America's Seer

A review of 'Henry Adams - American Writers 93: University of Minnesota Pamphets on American Writers' by Louis Auchincloss

Note: The following review was originally published at Amazon.co.uk on 22nd. July 2018.   Link to original review: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/RY5X3BFERIBK1?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

Henry Adams, the American historian, teacher, thinker, culturalist, biographer, essayist, traveller, and novelist, was not as prominent in public life as his illuminous ancestors: John Adams, a Founding Father, the first vice president and second president, and John Quincy Adams, the sixth president. Nevertheless, Henry made his mark, most especially with his nine-volume history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations (books published between 1889 and 1891) and his classic autobiographical and pedagogical book, ‘The Education of Henry Adams’ (1918). In this short but informative pamphlet, Louis Auchincloss, a lawyer, novelist and historian, provides some interesting insights into Adams, his life and career as a writer. This is well-written and engaged my attention throughout and it is difficult to find fault. Auchincloss is particularly excellent in contrasting Adams’ writing with that of Henry James, another American writer I am not very familiar with. I may add that Auchincloss was an interesting figure in his own right and quite similar to Henry Adams in some important respects. Like Adams, he was interested in politics and well-connected, and based his novels on elite society; also like Adams, his prose was dry and made heavy use of irony.

Henry Adams’ origins are in elite Boston as a scion of the Adams family. His father, Charles Francis Adams, was a United States diplomat, as well as a politician, writer and editor. Legend has it that when one morning the young Henry refused to go to school, his grandfather, President John Quincy Adams, led him there by hand, though whether this true or just another ‘cherry tree’ story is unclear. Despite this background of significant advantage, Henry always felt that he had been born out-of-time: a view that, in fairness, was perhaps typical of fin de siècle intellectuals. Happily, Adams would eventually find pleasant release from this dissonance late in life in an appreciation of Norman and Gothic cathedrals. While young, he travelled to Europe and completed the typical grand tour. He then made a career in diplomatic administration as his father’s private secretary, initially in Washington City, then in London. As Auchincloss notes, it was during this period that Henry began his writing career with solid articles on current affairs subjects for literary magazines, and these form an important part of his corpus – though, contrary to Auchincloss, I would say Adams was more of a critic than a reformer. Henry’s work in Washington and London caused him to avoid service in the Civil War, which made him concerned that he might be seen by others as lâche. This feeling of detachment characterised both his professional and private lives and influenced the tenor of his political and historical writing, giving him the posture of an augur, taking us to the heart of power - where he actually was - but as an observer rather than player, and cynically anticipating America’s degradation and demise. In keeping with his natural detachment, Henry Adams was quite a stand-offish individual, with few friends, and a rather romanticised understanding of love. Yet he and his wife, Marian Hooper Adams - in many respects his foil in terms of personality - were a happy part of society in Washington. The loss of Marian by suicide was a huge emotional blow to him, something he was able to novelise in his second fictional work, ‘Esther’ (1884). As Auchincloss recounts, Marian’s death was not the end of Henry’s life, but really a new beginning. He went travelling, first in Japan and then Polynesia, and the resultant experiences awakened his dormant aesthetic senses and left their mark in perhaps his two best works: his education book and a fascinating travel book, ‘Mont-Saint Michel and Chartes’ (1904) – the latter actually an imaginative cross between guidebook, history, fiction, culture and travel writing.

In the South Pacific, Adams enjoyed and rather admired the instinctive barbarianism of the Samoans, their vibrant, primal siva dance, their beauty, colour and innocence. In Tahiti, Adams gained the opposite impression. The Tahitians had come under the influence of the White Man and regressed into a half-civilisation, laced with the smell of rum and decay. Adams infamously remarked on the “pervasive half-castitude” of the place, its sense of weakness and disease, a people not quite being one thing or the other. Adams attempted to publish a history of the Tahitians, but the book was a commercial and critical failure. Nevertheless, ‘Tahiti: Memoirs of Arii Taimai e Marama of Eimee... Last Queen of Tahiti’ (1893) was an important step in his historical writing, taking him away from the dry, strictly factual, documentarian style of his presidential histories towards legend and imaginative story-telling. He was giving printed formality to the Tahitians own ‘cherry tree’ allegories, and may have invented some of his own. This was borne out of necessity. As Auchincloss says: [quote] ”He had to return, in Papeete, to his profession, but he had to try it with a new twist, for how else could Tahitian history be done?” [unquote] The Tahitians, a primitive society, lacked any ‘history’ as such before the arrival of European explorers, and what oral history they had and was told to Adams would no doubt have been embellished. Perhaps it needed to be. Both the Tahitians and the Samoans were societies of the Present, without histories or futures, their people resting on instinct entirely. Such a society can only recount a dull history. Yet Adams’ benefited. He was later able to bring the scholastic and the imaginative approaches together in ‘Mont-Saint Michel and Chartes’, perhaps his best work. By contrast, the two novels written by Adams – ‘Democracy’ and ‘Esther’ - portray rather unreal scenarios and show him as a didactic fiction writer. Adams’ other choices of biographical subject seem quite odd: Albert Gallatin (1879) was a dull and obscure figure, John Randolph (1882) was a “reprehensible man”, though of importance to the nascent Southern secession movement of the ante-bellum.

Adams is today a singular figure in American studies and his histories of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, while wrapped in idées reçues and not specially ground breaking, have been quite impactful - as they should be. Those volumes together form his magnum opus, but they have also influenced some unfortunate misunderstandings in the academy and in popular culture, especially about Jefferson. Adams successfully debunks the myth of American exceptionalism, showing that America would have to protect its interests in the world using the same military and diplomatic methods that any other state would; on the other hand, Adams falls into the error of setting up a straw-man of Jefferson, which he then proceeds to shoot down, characterising him romantically as a philosopher-president who gave in to the cynical exigencies of statecraft. The root of the problem was perhaps in Adams’ flawed historiography and incomplete grasp of the realities of politics. There is the suspicion that Adams’ talent as a documentarian perhaps caused him to delve too much into the “diplomatic skein” of things and miss the wood for the trees, but the flaw was deeper. Adams the historian came under the influence of all the modernist thinkers: Marx and his historical materialism, Nietzsche and his transvaluation of values, Darwin and his evolutionary theory, and Emerson and his pessimism about consciousness and human pragmatic will. The result was a belief that history is shaped by impersonal forces (‘philosophy of sequences’) rather than individuals. Meanwhile, Adams the diplomatist held to a cynicism about politicians combined with Quixotic idealism about politics - typical of the detached academic and impractical moral idealist, and distinguishing him from the public men he critiqued. As a result, Adams perhaps understates the impact of ‘great’ men on history, though Auchincloss highlights the sole exception: Napoleon, whom Adams seems to have regarded as a true Archimedes figure who had “a nation’s energy” – akin to a force of nature.

Adams’ historical method, based on a sequential understanding of historical causation, seems nonsensical in the way that Auchincloss describes it, which is as follows:

[quote] “Adams believed that a historian should first detach himself and his personal enthusiasms and disapprovals from the field of human events that he has selected to study. He should then develop his own general ideas of causes and effects by observing the mass of phenomena in the selected period. After the formation of such ideas, he should exclude all facts irrelevant to them.” [unquote]

It is that last point which presents the difficulty. Selectivity with facts based on a formation of “general ideas” does not seem to represent either an inductive or deductive method of historical inquiry, does not seem to be in the spirit of the scientific method of the time, and seems a little too vulnerable to the historian’s own whims and biases. Auchincloss goes on to explain Adams’ theory of American history:

[quote] “…his most important general idea is that the energy of the American people ultimately seized control of a chain of events which was initiated by energies in Europe. He attempted to trace this American energy in finance, science, politics, and diplomacy. Individuals were not of primary importance to him…Adams believed that in a democratic nation individuals were important chiefly as types.” [unquote]

This seems a plausible way to proceed: in effect, Adams is theorising that America, at the relevant point in its history, was still influenced by Europe, but as Auchincloss quickly notes, there seems to be little in the way of any special examination in Adams’ work of American particularities: cities, farms, commerce, and so on.

Auchincloss is not enamoured of Adams’ fiction writing, whereas I am something of a fan. He compares Adams’ two novels with his non-fiction classics, but I think the comparison is misconceived, as they are two different modes of operation. The novels are very good, but the mystery for me – which Auchincloss disappointingly doesn’t explore – is why Adams would want to have the novels not published under his real name. I can certainly think of one or two explanations, but the reason isn’t clear to anybody. Auchincloss says ‘Democracy’ is “flat”. I beg to differ: the story is unadventurous, true, but it’s a compelling read. That said, I agree with Auchlincloss’ view that the ending of ‘Democracy’ is disappointing in that it is unimaginative, if logical. Auchincloss’ thoughts about ‘Esther’, Adams’ second novel, are more interesting. It had not occurred to me that the novel may be Adams hankering after the Roman Church, but that does seem to be quite a good explanation. Romanism as ritualistic, pagan, sensationalist and non-literate may have appealed to Esther’s attractive medley of qualities: an artistic sensibility, combined with imaginative rationalism. I do share Auchincloss’ perplexity at the turn of the plot and wonder why it was necessary for Esther to choose to believe or not, but in my view that adds something to the story, even if it is quintessentially melodramatic.

Henry Adams found peace towards the end in the cathedrals of northern France, and at Chartres he experienced divine revelation. The architecture of these towering monuments of faith showed a balance between “outward austerity and inward refinement”, and a naturalness and humanity of scale that he had not found in alienated, prideful democratic-modernist-industrial America. The experience persuaded him that he was a ‘Norman’ to the more boorish Anglo-Saxons. These great buildings gave a dignity to man in their unity of art and purpose. To Adams this was humbling and edifying – as Newman lyricised: “The distant scene; one step enough for me.” In the way that Adams describes himself (per Auchincloss’ paraphrases here), I am not sure I would like him much: he comes across as an awful snob with a contemptuous attitude to country people in France. Yet he was a vivid and insightful travel writer and in ‘Mont-Saint-Michel’ he manages to convey the experience of faith to us, showing that it requires a full-blooded, imaginative person to feel the miracle of the Eucharist. As Adams implies, the awe that must have struck the medieval mind at the sight of these cathedrals was a revelatory experience in its own right. To Adams, who thinks in typologies, the Virgin, not Jesus, is the supreme figure of Christianity, and in his historical-cultural-travel book, Adams falls into romantic Mariolatry, offering that Mary is the more equitable justice at the core of an idiosyncratic and heretical theology of his own: she is “nature, love, chaos”, in contrast to Christ’s “law, unity, perfection.” We see the gender-based typological contrasts in Adams’ fiction writing: in ‘Esther’, for instance, the eponymous character in her artistic sensibility represents the Feminine: freedom, dark, chaos, subjectivity, anarchy; meanwhile, her male counterpart, Wharton represents the Masculine qualities of beauty, light, order, objectivity, hierarchy. In much the same vein, Adams contrasts heretical Mariology with the ordered theology of Aquinas, symbolised and actuated in the cathedral: the most complete expression of the faith. Here Adams is writing his history imaginatively: the logical outcome of a didactic process that began in Tahiti.

The contrast between Chartres and the looming, anti-revelatory world of mechanistic modernity inspired Adams to write down his own educational philosophy, which came to be perhaps his most famous book, ‘The Education of Henry Adams’. Adams saw the unity of the cathedral contrasted with the multiplicity and complexity of chaotic industrial America, and he deprecated that shift in mentality. He preferred the former world and believed himself to be out-of-place in the latter – a Man Out of Time – much like perhaps the purist catholicism turns away from the modern world around it and provides an island for Vestigial Man in ancient and primeval ritual. Nevertheless, despite his alienation, Adams sought to map out a possible philosophical basis for useful education in the modern world. What he recognised is that his own formal education – what he regarded to be a “quasi-education” - had been useless in preparing him for what was becoming a fast-moving world. This was the middle of the industrial era. Adams pointed to tycoons who were barely educated yet commanded great material success and argued that the best education is self-education: taking the form of reading and experiences. The problem that Adams seemed to be grappling with was specialisation: as the society becomes more complex, and as production became industrialised, people were estranged from the means of living and unable to fully provide all their own needs, but instead worked for wages on perhaps one narrow aspect of production. This ‘alienation’ encouraged a type of education that was schooled, formalised in the classroom, and focused on ensuring that people became regimented and obedient industrial workers. The notion of an unschooled education gradually became obsolete and eccentric in the eyes of most people.

The Industrial Revolution and urbanisation was the onset of ‘time speeded up’. Adams felt out-of-time, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that time was out of him and his thoughtful contemporaries. Adams was feeling the sensation of temporal-historical relativity. Time was accelerating, and this was exhilarating, alienating, disconcerting and discombobulating all at once. We now live in a post-industrial era and an Information Society in which we have e-mail, jet airlines, and the internet and worldwide web, requiring immediate response and feedback, and instantaneous reciprocation - all of which must alienate many, creating Men Out of Time who prefer to deliberate than submit to the tyranny of equivocation that postmodernism demands. What Adams called ‘multiplicity’ is ever-expanding in such a world, and what he called ‘unity’, is a contracting field. Multiplicity goes with experimentation, subjectivity and chaos; unity with truth, objectivity and order. The political system of multiplicity is democracy and the crowd or mob, and it is perhaps the worst, or at any rate, the lowest common denominator, who decide how things are run; the politics of unity is aristocracy or some other hierarchical order, and in such a system it is the best in society who decide how things are run. Multiplicity is the city and urban environment, commercialism and retail trade; unity is the countryside, industry and agriculture.

Adams expanded this philosophic distinction and his historical philosophy of sequences into the physical sciences and sought bravely to find a theory of unity that would explain ‘everything’. He did not succeed in that latter endeavour, which as Auchincloss says, was in any case an unwise misdirection of his talents. Adams’ real talent, in my view, was his ability to examine and communicate to the intangible. His conversion at Chartres opened his eyes and led him to recognise that the truth cannot be found in mundanity but requires the objectivity and beauty of the divine; science is not the search for truth, but simply produces a post-truth society based on force. It was this search for unity that vexed and drove Adams in equal measure, as much as it has other American thinkers - and to an extent he succeeded. He helped maintain at least a vision of the American Cathedral, and that shall be his towering monument.

Where Is Art?

A review of 'Esther: A Novel' by Henry Adams

Note: The following review was originally published at Amazon.co.uk on 19th. July 2018.   Link to original review: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R22XDA3SH735J0?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

Esther Dudley is a society woman who attends an episcopal church, St. John’s, on Fifth Avenue in New York. A talented amateur artist with her own private studio, she is commissioned at the church to paint a standing figure of St. Cecilia. She works there with several others from the congregation. There is Wharton, another artist. Wharton is opinionated and temperamental on the subject of art, and an experienced church decorator in his own right. He acts as Esther’s supervisor. Another character is Catherine Brooke, an enfant terrible from out West and cousin of Esther’s; and, there is a Professor George Strong, a paeleontologist, and another cousin. Together, they form an “ecclesiastical idyll” of mutual discussion, creativity and learning. At any rate, it is an amiable set-up with didactic pretensions and forms the main focus, and it’s pleasant enough. Now and then, Hazard the clergyman at St. John's, comes on the scene to check on progress and offer his views.  As a result, Hazard suffers a serious case of love sickness for Esther and attempts to develop a relationship with her. She has mixed feelings for Hazard, does not enjoy going to church anyway, and does not consider it proper to get to know a clergyman. But she likes the chase. The pursuit is the ultimate test of Hazard’s missionary abilities.

To an extent, the attraction seems to be down to opposite values and differences, which add frisson and sexual tension to their interactions. Esther, a reluctant church-going woman, is not a believer, but not strictly a non-believer either, more non-inscrit in matters of religion and faith. She has doubts about the fundaments of Christology. This is a point of some scandal within the congregational community as gossip spreads and she comes to be regarded as a prospective clergyman’s wife - the essentials of the role implicitly include at least a profession of belief, if not confessional certitude in Christ. The assumption is that if Hazard is to associate with a free-thinker, then he must be one too and should therefore split the congregation down the middle. Faced with this obstacle, Hazard is the determined evangelist, believing that he can convert Esther both to his love and to a love of God through faith, and even that her love of God can be realised through love of him. These protestations meet with resistance from her reasoned mind, culminating in a melodramatic finale in which one party flees and the other pursues.

I think this is an intelligent and beautifully-written novel, perhaps even better-written than Adams’ first work of fiction, ‘Democracy’. As well as the prose, there are some excellent sonnets, presumably of the author’s own devising. Readers who are not familiar with theology and religious issues may struggle to comprehend some of what is said - and Adams was a very cultured and literate writer - but even the most ignorant cannot fail to enjoy the story. That said, a little patience is needed, as it only picks up towards the end. Still, it’s reasonably short in length: you might say, it’s a long novella rather than strictly a novel. Adams wrote this pseudonymously, which is rather odd. It is understandable that Adams kept ‘Democracy’ anonymous, due to his social and professional associations, but not so much with ‘Esther’. Maybe he feared a pattern of writing style being recognised? Was it, in fact? That’s unclear, but Adams also disdained what he called the “mutual admiration business” of publishing, and made little effort to publicise his fiction writing, so this novel remained obscure. Probably only a few hundred people in the world have ever actually read it, and without Adams’ enduring fame, it wouldn’t even be that – but it is a good novel. I like books of this era anyway because they hark back to a time when even ordinary people had a sense of importance and seriousness.

A number of themes in this novel were also found in Adams’ first fiction work. There is an examination here of religion and theology, especially the conflict between divinity and a rational-historical understanding of Christianity. The naming of a character as ‘Wharton’ is probably inspired by the real-life person of Charles H. Wharton, a major critic of perhaps the 19th. century’s leading Christian rationalist, a Scottish Unitarian called Joseph Priestley. Priestley sensationally argued against Jesus’ divinity, believing that reliance should be placed on the moral teachings only. I’m also tempted to speculate that the character Hazard represents Jesus and that each of the main characters represents one of Jesus’ friends – Catherine is Mary Magdalene, Peter is Esther, George Strong is John (and also, I think, Satan), Wharton is Matthew, Mr Dudley (Esther’s father) is Lazarus, and Mrs Dudley (Esther’s aunt) is Judas. Why this should be ought to become clear when you read the novel. Another theme ibid is the prejudice of American easterners against westerners, though it’s not vicious. Catherine is gently patronised by Mrs Murray in a way that gives the distinct impression that Eastern society in the late 19th. century was a recreation of upper middle-class Victorian England.

As to the significance of the eponym, Esther is a central figure in Biblical Jewry and also part of the Christian canon, but I don’t fathom much of any link between the Biblical Esther and the Esther of this novel - save that both are ‘strong’ female characters in that they are wilful and determined to control their own destinies. Adams obviously based at least his fictional characterology on typologies - John Carrington from Adams’ first novel is a clear example of this: drawn as the noble, upright Virginian. The title character in this, Adams’ second novel, is taken from the eponymous short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Set during the American Revolutionary War, Hawthorne’s story is interesting in that he uses a strong female character as an iconoclastic figure of redemption and transfiguration and bearer of all sin. Adams follows a broadly similar pattern in both his novels. Like Hawthorne, he holds that women have a mystical nature, and like Hawthorne, he uses strong female lead characters as the exemplars of a heroine typology. For instance, in this novel, Catherine Brooke is an American Saint: a female iconoclastic type redeeming America. In ‘Democracy’, Madeleine Lightfoot Lee is the confessor, in the sacerdotal sense, to Silas P. Ratcliffe, the sinner, whereas in Adams’ second novel, the gender role is reversed: Esther is the sinner, Hazard is the confessor. There is also a telling similarity between Hazard and the antagonist in ‘Democracy’, Silas P. Ratcliffe: both are demanding that the female protagonist accept their worldview and values. In a way, Hazard is demeaning Esther, just as Ratcliffe sought to smother Mrs Lee. Both female characters are strong women standing up to male power and authority. The gender dichotomy underlines the essential conflict in the story between religious orthodoxy and free-thought.

Adams here addresses the reserve power of women in society, as he did in his first novel, but he does so with greater balance this time, looking at the problems and burdens of women too. Women like Esther are under great pressure to marry, men not so much. This sometimes puts them in a quandary. Mrs Murray puts the paradox well during a dialogue in which Esther is being quizzed by her father about her continued status as a single woman, showing a strong aversion to matrimony in concept. Yet Mrs Murray remains happily married and would not dream of divorcing her “one in a million” husband. Perhaps the reason is the pressure on women to marry combined with their social nature, which demands they seek protection. Yet as Schopenhauer observed, women know their biologically-allotted task and willingly go about it, exercising their primitive power over men that no earthly institution can easily supplant. In fact, it seems even God cannot step in the way. Interestingly, much like Wilkie Collins does, Adams puts his female character in the driving seat and gives her the initiative.

Hazard, though not especially attractive in the physical sense, is a Renaissance man with a strong spirit, clearly very confident, and of genuine religious conviction, regularly preaching in a strident way to his congregation. Esther, too, has a characterful look about her – she is an “American type”, as described by Wharton, with his keen artist’s eye. Catherine is out of her element and fulfils the archetype of the naïve country girl, a provincial Westerner thrust into a metropolitan environment of university professors, learned clergy, exhibited artists and society women. As such, much of what happens in the story centres around her as her new social circle affect to, variously, educate her, condescend to her or rib her. She is too good-natured to express her annoyance at this. Catherine agrees to sit as Esther’s model, thinking it will help her be accepted among the new company she is keeping. Wharton is hyper-critical of Esther’s art, while Catherine in her innocence simply assumes that Esther’s art is “wonderful”, not having the refinement to make any critical distinctions. Wharton is estranged from his rather tempestuous French wife, a veritable Jezebel. He represents the ambition of American fine art at the time to carve out its own identity, based on the cornfields and prairies.

Hazard, though evangelical, is theologically described as a high churchman. He sees God’s presence and His goodness in everything, including church art and architecture, and he values these as meta-theological components of his mission as he seeks to make worship and devotion an aesthetic experience. Is he right? Can art affect us religiously? Can the experience of art – whether as artist or observer – fill one with divine inspiration or missionary zeal? Can art and culture change people’s views? Art is inescapably experiential: it is an objective thing that teaches us about subjective experience. Thus, art is objective-subjective: it is the ‘experience’ of a ‘thing’, and when we look at a painting or sculpture, we are interpreting subjectively an objective external reality. Art is not a Rorschach Test, but nor can there be a unity of interpretation. This raises further questions, one of which is over interpretation and experience and their interrelationship. Do we each experience things in different ways, applying our own ‘uniquely unique’ meaning and feelings to each piece? Can there be such a thing as ‘art’ with its own definitional boundary and terminus outside of which we can say that things are not art per essentiam?

Another issue is the extent to which art ought to give sovereignty to the observer rather than the artist-creator. Should a portrait painting capture the reality of the subject (realist art) or a beautification of such (romantic art) or a divination (hagiographic art)? Which is the ‘proper art’, or are all? These questions become quite relevant when Hazard commissions Esther to paint St. Cecilia on the church interior. Esther decides to model her on Catherine, and a dispute ensues as to how Catherine should be depicted: whether as the pretty, youthful woman she is, or as a divine, older saint with creases and lines on her face and other signs of age. Wharton favours the latter because he wants St. Cecilia to look divine and churchlike. Paintings and their derivatives have the appeal of ideation and generalisation: when an artist sits down to paint a model or artifact, the two-dimensational re-creation on canvas is a generalised and ideated (and sometimes idealised) version of what is in front of him. By contrast, photography and its derivatives do not tend to have this feature. To the largest extent, and whatever his creative and technical manipulative skills, the photographer is reproducing specificity and parochiality. Esther, in proposing to recreate on the church wall the vigorous woman in front of her, is reducing Catherine to photorealism a la Rene Magritte’s Treachery of Images: she is to be depicted not as a saint, merely as an attractive woman. Wharton, then, is trying to maintain the eternity, dignity and integrity of art against Esther’s degradation and treason to it and feminine flimsiness. The religious purpose of saints is to provide a model after which believers should pattern their behaviour. Wharton wants to depict Catherine/St. Cecilia plainly because saints should be serious and non-sexual, even androgynous. Using art to portray Catherine’s natural youth and beauty removes her value as a model for such purpose and instead presents her as a sexual being perhaps. For further elucidation, we may offer up the contemporary fashion models as an example: normally the women of Givenchy or Trussardi are very thin, and androgynous too. They are that way because they fulfil a purpose. They are not sexually attractive, and not physically typical of women generally, but they are apt models for clothing.

Yet still we may ask: Shouldn’t saints relate to ordinary believers? Saintliness is equated with complete purity and virtue. This cannot allow beauty in the profane, sexual sense commonly-understood. Consequently, Christianity sees virility and ordinary (profane) beauty as infelicitous. Despite this, somewhat surprisingly Hazard relents in the end and Catherine is painted as she is rather than as she would be if saintly. It’s a disappointing decision on Hazard’s part. Spiritual earnestness is sacrificed for profane beauty. Christianity’s liturgical art should point back to the Passion and bear its scars, as that is the basis of the entire Creed, in that Christ suffered for all men’s sins. In a profane and sinful Satanic world, we confuse sexual attractiveness with beauty, and this keeps us ignorant. But didn’t Christ already suffer for sins? Why do we need to recreate passion and turmoil in art? Wharton’s point is that we should recognise our sins in everything and not allow ourselves to be taken in by plaster saints.

A word about Hazard’s rationalist foil, Professor Strong. He rejects the Creed and any sort of superstitious belief entirely, however he still manages to look on the church quite objectively. Initially Strong is supercilious and rude in that way that rationalist academics can be. He pours scorn on Wharton’s artistic sensibilities and mocks Catherine. At one point, Strong asserts to Hazard that science alone is truth, which ironically is not true, or is at least misleading. The science corpus is merely a set of provisional truths. However, Professor Strong reveals a more complex understanding of things in the more in-depth conversations he has with Catherine later. Strong points out that science, religion and truth are separate things and both science and religion depend on belief. Strong implicitly rejects the modernist Cartesian paradigm, pointing out that you cannot reason yourself into faith – like love, you either have it or not. I see the point, but I am not sure I agree entirely. You can’t choose whether to love or not, but you can choose to have faith, or faith can be the ultimate result of choices, through reasoning. In the face of Esther’s struggles with herself, Strong helpfully suggests that perhaps the Roman Church would be more suitable for someone such as her, full of pride and passion. Certainly, he has a point: the liturgies of Romanism, the worship of ritual and its primeval appeal to communality, can be of appeal to a reasoned mind leery of Protestant supplicancy. This is Strong, the rational man, trying to understand the unfathomable. What is love? Can we choose to love? He equates faith with love because he assumes faith is irrational. As such, he is not giving Esther enough credit.

Tellingly, Strong contradicts himself on the point, also averring, like Hazard, that the profession of faith is a simple, rudimentary willed act: it is submission, in short, though you have to choose whether to submit or not. All doubts can be laid to rest. This seems a little simplistic to me. All of us when we make choices are heading down a particular path that will shape our circumstances and determine how our lives will work out. We all make these choices without being able to weigh everything up - sometimes we make blind decisions out of feelings rather than entirely rational judgement. Faith is something that grows on you, just as any strong social or political belief might. Even if there is a Damascene conversion, this is still the result of earlier decisions and innumerable tiny influences. If you choose not to look into Christianity, you are unlikely to ever develop faith unless you have some sort of religious experience; those who have the curiosity (or weakness, as Strong would have it) to examine superstition may reason themselves into faith. Strong’s averment also seems tautological. Of course, we can lay to rest all doubts if we want to: that is faith, in which the individual rests on hope over the natural doubts. But what is this hope, which is at the root of faith? It seems to be a choice: an acceptance of mystery over a negation of tradition and doctrine. This is also a form of loyalty. Thus, it could be argued that divine love is loyalty – not necessarily true love for God, rather love for an organisation: a loyalty to tradition. Is romantic love itself just a form of loyalty? What compromises does love demand of people? Must we accept fully the person we love? Romantic and sexual love is not unconditional, as parental love typically is, however in the period that this novel is set, divorce was harder and so the prospect of marriage required still more serious contemplation.

Hazard’s argument for faith is not particularly innovative. He starts with the Cartesian dictum, cogito ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am” – which was a feature of the intellectual battle during the post-Renaissance 17th. century, and among the pre-cursors of modernism proper and post-modernism. Descartes was looking for an axiom, something on which he could rest with certainty and from which he could derive all other things: in short, a philosophical version of the First Cause that created everything and gives everything meaning. For Christians, an absence of First Cause implies that things have been created out of nothing, ex nihilo, and nothing has meaning. However, even if the premise is accepted, it is difficult to see how this justifies belief in superstition. The point seems to be that God must exist because otherwise nothing can be explained, but there are explanations – starting with evolution. Hazard brings this up in an attempt to reconcile religion and science, arguing that when it comes to resolving the great mystery of the physical world, consciousness, science cannot improve on religion: the “I AM” of existence is mystified to the scientist and it is only through faith in God that such imponderables can be understood. God is the Word, the Alpha and the Omega. This seems to be a way of merely shifting the goalposts: explaining one mystery by supplanting it with another. The significance of consciousness is that it concerns being. It is the stuff of life, what we are essentially. Christians use it in concept to say that everything around us may not be real, only the soul (the human stuff) is real. In reality, there is no mystery to consciousness, it may be explained entirely in evolutionary terms. We may add that the very fact that Descartes had to reason his way to God tells us that he and others of his time didn’t really believe in God. In any case, his ontological argument seems weak. Hazard then tries Pascal’s wager – which seems a rather self-interested basis for believing in God and therefore also undermines faith. What all of this suggests is a reasoning towards faith, a faith based on recognising doubts, rather than a simple belief. This placing of ‘knowing’ before ‘being’ has critically undermined Christianity and is the unintended gift of Descartes to the modern world. If you have to reason faith then it is not faith at all, it is just another falsifiable view.

Strong has a go too, but in a way that Hazard would not approve of. He seems to be Adams’ Miltonian satanic figure, straight out of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, with his pessimism about faith and human nature; he is, furthermore, figuratively Satan himself, subtly tempting Esther into an anti-Christian understanding of things that will serve his own purposes. In polemic with Esther, he tries to steer her towards what a Christian would see as the evil of nominalism in which morality is seen as extrinsic to the human being, what matters is a person’s aesthetic sense of right and wrong, and good and evil become negotiative. Strong holds that this life is everything, there is no spiritual future beyond it – or probably not. The Christian alternative is that this life is a preparation for the next, we have all sinned and are therefore damaged, and if we accept God’s grace we will be healed and can ascend to a supernatural state. If we reject God’s grace or do not have the capacity to accept it, then we will be estranged from God (which ultimately means Hell). Knowing is therefore equated with virtue. Love is all. At one point, Strong tries to suggest that any thought that is an abstract truth makes you immortal. This seems to me nonsense. Mind is matter and dies with it. Even if you have an abstract thought that is an abstract truth, it does not make you immortal. Your thought dies with you while its products and artifacts live on, but you cannot become your own thought. Your matter has a separate existence and your thoughts merge with you on death as they are simply part of matter. Ironically, Strong is reasoning himself into faith. If he is right, then truth is God and we become one with God when we accept his existence, but it is unlikely this was Strong’s intention.

In the end, Strong’s appeal to Esther amounts to saying that since all of these things cannot be disproven, they must be possible, and since even the hard sciences have mysteries as their axioms (so Strong says), science and religion are merely different paths to truth and Esther should consider which she wishes to accept. It is a weak argument. Strong’s evangelism is of the low church kind: though he does not quote the Bible, he is eschewing theology, and the richness and mystery of Christianity and its divine revelation, and instead appealing to Esther’s reasoned mind on the basis of a crude philosophical calculus. In contrast, Hazard’s evangelism is that of the high churchman: he demands that Esther submit to him on an emotional basis and that faith will follow from this, though it is still a reasoned argument in its own way, albeit fallacious: an appeal to authority, to patriarchy, to the Leadership Principle – Hazard merely being the petty leader above whom is God Himself. Hazard offers Esther a life to be lived in submission to the Father, and the possibility of Salvation through the acceptance of grace through low gradations to God. This explains Hazard’s approach to Esther’s mental turmoil: she can find the truth through him. It implies a paternalistic attitude to Esther and maybe women in general. To Hazard, the issue is not whether he should give up his faith, but whether Esther should sacrifice her own intellectual independence and trust herself to him. From his perspective, it is enough that she should love him, all else will follow, as God is love. This sounds odd, but how many regular church-going and casual believers take this approach? Most of them probably have never read the Bible, let alone studied it seriously. Most of them would probably scoff at tales of miracles of the kind that Jesus is meant to have performed as a demonstration of his holiness. But these things are fundamental to the Creed, and one who does not believe in them and accept them cannot be a Christian proper. Christianity relied on catholic and gnostic principles of worship right up until the invention of the printing press, when Scripture ceased to be the property of the Church alone, allowing the Reformation to spread. It would be difficult, actually, to overestimate the revolutionary effect of printing Scripture: Bible-based faith is non-experiential, causing adherents to turn against tradition. Belief is not very important when you have holy water, responsorials – magic is in things. But painting and architecture are not magic in and of themselves, they just allow you to be nearer to God or understand God better, not just rely on the formalism of liturgy and ritual. But once people start actually reading Scripture and the Pentateuch, then belief itself becomes an issue.

In pre-belief Christianity, ‘being’ in the religious sense is a presupposition and a priori entirely and nothing has to be explained. Once people could read the material, or have it read to them, suddenly it became necessary for them to believe in it. This presented a problem: the paradox of ‘literate’ Christianity is that it is imperatively atheistic: anybody who reads the Bible cannot believe in it. With the onset of the Scientific Revolution and the shift to mechanisation and industrialism, a ‘belief belief’ – i.e. faith and doubt as the requisites of belief - became more fundamental to Christianity instead of unquestioning ‘pre-belief belief’, and what was previously a belief in a metaphysics of reality become a belief in magic. This must have weakened Christianity, and it will be noted that the vestigial liturgies and doctrines of ‘pre-belief belief’ are almost entirely catholic, Roman or Orthodox: the liturgical catholic traditions in particular call back to paganism. Who in the industrial and post-industrial eras can possibly believe in the literalism of the Pentateuch? Or the divine incarnation? Or the Miracles of Jesus? Or the Resurrection? Or even simply Jesus as an actual historical figure? In modern times, the church must “choose between weak doctrine and weak brains”, a monitory parishioner admonishes Hazard. Which is preferable? The very dilemma is an acknowledgement that an educated and intelligent person cannot possibly believe in this stuff, and the church will go for ability. Hazard is an exception, maybe even a contraindication for modernism: he is proud of his strong dogma. The interesting thing is that many, maybe most, of today’s Christians see no contradiction in negation and probably ‘believe in belief’, as Christopher Hitchens had it, rather than believe in the dogma as a metaphysical reality. It is in that sense that they believe in the Creed itself. The broad cleave in Christianity between catholics and evangelists is really about the difference between a doctrine of belief per se and a doctrine of ritual. The ritualists (i.e. the catholics) take belief for granted, or otherwise don’t raise the subject; the ‘believers’ (i.e. the evangelists) actually expect you to believe in it. The catholics rest on apocalyptic evaluation: a grand Reckoning in which the All Knowing weighs up sins and ex post facto ratifies dispensations. The evangelists don’t care how you behave as long as you believe in Christ and repent.

Thus, we can see that Christian belief has evolved through three stages of palingenesis that dovetail with the West’s philosophical development since Constantine: the medieval ‘pre-belief belief’, the pre-modern ‘belief belief’, and the late modern and post-modern ‘belief in belief’. This is the slippage. It has been caused by the co-option of Cartesian circularity, which might better be understood as a singularity of faith-doubt. His dictum was more fully phrased: “dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum” – I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. This single line upturned 1,500 years of pre-cognitive belief. Nothing could be more radical and nothing has been. Descartes made a virtue of doubting, paving the way for postmodernism. We may say that Descartes is the Father of Postmodernism because he was rejecting implicitly belief in dogma as an a priori presupposition, though ironically he was trying to achieve the opposite: securing knowledge by establishing a kernel that is beyond doubt. The mundane result is modernist pseudo-theological exchanges such as those in this novel. The traditionalist Hazard and the modernist Esther are at cross-purposes. Hazard need not necessarily ask much of Esther: all that’s required is that she believes in the Creed because she should believe in it. Esther, for her part, is trying to be a pre-modernist and ‘believe believe’, rationally. Meanwhile, Hazard demands that she ‘pre-believe believe’, charismatically. Even if Esther could, which she can’t, she must ask a great deal of him. Like Esther, I prefer the divinity of Nature. But who is right? Can we even know? In the end, like any good work of art, the central question is left unresolved by the artist. All the important matters are for the reader to decide.

Shade Trees

A review of 'Democracy: An American Novel' by Henry Adams

Note: The following review was originally published at Amazon.co.uk on 14th. July 2018.   Link to original review: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R2PUFPQQGAMUN5?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

Madeleine Lightfoot Lee, a listless widow from New York, decides to go to Washington, D.C. and stay with her sister, Sybil Ross, because she wants to understand American democracy: “...good or bad, and to drink it down to the dregs….” She and Sybil befriend several individuals who join their genteel little salon, all of them interesting if under-developed characters, and all prominent in federal politics or in some way connected to it. The three main protagonists, John Carrington, Sybil and Mrs Lee seem to be composites of the author himself. Carrington, a mixture of Virginian nobility, pragmatic idealism and a melancholy, world-weary cynicism, is a good foil for Mrs Lee’s medley of gaiety, naivety, righteousness and penetrating intelligence, while Sybil possesses great loyalty and strength of character. Mrs Lee’s friendship with a certain Senator Ratcliffe forms the main theme of the story. She thinks that powerful men control things, seems drawn to Senator Ratcliffe, even if he is “dreadfully senatorial”, and seeks him out as he seems to provide a promising opening into the mysterious world she is seeking to comprehend. The two hit it off.

It seems a little uncouth to characterise the fictional Ratcliffe as a villain, or villain entirely. Perhaps it would be more accurate to style him as a tragical antagonist, whose pragmatic morality contrasts starkly with the honourable Mr Carrington, and marks him out as a caitiff and blackguard worthy of rejection. As such, Adams’ roman-à-clef appears to serve as a monitory, but it may be more complex than that. Try as I might, I struggle to accept the wayward Senator as an inimical bête noire. In truth, Mrs Lee’s situation with Ratcliffe leaves her on the horns of a dilemma: it is the eternal moral philosophical tension between ends and means. Can scruples prevent us from doing good? Is there a ‘common good’ that is above ordinary mundane morality and that can justify wrong-doing? Certainly, Senator Ratcliffe attempts to justify himself on the basis of higher civic virtues. Certainly, Mrs Lee urges on Ratcliffe that he should act according to the “public good”, but one suspects that the two have very different ideas about what that means. For Ratcliffe, it is about the ends more than the means. Mrs Lee seems more rigid and idealistic in the matter, and when regarding Ratcliffe, makes a naïve but hopeful comparison with the great antebellum senator, Daniel Webster. But even John F. Kennedy would have rejected Mrs Lee’s version of political courage: in his Profiles in Courage, Kennedy acknowledges the necessity of a transcendent public good. Borrowing from Kennedy’s portrait of Ratcliffe’s doppelgänger, Daniel Webster, we might say that Ratcliffe has proverbially come to Washington not as a Man From The Prairies, but as an American: “…to make alive and supreme the latent sense of oneness, of Union…”, as Kennedy refers to Webster. Certainly, Webster’s example teaches us that the different virtues – courage, discipline, morality, honesty, integrity - can come into conflict and even apparently noble individuals can struggle with this mightily. Carrington faces that quandary.

John Carrington is a statue of Virginian honour, but it is fair to say his actions are not morally-straight-forward. The author cleverly uses him to convey the angry but Stoic suffering of the Reconstruction-era South at a time when Washington and the North enjoyed the complacent prosperity of the Gilded Age. It may be added that Adams, chronic with mal du siècle, harboured an especial antipathy to the modernist Northern states and is clearly in some sympathy with the South - not its cause so much as its aesthetics. He draws Carrington sympathetically. Irrepressibly noble, at least in intent, Carrington in a way embodies the dual Arthurian archetype all-in-one, both the knight-errand seeking to protect Mrs Lee through noble intervention, and the black knight seeking to do good in the shadows, in his case through stratagem – a combination of stealth, gossip, snide, wit and slander, even trickery - rather than through direct confrontation with Ratcliffe. Can we therefore say that Carrington or Ratcliffe is more the man? Which? Ratcliffe may be corrupt, but he also has the virtue of being embarrassingly blunt and straight-forward about it, calling in aid nobility of motive; Carrington meanwhile obeys all the scruples of justice and honour, yet this draws him into tergiversation and evasion on account of his purity of conscience. Ratcliffe no doubt thinks he is doing good, whereas Carrington knows he is doing good, but which of them achieves good? And is achieving good what matters or is conduct more important? These thorny questions cause Mrs Lee to privately re-evaluate her fundamental motivations. What is the purpose of her coming to Washington? Is it romance and marriage? Is it learning? As a widow of independent means, she is free to continually seek newer and better experiences without the need to be tied down to a particular place. In New York, she had grown weary of the fruits of modernism: the monotony of the people and the brown-stoned houses. She journeys to Washington not just to discover politics but to escape New York – and escape Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and for all anybody knows, several other cities. Adams had studied the writings of Karl Marx and was familiar with his theory of historical materialism, but Mrs Lee’s interest seems to be in penetrating the political mind rather than the political machine. She is not out to comprehend the forces of history so much as understand the men of history. Maybe she has not cognised that the federal city is a ‘machine’? Or perhaps she does, but she holds that to get to the root of a system, one has to understand its divisions and parts – including its individuals – rather than understand it as a separate whole? At any rate, this is not a metapolitical novel. Mrs Lee wants to understand what moves politicians, how they impose their will on others, rather than the forces that move societies. Thus, the mystification is precisely in the art of leadership itself.

That brings us to the matter of how the different elements of leadership come about. What are the individual drives of the will? Is it charisma? Intelligence? Physical presence? Sexual energy? An important subtext of this novel is a battle of the sexes. Mrs Lee, as a woman - though she may be weak and unimportant in the scheme of things - indisputably exercises a veto or ultimatum over Senator Ratcliffe: regardless of how powerful he may be, she can still reject him brutally and there is little he can do; and, she may do so in the seemingly-pleasant environs of her private rooms, where only hours before glasses clinked and polite conversation filled the air. Women, then, are like beasts of Nature: pretty to look at, occupying Edenic surroundings even, but possessing the imperative of a killer instinct, executed coldly and savagely. As such, this novel suggests that women are the reserve power in society. Men may occupy positions that appear to give them power, but it is the (as then) voteless, unenfranchised woman who can ultimately refuse a man, even the most powerful man. That being so, sex itself and relations between the sexes are a major force in society, if not examined very much. But is there a separate will-to-power, a will to overcome others, that the other driving factors aid? At root, what motivates politicians? Ratcliffe frankly confesses that the pleasure in politics is the holding of power. Does that mean all this talk of civic virtue is for naught? The problem with the ‘power for power’s sake’ thesis is that power only means something if it is power over others, yet we may well ask whether any of these politicians exercise much more than titular power. On the other hand, we often hear people involved in politics and public affairs talk of the need for ‘pragmatism’, as if they are concerned with what works, which implies that they have some power or say in the machinery of society, but the real lines of authority can be invisible and based on social influence - an area that women can be quite skilled in. That said, it would be too simplistic to liken politicians to automata who merely go round shaking hands. Their notional offices do come with ex officio influences.

The author’s scathing critique of Ratcliffian practical morality is perhaps a little naïve, even banal. Being good is not necessarily the same as, or correlates with, doing good. Possibly only dangerous men can do good. Cowardly men tend to wrap themselves up in platitudes and passive attributes and ne’er achieve anything worthwhile, yet may be perceived as good men for it. John Carrington had been a rebel and had killed in the name of the Confederacy, yet he is presumably respected for this, even by former enemies. It’s clear that moral flexibility is needed. In that vein, I find Mrs Lee’s Manichean moral sense a little disappointing for the purposes of this novel. It may be the best way to look at things for the character’s own purposes – certainly, she must realise that life as a prominent political wife would be a quagmire of compromises and secrets - but as a medium through which to understand power, her attitude has its limitations, and could be regarded as an abrogation of responsibility, even somewhat cowardly. The world has lots of ‘Mrs Lees’ in it who snipe and sneer at politicians from their comfortable salons (which nowadays are electronic), issuing divine bolts of judgement based on a guileless understanding of virtue. None of them would have warranted a place among Kennedy’s noble gallery of hagiographies. This woman tells us that she wants to see inside and touch the machinery of American democracy, yet she is appalled at what she finds, giving credence to Nicolas de Chamfort: “One would risk being disgusted if one saw politics, justice, and one’s dinner in the making.” Democracy is a mystery to her, as all her other frivolous experiences have been - it is a superstition, an astrological fancy, to be exhausted then discarded before moving on to another sensation. Her butterfly journeys and trips around the American cosmos have instilled in her no learning, only deepened the mysteries of life while adding to her journals. Naturally we are appalled at Ratcliffe’s consistent pass on scruple, yet perhaps we also instinctively pall at Mrs Lee’s dreary self-righteousness, sensing that if Ratcliffe is the Fallen Man in this novel, he at least fulfils the dictum of Ecclesiastes 3:1–8; he at least represents America’s moral cosmos in full colour - both its beauty and brave passion - whereas Mrs Lee only had the potential but never the heart or sinew to do so. In that sense, Ratcliffe is Adams’ ironical anti-hero, Calvary is for him, if perhaps the author did not realise this himself. Only the acknowledged sinner can repent.

Maybe I am being a little harsh on Adams. He was a cynical realist about politicians and politics: he understood that the moral foundations of the American Republic were dubious, but this perhaps caused him to move too far in the other direction. Like most good cynics - especially the greatest one, Diogenes - Adams’ unrealistic evaluations of his fellow Man arise from a Quixotic sort of moral idealism. In fact, Adams hated Washington’s public men: among his quoted comments about them: “If a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?” Adams conveys his brutal realism in the form of subtle surrealism, rather in the style of Le Sang des bêtes. The put-downs, the fights, the petty wars, the arguments, the rivalries - even actual violence - do not take place on some battlefield or on the floor of Congress or from a bully pulpit, or even in a courtroom; it all happens in or around a quiet ladies’ drawing room in civic Washington, and rather like a parallax, as such we see the object of our attention much more keenly, if incongruently. Yet it is clear that Adams has retained his faith in democracy and his hope for it, but it was a sceptic’s faith. The scepticism probably began with his extensive studies of the début du siècle presidencies: Adams had famously historicised Jefferson as the farmer-philosopher president who had to set-aside provincial virtue to advance his statecraft.

Is Adams right to have faith and hope in democracy? Interestingly, in contrast to modern times, the tradition of American political thought is Platonic. The original American political vision was anti-political, and even anti-Hobbesian: it held that government is the people. Lincoln’s Biblical aphorism at Gettysburg was very un-American, in fact an elegy for republican government: the encapsulation of the very Hobbesian tyranny of moral-democratic sovereignty that the rebel Founding Fathers (with the exception of Hamilton) had sought to upturn. The Republic was to be replaced with ‘democracy’, its Virginian heroes like Robert E. Lee and the fictional Mr Carrington were to be replaced by the Silas P. Ratcliffes of this world: in actual history, men like Daniel Webster, Thaddeus Stevens, say, or Andrew Johnson. Gulliver was to be pulled down by the Lilliputians – finally. The backdrop to this new paradigm was a shift in political-economy, from pre-industrial to industrial society, from the organic ethno-democracy of the Old Republic to the beginnings of mass enfranchisement and mass democracy. With these changes came the psychological afflictions of a mass society: the mal du siècle and the sense of alienation, not just in the way posited by Marx, but also experienced and observed as a separation of ruler from ruled, as a growing sense of political and social complexity, and with this, the kind of compartmentalisation of social issues that is required in an industrial society but that makes responsive democracy impossible. In such a climate, it no longer seems possible for rulers to act in the interests of people, still less The People; instead, they must calculate and reckon on a utilitarian basis what is good for all, or as many people as possible. Thus we see a shift in the nature of virtù, the values that sustain the political community, and in the conflicting moral sensibilities of Ratcliffe and Carrington, we see vestiges of the dichotomy. Carrington is holding to the virtù of the original Republic, with which he would have seen a continuation in the Confederacy, for which he fought. Carrington’s civic credo is reaction, order, tradition, hierarchy and republican aristocracy, and is anti-democratic. His mores and customaries are honour, duelling, chivalry and ma parole d'honneur. The common good is defined and pursued by society’s best men, who are landed and ecologically tied to the country as if it were their own flesh and blood. To them, slavery was a paternalistic and humane institution.

Ratcliffe, in contrast, represents the virtù of mass democracy, with which slavery was an irreconcilable evil, and the relevant values are wrapped up in capitalism, industrialism, modernity, meritocracy and democracy; society is ruled by elective tyrants whose artifacts are the contract, the statute and the ballot box, and who define the common good according to the needs of capital, a class not necessarily tied to the country, seeking support and ratification from the individuated masses. Senator Ratcliffe, one of these elective tyrants and a possible future president of the United States, is meant to be what this novel describes as one of the “shade trees”: an impactful and consequential figure, perhaps with Svengali qualities. The president in this novel, for his part, is perceived to be quite an honest man of humble stock – one of Nature’s noblemen – this perception relating chiefly to his background as a stone-cutter. Perhaps there is something in the link between honesty and humility of occupation or vocation, but it is difficult to see what it is. We assume that the stone-cutter makes an ‘honest living’ because there is little scope for him to lie in going about a job that is based on fixing and repairing stone structures, but his job is not the sum of his character. True, a statesman can be as honest as a stone-cutter, but the problem is that a stone-cutter can be as honest as a statesman. We may also ask, is the honesty of this Nazarene-like figure much good to anybody in his chosen field? Adams seems to want to make the Socratean link between knowledge and virtue, and would have us believe that Ratcliffe is more a Lilliputian than a Brobdingnagian in this respect, but maybe it is the other way round? The Plain Man is only operative in the Wabash. In Washington, D.C. he is more vulnerable to the wiles of seasoned Capitol Men. On his home turf, he is an independent man, in the federal jungle he is prey to manipulation and control by cleverer men like Ratcliffe who can appeal to his less base attributes: the pride and vanity that took him from the Wabash to seek ‘greatness’ and immortality. Indeed, through his novel, Adams suggests to us that what Mrs Lee - a figurative Gulliver - found in Washington City was a race of Lilliputians: mean, back-stabbing, conniving and corrupt. The obvious flaw with this view is that, moral Lilliputians the Washingtonian statesmen may be, but some of them nevertheless cast long shadows.

Has democracy civilised us? It has not turned us against barbaric practices. We still associate greatness with war and even today our politicians are responsible for the deaths and maiming of many thousands under the aegis of the nation-state’s moral privilege to carry out violence. Is Plato right to see democracy as degraded? Are we better for it? The Founding Fathers perhaps knew or intuited that the political system they created would eventually deteriorate into a democracy, and so they put in place various checks and balances in the system in order to slow and counter this decline, but these measures were insufficient. The decline into ‘democratic tyranny’ that began in the 19th. century was perhaps borne out of what Adams through this novel calls “late 19th. century cynicism”. The works of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Tolstoy, among others, that revived the spirit of Antisthenes, were the culmination of a materialistic and scientific movement that had begun with the Enlightenment. Man was instilled with a mechanistic understanding of existence, making people less inclined towards reverence and hereditary rule. This marked an irradicable shift in consciousness. We find in this novel that Mrs Lee accepts Darwinism and argues with Ratcliffe about it, asserting that humans are evolved from monkeys. Interestingly, Ratcliffe - a church-goer - is unconvincingly sceptical and mocks the idea. Which view represents progress? The monkey view or that of the churchman? Perhaps there is something feminine and regressive about Darwinism: maybe it reflects the instinctive yearning for the vestigial and the primitive and a longing to return to it. Ratcliffe believes in the higher cause, which requires that we uphold the specialness of Man and allow him to make his own decisions, ordained by Faith; whereas Mrs Lee is implying that we are just animals and genetic vessels in the end and presumably a large part of our behaviour is governed by base drives. Yet it is Ratcliffe who acts more in keeping with the Darwinian idea, while Mrs Lee upholds the idées reçues. Ratcliffe’s approach to Washington is something akin to honouring Survival of the Fittest – in order to survive politically, he is prepared to do whatever gets him ahead in his chosen environment. Mrs Lee is left with a choice: she either has to adopt Ratcliffian morality, or she must adapt in a different way - by pursuing her own niche within the same environment or fleeing.

We must remember that Survival of the Fittest does not necessarily equate to Survival of The Best. Nature imposes an objective standard on what would otherwise be subjectivity. Democracy may well represent the deterioration of civics that the Founding Fathers anticipated, but it is nevertheless a triumph of Cynicism in its purest form – not a demonstration that Darwin was wrong, but an affirmation of his ideas. As such, people like Ratcliffe impose a disconcerting realisation on the observant. Whether intended or not, this novel shows us the inadequacies of the Little People’s moral outlook. Still more depressing is the realisation that there is no apocalyptic justice for the dark, profane Brobdingnagians, who are winners, and no ultimate redemption for the Quixotic Lilliputians, who are losers. There will be no ever-increasing advancement to a summit of light, only ‘progress’ in an evolutionary sense. The whig historians are wrong. In its palingenesis, American society has reached a mass-democratic phase in which political power is titular and appointments are the outcome of vapid popularity contests. The enfranchised population is shallow and steeped in commercial views, taught to regard old and new as ‘things’ to be switched and discarded on whims of convenience.

The old/new contrast between tradition and expediency is most evident in this novel during a visit by the social party to the old, dilapidated estate of General Robert E. Lee. With its dark emptiness and references to stylised pots, white marble, and machined plasterwork, the scene is an attractive nod to the emerging Southern Gothic literature movement, and also a sad reminder for Carrington of the reality of defeat. If war really is an extension of politics by other means, Carrington has seen the principle in action. All around him - physically and spiritually, in his own life and in the lives of his family - are the grim reminders of defeat. It is one thing to be conquered by a stronger force, but the point is that the South is forced also to change: politically, socially and culturally. The old thing must be abandoned for the new thing, as a sign of the conqueror’s permanent victory. Robert Lee’s run-down estate is not a manufactured monumental to celebrate a mythical history, like the tombs and icons of Washington City, but a genuine knife to the gut: a monument from the Old Time, left by the New to rot visibly into irrelevancy. Thus, Von Clausewitz’s maxim is reversed: politics becomes an extension of war by other means, in which parties that cannot overthrow the state by force seek to control or upturn it by intrigue. Men like Lincoln and the fictional Ratcliffe thrive in such coy environments, notwithstanding that they may sometimes be titular war leaders. The defeat of the South confirmed the mastery of the Lincoln-type managerial politician: revolutionary war against the state (as opposed to war inter nation-states, a different thing) could not be waged any more by violent means, instead stratagem would govern public affairs. Still the animal-nature is there, beneath the thin surface of civilisation. Yet we are also civilised and even appear to have a facility for civilisation. How can that be? Perhaps civilisation came about as a way of minimising suffering, this being in everyone’s rational self-interest. Maybe physically and morally weak men like Lincoln and the fictitious Ratcliffe somehow connived civilisation into existence, or perhaps civilisation weakened men genetically and they are the result, so that civilisation is devolving us? Taking us back to those Darwinian monkeys, even? Yet to Darwin, and anybody understanding of evolutionary theory, this would be ‘progress’, entirely consistent with Nature’s needs and purposes (if the clumsy formulation will be excused).

Possibly this novel is a disguised Gothic work. The scene at General Lee’s dilapidated plantation provides us with a window into the deeper primal and transgressive forces that lie at the heart of American history and that are rarely discussed in the mainstream. Like all modern nations, the United States is built on genocide, mass killing and suffering. In the novel, General Lee’s mansion is now a sad shell around which citizens and antiquaries can mosey at leisure, whereas once it was the seat of a great general and Southern hero. Meanwhile, on the horizon, below the purple haze, is the centre of federal power that has supplanted men like Lee in every possible sense, a designed political city that will resist its own redundancy – to the death, if need be. We are meant to accept this New Thing as the one legitimate thing until it becomes the Old Thing, replaced by a new New Thing. No questions must be asked or need be. The smiling, reassuring faces on the news, and the respectable robed judges with their learned voices and sophistic tomes, all derive their legitimacy from the most appalling acts of inhumanity and all maintain it on the basis of ultimately threatening similarly-inhumane acts against anybody who should challenge them. Adams’ novel is telling us the story: it’s the horror and darkness at the heart of a political dream: someone somewhere imposed his will on others. Violence and barbarism, then, are components of a sustainable civilisation, not inimical to it. Culture is only one of the trinity. Now the monuments to violence and barbarism are tourist attractions or subject-matter for hobbyists delving into conspiratorial musings that do not seem to rise much above the level of gossip and paranoia. Perhaps in a sense that is the point. We are not meant to understand, we are mere ideologically-infused tourists, honouring the Old, maybe weeping at its feet. Perhaps that is how tourism began? In the distant past, before the advent of industry, few people moved from place-to-place or would have seen the need as all of their needs were fulfilled in their locality. Presumably there were not tourists after the American Revolutionary War, or the English War of the Roses, say, seeking out artefacts and battlefields as a way of ‘touching history’? At the beginning of the post-industrial era (from the 1850s onwards in England), middle-class people suddenly found themselves with leisure time and decided that they would honour the Old Time and the Old Ways, or they just wanted to touch history as a way of experiencing meaning and tangibility in an otherwise alienated existence. Thus, tourism invented history. Before there were tourists, there were historians, but they were not self-consciously concerned with writing history as history, they were simply codifiers of folklore. It is our era that is self-consciously historical, because we have become reflective beings: the ultimate Cynics. We now reflect on our history as history, and the history of history, and the history of ourselves as a species, and we even self-consciously create history and memorialise it and then go round visiting the memorials. We have moved beyond our localities and ceased to be parochial.

Having begun to understand our place in the world and our folklores as systems (what we call history and ideology), we have also become conscious of the one thing at the centre of all life: suffering as suffering. The signature of an empathetic being is a wish to see suffering minimised. Civilisation is the penultimate palliative, Heaven (or death, if you are atheist) being the ultimate conclusion of suffering. Suffering, then, leads to love or at least the end. For the believer, morality is thus an inescapable paradox: if love is with God alone and we must strive for our end by following Christ’s Way and repenting all sins so that we can stand clean before God, how can one be insensible to a society that practices mass killing in the open under dubious rationalisations of freedom, liberty, equality and justice, and affects to elect, promote and respect the people who do this as law-givers? Both Jesus and Tolstoy had the answer, but few practising Christians embrace their teachings in any serious sense. At the very least, the believer must experience chronic daily mortification. It seems that this so-called Christian ‘morality’ is in rags, and perhaps the real theme of this novel is how such a civilisation – maybe any civilisation - is unsustainable and must inevitably turn in on itself, even kill itself. Why and how might that happen? I would suggest the core problem is the nihilism that superstitious dogma such as Christianity inculcates in self-reflective, self-conscious beings who are aware of history as history and can ‘see themselves’. It is a problem that is not soluble democratically – arguably, democracy in the modern sense even part-causes the dissonance - yet these ruminations are not above mundane politicians. Their type stridently avow that they will create their own City of God on Earth - except for Ratcliffe. Like most corrupt men, he is too honest to submit to such fancies, even in front of the public. Ever the moral-political evangelist, his touch of idiosyncracy is that he believes that purifying government is pointless before a nation of reprobates - he will not even entertain the notion. Yet he is a churchman who disavows a large sector of science and no doubt he may say that all that matters is our place in the City of God. Morality then becomes a mundane and dispensable concern. For Ratcliffe, there is no New Jerusalem, only a distant City that the clean and undefective may enter on conclusion of their lives, or at the Reckoning. There are no standards to be had. All are sinners. All that matters is that we should acknowledge and repent our sins. Ratcliffe creditably does so, only to continue sinning, presumably to repent later at the feet of the Old, weeping there if he has to. This exposes Christianity’s ironical nihilism, which Mrs Lee surmises, causing her to reject Ratcliffe’s City entirely.

America Will Break

A review of 'The Guns of the South: A Novel' by Harry Turtledove

Note: The following review was originally published at Amazon.co.uk on 24th. June 2018.   Link to original review: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R233VDZRN6WFFO?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

It is winter 1864. The setting is the field headquarters of the Army of Northern Virginia, the main military force of the Confederate States Army. The story opens during a lull in the fighting. The Confederacy is facing probable defeat at the hands of the Union. The Army’s commander, General Robert E. Lee, is despondently penning a letter to his president, Jefferson Davis, about some military matter. Hearing an unusual report from a gun, he makes enquiries and discovers that the Army has been approached by a strange man with an out-of-place accent, one Andries Rhoodie, part of a mysterious foreign group called the ‘AWB’. Rhoodie implies that the letters AWB stand for America Will Break. It develops they can offer the Confederacy’s military a weapon far ahead of its time, an AK-47 rifle that can be mass-produced. The AK-47 is a fully-automatic rifle, quite an advance on the primitive forerunner of the machine gun, the Gatling, that was available at the time (in fact used by the Union), thus offering the promise of a major advantage to the South come resumption of fighting in the Spring. The opportunity is seized and the AK-47 is soon adopted as the tactical weapon of choice for the Confederacy. This changes the outcome of the whole War. The novel tells in parallel the dramas, decisions and adventures of, respectively, General Lee and an ordinary Confederate soldier from Nash County, North Carolina, one Nate Caudell, a first sergeant in the 47th. Regiment of the North Carolina Infantry, who along with his fellow soldiers, is one of the first to make use of the AK-47 in battle. Once out of butternut, Caudell goes back to his teaching.

I enjoyed this novel. It does go a little slow initially and you have to be patient: but the story picks up greatly near the halfway point. Civil War aficionados will love it, as will people from the American South, especially Virginia: there are so many geographic references, battlefields, landmarks, towns and settlements, and lots of colourful military characters and other actual historical personalities get a mention. I would not say that the depiction of the South is especially rich or detailed, but it is competent, and though I am no expert on the archaic South, Turtledove seems to get the verbal Southernisms right. I love the way the author uses actual historical figures in the story. The true nature of Robert E. Lee is an historical controversy all by itself. Here, Turtledove cleverly uses the humanism of Lee as a literary axiom for bringing out the subtleties and complexities of the Confederacy, its prominent figures and their multi-layered loyalties. Whether accurately or not, Lee is portrayed as a man who is less than enthused about slavery, and evidently balks at the mistreatment of blacks, but he is loyal to a fault for the South nonetheless - on the principle of constitutional freedom, though perhaps also because of his attachment to Virginia. Lee is presented almost as the embodiment of the South’s noble aristocracy and its Cavalier values; a fit noble aristocrat who goes on constitutional walks while batting away probing questions from local reporters; he is also an old general haunted by the memory of Pickett’s Charge, a tactical mistake at Gettysburg that he sees as his own blunder. Lee thinks of himself as Cavalier and not fanatical, and disdains the fanaticism of the AWB. But Lee himself is, in his own way, quite fanatical when it comes to upholding his honour and pursuing what he sees as the right course, based on a sense of integrity. Which type of fanaticism will win out? Will the AWB’s fanaticism eventually prove to be their undoing? You will have to read the novel to find out.

An interesting area for debate is Lee’s views on slavery. Although not an enthusiastic slaver, Lee was a slave-owner at different times in his life and he held out some benefits for blacks in the institution. It is also clear from the historical record, and hinted in this novel, that Lee regarded whites as superior to blacks. In truth, Lee’s perspective on slavery fell into the humane more than the human category. He saw slavery as a necessary institution for black Africans transposed to the Americas; at the same time, he extended manumission to them and other support, but that is very far from a demonstration of opposition to, or even dislike of, slavery. Turtledove’s well-varnished muta-historical depiction of Lee gives a slightly different impression and is arguably inaccurate. In his depiction of Lee, has Turtledove fallen for the so-called Lost Cause arguments that were used to justify Jim Crow? Or is he just memorialising the Southern mentality as part of the interior rationalisations of this novel? The author seems to use Lee as a device through which to interpret the moral necessity of emancipation as a fulfilment of honour: Lee observes, for one thing, that if black soldiers can fight as well as whites, then there would seem to be no moral basis for allowing that blacks are the inferior of whites. But Turtledove’s ‘modernist’ Lee is a myth and out-of-time. Turtledove is attempting to reverse Lee’s character and figuratively de-situate him from the South. Instead of upholding the ‘humane’ but “peculiar” institution in comparison to the wage-slavery of industrial-modernism, Turtledove’s Lee chooses the human path. Even so, the idea of Lee as both a public and private abolitionist, while a historical mutation, would not be entirely implausible given the run of a Southern victory; still, it must be emphasised, this ‘modernist’ Lee is a myth.

There is also the riddle of Lincoln – who spoke of fine, inflexible principles, such as liberty, but at the same time did support slavery; was a racist by today’s standards; wanted to deport and resettle emancipated blacks in Africa; fought the War savagely and abused his constitutional powers in the process; and, would take revenge on the South and on white Southerners in the aftermath of a Union victory. I’m not convinced Lincoln was opposed to slavery on any principle. It was more that he regarded it as outmoded and would have preferred to remove blacks from the United States altogether. Whatever is the case, Lincoln is an important character in this novel, albeit peripheral, and shares scenes with Lee. Indeed, you might say this is a novel about iconism and iconoclasm. Lincoln becomes the veritable iconoclast in this alternate timeline, but you could say he is an inimical iconoclast even in the real history, just not as derided as Lee. He becomes the Devil in this novel, but in the real timeline, Lincoln was the Devil anyway, yet a redeemable figure in the eyes of Northerners, blacks and ‘progressive’ Southerners. Lincoln is unusual in that his legacy is black or white, a little like Nixon, Truman, FDR and perhaps even Wilson. These presidents are normally given a Manichean treatment, seen as either good or bad, depending on your point-of-view, and are re-invented from time-to-time in revisionist histories that attempt to rehabilitate them for one side or the other. Lincoln is rejected entirely by neo-Confederate Southerners but not fully claimed by Northerners and ‘progressives’. Yet Lincoln was a statesman - not just a politician, but a transcendent figure who stood for the entire nation. Why is he not more respected, even by the descendants of the defeated South? Is there a meaningful operative separation of the roles of politician and transcendent statesman? This is something that Lee seems to agonise over as his relationship with Lincoln as his political experience develops. Lincoln and Lee in this novel are statesmen and sought to transcend their own national politics and bring about what they believed to be the common good, but Lincoln was also very political. Lee, an aristocrat, perhaps fits the role of statesman better than Lincoln, but is that because he is an aristocrat living in a social and financial bubble? Lee has largely assumed his station in life rather than earned it, but he still has had to prove himself. He has still had it tough, yet his background as a sort of American nobleman rather than grafter does colour not just his affectations but his political sensibility: like the provincial grafter Lincoln, he sees a higher purpose, but unlike Lincoln he wants to get there in the right way. Hence he declines the offer of a Union command and instead fights for the Confederacy in defence of constitutional liberalism.

Lee also rails against sectionalism (as did Lincoln). Lee is the South’s Lincoln, you might say. But is sectionalism wrong? A definition of it is preoccupation with selfish or parochial concerns at the expense of the general well-being, but slave owning interests and those who support them are looking after what they think is the common good. Even Lee is eventually forced to become a ‘politician’ and exercise all the familiar tricks, using “deception and misdirection” to do (what he sees as) good. Much of these dilemmas are about the inevitable psychology of leaders and leadership. We have an image in our minds of leaders as tough, strong and imposing individuals, but often the true leader is somebody who is gifted with detachment and can look at the world with disinterest from above. Most of the major characters in this novel, are, in their own way, leaders and consequently quite lonely and set apart, or above, ordinary people. Caudell, as a first sergeant, is a petty leader. Like Lee, he is a proverbial Odd Man who meta-analyses everything around him. He sees that slavery is morally flawed. Caudell is the General Lee in his own micro-environment. Lincoln, too, seems like a loner in the way he is portrayed here. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" - Shakespeare's play Henry IV, Part 2. Leadership can be lonely. Lincoln, in dark austere suit and stovepipe hat, tall and thin, cuts an almost Christ-like figure, or Satan-like. He embodies a morality unto himself, the hallmark of a personage, but this comes at a price: he speaks above and perhaps past the ordinary man and is misunderstood. He does not necessarily command universal affection, but he is respected. It is interesting that Lee commands automatic respect among the ordinary Confederate soldiers – almost like a lodestone. Could men like Andries Rhoodie, and another AWB man, Benny Lang, command such respect? On the face of it, their leadership style is blunt, inhumane and rather cruel. Does effective leadership require humanity, morals and mutual respect, or can it just be based on fear and discipline? President Davis seems concerned by Lee as a potential political threat and offers him the presidency once his own term has expired. This implies that Davis may not be able to count on Lee’s loyalty during his term and so wants to pre-empt and neutralise the political threat he represents, and perhaps also control him once he assumes the presidency in his place. We associate loyalty with noble virtue, but is loyalty always a good trait? One imagines that loyalty could be a burden for an independent spirit like Lee who values other selfless virtues. Invoking Shakespeare’s Caesarean play Act 5, Scene 5, Lee was “…the noblest Roman of them all…”. Maybe that’s harsh. Lee is not Brutus exactly, more a would-be Brutus. He embodies the silent legitimacy of established generations-old interests that view the world in a detached manner. Not preoccupied with day-to-day politics like Davis, he has a disinterested air about him and even dislikes politics, seeing it as a necessary evil or grudging duty. Thus, he is classically aristocratic. But in developing into a statesman and honing a sense of virtù to augment and refine his virtue, Lee has to relegate his loyalty to the original values of the Confederacy and even work against its essential constitutional provisions in order to do what he considers to be both the right thing to do and what is in the longer term interests of the Confederacy itself. As such, he is betraying the Confederacy and his own political and social friends in order (as he sees it) to save them and the Confederacy.

The novel itself and the author’s historical note at the end demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of the Civil War. This is not surprising given that Turtledove has a doctorate in Byzantine history and he is known to research his novels thoroughly. Although Turtledove is Jewish and anti-white, he does not entirely fall into the same flawed understanding that other writers sometimes have. He understands that the Civil War was not just about race and slavery. Turtledove doesn’t really go into what caused the Civil War, which is just as well as the causes were complex and would require their own dissertation. For one thing, what caused the Civil War is not necessarily the same thing as why the War itself was fought. More important than the preservation of slavery were constitutional differences. In a true sense, the American Civil War was the Second American Revolution. The Confederates, believing in states’ rights, were trying to re-capture the original spirit of pre-Constitutional America: a confederation of independent nations, rather than the centralised federation that America was becoming as it industrialised. The Unionists, while not rejecting of states’ rights, held to a much more centralised interpretation of federalism. A lot of people think it was a war over whether the South should be allowed to continue with slavery, but it was more complex than that. Much of it was down to political and financial intrigues arising from the country’s Western expansion. Although the new Western territories did not promise much potential for slavery, due to the poorer quality of land, what helped kick things off was the political imbalance that would result in the South’s favour if the West was allowed to be notionally pro-slavery.

The best alternate histories are muta-historical rather than counter-historical, and I like the way that Turtledove achieves this quality in his writing, changing the destinies of specific historical personalities in line with the alternate logic of the new timeline. Turtledove only presents an alternative timeline in regard to a surface narrative. In reality his novel is his commentary on what really happened in consequence of the Confederacy’s bitter defeat. As the author alludes, slavery wasn’t really (or at least, not entirely) about profit, rather it was an institution embedded in Southern culture. True, slavery was at different times a very profitable institution – for instance, it was re-instituted in the Province of Georgia, having previously been abolished, because it was considered profitable. But by the Civil War, it was becoming unprofitable and burdensome. Slaves, who were not vested in production, were inefficient, unproductive and required huge sunk investment – see, for instance, the famous study by John Elliott Cairnes. It is also difficult to see how such an economy, in which slave-holding was a major element, could be innovative. I agree with the author that slavery was not just wrong, but wrong-headed. In reality, even before the Civil War began, slavery was becoming economically outmoded for the South and retrograding its culture, preventing innovation and stifling profit – and it would have ultimately put the Confederacy itself at risk, either through a slaves’ revolt of some kind or simply due to the lack of capital and poor economic development it caused. Lee’s reformist approach to slavery that we see in the novel is, in a convoluted sort of way, exactly what happened. Even in discussions within the leadership circle of the Confederacy in this novel, only a weak justification can be offered for slavery. In one scene, President Davis expounds on a mudsill rationalisation, characteristic of the Confederate mindset and that amounts to whataboutery: modernist-industrial societies have wage slavery, so the logic goes, thus Southern agrarian slavery is justified. There were those within the real Confederacy who had the vision and imagination to recognise the flaws of slavery as an institution – for instance: Confederate general officer, Patrick Cleburne, described antebellum slavery as a “peculiar institution” that left the Confederacy vulnerable; he wanted to emancipate Southern blacks so that they could fight in the Army. That plan in itself revealed the flaw in the thinking behind Southern slavery. Blacks were seen as a resource, to be used by whites as they saw fit. It had not been considered that by arming blacks to fight in the War, the basis would be laid for armed rebellion against the white slaveocracy. Slavery sowed the seeds of its own demise and even with a Southern victory, would surely have been reformed out of existence. Probably it was only the North’s economic measures against the South that helped to entrench it and keep it going for longer than it did, even in the face of foreign powers refusing to recognise the Confederate States in the main due to its slavery. Nevertheless, I think the author is right that disputes over slavery, even the very existence of slavery, would have formed the basis of the political culture of a victorious South.

Excellent though this novel is, I think it is marred from becoming a great work by the author bringing his own preening moral and political outlook into it. It’s preachy, and it would have been better just to let the story tell itself. For one thing, Turtledove’s depiction of ordinary Southern white men is very racist and templated. He sets up Nate Caudwell as the counterpoint, a literate and educated man, and a teacher, as well as a Confederate soldier, who ‘enlightens’ the other ‘ignorant’ and illiterate Confederate soldiers. People like Turtledove reveal their own peculiar brand of latent racism when they cast black slaves as passive victims of slavery or the white Confederate soldiers as simple-minded bigots. For another, Turtledove’s depiction of the Afrikaans men is, arguably, also racist in itself. It’s certainly crude and based around stereotypes. In the end, brilliant author though he is, Turtledove is just another leftist Jew seeking to tie down Gulliver. The AWB men are portrayed as demonic almost entirely. Lee comes to the conclusion that Andries Rhoodie has been lying to him about what Lincoln would do if the North won, but are Rhoodie’s warnings really lies or do they have their root in Lee’s rather generous assessment of Lincoln and his tendency towards acting nobly rather than putting interests first? History is about interpretation and mostly secondary sources. What we know now about the South and its motivations is largely dependent on interpretation of it by historians. It’s rare that people will go to primary sources, and also quite rare that people will pay due respect to the politicised voices of the South. The provincial South is also now being deinstitutionalised and disprivileged in the American South itself, replaced with a more cosmopolitan vision influenced by commerce. But is our understanding of Southern history and the Civil War correct? This novel certainly adopts the politically-correct view. That said, the deeper question this novel asks is valid: What is the price that must be paid for a society that we want? The South was a white utopia, but this came at the moral and ethical price of slavery. Do we turn our eyes blind to injustice against the scapegoat, and even against our neighbours, so that norms are maintained? The author is suggesting that the Confederacy was underpinned by a sort of Satanic pact of hyper-normalcy, in which injustice sat alongside justice, unfreedom existed alongside freedom, in other words a society fit for whites in which the white man was supreme. Yet the author’s view is that that can only lead to unfreedom and injustice for all. This is the typical liberal view, in which freedom is a construction of the individual. The opposite reactionary view would be that freedom depends on and is a construction of community. Which is the right approach? One way to tackle this would be to ask: Do all societies, including liberal-democracies, have such ghosts and scapegoats? We can see that they do. In a very real sense, the author’s type of humanitarianism can lead only to a chimeric Panglossia. The real questions remain unanswered, and perhaps a place to begin would be with a fuller understanding of slavery. This is where Turtledove’s myopia overrides his historical sophistication in that he paints slavery as a cruel institution and the AWB men as evil abusers of the slaves. Moreover, he disingenuously transplants the cruel-minded AWB men into the mid-19th. century and purports that they are a representation of slaveholding, ignoring that the AWB men’s perception of slavery may be more the result of Turtledove’s own distortions and similar misrepresentations of the relevant era from others. As such, Turtledove’s novel embodies in itself a self-conscious anachronism. Certainly, slavery was an appalling institution through contemporary eyes, but that does not imply cruelty. If slaves were the animate property of slave-owners, this implies custodianship. Slaves had to be looked-after by their owners. Arguably, the author’s jaundiced perspective is the corollary of neo-Confederalist whitewashing of abuses. Were slaves really treated as badly on the whole as the author depicts, or is mistreatment being exaggerated here, through the medium of the AWB men? The author makes a lot of the fact, as he claims, that blacks were banned from reading and literacy in some Confederate states. I don’t know if this is the case, but if true, it’s not in itself cruel. Most of them would not have had an interest in or need for literacy. Another problem arises with the author’s political-philosophical perspective. The Civil Rights era was in effect a replaying of the Civil War drama and its North-South antagonisms, but underpinning it are important philosophical differences. There is the difference over what is considered freedom. The Left believe that freedom depends on equality. The Right believes that freedom depends on inequality. The equality/freedom dichotomy has to be examined in context. In context, Jim Crow ‘separate but equal’ accommodations produced superior results for blacks compared to post-Civil Rights Act integration. Anybody who doubts this should look at Detroit – once a major industrial hub, now a metropolitan slum.

Has the secessionist South been vindicated by these modern problems? Perhaps, but equally this can lead to the wrong conclusions, in particular favourable but ill-conceived evaluations of the Confederacy. Certainly the South has been romanticised. Some white nationalist go further. They sympathise or associate themselves spiritually and politically with the Confederacy and even want to see its latter-day revival and restoration. Can such positions be valid in view of actual history? I would argue they cannot. First, they represent the converse of Turtledove’s flawed moral historiography: the Confederacy was inimically deontological. There was never a Southern white telos. Confederate statesmen would have done whatever was necessary to uphold state interests, including the slaveholding interests; it was never about slavery, it was about power and political economy. Today’s American white nationalists are, if anything, inheritors of the North rather than the South. With the South, there is no continuation. For one thing, the South regarded black Africans as a resource, in much same way that blacks were regarded under the pseudo-apartness of South Africa. For another, one cannot help but observe the irony that it was the Southern plantation owners who brought black Africans to America, not primarily the Northern interests, and it is no coincidence that during the antebellum, Northern cities tended to be demographically more white than in the South. It was actually the institution of slavery and the South that brought black Africans to America, and it was the South’s obstinate refusal to reform slavery away that did the damage.

Did the Northern victory in the Civil War put off what was inevitable: a coming-apart of the American settlement? Will America break? This would seem to be the logical consequence of a multi-racial society, but perhaps a better way of formulating the question to help us understand things would be: ‘Must America break?’ America’s eventual dissolution seems inevitable and probably was predictable to the pre-Actonite liberals who founded the country and drafted the Constitution. Thus we have to consider whether there is any way of preventing it, and indeed whether prevention is more desirable than the destructive cure. Below the surface in American politics, the basic cleave is still discernible between those who would fight for a true Jeffersonian constitutional republic and those who essentially believe the federal government should impose common values and run people’s lives. We see a replaying of this conflict in different ways: for instance, between ‘conservatives’ and so-called ‘progressives’, to the extent that there is even physical, institutional and geographic separation of the two groups - not least because ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ are more often than not considered to be racially-charged euphemisms, even if this is not normally spelled-out explicitly. The Northern solution of ‘soft’ apartheid has proved to be more enduring than its ‘hard’ counterpart, Jim Crow. America, a massive country, allows for this possibility, but as the collapse of Jim Crow showed, indeed as the Civil War itself proved, segregation and separation are not sustainable. Perhaps another civil war is indeed on the way?

Those thoughts aside, how to rate this novel? It’s well-written, parts are excellently-written, with good human touches – such as scenes involving Lee’s family. Lee is drawn whole, and the author is very humane in that sense. What puts me in a slight quandary is the structural weakness of the plot. To take one obvious point: the Confederates wouldn’t just wait for the new rifles to appear, and if Rhoodie can make one prototype rifle work, then he is clearly not a bragger. That being the case, Lee would want to know all the hows, whys and wheres of the rifle’s mass production, in order to ensure security of supply and to make sure that Rhoodie wasn’t supplying the same weapons to the North. There is also no explanation for Rhoodie’s appearance. Would a strange man obviously carrying what plainly is a weapon be allowed anywhere near the generals in a Confederate Army camp? Another thing is that there is no explanation of the time travel technology and how this came about. That in turn leaves a question mark over whether such a weapon as the AK-47 could be fabricated in the mid-19th. century – something the whole plot hangs on. But that’s a mere technicality that we can pass over. Then there’s Turtledove’s obvious politics, which put me off, but this novel grew on me and my eventual conclusion is that, on this evidence, Turtledove is brilliant. I will have to read his other books.

I’m giving this five stars. It’s an ‘A’ grade novel, but strictly an A-minus. What could have been a very good or even great work is marred by the author’s politically-correct views. There is a first-rate alternate history to be written – probably as a series of novels - that would convey to a younger, more right-leaning, generation the subtleties of the American Civil War. This novel, though in its own way brilliant, isn’t it.