The Common Reader

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1. Philip Hensher: How Can You Kill a Book Like That? from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

   Sep 2, 20261 hr 28 min

   Philip Hensher and I discussed the history of the novel in Britain from Defoe to Hollinghurst. Philip is remarkably well-read and happy to share his real opinions. He can go from Swift to Fitzgerald on the turn of a pin, isn’t shy about holding his ground, and has some very firm views. People who read novels are protected against becoming violent. Ideas are not important in most novels. Walter Scott isn’t very good. Arnold Bennett is a top 20 novelist. Rachel Cusk has the best chance of being read in 100 years. That sort of thing. Here’s one exchange where we disagreed about what a novel is. HENSHER: Oh, Henry, Henry, how can you kill a book like that? How can you— OLIVER: Look, you can’t have Jane Austen without the Enlightenment, and you can’t have George Eliot without the secularization of Jesus, and you can’t have Tolstoy without all the slightly incredible things that he believed. HENSHER: No, let’s not talk about Tolstoy. OLIVER: No, but the list goes on, right? Henry James even, who is often called a man of no ideas, he’s an incredibly good liberal. He might be the best novelist about the liberal idea that one person should not be allowed to dominate over another, in private conditions rather than just government. These ideas are, in a way, they’re the thing that distinguish those writers. Jane Austen knows how to observe and how to present because she’s thinking about what it means underneath. HENSHER: I don’t know. I don’t know about that. OLIVER: I don’t even think you can have Middlemarch without John Stuart Mill’s political economy, in a way. HENSHER: Yes, that’s probably true. But George Eliot’s an unusual sort of novelist. Jane Austen, I mean, how do we know what did she—what did Jane Austen think about slavery in the boldest and most extreme form? I think we can deduce that she thought that people involved in the slave trade or who came near it, like Mrs. Elton, were not at all the sort of people that she would altogether like to hang out with. I think the same is true of Sir Thomas Bertram, and the weakness of his imagination is somehow tied in with the fact that he has a plantation where he doesn’t really think about the people that it affects. But already we’re into speculation. I don’t know what we can really deduce about Jane Austen’s idea, because she’s such a polyphonic novelist that we don’t find an idea being put forward without being able to find a character who’s saying the exact opposite. And sometimes one side of the argument is eventually dismissed, but not always, I think. I said this at the conference we had a discussion with. I think that when you boil a novel down to its absolute irreducible essentials, I think what you have is not a proposal or a view of society or anything like that. It’s Charles Pooter painting his bath red, or the moment in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Mother and Son when the son irrevocably falls out with his mother by telling her that he doesn’t want to have sugar in his tea anymore. From the very beginning, novelists have said, “What I’m writing about, I’m writing about nothing, and this is the virtue of what I’m doing. I’m writing about the utter triviality of everyday life.” And that, for me, is the enchantment. OLIVER: Well, some novelists have said that. HENSHER: A lot. OLIVER: Samuel Richardson didn’t say that. Samuel Richardson’s quite an important exception. HENSHER: No, but people said it about Richardson. OLIVER: I don’t think we—yes, but we can’t believe it. HENSHER: People definitely said—no, I think we can. OLIVER: Pamela is a novel of ideas. HENSHER: Well, it’s a novel that contains some ideas. OLIVER: Yes. Transcript HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Philip Hensher. Philip is a British novelist. He’s written books like The Northern Clemency , King of the Badgers , The Emperor Waltz , and now he’s got a new book, A History of the Novel in Britain , and you can see it there. It looks very pretty with Alice in Wonderland on the front. Philip, hello. PHILIP HENSHER: Hello, Henry. Novels Are for Everyone OLIVER: Now, to begin with, tell me about your grandmothers. HENSHER: Oh, okay. Yes, well, I finished the book because—I kept my story out of it, largely. I thought that I should go back to a time when everybody read novels. It wasn’t a specialist interest as it seems to be turning into. And I thought I would talk about my two grandmothers, both of whom left school when they were 14. They worked in very ordinary and hard jobs in factories all their lives, and they were passionate readers of novels. My paternal grandmother loved Dickens. She had a complete set of Dickens, which, I’ve discovered after some research, was issued as an offer by the Daily Express sometime in the 1930s. I’ve still got it, actually. I’m going to go and get a sample volume. It’s terribly cheaply produced. OLIVER: Oh, I’ve got that set. That’s great, yes. HENSHER: Yes. The publisher is otherwise only noted as a printer. The typeface is absolutely tiny. OLIVER: It’s painful. HENSHER: It’s painful to read. But she had it. She loved Dickens. My maternal grandmother, I don’t have any of her books, I’m afraid. I would say that she loved stories of family lives, of people interacting with each other. She loved Catherine Cookson, a now slightly forgotten popular novelist of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. But she read an enormous amount. I mean, she must have read one or two novels a week, every week of her life. I think that the thing that has disappeared since my grandmothers’ generation is the idea that everybody can read novels. They speak to everybody. They explore every part of life, potentially. What seems to be happening now, and I greatly regret it, is that it’s passing into the property of expensively educated people, people who have gone to private schools, perhaps, have certainly gone to university. And the sort of reader like my grandmother, who read Bleak House with a lot of pleasure, seems to be disappearing. So that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book, to make the case for how wonderfully enjoyable novels are. They’re not a duty, or they shouldn’t be a duty. They should just be founded in pleasure, however complex that pleasure might be. And I wanted to finish the book by citing my two grandmothers, who were such great readers. OLIVER: And as well as inheriting that reading culture from them, you got a lot of that at your school, didn’t you? HENSHER: Yes, I suppose I did. I think that it’s hard for me to say because I was in at the beginning of a sort of curriculum change, where there was an idea that we ought to give the kids things that are relevant or are going to appeal to their social concerns. So, I mean, this is going back to the very early 1980s. My set novel for A-level was The Grapes of Wrath , a classic tale of victimhood, really. Classic approved message. And the thing was, I think what started me off as a passionate reader of novels was a sort of rebellious turn away from that sort of thing. I read Jane Austen off my own bat. I read a lot of Dickens before I left school—things that we weren’t taught at all. And that’s always been the sort of reader that I am, saying, “Oh, we’re not supposed to be reading this,” you know? “It’s not on the curriculum.” Parliament and Thatcher OLIVER: What was it like working in the House of Commons? HENSHER: It was fine. [laughter] It was a very unusual experience. I don’t think it was a job that most people would’ve known existed. When people said to me, “Well, what do you actually do?” I used to say, “Well, you know the guys with wigs who sit in front of the Speaker? They’re my bosses.” And it was a strange, ritualistic experience, and you were physically in the middle of all these political dramas. When I started work, I started work in the House of Commons the beginning of September—this is September 1990. And six weeks later, there was all the drama of Mrs. Thatcher being thrown out, which I saw physically very close up. I didn’t have anything to do with it. You weren’t aware of what really was going on, but you were there. And Mrs. Thatcher swept past you at crisis moments. And that’s a very seductive place to be as a baby novelist, because novels are very often told by people occupying minor positions about the lives of the great. There’s a mid-20th-century novelist called Alfred Duggan who made a career out of writing historical novels of the lives of Roman emperors as told by their servants. And I think that, actually, the novel that I eventually wrote about the fall of Mrs. Thatcher, Kitchen Venom , which has just been rereleased 30 years later by an American publisher, McNally Editions, as a neglected classic—I think that was very much one of those books. Somebody who saw these vast and world-changing events physically close up without really being an insider at all. OLIVER: Do you think you’re more conservative than most other novelists today? Small c conservative. Or big c . HENSHER: No, I don’t—I think that I’ve never been someone who fits in with the on dit , as it were. I don’t think that I’m particularly bothered about what people think of what I might think. One of the least effective arguments to change somebody’s mind, it always seems to me, is to say, “But most people think . . .” Most people are wrong about things. So yes, I do think that actually having a close connection with political figures—after Mrs Thatcher, I did get to know some cabinet ministers, mostly, for one historical reason or another, Conservative cabinet ministers. And then coming out from spending the day with them and going to some book launch in the ’90s and having to listen to some member of the lumpen intelligentsia say, “Oh, these people are so evil.” I’m just going, you know, “Save the word for someone else.” So yes, I think that I have a kind of interest in some things that most literary people just aren’t interested in at all. And I think I’ve come to conclusions of my own about some burning contemporary issues. I don’t think of myself as conservative. I think of myself as a 19th-century liberal. But then again, I also think of Mrs. Thatcher as a 19th-century liberal. OLIVER: I was going to say. HENSHER: [laughs] I don’t know where that leaves you. OLIVER: I was very struck in, I think it’s something you wrote or an interview you gave, where you said that you were at a comprehensive school in Sheffield. And contrary to what we think was going on at the time, actually you had teachers who were quite pleased about Mrs. Thatcher getting elected. And in the age of bell-bottoms, people were going to Mahler concerts all the time. On that front, you have a different view of the way England was, as it were. HENSHER: Yes. It’s partly true that those people have been flattened out of history. Eight years before the miners’ strike, for instance, when Mrs. Thatcher did come to lead the Conservative Party, it wasn’t actually apparent to most people that she was the embodiment of all evil. And I think that people realized that something must be done. There’s a lot of retrospective reimagining of these things. I think the absolutely classic example is Mrs. Thatcher taking free milk away from, I think, seven to elevens. And this is always presented as a gesture of sheer evil. But I can tell you, as one of the children who drank the official milk, it was absolutely disgusting. It was delivered at 7:00 a.m., and then it sat there in the sun for four hours in the summer, and it was absolutely undrinkable. Nobody drank it. Absolutely nobody drank it. It was a complete waste of money. There might have been some point in giving people free milk in the 1940s when there was rationing, but by the 1970s, what was the point in the government buying you milk? It was frankly the job of your parents to buy milk. But we’re returning to that position. And people seem to be assuming it’s the job of the government to buy your children breakfast these days, but what do I know? Things changed later on, I would say. The mood in the North certainly altered when people saw that the economic basis of subsidy was going to be taken away and that the coal mines would close down, the steel industry would close down, and it would take a long time for these things to turn round. And I understand why people feel that, but it’s completely wrong to project that backwards into the 1970s. The 18th-Century Battleground OLIVER: Now, you did your PhD about the 18th century. Why do you think that century is so much less popular than the 19th century, which seems to get all the attention? But in fact, the 18th century is in a way a much richer, more diverse period, aesthetically. HENSHER: Well, I don’t really know, actually, because I got to the end of my PhD and I got my PhD, and after that, I have to say it took me a while to get back to it. It is interesting because it is the battleground between what people used to think literature ought to be, which was firmly rooted in the classics, and a sort of vernacular, raucous, popular form that’s based in shocking things like the lives of criminals, pornography even. Rather extraordinary books explaining how people ought to behave to get on in society, how they should write letters. So it’s a battleground between Alexander Pope, who I must say I do love, but a very kind of classical, perfect, absolutely glass-like surface; and then, people like Defoe, whose sentences just run on in a kind of chaotic way. It can’t have been very obvious which of them was going to triumph, really. Whether it was going to be the epic poem in rhyming couplets, after Virgil, or whether it was going to be a 300-page scandalous narrative about a prostitute in London today. Or rather, the answer would’ve been obvious, but it would’ve been obvious and wrong. So, there you go. So yes, it is interesting. It is interesting. I think for me, the 19th century is more interesting simply because of the sheer abundance of material. There are plenty of books in the 18th century, but not the kind of colossal tidal wave of thousands and thousands of novels coming out, sometimes nearly a thousand novels in a single year as the tide rolls on. And that, as anyone who reads my book will appreciate, is actually the thing that I really love: a lot of books turning up. OLIVER: Did you study with John Mullan for that PhD? HENSHER: No. I knew him a little bit. He was a fellow in the college where I did it, and I used to pass the time of day with him in the courtyard. But no, I had a succession of supervisors, but not him. Judging the Booker OLIVER: I see. Now, you also judged the Booker Prize. How did that change your understanding of the way the literary world really works, as it were? HENSHER: Well, I quite enjoyed judging the Booker Prize. It’s a very unusual experience because it’s the only experience you’re ever going to have of reading a lot of novels that are published at the same time. Even as books are being published, all sorts of filtering mechanisms are usually taking place. With that, I think I read 140, 150 novels, all of which were published in 2001. And when you do that, you see all sorts of tendencies that you hadn’t really suspected. I remember that year, the thing that was extraordinarily common, to the point of being maybe a third or even 40 percent of the books submitted, were novels with a dual time scheme, where in the present day a woman is working in a library and she finds a box, and it’s the love letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, and then back to Mary, Queen of Scots. I’m making it up. I can’t remember. And I think the novels that kicked that off are certainly some very good novels. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust in the 1970s, or later on, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library and Antonia Byatt’s Possession . But the sheer number that were imitating that structure was really extraordinary. The later insight that I had into a predominant obsession was when I judged the Giller Prize in Canada, and again, it was about 120, 130 novels. And this was about 10 years ago now. And it was predominantly tales by second-generation immigrants of historical stories of their parents’ country of origin. There were a lot of those, and I think that’s an admirable thing, so long as it doesn’t overrun the rights of Bangladeshis, say, still living in Bangladesh to write their own stories which will be heard. It’s an interesting thing, judging a big literary prize. I was very skeptical about the value of them. But that year, judging the Booker, I think we did a much better job than a lot of juries have done. We not only shortlisted Ian McEwan for his best novel, Peter Carey for his best novel, but Andrew Miller, excellent novel, Ali Smith’s first novel, and who were the other two? Oh, David Mitchell’s second novel, and Rachel Seiffert, a very talented novelist with a brilliant novel. Novels vs. Sport OLIVER: How many novels do you read in an ordinary week? HENSHER: Oh, no idea. Three, four, five, something like that. OLIVER: So you’re spending an awful lot of your time reading novels. HENSHER: Well, I don’t know about that. [laughter] I’d say I’m probably reading a novel three or four hours a day, something like that. I am a pathologically fast reader. I don’t want to go into it too much because it does sound insane. Remember that I’ve often wondered why someone like me manages to read so many books by most people’s standards. And I’ve come to the conclusion it’s because I have absolutely no interest in sport whatsoever. And it’s surprising the number of people who—I mean, if you watch a football match, even if you watch it at home without the trouble of getting on a train and going there, a football match is 90 minutes, but there’s half an hour in the middle; two hours. There’s an hour of disquisition before; that’s three hours. And there’s an hour afterwards; that’s four hours. Well, in four hours I can read a novel by Graham Greene. That’s not a challenge. And I think that if you completely remove that from your life then, yes, you can get through a lot of novels, particularly if, like me, you absolutely love novels. It’s never been anything but a sheer pleasure. Well, actually, I won’t say never because there were one or two months, writing this book, when I knew I was going to have to get over a personal distaste and read a very prolific novelist in bulk who I knew I couldn’t stand. I’m not going to say who they were; it’s not fair. But I think you might be able to guess a couple of them. OLIVER: Did you know V.S. Naipaul? HENSHER: A little, yes. OLIVER: What was he like? HENSHER: If you said the right thing to him, he would respond intelligently and interestingly. If you weren’t scared of him, that was better. I would guess that when he first met you, if he knew who you are by repute, as he happened to do with me because I was a book reviewer, he would say something borderline insulting. And if you absolutely didn’t react to that, if you just kind of carried on talking to him in a respectful and interested way, then things were fine. Things were absolutely fine. Also, I think he was just a deeply interesting human being who had the knack, when he was bored, of saying something that would kick up a bit of a fuss. And I associate with that. I would say that many of my best friends are very much like that, just saying things to kick up a fuss. I wasn’t any more than someone who just met him a handful of times. But I had the utmost respect for him, and I still do. OLIVER: Yes, he’s one of the great writers in English, I think. HENSHER: Yes, I agree. Dominance of the Novel OLIVER: Why is the novel so dominant as a literary form? HENSHER: What, now? Is it? OLIVER: Well, there is no longer the same kind of reach or popularity for—there’s no Addison, there’s no poet, there’s no . . . To me it seems like, for the common reader, as it were, it’s all novels with a few other things. Whereas in the 18th century, it was lots of everything. HENSHER: Well, I don’t

2. Zena Hitz: Gulliver's Travels and the Failures of Human Understanding from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

   Jun 3, 202650 min

   What a lot of fun I had talking to Zena Hitz about Gulliver’s Travels . As well as discussing Swift, slavery, genocide, rationality, Christianity, and science, Zena told me that good philosophy is like a box of cake mix and that a liberal education requires you to be freed of false expertise. I also took Zena on a detour to discuss Iris Murdoch, the Catherine Project, and modern philosophy. TRANSCRIPT HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Zena Hitz . Zena is a tutor at St. John’s College. She is a philosopher, the author of Lost in Thought . She runs the Catherine Project. She’s famous on Twitter . We don’t know how she does it all. Zena, welcome. ZENA HITZ: Thank you, Henry. It’s great to be here. OLIVER: And we’re talking about Gulliver’s Travels because it is 300 years since it was published, and it’s a book that you love. HITZ: A book that I’ve loved for a long time. First Encounter with Gulliver’s Travels OLIVER: So tell me, when did you first read it? HITZ: Well, it was an important moment for me. I was in high school, and I was admitted to a scholarship summer program which offered college courses at different campuses. There were some normal-looking college courses at normal-looking colleges. And then there was this course at St. John’s called Science as Literature, Literature as Science. [laughs] It had this description that was just unbelievable. And I thought to myself, “This is the one, obviously the one to go to.” So I went, and we read books that no one in their right mind would assign to high school students now, and maybe not then. The fragments of Parmenides , Plato’s Timaeus , selections from Aristotle’s Physics , Gulliver’s Travels . After reading a number of—preface to Ptolemy’s Almagest , geocentric astronomy. And we read Gulliver’s Travels after reading selections from Hooke’s Micrographia , so the inventor of the microscope, and Galileo’s Starry Messenger , which is one of the great first uses of the telescope to discover the nature of the moon and the satellites of Jupiter. So then we read Gulliver’s Travels . We also read Emma and Flannery O’Connor and various other things. And one of the faculty who was running it said at one point, “Well, we thought we’d throw a bunch of things together and see what you could do, what you could make of it. We didn’t actually have an idea of how these all fit together,” which I think was probably true. At any rate, I think I came to Gulliver’s Travels thinking about these scientists who were looking at very large things and very small things, and thinking in general about the follies of human perception, whether that was shown in literature or philosophy or what have you, the ways in which human perception and knowledge don’t work very well. And I think Swift is still one of the best people to— Gulliver’s Travels is still one of the best books about that because it’s in the mode of a travel diary, an eyewitness account. Gulliver is trained as a surgeon, by his own account. He at one point says he was a bit of a projector in his younger days, someone who undertook scientific projects. And he’s a terrible observer, the worst imaginable observer, and Swift so brilliantly lets us see through his eyes, lets us see all the things he doesn’t see. And I think it’s not just about seeing and knowing. It has a very profound, I think, moral and political set of commitments. So it’s a very humane book. It’s social criticism, but from a point of view of a very deep humanity. So I’ve always loved the book for these reasons since then. I came back to it more recently because it is part of the curriculum at St. John’s. So when I came back to teach there, I began to reread it. The other experience I had was that I wrote a long essay on it when I was an undergraduate. So those are my—I’m not any kind of expert. My knowledge of the historical context of the book is limited. It’s not zero, but it’s limited. But I have always loved it as an account of human understanding and its failures and the way that might impact how we live and how happy we can be. The Houyhnhnm Problem OLIVER: Have you changed how you think about it as you’ve taught it? HITZ: I have not really changed the way I think about it. It gets more—like all of these books, the more you read them, the more comes out of them, the more details come up. Hilarious. The more jokes you get, the more . . . I think the one more recent insight I had was, I hadn’t understood the full horror of the Houyhnhnms in the last book until relatively recently. I think that took me some time to really take on. It’s one of the cases where Gulliver’s misperceptions are a bit harder to see, and I think many readers just assume that Swift is endorsing the praise of the Houyhnhnms in some sense or other. OLIVER: There are some very serious critics in the past who have called them Swift’s ideal beings. Which at this point in history seems unthinkable, but it has been a belief among serious readers. HITZ: Yes, yes. And also common among students. Yes, it’s absolutely one of the wrongest opinions you could have about anything, I think. OLIVER: Why does Swift allow us to make that mistake? Are we bad readers out of the context, or has he made too good a job of his diversions and concealments and ironies? HITZ: That’s a great question, and I’ll just take a stab at it. I think that he has hit on a mode of misperception which is very deep to us, and it’s something that we’re much more guilty of. We could imagine that if we were in a place where everyone was small or everyone was large, we might make mistakes like Gulliver makes. But we all live, I think, in communities that are a bit like the Houyhnhnms. And so we are all very subject to these kinds of deceptions, and I think that’s how he gets us. That’s not to really excuse the bad readings because, you know, Gulliver does leave the land of the Houyhnhnms with a boat made out of human skin, which should—I think that moment should make you realize, if you haven’t yet, that something is very seriously wrong with Gulliver. Gulliver has been kind of destroyed as a person by his travels, and especially by this last trip. But if you pass over that little detail, maybe you think, “Oh, wow, he found some very simple beings.” OLIVER: Well, there’s also the great council where they debate the genocide of the Yahoos. HITZ: [laughs] Yes. OLIVER: And it directly contradicts several things Gulliver has come to believe about the Houyhnhnms, about the Yahoos, and about himself. And he’s completely unaware of these contradictions and so in awe of the Houyhnhnms that he doesn’t quite understand, I think, that he’s accounting a genocide. HITZ: That’s right. That’s right. OLIVER: Even though he uses a phrase from Genesis that’s very unmistakable. It’s a sort of remarkable moment of—particularly to us, having had the 20th century. I think that’s why Swift came back into favor in a way, because people used to say, Swift’s unbearable view of human nature . . . This is a great bit in Boswell’s Life of Johnson where, when they’re traveling through Scotland, they’re with a lady, and she says to Johnson, “Is any man naturally good?” And Johnson says, “No, no more than a wolf.” And Boswell says, “Well, sir, what about ladies?” And Johnson says, “God, no, absolutely not.” And this woman says, “Oh my God, this is worse than Swift,” utterly horrific view of human nature. But of course, we can actually say, did he go far enough? [laughter] I mean, Swift clearly understands something very real and deep. The council of genocide is horrifyingly familiar to us. And I think that’s much to Swift’s credit that he can see that, and to show that Gulliver would blind himself to it. And people still blind themselves to it, right? HITZ: That’s right. And I wonder—you would know more about this than me because it is a bit of a historical question, but my understanding is that quite a lot of the savagery, the worst parts of rule over men that we see in Gulliver’s Travels are pictures of Ireland in the 17th, 18th centuries. And I wonder if that took some time to reveal itself to the British, and in some ways it’s still not really as known as it might be. We think of the colonial project as being something that was directed at India and Africa— OLIVER: Faraway countries. HITZ: —faraway countries where people looked really different. And we’re not as familiar with the kinds of things that were done to the cuddly Irish with their nice music, and who we don’t think of as being people that you would savagely oppress like that. So I think— OLIVER: So, I think partly the English are not interested in their own history in the way that they are expected to be. And partly the English interest in Irish history has become very focused on the more recent events. And it’s very hard to get back past that. And it all becomes very complicated, and it’s a sort of different country. So there’s some of that, but I think generally we don’t want to know what we did, yes. HITZ: Well, and I think in anglophone countries in general, there’s going to be a history of something like that. To attribute it to the British is not to say that—I mean, Americans have chattel slavery and the genocide of the natives, and the Australians have their own situation. All of the anglophone countries have something like this on their conscience. I think that obscures the meaning of that final book. I think we don’t recognize—and that’s really to Swift’s credit, to have a social critique that is so real and so deep that you may not even recognize yourself in the picture. Slavery in Gulliver’s Travels OLIVER: Yes. When I read it again—I read it as an undergraduate, but I really was actually more interested in the other parts of Swift’s work. And I thought it was brilliant, and then I read it again. And it was more recently that—I didn’t understand how I couldn’t have seen it, but it’s basically a book about slavery, as I come back to it. And in each of the books there is enslavement of a different sort. So, to begin with, Gulliver is the one being kept in a box or kept in a house, or he’s chained up by the Lilliputians or Glumdalclitch. HITZ: Right. That’s right. OLIVER: She’s a very nice sort of master, as it were, [laughter] but he has that box that can be sealed, and the dwarf has him swiping at the wasps. And then the enslavement that the flying island has of the country below is like England and Ireland. And then in the final book, you know, the Houyhnhnms are whipping the Yahoos. HITZ: That’s right. OLIVER: The slavery thing gets worse and worse as the book goes on. And one of the things that’s clever is that it’s funny when Gulliver is enslaved, right? When the wasps are let out and he has to—and Swift sort of does that clever thing where he undermines things by making it a joke at the end. By the book of the Houyhnhnms, there is really very little humor. And the twist at the end is always dark. Gulliver can’t see that—he can see that he’s a bit like the Yahoos. But he can’t see that they’ve been enslaved in the way that he—the farmer wanted to take him around the kingdom and show him off, and he says, “I couldn’t possibly have had children in that condition because I couldn’t have it on my conscience that I had begotten a slave, someone born into slavery. I couldn’t do that.” HITZ: Right. OLIVER: Then he’s in the Houyhnhnms and he can’t—it’s quite remarkable. HITZ: [laughs] Yes. I don’t think it’s quite true that in the end there’s no humor. I read it with some Catherine Project group a couple of years ago, and one of the readers pointed out that it’s not obvious Gulliver isn’t leaving his home and sitting out in the ocean and always landing on England every single time; just every time, he lands there. And there’s something hilarious about an Englishman that discovers a place where there’s all horses, [laughter] and his love of horses overwhelms him, and he becomes persuaded that they’re the only rational beings that there are. I mean, that is funny. OLIVER: Yes, I agree. There’s a lot of irony and stuff. But I think it’s in Lilliput when he describes their manner of writing. And he says they don’t write from left to right as we do in England, or from right to left, or up-down like the Chinese, but from one corner to the other, as the ladies do in England. This is very funny, dry humor, and that sort of thing is gone. And the things that surprise you at the end of a sentence or a paragraph are more like, “Oh, and of course I used Yahoo skin to cover the boat.” And you’re like, oh my God, this is not a joke anymore. You know, in A Modest Proposal , he makes real humor out of those kind of horrors. And with the Houyhnhnms, I think he actually refuses the joke to make you feel the disgust, in a way. HITZ: Yes, that might be right. That might be right. Swift and Philosophy OLIVER: What do you think about the idea that the Houyhnhnms are drawn from the Phaedrus and Socrates’s idea of the soul with the two horses? And there’s the good, rational horse and the vulgar, passionate horse, and the Yahoos are the other horse. You see what I mean? HITZ: Yes, yes. OLIVER: Is Swift showing us the two sides, and Gulliver’s mistake is to prefer the one and not the— HITZ: Right, I think I have heard something like this before. I’m a bit skeptical. Swift doesn’t strike me as someone who uses philosophy in quite that way. I think he’s much more interested in Gulliver’s—the Houyhnhnms’ self-deception about the kinds of beings they are. They do not say “the thing which is not,” yet Gulliver’s master hides from him this conversation about the genocide for quite some time. And maybe we don’t know if he tells him quite the whole truth about it. So there’s— OLIVER: And he also conceals the fact that the others don’t like Gulliver because he’s a partial—a reasonable Yahoo, as it were. HITZ: Right. So their self-deception, Gulliver’s being taken in by their self-deception, the ways in which they—this is one of the ways that I think it’s profound about the nature of slavery. And to cheer us all up, I’ll make a Holocaust analogy, as you also did. When I was traveling in Germany some years ago, in one of their Holocaust museums, there was an image from a Nazi-era German newspaper of Jewish people living in complete squalor in the ghetto. And of course, they had forced them into squalor. But somehow they forced them into squalor, and then this reinforces the sense that they’re these rat-like beings. And there’s something very similar that the Houyhnhnms do to the Yahoos. They force them into this animal state, and then they say, “Oh God, look, these people are disgusting. They just don’t know how to act.” That seems to me the kind of level at which Swift is working. He is interested in the nature of a human being, but not in the abstract Platonic sense, I don’t think. He strikes me as someone who believes in common sense, common decency, basic freedom, and basic use of reason. And he finds in his time that there’s distorting teachings, distorting ways of behavior that have gotten people far off track. To me, that’s what it feels like it comes from. It doesn’t feel like Plato is in the background to me. OLIVER: Is there an extent to which, though, it’s a work of sort of anti-philosophy? As you say, Swift, he likes common sense. He likes ordinary reason, and he likes what he would call the revealed truth of Christianity. So he talks, in his sermons about people, it comes to you from God like a light. It’s revealed to you. And he doesn’t like this idea that the philosophers can work it all out. And in a way, that’s the same sort of mistake that the scientists think they can discover all this stuff, and they go in these crazy ways. And the Houyhnhnms are a bit like that. If you had philosopher-kings, they would end up being perverted examples of rationality because they’re ignoring the—so do you think it’s anti-philosophy in a way? The book is saying, “No, no, I don’t want philosophers”? Criticizing Elite Intellectual Culture HITZ: That’s definitely a plausible reading. But it’s hard to tell whether it’s anti-philosophy or anti a particular style of thinking. It’s worth pointing out, in that light, that Gulliver, when he arrives in the land of the Houyhnhnms, before he even meets a horse, he sees a Yahoo who, from what I can tell from the text, is trying to wave at him and say hello, who recognizes him. And he’s horrified. He sees him instantly as a monster. So I think immediately upon landing, he sees the Yahoos as monstrous, and that tells me that he must already be off kilter. So he’s not just corrupted by the Houyhnhnms; he’s been somehow led off track, away from the capacity to recognize fellow human beings before that. And he’s come from this—the third book is all about various kinds of inquiry, scientific endeavors, practical endeavors, talking to the greats of the past, necromancy, and various kinds of inquiry into wisdom or things like wisdom. And somehow that’s the thing that seems to push him to the point where he can no longer tell what a human being is. OLIVER: One of my favorite parts is when he’s with the wizards, and he asks to be shown Homer and Aristotle and all their commentators. And he says that there were vast rooms full of these commentators, endless numbers of them. But Homer and Aristotle didn’t recognize any of them because they were all so ashamed of the terrible things they’d said about these great men’s works that they kept themselves forever in a different part of the underworld. They couldn’t bear the shame of being revealed to having told lies and said second-rate things. It’s very, very funny. And I think that’s another sort of angle on which the book says, “You’re so tempted to make a comment and have an idea and be a philosopher, and you should just accept the revealed truth of what is known. Just stop it. Just stop it.” [laughter] HITZ: Well, I suppose maybe I would also put it this way, that Swift sees the condition of 18th-century Ireland, which is quite poor, very bad. And it’s ruled in a savage way by the English, who have a quite flourishing intellectual culture, as it happens, at this time. So I think what he might be is not a critic of philosophy so much as a critic of intellectual culture. Because intellectual culture seems to not only not help with existential concerns like slavery and oppression and savage poverty, but even serves to mask and hide and create illusions behind it. So that’s, I guess, how it strikes me, as a book that’s hostile to what you’d now call elite intellectual culture. And I don’t know how fundamental that critique is, in light of its inability to solve problems for real human beings or to obscure the causes of what’s going on with real human beings. OLIVER: I think it’s quite fundamental because outside of Gulliver’s —I think this comes into Gulliver’s Travels , but what he might have said more explicitly elsewhere is, there are people starving in the streets of Dublin. And we’ve got corrupt politicians and intellectuals saying all these things, but you know, here she is starving. You don’t need to work that out. [laughter] There’s no question—the reveal—just be a Christian and, like, for goodness’ sake . . . HITZ: Yes. OLIVER: And when, for example, he talks to the king of Brobdingnag, and there’s that wonderful satire of the English government and everything. And he says, “Those people understood mathematics and poetry and whatever, but I could never drive into their head any sense of the abstract or any of these speculative—they simply didn’t know what that was. They didn’t know what I was saying.” [laughter] And so in a way, his ideal government is anti-philosophical because it would just look at the human problem in front of it. It wouldn’t do speculative science. It wouldn’t think of itself as rational, all this Platonic stuff. It would just—she’s in rags, she has bare feet, you know? HITZ: Yes, that’s right. OLIVER: What do we need a phi

3. Oliver Traldi: Jane Austen and the Defence of Virtue from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

   May 6, 20261 hr 14 min

   My colleague Oliver Traldi recently published an essay called ‘ Jane Austen’s Virtuous Liberalism ’. It’s a very nice discussion of the ways in which Austen understand the challenges of character formation. Virtue, as Austen sees it, faces two tough challenges. First, people whose characters are not yet formed must see how to be virtuous rather than vicious. Then, the virtuous must somehow find a way to succeed in their struggles against the vicious without adopting vicious means. In this episode, Oliver and I discussed Austen’s ideas of virtue, what that has to do with liberalism, the relationship between philosophy and literature more broadly, as well as poetry and ideas about the Great Books. We also talked about the Keira Knightly Pride and Prejudice . Yes, we both liked it. Here is why Oliver thinks Jane Austen is so popular among philosophers. TRALDI: And so I do think that even though she’s not making arguments, she’s not laying out philosophical theories, there is a level of precision in her thinking about virtue, which I do think is something that it took me a little aback. And I think it’s part of why—one person who quote-tweeted my article was Daniel Kodsi, who’s a friend of our colleague John Maier and his coauthor often. And he runs this magazine called The Philosophers’ Magazine , which I had written before. And Daniel quote-tweeted my article with something like, “Add Oliver to the list of all the philosophers who love Austen.” OLIVER: And it’s a long list. TRALDI: And I think it’s a long list. And I do think this precision is part of it that she does, that it is—again, it’s not like a philosophy journal article, but it is an intellectual sophistication that is often not present in novelists that we really appreciate. And here is an extract about Austen, Smith, and the wonderfully fertile period at the end of the eighteen century. TRALDI: But yes, I think it’s obvious—without knowing the background, I’m sure there are scholarly questions about, how much Smith did Austen read? And they’re both 250th—a lot was happening in 1775 and 1776. OLIVER: Those were great years. Those were the good old days. TRALDI: They were great years. In the great books syllabus, you get to the end of the 1700s and suddenly there’s this—you have Smith, you have Kant, you have the American Revolution, you have the French Revolution, you have Burke. Rousseau is right before, Montesquieu is right before. I mean, it was a real— OLIVER: It’s a great time. TRALDI: It was a great time. A lot was being done. And obviously, you know, I love the 1800s. I love the Romantics. But you could teach a whole great books course from 1750 to 1800, probably. OLIVER: You’ve also got all the dictionaries and all that kind of work going on as well. It’s a very, very fertile—explorations. TRALDI: Yes, yes. There’s all sorts of—yes, it was an amazing time. OLIVER: So did you, having read these two, Austen and Smith, close together— TRALDI: Yes, and I should say that my reading of Austen was much more careful than my reading of Smith. OLIVER: Sure, but you wrote this before you read Smith. TRALDI: Yes, absolutely. OLIVER: Or at least you fully conceived it. Do you see a lot of Smith in Austen? TRALDI: “A lot” might be— This was my favourite bit. TRALDI: Yes. But this is one of the great—I know we talked about this, but it’s one of the great—you see this in Smith, you see this in Austen—commerce has its own virtues, and they are very traditional virtues. You have to be trustworthy. You have to be pleasant. You can’t really be wholly self-interested in every moment because people have to be willing to deal with you given your—I mean, think about Yelp reviews or even just word of mouth. “Oh, that person screwed me over.” OLIVER: There’s a discussion in one of Hayek’s papers, which is—it’s a very Smithian point he makes about, the nature of the knowledge problem means that it’s not so much that I’m trying to get information about the thing you’re trying to sell me, but I’m really trying to get information about you and whether you are someone I should be buying from. Which is exactly the project that the novelists and Smith—there’s a sort of period between Smith and the early novelists, running through Austen to George Eliot, when they’re all working on that problem together. TRALDI: Yes. I do think in Austen, it’s often—the real puzzle is, how do you make out somebody else’s character? OLIVER: Exactly. TRALDI: This is a phrase that Lizzy Bennet does use with regard to Darcy. And how do we actually figure out who the trustworthy and untrustworthy people are? OLIVER: And if you’re too philosophical about that, in the sort of analytic sense, I think you can end up not paying enough attention to the particulars of that question. TRALDI: Yes. OLIVER: Because when you actually try and do it, it’s really, really hard. TRALDI: Yes. And I think this is the sort of—reading Austen, you get a sense of—and there are very few philosophy papers on things like this. Reading Austen, you get a sense of, what sorts of details in a normal life are the ones that I can extract information from to make out somebody else’s character? Oliver is an analytical, political philosopher. You can find out more about his work here . Here he is on Twitter . His Substack is orting . You can watch the episode on YouTube here. Transcript HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Oliver Traldi. Oliver is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Toledo in Ohio. He is my colleague on the Emerging Scholars Program at the Mercatus Center, and he’s written a book about political beliefs as well as many other articles for magazines, online. He’s got a Substack . He’s maybe the most prominent political and epistemological young philosopher of his generation. [laughter] But most importantly for us, he is interested in Jane Austen and the idea of virtue. Oliver, welcome. OLIVER TRALDI: Thank you so much for having me. Reading Austen as a Philosopher OLIVER: Let’s just start—before we get to this article you’ve written , tell me about being a philosopher but reading Jane Austen, because she’s often read and commented on by people who are not philosophers or who are only philosophers by acquaintance or whatever. TRALDI: Right. OLIVER: Is it different reading as a philosopher, do you think? TRALDI: I think yes and no. One thing as a philosopher, there are—contemporary philosophy, we have very exacting standards of rigor and clarity. And when we look for a theory, we want something that’s been improved by hundreds of people and thousands of journal articles. And so, if you were to simply extract a theory of virtue from a novel and say, “Does this—is this the end-all, be-all of moral thinking?” obviously you’re going to be disappointed. So I think as a philosopher, you have to look for other types of things, other types of sensitivities rather than logical sensitivity. You have to say, how sensitive is the author to the different types of situations where people’s virtue can be exhibited or challenged? Or how sensitive is the author to the different types of pressures that a character’s convictions can be put under, or the different sorts of compromises that they might have to make, or the different sorts of people who might not be virtuous who they might have to interact with and sort of, you know, contract with or avoid? And what are going to be the impacts of different kinds of choices in those situations? So the novelists, I think, tend—if they do it well, a novelist who’s interested in morality will understand living morally probably better than a philosopher, while maybe not understanding, say, arguments about whether morality supervenes on reality or vice versa, or what grounds morality, or different theories of meta-ethics or whatever. OLIVER: I mean, there are obviously some novelists who do have a better appreciation of those things than others, we should say. TRALDI: Yes, I think that’s absolutely true. And as I wrote in my article, I do think Austen in particular had an appreciation for this issue that you might call moral disarming or unilateral disarming. You know, does the moral person put themselves at a disadvantage relative to the immoral person? And then how do we actually help—how does morality survive? So that’s a kind of philosophical question, but I tend to think—I taught last year—I think we’ve talked about this a bit. I taught in a great books program at Tulsa. OLIVER: This is the Jennifer Frey program . TRALDI: This is the ill-fated Jennifer Frey program. Jennifer—I don’t know if you’ve met her, but she’s an incredibly charismatic person. But somehow the program, despite being enormously successful, did not survive. You know, I was there for a year, and they decided that was long enough. OLIVER: [laughs] You don’t think your arrival was the— TRALDI: No, no. I hope not. I most certainly hope not. OLIVER: No. General problems of higher education prevailed. Yes. TRALDI: Yes, many, many problems of higher education these days. But yes, so I think—what was I saying? OLIVER: Well, I think we’re getting to this question of, you are not just a philosopher; you teach the great books. TRALDI: Right, exactly. The great books. That’s where I was. Yes. Philosophy and the Great Books OLIVER: So, one thing I’m interested in is that, you know, reading as a philosopher, you get a slightly different perspective on Austen. When you read other fiction, poetry, whatever, is there a benefit to you as a philosopher? Does it broaden you in some way? TRALDI: Yes. I think absolutely, it’s broadening, but it’s also focusing in a different way. You know, contemporary philosophy is often described or captured with the word epicycles . So what we mean when we say epicycles is, you have some major theory, which is supposed to answer some big question. And then your career as a philosopher—you’re like three layers deep in the theory, in some sub-debate, and you’re making some really fine-grained distinctions. And if you can make those distinctions successfully, you’ve had a really great career. But I think it’s easy to forget, why are we doing—you know, what attracted us to philosophy? Why are we doing this to begin with? And the great novels, great books in general—one example I always use is the Book of Job. It doesn’t really—it’s not doing clear philosophy on the question of why do bad things happen to good people. But when you read it, you feel the question, why do bad things happen to good people? You get it, you know? You get why this is a question that people have worried about for thousands of years. You get why it calls out for an answer. You know, there’s a lot of truth out there. I’m looking at a set of coat hangers, and I could count the coat hangers. But if you were given the decision, would I rather have an answer to how many coat hangers are across the room from me, or why do bad things happen to good people? You’d probably go with the latter one. There’s somehow some kind of depth or importance to that question, right? And I think there’s—a great novelist can often generate some vividity to these questions. They can show how these questions are part of a good life, asking these questions, trying to have these questions answered—or a not-so-good life. Certainly in Austen there are a lot of characters who learn to be more virtuous. Probably Emma is the clearest example. But you might also think of Marianne Dashwood. Really— OLIVER: Lizzy Bennet. TRALDI: Lizzy Bennet really learns to be a better person. I actually think her character is rather close to Emma in a lot of ways. OLIVER: Yes, I think Emma’s sort of a clear rewrite of Lizzy in some—yes, yes. TRALDI: Yes, and in some ways more evocative, actually. Yes. I mean, we can talk about all these books. But yes, I think there’s these things, even—obviously qua literature, they have other virtues, right? Which much philosophy doesn’t have; very little philosophy has the literary virtues. But the philosophical virtue that a lot of literature does have is you see, okay, these are the—this is what a life is like. This is what making choices is like. These are the big questions when you decide how to live your life and what kinds of choices to make. And I think Austen—these questions are all through Austen, even though nobody has to murder anybody in Austen. Nobody has to make decisions about war and peace or about, you know, civilizational decline or civilizational progress or anything like that. These people making these small choices in a lot of ways. But those are the lives that most of us lead. And when you read Austen, you think, “Oh, okay, there’s a virtuous and a vicious way to lead this kind of rather normal life.” The Good Life OLIVER: The question of what is a good life, or what is a good life in a commercial society, maybe, is the sort of bedrock of what she’s doing. TRALDI: Yes, I think so. And that’s why I think Austen—you know, Austen wasn’t on our syllabus at Tulsa, but she was certainly discussed. And the “what is a good life” question—to me, it’s the big question that a great books program for college students should always come back to. If I didn’t know what else to talk about, I would just say, “Well, we just read this book.” You know, we read these old biographies of Charlemagne from, like, Einhard— Notker the Stammerer and Einhard , his adopted son or whatever. I don’t remember. But this is like 800s. I’m sure you know more about this stuff than I do. And I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them because what do I know about Charlemagne? So I just said, “Does it seem like Charlemagne lived a good life?” And you know, you’re off to the races. And I think that’s important at that age, because that’s the age at which— OLIVER: For the undergraduates? TRALDI: Yes. I think that’s the age at which you’re starting to make your own big decisions about what sort of life to lead. And I think for me, looking back to myself at that age, I think one thing I did wrong—at Tulsa I was in some ways as much a student as a teacher. I was rereading a lot of this stuff for the first time in decades. And some of it I was reading for the first time. As I told you, I was reading a lot of Austen for the first time for this essay. OLIVER: Right, right. TRALDI: And yes, it was stuff that I had thought about at a theoretical level, you know, like what are the ins and outs of this theory or this philosophical move or something like that. But you feel the question a bit differently when you’re like, “Okay, I’m an adult. I have to decide whether to live in this way or that way.” The world is open to you. You could convert to Thomism [laughter] like so many have tried to have me do, or you could become a merchant after reading The Wealth of Nations . Or you could become a revolutionary after reading Marx, or you could become a Nietzschean. You know, there are all these choices open to you. OLIVER: Please don’t become a Nietzchean. TRALDI: No, no. That is, I’m a— OLIVER: Keep your children out of school if that’s going to be the result. [laughs] TRALDI: Yes. I’m a committed moralist, so I cannot, but he is—he made a comeback, that’s for sure. Philosophy and Poetry OLIVER: Now, there’s this obviously sort of long-running question in philosophy about, what is the relationship between philosophy and poetry? Are they antagonists, or are they in some way, you know, twins, and each provides one half of what is needed for a complete way of understanding the world? Do you have a position on this? TRALDI: Yes, I mean, I think they’re what the kids call twinning. OLIVER: Twinning? [laughs] TRALDI: I think they’re twinning. No, no, I think that means something different. I think that means when you’re wearing the same outfit or something like that. OLIVER: So we’re almost twinning with our stripes—yes, I see. TRALDI: We’re almost. We actually—we are stripes and blue. Yes, we’re closer than I would’ve expected. I would say closer to twins. There are a lot of claims that philosophy is at odds somehow with this or that. There’s also this—certain people will say, “Well, ever since Socrates, philosophy has been at odds with politics.” And a big part of philosophy is, how do you survive? Well, I don’t know. Nobody’s trying to kill me. I think of myself as a decently committed philosopher. OLIVER: It seems to me this changed fundamentally in the Enlightenment and with the Romantics, and they see it all much more joined up. It’s a sort of ancient-and-modern dynamic. TRALDI: Yes, there may be an ancient-and-modern distinction there. But yes, for me I don’t see any kind of contradiction. Now, there are—and I think this comes out of what I said before—philosophical attempts to understand poetry. And certain kinds of literary and aesthetic devices do sometimes fall a little flat. The philosophical literature on metaphor, for instance—I think some theories of metaphor really don’t get why people use metaphors. [laughter] So one of the most important theories of metaphor is that they’re all just false, that it’s like everybody who uses a metaphor is lying. This isn’t the full theory. There are bells and whistles added. OLIVER: Sure, sure. TRALDI: But yes, so I think there’s no contradiction. But at the same time, they are different modes in some ways, and people who do the one are often trying to do something different than the other. I do think that the desire for rigor and precision and clarity that philosophers have can be a little maddening to nonphilosophers, who see the pull of philosophical questions like, “What sort of life I should lead?” and then see, what do philosophers actually do? And we’re doing all this modal logic and all these truth tables and all this very technical stuff that looks like math. And they say, “That can’t possibly be the right way to think about how to live.” And it’s true that there are these studies of—that suggest ethicists aren’t actually very good people and things like that, although you have to wonder what is the background ethical theory that went into evaluating them. So yes, I don’t think there’s really a contradiction between philosophy and anything else. But certainly, there was a point in my life where I always come back to trying to write poetry and do poorly and then stop. But it was always something where I would say, “Okay, if I’m doing philosophy in the afternoon, I better wait till the evening to write poetry.” You have to sort of reboot and get into a different mode. OLIVER: Iris Murdoch used to write philosophy in the morning and novels in the afternoon. That kind of thing. TRALDI: Yes, I think that’s very sensible. OLIVER: And she was upstairs for the one and downstairs for the other. TRALDI: Yes. That’s even better, you know? Favorite Poets OLIVER: Which poets do you like? TRALDI: Geez, I guess for an American, I like Wallace Stevens. I wasn’t expecting this question. For a Brit, you know, I actually like Philip Larkin a lot. OLIVER: Oh, yes? TRALDI: I know—what is the opinion of Larkin? Is he considered— OLIVER: Very high. TRALDI: Very high? Okay. OLIVER: Some—there are some dissenters, but basically he’s the guy. TRALDI: He’s the guy, okay. Yes. OLIVER: Twentieth-century English poetry is like Auden, Larkin, Betjeman. TRALDI: Yes, Auden is—actually, my friend Jane Cooper just wrote something about Auden . OLIVER: Yes, Jane is excellent. TRALDI: Yes, Jane is really great. OLIVER: That was in the New Statesman if you want to look it up. TRALDI: That was in the New Statesman . Yes, yes, yes. But Auden, I don’t know quite as well. I mean, poetry is—I think it’s interesting the way that we receive poetry now. I think you were talking about this a few days ago, about things like poems appearing as inspirational quotes on social media or something like that, and whoever is the most quotable. And you felt like maybe Dostoevsky is very quotable. OLIVER: Dostoevsky has a sort of screenshot quality. TRALDI: Yes, yes. OLIVER: As d

4. Laura Thompson on Agatha Christie: Shakespeare, Murder, and the Art of Simplicity from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

   Apr 1, 20261 hr 20 min

   What a delight to talk to laura thompson about Agatha Christie. Above all, this episode was fun. Laura really does know more than anyone about Agatha and we covered a lot. What did Agatha Christie read? What did she love about Shakespeare? Was she pro-hanging? Why so much more Poirot than Marple? Why was she so productive during the war? We also talked Wagner, modern art, the other Golden Age writers, nursery rhymes, TV adaptations, poshness, nostalgia, Mary Westmacott, and plenty more. Transcript HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to the very splendid Laura Thompson. All of you will know Laura’s Substack . She has also written books about the Mitfords , heiresses , Lord Lucan , many other subjects, and most importantly today, Agatha Christie, who died 50 years ago. And there’s a new book coming from Laura about Agatha Christie’s 1926 disappearance . Laura, welcome. LAURA THOMPSON: So lovely to be here, Henry. I’m such a fan of your Substack, as you know. OLIVER: Well, same. Same. This is a mutual admiration call. THOMPSON: Well, thank you. Well, that’s what we like. Christie’s Favorite Writers OLIVER: Now tell me, what did Agatha Christie like to read? THOMPSON: Oh, a lot the same as us. I discovered she was a huge fan of Elizabeth Bowen, as we are. And Nancy Mitford, Muriel Spark. But her big love really was Dickens. She absolutely adored Dickens. I mean, she grew up in a house full of books, you know, and she wrote a screenplay of Bleak House for which she was handsomely paid. And it was never—I know, don’t you long to know what that was like? Can you imagine— OLIVER: We’ve lost it? We don’t have the typescript? THOMPSON: I’ve never seen it. I mean, maybe—I don’t know whether it exists somewhere. But I just wonder how she tackled it, what she did. But yes, so that happened. And of course, Shakespeare, as we know from her books, which are full of subliminal and—I mean, you kind of notice them, but you don’t have to. OLIVER: Yes. There’s Shakespeare in every book? THOMPSON: No, but it’s there, particularly Macbeth , which I suppose figures. OLIVER: Yeah. THOMPSON: Like The Pale Horse is completely Macbeth themed. And when I was a kid reading them, I think she really—Tennyson she uses a lot—she affected my reading in a good way. OLIVER: She sent you back to Shakespeare and the poets? THOMPSON: Well, sent me to them as a kid, probably. And also, there’s a lot of Bible in her books, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. OLIVER: Yes. Yes. THOMPSON: Very easy facility with quoting the Bible. Christie and Shakespeare OLIVER: Now, what did she learn from Shakespeare? Because she clearly knows the plays in detail. She sees them a lot. She reads them. She and he are, I think, quite good plotters. THOMPSON: Is she even better than he is? OLIVER: Well, let’s not get into that. But there is a sort of, in a funny way, a kind of affinity between them as writers. THOMPSON: That’s so interesting. OLIVER: What do you think she learned from him? THOMPSON: Tell me how you—how you see that. OLIVER: Well, do you know that Margaret Rutherford adaptation, which probably you don’t like and I do— THOMPSON: Go on. OLIVER: It’s called Murder Most Foul , isn’t it? THOMPSON: Yes. OLIVER: And there’s something about the way that they can both walk the line between the sort of dark and deadly and the histrionic. Margaret Rutherford can’t walk that line, but Agatha Christie can, right? THOMPSON: That’s really interesting. OLIVER: And Miss Marple could come onstage in a couple of the plays. She’s not so far off from being a Queen Margaret or some—in her angry moments maybe, do you think? THOMPSON: More rational, maybe. OLIVER: Much more rational. THOMPSON: Not so mad. Well, she’s not mad, Margaret, is she? But she’s upset. OLIVER: She starts off as a much sort of nastier character— Murder at the Vicarage , right? THOMPSON: Yes, she does. She was more acidic and then gradually— OLIVER: Waspish. THOMPSON: Waspish, and sort of mellowed. I see what you mean. And almost in the way that she calls herself—although that’s obviously not Shakespeare—calls herself Nemesis. OLIVER: And the sense of atmosphere. THOMPSON: Yes, and the way they’re structured. That’s not necessarily just true of Shakespeare, but there is this sort of act three entanglement and this beautiful act five resolution that goes on with a soliloquy, I suppose. OLIVER: And some people think they both get confused in act four, but that’s obviously not true, that this is the real mess of the plot. I think she might have learned quite a lot from Shakespeare, right? THOMPSON: That’s really interesting. But, you know, the way she writes about Shakespeare in her letters to her second husband, Max, because when she was living in London during the war and almost at her most productive—I mean, her productivity levels are insane. And hitting every ball for six, really, you know: Towards Zero , Five Little Pigs , a couple of Westmacotts, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. But she spent a lot of time going on her own to see Shakespeare. She’s very—I hope I’m right in saying this—she’s very sort of Ernest Jones [CB1] in her approach. She doesn’t regard them so much as the products of words on a page; she regards them as rounded characters. Why were Goneril and Regan the way they were? What’s wrong with Ophelia? You feel like saying, “Well, whatever Shakespeare wanted it to be,” but she sees them in that way. And Iago particularly— OLIVER: Yes. THOMPSON: —is the one that gets her. Yes. In one of her, I better not say which, but a major, major novel. And the book that she wrote under the name Mary Westmacott, The Rose and the Yew Tree , which I think might well be her best book of all. I think—well, I’ll just say she wrote these six books under a pseudonym, Mary Westmacott. People call them romantic novels; that’s sort of the last thing they are. And they’re very, very interesting mid-20th-century human condition novels, and they’re full of lots of stuff that she had to distill for the detective fiction. And she talks a lot about Iago in The Rose and the Yew Tree really interestingly, I think. Christie on Shakespeare? OLIVER: Now, Max said she should just write a book about Shakespeare, all this Shakespeare all the time. But she didn’t. Why? THOMPSON: No. I don’t think she ever liked being told what to do. OLIVER: [laughs] THOMPSON: His letters to her are quite annoying, aren’t they? OLIVER: Yes, yes. I’ve only read what’s in your book, but yes, I didn’t warm to him. THOMPSON: I’m glad because people do. He gets a really good press even though he was unfaithful. But it worked, the marriage, because they both got what they wanted from it. But he said that, yes, and she says, “Oh no, they’re just thoughts for you.” I don’t think she would’ve felt the need, somehow. I think she liked saying things in her own more oblique way. OLIVER: Save it for the novels. THOMPSON: Yes, she’s a great mistress of the indirect, I think, really. The way she writes about Macbeth in The Pale Horse , which I think is a really underrated novel, including thoughts on how it should be staged, which are really interesting and very, very good. I think she would’ve preferred to do that and use it to her ends. And of course, she has an incredibly powerful sense of evil, which I suppose is also in Shakespeare. Hers is a Christian sensibility, I mean, no question. People never talk about that, but it really is. OLIVER: Was she pro hanging? THOMPSON: Well, I think she took a kind of utilitarian approach that the innocent must be protected. And she took a view that if you’ve killed once, it becomes very easy to kill again because something in you has shifted, so you become a danger to the community. So I suppose in that sense she was. I mean, Miss Marple was. She’s quite—“I really feel quite glad to think of him being hanged.” OLIVER: It’s one of her most striking lines. THOMPSON: It is, isn’t it? OLIVER: Yes. THOMPSON: So I suppose she was. I mean, I suppose she was. You know, she’s very modern, she’s very subtle in her thinking, but at the same time, she is a late Victorian product of her society. Yes. Dickens and Christie’s Family OLIVER: Now, you mentioned this Bleak House script. She loved Bleak House . Do we know what she loved about it? It’s obviously the first detective novel. Are there other factors? THOMPSON: You are going to know—this is when I’m going to start coming across as an idiot. Is it written before The Moonstone ? Yes, of course it is. OLIVER: I think so. Yes. Yes. It’s the first time there’s a police detective in a major English novel. THOMPSON: Okay. I think she—do you know, this is a really good question. I don’t actually know why she loved Dickens so much. She grew up—she had that rather intriguing upbringing whereby she had two much older siblings, a sister who was 11 years older, a brother who was 10 years older. Father died when she was 11. So she grew up incredibly close with a really rather intriguing mother, Clara. This is in the house at Torquay . And her mother encouraged her in a way that, it seems to me, quite unusual for the time and for the class to which she belonged. Because it was never deemed that it would interfere with her marrying and leading a more conventional life. But she always wanted to express herself creatively. And I think her mother possibly was a frustrated creative. I don’t know. She had a lot of go in her. And whether it was just something she read with—I think anything she did at an early age with her mother would’ve made a huge impression on her. I think what you read when you’re that age, you never quite—I never read Dickens at that age, so I’ve never quite got the habit. OLIVER: But if she’s born in 1890, presumably her mother is just about old enough to have been alive when Dickens was alive. And so she’s got a somewhat direct— THOMPSON: Yes, she was. OLIVER: You know, it’s sort of back to the original culture of it, as it were. THOMPSON: Yes. Isn’t that extraordinary? OLIVER: Yes. Yes. It’s crazy to think. So she must have taken it in maybe in a more original way, somehow? THOMPSON: Possibly. Certainly Tennyson, I get that feeling, because her mother wrote this rather leaden sub-Tennysonian poetry. [laughter] It’s like Tennyson on the worst day he ever had, but worse than that. OLIVER: But worse, yes. THOMPSON: Yes. And she wrote poetry like that, the mother, which is really rather sweet and touching to read. And obviously she would’ve been alive at the same time as Tennyson. So, yes, I’d never, ever thought of that before. Isn’t that extraordinary? I mean, they went to see Henry Irving . OLIVER: Yes. THOMPSON: Yes. And yet she feels—it just amazes me, this—so I’m leaping slightly here, but this 21st-century halo of cool that she has around her, Agatha Christie. [laughter] I know, it’s awful in a way, but the way she can be reinterpreted—that is a bit Shakespearean, in a way. I don’t mean to make extravagant claims, but there’s a sort of translucent quality to what she writes that means that people can impose and pull it and twang it and know that she won’t let them down, as we are seeing constantly at the moment. Art and Music OLIVER: Yes. No, I agree. Other arts—we know about all this, she loves reading. What music did she enjoy, for example? Did she like paintings? THOMPSON: Yes, she loved paintings. She liked modern art. She was painted by Kokoschka . It’s very good. And she writes about modern art. In Five Little Pigs , the painter in that is a modern artist. And then music was her grand passion. I mean, music was her original career choice, as you know, of course. She must have had a good voice. She thought she could make a career of it. And she could play the piano. Beautiful piano at Greenway, it’s still there. And they used to do this thing—I think it’s a lovely idea—as a family. They would fill in what they called the book of confessions, and it would be questions like, “What is your state of mind? If not yourself, who would you be?” And at the age of 63, which is the last time she filled it in, she wrote, “An opera singer.” So that was still what she would’ve dreamed of doing. She loved Wagner very, very deeply. OLIVER: Okay. Interesting. THOMPSON: And there’s a Wagner theme in a very late book, Passenger to Frankfurt , the one that everybody hates except me. And music, I mean, as a girl when—so her voice wasn’t strong enough for opera. I think her ultimate—same as I grew up wanting to be a ballet dancer, I think her ultimate would’ve been to sing Isolde at Covent Garden. And in some of her short stories and in her first Mary Westmacott, which is called Giant’s Bread , which is about a musician—and she really inhabits this character, Vernon, and it’s all about modern music. And somebody who knew about this stuff, which I don’t, told me, “No, she knew. She knew what was going on. She knew about the trends.” This is in the late twenties. And she always went to Beirut, and that was her real, real, real passion. She was one of those restlessly creative people. And her mother, God bless her, encouraged it. Christie’s Uniqueness OLIVER: What is it that distinguishes her from the other detective fiction writers? Because she doesn’t, to me, feel—she’s obviously part of this whole generation, this whole golden age, whatever you want to call it, but she doesn’t feel the same as them somehow. THOMPSON: No. OLIVER: What is that? THOMPSON: Do you think it’s her simplicity, that distilled simplicity that she has? She doesn’t write linear; she writes geometric, I always think. OLIVER: Tell me what you mean. THOMPSON: Well, if you think of a book, the one I admire the most, as I constantly go on about, which is Five Little Pigs —you think about the amount of stuff that’s in that book. It’s a meditation on art versus life. The solution is unbelievably intriguing, I think. There’s a whole family psychodrama in there. And every move of the plot, she’s also moving on a—every move of the plot is impelled by a revelation of character. So plot and character are utterly intertwined, distilled together. I don’t think any of the others can do that. I think Dorothy Sayers would take twice as many pages. And she’d dot every i and cross every t , and she couldn’t bear loose ends or anything, could she? And she liked to reveal her knowledge of other things, almost to—I think the others like you to know that they’re a bit better than the genre, maybe. Their detectives are superhuman, almost; wish-fulfillment man, almost. She doesn’t do that with Poirot. He’s just pure omniscience, really, plus a few tics and traits and, you know, mustache. I think it’s that distillation and simplicity and the way she inhabits the genre in a way that the others don’t quite do. And at the same time, she’s redefining it from within. OLIVER: There’s something as well, I think, about—she gets past the kind of Sherlock Holmes model in a different way. They still all have a bit of an overreliance on that, maybe. THOMPSON: Yes. OLIVER: Whereas Poirot in, what is it? In something like, is it Murder in the Mews ? Very sort of Sherlock and Watson— THOMPSON: Yes. OLIVER: —kind of dynamic. But within, I don’t know, two or three novels, that’s gone, and he’s Poirot as we know him, as it were. THOMPSON: Yes, yes. OLIVER: And she kind of, as you say, makes it her own thing and goes off in new directions. Christie and the Theater THOMPSON: Yes. She’s sort of conceptual and the others aren’t quite, I think. She doesn’t do—she does something completely different with the whole concept of what a solution is, it seems to me. She doesn’t—it’s not Cluedo, is it? It’s not, there’s six of them, and eventually it has to be one of them; however many tergiversations or however you say that word, you sort of know that. Whereas with her, it’s: it’s nobody, or it’s everybody, or it’s the policeman, or it’s a child, or there’s something bigger and bolder going on. And she writes—I think she writes very theatrically. I think she writes scenically. I think she’s incredibly good at character and action. That scene where you know the girl’s a thief because Poirot leaves out 23 pairs of silk stockings, and he goes back in the room and there’s 19 or something like that, tells you everything. It’s all in there. OLIVER: The solution to 4.50 from Paddington , which we shan’t reveal, but— THOMPSON: That’s Cards on the Table . But what I mean is, she’s given us a little scene that tells us all we need to know about that person, really: a sort of timid thief who can’t resist— OLIVER: Yes, but that’s what I’m saying. At the end of 4.50 , the solution is staged. THOMPSON: Oh, sorry. Yes. OLIVER: It is literally a little re-creation of the drama, if you see what I mean. THOMPSON: Yes, I do. Sorry, Henry. Yes, absolutely. OLIVER: No, no. We’re crossed wires. THOMPSON: Yes, yes, yes. OLIVER: But she is very theatrical, yes. THOMPSON: No, you are absolutely right. That’s a reenactment. OLIVER: Of something that was seen almost like in a—you know, the whole thing is very— THOMPSON: Yes, yes. Well, she was a great—I mean, obviously Shakespeare, but she was a great lover of the theater as a medium. And of course, she wrote plays, as we know, which I think are far weaker than her books, myself. OLIVER: Even The Mousetrap ? THOMPSON: Especially. [laughter] When did you last see it? Or have you not— OLIVER: I’ve seen it once. I’ve seen it—you know, I don’t know, before I had children, a long time ago. And I thought it was great. It was a lot of fun. The ending of act one, when someone opens a door and they say, “Oh, it’s you.” It’s very dramatic moments. You don’t like it? THOMPSON: No, I think you’re right. I wouldn’t mind seeing it done really, really well. There’s something strong at the heart of it, that theme that haunts a lot of her books about what happens to children who are unwanted. OLIVER: Yes. THOMPSON: Which is in loads of her—no, not loads. It’s in Ordeal by Innocence . It’s in Mrs. McGinty . That’s, I think, because that happened to her mother. Her mother was given away as a child. Her own mother was a poor widow and gave up her daughter to be raised by her rich sister, which is not—it’s not abandonment, but I think— OLIVER: Well, yes. THOMPSON: — it’s not great. And I think all these things were absorbed by Agatha as a child. She grew up in what we would today call a house of—I hate this—strong women. I hate that “strong woman” thing, but they were strong women. Her mother was very, you know, as we’ve said, a sort of driving little person. And the rich grandmother, the poor sister, the dynamic there, they both fed into Miss Marple. And then her older sister, Madge, who was a big personality and actually had a play on in the West End before Agatha did, which I’ve always thought was extraordinary, just to write a play and have it on in the West End in 1924. And the men were—the father was feckless and charming and a rather grand New Yorker, he grew up as, and then settled in Torquay. And the brother was the Branwell Brontë. [laughter] He ended up a drug addict, which is also a type that feeds into her fiction: the man who could have made something of his life and goes wrong. The TV Adaptations OLIVER: So all this theatricality in the books is obviously why she adapts so well to TV, and again, a lot of the others don’t. THOMPSON: Yes, that’s true. OLIVER: How famous would she be now without the TV adaptations? THOMPSON: Well, by 1990, so the centenary, she was a hell of a lot less—and that’s really when the Poirots got going, which she never wanted. She never wanted—she didn’t really want Murder on the Orient Express . It was only because it came via Lord Mountbatten. I don’t know. I don’t know because I think they’re mostly not very good. I don’t know what you think about the adaptations. But maybe that’s deliberate, that they’re less—if they drove you back to the books, you’d probably get quite a pleasant surprise. OLIVER: It’s hard for me to say because I saw th

5. Ruth Scurr: The Life and Work of John Aubrey from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

   Mar 18, 20261 hr 1 min

   What a pleasure it was to talk to Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey: My Own Life , about the great man himself, who was born four hundred years ago this month. Aubrey is best know for his splendid Brief Lives but he preserved a huge amount of knowledge which historians still rely on. There are many things we only know because of Aubrey—things about people Hobbes and Hooke, Stonehenge, architectural history. We also talked about Janet Malcom, the genre of biography, and modern fiction. HENRY OLIVER: Today I’m talking to Ruth Scurr. Ruth is a fellow of Gonville and Caius College in the University of Cambridge, where she specializes in the history of political thought. But more importantly, she is the biographer of John Aubrey, one of my favorite writers, who is celebrating 400 years of his birth this year. Ruth, hello. RUTH SCURR: Hi, Henry. OLIVER: Can you begin by giving us a brief life of John Aubrey? SCURR: So born in 1626, 17th-century antiquarian, collector, early fellow at the Royal Society. Well connected to scientific and the literary circles of his day. Someone who sees himself more as a whetstone: a person who could help sharpen other people’s ideas. As a recorder, someone who treasured the details, the minutiae of the lives he encountered, and pass those details on to posterity. He’s nonjudgmental, witty, kind, inventive. Very, very sociable. Very good friend. But he’s hopeless at self-advancement. Begins his life as a gentleman, but he inherits debts from his father and he can never really achieve financial stability. Never marries, ends up homeless and worried about being arrested for his debts. And he has to sell his precious collection of books periodically through his life to raise some much-needed cash, but he keeps his manuscripts safe. And he does this at the end of his life by putting them into the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, afterwards known as the Bodleian, and where they still are today. OLIVER: So how many manuscripts did he save for us? SCURR: Of his own manuscripts or other people’s manuscripts? OLIVER: Other people’s. Because he was collecting all sorts of precious things. SCURR: Oh, absolutely. He was the person who, when someone died, would go round if he could to their house and ask what was happening about the manuscripts. He’s particularly concerned, obviously, with his friends. So he had a close relationship with Robert Hooke and he wanted to make sure that Hooke’s many inventions and scientific contributions were recorded. And he has this wonderful line in the life of Hooke where he says, “It’s so hard to get people to do right by themselves.” And in his childhood, he had seen the fallout from the dissolution of the monasteries. He’d become very troubled by the habit of using manuscript pages which had been displaced in the dissolution. He saw them being used in schools to cover textbooks. He saw them being used to—or he heard about them at least being used—to wrap up gloves or to create stoppers in bottles. And this really troubled him from, from a very early age. And I think he has another beautiful line where he says after the dissolution of the monasteries, whereas these manuscripts had been kept safe, they flew around like butterflies. And he wanted to catch them and preserve them and to stop people letting the papers and the precious manuscripts of their relatives do the same. So he was very instrumental in rescuing manuscripts, other people’s manuscripts. And then fortunately with his own, he knew Ashmole and they had the shared astrology interest. Ashmole was a very different sort of person who basically said to Oxford, look, I’ll give you my collections, but there has to be a museum for them. And luckily Aubrey was able to use that museum as a safe place for his own manuscripts. OLIVER: So we know things about Robert Hooke and Thomas Hobbes and all these other luminaries of the 17th century, thanks to Aubrey. What else do we know, thanks to him? SCURR: We know what Stonehenge looked like in his day because he was a very good draftsman. He drew pictures of Stonehenge. He’d grown up in Wiltshire, he’d known those stones from childhood. He understood that Avebury nearby was a comparable monument, and he took Charles II to see it, and persuaded the king to get the locals to stop breaking up the stones, to reuse the stones, which was the practice. He also made drawings of windows because he was possibly the first person as a historian of architecture to realize that you could date buildings by the style of their windows. So we have those drawings. He was also interested in the history of costume. He did a survey of Surrey, of Wiltshire. So these are all sort of focuses in his manuscripts and people who’ve used them come to really appreciate how pioneering Aubrey was. But of course he doesn’t finish them. He doesn’t publish those manuscripts. So it’s very easy really to overlook the innovation and the contribution and the wonderful imagination that he had. OLIVER: You mean if he’d published a book, he would have a much bigger reputation? SCURR: Well, I think there’s two things. Yes, but in a sense, you know, the Brief Lives have been published after his death in various forms. But I think one of the most engaging things about Aubrey is that he’s a modest and self-effacing person. And I already mentioned the idea he had of himself as a whetstone to other people’s talents. There aren’t that many people—certainly not in my life, maybe there are in yours—but who would effortlessly describe themselves as a whetstone to other people’s talents. Most people want to be at the center. They’re happy to have clever and literary friends, but they want a place there at the table as well. And Aubrey really was very, very invested in helping other people to do right by themselves, as he said about Hooke. And he very movingly—this is one of the inspirations really for my book that I wrote about him—he spent all that time collating the information about other people’s lives. And for his own life, he puts down a few lines, a couple of facts and everything. He says, well, this could be used as the binding of a book. You know, it’s sort of waste paper really. So he doesn’t write his own life. Other people’s lives he’s going to convey to posterity. He doesn’t see his own life as really being at that level of needing the attention that he gave, for example, to Milton or to Harvey or Hobbes, as you mentioned. OLIVER: He’s born the year after Charles I comes to the throne. So he obviously lives through a fairly terrible period of history and very tumultuous, changeable in lots of different ways. The new world, the new learning, new religion, new politics, everything is changing. And he’s obsessed with the old ways. How did these historical events—is he reacting against his time? Is he just born in a lucky time in a way? SCURR: So he was a student in Oxford during the Civil War. And you are right. The upheaval is very disturbing for his generation. It means he gets called back from Oxford by his father because it’s dangerous to be there. And he’s really, really upset by that because, it’s like us, when we were students or our students today. You finally get away from your family and there you are in this place with all these exciting peers and access to books that you’ve never had before or at least to that extent, libraries, et cetera. And suddenly there’s a war on and you’ve got to go home. So there’s that disturbance. Then there is the fact that actually he was close to Hobbes. Hobbes actually was a Malmesbury man, so Wiltshire, very near Aubrey. And had come back to visit the school where Hobbes had been, which was where Aubrey was at school. And so they had met in Aubrey’s childhood, and then he would’ve been aware of Hobbes having to go into exile. And then Hobbes coming back, of course. And that’s a very important time in his life. And it’s not an accident that Hobbes asks Aubrey to write his life because Hobbes knows how careful Aubrey is. And he knows that Aubrey has information that he can convey in the life. So that is really the first life that he writes. And it’s different from the others. There’s a different sort of origin. And it’s after he’s done that, that he starts to think, well, actually, you know, I can think of at least 50, 55 other people’s lives. And now I’ve got my hand in, I might start on those as well. So in that period of upheaval there are wonderful stories. Maybe we’ll look at some of the Brief Lives , but there’s this amazing story that he captures in the life of William Harvey, which is a description of Harvey having been at the battlefield in Edgehill and recording one of the people who had been fighting and wounded, surviving by having the good sense to pull a dead body on top of himself, to keep himself warm on the battlefield. Things like that, which make the war very much alive. This is brutal, this civil war. It’s a long time ago and we think we passed over it, but the really brutal reality of war is captured in the Brief Lives through the anecdotes and the stories of that generation that Aubrey preserves. OLIVER: How English is he? SCURR: Well, as opposed to what? OLIVER: Welsh. SCURR: Okay. Well he goes to Wales often and is very interested in Wales. I think he sees himself as English. I think he’s very invested in English customs and stories and people. He’s not nationalistic in any sense like that. What he’s interested in is the inherited ways of living. And he’s very interested in language and different dialects. That’s one of the other things; he starts to collect different words. He was very aware of the Cornish dialect, for example. So I’d say it’s a very decentered England that’s rooted in customs, traditions, inherited stories. And there’s a big place there for both the future and the past. Huge excitement about The Royal Society, English science, what can be achieved through the sharing of knowledge. But again, Aubrey’s not an insular person in that respect. So, he wished he could go on the Grand Tour when he was a student. He would really have loved to have done that. It’s one of the things that he actually talked to Harvey about, going and traveling as his contemporaries, for example, John Evelyn did. But Aubrey actually says—this is very typical of Aubrey—that his mother persuaded him out of it. His mother didn’t want him going off on the Grand Tour. She was afraid for him. And he regretted it later in life. But it’s so typical of Aubrey that he would pay attention to his mother and her anxieties. OLIVER: This interest in the present and the past—so he loves all the history, but he’s in the Royal Society. One thing I like in your book is the way he talks about, oh, my grandfather still dresses in the old ways, like he’s an Elizabethan, but at the same time he’s doing a very sort of Baconian project. He’s influenced by Bacon. Is Aubrey a sort of paradox? Does this make sense in a way? SCURR: Only in so far as lots of other people are as well. I was just looking at the Harvey life, and there’s a story there about how when Harvey was a student he was meant to be setting sail with some friends. And he’s stopped and told, “No, you can’t get on this boat. You have to wait.” And he says, “Well, what have I done wrong? Why can’t I get on this boat?” He said, “No, honestly, we need to have a word with you. You are not going on the boat.” And then the boat sinks, everyone dies. And this is apparently because the guy who stopped him had a dream that he needed to stop Harvey going. Harvey told Aubrey that story. Harvey also is—as Aubrey sort of slightly inaccurately puts it, is the inventor of the circulation of the blood. And you think, well, that’s going a little bit far, perhaps not actually the inventor, but certainly the first person to discover, to understand about circulating blood. So there’s another example of someone’s life includes, I wouldn’t be alive unless somebody had had this premonition and dream that I was about to die. Which is from a completely different world, from the rational, scientific understanding of the body or the other scientific advances that are going on at the time. OLIVER: And Aubrey’s happy to just sort of coexist with both of those because of his interest in astrology? SCURR: And not just astrology. He’s very interested in astrology and nativities, as he called it. In some of the Brief Lives , you see the sort of recording of the information that would be needed to cast an astrological shape for the life. But he is also interested in the fact that people believe in fairies and ghosts. He doesn’t look down on those beliefs. Nor does he say that he necessarily believes in the presence of fairies or the interventions of the supernatural. But he’s got a very open mind in relation to that. And certainly being simultaneously interested in early astronomy and astrology together is, to us, very striking. But then I think it was much more normal. OLIVER: Why do you think he resisted ordination? SCURR: Because he said the cassock stinks. He considered ordination several times because he knew it would be a living, it would be a way of being able to have some income, probably not very onerous duties. Some of his friends say to him, “Come on, Aubrey, it really won’t be that much work. You’ll just get a curate who’ll do it all, and you’ll get the living, and then you won’t have to be worrying all the time about your paycheck. You haven’t got a paycheck. It would be a living coming to you.” And on one occasion, one of the reasons he gives for not doing that is he thinks well, what if there’s another religious upheaval and I have to change sides again? What if Roman Catholicism comes back and I ended up on the wrong side of it? And, again, would it really have been that difficult to go with the flow? But I think, in his own way, he had found his way of living, which was intensely sociable. And perhaps he didn’t want that constraint of being a member of the clergy around him. OLIVER: Do you think he was a nonbeliever? SCURR: Well. I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think so at all. I think he probably was a straightforward Christian believer. I think perhaps he’d seen enough of the religious conflicts and wars to be afraid of fanaticism on both sides. And that would fit certainly with his relationship with Hobbes. I don’t have any reason to think he’s an atheist. He’s got a beautiful way of writing about death and there’s this wonderful line he has when he says, “God bless you and me in our in and out world.” So the fact that we refer to his works as the Brief Lives because they’re short, but everybody’s life is brief. And even those who live, as he did, into his 70s, it feels brief. And there’s these very moving descriptions of him at funerals. I was thinking about this the other day because he often records where someone’s buried. And I recently wrote my first entry for the Dictionary of National Biography . I did the one for Hilary Mantel, which was a great honor and extremely interesting. And when I came back to the Brief Lives , I thought, gosh, I wish I’d put at the end of that DNB entry where she’s actually buried, that would’ve made sense to do that. And I didn’t do it because the DNB is quite formalized; they’ve got their formula and you need to stick to it. But maybe I’ll add it in. Because it seems to me very moving to record where people are actually buried. That would fit I think with her religious sensibility, with a regard for the afterlife, and with the rites of passage at the end of life. OLIVER: What is it that makes Aubrey such a good biographer? SCURR: So I think the modesty that is in his spirit, the noticing, the minutiae that he both notices and values and his wit. He has a sensitivity to these funny and revealing quirky stories about the people that he knows. Or he finds them in the stories he’s told by people who did know them. There’s an eyewitness account aspect to it as well. Or at least it’s an oral history. “I was told this by . . .” He’s extremely precise. He’ll try to assemble the facts so far as he can, and then he’ll tell you what people’s close friends said about them, and he will do so very, very carefully so that you know this is a story that he’s been told that he’s passing on. And then he doesn’t pass moral judgment. He doesn’t adjudicate. And finally, he thinks of himself as doing all of this for posterity and that posterity, i.e. us or the people who come after us, will find things there and he’s not going to tell them what to find. He’s not going to shape the life and say, this is what you should think about it. He will give you the raw materials, he’ll give you the stories, he’ll give you a flavor of the details of the life, and then posterity can look there and can see, for example, the disagreements between Hobbes and Isaac Newton. There are people who’ve written lives of Hooke and Newton. And there are people who’ve written lives and you can be team Newton or team Hooke. Interestingly, Aubrey is team Hooke. He doesn’t write a life of Newton. And he wants, as I said, to do well by Hooke. But his way of doing that isn’t to say Mr. Hooke was fantastic and Newton robbed him of lots of his ideas. He says, let me show you, let me assemble and make a catalog, if I can, of all these hundreds of contributions that Hooke made. OLIVER: When did you discover Aubrey? SCURR: So I discovered Aubrey because I was reviewing for the LRB, The Biographer’s Tale , and I had come across a really interesting—and it’s still in the introduction to my book—a really interesting reflection on the difference between Aubrey and Lytton Strachey, a reflection made by Anthony Powell, and I had quoted it or alluded to it in my review. And I had gone and started to read Aubrey as a result of that. So I was led to it through reviewing, via Anthony Powell, and then into the Brief Lives . But then another very strange thing happened, which is I met for the very first time, Janet Malcolm, who is someone who became very important in my life. And because she knew or had been told that I’d written this review, she read the review before we met. And she said to me, she said, “Ruth, I read your review”—and I doubt Janet Malcolm was a massive fan of A.S. Byatt, to be absolutely honest. We never really discussed that further, but she said, “I read your review and I was really interested in this Aubrey. I was so interested in what you quoted about Aubrey and the difference between his biographical approach and Lytton Strachey.” And then it sort of stuck in my mind and suddenly as I was coming toward the end of my first book, which was a totally different book on Robespierre and the French Revolution, I just knew I wanted to write about Aubrey. And I think at the time my then-husband really thought I’d gone mad actually, because you’re not supposed to do that, are you? I mean, you’re supposed to stick in your period and certainly build on it. So, you know, a book on Marra or even Napoleon would’ve been okay, that would’ve made sense. But to circle back to the 17th century and write about Aubrey seemed extremely eccentric. OLIVER: Well, what was Janet Malcolm like? SCURR: Oh, Janet was absolutely wonderful. She has this reputation of being sort of terrifying. And, of course, I was extremely interested in her forensic examination of biography which we had very interesting conversations about. She was a deeply kind person, extremely nurturing of younger writers, and extremely funny as well. That’s the other thing that you don’t associate with her sometimes from this sort of public image of a very austere interviewer, The Journalist and the Murderer , In the Freud Archives , et cetera. Actually, she was a really warm and extremely witty person. OLIVER: A lot of historians don’t think biography is real history. Why do you take biography seriously? SCURR: Well, Michael Holroyd writes Works on Paper —and I love Michael Holroyd so much. And he has

6. Naomi Kanakia: How Great Are the Great Books? from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

   Mar 4, 202653 min

   Ahead of her new book What’s So Great About the Great Books? coming out in April, Naomi Kanakia and I talked about literature from Herodotus to Tony Tulathimutte. We touched on Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Scott Alexander, Shakespeare, William James, Helen deWitt, Marx and Engels, Walter Scott, Les Miserables , Jhootha Sach , the Mahabharata , and more. Naomi also talked about some of her working habits and the history and future of the Great Books movement. Naomi, of course, writes Woman of Letters here on Substack. Transcript Henry Oliver: Today, I am talking with Naomi Kanakia. Naomi is a novelist, a literary critic, and most importantly she writes a Substack called Woman of Letters , and she has a new book coming out, What’s So Great About the Great Books ? Naomi, welcome. Naomi Kanakia: Thanks for having me on. Oliver: How is the internet changing the way that literature gets discussed and criticized, and what is that going to mean for the future of the Great Books? Kanakia: How is the internet changing it? I can really speak to only how it has changed it for me. I started off as a writer of young adult novels and science fiction, and there’s these very active online fan cultures for those two things. I was reading the Great Books all through that time. I started in 2010 through today. In the 2010s, it really felt like there was not a lot of online discussion of classic literature. Maybe that was just me and I wasn’t finding it, but it didn’t necessarily feel like there was that community. I think because there are so many strong, public-facing institutions that discuss classic literature, like the NYRB, London Review of Books, a lot of journals, and universities, too. But now on Substack, there are a number of blogs—yours, mine, a number of other ones—that are devoted to classic literature. All of those have these commenters, a community of commenters. I also follow bloggers who have relatively small followings who are reading Tolstoy, reading Middlemarch , reading even much more esoteric things. I know that for me, becoming involved in this online culture has given me much more of an awareness that there are many people who are reading the classics on their own. I think that was always true, but now it does feel like it’s more of a community. Oliver: We are recording this the day after the Washington Post book section has been removed. You don’t see some sort of relationship between the way these literary institutions are changing online and the way the Great Books are going to be conceived of in the future? Because the Great Books came out of a an old-fashioned, saving-the-institutions kind of radical approach to university education. We’re now moving into a world where all those old things seem to be going. Kanakia: Yes. I agree. The Great Books began in the University of Chicago and Columbia University. If you look into the history of the movement, it really was about university education and the idea that you would have a common core and all undergraduates would read these books. The idea that the Great Books were for the ordinary person was really an afterthought, at least for Mortimer Adler and those original Great Books guys. Now, the Great Books in the university have had a resurgence that we can discuss, but I do think there’s a lot more life and vitality in the kind of public-facing humanities than there has been. I talked to Irina Dumitrescu, who writes for TLS ( The Times Literary Supplement ), LRB ( The London Review of Books ), a lot of these places, and she also said the same thing—that a lot of these journals are going into podcasts, and they’re noticing a huge interest in the humanities and in the classics even at the same time as big institutions are really scaling back on those things. Humanities majors are dropping, classics majors are getting cut, book coverage at major periodicals is going down. It does seem like there are signals that are conflicting. I don’t really know totally what to make of it. I do think there is some relation between those two things. Ted Gioia on Substack is always talking about how culture is stagnant, basically, and one of the symptoms of that is that “back list” really outsells “front list” for books. Even in 2010, 50 percent of the books that were sold were front-list titles, books that had been released in the last 18 months. Now it’s something like only 35 percent of books or something like that are front-list titles. These could be completely wrong, but there’s been a trend. I think the decrease in interest in front-list books is really what drives the loss of these book-review pages because they mostly review front-list books. So, I think that does imply that there’s a lot of interest in old books. That’s what our stagnant culture means. Oliver: Why do you think your own blog is popular with the rationalists? Kanakia: I don’t know for certain. There was a story I wrote that was a joke. There are all these pop nonfiction books that aim to prove something that seems counterintuitive, so I wrote a parody of one of those where I aim to prove that reading is bad for you. This book has many scientific studies that show the more you read, the worse it is because it makes you very rigid. Scott Alexander, who is the archrationalist, really liked that, and he added me to his blog roll. Because of that, I got a thousand rationalist subscribers. I have found that rationalists at least somewhat interested in the classics. I think they are definitely interested in enduring sources of value. I’ve observed a fair amount of interest. Oliver: How much of a lay reader are you really? Because you read scholarship and critics and you can just quote John Gilroy in the middle of a piece or something. Kanakia: Yeah. That is a good question. I have definitely gotten more interested in secondary literature. In my book, I really talk about being a lay reader and personally having a nonacademic approach to literature. I do think that, over 15 years of being a lay reader, I have developed a lot of knowledge. I’ve also learned the kind of secondary literature that is really important. I think having historical context adds a lot and is invaluable. Right now I’m rereading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. When I first read it in 2010, I hardly knew anything about French history. I was even talking online with someone about how most people who read Les Miserables think it’s set in the French Revolution. That’s basically because Americans don’t really know anything about French history. Everything makes just a lot more sense the more you know about the time because it was written for people in it. For people in 1860s France, who knew everything about their own recent history, that really adds a lot to it. I still don’t tend to go that much into interpretive literature, literature that tries to do readings of the stories or tell me the meaning of the stories. I feel like I haven’t really gotten that much out of that. Oliver: How long have you been learning Anglo-Saxon? Kanakia: I went through a big Anglo-Saxon phase. That was in 2010. It started because I started reading The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. There is a great app online called General Prologue created by one of your countrymen , Terry Richardson [NB it is Terry Jones], who loved Middle English. In this app, he recites the Middle English of the General Prologue. I started listening to this app, and I thought, I just really love the rhythms and the sounds of Middle English. And it’s quite easy to learn. So then, I got really into that. And then I thought, but what about Anglo-Saxon? I’m very bad at languages. I studied Latin for seven years in middle school and high school. I never really got very far, but I thought, Anglo-Saxon has to be the easiest foreign language you can learn, right? So, I got into it. I cannot sight read Anglo-Saxon, but I really got into Anglo-Saxon poetry. I really liked the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle . Most people probably would not like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle because it’s very repetitive, but that makes it great if you’re a language learner because every entry is in this very repetitive structure. I just felt such a connection. I get in trouble when I say this kind of stuff, because I’m never quiet sure if it’s 100 percent true. But it’s certainly one of the oldest vernacular literatures in Europe. It’s just so much older than most of the other medieval literature I’ve read. And it just was such a window into a different part of history I never knew about. Oliver: And you particularly like “The Dream of the Rood”? Kanakia: Yeah, “The Dream of the Rood” is my favorite Anglo-Saxon poem. “The Dream of the Rood” is a poem that is told from the point of view of Christ’s cross. A man is having a dream. In this dream he encounters Christ’s cross, and Christ’s cross starts reciting to him basically the story of the crucifixion. At the end, the cross is buried. I don’t know, it was just so haunting and powerful. Yeah, it was one of my favorites. Oliver: Why do you think Byron is a better poet than Alexander Pope? Kanakia: This is an argument I cannot get into. I think this is coming up because T. S. Eliot felt that Alexander Pope was a great poet because he really exemplified the spirit of the age. I don’t know. I’ve tried to read Pope. It just doesn’t do it for me. Whereas with Byron, I read Don Juan and found it entertaining. I enjoyed it. Then, his lyric poetry is just more entertaining to read. With Alexander Pope, I’m learning a lot about what kind of poetry people wrote in the 18th century, but the joy is not there. Oliver: Okay. Can we do a quick fire round where I say the name of a book and you just say what you think of it, whatever you think of it? Kanakia: Sure. Oliver: Okay. The Odyssey . Kanakia: The Odyssey . Oh, I love The Odyssey . It has a very strange structure, where it starts with Telemachus and then there’s this flashback in the middle of it. It is much more readable than The Iliad ; I’ll say that. Oliver: Herodotus. Kanakia: Herodotus is wild. Going into Herodotus, I really thought it was about the Persian war, which it is, but it’s mostly a general overview of everything that Herodotus knew, about anything. It’s been a long time since I read it. I really appreciate the voice of Herodotus, how human it is, and the accumulation of facts. It was great. Oliver: I love the first half actually. The bit about the Persian war I’m less interested in, but the first half I think is fantastic. I particularly love the Egypt book. Kanakia: Oh yeah, the Egypt book is really good. Oliver: All those like giant beetles that are made of fire or whatever; I can’t remember the details, but it’s completely… Kanakia: The Greeks are also so fascinated by Egypt. They go down there like what is going on out there? Then, most of what we know about Egypt comes from this Hellenistic period, when the Greeks went to Egypt. Our Egyptian kings list comes from the Hellenistic period where some scholar decided to sort out what everybody was up to and put it all into order. That’s why we have such an orderly story about Egypt. That’s the story that the Greeks tried to tell themselves. Oliver: Marcus Aurelius. Kanakia: Marcus Aurelius. When I first read The Meditations , which I loved, obviously, I thought, “being the Roman emperor cannot be this hard.” It really was a black pill moment because I thought, “if the emperor of Rome is so unhappy, maybe human power really doesn’t do it.” Knowing more about Marcus Aurelius, he did have quite a difficult life. He was at war for most of his—just stuck in the region in Germany for ages. He had various troubles, but yeah, it really was very stoic. It was, oh, I just have to do my duty. Very “heavy is the head that wears the crown” kind of stuff. I thought, “okay, I guess being Roman emperor is not so great.” Oliver: Omar Khayyam. Kanakia: Omar Khayyam. Okay, I’ve only read The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald, which I loved, but I cannot formulate a strong opinion right now. Oliver: As You Like It . Kanakia: No opinions. Oliver: Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson . Kanakia: Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson . I do have an opinion about this, which is that they should make a redacted version of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. I normally am not a big believer in abridgements because I feel like whatever is there is there. But, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson , first of all, has a long portion before Boswell even meets Johnson. That portion drags; it’s not that great. Then it has all these like letters that Johnson wrote, which also are not that great. What’s really good is when Boswell just reports everything Johnson ever said, which is about half the book. You get a sense of Johnson’s conversation and his personality, and that is very gripping. I’ve definitely thought that with a different presentation, this could still be popular. People would still read this. Oliver: The Communist Manifesto . Kanakia: The Communist Manifesto . It’s very stirring. I love The Communist Manifesto . It has very haunting, powerful lines. I won’t try to quote from it because I’ll misquote them. Oliver: But it is remarkably well written. Kanakia: Oh yeah, it is a great work of literature. Oliver: Yeah. Kanakia: I read Capital [ Das Kapital ], which is not a great work of literature, and I would venture to say that it is not necessarily worth reading. It really feels like Marx’s reputation is built on other political writings like The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and works like that, which really seem to have a lot more meat on the bone than Capital . Oliver: Pragmatism by William James. Kanakia: Pragmatism . I mean, I’ve mentioned that in my book. I love William James in general. I think William James was writing in this 19th-century environment where it seemed like some form of skepticism was the only rational solution. You couldn’t have any source of value, and he really tried to cut through that with Pragmatism and was like, let’s just believe the things that are good to believe. It is definitely at least useful to think, although someone else can always argue with you about what is useful to believe. But, as a personal guide for belief, I think it is still useful. Oliver: Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw. Kanakia: No strong opinions. It was a long time ago that I read Major Barbara. Oliver: Tell me what you like about James Fenimore Cooper. Kanakia: James Fenimore Cooper. Oh, this is great. I have basically a list of Great Books that I want to read, but four or five years ago, I thought, “what’s in all the other books that I know the names of but that are not reputed, are not the kind of books you still read?” That was when I read Walter Scott, who I really love. And I just started reading all kinds of books that were kind of well known but have kind of fallen into literary disfavor. In almost every case, I felt like I got a lot out of these books. So, nowadays when I approach any realm of literature, I always look for those books. In 19th-century American literature, the biggest no-longer-read book is The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, which was America’s first bestseller. He was the first American novelist that had a high reputation in Europe. The Last of the Mohicans is kind of a historical romance, à la Walter Scott, but much more tightly written and much more tightly plotted. Cooper has written five novels, the Leatherstocking Tales , that are all centered around this very virtuous, rough-hewn frontiersman, Natty Bumppo. He has his best friend, Chingachgook, who is the last of the Mohicans. He’s the last of his tribe. And the two of these guys are basically very sad and stoic. Chingachgook is distanced from his tribe. Chingachgook has a tribe of Native Americans that he hates—I want to say it’s the Huron. He’s always like, “they’re the bad ones,” and he’s always fighting them. Then, Natty Bumppo doesn’t really love settled civilization. He’s not precisely at war with it, but he does not like the settlers. They’re kind of stuck in the middle. They have various adventures, and I just thought it was so haunting and powerful. I’ve been reading a lot of other 19th-century American literature, and virtually none of it treats Native Americans with this kind of respect. There’s a lot of diversity in the Native American characters; there’s really an attempt to show how their society works and the various ways that leadership and chiefship works among them. There’s this very haunting moment in The Last of the Mohicans , where this aged chief, Tamenund, comes out and starts speaking. This is a chief who, in American mythology, was famous for being a friend to the white people. But, James Fenimore Cooper writing in the 1820s has Tamenund come out at 80 years old and say, “we have to fight; we have to fight the white people. That’s our only option.” It was just such a powerful moment and such a powerful book. I was really, really enthused. I read all of these Leatherstocking Tales. It was also a very strange experience to read these books that are generally supposed to be very turgid and boring, and then I read them and was like, “I understand. I’m so transported.” I understand exactly why readers in the 1820s loved this. Oliver: Which Walter Scott books do you like? Kanakia: I love all the Walter Scott books I’ve read, but the one I liked best was Kenilworth . Have you ever read Kenilworth ? Oliver: I don’t know that one. Kanakia: Yeah, it’s about Elizabeth I, who had a romantic relationship with one of her courtiers. Oliver: The Earl of Essex? Kanakia: Yeah. She really thought they were going to get married, but then it turned out he was secretly married. Basically, I guess the implication is that he killed his wife in order to marry Queen Elizabeth I. It’s a novel all about him and that situation, and it just felt very tightly plotted. I really enjoyed it. Oliver: What did you think of Rejection ? Kanakia: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte? Initially when I read this book, I enjoyed it, but I was like, “life cannot possibly be this sad.” It’s five or six stories about these people who just have nothing going on. Their lives are so miserable, they can’t find anyone to sleep with, and they’re just doomed to be alone forever. I was like, “life can’t be this bad.” But now thinking back over it, it is one of the most memorable books I’ve read in the last year. It really sticks with you. I feel like my opinion of this book has gone up a lot in retrospect. Oliver: How antisemitic is the House of Mirth ? Kanakia: That is a hotly debated question, which I mentioned in my book. I think there has been a good case made that Edith Wharton, the author of House of Mirth , who was from an old New York family, was herself fairly antisemitic and did not personally like Jewish people. What she portrays in this book is that this old New York society also was highly suspicious of Jewish people and was organized to keep Jewish people out. In this book there is a rich Jewish man, Simon Rosedale, and there’s a poor woman, Lily Bart. Lily Bart’s main thing is whether she’s going to marry the poor guy, Lawrence Selden, or the rich guy, Percy Gryce. She can’t choose. She doesn’t want to be poor, but she also is always bored by the rich guys. Meanwhile, through the whole book, there’s Simon Rosedale, who’s always like, “you should marry me.” He’s the rich Jewish guy. He’s like, “you should marry me. I will give you lots of money. You can do whatever you want.” Everybody else kind of just sees her as a woman and as a wife; he really sees her as an ally in his social climbing. That’s his main motivation. The book is relatively clear that he has a kind of respect for her that nobody else does. Then, over the course of the book, she also gains a lot more respect for him. Basically, late in the book, she decides to marry him, but she has fallen a lot in the world. He’s like, “that particular deal

7. Hermione Lee: Tom Stoppard. “It’s Wanting to Know That Makes Us Matter” from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

   Feb 4, 202656 min

   Hermione Lee is the renowned biographer of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald, and, most recently, Tom Stoppard. Stoppard died at the end of last year, so Hermione and I talked about the influence of Shaw and Eliot and Coward on his work, the recent production of The Invention of Love , the role of ideas in Stoppard’s writing, his writing process, rehearsals, revivals, movies. We also talked about John Carey, Brian Moore, Virginia Woolf as a critic. Hermione is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. Her life of Anita Brookner will be released in September. Transcript Henry Oliver: Today I have the great pleasure of talking to Professor Dame Hermione Lee. Hermione was the first woman to be appointed Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and she is the most renowned and admired living English biographer. She wrote a seminal life of Virginia Woolf. She’s written splendid books about people like Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and my own favorite, Penelope Fitzgerald. And most recently she has been the biographer of Tom Stoppard, and I believe this year she has a new book coming out about Anita Brookner. Hermione, welcome. Hermione Lee: Thank you very much. Oliver: We’re mostly going to talk about Tom Stoppard because he, sadly, just died. But I might have a few questions about your broader career at the end. So tell me first how Shavian is Stoppard’s work? Lee: He would reply “very close Shavian,” when asked that question. I think there are similarities. There are obviously similarities in the delighting forceful intellectual play, and you see that very much in Jumpers where after all the central character is a philosopher, a bit of a bonkers philosopher, but still a very rational one. And you see it in someone like Henry, the playwright in The Real Thing , who always has an answer to every argument. He may be quite wrong, but he is full of the sort of zest of argument, the passion for argument. And I think that kind of delight in making things intellectually clear and the pleasure in argument is very Shavian. Where I think they differ and where I think is really more like Chekov, or more like Beckett or more in his early work, the dialogues in T. S. Elliot, and less like Shaw is in a kind of underlying strangeness or melancholy or sense of fate or sense of mortality that rings through almost all the plays, even the very, very funny ones. And I don’t think I find that in Shaw. My prime reading time for Shaw was between 15 and 19, when I thought that Shaw was the most brilliant grownup that one could possibly be listening to, and I think now I feel less impressed by him and a bit more impatient with him. And I also think that Shaw is much more in the business of resolving moral dilemmas. So in something like Arms and the Man or Man and Superman , you will get a kind of resolution, you will get a sort of sense of this is what we’re meant to be agreeing with. Whereas I think quite often one of the fascinating things about Stoppard is the way that he will give all sides of the question; he will embody all sides of the question. And I think his alter ego there is not Shaw, but the character of Turgenev in The Coast of Utopia , who is constantly being nagged by his radical political friends to make his mind up and to have a point of view and come down on one side or the other. And Turgenev says, I take every point of view. Oliver: I must confess, I find The Coast of Utopia a little dull compared to Stoppard’s other work. Lee: It’s long. Yes. I don’t find it dull. But I think it may be a play to read possibly more than a play to see now. And you’re never going to get it put on again anyway because the cast is too big. And who’s going to put on a nine-hour free play, 50 people cast about 19th-century Russian revolutionaries? Nobody, I would think. But I find it very absorbing actually. And partly because I’m so interested in Isaiah Berlin, who is a very strong presence in the anti-utopianism of those plays. But that’s a matter of opinion. Oliver: No. I like Berlin. One thing about Stoppard that’s un-Shavian is that he says his plays begin as a noise or an image or a scene, and then we think of him as this very thinking writer. But is he really more of an intuitive writer? Lee: I think it’s a terribly good question. I think it gets right at the heart of the matter, and I think it’s both. Sorry, I sound like Turgenev, not making my mind up. But yes, there is an image or there is an idea, or there are often two ideas, as it were, the birth of quantum physics and 18th-century landscape gardening. Who else but Stoppard would put those two things in one play, Arcadia , and have you think about both at once. But the image and the play may well have been a dance between two periods of time together in one room. So I think he never knew what the next play was going to be until it would come at him, as it were. He often resisted the idea that if he chose a topic and then researched it, a play would come out of it. That wasn’t what happened. Something would come at him and then he would start doing a great deal of research usually for every play. Oliver: What sort of influence did T. S. Elliot have on him? Did it change the dialogue or, was it something else? Lee: When I was working with him on my biography, he gave me a number of things. I had extraordinary access, and we can perhaps come back to that interesting fact. And most of these things were loans he gave them to me to work on. Then I gave them back to him. But he gave me as a present one thing, which was a black notebook that he had been keeping at the time he was writing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern , and also his first and only novel Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon , which is little known, which he thought was going to make his career. The book was published in the same week that Rosencrantz came up. He thought the novel was going to make his career and the play was going to sink without trace. Not so. In the notebook there are many quotations from T. S. Elliot, and particularly from Prufrock and the Wasteland , and you can see him working them into the novel and into the play. “I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be.” And that sense of being a disconsolate outsider. Ill at ease with and neurotic about the world that is charging along almost without you, and you are having to hang on to the edge of the world. The person who feels themself to be in internal exile, not at one with the universe. I think that point of view recurs over and over again, right through the work, but also a kind of epigrammatical, slightly mysterious crypticness that Elliot has, certainly in Prufrock and in the Wasteland and in the early poems. He loved that tone. Oliver: Yes. When I read your paper about that I thought about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern quite differently. I’ve always disliked the idea that it’s a sort of Beckett imitation play. It seems very Elliotic having read what you described. Lee: There is Beckett in there. You can’t get away from it. Oliver: Surface level. Lee: Beckett’s there, but I think the sense of people waiting around—Stoppard’s favorite description of Rosencrantz was: “It’s two journalists on a story that doesn’t add up, which is very clever and funny.” Yes. And that sense of, Vladimir going, “What are we supposed to be doing and how are we going to pass the time?” That’s profoundly influential on Stoppard. So I don’t think it’s just a superficial resemblance myself, but I agree that Elliot just fills the tone of that play and other things too. Oliver: In the article you wrote about Stoppard and Elliot, the title is about biographical questing, and you also described Arcadia as a quest. How important is the idea of the quest to the way you work and also to the way you read Stoppard? Lee: I took as the epigraph for my biography of Stoppard a line from Arcadia : “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter, otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.” So I think that’s right at the heart of Stoppard’s work, and it’s right at the heart of any biographical work, whether or not it’s mine or someone else’s. If you can’t know, in the sense of knowing the person, knowing what the person is like, and also knowing as much as possible about them from different kinds of sources, then you might as well give up. You can’t do it through impressions. You’ve got to do it through knowledge. Of course, a certain amount of intuition may also come into play, though I’m not the kind of biographer that feels you can make things up. Working on a living person, this is the only time I’ve done that. It was, of course, a very different thing from working on a safely dead author. And I knew Penelope Fitzgerald a little bit, but I had no idea I was going to write her biography when I had conversations with her and she wouldn’t have told me anything anyway. She was so wicked and evasive. But it was a set up thing; he asked me to do it. And we had a proper contract and we worked together over several years, during which time he became a friend, which was a wonderful piece of luck for me. I was doing four things, really. One was reading all the material that he produced, everything, and getting to know it as well as I could. And that’s obviously the basic task. One was talking to him and listening to him talk about his life. And he was very generous with those interviews. I’m sure there were things he didn’t tell me, but that’s fine. One was talking to other people about him, which is a very interesting process. And with someone like him who knew everyone in the literary, theatrical, cultural world, you have to draw a halt at some point. You can’t talk to a thousand people, or I’d have still been doing it, so you talk to particularly fellow playwrights, directors, actors who’ve worked with him often, as well as family and friends. And then you start pitting the versions against each other and seeing what stands up and what keeps being said. Repetition’s very important in that process because when several people say the same thing to you, then you know that’s right. And that quest also involves some actual footsteps, as Richard Holmes would say. Footsteps. Traveling to places he’d lived in and going to Darjeeling where he had been to school before he came to England, that kind of travel. And then the fourth, and to me, in a way, almost the most exciting, was the opportunity to watch him at work in rehearsal. So with the director’s permissions, I was allowed to sit in on two or three processes like that, the 50th anniversary production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Old Vic with David Lavoie. And Patrick Marber’s wonderful production of Leopoldstadt and Nick Hytner’s production of The Hard Problem at the National. So I was able to witness the very interesting negotiations going on between Tom and the director and the cast. And also the extraordinary fact that even with a play like Rosencrantz , which is on every school syllabus and has been for 50—however many years—he was still changing things in rehearsal. I can’t get over that. And in his view, as he often said, theater is an event and not a text, and so one could see that actual process of things changing before one’s very eyes, and that for a biographer, it’s a pretty amazing privilege. Oliver: How much of the plays were written during rehearsal do you think? Lee: Oh, 99% of the plays were written with much labor, much precision, much correction alone at his desk. The text is there, the text is written, and everything changes when you go into the rehearsal room because you suddenly find that there isn’t enough time with that speech for the person to get from the bed to the door. It’s physics; you have to put another line in so that someone can make an entrance or an exit, that kind of thing. Or the actors will say quite often, because they were a bit in awe—by the time he became well known—the actors initially would be a bit in awe of the braininess and the brilliance. And quite often the actors will be saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I don’t understand this.” You’d often get, “I don’t really understand.” And then he would never be dismissive. He would either say, “No, I think you’ve got to make it work.” I’m putting words into his mouth here. Or he would say, “Okay, let’s put another sentence or something like that.” Oliver: Between what he wrote at his desk and the book that’s available for purchase now, how much changed? Is it 10%, 50? You know what I mean? Lee: Yes. You should be talking to his editor at Faber, Dinah Wood. So Faber would print a relatively small number for the first edition before the rehearsal process and the final production. And then they would do a second edition, which would have some changes in it. So 2%. Okay. But crucial sometimes. Oliver: No, sure. Very important. Lee: And also some plays like Jumpers went through different additions with different endings, different solutions to plot problems. Travesties , he had a lot of trouble with the Lenins in Travesties because it’s the play in which you’ve got Joyce and you’ve got Tristan Tzara and you’ve got the Lenins, and they’re all these real people and he makes him talk. But he was a little bit nervous about the Lenin. So what he gave him to say were things that they had really said, that Lenin had really said. As opposed to the Tzara-Joyce stuff, which is all wonderfully made up. The bloody Lenins became a bit of a problem for him. And so that gets changed in later editions you’ll find. Oliver: How closely do you think The Real Thing is based on Present Laughter by Noël Coward? Lee: Oh, I think there’s a little bit of Coward in there. Yes, sure. I think he liked Coward, he liked Wilde, obviously. He likes brilliant, witty, playful entertainers. He wants to be an entertainer. But I think The Real Thing , he was proud of the fact that The Real Thing was one of the few examples of his plays at that time, which weren’t based on something else. They weren’t based on Hamlet . They weren’t based on The Importance of Being Earnest . It’s not based on a real person like Housman. I think The Real Thing came out of himself much more than out of literary models. Oliver: You don’t think that Henry is a bit like the actor character in Present Laughter and it’s all set in his flat and the couples moving around and the slight element of farce? The cricket bat speech is quite similar to when Gary Essendine—do you remember that very funny young man comes up on the train from Epping or somewhere and lectures him about the social value of art. And Gary Essendine says, “Get a job in a theater rep and write 20 plays. And if you can get one of them put on in a pub, you’ll be damn lucky.” It’s like a model for him, a loose model. Lee: Yes. Henry, I think you should write an article comparing these two plays. Oliver: Okay. Very good. What does Stoppardian mean? Lee: It means witty. It means brilliant with words. It means fizzing with verbal energy. It means intellectually dazzling. The word dazzling is the one that tends to get used. My own version of Stoppardian is a little bit different from, as it were, those standard received and perfectly acceptable accounts of Stoppardian. My own sense of Stoppardian has more to do with grief and mortality and a sense of not belonging and of puzzlement and bewilderment, within all that I said before, within the dazzling, playful astonishing zest and brio of language and the precision about language. Oliver: Because it’s a funny word. It’s hard to include Leopoldstadt under the typical use of Stoppardian, because it’s an untypical Stoppard. Lee: One of the things about Leopoldstadt that I think is—let’s get rid of that trope about Stoppardian—characteristic of him is the remarkable way it deals with time. Here’s a play like Arcadia , all set in the same place, all set in the same room, in the same house, and it goes from a big hustling room, late 19th-century family play, just like the beginning of The Coast of Utopia , where you begin with a big family in Russia and then it moves through the ’20s and then into the terrible appalling period of the Anschluss and the Holocaust. And then it ends up after the war with an empty room. This room, is like a different kind of theater, an empty room. Three characters, none of whom you know very well, speaking in three different kinds of English, reaching across vast spaces of incomprehension, and you’ve had these jumps through time. And then at the very end, the original family, all of whom have been destroyed, the original family reappears on the stage. I’m sorry to tell this for anyone who hasn’t seen Leopoldstadt . Because when it happens on the stage, it’s an absolutely astonishing moment. As if the time has gone round and as if the play, which I think it was for him, was an act of restitution to all those people. Oliver: How often did he use his charm to get his way with actors? Lee: A lot. And not just actors. People he worked with, film people, friends, companions. Charm is such an interesting thing, isn’t it? Because we shouldn’t deviate, but there’s always a slightly sinister aspect to the word charm as in, a magic charm. And one tends to be a bit suspicious of charm. And he knew he had charm and he was physically very magnetic and good looking and very funny and very attentive to people. But I think the charm, in his case, he did use it to get the right results, and he did use it, as he would say, “to look after my plays.” He was always, “I want to look after my plays.” And that’s why he went back to rehearsal when there were revivals and so on. But he wasn’t always charming. Patrick Marber, who’s a friend of his and who directed Leopoldstadt , is very good on how irritable Stoppard could be sometimes in rehearsal. And I’ve heard that from other directors too—Jack O’Brien, who did the American productions of things like The Invention of Love . If Stoppard felt it wasn’t right, he could get quite cross. So this wasn’t a sort of oleaginous character at all. It’s not smooth, it’s not a smooth charm at all. But yes, he knew his power and he used it, and I think in a good way. I think he was a benign character actually. And one of the things that was very fascinating to me, not only when he died and there was this great outpouring of tributes, very heartfelt tributes, I thought. But also when I was working on the biography, I was going around the world trying to find people to say bad things about him, because what I didn’t want to do was write a hagiography. You don’t want to do that; there would be no point. And it was genuinely quite hard. And I don’t know the theater world; it’s not my world. I got to know it a little bit then. But I have never necessarily thought of the theater world as being utterly loving and generous about everybody else. I’m sure there are lots of rivalries and spitefulness, as there is in academic life, all the rest of it. But it was very hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about him, even people who’d come up against the steeliness that there is in him. I had an interview with Steven Spielberg about him, with whom he worked a lot, and with whom he did Empire of the Sun . And I would ask my interviewees if they could come up with two or three adjectives or an adjective that would sum him up, that would sum Stoppard up to them. And when I asked Spielberg this question, he had a little think and then he said, intransigent. I thought, great. He must be the only person who ever stood up to him. Oliver: What was his best film script? Did he write a really great film. Lee: That one. I think partly the novel, I don’t know if you know the Ballard novel, the Empire of the Sun , it’s a marvelous novel. And Ballard was just a magical and amazing writer, a great hero of mine. But I think what Stoppard did with that was really clever and brilliant. I know people like Brazil , the Terry Gilliam sort

8. Literature, politics, and the future of the humanities from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

   Jan 7, 20261 hr 3 min

   This episode of The Common Reader podcast is a little different. I spoke to both Jeffrey Lawrence and Julianne Werlin about literature, politics, and the future of the academic humanities. Questions included: what do we mean when we talk about literature and markets? Can we leave politics out of literary discussion? Should we leave it out? If we can’t leave it out, can we have nice friendly conversations about it? What is academic Marxism? We also talked about whether Stephen Greenblatt is too ideological and why universities are necessary to literary culture, academics on Substack. Julianne writes Life and Letters . Jeffrey writes Avenues of the Americas . Here is Julianne’s interview in The Republic of Letters . Transcript (AI generated, will contain some errors) Henry Oliver (00:00) Today I am talking to Jeffrey Lawrence and Julianne Werlin. Jeffrey is a professor of English literature and comparative literature at Rutgers University. He specializes in the 20th and 21st century and he writes the sub stack, Avenues of America. Julianne probably needs no introduction to a sub stack audience. She writes Life and Letters, one of my favorite sub stacks. She’s a professor of English at Duke University, where as well as specializing in early modern poetry, she is interested in sociological and demographic studies of literature. and we are going to have a big conversation about literature and markets, politics, what do we mean when we talk about literature and markets, can we leave politics out of literary discussion, should we leave it out, if we can’t leave it out, can we have nice friendly conversations about it, and also maybe what is academic Marxism and what should it be and why is it so confusing? Jeffrey and Julianne, hello. Julianne (00:59) Hi. Jeffrey Lawrence (01:01) Hi, thanks for having us. Julianne (01:02) Yeah, thank you. Henry Oliver (01:04) I am going to start by referencing an interview that you did, Julianne, for Republic of Letters, which everyone has been reading. And you said, I’ve printed it out wrong, so I can’t read the whole quote. But you said something like, you joined Substack because you wanted people to talk with and because you felt a lack of debate in your academic field. There are lots of good things about scholarship being slow and careful, but it also needs to be animated by debate and conversation. and a sense of the stakes of what we’re doing, and that is eroding in the academy. So I want you both to talk about that. Why is that happening? How much of a problem is it? How much is Substack or the internet more generally the solution? What should we be doing? Why don’t we go to Julianne first, because it’s your quote. Julianne (01:54) Sure, I mean, won’t go on too long ⁓ since I have already spoken about this, but my sense within English departments is, you know, they’re becoming smaller, fewer people are taking our classes, we have much less of a role in public conversation and public debate, except as kind of a stalking horse for certain types of arguments. And certainly, if you are an early modernist, it’s very hard to locate a kind of a... Henry Oliver (02:14) You Julianne (02:25) discrete set of debates within early modern literature because there is so little public salience to literary fields. And I think this is happening in all literature. It’s especially pronounced if you’re working in the earlier periods. So my sense in joining SUBSTAC was that perhaps there will be debates by people who are not already so deep within the particular professional and disciplinary structures of a field that they can find new points of connection between literature and public life along different ⁓ axes that we have maybe not explored adequately within English departments and are maybe becoming harder to explore as English departments contract and recede from public life. Henry Oliver (03:04) Mm-hmm. So we’re bringing Milton back to the people and also finding out why they care about him at all. ⁓ What do you think about it, Geoff? Julianne (03:16) Well, hopefully. I mean, that’s the goal. Jeffrey Lawrence (03:21) Great, ⁓ so I actually restacked that specific quote from Julianne because it resonated so much with me. Yeah, I mean, my sense is that as someone who works on 20th and 21st century literature, there is more crossover there, I would say, between sort of academic scholarship and public debate. But I really wanna just echo what Julianne said there, that ⁓ I have gotten the feeling that within let’s call it like the legacy media. There are particular arguments that come from academia that are pushed forward and that become representative of the field of 20th and 21st century literature as a whole. And those kind of come to stand in for academic debate more generally. And I think it becomes very difficult. One of the things that I was noticing so much is that the people who had access to those legacy journals, are places like the Atlantic, the New York Times, that those began to dominate the debates and people just aren’t recognizing that in scholarships. So one of the things I particularly like about Substack is that I feel like although it has some of the same problems as social media more generally about kind of like who gets to participate and algorithmic culture and all of that sort of stuff. I did feel like the ideological diversity both left and right compared to the sort of a kind of monoculture, mono, you know, sort of academic argument that I found over and over in these legacy magazines, that Substack was the place where a lot of these debates are happening. And I only joined maybe four or five months ago, but for me, ⁓ sort of just in terms of my relationship to the Academy, it’s really changed my sense of what can be said and what’s being said by academics. Henry Oliver (05:17) feels to me like in some way humanities academia needs deregulating because there’s all sorts of things people can’t feel like they can’t say and can’t do. But it’s such a tangled mess that the easiest thing is for you all to just go to Substack and do it there and just try and avoid the bureaucracy because it’s gone too far. But when you’re on Substack... I feel like you’re often faced with people saying, these English literature academics, it’s all woke BS. They don’t know anything. They’ve killed this, right? You’re simultaneously in a kind of semi hostile environment. How do you, how does that seem to you? Julianne (05:56) Yeah, mean, that’s certainly true. I think that we are avatars on Substack for a kind of authority that we feel in our own lives we do not possess in any way. So we’re in this position where, you know, at least I feel this, I’m responding to comments that are, you know, very much, by people who very much feel that they’re attacking authority figures. And I’m, you know, I’m just a person on the internet, you know, talking with them when I’m on Substack. What I like about it is precisely that it levels any kind of authority structures insofar as they exist, which is debatable at this phase. But that’s not always the reality on Substack. I also feel there’s an additional thing, again, as an early modernist, where you feel like, you you don’t have... Henry Oliver (06:27) Yeah. Julianne (06:52) there’s not a lot of interest by people who are kind of on the left in contemporary politics in the Renaissance. It’s seen as kind of a conservative, canonical thing to study. And there’s a lot of pushback. even within English departments, there’s a lot of pushback ⁓ surrounding the idea that people should study Shakespeare or study Milton. It’s seen as kind of old and fussy and conservative. And then at the same time, you go on the internet and you’re the kind of ⁓ exemplar. Henry Oliver (06:59) Mmm. Yeah. Mmm. Julianne (07:22) of woke cultural discourse. So you feel like as a Renaissance scholar, you can’t win. You’re nobody’s idea of what people should be doing intellectually or culturally. Henry Oliver (07:25) Hahaha Do you think, someone asked me this the other day about why academics write in this funny way and why no one reads their books and all this. That was the way they phrased it. And I said, I think what you’re saying is like, why is there no AC Bradley today? Because Shakespeare in tragedy, so I don’t remember the number, of like quarter of a million copies or something that to us just feels like an insane number. Is there some legitimate criticism there that A.C. Bradley wrote in a way that, you know, your grandmother could understand? And a lot of what comes out of the Academy today is much more cut off from the ordinary reading experience. Julianne (08:18) Yeah, I mean, think that’s not debatable. think there have been quantitative studies, ⁓ DH studies that have shown that academic prose has become more difficult. I think it’s much more a consequence of how literary culture has become this sort of narrow and marginalized field that is preserved within academic debate and academic structures of argument and disciplinarity. Stephen Greenblatt certainly tries to be new A.C. Bradley and he does reach readers outside of academia but his audience is you know especially as a share of the population is not A.C. Bradley’s audience and I don’t think that’s a fault of his prose. Well that’s true. Henry Oliver (08:59) might be the fault of some of his ideas. Well, Jeff, I want to come to you on that. A.C. Bradley was not politically ideological. Maybe he’s a crazy Hegelian and he’s insane on that level. But is the problem that Stephen Greenblatt’s just obviously kind of a bit cranky in some ideological way, is this a general problem of the modern humanities academia? Jeffrey Lawrence (09:24) Yeah, I mean, I tend to see the problem as it’s kind of being a dual problem. One, I think, is the fact that we are facing in a lot of the academy a kind of scarcity politics. there are very, if you look at just academic hiring since the financial crisis in 2008, there’s just much less of it that’s happening. And so I think, I mean, part of what I see is this sense that there are certain I mean, we could say certain ideological lines that over the past 10 years, but even let’s say over the past 15 years ⁓ have been the ones that have become dominant in the academy. And I think my problem is not that people connect politics to literature. I think that that’s something that we all do to a certain degree. think the part of the problem is that we are now entering a situation in which if you deviate from a particular political line, which I have sort of identified with the Democratic Party, because I think you can follow a foul of it to the right, you can also follow a foul of it to the left, then you are seen as someone who is saying something that is not in line with the contemporary academy. And I think it used to be that when there were many jobs and many different departments that you could go to, Henry Oliver (10:28) Mm, mm. Jeffrey Lawrence (10:48) there were fewer consequences for making those types of statements that were out of sync with the dominant. And now I think it’s it’s become very, very punitive. And this is also reinforced again by the fact that what public scholarship we do have tends to be in line with this because the institutions that are kind of the elite, I would say Ivy league. institutions are also the ones that are feeding people into ⁓ sort of that public legacy discourse. Henry Oliver (11:23) Let’s talk about politics and literature because I don’t like making literature political as such. But whenever I read, Julianne’s probably read the Lisa Liebes substack. I don’t know if you’ve got to that yet, Jeff. She’s like, there should be no politics at all and it’s all aesthetics, which I kind of sympathize with. But then it just makes me think like, well, what about Edmund Spenser? Like there’s a certain extent to which a lot of poetry is political and we have to be political when we talk about it, otherwise we’re just ignoring a big part of it. ⁓ So how do we solve that problem? Like are we like badly trained in thinking about politics in the humanities academy or is it like what’s going on? have we got to a point where you can say there should be no politics about explicitly political writers? Julianne (12:19) Do you want to begin, Jeff? Jeffrey Lawrence (12:20) Yeah, I mean, I can just say briefly because I mean, I teach courses, a number of courses that are about politics and literature. I actually think, I mean, I started doing this in 2016, right after Trump’s election. I taught Steve Bannon’s film about the financial crisis alongside ⁓ the Big Short and a couple of kind of like trying to show kind of like the left and right responses. I mean, that’s not literature, that’s film, but many of the the literary works that we look at in those courses. There are conservatives, there are more classic liberals, there are Marxists. I mean, my personal feeling is that we need to talk about politics and literature, that it is a fair, it is a reasonable object of study. The problem, I think, is partially when you act as if certain... certain political writers or certain topics are simply out of bounds for study. And so there was actually a post by Dan Silver today about why I teach conservative thinkers and a response from the points John Baskin saying, who would think that you wouldn’t teach conservative thinkers in a sociology course? But I do think that it’s become par for the course that Henry Oliver (13:20) Mmm. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Jeffrey Lawrence (13:37) teaching someone, whether you’re on the right and you’re teaching someone who’s a Marxist or you’re a Marxist and you’re teaching conservatives, that somehow this is kind an ethical failure. And I think that’s a real problem of not assuming that what you’re teaching is kind of necessarily what you believe in or talking about politics means necessarily taking an ideological stance. Julianne (14:04) Yeah, I think that’s completely right. I think there’s this very pervasive confusion between ⁓ talking about the politics of literature and articulating an authoritative political perspective on that literature. Almost everybody who studies literature, especially in a historical context or in a contemporary context, honestly, is going to be talking about politics. Spencer, course, right? Milton. ⁓ How do you talk about somebody who was a literal revolutionary who wrote in favor of regicide and not talk about politics? You have to talk about politics. Henry Oliver (14:31) You Julianne (14:37) ⁓ But then there’s become this confusion where people assume that if you are talking about the politics of literature, you have not just a political, but actually an ethical ⁓ teaching that you are imparting by way of that literature. And that if you’re not doing that, you’re somehow not talking about literature, you’re not teaching the literature. That’s the confusion that has been so devastating to us and I think so devastating to literary study. Henry Oliver (15:03) So what’s the alternative? What should we be doing instead? Julianne (15:07) I I think that we should be talking about the politics of literature while acknowledging that literature raises political debates, not endless debates. know, there’s not any given author is going to raise, you know, a certain salient set of questions that we can talk about, that we can debate and acknowledging that people historically have had different responses to these, that it has been used in different ways in different moments and that it is still used in different ways today. That doesn’t mean that as intellectuals and scholars, we won’t have our own positions that may inform our scholarship in our writing and even our teaching, it just means that our positions do not shut down conversation and do not exhaust the range of possible positions. Henry Oliver (15:48) Yeah, and we should say, we’re saying about, you you should teach conservative thought and stuff. I don’t think either of you would identify as being on the right or conservative. So you’re saying that from a, from that position. ⁓ How do we, how do we get out of this then? How do we leave politics at the door? Because when I read modern ⁓ literary scholarship, to me, it’s either like very useful because it’s not political. Julianne (16:01) Yeah. Henry Oliver (16:17) Or I just, as I did with that book that we all, or that Jeff and I, sort of disagreed about. I just find it almost unreadable because it’s not scholarship anymore. It’s just partisanship. How do we move past this? Like, what’s the solution? Jeffrey Lawrence (16:33) I mean, if I can jump in just there, I mean, I would say one of the issues is having an ideological litmus test for scholars. And I think I see this in 20th and 21st century literature in a very strong way. And so what I would say is that, you know, allowing people to occupy different political positions, and I really mean Julianne (16:33) I mean, if I could jump in just there, I mean, I would say one of the issues is having an ideological litmus test for scholars. And I think I see this in 20th and 21st century literature in a very strong way. And so what I would say is that allowing people to occupy different political positions, and I really mean, Henry Oliver (16:36) Yeah. Jeffrey Lawrence (17:03) like people who I know on the left because they’re not toeing a particular line are also not welcome or are also kind of meat pushback in contemporary humanities departments that I think we need to get rid of that. And my thought about the Adam Kelly book, ⁓ the New Sincerity book is that to me, I think that what he’s trying to do in that book Henry Oliver (17:10) Yeah, yeah. Jeffrey Lawrence (17:31) is to understand neoliberalism as an economic and political philosophy that has effects on culture and to try to understand how authors themselves are dealing with that in their prose. To me, that is somewhat different from the way that neoliberalism is occasionally bandied about in the academy, where it doesn’t just, it isn’t just another word for saying, okay, this is the Chicago school or the Austrian school, and we’re gonna kind of take it seriously as a mode of thought. if just saying like, neoliberalism is like our ontological condition in the 21st century, and therefore everything is. necessarily an expression of neoliberalism and we don’t need to necessarily define it. So I mean, I think that may be where the disagreement extends is that I think that ⁓ Adam Kelly is trying to sort of be precise about that politics in order to understand how contemporary writers generally on the left are using it. Whereas I think that the kind of more wishy washy version of that is Henry Oliver (18:37) Mm-hmm. Jeffrey Lawrence (18:44) You know, just to say that neoliberalism is the air that we breathe. And there, I think I agree with you that it’s just not super helpful. Henry Oliver (18:49) Mmm. Yeah, my problem with the book was that he would not tell you what did Hayek think or say. He would say Hayek was a cheerleader for the free market. Or he would not tell you what is the Gary Becker view of human capital. He would say human capital is an ideology that infuses itself into every aspect of your life so that you can no longer be separate from the market. And it’s all this stuff, and it’s like, well, that’s nothing to do with Hayek and Gary Becker. ⁓ Jeffrey Lawrence (19:19) Can I just, just one thing on that, is that, I mean, I did go back and I mean, he has these moments where he’s talking specifically about Hayek and the road to serfdom and saying, I think that this is a worldview in which, he’ll quote Hayek talking about the problem with representative democracy and say, the real moral choices are choices that are made in the market. To me, I think that that is to engage to a certain degree with the thought. It is true, I think, as often happens in scholarship that you have the people who are defining a phenomenon from the pe

9. John Mullan. What makes Jane Austen great? from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

   Dec 12, 20251 hr 11 min

   Tuesday is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, so today I spoke to John Mullan, professor of English Literature at UCL , author of What Matters in Jane Austen . John and I talked about how Austen’s fiction would have developed if she had not died young, the innovations of Persuasion , wealth inequality in Austen, slavery and theatricals in Mansfield Park , as well as Iris Murdoch, A.S. Byatt, Patricia Beer, the Dunciad, and the Booker Prize. This was an excellent episode. My thanks to John! Transcript Henry Oliver (00:00) Today, I am talking to John Mullen. John is a professor of English literature at University College London, and he is the author of many splendid books, including How Novels Work and the Artful Dickens. I recommend the Artful Dickens to you all. But today we are talking about Jane Austen because it’s going to be her birthday in a couple of days. And John wrote What Matters in Jane Austen, which is another book I recommend to you all. John, welcome. John Mullan (00:51) It’s great to be here. Henry Oliver (00:53) What do you think would have happened to Austin’s fiction if she had not died young? John Mullan (00:58) Ha ha! I’ve been waiting all this year to be asked that question from somebody truly perspicacious. ⁓ Because it’s a question I often answer even though I’m not asked it, because it’s a very interesting one, I think. And also, I think it’s a bit, it’s answerable a little bit because there was a certain trajectory to her career. I think it’s very difficult to imagine what she would have written. John Mullan (01:28) But I think there are two things which are almost certain. The first is that she would have gone on writing and that she would have written a deal more novels. And then even the possibility that there has been in the past of her being overlooked or neglected would have been closed. ⁓ And secondly, and perhaps more significantly for her, I think she would have become well known. in her own lifetime. you know, partly that’s because she was already being outed, as it were, you know, of course, as ⁓ you’ll know, Henry, you know, she published all the novels that were published in her lifetime were published anonymously. So even people who were who were following her career and who bought a novel like Mansfield Park, which said on the title page by the author of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, they knew they knew. John Mullan (02:26) were getting something by the same author, they wouldn’t necessarily have known the author’s name and I think that would have become, as it did with other authors who began anonymously, that would have disappeared and she would have become something of a literary celebrity I would suggest and then she would have met other authors and she’d have been invited to some London literary parties in effect and I think that would have been very interesting how that might have changed her writing. John Mullan (02:54) if it would have changed her writing as well as her life. She, like everybody else, would have met Coleridge. ⁓ I think that would have happened. She would have become a name in her own lifetime and that would have meant that her partial disappearance, I think, from sort of public consciousness in the 19th century wouldn’t have happened. Henry Oliver (03:17) It’s interesting to think, you know, if she had been, depending on how old she would have been, could she have read the Pickwick papers? How would she have reacted to that? Yes. Yeah. Nope. John Mullan (03:24) Ha ha ha ha ha! Yes, she would have been in her 60s, but that’s not so old, speaking of somebody in their 60s. ⁓ Yes, it’s a very interesting notion, isn’t it? I mean, there would have been other things which happened after her premature demise, which she might have responded to. I think particularly there was a terrific fashion for before Dickens came along in the 1830s, there was a terrific fashion in the 1820s for what were called silver fork novels, which were novels of sort of high life of kind of the kind of people who knew Byron, but I mean as fictional characters. And we don’t read them anymore, but they were they were quite sort of high quality, glossy products and people loved them. And I’m I like to think she might have reacted to that with her sort of with her disdain, think, her witty disdain for all aristocrats. know, nobody with a title is really any good in her novels, are they? And, you know, the nearest you get is Mr. Darcy, who is an Earl’s nephew. And that’s more of a problem for him than almost anything else. ⁓ She would surely have responded satirically to that fashion. Henry Oliver (04:28) Hahaha. Yes, and then we might have had a Hazlitt essay about her as well, which would have been all these lost gems. Yes. Are there ways in which persuasion was innovative that Emma was not? John Mullan (04:58) Yes, yes, yes, yes. I know, I know. ⁓ gosh, all right, you’re homing in on the real tricky ones. Okay, okay. ⁓ That Emma was not. Yes, I think so. I think it took, in its method, it took further what she had done in Emma. Henry Oliver (05:14) Ha ha. This is your exam today, John Mullan (05:36) which is that method of kind of we inhabit the consciousness of a character. And I I think of Jane Austen as a writer who is always reacting to her own last novel, as it were. And I think, you know, probably the Beatles were like that or Mozart was like that. think, you know, great artists often are like that, that at a certain stage, if what they’re doing is so different from what everybody else has done before, they stop being influenced by anybody else. They just influence themselves. And so I think after Emma, Jane Austen had this extraordinary ⁓ method she perfected in that novel, this free indirect style of a third-person narration, which is filtered through the consciousness of a character who in Emma’s case is self-deludedly wrong about almost everything. And it’s... brilliantly tricksy and mischievous and elaborate use of that device which tricks even the reader quite often, certainly the first time reader. And then she got to persuasion and I think she is at least doing something new and different with that method which is there’s Anne Elliot. Anne Elliot’s a good person. Anne Elliot’s judgment is very good. She’s the most cultured and cultivated of Jane Austen’s heroines. She is, as Jane Austen herself said about Anne Elliot, almost too good for me. And so what she does is she gives her a whole new vein of self-deception, which is the self-deception in the way of a good person who always wants to think things are worse than they are and who always, who, because suspicious of their own desires and motives sort of tamps them down and suppresses them. And we live in this extraordinary mind of this character who’s often ignored, she’s always overhearing conversations. Almost every dialogue in the novel seems to be something Anne overhears rather than takes part in. And the consciousness of a character who doesn’t want to acknowledge things in themselves which you and I might think were quite natural and reasonable and indeed in our psychotherapeutic age to be expressed from the rooftops. You still fancy this guy? Fine! Admit it to yourself. ⁓ No. So it’s not repression actually, exactly. It’s a sort of virtuous self-control somehow which I think lots of readers find rather masochistic about her. Henry Oliver (08:38) I find that book interesting because in Sense and Sensibility she’s sort of opposed self-command with self-expression, but she doesn’t do that in Persuasion. She says, no, no, I’m just going to be the courage of, no, self-command. know, Eleanor becomes the heroine. John Mullan (08:48) Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But with the odd with the odd burst of Mariannes, I was watching the I thought execrable Netflix ⁓ persuasion done about two or three years ago ⁓ with the luminous Dakota Johnson as as you know, as Anne Elliot. You could not believe her bloom had faded one little bit, I think. John Mullan (09:23) And ⁓ I don’t know if you saw it, but the modus operandi rather following the lead set by that film, The Favourite, which was set in Queen Anne’s reign, but adopted the Demotic English of the 21st century. similarly, this adaptation, much influenced by Fleabag, decided to deal with the challenge of Jane Austen’s dialogue by simply not using it, you know, and having her speak in a completely contemporary idiom. But there were just one or two lines, very, very few from the novel, that appeared. And when they appeared, they sort of cried through the screen at you. And one of them, slightly to qualify what you’ve just said, was a line I’d hardly noticed before. as it was one of the few Austin lines in the programme, in the film, I really noticed it. And it was much more Marianne than Eleanor. And that’s when, I don’t know if you remember, and Captain Wentworth, they’re in Bath. So now they are sort of used to talking to each other. And Louisa Musgrove’s done her recovering from injury and gone off and got engaged to Captain Benwick, Captain Benwick. So Wentworth’s a free man. And Anne is aware, becoming aware that he may be still interested in her. And there’s a card party, an evening party arranged by Sir Walter Elliot. And Captain Wentworth is given an invitation, even though they used to disapprove of him because he’s now a naval hero and a rich man. And Captain Wentworth and Anna making slightly awkward conversation. And Captain Wentworth says, you did not used to like cards. I mean, he realizes what he said, because what he said is, remember you eight years ago. I remember we didn’t have to do cards. We did snogging and music. That’s what we did. But anyway, he did not used to like cards. And he suddenly realizes what a giveaway that is. And he says something like, but then time brings many changes. And she says, she cries out, I am not so much changed. Henry Oliver (11:23) Mm. Mm, yes, yes. Yep. Yes. Cries out, yeah. John Mullan (11:50) It’s absolutely electric line and that’s not Eleanor is it? That’s not an Eleanor-ish line. ⁓ Eleanor would say indeed time evinces such dispositions in most extraordinary ways. She would say some Johnsonian thing wouldn’t she? so I don’t think it’s quite a return to the same territory or the same kind of psychology. Henry Oliver (12:05) That’s right. Yes, yes, yeah. No, that’s interesting, yeah. One of the things that happens in Persuasion is that you get this impressionistic writing. So a bit like Mrs. Elliot talking while she picks strawberries. When Lady Russell comes into Bath, you get that wonderful scene of the noises and the sounds. Is this a sort of step forward in a way? And you can think of Austen as not an evolutionary missing link as such, but she’s sort of halfway between Humphrey Clinker and Mr. Jangle. Is that something that she would have sort of developed? John Mullan (12:49) I think that’s quite possible. haven’t really thought about it before, but you’re right. think there are these, ⁓ there are especially, they’re impressionistic ⁓ passages which are tied up with Anne’s emotions. And there’s an absolutely, I think, short, simple, but extraordinarily original one when she meets him again after eight years. And it says something like, the room was full, full of people. Mary said something and you’re in the blur of it. He said all that was right, you know, and she can’t hear the words, she can’t hear the words and you can’t hear the words and you’re inside and she’s even, you’re even sort of looking at the floor because she’s looking at the floor and in Anne’s sort of consciousness, often slightly fevered despite itself, you do exactly get this sort of, ⁓ for want of a better word, blur of impressions, which is entirely unlike, isn’t it, Emma’s sort of ⁓ drama of inner thought, which is always assertive, argumentative, perhaps self-correcting sometimes, but nothing if not confidently articulate. John Mullan (14:17) And with Anne, it’s a blur of stuff. there is a sort of perhaps a kind of inklings of a stream of consciousness method there. Henry Oliver (14:27) I think so, yeah. Why is it that Flaubert and other writers get all the credit for what Jane Austen invented? John Mullan (14:35) Join my campaign, Henry. It is so vexing. It is vexing. sometimes thought, I sometimes have thought, but perhaps this is a little xenophobic of me, that the reason that Jane Austen is too little appreciated and read in France is because then they would have to admit that Flaubertdidn’t do it first, you know. ⁓ Henry Oliver (14:40) It’s vexing, isn’t it? John Mullan (15:04) I mean, I suppose there’s an answer from literary history, which is simply for various reasons, ⁓ some of them to do with what became fashionable in literary fiction, as we would now call it. Jane Austen was not very widely read or known in the 19th century. So it wasn’t as if, as it were, Tolstoy was reading Jane Austen and saying, this is not up to much. He wasn’t. He was reading Elizabeth Gaskell. Jane Eyre ⁓ and tons of Dickens, tons, every single word Dickens published, of course. ⁓ So Jane Austen, know, to cite an example I’ve just referred to, I Charlotte Bronte knew nothing of Jane Austen until George Henry Lewis, George Eliot’s partner, who is carrying the torch for Jane Austen, said, you really should read some. And that’s why we have her famous letter saying, it’s, you know, it’s commonplace and foolish things she said. But so I think the first thing to establish is she was really not very widely read. So it wasn’t that people were reading it and not getting it. It was which, you know, I think there’s a little bit of that with Dickens. He was very widely read and people because of that almost didn’t see how innovative he was, how extraordinarily experimental. It was too weird. But they still loved it as comic or melodramatic fiction. But I think Jane Austen simply wasn’t very widely read until the late 19th century. So I don’t know if Flaubert read her. I would say almost certainly not. Dickens owned a set of Jane Austen, but that was amongst 350 selecting volumes of the select British novelists. Probably he never read Jane Austen. Tolstoy and you know never did, you know I bet Dostoevsky didn’t, any number of great writers didn’t. Henry Oliver (17:09) I find it hard to believe that Dickens didn’t read her. John Mullan (17:12) Well, I don’t actually, I’m afraid, because I mean the one occasion that I know of in his surviving correspondence when she’s mentioned is after the publication of Little Dorrit when ⁓ his great bosom friend Forster writes to him and says, Flora Finching, that must be Miss Bates. Yes. You must have been thinking of Miss Bates. John Mullan (17:41) And he didn’t write it in a sort of, you plagiarist type way, I he was saying you’ve varied, it’s a variation upon that character and Dickens we wrote back and we have his reply absolutely denying this. Unfortunately his denial doesn’t make it clear whether he knew who Miss Bates was but hadn’t it been influenced or whether he simply didn’t know but what he doesn’t… It’s the one opportunity where he could have said, well, of course I’ve read Emma, but that’s not my sort of thing. ⁓ of course I delight in Miss Bates, but I had no idea of thinking of her when I... He has every opportunity to say something about Jane Austen and he doesn’t say anything about her. He just says, no. Henry Oliver (18:29) But doesn’t he elsewhere deny having read Jane Eyre? And that’s just like, no one believes you, Charles. John Mullan (18:32) Yes. Well, he may deny it, but he also elsewhere admits to it. Yeah. Henry Oliver (18:39) Okay, but you know, just because he doesn’t come out with it. John Mullan (18:43) No, no, it’s true, but he wouldn’t have been singular and not reading Jane Austen. That’s what I’m saying. Yes. So it’s possible to ignore her innovativeness simply by not having read her. But I do think, I mean, briefly, that there is another thing as well, which is that really until the late 20th century almost, even though she’d become a wide, hugely famous, hugely widely read and staple of sort of A levels and undergraduate courses author, her real, ⁓ her sort of experiments with form were still very rarely acknowledged. And I mean, it was only really, I think in the sort of almost 1980s, really a lot in my working lifetime that people have started saying the kind of thing you were asking about now but hang on free and direct style no forget flow bear forget Henry James I mean they’re terrific but actually this woman who never met an accomplished author in her life who had no literary exchanges with fellow writers She did it at a little table in a house in Hampshire. Just did it. Henry Oliver (20:14) Was she a Tory or an Enlightenment Liberal or something else? John Mullan (20:19) ⁓ well I think the likeliest, if I had to pin my colours to a mast, I think she would be a combination of the two things you said. I think she would have been an enlightenment Tory, as it were. So I think there is some evidence that ⁓ perhaps because also I think she was probably quite reasonably devout Anglican. So there is some evidence that… She might have been conservative with a small C, but I think she was also an enlightenment person. I think she and her, especially her father and at least a couple of her brothers, you know, would have sat around reading 18th century texts and having enlightened discussions and clearly they were, you know, and they had, it’s perfect, you know, absolutely hard and fast evidence, for instance, that they would have been that they were sympathetic to the abolition of slavery, that they were ⁓ sceptics about the virtues of monarchical power and clear-eyed about its corruption, that they had no, Jane Austen, as I said at the beginning of this exchange, had no great respect or admiration for the aristocratic ruling class at all. ⁓ So there’s aspects of her politics which aren’t conservative with a big C anyway, but I think enlightened, think, I mean I, you know, I got into all this because I loved her novels, I’ve almost found out about her family inadvertently because you meet scary J-Night experts at Jane Austen Society of North America conferences and if you don’t know about it, they look at scants. But it is all interesting and I think her family were rather terrific actually, her immediate family. I think they were enlightened, bookish, optimistic, optimistic people who didn’t sit around moaning about the state of the country or their own, you know, not having been left enough money in exes will. And... I think that they were in the broadest sense enlightened people by the standard of their times and perhaps by any standards. Henry Oliver (22:42) Is Mansfield Park about slavery? John Mullan (22:45) Not at all, no. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. And I think, you know, the famous little passage, for it is only a passage in which Edmund and Fanny talk about the fact it’s not a direct dialogue. They are having a dialogue about the fact that they had, but Fanny had this conversation or attempt at conversation ⁓ a day or two before. And until relatively recently, nobody much commented on that passage. It doesn’t mean they didn’t read it or understand it, but now I have not had an interview, a conversation, a dialogue involving Mansfield Park in the last, in living memory, which hasn’t mentioned it, because it’s so apparently responsive to our priorities, our needs and our interests. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But I think it’s a it’s a parenthetic part of the novel. ⁓ And of course, there was this Edward Said article some decades ago, which became very widely known and widely read. And although I think Edward Said, you know, was a was a wonderful writer in many ways. ⁓ I think he just completely misunderstands it ⁓ in a way that’s rather strange for a literary critic because he says it sort of represents, you know, author’s and a whole society’

10. Rebecca Lowe: the container theory of time in On the Calculation of Volume from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

    Nov 25, 20251 hr 11 min

    I was delighted to talk to Rebecca Lowe , who is, like me, a great admirer of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series. We discussed Calculation as a philosophical novel: how it’s narrative voice is like that of a philosopher, the thought-experiments of the plot, and whether, as Rebecca thinks, the whole series is an argument for the container theory of time. Rebecca is a fellow at the Mercatus Center and writes the Substack the ends don't justify the means . Rebecca and I also recently started a joint Substack about classical liberal ideas. So if you want to read even more of our work together, have a look at The Pursuit of Liberalism . This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

11. Peter Pan video from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

    Nov 1, 202517 min

    I made a video of my recent essay ‘ What I Learned Reading Peter Pan to my Children ’. I made this video because it is one of the things I am most pleased with having written. You can watch it on YouTube or if you want audio only, that’s available here too. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

12. Shanon Chamberlain: what is a novel? from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

    Oct 25, 202553 min

    Shannon Chamberlain is a former tutor at St. Johns College, an expert in the influence of fiction upon Adam Smith, a mystery writer, Substacker , and amateur pilot. She is no longer an academic, and now works as a writer and editor . We talked about the history of the novel (Defoe, Swift, Fielding, Richardson), the links between Smith and Austen, epistolatory fiction, what Free Indirect Style actually is, fan fiction and the history of the novel, moral ambivalence, Adam Smith as a literary critic, what Ian Watt got right and wrong, and much more. My thanks to Shannon for a very interesting conversation! You can also watch this podcast on YouTube . This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

13. Rhodri Lewis: Shakespearean Tragedy from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

    Sep 25, 20251 hr 22 min

    I was delighted to talk to Rhodri Lewis, author of Shakespeare’s Tragic Art . We discussed Shakespeare’s most under appreciated plays, the best films, how to teach Shakespeare, humanism, personae, Frank Kermode, the future of the humanities, being supervised by John Carey, A.C. Bradley, what we have learned about Francis Bacon, and more. There’s a transcript below and you can also watch the whole conversation on YouTube if you wish . We also covered Rhodri’s love of Pevsner architectural guides. Timestamps 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:21 Shakespeare's best and worst plays 00:03:14 Performing Shakespeare 00:07:33 Pragmatism 00:09:13 Early experiences with Shakespeare 00:13:52 Teaching Shakespeare 00:17:08 Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet 00:19:38 Which five critical works? 00:23:37 Francis Bacon 00:31:31 What have we learned about Shakespeare? 00:34:32 Too much Shakespeare? 00:41:57 Tragedy 00:49:04 Humanism 00:54:00 Kermode 01:03:59 Quickfire questions This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

14. Video of my discussion with Catherine Lacey about Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

    Sep 11, 202548 min

    My thanks to Catherine Lacey for a great discussion! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

15. Frances Wilson: T.S. Eliot is stealing my baked beans. from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

    Jul 6, 20251 hr 5 min

    Frances Wilson has written biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, D.H. Lawrence, and, most recently, Muriel Spark. I thought Electric Spark was excellent. In my review, I wrote : “Wilson has done far more than string the facts together. She has created a strange and vivid portrait of one of the most curious of twentieth century novelists.” In this interview, we covered questions like why Thomas De Quincey is more widely read, why D.H. Lawrence’s best books aren’t his novels, Frances’s conversion to spookiness, what she thinks about a whole range of modern biographers, literature and parasocial relationships, Elizabeth Bowen, George Meredith, and plenty about Muriel Spark. Here are two brief extracts. There is a full transcript below. Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they? Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt. Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable? And. Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you? Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge , when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius? What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more. By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now. Transcript Henry: Today, I am talking to Frances Wilson. Frances is a biographer. Her latest book, Electric Spark , is a biography of the novelist Muriel Spark, but she has also written about Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, DH Lawrence and others. Frances, welcome. Frances Wilson: Thank you so much for having me on. Henry: Why don't more people read Thomas De Quincey's work? Frances: [laughs] Oh, God. We're going right into the deep end. [laughter] Frances: I think because there's too much of it. When I chose to write about Thomas De Quincey, I just followed one thread in his writing because Thomas De Quincey was an addict. One of the things he was addicted to was writing. He wrote far, far, far too much. He was a professional hack. He was a transcendental hack, if you like, because all of his writing he did while on opium, which made the sentences too long and too high and very, very hard to read. When I wrote about him, I just followed his interest in murder. He was fascinated by murder as a fine art. The title of one of his best essays is On Murder as One of the Fine Arts . I was also interested in his relationship with Wordsworth. I twinned those together, which meant cutting out about 97% of the rest of his work. I think people do read his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater . I think that's a cult text. It was the memoir, if you want to call it a memoir, that kick-started the whole pharmaceutical memoir business on drugs. It was also the first addict's memoir and the first recovery memoir, and I'd say also the first misery memoir. He's very much at the root of English literary culture. We're all De Quincey-an without knowing it, is my argument. Henry: Oh, no, I fully agree. That's what surprises me, that they don't read him more often. Frances: I know it's a shame, isn't it? Of all the Romantic Circle, he's the one who's the most exciting to read. Also, Lamb is wonderfully exciting to read as well, but Lamb's a tiny little bit more grounded than De Quincey, who was literally not grounded. He's floating in an opium haze above you. [laughter] Henry: What I liked about your book was the way you emphasized the book addiction, not just the opium addiction. It is shocking the way he piled up chests full of books and notebooks, and couldn't get into the room because there were too many books in there. He was [crosstalk]. Frances: Yes. He had this in common with Muriel Spark. He was a hoarder, but in a much more chaotic way than Spark, because, as you say, he piled up rooms with papers and books until he couldn't get into the room, and so just rented another room. He was someone who had no money at all. The no money he had went on paying rent for rooms, storing what we would be giving to Oxfam, or putting in the recycling bin. Then he'd forget that he was paying rent on all these rooms filled with his mountains of paper. The man was chaos. Henry: What is D.H. Lawrence's best book? Frances: Oh, my argument about Lawrence is that we've gone very badly wrong in our reading of him, in seeing him primarily as a novelist and only secondarily as an essayist and critic and short story writer, and poet. This is because of F.R. Leavis writing that celebration of him called D.H. Lawrence: Novelist , because novels are not the best of Lawrence. I think the best of his novels is absolutely, without doubt, Sons and Lovers . I think we should put the novels in the margins and put in the centre, the poems, travel writing. Absolutely at the centre of the centre should be his studies in classic American literature. His criticism was- We still haven't come to terms with it. It was so good. We haven't heard all of Lawrence's various voices yet. When Lawrence was writing, contemporaries didn't think of Lawrence as a novelist at all. It was anyone's guess what he was going to come out with next. Sometimes it was a novel [laughs] and it was usually a rant about-- sometimes it was a prophecy. Posterity has not treated Lawrence well in any way, but I think where we've been most savage to him is in marginalizing his best writing. Henry: The short fiction is truly extraordinary. Frances: Isn't it? Henry: I always thought Lawrence was someone I didn't want to read, and then I read the short fiction, and I was just obsessed. Frances: It's because in the short fiction, he doesn't have time to go wrong. I think brevity was his perfect length. Give him too much space, and you know he's going to get on his soapbox and start ranting, start mansplaining. He was a terrible mansplainer. Mansplaining his versions of what had gone wrong in the world. It is like a drunk at the end of a too-long dinner party, and you really want to just bundle him out. Give him only a tiny bit of space, and he comes out with the perfection that is his writing. Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they? Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt. Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable? Frances: I think that the way I approach biography is that there is a code to crack, but I'm not necessarily concerned with whether I crack it or not. I think it's just recognizing that there's a hell of a lot going on in the writing and that, in certain cases and not in every case at all, the best way of exploring the psyche of the writer and the complexity of the life is through the writing, which is a argument for psycho biography, which isn't something I necessarily would argue for, because it can be very, very crude. I think with the writers I choose, there is no option. Muriel Spark argued for this as well. She said in her own work as a biographer, which was really very, very strong. She was a biographer before she became a novelist. She thought hard about biography and absolutely in advance of anyone else who thought about biography, she said, "Of course, the only way we can approach the minds of writers is through their work, and the writer's life is encoded in the concerns of their work." When I was writing about Muriel Spark, I followed, as much as I could, to the letter, her own theories of biography, believing that that was part of the code that she left. She said very, very strong and very definitive things about what biography was about and how to write a biography. I tried to follow those rules. Henry: Can we play a little game where I say the names of some biographers and you tell me what you think of them? Frances: Oh my goodness. Okay. Henry: We're not trying to get you into trouble. We just want some quick opinions. A.N. Wilson. Frances: I think he's wonderful as a biographer. I think he's unzipped and he's enthusiastic and he's unpredictable and he's often off the rails. I think his Goethe biography-- Have you read the Goethe biography? Henry: Yes, I thought that was great. Frances: It's just great, isn't it? It's so exciting. I like the way that when he writes about someone, it's almost as if he's memorized the whole of their work. Henry: Yes. Frances: You don't imagine him sitting at a desk piled with books and having to score through his marginalia. It sits in his head, and he just pours it down on a page. I'm always excited by an A.N. Wilson biography. He is one of the few biographers who I would read regardless of who the subject was. Henry: Yes. Frances: I just want to read him. Henry: He does have good range. Frances: He absolutely does have good range. Henry: Selina Hastings. Frances: I was thinking about Selina Hastings this morning, funnily enough, because I had been talking to people over the weekend about her Sybil Bedford biography and why that hadn't lifted. She wrote a very excitingly good life of Nancy Mitford and then a very unexcitingly not good life of Sybil Bedford. I was interested in why the Sybil Bedford simply hadn't worked. I met people this weekend who were saying the same thing, that she was a very good biographer who had just failed [laughs] to give us anything about Sybil Bedford. I think what went wrong in that biography was that she just could not give us her opinions. It's as if she just withdrew from her subject as if she was writing a Wikipedia entry. There were no opinions at all. What the friends I was talking to said was that she just fell out with her subject during the book. That's what happened. She stopped being interested in her. She fell out with her and therefore couldn't be bothered. That's what went wrong. Henry: Interesting. I think her Evelyn Waugh biography is superb. Frances: Yes, I absolutely agree. She was on fire until this last one. Henry: That's one of the best books on Waugh, I think. Frances: Yes. Henry: Absolutely magical. Frances: I also remember, it's a very rare thing, of reading a review of it by Hilary Mantel saying that she had not read a biography that had been as good, ever, as Selina Hastings' on Evelyn Waugh. My goodness, that's high praise, isn't it? Henry: Yes, it is. It is. I'm always trying to push that book on people. Richard Holmes. Frances: He's my favourite. He's the reason that I'm a biographer at all. I think his Coleridge , especially the first volume of the two-volume Coleridge , is one of the great books. It left me breathless when I read it. It was devastating. I also think that his Johnson and Savage book is one of the great books. I love Footsteps as well, his account of the books he didn't write in Footsteps . I think he has a strange magic. When Muriel Spark talked about certain writers and critics having a sixth literary sense, which meant that they tuned into language and thought in a way that the rest of us don't, I think that Richard Holmes does have that. I think he absolutely has it in relation to Coleridge . I'm longing for his Tennyson to come out. Henry: Oh, I know. I know. Frances: Oh, I just can't wait. I'm holding off on reading Tennyson until I've got Holmes to help me read him. Yes, he is quite extraordinary. Henry: I would have given my finger to write the Johnson and Savage book. Frances: Yes, I know. I agree. How often do you return to it? Henry: Oh, all the time. All the time. Frances: Me too. Henry: Michael Holroyd. Frances: Oh, that's interesting, Michael Holroyd, because I think he's one of the great unreads. I think he's in this strange position of being known as a greatest living biographer, but nobody's read him on Augustus John. [laughs] I haven't read his biographies cover to cover because they're too long and it's not in my subject area, but I do look in them, and they're novelistic in their wit and complexity. His sentences are very, very, very entertaining, and there's a lot of freight in each paragraph. I hope that he keeps selling. I love his essays as well, and also, I think that he has been a wonderful ambassador for biography. He's very, very supportive of younger biographers, which not every biographer is, but I know he's been very supportive of younger biographers and is incredibly approachable. Henry: Let's do a few Muriel Spark questions. Why was the Book of Job so important to Muriel Spark? Frances: I think she liked it because it was rogue, because it was the only book of the Bible that wasn't based on any evidence, it wasn't based on any truth. It was a fictional book, and she liked fiction sitting in the middle of fact. That was one of her main things, as all Spark lovers know. She liked the fact that there was this work of pure imagination and extraordinarily powerful imagination sitting in the middle of the Old Testament, and also, she thought it was an absolutely magnificent poem. She saw herself primarily as a poet, and she responded to it as a poem, which, of course, it is. Also, she liked God in it. She described Him as the Incredible Hulk [laughs] and she liked His boastfulness. She enjoyed, as I do, difficult personalities, and she liked the fact that God had such an incredibly difficult personality. She liked the fact that God boasted and boasted and boasted, "I made this and I made that," to Job, but also I think she liked the fact that you hear God's voice. She was much more interested in voices than she was in faces. The fact that God's voice comes out of the burning bush, I think it was an image for her of early radio, this voice speaking, and she liked the fact that what the voice said was tricksy and touchy and impossibly arrogant. He gives Moses all these instructions to lead the Israelites, and Moses says, "But who shall I say sent me? Who are you?" He says, "I am who I am." [laughs] She thought that was completely wonderful. She quotes that all the time about herself. She says, "I know it's a bit large quoting God, but I am who I am." [laughs] Henry: That disembodied voice is very important to her fiction. Frances: Yes. Henry: It's the telephone in Memento Mori . Frances: Yes. Henry: Also, to some extent, tell me what you think of this, the narrator often acts like that. Frances: Like this disembodied voice? Henry: Yes, like you're supposed to feel like you're not quite sure who's telling you this or where you're being told it from. That's why it gets, like in The Ballad of Peckham Rye or something, very weird. Frances: Yes. I'm waiting for the PhD on Muriel Sparks' narrators. Maybe it's being done as we speak, but she's very, very interested in narrators and the difference between first-person and third-person. She was very keen on not having warm narrators, to put it mildly. She makes a strong argument throughout her work for the absence of the seductive narrative. Her narratives are, as we know, unbelievably seductive, but not because we are being flattered as readers and not because the narrator makes herself or himself pretty. The narrator says what they feel like saying, withholds most of what you would like them to say, plays with us, like in a Spark expression, describing her ideal narrator like a cat with a bird [laughs]. Henry: I like that. Could she have been a novelist if she had not become a Catholic? Frances: No, she couldn't. The two things happened at the same time. I wonder, actually, whether she became a Catholic in order to become a novelist. It wasn't that becoming a novelist was an accidental effect of being a Catholic. The conversion was, I think, from being a biographer to a novelist rather than from being an Anglican to a Catholic. What happened is a tremendous interest. I think it's the most interesting moment in any life that I've ever written about is the moment of Sparks' conversion because it did break her life in two. She converted when she was in her mid-30s, and several things happened at once. She converted to Catholicism, she became a Catholic, she became a novelist, but she also had this breakdown. The breakdown was very much part of that conversion package. The breakdown was brought on, she says, by taking Dexys. There was slimming pills, amphetamines. She wanted to lose weight. She put on weight very easily, and her weight went up and down throughout her life. She wanted to take these diet pills, but I think she was also taking the pills because she needed to do all-nighters, because she never, ever, ever stopped working. She was addicted to writing, but also she was impoverished and she had to sell her work, and she worked all night. She was in a rush to get her writing done because she'd wasted so much of her life in her early 20s, in a bad marriage trapped in Africa. She needed to buy herself time. She was on these pills, which have terrible side effects, one of which is hallucinations. I think there were other reasons for her breakdown as well. She was very, very sensitive and I think psychologically fragile. Her mother lived in a state of mental fragility, too. She had a crash when she finished her book. She became depressed. Of course, a breakdown isn't the same as depression, but what happened to her in her breakdown was a paranoid attack rather than a breakdown. She didn't crack into nothing and then have to rebuild herself. She just became very paranoid. That paranoia was always there. Again, it's what's exciting about her writing. She was drawn to paranoia in other writers. She liked Cardina

16. Victoria Moul. Poetry for life. from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

    Jun 22, 20251 hr 3 min

    Victoria Moul has been reading and memorising poetry since she was nine. She recites it at the dentist (‘ Aubade ’, rather alarmingly) and she recited poems all through her labours when she gave birth. We talked about all sorts of poetry, from ancient to living poets. What I really admire about Victoria is how at ease she is with poems across many centuries and how she can read as a scholar and with great personal emotion. Her Substack Horace & friends is one of my favourites. For the last quarter of this interview, Victoria recited poems which we discussed very briefly, mostly from memory. She must know hundreds by heart. We talked about * Horace * Shakespeare * Ovid * Claudian * Prudentius * Homer * Pindar * Sophocles * George Herbert * John Milton * Ben Jonson * Thomas Hardy * W. H. Auden * Keith Douglas * A. E. Housman * Basil Bunting * Ezra Pound * François de Malherbe * Philip Gross * Chris Childers (anthologist) * Michael Schmidt (anthologist) * Donald Davie * Gillian Allnutt * Marcel Proust * Diana Wynne Jones This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

17. Lamorna Ash. Don't Forget We're Here Forever from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

    Jun 12, 20251 hr 7 min

    In this interview, Lamorna Ash, author of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation's Search for Religion , and one of my favourite modern writers, talked about working at the Times Literary Supplement , netball, M. John Harrison, AI and the future of religion, why we should be suspicious of therapy, the Anatomy of Melancholy , the future of writing, what surprised her in the Bible, the Simpsons, the joy of Reddit, the new Pope, Harold Bloom, New Atheism’s mistakes, reading J.S. Mill. I have already recommended her new book Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever , which Lamorna reads aloud from at the end. Full transcript below. Uploading videos onto Substack is too complicated for me (it affects podcast downloads somehow, and the instructions to avoid this problem are complicated, so I have stopped doing it), and to upload to YouTube I have to verify my account but they told me that after I tried to upload it and my phone is dead, so… here is the video embedded on this page. I could quote the whole thing. Here’s one good section. Lamorna: Which one would you say I should do first after The Sea, The Sea ? Henry: Maybe The Black Prince . Lamorna: The Black Prince . Great. Henry: Which is the one she wrote before The Sea, The Sea and is just a massive masterpiece. Lamorna: I'll read it. Where do you stand on therapy? Do you have a position? Henry: I think on net, it might be a bad thing, even if it is individually useful for people. Lamorna: Why is that? Henry: [laughs] I didn't expect to have to answer the question. Basically two reasons. I think it doesn't take enough account of the moral aspect of the decisions being made very often. This is all very anecdotal and you can find yourself feeling better in the short term, but not necessarily in the long-- If you make a decision that's not outrageously immoral, but which has not had enough weight placed on the moral considerations. There was an article about how lots of people cut out relatives now and the role that therapy plays in that. What I was struck by in the article that was-- Obviously, a lot of those people are justified and their relatives have been abusive or nasty, of course, but there are a lot of cases where you were like, "Well, this is a long-term decision that's been made on a short-term basis." I think in 10 years people may feel very differently. There wasn't enough consideration in the article, at least I felt, given to how any children involved would be affected later on. I think it's a good thing and a bad thing. Lamorna: I'm so with you. I think that's why, because also the fact of it being so private and it being about the individual, and I think, again, there are certain things if you're really struggling with that, it's helpful for, but I think I'm always more into the idea of communal things, like AAA and NA, which obviously a very particular. Something about doing that together, that it's collaborative and therefore there is someone else in the room if you say, "I want to cut out my parent." There's someone else who said that happened to me and it was really hard. It means that you are making those decisions together a little bit more. Therapy, I can feel that in friends and stuff that it does make us, even more, think that we are these bounded individuals when we're not. Henry: I should say, I have known people who've gone to therapy and it's worked really well. Lamorna: I'm doing therapy right now and it is good. Transcript Henry: Today I am talking to Lamorna Ash. Lamorna is one of the rising stars of her generation. She has written a book about a fishing village in Cornwall. She's written columns for the New Statesman, of which I'm a great admirer. She works for a publisher and now she's written a book called, Don't Forget, We're Here Forever: A New Generation's Search for Religion . I found this book really compelling and I hope you will go and read it right now. Lamorna, welcome. Lamorna Ash: Thank you for having me. Henry: What was it like when you worked at the Times Literary Supplement? Lamorna: It was an amazing introduction to mostly contemporary fiction, but also so many other forms of writing I didn't know about. I went there, I actually wrote a letter, handwritten letter after my finals, saying that I'd really enjoyed this particular piece that somehow linked the anatomy of melancholy to infinite jest, and being deeply, deeply, deeply pretentious, those were my two favorite books. I thought, well, I'll apply for this magazine. I turned up there as an intern. They happened to have a space going. My job was Christmas in that I just spent my entire time unwrapping books and putting them out for editors to swoop by and take away. I'd take on people's corrections. I'd start to see how the editorial process worked. I started reading. I somehow had missed contemporary fiction. I hadn't read people like Rachel Kask or Nausgaard. I was reading them through going to the fiction pages. It made me very excited. Also, my other job whilst I was there, was I had the queries email. You'd get loads of incredibly random emails, including things like, you are cordially invited to go on the Joseph Conrad cycle tour of London. I'd ask the office, "Does anyone want to do this?" Obviously, no one ever said yes. I had this amazing year of doing really weird stuff, like going on Joseph Conrad cycling tour or going to a big talk at the comic book museum or the new advertising museum of London. I loved it. I really loved it. Henry: What was the Joseph Conrad cycling tour of London like? That sounds- Lamorna: Oh, it was so good. I remember at one point we stopped on maybe it was Blackfriars Bridge or perhaps it was Tower Bridge and just read a passage from the secret agent about the boats passing underneath. Then we'd go to parts of the docks where they believe that Conrad stayed for a while, but instead it would be some fancy youth hostel instead. It was run by the Polish Society of London, I believe-- the Polish Society of England, I believe. Again, each time it was like an excuse then to get into that writer and then write a little piece about it for the TLS. I guess, it was also, I was slightly cutting my teeth on how to do that kind of journalism as well. Henry: What do you like about The Anatomy of Melancholy ? Lamorna: Almost everything. I think the prologue, Democritus Junior to the Reader is just so much fun and naughty. He says, "I'm writing about melancholy in order to try and avoid melancholy myself." There's six editions of it. He spent basically his entire life writing this book. When he made new additions to the book, rather than adding another chapter, he would often be making insertions within sentences themselves, so it becomes more and more bloated. There's something about the, what's the word for it, the ambition that I find so remarkable of every single possible version of melancholy they could talk about. Then, maybe my favorite bit, and I think about this as a writer a lot, is there's a bit called the digression of air, or perhaps it's digression on the air, where he just suddenly takes the reader soaring upwards to think about air and you sort of travel up like a hawk. It's this sort of breathing moment for a reader where you go in a slightly different direction. I think in my own writing, I always think about digression as this really valuable bit of nonfiction, this sense of, I'm not just taking you straight the way along. I think it'd be useful to go sideways a bit too. Henry: That was Samuel Johnson's favorite book as well. It's a good choice. Lamorna: Was it? Henry: Yes. He said that it was the only book that would get him out of bed in the morning. Lamorna: Really? Henry: Because he was obviously quite depressive. I think he found it useful as well as entertaining, as it were. Should netball be an Olympic sport? Lamorna: [laughs] Oh, it's already going to be my favorite interview. I think the reason it isn't an Olympic-- yes, I have a vested interest in netball and I play netball once a week. I'm not very good, but I am very enthusiastic because it's only played mostly in the Commonwealth. It was invented a year after basketball as a woman-friendly version because women should not run with the ball in case they get overexerted and we shouldn't get too close to contacting each other in case we touch, and that's awful. It really is only played in the Commonwealth. I think the reason it won't become an Olympic sport is because it's not worldwide enough, which I think is a reasonable reason. I'm not, of all the my big things that I want to protest about and care about right now, making that an Olympic sport is a-- it's reasonably low on my list. Henry: Okay, fair enough. You are an admirer of M. John Harrison's fiction, is that right? Lamorna: Yes. Henry: Tell us what should we read and why should we read him? Lamorna: You Should Come With Me Now , is that what it's called? I know I reviewed one of his books years ago and thought it was-- because he's part of that weird sci-fi group that I find really interesting and they've all got a bit of Samuel Delany to them as well. I just remember there was this one particular story in that collection, I think in general, he's a master at sci-fi that doesn't feel in that Dune way of just like, lists of names of places. It somehow has this, it's very literary, it's very odd, it's deeply imaginative. It is like what I wanted adult fiction to be when I was 12 or something, that there's the way the fantasy and imagination works. I remember there was one about all these men, married men who were disappearing into their attics and their wives thought they were just tinkering. What they were doing was building these sort of translucent tubes that were taking them off out of the world. I remember just thinking it was great. His conceits are brilliant and make so much sense, whilst also always being at an interesting slant from reality. Then, I haven't read his memoir, but I hear again and again this anti-memoir he's written. Have you read that? Henry: No. Lamorna: Apparently that's really brilliant too. Then he also, writes those about climbing. He's actually got this one foot in the slightly travel nature writing sports camp. I just always thought he was magic. I remember on Twitter, he was really magic as well. I spent a lot of time following him. Henry: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of writing and literature and books and this whole debate that's going on? Lamorna: It's hard to. I don't want to say anything fast and snappy because it's such a complicated thing. I could just start by saying personally, I'm worried about me and writing because I'm worried about my concentration span. I am so aware that in the same way that a piano player has to be practising the pieces they're going to play all the time. I think partly that's writing and writing, I seem to be able to do even with this broken, distracted form of attention I've got. My reading, I don't feel like I'm getting enough in. I think that means that what I produce will necessarily be less good if I can't solve that. I've just bought a dumb phone on the internet and I hope that's going to help me by no longer having Instagram and things like that. I think, yes, I suppose we do read a bit less. The generation below us is reading less. That's a shame. There's so much more possibility to go out and meet people from different places. On an anthropological level, I think anthropology has had this brilliant turn of becoming more subjective. The places you go, you have to think about your own relationship to them. I think that can make really interesting writing. It's so different from early colonial anthropology. The fact that, I guess, through, although even as I'm saying this, I don't know enough to say it, but I was going to say something about the fact that people, because we can do things like substacks and people can do short form content, maybe that means that more people's voices are getting heard and then they can, if they want to, transfer over and write books as well. I still get excited by books all the time. There's still so much good contemporary stuff that's thrilling me from all over the place. I don't feel that concerned yet. If we all do stop writing books entirely for a year and just read all the extraordinary books that have been happening for the last couple of thousand, we'd be okay. Henry: I simultaneously see the same people complaining that everything's dying and literature is over and that we have an oversupply of books and that capitalism is giving us too many books and that's the problem. I'm like, "Guys, I think you should pick one." Lamorna: [laughs] You're not allowed both those arguments. My one is that I do think it's gross, the bit of publishing that the way that some of these books get so oddly inflated in terms of the sales around them. Then, someone is getting a million pounds for a debut, which is enormous pressure on them. Then, someone else is getting 2K. I feel like there should be, obviously, there should be a massive cap on how large an advance anyone should get, and then more people will actually be able to stay in the world of writing because they won't have to survive on pitiful advances. I think that would actually have a huge impact and we should not be giving, love David Beckham as much as I do, we shouldn't be giving him five million pounds for someone else to go to write his books. It's just crazy. Henry: Don't the sales of books like that subsidize those of us who are not getting such a big advance? Lamorna: I don't think they always do. I think that's the problem is that they do have this wealth of funds to give to celebrities and often those books don't sell either. I still think even if those books sell a huge amount of money, those people still shouldn't be getting ridiculous advances like that. They still should be thinking about young people who are important to the literary, who are going to produce books that are different and surprising and whose voices we need to hear. That feels much more important. Henry: What do you think about the idea that maybe Anglo fiction isn't at a peak? I don't necessarily agree with that, but maybe we can agree that these are not the days of George Eliot and Charles Dickens, but the essay nonfiction periodicals and writing online, this is huge now. Right? Actually, our pessimism is sort of because we're looking in the wrong area and there are other forms of writing that flourish, actually doing great on the internet. Lamorna: Yes, I think so too. Again, I don't think I'm internet worldly enough to know this, but I still find these extraordinary, super weird substats that feel exciting. I also get an enormous amount of pleasure in reading Reddit now, which I only just got into many, many years late, but so many fun, odd things. Like little essays that people write and the way that people respond to each other, which is quick and sharp, and I suppose it fills the gap of what Twitter was. I think nonfiction, I was talking about this morning, because I'm staying with some writers, because we're sort of Cornish, book talk thing together and how much exciting nonfiction has come out this year that we want to read from the UK that is hybrid-y nature travel. Then internationally, I still think there's-- I just read, Perfection by Vincenzo, but there's enough translated fiction that's on the international book list this year that gets me delighted as well. To me, I just don't feel worried about that kind of thing at all when there's so much exciting stuff happening. I love Reddit. I think they really understand things that other people don't on there. I think it's the relief now that when you type in something to Google, you get the AI response. It's something like, it's so nice to feel on Reddit that someone sat down and answered you. Maybe that's such a shame that that's what makes me happy now, that we're in that space. It does feel like someone will tell you not just the answer, but then give you a bit about their life. Then, the particular tool that was passed down by their grandparents. That's so nice. Henry: What do you think of the new Pope? Lamorna: I thought it was because I'd heard all the thing around fat Pope, thin Pope, and obviously, our new Pope is maybe a sort of middle Pope, or at least is closer to Francis, but maybe a bit more palatable to some people. I guess, I'm excited that he's going to do, or it seems like he's also taking time to think, but he's good on migration on supporting the rights of immigrants. I think there's value in the fact of him being American as this being this counterpoint to what's happening in America right now. If feels always feels pointless to say because they're almost the idea of a Pope. I guess, Francis said that, who am I to judge about people being gay, but I think this Pope has so far has been more outly against gay people, but he stood up against JD Vance and his stupid thoughts on theology. I'm quietly optimistic. I guess I'm also waiting for Robert Harris's prophecy to come true and we get an intersex Pope next. Because I think that was prophecy, right? What he wrote. Henry: That would be interesting. Lamorna: Yes. Henry: The religious revival that people say is happening, particularly among young people, how is AI going to make it different than previous religious revivals? Lamorna: Oh, that's so interesting. Maybe first of all, question, sorry, I choked on my coffee. I was slightly questioned the idea if there is a religious revival, it's not actually an argument that I made in the book. When I started writing the book, there wasn't this quiet revival or this Bible studies and survey that suggests that more young people are going to church hadn't come out yet. I was just more, I guess, aware that there were a few people around me who were converting and I thought it'd be interesting if there's a few, there'll be more, which I think probably happens in every single generation, right? Is that that's one way to deal with the longing for meaning we all experience and the struggles in our lives. I was speaking to a New York Times journalist who was questioning the stats that have been coming out because first it's incredibly small pool. It's quite self-selecting that possibly there are people who might have gone to church already. It's still such a small uptick because it makes it hard to say anything definitive. I guess in general, what will the relationship be between AI and religion? I guess, there are so many ways you could go with that. One is that those spaces, religious spaces, are nicely insulated from technology. Not everywhere. Obviously, in some places they aren't, but often it's a space in which you put your phone away. In my head, the desire to go to church is as against having to deal with AI or having to deal with technology being integrated to every other aspect of my life. I guess maybe people will start worshiping the idea of the singularity. Maybe we'll get the singularity and Terminator, or the Matrix is going to happen, and we'll call them our gods because they will feel like gods. That's maybe one option. I don't know how AI-- I guess I don't know enough about AI that maybe you'll have AI, or does this happen? Maybe this has happened already that you could have an AI confession and you'd have an AI priest and they tell you-- Henry: Sure. It's huge for therapy, right? Lamorna: Yes. Henry: Which is that adjacent thing. Lamorna: That's a good point. It does feel something about-- I'm sure, theologically, it's not supposed to work if you haven't been ordained, but can an AI be ordained, become a priest? Henry: Indeed Lamorna: Could they do communion? I don't know. It's fascinating. Henry: I can see a situation where a young person lives in a secular environment or culture and is interested in things and the AI is the, in some ways, easiest place for them to turn to say,

18. Helen Castor: imagining life in the fourteenth century. from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

    May 18, 20251 hr 11 min

    I was delighted to talk to the historian Helen Castor (who writes The H Files by Helen Castor ) about her new book The Eagle and the Hart. I found that book compulsive, and this is one of my favourite interviews so far. We covered so much : Dickens, Melville, Diana Wynne Jones, Hilary Mantel, whether Edward III is to blame for the Wars of the Roses, why Bolingbroke did the right thing, the Paston Letters, whether we should dig up old tombs for research, leaving academia, Elizabeth I, and, of course, lots of Shakespeare. There is a full transcript below. Henry: Is there anything that we fundamentally know about this episode in history that Shakespeare didn't know? Helen: That's an extremely good question, and I'm tempted now to say no. Helen told me what is hardest to imagine about life in the fourteenth century. I think it's relatively easy to imagine a small community or even a city, because we can imagine lots of human beings together, but how relationships between human beings happen at a distance, not just in terms of writing a letter to someone you know, but how a very effective power structure happens across hundreds of miles in the absence of those things is the thing that has always absolutely fascinated me about the late Middle Ages. I think that's because it's hard, for me at least, to imagine. Good news to any publishers reading this. Helen is ready and willing to produce a complete edition of the Paston Letters. They were a bestseller when they were published a hundred years ago, but we are crying out for a complete edition in modern English. Henry: If someone wants to read the Paston Letters , but they don't want to read Middle English, weird spelling, et cetera, is there a good edition that they can use? Helen: Yes, there is an Oxford World's Classic. They're all selected. There isn't a complete edition in modern spelling. If any publishers are listening, I would love to do one. Henry: Yes, let's have it. Helen: Let's have it. I would really, really love to do that. Full Transcript Henry: Today I am talking to the historian, Helen Castor . Helen is a former fellow of Sydney Sussex College in Cambridge. She has written several books of history. She is now a public historian, and of course, she has a Substack. The H Files by Helen Castor We are going to talk mostly about her book, The Eagle and the Hart , which is all about Richard II and Henry IV. I found this book compulsive, so I hope you will read it too. Helen, welcome. Helen: Thank you very much for having me, Henry. Henry: You recently read Bleak House . Helen: I did. Henry: What did you think? Helen: I absolutely loved it. It was a long time since I'd read any Dickens. I read quite a lot when I was young. I read quite a lot of everything when I was young and have fallen off that reader's perch, much to my shame. The first page, that description of the London fog, the London courts, and I thought, "Why have I not been doing it for all these years?" Then I remembered, as so often with Dickens, the bits I love and the bits I'm less fond of, the sentimentality, the grotesquerie I'm less fond of, but the humour and the writing. There was one bit that I have not been able to read then or any of the times I've tried since without physically sobbing. It's a long time since a book has done that to me. I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't read it, but-- Henry: I'm sure I know what you mean. That's quite a sentimental passage. Helen: It is, but not sentimental in the way that I find myself objecting to. I think I really respond viscerally to this sentimentalising of some of his young women characters. I find that really off-putting, but I think now I'm a parent, and particularly I'm a parent of a boy [laughter]. I think it's that sense of a child being completely alone with no one to look after them, and then finding some people, but too late for a happy ending. Henry: Too late. Helen: Yes. Henry: You've been reading other classic novels, I think, Moby Dick ? Helen: I'm in the middle of Moby Dick as we speak. I'm going very slowly, partly because I'm trying to savour every sentence. I love the sentence so much as a form. Melville is just astonishing, and also very, very funny in a way I hadn't expected to keep laughing out loud, sometimes because there is such humour in a sentence. Sometimes I'm just laughing because the sentence itself seems to have such audacity and that willingness to go places with sentences that sometimes I feel we've lost in the sort of sense of rules-based sentences instead of just sticking a semicolon and keep going. Why not, because it's so gorgeous and full of the joy of language at that point? Anyway, I'm ranting now, but-- Henry: No, I think a lot of rules were instituted in the early 20th century that said you can and cannot do all these things, and writers before that point had not often followed those rules. I think what it has led to is that writers now, they can't really control a long sentence, in the sense that Melville and Dickens will do a long sentence, and it is a syntactically coherent thing, even though it's 60, 70 longer words. It's not just lots of stuff, and then, and then. The whole thing has got a beautiful structure that makes sense as a unit. That's just not obvious in a lot of writing now. Helen: I think that's exactly right. Partly, I've been reading some of the Melville out loud, and having just got onto the classification of whales, you can see I'm going very slowly. Those sentences, which are so long, but it's exactly that. If you read them out loud, and you follow the sense, and the punctuation, however irregular it might be in modern terms, gives you the breathing, you just flow on it, and the excitement of that, even or perhaps especially when one is talking about the classification of whales. Just joyful. Henry: Will we be seeing more very long sentences in your next book? Helen: I think I have to get a bit better at it. The habit that I was conscious of anyway, but became acutely so when I had to read my own audiobook for the first time is that I think I write in a very visual way. That is how I read because mostly it's silent. I discovered or rediscovered that often what I do when I want to write a very long sentence is I start the sentence and then I put a diversion or extra information within em dashes in the middle of the sentence. That works on the page because you can see spatially. I love that way of reading, I love seeing words in space. A lot of different kinds of text, both prose and poetry, I read in space like that. If you're reading to be heard, then the difficulty of breaking into a sentence with, whether it's brackets or em dashes or whatever, and then rejoining the sentence further down has its own challenges. Perhaps I ought to try and do less of that and experiment more with a Melvillian Dickensian onward flow. I don't know what my editor will think. Henry: What has brought you back to reading novels like this? Helen: I was wondering that this morning, actually, because I'm very aware having joined Substack, and of course, your Substack is one of the ones that is leading me further in this direction, very inspiringly, is discovering that lots of other people are reading and reading long novels now too. It reminded me of that thing that anyone with children will know that you have a baby and you call it something that you think only you have thought of, and then four years later, you call and you discover half the class is called that name. You wonder what was in the water that led everybody in that direction. I've just seen someone tweet this morning about how inspired they are by the builder next door who, on the scaffolding, is blasting the audiobook Middlemarch to the whole neighborhood. Henry: Oh my god. Amazing. Helen: It's really happening. Insofar as I can work out what led me as opposed to following a group, which clearly I am in some sense, I think the world at the moment is so disquieting, and depressing, and unnerving, that I think for me, there was a wish to escape into another world and another world that would be very immersive, not removed from this world completely. One that is very recognizably human. I think when I was younger, when I was in my teens and 20s, I loved reading science fiction and fantasy before it was such a genre as it is now. I'm a huge fan of Diana Wynne Jones and people like that. Henry: Oh, my god, same. Which one is your favorite? Helen: Oh, that is an impossible question to answer, partly because I want to go back and read a lot of them. Actually, I've got something next to me, just to get some obscurity points. I want to go back to Everard's Ride because there is a story in here that is based on the King's square. I don't know if I'm saying that right, but early 15th century, the story of the imprisoned King of Scotland when he was in prison in England. That one's in my head. The Dalemark Quartet I love because of the sort of medieval, but then I love the ones that are pure, more science fantasy. Which is your favorite? Which should I go back to first? Henry: I haven't read them all because I only started a couple of years ago. I just read Deep Secret , and I thought that was really excellent. I was in Bristol when I read it quite unwittingly. That was wonderful. Helen: Surrounded by Diana Wynne Jones' land. I only discovered many years into an obsession that just meant that I would read every new one while there were still new ones coming out. I sat next to Colin Burrow at a dinner in-- Henry: Oh my god. Helen: I did sort of know that he was her son, but monstered him for the whole time, the whole course of sitting together, because I couldn't quite imagine her in a domestic setting, if you like, because she came up with all these extraordinary worlds. I think in days gone by, I went into more obviously imaginary worlds. I think coming back to it now, I wanted something big and something that I really could disappear into. I've been told to read Bleak House for so many decades and felt so ashamed I hadn't. Having done that, I thought, "Well, the whale." Henry: Have you read Diana Wynne Jones' husband's books, John Burrow? Because that's more in your field. Helen: It is, although I'm ashamed to say how badly read I am in medieval literary scholarship. It's weird how these academic silos can operate, shouldn't, probably don't for many, many people. I always feel I'm on horribly thin ground, thin ice when I start talking about medieval literature because I know how much scholarship is out there, and I know how much I haven't read. I must put John Burrow on my list as well. Henry: He's very readable. He's excellent. Helen: I think I can imagine, but I must go into it. Henry: Also, his books are refreshingly short. Your husband is a poet, so there's a lot of literature in your life at the moment. Helen: There is. When we met, which was 10 years ago-- Again, I don't think of myself as knowledgeable about poetry in general, but what was wonderful was discovering how much we had in common in the writing process and how much I could learn from him. To me, one of the things that has always been extremely important in my writing is the sentence, the sound of a sentence, the rhythm of a sentence folded into a paragraph. I find it extremely hard to move on from a paragraph if it's not sitting right yet. The sitting right is as much to do with sound and rhythm as it is to do with content. The content has to be right. It means I'm a nightmare to edit because once I do move on from a paragraph, I think it's finished. Obviously, my editor might beg to differ. I'm very grateful to Thomas Penn, who's also a wonderful historian, who's my editor on this last book, for being so patient with my recalcitrance as an editee. Talking to my husband about words in space on the page, about the rhythm, about the sound, about how he goes about writing has been so valuable and illuminating. I hope that the reading I've been doing, the other thing I should say about going back to big 19th-century novels is that, of course, I had the enormous privilege and learning curve of being part of a Booker jury panel three years ago. That too was an enormous kick in terms of reading and thinking about reading because my co-judges were such phenomenal reading company, and I learned such a lot that year. I feel not only I hope growing as a historian, but I am really, really focusing on writing, reading, being forced out of my bunker where writing is all on the page, starting to think about sound more, think about hearing more, because I think more and more, we are reading that way as a culture, it seems to me, the growth of audiobooks. My mother is adjusting to audiobooks now, and it's so interesting to listen to her as a lifelong, voracious reader, adjusting to what it is to experience a book through sound rather than on the page. I just think it's all fascinating, and I'm trying to learn as I write. Henry: I've been experimenting with audiobooks, because I felt like I had to, and I sort of typically hate audio anything. Jonathan Swift is very good, and so is Diana Wynne Jones. Helen: Interesting. Those two specifically. Is there something that connects the two of them, or are they separately good? Henry: I think they both wrote in a plain, colloquial style. It was very capable of being quite intellectual and had capacity for ideas. Diana Wynne Jones certainly took care about the way it sounded because she read so much to her own children, and that was really when she first read all the children's classics. She had developed for many years an understanding of what would sound good when it was read to a child, I think. Helen: And so that's the voice in her head. Henry: Indeed. As you read her essays, she talks about living with her Welsh grandfather for a year. He was intoning in the chapel, and she sort of comes out of this culture as well. Helen: Then Swift, a much more oral culture. Henry: Swift, of course, is in a very print-heavy culture because he's in London in 1710. We've got coffee houses and all the examiner, and the spectator, and all these people scribbling about each other. I think he was very insistent on what he called proper words in proper places. He became famous for that plain style. It's very carefully done, and you can't go wrong reading that out loud. He's very considerate of the reader that you won't suddenly go, "Oh, I'm in the middle of this huge parenthesis. I don't know how--" As you were saying, Swift-- he would be very deliberate about the placement of everything. Helen: A lot of that has to do with rhythm. Henry: Yes. Helen: Doesn't it? I suppose what I'm wondering, being very ignorant about the 18th century is, in a print-saturated culture, but still one where literacy was less universal than now, are we to assume that that print-saturated culture also incorporated reading out loud — Henry: Yes, exactly so. Exactly so. If you are at home, letters are read out loud. This obviously gives the novelists great opportunities to write letters that have to sort of work both ways. Novels are read out loud. This goes on into the 19th century. Dickens had many illiterate fans who knew his work through it being read to them. Charles Darwin's wife read him novels. When he says, "I love novels," what he means is, "I love it when my wife reads me a novel." [laughs] You're absolutely right. A good part of your audience would come from those listening as well as those reading it. Helen: Maybe we're getting back towards a new version of that with audiobooks expanding in their reach. Henry: I don't know. I saw some interesting stuff. I can't remember who was saying this. Someone was saying, "It's not an oral culture if you're watching short videos. That's a different sort of culture." I think, for us, we can say, "Oh yes, we're like Jonathan Swift," but for the culture at large, I don't know. It is an interesting mixed picture at the moment. Helen: Yes, history never repeats, but we should be wary of writing off any part of culture to do with words. Henry: I think so. If people are reporting builders irritating the neighbourhood with George Eliot, then it's a very mixed picture, right? Helen: It is. Henry: Last literary question. Hilary Mantel has been a big influence on you. What have you taken from her? Helen: That's quite a hard question to answer because I feel I just sit at her feet in awe. If I could point to anything in my writing that could live up to her, I would be very happy. The word that's coming into my head when you phrase the question in that way, I suppose, might be an absolute commitment to precision. Precision in language matters to me so much. Her thought and her writing of whatever kind seems to me to be so precise. Listening to interviews with her is such an outrageous experience because these beautifully, entirely formed sentences come out of her mouth as though that's how thought and language work. They don't for me. [chuckles] I'm talking about her in the present tense because I didn't know her, but I find it hard to imagine that she's not out there somewhere. Henry: She liked ghosts. She might be with us. Helen: She might. I would like to think that. Her writing of whatever genre always seems to me to have that precision, and it's precision of language that mirrors precision of thought, including the ability to imagine herself into somebody else's mind. That's, I suppose, my project as a historian. I'm always trying to experience a lost world through the eyes of a lost person or people, which, of course, when you put it like that, is an impossible task, but she makes it seem possible for her anyway and that's the road I'm attempting to travel one way or another. Henry: What is it about the 14th and 15th centuries that is hardest for us to imagine? Helen: I think this speaks to something else that Hilary Mantel does so extraordinarily well, which is to show us entire human beings who live and breathe and think and feel just as we do in as complex and contradictory and three-dimensional a way as we do, and yet who live in a world that is stripped of so many of the things that we take so much for granted that we find it, I think, hard to imagine how one could function without them. What I've always loved about the late Middle Ages, as a political historian, which is what I think of myself as, is that it has in England such a complex and sophisticated system of government, but one that operates so overwhelmingly through human beings, rather than impersonal, institutionalized, technological structures. You have a king who is the fount of all authority, exercising an extraordinary degree of control over a whole country, but without telephones, without motorized transport, without a professional police service, without a standing army. If we strip away from our understanding of government, all those things, then how on earth does society happen, does rule happen, does government happen? I think it's relatively easy to imagine a small community or even a city, because we can imagine lots of human beings together, but how relationships between human beings happen at a distance, not just in terms of writing a letter to someone you know, but how a very effective power structure happens across hundreds of miles in the absence of those things is the thing that has always absolutely fascinated me about the late Middle Ages. I think that's because it's hard, for me at least, to imagine. Henry: Good. You went to the RSC to watch The Henriad in 2013. Helen: I did. Henry: Is Shakespeare a big influence on this book? How did that affect you? Helen: I suppose this is a long story because Richard II and The Henriad have been-- there is Richard II . Richard II is part of The Henriad , isn't it? Henry: Yes. Helen: Richard II . Henry, see, this is- Henry: The two Henry IVs. Helen: -I'm not Shakespearean. I am. [laughs] Henry: No, it's Richard II, the two Henry

19. Clare Carlisle: George Eliot's Double Life. from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

    Apr 27, 20251 hr 21 min

    Clare Carlisle’s biography of George Eliot, The Marriage Question , is one of my favourite modern biographies, so I was really pleased to interview Clare. We talked about George Eliot as a feminist, the imperfections of her “marriage” to George Henry Lewes, what she learned from Spinoza, having sympathy for Casaubon, contradictions in Eliot’s narrative method, her use of negatives, psychoanalysis, Middlemarch , and more. We also talked about biographies of philosophers, Kierkegaard, and Somerset Maugham. I was especially pleased by Clare’s answer about the reported decline in student attention spans. Overall I thought this was a great discussion. Many thanks to Clare! Full transcript below. Here is an extract from our discussion about Eliot’s narrative ideas. Clare: Yes, that's right. The didactic thing, George Eliot is sometimes criticized for this didacticism because what's most effective in the novel is not the narrator coming and telling us we should actually feel sorry for Casaubon and we should sympathize with him. We'd be better people if we sympathize with Casaubon. There's a moralizing lecture about, you should feel sympathy for this unlikable person. What is more effective is the subtle way she portrays this character and, as I say, lets us into his vulnerabilities in some obvious ways, as you say, by pointing things out, but also in some more subtle ways of drawing his character and hinting at, as I say, his vulnerabilities. Henry: Doesn't she know, though, that a lot of readers won't actually be very moved by the subtle things and that she does need to put in a lecture to say, "I should tell you that I am very personally sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon and that if you leave this novel hating him, that's not--"? Isn't that why she does it? Because she knows that a lot of readers will say, "I don't care. He's a baddie." Clare: Yes I don't know, that's a good question. Henry: I'm interested because, in The Natural History of German Life , she goes to all these efforts to say abstract arguments and philosophy and statistics and such, these things don't change the world. Stories change the world. A picture of life from a great artist. Then when she's doing her picture of life from a great artist she constantly butts in with her philosophical abstractions because it's, she can't quite trust that the reader will get it right as it were. Clare: Yes, I suppose that's one way of looking at it. You could say that or maybe does she have enough confidence in her ability to make us feel with these characters. That would be another way of looking at it. Whether her lack of confidence and lack of trust is in the reader or in her own power as an artist is probably an open question. Transcript Henry: Today I am talking to Clare Carlisle, a philosopher at King's College London and a biographer. I am a big fan of George Eliot's Double Life: The Marriage Question . I've said the title backwards, but I'm sure you'll find the book either way. Clare, welcome. Clare Carlisle: Hi, Henry. Nice to be here. Henry: Is George Eliot a disappointing feminist? Clare: Obviously disappointment is relative to expectations, isn't it? It depends on what we expect of feminism, and in particular, a 19th-century woman. I personally don't find her a disappointing feminist. Other readers have done, and I can understand why that's the case for all sorts of reasons. She took on a male identity in order to be an artist, be a philosopher in a way that she thought was to her advantage, and she's sometimes been criticized for creating heroines who have quite a conventional sort of fulfillment. Not all of them, but Dorothea in Middlemarch , for example, at the end of the novel, we look back on her life as a wife and a mother with some sort of poignancy. Yes, she's been criticized for, in a way, giving her heroines and therefore offering other women a more conventional feminine ideal than the life she managed to create and carve out for herself as obviously a very remarkable thinker and artist. I also think you can read in the novels a really bracing critique of patriarchy, actually, and a very nuanced exploration of power dynamics between men and women, which isn't simplistic. Eliot is aware that women can oppress men, just as men can oppress women. Particularly in Middlemarch, actually, there's an exploration of marital violence that overcomes the more gendered portrayal of it, perhaps in Eliot's own earlier works where, in a couple of her earlier stories, she portrayed abused wives who were victims of their husband's betrayal, violence, and so on. Whereas in Middlemarch, it's interestingly, the women are as controlling, not necessarily in a nasty way, but just that that's the way human beings navigate their relations with each other. It seems to be part of what she's exploring in Middlemarch . No, I don't find her a disappointing feminist. We should be careful about the kind of expectations we, in the 21st century project onto Eliot. Henry: Was George Henry Lewes too controlling? Clare: I think one of the claims of this book is that there was more darkness in that relationship than has been acknowledged by other biographers, let's put it that way. When I set out to write the book, I'd read two or three other biographies of Eliot by this point. One thing that's really striking is this very wonderfully supportive husbands that, in the form of Lewes, George Eliot has, and a very cheerful account of that relationship and how marvelous he was. A real celebration of this relationship where the husband is, in many ways, putting his wife's career before his own, supporting her. Lewes acted as her agent, as her editor informally. He opened her mail for her. He really put himself at the service of her work in ways that are undoubtedly admirable. Actually, when I embarked on writing this book, I just accepted that narrative myself and was interested in this very positive portrayal of the relationship, found it attractive, as other writers have obviously done. Then, as I wrote the book, I was obviously reading more of the primary sources, the letters Eliot was writing and diary entries. I started to just have a bit of a feeling about this relationship, that it was light and dark, it wasn't just light. The ambiguity there was what really interested me, of, how do you draw the line between a husband or a wife who's protective, even sheltering the spouse from things that might upset them and supportive of their career and helpful in practical ways. How do you draw the line between that and someone who's being controlling? I think there were points where Lewes crossed that line. In a way, what's more interesting is, how do you draw that line. How do partners draw that line together? Not only how would we draw the line as spectators on that relationship, obviously only seeing glimpses of the inner life between the two people, but how do the partners themselves both draw those lines and then navigate them? Yes, I do suggest in the book that Lewes could be controlling and in ways that I think Eliot herself felt ambivalent about. I think she partly enjoyed that feeling of being protected. Actually, there was something about the conventional gendered roles of that, that made her feel more feminine and wifely and submissive, In a way, to some extent, I think she bought into that ideal, but also she felt its difficulties and its tensions. I also think for Lewes, this is a man who is himself conditioned by patriarchal norms with the expectation that the husband should be the successful one, the husband should be the provider, the one who's earning the money. He had to navigate a situation. That was the situation when they first got together. When they first got together, he was more successful writer. He was the man of the world who was supporting Eliot, who was more at the beginning of her career to some extent and helping her make connections. He had that role at the beginning. Then, within a few years, it had shifted and suddenly he had this celebrated best-selling novelist on his hands, which was, even though he supported her success, partly for his own financial interests, it wasn't necessarily what he'd bargained for when he got into the relationship. I think we can also see Lewes navigating the difficulties of that role, of being, to some extent, maybe even disempowered in that relationship and possibly reacting to that vulnerability with some controlling behavior. It's maybe something we also see in the Dorothea-Casaubon relationship where they get together. Not that I think that at all Casaubon was modeled on Lewes, not at all, but something of the dynamic there where they get together and the young woman is in awe of this learned man and she's quite subservient to him and looking up to him and wanting him to help her make her way in the world and teach her things. Then it turns out that his insecurity about his own work starts to come through. He reacts, and the marriage brings out his own insecurity about his work. Then he becomes quite controlling of Dorothea, perhaps again as a reaction to his own sense of vulnerability and insecurity. The point of my interpretation is not to portray Lewes as some villain, but rather to see these dynamics and as I say, ambivalences, ambiguities that play themselves out in couples, between couples. Henry: I came away from the book feeling like it was a great study of talent management in a way, and that the both of them were very lucky to find someone who was so well-matched to their particular sorts of talents. There are very few literary marriages where that is the case, or where that is successfully the case. The other one, the closest parallel I came up with was the Woolfs. Leonard is often said he's too controlling, which I find a very unsympathetic reading of a man who looked after a woman who nearly died. I think he was doing what he felt she required. In a way, I agree, Lewes clearly steps over the line several times. In a way, he was doing what she required to become George Eliot, as it were. Clare: Yes, absolutely. Henry: Which is quite remarkable in a way. Clare: Yes. I don't think Mary Ann Evans would have become George Eliot without that partnership with Lewes. I think that's quite clear. That's not because he did the work, but just that there was something about that, the partnership between them, that enabled that creativity… Henry: He knew all the people and he knew the literary society and all the editors, and therefore he knew how to take her into that world without it overwhelming her, giving her crippling headaches, sending her into a depression. Clare: Yes. Henry: In a way, I came away more impressed with them from the traditional, isn't it angelic and blah, blah, blah. Clare: Oh, that's good. Henry: What did George Eliot learn from Spinoza? Clare: I think she learned an awful lot from Spinoza. She translated Spinoza in the 1850s. She translated Spinoza's Ethics , which is Spinoza's philosophical masterpiece. That's really the last major project that Eliot did before she started to write fiction. It has, I think, quite an important place in her career. It's there at that pivotal point, just before she becomes an artist, as she puts it, as a fiction writer. Because she didn't just read The Ethics , but she translated it, she read it very, very closely, and I think was really quite deeply formed by a particular Spinozist ethical vision. Spinoza thinks that human beings are not self-sufficient. He puts that in very metaphysical terms. A more traditional philosophical view is to say that individual things are substances. I'm a substance, you're a substance. What it means to be a substance is to be self-sufficient, independent. For example, I would be a substance, but my feeling of happiness on this sunny morning would be a more accidental feature of my being. Henry: Sure. Clare: Something that depends on my substance, and then these other features come and go. They're passing, they're just modes of substance, like a passing mood or whatever, or some kind of characteristic I might have. That's the more traditional view, whereas Spinoza said that there's only one substance, and that's God or nature, which is just this infinite totality. We're all modes of that one substance. That means that we don't have ontological independence, self-sufficiency. We're more like a wave on the ocean that's passing through. One ethical consequence of that way of thinking is that we are interconnected. We're all interconnected. We're not substances that then become connected and related to other substances, rather we emerge as beings through this, our place in this wider whole. That interconnectedness of all things and the idea that individuals are really constituted by their relations is, I think, a Spinoza's insight that George Eliot drew on very deeply and dramatized in her fiction. I think it's there all through her fiction, but it becomes quite explicit in Middlemarch where she talks about, she has this master metaphor of the web. Henry: The web. Right. Clare: In Middlemarch , where everything is part of a web. You put pressure on a bit of it and something changes in another part of the web. That interconnectedness can be understood on multiple levels. Biologically, the idea that tissues are formed in this organic holistic way, rather than we're not composed of parts, like machines, but we're these organic holes. There's a biological idea of the web, which she explores. Also, the economic system of exchange that holds a community together. Then I suppose, perhaps most interestingly, the more emotional and moral features of the web, the way one person's life is bound up with and shaped by their encounters with all the other lives that it comes into contact with. In a way, it's a way of thinking that really, it questions any idea of self-sufficiency, but it also questions traditional ideas of what it is to be an individual. You could see a counterpart to this way of thinking in a prominent 19th-century view of history, which sees history as made by heroic men, basically. There's this book by Carlyle, Thomas Carlyle, called The Heroic in History, or something like that. Henry: Sure. On heroes and the heroic, yes. Clare: Yes. That's a really great example of this way of thinking about history as made by heroes. Emerson wrote this book called Representative Men . These books were published, I think, in the early 1850s. Representative Men . Again, he identifies these certain men, these heroic figures, which represent history in a way. Then a final example of this is Auguste Comte's Positivist Calendar, which, he's a humanist, secularist thinker who wants to basically recreate culture and replace our calendar with this lunar calendar, which, anyway, it's a different calendar, has 13 months. Each month is named after a great man. There's Shakespeare, and there's Dante, and there's-- I don't know, I can't remember. Anyway, there's this parade of heroic men. Napoleon. Anyway, that's the view of history that Eliot grew up with. She was reading, she was really influenced by Carlisle and Emerson and Comte. In that landscape, she is creating this alternative Spinozist vision of what an exemplar can be like and who gets to be an exemplar. Dorothea was a really interesting exemplar because she's unhistoric. At the very end of Middlemarch, she describes Dorothea's unhistoric life that comes to rest in an unvisited tomb. She's obscure. She's not visible on the world stage. She's forgotten once she dies. She's obscure. She's ordinary. She's a provincial woman, upper middle-class provincial woman, who makes some bad choices. She has high ideals but ends up living a life that from the outside is not really an extraordinary life at all. Also, she is constituted by her relations with others in both directions. Her own life is really shaped by her milieu, by her relationships with the people. Also, at the end of the novel, Eliot leaves us with a vision of the way Dorothea's life has touched other lives and in ways that can't be calculated, can't really be recognized. Yet, she has these effects that are diffused. She uses this word, diffusion or diffuseness. The diffuseness of the effects of Dorothea's life, which seep into the world. Of course, she's a woman. She's not a great hero in this Carlyle or Emerson sense. In all these ways, I think this is a very different way of thinking about individuality, but also history and the way the world is made, that history and the world is made by, in this more Spinozist kind of way, rather than by these heroic representative men who stand on the world stage. That's not Spinoza's, that's Eliot's original thinking. She's taking a Spinozist ontology, a Spinozist metaphysics, but really she's creating her own vision with that, that's, of course, located in that 19th-century context. Henry: How sympathetic should we be to Mr. Casaubon? Clare: I feel very sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon because he is so vulnerable. He's a really very vulnerable person. Of course, in the novel, we are encouraged to look at it from Dorothea's point of view, and so when we look at it from Dorothea's point of view, Casaubon is a bad thing. The best way to think about it is the view of Dorothea's sister Celia, her younger sister, who is a very clear-eyed observer, who knows that Dorothea is making a terrible mistake in marrying this man. She's quite disdainful of Casaubon's, well, his unattractive looks. He's only about 40, but he's portrayed as this dried-up, pale-faced scholar, academic, who is incapable of genuine emotional connection with another person, which is quite tragic, really. The hints are that he's not able to have a sexual relationship. He's so buttoned up and repressed, in a way. When we look at it from Dorothea's perspective, we say, "No, he's terrible, he's bad for you, he's not going to be good for you," which of course is right. I think Eliot herself had a lot of sympathy for Casaubon. There's an anecdote which said that when someone asked who Casaubon was based on, she pointed to herself. I think she saw something of herself in him. On an emotional level, I think he's just a fascinating character, isn't he, in a way, from an aesthetic point of view? The point is not do we like Casaubon or do we not like him? I think we are encouraged to feel sympathy with him, even as, on the one, it's so clever because we're taken along, we're encouraged to feel as Celia feels, where we dislike him, we don't sympathize with him. Then Eliot is also showing us how that view is quite limited, I think, because we do occasionally see the world from Casaubon's point of view and see how fearful Casaubon is. Henry: She's also explicit and didactic about the need to sympathize with him, right? It's often in asides, but at one point, she gives over most of a chapter to saying, "Poor Mr. Casaubon. He didn't think he'd end up like this." Things have actually gone very badly for him as well. Clare: Yes, that's right. The didactic thing, George Eliot is sometimes criticized for this didacticism because what's most effective in the novel is not the narrator coming and telling us we should actually feel sorry for Casaubon and we should sympathize with him. We'd be better people if we sympathize with Casaubon. There's a moralizing lecture about, you should feel sympathy for this unlikable person. What is more effective is the subtle way she portrays this character and, as I say, lets us into his vulnerabilities in some obvious ways, as you say, by pointing things out, but also in some more subtle ways of drawing his character and hinting at, as I say, his vulnerabilities. Henry: Doesn't she know, though, that a lot of readers won't actually be very moved by the subtle things and that she does need to put in a lecture to say, "I should tell you that I am very personally sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon and that if you leave this novel hating him, that's not--"? I

20. Matt Yglesias: reading books makes me feel calmer. from The Common Reader, opens in a new tab

    Apr 13, 20251 hr 17 min

    Interview with Matt Yglesias about reading classic novels, like Middlemarch, and some discussion of his favourite movies. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk