Harry Angstrom redux?

Over a 41-year span, American novelist John Updike wrote a series of  stories featuring former high school basketball star Harry Angstrom – Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990), which closes the series, but then truly concludes with the offspring in Rabbit Remembered (2001), the last before his death.  The stories, as you might expect, were set in the era of the 1960's and beyond.

As Casey-Werner and ABC planned the “series continuation” of Roseanne as a limited-run series, this revival seems to put the developers of the show and the viewer into those who remembered Mr. Updike's Harry Angstrom franchise.  Whereas the original show was Rabbit, Run, this series could be a mix of Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich.  How many times does a viewer ever think when a television show airs its series finale after a nice long run what would happen the characters in the show?  When looking at what people would think, we have the influence of the Angstrom series, and also Cynthia Cidre's short-lived Dallas continuation earlier this decade on TNT that sadly died with Larry Hagman's death.  But unlike Cidre's Dallas, which featured minor characters such as the son of Kristin Shepard and of course the son of John Ross Ewing, Jr, that viewers did not see on television in the original era, and how the heirs to the empire wanted a hold of Ewing Oil, the Roseanne continuation now takes Roseanne as a grandmother, with the child actors of the show now being parents themselves.

The Grandmother Roseanne, with the issues that are reflective of Tim Allen's Last Man Standing, has taken much of its influence from both Cidre and Updike.  People think Hollywood has lost its creativity with too many reboots, retellings, and the rest.  But I ask if making a well-known character, with the same cast, now as a grandmother controlling her children and the confusion of modern-day leftist propaganda, with the grandchildren's parents played by the former child stars on the same show, would sell in an era where America is confused by elites.  As father knew best in the 1950's, what will Grandpa and Grandma Conner do in trying to teach discipline to an era that needs it now?  Think about it when we consider this short series.  Is this Roseanne a hybrid of Cynthia Cidre's Dallas and John Updike's Rabbit sequels with a touch of Tim Allen's Last Man Standing as we imagine the Conner family now, with Roseanne and Tom being grandparents?  Maybe this will appeal to those who remember the original series and want to see how crazy the children have become, and what the grandmother now has to deal with leftist propaganda in schools.

Throwback Thursday: Nero Wolfe on curiosity

I don't thank you for coming," [Wolfe] said. "I'm not disposed to thank you for anything. I have reason to believe that you are withholding information that would be of value. Indeed, I think you have lied. Don't bother to deny it. I tell you that only to establish the temper of the conversation. I'll be trying to find support for my opinion. What will you be doing?"

She would be staring. She was staring. "I know what I ought to be doing," she said. "Leaving. I ought to be on my way out."

"But you're not. You wouldn't, even if I'm wrong, because you want to know why. That's what makes us the unique animal, we want to know why and try to find out. We even try to discover why we want to know why, though of course we never will."

- Rex Stout, Please Pass the Guilt

Originally published January 11, 2012

Throwback Thursday: Remembering when the band played on

THE TITANIC'S BAND PLAYS IN A SCENE FROM A NIGHT TO REMEMBER, 1958

Awhile back, Terry Teachout posted a meme that, as I recall, had something to do with books that had made an immediate and lasting impact on you after you'd read them. Now, I think it's an automatic reflex that the mind starts working every time you read about that kind of list, and it didn't take me long to realize that I might have a very difficult time coming up with ten or so titles that would fit the description. It's not that I haven't read a lot of books, nor is it the case that I'd classify most of those books as forgettable.

It's just that the bar is set pretty high on this. We're not necessarily talking about favorite or best-loved books. There are many books that pack a wallop when you've just turned the final page and closed the covers; it's the rare book that lasts beyond that, causing your mind to return to it again and again. For me, a writer as well as reader, it might involve characters so memorable that I start speculating on how I'd write the continuation of their story. It could be a line or two that sticks in the mind, a line that you find yourself pulling out and using frequently. Or it could be one scene that haunts you, burns itself into your memory like a photographic negative. Whatever the case, I think a list of such books, like a list of one's closest friends, is probably quite short.*

*My own list wound up being short enough; eight titles. Maybe someday we'll discuss them all, but of course that isn't what today's piece is really about.

The point of this is to set up the video clip we're about to look at. One of the books that made my list is Psalm at Journey's End, Erik Fosnes Hansen's remarkable novel about the members of the famed band on the ill-fated maiden voyage of the Titanic. As you know, I'm something of a Titanic buff, but fictional treatments of the Titanic have rarely risen to the level of the drama of the real story.  Psalm at Journey's End is the exception, and though the characters' names and their personal stories have been fictionalized (and, in fact, the Titanic itself is merely the vehicle, so to speak, through which their stories are told), Hansen's melancholy tale tells of the passion, the triumph and tragedy of the Titanic better than any recent movie could hope to.

The moment of truth comes on the novel's last page. Folklore has long supposed that "Nearer, My God, to Thee" was the piece which the band played as the ship went down. Walter Lord's definitive A Night to Remember rejected that tradition in favor of the Episcopal hymn "Autumn." Lord based his assessment on the eyewitness testimony of wireless operator Harold Bride, who was on the ship until the very end. However, in Lord's follow-up The Night Lives On, he addressed speculation that the piece to which Bride had been referring was actually "Songe d'Automne", a popular song of the time. Lord acknowledges the plausibility, indeed the probability, that this was in fact the final piece, but he concedes that we will probably never know for sure. Other historians have other opinions, the point being that such conjecture has long been part of the lore of the Titanic, and probably always will be.

Hansen, too, has his own theory, only his is far different, and adds to the poignancy of the ship's last moments. Recalling a memory from his childhood, bandleader Jason Coward asks the other musicians to join him in Handel's Largo.  The Largo is the popular name for the aria "Ombra mai fù" from Handel's opera Serse. Not only is it the most famous aria from this seldom-performed opera, it comes right at the beginning - a real rarety. Imagine Bobby Darin starting every concert by singing "Mack the Knife" (which he did, incidentelly). Or, since we're discussing Handel, suppose he started Messiah with the "Hallelujia Chorus." Nothing like leading with your strength.

"Ombra mai fù" is a wonderfully evocative piece (although if you look at the lyrics, you'll find that it's only a song about the shade provided by a tree), and coming as it does at the end of this very sad book, telling such a sad story, it makes a powerful impact. The following is not taken from Serse; even though it comes at the beginning, you still have to get through the opening credits and the overture. There are plenty of concert versions to choose from, sung by mezzos, baritones, countertenors. I'll give you this filmed performance by Jennifer Larmore - I know, there's no apparent reason for it to have been shot in a shipyard, but in our context it seems quite appropriate.

Ombra mai fu...

Uploaded by Vanhacker.

Originally published July 8, 2009

Throwback Thursday: Salome, when she danced

SALOME'S DANCE, BY MAURYCY GOTTLIEB, 1879

The movie Salome, starring Rita Hayworth, was on TCM the other night. I didn’t watch the whole thing, but it got me to thinking. We don’t really know much about Salome. Most of us think we know her from the Bible, but there she isn’t even mentioned by name, referred to only as the Daughter of Herodias. She’s starred in books, movies, opera – and yet, she was a real person.

Most of what we know of Salome, or think we know, comes from Oscar Wilde’s play Salome. It is here that Wilde creates the most familiar iconic images of Salome, elaborating on the scene from Mark’s Gospel in which, as a reward for her dancing, Herod offers to grant her any desire. It is from Wilde that we get the image of Salome as the teenage temptress with the sexually charged dance, leaving Herod drunk with lust (as well as wine). It’s this version of Salome that most people probably think of, and the version that appears in movies such as King of Kings (which actually uses bits of Wilde’s dialogue).

The best-known fictional portrayal of Salome is probably Richard Strauss’ opera Salome, which was based on Wilde’s play. The role of Salome is a particularly challenging one, insofar as it requires the soprano to demonstrate great vocal prowess while at the same time acting like a nubile teen, particularly in the famed Dance of the Seven Veils (usually performed by the singer, occasionally by a stand-in dancer). It’s a great role, and some of the greatest singers in opera have played it, with varying degrees of success (and believability).

There are other versions of Salome as well, but so much of our iconography comes back to Wilde, which makes the ending of Wilde’s play (and Strauss’ opera) all the more interesting. Wilde fleshes out Salome’s character (no pun intended), but adds a detail that is completely at odds with the historical record: her death.

The climax of Salome (again, no pun intended) features the dancer holding before her the severed head of John the Baptist on the silver platter, after which she proceeds to fondle and caress the head, finally delivering a passionate kiss to the dead head’s lips. Herod, who is terrified and repulsed by this act, orders his soldiers to kill Salome, which they do by crushing her under the weight of their shields.

Now, one is curious as to why Wilde chose to end his play in this fashion. It’s certainly consistent with Herod’s superstitious character – he does, after all, believe for a time that Jesus is John come back to life. But the real Salome actually lived into her 40s or 50s (depending on the account), dying between 62 and 71 AD.

So what might Wilde’s motives have been for introducing such a radical change into his play? There’s no doubt it makes for a great dramatic ending, as anyone who’s seen either the play or the opera can testify. And in a creative sense it does provide closure to a plot which otherwise wouldn’t have much of an ending.

Still, one is tempted to wonder if Wilde was trying to pronounce some kind of a moral statement at the end, with judgment being delivered on Salome for her heresy. We think often of Wilde as the sexual libertine, but in truth the ending of Salome seems much more in line with Joseph Pearce’s portrait of Wilde as a man with a constant fascination with Catholicism and its teachings. As Pearce says in his book, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde, "Once again, Wilde emerges in Salome as a Christian moralist par excellence." And certainly there does seem to be Old Testament justice being meted out in the end.

Heather Marcovitch, in Princess, Persona and Subjective Desire, offers that “Wilde saw Salome as the representation of all the unspoken impulses and desires in Donan Gray.” She suggests that Salome, seen primarily by Herod and his court as an object of desire, uses “power gotten from her persona to destroy the very system that imbued her with this power.”

Other scholars point to Wilde’s use of imagery of the kind favored by Israel's kingly poets “and that the moon is meant to suggest the terrible pagan goddess Cybele, who, like Salomé, was obsessed with preserving her virginity and thus took perverse pleasure in destroying male sexuality.”

There’s often a temptation to read either too much or too little into the thought process of artists, resulting in explanations that are either far too simple or exceedingly complex. And yet sometimes it is the simple or the complex that tells the true story of the author’s mind. Pearce suggests that Wilde’s term in Reading Prison, starting in 1895, was what broke him and forced him to come to terms with his life, and Salome predates that, in 1891. It’s frequently true that, prior to a conversion of any time, hints can always be seen in retrospect, and so it may well be with Salome. Whatever the reason for Wilde’s choice, Salome remains one of his most intriguing works, and the character he created one of the most intriguing in art.


Originally published May 4, 2007

Wish I'd written that - a Dickens of a time

On reading Charles Dickens:

"Some of it’s fascinating, and it’s marvelously acted, but there’s something about those 19th century novels that just wears on the heart like a dull stone pressing against a ventricle. The courtship rituals are tiresome and boring. All these protestations and fluttery words and fevered attempts to hold someone’s right pinky-finger. The conversations between anyone of the same class seem to take as their motto that one word shall not suffice when 75 may do, and the general effect is like being smothered with fresh bread."

- James Lileks, reading (or listening to an audio version of) The Mystery of Edwin Drood

I completely agree with this, which is why I also stay away from the Brontë sisters, and so many others from that era.

On the other hand, I have no trouble with Shakespeare.  Go figure.

Doctor Who and friend.

The once and future persecution

At At the risk of being disowned by my fellow orthodox Catholic friends, I picked up a copy of Rolf Hochhuth’s infamous play The Deputy a couple of weeks ago at a used book store.  It was no great revelation to me; I’ve read it before, and I bought it on this occasion as a research aid for a writing project that you may or may not ever hear about again.  It went on the bookshelf, between The Complete Works of Ayn Rand and How to Become a Libertarian in Six Easy Steps.

As a work of fiction likely to be taken as fact by readers and viewers, The Deputy is little more than a slanderous piece of Communist propaganda, deliberately promoted to tarnish the reputation of Pius XII through lie and innuendo.  And over the decades since it was published in the early ‘60s, it has indeed gone a long way to smear a man who, in the immediate aftermath of WW2, had been praised by Jews and Christians alike for his efforts to save Jewish lives while in a delicate position.  Evidence has since been uncovered linking Hochhuth with East German intelligence, and it’s likely that the whole thing was part of an orchestrated plot to undermine the Church.

It’s also not that well-written; far too polemical and strident, not to mention the slander I mentioned earlier (which, I guess, means I shouldn’t have to mention it again).  As a play, though, at least in written form, it has some intriguing qualities.  For one thing, Hochhuth’s prose stage instructions go on and on, sometimes for pages.  They’re obviously meant to be more than just directions; indeed, they provide background and commentary in such depth that they become an integral part of the story.  If you’re attending it as a performance without having the book in front of you, there’ll be so much left out that you won’t really receive the full impact.*  With some judicious editing, it would be reminiscent of a book I enjoyed quite a bit, Michael Herr’s Walter Winchell – a prose novel written in the form of a screenplay, complete with descriptions of fade-ins and fade-outs, camera cuts, and the like.

*Of course, there are many who’d argue that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

If there’s one redeeming factor in my purchase, aside from the research aspect (which has already borne fruit), it’s that I bought it second-hand, which means that neither Hochhuth, his publisher, nor anyone else connected with The Deputy made any money off of me.  Had I been forced to pay full price, I probably would have had to make a trip to the confessional.

There is, however, one thing I’d like to note in favor of The Deputy, although it has nothing to do with the book itself.  It came to me as I was driving in this morning, pondering the Christian persecution that seems to be in America’s immediate future.  Oh, I don’t necessarily mean a persecution on the scale of the Holocaust; it’s more subtle and insidious than that.  It’s the persecution occurring when an individual refuses to conform to the new social order and realize that religion is best kept hidden away in a dark corner, not to be brought out into polite company.  You’re OK if you want to cling to your superstitions, just don’t do it where you can be seen, or in a way that might influence public policy.

It might not be as pronounced as wearing a yellow Star of David, at least not at first.  But when you’re queried at work about political beliefs that have nothing to do with your job, when you can be forced to step down from a job or sell a company because of contributions you’ve made to various organizations, when the government can try to force companies  fund insurance coverage for acts that violate their own religious beliefs – well, you fill in the blanks.

Eventually it spreads.  The skeptic might suggest that, in a free-market economy such as ours, anyone confronted by religious discrimination is at liberty to start their own company, hire people who agree with you, and so on.  But when the prospective business isn’t able to get funding because lending institutions won’t provide it to those of a certain ideological or theological bent, when the business can’t attract customers because of intimidation tactics waged by those for whom freedom of speech applies in only one direction, when the burdens placed by government on the business force an owner to choose between conscience and profit – well, you try explaining it to someone who still has to put food on the table for a wife and children.  There’s more than one form of persecution, and sometimes the unbloody ones are every bit as painful and damaging.  They don’t attack the body, at least not outwardly, but they chip away at the soul.

Which leads me back to The Deputy.  Hochhuth’s claim is that Pius allowed political and financial considerations to prevent him from taking a stronger stance against Nazi persecution of the Jews.  And for all of his preaching, there’s no doubt that Hochhuth’s words (if they’re sincere and not simply a propaganda tool) show a great deal of compassion for the plight of the Jews during WW2.  If he really means what he says, if his fictional Fr. Riccardo (based, supposedly, on St. Maximillian Kolbe) really exemplifies, in his contempt for Pius, a desire to empty himself out for those being persecuted, then one can at least begin to understand the depth of abandonment that the Jews must have felt back then.  To have the entire world abandon you, turn its back on you and ignore what’s being done to you, and then to have the man who carries the greatest amount of moral authority remain silent* - well, that truly speaks to the dark night of the soul.

*To be clear once again: despite Hochhuth’s claim that the play was “ein christliches trauerspiel,” that is, a Christian tragedy, I believe it to be a smear job backed by the KGB, with no intent of sincerity.  However, as Caiaphas discovered (John 11:50), anyone can be an inadvertent prophet, no matter how much the thought might horrify them.

And so, as we enter the once and future persecution, I will put that hat on and look toward Rome and its bishop.  Can you see what is happening here, or are your eyes only on the refugees and the dissenters?  Do you feel the pain that so many are feeling, the choices that are having to be made, the sense of despair that rises, or are you more interested in kissing babies and playing the role of the kindly, benign father?  Are you prepared to confront a powerful government of an increasingly post-Christian nation that wants to marginalize Christianity and its beliefs in the name of progress and majority rule?  Are you ready to speak out for those who have no voice, to show the truth to a world that prefers not to see?

Are you aware of how high the stakes are, of how immigration and social justice and wealth redistribution and all the rest are of no consequence without this basic freedom?

In other words, are you ready to interfere?

Or, like Hochhuth’s fictional Pius, are you all-too willing to allow worldly considerations to influence you to look the other way?

We can be heroes

A few years ago - well, almost seven, to be exact - I wrote about one of the novels that made a seminal impact on the youthful Hadley - Walter F. Murphy's The Vicar of Christ. It's a book that holds up surprisingly well today, as does this review. Considering the novel's protagonist - a man who is elected pope and takes the name Francis I - I though it might also still be of interest.

I've linked a couple of times in past weeks to James Bowman's site, where he's been discussing a series of movies he's presented, entitled "The American Movie Hero." Bowman presents three architypes of movie heroes: the virtuous hero (Gary Cooper, John Wayne), the "cool" hero (Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen), and the cartoon hero (Harrison Ford, in Raiders of the Lost Ark).

It's difficult to craft a good story without a hero of some type, even if's only an anti-hero. Show me a flawed story, whether movie, show or book, and I'd suggest one of the major problems is the lack of a hero. Bowman doesn't presume to discuss all types of heroes, and therefore I'd suggest the existence of another: the doomed hero.

The doomed hero encompasses elements of all three types listed above. He probably comes closest to the virtuous hero, the one who fights for an ideal; who, as Bowman says, sees "the work that needs to be done," and this is perhaps the defining characteristic of the doomed hero. However, the doomed hero can also share elements of the cool hero in the sense of fatalism and world-weariness that accompanies his mission, which can include a moral ambiguity about his work. It's more difficult to see the similarities with the comic, or larger than life, hero, although the doomed hero often appears in works of an epic, larger than life, scale.

Most of all, when watching or reading about the doomed hero, there is the sense on the part of the witness that "this isn't going to turn out well." Think of Maximus, the character portrayed by Russell Crowe in Gladiator. Not only is there a sense of foreboding about Maximus throughout the film, that although he's certain to triumph he's also going to pay a heavy price, there's also the feeling that this is as it should be, that there really isn't any other way it could happen. The doomed hero meets this with a sense of resignation - the resignation that you see in Steve McQueen's face in The Towering Inferno, as his character, Fire Chief O'Hallorhan, heads back into the burning building in a last effort to save the lives of those trapped inside. The expression on McQueen's face (through which McQueen usually did his best acting) tells you that he doesn't expect to come out of this building alive, and it's perhaps more a testimonial to McQueen's star power than anything else that he somewhat surprisingly survives his mission, rescuing those inside to boot.

This has been perhaps a somewhat roundabout introduction to Declan Walsh, the doomed hero of Walter Murphy's 1978 novel The Vicar of Christ, a book that probably should be better known than it is. We know he's doomed before the story even starts, really: in a brief introduction, the unnamed narrator explains that he's on a mission to write the biography of the martyred Walsh, who died as Pope Francesco I. So, having been told in the opening pages that our hero dies, we are immediately plunged backward into the remarkable story of Walsh's life: a Korean War hero and winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Chief Justice of the United States and, finally, Vicar of Christ.

If all this sounds a little like just a too much for one lifetime (not to mention straining the credulity of the reader; even a favorable reviewer called it "preposterous"), there's good reason. I'd read the book myself one summer during my college years, afterward discussing it with a professor who enjoyed discussing that type of thing, and making this very point. Of course, he shrugged in response - after all, the story wasn't really about realism. It was about the epic, mythological hero. Were the adventures of Ulysses, Beowulf and Arthur any more realistic? It was big book for the reader to get lost in (over 600 pages), a bigger-than-life story that reminded one that life itself, in fact, is bigger than life.

The Vicar of Christ tells this epic story through the eyes of four people who knew Walsh well – a fellow soldier in Korea, a Supreme Court associate justice, the Cardinal who spearheads Walsh’s election as Pope (the book’s longest section), and, as a type of coda, the journalist who provides the inside story of (the now) Francesco’s final days. In doing so, Murphy tells us as much about the narrators, who appear and reappear through Walsh’s life, as he does about Walsh. Their distinctive voices, their (at times) compelling stories, their frequently contradictory opinions of characters they each come in contact with, and their insights into the enigmatic Walsh/Francesco all serve to weave the disparate threads of the story together. We know Walsh as they did, but in the end it’s unlikely that we know him any better then they did, for Murphy as author only lets us see Walsh through their eyes, giving us as much knowledge as he does them.

Murphy, given the chance to provide us with easy answers about Walsh, declines the opportunity and leaves the task to us. Occasionally one of the narrators will provide us with insight that another narrator lacks, but ultimately we’re left to guess about Walsh as much as they do. And while it’s clear that we’re meant to admire Walsh, it’s not at all clear that we’re supposed to understand him.

Murphy is never blind to Walsh’s faults. In an effective use of the narrative form, Walsh’s actions – good and bad – are always given to us as seen through the eyes of others, denying Walsh the opportunity (common to so many fictional characters) to provide a self-serving explanation. (When we do hear those explanations, they’re filtered through the translations of the narrators, further separating Walsh from the reader.)

As to those faults, they are a mixture of the objective (adultery, arrogance, crudity) and the subjective (a liberal Catholicism that will not rest easily with many more orthodox Catholics, though ultimately it does not get in the way of the story). But if great men have great faults, they frequently also have great virtues as well. A towering intellect, a driving ambition, an inner confidence that helps to hide an uncertainty self-knowledge, and an uncertain growth that (depending on your own reading of Walsh) either leads him far away from his old self, or brings him to the fulfillment of his destiny – these are the traits that Murphy uses to confirm his verdict of Declan Walsh/Pope Francesco I as a great, if flawed, man.

It’s always been a wonder to me that The Vicar of Christ, which was published in the heyday of the television miniseries, was not made into one. Its truly epic scale that covers all of the American passions – politics, religion, war, justice, lust – made the story a natural, and I’d thought that at one time I’d read of the story being optioned; alas, however, nothing apparently ever came of it.

So what, ultimately, do we make of Walter Murphy’s The Vicar of Christ? Doubtless it represents many things to many different readers – a hoary relic, the last gasp of a fading liberal Catholicism; a reminder, through the mists of time, of the legendary hero-warrior; a story, uniquely American, of ambition and accomplishment; or perhaps a universal story, that of triumph and tragedy, loss and redemption. At the very least it presents us with a doomed hero that would have done Wagner proud, a man sacrificed on the pyre of his own beliefs. Was he martyred for the faith, or stopped from destroying it? Or could it perhaps be both? That is one of the many mysteries the reader encounters, mysteries likely to be mulled over in the mind for some time to come. Not everyone will like it, or agree with it. Some may be bored with it. Fewer, in all likelihood, will quickly forget it.

One thing is for certain, however. As the college professor told me those many years ago, it is a modern demonstration of the power of myth, the need for heroes, the drama of life. And life itself requires some suspension of ordinary, mortal belief, doesn’t it? For even the most ordinary of lives is so full of miracles that, were we to write about it in simple truth, nobody would believe it.
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Gore Vidal, R.I.P.

I wouldn't consider myself particularly a fan of Gore Vidal. I’ve only read one novel of his, seen one movie based on a play of his, and watched one teleplay he wrote.

But the one novel was Lincoln, which I thought was brilliant, so much so that when reading biographies of Lincoln, I often felt that I’d read about the events and personalities before. And I had – from Vidal.

The one movie was The Best Man, which was as prescient an analysis of the future of politics as you could get in the early 60s. The Best Man was satire, black humor, but it came mostly from the portrayals, especially that of Cliff Robertson as the over-the-top conservative candidate. Sure, Henry Fonda was as sanctimonious as ever as Robertson’s sensitive, indecisive opponent, but that was as much a satire on Fonda’s own reputation as anything else. Reading the actual play, the black humor is much more evident, but whichever version one prefers, they were both terrific.

The teleplay was “Summer Pavilion,” which he wrote for the Golden Age anthology Studio One, and it had a disturbing, psychological quality that made it a cut above many of the episodes released in the DVD box set from a couple of years ago. A common misnomer is that all TV from the Golden Age was Golden – well, it wasn’t, and a lot of it was poorly written, at least in retrospect. Vidal’s work was as strong today as it was back then.

So Gore Vidal had talent. Gore Vidal could write good stuff.

But he also wrote crap, like Myra Breckenridge and Caligula and virtually all of his political nonfiction. His suggestion that he inserted a homosexual subtext into his work on the screenplay for Ben-Hur is stretching it (although it does produce one of the better Hollywood quotes, as William Wyler said to Vidal, “Don’t tell Chuck {Heston}, he’ll crack up.”) His essays, such as the one he wrote after longtime antagonist William F. Buckley Jr’s death (“RIP WFB – in Hell”) were usually execrable. About his personal life, the less said the better.

I think the most enjoyment I got from Vidal was from his debates with Buckley during ABC’s coverage of the Republican and Democrat conventions in 1968. Vidal provoked Buckley into a rare loss of his celebrated cool. (At one point Buckley called Vidal a “pink faggot” and threatened to “sock” him, “and you’ll stay socked.”) Personally, I loved Buckley’s response, but I can understand how he might have regretted losing control.



Subjective opinion: Gore Vidal wasted the God-given talent he had, which could have been even greater had it been used in the right manner. He might well have hated me for saying that.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth is credited with having said, “If you can’t say something good about someone, have a seat next to me.” Gore Vidal died today at the age of 86, and I have said something good about him - several things in fact. However, I also subscribe to the idea that we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, and in that spirit I think I’ll just leave well-enough alone. ◙

Wish I'd Written That

I don't thank you for coming," [Wolfe] said. "I'm not disposed to thank you for anything. I have reason to believe that you are withholding information that would be of value. Indeed, I think you have lied. Don't bother to deny it. I tell you that only to establish the temper of the conversation. I'll be trying to find support for my opinion. What will you be doing?"

She would be staring. She was staring. "I know what I ought to be doing," she said. "Leaving. I ought to be on my way out."

"But you're not. You wouldn't, even if I'm wrong, because you want to know why. That's what makes us the unique animal, we want to know why and try to find out. We even try to discover why we want to know why, though of course we never will."

- Rex Stout, Please Pass the Guilt ◙

The mockingbird that don't sing

I must admit that I've never been a fan of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird - not in high school, when I had to read its earnest social message, and not the movie version, featuring Gregory Peck's wooden performace. (And how that perforance won an Oscar, up against Albert Finney's in Tom Jones, I'll never know.) Gratifyingly, it turns out I'm not the only one. ◙

Dominick Dunne, R.I.P.

By Mitchell Hadley

Dominick Dunne, it seems, knew everyone and did everything.

He was a veteran of the literary circuit, a Hollywood producer, a constant fixture wherever the stars were on both coasts. He succeeded, he failed, became an addict, sobered up, and succeeded again. He could drop names with the very best of them, and the names he dropped were always heavy ones.

He was the brother of John Gregory Dunne, which made him the brother-in-law of Joan Didion. He was a survivor - the murder of his daughter and the lenient sentence her killer received propelled him into the area of true crime, which he made his own personal domain, and it propelled him back to the front pages.

He was a successful author, lighting up the pages of Vanity Fair with his accounts of the trials of the rich and famous. He was a familiar face on television, both on his own show on CourtTV and as a guest of Larry King’s. It was said that he was the people’s representative at the trials he covered, and each night he would tell you what he’d seen as if you were an old and trusted friend.

He wrote best sellers. The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. People Like Us. An Inconvenient Woman. A Season in Purgatory. He was a most outspoken critic of the O.J. Simpson fiasco, believing beyond doubt that Simpson was guilty of murder, a story he told in his memorable novel, Another City, Not My Own.

Dominick Dunne died of cancer today, at age 83. There is some irony in the fact that he died the day after Edward Kennedy, insofar as he chronicled the story of Michael Skakel, the nephew of Ethel Kennedy (widow of Robert), in A Season in Purgatory. I imagine he might have appreciated that irony, or at least acknowledged it.

I enjoyed watching him on television. I enjoyed reading his books. I’ll miss him, but the wonderful thing about words is that they have the power to live long after their authors have departed, and for that we can always be grateful.

Opera Wednesday

Written by Mitchell

A while back, Terry Teachout posted a meme that, as I recall, had something to do with books that had made an immediate and lasting impact on you after you'd read them. Now, I think it's an automatic reflex that the mind starts working every time you read about that kind of list, and it didn't take me long to realize that I might have a very difficult time coming up with ten or so titles that would fit the description. It's not that I haven't read a lot of books, nor is it the case that I'd classify most of those books as forgettable.

It's just that the bar is set pretty high on this. We're not necessarily talking about favorite or best-loved books. There are many books that pack a wallop when you've just turned the final page and closed the covers; it's the rare book that lasts beyond that, causing your mind to return to it again and again. For me, a writer as well as reader, it might involve characters so memorable that I start speculating on how I'd write the continuation of their story. It could be a line or two that sticks in the mind, a line that you find yourself pulling out and using frequently. Or it could be one scene that haunts you, burns itself into your memory like a photographic negative. Whatever the case, I think a list of such books, like a list of one's closest friends, is probably quite short.*

*My own list wound up being short enough; eight titles. Maybe someday we'll discuss them all, but of course that isn't what today's piece is really about.

The point of this, in a piece titled "Opera Wednesday," is to set up the video clip we're about to look at. One of the books that made my list is Psalm at Journey's End, Erik Fosnes Hansen's remarkable novel about the members of the famed band on the ill-fated maiden voyage of the Titanic. Although the characters' names and their personal stories are fictionalized, Hansen's melancholy tale tells of the passion, the triumph and tragedy of the Titanic better than any recent movie could hope to.

The moment of truth comes on the novel's last page. Folklore has long supposed that Nearer, My God, to Thee was the piece which the band played as the ship went down. Walter Lord's definitive A Night to Remember rejected that tradition in favor of the Episcopal hymn Autumn. Lord based his assessment on the eyewitness testimony of wireless operator Harold Bride, who was on the ship until the very end. However, in Lord's follow-up The Night Lives On, he addressed speculation that the piece to which Bride had been referring was actually Songe d'Automne, a popular song of the time. Lord acknowledges the plausibility, indeed the probability, that this was in fact the final piece, but he concedes that we will probably never know for sure. Other historians have other opinions, the point being that such conjecture has long been part of the lore of the Titanic, and probably always will be.

Hansen, too, has his own theory, only his is far different, and adds to the poignancy of the ship's last moments. Recalling a memory from his childhood, bandleader Jason Coward asks the other musicians to join him in Handel's Largo.

The Largo is the popular name for the aria "Ombra mai fù" from Handel's opera Serse. Not only is it the most famous aria from this seldom-performed opera, it comes right at the beginning - a real rarety. Imagine Bobby Darin starting every concert by singing "Mack the Knife" (which he did, incidentelly). Or, since we're discussing Handel, suppose he started Messiah with the "Hallelujia Chorus." Nothing like leading with your strength.

"Ombra mai fù" is a wonderfully evocative piece (although if you look at the lyrics, you'll find that it's a song about the shade provided by a tree), and coming as it does at the end of this very sad book, telling such a sad story, it makes a powerful impact. The following is not taken from Serse; even though it comes at the beginning, you still have to get through the opening credits and the overture. There are plenty of concert versions to choose from, sung by mezzos, baritones, countertenors. I'll give you this filmed performance by Jennifer Larmore - I know, there's no apparent reason for it to have been shot in a shipyard, but in our context it seems quite appropriate.

Ombra mai fu...
Uploaded by Vanhacker.

Murky Waters

By Drew

Does a demon beckon?
Do you follow?
Do you turn aside, mashing your fists into your eyes?
You won't know until it beckons. To you. So long as it temps others you can judge - can sneer - can express shock, disgust, outrage, and prim disdain - the usual emotions of punitive people. But you won't know. I didn't.
Joyce Carol Oates, The Assassins

*****
As enigmatic as the above is, it becomes a perfect representation of the enigmatic, prolific Joyce Carol Oates. She can be brilliantly crystalline in one moment, maddeningly opaque and pretentious in another.

Oates understands as well as anyone that the Kennedys have become a modern American myth, in much the same way as Paul Bunyan and King Arthur. Often critics of the Kennedys use the word “myth” as a substitute for “fiction,” and certainly the “Camelot” of the early 60s is as much fairy tale as reality. However, Oates uses the mythology as part history, part legend, part folklore – a story that has become so ingrained in the American consciousness that it acts as shorthand for a host of emotions, memories, and meanings, symbolic as well as real. In recasting and retelling the Kennedy story in its various components, Oates allows her characters to display aspects of this mythology, using it as background to the story at hand, without having to start from scratch.

The above selection is from her 1975 novel The Assassins, her first go at the mythos of the Kennedy family. The Assassins is the story of the Petrie family in the wake of the assassination of the man around whom the family revolved, the overpowering Andrew. The storytellers are the three most strongly affected by Andrew: his brothers Hugh and Stephen; and his young widow Yvonne. This can’t be seen as a word-for-word comparison to the Kennedy clan; the Andrew is a right-wing commentator and former U.S. Senator (rather than a Democratic president), the father a former judge (instead of a bootlegger), the family itself Episcopalian rather than Catholic (except for Stephen, a convert), and from New York instead of Massachusetts. That being said, it would also be impossible to look at the triumvirate of survivors and not see the shadow of America’s royal family.

However, Oates deals far more directly with myth in her 1992 novella Black Water, her retelling of Chappaquiddick, which gives us all the elements we need: a girl (Kelly Kelleher), a U.S. Senator (“The Senator”) who’s had a bit too much to drink, a car, and a body of water. The rest, as we all know, is history.

And it should be noted that one of the fascinating aspects of Black Water is that it takes place in a world populated by the real-life Kennedys and their real-life history, although the real-life Chappaquiddick is never mentioned (understandably). There are references to the Kennedys (especially Bobby) as well as Ronald Reagan and George Bush (who is president at the time of the book’s events), and the Gulf War is as much a part of history as the Vietnam War. The basic story is the same, however; to the extent that Oates’ take on things describe what really happened, “The Senator” certainly does not come out looking very good. He’s a married man coming on to a young woman, a drunk who causes the accident thanks to his reckless driving, and a coward who not only flees the scene of the accident without trying to rescue Kelly, but also lies to his friend as to the cause of the fatal crash.

Oates may argue that she is not attempting a thinly disguised retelling of Chappaquiddick, instead presenting the "archetypal" story "of a young woman taken advantage of by an older man, but it serves as a damning indictment of Teddy nonetheless. (Anyone too young to remember Chappaquiddick would do well to read this novella, regardless of whether or not it’s really about Ted, and then ask themselves once again why this Kennedy was never elected president.)

If you’ve tried JCO in the past and been intimidated by her, Black Water is a good place to visit. If you’ve never read Oates at all, then you could do worse than to begin here. Oates prose has rarely been more clear, more powerful. Her hypnotic repetition of phrases, her relentless portrayal of Kelly’s misplaced belief in the Senator, her ability to tell the familiar story and still have you hoping for a different conclusion, all work to produce a work that is ultimately quite moving. We feel the claustrophobia she must feel as she is trapped in the sinking car, we feel her hope (and ours) ebbing away as the water continues to rise, we see her dying before our very eyes. There is always something disturbing, gut-wrenching, about a work such as this – whether in opera, on stage, in movies, or through the written word. You are presented a life that is seen in happier, more innocent times, and yet know that the story will not end happily ever after.

For there is no happy ending to Black Water, just as there was no happy ending for Mary Jo Kopechne. And ultimately, there was no happy ending for Ted Kennedy, either. He survived the disaster, true, in a way neither of his brothers did. He survived politically, if you consider his continual reelection to the U.S. Senate by the people of Massachusetts. But he was never elected president, never won the fame and devotion that Jack and Bobby did.

Perhaps worst of all for Edward M. Kennedy, he has been forced to live with the memory of what happened on that bridge for the rest of his life, a life that now appears to be in its last act. We can never truly know what happened that night, although we are not prevented from drawing conclusions based on the evidence at hand. We can never truly know what goes on in the heart and conscience of Ted Kennedy; we can only consider his public words and acts over the years and filter them through our own sensibilities. We can surmise, though, that lesser men might have chosen death rather than to live with such a haunting memory.

Indeed, the real world haunts each and every page of Black Water, as the words of Joyce Carol Oates haunt those who read it. Of a novelist, the reader can ask little more.

Political Potpourri

By Mitchell

Some scattered odds and ends for the end of the week:

• At Architecture & Morality, Relievedebtor writes the kind of article I love - why the New England Patriots are Ayn Rand's team. Now, I'm neither a fan of the Pats nor of Ayn Rand, but I think the point here is a good one - that in a PC world, it's refreshing to see a team with a single-minded commitment to winning and nothing else - and I thoroughly enjoy how he supports the argument.
  
  
• Speaking of Ayn Rand, I've often cited Whittaker Chambers' landmark review of Atlas Shrugged to illustrate my points about the dangers inherent in Corporate America's adherence to the bottom line as their high altar, especially Chambers' assertion that capitalism, without a moral foundation, is no better than any other -ism. What's been frustrating, though, is that I've never felt I've been able to adequately paraphrase Chambers' eloquent argument. Now I don't have to try; on the recent 50th anniversary of the publication of Rand's book, National Review reprinted the essay, which appeared in their December 28, 1957 issue. And here, I believe, is the quote that summarizes Chambers' feelings on the matter:
  
  

  At that point, in any materialism, the main possibilities open up to Man. 1) His tragic fate becomes, without God, more tragic and much lonelier. In general, the tragedy deepens according to the degree of pessimism or stoicism with which he conducts his “hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silent universe.” Or, 2) Man’s fate ceases to be tragic at all. Tragedy is bypassed by the pursuit of happiness. Tragedy is henceforth pointless. Henceforth man’s fate, without God, is up to him, and to him alone. His happiness, in strict materialist terms, lies with his own workaday hands and ingenious brain. His happiness becomes, in Miss Rand’s words, “the moral purpose of his fife.”
  
  Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free-enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.

  
  
  I couldn't have said it any better and, now, I don't have to.

• A week or so ago at 2Blowhards, Donald made an astute observation that I hadn't previously considered. His points:
  
  

• Fairly often I come across the assertion that "homophobes" are actually repressed homosexuals.
• Now let's generalize and posit that anyone with a strong dislike of some form of human behavior secretly harbors such behavior himself.
• Therefore, it would be perfectly correct to assert that people who hate Republicans are really repressed GOPers.

You gotta like that, don't you think?

Cool Kids

By Mitchell

There’s been a revival of interest of late in Charles Schulz and his creation, Peanuts, with a documentary on PBS this week, a new biography in the bookstores, and the holiday trifecta – the Great Pumpkin, Thanksgiving, and Christmas – on the way.

And so it’s not surprising that there’s an article on Peanuts in the Strib Monday morning. The question it asks: has Snoopy lost his cool? It’s a question worth discussing, for many reasons.

The question of whether or not Peanuts is still cool isn’t a new one. Last year, when the Mall of America announced a deal with Nickelodeon for its characters to grace the mall’s indoor amusement park that had been formerly known as Camp Snoopy (after the mall had failed to reach terms to continue the Peanuts tie-in) , the reaction from retail experts was fairly positive. SpongeBob and Dora the Explorer were, it was argued, far more “in” with kids than Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Peanuts had become, the experts agreed, more of a nostalgia kick, something that parents could look back on with affection, reliving their own childhood. Peanuts might still be beloved, but clearly the demographics were skewing in the wrong direction. Today’s article reiterates much the same thing.

This kind of questioning was inevitable given that there are no new Peanuts strips being written, no opportunity for Schulz to offer commentary on the events of today. It is, literally, a nostalgia item, a throwback to another era. And so perhaps it's a good thing to remind ourselves that the question is something of a moot point. Why should kids consider Peanuts cool, after all? The fact is that Peanuts was for adults, written with an adult sensibility, with humor that could have been right out of the pages of The New Yorker, the kind of thing that people cut out and put up at work. Although kids would always find a humorous side to it, it was never really intended to appeal to children as primary readers. In an entry in the St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, we find this paragraph that sums it up:

The Peanuts characters, however, are not typical children. They do torment each other (making them some of the first realistic children in comics) and play games, much as other children do, but the Peanuts characters are somewhat more serious and intelligent than the average child. Lucy says she would like real estate for Christmas, Linus can philosophize about life's problems while sucking his thumb, and Schroeder's hero is Beethoven. They quote the Bible and have incredible vocabularies. Not only are these children intelligent, they are independent. Adults only appear "off stage," and rarely at that. The Peanuts characters seem to go through most of their activities with little adult supervision or interference, and they manage just fine. The characters tend to be a bit less fun-loving than the children we know. They are all somewhat depressed, and when they laugh, they tend to be laughing at each other rather than something innocent that simply strikes them as funny. As Schulz says in Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Me, "Strangely enough, pleasant things are not really funny. You can't create humor out of happiness." Charlie Brown himself is the apex of this philosophy. The Peanuts characters have enough childlike qualities to keep children interested, but much of this is adult humor.

So, one might wonder, how did we get to the point where we started to see Peanuts primarily as children's entertainment? As Schulz biographer David Michaelis, author of Schulz and Peanuts, points out, much of this transition comes with the advent of "A Charlie Brown Christmas." In the wake of the phenomenal success of the TV special, the Peanuts kids became some of the most heavily merchandised characters around. Invariably, the books, stuffed animals, and other tie-ins were marketed to, and found their largest audience with, children. More TV specials followed, often tied in to holidays such as Halloween and Thanksgiving, and the cartoons came to define the seasonal aspects of those holidays - merchandising seasons, for one thing.

At the same time, Schulz began to draw the primary focus of the strip somewhat away from Charlie Brown and his existential difficulties, and more toward the fantasy life of Snoopy. Snoopy became something of a Walter Mitty; traveling to the moon, playing golf at the Masters, competing for the Stanley Cup on the icy pond of a birdbath. They were, in fact, the same kinds of fantasies that many children had - whereas Charlie Brown, in his Sisyphusian parallel, had always struggled to kick that football before Lucy could pull it away, Snoopy's athletic endeavors were thes kind of fantasies played out on playgrounds, where kids imagined themselves with a chance to win the Super Bowl or the World Series by making that winning shot or catching the ball for the final out.

In the past Charlie Brown had always been Snoopy's foil, as if the dog were some type of Sybil dispensing the cruel realities of Fate, but now Snoopy acquired his own sidekick, the bird Woodstock, and together the two became something of a comedy team, further taking away the focus from the children, sometimes for days at a time.

Finally, as Michaelis points out, Schulz used Peanuts as a virtual diary. In looking back at the events of Schulz's life, from his childhood to his failed marriage and his romances, to his eternal struggles against the dual tormenters of self-doubt and ego, we see these all emerging from the words and thought bubbles of his child characters. With this knowledge the strip often assumes a dual meaning, and in one way it makes it difficult to read the old jokes in quite the same way as you did in the past.

Schulz was by these accounts a difficult man, gifted but doubting, modest yet arrogant, and oftentimes not particularly likeable. I can remember, even as a kid when Peanuts was my favorite strip, thinking that there often was something not quite right about it. How could anyone be as much of a failure as Charlie Brown? How could others inflict such cruelty as casually as so many of the kids did? Why, in fact, did he not just buck up and, as Lucy would say, deal with it?

Like many adults, my affection for Peanuts has remained, but the ardor hasn't. Today it comes across as humorous, still better than 90% of the dreck that litters the funny pages, but hardly the must-read that it once was. The relevance of its eternal truths continues, but the topical humor that was always one of Schulz's hallmarks can be hard to identify. In my mind, Calvin and Hobbes had long since surpassed Peanuts as both insightful and cutting-edge, the kind of thing at which Schulz used to excel. And yet there is no question that Schulz, flaws and all, remains a giant of cartooning - indeed, of pop culture, if not of literature itself. We can't afford to lose sight of that.

And so perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised at the conversation about whether or not kids still find Peanuts cool, for it is difficult to remember that once upon a time Peanuts wasn't really about kids at all.

Water, Water, Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink

By Mitchell

Not a weather report, but more like a book report. Or perhaps something like, "books, books, everywhere, and not a thing to read."

While researching an unrelated topic, I ran across this list by National Review of the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th century. The list of names on the selection panel are almost as inpressive as those found in the list. For what it's worth, I can say that we either own or have read 16 of the books on the list. Would anyone care to guess which ones they are?

It's hard to limit this kind of list to 100. I can't comment on the ones I haven't read, but of the ones I have I can't disagree with any of them. Wouldn't it be interesting to find out what books just missed the list? I can think of several I would have added myself - The Making of the President series by Theodore H. White, for example. These books, written every four years from 1960 to 1972, may or may not be good history - White was wrong about some things, naïve about others, and wasn't always as well connected as he thought - but this series is wonderfully evocative of a time and place in history when politics was more interesting, when it was actually fun to be involved. I wonder how many poli-sci majors cut their teeth reading about these campaigns?

Robert Caro's The Power Broker goes on the list, not simply because I've spent most of the summer reading it, but because it presents an unadorned picture of the lust for power and how the rammifications can affect generations to come. If you want a good idea of how our cities wound up the way they are, this volume is an excellent companion to one of the books on the NR list, Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of American Cities.

The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn, Ball Four by Jim Bouton, and The Biggest Game of Them All by Mike Celizik are sports books that all deserve mention. The Boys of Summer, the beloved story of the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers, and Ball Four, the first sports tell-all book, present two different yet complimentary views of the national pasttime, and again it seems like an era long past. The Biggest Game of Them All, Celizik's story of the 1966 Notre Dame-Michigan State college football showdown, literally comes from a different era, and tells us much about how sports grew into the media monster it is today.

A Night to Remember, Walter Lord's memorable telling of the sinking of the Titanic, has introduced generations to the wonders of the true-life epic disaster. If you're a Titanic buff, you probably already have it. If you aren't, you will be once you've read it. William Manchester's The Death of a President remains one of the definitive tellings of the events surrounding the assassination of JFK. Some will prefer Jim Bishop's The Day Kennedy Was Shot, but Manchester's book should be on the shelf if you have any interest in it at all.

And that's just a sample - I'm sure there are more on our bookshelves that I'm overlooking, but isn't this enough for starters?

The doomed hero

I've linked a couple of times in past weeks to James Bowman's site, where he's been discussing a series of movies he's presented, entitled "The American Movie Hero." Bowman presents three architypes of movie heroes: the virtuous hero (Gary Cooper, John Wayne), the "cool" hero (Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen), and the cartoon hero (Harrison Ford, in Raiders of the Lost Ark).

It's difficult to craft a good story without a hero of some type, even if's only an anti-hero. Show me a flawed story, whether movie, show or book, and I'd suggest one of the major problems is the lack of a hero. Bowman doesn't presume to discuss all types of heroes, and therefore I'd suggest the existence of another: the doomed hero.

The doomed hero encompasses elements of all three types listed above. He probably comes closest to the virtuous hero, the one who fights for an ideal; who, as Bowman says, sees "the work that needs to be done," and this is perhaps the defining characteristic of the doomed hero. However, the doomed hero can also share elements of the cool hero in the sense of fatalism and world-weariness that accompanies his mission, which can include a moral ambiguity about his work. It's more difficult to see the similarities with the comic, or larger than life, hero, although the doomed hero often appears in works of an epic, larger than life, scale.

Most of all, when watching or reading about the doomed hero, there is the sense on the part of the witness that "this isn't going to turn out well." Think of Maximus, the character portrayed by Russell Crowe in Gladiator. Not only is there a sense of foreboding about Maximus throughout the film, that although he's certain to triumph he's also going to pay a heavy price, there's also the feeling that this is as it should be, that there really isn't any other way it could happen. The doomed hero meets this with a sense of resignation - the resignation that you see in Steve McQueen's face in The Towering Inferno, as his character, Fire Chief O'Hallorhan, heads back into the burning building in a last effort to save the lives of those trapped inside. The expression on McQueen's face (through which McQueen usually did his best acting) tells you that he doesn't expect to come out of this building alive, and it's perhaps more a testimonial to McQueen's star power than anything else that he somewhat surprisingly survives his mission, rescuing those inside to boot.

This has been perhaps a somewhat roundabout introduction to Declan Walsh, the doomed hero of Walter Murphy's 1978 novel The Vicar of Christ, a book that probably should be better known than it is. We know he's doomed before the story even starts, really: in a brief introduction, the unnamed narrator explains that he's on a mission to write the biography of the martyred Walsh, who died as Pope Francesco I. So, having been told in the opening pages that our hero dies, we are immediately plunged backward into the remarkable story of Walsh's life: a Korean War hero and winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Chief Justice of the United States and, finally, Vicar of Christ.

If all this sounds a little like just a too much for one lifetime (not to mention straining the credulity of the reader; even a favorable reviewer called it "preposterous"), there's good reason. I'd read the book myself one summer during my college years, afterward discussing it with a professor who enjoyed discussing that type of thing, and making this very point. Of course, he shrugged in response - after all, the story wasn't really about realism. It was about the epic, mythological hero. Were the adventures of Ulysses, Beowulf and Arthur any more realistic? It was big book for the reader to get lost in (over 600 pages), a bigger-than-life story that reminded one that life itself, in fact, is bigger than life.

The Vicar of Christ tells this epic story through the eyes of four people who knew Walsh well – a fellow soldier in Korea, a Supreme Court associate justice, the Cardinal who spearheads Walsh’s election as Pope (the book’s longest section), and, as a type of coda, the journalist who provides the inside story of (the now) Francesco’s final days. In doing so, Murphy tells us as much about the narrators, who appear and reappear through Walsh’s life, as he does about Walsh. Their distinctive voices, their (at times) compelling stories, their frequently contradictory opinions of characters they each come in contact with, and their insights into the enigmatic Walsh/Francesco all serve to weave the disparate threads of the story together. We know Walsh as they did, but in the end it’s unlikely that we know him any better then they did, for Murphy as author only lets us see Walsh through their eyes, giving us as much knowledge as he does them.

Murphy, given the chance to provide us with easy answers about Walsh, declines the opportunity and leaves the task to us. Occasionally one of the narrators will provide us with insight that another narrator lacks, but ultimately we’re left to guess about Walsh as much as they do. And while it’s clear that we’re meant to admire Walsh, it’s not at all clear that we’re supposed to understand him.

Murphy is never blind to Walsh’s faults. In an effective use of the narrative form, Walsh’s actions – good and bad – are always given to us as seen through the eyes of others, denying Walsh the opportunity (common to so many fictional characters) to provide a self-serving explanation. (When we do hear those explanations, they’re filtered through the translations of the narrators, further separating Walsh from the reader.)

As to those faults, they are a mixture of the objective (adultery, arrogance, crudity) and the subjective (a liberal Catholicism that will not rest easily with many more orthodox Catholics, though ultimately it does not get in the way of the story). But if great men have great faults, they frequently also have great virtues as well. A towering intellect, a driving ambition, an inner confidence that helps to hide an uncertainty self-knowledge, and an uncertain growth that (depending on your own reading of Walsh) either leads him far away from his old self, or brings him to the fulfillment of his destiny – these are the traits that Murphy uses to confirm his verdict of Declan Walsh/Pope Francesco I as a great, if flawed, man.

It’s always been a wonder to me that The Vicar of Christ, which was published in the heyday of the television miniseries, was not made into one. Its truly epic scale that covers all of the American passions – politics, religion, war, justice, lust – made the story a natural, and I’d thought that at one time I’d read of the story being optioned; alas, however, nothing apparently ever came of it.

So what, ultimately, do we make of Walter Murphy’s The Vicar of Christ? Doubtless it represents many things to many different readers – a hoary relic, the last gasp of a fading liberal Catholicism; a reminder, through the mists of time, of the legendary hero-warrior; a story, uniquely American, of ambition and accomplishment; or perhaps a universal story, that of triumph and tragedy, loss and redemption. At the very least it presents us with a doomed hero that would have done Wagner proud, a man sacrificed on the pyre of his own beliefs. Was he martyred for the faith, or stopped from destroying it? Or could it perhaps be both? That is one of the many mysteries the reader encounters, mysteries likely to be mulled over in the mind for some time to come. Not everyone will like it, or agree with it. Some may be bored with it. Fewer, in all likelihood, will quickly forget it.

One thing is for certain, however. As the college professor told me those many years ago, it is a modern demonstration of the power of myth, the need for heroes, the drama of life. And life itself requires some suspension of ordinary, mortal belief, doesn’t it? For even the most ordinary of lives is so full of miracles that, were we to write about it in simple truth, nobody would believe it.
◙

Be Careful What You Wish For

By Mitchell

You may recall that Willie Stark, the Huey Long-esque central figure in All the King’s Men, originally comes to power through a literal collapse of the infrastructure. Stark, who winds up as one of the truly sinister political figures in American literature, starts out as an earnest crusader, thrust into the limelight when a tragic school accident confirms his earlier charges of corruption in the bidding process used to construct the building. As one character puts it, “I am punished for accepting iniquity and voting against an honest man!”

You don’t see scenes like that much in American politics today, and it isn’t only because we don’t have novelists like Robert Penn Warren writing the dialogue. It’s because we live in an era in which the idea of a political white knight, a populist hero of the people, is a concept totally foreign to the average American.

Now, at this point in All the King’s Men Stark is, in fact, a relatively honest man. (This is before he goes on to become a poster child for the “power corrupts” school of political science. For more information look under “Moses, Robert.”) And therein lies the difference. Stark himself, in one of the novel’s most memorable lines, says, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud.”

Again, you’d probably be hard-pressed to find a politician today (or anyone else, for that matter, outside of an evangelical pulpit) who would put it in quite precisely those terms. But Robert Penn Warren’s words lie at the heart of the debate that is to come, and the way in which our times have changed.

A friend of mine from out-of-town asked me if the outrage had started yet over the 35W bridge collapse. Certainly, if you’re interested in pointing fingers there’s enough blame to go around. You’ve got, just for starters, inspection records that might have sent up red flags, pork-barrel spending that might have taken needed funds away from supporting the infrastructure, a constitutional amendment that was supposed to take care of funding for roads (and might – several years down the line) and two new sports stadiums going up. (Wonder where the money for those is coming from, hmm?)

I told him that while I supposed the outrage would be there eventually, frankly people were still a little too stunned to get going on it. Not to worry though, I assured him – it will happen soon enough. (In fact, there are already arguments going on over the design and speed of the bridge replacement, not to mention the likelihood of a gas tax increase to pay for everything.)

So it’s easy to imagine the blame game to come. (Because, after all, we do have to have someone to blame for it, don’t we? The human heart is far more comfortable with that scenario. Something goes wrong, it has to be someone’s fault, right?) The question, however, is who will benefit from it? Who’s going to be the white knight? And I don’t think that’s a crass question to ask, when you’re talking about someone the public will turn to.

The days of Willie Stark are gone now, or fading quickly. If you look at the literature, the movies, the TV shows of the 50s and 60s, government leaders are generally the good guys. If there are monsters to fight, the military takes them on. If there are gangsters on the loose, the feds are there to protect us. Aliens, mind-control, different types of sinister plots, might even bring the president into the mix.

Hard to believe that would happen now. The general perception of politicians today is not a particularly positive one. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that any politician is going to be able to ride to the top on a wave of outrage over the bridge disaster. Between the earmarking, the pork-barreling, the vote trading, and the general level of corruption and politics-as-usual that most people associate with politics, today’s leaders are probably more likely to be blamed for causing the collapse (or at least the conditions that precipitated it) than looked to take care of the problem. That won’t stop them from trying, from talking a good game about it, but as the saying goes, talk is cheap.

Thomas Sowell had a brilliant column last week regarding the subject of tax increases to pay for infrastructure. He doesn’t think much of it. There’s plenty of money to pay for infrastructure, he said;

The real problem is that the political incentives are to spend the taxpayers’ money on things that will enhance politicians’ chances of getting reelected.

There may be enough money available to maintain bridges and other infrastructure but that same money can have a bigger political payoff if spent building something new instead of maintaining and repairing existing structures.

So where is one to turn to find the white knight? Not the politicians. They’re all guilty to one extent or another, most people would say. Or, as Stark puts it, “conceived in sin and born in corruption.”

(We probably ought to be suspicious of politicians who promise to take care of the infrastructure, anyway. They have ways of turning out to be something other than we’d expected, even as they fulfill their campaign pledges. He made the trains run on time, anyone?)

In truth, the politician of the Willie Stark era has been replaced, in most cases, by the trial lawyer. (See Edwards, John.) No matter what type of calamity occurs today, if you look closely enough you’ll probably find a lawyer somewhere in the aftermath, already working up his first briefs. It’s not that we look to the lawyers to remedy the situation. No, what we ask from them is simpler, more straightforward: we want justice, retribution, financial restitution. We look to them to assign the blame, to hand out the punishment, to hold the guilty parties up to ridicule.

It’s almost as if we’ve given up on the idea of changing things, and are content to simply react instead. We can’t prevent bad things from happening; we can only punish those responsible. The trial lawyers have punished a lot of people over the years, and they’ve certainly made a lot of money for the victims of disaster and their families (and a great deal of money for themselves, in the bargain). They’ve also been responsible for adding to the cost of even the most basic services, of skyrocketing costs (in the medical field, for example), and in attaining a level of trust just about as low as that of politicians. The only difference is that the lawyers might at least be able to get you a few bucks; anytime you talk to a politician it usually winds up costing you money.

There is one other possibility, of course. Oprah. She’s always got a sympathetic ear, unless you do her wrong. (See Frey, James.) Her audience is huge, heart-on-the-sleeve-wearing, inclined to believe the best about you and the worst about them. Maybe she can’t redress the wrongs you’ve suffered, but at least she’ll give you a hug and a shoulder to cry on. And there’s always the chance you’ll get a few minutes of fame, and maybe a book or movie deal. How good is that – a chance at the money, and you don’t even have to go through the trial lawyers to get it. Remember in Three Days of the Condor how Robert Redford goes to the New York Times to expose our corrupt government? Forget that; the Times is so passé. Oprah is the crusading journalist of our time.

I don’t mean for this to sound too cynical, although it undoubtedly is the product of a cynical age. It’s just that the times have in fact changed. Not necessarily for the better, or the worse; Willie Stark was hardly a bargain, as is usually the case once someone gets that first taste of power and finds he likes it. It’s just that we don’t look to the crooked politicians anymore, but to the ambulance chasers.

So when we demand answers, when we call on someone to do something, when we ask, “Where’s the outrage?” we’d better be careful what we ask for. We might just wind up with Willie Stark. Or John Edwards. Or even Oprah. Which one is worse? You be the judge.

Wish I'd Written That

By Mitchell

"Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talking about the right wing this and the right wing that. I ain't even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that's a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I don't like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I don't think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I don't have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm going to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation."

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (H/T to First Things)

The Dystopian Looking Glass

By Drew

The online issue of The New Criterion has a very interesting article by Anthony Daniels, "Blood and Smashed Glass," on dystopian (end-of-the-world, post-apocalyptic, what have you) novels. As Daniels notes, the best of these dystopian novels tend to be from Britain, and back in February I wrote about one of the best and most affecting, On the Beach.

Of the recent novels in the genre, Daniels focuses on J. G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come. (You might recognize Ballard as the author of Empire of the Sun, which was made into a movie by Steven Spielberg.) In Kingdom Come, Ballard writes of a bleak, spiritually empty Britain, where “the ‘spiritual’ focus of life here is the shopping mall, the airport, and the filling station.” In many ways more terrifying than the regressive, post-nuclear worlds we often read about, Ballard describes the not-too-distant future:

They [the inhabitants] lived in an eternal retail present, where the deepest moral decisions concerned the purchase of a refrigerator or a washing machine.

Parking was well on the way to becoming the British population’s greatest spiritual need.

Here, a filling station beside a dual carriageway enshrined a deeper sense of community than any church or chapel, a greater awareness of a shared culture than a library or municipal gallery could offer.

Consumerism dominated the lives of the people, who looked as if they were shopping whatever they were doing.

As Daniels notes, such a life can be deeply unsatisfying. Nationalism (or Balkanization of the culture, if you will), aggressiveness, and violence work to fill the gap, but so does the Oprafied, emotions-on-the-sleeve sentimental mush we seem to crave. In Britain, these contradictory elements are symbolized by the teddy bear for the sentimentality, the English flag for the brutality, both of which, Daniels says, “[serve] to make the country an increasingly civilization-free zone.”

Whenever there is a fatal accident, or a fatal stabbing or shooting, in an English city, teddy bears soon appear at the site, often strapped to the nearest lamppost. They are the lightning conductors of disturbing thoughts and emotions, discharging them harmlessly into the ground. They serve the purposes of shallowness and intensity at the same time; they are the tribute that egotism pays to sympathy. That is why, as Ballard so acutely perceives, they play so large a part in modern English life.

As for the flag, which only a handful of years ago was scarcely ever seen, and then only in the hands of people with the crudest xenophobic sentiments, it is now to be found everywhere. One of Mr. Blair’s greatest achievements, so far unheralded, is the near certain destruction of the 300-year-old union of Scotland and England, with the very real possibility of the emergence once again of destructive hostility. English nationalists will soon find real reasons to hate the Scots, for example because of the vast subsidies they have so thanklessly received for decades; the Scots, suddenly deprived of those subsidies, will find one more reason to loathe the English.

I don’t imagine we recognize much of our own culture in this, do we? Anyway, if you have a strong stomach and some antidepressants nearby, you might want to check this out.

If I haven’t already gotten you down by now, let me mention one additional element form Daniels’ article. In fact, it was the piece that fairly leapt off the page when I read it, for in it I saw the greatest parallel to our own time and culture. Oddly enough, it comes from one of the older of the dystopian novels, E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, published in 1909. The Machine Stops tells of a world where “mankind has become entirely subterranean, living isolated lives in temperature-controlled cells where everything is available at the push of a button and all human contact is second-hand, via electronic communication apparatus. First-hand experience of anything except the cell in which one lives is feared and avoided by everyone.”

I read this and I thought, “Internet. Email. MySpace. Virtual reality. Avatars. Self-absorption, the elimination of risk, the decay of neighborhoods. It’s all there, isn’t it. And he wrote this 100 years ago.”

If it’s uncomfortable having a mirror held up to us, if we squirm at the image we see reflected in its glass, we should also be grateful that we’ve been given this looking glass in which we can get a glimpse of what life has become. Of course, the hard part is to do something about it, as we must, before the looking glass turns into the picture of Dorian Gray.