Magic

This inaugural Chestertober continues with a brief dramatic interlude. The rest of this month I’m looking at Chesterton’s novels, but this week the subject is his first play, written at the behest of Chesterton’s old friend and philosophical sparring mate George Bernard Shaw, 1913’s Magic.

Magic takes place in the drawing room and grounds of a wealthy Duke but begins in a remote part of his garden on a cool drizzly evening. An Irish girl named Patricia, the Duke’s niece and ward, is searching the woods for fairies when she encounters a cloaked and hooded man. She takes him to be a giant fairy and reacts with awe but he is, in fact, the Conjurer, a magician arriving to perform for the Duke and his guests.

The Duke is an eccentric of the type familiar from Chesterton’s stories. He speaks in barely connected, allusive fragments and, though friendly, remains aloof through sheer inscrutability. He donates generously to rival causes—to both a vegetarian activist group and a group trying to stop vegetarianism, for example—and is meeting two men with petitions for support. One is Dr Grimthorpe, a skeptical doctor who used to know Patricia’s family in Ireland and believes her to be crazy but harmless, and the other is the Rev Smith, a broadminded Church of England clergyman more interested in social causes than religion. The Duke asks them to join him for the Conjurer’s performance, which will begin once Patricia’s brother Morris arrives.

Morris has been living in the United States for years and returns very “practical,” which is to say: materialistic, pragmatic, and aggressively skeptical. He scoffs at Patricia’s story of having met a fairy in the woods and, when the Conjurer arrives and reveals himself to be a mere magician, humiliates her. Patricia’s embarrassment turns to resentment. Morris looks over the Conjurer’s props and declares that he knows the secret to all of them. What he would really love to know, he says, are the secrets behind the tricks great religious leaders used to fool people:

Morris: Well, sir, I just want that old apparatus that turned rods into snakes. I want those smart appliances, sir, that brought water out of a rock when old man Moses chose to hit it. I guess it's a pity we've lost the machinery. I would like to have those old conjurers here that called themselves Patriarchs and Prophets in your precious Bible…

Patricia: Morris, you mustn't talk like that.

Morris: Well, I don't believe in religion…

Doctor: [Aside.] Hush, hush. Nobody but women believe in religion.

At this point, an already frustrated and embarrassed Patricia declares that she will perform “another ancient conjuring trick . . . The Vanishing Lady!” and leaves.

Morris becomes belligerent with the Conjurer, especially once the Conjurer moves a painting and knocks over a chair, apparently by magic. “Do you reckon that will take us in?” Morris asks. “You can do all that with wires.” The Conjurer concedes the point and Morris, in a sweeping rant against superstition, asserts that Joshua could no more stop the sun than a priest or magician could change the color of the red lamp shining at the end of the garden. As soon as he says this, the lamp turns blue.

Morris goes mad, working himself into a frenzy trying to determine how the Conjurer did it. When pressed, the Conjurer, with no satisfaction at having bested a critic but rather a spirit of deep sadness, reveals his secret: it was magic. He commanded devils to do it for him and they did.

The third and final act begins with Morris insane and confined to bed and the other characters attempting, one by one, to persuade the Conjurer to help him. The Duke offers to pay for the real secret behind the lamp trick. The doctor tries to get him to reveal the trick, assuming it must be so simple that it will make Morris laugh and break the hold of the madness that has taken him. Smith, the clergyman, attempts to reason sympathetically with the Conjurer. Only Patricia, to whom the Conjurer confesses that he fell in love with her the moment he saw her in the garden, is able to change his mind.

I’ll leave the details of precisely how Magic concludes for you to discover. Brisk, surprising, lighthearted but earnest, and steadily escalating in tension, this is a wonderful short play and was critically praised—including by Shaw—when it premiered in the fall of 1913, 111 years ago next month.

It’s easy to see why. Magic excels at the one thing Chesterton always used his stories for: pitting worldviews against each other. The whimsical, half-serious folk-spirituality of Patricia; the sentimental, largely political do-gooder formal religion of the Rev Smith; the liberal-minded but shapeless and ineffectual humanitarianism of the wealthy Duke; and the scientific materialism of the Doctor and, more aggressively, Morris all run up against something that they don’t believe in and are forced to confront its reality. Just as each character disbelieves in magic for different reasons, each reckons with its use by the Conjurer in different ways.

Perhaps the most sympathetic character besides the Conjurer is the Rev Smith. A Christian socialist and establishment figure, Smith is nevertheless not an object of mockery—Chesterton’s stage directions make it clear that Smith is “an honest man, not an ass.” (By contrast the Duke “though an ass, is a gentleman.”) In one of the play’s most dramatic scenes, the Conjurer furiously dresses Smith down for enjoying a position based on the supernatural when he is too urbane to believe in spirits:

Conjurer: . . . I say these things are supernatural. I say this was done by a spirit. The Doctor does not believe me. He is an agnostic; and he knows everything. The Duke does not believe me; he cannot believe anything so plain as a miracle. But what the devil are you for, if you don't believe in a miracle? What does your coat mean, if it doesn't mean that there is such a thing as the supernatural? What does your cursed collar mean if it doesn't mean that there is such a thing as a spirit? [Exasperated.] Why the devil do you dress up like that if you don't believe in it? [With violence.] Or perhaps you don't believe in devils?

Smith: I believe… [After a pause.] I wish I could believe.

Conjurer: Yes. I wish I could disbelieve.

Smith, chastened, confronted his his own lack of faith despite his position, is transformed—one might say converted. This is a subtle but powerful character arc, and a clear counterpart to Morris’s absolute refusal to believe in what he has seen. One, confessing himself unable but willing to believe, is saved; the other goes mad.

Madness is, of course, a major theme of Chesterton’s writings throughout his career but especially early on, and in Magic he suggests that madness is ultimately the only alternative to faith.

This is not to say that Magic is a sermon. Far from it. The balance of art and ideas which I’ve been exploring since we began the month with The Napoleon of Notting Hill is perfectly struck in Magic. Chesterton creates and sustains a mood of wonderful ambiguity from the first scene and maintains it throughout, and each character is permitted his or her own say. The result is a play that dramatizes exceptionally well the humility needed to face reality, especially those realities we often ignore or exclude, and the arrogance that leads to damnation.

Manalive

Today Chestertober continues with perhaps the most overtly, characteristically, even stereotypically Chestertonian of all of Chesterton’s fiction, his 1912 comedy of ideas Manalive.

The entirety of Manalive takes place at Beacon House, a boarding house on a hill overlooking London. Here a variety of lodgers move comfortably through their lives, among them an heiress named Rosamund and her maid Mary Gray; Diana Duke, the niece of Beacon House’s imperious landlady; a young man named Arthur Inglewood, who nurses secret feelings for Diana; a dour Irish journalist named Michael Moon; a Jewish cynic named Moses Gould; and the successful and intelligent but utterly humorless Dr Herbert Warner. The bland, peaceful routines of Beacon House are disrupted by the arrival of Innocent Smith, an eccentric whose coming is heralded by a blast of evening wind that drives the residents indoors just as Smith throws his luggage over the back garden wall and clambers over into the yard.

Smith’s eccentricities do not stop there. A gigantic man with unkempt blond hair, he speaks in a torrent of disjointed allusions and metaphors and partial quotations and half-formed jokes, invites the other lodgers to a picnic which he hosts on the roof, and carries a large revolver in his bag.

Despite his strange arrival and effusive, off-putting manner, Smith quickly wins over most of the other lodgers. His overwhelming energy inspires Arthur to confess his feelings to Diana and ask her to marry him, Michael Moon to win back the affections of Rosamund, with whom he used to be in love, and Mary Gray to agree to marry Smith. Beacon House resounds to song and laughter as love is either kindled or relit, and as Smith and Mary prepare to elope in a cab. All is going well until Smith takes his revolver and shoots at Dr Warner.

Warner, who is already hostile to Smith, understandably objects and calls in an American criminologist to examine him. Warner means to have Smith declared insane and committed. Arthur and Michael rise to Smith’s defense, and Warner and Dr Pym, the criminologist, present new charges that Smith is not only insane but a burglar, a repeat attempted murderer, and a serial seducer and bigamist who has abandoned several wives.

The second half of the novel is a long trial held at Beacon House with Warner and Pym as prosecutors and Arthur and Michael as Smith’s defense. Chapter by chapter, Warner and Pym produce statements from Smith’s past that suggest a life of depravity and crime and Arthur and Michael counter with clarifying and exonerating testimony.

When Warner and Pym relate an incident from Smith’s university days in which he chased a professor out a window and shot at him—much like the incident with Warner—it turns out that the accusation is based entirely on the testimony of a witness. The professor himself never pressed charges or even complained. The professor, it turns out, was a scientific skeptic and pessimist who had become convinced that life was meaningless and worthless. Being shot at revealed to him, for the first time, life’s value, and he emerged from the incident a changed man. When Warner and Pym bring eyewitness testimony from a minister of the Church of England that Smith had once led him down a chimney into a house where he stole goods, it turns out that the house was Smith’s own.

And, in the climactic series of accusations and testimonies, in answer to the charge that Smith has led astray a series of young women all over England who agreed to elope with him and were never seen again, Arthur and Michael prove that all of these women, all along, have been Smith’s actual wife—and so is Mary Gray.

“Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.”

— GK Chesterton

Smith, from a place of despair as a young man, had plunged into the joy of rediscovery, of turning life on its head and seeing it from a fresh angle. He shoots at the despairing to make them want to live, burgles his own house in order to appreciate home, travels all the way around the world to discover his country as if it were a foreign and exotic land, and repeatedly loses and rescues his wife to keep the thrill of marriage alive.

In the conclusion, Smith is acquitted and waves a burning log from the roof of Beacon House—making the name literal—and, just as when he arrived, a great evening wind blows. In the midst of Arthur and Diana and Michael and Rosamund’s festivities, Smith and Mary disappear.

I first read Manalive many years ago and, though I enjoyed it and have enjoyed revisiting it, it is not my favorite of Chesterton’s novels. This is curious to me since, as I suggested in the introduction, it is a very characteristically Chestertonian entertainment. Light, frothy, energetic, with painterly descriptions throughout and a gallery of over-the-top characters who still manage to feel like real people. It also includes some of my favorite passages from all of Chesterton’s work, among them:

If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments.

Often the thing a whole nation can't settle is just the thing the family could settle. Scores of young criminals have been fined and sent to jail when they ought to have been thrashed and sent to bed.

Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.

Or this, one of Chesterton’s best, truest, and most often quoted lines:

Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.

And this, which speaks deeply to me:

I think God has given us the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good reason.

I think what keeps me from loving Manalive is that Chesterton, for lack of a better way to put it, really leans into his Chestertonness here, almost to self-parody. It is too whimsical by half, a fact one has more of a chance to contemplate since it unfolds at novel length unlike, say, some similarly twee poems or short stories. And I think both form and structure present problems. This is a novel that desperately wants to be a play, as the single setting and very, very long trial scenes in the second half suggest. And as a play Manalive would be smashing, and probably use the repeated surprises of Innocent Smith’s topsy-turvy life to maximum effect. As a novel, it is only good.

“Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.”

— GK Chesterton

Again—it is good. Manalive might suffer in comparison to The Napoleon of Notting Hill, with which we started the month, or The Man Who Was Thursday, with which I intend to end October, but it is still worth reading, and that is on its strengths not as a novel but as a fable.

Back in the summer I posted about Joseph Epstein’s thoughts on “the novel of ideas” in his book The Novel, Who Needs It? Drawing from sources as various as Ortega y Gasset, Northrop Frye, and Michael Oakeshott, Epstein argues that a proper novel is not straightforwardly about its ideas, concepts, theories, or ideologies, but allows any such underlying philosophy to be dramatized subtly through character relationships. As I noted later, there’s an element of snobbery to this narrowing definition, but there’s also an element of truth.

In Manalive, Chesterton’s ideas are clearly in control, and the pitched battle he constructs between the haughty and reductive scientism of Warner and Pym, who can explain away anything through biology, sociology, and psychology; the wry cynicism of Gould; the untested idealism of Arthur; the disillusion of Michael; and the pious wonder of Smith is more important than the characters themselves. That does not reduce Manalive’s value as a story, but just as the form suggests it is better suited to the stage, the role of each character as the stand-in for a philosophy of life makes it more of a fable.

And as a fable, Manalive is both moving and profound. Through the disruption of Chesterton’s greatest Holy Fool, who renews the minds of those who are open to befriending him, the residents of Beacon Hill are forced to reckon with truths they have up to this time ignored or actively fought against. Some of these are confoundingly simple: life is better than death, for example. When people say that Chesterton’s ideas are “more relevant than ever,” it is these most obvious, common sense ideas that they have in mind. Only these can fortify a soul against the madness of our age—another theme Chesterton explored repeatedly, and to which we’ll return.

Manalive is neither Chesterton’s best nor best-remembered novel, but it is a worthwhile read as distilled essence of Chesterton, especially if his non-fiction covering similar ground—What’s Wrong with the World, Eugenics and Other Evils, and his many, many essays—don’t appeal as strongly. Even with its artistic flaws, Manalive leaves the reader refreshed and revived, just as Innocent Smith would want, as well as wanting an Innocent Smith of our own to scare a mad and death-loving culture back to life.

Vindicated by Dr Johnson

Back at the beginning of the summer I briefly meditated on great books that I’ve tried to read but simply can’t. I wrote in some detail about The Grapes of Wrath but also mentioned Paradise Lost, which I have started many times and never finished—a fact I always feel a little ashamed of.

Well, this week I started reading Joseph Bottum’s The Decline of the Novel, which is excellent so far, and in the introduction he included this passage from Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets:

“‘Paradise Lost’ is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”

This has been precisely my experience, and if Samuel Johnson could say the same—with much more besides—I can feel a little better about this gap in my reading.

Addendum: Having read the portion of Johnson’s life of Milton in which Johnson assesses Paradise Lost on the merits, I find some of his criticisms precisely accurate and insightful—the allegorical figures don’t work, Adam and Eve’s situation is literally unimaginable, and Milton has set himself the impossible task of describing at length things that can’t be described—while others are more specious. Maybe what will finally propel me through Paradise Lost is the need to make up my own mind about these controversies. To justify the ways of Dr Johnson, that is.

Song of Songs and particularity

I’m finally finishing Peter Kreeft’s Three Philosophies of Life, the final section of which is a 26-point meditation on love as described in Song of Songs. Here, Kreeft considers the particularity or specificity of love:

“The object of love is a person, and every person is an individual. No person is a class, a species, or a collection. There is no such thing as the love of humanity because there is no such thing as humanity. If your preachers or teachers have told you that the Bible teaches you to love humanity, they have told you a lie. Not once does the Bible say that; not once does it even mention the word humanity. Jesus always commands us to love God and our neighbor instead.”

If, as I’ve often argued here, particularity is the key to good literature, it is fundamental in love. Sine qua non. If it’s not particular, it’s not love.

Particularity is also important philosophically, as Kreeft makes clear in the next paragraph:

“How comfortable ‘humanity’ is! ‘Humanity’ never shows up at your door at the most inconvenient time. ‘Humanity’ is not quarrelsome, alcoholic, or fanatical. ‘Humanity’ never has the wrong political, religious, and sexual opinions. ‘Humanity’ is never slimy, swarmy, smarmy, smelly, or smutty. ‘Humanity’ is so ideal that one could easily die for it. But to die for your neighbor, to die for Sam Slug or Mehetibel Crotchit—unthinkable. Except for love.”

To paraphrase Edmund Burke: Abstract humanity is not to be found; “humanity” inheres in specific people. Each of whom is more important than the abstract category, I would add.

Compare the people who talk a lot about “the planet” or “our species” but not about our families, friends, neighbors, communities, hometowns, countries, and nations. The people who love those things love them very specifically for themselves, flaws and all, and not because they are part of a whole too big for any honest person to grasp. Abstractions, “thinking in categories” as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, are dodges—or, increasingly, solvent.

The one spot where I’ll disagree with Kreeft—provided he isn’t being ironic, and I’m more inclined to think so the more I reread this passage—is when he calls humanity an abstraction “so ideal that one could easily die for it.” I’m not sure that actually happens. Soldiers, famously, die for each other far more readily than for democracy or freedom or big-picture geopolitical objectives. (See the Chesterton quotations here.) Likewise martyrs, whether religious or political. Stories of far-seeing men approaching the gallows with the class struggle on their lips smack of Soviet propaganda, not reality.

No, your neighbor—whether the person singing off-key in church or the dipstick you have to share a foxhole with—are easier to die for than “humanity.” Because they’re easier to love. After all, we’ve been commanded to. ‘humanity’

Here’s some of what Kreeft had to say about Job in the middle section of this book. I’ve written about particularity in storytelling several times: with regard to John Gardner here, in a short note on what novels are for here, in much more detail with regard to James Bond and Honeychile Rider in Dr No here, and in memory of Cormac McCarthy here.

Kreeft on Job

detail from Job Rebuked by his Friends, by William Blake

I’ve been reading Peter Kreeft’s Three Philosophies of Life, a short examination of Ecclesiastes, Job, and Song of Solomon as visions of competing worldviews, bit by bit over the last month or so. Appropriately, over the weekend I read the section on Job—theme: Life as Suffering—while getting over an illness. Here are two passages that struck me:

First, from Kreeft’s introductory remarks:

Though bottomlessly mysterious, [the Book of Job] is also simple and obvious in its main “lesson”, which lies right on the surface in the words of God to Job at the end. Unless you are Rabbi Kushner, who incredibly manages to miss the unmissable, you cannot miss the message. If Job is about the problem of evil, then Job’s answer to that problem is that we do not know the answer. We do not know what philosophers from Plato to Rabbi Kushner so helpfully but hopelessly try to teach us: why “bad things happen to good people”. Job does not understand this fact of life, and neither do we. We “identify” with Job not in his knowledge but in his ignorance.

Identifying with Job in his ignorance is an elegant way to put it. Job doesn’t know at the beginning of the book—the Accuser executes his plan to have Job curse God without any forewarning—and Job still doesn’t know at the end, and yet he is satisfied. Cf. Chesterton’s comments on Job, which I quoted here two years ago in connection with another great ancient confrontation with Not Knowing: The Epic of Gilgamesh.

In the final third of the section on Job, Kreeft leaves the Problem of Evil behind and turns his attention to what he calls “The Problem of Faith versus Experience.” Here he engages in exactly my kind of comparative history:

In previous ages, especially the Middle Ages, which were strong on reason but weak on psychological introspection, and attention to feeling and experience, the crucial problem was the relation between faith and reason. . . . In our age, which is weak on reason (and even doubts reason’s power to discover or prove objective truth) and strong on psychology and experience, the crucial problem is the relation between faith and experience. Today many more people lose their faith because they experience suffering and think God has let them down than lose their faith because of any rational argument. Job is a man for all seasons but especially for ours. His problem is precisely our problem.

I’ve seen compelling arguments that conversion is often if not always pre- or sub-rational. CS Lewis’s account of his acquiescence to God in Surprised by Joy comes to mind. Traveling in the opposite direction, compare the recent evangelical phenomenon of “deconstruction,” which seems primarily to be a process of publicly washing off political cooties (Christians have been mean to gays! Christians owned slaves! Christians voted for Trump!) rather than a Christopher Hitchens- or Bertrand Russell- or Friedrich Nietzsche-style coldly reasoned apostasy.

Kreeft published this book in 1989, yet here he foresees our not only postmodern but post-truth world and the need for an apologetics based not solely on rational argument. Alister McGrath is the theologian I’m most familiar with who has made a deliberate effort at this.

Three Philosophies of Life has been excellent so far, not least because Ecclesiastes and Job are two of my favorite books of the Bible. I look forward to the final part on Song of Solomon, “Life as Love.” While Ecclesiastes and Job have spoken to me where I am for years, Song of Solomon has always been something of a mystery to me. Having read Kreeft’s examination of Job, I’m prepared to embrace that.

Pilgrimage back to Bunyan

“Someday you will be old enough to read fairy tales again.”

— CS Lewis, in his dedication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

I’m finishing work on a “life story” project for a church group today, which has got me in an even more than usually reflective mood as I consider family history, personal debts, and the things that have made me who I am. Among these are the books that have most shaped me. Ages and ages ago, sometime early in grad school, I wrote a multi-part series of blog posts on precisely this topic. One of the most important early books I mentioned was Dangerous Journey, a lavishly illustrated adaptation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

This came to mind because just a few days ago Alan Jacobs wrote about teaching The Pilgrim’s Progress and the “great joy” it gives him—not only teaching it, but the mere fact that “so utterly bonkers a book was so omnipresent in English-language culture . . . for so long.” He goes on, in a strikingly incisive paragraph, to note how

One of the “tough” things about [The Pilgrim’s Progress] is the way [it] veer[s] from hard-coded allegory to plain realism, sometimes within a given sentence. One minute Moses is the canonical author of the Pentateuch, the next he’s a guy who keeps knocking Hopeful down. But the book is always psychologically realistic, to an extreme degree. No one knew anxiety and terror better than Bunyan did, and when Christian is passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and hears voices whispering blasphemies in his ears, the true horror of the moment is that he thinks he himself is uttering the blasphemies. (The calls are coming from inside the house.) 

This captures both the strangeness and the power of Bunyan’s book, as I’ve lately been rediscovering.

I grew up with Pilgrim’s Progress as a load-bearing component of my imagination. My parents had Dangerous Journey at home and I pored over the incredible, grotesque, beautiful, frightening illustrations (by Alan Parry in a style reminiscent of Arthur Rackham) over and over again. My friends and I read a children’s version—with an excellent map—in school. Another time we acted out Christian and Faithful’s trial at Vanity Fair for a school music program. (I played Lord Hategood, the judge.) Occasionally during our church’s summer Bible school the nightly story would be a version of Pilgrim’s Progress in five short installments. I taught this version of it myself once shortly after graduating from college. There was even a two-part “Adventures in Odyssey” adaptation I listened to many times on cassette tape.

I knew Pilgrim’s Progress thoroughly without ever having read it cover to cover.* But you know what they say about familiarity.

Then, late in high school, I discovered Dante. I was on my first medieval literature kick and wanted all the epic poetry I could get ahold of. Dante’s Comedy struck me as both 1) a proper classic, the kind of thing a kid like me should be reading and 2) lurid enough to be interesting and entertaining. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into—it blew my mind. I ended up reading Dante over and over again for several years straight, right through college, and Dante has been a profound influence on me ever since.

But discovering Dante also led me into an easy contempt for Bunyan. Dante, I thought, had fashioned a real allegory. Bunyan—in addition to his other faults, like his Calvinism**—seemed cloddish and simplistic by comparison. What were the ad hoc, making-it-up-as-I-go plot points and symbols of Pilgrim’s Progress worth when I had the masterful intricacies of the Comedy as an alternative?

It’s a typical fault of immaturity to set in opposition things that should really complement each other, but there I was, pooh-poohing Pilgrim’s Progress. I’m bothered even to remember this attitude. And yet, Pilgrim’s Progress stayed with me. And now I’m rediscovering it, having grown old enough to read it again.

Two things have helped rekindle my interest and reopen me to the story, which I freely acknowledged was fundamental to my imagination even when I was most disdainful of it. The first is John Buchan. Anyone who’s followed my John Buchan June readings will know that Pilgrim’s Progress was his favorite book, and that it informed and influenced everything in his fiction from his novels’ stern moralism, hardy sense of adventure, the fact that many of their plots are journeys, and even character names and motivations. Buchan’s love of Bunyan started to bring me back around, the same way a good friend might convince you to give one of their friends another chance despite having made an awkward introduction.

But more important has been revisiting Pilgrim’s Progress itself. A few years ago I broke out my parents’ copy of Dangerous Journey to look at with my own kids and, like me thirty-odd years before them, they found the pictures mesmerizing, horrifying, and impossibly intriguing. They wanted to know more, to find out what’s going on in the story behind these images. The pictures cry out for the story to be told.

And then, right now a year ago, I read Little Pilgrim’s Progress to them a few chapters at a time before bed. Little Pilgrim’s Progress is a children’s adaptation of Bunyan by Helen Taylor, first published in 1947, that abridges, simplifies, and somewhat softens some of the original. The edition I read was a new, large-format hardback illustrated by Joe Sutphin. In Sutphin’s pictures, the characters are all adorable anthropomorphic animals: Evangelist is an owl, Christian is a rabbit, Great Heart is a badger, Giant Despair is a genuinely terrifying hare, Apollyon—rendered “Self” by Taylor—is a wolf, and others are otters, squirrels, toads, dogs, and more. I was worried it would all be a little too cutesy, but I wanted to introduce this story to my kids and I was glad to find the pictures and the adaptation perfectly suited for their ages. It’s brilliantly done.

What I was not prepared for was the way Bunyan’s story, even filtered through an abridgement and fuzzy animals, would wreck me. I had to stop reading Little Pilgrim’s Progress several times—most especially as the characters approached the River of Death and their final, long-awaited but fearful entry into the Celestial City—because I couldn’t hold back my tears. The raw emotional and, as Jacobs notes, psychological power of Pilgrim’s Progress ambushed me. The fear, guilt, anxiety, doubt, grief, and—above all—hope were so real, so true to life in our fallen and wounded state, that the story cut deep. All the more so because I was so familiar with Pilgrim’s Progress that I was, ironically, unprepared to meet it again. I’m glad I did.

I’ve had a long history with Pilgrim’s Progress, a history I should cap by finally reading the whole thing. I think that will be a good post-Buchan summer project. Until then, check out Dangerous Journey and Taylor and Sutphin’s Little Pligrim’s Progress, especially if you have kids and you want something that will really shape their faith and imaginations.

* A lesson in just how literate people who don’t read a book can still be when they have a culture to support their knowledge and understanding of it, something I often think about with regard to medieval people.

** Thank you, I will not be taking questions at this time.

Wildcat trailer reaction

Maya Hawke as Flannery O’Connor in Wildcat

As I noted in my 2023 movie year-in-review, Wildcat is one of the films I’ve been looking forward to this year. Though it was completed and premiered at a film festival last year I hadn’t heard any news about its distribution or release until yesterday, when a great trailer appeared on YouTube.

Wildcat takes place over a short stretch of the early 1950s, when young writer Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) moves back home to Milledgeville, Georgia and is diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that had killed her father when she was sixteen. While struggling with her illness and its severe effects she tries to sell her first novel, a searing Southern gothic religious fable called Wise Blood. Like her short stories, it’s deeply Catholic and Southern and poignant in the sense of sharp, cutting. It’s a hard sell.

It’s unclear from the trailer precisely how much of O’Connor’s life Wildcat covers, but there are scenes suggesting her time among the literary elite in the northeast in the late 1940s, after she had graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and when she was laboring over Wise Blood. The trailer suggests a strong contrast between the world O’Connor leaves behind and the clay-banked roads and nosy church ladies back home in Georgia—a contrast O’Connor was certainly aware of and wrote about.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing in the trailer are the scenes from several of her short stories—”Parker’s Back,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Revelation,” and especially “Good Country People”—in which O’Connor and her mother Regina (Laura Linney) play major characters like the cynical Hulga or the self-righteous Mrs Turpin. Catching even short glimpses of scenes I’ve imagined many times—a crowded doctor’s office waiting room, a Bible salesman running across a field carrying a prosthetic leg—got me excited in a way I haven’t felt for a movie in a while. Apparently these are intricately intertwined with the events of O’Connor’s real life. I’m curious to see how this works, especially since it’s so easy for a film about a writer to slip into the biographical fallacy (or what CS Lewis called The Personal Heresy): the idea that everything a writer writes is based on his or her actual experiences.

But I’m most pleased to see that Wildcat takes O’Connor’s Christianity seriously. Apparently Ethan Hawke, who directed and co-wrote the film, was inspired to make it when he read the Prayer Journal that O’Connor kept as a writing student in Iowa. O’Connor, in addition to being a brilliant writer, was prickly, hard-edged, had a chip on her shoulder as an outsider in the postwar literary world, and was fervently orthodox and devout. Her faith suffuses her work not only coincidentally but by design. Wildcat’s trailer manages to evoke all of this. Here’s hoping that the full film delivers.

A few other notes:

• The Southern accents sound pretty good. O’Connor was originally from Savannah and, though recordings of her remind me a lot of my paternal grandmother, an Athens native, O’Connor’s speech has some peculiarities that must be down to her roots, Savannah having some distinctive dialect features even by Southern standards. Listen to her read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” sometime.

• I’m interested to see how the film explores what some people perceive as O’Connor’s cruelty (“Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to stick pins in your readers,” her editor says in the trailer). The question of just how unpleasant a writer can or should make the reader feel in order to make a point has concerned me for a long time.

• Maya Hawke looks a lot more like O’Connor than I would have guessed was possible based on what I’ve seen of her in “Stranger Things” and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Kudos to her and the film’s hair and makeup folks.

• I like the cinematography a lot. It’s clearly digital but has some creative composition choices and lens work—e.g. the way the focus and bokeh fall off at the edges off the frame, which reminds me of The Batman. A distinctive look will probably help support O’Connor’s story and give it the otherworldly feel it will probably need.

• Wildcat was apparently shot mostly in Kentucky rather than Georgia. From what I can see in the trailer it looks like a good stand-in, though it’s funny to me that, with so many movies shooting in Georgia as a substitute for more expensive locales, such a Georgia-centric story wound up being shot elsewhere.

It’s striking, having watched the trailer several times now, how present O’Connor’s crutches are. The final “coming soon” shot of O’Connor at the family mailbox, which has been one of the only images available for a while, has them plainly visible but I never noticed them. And there they are behind her as she types up a manuscript or struggles even to walk around the house. Some early film festival reviews I’ve read suggest that Wildcat is not just a story about a writer publishing a novel but a meditation on suffering, the threat of death, and God’s grace. I’m here for it.

Wildcat is currently scheduled for a big-city release on May 3 with wider availability to follow, though I haven’t been able to find any details about that yet. Hopefully we can look forward to a time in the late spring or early summer when we can catch Flannery O’Connor in theatres.

Grace and the Grinch

I’m home with a sick four-year old today, which means I’m also home with the Paw Patrol. This morning began with “The Pups Save Christmas,” an episode in which Santa crashes in Adventure Bay on Christmas Eve, losing his reindeer and scattering presents over a wide area. It’s up to Ryder and the pups to help Santa or “Christmas will be canceled.” Naturally they pull through.

There’s more to the episode than that, but I was struck for the first time by how many Christmas shows and movies center on a team of good characters helping Santa “save” Christmas. They have to work to make Christmas happen, otherwise there’s a real possibility that it won’t. “There won’t be a Christmas this year” is an oft-repeated foreboding in these stories.

By contrast, think of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” a story the daring of which has been lost on us through sheer familiarity. The Grinch, not just a villain but a Satanic figure, does all he can to stop Christmas. He removes all of the Whos’ material means of joy, all the trappings of Christmas that characters in other stories work to save, and Christmas still happens. “It came without ribbons,” he says in outrage that turns to wonder. “It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes, or bags.”

“Paw Patrol” and other “save Christmas” stories show us the logic of magic or paganism—or, for that matter, computer programming, which is more like magic than devotees of either science care to admit. Certain conditions have to be met to get the desired result. If presents, then happiness. Mistakes or missing parts will crash the whole system. All of these stories have a lot to say about “Christmas spirit” and “believing” but this rhetoric is belied by the stories themselves, which always feature a desperate race to help Santa on his way.

What “The Grinch” shows us, on the other hand, is the logic of grace. It shows better than any other Christmas entertainment the pure gratuitous gift of Christmas, a gift that comes into the world through the goodness of someone else and that we have no control over. We can reject it, as the Grinch does at first, but we can neither make it happen nor stop it.

The nearest that that episode of “Paw Patrol” can get to grace is to assert that “Christmas is about helping others,” which is still making Christmas happen through your own best efforts. Again, compare the Grinch. Having put a lot of work into stopping Christmas and failed, he is transformed by it. You might even say converted. The grace given to the Whos extends even to him, and he returns the literal gifts that have proven, through grace, immaterial to them. Now that the presents and ornaments and roast beast don’t matter to him either, he has the grace to share them. Material blessing comes from joy and grace rather than the other way around, which is the Grinch’s starting assumption—and that of a lot of other Christmas stories in which mere mortals have to create the conditions for Christmas themselves.

This is the wonderful paradox of Christmas. The promise that Christmas will happen no matter what we do is a purer hope than any moralistic message about spending time together or helping others. Joy comes from grace, and that joy will produce everything else that makes Christmas meaningful—including helping others. We just have to let it transform us.

CS Lewis, 60 and 125 years later

Last week I was too busy critiquing Napoleon to note the 60th anniversary of the death of CS Lewis here—one more thing to hold against Napoleon—though I did manage to slip through an Instagram memorial. Fortunately, today is Lewis’s 125th birthday, so in the spirit of commemoration and appreciation here are a few good things I read from others to mark sixty years since his passing.

CS Lewis (1898-1963)

At her Substack Further Up, Bethel McGrew has an excellent reflection on her own lifelong connection to Lewis and the way the endless quoting of his work risks simplifying him into a generator of therapeutic fortune cookie messages:

Lewis is much-quoted, for good reason: He is prolifically quotable. (There are also a few famously misattributed quotes, like “You are a soul, you have a body,” which no doubt would have annoyed him greatly.) And yet, there’s a paradoxical sense in which his quotability almost risks watering down his true value as a thinker. There’s a temptation to see Lewis as a one-stop “Christian answer man,” the super-Christian who always had the perfect eloquent solution to every Christian’s hard problems. To be sure, he came closer than most Christian writers to providing a sense-making framework for hard problems. But even he wouldn’t claim to have “solved” them. Indeed, his very strength as a writer was that his work swung free of top-down systematic theologies which claim to provide comprehensively satisfying theological answers.

She continues with a particularly poignant example from A Grief Observed. I recommend the whole post.

At Miller’s Book Review, another outstanding Substack, Joel Miller considers Lewis’s humor in the years just before his death, when failing health should have robbed him of his joy:

Sayer says that Lewis “never lost his sense of humor.” Indeed, he was famously good natured, even amid dire circumstances. On July 15, 1963, he suffered a heart attack and slipped into a coma. Friends feared the worst; some came and prayed; a priest gave the sacrament of extreme unction. Amazingly, an hour after the sacrament, Lewis awoke, revived, and asked for a cup of tea.

True to form, he found a joke in it. “I was unexpectedly revived from a long coma,” he wrote Sister Penelope, an Anglican nun with whom he frequently corresponded. “Ought one honor Lazarus rather than Stephen as the protomartyr? To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard.”

Miller also reflects on his own experience of reading and rereading Lewis. Like Miller, I came to Narnia late, well after many of Lewis’s other books, and I have also read and reread Lewis’s work many times. As Miller notes, though Lewis did not expect his work to be remembered, it’s a safe bet that readers like him and myself will continue to find and appreciate Lewis’s work.

At World magazine, Samuel D James has a good short essay on Lewis as a prophet:

Precisely because Lewis knew that the claims of Christianity were all-encompassing, he recognized that no civilization that abandoned it could function. This was not because Lewis desired some kind of baptized Anglo-Saxon ethnonationalist state (born in Belfast, Lewis never forgot the high cost of religious intolerance), but because modern man’s alternatives were quite literally inhumane. Lewis saw from afar, with striking prescience, that humans had no choice but to retreat from personhood if they wanted to escape the implications of Christian revelation.

At The Critic, Rhys Laverty elaborates more deeply on the same theme:

At the close of the Second World War, Lewis was one of a number of Christian intellectuals (alongside Jacques Maritain, Simone Weil, W.H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot) who had begun to consider what world the Allied powers would now make for themselves. Lewis saw a future in which the rejection of transcendent values would allow a technologised elite to re-make nature as they saw fit, ultimately overthrowing human nature itself — a process made possible through the ideological capture of education.

Laverty invokes not only The Abolition of Man, as James does, but Lewis’s dramatization of those ideas in the final novel of The Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, in which the elite of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE) pursue genuinely diabolical technological progress and control:

With N.I.C.E, Lewis anticipated our contemporary technocracy. “Progress” is our unquestionable sacred cow, and its faithful handmaiden is technology. Whether we are tearing up areas of ancient natural beauty in order to build infrastructure supposedly intended to help protect the environment, prescribing new cross-sex hormones and surgery to enable greater self-realisation, or developing artificial wombs which we unconvincingly insist will only ever be used for the care of premature infants, there is now no technological innovation that we will deny ourselves today if it supposedly contributes to the nebulous “future good of humanity”.

It is only Green Book education which makes N.I.C.E possible. If truth, goodness, beauty, and so on are merely relative then there is nothing to rein in man’s “conquest of nature”. His scruples are mere hang-ups to be educated out. He will be driven by pure reason or pure appetite, with no sentiment to regulate their respective metrics of efficiency or pleasure. 

I commend all four of these essays to y’all. They’re good celebrations of a worthy life and a worthy mind, and have gotten me wanting to reread pretty much all of my Lewis shelf. Which might take a while.

Let me conclude with a brief personal reflection of my own. Growing up in the environment I did, I don’t remember ever not knowing about Lewis. He was a byword for intelligent Christian thought, something that stood out to me among the generally anti-intellectual atmosphere of fundamentalism. My earliest accidental exposure was probably the BBC Narnia films. I recall catching a long stretch of The Silver Chair on PBS at my grandparents’ house one morning. As dated as those adaptations are now, it scared me. But it also riveted me, and stayed with me. Indeed, The Silver Chair may still be my favorite of the Narnia books.

But it was a long time before I actually read anything by CS Lewis. My parents got me a set of his non-fiction books at our church bookstore when I was in high school. I started The Great Divorce one night and something about the Grey Town and the bus ride into the unknown disturbed me so much that I put it away. That nightmare quality again. But when I tried the book one sleepy Sunday afternoon in college—my way prepared by Dante, whom I discovered my senior year of high school—I read the entire thing in one sitting. It’s still among my favorite Lewis books.

From there it was on to The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity and The Four Loves. I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and liked it but returned to the non-fiction, devouring Lewis’s essays on any topic. After college I read The Space Trilogy—all three in one week, if I remember correctly—and delved into his scholarly work: An Experiment in Criticism and, crucially, The Discarded Image. I also read as much about Lewis as I read by him, and dug into the works that Lewis loved only to discover new loves of my own, most notably GK Chesterton.

Only with the birth of my children did I seriously return to Narnia, and now I genuinely love them. My kids do, too. They’ll be yet another generation entertained and blessed by Lewis’s work.

He is one of the few authors who has grown with me for so long—guiding me, enlightening me, introducing me to great literature, telling me entertaining and meaningful stories of his own, and deepening both my understanding and my faith. Where the fictional Lewis of The Great Divorce meets George MacDonald as his heavenly guide, the Virgil to his Dante, Lewis could well play that role for me.

On this, his 125th birthday, just over a week from the 60th anniversary of his death, I am more grateful than ever for CS Lewis. RIP.

Julian the Apostate: cage-stage pagan

From Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor, by Philip Freeman, a concise and insightful passage that I want to file away for teaching Western Civ.

Of Julian’s attempts to use his imperial power to reform and reinvigorate paganism and to craft a “universal paganism he hoped would defeat Christianity”—a paganism filtered through his highly symbolic philosophical interpretations that would be applicable everywhere, a rather condescending vision of “the common people of every village” in “childlike innocence” offering “an occasional pigeon to their local gods and pray[ing] for gentle rain and health . . . while philosophers and intellectuals would seek the higher mysteries of the Good”—Freeman writes:

But [Julian’s] austere form of Neoplatonism was not a belief system that had wide appeal to the pagan masses. The worship of the traditional gods of Greece and Rome had always taken a multitude of forms and had never been unified. It was not even exclusive. A good pagan might celebrate a solemn sacrifice to Zeus at a city temple in the morning followed by an afternoon visit to a shrine at a local spring and a frenzied festival honoring the goddess Cybele that same evening. The concept of a centralized set of doctrines was completely foreign to paganism. Pagans as such had no defining creeds, no universal priesthoods, and no canonical scriptures in the Christian sense. Julian was not only fighting Christianity but promoting a religion that had never existed.

This is one of the hardest things to impress upon a group of students when teaching ancient Greek and Roman religion. Even the non-religious among people today are so deeply influenced by the last fumes of the Abrahamic faiths that they struggle to conceive of a “religion” with no scriptures, no ethical content, and no standard “beliefs” to speak of. Alternately, often simultaneously, they struggle to conceive of ancient paganism as having any practices either. To them paganism is a set of myths, which they’ve probably gotten third-hand from Percy Jackson anyway.

I’ve commonly heard of religious converts, especially within Christianity to different doctrinal camps and especially to Calvinism, described as going through a “cage stage”—i.e. a period when they would be better off locked in a cage until they can calm down—in which they are rabidly, irrationally, monomaniacally obsessed with studying and sharing their new theological framework. Certainly Freeman’s description of Julian seeking “to lay out in sometimes tedious intellectual terms the philosophical foundations behind his religious reforms” sounds like some of the Calvinists I’ve known.

As a convert from Christianity back to paganism via the urbane schools of Hellenistic philosophy, he seems to have come to the imperial purple in his own sort of cage stage—from which he never returned.

Witch Wood

Last year I decided to reclaim my birth month by dedicating it to John Buchan, one of the great adventure novelists of the 20th century. Starting with one of Buchan’s first, A Lost Lady of Old Years, and ending with his last, Sick Heart River, I read eight of his novels and wrote about them here. I’m glad to say there’s still plenty more Buchan to read, and so John Buchan June returns today with one of his finest mid-career historical dramas, a novel Buchan himself regarded as his best, Witch Wood.

Though set in the Scottish Borders in 1644, Witch Wood begins with a present-day prologue. The narrator relates the legend of the young minister of Woodilee, a quiet rural parish in the Scottish Borders, who was abducted from a lonely spot in the forest by a fairy—or perhaps “the Deil,” the Devil—one night and never seen again.

The minister, it seems, was David Sempill, a young man fresh from seminary when he is introduced arriving in Woodilee. Woodilee is not the most illustrious parish a young minister could hope for but Sempill eagerly takes up his labors for the Kirk, poring over his books and delivering homilies and paying calls on his parishioners. In the course of getting acquainted with Woodilee, he meets many upstanding and quaintly charming members and elders of the Kirk; Daft Gibbie, the village idiot; and, most intriguingly, Katrine Yester, a young noblewoman who lives at nearby Calidon with her uncle, the local laird. David also comes to rely upon Isobel, his widowed housekeeper, for cooking, cleaning, and insight into the locals. He also discovers the Black Wood.

The Black Wood—or Melanudrigill—is a dense forest on the outskirts of Woodilee on the way to Calidon. It is here that David first met Katrine, dancing merrily in a little clearing among the dark trees one afternoon. David is fascinated. But Daft Gibbie warns him away from the wood, and Isobel, though refusing to say why, fearfully urges him not to go near the place at night and quietly works to prevent him from investigating it further.

But David will not be deterred. He finally contrives an opportunity to be away from his house one evening and slips in among the trees, searching for the clearing. When he finds it, he observes a dark, firelit rite around a centuries-old altar. Led by a man in a goat mask, worshipers dance ecstatically and obscenely in animal costumes and when David, with the boldness of youth and theological certainty, confronts them, they mob him. He awakes at home aching all over and with one fleeting, nightmarish memory of the night before—the face of one of his most prominent and faithful parishioners, leading the devil worship in the woods.

David, despite Isobel’s pleading to avoid trouble, determines to root out the heresy in his parish’s midst. He is enraged to see the faces of devil worshipers in his church every Sunday but needs evidence to expose them. He enlists a drunk to help him and attempts to mark members of the cult, with ambiguous results. Is a local woman burning her husband’s clothes to destroy the scent of an oil poured on them by David’s agent during the night? Or because a tramp infected them with fleas?

Further complicating matters are two events: The ongoing Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a conflict fought in several phases as an outgrowth of England’s civil war between Parliament and the supporters of King Charles I, and a new outbreak of the Plague in Scotland. From the wars come political intrusions, with Covenanters supporting a theocratically established Presbyterian Church in Scotland attempting to capture and eradicate Royalist enemies like Mark Kerr, a soldier of the Marquess of Montrose who makes David’s acquaintance early in the book. And with the Plague come more immediate and dire threats to life in Woodilee.

The Plague may prove David’s finest hour, as he offers succor to the sick and dying heedless of danger to himself and works hard with a mysterious stranger to prevent the spread of the disease. But it also proves his undoing, as becomes clear once the epidemic subsides and he finally presents his case against the suspected heretics to the presbytery.

I don’t want to explain much more about the plot, as it is complex, surprising, and moving. Witch Wood is a powerful slow burn, steadily increasing in tension as the naïve David uncovers more and more rot in a seemingly idyllic country parish and his investigations are complicated and thwarted by turns. Buchan, always a master of pacing, carefully and slowly reveals the truth of what is happening in the Black Wood, thereby creating a creeping sense of paranoia and vulnerability, and as the story progresses the novel’s rich and oppressive atmosphere gathers like the darkness as the sun goes down.

Witch Wood’s slow revelation and dramatic change of mood from tranquil to threatening made this one CS Lewis’s favorite novels: “all that devilment sprouting up out of a beginning like Galt’s Annals of the Parish,” Lewis wrote. “That's the way to do it.”

But the horror of uncovering a relict paganism under the noses of a staunch Christian establishment—something familiar especially from later “folk horror” films like The Wicker Man and, more recently, Midsommar—is only part of what makes Witch Wood so good. The Scottish Borders setting and the historical context are not only vividly and accurately drawn, with most of the characters’ dialogue in Scots dialect, but actually matter to the plot, and the characters are among Buchan’s best. Their complexity and ambiguity, even in the case of a seemingly straightforward character like David’s drunk collaborator Reiverslaw, contribute to the anxious mood of the story as much as the nighttime revels David witnesses. And David himself is one of Buchan’s most compelling characters: callow but determined, full of book learning but ignorant of the world, a prime example of what biographer Ursula Buchan calls “one of his most cherished character types: the scholar called to action.”

And Witch Wood is thematically rich, with an intricate plot turning on a series of ironic reversals and themes of faith, authority, and the corruption and perversion of the institutions meant to uphold both. By the novel’s end, in which Buchan surprisingly but perfectly fulfills the promise of that present-day prologue, David is a changed man, having revealed much more—both to himself and to us—than he expected when he first snuck into the Black Wood by night.

Gilgamesh and Job

Sam Kriss, in an essay at The Lamp that is ostensibly a review of Sophus Helle’s new translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh but is really an extended meditation on death, summarizes the value of Gilgamesh’s 4,000-year old refusal to answer:

The Epic of Gilgamesh is here to confront you with the problem of death, not to solve it. It is not therapy. It was not written to make the world any less cruel. But this is precisely why, against myself, I do find it comforting.

This naturally brought to mind Chesterton’s most powerful and challenging paradox, from his “Introduction to the Book of Job,” the Old Testament book that is “chiefly remarkable . . . for the fact that it does not end in a way that is conventionally satisfactory”:

This, I say, is the first fact touching the speech; the fine inspiration by which God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them. . . . Job [is] suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

And I happened to read Kriss’s essay this morning before heading to church for a sermon from Ecclesiastes 3, part of an ongoing series about the book which, with Job, is my favorite in the Bible.

Less therapy. More ancient Near Eastern confrontation of enigmas.

Read both essays at the links above. They’re well worth your while.