The art of controlling speech while avoiding the appearance of doing so has a long history in China. If ten years ago political censorship was done by telephone, now it is out on the table, in writing. Though euphemisms continue to be useful to China’s rulers, it has now become increasingly obvious that their use is declining. In the era of Xi Jinping, repression is often stated baldly, even proudly.
Books
Yaa Gyasi
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
Yaa Gyasi’s sweeping novel Homegoing begins with the divergent fates of two half-sisters in 18th Century Ghana, and weaves in the stories of their descendants across eight generations and three hundred years of history. In this episode of the podcast, the author talks with Miwa Messer about how a visit to a slave-trading castle on the West African coast inspired her ambitious and critically acclaimed debut.
Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.
Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.
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Leaving Walden
After two years, two months, and two days, Henry David Thoreau left his cabin in the Concord woods on September 6, 1847. As explained in the concluding chapter of Walden, Thoreau made his decision to move out in the same spirit of adventure as his decision to move in:
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves . . . The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
Recent books, many of them published in honor of this year’s bicentennial festivities — Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817 — certainly reflect his “more lives to live” determination, as well as the diversity and intensity of his interests. In his award-winning Thoreau the Land Surveyor, Patrick Chura shows how the profession Thoreau took up after Walden so deeply influenced his environmentalism and his writing. In The Boatman, Robert M. Thorson describes a man as happy on New England’s rivers and streams as he is tramping her woods. Geoff Wisner’s Thoreau’s Animals, like his earlier Thoreau’s Wildflowers, is arranged to reflect the seasons and Thoreau’s wonder about them in his journals, as in this May 27, 1841 entry:
I sit in my boat on Walden, playing the flute this evening, and see the perch, which I seem to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the bottom, which is strewn with the wrecks of the forest, and feel that nothing but the wildest imagination can conceive of the manner of life we are living. Nature is a wizard.
It may surprise some that Thoreau liked to play his flute for his friends, human and otherwise, and even liked a good sing-along. Scholar Laura Dassow Walls, author of the new biography Henry David Thoreau, cautions against trying to compartmentalize the man or failing to see the continuity in his worldview. In contrast to the more polarized approaches to Thoreau, Walls finds that his nature and political writing are connected by a common vision, and that the hermit-nag aspect of his personality is balanced by his “lively and charismatic” attributes. Walls also emphasizes the fundamental optimism that she finds in Thoreau — even given that the data-rich records he kept “help us measure the arrival of the Anthropocene epoch that threatens to overthrow everything he believed”:
Thoreau could look to “Nature” as an eternal fountain of renewal and regeneration, a sacred force capable of healing even the deepest acts of human destruction, including slavery, war, and environmental devastation . . . That the actions of human beings and the ancient fossil fuels they dug out of the ground to feed the engines of industry could fundamentally alter those natural processes — changing the chemistry of the atmosphere and of the encircling oceans, melting the poles, killing winter, killing life itself — was beyond Thoreau’s reckoning. Can his faith live on after nature, at least nature as he knew it has ended?
I think it can and will.
Walls notes that Walden ends with “an ecstatic vision into the regenerative forces of the Cosmos,” excerpted below. The new video game Walden is scheduled for commercial release this year; offering players “a kind of stillness at its core,” perhaps the game may guide a new generation to Thoreau and hasten the work of his wood bug:
Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!
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Not the Peaceable Kingdom: Melissa Harris on Michael Nichols
On one level, as its title suggests, A Wild Life: A Visual Biography of Michael Nichols, is a lavishly illustrated, 370-page account of legendary wildlife/nature photojournalist Michael “Nick” Nichols’s picaresque life and times.
Melissa Harris unfurls a compelling adventure story, tracking Alabama-born Nichols, once nicknamed “Nick Danger” by a close collaborator, as he moves from one episode to the next, displaying extraordinary endurance, ingenuity, and sangfroid in pursuit of his various missions. Marvel as Nichols and his partners improvise a device that allows him to photograph one of the grandest surviving redwoods in one of the last unspoiled forests of northern California. Watch Nichols risk life and limb to capture images of the Lechuguilla caves that suggest infinity, or as he accompanies Michael Fay, his ascetic, mono-focused doppelgänger, on portions of the Megatransect, an epic 455-day, 2,000-mile hike across the Congo Basin, undertaken to survey the ecology of the Central African forest. It’s one of multiple long-haul Nichols-generated projects in rugged environments across the African continent in pursuit of individualistic portrayals of gorillas, chimpanzees, elephants, lions, and tigers in their wild habitats.
Harris herself conducted several field trips and over eighty hours of interviews with her garrulous subject to underpin her narrative, which also contains testimonies from many of the remarkable collaborators — writers, scientists, assistants — who have facilitated his journey. In the manner of, say, John Richardson’s epic biography of Pablo Picasso, she integrates within the text vividly rendered reproductions of Nichols’s transcendent, hard-earned photographs, which are, after all, the meat of the matter.
It is perfectly possible to treat A Wild Life as a simply a exciting foray into the world of wildlife photography , without attending to Harris’s rigorous, jargon-free examination of the political economy of conservation — but that level is there for the taking. Harris offers learned essays on poaching, trophy hunting, the use of tiger bones in Chinese medicine, the domestication of wild animals, and issues of provenance and authenticity raised by images of the creatures in question. Perspectives honed during more than two decades as the editor of the Aperture Foundation’s quarterly journal and of numerous Aperture books lend authenticity to Harris’s accounts of Nichols’s relationships with Magnum Photos, where he developed the storytelling ethos that underpins every image, and National Geographic, which altered its editorial aesthetics to accommodate the stark, pitiless beauty of his vision.
“Nick also does not make conventionally pretty, sentimental, back-to-nature images,” Harris says. “His photographs have a lot of tension, drama. There is movement. There is emotionality, although he does not anthropomorphize. The animals are wild — he has to habituate them. It’s not the ‘peaceable kingdom.’ ”
That A Wild Life sells at a reasonable $35 price point testifies to Harris’s determination and engagement with her subject. “I spent my own money on the travels I did for the book and raised the money to do it as I wanted it to be,” she says. “I wanted it to fit Nick’s populism. Obviously, there’s some enlightened self-interest involved. It’s a complicated book, and I want people to read it; if they want to read it, I want it to be affordable. There’s a lot of intense stuff in here.” — Ted Panken
The Barnes & Noble Review: What was your path into this project?
Melissa Harris: During my years at Aperture, I’d worked with Nick on two books. One was Brutal Kinship, which documented his work, with Jane Goodall and others, on chimpanzees — in the wild, and as used for entertainment, and as pets. More recently was a book on elephants called Earth to Sky, with excerpts from different conservationists and other writers. I loved working with Nick. He’s very smart, enormously talented, and he’s focusing on conservation, which almost nobody else I’ve worked with does except for Richard Misrach — in a totally different way.
Nick and I sat down to talk about what our next project could be. I wanted to do something challenging that I’d never done before, though I didn’t necessarily know what that was. I wanted to write more. And I’d always wanted to be in the field with Nick.
In 2001, I’d interviewed Mike Fay, with whom Nick partnered on the Megatransect. I knew about the complexity of their working relationship and friendship. I knew that Mike could be remarkably difficult but also truly generous, and of course he’s a brilliant conservationist. I knew that Nick loves and respects him and yet sometimes was ready to kill him. I’d met Jane Goodall through working on Brutal Kinship. I was beginning to get very interested in these individuals. I’m drawn to obsessive people when they’re obsessing about something that matters. They’re not thinking about what they’re going to wear in the morning, or how they’re going to make their next zillion. They’re trying to save the world. It turned out that Nick liked the little text I wrote about Mike Fay. It was the first time he’d read anything I had written. I think he thought I’d be some academic, ridiculously esoteric, impenetrable writer. He knew I’d majored in art history at Yale. But then he was like, “Oh, this is a good read.” So we started to talk about trying out a biography. I’d done interviews with many other artists, and I liked the idea of doing them with Nick. Nick will say he baited me; I think I baited him.
BNR: Nichols has spent much of his career photographing for National Geographic, a very different platform than Aperture. Two-part question: Can you describe what Aperture and National Geographic represent, aesthetically and institutionally? And what qualities position Nichols as an apropos subject for an Aperture biography?
MH: Actually, this is Aperture’s first biography. Chris Boot, Aperture’s executive director, believes strongly in Nick’s work and mission and really supported me and this project.
I came to Aperture after working at Artforum and Interview. Aperture is a not-for-profit, and it was always mission-driven. The mission evolved, of course, and all the editors who work there interpret it differently. I am quite old-fashioned about photography in certain ways. I believe it still has the capacity to change hearts and minds at its most powerful. I worked on projects like Gene Richards’s Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue; Donna Ferrato’s project on battered women, Living with the Enemy; David Wojnarowicz’s Brush Fires in the Social Landscape; Letizia Battaglia’s Passion, Justice, Freedom, Photographs of Sicily; Charles Bowden’s Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future. All these projects, in their own ways, are evidentiary. There is context. They engage in riveting storytelling in different ways. They have a larger meaning and a larger goal. To do projects with a social conscience would be my interpretation of at least an aspect of Aperture’s mission. Other editors there may have different takes on the mission. For sure, Aperture is about trying to do something excellent with purpose and meaning. It’s serving the photographic community and those photographers who are devoting their lives to these and other kinds of projects. It’s also serving what the founders used to call a community of shared interest — people who might find this compelling, be they artists, lawyers, poets, doctors, or bankers.
I’ve never worked at National Geographic, so I’m hesitant to speak for their editors, but I believe they’d also say that the magazine, the Society, has always had a mission. The question that arose with all the conservationists I interviewed for this book was whether or not the magazine’s mission was intrinsically about conservation — for certain, that’s what they felt it should be about. But the magazine editors were not, I don’t believe — based on my interviews with many of them — thinking that their magazine should be about conservation. They see their magazine as not taking sides, as being objective, at times taking on tough issues, and seeing where that leads.
Conservationists are advocates. They want something to be protected, saved, changed. They want to save those elephants. They want to stop poaching. They want to stop the use of tiger bones in Chinese medicine. Whatever it may be. Personally, I don’t think it’s a journalistic problem as long as you’re very clear where you stand, and if your position doesn’t blind you to fact. If it blinds you to fact, then it’s a real problem. If you give both sides, then it’s OK to say where you land on it — everyone lands somewhere; everyone has an opinion. I am an advocate for wild. People who advocate positions sometimes cherry-pick their facts. I tried very hard not to, especially in areas, like non-subsistence hunting, that were more complicated for me. I didn’t want to take my brought-up-in-New York City liberal Ethical Culture background and apply it to things about which I knew nothing. And of course, almost none of it is black-and-white, and so my own understanding has become much more nuanced.
This gets to your question about Nick. Unlike many of the people I’ve worked with at Aperture, Nick is a real populist. He definitely wants people to relate to the work. And he wants to create work that operates on many levels. A three-year-old can fall in love with his image of a wild, ancient tree or the picture on the book’s cover of this extraordinary wild tiger named Charger. At the same time, Nick wants you to be able to go as deep as you’re willing to go. He learns about the conservation issues and challenges, and his work is grounded in these exceptional long-term studies. He observes the species he is photographing day after day and tries to figure out the particulars of whatever group or family of animals he’s spending time with, and then, who are the individual animals comprising these groups or families — how do they relate to the other creatures, how do they relate to their families, what is going on in their lives, what threatens their lives, their habitats? He does it without anthropomorphizing. He’s not pretending that he’s the animal whisperer or that they’re people, and he’s not attributing to them human qualities, except that he believes they have individuality — but who says that’s distinct to humans? If they’re all gorillas or all tigers, then it’s a species. If it’s Charger, or Gregoire the chimpanzee, or the Poets elephant family, or Vumbi the lioness pride . . . by distinguishing, you become attentive to specific characteristics or ways of being that become fascinating and that you can identify. I think the viewer or reader then looks harder, thinks differently, and perhaps cares more.
In that way, Nick is very similar to many of the Aperture photographers I’ve worked with, like Richards or Ferrato — or Sally Mann, who isn’t a photojournalist but is equally intense and storytelling-oriented in her work on her children comprising Immediate Family, which I edited. Nick was a member of Magnum, which was great for him. His takeaway was about narrative, about doing something with meaning, about building on previous work, and selecting his strongest work, his edgiest work.
BNR: He aimed very purposefully for years to be a National Geographic photographer.
MH: Yes. With National Geographic I think he found the audience for the subject matter that interests him: wild species and their ecosystems and the last places on earth; great characters, with powerful stories to reveal and challenges to explore. He also liked seeing all of his pictures sequenced together, not interrupted by advertising or a lot of text in the middle. That didn’t happen in many places. And National Geographic could offer him enormous resources and time.
BNR: He is a very swashbuckling type of guy.
MH: He is totally a swashbuckling type of guy! What’s interesting, though, is that it’s never adventure for adventure’s sake, though I do believe Nick likes the adrenaline rush (or at least he did), because that has to feed what he does. I think all artists like a certain tension, and it doesn’t have to be about putting oneself in a precarious situation.
Mitch Shields, the writer who worked with Nick on his first story for Geo about the caves, remembered that when they met, he saw this tall, athletic, good-looking guy who is going to take them all into caves, and he seems so laid back, and he’s got that Alabama accent — and uh-oh, is this really going to work? He soon understood that Nick is remarkably precise, driven, has been obsessively figuring out what’s going to work, how to keep them from killing themselves, and of course, all the lighting — how he’s actually going to get the pictures, and, at the same time, not leave a trace in the cave, not destroy this remarkable ecosystem.
BNR: The testimonies from Nichols’s collaborators — among them, Tim Cahill, David Quammen, Douglas Chadwick, Geoffrey Ward, Eugene Linden, George Schaller, Jane Goodall, Iain Douglas Hamilton, and Craig Packer — are fascinating. They serve very different roles in helping Nichols convey his stories.
MH: This was the most meta, complex interlacing of people, ideas, stories, and experiences I’ve ever done. There’s all the conservation. There are the stories Nick did for National Geographic or Rolling Stone or Geo, and the stories behind the stories. I talked to the writers and everyone I could for their perspectives, so I’d be accurate. To make the book relevant for now, I wanted to bring up to date the conservation issues he’d addressed throughout his projects. This turned out to be more complicated than I’d imagined — but also fascinating. All these scientists have devoted their lives to what they do. They’re all advocates for their respective creatures. Everybody I spoke with was forthcoming. My learning curve was huge at first, but I got smarter.
BNR: Quammen seems to be Nichols’s main collaborator of the last fifteen to twenty years.
MH: Yes. He’s been working with Nick since the Megatransect. Quammen and he collaborate very differently than the way Nick and Tim joined forces, yet the sense of partnership is as profound. They overlap for maybe a week or two, but they’re not doing the story “hand in hand,” as Nick would describe aspects of his approach with Tim. Naturally, they do talk about what the story is going to be. Nick tells David, “There is this amazing dark-maned lion named C-Boy, and you have never seen anything like this dude; he’s just got power, he presides, he’s regal — you’ve got to look at C-Boy.” David may check out Nick’s leads, but he’s also doing his own research, his own observation — figuring out the ecological-conservation-environmental issues. He’s objective, very scrupulous. He’s a great empirical observer, and exceptionally smart.
BNR: It must have been tempting to write at greater length about many of these sub-characters.
MH: The first draft is probably twice the size of the book. It became unwieldy, because there was so much going on. Nick has spent his life focusing on charismatic animals; I just did, too. Hopefully I did them all justice because they’re each so unique.
BNR: Aperture certainly did justice to the images.
MH: Printing a book is an interpretation, of course, but it’s Aperture, so we’re going to make it look as good as we can. But it was complicated. Aperture had never done a book like this. Of course, in most biographies you have maybe a couple of isolated sections of images. I wanted the images to be interspersed throughout, riffing off the text. It was expensive, but I raised the money to do it, while keeping the retail price what it would have been had we taken the less costly, more conventional approach. I wanted the book to be accessible. Even though it’s a big book, with over 100 pictures, people shouldn’t have to spend a fortune to buy it.
BNR: What attributes distinguish Nichols’s images in regards to craft and thematic continuity?
MH: Much of Nick’s early imagery was made in dark or dimly lit environments — the jungle, the forest, or caves. This was before digital cameras; he didn’t have all the easy, smaller, lighter technical possibilities photographers have now. So Nick had to figure out how to light the environments to get the images he wanted, and how to do it without leaving a trace of his presence on these environments or influencing an animal’s behavior. His imperatives are simultaneously conservation, in process and mission, and artistic: Above all, Nick wants to make a great photograph. All the tech is only about facilitating his larger vision and sensibility regarding how he wants to render the story. It’s never technology for the sake of technology.
Visually, Nick is a wizard with light, as is evident in his earliest cave pictures. His imagination is huge. He seems able to pre-visualize, to some extent, what he hopes to achieve, based on his endless observation. He’s got great ideas. To be able to focus on his larger goal, he works with strong and talented younger assistants in the field, for whom a lot of the tech stuff is second nature. When something is happening, he doesn’t want to be thinking about the technology; he wants to think about getting the photograph. He wants to be ready. He also has available to him the technological expertise at National Geographic.
A key feature of Nick’s work is the intimacy he achieves. It’s like you are right there with him, watching this amazing play between these elephants, watching these cubs roll over each other — whatever it is. Even on the occasions where he decides he has to use a telephoto lens, he has figured out how to subvert its flattening quality that messes with depth of field, and so he still gets all the gradations of the landscape, all the nuance. In order to achieve this proximity, he must habituate the animals to his presence. Nick is watching-water-boil patient.
BNR: What’s the nature of Nichols’s influence on the culture of photography?
MH: Nick brought the photojournalist ethic to photographing the natural world. Nick is not romanticizing nature. He is a consummate, sympathetic observer. He is watching, and he is completely engaged. He’s not going in with preconceptions and a checklist — “And then I saw an elephant, and then I saw a cheetah, and then I saw a vulture” — or whatever. He’s paying remarkably close attention, day after day after day. He’s storytelling, he’s being extremely honest, and he’s operating with an integrity that has not always characterized people who photograph nature. If it’s something wild, he’s telling you it’s wild. If he’s photographing in a zoo, he’s telling you he’s photographing an animal in captivity.
He — along with other photographers, editors, and writers — has made National Geographic tougher. Magazines are living entities; they have to evolve, otherwise they die.
BNR: You describe a harrowing night in your tent when several lions gathered outside it.
MH: Their visit was a bit nerve-wracking! Truthfully, the place where I felt fear was when I was working in Juárez for Charles Bowden’s book. I went to Juárez because I wanted to meet the group of photographers who were risking their lives daily to bear witness. I was hoping to publish their work with Chuck’s writing. I wanted to understand the place I was dealing with, and I knew the photographers wouldn’t trust me unless I showed up — how could they? They were gracious, kind, and wonderful, and Juárez was vibrant but also terribly poor and violent — at the time, there were so many murders and rapes, and such corruption, and there were many aspects of NAFTA that seemed to be so negatively exploiting the people. It was brutal.
BNR: You’ve written numerous articles and essays but never a book. Are there any antecedent or contemporary writers on whom you modeled your approach?
MH: I wasn’t aspiring to be like anyone else. I just wanted to be smart, credible, and original. I wanted it to be a fun read. I read a lot of biographies, and I learned from all of them, but there was no model for this. In my case, I had a happily loquacious subject who withheld nothing. It wasn’t like I had to pull teeth.
This may seem like a weird analogy, but I learned an enormous amount when I met John Cage in college. I learned that things don’t always have to be so linear. My memory of my first conversation with Cage is that he radiated, like a starburst, as he moved through notions of harmony and dissonance, Beethoven, Hopi Indian creation myths and Zen Buddhism, and Merce Cunningham. His way of bringing all these often disparate ideas together so fluidly was liberating. As a biography, this book is fundamentally chronological. It starts and ends, so there’s a linearity and Nick’s life is an anchor, but all these other voices, passions, visions, missions are moving through it, sometimes with a little more emphasis, sometimes a little less. If I hadn’t met Cage, my approach might have been compartmentalized. But instead, I wanted to try to weave together and make sense of varied perspectives and layers of happenings and contexts throughout. This was a dynamism that interested me more, because it’s like what happens in everyday life.
That’s not really a writing style, but that was the approach. Actually, the people Nick works with, the nature of the collaborations, make me think of John and Merce. Everybody is operating at this extraordinary level, all focusing on the larger idea but doing so in their way, individualistically, with their own visions. I like that kind of collaboration, because I don’t feel anything or anyone is compromised or subservient. Nobody is illustrating each other, in either words or images. Everyone is free. I tried to allow that approach to flourish in the text, so that the scientists and their ideas and aspirations coexist with Nick’s life story, with the evolution of his photography, with the stories that he was doing, and the stories behind the stories.
Image Credits:
(1/Top) Michael Nichols , self-portrait with “Aircam,” flying over Mbeli Bai, Republic of Congo, 1994; from A Wild Life (Aperture, 2017) © Michael Nichols/National Geographic Society.
(2) Vumbi pride (robot-camera photograph), Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, 2011; from A Wild Life (Aperture, 2017) © Michael Nichols/National Geographic Society
(3) Temple of Dagon, Lechuguilla Cave, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, 1990;
from A Wild Life (Aperture, 2017) © Michael Nichols/National Geographic Society
(4) Crocodile (camera-trap photograph), Zakouma National Park, Chad, 2006;
from A Wild Life (Aperture, 2017) © Michael Nichols/National Geographic Society
(5) Photo of Melissa Harris taken by Michael Nichols. © Michael Nichols; provided by Melissa Harris
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The Dunkirk Spirit
“Wars are not won by evacuations,” Winston Churchill famously told the House of Commons on June 4, 1940, hard on the heels of the improbable rescue of over 300,000 stranded British and French troops from a formerly dull Channel port dramatically encircled just then by Adolf Hitler’s all-conquering Wehrmacht. But three-quarters of a century later, winning Oscar nominations could obviously be a different story. Well, at least in technical categories like art direction, sound editing, photography, and so on.
Those were the whiz-bang elements of Christopher Nolan’s summer epic Dunkirk that couldn’t be faulted even by viewers as bemused as I was by the movie’s post-millennial hollowness: its allergy to any ruminative sense of the past, its almost nonexistent interest in human beings. To anyone with an emotional connection to World War Two as the fairly consequential affair boomers were raised to believe it was, a movie about the Dunkirk evacuation so flagrantly unconcerned with Dunkirk’s historical significance was bound to seem perverse. Audiences unfamiliar with the subject could exit their local multiplex feeling pleasantly befuddled about which war this was, if not serenely unaware the saga had any basis in fact at all — and this was clearly a deliberate choice on Nolan’s part.
As he never tires of saying in interviews, including the lengthy one that opens Joshua Levine’s abject Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture, Nolan took creative pride in paring down one of the signal events of twentieth-century British history and folklore to its supposed essence as a “survival story.” He was so set on omitting the real thing’s presumably antiquated, potentially alienating military and political specifics that the generic “enemy” imperiling his cast of thousands was never even identified as Nazi Germany. But setting aside quarrels with the director’s priorities, shouldn’t a survival story at least feature characters whose fates arouse our interest and apprehension? Personally, I couldn’t have cared less which of the unengagingly floppy-faced stick figures on Nolan’s beach lived or died.
One reason Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture makes for melancholy reading is that its author clearly does care about the stick figures’ real-life originals. Levine’s well-regarded earlier book, Forgotten Voices of Dunkirk, landed him a job as Dunkirk‘s historical adviser, which plainly thrilled him more than it should. So he’s produced a tie-in book whose occasional real merits as documentation (lots of good anecdotes from survivors that you wish had turned up in Nolan’s screenplay) keep on being undermined by fawning mentions of the movie. Most depressing of all is an early chapter called “Quite Like Us” dealing with 1930s youth culture in Britain, Germany — and, incongruously, the United States. That’s apparently Miller’s idea of helping to attract millennials to theaters by assuring them that great-grandpapa could have identified with Harry Styles, and now — lucky them — they can identify with both.
The irony is that Nolan’s Dunkirk isn’t interested in provoking that kind of identification anyway. Curiously, however, his film — no matter how ahistorically minded — isn’t the only one to exhume Britain’s precarious situation in June 1940 for 2017 moviegoers’ delectation. Last April brought us Their Finest, a comic look at a wartime government film team charged with making an upbeat propaganda flick about the Dunkirk evacuation. On the slate for November is the considerably more ambitious-looking Darkest Hour, starring Gary Oldman as Churchill during those same days. Its director, Joe Wright, is probably cursing Nolan for stealing his thunder, but Wright actually got to Dunkirk first in a famous sequence from 2007’s Atonement. Back then, however, it didn’t have much to do with the rest of the movie – and now hallowing the U.K.’s “darkest hour” is the whole point.
What explains this sudden fascination? The Brexit vote occurred much too recently to have already goaded filmmakers into revisiting World War Two’s first acid test of British self-reliance: a military disaster whose white-knuckle salvage of a badly beaten army to fight again was so paradoxically pride-inducing that “the Dunkirk spirit” is still a byword in Merrie Olde. But the zeitgeist works in mysterious ways.
No one could have guessed beforehand that the story of the last epochal moment when Britons gave up on the French and were harassed by the Germans would seem timely seventy-seven years later. As Michael Korda observes in Alone: Britain, Dunkirk, and Defeat into Victory, it was 1940 — and Churchill — that taught the British public to feel “not only good but heroic about bad news.”
Korda does manage to work in a facile mention of Brexit on his book’s next-to-last page, but that shouldn’t be any surprise. In both the complimentary and pejorative senses of the word, “facile” is his middle name. A renowned editor at Simon & Schuster for many years before he turned memoirist, novelist, and all-around literary putterer-about, his current self-reinvention as a military historian can’t help but provoke stupefied envy from those of us who aren’t in a position to professionalize our hobbies so handsomely. That Dunkirkiana is unexpectedly in vogue this year could mean he’s also prescient, but more likely it just proves Korda was right to call his first book about his own fabulous family Charmed Lives.
Nonetheless, Alone makes a nice antidote to Nolan’s studied indifference to the era’s politics and the messy military debacle that led up to the Dunkirk evacuation. Korda also finds room for a slew of ancillary topics, including his own memories of June 1940, when he was six-going-on-seven and his father and uncles — Austro-Hungarian expatriates turned British filmmaking royalty — were engaged in their own baroque and voluble version of “Keep Calm and Carry On.” These autobiographical vignettes work surprisingly well, partly because the Kordas did enjoy a rather special vantage point on history in the making. In the midst of preparing for the Battle of Britain, Churchill himself made time to contribute bits to the script for his chum Alex Korda’s That Hamilton Woman – a movie that starred Laurence Olivier as naval hero Horatio Nelson, designed as propaganda to help lure the United States into the war.
Among Korda’s earlier biographies of military chieftains –- Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, T. E. Lawrence –- the only one I’ve read is 2008’s Ike: An American Hero, which struck me as flimsy, hand-me-down stuff compared to a study as authoritative as Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War and Peace. But Alone, though it’s every bit as dependent on synthesizing other people’s books — he’s done no original research, so far as I can tell — is a far richer and more convincing production, partly because hero worship doesn’t dominate the agenda. Even Churchill is simply one of the more arresting characters in a drama enlivened by its variety of dimensions and perspectives, from dazed individual soldiers recalling their lurching retreat to the Channel once the Germans broke through to the Cabinet’s rising panic as the crisis took shape.
Korda is at his most appealing in his attentiveness to the different sets of sensibilities and values in play at each level and the distances between them. Like the born cosmopolitan he is, he’s especially acute and often amusing about the clash between French and British mind-sets that played such a large part in the speedy Allied collapse once, after eight months of uneventful “phony war,” the German war machine sprang its brilliantly conceived trap of luring them into Belgium before Guderian’s panzers swarmed out of the Ardennes to cut them off. If the French high command was slow to catch on that the thrust was aiming for the Channel ports instead of Paris, Korda explains, one reason was “the French habit of assuming that Paris was at the center of the world.”
No less mischievously, when describing the endless files of soldiers waiting to be evacuated from the beach, he can’t resist saying, “If there is one thing the British are good at it is queuing.” This sort of wryness doesn’t detract from the emotional impact of the overall picture he builds up; if anything, it’s Korda’s simulation of “the Dunkirk spirit.” Besides, if you’ve read a whole lot of military historians whose work surpasses his in depth, you’ll know how rare it is for any of them to show even a trace of his wit.
Korda’s eye for the telling detail also lets him mine the best nuggets from everything he’s read on the subject. (Downright poignantly, one book he not only relies on extensively but singles out for praise is Levine’s Forgotten Voices of Dunkirk.) Among his best finds is a memoir called Through Hell to Dunkirk by one Henry de la Falaise, who witnessed a lot he later recorded vividly as the French liaison officer to the British 12th Lancers — a venerable regiment only recently converted from cavalry to armored cars. But some British officers still traveled to war with their horses, including King George VI’s younger brother, the duke of Gloucester, and the BEF’s commander, Lord Gort. It somehow sums up the whole British debacle, if not the proverbial end of an era, that both men’s elegant mounts ended up “shot on the quayside” at Boulogne when their orderlies couldn’t figure out how to embark them.
For my money, Korda does better than Nolan at commemorating the keystone of Dunkirk’s mythology — the civilian “Little Ships,” from Thames pleasure steamers to cockleshell private craft, that streamed across the Channel to help bring off the troops when the Royal Navy summoned their help. To some extent, the “romantic legend” Korda calls it is just what it is, as the Little Ships’ role was vastly exaggerated to inspire the British public. But even so, exaggeration isn’t the same as fiction, including the gratifying fact that one yacht joining the fray was skippered by Charles Lightholler, the second officer of the Titanic once upon a time. By contrast, one of Nolan’s more confounding dramatic decisions was to have his movie’s representative Little Ship (with Mark Rylance at the helm) never reach the beaches at all.
Whether from glibness or haste — here and there, Alone shows signs of having been rushed to the printer with minimal editing — Korda does make a few bonehead mistakes of his own. Military pedants will roll their eyes when he refers to the French army having “three armored corps,” since divisions are clearly what’s meant. Rather more bizarrely, he claims that being “devoutly Catholic” helped make Charles de Gaulle eccentric “in an army in which clericalism was controversial,” which not only misuses “clericalism” — surely not the aptest term here — but ignores the French officer class’s long tradition of conservative, often anti-republican Catholicism, from Trochu to Boulanger.
As always, the effect of spotting errors like these is that they make readers wonder how many others we’ve missed. But to my eye, at least, Korda has gotten most of the important things right –- including, above all, what Dunkirk meant. That hardly makes Alone a classic, but if you’re curious about everything Nolan’s movie left out, this book will stand you in good stead.
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The Lost Poems of George Oppen
21 Poems, nearly doubles the size of George Oppen’s early and influential corpus, and happily, the poems themselves are fascinating. When I first shared my find with one of my professors, he grabbed my shoulders and said, “Don’t get used to this feeling, David, it may never happen again.”
Clothes That Don’t Need You
Walking mesmerized through the Rei Kawakubo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum was the closest I’ve come since to the feeling of Noh theater. Without always understanding what I was looking at, I was gripped by the kind of melancholy that seems to accompany the toughest, most searching and demanding levels of beauty.
Lee Markham: Horror Beyond Boundaries
I suspect I might be breaking the rules here, but I’m also fairly confident I’ve got a technicality with which I can get off my own hook, and breaking the rules is in my nature — my book The Truants breaks several rules of its own. I’ve been asked for a list of my favorite works of horror. The key word there (which provides the aforementioned technicality) is works, because my list is not a list of books alone. Apologies . . . but tough. It is doubly fitting to bend this unspoken “books only” rule because The Truants is actually a bastard child of all these works (and of course plenty others, but you don’t have all day. Nor, in fact, do I), I’d argue, as much in form as it is in function. I’d even go so far as to say that The Truants is, to my mind at least, as close to being a concept album as it is a novel — a collection of tracks that come together to form a narrative whole . . . but that’s probably just me.
Anyway, let’s do this thing . . .
By Stephen King
There are probably more obvious choices in the King canon: Misery, The Stand, and The Shining are fairly stock (and, fair’s fair, solid) responses. IT is probably my favorite of his — it’s certainly the one I love the most. But Desperation is, for my money, his most balls-to-the-wall horrifying book. It’s mean. It’s cruel and utterly punishing. Much like the God King has oft stated the book is about. In Desperation, King himself takes on the mantle of the cruel god of his fictional creations with absolute mercilessness and, certainly as an author, it’s awesome to behold. Awful. But awesome nonetheless. And horrifying unlike anything else he’s done.
By Manic Street Preachers
The first of my rule-breaking choices is an album. It’s also a towering work of existential horror. You could probably just pore over the lyric sheet and meticulous art design and photography of the thing and be left in a state of profound existential torpor. This might in fact be the version of the Holy Bible that Colonel Kurtz found out there at the end of his river. The fact that its primary creative force, lyricist Richey Edwards, disappeared (presumed dead) shortly after its creation does sadly add to its creative veracity, but incredibly it doesn’t define it. Calling an album The Holy Bible might be considered a monumental act of chutzpah were it not for the fact that it was so nakedly truthful to its author’s anguished and horrified reality, his gospel.
By Mark Z. Danielewski
By Alan Moore
There are a hundred reasons for each of these to be on the list. But, for this list, and the reason they share a spot, it’s because they’re the only two books that have ever made me quite literally drop them in shock. And, so as not to spoil them, I will only give you the barest details here . . .
In House of Leaves, there’s a long and fairly dry section about the science of acoustics and, specifically, echoes. It’s a rather soporific passage. Interesting if you want to know about acoustics. And echoes. (Yep, me neither.) It’s very thorough. But it lulls you . . . and then it does something. And when it did it to me I dropped the book.
In Voice of the Fire, that moment comes at the end of a book of tales across time. You’ve met characters who’ve endured experiences in Northampton, England, over the span of 5,000 years, each experience becoming a myth that informs the truth of each subsequent character. The true protagonist of the book you learn by the end is in fact time itself, and the horror of the tale lies in the casual way time obliterates all the subjective truths and experiences we believe make us what we are. Time cares nothing for our version of events. And time will write our history, however much we might imagine we’ve defined our own lives and selves. When we go, and we become first a memory and then, perhaps, a story, we don’t get to write that story. Time does that. So, all of these things bring us to the final chapter. To here. And now. And that’s when the author turns and looks out from the pages of the book and he sees you. Looks. Right. At. You. Yep. That happens in this book. Dropped the damn thing when it happened to me. I was in the bath at the time too, which was annoying.
Here’s the next rule breaker, this time a film. Jacob’s Ladder is an anomaly. It’s written by the guy who wrote Ghost — you know, that cheesy after-lifer with Priscilla Presley and Frank Drebin and the pottery . . . no, wait, sorry . . . Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore. That. And it’s directed by the guy that directed 9½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction. It should be rubbish. But it’s not. It’s actually perfect. It’s the story of a Vietnam vet struggling with PTSD in late ’70s New York. He sees demons. He’s haunted by guilt and loss and grief. But then maybe it’s not about just that. Maybe something else is going on. But here’s the thing about Jacob’s Ladder that makes it perfect: it has rigorously stress-tested the motivations of its every moment. The first time through you might think, why did that character do that? Why did Jacob feel this, or think that? On subsequent watches, when you’ve been clued in to the truth of it, you can swim in the existentially internalized construct of its narrative: you’re inside Jacob’s head for every single second. Every character and motivation is defined by Jacob’s own understanding of his own life and the people and experiences that populate it. His insecurities. His guilt. His pride. His desires. The whole thing is a portrait of a very human psyche trying to make sense of everything, and ultimately having to accept that he can’t, that he just has to let it go. By contrast however, the film itself actually adds up more and more the more you watch it. It is absolutely watertight. It is also beautiful and profound — which, I’d argue, all the best horror is. Nothing can confront and explore our fears like horror does when it’s done right, and Jacob’s Ladder does it righter than pretty much anything.
By Blake Morrison
This one is tough. It’s the factual account of the murder of two-year-old Jamie Bulger by two ten-year-olds. Morrison went to the trial, met the families, walked the streets they walked. And it broke his heart. It’ll break yours, too. I’m disinclined to say too much about it because it’s not make-believe, not like The Truants. It’s not imagined. A baby died. And two children lost their lives to the judgment and demonization of a society that longed to believe it wasn’t implicit in the horrific tragedy of what happened. What Morrison manages to do here is paint a portrait of what horror truly is. It’s randomness and purposelessness. It’s grim inevitability. And it teaches us what it feels like to be responsible for it. It is a book so full of love, sadness, humility and empathy that it’s almost beyond description. I held it in my mind when I wrote The Truants. Which isn’t to say that I think The Truants is in any way as courageous or important . . . but I do like to think that The Truants at least honors the value of documentary horror in the way As If does. The Truants is a serious book. A heartbroken one, too. Because horror can every now and then be those things. If we’re not too scared to go there.
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My Absolute Darling
A novelist who summons a monster runs a terrible risk. Bringing one to convincing life can threaten to eclipse the story’s other characters, particularly the people who are his victims. In his grab-you-by-the-throat debut novel, My Absolute Darling, Gabriel Tallent has created such a monster in Martin Alveston, who physically and sexually abuses his fourteen-year-old daughter. Martin is so fully realized that the daughter Tallent conjures would have to be remarkable to serve as his counterweight. The half-wild, vulnerable Turtle Alveston, whose conscience is the beacon of this dark book, proves up to the challenge. She has a center of gravity all her own.
Martin and his daughter live in isolation in a slowly disintegrating house on the Northern California coast, where “rose runners have prized off clapboards that now hang snarled in the canes.” Tallent grew up in the area, and a deep knowledge of the natural world suffuses his book, which is full of stunning descriptions. When Turtle dives into a spring-fed pool, for instance, “she opens her eyes to the water and looks up and sees writ huge across the rain-dappled surface the basking shapes of newts with their fingers splayed and their golden-red bellies exposed to her, their tails churning lazily.”
Martin believes that the end times are near, courtesy of global warming and environmental degradation. In his eyes, survival skills and an intimate familiarity with guns and knives are at least as important as schoolwork. The walls of Martin’s bedroom are lined with philosophy books by the likes of David Hume and George Berkeley. He is a charming conversationalist and liable to spin a monologue on, say, the nature of human consciousness. Yet his erudite mind is cratered by tar pits. Martin leeches a casual, bone-deep misogyny that his daughter has soaked up and often salts into her self-talk (“You bitch, you can do this, you bitch”), and his temper flares unpredictably.
What makes Martin terrifying isn’t so much the violence he metes out — though when it comes it’s breathtaking. It’s the tension that haunts even the quietest scenes. Living with violence means that each moment is inflected with the potential to be rent open. Though he limns a vicious relationship between Martin and his own father, and the ghost of the early death of Turtle’s mother, Tallent , to his credit, doesn’t spell out how Martin has come to be as depraved as he is. As John Steinbeck understood when he created Cathy in East of Eden, a “malformed soul” can never be explained satisfactorily.
Tallent acquaints us with Martin through Turtle’s observant, loving eyes. She desperately wants to please him — whether by hitting the bull’s eye on a shooting target or acing a vocabulary test — and silently wills him to placate school officials when they threaten to intercede on her behalf. Yet there is a whisper of self-knowledge in Turtle that blossoms, during the course of the novel, into a full awareness of what her life with Martin is depriving her of, and the damage it has done.
That journey is nurtured by her friendship with two boys whom she meets during one of her feral roams in the woods after they’ve become lost on a camping trip. Jacob and Brett — cerebral, nerdy, exuberant — admire and accept her. They call her a “ninja.” She is welcomed into Jacob’s resplendent home, where adults sit at the table with their children, drinking wine and making conversation. She develops an innocent crush on Jacob. She starts to envision her life — and her inner self — differently. She begins to want things that life with Martin can never provide.
Turtle’s awakening, as she continues to hold her father’s love in her heart even as she comes to recognize his ugliness, is the arc of Tallent’s story. My Absolute Darling is full of dramatic events, including a harrowing account of her and Jacob’s self-rescue after being washed out to sea by a giant wave. What makes the novel riveting, though, is Tallent’s gift for describing the psychological terrain Turtle traverses. The dynamics between abusive parents and their children are written about much more often than they are understood by their authors. Tallent captures the nuances.
Scene by scene, he builds the scaffolding for Turtle’s self-realization through gleams of insight. When her father cavalierly chips the blade of a knife she’s been gifted, she thinks, “I need you to be hard on me, because I am no good for myself, and you make me do what I want to do but cannot do for myself; but still, but still — you are sometimes not careful; there is something in you, something less than careful, something almost — I don’t know, I am not sure, but I know it’s there.”
Turtle’s determination to take care of her few possessions amid chaos, her warring impulses to protect her father and exploit his weaknesses, and the cruelties she deals to well-intentioned people who threaten to breach the levies she’s built between herself and the world ring true. The violent climax of the book, spectacular as it is, is less heart-stopping than the moment when Turtle makes the irrevocable decision to break away, determined to protect someone who is even more vulnerable than she is.
Comparisons between My Absolute Darling and another novel published earlier this year, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, by Hannah Tinti, are inevitable. In Tinti’s tale, a retired gun for hire is raising an adolescent daughter, Loo, in a small New England town. Strikingly, both books open with a father coaching his daughter to shoot a gun, and in both the death of a mother haunts the characters. Yet Samuel Hawley is no Martin Alveston. He’s a father with good intentions, trying to escape his past, and his attempts at parenting Loo are loving, if crude.
Tinti’s novel, fine as it is, illustrates the perils of writing a story about larger-than-life parents and their children, for it is Samuel who dominates Twelve Lives. Loo’s coming-of-age struggles are overwhelmed by her father’s turmoil and exploits. In My Absolute Darling, Tallent has created — to use a shopworn but apt description — an unforgettable heroine, whose greatest challenge is to recognize the good and the bad within her and to choose the good.
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Jennifer Finney Boylan
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
The author of fifteen works of fiction and nonfiction, Jennifer Finney Boylan may be known to most readers via her bestselling memoir She’s Not There. As she tells Barnes & Noble’s Miwa Messer in this episode, her new book Long Black Veil also draws on events from her life — but here Boylan weaves them into a droll, offbeat thriller in which the unexpected consequences of one night kick off a tale about secrets and lies, silence and truth, and the triumph of love and friendship.
On a warm August night in 1980, six college students sneak into the dilapidated ruins of Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, looking for a thrill. With a pianist, a painter and a teacher among them, the friends are full of potential. But it’s not long before they realize they are locked in—and not alone. When the friends get lost and separated, the terrifying night ends in tragedy, and the unexpected, far-reaching consequences reverberate through the survivors’ lives. As they go their separate ways, trying to move on, it becomes clear that their dark night in the prison has changed them all. Decades later, new evidence is found, and the dogged detective investigating the cold case charges one of them—celebrity chef Jon Casey— with murder. Only Casey’s old friend Judith Carrigan can testify to his innocence.
But Judith is protecting long-held secrets of her own – secrets that, if brought to light, could destroy her career as a travel writer and tear her away from her fireman husband and teenage son. If she chooses to help Casey, she risks losing the life she has fought to build and the woman she has struggled to become. In any life that contains a “before” and an “after,” how is it possible to live one life, not two?
See more from Jennifer Finney Boylan here.
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Sig Nordal 