Category: Literature

The Maypole Inn

Choosing the next novel to read is a huge pain in the neck. I Google for novels on particular subjects or particular periods, or I pore over book lists, and then I look up the books on Amazon. Sometimes I settle on a novel that looks like it might be a good choice, but when I “look inside” the Kindle edition on Amazon, I quickly see that the author cannot write. I move on.

When stuck between novels, reading a classic is a fallback that rarely fails. I have a Kindle file with the complete works of Dickens. I settled on Barnaby Rudge. I am no stranger to Dickens. I have read David Copperfield at least twice.

Yes, Dickens’ style is a little thick. His characters, especially the wicked ones, usually border on caricature. Important scenes are usually melodramatic. And yet few novelists have ever been able to paint pictures in the mind the way Dickens does. His style, actually, is remarkably cinematic. According to the Wikipedia article on Dickens, in 1944 Sergei Eisenstein wrote an essay on Dickens’ influence on cinema. Dickens may have invented the technique of cross-cutting, in which the narrative shifts back and forth between things that are happening at the same time.

There is a particular reason for reading Barnaby Rudge at present. The novel is about the Gordon Riots of 1780. The similarities between the Gordon Riots of 1780 and the Trumpist insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, are remarkable, so remarkable that I’m surprised not to have come across an article about it. Some things never change, including the sickening religious character and mob-affinity of people who do such things. Lord George Gordon was an odious man, the puritanical head of the Protestant Association, horrified by the idea of Catholics having equal rights. Yep. The mob attacked Parliament.

Even if you are reluctant to take on such a long book (almost 700 pages) and such a dense read, the opening scenes of Barnaby Rudge are worth reading. It is a dark and stormy night, and the story opens inside a country inn ten miles outside of London. Few writers can conjure atmosphere the way Dickens can. Dickens’ Maypole Inn very much reminds me of Tolkien’s Prancing Pony. What could be more cozy and comfortable that an inn in old England (or Scotland, or Ireland) on a dark and stormy night? Another thing about Dickens that I love: When people are eating, he always tells us what.

I don’t really find Dickens’ style of writing archaic. So many novelists, especially today, just can’t write. There is still much to be learned from Dickens about how it’s done.

Charles Dickens in 1852. Source: Wikipedia

Who knew that Tsarist Russia could look so good? Actually, most of this series was filmed in Hungary. Not since “Game of Thrones” has a fantasy series been such a visual treat.

I had watched the trailer for “Shadow and Bone,” and I was skeptical. But I heard good reviews from friends. I’ve watched two episodes so far, and it has greatly exceeded my expectations. The plot is a bit thick. I had to watch parts of it twice to hang on to the threads. But two episodes was enough to hook me.

The casting is excellent. It’s a very attractive, diverse, eccentric, and charismatic cast of characters. The sets and settings are lavish. Filming must have cost a fortune. The music is very good. And the horses!

The series is based on a trilogy of fantasy novels by Leigh Bardugo. It’s available for streaming from Netflix. There are eight episodes in the first season. I’m surprised how little buzz this series has gotten.

I know that, when something really gets under your skin, it’s a psychological red flag and that one should ask oneself what’s really going on. Whatever. But when I ask myself what’s really going on with my aggressive hatred of literary novels (or literary anything), I think it’s this: Literary novels are not merely bad, they’re also a fraud. They’re a fraud because they suck up so much oxygen, suffocating and marginalizing and demeaning far better work. Literary novels get all the attention. Everything else is carefully ignored by critics (though not by the millions of people who actually read for pleasure).

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant is trash, not worth having been written and not worth reading. But just look at all the fawning reviews it got in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Atlantic. I believe Gore Vidal called them “university novels,” though I’m not sure Vidal is entirely guiltless, literarily speaking. Orson Scott Card, a good writer in spite of his rotten politics, call it “pre-criticized fiction,” written to appeal to critics and for those who imagine themselves to be a literary elite.

So why did I read The Buried Giant? A friend was reading it, and I was looking forward to discussing it with him. Normally I would have flung such a book within thirty pages. But I kept reading even after I discovered it was a university novel, for the sorriest of motives: to have more credibility to rip it to shreds.

As is required in a literary opus, the title is meaningless. Clarity is forbidden, and vagueness and randomness substitute for plot. Most of the novel doesn’t make sense, because it’s not supposed to. It’s supposed to be more like a Rorschach test, and the reader is expected to project great profundity into the vagueness that one can’t quite put one’s finger on and that — since the critics loved it — must surely have gone over one’s head. The reader is constantly taxed with an excess of words. But, worst of all, the ending is frustrating to the reader and cruel to the characters. To my mind, it’s a writer’s ethical duty both to readers and to the writer’s characters that a novel’s characters might be made to suffer, but that they will be compensated in the end by winning their heart’s desire. It is both a literary crime and a breach of ethics to leave one’s characters in hell because that’s “like life” or something. If I ever met an author like Kazuo Ishiguro I would berate him within an inch of his life for being a fraud, for possessing a mediocre mind in which a deliberate vagueness masks the mediocrity, for his pessimism and literary cruelty, and for being a mediocre and wordy writer to boot.

A friend from L.A. with a large eating-out budget once criticized me for liking cuisines that are “easy to like,” such as Thai. To his mind, stuff that is hard to like — raw eels in cold gummy rice and reeking seaweed, for example — is the real test of a connoiseur. My crime was refusing to go with him to a sushi restaurant.

I refuse to be shamed. There must be a thousand bodice rippers, ten thousand science fiction and fantasy novels, and a hundred thousand historical novels, crime novels, spy novels and mysteries that are better, better written, wiser, and deeper than the phony likes of The Buried Giant.

I would have to watch this BBC mini-series at least twice to have any hope of following it. Those who have recently read up on the members of the Bloomsbury Group, or who have recently read a biography of Virginia Woolf, might be able to keep up a bit better. Still, it’s great fun to watch, because the performances are so good and the post-Victorian naughtiness is so delicious. This three-part series was produced by the BBC in 2015. It’s available for streaming from Amazon Prime Video.

Back in the mid-1970s, I read Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf. That was enough Virginia Woolf to last me a lifetime. I have never been able to finish one of her novels. I find them dull, and I just can’t get the point of them or figure out why they were worth writing. Shortly after I finished reading the Bell biography, a friend asked me what I thought about it. As I recall, I said, “Their lives were much more interesting than their literature.” This BBC mini-series is evidence of that.

In my opinion, for what little it’s worth, of the members of the Bloomsbury Group, I think it was E.M. Forster who matters the most. We must be careful not to give the Bloomsbury Group too much credit, either as writers, rebels, or philosophers. Oscar Wilde was way ahead of them, as were 19th Century heretics such as Charles Fourier or the American writers and theologians who clustered around Harvard University and Concord, Massachusetts.

But the members of the Bloomsbury Group certainly led interesting lives. And I have the greatest respect for them for the progress they made in rebellion against Victorian norms, in the odd ways available only to the upper-crust English who went to Oxford or Cambridge. Today, people such as Stephen Fry have carried this work forward. Fry, I believe, is one of our greatest living intellectuals. I doubt whether any member of the Bloomsbury Group could have claimed such a status in their lifetimes.

According to Wikipedia, the title, “Life in Squares,” comes from a comment made by Dorothy Parker. She said that the members of the Bloomsbury Group “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.” And yes, I would argue that Dorothy Parker, in her sassy American way, out-achieved all of them.

Series like this always make me wonder why the United Kingdom, five times smaller than the U.S., produces ten times as many superb actors and actresses. “Life in Squares” shows off quite a few of those actors and actresses. Fans of James Norton in “Grantchester” will want to watch this.

I resisted watching this, because I was afraid that the film had turned the story of Tolkien’s life into yet another costume romance for, and about, twenty-somethings set in all the usual sorts of glamorous British settings. In fact, it is that, and it requires that we re-imagine the quintessential white-haired and tweedy Oxford professor as a studly (but already tweedy) young man playable by Nicholas Hoult. But it turned out to be more.

There can be no doubt that Tolkien’s early friendships, and the loss of so many of those friends in World War I, are to be found between the lines of The Lord of the Rings. This screenplay gets a bit deeper into the texts than I expected, and it spends just enough time on philology — and in those photogenic Oxford libraries — to shed light on the lifelong scholarship that underpins Tolkien’s stories. Derek Jacobi as the linguist Joseph Wright — whose life story is just as interesting as Tolkien’s — ought to lead to a reprint of Wright’s 1910 Grammar of the Gothic Language. (I’d buy it.) Twenty-somethings could learn a lot from this film about the history of the English language, and why that history is worth caring about.

An obnoxious blogger who calls himself “the Imaginative Conservative” wrote last year: “I expressed my fears and misgivings about the new film, Tolkien, which focuses on the writer’s youth. I was concerned that the film would convey a homosexual and anti-Catholic agenda, weaving a fabric of lies of which Wormtongue himself would be proud. I cited the track record of the two screenwriters, David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford, and predicted the worst.”

But, after seeing the film, he wrote: “The homosexual agenda is inserted incognito in the characterization of Tolkien’s friend, Geoffrey Bache Smith, but in such a subtle manner that only the cognoscenti will notice it.”

Such is the conservative mind. I’d put it differently. The screenwriters encrypted — and in a historically accurate way — the other romance in the film so that it would go right over the heads of conservative churchlings. To everyone else, it should be very clear. There is in fact a good bit of scholarship supporting the possibility that Geoffrey Bache Smith was in love with Tolkien. Smith died during the war at the age of 22. Tolkien later published a volume of Smith’s poems. In the last scenes of the film, Tolkien is meeting with Smith’s mother. “I never knew Geoffrey,” she says. “Was he happy? Please. Tell me. Did he know love?” Hoult looks at her, and the camera searches his face. But he doesn’t answer.

Hence I upgrade this film’s grade from a C to an A. It’s quite an achievement when the subtext of a story can quietly hold its own against the text, while as a bonus bringing the roots of the English language to our attention.

Here at the abbey in April 2020, at the baby’s six-month-old half-birthday party.

For some years now, Ken and Astrid have been regulars at the Wigtown Book Festival in Scotland. This year, because of Covid-19, the book festival will be virtual. As one of the virtual events, here is an excellent 30-minute podcast from Wigtown in which Astrid talks about her art and Ken talks about his books — as well as the article he wrote about their lockdown time here in the Appalachian foothills after flights back to Scotland were canceled. The interview with Astrid is in the first half, and the interview with Ken is in the second half.

Wigtown Book Festival podcast

Ken’s article Letter from the Heartland

From my visit to Oxford, August 2019

A few days ago I finished my third reading of The Two Towers, and now I’m on book 3. The landscapes of Middle-earth are lucid in my imagination. And yet I find myself thinking again and again about Oxford. This story (the best story, I believe, in English literature) was born out of the imagination and knowledge of J.R.R. Tolkien. But Tolkien’s imaginary world could never have existed if our real world did not have the University of Oxford in it.

Yes, Oxford is one of the greatest seats of privilege in the world. Oxford has drawn heavily on the power and wealth of the British Empire. But that shows us, I believe, that no empire can sustain itself century after century — at least in any form that can do some good in the world along with the harm that empires do — unless it invests in all the things that the University of Oxford stands for.

Part of what I marvel at and am extremely grateful for is that it has been my privilege that the language of Oxford is my mother tongue. That is one thing that I can share with Oxford, though otherwise I have never had scrap nor morsel of its privilege. No matter how many languages a person may learn to speak later in life, it is the mother tongue that is connected most intimately with our minds and emotions. For years I have said, partly as a joke, that Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings would be impossible to translate into French. Tolkien’s story, and Tolkien’s language, are Anglo-Saxon to the bone, alien, like oil and water, to Latin.

In book 2, The Two Towers, I found myself re-reading and savoring the passages in which Faramir interrogates Frodo, and in which trust develops between them as Faramir decides to give Frodo as much help as he can, though they both are far from home. Faramir speaks “the fair speech.” Others in the story speak the fair speech, too. The elves for example. But though hobbits are to some degree hicks, Frodo acquired the fair speech, from his mentors.

This dialogue between Faramir and Frodo is some of the most perfect dialogue in the story. Tolkien polished every word and phrase. Consider what Tolkien as an Oxford professor was able to draw on, all products of Oxford: the long history of the English language all the way back to German and beyond; the refinements of English diplomacy; the conventions by which the privileged (Faramir was a steward’s son) expressed (or displayed) their noblesse and fine breeding. I’ll make another joke at the expense of the French. To be polite in French, one must double the number of words. It’s difficult in French to be both courteous and concise. Whereas in English a high rhetorical tone can get straight to the point.

On the train from Edinburgh to Oxford, as the train approached Oxford, a Ph.D. student whom I had talked with on the train said, “I speak acquired English.” I replied, “I understand that, because I speak acquired American.” It was not just language that we had in common. It also was a kind of language that we had in common, an echo of the “fair speech.” Americans are quite capable of the fair speech, scarce as it is these days in our public discourse.

I have heard it said about us American Southerners — at least a kind of Southerner in short supply hereabouts — that, when there is conflict, whoever is most polite wins. If that is true, then I suspect it is something we learned from the English. Pray that we all can keep it, even though, as with many Southerners who have an aptitude for language, I will cut a person to shreds with my tongue when I think they need it. Too many do. And you can get shot for mere words, these days more than ever.

Even if we have to turn to literature to hear the fair speech, it’s something we ought to do from time to time. In dark times such as these, there is something that is encouraging and healing about it.