On taking the bus at 4:50AM

I write this, oddly enough, while sitting on a train taking me from Ottawa to Toronto, with a number of short stops in between.  This is the first time I’ve been on a train trip in living memory, and the experience has been uneventful so far.  The window beside me reveals a blood-red sky, interrupted at points by dark, slender clouds.  It is an ominous sight, but a beautiful one; beneath it lies what appears to be an enormous expanse of marshland, stretching as far as the eye can see (or so it seems; it’s still too dark to be really sure).  I’d have been disappointed by anything else.

To get to the train station, anyway, I had to take the 95 Orleans bus, which runs all night and conveniently makes stops at some of the city’s major transport hubs.  I walked out the door at 4:40AM convinced that the driver would have but a single passenger – me – but I quite seriously miscalculated.

There is a vibrant and gladdening culture that has sprung up on this route, and that it’s a culture rather than a set of coincidences was borne out by what I saw and heard over the course of the twenty-minute ride.

While not being standing-room-only, the bus was quite shockingly full.  A man in paint-spattered jeans kindly moved his bag aside to let me sit down – my own large suitcase taking up a fair amount of the aisle, unfortunately – and gave me the sort of curt nod that unites those traveling at an hour before even God himself has risen for the day.  I surveyed my surroundings: the seats around me were filled by people in a variety of uniforms – construction, newspaper delivery, military – and happy conversations were taking place at every turn.  A young Indian man and an elderly, mustachioed Caucasian were in the midst of something that saw them laughing uproariously (I never did find out what).  The younger man got off a few stops before the train station; the elder was still riding when I left myself.  The easy banter between the two suggests a friendship forged in the unlikely environment of the bus itself, with the shared experience of a ridiculous commute helping to break the ice.  It would be hard to imagine the two sharing such a connection otherwise.

There were things like this happening all over.  A pair of women in the garb of waitresses (for different restaurants) were arguing over a crossword puzzle; a woman in the livery of the post office read a much-written-in paperback that looked to be The Iliad.  The stop before the train station saw a roar of greeting and happy laughter go up as a portly fellow carrying a duffel bag got on; evidently he was known to all.

This is the world, or at least a world.  It’s a life of which I’d like to see something more, and the twenty minutes I spent in it fascinated me more deeply than much of anything I’ve done in recent memory.  I shall have to look into it more.

Return to the source

In four hours I’ll be boarding a train that will take me back to London ON for the first time since the completion of my MA at the University of Western Ontario in the fall of 2008.  It’s not that I’ve had no reason to go back since then – the people I like are still there, the city still has things to appeal to me.  It’s just never come up, somehow.

Still, all that changed when I was informed that several departments at the university had joined forces to hold a conference that’s right up my alley.  The Great War: From Memory to History will run from November 10th through 12th, and will see scholars from all corners of the earth meet to discuss the ways in which the war has been chronicled, remembered, even misunderstood.

One of those scholars is me, as it happens.  I’ll be presenting a paper detailing the history of alternate histories of the war, which will provide a sense of the war’s place in allhistorical studies and offer inquiry into just why there aren’t more retro-speculative engagements with a military and cultural event that had such awesome consequences.  Arthur Conan Doyle and Jorge Luis Borges will both be cited; it will be a hell of a show.

I look forward to the trip immensely as a chance to return to the city I called home for five years and reconnect with the people and places that meant so much to me, but also as an opportunity to meet other academics in my field.  This will be the first time since the development of my obsession with this subject that I’ll be in the same room with more than one other person who’s just as interested in it as I am.  It should be quite a treat.

A report will surely follow, so stay tuned.

An unsung heroine

The BBC is reporting the discovery that a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry – a young woman named Mabel Elliott – was instrumental in breaking up a German spy ring in 1915.  The enterprising chemist was working as a censor for the War Ministry in London and intercepted letters sent by an “American” businessman to his contacts in Holland:

The German spy, Anton Kuepferle, had arrived in Liverpool from the United States, under the guise of being an American citizen and wool merchant.

But Miss Elliott found that his business letters to an address in Holland contained secret writing in lemon juice, which when treated revealed information about defence deployments around London and Royal Navy movements around the coast.

Mr Kuepferle was arrested and accused of spying, using invisible ink to send messages to the German secret services.

US newspapers carried stories of his claim to be an innocent American salesman – and described how he had been under surveillance in his hotel room near Victoria Station in London.

But before his trial had been concluded, the accused spy was found hanged in his cell, after apparently using a silk scarf to kill himself. He was said to have left a message admitting that he was a German officer.

A further two spies who were accomplices of Mr Kuepferle were also caught.

Not a very surprising discovery – such things likely happened quite regularly – but a useful reminder that the plots of so many juvenile novels at the time were not just fanciful.  To go through that section in Hager and Taylor’s The Novels of World War I: An Annotated Bibliography (for example) is to pass entry after entry consisting of something like, “Tom and his pal Jack/Mary and her friend Kate notice something suspicious and save the day by uncovering a German spy ring.”  It does tend to sound a bit monotonous, but it was a fruitful note to strike.  With little else they could actually contribute to the war effort, children – diminutive, innocent, unnoticed – could at least relish the prospect of becoming sleuthing informers.

Miss Elliott’s story also stands as a much-needed reminder that there were, in fact, plenty of German spies in England.  A thing can have propagandic value – can be used, literally, as propaganda – and still be quite true.

The Macrone Conspiracy

This was originally produced as a comment on a post at Prof. Holger Syme’s excellent blog, but I’m pleased enough with it to reproduce it here.  A commenter on Prof. Syme’s ongoing series of posts about the absurdity of the Shakespearean authorship debate humourously extended the idea to other works of literature – in this case, those of Dickens:

Are you then implying, Steven, that “Sketches by Boz” and other, even greater tomes of literature could actually have been written by an uneducated former pauper named Charles Dickens? –And that his storehouse of knowledge was found in books and in travelling the streets of London? Preposterous. Who is this mysterious, inimitable “Boz”-REALLY?

And so:

With regard to the true authorship of the Sketches by Boz, all evidence points to the matchless James Boswell (1740 – 1795), whose meditations upon his time in London and the individuals whose society he enjoyed have proven so enriching to readers interested in that city.

The discovery of his private papers at Malahide in the 1920s saw a number of his personal journals published for the consumption of an enthusiastic public, but orthodox scholars failed to realize that those papers constituted only what had been left over after the same collection had been thoroughly plundered almost a century before.  The Anglo-Irish publisher John Macrone had been on holiday at the castle in 1831 and discovered the trove of papers in an attic while seeking a place to smoke his pipe in defiance of his hectoring wife.  The papers found in that dusty trunk were of two characters; the smaller part were the personal journals and recollections that would be rediscovered later, but the greater consisted of dozens of bound manuscripts and an assortment of loose, diminutive works, all of them largely fictional pastiches of life in London as Boswell had seen it.

For indeed, the Sketches, as Macrone described them upon the commencement of their publication in 1833, began their lives as yet further episodes from Boswell’s endless wanderings about the streets of the Capital.  The most famous of his fictional engagements with the City and her denizens, of course, can be found in Boswell’s Life of his greatest creation – the ironical lexicographer, Dr. Samuel Johnson – but the short vignettes that Macrone appropriated were those which had been cut from that impressive tome for want of space.  The decision to excise them was made all the more simple by the degree to which their style differed from that of the rest of the book; they were written at a time when a particularly vicious case of the pox had seen Boswell heavily dosed with laudanum, and the work produced during this period was scarcely recognizable as his own.  Many of the larger, discrete manuscripts were noted to originate from this period as well.

Macrone was immediately presented with a problem: the texts he had purloined were clearly set in a London far removed from the one in which he wished to propagate them, and contained many references to political and social matters that would immediately date them in the eyes of an astute reader.  Inasmuch as they had an excess of things undesirable, so too did they lack much that was desired: nowhere at all were to be found any mention of the defeat of the Corsican Tyrant, the reigns of those august monarchs George IV and William IV, the widespread adoption of the steam engine in transport, or any one of a hundred other minor details that lend verisimilitude without straining plausibility.

By way of a solution, Macrone – no mean prose stylist himself, owing to the classical education enjoyed during his upbringing and a shrewd understanding of the tastes of that novel and growing “reading public” – exercised a program of strict substitution.  Where the texts were anachronistic (elaborate periwigs, the American Question, the latest triumph of Mr. Garrick), he replaced the offending passages with references to something modern (locomotive rail travel, the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act, His Grace the Duke of Wellington).  Where the speech of certain characters was too old-fashioned and affected to pass as contemporary intercourse, he rewrote each line in a dialect of some sort – the ever-inscrutable Cockney being a favourite.

Not wishing to hazard all on a single toss, Macrone started by releasing only a handful of minor pieces from among the reams of paper he had stolen – the Sketches already alluded to.  The first such sketch appeared in the December issue of The Monthly Magazine, and proved an immediate hit.

The reader will no doubt feel, with the benefit of hindsight, that Macrone’s chosen pseudonym of “Boz” was scarcely adequate concealment, and this eventually proved to be the case.  No one ever seemed to suspect that James Boswell was actually the author of the works being devoured by all the reading world – an honour not accorded to his writings in decades – but wide and loud was the cry for the mysterious author to step forward and reveal himself.  Macrone was thus faced with yet another problem.  The successes of such poetical gentlemen as Messrs Byron, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley had shown the public ready to make heroes of its favoured authors, but Macrone had nobody to present to them upon whom could be laid the laurels.  He could scarcely step forward and claim himself the tales’ originator; his friends and family knew him and his habits too well to believe that he would have the time to write at such length and with such insight.

Fate cast a line into his hands.  His weekly round of the local inns and pubs had brought him into contact with a young man of little prospects but great personal charisma.  This ill-starred fellow had been born into modest means but soon reduced to the most abject poverty, with his father sent to the debtor’s prison at Marshalsea and all the family forced to work for their support and the patriarch’s release.  He spent his days working in a warehouse for pennies, and fell into the habit of taking a pint or two on his way home.  It was while thus occupied that Macrone first found him, and a fast friendship developed.  It turned out that the young man had literary aspirations – had even looked into becoming a reporter of political speeches.  It was too perfect.

That man’s name was Charles John Huffam Dickens.  This ill-schooled issue of poorhouse and prison agreed to lend his name to the Boswell manuscripts that Macrone intended to slowly publish over the course of the coming years, the proceeds of the ruse being split 80/20 – in Macrone’s favour.  Macrone showed him the dozens of Boswell’s novels and stories that were already complete, needing only the substitution of modern elements for the old.  Dickens understood well what was expected of him.

In 1836, “Boz” was revealed as Charles Dickens, and all of England rejoiced.

In 1837, John Macrone – aged 28 and in excellent health – died suddenly, mysteriously, and without warning.  Dickens contacted the greatest authors in England to contribute to a small volume, The Pic-Nic Papers, the sales of which would raise money for Macrone’s widow.  She received 450 pounds, and brought all relations with Dickens to an end.

It is surely a matter of complete coincidence that, that very year, an inexperienced young girl named Alexandrina Victoria ascended the throne…

Against Anonymous

[I've decided to eschew my usual film review format because this isn't really a review so much as it is a revilement.  I do not think anyone should see Roland Emmerich's Anonymous (2011), of which the best that may be said is that it proves even an absurd fiasco can be boring.  It's also been a while since I've reviewed any films at all, here, so falling back into the mode wouldn't exactly be as easy as one might hope.

Still, for the sake of consistency in the master list of reviews, consider this a 4/10.]

Holding Pattern

This blog (and its author) will be on hiatus until September of 2011, at which point both will return in slightly altered form.  An actual plan has been conceived, for once, rather than a slapdash effort motivated by the impulse of the moment, so with luck things will actually work out as intended rather than failing and failing again.

See you in the fall.

More equal than others

This is a note to certain (not all) atheist/progressive/liberal/etc. ideologues who have in their anguish warned against some sort of impending theocracy in one or both of the North American countries.

Putting aside the fact that there is no such impending theocracy, it’s worth knowing that not all theocracies, however inadequately described, are created equal.  The world is Diverse, after all, and this has Implications.

Say what you will about protestant fundamentalists, or dominionists, or “Taliban Catholics” (what absolute bullshit), or whatever you wish to call them, this can hardly be described as being among the things that they typically do:

Hena Akhter’s last words to her mother proclaimed her innocence. But it was too late to save the 14-year-old girl.

Her fellow villagers in Bangladesh’s Shariatpur district had already passed harsh judgment on her. Guilty, they said, of having an affair with a married man. The imam from the local mosque ordered the fatwa, or religious ruling, and the punishment: 101 lashes delivered swiftly, deliberately in public.

Hena dropped after 70.

I would like to note at once that the staunch endurance of 70 lashes is something that even the most robust sailor in Nelson’s navy would have admired, though by no means have wished upon himself.  A 14-year-old girl who could endure such punishment is no unremarkable person.

But it doesn’t matter, now; we will hear no more from her in this life.  She is dead.

Hena Akhter’s great moral failing was to have been brutally raped by a man – a cousin of hers – three times her age.  The initial response of the family member who discovered this happening (another woman, incredibly; the wife of the man doing the raping) was to drag Hena away and beat her in vengeance for her “adultery.”  Shortly afterward she was put to death.

There is no excuse for this.  There is no possible justification.  There is only the glad recognizance of the reality of Hell and an awareness of the fact that actual people will actually go there – and thank God for that.  The tendency of certain moderns to discount the possibility of Hell and to cast doubt on its legitimacy as a doctrine seems to bespeak an unbelievable ignorance about what people are actually like, and what they absolutely deserve as a consequence.  I have said elsewhere that I believed in God’s Wrath before I ever believed in His Mercy, and even now I think this is a distinction that is not properly appreciated by the world at large.

I am glad to report that the Bangledeshi public are as outraged about this as you or I might be, and all involved are now facing the full weight of the law (such as it is).  Especially worthy of condemnation – perhaps of actual execution – are those “doctors” who conducted an “autopsy” on Hena’s body and determined that she had somehow died of suicide.

Some cultures simply are better than others; some moral outlooks simply are more laudable.  Do not pretend that all is relative and unimportant.  As long as such disparities exist, there is an unquenchable and immortal war between them, and you will be called to account, someday, and asked which side you upheld.

Do not err on the side of ignorance, or on the side of ease.  Evil is evil even if someone is doing it because he believes it’s right.  Know this.

The Best Laid Plans

The Best Laid Plans
Terry Fallis.
Emblem; 2008.
336p.  First reading.

There are many things that I think bring my country (Canada, to be exact) into a state of ill-repute, but I don’t often throw around the phrase “national disgrace” in describing them.  I don’t intend to do so now, either, but The Best Laid Plans comes close.

This marks the first time that I’ve chosen to produce a Book Note about a book I would not in good conscience recommend to anyone, so please bear with me as we proceed.  This might end up being shorter than usual, in fact, as I do not often wish to dwell upon the negative when appraising an artistic work that someone has spent a great deal of time and effort in producing.  It is for this reason (among others), that the idea of the “so bad it’s good” film holds no interest for me at all, and I have a sort of contempt for those who habitually indulge in viewings of what they deem to be such pieces.  There is no virtue in smug mockery.  It is a complete waste of time.

Nevertheless, the circumstances surrounding my reading of The Best Laid Plans compel me to speak up.

The book’s publication and reception history have much to do with the near-universal acclaim it now enjoys.  The author wrote the thing in hopes of seeing it accepted by a mainstream publisher of some sort, but no such acceptance was forthcoming.  He instead settled for presenting it chapter-by-chapter as a free podcast before eventually self-publishing it.  This might have been the end of the story, but the book was inexplicably (and I mean this with complete sincerity) awarded the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2008.  It blossomed in popularity as a consequence – a true Canadian underdog success story – and was recently declared to be the official selection for the 2011 “Canada Reads” event.  This is essentially a nation-wide book club.  The book, in short, is currently enjoying a sort of ne plus ultra status in terms of modern Canadian literature, and I find this depressing beyond belief.

I’m not sure where to begin in expressing this disappointment, really.  Perhaps a summary of the book’s contents and general drift is in order.

The novel tells the story of a disillusioned Canadian political maven (Daniel Addison) whose attempt to leave Ottawa forever is complicated by his final promise to cultivate a campaign for a Liberal candidate in a small (and fictitous) Ottawa-area riding that has been a Conservative safe seat for as long as it has existed.  This may be a sort of analogue to the Ottawa-Vanier riding that has been unshakably Liberal since its founding in the 1933, but, in a book in which the Tories are simply to be taken as unambiguously evil (more about this later), that would hardly serve.

Addison finds his hopeless candidate in one Angus McLintock, a crusty and imperturbable (and Scottish) engineering professor at the University of Ottawa.  McLintock agrees to run only because Addison assures him he has no chance of winning, and will, in exchange for McLintock’s candidacy, take over the “English for Engineers” course that McLintock will otherwise have to teach at the university this term.

This being a comic novel, the unthinkable naturally happens.  A wholly unexpected scandal wipes out the Conservative golden boy who had previously had the riding locked up, and McLintock is elected.  He thus enters the House of Commons as the only MP in Canadian history who does not care if he is re-elected and who puts the national interest above that of his riding.  The consequences are meant to be funny, but the incredible insufficiency of Addison’s (and, by proxy, Fallis’) narration does them a grave disservice.

I should say, in justice, that there’s much in The Best Laid Plans to enjoy.  Angus McLintock is the only character in the piece to whom the “Leacockian” label could with any justice be appended, and his furious prosecution of what he believes to be the nation’s interests is actually quite stirring when considered apart from Addison’s cynical, weary narration thereof.  Basically imagine that one of C.S. Lewis’ several hard-nosed Scottish rationalists (like the fictious Andrew MacPhee in That Hideous Strength or the quite real “Old Knock” in Surprised by Joy) ran for a seat in the Canadian parliament, and that he also loved chess and hovercrafts.  He’s a man of his word, no matter the consequences, and he brings a scientist’s detached scorn to the internecine squabbling that is so often the mark of the Canadian political scene.

That’s pretty much it, though.  Every other character is repugnant and cynical and vulgar and mean-spirited, more or less.  The only exception to this rule is found in the pairing of Pete1 and Pete2, two students from Addison’s “English for Engineers” class who end up volunteering on McLintock’s campaign.  Apart from being punk rock types who always look utterly absurd, there is absolutely nothing to their characters at all.  They are empty ciphers, and, in a sense, a sort of pandering.

Daniel Addison is an awful narrator.  He is an unlikeable cynic with a checkered past, which is bad enough, but he also bears all of the unfortunate authorial tics of the writer who gives him his voice.  The Best Laid Plans is in no sense a really well-written book; it achieves adequacy, at best.  It’s precisely the kind of aggressively middle-brow bullshit that seems to take various countries by storm every couple of years, and while I can readily understand why it’s popular I cannot really accept that popularity as being something that redounds to the nation’s credit.  Much of the book’s questionable humour springs from Addison’s constant similes, most of which are awful.  I had intended to provide some examples of the worst of them, but I really don’t feel like crossing the room to pick up the book again.

This “middle-brow” direction is at the heart of the book’s failure, anyway.  There’s nothing in that’s challenging or unexpected or unique at all.  It’s focused enough on the questionable hotbed of Canadian politics, and involves characters who are obsessed enough with proper grammar and big-name Canadian literature and suitably progressive ideology that it seems “smart” and “provocative,” but it’s so incredibly safe in everything that it proposes – even (especially) when it thinks it’s being startling – that one can only look upon it as a calculated massage of certain egos and perspectives.

It is hopelessly didactic.  Certain characters (that is, every last one that we’re meant to admire) are described as being devoted progressive, enlightened feminists.  Rather than showing this through their actions, though, the text treats us to extended reading lists and library entries (paraphrase of a certain passage: “his shelf contained Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin, and this bespoke his enlightened, progressive ideas” – and this is not a very loose paraphrase, either, I swear to you) that prove that the characters are as unobjectionable to the current L/liberal sensibilities as it’s possible to be.  Indeed, McLintock himself is presented as the widowed husband of the late Marin Lee, the (fictitious) grand dame of Canadian feminism.  It was one of her books that first opened Addison’s eyes and raised his consciousness about the injustices faced by certain etc. etc.  This kind of thing crops up all the time; at one point Addison is forced by Fallis to make a joke about someone having had something slipped into their drink to explain their sudden change of behaviour merely so McLintock can have an excuse to launch a wrathful tirade about the prevalence of Rohypnol and sexual assault on campuses and so forth.  It’s dreadfully contrived.

The book wears its liberal predilections on its sleeve.  The first thing we learn about Addison is that his family had been staunchly Conservative for generations before his reading during his undergrad years made him realize that all conservativism ever was a complete goddamned lie.  I almost threw down the book in despair at this point, but I wouldn’t want to reject something before the preface had even concluded.  It didn’t end up getting any better, though.

While Fallis is happy to show that all political parties are populated (and even run) by opportunists, there is nothing at all in the Tory party as he describes it to be respected.  They are to a man and woman unprincipled cads and cowards, their ideas awful, their positions two-faced, their politicking unscrupulous.  Indeed, the scandal that sees McLintock unexpectedly swept into office involves the Tories’ popular and very successful Finance Minister suddenly being revealed to be a BDSM fetishist, relying on the assistance of his (mercifully female) chief of staff to get his rocks off.

It is in this that another (and, to my mind, considerable) problem presents itself.  Much of the book’s current popularity and status is due to it having won the Leacock Medal in 2008.  Fair enough; while Leacock himself has regrettably passed into a sort of obscurity, his name still commands a certain respect in this country when it comes to literature.

Nevertheless, it is an absolute disgrace that this book was awarded the Leacock Medal.  I do not disagree that it is a work of Canadian Humour, however broadly described, but it is a humour of a kind that Leacock would never have supported and would rather have specifically deplored.  The book is mean-spirited and vulgar from start to finish; it takes a cynical delight in the downfall of everyone who happens to fall over the course of its narrative arc, and it has no reservations about gratuitous expletives and sexual explicitness.  That explicitness is masked by a cloak of euphemism (which I’ll grant is a paradox), but when a randy female staffer is described as enthusiastically polling a male politician’s caucus – and doing much else besides over the course of an interminable, awful paragraph – there is little left to the imagination.  This is disgusting and insupportable in a work to which Leacock’s tacit imprimatur has been granted.  He wrote entire volumes articulating his theory of humour, and in none of them will you find any approbation of this kind of pornographic nonsense.  Leacock’s humour was rather of a gentle, kindly and charitable kind, and certainly of a kind that eschewed words and ideas likely to prove scandalous or lascivious to a mixed readership.  He viewed such things – as well as the schadenfreude that is omnipresent in The Best Laid Plans – as being the province of contemptible barbarians rather than civilized men.  We may look upon these ideas as outmoded and old-fashioned, but, if that’s the case, we should perhaps stop handing out a medal in the name of a man who professed them to works he would have thrown into the fire.  What’s next?  The Jonathan Swift Medal in Satire to Larry the Cable Guy?  The Walter Scott Award for Historical Fiction to Dan Brown?  How much pandering can a thing take and still hold legitimacy?

The Leacock Medal has often been tarnished in this way (as far back at least as Donald Jack’s Me Bandy, You Cissie in 1980; a marvelous work of humour irretrievably tarnished by a completely gratuitous and completely explicit sex sequence), but to see its legitimacy suffer so in a novel that has so much that is resonant with Leacock’s own work – small-town vicissitudes, stentorian Scots, unlikely elections – is depressing.  It’s also depressing in that the book’s publication history is so comparable to how Leacock first made his own name.  His first collection of humourous writings, Literary Lapses (1910) could not find a publisher, and was eventually put out at the author’s own expense.  It became an absurdly popular hit, and eventually came to the attention of John Lane of the Bodley Head in England, who ensured that it was more broadly distributed and, in so doing, made Leacock a household name.

I’ll note – finally – that there’s another dimension to The Best Laid Plans that grated upon me, and that is the portion of the text that’s set at the University of Ottawa.  Daniel Addison flees from politics (or so he thinks) to become the U of O’s latest tenure-track professor in the English department, focusing especially on Canadian literature.  His work in this capacity serves as a backdrop to the first third or so of the book, and there’s little in it that bears any actual relation to what the University of Ottawa is really like.  Perhaps I’m more sensitive to these things because I actually work there, and have done so for the last few years, but still.  Addison’s hiring by the English department is incredibly unrealistic in its contours (no self-respecting department head would have done what was done in the case as described), and his life at the university is utterly preposterous.  He’s a tenure-track (which means, by necessity, a full-time) professor in the English department, which is on the third floor of the Arts building, which is attached to the Simard building on one side and across the street from the Tabaret building on the other.  Regardless, Fallis claims through Addison that Addison has an office “on the fourth floor,” which is completely absurd (the Linguistics people are up there, and we only have one windowless office on that floor – occupied entirely by grad students), and that it “overlooks the main quad,” which is doubly absurd.  No office in the Arts building – whatever the floor – overlooks anything that could be described as “the main quad,” and the school does not in fact have such a quad in the first place.

Addison’s work in the “English for Engineering” course is also somewhat baffling.  The course is treated as a sort of awful anomaly, and torture for those teaching it, because it somehow has to be taught by an Engineering professor – quite against his or her professional predilections.  U of O offers no such courses, so far as I can divine, and this function is instead fulfilled by English 1100, a multi-sectioned course taught each term by actual English instructors, the purpose of which is to give basic English and writing instruction to students in the non-English disciplines.  I’ve taught this course myself; it is full of engineers, and science majors, and medical students, and all other sorts of folk besides.  It has more sections to it than almost any other course on campus.  It’s not exactly obscure.  Why Fallis doesn’t just integrate it into his text is a mystery to me.

He also has Addison declare at one point that, upon his exit from “the engineering building” (where his course is taught), the campus looked “beautiful” in the light of an autumn evening.  Only SITE and Colonel By could qualify as “the engineering building,” so far as I can tell, and, having taught in both of them and having exited from both of them on autumn evenings, I can only declare his evaluation to be an ignorant lie.  Any beauty the campus has is in no sense in evidence from those perspectives, and I defy anyone who has actually seen them to say otherwise.

I said at the outset that I thought this might end up being shorter than usual, but I can see that I was mistaken.  Oh well.  Maybe I’ll write about books I dislike more often.

The Cavalry Went Through

[Cross-posted from There Are Real Things; yes, this means I'm regularly writing again - and with colleagues, at that!  More stuff will gradually be posted here, too, as I get back into the swing of it.]

The Cavalry Went Through
Bernard Newman
Gollancz; 1930 .
288p.  First reading.

While poring over Cyril Falls’ immensely useful War Books: A Critical Guide, a 1930 index of what Falls considered to have been the most important or interesting books about the Great War that had yet been written, I stumbled across an entry in the “Fiction” section that immediately caught my eye.  Everything else had been in the familiar line of short stories illustrating “slices of life”, or somewhat fictionalized memoirs, or novels drenched in painstaking verisimilitude.  Those who spend a lot of time studying the War will be familiar with the problem.  Anyway, The Cavalry Went Through, a book of which I had never heard written by an author of whom I had also never heard, stood out from the rest of them like fire on a mountaintop.  All the other books were focused on coming to grips with what happened, or with complaining about what happened, or with even just, in whatever sense, expressing what happened; The Cavalry Went Through is purposefully about what did not happen.

The field of speculative historical fiction is an especially rich one, albeit one often populated by second-tier (if prolific) writers.  Harry Turtledove is a prime example of this trend, though there are others.  For his own part, Bernard Newman was more at home in the espionage and counter-espionage genre, writing some hundred books (both fictional and non-fictional) on the subject while maintaining a lively career as a lecturer and public intellectual.  His first novel, though, was The Cavalry Went Through, and it was informed as much by Newman’s own very real experiences during the Great War as it was by whatever mischievous impulse tends to motivate those determined to unsettle history with their prose.

The concept of The Cavalry Went Through is simple enough: a brilliant, charismatic and entirely fictitious British general arrives on the Western Front in 1915 after astonishing successes in the African theatre and, through a mixture of unorthodox methods and an abandonment of the unofficial British “spirit of the defensive”, brings the War to a conclusion with the rout of the German army in Summer of 1917.  The way in which this happens is militarily sound but narratively difficult; it relies on coincidences and such that are, as Falls puts it, “wildly improbably and [which] could hardly stand detailed criticism.”  The fact that our victorious general never loses an engagement – never even comes close – is significant, but the ideas in play are nevertheless amazing.

For it is not just in some conventional manner that Gen. Henry Berrington Duncan establishes himself as the most famous man in the world.  Very far from it.  He is an intriguing mixture of Jan Smuts and Napoleon Bonaparte – beloved by his men, respected by his enemies, and never willing to let the established canons of military propriety get in the way of exploiting any weakness his opponents happen to offer.  His men wear any old uniform, and speak familiarly to one another regardless of rank.  Their parades and inspections are a disgrace.  More importantly, though, there is no respecting of persons: good ideas are good even if they come from a subaltern.  Every man under his command has been taught intermediate German – to expedite interrogations and the deciphering of captured documents – and instead of idling away with chess or checkers or cards in their leisure time they play a game of Duncan’s own devising, in which the practical possibilities of Western Front trench warfare are replicated on game boards constructed to be accurate topographical representations of the stretch of lines upon which the soldiers find themselves.

In short, General Duncan has no interest in merely holding on to the territory behind him.  He’ll never gain it for Britain even if he wins.   It’s not his territory: it belongs to Belgium and France.  There is no conceivable reason for him to be content with a stalemate, and he pushes for complete victory at all times.

The methods he employs in doing this are fascinating.  Realizing quickly that the tentative, cautious quality of British operations in general has been keeping them from making any significant gains (while also preventing them from incurring any significant losses), Duncan instead opts for bold strokes at unexpected points.  His means of achieving these bold strokes are notable.  Rather than sending the entire line forward in an attempt to take and hold the German trenches opposite them, he instead employs a squad of incredibly stealthy African scouts to go ahead in silence, kill everyone in the initial German trench for a hundred yards or so in both directions (again in complete silence), and then sends a single-file stream of highly-trained commandos through the gap – and this always in the dead of night.  This procedure is repeated at each successive support line, and more and more men pour through the aperture.  Some of them attack the German lines from the rear, acutely aware of how intolerable a night attack from that direction can be, but most of them disperse into the countryside behind the lines in groups of two or three to wreak as much havoc as they possibly can before being captured or killed.  Some of them return to tell the tale, but not many.

Duncan – and, by necessity, Bernard Newman – anticipates the absolutely essential nature of small, squad-based combat when it comes to modern warfare, but that isn’t all.  When the time comes to finish the fight and send the Germans rushing back to Berlin, the methods he employs are of a sort that seem more modern than the time in which he was writing would allow.  It comes down to this: to win the War in 1917, General Duncan employs a mixture of what we now call Blitzkrieg (which had not yet been really articulated by anyone), suicidal intelligence measures (which were then thought to be intolerably unsporting and are even now quite iffy), and the terror-bombing of Berlin from the air (which did not happen at all during the War, for any reason, so far as I’ve been able to discover).  He willingly gives up strategically useless territory regardless of its political significance, valuing the potential for pincer movements more highly.  He rejects utterly the interference of cabinet ministers and other nuisances, articulating (in some cases quite literally and not without anger) a vision of the successful general as being by necessity a sort of unaccountable dictator.  It succeeds in this case because Henry Berrington Duncan is a good man, but we must wonder at its universal applicability.

There’s lots more here to like.  While the book is not what I would call high literature when it comes to its depth or tone, there are numerous completely enjoyable vignettes in which the bolder exploits of certain minor characters are described.  Another source of fun (for those inclined towards such things) can be found in thinly-disguised historical figures under suggestive false names (Lord Kitchener becomes Lord Khartner, after his popular sobriquet, “Kitchener of Khartoum;” the two successive British commanders-in-chief, Sir John French and Sir Douglas Haig, are collapsed into Sir John Douglas;  Worton Spender, one of the main characters, is apparently Winston Churchill; and so on).  Another high point is a thrilling section in which the 1915 failure at Gallipoli is avenged by the successful invasion of the Dardanelles and the fall of Constantinople.

Some criticisms must be offered, however.  Apart from the narrative implausibility of it all, as noted above, there’s a certain tendency towards under-description of action throughout the piece.  This often presents itself in the form of an annoying tic of Newman’s; I lost count very quickly of the number of times he resorts to describing something as “indescribable” or “beyond description” – once thrice on a single page.  The under-descriptive problem manifests itself most notably when it comes to the cavalry to which the book’s very title alludes.  It really is a thrilling and beautiful moment when the gap in the German lines is consolidated and the great wave roars in, but we don’t really hear much more about it afterward, unfortunately.  This is the moment towards which the book – and the actual war – had been working all along, but it’s all we can do to hear even a hint of what the cavalry actually accomplishes once the breakthrough is achieved.  That’s fine, I guess, because we can well imagine it, but still… come on, Newman.

There are also moral concerns.  Though Duncan takes a very sympathetic view of how soldiers with shellshock or other nervous problems should be treated (indeed, his position on this is exemplary), he is much less interested in questions of dignity and humane treatment when it comes the enemy.  At several points throughout their shared adventures Duncan and Newman-as-narrator complain bitterly about having had to take actual prisoners, preferring it immensely when the enemy is either caught by surprise before he can throw down his arms or else simply refuses to do so.  The tactics of the commando teams sent behind the German lines also warrant caution; while they are undoubtedly effective, there’s a monstrousness to them that cannot easily be vindicated in Just War terms.  Newman’s response to this problem in a footnote is hardly satisfactory: “Certain critics have condemned the methods of the [commando] troops as brutal: of course they were, but so is all war.  There is no differentiation in degrees of brutality.”  We cannot easily agree.

All in all, it’s a fast, basically satisfying read.  Those with a pronounced interest in speculative militaria generally or the Great War particularly will likely be better served by The Cavalry Went Through than most, but just because a book is narrow in application doesn’t mean it can’t be a success.  I doubt very much that it’s still appreciably in print, so you’ll probably have to consult a library (and likely inter-library loan, at that) to secure a copy, but it’s well worth the effort.

Taking up the reins

Well, it’s a new year, and a new situation in terms of how my time has to be distributed these days.  The last four months saw me having to teach a university course (now happily concluded) and prepare my thesis proposal (almost done), but the next four will see me reduced once more to the lowly status of a Teaching Assistant, working one night a week but still reaping a living wage.  The upshot of this is that I’ll have more time for other things – even blogging.  I may even end up involved in a long-germinating group project.

So, let’s see what we can do.