The Limits of the Superman: Jack London's Wolf Larsen

One of Jack London's principal themes was the falsity of the myth of ultra-individualism so dear to the conventionally-minded in America--the individual who, even if beginning in the most unpromising circumstances, through will and prowess, wanting and needing no one and nothing else, becomes a mighty, all-conquering force (with Nietzsche and his superman particularly in London's sights, but I think the implications extending beyond that one thinker's work).

London handled this one way in Martin Eden. He handled it another in the surprisingly complementary The Sea-Wolf, where Wolf Larsen, in his intellect and strength and will (and ruthlessness), appears a superman--but "at the top of my life . . . when" he is "beginning to diminish and die," merely "master and owner of a ship." Indeed, Larsen is too thoughtful and intelligent to not be aware of this, speaking the words quoted here to the narrator Humphrey van Weyden and even remarking himself, "Paltry, isn't it?" Humphrey, up until his time aboard Larsen's ship a sheltered figure of far more conventional mind, answers that "history tells of slaves who rose to the purple," but Larsen answers back that "history tells of opportunities that came to the slaves who rose to the purple. No man makes opportunity," and all those who became what the world calls great "ever did was to know it when [opportunity] came to them." Napoleon knew, and Larsen says, he "dreamed as greatly as the Corsican. I should have known the opportunity, but it never came."

London seems to think Larsen wrong in and about a great many things, but on this point he seems to regard him as speaking the truth--very reasonably.

Have I Overlooked Dauriat's Virtues?

I have here written in the past of Balzac's character Dauriat. I have even suggested the use of "Dauriat" as a term for the cultureless controllers of our culture on Park Avenue and elsewhere.

This last may have been unfair--to Dauriat.

Dauriat is a crass, cruel, vulgar capitalist for whom the world of books is no more than a means of making money.

However, he never pretends to be anything other than what he is.

By contrast the folks on Park Avenue pretend otherwise--that they are book-lovers, book-people. And indeed demand to be respected as such rather than the crass, cruel, vulgarians they are, as we see in the contempt they poured on self-publishing, especially in those years when some dared to dream that this would become a genuinely viable alternative to traditional publishing. During that time the personnel of traditional publishing, and their courtiers across the literary and media worlds, insisted vehemently on their right to act as gatekeepers deciding what is or is not put before the public.

The dishonesty of their fundamental position is manifest in all sorts of lesser sorts of dishonesty. Dauriat makes it clear that the quality of a work is quite irrelevant to his concerns, that he uses books to make money out of "famous names," whereas those on Park Avenue tell the public that they are judges of quality, and that those they reject are simply not good enough--which goes right along with the pretense they maintain that they are worthy to be gatekeepers, and that anything sent to the public round them is illegitimate.

Next to the tellers of such lies Dauriat can almost seem admirable.

Craig Thomas' Charles Buckholz: A Few Thoughts

Craig Thomas' Kenneth Aubrey novels, like most comparable series', bring back not only the star but his supporting cast. (Mitchell Gant, in fact, was prominent enough in Firefox that he easily became a series protagonist in his own right, the central figure in three sequels, one of which cut Aubrey out altogether.)

This matters the more in that Thomas is rather stronger on characterization than most writers of action-adventure.

Still, after reading several Aubrey novels, and becoming very familiar with the name "Buckholz," I realized that the possessor of the name made almost no impression whatsoever. Yes, he was a very senior CIA man who could be thought of as Aubrey's American counterpart, but mainly he mattered because he was a point of contact with the bigger power in the special relationship, with all its import and resources.

In that he can seem Felix Leiter to Aubrey's James Bond.

Considering Ian Fleming's development of Leiter it has often been remarked that Fleming's patriotic inclinations and notions of how Britain could continue to count as a power in the world were a factor--America greatly superior to Britain in sheer economic and military muscle, but (a Fleming could hope) Britain America's superior at "playing the game," so much so that its superior expertise gave it a claim to being an equal partner, rather than a junior one.

I get less sense of anything like this in Thomas' books, very understandably. Britain's place in the world circa 1976 was a long way from its place circa 1953 (while the same could even go for America), making such visions less tenable. And at any rate, part of what gives Thomas his interest--and probably conduces to his giving us more interesting characters--is his being less inclined to that kind of nationalistic self-flattery than other writers are. Certainly American operators like Gant, or Clark in Sea Leopard, get treated with a respect Fleming never showed Leiter, while in a different way how Thomas handled Vorontsyev and Folley in Snow Falcon is consistent with that. However, it may be that even after Fleming's intention ceased to be noticed, or taken seriously, his handling of the duo of Fleming and Bond still had its influence on later writers.

The Legacy of Herman Wouk

Recently thinking about writers who were both hugely popular with the public and greatly acclaimed by critics but then largely forgotten I found myself considering Booth Tarkington--and somehow Tarkington got me thinking about Herman Wouk.

No one can deny that Wouk was enormously popular for a generation. According to the Publisher's Weekly lists his early novel The Caine Mutiny was the second highest-selling novel of 1951 and 1952 (which paved the way for the making and success of the Edward Dmytryk, Humphrey Bogart-starring film), while his next, Marjorie Morningstar, topped the list in 1955. Subsequently Youngblood Hawke, Don't Stop the Carnival, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance made the top ten lists of their own years (The Winds of War making the list two years in a row, in 1971 and 1972, and War and Remembrance getting the #2 spot in 1978, and the two becoming major event miniseries' on ABC in the 1980s).

Wouk's critical acclaim is more open to disputation than his popular success--but less so than some seem to think. After all, he did win a Pulitzer for The Caine Mutiny, while even his detractors could not avoid complaining (as Norman Podhoretz did) "[t]hat Wouk should pass for a serious writer" providing more than "'mere entertainment,'" however much they personally think this stature mistaken. One may add that this is much more than can be said for just about any decade-to-decade bestseller on that scale in our time, all as one may be a bit skeptical of the complaints about those who regarded Wouk as getting less than was his due--in the main, conservatives who regard him as, in spite of his sales and his honors, a victim of an era of countercultural rebellion and fashionable liberalism dismissive of Wouk because of his championing of traditional family, religious, patriotic, martial values (the more in as their eulogies make so very clear that those politics are a very large part of what they like about him).

At the same time it is very clear that in spite of bestsellerdom and a real measure of critical acclaim his star definitely fell. If War and Remembrance rounded out an (again) extraordinary third decade of top ten Publisher's Weekly year's bestsellers, none of the five novels he published afterward enjoyed that distinction, while an admiring David Frum went so far as to remark that if "[r]readers under 40 know Wouk . . . know him at all," it is "as a name on the spine of a paperback shoved into a cottage bookshelf at the end of someone else’s summer vacation." Indeed, it can seem telling that Stephen King actually published a short story titled "Herman Wouk is Still Alive" in The Atlantic in 2011!

Still, I think it harder to account for the decline of Wouk's standing than was the case with Tarkington. Contrary to the complaints of his eulogizers on the right conservatism as such has been no barrier to enduring reputation, and indeed often a basis for such reputation, in a way, I might add, that extends far outside the classroom. Thus are the works of authors from Anthony Burgess to Ayn Rand massive cultural presences generations on. It would seem more plausible to argue that Wouk suffered for lacking the stylistic fireworks or edginess of a Burgess, while however much conservatives approve his world-view (indeed, one has to go very far afield indeed to find really critical takes on his work), it is the case that, in contrast with Rand's capitalism-singing exaltation of the entrepreneur, even Wouk's fans do not consider him a "go-to" writer for a particular message. Meanwhile the sort of sweeping historical epic so popular in the decades of Wouk's greatest popularity has long since fallen out of favor with the broader audience--all as where one could in the years in which Tarkington's reputation was declining attribute it to people reading something else, in the years in which people were wondering "What ever happened to Herman Wouk?" they had grounds to wonder, and doubt, that the people who were no longer reading Wouk were reading anything else.

William Makepeace Thackeray's Counterfactual

In my reading about historical counterfactuals I do not recall ever running across the name of William Makepeace Thackeray, but as it happens he indulges in one at paragraph-length in the course of Vanity Fair as the Battle of Waterloo draws near. As he remarks, "[t]hose who like to lay down the History-book, and to speculate upon what MIGHT have happened in the world," may have wondered about Napoleon's timing in returning from exile, and whether his coming just a little later might have made history run another way. While those who study the period are typically taught to the Congress of Vienna as a triumph of statesmanship that helped prevent the outbreak of another general war in Europe for a near century (or from a more critical standpoint, shore up what remained of the waning Old Regime), Thackeray reminds us that it was not all cooperation at the conference. Rather each power, whose "august jobbers [had] assembled at Vienna" was out for what it could get, and arguing over the map of Europe like a band of robbers falling out over the division of the loot, with their mutual enmity the reason why their armies were so prepared to fight at that time--and only Napoleon's return uniting them in "hatred and fear" may have kept them from doing so. Indeed, Thackeray imagines, had Napoleon waited until the robbers actually did fall out before returning, they would not have confronted him with a united front as they did when he actually returned, and perhaps managed to go on reigning in France. However, for my part I wonder less about Napoleon's chances of having been Emperor for a few more years than how the map of Europe, and the attempt to turn back the clock socially and politically across the continent, may have been altered in the course of that timeline's events.

The Great Recession and "What Really Matters in Life"

The level of the mainstream discourse on world affairs is, of course, very low--with most of what gets to be heard exceedingly stupid, to the point of being what, in John Kenneth Galbraith's memorable phrasing, "would, by the uncouth, be called drivel."

So did it go with the 2007 financial crisis.

Much of said stupidity was as pernicious as it was false--as with the deflection of blame from bankers, speculators, regulators, politicians and the economics "experts" who lent cover to all of the above by the exceedingly shabby means of scapegoating the general public, and above all hapless mortgage takers for having let mortgage-backed securities mad functionaries foist on them loans they had little chance of repaying; providing cover for a bailout of Wall Street at the expense of a Main Street left to cope on its own in another exercise in "socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor"; and passing off the crisis as something quickly gotten over, as if circa 2012 the world had already got back on its onward and upward way.

The particular stupidity about the crisis and its hardships teaching people "what really matters in life" was of a piece with this-- perpetuating the false narrative that "we" were all responsible in such a manner, all of us mad with greed and since chastened and, with the crisis receding behind us, having learned our lesson, could be expected to act more "responsibly," when what really happened, was that the crisis of twenty to thirty banks in the trans-Atlantic financial system translated into a crisis that wrecked the world, all as business as usual continued, even as the global economy frayed and increasingly threatened to pull apart.

Ideally those who spoke such stupidities would today be ashamed of ever having done so--but I suspect few recall that they ever did, while pointing the fact out would, like the use of the word "drivel" to characterize it, be considered uncouth by the makers of respectable opinion, so that it is never done by anyone with a platform from which the speaker can actually be heard.

The Cult of Genius and the "Worker Who Reads"

In spite of his great importance for modern literature Bertolt Brecht is little mentioned in the English-speaking world, while from what mention he does get it is as a highly experimental playwright, rather than as a poet who produced many a verse of more conventional character.

One of Brecht's more famous poems is "Questions From a Worker Who Reads." The poem's worker, becoming acquainted with the events of history--the feats of arms, the feats of construction--finds himself wondering at who actually accomplished those feats. As he remarks early on all this is attributed to "kings," but it is not clear how they did it. "Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?" he asks. Reading of the conquests of Alexander and Caesar and even Frederick the Second, he wonders if they were alone when he made them--for certainly the books give the impression, speaking of no others. "Who cooked the feast for the victors?" he asks. "Who paid the bill?"

The worker finds no answers in the conventional, "Great Man"-minded history he has before him--and many would consider it an impertinence that he expect any, for only the Great Man was worth writing about. But alas, there is the matter of who hauled up "the lumps of rock." The trick for many is to trivialize that aspect of the matter, and the people who perform that task, as they enlarge the contribution of the "Great Men."

This is where the usage of the concept of "genius" of which we hear so much comes in, because it permits that to happen--permits, above all, individuals to be credited with the work of collectivities, even collectivities over eons, because it claims nothing short of transcendence of the merely human via reference to some mystical quality that endows the rare possessor with powers of the mind or personality as outlandish as the physical powers of the greatest superheroes.

However, to the best of my knowledge Brecht never wrote the poem where the worker was given that answer--and what the worker thought about it.

Why Are Pop Stars as Big as Ever When Other Celebrities Aren't?

Over the years I have written about the decline of celebrity, and seen this as partly a matter of broad social and technological developments (like the fragmentation of pop culture), but also developments relevant to particular kinds of celebrity (like the way that franchises and hyper-edited special effects-packed spectacle have overshadowed actors and thus stars in the biggest movies around, or sports have become less central to the entertainment-media world with all that means for how big a sports star can get).

However, music would seem an exception--this an area where the biggest Names are as big as they ever were, maybe bigger. (Pre-Taylor Swift, how many recording artists were honored by TIME as "Person of the Year?")

If one sees such a phenomenon as telling us something about the state of the culture in which we live it seems reasonable to give a moment's thought to explaining it.

One attempt by the BBC's Steve McIntosh to explain the matter (actually as attentive to the decline of the film star as the prominence of the pop star) stresses, on the positive side, the sense of closeness of people to pop stars in a way not the case with actors. He makes much of the personal connection people feel with a singer listening to their song, and especially the presentation of many of today's top pop stars as singer-songwriters, the source of their own lyrics which therefore mean that much more.

This can seem plausible--but also questionable. Pop stars and their performances are as manufactured a product as anything else, down to the voices we hear in the recordings as processed as any image to come out of Industrial Light & Magic, and their lyrics that we are only told they wrote, while these, are just part of productions that, whether the matter is a concert, music video, or even just the sound we hear through our earbuds, the musical equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster for the vast deployment of money, personnel, technology in the making of that sound to create an effect, and out of the effect a professionally marketed image. Live concerts, even concerts seen by way of concert films like The Eras Tour, add a crowd aspect that, I think, complicates any sense of intimacy between listener and singer. And as for the content itself . . . to the extent that fans feel emotional intimacy with the performer, it is more than ever a matter of intimacy with a raging narcissist.

Of course, that in itself does not mean that this sense of intimacy, of connection, is not there--just that this sense involves a good deal more illusion, delusion and frank deception than many realize, as fans give a pass to some very unattractive traits in their idols. (Narcissism is no way to make friends and influence people, but those of hierarchy-respecting conventional mind accept, defend, even celebrate, narcissism in a "star.")

It seems to me that other things are going on as well--like the combination of that intimacy with remoteness. As McIntosh points out, actors spend a lot of time promoting the movies they star in (so much so that many in the press looking for cheap non-structural explanations of Hollywood's lousy box office year in 2023 blamed the actor's strike's disruption of their promotional efforts) but the biggest names in popular music maintain a greater distance from the public, to the point of almost totally keeping clear of the press. McIntosh treats this as a reflection of their stature, but one can at least see this as contributing to their stature--for a star is supposed to exist in the heavens, and not on earth. (One can also see the touring so essential to a recording artist's career as a promotional tour, but a subtler one than doing interview after interview more in keeping with that remoteness and its fascination.)

All that said, it also seems worth thinking about the fact that the biggest names, like Taylor Swift, have been around for quite some time now--Swift having had her first big hit way back in 2006, in a different media universe, before the smart phone, before streaming became what it is, before a good deal else made for the fragmented media universe in which we now live. Beyoncé, the only figure who I think can be compared with Swift, made her name even earlier. It does not seem implausible to think that those who arrived on the scene later than they will never get to make so big a splash--that what we are looking at is "peak pop star," and that perhaps not too many years from now we will be looking back and thinking that, just as today we remember Michael Jordan and think no sports star since has loomed quite so large culturally since his day, no one ever got to be as Swift was in her extraordinary heyday.

Will Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Lose Money?

The film's production budget has been reported as $168 million. I do not know whether this is supposed to be net or gross--whether it includes or excludes subsidy defraying the studio's actual expenditure. However, not unreasonably assuming that this is what the studio spent, going by the old formula it suggests a final outlay of at least twice that to be made up before the film breaks even, or some $340 million. The movie likely needs to make at least 55 percent of that theatrically, which comes to $190 million in theatrical revenues, which would require a global gross of some $380 million.

How much of the way has the movie gone toward that mark?

Well, after its first four days in release the film has pulled in just $25 million domestically in its first three days, and $31 million in its first four.

The first Mad Max movie made 3.4 times its domestic opening weekend gross ($45 million) over its longer run in North America ($154 million), and 2.5 times its domestic gross globally ($380 million), or 8.5 times its opening weekend gross. Optimistically applying that formula we get a worldwide gross in the vicinity of $210 million. Even if we go by the four-day opening as a basis (which I think would be generous to a fault), we only get to $250 million. Working out to "rentals" of $125 million, and perhaps the equivalent of 80 percent of that from post-theatrical revenues on top of this, this comes to revenue of $225 million--some $115 million short of the $340 million+ the movie probably needs.

The result is that at this stage of things there would seem rather a yawning gap between what Furiosa would have to make to break even, never mind become profitable, and what it seems likely to make barring an extraordinary improvement in audience response--instead of good legs, really extraordinary ones, and a Fast-and-Furious-like balance of the international to the domestic gross over that longer run. In fact, the possibility of a $100 million+ loss suggests the movie may have as good a shot at making Deadline's list of biggest box office flops come April 2025 as anything released so far this year--though it is also the case that this year is young, and many bigger movies seem likely to have receptions no better than this before New Year's Day.

Notes on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga's Opening Weekend

As compared with last summer--and even this spring--I have been paying the box office less mind as of late. Part of this has been having less data to go on since Boxoffice Pro drew back from its publication of systematic, detailed, regularly updated forecasts, but part of it has been that in the main it is the same story over and over again--the contraction of the American box office, the sharply fallen returns on Hollywood's longtime box office strategy. And even where that story is concerned it seems that the early summer releases from which little was ever expected--The Fall Guy movie, the Planet of the Apes sequel no one ever asked for, etc.--mean little next to the bigger releases coming only relatively late in this season--with Inside Out 2 (due out only June 14!) generally considered the first.

Still, the discussion of the opening of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga got my attention. In spite of the bizarre talking up of the prior Mad Max movie as if it were some kind of record-crusher it was a merely respectable performer even by pre-pandemic standards--just #21 on the list of the year's domestic and worldwide grossers according to Box Office Mojo--and frankly a weak one given the reported $150 million production budget (reflected in the movie's reportedly losing money). It was not an obviously logical business decision to continue the saga from there, let alone do that in the form of a prequel to a character who is not the actual Mad Max (the strategy not of a main line Star Wars film but a Solo) put out a decade after that marginal performance with a different lead. Even if the movie was green-lit without the benefit of knowledge of how tough the market would become that ought to have been restrained expectations for it even pre-pandemic ought to have been lower still by mid-2024.

Considering the figures one may as well start with how Mad Max: Fury Road really did. That movie opened to $45 million over three days in 2015--the equivalent of $60 million in mid-2024 terms when adjusted for inflation. In fairness the box office-watchers expected less than that, about $40-$50 million in the first three days, and just $45-$55 million over the four day Friday-to-Monday Memorial Day weekend period. Still, anyone with a sense of how box office grosses have declined in the last few years (as the frequency of moviegoing practically halved) might suspect that a mere 16 to 33 percent real drop they projected was still on the optimistic side. Consider, for example, how even before the debacle of Captain Marvel 2 the Marvel Cinematic Universe's films (from Thor 4 to Guardians of the Galaxy 3) were doing just 50-80 percent of the business of the preceding films in their series'--a proportion which works out less to $40-$50 million than $30-$50 million, even with what was then, and even now remains, a stronger brand than Mad Max is in 2024. And indeed even the $30 million was more than the film took in over its three day period, its take just $25 million--while the fourth day does not get it much past the $30 million mark (at last report, just $31 million).

The obvious conclusion is that, even if expectations are lower than they were before, they still have not fallen anywhere near enough to give the professional box office-watchers a really realistic sense of just what the market is like now. Will they learn?

I wouldn't hold my breath--the more in as so much of what passes for analysis is mere claquing.

Craig Thomas' Snow Falcon: Some Reflections

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

As I have remarked in prior posts one of the most striking aspects of Craig Thomas' Snow Falcon was the extent to which Thomas had moved beyond the Cold War propaganda-caricature of Firefox in his conception of the Soviet Union. This is not simply a matter of his giving a little more thought to his characterizations of the Soviet figures, or his depiction of the society they inhabit (such as I have already discussed in Winter Hawk, even if this book goes further that way), but the fundamentals of the thriller plot itself, which offered quite a few surprises. Consider the impression the description of the book one is likely to find on the back cover of the paperback or the relevant page on the retail site makes--references to Thomas' longtime hero Secret Service chief Kenney Aubrey, photos suggestive of Soviet military moves in the vicinity of Finland, the infiltration of British special forces soldier Alan Folley to check out what is going amid an emerging crisis threatening nothing less than global catastrophe by way of a combination of coup d'etat in Moscow, and military aggression in Scandinavia which NATO is bound to resist.

Standard stuff, even the idea of the British cooperating with not just the Americans but Soviets to save the day.

However, as quickly becomes clear when one actually reads the book, the role of the Soviets is not marginal this time around--extending a hand to Aubrey, Folley and company as they play the principal role in saving the day. Indeed, senior KGB operative Alexei Vorontsyev becomes very prominent this time around in the first chapters, not only as a factor in these events but as a fully realized character living within a society with a more or less normal daily life (not least, in a failing marriage that can seem an all too common story anywhere, all of which soon proves more than mere background detail). By the midpoint of the book he actually emerges as the protagonist of the story, all as that British soldier checking out Soviet activity on the Finnish border gets captured, and lost to sight. Indeed, where in a conventional, jingoistic Cold War thriller Folley would play Rambo, escaping to finish his mission, it is Vorontsyev who does so--evading pursuit, fighting off enemies (in one case singlehandedly taking out most of an army squad and hijacking their armored personnel carrier for the purposes of his getaway), and actually rescuing Folley, who is not a triumphant action hero now ready to take the lead, but a man broken by the villains' torture, who in his damaged, degraded, pitiable condition (an astonishing counterpoint to the cult that was then growing up around Folley's Special Air Service) can help only with the clues he can give regarding the man behind the plot, to whom he was presented while in captivity. Naturally it is Vorontsyev and not Folley who personally hunts down the man, confronting him face to face.

Just as we have an interesting switch pulled on us with respect to the hero, so do we have one pulled with the villains. In the West the conventional idea is that no honest, intelligent, person could possibly have ever believed in the Bolshevik Revolution, let alone still been loyal to it in 1980. Indeed, looking at the mutiny on the Soviet destroyer Storozhevoy in 1975 Western intelligence was sure that what had been happening was an attempted defection--a reading that was the inspiration for Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October (who had read Gregory Young's Naval Academy master's thesis on the event). However, as it turned out the mutiny was not against the Revolution, but an attempt to save a revolution being betrayed by the Soviet elite led by ship political officer Valery Sablin--and especially in hindsight that the possibility was so little regarded by Western analysts can seem to testify to the intensity of Anti-Communist prejudice, and how it muddled the thinking of those whose job it literally was to understand the Soviet bloc for the purposes of fighting the Cold War. Yet such an attempt to save the revolution is what we ultimately see here--the plotter that Vorontsyev ultimately hunts down an old man who remembered Lenin, and had never ceased to be devoted to it, and regarded Stalin as having betrayed it--with the policy of "socialism in one country" that has, along with the reign of police terror with which Stalinism has been identified ever since, limited, twisted and threatened to destroy what Lenin and his allies sought to achieve, leaving us with a more than usually complex sense of this figure, the history he lived through, his world.*

Just as it seems to me that Thomas was ahead of Clancy in imagining the submarine scenario of Sea Leopard, he can seem ahead of Clancy in being able to consider such a possibility as that--and in the rather full-bodied development of a fairly conventional Cold War thriller premise, made what could have been standard a surprising and more than usually nuanced, richer, work.

* Thomas does not refer to the plotter as a Trotskyite, but this was, of course, a major Trotskyite criticism, and indeed we see the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico recalled by him as part of Stalin's catalog of crimes.

Of Upton Sinclair and Booth Tarkington

Recently considering the reputation of Booth Tarkington I was struck by how close to the height of his glory he was when Upton Sinclair produced his book Mammonart--and declined to give him a single mention, even of a negative kind. Rather Sinclair had occasion to mention him in another of his nonfiction books, The Brass Check, in which Sinclair contrasted the press' treatment of his own divorce (as usual, missing no chance to scandalize him) with its far more respectful treatment of Tarkington's divorce.

The contrast put me in mind of Sinclair's discussion of "ruling-class artists," who pander to the powerful and established, flattering them and their views, and "hero artists" driven by conscience and conviction to challenge them. Sinclair did not in that earlier book necessarily have these two categories handy--and certainly did not put Tarkington in the one category and himself in the other--but the difference in treatment was telling nonetheless (Tarkington "a novelist whose work involves no peril to the profit system," as Sinclair put it, in contrast with the work of one such as himself).

Both ended up largely forgotten--but if it seems to me that Tarkington was a rather slight writer who simply became less fashionable, Sinclair was a writer critics sought to bury, especially amid the turn the country's political and cultural life took in the following decades, when conservative critics, advancing their prejudices behind pieties about the priority of form, and the inappropriateness of "message" and "politics" in art (by which they meant, of course, the message and politics of dissenters and not those of the powerful, which they did not recognize or criticize as message and politics at all). Looking back it can seem as if in the process both Tarkington's falling by the wayside (for his just not having said much, and not said it particularly memorably), and Sinclair's burial (because of what he did say, especially to the extent to which he made it memorable), validated what he had to say about the politics of criticism--the more in as the world did not change in the way he had expected it would.

A Few Thoughts on Booth Tarkington's Legacy

Thomas M. Pryor's judgment on Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons strikes me as about right--"an exceptionally well-made film, dealing with a subject scarcely worth the attention which has been lavished upon it."

That slightness of subject reflected not the film's departure from Booth Tarkington's novel, but rather its extreme faithfulness to "the spirit and text of the novel" as Robert Gottlieb observed, sufficiently slight stuff that after I read it even as I disagreed greatly with many of that list's all too conventional choices, I wondered just how it managed to make the number one hundred spot on the Modern Library's list of the 100 Best Novels produced in the English language during the 20th century. Here and there I found something of interest--in the tidbits about the early days of the auto industry, and how Aunt Fanny lost her money in what hucksterism-indulging business journalists today breathlessly call a "start-up" because she failed to grasp the difference between what works well in a workshop and what is actually a salable product. Still, such things were few within the book, and relatively minor details, and at any rate not the kind of thing that generally catches the interest of critics in our era.

Ultimately my guess was that it seemed to the list-makers that Tarkington rated a mention more on the basis of his extremely high standing for some decades earlier in the century than his actual literary accomplishment by any relevant measure, and that this most famous of his books benefited from association with Welles' film.* But that, too, seems to me worthy of some remark--a reminder of how writers have so often gone from the heights not just of bestsellerdom but critical adulation to near-oblivion within a short span of time, with Tarkington's slightness very much relevant to this. That slightness, in combination with his conservatism, helped make him safe, appealing, popular with the critical community, and the public at large--a Saturday Evening Post regular. But it meant that he offered little that would endure as tastes changed, as indeed they did--a bit of patrician snobbery and nostalgia as he looked back to his privileged youth, an aesthetic distaste for automobiles and suchlike, an assurance to the people that a Sinclair Lewis satirized as Babbitts that they were just fine, but no more than that, as he produced works that were genteel, sprightly, straightforward, provincial, in a period in which, in line with the ascendant Modernism and postmodernism, critics were looking for brutal, dark, oblique, difficult; for obscurantist pseudo-profundity, and cosmopolitan urbanity; to the point of worshipping reactionary edgelords like Nabokov and Burgess (both far ahead of Tarkington on that Modern Library list; Nabokov can actually be found in the #4 spot!).

The result was that in contrast with the way critics strove to bury a Sinclair Lewis they simply forgot about Tarkington, the more in as the critical sensibility of the twentieth century changed so much from what it had been in his time.

The result is also that where those who in spite of those critical efforts to bury Lewis, discover Sinclair Lewis often find him worth their time, far fewer of those who happen upon Tarkington's books seem to find him so.

* Interestingly both Gottlieb and Thomas Mallon in their twenty-first century glances at back at Tarkington cite Alice Adams as a much more impressive novel than Magnificent Ambersons--which even got made as a movie twice, with the second adaptation a George Stevens-helmed, Katharine Hepburn-starring production nominated for Best Picture and Best Actress. But the film, like the novel, would seem obscure today.

Upton Sinclair's Ruling-Class Artists and Hero Artists

In Mammonart Upton Sinclair acknowledges the hard fact that for the artist "the path to honor and success in the arts has been through the service and glorification of the ruling classes." They desire that their persons and deeds should be flattered, their prejudices and lifeways affirmed, their sense of self-importance and their fantasies indulged--and "their subjects and slaves" taught "to stand in awe of them." Those who did so most satisfactorily could be very well-rewarded indeed, not only in life, but in death, and for the ages, it no accident that a Homer, a Shakespeare, a Racine--ruling-class artists all in Sinclair's view--were acclaimed the greatest of their era and nation, and continue to enjoy that status today.

I suppose this is in part because of the conservatism of literary critics, who tend to act as the priests of literature, uncritically accepting the judgments of the past to such a degree that they can at times seem to not even bother to have real opinions of their own, though they also would not seem to find acceptance of those judgments handed down to them a stretch given that the tastes of the comfortable have not changed so very much over the millennia--the upper-class Briton of Victorian times still able to thrill to Homer as the poet's own listeners once had. (Thus did ancient Greek robber-barons have poems composed "to glorify the ancestors of powerful chieftains and fighting men, and inculcate the spirit of obedience and martial pride in the new generations," and a William Gladstone still be moved.)

Equally those who walked a different path suffered for it--often in death as in life--with Sinclair making a pointed contrast between the treatment of a Shakespeare and a Shelley, a Racine and a Molière.

In handling the conceptions of the "ruling-class artist" and "hero artist" Sinclair displays some nuance--reflecting the reality that over a long career many a writer has been a mix of the two, and that many who began as one thing ended up another, with it all too sadly predictable that the more common pattern has been for a hero artist, or someone who might at least have become one, to become a ruling-class artist (as he recounts cases from Wordsworth to Wagner).

Still, if it is those who pandered to the powerful who have commanded respectability thousands of years after their passing, it has also been the case that those who look at them with their own eyes and make their own judgments are often less admiring than they are told they should be. In the aristocratic heroes giving in to "unbridled desires" of the epics and tragedies they are told they ought to speak of only in superlative terms they may, as Sinclair did again and again, see nothing but "spoiled children, flattered by servants and fawned upon by slaves," who were ultimately raised to be "psychopaths," and the art that portrayed them not at all "sublime" but rather "a bore." Those hero artists the powerful treated with such disdain, however, often manage to speak to us across time, space and culture in a way that surprises us.

Of course, it has been a long time since many read Sinclair--and few of those have been in positions of any influence. And so the canons of a century ago endure as the canons of today, as those of us required to read for school, or still read at all of our own volition, read the stories of psychopaths, and very likely find them a bore, but to retain the good opinion of others claim to have found them sublime.

Reading Ray Kurzweil for a Quarter of a Century: Some Thoughts

I first took an interest in Raymond Kurzweil's writing about the Singularity back when he first published The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999). All that sort of thing was a lot more novel then, and I was really intrigued by it--the more in as Kurzweil, unlike so many futurologists, presented long lists of specific forecasts precisely dated for 2009, 2019 and after.

Those forecasts for dates that were not too far away in particular had me thinking "Let's see what happens with all this," and so as I took in news about technological developments kept an eye open for signs that the advances he described--in the neural net-based pattern recognition that seemed most central to the progress in artificial intelligence, the mass-production and mass-scale usage of carbon nanotubes that would power Moore's Law into a post-Silicon age, the construction of nano-scale machinery, etc.--were actually happening.

A few years on, I saw no evidence of anything remotely like the pace of progress he predicted. The Segway scooter, instead, was as good as that seemed to get. Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near (2005), which seemed to me to elaborate his earlier theorizing rather than really break new ground, let alone demonstrate dramatic progress since the time of his last book, did not convince me otherwise. Nor did anything else I saw in the years that followed, including the smart phones that, for all their wonders, refined well-established technologies rather than representing the breakthroughs he talked about. And indeed, when 2009 rolled around, ten years after the appearance of Spiritual Machines, I published a systematic evaluation of his technological forecasts for that year in which I concluded that he had consistently been far off the mark in those areas where it counted most.

Indeed, watching so long and seeing so little I was getting fairly skeptical of promises for radical developments just around the corner. In fact I paid a lot less attention to technological forecasting afterward--in part because the writing about it I saw gave me less reason to do so, the writers seemingly saying the same things over and over again rather than presenting any new ideas, or new arguments for them, let alone present evidence for momentous things happening.

Of course, around the mid-2010s there was a new wave of techno-hype, the more in as progress in neural nets and machine learning was gaining steam, all as we were told a great wave of automation was very likely to soon sweep through the economy--with the supposedly imminent automation of our vehicles merely the beginning. At its height I suggested, optimistically, that perhaps we were running a decade or so behind Kurzweil's forecasts.

Alas, the it was just another bubble of techno-hype that went bust with almost nothing to show for it before the end of the decade, as the pandemic reminded us all how un-automated our economy really was, and seemed likely to remain for a good long while to come, while we ran a lot more than a decade behind Kurzweil's forecasts--our 2019 less advanced than his 2009, giving us additional grounds to doubt that it was worth comparing our trajectory with his timelines at all.

Of course, I knew that techno-hype is a cyclical thing and would resurge again, but it happened sooner than I would have guessed, while frankly being prompted by rather less than I thought it would take to accomplish that--Open AI and its chatbots. That excitement remains very much with us, fed by further advances in chatbots, and promised wonders such as what we have seen of Sora, while the price of the NVIDIA corporation's stock soared past the $1,000 mark because of its standing as a maker of AI chips, all as Wall Street generally seems to be behaving not as if the Singularity is near, but as if the Singularity is here (with the apocalyptic panic coming from some quarters only the other side of the expectation that momentous things were happening). The result is an especially opportune climate for Kurzweil's long-promised and repeatedly delayed follow-up to The Singularity is Near--The Singularity is Nearer--to appear before the world. As yet only the earliest reviews have appeared, as those of us who did not get early copies must wait another month before having the chance to check out Kurzweil's book for ourselves.

Will Kurzweil persuade those of us who grew skeptical of him over this uninspiring past quarter of a century to pay attention to his predictions again?

I suppose we will find that out soon enough.