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.
The author Neil Gaiman has been in the news in recent months, though I myself, incisive social observer that I am, was unaware until recently, and learned about it through Facebook. It appears there are a number of plausible accusations against him of inappropriate and coercive sexual acts with women.
Of course he’s legally entitled to the assumption of innocence. I have nothing to say about that. He is not a Christian, so my criticism wouldn’t mean much.
But I personally have been against Gaiman a long time, for purely private and petty reasons.
Goes back to 2001, when the man published a book called American Gods (I won’t link to it, because I’m small-minded) which dealt with the Norse god Odin appearing in the modern world. It was a huge bestseller.
I, on the other hand, had had a book published by Baen Books, Wolf Time, in 1999. It dealt with the Norse god Odin in the modern world too. This book was highly spoken of by my friends.
I have ever since held the bitter opinion that American Gods smothered Wolf Time. That there was only room on the market for one book about Odin in the modern world, and Gaiman had opportunistically grabbed that spot.
This argument is weakened by the fact that my book actually came out two years earlier and had had plenty of time to get traction, if traction was to be had.
But in my perception, the books came out in the same time window. My perception, as is so often the case, was wrong.
Still, I held a grudge against Neil Gaiman.
This may be a major reason why I turned down the opportunity to meet him when I had a chance.
I have a friend, retired now, who was a limo driver in Minneapolis. He used to regale me with stories of the celebrities he’d driven (Garrison Keillor was reserved but thoughtful enough to buy him lunch. Prince was positively standoffish, and a bad tipper as well. Cheryl Teigs was sweet). One day he called me and asked if I’d ever heard of Neil Gaiman. He was driving Gaiman around that day (the author was living in Wisconsin at the time) and could introduce me.
Part of my reluctance was just not wishing to be a fan boy, especially since I’d only read American Gods of his works and hadn’t loved it. I figured it would involve just a quick handshake and hello during a signing.
Later I learned that my friend had actually gotten quite close to Gaiman, and watched his kid while he was doing his signing. I probably could have had a real conversation with the guy. Shmoozed with a genuine industry player. Networked.
Learning that, I figured I’d missed an opportunity.
Now I guess it was just as well.
I’m having an attack of obsession with my translation work tonight — coming up on a milestone and eager to get to it. So you’ll have to settle for a message from better writer than me — C. S. Lewis talking about the books of his friend, Charles Williams.
It does not hurt that he’s defending the precise kind of fiction I write. I think it’s fair to say that posterity has justified Lewis’ position.
I was thinking, based on something I saw on Facebook, that today is J. R. R. Tolkien’s birthday. Then I took the unwonted precaution of checking it, and found that it’s actually tomorrow.
Which means I can actually post this in time for you to see it soon enough to do something about it.
So if you want to prepare for the traditional Tolkien toast, that will be tomorrow. Friday.
Tolkien is (he said, in a low voice as if he was expressing something not entirely predictable) a great inspiration to me.
For years, the man toiled away at this huge project, shoehorning it into his rare free moments. With no realistic prospect of publication, ever. He had no reason in the world to believe that anyone would be interested in reading it. When his friend C. S. Lewis said he liked it, “Tollers” was delighted.
Think of the cultural phenomenon The Lord of the Rings has become since that time. The millions of copies sold in a multitude of languages. The biographies and commentaries and scholarship. The film adaptations. The fandom. The games and memorabilia and merchandising. Whole careers have been built on the back of this fantasy, which has proven a very solid, load-bearing structure indeed, for a work of the imagination.
It’s hard to believe that there was a time when the story had one (1) fan in the world, outside of Tolkien’s own family.
It’s this kind of fact that keeps delusions alive in lesser writers. I could name one in particular, but let’s not talk about … him.
All together now: “The Professor!”
A Christian professor of fiction published a piece “To the Christian Writer” in which he recommends good art as a thing separate from Christian faith.
He begins by saying, “there’s no such thing as Christian art.” If someone wants to be a Christian, he should pursue it wholeheartedly, but “bad art comes out when you compromise art-making with some other intent.” Some other intent like Christian morals.
“If your fiction feels like it’s veering toward a moral conclusion, stop.”
I want to understand this professor’s argument and view it charitably, and I agree moralistic fiction is often shallow and ugly. I’m sure if I ever gain the courage to pick up Sheldon’s In His Steps, the novel that gave us the question “What Would Jesus Do?” I’ll regret it. I couldn’t make it past chapter one of The Shack. But separating Christian devotion from art sounds post-modern to me in all the wrong ways. What is art if it cannot be pursued as an expression of Christian truth?
I’m not sure he’s actually saying that, because he also says, “As a Christian person, would you not say it’s a joy to follow God? So follow him through your work. Quit telling him where to stand and how to speak.” That’s good. It calls back to moralistic work which may sound Christian while being far from it. That’s not good art.
“Preconceived moralizing jacketed in fiction aims for the head and the heart. If you want to be a good writer, aim elsewhere.” What does that mean? Aim for the spleen? What is good art if it doesn’t move the heart or elevate the affections (thinking of Jonathan Edwards’s language)? What makes the work of Margaret Atwood, Jack Kerouac, Barbara Kingsolver, Haruki Murakami, Annie Proulx, or Salman Rushdie objectively good that he recommends them over Lewis, Chesterton, and O’Connor?
Could it be we’re actually wrestling over cultural respectability — that our work would find approval in the New York Times Review of Books or Harper’s Magazine?
I think art is its own virtue, like planting and tending a tree, and artistic choices are also moral choices. Some choices are going to be more accessible to the public than others. Some will require greater levels of skill to succeed. In all of these choices, the best ones (though maybe not the most popular) will be true, real, and good. Isn’t that what Christian art is all about?
Photo by Peter Ivey-Hansen on Unsplash
A hundred years ago in Vietnam, when the French controlled their education, Edgar Allan Poe was believed to be “America’s literary giant.” They were familiar with eerie stories of supernatural beings, which a long-standing Chinese genre gave them, so discovering Poe was like grandkids discovering Mam-ma.
“Poe’s name evoked liberation of the mind, and he was praised as someone who had ascended from the mundane by the power of imagination,” Nguyễn Bình writes for Literary Hub, offering several examples of Poe’s influence on the nation’s literature.
In 1937, author Thế Lữ began writing detective fiction. “In the story “Những nét chữ” (Letter Strokes), [Hanoi-based hero] Lê Phong told the Watson-like narrator: ‘The stuff about reading people’s thoughts from their faces like Edgar Poe and Conan Doyle said… I’m only more convinced that they’re true. Because I just did so.'” (via Prufrock)
A couple more links for today.
Ted Gioia says the big guys are out to get independent creators. For example, Apple is squeezing Patreon. Google says it can’t find select websites. It’s ugly. Gioia writes, “I’ve been very critical of Apple in recent months. But this is the most shameful thing they have ever done to the creative community. A company that once bragged how it supported artistry now actively works to punish it.”
And is this the best sci-fi classic most fans have missed? “Though it routinely ends up on best-of-all-time lists, somehow, the 1974 science fiction novel The Mote in God’s Eye never actually seems to get read.” A quick glance at the first of 2200 reviews on Goodreads suggests the book hasn’t aged well.
Photo: Dinneen Standard station, Cheyenne, Wyoming. (John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)
The Fellowship & Fairydust blog has posted the second part of its interview with our friend Dale Nelson. This portion concentrates on his work on Inklings scholarship:
So, much that keeps me interested in the Inklings is not just academic curiosity or opportunism but a concern for the moral imagination incarnated in our lives and homes; and these books are delightful to read. At the moment I’m reading The Lord of the Rings for the 14th time.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, Columbus won out, as state capital, by only one vote over Lancaster, and ever since then has had the hallucination that it is being followed, a curious municipal state of mind which affects, in some way or other, all those who live there.
I had read bits of it already. I remember finding “The Night the Bed Fell On Father” hilarious when I was a boy. So I looked forward to reading A Thurber Carnival.
To be honest, I found it less funny, and more troubling, than I expected.
James Thurber is a classic American humorist, one of the founding fathers of The New Yorker. Some of his pieces, especially the story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” have become classics. Even legends.
As I worked my way through this collection of essays, stories, and cartoons, I was surprised how dark I found it. Not overtly – there was no obvious self-pity on display here. But I thought I felt the presence of a bitter spirit behind it all.
James Thurber, born in Columbus, Ohio, suffered the loss of an eye in a game of William Tell as a small boy. For the rest of his life, he lived with the fear – then the certainty – that the other eye was going to fail. He lost his sight entirely in the end, a terrible fate for a man of letters. For this reader, that unspoken fear seemed to form a background to everything. Here is not the lightness of Robert Benchley. Here is a humorist cracking wise on the scaffold.
Or so it seemed to me.
Or maybe it’s just that I’m not bright enough to appreciate the sophisticated gags.
Anyway, it’s a classic. You should probably read it. You might enjoy it more than I did.
I should perhaps warn that there’s some casual racism, characteristic of the time but not vicious, in descriptions of black people.
Dale Nelson, retired professor of English at Mayville State University, North Dakota, is a good friend of mine and one of the more frequent commenters on this blog. He is also a presence in the world of Inklings and fantastic fiction scholarship.
Linked here is a recent interview he gave to the Fellowship & Fairydust web site. The interview actually comes in two parts. This is the first, and deals mainly with horror literature.
A second segment, more about the Inklings, is coming soon. I’ll post that too.
