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.

JRR Tolkien, 50 years later

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the death of JRR Tolkien, an occasion for reflection and appreciation. A few impromptu thoughts on Tolkien’s work and what it—and Tolkien himself—have meant to me over the years:

Part of Tolkien’s legacy for me is purely philosophical. Writing at The Critic yesterday, Sebastian Milbank considers the unlikely success of Tolkien’s storytelling in a literary environment under the Sauron-like dominion of irony, cynicism, amorality, and the tortured solipsism of post-Freudian psychology. Milbank:

More than anything else Lord of the Rings communicates a sensibility utterly at odds with the spirit of the age in which it was written. It is one of profound, tragic loss, of the vulnerability of irretrievable, ancient beauty, that must desperately be conserved and defended. It is of the inherent heroism of standing against destructive change, of hope beyond all reason, amidst the logic of history, which Tolkien named “the long defeat”.

Further, there is no “authorial wink,” no signaling or messaging for fellow bien pensants of the kind typical of elitist, politically motivated modernist art. In its morality (not moralism), earnestness, and total commitment to the act of storytelling and the sub-creation of imaginary worlds, Tolkien’s legendarium has become perhaps the anti-modernist myth par excellence, and not by taking any conscious stance but simply by being utterly and sincerely itself.

And yet this philosophical and religious understanding of the drama of Tolkien’s stories came to me later, after long thought and even longer thoughtless basking in his world and words. And I do mean words quite literally.

During college I moved from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to some of Tolkien’s essays. This proved a fortuitous time to do so. I read “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” at about the same time I was taking British History I and British Literature I, a one-two punch of subjects that have become lifelong passions. Reading and rereading Beowulf, and learning about the Anglo-Saxons, and rereading The Lord of the Rings, and then giving intense nuts-and-bolts attention to language, style, tone, and technique in my Creative Writing minor classes, aided by the insights and example of John Gardner, revealed much that was at work beneath the surface of Tolkien’s stories. For the first time I perceived the purposeful deliberation behind his choice of words and the structure of his sentences and poems, and the careful use of allusion to expand the world in which a small story takes place.

This was heady stuff and, emboldened with the enthusiasm of discovery and youthful experiment, I plunged into my Novel Writing class in my final semester of college armed with new and exciting tools. The eventual result was No Snakes in Iceland. It may be that I belong to that class of “mediocre imitators,” as Milbank calls them in his piece, but my first published novel would not have come to be without Tolkien’s example.

And Tolkien’s example extends beyond the literary. Milbank does not delve far into Tolkien the man in his essay, but Tolkien’s actual life story stands as just as strong a rebuke to modernism as his novels. A child of hardship, orphaned at an early age, raised in a teeming industrial city, a soldier in some of the worst combat in history, here is a man who lived through all the blights that should have embittered and driven him to misery and indulgence nevertheless living quietly and faithfully with his wife and children and working just as happily in his professional field as on his private hobbies. He is not the tortured, arrogant literary scribbler of modern myth and his protagonists are neither whiners nor degenerates. Geniuses don’t have to be jerks. A man of faith, duty, family, close friendship, rigorous and honest scholarship, and devotion to the small and parochial and workaday, Tolkien was in every way a candidate for a saintly “hidden life.” And yet everyone knows who he was.

This is perhaps the starkest irony of Tolkien’s life: that a man so contented with his lot and so unambitious (in the way of the worlds of commerce, politics, or celebrity) should become the author of the twentieth century. The more I have studied his life the more I admire him and wish for the grace to emulate him.

All of these things matter to me—the philosophy, the aesthetic, the man himself—but at the root of Tolkien’s meaning for me lie the stories. As it should be.

I can actually date my love for Tolkien. I read The Hobbit in high school at a friend’s urgent insistence (thanks, Josh!) and—again, fortuitously—my county’s brand-new Walmart had the book in stock. On July 10, 2000, I was reading it while my family sat in Atlanta traffic on our way to Turner Field for the home run derby. I had reached a chapter called “Riddles in the Dark.” We drove through a tunnel, one of those places where the interstate runs under a major street like Jimmy Carter Boulevard, and I was hooked. I had enjoyed The Hobbit up to this point but now I loved it, and knew I would read the rest and move straight on to The Lord of the Rings as soon as I could. I’ve never looked back and that love and excitement has never flagged or diminished.

That’s the power of a good story told by a great artist. In Chesterton’s words, Tolkien became for me the “center” of a “flaming imagination.” That imagination has remained aflame for twenty-three years because Tolkien not only told a good story, which plenty of people can do, but because his work is rich and deep and loving and, most of all, true enough to return to again and again for more. No burglar can diminish this hoard by even a cup.

I’ve used the word “fortuitous” twice in this reflection despite knowing that Tolkien would not himself think of it that way. Rightly so. Tolkien believed in Providence and it is largely through his example that I can grasp and trust in that idea. So when I do think of those coincidences, the circumstances and strong confluences and old friendships that kindled and kept my love for Tolkien burning, I hear Gandalf’s closing admonition to Bilbo: “You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?”

No, I don’t. Thank goodness.

JRR Tolkien, artist, scholar, elf-friend, and faithful servant of God, from whom all creativity descends, RIP.

More if you’re interested

Milbank’s essay at The Critic is excellent—one of the best recent pieces on Tolkien that I’ve read. Check out the whole thing here. For more on the religious and philosophical underpinnings of Tolkien’s world, all worked out organically through his storytelling rather than imposed as a moral, read Peter Kreeft’s The Philosophy of Tolkien. I’ve written about Tolkien here many times before—just click the Tolkien tag below for more—but in the early days of this blog I reviewed a delightful and beautifully illustrated children’s book called John Ronald’s Dragons that I want to recommend here again.

Cormac McCarthy and the power of the particular

As I was closing out unused browser tabs yesterday I was glad to rediscover this in memoriam post on Cormac McCarthy by Declan Leary at The American Conservative, written after McCarthy’s death last month. It’s a good piece, making some insightful comments on McCarthy’s style, his philosophy, and his intentional resistance to easy didactic interpretation—as well as having some fun mocking the insufferable ego and faux intellectualism of wannabe auteur James Franco—but I especially appreciated it for two related points Leary makes near the end.

First, Leary responds to a 1992 New York Times profile of McCarthy in which the interviewer lazily turns the desolate setting of Blood Meridian into a mere metaphor:

Yet [Richard] Woodward, like later students at McCarthy’s feet, is bothered by the master’s resistance to interpretation. He slips up at one point, writing that McCarthy “has made dozens of similar scouting forays to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and across the Rio Grande into Chihuahua, Sonora and Coahuila. The vast blankness of the Southwest desert served as a metaphor for the nihilistic violence in his last novel, ‘Blood Meridian,’ published in 1985.”

This is one way of putting it, but it is not a very good one. Blood Meridian is set against the deserts of Mexico and the American West because it happened there; it cannot have happened anywhere else. If there is symbolism in the landscape, it is God’s, not Cormac McCarthy’s.

Second, “a related mistake,” Leary cites an obituary that makes a common but fundamentally mistaken assumption about how and why good fiction lasts:

Graeme Wood, eulogizing McCarthy in the Atlantic, makes a related mistake. He writes that “the McCarthy voice was timeless—not in the pedestrian sense of ‘will be read for generations,’ but in the unsettling, cosmological sense that one could not tell whether the voice was ancient or from the distant future.”

The interpretation is understandable, but the more one reads McCarthy the more firmly located his work feels. It is rock-solid in time and place and bound by historical force, even as it indulges the same fantasy and mystery of other Southern gothic greats. It is a failure either of imagination or of piety to assume that myth and Americana cannot coexist.

What Leary is driving at in his critiques of these incomplete appreciations is particularity. His assertion that Blood Meridian “cannot have happened anywhere else” is spot-on. To shift its action in time or place would be to change it utterly and almost certainly to weaken it. Likewise in all of McCarthy’s other books, all of which are closely observed and deliberately specific in every detail. And yet Blood Meridian—and No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses and, most spectacularly, The Road—speak to us wherever we are and will continue to do so.

This is the paradox of universality or “timelessness,” as Wood puts it in the passage Leary quotes above: If you want to say something genuinely universal, you have to get specific.

The works of literature that speak most universally, that have the greatest longevity and staying power and that readers come back to over and over, are not those with the most broadly applicable free-floating themes or messages, but those most firmly rooted in a specific time and place, among specific people and their specific mores and customs. What could be more seemingly parochial than Jane Austen’s matchmaking and county balls? Or Dante’s score-settling over the vicissitudes of one town’s politics? Or Shakespeare’s dramas of royal intrigue? Or Homer’s war stories? Or Moby-Dick’s painstaking account of every facet of whaling? And yet what books have dug deeper into human nature, heroism, home, love, sin, or salvation?

It took me a long time to grasp this (and it is largely thanks to Jane Austen, Dante, and Homer that I did). But how many young writers striving for greatness through theme or message or—worst of all—political enlightenment miss out on permanence because they don’t first humble themselves and attend to particulars? Know thyself is not only a philosophical necessity.

I wrote about the particularity of good fiction—and the present day’s lazy resort to “thinking in categories”—in another context last year. That post was inspired by an observation about the “antagonistic relationship” between politics, “the great generalizer,” and fiction, “the great particularizer.” And of course particularity of the kind McCarthy evinced contributes to the “vivid and continuous fictive dream.”

Three books behind The Snipers

My new novella The Snipers, a story set in northwestern Europe during World War II, arrives soon. Just waiting on the final proofs! In the meantime, I wanted to recommend three books that I made sure to cite as inspirations in the author’s note at the back.

These are not detailed campaign histories and give little or no attention to the political and strategic situations playing out at the highest levels of the war. One is a memoir, one is a short, narrowly focused history by a veteran, and the other is a grab-bag of anecdotes, reminiscences, and explanations for the public of what the infantrymen went through. They’re all excellent, and together they gave me some of my strongest impressions and understanding of what fighting in Europe from Normandy to Germany was like.

If You Survive, by George Wilson (1987)

Of these three books, this is the one I read most recently. George Wilson joined the 4th Infantry Division as a replacement platoon leader shortly after D-day. The title of the book comes from the pep talk his first commanding officer gave him as a brand-new second lieutenant plunked into combat in Normandy’s bocage: “If you survive your first day, I’ll promote you.”

Wilson survived Normandy, the breakout, the race across northern France, the Hürtgen Forest (about which more below), and finally the Battle of the Bulge.

Wilson’s descriptions of the fighting in Normandy and elsewhere are excellent, driving home the shock, horror, waste, and occasionally exhilaration of battle, but the standout chapters in his book narrate the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest. Though now overshadowed in public memory by the Battle of the Bulge, the result of a German offensive that occurred shortly afterward, the Hürtgen Forest saw tenacious, tooth-and-nail German defense in a rugged, densely wooded landscape sewn with pillboxes and minefields and raked by artillery set to burst among the treetops.

One of the strongest impressions Wilson’s memoir gave me had to do with the incredible turnover rate in personnel among frontline combat units—the attrition. During Wilson’s eighteen days in the Hürtgen Forest his company took 167% casualties. As Wilson relates it, men cycled in and out of his unit so quickly that he could not get to know them all and sometimes doesn’t try. Some replacements arrived and were killed or evacuated to a field hospital the same day, often within hours.

This is a scenario I’ve read about in other books and seen dramatized in a variety of films, but Wilson, with his straightforward, unembellished, but dramatic and moving style, makes you feel it.

The Hürtgen Forest is not the setting of The Snipers but it does figure into the story near the end, and Wilson’s If You Survive has a lot to do with how I present it. It’s an excellent lesser-known memoir that deserves a broader readership.

The Boys’ Crusade, by Paul Fussell (2003)

Paul Fussell may be familiar to you if you’ve ever taken a course on World War I. His literary study The Great War and Modern Memory is still standard reading. But Fussell did not write about war as a detached, ivory tower academic. Like Wilson, he fought across northwestern Europe from Normandy to Germany, in Fussell’s case as an infantry platoon leader in the 103rd Infantry Division. He was twenty years old when he first saw combat.

The Boys’ Crusade is not a memoir, though it is strongly shaped by Fussell’s own experiences, which he has written about more directly elsewhere (especially Wartime and Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic). Instead, it briefly narrates the campaign across northwestern Europe with an emphasis on the experience of ordinary soldiers, most especially the very young men like Fussell who constituted most of the combat infantry. Though a short, fast read, The Boys’ Crusade is full of vivid detail about what it was like to fight in the bocage or the forest or through villages and cities, to deal with officers, to march and march and march, to lead, to follow, to wallow in mud and snow and sleep in the rain, to deal with civilians, to yearn for women, to be tired and scared all the time—and what it was like to experience all of this at the age of eighteen, or nineteen, or twenty.

I’ve included a few passages that made a particularly strong impression on me the first time I read it some years ago and that, along with other books and more study, undergird what I try to evoke in The Snipers.

Here’s Fussell on the appearance of GIs after they had been at the front for a while, away from regulation-happy officers and the nitpicking of the parade ground:

There was one advantage of being in an attack, and only one: there, a soldier was seldom troubled by the chickenshit to be met with in the rear. At the real front there was no such thing as being “out of uniform,” for the soldier looked like a tramp with individual variations all the time, and officers were indistinguishable from the lowest dogfaces. Neither wore anything like insignia, and to look as dirty as possible was socially meritorious.

The two best approximations of this that I’ve seen on film are in one old and one recent movie: Battleground and Fury. (Really stop and look at the infantrymen in Fury sometime. Whatever else you think about that movie, it brilliantly evokes the lived in, raggedy, hard-eyed reality of the dogface in northern Europe.)

Back to Fussell, who notes that appearance was also an easy way to pick out replacements, the guys who hadn’t been in it yet:

Newcomers were regarded with a degree of silent contempt, and replacements were the most conspicuous newcomers. There were many signals by which new arrivals could be detected. Cleanliness was one of them. Soldiers or officers in new or neat clothing, not yet ripped in places or grease-stained all over from C- and K-rations, were easy to spot as targets of disdain. Company officers wearing gold or silver bars on shirt collars were clearly unacquainted yet with the veritable law of the line that unless officers’ insignia were covered by a scarf, enemy snipers would pick them off first. (Probably quite false, but believed by all.) The helmet net could become a low-social-class giveaway by the absence of a worn-out portion at the top; when the helmet was taken off and placed upside down on the ground, the net should be worn away. In many infantry divisions, rumor held that if the chin strap of the helmet was fastened and worn in the correct way, the wearer ran the risk of being beheaded by a close explosion, which, it was said, would tear off helmet and head at once. This probably began as a practical joke, like sending a newcomer to get a left-handed screwdriver, but it was widely believed.

That’s is a pretty representative passage, offering both general observations as well as vivid specifics while also conveying the mixture of boyish jocularity, protective exclusivity, half-believed superstition, and grim realism of the frontline GI.

And, finally, the opening of Fussell’s chapter on the Hürtgen Forest campaign:

If today an eighty-year-old survivor of the Boys’ Crusade were asked to indicate his worst moment as an infantryman, he might answer “Omaha Beach.” And then as an afterthought, he would be likely to add, “No, Hürtgen Forest”—less publicized and cine-dramatized but equally unforgettable, at least for the few participants still living.

This is a book well worth reading. I recommend it to students all the time as a short, accessible, but blunt and truthful explanation of the infantryman’s war.

Up Front, by Bill Mauldin (1945)

Bill Mauldin served with the 45th Infantry Division in Sicily and Italy, where he was wounded during the Monte Cassino campaign, before landing in southern France and advancing through western Europe. But he was most famous as a cartoonist, publishing a single-panel cartoon about two ordinary infantrymen called Willie and Joe. His characters first appeared in the divisional newspaper but were eventually syndicated in Stars and Stripes and published back home in the States. Willie and Joe became immensely popular and well-known, and Mauldin’s cartoons got a lot of attention—not all of it positive. He had a rather famous one-way feud with Patton, who thought the cartoons disrespectful and a threat to discipline.

Shortly after the war Mauldin collected some of the best of the cartoons in this book, Up Front, and supplemented them with a loosely structured running commentary. Though dismissive of his own writing, Mauldin brilliantly and succinctly explains to the civilian reader what the men streaming home from the military in 1946 had been through. Everything is here: the danger, the frustration, the destruction, the distance from home and family, the camaraderie and affection, the bottomless unfulfilled appetites for women and booze, the physical misery, the joy of simple comforts, the irony, the exhaustion, the plight of civilians, and most especially the tedium. If war is proverbially 99 hours of boredom punctuated by one hour of sheer terror, Mauldin deftly conveys that.

And, perhaps most importantly, he conveys the humor that sustained the GIs and bonded them together—not only the gallows humor you might expect but a great deal of pure silliness. A strong sense of the absurd and a gift for improvisation were just as important for survival as ammunition and good leadership.

I could share any number of samples, but this is the passage I always think of as the one that most strongly affected my understanding of the war—making me able to imagine some of what it was like—when I first read it as a kid:

Dig a hole in your back yard while it is raining. Sit in the hole until the water climbs up around your ankles. Pour cold mud down your shirt collar. Sit there for forty-eight hours, and, so there is no danger of your dozing off, imagine that a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance to club you on the head or set your house on fire.

Get out of the hole, fill a suitcase full of rocks, pick it up, put a shotgun in your other hand, and walk on the muddiest road you can find. Fall flat on your face every few minutes as you imagine big meteors streaking down to sock you.

After ten or twelve miles (remember—you are carrying the shotgun and suitcase) start sneaking through the wet brush. Imagine that somebody has booby-trapped your route with rattlesnakes which will bite you if you step on them. Give some friend a rifle and have him blast in your direction once in a while.

Snoop around until you find a bull. Try to figure out a way to sneak around him without letting him see you. When he does see you, run like hell all the way back to your hole in the back yard, drop the suitcase and shotgun, and get in.

If you repeat this performance every three days for several months you may begin to understand why an infantryman sometimes gets out of breath. But you still won’t understand how he feels when things get tough.

I discovered Up Front one day in middle school while tagging along with my mom in an antique mall. I spotted an old copy lying on an end table, for sale. I had never heard of Bill Mauldin but I loved comic strips and cartoons and World War II history, so I excitedly showed it to Mom. She bought it for me. I can’t be more thankful. This more than any other book laid the foundations for my understanding, however imperfect, of the experiences of GIs in Europe during World War II.

That first copy was a very early printing. I read it so much that the dust jacket eventually crumbled away to nothing, but I still have the book as well as a more recent facsimile reprint from WW Norton that includes a foreword by Stephen Ambrose. It is also included in toto in the Library of America’s excellent two-volume collection Reporting World War II. It is well worth taking the time to read.

Conclusion

Though The Snipers is not directly inspired by anything in these books, they helped shape my understanding of what the war was like for the young men who lived and fought through it. I strongly recommend all three of them—for starters. Thanks for reading, and I hope y’all will check out The Snipers when it arrives!

Cormac McCarthy, RIP

Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men. No one else has captured McCarthy’s blend of the old and modern like the Coen brothers.

I was genuinely grieved to learn of the death of Cormac McCarthy yesterday afternoon. No other writer has accomplished something quite like his body of work, and no other writer’s work has meant quite what his has meant to me.

I discovered him in the summer between my last two years of college. I have a standing rule that I will check out any unfamiliar book or author I hear about more than twice within a certain short amount of time. With McCarthy, I ran across references to his novel Blood Meridian in three places within the same week. I picked it up at the Barnes & Noble in town and that was that.

Blood Meridian is McCarthy’s magnum opus. It is also the worst place to start with his work. It is rich, dense, sprawling, arcane, operatic, a deliberate fusion of old fashioned curlicued prose and modern muscularity and bluntness. The chapters have strange headings summarizing the content and McCarthy does not use quotation marks. And of course there is the much-remarked upon brutality. But because of the allusions that had convinced me to pick Blood Meridian up, that was the one thing I was prepared for. 

I was flummoxed. I knew something great was going on but I struggled to wrap my mind around it. I thought the lack of quotation marks was a risible affectation. And I only barely followed the story. I think I gave it three stars on Amazon.

But it stayed with me. I kept thinking about it. And I bought more of McCarthy’s novels. 

I read through everything except Suttree by the time I graduated, and I reread several of them over the coming years. At last, I reread Blood Meridian last year, and while I want to say that I found it a completely different book, it was I who had changed. Age and maturity and years and years of reading McCarthy and reflecting back on Blood Meridian through his other work and—to throw it into relief—the work of less skilled imitators had prepared me for the novel. I had grown into it. It amazed me all over again.

Blood Meridian was the beginning of a long challenge to my way of writing. It was a bold early demonstration to me of the power of the precisely-chosen verb, of how to use a wide-ranging but carefully controlled vocabulary to create texture (or music, if you prefer), of the necessity of deep research presented as an organic part of the story, seamlessly and without ostentation. 

And the lack of quotation marks that annoyed me so much at first caused me to reconsider even more. McCarthy, I realized, had set himself an artistic limitation by refusing punctuation conveniences. He did not use quotation marks—or semicolons or, unless absolutely necessary, commas—the same way a sonnet writer does not use a fifteenth line. It was a self-imposed boundary that strengthened and liberated his style. It meant, as McCarthy has said himself, that there was less to get in the way. It allows the language to tell the story. Pure words.

From this I learned to avoid leaning on typography to communicate meaning. And so while I have not gone nearly as far as McCarthy in this regard, in my fiction I don't italicize words for emphasis or to establish the rhythm of a person's speech or use elaborate punctuation or typesetting. In a scenario like that of his penultimate novel, The Road—which as a student of the early medieval period I don’t have a hard time imagining—how much of your typographical shenanigans will survive transmission? McCarthy wrote to last. I hope to, too.

So much for style. What Blood Meridian and McCarthy’s work also taught me was to confront the harshness and evil of reality head on. Because of the violence and darkness of his work—most especially Blood Meridian, with its scalphunters and Comanches and hangings and the inscrutable, unstoppable Satanic figure of the Judge—people call him a nihilist. He wasn’t. What McCarthy had was a deeply moral sense of the utter fallenness of the world and an unwillingness to look away.

There is a time and place for the opposite approach, but we need our McCarthys, too, in all their bleakness. Witness this passage from a 1992 interview that I’ve seen circulating since yesterday:

There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

Uplifting? No. But it’s true. All the charge of nihilism means is “McCarthy did not reassure me.” Good. Those “afflicted with this notion,” which is most of us nowadays, need to be unsettled. McCarthy, a master of this kind of prophetic unsettling, showed us how.

Cormac McCarthy, novelist, prophet, and personal hero, RIP.

Eaters of the Dead

“When Eaters of the Dead was first published, this playful version of Beowulf received a rather irritable reception from reviewers . . . But Beowulf scholars all seem to enjoy it, and many have written to say so.”

— Michael Crichton, "A Factual Note on Eaters of the Dead," 1992

I first read Eaters of the Dead in high school and didn’t know what to do with it. I sought it out primarily because it had a famous name attached to it and because many of my friends were gaga for its film adaptation, The 13th Warrior. (I hadn’t yet taken my plunge into early medieval northern Europe, a plunge I still haven’t come up from.) I got ahold of a copy with the movie tie-in cover and alternate title somewhere and started to read it.

My reaction, per Crichton’s later comments above, wasn’t so much irritable as bewildered—and slightly disturbed. What was this? A novel? A translation of a medieval manuscript? Are all these footnoted manuscripts real? Is any of it real? It couldn’t be real—I knew enough of the story already to know that—but if not then what was this thing?

Bewilderment

What’s funny is that, at the time I was reading Eaters of the Dead, I was doing much the same thing as Crichton. I just didn’t have it published. Besotted with half-formed pictures of the Middle Ages, my recent discovery of the riches of Dante, and certain artistic preoccupations that haven’t gone away (snow; almost all my books have snow in them), I was spending my free time hammering out line after line of an epic poem about the Teutonic Knights, a brutal war, and forbidden romance made the sweeter by vows faithfully kept—and liberally peppering the manuscript with footnotes, dates, alternate translations of contested terms, and excerpts of related text from other poets and chroniclers. I had discovered the fun part of scholarship, the digging and puzzle-piecing.

I finished high school and went on to college and Eaters of the Dead mostly receded from my mind. But some part of it, the part that had unconsciously jibed with my artistic and intellectual sensibilities, stayed on. While I had been confused and unimpressed with the book at first, I never hated or disdained it—a sure sign that there was something there I had missed.

Then 2020 happened, and to pass part of last summer teaching remotely and sheltering in place with family, I revisited it. Wow.

The story

Eaters of the Dead purports to be a translation of a text by Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, a real 10th century Arab courtier and diplomatic envoy. On a journey north (up the eastern side of the Caspian Sea to modern-day Russia) on behalf of the caliph in 922, Ibn Fadlan encounters a wild pagan people called the Rus or the Northmen. While staying with them he observes their customs, witnesses a chieftain’s funeral involving brutal human sacrifice, and is present for an emergency meeting following the arrival of a high-status messenger from the north.

The messenger is Wulfgar, son of King Rothgar, and he seeks the help of the local chieftain Buliwyf in dealing with a literally nameless threat. Ibn Fadlan observes the usually cheerful Northmen’s distress and foreboding and asks for an explanation, but his translators offer little and he senses it would be unwise to inquire much further. All he learns is that, in accordance with the decree of the Angel of Death, an elderly female shaman who had assisted in the sacrifice of a slave girl at the earlier funeral, he must go with Buliwyf and his warriors on their journey as a thirteenth, and foreign, member of the party.

Ibn Fadlan therefore unwillingly joins the Northmen on their long, circuitous trip northward by river. They portage between rivers, avoiding nameless threats in certain forests and riding as swiftly as possible through others, until they reach the Baltic and sail to Denmark. Finding Buliwyf’s home destroyed—again, by a threat the Northmen refuse to name or explain except to say that it comes with “the mists”—they journey on to Rothgar’s kingdom.

Everywhere in this kingdom there are signs of violent, grisly attack, and the only clues left behind by the attackers are grotesque figurines of uncertain meaning. Ibn Fadlan’s dread only grows.

Buliwyf and his men, including Ibn Fadlan, defend Rothgar’s hall against repeated attacks by a host of bearskin-clad savages that, Ibn Fadlan finally learns, are known as the wendol or “the mist monsters.” Short, ugly, stinking horribly, but powerfully built and apparently fearless, the wendol attack en masse, kill indiscriminately, and take the heads of their victims, never leaving any dead or wounded behind—until Buliwyf takes the arm of one of their number. The fighting is ugly and the losses heavy, and Ibn Fadlan is sorely tested. He also grows to admire the Northman and forms friendships with them, especially Herger, who interprets for Ibn Fadlan until the Arab can speak the language well enough to be understood. Ibn Fadlan also learns to drink and wench—a lot.

After an nighttime wendol attack in which the monsters assault the hall on horseback while carrying torches—an attack dubbed by the Northmen “the glowworm dragon Korgon”—Buliwyf and his band ride out in search of the wendol homeland across “the desert of dread,” visit a colony of dwarves living on the fringes of Northman society, and finally infiltrate the central wendol stronghold, where Buliwyf slays “the mother of the wendol” and is in turn mortally wounded by her. He holds out long enough to repulse a final, desperate wendol attack before he himself dies, and Ibn Fadlan witnesses a second, more moving funeral. The text ends abruptly as Ibn Fadlan journeys home.

The rest of the story

So much for the plot. If you’re just reading Eaters of the Dead for the story, you should finish it satisfied—it’s a real rip-snorting adventure tale, a classic quest full of exotic locales, strange customs, plenty of action, and a splash of horror.

But don’t some elements of that story sound familiar?

The movie tie-in edition I read in high school

It’s Beowulf. Crichton, as he writes in “A Factual Note on Eaters of the Dead” included in some editions of the book, wrote Eaters of the Dead on a dare, as a demonstration that, viewed with fresh eyes or from a new angle, the “bores” of English literature survey classes are still exciting, dramatic, and meaningful.

To do so, Crichton took an actual text about a real journey by the real Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, deftly interwove elements of fiction into the early parts, and from the first funeral scene forward constructed an entirely new, fictitious story for the cosmopolitan Arab narrator. This story positions Ibn Fadlan as the foreign observer in a party of warriors led by a brave and charismatic nobleman responding to a crisis in a faraway kingdom beset by bloodthirsty attackers. Later, our reading of Ibn Fadlan implies, these events would become the story of Beowulf saving Hrothgar and his people from the depredations of Grendel.

All of this makes Eaters of the Dead, in addition to an adventure story:

• a euhemeristic take on Beowulf, a “real” version of what happened “before” the development of the mythic one that has come down to us in the poem;

• a parallel story, one retelling familiar events from a different perspective; and

• a fictional book, a version of Ibn Fadlan that, according to the story, Crichton and previous scholars cobbled together from multiple fragmentary manuscripts in several languages.

There are plenty of other examples of all of these things, but what I notice about many others is their often po-faced ideological didacticism. Witness the recent rash of deconstructive parallel novels about “marginalized voices” (i.e. minor characters) in famous stories. What sets Eaters of the Dead apart from so many of these is how much fun it is. Not only is it, again, a rip-snorting adventure, but it’s a fun send-up of scholarship, containing as it does an introduction, information on the provenance of Ibn Fadlan manuscripts, parodically pedantic footnotes (some of them much longer than the passages they seek to illuminate), explanations of variant readings, a bibliography, and an appendix on the “predictable debate” surrounding the wendol.

Jazzing around

Crichton is—as John Gardner, author of another parallel novel about Beowulf, put it in one of his books on writing—“jazzing around.” And it’s a hoot.

It’s even more of a hoot if you know the period or something about history and anthropology generally. Crichton tucks away lots of “Easter eggs” as bonuses for those in the know to enjoy. He has Buliwyf’s party visit the ring fortress of Trelleborg, which Ibn Fadlan describes in unmistakable detail, and of course the wendol are relict headhunting Neanderthals who worship bears and shamanic fertility goddesses, as evidenced by the instantly recognizable figurines they leave behind.

This is an anachronism stew—whatever historical events lie behind Beowulf probably occurred in the 6th century and Trelleborg wasn’t built until at least sixty years after Ibn Fadlan’s real journey, and that’s not even to address the survival of Neanderthals—and Crichton admits as much in his “Factual Note.” What makes all of these things fun is the little thrill of recognition you get when they come along, a bit of authorial irony that stays fun by never coming at the characters’ expense. Crichton knows and enjoys this stuff and wants us to play along.

Again—jazzing around.

What was most remarkable to me about Eaters of the Dead, as I reread it last year and listened to the audiobook this week, is how many levels it works on. It’s a satisfying historical action adventure. It’s a genuinely creepy horror story, with a carefully structured buildup and wonderful atmosphere and tension. It’s an engaging, vividly imagined, and just-barely-realistic-enough science-fiction story—the kind of book Crichton would become famous for—pitting Vikings against prehistoric headhunters. It’s a fun—and sometimes hilarious—pastiche of modern scholarship. And it is, in the end, a great celebration of Beowulf, definitive proof of Crichton’s assertion that great literature isn’t boring.

It took me twenty years to grow into, to see what Crichton was doing and to enjoy it, but I’m thankful that I did. Check out Eaters of the Dead sometime soon and see what level it works on for you.

More if you’re interested

There is, of course, the film adaptation, The 13th Warrior, which I haven’t watched since high school and can’t really comment on except to say that it has one of the best cinematic attempts to tackle the language barrier I’ve seen. I intend to rewatch it soon.

You can read the real Ibn Fadlan’s account of his travels among the Rus in a recent translation for Penguin Classics, Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North. Jackson Crawford has an excellent short video on the “Viking funeral” witnessed by Ibn Fadlan, described in his writings, and dramatized in both Eaters of the Dead and its film adaptation, The 13th Warrior. You can watch that here.

I reread Eaters of the Dead for the first time since high school last year. As I mentioned above, I just revisited it again in the form of Simon Vance’s excellent audiobook performance. Vance narrates Ibn Fadlan with a slight accent, which actually sounds more Indian than Arab but that helps differentiate Ibn Fadlan’s narration from the footnotes. I didn’t know how well this work work going into it, but I greatly enjoyed it.

The Rocketeer at 30

Here’s an appreciation that’s been a long time coming—growing off and on for thirty years (thirty years exactly on the 21st of this month), through nearly every phase of my own life from childhood to middle age and now extending into the childhoods of my children, and finally prompted by video essays by two of my favorite YouTubers. The subject: a modest action adventure from Disney, back when Disney still produced modestly sized movies, that is nonetheless masterfully crafted and rich with detail, not to mention a ripping good story. That film is The Rocketeer.

The movie

If you haven’t seen The Rocketeer, go and do yourself a favor and watch it. If you have seen it, a summary shouldn’t be necessary, but I’ll provide a short one here out of a sense of duty.

The film takes place outside Los Angeles in the fall of 1938, with Europe a year away from war (the Munich Agreement would have been signed just before our story takes place) and America rather insistently at peace. Our hero is Cliff Secord, a young pilot. When we meet him, he and a bunch of buddies at a rural airfield are taking their brand-new racing plane out for a spin after years of scrimping up what they can from crop-dusting and performing stunts at airshows. A police chase involving the FBI and gangsters with stolen merchandise—some kind of secret “gizmo”—intrudes, wrecking Cliff’s plane and almost killing him. He and his pals, right on the cusp of long-awaited great things, have just been set back years.

But then Cliff and his mentor Peevy discover something hidden in the cockpit of a superannuated biplane that they use for the humiliating “clown act” at airshows: a rocket pack. Cliff and Peevy intuit quickly that it’s designed to be strapped to a pilot’s back for rocket-speed flight. They test it, Peevy tinkers with it, and at the next airshow they are forced to give it a trial run to save an elderly and ailing pilot’s life. It’s a glorious success—but it also brings Cliff and his pals to the attention of the gangsters who were after the thing in the first place, the federal authorities who are hunting them, the industrialist who designed the rocket pack and is trying to recover it, and the highly-placed money behind the gangsters—and even his bosses far, far away.

The plot also sweeps up Cliff’s aviation buddies, including Peevy, Cliff’s beautiful girlfriend and aspiring actress Jenny, and their friends from around the airfield.

From this point forward The Rocketeer is a chase, a swashbuckler, a Flash Gordon adventure, an espionage thriller, a ritzy Hollywood chamber drama, and a gradually unfolding and ever escalating mystery. It’s great.

What makes The Rocketeer great

Why is it great? I can give you a short answer in three words: love, fun, and craftsmanship. Let’s start with the latter two.

First, The Rocketeer is a ton of fun. The period setting, the cast of characters, the heinous and varied villains, the combined dash of classic aviation and romance of classic Hollywood, the high stakes conflict boldly attacked by a spirited young hero who is still finding his calling and learning what is best in life—all contribute to the fun. All tell us, unequivocally, this is an adventure.

For me, the setting is a big part of the appeal. The trappings of the late 1930s are fun—the cars, the clothes, the hats, the planes, the music, the slang (“He hangs one on my kisser and you let him waltz?”), the guns (see below), the payphones and hatchecks and rumble seats, the look of the buildings from the hangars to the nightclub, and, relatedly, all that Art Deco design. The whole movie has a canvas, leather, and steel rivet chic that I’ve heard called dieselpunk. It’s beautiful. All the best of late 1930s material culture is here, and if you’ve ever fancied wearing a fedora (a real fedora, not the hipster hat, which is actually a trilby) and a trenchcoat under the cool light of the moon on a dark street corner, there’s something in The Rocketeer that you’ll like to look at.

But the setting also enriches the tone and dramatic subtext of the film. This is America late in the Depression, on the cusp of World War II but still at peace. This is also an era of change and potential. Everywhere we see the old alongside the new: Peevy’s truck and Cliff’s motorcycle, the biplane Miss Maibel and the Gee Bee, the oil derricks and orange groves of rural Los Angeles and the encroaching glitz of Hollywood. You can see this clearly in the film’s villains. The early villains, an Italian mob, are a known quantity—part of the status quo. Everyone knows who they are and what threat they represent. Howard Hughes is even a bit dismissive of them, calling them “hired muscle.” The film’s brilliant third act revelation of the real villains, the Nazis, points toward a terrifying new unknown.

And that’s another aspect of the setting that works gangbusters—there may have been more evil people or more lethal regimes, but there is no better screen villain than the Nazis. Just ask Indiana Jones.

The revelation of Nazi involvement in the plot also points toward the second thing that makes The Rocketeer so great, which is its craftsmanship.

The plot is perfectly structured, with a steady series of revelations that raise the stakes. Look at how the story progressively intensifies. First we have Cliff just trying to get ahead, then he and his friends are set back by unrelated mob crime, then he publicly rescues a friend using the rocket pack, then not only the mob and the FBI but an unstoppable ogre of a man begin pursuing Cliff, then not only Cliff but Jenny are endangered as Neville Sinclair tries to seduce her, and, the final revelation—the rocket pack isn’t just a MacGuffin for Cliff or the mob or even Neville Sinclair himself to chase, it’s the chosen tool of world domination by the Nazis. By the climax of the film all of the various plot threads have come together and the tension is at fever pitch, the stakes as high as they can go. It’s brilliantly done.

Furthermore—and this is especially important—nothing in the film comes out of nowhere. Everything that matters to the story, from plot points and important props (e.g. chewing gum) right down to jokes and incidental details, is properly set up earlier in the story. Consider Eddie Valentine and his gangsters’ turn on Neville Sinclair at the end. The film has already shown us the tensions in this patron-client relationship and the threat presented by the Nazis, so Eddie’s change of heart isn’t so much a change as the natural and rational step for his character to take given what he has just learned. For this moment to work so well takes the craft and dedication not only of the screenwriter but the director and editor. The Rocketeer, like Cliff’s jetpack, is a well-engineered and smoothly running machine.

So there’s the craftsmanship put into the story, but everything else in the film is finely crafted, too. The production design is stellar. The sets and costumes, from the dingy overalls at the airfield to the black tie and ballgowns at the nightclub, and most especially the Rocketeer’s costume—everything looks fantastic, helped along by Hiro Narita’s beautiful and classically-styled cinematography. The special effects, by ILM, for whom director Joe Johnston had previously worked on the first two Indiana Jones films and all three Star Wars films, are also the best possible for their time, with the climactic Zeppelin sequence being especially convincing and thrilling.

And, of course, there is the cast. The Rocketeer is perfectly cast, not only with good actors from the stars to the extras but with actors who are right for their roles. Even here all of The Rocketeer’s parts fit together smoothly. Billy Campbell is pitch perfect as Cliff, with just the right dash of cockiness and daring to complement his earnestness and naivete; Jenny could easily have been an eye-candy role, but Jennifer Connelly imbues her with life and drive, not to mention her own kind of daring and a radiant, classic Hollywood femininity; Timothy Dalton proves an outstanding villain, showing depth and layers of deception without simply being a caricature of a snobbish actor; and Alan Arkin is wonderful as Peevy (about which more below).

The supporting cast is also excellent, and rather than gush for another thousand words let me focus on three standouts. First, Coen brothers regular Jon Polito, a natural for period films, makes a strong impression with his handful of scenes as Bigelow, the penny-pinching owner of the airfield. Polito also gets one of the best lines in the film (again, see below). Second, Terry O’Quinn as Howard Hughes exudes authority and intelligence and is a natural fit for the story, Hughes being someone Cliff and Peevy would respect enough to make their continued “borrowing” of the rocket pack a real dilemma. And finally, seven-foot-tall Tiny Ron as Lothar, Sinclair’s henchman, is a wonderful old Hollywood type and presents a real threat. I remember dreading his appearance onscreen as a kid. The scene in which Lothar murders injured gangster Wilmer in the hospital, which Johnston and Narita stage in chiaroscuro shadows borrowed straight from black-and-white horror films, is genuinely terrifying and disturbing.

It’s that connection to classic Hollywood that brings me to the final and most important thing that makes The Rocketeer great—love.

I don’t just mean the love story between Cliff and Jenny, but the love the filmmakers had for everything about the movie. It’s apparent that they loved their work, and that love made the story infectious. It’s the root of both the craft and the fun of the movie.

The filmmakers’ love of old Hollywood comes through not only in the setting but in the camerawork and editing. I’ve mentioned the 1930s horror style of Lothar’s first murder, but The Rocketeer also employs classic tools like match dissolves—the best being the transition from Cliff flying over the moonlit mountains outside Los Angeles to the rumpled satin sheets on the bed where Neville Sinclair has deposited the drugged and kidnapped Jenny. That love also extends through every aspect of the look of the film, which I’ve already described but warrants mentioning again.

There’s also the music, an unapologetically heroic and beautiful score by James Horner. Horner was himself a pilot, and his score brings out the adventure, romance, and awe of flight. Look at the way the music during the airshow rescue moves naturally between all of those emotions. This is what flight would feel like if set to music, and it complements the movie perfectly. The Rocketeer is almost certainly my favorite of Horner’s many excellent soundtracks.

And there’s the filmmakers’ love of the story and of adventure for its own sake. The Rocketeer has dangerous villains who wish real evil upon the world, a genuine hero who behaves with integrity despite still having a lot to learn, and a community of people who matter to each other. It’s about courage and boldly facing danger to defend others, about the power of friendship and love and learning that those things are worth taking pains to protect. It’s about a man reaching adulthood and accepting responsibility and learning to think of others, and about the right use of skill, intelligence, and strength. It’s a sincere, heartfelt, uncynical movie of the kind Hollywood doesn’t produce any more, and I think that’s a shame.

Observations

As I’ve hinted above, The Rocketeer isn’t only about its characters, plot, and action, it’s rich with side details and the unnecessary grace notes that show creative people enjoying their work. Here are a few things I want to draw attention to:

• Peevy is a great mentor. His tough-love speech to Cliff about losing Jenny being his own fault is exactly the kind of thing that young men don’t want to hear but need to. Whatever happened to wise older male characters like this?

• Comic relief: I’m sick of Marvel-style quips and gags and pop culture references, especially where they undercut the sincerity of the drama. The Rocketeer is funny throughout without throwing shade at itself, its characters, or its story, and it roots its humor in character, character relationships, and the characters’ responses to their situation. They’re serious when they should be and funny when it’s appropriate to be and the humor isn’t just there to make people laugh but to make the story feel real.

• Cameos: I Like that two big names in 1930s Hollywood show up at the South Seas Club; I also like that the movie didn’t overdo it and turn that scene into one of those Looney Tunes shorts with all the celebrity caricatures. As with so much else, The Rocketeer got this just right.

• Speaking of the South Seas Club, that’s Melora Hardin singing “Begin the Beguine.” You might, like me, know her better now as Jan Levinson of “The Office.” This is one scene in the film that has aged weirdly for me.

• One more thing about the South Seas Club: to this day when I hear the word nightclub I imagine something like the South Seas Club—black tie, big band music, and elegant dining. I’ve gathered that modern nightclubs… aren’t like that.

• Guns: This movie is a smorgasbord of great-looking classic firearms. As I mentioned when reviewing The Highwaymen, I’m a total sucker for interwar and World War II-era hardware like this. The M1928 Thompson submachine gun, one of the most beautiful guns ever designed, is most prominent, and a nighttime shootout at Cliff and Peevy’s house—a gloriously over-the-top use of excessive firepower by the FBI (one of the film’s unintentionally realistic touches)—takes full advantage of the distinctive muzzle flash created by that model’s Cutts compensator. But there are some great automatic handguns, too. Lothar carries two .45 Colt M1911A1 pistols; Sinclair, once fully revealed as a Nazi spy, produces a then-new 9mm Walther P38; but the best of them is the Mauser C96 that Cliff picks up off of one of the German commandos at Griffith Observatory—a pistol he carries for about five minutes and never fires, but that looks fantastic. Those commandos’ main weapon is clearly the MP40 submachine gun, an anachronism as the MP40 wouldn’t be manufactured until 1940. But because the early MP38 looked almost the same (it had milled rather than stamped parts), the MP40 is so cool-looking, and, like the Thompson, its lines are so iconic, I’m happy to give this a pass—and have since I was about ten. You can browse a pretty thorough catalog of the film’s guns at the IMFDB.

• Cussin’: This movie feels squeaky clean now, but as a kid I fretted about watching this when we had a babysitter over and wondered why people in the 1930s and 40s said damn so much. (Another point of reference was my mom’s repeat viewings of Fried Green Tomatoes.) This may also be where I learned the expression son of a bitch—which, if you’ve read Dark Full of Enemies, you may know is McKay’s go-to exclamation.

• This is also where I learned the word fascist. Kudos to my dad for actually trying to explain this concept to seven-year old me.

• This was my first exposure to former 007 Timothy Dalton. I’m in a minority of Bond fans in liking The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, but because I had years and years of The Rocketeer to my credit ahead of watching either of those I always have a hard time shaking my impression of him as a villain.

• Nitpick: Why does Neville Sinclair kind-of, sort-of have a German accent once he’s aboard the Zeppelin at the end? Is he actually German and has been concealing it his whole career? I always took him to be a British Nazi-sympathizer—there were plenty of those in Britain and America in those days—rather than an actual German.

• I’ve mentioned that the cast are perfect from top to bottom, but let me point out one more thing about the bottom here—The Rocketeer is full to the brim of great faces. Pause the film sometime and look, really look, at each of Cliff and Peevy’s friends at the airfield, or the folks at the diner, or the film crew of The Laughing Bandit. It’s easy to fill the small roles and bit parts with just anybody, but I always like a film that gets interesting faces, faces that hint at their own histories and lifestories behind them. (Mel Gibson as a director has this talent in spades.)

• Quotability: This movie supplied and still supplies a lot of one-liners and allusions to my family. To this day my dad will say “It’s all part of the show!” in reference to any oddity that disrupts the regular flow of things. Also, the first time Cliff suits up: “How do I look?” “Like a hood ornament.” This line also has the virtue of feeling period-correct. The director of Neville Sinclair’s movie to the well-connected actress who got a speaking part over Jenny: “Acting is acting like you’re not acting. So act, but don’t act like you’re acting.” Millie, the owner of the diner, after Cliff’s date with Jenny goes down in flames: “Well, go after her, ya dope.” And Peevy after the shootout: “We don’t got a house, we got a gazebo.” I could populate a long list of good lines, but I’ll stop with this immortal line from Eddie Valentine: “I may not make an honest buck, but I’m 100% American and I don’t work for no two-bit Nazi.” I couldn’t type that without smiling.

• Aviation stuff: Last but not least, I have to mention the planes. The Rocketeer is a love letter to flying. The movie is full of beautiful vintage planes—real planes, not computer generated ones—and takes aviation seriously, including the gearhead culture of pilots and mechanics, and serves up a beautiful sample of what it is that lovers of aviation care so much about. It helps that Billy Campbell read up on flying ahead of playing Cliff and that composer James Horner was himself a pilot (see above).

Conclusion

The Rocketeer’s “critics’ consensus” on Rotten Tomatoes rather dismissively describes it as “anachronistic.” If this film is an anachronism then I don’t want to be up-to-date. It’s old-fashioned in the best sense of that term—fashioned as in made, shaped, crafted the old way—and it still works.

More fun and craftsmanship motivated by love and untainted by cynicism or—especially now—political partisanship, please. In the meantime, The Rocketeer, even after thirty years, holds up. Watch it if you haven’t.

More if you’re interested

I own the single-disk 20th anniversary Blu-ray of The Rocketeer. It’s of excellent quality; the picture is sharp and the digital transfer is very filmic, with a wonderful texture to the image, only further enhancing its old Hollywood appeal. Alas, it totally lacks special features. (See the episode of “Re:View” below.) The movie is also available on Disney+ with a subscription and to rent from Amazon Prime. James Horner’s magnificent soundtrack is, unfortunately, out of print if you’re a dinosaur who, like me, still likes to buy CDs, and YouTube recently removed a complete playlist of the score. An MP3 album based on a 2020 remaster is available for download on Amazon, albeit at a bit of a stiff price.

The two YouTube essays I mentioned above are Mike and Rich’s episode of “Re:View” from RedLetterMedia and a shorter video from Scots novelist Will Jordan, aka The Critical Drinker. Mike and Jay got me thinking about writing this appreciation when their video posted a year ago. Jordan finally got me writing about it.

In praise of cows

Detail from Grazing Cows, by Daniel Strain

Four items in praise of cows, occasioned by my browsing of photos from Scotland and the Alps on Instagram:

• First, dairy and beef, against which I will hear no ill spoken. I invoke this not in a sense of gluttony but of sincere appreciation.

• There are a great many regional varieties of cow, all of which have interesting histories, all of which have rich local traditions bound up with them, and all of which, viewed in their home context, adorn their landscapes or, viewed in isolation, suggest them. Look at the Highland without feeling a cool breeze, the Braunvieh without hearing cowbells, or the Texas longhorn without hearing the dry rustle of the mesquite, and I’d suggest checking your imagination for fault.

• Very few landscapes cannot be improved by a scattering of grazing cows. They provide a sense of both scale and restfulness, the latter of which you do not get from the presence of human figures.

• Bovine—from Latin bovus, “cow”—literally means “cow-like” but is often used metaphorically for, as Dictionary.com puts it, “stolid, dull.” As the cow, to me, radiates a humble equanimity, I’d love to see bovine rehabilitated as a term of praise.

One addendum, after I had already pondered the above silliness:

• On cowbells: these are intensely annoying at high school graduations but, heard at a distance in a meadow, as good as windchimes for relaxation.

Buechner on the challenge and blessing of children

Jacob wrestles the angel by the ford of Jabbok in this engraving by Gustave Doré

A good friend of mine and his wife had their third child yesterday. When he texted me to let me know, after the initial round of pleasant surprise (“It’s time already?!”) and congratulations we reflected on how his life is about to change—has, in fact, already changed. Having three children is a delight and a challenge. A new member has joined the fellowship and new adventures are about to unfold that would have been unimaginable even a few weeks ago. And of course some of these adventures are the children themselves.

It’s hard and it’s an unceasing joy. I never understood, prior to becoming a father, how both could be true. A challenge, a struggle, and a blessing?

Reflecting on this later I remembered a passage from The Son of Laughter that moved me terribly. As I wrote a few weeks ago, Frederick Buechner’s novel is a poetic, imaginative retelling of the story of Jacob and his lifelong struggle with God, whom the characters reverently refer to as “the Fear.” It is part of Jacob’s lot to live in the promises made by the Fear to his grandfather Abraham, something it proves exceedingly difficult to do in the hurly-burly of life in the tribal world of the Patriarchs.

In this passage, Jacob, so who has run away from his father Isaac (translated literally as “Laughter” throughout, hence the title of the book) and his brother Esau; taken up with his shifty uncle Laban; worked long years to earn marriages first to Leah and then to Rachel, his beloved; and fathered ten children (so far), sits among his tents and flocks and wives and teeming brood, overwhelmed:

I was like a man caught out in a storm with the wind squalling, the sand flailing me across the eyes, the chilled rain pelting me. The children were the storm, I thought, until one day, right in the thick of it, I saw the truth of what the children were.

One boy was pounding another boy’s head against the hard-packed floor. Another was drowsing at his mother’s teat. Three of them were trying to shove a fourth into a basket. Dinah was fitting her foot into her mouth. The air was foul with the smell of them.

They were the Fear’s promise. That is what I suddenly saw the children were. I had forgotten it. They were the dust that would cover the earth. The great people would spring from their scrawny loins. Kicking and howling and crowing and pissing and slobbering food all over their faces, they were the world’s best luck.

I started to weep. Just a trickle at first, the tears hot on my cheeks, salty at the corners of my mouth. Then it was as if I couldn’t catch my breath for weeping. Laban came over and pounded me between the shoulders. He thought I was choking to death. Rachel took my head in her arms. Leah held my feet. It was as close as the two sisters had come to each other for years.

A deep hush fell over the children. They stopped whatever they were doing. Their eyes grew round in their heads.

“You are so—so noisy,” I choked out at them.

They were the Fear’s promise to Abraham, and I had forgotten it.

It was with Abraham’s ancient eyes that they were watching me. “You are—so hopeless,” I said. “So important.”

Their silence, as they listened to my sobs, was Abraham’s silence as he waited all those years for the Fear to keep his promise.

While I and my friend are obviously not the recipients of the specific promise the Fear made to Abraham, this is the truest and most succinct depiction of the challenge and the blessing—and how wonderfully overwhelming both are—of children that I’ve come across. Thank the Fear for these noisy, hopeless, important ones.

God is good, and he remembers even when we forget. Rachel—who has had to see child after child born to her older sister and rival, Leah—reflects on this later in the same chapter:

Rachel’s womb was opened at last, and when she gave birth to my son Joseph, I told her it was Reuben and his mandrakes that she had to thank. Still exhausted from her labor, she reached out and placed her hand across my lips. “No,” she said. “No, no, my dear.”

They had laid the child at her breast though it was still too weak to drink from her. Her cheek was grazing his round, bald head. His head looked too big for him, as though already it was full of dreams.

“I thought he had forgotten me, but he remembered me,” she said. “At last he remembered Rachel.”

Like my mother, she rarely if ever named his name, but I knew the one she was thanking without naming him.

The Son of Laughter makes these promises and hopes feel real, lived in, and I hope you’ll read it sometime. It’s one of the best things I’ve read so far this year, and the passage above is only one of several that moved me to tears.

Adding the third to your family—so that you and your wife are outnumbered—is exciting for all kinds of reasons, and I’m excited for my friends and praying for them. After the birth of our own third child I also reflected on the miracle of birth and life, that time with reference to Beowulf and GK Chesterton. You can read that here.

2020 in books: Roger Scruton

The late Sir Roger Scruton interviewed on Uncommon Knowledge in 2017

Today marks the first anniversary of Sir Roger Scruton’s death. When he died, the foremost voice for a traditional conservatism rooted in virtue, a proper understanding of human nature, and love of home—in traditions and ideas rather than personalities and slogans—died with him.

His death came as a shock to me. I had received an invitation to an event to be held in his honor in 2019 but couldn’t afford to go and passed it up, thinking there would come another chance someday. Now I know there won’t. But what I did have were many of Scruton’s books—some of which I had read, many of which I just hadn’t gotten around to yet. With his passing I decided to set myself a project of reading as many of them as I could in the remainder of 2020.

It turned out to be a good year for it.

The Sir Roger Scruton Farewell Tour

I called my project “the Sir Roger Scruton Farewell Tour” both as a wry joke and as a way to draw out the goodbye. Learning of his death was an unwelcome surprise; a “farewell tour,” on the other hand—that would take a while, offering a chance for appreciation. I enjoyed it greatly, and ended the year more grateful than ever for Scruton’s life and work.

I read twelve books as part of the tour. All of them were good, but five were standouts even among the Scruton books I’ve read. I’ve given that top five its own section below. But first, here are the other seven:

Runners up

The Soul of the World—A dense but strongly and beautifully argued case against the scientific reductivism of modern atheism and a careful examination of the many hints of the transcendent that fill our lives—whether art, music, the world around us, or simply living with and knowing other people. This book builds upon his 2010 Gifford lectures, published as The Face of God, and is further refined by On Human Nature.

How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism—The longest of Scruton’s books that I’ve read, this one argues that conservation of the environment is, properly speaking, a conservative issue, and notes the irony of environmentalism’s place among the odd assortment of other modern progressive causes. He offers trenchant critiques of the dogmatism of activists and their search for universally applicable top-down solutions, as exemplified by the bungling environmental measures undertaken by the unaccountable bureaucracy of the EU. Scruton’s view of conservation and the environment, by contrast, is one rooted in what he calls oikophilia, love of home, and piety toward our inheritance. Conservation must be local and meet local needs. Long and detailed but compellingly argued. I shared a passage from this book on the blog back in the spring.

Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left—A recently revised edition of his most controversial book, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands works through the most important Leftist ideologues of the twentieth century, from the New Left’s roots in pre- and immediately post-War German philosophy through its flowering in first French and then American universities. Scruton is most concerned with what he, borrowing from Orwell, calls “Newspeak,” which is the leftist use of language to conjure or cast spells rather than to describe an independent reality. Dense but rewarding reading, with clear and scathingly written critiques of the ideologies that have birthed the worst of our modern mental confusions. I posted a selection of excerpts on the blog over the summer.

An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy—A good short guide to major issues in modern philosophy, written in a friendly conversational style.

The West and the Rest: Globalisation and the Terrorist Threat—A short, compelling response to September 11. Scruton considers the post-Enlightenment political and social trends of the West that created a world in which non-Westerners, confronted with the rapidly spreading global challenge of secular liberal politics and culture, could find terrorism a viable response, and in which non-Westerners and the West would respond half-heartedly and with incomprehension. A considerably more nuanced assessment than most offered either in the aftermath or since.

Beauty: A Very Short Introduction—One of Scruton’s best and most accessible books, a witty and wide-ranging introduction to the concept of beauty—what it is, how to judge it (and whether we can judge it), why it matters, and what it says about us as human persons. Possibly the best starting point for reading Scruton.

Souls in the Twilight—The first of Scruton’s fiction that I’ve read, a collection of short stories about individuals struggling to find meaning in a world in which all of the old avenues to transcendence—family, community, faith—have disappeared, replaced with nihilism. Bleak but well written, this set of stories sold me on his fiction—I have his novels Notes from Underground and The Disappeared on standby now.

Top five

While I would recommend any of the books in this post, these five were my favorites—the ones I most enjoyed and that gave me the most food for thought, both as I read them and in the months since. Presented in no particular order, my five favorite Scruton books of the farewell tour:

A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism

An excellent collection of essays on a variety of topics of political importance, including marriage, evil, animal rights and vegetarianism, and the obscure bureaucratese of unaccountable government agencies. The best essay in the collection, and one especially relevant to our moment, is “The Totalitarian Temptation,” a critique of totalitarian government, an examination of its origins, and a warning against the appeal of power driven by resentment. Scruton delivered this address in 2003 but it reads like an explanation of all that has happened over the summer of 2020. You can read my more detailed Goodreads review here.

Confessions of a Heretic

Another excellent essay collection, this one ranging more broadly than mere politics. In each essay Scruton offers his “heretical” opinions on a given subject, whether art, dancing, modern architecture, conservationism, the proper role of government, Western civilization and its defense, or death. Every essay is wittily argued, gracefully written, and offers sometimes surprising insight into familiar topics. This may be the Scruton book I most enjoyed this year.

Culture Counts: Faith & Feeling in a World Besieged

An excellent short account of Scruton’s views on culture, especially its collapse into ephemera, vulgarity, and vandalism in the modern world. This is also one of his most concise, clearly stated arguments against what he called “a culture of repudiation,” a culture we saw running in high gear through much of 2020. It’s excellent—a great starting point for Scruton’s philosophy and cultural critiques if you’re just beginning to read him. As a bonus, when Scruton summarizes he is at his wittiest and most trenchant, making this book a good deal of fun.

Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

This was the first book in the Farewell Tour, read before I even knew it would be the farewell tour. I finished it three days before Scruton died. It’s excellent.

Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition offers the reader a guide to the prehistory and origins of conservatism, from Aristotle and Cicero in the ancient world to Burke, the father of the modern movement, and traces multiple sometimes competing lines of conservative thought from Burke to the present. Along the way Scruton examines such disparate figures as Hegel and De Maistre, Chateaubriand and Tocqueville; cultural conservatives like Coleridge, TS Eliot, GK Chesterton, and CS Lewis; and Americans like John Crowe Ransom and the Southern Agrarians or William F Buckley and Russell Kirk, opposite sides of the fusionist conservative coin. Especially helpful are Scruton’s examinations of the way conservatism, as an anti-ideology, has pivoted to account for or counteract new threats, from liberalism and radicalism in Burke’s day to socialism in the late 19th and early 20th century to the Soviet Union and big government liberalism in the post-war United States. Scruton’s Conservatism is a big-tent review of centuries of thought, and makes clear the variety and richness of the tradition. (Every conservative will find at least one person profiled here that they don’t think belongs.) It’s also short and deftly written, making it an excellent introduction to a movement far richer and deeper than is often credited.

The book includes a long list of recommended reading at the back, so that if any one of the numerous thinkers outlined here piques your interest you can follow that trail deeper in. A few months after reading the book I borrowed the audiobook, read by Mark Meadows, from the library via Hoopla and listened to it on my daily walks. Excellent the second time around, too.

Conversations with Roger Scruton, with Mark Dooley

The last book I read in the Farewell Tour, and appropriately so. This book, though written several years ago based on a few days’ worth of talk with Scruton while Dooley stayed at his farm in Wiltshire, feels like a sendoff. Nevertheless the book is light and hopeful, wonderfully brisk and—as I’ve said so many times before of the other books in this post—wide-ranging. Think of this as a Roger Scruton sampler.

Conversations begins with Scruton’s life story, growing up in urban Britain with a resentful Labour Party father and discovering literature, art, and music; discovering, thanks to the student protests of 1968, which he witnessed, that he was a conservative; and following from there his forty years of academic and journalistic work in support of conservative philosophy. Scruton touches on specific books; works through the growth and development of his ideas over time; describes his repeated denunciations—both as an academic and a journalist—by Leftist colleagues and total strangers; and talks about work for underground universities behind the Iron Curtain in Communist Europe, work that got him arrested by the secret police in Czechoslovakia and honored, years later, by Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic for his efforts.

There’s much, much more. I ended the book struck by the busyness and variety, the ups and downs, of his life, something he himself comments on a number of times.

Throughout Scruton is frank, humorous, understated, and self-effacing. Dooley also gives us some nice vignettes of Scruton at home on his farm with his family, giving the reader some sense of the environment which Scruton—this man to whom the oikos, the home, is so fundamentally important—has fashioned with his wife and children. When the conclusion comes, it’s hard not to want to stay.

I highly recommend Conversations with Roger Scruton. It would probably help to be somewhat familiar with Scruton’s work beforehand, but if you’re not this book could work as an excellent, friendly and accessible introduction both to his ideas and to the man himself. This intimate and personal book was, for me, a most welcome way to end the Farewell Tour.

Previously read

One reason I embarked on this Farewell Tour was because, despite my appreciation of Scruton, I felt like I had only read a fragment of what he had written. Which is not to say that what I had previously read was unsatisfactory. Far from it. I needed to make up for lost time.

Here, in no particular order, are the five books I remember reading before 2020. I would recommend any one of them:

• The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope—The first book by Scruton I read, a caution against unwarranted and uncritical optimism and an argument in favor of low expectations. Full of wry wit. Right up my alley.

• The Face of God—Scruton’s 2010 Gifford Lectures. A critique of scientific reductionism. Thoughts established here are further developed in The Soul of the World (see above).

• On Human Nature—Clarifies and further develops some ideas from The Soul of the World (see above). I read these three way out of order. One of these days I’m going to go back through chronologically.

• Modern Culture—Much of Scruton’s pithy cultural critique in Culture Counts (see above) is foreshadowed here in deeper, more detailed and specific form. An excellent examination of the fragmentation and vulgarity of modern culture.

• How to Be a Conservative—Perhaps Scruton’s most famous book, this is an excellent introduction to conservatism via chapters explaining the truth and the error in prominent modern ideologies. Linked below are a couple of interviews Scruton gave specifically about this book. They’re worth your while.

Video and audio

Scruton not only wrote every day, he appeared frequently in interviews, documentaries, and recorded lectures until not long before he died. The following is a selection of my favorites, ranging from ten-minute audio essays from BBC Radio to full length lectures with Q&A sessions.

• Why Beauty Matters—One of his greatest legacies. In a number of interviews in his last few years Scruton mentioned that this documentary was one of the projects that students, correspondents, and others mentioned most often to him, the documentary having “found a second life” online. I blogged about this wonderful one-hour film last fall. You can read that here; Why Beauty Matters is embedded in a Vimeo player in that post.

• Apprehending the Transcendent—Another video that I’ve blogged about before, Apprehending the Transcendent is the title of the moderated discussion Scruton had with psychologist Jordan Peterson at Cambridge a few years ago. A thoughtful and wide-ranging set of critiques and meditations. You can read my blog post about it here; the discussion is embedded in a YouTube player.

• BBC audio essays—A number of Scruton’s audio opinion pieces are available on YouTube. These are a goldmine. Here are a few that offer short (usually ten minutes or less), pithy introductions to some of his representative concerns, especially art and its relation to human nature and society: “The Tyranny of Pop Music,” “Art Today, Fake & Kitsch,” “On Harry Potter,” “Offensive Jokes,” “Animals,” “The Religion of Rights,” and “The Witch-hunt Culture.”

• Uncommon Knowledge: How to Be a Conservative—A good interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution on Scruton’s book. Watch the interview here.

• Christian Humanist Profiles: How to Be a Conservative—An especially good podcast interview from 2016 conducted by my friend Nathan Gilmour of the Christian Humanist Podcast. Listen here.

• On The Future of Conservatism & Debate—A friendly conversation between Scruton and Spectator editor Douglas Murray. This wide-ranging discussion is especially worthwhile because of the wry, sometimes mordant British wit both men wield so well. Watch here.

• A Thing Called Civilization—In 2019, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute selected Scruton for its Defender of Western Civilization award. Scruton recorded his gracious acceptance speech on video. As far as I know this was his last semi-public appearance—an appropriate note for his career to end on. Watch here.

There is much, much more good stuff from Scruton out there; these are just the best places to start.

Conclusion—what Scruton has to teach us

Scruton is missed. We need his insight, his careful work, and the model he offered of a thoughtful conservatism grounded in virtue and ideas more than ever. If I were to summarize what we need most of Scruton right now, it might be:

• A proper understanding of human nature—what we are and what we need as rational and transcendent beings

• Love of home—not as mere places to exist, but places where human persons are rooted and connect with each other

• An understanding that persons are not free-floating individuals but exist in community

• An understanding of tradition and organic development rather than revolution as the source of freedom

• The necessity of order and the rule of law and its derivation from the bottom up, from a place and its people

And, finally, his most frequently repeated reminder, learned as he watched student revolutionaries trash Paris in 1968, that:

• Good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.

There is much, much more to Scruton’s philosophy than these, but these are good starting points. It is clear, after not only the last week but the last year—or perhaps decade—that even those who claim the title of “conservative” need to start over from fundamentals.

Appropriately, Scruton died on the birthday of Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism. Burke took a set of traditions, intuitions, and dispositions and gave them coherent shape as a response to ideological radicalism, revolution, and political violence. That response has survived, in one form or another, to the present, though it is now in a bad way—certainly in America. My hope is that Scruton’s legacy will prove a similar cohering influence, shaping of a new generation of real conservatism in the face of a new generation of vandals menacing our homes from all sides.

Roger Scruton, RIP.

Why Beauty Matters

Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020) inspects Marcel Duchamp’s urinal.

I learned of Sir Roger Scruton’s death just a day or two after finishing his pithy short book Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition. His death came as a shock, and is one of the few events this year that I was—and remain—genuinely sad about. Scruton wrote prolifically and I had many of his books sitting unread on my shelf, so since his death I’ve embarked on what I wryly think of as “The Sir Roger Scruton Farewell Tour,” making it my mission this year to read through as many of those unread books as I can, even adding to the collection as I go. So far I’ve read nine. I mean to write about the whole project at the end of the year.

As much as I’ve enjoyed and learned from Scruton’s books, one of his works that I return to most often, and have watched at least twice this year, is his 2009 documentary “Why Beauty Matters.”

In “Why Beauty Matters” Scruton makes the case for beauty, a concept that he demonstrates has been corrupted and robbed of meaning—in a word, vandalized—in the modern era. Beginning in the world of art and philosophy, Scruton argues that beauty has, for most of the history of Western civilization, been a reflection of the divine and therefore an end in itself rather than a means to some other end or some kind of nice bonus feature gained through other endeavors.

But modernists and their descendants in the world of art, having first abandoned the transcendent, abandoned and actively strove against beauty. They treated it as a joke, an outmoded and meaningless pursuit or even a symbol of oppression, and substituted for beauty the transgressive anti-virtues of shock, accusation, or profanation, all laced with a self-reflexive irony that brooks no sincerity. This century-long trend has created, as Scruton calls it, a “cult of ugliness.” Young artists working in traditional forms, we see late in the documentary, are told by their instructors to vandalize their own work in order to make it “interesting.”

But the results of the abandonment of beauty as a legitimate object of art are not confined to the art world, a world now so rarefied and set apart from the concerns of ordinary people as to be extraterrestrial. The place everyone, regardless of education or class, used to encounter beauty was in their day to day environment—in the structures and fabric of their homes, towns, streets, and places of work and worship.

Scruton’s critique of modern architecture—the field that combines the twin “cults” of ugliness and utility—is scathing. He notes the abandonment of beautiful buildings, constructed of local materials in native styles and human proportions, in favor of functional buildings of universally-applied designs, buildings that are bland-looking at best and prove useless as soon as they outlive their original function. “The result proves as clearly as can be,” Scruton says, “that if you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless.”

Images of Scruton’s hometown—full of pragmatically designed modernist stores and apartment blocks, now abandoned to crumble under layers of graffiti—are heartbreaking. “This place was built by vandals,” Scruton says, “and those who added the graffiti merely finished the job.”

“I think we are losing beauty. And there is a danger that, with it, we will lose the meaning of life.”

— Sir Roger Scruton, “Why Beauty Matters”

So why does any of this matter?

Something that has become clear to me over years of reading Scruton’s books is the centrality of his anthropology—his understanding of human nature—to his philosophy. Humans are particular kinds of creatures and therefore have particular needs, needs that set them apart from all other creatures. Beauty is among the foremost of these needs. Deprived of beauty, forced to live in “a spiritual desert,” mankind suffers and cannot flourish, and will grow warped and perverted—especially where the perversion is intentional, as in modern art.

This is, as Scruton argues, because beauty is a shared language of transcendence, something that connects all of us to the eternal and prompts us to consider more than merely earthly concerns. So not only is beauty actually useful, people possessed of beauty, of open, unironic, artful expressions of seeking, will be more wholly themselves, and more likely to connect both to each other and to the transcendent—and to pass something of that on to their heirs.

Roger Scruton - Why Beauty Matters (2009) from Mirza Akdeniz on Vimeo.

There is much, much more I’d like to say in appreciation of this documentary—it is not wholly concerned with critique, but with making a positive, indeed beautiful, case for beauty as well—but the more time you spend reading me the less time you will have to watch it.

[Update: The documentary is once again available in fairly high quality on Vimeo, and I’ve embedded it in this post. You can also choose to watch it at this Facebook page. —JMP, November 29, 2022] If you like what you see in this documentary, you can find many of the same ideas developed in greater detail in Scruton’s books Beauty: A Very Short Introduction and Modern Culture.

I hope y’all will take an hour this weekend to watch Scruton’s documentary. It’s worth your while and will, I hope, either renew within you or introduce for the first time a sense of true beauty and its meaning.

Pericles and September 11

Pericles: “The entire world is the tomb of ilLustrious men.”

Last year on September 11 I happened to be reading How to Think About War, a new collection of speeches excerpted from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, selected and translated by Johanna Hanink. That day, just before my afternoon Western Civ class, I read the famous funeral oration of Pericles.

Some context: Pericles was an Athenian demagogue and a fervent anti-Spartan who, through the power of his oratory and his popularity among the demos, the mob of Athens, helped provoke war with Sparta. Pericles gave this speech—or a version of it, as this is Thucydides’s reconstruction—at a public mass funeral for the first Athenian dead of the war.

It was a coincidence to have read that speech with that anniversary on my mind, but it proved a gut punch. I started class that day by reading the selection below, which I dedicated to those men and women who, on the morning of September 11, 2001, turned toward danger and gave their lives for others. I hope you’ll read this 2400-year old text with men like that in mind.

Having begun his speech with a lengthy explanation of what makes Athens unusual and worth fighting for (Athenian exceptionalism?), Pericles pivots to his eulogy for the dead hoplites of the city:

That, in fact, is the reason I have gone on at such length about the city: as a lesson in why this struggle means something different to us than it does to those who have no such good things to lose, and also to establish that there are manifest proofs for the eulogy that I am delivering over these men.

My most important points have now been covered, for it is the virtues of these men, and of others like them, which shed luster on those aspects of the city that I have praised.

In other words, rather than these men being heroes simply because they came from Athens, Athens is praiseworthy because it produces such men.

There are very few Greeks who would be capable of actually living up to their reputation as these men did. I think that what befell them offers both the first indication and the final confirmation of their worth, as it is only fair that valor displayed in war waged for the fatherland outweigh all other shortcomings. This right has cancelled out any past wrongs, for the service that they rendered collectively means more than any harm they did as individuals.

“Their bodies stood fast in action and, in one brief and fateful moment, they gave up their lives at the very height not of fear but of glory.”

None of these men’s resolve grew weak at the thought of their wealth and the sustained pleasures it promised, nor did any of them attempt to stave off danger because of poverty and their aspirations of one day escaping it and becoming rich. Instead they desired, more than anything else, to have vengeance against their enemies. And because they saw the risk that this would require as the most glorious one of all, with that thought in mind they resolved to seek their satisfaction and put off any other concerns. They consigned the uncertainty of success to hope and decided it best to have faith in themselves in the matter that was at hand. Understanding full well that their lot was one of resistance and suffering and not one of survival purchased by surrender, the one thing they fled was dishonor itself. Their bodies stood fast in action and, in one brief and fateful moment, they gave up their lives at the very height not of fear but of glory.

And later, on the same theme:

Though they gave their lives together, they each receive undying praise and the most conspicuous of all tombs—I do not mean the tomb in which they lie, but the one where their glory remains always unforgotten, whenever the occasion for words or deeds arises. For the entire world is the tomb of illustrious men, and it is not only the inscriptions on monuments at home that attest to this. Even in foreign lands there dwells an unprinted memory, carved not in stone but in people’s hearts.

This day, for me at least, has only grown more sobering the farther these events have retreated into the past. A lot has changed since then—much for the worse, if I’m being honest. But we have the tombs, the monumental memory, of the policemen, firefighters, EMTs, soldiers, and even ordinary civilians who gave their lives saving others that day. Now more than ever, as Pericles continues, we

must aspire to these men’s example: understand that happiness is freedom and freedom courage, and do not shrink from [danger]. After all, it is not true sacrifice when the dispirited lay down their lives, for they have already abandoned hope. Instead, the finest sacrifice issues from those who wager their continued happiness and have the most to lose if they fail. To a sensible man, at least, the disgrace incurred by cowardice is far more painful than death which comes imperceptibly, at a moment of great might and shared aspirations.

Do not abandon hope, and live in courage rather than fear. Hope and courage produced heroes like those who died nineteen years ago today. They can produce them again.