RADIO LIFE and A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ
Radio Life and A Canticle for Leibowitz
Derek B. Miller, 13 August, 2020
I was a Freshman at Sarah Lawrence College in 1988 meeting a friend for lunch. We were at the Pub. It must have been October or so because I remember the stone cottage in Westchester County, New York, being surrounded by the changing leaves. The sense of the school year was starting and the excitement was uplifting. Autumn was never melancholy or wistfulness on campus. It provided a kind of spiritual settling. Here comes the winter with the promise of books, ideas, and just maybe the cuddling of a new lover.
I can't remember the friend but I remember the conversation. We were talking about books — as people do at Sarah Lawrence — and in this case science fiction. "Have you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz?" he asked me.
No. Never heard of it.
‘It's a classic,’ he said.
Sounded Jewish. And Catholic. And mystical, as though it was inspired by something real and was only masquerading as fiction.
All good stuff.
‘You've got to read it,’ he said.
OK.
He described it and I still remember the description: there was a Flame Deluge (a nuclear war) and the population was wiped out. The survivors blamed the scientists and burned all the books. But there was a tiny abbey of monks run by an order of people who protected every scrap of paper and knowledge they could find even though they had no idea what any of it meant. They came across a box that contained the seeds of new technology.
I can't remember the rest, but I was intrigued.
I didn't read it.
(I was a Freshman. There were changing leaves, and classes, and girls, and other books, and girls, and classes, and leaves).
Twenty years went by and I'd long-since forgotten all about it. Then I saw a movie called The Book of Eli with Denzel Washington (and Jennifer Beals, who was excellent and unappreciated in that role). I didn't love the movie but I was reminded of the premise of Canticle — as it was told to me — by the scene at the end where the survivors try and build a new library and Eli (i.e. Washington) recites the Bible so they can add it to the collection. This was a linear ‘homage’ to that 1959 story whether the screenwriter knew it or not.
I still didn't read it.
But I did start thinking about it partly because I had a premise for a new science fiction story that I was kicking around. I was noticing that all around me were dystopian stories (Planet of the Apes, Dredd, Looper, The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead, Oblivion …) but nothing about the renaissance of civilization after the end. Nothing about the rise.
Now it's 2012 and I'm watching a documentary with Keanu Reeves called Side by Side. It's about film-making and captures a moment when the industry is switching over from film to digital. The conversations ranged from artistic possibilities to what's gained and lost to what it means for the democratization of storytelling and whether we might lose something vital. It was all fascinating. But one issue jumped out: At the end of the documentary, a cinematographer named Geoff Boyle reflected (along with George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and others) on the lax state of our archiving and whether these films/movies would even still exist a few hundred years from now — let alone after an apocalyptic event.
Geoff's view? (I'm quoting from the film here), ‘We're f**cked.’
I was intrigued. It wasn’t about the rise of civilization but it suggested a kind of blank canvas from which a new civilization might rise. All movies, gone? Because the technology failed? If the failure was the internet and cloud storage, wouldn’t that also eradicate pictures and books and music and everything else that was being moved to the cloud?
If we projected into the future a few decades or a hundred years … what wouldn’t be in the cloud?
Eager (read: too eager), I wrote a whopping six pages of a screenplay based on this notion in 2012.
Then I abandoned it and moved on. I had books to write.
In 2015 I turned back to it. By that time I'd already written a feature-length screenplay to my first novel, Norwegian by Night, and was enjoying the new form of writing (not that it could replace novels, but it was fun). I had seen Mad Max: Fury Road (a masterpiece of visualizing the same-old same-old dystopian vision) and also read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, (which I quite liked), but even that thoughtful story too ended long before my idea for a story would begin. The only story I’d ever heard of that addressed the rise was that Canticle book I never read.
By the time of the 2016 election I was becoming convinced that there was a space in our conversation about the future for a new kind of post-apocalyptic story. One that wasn’t dystopian, per se, but about creation and the challenges we’d face if we all had to try again.
That year I wrote twenty-one new pages of a new screenplay. Something about a meteor landing in Antarctica. It wasn't good, and it didn't resemble Radio Life in any way except in three regards: I had the title and loved it. Henry and Graham were already named. And their repartee and relationship as a couple jumped off the page.
Still: it was terrible. I went back to novels.
After finishing my third novel, America by Day in 2017, I needed to do something else and I wanted to have another go at Radio Life, this time as a feature-length screenplay. I got in touch with Geoff Boyle from the Side by Side movie to get the homework started and to develop new ideas. Geoff’s very tapped into the technical community and so he started asking around on my behalf. He talked to the media storage companies that all the movie studios use to archive their material. Though it wasn't a scientific poll, he wrote me and said (I'm quoting our correspondence), ‘at least 80% use Amazon Web Services. None of them know where their material is stored. They'd never thought about it. One, who was willing to talk if they were not named, was really concerned by the question once they thought about it. They are one of the largest companies specialising in data-handling from camera to archive. It appears that nobody knows where or how their material is stored, even the companies that said they had their own storage would mostly admit that that was just front end immediate rushes and that everything else was “in the cloud”. There really isn't anything else to say, publicly it's all fine, privately they are scared.’
That was when the idea of Radio Life really came together. It was not only possible for the world to forget everything; it seems like we actually will if we put everything in ‘the cloud’ and the cloud fails. The first part is happening now. Libraries are closing. Books are being digitised. All of our photographs and music are online now. It’s only a matter of time before we have nothing on paper.
Could the cloud fail?
Does any technology not fail?
At this point I also knew that I had to read A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was now a full thirty years since I first heard of the book and its premise. It was hovering over me. There was no writing Radio Life without engaging with this book written by Miller; a man who only published one novel in his tragic life and then one posthumously.
In 1959 there was no internet. There was no ‘cloud.’ There was no digitisation of knowledge and there was no way for it all to vanish at once. To achieve that condition in his imagined world, Miller (I later learned) created a period called the Age of Simplification where survivors set out to destroy all the knowledge, having blamed it for the destruction of the world. Mechanics aside, there was no denying that I was utilising a premise that he established some sixty years earlier. To my mind, it would have been both dishonourable and counter-productive to proceed as if I didn’t know it; the former for obvious reasons, but the latter because Radio Life’s potential value to our cultural conversation would be — if there would be any at all — in revitalising a conversation about remembering and forgetting, truth and lies, knowledge and wisdom, competition and cooperation all within the domain of science fiction.
After all, two things were colliding all around us by 2017: the rise of world-changing technology on the one hand, and the decline of trust in reason, logic, facts, truth, and scientific method on the other. A strange combination, it would seem, but a real one. In an age of strong(er) AI, nanotechnology, CRISPR and gene manipulation, killer robots, and STEM cell research we were also experiencing a full-on assault on our core democratic processes and institutions, multilateralism, international cooperation, and the post-WWII liberal order. We were once again moving in the direction of all-engine, no steering wheel. That was Miller’s world in the 1950s.
I was now certain that Ignorance needed to be the new Bad Boy of science fiction. After all, haven't we had our fill of asteroids, comets, aliens, waves, tornados, earthquakes, supervillains and monsters?
Now I had to read Canticle.
I still didn’t read it.
But this time was different. I wasn’t distracted or hesitant or busy. I deliberately didn’t read it because I knew that I needed to attend to the core themes and problematics of the story on my own without being swayed by Miller’s own answers.
I’m a mature writer and I’m not anxious about being influenced, as Harold Bloom might have suspected. I’ve written a doctorate, four books, and much more. So I don’t have a young writer’s fear about being lead on matters of style or tone or voice. But ideas – solutions to problems and mysteries – are more furtive. More insidious, in a way. It is easy to accidentally adopt philosophies and concepts them as one’s own and then move forward without a second thought to attribution. Art, after all, thrives not only on inspiration but theft. The weak-minded and the weak-willed are too fast to mistake an analytical product, or a hard-won insight, or a conceptualisation of a problematic, as their own. Watching the world rise again in the distant future, where knowledge and the act of remembering were central tensions in a drama where other people wanted us to forget, were ideas explored by Walter Miller Jr. in A Canticle for Leibowitz. They were also ideas largely untouched since then, and the book itself all but forgotten (which I’ll come to in a moment).
I didn’t need the will to read Canticle now. I needed a strategy.
My solution was to write about three quarters of Radio Life. Alessandra, by that time (in the screenplay), had escaped and Elimisha had not. The ending, more or less, was clear to me. I knew what I believed and the ideas were on paper. Canticle wasn't going to direct me now. It could only give me a basis for reflection and comparison against what I had already written. This was safe ground.
I read it.
I also read about it.
On March 6, 1960, Edmund Fuller (no less), wrote a full-page review of the book in Magazine of Books for the Chicago Sunday Tribune. ‘It is projected into the future – it has elements in common with science fiction, yet it would be quite impossible to classify it narrowly as such. It is fanciful, yet as deeply true as any book I’ve read. It brilliantly combines several qualities: It is prodigiously imaginative and original, richly comic, terrifyingly grim, profound both intellectually and morally, and, above all, is simply a memorable story as to stay with a reader for years.’
At the end of that same month, the comparatively tiny Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle would write, ‘The conjunction of day-to-day life with the sweep of centuries, of individual characters and masses of men – all viewed under the aspect of eternity – makes A Canticle for Leibowitz a unique experience in faith and adventure, in raw humanity and in the exploration of the spirit.’ The review continues with a brief biography of Miller, noting that he ‘enlisted in the Army Air Corps a month after Pearl Harbor and spent most of World War II as a radio operator and gunner. He participated in 55 combat sorties, among these was the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, the oldest monastery in the Western World.’
Those who know the book and its author also know that it was Miller’s participation in this raid that led him, in part, to write Canticle. As the Jewish Chronicle put it, ‘the story of another abbey with a somewhat parallel history.’
The part left unsaid in the reviews was that the abbey at Montecassino, Italy was erected in AD 529 outside of Rome. The Allies bombed it thinking the Germans had occupied it. After destroying it, the Germans did occupy it. The Battle of Montecassino was comprised of four assaults between January and May of 1944. Some 55,000 allied casualties resulted, and 22,000 German.
The monks of the abbey had copied and accumulated forty thousand manuscripts, including the majority of the writings of Tacitus, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. All were destroyed.
The abbey had been filled with hundreds of civilians who had fled there as a sanctuary.
Miller was one of the people who killed them.
Whatever the size of the publication, and wherever the book went, the reviews were all positive. In The Gazette, in Montreal, Canada, Phyllis Reeve wrote that Canticle ‘transcends the bounds of any fiction, impudently invading those of poetry and philosophy’, and in The Guardian out of London, Roy Perrott wrote in April of 1960, ‘… by AD 3700 the world is ready for another atomic war. The people and politicians have learned nothing; the scientists have passed the buck again; religion is nowhere. Platitudes of our time, perhaps, but Mr. Miller gives them room to breathe in a forceful and ingenious way. A deeply interesting book.’
Despite the universal acclaim and favourable comparisons to A Brave New World and 1984 among major fictional works of political philosophy, Miller disappeared almost entirely from the literary stage. By 1966 – a mere seven years after publication – Edward Ducharme at Teachers College, Columbia University, wrote a piece for English Journal (an academic periodical) and notes that, ‘[i]t went through several printings and was finally published as a paperback by Bantam in 1961. Since then it has died the death of most best-sellers.’
Ducharme, though, was only partly correct. For one thing, Canticle won the Hugo Award in 1961. For another – and with the benefit of decades of data and hindsight – we can now see that Miller’s book did not actually die; not by a long shot. Despite his being a recluse and not publishing another novel in his lifetime, Canticle would go on to sell two million copies over thirty-seven years until his death in 1996 and would also inspire — seemingly at random — staged theatrical productions in small towns and even a fifteen-part NPR radio production in 1981 adapted by John Reeves (which we can still listen to on Old Time Radio, https://www.oldradioworld.com/shows/A...)
Now, in 2020 – though I don’t have sales figures – it is still in print and selling well on Amazon, which is at least indicative. Those with access to Bookscan data can add the needed footnote here.
What is notable, however, is that talk of the book seems to have fallen into near silence, despite the themes it elevated being now central to science fiction (aside from one excellent piece in The New Yorker in 2014 by Jon Michaud that drew on many of the scant sources I too have found). How many of our stories today — from The Terminator to The Matrix to West World — are centrally concerned with whether we will ever have the wisdom to control the technological demons our minds create?
Looking through thousands of newspapers and archives on Newspapers.com as well as JSTOR and of course Google, I was struck by the utter lack of institutional engagement with this novel, whereas Huxley and Orwell are household names. Where is it being used in high school or college curricula? Where are the references to it as a benchmark in science fiction? Where are the novelists and screenwriters who credit that book with their inspiration or ideas? Surely there are instances, but there is no trend. In 1997, when David Streitfeld wrote his piece on the death of Miller, he entitled it, 'Canticle' author unsung even in death. Between then and now, I would posit that little has changed.
To be sure, the Huxley and Orwell comparisons can be over-stated. Their output as writers was incomparably greater, as was their public engagement. But Orwell was dead in 1950 and Huxley famously died the day Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. So – not to be cheeky about it, but – they didn't do much publishing after 1961 either.
So why is Miller still unsung?
Much of the blame, if that’s the word, seems to lie with Miller himself. ‘“Walt was deeply depressed by post-traumatic stress disorder and had been for half a century,” said writer Joe Haldeman, the closest thing Miller had to a friend in the science fiction world,’ according to Streitfeld of the Washington Post in October, 1997. ‘I don't know how many people he felt responsible for killing [during World War II], but it was a lot.’
The PTSD and depression isolated Miller from the world. ‘Miller's long-time agent, Don Congdon, said Miller was “the only client I never met, although we talked a lot,”’ Streitfeld explained.
Miller’s wife died two years earlier. By 1996, Miller had had enough.
With 90% of his second and final novel completed (which would be published posthumously), Miller called the police in Dayton Beach on January 9, 1996 at 8:29 a.m. and said there was a dead man on his front lawn. They arrived three minutes later at 8:32. ‘They found the 72-year old writer sitting in a chair on his lawn, dead from a bullet to the brain.’
Miller’s problems and reclusiveness, however, can’t shoulder all the blame for our amnesia about this book.
Streitfeld noted that ‘the first surprising thing about Miller’s suicide is that even now, 20 months after the fact [in 1997], it hasn't been widely reported. No obituary ever appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Associated Press. His children apparently wanted the information kept secret, and they largely succeeded.’
If there is a final conspirator in our amnesia it is the rest of us. It might be natural to take for granted the ideas that shape us, but there’s virtue in remembering and going back to core documents and concepts to better ensure that the conversations that define us remain anchored, rich, enlightened, and progressive.
I loved A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was imaginative and playful and bold. It seemed to be uninhibited by any fear of censure or criticism like all great novels and works of art. It wasn’t only the ideas. I liked the characters, I liked the settings, I was swept away by the story. My criticisms, and I have some, are best discussed in person rather than in print; I’m not a critic.
What I did find was that my reading of Canticle was different from many others. Miller may have been compared to Huxley and Orwell, but when I read it I thought of The Gallery by John Horne Burns (1947), The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer (1948), From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1951), and of course, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, which was written between 1953 and 1961.
The other book I thought of (which I also consider a war novel) is Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, published a decade later in 1969.
These were books about war. And not only war in general, but World War II specifically. Canticle was not. Not by any reading. So why did it strike me this way?
I think the answer lies with Emily Dickinson who once wrote ‘tell the truth but tell it slant —‘ and ended her poem (1263) with, ‘The Truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind—’
Canticle, like Slaughter-house Five in my opinion, was a war novel told slant.
Interestingly, even Miller himself didn’t notice it at the time. Jon Michaud wrote, “By his own admission, the Miller [sic] did not become fully aware of the driving force behind his novel until he was working on its third part. ‘I was writing the first version of the scene where Zerchi lies half buried in the rubble,’ Miller recalled. ‘Then a light bulb came on over my head: ‘Good God, is this the abbey at Monte Cassino? . . . What have I been writing?’”
While Vonnegut integrated his experiences from the firebombing of Dresden into his science fiction(esque) story, Miller didn’t — not explicitly. Instead, he injected his fears, his theology, his philosophy, his terror, and his sense of dread. He wrote about it using the only medium he could: Science fiction.
I’m speculating, but I think this happened for a number of reasons, some personal and some social.
We already know that Miller wasn't able to deal with his depression and pain from the war. So his need to come at the truth from any direction other than head-on might be obvious. And while I don’t want to psychologize his philosophy, because I think that would be an injustice to the depth of this reflection, I can't help but imagine Miller on 55 bombing sorties during World War II — a time when the likelihood of surviving 25 missions was extremely low — and wondering what that did to his view of the world. You take off. You fly a straight line to the bomb target where flak tries to kill you and often does. You kill people you never knew and will never see and will never atone for, and then you fly straight back. And then you repeat this another 54 times. Is it a wonder that his views of humanity represents a linear path from knowledge to destruction, only to be repeated over and over again if the destruction was not complete?
Even with this, I think there’s more to the story.
At some point, the canonical literature on any historical event begins to tie-off and the attention — of the agents, the editors, the publishers, the booksellers, the critics, the reading public — moves on. This happened with WWII literature. It happened with Vietnam literature. It happened with The Gulf War. Many will remember the key September 11 novels like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (2005), The Zero by Jess Walter (2006) and Falling Man by Don DeLillo (2007). It happened there too. Today, no one can write a ‘September 11’ novel anymore. It's too late. One can mention the events, but the literature is closed.
And yet, even after a literature has been tied off, the compulsion to write among writers lives on. It is little wonder to me that after the most explicit and realistic fiction about World War II, great writers like Miller or Vonnegut started turning to science fiction as the domain in which to explore the themes, philosophies, counter-factuals, emotions, and pain that was left behind in a world that no longer wanted novelistic expression of that war. In fact, I think that one of science fiction's greatest attributes is to be the last domain where all great ideas are welcomed and where neither time nor space will inhibit the exploration of what still matters.
I had a fresh reading of Miller’s book and I knew his fate. I wanted to say to him, ‘You didn't just write a book. You started a conversation about hope and possibility as we contend with knowledge and ignorance, reason and morality, conflict and cooperation. I thank you for that and for placing those things at the center of science fiction. You then abandoned all of that and eventually yourself but I'm not letting you off that easy because the conversation is bigger than you. It's current. It's pressing. And as best I can tell, it is also unattended. So forgive me, but Radio Life is going to pick up the baton you discarded."
Hubris? Arrogance? I didn't much care and still don’t. Sometimes the person who moves an agenda forward is simply the one who cares enough to try.
I finished writing the screenplay with some modest influences from Miller. I loved the story but the screenplay was weak. I soon decided that the only way to really attend to what was on my mind was to write a proper novel. I am, after all, a novelist. So I got started.
Though in conversation with Canticle, Radio Life was no homage, no sequel, no parallel, no competitor. However, it was a conversation between two books that I wanted to make explicit. Now I had a chance to give both Miller (and poor, hapless brother Francis) a better end.
In Part IV I elevated Miller's Brother Francis (who was eaten by cannibals, "eat! eat!") to the Abbott in Radio Life (it isn't Francis himself, of course, as they are very different men but I adopted the name), and I created an abbey in the forest (not the desert) defined by joy and humanity and hope, not devotion or work. That abbey was made possible by Miller's as his — in its way — was forced into being by Montecassino. And so destruction begets creation, and creation inspires new possibilities. The lives and loss at Montecassinno (or anywhere) can never be recovered. But what we do with the memories and remains define us. Which, of course, is what Radio Life is all about.
As I wrote the ending I had the privilege of comparing my own philosophies and education with Miller's in order to sharpen the philosophical underpinnings of the dramatic enactments — the scenes, the dialogues, the debates. The reason I could do this without fear of re-writing Miller’s book (so to speak) is because I see things differently than Miller did.
I never dropped bombs on people but I was under missile attack for over a month in Israel during the Gulf War in ‘91. I never served in the military, but I studied alongside mid-career military officers when I earned an MA in national security studies at Georgetown. Unlike Miller, I didn’t lament the absence of peace in our world and bury my head on apocalyptica (let’s call that a word) but worked for a decade at the United Nations on disarmament, peace, and security after earning a doctorate in international relations. And along the way I learned a few things relevant to my implicit debates with Canticle. To wit: I know, that the development of new technologies is not linear but contingent. The directions we take are a function of the values we hold and sustain through time as a culture, as well the resources we choose to allocate at specific moments in time as a polity. We could develop better chemical and biological warfare weapons, or blinding laser weapons, or exploding bullets, but they are banned by international convention and law and we do not. Even if they are developed in secret, that development is hampered by international norms and also by the values we teach our children who will later choose a career path of their own and hopefully will not want to develop such weapons because they are bad.
We could have developed new technologies for perfecting genocide and the eradication of swaths of humanity so that we might be more efficient than the Nazis were. We have not done this — not because we can't improve on the speed of murder as it was performed until 1945 — but because we are outraged by the Holocaust and will resist this rather than perfect it.
And then there are our failures. We might have cured cancer by now if we'd been as dedicated to that goal as increasing GDP. We might have eradicated malaria if wealthy and northern nations had considered the suffering of others as though they were our family and not distant strangers, but we haven't made those investments or directed our attention to those ostensibly-achievable goals either.
Inevitability, linearity, and determinism are easiest to believe when you are hindered from seeing the range of other possibilities. Many things hinder us. Our characters and personalities. Our cultures and conversations. Our imperatives and problems. Sometimes, simply our imaginations. But this is why we have to rely on each other; to break through the walls that contain us to reach the betterment on the other side. Stories can do that because we need the greatest imaginations to show us what is possible, what is desirable, and what is not.
Miller was a pessimist. I am no optimist but instead embrace the reality of uncertainty to find possibility. Faced with the truth of our own limitations, I encourage us to both imagine more and get our hands on the wheel of our fate.
I would have liked to tell Miller that what is possible is made possible by who we are and what we value; by what we will do to have a certain life. Technology itself will not doom us. Abandoning our values and humanity as the mechanisms to direct it, however, absolutely will. So in this way, I believe Miller was wrong about the linear relationship between thought and destruction. And I wish he'd known that and believed it. Though it didn’t set out to be and is not limited to this, I nevertheless see Radio Life as a response to the suicide letter Miller never wrote and the book that he did.
— Derek B. Miller
Derek B. Miller, 13 August, 2020
I was a Freshman at Sarah Lawrence College in 1988 meeting a friend for lunch. We were at the Pub. It must have been October or so because I remember the stone cottage in Westchester County, New York, being surrounded by the changing leaves. The sense of the school year was starting and the excitement was uplifting. Autumn was never melancholy or wistfulness on campus. It provided a kind of spiritual settling. Here comes the winter with the promise of books, ideas, and just maybe the cuddling of a new lover.
I can't remember the friend but I remember the conversation. We were talking about books — as people do at Sarah Lawrence — and in this case science fiction. "Have you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz?" he asked me.
No. Never heard of it.
‘It's a classic,’ he said.
Sounded Jewish. And Catholic. And mystical, as though it was inspired by something real and was only masquerading as fiction.
All good stuff.
‘You've got to read it,’ he said.
OK.
He described it and I still remember the description: there was a Flame Deluge (a nuclear war) and the population was wiped out. The survivors blamed the scientists and burned all the books. But there was a tiny abbey of monks run by an order of people who protected every scrap of paper and knowledge they could find even though they had no idea what any of it meant. They came across a box that contained the seeds of new technology.
I can't remember the rest, but I was intrigued.
I didn't read it.
(I was a Freshman. There were changing leaves, and classes, and girls, and other books, and girls, and classes, and leaves).
Twenty years went by and I'd long-since forgotten all about it. Then I saw a movie called The Book of Eli with Denzel Washington (and Jennifer Beals, who was excellent and unappreciated in that role). I didn't love the movie but I was reminded of the premise of Canticle — as it was told to me — by the scene at the end where the survivors try and build a new library and Eli (i.e. Washington) recites the Bible so they can add it to the collection. This was a linear ‘homage’ to that 1959 story whether the screenwriter knew it or not.
I still didn't read it.
But I did start thinking about it partly because I had a premise for a new science fiction story that I was kicking around. I was noticing that all around me were dystopian stories (Planet of the Apes, Dredd, Looper, The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead, Oblivion …) but nothing about the renaissance of civilization after the end. Nothing about the rise.
Now it's 2012 and I'm watching a documentary with Keanu Reeves called Side by Side. It's about film-making and captures a moment when the industry is switching over from film to digital. The conversations ranged from artistic possibilities to what's gained and lost to what it means for the democratization of storytelling and whether we might lose something vital. It was all fascinating. But one issue jumped out: At the end of the documentary, a cinematographer named Geoff Boyle reflected (along with George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and others) on the lax state of our archiving and whether these films/movies would even still exist a few hundred years from now — let alone after an apocalyptic event.
Geoff's view? (I'm quoting from the film here), ‘We're f**cked.’
I was intrigued. It wasn’t about the rise of civilization but it suggested a kind of blank canvas from which a new civilization might rise. All movies, gone? Because the technology failed? If the failure was the internet and cloud storage, wouldn’t that also eradicate pictures and books and music and everything else that was being moved to the cloud?
If we projected into the future a few decades or a hundred years … what wouldn’t be in the cloud?
Eager (read: too eager), I wrote a whopping six pages of a screenplay based on this notion in 2012.
Then I abandoned it and moved on. I had books to write.
In 2015 I turned back to it. By that time I'd already written a feature-length screenplay to my first novel, Norwegian by Night, and was enjoying the new form of writing (not that it could replace novels, but it was fun). I had seen Mad Max: Fury Road (a masterpiece of visualizing the same-old same-old dystopian vision) and also read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, (which I quite liked), but even that thoughtful story too ended long before my idea for a story would begin. The only story I’d ever heard of that addressed the rise was that Canticle book I never read.
By the time of the 2016 election I was becoming convinced that there was a space in our conversation about the future for a new kind of post-apocalyptic story. One that wasn’t dystopian, per se, but about creation and the challenges we’d face if we all had to try again.
That year I wrote twenty-one new pages of a new screenplay. Something about a meteor landing in Antarctica. It wasn't good, and it didn't resemble Radio Life in any way except in three regards: I had the title and loved it. Henry and Graham were already named. And their repartee and relationship as a couple jumped off the page.
Still: it was terrible. I went back to novels.
After finishing my third novel, America by Day in 2017, I needed to do something else and I wanted to have another go at Radio Life, this time as a feature-length screenplay. I got in touch with Geoff Boyle from the Side by Side movie to get the homework started and to develop new ideas. Geoff’s very tapped into the technical community and so he started asking around on my behalf. He talked to the media storage companies that all the movie studios use to archive their material. Though it wasn't a scientific poll, he wrote me and said (I'm quoting our correspondence), ‘at least 80% use Amazon Web Services. None of them know where their material is stored. They'd never thought about it. One, who was willing to talk if they were not named, was really concerned by the question once they thought about it. They are one of the largest companies specialising in data-handling from camera to archive. It appears that nobody knows where or how their material is stored, even the companies that said they had their own storage would mostly admit that that was just front end immediate rushes and that everything else was “in the cloud”. There really isn't anything else to say, publicly it's all fine, privately they are scared.’
That was when the idea of Radio Life really came together. It was not only possible for the world to forget everything; it seems like we actually will if we put everything in ‘the cloud’ and the cloud fails. The first part is happening now. Libraries are closing. Books are being digitised. All of our photographs and music are online now. It’s only a matter of time before we have nothing on paper.
Could the cloud fail?
Does any technology not fail?
At this point I also knew that I had to read A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was now a full thirty years since I first heard of the book and its premise. It was hovering over me. There was no writing Radio Life without engaging with this book written by Miller; a man who only published one novel in his tragic life and then one posthumously.
In 1959 there was no internet. There was no ‘cloud.’ There was no digitisation of knowledge and there was no way for it all to vanish at once. To achieve that condition in his imagined world, Miller (I later learned) created a period called the Age of Simplification where survivors set out to destroy all the knowledge, having blamed it for the destruction of the world. Mechanics aside, there was no denying that I was utilising a premise that he established some sixty years earlier. To my mind, it would have been both dishonourable and counter-productive to proceed as if I didn’t know it; the former for obvious reasons, but the latter because Radio Life’s potential value to our cultural conversation would be — if there would be any at all — in revitalising a conversation about remembering and forgetting, truth and lies, knowledge and wisdom, competition and cooperation all within the domain of science fiction.
After all, two things were colliding all around us by 2017: the rise of world-changing technology on the one hand, and the decline of trust in reason, logic, facts, truth, and scientific method on the other. A strange combination, it would seem, but a real one. In an age of strong(er) AI, nanotechnology, CRISPR and gene manipulation, killer robots, and STEM cell research we were also experiencing a full-on assault on our core democratic processes and institutions, multilateralism, international cooperation, and the post-WWII liberal order. We were once again moving in the direction of all-engine, no steering wheel. That was Miller’s world in the 1950s.
I was now certain that Ignorance needed to be the new Bad Boy of science fiction. After all, haven't we had our fill of asteroids, comets, aliens, waves, tornados, earthquakes, supervillains and monsters?
Now I had to read Canticle.
I still didn’t read it.
But this time was different. I wasn’t distracted or hesitant or busy. I deliberately didn’t read it because I knew that I needed to attend to the core themes and problematics of the story on my own without being swayed by Miller’s own answers.
I’m a mature writer and I’m not anxious about being influenced, as Harold Bloom might have suspected. I’ve written a doctorate, four books, and much more. So I don’t have a young writer’s fear about being lead on matters of style or tone or voice. But ideas – solutions to problems and mysteries – are more furtive. More insidious, in a way. It is easy to accidentally adopt philosophies and concepts them as one’s own and then move forward without a second thought to attribution. Art, after all, thrives not only on inspiration but theft. The weak-minded and the weak-willed are too fast to mistake an analytical product, or a hard-won insight, or a conceptualisation of a problematic, as their own. Watching the world rise again in the distant future, where knowledge and the act of remembering were central tensions in a drama where other people wanted us to forget, were ideas explored by Walter Miller Jr. in A Canticle for Leibowitz. They were also ideas largely untouched since then, and the book itself all but forgotten (which I’ll come to in a moment).
I didn’t need the will to read Canticle now. I needed a strategy.
My solution was to write about three quarters of Radio Life. Alessandra, by that time (in the screenplay), had escaped and Elimisha had not. The ending, more or less, was clear to me. I knew what I believed and the ideas were on paper. Canticle wasn't going to direct me now. It could only give me a basis for reflection and comparison against what I had already written. This was safe ground.
I read it.
I also read about it.
On March 6, 1960, Edmund Fuller (no less), wrote a full-page review of the book in Magazine of Books for the Chicago Sunday Tribune. ‘It is projected into the future – it has elements in common with science fiction, yet it would be quite impossible to classify it narrowly as such. It is fanciful, yet as deeply true as any book I’ve read. It brilliantly combines several qualities: It is prodigiously imaginative and original, richly comic, terrifyingly grim, profound both intellectually and morally, and, above all, is simply a memorable story as to stay with a reader for years.’
At the end of that same month, the comparatively tiny Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle would write, ‘The conjunction of day-to-day life with the sweep of centuries, of individual characters and masses of men – all viewed under the aspect of eternity – makes A Canticle for Leibowitz a unique experience in faith and adventure, in raw humanity and in the exploration of the spirit.’ The review continues with a brief biography of Miller, noting that he ‘enlisted in the Army Air Corps a month after Pearl Harbor and spent most of World War II as a radio operator and gunner. He participated in 55 combat sorties, among these was the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, the oldest monastery in the Western World.’
Those who know the book and its author also know that it was Miller’s participation in this raid that led him, in part, to write Canticle. As the Jewish Chronicle put it, ‘the story of another abbey with a somewhat parallel history.’
The part left unsaid in the reviews was that the abbey at Montecassino, Italy was erected in AD 529 outside of Rome. The Allies bombed it thinking the Germans had occupied it. After destroying it, the Germans did occupy it. The Battle of Montecassino was comprised of four assaults between January and May of 1944. Some 55,000 allied casualties resulted, and 22,000 German.
The monks of the abbey had copied and accumulated forty thousand manuscripts, including the majority of the writings of Tacitus, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. All were destroyed.
The abbey had been filled with hundreds of civilians who had fled there as a sanctuary.
Miller was one of the people who killed them.
Whatever the size of the publication, and wherever the book went, the reviews were all positive. In The Gazette, in Montreal, Canada, Phyllis Reeve wrote that Canticle ‘transcends the bounds of any fiction, impudently invading those of poetry and philosophy’, and in The Guardian out of London, Roy Perrott wrote in April of 1960, ‘… by AD 3700 the world is ready for another atomic war. The people and politicians have learned nothing; the scientists have passed the buck again; religion is nowhere. Platitudes of our time, perhaps, but Mr. Miller gives them room to breathe in a forceful and ingenious way. A deeply interesting book.’
Despite the universal acclaim and favourable comparisons to A Brave New World and 1984 among major fictional works of political philosophy, Miller disappeared almost entirely from the literary stage. By 1966 – a mere seven years after publication – Edward Ducharme at Teachers College, Columbia University, wrote a piece for English Journal (an academic periodical) and notes that, ‘[i]t went through several printings and was finally published as a paperback by Bantam in 1961. Since then it has died the death of most best-sellers.’
Ducharme, though, was only partly correct. For one thing, Canticle won the Hugo Award in 1961. For another – and with the benefit of decades of data and hindsight – we can now see that Miller’s book did not actually die; not by a long shot. Despite his being a recluse and not publishing another novel in his lifetime, Canticle would go on to sell two million copies over thirty-seven years until his death in 1996 and would also inspire — seemingly at random — staged theatrical productions in small towns and even a fifteen-part NPR radio production in 1981 adapted by John Reeves (which we can still listen to on Old Time Radio, https://www.oldradioworld.com/shows/A...)
Now, in 2020 – though I don’t have sales figures – it is still in print and selling well on Amazon, which is at least indicative. Those with access to Bookscan data can add the needed footnote here.
What is notable, however, is that talk of the book seems to have fallen into near silence, despite the themes it elevated being now central to science fiction (aside from one excellent piece in The New Yorker in 2014 by Jon Michaud that drew on many of the scant sources I too have found). How many of our stories today — from The Terminator to The Matrix to West World — are centrally concerned with whether we will ever have the wisdom to control the technological demons our minds create?
Looking through thousands of newspapers and archives on Newspapers.com as well as JSTOR and of course Google, I was struck by the utter lack of institutional engagement with this novel, whereas Huxley and Orwell are household names. Where is it being used in high school or college curricula? Where are the references to it as a benchmark in science fiction? Where are the novelists and screenwriters who credit that book with their inspiration or ideas? Surely there are instances, but there is no trend. In 1997, when David Streitfeld wrote his piece on the death of Miller, he entitled it, 'Canticle' author unsung even in death. Between then and now, I would posit that little has changed.
To be sure, the Huxley and Orwell comparisons can be over-stated. Their output as writers was incomparably greater, as was their public engagement. But Orwell was dead in 1950 and Huxley famously died the day Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. So – not to be cheeky about it, but – they didn't do much publishing after 1961 either.
So why is Miller still unsung?
Much of the blame, if that’s the word, seems to lie with Miller himself. ‘“Walt was deeply depressed by post-traumatic stress disorder and had been for half a century,” said writer Joe Haldeman, the closest thing Miller had to a friend in the science fiction world,’ according to Streitfeld of the Washington Post in October, 1997. ‘I don't know how many people he felt responsible for killing [during World War II], but it was a lot.’
The PTSD and depression isolated Miller from the world. ‘Miller's long-time agent, Don Congdon, said Miller was “the only client I never met, although we talked a lot,”’ Streitfeld explained.
Miller’s wife died two years earlier. By 1996, Miller had had enough.
With 90% of his second and final novel completed (which would be published posthumously), Miller called the police in Dayton Beach on January 9, 1996 at 8:29 a.m. and said there was a dead man on his front lawn. They arrived three minutes later at 8:32. ‘They found the 72-year old writer sitting in a chair on his lawn, dead from a bullet to the brain.’
Miller’s problems and reclusiveness, however, can’t shoulder all the blame for our amnesia about this book.
Streitfeld noted that ‘the first surprising thing about Miller’s suicide is that even now, 20 months after the fact [in 1997], it hasn't been widely reported. No obituary ever appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Associated Press. His children apparently wanted the information kept secret, and they largely succeeded.’
If there is a final conspirator in our amnesia it is the rest of us. It might be natural to take for granted the ideas that shape us, but there’s virtue in remembering and going back to core documents and concepts to better ensure that the conversations that define us remain anchored, rich, enlightened, and progressive.
I loved A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was imaginative and playful and bold. It seemed to be uninhibited by any fear of censure or criticism like all great novels and works of art. It wasn’t only the ideas. I liked the characters, I liked the settings, I was swept away by the story. My criticisms, and I have some, are best discussed in person rather than in print; I’m not a critic.
What I did find was that my reading of Canticle was different from many others. Miller may have been compared to Huxley and Orwell, but when I read it I thought of The Gallery by John Horne Burns (1947), The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer (1948), From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1951), and of course, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, which was written between 1953 and 1961.
The other book I thought of (which I also consider a war novel) is Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, published a decade later in 1969.
These were books about war. And not only war in general, but World War II specifically. Canticle was not. Not by any reading. So why did it strike me this way?
I think the answer lies with Emily Dickinson who once wrote ‘tell the truth but tell it slant —‘ and ended her poem (1263) with, ‘The Truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind—’
Canticle, like Slaughter-house Five in my opinion, was a war novel told slant.
Interestingly, even Miller himself didn’t notice it at the time. Jon Michaud wrote, “By his own admission, the Miller [sic] did not become fully aware of the driving force behind his novel until he was working on its third part. ‘I was writing the first version of the scene where Zerchi lies half buried in the rubble,’ Miller recalled. ‘Then a light bulb came on over my head: ‘Good God, is this the abbey at Monte Cassino? . . . What have I been writing?’”
While Vonnegut integrated his experiences from the firebombing of Dresden into his science fiction(esque) story, Miller didn’t — not explicitly. Instead, he injected his fears, his theology, his philosophy, his terror, and his sense of dread. He wrote about it using the only medium he could: Science fiction.
I’m speculating, but I think this happened for a number of reasons, some personal and some social.
We already know that Miller wasn't able to deal with his depression and pain from the war. So his need to come at the truth from any direction other than head-on might be obvious. And while I don’t want to psychologize his philosophy, because I think that would be an injustice to the depth of this reflection, I can't help but imagine Miller on 55 bombing sorties during World War II — a time when the likelihood of surviving 25 missions was extremely low — and wondering what that did to his view of the world. You take off. You fly a straight line to the bomb target where flak tries to kill you and often does. You kill people you never knew and will never see and will never atone for, and then you fly straight back. And then you repeat this another 54 times. Is it a wonder that his views of humanity represents a linear path from knowledge to destruction, only to be repeated over and over again if the destruction was not complete?
Even with this, I think there’s more to the story.
At some point, the canonical literature on any historical event begins to tie-off and the attention — of the agents, the editors, the publishers, the booksellers, the critics, the reading public — moves on. This happened with WWII literature. It happened with Vietnam literature. It happened with The Gulf War. Many will remember the key September 11 novels like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (2005), The Zero by Jess Walter (2006) and Falling Man by Don DeLillo (2007). It happened there too. Today, no one can write a ‘September 11’ novel anymore. It's too late. One can mention the events, but the literature is closed.
And yet, even after a literature has been tied off, the compulsion to write among writers lives on. It is little wonder to me that after the most explicit and realistic fiction about World War II, great writers like Miller or Vonnegut started turning to science fiction as the domain in which to explore the themes, philosophies, counter-factuals, emotions, and pain that was left behind in a world that no longer wanted novelistic expression of that war. In fact, I think that one of science fiction's greatest attributes is to be the last domain where all great ideas are welcomed and where neither time nor space will inhibit the exploration of what still matters.
I had a fresh reading of Miller’s book and I knew his fate. I wanted to say to him, ‘You didn't just write a book. You started a conversation about hope and possibility as we contend with knowledge and ignorance, reason and morality, conflict and cooperation. I thank you for that and for placing those things at the center of science fiction. You then abandoned all of that and eventually yourself but I'm not letting you off that easy because the conversation is bigger than you. It's current. It's pressing. And as best I can tell, it is also unattended. So forgive me, but Radio Life is going to pick up the baton you discarded."
Hubris? Arrogance? I didn't much care and still don’t. Sometimes the person who moves an agenda forward is simply the one who cares enough to try.
I finished writing the screenplay with some modest influences from Miller. I loved the story but the screenplay was weak. I soon decided that the only way to really attend to what was on my mind was to write a proper novel. I am, after all, a novelist. So I got started.
Though in conversation with Canticle, Radio Life was no homage, no sequel, no parallel, no competitor. However, it was a conversation between two books that I wanted to make explicit. Now I had a chance to give both Miller (and poor, hapless brother Francis) a better end.
In Part IV I elevated Miller's Brother Francis (who was eaten by cannibals, "eat! eat!") to the Abbott in Radio Life (it isn't Francis himself, of course, as they are very different men but I adopted the name), and I created an abbey in the forest (not the desert) defined by joy and humanity and hope, not devotion or work. That abbey was made possible by Miller's as his — in its way — was forced into being by Montecassino. And so destruction begets creation, and creation inspires new possibilities. The lives and loss at Montecassinno (or anywhere) can never be recovered. But what we do with the memories and remains define us. Which, of course, is what Radio Life is all about.
As I wrote the ending I had the privilege of comparing my own philosophies and education with Miller's in order to sharpen the philosophical underpinnings of the dramatic enactments — the scenes, the dialogues, the debates. The reason I could do this without fear of re-writing Miller’s book (so to speak) is because I see things differently than Miller did.
I never dropped bombs on people but I was under missile attack for over a month in Israel during the Gulf War in ‘91. I never served in the military, but I studied alongside mid-career military officers when I earned an MA in national security studies at Georgetown. Unlike Miller, I didn’t lament the absence of peace in our world and bury my head on apocalyptica (let’s call that a word) but worked for a decade at the United Nations on disarmament, peace, and security after earning a doctorate in international relations. And along the way I learned a few things relevant to my implicit debates with Canticle. To wit: I know, that the development of new technologies is not linear but contingent. The directions we take are a function of the values we hold and sustain through time as a culture, as well the resources we choose to allocate at specific moments in time as a polity. We could develop better chemical and biological warfare weapons, or blinding laser weapons, or exploding bullets, but they are banned by international convention and law and we do not. Even if they are developed in secret, that development is hampered by international norms and also by the values we teach our children who will later choose a career path of their own and hopefully will not want to develop such weapons because they are bad.
We could have developed new technologies for perfecting genocide and the eradication of swaths of humanity so that we might be more efficient than the Nazis were. We have not done this — not because we can't improve on the speed of murder as it was performed until 1945 — but because we are outraged by the Holocaust and will resist this rather than perfect it.
And then there are our failures. We might have cured cancer by now if we'd been as dedicated to that goal as increasing GDP. We might have eradicated malaria if wealthy and northern nations had considered the suffering of others as though they were our family and not distant strangers, but we haven't made those investments or directed our attention to those ostensibly-achievable goals either.
Inevitability, linearity, and determinism are easiest to believe when you are hindered from seeing the range of other possibilities. Many things hinder us. Our characters and personalities. Our cultures and conversations. Our imperatives and problems. Sometimes, simply our imaginations. But this is why we have to rely on each other; to break through the walls that contain us to reach the betterment on the other side. Stories can do that because we need the greatest imaginations to show us what is possible, what is desirable, and what is not.
Miller was a pessimist. I am no optimist but instead embrace the reality of uncertainty to find possibility. Faced with the truth of our own limitations, I encourage us to both imagine more and get our hands on the wheel of our fate.
I would have liked to tell Miller that what is possible is made possible by who we are and what we value; by what we will do to have a certain life. Technology itself will not doom us. Abandoning our values and humanity as the mechanisms to direct it, however, absolutely will. So in this way, I believe Miller was wrong about the linear relationship between thought and destruction. And I wish he'd known that and believed it. Though it didn’t set out to be and is not limited to this, I nevertheless see Radio Life as a response to the suicide letter Miller never wrote and the book that he did.
— Derek B. Miller
No comments have been added yet.
