Book Awards – 2024

One year ago, I said that I was especially looking forward to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, a biography of Gen. Longstreet, Charles Williams's Many Dimensions (an old favorite), the rest of Shirer's Third Reich, and, of course, Dickens (Great Expectations and Pickwick Papers this year). Most of these books campaigned hard in the last three or four weeks for Academy votes, and some of them will find that their efforts have been rewarded. The red carpet is out. The electricity is in the air. Welcome to the exlibrismagnis Book Awards for 2024!

Author of the Reread Book that Most Contradicted My Memory: Charles Dickens
The Inimitable always gets his own category in these awards so as to give other fictional writers a fighting chance at winning. The melancholy Great Expectations is always a beautiful chiaroscuro painting, a hearty feast with bitter herbs, and a best friend with special needs all rolled up into one. I know I’ll enjoy greatness every time I pick it up to reread it, and it never disappoints. Pickwick Papers, on the other hand, I had remembered as a good but relatively shallow book with a string of forgettably silly episodes. But once Sam Weller, heir to Sancho Panza and harbinger of Samwise Gamgee, comes on the scene, the book gains direction and develops a good pour of stout underneath the head of foam.

Best Reread in History: Herodotus, The Histories
I was worried back in January that I would forget about Herodotus by the time the Book Awards came around and that he would lose to a historian whose book was both written and read more recently. But then I remembered that I can grant one award for the best new read and one for the best reread. Congrats, Herodotus!

Best New Read in History: James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations
It just now occurred to me that I read both a book called Great Expectations and book called Grand Expectations in the same year. It seems crazy that I could have been so unobservant, but it’s true. And so now my head is swimming with the idea that the two books tell the same story. Dickens tells the story of Pip, who wants to live out the British Dream of becoming a gentleman, and then gets disappointed. Patterson tells the story of the people who survived the Depression and beat two aggressive totalitarian empires, people who wanted to live the American Dream of making a better, healthier, safer, more prosperous, more entertaining, more exciting world for their children through free choice, ingenuity, and hard work, only to be disappointed by Vietnam, lying leaders, a Generation Gap, and stagflation. Patterson’s book did indeed win a Pulitzer Prize and is, I think, the second best volume of the very good Oxford History of the United States.

Best New Read in Fiction: Jules Verne, Mysterious Island
The pre-Watergate American child in me read Mysterious Island and marveled at this motley group of shipwreck survivors learning to get along and striving to build a better, healthier, safer, more prosperous, more entertaining world for themselves through ingenuity and hard work. I had no idea when I scheduled this book that it would be the sequel to last year’s Children of Captain Grant, and I had no idea when I had read half the book that it would prove to be also a sequel to one of Verne’s greatest books. The experience took me right back to the time when reading was the most joyful: summer days when I had nothing to do but sit alone in a cool basement (maybe with a 1970s-formula, real-sugar Pepsi in a chilled glass bottle!) reading a great book for hours on end.

Most Disappointing Read: E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros
Lewis liked Eddison, and Tolkien said this book influenced him. But Eddison was a man who thought three men named Juss, Spitfire, and Goldry Bluzco could be brothers. What kind of language, what kind of culture, what kind of father could conceivably give siblings such incongruent names? They live in a world where everyone constantly clashes and wars as much as those names, and they like it that way. Thoroughly unpleasant.

Best Poetry: Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, first third
Granted, I read very little poetry this year. But, although I liked Auden’s poetry, it was very hard for me to understand, so I have to go with book that could also win an award for best epic. At some point I need to give Shakespeare this award.

Best New Read in Drama: August Wilson, The Piano Lesson
Family, ghosts, and a woman whose painful memories keep her from playing the piano she loves. All three strike chords (pun very much intended) with me. I just found out last week that Denzel Washington’s son has made a movie of this play!

Best Biography: Elizabeth Varon, Longstreet
Varon revealed a man almost entirely different from what I assumed he was and explained a lot about the way we commemorate and teach about the Civil War.

Best New Read in Religion: A Four-Way Tie
It was way too hard to decide between Augustine’s On the Trinity, Abelard’s Yes and No, Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, and William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, so I’m just going to put in the extra expense and get statuettes made for each of them.

Best Offroading: Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters
The road to China’s inclusion in the modern world was paved with questions about its language. How can the Chinese language be typed? In what order should the Chinese characters be arranged so Chinese titles can be found in card catalog? What numbers will represent the Chinese characters in digital communication, and which version of the characters will be represented? Every chapter presents a new conundrum that made me say, “Oh, yeah! How do they do that?” Honorable mention goes to Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.” It’s a short story; maybe I’ll give it a micro statuette.

Best Reread: Charles Williams, Many Dimensions
I already gave Orlando Furioso an award, so I’m going with Many Dimensions here, a good supernatural thriller with a good message. God’s power is not a commodity to be distributed, sold, patented, used, and consumed. We are not the consumers in this relationship, God is, for He is the Consuming Fire. Now that I think of it, I’m going to give this book an award for Religion as well. So many extra statuettes!

Janus, for whom January is named, had two faces, one looking forward and one looking backward. At least that’s what I’ve been told, and it’s been my understanding that the respectable fellow’s unusual anatomy lies behind our habit of both contemplating the old and anticipating the new at the turn of the year. (I highly suspect that the cause and effect are reversed – that our friend took on the extra visage after he learned of our quite natural custom.) What 2025 reading am I most anticipating? Graham Greene’s Quiet American, Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and Pascal’s Pensées stand out upon a quick glance at my list for the next twelve months. Will any of these win awards? It all depends on how the Academy that lives in my head votes!

I hope that your New Year’s Day is filled with happy memories of books read this year and fond hopes for books you plan to read in 45 squared. See you then!

Year-End Round-Up

My blogging hasn’t kept up with my reading this last month, so I’ll need to cover three books in one post. In July, I said I was hopeful that I would have happy things to say about Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, Williams’s Many Dimensions, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love. I did indeed enjoy all five of those books immensely, but I’ve only blogged about three so far. So I’ll say something about the other two and toss in some comments about William James for free.

I’m so glad I finally read Julian of Norwich: the Revelations are so very happy! God is our friend, she learned in her visions, and cannot be angry with those He has redeemed. In a beautifully quaint phrase, she says that God displays towards us “abundant largesse . . . through his marvellous courtesy.” We worry about sin more than God does, she says; He knows it had to happen, and He dealt with it. Repent, move on, and rejoice! “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” If you get an edition like mine, you will see that two versions of the book have survived: a short version and a long version. It’s mildly interesting to think about which might have come first and why Julian (or someone else) thought there should be a second version. But just go ahead and read the “long” version: it’s only about 150 pages long.

The last time I read Charles Williams's Many Dimensions, eleven years ago, I wrote in my personal notes only these thirteen characters: “pp. 118, 128.” I just checked my copy of the book to see what happens on those pages, and I have to say I don’t have any idea why I recommended page 118 to myself. But 128 does get at the heart of the matter. In this marvelous book of, well, um . . . , marvels, the Stone from the crown of Solomon finds its way to England. The Stone, marked with the Tetragrammaton, has some of the properties of God and, in fact, seems to be an inlapition (to coin a term parallel to “incarnation” while using the Latin for “stone” in place of the word for “flesh”) of the Divinity, showing clear manifestations of the powers of teleportation, telepathy, self-multiplication, and healing. Some people don’t believe what they see; others, following the Sanhedrin of Jesus’ time, believe what’s happening but think it can only cause trouble if word gets out; and yet others see the Stone and its powers as mere commodities to be sold or phenomena to be studied for personal enrichment. Alone in all of England, Lord Arglay and Chloe Burnett see the Stone as a divine object expecting fealty and sacrifice, and on p. 128, they decide to “choose to believe.” And by that bit of insightful phraseology, Williams indicates that the type of belief the Stone demands is more than mere acknowledgment of the truth; after all, the demons believe yet tremble. Belief in the Stone requires a personal choice and commitment.

Having enjoyed small pieces of James’s Principles of Psychology over the course of fifteen years or so, I knew I had to read The Varieties of Religious Experience. I didn’t know what I was in for, but I was certain it would be interesting. The first interesting surprise was to find out that the book wasn’t 140 pages long, as my planning notes said, but about 530, so I had to read a bit faster than I thought I would in order to finish before the holidays. I can’t begin to do justice to 530 fascinating pages in a one-paragraph review, but I’ll say a word about one cautionary point. James says to his audience (the book consists of transcripts of lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh) at the outset that studying religious experiences from a psychologist’s point of view can never prove, nor does he wish to suggest, that God is not involved in the experience, just as no amount of textual criticism can ever prove that God didn’t superintend the composition of the Bible. One of his conclusions is that visions, callings, divine assurance, etc. come from the subconscious part of the mind (he prefers other terms such as the “fringe” or the “extraliminal”), but again he assures his audience that he doesn’t mean to say that locating the immediate source of the experiences in one part of the mind precludes a prior, divine source working on the subconscious. Someday I’m going to have to do some experimentation with reading “subconscious” anytime I see the human spirit mentioned in the Bible and thinking “spirit” everywhere I see the subconscious (or “fringe”) mentioned in psychological writing.

That does it for the regular posts this year. I’ll be back in a few days with the yearly awards ceremony, and then it’s on to 2025, when, among other reading adventures, I’ll explore some more Thomas Hardy and the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, finish up The Forsyte Saga, and revisit two novels by the Great Man himself, one near the top in my ranking and one very near the bottom in everybody’s ranking. Stay tuned to find out which two books I mean and what I think about everything else!

I hope your Merry Christmas brings you some new books!

Not So Grimm

One of the great things about having a long-term reading list, perhaps the best thing, is that you know you'll eventually get to those books you’ve been meaning to read for years. I had wanted to read the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales (in translation, not original-original) for at least fifty years. Well, they got on my reading list, and this month I finally got to them.

My family had a volume of them when I was growing up. I don’t know what happened to that copy, and I don’t know why I didn’t read them as a teenager. But remembering having that book (it had dark green covers and a black spine) makes me pretty sure it was my dad who told me that I should read them “someday” (maybe that’s why I put it off) and that they were much darker than the versions most people know from kids’ books and Disney movies.

I have to say that they weren’t as dark as I had been led to believe. Yes, Cinderella’s sisters cut off parts of their feet in order to make them fit into the slippers, and, yes, Little Red Cap gets eaten by the wolf. But other tales weren’t any worse than that, and I’m sure I had a children’s version at one time that had both Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother being eaten by the wolf (swallowed whole, thankfully!) and rescued by a woodsman with an axe. (I’m almost certain that that’s where I got the notion, still held proudly today, that in the olden days there were men named “woodsmen” who roamed the forests carrying axes and searching for people to help.) And, really, no tale in the book of original versions is any worse than the American kid’s standard version of “Hansel and Gretel,” in which the parents decide it’s better to lead their children to the forest where they will starve or be eaten by wild animals than it would be to share the family’s scant supplies of food with them.

Tests are common in these stories, usually in the form of peculiar tasks required for breaking spells. Think the princess who has to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name. Most of the time, though, the person being tested doesn’t know about it: the prince, for instance, who kisses the “sleeping beauty” to wake her and her family from a hundred-year sleep. Is this a fairy-tale world, or is it just a slightly magical version of our world, where small actions can cause great effects? (See my post on the Mabinogion from last December.)

There are some morals, too; people don’t always just stumble unwittingly into their fortunes according to arbitrary rules. Many of the tales show two proud and selfish brothers (or sisters) receiving punishment or missing opportunities while the third, humble, generous brother gets the treasure or the girl or both. The moral here is obvious: be humble and generous! Several tell about foolish people who see things in a ridiculous way but get rewarded anyway. This time the moral is, Don’t count out the person who sees things contrary to conventional wisdom. God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.

Sorry I waited so long, Dad. But you were right: I loved them.

My Life Makes Sense Now!

Reading the mutli-volume, multi-author Oxford History of the United States has been quite an adventure. I’ve read seven of the volumes now, and overall I’m quite happy I put this project on my reading schedule. The quality has gone up and down (although it’s been mostly quite high), and the prices have gone up and down (altough they have tended to be low lately). But even with the vicissitudes, as a whole, it’s been a very satisfying and instructive experience.

The most frustrating problem with the adventure is the lag in publication. When I started this Third Decade list, Bruce Schulman’s contribution, covering the years 1896-1929, was scheduled to come out, I believe, in 2016. Great! I wanted to read the volumes in historical order, and Schulman’s would be out by the time I made it that far. But over the years, I’ve seen the expected date of that volume move back and back. Last year, the year I had originally scheduled Schulman, I had to jump ahead and read David M. Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear, about the Depression and World War II. By that time, Schulman’s book was scheduled to come out in September of 2024. Soon, I was seeing an ISBN number for it and a page length, and Amazon from Canada and the UK were taking pre-orders. So I thought my reordering would only last one year: just wait until September this year, I thought, and fill in the gap. Alas, September came and went this year, and still no Schulman. I wrote to Oxford Press and got an answer from some nice agent of that company saying that the book would come out in September of 2025. We’ll see.

In any case, I had to change gears again and read one more volume “out of order” (this kind of thing is really only a problem because of my mild-grade OCD). So a few weeks ago I bought the next book in the series, James T. Patterson’s Grand Expectations.

I’ve said before that I must have something in common with the Pulitzer committees, because my favorites had all won the prize for history: Daniel Walker Howe’s What God Hath Wrought (2008), James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (1989), and Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear (2000). The ones I would put in the second tier were finalists, and the one I really didn’t like is not mentioned on any Pulitzer page. That streak of harmonized opinion broke this year. I had only one complaint about Freedom from Fear: that, since its years witnessed two greatest-in-all-history events that demanded all the attention, Kennedy had no time to dwell on sports, clothing, movies, literature, leisure, etc. Well, today I just finished reading Grand Expectations, and I declare it even better than Pulitzer-Prize-winning Freedom from Fear partly because it did cover lots of cultural details in addition to the traditional historical subjects of politics, war, and economics – even though there was naturally plenty to report in all three of those areas in the years 1946-1974. But sadly, it did not receive a Pulitzer Prize and wasn’t, as far as I can see, even a finalist. Obviously, the committee didn’t know what it was doing in 1996. Poor Patterson had to settle for the slightly less prestigious Bancroft Prize instead. (I think he’s probably pretty happy with that honor!)

I should not neglect to say that the book was well researched, that the prose was polished, that it made both factual observations and subjective interpretations, and that it gave proper attention to the widely varying contemporary views and opinions on McCarthy, Korea, Vietnam, the Great Society, Nixon, and other controversial people, movements, and events. But the thing that made this book stand out to me is that it’s the first history book I’ve ever read in which I appear: the baby boom gets a long section and many mentions throughout the chapters. And many events I remember from when I was a kid – two Kennedy assassinations, the space race, color television, hippies, bombing in Cambodia, the My Lai massacre, Watergate, and more – finally made sense. OK, wrong phrase. Most of those events will never make sense! But I understood them in historical context for the first time, which is to say that I understand much of my childhood and youth in historical context now.

So maybe I have a bias that the Pulitzer committee doesn’t share. But this book was terrific! I hope I actually get to read Schulman’s book next year. (Boy, all those delays don’t give me much hope of it’s being any good.) But if not, I’m happy to say that the next volume in the series, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore, was also written by James T. Patterson. So whether my date with Restless Giant happens in 2025 or 2026, I know I’m in for some more good, eye-opening history.

A Post in which Barnes & Noble, Target, and Kicking All Make an Appearance

I’ve written several times now about Anthony Trollope. I don’t want to pass him by on the blog this year, but I don’t know what to add about him in general. He is, as far as I know, the best Victorian novelist that readers don’t read these days. (I base my notion that readers don’t read him on the very unscientific observation that he generally doesn’t join Dickens and Eliot and Stevenson and Thackeray on the table of cheap editions at Barnes & Noble. Also, I’m 99% sure he never made it into Classic Illustrated comic books. This is the kind of high-level literary criticism you get here, folks.) And I love his habit of talking to the reader in the narration about his craft, the reader’s expectations, and the obligation he senses to develop the plot satisfactorily; it’s as if he occasionally dismantles all the housing of the puppet theater and shows himself holding the sticks that animate his characters.

But I’ve said all that before. So I guess I’ll just respond to some details of the plot of He Knew He Was Right, a plan that decidedly does not meet my obligation to develop this post satisfactorily for you, since you almost certainly don’t know the plot of He Knew He Was Right and don’t know what to think about my response to it.

The book actually has about three plots. Concerning sublot no. 1, I can only say here that Dorothy Stanbury and her aunt are everything the Victorian housewife in me needs. Aunt Stanbury (I confess I can’t remember her first name!) is funny when she’s prickly, and charming when she’s in better humor, and Dolly is that most difficult of Victorian literary achievements: a good girl with actual depth.

And about subplot no. 2, I can only say that Nora Rowley is everything the Victorian feminist in me needs. She’s willing to be married, she’s willing not to be married, and she’s willing to live on her own no matter what people think of it.

This is a long novel, and I found myself picking it up sometimes during the month it took me to finish it and forgetting whether I was reading about Dorothy or Nora. Both are younger sisters who turn down their first proposals, so they were easy to confuse. I decided I needed to use a trick that has helped sometimes before: I picked out two young women I saw in passing one day (one in Target and one on the sidewalk), each having a distinctive face, and I made them the “actresses” for the characters in my head. Is that weird? In any case, it worked.

The main plot, the one indicated by the title, involves Nora’s older sister, Emily, who marries Louis Trevelyan and then gets several visits from an old family friend, Colonel Osborne. And we must say here that Colonel Osborne enjoys the dangerous excitement of getting slightly too familiar with married women, knowing he can (usually) get away with it because of his advanced age. But in spite of Osborne’s gray hair, Louis becomes literally mad with jealousy and tells Emily that she must not see the Colonel again. Emily refuses to obey what she believes to be an inappropriate command. (I think the Victorian housewives that bought and devoured Trollope’s books must have enjoyed staging a minor vicarious rebellion through Emily.) Louis begins to believe his wife to have been unfaithful in the unspeakable way – unspeakable for a Victorian, that is – and sends his wife out of the house. Trust me, one reason I enjoyed the subplots so much is that they provided much needed relief from the thoroughly unlikeable Louis. For a whole month I kept yelling at him in my mind: “Why don’t you quit accusing and exiling your wife and start kicking Colonel Osborne? Problem solved.”

This high-level literary critic gives He Knew He Was Right a big thumbs up. But don’t start here if you, like the editors of Classics Illustrated, haven’t read any Anthony Trollope. I recommend beginning with The Warden and Barchester Towers.

Will and Ariel Durant, What Do You Really Think?

It took Will and Ariel Durant a lifetime to write The Story of Civilization, and it’s taking me nearly a lifetime to read it. I didn’t start the massive work until I was about 30 and didn’t start reading it in earnest until I was 40, but I had fairly salivated over the prospect since I first saw the set in my church library when I was about 14. The landscape of history has changed, of course, over the course of my decades-long journey; ancient Rome and medieval Paris have very different histories, and the Reformation and the Enlightenment are worlds apart in spite of everything they have in common. But the carriage the Durants provide changes, too. For the ancient times, they convey the reader along the road in a sense of wonder. During medieval times, the rough wagon is driven by a teamster with profound respect for the church he doesn’t agree with. And the highway through the sunny hills of Renaissance art and the birth of modern science is enjoyed in an open-air barouche that rattles along merrily with giddy excitement.

I’ve blessed the Durants with encomiums before (especially while I was reading that very respectful volume about the Middle Ages), and I’ve scolded them a bit, especially when they couldn’t stop talking about Rousseau’s dalliances with women, as if the greatest boon of the Enlightenment’s new-found freedom was the right to air publicly one’s desire to be spanked by strange women. But I’m sticking with them for the entire tour, which will end for me in 2026.

This year, my visit with the Durants (I’ve had enough of the traveling metaphor!) was quite pleasant. Gone are the bloody, depressing theological disputes of the Reformation. Gone are the long chapters about Rousseau and his indulgent chaos. The 390 pages for 2024 covered Goethe, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the art and drama and literature of Johnson’s England, and the Great Man himself: Dr. Johnson. So interesting! So insightful!

But, boy! did I receive a shock when they got to Johnson’s biographer. Apparently, Boswell’s private journals were published in the twentieth century and revealed a man quite different from the respectable, orthodox character he portrays himself to be in the Life. My first reaction was one of bewilderment. Are we talking about the same Boswell?! My second reaction to the revelation of his persistent sexual incontinence centered on acceptance: OK, we all have our skeletons, and I’ve discovered that Boswell wasn’t sinless. I can live with that. My third and final reaction found me arguing on Boswell’s behalf: would Johnson have talked with him, dined with him, traveled with him, shared personal documents with him if the upright, pious persona wasn’t real and sincere?

Now I could have experienced all three of those reactions with little more information than I’ve given you here. But the Durants love a philanderer’s story. Page after page they revel in quoting the confessions in Boswell’s journals and in retelling story after story of affairs and visits with prostitutes. But why? Seriously, what is the significance of James Boswell to the “story of civilization"? The fact that he had a sex drive that overpowered him at times (which is almost the same as simply saying that he was human)? Or his ability and drive to write a monumental book read, loved, and hailed as a classic by students of history for 250 years – a masterpiece that simultaneously begins a literary genre and is unlike any other book in – or ever likely to be in – that genre?

The Durants finish the section on Boswell with this reasonable, charitable, eloquent, and historically relevant statement: “He made amends for his defects by worshiping in others the excellence that he could not achieve for himself.” And when they finally get around to telling about Dr. Johnson himself (strangely, not in the same chapter), they recap Boswell by saying, “[Boswell’s] sins are at present in the public mind, but we shall forget them when we read again the greatest of all biographies.” But if these two sentences truly represent their final judgment on the man, why dwell so long on those amended defects? Why not take their own advice and forget the sins? I know I’ll be following that advice the next time I read the greatest of all biographies.

Conversations with an Old Friend

I don’t think I’ve ever explained in these posts the significance of C. S. Lewis to me. I first encountered Lewis in a comic-book version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that appeared serially in a Sunday School magazine I once subscribed to. I was about twelve years old, and I wasn’t sure I liked the book. I was, however, sure that the title was the worst I’d ever heard!

My deeper contact with the professor occurred when I went to college and saw all the pastel-colored paperbacks from Macmillan on the bookshelves of all my Christian friends. The uniformity of the set appealed to me as much as anything else, and under the confidence that I could in fact judge a book (or set of books) by its cover, I bought a copy of the set for myself: The Problem of Pain, The Abolition of Man, and others.

Now to take a step back, while many young products of Christian homes turn sixteen and discover that they don’t believe anymore, I turned sixteen and discovered that my pastor didn’t believe anything. Churches were then divided for me into Those With Pastors Who Believe and Those With Pastors Who Don’t. Somewhat naturally thinking, “What’s the point?” about the second category, I looked for a church from the first to attend. Here were unwavering believers, and I felt more comfortable in that way. But they were also a bit . . . underinfluenced by education. It was a routine occurrence, for instance, for someone reading the Bible aloud to stumble over names and (the inevitable sequel to the tongue twisting) for everyone to join the reader in laughing the problem away breezily.

Everyone but me that is. I couldn’t figure out how people of The Book could laugh about illiteracy. But I remembered that God chose the foolish things of this world to confound the wise, and I went on, genuinely admiring their childlike faith while silently ruing their contempt for the medium through which God chose to speak to us.

But to be fair, they couldn’t figure me out, either. They were constantly telling me to get out of my head, quoting Colossians 2:8 at me, and telling me I was too educated and too knowledgeable to lead worship music.

But then I went away to college and met those new friends. These were smart people. They loved and respected education. They had interesting books on their bookshelves. Heck! They had bookshelves! And they loved C. S. Lewis. So I started reading him. And I loved him! I didn’t always agree with his theology, especially when it countered the tenets my friends at the home church drew out of the two dozen verses they knew well, but I admired him because he was intelligent.

After just three semesters I left that university (it’s an ugly story that has to do with a girl – ekkh!) and came back home. And then there I was back at the old church, with the old friends – and my new books. When I asked questions trying to deepen some common facile understanding, my friends continued to look at me as if I were from Mars and kept telling me that things were simpler than I was trying to make them and that I would be Free Indeed if I would only quit thinking. So I learned to stay quiet (well, less vocal), and at times I felt that Lewis was my only friend.

C. S. Lewis was my only friend.

There. I could have said that up front and gone on to talking about recent reading. But I needed to tell that story so that it would make some sense when I said that I’ve had good, edifying conversations with my friend over the decades. I read one of his books, think about things he says, live a Christian life, raise questions, grow in knowledge, and then come back to the same book ten or twenty years later, when I’ve forgotten the details of what he said to me in the first place. And then I find that Lewis responds to some of my new ideas. It’s a slow conversation but a good one.

No doctrine caused me more trouble in the 1970s than prayer. I’ve gone into enough detail for one post, so I’ll just say that (1) I had bad teaching in the 70s that nevertheless seemed unanswerable at the time, (2) I disagreed then with much of what Lewis had to say about prayer, especially in Letters to Malcolm (at last! the real subject of today’s post!), (3) after decades of wrestling, I came up with a better view of prayer (aided by, of all things, a football analogy?!), and (4) Letters to Malcolm made much, much more sense when I reread it last week.

Topics in this fascinating book include reasons for and against prayers written by others, places to pray (a train is good because it has just the right amount of distraction), problems with saying that our prayer changes God’s mind, how big or small an issue should be in order to be brought to God, “festoonings” of the Lord’s Prayer (is this why I did my own back in the 90s?), people thinking wrongly that it is automatically more spiritual to have transactions “opened with prayer,” determinism, the impossibility of knowing if an occurrence is an answer to my prayer or was just going to happen anyway, the good of anxieties as sharing in the sufferings of Christ (“We are Christians, not Stoics”), demythologization simply being a matter of a new mythology, the difficulty of dropping people from prayer lists as we age (that one sure strikes closer to home now more than it did fifty years ago!), holy places as reminders that every place is holy, and more.

Eventually he starts talking about the problems of prayer for people “in our condition,” i.e. intellectuals who can never take things simply. I don’t know if I thought of myself as one of the people in Lewis’s “condition” when I first read it. I may have thought his intellectual status was a quantum leap above mine with a gap between us as wide and unbridgeable as the river between the rich man and Lazarus. Now, while humbly admitting Lewis’s superiority over me in many facets of the intellectual life, I’m comfortable putting myself in the category of people “in our condition.” I mean, if Malcolm with all of his problems can be part of the in crowd, so can I! (Although I don’t believe there ever was a Malcolm corresponding with Lewis about prayer or any other topic.)

I will talk like a fool, though, and say that, for what I believe was the first time, I knew more than Lewis for one brief, shining moment. He says at one point, “We must aim at what St. Augustine (is it?) called ‘ordinate loves.’ ” Yes! I say to my old friend. Of course it’s Augustine!

The Return of Dinny

When I put together this Third Decade reading list, I thought, “I hope I like Galsworthy since I put one novel from The Forsyte Saga on each of the first nine years.” Thankfully, I do indeed like Galsworthy. These books have become a dependable treat each summer.

It’s year 8, so I’m on the eighth book of the series, Flowering Wilderness. I was glad to see Dinny Charwell (pronounced “Cherrell”) return. In the previous book, she raised questions about duty as she continually tried to help everyone, even when she couldn’t help and even when her efforts put her in bodily danger. In this novel, Dinny is the flowering wilderness of the title, a young woman who is figuring out that she might have her own life to live, not just the life of the dutiful phantom her family traditions have placed in her head. In fact, Dinny has realized that she might even make herself happy by marrying Wilfrid.

*sigh* When two people meet and fall in love near the beginning of a novel, you know they’re going to have trouble. It seems that, while traveling in the East, Wilfrid has accepted Islam at the point of a gun, and the story gets back to England just a few days after our lovebirds plight their troth. All of Dinny’s family and all the family’s friends believe that it is now impossible for Dinny to marry Wilfrid; what he has done is simply not acceptable. The catch is that no one involved is actually a Christian believer, so they can’t agree on exactly what is so wrong about Wilfrid’s conversion. Is it wrong because he betrayed an essential myth? Is it because he acted un-English? Is it because he wasn’t courageous enough to accept death?

Once again Galsworthy critiques modernism in a fascinating way. His modern characters are all very comfortable and self-assured as long as they’re attending clubs and running charity drives. But then an event comes along that shows tension between their agnostic beliefs and their vestigial Christian ethics. The intriguing conundrum plays out through strong, elegant prose presenting full-bodied characters speaking to one another in rational and emotional and absolutely essential dialog. By contrast, I’ll end today’s post with a weak, colloquial, superfluous line:

It’s so good!

Orlando Ritornando

A few years ago I published a post called “Full Circle,” in which I explained that a chance mention of Orlando Furioso somewhere in C. S. Lewis (with all my rereading of Lewis, I still haven’t found the passage!) inspired my whole project of reading the classics of great literature. At the time of the post, April of 2011, I had finally made it to the book that started it all. First encountering the colorful scenes, full-blooded characters, and melodious narration of Orlando made me realize that a part of me was made to love this epic book – a part of me I didn’t totally know the existence of before. My return to it is just as delightful if not as self-revelatory.

Thirteen years ago I mentioned many of the fantastic elements I was enjoying. But fantasy alone doesn’t excite me; I need a fantastic world to be filled with characters I can root for or against, not, as Mark Twain said, tedious characters I wish would simply drown. In the last two or three years, I’ve read two classic fantasies with drown-worthy characters (The Well at the World’s End and The Worm Ouroboros), and I didn’t like them – couldn’t wait to get away from them. But The Silmarillion, The Divine Comedy, Many Dimensions, and Orlando Furioso are among my very favorite books. Oh! I should also add The Chronicles of Narnia, The Phantom Tollbooth, and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish: fantasies all and every one a favorite.

So let me concentrate this time on some features of characters in Orlando Furioso that I especially like. First, I couldn’t be happier than I am to see Muslim and Christian knights respecting each other while fighting to the death. Join me in savoring this stanza from book I:

O noble chivalry of knights of yore!
Here were two rivals, of opposed belief,
Who from the blows exchanged were bruised and sore,
Aching from head to foot without relief,
Yet to each other no resentment bore.
Through the dark wood and winding paths, as if
Two friends, they go. Against the charger’s sides
Four spurs are thrust until the road divides.

Well, and then they have a choice to make. What common end could make these fierce enemies ride the same horse? It could only be money, power, or a woman, and they’re both too chivalrous to pursue money or power. Angelica, the maid who ultimately drives Orlando furioso, stands down one of these two branches in the road. She is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World (until we meet Dalinda and Olimpia, who are also, each, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World) and she is from China. Angelica, like Helen of Troy (also the MBWitW), is in the end not worth pursuing, but that’s what makes her and the search for her interesting. And can we cheer the sixteenth-century European author for locating ultimate pulchritude in Asia?

Ariosto is progressive in other ways, as well. Rinaldo rescues a woman who has been sentenced to death for having sex with her boyfriend. Rinaldo doesn’t care if she has done the deed or not; he knows it simply isn’t right to punish the girl while the boy goes scot-free. And Bradamante, one of the knights of most prowess and courage, is a woman, doing everything in the field that a man can.

But the poet can be conservative, too, because progressivism and conservatism are not in themselves goals or ideals but merely tools that can and should be used for good. Where a good is threatened, be conservative; where change toward the good is needed, be progressive. Answers aren’t simple, and you need wisdom to know when to preserve and when to reform. And you can’t make things simple again by just deciding that everything used to be good. Hear this wisdom from the preacher of Ecclesiastes: “Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.”

OK, enough theory. Where is Ariosto conservative? Where he has Orlando throw the ninth century’s only cannon into the sea, because launching a deadly ball from behind a stone battlement is not chivalrous. (“Aha! I’ve got you!” you say. “Gun control is not conservative!” Yes it is, when what you are trying to conserve is the way weapons used to be.)

So, anyway. Magic, realism, fantasy, heroes, villains, adventure, mystery, intrigue, love, loyalty, betrayal, beautiful poetry, dramatic plots, inspiring philosophy, “dark wood and winding paths,” hippogriffs, and Merlin prophesying from the grave – Orlando Furioso has it all! And I love it!

Two Civil War Biographies

Are these Great Books with a capital G and a capital B? No. Virtually no one will read them in a hundred years. (Sure: some future Ken Stephenson will one day walk through the oldest stacks in the quaint thing called a library, breathe in the delicious, wholesome air of the browned and brittle pages, find these books, and learn from them, so I won’t say absolutely no one will read them a century from now.) They haven’t won Pulitzers (although one has won the American Batllefield Trust Prize). But did these books make me think and rethink about what I understand of American history? Yes.

First, the better-written of the two books: Elizabeth Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South. Only last year, I found out that Longstreet plays an important role in the Lost Cause Myth: the notion that the South didn’t truly care much about slavery and fought a noble, hopeless war for liberty, led by great Christian heroes and stopped only by a godless butcher (according to the myth, Grant) and a crass commercial enterprise that simply made more guns (according to the myth, the United States). Whatever the tenets of this poorly supported historical theory, General James Longstreet certainly cared about slavery and white supremacy during the war: his rallying speech to his troops in front of Richmond warned them that a United States victory would mean abolition and a black-run society. But near the end of the war, he explained several times that he saw inevitable defeat for the Confederacy and determined that he would work to live at peace in the new, slaveless polity. He became a Republican (the liberal, pro-civil-rights party at that time, remember), worked to elect Grant, earned a spot as Customs Controller for New Orleans, and then was tapped to head the Louisiana Militia. When, in September of 1874, thousands of white supremacists gathered on Canal Street and threatened a violent end to Reconstruction and black voting rights, General Longstreet led the militia out to defeat them. The former rebel, now determined to abide by the newly amended Constitution and to recognize the constitutional rights of all citizens, led a militia of black soldiers and white soldiers, a militia in which every man of equal rank received equal pay regardless of skin color or former condition of servitude. A militia in which black soldiers could be and were promoted, all the way to the rank of general. A militia in which regiments were integrated. A militia in which white officers led both black and white soldiers and black officers led both black and white soldiers. Southern Democrats never forgave him.

I see a lot to admire in a man who left a life in which racial hatred and fear could lead him to betray his sacred oath to his country (he was a commissioned U. S. officer when secession started) and adopted a new life in which respect for the law could raise members of the recently enslaved race to positions of high authority. But Jubal Early and his ilk didn’t find Longstreet’s post-war stance admirable, and so they started a campaign against him, a campaign whose ramifications are still felt today, whose tenets I’ve read in history books that have won a Pulitzer. By the time Early got the ball rolling, the Daughters of the Confederacy were publishing materials defending the justness of the Confederate cause and, in their words, praising the “moral and military infallibility” of Robert E. Lee.

So look, there’s controversy about Longstreet. The Lost Cause side says that he disobeyed Lee’s orders at Gettysburg and lost that battle, thus losing the war, betraying his new country (let’s ignore the first betrayal), betraying his race (at least that’s what they said in the 1800s), and betraying his commander (whose military infallibility, I guess, couldn’t overcome one supposedly disobeyed order). Do I really, finally know if he screwed up at Gettysburg? Do I really, finally know that he ended up a good guy? No (although my parentheticals in this paragraph perhaps indicate which way I lean). But when the side that started the defamation program claims moral infallibility for their hero, I’m strongly inclined to believe that they have at least stretched the truth about their nemesis, also.

When I say this isn’t a Great Book, I don’t mean to malign Varon’s writing: her research is detailed, her arguments are nuanced, and her prose is smooth and polished. I’m just saying I don’t predict that her work will last as long as Herodotus’. John A. Carpenter’s Sword and Olive Branch, by comparison, is much less literary but, to me, equally enlightening. It, too, relates the life history of a Civil War general. Its subject also was and has been the subject of a smear campaign whose effectiveness can be gauged by its reverberations in Civil War histories of our time. And its subject also worked for the promotion of the four million new citizens naturalized by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Sword and Olive Branch tells the story of Union General Oliver Otis Howard, who watched his corps disintegrate in fifteen minutes at Chancellorsville. For this and for a retreat at Gettysburg (to a more defensible position!), he developed and suffered, as the history books continue to tell us, a bad reputation with the rest of the Army of the Potomac. And yet, when I continue to read accounts of the Civil War, I find him later in a place of high authority acting nobly and effectively under Sherman, without, to my recollection, authors pointing out that his earlier bad reputation may not have been deserved or had at least been atoned for by greater success later in the conflict. Carpenter points all this out, though, and I’m glad to see Howard’s full war record properly celebrated.

But the story gets really good after the war. As the Director of the Freedman’s Bureau, General Howard fought hard to get black citizens housing, jobs, pay, and, above all, education. I knew he founded Howard University, which is why I wanted to read about him. I didn’t know his work with the Bureau actually helped create several other colleges open to blacks (and women!) as well as almost two thousand elementary and preparatory schools. And I didn’t know that Howard by himself achieved in a few days what the government backed by the Army had not been able to do in thirteen years by treating successfully with Cochise (and apparently to Cochise’s satisfaction!) and almost eliminating violence between whites and Apaches in Arizona. I’m not quite finished with the book, and I think things don’t go so well or so honorably with the Nez Perce later. But what I’ve read so far makes Howard fascinating and admirable.

If these two books teach anything, they at least demonstrate that you can’t believe anything just because you read it in black and white. So let me just clarify before I close this too lengthy post that, while I have now read one biography of each general, each biography decidedly tending toward approval of its subject, I haven’t drawn any lines in the sand: I won’t say definitively whether either of the two was a good guy or a bad guy. But I tentatively admire each general while firmly believing that neither was either morally or militarily infallible.

Disappointment and Hope

Rarely have I found the first part of a book so good only to be deeply disappointed by the rest. I was looking forward to Owen Wister’s The Virginian, having heard that it was the first western (i.e. cowboy) novel; I was ready to find Wister an unjustly forgotten American author like Kenneth Roberts. And my first couple of says with the book confirmed my prognosis. Wister offers poetic descriptions of the West and keen observations of the characters: for instance, it’s a surprise to the first-person narrator that one cowboy can call another a son of a — (Wister uses the dash!) and have it received as a term of endearment. He also establishes a classic cowboy trope in 1902 when an enemy calls the Virginian an SoB. The Virginian pulls out his pistol, lays it on the table, and says, “Smile when you call me that.” The saloon gets quiet for a couple of seconds until everyone sees that no violence will ensue. Then the mingled noise of music, cards, and revelry returns. How many times have we seen that scene in movies and on television!

But things turned sour on the third day. First, Wister says that Equality means an equal chance for everyone to show how unequal he is. And then, of course, he has to try to redefine Christianity: “As soon as you treat men as your brothers, they are ready to acknowledge you – if you deserve it – as their superior. That’s the whole bottom of Christianity.” And there’s a very distasteful scene in which the manly Virginian humiliates a missionary by seeming to go along with his program, wrestling with his sin nature all of one night, only to laugh at him in the morning and go about his way, displaying true Christianity by showing how superior he is. That’s Wister’s disgusting idea of a hero. From then on the book just gets boring, with the cowboy getting moony about a girl, and continued trouble with the predictable villain. Oh, and there’s an attack from Indians who are called “peaceful” (with the quotation marks).

But now, just today, the day before I finish this novel, I was starting to think that maybe I had let some moments I disagreed with spoil a book I could have been enjoying if I hadn’t read in protest. (As to why I read books I don’t like “in protest,” that’s the topic for another post, I suppose.) But then the Virginian gave his girlfriend a lesson in civics, as if she hadn’t learned in school that the power of government by courts comes from the people. But, of course, women can’t be expected to retain, let alone, understand such things. That’s why we don’t let them vote! Then the narrator gave the reader, in a condescending tone, a lesson that one might do evil in order to achieve good, giving the example that one might correctly trespass in order to stop a murder, as if we readers don’t know that. And this was in defense of cowboys lynching cattle thieves, supposedly because the corrupt courts give them no other choice: as if killing a man to prevent thieving is just like trespassing to prevent killing a man. Then the final showdown with villain is set up, and Wister pulls back his flimsy curtain with one sentence: “It is only the great mediocrity that goes to law in these personal matters.” So much for Christianity boiling down to treating men as brothers. So much for respecting the authority of any court. We’re back to democracy meaning an arena where the best can win over the lesser. And apparently men always prove superior to women, and white men always prove superior to Indians. Seems to me I’ve read about some lies the white man told the Indian. But never mind that. It’s the Indians who lie so much they are only described as quote-peaceful-endquote. And remember: all this superiority is true Christianity. Wow! The Virginian just fell deeper and deeper into a foul-smelling pit today.

But I’ll be done with it tomorrow. And I know I have some much better reading coming up. Soon I’ll be starting to reread Orlando Furioso, the book that started my whole reading project. There’s also some Anthony Trollope coming up later this year and, in November or December, one of my very favorite books: Charles Williams’s Many Dimensions. (The novel is so much better than the title!) I also have high hopes for Grimm’s Tales and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. Consequently, you can hope for some happier posts in the next few months.

Seeds of a Comedic Masterpiece

I had originally intended the last post to refer to both tragedy and comedy in its title and to cover two related observations concerning The Pickwick Papers. But when I got to four good paragraphs on the tragic topic, I decided to split things up and look behind the comedic mask in a second post. Here is that second post; I can’t imagine that it will run as many as four paragraphs.

I begin my second paragraph by saying that several aspects of The Pickwick Papers seem to have found their way later into A Christmas Carol. You can’t read Dickens’s first novel – or even read much about it – without realizing that the embedded story of Gabriel Grub, a misanthropic sexton who has a change of heart one Christmas Eve when he is abducted by goblins, is the odd little tune that six years later served as cantus firmus for the gloriously polyphonic and much, much, much better Christmas Carol. But other things in Pickwick remind me of A Christmas Carol, too. There’s the Christmas dinner at Mr. Wardle’s with the games and the kissing under the mistletoe, which sounds quite reminiscent of nephew Fred’s party at which the rapidly reforming Scrooge played at Twenty Questions and Topper and the plump sister in the lace tucker “were so very confidential together behind the curtains.” And there are certain turns of phrase here and there that crop up again in the Christmas novella, too, especially in the first few paragraphs of Scrooge’s tale. A fellow in debtor’s prison asks Mr. Pickwick, “Why didn’t you say at first that you was willing to come down handsome?” I suppose the last phrase (meaning to be generous, especially in buying a round of drinks) was common in Dickens’s time, but it jumped out at me as I remembered that snow and sleet “often ‘came down’ handsomely, and Scrooge never did.” The teller of one of the stories-within-the-story in Pickwick says early on, “There is nothing at all extraordinary in this story, unless you distinctly understand at the beginning, that he [the story’s central character] was not by any means of a marvelous or romantic turn.” No person having read A Christmas Carol a dozen times (in other words, a mere beginner) can read those words and not think of these: “There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”

Hmm. That paragraph got a little bloated. I’d better finish quickly. And I will do so by offering a theory. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol after his first relative failure, Martin Chuzzlewit. He was in a funk and needed a new project, something wonderful and irresistible, to get both his readers and his mojo back. I believe he went back to Pickwick to think about the work that made him so popular to begin with (if offices had had water coolers in 1837, everyone would have stood around them talking about the adventures of Mr. Pickwick), realized that the story of Gabriel Grub would really shine after a good makeover, and in his rereading of that first novel caught a few choice constructions that could bear reusing. Remember, those phrases are all on the first page of A Christmas Carol, as if he were then still working to infuse inspiration into the new work. And now I have to wrap it all up or else I’ll find myself in a fourth paragraph. So I’ll bid adieu today with a recommendation of the movie The Man Who Invented Christmas. Everything in this dramatization of Dickens’s composing A Christmas Carol (other than the obviously fantastical scenes) is historically accurate. Except for the idea that he didn’t know, as he was writing, how Scrooge’s story would end. That bit of poetic license works fine in the movie, but we know that the real Dickens knew exactly where Scrooge was going from the very beginning: Gabriel Grub, after all, ended up a renewed man.

Tragic Relief

The first time I read The Pickwick Papers, I was surprised by all the inserted short stories. They annoyed me, too; I wanted to know more about the antics of the Pickwick Club, but every few chapters, some character would offer to tell a legend, and I kept having to work my way through dreary stories about ghosts and criminals. I’m pretty sure the copy I read included an introduction that told me the stories were dreary and annoying, and I let myself be impressionable. The second time I read the book, the tangential stories weren’t surprising anymore, but I think they still annoyed me.

But I just finished reading Pickwick for the third time, and I’m happy to say not only that I enjoyed the embedded stories – ghosts and criminals are good subjects for short stories, after all! – but that I found them almost necessary. I think that introduction that I read forty years ago said the book wasn’t really a novel but rather a hodgepodge or scrapbook of disconnected stories and comic vignettes. In other words, that Pickwick wasn’t cohesive or unified. Well, it certainly is a novel, with or without the stories, but now that I see their purpose, they seem part of a cohesive structure, as well.

We all know about comic relief. The clowns in Shakespeare’s tragedies provide familiar examples. Well, I think these stories of murderers and hopeless characters provide tragic relief to the ridiculous adventures of Pickwick and his companions. The Food Network’s Duff Goldman is always telling contestants on baking championships to use acid or even umami in desserts to balance the sweetness. Maybe 700 pages of unrelieved comedy would get cloying for the reader. Or maybe even a hundred pages of it did for the author. Maybe Dickens tasted his Pickwickian batter and decided his cake needed some acid to balance the sugar, whipped egg whites, and sprinkles that the humor of Pickwick served up.

Besides contributing to an alternating structure of dark and light, several of the stories have themes that work their way into the outer plot, too. Someone tells a Christmas ghost story, for instance, and then Mr. Pickwick and his friends attend a Christmas dinner. Another inserted story tells the tragic tale of a man who goes to debtor’s prison, sees the family he can’t provide for perish one by one, and then is released and wreaks awful vengeance on the creditor who had shown him no mercy. Several chapters later, Mr. Pickwick himself goes to debtor’s prison. Both presentations show the horrors of debtor’s prison and helped abolish the institution in Britain. But the episode of Mr. Pickwick’s sojourn behind the hopeless walls includes some silliness from himself, Sam Weller, Mrs. Bardell, and others, so the story within the story and its unrelentingly lurid tale of despair and revenge provides a necessary part of the message by working on different emotions.

I wish I hadn’t read that introduction all those years ago. But I’m glad I read The Pickwick Papers for a third time and finally got the bitter taste out of my dessert experience.

Like Children

Today I have just a couple of last notes on The Brothers Karamazov. The internet helped me out on the first one, and I’m sorry to say I didn’t see this one sooner. Dostoevsky’s novel about the dysfunctional family and all their very grown-up vices includes long sections about neighborhood boys. These boys talk about pets and get in trouble at school and do a lot of things that don’t seem to have much to do with the question of who killed Fyodor Pavlovich or which lover Grushenka will settle on. But, as the wisdom of the web points out to me, they are children, and Ivan’s great question has to do with the suffering of children. Clearly Dostoevsky intended for the reader to make some connections.

Although I’ll have to continue to ponder this issue, two points of contact have come to mind. First, the children may be innocent, but they are not sinless. The Bible supports the distinction in its twin teachings that children are born in sin (see for example Ps. 51:5) and that nevertheless they do not have the ability to distinguish good and evil (see for instance Deut. 1:39). The neighborhood boys display both notions pretty clearly, so we may be expected (or invited?) to learn that Ivan’s question may assume a purity that children simply do not have.

Second, the ending section in which little Ilyusha dies (if you haven’t read the lengthy book, you’ll forget I said that before you reach the end!) shows that the suffering of children, like any human suffering, can bring about great good. I understand that suffering itself is bad; otherwise God would not promise to do away with it in the future kingdom. But if I willingly submit myself to the pain of exercise, dieting, waiting for the purchase of a toy, or visiting the dentist, all for the sake of a greater good, I can begin to see that God might view the death of Ilyusha – who is happy to be going to Heaven, after all – as an acceptable cost for the salvation of several other boys. Could I have made a world in which this were so? Well, that’s Ivan’s great question, and I have to say that I, as currently constituted, definitely could not. But then God has baked it in to me that I shouldn’t kill a child. Still, if I accept that the government has a right to incarcerate, say, an armed robber for ten years while I have no right to lock someone in a shed for even a day, I must admit the possibility that while I have no right to kill a person as the result of a philosophical calculation, God does have not just the power but the right to take human life.

I promised a couple of last notes about Karamazov, and my first one became so involved it turned itself into three paragraphs with two enumerated subsections. My second final note is much shorter. Dostoevsky knew and loved the works of Dickens. He especially liked David Copperfield and often called himself and his wife Mr. and Mrs. Micawber. I haven’t read about any special affinity of Dostoevsky for A Christmas Carol, but Alexei’s plea to the boys never to forget the kindness and courage of the departed Ilyusha is so extremely reminiscent of Bob Cratchit’s tearful family enjoinder during Christmas Future, I can’t believe Dostoevsky didn’t intend his scene as a case of flattering plagiarism.

(Really, Blogspot Editor? You don't know the word "enjoinder"?)

Poetic Feete

I had what was for me an unusual experience last year: I read a few hundred pages of Shelby Foote’s history of the American Civil War and didn’t enjoy what I read. The work is massive, and I had read it one-and-two-thirds times, a few hundred pages a year for at least fifteen years, and I had never had a disappointing experience before, even in my previous encounter with the passage that I reread last year. But I loved my reading in Foote this year, so I'm glad to see that last year was just a temporary aberration. The problem may have lain in my circumstances: rushing to pack and move, concerned about selling the house, etc. It may have had to do with Foote’s attempt to downplay Nathan Bedford Forrest’s massacre at Fort Pillow. I didn’t know as much about Forrest the first time I read Foote’s account, but at this time in my life, I really don’t need to hear any defense of the murder of captured black soldiers by the Ku Klux Klan’s first Grand Wizard. Sure, it was an atrocity, Foote says, but no worse than other atrocities committed during the four-year bloodbath of war. I don’t buy it. That war is too full of stories of strangely humane behavior by the combatants between and after battles. Capturing enemy soldiers, disarming them, and then shooting them was not standard practice (except when the captured were black and the capturers were Confederate), and Forrest's act deserves not the slightest amount of extenuation.

I enjoy reading about the Civil War mostly, I think, because of the surprising events that happen when a supposedly civil, supposedly educated, supposedly noble, supposedly pious country descends into violent conflict. I found a lot of amazing characters and stories in the passage I read this year. Here were Admiral Farragut damning the torpedoes in Mobile Bay, Jubal Early attacking Washington, Lincoln standing above the fortifications to watch the action, and the anonymous soldier telling him to “get down, you fool!” Here were the incredible and tragic stupidity of the botched action at the Petersburg crater, Sherman’s march to the sea, Hood’s decision not to defend Georgia against Sherman’s advance and instead to go on the offensive to his destruction in Tennessee, and the inspiring example of a completed, accepted presidential election held during a civil war.

A note on the Petersburg Crater: I had read that thousands of Union troops marched, ran, or fell into the crater caused by an underground explosion and then that Confederate survivors began to fire at the packed, disoriented “attackers” as if, they said, at a turkey shoot. Thousands! I had imagined a stadium-sized crater! So I was surprised and – should I say? – disappointed when I visited Petersburg and saw a hole just a few feet deep that seemed like it could have held no more than five hundred men. I read in the park’s brochure that erosion and plant growth over the years had made the crater shallower and less ominous, so I supposed that I was seeing only a fraction of the original. But Foote says the crater covered about a quarter of an acre. When I read that a couple of weeks ago, I looked across the street at two houses and, remembering that a typical neighborhood plot contained an eighth of an acre, thought, “Those two yards make up about a quarter of an acre, and that was about the size of the crater I saw.” Online just now, I read that the depression measured about 170' by 60'. Yeah, about the size of two house lots. So maybe what I saw was the whole thing after all. But thousands of men? Could thousands of men stand in two neighborhood yards? Maybe I have grossly underestimated the meaning of the word “crowded” in the accounts of the crater.

I also want to read about the Civil War because it tells me like no other story just how stupid and stubborn and cruel humans can be. I remember decades ago reading Bruce Catton say that he thought about these stories every time he heard some “fathead” talk about the glories of war. In my Foote assignment this year, I read of Gen. Sherman saying, “War is cruelty. You cannot refine it.” And I read of a Union soldier in Georgia, seeing the boys and old men they had just shot down, who said, “There is no God in war. It is merciless, cruel, vindictive, un-Christian, savage, relentless. It is all that devils could wish for.”

After the election, Lincoln delivered an inspiring speech to some well-wishers serenading him on the lawn of the White House. In the middle of his remarks, he said, “Human-nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged.” Is he wrong? Do we not have today weak and strong, silly and wise, bad and good Americans trying to direct our future? In our endeavor, we must, as Lincoln said, learn wisdom from the past, and we must all try to make things right without seeking revenge. With malice toward none, with charity for all, folks. Every American should say these words ten times every morning and before every political utterance on social media.

By the way, Lincoln said his speech was “not very graceful.” You should read the whole thing and see what this wise, eloquent leader considered ungraceful. It will take you less time than it took to read this post. Just look up “Lincoln response to a serenade November 10, 1864.”

Why Did I Think Pickwick Wasn’t a Favorite?

Ten years ago, when I drew up my current ten-year Reading Plan, I decided that since I had read and reread all of Dickens’s novels, I could just stick with my favorites this time around. So I picked ten for the new schedule, one for each year: A Tale of Two Cities was there, of course, along with other obvious choices (obvious for me, anyway) like David Copperfield and Dombey and Son. The Pickwick Papers didn’t make that initial cut, but at some point I had a space on one ten-item list of miscellany and decided to throw Pickwick in. So I’m reading it now and wondering, How did I not think this was a favorite?

First of all, it's making me laugh out loud over and over. Its humor is silly, but I’m no snob. Mr. Winkle, for instance, brags about being a sportsman but scares all of his friends on their first hunt when he doesn’t know how to carry his gun without pointing it at parts of his friends or himself. That’s no highbrow joke; it’s the kind of humorous story one would tell about a family member again and again over the years. But I laugh at tried-and-true family jokes, and I laugh at this one. The humor in this first novel often reminds me that Dickens is firmly in the English comic tradition that spawned Monty Python; Mr. Jingle’s habit of stringing short phrases together without forming sentences, for instance, may have had a direct influence on Eric Idle’s “Say no more” character (Mr. Jingle lacks the bawdy inuendoes). I laugh at the Ministry of Silly Walks, and I laugh at Mr. Pickwick getting pushed in a wheelbarrow.

Then it’s so memorable. Before I started, I thought, “OK, this is the one where the hero is considered a great social scientist when he actually can’t tell a road sign from an ancient carving, where there’s a nice Christmas dinner, and where Pickwick goes to debtor’s prison.” That was about all I remembered at the moment. But after just a few pages, twenty more details and characters from the rest of the book came rushing to mind: the fat boy who says, “I wants to make your flesh creep”; Mr. Pickwick getting thrown over a wall and standing in the rain; Tony Weller spelling his name in court (trust me, it’s funny); and more. If I remember that much from it, I must have enjoyed it before.

In an old post on these pages called “Dombey Redux,” I list my favorite comic characters from the Dickens canon. At the end I say, “I know I’m forgetting someone obvious and important.” At last I can say that that obvious and important omission is Sam Weller. G. K. Chesterton says somewhere that Dickens became Dickens when he first put Sam Weller on a page. Sam’s most famous humorous trait is a form of speech known in the dictionary as a Wellerism, in which he says what he would naturally say and then claims his utterance as a quotation from someone in a different situation altogether. “Out vith it, as the father said to his child, when he swallowed a farden.” “That’s what I call a self-evident proposition, as the dog’s-meat man said, when the housemaid told him he warn’t a gentleman.” It doesn’t seem that the respectable Mr. Pickwick would hire such a volubly volatile servant, but to his credit and to our delight, he does. Like Holmes’s Dr. Watson, Sam is unexceptionally loyal and ready to lend a little muscle when a dangerous situation calls for it, and his sometimes embarrassing banter can usually be repressed with a quick, “Not now, Sam.”

Dickens hasn’t quite mastered his distinct art of naming characters yet. Mr. Winkle, Mr. Wardle, Mr. Jingle, and Mr. Trundle, all introduced in the first few chapters, offer a potentially confusing sameness barely broken by the arrival of Mrs. Bardell. But Pickwick is a great name, as are the names of Mrs. Bardell’s lawyers: Dodson and Fogg. Either of those names on its own would have far less than half the impact of the pair; together, the names of Dodson and Fogg give us a quintessentially Dickensian moniker for a law office.

But much of the mature Dickens is here, if in slightly less than polished form: the humor, the sentiment, the love for Christmas, and the pathos (more of that in a future post). One element that pervades Pickwick that doesn’t make much of a showing in later books is all the playful kissing between couples not married or even engaged. The frequency of kissing in Pickwick might be explained by the concurrence of Dickens’s marriage to Catherine Hogarth and the serial publication of the novel. Its relative absence in later books might be explained by the author’s grave nuptial disappointment.

Profoundly Short

I only have a few minutes today, and I’ve been reading The Brothers Karamazov, so I’m about to do a silly thing. I’m going to attempt to give my answer to Ivan Karamazov’s profound question in just a few words.

Ivan seems to waver on whether he believes in God. At one point he says that he believes in God but rejects his world. His greatest concern is the torture of children. Why would God make a world in which children can be tortured? I couldn’t make such a world, he tells his pious brother Alyosha; I couldn’t make a world with all its beauties and goodness and gratification at the cost of a single little girl being tortured. And then he asks, could you?

Hypothetical questions like this always include one big problem. Someone asks me, if you had just hit 63 home runs in a season and the Yankees offered you a contract, would you take it? I don’t know! I would have to be such a different person with such a different physical constitution and such a different history, I don’t know if my St. Louisian aversion to the Yankees would still hold. Ivan seems to be asking me, If you were God, could you create such a world? My first answer is, how could I possibly know? If I were God, I’d have a radically different mind, and I can’t imagine how that mind works.

But Ivan might actually be asking, Could you as a human being bring about a wonderful situation with happiness for millions if it meant the torture of one child? I don’t know if Alyosha in particular could, but I do know that, sadly, in millions of instances, a human being has tried to buy the happiness of just one person (that human’s self) at the cost of torturing a child. We do this, not God. We commit all the horrible atrocities Ivan mentions and much worse. We beat children senseless because they interrupt our drunken stupor. We drop napalm on Vietnamese children. We starve coal miners’ children to make CEO’s richer. We shoot children in schools. We drop fire bombs and atomic bombs on children in cities.

Ivan Karamazov asks, Could you do this, humanity? Humanity, if it’s honest, can only reply, Yes, Ivan, we do this all the time. The only sensible next step is not to blame God for what we with willing hearts do routinely, but to ask for his forgiveness and restoration and life.

Alyosha’s answer is shorter and simpler. He gets up and kisses his brother and walks away.

Electric Shivers

This year’s allotment of Shakespeare included four plays and fifteen sonnets. I continue to think that the plays I read over and over (about half the canonical list) are worth revisiting. By contrast, the sonnets more and more seem to include a handful of standouts and 140-something that I can ignore for the rest of my life.

About King Lear and Richard II, I will only say that I went into them this year as usual, thinking that they wouldn’t hold my interest so much this time, and I came out of them as usual, happy that they had each riveted my attention for five full acts.

Yes, Much Ado About Nothing is about nothing (it says it right in the title!), but it’s so good! Benedick and Beatrice are hilarious as they insult each other in lieu of admitting their mutual love. Their friends’ gentle trickery works quickly, with hardly any drama or farcical confusion, and the reader is glad that the pair don’t have to suffer any more than they already have. The Bard gives Claudio and Hero more of an actual plot: Don John arranges cruel deceptions in order to ruin their wedding. The dialog may briefly give a reason for his nastiness somewhere, but it seems to me he causes pain just because he’s a jerk. That wedding scene is intense, extremely so for a comedy. But remember that it’s all a big fuss about nothing. As soon as Don John’s schemes are revealed, Claudio and Hero are reunited.

The show-stealer, though, has nothing to do with young couples who eventually get married. Dogberry, a very English constable in a supposedly Italian setting, is surely the inspiration for every pompous but confused representative of the law that comes after him, from Oliver Twist’s Mr. Bumble to Mayberry’s Barney Fife. His malapropisms (Wikipedia says they can be called dogberryisms!) mostly take the form of substituting prefixes in Latinate words: “Dost thou not suspect my place?” for instance, in place of “Dost thou not respect my place?” In an aside about nothing, I will mention that they made me think this time about Slip Mahoney from the Bowery Boys movies. (Ah! Saturday afternoon TV in the ‘70s!) More to the point, they’re funny! And his pretentious repetitions are funny! “Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths.” Wonderful! But the best joke of all is his way of insisting that all the culprits’ untruths and insults be put into the record accurately: when the sexton, who’s taking it all down, leaves for a moment, one rogue calls Dogberry an ass, upon which Dogberry exclaims, “O, that he were here to write me down an ass! But masters, remember that I am an ass, though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.”

Now, when I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream right after Much Ado, I noticed that Bottom calls himself an ass, actually becomes an ass, and indulges in malapropisms. This is the same character, I thought! I’ll bet they were played by the same actor! So I looked it up, and sure enough, Dogberry was expressly written for William Kempe, whom Britannica calls “one of the most famous clowns of the Elizabethan era,” and scholars suspect that he also played Bottom. I will now send electric shivers through the world of Shakespeare scholarship by announcing with 99.2% certainty that, whether Kempe played Bottom or not, Shakespeare must have written the part with Kempe in mind. When that news becomes a well known truism, please remember that you read it here first.

Oh, Dear!

Or as Nicky from the Great British Bake Off 2023 would say, “Oh, dearie me!” Fourteen years ago, I started this project of reporting publicly on my reading. In 2017 I decided that the internet was, for me, no place to hold political discussions. But I keep reading political things! What do I do?

I heard about Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here in an article by a writer who finds parallels between the events in the novel and the dangers he associates with a certain current figure in U. S. politics. I, too, see this figure as potentially dangerous. So I read the book. In this novel, the fictional Buzz Windrip is elected President of the United States in 1936 by grievance-feuled voters. (The book was written in 1935, so Lewis didn’t know yet how the U. S. would vote in their upcoming referendum on how Roosevelt was handling the Depression.)  In his campaign, Windrip has outlined his agenda, which includes banning all immigration, keeping most women at home, barring minorities from higher-paying jobs, and giving all legislative and judicial power to the President, Congress being reduced to an advisory board and the Supreme Court stripped of its veto power. He challenges election results in an election he won. After inauguration, he immediately claims emergency powers and begins to enact his authoritarian program. The Supreme Court can’t stop the coup because Windrip has placed them and all his other political enemies under house arrest. With his new, unchallenged authority, Windrip abandons any plans for helping the hungry and unemployed, creates a police state, and essentially turns the government into a crime mob.

For most of the details, Lewis merely translates steps in Hitler’s rise to events in his alternate America. Windrip has his own militia groups, for instance, outlaws all other parties, and makes every news outlet a purveyor of Windrippian propaganda. But the goal of the dictator’s totalitarianism is the very American goal of making money by taking money rather than the very German (or at least Prussian) goal of leading a military juggernaut.

Lewis doesn’t prove anything. Stories aren’t about proving things. But he immerses the reader in a situation that seems plausible. (I suppose I’m only saying that he fulfills the function of a novelist.) I’ll admit that I thought of stopping halfway through; Lewis had made his point, it seemed, and the middle’s long, dry litany of tawdry, unilateral revolution – Windrip did away with states and appointed his cronies to oversee new districts; he redesigned the executive departments and appointed toady X to newly created office Y, where he enacted policy Z; and so on – lacked the vivid, conversation-driven scenes of the first few chapters. But I’m glad I stuck with it. The journalist Doremus Jessup returns to the fore in the last third of the book, and his struggles with the conflict between the duties of resistance and of family safety provide a moving, suspenseful build to the climax.

The U. S. survives in Lewis’s dystopian daydream. But only barely.

Yes and No

Among the special treats on this year’s reading list is a book I had looked forward to for decades: Peter Abelard’s Yes and No. Most people who read Abelard want to read his correspondence with Heloise. I was much more interested in the work that laid the foundation for the University of Paris. Abelard taught his lessons in odd corners of the cathedral of Notre Dame, and scores of students came and – bless them! – voluntarily paid Abelard for his services. And from these meetings arose the concept of Education in France.

What I thought I understood about the book was this: That Abelard wished to explore certain questions of Christian doctrine in search of authoritative answers. That he had compiled great numbers of quotations from the Bible as well as from Fathers and Doctors of the Church that purported to answers these questions. (Or rather that he had challenged his students to find all these passages.) That the authorities cited routinely differed in their answers, so that each question could, with support, be answered both “yes” and “no.” And that Abelard got in trouble for leaving his students in a muddle about essential tenets of the Christian faith and for never saying, “But of course the real answer to question X is this.” Now having read the book, I have to say my preconceptions were slightly wrong.

First of all, the only thing Abelard actually wrote in the volume is an introduction in which he provides several reasons for seemingly contradictory language in the Church's authoritative writings: ambiguity of words, false writings with a saint's name attached, corruption in text, statements later retracted by the writer, misunderstanding on the part of later readers of when an authority is quoting or speaking in the voice of a heretic, taking opinion for fact, and everyday use of speech that departs from literal truth (e.g., “this cup is empty”). We should not accuse the saints of lying, he says, but only Scripture can be said not to depart from truth. Even the saints themselves (especially Augustine) tell readers not to follow the statements they make in which they have erred. So Abelard prefaces the long litanies of conflicting quotations with a statement that none of the problems the reader is about to face mean that the Christian faith is a sham or that the Bible is not true or that the saints all just made things up.

Secondly, the core doctrines of the Christian faith are never questioned. None of the 158 questions touch, for instance, anything in the Nicene Creed. Abelard never sows doubt about the existence of God, his role as Creator, his existence in three persons, the divinity of Christ or of the Holy Spirit, the virgin birth, the actual death and resurrection of the Lord, or the efficacy of that death and resurrection toward salvation. Many of the early questions have to do with understanding the Trinity and the inadequacy of language to describe the Three-in-One. Is God triple, he asks? Well, as the title says, yes and no. Other early questions regard God’s foreknowledge, exactly how Christ took on humanity, etc. Starting somewhere around 40% of the way in, the questions begin to concern such questions as when the angels were created, whether Mary doubted Gabriel, the order of post-Resurrection appearances, which apostles had wives, which evangelist corresponds with which animal face on the cherubim, whether one baptismal immersion is enough, if James the Just was the son of Joseph, whether intinction is a suitable form for receiving communion, when and if one can remarry, whether Cain is damned, which sin is the second most serious, etc. I must admit that he does address whether baptism is necessary for salvation, whether infants have sin, whether works justify, the true presence of Christ on the altar, and whether grace comes before our good will or not, but I think most Christian students will have to admit that the answer to each of these questions is complex and cannot be summed up in a single word: yes or no.

Now I’m not a twelfth-century Parisian, so I don’t know how it came across at the time, and I wasn’t in Notre Dame to hear Abelard’s oral presentation of his lessons, so I don’t know what subtle nuances of meaning he may have supplied. But reading through Yes and No, I didn't get the impression that Abelard was thumbing his nose at doctrine or denying the truth of Christianity. However, the overall effect of the relentless verbal tennis does make it seem as if he thought the Church placed too much stock in authority, especially in proof texts taken out of context. Question: Did (and does) the Church depend too much on proof texts taken out of context? The answer is not “yes and no.”

Miss Engler’s List

During my last two or three years of high school (way back in the ‘70s of the previous millennium), if we had a substitute in English class, it was usually Miss Engler. Oh, Miss Engler! She always seemed so happy to be there with us, so we were always happy to have her there. She knew her English grammar, spelling, punctuation, and rhetoric, too, and was always able to help us with whatever topic we were studying at the time. She never got a chance to help us with literature assignments, of course, because we didn’t read literature in those days; the educators had written better things for us to read – more educational things.

But Miss Engler found her chance to shape our reading lives. One day she came in with her usual smile and a pile of mimeographed sheets. The eager anticipation of the whole class palpably filled the atmosphere in the room. It didn’t much matter what was written on the mimeographs, as long as we got to smell them while they were still warm! “I have something for you,” she said, still smiling, and handed out not one page but four. The underlined title on the first page, A BOOK LIST, created its own kind of copy, no less pleasant than a warm mimeograph: it placed a replica of Miss Engler’s smile on my face.

An introductory paragraph explained the organization of the list into four groups:

• “Group I: those ‘classics’ which are recommended to be read at the first opportunity.” I forgive Miss Engler for her use of the passive voice; I knew what she meant. At last someone was telling me what I ought to read! What was school for if not for this? This first part of the list included Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Macbeth, Moby Dick, and much more. Famous works of Dickens were there, because, of course, Dickens’s novels should be read at the first opportunity!

• “Group II: those books which include the more important modern writers or the works that the student has no doubt already read in the early stages of high school.” OK, Miss Engler looks less than perfect again; books don’t “include” writers. But look how clever she was! She gently presented us with the expectation (“no doubt” you’ve already read these) along with a kindly escape hatch: any book I hadn’t already read might be by one of “the more important modern writers,” leaving me with no cause to fear that I had disappointed Miss Engler! The “more modern writers” included Graham Greene, J. D. Salinger, and Robert Sherwood. The books I had “no doubt” read included the adventure novels of Cooper, Verne, and Stevenson. Don’t ask me why these two categories belong together; I’ve never figured it out. But there must be an explanation for the combination, because Miss Engler saw it.

• “Group III: those works on a difficulty and interest level which require greater maturity on the part of the student.” Good! A list for the future. Here are Balzac and Dostoevsky and Henry James and James Joyce and all their difficult and mature friends.

• “Group IV: those standard works which have become the basis of our literary culture and should be read at least in part.” In part?! Come on, Miss Engler! This is the best group in the list! Beowulf, Antigone, City of God, The Life of Johnson, Don Quixote, The Divine Comedy, The Iliad, Paradise Lost, The Republic! This is the light reading that I enjoy over and over!

I’m as certain as I am about any fact of human behavior for which I have no statistics that I am the only student who still reads, marks, and digests Miss Engler’s list. The group with the highest percentage of underlined titles on my tattered copy is Group IV. Samuel Butler’s Erehwon is one of the few works in that last quarter not marked yet, but it’s on my plan. The section with the lowest percentage is Group III; I guess I’m still not mature enough. But The Son of the Middle Border and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, both from Group III, are on my reading schedule, so I’m still making progress even on this sublist. (I must admit, though, that I think I will never get around to François Mauriac’s Viper’s Tangle.)

Now that I have my own ten-year schedules, I don’t check Miss Engler’s list often. But I got it out just a few weeks ago and underlined quite a few titles from the last four or five years: The Rise of Silas Lapham, The Good Earth, The End of the Affair, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln, Culture and Anarchy, and a few others. And it makes me happy to know that I have a definite plan to mark several more particular titles from A BOOK LIST over the next twelve years or so.

The last time I saw Miss Engler, I myself was substituting at my old high school. I had brought a book, as usual, to read while the classes did their work, and in a divinely appointed encounter, I passed her in the hallway as I was filled with the glow of having just read the last chapter of one of the perfections of literature. “Miss Engler!” I called to her, misty eyed, across the busy streams of criss-crossing students. “I just finished David Copperfield!” And there was that smile again.

Experiencing the Past

I’ve written about Edward Rutherfurd’s multi-generational novels a few times before. They can’t be considered classics or Great Books with a capital G and a capital B. But they get me thinking about history and large themes, and so, on the whole, I’ve enjoyed reading them and rereading them. The first of his books that I read was Sarum, which centers on the U.K. area around Stonehenge and the town of Salisbury. I’m rereading it now and don’t like it quite as much this time, and I’m not sure why. I reread London a couple of years ago and loved it. Perhaps my problem lies in the fact that I’m listening to all 50 hours of Sarum in the car, an experience which has taken months. Perhaps it’s simply a consequence of it being Rutherfurd’s first book, before he learned how not to lose the character trees in the historical forest.

But I liked Sarum enough the first time to read several of his other offerings, and I do remember what tickled my fancy so much fifteen or twenty years ago: I’m a sucker for novels that give a sense of a sweep of history, with characters having to deal with, in this case, Saxon invaders, the Plague, the reign of Bloody Mary, and other people and events I’ve read about in histories. C. S. Lewis tells us that what he calls a myth is the only way of getting the reader inside a world so as to feel what it’s like to see things, do things, and believe things beyond our ability to experience. Think about the difference between reading a clinical description of love and the experience of being in love. Huge, right? The shelves are full of descriptions of historical settings, but, without time machines, how can we experience any of those times with an intensity the lover feels? Through stories we can. I can read a history of the Wars of the Roses, but what was it like to live at the time, with neighbors and family taking different sides? Through Rutherfurd’s fictional account of the Wilsons and Shockleys of Salisbury, I can get a taste.

I also enjoy little mentions of things like the source of the name Charing Cross or Shakespeare visiting the town with a group of players. But herein lies the problem. Sometimes in Sarum there are too many mere mentions and not enough storytelling. And sometime the storytelling takes the form of dry narrative exposition rather than that of an interaction of characters. Take the chapter I’m in now, which covers the eighteenth century. We’re told at the beginning that Samuel Shockley lost all of his money in the South Sea Bubble, but then the details of the investments and the crash are all given in past-perfect narrative; we learn practically nothing about Samuel and don’t get inside the story of the ruin by seeing how it affected an individual. (When a novel presents me with more than a couple of sentences in a row in past-perfect tense, I start to get bored. Why is the book telling me about a previous event from the outside instead of placing me in the middle of it?) A little later in the chapter we learn (in the past perfect again) that Thomas Arne has written “Rule, Britannia”; but what was it like to sing that anthem? We learn narratively that the characters read Pope and Johnson and Voltaire, but we don’t experience a scene in which characters talk about this contemporary literature. Did they like it? Agree with it? Understand it? Without the experience, the mention of these authors just seems like name dropping.

OK. So much for me trying to change The Way Novels Are Written. Even if Sarum might have too much exposition, the parts that tell stories about characters do exactly what I want historical fiction to do. The chapter on the first century, for instance, gets me a sense of the experience, like no other book I remember, of what it felt like to live in a Roman outpost town. The chapter about the fifth century sets me down in the middle of a civilization that has a Roman legacy but that has largely accepted Christianity, although the Roman-British Christians in question debate the legitimacy of the theology of Pelagius. And debate it they do. Here Rutherfurd doesn’t just inform us that Pelagius had ideas and Augustine had other ideas; he gives us believable conversations between characters that show how diverging doctrine affected relationships. So maybe the novel isn’t a Great Book with a capital G and a capital B. But experiencing the life of a fifth-century citizen of Roman Britannia is kind of lower-case great.

Pede Poena Claudo

I'd never read it before, so it was wonderful finally to experience the original novel called The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde after knowing the story from so many versions, adaptations, spoofs, and cultural riffs. Stevenson is famous for a reason, and his eloquent narrative stays interesting, suspenseful, and insightful. The mystery of the story is maintained in a brilliant way, too: we first get the public story from the perspective of a lawyer acquainted with Jekyll, and then we get the inner explanation in a narrative written by Jekyll himself. Nobody needs for me to approve this book, but it's, oh! so good!

The details of the story are extra good, too. Jekyll's original purpose was to give his base desires (unstated in the narration, but promiscuous sex is implied) unlimited rein with the ability to hide back in the safe persona of the respectable doctor, and he concocts a potion to bring out the unrestrained Mr Hyde. But (1) Jekyll begins to feel remorse when Hyde turns violent, and (2) Hyde starts turning up spontaneously and a draught is now needed to get Dr Jekyll back. So sins indulged acquire power and return with a force that we cannot escape. In biblical terms, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. In Aristotelian terms, vices and virtues are habits and become, when strengthened enough, second nature.

As a bonus, I read a Stevenson short story called “The Body-Snatcher.” Here a pair of men have a business involving grave-robbing for the purpose of providing bodies for anatomy classes, but one night one of the partners kills a man in order to increase the company's stock on hand. The very last word of the story introduces a supernatural element. The effect is shocking, both for the characters and for the reader realizing that the genre of literature he's reading has just changed at the last second. But that single word again offers the moral that “sins follow after,” or as the narration puts it, quoting Horace, punishment comes "pede claudo": on limping foot, i.e. slowly but surely.