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.

Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 40s (2007)

Actually, Wilson's greatest legacy may well turn out to be the idea for 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.

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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. [However], 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.

Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-1877)

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)

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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.

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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)

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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)

•

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]

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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!

Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto

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

Charlton Hinman, ed.: The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare (1968)

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!

The First Folio of Shakespeare

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.

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A Happy New Year to All in
2025!

•

Troy Town

Leo Deuel, ed.: Memoirs of Heinrich Schliemann (1978)

Troy Town is the traditional name for many of the mazes and earthworks of England. This may refer to the tricky way in which the walls of Troy were constructed, full of dead-ends and blind corners to baffle an enemy. Or, alternatively, it may be just because the razing of the city of Troy, leaving only a few mounds of earth behind, has been seen ever since as emblematic of such scenes of utter devastation.

Heinrich Schliemann (1821-1890)

Recently I've been reading a compilation of autobiographical pieces by Heinrich Schliemann, the (so-called) discoverer of Troy. Schliemann was a bit of a con-man, an inveterate exaggerator, and a self-promoter on a Barnum-like scale, but there was also a touch of genius in him. His instincts often led him to the right place at the right time when others' well-reasoned arguments led them astray.

His initial excavations at Hisarlik, the Anatolian hillock which he believed to be the site of Homer's Troy, were catastrophic. He dug a huge trench through the centre of the mound, in the process destroying many of the remains which might later have helped him and others reconstruct crucial layers of the ancient city. To some extent he made up for this in subsequent years as he found collaborators with a firmer knowledge of archaeological method, but the fact is that he probably did more harm than good as an actual excavator.

He was, however, largely responsible for the discovery of a hitherto unsuspected civilisation. Whether you call it Minoan or Mycenaean, the existence of an advanced, sophisticated culture in the Eastern Mediterranean, long before the Classical Age, was unsuspected before he began his explorations in the 1870s. In the process, Schliemann whipped up a frenzy of enthusiasm not just for treasure hunting but for scientific archaeology in the Europe of his time.

He remains an ambiguous figure, but his contribution to the debate over the historicity of Homer's Troy is undeniable.

Michael Wood: In Search of the Trojan War (1985)

But why should there even be such a debate? Is there anything intrinsically implausible in the story of Troy? Whether the war was fought because of the abduction of Helen of Sparta by the Trojan Prince Paris, as Homer claimed, or over trade-routes through the Bosphorus, as the Greek historian Herodotus preferred to describe it, the basic plotline of a destructive conflict between west and east hasn't changed that much over the past three millennia.

Nor have the ruinous results.

Al Jazeera: Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza Strip (31/10/23)

As I write, Netanyahu's soldiers are invading hospitals and exulting as they blow up mosques. They film themselves doing it, in fact. Shades of Ajax and Achilles looting and desecrating their enemies' bodies!

CNN: Israeli soldier films himself blowing up a mosque (17/2/24)

Has anything changed in the intervening period? The weapons have got more powerful, and the propaganda easier to slipstream around the world. Otherwise, it's business as usual for humanity: hatred, lies, contempt for anyone you can define as 'Other', on whatever flimsy pretext you can find.

Perhaps in another few hundred years archaeologists will be speculating on the various layers of pulverised debris they find in their excavations in ancient Canaan / Judea, modern Israel / Palestine. Maybe they'll conclude that the whole idea of an Israel-Gaza war was just a myth: after all, the subsequent layers of radioactive fallout will have wiped out any sense of whatever civilisation (if any) proceeded the bombardment.

For the moment, though, women and children are dying in their thousands. It seems impossible to exaggerate the terror and privations being suffered by the people of Gaza: 27,708 is this morning's total of dead. Just stop. How can that be so impossible to achieve? Have we learned nothing at all from those previous massacres and cataclysms?

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Paul Klee: Angelus Novus (1920)

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

- Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

Rear Window


A friend of mine
set up a camera
in the back of her car

and drove down the hill
to the beach and back
art film

scoffed her boyfriend
and yet
there was something

so strange in the way
it bucked and leapt
as it recorded 

the unchanging mountains
behind
with no hint of the wild sea in front

Benjamin’s angel of history
does that
sweeps on

looking back
unable to help
as the rubble and graves pile up

they used to project it at rock concerts

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Demonstration in London (14/10/23)

CEASEFIRE NOW!

The Terror

The Terror
[2018 TV series created by David Kajganich, based on Dan Simmons's 2007 novel]

Friday, 28th June, 1850

A curious thing. We were in our small boat examining a piece of flotsam spotted by Abbot in the hope that it might have come from one of the ships. There was ice all around us, but being in deep water this neither obstructed nor threatened us in any way. The flotsam gave no indication of its origin, and as I inspected my pocket watch to note the time of our sighting for Pioneer's log, Abbot warned me against losing it overboard, pointing out to me that such was the depth of the water upon which we rowed that had I been careless enough to drop the watch it would have been telling yesterday's time before it struck the bottom.

Lt Sherard Osborn R. N.
Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal, 1852

That's not a quote from either David Kajganich's TV series The Terror, or even from Dan Simmons' book of the same name. Instead, it stands as the epigraph for Robert Edric's earlier novel The Broken Lands, which also attempted, a couple of decades earlier, to recreate the horror of Sir John Franklin's famous 'lost expedition.' Franklin set out in 1845 in the two (appropriately-named) ships Erebus and Terror to find the North-West passage, and not one of the participants, officers or crew, was ever seen alive again.

Robert Edric: The Broken Lands (1992)

There's a kind of poetic trippiness about Edric's version which perhaps befits what seems, in retrospect, a somewhat statelier time (not that the 1990s felt like that to us then). Evocative vistas, carefully honed epiphanies, and a general emphasis on style above substance distinguished much of the fiction of that decade.

I do still love that idea of the pocket watch sinking rapidly into the icy water, down and down and down, far enough down to strike "yesterday's time before it struck the bottom," though. I suppose it's as good an image as any for the art of the historical novelist - painting a vision so detailed and psychologically acute that it convinces all who experience it that that's how it must have been.

Edwin Landseer: Man Proposes, God Disposes (1864)

Not that Edric was the first to attempt it, by any means. There's always been something about the Franklin expedition which has appealed to myth-makers and psychogeographers. Edwin Landseer, better known for 'The Monarch of the Glen' and The Stag at Bay,' was much criticised for his vision, above, of polar bears gnawing at the exposed ribs of frozen sailors, when he showed it at the 1864 Royal Academy exhibition.

Perhaps, indeed, that was the motivation behind Millais's even more famous painting 'The North-West Passage' - promoting a message of imperial derring-do and bulldog intrepidity more acceptable to the Victorian establishment:

John Everett Millais: The North-West Passage (1874)

It seems only fitting that the figure of the Old Salt in Millais's picture should have been modelled on Lord Byron's old friend Edward John Trelawny. Trelawny, author of the novel Adventures of a Younger Son (1831) as well as the almost equally fictional memoir Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858), wrote a famous account of plucking the unburnt heart of Shelley from that famous bonfire on the beach after the latter was drowned at sea. Whether he really did risk the flames in that reckless manner is anyone's guess.

Louis Édouard Fournier: The Funeral of Shelley (1889)
[l-to-r: Trelawny, Leigh Hunt, and Byron; Mary Shelley, seen kneeling, was actually not allowed to attend]

All of which brings us back to The Terror. My own interest in the whole subject of the many, many expeditions in search of the North-West passage probably goes back as far as my childhood reading of the 'Classics Illustrated' comic below (which I'm glad to say I still own):

World Illustrated: Story of the Northwest Passage (No. 531)

A rather more sophisticated - though actually just as dramatic - account is given in Glyn Williams' more recent Voyages of Delusion (entitled, in America, Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage):

Glyn Williams: Voyages of Delusion: The Search for the Northwest Passage in the Age of Reason (2002)

So you can imagine that as soon as I saw those images of poor old Ciarán Hinds contemplating his end in the snow, it was only a matter of time before I watched the whole series. It might have been nice if it'd been possible to do so on some convenient streaming service, but never mind, I'm now the owner of a brand spanking new DVD of the whole thing.

The Terror (2018)

Is it a masterpiece? Too early to say, I suppose, but certainly the mise-en-scène looks brilliantly, hauntingly real - as befits any production under the supervision of Ridley Scott, or at any rate his production company Scott Free. The performances from all the various principals - Jared Harris as Captain Francis Crozier, Tobias Menzies as Commander James Fitzjames, Paul Ready as Dr. Harry Goodsir, and Ciarán Hinds as Franklin - are flawless. It also contains the slimiest, most reprehensible villain since Shakespeare dreamed up Iago as the ideal foil for his hero Othello.

I don't really want to say too much more about it, for fear of ruining the suspense for those of you who haven't yet watched it. Suspense and mystery are, after all, the lifeblood of stories such as these. Suffice it to say that all is not as it seems in these frozen wastes, and that David Kajganich's vision is probably closer to Edwin Landseer's (above) than to John Millais's.

If you'd like something more decorous and meditative, stick to The Broken Lands. This particular version of Franklin's story is as violent and bloody as anything I've ever seen on TV. It's more for fans of H. P. Lovecraft's lurid melodrama At the Mountains of Madness than for admirers (if there are any still left) of the 1948 film version of Scott of the Antarctic.

Jared Harris (1961- )

The presence, in the cast, of Jared Harris, has the effect - or so I would imagine, at least - of reminding us of his more recent star-making turn in the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. The pompous inanities and downright lies of such people as Sir John Franklin and his allies back in London seem not too far away from the rather more serious untruths promulgated in the latter series. In both cases, it would seem, if you want the craggy face of integrity, you go to Jared Harris (a long cry from his role as the most villainous villain of all in the TV Sci-fi series Fringe).

Chernobyl
[2019 TV series created and written by Craig Mazin, directed by Johan Renck]

'Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid.'
- Craig Mazin, Chernobyl (2019).

I wrote this poem some time ago, as a response to the (so-called) 'Polar-Bear-gate' scandal. It now seems to me strangely appropriate to the themes and atmosphere of the magnificent Chernobyl and the gut-wrenching The Terror alike:

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Peter Gleick: Stranded Polar Bear (2010)

Stranded Polar Bear


The ripples imply
a boat’s passed by

or something larger
like a whale

the islet’s small
and artificial

looking
like the bear

enduring exile
Augustus sent

his family
to islands

small enough
to terrify

even the young
willing to die

until you realise
it’s a fake

that bear
was never there

even his shadow
clouds and drift ice

carefully placed
to make the point

that lying is okay
when the legend becomes fact

print the legend
said John Ford

by saying it
he showed

he didn’t mean it

Paul Nicklin: Polar Bears (2010)