Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 7
June 23, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: ROBERT PAYNE'S "THE LIFE AND DEATH OF STALIN"
Death is the solution to all problems.
For me, Stalin has always been an enigma. Unlike the other tyrants and giants of his era, from Lenin to Hitler, Stalin always struck me as a kind of black hole, a void of personality, a man whose actual beliefs, goals and personality were indistinct, or hidden from view. He had no personal charisma, lacked physical courage, was a dull speech-maker, disliked writing, created no new systems of thought, and did not entirely understand the ones he was supposedly upholding. His contributions to the Russian Revolution were meager, he proved an incompetent soldier, and he showed every evidence of pathological jealousy, paranoia, and vindictiveness. Those who met him noted that he was vulgar, insulting and rude at almost all times, and when drunk could be especially vicious. His bullying drove his wife to suicide, and during WW2 he refused to exchange his son, a soldier in the Soviet army had been captured by the Germans, for a German general, with the offhand remark, "To gain a private for a general would be a poor trade indeed." Just how did this terrible mediocrity, this deformed misanthrope, this lump of unpleasant qualities, rise to such titanic heights of power? How did he outmaneuver cleverer, braver, more appealing men within his own party? How did he find so many willing tools to serve his morbid ambitions, and come to rule an empire greater than that of Ghengis Khan?
To answer these questions, or rather in hopes of having the questions answered, I consulted Robert Payne, a prolific author and world-traveler of yesteryear who, among his many published works, authored biographies of most of the major tyrants of the 20th century. I have always regarded his biography of Hitler as one of the best-written (if not necessarily the best-researched) biographies I've ever read, and his prose style is so far above that of the ordinary historian that any deficiencies he has in that regard can and should be easily forgiven.
In any event, Payne answers a number of these lingering questions in his biopic THE RISE AND FALL OF STALIN. He describes a man who grew up in an atmosphere of abuse and cruelty, and whose black views about humanity were initially formed between beatings and privations during his miserable childhood in Georgia. Later, as a minor revolutionary figure in Siberian exile, they hardened further, as Stalin absorbed the bleak, harsh, pitiless attitudes of the people and the environment. Payne shows Stalin from later childhood as being drawn to the aggrandizing heroic fantasies of Georgian folk tales, which he coupled later to Communist ideology to produce his cult of personality; but even as a young, burgeoning Socialist revolutionary it was clear he intended on nothing less than supreme power. The powerlessness of his youth manifested in adulthood as an insatiable appetite for domination -- what the Romans referred to as libido domanandi. He managed for a time to convince Lenin he was a sincere communist and a valuable asset to the Party, and seems to have harbored some genuine admiration for the man, but he came to view Lenin as an impediment upon his boundless ambitions, and privately marked for death all Lenin's friends and loyalists, long before he was in a position to harm any of them. Stalin was a man with both eyes on the main chance. His devotion to Communism seems to have been limited to the fact it, being amoral and authoritarian, was an effective means to an end: unlike Lenin and Trotsky, he probably would have embraced any extreme ideology if he thought it would allow him to satisfy his lust for dominance.
What distinguished Stalin was his cunning, which must be distinguished from his intelligence. Stalin was not stupid, he had an alert mind and a restless curiosity, but unlike Lenin and Trotsky he lacked mastery of any one particular discipline or system of thought, was unimaginative and inflexible, and his need for control led him to rigidly enforce plans which often failed or performed poorly in execution, which in turn triggered his paranoia and incapacity for taking blame, which in turn led to his penchant for killing anyone who failed him. However, all of these failings were eclipsed by the one outstanding quality he had, which he may have possessed to a greater degree than any tyrant or political leader in history: his ability to outmaneuver his enemies, to slowly undercut their positions, to initiate slander, libel and whispering campaigns against them, to isolate them politically, to marginalize them and prepare them for the killing blow, and to do this years in advance of any quarrel with them and in so subtle and gradual a way that even his worst enemies, men who should have been on guard and perhaps were fully on guard against his machinations, were nonetheless stunned to see the degree to which they'd been compromised in the grisly moments before the blow finally fell. While still a relative nobody in the Party, Stalin managed to get appointed "general secretary," a presumably minor post which gave him the power of filling positions within the sprawling communist organization, including the secret police. In this way he quietly managed to isolate Lenin and neutralize Trotsky and the other Old Bolsheviks who had actually brought about the revolution: and later, to exterminate his opponents via huge purges carried out by hand-picked men who were later themselves murdered, on and on, ad nauseum. Payne describes the USSR of Stalin as transforming from a tyanny that used terror and murder to enforce its lofty political aims, to a terror which had no political aims and whose sole function was to murder on an industrial scale to please Stalin's paranoia and blood lust.
This brings us to his second quality, his absolute rejection of all ethics, morals, and scruples. Stalin was a man capable of friendship, but incapable of loyalty. He once remarked that "gratitude is a disease of dogs" and he endeavored to prove this true by killing most of the men who got him into power, and many who helped keep him there. His distrust and jealousy doomed those he professed to love as certainly as his bottomless fund of hatred doomed his many enemies. He murdered relatives, in-laws, close friends, old comrades. He murdered complete strangers. He arbitrarily ordered mass executions, and relished playing cat-and-mouse with his victims for months or years before he finally had them executed. He framed people for crimes he himself had committed, supervised their interrogation and torture, and then had them shot or hanged, believing in their guilt even when he consciously knew them to be innocent. He then just as often murdered his own executioners. Orwell's "doublethink" seems to have originated not merely within the Stalinite state but in Stalin's own personality. When Stalin rewrote history to make himself appear infallible, he did so knowing everything he wrote was a lie; but he believed the lies and forced the world to repeat them on pain of death. Death, Payne tells us, Stalin was determined to keep so busy it would have no time to come for him.
Stalin's appetite for murder proved to be boundless: he was having men shot long before he was in power, and seemed incapable of, or unwilling to, impose any other penalty. In his mind, a man or woman who failed to complete a task was a traitor: mere incompetence was no shield from a firing squad. This applied even to those given tasks Stalin himself knew to be impossible. He created a vast murder apparatus which he then obligingly fed at first thousands, and later tens of millions, human beings. By the time Hitler had killed his first hundred thousand, Stalin had killed ten million, and he seldom slackened the pace of his atrocities, sometimes committing them out of sheer boredom. (The machine had to be fed, after all.) In a position of unchallengable power, ruling much of the earth's surface, he was gearing up for a fresh series of terrors and purges among his own people when he finally died himself. Payne tells us "Stalin ruled Russia as if he bore it a personal grudge" and he was right. Hitler turned on Germany when he realized his war was lost, but Stalin turned on the Soviet Union he had helped create before it was even fully created. In some senses he seems in retrospect like a homicidal maniac whose main worry was that he someday might run out of victims.
STALIN is a good book, but Payne's depictions of endless frame-ups, show trials, engineered famines, mass shootings, midnight disappearances, and nonexistent plots punished as if they were quite real, become numbing after a time. The stark fact is that Stalin is a very difficult person to read about without becoming hopelessly depressed. Hitler, in comparison, had great charisma and a sense of aesthetic grandeur to go along with his hate and mania; Mussolini was a would-be conquerer in the 19th century style, a sort of tragic farce in uniform; Lenin, Trotsky and Mao shared the single saving grace of sincerity of aim, even if their methods were drenched in blood. But Stalin was a nullity. He stood for nothing. He had no redeeming qualities at all. He lacked even the superifical charms of the other tyrants. His craving for adoration -- constant and shameless adoration -- seems to have come from the knowledge that without it, he would cease to exist, because he himself was a void, a black hole. His entire career is a warning to the rest of us, but at the center of the warning remains a mystery: how did so many smarter, fitter, abler men end up as his victims? And how did such a fundamentally unlikeable and treacherous person find so many who were willing, when he was still essentially a nobody, to carry out his aims?
Payne does not manage, ultimately, to answer the riddle of Stalin. Perhaps there is no answer. Perhaps Stalin was simply the historical version of Michael Myers in Halloween: an ill wind, the bad seed, the Book of Job in human guise, the Bad Thing That Happens To Good People. But he brought me much closer to a final understanding by reminding me that evil, in its purest guise, lacks even a dark glamour: it is not a thing of sinister beauty or devilish charm. There is no bad-boy appeal to it, no seductive quality. Evil is dull. It is ugly. It is humorless and unintelligent and small. And at its core is the void. Someone once called Stalin "the man with the iron heart" but we now know precisely what Stalin's heart was made of.
Nothing.
For me, Stalin has always been an enigma. Unlike the other tyrants and giants of his era, from Lenin to Hitler, Stalin always struck me as a kind of black hole, a void of personality, a man whose actual beliefs, goals and personality were indistinct, or hidden from view. He had no personal charisma, lacked physical courage, was a dull speech-maker, disliked writing, created no new systems of thought, and did not entirely understand the ones he was supposedly upholding. His contributions to the Russian Revolution were meager, he proved an incompetent soldier, and he showed every evidence of pathological jealousy, paranoia, and vindictiveness. Those who met him noted that he was vulgar, insulting and rude at almost all times, and when drunk could be especially vicious. His bullying drove his wife to suicide, and during WW2 he refused to exchange his son, a soldier in the Soviet army had been captured by the Germans, for a German general, with the offhand remark, "To gain a private for a general would be a poor trade indeed." Just how did this terrible mediocrity, this deformed misanthrope, this lump of unpleasant qualities, rise to such titanic heights of power? How did he outmaneuver cleverer, braver, more appealing men within his own party? How did he find so many willing tools to serve his morbid ambitions, and come to rule an empire greater than that of Ghengis Khan?
To answer these questions, or rather in hopes of having the questions answered, I consulted Robert Payne, a prolific author and world-traveler of yesteryear who, among his many published works, authored biographies of most of the major tyrants of the 20th century. I have always regarded his biography of Hitler as one of the best-written (if not necessarily the best-researched) biographies I've ever read, and his prose style is so far above that of the ordinary historian that any deficiencies he has in that regard can and should be easily forgiven.
In any event, Payne answers a number of these lingering questions in his biopic THE RISE AND FALL OF STALIN. He describes a man who grew up in an atmosphere of abuse and cruelty, and whose black views about humanity were initially formed between beatings and privations during his miserable childhood in Georgia. Later, as a minor revolutionary figure in Siberian exile, they hardened further, as Stalin absorbed the bleak, harsh, pitiless attitudes of the people and the environment. Payne shows Stalin from later childhood as being drawn to the aggrandizing heroic fantasies of Georgian folk tales, which he coupled later to Communist ideology to produce his cult of personality; but even as a young, burgeoning Socialist revolutionary it was clear he intended on nothing less than supreme power. The powerlessness of his youth manifested in adulthood as an insatiable appetite for domination -- what the Romans referred to as libido domanandi. He managed for a time to convince Lenin he was a sincere communist and a valuable asset to the Party, and seems to have harbored some genuine admiration for the man, but he came to view Lenin as an impediment upon his boundless ambitions, and privately marked for death all Lenin's friends and loyalists, long before he was in a position to harm any of them. Stalin was a man with both eyes on the main chance. His devotion to Communism seems to have been limited to the fact it, being amoral and authoritarian, was an effective means to an end: unlike Lenin and Trotsky, he probably would have embraced any extreme ideology if he thought it would allow him to satisfy his lust for dominance.
What distinguished Stalin was his cunning, which must be distinguished from his intelligence. Stalin was not stupid, he had an alert mind and a restless curiosity, but unlike Lenin and Trotsky he lacked mastery of any one particular discipline or system of thought, was unimaginative and inflexible, and his need for control led him to rigidly enforce plans which often failed or performed poorly in execution, which in turn triggered his paranoia and incapacity for taking blame, which in turn led to his penchant for killing anyone who failed him. However, all of these failings were eclipsed by the one outstanding quality he had, which he may have possessed to a greater degree than any tyrant or political leader in history: his ability to outmaneuver his enemies, to slowly undercut their positions, to initiate slander, libel and whispering campaigns against them, to isolate them politically, to marginalize them and prepare them for the killing blow, and to do this years in advance of any quarrel with them and in so subtle and gradual a way that even his worst enemies, men who should have been on guard and perhaps were fully on guard against his machinations, were nonetheless stunned to see the degree to which they'd been compromised in the grisly moments before the blow finally fell. While still a relative nobody in the Party, Stalin managed to get appointed "general secretary," a presumably minor post which gave him the power of filling positions within the sprawling communist organization, including the secret police. In this way he quietly managed to isolate Lenin and neutralize Trotsky and the other Old Bolsheviks who had actually brought about the revolution: and later, to exterminate his opponents via huge purges carried out by hand-picked men who were later themselves murdered, on and on, ad nauseum. Payne describes the USSR of Stalin as transforming from a tyanny that used terror and murder to enforce its lofty political aims, to a terror which had no political aims and whose sole function was to murder on an industrial scale to please Stalin's paranoia and blood lust.
This brings us to his second quality, his absolute rejection of all ethics, morals, and scruples. Stalin was a man capable of friendship, but incapable of loyalty. He once remarked that "gratitude is a disease of dogs" and he endeavored to prove this true by killing most of the men who got him into power, and many who helped keep him there. His distrust and jealousy doomed those he professed to love as certainly as his bottomless fund of hatred doomed his many enemies. He murdered relatives, in-laws, close friends, old comrades. He murdered complete strangers. He arbitrarily ordered mass executions, and relished playing cat-and-mouse with his victims for months or years before he finally had them executed. He framed people for crimes he himself had committed, supervised their interrogation and torture, and then had them shot or hanged, believing in their guilt even when he consciously knew them to be innocent. He then just as often murdered his own executioners. Orwell's "doublethink" seems to have originated not merely within the Stalinite state but in Stalin's own personality. When Stalin rewrote history to make himself appear infallible, he did so knowing everything he wrote was a lie; but he believed the lies and forced the world to repeat them on pain of death. Death, Payne tells us, Stalin was determined to keep so busy it would have no time to come for him.
Stalin's appetite for murder proved to be boundless: he was having men shot long before he was in power, and seemed incapable of, or unwilling to, impose any other penalty. In his mind, a man or woman who failed to complete a task was a traitor: mere incompetence was no shield from a firing squad. This applied even to those given tasks Stalin himself knew to be impossible. He created a vast murder apparatus which he then obligingly fed at first thousands, and later tens of millions, human beings. By the time Hitler had killed his first hundred thousand, Stalin had killed ten million, and he seldom slackened the pace of his atrocities, sometimes committing them out of sheer boredom. (The machine had to be fed, after all.) In a position of unchallengable power, ruling much of the earth's surface, he was gearing up for a fresh series of terrors and purges among his own people when he finally died himself. Payne tells us "Stalin ruled Russia as if he bore it a personal grudge" and he was right. Hitler turned on Germany when he realized his war was lost, but Stalin turned on the Soviet Union he had helped create before it was even fully created. In some senses he seems in retrospect like a homicidal maniac whose main worry was that he someday might run out of victims.
STALIN is a good book, but Payne's depictions of endless frame-ups, show trials, engineered famines, mass shootings, midnight disappearances, and nonexistent plots punished as if they were quite real, become numbing after a time. The stark fact is that Stalin is a very difficult person to read about without becoming hopelessly depressed. Hitler, in comparison, had great charisma and a sense of aesthetic grandeur to go along with his hate and mania; Mussolini was a would-be conquerer in the 19th century style, a sort of tragic farce in uniform; Lenin, Trotsky and Mao shared the single saving grace of sincerity of aim, even if their methods were drenched in blood. But Stalin was a nullity. He stood for nothing. He had no redeeming qualities at all. He lacked even the superifical charms of the other tyrants. His craving for adoration -- constant and shameless adoration -- seems to have come from the knowledge that without it, he would cease to exist, because he himself was a void, a black hole. His entire career is a warning to the rest of us, but at the center of the warning remains a mystery: how did so many smarter, fitter, abler men end up as his victims? And how did such a fundamentally unlikeable and treacherous person find so many who were willing, when he was still essentially a nobody, to carry out his aims?
Payne does not manage, ultimately, to answer the riddle of Stalin. Perhaps there is no answer. Perhaps Stalin was simply the historical version of Michael Myers in Halloween: an ill wind, the bad seed, the Book of Job in human guise, the Bad Thing That Happens To Good People. But he brought me much closer to a final understanding by reminding me that evil, in its purest guise, lacks even a dark glamour: it is not a thing of sinister beauty or devilish charm. There is no bad-boy appeal to it, no seductive quality. Evil is dull. It is ugly. It is humorless and unintelligent and small. And at its core is the void. Someone once called Stalin "the man with the iron heart" but we now know precisely what Stalin's heart was made of.
Nothing.
June 20, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: DAVID GOGGINS "CAN'T HURT ME"
Pain unlocks a secret doorway in the mind, one that leads to both peak performance and beautiful silence.
Let's be real with each other. We live in the softest age in human history, and anyone with any sense or honesty understands that it is doing us precious little good as a race. Like everyone else, I benefit measurably from this softness: as I sit here, writing this, the temperature in my apartment is comfortable despite the furnace-like heat outside, thanks to the miracle of air conditioning; my laundry is washing itself; my dishes are drying themselves; an oven roasts my food, and the light within ensures that I don't even need to open the door to check to see if it's done. I am exercised, freshly bathed, and my belly is full. When I finish this blog, I will drink a beer, watch half an episode of Da Vinci's Inquest and then climb into my queen-sized bed with The Inimitable Jeeves and read myself to sleep. I have taken tomorrow off from work, but I will nevertheless be paid. I am not a wealthy man, but in many ways I probably live better than the millionaires of a century ago, and have instantaneous access to almost unlimited amounts of information and entertainment. I do not need to work for any it. It is enough to speak a few words into my phone, and presto, it's there, waiting for me.
You would think that this state of affairs, which is at least roughly attainable for the working class and even to some extent for the poor, would lead to a corresponding rise in our sense of psychological and spiritual well-being and perhaps our physical health as well: precisely the opposite has happened. Americans are fatter, lazier, more anxious, more depressed, more suicidal, more homicidal, more antisocial, more angry, more suspicious, more entitled, more cynical, and somehow more ignorant than they have ever been. All this material prosperity and softness has left us incapable of gratitude or the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that comes with truly earning things. We have run so far from the pain which is a normal part of life that we have fallen into a completely different form of suffering entirely, a suffering of the soul.
Enter David Goggins.
For those unfamiliar with the name, David Goggins is a retired Navy SEAL who is legendary for his determination, will-power and ability to edure pain. Now, before you throw up your hands, adopt an English accent, and exclaim, "Och, not another bloody book by a bloody SEAL!" let me assure you that CAN'T HURT ME is most definitely not like all the other SEAL accounts you may have read. The Chris Kyles and Marcus Lattrells and what-not were telling war stories and to some extent, making extended commercials for their own branch of the military. Goggins is not. In fact, when it comes to his deployed-in-a-war-zone days, he doesn't write enough to fill out a paragraph, much less a page. He talks about his military training extensively, but only with the larger focus of the book in mind. Which is as follows.
Goggins grew up in an abusive family. His dad was a physically and emotionally abusive hustler who treated him like a slave. He ended up living with his mom and taking comfort in food -- lots of food, so that he eventually became grossly and immensely fat. As one of the only blacks in an all-white school, he was also subjected to terrible racism. By the time he was in his late teens, early 20s, his life was a kind of morbid joke, with his job being to empty traps left in restaurants which were full of dead insects and rats. He had no self-respect and no future, and his only pleasure was sucking down immense quantities of food and drink, which gave him temporary pleasure but also increased his girth and therefore his isolation and self-loathing.
Goggins eventually came to the conclusion that he must stop seeking out the easy path in life, must "find comfort in being uncomfortable," and constantly seek to challenge himself in every aspect of life. This led him to the SEALs, whose training he had to go through several times due to injuries and illness -- a remarkable feat in itself given the mental and physical brutality of the training, which not infrequently kills its subjects.
Once a SEAL, however, Goggins continued to find ways to become uncomfortable by seeking out the toughest trainings he could sign up for, including the Rangers and the Delta Force, and by entering marathons and later, the masochistic enterprise known as the ultra-marathon. Eventually he competed in even more punishing activities such as trying to become the Guinness Book of World Records holder in the category of chin-ups (which sounds like my idea of hell). But the thing which distinguishes him from everyone else is the fact that he did most of this with some severe congenital defects he didn't even know he had at the time, including a sizeable hole in his heart. This discovery truly blew his mind and got him asking, "What if -- ?" He began to realize that we are largely prisoners of our own perceptions, and are capable of so much more than we think, but we habitually underestimate our potential and settle for what he calls "the 40%." This is different for different people, but it usually involves living a life in which even our "challenges" (working out, dieting, etc.) fall within our comfort zones. Take my hike today after work. I spent an hour trampling through the mud in the deep woods. It's good exercise, but it didn't push my limits in any way whatsoever. If I doubled the hike it would probably have not done this. And if I had doubled the hike and then thrown in a different sort of workout afterwards, lifting weights, say, or some calisthenics, I still would not have pushed my body to 100% of its limits. So basically my workout was at the 40% level -- enough to give me the sense that I earned my before-bed beer, but not enough to make me suffer.
Goggins goal for himself, and his goal for you, is to reach 100%. Not only in your workouts, but in every aspect of life. His language here is characteristic of the man: "You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft that you will die without ever realizing your true potential." The fact reaching one's true potential may not be possible is irrelevant to him. It's the striving, the discomfort, the pain that he seeks, not because it will get him to the goal but because it is the goal. Seeing what one can endure expands what one can achieve. As writers from Marcus Aurelius to Ernst Jünger have noted, "the obstacle is the way." One of the best passages in CAN'T HURT ME is as follows:
"Are you an experienced scuba diver? Great, shed your gear, take a deep breath and become a one-hundred-foot free diver. Are you a badass triathlete? Cool, learn how to rock climb. Are you enjoying a wildly successful career? Wonderful, learn a new language or skill. Get a second degree. Always be willing to embrace ignorance and become the dumb fuck in the classroom again, because that is the only way to expand your body of knowledge and body of work. It’s the only way to expand your mind."
CAN'T HURT ME is important not for its recitation of all the blisters and sweat and torn ligaments Goggins has endured, or for his achievements as a sailor or an athlete, but for the way he approaches the central questions regarding the difficulties we all face in life. Goggins has plenty of reason to play the vicitim, but chose another path, the path of self-ownership. It really is very simple. For example, when he discusses his obesity, he does not blame his father, racism or society: he blames himself. His mantra in every aspect of his life is that we own our own skin and our own decisions and too often, we use our traumas to justify things like laziness, apathy, cowardice, drug abuse, and alcoholism. Overcoming this self-sabotage requires being brutally honest with oneself. "Don't call yourself overweight," he all but shouts at the reader. "Say what you really are -- a fat fuck!" In an age when 700 lb women are called "curvy," this is not a message which is going to please many of the people who hear it, but it is a necessary antidote to the culture of weakness and victimhood in which we live. Goggins, however, is not making a philsophical statement: he is trying to get people to take an honest look at their lives so that they can understand what it is they need to change to fulfill their potential and live their dreams. Carl von Clausewitz called this technique, "The appreciation of the situation." Goggins calls it a self-audit. He audits himself regularly, especially when he fails at something, but also when he is successful, too. He encourages a mind-set of brutal honesty with an emphasis on the brutal. He is very frank that he "gets his strength from a very dark place," and his ethos illustrates that, as does this book. He isn't a shiny, happy person. He isn't interested in fame. He doesn't have many friends. He doesn't seem to own much of anything in the way of material objects. Even when he writes about the SEALs, he offers fairly harsh criticism -- something you won't see much if any of in other books by former members. Some readers may be offput by this very darkness, especially in an era in which whining and entitlement (something he especially despises) are now rampant everywhere. But that is why I consider CAN'T HURT ME to be so important. It comes at a time when many are beginning to suspect that the victim mentality they've been told to sharpen their entire lives is actually an albatross, weighing them down, stranding them in weakness, unhappiness, and failure.
CAN'T HURT ME is a fast and brutal read. It's inspiring, but it's not a feel-good memoir, and one can't help but wonder if Goggins takes any real pleasure out of life as we ordinary folk understand the word. He's sort of the Mace Windu of inspirational writers, a grim-faced warrior monk who is going to poke you in your love-handle and ask if you think that is the best you can do. But should you manage to sweat it off, don't look to him for a pat on the back. Look to him to ask if you couldn't have done it more efficiently...and then to ask you what's next on your list of challenges. And why you aren't working on them yet.
Let's be real with each other. We live in the softest age in human history, and anyone with any sense or honesty understands that it is doing us precious little good as a race. Like everyone else, I benefit measurably from this softness: as I sit here, writing this, the temperature in my apartment is comfortable despite the furnace-like heat outside, thanks to the miracle of air conditioning; my laundry is washing itself; my dishes are drying themselves; an oven roasts my food, and the light within ensures that I don't even need to open the door to check to see if it's done. I am exercised, freshly bathed, and my belly is full. When I finish this blog, I will drink a beer, watch half an episode of Da Vinci's Inquest and then climb into my queen-sized bed with The Inimitable Jeeves and read myself to sleep. I have taken tomorrow off from work, but I will nevertheless be paid. I am not a wealthy man, but in many ways I probably live better than the millionaires of a century ago, and have instantaneous access to almost unlimited amounts of information and entertainment. I do not need to work for any it. It is enough to speak a few words into my phone, and presto, it's there, waiting for me.
You would think that this state of affairs, which is at least roughly attainable for the working class and even to some extent for the poor, would lead to a corresponding rise in our sense of psychological and spiritual well-being and perhaps our physical health as well: precisely the opposite has happened. Americans are fatter, lazier, more anxious, more depressed, more suicidal, more homicidal, more antisocial, more angry, more suspicious, more entitled, more cynical, and somehow more ignorant than they have ever been. All this material prosperity and softness has left us incapable of gratitude or the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that comes with truly earning things. We have run so far from the pain which is a normal part of life that we have fallen into a completely different form of suffering entirely, a suffering of the soul.
Enter David Goggins.
For those unfamiliar with the name, David Goggins is a retired Navy SEAL who is legendary for his determination, will-power and ability to edure pain. Now, before you throw up your hands, adopt an English accent, and exclaim, "Och, not another bloody book by a bloody SEAL!" let me assure you that CAN'T HURT ME is most definitely not like all the other SEAL accounts you may have read. The Chris Kyles and Marcus Lattrells and what-not were telling war stories and to some extent, making extended commercials for their own branch of the military. Goggins is not. In fact, when it comes to his deployed-in-a-war-zone days, he doesn't write enough to fill out a paragraph, much less a page. He talks about his military training extensively, but only with the larger focus of the book in mind. Which is as follows.
Goggins grew up in an abusive family. His dad was a physically and emotionally abusive hustler who treated him like a slave. He ended up living with his mom and taking comfort in food -- lots of food, so that he eventually became grossly and immensely fat. As one of the only blacks in an all-white school, he was also subjected to terrible racism. By the time he was in his late teens, early 20s, his life was a kind of morbid joke, with his job being to empty traps left in restaurants which were full of dead insects and rats. He had no self-respect and no future, and his only pleasure was sucking down immense quantities of food and drink, which gave him temporary pleasure but also increased his girth and therefore his isolation and self-loathing.
Goggins eventually came to the conclusion that he must stop seeking out the easy path in life, must "find comfort in being uncomfortable," and constantly seek to challenge himself in every aspect of life. This led him to the SEALs, whose training he had to go through several times due to injuries and illness -- a remarkable feat in itself given the mental and physical brutality of the training, which not infrequently kills its subjects.
Once a SEAL, however, Goggins continued to find ways to become uncomfortable by seeking out the toughest trainings he could sign up for, including the Rangers and the Delta Force, and by entering marathons and later, the masochistic enterprise known as the ultra-marathon. Eventually he competed in even more punishing activities such as trying to become the Guinness Book of World Records holder in the category of chin-ups (which sounds like my idea of hell). But the thing which distinguishes him from everyone else is the fact that he did most of this with some severe congenital defects he didn't even know he had at the time, including a sizeable hole in his heart. This discovery truly blew his mind and got him asking, "What if -- ?" He began to realize that we are largely prisoners of our own perceptions, and are capable of so much more than we think, but we habitually underestimate our potential and settle for what he calls "the 40%." This is different for different people, but it usually involves living a life in which even our "challenges" (working out, dieting, etc.) fall within our comfort zones. Take my hike today after work. I spent an hour trampling through the mud in the deep woods. It's good exercise, but it didn't push my limits in any way whatsoever. If I doubled the hike it would probably have not done this. And if I had doubled the hike and then thrown in a different sort of workout afterwards, lifting weights, say, or some calisthenics, I still would not have pushed my body to 100% of its limits. So basically my workout was at the 40% level -- enough to give me the sense that I earned my before-bed beer, but not enough to make me suffer.
Goggins goal for himself, and his goal for you, is to reach 100%. Not only in your workouts, but in every aspect of life. His language here is characteristic of the man: "You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft that you will die without ever realizing your true potential." The fact reaching one's true potential may not be possible is irrelevant to him. It's the striving, the discomfort, the pain that he seeks, not because it will get him to the goal but because it is the goal. Seeing what one can endure expands what one can achieve. As writers from Marcus Aurelius to Ernst Jünger have noted, "the obstacle is the way." One of the best passages in CAN'T HURT ME is as follows:
"Are you an experienced scuba diver? Great, shed your gear, take a deep breath and become a one-hundred-foot free diver. Are you a badass triathlete? Cool, learn how to rock climb. Are you enjoying a wildly successful career? Wonderful, learn a new language or skill. Get a second degree. Always be willing to embrace ignorance and become the dumb fuck in the classroom again, because that is the only way to expand your body of knowledge and body of work. It’s the only way to expand your mind."
CAN'T HURT ME is important not for its recitation of all the blisters and sweat and torn ligaments Goggins has endured, or for his achievements as a sailor or an athlete, but for the way he approaches the central questions regarding the difficulties we all face in life. Goggins has plenty of reason to play the vicitim, but chose another path, the path of self-ownership. It really is very simple. For example, when he discusses his obesity, he does not blame his father, racism or society: he blames himself. His mantra in every aspect of his life is that we own our own skin and our own decisions and too often, we use our traumas to justify things like laziness, apathy, cowardice, drug abuse, and alcoholism. Overcoming this self-sabotage requires being brutally honest with oneself. "Don't call yourself overweight," he all but shouts at the reader. "Say what you really are -- a fat fuck!" In an age when 700 lb women are called "curvy," this is not a message which is going to please many of the people who hear it, but it is a necessary antidote to the culture of weakness and victimhood in which we live. Goggins, however, is not making a philsophical statement: he is trying to get people to take an honest look at their lives so that they can understand what it is they need to change to fulfill their potential and live their dreams. Carl von Clausewitz called this technique, "The appreciation of the situation." Goggins calls it a self-audit. He audits himself regularly, especially when he fails at something, but also when he is successful, too. He encourages a mind-set of brutal honesty with an emphasis on the brutal. He is very frank that he "gets his strength from a very dark place," and his ethos illustrates that, as does this book. He isn't a shiny, happy person. He isn't interested in fame. He doesn't have many friends. He doesn't seem to own much of anything in the way of material objects. Even when he writes about the SEALs, he offers fairly harsh criticism -- something you won't see much if any of in other books by former members. Some readers may be offput by this very darkness, especially in an era in which whining and entitlement (something he especially despises) are now rampant everywhere. But that is why I consider CAN'T HURT ME to be so important. It comes at a time when many are beginning to suspect that the victim mentality they've been told to sharpen their entire lives is actually an albatross, weighing them down, stranding them in weakness, unhappiness, and failure.
CAN'T HURT ME is a fast and brutal read. It's inspiring, but it's not a feel-good memoir, and one can't help but wonder if Goggins takes any real pleasure out of life as we ordinary folk understand the word. He's sort of the Mace Windu of inspirational writers, a grim-faced warrior monk who is going to poke you in your love-handle and ask if you think that is the best you can do. But should you manage to sweat it off, don't look to him for a pat on the back. Look to him to ask if you couldn't have done it more efficiently...and then to ask you what's next on your list of challenges. And why you aren't working on them yet.
June 18, 2024
TAKE ONE DOWN AND PASS IT AROUND, OR 300 BOTTLES OF BLOG
The purpose of all goal achievement is to develop a sense of mastery. -- Mike Mentzer
Yesterday I posted the 300th blog I have written for Goodreads. I do not expect you to be impressed by that. As the saying goes, "That and five bucks will buy you a cup of coffee."
For the independent author, however, even these pebbly little milestones can have great significance, if only by a species of necessity. When I began blogging here in 2016, I had just released my first novel, CAGE LIFE, and was clumsily trying to learn how to navigate the seas of independent authordom. To paraphrase one of my favorite songs:
There was I time I saw a man
Who traveled in a caravan
He said "seek and ye shall find"
But I haven't found
And I wonder where you are
Curious
And to continue with a paraphrase of the same song:
eight years down the road
haven't found the pot of gold
Yes, it's been eight years. Kind of hard to believe, really. I find myself older, less ignorant, much better regarded, and not terribly richer than when I set out. I've received more awards and accolades than I can list, I've been an Amazon bestseller on many occasions in half a dozen different countries, but if I piled up every coin I have ever earned in the writing game, it would come to a little less than twenty thousand dollars. I had a fairly famous literary agent once, but nothing came of it, any more than anything came of those damnable Hollywood meetings I used to have two or three times a year, in which I sat in the presence of the great and powerful and got a great deal of smoke blown up my ass and nothing else out of the experience save a free lunch.
Am I discouraged by this? Angry? Bitter? The answer is yes on all fronts, but to a varying degree. Discouragement is not really part of my makeup as a writer. As yet another song goes, I get knocked down, but I get up again – and quickly. In fact my whole tenure as an independent author comes out of a brutal defeat I suffered at the hands of a movie producer who balked at a script I had worked on in tandem with a well-established partner for no less than six years. I spent one day in denial, three days in an alcohol-soaked depression, and then dusted myself off and put plans in motion to publish CAGE LIFE independently, a decision that changed the course of my life. This resilience not courage nor is it pride. It exists simply because writing is not something I do, it's something I am. You cannot separate me from it, we are one and the same. Step on a flower and it's still a flower, however crushed in appearance. Tear it out of the ground and it leaves its roots. Dig out the roots and, well, you get the picture. There will always be some spore, some particle of creativity within me that cannot be extinguished so long as I have breath and life. This of course does not preclude anger or bitterness. I do get frustrated sometimes, frustration is just a type of anger, and in my weaker moments I do succumb to bitterness. I've had my share of successes, but they never seem to resonate, never seem to lead to anything more substantive. The dream – the one in which I am free to do nothing but write for a living and not keep a “day job” – remains just that. And of course this situation can also lead me back to discouragement. It's a loop, and there is not a helluva lot of comfort in the knowledge that every artist who has ever lived, regardless of medium, has walked this circle at some point or other in their career. Vincent Van Gogh walked it all the way to his grave, which is not a pleasant thing to contemplate. I should not care to achieve massive success when I am in the ground and unable to take pleasure in it, or to see the pleasure it produces in others.
There is, however, more to an independent writer's life than absinthe and self-pity. There is also freedom. Every writer I know under a traditional publishing contract writes books in the same vein because this is their brand. The mystery writer writes mystery, the erotica writer, erotica, and so forth, into infinity. None of them are permitted to deviate from their chosen or appointed genre, unless of course they do so under a pen name, which is not as easy a course as you might think, since debuting a new line under a pseudonym means sacrificing your name recognition and starting again from scratch with no built-in audience. Traditional authors, too, are subject to the “slate,” the schedule of releases which often delays publication of their work for several years after its completion. Then there is the money. Even successful mid-list authors cannot live solely on the income they derive from writing. The fact is only a tiny fraction of writers, barely rising to the level of a measurable percentage, make enough money to live exclusively on their royalties and production deals. For most of the rest it is (at best) a lucrative side-hustle, or (at worst) an expensive hobby. In other words, writing is a business in which you can make a killing, but not a living.
As an indie author I can write whatever the hell I want and publish whenever the hell I wish. I am not subject to the whims of an agent or a publishing house or even my own audience, since by embracing no one particular genre, my audience, such as it is, are buying the books because I wrote them and not because they have any particular label assigned. It has taken me eight years, but I now have a small but slowly growing cadre of people who will buy anything I release whether it falls in a genre they ordinarily read or no. I am my own boss, my own guiding star. And it follows that this is more valuable than you might expect.
When I still lived in Los Angeles, I knew a content creator on YouTube who, despite having no master but himself, and while still in his 20s able to live a life of fairly exaggerated decadence in the sense that he could sleep as late as he wished, stay up all night, work the hours he chose, produce the content he wished, and so forth, nevertheless felt oppressed and exhausted by the necessity of doing what amounted to the same thing every day in a different way. His “brand,” you see, was commentary on the video game industry; his audience was interested in him only for that reason and any time he tried to move away from that subject his views plummeted and he was forced to return to his principal, indeed only, subject. While still very young he was already burning out from the demands imposed upon him by his narrow specialty. There was so much more to him as a human being, but no one seemed interested in it. In my present guise I will never have that problem. The problem I have is actually several smaller problems balled together to form one large trouble: lack of recognition leads to lack of money which leads to the loop previously mentioned. Egoistically or no, I crave more fame and more cash; but while I may be a shallow, materialistic fool in this regard, and sacrificing some abstract level of credibility in the artistic community for not starving impassively in my garret with the dignity of a true martyr, I am not such a complete fool that I believe there is a moment in which anyone truly “makes it.” Your profile grows larger, your paychecks have more zeroes, your ability to do things or buy things increases, but you remain a human being with all of a human's attendant problems and worries. They simply change in character. I will give you an example from my own experience, since I have no other to offer.
When I received my black belt in White Tiger Tae Kwon Do, my master smiled at me in his cheerful but slightly sadistic Korean way and said, “Now we can begin.” For him it was an axiom: the black belt was not an end point, it was a turning point. It marked the moment in the education of the student where he had proven he was capable of absorbing knowledge, submitting to discipline, and mastering the fundamental techniques necessary to advance further. Nothing more than that. And I guess that is the way I view myself presently: as a student who has advanced his studies to the point where greater responsibilities should now await him: not greater successes per se, but greater challenges with longer odds but also longer payoffs. Because, you might care to read this twice as it is one way of summing up everything I've learned in the last eight years in a sentence, perfect freedom is not the freedom to succeed but the freedom to fail. This is also perfect democracy. The reason people resent "industry plants" like Billie Eilish is not because life positioned them for success, and not even because they usually lie about how they came to that success, but because mastery is supposed to be a difficult proposition. It is supposed to come about by an effort of will, by constant homage to both an inner and an outer discipline, by humility in the face of superior knowledge, and by a great deal of effort and hard word spread consistently over time. It is not a mantle to be inherited, a crown to be passed on. It is a process. And in order for the process to have validity it should be the same for everyone. Not what they experience through the process or what they take away from it but rather what they endure going through it.
You may think I have lost the thread here. Not at all. We are speaking of freedom, which also includes the freedom to suffer for your choices, or in this case for your art. Art and suffering walk hand in hand in this journey. Meaningful art may be produced in a state of bliss but far more has been born out of pain than any emotional state. A writer operating in a state of security who has not paid any dues nor undergone any suffering nor submitted to any school of discipline may produce art out of sheer talent but he will certainly not develop his talent to its fullest extent. He will be like a flower that grows in shadow, which however large and beautiful it comes to be, never actually fulfills its potential.
Some might be tempted to believe I am smoking copium of the highest grade but it is they and not I who have lost the plot. Many roads lead to the same destination and many words describe the same thing. When I describe freedom I am describing suffering and when I describe suffering and I am describing freedom. I suffer by necessity because I am, or rather I was, the artist I am describing above. I was born into security and paid no dues and refused to submit to discipline or training. In spite of this I was able to be traditionally published at the age of seventeen and to place in various prestigious literary contests by the time I was twenty. I came to believe I was perfect as I was and could succeed on sheer talent. I paid very dearly for this mistake, but everything I am now and everything I have produced is the result of the suffering I experienced in consequence; the freedom I now enjoy is the result of the life experiences granted to me by my failure to achieve wealth and success at a young age, when I took them as my due and therefore could not have appreciated them nor experienced any gratitude as a result of them. My development as a writer and a human occurred because of negative consequences. Over and over again in life I am reminded that we value only that which we have struggled to obtain and the greater the struggle the greater the value. I have not been positioned for success, but I have positioned myself for success, so success when it comes will be all the sweeter even though it is not the endgame. There is no endgame for a writer except to write great words, to brood over them, to crush out the cigarette and sip the whiskey and blow away the pencil shavings and try and make the words greater and greater still, until finally there is nothing to add or take away and they must be released to their audience, be that a single individual or ten thousand individuals. But even if no one ever reads another word I write I would write for the void. I do not have any choice nor do I want one. Like Sherlock Homles, I play the game for the game's own sake. Until then I remain merely your Watson.
Yesterday I posted the 300th blog I have written for Goodreads. I do not expect you to be impressed by that. As the saying goes, "That and five bucks will buy you a cup of coffee."
For the independent author, however, even these pebbly little milestones can have great significance, if only by a species of necessity. When I began blogging here in 2016, I had just released my first novel, CAGE LIFE, and was clumsily trying to learn how to navigate the seas of independent authordom. To paraphrase one of my favorite songs:
There was I time I saw a man
Who traveled in a caravan
He said "seek and ye shall find"
But I haven't found
And I wonder where you are
Curious
And to continue with a paraphrase of the same song:
eight years down the road
haven't found the pot of gold
Yes, it's been eight years. Kind of hard to believe, really. I find myself older, less ignorant, much better regarded, and not terribly richer than when I set out. I've received more awards and accolades than I can list, I've been an Amazon bestseller on many occasions in half a dozen different countries, but if I piled up every coin I have ever earned in the writing game, it would come to a little less than twenty thousand dollars. I had a fairly famous literary agent once, but nothing came of it, any more than anything came of those damnable Hollywood meetings I used to have two or three times a year, in which I sat in the presence of the great and powerful and got a great deal of smoke blown up my ass and nothing else out of the experience save a free lunch.
Am I discouraged by this? Angry? Bitter? The answer is yes on all fronts, but to a varying degree. Discouragement is not really part of my makeup as a writer. As yet another song goes, I get knocked down, but I get up again – and quickly. In fact my whole tenure as an independent author comes out of a brutal defeat I suffered at the hands of a movie producer who balked at a script I had worked on in tandem with a well-established partner for no less than six years. I spent one day in denial, three days in an alcohol-soaked depression, and then dusted myself off and put plans in motion to publish CAGE LIFE independently, a decision that changed the course of my life. This resilience not courage nor is it pride. It exists simply because writing is not something I do, it's something I am. You cannot separate me from it, we are one and the same. Step on a flower and it's still a flower, however crushed in appearance. Tear it out of the ground and it leaves its roots. Dig out the roots and, well, you get the picture. There will always be some spore, some particle of creativity within me that cannot be extinguished so long as I have breath and life. This of course does not preclude anger or bitterness. I do get frustrated sometimes, frustration is just a type of anger, and in my weaker moments I do succumb to bitterness. I've had my share of successes, but they never seem to resonate, never seem to lead to anything more substantive. The dream – the one in which I am free to do nothing but write for a living and not keep a “day job” – remains just that. And of course this situation can also lead me back to discouragement. It's a loop, and there is not a helluva lot of comfort in the knowledge that every artist who has ever lived, regardless of medium, has walked this circle at some point or other in their career. Vincent Van Gogh walked it all the way to his grave, which is not a pleasant thing to contemplate. I should not care to achieve massive success when I am in the ground and unable to take pleasure in it, or to see the pleasure it produces in others.
There is, however, more to an independent writer's life than absinthe and self-pity. There is also freedom. Every writer I know under a traditional publishing contract writes books in the same vein because this is their brand. The mystery writer writes mystery, the erotica writer, erotica, and so forth, into infinity. None of them are permitted to deviate from their chosen or appointed genre, unless of course they do so under a pen name, which is not as easy a course as you might think, since debuting a new line under a pseudonym means sacrificing your name recognition and starting again from scratch with no built-in audience. Traditional authors, too, are subject to the “slate,” the schedule of releases which often delays publication of their work for several years after its completion. Then there is the money. Even successful mid-list authors cannot live solely on the income they derive from writing. The fact is only a tiny fraction of writers, barely rising to the level of a measurable percentage, make enough money to live exclusively on their royalties and production deals. For most of the rest it is (at best) a lucrative side-hustle, or (at worst) an expensive hobby. In other words, writing is a business in which you can make a killing, but not a living.
As an indie author I can write whatever the hell I want and publish whenever the hell I wish. I am not subject to the whims of an agent or a publishing house or even my own audience, since by embracing no one particular genre, my audience, such as it is, are buying the books because I wrote them and not because they have any particular label assigned. It has taken me eight years, but I now have a small but slowly growing cadre of people who will buy anything I release whether it falls in a genre they ordinarily read or no. I am my own boss, my own guiding star. And it follows that this is more valuable than you might expect.
When I still lived in Los Angeles, I knew a content creator on YouTube who, despite having no master but himself, and while still in his 20s able to live a life of fairly exaggerated decadence in the sense that he could sleep as late as he wished, stay up all night, work the hours he chose, produce the content he wished, and so forth, nevertheless felt oppressed and exhausted by the necessity of doing what amounted to the same thing every day in a different way. His “brand,” you see, was commentary on the video game industry; his audience was interested in him only for that reason and any time he tried to move away from that subject his views plummeted and he was forced to return to his principal, indeed only, subject. While still very young he was already burning out from the demands imposed upon him by his narrow specialty. There was so much more to him as a human being, but no one seemed interested in it. In my present guise I will never have that problem. The problem I have is actually several smaller problems balled together to form one large trouble: lack of recognition leads to lack of money which leads to the loop previously mentioned. Egoistically or no, I crave more fame and more cash; but while I may be a shallow, materialistic fool in this regard, and sacrificing some abstract level of credibility in the artistic community for not starving impassively in my garret with the dignity of a true martyr, I am not such a complete fool that I believe there is a moment in which anyone truly “makes it.” Your profile grows larger, your paychecks have more zeroes, your ability to do things or buy things increases, but you remain a human being with all of a human's attendant problems and worries. They simply change in character. I will give you an example from my own experience, since I have no other to offer.
When I received my black belt in White Tiger Tae Kwon Do, my master smiled at me in his cheerful but slightly sadistic Korean way and said, “Now we can begin.” For him it was an axiom: the black belt was not an end point, it was a turning point. It marked the moment in the education of the student where he had proven he was capable of absorbing knowledge, submitting to discipline, and mastering the fundamental techniques necessary to advance further. Nothing more than that. And I guess that is the way I view myself presently: as a student who has advanced his studies to the point where greater responsibilities should now await him: not greater successes per se, but greater challenges with longer odds but also longer payoffs. Because, you might care to read this twice as it is one way of summing up everything I've learned in the last eight years in a sentence, perfect freedom is not the freedom to succeed but the freedom to fail. This is also perfect democracy. The reason people resent "industry plants" like Billie Eilish is not because life positioned them for success, and not even because they usually lie about how they came to that success, but because mastery is supposed to be a difficult proposition. It is supposed to come about by an effort of will, by constant homage to both an inner and an outer discipline, by humility in the face of superior knowledge, and by a great deal of effort and hard word spread consistently over time. It is not a mantle to be inherited, a crown to be passed on. It is a process. And in order for the process to have validity it should be the same for everyone. Not what they experience through the process or what they take away from it but rather what they endure going through it.
You may think I have lost the thread here. Not at all. We are speaking of freedom, which also includes the freedom to suffer for your choices, or in this case for your art. Art and suffering walk hand in hand in this journey. Meaningful art may be produced in a state of bliss but far more has been born out of pain than any emotional state. A writer operating in a state of security who has not paid any dues nor undergone any suffering nor submitted to any school of discipline may produce art out of sheer talent but he will certainly not develop his talent to its fullest extent. He will be like a flower that grows in shadow, which however large and beautiful it comes to be, never actually fulfills its potential.
Some might be tempted to believe I am smoking copium of the highest grade but it is they and not I who have lost the plot. Many roads lead to the same destination and many words describe the same thing. When I describe freedom I am describing suffering and when I describe suffering and I am describing freedom. I suffer by necessity because I am, or rather I was, the artist I am describing above. I was born into security and paid no dues and refused to submit to discipline or training. In spite of this I was able to be traditionally published at the age of seventeen and to place in various prestigious literary contests by the time I was twenty. I came to believe I was perfect as I was and could succeed on sheer talent. I paid very dearly for this mistake, but everything I am now and everything I have produced is the result of the suffering I experienced in consequence; the freedom I now enjoy is the result of the life experiences granted to me by my failure to achieve wealth and success at a young age, when I took them as my due and therefore could not have appreciated them nor experienced any gratitude as a result of them. My development as a writer and a human occurred because of negative consequences. Over and over again in life I am reminded that we value only that which we have struggled to obtain and the greater the struggle the greater the value. I have not been positioned for success, but I have positioned myself for success, so success when it comes will be all the sweeter even though it is not the endgame. There is no endgame for a writer except to write great words, to brood over them, to crush out the cigarette and sip the whiskey and blow away the pencil shavings and try and make the words greater and greater still, until finally there is nothing to add or take away and they must be released to their audience, be that a single individual or ten thousand individuals. But even if no one ever reads another word I write I would write for the void. I do not have any choice nor do I want one. Like Sherlock Homles, I play the game for the game's own sake. Until then I remain merely your Watson.
June 17, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: JOSEPH SHOEMON'S "CROSSES IN THE WIND"
Here was a royal fellowship of death. -- "Henry V," Act IV, Scene 8
There are certain aspects of war which have been written about endlessly. Memoirs by infantrymen, for example, abound. Ditto paratroopers, fighter pilots, bomber crewmen, snipers, commandos, submariners, and Marines. And when we think of the Second World War, it's important to remember that something like fifteen million men and several hundred thousand women served in the military in one capacity or other. There are other areas, however, which are neglected or in some cases, totally unexplored. CROSSES IN THE WIND covers a subject which, up 'til now, I had only seen briefly examined by the legendary WW2 journalist Ernie Pyle: Graves Registration. The soldiers who had to collect the dead, identify them, and bury their remains. Author Joseph Shoeman was well qualified to paint this picture, having commanded a G.R. company in WW2 (European Theater) which buried 21,000 American soldiers and probably two or three times that many Germans.
Now, and at the risk of interjecting a commercial for my own work in this review, I must say that when it comes to the Second World War especially, Americans have a protective and occasionally stupid attitude -- stupid meaning literally stupid, i.e. willfully ignorant. WW2 is for Americans a sacred moment in our history: it is far more mythologized than the Revolutionary War or even the Civil War, and as a result of a mountain of half-fantastical war movies and libraries full of cheerleading "history" books heavy on propaganda and light on history which have been produced in the last eighty years, the uglier and nastier realities of our involvement in the conflict have been forgotten, denied or dressed up in angelic clothing. When I wrote SINNER'S CROSS, the first of my own WW2 novels, I did so with the conscious purpose of discussing subjects which by and large have been ignored because they don't fit the haloed Ambrose - Spielberg narrative. Now, I am not claiming this haloed narrative, complete with stirring and elegaic music by John Williams, is wrong per se: I am merely stating it is incomplete, because it ignores or minimizes much of what is uncomfortable.
If you doubt me on this, allow me to provide irrefutable evidence provided by none other that General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, who, when he wrote his own memoir of the war, CRUSADE IN EUROPE, devoted exactly fifteen words to the Battle of the Huertgen Forest, which was the longest battle ever fought in the history of the United States Army. Those words were: "The Germans, aided by geography, put up an unusually stubborn defense, but Yankee doggedness won through." That's it. That's all the ink he spent on a battle in which 14,000 American soldiers were killed and anywhere between 33,000 and 50,000 were wounded. Dear old Ike could not afford to say more, because even a cursory analysis of the campaign would have exposed glaring deficiencies in his leadership, the leadership of Omar Bradley, Courtney Hodges, "Lightning" Joe Collins and various other much celebrated brass hats who could think of no better strategy than feeding one infantry division after another into the meatgrinder almost without results. It was better for Ike to stay silent. As a result, the American public is almost totally ignorant of the Huertgen Forest Campaign, because it is "inconvenient to history." It is the spatter of blood, the clot of mud, the faint smell of decomposition, the scream in the distance that unsettles our pride and makes nonsens of the red, white and blue cartoon we see up on the screen.
CROSSES IN THE WIND is a short but very effective memoir of Shoemon's service with the Graves Registration company, and by its very existence it goes against this sanitized, deficient sort of narrative, by probing the grisly, unglamorous side of the war, one which cannot be made attractive by beautiful sountracks, snappy dialog or brilliant cinematography. Shoemon takes the reader from his training in the States, to deployment to England, and finally to France just after D-Day. He explains how the unit operated and what its responsibilities were, which included the creation of both temporary and permanent military cemeteries. He explains what tasks the individual soldiers in the company had, and some of the difficulties they faced -- internally, from interfering superiors, and externally, from German bombs and shells. (In one instance he records a massive night air raid by the Luftwaffe which blew up some fuel and ammo dumps near his position.) He takes the reader from Normandy to the end of the war, when much additional work was done locating bodies, identifying and burying them, and erecting some of the largest military cemeteries in Europe. I was struck, and moved, by his pride in his unit and by the reverence he and his men had for the dead. They took everything they did with the utmost seriousness and never seemed to become cynical, taking great care to produce cemeteries, even temporary ones, of the greatest aesthetic beauty possible: they went as far as to obtain truckloads of gravel, enormities of seeds and flowers, and all other items necessary to beautify the cemeteries. They even created grave sites for dead Germans, though they were somewhat less ornate and always kept well separated from Allied dead. His greatest passion, and that of his men, was in doing everything possible to identify unknown soldiers. Dental records, photographs, fingerprints and various other methods were used, including the rehydration of fingertips to get prints, and when these sometimes failed, the unit did not give up but sidelined the case for additional investigation when time permitted. The respect an army shows its fallen goes a long way to explaining what kind of values it has -- witness the dead of the present-day Russian army in Ukraine, abandoned and left to rot.
Now I would be lying if I said the book had the detail that I wanted. It's under 200 pages (a lengthy appendix gives it a deceptive thickness), and Shomon provides too much poorly written historical background, and not enough detail about what he and his company did, sometimes -- quite often -- resorting to bland generalities when the narrative calls for disgusting honesty. If memory serves, he explicitly states in the opening that he doesn't want to go into too much anecdotal detail because it would be too painful for those who lost loved ones in the war to read about. Since he wrote this book in 1947, just two years after the end of the war, I completely understand this impulse, but it left me with the feeling that there was a great deal left on the table. Gruesome details kind of go hand in hand with war memoirs, and I would think most especially in this case. Lest I seem as if I'm contradicting myself here, Shoemon is manifestly not trying to sanitize the war or glamorize it in any way whatsoever, but his humanity prevented him from slamming home its full horror.
That having been said, Shomon's picture of the Graves Registration companies in war is just about the only one we have of which I'm aware, and this little book is highly readable and quite informative despite its omissions and modest size. It's fascinating to think that the graves of which he speaks are still standing and still just as meticulously tended in 2022 as they were in 1946. Whatever your opinion of the military, anyone who claims that it is disrespectful to the memory of its dead is simply lying to you. (How it treats its living veterans is another matter entirely. But then again, how American society treats its living veterans vs. its "honored dead" is also another matter entirely, and one in which we are all of us complicit.
Now, it so happens I have a slight, accidental connection to the author. At a criminal trial that took place this year, I was chatting with one of my witnesses before he took the stand, and somehow the subject of this book came up. He expressed complete astonishment that I had read it, and told me that his father not only had served with Shoemon's company, he is mentioned no less than nine times in Shoemon's book. I confirmed this to be true. It is a mark of what a small world we live in, and how closely connected we are both to each other and to the dead who gave up their tomorrows so that we could sit here in comfort and, perhaps, spare a moment to reflect upon their sacrifice.
There are certain aspects of war which have been written about endlessly. Memoirs by infantrymen, for example, abound. Ditto paratroopers, fighter pilots, bomber crewmen, snipers, commandos, submariners, and Marines. And when we think of the Second World War, it's important to remember that something like fifteen million men and several hundred thousand women served in the military in one capacity or other. There are other areas, however, which are neglected or in some cases, totally unexplored. CROSSES IN THE WIND covers a subject which, up 'til now, I had only seen briefly examined by the legendary WW2 journalist Ernie Pyle: Graves Registration. The soldiers who had to collect the dead, identify them, and bury their remains. Author Joseph Shoeman was well qualified to paint this picture, having commanded a G.R. company in WW2 (European Theater) which buried 21,000 American soldiers and probably two or three times that many Germans.
Now, and at the risk of interjecting a commercial for my own work in this review, I must say that when it comes to the Second World War especially, Americans have a protective and occasionally stupid attitude -- stupid meaning literally stupid, i.e. willfully ignorant. WW2 is for Americans a sacred moment in our history: it is far more mythologized than the Revolutionary War or even the Civil War, and as a result of a mountain of half-fantastical war movies and libraries full of cheerleading "history" books heavy on propaganda and light on history which have been produced in the last eighty years, the uglier and nastier realities of our involvement in the conflict have been forgotten, denied or dressed up in angelic clothing. When I wrote SINNER'S CROSS, the first of my own WW2 novels, I did so with the conscious purpose of discussing subjects which by and large have been ignored because they don't fit the haloed Ambrose - Spielberg narrative. Now, I am not claiming this haloed narrative, complete with stirring and elegaic music by John Williams, is wrong per se: I am merely stating it is incomplete, because it ignores or minimizes much of what is uncomfortable.
If you doubt me on this, allow me to provide irrefutable evidence provided by none other that General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, who, when he wrote his own memoir of the war, CRUSADE IN EUROPE, devoted exactly fifteen words to the Battle of the Huertgen Forest, which was the longest battle ever fought in the history of the United States Army. Those words were: "The Germans, aided by geography, put up an unusually stubborn defense, but Yankee doggedness won through." That's it. That's all the ink he spent on a battle in which 14,000 American soldiers were killed and anywhere between 33,000 and 50,000 were wounded. Dear old Ike could not afford to say more, because even a cursory analysis of the campaign would have exposed glaring deficiencies in his leadership, the leadership of Omar Bradley, Courtney Hodges, "Lightning" Joe Collins and various other much celebrated brass hats who could think of no better strategy than feeding one infantry division after another into the meatgrinder almost without results. It was better for Ike to stay silent. As a result, the American public is almost totally ignorant of the Huertgen Forest Campaign, because it is "inconvenient to history." It is the spatter of blood, the clot of mud, the faint smell of decomposition, the scream in the distance that unsettles our pride and makes nonsens of the red, white and blue cartoon we see up on the screen.
CROSSES IN THE WIND is a short but very effective memoir of Shoemon's service with the Graves Registration company, and by its very existence it goes against this sanitized, deficient sort of narrative, by probing the grisly, unglamorous side of the war, one which cannot be made attractive by beautiful sountracks, snappy dialog or brilliant cinematography. Shoemon takes the reader from his training in the States, to deployment to England, and finally to France just after D-Day. He explains how the unit operated and what its responsibilities were, which included the creation of both temporary and permanent military cemeteries. He explains what tasks the individual soldiers in the company had, and some of the difficulties they faced -- internally, from interfering superiors, and externally, from German bombs and shells. (In one instance he records a massive night air raid by the Luftwaffe which blew up some fuel and ammo dumps near his position.) He takes the reader from Normandy to the end of the war, when much additional work was done locating bodies, identifying and burying them, and erecting some of the largest military cemeteries in Europe. I was struck, and moved, by his pride in his unit and by the reverence he and his men had for the dead. They took everything they did with the utmost seriousness and never seemed to become cynical, taking great care to produce cemeteries, even temporary ones, of the greatest aesthetic beauty possible: they went as far as to obtain truckloads of gravel, enormities of seeds and flowers, and all other items necessary to beautify the cemeteries. They even created grave sites for dead Germans, though they were somewhat less ornate and always kept well separated from Allied dead. His greatest passion, and that of his men, was in doing everything possible to identify unknown soldiers. Dental records, photographs, fingerprints and various other methods were used, including the rehydration of fingertips to get prints, and when these sometimes failed, the unit did not give up but sidelined the case for additional investigation when time permitted. The respect an army shows its fallen goes a long way to explaining what kind of values it has -- witness the dead of the present-day Russian army in Ukraine, abandoned and left to rot.
Now I would be lying if I said the book had the detail that I wanted. It's under 200 pages (a lengthy appendix gives it a deceptive thickness), and Shomon provides too much poorly written historical background, and not enough detail about what he and his company did, sometimes -- quite often -- resorting to bland generalities when the narrative calls for disgusting honesty. If memory serves, he explicitly states in the opening that he doesn't want to go into too much anecdotal detail because it would be too painful for those who lost loved ones in the war to read about. Since he wrote this book in 1947, just two years after the end of the war, I completely understand this impulse, but it left me with the feeling that there was a great deal left on the table. Gruesome details kind of go hand in hand with war memoirs, and I would think most especially in this case. Lest I seem as if I'm contradicting myself here, Shoemon is manifestly not trying to sanitize the war or glamorize it in any way whatsoever, but his humanity prevented him from slamming home its full horror.
That having been said, Shomon's picture of the Graves Registration companies in war is just about the only one we have of which I'm aware, and this little book is highly readable and quite informative despite its omissions and modest size. It's fascinating to think that the graves of which he speaks are still standing and still just as meticulously tended in 2022 as they were in 1946. Whatever your opinion of the military, anyone who claims that it is disrespectful to the memory of its dead is simply lying to you. (How it treats its living veterans is another matter entirely. But then again, how American society treats its living veterans vs. its "honored dead" is also another matter entirely, and one in which we are all of us complicit.
Now, it so happens I have a slight, accidental connection to the author. At a criminal trial that took place this year, I was chatting with one of my witnesses before he took the stand, and somehow the subject of this book came up. He expressed complete astonishment that I had read it, and told me that his father not only had served with Shoemon's company, he is mentioned no less than nine times in Shoemon's book. I confirmed this to be true. It is a mark of what a small world we live in, and how closely connected we are both to each other and to the dead who gave up their tomorrows so that we could sit here in comfort and, perhaps, spare a moment to reflect upon their sacrifice.
June 15, 2024
AS I PLEASE XXV: SATURDAY RAMBLE
So you may have noticed I've been a little busier on this blog than usual lately. I guess the whole "this wedsite is dedicated to books and reading, why the hell don't I talk about books and reading more often?" question finally required an answer, in the form of adding frequent book reviews to the stew of other-subject blogs which makes up Stone Cold Prose. In any event, I plan on releasing several of these short but I hope impactful book reviews each week in addition to anything else I may be doing. For the moment I'm concentrating more on novels, but as I read nonfiction to fiction at a rate of anywhere from 3: 1 to 5:1, depending on my yearly whims, I can't promise I won't be reviewing a lot of history, biography, autiobiography, and so on as well. I really am making a concerted effort this year to read more novels, especially by authors I've never read before, and it is paying off, but it will take years to redress this particular balance.
Exactly why I, a novelist, do not read more fiction is a curious question. The most obvious answer is that I enjoy nonfiction, especially history and biography/autobiography/memoir. This is true, but it is not the whole story. The answer also lies within my own mental laziness -- novels take more imagination and therefore more energy -- and in my own fragile egotism. As a writer I find great inspiration in reading fiction, but I also get very frustrated when I read "the best book this year" and find it, or merely believe it anyway, to be a huge pile of crap. As someone who fleetingly had a top literary agent, and who has sat down with mega-producers, or had such meetings inked onto the schedule only to see them go up in smoke due to freakish circumstances such as vehicular accidents or last-moment changes in studio regime, you can perhaps understand my bitterness and jealousy in this area even if it is childish and does me no good and probably much harm. But here at any rate is what I'm working on to push my "brand" a little farther forward in the Year of our Lord, 2024:
* In a week or so I'm sitting down to lunch with a publicity agent I met down in Miami when I accepted the Readers Favorite Gold Medal for my novel Sinner's Cross. I have previously been on his podcast, and was deeply impressed by the seriousness of the questions he posed to me. I've done just enough interviews and podcasts to distinguish between the guys that are just looking to fill up space in their posting schedule with a warm body, and those that actually want to coax some interesting responses out of their guests/interviewees, and this gentleman falls into the latter. I won't mention his name here because I've not asked permission to do so, but if anything substantive happens at our luncheon (and what a fancy word that is for a cheeseburger and a beer consumed in a diner), rest assured I will announce it here.
* I now have five, count 'em, five novels (rather, four novels and a short story anthology) submitted to Readers' Favorite's book awards for this year. I have another novel called The Night Hunter, which I finished some time ago but chose not to publish myself, submitted to a contest for, you guessed it, unpublished novels. I also subbed Sinner's Cross, to two other contests I've never entered before, and put my latest (Exiles) up for a review via Author's Reading, with intentions of entering that contest as well, provided the review is good enough.
* In two weeks I will be at the In Your Write Mind conference at Seton Hill University, both as an attendee and a presenter. I shall be teaching two hour-long modules, "Writing Violence" and "Writing Dialog" and look forward to sitting down to dinner with my old writing mentor and occasional partner, Patrick Picciarelli, and my editor, Michael Dell. Writing by nature is a solitary occupation so it is always good to be able to mingle with your own kind in both a learning and a social capacity.
* I have now bought most of the equipment I need to begin either a podcast or a YouTube channel, or both. I am still gunshy about these projects, because a) I'm intimidated by learning such things as editing and so on, and b) I have so many ideas that it's impossible for me to focus on anything specific. But in this day and age it's impossible to get anywhere unless you're willing to embrace technology, meaning social media and so forth, to its fullest extent.
* As I said above, I plan on being much more active with blogging than usual, but also possibly joining Word Press or some other popular blogging site since Goodreads by its nature is rather a niche market and not really suited to the sort of blogs I often produce. I also plan a massive overhaul of my (cough) charming but (cough cough) rather dated author site, mileswatsonauthor.com, which (cough cough cough) offers my entire catalog of paperback books, autographed and personalized.
* I spent the last two days drafting Dark Trade, the third installment of my CAGE LIFE series. I am really very happy with the manuscript, but the time has come for me to pass it off to my editor for a really thorough scourging, the dreaded "structural edit" which tests not grammar and spelling and syntax and the rest of that crap, but the stuff that really matters, story and style and continuity and logic and plot. There is always a kind of tussle in these moments between my vision and his suggestions for improving it, and while the final say is of course mine I have learned to trust his instincts. A good editor is, like a good mechanic or a good doctor, absolutely indispensible; the very best writer in the world can only improve if he has the right guy scribbling notes in his margins, and the very worst will improve under the prod of his red pen, even if he lacks talent. In any event, Dark Trade will be released sometime in the fall of this year, I hope to the same acclaim that greeted its two antecedents.
I believe that covers the updates. Dunno about where you live, but here in Pennsylvania it is a beautiful sunny day, not too hot and not too humid, and a lengthy hike in the woods is calling my name. After that, I must return to the salt mine that is South of Hell, the third installment of my SINNER'S CROSS series. This book is giving me a hard time, as every book in this particular series has given me, but I expect nothing less. A novel is very much like a human being: it has its own personality, its own identity, and its own journey to take; the difference is it takes the author with it, from first word to final period...and sometimes that journey is a castiron sonofabitch. So be it. Unlike some vocations, nobody ever tells a writer, "This is gonna be easy." In fact, everyone usually tells you the exact opposite, and they're right. Writing is, if nothing else, one endeavor in which you will generally find there is truth in advertising.
Exactly why I, a novelist, do not read more fiction is a curious question. The most obvious answer is that I enjoy nonfiction, especially history and biography/autobiography/memoir. This is true, but it is not the whole story. The answer also lies within my own mental laziness -- novels take more imagination and therefore more energy -- and in my own fragile egotism. As a writer I find great inspiration in reading fiction, but I also get very frustrated when I read "the best book this year" and find it, or merely believe it anyway, to be a huge pile of crap. As someone who fleetingly had a top literary agent, and who has sat down with mega-producers, or had such meetings inked onto the schedule only to see them go up in smoke due to freakish circumstances such as vehicular accidents or last-moment changes in studio regime, you can perhaps understand my bitterness and jealousy in this area even if it is childish and does me no good and probably much harm. But here at any rate is what I'm working on to push my "brand" a little farther forward in the Year of our Lord, 2024:
* In a week or so I'm sitting down to lunch with a publicity agent I met down in Miami when I accepted the Readers Favorite Gold Medal for my novel Sinner's Cross. I have previously been on his podcast, and was deeply impressed by the seriousness of the questions he posed to me. I've done just enough interviews and podcasts to distinguish between the guys that are just looking to fill up space in their posting schedule with a warm body, and those that actually want to coax some interesting responses out of their guests/interviewees, and this gentleman falls into the latter. I won't mention his name here because I've not asked permission to do so, but if anything substantive happens at our luncheon (and what a fancy word that is for a cheeseburger and a beer consumed in a diner), rest assured I will announce it here.
* I now have five, count 'em, five novels (rather, four novels and a short story anthology) submitted to Readers' Favorite's book awards for this year. I have another novel called The Night Hunter, which I finished some time ago but chose not to publish myself, submitted to a contest for, you guessed it, unpublished novels. I also subbed Sinner's Cross, to two other contests I've never entered before, and put my latest (Exiles) up for a review via Author's Reading, with intentions of entering that contest as well, provided the review is good enough.
* In two weeks I will be at the In Your Write Mind conference at Seton Hill University, both as an attendee and a presenter. I shall be teaching two hour-long modules, "Writing Violence" and "Writing Dialog" and look forward to sitting down to dinner with my old writing mentor and occasional partner, Patrick Picciarelli, and my editor, Michael Dell. Writing by nature is a solitary occupation so it is always good to be able to mingle with your own kind in both a learning and a social capacity.
* I have now bought most of the equipment I need to begin either a podcast or a YouTube channel, or both. I am still gunshy about these projects, because a) I'm intimidated by learning such things as editing and so on, and b) I have so many ideas that it's impossible for me to focus on anything specific. But in this day and age it's impossible to get anywhere unless you're willing to embrace technology, meaning social media and so forth, to its fullest extent.
* As I said above, I plan on being much more active with blogging than usual, but also possibly joining Word Press or some other popular blogging site since Goodreads by its nature is rather a niche market and not really suited to the sort of blogs I often produce. I also plan a massive overhaul of my (cough) charming but (cough cough) rather dated author site, mileswatsonauthor.com, which (cough cough cough) offers my entire catalog of paperback books, autographed and personalized.
* I spent the last two days drafting Dark Trade, the third installment of my CAGE LIFE series. I am really very happy with the manuscript, but the time has come for me to pass it off to my editor for a really thorough scourging, the dreaded "structural edit" which tests not grammar and spelling and syntax and the rest of that crap, but the stuff that really matters, story and style and continuity and logic and plot. There is always a kind of tussle in these moments between my vision and his suggestions for improving it, and while the final say is of course mine I have learned to trust his instincts. A good editor is, like a good mechanic or a good doctor, absolutely indispensible; the very best writer in the world can only improve if he has the right guy scribbling notes in his margins, and the very worst will improve under the prod of his red pen, even if he lacks talent. In any event, Dark Trade will be released sometime in the fall of this year, I hope to the same acclaim that greeted its two antecedents.
I believe that covers the updates. Dunno about where you live, but here in Pennsylvania it is a beautiful sunny day, not too hot and not too humid, and a lengthy hike in the woods is calling my name. After that, I must return to the salt mine that is South of Hell, the third installment of my SINNER'S CROSS series. This book is giving me a hard time, as every book in this particular series has given me, but I expect nothing less. A novel is very much like a human being: it has its own personality, its own identity, and its own journey to take; the difference is it takes the author with it, from first word to final period...and sometimes that journey is a castiron sonofabitch. So be it. Unlike some vocations, nobody ever tells a writer, "This is gonna be easy." In fact, everyone usually tells you the exact opposite, and they're right. Writing is, if nothing else, one endeavor in which you will generally find there is truth in advertising.
June 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: CLIVE BARKER'S "THE THIEF OF ALWAYS"
What did it matter, anyway, he thought, whether this was a real place or a dream? It felt real, and that was all that mattered.
Cliver Barker is one of the most underrated of all modern novelists. Viewed initially as a putative successor to Stephen King back in the 80s when he first burst on the scene, he is in fact a writer of unlimited imagination and surprising daring, simply ignoring genre labels and letting his pen flow freely in any direction he chooses. If more of his works were on the screen (which is the main reason King is as famous as he is), and if not for the freak illness which has perhaps permanently sidelined his writing career, he might be as celebrated as King, albeit for somewhat different reasons.
Although one could argue it is unnecessary to include any biographical information in a book review, since all authors reveal themselves to some extent or other through their writing whether they intend to or not, in Barker's case, his approach is so unique that I feel it incumbent upon me to say that his original works -- THE BOOKS OF BLOOD, DAMNATION GAME, and THE HELLBOUND HEART -- were all flat-out horror stories. And what horror stories they were. Even when operating within the broad but hard-shouldered confines of genre expectations, however, Barker's personal backstory -- he's gay, English, and started his career in the theater, writing numerous plays and even starting his own theater troupe -- colored much of his work. His work was highly intellectual yet pulsed with sexuality, he seemed not so much to destroy taboos as act as if they did not exist (without ever coming off as a mere provocateur), and his imagination seemed almost too big for his actual writing talent, as considerable as it was. Anyone who read the amazing six-volume BOOKS OF BLOOD knew within a few pages that this was not someone who would, or possibly even could, restrict himself to a single category of storytelling.
THE THIEF OF ALWAYS is Barker's demonstration that as well as displaying a frighteningly vast imaginative capacity, he understands the basics of storytelling. A children's/YA novel illustrated with his own art -- I forgot to mention he is a passionate and prolific artist -- it is the story of Harvey Swick, a smart but disgruntled kid bored senseless by a bleak winter. Indeed, the story opens with one of the more memorable passages I've read in years:
"The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive. Here he was, buried in the belly of that smothering month, wondering if he would ever find his way out through the cold coils that lay between here and Easter."
Is there anyone raised in a climate that includes winter that cannot relate to this? I myself can do so on two levels: the level of childhood and young adulthood, where for me, winter -- minus the snow -- was simply a dull, cold, dispiriting bore in which seemingly huge stretches of time passed between school holidays; and the level of adulthood, where winter often loses even its periodic Wonderland charms and serves simply as a reminder of mortality.
So Swick is bored, but needless to say, his boredom will not last. One night he is invited by a mysterious stranger to spend some time at Holiday House, an isolated and equally mysterious home on the far edge of town where each day contains all four seasons, and every wish Harvey has immediately comes true. This is obviously preferable to the great gray beast February, with its crap weather and tedious homework assignments; nevertheless Harvey has to think it over before he decides to embark on his visit. Our protagonist is not a fool: he only crosses the threshold after extracting a promise that he can leave whenever he wishes. He soon discovers the description of the place is accurate: it's a kid's paradise, in which the course of a single day contains not only all the sweets and toys he could ever desire, but every holiday, including the natural kid's favorites -- Halloween and Christmas.
Naturally, there is a price to pay, and naturally Harvey doesn't figure this out until he's been partially compromised by the unseen "Mr. Hood," who operates Holiday House, and whose one rule is not to ask too many questions. Harvey, tempted by unending irresponsibility and gluttony, must make a choice between unquestioning acceptance of this largesse and his own growing sense of suspicion and unease. Why are there so many heaps of children's clothes in Holiday House, some of them very old, but so few children? What is in the sinister lake on the fringes of the grounds, where nobody wants to go? Why won't Mr. Hood show his face? What will happen if Harvey tries to leave? Harvey's struggles with whether to accept the paradise he has found at the expense of his instincts, or begun tugging on the threads of inconsistency he has discovered in his wanderings, are handled more deftly than you might imagine for a YA novel:
"However this miraculous place worked, it seemed real enough. The sun was hot, the soda was cold, the sky was blue, the grass was green. What more did he need to know?”
And indeed, Harvey goes a fair distance down the path of temptation, including being tempted by such things as power and revenge, before his instincts prevail and he begins to wonder if Holiday House isn't as much of a prison as the great gray beast February, i.e. real life. After that, his thoughts shift to escape, and following escape, to undoing the consequences of his time at Holiday House, which has a very peculiar effect on all of its residents....
In writing THE THIEF OF ALWAYS, Barker poses a question which has always been with mankind at one point or another in his development, but has gained new currency in the post-MATRIX era, where the nature of reality itself is coming into actual rather than merely philosophical question. Put simply, Barker is asking exactly what the meaning of life is for human beings: is it in the fulfillment of physical desires and impulses, or does it lay in less tangible territory, say, within the human heart itself, as a philosophy, an ability to appreciate, an understanding that winter pays for spring and unending pleasure is perhaps as dull a prison as "the great gray beast February?" This is the question he poses to Swick and the reader, and while it's a YA novel and therefore the question is going to get a definite answer, it's the right answer and it doesn't come easily or without risk, or cost. Like Neo, who is asked by Morpheus to choose between the blue and the red pill, Harvey must decide.
When I said Barker understands the fundamentals of tale-telling, I wasn't kidding. The surface of this story is rich, but beyond the fundamental question posed above, the underlying messages and morals are just as simple and strong and timeless. This brief novel -- or is it a novella? -- is in some ways a horror story, of course, pitched toward young adults so as not to be too unsettingly, but it bears a similarity to Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, the Arthurian legends, and any other coming-of-age tale in which the refusal, or acceptance, of adult responsibility by the young hero are the hinge of the story. It also has some very definite things to say about appreciating what you have and the dangers of immersing yourself in fantasy to escape reality; and finally about the nature of evil, embodied by Mr. Hood and his minions, and where embracing such evil inevitably leads.
THE THIEF OF ALWAYS was a fast, enjoyable and vivid read from a writer who will probably not get his full due until Hollywood finally starts to mine his imagination more fully and audiences pick up his novels as a consequence of seeing his ideas on screen. Until then, however, Barker is probably doomed to be remembered by the big public only as the guy behind the HELLRAISER franchise. But damn, he's got a lot to say and damn, does he (usually) say it well.
Cliver Barker is one of the most underrated of all modern novelists. Viewed initially as a putative successor to Stephen King back in the 80s when he first burst on the scene, he is in fact a writer of unlimited imagination and surprising daring, simply ignoring genre labels and letting his pen flow freely in any direction he chooses. If more of his works were on the screen (which is the main reason King is as famous as he is), and if not for the freak illness which has perhaps permanently sidelined his writing career, he might be as celebrated as King, albeit for somewhat different reasons.
Although one could argue it is unnecessary to include any biographical information in a book review, since all authors reveal themselves to some extent or other through their writing whether they intend to or not, in Barker's case, his approach is so unique that I feel it incumbent upon me to say that his original works -- THE BOOKS OF BLOOD, DAMNATION GAME, and THE HELLBOUND HEART -- were all flat-out horror stories. And what horror stories they were. Even when operating within the broad but hard-shouldered confines of genre expectations, however, Barker's personal backstory -- he's gay, English, and started his career in the theater, writing numerous plays and even starting his own theater troupe -- colored much of his work. His work was highly intellectual yet pulsed with sexuality, he seemed not so much to destroy taboos as act as if they did not exist (without ever coming off as a mere provocateur), and his imagination seemed almost too big for his actual writing talent, as considerable as it was. Anyone who read the amazing six-volume BOOKS OF BLOOD knew within a few pages that this was not someone who would, or possibly even could, restrict himself to a single category of storytelling.
THE THIEF OF ALWAYS is Barker's demonstration that as well as displaying a frighteningly vast imaginative capacity, he understands the basics of storytelling. A children's/YA novel illustrated with his own art -- I forgot to mention he is a passionate and prolific artist -- it is the story of Harvey Swick, a smart but disgruntled kid bored senseless by a bleak winter. Indeed, the story opens with one of the more memorable passages I've read in years:
"The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive. Here he was, buried in the belly of that smothering month, wondering if he would ever find his way out through the cold coils that lay between here and Easter."
Is there anyone raised in a climate that includes winter that cannot relate to this? I myself can do so on two levels: the level of childhood and young adulthood, where for me, winter -- minus the snow -- was simply a dull, cold, dispiriting bore in which seemingly huge stretches of time passed between school holidays; and the level of adulthood, where winter often loses even its periodic Wonderland charms and serves simply as a reminder of mortality.
So Swick is bored, but needless to say, his boredom will not last. One night he is invited by a mysterious stranger to spend some time at Holiday House, an isolated and equally mysterious home on the far edge of town where each day contains all four seasons, and every wish Harvey has immediately comes true. This is obviously preferable to the great gray beast February, with its crap weather and tedious homework assignments; nevertheless Harvey has to think it over before he decides to embark on his visit. Our protagonist is not a fool: he only crosses the threshold after extracting a promise that he can leave whenever he wishes. He soon discovers the description of the place is accurate: it's a kid's paradise, in which the course of a single day contains not only all the sweets and toys he could ever desire, but every holiday, including the natural kid's favorites -- Halloween and Christmas.
Naturally, there is a price to pay, and naturally Harvey doesn't figure this out until he's been partially compromised by the unseen "Mr. Hood," who operates Holiday House, and whose one rule is not to ask too many questions. Harvey, tempted by unending irresponsibility and gluttony, must make a choice between unquestioning acceptance of this largesse and his own growing sense of suspicion and unease. Why are there so many heaps of children's clothes in Holiday House, some of them very old, but so few children? What is in the sinister lake on the fringes of the grounds, where nobody wants to go? Why won't Mr. Hood show his face? What will happen if Harvey tries to leave? Harvey's struggles with whether to accept the paradise he has found at the expense of his instincts, or begun tugging on the threads of inconsistency he has discovered in his wanderings, are handled more deftly than you might imagine for a YA novel:
"However this miraculous place worked, it seemed real enough. The sun was hot, the soda was cold, the sky was blue, the grass was green. What more did he need to know?”
And indeed, Harvey goes a fair distance down the path of temptation, including being tempted by such things as power and revenge, before his instincts prevail and he begins to wonder if Holiday House isn't as much of a prison as the great gray beast February, i.e. real life. After that, his thoughts shift to escape, and following escape, to undoing the consequences of his time at Holiday House, which has a very peculiar effect on all of its residents....
In writing THE THIEF OF ALWAYS, Barker poses a question which has always been with mankind at one point or another in his development, but has gained new currency in the post-MATRIX era, where the nature of reality itself is coming into actual rather than merely philosophical question. Put simply, Barker is asking exactly what the meaning of life is for human beings: is it in the fulfillment of physical desires and impulses, or does it lay in less tangible territory, say, within the human heart itself, as a philosophy, an ability to appreciate, an understanding that winter pays for spring and unending pleasure is perhaps as dull a prison as "the great gray beast February?" This is the question he poses to Swick and the reader, and while it's a YA novel and therefore the question is going to get a definite answer, it's the right answer and it doesn't come easily or without risk, or cost. Like Neo, who is asked by Morpheus to choose between the blue and the red pill, Harvey must decide.
When I said Barker understands the fundamentals of tale-telling, I wasn't kidding. The surface of this story is rich, but beyond the fundamental question posed above, the underlying messages and morals are just as simple and strong and timeless. This brief novel -- or is it a novella? -- is in some ways a horror story, of course, pitched toward young adults so as not to be too unsettingly, but it bears a similarity to Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, the Arthurian legends, and any other coming-of-age tale in which the refusal, or acceptance, of adult responsibility by the young hero are the hinge of the story. It also has some very definite things to say about appreciating what you have and the dangers of immersing yourself in fantasy to escape reality; and finally about the nature of evil, embodied by Mr. Hood and his minions, and where embracing such evil inevitably leads.
THE THIEF OF ALWAYS was a fast, enjoyable and vivid read from a writer who will probably not get his full due until Hollywood finally starts to mine his imagination more fully and audiences pick up his novels as a consequence of seeing his ideas on screen. Until then, however, Barker is probably doomed to be remembered by the big public only as the guy behind the HELLRAISER franchise. But damn, he's got a lot to say and damn, does he (usually) say it well.
June 12, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: EVELYN WAUGH'S "MEN AT ARMS" (SWORD OF HONOR #1)
"After all, he reflected, his whole uniform was a disguise, his whole new calling a masquerade."
Evelyn Waugh (1903 - 1966) remains a towering figure in British literature, and unlike many successful authors of yesteryear has not been cast aside by history in part because his works, at rather long intervals, continue to be adapted for television and film: BRIDESHEAD REVISITED was turned into a successful mini-series starring Jeremy Irons in a breakout role, and his SWORD OF HONOR trilogy was compressed into a single movie starring Danile Craig just a few years ago. Marcel DeCoste labeled him "one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century," and whether one agrees or disagrees with this characterization, it is fair to say that Waugh, who was a former soldier, a prolific writer in many mediums including biography and journalism, a world-traveler and a devout (converted) Catholic unafraid to tackle taboo subjects such as abortion and homosexuality, had a lot to say and said most of it with considerable ability. At the center of his style was a dry, arch-eyebrowed, self-depreciating sort of wit that lends itself to satire -- not of the surrealist degree pursued by, say, Joseph Heller, but satire of a more foot-planted variety: realistic without forgetting that fiction is, after all, make-believe.
I do not want to write a biography of Waugh, a task for which I am unsuited anyway, but it is important to note two aspects of his personality which seemed to have shaped his writing more than any other. The first is that he was notorious for his devotion to the British class system and for his personal snobbery, which seems to have taken a very deep root during his Oxford years, and which never wilted thereafter despite his religious feeling. When he refers to the "lower classes" in his writings, there is no doubt that he regards them as just exactly that: lower, lesser, and well deserving of the place they occupy. George Orwell noted with exasperation that "Waugh was as good a novelist as one could possibly be...while holding positions which were untenable."
These traits were unsurprisingly mixed up with a reverence for the past and a dislike of everything new, especially egalitarian ideals like socialism, which began to push its way earnestly into the British system during the First World War and never stopped pushing. Indeed, the crumbling of the old, pre-1914 class system and all the traditions, decadence and pomps that came with it, is a frequent motif in British literature flowing from the pens of men who were part of, or deeply admired, that system, and Waugh was such a man on both counts. One of the last passages in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED scathingly notes the "these men [aristocrats] must die to make a world...so that things might be safe for the traveling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat, wet handshake, his grinning dentures." Like many of his class, Waugh's outlook was feudal: the lower classes existed to support the strata above them, and any attempt to shift their place in the stratum could only lead to calamity and collapse. This view was not merely selfish: it was founded in a belief that the system existed for a reason, that the cream rose to the top by its own nature, and that all art, architecture, music, literature, etc. flowed out of the upper classes. To tamper with them was to bring down not only a system but culture.
The second factor worth noting is Waugh's devout Catholicism, which he came to by conversion and which he regarded as a partially successful brake upon said snobbery. To quote his biography: "Strictly observant, Waugh admitted to Diana Cooper that his most difficult task was how to square the obligations of his faith with his indifference to his fellow men. When Nancy Mitford asked him how he reconciled his often objectionable conduct with being a Christian, Waugh replied that "were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible".
That having been said, let us turn to the subject of the review, the first installment of his famous "Sword of Honor" trilogy: MEN AT ARMS (1952). This was the first of Waugh's novels I had ever read, and what struck me almost immediately was the influence they plainly had upon Derek Robinson, an English novelist who followed Waugh and who is one of my favorites. It contains the same satirical tone, the same facetious banter, the same obsession with ironical outcomes, Murphy's Law, and the sense that everything important turns on trivial incidents and throwaway events. The very name Waugh uses to describe the trilogy, pompous as it is, is the first hint of the satire to come. Though the books are set in WW2 and draw heavily from Waugh's own military experience, they are the furthest things from "hot lead and cold steel" war stories you can imagine. He is utterly uninterested in the glorification either of war, the military, or the Allied cause. Indeed, one of the most stinging quotes in the novel is, "the news quickened the sickening suspicion he had tried to ignore...that he was engaged in a war in which courage and a just cause were quite irrelevant to the issue."
So let us begin at the beginning and discuss MEN AT ARMS. It is the story of Guy Crouchback, a hag-ridden thirtysomething Englishman, just about the last of a decayed, once-distinguished line of academic adventurers, whom divorce has rendered a dried-out husk of a man: intelligent but lifeless. As WW2 begins, the brooding and passive Crouchback fights a quiet personal battle, not against the Nazis, but rather the British military, which doesn't want him due to his age and the incorrect assumption he is of pro-Fascist sympathy. Eventually he lucks -- if you want to call it luck -- into the Royal Corps of Halberdiers as an officer candidate, and spends much the rest of the book trying to navigate the incredibly complex, often silly, periodically insane traditions and realities of British military life. When at last he finally does get a taste of battle in Dakar (West Africa), it goes exactly like you'd expect: badly, comically, and tragically.
At the same time, Crouchback is plagued by his unfaithful ex-wife, a beautiful, parasitic sociopath who had an affair with Guy's good friend Tommy Blackhouse, who – of course – ends up Guy's superior officer. In an American novel this would lead to fisticuffs, but Guy hardly resents the destruction of his marriage: indeed, as a devout Catholic he refuses to acknowledge his marriage is over. Virginia Crouchback seems to represent not only the utterly useless, callow, self-serving, pleasure-seeking upper-upper class of Brits which found itself increasingly on the margins of both political and financial power as the war went on, but those British people who, by virtue of money, selfishness or honest disinterest, simply viewed the entire war as a bore and an inconvenience. Virginia's only sympathetic quality is her indifference to the war: from a woman's perspective, it must have seemed a ghastly inconvenience, a bore and a waste, engineered primarily so men could put on uniforms and have adventures in which she was not permitted to share. I found her character particularly interesting for the fact that Waugh was willing to let her be so loathsome. He, after all, wanted to preserve the society that allowed tapeworms like Virginia to exist. He seems to have found this segment of the Upper Crust to be ridiculous and amoral, but also curiously fascinating: he was both drawn to and repulsed by their vulgar wealth, lack of intellectual prowess and amoral behavior.
Like Siegfried Sassoon's famous "Sherston" trilogy, which was also largely autobiographical, Waugh mines his own experiences during the war as raw material for his story. And a ridiculous story it is. Poor Guy Crouchback is intelligent, decent, feckless, cuckolded, lonely, determined, faithful, and decidedly unlucky. Desperate to see battle, what he mainly sees is shortages, confusion, nonsensical, bullying regimental traditions, and quite frequently, madness under color of authority. The military service was always a refuge for eccentrics in Britain, but the degree to which functionally insane men could hold rank and in some cases rise to high command is a theme Waugh returns to again and again with obvious relish. He also seems to have resented social inferiors who achieved such rank and takes great pains to eviscerate them in the story. It is not always clear when he is poking fun at these unfortunates or the men who conspire to snub and blackball them despite their rank.
Many novels have been written on the absurdity and madness of war and military life, but Waugh flips the script by passing this through the lens of the ultimate straight man, Crouchback, whose very name speaks volumes about his approach toward life.
There is an almost Henry Miller-esque quality to Crouchback's passivity: it is so passive that it becomes aggressive by its sheer tenacity. In his own way he is of the "bulldog breed," though admittedly a bulldog who would prefer to read Greek philosophy on a silk-cushioned divan.
The more I sank into MEN AT ARMS, the greater my interest in it became, but it is the ironical outcomes and not the plot, such as it is, which really carry the novel. Waugh builds tension not through the impending terror of battle, but through trivial incidents which invariably escalate to climax with terrible results: such objects as a boot, a bottle of whiskey, and a portable Victorian toilet determine the ultimate fate of more than one man; a misunderstood conversation and a coincidence involving surnames portend to even darker outcomes in a subsequent novel. In Waugh's universe, no good deed goes unpunished, few evil deeds have any consequences, and capricious judgments determine entire destinies. Through it all, Guy Crouchback slogs along with grim determination and a stiff upper lip, his faith and sense of decency a shield against the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune."
When one embarks on a trilogy, it is reasonable to ask if one wishes to continue the journey when the first leg of the voyage has been completed. In this case, when I finished MEN AT ARMS, I immediately purchased the second and third volumes of the series. It was not that I found the book a blistering page-turner or was overwhelmed by its profundity or even the beauty of its prose. Rather what I felt was that I was traveling along a strange axis, looking at the world through a lens which was mostly unfamiliar to me: the hero was manifestly someone who was fighting for the past rather than the future: his war was not against Hitler or Mussolini but against change, against time, against the social upheavals which he himself knew were inevitable and could not be long denied whether they bode for good or ill. His intellect, his sense of decency, his physical courage and ultimately even his life were placed wholly in the service of an impossibility: regardless of who won the war, Crouchback would lose, at least spiritually. This view is so un-American in outlook -- because what was the America soldier fighting for in WW2 if not a different future? -- that it is almost alien to me, an American, and therein lay my fascination. But I'll let the character himself close out this review, for despite the book's humor it takes the bleakest possible view of the great conflict which Western culture has relentlessly romanticized for 80 years now:
“This war has begun in darkness and it will end in silence.”
Evelyn Waugh (1903 - 1966) remains a towering figure in British literature, and unlike many successful authors of yesteryear has not been cast aside by history in part because his works, at rather long intervals, continue to be adapted for television and film: BRIDESHEAD REVISITED was turned into a successful mini-series starring Jeremy Irons in a breakout role, and his SWORD OF HONOR trilogy was compressed into a single movie starring Danile Craig just a few years ago. Marcel DeCoste labeled him "one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century," and whether one agrees or disagrees with this characterization, it is fair to say that Waugh, who was a former soldier, a prolific writer in many mediums including biography and journalism, a world-traveler and a devout (converted) Catholic unafraid to tackle taboo subjects such as abortion and homosexuality, had a lot to say and said most of it with considerable ability. At the center of his style was a dry, arch-eyebrowed, self-depreciating sort of wit that lends itself to satire -- not of the surrealist degree pursued by, say, Joseph Heller, but satire of a more foot-planted variety: realistic without forgetting that fiction is, after all, make-believe.
I do not want to write a biography of Waugh, a task for which I am unsuited anyway, but it is important to note two aspects of his personality which seemed to have shaped his writing more than any other. The first is that he was notorious for his devotion to the British class system and for his personal snobbery, which seems to have taken a very deep root during his Oxford years, and which never wilted thereafter despite his religious feeling. When he refers to the "lower classes" in his writings, there is no doubt that he regards them as just exactly that: lower, lesser, and well deserving of the place they occupy. George Orwell noted with exasperation that "Waugh was as good a novelist as one could possibly be...while holding positions which were untenable."
These traits were unsurprisingly mixed up with a reverence for the past and a dislike of everything new, especially egalitarian ideals like socialism, which began to push its way earnestly into the British system during the First World War and never stopped pushing. Indeed, the crumbling of the old, pre-1914 class system and all the traditions, decadence and pomps that came with it, is a frequent motif in British literature flowing from the pens of men who were part of, or deeply admired, that system, and Waugh was such a man on both counts. One of the last passages in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED scathingly notes the "these men [aristocrats] must die to make a world...so that things might be safe for the traveling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat, wet handshake, his grinning dentures." Like many of his class, Waugh's outlook was feudal: the lower classes existed to support the strata above them, and any attempt to shift their place in the stratum could only lead to calamity and collapse. This view was not merely selfish: it was founded in a belief that the system existed for a reason, that the cream rose to the top by its own nature, and that all art, architecture, music, literature, etc. flowed out of the upper classes. To tamper with them was to bring down not only a system but culture.
The second factor worth noting is Waugh's devout Catholicism, which he came to by conversion and which he regarded as a partially successful brake upon said snobbery. To quote his biography: "Strictly observant, Waugh admitted to Diana Cooper that his most difficult task was how to square the obligations of his faith with his indifference to his fellow men. When Nancy Mitford asked him how he reconciled his often objectionable conduct with being a Christian, Waugh replied that "were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible".
That having been said, let us turn to the subject of the review, the first installment of his famous "Sword of Honor" trilogy: MEN AT ARMS (1952). This was the first of Waugh's novels I had ever read, and what struck me almost immediately was the influence they plainly had upon Derek Robinson, an English novelist who followed Waugh and who is one of my favorites. It contains the same satirical tone, the same facetious banter, the same obsession with ironical outcomes, Murphy's Law, and the sense that everything important turns on trivial incidents and throwaway events. The very name Waugh uses to describe the trilogy, pompous as it is, is the first hint of the satire to come. Though the books are set in WW2 and draw heavily from Waugh's own military experience, they are the furthest things from "hot lead and cold steel" war stories you can imagine. He is utterly uninterested in the glorification either of war, the military, or the Allied cause. Indeed, one of the most stinging quotes in the novel is, "the news quickened the sickening suspicion he had tried to ignore...that he was engaged in a war in which courage and a just cause were quite irrelevant to the issue."
So let us begin at the beginning and discuss MEN AT ARMS. It is the story of Guy Crouchback, a hag-ridden thirtysomething Englishman, just about the last of a decayed, once-distinguished line of academic adventurers, whom divorce has rendered a dried-out husk of a man: intelligent but lifeless. As WW2 begins, the brooding and passive Crouchback fights a quiet personal battle, not against the Nazis, but rather the British military, which doesn't want him due to his age and the incorrect assumption he is of pro-Fascist sympathy. Eventually he lucks -- if you want to call it luck -- into the Royal Corps of Halberdiers as an officer candidate, and spends much the rest of the book trying to navigate the incredibly complex, often silly, periodically insane traditions and realities of British military life. When at last he finally does get a taste of battle in Dakar (West Africa), it goes exactly like you'd expect: badly, comically, and tragically.
At the same time, Crouchback is plagued by his unfaithful ex-wife, a beautiful, parasitic sociopath who had an affair with Guy's good friend Tommy Blackhouse, who – of course – ends up Guy's superior officer. In an American novel this would lead to fisticuffs, but Guy hardly resents the destruction of his marriage: indeed, as a devout Catholic he refuses to acknowledge his marriage is over. Virginia Crouchback seems to represent not only the utterly useless, callow, self-serving, pleasure-seeking upper-upper class of Brits which found itself increasingly on the margins of both political and financial power as the war went on, but those British people who, by virtue of money, selfishness or honest disinterest, simply viewed the entire war as a bore and an inconvenience. Virginia's only sympathetic quality is her indifference to the war: from a woman's perspective, it must have seemed a ghastly inconvenience, a bore and a waste, engineered primarily so men could put on uniforms and have adventures in which she was not permitted to share. I found her character particularly interesting for the fact that Waugh was willing to let her be so loathsome. He, after all, wanted to preserve the society that allowed tapeworms like Virginia to exist. He seems to have found this segment of the Upper Crust to be ridiculous and amoral, but also curiously fascinating: he was both drawn to and repulsed by their vulgar wealth, lack of intellectual prowess and amoral behavior.
Like Siegfried Sassoon's famous "Sherston" trilogy, which was also largely autobiographical, Waugh mines his own experiences during the war as raw material for his story. And a ridiculous story it is. Poor Guy Crouchback is intelligent, decent, feckless, cuckolded, lonely, determined, faithful, and decidedly unlucky. Desperate to see battle, what he mainly sees is shortages, confusion, nonsensical, bullying regimental traditions, and quite frequently, madness under color of authority. The military service was always a refuge for eccentrics in Britain, but the degree to which functionally insane men could hold rank and in some cases rise to high command is a theme Waugh returns to again and again with obvious relish. He also seems to have resented social inferiors who achieved such rank and takes great pains to eviscerate them in the story. It is not always clear when he is poking fun at these unfortunates or the men who conspire to snub and blackball them despite their rank.
Many novels have been written on the absurdity and madness of war and military life, but Waugh flips the script by passing this through the lens of the ultimate straight man, Crouchback, whose very name speaks volumes about his approach toward life.
There is an almost Henry Miller-esque quality to Crouchback's passivity: it is so passive that it becomes aggressive by its sheer tenacity. In his own way he is of the "bulldog breed," though admittedly a bulldog who would prefer to read Greek philosophy on a silk-cushioned divan.
The more I sank into MEN AT ARMS, the greater my interest in it became, but it is the ironical outcomes and not the plot, such as it is, which really carry the novel. Waugh builds tension not through the impending terror of battle, but through trivial incidents which invariably escalate to climax with terrible results: such objects as a boot, a bottle of whiskey, and a portable Victorian toilet determine the ultimate fate of more than one man; a misunderstood conversation and a coincidence involving surnames portend to even darker outcomes in a subsequent novel. In Waugh's universe, no good deed goes unpunished, few evil deeds have any consequences, and capricious judgments determine entire destinies. Through it all, Guy Crouchback slogs along with grim determination and a stiff upper lip, his faith and sense of decency a shield against the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune."
When one embarks on a trilogy, it is reasonable to ask if one wishes to continue the journey when the first leg of the voyage has been completed. In this case, when I finished MEN AT ARMS, I immediately purchased the second and third volumes of the series. It was not that I found the book a blistering page-turner or was overwhelmed by its profundity or even the beauty of its prose. Rather what I felt was that I was traveling along a strange axis, looking at the world through a lens which was mostly unfamiliar to me: the hero was manifestly someone who was fighting for the past rather than the future: his war was not against Hitler or Mussolini but against change, against time, against the social upheavals which he himself knew were inevitable and could not be long denied whether they bode for good or ill. His intellect, his sense of decency, his physical courage and ultimately even his life were placed wholly in the service of an impossibility: regardless of who won the war, Crouchback would lose, at least spiritually. This view is so un-American in outlook -- because what was the America soldier fighting for in WW2 if not a different future? -- that it is almost alien to me, an American, and therein lay my fascination. But I'll let the character himself close out this review, for despite the book's humor it takes the bleakest possible view of the great conflict which Western culture has relentlessly romanticized for 80 years now:
“This war has begun in darkness and it will end in silence.”
June 11, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: TIM O'BRIEN'S "GOING AFTER CACCIATO"
Imagination, like reality, has its limits. -- Tim O'Brien
This is a remarkable book, meaning literally worthy of remark. It is not going to be to everyone's taste, and was often not to mine; I cannot however help admiring author Tim O'Brien for writing it.
GOING AFTER CACCIATIO is about a squad of American soldiers in Vietnam, tasked with hunting down a deserter named Cacciato, who leaves a note saying he's ditching the war and walking to Pairs. As they follow the elusive, enigmatic deserter deeper and deeper into the jungle, soldier Paul Berlin reflects on Cacciato, the various members of his platoon living and dead, his life back home, and the chances of Cacciato reaching his goal, 8,600 miles away. Eventually Berlin's imagination runs away with him, and the hard-boiled narrative of grunt life dissolves into a full-on "phantasy," in which the squad travels through the cities of the Far and Middle East to Europe, always hunting Cacciato and always missing him, until at last they arrive in Paris for the final --? -- showdown. Meanwhile, Paul Berlin, through an imaginary female companion he has conjured from his own mind, argues with himself about duty and possibility and ugly necessity as they relate to war. He reflects upon war itself and the way it manifests differently within each soldier who fights it. Through the real and imagined people Berlin encounters or remembers, we get such gems as this:
"It is easy, of course, to fear happiness. There is often complacency in the acceptance of misery. We fear parting from our familiar roles. We fear the consequences of such a parting. We fear happiness because we fear failure. But we must overcome these fears. We must be brave. It is one thing to speculate about what might be. It is quite another to act in behalf of our dreams, to treat them as objectives that are achievable and worth achieving. It is one thing to run from unhappiness; it is another to take action to realize those qualities of dignity and well-being that are the true standards of the human spirit.”
One of the central themes of CACCIATO -- it has many, perhaps too many for its own comprehensibility and flow, but so does every work of overflowing genius -- is whether the possibility of a thing is determined by mathematical odds and logic and so forth, or merely by will-power and daring. Paul Berlin seems to be a metaphor, an allegory if you will, for the ordinary decent American boy/human being who is nonetheless confined, cramped, even incarcerated within limitations imposed by society and by himself. By tribal mores and the expectations of his neighbors and relations. He asks himself, and is frequently asked: “What happened, and what might have happened?” And in a real sense the entire book is a wobbly balance between those two things -- reality and imagination.
CACCIATO is definitely one of the more imaginative novels I've read in many a year: off the top of my head only Ernst Jünger's interweave of the everyday and the fantasic in novels like THE GLASS BEES or ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS come to mind as standing with this ordinary, decent soldier's fever-dream. O'Brien, a Nam vet who penned several classic memoirs and novels about his service there, is attempting here to ask huge questions about the way morality and even sanity work in a war context. And he understands that it is different for everyone and contains a great deal of what seem to be paradoxes or contradictions. A soldier can hate the war and still revile the judgments civilians make about the war. He can believe in the war and not glorify it or have a sense of passion about it. He can hate both being in a war and being a soldier and yet embrace both because of his sense of duty. He can understand and empathize with Cacciato's decision to desert while despising him for being a deserter.
O'Brien does not romanticize his soldiers, nor does he allow them to be tainted by any judgment. He presents them as ordinary men who have worked out their own way of dealing with an impossible situation and are somewhat beyond armchair analysis. Most hate the war and are barely in the army in a meaningful sense, even plotting murder when they deem it necessary, but they have a strong if eccentric sense of duty and even of honor, all of which comes out in context. There is one chapter describing Berlin's march into his first battle -- not the battle, the long mountain climb into it -- which is a masterpiece of character study and of description, not unmixed with irony, and passages like that make CACCIATO unforgettable. O'Brien is not some guy who served in a war 50 years ago and made a career and a life kicking coins and candy out of that Piñata. He clearly took away life lessons and observations which changed him deeply and affected profoundly his way of looking at the world. Not just war -- the world, existence, life.
The issue I had with the novel, and it is a large one, is that the fantasy elements, except for some in the early-middle and the last few chapters, become somewhat tedious and over-wrought as they go on. I realize some of this was probably by design, but that didn't make it more engaging to read. I was much more interested in Berlin's reminiscences of, for example, Sydney Martin, the earnest, fearless, rigid-minded, ultimately doomed lieutenant who was deemed too dedicated for everyone's good own good by his men, than I was by Berlin's increasingly fantastic daydreams. I had to penalize my rating fairly heavily for this.
So, in the end I found this book a bit of a slog at times despite its daring and its brilliance, and yet I have very little doubt I'm going to read it again, which I can't say of many books I've given five stars. Make of that what you will, and consider this as you do:
“You have taken many risks. You have been brave beyond your wildest expectations. And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.”
This is a remarkable book, meaning literally worthy of remark. It is not going to be to everyone's taste, and was often not to mine; I cannot however help admiring author Tim O'Brien for writing it.
GOING AFTER CACCIATIO is about a squad of American soldiers in Vietnam, tasked with hunting down a deserter named Cacciato, who leaves a note saying he's ditching the war and walking to Pairs. As they follow the elusive, enigmatic deserter deeper and deeper into the jungle, soldier Paul Berlin reflects on Cacciato, the various members of his platoon living and dead, his life back home, and the chances of Cacciato reaching his goal, 8,600 miles away. Eventually Berlin's imagination runs away with him, and the hard-boiled narrative of grunt life dissolves into a full-on "phantasy," in which the squad travels through the cities of the Far and Middle East to Europe, always hunting Cacciato and always missing him, until at last they arrive in Paris for the final --? -- showdown. Meanwhile, Paul Berlin, through an imaginary female companion he has conjured from his own mind, argues with himself about duty and possibility and ugly necessity as they relate to war. He reflects upon war itself and the way it manifests differently within each soldier who fights it. Through the real and imagined people Berlin encounters or remembers, we get such gems as this:
"It is easy, of course, to fear happiness. There is often complacency in the acceptance of misery. We fear parting from our familiar roles. We fear the consequences of such a parting. We fear happiness because we fear failure. But we must overcome these fears. We must be brave. It is one thing to speculate about what might be. It is quite another to act in behalf of our dreams, to treat them as objectives that are achievable and worth achieving. It is one thing to run from unhappiness; it is another to take action to realize those qualities of dignity and well-being that are the true standards of the human spirit.”
One of the central themes of CACCIATO -- it has many, perhaps too many for its own comprehensibility and flow, but so does every work of overflowing genius -- is whether the possibility of a thing is determined by mathematical odds and logic and so forth, or merely by will-power and daring. Paul Berlin seems to be a metaphor, an allegory if you will, for the ordinary decent American boy/human being who is nonetheless confined, cramped, even incarcerated within limitations imposed by society and by himself. By tribal mores and the expectations of his neighbors and relations. He asks himself, and is frequently asked: “What happened, and what might have happened?” And in a real sense the entire book is a wobbly balance between those two things -- reality and imagination.
CACCIATO is definitely one of the more imaginative novels I've read in many a year: off the top of my head only Ernst Jünger's interweave of the everyday and the fantasic in novels like THE GLASS BEES or ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS come to mind as standing with this ordinary, decent soldier's fever-dream. O'Brien, a Nam vet who penned several classic memoirs and novels about his service there, is attempting here to ask huge questions about the way morality and even sanity work in a war context. And he understands that it is different for everyone and contains a great deal of what seem to be paradoxes or contradictions. A soldier can hate the war and still revile the judgments civilians make about the war. He can believe in the war and not glorify it or have a sense of passion about it. He can hate both being in a war and being a soldier and yet embrace both because of his sense of duty. He can understand and empathize with Cacciato's decision to desert while despising him for being a deserter.
O'Brien does not romanticize his soldiers, nor does he allow them to be tainted by any judgment. He presents them as ordinary men who have worked out their own way of dealing with an impossible situation and are somewhat beyond armchair analysis. Most hate the war and are barely in the army in a meaningful sense, even plotting murder when they deem it necessary, but they have a strong if eccentric sense of duty and even of honor, all of which comes out in context. There is one chapter describing Berlin's march into his first battle -- not the battle, the long mountain climb into it -- which is a masterpiece of character study and of description, not unmixed with irony, and passages like that make CACCIATO unforgettable. O'Brien is not some guy who served in a war 50 years ago and made a career and a life kicking coins and candy out of that Piñata. He clearly took away life lessons and observations which changed him deeply and affected profoundly his way of looking at the world. Not just war -- the world, existence, life.
The issue I had with the novel, and it is a large one, is that the fantasy elements, except for some in the early-middle and the last few chapters, become somewhat tedious and over-wrought as they go on. I realize some of this was probably by design, but that didn't make it more engaging to read. I was much more interested in Berlin's reminiscences of, for example, Sydney Martin, the earnest, fearless, rigid-minded, ultimately doomed lieutenant who was deemed too dedicated for everyone's good own good by his men, than I was by Berlin's increasingly fantastic daydreams. I had to penalize my rating fairly heavily for this.
So, in the end I found this book a bit of a slog at times despite its daring and its brilliance, and yet I have very little doubt I'm going to read it again, which I can't say of many books I've given five stars. Make of that what you will, and consider this as you do:
“You have taken many risks. You have been brave beyond your wildest expectations. And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.”
June 9, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S "THE DANGEROUS SUMMER"
Then he raised his hand as he faced the bull and commanded him to go down with the death that he had placed inside him.
Having previously read Hemingway's rambling, overflowing, unforgettable book on bullfighting, DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON, I was uncertain as to whether I wanted to bother with THE DANGEROUS SUMMER, whose very existence violated Hemingway's own rule about never chewing the same cabbage twice. It was, after all, another non-fiction book about bullfighting, and one produced near the of Hemingway's life, when he was struggling with depression, delusion, and, I suspect, a feeling that he was a has-been living in the shadow of his own legend. There is actually an incident in the book in which Hemingway is told this in so many words by a young writer he encounters in a bar. Indeed, the book's fulsome but very interesting introduction, by James Mitchner, makes a curious point of...well, pointing out that this book should probably not have been written, pointing out that Papa's conclusions about both the bullfighters profiled in the book ultimately being proved completely wrong. Not since various Ernst Jünger book introductions have I been told more thoroughly warned about what I was about to read.
Despite all of this, I found THE DANGEROUS SUMMER one of the most readable things the old master ever put to paper. For my money, which does not amount to very much, I have always found Hemingway at his absolute best not in his novels, but when writing short stories, or reportage, or non-fiction work, where his cut-to-the-bone style and absence of dialog produce the most vivid imagery and flowing pace. Such is the case here.
Hemingway loved anything that he felt reeked of manliness, and the more blood and death were involved in the manliness, the better. Hence his love, one might say lust or obsession with, bullfighting, which pits men against bulls in a contest that always ends either in death (for the bull) or blood (for the bullfighter). THE DANGEROUS SUMMER chronicles the real-life competetition between Luis Miguel Dominguín, the former undisputed great of bullfighting come out of retirement to reclaim his crown, and his brother-in-law, Antonio Ordóñez, the classic young lion determined to put the old one back in his pasture, which took place in 1959. Though friends with both men, Hemingway made no secret of his favoritism towards Ordóñez, and the book is written from a perspective of an admiring hanger-on who accompanied the hotshot across the length of Spain and elsewhere during this epic conflict.
Hemingway was an "aficianado" of the bullfight, which to him was a tragic and beautiful dance with death, and he had a way of describing these contests which brilliantly balanced his very high technical knowledge of the spectacle with his gift of describing physical action. I know absolutely nothing about bullfighting beyond what Hemingway himself has told me, but he somehow makes this horribly macabre activity poetic and artful with his descriptions while more or less fully acknowledging its cruelty. And he does this, for the most part, without repeating much of anything he said in DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON, in which he tried to explain why he found bullfighting so glorious without whitewashing its essential, visceral savagery or offering a defense of the spectacle.
I read this book in three days, for its very much written in the style of a thriller, and while there are a few faults, a few discreet displays of a man possibly trapped within the rigid confines of his own highly distinctive and unique style of prose, trapped beneath the weight of his own reputation, and in a different sense, trapped beneath what were rather faulty conclusions about both bullfighters which were arrived at due to his rather shameless favoritism of one man over the other, none of this made any real difference to me in terms of enjoyment. Hemingway is a fascinating read as much for his willingness to explore the forbidden, the taboo, the deepest darks of the human condition without any fear or shame or apology, while seldom if ever coming across as a mere provacateur, as he is for the beauty of his prose, his jabbing wit, or his bon vivant love of all things connected to life. He was partictularly artiful in finding deeper meaning in simple actions, especially ritualistic actions, such as the hunt, sailing, boxing, fishing, and war. There is an almost Buddhist quality to his ability to hold onto a moment and pluck its meaning without damaging or diminishing it. (I say "almost" because his love of violence is hardly a Buddhist quality.)
In short, I thought this was one hell of a book, something that did not aim at any lofty goal but concentrated its entire might and passion upon a single objective and achieved that objective handily. There are distinct parallels between Hemingway and his depiction (accurate or no) of Dominguín as a great man past his best, yet so stubbornly determined to reclaim his former glory that he does in fact periodically and briefly reclaim it with advantages; a parallel Hemingway may or may not have been aware of since it only heightens his tragedy; in the end though it doesn't matter. Death is for the afternoon and this summer, with Papa, will always be dangerous.
Having previously read Hemingway's rambling, overflowing, unforgettable book on bullfighting, DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON, I was uncertain as to whether I wanted to bother with THE DANGEROUS SUMMER, whose very existence violated Hemingway's own rule about never chewing the same cabbage twice. It was, after all, another non-fiction book about bullfighting, and one produced near the of Hemingway's life, when he was struggling with depression, delusion, and, I suspect, a feeling that he was a has-been living in the shadow of his own legend. There is actually an incident in the book in which Hemingway is told this in so many words by a young writer he encounters in a bar. Indeed, the book's fulsome but very interesting introduction, by James Mitchner, makes a curious point of...well, pointing out that this book should probably not have been written, pointing out that Papa's conclusions about both the bullfighters profiled in the book ultimately being proved completely wrong. Not since various Ernst Jünger book introductions have I been told more thoroughly warned about what I was about to read.
Despite all of this, I found THE DANGEROUS SUMMER one of the most readable things the old master ever put to paper. For my money, which does not amount to very much, I have always found Hemingway at his absolute best not in his novels, but when writing short stories, or reportage, or non-fiction work, where his cut-to-the-bone style and absence of dialog produce the most vivid imagery and flowing pace. Such is the case here.
Hemingway loved anything that he felt reeked of manliness, and the more blood and death were involved in the manliness, the better. Hence his love, one might say lust or obsession with, bullfighting, which pits men against bulls in a contest that always ends either in death (for the bull) or blood (for the bullfighter). THE DANGEROUS SUMMER chronicles the real-life competetition between Luis Miguel Dominguín, the former undisputed great of bullfighting come out of retirement to reclaim his crown, and his brother-in-law, Antonio Ordóñez, the classic young lion determined to put the old one back in his pasture, which took place in 1959. Though friends with both men, Hemingway made no secret of his favoritism towards Ordóñez, and the book is written from a perspective of an admiring hanger-on who accompanied the hotshot across the length of Spain and elsewhere during this epic conflict.
Hemingway was an "aficianado" of the bullfight, which to him was a tragic and beautiful dance with death, and he had a way of describing these contests which brilliantly balanced his very high technical knowledge of the spectacle with his gift of describing physical action. I know absolutely nothing about bullfighting beyond what Hemingway himself has told me, but he somehow makes this horribly macabre activity poetic and artful with his descriptions while more or less fully acknowledging its cruelty. And he does this, for the most part, without repeating much of anything he said in DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON, in which he tried to explain why he found bullfighting so glorious without whitewashing its essential, visceral savagery or offering a defense of the spectacle.
I read this book in three days, for its very much written in the style of a thriller, and while there are a few faults, a few discreet displays of a man possibly trapped within the rigid confines of his own highly distinctive and unique style of prose, trapped beneath the weight of his own reputation, and in a different sense, trapped beneath what were rather faulty conclusions about both bullfighters which were arrived at due to his rather shameless favoritism of one man over the other, none of this made any real difference to me in terms of enjoyment. Hemingway is a fascinating read as much for his willingness to explore the forbidden, the taboo, the deepest darks of the human condition without any fear or shame or apology, while seldom if ever coming across as a mere provacateur, as he is for the beauty of his prose, his jabbing wit, or his bon vivant love of all things connected to life. He was partictularly artiful in finding deeper meaning in simple actions, especially ritualistic actions, such as the hunt, sailing, boxing, fishing, and war. There is an almost Buddhist quality to his ability to hold onto a moment and pluck its meaning without damaging or diminishing it. (I say "almost" because his love of violence is hardly a Buddhist quality.)
In short, I thought this was one hell of a book, something that did not aim at any lofty goal but concentrated its entire might and passion upon a single objective and achieved that objective handily. There are distinct parallels between Hemingway and his depiction (accurate or no) of Dominguín as a great man past his best, yet so stubbornly determined to reclaim his former glory that he does in fact periodically and briefly reclaim it with advantages; a parallel Hemingway may or may not have been aware of since it only heightens his tragedy; in the end though it doesn't matter. Death is for the afternoon and this summer, with Papa, will always be dangerous.
June 4, 2024
THE MANY WORLD(S) OF DUNE
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic. -- Frank Herbert, DUNE
A few months ago I posted a semi-coherent rant about the dialog in Dennis Villeneuve's cinematic adaptation of DUNE. I was angry that one of the most cerebral sci-fi stories of all time had been pruned down to suit the text-message vocabulary of the Modern Audience -- so angry I forgot to mention that I didn't dislike the film. It didn't wow me as a whole, but there were definitely "wow" moments and the whole thing held a great deal of promise. Having seen the second installment, I am relieved to report that Villeneuve not only made a much better movie the second time around, there was significant improvement to the intellectual depth of the dialog.
This experience led me to think about the many worlds of DUNE. The original novel, a masterpiece published in 1966, sold 20 million copies, spawned a slew of sequels. Following author Frank Herbert's death in 1986, his heirs allowed the publication of numerous "in universe" prequels and sequels as well, operating from heaps of handwritten notes Herbert left behind. There have been several television miniseries devoted to the series, and it also spawned two massive cinematic adaptations, the first by David Lynch in 1984, the second by Villeneuve in 2021 in 2024, respectively.
Now, I should pause here to say that I am an old-school nerd. I was weaned on STAR WARS, STAR TREK and the original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. My older brother introduced me to DUNE by way of the novel, and I had only just completed it when the Lynch adaptation hit the theaters. Because this is so, because I am a fan of Herbert's worlds since back in the day, I thought it might be fun to start exploring the entirety of his universe here on Goodreads -- that is to say, both Herbert's novels and the films and series that sprang from them.
A review of DUNE the novel is daunting, so I'm going to ease into this attack with an easier target, the Lynch movie of 1984, which is singular in that it is the only one of the on-screen versions to be made while Herbert was still alive. And on that note, here we go....
[...serious music]
In 1984, my dad took me to see DUNE at a big theater in Washington, D.C. As we sat down, an usher passed out one-page "glossaries of terms" for the film's terminology. Though only twelve years old, I was already a veteran moviegoer (we probably saw 50 movies a year as a family when I was growing up, not including matinee rewatches) and remembered thinking, "Uh-oh...since when does a film need a glossary?" I'd never seen anything like that before. I never saw anything like that since. But that's David Lynch's take on DUNE. It's unique. (And the "Extended Edition," which incorporates significantly more footage and was made against Lynch's wishes, is even moreso.)
DUNE was an almost incredibly deep science-fiction work by Frank Herbert which developed a rabid cult following and finally became the best-selling sci-fi novel of all time. Eccentric director Lynch was tapped to helm what its producers hoped would be another "Star Wars" - style mega-hit. He tackled the intimidating task of cramming an enormous and intricate universe into a single movie by making the most lavish, operatic film you've ever seen. It's bad opera, but it's SO lavish, and so curiously sincere, that it too has developed a rabid cult following. I don't know if I belong to the cult, but I respect those who do. The book DUNE sucked you in with the complexity of its creative surround; this movie does the same, but on a largely visual rather than an intellectual level. If I can use a different metaphor, it's like that scene in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" when our famished heroes sit down to the royal banquet and get served fried insects, live snakes, and monkey heads. The food is weird and disgusting, but it's served on silver platters and white linen, and all the cutlery is gold.
DUNE is set in the distant, distant future, when humanity spans the entire galaxy and is theoretically ruled by the corrupt and devious Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV, and his terrifying legions of Sarduakar. Balancing the emperor's might are the Great Houses, the hereditary rulers of each individual planet in the imperium, each with its own smaller, less formiddable army. The most valuable substance in the universe is the spice melange, a substance which extends life and gives prescient powers to those who take it in large quantities, but also allows spaceships to "fold space" and travel instantaneously anywhere in the galaxy ("traveling without moving.") This substance is found on only one planet, Arrakis, known as Dune because its a giant desert. Dune is an awful place -- harsh and arid, populated by mysterious and savage warrior nomads, and full of gigantic monsters known as sandworms, which are virtually indestructible and will hunt down and devour anyone moving incautiously over the desert. At the story's opening, the emperor schemes to destroy a particular house of which he has become jealous, House Atriedes, by throwing his weight behind the Atreides' worst enemy, House Harkonnen.
House Atreides is ruled by the virtuous Duke Leto, his witch-concubine the Lady Jessica, and their teenage son Paul. Although Paul does not know it, he is the end-product of a breeding program 90 generations old, designed by the witch sisterhood, the Bene Gesserit, to produce a superhuman being. In the mean time, the Atreides have developed a new battle technique called "the weriding way" which uses sound as a weapon, but the technique is in its infancy when the Emperor orders the Atreides to take over spice-mining from the Harkonnens on Dune. The Atreides know it's a trap, but have no choice but to obey; in any case the Duke hopes to win over the local populace, the fierce desert warriors known as Fremen, to his cause. He suspects -- correctly -- that the Fremen are the key to holding Dune. Not long after the Atreides arrive, however, they are betrayed from within and largely wiped out in a sneak attack conducted by the Harkonnens and Sarduakar. Only Paul and his mother Jessica survive, and flee into the deep desert. They soon join the Fremen, who are awed by the fighting abilities Paul and his witch-mother possess, and accept them into their tribe. Paul, whose nascent powers are growing due to his proximity to so much spice, becomes a religious figure among the Fremen, a warrior-prophet, and, after mastering the secret of "desert power," begins the long bloody process of trying to wrest Dune from Harkonnen control. This guerilla war prompts the exasperated Emperor to openly side with the Harkonnens, and he arrives at the film's climax with his entire army, ready for the showdown. Because, after all, he who controls the spice controls the universe!
If this seems a bit involved for a recap, just imagine everything I left out! DUNE, as a novel, was layered with all sorts of ideas, concepts, and unfamiliar terms. Mentats, guild navigators, Bene Gesserit witches, Sarduakar, sword-masters, sandworms, thumpers, body shields, Suk doctors, Great Houses, the Landsraad, CHOAM, the spice, etc., etc. What's more, much of the book is written via internal monologue, which is a very tricky thing to translate to film. David Lynch manfully attempted to drag as many of these concepts into the movie as possible, including many sequences in which we can hear the characters' thoughts, and probably did too good of a job; he overloaded the 127 minutes of the theatrical version to the point where it could barely move...hence the "glossary" I got as a twelve year-old. What's more, it's fairly evident that a great deal more time was spent on the costume and production design than on the script, which is horribly clunky and often falls out of the actors' mouths like wet wooden blocks. Though the movie is positively jam-packed with talent (Kyle Maclachlan, Juergen Prochnow, Jose Ferrer, Sean Young, Patrick Stewart, Dean Stockwell, Sting, Kenneth McMillan, Virginia Madsen, Freddie Jones, Brad Dourif, Max von Sydow, etc., etc.) one gets the sense some of the cast just didn't know what the hell they were doing or how to approach doing it. (Some scenes are terribly over-acted, almost to the point of parody.) The final theatrical product is a bold, brassy mess of a movie, visually often stunning, intellectually charismatic, but executed in such an eccentric, awkward style that it's just bizarre...too weird for most people to enjoy.
After DUNE bombed -- if it wasn't a bomb, it was certainly a disappointment critically and commercially -- many people voiced the opinion that a longer version with less choppy editing and a more fleshed-out story would have worked wonders. So a massive 176 minute "extended edition," incorporating many deleted sequences as well as a completely different opening with much more exposition and backstory, was put together and released on television. I watched this when it came out, and was very intrigued by the added sequences, some of which -- like the dining-room scene where Gurney Halleck plays his balliset, or where Feyd-Rautha stuffs the Atreides insignia into Dr. Yeuh's mouth, or the fight scene between Jamis and Paul -- would have helped the story flow more smoothly together had they been shown in the theater. Unfortunately, others, like some of the scenes where Paul is taught Fremen mysteries, are so badly written as to be actually embarrassing. Everett McGill was saddled with nearly all the film's worst lines, and one gets a sense that Lynch was aware of this, for he made sure to employ McGill (and Machlachan) in TWIN PEAKS. A few sequences, like the throne-room confrontation at the opening of the movie, both gain and lose by the changes: some of the takes used in the Extended Edition are worse than in the Theatrical, but they reveal more information. One thing that particularly annoyed me was that even though this version is 39 minutes longer, it has several cuts -- the Baron's infamous "heart plug" assault on one hapless Harkonnen minion is cut out, as is the sequence where he spits on Lady Jessica's face. So amidst all the addition there are some subtle subtractions meant to make the film more palatable to a TV audience.
It is well known that David Lynch wanted nothing to do with the Extended Addition and had his name taken off it, hence the "Alan Smithee" at the beginning. And truth be told, it's not an easy film to watch at one sitting. It's slow and heavy and sometimes quite incomprehensible, and while you can be visually seduced by the uniforms, gadgets, sets and props, it takes a better man than me to sit through some of it with a straight face (or open eyes). Having said that, if you watched the Theatrical version of DUNE and felt frustrated by what seemed to be missing, or are a hardcore fan of the film period, you pretty much have to own this version. It contains enough extra material to more than pay for itself and as I've said, some of the added stuff is well worth watching. This is one bad opera that will have you coming back for more....
[music fades]
Such was the Lynchian version of DUNE. It departed mainly from the book in that the Atreides have actually developed a new form of battle technology, the weirding module, rather than simply trained their army very well; but otherwise it is as faithful an adaptation as one could possibly want. Indeed, it is too faithful: the complexity of the universe Herbert created lends itself to miniseries or even episodic "limited series" television far more than it does to cinema. This is why Villeneuve broke DUNE into two feature-length movies -- and even then, scooped out a great deal of material lest it overload the script. Villeneuve's approach was more logical and more effective, but it robbed DUNE of some of what made it so special in the first place, and I tip my hat to Lynch for his manly attempt at fleshing out so daunting a novel...especially for audiences who probably thought they were going to see a slightly more stylistic take on STAR WARS.
Such was Lynch. The next time we return to this sandblown planet, I am to have a go at Villeneueve's version, and then to the book series. Until then, keep the spice flowing.
A few months ago I posted a semi-coherent rant about the dialog in Dennis Villeneuve's cinematic adaptation of DUNE. I was angry that one of the most cerebral sci-fi stories of all time had been pruned down to suit the text-message vocabulary of the Modern Audience -- so angry I forgot to mention that I didn't dislike the film. It didn't wow me as a whole, but there were definitely "wow" moments and the whole thing held a great deal of promise. Having seen the second installment, I am relieved to report that Villeneuve not only made a much better movie the second time around, there was significant improvement to the intellectual depth of the dialog.
This experience led me to think about the many worlds of DUNE. The original novel, a masterpiece published in 1966, sold 20 million copies, spawned a slew of sequels. Following author Frank Herbert's death in 1986, his heirs allowed the publication of numerous "in universe" prequels and sequels as well, operating from heaps of handwritten notes Herbert left behind. There have been several television miniseries devoted to the series, and it also spawned two massive cinematic adaptations, the first by David Lynch in 1984, the second by Villeneuve in 2021 in 2024, respectively.
Now, I should pause here to say that I am an old-school nerd. I was weaned on STAR WARS, STAR TREK and the original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. My older brother introduced me to DUNE by way of the novel, and I had only just completed it when the Lynch adaptation hit the theaters. Because this is so, because I am a fan of Herbert's worlds since back in the day, I thought it might be fun to start exploring the entirety of his universe here on Goodreads -- that is to say, both Herbert's novels and the films and series that sprang from them.
A review of DUNE the novel is daunting, so I'm going to ease into this attack with an easier target, the Lynch movie of 1984, which is singular in that it is the only one of the on-screen versions to be made while Herbert was still alive. And on that note, here we go....
[...serious music]
In 1984, my dad took me to see DUNE at a big theater in Washington, D.C. As we sat down, an usher passed out one-page "glossaries of terms" for the film's terminology. Though only twelve years old, I was already a veteran moviegoer (we probably saw 50 movies a year as a family when I was growing up, not including matinee rewatches) and remembered thinking, "Uh-oh...since when does a film need a glossary?" I'd never seen anything like that before. I never saw anything like that since. But that's David Lynch's take on DUNE. It's unique. (And the "Extended Edition," which incorporates significantly more footage and was made against Lynch's wishes, is even moreso.)
DUNE was an almost incredibly deep science-fiction work by Frank Herbert which developed a rabid cult following and finally became the best-selling sci-fi novel of all time. Eccentric director Lynch was tapped to helm what its producers hoped would be another "Star Wars" - style mega-hit. He tackled the intimidating task of cramming an enormous and intricate universe into a single movie by making the most lavish, operatic film you've ever seen. It's bad opera, but it's SO lavish, and so curiously sincere, that it too has developed a rabid cult following. I don't know if I belong to the cult, but I respect those who do. The book DUNE sucked you in with the complexity of its creative surround; this movie does the same, but on a largely visual rather than an intellectual level. If I can use a different metaphor, it's like that scene in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" when our famished heroes sit down to the royal banquet and get served fried insects, live snakes, and monkey heads. The food is weird and disgusting, but it's served on silver platters and white linen, and all the cutlery is gold.
DUNE is set in the distant, distant future, when humanity spans the entire galaxy and is theoretically ruled by the corrupt and devious Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV, and his terrifying legions of Sarduakar. Balancing the emperor's might are the Great Houses, the hereditary rulers of each individual planet in the imperium, each with its own smaller, less formiddable army. The most valuable substance in the universe is the spice melange, a substance which extends life and gives prescient powers to those who take it in large quantities, but also allows spaceships to "fold space" and travel instantaneously anywhere in the galaxy ("traveling without moving.") This substance is found on only one planet, Arrakis, known as Dune because its a giant desert. Dune is an awful place -- harsh and arid, populated by mysterious and savage warrior nomads, and full of gigantic monsters known as sandworms, which are virtually indestructible and will hunt down and devour anyone moving incautiously over the desert. At the story's opening, the emperor schemes to destroy a particular house of which he has become jealous, House Atriedes, by throwing his weight behind the Atreides' worst enemy, House Harkonnen.
House Atreides is ruled by the virtuous Duke Leto, his witch-concubine the Lady Jessica, and their teenage son Paul. Although Paul does not know it, he is the end-product of a breeding program 90 generations old, designed by the witch sisterhood, the Bene Gesserit, to produce a superhuman being. In the mean time, the Atreides have developed a new battle technique called "the weriding way" which uses sound as a weapon, but the technique is in its infancy when the Emperor orders the Atreides to take over spice-mining from the Harkonnens on Dune. The Atreides know it's a trap, but have no choice but to obey; in any case the Duke hopes to win over the local populace, the fierce desert warriors known as Fremen, to his cause. He suspects -- correctly -- that the Fremen are the key to holding Dune. Not long after the Atreides arrive, however, they are betrayed from within and largely wiped out in a sneak attack conducted by the Harkonnens and Sarduakar. Only Paul and his mother Jessica survive, and flee into the deep desert. They soon join the Fremen, who are awed by the fighting abilities Paul and his witch-mother possess, and accept them into their tribe. Paul, whose nascent powers are growing due to his proximity to so much spice, becomes a religious figure among the Fremen, a warrior-prophet, and, after mastering the secret of "desert power," begins the long bloody process of trying to wrest Dune from Harkonnen control. This guerilla war prompts the exasperated Emperor to openly side with the Harkonnens, and he arrives at the film's climax with his entire army, ready for the showdown. Because, after all, he who controls the spice controls the universe!
If this seems a bit involved for a recap, just imagine everything I left out! DUNE, as a novel, was layered with all sorts of ideas, concepts, and unfamiliar terms. Mentats, guild navigators, Bene Gesserit witches, Sarduakar, sword-masters, sandworms, thumpers, body shields, Suk doctors, Great Houses, the Landsraad, CHOAM, the spice, etc., etc. What's more, much of the book is written via internal monologue, which is a very tricky thing to translate to film. David Lynch manfully attempted to drag as many of these concepts into the movie as possible, including many sequences in which we can hear the characters' thoughts, and probably did too good of a job; he overloaded the 127 minutes of the theatrical version to the point where it could barely move...hence the "glossary" I got as a twelve year-old. What's more, it's fairly evident that a great deal more time was spent on the costume and production design than on the script, which is horribly clunky and often falls out of the actors' mouths like wet wooden blocks. Though the movie is positively jam-packed with talent (Kyle Maclachlan, Juergen Prochnow, Jose Ferrer, Sean Young, Patrick Stewart, Dean Stockwell, Sting, Kenneth McMillan, Virginia Madsen, Freddie Jones, Brad Dourif, Max von Sydow, etc., etc.) one gets the sense some of the cast just didn't know what the hell they were doing or how to approach doing it. (Some scenes are terribly over-acted, almost to the point of parody.) The final theatrical product is a bold, brassy mess of a movie, visually often stunning, intellectually charismatic, but executed in such an eccentric, awkward style that it's just bizarre...too weird for most people to enjoy.
After DUNE bombed -- if it wasn't a bomb, it was certainly a disappointment critically and commercially -- many people voiced the opinion that a longer version with less choppy editing and a more fleshed-out story would have worked wonders. So a massive 176 minute "extended edition," incorporating many deleted sequences as well as a completely different opening with much more exposition and backstory, was put together and released on television. I watched this when it came out, and was very intrigued by the added sequences, some of which -- like the dining-room scene where Gurney Halleck plays his balliset, or where Feyd-Rautha stuffs the Atreides insignia into Dr. Yeuh's mouth, or the fight scene between Jamis and Paul -- would have helped the story flow more smoothly together had they been shown in the theater. Unfortunately, others, like some of the scenes where Paul is taught Fremen mysteries, are so badly written as to be actually embarrassing. Everett McGill was saddled with nearly all the film's worst lines, and one gets a sense that Lynch was aware of this, for he made sure to employ McGill (and Machlachan) in TWIN PEAKS. A few sequences, like the throne-room confrontation at the opening of the movie, both gain and lose by the changes: some of the takes used in the Extended Edition are worse than in the Theatrical, but they reveal more information. One thing that particularly annoyed me was that even though this version is 39 minutes longer, it has several cuts -- the Baron's infamous "heart plug" assault on one hapless Harkonnen minion is cut out, as is the sequence where he spits on Lady Jessica's face. So amidst all the addition there are some subtle subtractions meant to make the film more palatable to a TV audience.
It is well known that David Lynch wanted nothing to do with the Extended Addition and had his name taken off it, hence the "Alan Smithee" at the beginning. And truth be told, it's not an easy film to watch at one sitting. It's slow and heavy and sometimes quite incomprehensible, and while you can be visually seduced by the uniforms, gadgets, sets and props, it takes a better man than me to sit through some of it with a straight face (or open eyes). Having said that, if you watched the Theatrical version of DUNE and felt frustrated by what seemed to be missing, or are a hardcore fan of the film period, you pretty much have to own this version. It contains enough extra material to more than pay for itself and as I've said, some of the added stuff is well worth watching. This is one bad opera that will have you coming back for more....
[music fades]
Such was the Lynchian version of DUNE. It departed mainly from the book in that the Atreides have actually developed a new form of battle technology, the weirding module, rather than simply trained their army very well; but otherwise it is as faithful an adaptation as one could possibly want. Indeed, it is too faithful: the complexity of the universe Herbert created lends itself to miniseries or even episodic "limited series" television far more than it does to cinema. This is why Villeneuve broke DUNE into two feature-length movies -- and even then, scooped out a great deal of material lest it overload the script. Villeneuve's approach was more logical and more effective, but it robbed DUNE of some of what made it so special in the first place, and I tip my hat to Lynch for his manly attempt at fleshing out so daunting a novel...especially for audiences who probably thought they were going to see a slightly more stylistic take on STAR WARS.
Such was Lynch. The next time we return to this sandblown planet, I am to have a go at Villeneueve's version, and then to the book series. Until then, keep the spice flowing.
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