In this space, I do not think I have ever talked about film. It is something I study and write about privately, but there seems little use in placing it on display. I'm not interested in starting up anymore dialogue about movies. But I want to make an exception to that habit for at least one post, because Bad Lieutenant, and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans  are two films deal especially well with issues that I enjoy examining.

Bad Lieutenant, and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans feature outstanding performances from Harvey Keitel and Nicholas Cage. It's not the sort of work that everyone can appreciate. Americans rarely suffer enough to understand what they are watching in these films. But in both cases, what is happening is great and terrible and rude, and needs a little more recording---out of respect, I suppose. 

Glancing around the internet, the critical writing on these two films seems to me to be inadequate in its attempts to describe what occurs on the screen. Occasionally, someone like Roger Ebert might mention that the two films are distinctly different. But then he's forced to spend so much time describing the plot that he does not have the opportunity to cut into the body and look out the the eyes of skull. Ebert often waited to do this until a third or fourth viewing, which is something I do not think he got to do with these two pictures.

Both Bad Lieutenant and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans tell the story of bad cops. Not incompetent cops, but evil cops--agents of the state that enforce rules arbitrarily, and with little regard for the purported values or rights of the citizens whom they are sworn to protect.  Both films feature outstanding, risk-taking performances from their lead actors, Harvey Keitel and Nicholas Cage. Unlike most films, these movies neither sensationalize nor glamorize drug use. The two bad cops are addicts. They abuse their authority and harass and steal from those who stumble into their way. They gamble recklessly (though not unreasonably) and marvel at the turns of fortune. They cringe, stumble, and suffer their way through each night and day without rest, and with even less hope. These are not typical protagonists. They are not anti-heroes, either. They differ from what's found in spaghetti Westerns like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and gangster films like Goodfellas. These protagonists differ, because they are not cool. They know they are not going to win, but they do not have the courage to lose. In the context of modern can't-lose America, this makes their journey art, rather than popular fantasy. They stand as absolute challenges to America's identity as a protestant, hard-working, Christian nation.

BAD LIEUTENANT 

A lot of critics cite Bad Lieutenant as existing in a harsher world than Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. But this depends entirely on one's willingness to embrace the film-maker's vision of morality. The Herzog film, in fact, exists in a more realistic and less compassionate world than the Ferrara film, even if Herzog smiles more along the way. 

Crucially, Ferrara never explains why his Lieutenant has gone bad. We never learn the circumstances surrounding his downfall, or the proximate causes of his behavior. When did he begin using drugs? When did he lose his faith? When did he emotionally abandon his family? None of this matters. Ferrara is not interested in social explanations. The film differs from naturalism, for it makes no attempt to show a sequence of consequences. There is not really much of a plot, but instead a series of hellish, rotating scenes, each one compiling the misery of a man soaked with evil, and painfully aware of it.  

Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant operates in a medieval moral universe. Men fall; men must blame themselves for their fall, and only through the miracle of Jesus can human-beings find hope and salvation. In the film, miracles abound. The Dodger's lose to the Mets in a seven game series after going up 3-0 over the first three games--an historical impossibility, as no team in the major sports has ever lost a best-of-four series after sweeping the first three games. Christ appears (physically appears) throughout the film in various icons, until he wordlessly steps before the lieutenant, and allows him to unleash his guilt. When the image of Christ dissolves, the lieutenant finds himself at the feet of the woman that will guide him to another pair of sinners--two young men that violently raped a young nun and desecrated a Church. He wants to kill the two young men--he wants blood revenge, an eye for eye. Why? For the sake of some bloody concept of justice wrapped in fear and anger. He wants revenge for the nun who was raped. Doesn't everyone want revenge? And won't God demand revenge on him for all the crimes he has committed? But the nun does not want revenge. She has insisted that the boys go free. And so instead the lieutenant gives the two rapists $50,000 in drug money and puts them on a bus out of the city. He shows mercy: foolish, helpless and theologically essential Christian mercy. By abiding in Christian forgiveness, the lieutenant proves his faith, even if his mind is still filled with dread and doubt. Finally, the lieutenant is killed immediately after sending the two boys out of the city; his death immediately follows his one act of penance, and thus ensures his salvation. 

It is possibly the most Catholic film ever made. It is certainly the film most in tune with Roman iconography; this is the world of blood spattered martyrs, redeemed through suffering. It is a movie that depicts medieval, European Catholicism, rather than the slushy, politically democratic Catholicism we typically find in America.

Now, if one believes in Christ, the film's ending should in fact come across as optimistic--redemption achieved! God forgives! Miracles abound. But if you do not believe in the existence of God, then the ending steps into yawning, delusional nihilism; if the viewer is brave enough, the triumph of delusion is so supreme as to achieve a high station in artistic achievement, even if it's an achievement incomprehensible to most passerbyers--if you do not like this movie, do not worry. Most people cannot understand Hamlet, Macbeth, or King Lear either. 

PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is an entirely different experience. It features an intricate (though inessential) plot. The tone, as Roger Ebert pointed out, is comic, rather than tragic. The stakes for the lieutenant's soul are less clearly definable, but still quite high. Herzog, as is his custom, is more interested in unpacking the light-headed irrational foibles of man. It's Nietzsche with a camera, albeit with a more sexually mature mind. 

Interestingly, Ebert calls Herzog more forgiving than Ferrara. But it is forgiveness on a totally different scale. Herzog's forgiveness stems from nature, and falls like the rain or blows like a breeze--it comes from nature, and is not miraculous in the slightest. If Herzog laughs at his characters, it is because there is little point in haranguing them for their evils. God's not going to damn them, or forgive them. Given their finite existence, we might as well not take them too seriously, and laugh for their sake as well as our own.

Ferrara, in his film, traces the crippled the life of a lonely man, and then saves that man's soul just before he destroy's the body. Herzog damns the entire system--all of America--but merrily laughs and marvels at his protagonist's wild and unorthodox courage.  Ferrara's lieutenant lives in a medieval nightmare; Herzog's lieutenant lives the American dream, but he lives with the constant fear of waking up.

The clues begin early on. The lieutenant is back on the job after partially recovering from a back injury. He requires a life-long prescription to Vicodin, but what of that? Everyone takes something. Before long, the Vicodin isn't enough, and so the lieutenant starts abusing harder drugs that he steals from the yuppies and street thugs wandering around New Orleans. Sustained with chemicals, the lieutenant returns to work just in time to take a lead role in investigating a mass homicide. The mass homicide is a top priority, his captain notes, which means that overtime pay is authorized. If you're a cop, mass homicide pays handsomely. The sweet smell of monied bureaucracy thus initially appears at a systematic level--the entire force financially benefits from criminal bloodshed. In Herzog's own words, the lieutenant exists "in the bliss of evil." 

After that, a lot of plot happens. All of it is especially well portrayed. There's a bit about the lieutenant's alcoholic dad finally going sober, and another bit about the lieutenant's prostitute girlfriend breaking free from the world's oldest profession (but only after the lieutenant makes enough money to support her). The part about the iguanas is pretty cool, and it takes place in the context of a wild and reckless investigation ... Tracking the plot of this movie is like counting the turns on a roller coaster: yes, you can do it, but it's better just to enjoy the ride. The more important aspects of the film are the characters who are on the ride with you, and the environment through which the tracks travel.

Throughout the film, Herzog's lieutenant seems certain to die violently. He has, at one point, at least three different groups trying to destroy his life. The more obvious the danger, the more risks he takes. But the risks prove far more calculating than one might suspect. Unlike Ferrara's lieutenant, Herzog's clearly knows how to conduct police work, and how to manipulate the system as precisely as possible, all as a prelude to victories in family and fortune. The lieutenant straddles the line between rule-breaking and rule-enforcing, and this proves useful to all of the other characters in the film. And so he lives. Indeed, we all rely on these people each and everyday. We admire (and use) the people that rebel against the system, even as we ruthlessly enforce those rules that seem to us especially just and pertinent. 

After two hours of plot, the police force promotes the lieutenant to captain; the band plays 'God Bless America.' The captain leaves the ceremony with his prostitute-turned-homemaker wife, and drops her off their new, well-manicured suburban home. God bless America, indeed. The lieutenant peered deep into the depths, found a way to make those depths work for him, and came out the other side with a hot wife and an extra bar of rank. But throughout, the lieutenant is thoroughly human, and thoroughly American. He is also thoroughly despicable.

Throughout the film, nature nibbles at the weak buttresses of civilization. The first shots of the film are filled with the ravaging, fast-rising waters of Katrina, where Cage's lieutenant dabbles with heroics, but risks more than he intends. In the middle of the film, the lieutenant approaches the scene of an auto accident--a truck has turned over after striking an alligator that wandered onto an access road. The last shots of the film take place in the Aquarium of the Americas. Here, the water is controlled--carefully kept in vast glass containers holding thousands of predatory sharks. In America, we have nature firmly under control, don't we? Nature also attacks the home of the lieutenant's father, who resides in a rotting plantation-style home; the image wordlessly evokes the memory of Southern slavery, and the 'civilization' that allowed for the brutal, race-based enslavement of nearly half its population. As a child, the lieutenant tells us that he found silver spoons buried in the yard; he and his prostitute girlfriend smile at the idea, and fondly wonder at the miracle of silver spoons.  

Nature and desire suggest that our moral structures offer little protection in times of need. When Katrina hits, God and government disappear. Herzog's film dances with this level of moral hurt in its knees; it might not be graceful, but the effort is astonishing and tremendous. A lot of the credit must go to the screenwriter, William Finkelstein, who appears in the film as a gangster that wants 'more than his share.' 

When writing about 2001: A Space Odyssey, Roger Ebert noted that most movies "are about characters with a goal in mind, who obtain it after difficulties either comic or dramatic." 2001, in Roger's estimation, transcended this approach and attempted to fulfill a basic human need for intelligence. The Bad Lieutenant films are not transcendent, but they are also not strict servants of human desire. They push us to explore suffering, and challenge the moral conventions of our time. Plato, perhaps the harshest dramatic critic in the history of thought, would have despised these films for subverting the moral structure of established institutions--but Plato would have loved the way a bad lieutenant can make you think!

Last night, two new landing pages went up on this website: 'Cryptomnesia' and 'Veterans' Voices.' 

Cryptomnesia is the tentative title of a new play I am writing for the Department of Theatre Arts at Lawrence University. The play will go up alongside three other pieces: Antonin Artaud's SPURT OF BLOOD, Samuel Beckett's WHAT WHERE, and Caryl Churchill's THIS IS A CHAIR. 

When a new play is produced alongside other works, it typically appears in the company of other new plays; the experience of watching new work often elicits forced smiles and weariness, though a new piece can occasionally fire the imagination. The situation, in this case, is different. Artaud, Beckett, and Churchill are twentieth-century ogres, powerful and easily seen, mistreated but often admired for their strength. Of the three, only Churchill still lives. Artaud was loquacious on the purpose of art, but the other two typically remain silent. 

I'm writing Cryptomnesia, a short play that will appear at the end of the program. It would be very easy to fuck this up, but things will turn out okay. Promise. 

The other page describes Veterans' Voices, a program that I've been working on with Paul Woodruff. Paul comes from another generation. He served in Vietnam as a young Army lieutenant. He wrote plays as a young man, but ultimately focused on Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Thucydides. He studied at Oxford, earned a doctorate from Princeton, and then came to the University of Texas at Austin. After playing a pivotal role in the development of one of Texas' honors programs, he became the Dean of Undergraduate Studies, a position dedicated to improving the education of young students; this was an especially important task, because UT-Austin is a vast research university, and young people can easily get overwhelmed by the atmosphere. The purpose of public universities is higher education; active research plays a critical role in helping young minds ask and answer difficult questions, but it is also important to develop connections between young students and seasoned students--undergraduates and professors. Paul's work as Dean of Undergraduate Studies helped the university take major strides in building these sorts of relationships. He developed courses that ensured that young students have the opportunity to learn from professors who have a special gift for teaching. Paul also knows a great deal about Greek drama, having translated many of the tragedies and comedies of ancient Athens. His favorite modern play is Edward Albee's The Goat: or Who is Sylvia? 

Paul has written a number of plays. I am especially interested in two of them: Ithaca in Black and White and Geoffrey's Jerusalem. It is one of my goals to produce these plays. I am working with Paul on Veterans' Voices because it will help me reach that goal. 

What is Veterans' Voices? Since Paul and I have refused to incorporate the project into a non-profit, that is a little hard to pin down. But the main thrust is to communalize the cost of war at an emotional level. We do this through play readings, group recitations, story-telling, and (most importantly) listening. As playwrights, we try to tell the stories of others, and show how these stories reflect our life and times. As educators, we help place the experiences of individual people into the framework of a wider community. Sometimes, our purpose is classic catharsis. But other times we aim for pure expression. 

Paul's is a member of UT-Austin's philosophy department. As a philosopher, he has written three books for a wider audience: The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched, Reverence:Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, and The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness, and Rewards; I think these books help express our values. Paul and I are a value-driven partnership. If you start with values, and then look for opportunities as you happen upon them, then you have a pretty good idea of who you are going to be, even if you are not entirely sure of how you are going to do it. 

 Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929.

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own famously serves as both an essay and a novel; it is a call for androgynous authorship, and yet serves as a summons for women to equally partake in artistic flourishing.

  Woolf delivers her essay under the guise of a false identity; she tells us we may call her "Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Charmichael or by any name you please--it is not of any importance." This device distances Woolf from the popular notion of authors as heroic, path-breaking pioneers, capable of fully reinventing the world around them. For Woolf, specifically identifying a writer twice troubles the issues surrounding 'women and fiction.' First, the myth of the heroic, path-breaking writer defines the purpose of writing as jockeying for hierarchical status, rather than the more complex terms of artistic generation. Second, the myth shrugs aside economic, social, and political obstacles that stand in the way of women and writing. Woolf pursues achievement, not heroics, and when exploring the theme of 'women and literature' she coolly rejects the notion of settling for the pioneering glory of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot and the handful of other notable forerunners of women's literary achievement. 

Women writers, Woolf avers, rarely exist, and when they do they fail to achieve the greatest heights of literary accomplishment. Why? Because they lack economic, mental, and physical security--they lack a room with a lock on the door, and five hundred pounds a year of independent income. They also lack a strong tradition of writing. Society expects men to write. And so society provides men with education, job opportunities, and the mental freedom to produce literature. But society rarely expects women to write, and certainly not to write of their own concerns. Rather, society prefers women to address the concerns of men, and to accommodate those concerns in both thought and action. 

In the modern era, both men and women suffer from the emergence of "sex consciousness," which clouds writing with unnecessary dimorphic tension. Woolf considers it fatal to defend or apologize on the basis of gender. Thus, she disparages self-conscious moments like those found in Charlotte Bronte's Villette, where the lead character (a woman) mounts a defense of women vis a vis the opposite sex. Sex consciousness works both ways, so that Rudyard Kipling's adolescent masculine mind is just as hamstrung by the emergence of sex consciousness as any woman writer. Men and women, she asserts, mutually depend upon one another as writers. The best writers, she holds, like Shakespeare and Coleridge, write androgynously. Woolf ends her speech on a note of pessimism. Poor writers cannot achieve much of anything in Britain; their output stands as "poor poetry" that has "not a dog's chance" in the British commonwealth. And modern women, who "have less freedom the son of an Athenian slave," are very, very poor. Yet she hopes that women can, with decades of steady work, eventually create an androgynous master of literary arts--a place for a Judith Shakespeare to flourish alongside her brother William.

 Woolf's lecture revels in the difficulties and tensions produced through its narrative complex structure. Rather than speak directly to an audience, Woolf assumes an amorphous identity as a fictional woman; Woolf's text exhorts other writers to 'be yourself,' and yet Woolf writes in the form of another person. Further, Woolf refuses to identify her listeners as women until the middle of the 'lecture,' perhaps to stir androgynous sympathies in the mind of the reader. The complexity of book's structure creates delicious tension between word and action. What begins as an erudite essay on women's fiction morphs into a complex critique of writing as an art form, and a critique of art as existence.

In this critique, I have not mentioned Mary Breton's eye-opening dinner as an outsider at male-centric 'Oxbridge' University. Or the day she spends at the library to understand the relationship between man's obsession with writing about woman, and yet man's historical refusal to allow any woman to craft that literary discourse. Woolf tackles all this, and more. Erudite yet playful, scattered yet clear, Virginia Woolf invents a stained-glass approach to literary criticism--the abstract blends with the iconic, filters nature, and then achieves the transcendent. 

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.                                                    

                     W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)
                   "He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven"

This is one of my favorite Yeats' poems. He came to mind the other day while watching Harold Pinter's Betrayal, the film version with Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley. 

Irons and Kingsley play, respectively, a book agent and a book publisher. They reminisce about conversations concerning Yeats, but never actually manage to say anything meaningful about him, or his poetry. They merely decorate their lives with Yeats' name. The authors they publish, on the other hand, publish vain and literate autobiographical novels that sadden the two friends--they know they have not discovered a Yeats, just a few lads that can sell a book or two. The two friends have sold many, many books and they have read many more, but they sense they will not find a Yeats. Instead of finding a Yeats--or even earnestly searching for one, the two friends struggle half-hardheartedly over the love of a woman (Patricia Hodge). All three cast stones at one another--they wanted fire, but all they found were sparks. They live entrapped in bourgeois comforts and predictability. 

Well, anyhow. They never did say anything about Yeats. I suppose I might as well. "I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." The speaker has confessed his poverty--he also suffers from a poverty of words. All the rhymes depend upon pure repetition of entire words, rather than merely repeating sounds. Cloths, light, cloths, light; feet dreams, feet, dreams. He lays these few words before us--tread softly.

Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild. Anchor Books, 1997 [1996].

Jon Krakauer, author and outdoor thrill seeker, sensed a kindred spirit when he first wrote an article on Christopher McCandless for Outdoor magazine. In pursuit of McCandless' essence, Krakauer travelled across America, and did not stop working on the story until years after he had completed the initial piece of journalism. The resulting book, Into the Wild, was one of the most popular pieces of adventure writing of the late twentieth century. Instead of sensationalizing McCandless brief story, Krakauer offered a humane depiction of a boy in search of the love of his life: the American wild. McCandless sought a transcendental experience; he perhaps did not quite find one, but Krakauer patiently salutes his journey nevertheless.

The most famous chapter in McCandless' life began when he graduated with honors at Emory University. He promised his parents he would apply to law school, but instead he donated $25,000 in savings to charity. He then shuffled off his identity and wandered off into the American West. He lightened his load with each step, and abandoned most of his possessions along the way. He ditched his car when it suffered a dead battery (but not before hiding the plates to prevent easy identification). After two years of wandering under an assumed identity, he hitchhiked to Alaska.

Krakauer does not merely trace the steps of this journey--he interrogates the psyche and soul of every person he can find who met Chris McCandless along the way. Among others, McCandless befriended a lonely widower in the deserts of Southern California, a foot-loose romantic couple, and a Midwest machine operator. He left his mark on many, and for someone who prided himself as an isolated and independent young man, he nevertheless seemed to pursue genuine connections with many human beings. But after many adventures, he decided to try his hand at yet another. Therefore he made his way north.

In April 1992 Christopher McCandless walked alone into the Alaskan wilderness. In an age without uncharted territory, McCandless refused to carry a good map, or any navigation or radio equipment whatsoever. He forced his way into ignorance in hopes of better surprising his senses; he sought to develop an anachronistic type of self-reliance. Moving along an old miner's trail, he eventually found shelter in an abandoned bus. He read a stack of paperbacks he brought with him into the wild, with authors like London, Pasternak, Thoreau, and Tolstoy, as well as lighter stuff like Crichton. He shot and ate small game. He dug up edible roots and vegetables. He was proud, but he was also lonely, and scared. In July, he tried to leave the wilderness, but a stream that ran chest-deep in April had, in the face of an incessant summer sun, grown into a river surging with glacier rot and snow melt. The raging waters blocked his path. There was no leaving the wilderness. He returned to the abandoned bus. He grew increasingly lean, as did his margin for error. In August, he ate potato seeds that seized his system like a vice, and left him severely weakened; he could no longer digest enough calorie intake for his bone-lean body to sustain itself. He starved to death.

McCandless had survived 112 days in the wilderness. Less than three weeks later, a group of Alaskans discovered his skeletal, lifeless frame tucked into his sleeping bag and resting quietly in the abandoned bus.

Jon Krakauer's biographical essay, Into the Wild, deservingly became a best seller, and launched Krakauer into the highest order of American outdoor writing. For Krakauer pursues the story of McCandless' life and death with relentless questions and carefully carved detail. He traces McCandless' journey, not only in Alaska, but from his childhood onward.

Krakauer's Chris McCandless comes across as earnest and insistent, but perhaps not very intelligent or mature. He read deeply of the aforementioned authors, but not very broadly, and perhaps missed out on many of the most beautiful lessons that reading can offer. The lessons of empathy, forgiveness, and justice never fully captured his efforts, nor his imagination. But Krakauer uses a number of tools to show the importance of McCandless, not just as a person, but within the complex fabric of human life. McCandless epitomizes endurance and youth, naïveté and education; he stared so intently at the stars, and listened so intently to the sound of the wind shifting across the plains, that he felt himself transported far beyond the place his feet touched the ground. He moved beyond himself, and so joined the panoply of reckless wanderers that have sought self-realization in the American west.

In a particularly marvelous series of chapters, Krakauer breaks free from the narrow confines of biography and places McCandless' experiences in conversation with others who have died in the wilderness, as well as those who have barely survived. He places McCandless somewhere between inebriated self-delusion and euphoric expression; McCandless, in Krakauer's assessment, most closely resembles a young monk that chose to abstain from society as part of a vigorous test of self-worth. He may not have always been wise, but he pursued wisdom.

Near the end of the book, Krakauer reveals McCandless' vulnerability to the most universal of sensations: the shock of discovering your parent's imperfections. The recognition of parental imperfections threatened two aspects of the self. First, it upset McCandless' appreciation for his parents' model of adulthood; second, it challenged McCandless' assumed ability to achieve his own ideals. After all, if his parents could not live up to the values they taught their son, how could he possibly hope to achieve his own ideal behavior? McCandless began to disdain his parents for masking the origin of their marital relationship (McCandless' father refused, for a time, to end one marriage before starting another), and for their American materialism as expressed in houses, cars, and expectations of education. An average boy might merely fidget through a period of adolescent angst, but to a distrustful idealist like McCandless, his parents' transgressions gave him the necessary fuel to break all ties and vanish into the American landscape. The severing of all traditional social bonds eventually cost him his life, but it was a life he did not mind spending. He traded his complicated, well-to-do East Coast life for a simpler one, but the exchange destroyed him. [I wonder if McCandless is the capitalist-democratic version of Faust--instead of trading his soul for luxury, knowledge, and power, he must trade his life for simplicity and self-reliance.]

Krakauer writes with spirit and understanding; he traces the contours of McCandless' mind, as well as the terrain through which he traveled. Perhaps most importantly, the author uses his own experiences as a mountaineer to relate the essential impulses of McCandless' actions, and thus humanizes McCandless' apparently anti-social behavior. McCandless, rather than joining the ranks of mythic wanderers, becomes the brother of our strengths and weaknesses as human beings.

Is it a tragedy? Not quite. The story of Chris McCandless is something of a romance, a romance in which his love, the American west, not only failed to return his affection, but never even acknowledged his existence. It killed him without stirring a muscle.

In an earlier entry I reviewed The Viceroy’s Journal. The book made me a fan of its author, Viceroy Archibald Wavell. His frankness cuts ice like butter. And even when he finds himself on the wrong side of popular history, he paces himself through his actions with a disarming insistence on decency.

Like most generals of his generation, the First World War shaped his behavior in the Second, and in the intervening years. Many survivors of the First World War turned against the military and government service altogether, but Wavell’s early education and stoic coolness combined to ensure that he would serve his country for life. He could not speak off the cuff very well, but he wrote eloquently and effectively in private. He also published two popular works. The first was Generals and Generalship, derived from a pair of formal lectures he gave at Cambridge. The other was Other Men’s Flowers, a collection of all the poems that Wavell memorized throughout his life. Both of the slim books proved popular with soldiers during the Second World War.

Early on in his career, Wavell served as a personal liaison to General Sir Edmund Allenby. Wavell viewed Allenby as a mentor and role model. Allenby navigated a difficult political environment in Egypt at the close of the First World War. Much to Churchill’s chagrin, Wavell’s liberal tendencies and experiences under Allenby gave him the wherewithal to take an active role in Indian independence rather than passively waiting for the end of the Second World War. As Viceroy, Wavell saw his duty as careful balancing act: managing a transitional phase of Indian governance without undermining the precarious position of Britain’s war leader, Winston Churchill.

Serving under Allenby also gave Wavell the opportunity to see the value of experimentation and risk taking in warfare; Allenby led the allied forces to victory against the Turks with limited resources and a great deal of unconventional support.

Wavell played a crucial role in Wingate’s development as a battlefield commander. The start of this came in July 1937, when the Army placed Wavell in command of forces in Palestine and Transjordan. Arab unrest led to outbreaks of violence against both British troops and Israeli settlers shortly thereafter. Wingate, assigned to a relatively minor role as an intelligence staff officer, flagged down Wavell’s car and pitched to him his idea for Special Night Squads to defend Israeli settlements against violent attack. Wavell’s acquiescence to Wingate’s request provided Wingate his first opportunity to train unconventional forces and fight in combat.

Wavell made use of Wingate on two more occasions, first in Abyssinia against the Italians, and then in Burma against the Japanese.

The following notations about Wingate come from the book Viceroy’s Journal, as edited by Penderel Moon. I have shaped my quotes so that they demonstrate something of Wavell’s character and interests, and therefore the quotes are not as direct as they might otherwise be.

The following entries understate Wavell’s personal entanglement with Wingate and the Chindits. Brigadier Bernard Fergusson, mentioned in the December 29, 1943 and May 8, 1944 entries, later wrote a short biography of Wavell, as well as an account of Chindit operations called Beyond the Chindwin. Additionally, Wavell’s son, Archie John Wavell, was an officer in the Black Watch, one of the key units under Wingate’s command during Operation Thursday in March 1944. 

                                                                    ******

[Pg 15] August 23, 1943. 

Cabinet meeting with 2nd XI present, practically all 1st XI being still in Canada. Proposal to appoint Mounbatten to the S.E. Asia Command, with Stilwell as Deputy, and Giffard as commander of Land Forces, was announced. There was some criticism but general feeling was that appointment should be accepted since Chiefs of Staff and Americans approve.
            
P.M. is still in Quebec. I hear that Wingate has apparently ‘sold himself’ well there and his ideas are to havea  good run. I expect P.M. will now claim him as his discovery and ignore the fact that I have twice used Wingate in this war for unorthodox campaigns and that but for me he would probably never have been heard of. I gather they are at last realizing the difficulty of communications in Assam and Burma which I have been trying to impress on P. M. for nearly two years.

[Pg 37] November 17, 1943. 

M.B. [Mountbatten] came again on 15th to tell me about the Cairo meeting… we also spoke of the parachute demand; he still seems to think that to double the demand (from 100,000 to 200,000 [per month], the original demand having been 35,000) is a mere trifle for India; as it only meant giving up 2% total cloth: I pointed out that 2% of India’s population was 8,000,000 which was quite a large number to go short of clothes.

            Wingate left today after convalescing here for a week. He a little reminds me of T. E. Lawrence but lacks his sense of humour and wide knowledge, is more limited but with greater driving power.

[Pg 43] December 29, 1943. 

Bernard Fergusson turned up unexpectedly yesterday evening for an ight, and I had a talk with him about his experiences with 77 Bde in Burma. He says the venture was well worth while, and that Wingate’s theories are right, though the troops did not do all that Wingate claimed that they did. He said Wingate was, and is, extremely difficult—impossible at times—and he had many rows with him, but he still believes in his ideas. He was apprehensive about his forthcoming role, if he had to go in and come out again as he did not feel we could abandon the Burmans who helped us to the vengeance of the Japanese a second time…

[Pg 60] March 18, 1944. 

Saw both M.B. [Mountbatten] and [Lt.-Gen. Sir Henry] Ponwall and talked to them of situation on Burma frontier. It shows the respect they have for the Japaense tactics and fighting that though they have something like twice the Japanese strength available ion the Chin Hills-Chindwin-Manipur front and have known for months that the enemy were about to attack, they are both feeling rather apprehensive of the result; and have taken aircraft off the ferry route to China to fly into Manipur another division from Arakan. The 17th Division is being pulled back from Tiddim area by Japanese action against their communications, although in numbers we must be superior. How does the Jap do it? The simple answer ist hat we have a very ponderous L of C [Line of Communication] and the Jap has practically none at all; we fight with the idea of ultimate survival, the Jap seems to fight with the idea of ultimate death and contempt for it, when has done as much harm as possible. The flying in of Wingate’s two brigades [Operation ‘Thursday’] seems to have been a remarkable performance after an initial set-back in which there were about 150 casualties from crashed or lost gliders. But so far the Jap appears to have taken no notice of this force in his rear, his independence of communications is remarkable.

            M.B. is prepared to back me up on food problem and agrees that Americans must be told the situation officially if H.M.G. will not find imports. [reference to the Bengali Famine.]

[Pg 61-62] March 28, 1944. 

Last day or two comparatively quiet, usual interviews and papers, but I have actually managed to find a little time to work on the dispatch I ought to have written as C-in-C last year… The C-in-C spoke of the fighting on the Assam border where the Japs seem to be making headway. Large numbers of our troops are being concentrated in Assam, including I think 2nd Division; this will throw a very heavy strain on communications.

            Was told later in the morning that Wingate was missing from an air trip over Burma. I heard later that he had almost certainly been killed in an air crash between Imphal and Silchar.

[Pg 69-70] May 8, 1944. 

I got back yesterday from a short tour to Sikikim. A long days travel on May 2; left Delhi 6 a.m., landed Hassimara about noon and then had to cross a river by elephants, a flood having taken the bridge. Then a long motor drive to Gagtok were we arrived at 9 p.m…

            I left Gagntok on May 6th and flew to Sylhet in Assam. I spent the night at Sylet and visited H.Q. 3rd Indian Division—the headquarters of what were Wingate’s raiding columns, now Lengtaigne’s [Maj.-Gen. Lentaigne]. Lentaigne is good, I think, more orthodox and less highly strung than Wingate, who possible was killed at the right moment both for his fame and the safety of the division. But he was a remarkable man and I am glad that I was responsible for giving him his chance and encouraging him. My dealings with him, in three campaigns, were almost entirely official and I never knew him well enough to like or dislike him.

            I had hoped to see [my son] Archie John but he had flown into Burma a week before. Tired of waiting for vacancy in the Black Watch he had taken one in the South Straffords. I believe the column he has joined is likely to be flown out soon, but I expect Archie John will try to stay on with his own regiment or some other column. I hope his health will stand it. I saw Bernard Fergusson, complete with bushy beard, whose brigade had just been flown out. He was well, but a little upset by his failure to win his first pitched battle, at Indaw against the Jap airfield. He had had a hard time marching down from Ledo through the jungle, said it was surely the only recorded instance of a brigade marching 250 miles in single file.

            We had a long fly back, nearly 7 hours, as we were in a slow machine, and did not reach Delhi till nearly 7.45 p.m.

-------------------------------------- --------------------------------

Sources:

Fergusson, Bernard, rev. Robert O'Neill, and Judith M.  Brown. “Wavell, Archibald Percival, first Earl Wavell (1883–1950).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. OUP 2004-2013.

Wavell, Archibald Percival. The Viceroy’s Journal. Ed. by Penderel Moon. OUP, 1973.

Sykes, Christopher. Orde Wingate: A Biography. The World Publishing Company, 1959.    

A quote from Plutarch:

"I am writing biography, not history; and often a man's most brilliant actions prove nothing as to his true character, while some trifling incident, some casual remark or jest, will throw more light upon what manner of man he was than the bloodiest battle, the greatest array of armies, or the most important siege. Therefore, just as portrait painters pay most attention to those peculiarities of the face and eyes, in which the likeness consists, and care but little for the rest of the figure, so it is my duty to dwell especially upon those actions which reveal the workings of my heroes' minds, and from these to construct the portraits of their respective lives, leaving their battles and their great deeds to be recorded by others..."

Plutarch, The Life of Alexander

When writing biography, an author makes many assumptions about the subject at hand. The author's self-knowledge, moral outlook, and historical experience shape their writing; this is unavoidable. But to a certain extent the author can deliberately examine their own assumptions; inevitably they will do so as they determine general shape and form of their work. What is the purpose of biography? What are the salient characteristics of this person's life? What actions 'reveal the workings of my heroes' minds'? And what is my basis for interpreting those actions as essential, and discarding others as unimportant?

In the quote above, Plutarch compares himself with a portrait artist.  When Plutarch relates his story of Alexander, he will not seek to describe the soles of Alexander's feet, the scars on his hands, nor his relative income on a year to year basis. Plutarch makes no attempt to precisely quantify his subjects. He instead focuses on the peculiar moments and attributes of an individual, particularly those that relate to character and personality. Like the portrait artist, Plutarch limits his subject intentionally and necessarily. He cares more about the subject's character, rather than the landscape behind them. Plutarch compares himself to an artist, and he prioritizes artistic character above scientific rigor.  

Yet biography is not exclusively art. It can also resemble the work of 18th and 19th century naturalists, those individuals that sketched and wrote on the plants, animals and elements of the natural world. The trade of the naturalists morphed in the ethnographers of the 20th century. Ethnographers seek to study and understand life within its natural context. They want to bring the study of life out of the artificial abstraction of the laboratory. 

In understanding human beings and human nature, we cannot exclusively adhere to artistry, lab work, or fieldwork. But we instead must lean upon the resources of all three. Each approach requires precision. The culmination results in accuracy. 

Human beings, as authors, are not a blank slate--they cannot move freely between the approaches. We are too limited. But with enough resources we can bend our talents just enough to discard the greatest share of error and ignorance--if we're lucky.

Orde Wingate redefined infantry operations in modern conflict. He was an artillery officer by training, but never cared much for the work. His methods, instead, helped infantrymen survive against the threat of artillery. We can find traces of his methods in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Modern military units such as the U.S. Army Rangers still train with his teachings in mind. 

My own training in Ranger School began with the following story from Judges, Chapter 7, verses 1-8:

"Early in the morning, [Gideon] and all his men camped at the spring of Harod. The camp of Midian was north of them in the valley near the hill of Moreh. The Lord said to Gideon, “You have too many men. I cannot deliver Midian into their hands, or Israel would boast against me, ‘My own strength has saved me.’ Now announce to the army, ‘Anyone who trembles with fear may turn back and leave Mount Gilead.’” So twenty-two thousand men left, while ten thousand remained... 

"But the Lord said to Gideon, “There are still too many men. Take them down to the water, and I will thin them out for you there. If I say, ‘This one shall go with you,’ he shall go; but if I say, ‘This one shall not go with you,’ he shall not go.” So Gideon took the men down to the water. There the Lord told him, “Separate those who lap the water with their tongues as a dog laps from those who kneel down to drink.”  Three hundred of them drank from cupped hands, lapping like dogs. All the rest got down on their knees to drink. The Lord said to Gideon, “With the three hundred men that lapped I will save you and give the Midianites into your hands. Let all the others go home.” So Gideon sent the rest of the Israelites home but kept the three hundred, who took over the provisions and trumpets of the others."

Wingate used the story of Gideon to inspire the men he led in Israel, Abyssinia, and Burma. He adopted the name "Gideon Force" in Abyssinia, and tried to do so again in Burma, but the GHQ India prevented it. Still, he told the story over and over again. He wanted his men to believe they were select, and that they were specially chosen--if not chosen by God, then at least chosen by Orde Wingate. 

No one at Ranger School mentioned Orde Wingate's name, but they repeated the story of Gideon nonetheless. It stuck me as odd at the time, because soldiers in the infantry rarely quote the Bible. They might makes jokes about God and Satan, but they do not use the Bible for its parables or stories. 

This is a very small example, but it shows the seeping sort of influence Wingate had on modern armies.

                                                                           ******

Professors and career soldiers sometimes use the term "military science" to describe the process wherein soldiers study, adapt, utilize and teach new strategies and tactics. Wingate himself certainly found the idea of 'military science' attractive--his education at the Woolwich Royal Military Academy taught him to look for discernible patterns in warfare, and the British military training manuals of the period resemble engineering textbooks, with piles of tables and charts, and in-depth studies of munitions.

Many authors have attempted to chronicle Wingate's strategic innovations and their subsequent importance to military science. Yet Wingate bore a complex personality that marked every action he took in his short life. He ruthlessly castigated incompetence, yet playfully encouraged insubordination. He brandished a zealot's faith to rally his men, yet abandoned his religion (and sincere belief in God) at an early age. He modeled his life after the Old Testament prophets, yet earned a reputation for his cutting-edge use of modern technology. Reducing his life to a handful of 'strategic innovations' mis-characterizes the nature of his experience. 

                                                                         ******

The seemingly polar tendencies found within Wingates' personality represent external tensions, not internal contradictions; a human being is not limited to the simplistic set patterns handed down through history and myth. Every time we examine the life of a human being, we should expect to see a story of variation, not conformity. 

After a few weeks in the archives, I feel I am in a great place with the Wingate research. With my training in qualitative methods, psychological analysis, political philosophy, and military operations, and find myself well suited to apply my skill set to understanding Wingate's life in a unique way. Already I have come across new evidence that previous studies have either ignored or missed. Wingate, for example, wrote extensively on human nature and on war as an extension of politics--no other authors have tried to reconcile his stated philosophical views with his actions on the battlefield, and so I have a unique opportunity to study Wingate from a new angle. 

I plan to write about him in two ways. First, I will examine his life in a work of comparative biography. I will examine a series of most-similar cases; the juxtaposition will describe the commonalities between each individual, but I will highlight the unexpected differences. In doing so, I can help us understand the individuals that initiate 'special operations', and the people who voluntarily join such units. Second, I will write about Wingate for the stage. 

With my work on Wingate, I am glad to shift away from the more theoretical terrain of modelling evolutionary science as well as the explicit application of psychological models to empirical cases. Instead I can embrace a more humanistic approach to understanding life. In my case, the techniques fro playwrighting have always borne a strong resemblance to biography. For my plays, I spend hours and years closely studying historical documents, sifting through apparent contradictions, and finding the through-line that allows one person to house seemingly opposite beliefs. American Volunteers, The Priceless Slave, and Westhusing in the House of Atreus all make use of this technique. Then I find the shape and form that brings out the elements of the story that most people tend to ignore. By placing my emphasis on the most unusual elements of character, I believe I free up my imagination to contradict my assumptions regarding human behavior; instead of forcing an individual into my cookie-cutter conception of life, I allow them to dictate the terms of the game. 

Human beings go to great lengths to both encourage and destroy diversity; they obsess over preventing 'deviant' behavior. But we also reward individuals who think 'outside the box.' These tendencies are an essential part of human nature.

Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction. OUP, 2009.

Hermione Lee approaches the study of biography as a practitioner as well as a critic. Her 2009 book, Biography: A Very Short Introduction, reflects a thorough and personal knowledge of the craft of life-writing. She especially empathizes with writers facing the impossible task of constructing “the complete, true story of a human being” using the tools of a “mixed, unstable genre, whose rules keep coming undone.” Her hesitant embrace of the genre playfully manifests itself throughout the book, as well as in her own works, especially her wonderful 1997 biography of Virginia Woolf.

Lee digs into the actual words of biographers and brings to surface the pivotal moments and techniques that allow the transcendence of books such as Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. In a chapter called “National Biography,” she traces the struggles of Thomas Carlyle and other writers to determine what (and who) they should include in biographical studies. Changing habits, tastes, and trends shaped the biographical works produced throughout the years, or at least helped determine which works received a wide readership. Lee’s winds her way through the practice of biography by means of questions that strike the conscience of many life-writers: what is the purpose of biography? What tone should biography take? What elements of a life should one include, and what should one discard? What is the proper relationship between a biographer and her subject? Which metaphor best describes biography—the gruesome scientific cuts of autopsy or the feelingly sketched drama of portraiture?

Throughout, Lee stands at a remove from much of biography. She disapproves of biographical accounts constructed with a sensationalist tone. She argues against life-writing that produces smear campaigns rather than an empathetic investigation. She rightly censures authors that crudely denigrate the lives and choices of their subjects. And she often sympathizes with individuals who grow queasy at the idea of another human being investigating and summarizing their life for profit.

She addresses a particularly pertinent problem for the modern world of biography—to what degree should a writer embrace the use of modern psychological theory to understand a person’s life and interpret their behavior? The greatest biographies seek to understand the very minds of their subjects, so that the individual under review seems to breathe life into every page; the muscular theories of psychology (ancient or modern) seem like useful tools for digging into the earth and excavating the mind of an individual. But Lee seems to side with Richard Ellmann on the use of psychological theory—it too often manipulates the biographer, rather than the biographer manipulating a generalized psychological theory. She argues that “some of the most masterful literary lives of the mid-20th century—Leon Edel’s Life of Henry James (1953-77), or George Painter’s Marcel Proust (1959)—now seem skewed by their psychoanalytical bias… however rich and deep Edel’s account of James’s social, personal, and literary context, such moments in his biography seem over-schematic and infantilizing.” In Lee’s reading, psychoanalytic biographies fail to endure except as “historical moments in the interpretations of those great writers’ lives,” a fate she ascribes to all biographical approaches. To give a work greater longevity and spirit, she seems to suggest building a new theory of psychology, one custom built for that particular individual human being. Yet it seems impossible to believe that one can approach the life of another without assumptions regarding human nature, and that these assumptions direct one where to look when describing the life of the individual. At the same time, one can readily appreciate her point that biographers use psychology or psycho-analytics too readily, and without enough questions (one might say the same of religious or Platonic or philosophic interpretations of individual life).

Her selection of quotations enliven the book and often present an ironic edge to the proceedings—she begins with a ‘theme’ for each chapter, and then uses pertinent quotes and examples to steadily undermine the theme’s power to convey the attributes of a successful life-study.

A particularly fun thought comes from a Robert Graves poem, “To Bring the Dead to Life.”

To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man's embers
And a live flame will start.

Let his forgotten griefs be now,
And now his withered hopes;
Subdue your pen to his handwriting
Until it prove as natural
To sign his name as yours.

Limp as he limped,
Swear by the oaths he swore;
If he wore black, affect the same;
If he had gouty fingers,
Be yours gouty too.

Assemble tokens intimate of him --
A ring, a hood, a desk:
Around these elements then build
A home familiar to
The greedy revenant.

So grant him life, but reckon
That the grave which housed him
May not be empty now:
You in his spotted garments
Shall yourself lie wrapped.

Today we remember Graves more for his memoirs, poetry, and historical fiction rather than his early biographies of T.E. Lawrence, but all of those genres can burn close to biography, and may require similar skills. He and Lee both see the odd spiritual pairing found between the biographical writer and his or her subject matter. Biography lacks the medical precision and efficiency of the autopsy, or the immediacy and efficiency of portraiture. But it requires a unique art, a dance with the dead, wherein the dead gain strength from the writer and begin to move again; the writer, however, comes closer to joining the dead with each line.

Refreshingly, Lee provides neither a ‘how to’ list for life-writers, nor a ‘definitive’ guide to recommended biographies. She instead introduces the key ethical and academic questions pertaining to biography. The answers to those questions arise as suggestions rather than prescriptions, and come from not only her own viewpoint but from the many sources she uses to guide the book’s conversation. 

Archibald Wavell, The Viceroy's Journal, ed. by Penderel Moon. 1973, OUP. 528 pp    

The Viceroy's Journal records the first-person impressions, calculations, and musings of Archibald Wavell, a great man given the shoddy task of serving as the second-to-last viceroy of India, 1943-1947. Just prior to the book's opening moments, Wavell led the defense of British Middle East and British Asia, always with limited resources and virtually no proper support from Churchill's cabinet. Churchill thrusts Wavell, a one-eyed soldier with no active political experience, into the civilian appointment of Viceroy of India to avoid giving the popular general further military commands. Instead of riding out the war in comparative luxury (as Churchill expected), Wavell immediately sets to work with intelligence and enthusiasm, helping to end the famine in Bengal, release Gandhi from prison, and lobby His Majesty's Government (H.M.G.) to transfer Indian political power before the end of the war. Wavell records the government’s callow responses with frank and adroit perception. In the viceroy's account, Indian politicians do not fare any better. Gandhi and Jinnah appear as political demagogues, each clumsily manipulating the respective Hindu and Muslim masses. They seem more devoted to party approval than to the competent dissolution of the Raj. "They do not understand how the machinery of Government works in practice," Wavell avers, "and think entirely on the lines of all questions being decided by party votes."

Wavell addresses his readers with roughly three types of journal entries: amusing anecdotes of political machinations, annoyed dismissals of pomp and ceremonial lunches, and engaged analysis of India's economic and political problems. He writes with a calm voice and courageous enthusiasm, even when the task assumes a difficulty of quixotic proportions. Editor Penderel Moon, a former colonial administrator, provides footnotes and appendices that offer an approving assessment of Wavell's influence and understanding of Indian politics. Wavell, a career soldier, also demonstrates an apt mind for interpreting the dialectical highs and lows of British parliamentary politics. Inexpert readers might find Wavell's frequent use of acronyms and titles a little difficult to follow, and updated footnotes would help preserve the book's usefulness for future generations. That said, Wavell evinces a remarkably calm sense of duty and self-understanding, which allows the book to serve as a profound guide to the closing days of the British Raj.