The Christopher McCandless mystique continues

Kat Rosenfield at Unherd claims she knows why men are no longer wild: “Our sense of adventure died with Chris McCandless.”

I last wrote about the mythology around Chris McCandless and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild in 2015. Rosenfield’s article motivated me to survey the situation once more.

I won’t summarize here Krakauer’s book or Chris McCandless’ life and death. My earlier blog post (“Into the Wild and the continued fascination with Christopher McCandless’ death”) covers both. Wikipedia articles on the book and the man are good starting points too. And there’s no substitute for reading Into the Wild itself.

Why men are no longer wild

The meat of Rosenfield’s argument lies within this claim:

McCandless’s story became the object of fascination — and not long after that, backlash. His life was either an inspiring example of indomitable American spirit or a nauseating waste of privilege and opportunity; his death was either a tragic accident or an idiotic, avoidable bit of foolishness.

My motivation for this post started right there, in the above assertion. Compare it to what I wrote in 2015:

If this framing—reckless versus romantic—sounds wearily familiar, it’s because the debate over McCandless’s death has become nothing more than a flash-point in a broader argument we’ve had in America since he and I were born…

McCandless’ life has been converted into a proxy for this country’s culture wars, a string of battles where no one—no one—raises the white flag. … I’m unable to see how this situation honors or respects Christopher McCandless’ life.

Eight years later, Chris McCandless is still serving as a proxy for whatever culture war debate is on our collective brains at the moment. His life and death, cleansed and romanticized, provide a mythic framework to hang any number of ideological flags: anti-materialism, anti-woke, anti-technology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and more.

This is vital to recognize. Culture war ushers in an inevitable and putty-like transitive logic: Criticism of Krakauer is interpreted as an attack on McCandless; criticism of McCandless is read as an attack on his values; criticism of McCandless’ fans is an attack on progressivism; and so on.

So, yeah, I have and will criticize Krakauer, the actions of some of McCandless’ legions of fans, and the politicization of Into the Wild. I’ll even criticize some of McCandless’ choices. I’m trusting you to recognize that doesn’t make me a “Chris hater.”

“He’s emerged as a hero”

From there, Rosenfield takes what has become a standard approach in modern rhetoric: She claims her reasonable and clear-eyed position is the one under attack, even if she has trouble locating the hordes mounting said attack:

The lumping-together of McCandless with Thoreau was inevitable, and not just because the latter was a major inspiration for the former: here was an expression of the timeless desire to take these icons of male self-sufficiency down a peg. Today, the mention of either man tends to elicit a snarl — but the bulk of the anger is saved for McCandless, fuelled by a contemporary media ecosystem that keeps finding new ways to tell his story. [Emphasis mine.]

I cannot recall anyone “snarling” over Thoreau, who remains required reading in American high school and university curricula. He may have been dismissed in his time as a fraud or a crank, but I’m pretty sure Thoreau’s preeminence in American culture and letters is secure.

As for McCandless, Into the Wild has been translated into thirty languages and has remained in print since it was first published in 1996. It was made into a major motion picture by Sean Penn. It’s on high school and college reading lists across the nation, and was selected by Slate as one of the best nonfiction books of the past twenty-five years. A web site dedicated to Chris McCandless (christophermccandless.info) is still going strong, hosting papers written by young people affected by McCandless’ life story, a memorial foundation, a documentary, and more. The PBS special “Return to the Wild” promised to “probe the mystery that still lies at the heart of a story that has become part of the American literary canon and compels so many to this day.”

Yet Rosenfield somehow concludes McCandless and his life story are under a brutal and withering assault. If the debate could be placed on a scale like produce aisle apples, I’m certain we’d find any snarling criticism of Chris McCandless and Jon Krakauer is far outweighed by McCandless’ legions of fans and sympathetic media sources.

It doesn’t help that Rosenfield’s adoring portrayal of McCandless as the kind of masculinity we need more of in our on society is framed just as she outlined at the top of her article: “His life was either an inspiring example of indomitable American spirit or a nauseating waste of privilege and opportunity.” There are no alternatives, apparently.

“But lately,” she writes, “the controversy surrounding McCandless as a mythological figure is no longer an accompaniment to the story; it is the story.”

I don’t know that “lately” part is true. The controversy around McCandless began almost immediately after Krakauer’s story was published in Outside magazine. Its editors reported they’ve never received as much mail about a single story, before or since. The controversy became the focus of all subsequent accounts of Chris McCandless for the same reason Twitter melted down over the color of a dress: People couldn’t believe any sane person would disagree with their interpretation—and if you did, there was something wrong with you.

Here’s a good question: Why is McCandless a mythological figure? He was a human being, “full of vim and vigor, a complicated young man of effusive talents, predictable weaknesses, and eccentric foibles,” as I wrote in 2015. We can valorize a man, we can valorize his values. Why valorize his avoidable death?

Sherry Simpson of Anchorage Press put it this way in 2003:

Much of the time I agree with the “he had a death wish” camp because I don’t know how else to reconcile what we know of his ordeal. Now and then I venture into the “what a dumbshit” territory, tempered by brief alliances with the “he was just another romantic boy on an all-American quest” partisans. Mostly I’m puzzled by the way he’s emerged as a hero, a kind of privileged-yet-strangely-dissatisfied-with-his-existence hero.

I don’t agree with the “death wish” angle, nor do I think he was a “dumbshit” for entering the Alaskan interior. (I would say “grievously unprepared.”) “An all-American quest” ticks a few of my personal checkboxes, as does “I’m puzzled by the way he’s emerged as a hero.”

The diary

In an aside, Rosenfield complains that McCandless’ sister’s memoir The Wild Truth (2014) has been weaponized: “It was received less as additional context to his story than a debunking of it: McCandless wasn’t a latter-day adventurer, he was a spoiled trust-fund kid with daddy issues.” (It would have helped if Rosenfield could have linked to an actual “debunking.” The single link she provided goes to a perfunctory summary of the memoir by USA Today.)

Carine McCandless does offer eye-opening “additional context” to Chris’ story. The real issue her memoir introduces is that Krakauer agreed to withhold these key details from Into the Wild at the request of the family. By doing so, Krakauer created a hole in his narrative and in our understanding of McCandless’ motivations. The Wild Truth was not weaponized for a mass “gotcha” campaign, or if it was, the campaign made not a dent on the beatification of Chris McCandless. Rather, as with the evolution of the poisonous seeds (explained below), its details were smoothed over by sympathetic media sources as completing and supporting Krakauer’s story, and further buttressing the McCandless hagiography.

The only “debunking” of note was from McCandless’ parents:

“After a brief review of its contents and intention, we concluded that this fictionalized writing has absolutely nothing to do with our beloved son, Chris, or his character,” they wrote. “The whole unfortunate event in Chris’s life 22 years ago is about Chris and his dreams—not a spiteful, hyped up, attention-getting story about his family.”

There was another narrative hole, though, that is more substantial and of far more interest to people like me: The contents of the journal McCandless kept while in the Alaska wilderness. Initially only Krakauer had access to the diary, which he used while writing Into the Wild.

When the journal was finally released, it amounted to

approximately 430 words, 130 numbers, nine asterisks and a handful of symbols. Other than this, all Krakauer had to go on was several rolls of film found with the young man’s body and a rambling, cliche-filled, 103-word diatribe carved into plywood in which McCandless claimed to be “Alexander Supertramp” off on a “climatic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage.”

Craig Medred of Anchorage Daily News has much more to say about “the fiction that is Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. That Krakauer reconstructed McCandless’ last weeks in minute detail from such sparse documentation should be a flare in the sky to anyone who still believes the label “nonfiction” means something.

“It is as if the late writer Ernest Hemingway found a 430-word journal written by Nick Adams containing the words ‘railroad,’ ‘fish,’ ‘forest fire,’ ‘camp’ and a few others,” Medred writes, “and from that wrote ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ as the true story of Adams’ biggest fishing adventure.”

If that sounds like hyperbole, then reread the final three chapters of Into the Wild and reckon them against the source material Krakauer was drawing from. Here’s a portion of the journal, from the McCandless’ memorial site:

Day 2: Fall through the ice day. Day 4: Magic bus day. Day 9: Weakness. Day 10: Snowed in. Day 13: Porcupine day…. Day 14: Misery. Day 31: Move bus. Grey bird. Ash bird. Squirrel. Gourmet duck! Day 43: MOOSE! Day 48: Maggots already. Smoking appears ineffective. Don’t know, looks like disaster. I now wish I had never shot the moose. One of the greatest tragedies of my life. Day 68: Beaver Dam. Disaster. Day 69: Rained in, river looks impossible. Lonely, Scared. Day 74: Terminal man. Faster. Day 78: Missed wolf. Ate potato seeds and many berries coming. Day 94: Woodpecker. Fog. Extremely weak. Fault of potato seed. Much trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great jeopardy. Day 100: Death looms as serious threat, too weak to walk out, have literally become trapped in wild—no game. Day 101-103: [No written entries, just the days listed.] Day 104: Missed bear! Day 105: Five squirrel. Caribou. Day 107: Beautiful berries. Day 108-113: [Days were marked only with slashes.]

Chris McCandless’ entire diary, from day 1 to day 113.

McCandless notes on day 69, six weeks before his death: “Rained in, river looks impossible.” (I assume he means the river between him and civilization looks impossible to cross.) On day 100, he realizes “have literally become trapped in wild.” Earlier he writes, “Lonely, Scared.” Earlier still, he writes, “Weakness.”

“Male self-sufficiency”

McCandless entered the Alaskan wilderness packing ten pounds of rice, a .22-caliber rifle, ammunition, a camera, and a selection of books. Although his exact date of death is unknown, it appears he only survived for 113 days, or about sixteen weeks. All evidence is that he leaned heavily on a single food source, the seeds of a wild plant.

Rosenfield takes a crack at those who knock McCandless as unable to distinguish a moose from a caribou (“He could, actually”), although that’s beside the point. The real failure was him bagging a beast and lacking the skills to preserve it. After mere days he lost the carcass to maggots. Properly preserved, the meat and organs could have fed him for months, providing him with vital protein and fat. He wrote the waste was “one of the greatest tragedies of my life,” one of the few lucid and complete entries in his journal. Other than the wild seeds, he appears to have had no success in securing an additional food source.

The usual rejoinder to these failures is that the seeds he foraged were a good source of nutrition but, due to understandable circumstances, McCandless was poisoned by them, or some substance growing on them.

The seeds are, without a doubt, the most frustrating aspect of the entire affair. It’s oft-reported that over the years Krakauer required three tries to explain the puzzle of the poisonous seeds. As I wrote in 2015, the count was actually four, and is now closer to five:

  1. The explanation in his original Outside article;
  2. a modified explanation in Into the Wild;
  3. a third he offered in 2007 just as the movie was being released;
  4. a fourth in 2013 for New Yorker;
  5. and a modified fifth explanation in a peer-reviewed 2015 article, which he also discussed in a 2015 New Yorker article.

Diana Saverin of Outside magazine has a good summation of the history of the questions surrounding the seeds. (This article is also the first and only time I’ve seen a major media source acknowledge that the debate over McCandless’ legacy may be more than a Manichaean battle of “Chris supporters” vs. “Chris haters”: “[Some] readers don’t dismiss McCandless’ intention—spending time in the wilderness—as invalid or stupid. Rather, they reject his endeavor because of the consequence it led to: his death.” While not exactly my position, at least there’s an acknowledgment of a spectrum.)

With Krakauer’s later explanations for the seeds came sympathetic media outlets announcing he’d “solved” the mystery once and for all. NPR has declared the case closed on a couple of occasions. Salon originally titled their 2013 article “Chris McCandless’ death wasn’t his fault” before changing it to the blander “Into the Wild’s twist ending”. (The original title is still there in the page’s URL.)

The Salon switcheroo neatly encapsulates the stakes in play: By declaring McCandless was not culpable for his own death, the lessons and morality people wish to attach to McCandless’ life are preserved. Krakauer’s first explanation paints McCandless as fallible, and perhaps even liable for his own death (that Chris mistook poisonous seeds for edible ones). The later explanations (a mold or bacteria growing on edible seeds) reassures the faithful that McCandless’ death was understandable and unavoidable.

The various poisonous seed theories led to disputes between Krakauer and biologists. Even after the dust settled, the best the scientific minds could declare was “it is possible” the seeds were poisonous and “contributed” to McCandless’ death. That is not the indisputable evidence that some sources reported.

I’ll say it here, just as I said in 2015: I do not think McCandless was an idiot. I do not think he was reckless. He was far more prepared to enter the Alaska interior than a high majority of his admirers who’ve made similar attempts—but he was not prepared enough. I suspect he only realized his mistake when he could no longer trek out of the area (day 69, “river looks impossible”). Unlike living off-the-grid in places like the American Southwest, where he did well, McCandless’ resourcefulness was not enough in a truly remote and brutal location.

But even if rock-solid evidence arrived showing McCandless was poisoned by the potato seeds and nothing more, that does not prove his death was unavoidable. His survival in Alaska hinged on a single food source. He suffered from a single point of failure, and when that point failed, he was doomed. That is not “self-sufficiency.”

The cult

Rosenfield again:

On the 15th anniversary of McCandless’s death, Men’s Journal published a story titled ‘The Cult of Chris McCandless’, an examination of the young man’s legacy in and around the wilderness in which he perished. One gets the sense that there’s still little sympathy amongst Alaskans for McCandless’s death, and the quotes from locals range from pitying to contemptuous.

It’s true: A magazine wrote an article quoting some Alaskans’ contempt for Chris McCandless.

But it’s bewildering that Rosenfield could read the Men’s Journal story and come away with nothing more than the Alaskan angle. It’s titled “The Cult of Chris McCandless” for a reason. The bulk of the article regards the number of people—in particular, young men—inspired by McCandless to enter the wilderness and make a go of it themselves. They are almost always far less prepared for the ordeal than McCandless was when he entered Denali National Park.

I question the choice of the word “cult,” but confess I cannot offer a better alternative. The obsession with McCandless has made him a kind of secular saint, and the location of his death has become a pilgrimage site. TripAdvisor offers several pages on how to reach it; Google Maps still points to the site of Bus 142 before it was removed by the Alaska Army National Guard to discourage further sightseers. Authorities are routinely called in to rescue lost and stranded hikers. Deaths continue to occur. (Tellingly, Rosenfield mentions the reasons for the bus’ removal without pondering the implications of people losing their lives in the name of “authenticity.”)

If McCandless’ story truly inspires people to learn self-sufficiency—if it leads them to pause and hone the skills necessary to survive in the wilderness—I can only applaud that person for making the vision a reality. But when the inspired believe self-sufficiency is simply a matter of good intentions and a canteen of Evian, there’s a problem.

Compare the evolution of McCandless’ story—the beatification, the successive theories on the seeds, the guarded interpretation of his diary—to Charles Baxter’s observation of a proliferation of “dysfunctional narratives” in America:

Reading begins to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action. In such an atmosphere, already moralized stories are more comforting than stories in which characters are making complex or unwitting mistakes.

That sounds an awful lot like what happened to Chris McCandless’ story over the span of thirty years.

The politics

Krakauer:

A lot of people came away from reading Into the Wild without grasping why Chris did what he did. Lacking explicit facts, they concluded that he was merely self-absorbed, unforgivably cruel to his parents, mentally ill, suicidal, and/or witless.

Rosenfield picks up where Krakauer leaves off…and makes a serious detour:

The guy who hunts his own food, chops his own wood, and builds his own home, is a suspicious character: a little too trad, a little too in-your-face masculine, probably a Trump voter. And the guy a step beyond that, the one who doesn’t just paint outside the lines but wants to buck the system entirely? There’s something really wrong with him. He’s no pioneer; he’s a misanthrope, a deadbeat, an incel. … We’re afraid of men like this, and we’re afraid of the people who admire them.

This characterization is off-the-rails.

Without exception, criticisms of McCandless as an irresponsible privileged twerp are coded right-wing. The type Rosenfield describes sounds more like a standard-issue take-down of libertarians and hard-right Republicans (“a misanthrope, a deadbeat, an incel”). Those take-downs inevitably come from sources coded as left-wing—the same sources who trumpet McCandless as a modern icon (Salon, NPR, etc.) These sources will question the myth of rugged individualism in American history—and then, with no apparent introspection, hold up high Chris McCandless’ rugged individualism as an example to follow.

If anything, the animus toward Chris McCandless is a mirror-image of the one Rosenfield describes. Critics like to portray him as a coastal elite, a hipster from a privileged enclave who foolishly launched a narcissistic quest for authenticity, and certainly not as a Trump voter. I’ve never heard anyone describe themselves as “fearful” of McCandless’ admirers. “Idiots” is the terse word one acquaintance used when I brought up the subject.

Recall Sherry Simpson: “Mostly I’m puzzled by the way he’s emerged as a hero, a kind of privileged-yet-strangely-dissatisfied-with-his-existence hero.”

“Gather, cook, and eat”

If you still think of me as a “Chris hater,” in return I ask for your opinion of other individualists who forsook modernity and escaped to the wild.

There’s Alastair Bland, the student I wrote about eight years ago. The similarities between Bland and McCandless are remarkable: Both were anthropology majors who believed hunter-gatherer societies were freer and enjoyed more leisure time than agricultural/industrial ones. Both expressed a sharp disdain for modern consumerism and materialism. Bland did not penetrate the Alaska interior, but he did live off the land in and around U.C. Santa Barbara in 2002. Bland found people around him cheering him on:

They marveled at how great [his experiment] was and exclaimed that they would some day try to do something similar. They thought it was a good thing to boycott the American market and a shame more people didn’t appreciate nature’s bounty the way I did.

Like McCandless, Bland wound up concentrating on a single food source—tree figs—which left him bleeding from the mouth and nauseous. His days were spent scrounging for his next meal. He dreamed of climbing trees and eating figs. His life became “gather, cook, and eat.”

Just as McCandless attempted to flee the Alaska interior sooner than planned, Bland too quit his experiment early:

Even now I don’t believe what I did was very constructive. It was a memorable time in my life, to be sure, and it was a good thing to have tried. But to carry on like that forever would have been, for me, social suicide.

There’s Timothy Treadwell who, like McCandless, found a spiritual refuge in the Alaska interior. He lived there for thirteen seasons among the coastal brown bears, both alone and with his girlfriend. Like McCandless, he came from a well-to-do family, and was athletic and gifted. After some failures as an aspiring actor and a bout with alcoholism, he turned his life around. He grew famous for spending time close to the bears in Alaska, daring to approach them to gain their trust. He was immortalized in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man.

In October 2003, Treadwell and his girlfriend were attacked and killed by a bear. Treadwell’s running camera captured the audio of the attack. It was the first and only incident of a bear killing a person in the history of Kitmai National Park.

John Rogers of Kitmai Coastal Bears Tour writes of “The Myth of Timothy Treadwell,” although this myth never took on the heroic proportions of McCandless’. While Rogers says, “Timothy Treadwell was not the foolhardy person the media portrays him to be,” he does not acquit him of culpability in his own death, either.

There’s Christopher Thomas Knight, the recluse who lived twenty-seven years in isolation in the north of Maine. In a bit of philosophizing that could have come from McCandless, he said by living alone “I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for … To put it romantically, I was completely free.”

But Knight survived while habitually breaking into nearby cabins. He was accused of performing over 1,000 burglaries over a quarter-century, pilfering goods and supplies for his own survival.

Note that McCandless has also been accused of breaking-and-entering by Craig Medred:

Three cabins — two privately owned and one a property of the National Park Service — were broken into while McCandless was at the bus. It had never happened before. It has not happened since.

There’s Robert Bogucki, raised in Malibu and a student at Georgetown University. As a young man, he began to question materialism and capitalism. He traveled to Australia to walk solo across its interior desert.

He entered the desert carrying a week’s worth of food and 26 liters of water. When his supplies ran out, he began digging for moisture, and cutting himself to drink his own blood. His absence sparked what was the largest and most expensive manhunt in Australia’s history. After forty-three days, he spelled out “HELP” with rocks and was rescued by a search helicopter. Bogucki “lost more than 30kg [66 pounds] from his 86kg [189 pounds] and it took him a full year to regain his previous strength and stamina.” (McCandless’ corpse weighed 66 pounds—half of Bogucki’s final weight—when he was discovered.)

Why did Bogucki do it? To see God. He desired to model Jesus’ forty days in the desert. He claimed God spoke to him and directed him to water sources. Where McCandless packed in a book on Alaskan horticulture, Bogucki carried a Bible.

Why are these “self-sufficient males” not idolized by the legions of McCandless followers? Why don’t we praise their “sense of adventure”?

Perhaps due to the faulty optics of each story: Bland’s admission of failure in a soft Southern California beach town; Bogucki’s distasteful Bible-thumping; Knight’s “self-reliance” revealed as a reliance on others; Treadwell’s violent attack recorded on tape, supplying us an unromantic record of nature’s grim realities.

Are optics really what makes McCandless different? Doesn’t such a cynical and relativist view smack face-first into McCandless’ values of authenticity—honesty with others, and honesty with one’s self?


It’s taken me nearly a year to write this post. I gave up twice. Researching and writing this has been exhausting. Why spend so much time and energy?

As I wrote in 2015:

Jon Krakauer introduced me to a vivid and lucid life, one that will stay with me for years.

That life has been flattened into an icon, propagated as a cult of personality, and used to buttress petty political divisions. In the least I must register my protest.

Kurt Vonnegut on story shapes, writing with style, and running experiments

Recently I picked up Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, part of the Literary Conversations Series from University Press of Mississippi. The collection offers interviews and profiles of Vonnegut published between 1969 and 1999. The first comes shortly after the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five. The subsequent rocket ride of literary stardom Vonnegut enjoyed—or endured—follows.

The collection seems rather complete, culling all manner of sources, right down to a softball Q&A with Harry Reasoner for 60 Minutes. The collection is breezy if thought-provoking reading, much like many of Vonnegut’s books, but it still held a few surprises for me. (Apparently after the success of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut contemplated throwing out Breakfast of Champions when he realized he could now sell any book he wrote no matter its quality.)

The more I learn about Vonnegut, the more I’ve come to see how pragmatic he was when it came to the craft of writing. Vonnegut often lists Robert Louis Stevenson as one of his favorite authors because, as a boy, he was “excited by stories which were well-made. Real ‘story’ stories…with a beginning, middle, and end.” His essay “How to Write With Style” is advice of the roll-up-your-sleeves variety, featuring watery chestnuts like “Find a subject you care about” and “Keep it simple.” More interestingly, while teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he led a course to help students make a career out of writing after graduating—teaching, technical writing, ad copy, anything to put bread on the table. Apparently the course was not well-regarded by the other faculty.

One popular meme is Vonnegut’s lecture on the shape of stories. The audience chortles as he chalks out curves and lines graphing a set of basic story structures. (Maya Eliam’s infographics of these shapes are lucid and wonderful.) Most likely many in the auditorium thought he was satirizing when he said story forms could be graphed mathematically or analyzed by a computer, but his lecture is in earnest. This was his master’s thesis in anthropology, after all.

In a 1977 interview with Paris Review—the most in-depth interview in the collection—Vonnegut drops a mention of his story shapes:

Vonnegut: Somebody gets into trouble, and then gets out again; somebody loses something and gets it back; somebody is wronged and gets revenge; Cinderella; somebody hits the skids and just goes down, down, down; people fall in love with each other, and a lot of other people get in the way…

Interviewer: If you will pardon my saying so, these are very old-fashioned plots.

Vonnegut: I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. … When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do.

The last sentence may be the most plainly spoken argument against the avant-garde I’ve read.

Vonnegut even compared writing novels to experiments, which I’ve explored myself. He felt experimentation was in his nature due to his education as a chemist and an engineer. (I believe this is the first time I’ve read another fiction writer describe creating fiction as a kind of experiment.) Here he talks with Laurie Clancy about Breakfast of Champions (still unpublished at this point):

Interviewer: Could you indicate what direction your new work is taking?

Vonnegut: It’s in the nature of an experiment. I don’t know how it’s going to come out or what the meaning’s going to be—but I’ve set up a situation where there’s only one person in the whole universe who has free will, who has to decide what to do next and why, has to wonder what’s really going on and what he’s supposed to do. … What the implications of this are I don’t know but I’m running off the experiment now. I’ll somehow have a conclusion when I’ve worked long enough on the book. … Regarding [God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater], I said to myself “Well, all right, what happens when you give poor people money?” So I ran the experiment off and tried to control it as responsibly as I could.

The Clancy interview is one of the best in the book. Vonnegut is engaged, thoughtful, and revelatory.

Ray Bradbury on getting stories published

I’ve been dipping into Wayne L. Johnson’s 1980 book Ray Bradbury the past couple of months. It’s part of the Recognitions series published by Frederick Ungar, a series featuring critical work on genre writers who’ve transcended their genre.

Johnson’s Ray Bradbury is a biography of the author tracked through his output rather than a stiff-backed recounting of dates and locations of events in his life. Bradbury’s short stories are grouped by subject matter and style as a strategy for analyzing the author’s approach to fiction. Johnson’s book paints a picture of a man who delved deep in the human imagination and returned with some fantastic stories for the ages.

Ray Bradbury was one of the most prolific short story authors of the 20th century because he never abandoned the form, unlike other authors who move on from them to novel writing. Bradbury capitalized on his bounty by disguising his short story collections as longer work (The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man). Even Fahrenheit 451 is itself a maturation of a shorter work first published in Galaxy Magazine.

What caught my eye (and sparked the idea for this blog post) was a brief aside in Johnson’s introduction about how Bradbury was able to sell his prodigious output of short stories across the spectrum of American publishing:

Convinced that most editors were bored with seeing the same sort of material arriving day after day, Bradbury resolved to submit stories which, at least on the face of it, seemed inappropriate to the publication involved. Rather than send “Dandelion Wine” (later a chapter in the novel) to Collier’s or Mademoiselle, therefore, Bradbury sent it to Gourmet, which didn’t publish fiction. It was immediately accepted. “The Kilimanjaro Device” was snapped up by Life, which also didn’t publish fiction, after the story had been rejected by most of the big fiction magazines. … Bradbury insists that he places complete faith in his loves and intuitions to see him through.

Bradbury was certainly a known quantity when these short stories were published but, as Johnson indicates, he still faced his share of rejection slips. I don’t think Bradbury’s wanton submissions were ignorant of market conditions; it sounds to me he was quite savvy with this strategy. (Sending “Dandelion Wine” to Gourmet magazine is kind of genius, actually.) But Bradbury’s strategy transcends the usual mantra to “study the market.”

Galaxy Magazine (February 1951). Bradbury’s novella “The Fireman” was the nucleus for Fahrenheit 451.

I’ve been a front-line slush pile reader at a few literary magazines, and I can tell you Bradbury’s intuition is spot-on. When you’re cycling through a stack of manuscripts, they begin to look and read the same. Too many of those short stories were treading familiar paths. Too often they introduced characters awfully similar to the last story from the pile.

A story with some fresh air in it certainly would wake me from my slush-pile stupor. The magazine market has changed dramatically in the past ten years—and absolutely has reinvented itself since Bradbury was publishing “Dandelion Wine”—but I imagine similar dynamics are still in place in the 21st century. Surprise an editor with your story and you just might have a shot at publication.

And if you’re banging out short stories and fruitlessly submitting them one after another to the usual suspects, try taking a risk and following Bradbury’s lead. Trust me, if you can put on your next cover letter that your short fiction was published by Car & Driver or National Geographic, that will surprise editors too.

Lessons learned from Ross Macdonald

Recently at San Francisco’s Green Apple bookstore I discovered an edition of Inward Journey (1984), a collection of essays, poetry, and remembrances dedicated to mystery writer Ross Macdonald and published shortly after his death. The collection is edited by Santa Barbara rare book seller Ralph B. Sipper, who also collaborated with Macdonald on his autobiographical Self Portrait: Ceaselessly Into the Past.

Ross Macdonald obviously affected and influenced a great number of people in and around the Santa Barbara writing scene. The anecdotes and memories related by his friends and acquaintances paint a picture of a private and thoughtful novelist who quietly guided a number of writers toward improving their craft. It’s a touching book that mostly avoids miring itself in the maudlin. Some of the writers are quite close to the subject, such as his wife’s warm and elegant recounting of an early and late memory of him. Other essayists are more distant and matter-of-fact, such as popular writer John D. MacDonald’s humorous tale of his dance with Ross Macdonald over the appropriate use of their last names in publication credits.

That confusion is due to Ross Macdonald being the pen name of Kenneth Millar, who adopted the name to avoid being confused with wife Margaret Millar, a well-known novelist in her own right by the time his star began to rise. On top of his feud with John D. Macdonald, he also witnessed his style of detective fiction (and his detective, Lew Archer) relentlessly compared to hardboiled writers Raymond Chandler’s and Dashiell Hammett’s work from a quarter century earlier—often to his own detriment.

Between Margaret writing under his family name, authors John D. MacDonald and Philip MacDonald, and the unasked-for competition with Chandler and Hammett, it’s a wonder Ross Macdonald was able to carve out a name for himself. He did, and his workmanlike approach to novel-writing led to a corpus of nearly thirty solid books, the bulk set in Macdonald’s own Southern California, in particular his home of Santa Barbara (renamed to Santa Teresa). As such, Macdonald inherited not merely Chandler’s mantle of the premier tough-guy detective writer, but also the mantle of the leading Southern California mystery writer. The difference is, where Chandler’s stomping grounds are Los Angeles proper, Macdonald’s Lew Archer prowls the Southern California suburbs. This shift corresponded neatly with the rapid postwar growth of the Southern California valleys and coastal communities.

Free and joyful creation

Inward Journey opens with two previously unpublished essays by Macdonald himself. “The Scene of the Crime” is a lecture he gave at the University of Michigan in 1954 regarding the origins and development of the mystery story. It’s one of the most erudite, learned, and humble essays I’ve read on the subject. Macdonald had a degree in literature (his thesis analyzed Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner) and he draws on sources as wide-ranging as William Carlos Williams and Faulkner in way of framing the detective story as a modern narrative strategy devised in reaction to modernity itself:

“A Rose for Emily,” [Faulkner’s] most frequently reprinted story is a beautifully worked out mystery solved in a final sentence which no one who has read it will ever forget. … I don’t mean to try to borrow Faulkner’s authority in support of any such theses as these: that the mystery form is the gateway to literary grace…Still the fact remains he did use it, that the narrative techniques of the popular mystery are closely woven into the texture of much of his work.

The other chapter, “Farewell, Chandler,” originated as a private letter to his publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Pocket Books was republishing his detective novels and sought permission to “fix” them by making them more violent and sensational (and therefore more palatable to paperback readers). Macdonald was compared to Chandler his entire career, and this letter both acknowledges the debt while gingerly disentangling himself from Chandler’s legacy:

My hero is sexually diffident, ill-paid, and not very sure of himself. Compared with Chandler’s brilliant phantasmagoria this world is pale, I agree. But what is the point of comparison? This is not Chandler’s book. … None of my scenes have ever been written before, and some of them have real depth and moral excitement. I venture to say that none of my characters are familiar; they are freshly conceived from a point of view that rejects black and white classification…

A writer has to defend his feeling of free and joyful creation, illusory as it may be, and his sense that what he is writing is his own work. [emphasis mine]

These two chapters are worth reading (and worth republishing, if they’re not already.) If you’re a writer of any stripe, I would then encourage you read beyond them. Although many of the remembrances in Inward Journey are strictly personal anecdotes, more than a few dig into Macdonald’s bibliography for clues to understanding the man himself. They also relate tidbits of Macdonald’s writing habits and personal theories on fiction and form.

In particular, George Sims offers a wonderful history, book-by-book, of Macdonald’s bibliography, with highlights of his best work. The final chapters by Gilbert Sorrentino and Eudora Welty describe the evolution of Macdonald the writer (and Lew Archer, the hero) from Macdonald’s earliest works to his last. In 1954’s “The Scene of the Crime” Macdonald claims the mystery novel stands to be viewed in the same light as Zola’s and Norris’ Naturalism; Welty picks up that theme in 1984 and asserts Macdonald has earned the right to be included in the said light:

Character, rather than deed itself, is what remains uppermost and decisive to Macdonald as a novelist. In the course of its being explained, guilt is seldom seen as flat-out; it is disclosed in the round, and the light and shadings of character define its true features. … His detective speaks to us not as a moralist but as a fellow sufferer.

If you have any interest in Ross Macdonald or mystery/detective fiction, and your local library stocks this book, it’s well worth a trip to your nearest branch to absorb these chapters. It’s also available online at the Internet Archive.

Twenty Writers: Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

See the “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books” home page for more information on this series as well as a list of other reviews and essays


So far in this series, about half of the books I’ve discussed have been nonfiction and the other half fiction. This is the first time I’ve written about a text on critical theory—and it may be the best lit crit book I’ve ever encountered.

The text I’m speaking of is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Published in 1993, the book remains the definitive work on comics theory a quarter century later. Others have attacked the subject, but none come close to McCloud’s exhaustive treatment.

McCloud is an unlikely “Aristotle of comics.” Prior to Understanding Comics he was best-known for Zot!, a lighthearted superhero comic book series which introduced many American readers to the tropes and style of Japanese manga. While Zot! was a success in the 1980s, its reputation has not swollen over time, as evidenced by McCloud’s sheepish preface to a 2008 reprint.

There’s nothing sheepish to be found in Understanding Comics—McCloud is not merely comic’s Aristotle, he’s one of its best ambassadors. His belief in comics’ power and universality is unshakeable. Page after page he convincingly argues comics belong in the same inner circle as other high art forms, including art considered vulgar upon its first appearance, such as film and jazz. Comics may even be more inclusive than other forms, as the language of comics is the language of the modern world. Advertising, software, religion, news, and entertainment all employ comics’ visual cues for their own purposes. This isn’t so much a book on comics as a book on perception and semiotics.

When I first picked up Understanding Comics in the mid-1990s, I enjoyed reading comics occasionally, but only as a guilty pleasure. I’d read superhero comics as a teen but set them aside as childish even before I left high school. (And this was during the 1980s rise of so-called “adult” comics like The Dark Knight Returns and the all-but-forgotten Camelot 3000.)

McCloud’s treatise left me with a renewed pleasure for reading comics. He disassembled and reassembled what I “knew” about comics before my eyes, all the while with concision, humor, and infectious zeal. His unraveling of the “invisible art” also left me with a fresh re-looking of the world at large. I can’t think of higher praise for McCloud’s magnum opus.

The sequential art

Understanding Comics is not the first work on the principles of comics. That honor goes to Will Eisner’s Comics & Sequential Art.

Before Eisner, books on comics focused on technical production: inks, scripting, musculature, shading, etc. (The most prominent example I know of is How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, the standard go-to guide for aspiring fourteen year-olds back in the day.) Comics & Sequential Art focused on the language of comics, much as a book on film theory would discuss camera angles and shot selection as the “language” of movies.

Prior to Eisner and McCloud, books on writing comics skewed toward technique and process.

Sequential Art‘s biggest contribution is right there in its title—Eisner put forward a general definition for comics. He held up comics as a special style of communication with unique properties and advantages. Eisner saw the field still struggling to break free of cultural restrictions (“comic books are for kids”) and waiting to be applied to broader purposes. For example, Eisner advocated using comics for technical manuals and in education.

Reading comic books in grade school may be more acceptable today than when I was young, but I suspect the suggestion still earns chuckles among certain educators. That’s too bad; Eisner remains ahead of his time. After all, while IKEA’s assembly guides and their Ziggyesque “IKEA Man” character have elicited much lampooning, their ability to transcend written language stems from the fact that they are comics. And when Google wanted to introduce the world to its new Chrome browser in 2008, it hired none other than Scott McCloud to present the software’s design and features via a digital comic book.

Understanding Comics takes many cues from Eisner’s work, and McCloud is eager to tip his hat to the master as well as introduce readers to a plethora of other comic artists you may or may not have heard of. But where Eisner’s book is head’s-down on the drawing easel, McCloud’s eyes are fervently skyward. Eisner’s intended audience is other comic artists; McCloud’s audience is everyone. To McCloud’s thinking, the language of comics permeates the modern world. He’s not merely comics’ Aristotle and ambassador, he’s its evangelist. Understanding Comics may be the first foundational lit crit text written by a fan boy.

The invisible art

The care and thought put into Understanding Comics is evident from the front matter onward. Consider that a book subtitled “The Invisible Art” opens with an enlarged image of an eye staring back at the reader—an iris, eyelashes, and eyebrow framed by a comic panel. Seeing is everything for McCloud, which is why Understanding Comics earns a space on the shelf beside Berger’s Ways of Seeing.

One bit of lingo in the software business is “dogfooding,” that is, the idea software developers should use their own software to better understand the problems and bugs their users are experiencing. (Imagine if every Apple employee used Microsoft PCs and Android phones, or if the entire workforce of The Gap wore Armani suits.)

McCloud dogfooded comics. His entire thesis, from first page to last, is told in comic form. He demonstrates the ubiquitousness and power of comics by drawing comics. The only places McCloud “reverts” to pure text are the Acknowledgments and Bibliography pages (where he can be forgiven, since I doubt anyone wants to read a Bibliography set to comic form).

Cleverly, McCloud inserts a cartoon representative of himself into the book to gently guide the reader along (and even analyzes the strategy itself as a graphic device). He deploys every trick in the comic biz to illustrate his points: alternate panel layouts, strange word balloon shapes, odd and abstract art styles, and so on. Every page offers a surprise for the reader. I can’t imagine the quarts of blood McCloud must have sweat to craft this masterpiece. Whatever criticism you may lob at McCloud, you can’t call his book dry.

After an ambitious and vivid history of comics going back to prehistory (no, really), McCloud appropriates Eisner’s term for comics—”sequential art”—and develops his own rigorous definition. From this foundation he launches into the depth and breadth of the language of comics: panels, gutters, lines, word balloons, transitions, and the utility of color (as opposed to the job of coloring, a la How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way).

McCloud’s ambitious “picture plane,” from photo-realism (left) to iconography (right) with the degree of abstraction rising up the pyramid. The eye on the left is the realm of visual and the mind on the right is the realm of ideas. Notice on the far right how McCloud considers written language a kind of “pure” iconography.

But McCloud isn’t satisfied to stay grounded on matters pertaining to comics itself. He reaches further with chapters on iconography, the nature of vision, and perception versus self-perception. He muses on the unique language of comics, where pictographs plus written word combine, and how space on the page can represent shifts in location and time, and sometimes shifting both simultaneously. He concludes with a surprisingly moving chapter on the relationship between artist and art that should be required reading for students of all creative disciplines.

Whether you agree or disagree with his conclusions, McCloud’s faculties for persuasion are appealing and impressive. The power of Understanding Comics is in taking McCloud’s tour through language and imagery, even if you don’t always agree with his destinations.

Recommendations

If you enjoy Understanding Comics, I recommend exploring the terrain McCloud mapped out. What follows is a list of graphic novels reflecting McCloud’s vision. They’re also rewarding in their own right:

  • City of Glass, Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli: Engrossing graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s novel. City of Glass reads like a pure application of Understanding Comics.
  • Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, Shigeru Mizuki: Mizuki’s semi-autobiographical World War II manga features a “cartoony” military against a backdrop of stark photo-realistic Pacific island landscapes, a visual strategy McCloud fleshes out in his book.
  • Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, Guy Delisle: A story of palpable solitude, Shenzhen spends much page real estate showing off modern China via “aspect-to-aspect” transitions discussed by McCloud.
  • Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli: Like Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Polyp is a personal tale about a man hitting the road intertwined with philosophical musings on nature and existence. As with City of Glass, Polyp is obsessed with structure, symbols, and synthesis. Mazzucchelli’s detailed visuals slyly make the abstractions concrete.

For an entertaining stroll through the lingo and icons of the funny pages, I also recommend “Quimps, Plewds, And Grawlixes: The Secret Language Of Comic Strips.”

Twenty Writers: David Kidd, Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China

See the “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books” home page for more information on the series as well as a list of other reviews and essays.


Peking Story by David Kidd

David Kidd’s Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China has settled into a somewhat unnoticed shelf of American literature: the literary eulogy.

Serialized by The New Yorker in 1955, collected in book form in 1961 as All the Emperor’s Horses, and republished in 1988 under the title it holds today, David Kidd’s book is an underappreciated classic in American nonfiction. Memoir, travelogue, New Journalism, creative nonfiction—none of these terms are a snug categorization of Peking Story. The book is wistful, mournful, and laced with dry humor—a eulogy.

As the book opens, Kidd is an American college student on a foreign exchange trip to Beijing in 1946. There he meets Aimee Yu, one daughter among many in a prominent Beijing family. In the span of a few pages, the couple are married. Courting Aimee is more glossed over than spun out, treated as a perfunctory narrative requirement. Peking Story is not a romantic book in the sense of love and matrimony. It’s a romantic book in the sense of Eastern exoticism and lost traditions. It’s right there in the subtitle: The Last Days of Old China.

As the book progresses, David Kidd the narrator develops as a kind of mystery himself. He doesn’t come off as one would imagine most Americans would talk or act in the mid-1940s, especially a college student from the Midwest. There are moments that read like a Graham Greene novel, the world-weary Britisher turning up his nose at the dreary reactionaries and their anti-imperialist manifestos—only Kidd studied at a state school, not Oxford, and his father was an automobile executive rather than a member of Parliament. That’s one of the many mysteries of Peking Story, this American narrator who sounds distinctly un-American, seemingly more comfortable in Chinese silks and soft slippers than sneakers and blue jeans.

The Last Days of Old China

Like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, Kidd goes to some lengths to remain outside the book’s lens, preferring to focus on the events and people around him. Peking Story is a public story told by a very private man, and that shapes the narration and contributes to its unique form.

Kidd alludes to his private nature (and the burden of telling his story) in his preface:

Only a few Westerners who once lived [in pre-Communist Beijing] are still alive today—no more than ten or twenty of us at most, scattered throughout the world. I used to hope that some bright young scholar on a research grant would write about us and our Chinese friends before it was too late and were all dead and gone, folding back into darkness the wonder that had been our lives.

To this day, no such scholar has appeared, leaving me, as far as I know, the lone, first-hand chronicler of those extraordinary years that saw the end of old China, and the beginning of the new.

Author David Kidd
Author David Kidd

With the courtship and marriage out of the way, David Kidd eagerly moves into the opulent Yu family estate just outside of Beijing. (“Beijing” and “Peking” are Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations, respectively, for the current capital of China. As Mandarin is now the official language of the People’s Republic of China, I use it here and reserve “Peking” for the book’s title.)

Once situated within the family compound, Kidd slides his marriage away from the reader’s field of vision. In its place he slides in the colorful Yu family and their grand estate, garden, and art collection. Beyond the compound’s walls the Communist revolution begins to encroach on their daily lives. These elements are Kidd’s true focus, with his marriage merely the frame to explain his presence on the estate grounds and in the Yu family’s lives.

The Yu’s are rich beyond the everyday meaning of the word. The family’s history and prominence extends hundreds of years into China’s past. The grandfather was at one time the Chief Justice of the Republic of China’s Supreme Court. The family estate is known for having one the best gardens in Beijing, and perhaps all of China. The Yu’s once held mansions and houses all over northern China, but declining fortunes and currency devaluation have chipped away at their holdings. By the time Kidd arrives, the Yu’s can lay claim to the family mansion, a burial shrine outside the city, and a stunning collection of historical Chinese art they cannot bear to part with.

Arriving in Beijing two years before the Communist Revolution and leaving two years after it, Kidd witnessed China’s transition from a strict traditional society with deep class striations into a political culture intent on leveling the field and erasing its past. Rather than write this story with a breathless, you-are-there urgency, Kidd describes the changes from the comfort and safety of the Yu estate. Kidd’s encounters with the new Communist regime comes fleetingly, such as when they must register with the local police that the Yu’s intend to hold a costume party. Kidd portrays the revolutionaries as dreary, inconvenient, and déclassé.

I normally hold little interest in British entertainment of the upper-class variety, with the rich lolling about on their divans and club chairs, plotting intrigue against each other, while servants rush up and down stairs attending to their every whim. Peking Story is not this type of entertainment, but it certainly skirts its edges. For all of Kidd’s blind spots, Peking Story works because Kidd’s focus is to document the Yu’s way of life crumbling beneath their feet. Rather than pick up guns and defend their estate—what an American story that would be—the Yu’s shrug, brew another pot of tea, and reflect upon their garden before it’s wrested from them. The tension between dynamism and stasis is the backbone of Peking Story.

The bronze braziers

As a fiction writer, what I draw from Peking Story is Kidd’s skillfulness at sketching out characters and painting colorful scenes with graceful economy. Although Kidd comes across as waspy throughout the book (and a bit blithe to the poverty about him), his education and breeding gifted him with a clean writing style that flows effortlessly. It’s harder than it looks.

Kidd’s narrative construction is as classical as his prose. The chapters are arranged almost perfectly. Early scenes that read as little more than humorous anecdotes are later revealed as precursors of devastating consequences for the Yu family. Kidd neatly sews disparate events together to craft chapters that compare and contrast China’s culture and the steamrolling revolution. Although “compare & contrast” rings like a English teacher’s tired essay topic, these pairings illuminate the reader’s way through Peking Story like a trail of paper lanterns.

The most memorable episode in Peking Story relates to a collection of bronze braziers the Yu’s display throughout their mansion. As Kidd tells it, the luster of these incense burners is indescribable. They must be continually heated in order to keep their sheen, and so the Yu’s charge their servants to maintain a small charcoal fire burning beneath each at all hours. Kidd writes that the Yu family has kept the fires lit and the braziers hot for hundreds of years.

Encouraged by the Communists beyond the estate walls, the servants begin to question the nature of their employment. One morning, the Yu’s discover the charcoal fires have been extinguished. The once-indescribable bronze braziers are now irreparably dull and gray.

The tale of the bronze braziers is the perfect metaphor for the aristocratic Yu family straining to bolster China’s ancient culture against the Communist revolution threatening to overthrow it all.

However, the story may be too perfect:

I hope that specialists in Chinese bronzes, and technical experts, will back me up in saying that the story is completely phony—as is, I felt on reading it, much of the rest of the book. That Kidd had married Aimee Yu was plausible, although when I knew him he was plainly gay—he might have changed, or could—entirely laudably—have married her to get her out of China. But the obviously deceptive picture that the book painted was upsetting; this is one of the few books I’ve read that made me angry.

James Cahill’s rebuttal to Peking Story is well worth the read. He voices here a suspicion I too had in the back of my mind the first time I read the story of the bronze braziers. Their sublime beauty destroyed by ideological malice seems a writerly addition by Kidd who (possibly) felt the need to put an authorial thumb on the novel’s moral scale.

I’m torn on this subject. Cahill’s objections are worth any reader’s consideration, but I still find myself drawn to the elegance and power of Kidd’s prose. I don’t particularly care about his sexual orientation, although it certainly explains why his marriage takes a back seat in the book.

In Kidd’s defense, unlike fabricators such as James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) and JT Leroy, Kidd’s falsehoods—if they are false—don’t create an undeserved authority or prop up an exaggerated persona. His presence in China is documented, as is his marriage to Aimee Yu. The parable of the bronze braziers sweetens the book, the kind of misstep even a seasoned novelist might make to seal a point with the reader.

Tiananmen Square & Forbidden city entrance, Beijing, China. Joe Hunt. (CC BY 2.0)

It’s not the first time a well-respected work of nonfiction was revealed to contain fabrications and get a pass. Questions about the veracity of Steinbeck’s Traveling with Charley have been received with a shrug by Steinbeck fans and academics. If Cahill is “angry” at the “deceptive” Peking Story, he must be outraged at Steinbeck. If not, why? Because Steinbeck’s sympathies are on the right side of history and Kidd’s are not?

(If Kidd stretched the truth, it’s conceivable a kernel of truth inspired the story. Even if the braziers were not required to remain heated to sustain their beauty, it’s possible the Yu’s kept incense burning day and night throughout the household, and that one night the servants rebelled, damaging them somehow. The metaphor of an Old China lost is not so strong, but its thrust remains. Where Cahill sees deception, I see craft.)

The reader’s reaction to the story of the bronze braziers is a leading indicator of the way they’ll receive the entire book. Some will toss the book aside, disgusted with Kidd’s approval of Chinese high society and disdain of the servants. Others will sympathize with the Yu’s, for no reason other than their desire to preserve a four thousand year-old culture and its rich traditions. In either case, Kidd’s parable frames the entire book and the reader’s reception of it. It’s that kind of skill that encourages me to write a 2,200 word essay on Peking Story.

However, I’m less sure Kidd’s sympathies lie with the Chinese aristocracy per se. Kidd does not present the Yu’s as bold keepers of the flame, but rather as eccentrics of the Miss Havisham variety. Without exception, Kidd’s tragedies are the loss and destruction of Chinese art, culture, and tradition. Kidd mourns for the dispersal of the Yu collection and estate more than any death in the book. He also mourns the death of common sense. In Kidd’s hands, registering a costume party with the Beijing police is as absurd as proving to the American consulate his wife is Christian to guarantee her visa out of the country.

Then there’s the matter of Cahill accusing Kidd of kowtowing to “anti-Communist sentiment in the U.S.,” guessing Kidd was “encouraged somehow by the powerful and rich China lobby.”

Kidd may be accused of all manner of motivation, I suppose, but Occam’s Razor strikes me as appropriate here. I see Kidd as genuinely upset at the rearrangement of Chinese culture and its priorities. He seems deeply shocked to witness a four thousand year-old cultural legacy deleted in a fit of moral outrage. The suggestion of shadowy, powerful forces funding a book that, frankly, did little to shape American attitudes toward Communist China is unnecessary to explain the existence of Peking Story. I also don’t view The New Yorker—even The New Yorker of the 1950s—as a publication to kowtow to right-wing nationalists.

Fabricator or not, Kidd is forthright with his opinions and biases. When it comes to motivation, it’s simplest to take Kidd at his word. Cahill, on the other hand, appears more motivated by a sense of social justice than he’s letting on in his essay.

What’s more, for Cahill to argue Kidd misrepresented the Chinese Communists as a “mean-spirited movement” is to ignore the crop yielded by Maoism: The Cultural Revolution, an artificial civil war unleashed by Mao to silence his critics and tighten his grip on the levers of power; its annihilating purges, denunciations, self-criticisms, and “struggle sessions”; the anti-intellectualism behind the forced relocation and labor of students, leading to China’s own “Lost Generation”; and the party’s historical rewriting and reeducation tactics. Kidd’s stories, first published eleven years before the Cultural Revolution’s earliest stirrings, practically predicts the furies to unfold. It’s a literary feat almost as impressive as Graham Greene warning the United States out of Vietnam in 1955’s The Quiet American.

The 21st century may be China’s century, but Peking Story eulogizes the price China paid to make its great lurch forward.

David Kidd died in in 1996 leaving behind a life as far-removed from his Midwestern origins as possible. After fleeing Beijing, he settled in Kyoto and founded a school of traditional Japanese arts:

As a tourist attraction, Mr. Kidd did not disappoint. To sit on a cushion before his throne, listening to his erudite patter, and seeing him sitting cross-legged on his kang, a divided Chinese sofa, rustling his silken gown as he gestured extravagantly with his inevitable cigarette, was to be in the presence of a presence.

With China’s role ascending in the 21st century, I would recommend Peking Story to anyone curious to learn about China’s future from its past. For those who want to go deeper, I would pair Peking Story with the superb Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang and Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan.

BBC News on John Hersey’s Hiroshima 70 years later

Hiroshima by John HerseyLate last year I wrote about my love of front matter using John Hersey’s inestimable Hiroshima as an example of why the first pages of a book matter. To mark the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima‘s publication, BBC News published last week a fantastic article on the history of John Hersey’s masterpiece, detailing both the 1946 New Yorker article he penned as well as its reception when published in book form.

Not only does the BBC article reproduce some of the pages of the original “Reporter at Large” article—The New Yorker really hasn’t changed in 70 years—it includes a quick biography of Hersey and the circumstances leading to his assignment in postwar Japan. One literary tidbit worth mentioning:

[Hersey] expected to write, as others had done, a piece about the state of the shattered city, the buildings, the rebuilding, nine months on. …

On the voyage out he fell ill and was given a copy of Thornton Wilders’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Inspired by Wilder’s narrative of the five people who crossed the bridge as it collapsed he decided he would write about people not buildings. And it was that simple decision that marks Hiroshima out from other pieces of the time.

Wilders’ novel is an unapologetically Christian story scrabbling for meaning in the remains of a supposedly senseless tragedy. It’s an apt book to prepare one’s soul for writing about the tragedy at Hiroshima.

A war correspondent, Hersey would’ve had practical experience writing of attacks and military maneuvers as well as the journalist’s skill for getting the four W’s down on the page in economical, readable prose. Yet Hersey chose to write about civilians, each detached from the war, rather than the larger geopolitical context. This is why Hiroshima is sometimes seen as an early form of New Journalism, although unlike its later practitioners, Hersey maintains the traditional journalist’s distance from his subjects.

The BBC retrospective also has a nice gallery of Hiroshima‘s covers over the years, including the one I mentioned in my earlier post (and displayed above). Each complement Hersey’s writing in their own ways, although I remain partial to Wendell Minor’s cover for the reasons I explored before.

Most impressive for me is Hersey’s refusal to be interviewed by the BBC, or for most anyone. From a cabled response he sent to the BBC (probably mangled due to the quality of telegram transmission at the time):

Hersey gratefullest invitation and BBC interest and coverage Hiroshima but has throughout maintained policy let story speak for itself without additional words from himself or anybody.

Here’s to a time when authors believed their work should speak for itself, rather than the modern inclination to itch and claw for more book tours, more time in front of a microphone, and more publicity to burnish one’s credentials and sell more copies.