Profiles in Courage

Watching The King’s Speech last night, I saw what my dad liked so much. It was the archetype of a conservative hero.

Prince Albert, forced into the role of King, was, despite his apparent weakness, deeply imbued with a sense of responsibility to his country and its people. Through tremendous strength of character, he overcame a stultifying and emotionally blighted upbringing and the resulting speech impediment, rising to his vital duty in his country’s hour of greatest need. Unlike his wastrel brother, who shamelessly abandoned his responsibility and chose a shallow life of self-indulgence, Albert accepted the mantle. He took up his cross. With the dogged and creative help of an unorthodox friend and mentor, and the unflagging support of a devoted wife who was his equal in heroism, Albert persevered in excruciating effort to overcome his disability and be the king his country needed, saving England and the world. He did so, moreover, without self-congratulation and without self-pity. This is what my father saw.

I only saw, at first, the stellar acting, the beautiful photography, the richness of period detail. The story was interesting—that Albert’s tortuous rise should align with the advent of radio, his perfect nemesis, was particularly compelling—but the handling of it was fairly pedestrian. I was not transported by the film. It was not until reflecting later that I recognized this was my father’s perfect parable.

A man possessed

Wii golf looks to be my latest obsession. We went to the neighbors’ for dinner on Saturday, and I played a few rounds with O. It was strangely addictive, requiring just enough skill to hold my interest and keep me playing. On Sunday afternoon I played with D at home, and later that night after he was in bed, compelled to keep at it and better my score. I can see the attraction. I can also spy already the end of this bender in the fact that it’s the same nine holes played over and over. Lucky for me.

Wii golf thus joins the long list of enthusiasms that have taken complete possession of me at one time or another, flings brief and intense that typically run their course in a week or a couple of weeks before I lose interest and drop them for a year or two, when I may just as typically be bitten afresh and go through the whole thing again.

Thus have I accumulated piles of newspaper sections, each one folded to the day’s Sudoku puzzle, so that I’d be sure to have one to solve tomorrow and the day after. Or gone on extended binges of Solitaire and online chess. I can say the same too for spates of watching movies or baseball or playoff basketball or the soccer World Cup. For a month every four years that tournament becomes my favorite thing, soaking up most of my waking attention. When it’s over, it’s over. I may miss it for a couple of days, but then, in spite of my intentions, I forget about soccer entirely for four years until the Cup returns and grabs my attention again.

The same pattern fits my impulse to cook. For long stretches I don’t just cook, I inhabit cooking—studying recipes, watching cooking shows, trying new techniques and ingredients, cooking meal after meal, cooking like a fiend.

It may seem dilettantish, scattered. But these passing enthusiasms, storms or waves of interest, have been a source of immense pleasure in my life, of consuming interest, and I am thankful for them. The abiding mystery is that I don’t control them. The wind bloweth where it listeth.

Narnia, Schmarnia

June 26, 2007


I never read The Chronicles of Narnia as a child. Undoubtedly that’s the time to read it. I find now that I can muster no affection for fantasy—not for Tolkien’s intricately worked out world of Middle Earth (which I loved as a teenager), and certainly not for Lewis’s jumbled kingdom. The talking beavers, the lamppost in the middle of nowhere, the weird eunuch Mister Tumnus—all of it leaves me, well, cold. So does the staunch medievalism, the skewed allegory, and the unexplained appearance of Father Christmas. And the stuffy traditionalism. I’m straining to grasp some nuanced Christian message, and it’s slipping through my fingers.

But of course I’m reflecting on the movies, not the books. The movies remove the nuance, the saving grace of language. It was the language, mainly, in Tolkien, that caught me up. The story? Well, there was a dangerous quest and a loyal and heroic band—that much I could buy into. What is there here, though? A quartet of bickering siblings, parent-less, are called upon to save the world. It scans a little bit like The Incredibles.

The kids are tested. Edmund gives in to his selfish appetites and his jealousy and so causes trouble for everyone. Peter has to grow into a warrior. Lucy, the youngest, believes—with purity. Aslan the Christ-type gives himself over to the Evil One, and by his willing death redeems. There’s a climactic battle. The cause is won.

Why am I not moved by any of this? Because it is not the Gospel? Because I don’t like the glorification of war? Because the Christ-type is a talking lion?

It was written for kids, I should remember that, and evidently it reaches them. Inspires them to be courageous and self-denying and true. Nothing wrong with any of that, of course. Except for the whiff of William Bennett, and triumphalism, and Christian home-schooling.

Not lost in translation

Jean Renoir’s 1945 drama The Southerner follows a family of sharecroppers as they struggle to launch a farm of their own. I can’t help but compare it to Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, made five years earlier and long one of my absolute favorites. Amazingly, Renoir’s film more than holds its own.

Zachary Scott plays Sam Tucker, a strapping, laconic son of the dirt with a stubborn dream of something better for his family. Betty Field is his devoted, rough-and-ready wife Nona. Beulah Bondi is magnificent as the childish, hectoring Granny, whose selfishness is distilled from a lifetime of suffering, and J. Carroll Naish is equally good as the treacherous neighbor Devers, a crafty survivor whose soul has been curdled by hardship.

The harshness of their lot, and the family’s fundamental decency, are established in the opening scene, as they pick cotton together in the blazing sun. An elderly uncle collapses in the heat, and his dying words, “Own your own land,” are Sam’s catalyst. From there, Sam and Nona press on through innumerable obstacles, never losing their dignity.

There are unforgettable scenes. The family’s decrepit “new” home has the haunted alien look of Ford’s Dust Bowl shacks, but the scene balances pathos and humor with a subtlety that Ford seldom achieves. Likewise the moment when Scott brings home a possum for his starving family: The gleam in Granny’s eye as she ravens her share of this humble meal powerfully evokes a life of desperate poverty even as it invites a sympathetic laugh. The wedding party and the flood scene play like Faulkner or Dostoevsky.

Indeed it is the humorous ingredients that set the film apart, clarifying Renoir’s object as humanistic; unlike Ford, he does not aim to mythologize. Refreshing reversals of plot and tone undercut and temper the tragedy.

Renoir wrote the script, with help from Faulkner and others to catch the authentic speech and folkways of the American South. These particulars ring true. Yet The Southerner is also universal, a story of peasant struggle and survival that could well be laid in China, or in France, or in any mezzogiorno.