Orwell’s failure

I’ve almost finished reading George Orwell biographer DJ Taylor’s new guide to Orwell’s work, Who is Big Brother? It’s been an excellent short read so far, capably tracking the changes in Orwell’s life, views, and writings and insightfully linking them to each other as well as judging the man’s character fairly but not uncritically.

Of special interest to me, considering the way Orwell’s dystopian novel is so often compared to Aldous Huxley’s, was a line Taylor quotes from Orwell’s review of Brave New World. Faulting Huxley for his overemphasis on shameless hedonism in the society of Brave New World, Orwell asserted that “A ruling class has got to have a strict morality, a quasi-religious belief in itself, a mystique.”

This comment made sense of an aspect of Nineteen Eighty-Four that I’ve puzzled over since first reading it in college twenty-something years ago. Reading CS Lewis’s 1954 review of that novel a few years later focused and sharpened that puzzlement. Here’s Lewis on what he regards as the biggest flaw in Orwell’s dystopia:

In the nightmare State of 1984 the rulers devote a great deal of time—which means that the author and readers also have to devote a great deal of time—to a curious kind of anti-sexual propaganda. Indeed the amours of the hero and heroine seem to be at least as much a gesture of protest against that propaganda as a natural outcome of affection or appetite.

Now it is, no doubt, possible that the masters of a totalitarian State might have a bee in their bonnets about sex as about anything else; and, if so, that bee, like all their bees, would sting. But we are shown nothing in the particular tyranny Orwell has depicted which would make this particular bee at all probable. Certain outlooks and attitudes which at times introduced this bee into the Nazi bonnet are not shown at work here.* Worse still, its buzzing presence in the book raises questions in all our minds which have really no very close connection with the main theme and are all the more distracting for being, in themselves, of interest.

Lewis, in a rare moment of Bulverism for him, chalks this up to Orwell’s coming of age in the “anti-puritanism” of the DH Lawrence era. Maybe. But Lewis is right that the sexual repression of Big Brother’s state does not mesh organically with everything else—the state-mandated calisthenics, the brainwashed children, the mass surveillance, and most especially the manipulation of language.** Why would Big Brother care who’s doing it to whom and in what way as long as neither party engages in wrongthink?***

He wouldn’t. What Orwell failed to see is that the “strict morality” required of a tyrannical ruling clique need not be sexually traditionalist. It could indeed be the opposite, granting total sexual license but fastidiously and ruthlessly policing the terminology surrounding it, or by concentrating on some other occasion of sin—the accused’s carbon footprint, perhaps, or how much privilege they have, or what kind of ancestral sins they owe amends for. “[T]hough Brave New World was a brilliant caricature of the present (the present of 1930),” Orwell wrote, “it probably casts no light on the future.” On the contrary, George.

But to return to the point of comparison between Huxley and Orwell, a tyranny is, in fact, often better served by an out-of-control libido, which more than just about any other appetite has the power to distract and enervate. This is what Huxley saw that Orwell could or would not.

I should have more to say about Who is Big Brother? in my spring reading list later this month. In the meantime, check out Theodore Dalrymple’s review at Law & Liberty, which is what convinced me to read the book.

* “At times” is the right way to address this. The Nazis were not much concerned about sexual morality beyond guarding racial boundaries. Look into the private lives of Ernst Röhm, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, and especially Joseph Goebbels sometime.

** The Soviet-style manipulation of language is, I think, the real point of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but a point easily lost among the book’s other terrifying visions. Cf. Fahrenheit 451, which Bradbury intended as a critique of TV rather than censorship.

*** Combining licentious sexual behavior with mass surveillance is also a useful source for kompromat, something the Soviets knew and that Orwell surely must have as well.

CS Lewis, 60 and 125 years later

Last week I was too busy critiquing Napoleon to note the 60th anniversary of the death of CS Lewis here—one more thing to hold against Napoleon—though I did manage to slip through an Instagram memorial. Fortunately, today is Lewis’s 125th birthday, so in the spirit of commemoration and appreciation here are a few good things I read from others to mark sixty years since his passing.

CS Lewis (1898-1963)

At her Substack Further Up, Bethel McGrew has an excellent reflection on her own lifelong connection to Lewis and the way the endless quoting of his work risks simplifying him into a generator of therapeutic fortune cookie messages:

Lewis is much-quoted, for good reason: He is prolifically quotable. (There are also a few famously misattributed quotes, like “You are a soul, you have a body,” which no doubt would have annoyed him greatly.) And yet, there’s a paradoxical sense in which his quotability almost risks watering down his true value as a thinker. There’s a temptation to see Lewis as a one-stop “Christian answer man,” the super-Christian who always had the perfect eloquent solution to every Christian’s hard problems. To be sure, he came closer than most Christian writers to providing a sense-making framework for hard problems. But even he wouldn’t claim to have “solved” them. Indeed, his very strength as a writer was that his work swung free of top-down systematic theologies which claim to provide comprehensively satisfying theological answers.

She continues with a particularly poignant example from A Grief Observed. I recommend the whole post.

At Miller’s Book Review, another outstanding Substack, Joel Miller considers Lewis’s humor in the years just before his death, when failing health should have robbed him of his joy:

Sayer says that Lewis “never lost his sense of humor.” Indeed, he was famously good natured, even amid dire circumstances. On July 15, 1963, he suffered a heart attack and slipped into a coma. Friends feared the worst; some came and prayed; a priest gave the sacrament of extreme unction. Amazingly, an hour after the sacrament, Lewis awoke, revived, and asked for a cup of tea.

True to form, he found a joke in it. “I was unexpectedly revived from a long coma,” he wrote Sister Penelope, an Anglican nun with whom he frequently corresponded. “Ought one honor Lazarus rather than Stephen as the protomartyr? To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard.”

Miller also reflects on his own experience of reading and rereading Lewis. Like Miller, I came to Narnia late, well after many of Lewis’s other books, and I have also read and reread Lewis’s work many times. As Miller notes, though Lewis did not expect his work to be remembered, it’s a safe bet that readers like him and myself will continue to find and appreciate Lewis’s work.

At World magazine, Samuel D James has a good short essay on Lewis as a prophet:

Precisely because Lewis knew that the claims of Christianity were all-encompassing, he recognized that no civilization that abandoned it could function. This was not because Lewis desired some kind of baptized Anglo-Saxon ethnonationalist state (born in Belfast, Lewis never forgot the high cost of religious intolerance), but because modern man’s alternatives were quite literally inhumane. Lewis saw from afar, with striking prescience, that humans had no choice but to retreat from personhood if they wanted to escape the implications of Christian revelation.

At The Critic, Rhys Laverty elaborates more deeply on the same theme:

At the close of the Second World War, Lewis was one of a number of Christian intellectuals (alongside Jacques Maritain, Simone Weil, W.H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot) who had begun to consider what world the Allied powers would now make for themselves. Lewis saw a future in which the rejection of transcendent values would allow a technologised elite to re-make nature as they saw fit, ultimately overthrowing human nature itself — a process made possible through the ideological capture of education.

Laverty invokes not only The Abolition of Man, as James does, but Lewis’s dramatization of those ideas in the final novel of The Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, in which the elite of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE) pursue genuinely diabolical technological progress and control:

With N.I.C.E, Lewis anticipated our contemporary technocracy. “Progress” is our unquestionable sacred cow, and its faithful handmaiden is technology. Whether we are tearing up areas of ancient natural beauty in order to build infrastructure supposedly intended to help protect the environment, prescribing new cross-sex hormones and surgery to enable greater self-realisation, or developing artificial wombs which we unconvincingly insist will only ever be used for the care of premature infants, there is now no technological innovation that we will deny ourselves today if it supposedly contributes to the nebulous “future good of humanity”.

It is only Green Book education which makes N.I.C.E possible. If truth, goodness, beauty, and so on are merely relative then there is nothing to rein in man’s “conquest of nature”. His scruples are mere hang-ups to be educated out. He will be driven by pure reason or pure appetite, with no sentiment to regulate their respective metrics of efficiency or pleasure. 

I commend all four of these essays to y’all. They’re good celebrations of a worthy life and a worthy mind, and have gotten me wanting to reread pretty much all of my Lewis shelf. Which might take a while.

Let me conclude with a brief personal reflection of my own. Growing up in the environment I did, I don’t remember ever not knowing about Lewis. He was a byword for intelligent Christian thought, something that stood out to me among the generally anti-intellectual atmosphere of fundamentalism. My earliest accidental exposure was probably the BBC Narnia films. I recall catching a long stretch of The Silver Chair on PBS at my grandparents’ house one morning. As dated as those adaptations are now, it scared me. But it also riveted me, and stayed with me. Indeed, The Silver Chair may still be my favorite of the Narnia books.

But it was a long time before I actually read anything by CS Lewis. My parents got me a set of his non-fiction books at our church bookstore when I was in high school. I started The Great Divorce one night and something about the Grey Town and the bus ride into the unknown disturbed me so much that I put it away. That nightmare quality again. But when I tried the book one sleepy Sunday afternoon in college—my way prepared by Dante, whom I discovered my senior year of high school—I read the entire thing in one sitting. It’s still among my favorite Lewis books.

From there it was on to The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity and The Four Loves. I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and liked it but returned to the non-fiction, devouring Lewis’s essays on any topic. After college I read The Space Trilogy—all three in one week, if I remember correctly—and delved into his scholarly work: An Experiment in Criticism and, crucially, The Discarded Image. I also read as much about Lewis as I read by him, and dug into the works that Lewis loved only to discover new loves of my own, most notably GK Chesterton.

Only with the birth of my children did I seriously return to Narnia, and now I genuinely love them. My kids do, too. They’ll be yet another generation entertained and blessed by Lewis’s work.

He is one of the few authors who has grown with me for so long—guiding me, enlightening me, introducing me to great literature, telling me entertaining and meaningful stories of his own, and deepening both my understanding and my faith. Where the fictional Lewis of The Great Divorce meets George MacDonald as his heavenly guide, the Virgil to his Dante, Lewis could well play that role for me.

On this, his 125th birthday, just over a week from the 60th anniversary of his death, I am more grateful than ever for CS Lewis. RIP.

The fog of war is no excuse

Speaking of John Keegan, here’s a passage from the chapter on Waterloo from The Face of Battle that I’d like to enlarge upon. Regarding the way the Battle of Waterloo is traditionally described as unfolding—in five “phases” of engagement—Keegan writes:

It is probably otiose to point out that the ‘five phases’ of the battle were not perceived at the time by any of the combatants, not even, despite their points of vantage and powers of direct intervention in events, by Wellington and Napoleon. The ‘five phases’ are, of course, a narrative convenience.

A narrative convenience, he might have added, laboriously gathered and constructed after the fact and over many years. He goes on to describe “how very partial indeed was the view of most of” the participants, beginning with distraction and proceeding to visibility:

There were other causes, besides the preoccupation of duty, which deprived men of a coherent or extended view of what was going on around them. Many regiments spent much of their time lying down, usually on the reverse slope of the position, which itself obscured sight of the action elsewhere. . . . A few feet of elevation, therefore, made the difference between a bird’s-eye and a worm’s-eye view . . . But even on the crest of a position, physical obstacles could limit the soldier’s horizon very sharply. In many places, at least at the beginning of the battle, the crops of wheat and rye stood tall enough for the enemy to approach to within close musket shot undetected. . . . [T]he men in the rear or interior of dense columnar formations, of the type adopted by the Guard in their advance, would have glimpsed little of the battle but hats, necks and backs, and those at a distance of a few inches, even when their comrades at the front were exchanging fire with the enemy. And almost everyone, however well-positioned otherwise for a view, would for shorter or longer periods have been lapped or enveloped by dense clouds of gunpowder smoke.

And those are just problems affecting vision. The other senses have equally severe limitations and are just as susceptible to illusion. Look up acoustic shadow sometime. Keegan: “To have asked a survivor . . . what he remembered of the battle, therefore, would probably not have been to learn very much.”

Now compound these limitations and frequent misperceptions and misunderstands by passing them through reporters. But at least reporters are impartial, right?

Visit the New York Times complete online digital archive—or the archive of any old newspaper—and look up a the earliest possible reporting on a conflict you know a lot about. You’ll be amazed at how much is simply wrong. And that’s not even allowing for spin, for bias, for lies, for manifold other motivated errors.

What we know about battles and wars and other conflicts we know because of that laborious process I mentioned above, of gathering, compiling, organizing, and collating sources and information, and then study and study and more study, not to mention walking the ground. There are things happening now that we will never—none of us in our own lifetimes—have the perspective, much less the information, to understand completely. Even then, there will still be unanswered questions, or questions answered after years, even centuries of uncertainty.

“Assume that everything you hear or read about a current conflict is wrong, incomplete, made up, or the precise opposite of the truth.”

So my rule of thumb: Assume that everything you hear or read about a current conflict is wrong, incomplete, made up, or the precise opposite of the truth. And wait. And don’t get emotionally invested in what’s happening, especially if your sense of moral worth depends upon viewing yourself as on The Right Side and raging against a barbarous enemy.

War is tragic, and people will suffer. That’s guaranteed. But there is no reason to compound those facts with ignorant and impotent rage.

If you slow down, you won’t beclown yourself the way certain institutions have in the previous week. Many of these have now, suddenly, discovered the concept of “fog of war,” which has been dusted off to provide a sage reminder to readers instead of a mea culpa. Look here and here for samples, and here for well-earned mockery.

Per Alan Jacobs, who wrote excellently and succinctly on this topic over the weekend:

The more unstable a situation is, the more rapidly it changes, the less valuable minute-by-minute reporting is. I don’t know what happened to the hospital in Gaza, but if I wait until the next issue of the Economist shows up I will be better informed about it than people who have been rage-refreshing their browser windows for the past several days, and I will have suffered considerably less emotional stress. . . .

“We have a responsibility to be informed!” people shout. Well, maybe . . . But let me waive the point, and say: If you’re reading the news several times a day, you’re not being informed, you’re being stimulated.

To the New York Times’s credit, it has offered an editorial apology, but, as Jeff Winger once put it, “Be sorry about this stuff before you do it, and then don’t do it!”

I’ll end with a reflection from CS Lewis, in a passage from his World War II radio talks eventually incorporated into Mere Christianity, a passage that was going the rounds late last week:

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything . . . as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

Let the reader understand.

We already have something approaching Screwtape’s universe of pure noise. Can we still turn back from a universe of pure hatred?

Making faces at the world

One of the books that most shaped me when I was figuring out how and why I studied history was The Face of Battle, by John Keegan. I read it in grad school at Clemson and ended up writing my own master’s thesis as a similar series of experience-focused case studies. This week I revisited it via the audiobook, which I listened to on my commute. It was great to go back to it after fifteen years of further study and growth, to see familiar passages afresh and to rediscover many, many details I had simply forgotten.

Like this, from Keegan’s chapter on Waterloo:

What else are we to make of the experience of the 40th Regiment? They had arrived at Waterloo dead tired after a march of fifty-one miles in forty-eight hours; three weeks before that they had disembarked from America, having been six weeks at sea. During the day of Waterloo, they lost nearly two hundred soldiers dead and wounded out of seven hundred, and fourteen out of thirty-nine officers. ‘The men in their tired state,’ Sergeant Lawrence wrote, began to despair during the afternoon, ‘but the officer cheered them on continuously.’ When the French cavalry encircled them ‘with fierce gesticulation and angry scowls, in which a display of incisors became very apparent’ the officers would call out, “Now men, make faces!’

“Make faces!” is precisely the kind of real-world absurdity in the face of death that can’t be invented. Not without effort, anyway. In all of my war fiction I’ve tried to include surprising or absurd notes—but only because I’ve read of so many like this.

Oddly—but in the free-association spirit of this blog—that moment from Waterloo brought to mind a favorite passage from CS Lewis. In a letter to his friend and fellow Inkling Owen Barfield, Lewis contrasted a certain materialist vision of the world with what living in it is actually like:

“Say what you like . . . the world is sillier and better fun than they make out.”

— CS Lewis

Talking of beasts and birds, have you ever noticed this contrast: that when you read a scientific account of any animal’s life you get an impression of laborious, incessant, almost rational economic activity (as if all animals were Germans), but when you study any animal you know, what at once strikes you is their cheerful fatuity, the pointlessness of nearly all they do. Say what you like, Barfield, the world is sillier and better fun than they make out.

Indeed, and even in the dark and grim moments. Perhaps especially then.

The Four Reformers

On my commute over the last week I’ve been listening to the audiobook edition of The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky, a series of lectures by Russell Kirk presented in the early 1980s. The themes are decline and decadence, and the topics range across the loss of humane letters, the ideological capture of government and educational institutions, and reasons for hope. It’s good, and Kirk brings plenty of still-pertinent insight, even if his selected examples are often dated. Criticism of “Dallas” seems quaint when you know what the blood-drenched fleshpots of American culture in 2023 are like. Call it the Neil Postman problem.

In one of the final lectures, Kirk quotes a story by Robert Louis Stevenson from a book I’d never heard of: “The Four Reformers,” from Fables, an 1896 collection of twenty very short, pointed stories. Here’s the story in its entirety:

Four reformers met under a bramble bush. They were all agreed the world must be changed. “We must abolish property,” said one.

“We must abolish marriage,” said the second.

“We must abolish God,” said the third.

“I wish we could abolish work,” said the fourth.

“Do not let us get beyond practical politics,” said the first. “The first thing is to reduce men to a common level.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to give freedom to the sexes.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to find out how to do it.”

“The first step,” said the first, “is to abolish the Bible.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to abolish the laws.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to abolish mankind.”

By “reformer” Stevenson means the radical activist agents of societal change, of which there were plenty in his age and ours. The more radical the reform, the more radical the means of its implementation—especially when humans get in the way, as they do.

If I’ve run across this somewhere before I’ve forgotten it, but the final line must surely be the inspiration for the title of CS Lewis’s masterwork The Abolition of Man. Lewis, who was born four years after Stevenson’s untimely death, lived to see many such reformers put their plans into action, as well as the results.

Kingsnorth (and Lewis) on nostalgia and progress

Last week Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake, one of my favorite novels from the last ten years,* posted a marvelous reflection on nostalgia on his Substack The Abbey of Misrule. He includes this personal note near the beginning:

We all recreate our preferred old world. Mine was—probably still is—an awkward melange of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer culture and rural England before the First World War. Is it possible to wander the whited hawthorn lanes of Edward Thomas’s south country, the barrows intact up on the downs, smoke curling from the chimneys of the old inns, the motorways and superstores nowhere to be seen, whilst also hunting mammoths? Probably not, though it might make an intriguing backdrop to a fantasy novel I will never write.

That’s a charming way to highlight the hodgepodge quality of the imagined pasts that attract us, an attraction sharpened by the sense that every bit of this “melange” gathered from across the centuries is now equally lost. Maybe sometime I’ll describe some of my own hodgepodges. But Kingsnorth also drives deeper into the substantial appeal of nostalgia:

I’ve never been addicted to drugs or alcohol, but I have often been addicted to dreams. This is the lot of the writer. You become a writer because the world you encountered in the stories you read as a child is more exciting than the world you are actually living in. More exciting and, in a strange way, more real. Your world is school and suburbs and bus stops and breakfast cereals and maths homework and being forced to wash your dad’s car at the weekend and wondering how to talk to girls and listening to the charts to work out what kind of music it’s permissible to like. This is not Lothlorien, and neither is it Earthsea. The worlds created by Tolkein [sic] and Asimov and Verne and Howard are better than this, and there is no doubt at all that given a splinter of a chance you would prefer to live in them. Then, one day, you pick up a pen and realise that you can create your own.

Meanwhile, out in what is fondly called ‘the real world’ by people who often don’t know very much about reality, you are living in the Machine. If you have the kind of sensibility which prefers Lothlorien to Isengard, this means that you are a character in a tragedy rather than a heroic epic. Most of the things you like are fading away.

Further on, Kingsnorth engages the usual dismissive (and often deliberately rude) responses to wishing for a vanished—or, more painfully, vanishing—world:

Nostalgia is a curious thing. The love of a dead past is, on the surface, pointless, and yet it seems to be a universal, pan-cultural longing for something better than an equally dead but often less enticing present. This is something which its critics never seem to understand. ‘That’s just nostalgia’, they say, dismissively, when you suggest that a high street made up of independent shops might have been better than one giant superstore, or that folk songs around the fire in the pub might be better than Celebrity Love Island.

Spot on. Curiously, I have encountered this most forcefully in defending traditional architecture against the unsustainable and impractical eyesores of modern architecture. Calling Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall ugly or the Gherkin (aka the London Egg or the London Suppository) a blemish on the skyline or suggesting that church spires and Victorian market squares are in some way superior to what has replaced them makes a certain kind of person angry. This is strange to me because it seems like architecture, which as the late Sir Roger Scruton noted creates an aesthetic ecology we all have to engage with publicly, as a community, is the most straightforwardly concrete argument for the value of tradition and beauty.

But I digress.**

Kingsnorth goes on to suggest that nostalgia is often, in fact,

a rational response to a world heading in the wrong direction. Perhaps a practical response too. If the Machine is destroying so many things of value, from the home to the ancient woodlands that once surrounded it, then remembering those things is not only an act of rebellion, but can also be the first stage in an act of necessary restoration.

Which immediately brought to mind one of CS Lewis’s many reflections on “progress,” the ultimate God-term of the last century:

“If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road.”

— CS Lewis

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be and if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. . . . There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.

That’s from Mere Christianity, which originated as a series of radio talks during World War II. Lewis knew whereof he spoke. And, writing now eighty-odd years later, I think it is pretty plain that the world has taken the pig-headed route.

To return to Kingsnorth, he reflects as well on the way “nostalgic” is used as an insult, a rhetorical cudgel, and how to defeat it:

[T]he fact that ‘nostalgic’—like ‘Romantic’, ‘Luddite’, ‘reactionary’ and any other word that suggests attachment to anything before progressive Year Zero—has become a term of mockery makes it a tempting label to embrace if you are conducting a personal rebellion against the Total System. Being called names is supposed to scare you into silence, but it doesn’t work if you wear the names like a medal on your chest. Romanticising the past, you say? Well, maybe I do. But it’s a hell of a lot better than romanticising the future.

Hear hear.

I strongly recommend the essay in its entirety, especially the second half in which Kingsnorth examines three possible responses to the decline and fragmentation characteristic of the present age. Two, he notes, are traps. One is the unthinking acceptance of the Myth of Progress. The other—perhaps surprisingly if you’ve read this far—is nostalgia itself. While it is “vital” to be “guided by the past,” Kingsnorth is alert to the dangers of nostalgia, too: “[A]s we stand against the Machine, we need solid ground on which to brace ourselves. Neither Progress nor nostalgia offer that solidity.” Kingsnorth goes on to suggest a third way, one seasoned by both resignation and faithful hope, “to watch the great fall, accept its reality, and then get on with our work.”

An intriguing and profoundly challenging conclusion, one that jibes with things I’ve meditated upon for years but that confronts me more forcefully with what this kind of fruitful nostalgia must mean if it is to be of benefit to anyone. I have to wonder if Kingsnorth has read Jünger’s The Forest Passage. I mean to reread that soon. Food for thought.

Notes:

*The Wake is the first of a loose trilogy set in the distant past, the present, and the distant future of England. I have read The Wake, which takes places at the time of the Norman Conquest, and the second volume, Beast, but have not yet gotten to the third and final novel, Alexandria. Kingsnorth writes a good bit about what inspired it near the end of this Substack essay. I briefly reviewed Beast here last year.

**Let me here recommend Tom Wolfe’s clique-puncturing From Bauhaus to Our House and move on.

Jünger and the homo religiosus revisited

At the beginning of last year I posted a passage from Ernst Jünger’s short series of interrelated essays The Forest Passage about the homo religiosus—man as a religious animal, with a need for religion that will be filled by something. Now, just over a year later, I’m reading his allegorical novel On the Marble Cliffs, and unsurprisingly given the novel’s context the same concern is manifest.

On the Marble Cliffs takes place in the Marina, an idyllic Mediterranean region by the sea. The unnamed narrator tells the story of how the tyrannical host of the Head Forester, a warlord in the forests far to the north, infiltrates and turns the Marina to the Head Forester’s will. Unlike the Marina, which seems to exist in a placid mix of genteel paganism and the gutsy but learned Christianity of the Church Fathers or the early medieval Benedictines, the northern forests are the home of brutal idol worship and crude nature gods. The narrator mentions the Æsir explicitly, as well as a grotesque bull god worshiped in a sacred grove.

As the narrator tells his loose, dreamlike story, the avenues through which the Head Forester gains control over the Marina become more and more clear, but the religious one proves particularly striking:

Yet who would have believed that the gods of fat and butter who filled the cows’ udders would gain a following in the Marina—of worshippers, at that, who came from houses in which offerings and sacrifices had long been mocked? The same spirits who deemed themselves strong enough to cut the ties that bound them to their ancestral faith became subjugated to the barbarian idols’ spell. The sight of their blind obedience was more repugnant than drunkenness at midday.

Per CS Lewis, whom I also quoted in last year, “spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served.” The scoffing abandonment of the old religion does not leave the apostate unreligious; it just leaves an opening that must be filled by something else, probably something worse.

On the Marble Cliffs was completed in 1939, just before the German invasion of Poland. When it was published it was pretty quickly interpreted as a fabular broadside against the Nazis, an interpretation that is certainly hard to avoid. It was even taken seriously enough by the Nazi regime that Goebbels tried to have the book suppressed.

And yet Jünger insisted that it is not just an anti-Nazi parable but more broadly applicable, and the insight offered above—that irreligion, especially the elite ability to see through it and treat it with derision, leaves the scoffer open to far worse in the form of ideology and political contagion—is certainly relevant in our day and age. I have certainly seen plenty of acquaintances abandon religion as closeminded and oppressive only to embrace far more shrill, narrowminded, intolerant—and, not insignificantly, much less fun—political ideologies, and with a “blind obedience” that makes me feel pity for them more than anything else.

I’m reading Tess Lewis’s new translation of On the Marble Cliffs for NRYB Classics. It’s excellent so far and I hope to finish it this evening, after which I’ll read the introduction and other apparatus. For those interested, Thomas Nevins also gives the novel pretty extensive treatment in his book on Jünger, which I mentioned a few weeks ago in a much more lighthearted context.

2022 in books

I read a lot of good books in 2022, and I had a hard time narrowing them down in the “best of” categories I typically use for these posts, and once I had done that I still had a lot to say about them. So let me end these introductory remarks here and get you straight into the best fiction, non-fiction, kids’ books, and rereads of my year.

Favorite fiction of the year

This was a fiction-heavy year of reading thanks in no small part to two wonderful series recommended by friends, about which more below. I present the overall favorites in no particular order:

Wait for a Corpse, by Max Murray—A really charming and witty mystery from the early 1950s in which the mystery is not who killed the narrator’s awful Uncle Titus but who is going to. A genuinely romantic will-they-won’t-they love story, a variety of humorous and farcical plot complications, and a dash of small-town political shenanigans round out this fun story. Long out of print and probably hard to find, but worth seeking out.

John Macnab and Sick Heart River, by John Buchan—This year I declared my birth month John Buchan June and read and wrote about as many of his novels as I could. I squeezed eight in, and these two were my favorite new reads. One a high-spirited outdoor heist caper set in the Scottish highlands, the other a moody and contemplative outdoor odyssey through the furthest reaches of the Canadian Rockies, both are excellent, gripping, absorbing reads, albeit in dramatically different ways. You can read my full John Buchan June reviews of John Macnab and Sick Heart River here and here.

Fatherland, by Robert Harris—A Kripo detective in Berlin investigates the murder of an obscure Nazi Party functionary as the city prepares to celebrate Hitler’s 75th birthday—in 1964. I’m not usually one for alternate history, but Fatherland approaches a fantasy world in which the Nazis won World War II through a brilliantly structured mystery-thriller, giving the reader two levels of investigation and discovery that interlock with and complement each other. It’s vividly imagined, plausibly detailed, and briskly written. “I couldn’t put it down” is a hoary cliché, but in this case, for me, it was true.

And the Whole Mountain Burned, by Ray McPadden—A strongly written and hard-hitting novel about two soldiers—one experienced, one green—in the United States’ war in Afghanistan.

Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams—The story of a buffalo hunt in a remote pass of the Rockies, Butcher’s Crossing balances a gritty, sweaty, bloody plot with intense character drama, pitting the naïve and sentimental New England boy Will Andrews against the Captain Ahab-like Miller, the guide and trigger-man leading the expedition. Beautifully written and gripping. I blogged about Williams’s use of the senses in Butcher’s Crossing here.

The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey—A severely injured police inspector tries to solve a 450-year old mystery from his hospital bed. It’s better than it sounds—astonishingly good, in fact. Full review from last month here.

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie—The work of Agatha Christie is a weird lacuna in my reading, and until this year the only one of her novels I’d ever read was Murder on the Orient Express way back in high school. I fixed that this fall with one of her other most famous books, And Then There Were None. This review will be short: it’s regarded as a masterpiece for a reason.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, by Edgar Allan Poe—Poe’s only novel, Arthur Gordon Pym purports to be the journal/memoirs of a New England youth who stowed away on a ship and got considerably more than he bargained for, including mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism, ghost ships, and a final voyage into terra incognita, violent encounters with undiscovered peoples, and… something far worse. Poe combines Moby-Dick-style kitchen sink realism, a Robinson Crusoe-style spirit of adventure, and plenty of his own trademark feel for the uncanny and terrifying for an engaging and uniquely thrilling tale. I had only ever heard bad or dismissive comments about Pym up until this time and was very pleasantly surprised by it.

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy—Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since The Road sixteen years ago starts as a sort of New Orleans No Country for Old Men in which Bobby Western, the brilliant son of a Manhattan Project physicist who is now a salvage diver, starts his own investigation into the mysterious crash of a private jet in the Mississippi River only for terrible unseen forces to array themselves against him. This storyline is interspersed with that of Bobby’s sister, a child prodigy afflicted with intrusive schizophrenic hallucinations, whom we know from the opening pages eventually hangs herself. But neither storyline goes anywhere, exactly. Long, talky, meandering (none of which are intended as criticisms), The Passenger is as vividly written as any of McCarthy’s other work but clearly has much more going on in it thematically than the straightforward plot elements, and I knew even while reading it that it would stick with me and reward me more later through simply letting it sit in the back of my mind for a while, and that has proven to be the case. But that doesn’t make it a completely satisfying read. So, caveat lector. The companion volume focusing primarily on Bobby’s sister and her institutionalization, Stella Maris, is already out but I haven’t gotten to it yet. We’ll see how this informs and recasts the events of The Passenger in the new year.

Witch Wood, by John Buchan—I read this just a week or so ago, so you can expect a full, thorough treatment this coming John Buchan June, but for the time being let me recommend it as a strongly written, engaging, atmospheric, suspenseful, and genuinely spooky historical novel in which a young minister discovers the existence of a devil-worshiping cult in his seemingly upright Scottish parish. A favorite of CS Lewis, who wrote of it, “for Witch Wood specially I am always grateful; all that devilment sprouting up out of a beginning like Galt’s Annals of the Parish. That's the way to do it.”

Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy—This was a reread, but it was a special reread for me. This was the first novel by McCarthy that I read as a callow college student more than fifteen years ago, and I was unprepared for it. (I’ve described starting McCarthy’s corpus with Blood Meridian as “jumping into the deep end first.”) But it stuck with me, haunting me, and steadily grew in my regard, and within a year or two I had read almost everything else McCarthy had written up to that point. This year it was finally time to revisit Blood Meridian, and with the intervening years and maturity and experience it was like reading a different novel, or the fulfilment of the novel I struggled with one summer in college—gripping, bleak, and overwhelmingly powerful. So I’m including this reread among my favorite fiction reads of the year, and giving it a stronger recommendation than ever.

Discoveries of the year

Let me here thank my friends Dave Newell and JP Burten (whose novels Red Lory and Liberator y’all should check out) for introducing me to the following two series, of which I read too many volumes to include in the usual “favorites” format above but which I have to acknowledge as highlights of the year:

The Professor Dr von Igelfeld Entertainments, by Alexander McCall Smith—An absolute hoot, these short stories and novellas follow the marvelous philologist Prof Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, an aristocratic German scholar of the Romance languages and proud author of the seminal 1200-page study Portuguese Irregular Verbs. Von Igelfeld is a brilliant creation, simultaneously pompous and polite, rigid and kindhearted, humorless and eager to please, tone-deaf to social niceties but ostentatiously courtly, jealous of his own honor and childishly naïve. (He does not understand, for instance, why so many other prominent professors have such attractive graduate assistants, or why so many students are so obliging about coed room assignments on what is supposed to be a scholarly reading retreat in the Alps.) This is a charming combination of foibles that consistently lands him in uncomfortable situations ranging from awkward silences to high farce, situations from which he is either too proud or too oblivious to extricate himself. Pure, unalloyed fun.

• Volumes read: Portuguese Irregular Verbs, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, Unusual Uses for Olive Oil

• Volumes remaining: Your Inner Hedgehog

The Slough House series, by Mick Herron—An excellent series of spy thrillers featuring the outcasts, losers, and screwups of MI5 who, rather than being fired and creating public embarrassment, are shunted into dead-end jobs at a site called Slough House under the management of the slovenly former “joe” or field operative Jackson Lamb. Each volume is intricately plotted, engagingly and suspensefully written, and—what sets it most apart from the novels the series is most often compared to—funny. I’ve enjoyed these so much that I’ve forced myself to space them out so that I can squeeze in other reading.

• Volumes read: Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules, Joe Country

• Volumes remaining: Slough House, Bad Actors, and Standing by the Wall

Best of the year:

My favorite fiction read of the year is, for the first time in one of these lists, a reread. I had thought that rereading The Road in 2019 was my favorite that year, but it turns out I had misremembered. The novel is James Dickey’s Deliverance.

Deliverance is notorious in my hometown because John Boorman’s film adaptation was shot there and the movie hangs brooding over us like a specter. Plenty of cultures have to live with unflattering stereotypes, but toothless hillbilly sodomites has to be among the worst. Certainly, the “paddle faster, I hear banjos” bumper stickers got old pretty quick.

But as I discovered when I finally read it during grad school, Deliverance the novel is something else entirely—an involving, horrifying, thrilling, deeply and disturbingly beautiful novel with a rich narrative voice and strong, poetic writing.

If you’re familiar with the movie you already know most of the story; the film adapts the novel quite faithfully. But by the nature of its medium, the film has to deal in visuals, actions, and sounds—externals, surfaces. Dickey’s novel is internal, with deep, swift, very cold currents flowing beneath the surface. Its characters, chief among them narrator Ed Gentry, are all psychologically rich, and the seemingly simple actions of the plot—the drive north, the canoe trip, the horrible encounter with the moonshiners, the flight downriver, ambush, killing, and the final lie meant to flood and hide the events of the canoe trip forever—are complicated and intensified by the characterization and by Ed’s transformation from soft suburbanite to killer, a transformation we witness.

Deliverance is a brilliant novel, an intricately crafted prose poem, a haunting evocation of real environments, a thrilling tale of survival, and a weighty morality play concerning sin, guilt, and the thin layer of civilization far too many trust to keep them from the darkness in their own hearts.

Rereading Deliverance after well over a decade of reflecting on it made this the best fictional read of my year. Though it is not for the faint of heart, I strongly recommend it.

After finishing it this summer, I blogged here about John Gardner’s principle of using vivid, concrete detail to create a “fictive dream” in the mind of the reader and used Deliverance as a major example, comparing it to several other favorites from the spring and summer—Blood Meridian, John Macnab, and Sick Heart River. You can read that post here.

Favorite non-fiction of the year

While fiction threatened to take over my reading this year, I plugged away at a number of good works of history, biography, literary study, and cultural commentary. In the best of these those categories overlapped generously. The following handful of favorites are presented, like the fiction, in no particular order:

In the House of Tom Bombadil, by CR Wiley—An insightful and warmly-written literary, philosophical, and theological look at the meaning and significance one of the most perplexing characters in all of Tolkien’s legendarium. Full review from earlier this year here.

Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, by Katja Hoyer—A very good short history of the German Empire (1871-1918) with attention to its origins in post-Napoleonic nationalist movements, political intrigue, and military victory; its politics, finances, and imperial ambitions; its culture and key personalities; and, inevitably, its downfall in the catastrophe of the First World War. Well-structured and balanced and highly readable, this is the best book of its kind that I’ve come across.

The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City, by Scott Peeples—An engaging and insightful short study of the life of Edgar Allan Poe and the chaotic, striving, rumbustious landscape of antebellum America through the prism of the cities where Poe lived most of his life. Full review from October here.

Poe: A Life Cut Short, by Peter Ackroyd and Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living, by Paul Collins—Two elegantly written short biographies of Poe that complement each other nicely. Collins’s biography gives extraordinarily good coverage to Poe’s work for such a concise book, and Ackroyd’s gives greater depth to Poe’s tragic personal life. I’d readily recommend either of these to someone looking for an introduction to Poe that cuts through the manifold myths (insanity, drug abuse, etc etc) and fairly represents the man’s life and work. Short Goodreads reviews here and here.

A Preface to Paradise Lost, by CS Lewis—I have tried and failed many times to love Paradise Lost, so I’ll let CS Lewis love it for me. This is an outstanding introduction not only to Milton’s great epic, but to the origins and history of epic poetry generally and to Milton’s place in the story of this genre. Being a fan of epic from Homer to Dante, I most savored the earlier chapters that explain its history and contextualize Milton’s work, but the entire short Preface is an excellent piece of scholarship and worthwhile whether you love Milton or not. (Side note: While I have a very old paperback copy of this book from Oxford UP, I read the nice recent hardback reprint from HarperOne. My only criticism is some slipshod typography, which turned the letters ash (æ) and thorn (þ) in Old English quotations into Œs and Ps.)

The War on the West, by Douglas Murray—A bracing look at the climate of skepticism and outright hostility to Western civilization and the past, with many thoroughly documented examples and a strongly argued case for preserving, maintaining, and celebrating our inheritance. Would pair well with a read of Murray’s longer, more detailed, but more general The Madness of Crowds, one of my favorites of 2020.

Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, by Carl Trueman—Both a summary and extension of the key themes and arguments of Trueman’s longer and more scholarly The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self—which is high on my to-read list for this year—Strange New World is an excellent guide for general readers to how we got to where we are today, a world in which the transcendent is regarded as an oppressive myth and personal identity and sexuality are market commodities subject to infinitely recursive individual self-revision. A demonstration that ideas have consequences.

Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, by Sean McMeekin—A trenchant reappraisal of World War II with Stalin and the USSR as its central focus. McMeekin reminds the reader that Stalin was as much an aggressor as Hitler—indeed, the two allied to invade and divide Poland, a fact that was memory-holed during the war and has only seldom returned to public consciousness since—and demonstrates that even when Stalin could justifiably claim to be a victim following Nazi betrayal in the summer of 1941, he was a master manipulator who brazenly played the Allies to get what he wanted. And he got everything he wanted. Most damning are the book’s long middle chapters recounting in punishing detail the Lend-Lease bounty continuously heaped upon Stalin, entirely on Stalin’s terms, with Stalin offering almost nothing in return but contempt and ever larger demands, all while dealing high-handedly with Allied leaders and waging war with the same brutality he had brought to the invasions of Poland and Finland. FDR turned a blind eye and forced all around him—from anticommunist members of his administration who found themselves ousted all the way to Churchill himself—to do the same. Stalin’s War both reinforced some conclusions I had already intuited from years of studying and, especially, teaching the war, and placed Stalin at the center of a truly global picture of the conflict and how its results guaranteed decades of Cold War and continued bloodshed. A worthwhile corrective to rosy pictures of World War II—its aims, and prosecution, and its results.

Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Michael Hofmann—Sharply observed, unflinching, disturbing, and utterly exhilarating, this is one of the greatest war memoirs ever written. Like Blood Meridian, this is a reread of an old favorite that has exercised a profound influence on me, but the rereading experience was so gripping, so bracing, that it deserved to be among my other top non-fiction reads of the year. At the beginning of December I typed up some thoughts, observations, and reflections inspired by this second reading, which you can find here.

Best of the year:

If I cheated a bit by naming a reread as my favorite fiction of the year, I’ll do same here by picking two titles to share a best-of distinction for non-fiction. In this case, both books are fascinating, readable, deeply-researched works of scholarship in Anglo-Saxon history and literature.

The great Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey’s Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings is a short monograph that makes a strong case on a contentious topic.

Less than a century ago, Beowulf was wrongly looked at as a difficult, fatally flawed historical source for the centuries between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of Charlemagne’s Frankish empire, a frustrating farrago of myth and vague allusion to things 19th-century scientific historians wanted straight data about. This viewpoint changed with Tolkien’s 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” which argued that Beowulf is first and foremost a work of great poetic genius and unsurpassed thematic power, and that the historical elements are there to ground a fantastical story in what, for its original audience, felt like a real world.

Now, Shippey argues, the pendulum has swung too far the other way, with Beowulf viewed only as a poem or myth and neglected as a historical source. Marshaling an impressive array of literary, linguistic, and especially archaeological support from sites like Lejre in Denmark, Shippey argues that Beowulf is not only a great poem but also a broadly accurate and trustworthy window into the region, period, and culture in which it is set—the tribal Germanic peoples of early 6th-century Denmark and Sweden.

Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings is an indispensable read for anyone interested in Beowulf or this time period, and a boon to anyone who, like me, intuited Beowulf’s importance and authenticity as a representation of this world but lacked the archaeological clout to make such a strong case for it.

Just as readable and well-researched but probably of greater general interest is Eleanor Parker’s Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year. In this book Parker, a medievalist who maintained the the excellent Clerk of Oxford blog and has an extraordinary talent for making foreign minds understandable, tackles the nature of time itself—how Anglo-Saxon people thought about and reckoned it, and how they marked and celebrated the passage of it, season by season, year by year.

Parker draws from a huge array of Anglo-Saxon literature—part of the book’s purpose, she writes, is to introduce this literature and encourage people to seek out more of it—to describe first how the heathen Anglo-Saxon peoples’ understanding of time, years, and seasons changed with their conversion to Christianity, and then how they lived their lives within this new understanding. She gives good attention to everything from the number and names of the seasons (originally, it seems, only two: winter and sumor, with spring and fall by many other names imported from the Continent along with Christianity), the months, the work and pastimes of people from all walks of life at different times of year, and, perhaps most importantly, the intricate liturgical calendar and its many, many feasts, rites, and holidays. What emerges through this carefully arranged study is a holistic picture of a lost people and its lost way of life.

Appropriately for a culture whose poetry is so thoroughly tinged with elegy and ubi sunt reflection, I ended this book both delighted and saddened: delighted at the richness of this harmonious yearly cycle and the vividness with which Parker narrated and explained it, and saddened at what has been lost since that time. Winter, and specifically the early days of the twelve days of Christmas, unsurprisingly proved the perfect time to read Parker’s book.

I give my highest and strongest recommendations to both Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings and Winters in the World for anyone interested specifically in the Early Middle Ages and Anglo-Saxon England or for anyone willing to venture out and explore times, places, and minds alien to our own. You’ll find both books richly rewarding.

Rereads

In addition to a lot of good reading this year, I did a lot of good rereading. Rather than pick and choose and then burden y’all with more one-paragraph summaries, I’ve simply listed all of them as usual. But by virtue of my having taken the time to revisit these this year, please understand all of them to rank somewhere between good and excellent. Audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks*

• Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism*

• After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, by Samuel Goldman

• Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy

• Socrates: A Man for Our Times, by Paul Johnson*

• The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien

• The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman*

• The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan

• Greenmantle, by John Buchan

• How to Stop a Conspiracy: An Ancient Guide to Saving a Republic, by Sallust, trans. Josiah Osgood

• Deliverance, by James Dickey

• Gisli Sursson’s Saga and the Saga of the People of Eyri, trans. Martin Regal and Judy Quinn

• Das Nibelungenlied, trans. Burton Raffel

• Beowulf, Dragon Slayer, by Rosemary Sutcliff

• Life of King Alfred, by Asser, trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge

• Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Michael Hofmann

• The Third Man, by Graham Greene

Kids’ books

All of the books listed below were read-aloud favorites for myself and our kids this year. I had a hard time narrowing this selection down, but these are certainly the favorites, and I’d recommend any of them without hesitation.

• Caedmon’s Song, by Ruth Ashby, illustrated by Bill Slavin. A beautifully illustrated children’s version of an important Anglo-Saxon story related by Bede. Short Goodreads review here.

• Myths of the Norsemen, by Roger Lancelyn Green—An old favorite of mine that proved an excellent introduction to these stories for my seven- and five-year old.

• Alexander the Great and The Fury of the Vikings, by Dominic Sandbrook—Two volumes from Sandbrook’s Adventures in Time series that I read out loud to my kids this fall and winter. Perfect for our seven-year old, who thrilled to Alexander’s campaigns and the various Viking Age figures (e.g. Ragnar Loðbrok, Alfred the Great, Leif Eiriksson, and Harald Hardrada), and though our five-year had a somewhat harder time tracking with the stories he still enjoyed them. I strongly recommend both and look forward to other entries in the series.

• Basil of Baker Street, by Eve Titus—A fun, light, nimbly paced adventure with a clever mouse-level perspective on Sherlock Holmes and just enough of the trappings of Conan Doyle’s stories to hook new fans.

• Read-n-Grow Picture Bible, by Libby Weed, illustrated by Jim Padgett—A childhood favorite, a surprisingly thorough and serious illustrated Bible, read to my kids over several months. Short Goodreads review here.

• A Boy Called Dickens, by Deborah Hopkinson, illustrated by John Hendrix—A delightful and beautifully illustrated short retelling of Charles Dickens’s childhood and the influence growing up among the workhouses and debtors’ prisons of industrial London had on his imagination.

• The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson*—A hilarious and genuinely moving Christmas tale that combines farce, nostalgia, and remarkable depth, especially on one of my favorite themes: the foolish things of the world confounding the wise. My whole family enjoyed this greatly on our car trip to Georgia for Christmas.

Conclusion

If you’ve read this far, thank you for sticking with me, and I hope you’ve found something enticing to seek out and read during the new year. Thanks for reading, and all the best in 2023!

Three great sages on talking to oneself

Point: CS Lewis in chapter VIII of A Preface to Paradise Lost, writing of self-referential and -reverential modern “poetry which exists only for the poet”:

“There is nothing especially admirable in talking to oneself. Indeed, it is arguable that Himself is the very audience before whom a man postures most and on whom he practises the most elaborate deceptions.”

Counterpoint: GK Chesterton in a tongue-in-cheek review of his own short comedy play Magic, a quotation I once shared in the very early days of this blog:

“If a man does not talk to himself, it is because he is not worth talking to.”

Case study for your consideration: This exchange from “Tankin’ it to the Streets,” an episode from season six of “King of the Hill”:

“Hank: You know, Dale, sometimes I think you say things just to hear yourself talk.
Dale: What do you want me to do, ignore myself?”

Project for synthesis: In what ways is Dale Gribble A) the self-deceived man described by Lewis and B) a man worth talking to, as described by Chesterton? Is he either A or B or both A and B? Is he B despite or because of A?

File under either “Silliness” or “Questions Hank would never ask.”

EIIR, RIP

We talk quite glibly of “making history” these days. To describe someone as “making history” now is so banal it is beneath cliché. So when a moment of actual, immediate, discernible historical significance comes along we are without words. Or should be.

Queen Elizabeth II is a great loss. While I have never loved someone I don’t actually know, I admired the Queen and deeply respected the qualities everyone rightly comments upon: the dutifulness, the grace, the unstinting work ethic. That she carried on for so long only made these qualities more remarkable. As I noted on Instagram, her entry in the Penguin Monarchs series is perhaps the most appropriately titled volume: Elizabeth II: The Steadfast.

I cannot add much of substance to the outpouring of commemoration and grief of the last week, but since one of goals with this blog is to treat it as a commonplace book, I’ve collected the best things I’ve seen or read to preserve here. Fragments shored against ruin; for myself, at least.

Not only was her seventy years a record in the British monarchy and a monument to continuity, her reign bridged a much greater sweep of history than is immediately obvious. Several factoids that circulated in the days following her death make this point especially well:

• She was the last serving head of state who had served in the military during World War II.

• When she succeeded her father George VI, the Queen’s first Prime Minister was Winston Churchill, then serving his second term as PM. Two days before she died she met with Liz Truss, the new Prime Minister. Truss was born in 1975, Churchill in 1874.

• Her seventy-year reign accounts for 30% of the entire existence of the United States.

For yet more perspective, the President of the United States upon her succession was Harry Truman, who wrote the following to her upon learning of the death of her father:

The tragedy of this dispensation is made even more poignant by the fact that you were far from home when so worthy a life came to its peaceful close.

We pray that the God of all comfort will sustain you and keep you and that the King of Kings, under whose ruling hand all nations live, will give you fortitude and courage, strength and wisdom to fulfill the responsibilities thrust upon you as you assume your place in the long line of British sovereigns.

You can read the rest here. I’d say Truman’s prayer was answered.

On a lighter note, watch this short reminiscence from Richard Griffin, one of the Queen’s former bodyguards, of meeting some hikers in the Highlands near Balmoral. This is probably my favorite story about her.

Following the announcement of her death, this passage from one of CS Lewis’s letters made the rounds and captures something beautiful and stirring from the beginning of her reign seventy years ago. Writing of Elizabeth’s coronation ceremonies to a friend in Washington, DC (correspondence collected as Letters to an American Lady), Lewis said:

You know, over here people did not get that fairy-tale feeling about the coronation. What impressed most who saw it was the fact that the Queen herself appeared to be quite overwhelmed by the sacramental side of it. Hence, in the spectators, a feeling of (one hardly knows how to describe it)—awe—pity—pathos—mystery. The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be His vice-regent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate. As if He said “In my inexorable love I shall lay upon the dust that you are glories and dangers and responsibilities beyond your understanding.” Do you see what I mean? One has missed the whole point unless one feels that we have all been crowned and that coronation is somehow, if splendid, a tragic splendour.

Exactly right, and the point of “the sacramental side.” As Lewis writes elsewhere, it is right to be not a little awed by it: “The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite.”

Relatedly, Lewis has an answer to those people who have decided that now is the time to sound off with their deeply considered and highly original objections to monarchy and tradition, in a line I’ve quoted here before:

[A] man’s reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked’; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach—men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, of film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

De te fabula narratur.

Relatedly, read Capel Lofft, a name familiar to anyone who listens to The Rest is History, on the Queen’s old-fashioned virtues in the face of modern emotional incontinence and exhibitionism; Sebastian Milbank, who quotes part of that CS Lewis passage above, on what the Queen and the monarchy preserve; Carl Trueman on the Queen’s devout faith; and Theodore Dalrymple on the deeper lesson of the grief people feel at the passing of so worthy and virtuous a person.

All of those are good pieces, but the one that inspired this commonplace miscellany was this succinct post from Alan Jacobs, who summarizes much of what I feel and would say about the life and example of Elizabeth II, though in far fewer words than I would be capable of:

The late Queen Elizabeth II played the hand she was dealt about as well as it could possibly have been played, and this required her to exercise virtues that few of our public figures today even know exist: dutifulness; reliability; silence; dignity; fidelity; devotion to God, family, and nation. We shall not look upon her like again; her death marks the end of a certain world. Its excellences, as well as its shortcomings, are worthy of our remembrance.

Hear hear.

And, finally, to give the Queen herself the last word, consider this passage from her 1957 Christmas message, the first ever to be televised:

That it is possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us. Because of these changes I am not surprised that many people feel lost and unable to decide what to hold on to and what to discard. How to take advantage of the new life without losing the best of the old.

But it is not the new inventions which are the difficulty. The trouble is caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery. They would have religion thrown aside, morality in personal and public life made meaningless, honesty counted as foolishness and self-interest set up in place of self-restraint.

At this critical moment in our history we will certainly lose the trust and respect of the world if we just abandon those fundamental principles which guided the men and women who built the greatness of this country and Commonwealth.

Today we need a special kind of courage, not the kind needed in battle but a kind which makes us stand up for everything that we know is right, everything that is true and honest. We need the kind of courage that can withstand the subtle corruption of the cynics so that we can show the world that we are not afraid of the future.

It has always been easy to hate and destroy. To build and to cherish is much more difficult.

You can watch the whole thing here.

Queen Elizabeth II, champion of duty, goodness, and faith in a changing world bent on discarding such vestiges of the past, RIP.

Lewis on periodization

I spent a lot of time trying to come up with the most simpleminded and stereotypical timeline possible for this image, so please appreciate it as you scroll by

Over my Independence Day break I read The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis, an excellent short study by Jason Baxter of the literature that most shaped Lewis’s academic interests and worldview. I especially appreciated Baxter’s in-depth look at the influence of Boethius and Dante on Lewis, but what struck me most forcefully was a section quoting a lesser-known lecture of Lewis’s on how we divide and categorize past era—that is, periodization.

Periodization is one of my special interests and annoyances as an historian. I toy with and fuss over periodization the way motorheads used to sweat over their valves and plugs and carburetors. When I teach Western Civ I have to resist the urge to park on the topic every time we begin a new unit and move from the ancient to the medieval worlds, for example, or when we cross the especially blurry line into the modern.

Here’s how Lewis describes the problem in “De Descriptione Temporum,” his 1954 inaugural lecture as the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, a position created for him by Cambridge University:

From the formula “Medieval and Renaissance”, then, I inferred that the University was encouraging my own belief that the barrier between those two ages has been greatly exaggerated, if indeed it was not largely a figment of Humanist propaganda. At the very least, I was ready to welcome any increased flexibility in our conception of history. All lines of demarcation between what we call “periods” should be subject to constant revision. Would that we could dispense with them altogether! As a great Cambridge historian has said: “Unlike dates, periods are not facts. They are retrospective conceptions that we form about past events, useful to focus discussion, but very often leading historical thought astray.” The actual temporal process, as we meet it in our lives (and we meet it, in a strict sense, nowhere else) has no divisions, except perhaps those “blessed barriers between day and day”, our sleeps.

This comes quite close to an example I give my own students about periodization. Every time you have a birthday, I say, some tedious person will ask “Do you feel any older?” and the answer is almost always No. That’s because the changes brought by age creep up one day at a time, regardless of the actual yard-markers of birthdays and years. Ditto the changes from historical period to historical period.

Lewis continues:

Change is never complete, and change never ceases. Nothing is ever quite finished with; it may always begin over again. . . . And nothing is quite new; it was always somehow anticipated or prepared for. A seamless, formless continuity-in-mutability is the mode of our fife. But unhappily we cannot as historians dispense with periods. . . . We cannot hold together huge masses of particulars without putting into them some kind of structure. Still less can we arrange a term’s work or draw up a lecture list. Thus we are driven back upon periods. All divisions will falsify our material to some extent; the best one can hope is to choose those which will falsify it least.

“Continuity-in-mutability” is exactly right, and by pure coincidence exactly how I approach teaching the transition from ancient to medieval. And that last sentence is one of the watchwords of my studies and teaching.

Periods are historians’ conveniences. Treat them any more seriously or concretely than that, and you begin the falsification Lewis warns of here.

From here Lewis goes on to examine and challenge some of the points usually raised as indicative of the change between these periods, and even gets in a few good digs at the present along the way. (Re. the supposed loss of learning with the onset of the Middle Ages, “if one were looking for a man who could not read Virgil though his father could, he might be found more easily in the twentieth century than in the fifth.”) The whole thing is worth your while.

“De Descriptione Temporum” is collected in Selected Literary Essays, a posthumously published Cambridge UP volume edited by Walter Hooper. Despite being an important and insightful work, I think it’s lesser known (I read it years ago and had virtually forgotten it before reading Baxter’s book this month) because it hasn’t crept from its place in a university-published anthology into the more popular collections from religious publishers. You can read this lecture online here or in a .pdf here, though be aware that both of these online versions are riddled with typos and/or text recognition errors.

And definitely check out The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis if you’re interested in Lewis, medieval literature, or good books and great minds generally.

Difficult art and striving upward

I’ve been thinking a lot about an essay I recently read about the collapse of “cultural aspiration,” the desire of people to seek out, encounter, and enjoy the excellent in literature, music, art, architecture—you name it. Sooner or later I’m going to write at length about that essay and some of my thoughts on what has brought about this collapse. But part of it is surely resentment, the envy endemic to populism.*

Two items I’ve been reflecting on re. that essay and this cultural trend:

Item one—this blog post on “accessibility” in literature. The key passage:

A reader complains that he doesn’t understand the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. So far, so good. Hill can be difficult, though I find his poems worth the effort they sometimes demand—repeated readings, a bit of research (which can pay unexpected dividends), an overall familiarity with his work, contemplation. My reader’s reaction is different: “He’s an elitist. He has contempt for readers. He thinks we should know everything he knows. He’s impossible to understand.”

The idea that every work of art we encounter should be instantly accessible, free of difficulty, depths and ambiguity, is a strange one. How deeply self-centered. In an interview, Hill once addressed this peculiar notion, saying “the word accessible is fine in its place; that is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people in wheelchairs; but a word that is perfectly in its place in civics or civic arts is entirely out of place, I think, in a wider discussion of the arts. There is no reason why a work of art should be instantly accessible, certainly not in the terms which lie behind most people’s use of the word.”

Item two—from Letter 215 in The Letters of JRR Tolkien, an incomplete draft of a letter on children’s books and aiming higher than one’s station, so to speak, in one’s reading:

We all need literature that is above our measure—though we may not have sufficient energy for it all the time. But the energy of youth is usually greater. Youth needs then less than adulthood or Age what is down to its (supposed) measure. . . . Therefore do not write down to Children or to anybody. Not even in language. Though it would be a good thing if that great reverence which is due to children took the form of eschewing the tired and flabby cliches of adult life. But an honest word is an honest word, and its acquaintance can only be made by meeting it in the right context. A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.

Charges of “elitism” have always seemed, to me, to be a Trojan horse for becoming complacent. It begins by assuring yourself that failing to measure up to the standards of snobs is okay and ends with denying that there is any qualitative difference between the bad and the excellent. And so people who could enjoy the best are not only happy but congratulate themselves for staying put and reveling in the mediocre (or worse).

A final note: All my favorite books I have discovered either by 1) intentionally finding something reputed as good and stretching myself to understand it or 2) taking the recommendations of good friends who have already done #1.

Food for thought.

*Cf. CS Lewis in his essay “Democratic Education”: “Envy, bleating ‘I’m as good as you,’ is the hotbed of Fascism.”