The lightning-bug and the lightning

A recent episode of 372 Pages in which Mike and Conor continue their read through the interminable Tek Kill, the eighth book in a sci-fi detective noir series by William Shatner and ghostwriter Ron Goulart, spotlighted this odd passage:

A tiny needle came jabbing out. It dug into his flesh and delivered a shot of mood-altering drug into his system.

One could point out a number of awkward things in these two sentences, but one of the hosts—I think it was Mike—noted what I did when I heard this: hypodermic needles don’t really dig, do they? At least, one really hopes not.

There’s something off about this description. The verb doesn’t align with what the reader is invited to imagine. Which brought to mind Black Hawk Down.

I last read Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down in high school, before the movie came out. I’ve been meaning to reread it for decades now. It’s a brilliant piece of journalism and vividly written, so I don’t want the following to be construed as criticism, but read these short excerpts and see if you notice something that bothered me even as a high school senior when I read it in 2001:

Two of the three men blown out the back were severely injured. One, Delta Master Sergeant Tim “Griz” Martin, had absorbed the brunt of the blast. The [rocket propelled] grenade had poked a football-sized hole right through the skin of the Humvee, blew on through the sandbags, through Martin, and penetrated the ammo can. (p. 115)

Specialist Spalding was still behind the passenger door in the first truck with his rifle out the window, turned in the seat so he could line up his shots, when he was startled by a flash of light down by his legs. It looked like a laser beam shot through the door and up into his right leg. A bullet had pierced the steel of the door and the window, which was rolled down, and had poked itself and fragments of glass and steel straight up his leg from just above his knee all the way up to his hip. He had been stabbed by the shaft of light that poked through the door. He squealed. (p. 125)

Yurek ran across the road to the car to link up with DiTomasso. He passed the alley and saw the downed helicopter to his right. Just as he arrived, the Volkswagen began rocking from the impact of heavy rounds, thunk thunk thunk thunk. Whatever this weapon was, its bullets were poking right through the car. Yurek and the others all hit the ground. He couldn't tell where the shooting was coming from. (p. 168)

The verb poke doesn’t belong in any of these descriptions.

First, poke is just a funny word. You don’t have to subscribe to the whole cellar door theory of sound to realize that. In these intense descriptions of combat, maiming, and death, poke jars on the ear.

Further, poke suggests a small, relatively gentle action. It doesn’t fit what Bowden describes here. An RPG powerful enough to punch “a football-sized hole” through a Humvee shouldn’t be described as poking, nor should bullet fragments and shrapnel poke themselves—an odd reflexive construction—into a soldier’s body. The misalignment in words and meaning is especially clear in the final example, in which a heavy automatic weapon, loud enough to be heard distinctly over the rest of the fighting, is firing through a vehicle at soldiers taking cover behind it.

Finally, the use of poke sticks out—pokes out?—because the rest of the writing is so good. Notice the other verbs Bowden uses to suggest the violence and danger of combat: blow, penetrate, pierce, stab, rock, etc. These are active and vivid verbs and suited to the gravity of the story. Compare the first example above, which is describing the effects of an RPG hitting a Humvee and the men inside, with his initial description of what happened a page before:

The grenade had cut straight through the steel skin of the vehicle in front of the gas cap and gone off inside, blowing the three men in back right out to the street. (p. 114)

Cut is simple, direct, precise, and appropriately violent. Poke is not.

I’ve always figured this was just a case of the writer seeking variety in the thesaurus. One can only describe projectiles destroying targets so many ways. Whatever the case, it was a miscalculation—and a pervasive one. A word search in the Amazon text returned 27 uses of poke in the book. There’s a reason I remember it over twenty years after reading it.

If good writing happens in the verbs, precisely choosing the verbs is paramount, even—or perhaps especially—for good writers. Per Mark Twain:

“[T]he difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”

Notes on the Churchill kerfuffle

V for Victory? Or accidentally signaling the best response to his critics?

Speaking of The Bridge on the River Kwai, in a revealing moment early in the film the antagonist, Col Saito, speaking to his British counterpart about prisoners who had been shot in an escape attempt, shows pride in his enemy’s behavior: “For a brief moment between escape and death… they were soldiers again.”

Well, last week, for a brief moment between TikTok and college football, people cared about history again.

Background and backlash

Briefly, last week podcaster Darryl Cooper of Martyr Made appeared in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Twitter. Carlson feted Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian” in America, fulsome hyperbole that did Cooper no favors once the discussion started and Cooper ventured his unconventional opinions about World War II. These resulted in immediate controversy.

While early reporting on the interview floated a number of possible points of outrage, including wobbly suggestions of Holocaust denial and—more accurately and damningly—Cooper’s dark insinuations about the Zionists who had financial connections to Winston Churchill, the controversy eventually settled around Cooper’s examination of Churchill’s decision-making and leadership, and not least his description of Churchill as a “psychopath” and “the chief villain” of the war. Churchill’s crimes? Having needlessly antagonized Hitler before the war, bullheadedly refused peace offers during the war, and pushed for things like the strategic bombing of German cities. Cooper even repeats the meme-level cheap shot that Churchill was “a drunk.” (He wasn’t.)

Journalistic outrage-baiting ensued, all conducted in the breathless tone with which I assume Puritans reported the discovery of witches. I found it pretty rich that the same media that justified and celebrated anti-Churchill protests and vandalism in 2020 used a podcaster’s profanation of the same man for clicks. Well, it worked. I couldn’t escape this story as it unfolded.

I don’t intend to wade into the details. Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts, to whom I have referred many times here on the blog, handled those with aplomb in a blistering essay for the Washington Free Beacon. Read that, then follow it up with Roberts’s appearance on the School of War podcast in an episode that dropped just last night. The past week has produced many more apologias for Churchill and critiques of Cooper, but Roberts has done the work and is worth listening to on any subject he’s researched.

For his part, Cooper posted a characteristically discursive response on his Substack, which you can read here.

Hyperreality and post-literate history

What I found interesting and, at first, a little baffling about the controversy from the beginning was the… prosaicness of some of Cooper’s views. Churchill as warmonger, Churchill as manipulator of America, Churchill as the real instigator of the bloodiest war in history, even Churchill as drunk—these are all pretty pedestrian contrarian takes. Pat Buchanan published a book laying out many of these arguments sixteen years ago, and he was drawing on a current of anti-Churchill interpretation that was already decades old. (Roberts does a good job explaining some of the historiography of this controversy on School of War.)

The fact that such perspectives are and ought to be old news to anyone who has studied Churchill or the Second World War even a little bit suggests that most people—journalists, media personalities, podcasters, and the general public—simply haven’t.

For most people, Churchill is a recognizable character with no depth in a simplistic good-and-evil tale rather than a complex real person living through uncertain and dangerous times. This reduction of the man to the icon means that an attack of Cooper’s kind will generate either outrage at the profanation of a sacred image (when, again, we should have heard all this before) or the frisson of the conspiracy theorist discovering forbidden (false) knowledge. Beyond Cooper’s bad history, the fact that this interview generated the controversy that it did is revealing.

It’s this broader context that I’m most interested in, and two essays in particular offer a lot of food for thought in response.

First, writing at Compact, Matthew Walther sees the Carlson-Cooper interview and the resulting controversy as symptoms of a “post-literate history,” there being an “epistemic gulf between the current consensus . . . of practicing historians on any given subject and the attitudes of the ordinary person of general education.” The appetite of the public for charismatic purveyors of dark, hidden truths—usually old, debunked ideas that can still be used to surprise the ignorant—is part of the problem, but historians and educators generally share the blame. Take a few minutes and read the whole essay.

Second, Sebastian Milbank, one of my favorite writers at The Critic, published an essay this morning that only glances across the Cooper controversy as an example of our present absorption into “hyperreality,” an imaginary world shaped by social media that, through information overload and partisan polarization, turns real people and things into symbols and erodes discernment, judgement, and wisdom. Simplification, detachment from reality, the reduction of knowledge and rival truth claims to mere content, and the “openness to everything” of online hyperreality create an environment in which false views appear more inviting, and not only for the ignorant or wicked:

Anyone with a modicum of knowledge will be able to spot the huge gaps in Cooper’s argument here. But what is more interesting is how he came to embrace such a grotesque viewpoint. Cooper isn’t stupid, or wicked, or even ill-informed in a conventional sense. Instead, we could say that he is “overinformed”. He is the product of hyperreality, supersaturated with information to the point that his analytical faculties and sense of reality breaks down. One gets a sense of this in the interview alone, where he describes reading, not systematically, but omnivorously, consuming over eighty books for his podcast on Israel/Palestine, and not being able to recall all the titles.

Milbank’s essay is longer and richer than the discussion surrounding Cooper—and Milbank includes a favorite passage about madness from Chesterton—so be sure to read the whole thing. For an even more dramatic parallel case, including another pertinent Chesterton quotation, see Jonathon Van Maren’s essay on Candace Owens at the European Conservative here.

Caveats and crankery

Churchill lived a long time and involved himself in a lot of things, not always successfully. Far from the “correct” view being the flawless and burnished bronze lion of British defiance in the face of tyranny, Churchill is open to legitimate lines of critique that historians still debate. Irish and Australian critics, for dramatically different reasons, sometimes take a more negative view of Churchill, and he is the object of an entire subfield of anti-imperialist Indian criticism. But all of this is despite the role he played in World War II, and all of these grievances and arguments are subject to evaluation according to the evidence.

Which is the first place Cooper fails. And when Cooper asserts that the reactions to his interview are evidence that he’s correct, he fails even more seriously by falling into a trap I’ve written about here before: crankery.

Cooper is not, as Carlson tried to puff him, an historian. I’ve tried to avoid pointing this out but others, like Niall Ferguson, have been much less polite about it. Cooper is, however, as Walther and Milbank’s essays suggest, a gifted autodidact. But the problem for autodidacts in any field is that their enthusiasm is not a substitute for the basic intellectual formation that formal, guided study by those that have already mastered the subject provides. There is a moral dimension to this as well—enthusiasm and omnivorous reading are no substitutes for sound historical judgement or simple human wisdom.

And so the autodidact blunders into plausible but false theories that, owing to gaps they aren’t even aware of, become their entire frame of reference. “Everything becomes reduced down to a single question or thesis,” as Milbank puts it. Their world view is complete, but too small, according to Chesterton. And if, when questioned on their interpretation, they double down, attack their questioners, or begin to distort their evidence, they risk becoming a crank. Once they begin referring to “them” and an undefined “establishment” with knowing contempt, they’re already there.

This is, more than anything, a good example of why education in history and the humanities more broadly still matters.

Recommended reading

Churchill’s memory lives among those very few men—like Lincoln and Napoleon—who inspire a continuous flow of books. The following are those that I most often recommend:

• Churchill, by Sir John Keegan—An excellent and approachable short biography from a great military historian.

• The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler, by John Lukacs—A good look at a specific episode of Churchill’s life, from his appointment as Prime Minister in May 1940 into the summer, with Hitler’s activities at the same time told in quite revealing parallel.

• Winston’s War: Churchill 1940-1945, by Max Hastings—An excellent study of Churchill’s time as Prime Minister, with a lot of attention devoted to his frustrating relationship with the United States. A good antidote to at least one of Cooper’s claims.

• Churchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew Roberts—The big one, a massive and deeply researched comprehensive biography by an expert who, as I said above, has done the work. It shows.

• Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II, by Michael Burleigh—If you’re interested in the moral and ethical questions raised by the war, this is a more serious and better researched consideration of them than you’ll get from the Carlson interview.

I’d recommend any one of these for a more detailed and nuanced grasp of a great man than any podcast or social media interview can possibly provide.

Bold old voices

This week’s episode of John J Miller’s Great Books podcast covers Casino Royale. An instant must-listen, as you can probably imagine. In answer to Miller’s standard opening question, “Why is X a great book?” guest Graham Hillard replies:

“1950s British mass market fiction is written to pretty much the same standard as 21st-century American literary fiction.”

I think it’s great for two reasons: it inaugurates one of the iconic characters in post-war literature, without dispute, and it is surprisingly excellent in its literary virtues, and by that I mean pacing, characterization, even sentence construction. I think I joked with you in an e-mail that Casino Royale would win a National Book Award if it came out today—that’s a slight exaggeration, but there really is something to the idea that 1950s British mass market fiction is written to pretty much the same standard as twenty-first-century American literary fiction. I absolutely think that if Casino Royale came out today, it would occasion massive coverage of the “bold new voice” variety.

Like the first sentences of Casino Royale, which Miller and Hillard go on to unpack, this is a solid opening. I’ve written about Bond creator Ian Fleming’s craftsmanship as a writer before, including at the basic level of sentence structure back in May.

But what struck me in this introduction was Hillard’s point about the generally high quality of mid-century British genre fiction. Having read Fleming for years and a bunch of Eric Ambler (crime and espionage thrillers) and John Wyndham (science fiction) over the last year, I had noticed this as well—author after author turning out brilliantly structured, beautifully and strongly written novels in accessible genres. What was in the water back then? After finishing Epitaph for a Spy and The Kraken Wakes this summer I set each down and considered what it must have been like, in the 1940s and 50s, to have books like these coming out regularly. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.

Two things occur to me to complicate my nostalgia:

First, high literary quality in genre fiction was not new at the time. If anything, the Flemings and Amblers were carrying on the good work of the Buchans who came before. Good writing is good writing regardless of whether or not it appears in a highbrow form. Respect it wherever it appears. (If anything, I increasingly like good genre writing more because in addition to good writing the author of a thriller, for instance, has to excite the reader.)

Second, is there a form of survivorship bias at work here? If we read only the good stuff left over from a period, it’s not because no one wrote junk at the time. After all, I’m a big believer in Sturgeon’s Law. And yet…

And yet, the gap in quality between the good genre fiction of Fleming’s time and ours is, in my experience, vast. Insuperable. Whatever it was—a more demanding public, tougher editors, skilled authors willing to use their skills simply to entertain, deeper education on the part of writer and reader, a lack of pretension among both—something is missing now.

Tim Powers on chronocentrism and conformism

For the last week I’ve been reading Tim Powers’s 1987 pirate fantasy On Stranger Tides, a book that everyone seems to agree Pirates of the Caribbean couldn’t have come into existence without—even before Disney optioned the title for the fourth one—and that got me watching Powers interviews on YouTube again.

In this interview with a channel called Through a Glass Darkly, host Sean Patrick Hazlett asks, as a wrap-up, “What advice would you give to new writers?” Powers responds with a list of “the old, traditional advice, which is solid-rock true,” and that I have to add is still good advice for people who’ve been writing for years or decades. Here’s the first part of his answer in bullet-list form:

• “Read very widely, read outside of your field, read outside of your time, don’t restrict yourself simply to stuff published since 2000 or 1980 or whatever. You don’t want to be chronocentric.

• “Have as wide a base as you can, chronologically and [in] subject matter. Read mysteries, read plays, read poetry, non-fiction, et cetera.

• “Write a lot. Set yourself a schedule and keep to it. Even if it’s only a thousand words a month, stick to it. Use guilt and fear as motivators. Tell yourself you’re worth nothing if you don’t get the writing done.

• “Get it in front of editors, send it out. Don’t get trapped in a revision whirlpool. A story doesn’t exist until an editor has looked at it. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat.”

He follows this up with an elaboration on his first point of advice:

“Don’t be a conformist. Don’t bend your writing to fit what you see as trends, even if they seem to be mandatory trends. They’re not.”

— Tim Powers

Okay, all that’s true. Then I would say—goes back to chronocentrism—don’t be a conformist. Don’t try to clock what’s selling now, because even if you could correctly gauge that and then write a story, it’s very likely not to be what’s selling now by the time your story comes out. Don’t be a conformist. Don’t bend your writing to fit what you see as trends, even if they seem to be mandatory trends. They’re not. If you say, “Oh this is what they’re buying now. This is what you have to do now in order to get published. There’s some boxes you have to check.” No. Be different. Be a nonconformist. Because if you go along that conformist road, even if it gets published your work is just going to be one more of that generic type, and what’s the value in that? So I would say, ignore trends.

Hear hear.

Powers has said versions of this before—here’s a blog post I wrote last October based on a similar interview conversation—but it’s stated more firmly and in more detail here.

I especially like Powers’s framing of the problem in terms of “chronocentrism.” As I recently told one of my classes, the most neglected form of diversity in our diversity-obsessed age is chronological diversity. Powers is steeped in CS Lewis and loves his non-fiction, so he’s probably got Lewis’s concept of “chronological snobbery” and passages like this from “On the Reading of Old Books” at the back of his mind:

Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. . . . None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

For a similar concept, see Alan Jacobs’s “temporal bandwith.”

Sandbrook, Anglo-Saxons, and mad Americans

I think I’ve said all that I want to say (here and here) about the academic controversy surrounding the term Anglo-Saxon, but I wanted to acknowledge one more news item about it and an appropriate response from a favorite historian.

Earlier this month Cambridge announced that Anglo-Saxon England, the preeminent academic journal in the field, was changing its name to Early Medieval England and its Neighbors. This comes, as Samuel Rubinstein noted at The Critic, during a seeming lull in the Anglo-Saxon wars, one that had suggested to Rubinstein that the controversy had finally petered out.

But after Grendel comes Grendel’s mother, and between institutional inertia and the unsleeping restlessness of intersectional ideology, such a name-change—even if too late to please the activists originally fulminating against the term—was probably inevitable. Perhaps we can look forward to academic presses changing the titles of the thousands of old studies, monographs, and histories using Anglo-Saxon on their covers.

But as Luther said, in a line used by Lewis as an epigraph to The Screwtape Letters, “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” And so Rubinstein linked to this great response to Cambridge’s Twitter announcement from Dominic Sandbrook:

Hear hear.

“A handful of mad Americans” is exactly right. As I noted in my original post on this subject, the chief activity of the small, insular, pettifogging, puritanical, ruthlessly status seeking, and ideologically captive American academy today seems to be to export American neuroses to the rest of the world—ideologically colonizing foreigners and demanding conformity and obedience. This observation isn’t original to me, but it aptly describes the situation. It’s embarrassing. More mockery and an occasional firm “no” to the tiny number of activist scholars who push this kind of thing could help tremendously.

I remarked recently on the irony of mentioning Sandbrook and The Rest is History here only when I had a problem with him, which is rarely, so I wanted to make sure I noted this model reaction to academic nonsense. May his tribe increase.

Read Rubinstein’s latest on the controversy here. And get yourself a good book about the Anglo-Saxons that doesn’t dither over the term Anglo-Saxon. Here’s a good recent one, and here’s a great old one.

Thomas vs Thomas vs Thomas

My wife got me a membership in The Rest is History Club for Christmas, so for the last four months or so I’ve been enjoying the back catalog of Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s bonus episodes as well as the regularly released new ones. These are great fun, and offer a lot of food for thought.

This past week’s club episode ended with an intriguing counterfactual game submitted by a listener: “Of the three executed Tudor-era Thomases—Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer—you have to execute one, imprison one for life, put one of them back in power. How would you decide?”

Holland’s answer:

• Execute: Cromwell

• Back in power: Cranmer

• Imprison: More (“but I’d let him write”)

Sandbrook’s answer:

• Execute: More

• Back in power: Cromwell

• Imprison: Cranmer

My verdict: Holland’s answers are good, not great. Sandbrook’s are wrong at the two most crucial points.

Sandbrook expressed some hesitation about imprisoning Cranmer, preferring to “let him crack on” as Archbishop of Canterbury if he could, but was firm on one answer: “Definitely execute More.” Shortly thereafter:

Sandbrook: I mean, Thomas More’s ultimately disloyal, Tom.

Holland: Not to his God. Not to his God.

Sandbrook: No, but to put God above your king, and your country, is unbe—it’s to put your petty prejudices—

The discussion continues in what I think is a tongue-in-cheek tone. I hope so. Because More had his priorities exactly right.

I was surprised at Sandbrook’s reasoning. Given his jocular John Bull way of playing up his English Protestantism since the show’s Martin Luther episodes I was prepared for some kind of invocation of John Foxe, the slanders in his Acts and Monuments (aka Foxe’s Book of Martyrs) being what I most often see presented as grounds for criticizing More. But the view that More, a good classicist and Christian Humanist, should have been more loyal to the City of Man than to the City of God is a strange one.

It’s funny to me that, given that I probably agree with Sandbrook’s perspective about 90% of the time, whenever I blog about the show I seem to be taking exception to something he’s said. Regardless, kudos to Holland for—again, lightheartedly—sticking up for More.

My own choices:

• Execute: Cromwell, this being the only proper fate for a hatchet man

• Back in power: More, because the state needs more people who are obstructively “disloyal” to tyrants and keep God in his place above state and nation

• Imprison: Cranmer, but, as Holland would for More, “let him write,” since despite my misgivings about him his religious rhetoric in the Book of Common Prayer is second only to the King James Bible in its value to English

Fun stuff, and fun to discuss with my wife afterward. It also occurred to me that, if we could loosen the “execution” requirement, we could make things even more interesting by throwing Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey into the mix.

Might be time to break out my old DVD of A Man for All Seasons.

In the meantime, let me recommend Peter Ackroyd’s Life of Thomas More or, if you’re in a more fictional and speculative frame of mind, RA Lafferty’s Past Master, in which More is saved from the scaffold by agents of a far distant human space colony and asked to untangle their political problems. If you’re curious about the space I carve out for Cranmer’s masterful religious language, definitely read Alan Jacobs’s The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography.

Was John Buchan an anti-Semite?

John Buchan (1875-1940) at work

Several weeks ago I ran across a curious Instagram post about a favorite novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan. In the course of summarizing and praising the novel, the poster added a trigger warning: “The word ‘Jew’ appears ten times in this book.” An oddly specific and ambiguous note. At any rate, I forgot about it about until a few days ago, for reasons I’ll lay out below.

This morning Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s The Rest is History released the last episode in its excellent four-part podcast series on British Fascism. These were magnificent episodes, some of the most enjoyable and informative I’ve listened to. I know a lot more about Weimar and Nazi Germany and the United States in the interwar period than I do about Britain, so it was nice to have my understanding of Oswald Mosley, the British Union of Fascists, and even the Mitford sisters—who frequently and unexpectedly intrude into my reading from that period—so thoroughly and enjoyably expanded.

But there was one coincidental detail presented repeatedly in the historical context for the series that I objected to. As the show set the stage for the emergence of British Fascism and the rise of Mosley and Nazi hangers-on like Unity Mitford, Sandbrook invoked John Buchan’s fiction twice—along with Agatha Christie, GK Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Sapper, the creator of Bulldog Drummond—as examples of British culture’s pervasive atmosphere of anti-Semitic paranoia. In the second episode, he recapped this point, namedropping Buchan again, treating him as a byword for this kind of vulgar conspiracism. The third episode repeated this a final time, but with greater detail and a pretty grim supporting quotation.

Reflecting on a BBC radio interview she gave in 2015, John Buchan scholar Kate Macdonald noted that “far too often, talking about Buchan means talking about The Thirty-Nine Steps, and anti-Semitism, and then the conversation stops.” Thus with The Rest is History.

To be fair, Buchan isn’t the subject of the series, but the accusation that Buchan and his work were anti-Semitic is common enough and unfair enough that it warrants looking into.

As I mentioned, in the third episode Sandbrook quotes from The Thirty-Nine Steps to illustrate the kind of garden-variety anti-Semitic prejudice that notionally fed the rise of fascism. Sandbrook quotes a character called Scudder, an American investigative journalist, who believes he has uncovered a plot by a shadowy group to use an assassination to foment war between Germany and Russia. Sandbrook only quotes one or two lines but here’s more of the conversation for context. The first-person narrator is Richard Hannay:

When I asked why, he said that the anarchist lot thought it would give them their chance. Everything would be in the melting-pot, and they looked to see a new world emerge. The capitalists would rake in the shekels, and make fortunes by buying up wreckage. Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland. Besides, the Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated Russia worse than hell.

“Do you wonder?” [Scudder] cried. “For three hundred years they have been persecuted, and this is the return match for the pogroms. The Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him. Take any big Teutonic business concern. If you have dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von und zu Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English. But he cuts no ice. If your business is big, you get behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the manners of a hog. He is the German business man that gives your English papers the shakes. But if you’re on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now, and he has his knife in the Empire of the Tsar, because his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse location on the Volga.”

This passage is the one most often trotted out as evidence of Buchan’s anti-Semitism, and understandably so. It certainly seems damning, unless you remember that Scudder is a fictional character—and unless you keep reading.

Because Hannay is skeptical from the start. Immediately after the above passage, he wryly observes that, for all their plotting, Scudder’s conspirators don’t seem very successful: “I could not help saying that his Jew-anarchists seemed to have got left behind a little.” Hannay suspects that Scudder is “spinning me a yarn” but takes a liking to him in spite of it and offers the frightened man shelter. When Scudder is killed and Hannay goes on the run to avoid being framed for the murder, Hannay takes Scudder’s diary. Reading it confirms not Scudder’s suspicions, but Hannay’s: “The little man had told me a pack of lies. All his yarns about the Balkans and the Jew-Anarchists and the Foreign Office Conference were eyewash.”

And just in case we missed it, Sir Walter Bullivant, a British intelligence chief and Hannay’s savior and future boss, drives the point home again later:

If only I had more confidence in Scudder’s judgement. The trouble about him was that he was too romantic. He had the artistic temperament, and wanted a story to be better than God meant it to be. He had a lot of odd biases, too. Jews, for example, made him see red. Jews and the high finance.

The plot, as it turns out, has been orchestrated by German military intelligence. In fact, Hannay will contend with German spies in the two novels that followed his debut, Greenmantle and Mr Standfast, in both of which the menace is explicitly Prussian.

So much for this example—and for judging a book by counting words. Context and authorial intent matter. But if it were just a matter of quoting The Thirty-Nine Steps’s deranged journalist out of context, why does the accusation persist?

In John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier, biographer Andrew Lownie notes that Buchan’s fiction is “certainly scattered with disparaging comments about Jews.” Ursula Buchan, in her excellent Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps, is more specific: “the charge of anti-Semitism . . . surfaces from time to time, mainly as a result of about a dozen unfavourable comments by fictional characters, mostly to be found in the Hannay books.”

The fact that these comments almost always come from the mouths of fictional characters—often Americans—is important. Beyond these, which shouldn’t be construed as Buchan’s own opinions, there are a few stereotyped Jewish characters and slangy references. Something expensive might have “a Jewish price,” for instance. As unfortunate as these are, they are merely trading in the stock elements of the fiction of that time, just as Chinese laundry workers, black Pullman porters, and Irish beat cops show up in comparable American fiction. But even judging by that standard, Lownie argues that “Buchan was no worse and a great deal better than many of his contemporaries such as Dorothy L Sayers and Sapper.” He also points out, as does Roger Kimball in an excellent 2003 essay at The New Criterion, that the stereotypes and negative comments disappear from Buchan’s fiction as the Nazis rise in prominence—a detail suggestive of Buchan’s searching moral self-reflections.

For of Buchan himself, rather than his stories, there can be no doubt. Lownie understates things when he writes that “It is difficult to find any evidence of anti-Semitism in Buchan’s own personal views.” He notes the close, long-lasting friendships he shared with Jewish friends like financier Lionel Phillips, to whom he dedicated Prester John, and his commitment to Zionism. Ursula Buchan notes that he maintained this support “at a time when Tory politicians were thought to damage their chances of preferment” by doing so and that he was one of only fifty MPs who signed a 1934 motion denouncing the treatment of Jews in Germany. The next year,

he spoke at a rally in Shoreditch organised by the National Jewish Fund, describing Zionism as “a great act of justice. It was reparation for the centuries of cruelty and wrong, which had stained the record of nearly every Gentile people.” His name was inscribed in the Golden Book of the Jewish National Fund of Israel. It also appeared in a Nazi publication, Who’s Who in Britain (Frankfurt, 1938), the entry reading: ‘Tweedsmuir, Lord: Pro-Jewish activity.’

“If anything,” she writes, the evidence shows that Buchan “was a philo-Semite. How could it be otherwise for a man deeply imbued in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and in Jewish historical culture?” Lownie, Allan Massie, and others have also noted the special cultural affinity Buchan felt for the Jews.

If Buchan is personally unimpeachable in this regard, it is worth returning to Sandbrook’s point in using Buchan as a stand-in for all the anti-Semitism in the literature of his age. Sandbrook describes Buchan’s books as being filled with Jewish conspiracies. (Sandbrook is definitely accurate to ascribe to Buchan suspicion of flappers and the general Roaring ‘20s lifestyle. I think it’s meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek but, frankly, I find his scorn for it fun and refreshing considering how much that period has been romanticized.) Lownie and Ursula Buchan both deal with this handily, as I hope I’ve shown. But it’s worth considering just what kind of threats he did fill his books with.

Certainly Buchan’s thrillers teem with conspiracies, but the enemies of a Buchan hero are typically foreign or politically radical. The most frequent culprits are Germans—The Power-House, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, and Mr Standfast all concern German plots against Britain. There are also the Bolshevik kidnappers of Huntingtower and the Irish extortionist and mystic Dominick Medina of The Three Hostages, one of whose victims is Jewish. Often these foreign villains operate disguised as upper-class Brits—the implication being that it’s an easily convincing cover.

But just as often the villains really are British, as with The Dancing Floor’s dissipated pervert Shelley Arabin, who abused the population of a remote Greek island to the point of turning them to paganism, or, most chillingly, the devil-worshiping parishioners of a quiet Scottish village in Witch Wood. And in at least two novels, the hero is part of the conspiracy! Midwinter concerns a Jacobite spy preparing the way for Bonnie Prince Charlie during the ‘45 and The Blanket of the Dark is about a young man, snatched from an obscure monastery, at the center of an attempted coup against Henry VIII, who himself appears as a sinister villain.

Christopher Hitchens once noted Buchan’s powers of sympathy across the lines ordinarily drawn between factions, and in most of his stories the heroes find honorable and sympathetic enemies they can respect and who remind the hero that the enemy is human, too. The best and most moving example is the German woman who shelters Hannay in Greenmantle. Hannay even feels sympathy for the Kaiser in that novel.

“It is quite impossible to imagine him doing somebody an injury or an injustice on the grounds of their social or ethnic origin.”

— Christopher Hitchens

By the same token, the villains are often assisted by Englishmen, either out of pure venality or because they have been ideologically compromised—both signs of moral weakness. But even among these a rare man can prove himself courageous and upright, as the leftwing pacificist Launcelot Wake in Mr Standfast or the testy modernist poet John Heritage in Huntingtower convincingly show. “It is quite impossible,” Hitchens writes in his introduction to The Three Hostages, “to imagine [Buchan] doing somebody an injury or an injustice on the grounds of their social or ethnic origin.” What matters to Buchan is not ethnicity, class, or even political persuasion, but personal character, honor, and virtue, and of the latter most especially courage.

Why does any of this matter? Why go on about this for however many words this post has reached at this point?

First, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Buchan it’s the honor of fairness, and I hate to see a man I admire used as a byword for a fault of which he is innocent. Second, because Buchan is one of the kind of patron saints of this blog. I’ve enjoyed the last two years of John Buchan June and felt like I owed it to any of my handful of readers who have wondered about Buchan and anti-Semitism to sort through this.

And lastly, to bring it back around to The Rest is History, ever since their excellent episodes on Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, and Tolkien, I’ve thought that Buchan would make a marvelous subject for their treatment. He led a long, full, eventful life connected to many other remarkable people—including Sandbrook’s beloved Stanley Baldwin. Just recently I was reminded that it was Buchan who first told American journalist Lowell Thomas that he should look into the desert guerrilla activities of one TE Lawrence. Such a life deserves to be remembered well, and his stories to be appreciated.

More if you’re interested

The BBC radio piece on Buchan’s life and work linked above is an excellent short introduction and features interviews with literary scholar Kate Macdonald, novelist William Boyd, and two of Buchan’s grandchildren, James Buchan and the aforementioned biographer Ursula Buchan, whose book I strongly recommend. For John Buchan June for I’ve been reading the nicely designed paperback Authorised Editions from Polygon, which are endorsed by the John Buchan Society and feature excellent introductions by writers including Hitchens, Allan Massie, Hew Strachan, and former director of MI5 Stella Rimington. Buchan’s books are in the public domain and can be found for free online or in many poorly turned out print-on-demand editions on Amazon, but these are worth seeking out.

A good visit with Bookish Questions

Last week I was honored to talk to Alan Cornett of the excellent Cultural Debris podcast about my latest book, The Snipers. This video interview is part of a new short-form author interview project called “Bookish Questions.” I had a great time and hope y’all will enjoy this ten-minute chat.

Among the topics of conversation were not only The Snipers but also some of my other work, what I’m reading, what I recommend, what I’m working on and planning ahead for right now, and why it is that I gravitate toward writing historical fiction.

Be sure to check out Cultural Debris on the podcast platform of you choice. If you want good episodes to start with, I’ve enjoyed Alan’s interviews with Eduard Habsburg, Archduke of Austria, Tolkien scholar Holly Ordway, medievalist and CS Lewis scholar Jason M Baxter, author and literary scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson, and CS Lewis scholar Michael Ward.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for watching!

Price and Keegan on walking the ground

Yesterday on my commute I listened to the latest episode of The Rest is History, “Viking Sorcery,” in which Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook interview archaeologist Neil Price, author of Children of Ash and Elm, a massive archaeological and historical study of the Norse, which I read two summers ago.

Holland begins by reading a striking passage from Price’s earlier book The Viking Way. Having relocated from Britain to the University of Uppsala, Price realizes how the landscape of the Norse homeland is reshaping his understanding:

I was disturbed by the fact that the ancestral stories of the North should seem so much more intelligible when looking out over those Swedish trees than they had done while sitting in my office in England.

Price himself elaborates on this point not long into the interview:

“[W]hatever you’re studying about the past, it really does help to go to the places that you’re talking about to see the landscapes.”

I was conscious when I wrote The Viking Way—it came out in 2002 originally, so it’s twenty years old now—that sort of sentiment that you quoted about me being disturbed by the fact that those ancestral stories seem so much more intelligible when looking out over Swedish trees, there’s a risk that that’s a kind of romanticizing view. There’s me thinking, ‘Wow, I’m in touch with the Viking Age,’ and of course I’m not. So you have to guard against that as well. But I do think that, whatever you’re studying about the past, it really does help to go to the places that you’re talking about to see the landscapes, to experience what a Scandinavian winter is like. When you look at, say, reconstruction drawings, it’s always summer. They’re never sort of hunkered down in a snowed-in building, and yet that’s a very large part of the year. So to sort of try and get that kind of experiential aspect of things I think is quite important.

What Price calls the “experiential” dimension of historical understanding is what Chesterton called “the inside of history”—a recurring theme of my work as a historian, teacher, and novelist, and of my reflections on this blog. Getting at this dimension is not just a matter of trying to grasp alien minds or dressing up in a lost peoples’ clothing but in feeling and understanding the actual physical places where they lived and died.

Price’s discussion immediately reminded me of one of the passages that first brought this home to me as a grad student and reshaped how and why I study history. From Sir John Keegan’s great study The Face of Battle, first published in 1976:

Anecdote should certainly not be despised, let alone rejected by the historian. But it is only one of the stones to his hand. Others—reports, accounts, statistics, map-tracings, pictures and photographs and a mass of other impersonal material—will have to be coaxed to speak, and he ought also to get away from papers and walk about his subject wherever he can find traces of it on the ground. A great pioneer military historian, Hans Delbrück in Germany in the last century, demonstrated that it was possible to prove many traditional accounts of military operations pure nonsense by mere intelligent inspection of the terrain.

This passage took root in my mind as “walking the ground,” something I have few resources to do but which always, always helps when I can. My writing of Griswoldville was based closely not only on the specific locations around Macon where the battle takes place—which I walked in appropriate winter weather—but on the landscapes of north and central Georgia generally: the hills, farms, fields, orchards, pecan groves, and the weather. The land and what it is like is a fundamental part of that story. And, naturally, that understanding transferred to my historical narrative of the battle for the Western Theater of the Civil War Blog a few years ago. I work hard on everything I write, but my own best work always has walking the ground behind it.

A small but important point in Price’s chat with Holland and Sandbrook, but the entire interview is excellent. I strongly recommend it.

The Vinland Sagas on City of Man Podcast

It’s a been a somewhat slow month here on the blog. Work, travel, illness, and some exciting personal developments have conspired to keep me from blogging much apart from announcing the publication of The Snipers and my commitment to John Buchan June. Fortunately there is plenty of that, and I hope y’all have enjoyed that as much as I have my reading and writing for it.

But mercifully I did find time last week to record another episode of City of Man’s ongoing Medieval Times series with my friends Coyle and David. The subject: the Vinland Sagas, concerning the family of Eirik the Red and their discovery and brief, violent settlement of North America around the year 1000.

In the episode we cover the background, including a refresher on just what exactly sagas are as a genre of literature, the Norwegian and Icelandic antecedents to the continuous westward sailing of the Norse, the personalities involved, the events of The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red’s Saga, what to make of the sagas in historiographical terms, and geography, outlawry, ghosts, polygamy, religious conversion, sword-wielding pregnant women, and much, much more.

We conclude by asking why it was that the Norse settlements on Iceland lasted while those in Vinland didn’t. We also make plenty of recommendations for further reading and viewing, both good and bad.

Listen to the episode on iTunes, Google, Spotify, Sticher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or by listening in the embedded player in this post. You can find the episode’s page at the Christian Humanist Radio Network site, including links to our viewing recommendations, here.

Thanks for listening! I hope y’all enjoy.

Theatre chauvinism

Back in February I wrote in praise of an episode of the military history podcast School of War in which film critic Sonny Bunch appeared as a guest and talked about war movies for an hour. This morning, Bunch popped up on another show I sometimes listen to, The Charles CW Cooke Podcast, to talk about film, film criticism, and the state of filmmaking and cinema-going. It was an enjoyable short discussion and I commend it to y’all.

The part I was left thinking most deeply about during my morning and inter-campus commutes today concerned movie theatres. Bunch, in the course of talking about the artistic difference between films produced to be shown in theatres and those produced for streaming services, says: “Look, I’m a theatre chauvinist, in the sense that I think that if you don’t see a movie in theatres, it is—you’re watching TV.”

I don’t know that I’d go quite as far as Bunch, but I endorse the basic sentiment.

Like Cooke—who says something on the topic near the end of the discussion—I’ve been hearing about the death of movie theatres for a long time. I’ve also been thinking a lot about why I hope that doesn’t happen.

First, we may not put on suits and ties for a trip to the cinema any more, but there is something special about seeing a movie as an event. I don’t mean the mindless blockbuster “event” movies that studios have built their budgets around, I mean making an event out of seeing a movie—any movie. Watching a movie at home with my wife is different from taking her to a movie, and I hope the latter remains an option.

Second, for purely technical reasons, seeing a film on a big screen and with a theatre sound system is far beyond anything most people can afford or would be willing to set up for themselves at home. Seeing it in theatres makes a big difference, and even if you only see a film that way once and watch it dozens of times on home media later, the theatrical viewing will form the basis of how you see it again later. And if you do only see it once, as will almost certainly be the case, for me, with Glass Onion or the new All Quiet on the Western Front, it’s better to have seen it in a form that allows the filmmakers to make their best case for their work.

Third, for all the understandable complaints about the way people behave in theatres now, there is something good about seeing a film with a large group of strangers. As I noted when I saw Dune, a movie I wasn’t really looking forward to and was pleasantly surprised by, my enjoyment was enhanced by seeing it with an appreciative crowd. Ditto Top Gun: Maverick and The Batman. Ditto my very first visit to a theatre, The Fellowship of the Ring, an experience I still think about. There is something about communal, in-the-flesh entertainment that can’t be attained watching the same film at home in your pajamas. It’s the difference between a live concert and an .mp3 on your iPod.

Finally, and—to me—most importantly for the sake of the art, theatres demand something of the moviegoer. Virtually every other form of entertainment in the Dominion of Content today is tailored to the consumer and his habits and convenience and this, as I’ve mildly suggested, is a bad thing. Seeing a film in a theatre, on the other hand, is a discipline. You see it at the scheduled time, not whenever. You can’t pause it. You can’t leave and come back to it without missing something. And with a big screen and the lights properly dimmed you can’t see or do anything else. It’s one of the few places left to us that demand real attention, and going to a movie and doing so trains you in a liturgy of attention.

It also demands certain behaviors of you vis-à-vis other people. To go back to my third point, the fact that we recognize talking, texting, doom scrolling, or being a general distraction during a movie as rude is a sign that something important is happening to us, something too important to be disrupted, regardless of what the film is. And when it’s a good movie, one worthy of the attention we give it (and there is a give-and-take between filmmaker and audience), that discipline is all the more rewarding.

That’s what I think we risk losing if theatres die, and why I think a little of Bunch’s “theatre chauvinism” is more than justified.

Deliverance: a recommendation and a detail

James Dickey and Burt Reynolds on the set of the film adaptation of Dickey’s novel Deliverance

This morning the latest episode of John J Miller’s Great Books Podcast dropped and I was excited to see its subject: James Dickey’s first and greatest novel, Deliverance.

Miller’s guest is Cat Baab-Muguira, who has previously appeared for an episode on Poe and written a book about Poe’s unlikely self-help guidance, which is high on my to-read list. Miller and Baab-Muguira have a really excellent discussion not only of the plot and extraordinarily rich characters, writing, and themes of Deliverance, but also of the film adaptation and Dickey’s life and reputation. (I have some secondhand Dickey stories of my own, courtesy of a neighbor and former coworker.) They discuss the novel’s masculinity especially well, refusing to drop into the oversimplification du jour of “toxic masculinity,” and they handle the most infamous elements of the story deftly, not parking on the sensationalism of it but digging into the layers of meaning Dickey applied to his story. This is one of the best episodes of the show I’ve heard.

But—every time they said that the novel takes place in “northwest Georgia” I yelled at the radio, “northeast!”

This was a really strange detail to goof up, but they repeated it five or six times and so confidently that I began to worry that I’d gotten it wrong. But nope, here’s the novel itself, as Ed talks with his wife the morning of the big canoe trip’s departure for the mountains:

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go okay.

Even Wikipedia has this wrong. Which, as I said, is strange, because every carefully chosen detail of the novel suggests the northeast Georgia mountains. (And there’s no disputing where the film was shot.) The drive northward from Atlanta seems pretty clearly to be that toward Gainesville and points north—I’m old enough to remember changing landscapes and roadside scenes very much like those Dickey describes—and the small towns, mountains, rivers, woods, vegetation, and especially the massive gorge described by Dickey match those of my neck of the woods. And this is important because the setting was important to Dickey and the story. Northwest Georgia is my friend Sam at All the Biscuits in Georgia’s territory and, with all due respect to that area, it’s an entirely different region from “the mountains.”

Again, this is an otherwise excellent episode of The Great Books Podcast. I just had to get that down in writing somewhere before I could move on with my day. If you’ve read Deliverance you know us hillbillies can’t let things go.

You can listen to the episode at the link above or in the podcasting app of your choice, and I strongly recommend you do. Baab-Muguira’s book on Poe is called Poe for your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least Likely Self-Help Guru. It’s on my birthday wishlist and I hope to read it soon.

I wrote about Deliverance here a couple times last year: first in reference to outsiders’ prurient interest in what Flannery O’Connor called the grotesque; second, having been moved to reread the novel, as an illustration of John Gardner’s idea of the “vivid and continuous fictional dream;” and finally in my reading year-in-review, in which I decided it was the best novel I read in 2022.