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.
For an All Saints hymn today, let’s meditate on “Shall We Gather at the River” by Philadelphia-born minister Robert Lowry (1826-189). The Biography of Gospel Song and Hymn Writers praises his musical work.
“His melodies are sung in every civilized land, and many of his hymns have been translated into foreign tongues. While preaching the Gospel, in which he found great joy, was his life-work, music and hymnology were favorite studies, but were always a side issue, a recreation.”
“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” (Revelation 22:1–2 ESV)
1 Shall we gather at the river,
Where bright angel feet have trod;
With its crystal tide forever
Flowing by the throne of God?
Refrain:
Yes, we’ll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river;
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God.
2 On the margin of the river,
Washing up its silver spray,
We will walk and worship ever,
All the happy golden day. [Refrain]
3 Ere we reach the shining river,
Lay we ev’ry burden down;
Grace our spirits will deliver,
And provide a robe and crown. [Refrain]
4 Soon we’ll reach the shining river,
Soon our pilgrimage will cease;
Soon our happy hearts will quiver
With the melody of peace. [Refrain]
Douglas Murray discusses the success of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” and its failure of as both a concept and a conclusion from the trail of Adolf Eichmann.
“Together with Eichmann’s contemporary attempts at memoir-writing—which were known about by the time of the trial—an Eichmann entirely different from Arendt’s emerges. Wonder of wonders, it is the Eichmann that the world knew existed until Hannah Arendt came along.”
He wasn’t “a mere bureaucrat” but a man who was proud to be a part of the murder of six million Jews. Nazis in Argentina wanted to believe the Holocaust was a hateful lie. “To Eichmann, these efforts to minimize the Holocaust were offensive—something like spitting on his life’s work. Eichmann knew that the six-million figure was accurate, and he seems to have only realized gradually that his audience was hoping for something quite different from him.”
Murray then describes the use of evil banality by contemporary journalists as a way to wave away the acts of terrorists.
“Pure evil. Terrible evil. Unfathomable evil—all of these things for sure. But ‘banal’? No—nothing could be further from the truth. And yet today, the idea of pure evil seems unavailable to many cultured minds. Perhaps it is too theological. Or perhaps we think such terms come from a metaphysics that we have abandoned as insufficiently subtle for our more enlightened times.”
(Photo of Eichmann trail by Israeli GPO photographer/ Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
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.
The Norwegian word for “busy” is “travelt,” which always makes me thing of a crowded road. Which is pretty much what I feel like right now. I have a) my “novel writing” work, which currently means formatting books for paperback, b), the magazine I’m editing for the Valdres Samband, the ethnic organization that hired me for this purpose, c) my translation work on the Sigrid Undset biography, and d) the monthly newsletter for my Sons of Norway lodge (which won’t take long but should have been finished by now).
This morning it rained. The first rain we’ve had around here in months. It’s been raining all day, except for when it snowed (alas for the trick-or-treaters!). When I was done with my novel writing this morning, I happened to look outside and found that the first four of my cartons of orphaned books had arrived from Nordskog (see last night’s story). I have an idea the mail carrier was unhappy about being made to carry those heavy cartons, because he left them on the very outside edge of the porch, where the drip from the awning would pour straight down on them.
Some of the cartons were soaking wet; all were damp. I brought them in immediately and freed the books from the cartons. They’re air drying in my living room now, as are the cartons.
Most of the books are fine. A few have covers curled. But I’m getting these things for pennies on the dollar, and don’t expect to outlive the supply anyway.
Ten more cartons arrived this afternoon (perfectly dry, I’m happy to say). Also I finally got my paperback copies of The Elder King from Amazon. I’d been looking forward to that – photo above.
And… I got a surprise. Some moron – and there’s no moron but me on this job – accidentally put the wrong title in the page headers. All the right-hand pages in this edition say at the top that the book is Hailstone Mountain, which it is not.
I wouldn’t have this problem if I’d done the prudent thing and ordered a review copy for myself before releasing it. But I lack the patience. Now I have this.
It’s easily fixed. I’ll republish it tomorrow. Which means the book will be briefly unavailable. The few copies already sold will go down in history as errata, no doubt to become sought-after collectors’ items.
The hits just keep on coming – as many people must have said in the radio business, but I don’t think I ever did, back when I was in the game.
I am forging my way through my Viking books, and can herewith announce that the paperback version of King of Rogaland is now obtainable from Amazon.com. This completes the whole set (sort of, details below), except for the final book, The Baldur Game, which still awaits its cover art.
And then there are the first two books, which present complications of their own.
West Oversea, Book 3 of the series, is in an odd limbo at this juncture. Nordskog, its publisher, is – sadly – going out of business. They have kindly returned all rights to me, and are selling me their entire stock of paperbacks at a steep discount. That’s about 20 cartons at last count. I’ll have my little house packed with them, I guess, which is (I think) the final stage of deterioration in a self-published author’s life cycle. I’m working now at formatting the book for an Amazon version of my own. I think selling this stock of Nordskog paperbacks through Amazon would create a distribution challenge for which I’m not equipped. So I’ll just create a fresh one, and sell my Nordskog volumes at Viking events. I expect they should last me another 40 years or so.
And then there’s The Year of the Warrior. I’m currently getting the paper version printed by a private printer, but I’m going to try to get that one out through Amazon too. I think it’ll be cheaper, but the juxtaposition of Baen’s electronic version with my paperback will, I have no doubt, raise unanticipated problems.
We suffer for our art in many ways. This is not one of the worst. Yet.
Death comes while you are struggling with your application or lack of application of the Judeo-Christian ethic. While you work out the equation which says, If I don’t kill him, he will kill me, so even if I have been taught not to kill, this is an exception—while you are working that out, he is blowing chunks of bone out of your skull. The quick and the dead is an ancient allusion. They were quick and I was quick and lucky.
I always knew it was coming. Even when this book first came out (and I read it back then) I had to expect that when John D. MacDonald gave his hero Travis McGee the girl of his dreams, a big, healthy, well-balanced woman who seemed to be made for him, he would have to kill her off in the next book. (The author is the true villain of every story.) And so it was. The Green Ripper is the darkest and saddest of the Travis McGee series, and incidentally a harbinger of what future detective fiction would be.
Gretel Tuckerman, Trav’s new woman, has taken a job at a property development and health spa near Fort Lauderdale. One day she notices a stranger on the grounds, and recognizes him from a brief encounter years ago in California. A couple days later she is dead, apparently the victim of a rare disease carried by an insect bite.
But before long, a stricken McGee and his friend Meyer get a visit from some government agents with questions. Thanks to Meyer’s security clearance, they get to ask a few questions of their own. It appears there’s a terrorist network within the US, connected to a secretive religious cult in California. It was Gretel’s misfortune to recognize one of its members, and apparently they murdered her by clandestine means.
This is where McGee goes underground. He assumes a new identity, that of a working fisherman with a drinking problem, headed to California to find his daughter, whom he believes joined the cult. He will find the cult. He will join them. Get to know them. Make friends.
And he will get terrible revenge.
Here, I believe, we see the genesis of the detective thriller as we know it today – the Jack Reacher and Gray Man books and others in the same vein, some better, some not so good. Most Travis McGee books are about the mystery, the problem, with a generous helping of violence thrown in. Today, most detective series are primarily about the violence, with just enough of a mystery to hold the plot together.
As an old fogy, I generally find the older way more enjoyable. And as far as I recall, MacDonald never again went as far into ultra-violence as he did in this story. It’s not that I judge The Green Ripper a bad novel, it’s just that the combination of grief and vengeance makes it a downer.
Also, Meyer, supposedly a genius, makes a lot of economic predictions in this book that haven’t played out well in the real world. On the other hand, we have here an object lesson about avoiding religious groups run by women.
So, not my favorite Travis McGee. But it’s a great series.
I like and respect the English author Anthony Horowitz, but I’m less than in love with his Hawthorne and Horowitz books. The premise seems to be an interesting twist on the old Holmes & Watson formula – Hawthorne is a former police detective who has persuaded Horowitz, as an author, to accompany him on private investigations and write about them, with the profits divided. Horowitz shoehorns the stories (apparently) into his actual life circumstances. The Sentence is Death takes place, ostensibly, during the period when Horowitz was a writer for the Foyle’s War TV series.
In this story, the police have asked Hawthorne to consult on a murder investigation. A celebrity divorce lawyer has been murdered in his kitchen, bludgeoned with an expensive bottle of wine. Of course, the victim does not lack for enemies who might have wanted him dead, but there is also a broader range of suspects, some related to a caving accident he was involved in years back. Oddly enough, one of the other survivors of that accident died under mysterious circumstances within a few days of the murder. Also, why did somebody paint a number on the kitchen wall?
There’s nothing wrong with the writing The Sentence Is Death, nor with the characters or the plotting. It’s just that author Horowitz has labored to create a Sherlock Holmes-style character who seems to embody most of Holmes’ annoying characteristics and none of his charm. Hawthorne is surly, secretive, and thoughtless. He himself becomes part of the ongoing mystery, as Horowitz tries to figure out who this guy is and where he came from – a project with which Hawthorne cooperates not at all. Frankly, I do not like Hawthorne, and find him bad company.
Also, I must admit I figured out whodunnit this time. This is not because of my genius as a detective, but because I’ve gotten to where I can (sometimes) recognize the tricks authors use to divert our attention from serious suspects.
Still, The Sentence is Death is a well-done book. My reservations are all personal. So you should discount for that.
This classic hymn comes from the London Baptist minister Edward Mote (1797-1874). It was first published in 1836 under the title, “The immutable Basis of a Sinner’s hope.” The tune in the video above is not familiar to me, but I assume it’s traditional in some circles. It’s not the most common tune, which was written for the hymn in 1863.
“The Rock, his work is perfect,
for all his ways are justice.
A God of faithfulness and without iniquity,
just and upright is he.” (Deuteronomy 32:4 ESV)
1 My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus’ Blood and Righteousness;
No merit of my own I claim,
But wholly lean on Jesus’ Name.
Refrain
On Christ, the solid rock, I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand.
2 When long appears my toilsome race,
I rest on His unchanging grace;
In every rough and stormy gale
My anchor holds within the veil.
Refrain
3 His oath, His covenant and Blood
Support me in the raging flood;
When every earthly prop gives way,
He then is all my hope and stay.
Refrain
4 When the last trumpet’s voice shall sound,
O may I then in Him be found,
Robed in His righteousness alone,
Faultless to stand before the throne.
Refrain
