Showing posts with label poems. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poems. Show all posts

Monday, August 25, 2025

Euhemerism


Tim Severin: The Jason Voyage (1985)
Tim Severin. The Jason Voyage: The Quest for the Golden Fleece. Drawings by Tróndur Patursson. Photographs by John Egan, Seth Mortimer and Tom Skudra. Hutchinson. London: Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1985.

The other day I picked up a rather handsome secondhand copy of Tim Severin's book The Jason Voyage for a trifling sum. I wasn't actually planning on reading it right away, but somehow it grabbed my attention and diverted me from all the other odds and ends - biographies, short story collections, graphic novels - I'm working my way through at the moment.

I remember seeing a documentary about the making of Severin's replica twenty-oar Bronze Age galley the Argo some years ago, and it was interesting to compare that to the rather more contextual approach to the myth he takes here.


Apollonius of Rhodes: Argonautica (2014)
Apollonius of Rhodes. The Voyage of Argo. Trans. E. V. Rieu. 1959. Rev. ed. 1972. Introduction by Lawrence Norfolk. Illustrations by Daniel Egnéus. London: The Folio Society, 2014.

After a while I thought I should check on the critical response to some of Severin's more audacious claims about the original voyage of the Argonauts, and found the following review on the Goodreads site, contributed by a certain Koen Crolla (29/10/2020):
... Tim Severin spent much of the '70s and '80s and other people's money recreating some historic boat journeys; in this case, that of Jason and the Argonauts, from Iolcus (now Volos in Greece) to Colchis (now Georgia)...
The book covers everything from the construction of the replica Argo in Greece to their successful arrival in Poti, (Soviet) Georgia, and, in the epilogue, their engine-powered return, but Severin is neither a classicist nor an archaeologist, so many of the more interesting detail [sic.] are skipped over: you'll find plenty of anecdotes illustrating the boat-builder's personality, for example, but few details regarding the construction of the ship itself, and none at all regarding the archaeological basis of the design.
During the journey itself, too, Severin's thoughts on the Argonautica range far beyond what conscientious euhemerism will actually allow, with every coincidence becoming a confirmation of the definite historical fact of Jason and everything he encounters. It doesn't help that Severin's knowledge of Bronze Age Greece is rudimentary at best and tainted by Gimbutasian nonsense ... but some of the blame surely falls on two archaeologists (Vasiliki Adrimi in Greece and Othar Lordkipanidze in (Soviet) Georgia) for filling this gullible oaf's head with nonsense.
Still, things are such that even dodgy experimental archaeology often yields useful results, and if you ignore everything Severin writes about landmarks that are definitely 100% the locations mentioned in the Argonautica, there's still actual information left about the feasibility of crossing the open sea and rough currents in a crappy galley, even with doughy and/or middle-aged rowers — even if Severin is enough of a narcissist that large swathes of his account are clearly unreliable. (At least National Geographic took a lot of pictures.)
And though the write-up is kind of a lost opportunity, it's still decent entertainment; I would have liked to have been one of the crew.

Tim Severin: Rowers in the Bosphorus (1985)


How surprising that they didn't think to invite Mr. (or is it Dr?) Crolla to accompany them! His lively good humour would have left the whole crew in stitches, I'm sure - especially that little side-swipe at the "doughy and/or middle-aged rowers" Severin enlisted to help him. Not according to the photos he included of their sinewy bodies toiling at the oars - talk about "sitting well in order smite / The sounding furrows" (Tennyson, "Ulysses") ...

There were a couple of other points of interest in Koen Crolla's review, though. First of all, there was that intriguing word "euhemerism," which I must confess was new to me. Not any more, though:


Euhemerus of Sicily (fl. 4th century BCE)


Euhemerism:
is an approach to the interpretation of mythology in which mythological accounts are presumed to have originated from real historical events or personages. Euhemerism supposes that historical accounts become myths as they are exaggerated in the retelling, accumulating elaborations and alterations that reflect cultural mores. It was named after the Greek mythographer Euhemerus ... In the more recent literature of myth ... euhemerism is termed the "historical theory" of mythology.

Tim Severin: The Jason Voyage (map)


Well, there you go. You learn something new every day. That really is a perfect description of Severin's diegetic method. Nary a rock or a headland can be glimpsed without his pointing out how perfectly it matches Apollonius's description in the Argonautica: an epic poem composed in the 3rd century BCE, roughly a thousand years after the actual events of the original voyage are supposed to have taken place.

I was also intrigued by Crolla's side-reference to "Gimbutasian nonsense." Again, this was not an adjective familiar to me, but I presume it refers to Marija Gimbutas:
a Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe" and for her Kurgan hypothesis, which located the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic Steppe.

Marija Gimbutienė: Lithuanian postage stamp (2021)


The "Kurgan hypothesis" turns out, on investigation, to be a fairly well-regarded theory about the origins of the proto-Indo-European (or "Aryan", as they used to be called) languages in an area north of the Black Sea. What I think Crollas must be referring to, though, is her later work:
Gimbutas gained fame and notoriety in the English-speaking world with her last three English-language books: The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974); The Language of the Goddess (1989) ... and the last of the three, The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), which, based on her documented archaeological findings, presented an overview of her conclusions about Neolithic cultures across Europe: housing patterns, social structure, art, religion, and the nature of literacy.
The Goddess trilogy articulated what Gimbutas saw as the differences between the Old European system, which she considered goddess- and woman-centered (gynocentric), and the Bronze Age Indo-European patriarchal ("androcratic") culture which supplanted it. According to her interpretations, gynocentric (or matristic) societies were peaceful, honored women, and espoused economic equality. The androcratic, or male-dominated, Kurgan peoples, on the other hand, invaded Europe and imposed upon its natives the hierarchical rule of male warriors.
Aha! The penny drops. I'm certainly familiar with all the ideological battles over whether or not there ever was an ancient, peaceful woman-centred culture in Europe which was supplanted by the incursion of violent, male-dominated, warrior tribes. Once again, one point up to Crolla, though his reference to Severin as a "gullible oaf" still seems a little uncalled for.




Tim Severin: The Ulysses Voyage (1987)
Tim Severin. The Ulysses Voyage: Sea Search for the Odyssey. Drawings by Will Stoney. Photographs by Kevin Fleming, with Nazem Choufeh and Rick Williams. Hutchinson. London: Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1987.

It isn't really the voyage of the Argonauts that's the problem, though. It's the Odyssey.

After rowing his painstakingly constructed galley through the Aegean and across into the Black Sea to reenact the Argonautica, the second part of Severin's master-plan clicked into action. Now he would attempt to sail the same boat from Troy, on the coast of Asia Minor, to the island of Ithaka, in order to chart the much-vexed Odysseus's difficult ten-year journey home.

Here's one of the standard interpretations of this voyage:



And here's Tim Severin's own route from Troy all the way to the Ionian sea, as navigated (for the most part) by his own Trojan-war-era galley:


Tim Severin: The Ulysses Voyage (map 1)


And here's an overview of his blueprint for the entire voyage:


Tim Severin: The Ulysses Voyage (map 2)


Both versions agree on a side-trip to North Africa, and a long haul back from there. The difference, however, is that the earlier version has Odysseus's 12-ship flotilla blown all the way down the coast to Tunisia, whereas Severin calculates that the ships must have battened down and furled their sails and thus made landfall far further east, in Libya.

Severin therefore postulates a much shorter trip back to Greece, followed by some cruising around the island of Crete, whereas the other theory has Odysseus landing in Sicily, followed by excursions to the Balearic islands - possibly even as far as the Pillars of Hercules!



Which of these two routes sounds more plausible to you: the one Severin actually sailed in his own boat, or the one dreamed up by desk-bound scholars measuring distances on the map?

Here are a few of the problems I foresee arising from any attempt to answer this question:
  1. It presupposes that there was once a person called Odysseus / Ulysses
  2. It assumes that he took part in the Trojan War
  3. And also that there was an actual, historical "Trojan war"
  4. It also takes for granted that legitimate, topographically precise details of his journey home can be gleaned from the Odyssey, a poem probably written around the 8th or 7th century BCE, about a war which took place at least 4-500 years earlier, around the 12th or 13th century BCE
  5. There are further assumptions built into it about the poet we refer to as "Homer", who may (or may not) have been the "author" - whatever precisely we mean by that, in a predominantly oral Bardic culture - of both the Odyssey as well as the Iliad
  6. And isn't it just a little bit problematic that the one fact all accounts of Homer agree on is that he was blind? Could he really have been the keen yachtsman and ocean swimmer postulated at certain points in Severin's narrative?
Do I need to go on? Without wanting to be a spoilsport about it, I feel that we need at least a few plausible answers to the questions above before we start debating if an obscure Cretan folktale about three-eyed cannibals may have given rise to the story of the Cyclops, or whether or not the Straits of Messina are too wide to have been the abode of Scylla and Charybdis.


Robert Graves: Homer's Daughter (1955)


Such speculations can be a lot of fun, mind you. I'm a big fan of Robert Graves' historical novels, one of which resuscitates Samuel Butler's hypothesis - from The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) - that the real maker of the Odyssey was a Sicilian woman, who employed well-known landmarks from her own island for most of its more famous incidents.

Graves has her casting herself as Nausicaä, while her hometown is forced to play double duty as both Phaeacia and Ithaka. The whole concludes with a massacre, just like the Odyssey itself.


Robert Graves: The Golden Fleece (1944)


And then there's his earlier novel The Golden Fleece [retitled "Hercules, My Shipmate" for the US market], which turns the whole quest into a "Gimbutasian" struggle between Goddess worshippers and savage Apollonian invaders.

Or, as one of the more positive commentators on Goodreads puts it:
The Golden Fleece is an encyclopedic novel of all things Greek and pre-Greek. Graves incorporates or refers to many myths and legends, from the cosmogony through the trade war between Troy and Greece and the Twelve Labors of Hercules. And from various cultures, including Pelasgian, Cretan, Thracian, Colchian, Taurean, Albanian, Amazonian, Troglodyte, and of course Greek, he works into his novel many interesting customs, about fertility orgies, weddings, births, funerals, and ghosts; prayers, sacrifices, omens, dreams, and mystery cults; boar hunting, barley growing, trading, and ship building, sailing, and rowing; feasting, singing, dancing, story telling, and clothes wearing; boxing, murdering, warring, and treaty negotiating; and more. It all feels vivid, authentic, and strange.
In other words, there's no harm at all in reimagining and reinterpreting these old myths, as long as it's in the interests of sharpening our responses to the stories themselves - as well as the consummate works of literary art in which they've been preserved.

However, it's important to bear in mind that Apollonius of Rhodes was a scholar and librarian at the Library of Alexandria when he composed the Argonautica. Homer was - well, nobody really knows, but probably a Bard and performer of his own poems, in a possibly pre-literate culture. They were, in other words, completely different poets, from widely separate eras of Ancient Greek culture, who lived 500 years apart.


Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte d'Arthur (1485)


Try transposing these dates onto Le Morte d'Arthur, Malory's version of the Arthurian legends, published by William Caxton as one of the first printed books in English. The five and a half centuries between Malory and us should give you some idea of the actual distance in time between Homer and Apollonius.

If you extend the metaphor, and go back 1,000 years from Malory, you'll find yourself in the approximate era of the real King Arthur (if there ever was such a person). That gives you some idea of the gap between Apollonius and his own heroes, Jason's Argonauts.

Homer, by contrast, lived only 500-odd years later than his subject-matter, the siege of Troy (and its myriad dire consequences). Malory certainly could (and has been) used as a kind of guidebook to Arthurian Britain, but the more precise and "euhemeristic" these educed details become, the more absurd the whole project seems.



It'd be lovely to go back in a time machine and check out the facts for ourselves - though it might be a bit difficult to square the border region referred to in Hittite records as Taruisa (Troy?) or Wilusa (Greek "Wilios" or "Ilios") with the Troy of our imaginations.

Enterprises such as Severin's are certainly not futile. There is, however, little doubt that he tends to take an ahistorical, over-literal approach to both the textual and topographical details of the folktales that inspired his journeys. Whether or not this assists us in interpreting these myths, and the poems that embody them, is more debatable.



An alternative approach can be found in the work of the modern Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, who set out instead to remind us of the deep metaphorical significance of these legends for all of us - but particularly those who still inhabit those ancient lands today. Here's his great poem "Ithaka" (along with my own attempt at a version for contemporary travellers):


C. P. Cavafy: Ithaka (1911)


Ithaka


Before you set out for Ithaka
pray for a long itinerary
full of protracted stopovers.
Customs officials, Interpol,
the zombie Police Chief – not a problem:
as long as you keep your shit together,
staple a smile to your fat face,
they won’t be able to finger you.
Customs officials, Interpol,
the paparazzi, will look right through you
– unless you invite them up for a drink,
unless they’re already inside your head.

Pray for a long itinerary:
landing for the umpteenth time
on the tarmac of a third-world airport
at fiery psychedelic dawn;
haggling in the duty-frees
for coral necklaces and pearls,
designer scents & silks & shades,
as many marques as you can handle; 
visiting every provincial town,
sampling every drug & kick …

Never forget about Ithaka:
getting there is your destiny;
no need to rush – it’ll still be waiting
no matter how many years you take.
By the time you touch down you’ll be bone-tired,
happy with what you snapped in transit,
just a few daytrips left to do.
Ithaka shouted you the trip,
you’d never have travelled without her.
She’s got fuck-all to show you now.

Dirt-poor, dingy … she’s up front.
It’s over now; you’ve seen so much
there’s no need to tell you what Ithaka means.


(30/8-12/10/04)

Korina Cassianou: Odysseus of Ithaka (2011)





Wednesday, May 07, 2025

Confederates


Alex Garland, dir.: Civil War (2024)


I couldn't quite bring myself to go and see Alex Garland's much-hyped action film Civil War when it first hit the cinemas last year. It felt like an unnecessary incitement to violence at the time, pre-US election, when it still seemed possible - likely, even - that reason would prevail.

Now, a year later, having finally watched the movie, it's hard to see what what all the fuss was about. The Trump-like president, played by Nick Offerman, who's somehow hijacked his way into a third term, is opposed by a helicopter and tank-toting band of uniformed secessionists who appear to have almost infinite resources at their command.


Civil War core cast:
[l-to-r: Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Cailee Spaeny]


No, the morality of the plot is all to do with the coarsening effects of passively witnessing - and, in some cases, getting off on - other people's violent acts, in the guise of objective reportage. Kirsten Dunst (who plays a kind of updated version of World War II photojournalist Lee Miller) has become severely burnt out in the process.

She and her band of misfit reporters all learn a lot about themselves, and each other, in their perilous trek across war-torn America - replete with tortured looters on gibbets and corpses being trucked into mass graves - but unfortunately such self-knowledge seems to equate with being too slow to get out of the way of bullets in this movie, so most of the information ends up getting lost in transmission.


Tony Horwitz: Confederates in the Attic (1998)


The main reason I decided to watch the film at all was because I'd just finished reading the book above, Tony Horwitz's 25-year-old exposé of the sheer extent of sympathy with the so-called "Lost Cause" of the Confederacy - not only in the Southern States, but across the United States as a whole.

Horwitz tries to stress the humorous side of this obsession, as in his account of a five-man reenactment of Pickett's charge by a squad of hardcore neo-rebels:
A lobster-red woman in a halter top matched Rob stride for stride, carefully studying his uniform.
"What are you guys?" she asked.
"Confederates," Rob mumbled.
"Ferrets?"
"Confederates," Rob repeated.
"Oh," she said, looking underwhelmed.
- Confederates in the Attic: 278.
It all seems considerably less quaint and amusing now, after the 2021 Capitol riot and the exponential growth of such extremist groups as the Proud Boys and other far-right militants.


Tony Horwitz (1958-2019)





Edmund Wilson: Patriotic Gore (1963)


It's not that unusual for me to read several books simultaneously. Sometimes I move through them at about the same rate; other times one takes over altogether. It can be quite a long drawn out process to get to the end of all of them.

Alongside Confederates in the Attic, I found myself rereading Edmund Wilson's rather ponderous set of "Studies in the Literature of the Civil War", Patriotic Gore. The two books have a lot more in common than simply treating the same subject in different ways.

Tony Horwitz won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1995, so he's no light-weight, despite the rather garish design and packaging of his book. But Edmund Wilson is certainly far more of a name to conjure with: one of America's most celebrated literary critics, three-time finalist in the National Book Awards (the second time for Patriotic Gore), he remains a distinctly impressive figure.

However, his dismissive, off-the-cuff verdicts on such present-day luminaries as H. P. Lovecraft ("Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous," 1945) and J. R. R. Tolkien ("Oo, Those Awful Orcs!," 1956) have become so notorious that they now threaten to overshadow his more substantive achievements.



Actually, Wilson's greatest legacy may well turn out to be the idea behind the Library of America (1979- ), a uniform set of classic works from the United States, based loosely on the French Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (1931- ). It came to fruition only after his death, largely through the efforts of Jason Epstein and others, but it wasn't until a quarter of a century later that Wilson himself finally joined its ranks with a double-volume selection from his literary essays and reviews.


Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews (2 vols: 2007)


The two books, Wilson's and Horwitz's, were published exactly 35 years apart, the first during the intense period of self-examination triggered by the Civil War centennial in the early 1960s, the second in the late Clinton era, pre-9/11, when the much-touted Pax Americana could still be seen as a valid concept.

In between the two came Shelby Foote.




Ken Burns: Shelby Foote (1916-2005)


Or rather, in the early 1990s, Ken Burns's phenomenally successful 9-part PBS documentary series The Civil War (1990) had the inadvertent effect of propelling a hitherto largely unknown Southern writer to international stardom.


Shelby Foote: The Civil War: A Narrative (3 vols: 1958-74)


That's the other book I've been rereading recently: Foote's immense narrative history of the civil war - a labour of love which took him more than twenty years to complete. I've already written a couple of posts on this subject - one in the larger context of the literature of the Civil War, the other as part of a piece on the alleged "amateurism" of narrative historians in general.

In the first of these pieces, written over a decade ago, I was content to echo Foote's own assessment of his authorial stance:
Foote corrects the Union bias of earlier historians: an unabashed Southerner, he achieves a kind of imaginative empathy with the principal protagonists in the drama which is unlikely ever to be repeated or surpassed. This is certainly the best history of the war to date. It is a military history above all, though - if you want political insights, then Foote still needs to be supplemented by various others.
In the second, composed more recently, in 2023, I'd altered my view somewhat:
Since the appearance of Ken Burn's ... Civil War ... which made Shelby Foote a star, his epic narrative history of the war has somewhat fallen from grace.
It's true that he does consciously go out of his way to present a more Southern view of the so-called "irrepressible conflict" than such Northern historians as Bruce Catton and Allan Nevins in their own multi-volume works. [Moreover], his view that the two undoubted geniuses produced by the civil war were Abraham Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest is no longer seen as an amusing paradox, but rather a clear statement of "Lost Cause" belief.
Certainly he was a man of his own time and place. Stuart Chapman's critical biography of Foote reveals the complexity of his upbringing and self-positioning in the America of Jim Crow and the early Civil Rights movement.
For myself, I find it far too facile to arrange the writers and thinkers of the past into convenient columns of "right-thinking" and "aberrant". It's perhaps going too far to say that tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner, but being a liberal Southerner in the mid-twentieth century was not an easy row to hoe.
The fact that he's been criticised roundly by both sides for his views is surely some kind of testimony to his even-handedness? He's no apologist for racism by any means: no hagiographer of Southern rights, unlike General Lee's biographer Douglas Southall Freeman.

C. Stuart Chapman: Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life (2003)


It was rather a salutary experience to read Stuart Chapman's biography of Foote. The fact that it appeared two years before the writer's death may have inhibited Chapman somewhat in his analysis of the contradictions between Foote's warring ideological positions: on the one hand, sympathy for the South first and last; on the other, recognition of the futility of their continued refusal to recognise civil rights. Nevertheless, there was still much there to ponder.



Anove all, Chapman highlights Foote's passionate admiration for the dashing bravado of Nathan Bedford Forrest, slave-trader, military wizard, and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, contrasting it with the historian's slightly grudging respect for the genius of the Union hero, Abraham Lincoln.


Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)


I had thought that the two opposing principles were held in some kind of equilibrium - albeit precarious - in Foote's actual history of the war, but I now think I was wrong. What I detect there now is a resolute denial of the evidence for virtually any Southern atrocities (the Fort Pillow massacre, the appalling conditions at Andersonville prison), and a strange method of attributing victory to the side reporting the fewest overall casualties, regardless of the strategic consequences of such "triumphs". Antietam and Gettysburg become, for him, near-Southern successes rather than Union victories.

I can now see what his despised "professional historians" were complaining about when they criticised Foote for his uncritical use of a single, often unreliable, source when discussing complex issues and events. His failure to provide the complete set of references he'd earlier promised for the end of his third volume also begins to look a little suspicious in hindsight. Essentially he used the information which best suited his thesis, even when it came from dubious "Lost Cause" apologias.

In this respect, the chapter "At the Foote of the Master" in Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic makes even more interesting reading today than when it was first written. Rather than any kind of reconciliation with Yankeedom, it's Foote's fierce Southern nationalism which comes out most strongly in Horwitz's interview:
His great-grandfather [Colonel Hezekiah William Foote ... who owned five plantations and over one hundred slaves] had opposed secession but fought without hesitation for the South. "Just as I would have," Foote said. "I'd be with my people, right or wrong. If I was against slavery, I'd still be with the South. I'm a man, my society needs me, here I am. The difference between North and South in the war is that there was no stigma attached to the Northern man who paid two hundred dollars to not go to war, or who hired a German replacement. In the South you could have done that, but no one would. You'd have been scorned." [149-50]
The saddest thing about all this is that the reader feels increasingly that this romanticising of the old South has come to mean more to Foote than any attempt to get at the truth - and also to suspect that the motives behind it are largely personal.

Although Foote did serve as an artillery captain in World War II, he missed going into combat on D-Day as a result of being court-martialled for falsifying documents: to wit, a mileage report he wrote to cover a clandestine trip to Belfast to see his then girl-friend (later wife).
Returning to America, Foote enlisted as a private in the marines and went through boot camp. But the war ended just as he was bound for combat again, this time in the Pacific. To paraphrase what he'd said of the Civil War, Foote had missed the great trauma of his own generation's adolescence. [149]
His views on race are also somewhat troubling. He remarks on the consequences of Reconstruction:
"What has dismayed me so much is the behavior of blacks. They are fulfilling every dire prophecy the Ku Klux Klan made. It's no longer safe to be on the streets in black neighborhoods. They are acting as if the utter lie about blacks being somewhere between ape and man were true." [152]
This particular diatribe, from a man who claims to have always supported racial integration, concludes with a comparison of the Klan "to the Free French Resistance to Nazi occupation," together with an "explanation" that:
"Freedom riders were a pretty weird-looking group to Southerners ... The men had odd haircuts and strange baggy clothes and seemed to associate with people with an intimacy that we didn't allow. So the so-called right-thinking people of the South said, 'They're sending their riffraff down here. Let our riffraff take care of them.' Then they sat back while the good ol' boys in the pickup trucks took care of it, under the Confederate banner." [154]
And, à propos of Foote's claims about the greater social stigma of a failure to serve in the Confederate than in the Union army, it's curious that he fails to mention the 1862 "Twenty Negro Law" in the Southern States which "exempted from Confederate military service one white man for every twenty slaves owned on a Confederate plantation."

It was at this point in the conflict that the soldiers began to complain about a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight" - or, as Confederate soldier Sam Watkins put it:
Soldiers had enlisted for twelve months only, and had faithfully complied with their volunteer obligations; the terms for which they had enlisted had expired, and they naturally looked upon it that they had a right to go home ... War had become a reality; they were tired of it. A law had been passed by the Confederate States Congress called the conscript act. A soldier had no right to volunteer and to choose the branch of service he preferred. He was conscripted. From this time on till the end of the war, a soldier was simply a machine, a conscript ... All our pride and valor had gone, and we were sick of war and the Southern Confederacy.
That has more of the ring of truth about it - to my ears, at least.


Samuel R. Watkins (1839-1901)





Ronald F. Maxwell, dir.: Gettysburg (1993)
[Based on The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara (1974)]


A good deal of Tony Horwitz's book is concerned with the growing craze of Civil War reenactment. I remember seeing a vast horde of these reenactors - most of them looking disconcertingly well-fed - puffing up the slopes towards the Union centre in the "Pickett's Charge" scenes of Ronald Maxwell's four-hour war epic Gettysburg.

It's largely as a protest against such dilettantish, "farb" reenactments that Horwitz's friend Robert Lee Hodge and his friends perform their own hommage to Pickett's Charge - the one referred to in the passage quoted above.

Hodge and those like them try to recreate the actual - not the counterfeit - garb and physique of Confederate soldiers, as well as admiring their ethos. Another of his neologisms is "wargasm": an intense series of visits to as many classic battle sites as possible in a severely limited time-frame. And while it's hard to dispute Old Glory-author Jonathan Raban's view that he
would as soon tramp bare-foot through a snake-infested Ecuadorian marsh as spend a week in period costume, in the undiluted company of Robert Lee Hodge on a Civil Wargasm.
It's almost equally difficult to disagree with his claim that "Horwitz deserves some sort of medal for valor on the reader's behalf as he immerses himself in a society that most readers would instinctively shun":
his version of the South is solidly credible throughout - and seriously bad news for the rest of America.
Yes, the sting is in the tail there. It was - and still is - bad news for the rest of America. And while it may only have been the central concern of a few hardcore eccentrics in 1998, now, in 2025, the lunatics have definitely taken over the asylum.

I wish I could claim to have foreseen something of the sort some years ago, when I wrote the following poem - based on a viewing of the interminable Gettysburg (1993) and its even more tedious successor Gods and Generals (2003). Alas, at the time, like Horwitz, I still saw the whole thing as a bit of a laugh.




Ronald F. Maxwell, dir.: Gettysburg (1993)


Gettysburg


The worst fake beards
in the history of cinema

Tom Berenger in particular
looked like the pirate king

in panto
but more to the point

I never realized
so many Confederates

detested slavery
regretted it hadn’t

already been abolished
what they were fighting for

was liberty of conscience
independence

pushing back Northern invaders
(by invading the North)

nor did I know that Robert E. Lee
had never abandoned a battlefield

in the face of the enemy
Antietam?

so the whole thing was just
a ghastly mistake

where the Northerners took advantage
of their nobler opponents

in their mechanistic way
In Gods and Generals

the prequel
we further learn

that not only did Jackson too
hate slavery

but that he used to prance round
playing horsey

with five-year-old girls
and weeping buckets

when the latter died
he’s crying for all of us

for the whole war

said an awestruck aide

I know just how he felt


[20/1/16-22/10/17]

James Ryder Randall: Maryland, My Maryland (1861)





Tony Horwitz (2009)

Anthony Lander Horwitz
(1958-2019)

    Books:

  1. One for the Road: a Hitchhiker's Outback (1987)
  2. Baghdad Without A Map (1991)
  3. Confederates in the Attic (1998)
  4. Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before [aka "Into the Blue: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before"] (2002)
  5. The Devil May Care: 50 Intrepid Americans and Their Quest for the Unknown (2003)
  6. A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World (2008)
  7. Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War (2011)
  8. BOOM: Oil, Money, Cowboys, Strippers, and the Energy Rush That Could Change America Forever (2014)
  9. Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide (2019)


Tony Horwitz: Spying on the South (2019)





Tuesday, January 07, 2025

The World of Shakespeare


Adam Simpson: The World of Shakespeare (2019)


I'm not sure if four times in a row constitutes a tradition, but this is the fourth time Bronwyn and I have seen the New Year in with a (for us, at least) maniacally difficult jigsaw puzzle.

In 2022 it was The World of Charles Dickens:




In 2023 it was The World of Dracula:




Last year, 2024, it was The World of Hercule Poirot:




This year, 2025, it's Shakespeare in the hot seat:


Adam Simpson: The World of Shakespeare (2019)


I've already written a number of posts about Shakespeare - one about the sources for his plays; another about the differences between the quarto and folio editions of his works; and, most recently, one about that perennial question whether Shakespeare was really Shakespeare - or somebody else of the same name.


The World of Shakespeare
Photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd (5/1/25)


To tell you the truth, it's a bit of a relief to get out from under that last question and down to the nitty-gritty details of Shakespeare's London: complete with rebel heads on pikes, Gloriana on a floating barge, and a variety of theatrical troupes performing his plays.


Adam Simpson: The World of Shakespeare (2019)


As you'll have gathered, Shakespeare for me has mostly been a matter of books: biographies, collected editions, contextual "interpretations" ... Watching Kenneth Branagh's absurd adaptation of As You Like It the other day on Neon, though, I was struck by just how much fun Shakespeare can be.

The play is, admittedly, a rather silly one - and Branagh's decision to set it in Meiji-era Japan made literally no sense at all - but it was all still so delightful: exiled maidens running around in drag (for no obvious reason), pinning their love poems on the poor, long-suffering trees; melancholy Jaques spouting long speeches about nothing in particular. What's not to like?


Kenneth Branagh, dir.: As You Like It (2006)


It reminded me of the good old days when we used to sit down dutifully to watch each new instalment in Cedric Messina's (then Jonathan Miller's) long-running BBC Television Shakespeare (1978-85). There were some real revelations there. Who would have thought that his early Henry VI trilogy could be made into so gripping a Brechtian presentation on the roots of power? Who knew that the long-neglected Pericles could be made into such a profoundly beautiful and moving drama?

I ended up writing a poem about it, in fact:


William Shakespeare (with George Wilkins?): Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1984)


The Late Romances: Pericles


We have reached the 3rd Act
& Pericles
is ranting on the deck

the young Marina
lies in her mother’s arms
(still cold & dark
before revival)

which is coast
which sea?
the billows surge
up to the heavens

bodies bound below
by mortal surges
&how fares the dead?


[8/6/86]



What can I say? I was young at the time ...

It's easy enough to get the chance to see the great tragedies, or the Roman plays, or the Richard II / Henry IV / Henry V tetralogy, but the virtue of this BBC version was that they did everything. Timon of Athens, Cymbeline, King John - you name it, it was there. The productions were wildly various in quality, mind you. Some were pretty hard to sit through, others delightful - but they gave you a sense of what each of those 37 plays could be.

As you can guess from the above, it was the late romances - Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest - which were the real thrill for me. You see the last two performed sometimes, but hardly ever the first two.


Michael J. B. Allen & Kenneth Muir, ed.: Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto (1981)


I spent a good deal of time poring over the volume above in the Auckland University Library. So much time, in fact, that I eventually had to buy a copy for myself: a doorstopper if ever there was one!



It's almost unreadable, to be honest - but if you need to track some errant detail of wording, there it is.



The Shakespearean First Folio is a different matter. There are various facsimiles to choose from - it's unlikely that any of us will ever have the money (or the hubris) to purchase one of the few surviving copies of the original edition. You'd have to keep it in a bank vault, in any case!



It's a very handsome volume - colossal, yes, but clearly laid out and printed, with a host of important creative and critical issues hanging on virtually every line.

In any case, if you're looking for an absorbing way to pass a few idle hours, I'm afraid I can't recommend The World of Shakespeare. It's by far the most difficult of the puzzles we've done to date. There are few tell-tale blocks of colour once you've laid down the blue of the Thames, and a ridiculous number of tricky spires, towers, turrets, gable rooftops and leafy gardens to fill in one by one.

There's certainly some satisfaction in getting it done, but I'm afraid that it's back to the grindstone now for me - as well, I fear, as the rest of you.






A Happy New Year to All in
2025!