The French Mind: 400 Years of Romance, Revolution and Renewal by Peter Watson

A feminine emphasis on France’s intellectual history

British historian Peter Watson has been my favorite nonfiction author since I discovered his books a couple years ago. Though he also writes fiction, Watson is better known for his sweeping intellectual histories, or histories of ideas. Watson’s book The French Mind was published in 2022. In this book, Watson tries to answer the question: What’s so special about the French? To do that, as the subtitle indicates, he examines 400 years of French history, from the early 17th century to the present. Watson’s histories are generally not about kings, queens, and wars (although the Bourbons, Orléans, and Napoleons do make prominent appearances here) but rather about important developments in literature, philosophy, the arts, and culture. In The French Mind, Watson also looks beyond such highbrow disciplines and discusses how the French came to be renowned for perfecting some enjoyable aspects of life and leisure, such as fashion, food, furniture, and sex. Unlike some of Watson’s other intellectual histories, science is not part of the discussion here (Marie Curie isn’t even mentioned), except the social sciences.

Though the USA has always had its anti-intellectual tendencies (some might say now more than ever), France has always presented a decidedly pro-intellectual attitude. High culture is fashionable among the French, and one is expected to be well-read. When I visited France, I recall being amazed at how many streets they named after philosophers, scientists, and men of letters. France has always seen it as their duty to civilize the world through its refined culture, even if that means showing a disdain for capitalism, hard science, and technological progress. A crucial aspect of French intellectual life, Watson asserts, is “sociability,” which is manifested in the long tradition of the French salon and the café culture that followed. Watson also pursues a thesis (borrowed from historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch) of France’s “culture of defeat.” Even after losing the Franco-Prussian War and undergoing Nazi occupation, the French zeitgeist still managed to turn those losses into morally righteous victories.

Another element Watson really wants to emphasize is the role that women played in the development of French culture. I knew that salons would be an important part of this story, but I didn’t expect they would be the focus of the bulk of the book. Salons, in this case, were weekly gatherings, usually hosted by aristocrats in their homes, at which intellectuals and artists would gather and exchange ideas. Watson makes much of the women who hosted these salons and the influence they wielded. Many, probably most, of the chapters in the book focus on one of these salonnières—her life story, who she married, with whom she had affairs, and which luminaries she included among the regulars at her salon. France may have been less chauvinistic and misogynistic than the rest of Western Civilization, but it was still an unfairly male-dominated world. Despite his efforts to praise these unsung women, Watson’s feminist assertions feel forced. If the best thing he can say about many of these women is that they hosted a bunch of important men in their home, that’s not much of a feminist revelation. When these salonnières wrote published literature or wielded real political power, however, Watson does give credit where it’s due. At the point when the salons fade away, so does Watson’s feminist focus. Surprisingly, once this book moves past World War I, there’s barely a female mentioned other than Simone de Beauvoir.

Watson is a master of summary and synthesis, showing how ideas and movements spawn, influence, and interconnect one another. A master generalist, he draws the big picture in a sufficiently detailed and lively narrative that inspires the reader to want to learn more. If you really want to know what Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean Paul Sartre, or Michel Foucault were all about, you’re going to have to read their books, but with the help of an erudite survey such as Watson provides here, maybe you won’t have to read everything that came before and after those thinkers in order to understand their work. Similar to The French Mind, Watson has written other books in which he strives to encapsulate a nation’s intellectual and cultural spirit: The German Genius and The British Imagination. What’s next? The Dutch Mystique? The Scandinavian Psyche? The Polish Persuasion? Whatever Watson comes up with, I’m looking forward to it.   

Aku-Aku by Thor Heyerdahl

Chasing secrets on Easter Island

Thor Heyerdahl was an explorer who achieved worldwide fame in the 1950s and ‘60s—not quite as famous as Jacques Cousteau, perhaps, but close. The Norwegian adventurer and experimental archaeologist is best-known for riding a raft across the Pacific Ocean from Peru to French Polynesia, a journey he recounted in his book and Oscar-winning documentary film, both entitled Kon-Tiki. His follow-up to this much-celebrated achievement was an expedition to Easter Island in 1955 and 1956, which is recounted in his book Aku-Aku, published in 1957.

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is known for its giant stone heads carved out of lava rock. At the time of Heyerdahl’s trip, little was known about who made them, how they were made, and how the incredibly heavy rocks were transported to and erected at their various locations around the island. The thesis that Heyerdahl spent his life trying to prove is that Polynesian islanders are of American origin, essentially descendants of seafaring Inca or other Indigenous Peruvians. On Easter Island, he looked for evidence to support that theory and did find some correspondence between the artworks of Easter Island and those of the Inca. Heyerdahl was not an academic scientist, which opens him up to criticism by those with PhDs who regard him as merely an adventurer and pseudoscientst, so on this expedition he invited three professional archaeologists along on this expedition.

What amazed me the most about this book was learning that when Heyerdahl’s team arrived on Easter Island, all of the famed statues had been toppled face down in the dirt. This happened during a civil war on the island a couple centuries earlier. Heyerdahl, with the help of Indigenous workers, used traditional non-mechanical techniques to raise one of the statues upright. This was the first of such modern re-raisings. When you see photographs of a dozen monolithic heads lined up along the coast of Easter Island, all of those were raised after Heyerdahl, most of them not until the 1990s, when major restoration efforts were undertaken to encourage tourism. Heyerdahl was really the spark that set that flame of tourism alight, for better or for worse. On the one hand he brought attention to the cultural heritage of Rapa Nui; on the other hand his tactics trained the Natives to exploit that heritage for commerce.

While the giant stone heads, or moai, are quite fascinating, most of the book is not about that. It’s about Heyerdahl trying to convince the islanders to grant him access to their secret caves or hand over to him the artifacts that are contained therein. Heyerdahl’s methods of persuasion were not entirely ethical by today’s standards, nor is what ultimately happened to the artifacts (I think he just took them away on his boat). He starts out by bartering cloth and knives for small statues. He then moves up to chicanery in the form of exploiting the Natives’ superstitions to his advantage. Not only is this disturbing, it’s also rather boring. Long chapters go by in which Heyerdahl is just conning his way into these families’ caves, then not much is really said about the artifacts themselves and what they reveal about the island’s cultural history.

Heyerdahl’s theories on the Peruvian colonization of Polynesia have not stood up well to scientific scrutiny. Still, he’s usually very good at writing the adventure stories of his expeditions. Kon-Tiki is an excellent read, and I also enjoyed Fatu-Hiva, his account of roughing it in the Marquesas. Aku-Aku, however, is not as engrossing as those other books. It gets dull and repetitive, and Heyerdahl doesn’t talk much about the discoveries of the archaeologists who accompanied him. Other than collecting a lot of statuettes that aren’t thoroughly described to the reader, it’s unclear what exactly Heyerdahl and his team accomplished on Easter Island. Perhaps more is revealed in his more scientific publications, such as Archeology of Easter Island (2 volumes), published in 1965.

Forty Lashes Less One by Elmore Leonard

Smart and suspenseful Western prison thriller

Forty Lashes Less One, published in 1972, is a novel by American author Elmore Leonard. Nowadays he’s best known for his crime fiction, which has spawned many recent film adaptations, but in the early days of his career, Westerns were Leonard’s bread and butter. Forty Lashes Less One is included in the Library of America’s volume Elmore Leonard: Westerns, but it’s really only a Western because it takes place in Arizona. Yeah, it’s got some horses, but it’s got some motor cars too. This novel is really a prison drama—a thriller with comedic elements, more Cool Hand Luke than Butch & Sundance. The title Forty Lashes Less One is taken from a Bible quote and is in no way a literal indication of happenings in the story.

The novel is set in 1909 at Yuma Territorial Prison, a penitentiary on the verge of closing. A new prison is being built in Florence, Arizona, and when it’s completed, the prisoners will be moved to the new facility. While the old prison is still functioning, however, a Mr. Manly has been appointed acting warden at Yuma. Manley has no prior experience in the penal system; his background is in Christian ministry. Contrary to the fictional stereotype of prison wardens as sadistic dictators, Manly is depicted as lenient, benevolent, and naive. He sometimes calls to mind Father Mulcahy from M*A*S*H.

As the novel opens, prisoner Harold Jackson arrives at the Yuma prison, having been transferred from Ft. Leavenworth. Jackson is the only Black prisoner at Yuma, and he is singled out for abuse by some of the meaner guards and prisoners, led by Yuma’s resident alpha convict Frank Shelby. Raymond San Carlos, an Apache-Mexican prisoner, is sent by Shelby to pick a fight with Jackson, and the two prisoners of color soon develop an animosity for one another. Warden Manly, however, takes a special interest in these two prisoners and singles them out for his own private motivational ministry. As Jackson and San Carlos are repeatedly thrust together into work assignments and solitary confinement, they develop a friendship and begin to realize that they don’t have to play by Shelby’s rules, nor Manly’s.

I have expressed admiration for Leonard’s Westerns before, and Forty Lashes Less One is every bit as good as Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, and Last Stand at Sabre River. I’m not even a habitual fan of the Western genre, but what a run of novels! Leonard’s prose is about as perfect as it gets. Not a word is wasted. Every sentence develops the characters or propels the story forward. Every line of dialogue is sharp, smart, and often quite funny. There are some ridiculous elements to this story, but Leonard manages to make them come across as realistic, yet without denying their ridiculousness. This ain’t your everyday prison Western. It’s quirky but not silly, and it’s an entertaining and exciting ride.

Quentin Tarantino purchased the rights to Forty Lashes Less One back in the 1990s, but he never made a movie from it, and he probably never will. That’s a shame, because a film adapted from this novel surely would have been better than The Hateful Eight. The well-drawn characters and engrossing plot of this novel are ripe for a cinematic adaptation and would yield some great roles for its cast of actors. Regardless of whether that will ever come to fruition, this book is a great read, whether you’re a fan of Westerns or not.

The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Part 1: 1832–1839

Off to a slow start

Unlike other A-list names in the history of American literature, Edgar Allan Poe is not known for his novels. He only published one: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), and it wasn’t a hit. Other than his poem “The Raven,” we know Poe primarily for his short stories. Counts vary, based on what’s considered a short story, but I’m going to go with Wikipedia and the Delphi Classics and say he published 65 stories, plus one unfinished at the time of his death. These stories, or “tales” as they are often called in Poe’s case, have been selected and shuffled like a deck of cards into thousands of published volumes. I’m going to review these 65 and a half stories in chronological order, in three chunks of about 20 stories each.

Poe’s first published story, “Metzengerstein,” happens to be a horror story, and a pretty good one, but very few of the tales published in these first seven or eight years of his career could be considered classic Poe horror stories. Another early entry, the nautical ghost story “MS. Found in a Bottle,” is also a step in the right direction. “Ligeia,” from 1838, seems like a turning point in Poe’s career. This is the first story to really epitomize the mix of gothic romance and terrifying horror that we usually think of when we think of Poe. “William Wilson,” a horror story about a man tormented by his doppelganger, is another strong entry from this period. The only selection from this chunk of stories that can truly be considered a Poe masterpiece, however, is “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Poe is also remembered for mystery stories and, to a lesser extent, science fiction. None of the former category are here, but sci-fi is represented by the postapocalyptic “The Conversation Between Eiros and Charmion,” and “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” which shows us Poe operating in Jules Verne mode, with only partial success.

In this first act of Poe’s career, he wrote just as many humor stories as horror stories. In most cases, the humor has not survived the past nine decades very well. A couple of these comedic efforts remain moderately funny, however, like “Devil in the Belfry” and “A Predicament.” In “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” Poe satirizes the typical fare from the English literary periodical Blackwood’s Magazine. Many of the literary pretensions Poe pokes fun at in this piece, however, are sins he is frequently guilty of committing himself. In these early writings, his biggest fault as a writer is his uncontrollable desire to show of his erudition by loading his prose with gratuitous references to classical poetry, mythology, opera, or other high-brow literature. He also loves to throw in untranslated phrases in French, Latin, Greek, and maybe even German. There’s no need for any of this, and it’s just Poe showing off how well-read he is. In this regard, he’s more pretentious than Melville or Hawthorne. Thankfully, Poe seems to gradually cure himself of this annoying habit towards the end of the 1830s.

I had read “greatest hits” collections of Poe’s horror stories in the past and liked them well enough, but I have to admit that this first foray into his complete works was a disappointment. As previously mentioned, there’s just too much laughless humor and too much effort to impress with high-falutin allusions. His writing did improve over the course of these years, however, and I am confident that the second round of his stories that I dive into will be superior to the first.

Stories in this collection

Metzengerstein

The Duc de l’Omelette

A Tale of Jerusalem

Loss of Breath

Bon-Bon

MS. Found in a Bottle

The Assignation

Berenice

Morella

Lionizing

The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall

King Pest

Shadow

Four Beasts in One

Mystification

Silence

Ligeia

How to Write a Blackwood Article

A Predicament

The Devil in the Belfry

The Man That Was Used Up

The Fall of the House of Usher

William Wilson

The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion

An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, edited by Charles H. Smith, James T. Costa, and David Collard

A survey of his career in and beyond biology

Alfred Russel Wallace is known as the other British naturalist who formulated the theory of evolution. While Darwin was taking his time writing On the Origin of Species, Wallace wrote a paper that also spelled out the process of natural selection. Through a gentleman’s agreement, Wallace stepped aside and let Darwin finish his book. That’s a highly abbreviated summary of what happened; the truth, of course, is more complicated. Nevertheless, Darwin’s name will forever be associated with evolution while many an average Joe these days has never even heard of Wallace. Wallace was nevertheless a very accomplished and respected biologist in his own right. He explored the Amazon basin and the Malay Archipelago, outlived Darwin by 31 years, and enjoyed a reputation as a “grand old man” of science. The book An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, published in 2019, is an edited collection of essays by nine academics who examine various aspects of Wallace’s career. They give much-deserved consideration to his numerous accomplishments in the biological sciences while also shedding light on his endeavors further afield.

This is not an introduction to Wallace, but it is a synthesis. The reader is expected to have a basic knowledge of who Wallace was and his relation to Darwin and the theory of evolution through natural selection, but the book does not get into arcane matters that require a PhD to understand. The essays are written with scholarly rigor, citations, and notes. The reading degree of difficulty is about at an undergraduate level of proficiency. Although all the contributors are clearly very knowledgeable about Wallace’s life and career, they explain matters sufficiently for those who are not. As a survey of Wallace’s career, the book is successful in educating the reader about his significant accomplishments and influence. The scope of the essays sometimes overlap, however, which results in reading some of the same information multiple times.

If another goal of this book, as I suspect, is to get the reader to admire and esteem Wallace, it is less successful on that score. My regard for Wallace as a scientist actually lessened as I worked my way through this book. For starters, the book opens with a discussion of Wallace’s belief in spiritualism. The word “spiritualism,” in the late 19th century, meant a belief in ghosts, the “spirit world,” and communication with the dead. In other words, Wallace was attending séances and being fooled by spirit-conjuring mediums. Although Wallace was one of the chief formulators of evolutionary science, he also believed in intelligent design. When animals became humans, God intervened and somehow turned on their minds and souls. The book closes with a discussion of Wallace’s writings on extraterrestrial life. He thought humans on Earth must be the only intelligent life in the universe because God essentially created evolution for us: We are the purpose of the universe. It gets hard to take seriously a scientist who clings to such superstitious, supernatural, and teleological beliefs. The book also discusses disagreements between Wallace and Darwin over the details of natural selection, and in most cases, it seems Darwin was in the right. In the end, one doesn’t feel so bad that Darwin got most of the credit for evolution.

Wallace was also an outspoken public intellectual on socioeconomic matters. He advocated socialism and came up with a plan for land nationalization. If you’re reading this book because you’re interested in natural history, you won’t relish the chapter on British land law, tariffs, etc. The main positive verdict with which one comes away from this book is that Wallace was a pioneer in the field of biogeography: the study and mapping of the distribution ranges of species. In the days before genetics and continental drift, this was a key to determining where species arose, how they spread, and how they were related to other species. Although Alexander von Humboldt preceded him in the creation of this field, Wallace developed it to a higher level, carving out a specific domain of research in which he surpassed Darwin. There is no doubt that Wallace is an immensely important scientist in the pantheon of natural history, but the spiritualism and anthropocentric teleology are definitely a disappointment. If you’re only going to read one book on Wallace, this volume does provide a fine overview of his thought, for better or for worse.

Metropolis by Thea von Harbou

Simplistic dystopian epic adapted into a landmark film

The 1927 science fiction film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, is widely considered one of the masterpieces of the silent era of film. Few these days are likely to remember, however, that the film was adapted from a book. Metropolis the novel, published in 1925, was written by Thea von Harbou, who also wrote the screenplay for the film. She and Lang were married at the time.

The novel takes place at an unspecified time in the future, though some promotional copy for the book states the date as 2026, a hundred years after publication. Metropolis is a technologically advanced urban industrial center. It is not intended to be a future vision of New York or London, both of which are mentioned as separate cities. It’s unclear exactly where Metropolis is supposed to be located, though Germany would be a safe bet. Metropolis is ruled by wealthy capitalist oligarchs who live in lofty towers. Chief among these is Joh Fredersen, the city’s most powerful citizen, dubbed “the brain of Metropolis.” The army of laborers who operate Metropolis’s machinery of production dwell in underground cities. Existing only to perform their robotic jobs, they are veritable slaves to the machines they tend.

Joh Fredersen has a son, Freder, who lives an idle life hanging out at the Club of the Sons, a resort for male heirs of the oligarchs. One day while visiting his father’s place of work, however, he develops sympathetic feelings towards labor. He also falls in love with a beautiful woman who seems to run the factory’s day care. As he pursues this mysterious maiden, Freder learns that she is the leader and cult figurehead of an underground (literally) revolutionary movement. Meanwhile, a mad scientist has created a robot woman, which you likely already know if you’ve ever seen a single shot from the movie.

The story is fine, though rather predictable. I didn’t care much for the way that story is told, however. Von Harbou grandiosely exaggerates every phrase. She saturates the text with biblical imagery and constant hyperbolic references to “the gods.” Realism is not a concern. The prose is largely written in incomplete, choppy sentences, and sometimes it’s difficult to tell exactly what’s going on. In spite of the futuristic sci-fi trappings, the story resembles yet another Victorian-era romance. I guess this is German expressionist literature, but if so, it’s not as effective as German expressionist film or visual art. What makes Lang’s Metropolis such a stunning film are the visuals, which were developed apart from the novel. Von Harbou’s text doesn’t contain much visual description at all, not even of the robot woman. The author doesn’t go into a great deal of detail in describing the dystopian future she has created. There isn’t much futuristic tech, for example, or sophisticated social and political commentary. The most outstanding feature of this dystopia is the obvious extreme disparity between the lives of the rich and poor.

The revolution of the workers against the oligarchs inevitably delivers a socialist message, though it feels half-hearted, intended more to generate drama then for actual political persuasion. If social reform or forebodings of an authoritarian future were the important concern here, the novel would have needed more of a grounding in the reality of the class struggle. Metropolis reads more like opera than realism. It has more in common with sci-fi films like Star Wars or Logan’s Run than with novels like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), or even Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Metropolis is what it is, and it’s pretty good at what it is, but the film is more impressive than the book.

The Terror by Arthur Machen

Ingenious and spooky WWI thriller

Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863–1947) wrote primarily in the horror and fantasy genres, and his work has proved greatly influential to subsequent authors in those areas, from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King. Machen has only recently come to my attention, and so far I have enjoyed everything I’ve read by him. He may be the greatest of Edgar Allan Poe’s successors in the literature of horror and the supernatural. Machen’s work of the late 19th and early 20th centuries brings Poe’s gothic terror into the modern era in a way that can still be appreciated by, and frightening to, 21st-century readers.

Machen’s novel The Terror was published in 1917. It takes place in a small rural coastal village of southwestern Wales named Meirion. In 1915, at the height of World War I, a shocking rash of mysterious deaths occurs in and around this village. Children have fallen off of cliffs, or were they pushed? Bodies are found of people who appear to have died of asphyxiation, but with no apparent evidence of strangulation or other trauma. A family lies dead in the highway out in front of their home, their brains bashed in. A girl is stung to death by bees. A farmer is found dead of a stab wound, as if pierced by a spear. There are no witnesses to these killings, and no clues as to their causes or perpetrators. Since it’s wartime, however, one can’t help but wonder if the Germans are responsible. Could there be a secret network of German soldiers operating within the British Isles, spreading terror throughout the countryside? Whether the Germans are responsible or not, this tragedy and terror on the home front is certainly not helping Britain’s war effort and has greatly hindered England’s fight against Germany.

Two local citizens attempt to find an explanation for these bizarre happenings. Dr. Lewis is a country physician, while Mr. Remnant seems to be a well-read retiree. The two theorize as to the causes of these events and bounce ideas off of each other. Lewis seems to be the more rationally scientific of the two. Remnant is more open to far-fetched conspiracy theories. The story is related by an unidentified third-person narrator who, like an investigative journalist, has gathered testimony related to these incidents, much of it from the mouths of Lewis and Remnant.

Even to today’s audience, who has developed an immunity to murder novels and serial killer movies, Machen’s descriptions of the deaths are bluntly brutal and must have been quite shocking to readers of a century ago. Many horror filmmakers of today are still squeamish about killing children in their stories, but not so with Machen. The indiscriminateness of this tragedy, coupled with the journalistic style with which the details are presented, give the novel an air of realism, even when contemplating possible supernatural occurrences. There are times over the course of the novel when the plot just seems to be a collection of random scary events with no rhyme or reason to the proceedings. Machen concludes the mystery, however, with an ending that ingeniously ties all loose ends together into a unique, imaginative, and praiseworthy resolution.

Of the three novels by Machen I’ve read so far, The Terror is superior to The Hill of Dreams but falls just short of The Great God Pan. All three are really quite exceptional works. While it’s easy to draw comparisons to Poe, Machen really has a distinctive voice and style all his own. His writing is quite unlike any of his contemporaries. The horror stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, Ambrose Bierce, and Algernon Blackwood seem tame and quaint by comparison. I’m not an habitual reader of horror or supernatural fiction, but in Machen’s case I will gladly make an exception.