"I read Lord Hornblower during 24 hours. I have only one complaint to make about it; it is too short. This is the fault which … belongs in my opinion to all your writings on this inspiring topic." - Winston Churchill, in a letter to C.S. Forester

This blog, which was originally intended to be about writing and an author's life, has really just been turned into a convenient place for me to post whatever gives me a chuckle with my morning tea. So rather than castigate myself for laziness, I'll just say that the Bohemian Word Werks has taken on an organic quality and becomes the ultimate example of literary deconstruction in that it tore away layers of convention to the point where it deconstructed itself into a reason to talk about Lara Croft's jugglies.

To get myself back on the straight and narrow I'll make an effort to offer something that might be useful to hopeful writers out there (and keep in mind the old Robert Louis Stevenson saw: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive") -- a look at one of my favorite writers, C.S. Forester (1899-1966), and what I've learned from his books.

Forester wrote many novels, among them The African Queen (1935), The General (1936) Death to the French, The Gun, Payment Deferred and Plain Murder. The African Queen got turned into Bogie's second best movie, in my opinion (but if you read it, don't expect an ending like the movie), and there are few finer examples of history on film than Sink the Bismark, which Forester wrote for the screen using research for his book Hunting the Bismark (1959). During his first stint in Hollywood (which ended badly for everyone but Hornblower fans, for it was on the cruise home that he explored the Gulf of Fonseca and began to think about a Royal Navy Captain far from contact with command) he worked under a man named Arthur Hornblow and in association with Niven Busch. Of course to naval historical fiction fans, Hornblower and Bush are as familiar as Holmes and Watson are to mystery readers. That cruise engendered The Happy Return (1937) an ironic title changed for the US market to Beat To Quarters, the first Hornblower novel written but the fifth when arranged, as they usually are, in chronological order according to the character's life.

He's best known for Horatio Hornblower (a ficticious character born July 4, 1776), an officer in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars who eventually rises to the rank of Admiral of the Fleet. Hornblower ended up being the subject of ten completed novels, some short stories, and one unfinished work (Horblower During the Crisis), plus the Hornblower Companion, of course.

Forester left an account of himself as an author in Companion, last updated two years before his death. The first half of the book is full of maps of Hornblower's travels and actions, and the second is a dissertation on how Forester put together a novel and some thoughts on his love/hate relationship with Hornblower.

FORESTER ON WRITING

Forester described himself as a jellyfish drifting through life, devouring facts at random which slowly grow into ideas:

The casual phrase dropped by a friend in conversation, the paragraph in a book, the incident observed by the roadside, has some special quality, and is accorded a special welcome. But, having been welcomed, it is forgotten, or at least ignored. It sinks into the horrid depths of my subconscious like a waterlogged timber into the slime at the bottom of a harbor, where it lies alongside others which have preceded it. Then, periodically -- but by no means systematically -- it is hauled up for examination along with its fellows, and , sooner or later, some timber is found with barnacles growing on it. Some morning when I am shaving, some evening when I am wondering whether my dinner calls for white wine or red, the original idea reappears in my mind, and it has grown. Nearly always it has something to with what eventually will be the mid-point of a novel or a short story, and sometimes the growth is towards the end and sometimes towards the beginning. The casualty rate is high -- some timbers grow no barnacles at all -- but enough of them have progressed to keep me actively employed for more than forty years."
-The Hornblower Companion

Forester claimed to be lazy by nature, and once he settled on an idea for a novel the only way to ensure it would be completed was to tell his publisher and arrange for a turn-in date. Writing a novel took him four months or so of steady daily work in one dose of a few hours (longhand, he disliked typewriters and found changes easier to make with pad and pen) that left him so exhausted that "there is no pleasure left in life; I am drained and empty, and the rest of my day is lived by a different creature, mindless and spineless, who is creeping back to a resemblance to humanity only as the evening draws to a close."

He worked from a detailed mental outline, began on page one and went through to the close, finished sick of the work -- "Can a finished book ever be as good as the book the writer dreamed of before he stared writing it? I cannot believe that to be possible, for obvious reasons; certainly it has never happened to me. Luckily numbness and weariness take the edge off the disappointment" and had a horror of reading his galley proofs.

He wrote his scenes as if he were a ghost observing a stage play, moving through three dimensions (and a fourth special one that involved understanding the characters' motivations) and deciding how best to depict the action.

He understood his markets. One of the reasons Hornblower was in the Baltic in 1812 (other than Napoleon's invasion of Russia) was so Hornblower wouldn't have to shoot cannon balls at Americans if he'd been in his more usual haunts of the Atlantic or the Caribbean.

As to the perks of being a writer, Forester doesn't write much about praise or money, both of which he had in abundance (by an author's standards at the time), only that when traveling once it became known that he wrote Hornblower he was always waved through HM Customs Office with all possible speed.

CSF & Me

Forester has influenced me in a number of ways I'm conscious of, and God only knows how many others seeping up through my subconscious, like Forester's barnacled wreckage.

The Man Alone
Forester frequently cites Hamlet as the finest example of a story involving a man, alone. He goes on to say that even though the arc-light of Hamlet has been invented, well, people still find use for candles, and Horblower is his.

Of course he doesn't mean Jeramiah Johnson alone, he's referring to an intellectual and emotional state of someone responsible for keeping the men in his ship alive and healthy as he tries to carry out orders without being able to report to higher command as new situations develop, but rather rely on his own decision-making and resources.

In the first Hornblower novel, The Happy Return/Beat To Quarters Hornblower is dispatched in a small frigate to the Pacific coast of Central America -- he's to travel there secretly, without calling on any ports and avoiding other ships, and once there is to help a local Don start a revolt against Spain, which when he left is at war with Britain. The Don turns out to be a murderous madman but Hornblower, unable to contact the Admiralty in any manner that wouldn't take months at least, offers him arms and ammunition anyway, and captures a much larger Spanish warship sent to suppress the revolt, which the mad Don ("El Supremo" he calls himself, and wants a salute of 24 guns fired whenever he appears -- King George himself only gets 21) has more-or-less started without Hornblower. Hornblower hands over the cargo of muskets he has brought, the revolt gets going, and while passing near Panama learns that some months ago England and Spain signed a peace treaty. A captive of the Spaniards, the Duke of Wellington's sister, Lady Barbara, is released to Hornblower for conveyance home, as there is yellow fever in Panama and she may die waiting for transport. Hornblower, in effect, was hoist by his own attention to duty in avoiding other ships and ports where he might have heard about the peace. With the Natividad in El Supremo's hands, the Spanish have no other warships in the area (Trafalgar, fought a couple years before, pretty much destroyed it) so Hornblower must face the captured Spanish ship again, and keep Wellington's sister out of the way of cannon balls.

In my Vampire Earth books, thanks to the low level of post-apocalyptic technology, Valentine has many of these same difficulties. He can't keep in touch with his superiors. He's on a simple courier mission to the Great Lakes, but he gets curious about Kurian operation and one of his men is seriously wounded. What is his responsibility to his man vs. a couple of satchels full of messages? How about to a family who helps him? By introducing a larger concern, like a Grog revolt, into an intelligence-gathering mission I force Valentine to make a choice since he can't just report the situation and wait for orders, and his choices can't always turn out well.

One character, many situations
Forester is a fine example of how to keep a series interesting. From early on we know Hornblower's character: he's intelligent and resourceful, skilled at handling his men, and does his duty to the best of his formidable ability. On land, for most of the series, he's shabby, ill-at-ease in social situations but well-mannered, temperate to the point of abstentiousness, and aware of his low social status -- he's the son of a country doctor who managed to give him a decent education but little in the way of wealth or influence at court or parliament. Luckily, the Royal Navy is egalitarian (for the times) and the distinction "between the officers who worked a ship and the gentlemen who commanded it" is almost gone, allowing Hornblower to rise to the peak of his profession.

By the first few chapters of the Hornblower books we know Hornblower the man, he's the same as always. Like Sherlock Holmes, we want -- hunger even -- for more situations to see this character we love apply his skills. How does he handle a court martial? A long series of storms when his ship is low on food and water? How does he react to a visit from the Tsar of All Russias to his flagship? Can he outwit a poker-faced Turkish potentate long enough to recover the treasure from a sunken British supply ship?

The only way Hornblower changes is through his promotions, gradually acquiring more power, influence, and responsibility in the Royal Navy. When once he just had to get his jolly-boat under the rudder of a French merchantman in a cutting-out expedition, later he has to maneuver a whole squadron to slow Napoleon's advance into Russia.

Readers of Vampire Earth know I'm applying much the same formula in those stories. Valentine's duty will continue to bump up against his desire to do right by those who've helped him and humanity at large, and he'll continue to find it easier to bend duty than to abandon folks in need of his assistance.

Third person limited point of view
Once in the story, we never leave Hornblower's point of view (unless it's for another 3rd person limited point of view, as in Lieutenant Hornblower, a series fan favorite. One of these days I'll get around to doing a Vampire Earth book from Ahn-Kha's, but the right situation has to develop). Strict 3rd Person Limited has a number of advantages: the audience is pretty much bludgeoned into identifying with your character, since like Henry Ford, you've given them any color they want, as long as it's black, and as they learn about the situation at the same time as your character. Confined together, it's hard not for the two (your reader and the character) to grow close. It's also suited to heroic fiction, since Hornblower's exploits would sound like bragging told in first person (imagine, say, a Conan story told first person -- I cut a swath through the ring of enemies, leaving bodies in my wake fallen like cut wheat...I mean really!) and read like a historical narrative if we jumped between Hornblower, his commander, a gunner, a French Captain, and so on to cover various points of view with an equal amount at stake in the exploits of his ship and its enemies.

A faceless enemy
The conventions of Hollywood make it tough on writers. There's a good guy, a bad guy, and we generally know what each is doing until they duke it out in front of the western saloon or in a volcano or atop a flying Harrier jet or what have you. But it's rarely so clear-cut in the real world, especially for soldiers. Patton and Rommel never faced each other across a battlefield (much less jousted with tanks, as would have been Patton's preference for deciding the war) and Hornblower never comes face-to-face with Napoleon, or many of the commanders of the ships firing cannon-balls at each other.

Forester dodges that issue in an enormously satisfying manner by making the real struggles in his stories one of Horblower coming up with and carrying out stratagems that put his ship at the right place at the right time, or forging his officers, men, and material into the most effective instrument possible so they'll be ready to keep the guns firing accurately even when there's shot coming in the sides, or carrying out his superiors' verging-on-deranged expectations (I'm reminded of Telly Savalas's immortal line in Kelly's Heroes, shouted to a captured German colonel: "Look! We're not worried about the German army, we've got enough troubles of our own. To the right General Patton, to the left the British Army, to the rear our own goddamn artillery, and besides all that it's raining. And the only good thing to say about the weather: it keeps our air corps from blowing us all to Hell because its too lousy to fly, versteh?"). He's continually working to put his force in a situation where it will most likely win -- as in his brilliantly executed coup that takes the town of Le Havre in Lord Hornblower, or avoid a confrontation that it must lose (like the chase between tiny Hotspur and the French Frigate Loire off of Brest). Though sometimes a commander must accept a hopeless battle, as at the end of Ship of the Line where Hornblower throws his ship in the path of four French vessels to prevent their escape to the open seas.

I've chosen to follow in Forester's path by pitting Valentine against a "faceless" system rather than an individual like the Emperor in Star Wars or the shark in Jaws (and looking at my royalty statements, I've clearly made the wrong choice), because to me the worst evils of the world almost never manifest themselves in a single satanic figure, even Nazism was systematized to the point where I wonder if Hitler's death would have ended it (Hitler himself recognized this danger but left no clear successor until his suicide, but by then it didn't matter) before the war was obviously lost. I sometimes personify the Kurian Order in a character he meets like the General or Consul Solon, other times its nothing more than a reaper prowling the woods . Like a hydra, it seems like every time he chops off one head, by the next encounter two have grown in its place.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T
John Wayne used to say, when filming The Alamo "I want to make everyone look good." Santa Anna's army, the Texicans, blacks, the soldiers and the women who loved them -- a tip he got from John Ford, who took care to make his Apache and Commanche anything but wild, dipsomaniacal redskins. Forester does the same. While Hornblower serves under his share of fools, poltroons, and even a madman, he's rarely matched against them, except for the evil El Supremo. The next closest thing to an evil character is Napoleon's agent in Flying Colors, sent to Spain to bring Hornblower and Bush to Paris for trial and execution as pirates, but even he sees to it that Bush's wounds are attended to. After the smoke clears, the French and Spanish are professional, honorable, and gracious. Hornblower spends two years as a midshipman as a prisoner in Ferrol, and the Spanish officers do everything they can, up to and including raiding their personal libraries, to make his stay comfortable. He's even allowed to walk around town for some hours each day, after giving his word not to escape (another appeal of the Horblower books is honor, and the lengths the gentlemen go to not to impeach their own or that of other gentlemen).

I'm a little harder on the Quislings (still the dirtiest and most despicable of words to those of us of Norwegian heritage) in Vampire Earth, but when I find an opportunity for Valentine to meet decency in the Kurian Zone, I take it.

Getting to the action
War is long hours of boredom punctuated with brief moments of terror, so the saying goes, and I'm sure service in the Royal Navy, trapped aboard a ship for months at a time, the saw was doubly true. Forester always gives us a taste of plodding shipboard routine here and there, but its never more than a few paragraphs worth, for he's kind to his readers and relocates if there's nothing interesting going on and leaves out the sailing, holystoning, and daily servings of navy grog (water and rum, the high point of the ordinary seaman's day, served from a barrel that read "The King, God Bless Him") in the interest of story.

It's a lesson I'm still teaching myself.

Surfeit
One of the most delightfully real pieces of characterization about Hornblower is his moodiness. He's only rarely happy with his station and life. Life as a midshipman is hell and he dreams of being a lieutenant, but that comes with a new set of hells. He lives in poverty for much of his life, but once he has wealth it doesn't bring happiness, just a form of ease -- which he hates more than the economies of poverty, which at least engaged his intellect. He finds the adulation of crowds and the praise of vacuous politicians distasteful, the only respect he wants is that of the men who serve under him, and he'd rather they kept quiet about that.

Even when he gets the woman of his dreams, Lady Barbara (after maybe a tad-too-convenient death of his first wife in childbed), there's something a little wistful about it, as he remembers the devoted passion of Marie, the French widow who became his lover at the Count d'Gracy's on the banks of the Loire. When he's with Marie, of course, he was wondering about Lady Barbara and his wife. Marie sees through him:

"Good morning, " said Marie. She bent her head over her needlework--the sunshine through the windows lit her hair gloriously--and spoke with her face concealed. "We only have to say 'good morning' today, and tomorrow we shall say 'good-bye.'"
"Yes," said Hornblower, stupidly.
"If you loved me," said Marie, "it would be terrible for me to have you go, and to know that for years we should not meet again--perhaps for ever. But as you do not, then I am glad that you are going back to your wife and your child, and your ships, and your fighting. That is what you want, and I am pleased that you should have it all."
"Thank you," said Hornblower.
Still she did not look up.
"You are the sort of man," she went on "whom women love very easily. I do not expect that I shall be the last. I don't think that you will every love anybody, or know what it is to do so."
Hornblower could have said nothing in English in reply to these two astonishing statements, and in French he was perfectly helpless. He could only stammer.

He's self-aware enough to realize this failing, sometimes he wishes he were an ordinary seaman with orders to follow instead of a captain, but at the same time realizes how horrified he'd be if that came about.

I'm no Forester. Valentine is driven by a deeply held guilt that he should be alive, when so many others, some that he should have protected, have died. And the horrors he's experienced have awakened something awful in him, and when it gets out it's appalling. But like Hornblower, Valentine can only rarely be happy, even when he's given what he thinks he wants.

Authenticity without lecturing
Forester knew his seamanship well enough, he had a deep enthusiasm for it, was a recreational sailor while health allowed, but he never devotes page after page to showing his expertise. It is enough that we know what a reef is, the limitations of naval artillery at that period, or that the lead line is a device to measure depth, but he doesn't explain all the different knots and so on that tell the leadsman how deep the sea beneath the keel is. There's a scene where Hornblower helps Bush with his navigation equations, but Forester spares us the math, thankfully, because knowing how to shoot the sun and what to do with the readings (though he gives us a phrase or two as a taste) isn't as important as knowing Hornblower's patience with a fellow officer who isn't his intellectual equal, seeing the friendship grow between the two. This is where I think Forester trumps Patrick O'Brian, the seamanship is muchly in the background, a rich canvas on which the action takes place.

Balance of the romantic and the real
Ultimately, the Hornblower novels are romances in the ninteenth century sense of being stories designed to entertain with events and action the reader can't experience for himself (I suppose I must add a "fortunately" lest I get mail). Sailors board other ships with pistols firing and cutlasses waving, marines carry their flags as they storm their way up fortifications, roundshot howls overhead.

Forester was a doctor by training and a First World War infantryman who knew the awful effects left in the wake of those sorts of heroics, and he neither hides nor wallows in it. I think that's part of his appeal to me, on the one hand there's the good-God-I-can't-imagine-the-courage-that-took part of battle, on the other there's the appreciation of an inspired plan carried out by well-trained-and-led men, and on the other (whoops, that makes three hands) there's the horror at what they used to call "the butcher's bill."

It might be compared to pornography, which can be fun at times, but the real skill and interest is in all that takes place before and after the battle (or sex). There are books, good and bad, that are virtually nothing but battles, just as there are books, good and bad, that are nothing but sex. Forester's battles are superb, but they're not the reason for the book, and they're never the piece of water-logged wood, crusted with barnacles, that drifted up in his mind and inspired his work. Take your average Hornblower book, say Lieutenant Hornblower. My paperback is a hair over three hundred pages in length, small but not the smallest font I've ever seen in a mass market. Out of that, I would say guns are only firing for about ten percent of the novel. The rest is, in the thoughts of Lieutenant Bush:

Bush had learned something during the past few weeks which his service during the years had not called to his attention. Those years that had been passed at sea, among the wind and weather, deep water and shoal. In the ships of the line in which he had served there had only been minutes of battle for every week at sea, and he had gradually become fixed in the idea that seamanship was the one requisite for a naval officer. To be master of the countless details of managing a wooden sailing ship; not only to be able to handle her under sail, but to be conversant with all the petty but important trifles regarding cordage and cables, pumps and salt pork, dry rot and the Articles of War, that was what was necessary. But he knew now of other qualities equally necessary; a bold and yet thoughtful initiative, moral as well as physical courage, tactful handling of both superiors and subordinates, ingenuity and quickness of thought. A fighting navy needed fighting men to lead it.

That's the magic of a Hornblower novel, the bold plans, the moral and physical courage, the skilled handling of superiors and subordinates, the ingenuity always on display and of course the endlessly fascinating depiction of Horatio Hornblower.

C.S. Forester is the arc-light of historical series fiction, and I can't hope to equal him in anything but word count. But I pray readers will continue to take out my candles now and then.