun to nitpick and, when I point this out in class, to see students recognize it as a flaw based on what we’ve learned about the past. The real problem is that the combined lack of imagination and ideological cliche evidenced in Hans weaken the story. Like the dam in Frozen II, he’s there to make a point and reinforce a message, not to live and breathe.

A real aristocracy—the kind that patronized the courtly love poets and commissioned altarpieces and cathedrals—wouldn’t have made this mistake.

Dr Johnson and General Oglethorpe

This week’s batch of The Rest is History is a four-episode series on Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and their world. So far it’s a delight, and reflects well on Johnson. It also got me thinking about Johnson’s friendship with one of my heroes: soldier, humanitarian, and founder of Georgia James Oglethorpe.

I can’t recall how I first discovered their connection but it may have been through reading John Buchan’s Midwinter, a novel set during the Jacobite Rising in ’45 and in which both men appear. Possibly because of that, I dug into my copy of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson and turned up a number of charming and tantalizing anecdotes about Johnson’s dinners at Oglethorpe’s house (and one in which Johnson unexpectedly hosts Oglethorpe).

I’ve been meaning to research this further but haven’t gotten around to it; what I can do is copy a few choice excerpts into this, my commonplace book, something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. I hope y’all enjoy these as much as I have.

Here’s Boswell’s first mention of Oglethorpe, in the context of the publication of Johnson’s neoclassical poem London in 1738:

One of the warmest patrons of this poem on its first appearance was General Oglethorpe, whose ‘strong benevolence of soul,’ was unabated during the course of a very long life; though it is painful to think, that he had but too much reason to become cold and callous, and discontented with the world, from the neglect which he experienced of his publick and private worth, by those in whose power it was to gratify so gallant a veteran with marks of distinction. This extraordinary person was as remarkable for his learning and taste, as for his other eminent qualities; and no man was more prompt, active, and generous, in encouraging merit. I have heard Johnson gratefully acknowledge, in his presence, the kind and effectual support which he gave to his London, though unacquainted with its authour.

A good sketch of Oglethorpe’s character and virtues. I’d like to look into this further (this GHQ article is where I’ll start), as Oglethorpe was in England recruiting for his regiment in 1738 but Johnson’s London was initially published anonymously.

Boswell’s first account of a dinner at General Oglethorpe’s has Boswell provoking conversation with a question about the morality of dueling. Oglethorpe leaps in before Johnson can reply: “The brave old General fired at this, and said, with a lofty air, ‘Undoubtedly a man has a right to defend his honour.’” Not one to break character, the General.

There’s a bit of back-and-forth with Oliver Goldsmith before Boswell presses Johnson on the question of “whether duelling was contrary to the laws of Christianity.” Johnson gives a “masterly” and lengthy answer in favor of dueling as a form of self-defense. Oglethorpe chips in with an anecdote about accidental insult diplomatically avoided:

The General told us, that when he was a very young man, I think only fifteen, serving under Prince Eugene of Savoy, he was sitting in a company at table with a Prince of Wirtemberg. The Prince took up a glass of wine, and, by a fillip, made some of it fly in Oglethorpe’s face. Here was a nice dilemma. To have challenged him instantly, might have fixed a quarrelsome character upon the young soldier: to have taken no notice of it might have been considered as cowardice. Oglethorpe, therefore, keeping his eye upon the Prince, and smiling all the time, as if he took what his Highness had done in jest, said ‘Mon Prince,—’. (I forget the French words he used, the purport however was,) ‘That’s a good joke; but we do it much better in England;’ and threw a whole glass of wine in the Prince’s face. An old General who sat by, said, ‘Il a bien fait, mon Prince, vous l’avez commence:’ [He did well, my Prince; you started it] and thus all ended in good humour.

Dr. Johnson said, ‘Pray, General, give us an account of the siege of Belgrade.’ Upon which the General, pouring a little wine upon the table, described every thing with a wet finger: ‘Here we were, here were the Turks,’ &c. &c. Johnson listened with the closest attention.

An evening of war stories with General Oglethorpe!

There are several other mentions in the Life of dinners at Oglethorpe’s house, but not as much conversation. We do get observations of Oglethorpe’s character, though, such as Boswell’s note that “[t]he uncommon vivacity of Oglethorpe’s mind, and the variety of knowledge . . . sometimes made his conversation too desultory.” That is, he rambled. Johnson glossed this by saying of that Oglethorpe “never COMPLETES what he has to say.” One imagines him as an interesting conversationalist who leaps quickly from subject to subject.

There’s also the anecdote alluded to above, when Oglethorpe apparently assumed Johnson was having him over for dinner—entirely unbeknownst to Johnson. How this mixup occurred Boswell doesn’t say, but when he

mentioned this to Johnson, not doubting that it would please him, as he had a great value for Oglethorpe, the fretfulness of his disease unexpectedly shewed itself; his anger suddenly kindled, and he said, with vehemence, ‘Did not you tell him not to come? Am I to be HUNTED in this manner?’ I satisfied him that I could not divine that the visit would not be convenient, and that I certainly could not take it upon me of my own accord to forbid the General.

Boswell found Johnson talking to some ladies that night, morose because of a poorly performed play, but when Oglethorpe arrived Johnson was “was as courteous as ever.” A glimpse both of Johnson’s regard for Oglethorpe—which Boswell mentions almost every time he comes up—as well as some of Johnson’s mental troubles.

A final detail with regard to Johnson’s respect for Oglethorpe: one evening at Oglethorpe’s for dinner, Johnson “urged [him] to give the world his Life. He said, ‘I know no man whose Life would be more interesting. If I were furnished with materials, I should be very glad to write it.’”

It’s a shame we never got that book.

Again, a topic for further research one of these days. In the meantime, check out The Rest is History’s series on Johnson, and definitely give Buchan’s Midwinter a look. I glanced back through the parts mentioning Oglethorpe—Johnson is a major character throughout while Oglethorpe lurks in the background—and greatly enjoyed the novel’s final chapter, in which Johnson and Oglethorpe finally meet. The novel’s protagonist, Jacobite spy Alastair Maclean, who has befriended Johnson over the course of the uprising, arrives at Oglethorpe’s headquarters but

was not prepared for the sight of Oglethorpe; grim, aquiline, neat as a Sunday burgess, who raised his head from a mass of papers, stared for a second and then smiled.

“You have brought me a friend, Roger,” he told the young lieutenant. “These gentlemen will be quartered here this night, for the weather is too thick to travel further; likewise they will sup with me.”

When the young man had gone, he held out his hand to Alastair.

“We seem fated to cross each other’s path, Mr Maclean.”

“I would present to you my friend, Mr Samuel Johnson, sir. This is General Oglethorpe.”

Johnson stared at him and then thrust forward a great hand.

“I am honoured, sir, deeply honoured. Every honest man has heard the name.” And he repeated:

“One, driven by strong benevolence of soul,
“Shall fly like Oglethorpe from pole to pole.”

The General smiled. “Mr Pope was over-kind to my modest deserts. But, gentlemen, I am in command of a part of His Majesty’s forces, and at this moment we are in the region of war. I must request from you some account of your recent doings and your present purpose. Come forward to the fire, for it is wintry weather. And stay! Your Prince’s steward has been scouring the country for cherry brandy, to which it seems His Highness is partial. But all has not been taken.” He filled two glasses from a decanter at his elbow.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship.

* * * * *

Addendum: After posting this yesterday I listened to the end of the second episode, which mostly concerns Boswell, and Tom Holland quoted—in part—a charming passage from Boswell’s journals about his starstruck astonishment to be sitting and talking with Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith: “I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind.”

As it happens, I had just read the same passage in The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, by Leo Darmosch. For my purposes, Holland left out an extremely important bit. Here’s the whole passage from Darmosch:

In 1772 Boswell was flattered to be invited to dinner by General James Oglethorpe, then in his seventies, who had been a pioneer in prison reform and co-founder of the colony of Georgia. In his journal Boswell noted, “Mr. Johnson and Dr. Goldsmith and nobody else were in the company. I felt a completion of happiness. I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind. Here I am in London, at the house of General Oglethorpe, who introduced himself to me just because I had distinguished myself; and here is Mr. Johnson, whose character is so vast; here is Dr. Goldsmith, so distinguished in literature. Words cannot describe our feelings. The finer parts are lost, as the down upon a plum; the radiance of light cannot be painted.” (283)

I read this while browsing Mr K’s, our local used bookstore. I didn’t end up taking The Club home—I’m trying, however feebly, to thin our library out—but I did pick up Trevor Royle’s Culloden, which includes several pages on Oglethorpe’s role in suppressing the Jacobite Rising.

Richard Cory and ambiguity

One of my favorite poets is Edwin Arlington Robinson. Though both popular and respected in his day, winning the Pulitzer for poetry three times, he seems largely forgotten now. I suspect this is largely a matter of timing: he mastered traditional form and meter, especially the sonnet and villanelle, just as Pound and Eliot and company were coming along to blow it all up.

Robinson’s skill also makes his tightly constructed verse seem effortless, even conversational. It’s clear and understandable—something else the modern poetry establishment, which came more and more to resemble a clique or cult, won’t abide—and mines powerful emotions from everyday scenes and images. Perhaps his best-known poems in this regard are a series of character sketches describing people from a fictitious New England village: “Reuben Bright,” “Aaron Stark,” “Luke Havergal,” “Cliff Klingenhagen,” and my personal favorite—read it and you’ll get why—“Miniver Cheevy.”

Another favorite, and one of Robinson’s most memorable, challenging, and dark, is “Richard Cory.” Take a minute and read it—I’m going to spoil it.

In sixteen lines, Robinson introduces us to a handsome, elegant, popular, courteous, and, yes, wealthy local gentleman, a man with everything going for him. Envy is perhaps too strong a word for the community’s attitude—Richard Cory is too well respected, if not beloved, to warrant envy—but the anonymous speaker of the poem makes it clear that Richard Cory lives in a world everyone else only aspires to. And then Richard Cory kills himself.

I still feel the shock of the final line all the years later, and the bitter irony with which it reframes the entire preceding poem. There is some ambiguity there—was Richard Cory discontent? ungrateful? depressed?—but the import is fairly clear: money can’t buy happiness, and you never know what troubles afflict someone of seemingly greater privilege than you.

The Simon and Garfunkel version, released on Sounds of Silence in 1966, traffics in a different kind of ambiguity. It’s less than three minutes long—listen to it here.

Paul Simon, in adapting Robinson’s poem, makes some noteworthy thematic changes. Where Robinson began with the impression Richard Cory gave his neighbors on the street and mentions his wealth last, Simon leads off with his wealth and even explains where it came from—an inheritance from his banker father, though we’re told later he owns a factory—highlighting the extent of his property and influence. “He had everything a man could want,” in this version, “Power, grace, and style,” which is the reverse of the human view Robinson gives us. (Simon also updates the outward signs of Richard Cory’s wealth for the swingin’ sixties with “the orgies on his yacht.”)

But the biggest change is the inclusion of a chorus, in which the anonymous speaker of Robinson’s poem, one of Richard Cory’s neighbors, comments on his own situation:

But I, I work in his factory
and I curse the life I’m living
and I curse my poverty
and I wish that I could be (3x)
Richard Cory.

The chorus comes around three times and, on its final repetition, which comes immediately after the announcement of Richard Cory’s suicide, it takes on a powerful irony. Much the way Richard Cory’s fate in the last line of Robinson’s original changes the feeling and meaning of the rest of the poem, in Simon’s lyric version it changes the tone and meaning of the chorus.

This is where the ambiguity arises. Just what kind of envy—certainly the appropriate word here—is the speaker revealing?

If Simon has directly addressed his adaptation anywhere, I haven’t seen it. But an interpretation I’ve run across again and again online takes the final repetition of the chorus to be an admission by the speaker that he wants, like Richard Cory, to kill himself. (This is the interpretation presented in the Wikipedia summary, which cites no sources.)

I don’t think this is correct. For one, it makes the speaker far too individual, where in both Robinson and the rest of Simon’s version the “we” and the “I” stand in for the whole community. It’s also nihilistic in a way I don’t feel jibes with the rest of the song or Simon’s general oeuvre. But, most importantly, I think it has a simpler, more straightforward meaning related to that of the original poem: people don’t learn. The desire for wealth and material comfort lead us to overlook, ignore, or wish away the problems that come with them. We all know money doesn’t buy happiness—it’s a cliche for a reason—but who actually lives as if they know that? Literature and mythology, not to mention real life, are full of people who choose wealth and success knowing it will destroy them.

The yearning-for-suicide reading, which is rooted in an apparent ambiguity, bothers me. I think it’s a misreading of the song, yes, but I also think ambiguity, which can be a valuable tool in the hands of a purposeful artist, is overvalued today. The ambiguous ending is a mainstay of twee arthouse cinema. But ambiguity ceases to be cute when applied to suicide.

While feeling down and exhausted over the last month I’ve been doing a slow reread of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. Chesterton’s light and frothy reputation is belied by his serious treatment of a subject like suicide. Here he is in Chapter V, “The Flag of the World,” writing forcefully about the deadly sin at the heart of it:

Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. . . . [H]e is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe.

The power of Robinson’s poem and Simon’s song derives from the assumed heinousness of Richard Cory’s act. That’s why it’s shocking in both. His wealth, personal elegance, and position in life only make it ironic, not less terrible. If Richard Cory’s suicide is just one more option, one a person with far more reasons to be bitter might justifiably desire to take, the entire story loses its meaning and weight.

Maybe that’s what Simon intended. I don’t know—but it would ruin the song. As good a song as it is, Robinson’s poem, in its structure and its properly used ambiguity, is better, and better for us.

Does it matter if the movie is faithful to the book?

Over the weekend Substack, in its mysterious way, showed me a month-old note by a literary critic I follow and respect. Since this is a month old and there was already some debate along these lines in the comments, I’ll share and gloss it anonymously:

It doesn’t matter if the film is faithful to the book.
It’s a film! Judge it as a film.
And anyway, you cannot faithfully turn prose into film.
It’s an affront to literary genius to think otherwise.

I’m not actually sure what the last line is supposed to mean. How does holding a filmmaker to a high standard when adapting a writer’s work degrade the writer? But I strenuously object to the rest of it.

To work backwards, the critic here is asserting that the difficulty of adaptation from one medium into another actually makes it impossible—“you cannot faithfully” adapt from book to film, he says. An appalling oversimplification. What does he mean by “prose,” here? When we talk about how a book is adapted into a film and the film isn’t faithful, we might mean it fails with regard to one or more of the following:

• The literal events of the book

• The overall story arc of the book

• Particular details of the settings and/or characters

• The narrative structure of the book

• The meaning or thematic import of the book

• The tone of the book

I’ve tried to arrange that list from simplest to most complex. The events narrated in a story are the easiest to get on screen. The meaning, what the author is apparently both getting out of the story and trying to share through it, and the tone of his storytelling are much harder. We’ve probably all seen movies that more or less adapted a book’s events without capturing the immaterial elements that give the book personality. A Handful of Dust, a quite literal adaptation of the great Waugh novel, comes to mind, as does the John Wayne True Grit. But other films might deviate here and there from the original while nailing its tone and moral register. The Coens’ No Country for Old Men and True Grit, both of which capture most of the events of their respective novels while, much more importantly, faithfully adapting their tones, are masterpieces in this regard.

All of this, according to our critic, is just “prose,” which “cannot faithfully” be made into a film. Cannot. This is not only oversimplified but wrong. Adaptation is difficult, but that we want to judge faithfulness at all indicates that it can be done, and can be done well.

Our critic is on firmer ground in asserting that films and books should be judged by different artistic standards, but this is common sense. Novels and movies tell stories in different ways and may or may not do so well, of course. But—still moving backwards—to assert a novel and its film adaptation are so separate that “it doesn’t matter” whether the adaptation is true to the book is foolishness.

Of course it matters. It matters because if a film adaptation of a book exists it exists because of the book. If a movie presumes to share a title with an author’s book, if it is meant to please readers of the book at all and not to be purely parasitic on the writer’s work and readership—we’re all familiar with the term cash-grab by now—the filmmakers owe it to the book to be faithful in at least some of the areas listed above. And having established that faithfulness is not, in fact, impossible, they owe it to the original to try.

I think it also matters because this kind of talk about the difficulty or impossibility of faithful adaptation has far too often served as an excuse for vandalism. Some vandalism originates with filmmakers contemptuous of their literary source material and wanting to drag it down to their level. Some comes from filmmakers who hubristically think they can improve on great literature. But perhaps the most common problem is the filmmaker with neither contempt nor reverence for the original, who sees it only as raw material to be reworked according to his preferences. It’s all content, after all.

This was my problem with two of the worst film adaptations I’ve seen in the last few years, The Green Knight and All Quiet on the Western Front, both of which—if you look at my reviews—I tried to judge on their merits as films while also noting their utter failure as adaptations. They don’t adapt the events, characters, meaning, or tone of the originals even a little bit faithfully. Are we to give them a pass because they have nice cinematography? Because they try to flatter our present assumptions?

There are other reasons to demand faithfulness of a film adaptation—the movie may be the one and only time many viewers, especially students, encounter any version of an author’s story—but these, I think, are the strongest. There is room for debate, of course. Arguments about whether and how Peter Jackson succeeded in adapting The Lord of the Rings, for example, have been fruitful for an appreciation of both the film trilogy and the novel. But handwaving even the possibility of faithfully adapting a book is bad for both.

A film might be just a film, but a film based on a book exists in relation to that book. If an author cared enough to write it and readers cared enough to read it, filmmakers owe them something more than apathy, hubris, or contempt. So do critics.

Back in ’82

Our first glimpse of Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) in Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

Just about this time a couple years ago, I reflected on the pain and melancholy running through some old kids’ films like Angels in the Outfield and The Land Before Time. I’ve been pondering that again thanks to an unlikely film: Napoleon Dynamite, which I introduced to my kids over the weekend.

Napoleon Dynamite, like I noted about those other movies, is not Shakespeare or serious drama, but it’s well enough made and true enough to life to suggest more upon repeat viewings—especially when those viewings are separated by a decade or so. It’s been at least fifteen years since I watched it. When I last saw it in my twenties, it was pure quirky goofiness, like Mormon Wes Anderson costumed by a rural thrift store. Watching it with my kids in my early forties, I was not surprised to laugh again—especially since my kids thought it was a such a hoot—but I was surprised at how sweet, poignant, and melancholy I found it.

There’s a lot of unremarked upon pain in Napoleon Dynamite. Why do Napoleon and Kip live with their grandma? Where are their parents? How long has it been like this? Years, to judge by Napoleon’s behavior. His diaphragm-deep sighs are both hilarious and suggestive of repeated disappointment and frustration. Pedro, too, as comically stoic as he is, panics at least twice in the movie and develops psychosomatic fevers. They’re both holding a lot in. One sympathizes.

But there is also the case of Uncle Rico. He’s one of the movie’s sort-of villains, but is perhaps more fully developed than almost all of the other characters and actually talks about his melancholy several times. We learn that he is separated from Tammy, who is presumably his wife. His bluff, cocky way of dismissing Kip’s concern is funny when you’re in your twenties and suggests he’s hiding something—his own misbehavior, or simply how much it hurts—in your forties. He approaches his pitiful door-to-door Tupperware sales job with a confidence that smacks of desperation. He’s trying, but trying to do what?

The movie backs all this up visually. It introduces Uncle Rico utterly alone, in a beautiful and desolate landscape shot. His weird behavior only underlines what we grasp intuitively. And his first substantial scene, eating steak on the steps with Kip, gives us his “Back in ’82” monologue, which is hilariously pathetic, recognizable (the guy who peaked in high school is such a well known type he would be a cliche if he weren’t real), and sad. Uncle Rico is lonely and filled with regret—the football memories are just the way he can safely handle it.

It helps immensely that Jon Gries is a good actor. Watch him in that scene and look at the emotions that pass over his face. As with so much else in the movie, it’s both funny and poignantly done.

Not that Uncle Rico should be viewed more sympathetically. He’s a manipulative con man and liar who turns into a creep as the movie goes on. If this were his story rather than Napoleon’s, it’d be about hitting rock bottom. But at my age Uncle Rico is less of a joke than he used to be. He’s a there but for the grace of God caricature who proves both poignant and cathartic to laugh at.

I don’t want to get too far up the movie’s own tail end, because Napoleon Dynamite is a comedy. But part of what makes it funny is how identifiable it is—at least for those of us who were awkward and frustrated in high school. And, like all great comedies, that seam of melancholy only makes the humor deeper and richer and its little notes of redemption, as for Uncle Rico, to whom Tammy returns in the final seconds, more moving.

In dreams

I’ve taken on a somewhat wistful tone since the beginning of the year, at least partly because of feeling exhausted and downcast. Mercifully, I have improved a lot over the last few weeks—especially with regard to being able to sleep—but there’s still a good way to go. Being able to write again has helped. So has improved sleep. With that in mind, here’s a dream I had two nights ago:

After several odd dreams—including trying to liberate British POWs from a Japanese rowboat, something almost stereotypically predicable—my middle son, who is almost seven, and I stepped out of those dreamscapes onto a broad carpeted staircase on a completely imaginary campus of my college. At the top we walked into a large conference hall filled with tables, all crowded with school leadership. In the middle of the room, very close to us where we stood near the door, was my late grandmother, enthusiastically presenting a proposal for a new arts program.

My grandmother was a talented and prolific artist and so this was unsurprising. What I did note was that she looked much younger, probably around the age she was when I was born. What did not cross my mind at all in the dream was that she is no longer alive. (Knowing this within the dream has made it hard to talk to or interact with other relatives in other dreams.)

My son (named after her) and I just stood and listened. I appreciated how eloquently she was speaking to the movers and shakers at my school and was hopeful for the program she was describing.

And that was it. I woke up.

What’s curious about this dream is that, rather than deepening my sense of loss or sickheartedness, seeing my grandmother was a comfort. Purely and simply.

As I’ve written before, I dream a lot—what feels like all night, every night. (This has been a helpful measure of how much better I’m feeling; a month ago my dreams were completely jumbled fragments. Now they at least cohere into nonsense.) I’ve incorporated this into my fiction; I wouldn’t know how to understand my characters otherwise. Georgie Wax in particular—who, like my son, is also named for my grandmother—has the same sorts of dreams I do in Griswoldville, and in the end gets the same comfort from some of them. “O, what a foretaste,” he writes near the end.

I don’t know what such dreams mean, if anything—though I would like to think, as Georgie Wax does, that they are a booster shot of hope for the resurrection—but I am grateful for them when they come along.

Goodreads Inferno

In a longish state-of-the-publishing-world essay on Substack, independent publisher Sam Jordison gives special consideration to the disappearance of the negative book review—the hatchet job—as a symptom of decline. He notes that author and critic DJ Taylor, whose excellent guide to Orwell I wrote about here last year, described the disappearance of “tough-minded” reviews, criticism that “often bordered on outright cruelty,” ten years ago. According to Jordison, the tepid positivity of book review pages has only worsened since then.

What caught my attention was Jordison’s second mention of Taylor’s phrase “outright cruelty,” which Jordison notes we shouldn’t want or need to come back: “We have Goodreads for that.” This observation is glossed with the following footnote:

Goodreads has risen just as professional book pages have declined. The nastiness and ignorance on display there is a reflection of internet culture, and the way everything Jeff Bezos touches is infected with his mean spirit. But I do also wonder if some people think they are restoring some kind of balance?

The nastiness on Goodreads is well known. Goodreads users mob and harrass authors over single lines, engage in character assassination, try to preemptively get books canceled before they’re even published, and even the authors who use Goodreads join in the bad behavior. Imagine the vitriol of Twitter, the politics of Tumblr, and the righteous self-assurance of a school librarian in a Subaru and you have the predominant tone of Goodreads today.

Thanks to the nastiness the profound ignorance on Goodreads is perhaps less visible. But as it happens, it was fresh on my mind because this morning, as I searched for a brand new one-volume edition of The Divine Comedy that I’m about to start reading, I made the mistake of looking at its top review.

According to the user responsible, Dante has written this “OG” “self-insert bible [sic] fanfiction” because he “thanks he is very special” (stated twice), “has a bit of a crush . . . on both Beatrice,” “his dead girlfriend,” and “his poetry man crush” Virgil, and wants “to brag about Italy and dunk on the current pope.” All of this is wrong, for what it’s worth, but here’s the closing paragraph:

TLDR: Do I think everyone should read this? No, it’s veryyyyy dense. But I think everyone should watch a recap video or something to understand a lot of famous literary tropes that become established here.

Read The Divine Comedy for the tropes. Or better yet, “watch a recap video.”

This is a five-star review, by the way.

I wish this were the exception on Goodreads, but it’s not. Here’s a person with the capacity and the patience—perhaps? the review is short on details of anything beyond Inferno—to read the Comedy but who is utterly unprepared to receive and understand it, presumably having lost the good of intellect. This review reads like those parody book review videos that were popular a decade ago, except Thug Notes actually offered legitimate insight as well as laughs.

I have a love-hate relationship with Goodreads. I signed up fourteen years ago and still use it every day. But I can only do so and maintain my sanity by sticking to my tiny corner of online acquaintances and people I actually know and avoiding the hellscape of popular fiction, where the fights that can break out in review comment sections resemble nothing so much as Dante’s damned striving against each other even in death. Finding a legitimate, thoughtful, accurate review is harder than ever. One must dig, sometimes through hundreds of reviews like the one above, to find something helpful. And it’s even harder if you’re interested in older books, for which the temptation toward glibness or snark—omg so outdated! so racist! so sexist!—is for many irresistible.

And, for authors whose books are on Goodreads, it’s hard not to let a latent anxiety build up. Sometimes it feels like, inevitably, it’ll be your turn in the crosshairs.

Jordison blames Jeff Bezos, who he correctly points out—as I just did in my Tech & Culture class last week—started selling books not because he loves them but because they’re easy to catalog and ship. I’m sure that’s a factor, but it’s not sufficient to explain the whole problem. His other culprit, “internet culture,” that broad and protean devil, plays a crucial role as well. Regardless, Jordison ends his essay on a note of hope:

But I don’t counsel despair. Because the truth is that there is still good work being done. There are a few decent book sections left. Writers are producing fine books. Publishers are bringing them into the world. People are reading them.

At least some of those books will endure.

Truly encouraging to remember. But that this must happen despite rather than because of the technologies we’ve created from an ostensible love of books is a judgment on our culture.

State of Siege

In reviewing Eric Ambler’s Judgment on Deltchev last year, I noted that Ambler’s postwar novels, while focusing on polyglot, cosmopolitan, but out-of-the-way worlds unsettled by global events like his early classics, are marked by a broader scope and more mature perspective. Deltchev, his first postwar thriller, takes place in an unnamed Eastern European state faced with imminent Stalinist takeover. His next, The Schirmer Inheritance, follows an American lawyer tasked with settling an old lady’s estate on a journey through postwar West Germany, its scarcely buried past, and the lingering dangers of guerrilla warfare in Greece. Passage of Arms sprawls across British-controlled Malaya, newly independent and unsettled Indonesia, arms trafficking, Communist insurgency, Chinese organized crime, and American tourists.

These are tense and well-plotted but slower, statelier, with seemingly more at stake than the fates of their characters. State of Siege, published in 1956 between The Schirmer Inheritance and Passage of Arms, comes as a bit of a surprise then.

When the novel begins, British engineer Steve Fraser has finished a three-year assignment to build a dam on the island of Sunda, a former Dutch colony that has gained its independence from both the Dutch and Sukarno’s Indonesia. The dam is part of an international development scheme for southeast Asia. Fraser believes in the work but is happy to be leaving. Rampant local corruption and a succession of inept, unqualified native liaisons with the Sundanese government have left him disillusioned if not embittered. Only one local, Major Suparto, has proven tough, intelligent, competent, and genuinely involved with the project—suspiciously so.

Fraser flies to the capital, Selampang, and has only to wait a few days for the regularly scheduled cargo plane out. An Australian friend sets him up with female company, a half-Dutch, half-Sundanese girl named Rosalie van Linden, and his apartment on the town square by the radio station. Fraser is set for a pleasant few days before flying home but for one discordant note: while walking with Rosalie in the garden of a club, he overhears a voice he recognizes—Major Suparto.

The major has arrived by jeep from the dam, a strenuous daylong drive on seasonal roads through territory controlled by leftwing nationalist rebels under General Sanusi, who hopes to root out corruption and turn Sunda into an Islamic republic. That Suparto has arrived on the same day as Fraser, who flew, suggests that he is a part of the rebel movement, and his overheard conversation with “the general” seems to prove it.

Fraser puts it out of his mind. Whatever Suparto, the rebels, and local mobsters are up to, he’s leaving. He continues his preparations to return home, has a second date with Rosalie, and takes her back to his friend’s apartment.

That night, revolution breaks out.

The army having left Selampang on maneuvers, Sanusi’s rebels seize the opportunity to take over the capital and declare a regime change. His troops occupy the city and take over the radio station. Fraser and Rosalie, in their friend’s apartment nextdoor, find their building turned into the headquarters of Sanusi himself.

There they sit, trapped at the center of the revolution, watching and waiting through aerial and naval bombardment, street fighting, the revelation of competing loyalties and betrayal among the revolutionaries, and the growing pressure in Sanusi’s inner circle to eliminate any potential threat to the revolution, including Fraser and Rosalie: one a foreigner, the other a child of the former colonial oppressors.

I began by saying that State of Siege proved a bit of a surprise among Ambler’s postwar thrillers. Like the others I mentioned it has a sweeping, utterly realistic and plausible scope. Sunda is a fictitious island—one of several Ruritanias Ambler dreamed up for his stories, and likely the most vividly realized of them—but it feels of a piece with that part of the world at that time. Ambler never bludgeons the reader with explanation but allows the corruption and mismanagement of the national government, the idealism and brutality of the Islamic rebels, the broader political situation, the ethnic hodgepodge of Selampang, with its foreign engineers, Chinese business class and gangsters, and benighted native population, and even the geography of the conflict to emerge effortlessly, through Fraser simply telling his story.

That gives State of Siege a real-world believability and convinces the reader of the danger Fraser and Rosalie face, but Ambler combines this quality with the best of his pre-war thriller pacing. His typically skillful use of foreshadowing helps sets the story in motion from the first page and, once underway, the action and suspense build steadily right up to the end.

Fraser and Rosalie are also standouts among Ambler’s protagonists. His novels typically feature unadventurous, nose-to-the-grindstone types—often engineers, as Ambler had formal education in engineering—who find themselves embroiled in international intrigues not of their own making, and Steve Fraser seems at first to fit the standard Ambler type. But he proves unusually resourceful and plucky and, perhaps uniquely for Ambler’s put-upon main characters, keeps his cool in danger. A mid-story sequence in which Fraser is forced to work for the rebels in order to protect himself and Rosalie is arduous, tense, and makes his engineering an exciting and integral part of the plot.

And Rosalie may be Ambler’s best leading lady, not only working as a foil and romantic interest to Fraser but contributing, through her personal story growing up among the Dutch plantations in the back country, a strong sense of dread over the outcome of the revolution. Fraser is a tough, fundamentally honest man who wants to think well of people. Rosalie has no illusions whatsoever about what will happen to her if Sanusi’s side wins. Her perspective not only heightens the tension but adds to the realistic murk of Sunda. One’s sympathies may be pulled in one direction or the other—a tension maintained by the complicated and surprising rebel characters—but one cannot sensibly call either side in the revolution the “good guys.”

Finally, one of the unusual joys of State of Siege is watching Fraser and Rosalie’s casual, transactional relationship deepen through the danger they share. Ambler was not known for his romantic plots, but this works wonderfully, not least—without giving too much away—by adding a bittersweet note to the novel’s ending.

Short, briskly paced, but rich and surprising and centered on two of Ambler’s most sympathetic characters, State of Siege may well be my favorite of postwar Ambler. I hope to read it again soon.

Me and the Southern accent

Last month on his microblog, Alan Jacobs linked to this short Atlantic piece—now paywalled—about the slow extinction of the Southern accent. Quoting the author of the essay on the decline of distinctive Southern accents among the young and the eventual reality that the accents will only survive among the old in out-of-the-way places, Jacobs noted, “I’m part of the trend too: I certainly have a Southern accent, but it’s not as pronounced as it was when I was younger, and I profoundly regret that.”

Likewise and likewise. The regret is painful.

My speech, like Jacobs’s, is identifiably Southern to outsiders, but largely through syntax (e.g. double modals), vocabulary (e.g. y’all, fixing to), and peculiarities of emphasis (e.g. saying umbrella instead of umbrella). My accent, in terms of pronunciation, is limited to ineradicable features like the long I noted in that Atlantic essay, yod-dropping, hanging on to the H in wh- words, and the occasional dropped G. I have neither a drawl nor a twang.

This is a regret to me because I feel it severs me from previous generations and the place I come from in one of the most fundamental ways. We learn speech at our mother’s breast and from those closest to us, not only in terms of family but in physical proximity. Gradually losing that means losing a part of me that participates in them and in home.

And I cherish those accents—of which The Atlantic rightly notes there are many. I learned two kinds of Georgia accent growing up. My dad’s parents, natives of Clarke County and the Athens area, spoke a lot like Flannery O’Connor—a Savannah native with her own peculiarities of pronunciation—does in this recording, a soft, non-rhotic accent that outsiders read as genteel. My maternal grandparents, Rabun County natives, spoke in a strongly rhotic accent with heavy Appalachian features. Both of these are from “north Georgia,” broadly speaking, but couldn’t be more different. Southern accents have immense county-by-county variety.

Generation adds more variation. My parents’ accents, both still marked by their parents’ roots, nevertheless grew toward each other, and my own is a yet finer blend—dominated by my maternal side’s Appalachian terseness. It comes out when I try to say iron (arn) or Florida oranges (Flarda arnjes).

In old home movies I have a shrill, squeaky, very country little voice. I’m not sure when the most obvious marks of family and home began to fall away, but it must have been around middle or high school. Unlike the writer in The Atlantic, it was never intentional. I never wanted to blend in, was never ashamed of being Southern—far from it, I grew a sizable chip on my shoulder during an undergrad career surrounded by Yankees and Midwesterners who thought nothing of moving South and mocking the locals for saying umbrella—and, if anything, I wanted more of an accent than what I ended up with.

Faking it is not, I decided long ago, an option. Better to let it emerge occasionally, a nice surprise. (I’ve noticed myself, in the classroom, pronouncing opportunity without the R lately, a real surprise.) I try to comfort myself with examples of other provincials who unintentionally lost their accents—namely CS Lewis, a Belfast native who, quite unconsciously, slowly conformed to the speech of whomever surrounded him and ended up sounding like this.

But when I remember my grandparents’ voices, and talk to my parents and aunts and uncles and siblings, and think about those home movies, and then recall my own kids’ sweet speech—in which very little Southern remains—all I can do is regret. Time isn’t the only thing that gets away from us. And this, the Ubi sunt? sense of loss, is perhaps the only thing more Southern than the accent I used to have.