The Eagle and the Wolves

Posted on April 5, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Eagle and the Wolves
© 2003 Simon Scarrow
452 pages

The Roman Empire’s campaign in Britain may about to become a victim of its own success. While a great victory last summer established a stronghold in the heart of the island, the Britons haven’t given up yet — and  are finding in the Romans’ lengthening supply lines an opportunity to bleed the Empire white. If more troops are pulled from the front lines to defend against Celtic raiders, the advance will stall — but what if Rome creates a few cohorts out of the Celtic tribesmen themselves? Britain is riven with petty chiefdoms, some allied to Rome, some arrayed against it, and some shifting with the wind.  What if two centurions with experience on the island — one an old hand at training, the other with a working knowledge of the Gaelic spoken here — were to train to put some of the allies to work?  So begins The Eagles and the Wolves, in which Cato and Macro raise two auxiliaries (the Boars and Wolves) to defend their post.    Naturally things go south; the Romans are allied to an old king who is attacked by an assassin, and a few of the would-be successors to the king want to overturn the Roman alliance.  The Romans themselves are not united, as Cato and Macro are undermined by a weaselly politician who is manipulating everyone for his own advancement.  It comes down to a good old-fashioned last stand at the Alamo, with Cato and Macro holing themselves up in a supply depot while the Celts  serenade them with the sounds of their captured prisoners being tortured.  Buuut, as there are many more books in this series,  it doesn’t quite end like the Alamo.

As with a Cornwell review, the usual strengths are here — Romans swearing like Englishmen is funny,  the two main characters are solid, Cato is now wilier than his old mentor in some respects, and the action is gripping until the end.

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Podcast of the Week: the British History Podcast

Posted on April 5, 2017 by smellincoffee
History is human. History is drama. History is our story, and it belongs to all of us.
Since I’m celebrating English literature and history this month, I’d like to share the British History Podcast with readers who may be interested. This is a long-running and reliable history podcast which updates at least every week,  and is so thorough that after 238 regular episodes (not counting pay-only specials), it has only now reached Alfred the Great.    The host doesn’t just do politics; he often devotes special episodes to Anglo-Saxon economics, or Celtic religion, etc.   
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Perelandra

Posted on April 4, 2017 by smellincoffee

Perelandra
© 1943 C.S. Lewis
322 pages

In Out of the Silent Planet, Dr. Erwin Ransom was kidnapped by two malevolent technologists who thought to offer him as a sacrifice to the ruler of Mars, a planet they were interested in mining and otherwise exploiting. Their plan failed in part because they were dolts who didn’t realize they were reckoning with powers beyond their ken —  not a creature like themselves, fixed on gain, but something else altogether,  a being Ransom later understood to be more like an angel or a Greek god.  The governor of Mars was a  creature of goodness, and  one who ruled not as sovereign but as the steward of Another–  Maledil, the Creator.   Now  Ransom has been dispatched by Maledil Himself to the planet Venus, where an Edenic paradise is about to be disrupted by the presence of one of those formerly vanquished scientists,  who is now the pawn of something malevolent.   When Ransom realizes what his former captor is up to —  playing the part of the serpent and attempting to seduce a new Eve into disobedience — the doctor can only do his best to resist, debating the Devil and later giving him a good right hook to the jaw,  Resist the adversary and if he  will flee; if nothing else, fisticuffs will suffice.

Having now read all three books in the Space Trilogy, I’m struck by the progression of them.  Ransom begins Out of the Silent Planet as a fellow out for a walk, who literally stumbles into an abduction. (His captors were planning on taking a slow-witted youth, but Ransom foiled that by rescuing him.)  Here, his knowledge of the real nature of the Cosmos and his ability to speak the common tongue of creation allows him to interact with the new Eve,  and so act as a counter to the possessed corpse attempting to lure her into destruction.  By That Hideous Strength, he is the leader of the resistance, a King Arthur fighting a rearguard action against an evil conspiracy. The stakes, too, rise in every novel: in the first, Ransom is no real danger because he is in the realm of  goodly creatures; here the stakes are heightened, but the threat is to another world and to two people;  in the last, all of Earth’ is imperiled.  The philosophical content also rises throughout, although I was not as conscience of the debate going on in That Hideous Strength when I read it.   This novel is taken up largely with conversations and debates between Ransom, the Eve figure, and the “Un-man”, the animated corpse being used a puppet of another being. Their primary topic is will and obedience:  Maledil has given Eve and her husband (who is off exploring)  the entire planet to play in, and asks only one thing: don’t sleep on one particular piece of land. They can visit it during the day, but must retire  elsewhere at night.   The corpse attempts to persuade Eve that Maledeil secretly wants her to rebel, because that would be heroic and soul-enlarging.  She would prove herself a creature with a will of her own, and that’s what Maledil wants.  Of course, if she chooses to obey, she’s also demonstrating a will of her own, but the Devil doesn’t sleep and Ransom has to, which is why at one point he’s so tired of arguing he decides to start grappling in the truest sense of the word.

While a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, told largely through conversation and debate, make for an odd novel, I found that the pieces of Lewis’ worldbuilding here are fitting together better now that I’ve seen more of their shape. I was baffled in the third book by his odd mix of Greek mythology,  Merlin, and SF dystopia, but as with any imaginatively-developed world, it makes more sense the more time you spend in it.  I found Lewis’ Venus far easier to imagine and enjoy than I did his Mars, what with its golden sky, intensely pleasurable water and fruit, and island living.  Pity the real Venus would melt you before you ever so much as saw the surface..

Coming up in Read of England…either a bit of medieval literature, Victorian fiction about a medieval hero, or some history.

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Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth

Posted on April 3, 2017 by smellincoffee

Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth:  Understanding Middle-Earth
© 2002 Brad Birzer
255 pages

How better to kick off Read of England than by visiting the world of Tolkien, who has enraptured readers for decade after decade now?  Tolkien is not merely an English writer; his Middle Earth was composed of English stuff,  its  languages inspired by ancient British tongues, its heroes English yeoman with furry feet.  In Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, Brad Birzer uses extensive reading of the Tolkien  corpus, in addition to letters and interviews, to understand the influences and imagination which created the world of Middle Earth.  The themes that Birzer shares in  chapters on topics like heroism and evil, are knit together in an argument that Tolkien’s intention was to reinvigorate the west with the memories  of what was best in it — to remind it, via a new mythology, of ancient truths.

Birzer begins with a biographical sketch of Tolkien, who came of age in the trenches of the Great War – witnessing first hand Europe’s virtually successful attempt to destroy itself – and who spent much of his adulthood in the mire of the 20th century, observing both its progress and its regress with dismay.  Tolkien admired the arrival of automobiles (and the city spaces destroyed to make room for parking lots) about as much as he admired the German bombers that would destroy city blocks later on. They were Nazguls and Orcs to him – noisy, inhuman, unfeeling, and malignant. Tolkien was a man of Old England,  a man of the Shire about which he wrote so lovingly – an gentle and agrarian England composed of farmers and small shopkeepers, who minded their business and got together in crowds only for a good neighborly feast.

 Tolkien’s great dismay with the west was not its embrace of new modes of transportation, however, but with what it left behind. Man once knew his place in the Cosmos; he was part of a celestial story, and if he played his part well, there could be found meaning and joy.  Such was not to be found in the modern story of man,  one of an atomized individual seeking only his own pleasure, liberated from all that had once sought to direct individual energy towards bigger things, even a thing so small but so whole as the family. That ordered Cosmos is present in the world of Middle Earth, for there – -through the Silmarillion – we find an ordered creation disrupted by a rebellious angel (Morgoth), whose servants  work to destroy the good Earth and replace it with their machines and towers of domination.   The entire lore of Middle Earth contains many stories of imperiled fellowships enduring pain and deprivation to resist the schemes of Morgoth;  Frodo’s company is only one episode in a long drama that will only end when Illuvatar, the All-Father, decides to finish the symphony of creation  with a flourish.   Tolkien, as a Catholic, believed that humans on Earth were fighting the same ‘long defeat’ that would eventually end, but until then would demand perseverance.

In explaining the core of Tolkien’s mythos — the distinction he made between Creation and subcreation, the nature of evil and grace, the role of heroism in resisting evil and giving grace tools with which to work —   Birzer throws light on the bounty of Tolkien’s imagination.  A reader can only stand in awe of Tolkien’s imaginative work; his genius with language, deep appreciation of history, and  integration of pagan and Christian,  characters of fancy and fact.  Although Tolkien’s larger world is rooted in a monotheistic order, much of England’s pagan past is hailed and ‘sanctified’, rather like the epic of Beowulf was by whatever Christian monk preserved it for the ages.   Tolkien believed, like Chesterton and Lewis,  that the myths of the Greeks and Norse, among others, reflected parts of the Truth without being True in themselves.   In the Tolkien legendarium, the Good of earlier traditions is united with the Good of the Christian West. For the Tolkien fan, this sort of book should be enormously appealing, even if one is not comfortable with Tolkien’s worldview.  (His anti-modernity, for instance, which  is what makes him most delightful to me, personally…) Here are celebrated and made greater, characters of the LOTR lore. We see Aragorn as an Arthur, Gandalf as a wandering Odin figure,  Galadriel as a Marian type. We see the Shire,  Rivendell, and Morder serving as reflections on different relationships between man and nature — and appreciate Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, and Aragorn as differing types of heroism, from the self-sacrificial to the prophetic and martial.   Considering the actual book is only a little over 150 pages, there’s an amazing amount of content here. For good reason was this a favorite last year, and no less fascinating when I re-read it this year.

Related:
Frodo’s Journey; Bilbo’s Journey, Joseph Pearce

Posted in Religion and Philosophy, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Read of England 2017

Posted on April 1, 2017 by smellincoffee
 

Dear readers, it is at long last April, and you know what means! READ OF ENGLAND 2017 is officially on, a month dedicated wholly to England — English history, literature, culture, and personalities.  Why April?  April 23rd is both the feast day of St. George, patron saint of England, and the death anniversary of England’s most lauded writer, William Shakespeare.   The usual suspects are likely: classics like Dickens or Austen, mysteries from Christie or Doyle, and historical fiction from Simon Scarrow.  There will also be a few surprises, however.   Never one to do things by half-measures, I’m also going to be enjoying the fourth season of Jeeves and Wooster and the third season of Vicar of Dibley this month.   I love Read of England.

(Speaking of surprises, did anyone else know that A Study in Scarlet is one-third western? )

The game’s afoot! Follow your spirit, and upon this charge, cry God for Harry, England, and SAINT GEOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORGE!


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La Florida

Posted on March 29, 2017 by smellincoffee

La Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence
©  2016 Viviana Díaz Balsera & Rachel A. May
312 pages

Florida, like many places in the United States, bears the name given to it by another culture.  The Spanish, setting first foot on the peninsula in the ‘flowery season of Easter’,  Florida Paschal,  named it after the flowers of the season. While the Spanish flag has long been removed from the heights of St. Augustine and Pensacola,  Spain’s legacy lives on in a new form, its language having made a dramatic return to the land through Cuban and Puerto Rican immigration.  La Florida collects historical articles written on the Spanish heritage and continuing presence in Florida, spanning from Jared Milanich’s attempt to fix the actual landing sight of Ponce de Leon, to from Susan Eckstein’ss  analysis of changing Cuban political sympathies. (Few outside of Tampa itself probably appreciate the long history that Cuban immigration has played in that city — concentrating there long before the Castro coup.)   In between readers are treated to the turbulent history old Spanish Florida,  articles on distinctive aspects of Florida in the South (its role as a haven for escaping slaves, for instance), and Florida’s re-flowering in the 20th century.  This then is not a straightforward history, but a collection of very different pieces rooted in Florida’s Spanish heritage — a heritage abandoned, spurned, and then revived.    Midway, for instance, we find an article on the Spanish craze in the United States which manifests itself in Mission Revival architecture across the southwest and old Spanish gulf.   For a student interested in colonial Spain, here are bits of history not only forgotten by standard texts (the 1812 invasion of Florida by Georgia volunteers), but those forgotten by everyone, like the  time Amelia Island was taken over by a pirate and declared a republic.

Related:
Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

Posted in history, Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Other War of 1812

Posted on March 24, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Other War of 1812: The Patriot War
© 2007 James Cusick
398 pages

If the War of 1812 rings any bells for most Americans, they may associate it with the creation of the Star-Spangled Banner, the national anthem whose lyrics no one seems to know.  Those with a taste for history who look into it may regard it as the United States’ unfortunate ensnarement in the Napoleonic Wars,   responding to the attacks on its trade from  both English and French quarters. The invasion of Canada hints that the Americans were not quite perfect innocents, and still more persuasive is the case of the other invasion.  Far to the south, another war with ties to the War of 1812 had already been brewing, and would continue to work out bloody chaos for several years thereafter. I refer, of course, to the Georgian invasion of Florida.

Prior to its final annexation into the American union in 1821, Florida exchanged hands several times between the Spanish and English.  It was, in 1811, a strange sort of colony. Its residents were Spanish subjects, but most of the occupants and even leadership were not Spanish themselves.  Some called themselves Anglo-Spainards, for they hailed from varying parts of the British isles and yet gave Spain their allegiance while they lived in Florida.  Many were free blacks — some having escaped from Georgia, some manumitted under Spanish law for various reasons.  There were even Minorcans, previously brought in by the English to help rebuild Florida after so many Spanish residents left following the Seven Years War.    Spain, in 1811-1812, was in a bad way:   its king was lost to Napoleonic schemes, its legitimate regent besieged by the French at Cadiz.  Any moment all of Spain would be lost to Napoleon, and then where would little Florida be?

Georgians were asking the same question, but they knew the answer. Little Florida would cling to Great Britain’s skirts; they would allow British warships to steam from Floridian ports, there to play hell on American shipping. As war loomed with the English, the thought of the English navy safe at harbor so close to the American coastline was enough to raise anyone’s hackles. Spanish Florida was an enormous pain even in good years — not only did it continue importing new slaves from Africa, but it maintained itself as a safe haven for escaped slaves from Georgia. Worse yet,  these escapees were armed after joining the Florida militia.  And then there were the Indians, who were constantly used as a threat by Spain against the Georgians whenever border disputes loomed.  Getting the Spanish out of Florida would be useful all around.

In today’s America, Florida would have never stood a chance. In these early years of the Republic, however ,expansionism was still being reigned in by circumspection and the Constitution; as much as Madison might want to take Florida,   how could he declare war against Spain — the colonies’ first ally! — and shake them down? It was neither right nor lawful, and no one would let him get away with it.  Instead, Madison encouraged a certain revolutionary war colonel named Mathews to investigate the state of things in Florida,  and find people who wanted a little regime change. If they happened to raise the flag of revolution, kick the dons out of St. Augustine, and raise the American flag, well…then, by golly, who was Madison to stand in their way?

Of course, things didn’t quite work out that way. The Other War of 1812, heavy with details of diplomacy and brush combat, tells the story of how the revolution  died before it began, but was artificially resuscitated by a few hundred Georgians pretending to be Floridians with a hankering for Independence.  Because the ranking US Army officer in Georgia maintained that he could not invade Florida, only come to its defense after the local ‘authorities’ declared independence and requested aide,  the Patriots leading their war against the Spain had to make do on short rations. Their war was grim, ‘war even unto the knife’. Part of this was desperation, part of it the misery of battle conditions. (July is not fighting weather in the sunny South.)   The Georgians also had a serious grudge with St. Augustine and Fernandina, those cities who stole their trade and bid their slaves run, and they were especially vicious when fighting the Creeks, Seminoles, and free blacks of whom they lived in fear.    Eventually, the war petered out, but  the author points to the amount of destruction a few Patriots raised as one of Spain’s reasons for realizing Florida was a losing proposition.  The Americans were too close and too hungry to be held at bay long.

The Other War of 1812 is a good bit of history — substantial reading, yet accessible.   The war itself is not a riveting affair, just swamp raids, plantation burnings, and a prolonged siege of St. Augustine. There are a couple of stirring episodes  — a scouting party cut off for four weeks in hostile terrain, somehow holding its own despite being vastly outnumbered, for instance —  but the real star here is diplomacy. I don’t mean commissioners arguing with each other, but rather the light this sheds on how complicated relations were between the Americans, Spanish, English, and native crimes.  The author provides some books for further readings, as he links this Patriot war in with several of the Creek and Seminole uprisings that would erupt in the 18-teens.  I’m now itching curiously, but there’s so much ahead of Creek wars in my interest queue.

Further Reading:

  • War of 1812, John K. Mahone. According to Cusick, this text  is singular in integrating the Patriot War, the War of 1812, and the Creek Wars together. 
  • Britain and the American Frontier, James Wright
  • Struggle for the Gulf Borderlands, Frank Owsley
  • The Spanish Frontier in North America, David Weber
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The Benedict Option

Posted on March 23, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Benedict Option
© 2017 Rod Dreher
269 pages

Christendom has fallen; long live Christendom.   In The Benedict Option, Rob Dreher argues that the Christian church in the United States is at a crisis point and must now think seriously and act deliberately if it is to avoid the fate of European Christianity. The vestiges of America’s Christian past have evaporated away,  and what has replaced them?  A vague feel-good sentiment that is applied like lipstick on the pig that is self-worship.  One of Dreher’s earlier books, Crunchy Conservatives, introduced readers to the idea of a conservative ‘counterculture’ to resist the worst aspects of American consumerism.  With the Benedict Option, Dreher maintain that such a counterculture is no longer an option: it is a necessity if Christianity in America is to survive a culture now defined by corrosive materialism, violent and pornographic entertainment, and the disintegration of the family.

Dreher begins with a visit to the cradle of western monasticism, the abbey of Nursia where St. Benedict began.  Benedict, too, lived in an age of decline – in the dusk of the western Roman empire, an age of corruption and decay. Born into privilege , he could have had a reasonably comfortable life, yet devoted himself instead to creating a monastery for the purposes of work and prayer.  Dreher uses the Benedictine rule – its  requirements for  being rooted in a place, living communally,  studying, praying, and physically laboring – to explore ways that people today are creating an authentic Christian counterculture; one which is vibrant  and self-contained, existing within but separately from the  mass culture. (Judaism is the stellar example, having sustained itself for thousands of years despite chronic marginalization and outright persecution –  and possibly because of that persecution, if Natan Sharansky’s case is typical:  his embrace of Judaism increased every time he was targeted because of it.)

Up until the present day,  Christians in America have been able to combine their loyalties;  America was a place formed by Christian ideals,   from the Puritan townships of New England to the Catholic parishes of Louisiana. For most of its history it has been populated almost wholly by Christians, resulting in a culture where even non-Christians tended to conform to Christian norms of behavior by default.  The American devotion to individualism was thus moderated by some sense of religions conviction  The zeitgeist  has changed, however, and the prevailing religious attitude of most Americans (including its Christians) is what Dreher and others call “moralistic therapeutic deism”. Its  tenets are all mild and comfortable: God exists  and wants you to be happy, you should be nice, and if you  die without having murdered someone, you’ll probably go to heaven because God is nice, too.  It is the kind of religiosity that lends itself well to a consumer culture:  the idea of God is there when you need it, a quick prayer during distress, but doesn’t intrude on one’s life otherwise.   But this sort of vague belief is the useless security blanket that the anti-religious hold all religions to be. It  does not form the character, or steel it for real crises;  it does not compel people to work to create things good and beautiful, let alone prompt them to sacrifice themselves for someone else’s good.   The American polity is likewise bereft of virtue: the national government is marked by routine assassination, excessive surveillance, and casual coercion of the powerless.   If serious Christians wish to  preserve their faith, they  must realize that they are Christians first and foremost..   “Our citizenship is in heaven,” wrote Paul, and centuries later St. Augustine would repeat that in his City of God.  To be born into America is an accident of geography; to preserve oneself as a Christian in a materialistic,  selfish, and scorning society will require grace,  sheer will, and the support of other Christians.

To live inspired by the Benedictines, to preserve a culture amid collective chaos,  suggests a degree of asceticism.  A certain level of withdrawal is required from outside society. By no means does Dreher advocate Christians withdrawing into survival cells in the mountains,  but he does urge readers to reflect on the degree to which their characters and minds are being fragmented and disordered by popular television,  too-frequent use of wireless devices, etc.  It also means rethinking engagement with State politics, for beyond a few critical areas there is not much that can be done. Protecting basic liberties is possible within the cultural mainstream, sure, but to be most effective,  Christians should focus on local politics. A Benedictine works the soil he is given; he does not attempt to be a one-man agricultural lobby.

Education is crucial for renewing Christian civilization, for state schools are where children’s souls go to die.   A child raised in a morally-inclined home will, at school, be exposed to children who were raised in sewers – children who believe that violence and verbal abuse are normal, and that watching naked ladies on their cellphones is harmless fun.  Dreher encourages Christians to consider  the growing movement of classical Christian education, which grounds the cultivation of children in a tradition with deep roots.  Homeschooling is another option,  though it requires immense patience and more sacrifice on the part of the parents.

What we must realize, says Dreher, is that the Christian way must become part of every aspect of life:  the home and Christian school should be ordered like a monastery, towards God.    At home, Dreher recommends regular family prayer regimens, and suggests that single people living alone might do well to look for fellow Christians to live with —  relying on them not just as roommates but as spiritual brothers-in-arms who provide sources of accountability and advice for one another, as well as  opportunities for helping one another in charity.   Fellowship is crucial:  the essential horror of the modern post-west is that people are so atomized and separated from one another.  The iPhone, promising connectivity to others but in reality allowing people to live more and more inside their heads, is a fitting icon of the age.    Not only does  Christian fellowship help people grow in their faith and flourish emotionally, but if the State becomes overtly hostile towards its new minority, Christians will need to rely on networks to find employment and resources. The time to build those networks is now.  Benedictine Christians can create a counter polis,  creating anew civic structures that will attract the materially and spiritually destitute.

While the Benedict Option addresses itself to the Christian future, I do not believe the advice is merely applicable towards surviving and thriving in the future. Even learning a little of the classical tradition is edifying and eye-opening, whether one is reading the moral philosophy of the Stoics or contemplating the beauteous order in medieval architecture.  There is no shortage of books written today about the effects of television and constant computer usage on the brain — I personally haven’t watched television since 2009,  after I realized it was addictive, distracting, and idiotic.    Much of the problem with American politics today is that the polis is gone:  we feel its absence, we desire its order and meaning, but the national State is too large, too distant, too complicated to be the polis. This is why Dreher advocated localist politics, but if we created in his words a counter polis,  a membership within society,  we would be aiding contemporary life immeasurably.   Not only materially, of course, but socially.  Membership is one of the most fundamental cravings of the human soul.   Christianity has always been a social religion, an other-oriented religion: it exists, G.K. Chesterton maintained, for the purpose of people who are not its members.  To create a vibrant, stable, and humane society within the absurd chaos of modernity would establish sanctuaries for those outside Christendom, who feel the alienation and look for answers.   Thus, the Benedict option is not simply one of self-survival, but one which serves as a witness and a stronghold of charity.

Related

  • Out of the Ashes, Anthony Esolen.  Similar, but not focused on spirituality to the degree of Dreher.
  • Blue Like Jazz/Through Painted Deserts. In one of these books, the author lives in a Christian commune for a while. They may have been linked with The New Monasticism, which was an Emergent Christianity movement I read into a little back in 2009 when I was reading about simple living in the Buddhist, Gandhian, and Christian traditions.  Dreher writes about New Monasticism and its possible connection to the Benedict option here.
  • Dreher’s corpus of work at The American Conservative, where he’s been discussing the “BenOp” with readers for at least two years now.
  • Crunchy Cons, Rob Dreher.  One of the first ‘conservative’ books I ever read, back when the only conservatives I knew of were Republican warhawks.  Imagine my delight to find in Dreher a man who writes about new urbanism, public transit,  locavorism, a non-imperial foreign policy, etc!  It’s fun to read this review in part because I’ve changed over the years, and now share Dreher’s “sinister” contempt for the state  and media.
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The Unvanquished

Posted on March 22, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Unvanquished
© 1938 William Faulkner
254 pages

Years ago in a ninth-grade literature class,  I chose to read a book by William Faulkner for a class project on the basis that he was a southern writer. My teacher cautioned me against trying The Sound and the Fury, warning me that it was difficult — a challenge out of  scale for a minor paper. Well, dear readers, I persisted — for about a chapter. Then, faced with Faulkner’s bewildering narrative style –,a torrent of words with few  marks of punctuation, flowing ceaslessly like the Mississippi —  I returned to my teacher with tail between my legs and asked for something else, and thus read The Old Man and the Sea for the first time. Ever since then, the memory of Faulkner has haunted me.  I associate his writing with both brain-melting difficulty and with embarrassment, and yet…still I’ve wanted to read him. The prevailing reason is the same:   William Faulkner is a southern writer. He is not just a southern writer, though,  he’s one of The Southern Writers, always mentioned with Flannery O’Connor as though the two were manufactured as a set, like a pair of pants.

The Unvanquished is the story of a young boy (Bayard Sartoris) who comes of age amid the Civil War and reconstruction, along with his close friend Marengo (“Ringo”).  Ringo begins the novel as a slave, but the narrator mentions early on that he and Bayard were so close in age that they suckled at the same breast, and both lived in  dread awe of The Colonel and Granny.  While The Colonel (John Sartoris) is off at war, fighting to keep the damyanks out of Vicksburg,  Granny is the boss.  Actually, I almost suspect she remains the boss when The Colonel is home, for this is a woman who trucks into the middle of a warzone to demand the Yankees return her stolen mules, her slaves, and her chest of silver.  Fearless, she uses fabricated requisition papers to steal and sell livestock to the invading army — not growing rich, but using the proceeds to support her community of Jefferson, burnt-out by the war.   Shady business brings forth shadier persons, though, and soon death visits the Sartoris family. In the collection’s conclusion, young Bayard — who is now a twenty-something law student — must confront the man who robbed him of his father  upholding the family’s honor but heedful of the consequences should he make the wrong choice.

If you have never read Faulkner, The Unvanquished is a promising work  to test the waters,  It’s one of his shorter pieces, and the stories’ length allow an unfamiliar reader to dive into Faulkner without chance of drowning.  That style of writing, the torrent of consciousness (“stream” won’t do for Faulkner), is present here, but not nearly as overwhelming as I remembered from Sound and Fury.   Although these stories are filled with death, as the State’s armies lay waste to the South,  Granny’s confrontations with the Yank officers always have humor about them, as the officers regard her with astonished admiration. One of them thanks God that Jefferson David never thought to draft an army of grannies and orphans, for a regiment of Sartorises would be the Union’s undoing.

(Bayard and Ringo, Spanish cover)

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The Big Sleep

Posted on March 20, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Big Sleep
© 1939 Raymond Chandler
277 pages

A dying old man who lives in a greenhouse, sustained only by its heat and the fear of his children shaming the family,  has summoned Philip Marlowe for a job. The family is being blackmailed, and old man Sternwood wants Marlowe to find out who’s doing it, what they’ve got on him, and to handle the actual paying-off if need be.  Turns out the blackmailer is a local cretin mixed up with other lowlifes who want him dead, and what seems like a simple job will have Marlowe stumbling into a river of blood. The phrase ‘big sleep’ explicitly  refers to death, the equalizer of punks and patricians alike,  What is not dead is Chandler’s writing; only PG Wodehouse rivals him for sheer prosaic fun.  Having watched the movie months before didn’t too much spoil the outcome here, as the stories develop somewhat differently.  (One plus: Bogart did all of the narration while I read.)     This is enormous fun as a noir thriller, in part because the narrator doesn’t take anyone’s games seriously. He has a job to do and  his own sense of honor to abide by  — and no amount of coy women or thugs with guns is going to get him off the case.

Some early lines:
“I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.”

“I’m thirty-three years old, went to college once and can still speak English if there’s any demand for it. There isn’t much in my trade.”

“I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.”

“Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.”

“Tsk, tsk,” I said, not moving at all. “Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”

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