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.

Stories or themes?

Eric Ambler (1909-98)

I’ve wondered for some time whether stories are studied and taught the right way. I’ve been thinking about this more lately as I’ve read a lot of critiques of the modern literary establishment and English education, especially at the college level, and I’ve come back again and again to an approach that has bothered me for years: the emphasis on “themes” in fiction.

A few years ago, in reflecting on my first reading of Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, I quoted a PBS documentary’s summary of the story: “a dark maritime adventure that ends in a violent battle between blacks and whites in the South Seas.”

“Well,” I wrote, “that is kind of what happens.” Kind of. But not really. Not if you’ve read the story Poe actually wrote, all the complexity and horror of which is here reduced to a talking point.

I had a similar experience this week as I looked for articles on the great spy novelist Eric Ambler. One that I turned up, an introductory guide to Ambler’s life and work, should prove genuinely helpful to the newcomer, but when it recommends six “key” novels it includes the following “themes” for five of them:

• Epitaph for a Spy: “The vulnerability of the individual in a bureaucratic world.”

• Cause for Alarm: “The dangers of apolitical individuals in a politically charged world.”

• The Mask of Dimitrios: “The intersection of crime and politics, and the corrupting power of ambition.”

• Journey into Fear: “The thin line between courage and fear, and the impact of war on individuals.”

• The Intercom Conspiracy: “The futility of espionage in an increasingly chaotic world.”

Well… that is kind of what those are about. Kind of.

You’ll have noticed a few things about these themes. First, they are formulaic. Three of the five fall into a “the _____ of _____ in a _____ world” pattern, like a Mad Lib. These are all rich, complex, intricately constructed novels that place their characters in crises that admit of no easy answers. Boiling these stories—or any stories—down to something as simplistic and digestible as these themes should arouse our suspicions. Already particularity and nuance are being sanded off and forgotten as we prepare to slot each story into a pre-prepared box.

Second, these themes are vague. As it happens, I’ve read three of these five novels and started one of the others yesterday, and just about any of these “themes” could be applied to any of the novels.

Granted, all of this comes from one internet guide to a single author’s work, but based on my own experience and reading they are broadly representative of the way theme is extracted from story in textbook after textbook, class after class, essay after essay. The complex, diffuse, and imaginative is reduced to the simple, comprehensible, and ready-made. The narrator of Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” disturbs us, but we know what to do with “fear” or “guilt” or even “insanity.” Treasure Island is a rollicking adventure, but that’s not enough to make it an important book, so it becomes primarily a depiction of the danger of greed. This is also simpler, easier to understand, and—not insignificantly—to test.

More perniciously yet, at the college level the hunt for themes tends to mean subjecting stories to ideological scrutiny in order—to paraphrase Roger Ebert—to extract political messaging from them via liposuction without anesthesia. Thus assertions like this, which I once saw online: “The Last of the Mohicans is about the taboo on sex between whites and Native Americans.” Most of the time this comes from an overtly left-wing “tenured radical” perspective, but there is a right-wing version of it, too. Just this week a random stranger on Substack, commenting on something I had shared, wrote that Blood Meridian “depicts the southwest as irredeemably corrupt” and is therefore “a wokester wankfest.”

Again—is that really what The Last of the Mohicans or Blood Meridian are “about”? These books aren’t adventures set in particular times and places and happening to specific characters? Is all that matters the barely hidden pathologies or the political messaging?

It seems to me that the dangers of overemphasizing theme in the study of literature are:

• Gnosticism, by which I mean the suggestion that the “real” meaning of the story is hidden behind the words and events of the story, which leads students to either ignore the particulars or be frustrated with literature in toto.

• Didacticism, especially through the implication that good stories must have some broad meaning that should impart a lesson, describe life, or otherwise be useful to the student. If they cannot detect such, it must not be a good story.

• Political hijacking, which is easily the most high-profile, outrageous, and abominable form of this but is therefore also the easiest to identify and resist.

• The aesthetic smoothie, in which students are taught to look for big themes so thoroughly that all literature eventually loses its particularity and runs together into a bland abstraction puree. Last of the Mohicans and Blood Meridian are apposite here; one could say that both are “about” something like “the violence of whites and Native Americans on the frontier,” but are these books really as similar as this suggests?

This is by no means exhaustive, just the things that occur immediately to me and that I have found most frustrating.

But the final result of all of these is boredom. This is a boring, dull way to study fiction, especially when you’re introducing the young to great stories, and risks leading them away from simply enjoying reading. Great storytellers and their stories are powerful because they are specific. “Themes” are not.

Note that we don’t recommend books to each other this way. To return to one of my original examples, Epitaph for a Spy, would you rather read a book about “The vulnerability of the individual in a bureaucratic world,” something that could as easily be said of Kafka, Max Barry, or a one-star Google review of the local DMV, or a book about “A teacher on vacation who is mistaken for a spy by the police and forced to help catch the real spy”?

None of this is to say one shouldn’t look for, study, or teach themes in stories. Sensing and understanding a story’s theme is an important part of interpreting it, but themes should arise from the specific, concrete, particular details of the story, and placing as much emphasis on theme as we tend to do inverts that, elevating broad, big picture abstractions above the particulars that make a story what it is. Until we can treat stories as stories first again—and until we can just enjoy them—I think we should downplay theme.

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.

Further notes on Nosferatu

Willem Dafoe as Prof von Franz in Nosferatu (2024)

I’ve been thinking about Nosferatu a lot since I first watched it. I managed to get a short summary of my thoughts down in my “2024 in movies” year-in-review, but here are some more oddments and reflections I’ve had since.

Outside reading

Writing at National Review, Jack Butler, whose opinions I respect, “expected to be wowed but was merely entertained.” This is almost the opposite of my reaction, not least since I found Nosferatu too spiritually oppressive, too uncompromising in its presentation of the twisted, predatory, consuming nature of sin and evil, to be entertaining.

Nevertheless, Butler makes a good point earlier in his short review: “one character literally invites the demonic into her life,” he notes, followed by the pointed parenthetical “(Be careful what you ‘manifest,’ kids!)”

At his UnTaking Substack, my friend Danny Anderson contends with two misreadings of Nosferatu, and along the way makes this incisive point about Eggers’s meticulous quest not merely to capture the fashions and hairstyles of past times—those are the easy parts—but the inside of people:

In the end, I do think that Holmes is correct in his focus on Eggers’ attraction to the past and the metanarratives that once inscribed meaning onto life. This is what I admire most about his work, in fact. His films create worlds that shouldn’t still exist. They are anachronisms. He re-creates the mind of the past, not just images. The confrontation with that mind, which is alien and beyond our modern comprehension, is part of what makes his art valuable.

Agreed. We need to be confronted with past minds more often than we are. This is one of the things old books are good for, but since fewer and fewer people read, the need for such movies is growing. May Eggers’s tribe increase.

A few other points that I’ve been mulling, especially points that have proven controversial:

Nosferatu and Christianity

One line of criticism against Eggers’s Nosferatu has accused it of watering down or eliminating Christian elements present in Stoker’s original. I’m not as familiar with Dracula—the fons et origo of all this vampire stuff—as I should be, but I thought the evidence of Nosferatu itself is ambiguous. Crosses and crucifixes are both prominent and subtle throughout, but it’s not clear, as I’ve seen several critics online point out, that they do much to repel or impede Count Orlok. It’s possible that he only appears in rooms in, say, the Harding house where there are no religious decorations, but I didn’t pay close enough attention to be sure.

More pointedly, I’ve seen Willem Dafoe’s Professor von Franz accused of being a paganized Van Helsing. I don’t think so. The doctor who introduces von Franz name-drops at least one Christian occultist (in the early modern sense of someone who studies hidden forces, like magic and magnetism), and late in the film von Franz instinctively makes the sign of the cross.

Von Franz is also from Switzerland, from the southerly and more predominantly Catholic regions of German-speaking Europe. In this way he’s a contrast to the other characters, the Hutters and Hardings and Dr Sievers, who come from the fictional Wisburg, which is clearly a North Sea or Baltic port city—the Germany of Luther and Kant. Prof von Franz is coded from the get-go as more attuned to the eminent but hidden and the power of the liturgical. A nice touch by Eggers.

It’s not explicit, but I think von Franz is meaningfully Christian, albeit a Christian steeped in esoterica—but not of the Faustian variety.

But the strongest showing for Christianity belongs to two groups—the Romanian peasantry and the Orthodox nuns who nurse Thomas Hutter back to health. Out of all the characters in the film, they are the ones who most clearly understand what Orlok is and what it takes to resist him. Further, their explicit affiliation of Orlok with Satan is allowed to stand unchallenged. They, like Prof von Franz, know what they’re talking about and suffer no illusions.

Orlok, by moving from Transylvania to northern Germany is escaping the “superstitious” who know what he is to live among the “enlightened” who are easy pickings. A pretty powerful statement by itself.

Ellen’s sacrifice

The final act, in which Ellen makes herself available to her predator as carnal bait, luring him to their deaths, didn’t quite land for me. As I put it in my year-in-review, “I thought the ending stumbled a bit.” That’s the best I could put it at the time, but I’ve read and talked to other viewers who had the same sense of unease about it. As I put it in e-mail conversation with one of y’all, is Ellen’s final action a Christ-like self-sacrifice or an act of pagan expiation?

I think it has to be the latter. It was Ellen, after all, who first transgressed by summoning Orlok as a child. (See Butler above.) She was lonely and ignorant, but circumstances play no role in the pagan understanding of transgression. Whole mythologies have grown out of this conception of sin as crossing a line. By giving in to Orlok Ellen allows his appetite to consume him—and her. There is no eucatastrophe, only the methodical, inevitable outworking of the process she initiated years before. She has not received grace so much as restored balance.

This undercuts whatever is going on with the Orthodox nuns or the Catholic von Franz. However subtly and powerfully Nosferatu evokes their pre-Enlightenment liturgical Christianity, grace in this story ultimately has nothing to do with defeating evil. There’s an unfulfilled yearning for grace here. Eggers ends up framing Orlok’s defeat as an act of independent will, but under the influence of Orlok, how independent can Ellen be, really?

As clearly as Eggers can perceive and expose evil—and there’s no one else in Hollywood today who sees it this clearly—he seems to lack a countervailing sense of the good. Something to think and pray about.

Minutiae

• As I’ve said to a couple of y’all, I’ve been amazed at how totally my tolerance for bad things happening to children in movies has evaporated over the last several years.

• Relatedly, the role of the Harding family as mere cannon fodder for Orlok and the utter lack of redemption for Friedrich felt like a misstep into gratuitous shock.

• An uncharacteristic bit of internet nit-picking for me: If both Thomas Hutter and Prof von Franz know that Orlok sleeps in his coffin during the day—which Thomas knows because he came within a hair’s breadth of killing him and ending the nightmare earlier—why do they wait until night to go to his house outside Wisburg? Why not go directly there and stake him in the middle of the day? Perhaps I’m forgetting something.

• Finally, I can’t saw enough good things about the cast, but let me specifically point out Ralph Ineson as the unfortunate Dr Sievers. A lesser actor would have made him an unthinking period quack. Ineson makes him a thoughtful student of medical science who is doing his best against something impervious to his tools. This is his third role in an Eggers film and I hope the two keep working together.

Concluding unscientific postscript

I’m grateful to Chet for the e-mail correspondence that helped me give a shape to some of these thoughts, observations, and intuitions.

Nosferatu is a great movie but, again, not mere entertainment. It’s much more, but that doesn’t make it fun. I hope to watch it again someday, and to see more in it. But that will probably be a while.

Notes on the history of spy thrillers

This week, courtesy of Micah Mattix’s Prufrock Substack, I discovered Alexander Larman’s review of Gabriel’s Moon, a new spy thriller from William Boyd. Larman has become one of my favorite critics and is always insightful, as in the first two paragraphs here, where he offers a very short précis of the history of the spy thriller and the pivotal place of John le Carré in that history:

Roughly up until the heyday of John le Carré, the British spy novel tended to follow an approved pattern. A well-educated but bored man, somewhere between youth and middle age, would find himself caught up in an international conspiracy that would involve some, or all, of the following: duplicitous intelligence officers, untrustworthy foreign powers, a very great consumption of expensive food and wine, a MacGuffin that everyone wants to lay their hands on, and, last but not least, a love interest whose loyalties remain ambiguous right up until the final page.

Accurate, both specifically and generally. The boredom Larman notes, for example, is present in characters as different as Richard Hannay and James Bond, but for different reasons. The tone of the thriller changed between Buchan and Fleming even if some of the trappings remained, appropriately, unruffled. Larman continues:

Le Carré removed pretty much all of these elements, minus the mass duplicity and, in doing so, made the spy novel more intellectually respectable but (whisper it) just a tiny bit boring. If I was given the chance to read a rip-roaring page-turner in the vein of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps or Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male over Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or its ilk, I should take it without hesitation.

This is a paragraph calculated to get my attention, The Thirty-Nine Steps being the old favorite that started the whole John Buchan June thing here on the blog and Rogue Male being one of the best pure thrillers I’ve read in the last several years. As much as I like le Carré—something I’ve been chatting with a couple of y’all about for a while—I have to agree.

The result of le Carré’s transformation of the genre? Larman:

But most contemporary espionage fiction follows in the le Carré vein, alas, rather than the Ian Fleming mold. Carefully worked-out social criticism is plentiful, genuine thrills, and intrigue either meanly rationed or nonexistent.

Larman is pointing to the two main thematic components of the spy thriller: moral or at least intellectual weight, and action. Prior to le Carré, these were typically joined in the spy thriller. As the late great Sir John Keegan noted of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan’s thrillers in particular had, in addition to chases, danger, and wild hair’s-breadth escapes, “moral atmosphere.” As different as all of them are from each other, Buchan, Ambler, Household, and Fleming all had some measure of both. The drama gave the action weight and the action sold the book.

Le Carré bifurcated these, aiming for subtle and intensely introspective, chilly, cerebral drama. An Ambler or Fleming hero sweats when he faces capture and torture; a le Carré character—one hesitates to call them “heroes”—sweats when he has a terrible epiphany while looking through old files.

As Larman notes, le Carré’s astounding skill and success at this means it has become the model ever since, with “serious” spy novels almost always adhering to the introspective dramatic mode. Action continued to flourish in pulps before eventually taking on a highly technical, suspense-oriented character in writers like Frederick Forsyth and—the god of this kind of thriller—Tom Clancy.

So the spy thriller today is apt to be all dingy rented rooms, cynicism, and (usually left-wing) social criticism or all gear, gadgets, technical specs, and three-page chapters that begin with military time. (Occasionally you get writers who do both, with mixed success. Mick Herron, whose Slough House books are great favorites of mine for their wit, pacing, and suspense, recently published a turgid, commentary-heavy parallel novel burdened with smothering introspection. I’ve kept all the Slough House books to reread later but that one went straight to the used book store.)

But it need not be this way. Buchan, Ambler, and Fleming are still good models, and I was glad to learn from Larman that Gabriel’s Moon “is most definitely a spy novel of the Buchan-esque school,” balancing character drama and a fast pace. I’m looking forward to it. I picked up a copy Wednesday night and start it today. Here’s hoping it’s part of a reunification of the two halves of the spy thriller that, though they can succeed alone, work wonderfully together.

Ties that could never be chosen

Yesterday Alan Jacobs shared a thought-provoking short post on “the redefinition of all legitimate relations as contractual ones and the consequent rejection of the validity of any connections that are not explicitly chosen,” a deep cultural shift that has made all of us more autonomous and less human. Jacobs mentions family ties specifically, which we all receive rather than select, and includes the following quotation from the late Sir Roger Scruton’s final book, a study of Wagner’s Parsifal:

Liberal individualism is an attractive philosophy, and has produced beautiful and influential theories of political legitimacy, including those of Locke, Harrison, Montesquieu, Rousseau and, in our time, John Rawls. But it does not describe real human beings. What matters to us, far more than our deals and bargains, are the ties that we never contracted, that we stumbled into through passion and temptation, as well as the ties that could never be chosen, like those that bind us to our parents, our country, and our religious and cultural inheritance. These ties put us, regardless of our aims and desires, in existential predicaments that we cannot always rectify.

As it happens, I’ve just finished reading a new edition of Waltharius, an early medieval Latin epic about Walter of Aquitaine. The poem is set in the mid-fifth century world of the Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, and Huns. The action begins in the court of Attila somewhere in central Europe. There, we meet:

• Walthari, heir to a Visigothic kingdom in the west

• Hildigunda, daughter of the Burgundian king

• Hagano, a Frankish nobleman

All three are hostages to Attila, collateral in a peace deal between Attila and their respective kingdoms. Further, Walthari and Hildigunda have been pledged to each other in marriage since childhood, and Walthari and Hagano, through the trials of combat in the ranks of Attila’s allied fighters, have become fast friends.

But then the peace treaty between Attila and the Franks ends and Hagano flees before he can be killed, and when Attila, as a reward for Walthari’s brave and loyal service (being a medieval hostage involved a lot more collaboration with one’s host than the word suggests now, and could be quite cushy), announces his plan to marry Walthari into his family and keep him on permanently, Walthari decides to flee, too, and to take Hildigunda with him. They love each other and don’t want their childhood betrothal undone.

One might expect a frantic pursuit across Europe but Walthari and Hildigunda’s flight goes smoothly until they reach Frankish territory. There, Gundahari attempts to stop them and confiscate not only Walthari’s horse and treasure but Hildigunda herself. He calls on Hagano’s aid, but Hagano refuses to fight his old friend until ten other men—including, crucially, some of his own kinsmen—have been killed. The climactic action is akin to that six-minute brawl in the alley in They Live, a brutal knock-down drag-out that ends with renewed friendship.

Much of the tension in Waltharius therefore comes from the attempts by the characters to honor unchosen obligations. Namely:

• Walthari, Hildigunda, and Hagano’s hostage relationship with Attila, which was chosen for them by their families (and is threatened by events back home and Attila himself)

• Walthari and Hildigunda’s betrothal, which was chosen for them by their parents (and is threatened first by Attila and then by Gundahari)

• Walthari and Hagano’s friendship, which was chosen for them, in a sense, by Attila and their families (and is threatened by Gundahari)

• Hagano and Gundahari’s lord-vassal relationship, which was chosen for them by Gundahari’s succession (and is threatened by Gundahari’s presumption and Walthari’s skill with a sword)

Per Scruton, these are conflicts that cannot easily be resolved, if at all, and medieval people were acutely aware of that. The conflict of obligations is hardly unique to Waltharius. Think of the Volsungsaga, in which Signy must not under any circumstances fail to avenge her father, but can only do so by killing her husband Siggeir, whom she must not under any circumstances fail to protect. No happy ending there.

In each case above, the characters must choose which obligation is prior, and honor that. One suspects that a modern person in similar circumstances would nope out of there, as the kids say. Medieval people had a word for that.

That “we cannot always rectify” such “predicaments” does not make them absurd, however. The unchosen is prior to and deeper than any transactional alternative that the world of what Jacobs calls “metaphysical capitalism” can offer. But one wonders, given the inescapable success of the commodifying, transactional vision of the world, whether a story like Waltharius is even intelligible to modern people.

All the more reason to read, study, and share it.

Take a minute to read all of Jacobs’s post, as well as the handful of earlier posts he links to at the top. The edition of Waltharius I read is an updated version of Brian Murdoch’s translation published by Uppsala Books. It’s a delight. Check it out here or at Uppsala’s website here.

2024 in movies

2024 turned out to be a good year for forces of nature. From tornados to sandworms, vampires, and giant radioactive lizards, the movies I liked most showed a welcome return of the genuinely monstrous. The misunderstood villain, whose wickedness is explained away as the result of marginalization—or whatever—has had its moment for several years and seems to be going strong, but I’m hoping a new recognition of evil and our need to resist it will take firmer root and let us dramatize and celebrate goodness again.

So much for my hopes for the future. In the meantime, I often start these movie recaps lamenting how little there is to be excited about at the movies, but the truth is that this year I was so busy, pulled in so many different directions, that I barely had time to think about the movies and was lucky to catch even a handful in theatres. 2024 was, therefore, short on good new movies for me but with plenty of good older movies to discover, as we’ll see.

Nevertheless, let me start with the handful of standout new films, presented in no particular order:

Dune: Part Two

A worthy follow-up to Villeneuve’s first Dune, further developing the characters and the world of Arrakis and taking the plunge into the weirder aspects of Herbert’s fiction. The highlight, for me, was the gnarly climactic attack involving sandworms. I think the first part is still the better movie overall, as I thought a few of the performances here faltered under the weight of the story, but that’s the difference between an A+ and an A-. Dune: Part Two still shows more craft and care for the story than the majority of movies coming out right now. Full review from back in the spring here.

The Wild Robot

My kids love Peter Brown’s Wild Robot novels, and having finally gotten around to reading the first one myself—I finished it using a flashlight during the Hurricane Helene power outage—I shared their excitement for the movie. The Wild Robot is beautifully animated, and while it departed from Brown’s novel too much for my taste, enough of the spirit and tone of the book was there to be really enjoyable. Fun, funny, moving, and exciting, this is a genuine family movie in that it worked both for me and my kids.

Twisters

This movie generated some weird hostility online, which I have to credit to the derangement of internet bubbles. Twisters is good straightforward entertainment, with a simple story executed well, good performances, and good special effects. And, as I noted when I finally saw it, while not a message movie by any means—and by design—Twisters sincerely explores a few themes that are worthwhile for their very rarity in mainstream movies.

As for comparisons between Twister and Twisters, my wife and I rewatched the original ahead of seeing the sequel and, with it fresh on our minds, concluded that Twisters actually improved on it in a number of ways, not least in its less cartoonish supporting characters and in giving its villain a more obviously wicked goal than corporate sponsorship. This isn’t Shakespeare, but it’s engaging, exciting, and economically told, which, again, is more than you can say for a lot of other movies right now.

Nosferatu

Another incredible work by Robert Eggers, whose The Witch and The Northman are still two of the best historical films I’ve ever seen, Nosferatu nonetheless places me in the unusual position of praising a movie and saying I probably wouldn’t ever recommend it.

Nosferatu, a remake of the silent German horror movie which was itself an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula, is both artistically and technically brilliant, with fantastic costumes and sets and cinematography and sound design that create a precisely staged atmosphere of moody, oppressive cold and darkness which deepens until the very last moment. It is also brilliantly acted. Lily-Rose Depp as the demonically tormented Ellen Hutter and Willem Dafoe as Professor von Franz, the film’s Van Helsing character, were the standouts, but this is also the best I’ve ever seen from Nicholas Hoult. Bill Skarsgård, as Count Orlok, is genuinely terrifying.

Eggers, true to form, not only works hard to get into the minds of past people but also wrestles with some serious ideas, including the tendency of post-Enlightenment man to be blinded to evil. Professor von Franz gives a stirring speech on this point about halfway through. In order to fight the darkness, he argues, one must not only know something about it but admit that it is real.

And Nosferatu dramatizes that reality clearly and starkly. Eggers’s vampire is not tragic or misunderstood or some superhuman marginalized for his transhumanist beauty; he is gross, predatory, and parasitic, preying on the weak and wanting only to possess, enslave, and consume. “I am an appetite,” he says. “Nothing more.” Stripping the allure from evil and refusing to psychologize or pathologize it, as other characters more “rational” than Professor von Franz do, is a fatal mistake.

But it’s precisely that clear-sighted, even theologically inflected motif that makes me hesitate to recommend Nosferatu. The mood is so oppressive and some of its third-act horrors are so horrifying that I think it would be wrong of me to direct someone looking for entertainment to Nosferatu. Because as brilliant as this movie is, and as seriously as Eggers treats these themes, I would not call this movie entertainment. A hard, much-needed look at evil, but not fun and not one to be taken lightly.

There are other, more minor problems. It is perhaps too slow in some parts and I thought that the ending stumbled a bit, not quite resolving some of what Eggers so carefully set up earlier. But Nosferatu is, overall, one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s just not one I’d recommend for the even mildly faint of heart, and not one I’ll watch again any time soon.

Two near misses

Gladiator II—Slickly entertaining and substance-free. Gladiator II didn’t drive me to performative outrage the way it did some online movie reviewers, but I also wasn’t moved by it. Full review from November here.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare—My wife and I saw this for a date night late in the spring and we both enjoyed it. It’s light, frothy, World War II-flavored action-comedy with a unique setting and fun characters. And yet the very levity of the movie bothered me. After trying and failing to review it here on the blog a few times, I finally realized that I’m sick of gleeful killing in historical movies.

“But they’re Nazis!” All of them? The more common that excuse has become the more I’ve started to question it—and worry about it. Oddly, the movie actually acknowledges, just once, that the scores and scores of enemies Henry Cavill and company effortlessly wipe out are ordinary people when Cavill, about to kill yet another German sailor, sees how young the sailor is and lets him go. The rest of the movie is a numbing sub-Tarantino shooting gallery. It’s entertaining, yes, but its winky approach to slaughter—with never a single jam or misfire in hundreds of rounds fired from Sten guns, by the way—downplays the soul-damage wrought not only on participants in this kind of killing but on the audience as well.

There’s likely a good movie in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, but it would have required a sweatier, more earnest approach than what Guy Ritchie gives us here.

Favorite of the year: Godzilla Minus One

I’m cheating a bit by choosing this as my favorite of the year rather than bumping it down to the “new to me” section, but it was only briefly in theatres here in 2023 and I missed my only opportunity to see it during that window owing to sickness. And—not insignificantly—Godzilla Minus One is far better than anything else I saw during 2024.

This is not simply a good Godzilla movie (I’ve only ever see one other, one of the so-so American movies made over the last decade), this is a well-acted, beautifully shot, thematically rich, exciting, terrifying, and moving drama that happens to have a giant radioactive lizard in it. It is, in fact, those human elements that make Godzilla’s arrival so powerfully effective. I’ve watched it several times now—on my own, with my wife, with my family over Christmas—and it’s impressive and moving every time.

Full review from November here.

New to me

They Live (1988)—Classic John Carpenter sci-fi, with a great concept presented in a subtle, low-key way that only enhances the big revelation about halfway through. Wonderfully creepy, funny, and entertaining. I blogged about a recurring conspiracy motif that appears in the film here.

The Arctic Convoy (2023)—An immediately involving Second World War action-drama about a fictional Norwegian cargo ship traveling with a convoy based on PQ 17, which was en route from Iceland to Murmansk when its naval escort was withdrawn and the convoy was ordered to disperse. U-boats and German bombers stationed in Norway did the rest, sinking all but 11 of the 35 ships in the group. This film, something like Greyhound aboard a merchant ship rather than a destroyer, puts the viewer in the shoes of the ship’s crew and vividly presents the dangers of such work. There are a few excellent action sequences, but the heart of the film is a drama pitting the stalwart captain against his first mate, a broken former captain who was one of the only survivors of his previous ship. Worth seeking out.

Escape from Alcatraz (1979)—A gritty, well-acted, suspenseful show-don’t-tell prison drama with a great central performance by Clint Eastwood. Economically told and engaging right from the get-go. I’ve known this story for years without ever having seen this dramatization, and I’m glad I finally did.

Radical Wolfe (2023)—A solid feature-length documentary on one of my favorite writers, with an appropriate zing-pow energy to the presentation and some good attention to Wolfe’s background as a fish-out-of-water Southerner in the northeast and his early days as a reporter.

Looking ahead

Ordinarily I include a list here of what I’m anticipating in the new year, but I’m afraid that list is exceptionally short this time, consisting of Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning (at last), with Black Bag, Tron: Ares, The Amateur, and the new Superman four movies I’m curious but not necessarily excited about. (The last time I got excited about a Superman movie it was Man of Steel, which my wife and I watched on our honeymoon.) And just yesterday I discovered the upcoming Warfare, a real-time war movie co-directed by Alex Garland and based on an incident involving Navy SEALs during the Iraq War. I’ll also be taking my kids to see Dog Man, my eldest son being a huge fan.

I hope there’ll be more to get excited about, or that I’ve forgotten something, but 2025 may turn out to be another good year for new-to-me viewings of classics.

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.

Mendenhall on Weaver’s South

Western North Carolina native Richard M Weaver (1910-63)

Final exams are graded, final grades are posted, and graduation is tomorrow. After a mad semester—the last few weeks especially, since just before Thanksgiving—I feel like I’m coming up for air. As I tread water and take a few deep breaths, let me recommend a good essay that points toward a body of good essays.

Last weekend Allen Mendenhall, a professor at Troy University, published a piece at Law & Liberty on Richard Weaver and his vision of the South. Weaver was an Asheville native who spent much of his childhood in Kentucky and studied at the University of Kentucky, Vanderbilt, and LSU and taught at Auburn and Texas A&M before winding up at the University of Chicago, where he taught until his death at the age of 53. Weaver brought a peripatetic experience of many different parts of the South, the fruits of deep study of its thought, history, and literature, and a sharp rhetorical and analytical mind—further honed by exile, a feature of many great Southern writers’ lives—to his understanding of the South.

In his essay, Mendenhall unpacks Weaver’s views on the South’s literary character; its modes of religious practice (which Weaver is careful to distinguish from belief); the underpinnings and strengths (and weaknesses) of its social order; the roles of honor, hierarchy, and chivalry; the lives of important Southern figures; and the very nature of civilization itself. The South’s distinctiveness, to Weaver, stems from its distinct socio-religious origins but has been maintained through a posture of defense that is both instinctive and deliberate. Mendenhall:

The South’s literary character, as Weaver understood it, emerged not through imitation but resistance—a cultural flowering born of siege. The region discovered its voice not by absorbing Northern influences but by defining itself against them.

Poe would agree.

The result, in several areas, was the organic emergence, whenever a seeming social, political, philosophical, religious, or economic binary imposed a choice, of a practical, non-ideological tertium quid in the South. To give just one example: rather than capitalism or socialism—the one “fixated on utopian ideas of progress . . . industrial disruption and endless innovation” and the other marked by the “hubris of central planning and . . . an impossible (and ultimately destructive) egalitarian ideal”—from the South rose agrarianism: rooted, constrained, in continuity with received wisdom.

“Weaver’s essays,” Mendenhall notes in conclusion,

thus present the South as a repository of valuable political and cultural wisdom, offering a critique of centralization and mass democracy that remains relevant. His work suggests that the South’s traditional skepticism toward consolidated power and its emphasis on local autonomy might be a valuable counterweight to modern tendencies toward centralization and standardization. The present erosion of Southern identity might surprise Weaver, as Southerners are less vocal about the homogenizing pressures that jeopardize regional traditions and local character.

With that “erosion,” something I’ve watched in my own lifetime but that has been going on for more than a century, comes “a decline in standards and priorities,” one that

is particularly poignant because it represents the final curtain for an entire way of life and being, one in which honor, grace, gentlemanliness, reputation, knowledge, and refinement were harmonized in pursuit of something greater than oneself.

Mendenhall begins and ends the essay by wondering where our present-day Richard Weavers are—not to mention “our T. S. Eliot, our Flannery O’Connor, our Walker Percy, our Tom Wolfe, or an American Evelyn Waugh, even a Houellebecq?” A good question, especially for any Southerner who wants the South to be more than the shallow and easily commercialized “‘redneck’ signifiers” that Mendenhall points out.

The essay links to the 1987 anthology The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver. The book includes fourteen essays written between 1943 and Weaver’s untimely death in 1963. It’s outstanding. Since this essay went up last Friday I’ve been rereading a few of the pieces collected there in whatever snatches of free time I can. A few favorites:

• “The Older Religiousness in the South,” an incisive look at Christianity in the South and how it fundamentally differs from the rationalistic, socially utilitarian evolution of Puritanism in the north. If you’ve wondered what Flannery O’Connor meant in calling the South not Christian but “Christ-haunted,” this should go some distance toward providing an answer.

• “The South and the Revolution of Nihilism,” in which Weaver asks why, despite the South’s obsessively documented problems with race, Southerners vehemently opposed the movements of Mussolini and Hitler.

• “Lee the Philosopher,” perhaps my favorite of all Weaver’s essays, concerning as it does the character and worldview of my lifelong hero. I’ve blogged about it here before.

• Relatedly, “Southern Chivalry and Total War,” about the mismatch between the honorbound South and coldbloodedly pragmatic Union but written as a reflection on World War II in 1944. Weaver: “[C]ivilization is in essence a struggle for self-control.” And later: “Those who throw aside the traditions of civilized self-restraint are travelling a road at the end of which lies nihilism. . . . For the consequence of putting war upon a total basis, or of accepting it upon that basis in retaliation, is the divorce of war from ethical significance.”

Though I highly recommend this essay collection, I’m afraid it’s out of print. I recommend picking it up wherever you can find it. I have a battered old copy saved from the closing of a seminary library.

In addition to writing about Weaver’s examination of Lee as philosopher of warfare, I’ve written here about Weaver’s view of the toughness required to be heroic and his thoughts on what Chesterton called “the inside of history.” Weaver also provided one of the epigraphs for Griswoldville, a quotation I used again here in relation to another defeated army worth remembering.

After all, defeat is not judgment, and it can prove a powerful teacher. As Mendenhall puts it in his essay, the South’s “experience with tragedy” resulted in a “metaphysical instinct” contrary to the materialistic, success-oriented worldview of the rest of the country. This instinct is reflected in the South’s letters:

Southern literature refuses to flinch from tragedy. In an age prone to deny life’s darker aspects, these writers insisted on confronting them. Their vision, derived from “observation, history, traditional beliefs older than any ‘ism,’” offers what Weaver considers a fortification against dehumanizing ideologies.

And if there’s anything we need more than a new Richard Weaver, it’s that fortification.

What’s missing from modern sports

My late granddad—who knew how to have fun—and his brother Summie at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now Auburn, September 1945. From the auburn University Libraries.

One of my favorite discoveries since dipping my toe into Substack is Ted Gioia, a jazz critic who writes frequently and with great insight on a number of cultural topics I care about. I had planned to write about his “worst writing advice in the world,” and may yet, but over the weekend he shared a post that surprisingly helped give form to an intuition I’ve felt for a long time.

I say “surprisingly” because, as far as I can recall, over the last six years and 600+ posts on this blog, I’ve never written about sports. Here goes.

In a post called “I Say Forbidden Things About Sports,” Gioia tackles a host of problems with the culture of sports generally and college sports specifically, among them corrupt recruiting practices, the wildly out-of-whack priorities of coach pay, the physical devastation meted out to ever-growing numbers of young athletes, the sociopathic lust to win, and the creep of the corporate profit-maximizing motive into the world of the university—a phenomenon not limited to the gridiron. All of these are perversions of what sports are supposed to be about.

No argument there.

The one place where I think Gioia misses something is the single place in the essay where he is most dogmatic. After cataloging some of the failures of college sports, Gioia presents his “Six Intrinsic Benefits of Sports”:

Again, no objections. This is an excellent list. I have three kids who just started youth basketball and it’s already been a fantastic opportunity to teach them all six of these things, just as my parents taught me through baseball.

But when Gioia writes “End of story—there are no others,” I have to point out one thing missing from the list, the one that I think provides the basis for all the others: fun.

Remember when sports were fun? The language does. The words play and game, the language of the schoolyard, linger vestigially, suggesting the former place of sports in our culture. Sports were not always so serious. Even the word sport and its derivatives are suggestive, not only as a noun (sportsman, he’s a sport) but as an adjective (a sporting chance, sport fishing) and verb (sporting a new haircut, children sporting in a field of flowers). Take a look at the history of the word sometime, and at the many, many ways it’s used now. If you wanted to get high-falutin’ about playing games, you ventured, of necessity, into Greek—athlete, athletics, athleticism.

Gioia is absolutely right about those six benefits, but I’m not sure those benefits are why people play sports—or not why they used to, anyway. Kids don’t play basketball to bond, they play basketball and bond. Kids don’t play baseball to learn restraint and how to follow rules, they learn restraint and how to follow rules in order to play. They don’t lose at tennis to learn to accept defeat gracefully, they accept defeat gracefully so that they can play again and, just maybe, win. And they want to play because it’s fun.

Ed Poss (1927-2017)

The gratuitous, for-its-own-sakeness of sports and games is important, I think. And once that goes, the other knock-on benefits—teamwork, sportsmanship, hard work, grace in defeat—will not last.

Look around. What most strikes me about modern sports is how not-fun it all is. The vitriolic demands to fire coaches, the wrath at defeat (sharply parodied here), the punishing training, the increasingly obscene smacktalk, the psych-ward obsessiveness of sports commentary, the gleeful Schadenfreude when a rival loses, perhaps above all the gambling—none of it is fun. I watch the ways in which people I know participate in sports, either as fans or players, and wonder, Are you enjoying this?

And the not-fun of college and professional sports is oozing downward all the time. Read this essay by Tim Carney for an eye-opening look at this trend through his experience with his son’s travel baseball team. The task for those who want to enjoy sports despite modern sports culture and who want our kids to enjoy sports too is simply to keep it fun. That’s my goal, at least.

There’s a lot more to unpack here, I’m sure. Visit Gioa’s Substack, subscribe, and read the whole post. It’s worthwhile food for thought. When I first read it Saturday I went to the comments to see if anyone had suggested fun as a possible seventh—and most important—intrinsic benefit for Gioia’s list. There was a brisk back-and-forth going on there, but not a mention of fun. A telling omission. I’m glad to say I checked again this afternoon and at least three other people have raised the point I’m making here.

Glad to know I’m not alone. Maybe we could start a team.