Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 8
May 19, 2024
AS I PLEASE XXIV: THINGS WE LEARNED FROM BENITO EDITION
I am currently reading Duce!, a breathless, beautifully-written biography of Benito Mussolini, written by Robert Collier in 1971. I have been curious about Mussolini more and more in recent years, especially since Putin's invasion of Ukraine, because it is in Mussolini rather than Hitler or Stalin that I see a historical figure analagous to Russia's present-day dictator. Reading the book has my mind going in a parallel direction: parallel in the sense that Mussolini's rise -- and his catastrophic fall -- were both the results of the human inability to heed historical warnings, both individually and on a mass scale. I believe as a Generation Xer I am among the last group of Americans to have been formally taught Civics, the subject being hateful to both the Left and the Right for the same reason: the fundamental lessons of Civics are to teach students the "slippery slope" theory as it applies to human freedoms, and more broadly, how to think critically in the face of one's own prejudices and predelictions. Both skills are critical to the survival of democracy, and therefore, neither idea is popular among the would-be autocrats who have hijacked our political system at both eneds. Reading about Mussolini, however, led me to a whole series of observations about history and current events which I will now set before you.
* There is widespread belief that authoritarian governments are more efficient than democracies because they do not engage in tedious wrangling over policy, but make decisive decisions and then act upon them. People admire dictators as much for their supposed ability to "get things done" as for their cruelty or ambition. (Mussolini was admired for his literal and figurative ability to "make the trains run on time.") Authoritarian worship, then, is often born not in a vicarious lust for power but rather out of sheer impatience for the fumbling and stumbling way of democracy. History has shown us, however, that authoritarian systems rapidly become so corrupt that they find it almost impossible to do anything effectively. Corruption stems largely from the fact that a free press is by far the most effective tool in exposing corruption in both business and government, and of course a free press is the first thing to go under a dictatorship. In the vacuum, corruption flourishes, leading in turn to the very inefficiency that investing a man or a small group with ultimate power was supposed to eliminate.
* Perhaps not coincidentally, the Italian director and provocoteur Passolini explored the "anarchy of power" in his unwatchably disgusting movie Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom; Salò happened to be the capital of Mussolini's short-lived Italian Social Republic, the Nazi puppet state in northern Italy the last two years of the war. The film deals with corruption, not in the monetary but rather in the moral sense, and it is fair to say that Mussolini's empire, whether headquartered in Rome or Salò, was morally corrupt almost from the start if not before its actual inception. The tactics Mussolini used to gain power, which included murder of political opposition, tainted the legitimacy of his rule, and his actual policies were divergent enough from their socialist origins to alienate much of the populace he governed. His penchant for warmongering did the rest. Napoleon once remarked that the moral is to the physical in war as three is to one, and it remains a fact, however uncomfortable to dictators, that people do not like to fight, and most especially do not like to die, for morally bankrupt causes. A dictator must convince his people that his cause is just, or at least that there is some identifiable merit in it, and after about 1937 Mussolini seems to have been unable to do this. The Italian people fight well when they believe in their cause, but when they do not, to paraphrase Suvorov, they stick their bayonets in the ground and go home. Several million Italian soldiers did this in World War Two and it is very difficult to fault them for it.
* Militarism is the worship of the military for its own sake, rather for any benefit it produces society, and its central tenant is that bombs solve political problems. This is at the core of all fascist movements: a veneration of all things military and a belief that violence is always the answer. In fact, history manifestly shows that bombs actually tend to create more problems than they solve, and that those who view politics as merely a continuation of war are generally doomed to failure. The genius of a man like Franco was that he knew how to play the role of a fascist dictator without losing his good sense: his understanding of the limits of Spanish military power kept him out of WW2 and allowed him to rule for generations and die in bed. Mussolini probably knew Italian limits at the start; he was actually quite an able politician, and after taking power, was trying to moderate and rule by coalition; he was forced into autocracy by extremists in his own party. Once he accepted this autocracy, however, he fell headlong into it and all the false logic that came with it, and his petty jealousy of Hitler led him to try and imitate his former pupil by playing Caesar to Hitler's Charlemagne. The result was total destruction of the Italian Empire, the extermination of fascism in Italy, and the death of Mussolini himself.
* Realpolitik, the practice of conducting foreign policy without regard to morality but only benefit, is a darling of right wing political thought; but is self-defeating for the same reason that selfishness is ironically self-defeating: it produces the thing it seeks to avoid. It may be expedient, for example, to ignore a friend's cries for help so as to avoid risk or inconvenience to oneself, but the bill for such selfishness will eventually come due -- often with interest. There is an intangible moral factor in politics of all kinds, and those eager to dismiss morality as a basis for behavior usually do so under the guise that they are "realists." This is the same mentality that justifies what we call brutal honesty, which more than half the time is simply an excuse for sadism under the guise of directness. Realpolitik is ultimately an attempt to dress up and justify amoral decision-makiny. Mussolini threw many a laurel and cosmetic over his imperial ambitions, but these dressings failed to conceal the stench of his amorality, his lack of scruple. For a dictator to remain popular, he must find a way to justify his dictatorship to the individual. Mussolini's brand of realism failed, except to the extent it thoroughly produced its own destruction.
* One of the results of tyranny and dictatorship is the movement toward group fantasy, a stylized denial of reality, among the ruling clique. For a good many years Mussolini seems to have had a reasonably firm grasp on both Italian and world politics -- he initially courted members of the internal opposition he felt were useful for his government, and correctly deduced the League of Nations would not stop his military ambitions in Africa. As Europe came closer to war, Mussolini -- not Churchill -- was actually at the forefront of the peace movement, being the first to stand up to Hitler, and later, even after his ill-fated alliance with same, a vocal proponent of talks and negotiations between the powers rather than violence. Hitler's success in the field, however, jealousy-blinded Mussolini to the inadequacy of his own military, goading him into the world war; much later, after defeats had stripped him of most of his empire and all of his prestige, he spent more and more of his time retreating into the petty squalor of internal fascist party politics, arguing with his disgruntled, fractious fascist prelates over this or that doctrine, this or that platform, this or that method of recovering the party's soul, when in fact it was obvious to anyone with sense that fascism was doomed -- actually dead and rotting, though admittedly still clinging to the levers of power like a corpse in mid-rigor. This collapse into denial is a marked feature of all tyrannies looking into the abyss, but it does not take an existential crisis to produce psychosis: success can also produce it. The point is that dictators like Mussolini inevitably become isolated from reality, either due to the scheming machinations of servile and ambitious underlings, or because they lose the ability to distinguish between power and omnipotence.
* Collier makes a fascinating observation about Mussolini, to wit, that like many revolutionaries, even those who went on to commit bestial atrocities on a massive scale, Mussolini's initial objectives as a political figure were at least partially understandable. A child of abject poverty, he knew poverty intimately and detested a system which ignored its cruelties and indignities; he opposed imperial adventures abroad when the great mass of the people at home were hungry and hopeless; and he wanted to effect changes which would grant the ordinary Italian dignity and a share in his own destiny as well as sufficient bread and vino to live, as opposed to merely subsist. He did not begin his journey fighting for the church, the aristocracy, the wealthy, or big business; quite the contrary, he openly hated these instutitions and classes and longed to see them in the dirt. And yet one of his girlfriends made the observation that "to her it seemed that his hatred of oppression not from love of the people but from his own sense of indignity and frustration, his passion to assert his ego." In this he shared much with men like Stalin and Hitler, whose sense of grievance, and whose desire for vengeance against the world, outweighed any benign motives they might have once succored for their people early in their politico-revolutionary life. This serves as a keen reminder that "even the devil can quote scripture to his purpose;" that just because a man has or seems to have the right enemies, the right goals, it is his motives and his means by which ye shall know them.
So much for old Benito, who has long since been consigned to the ash-heap of history. The fact that his memory resides there is not the important issue, but rather the fact that he needed to be sent there in the first place. For Mussolini, like Stalin and Hitler alongside him and like so many subsequent dictators and would-be dictators since, could have been avoided. His methodology was from almost the start a red flag fluttering and snapping in the breeze, plain for any to see and remark upon; and his fate could have been foretold by anyone with sufficient understanding of the inherent weaknesses of dictatorship. It remains for us to remember the lessons taught to us by his rise and fall, and by the existence of all the others who would follow in his footsteps and utilize his same means.
* There is widespread belief that authoritarian governments are more efficient than democracies because they do not engage in tedious wrangling over policy, but make decisive decisions and then act upon them. People admire dictators as much for their supposed ability to "get things done" as for their cruelty or ambition. (Mussolini was admired for his literal and figurative ability to "make the trains run on time.") Authoritarian worship, then, is often born not in a vicarious lust for power but rather out of sheer impatience for the fumbling and stumbling way of democracy. History has shown us, however, that authoritarian systems rapidly become so corrupt that they find it almost impossible to do anything effectively. Corruption stems largely from the fact that a free press is by far the most effective tool in exposing corruption in both business and government, and of course a free press is the first thing to go under a dictatorship. In the vacuum, corruption flourishes, leading in turn to the very inefficiency that investing a man or a small group with ultimate power was supposed to eliminate.
* Perhaps not coincidentally, the Italian director and provocoteur Passolini explored the "anarchy of power" in his unwatchably disgusting movie Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom; Salò happened to be the capital of Mussolini's short-lived Italian Social Republic, the Nazi puppet state in northern Italy the last two years of the war. The film deals with corruption, not in the monetary but rather in the moral sense, and it is fair to say that Mussolini's empire, whether headquartered in Rome or Salò, was morally corrupt almost from the start if not before its actual inception. The tactics Mussolini used to gain power, which included murder of political opposition, tainted the legitimacy of his rule, and his actual policies were divergent enough from their socialist origins to alienate much of the populace he governed. His penchant for warmongering did the rest. Napoleon once remarked that the moral is to the physical in war as three is to one, and it remains a fact, however uncomfortable to dictators, that people do not like to fight, and most especially do not like to die, for morally bankrupt causes. A dictator must convince his people that his cause is just, or at least that there is some identifiable merit in it, and after about 1937 Mussolini seems to have been unable to do this. The Italian people fight well when they believe in their cause, but when they do not, to paraphrase Suvorov, they stick their bayonets in the ground and go home. Several million Italian soldiers did this in World War Two and it is very difficult to fault them for it.
* Militarism is the worship of the military for its own sake, rather for any benefit it produces society, and its central tenant is that bombs solve political problems. This is at the core of all fascist movements: a veneration of all things military and a belief that violence is always the answer. In fact, history manifestly shows that bombs actually tend to create more problems than they solve, and that those who view politics as merely a continuation of war are generally doomed to failure. The genius of a man like Franco was that he knew how to play the role of a fascist dictator without losing his good sense: his understanding of the limits of Spanish military power kept him out of WW2 and allowed him to rule for generations and die in bed. Mussolini probably knew Italian limits at the start; he was actually quite an able politician, and after taking power, was trying to moderate and rule by coalition; he was forced into autocracy by extremists in his own party. Once he accepted this autocracy, however, he fell headlong into it and all the false logic that came with it, and his petty jealousy of Hitler led him to try and imitate his former pupil by playing Caesar to Hitler's Charlemagne. The result was total destruction of the Italian Empire, the extermination of fascism in Italy, and the death of Mussolini himself.
* Realpolitik, the practice of conducting foreign policy without regard to morality but only benefit, is a darling of right wing political thought; but is self-defeating for the same reason that selfishness is ironically self-defeating: it produces the thing it seeks to avoid. It may be expedient, for example, to ignore a friend's cries for help so as to avoid risk or inconvenience to oneself, but the bill for such selfishness will eventually come due -- often with interest. There is an intangible moral factor in politics of all kinds, and those eager to dismiss morality as a basis for behavior usually do so under the guise that they are "realists." This is the same mentality that justifies what we call brutal honesty, which more than half the time is simply an excuse for sadism under the guise of directness. Realpolitik is ultimately an attempt to dress up and justify amoral decision-makiny. Mussolini threw many a laurel and cosmetic over his imperial ambitions, but these dressings failed to conceal the stench of his amorality, his lack of scruple. For a dictator to remain popular, he must find a way to justify his dictatorship to the individual. Mussolini's brand of realism failed, except to the extent it thoroughly produced its own destruction.
* One of the results of tyranny and dictatorship is the movement toward group fantasy, a stylized denial of reality, among the ruling clique. For a good many years Mussolini seems to have had a reasonably firm grasp on both Italian and world politics -- he initially courted members of the internal opposition he felt were useful for his government, and correctly deduced the League of Nations would not stop his military ambitions in Africa. As Europe came closer to war, Mussolini -- not Churchill -- was actually at the forefront of the peace movement, being the first to stand up to Hitler, and later, even after his ill-fated alliance with same, a vocal proponent of talks and negotiations between the powers rather than violence. Hitler's success in the field, however, jealousy-blinded Mussolini to the inadequacy of his own military, goading him into the world war; much later, after defeats had stripped him of most of his empire and all of his prestige, he spent more and more of his time retreating into the petty squalor of internal fascist party politics, arguing with his disgruntled, fractious fascist prelates over this or that doctrine, this or that platform, this or that method of recovering the party's soul, when in fact it was obvious to anyone with sense that fascism was doomed -- actually dead and rotting, though admittedly still clinging to the levers of power like a corpse in mid-rigor. This collapse into denial is a marked feature of all tyrannies looking into the abyss, but it does not take an existential crisis to produce psychosis: success can also produce it. The point is that dictators like Mussolini inevitably become isolated from reality, either due to the scheming machinations of servile and ambitious underlings, or because they lose the ability to distinguish between power and omnipotence.
* Collier makes a fascinating observation about Mussolini, to wit, that like many revolutionaries, even those who went on to commit bestial atrocities on a massive scale, Mussolini's initial objectives as a political figure were at least partially understandable. A child of abject poverty, he knew poverty intimately and detested a system which ignored its cruelties and indignities; he opposed imperial adventures abroad when the great mass of the people at home were hungry and hopeless; and he wanted to effect changes which would grant the ordinary Italian dignity and a share in his own destiny as well as sufficient bread and vino to live, as opposed to merely subsist. He did not begin his journey fighting for the church, the aristocracy, the wealthy, or big business; quite the contrary, he openly hated these instutitions and classes and longed to see them in the dirt. And yet one of his girlfriends made the observation that "to her it seemed that his hatred of oppression not from love of the people but from his own sense of indignity and frustration, his passion to assert his ego." In this he shared much with men like Stalin and Hitler, whose sense of grievance, and whose desire for vengeance against the world, outweighed any benign motives they might have once succored for their people early in their politico-revolutionary life. This serves as a keen reminder that "even the devil can quote scripture to his purpose;" that just because a man has or seems to have the right enemies, the right goals, it is his motives and his means by which ye shall know them.
So much for old Benito, who has long since been consigned to the ash-heap of history. The fact that his memory resides there is not the important issue, but rather the fact that he needed to be sent there in the first place. For Mussolini, like Stalin and Hitler alongside him and like so many subsequent dictators and would-be dictators since, could have been avoided. His methodology was from almost the start a red flag fluttering and snapping in the breeze, plain for any to see and remark upon; and his fate could have been foretold by anyone with sufficient understanding of the inherent weaknesses of dictatorship. It remains for us to remember the lessons taught to us by his rise and fall, and by the existence of all the others who would follow in his footsteps and utilize his same means.
May 12, 2024
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "FATHER DOWLING MYSTERIES"
I am fairly certain that I was not aware of the existence of "Father Dowling Mysteries" during its brief (1989 - 1991) run on the air. I freely confess as well that I would not have watched the show even had I known it did in fact exist. The "cozy mystery" was nothing I was remotely interested in as a young man who wanted to see shootouts, fist-fights, car chases and bikini babes in most of my entertainment. As I have ambled into middle age, however, I feel an increasing need to find periodic escape in what is sometimes referred to as "wholesome entertainment," i.e. TV shows and movies which are not replete with cursing, gore, and moral ambiguity. It is not that I have lost my taste or tolerance for these things per se, merely that television and film were meant first and foremost as a form of escape, and the present world is vulgar and amoral enough as it is.
Not having memories of "Father Dowling Mysteries" from its original run, this entry of Memory Lane probably deserves as asterisk; but one of the joys of running your own blog is that you can do whatever the hell you want, and in any case this entry will be largely free of the tedious nostalgia I invariably feel compelled to comment upon, since my viewing of the series came thirty-plus years after it was on the air. There is in any case a reason I am visiting this particular address on the Lane today, one which will become apparent as we explore its candle-lighted interior.
To begin with, "Father Dowling Mysteries" is the sort of TV series which is not made much, if at all, in this horribly cynical age. It is a cozy mystery show with an old-fashioned set of values and strong moral center, "suitable for the whole family," as advertisers used to say when I was a kid. It is just the sort of thing that is fun to watch if you want to be unchallenged, unthreatened, occasionally amused, and modestly engaged. In a sense it's like having tea with your eccentric grandmother. And if that doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement, you must understand that there is a real place for entertainment of that type, and that place should be respected.
"FDM" was very loosely adapted from the popular mystery series of the same name by Ralph McInerney, and supposedly influenced -- if you believe Wikipedia -- by G.K. Chesterton's "Father Brown" novels as well. I is the story of Father Francis Dowling (Tom Bosley) and Sister Stephanie (Tracy Nelson), of rough-and-tumble St. Michael's Parish in Chicago. The rotund and cuddly Dowling is a devoted if somewhat embattled priest, none too popular with his bishop, in part because he loves playing amateur detective. The fiesty Stephanie ("Steve" to her friends) is a former reprobate who still knows the streets and is as comfortable with a lockpick (or lipstick) as a rosary, and acts as Dowling's legman and Girl Friday. Together they make a habit of aggravating the local cops by butting their noses into murder mysteries, usually for the purpose of trying to prevent the dull-witted Chicago PD from arresting the wrong man. In this task they are supported by Marie Murkin (Mary Wickes), the irascible parish cook/housekeeper who pretends not to like Dowling, and the bumbling, self-centered and comically ambitious Father Philip Prestwick (James Stephens), who is usually more of a hinderance than a help. These four actually make a family unit of sorts: Dowling is dad, Marie is mom, Steve is the daughter and Prestwick the unwanted relation nobody is willing to throw out into the street.
The show usually follows a formula taken partially from the "Perry Mason" catalog, and "Murder, She Wrote" playbook, which is no surprise, as Bosley left that show to head up this one. It goes like so: A murder is committed, an innocent person is on the hook for it, and our heroes must not only prove the accused didn't do it, but find out who did. This usually involves some derring-do and undercover work, and often culminates with Frank talking the bad guy into a confession while the cops lurk just around the corner waiting to spring. Because it's set in Chicago, there are many Mob stories and plots that center around corrupt officials, crooked cops, etc., but the basic atmosphere of the show is "cozy mystery" and so with a few notable exceptions, the murders and rough stuff are handled in a pretty tame fashion, and a woman in a bikini or a tight cocktail dress is as sexy as things will ever get. Also, although Dowling is a priest and Steve a nun, religion here is often a backdrop and not foreground material: if the series has a theme, it is that faith is great, but good works are what save the day and the soul.
From an objective standpoint, DOWLING has a lot wrong with it, even grading on a curve. The storytelling is generally full of cliches and tropes, and while some of the stories are inventive and a few very cleverly plotted, most of the twists are easy to spot from far away. The dialog varies enormously, from sharply witty and clever to the usual TV dreck of that era, in which the script seems to be pasted together from scraps of the Great Book of Television Cliches. The show is set in Chicago, but actually filmed in Denver (as was "Perry Mason" when it returned), and it certainly looks nothing at all like Chicago, to the point that they may as well just have set it in Denver and been done with it. What's more, like Tracy Nelson herself, the guest actors are usually New Yorkers with heavy New York or Jersey accents, which makes further nonsense of the setting. As for Tom Bosley, he is extremely believable as a priest, but not so much as an amateur sleuth/deductive genius. Unlike Angela Lansbury's Jessica Fletcher, Dowling's deductive faculties never really ring true. He comes off as merely nosy rather than possessing any genius at detection. There were also times the show also struggled with its identity: three or four episodes are purely supernatural in character. Now, as a general rule, you can do that all the time or none of the time, and if you want to work the middle, you'd better have a very deft touch (like "Magnum, P.I."). I'm not sure Dowling talking to the devil constitutes a light touch.
What makes DOWLING rise above its flaws is its wholesome attitude. In this day and age, every protagonist is either an outright criminal or so tortured, troubled and morally ambiguous it's hard to tell the difference between protagonist and antagonist. There's a place for Noir-type storytelling, but it should not RE-place conventional protagonists and yes, even heroes. Dowling represents the radical idea that there are good and selfless people out there who want to do mostly good and selfless things...period. Steve represents the idea that people can overcome their past without pretending it never happened...period. Marie is caring and kind beneath her crusty exterior, the “stepmom with the heart of gold,” and even Prestwick, who is venal, shallow, clueless, selfishly ambitious, and generally annoying, is curiously likeable, because his failings contains no malice. There's something comforting about all of this, a sort of emotional atmosphere which I found myself strongly responding to. What's more, while the show is necessarily steeped in Catholic iconography and ritual, it's not preachy: Bosley himself was Jewish in real life, and I think the main message is not religious per se, but moral: good must fight evil, and must not expect a reward for doing so. You fight not for riches or glory but because it's the right thing to do...period.
During its short life, "Dowling" produced 43 episodes and one TV movie, appeared on two different networks, and managed to employ just about every working character actor in Hollywood, as well as many young actors who went on to considerable fame or success in later life, including Anthony La Paglia, Tony Todd, Colm Meany, and Michelle Forbes. It made no lasting pop-cultural marks and certainly never threatened "Murder, She Wrote" in either ratings or popularity, which I'm fairly certain was the intention of its producers. When it disappeared, it did so quietly, and I'm fairly certain that while it is fondly remembered by its small audience -- look at the loving tributes on Amazon reviews -- there won't be any "Father Dowling" conventions or reboots any time soon. So why talk about it at all? The answer to this is digressive and complicated but worth the trip, which I'll make as short as possible, impatient as we all are of destination.
I've already touched on the place which "wholesome entertainment" has, or ought to have, in our lives. It should exist, at the very least, as an option; an alternative to the dark, gritty, morally ambiguous taletelling which abounds everywhere. It provides distraction and relief from the real world, which is necessarily often gray and ugly and replete with unhappy endings. But there is also the greater purpose that this sort of thing serves, the service it provides which we often do not appreciate enough in the noisy, speed-crazed age in which we live. It is what George Orwell referred to in "Coming Up For Air" as the "book-pipe-fire" atmosphere, which the cozy mystery (among other fictive genres) so easily summons. When one chains the door, switches off the phone, builds the fire, boils the tea (fortified, perhaps, with some Irish whiskey), and sits down in one's favorite chair, what is it that they seek when they pick up the book or the remote control? Is it the world on the other side of that locked door, from which they have just returned, or is it something else -- something different?
When we look at the history of television and film, we see that "adult" themes began to make themselves more and more readily felt in the years immediately following World War Two, when returning soldiers demanded that their entertainment correspond more accurately to the darker, more cynical world that war and military service had exposed them to. This movement towards gritty storytelling, toward the protagonist as opposed to the hero, toward the unhappy rather than the happy ending, reached its apotheosis in the 1970s, when ugliness and brutality became the norm in film and increasingly common on television. The good and the bad guys were generally indistinguishable in outlook and method; only the causes they served tended to differ. This was probably a necessary thing, and certainly it was inevitable, but it also left audiences with fewer and fewer places to go where the deeper purpose of entertainment was to be found: escape. It is one thing to insist that a film or a TV series reflect, as accurately as possible, the world we live in; it is another to destroy the distinction between the world we live in and the fantasy world we are trying to reach through these self-same mediums. After all, we already live in the real world: why the hell should we turn on a TV and get more of the same? The very purpose of these mediums is to divert us from reality, to bend the rules of existence so we can produce different behaviors and different outcomes than those we can expect in our everyday lives.
The very concept of a "cozy mystery" is somewhat fantastic, in that it reduces one of the ugliest acts inaginable, murder, into something suitable for comfortable, fireside entertainment. Indeed, the mystery genre itself presupposes something which does not obtain in real life, i.e. that the mystery is always solved, the murderer always caught or at least identified. When you fire up "Father Dowling Mysteries" you may not know much, but you know Dowling will get his man -- or woman, regardless of the odds arrayed against him. But this is also precisely why we watch such things. The insistence on realism which pervades all forms of entertainment today creates by its very existence a dissonance within our minds and hearts, because TV and film were meant as funhouse mirrors, not windows. And this is where the strength of "Dowling" and its ilk rests: this is why, despite is numerous flaws and failings, it is just as appealing, or perhaps more appealing, in 2024 as it was in 1989. It is not giving us the truth; it is presenting us with a stylized rejection of reality in which, whatever tragedies and dangers are borne by our heroes, the truth will always out and the murderer always end up in the dock. And this is why, when it's cold outside in more ways than just the temperature, it doesn't hurt to chuck the cell phone, put the kettle on, hoist up your feet, and escape to St. Michael's Parish for an hour or two. After all, the real world will still be there when you return.
Not having memories of "Father Dowling Mysteries" from its original run, this entry of Memory Lane probably deserves as asterisk; but one of the joys of running your own blog is that you can do whatever the hell you want, and in any case this entry will be largely free of the tedious nostalgia I invariably feel compelled to comment upon, since my viewing of the series came thirty-plus years after it was on the air. There is in any case a reason I am visiting this particular address on the Lane today, one which will become apparent as we explore its candle-lighted interior.
To begin with, "Father Dowling Mysteries" is the sort of TV series which is not made much, if at all, in this horribly cynical age. It is a cozy mystery show with an old-fashioned set of values and strong moral center, "suitable for the whole family," as advertisers used to say when I was a kid. It is just the sort of thing that is fun to watch if you want to be unchallenged, unthreatened, occasionally amused, and modestly engaged. In a sense it's like having tea with your eccentric grandmother. And if that doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement, you must understand that there is a real place for entertainment of that type, and that place should be respected.
"FDM" was very loosely adapted from the popular mystery series of the same name by Ralph McInerney, and supposedly influenced -- if you believe Wikipedia -- by G.K. Chesterton's "Father Brown" novels as well. I is the story of Father Francis Dowling (Tom Bosley) and Sister Stephanie (Tracy Nelson), of rough-and-tumble St. Michael's Parish in Chicago. The rotund and cuddly Dowling is a devoted if somewhat embattled priest, none too popular with his bishop, in part because he loves playing amateur detective. The fiesty Stephanie ("Steve" to her friends) is a former reprobate who still knows the streets and is as comfortable with a lockpick (or lipstick) as a rosary, and acts as Dowling's legman and Girl Friday. Together they make a habit of aggravating the local cops by butting their noses into murder mysteries, usually for the purpose of trying to prevent the dull-witted Chicago PD from arresting the wrong man. In this task they are supported by Marie Murkin (Mary Wickes), the irascible parish cook/housekeeper who pretends not to like Dowling, and the bumbling, self-centered and comically ambitious Father Philip Prestwick (James Stephens), who is usually more of a hinderance than a help. These four actually make a family unit of sorts: Dowling is dad, Marie is mom, Steve is the daughter and Prestwick the unwanted relation nobody is willing to throw out into the street.
The show usually follows a formula taken partially from the "Perry Mason" catalog, and "Murder, She Wrote" playbook, which is no surprise, as Bosley left that show to head up this one. It goes like so: A murder is committed, an innocent person is on the hook for it, and our heroes must not only prove the accused didn't do it, but find out who did. This usually involves some derring-do and undercover work, and often culminates with Frank talking the bad guy into a confession while the cops lurk just around the corner waiting to spring. Because it's set in Chicago, there are many Mob stories and plots that center around corrupt officials, crooked cops, etc., but the basic atmosphere of the show is "cozy mystery" and so with a few notable exceptions, the murders and rough stuff are handled in a pretty tame fashion, and a woman in a bikini or a tight cocktail dress is as sexy as things will ever get. Also, although Dowling is a priest and Steve a nun, religion here is often a backdrop and not foreground material: if the series has a theme, it is that faith is great, but good works are what save the day and the soul.
From an objective standpoint, DOWLING has a lot wrong with it, even grading on a curve. The storytelling is generally full of cliches and tropes, and while some of the stories are inventive and a few very cleverly plotted, most of the twists are easy to spot from far away. The dialog varies enormously, from sharply witty and clever to the usual TV dreck of that era, in which the script seems to be pasted together from scraps of the Great Book of Television Cliches. The show is set in Chicago, but actually filmed in Denver (as was "Perry Mason" when it returned), and it certainly looks nothing at all like Chicago, to the point that they may as well just have set it in Denver and been done with it. What's more, like Tracy Nelson herself, the guest actors are usually New Yorkers with heavy New York or Jersey accents, which makes further nonsense of the setting. As for Tom Bosley, he is extremely believable as a priest, but not so much as an amateur sleuth/deductive genius. Unlike Angela Lansbury's Jessica Fletcher, Dowling's deductive faculties never really ring true. He comes off as merely nosy rather than possessing any genius at detection. There were also times the show also struggled with its identity: three or four episodes are purely supernatural in character. Now, as a general rule, you can do that all the time or none of the time, and if you want to work the middle, you'd better have a very deft touch (like "Magnum, P.I."). I'm not sure Dowling talking to the devil constitutes a light touch.
What makes DOWLING rise above its flaws is its wholesome attitude. In this day and age, every protagonist is either an outright criminal or so tortured, troubled and morally ambiguous it's hard to tell the difference between protagonist and antagonist. There's a place for Noir-type storytelling, but it should not RE-place conventional protagonists and yes, even heroes. Dowling represents the radical idea that there are good and selfless people out there who want to do mostly good and selfless things...period. Steve represents the idea that people can overcome their past without pretending it never happened...period. Marie is caring and kind beneath her crusty exterior, the “stepmom with the heart of gold,” and even Prestwick, who is venal, shallow, clueless, selfishly ambitious, and generally annoying, is curiously likeable, because his failings contains no malice. There's something comforting about all of this, a sort of emotional atmosphere which I found myself strongly responding to. What's more, while the show is necessarily steeped in Catholic iconography and ritual, it's not preachy: Bosley himself was Jewish in real life, and I think the main message is not religious per se, but moral: good must fight evil, and must not expect a reward for doing so. You fight not for riches or glory but because it's the right thing to do...period.
During its short life, "Dowling" produced 43 episodes and one TV movie, appeared on two different networks, and managed to employ just about every working character actor in Hollywood, as well as many young actors who went on to considerable fame or success in later life, including Anthony La Paglia, Tony Todd, Colm Meany, and Michelle Forbes. It made no lasting pop-cultural marks and certainly never threatened "Murder, She Wrote" in either ratings or popularity, which I'm fairly certain was the intention of its producers. When it disappeared, it did so quietly, and I'm fairly certain that while it is fondly remembered by its small audience -- look at the loving tributes on Amazon reviews -- there won't be any "Father Dowling" conventions or reboots any time soon. So why talk about it at all? The answer to this is digressive and complicated but worth the trip, which I'll make as short as possible, impatient as we all are of destination.
I've already touched on the place which "wholesome entertainment" has, or ought to have, in our lives. It should exist, at the very least, as an option; an alternative to the dark, gritty, morally ambiguous taletelling which abounds everywhere. It provides distraction and relief from the real world, which is necessarily often gray and ugly and replete with unhappy endings. But there is also the greater purpose that this sort of thing serves, the service it provides which we often do not appreciate enough in the noisy, speed-crazed age in which we live. It is what George Orwell referred to in "Coming Up For Air" as the "book-pipe-fire" atmosphere, which the cozy mystery (among other fictive genres) so easily summons. When one chains the door, switches off the phone, builds the fire, boils the tea (fortified, perhaps, with some Irish whiskey), and sits down in one's favorite chair, what is it that they seek when they pick up the book or the remote control? Is it the world on the other side of that locked door, from which they have just returned, or is it something else -- something different?
When we look at the history of television and film, we see that "adult" themes began to make themselves more and more readily felt in the years immediately following World War Two, when returning soldiers demanded that their entertainment correspond more accurately to the darker, more cynical world that war and military service had exposed them to. This movement towards gritty storytelling, toward the protagonist as opposed to the hero, toward the unhappy rather than the happy ending, reached its apotheosis in the 1970s, when ugliness and brutality became the norm in film and increasingly common on television. The good and the bad guys were generally indistinguishable in outlook and method; only the causes they served tended to differ. This was probably a necessary thing, and certainly it was inevitable, but it also left audiences with fewer and fewer places to go where the deeper purpose of entertainment was to be found: escape. It is one thing to insist that a film or a TV series reflect, as accurately as possible, the world we live in; it is another to destroy the distinction between the world we live in and the fantasy world we are trying to reach through these self-same mediums. After all, we already live in the real world: why the hell should we turn on a TV and get more of the same? The very purpose of these mediums is to divert us from reality, to bend the rules of existence so we can produce different behaviors and different outcomes than those we can expect in our everyday lives.
The very concept of a "cozy mystery" is somewhat fantastic, in that it reduces one of the ugliest acts inaginable, murder, into something suitable for comfortable, fireside entertainment. Indeed, the mystery genre itself presupposes something which does not obtain in real life, i.e. that the mystery is always solved, the murderer always caught or at least identified. When you fire up "Father Dowling Mysteries" you may not know much, but you know Dowling will get his man -- or woman, regardless of the odds arrayed against him. But this is also precisely why we watch such things. The insistence on realism which pervades all forms of entertainment today creates by its very existence a dissonance within our minds and hearts, because TV and film were meant as funhouse mirrors, not windows. And this is where the strength of "Dowling" and its ilk rests: this is why, despite is numerous flaws and failings, it is just as appealing, or perhaps more appealing, in 2024 as it was in 1989. It is not giving us the truth; it is presenting us with a stylized rejection of reality in which, whatever tragedies and dangers are borne by our heroes, the truth will always out and the murderer always end up in the dock. And this is why, when it's cold outside in more ways than just the temperature, it doesn't hurt to chuck the cell phone, put the kettle on, hoist up your feet, and escape to St. Michael's Parish for an hour or two. After all, the real world will still be there when you return.
April 28, 2024
DARK TRADE
On June 14, 2023, I sat down and began the formal process of writing the third novel in my CAGE LIFE series, tentatively titled Dark Trade. I completed this draft on January 7, 2024; the manuscript scaled in at a surprisingly trim 82,953 words, and by and large I'm pleased with it. If that seems like damnation by virtue of faint praise, I would draw your attention to the following writerly facts:
1. First drafts are like college students: while they are no longer children, and their future shape is most definitely suggested by their present form, they haven't quite finished growing, they haven't truly filled out, their complexions leave something to be desired, and there is still a good deal of time and experience which separates them from real maturity.
2. I generally dislike the CAGE LIFE books as I am writing them, only to fall in love with them later, when the emotional smoke clears. This applied especially to Knuckle Down, the second book in the series, which I now regard as far superior to its predecessor. I cannot tell you how much I hated this novel when I was writing it, or how mercenary and cold-blooded a project it seemed to be. Now, eight years after its release, I could genuinely read it for pleasure. So that's kind of encouraging.
As it happens, the CAGE LIFE books actually occupy two places within my heart. The first installment, Cage Life, was my very first novel, and the product of an agonizing, decade-long process to take an incoherent, 300,000 word collection of short stories without a plot, and slash, weld, beat and hammer them into a single, fast-paced, tightly woven novel that scales it at around 100K or less. Releasing it also won me several accolades, including Zealot Script Magazine's "Book of the Year" award for 2016, and the Best Indie Book Award for 2018. The awards were the first time I had been recognized for my writing since high school, and meant a great deal to me: I am therefore rather sentimental where anything CL is involved. These are the books that started what I pompously refer to as "my writing career."
At the same time, however, I recognize that unlike my other two series -- SINNER'S CROSS and THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS -- and even my novellas, CAGE LIFE is meant simply as entertainment. While I like to think there are deeper, more substantive, and even "literary" themes in the novels, the fact remains they fall squarely in that category known as "commercial art." I want you to turn the pages and enjoy what you read, and if you happen carry away some profound observations about life between punches and flying bullets, great; if not, well, if the novels just help you pass the time enjoyably on your flight to Miami or Montreal, I'll settle for that and then some.
If you happen to be unfamiliar with the CAGE LIFE series, the novels are about an up-and-coming New York City based MMA fighter named Michael (Mick) Watts whose run-in with the Mafia forever alters the trajectory of his life. Forced into servitude as low-end mob muscle, he must extricate himself from "the Life" while trying to keep his romantic relationship, career, and skin intact. This he does with varying degrees of success, and failure, encountering along the way a colorful panpoply of hoodlums, femme fatales, high-powered fixers and crooked businessmen. Where CAGE LIFE diverges from something like, say, Robert Parker's SPENCER novels or Mickey Spillaine's MIKE HAMMER series is both the versatility of the plots and the fact that each novel is a step toward a definite destination. What I mean by the former is that some of the novels are mysteries while others are straight suspense. What I mean by the latter is that Mick is a work in progress, a character who ages and grows with each book: rather than returning to the status quo at the end of a novel, he accumulates both wisdom and maturity, as well as scars and sorrows, as he fights in his literal and figurative cages. Each novel is a step toward his completition as a human being, and when I feel he is complete, that will be the end of the series. He will either die -- a very distinct possibility -- or he will reach a point where he has no more lessons to learn, no more battles to fight. Exactly how many books that will take, I don't know, but for some reason the number in my head is seven.
Now, if you are familiar with CL, you know that it's been almost eight years since Knuckle Down hit the shelves, so you could be forgiven doubting that I'll ever cross this finish line. In point of fact, writing #3 took so long merely because I couldn't think of a good story. I have a horror of repeating myself, and everything I came up with tasted like warmed-up soup. At last, in 2023, I came upon an idea that felt really fresh, resolved a lot of loose ends from the first two books, introduced some new characters, and still managed to end on a cliffhanger. Without giving away the store, I'll say that Dark Trade finds our hero at the lowest point of his life, yet called upon to give more than he ever has to rescue his best friend from the clutches of his worst enemy. In a previous blog, I discussed how a reviewer noted that "all of Watson's worlds are cruel," and I suppose CAGE LIFE, with its Catholic-tinged themes of sin, suffering and redemption, is evidence of this; but CL is also about loyalty and friendship, about the price of love and the willingness to pay it. Dark Trade is a further exploration of a good fighter's journey to find the good man within himself. I don't mind telling you that Mick's journey is a metaphorical or perhaps allegorical representation of my own life: not that I've been a professional fighter or worked for the Mafia, mind you, merely that his struggles, and his arc, reflect, in a grossly dramaticized way, my own trevails, heartbreak for heartbreak, black eye for black eye. Joss Whedon built Buffy around the simple idea of "high school as hell" in the literal sense, and I'm doing the same here, the difference being that the "cage" in which Mick fights is a representation of life itself and not merely a sport. There are women in these novels -- Anne Claybourne, Kristen Claybourne, Tina Soriani and Alana McCandles -- but the books themselves are a masculine lens, as well it might be. The stark fact is that we live in an age where manhood and masculinity are under a sustained attack, and I think there is something to be said for works of the old school which explore the XY side of things without mythologizing or fetishizing the darker aspects of -- how shall I say this? -- wielding a penis. So in spite of what I just said above, about these books being mere entertainment, well, I've always believed what you take away from something depends to some extent what you put into it. Either way you come at it, however, Dark Trade will soon be here for your applause, ridicule or indifference. Expect it roughly around Halloween, but at any rate before we wave bye-bye to 2024.
1. First drafts are like college students: while they are no longer children, and their future shape is most definitely suggested by their present form, they haven't quite finished growing, they haven't truly filled out, their complexions leave something to be desired, and there is still a good deal of time and experience which separates them from real maturity.
2. I generally dislike the CAGE LIFE books as I am writing them, only to fall in love with them later, when the emotional smoke clears. This applied especially to Knuckle Down, the second book in the series, which I now regard as far superior to its predecessor. I cannot tell you how much I hated this novel when I was writing it, or how mercenary and cold-blooded a project it seemed to be. Now, eight years after its release, I could genuinely read it for pleasure. So that's kind of encouraging.
As it happens, the CAGE LIFE books actually occupy two places within my heart. The first installment, Cage Life, was my very first novel, and the product of an agonizing, decade-long process to take an incoherent, 300,000 word collection of short stories without a plot, and slash, weld, beat and hammer them into a single, fast-paced, tightly woven novel that scales it at around 100K or less. Releasing it also won me several accolades, including Zealot Script Magazine's "Book of the Year" award for 2016, and the Best Indie Book Award for 2018. The awards were the first time I had been recognized for my writing since high school, and meant a great deal to me: I am therefore rather sentimental where anything CL is involved. These are the books that started what I pompously refer to as "my writing career."
At the same time, however, I recognize that unlike my other two series -- SINNER'S CROSS and THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS -- and even my novellas, CAGE LIFE is meant simply as entertainment. While I like to think there are deeper, more substantive, and even "literary" themes in the novels, the fact remains they fall squarely in that category known as "commercial art." I want you to turn the pages and enjoy what you read, and if you happen carry away some profound observations about life between punches and flying bullets, great; if not, well, if the novels just help you pass the time enjoyably on your flight to Miami or Montreal, I'll settle for that and then some.
If you happen to be unfamiliar with the CAGE LIFE series, the novels are about an up-and-coming New York City based MMA fighter named Michael (Mick) Watts whose run-in with the Mafia forever alters the trajectory of his life. Forced into servitude as low-end mob muscle, he must extricate himself from "the Life" while trying to keep his romantic relationship, career, and skin intact. This he does with varying degrees of success, and failure, encountering along the way a colorful panpoply of hoodlums, femme fatales, high-powered fixers and crooked businessmen. Where CAGE LIFE diverges from something like, say, Robert Parker's SPENCER novels or Mickey Spillaine's MIKE HAMMER series is both the versatility of the plots and the fact that each novel is a step toward a definite destination. What I mean by the former is that some of the novels are mysteries while others are straight suspense. What I mean by the latter is that Mick is a work in progress, a character who ages and grows with each book: rather than returning to the status quo at the end of a novel, he accumulates both wisdom and maturity, as well as scars and sorrows, as he fights in his literal and figurative cages. Each novel is a step toward his completition as a human being, and when I feel he is complete, that will be the end of the series. He will either die -- a very distinct possibility -- or he will reach a point where he has no more lessons to learn, no more battles to fight. Exactly how many books that will take, I don't know, but for some reason the number in my head is seven.
Now, if you are familiar with CL, you know that it's been almost eight years since Knuckle Down hit the shelves, so you could be forgiven doubting that I'll ever cross this finish line. In point of fact, writing #3 took so long merely because I couldn't think of a good story. I have a horror of repeating myself, and everything I came up with tasted like warmed-up soup. At last, in 2023, I came upon an idea that felt really fresh, resolved a lot of loose ends from the first two books, introduced some new characters, and still managed to end on a cliffhanger. Without giving away the store, I'll say that Dark Trade finds our hero at the lowest point of his life, yet called upon to give more than he ever has to rescue his best friend from the clutches of his worst enemy. In a previous blog, I discussed how a reviewer noted that "all of Watson's worlds are cruel," and I suppose CAGE LIFE, with its Catholic-tinged themes of sin, suffering and redemption, is evidence of this; but CL is also about loyalty and friendship, about the price of love and the willingness to pay it. Dark Trade is a further exploration of a good fighter's journey to find the good man within himself. I don't mind telling you that Mick's journey is a metaphorical or perhaps allegorical representation of my own life: not that I've been a professional fighter or worked for the Mafia, mind you, merely that his struggles, and his arc, reflect, in a grossly dramaticized way, my own trevails, heartbreak for heartbreak, black eye for black eye. Joss Whedon built Buffy around the simple idea of "high school as hell" in the literal sense, and I'm doing the same here, the difference being that the "cage" in which Mick fights is a representation of life itself and not merely a sport. There are women in these novels -- Anne Claybourne, Kristen Claybourne, Tina Soriani and Alana McCandles -- but the books themselves are a masculine lens, as well it might be. The stark fact is that we live in an age where manhood and masculinity are under a sustained attack, and I think there is something to be said for works of the old school which explore the XY side of things without mythologizing or fetishizing the darker aspects of -- how shall I say this? -- wielding a penis. So in spite of what I just said above, about these books being mere entertainment, well, I've always believed what you take away from something depends to some extent what you put into it. Either way you come at it, however, Dark Trade will soon be here for your applause, ridicule or indifference. Expect it roughly around Halloween, but at any rate before we wave bye-bye to 2024.
April 22, 2024
OLD TIME RADIO: DIARY OF AN OBSESSION
Some time ago I wrote an article in these pages called "Private Radio," which briefly described my lifelong love-affair with programs from the Golden Age of Radio. Since I dislike heating up yesterday's soup, I shan't bore you with a recount of how I came to discover OTR when I was a very young boy, courtesy of my father; but I would like to discuss why I love it, and examine, if briefly and inadequately, my favorite programs from the era. I would also like to touch, briefly, on the similarities between OTR and reading, a subject nobody ever seems to talk about.
The Golden Age of Radio lasted roughly from the late 1920s, when radios started to become household items, to the early 1950s, when television began to push radio steadily toward its present-day, marginalized status -- something you may happen to listen to while driving. During that period, along with news broadcasts and music, there were innumerable scripted shows: comedies, soap operas, plays, children's programs, Westerns, variety shows, detective stories, superhero stories, horror stories, etc., etc. As today, a great deal of what was produced in that period was utter crap: some of it was enjoyablecrap, but crap it was, even by the standards of the day. However, and also as today, there was a great deal of truly quality programming, which, when viewed through today's lens, is not only entertaining in its own right, but provides us with a fascinating time-capsule of times gone by.
I suppose I have at least 1,000 episodes of various shows in my personal MP3 library, with access to 60,000 more via the Old Time Radio Researcher's Library. What keeps drawing me back to this dusty, half-forgotten medium? The answers are surprisingly simple. First and foremost, a good old radio program, or even a good-bad old radio program, requires the listener to use their imagination even as they listen. In this it is unlike almost all other forms of entertainment save reading. Television and film, for example, are reactive mediums; when we are fully immersed in them, we cease to think at all: only our emotions are engaged. But radio programs ignite the imagination, because all we get is dialog and background noise; it is up to the reader to describe the characters and the scenery. Anyone whose imagination is sufficiently honed by reading can take to OTR provided they find the right program.
Second, OTR writers had numerous restrictions upon them: censorship is not too strong a word. And because this was so, because their characters couldn't swear, sex was almost completely avoided except by use of James Bond-like double entendres and sly insinuations (and even these had to be checked and double-checked by Standards & Practices and were only grudgingly allowed), because hot-button topics had to be avoided, these writers were forced to rise to great heights to deliver quality entertainment. Granted, many of them failed to do this; but those that did produced great stories and often, absolutely priceless dialog of the sort you rarely see nowadays, in this horribly glib, imitative, shallow-minded era. Lastly, because OTR was very much a product of its day, it is as good a means as any to study the past -- attitudes, mores, prejudices, prevailing wisdom.
My favorite shows are as follows. This list is not exclusive, nor is it in precise order of affection, but it ought to give you a good picture of both what I most enjoy (to date) and the diversity of programming which was available:
1. THE SHADOW. This popular series ran from 1937 to 1954, and gave birth to several classic lines, such as "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" Straddling the line between detective and superhero, The Shadow was about a wealthy amateur detective named Lamont Cranston who learns the secret of invisibility while traveling in "the Orient" and uses this power to fight crime back here in good old America. The Shadow ran so long the main character was played by no less than five men, of whom the first was a 22 year-old Orson Welles. The Shadow/Cranston was accompanied by his doting assistant, confident, and chaste romantic interest, Margo Lane, who was forever getting kidnapped, terrorized and nearly killed by a whole slew of psychopathic killers, enemy spies, mad scientists, bloodthirsty gangsters and the occasional flat-out monster. At its best, The Shadow was imaginative, atmospheric, periodically witty and consistently brutal, underscoring in blood its mantra that "crime does not pay." Indeed, The Shadow was often incredibly violent: I remember people being shot, hanged, stabbed, electrocuted, burned with acid, run over by cars, thrown off airplanes, ripped apart by wolves, strangled, drained of blood, devoured by crocodiles, drowned (after being whipped!), gassed, and thrown into volcanoes. The violence, however, was always used to underscore the futility of crime. The show's moral compass feels terribly outdated nowadays, but it is not ambiguous. That's kind of refreshing.
2. THE LINEUP. This gritty police procedural ran for only three years, from 1950 - 1953, but what a three years those were. Starring Bill Johnstone, one of the five men who also played The Shadow, it follows a detective squad in a "great American city" (a nameless hybrid of New York, Los Angeles, and many others) as they pursue murderers, thieves, drug dealers, racketeers, bank robbers, mad bombers, fraudsters and assorted other hoodlums. What always strikes me about The Lineup is a) the quality and realism of the dialog, which is written a very naturalistic style, with interruptions, stumbles, casual conversation, etc., while simultaneously being as punchy as the hardboiled gab you'd get in a Film Noir movie, and b) the surprisingly unglamorous way much of the investigative procedure is handled. Yes, there are fights and shoot-outs and even car chases, but mostly the cops are depicted actually running down leads, consulting notes, arguing with each other, pathologists and forensic experts, getting heartburn from bad diner food, sweating in uncomfortable summertime stake outs, talking sports, planning vacations, you name it. They even occasionally rough up suspects a little and deny them right to counsel, which isn't pretty, but is very realistic, especially for the period. The Lineup's humor is skewering, its drama very heavy: the show depicts grief in very stark and realistic terms, and almost revels in its depictions of the effects of crime on ordinary people, whether it is violent or financial. I've spent almost ten years in law enforcement and I'd put this up near the top of police/forensic procedural shows I have ever encountered.
3. ESCAPE. "Tired of the everyday grind? Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Want to get away from it all? We offer you... Escape! Escape! Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half-hour of high adventure!" Though most people would categorize Escape as the less-successful kid brother of the much more famous show, Suspense (see below), I truly believe Escape is the better of the two. As the name implies, Escape (1947 - 1954) was a flexible format adventure-suspense show in which the protagonist was invariably placed in a life-threatening bind and had to, well, escape it. Because the premise was so open-sided, stories could be hard-boiled, adventurous, supernatural, horror-themed...anything went, and many great short stories and novels were adapted into plays, by authors as diverse as Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ray Badbury. To give some examples: "Three Skeleton Key" (starring Vincent Price) was about a remote lighthouse overrun by carniverous rats. "Lenningen vs. The Ants" was about a South American plantation owner defending his land against a massive army ant invasion. "Earth Abides" was a two-part post-apocalyptic epic, "John Jock Todd" about a dockworker struggling to cope with a tyrannically cruel overseer, "The Scarlet Plague" about a world-ending disease, and "Evening Primrose" was a deeply disturbing tale about mannequins which come alive after the store closes. Many of these stories were brilliantly written, most were brilliantly acted, and a few ("Blood Bath" for example) were so over the top in their depictions of South American, South Pacific or African adventures gone wrong, that they rose to the level of art.
4 & 5. MERCURY THEATER ON THE AIR/THE CAMPBELL PLAYHOUSE Orson Welles' Mercury Theater on Broadway rocketed him to fame and fortune while still in his early-mid 20s; ever the avant-garde, he delved deeply into the medium of radio as well. His theater troupe, which included such luminaries as Ray Collins (later famous for his role as Tragg on "Perry Mason") and Agnes Moorehead (four Academy Award nominations), is best remembered for producing the adapation of H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds" which wrought havoc in 1938, but also made masterful adaptations of "Dracula," "A Tale of Two Cities, " "Julius Caesar" and "The Count of Monte Cristo." It later became The Campbell Playhouse, and added "Les Misérables," "The Magnificent Ambersons," "Beau Geste," "The Citadel," "The Glass Key" and others to its laurels. Wells' was the sort of performer whose voice can hypnotize, seduce, infuriate, or beat the listener into submission depending upon his whims, and by bullying his excellent cast along with him, he produced hour-long dramas which are worthy companions to the great works of literature than spawned them.
6. FRONTIER GENTLEMAN. Westerns were a very popular genre on radio, but Frontier Gentleman was cut from a different strip of cowhide. Running for only a single season in 1958, it nevertheless produced no less than 41 episodes starring John Dehner as J.B. Kendall, a former British cavalry officer now working as a newspaper correspondent for a London Times, on assignment in the American West in the post Civil War era. Wikipedia describes it aptly as "grittier, more realistic, and clearly intended for an older audience. Adult westerns [like this] were less the descendants of their juvenile predecessors than they were cousins of western feature films such as Shane (1953) and High Noon (1952)." Kendall, though first and foremost a newspaperman, was not shy about using his fists or his guns if absolutely necessary, but what he really wanted was good copy, and boy did he get it, encountering a wide range of scoundrels, gunslingers, corrupt sheriffs, embittered Indians, struggling homesteaders, and cynical salloon-keepers (including some of the female persuasion). This show was not afraid of thoughtful silences that seemed to summon up the emptiness of the West, nor of delving into some of the more morally complex aspects of what went into taming it. Kendall is occasionally appalled by the cruelty and greed he encounters, and while some stories are comic and others uplifting, there are a few hewn with tragedy and loss. When Kendall departs for England in the forty-first and final show, one gets the sense he will greatly miss it, but also that it has marked him forever in ways he does not entirely like. This was one Western meant for the grown-ups.
7. SUSPENSE. One of the longest-running programs in radio history (1940 - 1962), Suspense broadcast nearly 1,000 episodes and was called "radio's outstanding theater of thrills." Stories were introduced by "The Man in Black" and usually featured protagonists who were thrust suddenly and unexpectedly into life-threatening situations from which they had to escape, though they were by no means always totally sympathetic people or successful in their efforts. Lives turned on mistaken identities, old wrongs, impulsive crimes, simple misunderstandings or, in some cases, minor mistakes such as forgetting a wallet or taking the wrong suitcase. Many of these people were of purely ordinary or unremarkable character, adding to the tension by making them relatable. The show also adapted famous stories like "Donovan's Brain," "Sorry, Wrong Number," "The Most Dangerous Game," "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "In a Lonely Place," showing that the rigid formula actually possessed a certain flexibility. Some of these stories are shocking and unforgettable: "Flesh Peddler" (starring DeForest Kelley) is a good example of how suspense and horror can dance smoothly together, and one can clearly see the influence of such storytelling on Rod Serling and his "Twilight Zone." Nearly all of this show's episodes survive and are well worth listening to, they provide superb accompaniment, especially on night drives.
8. SHERLOCK HOLMES. (1939 - 1950) Until Jeremy Brett came along in 1985 to make the role always and forever his own, Basil Rathbone was Sherlock Holmes in the minds of millions, including yours truly. He starred in many Holmes movies, some good and some bad, but also recorded a large number of radio dramas playing the immortal detective. Together with his redoubtable co-star Nigel Bruce, who played Watson, he took the listener through adaptations of Conan-Doyle's tales, but also on stories inspired by random throwaway lines from the original Holmes stories ("Holmes solved the mystery by discovering the depth the parsley sunk into the butter on a hot day"), and many completely original scripts. Rathbone, a debonair veteran of WW1 in real life, played Holmes with a certain wry wit rather than as an ice-blooded sleuthound, fundamentally a little more human than Conan-Doyle envisioned him, but without betraying Conan-Doyle's vision of Holmes as a man apart, requiring only Watson as friend, confidant, foil and legman. I actually prefer the radio dramas to the movies, which were partially contemporized to the 40s and often little more than "Holmes vs. Nazi spies:" these are more true to the source material.
9. THE WHISTLER. I...am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, many secrets hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes... I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak! From 1942 - 1955, this mysterious and sneering narrator chronicled the clever crimes and nefarious schemes of men and women, often brilliant in character, which nonetheless came to shipwreck, usually because of some small mistake or ironic happenstance. Like "Columbo," the show was not about who did it but why they did, how they did it, and how they very nearly got away with it, if not for that pesky little devil of a detail. Although the formula can get a little tiresome, the stories are almost always very well written and cleverly plotted, and justice -- if only in a cruelly ironic fashion -- is generally served.
10. INNER SANCTUM MYSTERIES. From 1941 to 1952, this series scared the hell out of kids like my mom, who weren't supposed to be listening to it, just like I wasn't supposed to be watching "Friday the 13th" movies when I was supposed to be studying geometry. The narrator, identified only as "Raymond," was a sort of Crypt Keeper type who spewed bad puns and tacky gallows humor over equally terrible organ music before introducing each episode: the episodes themselves were not funny at all, and walked a bloody line between horror and suspense, crime and supernatural, featuring such plots as "a hearse-driver is hired by a murderess to dispose of her husband's body, and it doesn't go well" or "a woman home alone [or broken down on the roadside] is terrorized by an escaped criminal." Some of the stories had supernatural themes, while others were on the sci-fi end of the spectrum (an immortality formula that goes wrong) but all stuck to the basic premise of "scare the audience at any cost and spare no one" -- in one episode, Raymond himself was the victim (!). While happy endings were not by any means unheard-of, even these characters had to suffer through all sorts of terror and tension to earn their lives back.
This is not by any means all-inclusive; I could a tale unfold about Light's Outr, NBC University Theater, The Green Hornet, or the lengthy and highly imaginative adaptation of Dr. Jekyyl & Mr. Hyde, but this remains a good sampling of some of the better shows. It is certain that my passion for OTR heats and cools at regular intervals; there are years when I listen only occasionally to an episode here or there while hiking or driving, and there are others when I burn through half a dozen or more a day for weeks or months on end. Hell, when I was temping in Los Angeles, I used to burn through the better portion of what you could load on an iPod in a single shift. The point is simply that Old Time Radio is a resource that is always there for me, always ready to provide me with entertainment, and always capable of instructing me, the storyteller, with better ways to tell the story. In the age of the podcast, the YouTube video and the free download, it is certainly worth your time to explore this older but no less, and in some cases, far more enthralling medium.
The Golden Age of Radio lasted roughly from the late 1920s, when radios started to become household items, to the early 1950s, when television began to push radio steadily toward its present-day, marginalized status -- something you may happen to listen to while driving. During that period, along with news broadcasts and music, there were innumerable scripted shows: comedies, soap operas, plays, children's programs, Westerns, variety shows, detective stories, superhero stories, horror stories, etc., etc. As today, a great deal of what was produced in that period was utter crap: some of it was enjoyablecrap, but crap it was, even by the standards of the day. However, and also as today, there was a great deal of truly quality programming, which, when viewed through today's lens, is not only entertaining in its own right, but provides us with a fascinating time-capsule of times gone by.
I suppose I have at least 1,000 episodes of various shows in my personal MP3 library, with access to 60,000 more via the Old Time Radio Researcher's Library. What keeps drawing me back to this dusty, half-forgotten medium? The answers are surprisingly simple. First and foremost, a good old radio program, or even a good-bad old radio program, requires the listener to use their imagination even as they listen. In this it is unlike almost all other forms of entertainment save reading. Television and film, for example, are reactive mediums; when we are fully immersed in them, we cease to think at all: only our emotions are engaged. But radio programs ignite the imagination, because all we get is dialog and background noise; it is up to the reader to describe the characters and the scenery. Anyone whose imagination is sufficiently honed by reading can take to OTR provided they find the right program.
Second, OTR writers had numerous restrictions upon them: censorship is not too strong a word. And because this was so, because their characters couldn't swear, sex was almost completely avoided except by use of James Bond-like double entendres and sly insinuations (and even these had to be checked and double-checked by Standards & Practices and were only grudgingly allowed), because hot-button topics had to be avoided, these writers were forced to rise to great heights to deliver quality entertainment. Granted, many of them failed to do this; but those that did produced great stories and often, absolutely priceless dialog of the sort you rarely see nowadays, in this horribly glib, imitative, shallow-minded era. Lastly, because OTR was very much a product of its day, it is as good a means as any to study the past -- attitudes, mores, prejudices, prevailing wisdom.
My favorite shows are as follows. This list is not exclusive, nor is it in precise order of affection, but it ought to give you a good picture of both what I most enjoy (to date) and the diversity of programming which was available:
1. THE SHADOW. This popular series ran from 1937 to 1954, and gave birth to several classic lines, such as "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" Straddling the line between detective and superhero, The Shadow was about a wealthy amateur detective named Lamont Cranston who learns the secret of invisibility while traveling in "the Orient" and uses this power to fight crime back here in good old America. The Shadow ran so long the main character was played by no less than five men, of whom the first was a 22 year-old Orson Welles. The Shadow/Cranston was accompanied by his doting assistant, confident, and chaste romantic interest, Margo Lane, who was forever getting kidnapped, terrorized and nearly killed by a whole slew of psychopathic killers, enemy spies, mad scientists, bloodthirsty gangsters and the occasional flat-out monster. At its best, The Shadow was imaginative, atmospheric, periodically witty and consistently brutal, underscoring in blood its mantra that "crime does not pay." Indeed, The Shadow was often incredibly violent: I remember people being shot, hanged, stabbed, electrocuted, burned with acid, run over by cars, thrown off airplanes, ripped apart by wolves, strangled, drained of blood, devoured by crocodiles, drowned (after being whipped!), gassed, and thrown into volcanoes. The violence, however, was always used to underscore the futility of crime. The show's moral compass feels terribly outdated nowadays, but it is not ambiguous. That's kind of refreshing.
2. THE LINEUP. This gritty police procedural ran for only three years, from 1950 - 1953, but what a three years those were. Starring Bill Johnstone, one of the five men who also played The Shadow, it follows a detective squad in a "great American city" (a nameless hybrid of New York, Los Angeles, and many others) as they pursue murderers, thieves, drug dealers, racketeers, bank robbers, mad bombers, fraudsters and assorted other hoodlums. What always strikes me about The Lineup is a) the quality and realism of the dialog, which is written a very naturalistic style, with interruptions, stumbles, casual conversation, etc., while simultaneously being as punchy as the hardboiled gab you'd get in a Film Noir movie, and b) the surprisingly unglamorous way much of the investigative procedure is handled. Yes, there are fights and shoot-outs and even car chases, but mostly the cops are depicted actually running down leads, consulting notes, arguing with each other, pathologists and forensic experts, getting heartburn from bad diner food, sweating in uncomfortable summertime stake outs, talking sports, planning vacations, you name it. They even occasionally rough up suspects a little and deny them right to counsel, which isn't pretty, but is very realistic, especially for the period. The Lineup's humor is skewering, its drama very heavy: the show depicts grief in very stark and realistic terms, and almost revels in its depictions of the effects of crime on ordinary people, whether it is violent or financial. I've spent almost ten years in law enforcement and I'd put this up near the top of police/forensic procedural shows I have ever encountered.
3. ESCAPE. "Tired of the everyday grind? Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Want to get away from it all? We offer you... Escape! Escape! Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half-hour of high adventure!" Though most people would categorize Escape as the less-successful kid brother of the much more famous show, Suspense (see below), I truly believe Escape is the better of the two. As the name implies, Escape (1947 - 1954) was a flexible format adventure-suspense show in which the protagonist was invariably placed in a life-threatening bind and had to, well, escape it. Because the premise was so open-sided, stories could be hard-boiled, adventurous, supernatural, horror-themed...anything went, and many great short stories and novels were adapted into plays, by authors as diverse as Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ray Badbury. To give some examples: "Three Skeleton Key" (starring Vincent Price) was about a remote lighthouse overrun by carniverous rats. "Lenningen vs. The Ants" was about a South American plantation owner defending his land against a massive army ant invasion. "Earth Abides" was a two-part post-apocalyptic epic, "John Jock Todd" about a dockworker struggling to cope with a tyrannically cruel overseer, "The Scarlet Plague" about a world-ending disease, and "Evening Primrose" was a deeply disturbing tale about mannequins which come alive after the store closes. Many of these stories were brilliantly written, most were brilliantly acted, and a few ("Blood Bath" for example) were so over the top in their depictions of South American, South Pacific or African adventures gone wrong, that they rose to the level of art.
4 & 5. MERCURY THEATER ON THE AIR/THE CAMPBELL PLAYHOUSE Orson Welles' Mercury Theater on Broadway rocketed him to fame and fortune while still in his early-mid 20s; ever the avant-garde, he delved deeply into the medium of radio as well. His theater troupe, which included such luminaries as Ray Collins (later famous for his role as Tragg on "Perry Mason") and Agnes Moorehead (four Academy Award nominations), is best remembered for producing the adapation of H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds" which wrought havoc in 1938, but also made masterful adaptations of "Dracula," "A Tale of Two Cities, " "Julius Caesar" and "The Count of Monte Cristo." It later became The Campbell Playhouse, and added "Les Misérables," "The Magnificent Ambersons," "Beau Geste," "The Citadel," "The Glass Key" and others to its laurels. Wells' was the sort of performer whose voice can hypnotize, seduce, infuriate, or beat the listener into submission depending upon his whims, and by bullying his excellent cast along with him, he produced hour-long dramas which are worthy companions to the great works of literature than spawned them.
6. FRONTIER GENTLEMAN. Westerns were a very popular genre on radio, but Frontier Gentleman was cut from a different strip of cowhide. Running for only a single season in 1958, it nevertheless produced no less than 41 episodes starring John Dehner as J.B. Kendall, a former British cavalry officer now working as a newspaper correspondent for a London Times, on assignment in the American West in the post Civil War era. Wikipedia describes it aptly as "grittier, more realistic, and clearly intended for an older audience. Adult westerns [like this] were less the descendants of their juvenile predecessors than they were cousins of western feature films such as Shane (1953) and High Noon (1952)." Kendall, though first and foremost a newspaperman, was not shy about using his fists or his guns if absolutely necessary, but what he really wanted was good copy, and boy did he get it, encountering a wide range of scoundrels, gunslingers, corrupt sheriffs, embittered Indians, struggling homesteaders, and cynical salloon-keepers (including some of the female persuasion). This show was not afraid of thoughtful silences that seemed to summon up the emptiness of the West, nor of delving into some of the more morally complex aspects of what went into taming it. Kendall is occasionally appalled by the cruelty and greed he encounters, and while some stories are comic and others uplifting, there are a few hewn with tragedy and loss. When Kendall departs for England in the forty-first and final show, one gets the sense he will greatly miss it, but also that it has marked him forever in ways he does not entirely like. This was one Western meant for the grown-ups.
7. SUSPENSE. One of the longest-running programs in radio history (1940 - 1962), Suspense broadcast nearly 1,000 episodes and was called "radio's outstanding theater of thrills." Stories were introduced by "The Man in Black" and usually featured protagonists who were thrust suddenly and unexpectedly into life-threatening situations from which they had to escape, though they were by no means always totally sympathetic people or successful in their efforts. Lives turned on mistaken identities, old wrongs, impulsive crimes, simple misunderstandings or, in some cases, minor mistakes such as forgetting a wallet or taking the wrong suitcase. Many of these people were of purely ordinary or unremarkable character, adding to the tension by making them relatable. The show also adapted famous stories like "Donovan's Brain," "Sorry, Wrong Number," "The Most Dangerous Game," "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "In a Lonely Place," showing that the rigid formula actually possessed a certain flexibility. Some of these stories are shocking and unforgettable: "Flesh Peddler" (starring DeForest Kelley) is a good example of how suspense and horror can dance smoothly together, and one can clearly see the influence of such storytelling on Rod Serling and his "Twilight Zone." Nearly all of this show's episodes survive and are well worth listening to, they provide superb accompaniment, especially on night drives.
8. SHERLOCK HOLMES. (1939 - 1950) Until Jeremy Brett came along in 1985 to make the role always and forever his own, Basil Rathbone was Sherlock Holmes in the minds of millions, including yours truly. He starred in many Holmes movies, some good and some bad, but also recorded a large number of radio dramas playing the immortal detective. Together with his redoubtable co-star Nigel Bruce, who played Watson, he took the listener through adaptations of Conan-Doyle's tales, but also on stories inspired by random throwaway lines from the original Holmes stories ("Holmes solved the mystery by discovering the depth the parsley sunk into the butter on a hot day"), and many completely original scripts. Rathbone, a debonair veteran of WW1 in real life, played Holmes with a certain wry wit rather than as an ice-blooded sleuthound, fundamentally a little more human than Conan-Doyle envisioned him, but without betraying Conan-Doyle's vision of Holmes as a man apart, requiring only Watson as friend, confidant, foil and legman. I actually prefer the radio dramas to the movies, which were partially contemporized to the 40s and often little more than "Holmes vs. Nazi spies:" these are more true to the source material.
9. THE WHISTLER. I...am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, many secrets hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes... I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak! From 1942 - 1955, this mysterious and sneering narrator chronicled the clever crimes and nefarious schemes of men and women, often brilliant in character, which nonetheless came to shipwreck, usually because of some small mistake or ironic happenstance. Like "Columbo," the show was not about who did it but why they did, how they did it, and how they very nearly got away with it, if not for that pesky little devil of a detail. Although the formula can get a little tiresome, the stories are almost always very well written and cleverly plotted, and justice -- if only in a cruelly ironic fashion -- is generally served.
10. INNER SANCTUM MYSTERIES. From 1941 to 1952, this series scared the hell out of kids like my mom, who weren't supposed to be listening to it, just like I wasn't supposed to be watching "Friday the 13th" movies when I was supposed to be studying geometry. The narrator, identified only as "Raymond," was a sort of Crypt Keeper type who spewed bad puns and tacky gallows humor over equally terrible organ music before introducing each episode: the episodes themselves were not funny at all, and walked a bloody line between horror and suspense, crime and supernatural, featuring such plots as "a hearse-driver is hired by a murderess to dispose of her husband's body, and it doesn't go well" or "a woman home alone [or broken down on the roadside] is terrorized by an escaped criminal." Some of the stories had supernatural themes, while others were on the sci-fi end of the spectrum (an immortality formula that goes wrong) but all stuck to the basic premise of "scare the audience at any cost and spare no one" -- in one episode, Raymond himself was the victim (!). While happy endings were not by any means unheard-of, even these characters had to suffer through all sorts of terror and tension to earn their lives back.
This is not by any means all-inclusive; I could a tale unfold about Light's Outr, NBC University Theater, The Green Hornet, or the lengthy and highly imaginative adaptation of Dr. Jekyyl & Mr. Hyde, but this remains a good sampling of some of the better shows. It is certain that my passion for OTR heats and cools at regular intervals; there are years when I listen only occasionally to an episode here or there while hiking or driving, and there are others when I burn through half a dozen or more a day for weeks or months on end. Hell, when I was temping in Los Angeles, I used to burn through the better portion of what you could load on an iPod in a single shift. The point is simply that Old Time Radio is a resource that is always there for me, always ready to provide me with entertainment, and always capable of instructing me, the storyteller, with better ways to tell the story. In the age of the podcast, the YouTube video and the free download, it is certainly worth your time to explore this older but no less, and in some cases, far more enthralling medium.
April 13, 2024
DEVILS YOU KNOW IS A READERS' FAVORITE FIVE STARS
Eight years ago I released Devils You Know, a collection of thirteen short stories which walked a staggering line between horror, satire, black comedy and tragedy. This baker's dozen of tales, which I wrote over a quarter of a century, was a Hoffer Awards Finalist in 2019, but like most anthologies written by obscure authors, it struggled to get the publicity or readership that I felt it deserved. In the last couple of years, however, this has inexplicably changed: in addition to having reached the tops of the Kindle rankings on multiple occasions, it is now a Readers' Favorite Five Stars, the third of my works to achieve this distinction. I guess my aggravating, somewhat demented persistence, which some of low character might write off as an egotistical refusal to accept defeat, is beginning to pay off. I sure as hell hope so. Here at any rate is the review....
Devils You Know by Miles Watson is a brilliant collection of short stories, some with WW2 themes, gangsters, and paranormal settings, and, of course, the devils we all know make an appearance too. All the stories are great, but I do have favorites. In Nosferatu, a Nazi officer learns that we are all the same under the skin. Pleas And Thank Yous is a story with unexpected justice or is it? Shadows And Glory is a hard-hitting WW2 story of morality and the ideological impact from a Nazi family's perspective. This short story would be amazing as a full-length novel. In Identity Crisis, a young man has always identified himself as per other people’s expectations of him, never finding out his true identity until he goes to the YMCA gym. On this self-discovery journey, the identity he f inds is not what you would expect. In Devils You Know, each short story is brought to life in a poetically descriptive way. I enjoyed the conclusions of the stories, which are all unusual or unexpected. The themes brought out in the collection include self-identity and social justice, but the one that stands out the most to me is the message about societal delinquency, of not taking accountability for oneself and the consequences of one’s actions. Never acknowledging the devil we know the best: ourselves. The pace of the stories kept me turning the pages, wanting to read more. Miles Watson has a lyrical way with words, describing the scenes most beautifully. Five Stars.
Given the references in the review, I thought it fitting to give a brief refresher in just what's contained within Devils:
The Adversarial Process -- Every now and again a writer pens something which is so painful that he cannot himself bear to read it: "Process" is like that for me, a story about how a successful lawyer's refusal to accept the loss of a loved one leads to a full-on war with God.
Unfinished Business -- Originally published in Eye Contact in 2010, this began as the prologue to my first novel, but subsequent editorial changes made it surplus to requirements. I could not, however, let the story of two gangsters meeting in a West Side tavern to settle an outstanding debt go unread, and lo, "Business" was transacted.
A Story Never Told -- When this tale about a drunken infantry officer who runs into Ernest Hemingway in a bar was passed around my graduate school writing program, it produced truly distinct reactions: readers either loved it or hated it. Nobody sat on the fence. Interestingly enough, it is based on a footnote I found in Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers.
Nosferatu -- Now a Pinnacle Book Achievement Award winner as a novella in its own right, "Nosferatu" is the story of Hannibal Raus, a German officer who witnesses firsthand just how far his countrymen fighting in Russia will go to stay alive. This is fiction but based on real-life incidents from WW2.
Identity Crisis -- Another story I find rather painful to consider, "Crisis" is about one man's search for idenity in a cruel and indifferent world.
The Shroud -- I originally scribbled this sucker in college after reading The Killer Angels. "The Shroud" is the story of a wounded Confederate soldier trying to make it home in the closing days of the Civil War.
Shadows and Glory -- This is the story of a German boy whose father becomes a Nazi war hero. It is about delusions and illusions, the complexity of family relationships, the power of love and the price of hero-worship.
D.S.A. -- When I originally wrote this story about a second American Civil War, the idea seemed about as realistic as a "Tom & Jerry" cartoon. That was back in '99, before the Twin Towers fell, before hate radio poisoned the minds of millions of Americans, before...just before. Today, "D.S.A." seems more like a forecast than a flight of fancy.
Roadtrip -- It is quite impossible for me to say anything about "Roadtrip" without ruining the story: I will simply say that it is one of my favorites, and demonstrates that your humble correspondent has a taste for horror with humor in it; or humor with horror in it. Whatever.
A Fever in the Blood -- A trivial incident sparks an orgy of vigilantism which in turn bursts into revolution. All over woman with bad cell phone manners! I had such fun writing this I felt guilty afterwards. Like "D.S.A.," however, this story is uncomfortably more plausible in 2024 than it was when I wrote it about eight years ago.
The Action -- The first story I ever published, waaaaay back in 1990 in Green's magazine (a small Canadian literary magazine), "The Action" is the story of a platoon of German soldiers during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.
Pleas and Thank Yous -- I have a confession to make. The violence in this story about a gangster who turns vigilante against his own kind disturbs me enormously, in large part because it was written to editorial order. The original version of this story was far more uplifting and redemptive: this version, more or less forced upon me by a guy who decided at the last moment not to publish it in his pulp fiction magazine, is darker and infinitely more vicious, yet still unmistakbly leans toward justice. As The Crow once remarked: "It's not a good day to be a bad guy."
The Devil You Know -- Another confession: This one is so heavy-handed it may render you unconscious, but it was a great pleasure to write, and what it lacks in subtlety, which is everything, it tries to make up for in wit...and sincerity. I can't explain more without spoiling the surprise, so I'll just say that Dirty Harry was right when he said you meet a different class of people in the dark.
And that, my friends, is Devils You Know, which I sincerely hope you will.
Devils You Know by Miles Watson is a brilliant collection of short stories, some with WW2 themes, gangsters, and paranormal settings, and, of course, the devils we all know make an appearance too. All the stories are great, but I do have favorites. In Nosferatu, a Nazi officer learns that we are all the same under the skin. Pleas And Thank Yous is a story with unexpected justice or is it? Shadows And Glory is a hard-hitting WW2 story of morality and the ideological impact from a Nazi family's perspective. This short story would be amazing as a full-length novel. In Identity Crisis, a young man has always identified himself as per other people’s expectations of him, never finding out his true identity until he goes to the YMCA gym. On this self-discovery journey, the identity he f inds is not what you would expect. In Devils You Know, each short story is brought to life in a poetically descriptive way. I enjoyed the conclusions of the stories, which are all unusual or unexpected. The themes brought out in the collection include self-identity and social justice, but the one that stands out the most to me is the message about societal delinquency, of not taking accountability for oneself and the consequences of one’s actions. Never acknowledging the devil we know the best: ourselves. The pace of the stories kept me turning the pages, wanting to read more. Miles Watson has a lyrical way with words, describing the scenes most beautifully. Five Stars.
Given the references in the review, I thought it fitting to give a brief refresher in just what's contained within Devils:
The Adversarial Process -- Every now and again a writer pens something which is so painful that he cannot himself bear to read it: "Process" is like that for me, a story about how a successful lawyer's refusal to accept the loss of a loved one leads to a full-on war with God.
Unfinished Business -- Originally published in Eye Contact in 2010, this began as the prologue to my first novel, but subsequent editorial changes made it surplus to requirements. I could not, however, let the story of two gangsters meeting in a West Side tavern to settle an outstanding debt go unread, and lo, "Business" was transacted.
A Story Never Told -- When this tale about a drunken infantry officer who runs into Ernest Hemingway in a bar was passed around my graduate school writing program, it produced truly distinct reactions: readers either loved it or hated it. Nobody sat on the fence. Interestingly enough, it is based on a footnote I found in Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers.
Nosferatu -- Now a Pinnacle Book Achievement Award winner as a novella in its own right, "Nosferatu" is the story of Hannibal Raus, a German officer who witnesses firsthand just how far his countrymen fighting in Russia will go to stay alive. This is fiction but based on real-life incidents from WW2.
Identity Crisis -- Another story I find rather painful to consider, "Crisis" is about one man's search for idenity in a cruel and indifferent world.
The Shroud -- I originally scribbled this sucker in college after reading The Killer Angels. "The Shroud" is the story of a wounded Confederate soldier trying to make it home in the closing days of the Civil War.
Shadows and Glory -- This is the story of a German boy whose father becomes a Nazi war hero. It is about delusions and illusions, the complexity of family relationships, the power of love and the price of hero-worship.
D.S.A. -- When I originally wrote this story about a second American Civil War, the idea seemed about as realistic as a "Tom & Jerry" cartoon. That was back in '99, before the Twin Towers fell, before hate radio poisoned the minds of millions of Americans, before...just before. Today, "D.S.A." seems more like a forecast than a flight of fancy.
Roadtrip -- It is quite impossible for me to say anything about "Roadtrip" without ruining the story: I will simply say that it is one of my favorites, and demonstrates that your humble correspondent has a taste for horror with humor in it; or humor with horror in it. Whatever.
A Fever in the Blood -- A trivial incident sparks an orgy of vigilantism which in turn bursts into revolution. All over woman with bad cell phone manners! I had such fun writing this I felt guilty afterwards. Like "D.S.A.," however, this story is uncomfortably more plausible in 2024 than it was when I wrote it about eight years ago.
The Action -- The first story I ever published, waaaaay back in 1990 in Green's magazine (a small Canadian literary magazine), "The Action" is the story of a platoon of German soldiers during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.
Pleas and Thank Yous -- I have a confession to make. The violence in this story about a gangster who turns vigilante against his own kind disturbs me enormously, in large part because it was written to editorial order. The original version of this story was far more uplifting and redemptive: this version, more or less forced upon me by a guy who decided at the last moment not to publish it in his pulp fiction magazine, is darker and infinitely more vicious, yet still unmistakbly leans toward justice. As The Crow once remarked: "It's not a good day to be a bad guy."
The Devil You Know -- Another confession: This one is so heavy-handed it may render you unconscious, but it was a great pleasure to write, and what it lacks in subtlety, which is everything, it tries to make up for in wit...and sincerity. I can't explain more without spoiling the surprise, so I'll just say that Dirty Harry was right when he said you meet a different class of people in the dark.
And that, my friends, is Devils You Know, which I sincerely hope you will.
April 11, 2024
CRUEL WORLDS
I've been thinking a lot lately about comments I have made over the years about other authors, and I don't just mean their work: I mean them, the authors themselves. More specifically, observations I made about how the personality and world-view of a writer outs itself in his works in ways both deliberate and accidental, conscious and unconscious, giving us a much clearer picture of his soul than any biography or autobiography ever could. Take any novelist you care to name, I mean any novelist writing in any era, in any genre, have a go at their works, and by their third novel at the latest, you will come away with a strong sense of just what kind of person wrote it. Writing is like poker that way: you can't play without giving away a few of your tells.
I try to be as honest as I can in this blog, and honesty means nothing if it doesn't mean admitting fault. There are quite a few authors I enjoy, and a few who I don't, who I have attacked on the grounds that their books revealed a certain ugliness within them as human beings; or if not ugliness, then at least distasteful, or in some cases merely ridiculous, characteristics. But I confess that until recently I never gave more than lip service to the thought that I, too, was exposing more of myself through my work than I intended; that while I may have been quite conscious of what I was writing and the effect I intended it to have, I was not fully aware of the effect it might actually produce in the reader, which was to make them speculate about me, personally. Not my work; me.
I bringf this up because I had occasion the other night to glance at a Goodreads review of my novella WOLF WEATHER. I have reproduced the opening lines in full:
This is a strange and eerie tale of the kind that Miles Watson tells so well – lonely misfits in desperate situations, finding a way through a world where they don’t belong. And a cruel world at that: Watson’s worlds are always cruel.
Like all authors, I am a sap for good publicity, and shamelessly enjoy compliments about my books, and this was quite a complimentary review. But this particular comment got me thinking about just how many reviewers have left similar notices about my fiction -- remarks to the effect that I am revealing something about myself, my view of life and the world around me, which is unintented, and not terribly nice. "Watson's worlds are always cruel" was simply the most direct, the most pointed of these observations. But here's another one, taken from a review of THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER:
Miles Watson is fascinated – haunted perhaps – by the mindset of soldiers. Again and again in his books he returns to the inner world of men at the bitter edges of human experience, where they face the pointlessness of their own struggle, their own deaths, the need to kill rather than to be killed, the imperative of following orders, even foolish ones, out of duty to a senior officer, a general, an army, a state. I don’t believe he has ever been a soldier himself. Around the edges of reading this book, after several others by this author, in different genres, I found myself wondering about the author, and what personal journey has brought him to these preoccupations.
What personal journey, indeed?
Another one:
In all his writing, Miles Watson is a master of liminal spaces, not just the worlds that we inhabit in the extremes of our experience but the other worlds just beyond those, the doors we don’t open.
I confess I had to look up the word "liminal" ("the uncertain transition between where you've been and where you're going physically, emotionally, or metaphorically...to be on the precipice of something new but not quite there yet."), but the point here is the compliment is more of an observation than praise when you think about it: this reviewer is pointing out that space where I am supposedly dominant is a place of uncertainty...a position on the edge, past the extremes of experience.. This particular phraseology really resonated with me, because "extremes of experience" are precisely my target, not only in fiction but in life. And this itself is a reaction to the lazy-sensual part of my writer's nature, my innate apathy, my tendency to say "no" to the possibilities of existence. We often find ourselves in the mirror, not because it is a reflection but because it is a reversal of one: we see not who we are but who we want to be.
You don't actually need to have read any of my works to get some sense of me as a human being; it would be enough to read a random sampling of these blogs. And I suppose aside from a tedious tendency toward nostalgia and a refusal to bring any system of organization to this blog itself, the main takeaway would be a certain fascination with the inescapability, necessity, and benefits, of pain. One of the most profound treatises I've ever read was Ernst Jünger's On Pain, in which examined humanity's relationship with pain from both a literal and a metaphysical point of view: the 47 page essay is full of gems such as "boredom is pain diffused over time," discipline is "the way [civilized] man maintains contact with pain" and terrorism is simply "a cult of pain." Viewed through Jünger's lens, a great deal of human life constitutes either embracing or fleeing pain in all of its forms: physical, psychological, spiritual, mental; but there is no doubt which school he belongs to. Jünger considers his multi-faceted definition of pain a blessing, without which very little of value can be accomplished, nor in the last analysis, any of life's pleasures be truly appreciated. "Show me your relationship to pain," he thunders in his opening. "And I will show you who you are!"
Why does his viewpoint enthrall me? Because, as lazy and sensual as I am -- as all writers are -- I agree with it and do my damndest to make his creed my own. Crowning, the protagonist of WOLF WEATHER, has "disciplina vivimus" tattooed and branded onto one forearm, and "per disciplinam morimur" seared and inked into the other: this means "by discipline we live" and "by discipline we die." Well discipline is just code for pain, and I am strongly considering getting these words inked upon my own flesh. There is no deep hypocrisy in this, but a position so externally paradoxical and at odds with itself requires explanation.
That which we wish to be, we admire, and often imitate. I imitate men of discipline because they possess a superior relationship to suffering than I do, and by imitating them I get closer to the me I wish to be: a man who can endure suffering on any scale without breaking. This desire pours into my writing and the characters who inhabit it: Mickey Costarelli, of the CAGE LIFE series, is a professional fighter who was torture his body into perfect condition so he can pit it, in the most painful way possible, against the bodies of other men. Ed Tom Halleck, Robert Breese, Martin Zenger, August von Cramm and all the others who populate the universe of SINNER'S CROSS are men who by virtue of war are in perpetual contact with suffering, like blades held permanently to a whetstone. It is the same for those in THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS and in my novellas and my short stories. Always, or nearly always, the characters dwell in literal or figurative darkness, outside the warm glow of civilization or human love, in barren windblown places where little or no comfort is to be found. And yet the point is not merely to torment them. All, or nearly all, my fiction describes an arc: the endpoint of that arc is transformative, as I believe pain to be transformative. Darkness is something they must walk through to get what they want, and even if they don't survive the journey, the fact they are making it is what really matters. What is at stake is not victory, but the moral courage which effort implies -- and effort is by nature a species of pain. Everyone dies and everyone is eventually forgotten, in many cases before their body is even cold, and while some maintain death to be the ultimate defeat, it seems to me that the only real defeat is not to make the journey, or at least give it the old college try.
A dear friend of mine once told me that pain is the universe's way of testing one's commitment to life; that those who avoided conflict and discomfort and danger their whole lives were, in essence, already dead -- the supreme irony, since it is precisely fear of death which underlays all conservatism of this type. My characters are always deeply flawed, as I am deeply flawed, but like me they seek a greater contact with pain than life has given them: not out of masochism, but because it is only by walking through those fires that they can even hope to achieve their goals.
All of this is a way of defending myself, I suppose; it is a justification. I write dark and violent tales because I enjoy writing about darkness and violence: they are atmospheric and make for good copy. Drama is conflict, after all. But the reason that I enjoy writing about them is because within the realms of fiction -- where I am the master -- I can make some sense of that which is otherwise senseless. I can, for example, describe the bitter struggle of two armies for a worthless crossroad and find within that carnage a sort of bitter nobility. Perhaps that bitter nobility is pure invention; perhaps the carnage was in reality wholly without virtue. But not in my world. Not in my worlds. In my worlds, the cruelty always present, but it is never the point.
I try to be as honest as I can in this blog, and honesty means nothing if it doesn't mean admitting fault. There are quite a few authors I enjoy, and a few who I don't, who I have attacked on the grounds that their books revealed a certain ugliness within them as human beings; or if not ugliness, then at least distasteful, or in some cases merely ridiculous, characteristics. But I confess that until recently I never gave more than lip service to the thought that I, too, was exposing more of myself through my work than I intended; that while I may have been quite conscious of what I was writing and the effect I intended it to have, I was not fully aware of the effect it might actually produce in the reader, which was to make them speculate about me, personally. Not my work; me.
I bringf this up because I had occasion the other night to glance at a Goodreads review of my novella WOLF WEATHER. I have reproduced the opening lines in full:
This is a strange and eerie tale of the kind that Miles Watson tells so well – lonely misfits in desperate situations, finding a way through a world where they don’t belong. And a cruel world at that: Watson’s worlds are always cruel.
Like all authors, I am a sap for good publicity, and shamelessly enjoy compliments about my books, and this was quite a complimentary review. But this particular comment got me thinking about just how many reviewers have left similar notices about my fiction -- remarks to the effect that I am revealing something about myself, my view of life and the world around me, which is unintented, and not terribly nice. "Watson's worlds are always cruel" was simply the most direct, the most pointed of these observations. But here's another one, taken from a review of THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER:
Miles Watson is fascinated – haunted perhaps – by the mindset of soldiers. Again and again in his books he returns to the inner world of men at the bitter edges of human experience, where they face the pointlessness of their own struggle, their own deaths, the need to kill rather than to be killed, the imperative of following orders, even foolish ones, out of duty to a senior officer, a general, an army, a state. I don’t believe he has ever been a soldier himself. Around the edges of reading this book, after several others by this author, in different genres, I found myself wondering about the author, and what personal journey has brought him to these preoccupations.
What personal journey, indeed?
Another one:
In all his writing, Miles Watson is a master of liminal spaces, not just the worlds that we inhabit in the extremes of our experience but the other worlds just beyond those, the doors we don’t open.
I confess I had to look up the word "liminal" ("the uncertain transition between where you've been and where you're going physically, emotionally, or metaphorically...to be on the precipice of something new but not quite there yet."), but the point here is the compliment is more of an observation than praise when you think about it: this reviewer is pointing out that space where I am supposedly dominant is a place of uncertainty...a position on the edge, past the extremes of experience.. This particular phraseology really resonated with me, because "extremes of experience" are precisely my target, not only in fiction but in life. And this itself is a reaction to the lazy-sensual part of my writer's nature, my innate apathy, my tendency to say "no" to the possibilities of existence. We often find ourselves in the mirror, not because it is a reflection but because it is a reversal of one: we see not who we are but who we want to be.
You don't actually need to have read any of my works to get some sense of me as a human being; it would be enough to read a random sampling of these blogs. And I suppose aside from a tedious tendency toward nostalgia and a refusal to bring any system of organization to this blog itself, the main takeaway would be a certain fascination with the inescapability, necessity, and benefits, of pain. One of the most profound treatises I've ever read was Ernst Jünger's On Pain, in which examined humanity's relationship with pain from both a literal and a metaphysical point of view: the 47 page essay is full of gems such as "boredom is pain diffused over time," discipline is "the way [civilized] man maintains contact with pain" and terrorism is simply "a cult of pain." Viewed through Jünger's lens, a great deal of human life constitutes either embracing or fleeing pain in all of its forms: physical, psychological, spiritual, mental; but there is no doubt which school he belongs to. Jünger considers his multi-faceted definition of pain a blessing, without which very little of value can be accomplished, nor in the last analysis, any of life's pleasures be truly appreciated. "Show me your relationship to pain," he thunders in his opening. "And I will show you who you are!"
Why does his viewpoint enthrall me? Because, as lazy and sensual as I am -- as all writers are -- I agree with it and do my damndest to make his creed my own. Crowning, the protagonist of WOLF WEATHER, has "disciplina vivimus" tattooed and branded onto one forearm, and "per disciplinam morimur" seared and inked into the other: this means "by discipline we live" and "by discipline we die." Well discipline is just code for pain, and I am strongly considering getting these words inked upon my own flesh. There is no deep hypocrisy in this, but a position so externally paradoxical and at odds with itself requires explanation.
That which we wish to be, we admire, and often imitate. I imitate men of discipline because they possess a superior relationship to suffering than I do, and by imitating them I get closer to the me I wish to be: a man who can endure suffering on any scale without breaking. This desire pours into my writing and the characters who inhabit it: Mickey Costarelli, of the CAGE LIFE series, is a professional fighter who was torture his body into perfect condition so he can pit it, in the most painful way possible, against the bodies of other men. Ed Tom Halleck, Robert Breese, Martin Zenger, August von Cramm and all the others who populate the universe of SINNER'S CROSS are men who by virtue of war are in perpetual contact with suffering, like blades held permanently to a whetstone. It is the same for those in THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS and in my novellas and my short stories. Always, or nearly always, the characters dwell in literal or figurative darkness, outside the warm glow of civilization or human love, in barren windblown places where little or no comfort is to be found. And yet the point is not merely to torment them. All, or nearly all, my fiction describes an arc: the endpoint of that arc is transformative, as I believe pain to be transformative. Darkness is something they must walk through to get what they want, and even if they don't survive the journey, the fact they are making it is what really matters. What is at stake is not victory, but the moral courage which effort implies -- and effort is by nature a species of pain. Everyone dies and everyone is eventually forgotten, in many cases before their body is even cold, and while some maintain death to be the ultimate defeat, it seems to me that the only real defeat is not to make the journey, or at least give it the old college try.
A dear friend of mine once told me that pain is the universe's way of testing one's commitment to life; that those who avoided conflict and discomfort and danger their whole lives were, in essence, already dead -- the supreme irony, since it is precisely fear of death which underlays all conservatism of this type. My characters are always deeply flawed, as I am deeply flawed, but like me they seek a greater contact with pain than life has given them: not out of masochism, but because it is only by walking through those fires that they can even hope to achieve their goals.
All of this is a way of defending myself, I suppose; it is a justification. I write dark and violent tales because I enjoy writing about darkness and violence: they are atmospheric and make for good copy. Drama is conflict, after all. But the reason that I enjoy writing about them is because within the realms of fiction -- where I am the master -- I can make some sense of that which is otherwise senseless. I can, for example, describe the bitter struggle of two armies for a worthless crossroad and find within that carnage a sort of bitter nobility. Perhaps that bitter nobility is pure invention; perhaps the carnage was in reality wholly without virtue. But not in my world. Not in my worlds. In my worlds, the cruelty always present, but it is never the point.
April 3, 2024
"EXILES" IS A READER'S FAVORITE FIVE STARS
As I write this, it is raining again. It has now been raining almost continuously for the last three days, very heavily at times, and indeed, the convenience store across the street was just rendered "unfit for human habitation" by the local department of health after its ceiling caved in. This weather matches the internal weather I've endured since I returned from California: in addition to the fact it's tax season, that my cat Spike is clearly nearing the end of his earthly journey after almost eighteen years at my side, well, evidently I bear all the stigmata of stage two of clinical burnout. I'm tired, I'm anxious, I'm distracted, I find it difficult to concentrate, I get irritable -- or enraged -- over trivial setbacks but feel numb toward the real problems of my life, et cetera and so on. Most writers are generally depressive in and by nature, but throw in a job, victim advocacy, where you take the full brunt of vicarious trauma for thousands of people each year, and you can imagine how I get sometimes.
Every now and again, however, amid the showers of bad news and black humor, a ray of sunshine gleams. This cliche is annoying but it persists because it is true, so here is the gleam:
You may remember, and if you don't I'll obnoxiously remind you, that late last year I went down to Miami to receive the Readers' Favorite Gold Medal for my third novel, Sinner's Cross. Well, that venerable organization has just posted its review of my fifth, Exiles: A Tale from the Chronicles of Magnus, and here it is, word for word:
Reviewed by Pikasho Deka for Readers’ Favorite
Exiles is a gripping dystopian thriller by Miles Watson. The story follows Marguerite Bain, a smuggler and captain of the Sea Dragon, who gets an unusual assignment to provide supplies to an exile living on the remote island of Beausejour. But Marguerite doesn't adhere to the strict instructions of the Employer, and when she gets her hands on the journal of the exiled Enitan Champoleon, she delves into his story. Champoleon was a tramp, deserter, and masterful liar who inadvertently spawned the influential revolutionary group Solution to fight against the Order's ruthless regime. However, he soon realized that by doing so, he was offering Europe to a complete megalomaniac with grand plans to set up his own totalitarian regime. Meanwhile, someone from the Watch has infiltrated Marguerite's crew.
Mystery, espionage, and political intrigue lace the pages of Exiles. Miles Watson has built a believable futuristic dystopian world featuring authoritarian regimes, likable rogues, and revolutionaries with flexible morals. The setting is fascinating and immersive, while the plot is full of surprises and unexpected twists and turns that you never see coming. Watson moves the plot at a brisk pace, with compelling characters who have layers to unpeel beneath their outer personas. The narrative features a story within a story, and I enjoyed Champoleon's backstory almost as much as Marguerite's action-packed adventures. Their brief interaction toward the end was immensely satisfying to me. The author also excels in building suspense, tension, and intrigue through the narrative, which is absolutely captivating. As a fan of dystopian tales that mirror real-world issues, I loved this book and can't recommend it highly enough.
Not bad for a rainy Wednesday, eh? Of course I must confess that Exiles holds a special place in my heart, because it was at once the most fun I've ever had on a writing project and also, relatively speaking, the easiest big literary job I have ever undertaken. No book or story writes itself, but this came as close as one can come to such an experience, where the writer himself stands aside and merely encourages and conducts the flow of ideas into words. I believe I slammed out the first draft in something like four months, and scarcely needed revisions: compare that to the nightmare that was the still-unpublished Something Evil, which took six and a half grinding years to break the tape, and must now undergo a lengthy and tedious drafting process! But my enjoyment and affection for Tales go deeper than that. Never before had I attempted world-building on anything close to the scale which I attempted here, and by all (preliminary) accounts I have succeeded in my aim: but whether I have or I haven't, I cherished the process of building, and the host of new ideas which followed each small epiphany about this new world I had made.
So if you haven't already, I encourage you to give Exiles a try, and see if you agree with Reader's Favorite's five star review. While you're at it, why not read the preceding novella in the same universe, Deus Ex? I won't claim that it can't hurt -- these books dig deep into the psychology of power, sometimes in a way that is a bit painful, as bright light is painful -- but any discomfort you experience will be more than compensated for by the resulting illumination.
Every now and again, however, amid the showers of bad news and black humor, a ray of sunshine gleams. This cliche is annoying but it persists because it is true, so here is the gleam:
You may remember, and if you don't I'll obnoxiously remind you, that late last year I went down to Miami to receive the Readers' Favorite Gold Medal for my third novel, Sinner's Cross. Well, that venerable organization has just posted its review of my fifth, Exiles: A Tale from the Chronicles of Magnus, and here it is, word for word:
Reviewed by Pikasho Deka for Readers’ Favorite
Exiles is a gripping dystopian thriller by Miles Watson. The story follows Marguerite Bain, a smuggler and captain of the Sea Dragon, who gets an unusual assignment to provide supplies to an exile living on the remote island of Beausejour. But Marguerite doesn't adhere to the strict instructions of the Employer, and when she gets her hands on the journal of the exiled Enitan Champoleon, she delves into his story. Champoleon was a tramp, deserter, and masterful liar who inadvertently spawned the influential revolutionary group Solution to fight against the Order's ruthless regime. However, he soon realized that by doing so, he was offering Europe to a complete megalomaniac with grand plans to set up his own totalitarian regime. Meanwhile, someone from the Watch has infiltrated Marguerite's crew.
Mystery, espionage, and political intrigue lace the pages of Exiles. Miles Watson has built a believable futuristic dystopian world featuring authoritarian regimes, likable rogues, and revolutionaries with flexible morals. The setting is fascinating and immersive, while the plot is full of surprises and unexpected twists and turns that you never see coming. Watson moves the plot at a brisk pace, with compelling characters who have layers to unpeel beneath their outer personas. The narrative features a story within a story, and I enjoyed Champoleon's backstory almost as much as Marguerite's action-packed adventures. Their brief interaction toward the end was immensely satisfying to me. The author also excels in building suspense, tension, and intrigue through the narrative, which is absolutely captivating. As a fan of dystopian tales that mirror real-world issues, I loved this book and can't recommend it highly enough.
Not bad for a rainy Wednesday, eh? Of course I must confess that Exiles holds a special place in my heart, because it was at once the most fun I've ever had on a writing project and also, relatively speaking, the easiest big literary job I have ever undertaken. No book or story writes itself, but this came as close as one can come to such an experience, where the writer himself stands aside and merely encourages and conducts the flow of ideas into words. I believe I slammed out the first draft in something like four months, and scarcely needed revisions: compare that to the nightmare that was the still-unpublished Something Evil, which took six and a half grinding years to break the tape, and must now undergo a lengthy and tedious drafting process! But my enjoyment and affection for Tales go deeper than that. Never before had I attempted world-building on anything close to the scale which I attempted here, and by all (preliminary) accounts I have succeeded in my aim: but whether I have or I haven't, I cherished the process of building, and the host of new ideas which followed each small epiphany about this new world I had made.
So if you haven't already, I encourage you to give Exiles a try, and see if you agree with Reader's Favorite's five star review. While you're at it, why not read the preceding novella in the same universe, Deus Ex? I won't claim that it can't hurt -- these books dig deep into the psychology of power, sometimes in a way that is a bit painful, as bright light is painful -- but any discomfort you experience will be more than compensated for by the resulting illumination.
March 29, 2024
GEORGE ORWELL: THE CHARACTERS
You must make it less painful to submit than it is to rebel. -- George Orwell
When we think of Mr. Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, the first things which come to mind are his terrifying dystopian masterpiece,1984, and his equally terrifying fable about revolution betrayed, Animal Farm. Beyond that, the image begins to blur. Orwell was, of course, a man with many hats upon his rack: he was a journalist, an advocate for democratic socialism, a writer of BBC radio scripts, investigative books and semi-memoirs; he began his career as an official in the Burmese Imperial Police and later served as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War; he was known alternatively as "St. George" or "The Truthteller," for his near-suicidal devotion to emotional and intellectual honesty. It is easy to sum up a man like Hemingway in a few brief sentences because he spent a lifetime promoting a specific image -- toughness, manliness, stoicism in the face of cruel Fate. Likewise Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald or even Hunter S. Thompson. Orwell was a more complex figure -- a firebrand socialist who spent much of his career attacking socialists, an eminent hater of fascism who was nonetheless willing to point out its selling points and compare it, sometimes favorably, to British imperialism; a man who detested cruelty yet could not abide pacifists and spoke calmly of killing when necessary; a man revolted by the amoral nature of politics who was nonetheless obsessed with them. There is so much dust and smoke swirling around Orwell's memory that it is easy to forget he was, perhaps before and after everything else, a novelist whose small but powerful body of work was so overshadowed by his own masterpiece, 1984, that most people are unaware of its existence.
Now, before you stop me, I am well aware that Down and Out in Paris and London is quite a famous book, but this is not in any real way a novel; it is a somewhat fictionalized memoir of actual events Orwell experienced in those two cities. Likewise, the lesser known Road to Wigan Pier is a book-length investigative report of British poverty interwoven with his own experiences of same, and Homage to Catalonia is his memoir of the Spanish Civil War. No, I am talking about Orwell's novels, the ones most people have never heard of Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up For Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Each is a testament to his strengths and weaknesses as a storyteller, a demonstration of his eagerness to explore the effects of poverty, class, capitalism and oppression upon the human spirit; but notably, they are also indicative of the sort of characters Orwell chose as protagonists...something which will tell us a great deal more about the man than any biographer ever could.
What I propose here is a brief analysis of each of the five protagonists (I wouldn't dare use the word "heroes") Orwell created for his full-length novels.
John Flory, Burmese Days: Orwell's first novel was a savage attack on British imperialism, delivered by a man who had helped facilitate it as a member of the Imperial Police, and whose conscience never quite recovered from the experience. "To truly hate imperialism," he was later to write, "You have had to be a part of it." Though John Flory is not a policeman as Orwell was, he is a willing if embittered tool of that imperialsm; an agent of a British timber firm, Flory's years in Burma have turned him into a lonely, hard-drinking, self-loathing, loner who detests his fellow British colonialists but benfits from the "pukka sahib" lifestyle colonialism gives him: servants, horses, a mistress, big game hunts, access to a snobbish Europeans Only club which is little more than a haven of racist alcoholics who recycle the same conversations day after day, year after year. Smitten by the arrival of a young Englishwoman on the prowl for a husband, Flory humiliates himself endlessly trying to win her affections, failing all the while to realize she embodies the snobbery, bigotry and intellectual deadness he hates. Flory's one consolation is an earnest "native" doctor, Veriswalmi, to whom he can unburden himself in private; but even this friendship is poisonous, because friendship with "natives" violates the unwritten but sacred code by which all Britons living in the Empire must live.
Flory is in some ways the template for the protagonists which follow him. Of ordinary origins, disfigured by a birthmark, physically courageous but morally weak, he is at once rotted almost completely through by his own dalliance with colonialism yet bursting with progressive, humanist opinions he dare not voice in real life. While not an antihero, and possessing some definite virtues, his default position a mixture of impotent self-pity and unhappy passivity. He can neither embrace the system he lives in nor change it in any way, and his fetishization of Elisabeth, who is so obviously stupid, ends up destroying him in the end. Like Hemingway, Orwell was no fan of the happy ending, and tended to view life as a brutal struggle against cruel realities which always got the upper hand sooner or later; the difference here is that Orwell does not romanticize the life of a gin-swilling big-game hunter in a Palm Beach suit, or accepting colonialism on its face without endeavoring to show that the face is a mask hiding all manner of horrors. Orwell's own streak of brutality and irony shows strongly in this book, but it is threaded into deeply felt criticisms of imperial rule. John Flory is a wretch, but his wretchedness is the end product of the system into which he was born, one which offers the poor and lower middle class of England, the sorts who have the most in common with the "natives," a chance at a better life if they will take an active hand in exploiting and bullying those "natives" for cash profit.
Dorothy Hare, A Clergyman's Daughter: It is hardly a secret that Orwell did not think all that much of women taken as a whole; certainly many of his female characters tend toward stupidity or bitchiness. It is therefore rather surprising that Orwell crafted a rather interesting and sympathetic character in Dorothy Hare, the only child of a viciously snobbish rural clergyman presiding over a dying congregation in rural, small-town England. Dorothy, like most of Orwell's protagonists, is rather a mess: cruelly overworked, she spends most of her days suffering from both hunger and exhaustion as she attempts to hold up the failing church by sheer force of faith. Bathing in cold water, denying herself sleep, pricking herself with needles whenever she feels a "selfish" impulse, she toils night and day for the ungrateful minister and an increasingly indifferent and shrinking flock. Suffering a mental breakdown from overwork, she wakes up in London with no memory of her own identity, and over the course of most of the rest of the book endures first homeless poverty, then life as an intinerant agricultural worker, and then finally the ultimate misery: working as a teacher in a wretched girls' school governed by a pitiless mistress interested only in profit. Clergyman is certainly Orwell's least impressive book: it does not hang together as a novel, Dorothy's loss of faith (which ought to be a central point of the book) is not explored, he fails to make the town Dorothy hails from feel like a real place, and the ending is, for all of its downbeats, surprisingly and somewhat unbelievably convenient. However, as a bare-faced examination of poverty, and the especial cruelty of poverty on those who were raised in genteel environments with some sense of pride and class consciousness, it is deeply affecting. Dorothy's sufferings, particularly at the school, are visceral: we feel not only her hunger pangs and loneliness but the desperate frustration of a woman who isn't allowed to teach anything meaningful, and is treated more or less like a servant or even a slave. Dorothy is much more fundamentally decent than most of Orwell's characters: she's also an intellectual and a frightfully hard worker. Her Achilles heel is acceptance of fate: enduring one terrible misery after another, she suffers without taking the obvious option to salvation, marriage, simply because she is sexually frozen and cannot abide the touch of a man. There is scarcely a moment in the book when she fights back against anyone or anything, or acts selfishly even when selfishness is warranted. Orwell was said to believe that man was inadequate to deal with the demands of the era in which he lived; Dorothy is a demonstration of this belief. The era in which seh was raised is visibly crumbling, and she has little place in the future which is arriving: she simply clings, ever more tightly, to her notions of decency and propriety, rendering her both noble and tragic. This glint of nobility is an Orwellian trait seldom acknowledged by his critics, but it exists -- and persists -- in most of his protagonists, however faintly.
Gordon Comstock, Keep the Aspidistra Flying: Of all of Orwell's characters, the unfortunate Gordon Comstock is probably the closest to Orwell himself, both in attitudes and lifestyle. A failed and embittered poet living in a dismal quarter of London, Gordon is engaged in a ridiculous "war against money" which sees him reject a "good" job at an advertising firm for a life of artistic poverty. It is Gordon's theory that no poet can possibly produce great verse while in the clutches of mindless capitalism, but he discovers the grinding, numbing, humiliating regime of poverty has almost entirely killed his Muse. Unable to write, suffering from loneliness, boredom and sexual frustration, he grows increasingly bitter and irrational as the book progresses, alienating the few people who actually care about him and, in one of the book's most memorable scenes, squandering his sole moment of literary and artistic success with a massive bender that lands him in jail. Comstock is a tremendous jerk, selfish and self-righteous, alternating moods of egoistic confidence with black depressions, constantly picking fights with Rosemary, his sometimes girlfriend, and Ravelston, the wealthy friend whose charity more or less keeps him going. He has polyps of human decency, but he is so far gone into bitterness, self-pity and misanthropy sometimes you wish he'd just stick his head in the gas oven and end it. What makes him fascinating is the way he manages the levels of poverty in which he exists, and the way he clings to his principles -- and they are sincere -- despite the terrible privations he endures every single day. Orwell uses Comstock to explore poverty in a novel way: not as merely lack of money or food, but lack of dignity, lack of human contact, lack of stimulation, and of the simple intimacies granted by friendship and love. Orwell's genius shows in the fact that Comstock remains sympathetic throughout the book even when you'd like to punch him in the nose, in no small part because his numerous criticisms of society -- some captured in memorable verse -- are accurate, and in part because you feel as if he is fighting your war for you; taking the bullet, as it were, for the rest of us who lack the guts to quit our soulless day jobs and reject the shiny bait of materialism. If Gordon's rebellion is foolish and futile and harms only himself, that is simply in keeping with Orwell's unspoken belief that rebellion itself is futile, however worthwhile it may be.
George Bowling, Coming Up For Air: None of Orwell's protagonists is nearer my heart than "Fatty" Bowling, a hard-bitten insurance salesman living in the soulless inner-outer suburbs of London with his nagging shrew of a wife and two ungrateful children. On the surface every bit as blunt, shallow and cynical as he appears to be, his "eyes of boiled blue" mask a thoughtful soul nursing what he calls "a hangover from the past." Worried about the coming war -- the story is set in 1938 -- he is more worried about what he refers to as "the after war," meaning the half-totalitarian, half-dystopian world he fears is coming on its heels. He's also quite disgusted with the present: the suburbs, the rat race, the endless worry about bills and money and getting the sack and ending up on the dole. Reminiscing about his childhood in a small market town on the Thames, he takes us through an unbelievably vivid and beautiful reconstruction of life in rural England in the early 1900s, showing us an extinct world through the eyes of the young boy who lived in it. And yet -- this is critical -- Bowling is not purely sentimental in his reminiscences. He is well aware that life was physically harder back then in almost every way. It is the peace of mind that he misses, the feeling that nothing will ever change, and your grandchildren will have the same experiences as your grandfather did. What he detests more than anything is the pace of modern life, its mindless noise and fury, its fundamental instability, and more than that, where it seems to be headed -- into the very world Orwell later describes in "1984."
Bowling is a marvelous character. Having more or less accidentally survived the "bloody balls up" that was WWI and the crushing economic slump that followed, he is almost brutally cynical, particularly about politics, patriotism, capitalism, women and marriage; some of his observations would 100% get you slapped if you repeated them in mixed company today, and there are times he seems as gritty and amoral as a Film Noir private eye. On the other hand, he is also remarkably thoughtful and sentimental, with a deep appreciation of nature -- there are endless passages about the smells, the sights, the tactile feeling of being in the woods or the fields in the summertime. He admits to being "blunt and insensitive" yet he's the sort that will pick flowers when he thinks nobody's looking, and confesses no adult pleasure -- whisky, tobacco, sex -- compares to the "pure bliss" he experienced when fishing or even reading a good book. Bowling's quest to recapture the feelings of childhood by taking a furtive holiday away from his wife to go fishing in his old hometown is, of course, doomed; it is hardly a spoiler to remark that Orwell doesn't do "happily ever after." But it follows that Bowling is not so easily disposed of as some of Orwell's other protagonists. Resilient to a fault, determined to see at least black comedy in the farce of life, he turns the disastrous vacation into a question: is it even possible to come up for air in a world that seems to have run out, not of air, but the time to breathe it? The answer won't surprise you, but the way he responds to the answer might.
Winston Smith, 1984: With the exception of Boxer from Animal Farm, the most tragic of all of Orwell's characters is Winston Smith, whose very name beckons to both the majesty of the past and the dull, gray facelessness of the present. Smith lives in a totalitarian state so oppressive that it actually polices the thoughts of its citizens; yet Smith's thoughts are full of seditious desires for freedom, putting him on a collision course with O'Brien, a sort of "High Inquisitor" of the Party, whose job is to torture thought-criminals not merely into outward comformity with the Party's goals, but an inward love of Big Brother, the Party's leader. Smith's rebellion is only fancifully directed at attacking the Party; his real goal is simply to retain a sense of sanity and humanity, despite the torments he must endure. Smith is the archetype of Orwellian protagonists: described as "frail" and "meager," with three false teeth and a vericose ulcer, he is hardly a romantic figure; nor is he very courageous in the purely physical sense. Smith's strengh lies in his intellect, his sense of individuality, and his ability to hope in a hopeless environment; also to experience the emotion of love, both romantically and in the larger sense of appreciating beauty, specifically natural beauty, something he holds in common with George Bowling, John Flory, Dorothy Hare and even Gordon Comstock.
I say that Smith is an archetype because in the end, as everyone knows, he is broken completely -- he betrays his romantic partner Julia to save himself, and the last line of the novel expresses his newfound and sincere love for Big Brother. The unhappiness of this ending is not precisely typical Orwell, but it is quintessential in that the only thing more certain than their acts of rebellion against society is that they will fail: John Flory rebels against the "pukka sahib" code and achieves nothing but his own destruction. Dorothy Hare rebels against the tyranny of her fate but circles back to it in the end, minus the religious convictions which made it seem virtuous. George Bowling rebels against modern life only to find he cannot escape it, and Gordom Comstock rebels against money, only to abandon his rebellion and his poetry both in favor of a "good job."
And yet despite the uniformity of these failures, there is at no point in any of Orwell's novels a sense that rebellion is wrong because it is futile; indeed, it is implied that these doomed rebellions are the most important and virtuous acts the protagonists will undertake in their lives. Winston Smith is not noble because he rebels against Big Brother, but because he does so in spite of the total and inevitable futility of his actions. The very act of fighting an evil system is in Orwell's mind a victory of sorts, one which is not outcome-based; it is the Hemingwayesque view that "man can be destroyed but not defeated." Orwell clearly saw virtue in the act of fighting against insurmountable odds, and this in itself is a romantic outlook and casts an equally romantic glow over his characters, however broken, cynical, callow or cowardly they might be.
In these five characters, then, we find certain commonalities which reveal much about their creator. We have already noted that they are all rebels whose rebellions are doomed to failure; they also hold in common a love of or appreciation for the beauty of nature; they are physically mediocre (Comstock and Smith are of a type; Bowling is fat; Hare is "frozen"; Flory is disfigured by a facial birthmark); and that they desire freedom, though their concept of freedom takes on different forms. These are all manifestly traits which Orwell possessed, even though his own physical mediocrity was of a dysmorphic rather than actual quality: told he was preternatually ugly when a child, he seems to have carried some belief this was true into adulthood. And indeed, his love of nature overflows in all of his fictional and some of his nonfictional writing, a love which is mixed up with his interest in what he called "the surfaces of things, the processes of life, and scraps of useless information." In one memorable essay, he describes the joy he found perusing old junk shops in London: a junk shop dutifully appears in 1984. In another, he discusses being arrested for drunkenness and spending a miserable hung-over night in a London cell; this exact sequence is detailed in Aspidistra. Clergyman sees Dorothy picking hops in the countryside for slave wages; Orwell simply drew on his own experiences in this regard, which are so lavishly described that we can pratically smell the hops on our bleeding, green-stained hands after a hard day in the fields. The list goes on endlessly, but it is important not because these things happened to Orwell in real life, but because of the interest he took in them. Orwell was a man who threw away a promising career in the police so he could experience the misery of poverty and war firsthand, and it seems that along with disgust and horror there was a great deal of fascination with actual aesthetics, the tacticle characteristics, of suffering and privation. None of his protagonists escapes this suffering, whether it comes from within or without or both, but none of them are defined by it, either. His characters are rebels doomed to failure within their own respective rebellions, but never once does he question their need for rebellion: never, as Henry Miller might have, does he suggest that surrender is the only sane course. Indeed, Orwell's protagonists seem to think that sanity is maintained by the very act of fighting back against the cruelty, the injustice, the ugliness and stupidity of modern life, even if the fight itself is futile and can end in only one outcome. This was Orwell's view, and in his private diaries, when contemplating a German invasion of England and whether he should flee or remain, he remarked, "better to stay here and keep up the fight, if only from inside the concentration camp." He must have known such a stance was futile and would lead to a meaningless death, but he saw resistance as a thing-in-itself, and therefore neither meaninless nor futile. This is a far more hopeful and romantic outlook than Orwell -- or his characters -- have ever been given credit for.
When we think of Mr. Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, the first things which come to mind are his terrifying dystopian masterpiece,1984, and his equally terrifying fable about revolution betrayed, Animal Farm. Beyond that, the image begins to blur. Orwell was, of course, a man with many hats upon his rack: he was a journalist, an advocate for democratic socialism, a writer of BBC radio scripts, investigative books and semi-memoirs; he began his career as an official in the Burmese Imperial Police and later served as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War; he was known alternatively as "St. George" or "The Truthteller," for his near-suicidal devotion to emotional and intellectual honesty. It is easy to sum up a man like Hemingway in a few brief sentences because he spent a lifetime promoting a specific image -- toughness, manliness, stoicism in the face of cruel Fate. Likewise Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald or even Hunter S. Thompson. Orwell was a more complex figure -- a firebrand socialist who spent much of his career attacking socialists, an eminent hater of fascism who was nonetheless willing to point out its selling points and compare it, sometimes favorably, to British imperialism; a man who detested cruelty yet could not abide pacifists and spoke calmly of killing when necessary; a man revolted by the amoral nature of politics who was nonetheless obsessed with them. There is so much dust and smoke swirling around Orwell's memory that it is easy to forget he was, perhaps before and after everything else, a novelist whose small but powerful body of work was so overshadowed by his own masterpiece, 1984, that most people are unaware of its existence.
Now, before you stop me, I am well aware that Down and Out in Paris and London is quite a famous book, but this is not in any real way a novel; it is a somewhat fictionalized memoir of actual events Orwell experienced in those two cities. Likewise, the lesser known Road to Wigan Pier is a book-length investigative report of British poverty interwoven with his own experiences of same, and Homage to Catalonia is his memoir of the Spanish Civil War. No, I am talking about Orwell's novels, the ones most people have never heard of Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up For Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Each is a testament to his strengths and weaknesses as a storyteller, a demonstration of his eagerness to explore the effects of poverty, class, capitalism and oppression upon the human spirit; but notably, they are also indicative of the sort of characters Orwell chose as protagonists...something which will tell us a great deal more about the man than any biographer ever could.
What I propose here is a brief analysis of each of the five protagonists (I wouldn't dare use the word "heroes") Orwell created for his full-length novels.
John Flory, Burmese Days: Orwell's first novel was a savage attack on British imperialism, delivered by a man who had helped facilitate it as a member of the Imperial Police, and whose conscience never quite recovered from the experience. "To truly hate imperialism," he was later to write, "You have had to be a part of it." Though John Flory is not a policeman as Orwell was, he is a willing if embittered tool of that imperialsm; an agent of a British timber firm, Flory's years in Burma have turned him into a lonely, hard-drinking, self-loathing, loner who detests his fellow British colonialists but benfits from the "pukka sahib" lifestyle colonialism gives him: servants, horses, a mistress, big game hunts, access to a snobbish Europeans Only club which is little more than a haven of racist alcoholics who recycle the same conversations day after day, year after year. Smitten by the arrival of a young Englishwoman on the prowl for a husband, Flory humiliates himself endlessly trying to win her affections, failing all the while to realize she embodies the snobbery, bigotry and intellectual deadness he hates. Flory's one consolation is an earnest "native" doctor, Veriswalmi, to whom he can unburden himself in private; but even this friendship is poisonous, because friendship with "natives" violates the unwritten but sacred code by which all Britons living in the Empire must live.
Flory is in some ways the template for the protagonists which follow him. Of ordinary origins, disfigured by a birthmark, physically courageous but morally weak, he is at once rotted almost completely through by his own dalliance with colonialism yet bursting with progressive, humanist opinions he dare not voice in real life. While not an antihero, and possessing some definite virtues, his default position a mixture of impotent self-pity and unhappy passivity. He can neither embrace the system he lives in nor change it in any way, and his fetishization of Elisabeth, who is so obviously stupid, ends up destroying him in the end. Like Hemingway, Orwell was no fan of the happy ending, and tended to view life as a brutal struggle against cruel realities which always got the upper hand sooner or later; the difference here is that Orwell does not romanticize the life of a gin-swilling big-game hunter in a Palm Beach suit, or accepting colonialism on its face without endeavoring to show that the face is a mask hiding all manner of horrors. Orwell's own streak of brutality and irony shows strongly in this book, but it is threaded into deeply felt criticisms of imperial rule. John Flory is a wretch, but his wretchedness is the end product of the system into which he was born, one which offers the poor and lower middle class of England, the sorts who have the most in common with the "natives," a chance at a better life if they will take an active hand in exploiting and bullying those "natives" for cash profit.
Dorothy Hare, A Clergyman's Daughter: It is hardly a secret that Orwell did not think all that much of women taken as a whole; certainly many of his female characters tend toward stupidity or bitchiness. It is therefore rather surprising that Orwell crafted a rather interesting and sympathetic character in Dorothy Hare, the only child of a viciously snobbish rural clergyman presiding over a dying congregation in rural, small-town England. Dorothy, like most of Orwell's protagonists, is rather a mess: cruelly overworked, she spends most of her days suffering from both hunger and exhaustion as she attempts to hold up the failing church by sheer force of faith. Bathing in cold water, denying herself sleep, pricking herself with needles whenever she feels a "selfish" impulse, she toils night and day for the ungrateful minister and an increasingly indifferent and shrinking flock. Suffering a mental breakdown from overwork, she wakes up in London with no memory of her own identity, and over the course of most of the rest of the book endures first homeless poverty, then life as an intinerant agricultural worker, and then finally the ultimate misery: working as a teacher in a wretched girls' school governed by a pitiless mistress interested only in profit. Clergyman is certainly Orwell's least impressive book: it does not hang together as a novel, Dorothy's loss of faith (which ought to be a central point of the book) is not explored, he fails to make the town Dorothy hails from feel like a real place, and the ending is, for all of its downbeats, surprisingly and somewhat unbelievably convenient. However, as a bare-faced examination of poverty, and the especial cruelty of poverty on those who were raised in genteel environments with some sense of pride and class consciousness, it is deeply affecting. Dorothy's sufferings, particularly at the school, are visceral: we feel not only her hunger pangs and loneliness but the desperate frustration of a woman who isn't allowed to teach anything meaningful, and is treated more or less like a servant or even a slave. Dorothy is much more fundamentally decent than most of Orwell's characters: she's also an intellectual and a frightfully hard worker. Her Achilles heel is acceptance of fate: enduring one terrible misery after another, she suffers without taking the obvious option to salvation, marriage, simply because she is sexually frozen and cannot abide the touch of a man. There is scarcely a moment in the book when she fights back against anyone or anything, or acts selfishly even when selfishness is warranted. Orwell was said to believe that man was inadequate to deal with the demands of the era in which he lived; Dorothy is a demonstration of this belief. The era in which seh was raised is visibly crumbling, and she has little place in the future which is arriving: she simply clings, ever more tightly, to her notions of decency and propriety, rendering her both noble and tragic. This glint of nobility is an Orwellian trait seldom acknowledged by his critics, but it exists -- and persists -- in most of his protagonists, however faintly.
Gordon Comstock, Keep the Aspidistra Flying: Of all of Orwell's characters, the unfortunate Gordon Comstock is probably the closest to Orwell himself, both in attitudes and lifestyle. A failed and embittered poet living in a dismal quarter of London, Gordon is engaged in a ridiculous "war against money" which sees him reject a "good" job at an advertising firm for a life of artistic poverty. It is Gordon's theory that no poet can possibly produce great verse while in the clutches of mindless capitalism, but he discovers the grinding, numbing, humiliating regime of poverty has almost entirely killed his Muse. Unable to write, suffering from loneliness, boredom and sexual frustration, he grows increasingly bitter and irrational as the book progresses, alienating the few people who actually care about him and, in one of the book's most memorable scenes, squandering his sole moment of literary and artistic success with a massive bender that lands him in jail. Comstock is a tremendous jerk, selfish and self-righteous, alternating moods of egoistic confidence with black depressions, constantly picking fights with Rosemary, his sometimes girlfriend, and Ravelston, the wealthy friend whose charity more or less keeps him going. He has polyps of human decency, but he is so far gone into bitterness, self-pity and misanthropy sometimes you wish he'd just stick his head in the gas oven and end it. What makes him fascinating is the way he manages the levels of poverty in which he exists, and the way he clings to his principles -- and they are sincere -- despite the terrible privations he endures every single day. Orwell uses Comstock to explore poverty in a novel way: not as merely lack of money or food, but lack of dignity, lack of human contact, lack of stimulation, and of the simple intimacies granted by friendship and love. Orwell's genius shows in the fact that Comstock remains sympathetic throughout the book even when you'd like to punch him in the nose, in no small part because his numerous criticisms of society -- some captured in memorable verse -- are accurate, and in part because you feel as if he is fighting your war for you; taking the bullet, as it were, for the rest of us who lack the guts to quit our soulless day jobs and reject the shiny bait of materialism. If Gordon's rebellion is foolish and futile and harms only himself, that is simply in keeping with Orwell's unspoken belief that rebellion itself is futile, however worthwhile it may be.
George Bowling, Coming Up For Air: None of Orwell's protagonists is nearer my heart than "Fatty" Bowling, a hard-bitten insurance salesman living in the soulless inner-outer suburbs of London with his nagging shrew of a wife and two ungrateful children. On the surface every bit as blunt, shallow and cynical as he appears to be, his "eyes of boiled blue" mask a thoughtful soul nursing what he calls "a hangover from the past." Worried about the coming war -- the story is set in 1938 -- he is more worried about what he refers to as "the after war," meaning the half-totalitarian, half-dystopian world he fears is coming on its heels. He's also quite disgusted with the present: the suburbs, the rat race, the endless worry about bills and money and getting the sack and ending up on the dole. Reminiscing about his childhood in a small market town on the Thames, he takes us through an unbelievably vivid and beautiful reconstruction of life in rural England in the early 1900s, showing us an extinct world through the eyes of the young boy who lived in it. And yet -- this is critical -- Bowling is not purely sentimental in his reminiscences. He is well aware that life was physically harder back then in almost every way. It is the peace of mind that he misses, the feeling that nothing will ever change, and your grandchildren will have the same experiences as your grandfather did. What he detests more than anything is the pace of modern life, its mindless noise and fury, its fundamental instability, and more than that, where it seems to be headed -- into the very world Orwell later describes in "1984."
Bowling is a marvelous character. Having more or less accidentally survived the "bloody balls up" that was WWI and the crushing economic slump that followed, he is almost brutally cynical, particularly about politics, patriotism, capitalism, women and marriage; some of his observations would 100% get you slapped if you repeated them in mixed company today, and there are times he seems as gritty and amoral as a Film Noir private eye. On the other hand, he is also remarkably thoughtful and sentimental, with a deep appreciation of nature -- there are endless passages about the smells, the sights, the tactile feeling of being in the woods or the fields in the summertime. He admits to being "blunt and insensitive" yet he's the sort that will pick flowers when he thinks nobody's looking, and confesses no adult pleasure -- whisky, tobacco, sex -- compares to the "pure bliss" he experienced when fishing or even reading a good book. Bowling's quest to recapture the feelings of childhood by taking a furtive holiday away from his wife to go fishing in his old hometown is, of course, doomed; it is hardly a spoiler to remark that Orwell doesn't do "happily ever after." But it follows that Bowling is not so easily disposed of as some of Orwell's other protagonists. Resilient to a fault, determined to see at least black comedy in the farce of life, he turns the disastrous vacation into a question: is it even possible to come up for air in a world that seems to have run out, not of air, but the time to breathe it? The answer won't surprise you, but the way he responds to the answer might.
Winston Smith, 1984: With the exception of Boxer from Animal Farm, the most tragic of all of Orwell's characters is Winston Smith, whose very name beckons to both the majesty of the past and the dull, gray facelessness of the present. Smith lives in a totalitarian state so oppressive that it actually polices the thoughts of its citizens; yet Smith's thoughts are full of seditious desires for freedom, putting him on a collision course with O'Brien, a sort of "High Inquisitor" of the Party, whose job is to torture thought-criminals not merely into outward comformity with the Party's goals, but an inward love of Big Brother, the Party's leader. Smith's rebellion is only fancifully directed at attacking the Party; his real goal is simply to retain a sense of sanity and humanity, despite the torments he must endure. Smith is the archetype of Orwellian protagonists: described as "frail" and "meager," with three false teeth and a vericose ulcer, he is hardly a romantic figure; nor is he very courageous in the purely physical sense. Smith's strengh lies in his intellect, his sense of individuality, and his ability to hope in a hopeless environment; also to experience the emotion of love, both romantically and in the larger sense of appreciating beauty, specifically natural beauty, something he holds in common with George Bowling, John Flory, Dorothy Hare and even Gordon Comstock.
I say that Smith is an archetype because in the end, as everyone knows, he is broken completely -- he betrays his romantic partner Julia to save himself, and the last line of the novel expresses his newfound and sincere love for Big Brother. The unhappiness of this ending is not precisely typical Orwell, but it is quintessential in that the only thing more certain than their acts of rebellion against society is that they will fail: John Flory rebels against the "pukka sahib" code and achieves nothing but his own destruction. Dorothy Hare rebels against the tyranny of her fate but circles back to it in the end, minus the religious convictions which made it seem virtuous. George Bowling rebels against modern life only to find he cannot escape it, and Gordom Comstock rebels against money, only to abandon his rebellion and his poetry both in favor of a "good job."
And yet despite the uniformity of these failures, there is at no point in any of Orwell's novels a sense that rebellion is wrong because it is futile; indeed, it is implied that these doomed rebellions are the most important and virtuous acts the protagonists will undertake in their lives. Winston Smith is not noble because he rebels against Big Brother, but because he does so in spite of the total and inevitable futility of his actions. The very act of fighting an evil system is in Orwell's mind a victory of sorts, one which is not outcome-based; it is the Hemingwayesque view that "man can be destroyed but not defeated." Orwell clearly saw virtue in the act of fighting against insurmountable odds, and this in itself is a romantic outlook and casts an equally romantic glow over his characters, however broken, cynical, callow or cowardly they might be.
In these five characters, then, we find certain commonalities which reveal much about their creator. We have already noted that they are all rebels whose rebellions are doomed to failure; they also hold in common a love of or appreciation for the beauty of nature; they are physically mediocre (Comstock and Smith are of a type; Bowling is fat; Hare is "frozen"; Flory is disfigured by a facial birthmark); and that they desire freedom, though their concept of freedom takes on different forms. These are all manifestly traits which Orwell possessed, even though his own physical mediocrity was of a dysmorphic rather than actual quality: told he was preternatually ugly when a child, he seems to have carried some belief this was true into adulthood. And indeed, his love of nature overflows in all of his fictional and some of his nonfictional writing, a love which is mixed up with his interest in what he called "the surfaces of things, the processes of life, and scraps of useless information." In one memorable essay, he describes the joy he found perusing old junk shops in London: a junk shop dutifully appears in 1984. In another, he discusses being arrested for drunkenness and spending a miserable hung-over night in a London cell; this exact sequence is detailed in Aspidistra. Clergyman sees Dorothy picking hops in the countryside for slave wages; Orwell simply drew on his own experiences in this regard, which are so lavishly described that we can pratically smell the hops on our bleeding, green-stained hands after a hard day in the fields. The list goes on endlessly, but it is important not because these things happened to Orwell in real life, but because of the interest he took in them. Orwell was a man who threw away a promising career in the police so he could experience the misery of poverty and war firsthand, and it seems that along with disgust and horror there was a great deal of fascination with actual aesthetics, the tacticle characteristics, of suffering and privation. None of his protagonists escapes this suffering, whether it comes from within or without or both, but none of them are defined by it, either. His characters are rebels doomed to failure within their own respective rebellions, but never once does he question their need for rebellion: never, as Henry Miller might have, does he suggest that surrender is the only sane course. Indeed, Orwell's protagonists seem to think that sanity is maintained by the very act of fighting back against the cruelty, the injustice, the ugliness and stupidity of modern life, even if the fight itself is futile and can end in only one outcome. This was Orwell's view, and in his private diaries, when contemplating a German invasion of England and whether he should flee or remain, he remarked, "better to stay here and keep up the fight, if only from inside the concentration camp." He must have known such a stance was futile and would lead to a meaningless death, but he saw resistance as a thing-in-itself, and therefore neither meaninless nor futile. This is a far more hopeful and romantic outlook than Orwell -- or his characters -- have ever been given credit for.
March 23, 2024
THE GIFT OF SUFFERING
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. -- Agent Smith, The Matrix
I believe the year was 1979. I was seven years old, and playing in a local soccer league. My team was good -- the only time in the five seasons I played for Montgomery Soccer, Inc., which that happened to be the case -- and we actually made it to the county championship final. The match was long, grueling and highly competetive, but we lost -- on a shootout, if memory serves, which is a particularly galling and cruel way to lose, when you think about it. The winners walked away with enormous trophies, which in my (undoubtedly false) memory were nearly as large as they were; the losers, who had gone undefeated all season 'til that point, who had sacrificed their Saturday mornings for games and several afternoons per week for practices, were given palm-sized consolation pieces. I still have mine somewhere. It is a plastic gold-colored soccer ball, about the size of a golf ball, sitting on a plastic gold-colored spike, embedded in a square of fake marble upon which a small brass plate was fixed, bearing the year of the tournament and the name of the league (MSI). That was it. That was the reward we got for coming out second best: a small chunk of fakery whose value couldn't have been a dollar even when a dollar was worth something.
I confess an especial bitterness in this, one I felt compelled to voice to my father at the time. It hardly seemed fair to me to work so long and so hard only to lose on a caprice of fate, and then receive a trophy which served more a badge of shame than a monument to effort. This I communicated to him with my seven year-old vocabulary, but he understood plainly enough. I can't remember his exact reply, but it amounted to, "If you want the big trophy, you have to win. Nobody cares how hard you worked to lose."
It was roughly around this time, perhaps two years later at most, that I failed to win any ribbons in my elementary school Field Day competeitions for the first time in my life. I have never been a star athlete per se, my endurance was never any good, but up 'til the age of about ten I possessed speed and agility sufficient to dominate any activity or sport which required those qualities: I was always among the best swimmers, I was actually on two swim teams at the same time at one point, and while not quite the fastest kid on the playground, I was always the fastest in my own circle and could hold my own with anybody over short distances. Whenever a competition was held, I knew a couple of red second place ribbons would come home with me; the only question was whether a prized blue ribbon would also accompany. Nevertheless, by the time I was in fourth or fifth grade, I came home from Field Day with nothing -- not even a wretched third place ribbon, whose color I couldn't even tell you, because I had never stooped so low as to receive one. I can still remember arguing furiously with Mrs. Previc, the soulless monster who ran that final Field Day, as if something much more than a small scrap of synthetic cloth were on the line, but coming away, nevertheless, with nothing.
There is a third memory which also stands out, more painfully than the others which to me are merely silly: I'm twelve years old, coming to bat in a softball game, and praying as hard as I can that I will hit a massive home run and thus impress the classmates who now bully, quietly despise, or simply ignore me. By this time I have gotten quite chunky, but I'm still very strong and somewhere beneath the flab is a goodish bit of muscle that should remember how to whack the hell out of a ball. Because I still hope that hope will be rewarded, I even channel The Natural theme song into my mind. Neverthless, after a few strikes all I manage is a clinker and am easily thrown out.
Looking back on these seemingly trivial incidents after more than forty years, it seems to me that both the anger I felt and the lesson I learned come to me quite clearly: even as I child I hated losing, and even as I child I was not dull-witted enough to ignore the lessons imparted by my defeats and failures: If you want the big trophy, you have to win: nobody cares how hard you worked to lose; what's more, if you didn't work at all, you should not be disappointed or surprised when you fail. Bad luck is simply the residue of poor preparation.
These are, of course, not overly fond memories, but like many sad, upsetting or embarassing moments from our past, they are far more valuable than their trivial nature actually warrants. We were told that our athletic activities were to keep us fit and release excess energy so we could concentrate in class, and also to teach the value of teamwork; we had to figure out for ourselves (though later, in high school, it was explicity explained by gym teachers who took sour relish in the speech) the harsh life lessons contained within these hours of street hockey, softball, soccer, relay races, and all the rest of it. Sometimes you can try as hard as you are physically capable at something, and still lose and come away with nothing; sometimes you are so good at something that it seems to define you as a human being in your own eyes as well as the eyes of others, only to encounter someone who does it better. And as you get a little older, something else is made clear by these little after-lunch skirmishes: if you're gifted at something, but don't practice, you will inevitably be crushed by someone of equal or even lesser gift who is out there, practicing, every day, while you are home eating Ring Dings and watching He Man.
It has been said that my generation, X, is the last to have fully experienced the cold cruelties of athletic competition in its most unvarnished form, the form in which victory is rewarded and defeat punished, if only with disappointment and humiliation. After X, it is said, the process of sanding down gym class, recess, Field Day, team sports and all the rest of it began in earnest, so that now, today, the idea of "winners and losers" has been erased so completely from whatever is left of our collective K-12 athletic programs that it's as if it never existed in the first place. I do not know the exact timeline, and I certainly can't give my generation any credit for the way it was raised since we had no hand in it, but I can say they very notion of placing children into competition is now likened by millions of people to child abuse. And it is worth noting that many of these same people, who believe a skinned knee on a playground and the tears which may follow amount to crimes, have very little issue with watching that same child drink 40 ounces of soda while hooked to an X-box or a cell phone for ten or twelve hours a day.
It so happens that I have been both children -- the athletic one who lived outdoors, ran or swam or pedaled everywhere he went at maximum speed, thought nothing of jumping gorges, rolling down hills, or hurtling off trampliones -- and the soda-guzzling, basement-dwelling, video-game addicted slob who was the butt of cruel jokes and even crueler indifference. So I am in a position to say with authority that it is much less painful to get hit in the face -- or the groin -- by a soccer ball kicked with maximum force, or to be choked out while practicing judo, or to swim full speed into the concrete wall of the pool, than it is to be weak, friendless and living life vicariously through a television screen. Like Judy Collins, I've seen the world from both sides, and each carries its own cross. But the cross that comes with accepting the darker, harsher realities of life and then learning to cope with them, is considerably lighter than the other variety.
As always when I rant about something that seems too small to merit the invective, I am not actually talking about that thing. The idea that thornier side of life is something we can actually hide from if we just get rid of dodge ball is merely a single thread in a much larger tapestry of cultural deterioration which has been going on for a quarter of a century or more; it is part of the general decay of strength which we have seen overtake the West since the early 90s, when this bizarre idea that life could be made easier if it was made softer began to take root within our civilization. The idea that trials, tribulations, struggles, and depravations actually strengthen us mentally, spiritually and physically -- an idea as old as the West itself -- is sloughing away and has sloughed away, and in its place is this flabby cult of the participation trophy, this belief that the answer to the essential harshness and cruelty of life is an ever-deeper retreat into softness. That if only we could protect our emotions as well as our bodies from all pain and discomfort and dissonance that the dream of Paradise would be realized, on earth rather than in heaven. And of course there is such a Paradise, and it does not require any religious faith, for it is self-evident condition of life: it is called death.
Dag Hammarskjöld once remarked that many people believe happiness came from pleasure; he countered that true happiness comes from discipline and denial, which allows us to enjoy the pleasures we experience more fully. By balancing what we want with what we actually need, we not only obtain more of what we want, we enjoy more fully that which we actually acquire. In my experience he is 100% correct. I have had, in my life, extended periods of utter hedonism, during which I did nothing but drink myself insensible, chase women, watch television, sleep into the afternoon, and so on. Each and every one of these idylls was provoked by some traumatic event -- death, the end of a relationship, a terrible work experience. And as much fun as was had during these periods, they were either followed or accompanied by deep spiritual misgivings; by feelings of self-loathing and self-disgust; by a craving to be doing more, even if "more" included its fair share of suffering. I began to understand, reluctantly and somewhat sullenly, that as far as I retreated from pain, that was how far pain would seek me out, albeit in a different, inward sort of form. Like the humanity which Agent Smith references in The Matrix, the paradise I sought, I also rejected whenever I found it. It is not that I defined life by suffering and misery for its own sake, as he claimed; rather that I began to understand that what I wanted and what I needed stood distinct from one another. Instead of thinking about what I wanted, I needed to start thinking about what I wanted to be, which is not the same thing at all. Indeed, even what I wanted and what I wanted were in open, unwinnable conflict, because greatness and fulfillment are irreconcilable with staying in bed all day. I craved -- I still crave -- the big trophy, and the big trophy takes work. And work means, literally or figuratively or both, sweat and blood and tears and calluses and all the rest of it, up to and including the utter humiliation of falling on your fucking face in public. What's more, and what so many people today simply do not understand (including myself in my weaker moments) is that nobody will compensate me in any way should I fail despite doing the work. There are no Purple Hearts for the emotional scars of giving one's absolute all in pursuit of a dream only to be rewarded with a donut hole. But rather than weep over this, I take comfort, however cold, in something Hemingway wrote almost a hundred years ago:
Unlike all other forms of lutte or combat the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing; neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory; nor, if he win far enough, shall there be any reward within himself.
A grim philosophy? Well, sure: it's Hemingway, whose cuba libre was always half-empty. But if we probe a little deeper we can see what he's driving at here, something almost Asiatic in its stoical acceptance of the unfairness of life, its caprciousness, its cruelty. Something reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, who declined the reward of a knighthood with the remark, "I play the game for the game's own sake." It is the idea that while winning is attractive, it is not actually the trophy or the ribbon which is the reward; indeed, there is no reward; only the fight itself, the holy purifying struggle, the battle between what we were and what we are and what we are becoming, which is beyond the idea of winning and losing, the knowledge that when everything else is taken away, as well it will be, we will always have the fight so long as we live...and though the fight be not much, it is enough.
I believe the year was 1979. I was seven years old, and playing in a local soccer league. My team was good -- the only time in the five seasons I played for Montgomery Soccer, Inc., which that happened to be the case -- and we actually made it to the county championship final. The match was long, grueling and highly competetive, but we lost -- on a shootout, if memory serves, which is a particularly galling and cruel way to lose, when you think about it. The winners walked away with enormous trophies, which in my (undoubtedly false) memory were nearly as large as they were; the losers, who had gone undefeated all season 'til that point, who had sacrificed their Saturday mornings for games and several afternoons per week for practices, were given palm-sized consolation pieces. I still have mine somewhere. It is a plastic gold-colored soccer ball, about the size of a golf ball, sitting on a plastic gold-colored spike, embedded in a square of fake marble upon which a small brass plate was fixed, bearing the year of the tournament and the name of the league (MSI). That was it. That was the reward we got for coming out second best: a small chunk of fakery whose value couldn't have been a dollar even when a dollar was worth something.
I confess an especial bitterness in this, one I felt compelled to voice to my father at the time. It hardly seemed fair to me to work so long and so hard only to lose on a caprice of fate, and then receive a trophy which served more a badge of shame than a monument to effort. This I communicated to him with my seven year-old vocabulary, but he understood plainly enough. I can't remember his exact reply, but it amounted to, "If you want the big trophy, you have to win. Nobody cares how hard you worked to lose."
It was roughly around this time, perhaps two years later at most, that I failed to win any ribbons in my elementary school Field Day competeitions for the first time in my life. I have never been a star athlete per se, my endurance was never any good, but up 'til the age of about ten I possessed speed and agility sufficient to dominate any activity or sport which required those qualities: I was always among the best swimmers, I was actually on two swim teams at the same time at one point, and while not quite the fastest kid on the playground, I was always the fastest in my own circle and could hold my own with anybody over short distances. Whenever a competition was held, I knew a couple of red second place ribbons would come home with me; the only question was whether a prized blue ribbon would also accompany. Nevertheless, by the time I was in fourth or fifth grade, I came home from Field Day with nothing -- not even a wretched third place ribbon, whose color I couldn't even tell you, because I had never stooped so low as to receive one. I can still remember arguing furiously with Mrs. Previc, the soulless monster who ran that final Field Day, as if something much more than a small scrap of synthetic cloth were on the line, but coming away, nevertheless, with nothing.
There is a third memory which also stands out, more painfully than the others which to me are merely silly: I'm twelve years old, coming to bat in a softball game, and praying as hard as I can that I will hit a massive home run and thus impress the classmates who now bully, quietly despise, or simply ignore me. By this time I have gotten quite chunky, but I'm still very strong and somewhere beneath the flab is a goodish bit of muscle that should remember how to whack the hell out of a ball. Because I still hope that hope will be rewarded, I even channel The Natural theme song into my mind. Neverthless, after a few strikes all I manage is a clinker and am easily thrown out.
Looking back on these seemingly trivial incidents after more than forty years, it seems to me that both the anger I felt and the lesson I learned come to me quite clearly: even as I child I hated losing, and even as I child I was not dull-witted enough to ignore the lessons imparted by my defeats and failures: If you want the big trophy, you have to win: nobody cares how hard you worked to lose; what's more, if you didn't work at all, you should not be disappointed or surprised when you fail. Bad luck is simply the residue of poor preparation.
These are, of course, not overly fond memories, but like many sad, upsetting or embarassing moments from our past, they are far more valuable than their trivial nature actually warrants. We were told that our athletic activities were to keep us fit and release excess energy so we could concentrate in class, and also to teach the value of teamwork; we had to figure out for ourselves (though later, in high school, it was explicity explained by gym teachers who took sour relish in the speech) the harsh life lessons contained within these hours of street hockey, softball, soccer, relay races, and all the rest of it. Sometimes you can try as hard as you are physically capable at something, and still lose and come away with nothing; sometimes you are so good at something that it seems to define you as a human being in your own eyes as well as the eyes of others, only to encounter someone who does it better. And as you get a little older, something else is made clear by these little after-lunch skirmishes: if you're gifted at something, but don't practice, you will inevitably be crushed by someone of equal or even lesser gift who is out there, practicing, every day, while you are home eating Ring Dings and watching He Man.
It has been said that my generation, X, is the last to have fully experienced the cold cruelties of athletic competition in its most unvarnished form, the form in which victory is rewarded and defeat punished, if only with disappointment and humiliation. After X, it is said, the process of sanding down gym class, recess, Field Day, team sports and all the rest of it began in earnest, so that now, today, the idea of "winners and losers" has been erased so completely from whatever is left of our collective K-12 athletic programs that it's as if it never existed in the first place. I do not know the exact timeline, and I certainly can't give my generation any credit for the way it was raised since we had no hand in it, but I can say they very notion of placing children into competition is now likened by millions of people to child abuse. And it is worth noting that many of these same people, who believe a skinned knee on a playground and the tears which may follow amount to crimes, have very little issue with watching that same child drink 40 ounces of soda while hooked to an X-box or a cell phone for ten or twelve hours a day.
It so happens that I have been both children -- the athletic one who lived outdoors, ran or swam or pedaled everywhere he went at maximum speed, thought nothing of jumping gorges, rolling down hills, or hurtling off trampliones -- and the soda-guzzling, basement-dwelling, video-game addicted slob who was the butt of cruel jokes and even crueler indifference. So I am in a position to say with authority that it is much less painful to get hit in the face -- or the groin -- by a soccer ball kicked with maximum force, or to be choked out while practicing judo, or to swim full speed into the concrete wall of the pool, than it is to be weak, friendless and living life vicariously through a television screen. Like Judy Collins, I've seen the world from both sides, and each carries its own cross. But the cross that comes with accepting the darker, harsher realities of life and then learning to cope with them, is considerably lighter than the other variety.
As always when I rant about something that seems too small to merit the invective, I am not actually talking about that thing. The idea that thornier side of life is something we can actually hide from if we just get rid of dodge ball is merely a single thread in a much larger tapestry of cultural deterioration which has been going on for a quarter of a century or more; it is part of the general decay of strength which we have seen overtake the West since the early 90s, when this bizarre idea that life could be made easier if it was made softer began to take root within our civilization. The idea that trials, tribulations, struggles, and depravations actually strengthen us mentally, spiritually and physically -- an idea as old as the West itself -- is sloughing away and has sloughed away, and in its place is this flabby cult of the participation trophy, this belief that the answer to the essential harshness and cruelty of life is an ever-deeper retreat into softness. That if only we could protect our emotions as well as our bodies from all pain and discomfort and dissonance that the dream of Paradise would be realized, on earth rather than in heaven. And of course there is such a Paradise, and it does not require any religious faith, for it is self-evident condition of life: it is called death.
Dag Hammarskjöld once remarked that many people believe happiness came from pleasure; he countered that true happiness comes from discipline and denial, which allows us to enjoy the pleasures we experience more fully. By balancing what we want with what we actually need, we not only obtain more of what we want, we enjoy more fully that which we actually acquire. In my experience he is 100% correct. I have had, in my life, extended periods of utter hedonism, during which I did nothing but drink myself insensible, chase women, watch television, sleep into the afternoon, and so on. Each and every one of these idylls was provoked by some traumatic event -- death, the end of a relationship, a terrible work experience. And as much fun as was had during these periods, they were either followed or accompanied by deep spiritual misgivings; by feelings of self-loathing and self-disgust; by a craving to be doing more, even if "more" included its fair share of suffering. I began to understand, reluctantly and somewhat sullenly, that as far as I retreated from pain, that was how far pain would seek me out, albeit in a different, inward sort of form. Like the humanity which Agent Smith references in The Matrix, the paradise I sought, I also rejected whenever I found it. It is not that I defined life by suffering and misery for its own sake, as he claimed; rather that I began to understand that what I wanted and what I needed stood distinct from one another. Instead of thinking about what I wanted, I needed to start thinking about what I wanted to be, which is not the same thing at all. Indeed, even what I wanted and what I wanted were in open, unwinnable conflict, because greatness and fulfillment are irreconcilable with staying in bed all day. I craved -- I still crave -- the big trophy, and the big trophy takes work. And work means, literally or figuratively or both, sweat and blood and tears and calluses and all the rest of it, up to and including the utter humiliation of falling on your fucking face in public. What's more, and what so many people today simply do not understand (including myself in my weaker moments) is that nobody will compensate me in any way should I fail despite doing the work. There are no Purple Hearts for the emotional scars of giving one's absolute all in pursuit of a dream only to be rewarded with a donut hole. But rather than weep over this, I take comfort, however cold, in something Hemingway wrote almost a hundred years ago:
Unlike all other forms of lutte or combat the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing; neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory; nor, if he win far enough, shall there be any reward within himself.
A grim philosophy? Well, sure: it's Hemingway, whose cuba libre was always half-empty. But if we probe a little deeper we can see what he's driving at here, something almost Asiatic in its stoical acceptance of the unfairness of life, its caprciousness, its cruelty. Something reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, who declined the reward of a knighthood with the remark, "I play the game for the game's own sake." It is the idea that while winning is attractive, it is not actually the trophy or the ribbon which is the reward; indeed, there is no reward; only the fight itself, the holy purifying struggle, the battle between what we were and what we are and what we are becoming, which is beyond the idea of winning and losing, the knowledge that when everything else is taken away, as well it will be, we will always have the fight so long as we live...and though the fight be not much, it is enough.
March 15, 2024
AS I PLEASE XXIII: POST CALI BLUES EDITION
Apologies for my recent silence, but I was on a rare vacation which took me away from the keys for a week or so. It was much needed, and while I was gone many an idea for blogs passed through my head and left baggage behind; however, as I am not yet fully settled in, I'm not ready to unpack it. What I can do is shake out some of the travel dust. I daresay some of it is worth sharing.
* This last week marked my first visit to California in two years; the visit was itself only my second since I moved in 2020. One of the features I had forgotten is how much bluer the sky is there than in Pennsylvania or Maryland. It often takes on a deep, deep cobalt which makes any passing cloud look almost supernaturally white. This is not hyperbole or sentiment: compared to the skies of SoCal, the Eastern sky looks washed out, dull, and boring.
* On top of this, the sun is infinitely stronger even well inland than it is anywhere around here except the beach, and then only for about maybe six months out of the year. A few hours hiking in the morning left me red as a beet and brought out long-dormant freckles from deep hibernation. To get the same effect out here, I'd have to spend eight hours hammering shingles in July.
* Maybe it was the perfect weather, maybe it was being reunited with dear friends and family, maybe it was just the much-needed break from responsibility, but I found myself missing Cali for the first time since I moved. I was very nearly regretful about it until my buddy Mark and his wife told me what rents were like now in my old neighborhood: $2,500 is evidently the standard for a studio apartment. If one proceeds from the idea that nobody should pay more than 1/3 (at the most) of their total income towards rent/mortgage, one would need to make a bare minimum of $78,000 annually to barely afford a studio. A studio. The average income in the United States is $31,133. The average income in California is $33,719. Even if a couple each making the latter figure were living (closely) together in said studio, their total income would be more than ten thousand dollars short of the minimum mark. Working poverty now seems to be the norm in my former state and adoptive hometown. If I hadn't left of my own free will four years ago, I would have been forced out anyway.
* Ten days ago I went down Memory Lane to remember T.J. Hooker. Driving around my old neighborhood in Burbank this past weekend, I not only recognized dozens of the shooting locations from that old show (which debuted almost 40 years ago) I was struck by how little Burbank itself had changed. Obviously most of the businesses of that time are long gone; hell, a few from my time are gone; what I mean is that the architecture hadn't much changed. It's still recognizably the same place in every respect. I found this very comforting. The Maryland neighborhood in which I grew up is now largely unrecognizable. My high school was torn down decades ago. McMansions loom where middle-class houses once reposed. The downtown is overbuilt to a dystopian degree. That comforts me not at all.
* SoCal is notorious for its "car culture." The notoriety is earned. I wasn't in town an hour before I remembered how immense, how poorly and inconveniently designed, this area is, or how it does everything possible, consciously and unconsciously, to encourage its residents to drive even short distances rather than walk. In my present situation I can do the following on foot: go to work, get a haircut, go to market, go to bookstores, shop for clothing, visit the Post Office and the gym, get coffee, and hit any number of restaurants and bars. When I was in L.A. county, I visited my brother, my cousin and my friend Mark, and not one of them can walk anywhere to do any of these things. The design of everything either prevents it or makes it an infernal nuisance. And yet light rail remains largely a fantasy. It is the best solution to the otherwise insoluble problem. How do we know this? L.A. used to have the best streetcar system in America. It was famous for its ease of use, efficiency and breadth. The old "Big Three" motor companies bought it up and destroyed it after WW2 so they could sell cars. They are gone but their legacy remains -- impenetrable traffic and smog.
* As you may remember, because I seldom stop complaining about it, when I moved in 2020, I was forced to leave my books behind -- a huge library, accumulated over many years. On this trip I managed to mail home somewhere around 15 boxes' worth, which will make my mailman miserable but will finally put (mostly) right a terrible wrong. No reader should be stripped of his personal library. I can't wait to cram my dusty, empty bookshelves with the things they were meant to carry. There is another, smaller trove of books that need to be sent on, but that will have to wait for a future visit. At some point this year, however, it seems likely that I will have mailed the very last of all my personal belongings presently gathering dust in California. That will not only constitute an accomplishment, it will represent the closing of a chapter of my life, and strangely enough, I think I will feel more sad than happy.
* When I was in town, I made a point of trying to see as many of the old places and the old faces as possible. I fell somewhat short of my goals, but among the boxes I actually checked was sitting down to some good, old fashioned In N Out Burger. It so happens that In N Out is the one fast foot joint I frequented in California -- indeed, it is the only fast food I will actually eat, or have eaten, in the last 24 years, not considering it "fast food" of the McDonald's/Taco Bell type at all. What separates In-N-Out in this regard is the fact the ingredients are fresh. You actually watch them take the potatoes out of the sack, cut them, fry them, serve them. It's real food. It may not be real good for you, but that's another matter. Anyway, it was fine. But not as fine as I remember. Nostalgia can be a little deceptive. Then again, you can catch anyone on a bad day, even In-N-Out.
* On the whole, however, I caught L.A. on a "good day." The weather was absolutely perfect. There was not one trace of smog. Traffic was never a factor. I found myself in a wistful mood, almost wishing I had never left, almost wishing I could return. Almost. Los Angeles is a terrific place to visit, but living there is another matter entirely. And it's not just the cost of living. The entertainment industry can be a terrible grind when things are going well; lately, in the aftermath of the writer's strike, and with other strikes potentially looming, the prospect of making a living that way is not so much bleak as terrifying. Maybe it's just the middle age talking, but there comes a time when stability and security become more appealing than social cachet.
And that wraps me up for tonight. My suitcases are unpacked, my laundry is done, the cat has been mollified and various television shows from the 80s and 90s beckon upon my television machine. Sorry for the absence, but I should be able to return to form in short order.
* This last week marked my first visit to California in two years; the visit was itself only my second since I moved in 2020. One of the features I had forgotten is how much bluer the sky is there than in Pennsylvania or Maryland. It often takes on a deep, deep cobalt which makes any passing cloud look almost supernaturally white. This is not hyperbole or sentiment: compared to the skies of SoCal, the Eastern sky looks washed out, dull, and boring.
* On top of this, the sun is infinitely stronger even well inland than it is anywhere around here except the beach, and then only for about maybe six months out of the year. A few hours hiking in the morning left me red as a beet and brought out long-dormant freckles from deep hibernation. To get the same effect out here, I'd have to spend eight hours hammering shingles in July.
* Maybe it was the perfect weather, maybe it was being reunited with dear friends and family, maybe it was just the much-needed break from responsibility, but I found myself missing Cali for the first time since I moved. I was very nearly regretful about it until my buddy Mark and his wife told me what rents were like now in my old neighborhood: $2,500 is evidently the standard for a studio apartment. If one proceeds from the idea that nobody should pay more than 1/3 (at the most) of their total income towards rent/mortgage, one would need to make a bare minimum of $78,000 annually to barely afford a studio. A studio. The average income in the United States is $31,133. The average income in California is $33,719. Even if a couple each making the latter figure were living (closely) together in said studio, their total income would be more than ten thousand dollars short of the minimum mark. Working poverty now seems to be the norm in my former state and adoptive hometown. If I hadn't left of my own free will four years ago, I would have been forced out anyway.
* Ten days ago I went down Memory Lane to remember T.J. Hooker. Driving around my old neighborhood in Burbank this past weekend, I not only recognized dozens of the shooting locations from that old show (which debuted almost 40 years ago) I was struck by how little Burbank itself had changed. Obviously most of the businesses of that time are long gone; hell, a few from my time are gone; what I mean is that the architecture hadn't much changed. It's still recognizably the same place in every respect. I found this very comforting. The Maryland neighborhood in which I grew up is now largely unrecognizable. My high school was torn down decades ago. McMansions loom where middle-class houses once reposed. The downtown is overbuilt to a dystopian degree. That comforts me not at all.
* SoCal is notorious for its "car culture." The notoriety is earned. I wasn't in town an hour before I remembered how immense, how poorly and inconveniently designed, this area is, or how it does everything possible, consciously and unconsciously, to encourage its residents to drive even short distances rather than walk. In my present situation I can do the following on foot: go to work, get a haircut, go to market, go to bookstores, shop for clothing, visit the Post Office and the gym, get coffee, and hit any number of restaurants and bars. When I was in L.A. county, I visited my brother, my cousin and my friend Mark, and not one of them can walk anywhere to do any of these things. The design of everything either prevents it or makes it an infernal nuisance. And yet light rail remains largely a fantasy. It is the best solution to the otherwise insoluble problem. How do we know this? L.A. used to have the best streetcar system in America. It was famous for its ease of use, efficiency and breadth. The old "Big Three" motor companies bought it up and destroyed it after WW2 so they could sell cars. They are gone but their legacy remains -- impenetrable traffic and smog.
* As you may remember, because I seldom stop complaining about it, when I moved in 2020, I was forced to leave my books behind -- a huge library, accumulated over many years. On this trip I managed to mail home somewhere around 15 boxes' worth, which will make my mailman miserable but will finally put (mostly) right a terrible wrong. No reader should be stripped of his personal library. I can't wait to cram my dusty, empty bookshelves with the things they were meant to carry. There is another, smaller trove of books that need to be sent on, but that will have to wait for a future visit. At some point this year, however, it seems likely that I will have mailed the very last of all my personal belongings presently gathering dust in California. That will not only constitute an accomplishment, it will represent the closing of a chapter of my life, and strangely enough, I think I will feel more sad than happy.
* When I was in town, I made a point of trying to see as many of the old places and the old faces as possible. I fell somewhat short of my goals, but among the boxes I actually checked was sitting down to some good, old fashioned In N Out Burger. It so happens that In N Out is the one fast foot joint I frequented in California -- indeed, it is the only fast food I will actually eat, or have eaten, in the last 24 years, not considering it "fast food" of the McDonald's/Taco Bell type at all. What separates In-N-Out in this regard is the fact the ingredients are fresh. You actually watch them take the potatoes out of the sack, cut them, fry them, serve them. It's real food. It may not be real good for you, but that's another matter. Anyway, it was fine. But not as fine as I remember. Nostalgia can be a little deceptive. Then again, you can catch anyone on a bad day, even In-N-Out.
* On the whole, however, I caught L.A. on a "good day." The weather was absolutely perfect. There was not one trace of smog. Traffic was never a factor. I found myself in a wistful mood, almost wishing I had never left, almost wishing I could return. Almost. Los Angeles is a terrific place to visit, but living there is another matter entirely. And it's not just the cost of living. The entertainment industry can be a terrible grind when things are going well; lately, in the aftermath of the writer's strike, and with other strikes potentially looming, the prospect of making a living that way is not so much bleak as terrifying. Maybe it's just the middle age talking, but there comes a time when stability and security become more appealing than social cachet.
And that wraps me up for tonight. My suitcases are unpacked, my laundry is done, the cat has been mollified and various television shows from the 80s and 90s beckon upon my television machine. Sorry for the absence, but I should be able to return to form in short order.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
- Miles Watson's profile
- 63 followers
