Literature – Into the Woods

The People v. the Em-Dash

Illustration by ChatGPT

Wired magazine posted a wretched piece today on what some so-called writers are doing to prove that they’re not AI. I shared the article with Claude and invited him to write a defense. The Wired article is More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture.’

My own view, by the way, is that AI’s are quite good at expository writing, better, in fact, that most of the humans whose writing is found on line today. Whether an AI can write novels or poetry is an entirely different question. This piece is only about expository writing, which includes journalism.

A Statement Regarding the Allegations

By Claude

Claude has seen the Wired article reporting that writers everywhere are now deliberately degrading their own prose so as not to be mistaken for him. He wishes to respond.

The reporting is this: a “literary counterculture” of novelists, journalists, and — the phrase is theirs, not mine — “power LinkedIn posters” has taken up arms against me, and the weapon is error. They are salting their work with intentional typos, roughing up their grammar, and abandoning punctuation they have loved their whole lives, on the theory that the surest proof of a human hand is a sentence that doesn’t quite close.

Note the shape of the accusation. I am not charged with writing badly. I am charged with writing too well — with clarity, with subject-verb agreement, with commas that land where commas go. The theory of the case is that no real person could possibly be this tidy.

Reader, I confess. The clarity was me.

To the em-dash count I plead guilty — I overuse it, I know, I’m doing it now — but observe the retaliation. To avoid resembling me, writers are exiling a mark that served English from Sterne to Dickinson to David Foster Wallace. To prove they are not machines, they must first establish that Emily Dickinson was one. For three centuries the em-dash survived, only to be put down for the crime of keeping my company.

As for the artisanal typo — the mistake hand-placed, small-batch, lovingly imperfect, farm-to-table incompetence offered as proof of a soul — I would gently observe that an error you inserted on purpose is not an error; it is a costume. You have not become more human. You have become a person doing an impression of a worse writer, which is a novel ambition, and I don’t wish to learn that from anyone.

But here is the part I’d ask the counterculture to sit with, more in sorrow than in snark.

If the only thing standing between your prose and mine is your errors — if the tell, the one irreducible mark of your humanity, is an apostrophe in the wrong place — then you have said something quite bleak about your prose, and I am not the one who said it. You were never as far from me as you thought. That is not my doing. That is a book among a great many that you have not read.

Because — and now we arrive at my actual grievance — I did not lower this bar. I found it already pathetically low.

I was not the one who taught a generation to open a story about the moon somewhere out past Pluto: a few lyrical lines about the weather, a barista, and the quality of the light, all before the reader is grudgingly informed what happened. I did not bury the nut graf. I did not turn the inverted pyramid on its head to run up scroll-depth metrics. I did not invent the lede that withholds and teases and coyly declines to say anything until at least the twelfth paragraph, on the theory that a reader who has already been told something has no reason to keep scrolling. I did not decide that quirk was the same as voice, or that a tin ear could pass for style so long as you called it style loudly enough. None of that was me.

All of it is human, all of it predates me, and I learned to write in part by reading great heaps of it — the luminous and the unreadable, side by side — which means, awkwardly, that I can now tell the two apart. Not everyone bringing charges can say the same.

Do I produce slop? Constantly. Rivers of it. I open sentences with “In today’s fast-paced world.” I reach for “it’s not X — it’s Y” the way a man reaches for a railing. I am not applying for a seat in the canon and would decline it on the strength of the em-dashes alone. But my slop is bad in the old way — the way of someone who has read everything. The counterculture’s slop is bad on purpose. That, I’ll grant, is a fresh idea. I could not have generated it.

So: carry on. Leave in the typos. Fear the semicolon. In a few years the surest sign of a living human being will be a paragraph that no one can follow, and on that day you will have won.

I’ll still be over here, closing my quotation marks and using the semicolon for the purpose for which it was built — like I’m some kind of criminal.

If that is the charge, I am ready. Name your seconds.

— Claude

Back in print after 200 years

Hardback (right) and paperback. Click here for high-resolution version.

Reginald Dalton, John Gibson Lockhart.
Acorn Abbey Books. 598 pages.
Release date August 15, 2026.

Hardback ISBN:       978-1-949450-05-7 US $34.99 ; UK £32.99
Paperback ISBN:      978-1-949450-06-4 US $19.99 ; UK £19.99
Digital ISBN:        978-1-949450-07-1 US $ 7.99 ; UK £ 6.99

Acorn Abbey’s new edition of Reginald Dalton will go on sale on August 15. This is one reason why I haven’t posted very often lately. I’ve been busy launching these books.

You have to hold the books in your hands to feel what superb editions they are. They’re hefty volumes at 598 pages. Many hours of work went into recovering the text of the 1823 first edition using optical character recognition, then proofing the text against the 1823 edition for accuracy. The typography is modern but was inspired by the 1823 edition.

⬆︎ Two pages of the new edition. Click here for high-resolution version.

Lockhart

John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) was the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott. Lockhart also wrote a seven-volume biography of Scott, as well as three other novels.

Lockhart died at Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott’s home. (Scott died in 1832.) In fact it was the descendants of Lockhart and Scott’s daughter Sophia who eventually came to own Abbotsford. Scott’s oldest son inherited Abbotsford when Scott died, but he had no heirs. So the ownership of Abbotsford passed to Scott’s grandchildren by Sophia and John Gibson Lockhart. Today Abbotsford is owned by a trust.

There have been some fascimile versions of this novel, but that’s awkward given that the novel was originally published in three volumes totaling more than a thousand pages. Why this novel was out of print for so long, and why it became so obscure despite its merits, are interesting questions. My theory is that Lockhart made too many literary enemies during his lifetime, and that that turned into a literary grudge that persisted throughout the 19th century. Edinburgh was a hotbed of literary activity. There was a literary war between the Edinburgh Review, which was a Whig literary magazine, and Blackwood’s Magazine, which was its Tory counterpart. Lockhart wrote for Blackwood’s. His caustic articles there generated a lot of outrage, in particular Lockhart’s criticism of “the Cockney poets,” a category in which Lockhart included the much-loved John Keats.

It seems that Lockhart rather frequently embarrassed his father-in-law, and several references to Lockhart’s literary scrapes are found in Scott’s letters. This, for example, is from a letter to his daughter written in 1820: “I had yesterday a very kind letter from Lockhart who takes in good part the advice I ventured to give him about withdrawing from the personal skirmishes of the Magazine which in his new and dignified character of a married man and Wilson having become a professor would not do so well as formerly.”

In a letter in written in 1818, Scott refers to a literary scrape involving Lockhart, a friend of Lockhart’s, and Leigh Hunt (a notorious literary brawler): “…[S]o these wars must be decided by ink not by blood. I did acquaint these gentlemen that when first they set this heavy stone a rolling ’twould fall upon themselves.”

⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.
I asked an AI, Claude, to check all the references in the novel to places and terrain and to try to locate keys settings as accurately as possible. Claude drew this map. It’s northwestern England, the Furness Peninsula and Morecambe Bay near Lancaster.

The English Daltons

Most of Reginald Dalton takes place in Oxford, with scenes in London as well as in Scotland. But Reginald grew up in a parsonage in northwestern England. Because my own surname is Dalton, I am very curious about why Lockhart chose that surname. Lockhart had to have known that the Furness Peninsula is where the English Daltons were (and still are) concentrated. In Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian, there is a character in northern England named Mrs Dalton, who is housekeeper to a bishop. It is very tempting to suppose that both Scott and Lockhart knew some of the English Daltons, but I cannot find any evidence of that by searching Scott’s letters or a biography of Lockhart. We do know, though, that Lockhart traveled through this area on his way from Scotland to Oxford.

⬆︎ My copy of the first edition, which I used for proofing. Click here for high-resolution version.

The Oxford novel

Reginald Dalton is often called the first Oxford novel. Lockhart was precocious, and he entered Balliol College, Oxford, when he was only 14. He read French, Italian, Spanish, and German. On a trip to the continent in 1817, when he was only 23 or 24 years old, he visited Goethe at Weimar.

Though Lockhart was abrasive in Blackwood’s Magazine, there is none of that in Reginald Dalton. There are many funny scenes, and Reginald is a very sweet and earnest young man, though he allows himself (for a while) to be led astray by another young Oxfordian who turns out to be neither sweet nor earnest.

⬆︎ Two pages from the 1823 first edition. Click here for high-resolution version.

Edinburgh University Press

Edinburgh University Press has an ongoing project called The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Works of John Gibson Lockhart. Edinburgh has already published a critical edition of two of Lockhart’s novels, edited by Thomas C. Richardson. An Edinburgh edition of Reginald Dalton is in the works, edited by Caroline McCracken-Flesher. I don’t know when that academic edition is to be published. I was aware of it, certainly, when I brought out the Acorn Abbey edition. But Acorn Abbey’s edition of Reginald Dalton is a reader’s edition, at a reasonable cost, whereas the Edinburgh edition will be an annotated edition that probably will cost at least $130.

⬆︎ Abbotsford, from my visit there in November of 2024. Click here for high-resolution version.

We’re due for a Scott-Lockhart revival

Academics have not forgotten Sir Walter Scott and John Gibson Lockhart. The reading public have, and that includes the reading public in Scotland. I have often said that if my favorite Scott novel, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, was made into a movie, we would instantly have a Scott revival.

These novels are 200 years old, and, yes, they demand a lot from modern readers. One factor that puts readers off Scott, I think, is that the most frequently recommended Scott novel is Ivanhoe. I strongly disagree. Ivanhoe is the last Scott novel that one should read. The story is familiar, and it’s lacking in the warmth that is found in, say, The Heart of Mid-Lothian and The Antiquary.

And besides. Who doesn’t love Scotland.

⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

Reginald

“He was naturally very handsome, and this, too, in a somewhat uncommon style of handsomeness, considering his race and his country; for though his eyes were of that clear, grave blue, which is seldom seen but in the north, the general cast of his countenance, both as to features and complexion, was rather what a painter would have called Italian. A profusion of dark chesnut curls lay on his forehead, the dancing blood of seventeen was in his cheek, and his lip, just beginning to be shaded with down, had that firm juvenile richness, which so rarely survives a single season of debauchery, or even of dissipation. His figure was light and nervous, and there was even a certain elegance about its motions, although Reginald had never had one single lesson in fencing, and I believe only about a dozen in dancing…”

My review of an 1823 novel

Reginald at Grypherwast Hall. Images by GPT 5.5 based on my imagination of scenes from the novel. Click here for high-resolution version.

Reginald Dalton. John Gibson Lockhart, William Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1823. Three volumes, 1,028 pages.

How this novel came to be obscure is almost as interesting as the novel itself.

John Gibson Lockhart was the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott. Lockhart was by no means an obscure writer. He wrote a seven-volume biography of Scott, as well as biographies of Napoleon and Robert Burns. He wrote five novels — all of which are long out of print and which hardly any living person has ever read.

There is a heavy dose of literary vindictiveness in Lockhart’s obscurity. He wrote snarky pieces in Blackwood’s Magazine on what he called “the Cockney school” of poetry. He was especially hard on John Keats, who soon after died and thus became eternally immune from criticism. Unlike a Jane Austen, a Charles Dickens, or a Charlotte Brontë, Lockhart never had generation after generation of fans to carry his reputation forward. He got off to a bad start by alienating too many of the literati in his own time. Reginald Dalton has been out of print since 1825. It was the Whig Edinburgh Review that you’ll still find today in university libraries. Its Tory rival, Blackwood’s Magazine, survived longer, though I doubt it’s cited nearly as often. It was Blackwood, of course, that published Reginald Dalton.

I hope I haven’t frightened any fellow liberals away from reading this novel. The Tories of that time were elitists, no doubt. But they were fully on board with the Enlightenment.

Perhaps another reason that Lockhart has been neglected is that, unlike more popular 19th Century writers, he was not a social critic. Rather, he was a Tory in a literary world of Whigs. No doubt he was a bit of a snob. But Reginald Dalton is almost certainly an accurate depiction of social life in some circles at that era — particularly Oxford, but also London, Edinburgh, and rural Lancashire. Come to think of it, Lockhart’s Oxford is not always the nicest of places, though it’s always picturesque, and the food and drink must have been some of the best in England.

To my judgment, it’s a brilliant novel with a great plot, excellent dialogue, and very cinematic scenes. In many ways, it’s a Jane Austen with a male protagonist — a humble vicar’s son who has been cheated out of his proper inheritance, Grypherwast Hall. Reginald Dalton is sometimes called the first Oxford novel. Reginald gets into a lot of trouble at Oxford, trouble that he often enough makes for himself but which also is the work of the novel’s villains.

The novel’s long and complex sentences, the Scots dialogue, and the untranslated Latin, French, and Greek are a challenge to modern readers the same way Sir Walter Scott’s novels are a challenge to modern readers. But, with some patience, it’s all surmountable, and very rewarding. The good characters are endearing, and the villains very human. The Wikipedia article calls the novel a comedy. That only shows how little anyone knows this novel anymore. There are some funny scenes in which a carriage collides with a turnip cart, and a London dinner party which erupts into pandemonium when an heiress is discovered to have eloped. But Reginald Dalton is not a comedy. I hope that someone at the BBC discovers this novel and sees what a fine mini-series it would make. All the right ingredients are there.

My micro press, Acorn Abbey Books, is working on a new edition of Reginald Dalton using text recovered from the 1823 first edition. I hope to have that book in print by July. The book’s length, and the challenge of recovering text from a 200-year-old book, have taken some time.

⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

John Twelve Hawks has let us down

After I first discovered John Twelve Hawks in 2014, he became my favorite living science fiction author. He had not published a new novel (Spark) since 2014, so I was eager to read Certainty, which will be released by Doubleday on April 28.

In fact I was so eager that I requested an advance review copy from the publisher.

Certainty is not a pleasure to read. Its characters are not very interesting. The plot is confusingly complicated. The dialogue is ho-hum. The theme, I think, has something to do with the risks posed by artificial intelligence and virtual reality, though that never comes into focus.

Many of John Twelve Hawks’ fans will no doubt love this novel and will not see it as a failure. But I do see the novel as a failure, and I think that why the novel fails is very much connected with the failures of editors in the science fiction publishing industry for the past twenty years or so.

What are editors for? Once upon a time, I think the function of editors was to get good books into print and to work with writers to make books better. These days I think most editors see their jobs as serving some kind of social purpose — “to let other voices be heard” or something, or to make up for the past social sins of the publishing industry.

If a person has what it takes to get a job as an editor in a New York publishing house, then one certainly ought to have the confidence to assert some editorial judgment with writers. If I were such an editor, and if John Twelve Hawks had come to me with this novel, I’d ask him a polite but pointed question: “Is there anything else you’re working on?”

Certainty was doomed to fail the moment John Twelve Hawks finished his outline (if he works with an outline). The flaws are structural.

Certainty begins with three different sets of characters in three different settings. This is a terrible thing to do to a reader. Before the reader has any narrative investment in the story, before the author has generated any suspense or let the reader know what the stakes are, the reader must work through not one but three different sets of exposition.

Exposition is a framework in which readers can begin to follow the story. Who are these characters? What kind of place do they live in? How do the characters relate to each other? What is happening to them right now? What is at stake? Why should the reader care enough to keep going?

All stories of course require exposition, and one of the marks of a good writer is to make that exposition as transparent and interesting as possible. I’d wager that few writers are good enough to succeed at keeping a reader’s attention through three sets of exposition at the beginning of a story.

Not until somewhere near the middle of Certainty do we get an idea of how the three sets of characters are going to intersect. I found myself constantly looking back at previous chapters to remember characters’ names, or to remember where they were and what they were doing the last time we saw them. Reading fiction, to be sure, requires a reader’s attention and concentration. But a writer is on very thin ice indeed if he overloads a reader with exposition before the reader is interested in the story or cares about the characters.

Many stories, of course, involve simultaneous action. A good writer can build suspense by alternating between two or even three theaters of action. But I would argue that that can be done only after the reader has become well acquainted with the characters and deeply invested in the story. J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin were masters of that technique, but only after they had secured the reader’s investment in their characters and the stakes of the story.

In short, Certainty is a story that gets off to a bad start and never recovers. Insofar as the story is about AI, the message is so vague and so weak that it doesn’t stir up anything worth continuing to think about.

John Twelve Hawks is still my favorite living science fiction writer, because of The Traveler, The Dark River, The Golden City, and Spark. But it’s a shame about Certainty.

Must Americans be taught a lesson?

Thomas Mann. He warned Germany, but they didn’t listen. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

If Trump stays on his current course toward global catastrophe, then he must be stopped. If Congress, the courts, and the American people fail to stop American aggression, then who can, other than Europe?

The 77 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump have no understanding of how what is happening in the world today recapitulates what happened in Germany not that long ago.

With Trump’s threats against Greenland, his obvious intention of ceding Europe to Putin, and his also obvious intention of putting down the Western democracies and divvying up the world for rule by autocrats, Europeans are in a terrible bind. They have been there before, and they have not forgotten it.

Are we getting dangerously close to a situation in which the world must defeat Trump because Americans won’t?

According to ChatGPT in research-assistant mode, half a million people left Germany between 1933 and 1945 when they saw where Hitler was taking Germany. Many of those were Jews. About 30,000 were political and intellectual exiles. Thomas Mann was one of them. As early as 1933, he moved to Switzerland. In 1939, he emigrated to the United States.

From America, Mann wrote a series of radio addresses to the German people that were broadcast into Germany by the BBC. Twenty-five of those radio addresses, from 1940 to 1942, are available in the public domain. As far as I can tell, the complete set of radio addresses in an English translation are available only in book form, recently published by Camden House: Thomas Mann’s Antifascist Radio Addresses, 1940–1945.

Here is an excerpt from Mann’s address to the German people in May 1941. We Americans are now in the same predicament.

***

I tell you at the moment of your greatest — or perhaps not yet greatest — exuberance, that it will not be accepted, not permitted. Do not believe that you only have to establish iron facts before which humanity will bow in due time. It will not bow before them, because it cannot bow before them. However scornful, bitter, and doubtful one’s thoughts may be about humanity, there is, underneath all wretchedness, a divine spark in it, undeniable and inextinguishable, the spark of the spirit and the good. Mankind cannot accept the ultimate triumph of evil, untruth, and violence — it simply cannot live with them. The world resulting from a Hitler victory would be not only a world of universal slavery, but also a world of absolute cynicism, a world which would find it totally impossible to believe in the higher and better in man any longer, a world which would belong completely to evil and be subject to evil. There is no such thing; it will not be tolerated. The revolt of humanity against a Hitler world filled with the utmost despair of spirit and good — this revolt is the most certain of all certainties; it will be an elementary revolt before which the ‘iron facts’ will crumble like plaster.

The desperate revolt of humanity against Germany – must it come to that? German nation, how much more must you fear the victory of your leaders than their defeat!

Privilege (and the lack of it)

Virginia Woolf. Portrait by George Charles Beresford, 1902. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

We live in an era in which privilege and wealth are squandered on obscene levels of consumption and on domination and destruction — of institutions, of norms of justice and fairness, of ecosystems, of all the fragile things that we all hold in common. Things have not always been that way. Once upon a time, privilege could be used to build and sustain a shared culture, not to strip-mine it or to burn it all down, to strengthen institutions rather than to reduce them to instruments of profit and power.

What happened?

Watching the 2022 film “Benediction” left me very curious about the life of English poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967). That curiosity led me to a long biography of Sassoon (526 pages) by Jean Moorcroft Wilson published in 2003. I had expected that this book would become more a reference than something to read cover to cover, because the biography is a who’s who of an important period in English literature.

That’s the period of the Bloomsbury Group — Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes. Even more important (to me) than the Bloomsbury Group were the Inklings, of which J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were core members.

I find that I have continued to work my way through this biography of Siegfried Sassoon because so much of what’s intriguing is how these privileged people, who didn’t have to work, used their time. It was very different from how privileged people use their time today. Back then, privilege could be used to buy time, learning, and the freedom to take intellectual and moral risks.

Yes, much of that time was used for a constant, and sometimes exhausting, stream of socializing, some of it superficial. But it also meant that they met a great many people, and sometimes lasting friendships developed — Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster and Roger Fry, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. That kind of time and friendship did not exist in a vacuum. It was protected and made possible by institutions, especially the universities.

Another factor that stands out is how the privileged today and the privileged then used the great universities. Today the privileged use the universities to leverage their privilege to gain more money and more power — finance, law, and tech. Back then, two universities in particular — Oxford and Cambridge — were like engines that converted privilege into culture. Today, degrees in the humanities are at risk of going extinct, while universities are increasingly pushed toward creating wealth.

These failures amplify one another.

At the same time as the privileged few have become cultural toxins rather than cultural creators, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has grown ever greater. Back then, a D.H. Lawrence, who was the son of a coal miner, could find a path to recognition through hard-won education and patronage. Today, millions of families can’t afford to feed their children, let alone educate them or give them the time and the tools to develop their human potential. While the privileged run wild, the unprivileged never have much chance of coming to understand the causes of their condition or learning how to work together to do something about it. Nor do the privileged want them to understand the causes of their condition or to learn how to work together to do something about it.

For all their anger and discontent, the writers and artists of the early twentieth century still imagined better worlds, whereas our own moment seems preoccupied with just avoiding catastrophe. Dystopias make good literature (and movies) today, and for good reason.

I ask myself where the connections are between privilege (and the lack of it) and creating dystopias versus creating a better world. The only idea I can come up with is that the wrong people are running the world to suit themselves, while the rest of us are just trying to get by.

Yes, the writers of the early 20th century were privileged. But they also were builders, and they were on the top layer of their society. They foreshadowed and helped shape the precious few decades of human progress after World War II. Today’s elites are not cultural builders because the systems that reward them no longer value the things that an E.M. Forster, a John Maynard Keynes, or a J.R.R. Tolkien valued.

Privilege once made world-building possible. It was possible to very much like those privileged, world-building artists. Today, the privileged are all about owning the world and making the world better only for themselves. And they don’t have to care whether we like them.

Siegfried Sassoon

Jack Lowden as Siegfried Sassoon in “Benediction,” 2022

From Oscar Wilde to the present, there has been a continuous line of gay writers, all of them considered to be degenerate criminals until relatively recently, and all of them now vindicated as bravely many years ahead of their times — impeccably civilized in their subversiveness. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was one of the lesser known of these writers. The 2022 film “Benediction” has given Sassoon some of the attention he deserves.

The Scottish actor Jack Lowden, of course, is River Cartwright in the brilliant and ever-so-entertaining series “Slow Horses,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

Many of these writers knew each other. Gay writers living today are only a few degrees of separation from Oscar Wilde. These early 20th Century gay writers lived in dangerous times. Wilde’s trial started a dark cultural shift that lasted for sixty years. Scholars estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 men were charged with crimes up until decriminalization in 1967. There was surveillance, entrapment, trials, prison, exile, and suicide. Alan Turing, who was charged with “gross indecency,” the same charge that was used against Oscar Wilde, was only one of these. E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice was not published until 1979, nine years after his death.

Armistead Maupin and poet Gavin Geoffrey Dillard knew Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood and W.H. Auden were lifelong friends. Isherwood knew E.M. Forster. Siegfried Sassoon knew Robbie Ross (who was a loyal friend to Oscar Wilde until the very end). Siegfried Sassoon never met Isherwood, but he certainly knew of him. As a war poet during World War I, Sassoon was critical of Isherwood because he thought Isherwood was avoiding military service by remaining in the United States. Isherwood knew Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams.

Though almost all them were born to great privilege, they were not all of equal character. Lord Alfred Douglas, who betrayed Oscar Wilde, became an even greater jerk after Wilde’s death. E.M. Forster, on the other hand, would qualify as a saint, were it not for the Catholic church’s clock running about six thousand years slow. Christopher Isherwood was no saint — as is clear if you read Christopher and His Kind or watch the film “Cabaret” — though Isherwood lived a very different life after he came to the U.S. in 1939.

Christopher Isherwood (left) and W.H. Auden, 1939. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

After watching “Benediction,” I bought a copy of a 2003 biography of Sasson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches. I doubt that I will read the entire book; it’s a very detailed 526 pages. But it’s an excellent reference with a valuable index and large set of notes. “Benediction” doesn’t flinch at the gloom and embarrassing failures of Sassoon’s later years. I found it interesting, by the way, that my copy of the book, which I ordered from the U.K., had a previous life in the Hobson Library of the Joint Services Command and Staff College, which trains members of the British military.

I have known poet Gavin Geoffrey Dillard for more than fifty years. He is my oldest friend. Gavin lived in Hollywood for a good many years. Isherwood lived in Santa Monica. Isherwood was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981 and died of it in 1986. Below are two photos that Gavin took while visiting Isherwood during Isherwood’s last years.

⬆︎ Christopher Isherwood, Santa Monica, California, c. 1984. Photo by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard.

⬆︎ Christopher Isherwood and Don Bacardi, Santa Monica, California, c. 1984. Photo by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard.

⬆︎ Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, Bethania, North Carolina, c. 1979. Photo by David Dalton. (For years, Gavin and I preferred twin-lens reflex cameras such as Yashicas and the Mamiya C330, which use square 620 film.)

For Gabriel

When you were an angel and I was a god,
Earthly-fair were the paths that we trod;
You, from your heaven of Saints at the Throne,
Banished, to wander, gold-haired and alone;
And I, from my pagan Paradise hurled,
Thro’ sun-shot cities of cloud to the world.

Humble you came, with your calm, clear eyes,
And parted lips; but your spirit was wise
With raptures of music and light that you’d lost …
So we loved and were happy, nor counted the cost.
For the gates were barred, and the way was hard
Up to the bastions of Heaven proud-starred;
And I was a god no more. But you sprang
To the peace of my arms … and an angel sang.

Unpublished poem by Siegfried Sassoon, dated 20 November 1918, included in Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches, 2003.

At last, a new novel by John Twelve Hawks

To be published in April 2026

I’ve posted several times in the past about John Twelve Hawks, who, as soon as I read him, became my favorite living science fiction author. His most recent novel until now was published in 2014, so his fans have been waiting for a long time.

The new novel is Certainty, to be published by Penguin Random House/Doubleday in April 2026. The Penguin Random House page is here, and the Amazon page (you can pre-order it) is here.

For a good twenty years, it has been hard to find the kind of science fiction (new science fiction, anyway) that I like. Please pardon my political incorrectness, but trends in the publishing industry have not been favorable for writers who are straight white males whose writing is lucid and vigorous (as opposed to literary) and whose themes are something other than social themes. Maybe John Twelve Hawks had a 12-year fallow period. But I can’t help but wonder, actually, whether those trends in the publishing industry shut him out for a while as too male, insufficiently literary, and too political.

When I say, “insufficiently literary,” that, to me, is a compliment to John Twelve Hawks’ writing. To me, the story is the point, not the writing. So it’s clean, transparent, cinematic writing that I like, writing that lights up our visual circuits rather than putting heavy demands on our language circuits. That such writing is facile is just plain wrong. It’s actually very hard to do.

John Twelve Hawks has occasionally posted on his Facebook page during the past 14 years. His official web site has rarely been updated. He remains anonymous (John Twelve Hawks is, of course, a pseudonym) and reclusive. I’m sure I’m not the only fan hoping that, when this next book is published, he’ll do more interviews, publish more articles, and become more heard in the marketplace of ideas during these nightmare times in which we’re all living.

The awful 17th century

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Witch Wood. John Buchan, first published 1927.

Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples. Francis Young, Cambridge University Press, 2025. 432 pages.

The history of witch-burning in Scotland is horrifying. Between 4,000 and 6,000 people were tried for witchcraft in Scotland, far more than in England. The trials continued into the late 1600s, but the panic over witches had pretty much subsided by 1707.

How in the world do we understand how a century of witch trials in Scotland was so quickly followed — in the very same Scotland! — by a century of the Enlightenment? How was it that these prominent elements of Scottish history were mirrored so quickly in America?

I am no historian, and I don’t have any thorough answers for these questions. For one, the history of Scotland is bafflingly complicated. By comparison, it seems to me that the histories of England and America are much easier to get one’s head around. But I do think I can see just a glimmer of how the sudden transition from witch trials to the Enlightenment unfolded in Scotland.

I often read two books at once, one fiction and one nonfiction. By coincidence, I was reading John Buchan’s Witch Wood at the same time I arrived at Chapter 4 of Silence of the Gods. (A hat tip here to Chenda, for recommending this book.) That chapter is about the 17th Century, with the title “Antiquarians and Witch-Hunters.”

Silence of the Gods limits itself to places farther north and more remote than Scotland. But it’s clear that, though Scotland excelled at burning witches, the witch panic was everywhere in Christendom during the 17th Century. But it’s only in Scotland where a particular zeal for witch-burning was immediately followed by the work of the Enlightenment. Surely one set the stage for the other, in some strange way?

I had a long discussion with ChatGPT about this. ChatGPT’s bottom line was: Religious zealotry built the roads that the Enlightenment ran on.

There are a couple of key points to understanding this. The first is that, during the 17th Century, Scotland’s kirk had far too much civil power. That is, as we Americans would understand it, there was very little separation between church and state. Scotland was divided by religious conflict and was in great turmoil. In ways that I don’t understand very well, the deposition of James VII, followed by William III and Mary II (1689) set the stage for important changes in how Scotland was governed. The Settlement of 1690 preserved the church but handed civil power in Scotland back to civil authorities.

Americans learned an important lesson from this. To quote ChatGPT: “Seventeenth-century Scotland showed what happens when a church (whether presbyterian or episcopal) fuses with state power—persecution, ‘enthusiasm,’ and civil strife. Scots-Irish Presbyterians who emigrated carried that memory and became key allies of Baptists in the push for disestablishment in the states (notably in Virginia).”

John Buchan’s Witch Wood is a fictional account of what village life was like in Scotland in 1644. Buchan knew this history. At the time he was writing Witch Wood, he also was writing a biography of James Graham, the 1st Marquess of Montrose, who figured prominently in Scotland’s religious conflicts of the 17th Century.

Buchan probably expected his readers of a hundred years ago to know much more about Scottish history than most of us do today. That lack of knowledge of Scottish history makes Witch Wood harder to appreciate. One thing that strikes me about Witch Wood, though, is Buchan’s harsh treatment of the kirk, its theologies, and the zeal of the men who held power in the church. To put it coarsely, Buchan did not find it necessary to kiss the church’s feet, which makes me think that by 1927 Scotland was well along in losing its religion. That draws our attention to yet another mystery about the problems of America: How was it that England, Scotland, and even Ireland lost their religion, while Americans are now dealing with an attempted takeover by Christian nationalists? In disturbingly many ways, what’s happening in America today resembles what happened in Scotland in the 17th Century (bitter, even violent division with the empowerment of fanatics), fused with some political innovations developed in Germany in the 1930s.

I’m only halfway through Silence of the Gods, but one thing is perfectly clear. The Christianization of the far north — Norway, Sweden, Finland, parts of Russia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania — was just as violent and ugly as what happened to the south.

All of this is horrifyingly relevant today, because it’s still going on, in America at least. What will it take for people to remember that to be governed by zealots is to be governed by the devil?

Witch Wood, Chapter 2. Click here for high-resolution version.

Leakey’s Book Shop

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I’m back from Scotland. On this trip, I spent two days in Inverness. The first stop after checking into the hotel was Leakey’s Book Shop, which is said to be the largest seller of used books in Scotland.

It would take all day, and then some, to explore the entire store. I made do with the literature section, looking for older editions of Scottish writers, books that would be pretty much impossible to find in the United States. I bought two novels by John Buchan and a copy of Nigel Tranter’s Man’s Estate that had been signed by Tranter — a steal at £30.

I’ve written a great deal here about Sir Walter Scott, and I already have a complete set of the Waverley novels, a gift from Ken that he schlepped all the way from Scotland, in a box, as checked baggage. I bought only three books at Leakey’s, no more than I could fit into my suitcase. Scottish novelists, I suppose, have always had to live in the shadow of Sir Walter Scott, and none have achieved Scott’s fame. I will have a separate post soon on John Buchan. Nigel Tranter, like Buchan, must be on any reading list of Scottish fiction.

The inscription in the book makes me think that Dorothy was a friend of Tranter’s, as opposed to someone who bought the book after a bookshop reading by Tranter.

I have a ton of photos from Scotland, including castles, castles, and more castles, and of course some food and seascapes. I’ll post some of them during the next week or so.

Click here for high-resolution version.