A Defence of Skeletons

A recent tempest in the social media teapot brewed up over Halloween decorations. An angry dad, disturbed on behalf of his young daughters, complained on Substack about the excessive and grotesque decorations in his neighbors’ yards—in addition to cobwebs and tombstones, one featured things like animatronic zombies and demons and skeletons in bloodstained cloaks. It got shared and restacked many, many times and a lot of people shared opinions, usually in a tone of “Chill out and grow up” on both sides. It was pretty unseemly, but not as unseemly as those yard decorations.

I could understand the dad’s original complaint, but mainly on grounds of taste. A lot of Halloween decor is tacky and reveals mere grossness of mind, not least in its effort to shock. I saw a few people in the controversy suggesting a gentle middle way, of decorating with non-threatening pumpkins, bats, black cats, and so forth. I don’t actually agree with that. While the lurid and needlessly grotesque is one extreme, rendering the spooky toothless is also a mistake. I don’t object to skulls, bones, or whole skeletons on principle.

Chesterton’s “Defence of Skeletons” is not specifically about Halloween, but I think it has something to offer when thinking about a holiday in which death becomes decor, in which we are likely to confront an image of what we’ll all look like just a few years after we’re gone. Skeletons can teach us something.

Opening with the image of leafless winter trees, Chesterton mentions the embarrassment with which the locals were apologizing for the bare branches. He doesn’t understand it. A leafless forest is still—or even especially—beautiful: “So far from the line of the tree when it is bare appearing harsh and severe, it is luxuriantly indefinable to an unusual degree; the fringe of the forest melts away like a vignette.”

This embarrassment reminds Chesterton of the “horror” people commonly have of skeletons. They find something unsettling about the revelation of hidden structure. “This is felt dimly in the skeleton of the tree: it is felt profoundly in the skeleton of the man.” But why? He wonders about this in his signature style:

Without claiming for the human skeleton a wholly conventional beauty, we may assert that he is certainly not uglier than a bull-dog, whose popularity never wanes, and that he has a vastly more cheerful and ingratiating expression. But just as man is mysteriously ashamed of the skeletons of the trees in winter, so he is mysteriously ashamed of the skeleton of himself in death. It is a singular thing altogether, this horror of the architecture of things. One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.

I should note that this is a funny essay, even by the standards of Chesterton generally and The Defendant specifically.

Interestingly, Chesterton argues that this shame or horror of the skeleton is only superficially about reminders of death. It actually stems from the skeleton’s condition of being exposed: “It is man's eccentric glory that he has not, generally speaking, any objection to being dead, but has a very serious objection to being undignified.” Skeletons make us uncomfortable because we fear not death but embarrassment.

The skeleton is a state of nakedness more total than that of leafless trees or unclothed humans, and it is “shamelessly grotesque.” Really think about the shapes of the bones under all of our flesh sometime: ribs, hips, tailbones, kneecaps, the jaw. But being uncomfortable with this indignity, Chesterton says, doesn’t make much sense. The world is full of strange, awkward, grotesque things and it is worth celebrating the gloriously ugly—the oinking of a pig, the cawing of rooks—because it is so innocent, honest, and full of life. Skeletons are good for us because they remind us of our place in this glorious grotesque world, of its goodness, and that everything, even ourselves, is funny.

That mankind is made uncomfortable by the sight of the thing that gives every one of us our shape is a mark of our pride. The strange appearance of bones should make us laugh and give up our cheap dignity, especially the cheap but insistent dignity of youth and beauty. Of the Renaissance types tempted to stand on this dignity in the face of death and for whom the artistic motif of the skeleton could “freezing the pride out of all earthly pomps and the fragrance out of all fleeting pleasures,” which “almost assuredly did more good than harm,” the fact

[t]hat the whole structure of their existence was as wholesomely ridiculous as that of a pig or a parrot they could not be expected to realize; that birth was humorous, coming of age humorous, drinking and fighting humorous, they were far too young and solemn to know. But at least they were taught that death was humorous.

It is through this, and not abject fear of death, that skeletons humble us.

At least, if we are willing to be humbled. But here the skeleton plays a final great joke on us, because “however much my face clouds with sombre vanity, or vulgar vengeance, or contemptible contempt, the bones of my skull beneath it are laughing for ever.”

A good note to end this foreshortened Chestertober on. Happy Halloween!

Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy is almost certainly Chesterton’s most famous book. The only other serious contenders may be fiction like The Man Who was Thursday or—just maybe, and mostly thanks to TV now—the Father Brown stories. But for many who come to know Chesterton as more than a source of pithy quotations, Orthodoxy serves as their introduction and guide. That is certainly true of me.

Chesterton wrote Orthodoxy as a follow-up to Heretics, which I covered here last week. Heretics offers a strong dose of Chesterton’s emerging worldview, albeit in diffuse form and somewhat less accessible a hundred and twenty years on. Orthodoxy, though a sequel, is better remembered thanks to offering a positively stated vision rather than responding to a string of false doctrines and—I think this is key—because of the form in which Chesterton wrote it.

Because Orthodoxy is highly personal. Those familiar with Chesterton’s discursive, topsy-turvy style and his use of metaphor, simile, and paradox will find that here, but—in a phrase from his later book The Everlasting Man—viewed from “the inside.” Rather than simply opining on a subject in his signature style, Orthodoxy more than any of Chesterton’s other books takes the reader directly into his mind. Though he wrote an Autobiography just before he died, Orthodoxy remains the definitive testament to his growth, conversion, and imagination. All it lacks to make it a memoir is names and dates.

Briefly, Orthodoxy tells the story of Chesterton’s growth away from a comfortable “paganism.” His journey is marked at every step by self-examination, examination of what others have told him, and a turn in another direction. His attitude is a cheerful version of Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse,” refusing to comply with fashionable ideas or accept fashionable attitudes and rebelling against the complacent. Guided both by intuition and rigorous, complex questioning (“My own case for Christianity is rational;” he writes near the end, “but it is not simple”), he works his way into philosophical positions that he always finds preempted by Christianity: having tried “to found a heresy of my own,” he found, “when I had put the last touches to it, . . . that it was orthodoxy.”

Like all of Chesterton’s non-fiction, Orthodoxy reads smoothly but proves hard to summarize, the curlicues of Chesterton’s thinking always feeling right and leading to the right place but also surprising. Having slaved over this review more than any other Chestertober post, I can’t claim to do the book justice here. I’ll have to content myself with a illuminating a few connected points and suggesting the larger shape of the book.

Having begun as an uncatechized pagan or agnostic, he moves, through the process mentioned above, toward religious faith and finally to Christianity itself. Along the way Chesterton integrates the critiques of progressivism, materialism, scientism, sentimental humanism, racialism, rationalism, pessimism, cynicism, and other persistent -isms from Heretics into a coherent argument and makes his case for Christianity as the answer to all of them, the only complete picture of the world.

The rational part of Chesterton’s approach is strongly historical. Told that Christianity was responsible for the misery of the Dark Ages, Chesterton “read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations.” He noticed contradictions, criticisms that Christianity was both unmanly and too warlike, denigrating to women but only of interest to women, forcing people into families and tearing families apart to put people in monasteries, emphasizing poverty and humility too much but also too full of “pomp” and “ritualism,” of being too sexually repressed and too reproductively fruitful, and on and on. Tempted to conclude that Christianity was more monstrous than he had at first assumed, he realized instead that “[i]t looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with.” There is a dimension of apologetic work in which reason, fact, and study are appropriate, and this is it.

The other aspect of his approach, on the other hand, is observational, intuitive, and even aesthetic. In reviewing Heretics I noted Chesterton’s artistic background and sensibilities, and the gut feeling that something in the world is out of true, out of proportion, both begins his investigations and guides them. The truth of Christianity is encoded in the real world, perceptible to the senses and internalized both through doctrine and the prevailing Christian culture of his day—the starkest difference between his original audience and ourselves, to which we’ll return—as well as through impressions gained from fairy tales, observation, and inference and analogy. This is where Chesterton most often invokes common sense and tradition, “the democracy of the dead.” These are arguments, too, but not the kind amenable to the spreadsheet.

Taken together, these two “truth-detectors,” as Peter Kreeft has called them, give the honest seeker complementary pictures of the truth. The task is rightly perceiving, followed by synthesis. As Chesterton himself points out, the opportunities for mistakes are infinite. Only Christianity has avoided them all.

As I mentioned, Orthodoxy is an intensely personal and interior book, taking the reader through years of intellectual workings to reach Chesterton’s destination. The memoir-like format, the warm confessional tone—unlike the polemics of Heretics, which are jovial but still polemics—and especially the imaginative appeal of his reasoning unify the many threads of thought before they are brought together in the final chapters. These must also account for much of the book’s success, then and since.

Chesterton’s book is a personal story, so here’s mine, parts of which I have related previously. Like many others, I came to Chesterton by swimming upstream from CS Lewis’s work. I had heard Chesterton was an influence on Lewis, and when I stumbled upon a copy of Orthodoxy in Barnes & Noble one day, I bought it.

Orthodoxy surprised, challenged, and encouraged me. I was intensely interested in apologetics and debate at the time and was used to an icy logical approach. Chesterton’s combination of reasoning with art and instinct was surprising but spoke powerfully to me. Like Lewis, he didn’t just focus on splitting hairs and debating points of fact, but targeted the heart, the imagination, and all of existence. It spoke powerfully to me, and of course it was loaded from front to back with quotable lines. And this was at a time before you could encounter all the Chesterton quotations you could stand online.

As simple as parts of it are, it also suggested the need for frequent rereading—and that I would want to read more from Chesterton. I did. Scarcely a year has gone by over the last twenty when I haven’t read something by him, and this book in particular has grown with me. As a college student I appreciated the reinforcement as well as testing my assumptions about what faith and apologetics were. Rereads over the years have impressed me with his insight into human nature and his fierce arguments for joy and humor against melancholy and despair—a theme I’ve written on recently. During my most recent reading I noticed and appreciated Chesterton’s tireless refusal to accept fashionable consensus. Told about the Dark Ages, “I read a little history.” Told a lot of tall tales about Jesus, Jesus’s character, and what Jesus would do about this or that issue (remember that the man who first asked “What would Jesus do?” was a contemporary of Chesterton, and a socialist), “[i]nstead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament.”

Chesterton is always suspicious of accepted polite opinion, always ready to look into a thing, and always ready to be surprised. His openness and intellectual honesty—agree with him or not—are winsome and have kept him appealing.

To return from the personal to more of a review, however, (“clos[ing],” as Chesterton says in the book’s final paragraph, “this chaotic volume”), I have to wonder about the strengths of Orthodoxy’s arguments in our own age. As people as diverse as David Bentley Hart in Atheist Delusions, Richard Dawkins in various interviews, and especially Tom Holland in Dominion have pointed out, Christianity has invisibly undergirded our civilization for centuries. Our assumptions have been Christian assumptions. Chesterton could bank on that and argue from it.

But in the more than century since, those assumptions have been shaken—partly by complacency and Christian self-sabotage, partly by deliberate philosophical warfare by the descendants of Chesterton’s heretics, partly by the unintended consequences of the kind of amoral sentimental do-gooders Chesterton sought to expose. Just this year Carl Trueman ably outlined the changed assumptions in anthropology and their consequences. Could Orthodoxy, which assumes much of the worldview Chesterton shared even with his opponents, still make Chesterton’s case?

I think so. The cultural foundation of his Edwardian world has been fatally compromised but, just as with the worldviews attacked in Heretics, many of the problems are the same. Christianity is mocked, derided, and libeled in just the ways Chesterton outlines. Fashionable opinion still hews to notions of steady progress, materialist evolution, and, in ethics, an airy, inconsistent humanitarian impulse apparently rooted in nothing. Further, and more positively, apologists like Alister McGrath have argued that the strict logic-chopping arguments of the previous century will be inadequate for rising generations. An unintended consequence of postmodernism and other such schools of thought has been openness to the intuitive and imaginative as avenues of argument—just Chesterton’s specialty.

That leaves only superficial hurdles to encountering and arguing—but not quarreling—with Chesterton. As much as it pains me to say it, in the words of Matthew Lee Anderson, quoted in the foreword to a recent edition of Orthodoxy, “it is a dated work.” The language and structure may pose problems for readers who, we are constantly reminded now, have been so badly served by the educational system and a culture that militates against reading, attention, and thought. I don’t personally find Chesterton forbidding, but for those who do, Simon Vance’s audiobook recording is an easy entry point thanks to Chesterton’s conversational tone, and Broadman & Holman’s 2022 hardback of Orthodoxy edited by Trevin Wax has had the long paragraphs broken up, topical headers inserted to better illuminate the structure of the book, and unfamiliar names and terms annotated.

I’m not usually a fan of this kind of formatting, but the goal is to ease modern readers into Chesterton’s thought and the words remain unchanged. If that means more people can meet Chesterton through Orthodoxy and be challenged and changed by his work, I can embrace that.

To return to that line from Anderson quoted above, though dated in some ways, Orthodoxy “comes nearer to timelessness than anything we have today.” A Chesterton-worthy paradox. Orthodoxy is still the best place to encounter Chesterton, the purest dose of his personality, and a challenging introduction to discovering the world as it has already been revealed.

A Defence of Slang

John Gardner begins his posthumously published On Becoming a Novelist with a consideration of the things that constitute “the writer’s nature.” The first item on his list is “verbal sensitivity.” This is not, Gardner points out, the same thing as grammatical accuracy: “Good grades in English may or may not go with verbal sensitivity, that is, with the writer’s gift for, and interest in, understanding how language works.” On either side of the verbally sensitive lie the dangers of the “tin ear” and the prescriptivist “stickler,” whom it is easy to imagine as a schoolteacher with a ready red pen:

given this distaste for linguistic change, or perhaps distaste for certain classes of humanity, the sophisticated stickler may dismiss without thought an ingenious and sensitive use of the suspect word or phrase. The true artist's verbal sensitivity may well be different, in other words, from that of the usual “writer of good English.” Black street kids playing “The Dozens”—piling up ingenious metaphorical insults of one another’s mothers, not all of the metaphors grammatical or unmixed—may in fact be showing more verbal sensitivity than the speechwriters who helped create the image of John Kennedy.

A point that has stuck with me since first reading this twenty years ago. And eighty years before Gardner, Chesterton made much the same argument in “A Defence of Slang.”

Consideration of class is only an aside in Gardner, but Chesterton’s starting point. The upper classes of his day, he asserts, have abandoned their duty to be vivacious and interesting. By comparison with their medieval forbears, who “could not write three legible letters, but . . . could sometimes speak literature,” their talk is lifeless and limited: “it is like the formless cries of animals, dimly indicating certain broad, well-understood states of mind. ‘Bored,’ ‘cut up,’ ‘jolly,’ ‘rotten,’ and so on, are like the words of some tribe of savages whose vocabulary has only twenty of them.”

The duty and privilege of bold and poetic language has, according to Chesterton, passed to the lower class. Where the wealthy might speak in “a mere string of set phrases,” the working man, “being filled with the Muse,” might “burst out into a solid literary effort”:

“You’re a gen’leman, aren’t yer… yer boots is a lot brighter than yer ‘ed... there’s precious little of yer, and that’s clothes... that’s right, put yer cigar in yer mouth ‘cos I can’t see yer be’ind it... . . .” and so on. It is evident that this mode of speech is not only literary, but literary in a very ornate and almost artificial sense. Keats never put into a sonnet so many remote metaphors as a coster puts into a curse.

One thinks of the elaborate facility with swearing of the military man. Watch the boot camp scenes from Full Metal Jacket again sometime and keep track of the rhetorical devices Gunnery Sergeant Hartman uses: irony, simile, synecdoche, anaphora, parallelism, and especially hyperbole, all with vivid, concrete images that both register immediately and are remembered. The endless invention of slang—often effortless and energetic, and the more energetic the more effortless—is art. To return to Gardner’s example, it’s not hard to imagine Chesterton enjoying the verbal play of “The Dozens,” especially the classic: “Your mama’s so fat, when she sits around the house she really sits around the house.”

Chesterton’s one serious point in “A Defence of Slang”—that the aristocracy lost its color when it ceased being a warrior class, and the lower classes now have have become colorful because they “live in a state of war”—is something of a truism. Affluence and artificiality sap the vitality of a society. Its manners, enjoyments, and its language degrade, and as I argued when writing about Heretics over the weekend, Chesterton loved the organic, the intuitive rather than the purely rational, and the lively. While highbrow poetry would enter a permanent state of recursive self-awareness not long after Chesterton wrote, the poetic instinct survived elsewhere: “The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.”

I’ve mentioned that I reread A Farewell to Arms for the first time since high school this summer. Consider this passage from the opening of Chapter XXI, which features a bit of slang that has, amusingly, come back into currency:

A British major at the club told me the Italians had lost one hundred and fifty thousand men on the Bainsizza plateau and on San Gabriele. He said they had lost forty thousand on the Carso besides. We had a drink and he talked. He said the fighting was over for the year down here and that the Italians had bitten off more than they could chew. He said the offensive in Flanders was going to the bad. If they killed men as they did this fall the Allies would be cooked in another year. He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war. We had another drink. Was I on somebody’s staff? No. He was. It was all balls. We were alone in the club sitting back in one of the big leather sofas. His boots were smoothly polished dull leather. They were beautiful boots. He said it was all balls. They thought only in divisions and man-power. They all squabbled about divisions and only killed them when they got them. They were all cooked. The Germans won the victories. By God they were soldiers. The old Hun was a soldier. But they were cooked too. We were all cooked. I asked about Russia. He said they were cooked already. I’d soon see they were cooked. Then the Austrians were cooked too. If they got some Hun divisions they could do it. Did he think they would attack this fall? Of course they would. The Italians were cooked. Everybody knew they were cooked. The old Hun would come down through the Trentino and cut the railway at Vicenza and then where would the Italians be? They tried that in ’sixteen, I said. Not with Germans. Yes, I said. But they probably wouldn’t do that, he said. It was too simple. They’d try something complicated and get royally cooked.

Henry and this British major are discussing immensely complicated matters and yet one slang word, cooked, with minor poetic variations (royally cooked), covers all of it with more immediate gut-level clarity than any strategic or diplomatic jargon.

Not that all slang is wholesome—far from it. And perhaps the starkest difference between Chesterton’s world and our own is the degraded, unimaginative quality of slang at all levels of society. Even the operatic constructions of Gunny Hartman have given way to pervasive use of monosyllables.

But “[a]ll slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry,” and, like penny dreadfuls, the crude slang of the lower classes of Chesterton’s day and—where it survives—in the present meets a human need:

It is unfortunate that the poetry which is developed by this process should be purely a grotesque poetry. But as the higher orders of society have entirely abdicated their right to speak with a heroic eloquence, it is no wonder that the language should develop by itself in the direction of a rowdy eloquence. The essential point is that somebody must be at work adding new symbols and new circumlocutions to a language.

As Chesterton famously wrote elsewhere, “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” You could even take that line as the belated thesis statement of The Defendant.

This particular essay is mostly Chesterton having fun, praising the lower classes for their “light, living, and flexible slang” and calling on our betters—either by birth or by presumption—to get over themselves and be more interesting, but his perceptiveness and insight also reflect well on himself as the appreciator of just such slang. As Gardner would write eighty years later, “though some great writers may at times write awkwardly, it is nevertheless the case that one sign of the born writer is his gift for finding or (sometimes) inventing authentically interesting language.”

Not a bad description of Chesterton, and this essay is good evidence for it.

Heretics

Critics and even some fans of Chesterton have tried to fault him with many defects in the ninety years since he died, but I’ve never seen anyone call him a coward. The early nonfiction work with which this abbreviated Chestertober continues today, Heretics, published when he was only thirty-one, offers an excellent sample of his willingness to disagree, to argue, and to name names.

Heretics is a bold title. The Edwardian world, Chesterton thought, was beset with harmful doctrines embraced by the powerful and influential. These are not merely differences of opinion but heresies, partial apprehensions of the truth that prove more damaging than indifference to it. Chesterton attacks many of these by focusing on the work and views of their most prominent spokesmen or on their manifestations in popular culture like painting and novels.

There are twenty essays, and they range widely. Among the heretics are names that remain famous like Rudyard Kipling, HG Wells, James McNeill Whistler, and George Bernard Shaw, and many more that have been forgotten to most of us: George Moore, Joseph McCabe, Olive Schreiner, Lowes Dickinson. Among their heresies: a deracinating globalism, a Nietzschean worship of power and will, journalism that substitutes cheap sensationalism for the real sensationalism of telling the truth, praising the metaphorical “youth” of “young nations” that already show signs of decay, the prideful assumptions of anthropology, novelists toadying to the rich, novelists presuming to represent the poor, scientific reductivism, pragmatism, militarism, nationalism, neopaganism, atheism, lack of a sense of humor, pride.

Heretics is much too complex and diffuse to summarize easily. A chapter-by-chapter breakdown, especially if including asides and subordinate arguments, would run to thousands of words. But what all of Chesterton’s critiques have in common regardless of target is an objection to the simplifying tendency of ideologies. Each view, whether the scientism of Wells or the art-for-art’s-sake amorality of Whistler, offers to make sense of the world according to some easy-to-use heuristic, and each fails either because it is founded on a misapprehension of the truth that warps one’s entire perception, or because it forces fragments of the truth to stand in for the whole.

And so those trying, in Chesterton’s day, to revive a pagan ethic do so out of a belief that ancient pagans were unencumbered with the guilt imposed by Christianity and “were continually crowning themselves with flowers and dancing about in an irresponsible state.” Actual paganism was diffuse, devoted to inscrutable gods, and sad, the pagans ironically being “praised as disobedient when they had only one great virtue—civic obedience” and “envied and admired as shamelessly happy when they had only one great sin—despair.” Remove religion and ethics from the question and focus on genetics and race, and one has the jingoist ethno-nationalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “that silly Teutonism which knows as little about England as it does about anthropology, but which is always talking about Vikings.”

Sometimes the heresies seem to be opposites—a point Chesterton does not draw attention to, but which would go on to be an important part of his argument in the sequel to Heretics, Orthodoxy. In two interesting chapters on the fiction of his day, Chesterton criticizes novelists who flatter the pretentions of millionaires and aristocrats by making them sharp, witty, and urbane and their seeming opposites, novelists who explore the plight of the lower classes and depict them as degraded, helpless, even monstrous. Chesterton will abide neither obsequiousness to the rich nor condescension to the poor, neither of which is democratic in the sense of men conceiving of themselves as equals or brothers. Even “hereditary despotism” is to be preferred to managerialism under such types, “because with that you have the ordinary man misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect for him at all.”

In addition to being untrue, these heresies also—as the above examples demonstrate—tend to make their adherents pretentious. This comes across clearly in perhaps the most entertaining and purely Chestertonian essay, “On Mr McCabe and the Divine Frivolity.” Former Catholic priest turned freethinking gadabout Joseph McCabe had, in an aside in one book, reproached Chesterton for writing about serious subjects lightheartedly. Chesterton’s opening salvo is still laugh-out-loud funny:

It is quite useless to talk about profane jesting. All jesting is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so very solemn after all. . . . It is not I; it is not even a particular class of journalists or jesters who make jokes about the matters which are of most awful import; it is the whole human race. If there is one thing more than another which any one will admit who has the smallest knowledge of the world, it is that men are always speaking gravely and earnestly and with the utmost possible care about the things that are not important, but always talking frivolously about the things that are. Men talk for hours with the faces of a college of cardinals about things like golf, or tobacco, or waistcoats, or party politics.

Tellingly, it is humorlessness and pride that provoke Chesterton’s sharpest jabs. He respects all the other heretics in this book—and names them because he respects them as sincere men—but the puffed up, he implies, lack the honesty and humility to argue with him, or be saved.

First published in the summer of 1905, Heretics was assembled from some of Chesterton’s columns for the London Daily News. They vary greatly in length and detail and the subject changes sometimes dramatically from chapter to chapter. What keeps them from becoming a hodgepodge, a mere collection of essays, is Chesterton’s inimitable cheery tone, consistent conceptual overlap and recurring themes between chapters, and his already coherent worldview.

Chesterton’s highest formal schooling before becoming a journalist was the Slade School of Art, which is worth remembering because his sensibilities are above all artistic. He knew the marriage of hard work and pure enjoyment that sets the artist apart from the dabbler (“[t]he artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs”) and hates the squandering of natural talent on self-serious intellectual projects—as when he praises the “violent vision” of Wells’s early science fiction novels before tracing his descent into drab works of “scientific” history and social theory—and the blinkered imagination of the ideologue. Where Chesterton critiques the abstractly rational, the scientific, and the calculated, he favors the humble and common sense and argues for the organic, traditional, and intuitive, all of which are neighbors to the mystical.

Again, these points prefigure key elements of Orthodoxy.

The joy of his personality is key in a book like this, which in other hands would be twenty chapters of invective. Chesterton is charitable toward his “heretics” throughout, even to the humorless, and does not attribute base motives to them or suggest they are part of a conspiracy to bring down Western Civilization. A true happy warrior, he weighs them case-by-case, praises them where they deserve it and criticizes in a spirit of friendly correction. Their errors have helped him see the truth, and he wants to share.

Heretics is a lively critique and a perceptive survey of informed, fashionable opinion in Chesterton’s time. Though not straightforwardly an apologetic work, its arguments against the heretics and their heresies suggest the outline of an alternative, which he names in the introductory and concluding chapters: orthodoxy.

Heretics was well-received in its time even if, 120 years later, we agree with Chesterton biographer Ian Ker that it is a “major, if not great work.” What keeps it from being among the shortlist of Chesterton’s greatest hits and what poses the book’s biggest obstacle for the latter-day reader is precisely his strength as a journalist and a critic of his peers—his topicality. Kipling, Shaw, and Wells may still be familiar names to modern readers, but their social and philosophical ideas are likely to be less well-known. Lesser lights like McCabe or Moore or Dickinson, the politicians Chesterton namedrops (of whom probably only Arthur Balfour may now ring a bell, and likely not for good reasons), or those, like Whistler, known purely for images, are mostly forgotten.

I last read Heretics during grad school at Clemson sixteen or seventeen years ago. Many of the names were unfamiliar then but I got the gist. Rereading it now I know much more about Chesterton’s world, but there were still many names that sent me to Google for more detail. To get the most out of Heretics, one needs an annotated edition—with the disruption to the flow of Chesterton’s argument that that potentially entails—or preexisting knowledge of the period.

And yet—no matter what, Chesterton’s wit and fundamental arguments shine through. A modern reader may not know or remember much about Teutonism or Celticism now, but they’ll recognize the simplifying impulse of racial or class or gender essentialism of all kinds and all political stripes. A modern reader may not recognize the trend of novels about witty aristocrats, but they’ll know movies and books that flatter a certain kind of knowing irony or cynical, unsmiling flippancy, especially among our present elites—office drones, politicians, techbros. Try to read the following without thinking of Aaron Sorkin’s characters:

This new frivolity is inadequate because there is in it no strong sense of an unuttered joy. The men and women who exchange the repartees may not only be hating each other, but hating even themselves. Any one of them might be bankrupt that day, or sentenced to be shot the next. They are joking, not because they are merry, but because they are not; out of the emptiness of the heart the mouth speaketh.

The heretics have changed but the heresies haven’t. As Michael Ffinch argues in his biography of Chesterton, the book is “at its best . . . not so much when he was attacking the ideas of men like Shaw,” whom readers may or may not know much about, “but more when he was attacking some of the fads of the time, and in as much as some of these have remained fads until our time, Chesterton’s comments are still relevant.”

Heretics seems an unlikely book to remain relevant, but it’s true. It is also, like all of Chesterton’s books, immensely quotable. I’ve tried to avoid quoting the most famous passages here, but one in particular suggests itself for the end of this review:

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and, eclipse. . . . For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

A paradox worth remembering both in Chesterton’s age of heretics and ours.

A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls

It’s been a busy fall, and despite my best hopes for a revived Chestertober the month is already two-thirds over. I nevertheless hope to put out at least a few posts on some of Chesterton’s non-fiction, including a few of his earliest essays and one of his most famous books. Here’s the down payment.

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Recently on Substack a post from someone who has made a career out of lamenting the state of modern literature accused the culture of a “seriousness crisis.” We are not all reading Dostoevsky in our leisure time, you see. It seems sublimely appropriate, then, that the first essay in GK Chesterton’s first published volume of essays is so writerly, so populist in attitude, and—in keeping with Chesterton’s well-earned reputation as a prophet—still so relevant.

When Chesterton wrote “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” he was responding to much the same criticism. The penny dreadful, cheap exciting fiction for the masses, but especially young men and boys, was a wildly popular medium in the late Victorian period and prefigured the rise of pulp fiction. Critics scoffed at the novels’ vulgarity and sentimentality, decried their simplistic artistry and bad writing, and warned that their romanticized, action-packed stories of bandits, swordsmen, knights, cowboys, and other adventurers promoted violence and immorality.

Chesterton defends the penny dreadful with an appropriate tu quoque. “Bad story writing is not a crime,” he argues, pointing out that Hall Caine, a well-regarded novelist whose books trafficked in socially conscious moralizing, “walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax.” More damningly, he argues that fears of penny dreadfuls leading to crime—an accusation familiar to us in arguments about video games—are overwrought and misplaced. The heroes of both highly praised modern novels and the classics do the same things, and more:

Among these stories there are a certain number which deal sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates, which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely the same thing as Scott’s Ivanhoe, Scott’s Rob Roy, Scott’s Lady of the Lake, Byron’s Corsair, Wordsworth’s ‘Rob Roy’s Grave,’ Stevenson’s Macaire, Mr. Max Pemberton’s Iron Pirate, and a thousand more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents. Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in Ivanhoe will lead a boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; no one thinks that the incautious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will set him up for life as a blackmailer.

A lot of this worry, as belied by the frequent accusation that penny dreadfuls are “vulgar,” is simple class bias. A businessman, lawyer, or aristocrat thrilling to Sir Walter Scott in his drawing room is acceptable but a delivery boy enjoying a cowboy novel during his lunch break is cause for concern.

It is easy to point out this kind of hypocrisy but Chesterton does not stop at rubbishing the critics’ arguments. Although frankly admitting their lack of artistry—they embrace hero and villain cliches, stock situations, and adventure tropes—Chesterton asserts that they meet human needs. Two, in fact.

First, the stories in penny dreadfuls, despite centering on bandits and pirates and other dodgy sorts, presented characters adhering to and living according to codes of honor, acting as though life were precious and worth living, and believing in right and wrong. Their thieves were more careful about morality than the protagonists—definitely not heroes—of tasteful realistic fiction:

It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables. . . . And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German Professors) whether morality is valid at all.

For all their airs of seriousness, it is the highbrows who are the moral threat and the lowbrows who are embracing and reinforcing morality, in however backward a fashion. As Chesterton would put it a few years later in Orthodoxy, “The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal.” This moral aspect is what keeps Chesterton’s defense of popular fiction from devolving into the tired “At least they’re reading!” argument. We’ll return to that.

Second, and more deeply rooted in human nature: regardless of the artistry or content of the penny dreadfuls, that they excite and stir the reader at all is worthwhile. “[P]eople must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories,” he writes. “The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important.” Decry the cheap novel’s poor writing and simplistic plot and characters all you want, but “it is not vulgar intrinsically—it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.”

“A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls” is one of my favorite Chesterton essays, not least for the reminder in that last line quoted above—which actually comes from the first paragraph of the essay. (Chesterton, patron saint of topsy-turvydom, was turning everything on its head right from the beginning.) Seriousness is not the only reason to read fiction, or even the strongest one. Chesterton offers an excellent answer to the kind of po-faced critic I began this post with, the kind of person who thinks their tastes are serious and that everyone else is goofing off, but it is also worth considering what has changed since Chesterton’s day.

Of the two crucial points in the essay, the second is best and remains truest. We are storytelling creatures, understanding and remembering our lives as stories. We need stories to make sense of the world, and meeting this need is more vital to the mind and soul than good taste. After all, taste changes with the age. (Who among us doesn’t encounter the name Hall Caine and have to look him up?) Chesterton suggests that the imagination is fundamental, not an artifact, and we must attend to it—especially now, when our imaginations are continuously threatened with dullness by screens, passive entertainment, and machines that aim to take over what little bit of our thinking is left to us.

It’s Chesterton’s first point that requires emendation. Whatever fumes of morality the boys of Chesterton’s examples picked up from the “vulgar” examples of Dick Deadshot or Robin Hood is long gone from popular fiction. The excitement of the bestselling fiction today is not provided through action, danger, and suspense but through pornographic titillation—blunt, artless, explicit, and geared toward self-absorption and self-indulgence if not self-abuse—and in increasingly extreme forms. Vulgarity ain’t what it used to be.

While the culture pays lip service to the imagination and the appetite for stories is alive and being fed, we cannot trust even vulgar literature to excite it in helpful ways anymore. As CS Lewis, a noted Chesterton fan, would write later, “spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

The threat of technologies that compete for control of the imagination—addicting it and then dulling it—means the task of storytelling is as important as ever, with the added pressure that the culture has turned against the morality even cheap fiction used to instill. The burden writers today must shoulder is not to feed the storytelling instinct but to shape it well, and to worry less about seriousness or elite taste and more about setting imaginations aflame.

Chesterton and the Pout-Pout Fish

In case you aren’t familiar with it, The Pout-Pout Fish is a rhyming kids’ picture book about a glum fish who is so downbeat and pessimistic he makes everyone around him miserable. Mr Fish fatalistically assigns his attitude to his frowny appearance: “It’s just the way I am.”

Over the course of the book, Mr Fish encounters four friends—a clam, a jellyfish, a squid, and an octopus—who show decreasing amounts of patience with his sad sack ways. Finally, having rebuffed even the friend who is willing to tell it to him straight, Mr Fish is approached by a newcomer. A “bright and brilliant swimmer,” she doesn’t even say hello, just kisses him on the cheek and swims away. Mr Fish is transformed, and dedicates himself to spreading love and cheer to everyone around him.

Our twins have picked The Pout-Pout Fish for their bedtime story almost every night for what feels like months. I don’t actually mind, because it’s fun to do Mr Fish’s voice and the boys enjoy his repeated refrain of “Blub, bluuub, bluuuuuub.”

But it has also brought Chesterton to mind every time I’ve read it. In Chapter IV of Orthodoxy, “The Ethics of Elfland,” Chesterton meditates on the truth we learn from fairytales. As a child, he writes, he was “fed on fairy tales” and derived an “ethic and philosophy” from them. He mentions several examples, but one in particular has always stuck with me:

There is the great lesson of “Beauty and the Beast”; that a thing must be loved before it is loveable.

As silly and fun as The Pout-Pout Fish is, this is the drama at the center of it. Mr Fish’s friends try sweet-talking, cajoling, playing on his sympathies as a friend, and bluntly telling him he’s a drag to be around, and all fail to reform him. Rational appeal, social convention, and force don’t work. But the newcomer’s wordless act of love converts him.

Chesterton notes that the “certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, . . . has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.” There are plenty of ideas vying for attention and space in our children’s imaginations. Only a few will be “ratified” by real life experience. Love as the ultimate tool of redemption, making lovable what was once intolerable, is an important one.

Spring reading 2026

William Howard Taft reading at his desk c. 1904. The label pasted to the spine reads: “Copyright. Cannot Leave the Library.”

As personally difficult as this spring has been, with thirty-three books down—and almost perfectly divided between fiction and non-fiction—this turned out to be a stellar season for reading. Not only did I bulk up my non-fiction reading after a couple years of fiction-heavy lists, I also read more sci-fi and fantasy than usual. Almost all of it, of whatever genre, was good. I had to make myself leave things out of the list below, the ruthlessly selected best of the season.

The way I divide the year for these posts is always a bit arbitrary, but for the purposes of this one, “spring” is everything from New Year’s Day to the end of classes last week. As usual I present these in no particular order, and with my one audiobook “read” marked with an asterisk.

That said, I hope y’all enjoy and can find something good to read below:

Favorite non-fiction

On Conan Doyle, by Michael Dirda—A succinct and insightful overview of Conan Doyle’s life and work, with special attention to the Holmes stories as well as his more often overlooked work: Professor Challenger in The Lost World, the Hundred Years’ War novels The White Company and Sir Nigel, and the Napoleonic adventures of Brigadier Gerard. I was especially interested to learn more about Conan Doyle himself: his personal life and character, his intelligence and work ethic, and even his much-derided interest in spiritualism and fairies.

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, by David Woodman—A solid new biography of Alfred the Great’s grandson, the first king of a unified kingdom of England, that gives a lot of attention to the complicated political situation of the time and just how much we can and can’t know about what was going on. Occsionally this means extended parsing of primary sources rather than narrative, which may not appeal to the general reader, but that comes with the territory. An Æthelstan biography is also going to be a historiographical paper to some extent and I think Woodman balances it all well. I used The First King of England as an example of the judicious use of incomplete sources for historical inferences here.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans—This is an insightful series of character sketches of people from all levels of the Reich, starting with a 100-page biography of Hitler himself (which I’d love to see the publisher break out as its own little paperback, an ideal classroom text) and the Nazi Party’s elite (Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, and the like) down through the functionaries and ideologues and enablers (e.g. Heydrich, Eichmann, Hess, Hans Frank, Franz von Papen) to the ordinary people doing the work of the Reich: the generals, the gunmen who traveled Eastern Europe massacring Jews, the camp guards, the propagandists, and even the ordinary citizen. Evans has chosen good subjects and, taken together, these sketches give the reader a top-to-bottom feel for the culture of the Reich and how it worked—especially with regard to dimensions of the regime that don’t get as much attention, like labor organization or even motherhood—as well as the sheer variety of people it involved. Not all of them were motivated by the same things and not all of them explained or justified their participation the same way.

The Desecration of Man, by Carl Trueman—A more narrowly focused “how we got here” account from Trueman, this time looking specifically at how a changing understanding of anthropology—how we answer “What is man?”—was meant to liberate but has instead undermined and destroyed. Full review on the blog here.

The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, by Matthew Restall—An interesting multi-layer biography of Columbus, one that starts with the man (about whom, contrary to a widespread myth, we can know quite a lot), his goals and pretensions (he was a single-mindedly ambitious climber), and what he actually accomplished and follows his various “lives” through the five hundred years since: as a symbol of Manifest Destiny, an icon of Italian-American patriotism, a would-be Catholic saint, a progressive scapegoat for all the bad that has happened in the Western hemisphere ever since. Wide-ranging, deeply researched, fair to Columbus the man—warts and all—and attentive to how his character and actions have been interpreted in shifting contexts. I learned a lot from this book.

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass, by Dave Barry—A funny and often moving memoir covering everything from Barry’s childhood in New York and his early years in journalism to some of his antics as a reporter and his work since retirement. Hugely enjoyable.

Honorable mentions:

• The Sleep You’re Longing For: How Rest Connects Us to Happiness, Healing, and Hope*, by Ken Wytsma—A helpful short guide to sleep, sleep problems, and some of the ways we can make life more generally restful, not just grudgingly recharging for a few hours at night.

• The Way of Dante: Going Through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven with C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams, by Richard Hughes Gibson—A series of expanded lectures on Dante’s reception and interpretation by Williams, Lewis, and Sayers that illuminates all four. I was especially intrigued to learn how late Sayers came to Dante, and with what overwhelming gusto she embraced the Comedy.

• Cicero: A Very Short Introduction, by Yelena Baraz—Exactly what it says on the tin: a short overview of Cicero’s life, legal and political career, and his literary and philosophical work. An approachable place to start and just over a hundred pages. Would pair well with reading his letters, speeches, or especially late essays like On Old Age or On Duties.

Special mentions

I’ve started including these “special mentions” sections for books that are neither straightforward fiction nor non-fiction as usually understood. Most of the time this is epic poetry. This time you’ve got not just any epic but the original, the very first, as well as some important primary sources for American history.

Gilgamesh, translated by Simon Armitage—A new translation of the epic that prioritizes coherence and readability above the precise indication of every gap and mystery in the text as it has come down to us. At that it succeeds admirably and was a pleasure to read. It was exciting and moving and conveyed the foreignness of the ancient world in an approachable and readable way. This is likely the version I’d recommend to people coming to Gilgamesh for the first time.

An interesting side issue: In his introduction, Armitage states forthrightly that he does not know the languages concerned and worked from literal translations by experts, which to me raises the question of how much this can be called a “translation” in the normal sense of the word, but Alan Jacobs persuasively argues here that Armitage’s project to craft a Gilgamesh that “will be exciting, that will make the text vivid” is a worthy one.

The Alien and Sedition Acts—Part of a new series from Modern Library, this volume collects four laws signed by John Adams over about a month in the summer of 1798—bills that extended the timeline for naturalization, empowered the president to arrest and deport foreigners, and criminalized written or spoken criticism of Congress and the president—and the Jefferson- and Madison-authored Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions that challenged them.

The laws themselves are bad enough, but most galling are the responses by several state legislatures to the resolutions, all of which assert that, nah, the violation of the 1st and 10th Amendments is in fact constitutional, that Kentucky and Virginia are the real threats, and that anyone who loves the union should back up whatever the president does in time of crisis. (Notably, these responses all come from northern and New England states. Massachusetts goes out of its way to praise the wisdom of Adams, an obsequious defense of its hometown boy.) The longest document, Madison’s background notes on the Virginia Resolution, is an angry masterclass on federalism, the proper relationship between state and central governments, the danger of the loose interpretation of the constitution pioneered by Alexander Hamilton (mentioned, but not by name) and the failure of the states to protect their prerogatives.

The introduction, by a civil rights lawyer who has written about growing up as an illegal alien, suggests the publication of these texts now is some kind of gotcha to the current administration’s immigration policies, but the documents themselves are much, much more concerned about states’ rights and free speech. What the book really shows is that the violation of the 10th Amendment, the federal government’s bent toward setting itself up in newer and more expansive spheres of authority, the expectation that the states fall into line behind whatever the executive wants, and the desire to curtail speech in the name of preventing the spread of false information are as old as the Republic. The Antifederalists’ fears of an overreaching, tyrannical federal government, something all conservatives should be concerned about, were not fulfilled in Obama, LBJ, FDR, or even Woodrow Wilson, but came true almost immediately. A sobering consideration.

Favorite fiction

This section will be somewhat shorter not out of any lack of good reading—this was an exceptional spring for fiction—but because I managed to review a lot of these in full, dedicated posts of their own. I’ve linked to those below.

Mars in Aries, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—In the days leading up to World War II, an Austrian cavalry reservist falls in with a strange crowd and becomes infatuated with the mysterious woman at their center. Then he’s deployed, and his recurring visions of past people and events start to merge with reality. Perhaps my favorite Lernet-Holenia so far. Full review on the blog here.

The Mills of the Gods, by Tim Powers—One I had hoped to review in full but couldn’t find the time to. Powers’s latest takes place in 1920s Paris, where expat American illustrator Harry Nolan finds himself involved with a young woman named Vivi and both end up on the run from the sauteurs, a centuries-old secret society striving for immortality by stealing into the bodies of specially prepared newborns. The sauteurs are dangerous and possessive of their target bodies, and Vivi’s most especially. Together, Harry and Vivi must free her and, with clues gathered from Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and a sympathetic and helpful Gertrude Stein, unearth the true history of the sauteurs and defeat them permanently. The plot moves briskly and I was absorbed from the first chapter. I greatly enjoyed the Parisian setting, the cameos by Lost Generation artistic figures, and the connections to the ancient world Powers establishes for the sauteur cult. (As deadly and satanically parasitic as the villains are, I mercifully did not find them as spiritually oppressive as the succubi of The Stress of Her Regard.) But I most liked the relationship between Harry and Vivi. Both the First World War veteran Harry and intended sauteur host-body Vivi are damaged goods in need of redemption, and while they begin in mutual suspicion and work together out of necessity they move, over the course of the novel, through collaboration and friendship to something, not coincidentally, full of grace. A beautiful and moving ending caps a breakneck supernatural adventure.

A Rough Shoot, by Geoffrey Household—A lean, tightly-focused thriller from the author of Rogue Male. An English businessman and veteran of World War II surprises what he thinks are poachers on his patch of rented hunting land and accidentally kills one. His effort to cover it up embroils him in deeper, more complicated, and more far-reaching events than he could have anticipated. Full review on the blog here.

State of Siege, by Eric Ambler—An English engineer working in postwar Indonesia has finished his contract and hopes to fly home but finds himself, and a casual date, in the center of a military revolution. Fast-moving and suspenseful while also sweeping in scope, this is almost certainly my favorite of Amber’s post-WWII novels. Full review on the blog here.

The Lost Language of Oysters, by Alexander McCall Smith—The latest in McCall Smith’s long-running series about hapless German philologist Professor Dr Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, this is a unified novel rather than a collection of interrelated short stories and finds the good Professor jockeying for status with a pesky old colleague and, to his own surprise, falling in love with an American linguist after she gives him a ride on her motorcycle. The more recent entries in the series are gentler and don’t have some of the darkness or ironic bite of the earlier ones, but they are always enjoyable, funny, and—just occasionally—surprisingly sweet. This one has some particularly good twists and surprises and a great ending.

Other Paths to Glory, by Anthony Price—Paul Mitchell, a young military historian studying a battle on the Western Front, receives two strange visits on the same day: the first is with two intimidating, authoritative men who are clearly not what they say they are; the second is with an assassin who throws him into a canal in an attempt to stage a suicide. The first two men, Audley and Colonel Butler, who were introduced in Price’s The Labyrinth Makers (which I briefly reviewed here), come to Mitchell’s aid and together they return to the former battlefield. What could be hidden there that would lead to murder and, with a secret international conference about to occur nearby, a threat to world peace? Another good thriller with a historical dimension from Price.

Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn—My first Star Wars novel. Picking up a few years after The Return of the Jedi, this story follows the New Republic—formerly the Rebellion—through instability and infighting in the aftermath of success and the emergence of a new threat from the Empire, the skilled and intelligent Grand Admiral Thrawn. A fun read, and truer to the spirit and characters of the originals than much of what’s been sold as Star Wars since. Full review on the blog here.

Honorable mentions:

• The High Crusade, by Poul Anderson—Vintage sci-fi with a fun hook—knights mustering for a crusade in medieval England encounter aliens, commandeer their ship, and set off on a crusade across the stars—that actually delivers. Brisk and enjoyable.

• Spy Hook, by Len Deighton—The beginning of Deighton’s second Bernie Samson trilogy. A former secret agent murdered, a slush fund missing, old colleagues back from the dead, and Samson’s burgeoning romance with a younger woman threatened. Not quite as tight as the Game Set Match books but an involving story with a lot of surprises.

• Beast in the Shadows, by Edogawa Rampo—An eerie, atmospheric, disturbing short novel in which a woman who believes she is being stalked approaches a crime novelist for help. Rampo was a devotee of Poe (Edogawa Rampo is his pen name, a Japanese near-equivalant of Edgar Allan Poe) and it shows clearly: concision, intricate construction, darkness, a beautiful tormented woman, violence, and insanity. Bleak but enthralling.

• The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham—A young boy living in a farm community that, following a nuclear war, has reorganized itself around an intense religious vigilance for genetic mutation questions what he’s learned about mutants and realizes that his gift for telepathy, which he had always taken for granted, may be endangering him and his friends. Not my favorite Wyndham but a brilliantly imagined situation with a suspenseful final third.

Favorite kids’ books

The Raven: The Classic Poem, by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Chloe Bristol—A beautifully illustrated new edition of Poe’s masterpiece, with moody, atmospheric but kid-friendly pictures. Full review on the blog here.

Bones and Berserkers, by Nathan Hale—A fun anthology of short horror stories—some true, some fictional, several somewhere in-between—by one of my kids’ favorite graphic novelists. Full review on the blog here.

Corduroy, by Don Freeman—A teddy bear for sale in an apartment store wants a home and finds unexpected fulfilment. I somehow made it to adulthood without having read Corduroy. I read it to our twins and just about lost it. A simple, beautiful and moving story with a lot of emotional and even spiritual depth.

Count Yourself Calm, by Eliza Huie, illustrated by Mike Henson—We got our own copy of this picture book after an occupational therapist worked through it with one of our kids. It helps create a simple routine for calming anger, fear, frustration, and other “BIG feelings,” per the subtitle, by counting down gifts from God: parts of creation that bring us joy, the gifts he’s given us, the people who love us, and more. Simple and helpful for both kids and adults!

Ember Falls, by SD Smith—The second of Smith’s Green Ember fantasy series about anthropomorphic rabbits Heather and Picket; another fun adventure and a worthy followup to the original.

Looking ahead

I’m already into the reading for this year’s John Buchan June—the fifth June since I began this event!—so be on the lookout for that to begin in just a few weeks. I’ve also got a lot of other good fiction and non-fiction lined up and I hope to slow things down a bit for a few older, longer novels in the late summer or fall. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and I hope this list will have led you to something you can enjoy this summer!

Something special and small

I mentioned last month that I’ve been doing a leisurely reread of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. I finished it last night which, being Maundy Thursday, the evening before Good Friday, turned out to be perfect timing.

I did a blog event I called Chestertober a couple years ago but wasn’t able to follow it up last fall. I’m considering reviving it this year. If I can manage it, Orthodoxy will be one of the major books I mean to review. It was my introduction to Chesterton twenty years ago—I recall reading it during the summer of what must have been 2006—and proved genuinely revelatory. It’s frequently quoted for a reason. I could pull out a dozen passages per chapter, minimum, and comment on them at length and still find more to consider and work through on another reading.

For now, as part of observing and thinking about Good Friday, here are two that leapt out at me in the final chapter last night.

First, near the end, as Chesterton ties together the book’s arguments, he narrows his focus briefly from broad philosophical and cultural conflicts to the mischaracterization of Christianity as “something weak and diseased” and the character of Christ himself, who has often been portrayed as “a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly”:

“The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque”

Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god—and always like a god. . . . The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence.

A brilliantly concise summary of the moralistic “be nice” Jesus manufactured out of a variety of ulterior motives and the man we actually encounter in the Gospels. The contrast is perhaps most striking if one returns to the Gospels after several years, or reads them straight through in a reader’s Bible—a topic I intend to write about one of these days—rather than parceling them out in discrete episodes or tidied up storybook versions. And the “extraordinary” quality of Christ is nowhere more apparent than in the events of Holy Week.

Second, and most personally moving to me, was the book’s penultimate paragraph. Having considered the way paganism, for all its strengths and admirable qualities, still left men in despair, the state to which Christianity’s critics threaten to return the world, Chesterton closes Orthodoxy with his most important point:

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. . . . Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small.

I did not recall this passage from previous readings; it had not stuck out to me or stuck with me. That changed this time.

“Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.”

I’ve mentioned before the struggle that this winter and spring have been, of the insomnia and depression and paranoia and exhaustion. The melancholy of January grew so deep during our back-to-back weekends of ice and snow that I picked up Orthodoxy precisely because of its early passages on madness. Chesterton has a reputation for rescuing diseased minds from the brink and, though whatever I was going through wasn’t that severe, I reckoned I needed it. And it worked.

But to begin with madness—reaching for an old favorite as a comfort at a time when I felt like I was losing my mind—and to end with the above passage… that felt truly providential. Reading last night, I recognized myself from two months ago. Grief, melancholy, pessimism—these are my natural bent anyway but had somehow become “the fundamental thing.” Something had gone badly wrong. But far from mere description, this passage is also prescriptive. It can feel like this state lasts forever, but thanks to Christ these will only be temporary.

Already they have been lifting. Good Friday is a chance to remember that they will, if not now, be lifted forever. They’ve already been conquered, reduced to “something special and small.”

I hope this is an encouragement to y’all as it has been to me. If you haven’t read Orthodoxy, do so. I first picked it up because I had learned, somewhere, somehow, of Chesterton’s influence on CS Lewis. But I’ve read and reread it over the years on its own merits. Every time I enjoy my favorite parts again, and every time some part I had never noticed before touches something in me that I never knew needed help.

Richard Cory and ambiguity

One of my favorite poets is Edwin Arlington Robinson. Though both popular and respected in his day, winning the Pulitzer for poetry three times, he seems largely forgotten now. I suspect this is largely a matter of timing: he mastered traditional form and meter, especially the sonnet and villanelle, just as Pound and Eliot and company were coming along to blow it all up.

Robinson’s skill also makes his tightly constructed verse seem effortless, even conversational. It’s clear and understandable—something else the modern poetry establishment, which came more and more to resemble a clique or cult, won’t abide—and mines powerful emotions from everyday scenes and images. Perhaps his best-known poems in this regard are a series of character sketches describing people from a fictitious New England village: “Reuben Bright,” “Aaron Stark,” “Luke Havergal,” “Cliff Klingenhagen,” and my personal favorite—read it and you’ll get why—“Miniver Cheevy.”

Another favorite, and one of Robinson’s most memorable, challenging, and dark, is “Richard Cory.” Take a minute and read it—I’m going to spoil it.

In sixteen lines, Robinson introduces us to a handsome, elegant, popular, courteous, and, yes, wealthy local gentleman, a man with everything going for him. Envy is perhaps too strong a word for the community’s attitude—Richard Cory is too well respected, if not beloved, to warrant envy—but the anonymous speaker of the poem makes it clear that Richard Cory lives in a world everyone else only aspires to. And then Richard Cory kills himself.

I still feel the shock of the final line all the years later, and the bitter irony with which it reframes the entire preceding poem. There is some ambiguity there—was Richard Cory discontent? ungrateful? depressed?—but the import is fairly clear: money can’t buy happiness, and you never know what troubles afflict someone of seemingly greater privilege than you.

The Simon and Garfunkel version, released on Sounds of Silence in 1966, traffics in a different kind of ambiguity. It’s less than three minutes long—listen to it here.

Paul Simon, in adapting Robinson’s poem, makes some noteworthy thematic changes. Where Robinson began with the impression Richard Cory gave his neighbors on the street and mentions his wealth last, Simon leads off with his wealth and even explains where it came from—an inheritance from his banker father, though we’re told later he owns a factory—highlighting the extent of his property and influence. “He had everything a man could want,” in this version, “Power, grace, and style,” which is the reverse of the human view Robinson gives us. (Simon also updates the outward signs of Richard Cory’s wealth for the swingin’ sixties with “the orgies on his yacht.”)

But the biggest change is the inclusion of a chorus, in which the anonymous speaker of Robinson’s poem, one of Richard Cory’s neighbors, comments on his own situation:

But I, I work in his factory
and I curse the life I’m living
and I curse my poverty
and I wish that I could be (3x)
Richard Cory.

The chorus comes around three times and, on its final repetition, which comes immediately after the announcement of Richard Cory’s suicide, it takes on a powerful irony. Much the way Richard Cory’s fate in the last line of Robinson’s original changes the feeling and meaning of the rest of the poem, in Simon’s lyric version it changes the tone and meaning of the chorus.

This is where the ambiguity arises. Just what kind of envy—certainly the appropriate word here—is the speaker revealing?

If Simon has directly addressed his adaptation anywhere, I haven’t seen it. But an interpretation I’ve run across again and again online takes the final repetition of the chorus to be an admission by the speaker that he wants, like Richard Cory, to kill himself. (This is the interpretation presented in the Wikipedia summary, which cites no sources.)

I don’t think this is correct. For one, it makes the speaker far too individual, where in both Robinson and the rest of Simon’s version the “we” and the “I” stand in for the whole community. It’s also nihilistic in a way I don’t feel jibes with the rest of the song or Simon’s general oeuvre. But, most importantly, I think it has a simpler, more straightforward meaning related to that of the original poem: people don’t learn. The desire for wealth and material comfort lead us to overlook, ignore, or wish away the problems that come with them. We all know money doesn’t buy happiness—it’s a cliche for a reason—but who actually lives as if they know that? Literature and mythology, not to mention real life, are full of people who choose wealth and success knowing it will destroy them.

The yearning-for-suicide reading, which is rooted in an apparent ambiguity, bothers me. I think it’s a misreading of the song, yes, but I also think ambiguity, which can be a valuable tool in the hands of a purposeful artist, is overvalued today. The ambiguous ending is a mainstay of twee arthouse cinema. But ambiguity ceases to be cute when applied to suicide.

While feeling down and exhausted over the last month I’ve been doing a slow reread of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. Chesterton’s light and frothy reputation is belied by his serious treatment of a subject like suicide. Here he is in Chapter V, “The Flag of the World,” writing forcefully about the deadly sin at the heart of it:

Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. . . . [H]e is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe.

The power of Robinson’s poem and Simon’s song derives from the assumed heinousness of Richard Cory’s act. That’s why it’s shocking in both. His wealth, personal elegance, and position in life only make it ironic, not less terrible. If Richard Cory’s suicide is just one more option, one a person with far more reasons to be bitter might justifiably desire to take, the entire story loses its meaning and weight.

Maybe that’s what Simon intended. I don’t know—but it would ruin the song. As good a song as it is, Robinson’s poem, in its structure and its properly used ambiguity, is better, and better for us.

Artistic appreciation comes first

I was revisiting Chesterton’s Everlasting Man over the weekend and was struck by this passage in the opening paragraph of Chapter V, “Man and Mythologies”:

It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It needs a poet to criticize it. There are more poets than non-poets in the world, as is proved by the popular origin of such legends. But for some reason I have never heard explained, it is only the minority of unpoetical people who are allowed to write critical studies of these popular poems. We do not submit a sonnet to a mathematician or a song to a calculating boy; but we do indulge the equally fantastic idea that folk-lore can be treated as a science. Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are not appreciated at all.

That last line is gold.

What I found striking was that Chesterton is essentially making the same point about understanding and interpreting mythology in general that Tolkien was in his lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Crtiics.”

“Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are not appreciated at all.”

— GK Chesterton

Early on Tolkien asks “why should we approach this, or indeed any other poem, mainly as an historical document?” And after summarizing the many prevailing angles of scholarship—and sometimes mere prejudice—from which Victorian and early 20th century scholars dismissed Beowulf as worthy of study, he argues: “[I]t is plainly only in consideration of Beowulf as a poem, with an inherent poetic significance, that any view of conviction can be reached or steadily held.”

And he makes his point about the misunderstood—or simply missed—artistic purpose of the poet in a famous allegory:

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: ‘This tower is most interesting.’ But they also said (after pushing it over): ‘What a muddle it is in!’ And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.

This is not to deny the value of doing the historical, cultural, and linguistic spadework to gain better understanding of mythology and its place in a given culture. That would be an overcorrection, as Tom Shippey has argued, in Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings, that Tolkien’s lecture unintentionally swung the pendulum too far away from studying Beowulf for its history, so that Beowulf and Hrothgar are assumed to have the historicity of Leda and the swan.

These things require balance, but the artistic and imaginative—what Chesterton elsewhere in the same book called “the inside of history”—must come before historical parsing and sociological datamining. Once the artistic purpose is understood, what the myth-makers were hoping to see or show us from the top of their construction, the rest will fall more clearly into place.