What was my surprise to open up James Scott Bell’s latest Mike Romeo novel, Romeo’s Truth, and find that one of my own reviews on this blog was quoted as the very first blurb at the front of the book?
James Scott Bell has produced gold in the Mike Romeo series, about a one-time cage fighter and certified genius on a quest for virtue. I want to be Mike Romeo when I get younger. Highly recommended.
My thanks to author Bell. I’m enjoying Romeo’s Truth.
It’s one of those loose end nights. I’ve accomplished little today, and the book I’m reading goes slow. Above is a video I found, in which a saga scholar discusses the influence of the saga writer Snorri Sturlusson on J.R.R. Tolkien, citing his own interview with one of the Tolkiens’ Icelandic au paires.
Today was a rainy, cool day, devoted – in my world – to worrying about buying a car. I’d made contact with a guy who had one to sell that interested me. Last night I made all kinds of plans for getting over to Woodbury, where he’s located, to look at it (without a working car of my own). This morning all the plans fell apart, as it appeared somebody else was considering the car. I studied the ads over again, increasingly aware how rare is the plausible vehicle that I can actually afford. But later today the guy called me back, inviting me to call him tomorrow morning to make arrangements; he’s willing to drive the thing to my place so I can test-drive it.
I have a feeling I’ll buy it after all that trouble, unless it’s visibly smoking or trailing oil, or smells of dead bodies.
I’m already thinking of my brief adventure with Sigrid the Haughty, my Subaru Forester turbo, as a kind of midlife crisis (a little late in life, but that’s mostly how I roll). Sigrid was fast and exciting, but expensive and not really suited to me. The car I have in mind looks to be a little more bourgeois and conventional.
I’ll let you know how it turns out.
I did a search on YouTube for a BBC comedy program I remember from the 1970s, “Wodehouse Playhouse.” I caught a couple episodes back in the day, on PBS, and I remembered it as somewhat low-budget, but energetic and fun.
I tried this once a couple years ago and only found one episode, which I duly posted on this blog. But now I find that the whole thing is available. The first episode is above.
(There’s another version on YouTube, and it may be better, as it won’t let me post it here. If the quality of this one disappoints, you might search for that other.)
Well, I’m still moving slowly through the book I’m reading, my time monopolized by work, so I’ll follow up on last night’s post about Rose O’Neill with the story of another famous creative American who’s almost entirely forgotten today – and who also hung around Branson, Missouri. In fact it was this guy, Harold Bell Wright, who made Branson a center of tourism. Not intentionally.
Harold Bell Wright grew up in difficult circumstances, losing his parents at 11, and ended up in Ohio, working at various jobs. He studied for the ministry, and became a pastor in the non-denominational, non-creedal Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), taking a call in Pierce City, Missouri. He later served churches in Kansas and California.
He wrote a serialized story in 1902 that got printed, though he hated it, in a denominational magazine. His parishioners loved it, however, and so it was published as a book. His second novel was his breakthrough. The Shepherd of the Hills, set in the Branson, MO area, which he’d visited for his health, was published in 1907. It became a blockbuster bestseller – the first American novel to ever earn a million bucks. It has since been filmed four times, most notably with John Wayne starring in 1941. Other novels of his have also been turned into movies, notably The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926) with Ronald Coleman and Gary Cooper.
But today, chances are you’ve never heard of the man or his books. The reason for that is simple – he wasn’t a very good writer. (Owen Wister called one of his novels “a mess of mildewed pap.”)
Now as it happened, I acquired a copy of Shepherd of the Hills on my trip with my parents to Branson long ago, and I read it. As I recall, I found it entertaining and even inspirational, though a little stiff, as old books tend to be. However, it should be noted that my critical sense in those days was almost nonexistent. I aspired to be a writer, but I definitely wasn’t ready, because I couldn’t tell good writing from bad.
The Shepherd of the Hills is a highly moral tale. It tells a complicated story of mountain people who hold long-time grudges, which they are prepared to settle with blood until their hearts are softened by the spirit of forgiveness. In forgiveness they find peace.
Which is nice, as far as it goes. But it’s not a Christian tale in the sense of talking about Jesus or grace. It is assumed that the blessings of forgiveness flow from the world of the spirit in some sense, but it’s a matter (if I remember correctly) of people achieving their true moral stature rather than of their dying and rising again in Christ.
Wright’s church body was and is a pretty tolerant one in terms of doctrine, but still Wright quit the ministry (to make a much better living as a writer), declaring most congregational life hypocritical. His emphasis was on good works. That was well suited to the rising culture of America at the turn of the 20th Century – an emphasis on progress and self-help, with a sprinkling of Christianity on top, to taste.
I’ve seen the John Wayne movie of The Shepherd of the Hills. Its plot is radically altered and simplified from the book (it would pretty much have to be). It amused me that the film climaxed with John Wayne in a shootout – I guess the writers couldn’t resist that, though it’s not at all in the spirit of the book.
But, who cares? It’s not like the original material was a work of priceless art. Harold Bell Wright toiled in his time, and pleased most of his neighbors, and made a pile of money. His legacy is not his forgotten book, but the tourist mecca of Branson, Missouri, which he fathered unintentionally.
I wonder if he ever hung out with Rose O’Neill in Branson.
Now and then, ideas converge for me, which is about the best fun I have in life. And then I feel compelled to write about them here, in the sight of my guardian angel and everybody, inviting public scorn and ignominy (I believe Ignominy is a town in Wisconsin. Good fishing, they tell me).
A while back I posted about what seemed like a breakthrough in my own mental life – by way of, of all things, a dream. I found a “place” in my brain where I could take shelter from intrusive memories. I even had an idea where that “place” was located – on the right side of the brain, just above the ear. The technique of resorting to this “place” has not proved the panacea I hoped at first, but it remains a useful trick for me in regulating my thoughts, and I still use it pretty much every day.
More recently, I discovered the psychiatrist Iaian McGilchrist, initially through the conversation with Eric Metaxas embedded above. I have not yet shelled out for any of his books, because they’re kind of pricey, but I’ve watched several more videos. So far as I can grasp his thesis, I understand it thus:
We all know that the normal human brain is bilateral. Most of my life I’ve been informed that the left brain (which controls the right side of the body) is the plodding, logical, workhorse of the mind. Meanwhile, the right brain is creative and spontaneous. Back in the sixties and seventies, the hippies were always trying to access their right brains.
McGilchrist’s thesis does not contradict these distinctions, but refines them. The left brain, he says, evolved for the purpose of concentration and task completion. It learns routines, devises systems, puts things in boxes and labels them. It’s what allows us to do things automatically. Its functions are necessary to our survival. But it considers itself very smart – smarter than it is. Its true purpose is to be the servant or “emissary” of the “master” – the right brain.
The right brain is where our real intelligence lies. The right brain makes imaginative leaps. It maintains a global awareness of its surroundings. It is creative and inventive. It’s meant to be in control.
All my life, the left brain has been associated with people like me – the orthodox, the conventional. Left brain people reduce everything to set formulas and are quick to judge. Which – I can’t deny – is not far from a description of my own nature.
But McGilchrist also directs his spotlight onto other kinds of idealogues – the leftists and fascists and communists and feminists and environmentalists, etc., etc. who’ve infested our politics and history for so many decades. They’re left-brain people too, he says, and we’re beginning to get tired of them (or so he hopes).
But here’s the point of tonight’s essay. In a recent McGilchrist video I watched, he made a comment that rang a little bell for me – he said, in so many words, “The left brain is, in fact, mad.”
I immediately recalled something G. K. Chesteron wrote in Orthodoxy:
If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
McGilchrist is not a Christian. By his own account, he values Christianity but is unable to believe in the miracle of the Resurrection.
Yet he has managed, after a century, to catch up to Chesterton, by the empirical rather than by the theological road.
Chesterton, I imagine, was thinking with his right brain.
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.
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.
Have you ever tried it? Know anyone who has?
I took to American food from the start like a starving Eskimo flinging himself on a portion of blubber. The poet Keats, describing his emotions on first reading Chapman’s Homer, speaks of himself as feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. Precisely so did I feel … when the waiter brought me my first slab of strawberry shortcake … ‘No matter if it puts an inch on my waistline,’ I said to myself, ‘I must be in on this.’
There are biographies of P.G. Wodehouse out there; I haven’t gotten around to reading any of them. But a deal showed up on P.G. Wodehouse In His Own Words, and I figured I’d give it a try. It’s neither a long nor greatly illuminating work, but it is an opportunity to revisit a lot of Wodehouse’s best stuff, which can’t help being entertaining.
The scheme here is to go through the facts of the author’s biography, relating them to various quotations from his works. This book’s authors, Barry Day and Tony Ring, admit that we don’t know for sure how Wodehouse’s thinking worked, and we can’t always rely on his own statements on the subject – he considered himself rather a dull fellow, and embroidered his statements accordingly. But overall I think I learned a little reading it.
There isn’t a lot of drama in the story, except of course for the lamentable account of Wodehouse and his wife being detained by the Germans during World War II, and his grievous error in making recordings that the Germans used for propaganda. This mistake resulted in his never returning to England (though he could have gone back after a time, and the queen knighted him in absentia), but becoming a US citizen. The authors take what I consider the correct view – that Wodehouse dropped a brick but merely through thoughtlessness. And regretted it.
I did notice one error in the book. The authors believe (no doubt deceived by Jeeves’s glamor) that valets stand higher in the social order “Downstairs” than butlers. This is wrong. The butler was king of the servants in an aristocratic household. If Bertie had married and set up a stately home, I expect Jeeves would have been promoted to that lofty office.
But otherwise, I had a good time with P.G. Wodehouse In His Own Words. Recommended.
Sarah A. Hoyt, who blogs at According to Hoyt and who frequents the juggernaut that is Instapundit, was kind enough to include my novel The Year of the Warrior in her final post in her Liberty Book Promo, promoting authors who support freedom. Here’s the link. There are other books there that might interest you too.
Today was Sverdrup Forum Day. Our annual Georg Sverdrup Society meeting for students of our seminary, and others interested, in which papers are read and discussion encouraged.
I usually read an extract from one of my translations of Sverdrup’s works, but this year somebody else did that duty, and I was asked to do opening devotions instead.
I’ve written before about my phobia concerning praying in public. But I wrote it all out ahead of time, and read it from my printed text. That was not a problem.
I ran short, time-wise, but not by accident. I knew, from experience, that these shebangs tend to run long. Nobody complained about my brevity, and the forum, as it happened, ended almost precisely on schedule.
[Insert here labored metaphor about the concept of brevity and its application to life.]
As I’ve told you, I just finished translating a literary biography.
A question occurred to me – “Is there such a thing as a genuinely good biography that isn’t sad?”
I once read (I think) a quotation by Oscar Wilde (can’t find it online, so maybe it’s one of those made-up things. Still good): “Tragedy is comedy plus time.”
In other words, you can make any comedy a tragedy by just leaving the curtain up. In the end, everybody dies, just like in Hamlet.
You’ve got two choices in a death. It can be too soon, or too late. There never seems to be a perfect time.
Most of us look forward to a long life. But that often means a slow decline as health problems increase, and friends die, and the world gradually turns alien and dangerous around us.
I just wrote a novel where two main characters die Viking deaths.
There’s something to be said for that.
Does this mean I’m ready to go now, while I’m still ambulatory and not wearing a diaper?
Are you kidding? No way.