The Lord of the Rings (1954)

First of all, thank you all for coming this morning. This is my third time doing this and the first two times, people ran out of here screaming. Particularly last time, when, for the books-to-movies series, I spoke of Washington Irving and then screened Tim Burton's film Sleepy Hollow, a good film, but which had far more gore than I remembered. People having their heads chopped off and whatnot. Just a lovely before-lunch treat.

But this morning I'm here to talk about Professor Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. I'd been threatening to stand up here, without a script, just to see what might fall out of my mouth. This, after all, is a book I first read when I was 11 years old, and have read several times since; any serious reader will understand when I say this is a book I care deeply about. So I had a couple friends who told me that would probably be all right, that I love the book enough, and know enough about it, that I could easily prattle on for an hour or more. But then again, there's always the chance that I might stand here, in front of forty souls, and think of absolutely nothing to say. Does anybody have any questions? Good. So as before, please pardon my script.

And it's a good thing I did sit down beforehand to arrange my thoughts. This is a well-regarded, thousand-page novel with (obviously) a long main narrative, a bunch of characters, and a complicated (to say the least) backstory. Where does one start? I'll start at the beginning, by describing the story.

The Lord of the Rings is set in Middle Earth, an imaginary world with an early-medieval feel. There are city-sized castles and caves, chainmail-clad warriors wielding swords, armies on horseback. There are great tracts of unspoiled plains, living (literally) forests, mountains. Everywhere the land is peppered with monuments and rubble from an even older time, and stories abound regarding that time. The inhabitants of Middle Earth are greatly varied, some fantastic, such as dwarves, hobbits, and the monstrous enemy orcs and trolls; others are more recognizably human -- there are men of varying tribes, carrying their own geopolitical issues, and then there are the mysterious elves and wizards.

Frodo Baggins, a hobbit (which is a sort of genteel gnome-like creature, invented by Tolkien), inherits from his cousin Bilbo a mysterious ring of power. Mainly, it turns the wearer invisible, but this is only a symptomatic effect of the ring. As it turns out, this ring is a Very Bad Thing, created at the dawn of the world by a demonic force named Sauron, and now Sauron, gathering his power again, wants it back so that he can enslave Middle Earth in darkness. His minions are already unleashed, hunting for the ring, and they have a pretty good clue that Frodo has it. So Frodo must take the ring and flee his comfortable home, not to any sanctuary but directly into the heart of danger, to the evil land of Mordor, where Sauron dwells, to the fires where the ring was forged, and the only place where it can be unmade, rendering Middle Earth safe again.

The book is a classic romance, a straight-line narrative quest novel. Its only surface complications are the number of characters: there are about twenty main characters, some of whom do not enter the story until halfway through. In the beginning, Frodo amasses several traveling companions, who safeguard him; this is the Fellowship of the Ring, a group formed during a secret council for the purpose of sneaking Sauron's ring across Middle Earth and into Mordor. There are three other hobbits, first and foremost his trustworthy protector, loyal servant (and former gardener) Sam; two others, Meriadoc (or Merry) and Peregrin (or Pippin) are old friends who basically just end up coming along for the adventure. Then there is Boromir, a captain of men from the last stronghold of the Western Lands, the region of Gondor, facing Mordor. There is Gimli, a dwarf lord of noble heritage, and there is Legolas, an elf prince from the wooded lands of the North. There is Strider, or Aragorn, a mysterious ranger who turns out to be the long-lost heir to the throne of Gondor. And finally there is Gandalf, a wise old wizard of sorts, more like a sort of supernatural back-room broker who does his best to guide everyone along the best possible path.

So this group tracks southward across Middle Earth and the hijinks ensue. But the Fellowship splinters about a third of the way through, and as the narrative trail forks in order to follow them all, so are more characters introduced. There is Galadriel and Elrond, both elf royalty, who guide the Fellowship. There is Theoden, king of the realm of Rohan, land of the horselords, and his kin, nephew Eomer and niece, the noble Eowyn (a precursor of sorts to Xena, Warrior Princess). There is Saruman, evil counterpart to the beneficent Gandalf, and would-be partner to Sauron. There is Faramir, erstwhile brother of Boromir, and their disturbed father Denethor, steward to the throne of Gondor. And finally there is the hapless, feckless Gollum, the previous owner of the Ring, corrupted and distorted nearly beyond recognition by centuries spent in the grip of the Ring's corrosive, absolute power. And to keep things from getting boring, there are myriad other characters as well, who usually pop in for a few pages and then disappear, sometimes for good, sometimes until later in the story when they are suddenly necessary to keep things from becoming disastrous for the principals.

Still with me? Mainly, the story concerns getting the ring to Mordor, and of rallying the troops of men and elves and dwarves against Saruman and Sauron, who are busy massing thousandfold armies of horrible monsters called orcs ... all of these intrigues are only the surface story, which takes Tolkien 1000 pages to wind through.

Beneath this layer of conventional plot lies a backstory, a history and culture for the characters and races, which was Tolkien's main concern. Like The House at Pooh Corner, The Lord of the Rings comes complete with a set of maps detailing every inch of Middle Earth, including numerous locales not explored or even mentioned by the characters. Yet despite every appearance of this being an overlong, complicated, out-of-control children's fable, it is not. There is also a long set of appendices that details the lines of kings dating back 3,000 years, a chronology of the ages of Middle Earth, family trees for the hobbits and, in addition to a well-divided index for characters, places, things, and songs, there is finally a long section devoted to the languages and supposed translation of those languages into the English edition published in our world.

So who was the nutty guy who thought all this stuff up? All right. Professor Tolkien was born in 1892 and died in 1973 and aside from some early and horrible experiences in World War I, spent the bulk of his life in academia, as a philologist. These days, you'd probably call him a linguistic anthropologist, with an uncanny interest in Old English. School was the only stable element in his life, following the early deaths of both his parents, when he was still only a child. He became Professor of English Language at Leeds in the early 1920s, then became Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, eventually retiring in 1959. In his day he was acknowledged as the world's leading expert on Beowulf, and on old Norse myth and language. In a letter to his publisher, now reprinted in the current paperback of The Silmarillion, he says "Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write."

Genius takes many forms. Some men build rockets, some men write operas, some men clone sheep; Tolkien invented languages and, most importantly, cultural forms for those languages, and that is the true backbone for The Lord of the Rings. Ancient myths and legends being something of a hobby for Tolkien, he set out to create one of his own. More than one account has him lamenting the lack of an overriding mythology, like those enjoyed by Greek or Icelandic cultures, for the English, Anglo-Saxon heritage. Sure, there are the Arthurian legends, and some folktales, but Tolkien wanted to go a step (or a mile, some might say) farther than that. It's known that he was writing from an early age. Even during his service in the trenches in France during WWI, he was jotting in a notebook that bore the title The Book of Lost Tales. Most telling, perhaps, is Tolkien's 1947 short story (one of only a very few he wrote) "Leaf by Niggle." The titular artist paints "the only really beautiful picture in the world" and then gets to step inside it and walk around within it. "As you walked, new distances opened out; so that you now had double, treble and quadruple distances, doubly, trebly and quadruply enchanting. You could go on and on, and have a whole country in a garden." What better description is there of the joy of falling into and in love with a great piece of fiction?

So that was Tolkien's primary MO -- an obsession with language and with mythology. From his foreword: "I desired to do this for my own satisfaction, and I had little hope that other people would be interested in this work, especially since it was primarily linguistic in inspiration, and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues." He charged himself with creating not just a world but also a comprehensive history for that world that could exist beyond the sheen of fiction. Indeed, the fiction was an afterthought. The Lord of the Rings thus has a superstructure allowing for literary self-containment to such an extent that it begins to seem strange, on close examination. It's almost more than a novel -- it's a world unto itself, with deep strata composed of shifting layers, working exactly as continents do, over time. It's a puzzle that comes with its own ciphers. It does not reference our world at all, though one might at certain points feel a kind of magnetic pull, as if it's coming close to something we recognize, this bizarre mishmash of Christian symbolism (almost), Arthurian and Norse legendary (almost) and Shakespearean melodrama (well, okay, that one is pretty much inevitable since Tolkien's tale is couched in English, after all).

And yet, Tolkien adamantly warned against readers looking for allegory and symbolism in his work -- at least those sorts of allegories and symbols that would connect his story directly to our modern world. The mythos of the ancient Greek and Norse cultures don't, after all, find direct interlocking parallel to the events of the 20th or 21st centuries. Tolkien wants you to pretend that the story and mythology of The Lord of the Rings is peculiar to itself. But that's hard for anyone to do. Interpretation is part of human nature.

The main case in point: just as it's easy to see the deep bonds of friendship forged by the possibility of crushing loss among his Lord of the Rings characters finding origin in Tolkien's own wartime experiences ("By 1918," he wrote, "all but one of my close friends were dead"), it's equally easy, and hard to resist, visualizing other 20th Century wartime parallels of the Lord of the Rings narrative. In the second-edition foreword, Tolkien gives a specific timeline for the stop-and-start composition process: 1936 to 1949. Again, admittedly, there are no direct parallels. One cannot correctly say that Sauron equals Hitler any more than one can now say that Aragorn equals Tony Blair. But anyone who writes about a great world-threatening war during the process of a real world-threatening war isn't going to avoid similarities, in tone and intention if not directly in plot and circumstance. And Tolkien, after spending several paragraphs debunking such endeavors, essentially gives in with a slight disclaimer: "Arrangements could be devised according to the tastes or views of those who like allegory or topical reference. But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers." The telling phrases here being true or feigned, then varied applicability.

What Tolkien penned is a dramatic tragedy, exemplary in form and on a scale rivaling his predecessor in English literature, Shakespeare. Kings lose their bloodlines and fall prey to wicked advisers; salvation comes in an 11th-hour willingness to heed a call to arms. Greed for power and mastery motivates and corrupts, causing stewards to send their only sons blindly into hopeless battle. Deep friendships form and are honored during a treacherous quest, often providing the only bridge over peril. A wretched creature is torn between aiding a new master in hopes of overcoming the evil deeds of his past, or succumbing to his own dark desires. An heir to the throne, long in self-imposed exile, overcomes his own doubt to claim his legacy and his bride. In the end, as you might expect, Evil is overcome, but things will never be the same as before, as peace comes in an unexpected form.

So, as a singular work, why isn't this thing taken more seriously by critics, and by some potential readers, daunted not just by the size of the book but by its content? Despite its popularity, meaningful consideration of this book is frowned upon during discussions of English literature, just as in the annals of Southern literature, during evocation of Faulkner and O'Connor, Gone With the Wind is summarily dismissed. As if it's too popular to be taken seriously. Or perhaps for some other, gently misguided reasons. Roger Ebert, in his December 17 2003 review of the film The Return of the King, turns out this judgment, which easily applies to the source material as well: "That it falls just a little shy of greatness is perhaps inevitable. The story is just a little too silly to carry the emotional weight of a masterpiece."

Okay, I'll grant you a few things. Certainly the book has its problems. Women are relegated to minor roles. Some critics have cried racism, but Tolkien was after all striving to create an English/Anglo-Saxon mythology, not a global one. His poetry is pretty bad. And his prose, at times, runs purple and dense. For good or ill, the book is an achievement not possible by today's publishing and editing standards: there are too many characters, there are too many diversions from the matter-at-hand, with the plot wandering for chapters at a time. And there are all those long passages in Elvish, which Tolkien doesn't even bother to translate. There isn't much visible psychology in the narrative, maybe none at all. The characters at points seem like wind-up toys that go tottering in the directions of their fates. (Though it would be wrong to say that they don't grow and change.) But here again, Tolkien has given the drama an archaic structure, perfectly suitable to the subject matter. Mythical, legendary figures cannot, by nature, be scheming, ironic anti-heroes.

Largely though, the trepidation comes, I believe, from what I call The Problem of the Elves. How can you, after all, take seriously anything that has elves running around in it? Don't elves live in trees, baking cookies and wearing curly-toed shoes? It's not only elves, of course, but all the fantastic elements at play that challenge suspension of disbelief, beyond what we're used to in "serious" literature. But that belies a tendency to look only at the elements of the story, and not at how those elements function. That, after all, is how the real magic of The Lord of the Rings emerges. But Tolkien saddled himself, early on within the pages of The Hobbit, (before he'd conceived this particular story, though he'd already conceived Middle Earth itself) with traditional terms and creatures long familiar to fairy tales and children's literature, that create a bias against the book being taken seriously.

But as any new reader quickly discovers, Tolkien's elves are not fanciful, squeaky-voiced shoemaker elves or the cookie-making, tree-dwelling elves we normally imagine. The elves of Middle Earth are really sort of creepy, more like an alien race, set apart in the world by their grace and their potential immortality (elves can be killed, but they cannot die under normal conditions unless they choose to do so). Elves are the final remaining race from the First Age of Middle Earth, present at the creation; they bear witness and memory via their immortal lifespans; the elves are the main conduit into the pervasive undercurrent of history in the novel. As characters invoke ancient songs and legends to augment the narrative, as a sort of Greek Chorus, they do so in Elvish. Tolkien deliberately wiped Middle Earth clean of scheduled religious practices and icons. It was his intention that any religion practiced or observed by his characters would be embodied by their acknowledgement of history and their own place in honoring that history -- similar to the traditional beliefs of Native American Indians, which the elves truly more closely resemble. I can't think of a single children's book that contains such a social structure.

Likewise, other elements sublimate Tolkien's more pressing concerns, couched in phantasmagorical terms. There are talking tree-like creatures, the Ents, caretakers of the forests who embody Tolkien's love of the natural world, and hatred of "mass-production robot factories and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic." There are Dwarves, but the only one really featured in the novel, Gimli, never does anything truly dwarfish other than talk about glittering, jewel-encrusted caves every now and then; he spends most of his time behaving like any other guy. There is an army of ghosts, but this too is a symbol of ties to the past, of legacy and obligations that persist throughout, or despite, the passage of time.

Ebert goes on to lament how "the epic fantasy has displaced real contemporary concerns" without considering how malleable contemporary concerns really are. And this besides the most important thing: the best and most moving works of art and music and literature don't tell us how to feel -- they give us room to feel what we will. Tolkien's archetypal narrative and motivational construction allows for varying contemporary interpretations. There will always be wars, and as long as the book remains in print readers will see their current global situation mirrored in Middle Earth; elements (though never the whole) of Lord of the Rings can be applied in turn to World War II, the Cold War, the War on Terrorism. The struggle of the underdog, as seen in the hobbits striving to take an honored place among the other races and cultures, made the novel popular among the counterculture of the 1960s, but the small and oppressed rising triumphant against smothering powers-that-be is something we all can identify with, whether socially or personally in day-to-day life. And the Ring itself has been viewed as a symbol for everything from nuclear weaponry to cocaine addiction.

No one calls Fahrenheit 451 or Brave New World silly because they take place in imagined, sci-fi futures; they actually take place in worlds uncomfortably close to our own. No one dismisses To Kill a Mockingbird because Atticus Finch wasn't a real historical figure. If Mary Shelley is allowed to bring a homonculus to articulate life in Frankenstein, to preach the dangers of runaway science; if Dickens can spook Scrooge with three ghosts, to warn us of the dangers of ignoring the love of our fellow man; if Poe can invite the Reaper to a costume party, as a lesson against abdication of responsibility during crisis ... then why not elves? Why not sentient trees and phantom warriors? As fiction bearing at its heart real concerns, what makes The Lord of the Rings any less meaningful to us than Gone with the Wind, or Cold Mountain -- as no one alive now has any direct memory of the Civil War? Are not tales of the colonial times, such as The Scarlet Letter, or of the Inquisition, such as The Name of the Rose, also fables of a sort? There is no reason why the stories that move us be required to remain rooted in the world that we know and touch, or the world that can be researched and not imagined.

The first rule of successful fiction should be to tell a great story and to tell it well. That was pretty much Poe's edict. Tolkien admits, he only wanted to "try [my] hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them. As a guide I had only my own feelings for what is appealing or moving." It's a long story, and by the end, most people I know, myself included, still don't want the thing to come to an end. Even those that resist reading the book, at first. It captures everyone. And that's because it's a great story, greatly told, of honor and valor and difficult burdens, and the friendships that will see you through, if only you allow them to. And I'm hard pressed to find anything silly in that. Elves and all.

Originally presented at the Fairhope Public Library Tuesday Book Review and Lecture Series, March 16 2004
Tolkien & Gandalf artwork by Dena Kaye

Hawthorne: A Life (2003)

Few of the personages of past times are anything more than mere names to their successors. They seldom stand up in our Imaginations like men. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote these words in his early bio-sketch of Sir William Phips, governor of Massachusetts from 1692-95. But in our living years, the sentiment could well be self-applied by the author, particularly in regard to James Mellow's 1980 biographical treatment Nathaniel Hawthorne in his Times, a comprehensive and encyclopedic work, essential as a reference but most often a cold and dark reading experience, with few visible details.

A license must be assumed in brightening the materials which time has rusted ... fancy must throw her reviving light on the faded incidents which indicate character, whence a ray will be reflected, more or less vividly, on the person to be described. Following this charge, Brenda Wineapple provides the recently published Hawthorne: a Life, which infuses historical fact with lively details. But rather than resort to fancy, she makes liberal use of extracts from letters and journals, enabling the easy-flowing narrative to reach back and capture a contemporary Hawthorne in all his conflicted glory, rending him tenderly human as the musing, frustrated author of tales and novels that have aged and grown beyond the scope of any life he could imagine -- and he was capable of imagining quite a lot.

Born on July 4th, 1804, in bustling, "self-obsessed" Salem, Hawthorne divided his childhood between the city and a wooded family estate in Maine. There, finding more happiness in isolation, he began the habit of deliberate extraction from the mainstream of society that would continue throughout his life. Sent back to Salem for schooling, Hawthorne injured his foot and hobbled for over a year, refusing at times even to walk; this telling, self-punitive rebellion allowed for secluded self-education: "Instead of pursuing the ragtag parade of schoolboys with muskets, Nathaniel could study ... lying at home on the carpet, where he built a house of books for the cats."

Following education at Bowdoin College (classmates included Horatio Bridge, Henry Longfellow, and lifelong friend Franklin Pierce), Hawthorne entered a state of jittery suspension; he secretly longed to pursue a life of the mind, and scribbled accordingly, though plagued by reservations: Authors are always poor Devils, and therefore Satan may take them. As Wineapple points out: "Idle, ambitious, and damned either way." It seems almost ridiculous to contemplate, that the man who would write the first great American novels would be so reticent and unsure of his own talents: I shall never make a distinguished figure in the world, and all I hope or wish is to plod along with the multitude.

This grapple between the demands and responsibilities (both perceived and palpable) of employment, and the less-restrictive observational life of an author continually vexed Hawthorne. Wineapple points to this struggle as the best explanation for his otherwise confusing decision to toil at Brook Farm, the famed Transcendentalist commune, for most of a year, despite his non-commitment to (and sometimes downright derision of) the founding principles. He was more interested in buying himself time to write, and in working to provide a comfortable, stable home for future wife Sophia, in hopes of ending their protracted, secret engagement. (Hawthorne was thirty-eight before they finally married -- "middle-aged" if not frankly old by the standards of the day.)

The major periods -- idyllic life in Concord & greater New England as husband and author, friend to Thoreau, literary guru to Melville, and cagey associate to Emerson; frustrated life in Salem as Customs Officer (cut abruptly short by political maneuvering); twilight life in Europe as government emissary and disconnected literary lion -- constitute the bulk of Wineapple's extrapolative attentions. Seen as socially demure (or taciturn and diffident depending on the reports, one of which has him ducking behind trees to avoid speaking to passersby) Hawthorne shied from putting himself forward with strangers but was warm and open when comfortable among friends.

(For contrast, a more tender, surprising view of Hawthorne can be found in the recently published Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny by Papa, an extract from his journals, accompanied by a terrific introduction from Paul Auster. With Sophia and the girls off visiting family, Hawthorne was left alone for three weeks with his five-year-old son. The account of this time -- the endless childhood questions, the forays into neighboring Shaker communities, and typical domestic crises -- is nothing less than a precise snapshot of early fatherhood, and delivered in language crisp and quick, not what is generally expected of Hawthorne.)

Meanwhile, his vacillations between public, salaried appointments and reclusive turns at authorship became more pronounced; at one point, Wineapple explains: "He said he couldn't compose fiction because, working for the government, he felt he no longer owned himself; but... Hawthorne held on to his government job not just because he needed the money or because the country ignored its artists, but because he liked it." Yet just a few years later, during the period that produced The Scarlet Letter, Sophia reports "He writes immensely. I am almost frightened about it". (Hawthorne himself more coldly -- though correctly -- characterized his spotty output: A life of much smoulder, but scanty fire.) And finally, Wineapple boils it down to: "Hawthorne needed the consulship as much as he needed to write ... writing meant everything to Hawthorne and yet cost everything. It was his heart of darkness, an isolation no one could fathom or relieve; it was a source of shame as much as pleasure and a necessity he could neither forgo nor entirely approve."

Perhaps most troubling to modern audiences are Hawthorne's ambiguous views of slavery and emancipation, and Wineapple is careful to reveal these within context. Hawthorne banked his later employment upon his friendship of (and thus the political policies of) Franklin Pierce, a man often blamed for contributing (via ineptitude) to the instabilities that led to the Civil War. To that end Hawthorne extended his loyalties, perhaps over-extended them; there is some evidence that he simply did not give the matter much thought beyond providing the opinions that were expected to tow the party line. Though he despised the slave trade, he also opposed emancipation -- a tricky stance, and one that earned him a good deal of criticism in his own time. Yet there is no doubt: the fighting of the Civil War, which he did not live to see the end of, broke his patriot heart: I hear the cannon and smell the gunpowder through everything.

Ultimately, Wineapple does for Hawthorne what David McCullough did for John Adams -- freeing him from history so that he may walk among us, again. It's a clear, populist approach, a daguerreotype in narrative, devoid of criticism or speculation. Yet, just as it is impossible (also, worthless) to render the life of a politician without discussing his politics, so it is with a writer and his work. Wineapple utilizes Hawthorne's fiction as an overlay for crucial moments in his life, deftly mapping parallels and intersections but without crossing into shady realms of sheer speculation. The works are dissected not for literary merit, but for humanistic evidence. Declining the role of critic, Wineapple concentrates more on what the stories might have meant to Hawthorne, less on what they might mean to an audience. And just as well to draw on this record -- Hawthorne was notorious for covering his own historical tracks, burning letters, manuscripts, journals, and begging friends and associates to follow suit. As he wished, his fiction stands as the testimonial to his life and thoughts; we are thus obligated to listen to it.

Stemming from a man so obsessed with shameful, suspicious legacy -- particularly his own harsh Puritanical ancestry -- it is tempting to note (though one must enter willfully into the realm of supernatural speculation to do so) the phenomena of Hawthorne's ongoing reputation and fame. Hawthorne's forefathers publicly flogged Quakers (great-great-grandfather William Hathorne) and presided in the Salem Witch Trials (great-grandfather John Hathorne). Young Nathaniel changed the spelling of his last name to distance himself from their blood, but that wasn't all. He wrote of these dubious achievements, as if to purge himself of a guilt he felt by association. Time and again in Hawthorne's writing, and nowhere more perfectly than in The House of the Seven Gables, the World seeks balance and retribution for wrongs committed, even if reparation must be done in secret, or if those who benefit from it cannot entirely grasp how things have been set right. As physical manifestation of that idea, modern-day downtown Salem (which now does honor the literary son it once drove away in disgrace) would not be recognized by those men who hanged the witches -- the open practice of Wicca, the horror-movie museums and haunted house attractions, and most especially the memorial that remembers the victims of their cruel injustice.

Redemption is the noble goal in Hawthorne's fiction, though it might never be achieved -- still, it is the reaching for that goal that matters most, not the attainment of it. And Nathaniel Hawthorne, via his writing, certainly did make the reach. And now it is more than 140 years since his death; still his name is spoken, and still his face is gazed upon in portraits -- quite the opposite of the anonymous, failed man he wrote of in "The Ambitious Guest." Hawthorne would perhaps be surprised. But who is to deny that some elemental force isn't still repaying him for the gesture -- Sarah Goode, perhaps, smiling down from above in eternal appreciation.

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "Humanizing Hawthorne," December 07 2003

The Buzzing (2003) / Masters of Atlantis (1985)

It is characteristic for potboilers about global conspiracies and secret societies to be flavored generously with ingredients of arcane, if not half-baked, history. From Umberto Eco to Robert Anton Wilson to Dan Brown, the alchemy is practiced from a familiar bag of elements: the Knights Templar, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission (or a shadow government of some description), UFOs. But by coincidence (or was it?) I recently read two novels that broke the mold with atypical mixtures.

The Buzzing by Jim Knipfel is the tale of Roscoe Baragon, a once-lauded foreign correspondent who has settled into a comfort zone, killing time between paychecks by covering the "kook-beat" for a fourth-rate New York daily. A few potentially career-saving stories slide across Baragon's desk, but he allows the more legitimate angles to pass to a junior reporter while he pursues the fringes, and begins to discern an unlikely pattern of events emerging from far-flung and sometimes odd sources.

Knipfel rolls out the story in a smooth but irony-edged matter-of-fact style, honed during his own years at the New York Press (undoubtedly the template for Baragon's rag, the Sentinel), that could be classified as B-movie noir -- Raymond Chandler meets Kolchak the Night Stalker. To his credit, Knipfel dismantles the typical and oft-overused platforms for conspiracy theories, instead blueprinting how tiny, odd details assemble for some people into nearly-coherent but ultimately deranged worldviews. Knipfel's main effort is to show just how easy it is for a rational train of thought to become derailed: "It's almost like there are fads in delusional psychosis." (Obviously, the talking heads at Fox News have picked up some pointers.) 

Familiar characterizations evoke the investigative reporter genre while simultaneously subverting it. There is Baragon's boss, the prototypical angry newspaper editor. There is his not-quite girlfriend but certainly devoted drinking buddy, Emily. It is she who provides Baragon the scoop about a radioactive corpse at the city morgue, which starts his snowball rolling. And there is "Eel" O'Neill, a producer of sleazy Z-grade horror movies (Cannibal Boogaloo 3 is his latest), who serves as sounding board and ballast for Baragon's quest. Despite his questionable profession, Eel displays a keen, canny perspective as events unfold.

Legitimate sources (a NASA engineer tracking a falling satellite, a geophysical surveyor analyzing a seemingly deliberate pattern of earthquakes) fuel Baragon's initial investigations, but these are swiftly obfuscated by elements that turn up like random cards from an Old Maid deck: a plot to steal tenement-house plumbing, nuclear meltdowns in the Ukraine, killer whale attacks, and kidnappings reportedly committed by "the state of Alaska." A menagerie of minor characters provides herrings in various shades of red: Baragon interviews Abraham Campbell, an institutionalized church arsonist who claims to be a government-trained operative in the secret war with the "Seatopians." Also lurking is Natacia Ranzigava, a former Soviet refugee who is to crackpot theories what Mary Mallon was to typhoid; she presses Baragon to investigate citywide disappearances of elderly flophouse residents. And finally there is Raymond Martin, the aforementioned radioactive corpse whose trail leads back to many of the other plotlines.

The book is peppered with obscure references (or clues, if you're so inclined) to Japanese monster movies. Baragon himself is named after a creature from Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965), a film that features neither Frankenstein nor his monster, by the way. Likewise with his cat, Hedora, named for the eponymous villain in Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971). Oftentimes these references are fitting: the Gaira is the name of a Japanese fishing boat which sinks mysteriously in one of the stories Baragon goes chasing; Gaira is also a giant aquatic zombie-thing from War of the Gargantuas (1966) that has a penchant for ... sinking fishing boats.

There's even a cryptic nod to Capricorn One (1978), the film about a NASA conspiracy which co-starred OJ Simpson. While to a certain extent this is all in the name of fun, the references do provide a creepy outreach as the novel winds toward its closing moments. "Hollywood makes a movie about some historical event," Baragon says, "and to a huge majority of people, that becomes history. In the end there's no real difference between Destroy All Monsters and some drought in California." Oliver Stone will undoubtedly be pleased to hear this.

Knipfel is the author of two well-regarded memoirs, and given that background The Buzzing feels oddly skimpy on the kinds of details that would truly endear its characters. As Eel O'Neil might tell you, the best horror movies are character driven; ironic since Eel in particular is sorely underdeveloped. Then again, as Eel might also say, The Blair Witch Project (1999) was a brew of slightly underdone characters, but was spiced with enough eerie ideas to overcome those weaknesses. The Buzzing weaves the same kind of spell. Towards the end, Baragon ponders the "paranoids" who continually rattle his office phone: "Without their fears, what would these people do all day?" As Baragon goes about connecting all the wrong dots, there's devilish good fun in the details.

Charles Portis is best known as the author of True Grit, a masterpiece blend of the Western genre and what might be called interior-monologue slapstick. Though the five slender novels in his canon are eccentric and diverse in terms of subject matter, a current of wiseacre humor runs through them all. With Masters of Atlantis, Portis delivers an immensely entertaining comic portrait of a fictional secret brotherhood, the Gnomon Society.

In 1917 Lamar Jimmerson comes into possession of the Codex Pappus, a little gray booklet containing "the secret wisdom of Atlantis." Or something like that. Mainly the pages are "given over to curious diagrams and geometric figures, mostly cones and triangles." Shortly thereafter he meets "Sir" Sidney Hen, and the architecture of the book is cemented as these two deduce (or at least manufacture) not only their roles in the Society, but the aims of the Society itself by straining through the Codex: "This is marvelous stuff!" says Hen, "I can't make head or tail of it!"

They devise a plan to take Gnomonism to the world. With Hen responsible for Europe and Asia, Jimmerson returns to America (Gary, Indiana, to be exact) and struggles to spread the word. Things take off with the arrival of Austin Popper, a character seemingly made of equal parts P.T. Barnum, Dan Quayle, and Wile E. Coyote. Popper assumes the role of Society spokesman, goes on the lecture circuit (with his talking blue jay, Squanto) and becomes a pre-WW2 celebrity. The American Gnomons experience a heyday, but this behavior unfortunately creates a philosophical rift with a now-angry Hen, who denounces Jimmerson's Indiana Temple and credibility. And this is only in the first forty pages.

Masters of Atlantis is essentially a long, perfectly told joke. The story is symphonic in structure, with general exposition sweeping smoothly into manic chapters, set-pieces, and comic monologues, then back again. Popper turns draft-dodging into a career; the benevolent but nescient Jimmerson is coerced into running for Governor of Indiana; there is an alchemical scheme to extract gold mineral from the leaves of bagweed; Sidney Hen is nearly poisoned by his secretary and attempts a late-life return to his London Temple, which has been "turned into a government home for unwed mothers" (Jimmerson's own Indiana Temple is soon also similarly overrun, leading to a bail-out of apocalyptic proportions).

These episodes are executed in the straightforward, knowing language of the best nonfiction; it's hard to imagine John McPhee or the late Stephen Ambrose doing a better job with the material. Portis twists this delivery by saturating every page with a sense of giddy yet deadpan hoax, made possible in no small part by the plausibility of it all; at one point, the description of one of Popper's Gnomonic lectures sounds eerily like a Tony Robbins seminar: "Through Gnomonic thought and practices they could become happy, and very likely rich, and not later but sooner. They could learn how to harness secret powers, tap hidden reserves, plug in to the Telluric Currents ... He bucked them up with the example of his own dynamic personality and they went away thinking better of themselves." A published photograph of a similar rally depicts "a roomful of solemn men standing with their hands clasped atop their heads." Later, Popper admits: "I discovered I had a knack for selling things, a gift for hopeful statement combined with short-term tenacity of purpose."

Though character-driven, there is no psychology in the book. Portis never pauses to examine or even mention motivation or emotion, or to dwell morally on any result. (Only occasionally does he let slip a phrase that acts as a Twain-like wink directed at the reader.) The characters simply are, like random neutrons, dizzily spinning, and often into each other; every act boils peculiarly to the surface, and the actors make up new rules and regulations to account for themselves. Where in lesser hands this would lead to strained if not overblown chaos, Portis coolly minds the tiller for an easy ride up Crazy River. You'd swear Jerry Seinfeld kept a copy of this book handy for reference while co-scripting his sitcoms.

If the characters are saved by anything, it is the integrity of their belief systems; misguided though they are, they yet persevere. Only once does Portis reach beyond their insulated experiences to shed the light of the Outer World (as populated by "Perfect Strangers" in Gnomon-speak) on the principals, and that is for the punchline at the end, when Austin Popper must address a congressional hearing to account for himself and the purposes of the Gnomon Society. But Portis never lets up; even the senators end up buying into the buffoonery during their inquisition: "Experiments are carried on behind locked doors, I am told, with vicious dogs patrolling the corridors. What safeguards do you have in place, Mr. Popper? What precautions have you taken to ensure that these experiments do not get out of hand and set the air afire and perhaps melt the polar ice caps?"

At various points it's tempting to try and decipher exactly who Portis is skewering -- the Rosicrucians? Freemasons? Followers of Dianetics? Art Bell? Glenn Beck? But finally, every fringe group and conspiracy movement worth its essential salts attracts a fair share of oddballs and grifters, making controversial noise in search of celebrity or seeking a quick buck by swindling the rubes. The usual rush towards denouncing and debunking based solely on these elements often neglects to consider the engine spark behind the eventual movement. As one character blissfully says upon first encountering the Gnomon philosophy, "My search for certitudes is over." Portis and Knipfel remind us in comic relief that it is the innocent and misguided who, in the ordinary, everyday quest for answers and meaningful experience, stumble towards truth by way of delusion and often provide the initial fuel for the strangest-colored flames.

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "Conspiracy Theory Double Feature," July 13 2003

The Heaven of Mercury (2002)

Rod Serling must be counted as one of the most influential 20th Century talespinners; his main creation, The Twilight Zone, if considered as a 5-year-long (rather than X-pages long) short story anthology, would be a perennial backlist bestseller, ranking easily with, say, Winesburg, Ohio or The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor. But images don't necessarily age as well as words: the production values, the fashions, the reflected culture all conspire to make those groundbreaking episodes seem quaint by modern standards. Not to mention the Zone stories and their elements have been copied, recycled, and imitated palely by scores of lesser storytellers, so it's easy to reverse attribution -- you might think you've Tasted This Before, but the truth is, this time you're drinking from the Well, not from a bottle of filtered tap. The oft-copied elements seem familiar, but the tingling Soul of those stories remains true and pure and poignant. This is the feeling I had while reading Brad Watson's new novel, The Heaven of Mercury. That I had found a Well, pure, true, and deliciously deep.

It's a puzzle every modern Southern author faces: how to cultivate something new out of the battered old landscape. Southern Lit (coming to be known as "Grit Lit" in some circles) is now practically a genre unto itself, with its own Gothic story elements and character archetypes and settings; excessive re-combinations of these pieces lead to an intrinsic sameness and predictability, which fails drama. Watson has solved this puzzle. A picture emerges of a slightly different kind of Old South. Not Faulkner's old South of dusty roads and crumbling plantation mansions; this is the pre-Segregation, middle-class South: brick downtowns, shaded suburban homes, timeless in a way, not yet taken over by television and franchise chain-stores, and so retaining an indigenous flavor and heritage. A place outwardly stolid yet troubled, like the Illinois of Ray Bradbury or the backroads Maine of Stephen King. Just as those places are vexed by lost innocence and the supernatural, Watson's Mercury, Mississippi, is plagued by broken dreams, missed opportunities, repressed racism, and unrequited love.

As described by Dante, Mercury is the second level (out of a possible ten) of Paradise, where dwell the spirits of folks who achieved great things for the wrong reasons -- despite themselves or by accident. Even though it might have been a self-serving motive, well, you done good, and here's your reward. Mercury, Mississippi is an apt Earthly counterpart, where the characters collide and influence each other through their missteps -- sometimes comical, sometimes severe -- and the achievements are personal rather than grand, but the scale inclines rather than degrades.

The first half of the book follows an incomplete arc, describing nearly in full the lives of the principals: Finus Bates (Mercury as messenger: local newspaperman and elder radio personality) and his lifelong infatuation with Birdie Wells (whom Finus once saw perform a naked cartwheel, capturing his heart in orbit forever) set the trajectory for all the according storylines. He could never quite reconcile her real presence with what her presence suggested to him, and it kept him not only enchanted but also confused in some deep sense he couldn't grasp. But early on, Finus loses Birdie to the courtship of rival suitor Earl Urquhart, and subsequently finds himself in an unhappy, besieged marriage to Birdie's friend Avis Crossweatherly. There is also maid Creasie and her commonlaw husband Frank, whom Creasie believes is a wood-spirit made flesh, and Parnell Grimes, Mercury's funeral director, fevered with uncanny drives linked inexorably to his profession: through the blessed privilege of sensual touch lay contact with the spiritual world.

The book contains some of the best set pieces this side of The House of the Seven Gables. There's a breathtakingly ghoulish turn in the chapter titled "The Dead Girl." A violent family squabble and its long-term repercussions are detailed in "Blood." "Through the Mockingbird" depicts an eerie but redemptive journey through a graveyard. Late in the book, "A Lost Paradise" describes a Fort Morgan peninsula, circa 1906, so pastoral and idyllic that it makes the current development there seem the work of the Devil himself.

Watson builds these episodes (which unfold in a slightly disconnected, overlapping sequence, an evocation of memory itself) around immediate, emotional moments -- the death of a child, the passion of a lubricious affair -- but lets the narrative transgress outwards, into the future, until the reader finds himself viewing a scene as through the reversed lens of a telescope. This approach doesn't take the steam out of the drama, but rather gives it a context, just as a spotlight, illuminating a single character onstage, becomes subsumed by surrounding stage lights as they brighten to expose greater action taking place concurrently within the shadows: the fearful illusion of mortality -- and immortality, as well -- is lifted like a veil to reveal something simpler and more profound, without fear.

There is a latent racial divide in Mercury, defined by resigned acceptance rather than sensational, expressed tension, though it does resonate throughout the novel. The African American population lives in a ravine-sheltered shantytown, and is portrayed as nearly mythic: insular, strange, and half-wild creatures of the wood, more in tune with a natural order than their white counterparts, living in the proper if long-stagnant town, could ever hope to be. Shown through the voodoo/occult practices of Aunt Vish, who dispenses arcane potions from her cabin outside of town, they are neglected touchstones to man's more instinctive side, to forgotten knowledge, finally to secret retribution. As time passes, the Mercury blacks begin to trickle out to homes in old neighborhoods ... quietly slip their best (as wood creatures slip into our midst unbeknownst) into the local public schools and the state universities beyond, to live as real human beings in the real world.

Meanwhile, Watson addresses the imbalance with a grimly humorous symbol. An "electric Negro," a wooden dummy painted with minstrel features, built for use in some store window-display now as outmoded as the machinery of slavery itself, is kept locked in a shed behind Earl's house -- a legacy claimed but shunned, at least in the immediate. "Why don't they plug you into the electric? I know what you'd do. Go kill them all. Cut they throat." Though this dummy does indeed play a role, if only as a kind of silent Greek chorus, singing chords which resonate not to the ears, but to more sublime organs of sense.

Love and loss move through Watson's characters like alternating current. Viewed through his panoramic lens, they live long enough to suffer the deaths of wives, husbands, children, and eventually each other. The usual grief that applies to such final losses are not necessarily the defining moments here. It is the pulse between those lapses that counts; it is the carrying on that delivers them: The air is adrift with what presences are left behind, which find new forms in the living, in those who are most open and alive themselves, not slaves to ignorance and fear.

So although the book seems to end half-way through, with a string of obituaries written for the newspaper owned by Finus, the second half, mimicking planetary retrograde, doubles back to fill in those gaps which, during the initial pass of the story arc, disappeared as if into the cosmic haze described in the opening moments of the novel, or as if into the haze of memory itself. And there are plenty of surprises remaining before the narrative proceeds again forward, gently as a washing tide, even offering glimpses into distorted slips of air that revealed, like thin and vertical flaws in a lens, the always nearby regions of the dead.

Central to this second half is Selena Oswald, the young woman who becomes wife to Parnell Grimes. Selena, raised by the overpowering figure of her Primitive Baptist mother, makes a choice to give herself over to the Spirit; thereafter she believes in her capacity to perform "miracles:" She could make her teacher call on her for an answer, if she wanted to ... she could change the weather ... but more often she merely willed the weather to stay as it was, since she liked most kinds of it. Watson's observation of these ways we distract and illusion and thus invent ourselves unwittingly is at the heart of his humor and charm, and also his capacity to be heartbreakingly honest -- sometimes within the space of just a few words.

As the story doubles back on itself, it creates a pristine rendering not just of unrequited love, but unrequited life, as the two central characters look back, together, on their decades in Mercury, and Finus is able to imagine a time when love was more real to them then, when there were fewer things you could use to distract yourself from a thing which was so frightening and strange. This is not patterned drama, but a convincing interconnected web of lives and choices, a long journey through a tangled wood all as if in a semiconscious dream, a pretension of life ... a free traveling current or pulse in the passage of time -- yet viewed as a sudden whole, seeming therefore timeless -- moments intact and perfect as blades of grass plucked from a summer field. All time is in a moment ... these shapes are just the forms of memory and imagination.

By extending such a grand focus and by eschewing the typical heavy-handed Gothicism that infuses Southern storytelling, Watson approaches his territory with a resonant, laid-back, ironic humor that echoes Mark Twain in his more tender moods. At one point, Finus thinks: You couldn't convince a body anymore that there was integrity in the use of language. The entirety of this book is an argument for that integrity. The novel's prose is nearly tactile -- as refreshing and welcome as a finely blended milkshake on an August afternoon, going down rich but smooth and cool. The nectar, indeed, of a freshly discovered Well. And as the words grew fewer and fewer, I found myself wishing Watson's narrative would yet again, somehow, double back on itself and renew and continue: Seemed like something that would've had to happen in a separate universe or something. Maybe it had.

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "The Ascent of the Messenger," October 20 2002

Ode to the Headless Horseman

I did request to be last in this Consanguinity Lecture Series because I knew that a horror movie at 10am would run everybody off... The idea for this programming came, oddly enough, from an essay of mine that John Sledge published on the Mobile Register's Sunday Bookpage a couple months ago, and, to follow the analepse even further, the idea for that essay was born of a conversation I had about the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? which is supposedly based on the Odyssey. "Loosely based" is I think the operative phrase.

So that begs a question -- Loosely Based -- what should that mean in terms of converting stories in books to stories in movies, and why should it be a good thing? The idea I tried to put across in the article is that Books and Movies are two different types of storytelling, using different languages. Words in books seep into consciousness and memory, they play upon what we've experienced and felt. Movies do the same thing, but the language of icons and images, as opposed to words, is more immediate. With movies, we're given the experience. Now, I'm not saying one form of storytelling is better or more legitimate than the other. (I can be a Snobbish Reader -- I've worked among books for the past twelve years, in bookshops and in libraries. But I love movies too.) After 100+ years, movies have certainly established themselves as an artful form of storytelling. What I'm saying is that it seems to me, because I so often hear the phrase The Book Was Better, that these two essentially different forms of storytelling are being unfairly, if commonly, compared.

So there are two regions of responsibility for avoiding this. One is on the head of the Reader, and one is on the head of the Filmmaker. As Readers, we have to let go of our preconceived notions about the way our favorite stories are told on the page. By proxy, when we read stories, they become ours -- we fill in the holes left by the writer with our own images, the characters look like ourselves or our friends (or -- gasp! -- our favorite actors), the locations are our favorite places, real or imagined. The way the characters are revealed to us, through their own memories and reflections and interior monologues -- all the things that make us feel that we personally know these characters -- these things are impossible with film (unless the filmmaker resorts to a cheesy voice-over narrative, which makes everything sound like it was written by Mickey Spillane).

For their part, the Filmmakers must recognize this and move on with what's best for the Story (with a capital S), no matter what their source material, be it a book or a play or a picture, or even some form of stationary art -- anything that carries a narrative idea. I think it was Marshall McCluhan who said of TV and movies that in their pure form, you should be able to take away dialogue and sound, plug up your ears and still be able to interpret the action and follow the story, which ought to be told in an entirely visual way. But of course, we rely on dialogue and language even in movies, since that's our primary form of communication in daily life, so maybe that's where some of the confusion is so easily brought to bear. At any rate, I think Filmmakers should bear that in mind, and strive to create something new, and not have us expect exactly the same of their films, because in doing so they are doomed to fail. And we are doomed to be disappointed, if we don't allow them to create something new, and to accept the film on it's own terms.

Actually, some of the criticism that I heard and read about Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, which came out last fall, speaks to this argument. Chris Columbus tried too hard to simply mimeograph scenes from the book onto celluloid, and it came out stilted and lifeless. If he'd played with the material more, perhaps he could have avoided that. It's difficult to say. Certainly the Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which was fairly faithful to the events of the book, in my opinion maintained a lot of drama and passion. I've read those books I-don't-know-how-many times, and yet I was on the edge of my seat. And although it's not a book or a movie for everybody, Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, based on Hunter S. Thompson's well-known book about drug use in the 1970s, managed to capture the manic, chaotic energy even while sticking close to the book. So maybe there is a level of moviemaking skill that transcends this argument, as well.

Okay, that was the gist of my original idea, and my essay for John. Though truth be told, my very original idea for such an essay goes back even farther than the O Brother Where Art Thou? conversation, to the time when this movie, Sleepy Hollow, came out.

I have loved Washington Irving's story for a long time, since I was a kid and so young that I can't tell you exactly when or how I first encountered it. I know I saw the cartoon version on Wonderful World of Disney, one evening near Halloween, but it seems that even then I was already familiar with the "Legend" in some way or other, that the parts making up the story -- the goofy underdog hero, the terrifying Night Journey, and of course the dreaded Headless Horseman -- were already a part of my understanding of the world. They are archetypes, of a sort. (Indeed, the Night Journey has become such an integral part of American Literature, from Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown meeting the Devil in the woods at night, to Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, up to Oedipa Maas' venture into midnight 1960s San Francisco in Pynchon's postmodern fable The Crying of Lot 49 -- this symbolic rendition of a Dark Night of the Soul is surely so much more than a foppish schoolteacher spurring a donkey through a darkened dell, trying to outrun a hellish, headless revenant. Surely it's more than that... There's some reason we're all secretly afraid of the dark, right? There's some truth to this Legend, right?...)

Irving is considered our first successful American writer -- that is, he was the first to make a living at it. (Others wrote before him, obviously, like novelist Charles Brockden Brown.) The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is the last story, or chapter, in a book called The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, published semi-anonymously by Irving in 1819 and 1820. In the main it is a kind of diary or journeybook kept by an anonymous traveler, leaving America and revisiting the Old Country. But embedded within these earnest and true-to-life sketches and impressions are three short stories, planted like red herrings. The other two are The Specter Bridegroom and Rip Van Winkle, and all the stories are told as if they are true, just as true as the other things described throughout the book, such as the English customs of Christmas Eve. Not that I've done any real digging in the interest of research, but I wonder what some of the man-on-the-street reaction was to these tales, at the time of publication. It amuses me to think, and it's not an entirely ridiculous notion, that some folks might have been rightfully confused by this context -- much as were many people several years ago, when the movie The Blair Witch Project appeared. That movie supposes itself a documentary about some vague, spooky manifestations in the New England woods, and all the commercial hype surrounding it played the story as "true." There were "making of" specials on TV to promote the movie, and these too were done as serious documentaries. Many were fooled, including a couple of my own friends, by this angle. In this day and age, this ostensible Information Age, if it's that easy to hoax someone with a movie, surely in 1820, a lot of people took the Headless Horseman as fact... as did I, at the tender age of eight.

At that age, I was even taken in by that key word in the title: the Legend. Sleepy Hollow sounds like a real enough place to me. And a Legend, isn't that like an old story, a true story, passed down through time? At that age I was also scared easily, and I watched what I could of this affable, harmless-enough cartoon through fingers I held up in front of my face. So my comprehension of the story, filtered through fear and the resulting inability to watch, was a little iffy. (I saw it not long ago, and you can't imagine a more docile horror story -- I mean, it's narrated by Bing Crosby, after all.) So for a long time I "understood" the story of the Horseman to be describing some event, distorted perhaps but still an event which really happened...

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I finally read the story in 8th grade, still too young to appreciate all the intricacies, all the details, the careful structure, and most especially Irving's distinctly ironic, American humor that makes it, still, one of the best short stories ever written. I was only irritated to discover: Dammit! There's no actual Headless Horseman! It's just Brom Bones acting like a jackass to run Ichabod Crane out of the country, so that he can have the full attention of Katrina Van Tassel. And let's face it: none of these characters are really very likable. Brom is a sulking bully, Ichabod is a blustering coward who is most interested in marrying into the family that will feed him best, and Katrina is feckless, attaching herself to whichever man is still around at the end of the day. They need a headless horseman to come along and keep them in line.

So I was pretty happy when Tim Burton came along with his version of events, Sleepy Hollow. I don't know much about Burton personally, but I like his movies, which are typically dark, atmospheric, and contain huge doses of comic irony. His first big movie was a surreal look into the afterlife called Beetlejuice, then he directed the first two Batman movies, ten years ago; Mars Attacks makes fun of the 1950s alien invasion movies; Edward Scissorhands, also with Johnny Depp, is one of the strangest romantic comedies you'll ever see; and Ed Wood is about the man who made some of the worst low-budget movies in Hollywood history (Martin Landau won an Oscar for playing Bela Lugosi in that movie).

Sleepy Hollow takes the characters and premise of Irving's story, tosses everything into a kind of blender, along with other tropes cribbed from the Gothic Novel, popular in the early 1800s. And for my money, for as much as I've learned to appreciate Washington Irving, this version is a little closer to what the kid in me expected, those decades ago. Here you will find an actual ghastly Headless Horseman galloping across the countryside, chopping off heads of the citizenry. So it becomes a murder mystery, and a bit of a campy one, with a supernatural twist. (And it doesn't spoil any of the major plot when I tell you here that, at last, Brom Bones gets what he deserves.)

In approaching this movie, I don't doubt that Burton recognized the need to shuck the original story and concoct something new using only the essential elements. And he's done it so wildly, viewers have no choice but to accept or reject this movie on its own terms. It's a moot point to say that Irving's story is better than Burton's movie. But consider this: I think Washington Irving would have appreciated what Tim Burton did. Irving, for his day, was a pretty experimental writer, and he loved toying with the conventions of storytelling. Looking back on his canon of short stories -- and following these successful experiments showcased in the Sketch Book, Irving for a while dabbled very seriously in fiction before turning back to nonfiction, such as his biography of his namesake, George Washington -- Irving has left us many templates for the form, and it can be said that, along with writers like Guy de Maupassant, he helped to popularize short-form fiction. I think of a story called The Stout Gentleman, a first person narrative told from the POV of a man staying in a wayside inn, who knows this unnamed Stout Gentleman only by reputation and a few things he's overheard. And the whole story is this narrator, himself unnamed, imagining what this Stout Gentleman might look like, and what his business might be, and what his private life might be like... and all the while the reader is being led to the conclusion that the Stout Gentleman will eventually be revealed. Well, not to ruin it, he isn't, and the story becomes a clever joke on the reader. It's to Irving's credit and charm that the reader isn't simply aggravated by the twist ending to this tale, just as the reader doesn't moan in disgust at the end of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with all its fops and nitwits. You've been entertained. And at the hands of a master storyteller.

And because many of his short stories were retellings of older folktales from the oral tradition (the same strategy as Chaucer, by the way), I think Irving had a great sense of how yarns spin themselves anew, every so often. And here in Tim Burton's movie, we have a full-tilt homage to Gothic Horror, such as it was in Irving's day, in the novel form rather than the short story. The most famous of these novels are The Castle of Otranto by Walpole, and The Mysteries of Udolpho by Radcliffe, and The Monk by Matthew Lewis, which is a great, late 18th century stew of sexual decadence and political prurience and deals with the Devil, all of which ends horribly; you'd never think those folks back then could be so bad. So in this movie, the ghosts are real, and the characters believe in them to a point nearly of the grotesque, and there's some phantasmagorical... gore thrown in just to make it boil over the top.

A careful viewer will notice lots of elements from Irving's story, including several things that are only mentioned by Irving, but which Burton expounds upon, like local legends about "the great tree where the unfortunate Major Andre was taken," as there's a significant tree in the movie; and "the woman in white, that haunted the dark glen at Raven Rock" also makes an appearance. There are more obvious similarities: Ichabod Crane is still a blustery wuss, though his station in life has changed from schoolmaster to early American detective. The iconic midnight ride is acknowledged, complete with flaming jack-o-lantern, as is the covered bridge, and the churchyard which marks the border of the Horseman's power, though all in a very different light than in Irving's version.

The film is also atmospherically and texturally beautiful, and does a fair job of depicting the dark, dreamy, slightly ominous atmosphere that Irving sets up in his early paragraphs. Burton's ultimate message regards the fact that our technological advances have never really outstripped our capacity for superstition. But mainly he does a brilliant job of evoking Washington Irving's story, without actually copying it. And in that sense, it's entirely successful.

Originally presented at the Fairhope Public Library "Consanguinity" Books-to-Movies Lecture Series, July 29 2002

Stone, Wood, Water

It is three days before Christmas and only a few degrees above freezing in Concord, MA when I crest the rise in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery known as Author's Ridge. Laid out below me is a slumping dell clustered with graves, wound through by footpaths that crisscross before leading back out through the trees. The morning light sets aglitter a few stubborn patches of snow; in contrast the slatted shadows of the evergreens seem as heavy as the tombstones over which they pass.

Family plots are numerous -- central obelisks swarmed by smaller stones, like satellites orbiting a fixed celestial point. Such are the markers for the Family Thoreau, at the head of the ridge. The focal marker is tall and stout but of modest craftsmanship, bearing only names and dates -- no titles, no epitaphs. At the northeast corner of the plot, on ground suitably gnarled with the exposed roots of a nearby oak, stands a simple weather-worn stone, barely a foot high. Henry. It is adorned by no "bawbles" but a few yellow flowers only, preserved in the cold, and by piles of smaller stones, undoubtedly brought by other pilgrims, from the Pond to here. Many a traveler came out of his way to see me…

The Thoreau family marker broadcasts a long shadow across the footpath, over a plot of graves even more anonymous, each marker carved identically with a single name: Hawthorne. We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death. Bartlett's 1885 guide to Concord describes Nathaniel's grave as "surrounded by a low hedge of arbor vitae, as if the gifted author sought in death the modest retirement which he loved in life." No such flora exists now, and I am left to guess that Hawthorne's grave is the one farthest from the path. It too is garlanded with frozen daisies.

A walk farther down this increasingly sunlit path reveals a who's-who resting ground of 19th century Transcendentalists and social reformers and literati who were the architects of the American Renaissance -- that moment when we at last shrugged off English and Continental cultural influences and came into our own on the stage of Global Thought. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the World. Here is Elizabeth Peabody, the progressive educator who opened the first kindergarten in the United States. Here is Harriet Lothrop, author of Little Peppers and How They Grew. Here is Sam Staples, the constable who jailed his friend Thoreau, thus inspiring Civil Disobedience. The Alcott family is marked by an elaborately carved obelisk, still faithfully decorated each Memorial Day by the residents of Concord.

Finally there stands a towering boulder of native pink quartz, alchemically glistening as though fresh from the quarry. Bartlett mentions that friends of Thoreau, after his passing, had intended to place just such a monument at Walden Pond; that dedication seems to have been reserved instead for his mentor and friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Give me insight today, and you may have antique and future worlds.

And here I pause. There is a natural expectation of graveyards for a spectral haunting, or at least some chance of revelation -- that to visit and refresh a feeling of loss and disconnection will allow us to reroute those emotions into something more privately constructive. These are the places where we might allow the Dead to lead us back to ourselves. A parapsychologist would argue that the expectation itself is the key; poltergeists appear only in conjunction with certain personality types, just as specific chemical reactions occur only when the correct elements are mixed in the correct proportions.

If so, then this particular morning the Dead and I don't mix. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. My own experience with death has convinced me funerals and burials and the hallowed grounds that result are for the living. (What living person haunts the site of his future burial, if he knows it? What ghost would want to linger at his eternal one?) The spirits of the departed, if they move among us, are more likely to do so in familiar environments, both psychic and physical, and appear to us in ways to which we are most receptive.

So though I have come here to pay my respects to a pocket of men and women who noticeably shaped their world, and I believe still weave a certain magic in our own, I am left bereft. I am too late, even to kneel before unfamiliar stones and send silent prayers, a few words of thanks… Perhaps they have been dead too long, and there is nothing beneath these rocks but dust, and more dust. For what are they in all their high conceit, when man in the bush with God may meet?

The fabled row of black ash trees leading to the front door of the Old Manse is now gone, as is the apple orchard which once connected the backyard with the bank of the Concord River. It is certainly the most unexcitable and sluggish stream that ever loitered, imperceptibly, towards its eternity, the sea. Only a few winter-barren birches remain. Leaves float on an updraft breeze, like angels seeking heaven at last.

The Manse itself appears much as it did in 1770, when it was built according to the specifications of Rev'd William Emerson (Ralph Waldo's grandfather), and the furniture within still dates from the time of construction. Relatively modest by current standards, the arched, barn-like structure was the first two-story (three, if you count the garret) home in Concord; chock-a-block extensions of the ground floor snake from the rear, toward the river -- symbolic of Concord at-large, which has expanded and modernized gracefully, retaining a historical identity without falling victim to excessive over-development and franchising.

This persistence of Native Spirit could very well be attributed to the silent influence of the Manse. Built for a minister and later inhabited mainly by clergymen, including Ezra Ripley, it seems a spot conducive to that reverence and meditation which concerns the soul. Awful to reflect how many sermons must have been written there. One exception was Nathaniel Hawthorne -- a "profane lay occupant," though certainly known for wrestling with his own Demons of Morality; Mosses from an Old Manse was scribed here, including Young Goodman Brown's midnight encounter with the Devil. Hawthorne claimed the house haunted by none other than Ripley -- describing how door latches would raise without the aid of human strength, and cold otherworldly gusts would sweep through the rooms.

As a gift to newlyweds Nathaniel and Sophia, upon their moving in, a new garden was planted on the south side of the house by Henry Thoreau; each spring this vegetable patch is resurrected, as per the specs of Hawthorne's journals, with the eventual produce donated to local soup kitchens. The giddy Hawthornes employed Sophia's wedding ring diamond to etch inscriptions in the windowpanes of the upstairs study (the room where Emerson wrote "Nature," a cornerstone of the Transcendentalist movement, a few years prior). These etchings can still be seen: Nath Hawthorne/This is his study/1843.

Through this same window, eighty-six years earlier, William Emerson viewed a singular skirmish on the planks of the Old North Bridge. Here once the embattled farmers stood. Four hundred minutemen, tipped off by Samuel Prescott, lay in wait for the advancing British army. (Paul Revere was already captured at Lexington, ten miles east of Concord.) Setting a pattern which has resonated throughout history, the Americans did not fire until fired upon, but at the command of Major John Buttrick -- Fire, fellow soldiers, for God's sake, fire! -- let loose volley after volley after volley, and sent the Redcoats scrambling.

The original bridge, of oak and stone, was dismantled in 1793 due to dilapidation from wear, weather, and war. When Hawthorne wrote the introduction to his Mosses, only a modest cenotaph erected in 1825 marked the spot. (Some locals were rankled that this monument stood on the east bank, where British, not Colonial soldiers, fell.) The North Bridge now in place, built in 1956 and of a design and materials meant to replicate the original, links with the west side where stands the famous Minuteman statue, commissioned by Louisa May Alcott's friend, Daniel Chester French.

If there is any ounce of soil that might be said to lay claim to the conception of the American nation, this is it. Yet this field, separated from the Manse grounds by a shin-high stone fence, interested Hawthorne less as a historic battleground than as a former Indian village. Thoreau, who has a strange faculty of finding what the Indians have left behind them, first set me on the search. It is not hard to imagine the two of them, Thoreau stooping low to scrape the earth with the blade of his garden-trowel, while Hawthorne allows himself a moment of distraction at the beauty of the early springtime blue squill in bloom. There is an exquisite delight in picking up an arrow-head that was dropt centuries ago, and has never been handled since, and which we thus receive directly from the hand of the red hunter.

The first places we go in seeking a past, whether personal or cultural, are the graveyards. The stones point the way back into immovable history, even as the temporal sun winds shadows around and around them. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. We are, for the same reason, drawn to the wood in well-traveled homes -- window sills and doorframes, shelves, cabinets, the handles of hammers and shovels, knives and cutting boards -- any place that wears away beneath our hands, soaks up our natural oils, allowing the grain to rise and speak in testimony of our arrivals and departures, of the work we have done.

In the Concord woods, one half-mile from Walden Pond, is a ten-by-fifteen foot patch of land, lined in stone. A small house once stood here. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately. A replica of that house stands nearer the pond; it is built of new and treated wood and will serve, for now, as well as any monument.

And here is a kettle-hole, formed 12,000 years ago by the retreat of a mighty glacier. It is lined with evergreens, along steep grades that lead down to a broad sandy cusp. The water is mirror-clear: green and silver where it reflects the trees and sky, shading to blue towards the center, where mysteries arise about its ultimate depth, a quarter-mile from shore. The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and does not approach to grandeur.

On the shore, a curiosity on this bitter winter day, a lone seabird pecks at the shallows. My life is like a stroll upon the beach, as near the ocean's edge as I can go. The temptation is too great not to walk toward it, as though it might carry some message... but the bird launches itself from the sand, over the water, then into the sky.

Overhead, the moon floats in the afternoon heavens -- that glowing rock loved by poets and dreamers ever since we have had language for our dreams. For it is those dreams that allow us to trespass against time -- and language that allows us to navigate the way. In a way, it is Language that brought you here... Heaven is under our feet.

Closer, to the spot so hurriedly abandoned by the seabird, where just beneath the water caressing the shoreline is a smooth white rounded stone, about the size of an egg and appearing to hold as many secrets, and as much promise. The water is cold, remembering the glacier it once was. The stone is quickly fished from the shallows, snatched from the threshold of another world. Not a stolen treasure, but a measure of wordless insurance -- proof that this place is real.

What better could be done for anybody, who came within our magic circle, than to throw the spell of a tranquil spirit over him? And when it had wrought its full effect, then we dismissed him, with but misty reminiscences, as if he had been dreaming of us.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, June 30 2002

Pentimento: Paper Projections

Before I saw the movie myself, I took in several reviews of Billy Bob Thornton's take on Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, most of which echoed a lazy sentiment: The Book Was Better. I've been a reader since before kindergarten, worked among books for more than a decade now, and this phrase increasingly annoys, belying as it does a blanket disregard for storytelling in a medium other than that of the printed page. If the filmmaker made a bad movie, okay. But saying "the book was better" is a reaction particular to one's appreciation of a book, not a review of a film. In that regard, what I would really want to know is whether or not the film does justice to that source material -- the Story Itself -- and not the novel by which one came to first know that Story.

I believe there exists, like a diamond floating somewhere on the ethereal plane, an Essential Idea for a story, of which a book, channeled through one particular writer, is only a single facet. It should be that Essential Idea which is followed -- a smart filmmaker should reach beyond a novel and into that idea -- fully aware he's using a different medium (nobody would expect a painting or a radio show or a stage version to be the same as a book -- why do we expect it of film?).

Writers like John Barth or Kurt Vonnegut, whose works present particular difficulties for the Silver Screen, might be the first to argue that a story is, first and foremost, in the telling. It was an argument good enough for Twain, after all. But moviemaking is a specific and very different way of telling a story than is writing. The currency of language is images, not words. Think for a moment about great movies which were conceived as movies -- and how poorly they might fare as novels. Citizen Kane. O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Even Night of the Living Dead draws a great deal of its effect from what is seen (and also by what is not seen) and heard; a textual version would lose a fair amount of impact -- unless of course major changes are implemented.

A few movies do manage to change or even transcend their source material. Jaws. Love Story. Forrest Gump. Think what you like about their content -- the makers of these movies openly accepted the books as mere source material, and by not attempting mere visual translations of what was already on the page, but warping the situations to befit the celluloid medium, perhaps they produced something that improved upon the textual basis, and perhaps revealed more of the Source. Why should we think a book is automatically the best way to tell a story, simply because it appeared to us first?

There's terminology in the painting arts to describe evidence of change to the original composition: pentimento. Often the opaque pigment with which the artist covered a mistake or an unwanted beginning will, with time or injudicious cleaning, become transparent, and a revelation of original intentions will become visible through the finished composition. A celebrated example is Caravaggio's Lute Player (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in which X-ray photography was used to uncover evidence of the painter's original intention. 

Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, for example, uses Washington Irving's famous tale as a transit point for a loving exposition and homage to Gothic storytelling traditions. Irving's legendary headless specter was an excuse for a bit of fun between rival suitors, a 19th century version of The Blair Witch Project; in Burton's version, the Horseman is a visceral revenant, summoned forth by a witch for purposes of greed and revenge. In execution, the stories are nearly mirror-opposites, but both respect a central idea -- the way we weave tales in our lives ultimately gives shape to those lives.

On the other hand, the filmmakers of The Name of the Rose didn't pretend they could bring to the screen all of Umberto Eco's philosophical and religious musings, the intricate symbolic structure, the deep political machinations of the Inquisition. At best, within a 2-hour celluloid environ, these things could only be mentioned or evoked, rather than expounded and invoked. Indeed, the opening credits name their attempt a "palimpsest" of Eco's novel -- terminology for a partially erased and written-over manuscript. But boiling the 500-page novel down to its murder-mystery core was a moot exercise -- all the meaning of the book lay in the clues, not the solution -- and the filmmakers offered nothing new or different as an offset.

Billy Bob Thornton faced the same sort of puzzles by taking on Cormac McCarthy. Celluloid cannot possibly convey the moment young John Grady Cole looks out across the plain and envisions the exodus of the Indians: "…nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives." It is, in total, a passage less than a thousand words -- but an equal number of pictures (about 41 seconds, at 24 frames per second) could never match their worth.

A moment later Cole picks up, Hamlet-style, a horse skull he finds in the sand, and turns it, and listens to the sand shifting inside it. And while that alone is certainly a filmable event, the narration that precedes and follows it, which lifts the scene aloft in meaning and character, evokes things which cannot be seen, or filmed. Film, therefore, must necessarily try something else.

Thornton, for his part, tried to reach beyond McCarty's prose; he spent a lot of time capturing the sweep of the Mexican vistas, but ultimately finally fell victim to the same trap as did, say, Demi Moore's version of The Scarlet Letter (for which, I am sure, Nathaniel Hawthorne is still a-spin). In these books, much of the action takes place by way of character monologues, or observances and impressions -- Thornton follows McCarthy's book too closely with his camera, and when the characters finally open their mouths to explain themselves, the results are staged, stilted speeches. The only way around this would have been to change the story itself to fit the visual medium (well, I'll give Moore's Letter an A for effort in that regard -- I sure don't remember any sponge-baths in Hawthorne's novel).

These are also matters of perception and expectation, in our visual age. We have to acknowledge that movies can't be books, nor should they want to be. Still, a rare success, when truly successful, fuels that expectation -- and so we sit through a thousand more bad film adaptations, hoping to be treated again. The film that comes to mind is To Kill a Mockingbird, which I recently (and correctly, in my opinion) heard described as a "perfect distillation" of the novel, to the point that "we think we're remembering the book, when we're really remembering the movie."

I can think of only one other book that could be paid such a compliment -- Dracula. The nuances of Stoker's elongated Victorian melodrama are now all but forgotten as we recall simply the icongraphic mugging and hypnotic gaze of Bela Lugosi, who drills down to the very sinister heart of the character and takes viewers through the story in just 70 minutes. Lugosi was chosen for the film (after Lon Chaney turned down the role) thanks to the strength of his performance in the stage production. Which brings us back, finally, to what someone else once said, about being true to the Muse, about the Play being the Thing…

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "Double Images: On Paper, On Screen," March 24 2002

See Also:
Ode to the Headless Horseman
The Scales of Myth