Something of the Springtime by John King Spiezio

Passage Press's impressive first novel

Among /newwave/ authors, there’s been some discussion of fiction becoming a “conservatory form.” What this means is that fiction will become like classical music: readers will be outside of the mainstream, in a kind of harmless and educated way. Probably for anyone reading this review, this idea is easy to imagine. We see that for young people especially, the draw of playing, say, Call of Duty, which is visceral and palpable and, above all, social, is far stronger than the draw of sitting in contemplative silence. That reading is out-competed by other media is not a matter of TikTok having “rewired” our attention spans: a huge number of young people–even those labeled as having attention or processing disorders–can focus intensely on games for hours; it’s that the appeal of text is difficult to discern. Seventy years ago, someone interested in science fiction had no choice other than text; today, he has, yes, major streaming, film, and video game franchises, but also a landscape of finely differentiated social media channels in which users post short form text, images, audio files, videos, and so on riffing on hundreds of variations of science fiction: he flips between X, Reddit, Discord, and YouTube, where science fiction flourishes. If he finds reading hard or boring or if he doesn’t have the time or tranquility to do it, the market is happy to meet him where he is.

Still, there is reason to read long form prose, I think: there are virtues unique to text, like refined prose style or the high definition capture of interiority. In fact, these two elements are so important that I don’t understand why anyone reads authors who aren’t masters of them. What’s the point of reading the thin prose and shallow characters of downmarket commercial genre fiction when you can see and hear explosions on the streaming platforms? Even at the highest end, no author–not Joyce or Melville or Hopkins–can compete with, say, Dennis Villeneuve’s or Terrence Malick’s ability to render poetic passage of time; no author can compete with Nickolas Grace’s delivery of Anthony Blanche. Therefore, writers of long form prose fiction should focus on what text can do best: namely, (a.) euphonic, high definition prose and (b.) serious engagement with interiority, including spiritual interiority. But one rarely encounters this kind of ambition in mainstream literary fiction or within the alt-lit scene, which roughly means that there isn't a large demand for it.

There is, though, a nebulous alternative market for cultural products that, in the pursuit of mastery, achieve vision cleared of the neurotic left wing scrupulosity that has mutilated beyond recognition Anglo and American arts and culture. For the New Right, Passage Press is the premier institution beginning to meet this demand. Its first significant work of prose fiction is Something of the Springtime by

John King Spiezio

, and this work, I am glad to say, indeed is incomparably superior to what is on offer from traditional publishing for a number of reasons.

The first virtue is Spiezio’s prose style. The story takes place at the University of Oxford in the year 1888. James Dalthey, an American, is a visiting lecturer in Nordic languages. Socially, he is in communication with a number of aristocratic and academic personalities, who exchange written letters and notes. Spiezio’s ability to render these communications in formally perfect prose is one of the hallmarks of the text. For example, here is a note from an aristocratic friend.

Dear James,

I heard from Dominic of the loss of your mother. Please accept my sincerest condolences. Helen and I will be leaving first thing this morning to visit our son in Florence. I have included a slip in this envelope with our address in that city. Please do not hesitate to contact me there if you are in need of a sympathetic ear.

Your friend,

Thomas Trimblay (76)

The appeal of writing like this is elusive: one needs to know the Victorian linguistic context and what contemporary readers think of Victorian English. There is a pre-existing market within the Anglosphere–readers of Susanna Clarke, for instance–who will revel in Victorian nostalgia. For this readership, Spiezio could have hammed up the vocabulary, with items like “countenance” (as a noun), “endeavour,” “most dreadful,” “sentiment,” “gravity,” and so on: “pray forgive, dearest James, that I trespass upon your indulgence at this time of most dreadful gravity,” etc. Instead, Spiezio renders his Victorian aristocrat as serious, intelligent, and restrained in his communication; the language is confident, not cloying: it is a series of simple sentences without asides, without whimsical formality, without superlative modifiers, which make the past seem silly and bizarre.

At the same time, the narrative voice is complex and visual, sometimes rhythmic, sometimes euphonic. For instance, on page 21 his protagonist describes, in assonant prose, a house in Mayfair: “The steps, like the floor before them, were bare walnut; like the floor before them, they creaked.” Later, he describes a moment of hallucinatory beauty: “Emma walked on air. I turned to see her coming towards me at the pace of snow melting down a hillside…” (107). His eye lingers over architecture and furniture. Here’s one of probably 20 examples of beautiful descriptions of interior and exterior elements of the built environment of 1888.

On the wall to my left upon entering were two windows; a third was on the wall ahead of me. All three were treated with curtains of delicate white lace hanging from fluted rods of polished cherry. The space between them, and around the rest of the room, was papered with robin’s-egg blue and a repeated print of bursting white lilies in columns, floor to ceiling. Above and below were twin frames of white molding. In the center was a rosewood table of medium height whose long, slender stem and broad base, along with the white cloth covering its circular top, had the appearance of an overflowing fountain and garden (105-106).

This kind of precision of image is valuable. Partisans of the ubiquitous “spare” prose style will argue that this kind of description slows the pace. Still, high definition description brings the world of Oxford in 1888 into vivid relief–for the purposes of this story, yes, but also for the reader’s general understanding. As I read Spiezio’s descriptions of architecture and interiors, for instance, I thought often of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who died 1889, having graduated from Oxford 22 years earlier. He would have been in rooms just like these; he would have known people just like these; he would have had conversations just like these, and this kind of description provides important physical context for Oxford in the late 1880s, which is of interest generally.

Another of the book’s virtues is an assumption that readers are mature enough to encounter the questions underpinning Anglophone civilization. In one chapter, for instance, Dalthey helps a blind woman, whose eyes were “clouded over with cataracts,” to a holy well (142). She splashes herself with water, then prays in silence at a small church. He later notices that “her eyes were shining emeralds” (144). This is a miracle healing, the kind that has been recorded and witnessed countless times throughout history, the kind that has been documented over and over by medical professionals, yet still there is–and must be–controversy surrounding supernatural phenomena. In the face of the adolescent skepticism that animates so many literary personalities, Spiezio treats this miracle as almost unremarkable within the context of the other ideas and experiences that make up the Anglophone world. He treats ethnicity in similar fashion. In an early scene, an aristocrat speaks with James about his interest in Nordic sagas. In a moment of climax, the man asks if James is a Wagnerite. James laughs it off, but the man defends Wagner in the following terms.

“I believe that this is what is really missing in our age: a certain frankness and authenticity of feeling. There are too many formulas, too many assumed opinions, too many things that we do by rote. But these older stories, and Wagner’s magic that captures them, remind us of a…a more direct mode of experience” (25).

Knowing about some of the strictures of Victorian propriety, one can understand the appeal of this kind of “direct mode of experience.” The intellectual currents of the period were Darwininian (On the Origin of Species was published in 1859) and spiritualist (Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine was published in 1888), yet Spiezio avoids cartoonish treatment of these tendencies–e.g, Gussie Fink-Nottle or Roderick Spode, respectively–and delivers the Wagnerite claim in reasonable terms through the person of an intelligent aristocrat, which is to say: he understands the claim and is fair to it, even if he doesn’t approve of it. Later in the book, Dalthey’s romantic interest, Emma, dismisses romantic nationalism.

“One loves one’s country, one loves one’s people. But that, to me, seems like a matter of course. And so, to make something so intellectual out of it, it’s like trying to build a philosophy around pointing out that one has ten fingers and toes as if this simple fact were one of the best-guarded secrets of the universe” (122).

Here’s the reality: it might be true that there are authors of fiction today who understand the cases for and against questions of world historical importance, like romantic European nationalism; there might even be some who can personify these ideas without degrading them into cartoons. But to find these authors within the mainstream, the enterprising reader has to become a kind of storm chaser: the only vehicle driving, insanely, towards a tornado of trash and debris while all others flee the vicinity. Further, it’s important to note that this degree of rigor is rare not because our writers are dull, but because our audiences are dull. That Spiezio is able to write in this register is a testament to the vision and good taste of Passage Press and its readership: because Lomez has cultivated an audience receptive, for once, to serious ideas and aesthetics, significant authors, like Spiezio, are able to meet the demand. Other brilliant authors should take note: here is your opportunity to write for a sophisticated audience, the kind that can read and process bleeding edge literary concepts, the kind that isn’t scared beyond comprehension of widely held political or religious points of view, and so on.

All of that said, this book is not perfect. While his characters discuss ideas at length, the ideas mostly appear fully formed during the course of dialogue. For instance, here’s an exchange between Dalthey and Dominick, an Anglican chaplain.

“Well, if we talk about God and the world as identical, then God becomes beholden to the laws of nature. In a sense, God is less free than we are. We can do whatever we please, good or bad, sin or sanctity, but God must bring the spring and the rain and the winter thereafter. Do you see what I mean?’

“I believe so.’

“So in this way, well, God becomes little more than a sentimental label, and miracles become impossible. God can no longer ‘do’ anything, such as, say,” he picked up a stone and dropped it back on the ground, “this stone did not complete any conscious action. It did not make a choice. It simply followed the laws of universal gravitation. In the same way, we’re turning God into an absolute object, rather than the subject that He should be” (204).

This idea, like many others contained within the story, is profound. But, instead of through dialogue–literal telling–I’d like Speizio to have captured the experience of cognition as someone comes to this realization, not through linear, logical exposition, but through a blending of qualia and logos: what was the experience of the light of this realization like? What were its physical manifestations? What were its immaterial manifestations? Yes, platonic dialogue is a classical method of transmission of philosophical ideas, but at this point in history, two characters simply talking to one another is best expressed through a kind of animated educational video format–Khan Academy, for instance–on YouTube. The highest and best use of fiction, I think, is the high definition capture of subjectivity, especially subjectivity as it approaches fixed concepts like God or love or nature. Throughout the book, there is, as mentioned, a lot of (beautiful) description of exteriority and a lot of (rigorous) exposition and dialectic through dialogue, but not enough capture of interiority and consciousness, of the processes by which the material and the immaterial converge.

Still, this book has so many strengths that this final critique becomes almost insignificant. That Passage Publishing–dogged as it is by the forces of authoritarian reaction–has produced a work of this quality on its first effort in contemporary fiction is cause for celebration. For those wondering where conservative cultural products are, here’s the author; here’s the publisher; here’s the movement. For any of them to survive, you need to buy the book.