Orwell, Camus, Chesterton, and bad math

Earlier this week I read this really interesting piece by William Fear on the most distinctive trait shared by Orwell and Albert Camus: “Both of these writers took the view that truthfulness was more important than ideological allegiance and metaphysics, that the facts should be derived from the real world, rather than the world of ideas.” I can’t weigh in on whether this is true of Camus—I think I read The Stranger and The Plague somewhere around seventeen years ago in college—but it strikes me as a good assessment of Orwell.

Fear uses a particularly striking example to illustrate the closeness of Orwell and Camus’s thought on truth and the threat posed to truthfulness by modern ideology, a major concern for both men—what Fear calls “common ground.” He begins with a line from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:

“There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death.”

— George Orwell, 1949

He then points out that, in fact, “these words are not Orwell’s at all. This is a quote from Albert Camus’ novel La Peste, which was published two years before Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1947.” Fear doesn’t give the exact quotation but this is what I turn up in searching for it:

“But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four.”

— Albert Camus, 1947

Orwell’s quotation is almost exact, and the import of the quotation—the ideological threat, enforced through peer pressure and naked authority, to admitting what is objectively true and the courage required to do so—is precisely the same. Again, common ground for these writers.

So Orwell got the idea from Camus. But… did Camus get the idea from Orwell? Fear quotes one of Orwell’s book reviews from 1939:

“It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so.”

— George Orwell, 1939

Fear declines to speculate on precisely whether Camus got this mathematical example from Orwell, noting that the nature of each man’s influence on the other is really beside the point, and continues with his essay. I recommend reading the whole thing.

But a longtime reader of Chesterton cannot read the these three variations on one idea without going back yet further, to a column by GK Chesterton published in the Illustrated London News in 1926. I quote this at greater length because the context makes it clear that the parallel runs deeper than the use of 2+2 as an example:

“We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four.”

— GK Chesterton, 1926

But there is not only doubt about mystical things; not even only about moral things. There is most doubt of all about rational things. I do not mean that I feel these doubts, either rational or mystical; but I mean that a sufficient number of modern people feel them to make unanimity an absurd assumption. Reason was self-evident before Pragmatism. Mathematics were self-evident before Einstein. But this scepticism is throwing thousands into a condition of doubt, not about occult but about obvious things. We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.

And this in itself recapitulates something Chesterton wrote as early as his essay collection Heretics, published in 1905. Its stunning final paragraph includes this passage:

The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.

So did Orwell get this example from Chesterton? We know Orwell read Chesterton, and that Chesterton even published some of Orwell’s earliest work. So I’d add Chesterton to the lineage of this idea.

But alongside Fear, I’d also say it doesn’t entirely matter. What does matter is the reason Chesterton and Orwell and Camus kept coming back to the childish simplicity of 2+2: an abiding concern for the truth, a truth to be found out there in reality rather than in here in personal perception or political ideology, and a shared—and quite justifiable—anxiety about the threats it faces.

I’ve written before about Orwell’s view of the relation of the modern historical discipline to objective truth, here and here, and about Chesterton and Orwell’s overlapping concerns with language and clarity here. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni quoted the Heretics version of Chesterton’s line in a clip that went mildly viral—at least among Chesterton fans—several months ago. I still know next to nothing about Camus, largely owing to a prejudicial suspicion of twentieth-century French thinkers, but Fear has convinced me to look again, and more closely.

A visit to Tulum

“He thought too much fuss was made over all this ancient masonry. . . . It was all a great bore to him, the Maya business, except for the tourist aspect. It gave people the wrong idea about Mexico. Blinking lizards on broken walls.”

— from Gringos, by Charles Portis

Last week, as part of a family trip to Mexico, I got the chance to visit my first Mayan city—the Yucatec town of Tulum. Having never been to this part of the world and having only studied it cursorily, I looked forward to an opportunity to learn a little more directly, on the ground. It was a great experience.

Tulum stands on rocky cliffs overlooking the sea on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, about a third of the way between Cancun to the north and Belize to the south. The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, which stretches from north of Cancun to Honduras, lies just offshore. A natural gap in the reef created by the undersea outlet of a freshwater underground river that flows into the ocean below the city played an important role in the siting of the city sometime around 800 years ago. Possibly more.

In the broader context of Mayan history, Tulum is a late post-classical city. The classical era—the one most people imagine, however vaguely, when they hear the word Maya—lasted about seven centuries, from c. AD 250-950. The post-classical period saw the diminution in size, population, influence, and order of the great classical city-states. Some were abandoned outright. Tulum was founded and flourished.

The playa at Tulum, now closed to the public as its shelter and ready supply of sargassum (the reddish brown seaweed visible along the shoreline) make it an excellent nesting site for sea turtles

Tulum is unusual in two respects. First, it sits on the coast, as a port. Though historians and archaeologists are discovering or recovering more and more about travel, communication, and trade throughout the Maya world, port cities are uncommon. That gap in the reef is the key. By aligning the city with the gap, Tulum allowed for the easy entry and exit of the large canoes used for trade up and down the Yucatán coast. A sheltered beach below a notch in the cliffs provided a natural dockyard. Further, the central political and religious complex of the city and its most important monumental building, the Castillo, were oriented to the gap in the reef. Not coincidentally, this the same direction in which the sun rises.

Second, Tulum is small. The city’s walls, greatly diminished but still impressive, enclose and protect a space 400 meters wide and 200 deep. Our guide, Pedro, estimated a population of 2,000, predominantly the city elite and traders, who lived in luxurious stone houses within the city walls. A larger population of farmers and slaves lived outside, growing the food.

So Tulum is no Chichén Itzá, perhaps the most famous late classical city, or the much earlier Tikal, but it has a unique history and its ruins are still impressive. Several houses, including two called the “palace” and “great palace” by archaeologists, have been excavated and partially reconstructed, but the centerpieces are the walls and the temple complex. Two smaller temples, the Temple of the Wind God and the Descending God Temple, sit atop the cliffs bracketing Tulum’s sheltered beach. The latter, presumably dedicated to a solar deity, has doorways aligning with the sunrise on the summer and winter equinoxes. On those days, dawn light shines straight through and clear across the city, striking a large stone in the outer walls.

Temple of the Descending God, visible upside down above the opening at the top of the stairs

But dominating the city is the Castillo, so named later, after the city’s abandonment, but in fact a combination temple and lighthouse. Canoes seeking to pass through the reef could aim for the Castillo. According to Pedro, fires were kept burning to help navigators aiming for the port.

The “great palace” in the foreground and the Castillo beyond

It also provided a stage for human sacrifice. Pedro proved refreshingly straightforward about this, indulging neither romantic notions that the victims offered were idealistic volunteers (something I’ve heard, absurdly, about the occasional victims of Viking human sacrifice, but never about the Maya) nor trying to diminish or explain away the practice. These were human sacrifices. Those offered were other Maya, captured in the ongoing internecine warfare characteristic of the ununified, warlike Maya world, and the offerings were meant to ensure good harvests, success in war, prosperity and stability for the city and all of its inhabitants.

That fact gives this sunny spot by the ocean, cooled by continuous breezes rushing in over the reef, an ominous aspect not unlike the Colosseum or some other ancient site of bloodshed. The intimacy, the smallness of the setting only strengthens this impression. Gladiator notwithstanding, it’s hard to visit the Colosseum and imagine it full of people celebrating bloodsport. At Tulum, it is easy to fill the avenues and plazas with people and visualize them staring up at the priests and doomed offerings. It’s easy because on the morning we visited, Tulum was full of people, and it is hard not to look up at the temple. Reverence comes naturally in a place like this.

The Castillo looms above the central plaza, the palace in the foreground, and dominates even the Temple of the Descending God at left

This in no way diminishes Tulum. It’s just a fact of the place, and Pedro treated it as such, explaining things gently but firmly. This is history—accept and understand it. I appreciated that approach.

The face of a god on the facade of the great palace, with yellow, red, and black paint still decorating the eye and nose

The human sacrifice and the dedication to astronomy that I’ve already mentioned are perhaps the two most famous aspects of Maya culture, but do not come close to expressing all of it. In addition to telling us about trade, the observation of the stars and the careful orientation and construction of Tulum’s monumental buildings, Pedro described the art and decoration of the city. Rather than bare stone, Tulum in its heyday was brightly painted with a variety of colors derived from natural pigments. The dominant color scheme was a bright turquoise, though reds, blacks, yellows, and other colors were used for murals or to accent sculpture.

On “the great palace,” in addition to the faces of gods sculpted in larger-than-life size into the masonry at the four corners of the building and reliefs of other gods—including the Descending God and a squatting goddess of birth and fertility—ritual scenes were painted inside. The paintings were still visible through the columns supporting the upper level. The faces of the gods still bore traces of yellow and red paint, and red handprints—artists’ signatures? marks of prayer? pure decoration?—showed plainly all over the building.

Tulum, as Pedro explained, was seen and described but never conquered by the Spaniards. It was abandoned in the 1540s. The pressures of war, overpopulation, and crop failure led the people of Tulum to pull up stakes and leave. And where did they go? Yet another unexplained aspect of the mysterious Maya?

That reputation, after all, has drawn people to ruins like Tulum from all over the world for the better part of a century. Charles Portis’s final novel Gringos, which I reread during the trip, is in no small part about the cranks and oddballs who all wind up in the Yucatán hoping to get something out of the Maya. The allure of the mysterious and the uncanny. But here Pedro was excellent as well. The city was abandoned, yes, later to be claimed by the jungle and rediscovered by European travelers exploring rumors of lost cities, but the people did not disappear. More than twenty Mayan languages are still spoken in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras.

There was much more I could describe and much more detailed information imparted by Pedro and the bilingual signage around the city, but I want to encourage y’all to visit for yourselves if you can. I came away with a strong impression of the strength and vibrancy, the ingenuity and ceremony, the good and the bad of a civilization even in its period of decline and of Tulum’s unique place in the broader Maya world. And visiting in person—seeing the centuries-old handprints on the great palace, staring up at the site of a long ago bloodstained altar, feeling the relief from the tropical heat borne from the sea by the wind—gave me a flesh-and-blood appreciation for the history I’ve previously only read about.

If you’re going to visit Tulum, let me corroborate a few things that a travel agent will probably tell you:

• Dress comfortably and coolly, even if you’re visiting in the late winter, like we did.

• Wear a broad-brimmed hat, and make sure it fits well. The closer you get to the cliffs the more likely it will be blown off.

• Bring bottled water, and plenty of it.

• Bring sunglasses and sunscreen.

• Bring bug spray. We came well-equipped in this regard but had no trouble with insects whatsoever. But it can’t hurt to be prepared.

And a final, personal and historical bit of advice: behave yourself. Much of the ruins of Tulum are roped off and closed to the public—with armed federales at the entrance and local police hanging around, watching—because of vandalism. Per Mark Twain, “There have always been ruins, no doubt; and there have always been pensive people to sigh over them, and asses to scratch upon them their names and the important date of their visit.” Always have been, perhaps, but it doesn’t have to be you.

My wife and I have been back in the States for a week and have enjoyed going over our experiences on the trip, especially our visit to Tulum. I hope this rare travelogue will entice y’all to visit, too. In the meantime, I’ll conclude with a gallery of a few other photos from our visit.

The scorn of one crank for another crank

With my dad in front of the Castillo at Tulum. That’s Gringos that I’m carrying in my right hand.

Late last night I returned from a trip to the Yucatán, during which I got to do two amazing things—one for the first and the other for the third time. The first was visiting the Yucatec Maya city of Tulum, which I hope to write about in the coming week. The other was rereading one of my favorite novels, Charles Portis’s Gringos. I’ve been planning to reread this particular novel on this particular trip for months, as the story takes place in the Yucatán and concerns the use and abuse of Mayan sites and artifacts. I enjoy reading novels in story-appropriate settings, and this reading of Gringos was one of the best I’ve ever experienced. Five stars, would recommend.

I hope to write more about Gringos and Portis in the coming weeks, too, but for the time being I wanted to share a longish passage from early in the novel. The narrator, Arklatex expat Jimmy Burns, has just run into the young UFO researcher Rudy Kurle broken down midriver deep in the Yucatán jungle. Rudy is on his way to a Mayan city he believes is a UFO landing pad.

He wore a bush hat with the brim turned up on one side, Australian fashion, and a belted safari jacket with epaulets, rings and pleated pockets, and he wanted to be known as “Rudy Kurle, author and lecturer.” He and Louise were in Mexico to gather material for a book about some space dwarfs or “manikins” who came here many years ago from a faraway planet. There was no connection to the chaneques, as far as I knew. Their little men were benign, with superior skills and knowledge, and they had transformed a tribe of savages into the Mayan civilization. Not very flattering to the Indians, and it wasn’t of course a new theory, except perhaps for the dwarf element. There had been recent landings as well. 

As a geocentric I didn’t find this stuff convincing. I knew the argument—all those galaxies!—a statistical argument, but in my cosmology men were here on earth and nowhere else, go as far as you like. There was us and the spirit world and that was it. It was a visceral belief or feeling so unshakable that I didn’t even bother to defend it. When others laughed at me, I laughed with them. Still, the 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. 

Rudy was often gone on these mysterious field trips, to check out reports of ancient television receivers, pre-Columbian Oldsmobiles, stone carvings of barefooted astronauts strapped into their space ships. The ships were driven by “photon propulsion,” although here in the jungle the manikins went about their errands in other, smaller, “slow aircraft.” Rudy wouldn’t describe the machines for me. He and Louise tried to draw people out without giving away anything themselves. There were thieves around who would steal your ideas and jump into print ahead of you. So much uncertainty in their work.

And so little fellowship among the writers. They shared a beleaguered faith and they stole freely from one another—the recycling of material was such that their books were all pretty much the same one now—but in private they seldom had a good word for their colleagues. There were usually a few of these people in temporary residence in Mérida. They exchanged stiff nods on the street. Rudy even expressed contempt for Erich von Däniken, his master, who had started the whole business, and for lesser writers too, for anyone whose level of credulity did not exactly match his own. A millimeter off, either way, and you were a fool. It was the scorn of one crank for another crank. 

A few observations: First, this is some really fine writing. It’s almost pure exposition but it also characterizes Rudy and his colleagues and Jimmy Burns all at the same time, and is peppered with dozens of vivid, concrete details, which as I’m always noting are “the life blood of fiction.”

Second, this is hilarious. The bit about preferring the belligerent UFO books has made me laugh for ten years now. But it was that line’s context which really struck me this time around.

Third—that context. There’s the accidentally insulting (and potentially racist) condescension of ancient aliens theories, the continuous cross-pollination and outright plagiarism of unverified and ultimately unverifiable information, the jockeying for position and originality, the caginess, the backbiting, and the strange hauteur of the precisely defined and defended wackadoo position. This is a sharply observed and pinpoint accurate description of the UFO community—or any conspiracy-minded community, for that matter.

And the whole book is like this. Actually, it gets even better.

Check Gringos out if you haven’t. While Portis’s best book is incontestably True Grit, Gringos has many of the same strengths—a straightforward plot, a brilliantly realized setting, great humor, a strong narrative voice—but a more intricate plot. That makes it certainly, I think, his most finely crafted novel. I strongly recommend it. And if you can read it while visiting Mayan ruins in the Yucatán, all the better.

I’ve written before about cranks, with reference to Chesterton, here, and—once again with reference to Chesterton—about chronological snobbery and the inadvertent (or not) racism of ancient aliens theories here and here. And Gringos was the subject of one of the very first posts on this blog, in which I quoted the “belligerent” line above as well as another gem about a subject dear to me, here.

Against value in literature, for delight

An interesting exchange from near the end of the latest episode of John J Miller’s Great Books podcast, with translator David Slavitt talking about Orlando Furioso:

Miller: What is the value of reading Orlando Furioso today?

Slavitt: None whatever! There’s not a value of reading anything. I mean, there’s a value of reading instructions when you have a new electronic device, but reading by itself does not make anybody better, certainly doesn’t make anybody wiser, it just refines your sensibility. Now, a refined sensibility you would think is an advantage, but what it does is it allows you to be assaulted and affronted and outraged over and over again, probably fifty times more frequently than somebody who has no refinement whatever. The notion that reading is “good” or poems are “great”—all of that seems to me defensive without anybody having attacked. The reason for reading is that it entertains you. I can’t remember which medieval guy it was—Pound quotes him—[wrote that] the purpose of literature is . . . that it may move, that it may teach, that it may delight. And the delight part is more important than the other two. And without that, there’s no sense in undertaking the effort.

Miller: Does Orlando Furioso move and teach?

Slavitt: Well, it teaches because it gives you confidence to turn on any text or any saying, any utterance, and ask of it, “Are you kidding? Do you mean that? Is this true? Is it useful? Is it nonsense?” And “Is it nonsense?” is a question that all readers should bring to whatever they’re reading all the time.

Two things:

First, Slavitt is clearly responding to the instrumental use of literature, which is borne of a widespread viewpoint that to be of “value” a text must inform or persuade in a particular way. Literature must have a function; it must get you something. This is a commodification of literature, and pretty typically American in its pragmatism and evangelicalism. And Slavitt’s point that praising great literature smacks of protesting too much, of trying too hard to convince the unsympathetic that it’s worth their while, highlights the same problem. Note the metaphors this discussion has to fall back on: value, worth, etc.

I might quibble with Slavitt’s hyperbole here, but I agree that stories and literature must be enjoyed for their own sake before they can be “used” for anything. As it happens, delight will also give a good story staying power, and as Slavitt hints in his answers, delight will open you up to be taught and formed—the “useful” parts. Writers who entertain will continue to entertain and teach long after their “usefulness” has expired. Who do people still talk about more outside the classroom: Shakespeare or Upton Sinclair?

Second, Slavitt, in arguing that reading per se does not necessarily make a reader better or wiser (again, an instrumental assumption), brought to mind what might be my least favorite popular slogan: “Fight evil, read books.” Google that phrase and just see how much garbage merch you turn up. Beyond being a comma splice, this sentiment shouldn’t withstand even ten seconds of reflection. Have no evil people written books? Have no evil people been influenced by books? Do evil people not read, too? Are there no books modern people think are evil?

As with so much other nerd culture, the “Fight evil, read books” t-shirts and totes and bookmarks and memes are just so much self-serving gloating. Congratulations, you’re literate. But goodness—before you even get to “fighting evil”—takes more than a library card and an addiction to YA novels.

One of the delights of the above exchange is the 88-year old Slavitt’s wry crustiness and the usually unflappable Miller clearly struggling to recover from that first answer to a pretty standard wrap-up question. The episode doesn’t actually cover much of what Orlando Furioso is about, but it’s certainly piqued my interest to finally read this Renaissance epic and Miller and Slavitt’s discussion is great fun. Check it out.

Addendum: Coincidentally, after listening to this episode on my long Thursday commutes I tuned into the latest episode of Alan Cornett’s Cultural Debris, in which Holly Ordway discussed CS Lewis’s distinction between “using” and “receiving” literature. A helpful parallel line of thought.

Beethoven, art, criticism, and enjoying yourself

From the late Edmund Morris’s Beethoven: The Universal Composer, an excellent short biography for the Eminent Lives series, on the composition Beethoven undertook during a dark period before the premier of his Eighth Symphony in December 1813 and his hugely successful revision of Fidelio:

He went about the task of composing the “Battle Symphony” (known in Germany as Wellingtons Sieg, or “Wellington’s Victory”) with typical professionalism, expanding it to two movements and throwing in “Rule Britannia” for good measure. After scoring it for Panharmonicon, he composed an alternative version for grand orchestra. This enabled him to indulge his love of military field drums, beginning the piece with two enormous rattling crescendos in contrasting rhythms, as if marshaling his aural forces. In the ensuing “battle,” he marked 188 exact cues for cannon fire, with solid dots for British artillery and open ones for French, plus twenty-five musket volleys of precise length and direction, indicated by tied, trilled ghost notes. He synchronized all these salvos with his music so precisely that at the height of the conflict, six cannonades and two musket volleys went off within three seconds.

The “Battle Symphony” commemorates Arthur Wellesley’s victory at Vitoria, the victory that resulted in his elevation to the peerage as the Duke of Wellington. I’ve loved Beethoven since childhood but am by no means a connoisseur, so I had to look the “Battle Symphony” up. It’s wild. In addition to “Rule, Britannia,” it incorporates “God Save the King” as a leitmotif for the British and a French folksong better known as “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” or “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” I’ve embedded von Karajan’s performance in this post; you really have to hear it.

Morris points out several times that critics—actual connoisseurs, unlike yours truly—hold Beethoven’s “Battle Symphony” in pretty low regard. But he also offers this important caveat:

The “Battle Symphony” is by scholarly consensus the worst potboiler Beethoven ever composed, infamous for noise and naïveté. Yet its disparagers ignore that he obviously enjoyed writing it, and that its huge popular success—fanned by Prince Karl Schwarzenberg’s defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig in mid-October—helped pull him out of the Slough of Despond.

Critical consensus matters, as it often does, over enough time, sift what is best from what isn’t, but popular success and pure personal enjoyment matter, too. Sometimes it’s good to remember that. In any art form, if you’re not having fun doing it at least some of the time, why bother?

Bonus trivia or, When Interests Collide: The idea for the “Battle Symphony” came from Beethoven’s acquaintance Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, an inventor who wanted something topical to play on the mechanical orchestra contraption mentioned above. The name sounded familiar to me, and I finally realized where I’d run across it: an early and influential Southern Literary Messenger essay by none other than Edgar Allan Poe, in which he exposes a chess-playing automaton called The Turk that Mälzel had exhibited up and down the East Coast as a hoax. Small world.

Clarity and confusion in war movies

Tom Hanks and Gary Sinese in Forrest Gump’s ambush scene

Happy St Valentine’s Day! Let’s talk about war movies.

One of my favorite podcast discoveries last year was School of War, a military history podcast hosted by Marine veteran Aaron MacLean. School of War gets fantastic guests and covers a wide array of topics—just recently I’ve listened to episodes about Gaius Marius, Erich Ludendorff, the Battle of Crécy, the Anglo-Zulu War, and the myth of Spartan invincibility. This morning the show’s latest episode covered “something a little lighter,” as MacLean puts it: the best of American war movies with guest Sonny Bunch, film critic for The Bulwark.

This episode was a great surprise, and exactly the length of my commute this morning. After an initial discussion of what precisely constitutes a “war movie,” MacLean and Bunch talk through a series of great films in chronological order from Last of the Mohicans and Gettysburg (MacLean sounds like he had a childhood very similar to mine) to Zero Dark Thirty and The Outpost. Along the way they consider a lot of recurring themes as well as the manifold problems of telling war stories on film.

One exchange that particularly struck me relates to a tension running through all war movies. MacLean and Bunch raise this topic a couple of times, but perhaps in greatest detail (at approximately 21:00) as they discuss another old favorite of mine, Sergeant York:

Bunch: That is classic [Howard] Hawks, just pure visual storytelling. The sequence where he’s running essentially from, like, hole to hole taking out German forces, you’re never confused about where he is. There’s a perfect spatial understanding of what is happening in the picture. Again, Howard Hawks is one of the greats, and that is a great movie.

MacLean: Which actually—if I may make a thematic observation—is the thing about war movies that is probably, you know, necessary to making a good movie but the least truthful about the actual battlefield. From time to time, you’ll hear people say, you know, who were in combat, “That was just like a movie on some level,” or we’ll get asked, “Is it like the movies?” And the answer is “In some ways Yes and in some ways No,” and the principal way in which it’s “No” is that, in the movies, you know, as you just pointed out, in a good movie you’re not confused about what’s happening in the action. So in, take Black Hawk Down, for example. Right before the RPG hits a truck, what do you see? You see a bad guy on the roof pop out with the RPG launcher and fire the thing. But if you’re in real life, you’re the kid in the truck, you don’t see the guy pop out with the launcher nine times out of ten, you just see Boom! So the actual battlefield is a place of genuine confusion, where a lot of your energy is going into the most simple tasks of, like, Where are they? Who is shooting at me? From where? You know, those things are what you’re spending a lot of your time doing. But if you made the audience do that in a film you would alienate them very quickly. So even in—I’m curious to know your view on this—even in films that—maybe we’ll talk about this one in a minute—like Saving Private Ryan, where famously the chaos of Omaha Beach is a major subject of the film’s first thirty minutes, even there you’re pretty well oriented, actually, as the viewer. You’re not hiding behind something looking at the back of that thing, like, peeking out from time to time trying to figure out what the heck is going on. You actually have a pretty mobile eye that gives you some sense of orientation to what’s happening.

The discussion moves on from there, but MacLean nicely expresses the tension between the needs of film as a medium and the actual experience of combat. Every war movie has to make decisions about how to handle this. The classic war movies often err in the direction of clarity, with alternating scenes of crisp, clearly shot combat and generals pushing flags around a map table. The choice here is explaining a narrative. Alternately, and more rarely, some films err on the side of chaos and bewilderment, but these often do alienate the audience (and, as MacLean and Bunch discuss later, they tend to have explicit political aims). The best war movies manage a little of both.

One that I think balances this expertly is Forrest Gump. Every year in US History II I show my students the film’s Vietnam ambush scene. Among the things it does well:

• the scene goes from tranquil to chaotic instantly;

• Lt Dan’s platoon returns fire—somewhere. Despite the immense firepower they’re spraying out there’s little indication of what they’re shooting at or whether they’re having any effect, and that’s because

• the enemy is invisible. There are muzzle flashes in the distant treeline, and that’s just about it.

After I show this clip, I ask my students how many enemy soldiers they saw in the scene. Very rarely one student will have caught the movement, out of focus in the extreme lower lefthand corner of one shot near the end, of a few VC, though even after viewing it dozens of times myself I’m not sure precisely how many there are. This situation, I explain, was typical. Hollywood action—or the kind of clarity and control you get in Call of Duty—was not.

Anyway, a great discussion in a great episode, and I heartily recommend listening to it. I’ve seldom wanted to jump in and participate in a podcast more. If I could have—and since I’m on the subject anyway—here are two war movies from periods they skipped over that I would strongly recommend:

• Revolutionary War: The Crossing, a cheap TV movie about Washington’s crossing of the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton, but a solid short dramatization that I sometimes show US History I classes.

• Texas Revolution: The Alamo, the Billy Bob Thornton one. I wrote about this some years ago and I show it every time I teach US History I.

In the meantime, MacLean and Bunch have got me wanting to revisit a lot of old favorites. If you need me, I’ll be trying to convince my wife to celebrate St Valentine’s Day with a viewing of Glory.

I’ve written about war movies here plenty of times before. Last summer I considered the difference between Hollywood action and actual combat footage. Two summers ago I considered what “realism” means in a genre often tasked with depicting already unbelievable events. I also reviewed Sergeant York in some detail for the same defunct Historical Movie Monday series in which I reviewed The Alamo back in the first months of this blog.

Maybe the classified documents are the problem

Last month Tablet published a bracing essay titled “Secrecy is for Losers.” Commenting on the then-ongoing saga of classified documents turning up in the homes, offices, storage units, and outhouses of everyone from sitting presidents to minor federal apparatchiks—a truly bipartisan effort—the essay’s author, Jacob Siegel, noted the scale of official secrecy:

The United States now has more secrets than ever—far more than it can possibly keep track of or justify on national security grounds. As of 2019, 4.2 million people in the United States held security clearances. That’s not a specialized core of security professionals; it’s the population of Los Angeles. And while the clearance holders are now a class unto themselves, that’s nothing compared to the number of classified documents in existence. The government not only doesn’t know how many classified documents it has circulating but also has no way to find out . . . since there is no system for tracking all of them. Mark Bradley, director of the National Archives Information Security Oversight Office, acknowledged that his office has stopped trying to count the number of new secrets being created.

Everyone gets to be James Bond, and M cannot keep up with the reports. Doesn’t even bother, really.

Siegel’s piece is especially good on some of the societal consequences of the federal government’s paranoid addiction to secrecy. Conspiracy theories flourish not only because of the chaotic, omnidirectional, unfocused media ecology—a state of affairs pretty much predicted by Neil Postman—or because of collapsing educational standards, although that is a problem, too, but because secrecy and suspicion breed secrecy and suspicion:

[T]he outrage over Jamie Lee Curtis’ wall art and the far larger scandal over President Biden’s improper handling of classified documents are both products of an enormous, opaque system of secrecy—so opaque we don’t know how enormous it is—that has captured American politics. The principle of democratic self-governance is obviously incompatible with that system, but so too is the sanity of individuals living inside of it. Americans who want to join in their country’s civic life now find that the main way to participate is by following the trail of clues leaked by official sources while trying to solve elaborate, rigged puzzles about the nature of reality. It’s no surprise the country is going nuts.

This situation is only aggravated by the flagrantly partisan way secrecy is used to target political opponents:

The unprecedented use of a state security agency against a former president was justified by what was purported to be an urgent national security threat. And what was that threat? We still don’t know since the whole matter remains a secret. In The Washington Post, anonymous government sources claimed that the raid was triggered because Trump was holding on to documents containing nuclear secrets. Each individual component of the story—the anonymity of the sources, the unknown nature of the documents, the secrecy surrounding the timing of the raid—might appear weak on its own, but together they were mutually reinforcing and created the illusion that there was solid evidence of an imminent national security emergency. Even better, since the claims were secret, they couldn’t be refuted—an arrangement that granted the federal agencies impunity and allowed pundits’ imaginations to run wild devising the most grandiose possible justifications for the raid.

For what it’s worth, I don’t have a dog in this fight. The political gotcha game of which party’s guy was illegally in possession of which secrets got boring very quickly. But watching this unfold, especially after reading Siegel’s piece, got me thinking. Whether classified documents are turning up in the possession of Biden or Trump or one of their cronies, maybe the problem is all that classified information itself. What kind of vast, protean, invasive, totalizing, unaccountable but incompetent government generates this much secret material?

Secrecy, especially for national security purposes, is offered as a solution but rapidly becomes a problem. It’s addictive, pathological, mind-warping. If all you have is a hammer, etc. Siegel once more:

Different forms of government can heighten certain human traits while inhibiting others. Democracy can enhance reason while taming faithfulness. Secrecy turns cunning into a virtue. It rewards plotters, schemers, and the lackeys they rely on.

I’d quibble with whether democracy enhances reason at the expense of faithfulness; I think democracies, if they last long enough, wind up without much of either. But I agree that secrecy is unbecoming of a free people, and a regime of secrecy and classified, need-to-know information will only operate at a greater and ever less accountable remove from the people the government notionally represents.

Siegel’s piece is worth reading in its entirety. You can find it at Tablet here.

The Pale Blue Eye

Speaking of breaking the basic rules of fair play in a whodunit, my first fiction read of 2023 was the historical mystery thriller The Pale Blue Eye, by Louis Bayard. I first heard of this novel late last year when the teaser for the Netflix film adaptation arrived. A lifelong Poe devotee, I was immediately intrigued. I dithered over whether to read the novel as I have had some of my own Poe-related fiction simmering for a few years, but as I don’t have Netflix and the basic premise wouldn’t leave me alone, I decided to go for it.

I read it in just a few days right after the New Year. I’ve been thinking about and reconsidering it ever since.

The film has been out a while now so the broad outlines of the story should be familiar. Retired New York City constable Gus Landor is called one fine autumn day to meet with the commandant of the United States Military Academy at West Point. The commandant, Sylvanus Thayer, tells Landor that one of the Academy’s cadets has been found hanged. Thayer has already ruled out suicide, as after the victim was discovered his body was cut down and his heart cut out. The corpse they removed to the infirmary. The heart has yet to be found. Thayer asks Landor to investigate, both to find the killer and to protect the Academy, which is still new, untested, and the object of suspicion among some citizens of the young republic.

Landor, a consumptive who lives continuously aware of his impending death, agrees to his request with some strict conditions and begins. He questions witnesses, examines the body, searches the barracks, and goes over the grounds of the Academy and the place near the Hudson where the body was found. In the course of his searches he meets a first-year cadet from Virginia, one Edgar A Poe, who offers Landor one sharp bit of advice and disappears. His curiosity piqued, Landor later seeks Poe out at a local tavern and the two strike up an odd partnership built around solving the crime—part crime-fighting duo, part mentor-protégé, part estranged father and orphaned son.

Their partnership is deepened and tested when more cadets are murdered and, even more disturbingly, evidence mounts of some kind of satanic worship extending right into the ranks of the Academy itself.

I don’t want to give much more away, as the unfolding of the investigation, the accumulation of clues, and the working relationship between Landor and Poe is one of The Pale Blue Eye’s great joys. It is also, as it turns out, one of its great frustrations.

Before I get into the one major spoiler, let me praise the two best features of the novel. First, the narrative voice: wry, sardonic, blunt and straightforward but with a finely honed poetic edge, Landor tells his story in such a way that a reader is guaranteed to be hooked. Even when the story’s pacing flagged—as it does in a few places near the middle—I was drawn along by Landor’s narration, which never lost my interest.

The other strength of The Pale Blue Eye is its portrait of young Poe. His semester and a half at West Point is often passed over as a biographical curiosity, but Bayard gives Poe’s time there a central place in his life story and brings this young man, burdened with a hard background and self-sabotaging flaws but buoyed by a tremendous trust in his own gifts, to vibrant life. (Bayard’s interpretation owes too much to Poe biographer Kenneth Silverman, who psychologized and pathologized and autobiographized Poe’s work to death, but that angle is probably only discernible to the enthusiast.) I’ve seen some readers complain that the novel is dull whenever Poe is “offscreen”; I disagree, but it does take on an irresistible energy whenever he appears.

That said, I’ve been reflecting on The Pale Blue Eye ever since I finished it not only because I enjoyed it so much, but because its conclusion, its climactic revelation, was such a cheat: it turns out that the first murdered cadet was killed by Landor himself.

In my post about Glass Onion’s failure to play fair with its audience, I mentioned Ronald Knox’s ten commandments of detective fiction. Knox’s rules had been on my mind because of that movie and I sought out the specific rules again because of this novel. In the case of The Pale Blue Eye, rules seven and eight are broken: “The detective himself must not commit the crime” and “The detective is bound to declare any clues he may discover.”

Given the structure and narration of The Pale Blue Eye, violating the one necessitates violating the other. Landor, having already murdered the first victim when the novel begins, withholds key information—namely, that the cadet had been one of several who had gangraped Landor’s daughter, an act that drove her to suicide. Instead, Landor misleads, telling everyone he meets and us, the readers, directly, that his daughter has left him. This is left as vague as possible: perhaps she ran off with a man, perhaps she died… somehow. Landor’s own tuberculosis offers the reader a red herring by association. His tragic backstory, when it is alluded to, is only a tragic backstory, presented with no apparent connection to the events at the Academy because Landor never gives any specifics regrading what happened to his daughter.

The point is that, until Landor explains precisely what happened in the final pages of the book, the reader could never have guessed at these relationships or events. Even when, about halfway through, I first darkly suspected that Landor was involved in the first murder I told myself it couldn’t be—there was nothing to base that suspicion on. Once Landor confesses to Poe and the reader, it recasts not only the meaning of every event in the book like a good twist should, but the very premise of the story itself. It just doesn’t work. The reader rejects it. The revelation is meant to be a tragic surprise but feels like a betrayal, a betrayal compounded in the last few pages by absurdity as Landor, somehow, narrates throwing himself over the same cliffs where his daughter killed herself.

As I mentioned last time, rules are made to be broken, and I didn’t look up Knox’s rules to hold The Pale Blue Eye accountable for some minor breach of protocol. I despise that use of rules for fiction. (Here’s the worst offender, an utterly arbitrary and stupid measure that many readers take as gospel.) But rules like Knox’s exist for a reason. Think of them less as an imposition of external standards on how to tell a story and more an empirical record of what doesn’t work.

A master, fully cognizant of the rules and of the risks he runs in purposefully breaking one, might get away with it. I’ve mentioned Agatha Christie in this connection before. But more often you will get a novel like this one.

The Pale Blue Eye is a case study in taking such risks and failing. It is brilliantly and often poetically written, full of well-realized characters, spooky gothic atmosphere, evocative and realistic Jacksonian-era period details, and a striking portrait of a real person at a formative moment in his life. But its final twist undermines the entire novel up to that point, making the reader doubt whether it was worth the investigation at all.

My problems with Glass Onion

Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion: “No, it’s just dumb!” Note the literal lampshade.

I’ve mentioned twice now, once in my initial review and once in my 2022 at the movies post, that I had some nagging misgivings about Rian Johnson’s latest Benoit Blanc mystery, Glass Onion. I’ve been mulling those problems over ever since I saw the movie around Thanksgiving and wondering whether I should ever try to work through them in writing. Well, a couple weeks ago my friend Danny Anderson of The Sectarian Review offered a short, pointed critique of the film that I’ve taken as permission and encouragement to do the same.

As I wrote at the time I first saw Glass Onion, I can’t lay out my problems with it without giving too much away, so consider this a spoiler warning.

Briefly, what I most admired and enjoyed about the film when I first saw it was its intricate structure and its humor. I think I mostly stand by that, though what I remember of the humor has somewhat soured on me since I first saw it. We’ll get to my deeper problems momentarily.

In his post, Danny faults Glass Onion for being clever but hollow, for jerking the audience around by offering a mystery without an actual mystery, and for its self-righteous indulgence in pillorying shallow, cartoonish characters.

Any disagreements I have with Danny’s assessment are only in degree, not kind. Or to put it another way, I agree with every point here, albeit with differing levels of intensity. To take these one at a time:

• Glass Onion’s structure still impresses me, but as other elements of the story have continued to bother me I’ve come to see the film’s fugue-like transparent layers as unworthy of the story it tells. It’s like a perfectly crafted sonnet in praise of cannibalism.

• I agree completely with Danny about the way the film manipulates the audience. Johnson’s self-awareness, the constant calling of attention to storytelling conventions and what he is doing, goes beyond the tongue-in-cheek or the meta to the pathological. Johnson displays an utter contempt not only for the characters he creates—leading one to ask “Why bother?”—but for his audience. Again, why bother? Is this purely about showing off?

• Danny’s last criticism, Johnson’s political point-scoring via ridiculous caricature, is where he spends most of his time, and while I agree completely on this point the characters bother me somewhat less because Glass Onion is pretty clearly a farce. For all the music-box intricacy of his plotting, Johnson doesn’t deal in nuance when it comes to human beings. I don’t necessarily like that (note that in my original review I described every character as “annoying”) but I’m willing to give it a pass purely for the sake of the genre.

To these I would add a few more misgivings of my own, some minor and technical but others, like Danny’s most serious complaints, what John Gardner called “faults of soul.”

First, and related to Danny’s point that Johnson continuously plays false with the viewer, Glass Onion breaks some of the classic rules of fair play in a whodunit story—namely Ronald Knox’s ten commandments of detective stories. The film bends or breaks several of these, as you can read about in greater detail here, including artificially withholding important clues. But the biggest and clearest cheat is against rule ten: “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.” Compare The Prestige, a film in which twins are part of the mystery’s solution and Christopher Nolan sets this revelation up expertly.

Two possible rejoinders occur to me: First, that rules are made to be broken, a point I’ve made plenty of times myself. Agatha Christie rather famously violated a number of Knox’s rules. And second, Glass Onion is not really a whodunit after all, but a combination revenge story/heist caper. To these I say: Rian Johnson is no Agatha Christie, who could match her mastery of plot and boldness in experiment with genuine compassion and a keen understanding of human nature; and to argue that presenting the audience with a mystery but having it turn out to be something else is just another dodge. And don’t make me bring up “subverting expectations.”

Second, and related to Danny’s argument about political point-scoring, there is Johnson’s obvious and already much commented-upon pandering to leftwing identity politics. But this is so much the norm for Hollywood now that it feels pointless to complain about. (Interestingly, both Danny and I discerned that Johnson’s worldview is shaped entirely too much by the anti-discourse of Twitter, a point that even made its way into the Honest Trailers spoof of Glass Onion.)

But—to use the same note about politics as a jumping-off point—my most serious misgivings always had to do with the climax of the film. When the aggrieved Andi finds her mission of vengeance stymied by Miles Bron and company, she simply starts smashing his collection of glass curios, a spree of vandalism that culminates in a (somehow) non-lethal explosion that destroys Bron’s glass onion house, an act Andi can only top by deliberately destroying the Mona Lisa.

Remember Johnson’s political pandering, and the strawmen he has peopled his film with, and remember as well that Glass Onion takes place in the late spring of 2020, a setting Johnson is not only mining for quarantine and masking jokes. I’d wager that a climax in which injustice is not corrected but simply reacted to with a childish tantrum—by breaking other people’s stuff, setting things on fire, and destroying art—is not coincidental. And I’d argue absolutely that this is an instinct that does not need to be encouraged, much less held up as the satisfying final act of a drama of theft and restoration.

So the more I’ve reflected on Glass Onion, the more it’s struck me as precisely what Danny described in his post: hollow and self-satisfied, slick but contemptuous, a triumph of “precociousness over substance,” and a marriage of political shallowness with irresponsible virtue signaling. And these problems—“faults of soul,” as I mentioned above—originate with the film’s creator.

As so often, Chesterton comes to mind: “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

Kingsnorth (and Lewis) on nostalgia and progress

Last week Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake, one of my favorite novels from the last ten years,* posted a marvelous reflection on nostalgia on his Substack The Abbey of Misrule. He includes this personal note near the beginning:

We all recreate our preferred old world. Mine was—probably still is—an awkward melange of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer culture and rural England before the First World War. Is it possible to wander the whited hawthorn lanes of Edward Thomas’s south country, the barrows intact up on the downs, smoke curling from the chimneys of the old inns, the motorways and superstores nowhere to be seen, whilst also hunting mammoths? Probably not, though it might make an intriguing backdrop to a fantasy novel I will never write.

That’s a charming way to highlight the hodgepodge quality of the imagined pasts that attract us, an attraction sharpened by the sense that every bit of this “melange” gathered from across the centuries is now equally lost. Maybe sometime I’ll describe some of my own hodgepodges. But Kingsnorth also drives deeper into the substantial appeal of nostalgia:

I’ve never been addicted to drugs or alcohol, but I have often been addicted to dreams. This is the lot of the writer. You become a writer because the world you encountered in the stories you read as a child is more exciting than the world you are actually living in. More exciting and, in a strange way, more real. Your world is school and suburbs and bus stops and breakfast cereals and maths homework and being forced to wash your dad’s car at the weekend and wondering how to talk to girls and listening to the charts to work out what kind of music it’s permissible to like. This is not Lothlorien, and neither is it Earthsea. The worlds created by Tolkein [sic] and Asimov and Verne and Howard are better than this, and there is no doubt at all that given a splinter of a chance you would prefer to live in them. Then, one day, you pick up a pen and realise that you can create your own.

Meanwhile, out in what is fondly called ‘the real world’ by people who often don’t know very much about reality, you are living in the Machine. If you have the kind of sensibility which prefers Lothlorien to Isengard, this means that you are a character in a tragedy rather than a heroic epic. Most of the things you like are fading away.

Further on, Kingsnorth engages the usual dismissive (and often deliberately rude) responses to wishing for a vanished—or, more painfully, vanishing—world:

Nostalgia is a curious thing. The love of a dead past is, on the surface, pointless, and yet it seems to be a universal, pan-cultural longing for something better than an equally dead but often less enticing present. This is something which its critics never seem to understand. ‘That’s just nostalgia’, they say, dismissively, when you suggest that a high street made up of independent shops might have been better than one giant superstore, or that folk songs around the fire in the pub might be better than Celebrity Love Island.

Spot on. Curiously, I have encountered this most forcefully in defending traditional architecture against the unsustainable and impractical eyesores of modern architecture. Calling Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall ugly or the Gherkin (aka the London Egg or the London Suppository) a blemish on the skyline or suggesting that church spires and Victorian market squares are in some way superior to what has replaced them makes a certain kind of person angry. This is strange to me because it seems like architecture, which as the late Sir Roger Scruton noted creates an aesthetic ecology we all have to engage with publicly, as a community, is the most straightforwardly concrete argument for the value of tradition and beauty.

But I digress.**

Kingsnorth goes on to suggest that nostalgia is often, in fact,

a rational response to a world heading in the wrong direction. Perhaps a practical response too. If the Machine is destroying so many things of value, from the home to the ancient woodlands that once surrounded it, then remembering those things is not only an act of rebellion, but can also be the first stage in an act of necessary restoration.

Which immediately brought to mind one of CS Lewis’s many reflections on “progress,” the ultimate God-term of the last century:

“If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road.”

— CS Lewis

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be and if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. . . . There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.

That’s from Mere Christianity, which originated as a series of radio talks during World War II. Lewis knew whereof he spoke. And, writing now eighty-odd years later, I think it is pretty plain that the world has taken the pig-headed route.

To return to Kingsnorth, he reflects as well on the way “nostalgic” is used as an insult, a rhetorical cudgel, and how to defeat it:

[T]he fact that ‘nostalgic’—like ‘Romantic’, ‘Luddite’, ‘reactionary’ and any other word that suggests attachment to anything before progressive Year Zero—has become a term of mockery makes it a tempting label to embrace if you are conducting a personal rebellion against the Total System. Being called names is supposed to scare you into silence, but it doesn’t work if you wear the names like a medal on your chest. Romanticising the past, you say? Well, maybe I do. But it’s a hell of a lot better than romanticising the future.

Hear hear.

I strongly recommend the essay in its entirety, especially the second half in which Kingsnorth examines three possible responses to the decline and fragmentation characteristic of the present age. Two, he notes, are traps. One is the unthinking acceptance of the Myth of Progress. The other—perhaps surprisingly if you’ve read this far—is nostalgia itself. While it is “vital” to be “guided by the past,” Kingsnorth is alert to the dangers of nostalgia, too: “[A]s we stand against the Machine, we need solid ground on which to brace ourselves. Neither Progress nor nostalgia offer that solidity.” Kingsnorth goes on to suggest a third way, one seasoned by both resignation and faithful hope, “to watch the great fall, accept its reality, and then get on with our work.”

An intriguing and profoundly challenging conclusion, one that jibes with things I’ve meditated upon for years but that confronts me more forcefully with what this kind of fruitful nostalgia must mean if it is to be of benefit to anyone. I have to wonder if Kingsnorth has read Jünger’s The Forest Passage. I mean to reread that soon. Food for thought.

Notes:

*The Wake is the first of a loose trilogy set in the distant past, the present, and the distant future of England. I have read The Wake, which takes places at the time of the Norman Conquest, and the second volume, Beast, but have not yet gotten to the third and final novel, Alexandria. Kingsnorth writes a good bit about what inspired it near the end of this Substack essay. I briefly reviewed Beast here last year.

**Let me here recommend Tom Wolfe’s clique-puncturing From Bauhaus to Our House and move on.

Jünger and the homo religiosus revisited

At the beginning of last year I posted a passage from Ernst Jünger’s short series of interrelated essays The Forest Passage about the homo religiosus—man as a religious animal, with a need for religion that will be filled by something. Now, just over a year later, I’m reading his allegorical novel On the Marble Cliffs, and unsurprisingly given the novel’s context the same concern is manifest.

On the Marble Cliffs takes place in the Marina, an idyllic Mediterranean region by the sea. The unnamed narrator tells the story of how the tyrannical host of the Head Forester, a warlord in the forests far to the north, infiltrates and turns the Marina to the Head Forester’s will. Unlike the Marina, which seems to exist in a placid mix of genteel paganism and the gutsy but learned Christianity of the Church Fathers or the early medieval Benedictines, the northern forests are the home of brutal idol worship and crude nature gods. The narrator mentions the Æsir explicitly, as well as a grotesque bull god worshiped in a sacred grove.

As the narrator tells his loose, dreamlike story, the avenues through which the Head Forester gains control over the Marina become more and more clear, but the religious one proves particularly striking:

Yet who would have believed that the gods of fat and butter who filled the cows’ udders would gain a following in the Marina—of worshippers, at that, who came from houses in which offerings and sacrifices had long been mocked? The same spirits who deemed themselves strong enough to cut the ties that bound them to their ancestral faith became subjugated to the barbarian idols’ spell. The sight of their blind obedience was more repugnant than drunkenness at midday.

Per CS Lewis, whom I also quoted in last year, “spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served.” The scoffing abandonment of the old religion does not leave the apostate unreligious; it just leaves an opening that must be filled by something else, probably something worse.

On the Marble Cliffs was completed in 1939, just before the German invasion of Poland. When it was published it was pretty quickly interpreted as a fabular broadside against the Nazis, an interpretation that is certainly hard to avoid. It was even taken seriously enough by the Nazi regime that Goebbels tried to have the book suppressed.

And yet Jünger insisted that it is not just an anti-Nazi parable but more broadly applicable, and the insight offered above—that irreligion, especially the elite ability to see through it and treat it with derision, leaves the scoffer open to far worse in the form of ideology and political contagion—is certainly relevant in our day and age. I have certainly seen plenty of acquaintances abandon religion as closeminded and oppressive only to embrace far more shrill, narrowminded, intolerant—and, not insignificantly, much less fun—political ideologies, and with a “blind obedience” that makes me feel pity for them more than anything else.

I’m reading Tess Lewis’s new translation of On the Marble Cliffs for NRYB Classics. It’s excellent so far and I hope to finish it this evening, after which I’ll read the introduction and other apparatus. For those interested, Thomas Nevins also gives the novel pretty extensive treatment in his book on Jünger, which I mentioned a few weeks ago in a much more lighthearted context.

Johnson's rhino

One of my longtime favorite writers, historian and journalist Paul Johnson, died earlier this month aged 94.

I discovered his work in grad school when I read his notorious volume of character studies, Intellectuals, a searing takedown of destructive know-it-alls from Rousseau onward. My appreciation deepened not long before I got married and began teaching with A History of the American People, a massive narrative account of the origins, founding, and ups and downs of the United States written explicitly as an answer to the mendacious Howard Zinn. These two books demonstrate Johnson’s foremost gifts—polemic and grand narrative, the one with sharp elbows and cutting voice and the other with wide, eager eyes trained on far horizons.

In the first years of my marriage and teaching I enjoyed Johnson’s late-career venture into short biographies of great historical figures: Jesus, Napoleon, Churchill, Darwin, Socrates, Washington, Mozart. I have especially fond memories of Eisenhower: A Life, a little book I smuggled into the warehouse area of the sporting goods store where I worked to read furtively during the rare downtime of the retail Christmas season. My wife and I were expecting our first child and I was supplementing my adjunct paychecks from two colleges and a once-a-week tutoring gig. Stealing away to be with Ike for a page here, two pages there, and in Johnson’s brisk and elegant prose, was a great encouragement amidst the cold, the customers, and all the uncertainties of that time.

But I noticed after I finished Eisenhower that no more Johnson books were forthcoming. I looked off and on for years, checking in on Johnson via Google and hoping always for a newly announced title. I regretfully concluded that he was in decline. His death a few weeks ago makes my memories of those books all the more special.

Of the obits and appreciations published after Johnson’s death one stood out to me: a shambling, unstructured, and therefore endearing reminiscence by National Review’s Jay Nordlinger. Amidst the anecdotes and interesting tidbits (at Oxford, Johnson studied under AJP Taylor) Nordlinger included a mention of Johnson’s “Rhino Principle,” which Johnson explicated in a 2006 essay for Forbes. Here’s the principle:

Now, the rhino is not a particularly subtle or clever animal. It’s the last of the antediluvian quadrupeds to carry a great weight of body armor. And by all the rules of progressive design and the process of natural selection the rhino ought to have been eliminated. But it hasn't been. Why not? Because the rhino is single-minded. When it perceives an object, it makes a decision—to charge. And it puts everything it’s got into that charge. When the charge is over, the object is either flattened or has gone a long way into cover, whereupon the rhino instantly resumes browsing.

Few people think of learning from a rhino. But I have. And when I hear of an author who cannot finish or get started on a book, I send him (or her) a rhino card. I paint a watercolor of a rhinoceros on the front of a postcard—something I do well, as I’ve practiced it a great many times. And in the space next to the address I write: “Stop fussing about that book. Just charge it. Keep on charging it until it is finished. That’s what the rhino does. Put this card over your desk and remember the Rhino Principle.”

And the crucial point:

Now, the Rhino Principle may not produce the perfect book, but it does produce a book. And once a book is drafted, it can be improved, polished and made satisfactory. But if the Rhino Principle is ignored, there is no book at all.

Like Johnson’s Ike in the chilly shipping area of the Academy Sports warehouse, this was precisely the encouragement and inspiration I needed right now, and I’m grateful to Johnson for it.

To the ranks of the great proverbial possessives out there—Buridan’s ass, Morton’s fork, Hobson’s choice, Chesterton’s fence—let us add Johnson’s rhino.

Paul Johnson, journalist, critic, commentator, controversialist, and guide to the epic sweep of the past, RIP.