Twisters

PhDs and Hillbillies—Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones unite to chase storms in Twisters

It’s been a slow year for movies in the Poss household, with Dune: Part Two and The Wild Robot being two of only three movies we’ve gotten really excited about. Over the weekend my wife and I finally got a chance to see the third, Twisters, after having to cancel plans to see it several times over the summer. We weren’t disappointed.

Twisters is old enough news now that I won’t recap the plot in any detail. Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a former meteorology PhD student who got several friends killed in an experiment. When Javi (Anthony Ramos), the only other survivor, approaches her about a new opportunity to learn more about tornadoes using new portable military radar, she agrees to a brief return to the field to look things over. With Javi and his corporately-sponsored team in Oklahoma, Kate meets Tyler Owens (Glenn Powell), a cocky amateur with a wildly popular YouTube channel. Then a monster storm arrives.

As a movie, Twisters is rock-solid old-fashioned entertainment, with good acting and a well-structured, suspenseful script that also makes room for much more realistic and nuanced characters than the original. Given the format in which we finally saw Twisters—projected on an inflatable outdoor screen with a portable sound system—I can’t fairly comment on a lot of the technical aspects of the movie. But despite the setting in which we saw it the movie looked and sounded great. I learned afterward that it was shot on 35mm film, which is a credit to the filmmakers. I hope to watch it again soon.

But while Twisters’ story and the technical aspects were good, they are not what made me want to write about it.

When the movie came out, our political schoolmarms were affronted that the movie did not lecture its audience on climate change. (The byline on that Salon piece sounded familiar, and, sure enough, that’s the same guy who wanted 1917 to sit the audience down for a talk on nationalism.) Again, to the filmmakers’ credit, the director explicitly stated in interviews that movies aren’t for “preaching”: “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”

Hear hear. And yet, while Twisters does not “put forward a message” in the sense of “preaching,” like all well-crafted stories it does have something to say. And like all well-crafted stories, it does so not through speeches but through its characters.

This begins when Kate, tagging along with Javi’s well-funded storm-chasers, first meets the crowdfunded livestreaming Tyler. The two sides are explicitly set in opposition as “the PhDs” on Kate and Javi’s side and “hillbillies” on Tyler’s. Javi’s company receives funding in exchange for data, and Tyler receives YouTube money and adulation from his viewers in exchange for risking his life to chase storms. It’s a familiar American dynamic in microcosm—elites vs populists.

But while Twisters introduces these two sides in opposition, it doesn’t hold them there. Both sides have hidden depths. Beneath their slick equipment and university backgrounds, Kate and Javi genuinely care about using their research to help people, and beneath his media-hungry machismo, Tyler has actual scientific knowledge and wants to help, too. Neither is blameless—one takes money from a shady real estate mogul, the nearest thing the movie has to a villain, and the other hawks t-shirts. Despite all this, they are more alike than different, and both want to help people.

This last point is important, because the key moment in bringing Kate and Tyler together, working toward a common goal, is a small town rodeo, an event that opens with the national anthem and is presented completely unironically. There is no wink or condescension toward the people at the rodeo, and, significantly, it is here that Tyler first opens up to Kate and the two begin working together. Twisters is the first movie I can remember in a long time that unequivocally presents small-town American life as good and worth preserving, and the suspense of the film’s final act comes not only from whether Kate’s experiment will finally succeed, but whether Kate and Tyler can save a town in the path of a once-in-a-generation tornado. Why? Because the people there are worth saving, period, regardless of their political affiliation or whom they vote for.

Twisters does not preach, no, but it presents a vision of an America where the elites and the people, the PhDs and the hillbillies, work better together. That demands a common goal, and on one side realizing that the people are more than data or raw material, and on the other realizing that the elites are people, too, and being willing to work alongside them toward a common goal.

This may not be a life-changing movie or high art, but Twisters is well-crafted and both entertains and uplifts. That’s rare enough in this day and age, but Twisters also tells a story of what can united Americans, which is worth contemplating during an election year—or any year.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

After a slight delay, I’m pleased to introduce a new project that may or may not become an annual event on the blog. I’m calling it Chestertober, a dedication of the month of Halloween to the work of GK Chesterton, the prophet of the kind of madcap but meaningful topsy-turvydom that Halloween at its best embodies. For this inaugural Chestertober I wanted to look at some of Chesterton’s novels, and I figured I would start with Chesterton’s first: The Napoleon of Notting Hill, published in 1904.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill begins in 1984. A king still rules England, but only as a formality—he is selected at random from among the citizens. Real power is exercised by the bland professional functionaries of a smooth, efficient, and utterly joyless technocratic state, a state that has gradually absorbed and homogenized the entire world.

The last holdout, Nicaragua, has recently fallen, and in the novel’s opening chapter a group of London bureaucrats encounter the deposed Nicaraguan president wandering the city alone. They witness him cutting up a poster to make ribbons with the national colors of his country and, failing to find any red paper, he soaks some paper in his own blood and pins it to the breast of his uniform jacket. The government functionaries treat the former president to lunch at a café, where he makes his pitiful case to them before they go their separate ways. Most of them revile his backward, tragic attachment to his former country. One, a small, wide-eyed man named Auberon Quin, is intrigued. They find out later that, after this encounter, the president died of heartbreak, alone.

Not long after, to the surprise of his unimaginative bureaucratic friends, the eccentric Auberon receives word that he has been selected as the next King of England.

Auberon, a prototype of hipster irony, thinks this is a grand joke. He underscores the absurdity of his own position by reinstating medieval titles, honors, and customs, requiring strict court etiquette and elaborate costume, and issuing a charter to all the neighborhoods of London granting them specific rights and duties under him as their sovereign. Heraldry and courtesy make a comeback. The bureaucratic types bridle at the uncomfortable robes and chains of office that King Auberon insists upon, but beyond the superficial trappings of pennants and coats of arms and sumptuary codes business continues pretty much as usual. No one, least of all Auberon, takes any of this very seriously.

No one until a young man from Pump Street, Notting Hill named Adam Wayne. Having been a child when Auberon ascended the throne and surprised and annoyed everyone with his charter and reforms, Wayne grows up in the world Auberon created and sees it with utter sincerity. The red and gold of Notting Hill’s coat of arms is dear to him, and he does not find the idea of Notting Hill as a place with cherished customs and a distinct identity born of the people who share life there a joke.

So when the bureaucrats propose a massive new highway project that will obliterate Pump Street, Wayne, as Provost of Notting Hill, begs audience of King Auberon and appeals to him to spare his neighborhood. And he is shocked to discover that Auberon only thinks him amusing and that, to the bureaucrats who actually make the decisions, Pump Street is mere raw material for their projects. The road will go through. Defending Notting Hill is up to Adam Wayne.

And so a war begins. After raising a few hundred men from some of the other London boroughs under Auberon’s charter, the bureaucrats, chief among them a cold-blooded calculator named Barker, launch an invasion of Notting Hill meant to crush Wayne’s resistance movement and force compliance with the road project. Wayne’s men, knowing the neighborhood and its streets and byways, allow the army to penetrate to Portobello Road and then turn out the streetlamps. Most of Barker’s army is lost and the survivors are driven back to Auberon in humiliating defeat.

The war escalates, with larger and larger forces brought against Wayne and his neighborhood army and Wayne resorting to more and more desperate stratagems to defend Notting Hill, like building barricades out of stolen hansom cabs—thus protecting his streets and depriving the enemy of mobility. Finally, like a besieged medieval lord on the verge of defeat, Wayne sallies forth from Notting Hill, striking south into Kensington before apparently being halted and surrounded at the local waterworks. Barker is delighted, thinking Wayne finally defeated, but then Wayne issues an ultimatum—surrender and guarantee Notting Hill’s rights under the charter or Wayne will empty the reservoir and flood London.

This is not the end—there is a coda in which the war is renewed and finally ended ten years later, with Auberon abdicating to fight on Wayne’s side against the forces of Barker and the rest of the technocratic state—but this is a good place to leave off. Without giving anything away, the final chapter, a dialogue among the wounded through the long night after the last battle, is among the most moving scenes in Chesterton’s fiction.

Chesterton was only thirty when The Napoleon of Notting Hill was published, and it is remarkable for a first novel for its control, its imaginative world, and its thematic richness. Its characters, as heightened as any in Chesterton’s fiction, nevertheless feel like real, recognizable people, not mere avatars for the isms Chesterton wishes to pit against each other. Quin and Wayne are the highlights, but the many side characters, especially the quietly villainous Barker, contribute to the teeming, energetic feel of the book. And while not having the breakneck plotting of his fictional masterpiece, The Man Who Was Thursday, it is more tightly and briskly paced than some of his more meandering later novels. In some of those the ideas threaten to overwhelm the the story, but The Napoleon of Notting Hill feels always like a marvelous fable first.

And what is the point of this fable? The Napoleon of Notting Hill is Chesterton’s anthem to localism. Pump Street, with its handful of shabby shops, is an irrational place to love, but Wayne loves it not out of some rational, material conclusion. That’s the way Barker’s type thinks. For these deracinated globalists, all places everywhere are fundamentally interchangeable and attachment to home is a risible relic, especially in the face of Progress. All their studies and statistics show that the road through Notting Hill will be a quantifiable improvement, and so the people must bow to the greater good.

No, Wayne loves Pump Street not because it is perfect or beautiful or scientifically useful to do so, but because it is home. The heraldic trappings and ceremony only allow him to act out his love in visible ways. The love is already there; the ritual deepens it by giving it shape.

And so The Napoleon of Notting Hill arrays sincerity on one side against detached irony and chilly pragmatism on the other. It is easy to imagine it taking place today, especially given the way the clique at the top scoff at Wayne and the terrifying speed with which Barker and the bureaucrats, in their assurance of progressive righteousness, move from disdain to brutal violence. What is heartening in the novel’s tragic, almost Arthurian ending is that Auberon allows himself, at last, to be won over by Wayne. What had started as a joke at everyone’s expense transforms him, suggesting that even the ironic still have hope since they still have a sense of humor.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill may not be the most famous of Chesterton’s novels but it is deservedly well-remembered. It has all the best qualities of his later fiction and few of their faults, but most importantly it is a fun, rollicking adventure in a strange near-future Edwardian dystopia. Wayne’s defense of Notting Hill is genuinely thrilling in places, and I’ve read several times that this novel has been a favorite of urban guerrillas like Michael Collins. But in addition to its fun and odd story, it presents a compelling vision of the goodness of place and the ever-present need to protect hearth and home, to defend the small in the face of Leviathan.

The Frog Pond

One of the things I’ve most enjoyed since I began studying Poe’s life more deeply and systematically a few years ago is his running feud with the Boston literary elite. Poe called them “Frogpondians,” as if they were a bunch of frogs croaking at each other in a Boston park, and faulted them for plagiarism, uncritical public appraisal of each other,* slavish imitation of British styles, false humility in the face of their white-knuckled grip on American letters,** and—my point here—self-righteous uniformity of opinion, a uniformity they didn’t intend to limit to themselves.

Yesterday a cartoonist that I follow on Instagram cheerfully announced that he had “checked his registration”—i.e., voter registration—and cheerfully reminded us to go check ours, too. This came with a collage of glossy, cheerful images of his preferred presidential candidate and her running mate. If you catch my drift.

This didn’t bother me so much as make me tired, especially when I noticed the small print: “Comments have been limited on this post.” A well-to-do cartoonist, with a line of “merch” and a TV show, stumping for the same phony candidate with the same phony excitement as everyone else in his milieu… When people like me complain that actors should act, cartoonists should cartoon, and athletes should athlete without sharing their political opinions, it isn’t so much the fact of their sharing opinions as the sameness of those opinions that I find so wearying.

I’ve been thinking about all of this for a while, anyway, especially since Alan Jacobs shared his three-strike system for choosing whether to bother with a work of contemporary fiction. Author lives in Brooklyn? Three strikes. Book is set anywhere in New York City? Two strikes. Author has an MFA, or lives in San Francisco, or the book is set in the present? One strike.

This might seem arbitrary—though I understood immediately what this system was designed to detect—but Jacobs’s aim is to avoid the tedium of the monoculture:

Literary fiction in America has become a monoculture in which the writers and the editors are overwhelmingly products of the same few top-ranked universities and the same few top-ranked MFA programs . . . and work in a moment that prizes above all else ideological uniformity. Such people tend also to live in the same tiny handful of places. And it is virtually impossible for anything really interesting, surprising, or provocative to emerge from an intellectual monoculture. 

After laying out his strike system, Jacobs continues:

I am not saying that any book that racks up three strikes cannot be good. I am saying that the odds against said book being good are enormous. It is vanishingly unlikely that a book that gets three strikes in my system will be worth reading, because any such book is overwhelmingly likely to reaffirm the views of its monoculture.

See numbers 9 and 12 in this list of “Warning Signs that You are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture” from Ted Gioia.

Occasionally you can witness an up-and-comer being absorbed into the monoculture. Another favorite web cartoonist achieved surprising success doodling in a parttime museum job in a rural area and, after a few years, moved to New York City to be part of the webcomic scene there. A sharp decline in quality followed. The artwork might have improved, but the jokes conformed quickly to the political standards of the terminally online. The cartoonist I’d enjoyed so much disappeared into the frog pond.

And woe unto the artist who fails to adhere perfectly to the monoculture! The civic-minded cartoonist who reminded me to check my voter registration yesterday was subject of a brief pile-on a few years ago when it came out that he had once said mildly pro-life things online. The obsequious apologies necessary to remain in the good graces of the right-minded were duly performed. And it’s hard, of course, not to interpret politically-tinged messages like the one yesterday with past incidents like that in mind.

That croaking sound you hear is the frog pond, and the frogs want you to register to vote.

* One of my biggest surprises in reading about this specific point was that “puff,” meaning to falsely praise and promote, usually quid pro quo—as in writing a “puff piece”—was already in common use in Poe’s day. Poe hated puffing.

** Monopolies can easily outlast the people who establish them. Why else are we still boring high schoolers with Emerson, Thoreau, and other Brahmins, and why else is the American Revolution still presented as a predominantly New England thing?

Martin and Lewis, envy and fascism

No, not that Martin and Lewis!

This morning a friend passed along an insightful Facebook post from science fiction author Devon Eriksen regarding George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. The series, Eriksen argues, is unfinishable because what Martin wants to do with it clashes with the form. His story naturally inclines in a direction he refuses to take, leading to the current yearslong stall-out.

And why does Martin refuse to follow his story where the form leads it? “Because he’s a socialist,” Eriksen writes. “And a boomer.”

This combination, part deliberate, part instinctual, gives Martin an inflexible cynicism toward heroes and heroism, a cynicism that has always clearly marked his work. And not just cynicism: people like Martin

want to convince themselves that anything which appears good is secretly evil, actually, and that anyone who makes them feel or look bad is obviously evil because reasons. So when they see a hero, they tend to call him a fascist. . . . [I]n George's world, heroism must be a sham or a weakness, because then George's own bad character is wisdom and enlightenment, instead of just lack of moral virtue.

I seem to remember some very old admonitions against calling good evil and evil good.

I’m less convinced by the generational dimension of this critique—generational labels being a kind of materialist zodiac as far as I’m concerned—but I think Eriksen is onto something with regard to Martin’s vocal leftwing politics. One line in particular struck a chord with me: “Socialism’s motivational core is envy, and its one underlying rule is ‘thou shalt not be better than me’.”

This brought to mind one of the concluding lines of CS Lewis’s essay “Democratic Education,” which was published in April 1944, at the height of World War II: “Envy, bleating ‘I’m as good as you’, is the hotbed of Fascism.”

Envy also leads to bad art, or to no art at all.

Lewis’s insight is especially ironic given what prompted Eriksen’s post in the first place. In a blog post from late August, Martin lamented “war everywhere and fascism on the rise,” leading to this slightly unfair but funny riposte:

 
 

Dissidents in the Soviet Union composed entire books in their heads until they could scribble them down on toilet paper and smuggle them out despite the threat of torture and imprisonment. But then again, writers like Solzhenitsyn were geniuses, and actually believed in something.

You can find Lewis’s “Democratic Education” online or in the slim paperback Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays, which is one of my favorite collections of his work. And for a writer with a stellar work ethic, who got his books done 350 words at a time come hell or high water (or fascism, presumably), here’s historian Thomas Kidd on the slow-burn success of Mick Herron, whose Secret Hours I’m about halfway through right now. As if to underscore the contrast between Herron and what we’re considering here, Kidd titled his post “Writing When You Have No Time to Write.”

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.

Careful where you aim that historical allusion

This week for my US History II students I’ve been preparing an annotated copy of William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech. Giving the text of Bryan’s speech the kind of close scrutiny required to plop explanatory notes into it has brought two things to mind.

First, whether teaching Andrew Jackson, Bryan, or later populists, I emphasize to my students that populism is an attitude or style, not a set of policy prescriptions. Read “The Cross of Gold” closely and yeah, it’s true. The style, posture, or rhetorical mode of populist movements really never changes. But that’s a blog post of its own for… some other time. Probably never.

Second, Bryan, despite being a “Great Commoner,” was a learned man and could count on his audience to pick up a lot of literary, biblical, and historical allusions. Their density in this six-page speech is remarkable—just based on the notes I added to the text, I count three biblical allusions, two to modern French history, three to American history, and one each to Roman and medieval history. His use of these allusions can be pretty sophisticated, as when he suggests that coastal elites (see point one above) not only feel scorn for the poor but also nurse a blasphemous pride by putting the words of Proverbs 1:26 into their mouths.

But not all of these allusions do the work that Bryan seems to think they’re doing. Two in particular stand out.

Early in the speech, in describing the groundswell of populist support for policies like bimetallism and a federal income tax in the months leading up to the Democratic convention, Bryan says that the Populists “began the conflict with a zeal approaching the zeal which inspired the crusaders who followed Peter the Hermit.”

Peter did attract a surprising amount of enthusiastic support through his preaching in 1095, but his ramshackle following made it only as far as Anatolia before they met a smaller but better organized Seljuq army and were slaughtered.

Then again, maybe popular enthusiasm leading to an unsustainable movement that ends in disaster might actually be a good metaphor for the 1890s Populist Party. Not what Bryan was going for, though.

The other allusion comes in Bryan’s admittedly stirring call to defend the common people from the financial rapine of the elites. After invoking Andrew Jackson as a model, Bryan borrows a comparison from an old speech by Thomas Hart Benton, a comparison guaranteed to get my attention:

If you will read what Thomas Benton said, you will find that he said that in searching history he could find but one parallel to Andrew Jackson. That was Cicero, who destroyed the conspiracies of Cataline [sic] and saved Rome. He did for Rome what Jackson did when he destroyed the bank conspiracy and saved America.

As always, I hesitate to entertain a hypothetical, but I doubt Cicero would be flattered.

As with the earlier invocation of amateur crusading zeal, this comparison does work on a superficial level. Cicero was a novus homo, a new man, a commoner risen to senatorial rank and even the office of consul, and Catiline was a corrupt aristocrat. That’s pretty easily mapped onto American populist prejudices, especially since Cicero was able to detect and defeat Catiline’s conspiracy and preserve the Republic—something Cicero never let anyone forget. But…

Cicero also steadfastly opposed the political machinations of other demagogues who made recognizably populist appeals: Clodius early on and, later, Julius Caesar, godlike champion of the Populares. Cicero’s moderation and constitutionalism, Caesar’s resemblance to Andrew Jackson—a beloved general using his success and his popularity with the masses to flout the constitutional limits placed upon him—and Cicero’s eventual murder at the hands of Caesar’s loyal lieutenant Mark Antony not only complicate Bryan’s comparison but more or less rubbish it. If you know more than Bryan uses to make his point, that is.

A final example. This allusion to modern history would turn out, within months, to be grimly ironic:

Mr. McKinley was the most popular man among the Republicans; and everybody three months ago in the Republican Party prophesied his election. How is it today? Why, that man who used to boast that he looked like Napoleon, that man shudders today when he thinks that he was nominated on the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. Not only that, but as he listens he can hear with ever increasing distinctness the sound of the waves as they beat upon the lonely shores of St. Helena.

This is, I believe, known popularly as “asking for it.”

Historical allusions are useful, of course, but be sure to think them through. A point worth considering ourselves, since Bryan is often invoked now as a sloppy, imprecise parallel to certain present-day leaders.

Memory Hold-the-Door

I ended the very first John Buchan June a few years ago with Buchan’s final, posthumously published novel, the thrilling, beautiful, and poignant Sick Heart River. It only seems right, now that I’ve read it, to end this year’s event with the non-fiction book Buchan was composing at the same time as that final Sir Edward Leithen adventure. The book is his memoir, completed, like Sick Heart River, only a short time before he died in early 1940: Memory Hold-the-Door.

Memoir is the best word to describe this book, but is still not quite right. Though billed as Buchan’s autobiography by his publisher, Buchan himself described the book this way in the short, pointed preface: “This book is a journal of certain experiences, not written in the experiencing moment, but rebuilt out of memory.” He confesses that he had considered having the book privately published, but changed his mind when he “reflected that a diary of a pilgrimage, a record of the effect upon one mind of the mutations of life, might interest others who travel a like road.” It was, accordingly, published under the title Pilgrim’s Way in the United States, where it became a favorite book of the young John F Kennedy.

Memory Hold-the-Door is easily summarized. Beginning with his childhood and youth in Scotland, where he spent much formative time outdoors (“My earliest recollections,” he writes, “are not of myself but of my environment”), through his student days at Oxford, his political career in South Africa, Britain, and Canada, his government work in intelligence and propaganda during the war years, and his career in journalism, publishing, and fiction, Buchan narrates his life story in broad outline, with many episodes and memories rendered in striking and beautiful writing. His fiction’s strongest qualities are much in evidence, especially his descriptions of beloved landscapes and in his character sketches of family, friends, colleagues, and comrades, to all of whom he renders the same service as he does the natural world.

What most struck me about Memory Hold-the-Door was its tone. Even before the narrative has taken Buchan from Oxford to the veldts and kopjes of South Africa, a sharp, persistent elegiac note has entered. One realizes quickly how many of those Buchan knew and worked with as a young man were fated to die in the First World War. This book, even though it is a grateful remembrance of a good life by an uncomplaining man, is marked throughout by loss. His publisher and one of his best friends, Tommie Nelson, died on the Western Front, as did his brother Alastair. Of Nelson he writes:

I can recall many mannerisms of his, but it is only by an effort of thought, for they do not run to meet the memory. His presence warmed and lit up so big a region of life that in thinking of him one is overwhelmed by the multitude of things that he made better by simply existing among them. If you remove a fire from a hearth, you will remember the look, not so much of the blaze itself, as of the whole room in its pleasant glow.

And of his brother Alastair:

I remember that when I occasionally ran across him during the last stages of the battle of the Somme I thought him the only cheerful thing in a grey world. He managed to get the best out of everybody, and won a general affection because he himself gave out so much of it. I wonder if the future historian will realise how much of the strength of the British army was due to the boys of twenty who brought the kindly ardour of youth into the business of war and died before they could lose their freshness.

And those were only the dearest lost to him among the many war dead he knew.

His reflection on his brother’s loss points as well to Buchan’s perspective—even when eulogizing men who have been gone a quarter century by the time of his writing, he never loses sight of the big picture their lives and deaths formed a small part of. This in itself adds to the poignancy of the book, as not only the losses but the civilization-shaking repercussions of the war bothered him, filling him with forebodings that would all too often turn out to be right. Even the end of the war, superficially a cause of celebration, augured trouble: “My reason indeed warned me that there was little cause for optimism. The War, the vastest disordering since the breakdown of the Pax Romana, must be followed by decades of suffering and penury.”

But I don’t want to give too dour an impression of this book. Though tinged throughout with loss and sadness, it is still a fundamentally joyful book. Buchan writes warmly of his childhood; of his work; of the books he has enjoyed (e.g. Pilgrim’s Progress, Robert Louis Stevenson, from whom the title comes) and the historical figures he admires (e.g. Montrose, Lee, Cromwell, Sir Walter Scott); of the many places he was privileged to live, in all of which he finds something lovely; and, though this is not a deeply intimate book, of his family. It is striking what a variety of famous people he knew: members of parliament, literary men, generals, presidents, kings. If you’re looking for the link between GK Chesterton, TE Lawrence, and Alfred Hitchcock, Buchan is your man. But perhaps the finest tribute, and one I can personally relate to, goes to Susie Grosvenor, whom he married in 1907: “I have been happy in many things, but all my other good fortune has been as dust in the balance compared with the blessing of an incomparable wife.”

Memory Hold-the-Door is also, like the Greek and Roman classics Buchan best loved, highly quotable. Buchan maintains an aphoristic readability throughout. I read the book in Kindle, the only way I could find it, and eventually saved over 150 highlights (which you can peruse here if you want a generous sample of the book). A few favorites:

  • On mining oneself for the purposes of fiction: “A writer must inevitably keep the best of himself for his own secret creative world.”

  • On some writing friends, one of whom will be well known to readers of this blog: “With G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc and Maurice Baring I never differed—except in opinion.”

  • On staying current and/or “relevant”: “My taste was for things old and shabby and unpopular, and I regarded with scepticism whatever was acclaimed as the Spirit of the Age. I was born to be always out of fashion.”

  • On his favorite classical authors (see “relevance” again): “My reading was chiefly in the Latin and Greek classics, which were beyond the caprice of time. I read and re-read Thucydides, for he also had lived among crumbling institutions; Virgil, for he had known both the cruelty and the mercy of life; Plato, above all, for he was seraphically free from the pettinesses which were at the root of our sorrows.”

  • On technological progress as exemplified by the First World War: “The War had shown that our mastery over physical forces might end in a nightmare, that mankind was becoming like an overgrown child armed with deadly weapons, a child with immense limbs and a tiny head.”

  • On the bind intellectuals of the 1920s had put themselves in: “It was a difficult time for those who called themselves intellectuals. They found themselves living among the fears and uncertainties of the Middle Ages, without the support of the mediaeval faith.”

  • On theory and pure reason: “The drawback to a completely rational mind is that it is apt to assume that what is flawless in logic is therefore practicable.”

  • On writing fiction for its own sake: “I always felt a little ashamed that profit should accrue from what had given me so much amusement. I had no purpose in such writing except to please myself, and even if my books had not found a single reader I would have felt amply repaid.”

  • On the threats facing Christianity in the modern world: “I am of Blake’s view: ‘Man must and will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus he will have the religion of Satan, and will erect a synagogue of Satan.’ There have been high civilisations in the past which have not been Christian, but in the world as we know it I believe that civilisation must have a Christian basis, and must ultimately rest on the Christian Church. To-day the Faith is being attacked, and the attack is succeeding.”

  • On the perseverance of Christianity despite it all: “The Faith is an anvil which has worn out many hammers.”

These are drawn pretty much at random from my Kindle highlights. I could provide dozens more.

There are also many wonderful anecdotes. Here’s one from the First World War regarding General Sir Douglas Haig, whom Buchan worked with and admired but who apparently didn’t have the common touch:

He had not Sir John French’s gift of speaking to the chance-met soldier. Once, I remember, he tried it. There was a solitary private by the roadside, whom he forced himself to address. Haig: “Well, my man, where did you start the war?” Private (pale to the teeth): “I swear to God, sir, I never started no war.”

And another in which a fan of Buchan’s thrillers is disappointed by his historical novels:

These were serious books and they must have puzzled many of the readers who were eager to follow the doings of Richard Hannay or Dickson McCunn. That is the trouble with an author who only writes to please himself; his product is not standardised, and the purchaser is often disappointed. I once had a letter from an Eton boy who, having a taste for a bustling yarn, was indignant at anything of mine which did not conform to that pattern. He earnestly begged me to “pull myself together.”

But as mentioned above, and by Buchan’s design, Memory Hold-the-Door is not an exhaustive autobiography. Buchan states at the outset that he does not intend to use his memoir for the things most memoirists do, especially today. There is no score-settling, no self-justification, no gossip. He writes only of the dead, and then only to praise them—especially those he believes have been unjustly forgotten or remembered for the wrong reasons. Reviewers since its first publication have remarked on its “curiously oblique” approach, on what it covers in detail and what it glances across in a paragraph—or less. Buchan himself, though he states with some embarrassment that he found his manuscript “brazenly egotistic,” disappears from the narrative for long stretches. He prefers always to write about others.

“That said,” remarks biographer Andrew Lownie, “it is a very revealing book, both consciously and unconsciously.” As I’ve already suggested, even where Buchan says little about himself, his character comes through clearly—friendly, pious (in the Roman sense), hardworking, well educated, charitable toward all, firmly rooted in a place loved lifelong, of disciplined and expansive mind, and above all openminded but of firm conviction. The book’s final line offers a strong unifying theme: “Dogmatism gives place to questioning, and questioning in the end to prayer.”

In early February 1940, shortly after Buchan completed both Memory Hold-the-Door and Sick Heart River and having repeatedly refused the chance at a second five-year term as Governor General of Canada when his term ended in August, he suffered a stroke while shaving, fell, and struck his head. Within a few days he was dead, and widely and affectionately mourned. These two final books, the memoir and the novel, would appear over the course of that year. Memory Hold-the-Door sold out almost immediately and was repeatedly reprinted during the war years and afterward.

Though eventually Buchan’s fiction, especially The Thirty-Nine Steps, became his most lasting legacy, his memoir offers a fine portrait of a life honorably and gratefully lived. Memory Hold-the-Door is both intensely and poignantly self-reflective but also generous. It is that strangest and rarest of literary beasts, the humble memoir.

* * * * *

Once again I’m sorry to see John Buchan June end. This concludes the third year in a row that I’ve done this, and I’ve enjoyed it more every time. What started as a bit of a lark, a relief from some of the early summer corporate activism that eats up our screens during my birth month, has turned into a tradition that I relish and look forward to. I hope these reviews—including some of Buchan’s non-fiction for the first time this year—have piqued your interest in his work, and that you’ll check at least a little bit of it out in the coming year.

Thanks as always for reading. Until next June!

The House of the Four Winds

As this year’s John Buchan June draws to a close, we return to the adventures of retired Scottish grocer Dickson McCunn and friends, this time traveling abroad to help a disinherited prince claim his rightful throne. This novel, the final fictional read this year, is The House of the Four Winds.

Before we consider what kind of trouble the redoubtable Mr McCunn lands in this time, we should consider a mostly-forgotten genre: the Ruritanian Romance. Anthony Hope, a twenty-four year old London lawyer, published The Prisoner of Zenda in 1894 to great acclaim. The plot of this novel concerns an aimless English traveler being swept into a foreign country’s succession crisis and being forced—temporarily, at first—to impersonate a king. Hijinks ensue. As I’ve mentioned here before, The Prisoner of Zenda is a favorite swashbuckler of mine.

But what Hope did genre-wise In Zenda was to combine political intrigue, secret identities, well-intentioned conspirators, high-spirited derring-do, the put-upon Englishman in an exotic land, and a little old-fashioned forbidden romance and—crucially—set it in an imaginary central European kingdom. That unlikely formula proved a huge success and spawned decades of imitators, all called by the name of Hope’s kingdom: Ruritania.

Ruritanian politics informed the plot of the second Dickson McCunn tale, Castle Gay, which I reviewed earlier this month. In that novel, factions from the Republic of Evallonia slip into Scotland with the aim of interfering with British public opinion via the press. In The House of the Four Winds, a direct sequel to Castle Gay, Buchan embraces the Ruritanian genre form and sends his characters into the heart of Europe. The result is, as we will see, only partially successful.

When the novel begins, Dickson McCunn is taking a doctor-ordered cure at a spa town in southern Germany. Coincidentally, Alison Westwater, the young heroine of the previous novel, is in the same town with her elderly parents, as is frequent Buchan hero Sir Archie Roylance—taking a break from a dull League of Nations conference in Switzerland—and his wife Janet, whom we learn is a cousin of Alison’s. At various points members of the group encounter figures they recognize from their previous Evallonian adventure in Scotland: first Mastrovin, the nefarious leader of the republicans, a man with ties to the Bolsheviks; and second the heir to the throne of Evallonia, Prince John, whom Mastrovin had attempted to kidnap in Scotland in the previous novel. Something is afoot.

Meanwhile, Alison’s love and the real hero of both this novel and the previous one, Jaikie Galt, is taking a walking tour across eastern France and southern Germany. He winds up crossing the border into Evallonia—which, based on context, seems to be somewhere between Salzburg and Trieste—and almost immediately becomes embroiled in the country’s political upheaval. As established in Castle Gay, Evallonia was one of a number of half-baked republics created by the Treaty of Versailles following the end of the First World War, and like all of those enlightened creations is beset with problems.

Evallonia’s unpopular republican government is on the brink of collapse. Everyone expects this; what worries them is what will replace it once it has collapsed. The monarchists hope to restore Prince John to the throne as king. Mastrovin’s republicans have more sinister intentions, though these are never made totally clear. But what most complicates matters is the recent rise of a movement known as Juventus. A populist, nationalist movement oriented toward youth with a powerful and popular “Green Shirt” paramilitary wing, Juventus enjoys nationwide support but is functionally rudderless. Unlike similar populist movements in, say, Italy and Germany, Juventus has no singular figure who can steer it toward an attainable political goal. Until they have one, the Green Shirts are a danger to everyone.

The plot, hatched in the castle known as The House of the Four Winds by Jaikie, Count Odalchini, one of the leading monarchists, Randal Glynde, a circus owner with a long career in Evallonia (and another of Alison’s cousins), and, eventually, Dickson McCunn himself, is to manipulate the Green Shirts into support for Prince John by placing an even more objectionable heir on the throne, the prince’s elderly uncle, an archduke who has been living in exile for decades. This, they hope, will rally the Green Shirts to Prince John, restore him to his throne, and unite the anti-republican factions enough to prevent a pro-Bolshevik turn in Evallonian politics.

It should not be a surprise that the plot succeeds, but along the way the characters encounter plenty of dangers from every direction: kidnapping and torture by Mastrovin and his cronies; bullying and roughing up at the hands of Green Shirts; and dangers like scaling castle walls and leaping from prison windows. Like the other Dickson McCunn novels, The House of the Four Winds is a lark.

This book was published in 1935, between The Free Fishers and The Island of Sheep, two brisk and skillfully executed late novels. Reception for this final Dickson McCunn adventure, however, was pretty poor. Andrew Lownie, in his biography The Presbyterian Cavalier, quotes critic Cyril Connolly’s judgment that The House of the Four Winds represents “a rather low point” not only for Buchan’s fiction but for his entire career. Lownie himself notes succinctly that critics and reviewers since then “have not substantially challenged that contemporary view.” Ursula Buchan is more to the point: The House of the Four Winds “is probably [Buchan’s] worst novel.”

I enjoyed this novel more than they did, but it certainly has more evident weaknesses than much of Buchan’s other fiction. Most of them—strangely for Buchan, a master of pacing—are structural. Several chapters in the middle and end of the book begin with abrupt leaps forward in time, backtrack to fill in what has happened, and then awkwardly shuffle forward again. This technique can work; here it mostly doesn’t. (I remember being warned off of it in my undergrad Novel Writing class.) Some plot elements are introduced and abandoned quickly. At one point, Jaikie departs (between chapters) on a motorcycle with the aim of meeting an important Countess, but reappears having not found her only to be immediately diverted into another strand of the story. Finally, Mastrovin and the other villains are defeated too early, leaving an overlong denouement involving the mechanics of extracting a disguised Dickson McCunn from Evallonia.

There are also more contrivances than is usual, even for a writer famous for using the lucky coincidence. Jaikie’s love interest Alison has so many cousins one begins to wonder if everyone in the novel is related to her. Jaikie is also always bumping into people he happens to know. And Glynde and his circus, especially his trusty elephant, are always exactly where they need to be, exactly when they need to be.

But The House of the Four Winds still has its charms. For someone interested in thrillers and adventure stories, the interwar spin Buchan puts on Hope’s Ruritanian form is clever. This is a light adventure in a recognizably shaken up, post-Austria-Hungary central Europe, and reflects not only real currents of disruption, uncertainty, and political revolution, but presages the dangers that could arise from these scenarios. Dangers that, indeed, already had by 1935. Mussolini is mentioned once and Hitler not at all, but The House of the Fours Winds is shadowed by their presence. Could Evallonia in the hands of the Green Shirts, who are presented as misguided and potentially dangerous but fundamentally decent, wind up where Italy and Germany did?

More immediately enjoyable are the characters themselves. Jaikie and Alison’s genuinely sweet romance finally flowers in this novel, and it is good to see Sir Archie and Janet again. (It also makes me want to reread John Macnab, in which they meet and enjoy the best love story Buchan wrote.) And, thankfully after Castle Gay, from which he is mostly absent, we get more Dickson McCunn.

The novel’s final short farewell chapter, in which a band of horsemen hurries Mr McCunn over the mountainous Evallonian frontier by moonlight, is a charming episode devoted entirely to him and his spirit of adventure. That’s how his stories began in Huntingtower, the best of the bunch, and even if Castle Gay and The House of the Four Winds never worked as well as that first adventure did, this novel’s conclusion makes a fitting end for this unlikeliest of Buchan heroes.

The furtive fallacy

Some years ago I wrote here about “the fallacy of the universal man,” the assumption that all people everywhere are “intellectually and psychologically the same.” The term and definition come from David Hackett Fischer’s 1970 book Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. I concluded that post by mentioning “the furtive fallacy.” Here’s Fischer on that error:

The furtive fallacy is the erroneous idea that facts of special significance are dark and dirty things and that history itself is a story of causes mostly insidious and results mostly invidious. It begins with the premise that reality is a sordid, secret thing; and that history happens on the back stairs a little after midnight, or else in a smoke-filled room, or a perfumed boudoir, or an executive penthouse or somewhere in the inner sanctum of the Vatican, or the Kremlin, or the Reich Chancellery, or the Pentagon. It is something more, and something other than merely a conspiracy theory, though that form of causal reduction is a common component. The furtive fallacy is a more profound error, which combines a naïve epistemological assumption that things are never what they seem to be, with a firm attachment to the doctrine of original sin.

There is a little of the furtive fallacy in us all . . . And when there is much of it, we are apt to summon a psychiatrist. In an extreme form, the furtive fallacy is not merely an intellectual error but a mental illness which is commonly called paranoia.

History afflicted with the furtive fallacy is warped by the endless search for the ulterior motive and the hidden hand.

This is not a new problem. Fischer names as one of the earliest practitioners Algie Simons, a socialist reporter who was possibly the first to spin the Constitution as a conspiracy of the wealthy to exploit and disenfranchise.

But furtive history’s greatest and most influential example is certainly Charles Beard, whom Fischer investigates in some detail. Beard made his name by imputing purely economic motives to the framers of the Constitution (“Beard . . . several times insisted that his thesis was misunderstood. But in fact it was misconceived.”) and ended his career with a book arguing a thesis popular among the latter-day furtive: that FDR had deliberately maneuvered the United States into participation in WWII.

Interestingly, Fischer notes that the same paranoid-leaning mindset at work in critics of Beard, namely the conservative historian Forrest McDonald, whose account of the drafting and ratification of the Constitution deliberately targets Beard’s and provides instead “a rum and strumpet history” of backroom deals and smoke-filled rooms different in degree—and political angle—but not in kind. Whether left-wing, right-wing, or politically indiscriminate, in history marked by furtiveness “[r]eality is reduced to a set of shadows, flickering behind a curtain of flimsy rhetoric.”

As Fischer notes near the beginning of this section, the furtive fallacy is not the same thing as a conspiracy theory, but conspiracy theories seldom lack this hermeneutic of paranoia. Put another way, you can be paranoid without drifting into conspiracism, but not vice versa. Understandably, since if you already believe all true motives are base but hidden, it’s not a difficult step to find spectral evidence for these assumptions everywhere.

In fact, it was Fischer’s description of furtive history, driven by “causes mostly insidious and results mostly invidious” that caught my attention and reminded me of one of my favorite short documentaries: “The Umbrella Man,” a six-minute film by Errol Morris. In this film, private investigator Tink Thompson, himself a JFK conspiracy theorist, tells the story of a mysterious man spotted in film and photographs from Dealy Plaza. He wore a suit and stood holding up an open umbrella—despite the brilliant fall weather—as JFK’s motorcade passed by.

Thompson summarizes the suspicions surrounding the Umbrella Man thus: “The only person under any umbrella in all of Dallas standing right at the location where all the shots come into the limousine. Can anyone come up with a non-sinister explanation for this? Hm? Hm?”

I don’t want to give the documentary away—seriously, take six minutes and watch the film—but Thompson does tell the satisfactory but wholly, totally unexpected story of who the Umbrella Man was and why he did what he did that day, a solution “just wacky enough it has to be true!” Thompson concludes:

What it means is, if you have any fact which you think is really sinister, that is really obvious a fact which can only point to some sinister underpinning, hey, forget it man, because you can never, on your own, think of all the non-sinister, perfectly valid explanations for that fact. A cautionary tale.

Food for thought and a useful rule of thumb, especially given that even much of the non-conspiratorial history produced today revels in and even demands the furtive perspective.

Further notes on Orwell and Big Brother’s puritanism

At the end of my post last week about Orwell’s failure to see how totalitarian regimes can—contra his criticism of Huxley’s Brave New World—have “a strict morality” that is not sexually repressive, I noted that the Soviet Union exploited just such conditions in order to obtain kompromatcompromising material that could be used for blackmail, either of its own people or foreign agents.

I hadn’t finished reading DJ Taylor’s Who is Big Brother? when I wrote that post, but as I did later that evening Taylor raised an interesting possibility about Nineteen Eighty-Four’s central love affair, one that hinges on the ambiguity of Julia, Winston Smith’s lover. Not just ambiguity, but inscrutability. “What goes on in her head?” Taylor asks. “Orwell never says.”

This is not because, as some recent feminist critics have argued, Orwell is too sexist to write women well, but because she is mysterious by design. There is a dimension to Julia that she keeps from Winston, that he is too smitten and desperate and unworldly to detect.

Consider: When Julia throws herself at Winston, he, “desperate for companionship . . . takes this at face value.” She is considerably younger than him, is both bold as the instigator of their affair and furtive in its execution, has unexplained access to small luxury items, and confesses to a history of sexual indiscretions with Party elites. Taylor continues:

Julia, it seems clear, is up to something. But what exactly? Some of the most revealing passages about her turn up in the chapter that begins with the disappearance of Syme. Half of her is oddly naive and uninformed: she has only the faintest idea of who [Emmanuel] Goldstein is and the doctrines he is supposed to represent. But the other half is ominously sophisticated, tuned in to ideas and deceptions that are beyond Winston’s power to comprehend. When on one occasion he mentions the war in Eurasia, she insists that the conflict is simply imaginary and the bombs which fall on Oceania are probably fired by its own rulers ‘just to keep people frightened’.

Further, when Winston tells her about his irrational desire to confess his thoughtcrime to O’Brien and recruit him as an ally and defender, Julia tells him to do it. It is O’Brien who eventually arrests them—in a love nest owned by an undercover member of the Thought Police—and who tortures Winston in Room 101.

Considered from outside Winston’s naive point-of-view, Julia’s personality and behavior—her forwardness, her attitudes toward the Party, her mysterious access to goods usually reserved for the elite, and especially her seduction of an unattractive older man—make her look less like another love-starved prole driven into a doomed relationship by sheer need and more like bait. Julia, Taylor concludes, “is a honey-trap, gamely enticing Winston into O’Brien’s lair so that he can be exposed, tormented, and ultimately re-educated. From start to finish, you infer, their whole affair is a put-up job.”

This makes a lot of sense. Even Winston and Julia’s final meeting, post-Ministry of Love, can be read this way. But Taylor notes that the reader can’t be sure, which is probably part of Orwell’s point. Julia remains ambiguous to the end.

Interpreting Julia as a tool of the Thought Police does not resolve the problem of Big Brother’s repressive sexual puritanism, the aspect of his regime that fundamentally jars with the rest—which was the point of last week’s post—but it does add a note of realism to how Big Brother might exploit and suppress a potential enemy. It also makes Winston’s story that much more pitiful.

Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell turned out to be excellent, by the way. You can look for more about it when I finish my spring reading post. I am aware of the recent parallax novel Julia, which retells Nineteen Eighty-Four from Julia’s perspective, but I have no interest in reading it. I do, however, need to reread Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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.

Orwell’s failure

I’ve almost finished reading George Orwell biographer DJ Taylor’s new guide to Orwell’s work, Who is Big Brother? It’s been an excellent short read so far, capably tracking the changes in Orwell’s life, views, and writings and insightfully linking them to each other as well as judging the man’s character fairly but not uncritically.

Of special interest to me, considering the way Orwell’s dystopian novel is so often compared to Aldous Huxley’s, was a line Taylor quotes from Orwell’s review of Brave New World. Faulting Huxley for his overemphasis on shameless hedonism in the society of Brave New World, Orwell asserted that “A ruling class has got to have a strict morality, a quasi-religious belief in itself, a mystique.”

This comment made sense of an aspect of Nineteen Eighty-Four that I’ve puzzled over since first reading it in college twenty-something years ago. Reading CS Lewis’s 1954 review of that novel a few years later focused and sharpened that puzzlement. Here’s Lewis on what he regards as the biggest flaw in Orwell’s dystopia:

In the nightmare State of 1984 the rulers devote a great deal of time—which means that the author and readers also have to devote a great deal of time—to a curious kind of anti-sexual propaganda. Indeed the amours of the hero and heroine seem to be at least as much a gesture of protest against that propaganda as a natural outcome of affection or appetite.

Now it is, no doubt, possible that the masters of a totalitarian State might have a bee in their bonnets about sex as about anything else; and, if so, that bee, like all their bees, would sting. But we are shown nothing in the particular tyranny Orwell has depicted which would make this particular bee at all probable. Certain outlooks and attitudes which at times introduced this bee into the Nazi bonnet are not shown at work here.* Worse still, its buzzing presence in the book raises questions in all our minds which have really no very close connection with the main theme and are all the more distracting for being, in themselves, of interest.

Lewis, in a rare moment of Bulverism for him, chalks this up to Orwell’s coming of age in the “anti-puritanism” of the DH Lawrence era. Maybe. But Lewis is right that the sexual repression of Big Brother’s state does not mesh organically with everything else—the state-mandated calisthenics, the brainwashed children, the mass surveillance, and most especially the manipulation of language.** Why would Big Brother care who’s doing it to whom and in what way as long as neither party engages in wrongthink?***

He wouldn’t. What Orwell failed to see is that the “strict morality” required of a tyrannical ruling clique need not be sexually traditionalist. It could indeed be the opposite, granting total sexual license but fastidiously and ruthlessly policing the terminology surrounding it, or by concentrating on some other occasion of sin—the accused’s carbon footprint, perhaps, or how much privilege they have, or what kind of ancestral sins they owe amends for. “[T]hough Brave New World was a brilliant caricature of the present (the present of 1930),” Orwell wrote, “it probably casts no light on the future.” On the contrary, George.

But to return to the point of comparison between Huxley and Orwell, a tyranny is, in fact, often better served by an out-of-control libido, which more than just about any other appetite has the power to distract and enervate. This is what Huxley saw that Orwell could or would not.

I should have more to say about Who is Big Brother? in my spring reading list later this month. In the meantime, check out Theodore Dalrymple’s review at Law & Liberty, which is what convinced me to read the book.

* “At times” is the right way to address this. The Nazis were not much concerned about sexual morality beyond guarding racial boundaries. Look into the private lives of Ernst Röhm, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, and especially Joseph Goebbels sometime.

** The Soviet-style manipulation of language is, I think, the real point of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but a point easily lost among the book’s other terrifying visions. Cf. Fahrenheit 451, which Bradbury intended as a critique of TV rather than censorship.

*** Combining licentious sexual behavior with mass surveillance is also a useful source for kompromat, something the Soviets knew and that Orwell surely must have as well.