Concepts and ideas in the novel

From critic and essayist Joseph Epstein’s The Novel, Who Needs It? an apologia for the novel as a form:

“Create a concept and reality leaves the room.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

Concepts have their value, but they tend to explain more than they can justify. From Karl Marx’s class-struggle to Max Weber’s linking the rise of capitalism to the rise of Protestantism to Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus Complex, conceptual thinking tends invariably to be both overly ambitious and sketchy, leaving out crucial aspects of human experience, and thereby necessarily highly simplifying. “Create a concept,” Ortega wrote, “and reality leaves the room.”

What Epstein calls “concepts” could also be called “theories” or, more precisely, “ideologies,” though the line between all of these is blurry. Epstein continues this paragraph with an observation on the similarly limiting effects of specialization:

Scientists, historians, politicians, economists, and poets all perceived the world, as Michael Oakeshott noted, through what he termed their separate “mode of experience,” but for him each of these modes was partial, incomplete, only part of the story. Oakeshott also felt that the whole story was not to be encompassed through any discrete mode of learning, even through philosophy, with its pretensions to be architectonic.

The novel, Epstein argues, has an important role in culture because of its ability to create comprehensive imaginative visions of human experience informed by the author’s understanding of human nature, something the arts and sciences tend to approach from only one angle.

Later, Epstein contrasts the ideological novel, the novel of “concepts,” with “the novel of ideas”:

“[W]hile all serious novels are ultimately about ideas, the best novels always put facts before ideas.”

— Joseph Epstein

Of the various forms the novel has taken-the family chronicle, the picaresque, the satire, the novel of ideas—the last, the novel of ideas, may seem a contradiction. I say a contradiction because, first, while all serious novels are ultimately about ideas, the best novels always put facts before ideas. . . . When ideas are at the forefront in fiction, when ideas dictate fact, characters seem diminished, plot suffers, and reality leaves not only the room but the novel.

That is, ideas and theory have to be expressed in “facts,” as characters, places, events, deeds, and choices. Epstein quotes the critic Northrop Frye: “An interest in ideas and theoretical statements is alien to the genius of the novel proper, where the technical problem is to dissolve all theory into personal relationships.”

Which is not to say that ideas have no place in fiction, just that they must take concrete form if they are to work as fiction. Epstein praises Dostoevsky and other 19th century Russian novelists as the masters of this form of philosophical storytelling. Certainly there have been many poor attempts to write novels of ideas, and the more the ideas veer into “concepts” or a systematized ideology—whether of the Dalton Trumbo or Ayn Rand varieties, though we are of course afflicted with a lot of strongly ideological fiction today—the more the storytelling suffers.

Food for thought. I’m enjoying The Novel, Who Needs It? and if I’m able I’ll have a full review when I’m done.

Castle Gay

Today marks the beginning of my third annual John Buchan June. I started this blog series two years ago in an effort to reclaim my birth month from other themed celebrations and turn it in a more fun, wholesome, and adventurous direction. As it happens, the Buchan novel we’re starting this year’s festivities with fits that description perfectly—the second Dickson McCunn tale, Castle Gay.

Buchan introduced Dickson McCunn, a retired Glasgow grocer with a businesslike mind and a romantic heart, in 1922’s Huntingtower. Castle Gay picks up six years after his retirement and first adventure as he hosts two of the Gorbals Die-Hards, the young scouts from a Glasgow slum who had assisted him in routing Bolshevik agents and saving a Russian princess. Now grown, Jaikie Galt is a Cambridge rugby star and Dougal Crombie a reporter for one of the largest newspaper chains in Britain. McCunn, who had taken the boys in after the events Huntingtower, is justifiably proud of them, and sees them off on a walking tour of Scotland ahead of Jaikie’s return to Cambridge.

But this being a John Buchan novel, not long after setting out Jaikie and Dougal fall headlong into a plot that slowly grows more complex and dangerous the more they discover about it. First, they happen upon Dougal’s wealthy employer, Thomas Carlyle Craw, under apparent house arrest deep in the countryside. It turns out that local students have kidnapped Craw as a prank, mistaking him for an older student running for rector of their university, and the befuddled landlady is holding him there. Dougal and Jaikie offer to contact Craw’s staff and the outraged Craw sends a letter with them announcing his predicament.

When they arrive at Craw’s vacation home, Castle Gay, they discover the gates locked and barricaded and reporters from rival newspaper chains skulking the grounds. With the help of a spirited local girl named Alison Westwater they enter the castle and learn that not only are reporters snooping the countryside trying to find out why Craw is missing, but an envoy of agents from the eastern European republic of Evallonia are in the neighborhood, hoping to meet him. Craw, in the high-minded editorials he dashes off from the seclusion of his homes around the country, has taken a hard pro-monarchy stance on this distant country’s politics in the hopes of preventing its takeover by Bolshevik-aligned radicals.

At first Jaikie, Douglas, Alison, and Craw’s staff assume that the visiting Evallonians are republicans hoping to kidnap or otherwise harm Craw for his influential opinions. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the group represents the monarchist faction, and that the heir to the Evallonian throne himself may be among them.

But the republicans are not out of the picture and, as Jaikie shuffles Craw through the countryside and Dougal works to prepare the way for his boss’s return following his strange absence, they learn that this faction is also present in the area, that they’re watching the land around Castle Gay closely, and that their intentions are much more sinister than those of their monarchist rivals.

And so Jaikie and Dougal find themselves saving a newspaper magnate from one kidnapping plot and trying to foil another, meanwhile guarding Craw’s reputation as well as his life by dodging rival reporters from London and Bolshevik spies from eastern Europe, facilitating a nighttime escape by sea, and even managing a costume ball in which real European royalty appear in disguise, all leading to a dramatic final confrontation in the stately library of Castle Gay. Along the way, Dougal comes into his own as a reporter, Craw reconnects with the real world, and Jaikie falls in love.

Castle Gay is not as good as Huntingtower, which benefited from a simpler plot with the lovable Dickson McCunn at its heart, but it is greatly enjoyable. No less a reader than Evelyn Waugh praised its masterful handling of tones that should clash—the thrilling, the romantic, the comic. Buchan has a lot of fun at Craw’s expense, with Jaikie dragging the put-upon media mogul through the rain and mud and cold of the Scottish countryside. And while fun and often funny, Buchan also gives Craw a clear character arc. This fussy, picky, detached newspaperman, who lives in carefully controlled comfort, has his expensive suit ruined and his impractical shoes destroyed on what to Jaikie is an unremarkable walk through the hills, but once he has gotten past his outrage and his discomfort he discovers real physical courage and, Buchan suggests, rescues his soul.

Buchan also plays with irony and mistaken identity, not only in Craw’s initial kidnapping, in which he is merely the victim of a student gag, but later, when one of the reporters finally gets into Castle Gay and has a surprising interview with the reclusive Craw—not knowing that it is actually Dickson McCunn. When the interview is published in a rival paper, Craw is furious at the very McCunn-like opinions ascribed to himself, but can’t disavow them.

All of which is humorous, but it also hints at Buchan’s genuine concern with the influence of the news media. Buchan wrote Castle Gay while recovering from an illness in 1929 and published it in 1930, a time when central and eastern Europe were still in a tumult as a result of the Great War and the Treaty of Versailles. Opinions on foreign politics were hotly debated in the Anglophone world, which was often a point of resentment in the countries in question. The influential Craw, stumping for monarchy in a republic presumably carved out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (the Evallonians’ names are all scrupulously polyglot, making Evallonia impossible to pin down as a stand-in for any specific country), attracts the wrong kind of attention from both parties in Evallonian politics, both of whom wish to manipulate British media coverage to their advantage. The fact that the coverage is exposed as often wrong, as when McCunn’s opinions are breathlessly reported as Craw’s to a stunned readership—and a stunned Craw—is not only funny but subtly shows how dangerous this influence can be. As biographer Ursula Buchan points out, Buchan “perfectly understood the concept of ‘fake news.’”

But while this is an interesting and, Lord knows, still-relevant theme, the joy of Castle Gay is in the complicated maneuverings; the slapstick discomfiture of Thomas Carlyle Craw; the shy love of Jaikie for Alison, one of the most attractive of Buchan’s female characters, rivalling John Macnab’s Janet Raden; and the stir of chivalrous romance in the end as Dickson McCunn, brought into the plot by Jaikie and Dougal, gets to participate in an adventure like something out of a book again—the thing he’s always desired.

Castle Gay may not be my favorite of Buchan’s adventures, but it has many touches of his best fiction and is an enjoyable romp through the Scottish hills. Not a bad way to begin John Buchan June.

A vain aspiration to self-sufficiency

“The mistake is to see No Country for old men as being about the bad guy.”

I’ve argued for years, including here on this blog, that despite its darkness and violence Cormac McCarthy’s work is not nihilistic. Good and evil have clear meaning in his novels, and the tiny flame of hope shines all the brighter for the omnipresence of evil—a burning tree in the desert, a horn full of glowing embers. This theme recurs especially often in his later novels.

In a review of an anthology titled Film and Faith: Modern Cinema and the Struggle to Believe posted today, Anthony Sacramone considers an essay on the Coen brothers’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men by Carson Holloway. The essay mounts a “successful effort to redeem No Country for Old Men from the charge of nihilism,” a view Sacramone himself had previously held:

I, too, had dismissed No Country as another affected, self-consciously “cinematic” Coen brothers’ dead end, but Holloway’s careful reading converted me. The mistake is to see No Country as being about the bad guy. Instead, it’s about a traditional Hollywood good guy, the local sheriff, Bell (Tommy Lee Jones): “a kind of traditionalist conservative, … a lifetime lawman, a proud member of a line of lawmen.” But when this old-fashioned guy is confronted with radical evil in the person of Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who possesses not “an inordinate attachment to some real good” but a sadistic need to show everyone who crosses his path the utter worthlessness of their existence, Bell is lost.

Why? The lawman is unable to contend with Chigurh’s perverse brand of lawbreaking because he fears God has abandoned him and that “he may somehow be drawn into this evil.” In the end, Bell “quits” the fight because a “low estimate of himself arises from a vain aspiration to self-sufficiency.” When you believe you’re in a fight against the odds all by yourself, that you’ve lost God as your backup, what else is there to do but turn tail and run?

A great insight, and one that I hadn’t considered before. Bell’s despair, an outgrowth of his self-sufficient isolation from God, is underlined in the film by small changes the Coen brothers made to the novel. For one, Bell’s father in the novel “was not a lawman,” though his grandfather was. The “line of lawmen” Holloway notes—three generations in the film version, with Bell and his grandfather serving as sheriffs in separate counties at the same time—is the Coens underscoring this aspect of Bell’s history. A subtle but important detail.

But having just reread No Country I thought immediately of the ambiguity of this exchange between Bell and his elderly Uncle Ellis. After a long bit of dialogue from Ellis:

Bell didnt answer.

I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didnt. I dont blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion of me that he does.

You dont know what he thinks.

Yes I do.

He looked at Bell.

Ellis continues the conversation at that point, but who exactly is saying what here? The paragraphing and lack of dialogue tags leave it unclear. I’ve puzzled over it since that last reading. But in the film, the Coens assign the despair of that first line not to Ellis, whom Bell worries has “turned infidel” in the book, but to Bell himself.

Not only Sheriff Bell—who we learn in the novel was the sole survivor of his unit during World War II and only lived because he ran away when holding out alone proved hopeless—but also Llewellyn Moss and Carson Wells aim at self-sufficiency and fail utterly. Their greed and pride tempt them into isolation, where Chigurh destroys them both. Bell at least survives to receive prophetic word that hope remains alive. God or grace is reaching for him.

June 13 will mark the one-year anniversary of McCarthy’s death. I paid tribute to him following his death here.

White whales and bleak houses

Napkin doodle by yours truly

Earlier this week, Jay Nordlinger at National Review wrote of an aging concert pianist who had “made peace” with never conquering some famously difficult classical pieces. Nordlinger continued:

This reminded me of Bleak House—Bleak House and me. I won’t retell my tale. (I wrote about this in an essay a few years ago, here.) But suffice it to say: Decades ago, Harold Bloom said that Bleak House is pretty much the best novel in English. I tried to read it for years and years. Just could not. Could not persevere in it. After a final push, I gave up.

I don’t say there is anything wrong with Bleak House, heaven knows. But there is something wrong with me—with me and Bleak House. And I have made my peace (sort of) with never reading it, or finishing it.

He solicited comparable stories and titles from readers, some of whose responses you can read here. A lot of readers concur on Bleak House, and Moby Dick and Middlemarch both come up several times. Readers also name The Sound and the Fury, Crime and Punishment, Les Misérables, and War and Peace, among others. Thematic headiness and sheer length seem to be recurring features of such books.

The one that immediately came to my mind is The Grapes of Wrath. I’ve started it at least three times, maybe four, at different periods of my life and in different circumstances, but I can never make it more than thirty or forty pages. I’ve made a game effort because I always try to finish what I start and one of my oldest friends is a huge Steinbeck fan, but somewhere just past the explicitly phallic farm equipment and the hypocritical preacher recounting his misdeeds I always set it down and never resume.

That’s the one that I thought of right away, but toward the end of Nordlinger’s post one of his readers mentions another book that I’ve worked even harder to finish and never have: Paradise Lost. Like the reader who mentioned this one, I love Dante’s Comedy and much other epic—at times I’ve read nothing but long narrative poems—but I just can’t hack Milton. I’ve written about that here before.

“The courage to put down a book,” Nordlinger writes. “It’s necessary.” And while I can own up to not liking or being able to finish certain books and recognize the value of resigning myself, setting them aside, and moving on, I can’t help but feel that each is an ancient hoard that will remain buried to me until I come back and, finally, read it.

As for Bleak House, I’ve owned a copy for years but have never even opened it. Whenever I hear the title, I always remember a conversation my best friend in high school had with his grandfather. I don’t remember why or under what circumstances, but for some reason his grandfather revealed that he had once read Bleak House. My friend asked him what he thought. After a long pause, his grandfather said, “It’s a bleak house.”

Operation TNT

Twenty-odd years ago, beginning in the mid-90s, TNT (Turner Network Television) would run nothing but war movies for Memorial Day weekend and the week following. The selections ran from classic dramas like From Here to Eternity and The Bridge on the River Kwai—which presumably made the cut because of its one American character—to the old-fashioned big-picture story-of-a-battle films like The Longest Day and Tora! Tora! Tora! to the John Wayne war subgenre with Sands of Iwo Jima and They Were Expendable to pure action entertainment like The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes.

For a movie-loving kid with an emerging interest in World War II “Operation TNT” was a godsend. Films I’d seen mentioned in World War II magazine or had recommended by the veterans at church would appear on the lineup. The challenge—in that age before on-demand streaming or even the DVR, when finding a rare movie meant literally finding it at a flea market or a store at a mall two hours away—was to be watching TNT when The Devil’s Brigade or The Bridge at Remagen finally aired.

You’ll notice that all of the movies I’ve mentioned so far are World War II movies. Operation TNT did air movies about other conflicts—I’m pretty sure I remember catching Sergeant York, and, in its later years, a heavily redubbed Platoon—but the preponderance of films dramatized the last “good war.” It was meant as a tribute, after all.

And Operation TNT did pay tribute. Veterans’ stories would be read and letters and reminiscences were solicited during commercial breaks. Here’s someone for whom this meant enough that they recorded it and, years later, uploaded it to YouTube. The theme throughout was earnest and patriotic but, above all, appreciative. It’s hard to imagine something like it airing now.

And, indeed, Operation TNT withered away over the years. When I first remember tuning in, often during trips to the beach, when my parents would have to order me to the pool and away from the movie lineup, the marathon lasted all week. Eventually I noticed it had shrunk to the long Memorial Day weekend. The last I remember Operation TNT, it was a single day of programming on the holiday itself. I don’t remember noticing it disappear.

So in the spirit of Operation TNT, let me propose a movie marathon for your next Memorial Day—or any day for which good movies about men worth remembering are suited.

A proposed Memorial Day movie marathon

The following eleven films cover about a century of American warfare. I’ve tried to pick some lesser known or—in my opinion—underappreciated or unfairly maligned films that still offer entertaining and edifying viewing, and have arranged them in the chronological order of the events they depict:

The Lost Battalion (2001)—A World War I film based on a real incident in which a battalion of New York draftees ended up trapped behind German lines and held out despite heavy losses. A relatively low-budget TV movie, but clearly made with reverence and respect for its subject and the men involved, especially the hundreds who were lost. The commander, Charles Whittlesey, was one of seven who earned the Medal of Honor during the battle but took his own life in 1921.

Midway (2019)—Outnumbered pilots in outclassed planes make a desperate stand and win. Exposition-heavy dialogue, some cheap special effects, and a handful of hammy performances don’t detract from this detailed, earnest, and suspenseful dramatization of the battle that took the United States off the defensive and turned the war against Japan. This film also makes the cost of the war abundantly clear right from the beginning, making this perhaps the most appropriate Memorial Day movie on this list. I wrote a full review here after the pleasant surprise of seeing it in theatres.

Merrill’s Marauders (1962)—One of the rare World War II films that even acknowledges the war in Burma, this film follows a special unit that spent months fighting the Japanese in punishing jungle and mountain environments. Directed by WWII veteran Sam Fuller with less melodrama and a greater degree of authenticity and grit than a lot of comparable movies from the same period.

Battleground (1949)—The first great Battle of the Bulge film, this depicts a small group of paratroopers from the 101st Airborne in the combat around Bastogne and pays special attention to the cold, dark, hunger, general discomfort, and danger of their situation, as well as the heavy losses taken even in a successful defense. Well-trodden ground now, but few other films have told this story with the unromanticized simplicity of Battleground.

Fury (2014)—A solid war drama with powerful religious themes unfairly dragged by internet experts. Fury vividly and authentically dramatizes the desperation of the tail-end of the war in Europe, when Hitler has clearly been beaten but ragtag, borderline amateur units of SS fight on, and suggests that the men who survived had a hard time talking about it not just because of what they saw but because of what they did.

The Great Raid (2005)—A strong dramatization of the successful liberation of a POW camp in the Philippines, with special attention given to Japanese brutality toward the prisoners, the role played by Filipino guerrillas in the American recapture of the islands, and the weight of the cost of every campaign as the war neared its end. Be sure to watch the director’s cut.

Pork Chop Hill (1959)—Probably the great Korean War film, a stripped down, unvarnished war drama in which both the heroism of the soldiers involved and the unbelievably high losses taken in capturing the holding the hill both receive attention. I wrote a full review of the film last year.

Go Tell the Spartans (1978)—An early Vietnam film and an unusual one in that it tells a story from the advisory stage of the war circa 1964, this movie stars Burt Lancaster as a superannuated, put-upon officer leading a small MAAG unit and a larger South Vietnamese force in an effort to secure a remote rural area against the Viet Cong. It doesn’t go well.

Hamburger Hill (1987)—A solid war drama based on the real Operation Apache Snow in 1969, in which paratroopers patrolling a remote area close to the Laotian border took heavy losses in a literal uphill battle against dug-in NVA troops. As in Battleground, the other 101st Airborne story on this list, the characters are fictional but the film captures the reality of their experiences well.

BAT*21 (1988)—A story from 1972, late in the Vietnam War, when US Air Force officer Iceal Hambleton was shot down behind enemy lines, the only survivor of his plane’s crew. He not only survived but was rescued thanks in part to the efforts of a scout plane pilot, who kept in touch with Hambleton by radio and helped guide him to safety and rescue. The film takes liberties partly for Hollywood reasons and partly because some crucial information about the incident was still classified at the time, but BAT*21 nevertheless offers a good look at an unusual story from the war and the risks and losses involved not only in combat, but in rescuing the lost.

The Outpost (2019)—The story of the defense of Combat Outpost Keating in Afghanistan in 2009. The only genuinely great film to come out of the War on Terror, I think, one that tells a true story well and without either softening the ugliness and horror or romanticizing the men and their actions involved. I wrote a longer review here in 2020.

Conclusion

That’s eleven films totaling just over twenty-one hours altogether, and even if y’all don’t watch all of these—much less one after the other for an entire day—I hope you’ll check out at least a couple of them and watch them not only for entertainment, but to remember. The best of them, as Operation TNT originally recognized, are designed for both.

Spring reading 2024

As I hinted at last month, this has been a tough semester, with a lot of illness in the middle and plenty of simple busyness throughout. For a good part of it my reading felt almost as lifeless as I did. Being wrung out by work, the babies, my commute, and many, many trips to the doctor (all good problems to have), I read more fiction than history or other non-fiction this spring, and much of that I didn’t feel too strongly about. Even the disappointing books were only disappointing, not outright bad. Everything felt grey. But looking back several weeks after final grades were in and I could rest for a moment—mentally if not physically—there was actually quite a lot of good reading packed in with the mediocre stuff.

Here are the highlights: my favorite fiction, non-fiction, and kids’ books as well as the handful of books I revisited. For the purposes of this blog, “spring” is defined as everything from New Year’s Day to the end of my first week of summer classes, which was last Friday.

Favorite fiction

The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, trans. William Weaver—Two monks, a widely-read Franciscan scholar and his young Benedictine assistant, investigate a series of strange, seemingly symbolic murders in a remote Italian monastery ahead of a conference of monastic leaders. This is one of the great literary historical novels even if Eco takes the wrong side in the medieval disputes over Ockham’s Nominalist theories and perpetuates some medieval stereotypes along the way, which is frustrating given how well he knows the era. But those a niggles. Erudite and richly detailed but fun, engrossing, and, above all, atmospheric, I greatly enjoyed it.

Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers—A wide-ranging collection of more than twenty stories that deal with ghosts, vampires, used books, time travel, custom-edited Bibles, revenge in the afterlife, the sacrament of confession, tomato plants under siege by pests, the grave of HP Lovecraft, and, yes, Purgatory. As with any 700-page collection of short fiction, these are of mixed quality, but all range from good to excellent, with plenty of the creativity, surprises, and wry humor of Powers’s novels. Personal favorites included “The Better Boy,” “The Bible Repair Man,” “Through and Through,” “Fifty Cents,” “A Time to Cast Away Stones,” and the title story, “Down and Out in Purgatory.”

A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler—An English writer in Istanbul, his curiosity piqued by the discovery of the body of a notorious gangster, investigates the gangster’s life and discovers there’s no bottom to interwar Europe’s dark underworld. Evocative and atmospheric, this is a detective story and crime thriller wrapped up in the globetrotting of a spy novel. Full review here.

Medusa’s Web, by Tim Powers—An intriguing supernatural tale of the last remaining members of a cursed family living in their ramshackle old mansion, ominously named Caveat, in the Hollywood Hills. Scott and sister Madeline return to the family manse following the death of their aunt but their cousins, wheelchair-bound Claimayne and angry, standoffish Ariel, make it clear to Scott and Madeline that the siblings are unwelcome and the house rightly belongs to them. We soon learn that the members of this family can travel through time by staring at eerie, abstract, spider-like illustrations on slips of paper. The downside is that using the spiders is addictive and can cause permanent physical and mental damage. In the course of the family drama, trips into the past involve the characters in unsolved mysteries from Hollywood’s silent era, and an unexpected love story blossoms between one of them and a long-dead film star. It also becomes clear that a fabled über-spider, a drawing that contains the visions of all the others and guarantees lethal insanity if even glanced at, may not only still exist but be much nearer Caveat and the warring cousins than Scott would like. And on top of the visions and body-jumping and Old Hollywood gossip and Lovecraftian threat of world-ending madness there are overtones of Poe’s House of Usher, ancient myth, and more. Medusa’s Web has a lot going on and it’s hard to explain without giving too much away, but I greatly enjoyed it and read the entire book in just a few days. Worth checking out if you’re looking for something completely different.

The Mysteries, by Bill Watterson, illustrated by John Kascht—A simple but haunting “fable for grownups” from the creator of “Calvin & Hobbes.” A story of the disenchantment of the world, human hubris, and the inevitable consequences of both. One of my favorite books this spring. Full review here.

Favorite non-fiction

Great Uncle Harry, by Michael Palin—A biography of Palin’s great uncle, a man who was killed in action at the Somme and whom Palin never knew, this is a remarkable piece of detective work, archival research, and familial pietas that also commemorates a lost world and a generation destroyed. A continuously engaging and moving book. Full review here.

Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, by DJ Taylor—An excellent short introduction to Orwell’s life and work, ranging from his childhood to his death and posthumous reputation—indeed, the book begins with the birth of his legend almost the moment he died—and covering everything from his personal character, novels, journalism, and his evolving political ideas to his attempts at farming, his friendships with other writers, his love of England, and his hatred of pigs. I strongly recommend this book to any and everyone. Taylor is also the author of two (two!) full-length biographies of Orwell. I have his Orwell: The New Life on standby for future reading. I blogged about Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four twice based on observations made in Taylor’s book. You can read those posts here and here.

Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, by Mark Brotherton—A solid examination of the psychology of conspiracy theories and conspiracist thinking. Brotherton does not make a case that conspiracy nuts are, well, nuts, but rather that they let run unchecked natural and useful thought processes that simply need discipline. Some of this will be old hat to anyone who has studied conspiracy theories seriously, but this may be the best and fairest one-volume assemblage of this material that I’ve come across. Full review here.

Campaldino 1289: The Battle that Made Dante, by Kelly DeVries and Niccolò Capponi—A thorough and thoroughly-illustrated guide to the bloody battle between Guelf Florence and her allies and Ghibelline Arezzo and her allies, in which a young Dante Alighieri participated. I wrote a paper about Campaldino in a graduate seminar on medieval and renaissance Florence at Clemson and the available material was thin back then. This book would have been a godsend. Worth looking at for anyone interested in Dante, medieval Italy, or military history.

A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Mark Dawidziak—This briskly written book tells two stories in alternating chapters. The first is an overview of Poe’s life, with all of its hardships and all-too-brief victories, up to 1849. The second is the story of Poe’s final months, in which he both behaved erratically (telling friends in Philadelphia that pursuers were trying to kill him and had, in fact, murdered and dismembered his beloved mother-in-law, who was alive and well in New York at the time) and also seemed to be on the cusp of overdue success (having reached an understanding with a childhood sweetheart, now a wealthy widow, and working on soliciting support for his long-dreamed-of literary journal) before dying under unexplained circumstances in Baltimore. Dawidziak offers a good capsule life story of Poe in the one half and a thorough examination of Poe in the weeks before his death in the other, and follows these up with a good explanation of the evidence and competing theories about what exactly happened to Poe on that final trip. Had Poe had an alcoholic relapse? Was he the victim of cooping? Some kind of brain swelling? Cholera? Syphilis? Rabies? The theory Dawidziak offers is one of the more convincing that I’ve come across, and he makes a good case for it. I would have liked a slightly more scholarly and well-sourced treatment of this subject but this is a good book and a worthwhile read for any fan of Poe. I wrote a short post about one offhand comment by an interviewee in this book. You can read that here.

Rereads

As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Inferno and Purgatorio, by Dante, trans. Stanley Lombardo

• No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy*

• Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, by Roger Scruton*

• Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor

A strong set of books to revisit, especially Wise Blood, which I last read in college and hardly remembered. I’m enjoying but not loving Lombardo’s translation of the Comedy. I hope to read his Paradiso this summer.

Kids’ books

The Mysterious Goblet, by Sophie de Mullenheim, trans. Janet Chevrier—The third in a series set in the Rome of Diocletian and the Great Persecution, in which the emperor is all-powerful and Christians are despised and suppressed as threats to order. This wasn’t my favorite of the series so far but it has an engaging, multi-thread plot and was enjoyable both to read aloud and, for my kids, to listen to.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl—Somehow I’ve made it to the age of 39 having never read anything by Roald Dahl. I read this on my daughter’s recommendation and loved it. (And what a joy to take a book recommendation from one of your children!) Clever, briskly paced, darkly and wryly funny, and most of all really fun to read. Looking forward to James and the Giant Peach soon.

Flight for Freedom: The Wetzel Family’s Daring Escape from East Germany, by Kristen Fulton, illustrated by Torben Kuhlmann—A short, simple, but nicely illustrated retelling of the story of two East German families who flew over the wall to West Germany and freedom in a homemade hot air balloon. A fascinating story that my kids really enjoyed, and a good opportunity to talk about why Germany was divided and what Communism is (as opposed to what some people would like it to be). This also prompted us to check out the 1982 film Night Crossing, which we enjoyed.

Saint Patrick the Forgiver, by Ned Bustard—A delightful picture book with a rhyming story and beautiful woodcut illustrations by the author. Bustard also has books on St Valentine and St Nicholas of Myra—the real Santa Claus—but this Patrick book is far and away his best of the three. Going to add this to my list of recommended St Patrick’s Day reads soon.

Looking ahead

That’s it! I’m already reading some good stuff—a Viking adventure by the author of King Solomon’s Mines, a study of Dante by Charles Williams, a short book on Old Testament wisdom literature by a favorite philosopher, and my first novel for this year’s John Buchan June—and I’m looking forward to more in the relatively more relaxed days of summer. I hope y’all found a book or two above that sound enticing and that you’ll check them out. Thanks as always for reading!

Further notes on Orwell and Big Brother’s puritanism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sandbrook, Anglo-Saxons, and mad Americans

I think I’ve said all that I want to say (here and here) about the academic controversy surrounding the term Anglo-Saxon, but I wanted to acknowledge one more news item about it and an appropriate response from a favorite historian.

Earlier this month Cambridge announced that Anglo-Saxon England, the preeminent academic journal in the field, was changing its name to Early Medieval England and its Neighbors. This comes, as Samuel Rubinstein noted at The Critic, during a seeming lull in the Anglo-Saxon wars, one that had suggested to Rubinstein that the controversy had finally petered out.

But after Grendel comes Grendel’s mother, and between institutional inertia and the unsleeping restlessness of intersectional ideology, such a name-change—even if too late to please the activists originally fulminating against the term—was probably inevitable. Perhaps we can look forward to academic presses changing the titles of the thousands of old studies, monographs, and histories using Anglo-Saxon on their covers.

But as Luther said, in a line used by Lewis as an epigraph to The Screwtape Letters, “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” And so Rubinstein linked to this great response to Cambridge’s Twitter announcement from Dominic Sandbrook:

Hear hear.

“A handful of mad Americans” is exactly right. As I noted in my original post on this subject, the chief activity of the small, insular, pettifogging, puritanical, ruthlessly status seeking, and ideologically captive American academy today seems to be to export American neuroses to the rest of the world—ideologically colonizing foreigners and demanding conformity and obedience. This observation isn’t original to me, but it aptly describes the situation. It’s embarrassing. More mockery and an occasional firm “no” to the tiny number of activist scholars who push this kind of thing could help tremendously.

I remarked recently on the irony of mentioning Sandbrook and The Rest is History here only when I had a problem with him, which is rarely, so I wanted to make sure I noted this model reaction to academic nonsense. May his tribe increase.

Read Rubinstein’s latest on the controversy here. And get yourself a good book about the Anglo-Saxons that doesn’t dither over the term Anglo-Saxon. Here’s a good recent one, and here’s a great old one.

An annoyance of collective nouns

Last week First Things posted an article by George Weigel on “terms of venery,” that is, collective nouns, especially those used of groups of animals. There are a lot of them. Weigel cites “a pomp of Pekinese,” “a tower of giraffes,” “an ostentation of peacocks,” and “a murmuration of starlings”—among many others—as favorites, and writes that “an exaltation of larks,” which is also the name of a book on these words by the late James Lipton, “may be as good as the venereal game gets.” Veneral being an approximate adjective form of venery, just so we’re clear.

I’ve actually mulled writing about terms of venery for a long time, since the very early days of this blog. But I’ve avoided doing so for a long time because I try to keep this blog relatively positive and these words just plain bug me. So permit me a half-serious rant.

These collective nouns bug me in the way lots of twee, intentionally precious things do, even where they’re meant as jokes—as many of these terms clearly are. (So much so that joke collective nouns have persistently been mistaken for “real” ones, “a congress of baboons” being the best example. This raises the question of who actually gets to decide which of these things is official.)

Which is not to say that some animals don’t have odd collective nouns. Some are quite ancient. Fish move in a school, for instance, because in Old English such a group was called a scolu. The modern alternative shoal is likely the direct descendent of that word and is pronounced almost the same. It’s a strange linguistic accident that it came to resemble the Latinate school. A few others go a ways back as hunting jargon, the professional shop vocabulary of gamekeepers on the estates of the landed aristocracy. But there’s no earthly reason anyone should called a flock of starlings a murmuration.

I didn’t have strong feelings about this until I read an otherwise good novel by a contemporary Southern novelist who used three of the outlandish bird-related ones—I remember a murmuration and a murder—within a few pages of each other during a dramatically and thematically important funeral scene. I was so distracted and irritated that I swore off such terms altogether.

So as far as I’m concerned, and regardless of species, birds gather in flocks, larger mammals in herds, predators in packs, fish in schools. I may not get the lip-pursing amusement of writing about obstinacies and ostentations when some buffalo or peacocks blunder into a scene, but at least I won’t distract the reader.

Weigel ends his article by proposing some new terms of venery to go along with the better established ones. I’d like to end this post by proposing one of my own—a collective noun for groups of collective nouns: an annoyance.

Orwell’s failure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping adventure within hailing distance

John Buchan on the quality that makes a story “romantic”—i.e. an adventure—in Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Works:

Scott transforms life, as is the duty of a great artist. He enlarges our view and makes the world at once more solemn and more sunlit, but it remains a recognisable world, with all the old familiar landmarks. He has that touch of the prosaic in him without which romance becomes only a fairy tale and tragedy a high heeled strutting.

That’s Buchan on Scott specifically, but Buchan continues with a more general observation on storytelling:

“For the kernel of romance is contrast—beauty and valour flowering in unlikely places, the heavenly rubbing shoulders with the earthly. All romance, all tragedy, must be within hailing distance of our humdrum lives.”

Better authors and critics than I have pointed out that, in the best and most vividly realized fantasy or adventure stories, the protagonist ventures away from an ordinary life into one of excitement and danger, in which everything is different. As Buchan lays out here, that link to the ordinary provides contrast and keeps the story grounded no matter how wild it may get.

One thinks immediately of the hobbits who, as Tom Shippey has noted in detail, Tolkien made just about as characteristically English as he could—Bilbo with his tobacco and brass buttons and greedy cousins, Frodo going off to war with his gardener-turned-batman, and the whole Shire with its tavern gossip and detailed genealogies. Or perhaps the Pevensies, swept from a stately—or, to them, boring—country house during an unfortunately ordinary total war through a seemingly ordinary piece of furniture into another world. One could multiply examples. Buchan’s own books offer plenty.

Neglecting contrast will result in stories that are all weirdness, all bleakness, or mere chaos. Think of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies’ descent into the maelstrom. The first film had an actual toehold in reality that made the intrusion of a ghost ship, voodoo, and cursed Aztec gold exhilarating, but by the third film the fantasy elements had completely overwhelmed anything “humdrum”—Will Turner’s blacksmithing, say—and this combined with its visual grotesquery robbed the series of what made it feel like an adventure in the first place.

Carefully providing contrast, on the other hand, will not only keep the reader grounded but suggest to him that adventure—the dangerous, the uncanny, even the “heavenly”—is nearer to him than he may have thought.

On Ian Fleming’s prose rhythm

Ian Fleming (1908-64)

I’ve made the case for the strength of Ian Fleming’s writing in the James Bond novels before, usually emphasizing his concrete word choice, his concise and vivid descriptions, and his strong, direct, active narration. These are all characteristic virtues of his style. But one I haven’t paid much direct attention to is the cadence or rhythm of his prose—in poetry, meter.

This week I started reading Casino Royale to my wife before bed every night. I’ve read Casino Royale several times before and even listened to the excellent audiobook narrated by Dan Stevens, but this is my first time reading it aloud myself. Going through it in this way, I noticed Fleming’s attention to rhythm immediately.

Here’s a paragraph from the first chapter. Bond, undercover at a French casino, has just received a telegram from M via a paid agent in Jamaica. He’s thinking about the process of relaying information to headquarters when this paragraph begins:

Some of this background to his cable passed through Bond’s mind. He was used to oblique control and rather liked it. He felt it feather-bedded him a little, allowed him to give or take an hour or two in his communications with M. He knew that this was probably a fallacy, that probably there was another member of the Service at Royale-les-Eaux who was reporting independently, but it did give the illusion that he wasn’t only 150 miles across the Channel from that deadly office building near Regent’s Park, being watched and judged by those few cold brains that made the whole show work. Just as Fawcett, the Cayman Islander in Kingston, knew that if he bought that Morris Minor outright instead of signing the hire-purchase agreement, someone in London would probably know and want to know where the money had come from.

Fleming shows a lot of his skills here, including variety of word choice and sentence length. Both of those tend to be treated as boring mechanical aspects of writing (“Vary your sentence length” is a pretty rote piece of writing advice that is seldom elaborated upon) but, as this paragraph should show, both skills are crucial to rhythm and, ultimately, mood.

The rhythm of the words and phrases controls the pace of the paragraph, which rises and falls. It begins with two short, simple sentences followed by a slightly longer, slightly more complicated one expanding on the meaning of the first two. Then comes the centerpiece of the paragraph. Read this again, aloud:

“He knew that this was probably a fallacy, that probably there was another member of the Service at Royale-les-Eaux who was reporting independently, but it did give the illusion that he wasn’t only 150 miles across the Channel from that deadly office building near Regent’s Park, being watched and judged by those few cold brains that made the whole show work.”

This is a marvelous sentence, 61 words long and almost musical. It starts slowly, building momentum as Bond considers his situation before plunging into a downhill run that begins at the conjunction but and slows again, ominously, in the final dependent clause.

Here’s where word choice comes in. Fleming didn’t write poetry but he understood how to use its effects. The long vowels in the last several words, almost every word of that last clause—“those few cold brains who made the whole show work”—as well as the heavy emphasis the most important words require metrically—“those few cold brains who made the whole show work”—have a braking effect, slowing the reader and bringing him back down to the reality of Bond’s situation. Right alongside Bond.

All of which points to the purpose of this kind of rhythm: setting tone and mood. Narratively speaking, little happens in this paragraph. Bond stands holding a telegram slip, thinking. A lesser writer would turn this into pure exposition. But the way Fleming narrates Bond’s thinking imparts to the reader what it feels like to be Bond in this situation.

The same is true of the entire chapter. In Casino Royale’s first chapter, Bond 1) realizes he is tired, 2) receives a message, 3) sends a message, and 4) goes to bed. But through Fleming’s writing, we get exhaustion, self-loathing, a degree of paranoia (who wants to be “watched and judged” by “cold brains,” even those on your own side?), and a great deal of unexplained danger.

Here’s how the first chapter ends. Read this aloud with these things in mind:

His last action was to slip his right hand under the pillow until it rested under the butt of the .38 Colt Police Positive with the sawn barrel. Then he slept, and with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold.

Great stuff, and subtly done.