Book Awards – 2022

The votes have been tabulated (not difficult since I’m the only voting member). A protective barrier has been placed around the presenters’ podium to prevent any unscripted slapping. It looks like we’re ready for the presentation of this year’s Book Awards.

Author of the Most Books Named Little Dorrit: Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens always gets his own category in these awards so as to give other fictional writers a fighting chance at winning. My third reading of Little Dorrit magnified its great qualities in my mind and at least found some explanation for a couple of the weaknesses. One theme I thought about this year but didn’t blog about earlier is condescension. Miss Wade resents all kindnesses done to her because they seem like condescension. But Dickens shows the right thinking in other relationships. First, not all kindness is condescension, as Arthur Clennam demonstrates in his kindness to Daniel Doyce. Second, condescension isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Amy rightly “condescends” to poor, witless Maggie: as an orphan with stunted mental growth, Maggie needs someone to talk with her and deal with her at a level she can understand. And are we to be offended that our Lord emptied Himself and became flesh, “abhorring not the virgin’s womb” and humbling Himself by a birth in a stable?

Best New Read in History: Stephen R. Brown, Merchant Kings
Some volumes of the Oxford History of the United States are among the best history books I’ve ever read. But this year’s dreadful The Republic for Which It Stands is not among that august group. Often this award goes to Will and Ariel Durant, whose massive, multi-volume history of western civilization I’ve enjoyed reading for decades. But this year’s pages on the Enlightenment left me wishing for darkness. So with the usual suspects out of contention, this year the award goes to an author whose obscure name I had to look up again just now, and to a book lacking the verbal polish of anything by, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin. But from Merchant Kings I finally got a good, brutally honest exposition of the Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company (as well as four other exploratory and exploitative companies from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries) and a clear idea for the first time of the strange and dangerous relationship of each with its mother country. I learned a lot from all the histories I read this year, even the ones that didn’t make me smile, but I learned the most from this slender volume.

Best New Read in Fiction: Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
I don’t remember where I got the tip to read this book. I don’t remember ever seeing this author’s name outside my own reading plan. (Have you ever heard of her?) I understand why the book has been forgotten by society: it’s a twentieth-century book about a devout believer, but it isn’t written in the style of the Christian romances that filled the bookshelves of the late twentieth-century Christian bookstores. So it’s designed to appeal to a small slice of the reading public. Well, I for one am in that slice. It turns out that a twentieth-century Christian doesn’t need to have a crisis of faith in order to have a compelling story. What to do with church bazaars and annoying neighbors can be surprisingly dramatic. And I defy you to predict the charming ending!

Most Disappointing Read: Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization
I’ve already complained about them enough this year, even in today’s post. But this dubious honor is awarded each year, so duty demands that I mention them one last time. Let’s hope I have better things to say about the Durants next year.

Comeback Player of the Year: Alexandre Dumas
In The Man in the Iron Mask, the Musketeers came back again in all their glory . . . only to die. Well, most of them, anyway. I couldn’t be happier about being so sad.

Best New Read in Poetry:
This award was not given this year because of the excessive appearance in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s works of dead girls hanging their ghostly hair from heaven and brushing men’s cheeks.

Best New Read in Religion: Augustine, Homilies on I John
Augustine works through grammatical points (“I am writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven,” means that his readers are little children because they are forgiven), important implications of single words (“We have an advocate” shows that the Apostle also had need of Jesus’ advocacy), and apparent contradictions (Do Christians commit sin or not? I’ll let you read the homilies to find Augustine’s solution for yourself). Augustine was such a good pastor, he continues to feed sheep.

Best New Read in Biography: Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life
It was very difficult for me to decide which was the best written of the biographies I read this year. In the end I gave the award to the biography which most changed my view of the subject. I ended up admiring John Kennedy more than I had, which was no mean feat considering that Dallek also made the President’s flaws look even more despicable than I had imagined!

Best Subject of a Biography: Ron Chernow, Grant
I might actually have learned more from this book than I did from An Unfinished Life since Grant’s considerable accomplishments as President have been underplayed for at least a century. But I have to say that it didn’t so much change my view of this hero as much as it strengthened my view that Grant has been and is still the most underrated of American Presidents. Thank goodness the Dunning School and the Lost Cause are losing their grip on historiography.

Best Reread: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Maybe this is just a given.

Best Book in a Category By Itself: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Capote said that this wasn’t just a new book but a new kind of book: journalistic history written as a novel. His approach gave literary life to the victims of this senseless crime and provided insight to the aberrant minds of the killers. I couldn’t help wondering if his work at all inspired John Douglas when he started the real life BAU in the FBI.

Best Offroading: Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place
I had meant to read this book ever since it was recommended to me fifty years ago. I don’t know what I would have thought then. I’m sorry to say I’m afraid the strict doctrinal bounds of my youth would have led me to disapprove of Corrie Ten Boom’s Christianity. Now I can only see that her faithful love of Jesus led her to sacrifice to unimaginable lengths in an attempt to save Jews from the Nazis. As far as the doctrine goes, the book actually challenged me to reconsider whether I weren’t more right at 16 about some things, especially about how God might lead someone to action. But then, I’ve never been put in a situation where lying to authorities would save a life, or a situation in which I had to judge whether the officers of an invading force had any authority. No book this year made me think and rethink more than this one.

A year ago today, I wrote that I was looking forward to Capote’s In Cold Blood, Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, Augustine’s homilies on I John, and even Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. None of these disappointed, and two even won awards. What am I especially eager to read in 2023? Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (about the hunchback), poetry and essays of Matthew Arnold, and a return to Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. I’m also hoping for a better experience from the Durants and from the Oxford History of the U. S. as I read David M. Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear. (Kennedy’s book won a Pulitzer, so I think my hopes will be fulfilled.) May your New Year also be filled with anticipation for an abundance of good books!

Troll the Ancient Yuletide Carol – 2022

Several months ago I read all of Chesterton’s columns for the Illustrated London News from 1926. When I posted about that reading at the time, I mentioned that I would come back to it in December, since the series ended with a wonderful piece about old Christmas carols. In this last, beautiful column, Chesterton ascribes three special virtues to old Christmas carols: (1) anachronism, which shows that the events of Christmas and its celebration are continuously present in a spiritual sense throughout history, (2) incongruity, which makes little logical sense but great poetic sense, and (3) lustiness such that people sometimes shout “Ut hoy!” in celebration of Christ’s birth.

Now, I have to think that Chesterton knew many more truly old carols than I do. I don’t know the one, for instance, that contains shouts of “Ut hoy!” But I do know a couple of carols about holly that seem to fit GKC’s description perfectly.

The first carol I’m trolling today is “The Holly Bears a Berry.”

1. Now the holly bears a berry as white as the milk,
And Mary she bore Jesus, who was wrapped up in silk:

Chorus: And Mary she bore Jesus our Saviour for to be,
And the first tree that's in the greenwood, it was the holly.
Holly! Holly!
And the first tree that's in the greenwood, it was the holly!

2. Now the holly bears a berry as green as the grass,
And Mary she bore Jesus, who died on the cross:

Chorus

3. Now the holly bears a berry as black as the coal,
And Mary she bore Jesus, who died for us all:

Chorus

4. Now the holly bears a berry, as blood is it red,
Then trust we our Saviour, who rose from the dead:

Chorus

Anachronism? Not exactly. But I think the mix of tenses in every verse accomplishes the same thing. The holly bears a berry in the present tense now, and Mary bore Jesus in the past tense in, perhaps, 4 B.C. But maybe there is some anachronism in the assignment of the colors. I had to look up the white berry: the berries on my holly bushes are never white. But according to the internet, which might actually be right in this case, a Christian legend says that the berries were white until the time of the crucifixion. I wasn’t familiar with this legend until this morning, but it sounds a lot like the legends printed on cedar signs I used to study in roadside Stuckey’s restaurants. (Talk about anachronism and incongruity!) According to this very important and informative bit of childhood reading, both the dogwood flower and the burro mystically acquired their cross-shaped markings during the original Holy Week. If we accept the legend, this carol sings of the holly as bearing, in the present tense, berries it hasn’t born in two thousand years.

I honestly don’t know that I understood why I have always loved the verses of this carol so much until Chesterton pointed out the vitality of incongruity in this literature. Some songwriter not as wise as the anonymous farmers of Cornwall who shaped this poem over generations – some silly songwriter like me, for instance – would have tried to get the bloody red in the same verse as the cross and the living green in the verse with the Resurrection. How much better the carol is the way it stands! Death in life, life in death.

Lustiness? What could be more “lusty” than stopping the lilting beat in the middle of each stanza to exclaim the word “holly” twice? Have you ever shouted that word before? The next time you find yourself walking through the woods wondering why life isn’t making any sense, I hope you come across a holly bush and get a chance to start the habit.

The other carol today is clearly related to the first. Maybe a fellow in Gloucestershire visited Cornwall, heard “The Holly Bears a Berry,” and tried to bring it home, but forgot parts or tried to improve it. Maybe the geographical journey went the other way. Maybe both carols stand as descendants of some forgotten Ur-carol that connected the holly and the birth of Jesus. However it was, here are the lyrics, as currently known, of “The Holly and the Ivy”:

1. The holly and the ivy,
When they are both full grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood,
The holly bears the crown.

Chorus: Oh! The rising of the sun
And the running of the deer,
The playing of the merry organ,
Sweet singing in the choir!

2. The holly bears a blossom,
As white as the lily flower,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ,
To be our sweet Saviour.

Chorus

3. The holly bears a berry,
As red as any blood,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
For to do us sinners good.

Chorus   

4. The holly bears a prickle,
As sharp as any thorn,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
On Christmas Day in the morn.

Chorus

I want to go through Chesterton’s three qualities in reverse order this time. I hate “contemporary” “worship” “songs” that forget sentence structure and just start stringing spiritual sounding phrases together without any verbs. I like verbs. But I love this verbless chorus with all my heart and have since I first sang it in the third-grade Christmas concert at Maude V. Roark Elementary School in Arlington, TX. (Arlington consisted of a couple of neighborhoods of houses, the Hollandale Circle apartments – where my family lived –, Roark school, a Walmart, and Six Flags. That’s all my eight-year-old mind took in, but I honestly don’t think there was much more. I just looked up the school: it closed last year and was demolished! May the echoes of “The Holly and the Ivy” reverberate around the area forever!)

Anyway, back to the chorus of this carol. I don’t care about verbs here. I just want to sing lustilly about four beautiful things! In fact, as I sing this song, I start to wonder if these aren’t my four favorite things in the universe! The running of the deer! Why haven’t I thought to celebrate that before! Oh, glorious!

Now what the deer and the organ have to do with each other or what either has to do with a holly’s berries or blossoms, I don’t know. But the poem works its aesthetic magic as we sing it, and it is clear to our minds that all these things, incongruous at first glance, form one perfect unity of ideas to which nothing could be added, from which nothing could be taken. I used to think there was a slight imperfection in this otherwise integral organism with the mention of the organ, which didn’t exist when Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ. But Chesterton has taught me that the anachronism is part of the point: our means of celebrating and singing dwell in mystical unity with the songs of the angels and the shepherds on the Holy Night.

You know what this world needs? People need to stop “trolling” each other on social media and start trolling ancient yuletide carols!

Really Rapid Wrap-up of Rather Recent Reading

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to write a post. The biggest part of my problem has actually been the reading. I set up my yearly schedule assuming that a history book or biography will come in at around six-hundred pages. But here in the last weeks of the year, when I don’t have much leeway, I opened up this year’s volume in the Oxford History of the United States and found out it was nine-hundred pages long and then started the biography of Grant that I had chosen only to find that it was nine-hundred sixty pages long. These surprises form part of the adventure of e-reading. If I had purchased hard copies of these books, I would have known by their thickness to set aside extra days.

Anyway, I’m packing two months of reading into one post today.

I’ll begin the quick catch-up with Spenser’s Faerie Queene. I reread books III and IV this year, and it finally sank in (perhaps because of something I read this year about Richardson’s Clarissa) that Spenser isn’t trying to prove anything about virtues but simply aims to present the reader with examples of each selected virtue and its opposite(s) through the interweaving stories of his knights, damsels, wizards, gods, and monsters. By a multitude of examples, we see in book III, for instance, that a life of charity is simply and obviously better than a life of hatred. I love the language and the stories, and I enjoyed reading the unfinished epic enough to read it again, but only now did I really understand this plan and purpose.

Next up, Trollope’s Castle Richmond. I have to give a bit away, but only as much of the early plot as you might find on the back cover of an edition of the book. Right off the bat, Herbert Fitzgerald becomes engaged to Clara Desmond. When the two kids get engaged at the beginning of the book, you know something is going to go very wrong. It turns out that Herbert's mother was married previously to a cad who abandoned her and then, based on extensive research, seemed to have died. But twenty years or so later, the first husband shows up, arranges a secret meeting with Sir Timothy Fitzgerald, Herbert’s father, and blackmails him. Now, within the accepted norms of the time, this situation makes for an interesting, tense plot. But, wow! Why was this normal at the time? Why is the honor of Herbert’s mother dependent on whether this creep really died or not? (A later twist that I won’t reveal shows how really arbitrary this view is.) Why is Sir Timothy so convinced that his wife is too frail even to hear the news? (Thankfully, Trollope is not convinced of that chauvinistic view at all.) And why can’t they just admit the truth to the public, thus taking away the blackmailer’s power?

Now for Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands. The two volumes I've read in the Oxford History of the U. S. that seem to me to be superbly written (Battle Cry of Freedom and What Hath God Wrought) both won the Pulitzer prize for history. The two that I enjoyed without going crazy over (you’ll have to ask my wife about all the strategies she developed in dealing with my daily outpourings of enthusiasm for What Hath God Wrought) were both finalists for the prize (The Glorious Cause and Empire of Liberty). Richard White’s offering, covering 1865-1896, was not a finalist for the prize and I . . . yeah, I think I just have to say that I didn’t like it. So I guess my critical eye for good nonfiction writing, honed over decades of grading papers, is in line with the Pulitzer committee. (My wife can’t figure out why I read nine-hundred pages of a book I didn’t like.) On virtually every page, I came across a sentence whose place in the argument of its paragraph I could not discern. Many times I encountered paragraphs whose occulted relation to the chapter, I could not understand. Much of the information was interesting, but it’s presentation was such a jumble! A typical example: “The United States was still the country Mark Twain took so much pained delight in, and it produced figures hard to imagine until they had actually emerged.” Mark Twain had not been mentioned for many chapters; I don’t know what singular vision of the country Twain had; I don’t know why his delight in the country was pained; I don’t know why the personage about to be introduced, Jacob Coxey, was so hard to imagine; and I can’t conceive why the existence of eccentric people is harder to imagine in a country painfully loved by its leading author. How did the greatest publisher in the world make a deal with this guy?

Jacob Abbott’s King Alfred of England, was the only biography of Alfred the Great I could find at the time. (This isn’t the long one.) I thought I was in big trouble when this nineteenth-century book began with a declaration of the superiority of Anglo-Saxons over everyone else in the world. But it eventually settled in and provided me, surprisingly, with exactly what I was looking for: a coherent telling of the life of the great king with careful notes about discrepancies in the chronicles, and arguments about what in all the tales we can believe and what truths we can infer from the parts we can’t believe. I loved seeing that Abbott conducted his most detailed inspection of variants in dealing with the story in which Alfred, hiding out from the momentarily overpowering Danes and disguised as a farm hand, is scolded by the wife of the house for burning some bread. Here’s another thing I’m never going to do (as SNL’s couple of Sammies would say): write an opera about Alfred the Great in which his time at the farm takes up all of Act II.

I end with Ron Chernow’s Grant. (This is the long one.) Both the book and the President deserve longer, more glowing reviews than I have time to give them today. About the author, I’ll just say that his biography of Hamilton inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to write the musical and that he went on to be a very active historical adviser during the writing and development of the show. About the President (I already knew so much about him as a general, my main hope in reading this book was to learn more about his years in the White House), I’ll only say this: Voter suppression during his eight years as Chief Executive didn’t just mean requiring a literacy test or purging registration rolls or closing polling places. Thousands of black voters in the South were simply murdered (together with a few white Republicans). And Grant sent in troops to fight against these outrages when the states did nothing.

I’m going through my schedule for 2023 now and checking the length of each potentially hefty book. So I should have fewer days next fall when I have to read in panicked overdrive.

Watching the Wheels

I begin today following up on the last post with one more comment about the Sun in C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Since the character of each traditional planet is presented by Lewis as a “splintered fragment of the true light,” i.e. as one part of the character and nature of Christ, then we can easily see Christ in Lewis’s conception of the Sun since our Lord is the source of knowledge and of transformation. And since Christ is our exemplar in all things pertaining to life and godliness, where we find ourselves in positions (professional and otherwise) of teaching and transforming, we follow and learn from Christ.

Next in the Narnia series (following the original order, of course) is The Silver Chair. The mention of silver in the title provides our link to the moon. As Michael Ward points out, in medieval and Renaissance cosmology the moon divides creation into the changeable, transient things below its sphere and the perfect, eternal things above. You’ll remember (I hope) that a large portion of the story takes place underground and involves debates with the witch about the differences between the world below the ground and the world above. The moon also affects mental health, providing another division, this time between sanity and luna-cy, a division whose effects are seen in Rilian as he passes between those two states each day. Are you a health-care worker? Whether you’re providing therapy to the mentally ill or just putting a band-aid on a child’s knee, learn from the Great Physician. (I don’t know what it has to do with the moon, but I want to mention my favorite allegorical image from the whole series, which appears in this volume: Eustace and Jill are looking for a message carved in the stone, but it doesn’t occur to them that the writing might be sized appropriately for the local giants, and they fail to recognize the smooth, closed canyons they walk through as the letters they’re seeking.)

The fifth of the Chronicles is The Horse and His Boy. Mercury is present everywhere in the book as rapidly traveling children and horses and lions merge and separate like beads of quicksilver. Human followers of the god of speed include traders and carriers. In his aspect as messenger, Mercury is a type for journalists and messengers. In his work of dividing and joining, he guides people who work in mathematics and analysis. If your line of work falls within any of these areas, learn from Jesus, the Word who will return traveling as fast as lightning across the sky.

In The Magician’s Nephew, we read of the creation of Narnia. Ward links this book with Venus. Our sex-crazed culture thinks only of Venus’s association with eroticism, but Lewis concentrates more (or totally) on her beauty and fertility. Anytime you make things, especially where you produce beautiful things, whether that means children, crops, or works of art, learn how to do this from the One through whom all things were made, remembering that “He has made everything beautiful in its time.” (Anyone squeamish about the whole idea of comparing Jesus to the planets worshiped by ancient pagans will do well to remember that He refers to Himself once as the Morning Star and is in many biblical passages compared to the Sun.)

There’s one book left and one planet, and as it turns out, The Last Battle and Saturn go together very nicely. Saturn is often depicted holding a scythe, an instrument which suggests among other things, agriculture. Lewis has already assigned the notion of growing things to Venus, though. Biblical references to the true God holding a sickle remind us that the scythe is used at the end of the agricultural cycle: at the time of reaping, the time of death. Having trouble associating the Way, the Truth, and the Life with death? Remember who holds the keys to Hell and to Death! And remember that for the faithful, death is but a transition; we might even say death is a Door. Honor Christ who holds both your life and your death in his hands. And thank the good Lord for all who work in professions of dissolution, decay, and closure. Buildings need great expertise when it’s time for them to be demolished. Bodies need tender, skilled, respectful care when they lie lifeless. And the trashman? The trashman should be paid four times what he makes now! Christ is the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End. Learn from Him to bring everything to its fitting end at the proper time.

A few short blog posts won’t convince you of Michael Ward’s theory. But if you’re on the verge of believing, consider that Saturn is often equated with the Greek Cronos, the god of time, and then think of Father Time waking up to signal the end of all things in The Last Battle. If you need more convincing, read one of Ward’s books. If, on the other hand, you’re sure you can’t be convinced of this theory . . . well, I don’t think you would have read this far if you’re that sure.

Here Comes the Sun

When I first read The Chronicles of Narnia fifty years ago, most of my friends who were fellow fans of the series called The Voyage of the Dawn Treader their favorite of the seven books. I didn’t understand; it was my least favorite. People sailing around finding weird islands with no thematic connection? My 16-year-old self wasn’t having it. (The 2010 film’s attempt to provide an overarching plot with its green mist and seven swords didn’t work and, while it presumed to save Narnia the land, brought about the tragic downfall of Narnia the movie franchise.)

During my most recent rereading of the book, though, I kept thinking that I couldn’t see how I had missed its now very obvious meanings and messages. Even without Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia theory, couldn’t I have seen the unifying warp thread of Knowledge (with its inevitable woof of Ignorance) running through the whole web? Making maps of unknown lands is almost the cardinal symbol for learning and knowledge. But I was as blind to it as Lucy was to the Dufflepuds at first. Oh yeah! Seeing what was invisible before: that is actually the leading metaphor for learning and knowledge! Ah! Now I see!

Ward associates this third volume of the series with the Sun (one of the classical “planets,” a word which referred to the bodies that moved with respect to the stars), and surely no one can argue with that claim. The sun shines on the gold in the lake; it disappears in the sea of darkness that drives people mad by making all their dreams come true (ALL their dreams); and its rays edify, encourage, and guide Lucy when she stands in them. If you haven’t read Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed” and you’re the kind of person who would read this post (as I suppose you are!), you should read it. It’s available online. You can probably even listen to it on YouTube, unless the publishers find it and take it down.

OK, you’re back. In that essay, as you know since you just read it, Lewis talks about the difference between seeing a beam of light coming through a crack in the door and then looking along the beam of light at the world outside. He takes the analogy in various directions, but they all have to do with types of knowledge based on how we see things. And Lucy looking along the beam of the Sun is surely Jack Lewis in that toolshed.

The main symbol of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the Sun, the Sun gives light, and light is a metaphor for knowledge. So what is it that Lucy knows in a new way while standing in the beam of sunlight? Among the things she sees is an albatross that looks like a cross, so even my teenage mind could have figured out that Lucy was learning to know Jesus better. And where ultimately are they all sailing? To Aslan’s land. Every Christian reading this book should also be on a voyage to Aslan’s land where, after seeing in a mirror dimly for so long, we will finally see Him face to face. “Thou hast said, ‘Seek ye my face.’ Thy face, LORD, do I seek.” If thinking about the symbology in the book didn’t get me to understand that the voyage is one of getting to know God better and better, I could have learned it when Aslan explains it in plain English near the end: “There [i.e. in our non-Narnian world] I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

I think I probably just needed to live more of my own voyage to understand what Lewis had to say through the Dawn Treader’s voyage about getting to know Aslan better. There is a time and place for everything, a time for Narnia to be at war, and a time for Narnia’s prince to enjoy peace and seek knowledge. But the journey to know God better in this life has been traveled before. In the book the trailblazers are Lord Octesian and Lord Rhoop and . . . oh, I can’t remember them any better than Caspian can. In our world they are the saints, whether that means people whose names get on calendars or family members and mentors who inspire us. Along the way, Caspian, Lucy, Edmund, Reepicheep, and Eustace find some of their forerunners, who have been distracted from pursuing their journeys to the glorious end; but surely we can learn as much from the errors of those who go before us as we do by their successes. And, thank God!, we can also learn from our own errors. On that journey we have times of darkness. We encounter Dufflepudlian mysteries that become clear only slowly. We sometimes have to peel off layers of dragon skin. But with all the wanderings, the overall trajectory is still one of becoming closer to God by knowing Him better and better.

The subtitle of my blog is “one Christian’s journey through literature.” So really my reading plan and my blog are also voyages of the Dawn Treader. See? How did I miss it before?

Jupiter and Mars Are All Right Tonight

In the summer of 2008, I was privileged to attend a three-day seminar with Michael Ward in which he talked about his view of C. S. Lewis’s organizational scheme for the Chronicles of Narnia, a view then recently published in his book Planet Narnia. “I know I sound like a conspiracy theorist,” he said, “but I believe I have discovered the secret to these books, a secret Lewis seems not to have shared with anyone during his lifetime.” Ward was sitting in bed one evening studying Lewis’s Poem “The Planets” when he read, in the section on Jupiter: “Of wrath ended / And woes mended, of winter passed / And guilt forgiven, and good fortune / Jove is master.” He sat up suddenly and thought, “That’s the plot to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe!” He then started thinking of whether the other six classical planets corresponded to the other six Narnia books.

I highly recommend Ward’s book if you like Lewis’s children’s series. If you don’t care to read a somewhat lengthy rendition of an Oxford dissertation, you could also try Ward’s condensation of the ideas in The Narnia Code, which was, I believe, written for use in adult Sunday School classes. In any case, I have used it in adult Sunday School classes.

In his capacity of professor of Renaissance literature, Lewis had professional interest in the symbolic history of the planets. As a lay theologian, he regarded the gods associated with the planets as conveying partial truth. As his friend J. R. R. Tolkien told him, “Myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light.” (Quotation from Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien.) So Jupiter’s qualities are only some of the qualities of Jesus Christ, and insofar as we can see Jupiter, the king of winter passed and guilt forgiven, as worthy of respect, we must realize that Christ is worthy of honor and praise for this and for so much more.

Prince Caspian is heavily influenced by the myths of Mars. There’s more war in that book than in any of the other six. We are meant to lionize (pun very much intended) Caspian and all the Old Narnians who win the battles in that book; in doing so, we honor the image of Mars in them. So, too, we honor Christ as the Lord of Hosts with a sword in his mouth. 

Mars’s martial qualities are well known to all of us. After all, those "martial" qualities are named after him. Much more surprising to me is Lewis’s indication in his poem of a connection between Mars and trees. However essential that aspect might or might not be to the common understanding of the myth of Mars, Lewis notes it, and sure enough, Prince Caspian is full of woods and forests.

Michael Ward has convinced most people in the world of Lewis scholarship of the validity of his theory. He has thoroughly convinced me, and he has certainly changed the way I read and think about those books. Essentially, Ward says that rather than waiting for Aslan to show up, we are to recognize Christ’s presence on every page.

In turn, my altered thinking about Lewis’s Narnia books has improved the way I think of Jesus. Seeing Him as the synthesis of seven mighty mythical gods (and more!) make me more able to see Him at a glance as grander and more awesome than I normally do. And understanding more about Lewis’s desire to have Aslan permeate the very atmosphere of each of the Narnia books helps me to see Christ permeating our world. In other words, Michael Ward has helped me, in biblical terms, to magnify the Lord.

I’ve also come to see more clearly Jesus Christ as an exemplar of all that we might do for a vocation. In what situations or jobs do you follow Jupiter? Are you a government official? A boss? A parent? Any kind of authority figure? King Jesus shows you how to be a righteous leader. In what contexts do you follow Mars? Are you in the military? A police officer? A firefighter? Jesus shows you how to be courageous. Or turning to the relationship between Mars and trees and carpentry, do you craft or build anything? Jesus shows you in the wonders of the physical world how to craft with loving attention to detail.

Enough for now. More in a few days about the other books in the series.

The Tedious Enlightenment

For each of the last fifteen years, I’ve spent about a month with, at first, Will Durant and then later with Will and his wife Ariel and their work-of-a-lifetime history of “western” civilization (mostly European, with some notable passages on ways Asian cultures and religions, especially Islam, affected Europe, and with surprisingly little on the Americas). And, as I’ve often reported in these posts, I’ve loved every page of the experience.

Last year, things changed just a little. I got into the volume called The Age of Voltaire and found out who the Durants’ hero was. Of all the countries in Europe, the book concentrated on France (with sidetrips to other countries, to be sure), and of all the people in France in the first half of the eighteenth century, the volume focused on Voltaire. Very few personages in history receive more than one dedicated chapter in this bookshelf full of chapters: only Jesus and Mohammed come to mind. But in this volume, all of the history of the era is treated as an extension of a biography of this one man.

This year, I finished up that volume and opened up the next, covering the second half of the eighteenth century. Called Rousseau and Revolution, it fittingly begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau: two biographical chapters, in fact, and the story hadn’t even reached his most famous written works. “Another extended biography?” I thought. And then who should show up again with one more dedicated chapter but Voltaire! In fact, here in the volume whose title refers to Voltaire’s philosophical rival, the Durants make their best case yet for the importance of Voltaire. I know he and Rousseau were influential, but more influential than Jesus and Mohammed? Do two billion people roam this earth claiming to live their lives according to the pattern set by either Voltaire or Rousseau? Do two hundred?

I get it. The Durants were humanists who wanted to celebrate in their history the “freeing of the mind” in the last, say, four hundred years. They were very, very respectful of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (maybe only a little more than either Voltaire or Rousseau were), but they rejoice to look back and see the control of these religions on science, philosophy, law, government, and education broken. And to an extent, I’m with them. I’ve read in their books and others about the abuses of the medieval Church. I sympathize to a great extent with the Protestant renunciation of those abuses and cringe when I see Protestantism’s own abuses. I love freedom of the press and freedom of speech; I believe people should be able to express their views without fear that a state run by a church will imprison or kill them. I am in awe at the discoveries of science and don’t think any researcher should have to alter any words to please any institution with its own interpretation of its own religious scripture. (I’m trying to be brief here. Of course these freedoms have limits: crowded theaters, human experimentation, etc.)

But, really, do I need to be happy that Rousseau, in his Confessions, could write with legal impunity about wanting to go to an alley, pull down his pants, and hope that some woman would come along and spank him? Is this really why we should be happy with freedom of expression?

I like Voltaire and Rousseau, and the Durants have made me like them even more. What I admire about them most was their stand against wrongs. They wanted to rid the Church and the government of corruption and immorality. (Their definitions of morality aren’t exactly mine, but close enough for my sympathy.) But they didn’t have much to replace it with. Rousseau sent all his infants to a foundling hospital and then wrote a book on how to raise children!

The French philosophers of the period called their movement éclaircissement: enlightenment. That label suggests to me that they were promising to show civilization the way out of a dark place, but in fact what they did best was only to put a light on some dark corners in that place. They shone the light on a door or two that they claimed opened onto paths toward a better life. But let’s face it: all their hopes led to the Reign of Terror and then to Napoleon’s tyranny. So the Durants' raising golden monuments to Voltaire and Rousseau and then asking me to make long, polite bows towards them got uncomfortable. This year for the first time, I found my yearly conversation with the historians tedious.

Swan Song

Every year for the last three or four, my experience with Galsworthy has followed the same dynamic. Disappointment follows hard on the tail of the onset of reading. (“Oh, no. Soames again? When will we ever get to the next generation of Forsytes?”) Then the seed of a plot piques the interest, even if the first impetus launches nothing much more than a lot of talking and worrying. Then the characters’ critiques of modernism start in again, and it seems once more as if I’m in for just another ride on the same track.

Well, I won’t say that Galsworthy has surprised me this year with a new exit off of that well worn track. The narrative twist always has the same effect, and he never seems to fail to provide a new set of secondary characters that offer a twist on the twist, a critique of the critique. And yet the view on each new circuit around the track becomes clearer, more full of detail. And in the end, I see Galsworthy as even more ingenious than I had thought before. There. That’s how predictable Galsworthy is: he always convinces me that he’s smarter than he seemed before. Can’t he ever come up with a new trick?

In Swan Song, the sixth novel in The Forsyte Saga, the formula proceeds in this way. Jon Forsyte moves back to England with his pretty American wife, and the married Fleur Mont thinks she has to indulge her continued feelings for him. This young generation, groping along after the Great War, rejects the past because it is “boring,” so, really, how can marriage vows mean anything to them? Fleur’s father, Soames Forsyte, criticizes his daughter’s immorality (mostly to himself) but has nothing better to replace it with. He blames dishonesty and thievery and adultery on modernism, disliking its art, its literature (it has “no continuity”), and its dancing (the Charleston is “vacuous”), as if the previous generation or the Old Days were better. Yet he knows personally all too well the pains of infidelity. And he even discusses with an art dealer the talent Fragonard had for making adultery seem attractive. So clearly immorality isn’t just a new fad after all. Each generation of Forsytes blames the other for the ills of the world, and yet both clearly have deep moral problems.

Meanwhile, politician Michael Mont tries a new scheme: upgrading the slums without displacing the tenants (permanently anyway). Here’s where the plot offers a first-level critique: instead of looking to others in order to find blame, just try to make the world better. But the humanitarian projects in the Forsytes’ world always fall apart because they depend on committees who can only be altruistic in the most mercenary ways.

So then comes the critique of the critique: Jon asks help of his uncle Hilary. This humble cleric and his wife truly breathe the life of heaven; they are in this world but not of it. Jon’s only way of understanding their godliness is to say that they are good without being boring. Through them Galsworthy offers his critique of modern society, Edwardian society, Victorian society, the selfishly charitable, and any other group living according to merely human values.

Yeah. Same old thing. Galsworthy is so boring. And I can’t wait for more!

Anger

I’m going to confess a guilty pleasure: Master Chef. I could prolong my confession with comments about the show’s excessive love of purées, its quirky editing, its endless repetition of dramatic moments, and the mystery boxes that are never mysteries since the viewers have already seen the hidden ingredients at least twice before the contestants do. But for the purpose of today’s post, I just want to make an observation about Gordon Ramsay’s anger. Clearly, yelling is as much a part of Gordon’s television brand as the sixteen Michelin stars he has received. And his blunt critiques bring many a contestant to tears. But when “one of America’s best home cooks” is eliminated (a few episodes into a season anyway, after which the judges supposedly have really come to know and care about the contestants), the Chef with the Coif asks for a hug, and (here’s the real point) the contestant always wants that hug. There’s a junior edition of the show, as well, and the kids adore Gordon Ramsay, even after he yells and (oh, so predictably) throws the raw meat they’re trying to serve to ranchers or truck drivers or firefighters. It seems that the contestants know that Gordon Ramsay’s anger is, well, perhaps mostly schtick, but is, in any case, always directed at the food and the performance, not at the person.

I don’t know if that analogy helps you. But I was thinking about it just two days ago and felt like tossing it in today like a Homerian simile.

    And as the Scot does cast his darkened brow
    And smold’ring eyes down on an errant chef,
    Trembling with diffidence about a faulty dish,
    And yet retains the love and honor due
    To him contestants dearly wish to please;

    So, too, the sixteenth President did find
    Himself in frequent states of passioned pique
    As office seekers begged and gen’rals balked,
    Although the people still deemed him their father.

OK, that was six-and-a-half times as good as I thought it would be when I started it and makes my main point so well I don’t have much else to say. But I should mention the book I really intended to talk about and make one other point.

Michael Burlingame’s The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln touches on many aspects of Lincoln’s psychology other than anger: his hatred of slavery, his diffidence with women, his ambition, and more. But the chapter on anger suddenly affected me more than the others before it. I had read several of the anecdotes before about Lincoln getting frustrated and scolding, to give just one of many kinds of examples, southern women asking for pardons for their sons, imprisoned for rebelling against the United States. But reading fifty pages of such stories, one after the other, presented a picture of Lincoln almost wholly new to me. Here was a man who didn’t just have occasional lapses from patience but who showed his frustration through displays of anger over and over again.

And yet. 

And yet, I remembered, the people who knew him best still revered him and thought of him as a father figure.

The same mitigating consideration didn't come to mind in the next chapter, though. It was surprising to have a sixty-page chapter on Mary Todd Lincoln’s personality in a book on the psychology of the more famous of this wedded pair, but it was far and away the most enlightening in the book. I knew she tried her husband’s patience, but, wow! On one occasion, Mary, angry that Abraham had not stoked the fire, hit him in the face with a piece of firewood and drew blood. On the way to Washington for the first inauguration, when agents learned of an assassination plot against the President-elect, Mary publicly announced their change of route; she eventually had to be locked in a room in order to keep her quiet and to preserve her husband’s safety. As first lady, she often accepted large gifts from men and then threw tantrums until the President gave them offices. After her husband’s death, Mary then extorted many of these same men, telling them she would announce the partial truth that they got their offices only because of her if they didn’t send her money. Yikes! She was so much worse than I knew.

After reading sixty pages of such stories, I began to see how the chapter on Mary did indeed speak to the “inner world of Abraham Lincoln.” The man who lost his temper so many times in speaking to others very rarely did so with his wife.

The End of D’Artagnan

I had known about The Man in the Iron Mask since my childhood encounters with Classics Illustrated and knew that I would read the actual book some day. I didn’t get that particular title from CI when I was a kid, so I didn’t know the story. I didn’t even know it was a Three Musketeers book until about four years ago. So the long, long wait, the return of beloved characters, the positive comparison with the dreadfully tedious Louise de la Valliére (the “Musketeers” book I read last year), and the poignant end of three of the four musketeers made this a very satisfying and moving read.

The Man in the Iron Mask is actually only the final third of a novel three times the length of either The Three Musketeers or its first sequel, Twenty Years After. But having read the whole series now, I can see why it is often published (and filmed) separately: only a little background is needed to understand the situation, and only in this last third do we get an interesting, exciting plot involving the characters we (and, from what I can tell, Dumas) actually care about.

The man in the iron mask was a real personage, a prisoner in the Bastille held by Louis XIV for historically undisclosed reasons. But Dumas had made the musketeers famous by putting them at the heart of historical events, and here he makes the masked prisoner the twin brother of King Louis and has our heroes involved in a plot to substitute one for the other. Whether for or against, I won’t say!

And I won’t reveal any other secrets of the story except to say again that, as becomes a final volume in a series about favorite characters, the reader grieves some deaths at the end. Each death is utterly befitting its respective character, as is the non-death: that character needs to live with some regrets for a while.

Yes, I am truly grieving. I was sad when I finished the book, and I’m sad now writing about it. This is the end, in several ways, of characters that I have deeply loved since I was sixteen. And, as with many real deaths I’ve experienced, I didn’t see these coming.

Balance

I want to say that I didn’t feel any emotion when I read Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. For most people, that comment would mean that the book wasn’t good, as if feeling were the only inner motion of the human psyche. (Of course, this kind of person is unlikely to read Hermann Hesse in the first place.) But for me it represents merely a curious aspect of my response to a book that made me think a lot in a very enjoyable way.

Sometimes art that I like just makes me think without raising emotion. The film My Dinner with Andre springs to mind. Some Asimov sci-fi stories also do this. It wouldn’t be a problem here except that The Glass Bead Game seems to say that we need emotional life to balance the intellectual.

Joseph Knecht lives in a future shaped by reaction to the horrible world wars of the twentieth-century. To get away from the irrational manias that destroyed Europe and to encourage the arts and philosophy and academics, a system of schooling is established and a whole district set aside for the training of the most promising youths (all boys!) in the sciences and humanities. Over the centuries the highest school develops a game in which any idea – a part of a piece of classical music, for instance, or a passage or theme from a great piece of literature – is represented by a configuration of colored beads on a board. Players add beads representing astronomical formulas, poetic phrases, mathematical formulas, philosophical tenets and more, tracing through the arrangement on the board the common threads that connect them all. The experience of the unity of pure knowledge gives these men perspective and peace, and the rest of society looks up to them as the guiding stars that keep them all from going to war again.

History is seen in this future world as the ebb and flow of passions that cause troubles and wars and is left out of the schools and out of the game. But eventually Joseph comes to see that the game itself has had a history and must come to an end. He admires the family life of a friend he makes in the world outside his academic cloister. And because of these insights and others, ultimately he decides that life must have a balance between the intellect and passion.

But does the book really convincingly demonstrate the need for balance? Everything weird and wonderful and new in the book has to do with the extremely erudite atmosphere of the game, and ultimately if the book makes anyone want anything it is to have more of the intellectual tranquility of the Glass Bead Game.

And of course it makes me want to experience the game itself. Hesse only gives cryptic descriptions, not much more detailed than what I posted here. But a handful of game designers have tried their hands at realizing the game, and a couple of the results are available (in part at least). One seems more like a method of exploratory conversation. Its promotional material suggests a question something like this: If music were astronomy, what constellation would Bruce Springsteen be? While the answer is clearly Ophiucus (I mean, obviously!), that implementation of the game doesn’t seem to capture anything like the idea of representing the connection on a board. But a couple of the others seem promising, and I’m going to have to order them or try contacting the inventors to see if they can share a copy.

Follow-up on Dickens’s Christian Message

Thinking over what I wrote last month about Dickens’s Christian message, I realize that I followed my train of thought down two avenues only: Dickens’s use of allegory and his explicit portrayal of the moral characters as Christians. Today I want to trace two other paths.

Sometimes Dickens just blatantly offers a Christian message in his narration. The example I think of first has to do with Jo, the little crossing sweeper from Bleak House. Jo is a homeless orphan. He has never known a day of education or a day of love (that he remembers). Dickens describes his illiteracy thus:

It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language—to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think (for perhaps Jo DOES think at odd times) what does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me?

One day, Jo is called upon to testify at an inquest, but the officers of the court find that he doesn’t know what it means to swear to the truth or what truth is or what the Bible says about truth. They are completely stymied by the question of what to do with such an uncooperative boy! But it never occurs to anyone in the court (representing the Christian state of the United Kingdom, remember) that what they should do is to give Jo a home and teach him to read.

Later Jo comes across a charlatan preacher named Chadband, who, as a minister in the Church, has even less reason than the bailiff at the court to wonder what to do with a boy wholly ignorant of the Bible. But Chadband leaves Jo just as unenlightened as he found him. After their initial conversation, Dickens’s narration addresses this apostrophe (I learned this use of the word from Dickens himself!) directly to the neglected child:

It may be, Jo, that there is a history so interesting and affecting even to minds as near the brutes as thine, recording deeds done on this earth for common men, that if the Chadbands, removing their own persons from the light, would but show it thee in simple reverence, would but leave it unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without their modest aid--it might hold thee awake, and thou might learn from it yet!

There’s nothing hidden about this message. If you are a Christian individual, organization, institution, or country, take care of children and teach them to read, because our religion depends on revelation found in a Book. Don’t be a Chadband! (By the way, “Chadband” is one of Dickens’s most successfully expressive names. As soon as the narration presents you with “Rev. Chadband,” you know you’re meeting pomposity and hypocrisy. And the beauty of it is, I don’t know exactly how the name conveys the idea so well. But how can any good come out of “Chadband”?)

I alluded to the other kind of Christian message I want to mention in one confusing sentence near the end of the earlier post. But it deserves more space. This message is all-pervasive in Dickens’s books and stories. It is simply this. In Dickens, as in no other author whatsoever, every character – businessmen and lawyers, landowners and urchins, moneylenders and spendthrifts, belles and streetwalkers, butlers and innkeepers, parents and children, teachers and students, eccentric aunts and boring office mates, cart drivers and coal diggers, bashful grooms and jilted brides, clerics and showmen, aristocrats and scullery maids, conservatives and revolutionaries, doctors and nurses, detectives and engineers, criminals and judges, sailors and tailors and jailers, French and English, American and Indian – all are presented as humans and individuals, not merely plot points.

Most authors in a situation where a runaway boy needs money would simply report that he sold his jacket for a few shillings at a resale shop, perhaps mentioning a shopkeeper, maybe even giving him a generic line or two: “I can give you ’alf a crown at most.” Dickens, however, gives the man who buys David Copperfield’s jacket a weird rattle in his throat and makes him so strange and so memorable, I believe Tolkien found inspiration here for Gollum. The clear message is that the children of God in all their infinite variety of forms are worthy of our attention. The hypocrites and self-servers Dickens dignifies by scolding them. (Our contemporary society doesn’t understand that thought, but what good parent doesn’t know that loving the child sometimes means telling her she is very wrong?) Those characters with a heart, on the other hand, find their author’s mercy for all their doubts and missteps and hilarious foibles, and receive his honor and admiration for their best moments.

Were you to ask me for examples of people who treated prostitutes as dignified beings fashioned in the image of God, only three people would immediately come to mind: Jesus and, in their writing, Cervantes and Dickens. If we could each learn to treat every real person we meet on the road of life as Dickens treats the creations of his prolific imagination, we would have nothing to be ashamed of when we meet our own even more prolific Creator.

Cold Blood

I want to say it made my blood run cold. But the book is called In Cold Blood, so saying that my blood is cold makes me sound like a sociopath. I can think of two situations in which we speak of cold blood in humans. (More may exist that I’m not thinking of at the moment.) We talk of a person who murders when not in a rage as a cold-blooded killer. And we say when we encounter something horrific or uncanny that it makes our blood run cold. So here's what I actually mean: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood made my blood run cold in the best way.

OK, see? “In the best way.” That makes me sound like I enjoy murder. I don’t! Like Hercules Poirot, “I do not approve of murder.” But don’t we all like reading about it?

Sometime in the last couple of years, my wife and I saw a movie or TV show in which the character Truman Capote appears once or twice, telling dinner companions that he is writing not just a new book but a new kind of book. Neither of us can remember what that show was. If any of my readers recognize it, please remind me! (Note: he appears once or twice. I’m not talking about the Philip Seymour Hoffman film.)

In any case, with or without that source identified, I know that Capote thought this about his book. And now I understand what he meant by a new kind of book: it is a nonfiction book written as a novel. His beautiful prose descriptions of Holcomb, Kansas, raise a crystal-clear picture of the town to my mind’s eye. His presentation of the killers Hickock and Smith, based on extensive interviews, depicts the surprisingly numerous layers of their terrifying personalities in tragic detail. He recounts the story of KBI agents combing through evidence and tracking down the solution to the crime with all the suspense of Hitchcock. But the masterstroke is the way Capote portrays the victims, the members of the Clutter family, never of course known to him while alive. Yet the novel-style narration, based on interviews with everyone in Holcomb, makes it seem as if he did know them. I want to say he brought the characters to life, but of course that is exactly what he couldn’t do. I can say, though, that he honored them by making them stand up from the page in three-dimensional solidity with all their charm, all their morality, all their intelligence and beauty and strength and athleticism, all their ambitions, all their quirks, all their shortcomings, and all their foibles. Amazing.

I’d waited a long time for this one, and it exceeded expectations.

Refining the Arthurian Question

It seems like “Did King Arthur exist in any real sense?” is a good question to ask. I’ve asked it, read about it, thought about it. But, says Geoffrey Ashe in The Discovery of King Arthur, this is the wrong question. If you mean, “Was there ever an Arthur who was King of All Britain, seated with his Knights at the Round Table, chivalric defender of all good, beholder of the Holy Grail, aided and counseled by Merlin the Magician?” the answer is clearly, “No.” End of story. This Arthur begins to appear (some features of him at least) in the twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain by the cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, whereas Arthur, if he was real, lived many generations before in (depending on your sources) the fifth or sixth century. Ashe says that the proper question is, “Which historical figure did Geoffrey have in mind when he created the legend?”

I enjoyed Ashe’s book a lot. A lot! And I like his answer: Looking only at the contradictory chronicles from Britain, it is difficult to pinpoint a person who might be the source of the legend. But if we note that Geoffrey of Monmouth three times associates Arthur with the reign of Emperor Leo (r. 457-474) and has him traveling to Gaul near the end of his life, we find a historically documented person who matches: Riothamus, called “King of the Britons,” who came to Gaul in 469 at the request of the western emperor to fight off Euric, King of the Visigoths. (It appears that Riothamus could be a romanization of a Brittonic word meaning “high king,” which could explain why no British document includes the name. “Riothamus” presumably corresponds with some “Arthur” or “Aurelius” in one of the British or Saxon chronicles.)

But is Ashe’s question really the right one, either? Am I satisfied to know that Geoffrey of Monmouth, when he gave us the greatest king in British history (whether real or imaginary), had in mind a fellow whose exploits in Gaul are the only historically certain facts? I am not. Maybe it will help to think of the problem.

The problem is that, since the protectors of civilization and education, i.e. the Romans, had abandoned Britain in the early fifth century, and illiterate barbarians, i.e. the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes, had begun to swarm in around the middle of that same century, there is no consistent British record of British events written at the time. It’s hard for us to imagine in an age when almost any Google search brings up hundreds of thousands of written pieces of information, but we only have a few documents out of Britain from the time when Arthur supposedly lived or even from the next couple of centuries. Now, the authors of those sporadic treatises had to have learned to read and write somewhere, so presumably literacy was preserved in some tiny pockets, but those grocery lists and inventories and theological musings have all disappeared. What we have left are just a few writings, spread out over centuries, that mention various kings with little consistency of names or dates (or dating systems). So the question can’t be “Which established historical personage of British history from the time is the prototype of the legendary King Arthur?” There are no clearly established historical personages since the document record in Britain is so sparse and erratic.

Geoffrey of Monmouth mentions an “ancient British book” that he used as a source. Now, he might have been pulling our leg. Cervantes claimed that his book of Don Quixote came from a history by Cide Hamete Benengeli. Goldman says that The Princess Bride is an abridgement of a book by S. Morgenstern. These authors merely used a fun device to make their fiction seem more worthy of our suspension of disbelief. Geoffrey might have done the same thing. On the other hand, he might conceivably have been in earnest about his source, and so one might propose that The Question is “Where is that missing ancient British book?” Since that question has not been answered satisfactorily in nine-hundred years, however, we should set it aside for now. Besides, is that really what you or I want to know? A handful of historians, I’m sure, would die happy to have found that book. And I would be very excited to hear that it had been discovered in some monastic cellar. But surely the whereabouts of that book cannot be the central question we all have in mind about King Arthur.

So what do we in fact want to know? I suggest that the question is simply, “Did some king unite the Britons for a while in the dark times of Saxon invasion?” And the answer to that question is clearly, “Yes!” Whatever his name was – Arthur, Aurelius, or Riothamus (I think his name was probably Arthurius Aurelius and that the Romans in Gaul knew him as Riothamus) – all those otherwise irreconcilable documents and all other evidence agree that a high king once led the petty British kingdoms and kept the Saxons at bay for a while. Maybe it was in the 460s; maybe it was in the 530s. If we depend on British sources, we’ll never know. But they all agree it happened: the world as Britons knew it was ending, yet some king held off the apocalypse for a season. And that’s a story that gets handed down, even in Dark Ages of illiteracy. That’s a story that acquires legendary status and then legendary episodes and characters. That’s a story that could inspire Geoffrey of Monmouth to get the ball rolling on the greatest theme in British literature, what has become known simply as the Matter of Britain.

Yes, that king, whom we know as King Arthur whatever his real name might have been, existed. And now, having read Ashe’s work, I believe that that king must be the same as Riothamus, because only a king who had quelled the waves of Saxon invasion in Britain could have afforded to take his army to Gaul to help out there.

Influences and George MacDonald’s Sermons

I’ve been reading George MacDonald’s novels for many years. This year I set aside the fiction in favor of two sets of sermons. I don’t remember who recommended that I read some of his sermons, but I’m glad that person did. MacDonald writes clearly and passionately in these “unspoken” addresses, a difficult combination to pull off. And his lessons are quite good. Some examples: Life has many daily questions the Bible doesn’t answer, which is why we must daily rely on Jesus for guidance. Each follower of Christ will receive in Heaven a new name written on a white stone, unique and secret because each believer can worship God in a way that no one else can. We could not hate our cruelest enemy except for a shred of humanity in him that makes us think he could be different, and that shred is what we can love. Jesus gives the rich young ruler things to do in order to receive eternal life rather than things to believe or things to be partly because when someone asks how to reach the top of a mountain, you don't say, "Put your foot on the peak."

I know of MacDonald only through C. S. Lewis and read him at Lewis’s recommendation. And although I don’t always understand why Lewis admired him so deeply, here in the sermons, I see the influence of MacDonald on Lewis very clearly. Why does God even have his children ask for things if He knows what we need and can give it? Because prayer is the thing we need most, says MacDonald, and I hear the echoes of that excellent point reverberating throughout Lewis’s work. Miracles show the hastening of natural processes, says MacDonald, an idea repeated by Lewis a few decades later in his book on miracles. And when MacDonald says that God will strip away our sin layer by layer, I can’t help but think of Lewis’s Edmund having his dragon skin peeled from him.

Strangely, I also saw influences of Hegel on MacDonald. Hegel, the ultimate philosopher of progress in the century of progress, essentially taught that the purpose of the universe was to evolve to the point that some part of it understood it as a whole. In other words, according to Hegel, the purpose of the universe was to produce Hegel. I see Hegel’s influence where MacDonald talks about progressive revelation as God’s working toward humanity’s comprehension of Him. I see it again where MacDonald says, “Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.”

I’m far from alone in seeing Hegel as a big problem. Right now, I’m also reading Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (more on that book in a later post), in which protagonist Joseph Knecht blames Hegel for the world wars of the twentieth century. As Lewis said that MacDonald baptized his imagination, I could say that MacDonald baptized Hegel’s ideas, Still, two months ago, I would never have imagined a line of influence from the pagan Hegel to the Christian C. S. Lewis with only one stop in between.

A Book I Had Not Planned to Read this Year . . . or Any Year

Background bit no. 1:

During my Second Decade Reading Plan, I revisited Sherlock Holmes canon: all four novels and all fifty-six short stories. At the end of those ten years, I knew that I would one day want to read them all yet again – all, that is, except for A Study in Scarlet. The first couple of chapters, in which Watson meets Holmes for the first time, are priceless and indispensable. But on the second reading, after I had found the American backstory involving the vengeful Mormon town once again a tedious diversion from the main attraction, I decided to leave that novel out of my next run-through. (I guess I could say in Doyle’s defense that he didn’t know yet that he had just introduced one of the greatest characters in the history of literature and shouldn’t leave him out of almost half of the book.)

Background bit no. 2:

For a long time, perhaps as long as I’ve been following to ten-year reading plans, I’ve been playing computer logic puzzles by Everett Kaser. I usually play at least one every day. The puzzles use little pixel-art pictures and icons and involve graphic clues that tell you, for instance, that the apple is in the same column as the Japanese flag or that the hammer is above and to the right of the rose. Many involve paths or mazes that must be put together by following the clues to discover where walls and doors are placed. The one I’ve been playing the most lately is something like Slitherlink, but the player has to figure out where the clues go in the grid as well as determining the looping path that satisfies the clues. I love it!

The titles of the games group themselves into several themes. Some games are named after, I presume, family members: “Willa’s Walk,” for instance, and “Floyd’s Bumpershoot.” Others are named after famous mathematicians. The most common theme, though, is Sherlock Holmes. The set is made up of “Inspector Lestrade,” “Baker Street,” “Mrs. Hudson,” “Moriarty’s Dinner,” “Reichenbach Falls,” and several others, including the one with the apples and the Japanese flags, which is entitled simply “Sherlock.” (The games cost more than you may be used to in an age of free phone apps. But you can try each one for free, they don’t include ads, each includes hundreds of puzzles at each of various levels of difficulty, and Everett himself might call you personally if you have any problems. I’ve had one problem in thirty years, and he certainly helped me.)

Main point of today’s post:

One of the latest Kaser puzzle games is “Beckett’s Books,” which presents classic books, one two-page spread at a time, with the pages torn up into little squares. The player places the pieces with margin first (like the edge pieces of a jigsaw puzzle) and then, following the spelling and sense of the words and the patterns of white space at the beginning and end of each paragraph, puts the interior pieces in position so the text can be read.

I tried the free demo first, which offered five pages of each of five books. When I paid for the full version, which book did I inexplicably decide to continue? Of course Everett included the first Sherlock novel in his game of reassembling books through deductive reasoning! So there I was for several months earlier this year, reading A Study in Scarlet, two pages per day. All of that to say that, maybe because of the unusual format and pace of reading or maybe just because my expectations were so low, the book was interesting all the way through – even the chapters in Utah. Now I’m really looking forward to rereading the other three novels and the fifty-six stories over the course of my fourth decade of scheduled reading.

Suggestions for Reading Dickens as a Christian Author

A friend has commented on my post from February 11 that she would like to read some Dickens with his Christian message in mind. So I thought I would offer my best ideas on where to start.

If you’d like to start by reading about Dickens, I highly recommend God and Charles Dickens: Recovering the Christian Voice of a Classic Author by Gary L. Colledge. Colledge shows the man with all of his faults and all of his spiritual virtues, as well. Some critics have made facile arguments claiming that Dickens was not a true Christian. (The same kind of critics desperately want Handel to be an unbeliever, presumably so they can listen to Messiah without any pressure.) Colledge sets those views aside quickly and starts to show how Dickens exalts Christ in his books and stories.

If you can’t stand just reading about Dickens but must start reading the words of the Inimitable himself, begin with this letter from 1861 to a certain Reverend Macrae:

With a deep sense of my great responsibility always upon me when I exercise my art, one of my most constant and most earnest endeavours has been to exhibit in all my good people some faint reflections of our great Master, and unostentatiously to lead the reader up to those teachings as the great source of all moral goodness. All my strongest illustrations are drawn from the New Testament; all my social abuses are shown as departures from its spirit; all my good people are humble, charitable, faithful, and forgiving. Over and over again, I claim them in express words as disciples of the Founder of our religion; but I must admit that to a man (or a woman) they all arise and wash their faces, and do not appear unto men to fast.

So don’t expect his Christian heroes to say, “According to Romans 8:28 . . . .” Dickens's humbugs and judgmental Christians thump their Bibles, whether literally or metaphorically, on the heads of others. His “good people,” on the other hand, follow the words of the book of James and show their faith by their good works. (The one, glorious exception is Captain Cuttle from Dombey and Son. This nearly illiterate sailor constantly quotes the Bible and the Prayer Book with uproarious imprecision. Yet, he, as much as any character in all of Dickens’s works, is “humble, charitable, faithful, and forgiving” and thus shows his true heart.) The piety of these good characters may be represented by a single phrase among the hundred thousand in a typical novel; don’t let these slip past your notice. If Pip says he prays or Bob and Tiny Tim go to church, Dickens is telling us with modest efficiency where the character’s allegiance lies.

Now, what you’re really looking for.

Start by rereading A Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens grew up and lived in an officially Christian country. Nearly everyone he knew was baptized as an infant. The purest Christian he ever knew was his sister-in-law, who died in his arms at the age of (I believe) sixteen. Put these facts all together (with a few choice words from our Savior about the faith of children) and it’s easy to see how the author would come to the point of view that Christian faith is something that children grow up with and many adults have wandered away from and that returning to Christ means undoing some adult decisions and going back to take up again a state of childlikeness. Note that Scrooge’s parents raised him in some kind of Christian faith, else they would not have named him the otherwise improbable Ebenezer. Then watch in Stave the Second as young Ebenezer trades in his childlike faith for a love of money. Then, of course, there has to be a child of faith to show Scrooge the way. And of course the child, Tiny Tim, has to die (in one version of the Future) in order to demonstrate the beauty of an entire life lived in devotion to the one “who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.” Now tell me if you can (and you know you can’t) that Scrooge’s joyous “I am as merry as a schoolboy” doesn’t mean a return to faith in Jesus. If you still doubt, think of Dickens’s checklist as you read the last few pages and note where, after his conversion, Scrooge is humble (check), charitable (check), faithful (check: he goes to church!), and forgiving (check).

Next stop, A Tale of Two Cities. Here Sydney Carton transforms from the most beautiful lost character in all of literature, to Christian (remembering the words “I am the Resurrection and the Life” from his father’s funeral), to Christ figure. On the slight chance that you don’t know the end of the plot, I won’t give it away. But pay attention to these key elements along the way. (1) Dr. Manette is released from prison in a scheme involving the codewords “recalled to life.” Keep in mind this master analogy in all of its deepest Christian connotations as it affects the rest of the book. Prison = death (literal, metaphorical, and spiritual). Freedom = resurrection (literal, metaphorical, and spiritual). (2) Think about Manette’s resurrection and the new Christian’s spiritual resurrection and Christ’s resurrection in comparison to the grave digging done by “the resurrection man.” (3) When one great character finally tells his wife that he approves of her praying, keep in mind that Dickens by that tiny rudder of a phrase turns a whole ship of spiritual meaning and wants us to take the words as a sign of renewed Christian faith. (4) When the drinker (you’ll know who) pours out his drink on the hearth, don’t take it simply as a renunciation of alcohol but also as a pouring out of sacrificial blood on an altar. (5) When Charles Darnay says that inheriting aristocracy, a state that brings a death sentence in the new French Republic, leaves him “bound to a system that is frightful to me, responsible for it, but powerless in it,” consider the similarities to the Biblical description of the state of sin. (6) When Sydney changes clothes with Charles, consider that Christ took on our humanity that we might “become partakers of the divine nature.” For me, no other novel, not even The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, gives a more powerful, theologically detailed allegory of salvation from sin by substitutionary death.

Little Dorrit contains much less allegory. But it’s there. My post from February outlines the main points. As for the rest of the content of the book, we have a morality play with three main groups: the Christians (“my good people” who quietly go their way demonstrating the character of Christ), the villains (who obviously do the opposite), and the humbugs, chiefly Mrs Clennam, who talk much more about the Bible than Dickens’s heroes but only seem to find in it judgment and cause for anger and revenge.

The Old Curiosity Shop reads like a fairy tale at times with its generically named characters: the Grandfather, the Single Gentleman, the Bachelor. So a little allegory shouldn’t come as a surprise. Little Nell leads her troubled Grandfather through the industrial midlands where they see poor souls tortured in the fires of the furnaces. Hmm. I wonder what that could represent? They find peace in their journey when they hear the bell of a country church, and for the rest of her time, Nell enjoys sitting among the statuary of the saints. The plot is actually barely allegorical. Clearly the good Christian Nell leads her Grandfather, a man mentally and spiritually bound by [I’ll let you discover the secret on your own], from Hell to Heaven by her humble, faithful, forgiving ways.

David Copperfield seems at first like it might be a great Biblical allegory, pitting David against Uriah Heep. (See 2 Samuel 11 & 12 for the story of the original David and Uriah.) But its symbolic message is more in the details of the separate characters. Note especially Agnes (Agnes = agnus = the lamb), who first appears in front of a stained-glass window, standing as one with the spiritual light shining down on David. Aunt Betsey Trotwood is one of the best Christians and best characters in all of Dickens’s works, and David Copperfield is one of the best novels in the history of English literature. So don’t forget that part of Dickens’s Christian message is care for all of humanity as shown in his realistic, carefully crafted attention to detail of character.

Then read any of the other novels with the letter to Rev. Macrae in mind. My recommendations in order: Dombey and Son, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby, Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House. If you still like Dickens after all that, you can read Oliver Twist, Pickwick Papers, and the others.

Enough. Stop reading me. Start reading Dickens.

Suspended Animation

Patrick O’Brian’s sea adventures wouldn’t have worked without some action. Lucky Jack Aubrey has to slip his one ship by five French ships and a land fortress to cut out a valuable prize in harbor, or he has to take his sloop with fourteen guns against a Spanish frigate with thirty-two. (Of course he succeeds in these feats, or he wouldn’t be called Lucky Jack Aubrey.)

But the best parts of the books for me are the long descriptions of daily sea life, when action and danger lie far beyond the horizon. I just reread The Letter of Marque and The Thirteen-Gun Salute – the twelfth and thirteenth installments in the tales of Captain Aubrey and his friend, surgeon, fellow musician, and government agent, Stephen Maturin – and the books are full of a state of nautical suspended animation. HMS Surprise hits the doldrums or simply has days on end of tacking across the Atlantic. In these times, the sailors scrub the decks with their holystones. They play chess. They trade stories. They turn the hour glass and strike the bells. They reef the t’gallant sails. They sing (well, as long as Surprise is a privateer – once reinstated to the Royal Navy, Capt. Aubrey doesn’t go for such frivolity). At one point in one of these books, some character even mentions “suspended animation.”

The frequent tastes of suspended animation in the books don’t all have to do with a sailor’s life, per se. Here and there time stands still as some grand object, literally suspended, brings perspective to time, space, and life. At the end of The Letter of Marque, Stephen dreams of a ride in a hot-air balloon, feeling his cares rolling off his shoulders as he watches clouds go by underneath him. In the middle of The Thirteen-Gun Salute, the best image in the whole series occurs as Stephen sees above him, in a towering wave hovering higher than the ship at the apex of its gigantic undulation, a whale, suspended in the clear, sunlit ocean water.

The best parts of retired life are the boring weeks with no appointments, nothing to do but what Jack’s crew does: read a story or play a song or get all the clocks in the house set to the same time or clean something that hasn’t been ship-shape in a year. (I don’t have any equivalent to reefing t’gallant sails.) Or I might just listen to the murmuring of a million leaves rustling in the gentle summer breeze or drive down the road to the Greenbrier entrance of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and watch the waters of the Little Pigeon River incessantly cascade down the rocks on their way to the ocean Jack Aubrey sailed. But with one thing and another (I don’t need to go into any details), I hadn’t had any boring weeks since the beginning of last July. Maybe I decided to take this angle on O’Brian this year because his images of suspended animation came through my schedule just as all the crises came to resolutions and the blessed boring weeks began again.

My Refreshing Experience with Chesterton This Year

What can I say about G. K. Chesterton after I’ve written so many posts about him? I’m not going to give you a list of nifty quotations; you can buy whole books of his pithy, twisty aphorisms. I also won’t rehash the story of my discovery last year that I had been on a forty-year quest to rediscover some favorite essays I read in the ’80s only to find I’d been looking for them in the wrong books. (OK, I guess I just rehashed it.) Much more important and pertinent is my need to report my experience with Chesterton this year, without necessarily focusing on the author himself.

I began by dreading my yearly encounter. Between court dates and an earache, I wasn’t sure I had the emotional wherewithal to wade through the topical pieces I had no chance of understanding just to get to the few good offerings. But after getting through January, 1926, and making it to his column for February 13, I found new strength in the peculiar comfort and joy that somehow only GKC can impart. In fact, I remembered that twenty years ago I often read through some Chesterton during stressful times precisely because he made them less stressful.

What is it about Chesterton that serves so well as a specific for my disquietude? It’s not particularly the “paradoxical” turns of phrase that everyone else seems so enamored of. (They’re not paradoxes, for one thing.) It’s the clear logic, the refreshing skewer popping the thin bubbles of modernist thinking. As I think about it, far from being his own so-called paradoxes, it’s Chesterton’s expert ability to show and demolish the actual paradoxes in modernist thinking that calms my nerves.

When a modern person tells you, he says in that February number, that faith kept the Dark Ages dark, that person speaks from ignorance; faith is the only thing that brought light to the early Middle Ages. But wait; there’s more! The person who says that, clearly not getting it from his own digestion of historical fact, has received it from an authority – a teacher or a modern book – and takes it at face value without examining it by the light of evidence. He is, then, exhibiting the very practice he reviles in what he imagines to be the Middle Ages.

A little later in 1926, Chesterton tells me that modern people can’t make customs, only fashions, and he has given me exactly the words and the formula I needed in order to express what I had been thinking lately about the postmodern penchant for tattoos and ear spacers and buzz cuts on one side of the head. He challenges me (successfully, I think) when he points out on November 13 that democracy was originally made for small societies and still works best only when everyone personally knows the leaders they have elected. His even more pointed conclusion: what we have is not a democracy but a plutocracy. (Can anyone deny that Congress is elected less on the principle of “one person, one vote” than on the principle of “one dollar, one vote”?)

At last – I mean literally on the last essay of the year – Chesterton reminded me that things sometimes explode in goodness just when you think they can’t get any better. (They have a way of punching you in the gut just when you think they can’t get any worse, too, but I didn’t suffer that experience this week.) In what will be one of my favorites of the thousands of Chesterton columns I’ve read in my life, he explains to me the poetic devices of old Christmas Carols that make them so good in “appalling” contrast to poetically flaccid hymns like (his example) “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” I won’t say more now, though. I want to save it for December when I write about “The Holly and the Ivy.”

Good Stories Make up Good Chapters, Which Make up Good Books

Over the course of forty years or so, I’ve read and reread books on the American Civil War by Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton. For this ten-year reading plan, I wanted to branch out and find some other authors worth visiting over and over. One of my happy discoveries has been Steven E. Woodworth. In rereading just now my post from two years ago on Woodworth’s While God Is Marching On, I was reminded about some disappointing features early in that book. But right now I’m reading his history of the Union Army of the Tennessee, entitled Nothing but Victory, and I’m happy to report that none of the problematic tendencies of the earlier book show up here.

It is odd to read an account focusing on just one of the several armies that the United States deployed in that war; the tightly defined subject matter creates some interesting differences in the way some familiar stories are told. The Battle of Lookout Mountain, for instance (the so-called “Battle Above the Clouds”), is barely mentioned, in just one sentence, having been conducted, as far as the northern forces were concerned, by Joseph Hooker leading the Army of the Cumberland. On the other hand, the accompanying Battle of Missionary Ridge (begun by the Army of the Tennessee, both struggles being part of the greater battle for Chattanooga) is outlined in detail, regiment by regiment. (Regiments make up brigades, which make up divisions, which make up corps, which make up armies.)

Where Woodworth really shines is in the personal stories. I loved reading about the men who scoured Illinois during the summer of 1861 trying to recruit one hundred soldiers each in order to be made captain of the company. (Companies make up regiments, which make up . . . .) Then there were the women and girls who sewed flags for these companies and special hats for the uniformless volunteers to wear and who held parties and public ceremonies in which they bestowed, with eloquent blessings, the precious sewn goods to the departing troops. I’d read often that John McClernand was a political rival to Lincoln whom Lincoln commissioned as a general; Woodworth tells me just how that happened. (It involved McClernand’s help in recruiting in southern Illinois, where many were sypathetic to the seceded states.) I’d read about the Battle of Shiloh before, but I don’t ever remember reading about the crowds of northern civilians who swarmed to the rural Tennessee area after the battle to help the wounded or search for and bury dead loved ones.

Woodworth reads personal journals of soldiers incessantly. I might have expected to read in another book that private George Smith told God that he would serve Him if he survived the siege of Vicksburg. But Woodworth’s reading doesn’t end with the entries from 1865; he tells us that Smith’s journal from fifty years later confirms that he kept his promise. How many pages about sick children and cows bought for five dollars and visits from Aunt Polly did Woodworth have to read through before finding this pertinent detail? Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, my final example concerns Private Albert Crummell of the 30th Ohio who, in a brief lull in the fighting around Atlanta, made furtive forays into no-man’s land to search for tobacco in the packs of dead rebel soldiers but found one who was, as Miracle Max would say, only mostly dead and who demanded that Crummell carry him to safety in return for the tobacco. Crummell made the trade.

All’s Well that Ends with a Problem?

All’s Well that Ends Well has been known since 1896 as one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays.” The problem, according to some, is that Bertram [spoilers ahead!] displays his love for Helena too suddenly at the end of the play, after four-and-seven-eighths acts of despising her. Here’s how the situation unfolds: Helena is the orphan of a great physician, and she brings a cure to the king of France one day. The cure works, and as a reward, the king gives her any lord she wishes to marry, and Helena chooses Bertram. The offended Bertram weds her according to the sovereign’s orders, but vows never to consummate the marriage. He even runs away to war just to get away from her. But the ever hopeful Helena plays an elaborate ruse on Bertram and then appears at the end to explain everything that has happened, upon which Bertram accepts her.

Some say that Bertram doesn’t really willingly relent at the end but gives in only under coercion. Some say that there must be some missing text that explains the reluctant husband’s sudden change. And I have to admit that the first two times I read this play, I was searching for some explanation for Bertram’s quick conversion, as well. But this time, everything seemed clear. The problem seemed to resolve itself very neatly right in the clear words written on the page. How did I miss this before? How have others missed this?

First, there’s a comic side-plot involving Bertram’s rascally servant named Parolles. Parolles is also the subject of a ruse, and as a result Bertram sees just how unfaithful his servant is. Perhaps this series of events gets our hero thinking about relationships and vows and duty and helps him see things from Helena’s point of view. Second, it is rumored near the end of the play that Helena is dead, and Bertram explicitly admits that he loves her now that he realizes what he has lost. So what’s the problem? How is his change of heart “sudden”? Can I also suggest that Shakespeare didn’t see a problem or else he wouldn’t have given the play the title he did?

The Button

I remember that Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy was one of the last books I put on my Third Decade reading plan. I have several presidential biographies on my draft of a Fourth Decade, and I don’t remember what led me to read this one sooner. Maybe I was thinking about Vietnam in comparison to our current military involvement in Asia. Maybe I was thinking about civil rights because of Confederate statues and “fine people on both sides.”

Whatever the reason, it wasn’t that I’m more interested in Kennedy himself than in some of the other U. S. Presidents on my future reading plans (Madison and Eisenhower, for instance). I’ve thought of him as overrated and extremely problematic in that the good he did (or might have done) always has to be taken in the context of his lies about Vietnam. As it turns out, Dallek made Kennedy’s faults look even worse, his virtues even better, and the most amazing parts of his story even more astonishing, and he caused me to reassess the 35th President.

The bad parts first. I found Kennedy’s sense of rich-boy privilege disgusting; as kids, he and his siblings were known to step off a pleasure boat and just throw their coats on the sidewalk in town knowing that someone (they never knew who) would pick them up. The extravagant womanizing started in high school, so it can’t be explained away as caused by a mid-life fear of death. And his willingness to lie to the American public as President just felt like the beginning of a Greek tragedy.

Now for the amazing: Kennedy’s health problems started while he was still a child, and doctors prescribed for him what was then an experimental treatment: steroids. But he didn’t get shots or swallow pills as you or I might: young Jack had to cut a slit in his leg and slip a tablet under the flap in his skin. Sadly, the overdoses of the steroids caused even greater issues later, including his spinal problems. As President, Kennedy was on a crazy cocktail of drugs every day to deal with the constant pain. Dallek doesn’t think the heavy medication affected his performance, but can we really believe that?

And finally the good: Kennedy’s heroism in World War II was not exaggerated, as I had previously thought. After PT 109 was destroyed, Kennedy swam for miles, pulling an injured buddy by gripping the straps of his comrade’s life vest in his teeth. And, wow! did he have to fight his generals to keep the Cuban Missile Crisis from going nuclear. I said that I’ve thought before that all of the good in John Kennedy has to be taken in the context of his lies. But now it seems to me that all of his missteps have to be taken in the context of his insistence that the President alone decides when nuclear weapons will be used. It is a cliché of our times that the President has The Button. But Kennedy made The Button and then took it out of the hands of the people who insisted that nuclear war could be won. This sounds like crazy hyperbole, but I think I was able to enjoy this book only because Kennedy’s restraint during thirteen days in the fall of 1962 left us a world where I and books still exist.

Literary Offenses

I’ve read Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” many times. Laughed at it, too. Hard. I had read Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans when I was a teenager, and every hilarious invective of Twain’s seemed justified when cast toward the author who had his hero Hawkeye crawl into an Indian camp wearing a bear skin as a disguise without raising suspicion.

But when putting together my reading plan for this third decade, I just felt I had to read some more Cooper, if only because he was such an important figure in the history of American literature. His books established the genre of adventure on the American frontier and enjoyed huge popularity at home and in Europe. So I scheduled The Pathfinder for year 6.

And I’m glad I did! Oh, the book had its problems. The pacing, for instance, seemed strange to my twenty-first-century sensibilities. The first group of main characters takes about 20% of the whole book to get down a river to a settlement. One set of rapids and one Indian ambush would have been enough for me. Later on, the heroine hides in a fort for about 30% of the book.

But the action was exciting (you know, the first one or two times each challenge occurred). The romance was interesting, with Mabel Dunham having a choice between two and possibly three virtuous men of varying personalities. And the Natives were portrayed surprisingly fairly. Some are devious, others are trustworthy. All have a set of mental, ethical, and religious principles distinctly non-European, and the hero – Hawkeye again, although here known only as “The Pathfinder” – repeatedly describes these principles as the Indians’ proper gifts. Mark Twain’s review seemed grossly unjust to me while I was reading The Pathfinder.

But then there was that scene with the bullets in the tree.