Batman Breeds Thoughts on Culture High and Low, Along with Musings on the Current Cultural Crisis

Yesterday we looked at Glen Weldon’s wonderful new book, Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture, and that got us to thinking.  (Before we get to thinking, though, let’s reiterate that Weldon’s book is quite terrific and highly recommended.)  Is Batman art?  And is a deep engagement with Batman (or other facets of Nerd Culture) a worthwhile endeavor?

Before we start exploring, let’s set some ground rules.  We here at The Jade Sphinx have given serious consideration to pop fiction and film, along with kiddie books.  We have also examined literary, artistic and musical works by great masters.  Clearly, we think that pop fictions are worthy of serious consideration … but the mistake this discussion often makes is equating serious consideration with serious art. 

But that is not the case.  Kiddie lit and pop fiction can be crafted with varying degrees of artistry, but that does not necessarily make it art.  Oh, it can be art, but it does not transmute into art simply through virtue of its examination.  A doctoral thesis on Batman, for example, may result in a diploma, but the intrinsic quality of our pointed-eared friend and the body of work about him remains unchanged.

Now, the call to canonize kitsch is a relatively new phenomenon.  From the 1930s through the 1960s – a time of unprecedented media saturation – junk art for children was enjoyed by children.  In what seems was a more innocent time, there were whole industries creating art for children: comic strips and books, movie serials, radio shows, animated cartoons and hosts of literary options created expressly for everyone from beginning readers to teenagers.  Adults could sometimes dip in an appreciative toe to remember the sweet currents of youth, and may even enjoy much of the material, but to become an avid consumer of such was a sign of feeble-mindedness.

Pop fiction for adults also fully realized (and embraced) its limitations.  One well remembers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s dedication to his 1912 novel The Lost World (a masterpiece of its kind): I have wrought my simple plan/If I give one hour of joy/To the boy who’s half a man,/Or the man who’s half a boy.  That lovely and poetic preamble is suitable for so much that came before and after, everything from Fu Manchu and Tarzan, to James Bond and Indiana Jones.  Good pop fiction can be terrific stuff: insightful, bracing, engaging and amusing.  It is not to be sneered at; nor, however, is it to be overestimated.

We are not saying, to be clear, that it is impossible for a piece of genre fiction or popular entertainment to elevate into the realm of higher art.  Wind in the Willows, The House at Pooh Corner and Peter Pan are magnificent books, transcending the designation of mere kiddie lit to soar to literary heights.  And one need only to think of Poe, of much of H.G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson, of Graham Greene or Dashiell Hammett, to realize that many classic novels could also be shelved in the genre sections of your local bookstore.  But, again, such company doesn’t elevate a genre en toto.

But over the last few decades what has changed in the culture at large is a flight from adulthood and complexity, from the challenges of great art and great beauty, and a retreat into comfortable and childish enthusiasms.  Worse than that, consumers of pop culture are demanding that attention not only be paid, but that entry to the Canon is fair and just.  And, in so doing, they debase the wonderful raw power of pop fiction, and the innocence of kiddie lit.

In the 1990s, I was frankly amazed at the adult craze for Harry Potter books.  This is in no way to say that these books were bad, but they were written for children, and a deep identification with them signifies a lack of seriousness.  Worse still, as more and more adults read them, the books lost more and more of their grounding in a child’s world, ending with what was to be the Gotterdammerung of kiddie books.  It became almost impossible to read the last novel in the corpus and remember that it all started with some kids playing ball from atop some brooms.

Much the same thing for adults who obsess over Batman.  It is adults (of questionable maturity) who have demanded the darker, brooding, psychopathic Batman.  It was the same adults who have consigned the sunnier, smiling, and more optimistic Superman into oblivion, insufficiently violent or complex and now hopelessly passé.

What these adults playing with children’s toys forget is that amusements made for children cannot bear the weight they wish to impose upon them.  We are supposed to move on from the amusements of our youth to more challenging, complex and elevating fare.  Enjoy them as palette cleaners, but then get onto the main meal.  The answer is not to make Batman relevant to adults (an impossibility), but to embrace the challenge of real adult art. 

And, again, read and look at what you want.  But a steady diet of aesthetic and cultural junk is much like a steady diet of junk food: it will significantly impair your physical and mental health, greatly diminish your quality of life, and, in the long run, it will kill you.

Now, we make our children’s entertainment for adults.  I can think of few more damming condemnations of us as a culture and as a people that we actually make Batman or Superman movies that are so violent … that children cannot see them. Stop for a moment and ponder how … impossible that would have been as little as 50 years ago.  The idea of a “serious” Batman movie would have been met with well-deserved derision.  But not today.  The cheapening of our culture since the 1960s (and the concomitant tenets of aesthetic relativity), have made this dumbing down not only possible, but inevitable.  The highest grossing films of the year are blockbusters based on 40 year old superhero comics.  This lack of adulthood has poisoned our language, our music, our political discourse. 

This corruption has bled into everything.  For example, in the just-released Against Democracy, a political screed published by Princeton University Press (!), author Jason Brennan breaks the body politic into three classes:  hobbits, hooligans and vulcans. 

Hobbits…?  Vulcans...?  Really?  Is that what 21^st Century adulthood has become?

I love pop fiction.  And when pop fiction is working on all cylinders, it can be wonderful, terrific and … art of a kind.  But it’s like a twinkie: I’ll eat them, but it’s not my sole diet.  And if the very notion of adulthood is to survive, we have to get back to the business of serious art, or our emotional, intellectual and philosophical selves are finished.

Tomorrow: James Bond – it aint art, but nobody does it better.

Alarms and Discursions, by G. K. Chesterton (1910)

Over the past many months we have been reading quite a bit of that brilliant author, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, (1874 – 1936), creator of the delightful Father Brown detective stories.  Though little-remembered today, Chesterton was one of the outstanding critics and thinkers of his age.  There are many reasons to admire GKC, but perhaps the most sensible is that he had never lost his childlike sense of wonder.  It was his innocence and clarity, mixed with a prodigious erudition, that resulted in his gargantuan influence as a writer and thinker.  He is simply the finest critic of Dickens and Stevenson I have ever read, and his take on Shakespeare is enthralling.  To read Chesterton is to see these writers anew, as if some profound truth were staring us in the face and it took a little boy to point it out.

The Falstaffian figure of GKC was familiar to all literate people in the US and UK for decades.  Tall and fat, he wore a broad-brimmed slouch hat and cape, and often carried a sword cane.  Of such figures legends are made, and Chesterton, the man himself, influenced writers who converted the easily recognizable figure into a string of fictional characters.  (His influence on detective fiction is vast – and the man himself served as the model for the fictional Dr. Gideon Fell, who appeared in mysteries by John Dickson Carr.)  The most contemporary figure similar to GKC would be Orson Welles; but though brilliant, Welles did not have his deep and profound depth of learning, his purity of soul, nor his sense of fun.  Welles was old before his time; GKC was forever young.

Chesterton earned his bread and cheese as a journalist, writing for the London Daily News.  His 1910 book Alarms and Discursions features dozens of columns on a variety of different subjects.  Paging through this book, the reader would learn his thoughts on everything from democracy, to cheese to the failure of the English upper classes.   Anyone interested in learning more about this fascinating man should look at his newspaper columns while also reading his many novels and books of sustained criticism.

Here are some quotes:  When a man says that democracy is false because most people are stupid, there are several courses which the philosopher may pursue. The most obvious is to hit him smartly and with precision on the exact tip of the nose. But if you have scruples (moral or physical) about this course, you may proceed to employ Reason, which in this case has all the savage solidity of a blow with the fist. It is stupid to say that "most people" are stupid. It is like saying "most people are tall," when it is obvious that "tall" can only mean taller than most people. It is absurd to denounce the majority of mankind as below the average of mankind.

Isn’t that grand?  And here is GKC writing in 1910 something that is even more pertinent to 2014:  In a popular magazine there is one of the usual articles about criminology; about whether wicked men could be made good if their heads were taken to pieces. As by far the wickedest men I know of are much too rich and powerful ever to submit to the process, the speculation leaves me cold. I always notice with pain, however, a curious absence of the portraits of living millionaires from such galleries of awful examples; most of the portraits in which we are called upon to remark the line of the nose or the curve of the forehead appear to be the portraits of ordinary sad men, who stole because they were hungry or killed because they were in a rage. The physical peculiarity seems to vary infinitely; sometimes it is the remarkable square head, sometimes it is the unmistakable round head; sometimes the learned draw attention to the abnormal development, sometimes to the striking deficiency of the back of the head. I have tried to discover what is the invariable factor, the one permanent mark of the scientific criminal type; after exhaustive classification I have to come to the conclusion that it consists in being poor.

GKC had a remarkably Christian point of view – and by that, I don’t necessarily mean he wore his Catholicism on his sleeve.  He was a Christian humanist – someone who, seemingly against all odds, genuinely loved people.  This is a rare quality among those who live in the mind, but GKC was a rare man. 

The charm of a book like Alarms and Discursions is that it can be read through in one sitting, or can be dipped into almost indiscriminately.  There is not a page without gold of some kind, and, in addition, even his most interesting observations are presented with a puckish insouciance.  Read this, and savor, especially, the last line:  Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in this world. The first kind of people are People; they are the largest and probably the most valuable class. We owe to this class the chairs we sit down on, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in; and, indeed (when we come to think of it), we probably belong to this class ourselves. The second class may be called for convenience the Poets; they are often a nuisance to their families, but, generally speaking, a blessing to mankind. The third class is that of the Professors or Intellectuals; sometimes described as the thoughtful people; and these are a blight and a desolation both to their families and also to mankind. Of course, the classification sometimes overlaps, like all classification. Some good people are almost poets and some bad poets are almost professors. But the division follows lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not offer it lightly. It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of earnest reflection and research.

Alarms and Discursions is available at Project Gutenberg, and the invaluable www.manybooks.net.  It makes for wonderful reading.

Charles Robinson Illustrates Oscar Wilde Part II

We return to our look at some of the illustrations created by Charles Robinson for Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888). 

Robinson (1870-1937) was born into a family of artists, and both of his brothers became illustrators, as well.  Robinson had a particular facility for illustrating children’s books – both with pen and ink drawings and watercolor pictures of delightful delicacy. 

Though we’re looking at his illustrations for Wilde’s fairy tales, I cannot help but include a page from A Child’s Garden of Verses (1895) by Robert Louis Stevenson (see below). Look at how Robinson creates his page layout -- the long illustration with the reaching minarets, all pointing upward to the moon.  The child in the lower foreground is a stand-in for ourselves, and one cannot help but look on in wonder.  He then balances this delicious drawing with the child and clock to the right, the chains of the clock pointing downward at the tyke, a perfect counterpoint to the adjourning illustration.  Masterful.

The story of the Happy Prince is tragic, indeed.  The Prince is a statue in the town square.  “He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large red ruby glowed on his sword hilt … He was very much admired indeed.”

But the Prince is not only beautiful of form and figure, but of soul, as well.  He entreats a swallow, en route to make merry with friends in Egypt, to take various jeweled parts of his body to the hungry and suffering poor.  Before long, there is little outward beauty left to the Prince and the swallow, exhausted, dies at his feet.  Now shabby, the statue is taken down and burned in the furnace.  However, Wilde ends his tale on a redemptive note:

“Bring me the two most precious things in the city,” sad God to one of His Angels; and the Angel brought Him the leaden heart and the dead bird.

“You have rightly chosen,” said God, “for in my garden on Paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me.”

Robinson made two color illustrations for this story; here is the Palace of Sans-Souci, the home of the Prince when he was alive, and a place where sorrow is not allowed to enter.  This watercolor is a wonderful example of Art Nouveaux, and highlights all of Robinson’s strengths of composition.  If Sans-Souci is, indeed, a place where sorrow is not allowed to enter, how best to design paradise than as a place of great beauty … of marked stillness?  There are birds here, but they rest upon the grass (or on a maiden’s fingertip), at peace.  The women, beautifully dressed, are in conversation with one another, or listening to the lute played by one of their numbers.  The plants around them are in blossom, and a garland of flowers hangs overhead.  The highly idealized trees accentuate the heavenward thrust of the picture, and the curvilinear architecture that surrounds them is a perfect encapsulation of the Art Nouveaux aesthetic.

All of the women look alike.  Are they sisters?  Perhaps muses to some unseen artist?  The text tells us nothing more than Sans-Souci is a paradise, and to Robinson that seems to mean conversation, music, nature and beauty.  He may have a point.

Charles Robinson Illustrates Oscar Wilde

The tradition of beautifully illustrated children’s books is not a new phenomenon.  In fact, there was something of a Golden Age of illustration, starting with the Victorian era and lasting all the way to the start of World War II.  During this period, it was not just “picture books” that were filled with lovely and evocative pages, but prose stories as well.

One of the most felicitous parings of author and illustrator were Oscar Wilde and Charles Robinson.  Wilde’s fairy tales were only ostensibly for children; actually, he would often recite them at dinner parties and share them with friends.  (Though he also recited them in the nursery to his own children, Cyril and Vyvyan.)  These stories are magnificent creations – lyrical and lovely and often rife with paradox. 

They were greatly admired by actor George Herbert Kersely, who later went on stage and played a part in Wilde’s An Ideal Husband.  He sent a copy of the first collection of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), to Wilde to autograph.  Wilde’s letter in reply read, in part, “I am very pleased that you like my stories.  They are studies in prose, put for romance’s sake into fanciful form: meant party for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find simplicity in a subtle strangeness.”

Charles Robinson (1870-1937) was born in Islington, the son of an illustrator.  Obviously, art was in the blood, for his two brothers, Thomas and William Robinson, also became illustrators.  Robinson entered the Royal Academy, but was unable to attend because of his precarious financial state.

Robinson illustrated A Child’s Garden of Verses (1895) by Robert Louis Stevenson and met with great success.  After that, his lilting water colors appears in many great classic, including The Secret Garden (1911), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1907) and Lullaby Land (1897).

The illustration above is from The Selfish Giant, one of the finest fairy tales in the Wilde corpus.  Vyvyan remembered his father telling he and his brother Cyril this story and asking why he wept as he done so.  Wilde answered that beautiful things always made him cry.

The overall design of this striking water color shows Robinson’s mastery of composition and color.  The delicate white blossoms denote both purity and death, and the lighter color around the child’s head is suggestion of a halo.  There is an almost subtle Japanese effect, with the one-direction sweep of the action and great amount of unused paper.  The wide-eyes of the child, along with the slightly over-sized head and under-sized hands, are still seen in commercial Japanese illustration and animation.

Here is how Wilde ends his tale:

One winter morning he looked out of his window as he was dressing. He did not hate the Winter now, for he knew that it was merely the Spring asleep, and that the flowers were resting.

Suddenly he rubbed his eyes in wonder, and looked and looked. It certainly was a marvellous sight. In the farthest corner of the garden was a tree quite covered with lovely white blossoms. Its branches were all golden, and silver fruit hung down from them, and underneath it stood the little boy he had loved.

Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy, and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came near to the child. And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, 'Who hath dared to wound thee?' For on the palms of the child's hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on the little feet.

‘Who hath dared to wound thee?' cried the Giant; 'tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him.'

'Nay!' answered the child; 'but these are the wounds of Love.'

'Who art thou?' said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.

And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, 'You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.'

And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms.

The Capt. Alatriste Novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Like most aesthetes, your correspondent is slavishly addicted to novels of swashbuckling romance.  A good swashbuckler has a tremendous sense of style, is written with élan and thrives on a heightened sense of drama, emotion and plot.

So, it’s natural that many people have pushed on me the historical romances of Arturo Pérez-Reverte, author of several novels about solider and swordsman-for-hire Captain Diego Alatriste y Tenorio, and his young companion, Íñigo Balboa y Aguirre.  With these novels, Pérez-Reverte clearly shows his ambition to create a series that rivals the D’Artagnan romances of Alexandre Dumas.

Pérez-Reverte (born 1951), author of the excellent The Fencing Master already covered in these pages, has set a laudable goal for himself with these books.  The author admits to being horrified at the lack of depth in the coverage of Span’s Golden Age in contemporary schools, and sought to correct this with a series of historical romances that fully detail the glory that was Spain.

However, it is his very ambition that sinks the Alatriste novels, as Pérez-Reverte forgets the romancer’s pledge to recreate history, rather than teach it.  I have just finished the fourth in the corpus (The King’s Gold), and, at this point, despite my devotion to the genre, could not possibly go back for a fifth (or seventh, as that is where the novels now stand with no sign of letting up) helping.

Pérez-Reverte does not wear his erudition lightly, and the novels stop regularly for Alatriste or one of the supporting characters (often real-life historical personages) to rattle off long bits of poetry, historical detail or antiquated epigrams and aphorisms.  This is amusing in small bits, but page after page is rather like a historical romance written by a Spanish Charlie Chan – very little goes a long way indeed.

Moreover, the great masters of the form (talents as diverse as Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rafael Sabatini) had a wonderful flair for intricate plotting.  Indeed, one of the deep joys of swashbuckling romance is its complexity of plot, almost for its own sake.  That love of plot is usually married to a depth of emotion – not just love, but hate, lust, the thirst for revenge, envy and self-respect.  However, the Alatriste novels never deliver this density of plot; indeed, they have more the plodding feel of 17^th Century police procedurals, where Alatriste and Íñigo make a bloody path from point A to point B. 

Missing, too, is that sense of style, that distinct touch of panache so essential to the genre.  Perhaps this is because Alatriste is a taciturn battle-weary survivor, or that Íñigo, our narrator, is too young for such embroideries.  But this ennui prevents the books from ever really taking off – they cannot inhabit the more expansive corners of our imagination because they have no appeal to our sense of fun.

It is often with the supporting characters – the various aides, schemers and villains – that the author of romances truly shines, and here, too, Pérez-Reverte fails.  The recurring villain of the piece, Gualterio Malatesta, an Italian fencing master, is clearly the Basil Rathbone part.  However, like Alatriste, he never really comes to life – we know he’s the villain because he gets to sneer quite a bit, but there is never that passion for naughtiness, that sheer delight in vileness, that essential theatricality, that marks a great swashbuckling heavy.  Angélica de Alquézar, who spends most of her time in the books alternately trying to seduce or murder Íñigo, is weak tea indeed, never becoming more than a pale shadow of Dumas’ Milady de Winter, her most obvious influence.  Historical figures, such as Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), come off more like name dropping than fully rounded characters, a trick Dumas, for example, admirably pulled off with Cardinal Richelieu.

Part of the problem may be inherent in the series itself – because they are set in Spain of the 17^th Century, the Alatriste novels cannot help but escape a whiff of provincialism.  While most European nations at the time were unified under one strong ruler, Spain was in essence broken up under various feudal lords who served the King.  In addition, both royalty and the Catholic Church used religion to keep the people pliable, ignorant and afraid.  Spain simply had not the expansive, intellectually exploratory or cohesive feel of England or France at that time. 

I must confess that the shortcomings of 17^th Century Spain detailed in The King’s Gold inspired extremely uncomfortable comparisons to the present-day United States as I read the novel.  Here’s a passage that I found disconcertingly familiar:

Most political activity, therefore, consisted in a constant to-and-fro of haggling, usually over money; and all the subsequent crises that we endured under Philip IV – the Medina Sidonia plot in Andalusia, the Duque de Hijar’s conspiracy in Aragon, the secession of Portugal, and the Catalonia War – were created by two things: the royal treasury’s greed and a reluctance on the part of the nobility, the clerics, and the great local merchants to pay anything at all.  The sole object of the king’s visit to Seville in sixteen twenty-four and of this present visit was to crush local opposition to a vote in favor of new taxes.  The sole obsession of that unhappy Spain was money, which is why the route to the Indies was so crucial.  To demonstrate how little this had to do with justice or decency, suffice it to say that two or three years earlier, the Cortes had rejected outright a luxury tax that was to be levied on sinecures, gratuities, pensions, and rents – that is to say, on the rich.  The Venetian ambassador, Contarini, was, alas quite right when he wrote at the time, “The most effective war one can wage on the Spanish is to leave them to be devoured and destroyed by their own bad governance.”

Perhaps my overarching problem with the Alatriste novels is that their setting – 17^th Century Spain – has too, too many similarities with the worst components of 21^st Century American life: an exploitive over-class, unquestioning religious devotion, a hawkish international stance and the crippling provincialism of many of its people.  Hardly my recipe for romance.

Christmas Wishes From Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson

Painted By John Singer Sargent

Any man who creates the Master of Ballantrae, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the palmy shores of Treasure Island must be a romantic.  All swashbucklers, both real and literary, have something warm-spirited and generous in their nature, and as such, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was not a writer to let the Christmas season pass unremarked.

Christmastime 1887 found Stevenson in Saranac Lake, mostly miserable.  The temperature was freezing, the weather was wretched and Stevenson found himself “grey and harsh.”  He was recovering from a lung ailment there, under the care of Dr. E. L. Trudeau, and writing much of his masterpiece, The Master of Ballantrae.  The bleak and uncompromising weather may have had significant influence on some of the gloomier set pieces of the novel, including the wonderful moment where the two brothers nearly kill each other during a midnight swordfight and the closing moments in a desolate and deserted American forest.

He also wrote many essays, among them, A Christmas Sermon.  Stevenson’s sermon is available on the invaluable Manybooks.net for download to your Kindle or e-reader, and can also be found in its entirety here:  http://www.thefullwiki.org/A_Christmas_Sermon_(Stevenson).  It can be read in a single sitting and comes highly recommended.

I think what is so refreshing about Stevenson’s Christmas thoughts is just how little Christmas is to be found in them.  Instead, Stevenson questions the motives of professional moralists, those who seek to control or condemn the behavior of others without taking time to think of the wrongs they do themselves.   In this age when questions of morality have taken down one presidential hopeful and counting, it is a refreshing change.  As Stevenson says, if your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say ‘give them up,’ for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

Stevenson is one of the great novelists of the 19^th Century; initially a popular writer who has eventually been embraced by academia and the literati (a process that can sometimes take a surprisingly long time.)  Readers seeking literary art along with concise and vivid storytelling could hardly do better than Stevenson.  Ballantrae (written in 1889 and already covered in these pages) is highly recommended, as are Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886).

Let’s close with a few more Christmas thoughts from the man who was both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:

It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with our life's endeavor springs in some degree from dullness. We require higher tasks, because we do not recognize the height of those we have. Trying to be kind and honest seems an affair too simple and too inconsequential for gentlemen of our heroic mould; we had rather set ourselves to something bold, arduous, and conclusive; we had rather found a schism or suppress a heresy, cut off a hand or mortify an appetite. But the task before us, which is to co-endure with our existence, is rather one of microscopic fineness, and the heroism required is that of patience. There is no cutting of the Gordian knots of life; each must be smilingly unraveled.

To be honest, to be kind—to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulation—above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful. There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of living well. Here is a pleasant thought for the year's end or for the end of life: Only self-deception will be satisfied, and there need be no despair for the despairer.

The Master of Ballantrae

My recent musings on the movie Black Magic cast my mind back to one of my favorite swashbuckling novels, The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) written in 1889.

Ballantrae is the story of two brothers, one good, the other bad, and the conflict between them that mars their lives. (Think of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde turned into a familial drama).   This novel is a great, Gothic-flavored adventure featuring a fascinating villain, Jamie Durie, the Master of Ballantrae.

Jamie Durie is the most colorful character in the book; as is often the case in swashbuckling adventure tales, the villain gets all the best parts.  Like the Cagliostro of Black Magic , Ballantrae features the villain as the main protagonist.  The attainments of Jamie are formidable: master swordsman, soldier of fortune, athlete, dandy, scholar and possessor of a fatal charm.  Jamie is aggressively charming – and his is a fatal charm.  He treats people badly, but it doesn’t matter.  He is more highly regarded than his decent (and publicly despised) brother Henry because Jamie’s charm is charged with color and vitality and energy.  Life around him is an event, leaving even his bitterest enemies entranced.

Think of what the great charmers of the classic movie era would’ve done with him!  John Barrymore may well have made the definitive Ballantrae.  Or Douglas Fairbanks Jr.  Or George Sanders or Basil Rathbone or even Louis Haywood.  All, for different reasons, would’ve been great.

It is notable that the most memorable swashbuckling characters, and characters who define what it is to be a swashbuckler, are the villains. It is almost as if there is something in the makeup of the swashbuckling hero – the theatricality, the dandyism, the artifice, or some other quality (the freedom, perhaps?)  – that reads more effectively outside the realm of angels.  The best swashbuckling villains often embody the attributes of the best swashbuckling heroes – almost as if these qualities in abundance lead to villainy.

Like Cagliostro, Jamie is undone by his own overarching passions.  Jamie lacks Cagliostro’s Gothic flourishes – he would never hypnotize a woman to make him love him, he’d move on to the next wench.  But he has insouciance, a sense of fun, a delight in his own villainy that makes Master of Ballantrae, the book and the man, delicious.

There are two movie versions of Ballantrae.  The first, starring Errol Flynn as Jamie, was released in 1953.  It is a very disappointing affair.  Flynn (1909-1959) famous as a screen hero, could not play an out-and-out villain, and the screenplay by Herb Meadow had a last-reel turnaround to clean up the character.  The other, infinitely superior, adaptation was in 1984, a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation.  That starred Richard Thomas as good-boy Henry, and a wonderful Michael York as Jamie.  (York exuberantly portrayed D'Artagnan in the Richard Lester Musketeer films, again proving that the line between charming hero and beloved rogue is a thin one).  Sadly, this version is not currently available on DVD, but it can sometimes be found on eBay.  It is worth searching for.