From Tradition and Away From Tradition

I have been nibbling away for some time now at a slim volume of poetry entitled From Tradition and Away From Tradition, by Andrew Huntley.  Huntley’s work has appeared in these pages a handful of times, and four of those offerings are present in this collection of poems from 2001 to 2014.  Born in Fiji to Australian parents who moved the family back to Australia when Andrew was 12, Huntley is a convert to Roman Catholicism.  Not surprisingly, given the title of this collection, his devotion to the Church’s more traditional wing is on display herein.

That devotion expresses itself beautifully in such poems as “On Praying for All Those Who Have Died Lonely Deaths,” a profound meditation on both the state of souls in Purgatory and God’s existence outside of time, and the lengthy (autobiographical?) “The Plough & The Cross,” which closes out the volume; and even where one might not expect it, such as a poem bearing the title “Lament for the Latest Female Backpacker Murdered.”

Yet other poems slip into didacticism, and lose their artfulness; “The ‘Spirit of Vatican II’ Exit March” is about what one might expect from the title, while “Against Certain Catholic Fantasts” oddly contrasts Pius IX unfavorably with Abraham Lincoln, whom Huntley sees as clothed in “the cope / Of Heaven, as he wrought to make men free.”  (Lord Acton, who famously opposed Pius’s promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council, would nonetheless likely find this comparison beyond the pale, since he understood far better than Huntley what was at stake in the American Civil War, as his postwar correspondence with Robert E. Lee makes clear.)

Despite such clunkers, this handsomely typeset and well-bound volume has much to recommend it, including my favorite of Huntley’s poems, “Closing Tolkien,” first printed in these pages in August 2004.

First published in the June 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Learning as I Go

The writing of Jeff Minick should be familiar to Chronicles readers; he has appeared in these pages dozens of times over the past 15 years or so.  His name, however, was not always attached to his work.  Under the nom de plume Joe Ecclesia, he wrote our Letter to the Bishop column for the better part of a decade, and those articles constitute a majority of his Chronicles pieces (though that majority is getting slimmer with time).  His more recent letters from Uncle Samuel to his nephew Hobson have borne his own name.

For a couple of years now, I have had Jeff’s Learning as I Go sitting on my shelf, constantly disappearing under stacks of other books, waiting for life to slow down enough so that I could savor its contents.  But life doesn’t slow down unless we make it do so, and I finally decided to force its hand by picking up this 300-plus-page volume.  What a delight it has been to revisit the letters of both Joe and Samuel, and all of the other pieces that Jeff published in these pages up until 2013, and to read for the first time others that appeared elsewhere.  Most of the pieces in this handsome and elegantly typeset volume are only four or five pages long—a perfect length when your eyes need a rest from your computer screen, and your mind needs a rest from the inanities of the modern world.

First published in the March 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

A Walk in the Woods

Having written the book on Bill Bryson (literally—for Marshall Cavendish’s Today’s Writers & Their Works series, 2010), I have been looking forward to the film version of A Walk in the Woods (1998) since I first read Bryson’s semifictionalized account of hiking the Appalachian Trail.  Robert Redford, who produced the movie and stars as a much-older Bill Bryson (he is 35 years older than the author was at the time Bryson hiked the trail), optioned the rights back in 2005, with the idea of casting Paul Newman in the role of Bryson’s childhood friend, Stephen Katz, who accompanied him on most of the hike.  Newman’s death in 2008 prevented the reunion, which is just as well, because the movie would have been very different, and not for the better.

A Walk in the Woods was the expatriate Bryson’s first book to garner a significant American audience.  His earlier book on the United States, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989), was written for a British audience, and Bryson’s jabs at his native land were not so much biting as bitter.  (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, published in 2006, covers much of the same material, but through the eyes of a more mature writer who has made peace with his roots.)  Both the book and the film versions of A Walk in the Woods have increased interest in the Appalachian Trail—a good thing in a nation that values its natural and cultural resources far less than it should.

It hardly matters whether one reads the book first or watches the movie; they are two very different works, and not simply because the plot had to be changed to account for Redford’s age.  Anyone who says that Redford does not look his age is simply star-struck—at 79, he could easily pass for 80 or older.  There’s a scene where Redford and Nick Nolte (playing Katz), having departed the trail for a few nights in a town, walk across a road.  As my father-in-law noted, it requires a suspension of disbelief just to convince oneself that Redford would make it to the other side, much less hike any distance on the Appalachian Trail.  Indeed, while Katz is supposed to be the unfit one, I suspect that the rotund and red-faced Nolte would survive longer on the trail than Redford.  (While the credits were rolling at our local multiplex, an elderly lady behind me said to her companions, “I wonder how many miles of the trail they actually walked?”  My guess is that the distance could be numbered on two hands, or possibly even one; the trail portions were filmed entirely at Amicola Falls State Park in Dawsonville, Georgia, at the southern terminus of the trail.)

Bryson can, on occasion, be ribald, and there are passages in A Walk in the Woods that one might skip while reading it to children (as I did several years ago).  But the fact that the film, with some mild sexual humor, no nudity, and no violence, is rated R for a few “F-bombs” speaks volumes about the uselessness of the ratings system.

In the end, my wife and I both enjoyed the movie, though the Emilio Estevez/Martin Sheen production The Way (2010) is a much better film about a man coming to grips with mortality while hiking a trail (in that case, the Camino de Santiago).  But whether you like the film or not, read the book, and pick up some of Bryson’s other works as well (especially The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid and A Short History of Nearly Everything).

First published in the November 2015 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Wayward Pines

How does an author sell over a million copies of his novels without ever learning how to write a convincing line of dialogue?  Welcome to the world of Amazon Publishing and self-published direct-to-Kindle ebooks.  Price your work cheaply enough and enable One-Click™ purchasing, and you may be the next Blake Crouch.

So why did I read not one, not two, but three of Crouch’s excruciating “novels” set in a fictional town in Idaho?  Crouch’s books were the inspiration for the recent FOX television show Wayward Pines.  Compared initially by reviewers with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, the M. Night Shyamalan-produced series caught my attention with the very first episode.  It had, as they say, “great potential,” as did the central idea of Crouch’s trilogy.  Part nostalgia, part science fiction, part post-Edward Snowden surveillance-state paranoia: In different hands—say, Ray Bradbury’s—this story could have been a delight.  (Indeed, something about the premise calls The Martian Chronicles to mind.)  Instead, it feels like a missed opportunity, because no one will now be able to take this particular twist on a postapocalyptic world and do it right.  (Shyamalan had a chance, but he diverged from his source material only in frustratingly inconsequential ways, and hewed closely to it whenever he shouldn’t have.)

The only thing to be said for Crouch’s dialogue is that it is no worse than the other elements of his writing—plotting, pacing, grammar, spelling.  Amazon.com has pitched its direct-to-Kindle imprints as the future of publishing; if Crouch’s trilogy is any indication, that future looks about as bright as that of the residents of Wayward Pines.

First published in the September 2015 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

His Final Lesson

A friend of mine has expressed the devout hope that, upon his death, his wife and children will have the good sense to burn his papers. While his main desire is to prevent unfinished thoughts from seeing the light of day, there are other, equally important, concerns. Posthumously published works allow enemies to attack without fear of reprisal; even worse, they encourage excessive—and uncritical—adulation from friends. The Sword of Imagination has provoked both responses.

By the time of his death in 1994, Russell Kirk had generated an impressive body of work that included over 30 books and hundreds of articles and reviews. Departing from this vale of tears, he left behind his completed but unpublished memoirs, which appeared a year later as the current volume. In the preface. Kirk notes his peculiar (but for him characteristic) stylistic choice: “Emulating Julius Caesar, Henry Esmond, and Henry Adams, I express my memoirs, throughout the following chapters, in the third person—that mode being less embarrassing to authors who set at defiance the ravenous ego. Besides, when the man within . . . regards critically the life of the outer man, it may be possible to attain some degree of objectivity—using that word in its signification of detachment from strong emotion or personal prejudice.” Curiously, Kirk was too much of a Romantic not to know that “objectivity,” especially regarding oneself, is a fiction. Indeed, the pretense of objectivity often serves as cover for “the ravenous ego,” rather than setting it at defiance. Some readers, especially if they did not know Kirk, may suspect that to be true in this case.

The decision to write in the third person may be at once the book's strongest point and its weakest. It allows Kirk to put into writing emotions that he could never express in the first person, especially about his family life. On the other hand, portions of The Sword of Imagination (for instance, where the author discusses the importance of his own work, or its influence) read like the work of a biographer, even a hagiographer, rather than an autobiography. While he may have seen himself in the third person (and some who were close to him often suspected he did). Kirk might better have left an appraisal of his own work to others.

Forty years after the publication of a book is probably too soon to be able to gauge its long-term significance. Yet Kirk attributes the rightward drift of American politics in recent decades in no small part to the influence of The Conservative Mind: “So it was that The Conservative Mind—working through a kind of intellectual osmosis and popularized through newspapers and mass-audience magazines, radio and even television commentators, and other media of opinion—gradually helped to alter the climate of political and moral opinion. A generation later. Kirk's works would be cited and quoted by the president and the vice president of the United States.” Whether, a century from now, historians will draw such a connection is anybody's guess; but even if they should do so, what would it mean? Ronald Reagan quoted more often from Tom Paine, the intellectual enemy of Kirk's hero, Edmund Burke, than from any other political figure; and in his eight years in office, he enshrined as the centerpiece of conservatism those “dreams of avarice” that Kirk wanted to get beyond. Though Kirk writes of President Eisenhower that he “and his people did retard the advance of the welfare state in America but did little to give flesh to the conservative imagination,” Reagan and his people merely fed that imagination a steady diet of Hollywood-style celluloid, (Kirk admits as much: “Mr. Reagan was endowed with a certain power of imagination; successful actors almost necessarily have a talent for image-making.”) As for the Vice President who quoted from Kirk's works, when he ascended to the presidency Kirk found him “worse than unimaginative—merely silly, often,” and “would come to detest Bush for his carpet-bombing of the Cradle of Civilization with its taking of a quarter of a million lives in Iraq.” And “so in 1992 Kirk became general chairman of Patrick Buchanan's campaign in the Michigan primary.” If The Conservative Mind really led to Reagan and Bush, even Kirk might question the value of that accomplishment.

In an age of abstractions, in which “Efficiency and Progress and Equality” are seen as more real than “all those fascinating and lovable peculiarities of human nature and human society that are the products of prescription and tradition,” Kirk cultivated a sense of mystery and awe and wonder.

Unlike Eisenhower and Reagan, Kirk did help to “give flesh to the conservative imagination,” and the number of conservative luminaries who claim that his works played a role in their political and intellectual development is legion. But today, with the conservative movement in a shambles and the Republican Party headed for self-immolation in November, perhaps we can learn a final lesson from Russell Kirk. For unlike those who have succumbed to the siren song of Washington, D.C., Kirk realized that the lasting accomplishments of his life were not political, nor even intellectual. Rather, they surrounded him every day, and he presents them here in loving detail: a devoted wife, who still works tirelessly to keep his memory alive; four gracious daughters, who will raise their children well, as they were raised; a congeries of assistants, who planted trees and took long walks with Kirk, and came to see the woods and fields that surround Mecosta, and even the little village itself, through the lens of his Romantic imagination.

In an age of abstractions, in which “Efficiency and Progress and Equality” are seen as more real than “all those fascinating and lovable peculiarities of human nature and human society that are the products of prescription and tradition,” Kirk cultivated a sense of mystery and awe and wonder. To his eyes, Mecosta, shunned and despised by the commissars of big government, big business, and big culture, was a Brigadoon. As a business partner of Kirk's once remarked, “Russell, you are the last of the Romantics, and probably the greatest: for nobody else could make tales out of that God-forsaken Mecosta County.”

That Romantic imagination is Kirk's greatest legacy. If his influence should continue on into the next century, it will be because those who knew him had their imagination awakened to possibilities greater than those dreamed of in Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles. Those possibilities are what make life worth living, and they—more so than Kirk's discussions of politics, or his portraits of famous acquaintances—are what make The Sword of Imagination worth reading.

[The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict, by Russell Kirk (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company) 497 pp., $35.00]

First published in the November 1996 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.