"Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."
--H.P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key
At the time Don DeLillo wrote White Noise (1985) computers were still a discrete object and something that you engaged with on an occasional basis. We had PCs but they were chained to desks and their applications limited. Today we’ve got a device 100x more powerful with a bottomless scroll and an insatiable appetite for our attention. ChatGPT and other AI applications spit out answers that flatter you and may or may not be correct, with the only certainty that you haven’t learned a damned thing. And here comes a new bright shiny and it's time to stare at the next thing!
We have WAY too much information at our disposal and most of it is noise, not signal.
This is the low hum of DeLillo’s novel.
You don’t need a plot summary; as with a book like Stoner the plot is entirely secondary and almost irrelevant. Remarried suburban well-to-do husband and wife raising a family are outwardly OK but inwardly unhappy, living a life of mindless consumption. The husband is a college professor who has built his entire career teaching an undergraduate seminar on Hitler. Weird, but he’s the king of his odd fiefdom of hyper-specialized knowledge.
The family is awoken from its torpor by a chemical spill which briefly threatens to tip the novel into postapocalyptic territory. It does not, but exposure to the chemical lends an apocalyptic air to the rest of the book. The husband is poisoned, likely fatally. His wife is caught taking experimental pills to remove her fear of death. This leads to some late novel drama that I won’t spoil here.
Is it worth your time?
Qualified yes. You need to read outside your genre; White Noise won a National Book Award and DeLillo is a wonderful stylist.
We are drowning in white noise more than never. Even though the technology of the book is dated the underlying message is even more relevant today than 1985.
I recognize myself in the novel’s protagonist. My head is stuffed with useless information; I have become an “expert” on things like sword-and-sorcery and heavy metal, but I could not fix a car engine or build a house. I suspect many of you will identify.
Now the qualifications.
It’s a postmodern novel and rather enervating. I’m much more aware of what I consume (even if I still eat too much junk food and drink too much beer); I know that you are impacted by that with which you choose to spend your time. And this book doesn’t have a particularly uplifting message ... though neither does A Song of Ice and Fire and people seem to like that well enough.
I would not recommend reading too many postmodern novels without a strong foundation of other works. Balance this stuff with heroics or fantasy or the spiritual because there is none of that here. It offers no answers to life, just an (admittedly beautiful) depiction of our powerlessness, and helplessness in the face of death.
It’s the usual stuff: God doesn’t exist, we’re just chemical reactions, even a gorgeous evening sunset is just natural phenomena—and quite likely the result of toxic fumes from the spill.
None of this is presented as a Good Thing by DeLillo; the protagonist goes from complacency to ennui, to unnerved, and finally disappointed by the state of the world. He refuses to engage with it, the hard cold data of it, and remains in a state of denial. And when he does attempt action the book steers into something of the pathetic and comic.
But if you want to learn how to incorporate theme into your work, or what heroic fantasy/S&S pushes back against, or how to create believable characters, I’d recommend White Noise.
Sword-and-sorcery typically works better in the short form than the novel, and I think I know why. It’s a lot harder to sustain breakneck action over 250-300 pages. I was reminded not for the first time of this maxim while reading Andrew J. Offutt’s Sword of the Gael (1975, Zebra Books), which I found to be a bit of a mixed bag.
Sword of the Gael is the first in a series of six books from Offutt (and later co-writer Keith Taylor) of Cormac Mac Art, a quasi-historical/mythic High King of Ireland out of medieval Irish legend. Robert E. Howard wrote a handful of stories about the character collected posthumously in Tigers of the Sea, two of which were completed by S&S author Richard Tierney. It is from REH’s interpretation of Mac Art that we get Offutt’s series.
Sword of the Gael opens with a couple fantastic chapters that hooked me out of the gate. A dragon-prowed ship bearing Cormac and his crew capsizes in a storm; many men drown but about a dozen or so including the mighty Dane Wulfhere the Skull-splitter cling to the wreckage and survive after they wash ashore on a rocky isle. Combing the barren spit for any signs of life or life-giving water they happen across a temple of anachronistic construction. Something not of Roman construction, nor even ancient Celtic, but of Atlantis. And it’s occupied by a hostile Viking crew.
Had Offutt ended there it would have made for an excellent short story. But after this well-done piece of Howardian world-building and weirdness we never see nor hear of Atlantis nor the temple again. A classic unused Chekov’s gun. Maybe we will in the second book, The Undying Wizard (1976) however this is not pitched as a series nor a book one. And after the great opening sequence the story begins to flag.
But hold your judgement for a moment.
Though it fails to live up to its opening promise there are many interesting elements in the reminder of the book that carried me through to the end. Offutt says in the introduction he read millions of words and took thousands of words of notes researching ancient Ireland, aka., Eirrin, and in the process fell in love with its history and legends. This is evident. The story feels historical and interesting in a way a lot of generic fantasy does not, clothing and food and Irish culture faithfully depicted. We get so little of Ireland/Eirrin as the setting of fantasy novels (Taylor’s Bard is a notable exception) that this was welcome, and moreover well-rendered. Here’s a bit of that rendering, from a monologue delivered from Cormac’s love interest, the Irish princess Samaire:
There are no former sons of Eirrin, Cormac of Connacht! It’s a spell there is on the fens and the bogs, and the cairn-topped hills of green Eirrin called Inisfail, and it envelops us all at birth like a cloak about the mind. We are forever under it—even those who so long and long ago moved across Magh Rian to Dalriada in Alba. Eirrin-born is Eirrin-bound, as if by stout cords and golden chains.”
This stirs my Irish blood. What do you expect with a last name like Murphy? More than a bit of Eirrin is in me (as well as Danish blood from my mother’s side).
Speaking of stirred/spilled blood, we also get a desperate pitched battle against Picts, and a fun battle against a pool dwelling giant squid. We get a reasonably well done and familiar story of a hero’s homecoming, back to the land that once declared him an exile. Cormac is the son of a murdered high king but cannot return to Eirrin because of a killing he committed years before at a great assembly, a sort of great fair and friendly gathering of competitive clan rivals where no quarrels are permitted (not unlike a Danish Thing). But the young and hot-headed Cormac is goaded to violence and flees his homeland for a dozen years.
Offutt isn't Howard but he’s a good storyteller in his own right. Sword of the Gael is earnest (Offutt even includes bits of his own verse); you cannot fake its enthusiasm. As a standalone novel it’s not entirely successful. But it’s an interesting failure, entertaining enough, and moreover instructive for writers working in the field. I’d give it a tentative recommendation to S&S fans.
Written storytelling has a unique and curious aspect. If a story has a great enough impact on you as a child or young adult, re-reading it can take you back to a distinct place and time in your life, even decades later. It’s a power that I don’t think movies quite possess, perhaps because of the images you form in your brain while reading, or the tactile book you once held in your hand.
After a span of 40-odd years I obtained and re-read Monster Tales, and once again was Werewolf Boy.
This proved to be a fun collection, obviously written for adolescents though it certainly has sharp edges. Every protagonist is a kid and few have happy endings. The 70s “hit different” man.
I enjoyed some of the stories more than others. The standouts included “Torchbearer” and “The Call of the Grave.” “Wendigo’s Child” by horror veteran Thomas Monteleone was pretty good too, if a bit telegraphed.
I also remembered “The Vrkolak” though I remembered it being better. It reads like a PG version of Friday of 13th with Jason swapped out for a giant toad, and murder replaced by scaring a nasty camp counselor half to death.
But the story that most captured my imagination was Nic Andersson’s “Werewolf Boy”, both now and then. I am plagued with a lousy memory but somehow I recalled most of the beats. I think what makes it memorable was my identification with the protagonist, Stefan, a young boy who is treated with a cruelty that stays with you.
(spoiler alert coming)
The story is set long ago in medieval Europe. Stefan is caught out in the woods coming home at night with a puppy. A sadistic local baron is out hunting with his cruel hounds Arn and Bern and tree the young boy. As he reaches for a branch Stefan drops his helpfless pup to the ground. And watches in horror as the hounds tear it to shreds.
To add injury to insult, the baron calls Stefan down, strikes him cruelly across the face with his whip, and rides off laughing.
That’s some callous shit and a shock for anyone to read, but especially when you’re eight years old or so.
But vengeance is Stefans. He encounters a hideous old witch in the woods (she’s missing her nose, which we find out is also the baron’s doing), and asks if she’ll cast a spell to grant him revenge. She does, but not without great cost. The spell turns the boy into a werewolf—and also costs him his soul.
Memory is not just a recall of facts, but also of feelings, emotions. It can be unlocked by a certain smell, a sound—or a story. It can even make you... transform.
As an adult, I found myself shape-shifting, into 10 year-old me. I remembered being shocked by the baron’s cruelty, then (and now). I remembered reveling in Stefan’s vengeance, and thinking how cool it would be if I could become a werewolf, and take care of a few childhood problems of my own.
The bits in the story of Stefan’s transformation from boy to beast and development of a shocking new power and inhuman sense of smell are well-rendered. The fights with Arn and Bern are a slightly less bloodless but no less ferocious version of something in The Call of the Wild. And so were burned into my memory, there for the retrieval--and re-living.
“Werewolf Boy” is an effective little tale and I was pleased to re-read it. And equally pleased to learn that it had the same effect on at least a couple other readers. While searching for details about the author I came across a couple threads where folks who had also read the story long ago were asking if anyone could recall it from its details.
Evidently this story holds a stranger power over more people than just myself.
Anyway, I'm glad I finally have a copy of Monster Tales, and equally pleased to become a werewolf boy once more.
“Myths formulate things for you. They say, for example, that you have to become an adult at a particular age. The age might be a good average for that to happen—but actually, in the individual life, it differs greatly. Some people are late bloomers, and come to particular stages at a relatively late age. You have to have a feeling for where you are. You’ve got only one life to live, and you don’t have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.”
--Joseph Campbell
Myths—the old great ones—are true. Not because they necessarily happened—though some have, in some form or fashion, even if distorted or exaggerated over centuries and millennia of retelling—but because they convey timeless truths about the human condition. We recognize something of ourselves in them. The wanderings of Odysseus. King Arthur and the quest for the Grail and the fall of Camelot. The Celtic myths and legends, of Cú Chulainn and the Tuatha Dé Danann. These stories endure because they tell us something profound about human nature, both how it is and how it might be different, how we might live better lives.
I was reminded of everything I love about myth in a recent reading of The Power of Myth. Published in 1988, the book is an extended conversation between Joseph Campbell and television journalist Bill Moyers (who just passed away last month) that took place in 1985 and 1986 at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch and the Museum of Natural History in New York. Portions of the interview were aired in a six-hour PBS series, which proved wildly popular at the time and led to a Campbell revival. The interviews spanned more than 24 hours and The Power of Myth is the complete edited transcript.
Campbell passed away just a year after the interview and The Power of Myth serves as a repository of his thinking late in life. I’m glad we have it. I cannot do justice to his unique intellect except to say he understood humanity at a level few have before or since. His great genius was in comparative mythology. Campbell spent a lifetime studying the great myths of all the world and came to find they shared much in common. People across cultures and ages are different, but also struggle with the same concerns and problems—the aimlessness of youth, the difficult transition from childhood to adult responsibility, aging and death. And these common stories become encoded into myth.
The Power of Myth is not Bulfinch’s Mythology. It is not a history of the myths, but instead addresses their metaphysical aspects: What are myths? Why do we need them? How have they come to endure?
I spent much of my life walking around in a fog, consuming music, books, porn, social media, whatever. Never turning inward; never attempting to come to grips with my unconscious self that ruled my actions like an unseen hand on the tiller. Myths offer a way out, into a higher plane of existence, because they make you look within, where the answers lie, and where the dragon waits. This is the hero’s journey and one we all must undertake. I have personally experienced it, and see the same story and archetypes and patterns play out again and again in the broader culture.
Jung and Campbell have somewhat fallen out of favor today. We have a blossoming field of neuroscience plumbing the depths of the human brain at a physical, biochemical level. I suspect the scientific community would consider the idea of a shadow self or the collective unconscious unscientific, speculative, lacking empirical support. But they continue to provide a working model of the human psyche and development that speaks to me, deeply. I have to come to believe in dualism. Mind and body are separate though related. Although concepts like love and honor and pride are not physical objects they exist, and so are of no less import than physical matter. We need abstract symbolic language to navigate the concrete world. Myths offer the roadmap.
The real quest is within, our foe to be conquered is the unexamined life, the un-individuated self. We believe our lives will be fixed if a certain politician gets into office or some bill is passed; we are mistaken. The hard truth is that no calvary is coming over the hill; we must accept the burden of accountability, which is paradoxically liberating. Says Campbell:
“Ultimately, the last deed has to be done by yourself. Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage. The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon, break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down … Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, and Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself. That’s the helpful thing about the Indian idea of karma. Your life is the fruit of your own doing.”
As Jung said in The Undiscovered Self, “A million zeroes joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations.” Adds Johnson: “You have to have some sane people as individuals before you can talk about community. Otherwise you have a community of sickness.”
This is not a call for selfishness; it’s a call for living an authentic life and then sharing the bounty outwards. Being curious about other people’s lives; expressing true empathy. This is the truth at the heart of the Holy Grail myth, in which the knights set out each on their own path, entering the Forest Sauvage at their own entry points. Per Campbell:
“The theme of the Grail romance is that the land, the country, the whole territory of concern has been laid waste. It is called a wasteland. And what is the nature of the wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life. And that is what T.S. Eliot meant in his poem The Waste Land … the Grail becomes the—what can we call it?—that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. The Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness.”
Once we have found ourselves, we help others. That completes the circle. Perceval recovers the Grail only after he formulates the question to the wounded Fisher King: “What ails thee?”
“The question is an expression, not of the rules of the society, but of compassion, the natural opening of the human heart to another human being,” Campbell explains. “That’s the Grail.”
It’s not easy, but life is hard, and has always been thus. But Campbell chose to play it. His lessons are worth reading. "I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera--except that it hurts".
On a bit of a lighter note, if you’re a Star Wars fan The Power of Myth contains some insightful analysis of the film. For example, Campbell describes Darth Vader as an unformed man, undeveloped as a human individual, but is instead a bureaucrat living for an imposed program (Lucas was a big Campbell devotee and Star Wars an homage to his teachings). Vader’s monstrous mask is a symbol; when taken away his “strange and sort of pitiful undifferentiated face” is laid bare.
I don’t read much romance. But when I do, I read The Romance of Tristan and Iseult. It’s an old romance, a medieval romance. Definitely not a bad romance.
There is something to old.
Many of today's fantasy authors attempt to replicate the medieval age by slapping armor on a modern talking dude operating within a modern moral framework. Which is not wrong (it’s fantasy; they can do what they will), but it’s also not the past; it’s a contemporary novel draped in the outwear of the archaic.
The Romance of Tristan and Iseult is old, and feels it. It traces back to the 12th century and likely older Celtic legends. Its soul is medieval. Modern politics are as out of place here as a 9mm pistol. Women are married off to mollify tension between kingdoms; children are taken as chattel slaves; men risk everything to ride to the defense of other lords. Kings make the rules … and they are not all good.
The story is a basic tale of star-crossed lovers. Iseult, an Irish princess, is promised as a bride to King Mark of Cornwall. But she and Mark’s young nephew Tristan fall in love and begin an affair. Conflict ensues.
What makes it “new” is the deeply medieval moral framework in which the story exists. All the same petty jealousies and betrayals that we recognize today are here but with medieval twists. When Mark discovers the affair he’s pissed and orders the lovers … burned at the stake. No trial, no one riding to their defense. This is pre-bill of rights, pre-courts. I feel like the Old Norse Thing settled disputes far more equitably. We experience a terrible/wonderful tension of illicit love at conflict with fidelity to lord/honor and obligation, each side fairly represented in a classic courtly love which fueled so many medieval romances. Other modern dissonances: Tristan decides for Iseult that she shall marry King Mark (she has no say). Tristan falls for another Iseult, Iseult of the White Hand, marries her, and then leaves her hanging, marriage unconsummated, when he realizes he still loves the OG Iseult. Iseult of the White Hand returns the ill favor a hundredfold in a stunning end that I won’t spoil here (can 1000 year old stories be spoiled)? There is deference to God; Iseult takes a test of purity to prove her innocence, submitting her flesh to a hot brand.
You don’t see this type of thing being written today. Maybe we do and I’ve missed it.
Tristan and Iseult is part of the Arthurian cycle, occupying the same shared universe, but only peripherally. Arthur and his knights are mentioned in the story but play no significant role. The tale serves as likely inspiration for the Launcelot-Guinevere-Arthur love triangle. There are small incursions of magic, including a magic dog with a bell that distracts its owner from grief, a gift from the mystic isle of Avalon. Most notably it includes a love potion whose accidental ingestion causes Tristan and Iseult to fall madly in love. The potion has been the subject of much debate; was it placed here to remove some of the responsibility for the affair, or evoke our sympathy? Far be it from me to criticize timeless works but it did not feel wholly necessary and may have made more sense to a medieval audience.
I read an accessible modern-ish retelling assembled by French medievalist Joseph Bediere in 1900, translated into English in 1945. It is told with the reference point of a Celtic bard talking to an audience of nobles, breaking of the fourth wall with direct references to the reader. We are a listener in this hall of fire. This device allows the tale to cover a lot of ground but without the detail we’d expect in a modern novel. For example, battles are relayed as events that occurred minus the up-close cut and thrust of Joe Abercrombie. But some are desperate and memorable, including Tristan’s one-on-battle duel on a small island vs. the massive and intimating Irish champion the Morholt (what a menacing name; a possible precursor to The Mountain?) Speaking of the Mountain the combat and the broader story features a liberal use of poison.
I was moved by the incredibly touching end image, a persistent vine that even when cut continues growing to connect the two graves. Love endures all.
John Steinbeck is rightly remembered these days as a Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Grapes of Wrath and secondarily, East of Eden; almost no one talks about his foray into Arthurian myth.
Yet his heart lay in time-shrouded tales of questing knights and the shining castle on a hill. Steinbeck was ensorcelled by the stories of King Arthur his entire life. They were his gateway to a true love of reading at age 9, and from youth all the way to his death in 1968 the stories of King Arthur were never far from his mind.
Steinbeck embarked on his own spin on Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, writing The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights in a two-year period from 1958-59. Sadly the book was never finished … but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it.
You should. I just did, and I’m better for it.
The King Arthur stories are not (just) stories of dudes in armor riding off on great quests. They are part of our western literary canon, but even more so, part of the fabric of western myth. They instruct us how to behave, but also where we fall short.
And so we have passages like this (cue Nicol Williamson); not a celebration of our species’ predilection for violence, but certainly a good as explanation of any as to why we’re still fighting wars in the 21st century in the shadow of millions of heaped corpses still fresh from the 20th:
“Then Arthur learned, as all leaders are astonished to learn, that peace, not war, is the destroyer of men; tranquility rather than danger the mother of cowardice, and not need but plenty brings apprehension and unease. Finally he found that the longed-for peace, so bitterly achieved, created more bitterness than ever did the anguish of achieving it.”
Here is Steinbeck’s Merlin, wise beyond comprehension to the point of being able to see the future, yet he too is subject to the lusts that rule men, falling helplessly under the binding spell of Nyneve:
“In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins. I have told you your certain future, my lord, but knowing will not change it by a hair. When the time comes, your feeling will conduct you to your fate.”
This is a tale of many characters but Launcelot is the central figure; Launcelot who is the best of all knights, but of course with a fatal flaw; who despite his love for Guinevere wins every bit of our admiration because when asked if he is content to be the world’s perfect knight the question nearly splits him in two before he regains his composure. This internal struggle is rendered beautifully by Steinbeck:
A black rage shook Sir Launcelot, drew his lips snarling from his teeth. His right hand struck like a snake at his sword hilt and half the silver blade slipped from the scabbard. Lyonel felt the wind of his death blow on his cheek.
Then, in one man he saw a combat more savage than ever he had seen between two, saw wounds given and received and a heart riven to bursting. And he saw victory, too, the death of rage and the sick triumph of Sir Launcelot, the sweat-ringed, fevered eyes hooked like a hawk’s, the right arm leashed and muzzled while the blade crept back to its kennel.
Lancelot and Guinevere.
Launcelot is if not the “greatest” knight the most sympathetic, because he wrestles with his conscience and occasionally fails, yet never relents. Unlike the perfect Galahad who recovers the grail, for Lancelot every day is a battle that leaves him bone-weary, either with foes eager to test their mettle or against his own weaknesses—vanity, violence, disloyalty. And yet we love him for it, as does his young cousin and knight in training Sir Lyonel:
Sir Lyonel knew that this sleeping knight would charge to his known defeat with neither hesitation nor despair and finally would accept his death with courtesy and grace as though it were a prize. And suddenly Sir Lyonel knew why Lancelot would gallop down the centuries, spear in rest, gathering men’s hearts on his lance head like tilting rings. He chose his side and it was Lancelot’s.
This is a book of quests, and one of my favorites is when Lancelot confronts a broken Kay, who used to be a great champion but is now a shell of his former self. Lancelot asks him why he has fallen; Kay explains the weight of responsibility, and the mundane, soul-crushing management required of a kingdom:
“Granite so hard that it will smash a hammer can be worn away by little grains of moving sand. And a heart that will not break under the great blows of fate can be eroded by the nibbling of numbers, the creeping of days, the numbing treachery of littleness, of important littleness. I could fight men but I was defeated by marching numbers on a page.”
I suspect a modern office middle manager, or Kull at his writing desk, would be nodding his head sagely. Lancelot does as any good friend should; he dons Kay’s armor and shield and rides out to knock a hundred men off their horses and send them groveling back to Arthur’s court to submit to the queen as Kay’s prizes, unbeknownst they were fighting the greatest knight in the land.
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights is of course notably unfinished, published posthumously in 1976; leading one to speculate. Did Steinbeck finally lose interest in Arthur? Was it becoming tedium, because the story was not his and he knew how it would end? Could he not bear to engage in the full measure of tragedy in a time when he and his wife were reportedly at their happiest?
We don’t have an answer. In its early stages Steinbeck described it as the greatest work of his life. Keep in mind this was late in his career, AFTER all his major works were completed.
It is perhaps fitting the story ends with a kiss, perhaps the most passionate and illicit in western literature. From there it’s all downhill for Camelot. Perhaps Steinbeck did not wish to deal with the full measure of the tragedy. Which seems unlikely given the tragedy in his better known literary works, but Le Morte D’Arthur is the big daddy of tragedy.
We can only guess. But I’m glad we have what we have. Highly recommended.
A few notes: Because it was unfinished and Steinbeck indicated that it took him some time to get down the style, he intended to go back and do rewrites. As such it’s a uneven to start and does not truly get going until the Morgan Le Fay chapter about 100 pages in. Up until then it feels like a beat-for-beat translation of Le Morte D’Arthur with updated diction, but at that point takes on something of the pace of a modern novel.
A perilous quest...
Most critics then and now did not care for the book, mainly because they were expecting something much more Steinbeck and not a faithful adaptation/quasi translation of Malory. Steinbeck’s agent was puzzled upon seeing an early draft, leaving him stung by the reaction. Perhaps they were expecting a family of migrants on a dusty trek/quest to California, riding flatbed trucks instead of chargers? That does sound cool come to think of it but not what we get here. I suspect Steinbeck held Le Morte D’Arthur in such reverence he found no need to try to improve upon it; he set out to tell the same story in plainer English and IMO for what we have, succeeded.
He might also have felt like the original stories were being lost. In an age of radical literary experimentation and increasing Hollywood exploitation (then and now) he was not wrong.
My edition has a wonderful series of letters at the back, most from Steinbeck to his literary agent or his longtime friend. These offer terrific insight into his first-person research that included trips to Wales, Glastonbury, Tintagel and other places associated with Arthur. We get valuable insight into Steinbeck’s writing process, including his struggles to find the right literary voice and approach, eventually settling on “a close-reined, taut, economical English, unaccented and unlocalized … it just as simple as that and I think it is the best prose I have ever written,” Steinbeck says. And everywhere his love of Malory that shines through any faults he found in the original. Steinbeck was very well versed in the old stories and I enjoyed reading his own analyses of the myth, as here where he compares the stories to modern televised westerns:
And it can be shown and it will be shown that the myth of Arthur continues even into the present day and is an inherent part of the so-called “Western” with which television is filled at the present time—same characters, same methods, same stories, only slightly different weapons and certainly a different topography. But if you change Indians or outlaws for Saxons and Picts and Danes, you have exactly the same story. You have the cult of the horse, the cult of the knight.
Steinbeck felt the profound human truths at the heart of the story, truths which transcend time and place, and sought to preserve it whenever possible. This is not George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, it is something much older and in my opinion, far deeper. It will endure the ages. To close with Steinbeck: “I am not writing this to titillate the ear of the twentieth century. Perhaps I am overambitious, but I am trying to make it available, not desirable. I want the remote feeling of the myth, not the intimate feeling of today’s man who in his daily thought may change tomorrow but who in his deeper perceptions, I am convinced, does not change at all. In a word I have not been trying to write a popular book, but a permanent book.”
***
A few other thoughts about Arthuriana.
When talking about the north stars of fantasy most seem to skip the King Arthur stories. If I had to speculate, it’s because they occupy some liminal space between mythology, history, and national epic. You can’t really compare Sir Thomas Malory with Dunsany or Tolkien, Howard or Leiber, Lewis or LeGuin, Martin or Rowling.
But of course they are largely fantasy, replete with spells and giants and magic swords. And if you choose to classify them as such, it’s hard to think of anything more fantastic.
How do you review a new Robert E. Howard biography? Perhaps with the question: Do we need a new Howard biography? After all, we have two major works already: L. Sprague de Camp’s Dark Valley Destiny and Mark Finn’s Blood and Thunder. There are others too, which I have not read and cannot comment on: David C. Smith’s Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography, and Todd Vick’s Renegades and Rogues: The Life and Legacy of Robert E. Howard.
The field seems well sown. But let’s dig a little deeper.
DVD is well-researched and eminently readable but ultimately a flawed work. It places its emphasis on Howard’s psychology, starting from a place that there must have been something wrong with REH and then building that case with outdated and clumsy psychoanalysis (for more, see here).
If Dark Valley Destiny frames REH’s life as a story of tragedy, a literal Dark Valley from which there was no escape, Finn’s Blood and Thunder is a thunderous corrective. Its strength is its compelling case as Howard as Texas writer, a young man who drew from his surroundings and the recently closed Texas frontier to give us pulp adventure that shows every sign of literary immortality. It’s also a cracking good read by a born raconteur. What it does lack is scholarly apparatus, footnotes and avenues for further research.
So yes, you can make the case for new Howard biography. Willard M. Oliver has added a new voice and a new chapter in Howard scholarship with the newly released Robert E. Howard The Life and Times of a Texas Author (University of North Texas Press, 2025). And I’m happy to report it’s very good.
Oliver’s biography is not a middle ground between DVD and B&T but instead cuts a new channel—scholarly biography, as exhaustively researched as DVD and as fair as Finn’s reappraisal. It’s a substantial book, more than 500 pages counting references and works cited. The heart of the book is Oliver’s theory that Howard’s desire for personal freedom was the motivating force of his life and writing career, perhaps the apex in his personal hierarchy of values: “I have but a single conviction or ideal, or whateverthehell it might be called: individual liberty. It's the only thing that matters a damn” (letter to H.P. Lovecraft, 1932).
And yet as deeply as Howard strove for freedom another value equally as powerful presented a formidable counterweight: The call of community. This was chiefly apparent in Howard’s obligation to provide care for his ailing mother and her battle with tuberculosis. Howard depended on a literary community of magazine editors and loyal readers. And finally, he desired a meaningful relationship with Novalyne Price Ellis, one he was ultimately denied. When Price asked REH to delegate his mother’s care to nurses or other paid help Howard refused: it was his obligation. Oliver paints an arresting scene in which Howard, out driving on a date, slams on the brakes of his car, telling Price, “I want to live! I want a women to love, a woman to share my life and believe me, to want me and love me. Do you know that?”
Values dissonance can result in emotional growth and meaningful change, but generally only after a crisis. Howard was unable to reconcile the opposition of personal liberty and communal obligation and his mother’s death provided the way out.
Robert E. Howard The Life and Times of a Texas Author gives us all of this, all of Howard’s life, in probably as much detail as any fan could want.
Following are some of the details and bits I enjoyed, either because they're well-presented, interesting, and/or new (to me).
Oliver does a fine job setting up Howard’s time and place—the actual town of Cross Plains. It offers rich detail of his family history/parents and settlings in the United States.
There is some great material here on Howard the poet—his love of verse, his early sales, and being one of the most prolific poets in WT history. Howard’s poetry even received rare praise from mercurial Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright. Fans often forget this or overlook his wonderful poems.
New to me; Howard’s deliberate construction and cultivation of an Irish identify (pp. 197-198); I knew about his strong Gaelic interests but not how far he adopted them into his own life—singing old Irish songs, Gaelicizing his middle name, etc.
His youthful, beer-swilling trips with Smith and Vinson as detailed in the Junto (p. 215), told here evocatively and dude-bro awesome by Oliver.
Oliver does a nice job introducing “The Shadow Kingdom” and its important place as the origin of sword-and-sorcery but also one of Howard’s most poetic and vivid stories, as well as how popular it was with WT readers and editors (my ego is pleased to find myself cited here, and elsewhere, in the work—pp. 245-246).
Howard’s fatiguing medical condition is covered here with more research, care and nuance than DVD.
There are several new pics of REH I had not seen before. This was a very pleasant surprise.
We get some well-placed details on the Great Depression, focused on Cross Plains and the closure of its two banks in 1931 (p. 308).
Howard’s love of westerns and the role of the frontier in his books. Although he wrote straight two-fisted westerns he also wrote some weird westerns, a genre for which he is considered the founder (p. 315)
I enjoyed the detail on Margaret Brundage’s artistic process. A prolific cover artist for Weird Tales, she would actually read the stories, pick the scenes that seemed most salacious/sexy, draw them using pastel chalk on canvas, and tack the image to a wooden frame before dropping them off at the WT office (p. 338).
Black Mask, Dashiell Hammett and the birth of hard-boiled detective, meting out tough personal justice outside the law. Howard wrote his own hard-boiled detective stories but never loved the form and it was his least successful literary foray (p. 350).
Howard getting half-checks from a struggling Weird Tales before these too ceased due to the magazine’s financial woes (p. 412). If I had read before that WT was cutting Howard half-checks with the promise to pay the rest later if so I had forgotten this detail.
Howard’s love for the Texas landscape and its barbarian ethos, which likely would have been his next literary venture (p. 436).
Oliver’s speculation that Hester’s death provided the occasion for Howard’s suicide and was not necessarily the inciting incident; I agree, though would add it was the result of an irreconcilable clash of values (p. 455).
Details about a will Howard wrote near the end of his life which reportedly bequeathed all his worldly possessions to friend Lindsey Tyson. And destruction of said will. Oliver says this may have been gossip, not fact.
A nice summation of Howard’s character by Price and his circle of friends and WT collaborators, post-suicide. This was sad, especially the letters of remembrances and posthumous praise to the Eyrie from heartbroken WT readers (p. 466).
Does the book contain any flaws? From a research perspective I cannot say; I’m not a Howard scholar and lack the qualifications to fact-check a book with this level of detail. But everything I read seemed accurate and, as noted, Oliver provides voluminous references for cross-checking. It perhaps is a little slow to start; try as I might I’m just not interested in genealogy and so I found the early chapters a bit dry. If Oliver is not as colorful a writer as DeCamp or Finn he’s certainly economic and journalistic and his style is very accessible (which is in itself, an art). The book does not delve into Howard’s racism, which is fair enough, as IMO it does not transcend its time and place and is therefore unremarkable. I imagine some might criticize this decision. There is little to no post-mortem discussion of REH’s legacy, but as Oliver himself states that’s a story requiring a book-length work of its own. The price of the hardcover may be steep for casual fans, as is its length, but I doubt many casuals will pick it up.
In summary, any criticisms I have are minor. I believe Robert E. Howard The Life and Times of a Texas Author will join the front ranks of Howard scholarship; I can’t see another Howard biography surpassing this one for research, even-handedness, and thorough attention to detail. Time will tell.
“It is honor, Able. A knight is a man who lives honorably and dies honorably, because he cares more for his honor than for his life. If his honor requires him to fight, he fights. He doesn’t count his foes or measure their strength, because those things don’t matter. They don’t affect his decision.”
The trees and the wind were so still then that I felt like the whole world was listening to him.
“In the same way, he acts honorably toward others, even when they do not act honorably toward him. His word is good, no matter to whom he gives it.”
--Gene Wolfe, The Knight
Character matters. There is truth in the world of ideas.
I was listening to a podcast the other day. One of the guests--an author, self-described philosopher, and entrepreneur—concluded a view of the world I find abhorrent: Objective truth does not exist, values are manufactured and none better than others, and the purpose of life is maximizing personal happiness.
I’m leaving this dude’s name out because I don’t know him, and I’m attacking the idea, not the individual. But I do wonder: How do you end up in your mid-50s endorsing nihilism? Cheerily admitting there are no such things as absolute moral values … which means that everything is in theory permitted? It’s a train of thought that leaves dragons hoarding wealth they’ve ruthlessly abstracted from others, swelled with hubris, unable to see that their gold is derived from the thankless labor of uncountable generations who built civilization, created the human project from squalor, and allow for the existence of privileged coastal millionaire elites.
Few openly admit to nihilism, but many act that way. “I’ll extract wealth from the less fortunate, because no one is watching. And after all, it’s technically legal and I can get away with it.”
We each have the freedom to construct our own meaning and live our own lives as we see fit … except when that freedom infringes on or destroys other’s lives. The strong are obligated to lift up the sick, weak, and needy. Because it’s honorable to do so. And I would argue, an obligation that is an objective truth of the human condition. How long does this last if everyone behaves like a selfish douche canoe?
Imagine if Able of the High Heart was a nihilist? It would make a much different book than Gene Wolfe’s The Knight.
The story centers around a small boy who enters through a portal from our world to Mythgarthr, a world of high fantasy, gods, magic, monsters… and stouthearted knights. After an encounter with an elflike being, Disiri the Mossmaiden, Able rapidly grows into a powerful man and embarks on a journey into knighthood.
This sudden transformation means we get a uniquely compressed character arc. Able goes from an adolescent experiencing the vicissitudes of life, to young man called to perform duties to others, to grown man called to service to his own heart and conscience. From learning from others to teaching others the way. As we all should, objectively. Because if we don’t do this, we’ll leave the next generation in shambles. Which should concern you unless you’re a nihilist and think that death and life are one and the same.
Of course, we’re never going to be perfect. We throw away much for pleasure. Reject responsibility to others because it doesn’t maximize our momentary well-being. As Able does with the vixen of the woods. This is part of growing up. I think we all have to indulge in pleasures of the flesh.
But at some point adults realize it’s time to fight the dragon.
As noted recently I struggle with Wolfe. I find him needlessly opaque and allusive, at times impenetrable. Not so much with The Knight, which I enjoyed, if not unreservedly. Even here Wolfe does not make the journey easy for the reader. The story is told in an epistolary/letters from Mythgarthr to modern earth style which I don’t love, which leaves important sequences glossed over or relegated to the background. Able often for example will completely gloss over a battle, and only later do we realize the extent of his heroism through offhand remarks from observers after the fact.
… but that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? Knights with a code of honor don’t crow about their accomplishments. They don’t virtue signal on Instagram and sell self-help books as they lead deeply insulated, selfish lives. That would be … dishonorable.
There’s much other great stuff in here that make the The Knight a memorable journey. Wolfe-ian symbols I’m quite certain I failed to grasp. When Able plunges three times into a deep pool, beyond air and endurance, to retrieve his armor and sword, and hears the horns of Aelfrice/elfland, we feel a mythic power we cannot articulate, literally and metaphorically deep. But one lesson we can be sure of: Unless you confront the metaphorical dragon it becomes terribly real.
I’m sure I will tackle The Wizard after a palate cleanser. For now something a bit lighter is in order.
Over the course of my lifetime I’ve been exposed to Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung in many and various ways. The story, or pieces thereof, from the Old Norse literature upon which the operas are based. The thematic content from modern works like The Broken Sword and The Lord of the Rings. Even the music, which I’ve heard in various and sundry films including Apocalypse Now ("The Ride of the Valkyries") and Excalibur (“Siegfried’s Funeral March," "Prelude to Parsifal").
But I haven’t ever seen the opera nor read a full literary treatment of the work. And was overdue to scratch this niggling itch … but wanted to have some fun, with a low bar to entry. And so, I scooped up a treatment I did not know existed until quite recently: Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, the complete graphic novel as adapted by the great Roy Thomas and Gil Kane, with Jim Woodring.
This was enjoyable. I plowed through it in just a few hours over a few nights. It’s a product of DC Comics, released in 1991, and checks in at a relatively hefty 191 pages. It includes some welcome introductory material, including a foreword introducing the biography and talents of the authors, and an introduction to Wagner’s opera cycle by Brian Kellow of Opera News.
The Ring of the Nibelung is a somewhat complex story, with four acts/operas (Wagner prefers music dramas) spanning long periods of time, told through different sets of characters ranging from gods, giants, and dwarves to the heroic albeit mortal race of humans known as Nibelungs. It starts with the creation of the world, and ends with its downfall at Ragnarok. The centerpiece is the story of Siegfried, a mortal hero sent to slay a dragon, reclaim the gods' stolen gold and rescue the Valkyrie Brunnhilde. These stories are bound together by a golden ring that grants its wearer dominion over the world. Yes, there are some Tolkien parallels here, which JRRT denies and to be fair he likely drew on Wagner’s common influences, not the operas. But we’ve got a greedy dragon hoarding wealth, a precious ring fought over by two brothers (one of whom kills the other to take it for himself), a broken sword reforged, and many other familiar elements.
Overall it's a gorgeous, epic, deeply thematic story well told by Thomas—and as you’d expect from his pen, it moves. Kane’s artwork is marvelous, beautiful, comic booky and muscular but not garish. The men are jacked and the women beautiful. Rather than me attempt to word-paint here are some of the panels:
What does it all mean? There’s a lot to dig into, too much for me after one rapid reading of an adaptation in graphic novel form. But The Ring is undoubtedly a Great Story, and like all great stories contains truth. I’m quite fond of Sir Roger Scruton’s “Reflections on The Ring of the Nibelung,” which he describes as a story for “modern people, for whom the path to heroism is overgrown.”
From that essay:
Wagner’s story of gods and heroes, of giants and dwarfs, is not a fairy tale. It is addressed to modern people, who have lost the ways of enchantment, and for whom the path to heroism is overgrown. It is a story in which law and love, power and property are all caught up in a life and death struggle between the forces that govern the human soul.
Love without power will not endure, and power without law will always erode the claims of love. We live this paradox, and without the gods to maintain the moral order the burden of it falls entirely on our shoulders.
Gods come and go; but they last as long as we make room for them, and we make room for them through sacrifice. The gods come about because we idealize our passions, and it is by accepting the need for sacrifice on behalf of another that our lives acquire a meaning. Seeing things that way we recognize that we are not condemned to mortality but consecrated to it. Such, in the end, was Wagner’s message. Yes, the gods must die, and we ourselves must assume their burdens. But we inherit their aspirations too: freedom, personality, love, and law. There is no way in which we can achieve those great goods through politics, which, if we put too much faith in it, will inevitably degenerate into the kind of totalitarian power enjoyed by the dwarf Alberich. But we can create these things in ourselves, and we do this when we recognize the sacred character of our joys and sufferings, and resolve to be true to them.
I don’t write fiction, but I’ve read enough of it to make some observations about what makes for good writing. Here’s one: Good writing results from knowing what to emphasize, and what to leave out.
Poor writing is usually not the result of a bad idea, nor even of clumsy or artless style. Rather it suffers from being bogged down in needless detail, not placing proper emphasis on the right things. Good storytellers know where to aim the lens. When to let it linger, and when to move it along. Then comes inventive plot, believable character, and good word choice and style. In no particular order.
Tanith Lee is such a storyteller. She’s a writer of atmosphere and romance and decadence and depth who accomplishes this with an economy of words that astonishes. She seems to have an unfailing instinct for what is boring (what to leave out), what keeps the story moving (what to emphasize). Lee then harnesses these principles to a wonderful and unique style that makes every word a pleasure, the act of reading immersive. Dense yet somehow elegant, evocative, lush, and dreamlike. A master of the craft.
The result is that a short story collection like The Empress of Dreams moves, and contains multitudes.
This 2021 collection from DMR Books includes16 stories written over the course of Lee’s career, the earliest from 1976 (“The Demoness,” originally published in The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 2), and the latest 2013, just two years before her death (“A Tower of Arkrondurl,” originally published in Legends: Stories in Honor of David Gemmell). All can be grouped loosely as sword-and-sorcery. There are some who seem to want beefcake heroes and epic battles and slaughter out of S&S. You don’t get that here. What you do get is dark magic. Atmosphere. The true weird, displacement and strangeness in quasi-medieval settings that derived from Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith and continued through to Jack Vance and Michael Shea. For modern comparisons, look to the likes of Schuyler Hernstrom or John Fultz.
Some of these stories are S&S through and through. Mercenaries in search of gold, a hot meal, or a new start in life. Warriors encountering strange towers. Everything is small stakes (well, if you count your life as small stakes). But there’s also deep symbolism, engagement with themes and the human condition. “The Woman in Scarlet” explores the fickleness and disloyalty of women in a frank albeit oblique way—it’s told from the vantagepoint of a female sword--that I think a man would have trouble writing. Fearless, edgy stuff. “Odds Against the Gods” is about a young woman in search of her past, and her identity. Lee writes strong men and women in her stories, lusty and brave and three dimensional. Four pages into this collection a woman is enjoying the pleasures of another woman, and later on the attentions of a man. If this type of thing offends you, sorry? Look elsewhere.
I haven’t even mentioned her imagination which at times seems unshackled from the earth. In “The Pain of Glass” Lee conjures a story about a goblet spun from a patch of desert on which a dying woman is separated forever from her true love. Part of her ethereal voice and spirit is absorbed into the sand and later heated and molded into a glass that seeks its soulmate, traveling from hand to hand over years. Those who drink from it are changed:
“Is the cup ensorcelled?”
“I cannot definitely tell you,” Jandur answered. It was a fact, he could not.
“It is—what is it?”
“Alas, I cannot say. Mystical and magical certainly.”
“Does it affect all—who—touch it?”
“In various ways, it does. Some weep. Some blush. Some begin to sing.”
“And you,” said Razved, with another warning note suddenly entering his voice; that of jealousy, “what do you feel when you take hold of it?
“Fear,” Jandur replied simply.
“Ah,” said Razved. “It is not meant for you, then.”
But again, what unites all of these disparate stories is terrific writing. Here’s how Lee renders the changing face of an arrogant town guardsman, whose veneer of invulnerability crumbles beneath the insult of an insouciant outsider who refuses to be intimidated:
Razibond’s face was now a marvellous study for any student of the human mood. It has passed through the blank pink of shock to the crimson of wrath, sunk a second in superstitious, uneasy yellow, before escalating into an extraordinary puce—a hue that would have assured any dye-maker a fortune, had he been able to reproduce it. More than this, Rozibund had swollen up like a toad. He cast his wine cup to the ground, where it shattered, being unwisely made of clay, and, disdaining his knife, heaved out a cleaverish blade some four feet long.
Wonderful.
Admission—I had read Lee prior in the likes of Swords Against Darkness, The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories, and Amazons, which I re-read while researching and writing Flame and Crimson. But I’ve never any of her many novels, of which she’s written more than 90(!), nor a collection. This was a mistake. I think she is close to a first rank S&S writer. She’s that good. In fact she might now rank as my favorite female S&S writer. I feel that strongly after reading this collection. C.L. Moore’s best short stories (Black God’s Kiss, Shambleau, Hellsgarde) and Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon are as good or arguably better as anything in here but The Empress of Dreams as a whole is in incredibly diverse and strong all the way through, hit after hit or at least strength to strength.
Lee’s literary debt to Vance is evident and admittedly her greatest influence, and so it is appropriate that the collection ends with “Evillo the Uncunning,” which originally appeared in Songs of The Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance (2009). This story ends with Lee’s short appreciation of Vance, in which she writes, “I don’t quite believe Jack Vance invented the Dying Earth. Part of me knows he’s been there. Often.”
Lee seems to be having a bit of a resurgence these days due to the Neil Gaiman controversy, which has brought to light Gaiman’s liberal borrowing from Lee’s flat earth stories. No one would have a problem with this had Gaiman admitted as much; Lee certainly admits to her own great indebtedness to Vance, for example. The fact he has seemingly never admitted to Lee’s influence does him no honor. See more here.
What criticisms do I have of this collection, if any? Lee loves open-ended endings perhaps a little too much. Not all her stories do this, but enough fall into the category of leave it up to the reader to figure out the meaning. I’m of a mixed mind of these types of stories; it can rob them of impact, leaving you with the feeling you’ve read something unfinished, scratching your head. But these are also the sort of stories that stay with you; you are made to put the pieces together and assemble the meaning, and when you do, you participate in the story. And it lingers. As this collection does.
Jack London is a great writer, full stop. Upon reading Martin Eden (1909) I declare he now resides firmly in my top 10 favorite authors. A list still in progress and subject to change but probably looks something like this (not in any order):
1.JRR Tolkien
2.Robert E. Howard
3.Jack London
4.TH White
5.Stephen King
6.Ray Bradbury
7.Bernard Cornwell
8.Poul Anderson
9.Karl Edward Wagner
10.HP Lovecraft
Reading London is akin to receiving an electric shock. The intensity with which he writes is almost unrivaled. In fact, there’s really only one author I’ve encountered who writes with the same poetic, romantic verve, great splashes of color and blood and rage and wild passion: Robert E. Howard.
I didn’t necessarily think Martin Eden would deliver the same visceral experiences as The Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, or The Star Rover, but as it turns out, it did. These are mostly contained in the heart and mind of the titular protagonist, though there are some all-time savage fistfights. But even with no swordplay or sorcery, I literally aloud mouthed, “god damn” after reading various lines and passages--probably at least a dozen times.
Why read Martin Eden if you a sword-and-sorcery fan, or a fan of REH?
Howard was directly influenced by London, in all ways.
If you want to know how Robert E. Howard felt, read Martin Eden.
If you want to know how Howard wrote, read Martin Eden.
How Howard struggled with life, with relationships, with his disappointment for the world--it’s all here, in this book. Martin Eden is almost as vital to understanding Howard as his personal correspondence, or One Who Walked Alone. IMO.
How can I make such a wild declaration? Martin Eden was the chief influence on Howard’s own autobiographical novel, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs. It likely influenced Howard’s life choices and how he viewed himself, too. REH scholar Will Oliver does a nice job tracing these influences in his essay “Robert E. Howard and Jack London’s Martin Eden: Analyzing the influence of Martin Eden on Howard and his Semi-Autobiography” (The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies, Vol. 11, Issue 1, June 2020). Which I sought out and read after finishing the book.
Martin Eden is a writer, a frustrated romantic, a boxer. He worked long hours in soulless jobs while wanting to do something else. The book is a story of romance colliding with commerce. Just as Howard was foiled by the whims of magazine publishers and the late payments of Weird Tales, so too is Martin Eden consumed with these struggles, living on the edge of poverty and needing to work back-breaking jobs that left him too tired to write. Yet he pressed on, because he refused to let passion and truth succumb to conformity and mindless work.
But it’s a brutal struggle, and a tragedy, just as Howard’s life was.
Martin Eden is many other things besides. A critique of early 20th capitalism, its long and inhumane working conditions. A critique of class, the cultural elites who look with scorn upon the working-class men and women who actually make the world go round. It’s a critique of the weakness of people, who are fickle and disloyal and petty.
Eden’s great love, Ruth, abandons him when he needs her most. When he finally meets with success the world comes crawling back but Martin sees through the grift and shallowness. He’s like Conan, a barbarian at odds with corrupt civilization. A rough and uncultured sailor, Eden desperately wants to be civilized, and spends the whole book in this pursuit. He makes, it, but at the expense of his soul. When he finally learns of its cultured ways, “the gilt, the craft, and the lie,” it breaks his heart.
“I’m no more than a barbarian getting my first impression of civilization,” he observes.
I won’t it spoil any further, just to add if not already apparent: Martin Eden=Recommended.
A cover better than the contents... unfortunately true of many Frazettas.
A very brief review of Ardor on Aros, by andrew j. offutt (1973).
(some spoilers follow)
The good
Great cover by Frank Frazetta, though unfortunately has nothing to do with the contents of the book (save perhaps symbolically, and I’m being generous).
It’s an easy, fast-paced read. Which says something for Offutt’s prose, which if not elevated or inspired does the job.
It’s unrepentant pastiche. Unlike some pastiches which dance uncomfortably with their source material, Ardor on Aros leans in all the way. The protagonist, Hank Ardor, is transported to Aros, a planet conjured from the imagination of three separate beings, one of whom is a female author writing a Burroughs pastiche. He arrives nude and is able to take huge leaps due to the thin atmosphere on the planet. We run into “Dejah Thoris” or someone closely approximating her; he names his two alien mounts “ERB” and “Kline”—the latter named after Otis Adelbert Kline, who wrote his own sword-and-planet including The Swordsman of Mars (1933) and The Outlaws of Mars (1933). Still not sure if this might not be better described as parody.
The bad
The pacing is off. It feels rushed, but not in a great barreling and breathless Burroughs manner. Too much emphasis on seemingly inconsequential details and not enough on important events.
Sexual assault and worse that will likely stop many readers dead in their tracks. Part of this is deliberate; the story attempts to tell a more “realistic” version of A Princess of Mars and what would happen were people walking around nude and taken captive by barbaric conquerors. But it’s still tough to digest.
It’s supposed to include the spicy sex ERB avoids but it’s almost as tame. The violence is more graphically described but it lacks ERBs style. In short, it doesn’t deliver what it says on the tin. The back cover trumpets, “what happens to a red-blooded young graduate looking for sex, fame, and answers when he suddenly finds himself naked, frightened, and several light years from earth? A lot.” Except, not really.
Can’t really recommend unless you’re an S&P completist.
Utopias cannot survive contact with the world of commerce. It’s a message delivered in brutal fashion in the catastrophic ending of George Romero’s Knightriders (1981). Idealism meets the hurtling steel of a freight truck, alternative counterculture going under the wheels of the unstoppable economic engine of the 1980s.
The outcome is predictable and sad. But the leadup and the message of the film is magic.
Weird and flawed, too on the nose perhaps with heavy-handed messaging, Knightriders nevertheless succeeds. It’s unpredictable, meaningful, wonderfully anti-establishment, and utterly singular.
The film opens with a knight (Ed Harris) waking up in a forest, naked and in the arms of his paramour. He kneels and prays over the hilt of his sword, enters a nearby pool to bathe … and proceeds to beat his back with a branch in what we can only presume to be some sort of purification ritual.
Right then you know you’re in for an offbeat movie. And if you had any doubts Knightriders goes straight off the deep end when instead of a horse Harris climbs on a motorcycle and rides back to “Camelot.”
Knightriders engages with the myth of King Arthur in a very unique way, demonstrating the extreme malleability of the old stories. It skips the “historical” Arthur of the 5th/6th century and the romantic late medieval-ish setting of Excalibur and instead leaps straight into 1980. There are no knights, no nobles, no real king. The story instead follows a troupe of traveling entertainers who put on a combination renaissance fair and tournament, complete with jousting and full-on melee conducted by knights riding motorcycles. At its head is Billy (Harris), a stand-in for Arthur. He is the heart of this comic but earnest ragtag group of misfits.
Instead of Camelot Billy’s “kingdom” is a commune of outsiders, all wanting something different than the 20th century has to offer. It’s got some similarities with the hippie communes of the 60s, perhaps the last gasp on the verge of the decade of excess.
It wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I of course know Romero from Night of the Living Dead and its various sequels, and so I thought I might be getting ultraviolence, apocalypse, bloodshed. Knightriders is none of the above. There’s plenty of action, of course (the stunts are fantastic and I winced at a couple of the crashes--stuntmen hit the ground HARD. These guys were not making an easy paycheck). But its basically a character drama spread across a large troupe of actors. All of Romero’s old cronies are in the film … as I was watching every five minutes I was like, “wait, there’s the guy from Dawn of the Dead, and another guy from Dawn of the Dead. That’s the guy from Day of the Dead! Wait is that a Stephen King cameo?” (answer—yes.) Tom Savini plays a major role, not a villain but a foil to the king, and who knew—Savini can act. It’s got an interesting Merlin too, a dude with some medical training but equal parts witch doctor, harmonica playing savant, and prognosticator.
It’s amazing Knightriders ever got made, and unsurprisingly it was a commercial flop. Harris admits in a relatively recent interview that while he remains a fan he knew it was destined for obscurity. It’s too odd and offbeat, non-genre, and the intended audience is unclear. Truth be told it’s also flawed. Some of the acting is, to be charitable, pedestrian. The dialogue in many places is stilted. It’s at least 30-40 minutes too long and badly in need of an edit. It meanders and threatens to lose the thread of story.
But I can deal with these imperfections, even its deep and abiding flaws, for what we did get. Imperfection is the way of the world. The courage of knights wavers, their honor and fealty are tested by fortune and fame and lust, and often fail. This film does not fail, and for what it lacks in technical artistry it succeeds through heart. I can think of very few films as earnest and sincere. Romero set out to make a statement about the pressures to sell out vs. staying true to your art, and of the extraordinary difficulties of leading a principled life. Of living a values-led life, to whatever end.
I felt a deep stir of emotion near the end of the film when Harris/Billy/Arthur sees himself not on a bike, but a horse, galloping off on some quest through green lands in a better place. He passes on his legacy in the form of a sword, handing it to a wide-eyed young fan who wanted only an autograph but got much more.
Even if we cannot ever experience earthly utopia the elusive search continues. As long as nonconformists and artists and the disaffected yearn for something more, Camelot beckons.
(warning: spoilers… though you can’t really spoil a book like this)
It’s not worth talking about the plot of Stoner (1965, John Williams). But because you need some of this in a review, I’ll do it in one short paragraph: Farmer’s son goes off to school to study agriculture. Falls in love with literature instead, and becomes a college professor. Gets married to a loveless woman, has great affair with a younger graduate student, is stymied in his career by petty men, dies.
Very banal and recognizably average, especially compared to what I usually write about here. But plot is not why you read a book like Stoner.
This book is not about plot. It’s about revelation of character. It’s about love. It’s about illuminating the past. It’s about life and whether it has any meaning and how we might live it in between, against a tide of pettiness and unfairness.
Many men live lives of quiet desperation. They toil in thankless professions and when they pass the mark they leave on the world is ephemeral. But in between, we find moments of glory. Love, great passions that cannot last, but briefly burn as bright as the sun.
Stoner finds these, and he needs them, because his home life sucks. His wife Edith is a terribly flawed human being, shallow and petty and devoid of passion save when she’s roused by jealousy. There is a breathtaking scene of vindictive selfishness in this book that is a little piece of Mordor. I wanted to reach through the pages and choke this bitch, which to be honest is an indicator of a remarkable piece of writing. In sparse sentences and mainly through dialogue and action Williams brings characters to life through black letters on a white page. We don’t exactly know why Edith is the way she is, but get glimpses in the way she burns everything related to her father upon his death. There is some quiet tragedy in her past that haunts her forever and prevents her from ever being an accessible, whole person.
Writing is awesome, isn’t it?
Stoner is also a book about love.The unqualified love Stoner feels for his daughter, Grace, and the sad separation that comes inevitably with the passage of time. Grace emulates her dad and for a time is cool water to a man in a parched desert.
It’s about the love we can have for literature, which pours through these pages. Of the joy of teaching, the connections you can forge with other people when your passions for a common subject have been roused. I was a failed teacher but a romantic student and understand every bit of this. Passions doused by petty politics playing out in the halls of academia, the power struggles of tenured professors that are all but un-fireable but whose lives can be made sufficiently miserable such that they question the whole enterprise.
Stoner is sad and sometimes pathetic but also surprises with quiet acts of unremembered integrity. Refusing to pass an unqualified, fraudulent student, drawing the great ire of the department chair. The subsequent 30 year war of professional coldness waged by Lomax on Stoner is the great battle. Not the Somme or the Pelennor Fields but a great battle nonetheless, with great casualties.
Yeah, I admire this book. Its sad and wonderful and utterly absorbing. Only 278 pages and there are no spare words, nothing wasted. The style is remarkable, a wonderful blend of startling scenes and images mixed with a wonderful interiority to the character of Stoner. Stoner’s great passions are contrasted with the terrible hardness of early 20th century farmlife, the back-breaking effort that is farming by hand with horse drawn plows. I read this and thought, thank god that is not my lot, I can’t imagine living in that hard world.
Fantasy comes in many forms and it’s all made up anyway, realistic fiction like Stoner is no more real than Robert E. Howard’s Conan, save that both convey pieces of the truth. That part of the past is now inaccessible to us, but can come to life in the pages of a book.
I’m drawn to the past, and not because I think everything was better back then (though some things were, and other things were not, such is the nature of change). I’m drawn to the past because I’m fascinated by time, which used to be vividly now and is now irretrievably gone. I’m drawn to the past because I get weary of the now, the endless cycles of social media and 24-hour news cycle despair and gnashing of teeth. Of course there was great pettiness in people then as now, and Williams shows us this, unflinchingly. Stoner does not offer nostalgia, and I have not mentioned this but brings home the catastrophe of World War I on a campus of young men, and to a lesser extent the second war. The past was hard, but getting immersed in a novel of a distant place breaks the spell of now, so oddly offers some measure of consolation.
Stoner is a different country, but the human emotion in it rendered so well by Williams is familiar and timeless.
