St David’s Cathedral. Image: Alan Thomas, Wikimedia Commons
STUART MILLSON enjoys the sounds of the classical continuum
In Director, Ken Russell’s famous 1962 Monitor film about the life of Edward Elgar and narrated so memorably by Huw Wheldon (a patrician voice clinging on in what was a changing era), the point was made that the English composer’s life encompassed three facets: “the romantic, the drum-beating patriot, and religious visionary”.
Certainly, the religious element – Elgar was a Roman Catholic – is hugely significant in his work, as his most famous oratorio, the Cardinal Newman setting, The Dream of Gerontius (1900), testifies. Six years later, now knighted and perhaps the nation’s most famous and recognised composer, Sir Edward turned again to religious themes, but this time a piece about the earliest days of the Christian church, with a libretto selected and woven together by his own hand from both the Old and New Testaments. Whereas The Dream of Gerontius began with a hushed orchestral introduction – as if the mist of incense is beginning to clear in the shadows of a Worcestershire rural Catholic Church – The Kingdom opens with a “rushing wind”, a tremendous, revelatory symphonic call-to-arms, before subsiding into one of Elgar’s most moving passages, almost out-Nimrodding Nimrod: surveying the lands of the Bible, the morning of Pentecost, Solomon’s Porch – all seen through the hazy summer skies of the Malvern Hills.
Revelatory, too, is the May 1957 recording of the piece, set down for posterity by the SOMM label – and, thanks to Elgar expert and sound-technician, Lani Spahr, presented in astonishingly-detailed, audio-restoration glory. I do not use the latter term lightly: for here we have the pre-eminent Elgar conductor of his age, perhaps of all time, Sir Adrian Boult at the Royal Festival Hall, at the helm of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with the voices of (in those halcyon days of regional and London choruses) the much-acclaimed Croydon Philharmonic Society. The soloists, too, are names that dominated the concert stages and recording studios of the 1950s to early 1970s: Heather Harper, Helen Watts, William Herbert and Gordon Clinton. But aside from the Elgar and Boult interest, another important element exists with this recording, and that is the capturing of a sound-of-voice, tone-of-voice and diction which, over the last 60-odd years, has almost been lost. The best way in which I can describe the sensation is by comparing the voice, of say, Kenneth More or indeed, Huw Wheldon, to an actor or announcer of today. SOMM’s new CD is a vital piece of social history, too.
The fill-up work on this two-CD set, the Enigma Variations, is another remarkable archive performance: Sir Adrian Boult again, but this time abroad – in Holland, in that year of peril, 1940. Conducting Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra (now, Royal Concertgebouw) we are reminded of a time when Elgar was played more frequently in continental Europe than he is now. Needless to say, the Dutch orchestra is on fine form as one of the greatest ensembles of its time – an excellence continued, post-war by Van Beinum and Haitink, and which, of course, lives on in our own time under new generations of musicians. But when Boult stood before those players, just months before Holland was overrun by Nazi Germany, the combination of music, emotion, world events all seemed to make a potent brew. We are so fortunate to be able to dip into the Europe of 86 years ago and to hear – and imagine – what must have been in people’s hearts. Another truly superb addition to SOMM’s (and the world’s) music library.
The anguish of totalitarianism, this time of the Soviet era, is brought into focus by another of SOMM’s productions, the Symphonic Diptych, Anna, Op. 171 by David Matthews (b. 1943). Anna – an opera, with libretto by the philosopher and writer, the late Sir Roger Scruton, tells an anguished story of Peter and Anna, whose father (during the years of the Iron Curtain) was imprisoned for assisting anti-Communist dissidents. Anna meets a young man, Miro, with whom she falls in love, but it is later revealed that his own past, spent cooperating with the authorities, was responsible for their father’s death. The tragedy unfolds, but the composer brings us not operatic extracts or the full drama, but instead, a symphonic compression of this modern saga – an intensive, half-an-hour ‘symphony’ in its own right, Mahlerian in its emotions, but more pared down, more intimate, more of a philosophical conversation between the music and the listener.
Performed by the Ulster Orchestra under Jac Van Steen and recorded two years ago in Belfast, this is the brightest of modern recordings, showing the rich tone of the Northern Ireland players, especially the pinpoint, sharp yet subtle brass and woodwind instruments, captured with both balance, forthrightness and radiance by SOMM’s director, Siva Oke, and Recording Engineer Richard Campbell – with mixing and mastering by Alastair McMillan. The team at the recording console also bring us a change of mood and tempo, in the form of the David Matthews Flute Concerto, given a mesmerising, air-borne, joyful and fabulously detailed rendition by soloist, Emma Halnan – acclaimed several years ago at the English Music Festival for her performance of Malcolm Arnold’s Flute Sonata.
Another contemporary composer, Nimrod Borenstein (b. 1969), is currently bringing his exacting, intense, but fluid and compelling conducting style to the English Chamber Orchestra, in a new Mandolin Concerto performed by Alon Sariel. Borenstein rejects the leaden, de-Natured, tortured landscape of much old-hat, self-consciously anti-tonal ‘music’. In conversation, the conductor-composer talks in a torrent of intellectual passion about Mendelssohn and Mozart, so it is easy to see the inspiration behind his own exciting, classically based, thoroughly tuneful compositions. SOMM’s discography embraces not just the old masters, but a genre of contemporary music that has something to say and which belongs to the continuum.
Finally, live music, courtesy of the enterprising, classical-opera and folk-filled Fishguard Festival of Music in West Wales, in their grand opening concert at St. David’s Cathedral on the south-western tip of Cambria. In a countryside alive not just with Festival fever, but wrapped up in preparations and bunting for August’s Eisteddfod, it seemed completely right that the opening works celebrated folk tradition – in this case, the movements, Sarka, and From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields by Bedrich Smetana. Czech conductor, Tomas Hanus, drew both intense and delicate playing from the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera – the players clearly enjoying the experience of performing as a symphony orchestra ‘on stage’, rather than an ensemble half-hidden beneath flooring occupied by singers and scenery. Sarka is an alarming tale of a deadly female warrior army of legend, in which the orchestral pace is sometimes strident and alarming, yet in the contrasting woods and fields of Bohemia, Smetana invites us to wander dreamily in meadows (which some two decades later, Mahler would consecrate to Pan).
A more spectral rural atmosphere, this time in England, was evoked in George Butterworth’s Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad, sung by the prize-winning young baritone, Steffan Lloyd Owen – whose voice took me back to concerts and recitals by the famous Cornish baritone, Benjamin Luxon, an artist prominent in the 1970s and 1980s who recorded the cycle, but with piano accompaniment. In the St. David’s performance, perhaps a slightly slower tempo might have been in order, as occasionally (such as in the song, Look Not in My Eyes) I found the clarity of the words a little indistinct. But nevertheless, the interpretation unearthed all the treasures of Butterworth’s and A.E. Housman’s native soil – romance, lost love, the passing of youth, the sacrifice of a generation (the composer was killed on the Western Front in 1916), the memory of the town fair, good chaps and friends, the cherry tree, and the ploughed field.
A delightful interval was spent in the grounds of the cathedral, watching jackdaws find their nests and nooks in the great building’s tower, and listening to the mid-evening swifts, scything and “scree-screeing” through the drowsy, warm air. The interval bell summoned the capacity audience back to the final work, the Symphony No. 4 by Brahms, written in the Austrian countryside of Styria in 1884-85 (1885 being the year Butterworth was born). Brahms’s Fourth is often considered, especially in its opening and final movements, a tragic, autumnal, even wintry work, casting a spell of solitude and introspection. Yet all such thoughts are banished in the headlong, joyful rush of the Allegro giocoso third movement – the WNO musicians filling the cathedral with a head-spinning, summer energy. After the applause had died down, the orchestra paid its own tribute to Tomas Hanus, now leaving the company for pastures new. A moving encore from Songs my Mother Taught Me by Dvorak seemed the perfect end to this well-thought-out programme of heavy high summer.
WILLIAM MARKLEY remembers an original and politically unclassifiable writer
Many of us in the USA believe that our country has lost much of the strength and virtue which it once had. We see an America that isn’t working the way it should. And we know that corruption, incompetence, and division are on the rise. I was born in 1962. For anyone my age or older, it should be clear that the nation has culturally and socially declined in our lifetimes. The roots of this decline stretch back far into the twentieth century.
In the 1990s, historian and sociologist Christopher Lasch presented a diagnosis of what had gone wrong. While he is right in many of his conclusions, and accurately describes much of what happened, I believe that he misses some of the reasons for America’s decline. But despite any shortcomings, he is well worth reading.
Lasch sadly died too young, in 1994, at the age of sixty-one. In his last book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, which was published the year after his death, he warned that Americans in higher social positions had developed a contempt for their own nation, and for fellow citizens. These so-called “elites” isolated themselves from the rest of us, praised themselves as more enlightened “Citizens of the World,” and merged into the group that is today called the globalists. They especially despised middle- and working-class Americans.
In his introduction to Revolt of the Elites, Lasch noted several concerns that non-elite Americans had at the time, including the loss of industry and associated jobs, threats to the middle class, rising crime, and declining cities. [1] Sound familiar? It should. And remember, Lasch wrote this in 1994. America still has many good people, but the qualities that made America healthy are still under threat. We, today, could add to Lasch’s list of concerns: uncontrolled immigration, Woke, declining education, family breakdown, social disorder, institutional corruption, an upper class that is hoarding more and more of America’s wealth, and last but not least, a demoralizing war on beauty.
Since Lasch’s day, Americans have also been dissatisfied with the state of politics and government. Neither major American political party has adequately addressed our urgent problems. Lasch ascribes this to the increased isolation of American elites. This isolation has ensured that powerful people don’t suffer from the results of their many failed policies. [2] This has been a relatively recent development in American history. It’s very important for us to understand that, as a group, our elites were not always as unmoored and hostile to the rest of us as they are now. Lasch describes how the wealthy in America once commonly had a strong sense of noblesse oblige—a belief that they were responsible for acting generously, benevolently and honorably towards people in other, less fortunate classes. As a result, “Libraries, museums, parks, orchestras, universities, hospitals, and other civic amenities stood as so many monuments to upper-class munificence.” [3]
Carnegie Library in Xenia, Ohio. Industrialist Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of many public libraries in small and large cities
The new “elites,” for want of a better word, are a very different breed. They partially developed out of a system of “mobility of capital and the emergence of a global market.” This economic system arose in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The new elites also have taken advantage of a recently-developed system of educational credentials, acquired from approved schools such as the Ivy League universities. This credentialism that has become so consequential is associated with so-called Progressive ideology, which gained a foothold in America by the early twentieth century. Among the new elites, noblesse oblige has disappeared. These successors to the Henry Fords of old include business and NGO managers, media figures, government bureaucrats, the education establishment, tech leaders and workers, and others who “produce and manipulate information.” They are not nearly as closely tied to local communities and the nation as a whole as the earlier elites were. They are the “Anywheres” which David Goodhart described, as opposed to the “Somewheres” who are still conservative and rooted in a place. Lasch notes, “It is a question whether they think of themselves as Americans at all. Patriotism, certainly, does not rank very high in their hierarchy of virtues. ‘Multiculturalism,’ on the other hand, suits them to perfection.” [4] This new class has tried to change the meaning of the word “democracy” for its own benefit, and to favour certain social classes which have supposedly been treated unfairly. According to Lasch, for the new elites, democracy means a “therapeutic state” which promotes “self-esteem.” [5]
In Revolt of the Elites, Lasch expressed appreciation for the American Founding Fathers, and the civic and social life of America that flourished well into the nineteenth century. Our Civil War was a terrible rupture, of course. But although antebellum politicians obviously failed to find a peaceful resolution before that war erupted at Fort Sumter, many of them had tried diligently, using political channels that worked well in earlier decades, and would again work well after the war, until the new elites rose to domination.
Lasch carefully studied and understood the earlier, sometimes novel American ideas of democracy. He appreciated how the American republic and its democratic elements, based on the founding documents, rule of law, and separation of powers, provided ways for people of all social classes to thrive and earn respect. Nineteenth century Americans tended to have a very different understanding of American democracy than the ideologues who refer to “our democracy” today. While Federalists and Whigs warned of the dangers of the mob, those who approved of the expansion of democracy stressed the need for a cohesive society with wide, active participation, and warned of the dangers that would arise from a widening gap between the rich and the poor. They emphasized the value of a high proportion of men participating in a trade or owning and managing property, which would foster qualities necessary for a healthy democracy, such as self-reliance and responsibility:
Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state. Not that democracy should be equated with rugged individualism. Self-reliance does not mean self-sufficiency. Self-governing communities, not individuals, are the basic units of democratic society. [6]
While individualism was often emphasized in America, it was balanced, from America’s beginnings, by the activities of religious and other voluntary organizations, which provided assistance to those in need, strengthened social bonds, and promoted cultural pursuits. The decline of these organizations is now attested by many empty churches, and countless other empty, crumbling buildings in small towns and cities, which once housed thriving community groups such as the Grange, the Odd Fellows, and the Lyceum.
A former Odd Fellows Hall, in rural Ohio
The role of “experts”
Along with globalized economics, Lasch assigns blame for America’s decline on the rise of “experts,” and an unquestioning trust in “science” to solve all problems. This process accelerated in the late-nineteenth century, as American intellectuals looked to Europe for new ideas. Among the results in government were a professionalized bureaucracy, which continually grew and changed in unforeseen directions, and a growing reliance on educated experts for developing policies. This new system of the American “Progressives” showed its fallibility by the 1930s, with policies that prolonged the Great Depression. “The Best and the Brightest” also showed their short-sightedness in the 1960s, with the development of the welfare state, the direction of the Vietnam War, and other policies which ruined American cities. As we saw later with Covid in 2020, and the “climate change” hysteria of the last few decades, scientists and other experts have continued to be wrong in many cases. True science knows its limits, and always encourages professional argument and rational criticism. In order to offer convincing evidence, it must show that the results of a scientific experiment can be duplicated. This is very different from today’s “scientism” delusion, which is prevalent among many persons who believe that they are well-educated. Another difference from the days before the “Progressive Era” is that, in recent years, many in the expert classes have not been anchored in the Christian, Western morality which served America so well. Traditional Christian, Western morality taught that there are limits to the understanding and capability of science and knowledge. Without this, a blinding arrogance has developed among the new elites. And Lasch emphasized that this arrogance is very different from the pride of earlier aristocrats, which was based on “the inheritance of an ancient lineage and on the obligation to defend its honor.” Knightly ideals and qualities are a thing of the past. [7]
Lasch also criticizes the ideal of a “meritocracy.” He argues that, paradoxically, this tends to encourage an upper class to become more entrenched, rather than providing truly fluid social mobility. This happens by allowing capable persons from lower classes to rise who, in the process, develop allegiance or obligation to the established upper class. And the lower classes lose effective leaders. I’m not sure that I am completely convinced by Lasch’s argument here, but it is food for thought. Lasch does provide plenty of evidence for what Charles Haywood describes, in another review of Revolt of the Elites: “Until quite recently, in fact, the American ideal was not rising up through the class structure, but succeeding within one’s own community and frame.” [8] Lasch also specified that this ideal insisted upon opportunities for full citizenship, and for participating and mixing with others in the broad society. [9]
A Young Carpenter, ca. 1850 (Chrysler Museum of Art)
The republican system which America’s founders and their adherents established provided the means for many humble people to live productive lives. It didn’t necessarily enable everyone to become a tycoon or to get rich quick, but it did offer a share of social respect to any citizen who acted responsibly. Nineteenth-century workers, farmers and craftsmen considered this kind of respect to be their due. They weren’t interested in a social revolution that would overthrow the wealthy. Compared with the rest of the world, a high proportion of working-class and middle-class persons participated in the civil aspects of the American system. Those in other classes also benefited from this system.
Lasch rightly lamented the loss of these civil aspects of America. He claims that the rise of wage labor and large corporations, along with the dwindling of more independent workers, were among the reasons for this change. There was also the growth of the new, more isolated elite classes who lacked solidarity with the less wealthy. Among the Progressives of the early twentieth century, an attitude arose that “most political questions were too complex” for the public. [10] In more recent decades, prominent politicians have denounced the supposedly benighted “deplorables” and “bitter clingers” of the middle and working classes – those who have earned responsibility and respect but are shut out from the workings of the current system, and sometimes even denied full freedoms in a system of anarcho-tyranny.
The decline of journalism and debate
From 1830 to 1900, political participation was much higher in America than today. And there was a thriving press which contributed mightily to public debates, unlike our later mainstream media. Newspapers were “fiercely partisan,” as Lasch described. Many papers tended to advocate for one political party or another. Some refused to be in the thrall of any party. Many cities and towns offered multiple papers which offered views in opposition to each other. Despite the recent development of the so-called “Information Age,” Lasch claims frankly that by the late twentieth century, voters tended to be much less well-informed than before. This was a result of a discouraging of open debate that developed, and a transformation of journalists into a more credentialed “profession.”
Throughout the nineteenth century, Americans eagerly attended political speeches and debates. These occurred frequently throughout the country, and focused on topics of local, state, and national importance. The series of Lincoln-Douglas debates was just one famous example. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas spoke very frankly compared with today’s politicians, who are surrounded by consultants and PR managers. Those earlier debates often occurred directly between the opposing politicians, without journalists intruding as intermediaries, as we usually see today. Such journalists tend to assert their own agendas into the debate, often disregarding public concerns. [11] Lasch highlighted the necessity of “sustained public debate” as a remedy for the avalanche of “junk mail” media to which we have been subjected since the late twentieth century. [12]
Let’s also remember the whining by American deep-state apologists during the past decade about what they called misinformation and disinformation. Of course false information exists, but this recent effort was a coordinated targeting of information that was truthful and did not fit the narrative of the regime. This effort was completely opposed to what Lasch called “sustained public debate.” It was a contempt for the public, exhibited by Biden administration officials and several members of the media. They actively tried to shut down free discussion online. Both major parties have been guilty of media manipulation, but the aforementioned campaign was an especially aggressive example, using government agencies to impose censorship.
This didn’t only happen in the USA. During Covid-19 in New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern insisted that the only true source of information for the public would be the government. “We will continue to be your single source of truth,” she stated. And she emphasized, “Otherwise, dismiss anything else.” This was during a time when, throughout the West, we were repeatedly misled and lied to by government officials and media. During her reign, Ardern and her government inflicted a drastic lockdown on New Zealand, which included human rights violations and significant economic damage. She admitted openly that there would be “two classes of people” in the country, the vaccinated and unvaccinated. We are steadily learning how very harmful the lockdowns and other Covid policies were to our societies. As one alternative media figure put it, this was “weaponized, phony niceness.” It was also totalitarian and rooted in unreality. [13]
This leads me to a positive note. One thing has improved in my lifetime: the opening up of political discussion beyond the limits that were strictly enforced for decades by the mainstream media and their controllers. The Internet has allowed much more free discussion – a very welcome widening of the Overton Window. Elon Musk’s X has played a role in this, along with the ability for anyone – such as your humble author – to post their musings on a variety of Internet platforms. It’s a bit like a return to the wild and woolly days of nineteenth-century newspapers, although not quite. It certainly has allowed for more sources of information. Thoughtful, substantial arguments for a variety of perspectives can be found, when one ignores the vituperation, lies and vast amounts of other noise.
Race relations and cities
Revolt of the Elites offers a good, succinct summary of what went wrong with race relations in the 1960s. Lasch highlights how communities were destroyed by radical civil rights activism and related government actions. Much of this was also caused by social engineering that was pushed by the new elites. Lasch might have retained some naïveté about the civil rights movement, yet he saw through the platitudes of extreme activists who demanded equality at all costs, equality of results, and more. He specifically blames social engineering for
“a rapid deterioration of race relations….busing, affirmative action, and open housing threatened the ethnic solidarity of neighborhoods and drove lower-middle-class whites into opposition. In the face of their resistance, liberals ‘reacted with self-righteous indignation,’ in [Jim] Sleeper’s words. Black militants encouraged racial polarization and demanded a new politics of ‘collective grievance and entitlement’…Liberals and other leftists also insisted on lowering or removing standards in schools and other institutions, claiming that standards were racist. White leftists praised black culture for having “an expressive, sexually liberated way of life free of bourgeois inhibitions.” [14]
In recent years, Christopher Caldwell has added to Lasch’s analysis by describing the harmful effects of civil rights legislation on our legal system and society in general, including its subversion of our constitution. [15] While the civil rights movement was active, many white Americans understandably wanted fairness for all, but much of what happened with civil rights was something different.
Social engineering had other dire impacts. One of the most striking signs of America’s decline is the current state of its cities, which were profoundly harmed by government policy and the influence of powerful private foundations. As suggested above, this was a set of “misguided policies intended to break up ethnic neighborhoods that allegedly [stood] in the way of racial integration.” Revolt of the Elites doesn’t mention it much, but increasing urban crime also played a large role in forcing whites to migrate to the suburbs. I can remember from my own lifetime when our cities were safer than they are today. Commentators such as Thomas Sowell have documented this decline.
There have been slums and a degree of urban crime for millennia. But American cities generally went from thriving social and cultural centers to, in many cases, places that many normal citizens try to avoid. Lasch does mention how the tax base of cities was eroded by white flight and the loss of industry, and he emphasizes the very valuable role that city neighborhoods once played in the lives of humble citizens. Much of that neighborhood cohesiveness is gone. [16] In my own city, neighborhoods that once were safe and tended to have cohesive Polish, Italian or German populations are now dangerous wastelands.
Decline of personal character
One theme which continues to run through Lasch’s book is the nature of respect and self-respect. We’ve already looked at how American workers, farmers, and craftsmen claimed the opportunity to earn a respectable place in society. This is of course related to self-respect. Lasch goes against the grain of many recent intellectuals by insisting that respect and self-respect must be earned through moral achievement and character. I’ll venture to say that almost all Americans would have agreed with Lasch about this, before modern psychological and teaching theories took effect. [17]
In his chapter, “The Abolition of Shame,” Lasch explores in detail some psychological theories of human shame, and some strategies recommended by psychologists for coping with it. Lasch reveals his concern about a very destructive development: how shamelessness has become widely predominant in our culture. [18] This growing attitude resulted from the increased influence of politicized psychiatrists and psychologists, and the declining influence of Christianity. Lasch reviews how Freudian revisionists in the 1930s began to insist that American society as a whole was in need of psychiatric treatment. With some variation, this general approach of attempting to transform our society has continued to be very influential. [19] Related to the attack by psychologists on human shame was a large push in the 1990s to promote “self-esteem.” Lasch describes how the recently deceased feminist Gloria Steinem got involved in an effort to mix liberal politics with psychotherapy. Steinem’s ideas were implemented as policy in some states. [20]
Higher education, culture, society, and trust
In a chapter on higher education, Lasch bent over backwards trying to be even-handed, in answering concerns about political correctness. He believed that the biggest problem in academia was the growing influence of corporations. That has certainly been a destructive force, eroding the traditional academic model. But while Lasch also criticized far-left ideologues who were becoming very influential in faculty departments, he underestimated the extent of the PC problem, and how pervasively it would subvert and eventually dominate higher education. Since the 1980s, far-left ideology has taken over vast swathes of college faculties and administrations throughout the country. Not only has this resulted in a widespread emphasis on leftist indoctrination of students, but it has also contributed to the lowering of academic standards, and has promoted policies such as DEI. As many other commentators have noticed, the woke tail wagged the corporate dog in many cases. Very significantly, far-left ideas that became prominent in higher education have been embraced throughout the primary and secondary educational systems, and in Human Resources departments, all across America.
Lasch also does not discuss some major influences on American culture and society in the twentieth century such as Alfred Kinsey’s books on sexual behaviour, the 1950 collaborative book The Authoritarian Personality, and Herbert Marcuse and other figures of the New Left. Lasch was very troubled by the breakdown of the traditional family, but in my opinion he did not explore this as thoroughly as he should in Revolt of the Elites – although he did explore threats to the Western nuclear family in another book, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged.
He also did not delve as much into the loss of social trust as I would have liked. America, along with other Western nations, once had a relatively high-trust society. In many places, we could leave our doors unlocked all the time. We could prop up our unlocked bicycles outside a store, while we went shopping. At a farm stand, we could deposit money in an untended box, to pay for farm produce. And parents could allow their children to play outside unsupervised, without much worry. Such elements of a high-trust society are disappearing. Much of this is a result of increased cultural diversity, which inevitably lowers trust, as the liberal social scientist Robert Putnam finally admitted. Lasch touched on some of the problems of diversity, and mentioned that the market and the welfare state tend to weaken “ties of trust,” [21] but he did not focus on this process.
Cleveland shoppers, 1940 (Ohio History Connection)
Other perspectives
Historian Claes Ryn agreed with Lasch to an extent. In a 2023 interview he said, “The most telling illustration of America’s fraught condition is the inability or refusal of our dominant, trend-setting elites to recognize and act on reality.” He also agreed that there was a major transformation of America in the twentieth century. [22] Yet, back in 1993, anticipating the populism that Lasch favored in Revolt of the Elites, Ryn offered the following warning….
“…[I]t would be a great mistake, especially in our disoriented era, to look to ‘the people’ for sources of purity and social unity. Populism is only another form of escape from the real problem, which is that Western civilization as a whole is disintegrating at the moral center. The people in general may today be less obviously corrupt than the elites in some respects, but that is not because of some natural propensity to virtue greater than that of elites. The mass is just slower to change and lags behind the more daring and creative elites. The people seem culturally conservative today only in comparison with more adventurous leaders. If the mass of common men have such sound instincts, who is digesting all those television programs, movies, records, musicals, and novels? Who is paying all those college and university faculty and electing and reelecting all those congressmen?… John Adams was more representative of early American political thought than Jefferson when he said that the people can be as tyrannical as any king.” [23]
While I agree somewhat with Lasch that “Populism is the authentic voice of democracy,” [24] Ryn expresses some important truths here. It’s undeniable that today’s masses have fallen under the spell of bread and circuses. The whole nature of “the People” has changed since the American founding. John Adams, in 1798, made another applicable remark: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” [25]
In the 1960s an American scholar, Eugene Rose, studied the decline of the West. He found that our culture, society, and politics had become ill with a deep-seated Nihilism. Having read widely in history, philosophy and religion, Rose believed that elements of this civilizational illness were unprecedented, such as the extent of religious unbelief combined with an unhealthy restlessness, which had grown to “a scale so vast as to be almost universal.” Rose found that: “Toward the end of the nineteenth century increasing numbers of quite ordinary men had begun that restless search – so much a part of our own contemporary scenes – to find a substitute for the God Who was dead in their hearts.” [26]
Rose described four stages of Nihilism that have been especially active in the West since the French Revolution. He called these stages Liberalism, Realism, Vitalism, and the Nihilism of Destruction. They have worked together in a dialectical way, opposing but also embracing each other, to propel the West further into decline and destruction. The cause of these nihilistic developments is the denial of absolute truth.
As he was examining the West’s decline, Eugene Rose found solace and personal healing in the Russian Orthodox Church, and he became a monk. He was given the title of Father Seraphim Rose, and his writings have become influential since his early death in 1982. Christopher Lasch probably would have agreed with at least some of Rose’s diagnosis. For me, Rose provides a more complete and satisfying analysis, but Lasch’s work adds a lot of very important details, specific to developments in America.
Father Seraphim Rose (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood)
I was surprised that Lasch did not cite James Burnham in Revolt of the Elites. Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution (1941) and Suicide of the West (1964), which examined and sharply criticized America’s emerging, increasingly dominant managerial classes of the 20th century. Burnham became influential in some American intellectual circles, and his diagnoses are still frequently studied. But, we can’t have everything. Lasch gave us some important, clear insights into how the powers-that-be in America have steered us wrong.
An independent mind
My wife grew up in another country, and I have lost count of the number of times that I’ve told her, “It wasn’t always like this!” I resist looking at the past with rose-colored glasses, but it’s undeniable that we have lost a tremendous amount that was good in America. Zoomers today are often understandably shocked when viewing photographs and documentary film footage of Americans in the past. They see evidence of a safer, more cohesive society, with well-dressed people of all classes showing self-respect and respect for others. Our past wasn’t a utopia, but it offered much that was healthy and good. Lasch would understand.
Lasch leaned politically leftwards during much of his career, but in Revolt of the Elites he said many things which today’s leftists would label “far-right.” His general remedy for America was “to emphasize responsibility rather than rights,” to tame both capitalism and the welfare system, to strengthen community, and to prevent “a centralized state bureaucracy.” [27] He also urged a commitment to past and future generations, and quoted Horace Mann in this regard: “The successive generations of men, taken collectively, constitute one great commonwealth.” [28]
Earlier in his academic career, Lasch used some Marxist approaches in his thought and study. His “paleoconservative” academic friend Paul Gottfried claimed that he was devoted to “a non-mainstream form of socialism.” He had a
lifelong hatred of consumer capitalism…. His project was to find a religiously based communitarianism that could serve as an alternative to multinational capitalism. This communal identity would focus on service to one’s family and neighbors, and it would supposedly take everyone’s mind off consumption and the false idea of “Progress.” He also “personified an old-fashioned Presbyterian way of life. [29]
Lasch angered people on the Left and the Right. Pundits argue about where he really stood on the political spectrum. Anyway, as I’ve written elsewhere, you’re often not doing your job if you don’t make someone angry. Lasch was criticized for inconsistency, but I think that some of the anger directed against him was because he was good at bursting people’s bubbles. Original, independent thinkers like him aren’t completely cast in an ideological mold.
In his scholarship, Lasch studied many thinkers who are not commonly cited by either the Left or the Right today. He examined the ideas of some who were widely known during their lifetimes, such as William Henry Channing, Horace Mann, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, and Orestes Brownson. He also offered the perspectives of many others who have been less known, including Robert Rantoul, Jr., Charles Ingersoll, David Ramsay, R. H. Tawney, and Michael Young. All of them still have useful, interesting things to say to us – and I hope I’ve shown that Lasch does also.
NOTES
[1] Lasch, Christopher, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995, p.3
[15] Caldwell, Christopher, The Age of Entitlement, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020
[16] Revolt of the Elites, pp. 8-9, 98-99, 118-19
[17] Ibid., pp. 89, 105, 206-7
[18] Ibid., pp. 204
[19] Ibid., p. 207
[20] Ibid., 208-10
[21] Ibid., p. 102
[22] Ryn, Claes, in “”The Failure of Conservatism and the Road Not Taken” — A conversation with Claes Ryn,” Michael Vlahos Channel, YouTube, May 8, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JVlF6lCqxI
WILLIAM MARKLEY was born and raised in Ohio, in the United States, and currently lives in Erie, Pennsylvania. He has worked in librarianship, government, and the corporate sector, and is currently a caregiver for elderly and disabled clients. He is an old-fashioned American anglophile, and an amateur historian, who has written on local history topics, and conducted oral history projects. He has a Substack at https://williammarkley.substack.com/
Arthur Rackham illustration from his Allies Fairy Book
Fairies: A History
Francis Young, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2026, 340pps.
LIAM GUILAR admires a fair-minded and well-informed treatment of an often-scorned subject
Towards the end of the 12th Century, an English writer called Laȝamon added a story to the French poem he was translating. He wrote that at king Arthur’s birth, the baby was visited by magical beings who took charge of him with strong magic and gave him gifts[i].
The magical beings are called aluen. I had always assumed these were elves, but the word has also been translated as fairies. The Middle English Compendium cites this quotation and offers: “Fairies or Elves of either sex” as a translation. Take your pick. But what did Laȝamon visualise when he wrote the word? Could he distinguish between an elf and a fairy? And if he did, what were they? A study of elves in his poem concludes, somewhat unhelpfully, that the term is “prone to shapeshifting. It can connote disease causing organisms, witches, nymphs, sea monsters fairy mistresses, nightmares.”[ii]
In search of answers, I have been reading scholarly works on fairy belief and Francis Young’s A History of Fairies is the most thorough treatment of the subject I’ve found. Ranging widely over time and geography he puts together a comprehensive and readable history of the idea of fairies. He does this even though his introduction explains why it is impossible to write a history of Fairies in the way someone could write a history of ‘The French’ or carpentry.
The problem is that defining the subject is not straightforward. Although some kind of fairy belief has been a characteristic of British and many other cultures throughout history, today the words fairy and elf point in the wrong directions – to cute little winged creatures with a wand (thank you 19th century and Disney) or beautiful folk with pointy ears (thank you Professor Tolkien and Peter Jackson.).
Throughout history people encountered supernatural beings, but discovering which beings they encountered is problematic. In the past the names used to describe ‘fairies’ were often deliberately vague or euphemistic to avoid either naming or offending the ‘good people’ who were often everything but good. Though there are stories of encounters from the Middle Ages onwards, they were usually recorded by educated men using Latin terms which may or may not reflect the words used by their vernacular speaking informants. To compound the problem, the supernatural beings in these encounters didn’t introduce themselves as fairies or elves, or boggarts, nor are they usually identified using such names[iii].
Young’s solution is to define fairy as: “A frequently invisible population of uncanny, non-human (yet human like) living beings, reported by folklore who share our world,”[iv] Having done so he demonstrates how to write a history of a subject that can’t be clearly defined based on evidence that is unreliable for so many reasons.
He traces the possible origins of fairies to the animism of prehistory, and later what he calls the godlings of non-Christian belief. For most of Europe’s Christian history the fairies have been the unsanctioned supernatural, sitting aslant a theology that was more comfortable with angels and demons, ghosts, God and the Devil.
As the narrative moves towards the present, it moves on to firmer ground. There is more evidence, and the bias and error are perhaps easier to see. Folklore became a respectable subject by the 19th century and educated people started to take an interest in the beliefs and practices of ‘The Folk.’ Ironically, some of them didn’t just record fairy belief but (perhaps inadvertently) invented some and repackaged others.
Stepping neatly through the problems of evidence and contending arguments. Young is even handed in summarising various points of view, while tentatively offering his own. At times this even handedness makes the book feel like a symposium where everyone is on their best behaviour.
Given the limitations of the evidence there’s an unavoidable familiarity to much of the material. However, a history of fairies that didn’t mention Elidyr or the Cottingley fairies, or Bridget Cleary, would be deficient. Young’s emphasis on each is his own. Summarising the story of the Cottingley photographs, he explores their consequences for subsequent fairy belief. The death of Bridget Cleary comes in the context of how belief can be denigrated as superstition and used for political ends.
It’s a history where there are few certainties. There are crucial problems that never will be solved. The contemporary relationship between the fairies of medieval literature and the fairies of popular belief is impossible to untangle. Why the church and civil authorities moved from a long-standing dismissive attitude towards popular ‘non-sanctioned’ supernatural beliefs to what Young aptly calls a lethal credulity will never be known.
At times this uncertainty and the lack of definition threaten to subvert the attempt to discuss the subject. Across time and geography, the accounts are so various, the practices so widespread, so similar yet different that it must be difficult to know what can be excluded from the discussion.
What is missing, inevitably, are the fairies themselves. As Young acknowledges, a history of fairies must be a history of the opinions of educated, literate people, then and now, about other people’s beliefs (p.24). I still don’t know what Laȝamon thought aluen were, but the book is a reminder of how ‘vast and various’ the human imagination is, and how unpredictable people can be. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of that most rational of detectives, was a believer in the Cottingley photographs. Hugh Dowding, who led RAF Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain, was a firm believer in fairies, belonged to the Fairy Investigation Society, and feared the next war would be between fairies and humans.
A History of Fairies stands out amongst the ones I’ve read for several reasons. The book ranges widely over its subject in time and geography. While he focusses on Europe, Young acknowledges that a belief in fairylike creatures spreads much further. While acknowledging the role of Ireland in fairy lore, the geographic range of Young’s examples prevents him from falling into the trap of suggesting fairies are ‘Celtic’ or that all elves come from Iceland.
While adopting a neutral stance as to their existence, he insists that “Fairies are part of the rich history of human experience and I do not see why belief in them or claims of encounters with them are any less worthy of respect than say, religious beliefs or reports of religious experiences” (p.2). Coupled with this is his refusal to fall into the modern trap of ‘explaining’ fairy belief. Modern writers who reach for an explanation which appeals to them as rational can sound like adults in a primary school playground and their explanations usually raise more questions than they answer[v].
Because he takes his subject seriously, Young can suggest that more is at stake in a history of fairy belief than the question of when fairies were first portrayed as being tiny, cute creatures with wings: “Belief in non-human populations of supernatural beings existed all over Europe, and not just in those countries where it was endlessly discussed and self-consciously revived by romantically inclined intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth century” (p.205).
If this belief in a human-like, non-human social being was so widespread, for so long, does it reveal something about the ways humans made sense of the world and their place in it? What does the disappearance of this belief as a widely held assumption suggest about modern consciousness? The book raises these questions while admitting their answers are beyond its scope.
Fairies: a History also has a significance beyond its subject matter. It is an effective demonstration of how difficult it is to understand or discover what people believed in the past. I started with Laȝamon and his story about aluen. He was a parish priest, for part of his life at a small church in Worcestershire. He and his parishioners would have identified themselves as Christian without hesitation. However, we know nothing about what ‘being Christian’ meant to them, what they knew of Christian doctrine or how much they understood it, or how it shaped their behaviour or their imaginative, emotional and intellectual lives. We sometimes know what an elite group of highly educated men thought everyone else should believe. We know what some snarky high-ranking ecclesiastics thought of ‘parish priests’ in general, but of their faith we know as much as we do about their interactions with the local aluen.
Fairies: A History is an eloquent reminder that confident assertions about the beliefs of the mass of any population in the past are about as trustworthy as those famous photographs taking in a garden in Cottingley.
[i] ‘Sone swa he com an eorðe; aluen hine iuengen/ heo bigolen þat child; mid galdere swiðe stronge.’
[ii] Cyril Edwards, ‘Layamon’s Elves’ in Laȝamon: Context, Language, and Interpretation, Edited by Rosemond Allen, Lucy Perry and Jane Roberts. P.95
[iii] A point made by both Jeremy Harte in Fairy Encounters in Medieval England and Richard Sowerby in Natural and Supernatural in Early Medieval England
[iv] This is similar to Alaric Hall’s suggestion in Elves in Anglo-Saxon England that the early Old English evidence suggest Elves were ‘Corporeal anthropomorphic beings mirroring the human in groups which believed in them.’ p.68. Such definitions give historians room to manoeuvre even if they aren’t very helpful for the reader
[v] See for example Matthias Egeler’s ‘Explanation’ of some of the practices associated with fairy abduction in Elves and Fairies: A short history of the Otherworld, p.61
LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of The Brazen Head, and the author of several poetry collections, including the series A Man of Heart, Presentment of Englishry and The Fabled Third (Shearsman), set in post-Roman Britain. His most recent publication is a translation of the Mabinogion folk-tale How Culhwch Won Olwen (Shearsman, 2026)
RUPERT LOYDELL reflects on political games and post-apocalyptic futures
These are some of the films I remember from my teens and start of my twenties. In my mind they were released closer together but searching for the release dates online today I can see that is not true. However far apart they were, they are linked together by a kind of stylised, cartoon-like violence that mostly avoided the horrific, and only occasionally made use of pathos.
I am not going to engage with the debate about whether violent films make us more violent and desensitize us, nor am I going to visit the argument about whether children know that cartoon violence is different from actual violence. If you want that kind of thing there are plenty of academic articles and books that engage with media and communications theory, psychology and critically dissect cinema tropes, motifs and individual films – not to mention lots of online unsubstantiated opinions and rants. Be my guest.
No, I want to think about why these three films have remained films which I frequently enjoy rewatching, despite (or possibly because of) the onscreen violence.
The first, Rollerball, imagines a world where everything has been bought. Everything is owned by giant corporations, everything is seen as a commodity, be that sex, property, audiences and, of course, sport. War (contrary to the actual capitalisation of wars) is not profitable; instead, there is a televised sport where each corporation’s teams play each other on a banked circuit, chasing a steel ball before capturing it and getting it into a kind of basket or hole at the top of the bank. Oh, and everyone is dressed like American Football players on roller skates, except for a couple of guys who ride motorbikes, which can also be used to tow the skaters.
Confused? It doesn’t matter. This film is actually about an individual (Jonathan E., played by James Caan) holding out against the state and/or big business. The game of Rollerball is a futuristic version (I say futuristic, but the film is set in 2018!) of the Roman gladiatorial circus, designed to distract and pacify the population; it is watched live by millions of people on TV and also in person. There are not meant to be standout individual players, and when Jonathan becomes recognised and idolised the corporations ask him to resign.
Jonathan, of course, refuses, so the corporations start changing the rules and the game becomes more and more deadly. Players no longer get injured, they get killed; motorbikes are used as weapons, and explode and burn; Jonathan’s friends and teammates mostly end up dead. Jonathan is not happy about this, but he will not run away. In the final game of the film, with all rules cancelled in favour of ‘anything goes’, he is the last man standing and slowly gathers his wounded self together to start skating a victory lap as the crowd chants his name.
It is not a subtle film, although for a while it was used in economics and political studies classes to show one possible outcome of neoliberalist capitalism and business monopolies. Beautifully stylised and choreographed, it makes use of a computer-style font specifically designed for the film on the players’ jerseys and films the games in an immersive way. Although there are scenes away from the game arena, carefully highlighting the teams’ camaraderie and also the wealth and degeneracy of corporation executives as they and their friends casually use fire guns to burn down trees, the film is about the game.
The game provides an endless background noise of roller skate wheels on wood, accompanied by the revving of motorbikes and the thunk of gloved fists on opposition bodies, but there is also a clever use of classical and background music, the latter composed by André Previn. Most of the time the music is accompaniment rather than featured, but the exception is the film’s use of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, which blasts out as introductory music and again during the closing credits.
Music is much more important in The Warriors, where a small Coney Island gang are trying to make it back home after an assassination of another gang leader, Cyrus, who was presiding over a huge gathering of all the New York gangs in the Bronx. Cyrus pointed out that there were far more gang members than policemen if they chose to work together, but is shot by the psychopathic Luther, who then points out The Warriors and says that they shot Luther. The summit and gangs’ truce are over, and The Warriors are at the wrong end of New York City.
I didn’t go to New York until 1980, so one of the great things about the film was seeing New York in all its grubby, run-down glory, just like the reality I would encounter a year on. New York City was bankrupt, dirty, violent and dangerous. It was also full of energy, music, art and attitude, 24 hours a day. It wasn’t, however, full of gangs in fancy dress, which The Warriors is.
It is the costumes and make up, along with the funky soundtrack and naturalistic filming, that makes The Warriors work. The film is episodic in nature, each episode containing a chase or fight or romantic encounter, each accompanied by an appropriate track, be that pumping synthesizer music for running, romantic pop for emotions, or Joe Walsh’s ‘In the City’ for the uplifting heroic credits where the remaining survivors of the gang’s long trek home walk into the distance along the beach. The film also makes good use of lyrics to reinforce the tension and offer narrative commentary, particularly with the songs ‘Nowhere to Run’ and ‘You’re Movin’ too Slow’. At times the music is played by a radio DJ who also keeps those gangs listening cryptically updated about The Warriors’ run for home.
The DJ has a sultry voice and red lips, which is pretty much all we see of her. She is a sexy presence throughout, as is Mercy (Deborah Van Valkenburgh) who following a street standoff defects from a rather pathetic gang, The Orphans, to join The Warriors. She has her eye on Swan (Michael Beck) and by the end there is clearly something going on.
It’s not a film about lurve though; it’s about male bonding, choreographed fighting skills and the constant arrival of yet another gang. The Warriors include a stupid macho tough guy, who gets caught by an undercover cop – a clever, observant kid – a couple of would-be leaders; and an amazing number of athletes and weapons specialists, be that swinging a baseball bat or manufacturing Molotov cocktails out of nothing.
The Warriors wear leather vests (waistcoats) with their gang colours on the back, but other gangs each have their own uniform: baseball outfits and face paint, top hats and white mime face with a red and black ensemble, denim dungarees and roller skates, silk jujitsu outfits, or leather jackets and caps. There’s also a skinhead gang who drive round in an old school bus, and a lesbian girl gang who try to seduce three of The Warriors who are oblivious to their seductresses’ sexuality.
Of course, in the end The Warriors make it home, only to find Luther and other members of The Rogues waiting for them. Swan suggests Luther and he fight one to one, but Luther is having none of it, so Swan throws a knife into his hand, then cuts a lock of Luther’s hair from him while he whines for forgiveness. He needs to do this as The Gramercy Riffs, the huge gang which Cyrus was leader of, have realised that The Warriors are innocent and have come looking for Luther, who is not a happy bunny. It is at this point The Warriors walk off into the sunset, Mercy and Swan hand in hand…
Nobody in Mad Max 2 (known as The Road Warrior in some territories) is very happy either. They all live in a post-apocalyptic desert world where fuel is scarce, vehicles are cannibalised for parts and clothing is a kind of D.I.Y. goth/sci-fi/biker hybrid. Mel Gibson plays Max, who is alone apart from his dog and a well-worn turbocharged cop car. Early on he observes a battle between a small walled town and a deranged gang of Hell’s Angels and soon ends up helping the town’s citizens escape to somewhere else with a tanker full of gas.
The escape is, of course, an excuse for an epic chase sequence, with exploding vehicles, impossible jumps between vehicles, shouting, shooting and stunts. There’s also a gyrocopter, sand storms, violent threats and sexual abuse, along with a feral kid and some far-fetched characters and cars. In the end Max remains standing in the desert whilst a voiceover informs viewers that the narrator “never saw the Road Warrior again”.
I remember my mate and I standing up at the end of this film to put on our leather jackets and pick up our motorbike helmets, only to have several hundred people in the audience stare at us, unable it seemed, to differentiate between reality and feature film.
Of course, having seen Mad Max 2, we decided to play catch-up and watch Mad Max (1979). This turned out to be a very different type of film, providing a grim back story to what would become a whole series of Mad Max capers. In the first film, Max is a highway patrolman, with a souped-up police car and several colleagues, who cruise the long, straight desert roads, trying to stop trouble brewing, particularly dealing with a biker gang who not only terrorise people but seem to cause semi-mystical apparitions of a crow.
It’s a clumsy device at best, but is indicative of the whole film, which has clearly not been completely thought through and has been filmed on the cheap. There are a few motorbikes, a couple of cop cars, lots of images of the Australian outback and not much else. Most of the violence, including the murder of Max’s wife and child, happens offscreen but it is still horrific, and the ending, where Max exacts his revenge on a biker, is even more horrific and nasty.
The film does, of course, explain why Max is like he is in Mad Max 2 but George Miller, who directed both films, clearly knew which side his bread was buttered on. However, instead of trusting the vehicular capers and dynamics of the sequel, he signed up Tina Turner for 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, dressed her in chain mail and put her in charge of Bartertown, a makeshift settlement run on methane from pigs, and policed by a bunch of bully boys.
Bartertown also has its own kind of gladiatorial arena, a weird dome where those fighting are strung up on elastic and have to bounce their way to any weapons provided and to their opponents. Max, of course, ends up in there (it might even be more than once, I can’t remember) and also manages to be mistaken by another community – this time young people and kids living around an oasis – as a mythical and possibly resurrected Captain Walker, the pilot who crashed the plane they were travelling on.
Miller not only drew on William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies but also decided to steal speech, language and elements of the plot of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker wholesale, and to let Tina Turner sing the theme tune. Despite the film’s utopian ending, which sees the lost tribe from the oasis now safely ensconced in the ruins of a city, it seemed to be the final Mad Max film of a loose trilogy.
2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road proved that wrong, though. It reinvented the post-apocalyptic world Max lives in, replaced Mel Gibson with Tom Hardy, and was basically a long chase sequence followed by another one back to where the film started. I saw it at the cinema with my friend Pete (who had not seen any of the Mad Max movies) and remember him outside saying ‘What was that?’ Shellshocked wasn’t the word; gobsmacked probably was. Impressive vehicles, great make-up & costumes, spectacular explosions, a gaggle of female concubines rescued, a ridiculous and not-scary baddy, some weird but also funny acolytes, lots of gymnastics & pole-vaulting and some terrific action sequences and scenery. What more could anyone possibly want?
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Isabel Ortiz said that “Mad Max: Fury Road does not look like an animated movie” but went on to add “And yet, despite the oozing corporeality of the film’s protagonists, many critics have commented on its resemblance to a cartoon.” In an argument that could apply to all three of my films, Ortiz states that
Fury Road is notable for transferring not only the rule-bound integrity of the cartoon genre onto fleshy heroes and heroines, but also the physics and bodily elasticity. Just as the animated body can stretch and recoil to absorb the impact of dizzying attacks, in Miller’s film human forms are endowed with the plasticity of cartoon characters.
Like Tom & Jerry, or other cartoon characters, these films are notable for their visual wit, pace and entertainment value, constant speed and dynamic, not to mention their impossibly indestructible heroes. And best of all, they are fun.
NOTES
• Avoid the appalling 2002 remake of Rollerball
• Details and a download of the Rollerball 1975 font, designed by Anthony Robinson, can be found here
• The WarriorsMovie Site is online here. It includes news, deleted scenes, a list of all the gangs, location sites and more
• Isabel Ortiz’s ‘The Cartoon Bodies of “Mad Max: Fury Road”’ can be read in full here
RUPERT LOYDELL is the editor of Stride magazine, contributing editor to International Times and a writer and abstract artist. He has many books of poetry and several collaborative publications in print and has edited anthologies for Shearsman, KFS and Salt. His critical writing has appeared in Punk & Post-Punk (he is a member of the journal’s editorial board), JournalofWriting and Creative Practice, New Writing, English, Text, Axon, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, Musicology Research, Revenant, The Quint: an interdisciplinary journal from the north, and Journal of Visual Art Practice. He has also contributed chapters to Brian Eno. Oblique Music (Bloomsbury, 2016), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds (Routledge, 2021) and Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
What follows is an extract from J. Simon Harris’s new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. You can read an interview with Josh about his translation in this issue
Excerpt from Fitt IV (lines 1998-2090)
NOW the New Year draws nigh, and the night passes,
and the day drives into the dark, as the Lord commands.
But the wild weather of the world awakened outside:
clouds had cast the cold keenly down to the earth,
with enough of the nip of the north to sting the naked skin;
the snow fell sullen and bitter, biting the beasts of the wild;
the whistling wind whipped down from on high
and filled every valley with vast snowdrifts.
The knight was listening close as he lay in his bed—
though his lids are closed, he sleeps little.
By each cock that crowed, he knew the hour.
Suddenly he sat up, before the day had dawned,
for the light of a lamp still gleamed in his chamber.
He called to his chamberlain, who quickly answered,
and he bid him to bring him his byrnie and saddle his steed.
The servant bustles about and brings him his outfit,
and he gets Sir Gawain geared up in splendid style.
First he clad him in his clothes to keep out the cold,
and then his equipment, which was carefully kept—
his paunce and his breastplate brightly polished,
the rings of his rich chainmail rocked of rust—
and all was as fresh as it was at first, and his gratitude was
quite keen.
He’d donned each sparkling piece,
wiped to a shimmering sheen;
the most gallant from here to Greece,
he bade him bring his steed.
As he threw the finest threads on himself—
his surcoat with the sign of shining achievements
emblazoned on velvet, and virtuous stones
embedded all over the borders, and embroidered seams,
and a lining of fair fur from the finest pelts—
yet he did not leave the lace, the lady’s gift:
that Gawain did not forget, for his own good.
When he’d belted his blade on his bulging haunches,
he twined his true-love token twice about himself,
sweetly swaddled around his waist, that knight.
The girdle of green silk well suited that gallant hero,
such a rich display upon that royal red cloth.
But the warrior wasn’t wearing the girdle for its wealth,
nor for the pride of its pendants, polished though they were,
and though the glittering gold glinted upon the ends—
but rather to save himself, when it comes time to suffer,
to abide, without debate, the baleful blow of sword
or knife.
The bold knight, fully clad,
comes swaggering outside,
and thanks the noble lads
profusely with delight.
Then Gringolet was geared up, that great big horse;
and having stayed in the stable, safe and sound,
that proud horse pined for the spur to gallop.
The man approaches his mount and inspects his face,
and he solemnly said, and swore by his oath,
“There are men in this castle with a mind for character!
May the prince who supports these people rejoice!
May the lovely lady be loved in the fullness of life!
When they cherish a guest out of goodness and charity,
when they hold honor in their hand, may the good Lord
of heaven on high reward them, as well as all of you!
And if I lead my life on earth for long enough,
I’ll compensate you somehow, if I can.”
Then he steps into the stirrup and saddles up.
His servant hands him his shield, which he slings on his shoulder.
He spurs Gringolet with his gilded heels,
and he starts over the stones, standing no longer
to prance.
His man was next to ride,
bearing his spear and lance.
“I trust this castle to Christ—
may He give it fair chance.”
The bridge was drawn down, and the broad gates
unbarred and borne open on both sides.
He blessed himself quickly, and crossed the boards.
He praises the porter, who knelt before the prince
and gave him God and good day, that Gawain be saved.
And he went on his way with his one man
who would teach him the path to that perilous place
where he’s meant to receive the mournful stroke.
They passed by peaks where the boughs are bare;
they climbed by cliffs where the cold clings.
The heavens were high, but ugly and ominous.
Mist moistened the moors and melted on mountains;
each hill had a hat, a huge mantle of mist.
Brooks bubbled and broke on the banks about them,
cascading through cracks and crevices, shimmering down.
The way through the wood was wild and devious,
until it was soon time that the sun rises in that season
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
JOSH SIMON HARRIS has recently completed a translation of the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Brazen Head poetry editor LIAM GUILAR asked him about it.
Tell us a little about your language background and your day job. What brings a scientist to translation? Which other texts have you translated, are translating?
I’ve always been interested in language and poetry; I wrote my first poems in third grade (I would have been about eight or nine years old), inspired by the great poets of my childhood like Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. At the same time, I was always good at math as a kid, and when I took my first Physics classes in high school, I was blown away at how precisely the natural world can be described by mathematical models. In college, I kept up both interests; I was a double major in English and Materials Science and Engineering. It was there that I first fell into translation. I had taken a bit of Spanish, and I really liked Pablo Neruda’s poem, “Puedo escribir” (Poem 20 in his collection, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair). I had heard it in Spanish without fully understanding all the words, and I was struck by how much better it sounded in Spanish than in translation. I wrote my own translation of it (which likewise doesn’t hold a candle to the Spanish original), and eventually translated the whole collection over the course of a summer (I wasn’t able to publish it until a few years later when it entered the public domain, and even now, it is only available in the United States due to copyright).
At some point in college, I also took a World Literature class where we read Homer and Dante, among other authors. I’ve had a fascination with Greek and Roman mythology ever since I was a kid (I used to love this book, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, which is more or less Ovid for children; I’ve been reading it again with my son recently), so of course Homer and Dante pulled me right into the deep end. We talked in class about terza rima, the rhyme scheme of Dante’s Commedia, but the translation we were using didn’t rhyme at all. I thought it would be fun to write a translation in the original rhyme scheme, and my professor agreed to let me try my hand at the first canto instead of writing a final essay. I ended up translating the first five cantos. I didn’t know any Italian at the time, but I knew a little Spanish; and with a combination of online resources like Wiktionary and existing translations, I was able to pick it up readily enough. From there, I just got sucked in.
I had no idea what I was getting into, of course. To translate Dante, I essentially had to become an amateur Dante scholar. While translating, I read countless commentaries, essays, biographies, and translations of Dante’s other works and primary sources. It took me about ten years to finish the Inferno. During that time, I graduated college, wrote a novel based on the Greek tragedy Philoctetes (which probably about a dozen people have read), went to grad school for Computational Materials Science, met my ex-wife, had a kid, got married, got my PhD and got accepted for a postdoc position. Dante shadowed me through all these major milestones of my life; as Virgil guided Dante through the Inferno, so Dante guided me in my journey to become a better poet, translator and human being.
I can’t even explain how it felt when I finished the Inferno. It was like a breath of fresh air that is still somehow suffocating—relief and regret at the same time. I was about halfway through translating Dante’s Vita Nuova, a shorter, earlier work of prose and lyric poetry; but I had to get away from Dante for a while. I started translating Homer because I wanted to try writing in the epic hexameter (and became convinced that I could after reading Longfellow’s Evangeline). But the problem with the Iliad is that it is very, very long, and I also wanted a project that I could finish on a reasonable timeline. That, plus an interest in alliterative verse, is what led me to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and here we are. Along the way, I have also translated a lot of shorter poems from various languages and poets (Sappho, Bertran de Born, an anonymous Old English poet). I even translated a Norwegian short story for a contest (I didn’t win, but the translation that won was better than mine anyway). Now that I’m done with Gawain, I’ll get back to translating the Iliad, and I will eventually make my way back to Dante. I’m also working on a second novel, which is a science fiction story with inspiration from biblical mythology (sounds a bit like Dune when I put it that way, but it’s not).
Today, I’m still a scientist for my day job; I work at a small pharmaceutical company using AI and machine learning for drug discovery and toxicology (essentially making models to predict whether a molecule might be toxic or might have therapeutic effects). I remain intensely interested in science and mathematics, and for now it pays the bills better than poetry. But creative writing and science are both deeply ingrained in my soul. I’ll always do both.
Why alliterative verse? And while we’re here were you ever tempted to translate Sir Gawain or Saint Erkenwald into another, perhaps more modern verse form?
Verse form is one of my favorite things about poetry. Even in free verse, form is what distinguishes poetry from prose. Part of the fun of translation, for me, is the challenge of translating a poem into a new language while keeping the verse form intact. With Dante, it was terza rima; with Homer, it’s dactylic hexameter; and with Gawain, it’s alliterative verse (and the “bob and wheel” at the end of each stanza, of course). I became interested in alliterative verse purely for this reason. I translated a short Old English alliterative poem, “The Wanderer,” and I really enjoyed it; alliteration requires a different kind of mindset from meter and rhyme. After writing a lot of alliterative verse, I also noticed how prevalent alliteration is in our language and in a lot of my favorite books (Tolkien is a great example).
I haven’t really been tempted to translate Gawain or Erkenwald into another verse form, but I think it’s a really interesting idea. This is essentially what Pope did with Homer (he translated Homer into heroic couplets). Likewise, Dante translated the Lord’s Prayer into Italian in terza rima in order to fit it into the Comedy. There are a couple of Sappho poems that I’ve translated into a different form than the original, essentially because there is no good English equivalent of their original meter; it is kind of fun to try to fit a poem into a new box in that way. So I think it’s worth considering.
Why Sir Gawain? From your Introduction it seems you hadn’t read the poem before you started translating it? Is that correct? And how did you feel about the poem when you’d finished? Impressed? Disappointed?
That’s right. I had heard of Sir Gawain, and I knew other people who had read it, but I had never read it myself before I started translating it. As I mentioned, I had already done an alliterative verse translation of “The Wanderer,” and I really wanted to try a longer alliterative poem. The obvious choice in Old English would be Beowulf, but I was never a big fan of Beowulf, so I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of devoting a chunk of my life to it. Besides, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf is pretty much as good as it is ever going to get, in my opinion (I really love the poetry in his version, even though I find the narrative kind of dull). So Old English was out. What about Middle English? I did a bit of research into alliterative poetry, and the general consensus seemed to be that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was the best alliterative poem in Middle English. I didn’t read the poem first, I just took a leap of faith and started translating. I was kind of looking for something quick and easy after working with Dante and Homer, and I thought a Middle English Arthurian romance would be sort of a light and fun adventure. I wasn’t expecting great depth and complexity—man, was I surprised. The poem was way, way more impressive than I thought it would be; it exceeded my expectations in almost every way. The Gawain poet is deeply concerned with form and symmetry, and it comes across in each line, each stanza, the structure of the poem as a whole, and the structure of the narrative. On top of that, his characters (particularly Gawain and the lady of the castle, whom he meets) have rich inner minds in a way that is unusual for old Arthurian tales; the poet explores emotion and psychology in surprisingly modern ways. So I think it’s fair to say I was impressed.
How do you translate? What’s your process? Is translating Gawain different from how you might approach Homer?
My translation process has evolved over time, and it is definitely different depending on the text. With Dante and Homer, I first translate the original text word by word into a kind of pidgin language with English words but the original syntax; the pidgin language reads like a kind of code, with symbols indicating certain things to me about the original language. To do this, I use a combination of online dictionaries (Wiktionary is a good general resource with etymologies, etc.; and there are specific dictionaries for Ancient Greek and Middle English), plus other resources if there is a unique word or context that is unclear or perplexing. With Dante, I’m also reading Singleton’s commentary while writing the pidgin translation, keeping notes on anything relevant (e.g. if Dante’s word choice alludes to something famous, I want my word choice to do the same). With Homer, I’m checking for repetition, because I want to make sure that if Homer repeats a phrase verbatim, I do the same (repetition is very important in Homer, since it derives from semi-improvised oral poetry). After completing the pidgin-language version, I go through and write my translation in verse (still referring to the original text as well as the pidgin text, and often consulting other translations and commentaries).
With Gawain, because the original language is Middle English, I don’t bother with writing the pidgin text first. When you get the hang of it, you can more or less read big chunks of the Middle English text without a dictionary; I still look up most of the words, since the meaning of several words has changed over the centuries, but it is easier for me to scan through than Italian or Ancient Greek. As I write, I also consult other translations and commentaries to make sure I’m getting the correct meaning (and not missing any subtext or anything). So the common thread of my translation process is that I am essentially close-reading the text as I write, looking up each word individually while considering the passage as a whole.
Were there parts of the story that gave you problems, were more difficult to translate, made you wish you could do a little editing?
Oh, there were many. Sometimes, especially with Middle English (where the words can often be quite close to Modern English), you find yourself just rolling along without any problems. But when you bump into a challenging passage, you might be stuck for a day or longer trying to find a solution. It’s hard for me to think of specific examples after the fact, though. I ended up happy with most of the alliterative lines, because there is a lot of freedom to render them in different ways. If there are some rough edges on the translation, they would probably be in the “bob and wheel” sections, the five lines of rhyming verse at the end of each stanza. Those lines can be very difficult to translate, given the short lines combined with the tight rhyme scheme. As always, translation is a compromise between several conflicting ideals.
Were there any parts of the original that I wished were different? Of course. While the poem is surprisingly modern, the medieval sensibilities of its author often show up in unexpected ways. But it’s not my job as a translator to edit the original, it is my job to bring it into Modern English. So I stayed as faithful as I could to the original text.
Gordon and Tolkien in their introduction to their edition of the poem thought the story was almost perfect but the three hunting episodes were excessive. What do you think of them?
On my first reading, I might have agreed that the three hunting scenes were excessive—after all, the same sequence of five scenes is essentially repeated three times in a row: the lord goes hunting, the lady tries to seduce Gawain, the lord’s men carve up their quarry, Gawain and the lord exchange spoils, and finally, Gawain and the lord renew the terms of their game. But when I was working on the notes, I realized that this repetition of five scenes mimics the shape of the pentagram (a five-pointed star): to draw a pentagram, you draw a sequence of five overlapping lines, and the fifth line brings you back to the start. The pentagram is thematically important to the narrative—it is represented on Gawain’s coat of arms, and the poet links it explicitly to Gawain’s virtues (he calls it a “token of truth”). The poet very cleverly mirrors the structure of the pentagram in the structure of his verse. But the thrice-repeated sequence of scenes is not exactly the same each time; there is a progression in which Gawain’s virtue slowly breaks down, and at the end of it the structure of the pentagram is broken too. I talk about this in more detail in the notes, of course.
What is your take on the ending? Gawain is mortified and thinks he’s failed. The people at Arthur’s court reject this and insist on wearing what he thinks is a badge of shame as a badge in his honour. What do you think?
I love the ending. I think it is an uplifting reminder of the importance of being part of a supportive community. In the first half of the poem, Gawain does not grow as a character—he is presented as a knight already at the peak of perfection (in terms of chivalric virtue, anyway). He readily trades his own life for his king’s, he bravely goes on a quest that will almost certainly end in peril for him, and he defeats ogres and dragons along the way as if they were a mere inconvenience. But nobody is perfect. The poet puts Gawain in a situation where even his chivalric virtues cannot sustain him, and Gawain fails. It is a small failure, really, but he takes it hard. When he comes home, he confesses everything to Arthur and his courtiers; but instead of shaming him, they completely turn it on its head. His imperfection is not shameful, it is only human; his shame is excused by the mere fact that he is ashamed, that he continues to strive to be virtuous. Perfection may be the ideal of knighthood, but no knight is perfect in practice.
How would you sell your translation to a possible buyer? What will they get from your translation they can’t get from any of the existing ones?
Probably the biggest thing that distinguishes my translation from others is that I adhere to the original form of the poem using natural-sounding language (not using awkward diction, syntax inversions, etc.), while still staying true to the meaning of the text. The verse form of the Middle English original is really interesting: each stanza consists of (on average) twenty lines of alliterative verse, capped off by a short five-line rhyming section. Other translators have certainly carried this verse form into Modern English; but often they sacrifice clarity, or a good word choice, or (worse) the mood of the poem in order to pull it off (I certainly don’t want to judge too harshly; there are a number of good translations already out there). Not that I never make any sacrifices; translation is all about making choices to balance the meaning, form, and emotion of the original text. But I like to think that my translation strikes a pretty good balance.
Additionally, I have included lots of goodies besides the poem itself. Instead of line-by-line notes (which are common enough in translations of classic poetry), I opted to write commentary in the form of a conversational essay in which I’m walking through the poem along with the reader. I analyze the text of course, but also provide some historical background, discussion of the poetics, etc., in relevant places as I go along; I think readers who enjoy the poem will find the commentary interesting and worthwhile. I also have a bibliography intended more for readers and enthusiasts than scholars; a pronunciation glossary with names, places, and medieval titles, arms and armor; King Arthur’s family tree; a timeline of the narrative; a historical timeline of events relevant to the poem; and several hand-drawn images (a map of Gawain’s journey through England and Wales, a drawing showing the armor of a medieval knight, and more). Finally, I’ve capped off the book with an original poem which has a rather interesting verse structure (it’s complicated, but it is based on the shape of the pentagram, which is central to the themes of the narrative). There’s also a link in the back of the book to a project I’m working on, which is a “choose your own adventure”-style version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (I’m putting it online as I write it; it is not nearly complete yet).
Your book has an extensive section of commentary and notes. What do you think a reader will learn from them that is new?
Most works of classic literature have editions with notes or commentary, but I’ve found that the commentary is sometimes rather dry and uninteresting to anyone but scholars (this is certainly not always the case, but it is common enough). I wanted to keep my own commentary engaging throughout. When I’m out driving or doing chores, I like to listen to podcasts that walk through narrative poems, films and video games while providing commentary and analysis along the way. Inspired by that format, I wrote my notes in something of a conversational style; I basically walk through the narrative discussing everything I find interesting along the way. I consulted the notes of several different Gawain translations as well as online resources to ensure I didn’t miss anything important. My commentary is designed so that it can be read on its own after reading the poem, without flipping back and forth to see what lines I’m referring to. In this way, I get to do a close reading of the poem with the reader. I’m not familiar enough with the full body of Gawain scholarship to know how novel my commentary really is, but it isn’t meant to be a work of rigorous scholarship anyway. I can say with confidence that there’s a lot that you won’t find in the notes of other translations. Above all, I think (I hope) readers will find it interesting and thought-provoking.
The poet is anonymous but generally regarded as one of the great poets of Middle English. You’ve spent a long time in his company. Do you have a sense of ‘The Gawain Poet’?
The Gawain poet lived in the late fourteenth century in the northwest part of the English Midlands (scholars deduce this from his dialect). He has a strong voice and occasionally inserts himself into the narrative, providing a little clarification or observation in first person. He’s obviously intelligent and well-read, and he seems to have a good deal of familiarity with matters of both church and court. On the one hand, he is learned in Latin, theology, and ecclesiastical rites, suggesting an education in the Church; on the other, he displays an intimate knowledge of chivalry and courtly affairs, suggesting some role in the English court. And yet, he doesn’t seem like a man tied too tightly to the cloth or the crown; he doesn’t shy away from low language and bawdy humor, and he seems unusually attuned to the inner minds and outward concerns of people from many different backgrounds. As a historical person, he is an enigmatic figure; and yet, his personality often shines through in his writing. He is passionate, curious, fair-minded, empathetic, intelligent, and a deep thinker in all sorts of subject areas. He’s funny when he wants to be, and somber when he needs to be. Overall, he’s just a fantastic writer. So yes, I feel like I do have a sense of who the Gawain poet is—even if, paradoxically, we may never know his true identity.
I just want to say thank you for giving me the opportunity to discuss my translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I spent a lot of time working on this in solitude, so it’s wonderful to finally share it with other people. Thank you!
Publication information
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Anonymous, J. Simon Harris (translation and commentary)
LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of The Brazen Head, and the author of several poetry collections, including the series A Man of Heart, Presentment of Englishry and The Fabled Third (Shearsman), set in post-Roman Britain. His most recent publication is a translation of the Mabinogion folk-tale How Culhwch Won Olwen (Shearsman, 2026)
ALISTAIR NOON’s recent publications include Paradise Takeaway (Two Rivers, 2023 https://tworiverspress.com/shop/paradise-takeaway/) and two further volumes of his translations from the Russian of Osip Mandelstam (The Voronezh Workbooks and Occasional and Joke Poems, Shearsman, 2022). His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, the Guardian and New Statesman, and he’s published essays on translocality and poetry, Wuhan Punk and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Two Verse Essays is available from Longbarrow Press https://longbarrowpress.com/current-publications/alistair-noon/ He lives in Berlin.
In 1930, Politburo member Nikolai Bukharin arranged for the Russian poet OSIP MANDELSTAM (1891-1938) to take a trip of several months to the Soviet Caucasus, most of which was spent in Armenia. The trip kickstarted Mandelstam’s poetry again, which had been in hiatus for five years, not least due to political pressure and the narrowing of publication opportunities. A number of poems Mandelstam wrote during or after the trip were not included in the “Armenia” cycle itself but retained in the manuscripts he and his wife, Nadezhda, kept for possible future publication. These are translated here.
Translations from Mandelstam
Scratching out words from the Ararat valley, Armenian’s like a wild cat, a clawlike language of mudbrick cities, the speech of hungering bricks.
The sky is shah, but the shah’s short-sighted, its turquoise blind from birth: it still can’t read that hollowed volume of clay baked hard with dark blood.
October 1930
I love this land that strains to give birth, that dozes and cries, this nation nailed to its terrain, the centuries mere years in its eyes.
How beautiful everything sounds in your ear that patrols the frontier, where the stinking ragwort surrounds the mustard hush that reigns here…
October 1930
That feral cat, Armenian speech, plays with me, scratches my ears till they’ve bled, gives me a fever. You evil creature! Let me doze off on this humpbacked bed!
Down from the ceiling tumble the glow-worms. Flies crawl over the sodden terrain of the sheet. Battalions of long-legged birds march in platoons over yellowing plains.
Fearsome inspector, face like a mattress, truly pathetic and superrepellent, short of a pass and yet they dispatched you into Armenian steppes – what the hell?
They told you to kindly remove your butt: “No one needs your sort round here! Get lost!” Head of a Desk, you’d taken your cut, were once with the Guards, but the spit washed off.
“Look who’s here!” you boom at the door. But like two girls out hunting mushrooms, we won’t have to wait too long before we find good coffins to put in our tombs…
Once we were people. Now we talk piffle – what would you say is our service grade? – condemned to a final stitch in the ribs and a poet’s bunch of Erzurum grapes.
October 1930
Where pifflers howl like beasts in the wild, and beasts are like people, unleashing their tricks, short of a pass, dispatched like an exile bound to a cart, in a sorceror’s power, the inspector headed for Erzurum sips Chernomor’s wine at a tavern gone sour.
October 1930
As we crossed the mountain pass up high on the Muslim side, Death topped up our glasses. We’d cantered out of a nightmare
in the hands of a charioteer the sun had baked like a plum, a local devil for hire and monosyllabically glum:
“Tso!” As we gathered pace, he croaked on down the road, a Bedouin hiding his face like a rose perhaps, or a toad.
His hideous features concealed in a leather mask, he forced the ponies pulling our wheels onwards until he was hoarse.
We felt his haste, felt the jolts, and every roadside stop spun like the passing chariots. No road led down from the top.
“Damn it!” I cried, wide awake, “Stop here!” I screamed at the back of this chairman mad with the plague and headed down the wrong track!
With a whoop, he cracked the wire reins, that noseless horseman: we felt the sweet and sour terrain turn like a carousel.
These were the terrors that found their way right into my soul in Shusha, the fortress town that wolves and vultures controlled –
a cocoon no human sound rang through, a grave in the mountains. Dead windows all around were visible by the thousand,
the houses’ soft pink walls standing shamelessly naked. And over them hung the pall of the sky, as blue as the plague.
ALISTAIR NOON’s recent publications include Paradise Takeaway (Two Rivers, 2023) and two further volumes of his translations from the Russian of Osip Mandelstam (The Voronezh Workbooks and Occasional and Joke Poems, Shearsman, 2022). His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, the Guardian and New Statesman, and he’s published essays on translocality and poetry, Wuhan Punk and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He lives in Berlin.
JULIE STEINER is the pseudonym of a recovering classicist in San Diego, California. Her recent work appears in The Classical Outlook, The Ekphrastic Review, Snakeskin, Light, Lighten Up Online, and The Asses of Parnassus. See more on her Substack ‘Off-Piste on Mount Parnassus’ (offpisteonmountp.substack.com).
SINE ULLA QUERELLA — “without any complaint whatsoever”
Phrase on a 1590 memorial plaque mounted next to the door into the Hall of Confessions, adjoining the Basilica of St. Anthony of Padua.
While waiting for an English-speaking priest
to come and comprehend what Mom confessed,
I passed the hours by trying to digest
a stone. The man it honored was deceased,
but buried elsewhere — praised, not rest-in-peaced.
The Latin called this personage the best
of lords (as most such cenotaphs attest),
but also hailed his lady as the least
of battle-axes (as I paraphrased):
with no complaint at all in twenty-five
years of marriage, testified the stone.
“A miracle,” my mom agreed, amazed
that both had somehow managed to survive
so long, if his decisions ruled alone.
Online, I checked my on-the-fly translation,
having learned the hard way to be wary
of Englishing without a dictionary.
As I had feared, my quick interpretation
was flawed, and needed hasty emendation:
“I goofed. It’s true that this obituary
was placed here by his wife, but not to carry
a boast about her silent subjugation:
her non-complaint was evidence of his
attentiveness. Incomparable spouse,
she also wrote of him. That’s very sweet.
And still miraculous.” Mom laughed, “It is,
but I prefer the autocrat-and-mouse
scenario, so that’s what I’ll repeat.”
I bite my rodent tongue. I know the drill:
when inconvenient data is revealed,
my mom’s reality-distortion field
allows her to believe, by force of will,
whatever she would like to. It’s a skill —
a superpower — I’ve often heard her wield.
The version of events that’s most appealed
to her has always been her gospel. Still,
I’m five years old again, and flabbergasted,
whenever Mom deliberately lies.
And now she’ll use my own mistake to shatter
this touching limestone tribute, which has lasted
since 1590. I apologize
to Truth, in case my penitence might matter.
NOTE
“The expression sine (ulla) querella is well attested in sepulchral inscriptions so that one might suspect that it had become a hackneyed formula devoid of real meaning.”
—R.E.A. Palmer in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1994/94.03.06.html)
Below is the translator’s transcription of the limestone cenotaph that is mounted on the west wall of the Magnolia Cloister, to the right of the door into the Hall of Confessions, adjoining the Basilica of St. Anthony of Padua.
·D· ·O· ·M·
[Deo optimo maximo, “to the god [that is] most good and most great”,is the standard Classical dedication to Jove/Jupiter. This abbreviation begins many Christian inscriptions in Italy.]
RENATO · VALLIO · STORSII · DOMINO ·
ILLVSTRI · APVD · GALLOS · LOCO · NATO ·
HENRICI · III · GALLIARVM · ET · POLONIAE ·
REGIS · A · CONSILIIS · OECONOMO · ATQ[VE] · APVD ·
KAROLVM · EMANVELEM · SABAVDIAE · DVCEM ·
QVADRIENNIVM · INTERNVNCIO · VIRO · PROBO ·
ET · PRVDENTI · QVI · POST · REGIS · NECEM · VT ·
BELLORVM · CIVILIVM · PATRIAM · DEVASTANTIVM ·
MISERRIMVM · SPECTACVLVM EVITARET ·
AVGVSTA · TAVRINORVM · PATAVIVM · CVM ·
SECESSISSET · ARDENTI · FEBRE · CORREPTVS ·
LIIII · AETATIS · SVAE · ANNO · VITAM · CVM · MORTE ·
COMMVTAVIT · MAGDALENA ALBASPINEA
CONIVGI · INCOMPARABILI · CVM · QVO · VIXIT ·
ANNOS · XXV · SINE VLLA · QVERELLA ·
PRO · TEMPORE · P · C · [poni curavit = “caused (this memorial) to be placed”— another standard formula in dedicatory inscriptions; sometimes refers to the building, not just the plaque]
OBIIT · DIE · XIII · MARTII · ANN[O] · M · D · XC ·
To God, the most good, the most great: on behalf of René Duval, of Stors [in the Oise Valley, close to Paris], an illustrious lord among the French in his birthplace; chief advisor of Henry III, King of the French and of Poland [1551-1589], and for four years his diplomatic agent at the house of Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy [1562-1630, first cousin of Henry III, based in Turin]; [Duval was] a virtuous man, and a prudent one, who, when he had retired from Turin to Padua after the assassination of the king [August 2, 1589], in order to avoid the civil wars—an extremely lamentable scene, devastating his homeland—was seized by a burning fever. In the 54th year of his life, he exchanged life for death. Madeleine de L’Albépine erected this monument for her incomparable spouse, with whom she had lived for 25 years without any complaint whatsoever during that time.
JULIE STEINER is the pseudonym of a recovering classicist in San Diego, California. Her recent work appears in The Classical Outlook, The Ekphrastic Review, Snakeskin, Light, Lighten Up Online, and The Asses of Parnassus. See more on her Substack ‘Off-Piste on Mount Parnassus’ (offpisteonmountp.substack.com).
1863 book fore-edge painting of Pope’s Villa at Twickenham
The Twitnam Summer: Friendship, Satire and the Writing of Gulliver’s Travels
Hester Grant, London: William Collins, 2026, hb., 336pps., £25
DEREK TURNER reads about an extraordinarily productive summer
Early in the eighteenth century, the Middlesex village of Twickenham began to be noticed by Londoners wearying of the metropolis, drawn by the attractiveness of its Thames-side setting. One admirer was Alexander Pope, a poet of waspish reputation and socially problematic Catholic background, who in 1720 built a riverside villa in the latest Palladian style on a five-acre plot set between a malthouse and a tanner’s yard.
Pope was widely considered England’s preeminent poet, thanks to works like Essay on Criticism (1711), from which we get the phrases “A little learning is a dang’rous thing” and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”. He had also written The Rape of the Lock (1712), a mock-epic about the cutting of a hank of hair belonging to a society beauty, and Windsor Forest (1712/3), a lyrical example of loco-descriptive poetry. He had translated the Iliad, and knew Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and William Wycherley.
He was friends, too, with Jonathan Swift and John Gay – and between May and August 1726 played host to both at his house in what was then commonly called ‘Twitnam’, at a pivotal time in all three men’s creative lives. The works associated with that season have ever since been regarded as among the brightest ornaments of English letters.
Pope had known Swift since Windsor Forest, which as well as evoking that history-haunted tract, was also a commentary on contemporary politics. Pope’s poem was adopted by the Tories as useful agitprop, and the poet annexed by Swift, twenty-one years older, the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, and a highly effective veteran of political pamphleteering at an especially turbulent time. Dichotomies and discontents left over from the Civil Wars had found new expressions in vitriolic battles between Whigs – mostly Dissenters, anti-Stuart, and allied to mercantilism and finance – and Tories – mostly Anglicans, pro-Stuart, and associated with the landed gentry – with all the writers of the age enthusiastically taking sides.
Swift was famous for Tale of a Tub (1704), a satire on denominational disagreements between Christians, and the clash of old and new learning, and the Bickerstaff Papers (1708-9), a still funny extended lampoon of the Whig astrologer-propagandist John Partridge. After the Whigs took power in 1715, and began purging Tories at all levels, Swift’s writings waxed increasingly incandescent, sometimes forcing changes in government policy, infuriating Prime Minister Robert Walpole.
Walpole’s period of political dominance, between 1721 and 1742 – nicknamed the ‘Robinocracy’ – was notorious for its corruption and partisanship, and the generally unwanted extension of state power through patronage and preferment. Swift took courageous stances against such practices, frequently risking his liberty, and became a folk hero in Ireland, his writings uniquely able to unite Catholics and Presbyterians against exploitative London policies. Swift was held in such awe in Ireland that on one occasion he was able to disperse a crowd which had assembled to watch an eclipse by telling them it had been put off on his orders. Ironically, Swift saw himself as English, and didn’t much approve of the Irish, but any reservations about his adopted country were outweighed by his desire for social stability, and moral outrage at abuses by the rich and powerful.
Swift brought to Twickenham the militantly ironic manuscript which would make him immortal – Travels into several remote Nations of the World. In four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver. Gulliver’s Travels is one of the great books of the eighteenth, or any, century – a masterpiece of surreal invention and sustained invective which gave the language ‘Lilliputian’ and ‘Yahoo’, and held up the perfect Houyhnhnms to shame humans into better behaviour. Its exposure of cant, folly, gullibility and human weakness is still resonant; Gulliver is, wrote Morris Golden in his 1972 study The Self Observed, “more painfully ourselves than any other creation of his century.” Swift made his last tweaks during his time at Twickenham, and on the 8th of August packed it off to the printer, and posterity.
Almost as sensational in their day, if perhaps less read now, were Pope’s Dunciad (1728) and Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (first staged in 1728), both influenced by Gulliver and prodded into being by Gulliver’s author. Swift reputedly snatched a first sketch of the Dunciad out of the fire into which Pope had cast it. Years before, he had given Gay an idea for a “Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves”, and now made Gay bring it forward.
Pope penned the Dunciad to poke fun at bad or sycophantic writers, some of whom had recklessly assailed him in print, ironically giving them a more lasting fame than they would ever have attained otherwise. The poem’s portentous closing lines are still cited – “Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor’d; / Light dies before thy uncreating word: / Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; / And Universal Darkness buries All” – but no stylistic fineness can conceal the essential redundancy of his squibs against such ignes minores as his former publisher Barnaby Lintot, and the malignant Irish cleric-poetaster Jonathan Smedley. The only target who could be called well known is the dramatist Colley Cibber, who in 1730 became one of the least distinguished versifiers ever to occupy the post of Poet Laureate. The Dunciad nevertheless contributed greatly to contemporary Whig discomfiture, and Pope’s then and future fame.
Gay had written unusually empathetic poetic conjurations of rural life, and finally following up on Swift’s old idea, completed his musical play TheBeggar’s Opera, which introduced the characters of Polly Peachum and her highwayman beau Captain Macheath to enthralled London playgoers. Gay supposedly made £800 from the play, leading to a joke that it had made Gay rich, and Rich (the surname of the producer) gay. The strength of the satire is evident from the outset, the first song sung by Polly’s father, a receiver of stolen goods and underworld informer, which runs in part “The Priest calls the Lawyer a Cheat, / The Lawyer be-knaves the Divine: / And the Statesman, because he’s so great, / Thinks his Trade as honest as mine.” Delighted-scandalised audiences saw shades of Walpole in Mr Peachum, Macheath and a gang-member, “Bob Booty”.
Gay’s spin-off, Polly, was accordingly banned by the Lord Chamberlain, which naturally excited frenetic interest. The Duchess of Marlborough paid £100 for a copy, and the Duchess of Queensberry was banished from court for soliciting money for Gay within the precincts of the Palace. The Opera had become a powerful weapon in the Tories’ intellectual armoury. It is ironic to recall that Gay’s most famous modern emulator was the Marxist playwright, Berthold Brecht.
The conversations of that summer must have been as sparkling as the Thames, and they were occasionally joined by guests like William Congreve, the politician-philosopher Henry St. John (1st Viscount Bolingbroke), and the polymathic physician Dr John Arbuthnot, who invented the bluff English archetype, ‘John Bull’. As well as agreeing in morals and tastes, the three were also united in bachelorhood. Gay’s innate indolence appears to have extended to his relations with the opposite sex. Swift was platonically devoted to two women – Esther Vanhomrigh (“Vanessa”) and Esther Johnson (“Stella”) – whose correspondence with him reveals the literary lion’s private humanity and humour. The unluckily diminutive and deformed Pope – he was 1.3 metres tall, and suffered from Pott’s disease, which twisted his spine and gave bladder and bowel problems, joint pains, headaches and eye inflammation – seems to have been celibate much against his will.
Hester Grant conjures this dazzling company deftly, memorably conveying the flavour and likely routines of that sunlit season, as the trio conversed, read or wrote, wandered in the celebrated gardens, or sat in the shell- and mirror-encrusted grotto called the Nymphæum in search of shade and classical inspiration. She also offers excellently observed wider vistas of these extraordinary artists in full, the politics and literature of their period, and a capital city full of corruption and disquiet, but also abounding creativity and vitality, where wits traded brilliant insults and speculative builders raised elegant edifices above stinking streets.
That London is lost, and Pope’s villa has gone, with just the Nymphæum to mark where once a great poet walked with great friends, and all imagined a world less unclean. Three hundred years on from that remarkable meeting of minds, this is a poignant portrait of an England that once was, or maybe could have been – and a satisfying reminder of the power and possibilities of literature.
This review first appeared in Engelsberg Ideas, and is reproduced with permission
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
GARY BILLS was born at Wordsley, near Stourbridge, UK. He gained his MA in Creative Writing at Birmingham City University, with a distinction. He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, and he has three full collections to his name. His work has been translated into German, Romanian and Italian.
Black Sea
Those dead ships in abysmal sleep
where time and shipworm cannot bite
and even snows of flesh and slime
which elsewhere ghost it down from light
can never reach this other deep
where oil-less lamps on Punic prows
are waiting for the taper’s touch,
though all the crews are sift by now
or swimming in the eyeless mind.
But when Man’s dreams are kindled bright
the fish is startled in its flight,
to glimpse the ports he left behind.
Moments at an English Church
Time preserves its monuments of quiet –
the marble baby, wailing from her crib
in perfect silence – rumpling up her face
And pudgy cherubs flutter round a name
with virgin crants for James, who died a teen,
white ribbons for his purity and grace.
A bishop waves his devils’ book and frowns –
(his bald head’s like a marble on a ruff…)
but after all, this was his solemn place.
Outside the seeds are spinning from the limes –
past saints who float in frames of staining glass,
GARY BILLS was born at Wordsley, near Stourbridge, UK. He gained his MA in Creative Writing at Birmingham City University, with a distinction. He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, and he has three full collections to his name. His work has been translated into German, Romanian and Italian.
