Book Review: Wanda Gág's works

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1938), Tales from Grimm (1936), and More Tales from Grimm (1947) by Wanda Gág

If I were forced to limit my library to a small core of books, I would choose the Bible (KJV), Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, C. S. Lewis (the Narnia series), Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and the collected works of the Brothers Grimm. All except the last work were originally written in English and need no translator. I would definitely choose Wanda Gág as my translator for the Brothers Grimm. She illustrated and translated a number of the Grimm’s fairy tales.

Wanda Gág grew up in the German-speaking section of New Ulm, Minnesota. Her ancestors came from the very places in Germany where most of the Grimm’s tales were born. She has, in my opinion, not only the genius to illustrate the tales but also the right spirit to translate them. In her own words, she tells us what the fairy tales mean to her:

The magic of Märchen is among my earliest recollections. The dictionary definitions – tale, fable, legend – are all inadequate when I think of my little German Märchenbuch and what it held for me. Often, usually at twilight, some grown-up would say, “Sit down, Wanda-chen, and I’ll read you a Märchen.” Then, as I settled down in my rocker, ready to abandon myself with the utmost credulity to whatever I might hear, everything was changed, exalted. A tingling, anything-may-happen feeling flowed over me, and I had the sensation of being about to bite into a big juicy pear.

When, four years ago, I was in the midst of a Hansel and Gretel drawing, the old Märchen magic gripped me again and I felt I could not rest until I had expressed in pictures all that Märchen meant to me.

In order to be influenced as directly as possible by the real spirit of these stories, I read them in the original German. I had at that time no idea of writing my own text but I soon found that I wanted to do this also.

After choosing a group of stories, I made literal translations of them. Some lent themselves easily to this method and came out practically as fresh and lively as they were in the original. This was especially true of those in dialect, for, because of their simple language and many repetitions, they were clear enough for any child to understand. Others, which were smooth, warm and colorful in the original, came out thin, lifeless and clumsy. It seemed evident that in the case of the latter, only a free translation could convey the true flavor of the originals. I hoped it might be possible – and thought it worth trying – to carry over into the English some of their intimate me-to-you quality, and that comforting solidity which makes their magic more, rather, than less, believable.

The fairy world in these stories, though properly weird and strange, has a convincing, three-dimensional character. There is magic, wonder, sorcery, but no vague airy-fairyness about it. The German witches are not wispy wraiths flying in the air—they usually live in neat cottages and wear starched bonnets and spotless aprons. The bear in Snow White and Rose Red is only outwardly bewitched, for a rent in the fur reveals him as a full dressed, flesh-and-blood Prince underneath. The story of the spindle, shuttle and needle is more airy than most, but even here the supernatural agents are not ballet-skirted fairies with wands, but three plain work-aday objects. Aside from this, many of the stories are folk tales rather than fairy stories—and what could be more substantial than a peasant?

When Miss Gág says that the Grimm’s tales do not have a vague airy-fairyness about them, she articulates why I have always preferred the Grimm’s tales to the more modern fantasy stories. The European peasant’s faith is an incarnational faith. No Star Wars-Harry Potter nonsense for him. And the Grimm’s tales are tales for those who are children and peasants at heart.

My copy of More Tales from Grimm has the word, ‘discard’ stamped on the title page. Some modern library no longer wanted it. That speaks volumes about modern libraries and the modern world.V

Book Review: Swift and Sure

Swift and Sure: Bringing Certainty and Finality to Criminal Punishment by Judge William J. Cornelius, Bridge Street Books, 1997, O.P.

There is a myth about our country circulating mainly in conservative circles that we are a good, solid, can-do type of nation. We see a problem, and by-gum, we fix it. Well, our crime problem has been spiraling out of control for years, and by-gum, we haven’t done a thing to fix it.

Judge Cornelius starts his excellent book by citing the terrible crime statistics that show the United States to be the most violent, crime-ridden nation in the world. And we are, so the good Judge says, because American justice is neither swift nor sure. If justice were swift and sure, we would not have the crime rates we have.

The Judge tells us why abolishing parole, probation, and early release programs could serve as a vital deterrent to crime. He also is against concurrent sentences, the exclusionary law, and Miranda rights. His case for repealing the exclusionary rule is excellent. I wish more Americans knew just how damaging the exclusionary law is. It has no constitutional or moral basis. In fact it is completely immoral. The law punishes the victim of a crime for the alleged procedural errors of police officers. No other nation has such a ridiculous law, which is no doubt one of the major reasons why no other nation has such high crime rates as we do.

Cornelius also shows us how ridiculous the insanity plea has become. If someone was ever upset in their past, they can claim that the recollection of that past made them “temporarily insane.” And if the jury doesn’t like the victim (as in the Bobbit case), the guilty party will go free. Cornelius recommends we go back to the old English common law of insanity, which would result in a virtual elimination of the temporary insanity plea.

There is chapter after chapter of sound advice in this book. The chapter on revamping our juvenile system, for instance, is quite good. We currently live under a system where juveniles can kill with impunity, and unfortunately, they know it and are killing at growing rates.

Judge Cornelius’ positions are, in my judgment, unassailable. His is right. His advice is sound. The only weakness in the book lies in the question Judge Cornelius doesn’t ask: If he and any person with a modicum of common sense can see that the Judge’s reforms are necessary, why then can’t the reforms be implemented? The answer takes one into the religious realm where practical men do not want to go. Doesn’t there have to be some metaphysical belief that justice and truth are important in order for high-salaried bureaucrats to be inspired to change a system that is making them rich? In other words, in the absence of a Christian conscience, why should defense attorneys, who make their living getting hoodlums off the hook by catching police in procedural errors, give a particular damn about the fact that child molesters and murderers go unpunished? And likewise, why should policemen, in the absence of a Christian conscience, go after violent black criminals when to do so means loss of employment and at least five years in jail?

Respect for the law is a virtue when a nation’s laws have a Christian basis. But when the law is used to serve the Prince of Darkness, Christian men should defy it. On every issue – legalized abortion, the barbarian invasion, black crime, the state takes a position in favor of Satan and against the Europeans of the old stock.

Regimes that have instituted the law of Satan are not toppled overnight. But Christian men committed to counterrevolution have wrought wonders in the past. Our ancestors, such as William Tell and Nathan Bedford Forrest, are quite rightly revered. But shouldn’t we also seek to emulate them?

‘Away to the hills, to the caves, to the rocks—
Ere I own an usurper, I’ll couch with the fox,
And tremble, false Whigs, in the midst of your glee,
You have not seen the last of my bonnet and me!’

Of Mongrels and Commies

Book Review: Hollywood Party: The Untold Story of How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 30s and 40s, by Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2000

First of all, the book’s title is a bit of a misnomer. It should be titled, “How Communism Failed to Seduce the American Film Industry in the ’30’s and ’40’s but Succeeded in Doing So in the ’60’s and ’70’s,” for what Kenneth Billingsley presents is a rather surprisingly ineffective campaign on the part of the communists to have a major impact on the type of films Americans viewed. Plenty of screenwriters did become communists, but they never could bring themselves to write the communist propaganda that the Party demanded, mainly because the few propaganda pictures that did get into theaters bombed. Propaganda films were bad box office.

What Billingsley does document for us is the communist influence among Hollywood personalities in the 1930’s and 1940’s. It really is nothing different from what was going on at the universities at the time. The communists would seek out left-leaning liberals like Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart and get them to shill for nice-sounding organizations that were really communist front organizations. In fact, the majority of actors and writers at that time were to the left of center. Walt Disney, John Wayne, Adolph Menjou, Robert Montgomery, Robert Taylor, and Ward Bond were notable exceptions.

The book is a “just the facts, ma’am” type of book. The author doesn’t draw any conclusions but does present the reader with enough information to draw his own conclusions. The book is advertised as the “untold story,” but the story has been told often by conservatives, albeit not as often as the leftist version is told by the liberals. Which is why this book is useful: it sets the record straight about the so-called bad old blacklisting days.

However, I must admit that the facts as Billingsley presents them led me to conclude that the House Un-American Activities Committee was one of the stupidest ideas ever conceived. The 1960’s and 1970’s witnessed a huge increase in mainstream communist propaganda films because anyone who opposed them was tarred with the same brush as the ineffectual House Committee and McCarthy.

The old adage that you either have to kill a rat or let it alone should be applied to communists. Either kill them or let them alone. But don’t give them an opportunity to claim martyr status for having suffered a few anxious moments before a toothless board of inquiry.

Quite revealing is Billingsley’s account of the treatment accorded ex-communists who talked to the Committee. Men like Edward Dmytryk and Elia Kazan were victims of an anti-anti-communist blacklist that was far harsher than any so-called right-wing blacklist. Indeed, as Billingsley shows, there was no great persecution. Blacklisted writers could use assumed names, and repentant communists were welcomed back into the fold by the film industry. Only Ward Bond, tough guy that he was, was against letting even repentant communists back into the film industry.

The liberals have turned the blacklisting era into a major propaganda triumph, but this book shows any objective reader that there were real communists in Hollywood during that era who tried to use the film industry to advance their agenda. That they failed was more a tribute to the ’30’s and ’40’s moviegoer who preferred the movies of Alfred Hitchcock (a man hated by the communists) and Westerns to commie propaganda films. Yet, sappy propaganda films did capture the popular imagination during the 1960’s and 1970’s, so perhaps the inability to appreciate a good story goes hand in hand with communism.

This book is valuable in what it can elicit from the reader. I would hope that thoughtful readers would ask themselves why so many actors, directors, and creative people are leftist, and why conservative views do not seem to inspire creative types. I would suggest it is because 20th century conservatives lack a metaphysic. In centuries prior to the 20th, there were always men of the right in the arts and in the military willing to champion the cause of God, King, and country. But no one with any poetic instincts wants to champion free markets and greed. Marxism is a delusion from which great poets such as Whittaker Chambers eventually walk away. But it has an enduring appeal to the lesser poets who quite rightly see nothing inspirational in capitalism.

There is no question the seeds of communist dissension were being planted in the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s, but the Christian morality of the American populace had not been sufficiently contaminated to produce tangible results. Two things were necessary to make Americans more tolerant of communism. One was a breakdown in sexual mores, which did indeed take place in the 1960’s, and the second was a major change in the United States immigration policies, which also took place in the 1960’s. White technocrats make up the communist elite, but the major resistance to communism also comes from white people. When a nation is mongrelized, there is no longer any resistance to communism.

The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead

A Book Review of The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead by Derek Freeman, Westview Press, 1999

Freeman’s exposure of the false assumptions and faulty “research” behind Margaret Mead’s book, Coming of Age in Samoa, is certainly significant in view of the sainted status that liberaldom has conferred upon Mead.

The book’s weakness is that it is written in the dull academic style of an anthropologist, which is, of course, what the author is. And indeed, Freeman admits, he himself was a Mead enthusiast when he began his follow-up research, until he discovered that Mead’s research was flawed and inaccurate. He even includes, in the book, a letter from Mead to himself in which she concedes that her research was inaccurate.

What Freeman unearths is that Samoa was not the uninhibited sexual paradise that Mead described in her book. Mead spent most of her time “researching” the Samoan culture in a Navy hotel and never really lived with the Samoans. She got her information about the sexual practices of young Samoan girls from two girls, who, Freeman reveals, were just indulging in the Samoan custom of telling tall tales. They never dreamed that Mead would take them seriously.

But Mead, who had studied under the cultural determinist Franz Boas, was determined to give her mentor the research he wanted. And the liberal world wanted to believe that there was a tropical paradise devoid of Western cultural guilt about sexual matters.

Mead’s ridiculous book should be exposed as the travesty it is, but I should note that Freeman is not on our side (that of the good guys with the Christian crusader outfits on) either. He criticizes Mead’s inaccurate research, all well and good, but he also criticizes her for not being up on the latest research which reveals that heredity is more important than culture. This is less acceptable to a Christian than the cultural determinism of Boas and Mead; the Biology-is-Destiny school of thought usually ends up studying apes to learn about man. Christianity rejects the false ‘either/or’ of nature vs. nurture and instead claims that spirituality determines nature, which then must be nurtured by a Christian culture.

Nevertheless, Freeman’s expose is worth reading. It is indeed incredible that a few tall tales told by some adolescent Samoan schoolgirls should be the rallying cry for feminists and part of every textbook in America.

Freeman does mention Mead’s early lesbian affair with a kindred academic and her failed marriage, but he doesn’t dwell on the details of her private life. Instead he focuses on her research, or rather, her lack of it. In the end, we are left with a Madame Bovary-type character: too pathetic to hate and too shallow to love.

Some interesting quotes:

This then was the quintessentially Samoan response to which Fa’apua’a and Fofoa had resort when Mead advanced what was to them the ludicrous notion that despite the traditional emphasis on virginity in the fa’aSamoa and within the Christian church, the adolescent girls of Nau’a were, in fact, sexually promiscuous. As Fa’apua’a remarked to Galea’I Poumele, the then Secretary of Samoan Affairs of American Samoa, when he interviewed her in Fitiuta on November 13, 1987: “As you know Samoan girls are terrific liars when it comes to joking, but Margaret accepted our trumped-up stories as though they were true.”
___________________________________

If only Mead had arranged to live with a Samoan family in Manu’a, as she easily culd have done, she would have known from direct observation just how false were the conclusions set out in her letter to Boas of March 14, 1926. However, because of the Spam and other comforts that she felt she could not do without, she chose to reside
with fellow Americans in the United States Naval Dispensary at Luma, where, cut
off from the realities of Samoan existence, she relied for the most part on informants who came to visit her there. And so, lacking the experience of Samoan behavior and values, she was quite unable to appraise the tales of Fa’apua’a and Fofoa for what they were.

In The Republic, Plato wondered if it might be possible to contrive a convenient story of magnificent myth that would carry conviction with the whole community. It was just such a myth that Margaret Mead created in Coming of Age in Samoa and although it was based on entirely false information derived directly from her hoaxing on the island of Ofu on March 13, 1926, this myth, after Coming of Age in Samoa had been vouched for by Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict and other cogniscenti, came, in America as elsewhere in the world, to carry conviction with a whole community of anthropological and other cognitively deluded believers. Such magnificent myths, once a sufficient number of individuals have come fervently to believe in them, achieve an aura of invincible propriety and are defended, when challenged, with the utmost vehemence, as were Mead’s demonstrably erroneous conclusions about Samoa when, early in 1983, they were seriously questioned for the first time. Indeed, before the year was out the scientific standing of Margaret Mead’s Samoan research had become the ruling cause celebre of the twentieth century anthropology.

The liberals' failure to go back and change all the textbooks in which Mead's research is taken as gospel and to rethink their basic assumptions about the glories of a guilt-free, sexually permissive culture tells us something about the men and women who make up Academia Satania. They are not interested in truth; they are only interested in advancing their demonic vision of a society that is a mirror image of hell.

Fields Without Dreams

Book Review: Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Ideal by Victor Davis Hanson, Free Press, 1997

Hanson's contention is that the small farm is dead and that capitalism killed it. For those who say, "So what," Hanson would answer that Greek democracy and Jeffersonian democracy all depend on the existence of small farms manned by trusty yeomen. Can we abandon the agrarian principles on which our country was founded and still maintain our country? Hanson says we cannot. Wendell Berry echoes the same thoughts in his book, Another Turn of the Crank.

The small farmer is not asking for government handouts, but he is asking for protection from large corporations and protection from unfair foreign trade. Why should the small farmer be protected? Hanson maintains that the small farmer should be protected because he is the heart and soul of the American democratic experiment. The small farmer is in a dilemma when it comes to politics. He is usually a conservative on issues such as pornography, divorce, and sexual permissiveness, but he has done better economically under Democratic regimes instead of Republican. Hanson addresses this dilemma:

Oh, it is true that most farmers now say they 'like' such Republican constriction, the hard dollar, low wages, predictable prices, stasis, and all that. I won't argue with farmers that skeptical Republican administrations may be smarter in dealing with drugs, welfare, the lazy and criminal, and other social ills. But raisin farmers, even conservative farmers, usually – predictably – go broke voting Republican, hating the rare Democratic administrations as they become prosperous. So much for homo economicus … Tell a farmer that: he almost punches you in the face, citing rains, luck, and all sorts of extraneous, superfluous factors for the Carter extravaganza of the late 1970s. He hates you for saying what he knows in his black heart to be true:
Democrats inflate and expand; Republicans deflate and constrict. Democrats enrage farmers with their farrago of entitlement and permissiveness; Republicans excite with their stern talk and get-tough threats. But Democrats make farmers rich; Republicans make them go broke.

Hanson makes his case against the unrestricted free market by describing the tragedy of his own small, ancestral farm. His mother, his father, and now he and his brothers have all had to get jobs outside the farm (Hanson works as a Professor of Greek) just to keep it alive. The great raisin crash (depicted in great detail in the book) of 1983 ended the last hope the Hansons had of making a living from their land. Nor does Hanson confine himself to just the story of his own farm. He tells the stories of many other small farmers who were unable to compete with the leviathan. To the Limbaughs who would call Hanson and his fellow farmers 'liberal whiners' who just couldn't cut it in a free-market economy, Hanson replies with this:

All the free-market economists I met who lectured on productivity while ignoring obscene commissions, dividends, and salaries, the Ivy League careerists who pontificated about market corrections and the stabilizing, healthy effect of buyouts, shutdowns, and bankruptcies, were themselves quite a sorry bunch. A pampered lot they were, terrified of the ghetto across the freeway, struck dumb by a hammer and nails, left pale and stammering before the formidable blue-collar white repair man. They preached an awfully stern Darwinism. But even those tanned and fit on their Nautilises would be the first to go in any jungle their own models might create.

No doubt because of a second career (Hanson considers himself a farmer first) spent with Aeschylus and Sophocles, Mr. Hanson does not feel obligated to end his work on an optimistic note. He makes a few suggestions about things that could be done, but he makes it clear that he doesn't believe anything will be done to help the small farmer. Like a soothsayer from one of Sophocles' tragedies, Hanson tells us, without commercial break, that there will be hell to pay for our destruction of the agrarian way of life.*

Now, let me mention the major flaw of the book. Hanson's critique of the free-market is just; his defense of the agrarian way of life is noble. However, I would quarrel with the gods he invokes. He states in his preface that he rejects the more romanticized vision of farming presented by Virgil in The Georgics in favor of the bleaker vision presented by Hesiod in Works and Days. Throughout the book, when he talks about 'Western Civilization' he clearly refers to the Greeks. Well, the Greeks were a fine bunch of fellows, and we owe them much, but the Incarnation is a fact. The Western monks preserved the Greek and Roman works because there was much in them that deserved to be preserved, but to ignore the colossal change in our institutions, in our art, and in our morals that took place since the Incarnation is at best second-rate thought. Agrarianism needs to be defended because it was under an agrarian economy that Christendom flourished, not because the Greeks (as Hanson suggests) flourished under an agrarian system. So, this is a good book, but not on a par with Andrew Lytle's Eden to Babylon, in which Lytle defends the agrarian idea from a Christian viewpoint.

*The poisoned food from China is part of the hell we are paying.

The Four Feathers

The Four Feathers
By A. E. W. Mason (Grosset & Dunlap: New York, 1901)

I would be hard pressed to come up with a major author who does not, in some aspect of his work, deal with a military theme. This is quite understandable. Human souls, when placed in the extremities of combat, are often more fully revealed than they are in less intense situations. And it is an author’s business to lay bare the soul of man.

But many books with a military theme and setting fail to give us any kind of spiritual revelation. They are often boring, documentary-style books, giving us mere facts about the military; or they are propaganda books designed to show us either an unrealistically horrible or an unrealistically glorious view of the military.

The Four Feathers fits none of these categories, and it contains the best depiction of the military experience outside of Shakespeare that I have ever read.

There are men who fight and fight courageously in this book who are nevertheless moral cowards. And there are men who fight reluctantly and with great fear and trepidation who rise to heroic heights. What A. E. W. Mason really has done, through his protagonist, Harry Feversham, is to show us the moral dimension of heroism. Without that moral dimension, heroism is mere guts, which is pagan, not Christian.

One might admire the pagan hero’s courage, but it is the Christian hero who gives us a glimpse of the living God. It is the difference between Robert E. Lee and G. Gordon Liddy. Or in film, it’s the big difference between the heroes depicted by Gary Cooper and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and the heroes depicted by Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwartzenegger. The former are Christian heroes, the latter are merely pagan ones.

I love Harry Feversham. He strikes a blow for every armchair warrior and poet who believes that the warrior bard will ultimately prevail against the foreign Turk and the brutish homegrown bore.

A work like Mason’s The Four Feathers could not be written today because our Western culture has been eradicated by the dialectic. Masculinity means only one thing now – aggressiveness, and it is permitted and admired only when it appears in the female. And femininity means only one thing now – passivity, and it is permitted only when it appears in the male.

In contrast to the modern, obscene, dialectic depiction of human beings, Mason paints a portrait of human beings with souls, working out their eternal destinies in a world that has not yet surrendered to the dialectic.

There is a passage of incredible poignancy in the book which I must quote. Feversham, in disguise, has gotten himself thrown into an Arab prison in order to rescue a fellow countryman. His countryman, Colonel Trench, is about to strike Feversham because he fears that he will be knocked to the floor and trampled if he doesn’t hold his own in the crowded prison.

“Back!” he cried violently, “back, or I strike!” and, as he wrestled to lift his arm above his head that he might strike the better, he heard the man who had been flung against him incoherently babbling English.

“Don’t fall,” cried Trench, and he caught his fellow-captive by the arm. “Ibrahim, help! God, if he were to fall!” and while the crowd swayed again and the shrill cries and curses rose again, deafening the ears, piercing the brain, Trench supported his
companion, and bending down his head caught again after so many months the accent of his own tongue. And the sound of it civilized him like the friendship of a woman.

Ah, how could a modern appreciate that passage? The modern does not believe that there are differences in cultures. How could the sound of a language associated with Christian things hearten and humanize a man? And stranger still to the modern – how could the friendship of a woman civilize a man? The modern knows only viragos and hard-eyed business women. “Surely, Mason must be from Mars.” No, not Mars, but Christian Europe, which to the modern is more remote than Mars.

Judge Priest

Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People (Grosset and Dunlap: New York, 1912)
and
Old Judge Priest (George H. Doran Co.: New York, 1916) by Irvin S. Cobb

The setting of these tales is Kentucky in the early 1900s. The Civil War is a living memory to many of the older inhabitants of the region and is still a significant event to the younger members of the communities. All the stories center around one Judge Priest, a portly judge in his mid-sixties, who fought with Forrest during the War for Southern Independence.

In his autobiography, Exit Laughing (1941), Cobb tells us of Judge Priest’s origins:

Now Judge Priest, who became a mainstay and a breadwinner for the Cobb family over a stretch of thirty years or longer, was a consolidated likeness, into which I diagrammed elementary parts of three separate persons. In him, as he ambled across a border southern terrain, was a trace of my father, but only mental attitudes here, not bodily aspects; and an occasional touch taken from my former fellow townsman and crony, Hal Corbett, who made a briefened appearance among these strolling memories chapter before last. But predominantly he was a reincarnation of the late Judge William S. Bishop and physically almost altogether was Judge Bishop—the high bald forehead, the pudgy shape, the little white paintbrush of a chin whisker, the strident high-pitched voice which, issuing from that globular tenement, made a grotesque contrast, as though a South American tapir had swallowed a tomtit alive and was letting the tomtit do the talking for him. The habits and the traits embodied in this triple-sided composite portrait mainly were his too: his exterior dovelike gentleness under which deceiving surface lurked a serpent’s shrewdness; his deftly concealed manipulations of local politics; his cultivated affectation of using a country jake vernacular when off the bench and his sudden switch to precise and stately English when on it; his high respect for the profession that he followed and for the office that he held so many years; his divine absent-mindedness; his utterly unreasonable fear of thunderstorms.

Touching on these two last-named peculiarities, tales were told. Once when company was present in his home a sudden forked flash in the murky heavens and a great thunderclap sent him fleeing to an umbrella closet under the front stairs where he fastened the door behind him and cowered among the galoshes. His wife pursued him there and through the keyhole she said: “Judge Bishop, I am ashamed of you—you a brave soldier of the war, to behave like a veritable coward before our guests. Don’t
you know, Judge Bishop,” –the good lady was very religious –“don’t you know that if the Lord wants to smite you dead, He will find you, no matter where you hide?”

“Maybe so, Madam, maybe so,” came back the muffled answer. “But by Gatlins, I’ll put Him to as much trouble as possible!”

In midsummer he went to a bar association meeting upstate. As he was leaving, Mrs. Bishop said: “Judge, I’ve packed six clean shirts for you and six clean collars so don’t you go mooning around, like you usually do, and forget to change every morning.” (In those days, before pajamas were ever dreamed of and nightshirts were regarded as being fussy, not to say effeminate, many a cultured Southern gentleman slept by night in the hard-bosomed back-buttoning linen which he had worn through the day.)

When he came home she was waiting for him at the depot with the family buggy.

“You look warm,” she said.

“Warm?” he echoed. “I’m parboiled. I’m cooking in my own gravy. I’m broken out with nettle rash like a baby. I think I’m fixing to die.”

“Why, the weather here has been very seasonable,” she said.

“It wasn’t too warm in Frankfort, either,” he said. “That’s the funny part of it. Seemed to me I got hotter and hotter all the time. Maybe I’m sickening for a stroke or something. Right now I’m sweating like a free nigger at election.”

“Right now? Why there’s a cool breeze blowing… Judge Bishop, bend over here and hold still!”

She undid a wilted collar and ran an exploratory finger down inside his neckband—down inside six neckbands, to be exact. Obeying orders, he had each morning put on a clean shirt. Only one detail he had inadvertently skipped. He forgot to take off the
shirt he’d slept in.

Although set in the 1900s, the best and noblest characters in the tales are the old Confederate veterans and the men and women who support the old ways. The good ‘darkies’ are the ones who also support the old South. (Cobb is a bit unrealistic on that subject, in contrast to Caroline Gordon’s None Shall Look Back and Stark Young’s So Red the Rose.) The villains are the mean-spirited souls of both races and the new breed of capitalist whites.

Not all the stories sing as sweetly as “A Beautiful Evening” and “When the Fighting Was Good,” but taken as a whole, the Judge Priest stories give us a pleasant glimpse of a place where community still existed, fragile and disappearing, but still living.

I recommend reading the stories; but even greater (much greater) than the stories is the movie loosely based on the story, “Words and Music.” The movie, called appropriately enough, Judge Priest, is directed by (who else) John Ford. Will Rogers, a contemporary and close friend of Irvin Cobb, plays Judge Priest. The movie is far and away the best movie ever made about the South and the Great Cause. I don’t see how it is possible for one to view the movie without forever being a die-hard Southern partisan.