Notes on the history of spy thrillers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ties that could never be chosen

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

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

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

• Walthari, heir to a Visigothic kingdom in the west

• Hildigunda, daughter of the Burgundian king

• Hagano, a Frankish nobleman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screwtape reviews a book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is it?

One of the peculiar annoyances of medieval history is the license even good historians seem to give themselves to make sweeping generalizations, only to qualify them to the point of contradiction later.

Here’s Tore Skeie in his otherwise excellent book The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Battle for the North Sea Empire, in the middle of a discussion of the remarriage of Æthelred Unræd’s widow Emma of Normandy to his conqueror, Cnut the Great:

But despite her status and central position in this drama, it is more difficult to obtain a clear picture of Emma than of the men around her, for the simple reason that she was a woman. The men who recorded the course of history—mostly monks—almost never mentioned women other than when they were married off or acted on behalf of their husbands or sons. The kings’ wives, sisters, mothers and daughters—all of them remain almost invisible to us, even though they were often deeply involved in everything that went on and could be accomplished and independent political players in their own right.

And in the next paragraph we read:

Emma of Normandy (c. 1984-1052) in her Encomium receiving the manuscript from its authors

One of the most important sources from this period is the Encomium Emmae Reginae, a tribute to Emma and the people around her written at her request later in life, probably by a Flemish monk.

Typical! Nasty old patriarchy-loving sexist monks ignoring a powerful woman, erasing her from history... Right up until they write a dedicated biography of her at her command.

The truth is that it is “difficult to obtain a clear picture” of anyone for most of history, men and women, high and low. Even the more heavily documented men in this story seldom reveal much of a personality or motives behind what they do or the particular courses they take, and even the most important of them simply disappear from the record for years at a time. In his short biography of Cnut for the Penguin Monarchs series, Ryan Lavelle records the king’s death thus:

Cnut died in Shaftesbury in November 1035 at about forty years of age. We don’t know why he died there or what he was doing at the time.

That’s two short sentences, but go back over them and really consider just how much they indicate we cannot know about the most powerful man in northern Europe at the time of his death. Even his age is approximate. The rest of the book is full of such passages beginning with “maybe,” “probably,” “possibly,” and “we don’t know.” The “invisibility” of people in historical sources, especially the Early Middle Ages, has more to do with the purpose and built-in limitations of the sources than sexism.

The generalization in that first paragraph from The Wolf Age does not so much inform the reader about medieval culture and historiography than affirm a dearly held modern prejudice. And this prejudice, much like that passage’s imaginary chauvinist monks, renders the close-following contradiction invisible to the right-thinking modern person.

For two other examples of modern preconceptions blinding the historian and the reader to medieval minds, see here—an example coincidentally also involving Cnut—and here. Like the imputations of sexism in the example above, these faults—cynicism and a reductive “seeing through”—warp our perception of the past. For a better approach, Tolkien is always a good place to start, as here.

Mendenhall on Weaver’s South

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

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

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

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

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

Poe would agree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not mincing words, words, words

Every once in a while the YouTube algorithm gets one right. A few days ago it recommended a recent video called “The truth about Shakespeare” (thumbnail blurb: “You’re being LIED TO about Shakespeare”) from the RobWords channel. This wouldn’t usually entice me but for some reason it piqued my interest in just the right way, and I gave it a chance.

I’m glad I did. It’s a good short video concerned primarily with the commonly repeated factoid that Shakespeare himself coined 1,700 words—or perhaps 3,500, or perhaps 20,000. I’ve even seen this presented as an important reason to read Shakespeare, or at least learn about him in school. I’ve been skeptical about both claims for a long time.

Rob does a good job interrogating just what these figures are supposed to mean, pointing out the difference between coining a word, modifying a word, or simply being the first known person to write a word down. He also notes that some of the words credited to Shakespeare either mean different things the way he used them (bedroom being an instructive example) or are attested years before Shakespeare in other writers like his earlier contemporary Marlowe or the much earlier William Caxton.

All this alone makes it a worthwhile video. But near the end, Rob raises the question of authorship—and rightly doesn’t spend much time on it. Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. The theories that he didn’t arise suspiciously late, being popularized in the late-19th and early 20th centuries by colorful cranks like Atlantis enthusiast and sometime vice-presidential candidate Ignatius Donnelly or—you can’t make names like this up—J Thomas Looney.

If it took more than two hundred years for people to question Shakespeare’s authorship, why did they eventually start at all? And they do some people keep questioning it? Rob has a suggestion: “To my eyes the main argument is essentially classist.”

The editors’ introduction to the Pelican Shakespeare editions of the plays, which I’ve had since college, put it even more bluntly. Regardless of which alternate author an anti-Stratfordian puts forward as the “real” playwright behind Shakespeare, the conspiracy theorists all “have one trait in common—they are snobs”:

“The Baconians, the Oxfordians, and supporters of other candidates have one trait in common—they are snobs.”

Every pro-Bacon or pro-Oxford tract sooner or later claims that the historical William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could not have written the plays because he could not have had the training, the university education, the experience, and indeed the imagination or background their author supposedly possessed. Only a learned genius like Bacon or an aristocrat like Oxford could have written such fine plays. (As it happens, lucky male children of the middle class had access to better education than most aristocrats in Elizabethan England—and Oxford was not particularly well educated.) Shakespeare received in the Stratford grammar school a formal education that would daunt many college graduates today; and popular rival playwrights such as the very learned Ben Jonson and George Chapman, both of whom also lacked university training, achieved great artistic success, without being taken as Bacon or Oxford.

Curt, to the point, and inescapably true. There is, in fact, at least one inattentive person in the comments of RobWords’s videos making exactly this argument.

Western literature is replete with geniuses who came from nowhere—blind (or at least illiterate) bards, failed politicians, school teachers, orphans who turned to journalism, whole armies of anonymous monks and clerics, and, yes, even the son of a glovemaker. Genius is neither rational nor dependent on resources, and it would mean nothing if it were distributed only to the people we would expect to have it. To argue otherwise is not just crankery, but snobbery.

If you’re interested in this question, Stanley Wells’s William Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction and Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The Worlds as Stage both offer accessible, well-argued short introductions and responses to these theories. And be sure to give RobWords’s video a watch, especially if you’ve ever been told Shakespeare’s value is in his coinages rather than his stories.

Travis McGee on the automated imagination

It’s been a slow month on the blog for a variety of reasons including but not limited to illness, work, and car trouble, but fortunately not a slow month for reading. Last week I read a book I’d recently had recommended to me, The Long Lavender Look, the twelfth in John D MacDonald’s long-running Travis McGee series, which began with The Deep Blue Good-by in 1964. I greatly enjoyed it, not least because it was so quotable, with “salvage expert” McGee providing sharp observations on everything from criminal character, law enforcement, the myth of the hooker with the heart of gold, and raccoons.

This passage about a third of the way through, in which McGee muses as he follows a woman home through the neighborhoods of a small rural Florida town, hit especially hard:

“We sped through old residential areas where the people sat in their dimly lighted rooms, watching all the frantic imitations of festivity on the small home screens, watching the hosts and the hostesses who were old, dear, and familiar friends. Long ago their parents had old familiar friends named Alexander Botts and Scattergood Baines and Tugboat Annie. But reading was a lot harder. You had to make up the pictures in your head. Easier to sit and watch the pictures somebody else planned. And it had a comforting sameness, using up that portion of your head which would start fretting and worrying if it wasn’t kept busy.”

As I said, sharply observed, especially that bit about the narcotic effect of electronic entertainment. And I’ve recently had cause to consider the way older popular forms are suffering at the hands of newer, easier, flashier, but less creative forms.

After the above passage McGee, his mind wandering into parody, imagines Jim Phelps of the original “Mission: Impossible”—of “This message with self-destruct in five seconds” fame—finally rejecting one of his impossible missions, an act that causes the TVs all over the country to wink out forever:

And the screens go dark, from the oil-bound coasts of Maine to the oily shores of Southern California. Chief Ironsides retires to a chicken farm. Marshall Dillon shoots himself in the leg, trying to outdraw the hard case from Tombstone. The hatchet bounces back off the tree and cuts down tall Dan’l Boone. The American living room becomes silent. The people look at each other, puzzled, coming out of the sweet, long, hazy years of automated imagination.

Where’d all the heroes go, Andy?

Maybe, honey, they went where all the others went, a long time ago. Way off someplace. Tarzan and Sir Galahad and Robin Hood. Ben Casey and Cap’n Ahab and The Shadow and Peter Rabbit.

Went off and joined them.

But what are we going to do, Andy? What are we going to do?

Maybe… talk some. Think about things.

Talk about what? Think about what? I’m scared, Andy.

But there’s no problem, really, because after the screens go dark and silent, all the tapes of the watchers self-destruct in five seconds.

This isn’t just a funny aside. The woman McGee is following, and with whom he’ll develop a relationship in the course of his investigations, has a mind shaped entirely by screen stories. She behaves as if slipping in and out of pre-scripted scenarios she’s seen enacted a thousand times—“playing games,” McGee calls it—and can’t approach much of life with genuine seriousness. There’s very little of her underneath all the clichés. McGee eventually gets to see some of it, but not always in scenarios with TV-friendly happy endings.

The Long Lavender Look, I should have mentioned, was published in 1970. One wonders what McGee would make of the smartphone era and its even more fully “automated imagination.”

I was able to pick up four more Travis McGee novels at our local used bookstore over the weekend. Looking forward to those, and to more from their wry, hard-bitten, observant narrator. But first, I’m about halfway through an excellent Eric Ambler slow-burn and have the last of Len Deighton’s Game, Set, Match trilogy lined up for Thanksgiving. Fall and winter look to be shaping up nicely. I’m certainly eager for the break.

For whom?

Inklings James Dundas-Grant, Colin Hardie, Dr Robert Havard, CS Lewis, and Peter Havard on a walking tour, c. 1955

The dangers posed by adverbs in writing fiction—awkwardness, overreliance—is well known. A less obvious problem with adverbs in non-fiction arises when they offer accidental one-word commentary when the author is aiming for dispassionate, nuanced, unbiased narrative. Two examples from very, very good books I’ve read recently:

First, from a book about Lewis, Tolkien, and the Inklings:

Both men enjoyed clubs, but Tolkien especially relished being a part of male-only circles with clever names. It should be pointed out that the view held by Tolkien (and by the vast majority of British culture at this time) was that true friendship was only possible between members of the same gender. For Tolkien and Lewis, this was partially shaped by their generation’s intimate experience with other men in the trenches of war. There were women writers who the Inklings much admired, like Dorothy Sayers and Ruth Pitter, who would very much have been at home with the Inklings. Sadly, women were never part of their official meetings.

Second, from a case study in a book by a religious historian about the theological importance of studying the past:

It is also important to understand the historically complex relationship between various churches and slavery in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. For instance, Mary Prince had joined the Moravian Church in Antigua. The Moravian missions in Antigua (and elsewhere) did keep slaves, but, paradoxically, the Moravians also ministered to slaves, including to Mary Prince.

To which one might ask: Sadly for whom? Paradoxically for whom?

Not to the Inklings. Not to the Moravians. Sadly here means “sadly to a modern person who expects groups of friends to look like the stock photos on college recruiting pamphlets.” Paradoxically here means “paradoxically to a modern person who has not really thought about how complicated and tangled up the relationships and affections of a world suffused with slavery could be, and were.” Or perhaps they just haven’t read Philemon.

The first passage invites us to imagine some hypothetical world in which the Inklings’ meetings would have been improved by being coed. The second passage actually undermines what it has already said about the complexity of religious groups’ approaches to Caribbean slavery, and suggests as well that those who owned slaves cannot, would not, or should not have ministered to them—which is obviously untrue.

It’s interesting and revealing to me that, in both examples, the adverbs are interjected or parenthetical. They are intrusions of the author’s own time and—possibly but not necessarily—personal perspectives into a past that they have otherwise done an excellent job of describing charitably, with good attention to context and the cultural differences between now and then. The one begins, for example, by pointing out common cultural assumptions and shared historical experiences among the Inklings; the other nests the story of Mary Prince among others equally as complex—of mixed-race abolitionist slaveowners, for example.

Perhaps sadly and paradoxically should be read as a hesitation or lack of confidence. After all, both authors are broaching potentially contentious topics in these passages. The Inklings example especially reads, to me, like something an editor might have insisted on the author addressing. But the result, for the reader paying attention to such things, reads like a slip or a stumble.

Again, both of these come from excellent books, which is why I haven’t identified their titles or authors. But they also offer good examples of why—beyond the usual Strunk & White reasons—you should guard your adverbs closely. Maybe stop and ask For whom? of them more often.

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.”

GKC and me

Last week Paul Kingsnorth, a writer I’ve enjoyed and admired since reading his experimental historical novel The Wake almost a decade ago, posted an appreciation of Chesterton and The Everlasting Man on his Substack. The Everlasting Man vies with Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday as my favorite Chesterton book so I was interested in Kingsnorth’s thoughts, but it’s his introduction, in which he describes how he came to read Chesterton, that I found most arresting.

Briefly, Kingsnorth discovered Chesterton almost by accident as a godless environmental activist, finding in his work—beginning with The Napoleon of Notting Hill—a salve for the “push-and-pull of apparently conflicting tendencies and views” inside himself. He learned to love Chesterton for his localism and rejection of both socialism and capitalism but had no time for Chesterton’s Christianity. Only after his own conversion did he find that it was Chesterton’s Christianity that undergirded and gave shape to the rest.

Though the specifics are different, the trajectory of Kingsnorth’s story resonates with me—as does the feeling that Chesterton was, at first, a private discovery: “I liked G. K. Chesterton before anyone else did.”

My first GKC—The paperback reprint of Orthodoxy that I read in college

My own story with Chesterton begins, like I suspect many people’s does, with CS Lewis. I started reading Lewis as a freshman in college and somehow became aware of Chesterton as an influence on him. When I stumbled onto an Image paperback of Orthodoxy in Barnes and Noble one day as a sophomore or junior, I snapped it up. At some point I bought matching paperbacks of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox. I still have all three.

I ended up reading Orthodoxy the same summer I took my deep dive into the Icelandic sagas, the reading of which resulted in No Snakes in Iceland a few years later—that was one formative summer—and read the other two as a burgeoning medievalist sometime before I graduated.

At Clemson I dug into The Everlasting Man, which I even managed to work into my master’s thesis, and from there I read everything else I could get my hands on—What’s Wrong with the World, Heretics, Eugenics and Other Evils, Magic, A Short History of England, Charles Dickens, The Ballad of the White Horse, the Autobiography, Father Brown, and criticism and essays galore. Chesterton’s work startled, amused, confused, and stretched me. I marveled at his range. I collected quotations by the bushel. I remember testing the longsuffering of a friend by texting—in the primordial texting days, with only a ten-digit keypad to type on—a whole paragraph of Eugenics and Other Evils during an argument.

Like Gabriel Syme in The Man Who Was Thursday, I had deeply felt but essentially shapeless and purposeless convictions in college, and the chaotic environment of opinion and argument into which I was thrust after a pretty tranquil upbringing as well as personal upheaval in grad school proved difficult for me. Lewis helped over those years, as did Peter Kreeft. Chesterton continued their work and challenged me even more than they did. He tested many of my assumptions, forcing me to rethink or abandon some and affirming and reinforcing others. He helped give my beliefs a consistent shape. It took years for me to recognize just how much he changed me.

Only much, much later did I become aware of the subculture—or, when I’m feeling less charitable, the industry—that has grown up around Chesterton. And by then that world’s Chesterton didn’t feel much like the Chesterton I had sat at the feet of for a decade. Kingsnorth nods unmistakably toward the kind of Chesterton cosplayer I’m thinking of. I’m not knocking those Chesterton fans—I’m glad he still has enough readers to keep his books in print—but I feel like we’re adoring different Chestertons. Theirs is all tweedy whimsy and cigar smoke and strained cheerfulness and the same endlessly repeated decontextualized quotations and really bad attempts to write like Chesterton. (Don’t attempt to write like him, ever.) Their Chesterton strikes me as a cartoon, a simplification, without the thread of darkness and lifelong self-examination running through the real man.

And yet, their Chesterton is present in the real Chesterton. He contains multitudes. Like the undercover detectives in The Man Who Was Thursday, we’re all pursuing the same gigantic, surprising, seemingly unknowable man, and there is healthy unity in that. As Kingsnorth puts it, “I don’t resent their incursion on my turf, though. Indeed, I welcome them into the fold of true believers.”

But that feeling of difference and my natural un-clubbableness has kept Chesterton a somewhat private love. Which has, with a completely appropriate sense of paradox, made it that much better when I discover that a new acquaintance is also a fan. To bring Lewis back in, he wrote that “[t]he typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too?’” That feeling is a joy when shared with anyone who stumbled into Chesterton the way I did, and cherishes his work the way I do.

I greatly enjoyed getting Kingsnorth’s perspective, especially his story. You can read all of his reflections on GKC as well as his takeaways from The Everlasting Man here. You can read his conversion story, which came as a great and welcome surprise to me when I stumbled across it, at First Things here.

Chestertober concludes later this week with The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. The subtitle is important. Stay tuned for that.

Wanting to believe

Back before the hurricane, Micah Mattix’s Prufrock Substack quoted a recent essay by Clare Coffey in the The New Atlantis, “Who Wants to Believe in UFOs?” It’s an excellent essay, making the case that the rinse-repeat pattern of UFO revelations—purported new evidence, new whistleblowers, new openness on the part of the government and media, and new excitement followed by… nothing much—indicates a turn toward “something much older and weirder” in the way the public thinks of this phenomenon.

That Coffey also brings in two works on our changing views of the cosmos over time, CS Lewis’s Discarded Image and his close friend Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances, as well as the work of the late Michael Heiser, an expert ancient Semiticist with a sideline in “anything old and weird,” only makes it that much better. It’s well worth your time.

Two specific aspects of Coffey’s essay gave me a lot to think about. First, her informal taxonomy of attitudes toward UFOs etc. If mentioning Lewis and Barfield is bait, giving my wannabe Aristotelian mind a set of categories to sort things into is setting the hook. Coffey gives us three basic groups:

• Disinformation non-enjoyers—aggressive skeptics who “do not merely disbelieve in aliens; they see public discussion of UFOs as an embarrassing social scourge foisted by hucksters on an ever-gullible populace.”

And among believers:

• Explorers—adherents of the more scientifically- and technologically-oriented and, until recently, culturally predominant vision of UFOs as evidence of intelligent life “over there,” elsewhere in the same universe we inhabit and bound by the same laws. Hence the emphasis on technology.

• Esotericists—the burgeoning newer view, a vision of UFOs as evidence of deeper hidden truths “in here,” which naturally lends itself to theory-of-everything mix-and-match worldviews in which everything is evidence of everything else though, seemingly paradoxically, they “are both profoundly open and restlessly systematizing.”

Both types of believer have specific fundamental assumptions and hopes. Both also have shadow forms or “negating modes”:

• Negating explorers believe the evidence but interpret it as part of some kind of purely terrestrial psyop.

• Negating esotericists are the folks who interpret aliens as demons in disguise.

As Coffey herself points out, these are loose categories with fuzzy boundaries and significant overlap. I’ll add that, even if the esotericists in the form of the Graham Hancock and Missing 411 and Joe Rogan types are gaining the upper hand, they are not new. Charles Portis, a sharp-eyed observer of the UFO scene circa 1975, just after von Däniken made the ancient astronauts thesis popular, portrays the type realistically in Gringos, as I’ve noted here before.

To lay my cards on the table, especially since I’ve written about this stuff several times and don’t want to be misunderstood, I’m probably about 15% negating explorer and 85% solid disinformation non-enjoyer. I’m simply never impressed with the purported evidence, its interpretation, and the fact that new whistleblowers inevitably turn out to be frauds. Not that I’m a killjoy. My attitude is basically that of Jimmy Burns in Gringos, one of amused observation and even enjoyment without a bit of belief: “[T]he flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren’t nearly enough of them to suit me. I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment.”

Which brings me to what I think is the one weakness of this taxonomy: its inability to account for what I’ll call aestheticists. These are people for whom the actual existence of UFOs is immaterial; their interest is purely in the atmosphere, the vibe of UFOs and aliens.

My recently developed pet theory is that UFOs and UFO lore have, for modern people, filled the hole left by the gothic. Where the Romantics, when in search of a tingly spine, went to windswept moors under the light of the full moon, relict beasts of bygone ages, decaying houses full of dark family secrets, and the inexplicable power of the supernatural—to the otherworldly of the past—if we want the same sensations in the present we go to the strange lights in the night sky, the disappearance, the abduction, cold intelligences from the future, decaying governments full of secrets, and the inexplicable power of interstellar technology.

I suspect a significant subset of interest is based on this appeal. Add this as a third-dimensional Z-axis to the X and Y axes of the explorers and esotericists and I might be able to plot myself more accurately. I’ve always gotten a similar kind of thrill from both Baskerville Hall at night and the atmospheric dramatizations of “Unsolved Mysteries.”

That’s a quibble, but I think a potentially fruitful one since Coffey does not discount the human need for the uncanny. (Her section on the flaws in the argument that UFO obsession is a substitute religion, something I’ve suggested here myself, is especially good and probably mostly right. The religious impulse is real but better fulfilled elsewhere, though I still think that the religious overtones of much UFO lore is not accidental.)

The other thing that I found particularly thought-provoking is, in a reconsideration of the “roundelay discourse” on UFOs, the endless cycles of approach to new knowledge that never actually reveal anything, Coffey’s argument that the “meta-discourse” of the phenomenon—talking about what the enthusiasm about UFOs and aliens means in and of itself—is “the only productive line of inquiry.” She goes through five possible explanations and repercussions based on which of the groups in her taxonomy turns out to be right. I won’t recap it here in the interests of space, but it’s excellent—another good reason to read the essay.

And it leads into Coffey’s concluding thoughts on the reason the UFO phenomenon is impossible to “culturally metabolize”—cosmology or worldview. Reductivist, mechanistic materialism has ingrained itself so deeply in our culture that it shows up in our unthinking turns of phrase, even among the religious:

The biggest development seems the elevation of chemical and electrical mechanisms within the machine universe: we love to talk about love as “a chemical reaction,” and our Twitter compulsions as “dopamine hits,” as if we were actually clearing obfuscation by speaking in these terms. We love to discuss thinking as “our synapses firing” and our world as a tiny rock hurtling along its orbit through space.

UFOs, at least as interpreted by esotericists, flout this conception of the world, and the esotericists know this. “[T]hey are tired of the machine universe,” Coffey writes. “They want out.”

I do not think, as Coffey seems to suggest, that the disinformation non-enjoyers feel threatened or that they need to defend a materialist, mechanistic universe. Far from seeing earnest UFO obsession as a threat, I’m usually simply grieved by it, and Lord knows I am no materialist. But this essay is an excellent examination of much of what is going on in popular enthusiasm for UFOs and I recommend it heartily.

Bigfoot and the resurrection, a Frog Pond test case

A few weeks ago I wrote about Alan Jacobs’s three-strike system for determining whether a current book is worth reading. He laid out some of his system here back in April, writing specifically of new literary fiction. (Brooklynite, three strikes; Ivy Leaguer, two strikes; MFA, one strike, etc.) I brought it up in the context of elite cultural bubbles in general, Edgar Allan Poe’s hated Boston “Frogpondians” being a paradigmatic example.

This was already on my mind because of a trip to our local library with the kids during which I picked up a new book on a whim: The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster, by John O’Connor. Leafing through the book at home, I alighted on this paragraph:

Even demonstrably batshit belief—in headless cannibals, in Jesus rising from the dead, in the COVID-19 pandemic being a global hoax orchestrated by the CDC and Zoom to prevent the Tangerine Tornado from being reelected—can make you feel as if you’ve pierced the Baudrillardian veil to see the world as it truly is. Not so long ago, perfectly reasonable people thought exposure to moonlight could get a girl pregnant. Or that rainwater found on tombstones removed freckles. Or that 7,409,127 demons worked for Lucifer, overseen by seventy-nine devil princes and helped by countless witches who multiplied faster than they could be burned alive. “I believe because it is absurd,” went the credo of third-century Christian theologian Tertullian. In many ways, our lives remain influenced by beliefs that were set in place when we crucified people on the regular.

It’s hard to know where to start with a specimen like this: the flippant tone (flippancy being the devil’s preferred form of humor), the cloying in-group signaling in which the author invokes meme culture and internet slang and Baudrillard at the same time, the cheap dunk on a bad-faith misquotation of Tertullian—all are worth attention. When Strunk and White condemned what they called “a breezy manner” (elsewhere O’Connor refers to Beowulf as “Mr Big Dick himself,” and Leviathan as “God’s way of reminding Job . . . that He is not to be fucked with”) they had good reason.*

No, what stuck out immediately was the lumping together of COVID conspiracy theories, superstitions, creatures reported in Herodotus, early modern amateur demonology, folklore, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ as “batshit.” (Presumably he means “batshit crazy,” though he chooses to economize his words here, of all places.) And not just “batshit,” but “demonstrably batshit.”

Someone should alert the press.

I decided to find out more about the author, and what do you know? Ivy League MFA, has written for The New Yorker, teaches at Boston College,** and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, making him an actual Frogpondian. Using Jacobs’s system, the Columbia MFA is three strikes by itself. At this point the knowing, dismissive tone is self-explaining.

Jacobs’s strike system is a simple heuristic meant to weed out works produced within and for intellectual bubbles. The passages I read—many more than the paragraph I quoted—and the author’s credentials suggest just such a bubble pedigree. So who is O’Connor’s Secret History of Bigfoot written for? As with all bubble writing, the likeminded. NPR, voice of the Frog Pond, called it

a smart, engaging, incredibly informative, hilarious, and wonderfully immersive journey not only into the history of Bigfoot in North America and the culture around but also a deep, honest, heartfelt look at the people who obsess about, the meaning of its myth's lingering appeal, and the psychology behind it.

But ordinary readers aren’t so sure. Here’s a well-put sample from a reader review on Goodreads, where the book has three out of five stars—a vigorously middling score:

I’m really confused as to what the purpose of this book was. As a person who’s uninitiated into Bigfoot lore I didn’t learn hardly anything about the phenomena. The same could be said for the commentary on psychology and delusion. I also don’t think this book is designed with Bigfoot enthusiasts in mind (nobody wants to be casually shrunk and mocked), or skeptics, who wouldn’t have much to take away from this book.

In a bit of serendipity, Jacobs wrote a short, one-paragraph post on his blog that I missed during the hurricane. It’s called “Parochialism,” and is a response to a New Yorker essay by Manvir Singh (Brown undergrad, Harvard PhD, UC Davis anthropology faculty). Jacobs notes simply that “the radical parochialism of elite opinion is quite a remarkable thing” and that, for a writer of Singh or O’Connor’s ilk, “ideas that aren’t present (a) in his social cohort and (b) at this instant simply don’t exist.”

Point (a) is especially important there. Living in a bubble leads the people in the bubble to think that the cocksure, mocking tone characteristic of work like this is just wit. The author can assume that everyone who matters agrees with him, and that anyone who disagrees doesn’t matter.*** We used to call this “preaching to the choir.” And the thing about preaching to the choir is that it’s unnecessary, and no one pays attention.

If you’d like a quick demonstration of just why it’s, well, batshit crazy to lump the resurrection of Jesus in with conspiracy theories and folk medicine, you can start with Richard Bauckham’s Jesus: A Very Short Introduction, a short work by a careful, earnest scholar for Oxford UP. Pages 104-9, which you can start reading here, offer an excellent précis for just why billions of people have believed something like this for two thousand years.

* “The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric.”

** I find it curious, albeit not terribly surprising, that someone who teaches at a Catholic college can blithely describe the resurrection of Christ as a “demonstrably batshit” idea.

*** A different Goodreads user counted 28 mentions of Donald Trump—by name, with more through brilliant nicknames like “the Tangerine Tornado,” which is, bizarrely, indexed—in O’Connor’s book. What writer who is not a well-submerged Frogpondian would risk alienating half of his potential readership to make puerile political digs in a book about Bigfoot?