The Magic of Silence

As I’ve previously noted, since reading Rembrandt is in the Wind late last year I’ve been making an effort to learn about some of my favorite artists more deliberately. Having grown up with an artist grandmother, surrounded by her art and that of the artists who inspired her, and learning from an early age to love and appreciate it, I discovered through that book how much I’ve taken for granted through simple complacency.

This book by Florian Illies, The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey through Time, came my way at exactly the right time. Recently translated from German, this is a study of the great German Romantic landscape artist.

A native of the Baltic port city of Greifswald, Friedrich was the son of a candlemaker and only slowly achieved success as a painter. He unsuccessfully sought the patronage of Goethe, who apparently found him annoying, but eventually sold paintings to the Prussian and Russian royal families. Quiet, deeply religious, and a staid creature of habit, he spent most of his life in Dresden, from which he traveled back and forth to his hometown on the Baltic coast and such islands as Rügen, and married late. By the time he died in 1840 he left behind a widow and three children as well as hundreds of sketches and canvases.

Friedrich was then, for over sixty years, almost totally forgotten.

Illies approaches Friedrich’s life and work thematically, through the four classical elements: fire, earth, water, and air. This proves a stimulating and surprising approach. “Fire,” quite movingly, opens with the loss of hundreds of German Romantic paintings in a gallery fire in Munich, and Illies provides numerous other examples of Friedrich works lost to fire, whether an accidental housefire at his family’s tallow rendering shop back home in Greifswald or in the RAF bombing of Dresden. “Water” examines this Baltic coast native’s use of the sea, especially at dusk—or is it morning?—and “Earth” the power of his landscapes, which pieced together landmarks from real places to create imaginary forests, ruins, and mountain ranges more real than their antecedents.

Certain themes recur: loss, faith, nature, the melancholy of Friedrich’s work, which features so many stark landscapes, cemeteries, and ruins, and his place in the nascent German nationalism of the time, for which he later, unwittingly, became the posterboy. The personal stories are especially moving, such as a childhood incident related in “Water”; one winter as a child, Friedrich fell through the ice on a frozen river. His brother jumped in to save him and, despite hauling Friedrich to safety, was himself drowned beneath the ice.

What can this have done to Friedrich the boy? How did it affect Friedrich the man? Illies speculates cautiously, but makes it always clear that there is much about the reticent, closed off Friedrich that we cannot know. But knowing about this incident affects us—read Illies’s account of Friedrich’s near-drowning and his brother’s death and then look at The Sea of Ice or a pensive later seascape like Stages of Life.

What also proves moving is the story, told piecemeal throughout the book, of how Friedrich’s work was rediscovered, which we can credit to the enthusiasm and hard work of a handful of art historians and collectors. Thanks to their efforts, within the first twenty years of the 20th century a forgotten artist had become a sought-after icon. The many stories of lost Friedrichs surfacing here and there—a gallery, a country house, the retirement home bedroom of an elderly noblewoman—many of them initially misidentified or simply anonymous, are an important part of the book’s appeal. Even recent history enriches the story, as in a years-long case involving stolen Friedrich canvases hidden in a stack of tires and a mafia lawyer’s legally dubious negotiations to return them.

While The Magic of Silence says much about Friedrich’s life, work, rediscovery, and legacy, it does not focus as much on composition or interpretation. Only a few major works like Friedrich’s early altarpiece Cross in the Mountains, which became surprisingly controversial on its exhibition, or The Monk by the Sea, which has been interpreted variously as a nihilistic image of a hopeless, godless world or the first great abstract painting, or the magnificent, justly famous Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog receive in-depth attention. Illies’s subject is Friedrich’s life and mind and the afterlife of his work, not the mechanics of how he executed them.

My only real complaints are that the thematic organization broke up Friedrich’s life story so totally and that only four of his paintings were included in the book. The former problem is not insurmountable, and reading the book quickly created a powerful cumulative effect that suggests the shape of Friedrich’s life without sticking to it chronologically.

The latter is a bigger problem. Illies names and describes many of Friedrich’s works—whether as he completed them or as they were rediscovered in the early 1900s—but most of them are not available to look at in the book itself. I ended up mentally noting a lot of titles and browsing Wikipedia’s impressive (if still incomplete) collection of articles on them later, as well as ordering this more thoroughly illustrated book. This does not detract from the value of Illies’s study, but it is a curious oversight in a book about art.

Those two quibbles aside, this was a strong place to start in my project to give more proper attention to art. The Magic of Silence is a deeply researched, engrossing, insightful, and beautiful read. I especially appreciated occasional insights into Friedrich’s theological view of his art as well as the picture of the artist’s personality that emerges over the course of the book. I’m glad to recommend it to anyone interested in Romanticism, German culture and history, or art generally.

The illusion of insight

A quick follow up from last week’s post about the overemphasis on “themes” as part of English education.

People may rebel against their middle- and high-school English classes out of frustration with things like themes and symbols, but the same oversimplifying impulses are alive and well in pop culture. Where the wannabe intellectual discussing his favorite books online might still talk about themes, the more populist, mystical type will gravitate toward “archetypes” and, the thing that has introduced legions of precocious readers to this kind of talk, the Hero’s Journey.

I don’t know enough about Jung qua Jung to judge the validity of his ideas as an approach to psychology, but I abhor the Jungian “archetypal” approach to literature, and for the same reasons I abhor overemphasizing themes.

An example, and one of the things that alerted me to and turned me against archetypal readings:

Years ago I read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, a book on “the masculine archetypes” recommended in a blog series at The Art of Manliness. The authors, Jungian analysts, use the four titular archetypes to develop a taxonomy of the male personality and to examine the ways deficiencies and excesses—to put it in Aristotelian terms—warp it. Where the “mature masculine” balances all four, too little or too much of any of the archetypes result in various forms of bad character. The king, if insufficiently strong, becomes a weak puppet; if too strong, a tyrant. The warrior must use the wisdom of the magician to balance his propensity for violence, lest he become either a cruel sadist or a passive masochist. And so on.

All well and good. What has always been most interesting and appealing to me about Jungian archetypes is their usefulness in taxonomy—in sorting and categorizing. (There’s the Aristotelian in me again.) But the authors of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, in their effort to support their thesis, plunder history and world mythology for examples and badly misuse the ones that aren’t flatly wrong or made up.

Thus, in discussing the “generative,” fertility-related traits of the lover archetype, they give us Abraham and… Zeus. The father of two nations and the ravisher of mortal women and, in at least some traditions, little boys. Sure, both fathered children, but focusing on that similarity and ignoring the differences between these two “generative” archetypes is morally incoherent.

Which brings me to Jungian archetypes in literature and to the Hero’s Journey specifically. (Somewhere inside me I have a 5,000-word essay called “Against the Hero’s Journey,” but until I find the time and patience to write that, a post like this one will have to suffice.) There are plenty of problems with the Hero’s Journey—not least its artificiality, oversimplification or misinterpretation of other myths, and its rarity in the wild—but my primary objection to it is the temptation to treat an observation about structure as some kind of insight into content. Time and time again, I’ve seen stories dissected as examples of the Hero’s Journey and its characters labeled with various archetypes as if this says anything at all about them beyond pointing out the shape of their plots.

I can provide a very direct example. A few years ago I was surprised to see a new review on Goodreads for my first novel, No Snakes in Iceland. The review was fairly positive but what stunned me about it was seeing the author label No Snakes in Iceland an example of the Hero’s Journey. Is that actually true? I wondered. I had a good, long think about it and had to conclude that, yes, it mostly fits the shape proposed by Campbell.

But does that actually say anything about the story? No.

Borrowing from John Gardner and others, I’ve emphasized over and over and over particularity—the preeminence of concrete specifics—as a creative principle. It seems to me to be a good interpretive principle as well. So, to look at just one element of the Hero’s Journey with that in mind, the hero himself, what is this comparison ignoring that matters to the story?

The hero of No Snakes in Iceland is Edgar, a middle-aged Anglo-Saxon nobleman and close associate of King Æthelred, who has served the king for years as gofer and chronicler. Edgar is educated, intelligent, dutiful, and brave, if self-effacing and preferring to work behind the scenes. He is also bitter in the extreme at the loss of his only child to an accident and the loss of his wife in a Viking raid a few years before. He is in Iceland by the order of an archbishop as an act of penance and longs for home. Edgar’s story then—if you’re looking for a theme or character arc—is one of repentance.

Compare him to the specifics of a few other purportedly Campbellian heroes:

• Luke Skywalker—a young single man in an out-of-the-way place with no prospects and apparently undistinguished background. He is brave but petulant and ignorant of the world and mostly wants to get away from the family farm and make something of himself.

• Harry Potter—a child of exalted background who has been orphaned, deprived of his inheritance, and kept in total ignorance of who he is. Longsuffering and not ambitious, he is rescued from his predicament rather than escaping from it and placed in a situation where his natural goodwill can develop.

• Bilbo Baggins—a comfortably situated middle-aged bachelor who enjoys a quiet, undistinguished rural life in his ancestral home. Unambitious to a fault and utterly unaccustomed to danger and hardship.

• Neo—a twenty-something cubicle drone by day and computer hacker by night, who lives in total isolation and with no apparent drive and no prospects of improvement. He is ignorant and apathetic and important mostly by dint of being “chosen.”

• Hamlet/Simba—an actual prince who is deprived of his inheritance by his uncle and actively and knowingly avoids his calling until confronted by his father’s spirit.

Are there points of similarity? Yes! But focusing on these obscures more than it reveals. The dissimilarities matter immensely, not only in terms of the specifics of each story but for message, moral import, and, yes, theme. Does it actually mean something that these heroes’ stories play out in a similar structure? No, I don’t think so. Does it mean something that Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter are young and undistinguished while Bilbo and Edgar are older, successful, and well-connected? Yes. So why don’t we focus on that instead? Similarities might draw your attention but you’ll get more understanding from looking at dissimilarity.

As I hope I’ve suggested above, there’s a place for archetype talk in the discussion and study of good stories, but more often than not, without a counterbalancing focus on the particulars of a given story, it offers only the illusion of insight.

Ironies and reversals

I came down with something over the weekend that has contrived to keep me home mostly immobile today. I have, however, been able to read a little bit, and to reflect on several striking ironies in two of the books I’m reading right now.

First, a pair of reversals. From Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, in a chapter discussing Fleming’s career hopping—diplomacy, reporting, stock trading—during the early 1930s, a seemingly aimless trajectory that looked especially unimpressive next to his older brother Peter, who was already a daring and accomplished travel writer:

As at Eton, Peter’s literary success thrust Ian back into the shade; only now, Peter’s shadow stretched in pretty well every direction.

For the next twenty years, Ian had to steel himself to be called the brother of writer Peter Fleming, as a decade before Evelyn Waugh had been the brother of Alec Waugh, after Alec’s controversial, best-selling novel The Loom of Youth (1917), written when he was still a schoolboy, had sent shudders of horror down many respectable British spines.

Like Ian, Evelyn had grown up in the slipstream of a successful elder brother. Then in the 1950s both Alec and Peter were to experience a dramatic reversal.

By the time of lan’s death in August 1964, it would be Evelyn Waugh and not Alec who had grounds to be considered England’s most eminent living writer—and Ian Fleming and not Peter, England's most popular.

Interestingly, Peter Fleming and Alec Waugh were both the older brother, and both outlived their (eventually) more famous sibling.

Second, cruel ironies. I’m also reading The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time, a thematic, somewhat impressionistic study of Friedrich organized according to the four classical elements—fire, water, earth, air. Author Florian Illies includes numerous ironic incidents from the artist’s afterlife. Among them is this anecdote regarding Two Men Contemplating the Moon, which was narrowly saved from destruction and looting at the end of World War II:

Those Two Men Contemplating the Moon leave Dresden only very rarely. Once, early in the twenty-first century, they flew to New York because the Metropolitan Museum proposed to hang them, for the first time in almost two centuries, beside another Two Men Contemplating the Moon that Friedrich had painted about the same time, but for his doctor, who had been so enamoured of the original version that he accepted a copy of it as payment for his services. But, when the two paintings were finally reunited for the first time, no one could see them. Just on the day the ‘Moonwatchers’ exhibition was to open—11 September 2001—a handful of Islamist terrorists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center. The age of Romanticism was over just when it was about to be reopened. On the evening of 11 September, no one in downtown Manhattan was able to contemplate the moon: dust and ash clouded the sky, and fear obscured the view heavenward.

The ironies are especially terrible and saddening in the first part of the book, “Fire,” and this is the worst of all:

In Leipzig in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a legendary collector of art and music, an unprepossessing building society clerk called Manfred Gorke. He scrimped and saved to purchase art treasures, which he horded in his Leipzig home. . . . Gorke was originally from Hirschberg, Silesia, a mountain town Friedrich had particularly loved; hence he felt a special connection with [Friedrich]. . . . And while dire financial straits forced Gorke to part from his paintings by Carus and Runge in the early years of the war, he would never give up his Caspar David Friedrichs.

As the fighting came closer, and the air raids grew more frequent, Manfred Gorke decided to bring his Friedrichs, yet unknown to art history, to the University of Leipzig to be photographed and safely stored. On the afternoon of 3 December 1943, he personally handed them over to the university. But just the next day, in the early morning hours of 4 December 1943, 400 British aircraft bombed Leipzig, passing over the city centre in three waves between 3.50 and 4.25. They dropped countless explosive and incendiary bombs, enough to set the whole city centre ablaze. The university quarter was levelled; the Department of Art History was burned to the ground; Manfred Gorke’s Caspar David Friedrichs were reduced to ash just twelve hours after being stored away.

And, after listing some of what was lost in the blaze, Illies notes a final awful irony: “Gorke’s flat, where the Friedrichs had hung until the afternoon of 3 December 1943, survived the war unscathed.”

Sometimes it’s remarkable that anything old has survived at all.

On the need to be “deeply grounded”

I don’t pay as much attention to YouTuber Critical Drinker as I used to, especially since, over the last year or so, he aggressively crowdfunded a short film based on his line of action thriller novels starring agent Ryan Drake. A trailer for Rogue Elements looked indifferently produced, with a lot of the typical limitations of low budget action shorts. The finished film—rebranded as a TV show “proof of concept”—was only made available on his Patreon at first, pushing it even further back in my mind and priorities. When it was finally posted to YouTube I didn’t bother to watch it.

It turns out that Rogue Elements wasn’t very good.

This in itself shouldn’t be so surprising. I’ve watched a lot of short films in my time and most of them are embarrassing in one way or another. But Rogue Elements took a lot of flak because, after years of the Drinker smack-talking Hollywood not only for its woke politicking but also for its incompetent, incoherent storytelling, he had attempted to show the bigwigs how it’s done, offering Rogue Elements up as the antidote to modern Hollywood and calling a lot of attention to the project along the way, and failed spectacularly. Among its shortcomings, viewers have griped that is poorly produced, badly written, and simply repeats many of the tropes and cliches the Drinker himself regularly complains about.

Apparently some of his enemies—especially enemies on political grounds—have used this to dunk on him. The accusation of hypocrisy provided an especially juicy opportunity to twist the knife. I’m not interested in any of that. I was indifferent, at best, to his project, and take no satisfaction in its lack of success. Anything tempting us into the poisonous Schadenfreude of the modern world is to be shunned. In fact, I only found out about this whole mess because of Substack.

Having just launched Quid, my Substack digest, I’m still figuring out a lot about how the platform throws essays and notes my way. Somehow I came across some post mortem discussion of Rogue Elements, and one interesting sympathetic take on the Drinker’s failure was best summarized by its title: “Art is Hard.” It is one thing to sit back and critique—whether drinking or not—and another to make. (As it happens, at least one good movie has been made about exactly that.)

But the most incisive response came from Librarian of Celaeno, an anonymous classics teacher and fellow Southerner, who offered up this response to that essay:

The problem [the Drinker] has, one that a great critic like Poe would never have had to worry about, is that while he gets what’s off with modern storytelling, he’s unfamiliar with any other kind. He’s never shown any evidence of being deeply grounded in his own culture, even when he’s aware that others are, as when he references Tolkien. Having no real background in myth or older literature or religion, the best he can do is to try to make a good version of the bad stuff he decries.

This is spot on. The Critical Drinker can see clearly the problems with modern movies (and he focuses almost exclusively on movies) but, lacking deep roots in older stories and forms of storytelling, can see no way out but to rearrange the inferior materials available at present. No wonder the results are disappointing.

Way back in the early days of this blog, I reflected on this passage in a letter by poet Donald Hall about the self-inflicted limitations of mid-century modernist poets:

You must understand that art is nothing to these men, nor history. The penalty for ignoring two thousand years is that you get stuck in the last hundred. They have the specious present of the barbarian. Art in this century demands a sense of the tragic dignity of history. These poor bastards are stuck in the last third of the 19th century and I swear they don’t know that anything happened before that.

In the last year, I’ve talked with a successful sci-fi/fantasy author about up-and-coming sci-fi writers who haven’t (or won’t) read Asimov or Heinlein or Philip K Dick, and with an English teacher about young poets who haven’t (or won’t) read the classic English language poets or anything that rhymes. What fruit do they expect to bear, cut off from the roots? Thus also the YouTube critic, whose chronological range is even narrower—not centuries, but decades or years.

A useful object lesson and an experience that, one hopes, thoughtful, driven, earnest, but shallow people like the Drinker can learn from. Because on the other side of such chastening is a rich tradition to explore, participate in, and enjoy.

You can read the whole of Hall’s letter at the Paris Review archives here. And if, like me, you’re new to Substack, subscribe to Quid and go explore some of the good and thoughtful writers who are on there.

Screwtape reviews a book

It isn’t often that you can say unequivocally that an artistic judgment is wrong. De gustibus, etc. And yet here are coauthors Philip and Carol Zaleski in their quadruple-biography The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings discussing CS Lewis’s 1942 novel The Screwtape Letters. After half a paragraph of tepid praise, they write:

For all the clever satire, however, the book does, as Lewis feared, begun to smother the reader by the end. It is a one-joke affair, however inventive the variations. The devils’ names—Screwtape, Slumtrimpet, Slubgob, Scabtree, Triptweeze, Toadpipe—and their use of inverted epithets—“Our Father Below” for Satan, “The Enemy” for God—delight and then grow tiresome; so, too, do Lewis’s repeated slaps at favorite targets, including psychoanalysis, proponents of the “Life Force,” and overly spiritualized conceptions of prayer (Coleridge’s “sense of supplication” takes a direct hit). It all comes off as terribly clever but a bit sophomoric. The Screwtape Letters is a good, short book; if it were half as long and half as clever, it might have been twice as good.

N.b. most editions of The Screwtape Letters come in at or below 200 pages even with reader-friendly large type.

This is so wrong it is hard to know where to begin. Should one not take swipes at psychoanalysis, one of the stupidest and most damaging theories to run riot in the last century and a half? And sophomoric? “The Miller’s Tale” and Candide are sophomoric. Screwtape is funny but treats its subject seriously, since its subject is ultimately damnation and salvation, a fact underscored by the time and place in which it was written. One infers from Screwtape’s comments that the story takes place, in human terms, during the Blitz, and it is made clear in the final letter that our human protagonist, the object of the devils’ torments, is killed by German bombs—a real fear for the book’s original readers, and one Lewis treats reverently. And artistically, Screwtape is a model of concision. Lewis gets exactly the right amount out of the book’s conceit and epistolary format and ends it with a chilling bang.

And this is not even to address the insight—into everything from prideful self-delusion to the danger of snark to simple carnal lust—that Lewis’s topsy-turvy perspective offers. Its carefully observed portrait of human nature is rightly Screwtape’s greatest appeal and gives it its most lasting power. The attentive reader will see himself more clearly having read The Screwtape Letters, and probably won’t like the view.

I could go on. One suspects that for these authors, Ivy League-connected editors of anthologies of “spiritual writing” for many years, Lewis’s bracing devil’s-eye view of temptation, one in which he dramatizes firm orthodox opinions and depicts devils as real and predatory and sin as real and damning, is rather strong drink. Their suggestion that an unfunny pamphlet-length version of Screwtape would be better only reinforces that impression.

This critique smacks of distaste rather than any legitimate line of literary or artistic criticism. And one can feel the authors’ disapproval when they continue by noting that

The public . . . roared its approval. The book sold very well upon release and remains one of Lewis’s most popular works. The Manchester Guardian (February 24, 1942), eager to canonize it, declared that it “should become a classic,” while The Times Literary Supplement (February 28, 1942) more temperately warned that “time alone can show whether it is or is not an enduring piece of satirical writing.” Endured it has; whether that makes it a classic, the next century or two will judge.

The Zaleskis’ book is a finely researched and written biography—though despite invoking “the Inklings” it focuses, predictably, only on Lewis, Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. (Where is our Hugo Dyson or Roger Lancelyn Green biography? Warnie Lewis has only recently gotten one.) But the Zaleskis’ judgments on specific works are lacking. That passage on Screwtape has bugged me since I first read it nine years ago, and their treatment of Tolkien betrays similarly poor understanding and judgment.

This morning, realizing that I hadn’t cracked open The Fellowship in almost as many years, I put it in a box to trade in at the local used book store. But The Screwtape Letters is still on my shelf.

Poe and Wolfe

Building off of my post about modern Frogpondians yesterday, at the same time that I started studying Poe’s life more deeply—especially his letters and criticism—I also read more of the late great Tom Wolfe’s journalistic monographs. These include From Bauhaus to Our House, a takedown of modern architecture; The Painted Word, a similar treatment of modern art; and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, a brilliant pair of essays about high-minded leftwing activism and its distance from grungy reality.

With all of these assorted things floating around in my mind I realized one day that Poe and Wolfe took a similar glee in identifying and attacking cliques. Both objected to the self-identified, self-satisfied, and self-righteous cognoscenti who have found a way to dominate a particular field and enforce an orthodoxy, all while feathering their nests and basking in a success lauded primarily by its members, whom they treat as the only people that count. Poe had Longfellow and Emerson, Wolfe had Mailer, Updike, and Irving. And Leonard Bernstein. And Le Corbusier. And…

And once I noticed this similarity, I noticed others. I’ve kicked this idea around with a few of y’all in conversation, but wanted to get some of this down in writing. Consider the following notes toward a comparative study of Poe and Wolfe:

• Both were Southerners

• Both were Virginians specifically—Wolfe by birth, Poe by rearing and explicit self-identification

• Both worked primarily in big northeastern cities

• Both were accounted personally charming and gentlemanly despite their acid literary criticism

• Both worked in journalism and fiction—Poe considering himself a poet who worked for magazines to (barely) make ends meet while Wolfe was a successful journalist who moved into fiction mid-career

• Both, in rejecting and attacking the dominant literary cliques, made themselves political outsiders, though neither was particularly interested in politics except as an epiphenomenon of something more important

• Both had an intense concern for authenticity in fiction

• Both developed immediately identifiable styles intended to convey something more truthful than the dominant style at the time

• Both were mocked for their style

I’ve returned to this and thought about it a lot, especially since realizing that the similarities are not just biographical but thematic.

The regional dimension, especially in Poe’s case, is too easily overlooked, but I think it’s fundamental to understanding both men. Back in the spring I watched Radical Wolfe, an excellent recent documentary on Wolfe’s life and career that I meant to review here but never found the time to. I recommend it. It doesn’t cover Wolfe’s youth and education in detail, but the sense of Wolfe as a Southerner amused by the unquestioned pretensions of the Yankees in the society he was forced to keep from Yale onwards comes through clearly. It certainly resonated with me.

And now, after mentally connecting Wolfe with Poe, I have to wonder whether the man in black, whom we are so used to imagining with a far-off gaze and a tired frown, used to wander the streets of New York and Philadelphia with a small, wry smile on his face the way the man in white did.

Speaking of Wolfe, Joel Miller recently posted about the delicate art of book cover design, beginning with the recent news that Picador is reprinting thirteen of Wolfe’s books with new matching covers. I’m not crazy about the cover art, personally, but my Wolfe shelf is a jumble of different trim sizes and if I can someday tidy that up and Wolfe can experience a much-deserved posthumous resurgence, all the better.

More writing advice from Lewis

Years and years ago I collected lists of writing advice from three authors—CS Lewis, George Orwell, and Elmore Leonard—and shared them here, both for my own reference and for anyone else who might benefit from them. The Lewis advice came from two separate sources, a letter from the 1950s and his final interview in 1963, and came to eight interrelated points about clarity and precision.

This morning I came across the following, from a 1959 letter to an American schoolgirl collected in Letters of CS Lewis. I own this book, so I don’t know how I’ve missed this set of writing advice before, especially since it may be the best and most systematic that I’ve seen from Lewis. I reproduce it here in full:

It is very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here’s my attempt.

(1) Turn off the Radio.

(2) Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines.

(3) Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You shd. hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.

(4) Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about. . . .)

(5) Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn’t, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding. In a story it is terribly easy just to forget that you have not told the reader something that he wants to know—the whole picture is so clear in your own mind that you forget that it isn’t the same in his.

(6) When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier.

(7) Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.

(8) Be sure you know the meaning (or meanings) of every word you use.

Excellent, generally applicable advice. I’d say his attempt succeeds. A few of my own glosses:

#1 is a good caution against technological or media distraction. Most of the advice from the last few years will have something about staying off Twitter or putting your phone in another room while writing. Same principle.

#2 is evergreen but perhaps even more important now thanks to the exponential proliferation of trash reading material on the internet. AI-generated textual “content” will only aggravate the problem. Read old books of a wide variety.

Speaking of Elmore Leonard, he’s a good illustration of #3. His dialogue always sounds natural and his third-person narration is so effortlessly conversational that one is not conscious, after a while, of reading it. Great writers can achieve this effect in a variety of ways, not necessarily Leonard’s.

My worst experience with #5 is simply leaving a detail out. Attentive readers of Griswoldville might note the word musketoon in the glossary at the back, though the word appears nowhere in the novel. Well, it was supposed to. One character, a cavalryman who encounters the narrator just before the climactic battle, rests a musketoon on his thigh in my head, but that detail either never made it onto paper or was trimmed and never reinserted in a better place. Fortunately this omission affects nothing in the scene negatively, but it has always bothered me—and cautioned me to make sure I know which details I’ve actually written.

This is where revision and having other people read your manuscript proves most helpful. When writing The Snipers, I had a clear, concrete picture of all of its locations in my head, but I didn’t effectively describe all of them on paper. JP Burten (whose second novel has just come out, by the way) pointed out that the geography of one early scene was totally unclear. I worked hard to fix that, and it strengthened that scene.

#8 has been on my mind a lot recently thanks to YouTube. Listening to—rather than watching—a lot of aspiring YouTube documentarians (I have specifically American YouTubers in mind) has made me wonder whether they know how English works or what words mean. Malapropisms abound. Most often they misuse words as they strain to sound more serious and intellectual than necessary. Basic attention to meaning is sacrificed for a pretentious (or portentous) tone. Which becomes self-defeating, in the manner of Michael Scott trying to use big words.

The mercenary aspect of seeking views by producing videos on the same handful of sensational stories—how many Dyatlov Pass documentaries does a man need?—also plays a role. Per #4, someone who isn’t interested in material for its own sake will not take the care over it that Lewis’s advice requires.

Dramatic irony and plot contrivance

Bates and Anna in Downton Abbey and Abby in Blood Simple

Last night RedLetterMedia posted their review of the first season of “The Acolyte,” the latest Star Wars show. I have no interest whatsoever in watching “The Acolyte” but in the course of Mike and Jay’s discussion Jay specifically critiques it for an overused storytelling technique:

One of my least favorite plot contrivances that’s used for, like, lazy screenwriting is the misunderstanding and the not explaining to a character what is going on because the plot demands it. . . . the lazy contrivance of not knowing all the information and not being told the information because if you were then there would be no story.

I should say “misused” rather than “overused.” What Jay is describing is dramatic irony, a form of literary irony in which the audience knows more than the characters do. This can create tension and pathos as characters ignorant of the full significance of their own actions carry on, ignorant not only of what they’re doing but of the consequences they will face later. Shakespearian and especially Greek tragedy are rich in dramatic irony, as are modern horror and suspense movies—as exemplified by Hitchcock’s famous example of the bomb under the table.

But dramatic irony, as Jay suggests, becomes a plot contrivance when the ignorance of the characters is maintained unnaturally. The best example I can think of is “Downton Abbey.” Earlier seasons of the show produce dramatic irony much more organically, but as the show goes on and becomes more obviously a high-toned soap opera, characters get into increasingly melodramatic situations and increasingly refuse to talk to each other about them. Most of the show’s problems could be resolved with one conversation, a conversation the characters will not have.*

This is particularly the case with any plot involving Mr Bates, whose aloof taciturnity is taken to a ridiculous extreme when he is accused of murder—among other things. He has numerous opportunities simply to explain to someone else what is going on and why he is acting in the way that he is, and he doesn’t.** Over and over, “Downton Abbey” prolongs the drama artificially in exactly the same way.

For dramatic irony done not just well but brilliantly, watch Blood Simple, the Coen brothers’ first film. The film has four primary characters: Abby, the young wife of a shady nightclub owner; Marty, the husband; Ray, a friend with whom Abby begins an affair; and Loren Visser, a private detective. Briefly, Marty hires Visser to look into what Abby and Ray are up to and, when he finds out, pays Visser to kill them. Visser double-crosses and shoots Marty, and Ray discovers the body.

Without giving too much away, as the rest of the movie unfolds:

• Ray thinks that Abby killed Marty (she didn’t) and decides that he has to cover for her

• Abby thinks Marty is still alive and out to get her (he isn’t) and decides to fight back

• Visser thinks he has gotten away with his crime (he hasn’t) until he realizes he has left evidence in Marty’s nightclub, which he thinks Ray and Abby have (they don’t), and decides to eliminate them to cover his tracks

All of the characters operate in ignorance of the whole picture—with the possible exception of Visser, who makes mistakes despite knowing more than Ray and Abby—and make their decisions based on what they think they know, which is often wrong. This ignorance continues right up until the final lines of the film, following a climactic confrontation in which the two surviving characters can’t see each other. And it is unbearably suspenseful rather than, like “Downton Abbey” or “The Acolyte,” merely frustrating.

Dramatic irony is a powerful device, and it’s a shame it isn’t better used. Writers hoping to create tension in their stories through the ignorance or misperceptions of their characters would do well to revisit a movie like Blood Simple, some of Elmore Leonard’s crime fiction, or, even better, go back to Aeschylus and Sophocles.

* This is, I think, part of what makes Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess such a breath of fresh air whenever she appears, as she actually says what she means.

** My wife and I refer to these as “Shan’t” moments, as in “I could resolve this with a simple explanation, but—” turning one’s head away, “shan’t.”

On artistic innovations that don’t make art better

For years now I’ve wanted to write a blog post about the Coke machines on my college’s campus. They’re sleek, modern, and high tech, with WiFi-integrated chip card readers and LED lights and a system of robotic conveyor belts that whisk your drink out of the rack to dispense it in a rotating receptacle with its own recessed lighting.

They also don’t work very well. All that innovation has resulted in more points of failure than the rudimentary, purely mechanical Coke machines I grew up with. One of those might occasionally have eaten your change. These can break in at least twenty ways. I’ve counted. Technological sophistication has actually made the machines worse for their original purpose.

Here’s a quotation I’ve been meaning to share for a while, a passage from poet Dana Gioia’s essay “Notes on the New Formalism,” which was published in 1999 but that I first ran across last year:

These young poets have grown up in a literary culture so removed from the predominantly oral traditions of metrical verse that they can no longer hear it accurately. Their training in reading and writing has been overwhelmingly visual not aural, and they have never learned to hear the musical design a poem executes. For them poems exist as words on a page rather than sounds in the mouth and ear. While they have often analyzed poems, they have rarely memorized and recited them. Nor have they studied and learned poems by heart in foreign languages where sound patterns are more obvious to nonnative speakers. Their often extensive critical training in textual analysis never included scansion, and their knowledge of even the fundamentals of prosody is haphazard (though theory is less important in practice than mastering the craft of versification). Consequently, they have neither much practical nor theoretical training in the way sounds are organized as poetry. Ironically this very lack of training makes them deaf to their own ineptitude. Full of confidence, they rely on instincts they have never developed. Magisterially they take liberties with forms whose rudimentary principles they misconstrue. Every poem reveals some basic confusion about its own medium. Some misconceptions ultimately prove profitable for art. Not this one.

The failures of both modern poetry and modern Coke machines stem from a fundamental misapprehension of their purpose—what they’re for, how they’re supposed to work. The basics are neglected. Not for nothing does the phrase mechanical failure apply in both instances. What you end up with is pointless sophistication (cf. Jacques Barzun’s definition of “decadence”) that often doesn’t even work.

A silly comparison, probably, but one that is broadly applicable.

Scruton on what children can teach us about art

From the late Sir Roger Scruton’s documentary “Why Beauty Matters”:

“Art needs creativity, and creativity is about sharing. It is a call to others to see the world as the artist sees it. That is why we find beauty in the naïve art of children. Children are not giving us ideas in the place of creative images, nor are they wallowing in ugliness. They are trying to affirm the world as they see it and to share what they feel. Something of the child’s pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.”

— Sir Roger Scruton

Scruton makes this aside as a point of contrast with modern art—which is intentionally insular, confrontational, transgressive, and over-intellectual if not ideological—but in doing so he makes a broader point about what art is and what it’s for. This description of children’s art is also honestly and accurately observed.

I’ve thought of this passage many times over the last few weeks, ever since my eldest son eagerly presented me with a picture he had drawn. It was a pencil and highlighter drawing that showed me holding my youngest son at the dinner table—a picture of his dad and one of his little brothers. It was drawn from life without my noticing, and joy he took both in drawing and giving it to me, the joy in and care taken over the details, including the stubble of my beard, and the simple, straightforward, honest love in the picture itself have stuck with me. My kids have drawn many things for me, but this one in particular struck me as a clear example of Scruton’s “pure delight” in “sharing.”

Last week I tacked it to the wall of my office at school. May any art I create be motivated as purely as my son’s.

“Why Beauty Matters” is worth your while, as I wrote here almost four years ago following Scruton’s death. You can watch the whole thing on Vimeo here.

Scruton on style

Last week I revisited the late Sir Roger Scruton’s Beauty: A Very Short Introduction via audiobook on my commute. It’s an excellent precis of much that is fundamental to his thinking and, true to the subtitle, a wide-ranging introduction to many topics that bear further thought. Here’s one.

From a discussion of the role proportion plays in the creation of vernacular architectures by launching the builder on “a path of discovery” to what “fits” and is “suitable” for each detail in relation to the others in Chapter 4, “Everyday Beauty”:

One result of this process of matching is a visual vocabulary: by using identical mouldings in door and window, for example, the visual match becomes easier to recognize and to accept. Another result is what is loosely described as style—the repeated use of shapes, contours, materials and so on, their adaptation to special uses, and the search for a repertoire of visual gestures.

I like the idea of a style as mastery of a discipline’s “repertoire,” the selective, purposeful use of a shared vocabulary. Scruton’s example is architectural, but he also refers throughout the book to painting, sculpture, cinema, and most especially music. My mind naturally suggested literary style, with its literal shared vocabulary and the many effects and fine shades of meaning that a firm control of English can yield.

Scruton himself raises the idea of control as a component of style in the next chapter, “Artistic Beauty”:

“True artists control their subject-matter, in order that our response to it should be their doing, not ours.”

True artists control their subject-matter, in order that our response to it should be their doing, not ours. One way of exerting this control is through style . . . Style is not exhibited only by art: indeed, as I argued in the last chapter, it is natural to us, part of the aesthetics of everyday life, through which we arrange our environment and place it in significant relation to ourselves. Flair in dressing, for example, which is not the same as an insistent originality, consists rather in the ability to turn a shared repertoire in a personal direction, so that a single character is revealed in each of them. That is what we mean by style, and by the ‘stylishness’ that comes about when style over-reaches itself and becomes the dominant factor in a person’s dress.

The tension between originality and a common vocabulary and the need for balance is an important topic and one Scruton returns to later in the book, but he continues by introducing another consideration:

Styles can resemble each other, and contain large overlapping idioms—like the styles of Haydn and Mozart or Coleridge and Wordsworth. Or they might be unique, like the style of Van Gogh, so that anyone who shares the repertoire is seen as a mere copier or pasticheur, and not as an artist with a style of his own. Our tendency to think in this way has something to do with our sense of human integrity: the unique style is one that has identified a unique human being, whose personality is entirely objectified in his work.

This passage in particular offers a lot for the writer to think about. Every writer has heroes and idols and role models, other writers whose control over their work has influenced our own technique, consciously or not. This starts young. It’s been more than twenty years since I read Stephen King’s On Writing, but I still remember and think often about this passage:

You may find yourself adopting a style you find particularly exciting, and there’s nothing wrong with that. When I read Ray Bradbury as a kid, I wrote like Ray Bradbury—everything green and wondrous and seen through a lens smeared with the grease of nostalgia. When I read James M Cain, everything I wrote came out clipped and stripped and hard-boiled. When I read Lovecraft, my prose became luxurious and Byzantine.

All of which is, for King, a crucial developmental stage in the writer’s life, one that should be refined through constant reading and writing, so that eventually one is no longer writing in imitation but in “one’s own style.”

But if you’re aware of what you’re doing and working hard at it, particularly in order to achieve a certain specific effect—so that, per Scruton, the readers’ response will be my doing, not theirs—it’s hard not to become anxious that one is working merely in pastiche or even accidental parody. Have I sacrificed my integrity to sound like someone else? Inconsistency doesn’t help. I’ve worried more about this on some projects than others. Why am I confident that I can use tricks learned from Charles Portis but not those from Cormac McCarthy? Food for thought.

I think, naturally, of John Gardner and his description of “mannered” prose, a term he’d certainly have applied to McCarthy. “Mannered” suggests artificiality or phoniness, the lack of integrity Scruton suggests above, which is how every good writer hopes not to come across. But I also think of Elmore Leonard, another author whom I’ve quoted here many times, and who worked hard to make his style the absence of style. Scruton contends that that is impossible:

Style must be perceivable: there is no such thing as hidden style. It shows itself, even if it does so in artful ways that conceal the effort and sophistication . . . At the same time, it becomes perceivable by virtue of our comparative perceptions: it involves a standing out from norms that must also be subliminally present in our perception if the stylistic idioms and departures are to be noticed. Style enables artists to allude to things that they do not state, to summon comparisons that they do not explicitly make, to place their work and its subject-matter in a context which makes every gesture significant, and so achieve the kind of concentration of meaning that we witness in Britten’s Cello Symphony or Eliot's Four Quartets.

This is exactly right, and Leonard would agree. Leonard’s style, which was precisely designed to “conceal the effort and sophistication” of his writing and make it seem effortless, was immediately recognizable because it was distinct from the “norms” described above in particular ways—something Leonard himself noted. Those “norms” or context are the broader shared vocabulary we began with—which gives shape to one’s work through contrast.

And that final sentence on what a firm, controlled, purposeful, precise style can do, using the power of allusion, implicit comparison, the subtle significance of every detail to “achieve . . . concentration of meaning”—is there a writer who wouldn’t die happy having that said of his work?

Melancholy in the outfield

A few weeks ago I revisited a childhood favorite with my own kids. Angels in the Outfield came out when I was ten years old and an enthusiastic baseball fan. I must have watched it fifty or sixty times over the next few years, before I aged out of it and the real-life drama of the mid-90s Braves gently edged it out of my imagination.

What I remembered most about Angels in the Outfield was the comedy, the slapstick baseball action, the standard sports movie joys of becoming a team and winning the big game, and the music. (I noticed, though very young, that composer Randy Edelman’s score had a lot of cues suspiciously similar to his work on the previous year’s Gettysburg, one of my favorite soundtracks.) What I was not prepared for upon rewatching it as an adult just how firmly the plot’s foundation was built upon pain, sorrow, and longing.

Roger, the main character, lives in foster care because his mom has died and his dad is a negligent, uncommunicative deadbeat. When the film starts his father has already signed over his rights to his son and has shown up just long enough to tell Roger, a job he performs badly. Is that guilt we see in his eyes, or just awkwardness in performing the unwanted duty of talking to his child? When an oblivious Roger asks when they can “be a family again,” his dad replies with a “when pigs fly” scenario that Roger takes literally. And Roger’s younger friend JP seems bright and happy all the time but collapses into grief when another boy is moved out of the foster home, an emotional response the movie suggests is always ready just below the surface. This is clearly a child struggling with abandonment.

But the vein of sadness runs through the adults, too. California Angels manager George Knox seethes with grievance, not only having had his career cut short when a dirty player slid into him cleats-first, but also becoming a manager only to be saddled with the worst team in the league. The man who injured him, Ranch Wilder, is now the Angels’ radio announcer and loathes the team as well as Knox. His entire demeanor suggests he resents being kept down when he is meant for greater things. And Mel Clark, a former star pitcher who developed a pain pill addiction under Knox’s managership at Cincinnati and who has the film’s clearest redemption arc, is revealed at the end to be only six months away from death. He has lung cancer and doesn’t even know it yet. And so even the longed-for victory in the playoffs is tinged with loss.

I’m not going to pretend that Angels in the Outfield is a great movie or serious drama; it’s simply well and honestly crafted and it treats all of these scenarios seriously. None of it feels forced, none of it is used merely to jerk tears, and none of it is tidily and painlessly resolved. In fact, most of the characters don’t actually get the specific thing they want at the beginning of the film.

This brought to mind two things I had reflected on long ago. The first is an essay from Film School Rejects called “The Melancholy of Don Bluth,” an excellent read on animated films like The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven, or An American Tail—all three of which were in constant rotation in the Poss household when I was growing up. Bluth’s movies have a reputation for going to dark places Disney typically balks at, to the point that they’re sometimes the subject of internet memes about “trauma.” Please.

The artistic upshot of Bluth’s willingness to include death and—perhaps more importantly—mourning in his films is a truth and richness often missing from comparable animated films:

Thematically, there is an ever-present air of death about Bluth’s work that is profoundly sad. Bones litter certain set-pieces; illness and age are veritable threats (shout out to Nicodemus’ gnarly skeleton hands); and characters can and do bleed. Critically, Bluth films don’t gloss over grief, they sit with it. From Littlefoot’s straight up depression following the on-screen death of his mom, to Mrs. Brisby’s soft sorrow at finding out the details of her husband’s death. There is a space for mourning in Bluth’s stories that feels extra-narrative, and unpretentious. Critically, this is distinct from, say, wallowing. Bluth’s films have a ridiculously productive attitude towards mourning, most lucidly articulated through Land Before Time’s moral mouthpiece Rooter: “you’ll always miss her, but she’ll always be with you as long as you remember the things she taught you.” Disney meanwhile, tends to treat death as a narrative flourish, or worse, a footnote. And in comparison, even notable exceptions like Bambi and The Lion King seem immaturely timid to let palpable grief linger for longer than a scene, let alone throughout a film’s runtime.

The other thing that came to mind was a podcast conversation on The Sectarian Review concerning Hallmark Christmas movies. At some point during the conversation I drew a comparison between Hallmark romantic comedies and older romcoms by pointing out that films like You’ve Got Mail, as fun and bubbly and appealing as they are, also have vein of genuine pain running through them. Kathleen Kelly takes her mom’s little bookshop up against the big chain store and loses, an event the film doesn’t gloss over and doesn’t paint as some kind of moral victory. Who doesn’t feel the pang of her loss as she closes up shop for the final time and walks away into the night, her mom’s shop doorbell jingling in her hand?

Only Pixar, in older movies like Up and Toy Story 2 and Inside Out, has recently attempted to include such real pain in their stories. By comparison, most of the recent crowd-pleasing PG-13 action fare or animated kids’ movies in theatres or the mass-produced dramas of the Hallmark Channel are pure saccharine—thin, fake, and probably carcinogenic.

I have no firm conclusions to draw on this topic except to note that, for whatever reason, even in our simplest and cheapest stories we’ve lost something important. And if you feel some of this and hope for catharsis, one of the oldest reasons for watching a drama that there is, you’ll have to go to older films for it.