Len Deighton on writing to entertain

Apropos of my thoughts on the false divide between literary and genre fiction last week, here’s a great 1977 interview with Len Deighton that I happened across over the weekend. This interview takes place after the success of The IPCRESS File and its sequels as well as Bomber and Fighter but before the Bernie Samson novels I’ve recently mentioned here.

Asked whether or not his heroes are not less concerned with thoughts than with actions, Deighton replies:

Well, I think that’s true, and I think that people who write the sort of books I write are essentially in the entertainment business, and they will be judged according to how successful they are at entertaining the reader, and anything else that they want to do has to be done in a way that is subordinate to the main task of entertaining the reader. And I think that the sort of books I write are essentially action books, that people move, that they do think but that they don’t spend too many pages in thinking if you sell many and there has to be pace with it.

The literary-genre divide is nothing new, of course, as interviewer Melvyn Bragg’s followup question makes clear: “When you say ‘I’m in the entertainment business,’ you’re separating yourself from people you’d call ‘novelists,’ is that…?” Deighton:

Well, depends how you use the word novel. I mean, I think novelists at one time were people who wrote the sort of books that Victorian housemaids took to bed at night and read. Well, I’d be very happy to identified as a novelist in that context. But I’m afraid that the way that the word is used nowadays, to mean profound and philosophical, well now I wouldn’t want to frighten anyone away from a good read by attaching a label like that to anything that I do.

Deighton gently but firmly disputes not the status of his own books but the artificiality and pretention built up around what it means to be a “novelist.” His happiness to align with the books that entertained even the lowly (Deighton’s parents both worked in service), the sort defended by Chesterton in “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” is of a piece with his insistence that messaging, argument, and “anything else” a writer might “want to do” with a book must come after entertaining the reader.

Proper priorities, I think.

I’m struck in this interview by Deighton’s confidence in sticking up for himself as an entertainer. Perhaps it’s born of his background. The posh and well-connected Ian Fleming, by comparison, right from the publication of his first Bond novel adopted a defensive crouch about his writing. This posture comes through in his 1963 essay “How to Write a Thriller.” A sample:

I am not “involved.” My books are not “engaged.” I have no message for suffering humanity and, though I was bullied at school and lost my virginity like so many of us used to do in the old days, I have never been tempted to foist these and other harrowing personal experiences on the public. My opuscula do not aim at changing people or making them go out and do something. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes and beds.

Despite including some good advice, Fleming severely undersells himself throughout this essay. But read on for a story Fleming tells about a conversation with a young relative writing self-consciously literary novels, and note the way in which Fleming defines himself as “a writer” rather than “an author,” a difference only of connotation, and asserts that his only goal is “to get the reader to turn over the page.”

Both Fleming and Deighton aim to avoid pretention; both simply want to tell stories. Both ended up doing much more. Again—proper priorities.

Deighton, who is still with us at age 96, by the way, is always great in the old interviews I’ve been able to turn up on YouTube. (Here’s another one from 1983 that’s quite good albeit not as in-depth.) His interview style—open, straightforward, down-to-earth, making no fuss and creating no Oz-the-Great-and-Powerful mystery around his trade—reminds me of Elmore Leonard. Both are always refreshing to listen to. Check out the interview quoted above and give one of Deighton’s books a try if you haven’t yet.

A dialogue tag oddity

I’ve mentioned before that reading out loud is part of the bedtime routine for me and my wife. We’ve enjoyed this as long as we’ve been married, and have read dozens of books by now. Very few of the books we’ve chosen have been stinkers, but reading aloud does have a way of spotlighting authorial quirks or tics even in the good ones. One area where tics most frequently appear is in dialogue tags.

I’ve written here about dialogue tags a few times in the last few months (see here, for example). Again, I believe strongly in Elmore Leonard’s rule of never using a verb other than said for dialogue, though I—following Leonard himself—allow for a lot of flexibility. I’ve read two novels recently, Hill 112, by Adrian Goldsworthy and The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers, that approach ascribing dialogue in plenty of other ways without calling attention to themselves.

That said, reading aloud before bedtime has only entrenched my opinion that a simple “he said” or “she said” is best.

This has been on my mind because of our recent bedtime reading: Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. Alexander is a good and imaginative writer and these books have been favorites for a long time, but in reading them aloud I grew increasingly exasperated with a pattern in his dialogue. See if you can spot it:

As he made to leave the chamber, however, Doli took him by the arm. “Gwystyl,” said the dwarf severely, “you have a skulking, sneaking look in your eyes. You might hoodwink my friends. But don’t forget you're also dealing with one of the Fair Folk. I have a feeling,” Doli added, tightening his grip, “you’re far too anxious to see us gone. I’m beginning to wonder, if I squeezed you a little, what more might come out.”

“It’s not that we're starving,” Eilonwy said. “Gurgi did remember to bring along the wallet of food. Yes, and that was a gift from Gwydion, too, so he had every right to take it. It’s certainly a magical wallet,” she went on; “it never seems to get empty. The food is really quite nourishing, I’m sure, and wonderful to have when you need it. But the truth of the matter is, it’s rather tasteless. That’s often the trouble with magical things. They’re never quite what you'd expect.”

“We have a lovely view of the fens from the hilltop,” Orwen put in with such enthusiasm that her necklace bounced and rattled. “You must come and enjoy it. Indeed, you’re perfectly welcome to stay as long as you want,” she added eagerly. “Now that little Dallben’s gone, and found himself a beard, too, the place isn’t half as cheery as it used to be. We wouldn’t change you into a toad-unless you insisted on it.”

“I don’t mean that,” Taran said. “What I believe,” he added thoughtfully, “is that Adaon understood these things anyway. Even with his clasp, there is much I do not understand. All I know is that I feel differently somehow. I can see things I never saw before—or smell or taste them. I can't say exactly what it is. It’s strange, and awesome in a way. And very beautiful sometimes. There are things that I know…” Taran shook his head. “And I don't even know how I know them.”

“I think you see many things,” Taran replied quietly, “many things which you tell no one. It has long been in my mind,” he went on, with much hesitation, “and now more than ever-the dream you had, the last night in Caer Dallben. You saw Ellidyr and King Morgant; to me, you foretold I would grieve. But what did you dream of yourself?”

“Go on,” Gwystyl said, “put him on your shoulder. That’s what he wants. For the matter of that, you shall have him as a gift, with the thanks of the Fair Folk. For you have done us a service, too. We were uneasy with the Crochan knocking about here and there; one never knew what would happen. Yes, yes, pick him up,” Gwystyl added with a melancholy sigh. “He’s taken quite a fancy to you. It’s just as well. I'm simply not up to keeping crows any more, not up to it at all.”

Alexander’s characters are always going on and adding and continuing, which we already know because they are still talking. A few of these, especially the last two above, hint at stage directions Alexander is trying to give his characters—sighing, hesitating—but this would work better broken out of the flow of dialogue and directly described, which would also give the narration, the characters and action, and the reader’s imagination space to breath. Look at how much better the simple “Taran shook his head” works near the end of the fourth example.

But this habit of breaking into the dialogue for these secondary tags is not only awkward and unnecessary, it’s annoying to read aloud. If dialogue tags should be as close to invisible as possible, annoying the reader may be worse than a lot of clumsy, highly noticeable Tom Swifty adverbs.

I selected these at random from the second book, The Black Cauldron. We’re several chapters into the fourth book, Taran Wanderer, and these interrupting tags are much less common than in the first couple volumes of the series. Someone must have had a talk with Alexander sometime around The Castle of Llyr. The books, already very good—The Black Cauldron and The High King won Newbery honors and a Newbery Medal back when that meant something!—are better for it, and I, as my wife’s reader, am grateful.

We’ve come to resemble them

The latest School of War episode dropped yesterday and featured historian Sean McMeekin, whose book Stalin’s War I’ve quoted and recommended here before. McMeekin discussed his latest, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, a book that’s been on my to-read list since it was announced.

The interview was insightful and wide-ranging despite coming in under an hour and is well worth a listen. But the conclusion was especially pointed. Speaking of Communist regimes that not only survived the fall of the USSR but have become globally ascendant—note carefully the subtitle of his book—McMeekin assessed the present dangers not only of external Communist enemies but of threats from within. These threats are not the Hollywood pinkos of Cold War anxiety but our own inbuilt mimetic tendencies, through which we gradually become like the thing we resist, and, even more to the point, the uncritical embrace and celebration of technologies that enable tyranny:

I don’t think the kind of threat, let’s say, to either Western values or our way of life is quite the same as you might have seen from the years of high Stalinism or high Maoism, even as far as people being fellow travelers or kind of trying to embrace those ideas, but some of it I still think—and I guess this is what I was trying to get at in my epilogue—certain elements of Communist practice which have in some ways actually you might even say been streamlined or improved that is to say: the repression, the censorship, the state control of information, social credit system. . . .

I remember back in the 90s when I was in Model UN among other things there were all these debates about US policy vis-à-vis China and the idea of opening up China, and back then the argument was that we should trade with China, we should open up to China . . . because that way we’ll make them more like us. That is to say, “You know, it’s true they crushed the rebels, the student protestors at Tiananmen Square . . . they obviously crushed and suppressed them, they obviously did not introduce any kind of genuine democracy or accountability to the public, however, if we trade with them they’ll be a little bit more like us and eventually they’ll develop liberal political institutions.”

That doesn’t seem to have happened. If anything, the opposite seems to have happened. I mean, if anything I think we’ve come to resemble them more than they resemble us, that is to say, our own public life is increasingly kind of taken over by social controls. And, you know, the early euphoria about the internet, maybe we should have been suspicious because the internet was originally ARPANET, a project of basically the Pentagon and the Defense Department. Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised that, in the end, these tools of social or political liberation could also be turned against us by governments, large corporations, etc.

I think it’s something to worry about. I think, you know, we just have to stay vigilant, and make sure our own traditions are upheld.

Host Aaron MacLean ends the episode by inviting McMeekin back someday to discuss “the global designs of universal liberalism.” I’d be there for that. Not exactly uplifting but necessary. Listen to the full interview here.

Food for thought, especially when it comes to discerning what “stay[ing] vigilant” means and just which of “our own traditions” we wish to preserve. For some related thoughts about the warping effect of the technologies used against ideological opponents, see this post from three years ago.

Ian Fleming on writing good reports—and fiction

The Amazon/Bond film series news I responded to earlier this week was an interesting coincidence, as I’ve been reading Nicholas Shakespeare’s new biography Ian Fleming: The Complete Man for about a month and a half now.

As assistant to the head of Naval Intelligence during World war II, Ian Fleming had to read and write many, many reports. Fortunately for him, he brought some natural talent as well as prior experience as a reporter for Reuters to the job. Here, excerpted from a classified memo in Shakespeare’s book, are three essentials Fleming insisted upon for the reports he received:

A report should aim at three virtues. First, it should have impact; the reader must be made to know at once what it is about; the opening sentence is therefore of great importance. Second, it should be unambiguous; it must leave no room for doubt or ignorance other than the doubt or ignorance which the writer has himself expressed. Third, it should have the brevity which comes only from clear intention; the writer must know what he wishes to say before he begins to say it; otherwise he will hedge and be verbose. He should imagine himself in the position of one who will have to act, and act quickly, on the information which his report contains.

With regard to clear and unambiguous meaning, compare one of CS Lewis’s bits of writing advice from a 1956 letter: “Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.” This is not to say ambiguity has no place in fiction, of course, but that must be the author’s purpose—just like an intelligence officer who must leave room only for those doubts he himself wants to convey about his report.

Directness or immediacy, clarity, and concision born of precision and purpose: as Shakespeare notes, “lan wrote his novels in this manner.” Good writing is good writing regardless of form, genre, or content.

The masculine urge to zap space bugs

This week on my commute I’ve been taking a break from podcasts to revisit a novel I last read in college, Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. It’s been about twenty years.

I faintly remember being disappointed by it, but not much else. I still wish it had more action, but with the benefit of twenty years of growing up, studying, reading, and learning from life, I can see that the problem with my first read was me. Under the sci-fi adventure premise and WWII-memoir-in-space style, Starship Troopers is an uncommonly rich and complicated book.

This passage from relatively late in the story struck me especially sharply. The protagonist, Johnny Rico, joined the Mobile Infantry straight out of high school, during peacetime. While training, war broke out with the “bugs,” the most notorious early incident of which was a bug attack on Buenos Aires that “smeared” the entire city—including Johnny’s parents. Or so he thinks. As he departs his original ship for OCS, he bumps into his father, now an NCO despite being in his mid-40s.

Johnny’s father had strongly disapproved of joining up, so not only his survival but his about-face on military service surprises Johnny. He assumes his father joined to avenge his mother. Not so. Johnny’s enlistment awakened something long dormant in his father:

“Your mother’s death released me for what I had to do… even though she and I were closer than most, nevertheless it set me free to do it. I turned the business over to Morales—”

“Old man Morales? Can he handle it?”

“Yes. Because he has to. A lot of us are doing things we didn’t know we could. I gave him a nice chunk of stock—you know the old saying about the kine that tread the grain—and the rest I split two ways, in a trust: half to the Daughters of Charity, half to you whenever you want to go back and take it. If you do. Never mind. I had at last found out what was wrong with me.” He stopped, then said very softly, “I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal… but a man.”

There’s a lot going on here. Running through it is a strong strand of Ernst Jünger—who like Heinlein proved controversial for being clear, unsparing, and uncategorizable within the permissible simplistic divisions—and the word “man” means Johnny’s father is not only making a statement about himself, masculinity, and courage, though that is the obvious surface-level meaning, but about what people are and ought to be.

What I immediately thought of was a short but poignant line from Dr Johnson, who has been much on my mind lately. In his Life of Samuel Johnson Boswell quotes him as saying, on the topic of war:

“Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.”

— Samuel Johnson

An apt description of Johnny’s father, who is a fairly minor but memorable character, and a lot of the rest of us. I had my own abortive brush with the service after grad school, the kind of thing that was clearly not meant to be (a little too old, a little too slow) and worked out well in the end. I wouldn’t change a thing. But thinking back on it still causes me a pang of “what if” every so often. Fortunately we have imagination and stories, and the examples of the men who did soldier, who did go to sea.

Starship Troopers might be a “controversial classic,” as the most recent paperback calls it, but that it resonates so strongly with itself, with other great literature, and with a powerful impulse inside most men, an impulse either fulfilled for felt forever as accusation, is a clear mark of its worth.

For a recap of some of the controversy, a good examination of some of the nuance in the book, and a very good critique of the film adaptation, which was an deliberate act of vandalism, see this piece from American Reformer. For a similar premise with different themes and a strikingly different tone but similarly powerful social critique and more action, read The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman, a novel I’ve read or listened to a number of times.

Butler, Palmerston, and the soldiering menace

Each week on Substack I publish a clerihew, my favorite form of light verse: a quatrain in AABB with intentionally awkward scansion and forced rhyme. The subject is always a person, whose name constitutes the first line. My clerihews usually concern historical figures. My subject last week was General Benjamin Butler.

The joke in the poem itself had to do with something tawdry that Butler, playing the part of the moneygrubbing Yankee to the hilt, supposedly did while dining at a wealthy lady’s home while in charge of the Union occupation of New Orleans. But in my brief historical note afterward I mentioned something for which he was infamous: General Order No. 28 of May 15, 1862, which reads:

As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.

The women of occupied New Orleans had not welcomed the Union army or navy into the city and had shown repeated disrespect to them. One story has a lady emptying a chamber pot onto Admiral David Farragut. Cartoons depict them spitting at Union soldiers. One suspects simple snubs and insults were most widespread. But Butler could allow none of this to stand. In case it wasn’t clear, General Order No. 28 calls for any woman (he denies them the title “lady,” an obvious dig) disrespecting his troops to be considered and treated as a prostitute.

The reaction was predictable and swift. Here’s Confederate General PGT Beauregard, who issued a general order of his own in response, a straightforward appeal to gallantry and the protection of women’s honor:

Men of the South! shall our mothers, our wives, our daughters and our sisters, be thus outraged by the ruffianly* soldiers of the North, to whom is given the right to treat, at their pleasure, the ladies of the South as common harlots? Arouse friends, and drive back from our soil, those infamous invaders of our homes and disturbers of our family ties.

Political authorities weighed in as well. President Jefferson Davis condemned Butler. The Governor of Louisiana, Thomas Moore, published a longish open letter in which he echoed Beauregard, defended the women of New Orleans as reacting naturally to an invading foreign force, and, interestingly added force through historical argument:

The annals of warfare between civilized nations afford no similar instance of infamy to this order. It is thus proclaimed to the world that the exhibition of disgust or repulsiveness by the women of New Orleans to the hated invaders of their home and the slayers of their fathers, brothers, and husbands shall constitute a justification to a brutal soldiery for the indulgence of their lust. . . . History records instances of cities sacked and inhuman atrocities committed upon the women of a conquered town, but in no instance in modern times, at least without the brutal ravishers suffering condign punishment from the hands of their own commanders. It was reserved for a Federal general to invite his soldiers to the perpetration of outrages at the mention of which the blood recoils in horror.

Unable to penetrate deeper into Confederate territory or to break the spirit of civilian resistance, Moore suggests, Butler “sees the fruits of a victory he did not help to win eluding his grasp, and nothing left upon which to gloat his vengeance but unarmed men and helpless women.”

There’s a lot going on here, and more I could have quoted.

Over the years I’ve seen this incident downplayed as Confederate hysteria, with everything from “Lost Cause” mythology to “the patriarchy” playing a role. The short version: Southerners were ninnies upset about nothing, and anyway they deserved it. Sometimes the fact that Butler’s order did not result in a wave of rapes is adduced in support, but this is post facto justification. No one living through this could have known how it would turn out. The example of history gave them plenty to worry about.

And the historical dimension is what most piqued my interest. Reading up on Butler ahead of publishing that clerihew, I discovered in Library of America’s great four-volume set of primary source materials a British reaction to General Order No. 28. Here’s a note delivered by Lord Palmerston, then prime minister, to American ambassador Charles Adams (son of john Quincy, grandson of john) on June 11, 1862:

My dear sir,—I cannot refrain from taking the liberty of saying to you that it is difficult if not impossible to express adequately the disgust which must be excited in the mind of every honorable man by the general order of General Butler given in the inclosed extract from yesterday’s Times. Even when a town is taken by assault it is the practice of the Commander of the conquering army to protect to his utmost the inhabitants and especially the female part of them, and I will venture to say that no example can be found in the history of civilized nations till the publication of this order, of a general guilty in cold blood of so infamous an act as deliberately to hand over the female inhabitants of a conquered city to the unbridled licence of an unrestrained soldiery.

If the Federal Government chuses to be served by men capable of such revolting outrages, they must submit to abide by the deserved opinion which mankind will form of their conduct.

Adams asserted that he would not “recognize” Palmerston’s note—which was marked Confidential—“unless he was assured it was official.” Palmerston replied that it was, and publicly condemned Butler in a speech in the Commons. Adams, according to his secretary’s journal, “was much offended,” considering Palmerston’s note an “impudent” act of “insolence” and its arguments “sophistical.” Adams’s secretary, who viewed Adams as the winner of the tangle, thought Palmerston was projecting:

Knowing the brutality of his own officers and soldiers he readily imagined ours of the same stamp, and insolently presumed to lecture Mr. Adams on a thing which was not his business. His ill-manners were properly rebuked. American soldiers, he will find out, are not beasts, tho’ English soldiers are; and he will also learn that it is only a debased mind that would construe Gen’l Butler’s order as he has done.

If there is anything “sophistical” in this exchange, it is this. The explicit insult and implicit threat in General Order No. 28 were clear, hence the outrage. This is perhaps the first move in the long game of pooh-poohing the outrage at Butler.

At any rate, the women of New Orleans, Southerners generally, and foreign observers like Lord Palmerston knew what was up. So did Lincoln. Whether out of principle, canny strategic considerations, or for reasons of pure PR, Lincoln removed Butler from command in New Orleans in December 1862.

I was struck by the similarity of Palmerston’s appeal to that of Moore. Both correctly observe the dangers of a population of soldiers toward civilians in an occupied area. Both correctly observe that part of the long, slow evolution toward an ideal of “civilized” warfare involved the responsibility of leadership to protect civilians, even enemy civilians, and “even when a town is taken by assault,” which in the ancient world and much of the Middle Ages was understood to give the victor carte blanche to loot and rape.

Here’s something I’ve had to work hard to make my students understand given our “thank you for your service” culture of trust and admiration for soldiers: historically, soldiers were a menace. Even your own soldiers. (Perhaps especially your own soldiers, since if all was going well you would never see the enemy.) Discipline, martial law, flogging and the firing squad, and the inculcation of chivalrous ideals were partial solutions to the threat posed by large bodies of bored, strong, regularly paid young men to the civilian population, but only partial solutions. And these crumbled following the French Revolution which, as David Bell makes clear in The First Total War, rejected limited “civilized” warfare as an irrational fiction and embraced ruthless pragmatic brutality.

So, what to make of all this? Far from hysteria or Lost Cause mythologizing, the outrage was justifiable and the concern real. To pretend otherwise is partisanship.** Palmerston knew his history, and how thin and artificial the barrier between civilization and barbarism is. Adams imagined Union soldiers to have transcended history. One of these men is, at best, a deluded optimist.

A few years ago, quoting the Oxford History of Modern War, I wrote about the Civil War as a psychological conflict. Butler’s General Order No. 28 is a good example of what this looked like before the “frankly terrorist” campaigns of Sherman and others, campaigns that had more than a little of Jacobin total war in them. In addition to military victory, Butler needed to crush the enemy psychologically. Nothing short of abject subjugation would do, which is why Butler became a darling of the punitively-minded Radical Republicans. No “hearts and minds” here. In that way it’s of a piece with other nationalist wars.

* Appropriately, ruffian comes into English from Italian, in which it means “pimp.” Dante uses it in Inferno XVIII, the circle of panderers and seducers. Moore plays on the same theme when he writes that Butler can “add to infamy already well merited these crowning titles of a panderer to lust and a desecrator of virtue.”

** As a measure of the extent to which these events are still subject to purely partisan interpretation, why do we hear so much about the Southern desire to protect women being “misogyny” and “patriarchy,” but not Butler’s expressed intention to treat Southern women as prostitutes out of political spite?

Ironies and reversals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the need to be “deeply grounded”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.