Tim Powers on the danger of chasing trends

Over the last few weeks I’ve been (very, very slowly) reading Declare, a supernatural Cold War espionage thriller by Tim Powers. I reached the halfway point the other night and it’s so continuously involving and intriguing, so brilliantly imagined and deeply realized, and so different even from the science fiction that I occasionally read that I looked for some interviews with Powers. I found several recent ones on YouTube and they haven’t disappointed.

Here’s an excellent exchange from a 57-minute interview with a channel called Media Death Cult. After discussing Powers’s love of Robert Heinlein and the contemporary obsession with how “problematic” he is, Powers and the interviewer consider whether it is possible to write old-fashioned fiction in a world that adheres so dogmatically to the prevailing political pieties:

Media Death Cult: I think it’s easy to pick on [Heinlein] because his heart was in the right place. You know what I mean?

Powers: Yeah, and he suffers from, uh, being dead, uh, in that the current standards of acceptability move on. Harlan Ellison was certainly progressive, liberal, cutting edge in his time, but now being dead, the standards, acceptable norms, have moved on.

MDC: So you think someone like Heinlein or Ellison, if they were to pop up now and want to write like that, it’s just not going to stick because of this weird situation that the Western world seems to be in with the microscope that you’re put under? I think you’d be a fringe writer, wouldn’t you? Which I think is a shame. I think if we can’t get that kind of thing going again it’s a bit of a shame.

Powers: Yeah. I mean, there’ve always been trends, which I think any writer is wise to ignore. Cyberpunk, nanotech, steampunk, uh, have all been flurries that briefly inspired lots of imitations and, you know, follow-alongs, and I always think it’s a big mistake for a writer to do that—to clock what is acceptable right now, what’s popular right now? I will do that. Because at best you’re going to be one of a crowd following along, and, more likely, by the time you finally get on the bandwagon the wheels will have fallen off and it’s overturned in a field somewhere.

MDC: Yeah.

Powers: And I think these days—and I speak from the advantage of complete ignorance—

MDC: Me too.

Powers: Ha! I think there are a number of bases to touch, boxes to check, especially in current science fiction and fantasy, which I think would be detrimental for a writer to pay much attention to. I think we’re going through a sort of tunnel. I think it may not be related but I think it’s alarming that Roald Dahl, RL [Stine] who did those sort of spooky stories for kids, and Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie are having their works retroactively revised to be acceptable to 2003 [sic] standards.

It’s definitely related. Powers’s choice of the tunnel as a metaphor for our cultural moment is fitting, tunnels being narrow, dangerous, and impossible to escape in any way but getting through it.

Just don’t live unto the tunnel, or take on its shape. Do your own thing. Be your own man, write your own stories, and don’t chase the latest trend—especially if that trend is writing to appease the legion of scolds who want to dictate how you must write your story and what you must include. Bowing to this kind of political orthodoxy is the worst way to fit in and be trendy. After all, recent events have demonstrated that you can toe the line—touch every base and check every box, in Powers’s terms—and still fall afoul of the mob. A lesson anyone familiar with Bolshevism should know.

Powers and his interviewer do, however, offer a hopeful vision of the future:

MDC: You got this kind of weird landscape where everybody is—you’re right, you’re writing through this tunnel. I think we’ll come out of the other side of it, though. There is pushback.

Powers: Oh, yeah.

MDC: And it’s not just the old school who are old enough to have enjoyed these things before the world started turning woke or whatever it is. I think there is a movement, there is pushback on it. We don’t want art to be that way. We don’t want it.

Powers: Yeah, yeah. And certainly, you think, ‘Well, it’s old now, the original text of Fleming and Agatha Christie.’ But then, when I was reading Heinlein, Sturgeon, Leiber, Murray Leinster, Henry Kuttner, those were all before my time. Those weren’t new writers. I was, you know, digging around used book stores and, yeah—I don’t think the readership is going to confine itself to the new editions. I think readers are hungry enough to dig widely.

The used book store may well prove to be the ashes from which literature will resurrect itself. But first we have to pass through the tunnel.

Good stuff, and there’s more I could have included. There’s a lengthy section in which Powers talks about his friendship with Philip K Dick that was especially good. Check out the entire interview at the link above or in the embedded YouTube player.

Special thanks to those of y’all who’ve recommended Declare to me at some point, especially David and Chet. I’m enjoying it so much that I’ve already picked up Powers’s supernatural pirate epic On Stranger Tides, which looks amazing, and I’d be glad to hear from other Powers fans which of his other books would be good to look into after that. I’ve already heard good things about Last Call. In the meantime, I’m trying to make time between work and the commute and feeding babies all night to finish Declare. Looking forward to all the big revelations along the way.

The Four Reformers

On my commute over the last week I’ve been listening to the audiobook edition of The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky, a series of lectures by Russell Kirk presented in the early 1980s. The themes are decline and decadence, and the topics range across the loss of humane letters, the ideological capture of government and educational institutions, and reasons for hope. It’s good, and Kirk brings plenty of still-pertinent insight, even if his selected examples are often dated. Criticism of “Dallas” seems quaint when you know what the blood-drenched fleshpots of American culture in 2023 are like. Call it the Neil Postman problem.

In one of the final lectures, Kirk quotes a story by Robert Louis Stevenson from a book I’d never heard of: “The Four Reformers,” from Fables, an 1896 collection of twenty very short, pointed stories. Here’s the story in its entirety:

Four reformers met under a bramble bush. They were all agreed the world must be changed. “We must abolish property,” said one.

“We must abolish marriage,” said the second.

“We must abolish God,” said the third.

“I wish we could abolish work,” said the fourth.

“Do not let us get beyond practical politics,” said the first. “The first thing is to reduce men to a common level.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to give freedom to the sexes.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to find out how to do it.”

“The first step,” said the first, “is to abolish the Bible.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to abolish the laws.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to abolish mankind.”

By “reformer” Stevenson means the radical activist agents of societal change, of which there were plenty in his age and ours. The more radical the reform, the more radical the means of its implementation—especially when humans get in the way, as they do.

If I’ve run across this somewhere before I’ve forgotten it, but the final line must surely be the inspiration for the title of CS Lewis’s masterwork The Abolition of Man. Lewis, who was born four years after Stevenson’s untimely death, lived to see many such reformers put their plans into action, as well as the results.

Was John Buchan an anti-Semite?

John Buchan (1875-1940) at work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

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

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

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

More if you’re interested

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

Julian the Apostate: cage-stage pagan

From Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor, by Philip Freeman, a concise and insightful passage that I want to file away for teaching Western Civ.

Of Julian’s attempts to use his imperial power to reform and reinvigorate paganism and to craft a “universal paganism he hoped would defeat Christianity”—a paganism filtered through his highly symbolic philosophical interpretations that would be applicable everywhere, a rather condescending vision of “the common people of every village” in “childlike innocence” offering “an occasional pigeon to their local gods and pray[ing] for gentle rain and health . . . while philosophers and intellectuals would seek the higher mysteries of the Good”—Freeman writes:

But [Julian’s] austere form of Neoplatonism was not a belief system that had wide appeal to the pagan masses. The worship of the traditional gods of Greece and Rome had always taken a multitude of forms and had never been unified. It was not even exclusive. A good pagan might celebrate a solemn sacrifice to Zeus at a city temple in the morning followed by an afternoon visit to a shrine at a local spring and a frenzied festival honoring the goddess Cybele that same evening. The concept of a centralized set of doctrines was completely foreign to paganism. Pagans as such had no defining creeds, no universal priesthoods, and no canonical scriptures in the Christian sense. Julian was not only fighting Christianity but promoting a religion that had never existed.

This is one of the hardest things to impress upon a group of students when teaching ancient Greek and Roman religion. Even the non-religious among people today are so deeply influenced by the last fumes of the Abrahamic faiths that they struggle to conceive of a “religion” with no scriptures, no ethical content, and no standard “beliefs” to speak of. Alternately, often simultaneously, they struggle to conceive of ancient paganism as having any practices either. To them paganism is a set of myths, which they’ve probably gotten third-hand from Percy Jackson anyway.

I’ve commonly heard of religious converts, especially within Christianity to different doctrinal camps and especially to Calvinism, described as going through a “cage stage”—i.e. a period when they would be better off locked in a cage until they can calm down—in which they are rabidly, irrationally, monomaniacally obsessed with studying and sharing their new theological framework. Certainly Freeman’s description of Julian seeking “to lay out in sometimes tedious intellectual terms the philosophical foundations behind his religious reforms” sounds like some of the Calvinists I’ve known.

As a convert from Christianity back to paganism via the urbane schools of Hellenistic philosophy, he seems to have come to the imperial purple in his own sort of cage stage—from which he never returned.

Where now the rider?

I mentioned in my summer reading recap that I’m currently reading Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, which my daughter thoughtfully picked out for me from her classroom’s library. Here’s a passage from about a third of the way into the book, the first time Joey, the horse, and his second owner, a British cavalry officer, see combat in the fall of 1914:

The gentle squeak of leather, the jingling harness, and the noise of hastily barked orders were drowned now by the pounding of hooves and the shout of the troopers as we galloped down on the enemy in the valley below us. Out of the corner of my eye, I was aware of the glint of Captain Nicholls’s heavy sword. I felt his spurs in my side and I heard his battle cry. I saw the gray soldiers ahead of us raise their rifles and heard the death rattle of a machine gun, and then quite suddenly I found that I had no rider, that I had no weight on my back anymore, and that I was alone out in front of the squadron.

A simply narrated but powerful moment, and presented believably from the point of view of an animal. Having seen Spielberg’s film adaptation several times, I had a good idea what the outcome of this attack would be, and yet when I read “quite suddenly I found that I had no rider, that I had no weight on my back anymore,” I choked up. I was moved.

Part of it is the fate of the kind, noble, courageous Captain Nicholls, and part of it is the finely wrought dramatic irony of Joey not realizing at first what has happened. (Another novel to do the same thing extremely well is Richard Adams’s Traveller.) But another factor is surely the image that the passage creates—the riderless horse.

The movie, in one of its most beautifully shot and stirring scenes, makes dramatic and stirring use of this image, but for my money the subtlety and simplicity of the original in Morpurgo’s novel cuts deeper.

Reading this passage brought to mind another riderless horse, this one from Michael Shaara’s great Gettysburg novel The Killer Angels. Just before Pickett’s Charge, the climactic Confederate assault on the last day of the battle, General Lewis Armistead cautions a fellow brigade commander named Richard Garnett against participating in the attack. Garnett is ill and can’t march in with the infantry; he’ll have to ride, and that means he’ll be a huge target. Garnett will not be dissuaded—an officer’s job is to lead.

The attack commences and Pickett’s division, including Armistead and Garnett’s brigades, moves out and comes under heavy artillery and finally rifle and canister fire. As Armistead, coming up with his men behind Garnett’s brigade, nears the Union line, we read:

Armistead thought: we won’t make it. He lifted the sword screaming, and moved on, closer, closer, but it was all coming apart; the whole world was dying. Armistead felt a blow in the thigh, stopped, looked down at blood on his right leg. But no pain. He could walk. He moved on. There was a horse coming down the ridge: great black horse with blood all over the chest, blood streaming through bubbly holes, blood on the saddle, dying eyes, smoke-gray at the muzzle: Garnett’s horse.

A gut punch of a conclusion to an already apocalyptic paragraph. Armistead briefly looks over the field to see if Garnett is still alive, unhorsed and on foot somewhere, but the reader knows immediately. The riderless horse tells the whole story.

The same horse reappears once later, after the attack has failed, as General Longstreet, the overall commander of the assault, responds to the destruction of his men:

There was nothing to send now, no further help to give, and even if Lee on the other side would send support now it would be too late. Longstreet hugged his chest. He got down off the fence. A black horse rode up out of the smoke: familiar spot on a smoky forehead, blood bubbling from a foaming chest: Garnett’s mount.

If the first passage is an apocalypse, with the horse a sign in the midst of catastrophe, here the horse is the final, mournful sign of defeat, a single, hollow death knell.

As with War Horse, the film adaptation Gettysburg uses this image to good effect. I think the purely visual language of film may even improve it. First, the film expands the point of view of Shaara’s novel by actually showing the viewer what happens to Garnett. He charges the Union line, trying to lead by example, and rides directly into the sights of a Union cannoneer who fires at him point-blank.* Garnett disappears instantly. We get a stunned reaction shot from General Lee, who watches from afar through his field glasses, and then this shot:

Soon after we cut to Armistead’s brigade following behind, and Armistead sees the horse and knows. No words are necessary.

And later, after Armistead has briefly breached the Union line, been shot down and captured, and the attack has collapsed, the horse reappears a final time—not for Longstreet as in the novel, but for General Pickett, who had insisted that Garnett be allowed to ride at the head of his brigade, a poignant double reminder.

The film does this wordlessly, in one of its most powerful shots.** First, as the walking wounded straggle back to the Confederate line the horse passes among them at a trot:

The camera follows, both panning and tracking with it from right to left—away from the fighting and the failed objective—to end on a poignant medium shot of Pickett, pushing in as he lowers his field glasses. The usually vivacious and fiery Pickett has been stunned into silence:

The riderless horse goes back much further than War Horse and The Killer Angels, of course. Consider the plaintive questions of The Wanderer. When the poem’s speaker turns from describing his lonely fate to ask where everything that once mattered and made life a comfort to him has gone—genap under nihthelm, darkened under night-helm—the very first pair in the list is:

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?

“Where is the horse? Where the young man?” Or, in a more famous but slightly less literal rendering by Tolkien, “Where now the horse and the rider?” These are paired in a way that doesn’t scan with most of the rest of the poem, suggesting their inseparability even in the loss of both.

And if we go back to the foundation of Western Literature, the last word of the Iliad, in a sentence that closes out Hector’s funeral and ends the action of the poem with thousands dead and the Trojan War still unwon, is the slaughtered Hector’s epithet: ἱπποδάμοιο, breaker of horses.

Is there any more poetic and immediately mournful image than the war horse with an empty saddle? Geared for war but aimless, it instantly suggests a whole tragedy. The riderless horse is a brave man, lost forever. The saddle is the gap he has left in the world.

* I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone else mention this, but it’s pretty clear from the action around the gun that the filmmakers mean this to be Alonzo Cushing’s battery. Just watch what’s going on with the gunner and the dead officer right before Garnett charges.

** It’s not appreciated enough just how well shot Gettysburg is.

How often do I think about Ancient Rome?

Cicero Denounces Catiline, by Cesare Maccari—a favorite painting, inaccurate in detail but capturing the spirit and drama of the moment

Every day.

Seriously—every day. And really, what did you think my answer would be? When my wife heard about this online trend she just laughed. She didn’t even bother asking me.

Why do guys think about the Romans so often? I can’t speak for every man—and I may be especially unrepresentative because I teach history for a living—but I think that while it must have something to do with the rich mixture of drama and violence, the personal and the political, the depraved and the philosophical, the great crowd of examples both to emulate and condemn, and the momentous and long-lasting consequences and sheer range of events encompassed by Rome’s history, another part of it must surely be how familiar Rome sometimes feels.

That’s true not only in the sense that we in the West are, in a sense, part of a cultural familia with many branches and in-laws but a clear lineage all the way back to Rome, but in the more usual sense. On some level, no matter how strange they are, you know these people. I often tell my students that one of the joys of studying the Late Republic is the soap opera feeling that not only does everyone in this rather upstart city know everyone else, we can know them all, too, and vicariously participate in their upheavals. Some enterprising guy out there could make a fortune with a Roman fantasy league.

That’s my two denarii, anyway. I could say a lot more, but that would be less fun.

Instead, since I lured y’all here with what is basically a meme, let me offer something of more value. If you too think about Rome and want more to think about, more deeply and fully and with more of that delicious detail, let me offer a short list of my favorite books on Rome. This is by no means exhaustive and I could have made the list much longer; these are just my personal favorites and the books that have benefited me most over the years.

General histories and biographies

Roman Realities, by Finley Hooper—My college Rome class’s textbook, this is an older survey but it holds up, being well-written, comprehensive, and judicious in its judgments.

Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, by Lesley Adkins and Roy A Adkins—This is a reference work rather than a proper history, but it’s a fantastically rich resource, covering everything from the gods, the structure of the Republic’s government, and the organization of the army to town names, baby names (a pretty short section), and holidays. I’ve consulted my copy regularly for nearly twenty years.

Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity, by JE Lendon—This is a broad study of Greco-Roman warfare from Homer to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, so only half of it is about the Romans, but it’s excellent—one of the most helpful and insightful books I’ve read in this area.

The Punic Wars and Cannae: Hannibal’s Greatest Victory, by Adrian Goldsworthy—Two excellent books on the period that first got me hooked on Roman history. The former is an excellent study of all three wars by a master military historian, and the latter is a good short book about the most famous battle of the wars and possibly of all of Roman history. I recommend either depending on how long you like your books.

Scipio Africanus: Greater than Napoleon, by BH Liddell Hart—A short older biography of one of my favorite Roman figures, the victor of the Second Punic War, who is often overshadowed by the enemy he defeated.

The Spartacus War, by Barry Strauss—An excellent short history of the greatest slave rebellion in the Republic. Strauss writes engaging, approachable prose and exercises masterful command of the sources, making this a book I often recommend to students.

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician, by Anthony Everitt—A favorite biography of my favorite Roman. Deeply researched, well written, and admiring but measured in its portrait of Cicero. Because Everitt situates him in his complicated historical context so well, and with such precision and clarity, I often recommend this book as an introduction to the end of the Republic.

Caesar: Life of a Colossus and Augustus, by Adrian Goldsworthy—Two magnificent biographies of the two men, father and adopted son, more responsible than anyone else for the destruction of the Republic and the longevity of the Empire. Goldsworthy, in addition to being an excellent researcher and writer, has good judgement and avoids extremes in his interpretations.

The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination, by Barry Strauss—Another excellent book from Strauss, this time covering the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, the assassination and its aftermath, and the fates of the conspirators, only one of whom died a natural death.

Pax Romana: War, Peace, and Conquest in the Roman World, by Adrian Goldsworthy—A sweeping but detailed study of how the Romans built their empire and carved peace out of chaos. I reviewed this book for University Bookman some years ago, one of my first paid writing jobs. You can read that here.

Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, by James Romm—A look at the irony of one of Rome’s most selfish and perverted emperors having studied under one of its greatest apostles of reason and moderation. A really fascinating and engaging book.

How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy—A detailed study of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the emergence of the early medieval world. Preview of coming attractions.

Rome for kids

Pompeii: Buried Alive! by Edith Kunhardt, illustrated by Michael Eagle—A very good Step Into Reading chapter book with great illustrations and a narrative that builds a palpable but kid-friendly sense of dread. Includes a little bit about the archaeological discovery of Pompeii and the fact that Vesuvius is still active.

The Romans: Usborne Starting Point History, by Phil Roxbee Cox, illustrated by Annabel Spenceley—I think this one may, sadly, be out of print, which is a shame. I got a used copy for my kids years ago and it’s a favorite. Includes nicely-illustrated two-page spreads about many facets of Roman life and some nice cutaways of Roman buildings.

The Traveler’s Guide to Ancient Rome, by John Malam, illustrated by Mike Foster—Another used acquisition, this one is from Scholastic and has even more extensive coverage than the Usborne book, plus a lot more attention to overall historical context with timelines, maps of the city and empire, and more.

Rome in Spectacular Cross-Section, by Stephen Biesty—Having grown up on books of plane schematics, Usborne books, and David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work, I adore cross-sections. Biesty’s books are among the best I’ve ever seen. This is a huge picture book with vast, intricately detailed illustrations of major Roman buildings including the Colosseum, the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter, a Roman bath, and more. It’s amazing. Unfortunately it also appears to be out of print, but your local library may have a copy. That’s how we enjoy it.

Detectives in Togas and The Mystery of the Roman Ransom, by Henry Winterfeld—Two of the books that first introduced me to Rome, these are children’s novels about a group of Roman schoolboys who solve mysteries. Set in a vaguely defined period of the early Principate, they’re not rigorously historically accurate but are leavened with nice period details and a good sense of the spirit of the era. They’re also a lot of fun—I remember devouring them sometime around 4th grade.

Rome in fiction

Pompeii, by Robert Harris—A brilliant historical thriller that uses dramatic irony—we all know exactly what’s going to happen even as the characters struggle to figure it out—to devastating effect. This is the Roman novel I recommend most often to students.

Vindolanda, The Encircling Sea, and Brigantia, by Adrian Goldsworthy—This trilogy set in Roman Britain in the first years of the reign of Trajan follows the adventures of centurion Flavius Ferox, a native Briton of the Silures. Goldsworthy uses his mastery of the Roman world, the Roman army, and Roman Britain specifically to great effect, setting his dramatic action-mystery stories in a rich, complicated, detailed world.

Augustus, by John Williams—An epistolary novel covering the life of Augustus from his rise to power to his final years, with all the ups and downs and personal tragedies in between. I don’t agree with Williams’s interpretation of some things (his take on Cicero is pretty cynical) but this is a brilliantly executed novel.

I, Claudius and Claudius the God, by Robert Graves—Everyone knows and loves these, but what can I say? These are brilliant, fun, dramatic, and moving novels written with great energy, wit, imagination, and a love for the details and the larger-than-life characters of Roman history. They’re classics for a reason.

Helena, by Evelyn Waugh—A profound, moving, and thematically rich historical fantasy about the mother of the first Christian emperor of Rome that follows her from girlhood in Britain to old age in quest of the True Cross.

And before I hand the reins over to the Romans themselves, let me mention my own modest Roman fiction, the novella The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero, about the final hours of my favorite Roman.

The Romans in their own words

Aeneid, by Virgil—The pinnacle of Latin epic and a stirring story of family, nation, and manhood, the Aeneid has been justly admired by everyone from Dante to CS Lewis, who wrote of it: “With Virgil European poetry grows up.” I’ve most recently read the translation by David Ferry but would also recommend those of Robert Fagles, Allen Mandelbaum, and Stanley Lombardo. I have Sarah Ruden’s well-regarded translation on standby for my next readthrough.

Metamorphoses, by Ovid—Most of the “Greek” myths you’ve heard come, in some form, from Ovid. Not my favorite epic but a striking experiment with many beautiful and moving episodes.

The Early History of Rome and The War with Hannibal, by Livy—These are the titles of two of the four extant volumes of Livy as published by Penguin Classics. I’m particularly attracted to these stories of formative catastrophes, whether of a village hanging on to existence by its fingernails or a republic weathering the worst storm yet in its history.

The War Against Catiline, by Sallust—A short history of a crucial moment in the careers of Cicero, Caesar, and Crassus and in the death throes of the Republic. A fresh new translation for Princeton UP’s Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series titled How to Stop a Conspiracy is a great read.

The Gallic War, by Julius Caesar—When Jordan sat down to write this list, Caesar’s commentaries were among the very first things he thought of.

On Duties, On Old Age, and On Friendship, by Cicero—Three excellent long essays on philosophical, moral, and ethical topics that are all full of wisdom and mean a lot to me. There’s much more Cicero I could recommend, but these three are my absolute favorites. The latter two, retitled How to Grow Old and How to Be a Friend, are two of the best volumes in the Princeton UP series mentioned above. I reviewed How to Grow Old on the blog here.

The Twelve Caesars, by Suetonius—If the myths you vaguely remember come from Ovid, the stories of debauched and greedy emperors almost certainly come from here. Robert Graves, author of I, Claudius, translated Suetonius for Penguin Classics.

Agricola and Germania, by Tacitus—I love all of Tacitus but I have read and reread these short treatises for pleasure many times. Agricola is a story of native rebellion and a successful Roman campaign in Britain and Germania, by some assessments the first work of ethnography in history, is of particular interest to me, with its fascinating and tantalizing catalog of different German tribes.

The Golden Ass, by Apuleius—A hilarious romp in which a Greek merchant named Lucius is transformed into a donkey by a witch. Lucius, who is immediately stolen by bandits, then spends years observing the behavior and listening to the stories of ordinary people in the age of the Empire. Stories within stories, absurdity, violence, tragedy, a handful of over-the-top poop jokes, and a happy ending make this some of the most fun Roman literature that has survived.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope you find something good to read here. In the meantime, keep Rome in your thoughts and establish peace, spare the humbled, and conquer the proud.

Summer reading 2023

This proved to be a pretty momentous summer. I published my fifth book and my wife and I welcomed twins, our fourth and fifth children, a few weeks ago, not long after I first announced it here. And somewhere in there were work, looking for more work, preparing for the babies’ arrival, a little bit of travel, and reading. I’m glad to say it was all good, the reading included. So here are my favorites from this busy but blessed summer.

For the purposes of this post, “summer” is defined as going from mid-May to last week, just before fall late-term courses began at my school. The books in each category are presented in no particular order and, as usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite non-fiction

Looking back over the summer, I read a pretty good and unintentionally wide-ranging selection of non-fiction—history, biography, memoir, literary criticism, and, most surprising for me, self-help! Here are the best in no particular order:

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919, by Mark Thompson—A well-written and comprehensive history of the Italian Front in the First World War, a front fought over unforgivingly rugged mountain terrain. Thompson focuses primarily but not exclusively on Italy: its history from the Risorgimento to 1914, the role of nationalism and irredentism in its rush toward an unpopular war of aggression against Austria-Hungary, its appalling mismanagement of the war, and the effects of the war on its politics, military, culture, literature, and, most painfully, its people. Though little-known or understood in the English-speaking world today—outside of high school lit classes forcing A Farewell to Arms down a new generation of unreceptive throats—the Italian Front was a continuous shambles, with proportionally higher casualties per mile than even the Western Front. Thompson gives less detailed coverage to the Austrian side, which is what I was actually most interested in when I picked up this book, but the book is so solidly researched and well-presented that this is not a flaw. Highly recommended if you want to round out your understanding of the war in Europe.

Cheaper by the Dozen, by Frank B Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey—A charming, funny, and genuinely sweet memoir of a unique family and its colorful, larger-than-life father. I read this to my wife a chapter at a time before bed and we both loved it.

The Habsburg Way: Seven Rules for Turbulent Times, by Eduard Habsburg, Archduke of Austria—A short introduction to a great old family, its history, its faith, and its methods. Far from a relic of a bygone, outdated world of monarchs and arranged marriages, the Habsburgs still have things to teach us, especially as the world since the demise of Austria-Hungary has so spectacularly lost its way. The “rules” in this volume range from the dynastic and political to the individua and spiritual: marriage and childrearing, the principle of subsidiarity, living a life of devout faith, courage, dying a worthy death. Habsburg writes with warmth and humor, using his family’s rich past as a mine of stories supporting his points, making this one of the best surprises of my summer.

Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least-Likely Self-Help Guru, by Catherine Baab-Muguira—This book’s thesis might have been Chesterton’s line that “anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” That a figure like Edgar Allan Poe—born into and marked by tragedy all his days, with a doomed love life and bottomless wells of both self-promotion and self-sabotage—could still be the object of admiration over 170 years after his death is a sign that he did something right. Baab-Muguira, in a series of wry how-to chapters, lays out both Poe’s tragicomic life story and how he succeeded despite his failures. I had hoped to write a full, more detailed review of this wonderful and fun little book—and maybe I’ll have the time sometime soon to do so—but please take this short summary as a strong recommendation.

Crassus: The First Tycoon, by Paul Stothard—A good short biography of an important but elusive figure from the end of the Roman Republic. Considering the role Crassus played in the careers of Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, and even Catiline, it is striking that his life does not have the extensive coverage accorded to any of those other men. Stothard gathers what information we have about Crassus and interprets it judiciously, leaving plenty of space open for the unknowable, and concludes with a good detailed history of Crassus’s fatal campaign into Parthia.

The Battle for Normandy 1944, by James Holland—The ninth entry in the beautifully illustrated Ladybird Expert series on the Second World War, this little book covers everything from the Allies’ preparations to breach Fortress Europe through D-Day and the bloody battles in the intractable Norman countryside that followed to the breakout in late summer. It reads like a fast, sharp precis of Normandy ‘44, Holland’s much longer history of the campaign. This is a great little series and Holland has done a good job of summarizing such vast and complicated events. I look forward to the three remaining volumes.

The Battle of Maldon: Together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, by JRR Tolkien, Peter Grybauskas, Ed.—A wonderful new addition to my Tolkien shelf, this volume collects a miscellany of texts related to the fragmentary Anglo-Saxon epic The Battle of Maldon, which relates a tragic defeat at the hands of the Vikings in 991. Included are Tolkien’s own translation of Maldon, a selection of his notes on the poem, relevant excerpts from a number of his critical essays, and “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son,” a verse composition for two voices designed as a sequel to Maldon. Whether you love Tolkien, Anglo-Saxon history and poetry, or all three, this is a welcome treasure trove. I blogged two excerpts here: one about the transmission of poetry or any other tradition across generations, and one about those times—more common than skeptics care to admit—when the literary and the real coincide.

No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men, by Anthony Esolen*—Part paean, part elegy, part polemic. Esolen forcefully argues that saving masculinity—and, inextricably, femininity—from gender ideology is not only desirable or correct but a necessity. I think I agree with everything Esolen sets out, but I kept wishing for more effort toward persuasion for the many who will be hostile to his message. Then again, simply reaffirming the obvious and reinforcing those struggling to live out the truth is a difficult enough task now, and quite necessary and welcome on its own.

Favorite fiction

My summer was pretty light on good fiction—with the exception of John Buchan June, which I summarize in its own section below—but here are five highlights in no particular order:

Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne, trans. Frank Wynne—A fun diversion, and the first Verne I’ve read since childhood. And it also prominently features Iceland! This is a convincing and involving if not remotely plausible adventure, and the effort Verne puts into situating the story within the cutting-edge scientific knowledge of his day made me realize his place in Michael Crichton’s DNA. I began by reading a reprint of the original English translation but switched to the new translation available from Penguin Classics, which is more accurate and apparently restores a lot of material cut from or modified by the original translators.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by GK Chesterton—An early Chesterton novel I’ve been meaning to read for years. Worth the wait. Taking place in a near-future London in which very little has actually changed, the one major difference is that the monarchy has become a randomly elected lifetime position. When the eccentric and flippant Auberon Quin is elected and decides to refortify the neighborhoods of London, prescribe feudal titles and heraldic liveries for their leaders, and insist on elaborate court etiquette—all purely ironically, as a lark—he doesn’t count on one young man, Adam Wayne, becoming a true believer in this refounded medieval order. All attempts to crush Wayne end in cataclysmic street violence, and the novel concludes with a genuinely moving twilight dialogue on the field of the slain. This is Chesterton at his early energetic best, with some of the verve and freshness of The Man Who was Thursday about it. I reflected on a short passage from the beginning of the novel here.

The Twilight World, by Werner Herzog, trans. Michael Hofmann—A hypnotically involving short novel about Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese officer who carried on a guerrilla campaign in the Philippines from 1945 to 1974—decades after the end of World War II. Herzog evokes the isolation and paranoia of Onoda and his handful of comrades, who always manage to find a reason to believe the war has not ended, as well as the passage of time. An epic story briskly and powerfully told. Full review on the blog here.

The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw* and Real Ponies Don’t Go Oink,* by Patrick F McManus—Two collections of hilarious articles and tall tales from the late outdoor writer Patrick McManus. His stock of humorous characters like cantankerous old time outdoorsman Rancid Crabtree or childhood buddy Crazy Eddie Muldoon is especially rich, and all of his stories are written with a wry, self-deprecating irony that makes them doubly enjoyable. The title story in The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw is still one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. My wife and I listened to the excellent audiobook versions performed by Norman Dietz during 1:00 and 4:00 AM feedings for the twins.

John Buchan June

For the second annual John Buchan June I didn’t manage to make it through as many of Buchan’s novels as last year, reading only seven, but they were a solid assortment from the middle of his career and included serious historical fiction, espionage shockers, a wartime thriller, a borderline science fiction tale, and the first of the hobbit-like adventures of retired grocer Dickson McCunn.

The seven I read, in order of posting about them, are below. My full John Buchan June reviews are linked from each title.

• Witch Wood (1927)

• Huntingtower (1922)

• The Dancing Floor (1926)

• Mr Standfast (1918)

• The Blanket of the Dark (1931)

• The Gap in the Curtain (1932)

• The Three Hostages (1924)

Of these, I think my favorite was certainly Witch Wood, a seriously spooky historical folk horror novel set in 17th-century Scotland. The two Sir Edward Leithen adventures The Dancing Floor and The Gap in the Curtain, with their own hints of the supernatural or uncanny, as well as the first Dickson McCunn novel, Huntingtower, were strong contenders as well, but Witch Wood also has great depth and therefore that much more power. I hope to reread it sometime soon.

Kids’ books

A Picture Book of Davy Crockett, by David Adler, illustrated by John and Alexandra Wallner—A short kids’ biography of Crockett with fun storybook illustrations that manages to give a surprisingly detailed and nuanced version of his life story and historical context. I was pleasantly surprised by this book and intend to seek out more in Adler’s series of picture book biographies.

The Little Pilgrim’s Progress, adapted by Helen L Taylor, illustrated by Joe Sutphin—An adaptation of John Bunyan’s classic for children, with simplified language, a streamlined plot, and anthropomorphic animals instead of people, this still powerfully evokes the richness and pathos of the original. I wept at least twice while reading it out loud to my kids, who loved the whole thing and still talk about the characters. Sutphin’s illustrations are also beautiful and kid-friendly. I very much look forward to his graphic novel adaptation of Watership Down, which comes out this fall.

The Phantom of the Colosseum, by Sophie de Mullenheim, trans. Janet Chevrier—The first volume of the In the Shadows of Rome series, this is a fast-paced, suspenseful story set during the reign of Diocletian. Three Roman boys—Titus, Maximus, and Aghiles, Maximus’s Numidian slave—break into the Colosseum in search of a thief and find themselves involved in the efforts of Christians to survive persecution. Though none of the main characters converts—a rarity in a Christian novel—they find their assumptions about the believers challenged and their consciences pricked. My kids greatly enjoyed this adventure and we’re now reading the sequel, A Lion for the Emperor.

The Go-and-Tell Storybook, by Laura Richie, illustrated by Ian Dale—The third in a series of beautifully illustrated picture books by Richie and Dale, this one covers a large part of the Book of Acts and tells the stories of the first apostles and the spread of the Church beyond Judaea all the way to Athens and Rome. It’s rare to get such detailed coverage of this material in a children’s book, which I greatly appreciated, and it afforded many opportunities to talk about history and the Church with our kids.

Looking ahead

You won’t be surprised to learn that my reading has slowed down a bit over the last month or so, but I’m glad to say I’m still enjoying plenty of good stuff. In addition to the historical kids’ adventure novel set in Rome I mentioned above, right now I’m working on a supernatural espionage thriller by Tim Powers and War Horse, by Michael Morpurgo, which my daughter thoughtfully brought me from her classroom library. There’s more, and there’s always the to-read list. You’ll hear about the best of it after this semester ends, a respite I already look forward to.

Until then, I hope y’all will check some of these out and that whatever you find, you’ll enjoy. Thanks for reading!

A good visit with Bookish Questions

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

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

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

Thanks for reading, and thanks for watching!

The Great Locomotive Chase

Conductor William Fuller (JEffrey Hunter) flags down the locomotive Texas in The Great Locomotive Chase (1956). That’s Slim Pickens in the cab of the engine.

Last night for family movie night I got to share a movie with my kids that I had previously seen only once, probably thirty years ago, but wanted to rewatch ever since. It’s an action-packed Civil War story and, best of all, was shot in my home county in northeast Georgia. It’s Walt Disney’s 1956 spy thriller The Great Locomotive Chase, starring Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter.

The Great Locomotive Chase is a bit of a legend back home. For years the Clayton Cafe on Main Street had a photo of Disney himself, enjoying a post-breakfast cigarette in one of the booths, framed on the wall behind the register. It seemed like everyone I knew growing up had some connection to the film. A cousin of mine claimed a grandfather on his dad’s side was visible on the station platform in one scene. Others who didn’t appear as extras remembered the filming, or seeing Disney and his cast and crew around. There have been plenty of movies shot in Rabun County, but none remembered quite as fondly as this. It certainly doesn’t provoke the shame or hostility that Deliverance still does.

As for me, after years of hearing about it and having developed a powerful interest in the Civil War in elementary school, I finally got to watch it one afternoon when my dad rented a VHS from the now-defunct Movie Time Video next door to the now-defunct Bi-Lo. I watched it eagerly, and we returned it, and I never saw it again. Until this weekend.

I’d forgotten a lot about it. I mostly remembered the standard old Hollywood Confederate uniforms—gray with blue infantry collars, cuffs, and hatbands—that struck me even at the time as unrealistic. And I remembered a railroad tunnel and, at the end, the Yankee spies walking circles in a prison yard. But that was about it. When I ran across an unopened DVD at our local used book store I snapped it up.

I’m glad to say it was an enjoyable adventure, and much better than I even remembered.

The Great Locomotive Chase is based on the true story of the Andrews raid of April 1862, in which twenty Union saboteurs led by civilian spy James Andrews infiltrated north Georgia, boarded a train at Marietta north of Atlanta, and hijacked it. The plan was to steam northward to Chattanooga vandalizing the tracks, cutting telegraph wires, and burning bridges and causing as much destruction as possible to cripple a key link in the Confederacy’s flimsy rail network.

Unfortunately for Andrews and his men, they were held up several times by southbound freight trains. Worse, and fatally for them and their mission, they were doggedly pursued by employees of the railroad, who at first assumed the train had been stolen by deserters. One of the pursuers, a young conductor named William Fuller, chased them for 87 miles, starting on foot before working through three locomotives, the last of which he drove backwards up the tracks.

As for Andrews and his raiders, Fuller’s pursuit cost them the time needed to take on fuel and water. When they ran out of steam they abandoned the locomotive and were swept up by Confederate cavalry. Eventually, eight were executed as spies, including Andrews. But the raiders became the first recipients of the new Congressional Medal of Honor.

Disney’s film tells this story straightforwardly, framing it with the presentation of the Medal of Honor to some of the raid’s survivors. Among them is William Pittenger (John Lupton), who serves as narrator. Parts of the first act feel rushed, as Andrews (Fess Parker) is introduced quickly, briefs a Union general, requests a team, and instantly receives one. Only as the group travels south to infiltrate the Confederacy do the raiders get characterization. The most notable after Andrews and Pittenger, who mostly works as an observer for the audience, is Campbell (Jeff York), a nationalist hothead who becomes fed up with the “bowing and scraping” of his spy cover and wants nothing more than to murder Southerners. His temper and desire to fight present a constant danger to the secrecy of Andrews’s mission.

But once the raiders are aboard the train and put their plan into motion, the film is continuously propulsive, suspenseful, and well-paced. The train action, almost all practical, staged aboard real trains on the Tallulah Falls Railroad, is genuinely impressive. Andrews and Fuller (Jeffrey Hunter) engage in a stream-driven game of cat and mouse, with Andrews sabotaging the line ahead of Fuller in numerous creative ways and the tenacious Fuller using his expertise as a railroad man to counteract them and keep up the pursuit. Adding appreciably to the quality of the action, it appears that Hunter did most of his own stunts. The final leg of the chase, in which he shouts orders to the engineer from the back of a locomotive racing along in reverse, is especially exciting.

Based on some of what I’ve read online, people at the time and since have found the film’s final act anticlimactic or even too depressing. I thought it fit the structure of the story perfectly, allowing the action-heavy first parts of the film to conclude on character-driven notes of respect if not reconciliation.

The ending serves Parker especially well, as for most of the movie he is stoic, manly, and brave, but not much else. In this film he lacks the charisma that made him famous as Davy Crockett, and so—without giving too much away—a heartfelt speech in his final scene gives him a belated depth that was very moving. The rest of the cast ranges from mediocre to fine. One confrontation between Campbell and the more patient members of the raiders has some noticeably wooden acting, but I was pleased to see how many locals got bit parts in the film and how well they did. Among the rest of the professional cast, I especially liked seeing Slim Pickens in an early role as one of Fuller’s engineers.

But performance-wise, The Great Locomotive Chase belongs to two secondary characters—Campbell and Fuller. It’s easy to see why. York and Hunter are certainly excellent in their parts, especially Hunter, whose physicality and sympathetic performance make him a worthy adversary but not a bad guy, but the characters themselves are more compelling than the lofty and distant Andrews. Both Campbell and Fuller are tough, tenacious, and physically brave, both are driven by implacable hostility toward their enemies, and both reliably follow through in a crisis. Both also have full character arcs, with their intense aggression transformed into respect in the conclusion—which, again, I don’t want to give away.

Disney put a lot of effort into this movie, shooting it in Technicolor CinemaScope like the more special effects-heavy 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which had come out two years before, so it’s a shame it wasn’t as financially successful as he had hoped. More to the point for us nowadays, it’s a shame that Disney’s successors haven’t given this film a decent home media release. It’s currently available to rent in HD on Amazon Prime, but as far as I can tell the 20+ year old, non-anamorphic DVD I found a few weeks ago is the sole home video release since the VHS days. A restored Blu-ray would be nice, especially since this film meant as much to Disney—and the people of my county—as it did.

The Great Locomotive Chase is a simple, straightforward film, but a fine example of classic Hollywood filmmaking. If you haven’t seen it before or haven’t even heard of it, I hope you’ll check it out.

More if you’re interested

The Walt Disney Family Museum has a good “making of” article on The Great Locomotive Chase that gives good attention to Rabun County and the technical side of filming. For local resources and memories of the film, here’s a Rabun County Historical Society newsletter with behind the scenes photos and detailed captions, and here’s a Foxfire podcast interview with locals who appeared as extras.

If you’re interested in the true story of the Andrews Raiders, see the New Georgia Encyclopedia article above for a good overview. Here’s a short volume from Osprey’s Raid series on the Andrews Raid, and here’s the primary source behind the film: William Pittenger’s memoir Capturing a Locomotive: A History of Secret Service in the Late War, available for free at Project Gutenberg.

Woke Bond is boring Bond

Earlier this week I read a short piece by Niall Gooch at the Spectator called “The terribleness of a progressive Bond.” It’s a review of a new Bond novella by Charlie Higson, On His Majesty’s Secret Service, which was written to coincide with the coronation of Charles II. The story, insofar as it has one, involves Bond traveling to Hungary to infiltrate a nationalist plot to overthrow Charles and install a pretender claiming direct descent from Alfred the Great.

Gooch was not impressed. In addition to poor plotting and writing (“It makes Dan Brown look like a master of nuance, understatement and subtle characterisation”), Higson’s novella is overtly political, with a menagerie of baddies gathered from the most fevered imaginations of left-leaning Twitter types. The villains are cartoonishly anti-immigration, anti-EU, and vaccine-skeptical, and needless to say they’re all inarticulate white men who like guns and beer. Gooch:

None of them is a genuine character. Instead they are mere empty vessels, onto which he projects his bizarre fantasies about the motivations and beliefs of conservatives. People who are sceptical about mass immigration or transgenderism or the erosion of free speech are simply itching to engage in mass terror attacks in the heart of London, apparently.

But long before this becomes explicit, you’ll feel it. They’re interested in Anglo-Saxon history? They like Hungary? If you are left wondering why a London businessman calling himself Athelstan of Wessex would organize his plot in Hungary, you are not part of Higson’s political bubble, and On His Majesty’s Secret Service is not written for you. It is, Gooch writes, “clearly a work of propaganda.”

As it happens, I read On His Majesty’s Secret Service this summer, and there’s a reason you didn’t hear anything about it here. Gooch’s review is wholly accurate.

I thought it perhaps better written than Gooch did, but that’s damning with faint praise. My one thought through the entire first half of the story was “Okay, I see what you’re doing,” which was personally irritating and, artistically, meant that the second half held no surprises. And I agree entirely that the staid “Centrist Dad” Bond of this novella—a man who is in a carefully worked out and consensual open relationship; whose self-satisfied inner thoughts range across a litany of studiedly correct leftwing opinions on everything from English nationalism and Viktor Orban to sweatshops and gut health; and who is comfortable dropping terms like “toxic” and “far right”—is a diminished Bond. For Gooch, this is “cringeworthy.” My word was “annoying.”

It’s also boring.

Why? The key word comes in Gooch’s final paragraph:

It is perhaps some consolation that there must eventually be a reaction against the smug, complacent tone of of the contemporary cultural scene. Until then, it seems like we may be in for some very bad films, books and TV shows, praised not for any artistic merit but for their ideological conformity.

Complacent. You could never call the original Bond complacent. He was not a happy man. Despite his smarts, skills, strength, love of the high life, and success with women, Bond was always a bit out of step with the modern world, ever more so as time went on. When Judi Dench’s M calls Bond a “dinosaur” in GoldenEye it is meant as an insult but accurately captures a fundamental aspect of the original character. This is because Fleming’s Bond—and, to a lesser but still palpable extent, the Bond of the films—was a relic of the Empire. His fate all the way through Fleming’s series is to risk all and suffer much on behalf of something that was crumbling anyway, often preventably and therefore pointlessly.

And so Fleming’s Bond grows more bitter and the novels more poignant and reflective as the series goes on. By the time of You Only Live Twice, the penultimate original novel, Bond is so alienated, so disillusioned with his work and what Britain has become, that the only person left who can understand him is a former enemy, a Japanese kamikaze pilot. Both know not only what it means to lose, permanently, but to survive to no apparent purpose.

By contrast, a Bond who shares the views dominant in media and academia is comfortable, static, and smug in a way Fleming’s Bond never could be. The original Bond is fighting what Tolkien called a “long defeat,” a doomed but heroic defense of something that will perish but is worthwhile anyway. Higson’s Bond critiques everything he sees from the lofty height of his own detached correctness. He would be more likely to process his trauma with a therapist than find a friend in a past enemy. He has nothing to learn, nothing to lose, and nothing to die for. He is right where he—and, indeed, everyone else—should be.

Blame the author. Fleming put a lot of himself into Bond; hence not only the womanizing and love of scrambled eggs but the bitterness, weariness, and disillusionment. Fleming was a dinosaur, too, and he knew it. Higson, on the other hand, and his Bond belong. Gooch:

I admit to being somewhat surprised by quite how leaden and didactic this book was. Are there no editors left, I asked myself as I waded through the underpowered, hectoring prose. Perhaps, however, that is a function of how hegemonic Higson’s views are among the creative classes.

After all, goldfish do not know they are wet, and people who conform instinctively and wholeheartedly to contemporary pieties—about borders and gender and free speech and identity—find it very difficult to understand the extent of their epistemic bubbles. We seem to be entering an age when didactic pro-establishment propaganda with little merit is not only everywhere, but goes unremarked and uncriticised because the people with cultural power generally agree with each other about almost every issue of importance.

If a literary or even cinematic Bond is to retain any shred of his antiheroic character—or even to remain merely interesting—he’s going to have to become ever more an outsider in his behavior and opinions. He can do that simply by remaining himself. Whether the people at the levers of publishing and filmmaking will allow that is another question entirely.

Gooch’s entire review is worth reading, not only for its critique of Higson’s book but for its insight into the present cultural hegemony. I’ve written about Bond along similar lines several times before: here on the blog about the vein of melancholy running through Fleming’s stories as Bond watches the disintegration of the world he is defending, and at the University Bookman about Bond’s arc and Fleming’s craftsmanship. I’ve also speculated about what is to become of the film series and its Bond here.

JRR Tolkien, 50 years later

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the death of JRR Tolkien, an occasion for reflection and appreciation. A few impromptu thoughts on Tolkien’s work and what it—and Tolkien himself—have meant to me over the years:

Part of Tolkien’s legacy for me is purely philosophical. Writing at The Critic yesterday, Sebastian Milbank considers the unlikely success of Tolkien’s storytelling in a literary environment under the Sauron-like dominion of irony, cynicism, amorality, and the tortured solipsism of post-Freudian psychology. Milbank:

More than anything else Lord of the Rings communicates a sensibility utterly at odds with the spirit of the age in which it was written. It is one of profound, tragic loss, of the vulnerability of irretrievable, ancient beauty, that must desperately be conserved and defended. It is of the inherent heroism of standing against destructive change, of hope beyond all reason, amidst the logic of history, which Tolkien named “the long defeat”.

Further, there is no “authorial wink,” no signaling or messaging for fellow bien pensants of the kind typical of elitist, politically motivated modernist art. In its morality (not moralism), earnestness, and total commitment to the act of storytelling and the sub-creation of imaginary worlds, Tolkien’s legendarium has become perhaps the anti-modernist myth par excellence, and not by taking any conscious stance but simply by being utterly and sincerely itself.

And yet this philosophical and religious understanding of the drama of Tolkien’s stories came to me later, after long thought and even longer thoughtless basking in his world and words. And I do mean words quite literally.

During college I moved from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to some of Tolkien’s essays. This proved a fortuitous time to do so. I read “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” at about the same time I was taking British History I and British Literature I, a one-two punch of subjects that have become lifelong passions. Reading and rereading Beowulf, and learning about the Anglo-Saxons, and rereading The Lord of the Rings, and then giving intense nuts-and-bolts attention to language, style, tone, and technique in my Creative Writing minor classes, aided by the insights and example of John Gardner, revealed much that was at work beneath the surface of Tolkien’s stories. For the first time I perceived the purposeful deliberation behind his choice of words and the structure of his sentences and poems, and the careful use of allusion to expand the world in which a small story takes place.

This was heady stuff and, emboldened with the enthusiasm of discovery and youthful experiment, I plunged into my Novel Writing class in my final semester of college armed with new and exciting tools. The eventual result was No Snakes in Iceland. It may be that I belong to that class of “mediocre imitators,” as Milbank calls them in his piece, but my first published novel would not have come to be without Tolkien’s example.

And Tolkien’s example extends beyond the literary. Milbank does not delve far into Tolkien the man in his essay, but Tolkien’s actual life story stands as just as strong a rebuke to modernism as his novels. A child of hardship, orphaned at an early age, raised in a teeming industrial city, a soldier in some of the worst combat in history, here is a man who lived through all the blights that should have embittered and driven him to misery and indulgence nevertheless living quietly and faithfully with his wife and children and working just as happily in his professional field as on his private hobbies. He is not the tortured, arrogant literary scribbler of modern myth and his protagonists are neither whiners nor degenerates. Geniuses don’t have to be jerks. A man of faith, duty, family, close friendship, rigorous and honest scholarship, and devotion to the small and parochial and workaday, Tolkien was in every way a candidate for a saintly “hidden life.” And yet everyone knows who he was.

This is perhaps the starkest irony of Tolkien’s life: that a man so contented with his lot and so unambitious (in the way of the worlds of commerce, politics, or celebrity) should become the author of the twentieth century. The more I have studied his life the more I admire him and wish for the grace to emulate him.

All of these things matter to me—the philosophy, the aesthetic, the man himself—but at the root of Tolkien’s meaning for me lie the stories. As it should be.

I can actually date my love for Tolkien. I read The Hobbit in high school at a friend’s urgent insistence (thanks, Josh!) and—again, fortuitously—my county’s brand-new Walmart had the book in stock. On July 10, 2000, I was reading it while my family sat in Atlanta traffic on our way to Turner Field for the home run derby. I had reached a chapter called “Riddles in the Dark.” We drove through a tunnel, one of those places where the interstate runs under a major street like Jimmy Carter Boulevard, and I was hooked. I had enjoyed The Hobbit up to this point but now I loved it, and knew I would read the rest and move straight on to The Lord of the Rings as soon as I could. I’ve never looked back and that love and excitement has never flagged or diminished.

That’s the power of a good story told by a great artist. In Chesterton’s words, Tolkien became for me the “center” of a “flaming imagination.” That imagination has remained aflame for twenty-three years because Tolkien not only told a good story, which plenty of people can do, but because his work is rich and deep and loving and, most of all, true enough to return to again and again for more. No burglar can diminish this hoard by even a cup.

I’ve used the word “fortuitous” twice in this reflection despite knowing that Tolkien would not himself think of it that way. Rightly so. Tolkien believed in Providence and it is largely through his example that I can grasp and trust in that idea. So when I do think of those coincidences, the circumstances and strong confluences and old friendships that kindled and kept my love for Tolkien burning, I hear Gandalf’s closing admonition to Bilbo: “You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?”

No, I don’t. Thank goodness.

JRR Tolkien, artist, scholar, elf-friend, and faithful servant of God, from whom all creativity descends, RIP.

More if you’re interested

Milbank’s essay at The Critic is excellent—one of the best recent pieces on Tolkien that I’ve read. Check out the whole thing here. For more on the religious and philosophical underpinnings of Tolkien’s world, all worked out organically through his storytelling rather than imposed as a moral, read Peter Kreeft’s The Philosophy of Tolkien. I’ve written about Tolkien here many times before—just click the Tolkien tag below for more—but in the early days of this blog I reviewed a delightful and beautifully illustrated children’s book called John Ronald’s Dragons that I want to recommend here again.

Chesterton on the arrogance of civilization

detail from The Course of Empire: Desolation, by Thomas COle

Last night I finally started reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill, an early Chesterton novel that I’ve just never gotten around to. The opening chapters are vintage Chesterton, and probably even a little more fresh and brisk than his later fiction. The novel is set in the London of far-distant 1984 (another underrecognized Chesterton-Orwell connection?), a sort of dystopia of efficiency where everything is regulated, everything is chugging along successfully, and everything is dull.

In the opening chapter, two bureaucratic functionaries, both dull men in black suits, are walking to work in the pre-dawn twilight when they run into the deposed President of Nicaragua. They are immediately drawn to the President not just because of his elaborate and brightly colored costume, but because of his magnetic air of regal authority. That he produces a pocket knife and soaks his handkerchief in his own blood, next pinning the bloody rag to his breast as a flag to commemorate the loss of Nicaragua, only cements their interest in him.

Nevertheless, the two fall into an argument with the President. Barker, the intellectual of the two (“He had a great amount of intellectual capacity, of that peculiar kind which raises a man from throne to throne and lets him die loaded with honours without having either amused or enlightened the mind of a single man”), condescendingly argues that the President’s overthrow and the absorption of a once-independent Nicaragua into a North American superstate is not a bad thing, because Progress. That absorption brought education, science, and progress even if it meant the decline of the things that made Nicaragua unique.

The President, understandably, assumes that Barker’s sympathies are with the unnamed larger nation that took Nicaragua over. “My sympathies are with no nation,” Barker replies. “We moderns believe in a great cosmopolitan civilisation, one which shall include all the talents of all the absorbed peoples.” Consumed, assimilated, brought up to some external standard, scientifically progressed into a deracinated copy of every other “absorbed people,” the Nicaraguans have lost even their once famous ability to capture and tame wild horses.

“‘I never catch a wild horse,’ replied Barker, with dignity.”

Such folk skills are, to him, “a mere barbarian dexterity.” But the President cannot help but feel “that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilised.” 

“Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”

“Something, perhaps,” replied Barker, “but that something a mere barbarian dexterity. I do not know that I could chip flints as well as a primeval man, but I know that civilisation can make these knives which are better, and I trust to civilisation.”

“You have good authority,” answered the Nicaraguan. “Many clever men like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”

It is not the point of Chesterton’s novel, but this is a striking preview of the globalist blender—well before it was set to puree by the internet—complete with the self-satisfied moral superiority of the big as they wield their bigness against the small. And the President’s final line is a good reminder of the fate of all civilizations, no matter how confident, successful, and progressive. At the very least it is a warning against the tyranny of the present.

As for the President, he departs the story with an even sharper and more evocative line, and possibly one to live by:

“Every man is dangerous,” said the old man without moving, “who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.”

And with a pleasant smile he finished his coffee and rose, bowing profoundly, passed out into the fog, which had again grown dense and sombre. Three days afterwards they heard that he had died quietly in lodgings in Soho.

For those of us who sense the going of “something” from the world with the advance of “civilization,” see this reflection on Paul Kingsnorth from back in January. For the “theological task” of the present age, that of making modern man have even “an inkling of what has been taken from him,” see this passage from Jünger’s The Forest Passage that I posted last year.