Today’s hymn isn’t the typical Palm Sunday theme, because I’ve been thinking about the cross lately and meant to post another hymn on the cross last Sunday. Isaac Watts on this favorite in 1707 as a communion hymn, and it’s become a beloved Easter hymn. The tune sung above was adapted from a Gregorian chant by prolific hymn tune writer Lowell Mason (1792-1872), “the father of American church music.”
“But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Galatians 6:14 ESV)
1 When I survey the wondrous cross On which the Prince of glory died, My richest gain I count but loss, And pour contempt on all my pride.
2 Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast, Save in the death of Christ my God: All the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them to his blood.
3 See, from his head, his hands, his feet, Sorrow and love flow mingled down: Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, Or thorns compose so rich a crown?
4 Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were a present far too small; Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all.
Today, free association. Because I used to work for the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations. (Actually, no – I just free-associated that thought.)
What actually happened was that I was reading the latest issue of the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty magazine today, and saw an article about the founding father John Dickinson. My brain burped, and somehow the name came out “Dick Johnson” in my mind.
That sent me sliding down the memory hole, to my antique boyhood. One of the only books we had in our home was the anthology of light verse, What Cheer, published by Modern Library, edited by David McCord. I spent a lot of time with that book, understanding about half of what I read but fascinated by the rhyme, rhythm, and word play. One of the poems that caught my fancy was an American political ditty about the politician and soldier Richard Mentor Johnson (1780-1850). I can’t find the poem in my own copy at the moment, but I remember the chorus going, “Rumpsey-dumpsy, rumpsey-dumpsy; I, Dick Johnson, killed Tecumseh.”
The poem struck me at the time because I had a schoolteacher named Dick Johnson. I wondered, vaguely, who this Dick Johnson might be (I did not wonder about Tecumseh. Contrary to what the educational demagogues are telling us today, we did learn about Native Americans in school back then). Once the internet became available, I eventually looked the man up. He had a fascinating story, one that demonstrates some of the overlooked nuances in American history.
Going straight to the headline, Richard Johnson was Vice President of the United States under Martin Van Buren. He holds the distinction of being the only V.P. ever elected by the Senate under the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution.
Johnson was a Kentuckian. He attended Transylvania University and became a lawyer, being noted for doing pro bono work for the poor. Among the properties he inherited from his father was a female slave of mixed race, what they called an “octoroon,” named Julia Chinn. He fell in love with her. It was illegal for them to marry, but Johnson treated her as a common law wife and acknowledged their children. This arrangement would impair his political career, but he remained faithful to her until her death in 1833. Both their daughters married white men, though they were not permitted to inherit his property.
He served in the Kentucky House of Representatives, and then became the first native Kentuckian elected to Congress. He was one of the “war hawks” in the run-up to the War of 1812. Notably, he supported the claims of Alexander Hamilton’s widow to army wages which her late husband had refused during the Revolution, despite the fact that Hamilton had been a member of the opposition party.
Back in Kentucky, Johnson raised a troop of 300 volunteers for the war and they elected him their major; later he became a colonel. Most of these volunteers’ actions were against the Native Americans allied with the British. At the Battle of the Thames in October 1813, he led a charge against the Shawnee leader Tecumseh in which Tecumseh was killed. Johnson himself never claimed to have fired the shot that struck that charismatic man down, but several others said he did. Historians are undecided.
The capitol was in ruins, burned by the English, when Johnson returned to congress in 1814, and they met in temporary quarters. As a legislator, Johnson pushed for pensions for military widows and orphans, and for public improvements in the west.
In 1819 he was elected to the Senate (state legislatures did it back in those days, you may recall). In 1820 he voted in favor of a law to bar slavery north of the 36˚30’ north latitude line (with the exception of Missouri). In 1822 he proposed a bill outlawing imprisonment for debtors in the US. It did not pass, but he reintroduced it every year. (Full disclosure – he had debt troubles of his own.)
He became a supporter of Andrew Jackson, and was one of the original founders of the Democratic Party in 1828. In 1825 he succeeded in getting funding for a school for children of the Choctaw nation which was established on his own property and which he oversaw (there were accusations of conflict of interest).
On an amusing note, Johnson sponsored a bill in 1823 for funding an expedition to discover whether the earth was hollow. This proposal failed. In 1828 he lost a race for reelection to the senate. He returned to the House in 1829. In 1832, his law to abolish debtor’s prisons finally went through. He was considered as Andrew Jackson’s running mate in 1832, but Martin Van Buren got the nod. Friends, including Davy Crockett, urged Johnson to run for president in 1836, but he ended up as Van Buren’s running mate. Much of Johnson’s political opposition rose from distaste, especially in the south, for his racially mixed domestic situation. Thus, though Van Buren did win the presidency, Johnson got considerably fewer electoral votes, and the race was thrown into the Senate, as mentioned above.
His tenure as vice president was not notable, except for continuing accusations of conflict of interest, and his adoption of a personal fashion brand – he made it a practice to wear a red tie and vest at all times. In 1840, although Van Buren was reelected, Johnson was not. By that time, it is reported, his mind was beginning to fail.
Back home in Kentucky, he served in the state legislature and was one of Daniel Boone’s pallbearers. He died of a stroke, aged 70.
The early 19th Century is a somewhat neglected period in our common memory, it seems to me, except for a few incidents like the Alamo and the California Gold Rush. But I always found it a fascinating time, full of idiosyncrasies, as the new country tried out its muscles, tested its limits, and tried to figure out exactly what kind of a country it wanted to be.
There are many ways for a book to be bad, and many different ways for readers to respond to badness in books. (I’m speaking here of bad craftsmanship, not qualities of morality.) In my case, really bad prose will usually kill a book for me – if words are fumbled, I’ll dump it. Weakness of plot I can tolerate a little more, if there are other pleasures in the story. So it was (for me) with Drive to Kill, by Sam Jones. It was weak, but good enough to finish.
Dean Blackwood, the hero of the series that this book kicks off, is a sort of special FBI agent. He’s been their go-to guy for extreme investigations in which overkill and brutalization of prisoners are permitted (not sure how that works legally). But in his last case, his family got caught in the crossfire; they survived, but his wife left him and he was reassigned to a desk job in the northwest.
But now he’s come back to Los Angeles to visit his family, hoping for a reconciliation. He goes to the beach for some surfing with an old friend, and a gunfight breaks out in the parking lot. His friend catches a bullet and is killed, and Dean makes up his mind to investigate this thing, whether the cops, the feds, or his wife approve or not. The trail will lead him to the Armenian mob, crooked cops, and somewhere else where he really does not want to go.
The major weakness in this book was the plotting, which was unusually poor. I’m accustomed to today’s thriller writers employing “movie logic,” expecting us to swallow improbabilities camouflaged with fast chases and violence. But author Jones expects us in this story to believe a ridiculous sequence of coincidences – the gunfight that kills Dean’s friend at the start of the story just happens to be related to an old case Dean worked. And then he goes to talk to a witness, and just happens onto another related murder. There’s a further coincidence too, I think, but I forget the details.
Writing tip: You get one major coincidence per book. One coincidence, especially if it kicks off the action, can be permitted. Pile them on, and you lose credibility.
The prose was fair – I’ve seen worse, though the author sometimes needs his verbiage pruned, and occasionally he mistakes homophones. On the other hand, he included what I considered one good, original figure of speech, and in a couple scenes he employed a nice technique for building suspense that impressed me – I may borrow it in the future.
There’s a Christian evangelist in the story who looks pretty bad, but the character turned out more complex than I suspected, so that’s OK.
But all in all, I give Drive to Kill a thumbs down for shabby plotting.
It may be spring at last now. We’ve hovered around the freezing point, up and down, for several weeks. Just warm enough to make me check what coat to put on every time I’ve gone outside. Last Saturday I attended a wedding. Rain had been forecast, but it turned out bright – though the temperatures were cool. I was able to wear my new suit. Survived a few conversations with human beings, which required some restorative napping afterward.
On Monday I finally did it (I think). I sat down in my makeshift recording studio and recorded the Prologue to Troll Valley. I don’t know how long it’s been since certain friends provided me with a decent mike and earphones, plus peripherals, and I began trying to master the dark art of recording audiobooks. I have taken it slowly, and for longer or shorter periods I’ve had to set it aside for other projects. I’m not sure what accounts most for my slow progress – my fear of technology or my innate ineptitude with anything that involves working with my hands. Perhaps a mixture of the two.
So I’ve taken the cautious route. I have not pushed myself far on any particular day. Practiced until I felt uncomfortable, then packed it up for tomorrow. Tiny increments. Dr. Jordan Peterson tells us that if you’re afraid to tackle something, you break it down into small portions. If you can’t clean your room yet, clean out a drawer. Dust a shelf. Just do something every day.
He says that if you do this, your confidence will grow as you accumulate little successes. Each success results in a small shot of dopamine, and you come to look forward to those little shots, and so you can accomplish more and more – enjoying it more and more all the while.
That doesn’t really seem to work for me. My dopamine delivery system appears to have been suppressed, or overwhelmed by one or more of my myriad phobias.
So I’ve been proceeding purely on stubbornness, buttressed by a guilty fear of disappointing the people who’ve helped me out.
And on Monday I recorded that Prologue. And in spite of all my misgivings, I could not but admit that it was adequate. Adequate is enough at this point. Artificial Intelligence does adequate work, and it’s taking over the book narration business. Adequate will do.
And I actually felt that little spurt of dopamine. It must have been a massive infusion at the source, to muscle its way through all my inhibitions. But I felt a genuine sensation of gratification, of having passed a milestone, of scoring a goal.
My progress will continue to be slow. Chapter 1 is long, and I’m taking it in little pieces.
Here is a portion of a radio talk C. S. Lewis gave on Charles Williams, whose Descent Into Hell I reviewed last night.
I’ve heard the complete talk, which is very short in its own right. I don’t know why they cut it down, except that Lewis starts with an anecdote about the poets Leigh Hunt and Thomas Babington Macauley as an example of bad literary criticism. I suppose nowadays nobody knows who either of them is. (To be honest, I don’t know much about them myself.)
Below, an introduction to Williams by the scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson, for whom I recently did some translation work. I did not in fact know she was into such good stuff. Turns out that, counting David Llewellyn Dodds, who comments here from time to time, I know two important Inklings scholars.
He could enjoy; at least he could refuse not to enjoy. He could refuse and reject damnation.
With a perfectly clear, if instantaneous, knowledge of what he did, he rejected joy instead.
Charles Williams’ novels have been a major influence on my own works (partly, certainly, by way of C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, but to a great degree on their own account). Of all those books, it’s the 1937 urban fantasy Descent Into Hell that has most kept me company through the years, because I recognize my own vulnerabilities in it.
The book is misleadingly simple to explain, yet complex in the execution. The action centers on the production of a new play by the poet Peter Stanhope, in his home town and residence of Battle Hill, a suburb north of London. Among the actors is Pauline Anstruther, a young woman crippled by constant fear. Occasionally through her life, and increasingly frequently in recent weeks, she has been seeing her doppelganger, a double of herself, approaching her up the street. Her fear of the apparition is increased by her fear that she is losing her mind. She’s ashamed to share the problem with anyone, until finally Stanhope himself draws it out of her. He is surprisingly unsurprised, and explains to Pauline the doctrine of exchange, by which Christians may literally bear one another’s burdens. He promises to carry her fear for her, and the results are immediate. But Pauline learns that this relief is only the first step in her own assignment, that of carrying the burden of yet another person – an ancestor of hers who was martyred under Bloody Mary. (In Williams’ view, as in quantum physics, an effect may precede its cause.)
Meanwhile, we also have the chilling tale of Lawrence Wentworth, a noted but superficial military historian, also a resident of Battle Hill. Wentworth is experiencing what we now call a midlife crisis. He has grown obsessed with Adela Hunt, a pretty and superficial young woman who’s engaged to a young man but likes to flirt with him. Through the machinations of a local witch, Lawrence is presented with a simulacrum of Adela, a soulless automaton which embodies his lustful imaginations of what he thinks Adela ought to be. Under the spell of the false Adela, Lawrence gradually disengages from everything that mattered to him – even some of his petty sins might have offered a roundabout road to salvation, if he desired it, but all he really loves, at bottom, is himself as he seems himself reflected in the false Adela. And so he is damned.
There’s yet another plot thread, touching both Pauline’s and Lawrence’s stories, involving a pitiful ghost who never lived much of a life and died a suicide. He wanders in a sort of limbo in another dimension of Battle Hill, and a way to salvation is offered to him as well.
What I had forgotten about Descent Into Hell was how dense and difficult the prose is. The characters’ actions are fairly straightforward. But the author is constantly informing us what is going on on the heavenly or spiritual level. And that commentary is what makes the book a difficult read. Author Williams goes very deep into his theology and his personal speculations on theology here. I’m more familiar with Williams’ thinking than most people, but I often had trouble following.
And yet it was worth it – for me. I do love Descent Into Hell.
There were interesting points I noticed for the first time on this reading: for instance, Lawrence neglects his scholarship as part of his process of damnation, but Stanhope, in another place, sets aside his poetry, in a different way, and that’s part of his process of sanctification. Nice touch, symmetrical and instructive.
Recommended, if you’re up for a challenge. This e-book edition contains some OCR errors.
Here’s the latest news from the Saga Heritage Foundation, the organization that produced the wonderfully translated book, Viking Legacy.
Their next projects, as I understand it, are English versions of the Flatey Book and Tormod Torfaeus’ Latin history of Norway. I doubt there’ll be much work for me in all this, but it’s worth spreading the news.
Prof. Titlestad, who wrote Viking Legacy, is the fellow in the wide-brimmed hat.
I’m re-reading Charles Williams’ Descent Into Hell. It’s my favorite of his novels, and (I was pleased to learn) often considered his best by critics. If you haven’t read it, it centers on two characters – a young woman who repeatedly meets her doppelganger walking up the street, and a middle-aged historian who becomes obsessed with a young woman and is offered a soulless simulacrum of her. One of them is drawn into the community of God’s grace, while the other “descends into Hell” through self-indulgence. I have an idea I can write an article about this book that might illuminate some current issues.
Because I have my finger, you know, on the pulse of societal change.
Silly, I admit, but I think I may actually be in a unique position to comment, due not to my wisdom but to my failures and sins.
Anyway, it’s also in this novel that Williams demonstrates most clearly his doctrine of exchange, the idea that the Christian teaching that we should bear one another’s burdens is more than a metaphor. He believed that we can pray to literally take on our brothers’ and sisters’ fears, difficulties, and pains, suffering them for them – because it’s lighter to bear when it’s someone else’s. And they in turn can bear ours.
Williiams’ friend C. S. Lewis reported that he attempted this exercise with his wife Joy, when the pain of her cancer was most difficult. He felt some pain, he said, and she told him her own was diminished.
That’s all very subjective, of course. Not nearly as dramatic as what happens in the novel. I made the experiment myself at least once. As I recall, the sick friend I prayed for did report he was feeling better soon. But again, it’s subjective. Not the sort of dramatic outcome we would like to see.
Of course we can always spiritualize it. Regard it in terms of the mystery of Christian community, the fellowship of the saints.
But that wasn’t what Williams believed. He took it literally.
What is on Walker’s TV as he writes this blog post, America asks.
The TV series above. It’s been my habit for some time to turn to some old TV show or movie at this time of day, as a sort of white noise. Quite often it’s been some old British crime TV series. I watched, for instance, several episodes of an ancient series called “Z-Cars” (pronounced, of course, “Zed cars”), which in its earliest seasons featured a beardless Brian Blessed as a uniformed cop – one of his early acting jobs.
Now I’ve found this 1985 British miniseries set in Norway, entitled “Maelstrom.” It was broadcast in the US, on one of the cable networks, back in the late ’80s, and I recorded it on VHS at the time because, after all, it was set in Norway, and it wasn’t awful.
It stars an English/Swedish actress named Tussi Silberg as a British woman who discovers that a Norwegian millionaire she’s never heard of has left her some property and a dried fish factory. Mystified, she flies over there, where she finds everyone welcoming, and nobody seems to begrudge her a share of the family’s rather large fortune. But strange occurrences… occur, and behind it all there’s the continued puzzle of what possible connection the old man might have had to her.
It’s not bad. The acting’s fair, except for some histrionics at the end. The psychology is pretty naïve. And, of course, there’s the beautiful Norwegian scenery.
For some reason, perhaps because of the old TV series (which I hated as a kid but quite like now), I never really considered reading a Perry Mason book until fairly recently. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how much I’ve liked them. There’s no great writing here – the prose can be pretty shopworn – but Erle Stanley Gardner was a top-notch plotter. One reads these books for the surprises. Today’s review: The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom.
Attorney Perry Mason is putting in late hours in his office one night, when he spots a pair of lovely female legs on the fire escape. He confronts the possessor of those legs, persuading her to come inside. (Mason is certain that she tosses a gun into the alley in the process, but she insists that’s not true.) She tells him that she has been concerned about the oil exploration company that occupies offices directly above his. She thinks someone is up to something shady there, and as a relative is an investor, she wanted to see what was going on. The story’s a little thin, but she manages to escape Perry in the end.
The next day Perry meets the manager of the office upstairs, who wants to hire him on a divorce matter. He recently went to Mexico to get married, not realizing that his first wife, who had told him she had divorced him in Reno, did no such thing – and now she’s trying to use bigamy as a lever against him. Perry learns that she has gotten the police involved, and accompanies his client and the new wife to Mexico, where they can get a Mexican divorce and marry legally.
But when the police put out a warrant for murder against his client, things get complicated.
There are some very nice plot twists in The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom. I especially liked one where Perry tries to get a jump on the prosecution strategy and it comes back to bite him. Lots of lies, lots of twists, and a surprise ending in the Gardner style.
First class, undemanding entertainment. I enjoyed The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom.
