Category: Literature

If you haven’t watched a Disney feel-good flick for a while, then here are two reasons to watch Better Nate Than Ever. One, it’s very funny and very sweet. It’s even got Lisa Kudrow. Two, the book the film is based on is a good example of the kind of book that some people want banned from libraries. Here’s an example of a ban-the-book list from NBC News: “Records requests uncovered dozens of attempts to remove library books from schools, nearly all related to titles dealing with racism, gender or sexuality.”

The book, by Tim Federle, was published in 2013. The Disney film was released a few weeks ago and can be streamed from Disney+.

Nate Foster is 13 years old and is in the seventh grade. He’s bullied for being different. His athletic older brother is ashamed of him. Nate’s method of surviving is to dream of Broadway.

When those who dream of theocracy start going after Disney — Disney! — then they’ve already lost. But the sad thing is that so many kids are still caught in the crossfire.

Once again, unable at present to find any newer fiction that seems worthwhile, I have turned to Sir Walter Scott — this time, Ivanhoe.

Reading Sir Walter Scott can be hard work for contemporary readers. Even in the early 1800s when his novels were being published, Scott’s style would have been pretty florid, I think. But somehow (if you’re stoic enough to read him) that remains part of the charm today. In Ivanhoe, at least, because it is set in England rather than in Scotland, readers won’t have to work their way through page after page of dialogue in the Scots dialect. But dialect or no, Scott is in many ways a linguist, very much aware of how he employs language and dialect for literary effect. And as a historian, Scott also would have been aware of the history of the English language itself and how the French and Anglo-Saxon languages mixed and merged into English in the miserable (unless you were Norman) years after the Norman Conquest.

Consider this conversation from the first chapter of Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe is set in 12th Century England. The conversation is between a Saxon swineheard (Gurth) and the court jester (Wamba) of a staunch Saxon noble:

“Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on their four legs?” demanded Wamba.

“Swine, fool, swine,” said the herd, “every fool knows that.”

“And swine is good Saxon,” said the Jester; “but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?”

“Pork,” answered the swine-herd.

“I am very glad every fool knows that too,” said Wamba, “and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?”

“It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool’s pate.”

“Nay, I can tell you more,” said Wamba, in the same tone; “there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment.”

The words at play here, of course, are bœuf for what we English speakers call cows when we eat them, and porc for what we call pigs when we eat them. My guess is that Scott is suggesting a plausible linguistic history for how it came to be that we use separate words for creatures on the hoof versus creatures on the plate.

So clearly Scott is well aware, when he writes, of whether he is using English words of French or of Anglo-Saxon origin. But here’s the sad thing. One of the reasons why Scott can be so difficult to read, and for why the rhythms of his writing can be so choppy, is that he loves English words of French origin and uses them a lot. Here’s a sample of French words (little changed from their Latin roots, of course) gleaned from just a few pages of the first chapter of Ivanhoe: misapprehension, refractory, rivulet, dejection, construed, disposition, obstreperously, proprietors, importations.

I always use Tolkien as the best example of an English writer who wisely and consciously writes out of the Anglo-Saxon half of the English language. Can you imagine Tolkien using such words as obstreperously or refractory? Of course not.

It’s as though Scott knows that it is wrong and pretentious (oops … French!) of him to do this, but he does it anyway. Proving that he knows better, he writes (again from the first chapter of Ivanhoe):

In short, French was the language of honour, of chivalry, and even of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds, who knew no other.

There are other little jokes that relate to Scott’s awareness of languages. When he names a character Albert Malvoisin, for example, which is more or less French for “wicked neighbor,” you know that character is going to be a villain.

Please don’t misunderstand me, though. I love Walter Scott and enjoy reading him, Frenchified or not. But I’m going to test a theory as I continue to read Ivanhoe (I’ve just started). That is that Scott may primarily use French when he wants to be funny (he’s often hilarious), but that he sticks to Anglo-Saxon when he wants to be serious and to talk to another native speaker of English heart to heart — another thing that Scott does well, though those kinds of tender scenes, I think, tend to be near the end of his novels rather than at the beginning.

Yes. I’d encourage all lovers of English fiction to dust off their stoic-hats, take a deep breath, fortify their patience, and pick up a novel by Sir Walter Scott. At present I’m reading the Gutenberg.org edition on my Kindle, but I’ve also ordered an 1880 hardback edition from the U.K., which should be here in a couple of weeks. I’m having more shelves built for my little library room, so why not, since it’ll probably take me a month to read Ivanhoe. Antique fiction reads better somehow if you’re holding an antique book in your hands.

Oscar Wilde: A Life. Matthew Sturgis. Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. 838 pages.

It’s an important question, and there probably are many answers: A hundred and twenty years after his death, why does the life of Oscar Wilde still matter, and why does Wilde interest us so much today? This is the second vast biography in 30 years. Richard Ellman’s biography (1988) still sells and was a fine piece of scholarship. Sturgis’s biography is even better.

Sturgis offers no opinions on why Wilde matters until the four-page epilogue. Wilde matters today, Sturgis says, because he was right about a lot of things.

The tragedy was that Wilde was born into the wrong place and time. Even at the time, France and Italy would not have destroyed Wilde the way England did. France and Italy were often refuges for Wilde, though they were not places where Wilde could have become famous.

At times while reading this book, I wanted to scold Wilde. Clearly he was vain, and much of his posings, posturings, and sayings were a show driven by the desire for fame. Again and again he made ridiculously bad decisions. He was clueless about how to handle money. If you add up what Wilde earned versus what he squandered (not just money), then the squanderings at the time of Wilde’s pathetic death (Nov. 30, 1900) surely exceeded the earnings — except for the fact that Wilde left a legacy that we continue to value today. I don’t recall that Ellman was clear about the fact that Wilde was born to enormous privilege. Sturgis tells us much more about Wilde’s aristocratic origins in Ireland and the open doors for Wilde at Oxford. Much should be expected out of so much privilege.

And yet foibles aside, Wilde comes across, always, as a kind, generous, and very decent human being. When he damaged others — as he certainly did with his family — it was always out of blindness for which he subsequently repented (and often relapsed), never wilful malice. There were many people of high achievement who saw Wilde as a fraud but who, after talking with him, had to concede that Wilde was a superb scholar and a more genuine person than they had supposed.

The villains in this story are the Victorians. The ogres are a few horrible people such as Lord Alfred Douglas and his father, John Douglas, the 9th marquess of Queensbury. The saints are people such as Constance, Wilde’s wife, who died a few months before Wilde died, probably from grief and shame. Another saint is Robbie Ross, who stuck with Wilde until the end and who, as Wilde’s literary executor, did much of the work than preserved the record of Wilde’s life and works.

In 2017, the Queen of England pardoned Wilde, along with 75,000 other Britons who had been convicted under the abolished laws that sent Wilde to prison and led to his death. That took almost 120 years. What a sorry race of human beings we white people are, even if we’re slowly getting better.

I’ll venture one other thought on why Oscar Wilde still matters. It’s that the Victorians are still among us, and that the work that Oscar Wilde bravely started remains incomplete. If Wilde’s life was a warning to other misfits about how to live in the wrong place at the wrong time, other lives in this story are models — Robbie Ross, for example, with his loyalty, integrity, and his talent for salvaging as much as possible from catastrophe.

Updated below

Though it’s two and a half hours long, this is a bare bones, abbreviated Dune. Much of what makes the book such a classic had to be left out — for example, the politics, including the intricate political scheming of the Bene Gesserit witches and the wickedness of House Harkonnen. The dialogue, though good, is remarkably spare. There is character development for only two of the characters — Paul Atreides and his mother, Jessica. Those who have read the book will be able to fill in the gaps. Those who haven’t read the book will become acquainted with only two parts of the Dune story — the character Paul Atreides, and the planet Arrakis.

Thus the camera is often in Timothée Chalamet’s face, and he is a good enough actor to handle it. The deserts of Arrakis are lavishly presented as a vast sea of deep sand, sand which, when roiled by the giant worms, rolls up in massive waves and crashes against skelligs of rock like a stormy North Atlantic against the western coasts of Ireland and Scotland.

Though there is just enough narration at the beginning of the film to set up the plot for those who haven’t read the book, the film never tries to explain anything, leaving time to focus on: Paul Atreides and the planet Arrakis. That probably was smart. It would take many hours of cinema time to tell the full story. And since that could not be done in two and a half hours, why not do the key parts of the story well. The film ends, by the way, before the book does. No doubt there will be a sequel.

My only complaint about this version of Dune is that, once again, when the film industry gives us the science fiction and fantasy blockbusters that so many of us crave, it’s stories that we already know. Part of the awesomeness of Star Wars was that it was a new story, with new faces and new characters like Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. Dune gives us an old story and the stars du jour — Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Jason Mamoa. Must they be in everything? The faces of familiar actors inevitably evoke memories of their recent roles, creating friction for suspension of disbelief and immersion in the story.

Dune is in theaters and can be streamed on HBO Max.

Update:

The Washington Post here touches on my complaint about the Hollywood star system and how the same faces keep appearing in different roles in quick succession. My complaints are two: First, that our ability to lose ourselves in a story is impaired by famous familiar faces that remind us of what we just saw them in. And, second, that re-employing popular actors again and again and again deprives us of seeing brilliant new actors of the sort that Game of Thrones introduced in droves.

The Washington Post story is here: Welcome to our future of omnipresent Timothée Chalamet. It’s not that I have anything against Timothée Chalamet, who is a brilliant young actor. It’s that I’d rather see Chalamet go do the stage for a while so that we can bring some new stars on line at the cinema.