Every day, I take my copy of Proust to the pool. It is the perfect place for such immersive reading. We were the first people in the pool this season, despite the rain. The water was 69°F, hardly too cold: though the weather was chilly for the Americans, it was quite normal for us English. Within a day or two, the sun came back and we were swimming and lying by the pool for hours at a time, and I was reading, reading, re-reading Proust. (When Albertine arrived, I had to reread the same half-a-dozen pages four times. There was hardly anyone at the pool, so I could just pace round and read it aloud under my breath.) And as I read, I daydream, and as I daydream, the beginnings of paragraphs come into my mind. Every day, I read more Proust by the pool in the evening, and then go home and read more Proust, and then realise I have to write about Proust.

If I didn’t write, how much of myself would I lose? Even though I write, I still lose so much. I once heard Knausgaard say that he had drunk in Proust like water and had not realised it had affected him, until he began to write My Struggle. We must hope that our reading is like this—not that it will lead to our own writing of similar proportions, as if we could become architects after visiting cathedrals,—but that it will leave some trace within, undetectable until it is provoked, however little we seem to remember. How often I put Guermantes Way down at the pool, to daydream about some instance of my own life, to wonder about some echo I heard, to just dwell on a passage, and then to listen to a paragraph compose itself in my mind. All of that is gone: none of the actual words of those paragraphs are remembered; someone splashed, a bird called out, a child wanted me, the dream was broken. I can only hope that it will recur without my being conscious of the recurrence. That is the faith we all keep. Writing is a method of remembering, a daydream of its own: it is not until we move the pen or type the keys that we realise what we knew.

Proust begins his book with a dream, and dreams recur throughout. In a Dickensian passage set in a hotel restaurant, Proust identifies the only server who is able to help him find his table—a man who is lost in thought.

And similarly, in the big dining-room which I crossed the first day before coming to the smaller room in which my friend was waiting for me, it was of some feast in the Gospels portrayed with a mediaeval simplicity and an exaggeration typically Flemish that one was reminded by the quantity of fish, pullets, grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in dressed and garnished and piping hot by breathless waiters who slid over the polished floor to gain speed and set them down on the huge carving table where they were at once cut up but where—for most of the people had nearly finished dinner when I arrived—they accumulated untouched, as though their profusion and the haste of those who brought them in were due not so much to the requirements of the diners as to respect for the sacred text, scrupulously followed in the letter but quaintly illustrated by real details borrowed from local custom, and to an aesthetic and religious scruple for making evident to the eye the solemnity of the feast by the profusion of the victuals and the assiduity of the servers. One of these stood lost in thought at the far end of the room by a sideboard; and to find out from him, who alone appeared calm enough to be capable of answering me, in which room our table had been laid, making my way forward among the chafing-dishes that had been lighted here and there to keep the late comers’ plates from growing cold (which did not, however, prevent the dessert, in the centre of the room, from being piled on the outstretched hands of a huge mannikin, sometimes supported on the wings of a duck, apparently of crystal, but really of ice, carved afresh every day with a hot iron by a sculptor-cook, quite in the Flemish manner), I went straight—at the risk of being knocked down by his colleagues—towards this servitor, in whom I felt that I recognised a character who is traditionally present in all these sacred subjects, for he reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the blunt features, fatuous and ill-drawn, the musing expression, already half aware of the miracle of a divine presence which the others have not yet begun to suspect.

How Dickensian to feel so much life in a character who appears only for a sentence. For a moment, we almost wonder if the breathless waiters will skid into each other, spill the feast, break the elegant dream of civilisation. Perhaps Proust’s narrator will be knocked down. Dickensian farce lurks within the syntax, and it is the genius of Proust to keep tight hold of the reins so that it remains a latent presence.

It is inherent to Proust’s (and James’s) elongated sentences to express the civilized and expose the over-civilized, (an ancient screen for weakness and wickedness, the charming and exclusive smile of decadence ), and Dickens had done as much before them, but whereas Proust’s elegance is haunted by farce, images of death are contained in Dickens’ humour—

As they made the exclamation, the general, attired in full uniform for a ball, came darting in with such precipitancy that, hitching his boot in the carpet, and getting his sword between his legs, he came down headlong, and presented a curious little bald place on the crown of his head to the eyes of the astonished company. Nor was this the worst of it; for being rather corpulent and very tight, the general being down, could not get up again, but lay there writhing and doing such things with his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history.

Of course there was an immediate rush to his assistance; and the general was promptly raised. But his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully made, that he came up stiff and without a bend in him like a dead Clown, and had no command whatever of himself until he was put quite flat upon the soles of his feet, when he became animated as by a miracle, and moving edgewise that he might go in a narrower compass and be in less danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes by brushing them against anything, advanced with a smiling visage to salute the lady of the house.

How almost-Jamesian is this passage. We might find it absurd to think of the author of The Sacred Fount compared with Dickens in this regard, but here it is, both of them are masters of control, not allowing their prose to overbalance, not quite giving full lease to the emotional force beneath the passage, so that when the snap comes, it comes sharply; Dickens is always building and releasing tension, whereas James works to make it build without diffusing, so that it is constrained by a silken rope, the image he uses in The Golden Bowl, but the essential technique is the same: to hold the reins just tightly enough to create a dynamic. Whether this is a line of inheritance or a process of joint-discovery, that dynamic tension—used now for farce, now for the plangency of ordinary life, now for the smiling villains of the rising rich—is the heart of the accomplishment that James and Proust share with Dickens. And it is part of the ordinary stuff of life—the way we conduct ourselves day-to-day is often a question of keeping irrelevant or unsuitable associations submerged, so that we can move between children, neighbours, colleagues, and spouses, each with their own ability to understand, tolerance to accept, and willingness to know us, so that we must keep our own hold on the reins, rather than act with our work superiors in the same manner we play with our children. We are forever entering different dreams, playing along with the tensions that make those stories real.

Proust loved Dickens, I believe; I do not know, for I have read no biography of Proust (other than How Proust Can Change Your Life, which I read out of morbid semi-professional curiosity recently, and if it mentioned Dickens then that passed through me like water); but I love Dickens, and I can sense him here, a background presence, and whether I sense him from Proust’s love or my own hardly matters. Reading Proust reminds me of reading Dickens. Searching online, I find that Edmund Wilson felt the same in 1928 when the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past was published.

In the descriptive parts of the early volumes, we have recognized the rhythms of Ruskin; and in the social scenes which now engage us, though Proust has been compared to Henry James, who was deficient in precisely those gifts of vividness and humor which Proust, to such an astonishing degree, possessed, we shall look in vain for anything like them outside the novels of Dickens. We have already been struck, in Du côté de chez Swann, with the singular relief into which the characters were thrown as soon as they began to speak or act.

I feel sure that Proust had read Dickens and that this almost grotesque heightening of character had been partly learned from him. Proust, like Dickens, was a remarkable mimic: as Dickens enchanted his audiences by, dramatic readings from his novels, so, we are told, Proust was celebrated for impersonations of his friends; and both, in their books, carried the gift of caricaturing habits of speech and of inventing things for their personages to say which are almost invariably outrageous without ever ceasing to be characteristic, to a point where it becomes impossible to compare them to anybody but each other. As, furthermore, it has been said of Dickens that his villains are so amusing—in their fashion, so generously alive—that we are reluctant to see the last of them, so we acquire a curious affection for even the most objectionable characters in Proust

James was, perhaps, deficient in those gifts of vividness and humor which Proust, to such an astonishing degree, possessed, (though I think the point is arguable when it comes to vividness, at least), but he was holding the reins in a Dickensian way, just as Proust was, as here, in The Sacred Fount—

One of the men of our company had come out by himself for a stroll, and the man was Gilbert Long. He had paused, I made out, in his walk; his back was to the house, and, resting on the balustrade of the terrace with a cigarette in his lips, he had given way to a sense of the fragrant gloom. He moved so little that I was sure—making no turn that would have made me draw back; he only smoked slowly in his place and seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him. I scarce knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. It had for my imagination a value, for my theory a price, and it in fact constituted an impression under the influence of which this theory, just impatiently shaken off, perched again on my shoulders.

We have moved from gaiety in Dickens to the brink of sanity in James, but we see the same way in which the sentences are allowed to come close to some alternative mood—will “fragrant gloom” lead us in the direction of Wodehouse?, can you not hear Wooster saying to Jeeves, ah, what a shame, the old boy had given way to a sense of the fragrant gloom; are we not, in the phrase he only smoked slowly in his place and seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him on the edge of a vast, Proustian, digression?—which James keeps suppressed by the succession of images, and the tightness of the syntax.

In all three, this style of writing is a means of being lost in thought: James knows this, and has his narrator voice the idea directly: I scarce knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. This is exactly the sensation of reading a novel: that we do not yet know what it all means, but that we can sense it forming some purpose in the overall picture. Dickens manages that with his succession of phrases about the general’s attire: attired in full uniform, hitching his boot, getting his sword between his legs, doing such things with his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history, his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully made, he was put quite flat upon the soles of his feet, be in less danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes. We do not know why it matters that he is attired in full uniform at the start of the passage, but by the time the general is saluting the lady, taking care not to fray his epaulettes, the latent farce of such a uniform has been brought out more fully than any other writer might have managed.

Likewise, as James can keep the hints of absurdity suppressed in a manner that allows for psychological tension, so Dickens can approach melodrama and keep it suspended for the effect of high drama, as here, from Pickwick.

He had hardly spoken the words, when a sound resembling a faint groan, appeared to issue from the interior of the case. It startled him at first, but thinking, on a moment’s reflection, that it must be some young fellow in the next chamber, who had been dining out, he put his feet on the fender, and raised the poker to stir the fire. At that moment, the sound was repeated; and one of the glass doors slowly opening, disclosed a pale and emaciated figure in soiled and worn apparel, standing erect in the press. The figure was tall and thin, and the countenance expressive of care and anxiety; but there was something in the hue of the skin, and gaunt and unearthly appearance of the whole form, which no being of this world was ever seen to wear. “Who are you?” said the new tenant, turning very pale; poising the poker in his hand, however, and taking a very decent aim at the countenance of the figure. “Who are you?”

Who’s there, of course, are the opening words of Hamlet, which Dickens knew as well as he knew the feeling of his own fingernails, and it is one of the central questions of great literature, which Proust and James, in their oddly parallel Dickensian manners, make the center of their inquiries. Here is how Proust continues his scene with the server who was lost in thought…

I should add that, in view probably of the coming fair, this presentation was strengthened by a celestial contingent, recruited in mass, of cherubim and seraphim. A young angel musician, whose fair hair enclosed a fourteen-year-old face, was not, it was true, playing on any instrument, but stood musing before a gong or a pile of plates, while other less infantile angels flew swiftly across the boundless expanse of the room, beating the air with the ceaseless fluttering of the napkins which fell along the lines of their bodies like the wings in “primitive” paintings, with pointed ends.

Some of this could have been written by Dickens—beating the air with the ceaseless fluttering of the napkins—but it retains that Jamesian quality of control, the use of persnickety qualifications (A young angel musician, whose fair hair enclosed a fourteen-year-old face, was not, it was true, playing on any instrument, but stood musing) to achieve an overall effect that would be beyond simple description, and becomes greater than the sum of its parts. James works his art towards the discovery of evil, not the Dickensian jubilation of life, nor the quiet Proustian demonstration of what it means to experience life, but the same careful management is there, the same hold on the reins, which achieves equally a sense of restraint, a sense of coherence, a sense that more sense will be made of all of this later on.

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him…

How much that phrase She waited, Kate Croy, will keep coming back to haunt the reader throughout The Wings of the Dove. How much will be revealed to lurk within her waiting.

In all three writers, we are transported not exactly to the world they describe, but to the world of their prose, just as when we watch a great movie, we are not taken to the world it depicts, exactly, but to the world of the images. The final similarity this prose style results in between Dickens, James, and Proust is that they create a world all of their own.

Proust often brings in supernatural or phantasmagorical images: as well as angels, he talks of fairies, ogres, giants. In the famous madeleine scene, he writes, It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. He is unabashed about telling us a fairy tale. The life of the novel exists in an in-between world, the prose world, just as the experience of reading exists in the vagaries of individual consciousness—the day-dreams, the forgotten memories, the paragraphs we compose in our minds on a sun-lounger before falling asleep and waking only to the general feeling that it was something that would have been worth writing down.

When Proust’s narrator’s grandmother is dying—that unbearable sequence at the end of the first part of The Guermantes Way—the image of an ogre is used, not only to invoke the sense we all feel of still being, to some extent, a child in front of our grandparents, but to show the impossibility of describing what was happening: no matter how accurately he might have described what was said and done, the presence of death and final illnesses remains impossible to accommodate.

To ease her pain my grandmother was given morphine. Unfortunately, if this relieved her in other ways, it increased the quantity of albumen. The blows which we aimed at the wicked ogre who had taken up his abode in my grandmother were always wide of the mark, and it was she, her poor interposed body that had to bear them, without her ever uttering more than a faint groan by way of complaint. And the pain that we caused her found no compensation in a benefit which we were unable to give her. The savage ogre whom we were anxious to exterminate we barely succeeded in touching, and all we did was to enrage him still further, and possibly hasten the moment at which he would devour his luckless captive.

This reliance on ogres is a recognition of the impossibility of being able to describe experience in words. This is a small and clichéd idea in the abstract, in the currency of memes and quotations, as when people pass around T.S. Eliot’s intolerable struggle to say just what I mean, but in the particulars, this is one of the most vital issues in literary art. The inability to match experience to language is why literary art is valuable, and the splendour of Proust is that he gets closer than we had thought possible.

James, in his conscious re-working of the old tropes of Romances, plays with the idiom of fairy-tales as well, such as here, when the deluded narrator of The Sacred Fount recalls the enchanted castles of his childhood.

The last calls of birds sounded extraordinarily loud; they were like the timed, serious splashes, in wide, still water, of divers not expecting to rise again. I scarce know what odd consciousness I had of roaming at close of day in the grounds of some castle of enchantment. I had positively encountered nothing to compare with this since the days of fairy-tales and of the childish imagination of the impossible. Then I used to circle round enchanted castles, for then I moved in a world in which the strange “came true.” It was the coming true that was the proof of the enchantment, which, moreover, was naturally never so great as when such coming was, to such a degree and by the most romantic stroke of all, the fruit of one's own wizardry.

This is, as well as being an account and a set of images of the narrator’s decline into madness, a description of literary art: a world in which the strange “came true.” James writes about those moments when we cannot quite say what we mean, or when we mean or know more than we can say, or when we know there is something that we mean or that we are aware of, but that thing is only apparent to us tacitly. His characters are forever looking at each other, seeing themselves reflected back to themselves in each other’s eyes, expressions, reactions, and coming not to some thundering revelation of themselves, but to the new, dim, half-awareness that there is more to be known. They are entering the realm of strangeness, in which we must find our faith doubted that everything will come to be relevant in time, as we are often left in a state of suspense.

For the reader, this is a calm and pleasurable experience. While the characters are held in the moment, we can put the book down. We may not wish to—we may wish to do anything but put the book down—but we are voyeurs, and what is gripping to us is precisely the fact of the scene being at our command. We read along in a compulsion, knowing that we can read it again and again, find out the little secrets of its prose, enjoy it once more, keep it in our memory. When the book is put down, and we emerge back into the world, it is like waking up, and so we are moving from one sleep to another, and neither of them feel like sleep, but like a vanishing—wherever we just were has gone: the book languishes forgotten on our chest while we daydream, and then, when the page is before our eyes once more, the daydream is another lost memory, to which, perhaps, we will at some point return.

When Proust’s narrator’s mother wakes him up early one morning, close to his grandmother’s death, he claims not to have been asleep.

I said this in good faith. The great modification which the act of awakening effects in us is not so much that of introducing us to the clear life of consciousness, as that of making us lose all memory of that other, rather more diffused light in which our mind has been resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea. The tide of thought, half veiled from our perception, over which we were drifting still a moment ago, kept us in a state of motion perfectly sufficient to enable us to refer to it by the name of wakefulness. But then our actual awakenings produce an interruption of memory. A little later we describe these states as sleep because we no longer remember them. And when shines that bright star which at the moment of waking illuminates behind the sleeper the whole expanse of his sleep, it makes him imagine for a few moments that this was not a sleeping but a waking state; a shooting star, it must be added, which blots out with the fading of its light not only the false existence but the very appearance of our dream, and merely enables him who has awoken to say to himself: “I was asleep.”

Reading is like this: it is a state of motion perfectly sufficient to make it a form of consciousness, but it is always succeeded by an interruption, which is like an interruption of memory, the coming back from a day-dream. Sitting by the pool, pacing round the table and chairs, lying almost flat on a lounger, I am aware of my surroundings, but am aware of them as part of my reading, the way I feel the hot sun despite being off in a day dream, somewhere else, my own grandmother’s house, perhaps, or the London Library where I first read Proust, and used, until recently, to do so much of my reading.

The desks in the London Library where I used to work, listening to the tintinnabulations of London’s noise, which I now think of most, sitting in the strong Virginia sun by the pool, are the ones that looked out onto white walls and metal doorways which seemed to emerge straight into the openness, because I did not know what purpose there could be to a door opening out of roofs onto narrow walkways. I think of the sun making the whiteness of the walls, and the silver of the metal, shine with such a brightness they seemed to be doorways into the fantastical.

Is it because we live over our past years not in their continuous sequence, day by day, but in a memory that fastens upon the coolness or sun-parched heat of some morning or afternoon, receives the shadow of some solitary place, is enclosed, immovable, arrested, lost, remote from all others, because, therefore, the changes gradually wrought not only in the world outside but in our dreams and our evolving character…

In the London Library, I read my way into a career as a literary critic, and the sunny morning when I read Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World is unforgettable to me now, as are the days when I sat in the literature building, the clanky metal floors with gaps in always making me feel uneasy, where the desks are pushed into dark spaces and fitted with bright lamps, where I read half the Shakespeare section, Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism, Lukács, John Aitkin Carlyle’s prose translation of Dante, which gave me more mornings which changed my horizon of awareness than I had had since my undergraduate days, and probably far more than I had as an undergraduate, so that I was becoming immersed in the ideas of Jane Austen as a member of the Enlightenment, Shakespeare’s rivalry with other playwrights, debates over Johnson’s involvement in the 1745 rebellion, and was also becoming aware of the great vast dullness—what James might call a great alkali desert—of so much that passes for criticism. The days that have stayed with me, and which were truly the most productive, were the ones I spent upstairs in the members’ room, drinking machine coffee in a styrofoam cup next to a circular window, reading Félix Fénéon, The Lives of the Engineers, Clare Carlisle’s biography of George Eliot.

This was the real calling of my time in the library. I was going home with bag-fulls of Iris Murdoch, the complete tales of D.H. Lawrence, and a miscellany of novels by writers like Edna O’Brien, which attract one’s attention as one passes the shelves, or reads an obituary, or hears some chatter. Writers like Walter Jackson Bate, various histories of literature and language, long-outdated classic studies, works from John Bayley and David Cecil, scholars like Anne Barton. I never left the library without some sense of exhaustion, even if I was often exhilarated.

My inner map of literary history was slowly coming into view, with side-streets, underground rivers, architectural ruins, buildings with sections from every century, and radically new impositions in incongruous places all starting to form part of the nuanced view of the past I was developing, with an ability beginning to form of reacting to a book not only in personal terms, but by placing it in comparison to all the rest. It was part of my quest, a dream into which I woke, and out of which I woke back into my life every afternoon. And it was in that dream that I discovered The Golden Bowl and Swann’s Way. In the London Library, I lived in a great sleep of reading.

And in this sleep, I had come to see the library in totally different terms. Far from the remote and fairy-tale institution it had been when I heard about it second-hand, or visited to collect a book as a stranger, an aspiring member of the library’s novitiate, it had become something familiar, detailed, a place I knew shelf by shelf, where I could go to Italian Literature trans. or Fiction S-Z (kept in a submerged floor that conceals itself) without a second thought. I could now walk myself to Hayek’s essays, Napoleonic history, or, as I did one afternoon, to Proust, as if I had never not belonged here. All these new images I had formed of the library were now held in perspective with the old, remote images, just as my sense of the ghosts of J.S. Mill and Thomas Carlyle (whose bust was removed) followed me around in my imagination; when I went to the section with Dickens’ novels, I thought of Mill writing in anger to Harriet Taylor

That creature Dickens, whose last story, Bleak House, I found accidentally at the London Library the other day & took home & read—much the worst of his things, & the only one of them I altogether dislike—has the vulgar impudence in this thing to ridicule rights of women. It is done too in the very vulgarest way—just the stile in which vulgar men used to ridicule “learned ladies” as neglecting their children & household &c.

And picking up Virginia Woolf, I thought of her diary entries, like: “I spent one afternoon at the L.L., looking up quotes.” But I also knew, more now, what she meant by entries like this one:

Yesterday in the Public Library I took down a book of X.’s criticism. This turned me against writing my book. London Library atmosphere effused. Turned me against all literary criticism; these so clever, so airless, so fleshless ingenuities and attempts to prove — that T. S. Eliot for example is a worse critic than X. Is all literary criticism that kind of exhausted air? — book dust, London Library, air. Or is it only that X. is a second hand, frozen fingered, university specialist, don trying to be creative, don all stuffed with books, writer? Would one say the same of the Common Reader?

No, no-one would say the same of the Common Reader, which still sits, in its original binding on the Library shelves. But I had realised how slow and stifled a place it was, as well as a place of wonders, and how many of the books were dull: dull, dull, dull. It is an institution of greatness and an institution of Casaubons. For every A.N. Wilson, there are a clutch of those who produce so clever, so airless, so fleshless ingenuities. Good Lord, I was always becoming a Casaubon myself, trying to sell book ideas to publishers that were hopelessly uncommercial. After all, was not I one of those clever and airless and fleshless writers, concerned with questions like whether T. S. Eliot for example is a worse critic than X? There I was, arrogating material into my notes, second hand, frozen fingered, like Casaubon himself,

Poor Mr. Casaubon himself was lost among small closets and winding stairs, and in an agitated dimness about the Cabeiri, or in an exposure of other mythologists’ ill-considered parallels, easily lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to these labors. With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men’s notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

Was not my book being researched, but not being written? Was I not at risk of getting lost among small closets and winding stairs, and in an agitated dimness? All of this became a part of how I understood the library. It was no longer a remote institution in the corner of St. James’ Square, but a complex picture of the sort that Proust describes when Albertine returns to visit him in the second part of The Guermantes Way,

Apart from the most recent applications of the art of photography—which set crouching at the foot of a cathedral all the houses which, time and again, when we stood near them, have appeared to us to reach almost to the height of the towers, drill and deploy like a regiment, in file, in open order, in mass, the same famous and familiar structures, bring into actual contact the two columns on the Piazzetta which a moment ago were so far apart, thrust away the adjoining dome of the Salute, and in a pale and toneless background manage to include a whole immense horizon within the span of a bridge, in the embrasure of a window, among the leaves of a tree that stands in the foreground and is portrayed in a more vigorous tone, give successively as setting to the same church the arched walls of all the others…

What I dream of now when I become distracted from Proust and think of the Library is a whole immense horizon within the span of a building, those warrened buildings that house a million books on the open shelves, the young people gossiping in the corridors, A.N. Wilson working harder than any of us, the anxious middle-aged father who used to come up to the members’ room and talk about the novel he was spending a year writing to a former novelist turned (as I assumed from his daily reading matter) theologian, the ones who sat on their phones while galleys of the new Sally Rooney novel languished unread in front of them, the nice lady in her headband who searched up books about nineteenth century Blackheath for me, and all the things I left undone there, the days I spent wandering around looking not for anything useful—those small, quiet, well-spent days when I merely wanted something good to read.

Can you remember pain? My daughter, without saying anything, but with a mute communication (as James has it in Wings), got me to put down my book, put aside my day-dreaming, so we could discuss this question as we sat by the pool. There is a difference, I said, in remembering the pain as it was felt, and remembering the idea of the pain. My son was next to us, reading, and I gave that as an example. I have memories of reading, I know where I was, I can see it now, and I remember the sensation, both of the space and of the book, but I do not remember it in anything like the same intensity that my son was then experiencing his own book. We are left with so little. My daughter described being able to bring the taste of foods into her mouth, such as scrambled eggs, whenever she wished, but in a smaller way than the experience of the real taste, and as if it was on a tongue “just over there”, she gestured to her side; I knew what she meant, that there is a shadow world inside us all, where memories arise, sensations of sensations, the ideas of experience. I can remember having memories, my father once told me, when he was perhaps a decade older than me, or less: the original memory was gone, but he remembered remembering it, like the idea of pain, the sensation of scrambled eggs, the recollection of a life in a library, a dream we know we had but to which we can no longer return.

There is another form of remembering pain, I added, which is that when we get a new pain, we not only feel that fresh hurt, but we think oh I remember this, it will be awful, like last time, and there is an additional and different sort of suffering, such as when I trapped my toes in the door recently, and I was aware, as well as of the immediate pain, of the time a few months ago when I stubbed my toe on a concrete step so badly I got a black spot of blood growing under my nail, or the time a few months before that when I stubbed another toe on some scaffolding. Each new instance of pain brings memories—realisations—of what pain is, just as each instance of reading re-immerses us in the sensation of knowing what it means to read, what it is like to read, and just as the pain of a paper cut is distinct from an oven burn, so the sort of memories we awake reading Proust or Dickens or James are not the same as when we read other books.

In all these instances of memory, we are experiencing something strange: something not the thing we are directly experiencing. And when some new event occurs to remind us ah yes this is pain then we are in the situation James described: a world in which the strange “came true.” The great majority of our experiences, of the time we pass, is not eventful though, and there are no memories of this nature. Instead, we have calm and simple memories. Whether or not I remember the question Can you remember pain? (though I surely will), I will remember days spent in the sun, by the pool, with the sort of questions and discussion topics that ten-year-olds bring up, just as, whether or not I remember the details of the Dreyfus salon, or of what a particular character said, I will always keep the impressions of Proust, and in all these words I write to try and help me retain more of those impressions, what will be most precious in my memory is something beyond words, a sensation, an impression, a mood.

Sitting by the pool, thinking about this with my book in my lap, later on, after the conversation is over, while I stare into the vast blue Arlington sky, I think of a line from a Jack Gilbert poem, and which I often think about on those days when I have both argued with my children and enjoyed those indescribable hours when nothing is happening but everyone is happy.

We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional
and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children,
vacations, and emergencies. The uncommon parts.
But the best is often when nothing is happening.
The way a mother picks up the child almost without
noticing and carries her across Waller Street
while talking with the other woman. What if she
could keep all of that? Our lives happen between
the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.

So it is with reading. What remains after all the quotations and plot details and close analysis is the commonplace we can no longer remember.

When Proust’s narrator’s grandmother is dying, the Duc de Guermantes comes over and wishes to see the boy’s father, imposing himself upon the household.

One of those “extra helps” whom people engage at exceptional times to relieve the strain on their servants (a practice which gives deathbeds an air of being social functions) had just opened the front door to the Duc de Guermantes, who was now waiting in the hall and had asked for me: I could not escape him.

“I have just, my dear Sir, heard your tragic news. I should like, as a mark of sympathy, to shake hands with your father.” I made the excuse that I could not very well disturb him at the moment. M. de Guermantes was like a caller who turns up just as one is about to start on a journey. But he felt so intensely the importance of the courtesy he was shewing us that it blinded him to all else, and he insisted upon being taken into the drawing-room. As a general rule, he made a point of going resolutely through the formalities with which he had decided to honour anyone, and took little heed that the trunks were packed or the coffin ready.

Here, again, I hear the echo of Dickens’ deathly comedy—the general rising from the floor like a dead clown—in the juxtaposition of trunks and coffins, which is one of the many ways in which Proust maintains his theme, as in a great symphony, with cells of rhythm and recurrence: life is a journey to death: that is the journey that the grandmother is about to begin, but whenever we travel, or read, or dream, we are undertaking a new part of that journey ourselves, and the suitability of James and Proust and Dickens, and their prolonged prose, to life is that life, too, is like that, it elaborates, circumlocutes, repeats, and finds itself moving from one state of strangeness to another.

The effect of Proust is not found in the parts, but in the whole, in this experience of his holding the reins to maintain our sensation that whatever is happening it will all fit in, so that when we read a passage of particular relevance or significance to us, it will not stand out the way a great speech in Shakespeare stands out, but will be revealed with the luminosity of a jellyfish in the water or a star in the sky, continuous, somehow, with its surroundings, but also distinct, like the patchwork of memories, selves, and dreams—waking sleeps—we all live among. How many people will have experienced something like this heart-breaking passage about Proust’s narrator’s dying grandmother:

Françoise, with innocent savagery, brought her a glass. I was glad for the moment that I had managed to snatch it from her in time, before my grandmother, whom we had carefully kept without a mirror, could catch even a stray glimpse of a face unlike anything she could have imagined. But, alas, when, a moment later, I leaned over her to kiss that dear forehead which had been so harshly treated, she looked up at me with a puzzled, distrustful, shocked expression: she did not know me.

But this works not as a quotation, an extract, but as part of the continuous stream of experience. The strange has “come true” not merely because it is true to life, but because, like all dreams, consciousness, the sense of self, it is true to itself as well. With the death of the grandmother, I had to wake up from Proust a while. I had spent pages and pages anticipating the moment. My own grandmother died like this. Not with leeches and servants, but increasingly behind the veil of unconsciousness.

When my lips touched her face, my grandmother’s hands quivered, a long shudder ran through her whole body, reflex perhaps, perhaps because certain affections have their hyperaesthesia which recognises through the veil of unconsciousness what they barely need senses to enable them to love. Suddenly my grandmother half rose, made a violent effort, as though struggling to resist an attempt on her life.

We all live with a veil of unconsciousness. James and Dickens and Proust developed an art of making that veil less opaque, of convoluting narrative to make it resemble the difficulty of knowing ourselves, and to keep shocking us out of egotism. When someone slips entirely behind that veil, and is living only as a set of reflexes, so that we can no longer be sure what sort of consciousness, how much consciousness, they experience, they become a living grief, something out of a fairy tale, a dream into which we cannot—yet—follow them.

Our social existence, says Proust’s narrator, is like an artist’s studio, filled with abandoned sketches. We read in fragments as we live in fragments, and what we write can only save so much of what we remember, and what we remember can only be so many fragments of our lives. And so I put the book aside, after only two dozen pages, not as one of the many half-abandoned half-read books on which it sits on my desk, nor to become one of the distant memories of reading, as in the London Library, fragments of my past, but as something which will dwell in my mind, “just over there”, a strange place which becomes clearer in retrospect, upon revisiting, and I begin to write, thinking, These fragments I have shored against my ruins, and it is not until I reach the end of this essay, the writing, editing, rethinking, deleting, that I realise which lines I have been almost remembering ever since I started reading Proust,

I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.

The Longman’s annotated poets series achieves something like this for poets (though we might wish for editions with slightly less annotation), but for the novelists we only have the Penguin and Oxford classics series, which are paperback; there are very fine hardcover Everyman editions, but they have significant omissions. The purpose of this new series would be to provide all of an author’s works. As far as I can tell, for example, Sir Charles Grandison is only available in the Cambridge Edition of Richardson’s works, which is burdensomely full of annotations, whereas, once upon a time, it was available in the slightly more manageable Clarendon editions. Everyman does not even publish all of George Eliot’s novels. ( pointed out to me that Library of America no longer has Moby Dick in print!)

If this project were undertaken, I would like to see pocket books, such as the old Chatto editions of Proust, or the Everyman editions of Clarissa, but the Library of America format, a larger hardback with three or four novels per volume, has some advantages. And of course, I would like to see useful introductions, such as Johnson once wrote for the English poets series.

Most importantly, a true Library of Britain would go beyond fiction: bring me the works of Izaac Walton, Samuel Johnson, and the essays of J.S. Mill (another astonishing omission in current editions). Bring me Hazlitt, Browne, and DeQuincey. Let there be volumes of Donne’s sermons, Burke’s speeches, Swift’s pamphlets. Bring me the essays of George Henry Lewes, V.S. Pritchett, Francis Bacon. Bring me Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde. The prose of Milton ought to be among the early editions. And Addison, the splendid Addison. We must publish Cato’s Letters, Adam Smith, Cobbett and Wollstonecraft too. A.V. Dicey, Walter Bagehot, and many others could earn a volume. Let there be a life-writing series, with Froude Keynes; histories, as well. The Book of Commmon Prayer, and Edward VI’s two prayer books must be included. We might even add the great writers of cookbooks, like the very fine Elizabeth David. I would like to see volumes of important legal judgements, not only the glittering works of Lord Denning, but the great cases of English history like Entick v Carrington, Donoghue v Stevenson, Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company, Liversidge v Anderson, and so on. “In this country, amid the clash of arms, the laws are not silent.” Now that is good English prose!

TRANSCRIPT

HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Zena Hitz. Zena is a tutor at St. John’s College. She is a philosopher, the author of Lost in Thought. She runs the Catherine Project. She’s famous on Twitter. We don’t know how she does it all. Zena, welcome.

ZENA HITZ: Thank you, Henry. It’s great to be here.

OLIVER: And we’re talking about Gulliver’s Travels because it is 300 years since it was published, and it’s a book that you love.

HITZ: A book that I’ve loved for a long time.

First Encounter with Gulliver’s Travels

OLIVER: So tell me, when did you first read it?

HITZ: Well, it was an important moment for me. I was in high school, and I was admitted to a scholarship summer program which offered college courses at different campuses. There were some normal-looking college courses at normal-looking colleges. And then there was this course at St. John’s called Science as Literature, Literature as Science. [laughs] It had this description that was just unbelievable. And I thought to myself, “This is the one, obviously the one to go to.”

So I went, and we read books that no one in their right mind would assign to high school students now, and maybe not then. The fragments of Parmenides, Plato’s Timaeus, selections from Aristotle’s Physics, Gulliver’s Travels. After reading a number of—preface to Ptolemy’s Almagest, geocentric astronomy. And we read Gulliver’s Travels after reading selections from Hooke’s Micrographia, so the inventor of the microscope, and Galileo’s Starry Messenger, which is one of the great first uses of the telescope to discover the nature of the moon and the satellites of Jupiter.

So then we read Gulliver’s Travels. We also read Emma and Flannery O’Connor and various other things. And one of the faculty who was running it said at one point, “Well, we thought we’d throw a bunch of things together and see what you could do, what you could make of it. We didn’t actually have an idea of how these all fit together,” which I think was probably true.

At any rate, I think I came to Gulliver’s Travels thinking about these scientists who were looking at very large things and very small things, and thinking in general about the follies of human perception, whether that was shown in literature or philosophy or what have you, the ways in which human perception and knowledge don’t work very well. And I think Swift is still one of the best people to—Gulliver’s Travels is still one of the best books about that because it’s in the mode of a travel diary, an eyewitness account.

Gulliver is trained as a surgeon, by his own account. He at one point says he was a bit of a projector in his younger days, someone who undertook scientific projects. And he’s a terrible observer, the worst imaginable observer, and Swift so brilliantly lets us see through his eyes, lets us see all the things he doesn’t see. And I think it’s not just about seeing and knowing. It has a very profound, I think, moral and political set of commitments. So it’s a very humane book. It’s social criticism, but from a point of view of a very deep humanity. So I’ve always loved the book for these reasons since then.

I came back to it more recently because it is part of the curriculum at St. John’s. So when I came back to teach there, I began to reread it. The other experience I had was that I wrote a long essay on it when I was an undergraduate. So those are my—I’m not any kind of expert. My knowledge of the historical context of the book is limited. It’s not zero, but it’s limited. But I have always loved it as an account of human understanding and its failures and the way that might impact how we live and how happy we can be.

The Houyhnhnm Problem

OLIVER: Have you changed how you think about it as you’ve taught it?

HITZ: I have not really changed the way I think about it. It gets more—like all of these books, the more you read them, the more comes out of them, the more details come up. Hilarious. The more jokes you get, the more . . .

I think the one more recent insight I had was, I hadn’t understood the full horror of the Houyhnhnms in the last book until relatively recently. I think that took me some time to really take on. It’s one of the cases where Gulliver’s misperceptions are a bit harder to see, and I think many readers just assume that Swift is endorsing the praise of the Houyhnhnms in some sense or other.

OLIVER: There are some very serious critics in the past who have called them Swift’s ideal beings. Which at this point in history seems unthinkable, but it has been a belief among serious readers.

HITZ: Yes, yes. And also common among students. Yes, it’s absolutely one of the wrongest opinions you could have about anything, I think.

OLIVER: Why does Swift allow us to make that mistake? Are we bad readers out of the context, or has he made too good a job of his diversions and concealments and ironies?

HITZ: That’s a great question, and I’ll just take a stab at it. I think that he has hit on a mode of misperception which is very deep to us, and it’s something that we’re much more guilty of. We could imagine that if we were in a place where everyone was small or everyone was large, we might make mistakes like Gulliver makes. But we all live, I think, in communities that are a bit like the Houyhnhnms. And so we are all very subject to these kinds of deceptions, and I think that’s how he gets us.

That’s not to really excuse the bad readings because, you know, Gulliver does leave the land of the Houyhnhnms with a boat made out of human skin, which should—I think that moment should make you realize, if you haven’t yet, that something is very seriously wrong with Gulliver. Gulliver has been kind of destroyed as a person by his travels, and especially by this last trip. But if you pass over that little detail, maybe you think, “Oh, wow, he found some very simple beings.”

OLIVER: Well, there’s also the great council where they debate the genocide of the Yahoos.

HITZ: [laughs] Yes.

OLIVER: And it directly contradicts several things Gulliver has come to believe about the Houyhnhnms, about the Yahoos, and about himself. And he’s completely unaware of these contradictions and so in awe of the Houyhnhnms that he doesn’t quite understand, I think, that he’s accounting a genocide.

HITZ: That’s right. That’s right.

OLIVER: Even though he uses a phrase from Genesis that’s very unmistakable. It’s a sort of remarkable moment of—particularly to us, having had the 20th century. I think that’s why Swift came back into favor in a way, because people used to say, Swift’s unbearable view of human nature . . .

This is a great bit in Boswell’s Life of Johnson where, when they’re traveling through Scotland, they’re with a lady, and she says to Johnson, “Is any man naturally good?” And Johnson says, “No, no more than a wolf.” And Boswell says, “Well, sir, what about ladies?” And Johnson says, “God, no, absolutely not.” And this woman says, “Oh my God, this is worse than Swift,” utterly horrific view of human nature.

But of course, we can actually say, did he go far enough? [laughter] I mean, Swift clearly understands something very real and deep. The council of genocide is horrifyingly familiar to us. And I think that’s much to Swift’s credit that he can see that, and to show that Gulliver would blind himself to it. And people still blind themselves to it, right?

HITZ: That’s right. And I wonder—you would know more about this than me because it is a bit of a historical question, but my understanding is that quite a lot of the savagery, the worst parts of rule over men that we see in Gulliver’s Travels are pictures of Ireland in the 17th, 18th centuries. And I wonder if that took some time to reveal itself to the British, and in some ways it’s still not really as known as it might be. We think of the colonial project as being something that was directed at India and Africa—

OLIVER: Faraway countries.

HITZ: —faraway countries where people looked really different. And we’re not as familiar with the kinds of things that were done to the cuddly Irish with their nice music, and who we don’t think of as being people that you would savagely oppress like that. So I think—

OLIVER: So, I think partly the English are not interested in their own history in the way that they are expected to be. And partly the English interest in Irish history has become very focused on the more recent events. And it’s very hard to get back past that. And it all becomes very complicated, and it’s a sort of different country. So there’s some of that, but I think generally we don’t want to know what we did, yes.

HITZ: Well, and I think in anglophone countries in general, there’s going to be a history of something like that. To attribute it to the British is not to say that—I mean, Americans have chattel slavery and the genocide of the natives, and the Australians have their own situation. All of the anglophone countries have something like this on their conscience.

I think that obscures the meaning of that final book. I think we don’t recognize—and that’s really to Swift’s credit, to have a social critique that is so real and so deep that you may not even recognize yourself in the picture.

Slavery in Gulliver’s Travels

OLIVER: Yes. When I read it again—I read it as an undergraduate, but I really was actually more interested in the other parts of Swift’s work. And I thought it was brilliant, and then I read it again. And it was more recently that—I didn’t understand how I couldn’t have seen it, but it’s basically a book about slavery, as I come back to it.

And in each of the books there is enslavement of a different sort. So, to begin with, Gulliver is the one being kept in a box or kept in a house, or he’s chained up by the Lilliputians or Glumdalclitch.

HITZ: Right. That’s right.

OLIVER: She’s a very nice sort of master, as it were, [laughter] but he has that box that can be sealed, and the dwarf has him swiping at the wasps. And then the enslavement that the flying island has of the country below is like England and Ireland. And then in the final book, you know, the Houyhnhnms are whipping the Yahoos.

HITZ: That’s right.

OLIVER: The slavery thing gets worse and worse as the book goes on. And one of the things that’s clever is that it’s funny when Gulliver is enslaved, right? When the wasps are let out and he has to—and Swift sort of does that clever thing where he undermines things by making it a joke at the end. By the book of the Houyhnhnms, there is really very little humor. And the twist at the end is always dark.

Gulliver can’t see that—he can see that he’s a bit like the Yahoos. But he can’t see that they’ve been enslaved in the way that he—the farmer wanted to take him around the kingdom and show him off, and he says, “I couldn’t possibly have had children in that condition because I couldn’t have it on my conscience that I had begotten a slave, someone born into slavery. I couldn’t do that.”

HITZ: Right.

OLIVER: Then he’s in the Houyhnhnms and he can’t—it’s quite remarkable.

HITZ: [laughs] Yes. I don’t think it’s quite true that in the end there’s no humor. I read it with some Catherine Project group a couple of years ago, and one of the readers pointed out that it’s not obvious Gulliver isn’t leaving his home and sitting out in the ocean and always landing on England every single time; just every time, he lands there.

And there’s something hilarious about an Englishman that discovers a place where there’s all horses, [laughter] and his love of horses overwhelms him, and he becomes persuaded that they’re the only rational beings that there are. I mean, that is funny.

OLIVER: Yes, I agree. There’s a lot of irony and stuff. But I think it’s in Lilliput when he describes their manner of writing. And he says they don’t write from left to right as we do in England, or from right to left, or up-down like the Chinese, but from one corner to the other, as the ladies do in England. This is very funny, dry humor, and that sort of thing is gone. And the things that surprise you at the end of a sentence or a paragraph are more like, “Oh, and of course I used Yahoo skin to cover the boat.” And you’re like, oh my God, this is not a joke anymore.

You know, in A Modest Proposal, he makes real humor out of those kind of horrors. And with the Houyhnhnms, I think he actually refuses the joke to make you feel the disgust, in a way.

HITZ: Yes, that might be right. That might be right.

Swift and Philosophy

OLIVER: What do you think about the idea that the Houyhnhnms are drawn from the Phaedrus and Socrates’s idea of the soul with the two horses? And there’s the good, rational horse and the vulgar, passionate horse, and the Yahoos are the other horse. You see what I mean?

HITZ: Yes, yes.

OLIVER: Is Swift showing us the two sides, and Gulliver’s mistake is to prefer the one and not the—

HITZ: Right, I think I have heard something like this before. I’m a bit skeptical. Swift doesn’t strike me as someone who uses philosophy in quite that way. I think he’s much more interested in Gulliver’s—the Houyhnhnms’ self-deception about the kinds of beings they are. They do not say “the thing which is not,” yet Gulliver’s master hides from him this conversation about the genocide for quite some time. And maybe we don’t know if he tells him quite the whole truth about it. So there’s—

OLIVER: And he also conceals the fact that the others don’t like Gulliver because he’s a partial—a reasonable Yahoo, as it were.

HITZ: Right. So their self-deception, Gulliver’s being taken in by their self-deception, the ways in which they—this is one of the ways that I think it’s profound about the nature of slavery. And to cheer us all up, I’ll make a Holocaust analogy, as you also did.

When I was traveling in Germany some years ago, in one of their Holocaust museums, there was an image from a Nazi-era German newspaper of Jewish people living in complete squalor in the ghetto. And of course, they had forced them into squalor. But somehow they forced them into squalor, and then this reinforces the sense that they’re these rat-like beings.

And there’s something very similar that the Houyhnhnms do to the Yahoos. They force them into this animal state, and then they say, “Oh God, look, these people are disgusting. They just don’t know how to act.” That seems to me the kind of level at which Swift is working. He is interested in the nature of a human being, but not in the abstract Platonic sense, I don’t think.

He strikes me as someone who believes in common sense, common decency, basic freedom, and basic use of reason. And he finds in his time that there’s distorting teachings, distorting ways of behavior that have gotten people far off track. To me, that’s what it feels like it comes from. It doesn’t feel like Plato is in the background to me.

OLIVER: Is there an extent to which, though, it’s a work of sort of anti-philosophy? As you say, Swift, he likes common sense. He likes ordinary reason, and he likes what he would call the revealed truth of Christianity. So he talks, in his sermons about people, it comes to you from God like a light. It’s revealed to you. And he doesn’t like this idea that the philosophers can work it all out.

And in a way, that’s the same sort of mistake that the scientists think they can discover all this stuff, and they go in these crazy ways. And the Houyhnhnms are a bit like that. If you had philosopher-kings, they would end up being perverted examples of rationality because they’re ignoring the—so do you think it’s anti-philosophy in a way? The book is saying, “No, no, I don’t want philosophers”?

Criticizing Elite Intellectual Culture

HITZ: That’s definitely a plausible reading. But it’s hard to tell whether it’s anti-philosophy or anti a particular style of thinking. It’s worth pointing out, in that light, that Gulliver, when he arrives in the land of the Houyhnhnms, before he even meets a horse, he sees a Yahoo who, from what I can tell from the text, is trying to wave at him and say hello, who recognizes him. And he’s horrified. He sees him instantly as a monster.

So I think immediately upon landing, he sees the Yahoos as monstrous, and that tells me that he must already be off kilter. So he’s not just corrupted by the Houyhnhnms; he’s been somehow led off track, away from the capacity to recognize fellow human beings before that.

And he’s come from this—the third book is all about various kinds of inquiry, scientific endeavors, practical endeavors, talking to the greats of the past, necromancy, and various kinds of inquiry into wisdom or things like wisdom. And somehow that’s the thing that seems to push him to the point where he can no longer tell what a human being is.

OLIVER: One of my favorite parts is when he’s with the wizards, and he asks to be shown Homer and Aristotle and all their commentators. And he says that there were vast rooms full of these commentators, endless numbers of them. But Homer and Aristotle didn’t recognize any of them because they were all so ashamed of the terrible things they’d said about these great men’s works that they kept themselves forever in a different part of the underworld. They couldn’t bear the shame of being revealed to having told lies and said second-rate things.

It’s very, very funny. And I think that’s another sort of angle on which the book says, “You’re so tempted to make a comment and have an idea and be a philosopher, and you should just accept the revealed truth of what is known. Just stop it. Just stop it.” [laughter]

HITZ: Well, I suppose maybe I would also put it this way, that Swift sees the condition of 18th-century Ireland, which is quite poor, very bad. And it’s ruled in a savage way by the English, who have a quite flourishing intellectual culture, as it happens, at this time.

So I think what he might be is not a critic of philosophy so much as a critic of intellectual culture. Because intellectual culture seems to not only not help with existential concerns like slavery and oppression and savage poverty, but even serves to mask and hide and create illusions behind it.

So that’s, I guess, how it strikes me, as a book that’s hostile to what you’d now call elite intellectual culture. And I don’t know how fundamental that critique is, in light of its inability to solve problems for real human beings or to obscure the causes of what’s going on with real human beings.

OLIVER: I think it’s quite fundamental because outside of Gulliver’s—I think this comes into Gulliver’s Travels, but what he might have said more explicitly elsewhere is, there are people starving in the streets of Dublin. And we’ve got corrupt politicians and intellectuals saying all these things, but you know, here she is starving. You don’t need to work that out. [laughter] There’s no question—the reveal—just be a Christian and, like, for goodness’ sake . . .

HITZ: Yes.

OLIVER: And when, for example, he talks to the king of Brobdingnag, and there’s that wonderful satire of the English government and everything. And he says, “Those people understood mathematics and poetry and whatever, but I could never drive into their head any sense of the abstract or any of these speculative—they simply didn’t know what that was. They didn’t know what I was saying.” [laughter]

And so in a way, his ideal government is anti-philosophical because it would just look at the human problem in front of it. It wouldn’t do speculative science. It wouldn’t think of itself as rational, all this Platonic stuff. It would just—she’s in rags, she has bare feet, you know?

HITZ: Yes, that’s right.

OLIVER: What do we need a philosopher-king? Like, what are you talking about?

HITZ: Exactly.

OLIVER: The priest understands this because he’s there in the city doing it. And is there something of that in the book, that constant resistance of the cleverness of people who cannot see daily life?

HITZ: I think that’s absolutely true, and I think it’s probably one of the things I love about the book, because I think this somehow gets to something in my own heart. Even though I’m a professional intellectual—I have been my whole life—the distance between the concerns of professional intellectuals and the concerns of living, real people in various parts of the world is very large.

And it’s even worse when, as it was when I was coming up in grad school, there’s a ton of explicit concern and various operations underway to improve life for others, which have zero connection with anything that anyone actually does. So I think the Laputans, which is the beginning of the third book, when Gulliver—

OLIVER: The flying island.

HITZ: Yes, when Gulliver visits the people on the flying island, who have one eye towards the heavens and one eye pointed inward. And they study music and mathematics, and they live in a giant flying saucer, which has the—

OLIVER: And the flappers.

HITZ: That’s right. [laughter] When someone needs to talk to them, someone flaps their ears so that they pay attention. And their wives all run off with working people because they can’t bear to be treated the way they are by men like this. And the flying saucer is not just distant. It also has the power to crush the towns underneath it if it judges them to be rebellious.

This image will stick with you for the rest of your life. I mean, it’s absolutely perfect, and the perfect image of bad government of a kind when intellectual culture is prized. And it’s hinted early on in the book in Lilliput, when the rulers in Lilliput have to do these elaborate dances with ropes.

OLIVER: Oh, with the king and the chief minister hold the pole, funny angles, and if you get under it, you get a green ribbon or a red ribbon.

HITZ: Exactly. [laughter] And they have these athletic contests of grace and various colored ribbons, and that determine how far you get in the halls of power.

OLIVER: Yes. Are you a cabinet minister or a junior minister? Yes, yes.

HITZ: Exactly. So there, it’s all just a funny joke. But it develops, I think, into the Laputans, people who have kinds of expertise that are actually hostile to them doing any kind of humane governing. So yes, that seems right to me.

Christianity in Gulliver

OLIVER: To what extent is it a Christian book?

HITZ: That’s an interesting question. I’ve never found a strong Christian element in it myself. There are satires of religious wars, both in Lilliput, where Lilliput’s at war with its neighboring city. Oh, wait a second, there’s two different disputes in Lilliput. One is about what side you cut your egg on.

OLIVER: There are the Little-Endians and the Big-Endians,

HITZ: Right. And then there’s also one about heel size. So there’s two different kinds of disputes.

OLIVER: With the marvelous image that the king is a Short-Heeler. But they think that the heir to the throne might be favorable to the High-Heelers because he has one heel slightly higher than the other, and he walks with a wobbly gait.

HITZ: [laughs] That’s right. This, again, in Lilliput is just utterly hilarious, outrageous, very silly, obviously a parody of religious wars between different kinds of Christians. But it resurfaces towards the end. It’s the Houyhnhnms, where he talks to the Master Horse—

OLIVER: And the horse sort of pretends to this great rationality, simply can’t understand that men would kill each other over the question of whether flesh is bread or bread is flesh.

HITZ: That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. So there’s definitely disparaging remarks about religious wars. And as you’re talking about it, where along with Swift’s praise of common sense, there’s a kind of basic Christian morality, which is that the poor and the suffering need attention. That all strikes me as Christian. Apart from that, I’m not sure. If you have a religious take, I’d be interested to hear it.

OLIVER: I find it very interesting that Swift had quite strict beliefs. He was not in favor of Catholics. He thought Dissenters should be tolerated, but he wanted the Test Act. He was very particular about all these things. And in his other works, he’s quite direct about that. But in this book, he achieves a kind of high ambivalence. And he’s not a Little-Ender or a Big-Ender.

HITZ: That’s right.

OLIVER: And he says the religious text on which this is based simply says that you must break the egg at the most convenient end.

HITZ: [laughs] That’s right.

OLIVER: Now, of course, in reality, he’s a Little-Ender, and he’s very committed to the Reformation, and he thinks it’s all terrible that they’re not. And it’s interesting that someone with such angry, insistent beliefs on the Anglican Church would take this ambivalent position.

And he satirizes so much. But the anti-slavery stuff, the description of the Laputans bringing the island down, and then he says, “I’ve never seen so much want and misery, and there’s a wild look in their eyes, and they’re wearing rags.” I mean, this is Dublin, right? This is just, along with the slavery, this basic Christian concern for the oppressed, the poor, the suffering.

HITZ: Yes, that’s right.

OLIVER: And so I don’t quite know. It’s almost like the book is saying, again with this anti-intellectual thing, all these doctrinal disputes and which church this and who believes that. And here we have slaves and poor people and beggars and starving people.

HITZ: Right.

OLIVER: Christianity should deal with that first. So is the implicit criticism of his fellow Christians, in a way, that they’re more interested in these disputes than in the fact that there are enslaved people and suffering people and—you see what I mean?

HITZ: Yes, that’s right.

OLIVER: And Gulliver—the Houyhnhnms are highly rational but not Christian, which is a significant omission. And by the end, are you supposed to wonder if Gulliver actually isn’t very much of a Christian? Because he can see this suffering and not respond to it at all.

HITZ: Right, when maybe the—is the best person in the book the King of Brobdingnag? Does that seem right? The person with the—at least who says the best things?

OLIVER: He says the best things. I think the best person is Glumdalclitch. She shows real charity and real love towards him.

HITZ: What about the Houyhnhnm, the one who likes him, who says, “Fare thee well, gentle Yahoo”? It’s tear-jerking—

OLIVER: Oh, the sorrel nag.

HITZ: The sorrel nag. I can literally weep at that moment when she says, “Fare thee well, gentle Yahoo.”

OLIVER: That’s true. That’s true. She and Glumdalclitch are maybe more similar characters. Yes, yes, yes.

HITZ: They’re similar characters. Okay.

OLIVER: And they have that basic, you don’t need to call it Christian. You don’t need—it doesn’t need theology.

HITZ: Humane. I would call it humane. Yes.

OLIVER: They have that basic love of their fellow. You know, Glumdalclitch doesn’t say, “Oh, how amusing this little man is, or how entertaining, or I can make—” She says, “He must be cared for. He looks a bit like me. He must be cared for.”

HITZ: Right.

OLIVER: And the sorrel nag, again, has the love of the fellow creature.

HITZ: That’s right. That’s right.

OLIVER: So I think Swift might be bringing in this, what he thinks of as the revealed truth of Christianity. Like, you shouldn’t need telling, you shouldn’t need to argue. It’s there.

HITZ: Right. This is just me making things up, which is what I’m here for. We’re podcasting. Yes.

OLIVER: Yes, of course. Also, is that not what the philosophers would do? That’s what Swift would say.

HITZ: But if I was going to make something up, what I would say is something like this: that Swift to me, from the testimony of Gulliver’s Travels, which is the book of his I really know the best. I don’t know much about the rest of it. He has a level of self-awareness and sophistication. So, he knows that that religious difference is being used as a pretext. He knows that it is obscuring the suffering of these people. So, for the purposes of the book, he says, “Look, if you’re a smart person, if you’re a smart ruler, if you’re an actually humane, intelligent, commonsensical ruler, you know that the fact that they have the wrong religious views is not a reason for them to be enslaved and oppressed and starved.” So that would be my suspicion.

And that’s why I think, to me, the religion is so light, because it’s not really a religious problem. It’s actually just a human problem and a political problem that is, how do you run your country so that these subject peoples are allowed to be free and develop themselves and be full human beings? That would be my made-up guess.

Students’ Views of Gulliver

OLIVER: What do undergraduates think? What is it that they find interesting in the book, and what do they like or dislike?

HITZ: It’s been a couple of years. I think they like this idea that—we all think travel is very broadening, a great way to think about the world. You know, you can learn so much about one’s fellow human beings. And whatever else is going on in Gulliver’s Travels, travel does not necessarily produce enlightenment.

So I think they like the attention to the ways in which, even when we are trying to learn, we fail to learn. And the ways in which structures of learning, like traveling or studying science, might actually make you worse and not better, things like that. But it’s not a book—I think it’s fair to say it’s not one of the favorite books of the undergraduates.

OLIVER: Okay.

HITZ: I think they find it a little bit distant, and I’m not sure why that is.

OLIVER: Is it because it sort of looks like a novel, but it’s not what we have come to expect a novel to be? And it sort of has that—

HITZ: I think that’s right.

OLIVER: The pre–Jane Austen novel is kind of weird to us now.

HITZ: Well, they love Don Quixote.

OLIVER: Okay.

HITZ: And that is a challenge of a similar kind. It’s a novel which doesn’t quite read like a novel, and the humor is kind of old. I mean, it’s also true—undergraduates, in my experience, in general—I hope they’ll forgive me for saying this on a podcast—they’re not always good at comedy. They tend to think that serious things must be tragic.

OLIVER: You can’t get an A by making a joke.

HITZ: Well, more that they have a sense that an intellectual life is something serious. It’s serious.

OLIVER: Oh, yes. Okay. And the syllabus slightly reinforces that, doesn’t it?

HITZ: Well, it’s sort of self-reinforcing because we used to read more Aristophanes. We used to read Rabelais.

OLIVER: If you do Shakespeare, it’ll be the tragedies.

HITZ: No, no, we do Shakespeare comedies.

OLIVER: Oh, you do? Okay.

HITZ: Yes. We have As You Like It and The Tempest. And do we have more tragedies? Maybe one more tragedy than comedy, but not a terrible imbalance.

OLIVER: Well, that’s good.

HITZ: It’s not Shakespeare-type comedy that’s—maybe, correct me if I’m wrong, a Shakespeare comedy is something that ends in a marriage, more or less.

OLIVER: More or less.

HITZ: It’s things that are funny—they don’t necessarily think that humor is a way of thinking.

OLIVER: Do they struggle with irony?

HITZ: No, not usually. As long as it’s serious irony, Anyway, I’m not sure why. I think I’m making things—I’m going too far out of the grounds for drawing conclusions.

Favorite Parts of the Book

OLIVER: Sure. Do you have a favorite passage?

HITZ: One of my favorites is the part—is it Balnibarbi where they have people who try to speak with objects?

OLIVER: Oh, yes, yes, yes.

HITZ: And they have to carry around wagons full of things because they never know what you might want to talk about. [laughter] That’s so weird. Because I think I spent a lot of time studying with philosophers, there’s a bit of—something’s on the nose about this.

OLIVER: Yes.

HITZ: You know, it’s like, “No, you’ve got to say exactly—no, that’s too imprecise. You have to say exactly what you mean.” Bernard Williams, the great philosopher, has something complaining about how contemporary philosophers are very controlling of their readers. They don’t want anyone to make the slightest mistake about what they mean by a particular word. That’s how the people who speak by objects strike me.

OLIVER: Do you think that is a problem of contemporary philosophy?

HITZ: Oh, sure. Yes, absolutely. Yes. The way Williams puts it is that when you write something, it should be like a cake mix, and the reader should be able to put their own egg and bake the cake themselves.

OLIVER: Oh, I see. You mean like a box of mix, yes.

HITZ: Yes, yes, exactly. It’s like a box of cake mix. Whereas making the cake painstakingly and force-feeding it bite by bite to the reader is not actually an—

OLIVER: Telling them how it tastes.

HITZ: Telling them how it tastes is not an educational endeavor.

OLIVER: When does this become too dominant in philosophy?

HITZ: It’s a feature of 20th-century analytic philosophy to be very careful with the meanings of words. And it’s by no means universal; it’s just a natural vice to the territory.

Iris Murdoch

OLIVER: Is this a problem for someone like Iris Murdoch, or is it more the A. J. Ayer type?

HITZ: No, it’s the A. J. Ayer type, not Iris Murdoch. No, Iris Murdoch is heterodox outside of the—

OLIVER: Do you like her philosophy?

HITZ: I do, yes.

OLIVER: What do you like about it? Platonic?

HITZ: Now, see, I came here to talk about Swift. [laughter]

OLIVER: I know, but you made such a good point about the satire of philosophers.

HITZ: I like her writing for a more general educated audience, her not making assumptions about the philosophical training of her readers, and her use of Plato for sure, which is quite interesting and creative. She sort of ingests Plato and does something with it that I think is very interesting.

OLIVER: Is she properly appreciated as a Platonist, or do you think there’s more attention to be paid?

HITZ: There’s probably more attention to be paid, but she gets some attention. She gets some attention. I also don’t think it was particularly helpful, these two books that came out a couple of years ago about Murdoch, Foot, Midgley, and Anscombe.

OLIVER: Oh, yes, yes, yes. I only read one of those. It was quite good.

HITZ: It might be quite good, but those four women are quite different from one another. So it’s an example of where attention to identity could obscure as much as it—

OLIVER: Well, one of the books was more about the ideas—they were both obviously about the ideas—and one of them was more about the fact that they were together in Oxford. And that they benefited from hanging out, talking, doing different sorts of work, sleeping with each other’s husbands, et cetera.

HITZ: Yes, all the good stuff.

OLIVER: And from the more sociological point of view, it was very interesting to see that, actually, a lot of what Murdoch did was bound up with her friendships and relationships, in that the argument basically is, A. J. Ayer and the others get sent away because of the war. So these four women are actually—they’ve been banned from this seminar and told they’re not allowed.

Well, now they can sit around and do what they want to do. And it worked, and they all produced very interesting things. So from that point of view, I think it was—but I agree with you, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch are not the same. [laughter]

HITZ: Not even particularly similar. I also feel like I’ve read enough of Murdoch’s novels to have a sense of what the sociological situation was like.

OLIVER: You like the novels?

HITZ: I do like them, yes.

OLIVER: Do you have favorites?

HITZ: I can’t remember the name of my favorite because I haven’t read them for years. It’s one of the things I read years ago, the one—I’d remember it if I saw the title. There’s an LSD trip at the beginning of it.

OLIVER: Oh, The Good Apprentice. I love that book.

HITZ: The Good Apprentice, yes. I think that was my favorite. But I never fell in love with it. I just liked it, and I found it interesting, and I found the sociology interesting. Okay, this is what academics at this time period were doing.

What to Pair with Swift

OLIVER: We got diverted.

HITZ: “We” got diverted. [laughs]

OLIVER: We did. If Swift is on a great books syllabus, what is it good to pair him with? If people are reading Swift, on or off a syllabus, do you think there are other—Hooker, you said, which I think would be interesting.

HITZ: No, Hooke. It’s Hooke.

OLIVER: Hooke. Hooke. That’s a very good point.

HITZ: The guy who wrote Micrographia, who has the enormous picture of the flea.

OLIVER: Yes, yes, yes. So that would be good. But any other? Is it worth reading Plato alongside him?

HITZ: Well, I like to—he’s on the list for something we called Life of the Mind Seminar at Catherine Project, which is our introduction to the life of the mind.

OLIVER: And just to tell people, the Catherine Project—this is not a university. Anyone can join a seminar.

HITZ: That’s right. It’s an open online readers community. Consists of small, high-quality conversations, mostly on Zoom, some in person.

OLIVER: You could be some kid, an accountant, a dentist, whatever, and you come and do a—you’ve got a PhD running a seminar, and you get that experience.

HITZ: Right. Some of them are peer led, so they’re not necessarily PhDs running them. The reading groups are not necessarily run by PhDs. But the core program in which the Life of the Mind Seminar is—either a PhD or an ABD [all but degree] or someone with some academic experience is usually leading that. We have it there, and we have it there with a set of books that are meant to disorient rather than to orient.

So one of the difficulties with reading great books with more or less random selections of adults is that people feel uncertain, out of place. And they bring expertise, real or fake, to the table, which makes it very difficult to have a conversation. It’s usually fake expertise, for what it’s worth.

OLIVER: Give us an example of what you mean by fake expertise.

HITZ: Well, so someone will have—we’ll be, say, reading Hamlet. Someone will have taken a class on Shakespeare in college, and they’ll say, “Actually, we’re asking this question. But what I learned, my professor told me, is that Hamlet actually symbolizes—he has an Oedipus complex and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then this is what this means, and this is what that means.” And then your conversation’s over, because you need to focus just on the text that’s shared between the—

OLIVER: It’s not a crossword puzzle.

HITZ: Exactly. It’s not a crossword puzzle, and it’s not something where—or the other—people often, again, they feel a bit on their back feet. So they’ll google a bunch of stuff about the author, and they’ll start tossing out random facts about the book or about the author, about the context. And again, you don’t get really into the meat of the book that way.

So, Gulliver’s Travels is there to help us think about ways in which we might not be expert in things we’re expert. Ways in which we might think we understand something and not understand it. And ways in which people who, with every appearance of seriousness and scientific principle, can just say unbelievably stupid things.

So it’s a very, very good book for that, where in that sense, it’s I think very good for any liberal education program. It’s liberating that way. One of the things we need to be liberated from is false expertise.

OLIVER: You’re talking really about these secondhand opinions that you haven’t interrogated and come to understand yourself.

HITZ: Exactly. Exactly, exactly, exactly.

OLIVER: This is what Mill says. Everything is new to someone, and the real genius is that you find it out.

HITZ: Exactly.

OLIVER: You don’t get taught it. Yes, yes.

HITZ: Exactly, exactly. So real learning is things you find for yourself. Anyway, that’s what I like it with. As for pairing it, yes, I think it would just depend on what you were—I don’t have a clear thought about that. I think it’d be good to pair it with Galileo’s Starry Messenger and preface to Hooke’s Micrographia.

But you could also pair it with Emma. Be quite good, actually, because Emma is also about someone who really doesn’t know what they’re doing and has no idea. Thinks they know what’s going on; they really have no idea what’s going on.

OLIVER: Yes. Hamlet as well, in fact.

HITZ: I guess so. Does he not know what’s going on?

OLIVER: Who’s diverting now? [laughter] Well, there’s an interesting question, isn’t there, about whether Hamlet has legitimate doubts. So he says, “This ghost could be a demon. I should be careful. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m going to pretend to be mad. I’m going to find out.” Or whether he just doesn’t want to see the truth in front of him, and he quote-unquote “delays” because of that. I don’t know if you have a view.

HITZ: I don’t think he’s deluded. I think the problem is something different, but I haven’t thought enough about it recently to know what his volitional obstacle is. But I don’t think he’s deluded. I think he sees what’s going on, but there’s something about acting that doesn’t work for him.

OLIVER: An internal—

HITZ: Something internal. Something internal. In a way, I find the play very hard. I don’t know what, for instance, what does that obstacle have to do with Ophelia? What’s going on with that? Anyway, he’s very mysterious, but I don’t—yes, that’d be my sense, is that he’s not—

OLIVER: Do you buy this idea that he’s a nihilist?

HITZ: No, although he’s definitely faced with something like nihilism. He has to look at it. And of course, the play does end with everyone dead, [laughs] so it’s not obvious that he’s wrong.

Sympathy for Gulliver

OLIVER: This question hangs over Gulliver as well. Is the problem by the end that he’s basically become a nihilist? His response to the Yahoos is to deny meaning, deny the possibility of meaning, to shut himself away.

HITZ: He is a true misanthrope. He hates human beings and refuses to interact with them and in that sense, in some way, removes himself from any further mistakes. In another way, the mistake that he’s in is so massive that that hardly seems like a consolation. But yes, he’s definitely stuck, and he’s stuck in a place where who he is—because he’s a human being. We have to remember that.

So he’s in a place of total self-hatred and the hatred of his neighbor, what you’d call from the Christian perspective a total loss of charity. Is that nihilist? I don’t know, but it’s definitely bad. It’s not a good state to be in. Maybe I don’t know what you mean by nihilism exactly.

OLIVER: Are we supposed to disapprove of him at the end or sympathize with him?

HITZ: Disapprove, I think.

OLIVER: Yes? You don’t feel sorry for him?

HITZ: I do a bit.

OLIVER: But not much.

HITZ: Well, should I?

OLIVER: I have come to believe—yes, this is what I’ve come to feel in subsequent readings, is that Gulliver, as you say, is very mistaken. He thinks he understands things that he does not understand. He has the sort of pretense of rationality, but he lacks any sort of meta rationality to see what his limits are.

And he becomes, therefore—he doesn’t advocate genocide, and he doesn’t take any pleasure in using Yahoo skin, but he’s just completely null to it. There’s a sort of void there where human feeling ought to be. And it’s tragic for him. It’s a tragic ending that he is so isolated. And we can’t sympathize with him, as it were, but we can feel sort of awful that he’s shriveled into this state rather than judging or blame.

I think one of the persistent themes of the book is, as I say, this kind of basic love of fellow creature, the Glumdalclitch or the sorrel. And if you take that from the book, you will wish you could bring Gulliver back.

HITZ: Right. What you’re saying reminds me that there is an interesting parallel in Plato’s dialogues that I hadn’t thought of before, Plato’s Parmenides, which is perhaps the most difficult Plato’s dialogue. So it’s a conversation between young Socrates and the philosopher Parmenides. The first third of it is relatively clear, some arguments against what people think of as Plato’s theory of forms.

Then there’s an extensive, insane dialectical process where various theses about the connection between being and oneness are both argued for and then refuted, and argued for and then refuted, pages and pages and pages and pages of it. So this seems to be—it’s Parmenides and Zeno who are running Socrates through this ringer.

And the person at the very beginning of the dialogue who they have to go find, to tell him the story of how Socrates met Parmenides, used to study philosophy. But now he just trains horses. [laughs] One of my teachers pointed this out to me, and I’ve never been able to get over it, that he spent this time doing philosophy, and he’s like, “You know what? I’m going to work with horses for the rest of my life. If I never hear another human voice, that’s fine with me.”

So I think that is an interesting parallel. And I think it is not really that uncommon to see people who are totally disillusioned with relating to humans, who then relate to animals instead, like they devote themselves to animals.

OLIVER: But on that reading, it might be a disillusionment with philosophical humanity. It might be philosophy that’s killed Gulliver’s human feeling.

HITZ: That’s right. Well, I think that’s one possibility, one very strong possibility. That’s why I think the Houyhnhnms come after the Laputans. Going to the furthest reaches of his intellectual interests just destroys his humanity.

But it doesn’t seem like exhaustion in the same way that whoever, I can’t remember his name, the character who relates the Parmenides, where you just think he must be exhausted from having heard more than one conversation like this. [laughter] And just in the stable with the horses eating oats, I mean, it’s just delightful. It’s just so peaceful, you know?

OLIVER: Bucolic, pastoral, yes.

HITZ: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Maybe you’re right that we should be more sympathetic to someone in that situation.

OLIVER: Well, next time you read it, you can tell me if you change your mind.

HITZ: All right. I will tell you if I change my mind.

OLIVER: Very good. Zena Hitz, thank you very much.

HITZ: Thank you very much, Henry Oliver.

Then one day, I was reading Helen DeWitt’s blog, and she was commenting on a new translation of Proust. I was not reading her blog for this commentary, merely because I wanted to read her whole blog, which I more or less managed. The post that made me read Proust was a response to someone commenting on some new translations of À la recherche du temps perdu. DeWitt argued that these new translations may or may not be good, but that was hardly the point when readers could be encouraged to read the original French for themselves. Whatever you decide about translations, DeWitt wrote, order a copy of the original French and try it. Look up whatever words you do not know and make progress slowly. At the very least, you will have some sense of the original. As she says, the difference between the French and English is the difference between musical instruments.

By then, I was in my thirties, thought DeWitt a genius, and had been meaning to read Proust for a long time. So I did exactly what she said; I went to amazon.fr and ordered a copy of Du côté de chez Swann, paying the postage for it to be sent to me in London. When it arrived a week or two later, I began, with a notebook I had bought specially for the task, looking up every word and noting down its meaning and grammar. For half an hour every evening I sat at my desk and pieced things together. Slowly, the first few pages came into view. Every phrase and sentence I understood gave me the sensation of a light flooding my mind. I still recall the sensation of understanding the first paragraph well enough to be able to read it unaided, though that understanding is sadly lost to me now, and I especially remember the thrill of the image of the train in the second paragraph.

I would ask myself what o’clock it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home.

It is often said that the first sentence, Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure, encapsulates the novel: it is synecdochic: in the opening sentence the whole theme of the novel is encapsulated, and the encapsulation is itself representative of the compressions of memory and recollection. The train develops this idea, beginning the constant unfolding of the theme, and creating the parallel track for the narrative: time, like the train, runs one way, but as we progress we remember life non-linearly “now nearer and now farther off”, and as we age and recall our lives “punctuating the distance” and we live like the traveller “hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory.” We are caught between living and memory.

Alas, like Samuel Johnson I have never been able to stick to a plan, and something—some illness, a trip somewhere, something to do with a child, or something, perhaps, innate to myself, some idleness, forgetfulness, entropy, (this last is the most likely)—meant that one day I put Proust back in the drawer of my desk, where it lived with its dedicated notebook, and never took it out again. I knew that I had failed, but, as DeWitt had written, “It's not, of course, compulsory to read the whole thing, but it seems a shame not to see what this extraordinary prose is like.”

Failure, however, left me with an appetite, the feeling that I should simply read the English and then I would be able to go back to the French, and so one day, caught by one of those sudden fits of mood one cannot account for—why this book, why just now?—just as I was packing up to leave the London Library for the day, I hurried to the second floor of the main building where the fiction is kept, to get the new Lydia Davis translation. But it was not there. So I put it on hold. And for a long time, I waited. Several people were ahead of me in the list. And so, after a few months of waiting, gripped by another of those moods, I walked from my house to the pale blue bookshop on the corner of the parade in Blackheath, which is still stocked and run in a traditional manner, with an ailing owner, a talkative woman who works there during the week, and paper signs hung in the doorway when she goes out for coffee, where I had seen an incomplete set of the beautiful old Chatto and Windus editions of the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation (which I had read many people disliked) and paid more than I wanted to for the first two volumes, which made up, together, Swann’s Way. I was simply going to start.

My god what a revelation those books were to me. It was little surprise to discover that Proust was obsessed with The Mill on the Floss and Ruskin (“I do not speak English, I speak Ruskin”). I had to read as slowly as I have ever read, as with James. I stopped to take many notes, transcribing passages onto the yellow A4 paper I now used instead of notebooks, having gone half-mad when I was writing my own book not knowing which of the half-dozen identical notebooks I needed to open for that one page reference, and a new pile of notes began to form. When I finished those volumes, I walked back to Blackheath, knowing that the next two had not been among the ones they had in stock, but hoping they might have acquired them, which, alas, they had not. So the next day, I went to the London Library and checked them out. Again I read slowly, lying on my bed, almost inert with the immersion. But before I could finish the second volume, we had to leave England, the book had to be returned to the library, where my membership has now expired, and the original Moncrieff translation, which I had loved so much, was no longer available to me. Everything now is in the updated Moncrieff, which, perhaps irrationally, gives me the feeling of accepting the NRSV instead of the King James Version.

I have a tablet I use for Kindle reading, a Daylight, but for a long time I could not connect it to the internet in the USA (I forgot I changed the WiFi password), so I was unable to download Proust. And anyway, I had a new job, we had moved to a new country, reading Proust was nothing to do with anything I needed to do. And those moods kept gripping me to read other things like Adam Smith and Walter Scott’s poetry—books that demand all your attention, as much as Proust does. Once I figured out that I had been putting in the wrong WiFi password, however, I downloaded Proust. And then, that afternoon, before I started re-reading, I was browsing in Capitol Hill Books and I found old Modern Library editions of the Moncrieff translation. Déjà vu.

Another strange undefinable sense one gets that now is the time to read this book had gripped me and taken me away from Proust. For years, I disliked Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady, which starts so enchantingly, became unreadable to me within a hundred pages. James’s narrow, fussy, insular critical opinions were all explained by his fastidious fiction. This is the sort of book a man writes when he does not love George Eliot the way Proust loved George Eliot. I knew I had to take James more seriously. A great many other critics find James to be the pinnacle of a certain sort of art, The Master, the great theorist of the English language novel. Not for me. Before I read The Golden Bowl, James largely left me cold. This is an exaggeration, of course: some of the short fiction was irresistible, but I had failed to read The Portrait of a Lady, supposed to be his best, and even once I had read it, I could never love it. Books like The Europeans, The American were totally unreadable. The Bostonians took a great deal of work. Reading James made me feel simultaneously impressed and bored.

There had been a moment when everyone was talking about The Golden Bowl because it had been mentioned in the Sally Rooney novel Beautiful World, Where Are You. That moment had passed me by. But then, browsing the library shelves, I chanced upon an old copy of The Golden Bowl. It had large dull-green covers and the beautiful sort of thick, creamy paper that is no longer used to make books, upon which the firm’s fine old-fashioned typeface seemed to live with great authority and security. I picked it up with the sense that I would have to begin reading it right then.

I was immediately entranced. It is almost impossible to say anything about The Golden Bowl. If you have read it and you are one of the readers who loves the book (and indeed a great many of them do not, including Edith Walton who hated it terribly, thinking it the ruin of a great talent) we would be able to find some common ground, a shared sense of what the book is like and about. But if I merely tried to describe, summarize, explain, or explicate The Golden Bowl I think I would fail. It is notable that a lot of the most interesting criticism of this book, although it does make some efforts to explain the story, largely proceeds on the basis that you would only be reading criticism of The Golden Bowl if you had read the novel. James deliberately made his book into a labyrinth, and your choices are either to descend into the darkness or to entirely decline the adventure.

Although some of my efforts to read James had been successful—I liked The Spoils of Poynton and Washington Square, though that last one is a minor masterpiece, like Daisy Miller, not the pinnacle some people believe—this was an entirely new sensation, and I no longer read in that plodding, linear manner I had become accustomed to with James’s other books. Now I read like an enthusiastic spaniel, who, when let off the lead on a walk keeps running ahead and coming back, making loops, working over a piece of ground, moving on, coming back, making comparisons of obscurely doggy matters, so that in the end, the dog has not only had a walk of three or four times the length of the amused humans, but has experienced everything in a wild, rotating reality, quite different from the pleasant linear walk that takes place beside him. The same was true of the other late masterpiece I read by James, The Wings of the Dove, of which I never managed more than a few pages or paragraphs before turning back and re-covering the ground, sometimes pausing to re-read multiple times, sometimes to copy out page-long passages. There is no reading these books, one simply moves around in them, backwards and forwards, over and over, reviewing and reviewing, letting the picture become clearer and clearer. James is so dilatory and expansionary and moves so freely between the past and the present and the future, telling you what realization a character has in the future about a moment being narrated in the present, which clarifies something in the past, that one simply cannot breeze through the novel. We have entered the labyrinth and our torch will only show us one corner or one passageway at a time and we must keep moving it round and round the way James moves his narrative round until we develop a full sense of where we are and where we are going. The aim is not to solve the novel like a puzzle but to come to terms with its vastness. So little actually happens in the plot, but the novel contains so much.

This sort of reading is pure luxury. Sometimes, I read a hundred pages of The Golden Bowl, lying on the sofa in a sort of immersive trance—reading the way children read—but more often, it was the first thing I did in the morning, simply to read one chapter, and it took as long as it took, since I was prepared to give this book whatever it needed.

Many readers, though, find it impossible to enjoy The Golden Bowl, including accomplished critics and lovers of James’s early novels. After I recommended The Golden Bowl on Substack, someone emailed me asking if the book gets easier to read as you go. I had to tell them:

erm.... no.... Sorry!

He’s trying to depict the difficulty of knowing the world, the convolutions are his technique for showing you how hard it is to be certain about anything as an individual, or about an individual, and thus to tell the story through the vagaries of individual consciousness, rather than with the confidence of an external narrator.

I sent a paragraph from a Colin Burrow essay, published in the London Review of Books, which I thought got to the heart of the matter.

…we occupy a delicate weave of emotions and beliefs that half beguiles us into thinking of ourselves as its centre, until something is seen or something happens which tells us, irrefutably, that we are not. We live in a state of bewilderment, even though we do not want to acknowledge it, and indeed may not always know it.

James’s late style evolved along with this multiplex vision of human reality, and it is not so much a vehicle for that vision as its enabling condition.

When the modern novel was invented, it was, as Northrop Frye said, almost a parody of Romance. From tales of knights and dragons, through the direct parody of those things, the novel arrived at a reformulation of the Romance: wandering knights became gallant gentlemen, and while the characters didn’t go on marvellous journeys, they still adventured, albeit in a domestic, realistic manner. Elizabeth Bennet in her carriage is a modern image of Sir Lancelot in the forest. The quest took its characters into states of bewilderment—the state which Burrow identifies in James.

James’s characters are often called “pilgrims” who he describes as being on “adventures”—a word that once titled many early novels. His plots are so often about the arrival of a naïve American in the hostile land of England. The old quests had been in pursuit of something grand: Helen of Troy, the Holy Grail, God. Bewilderment led to victory and wisdom. But James wrote in disillusioned times. There was not just Moby Dick, but Bartleby The Scrivener, about a man who refused to do anything at all. As Borges says, in the past, every enterprise was fortunate. The golden apples were stolen. One of the knights, at least, deserved the Grail. Captain Ahab caught Moby Dick. Now, all our adventures fail: “the heroes of James or Kafka can only hope for defeat. We are so poor in courage and faith that the happy ending is nothing more than an industrial flattery. We cannot believe in heaven, but we can in hell.”

James’s characters are often stifled, bored, and disillusioned. They quest in search of experiences of life. So many of James’s characters make this appeal, and so much of the yearning and pathos that animate the late novels is an expression of this desire for life, for some real meaningful experience. The canonical expression of this mood is given by Strether in The Ambassadors.

… don’t forget that you’re young—blessedly young; be glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? This place and these impressions—mild as you may find them to wind a man up so; all my impressions of Chad and of people I’ve seen at his place—well, have had their abundant message for me, have just dropped that into my mind. I see it now. I haven’t done so enough before—and now I’m old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh I do see, at least; and more than you’d believe or I can express. It’s too late. And it’s as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to know it was there. Now I hear its faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. The affair—I mean the affair of life—couldn’t, no doubt, have been different for me; for it’s at the best a tin mould, either fluted and embossed, with ornamental excrescences, or else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one’s consciousness is poured—so that one ‘takes’ the form as the great cook says, and is more or less compactly held by it: one lives in fine as one can. Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion.

See the Proustian image, right in the middle of the paragraph, when Strether compares himself to a passenger who doesn’t know his train is waiting: “it’s as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to know it was there.” Recall the description from Swann’s Way:

I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory

Strether never got on the train and his path was not fixed in his memory, instead, he was the epitome of the Borgesian failure: he never even began his journey. What was fixed in his memory was reluctance, denial, and yet, he chose to leave Paris, to go home to morality, to once more live without the gumption to know the train was there. In the late novels, James’s characters are on a quest for morality. The Golden Bowl is that rare thing: the triumph of Good over Evil in the figures of Maggie and Charlotte; The Wings of the Dove is the triumph of Good over Evil within the breast of the hero Merton Densher. And so, worried about the immorality of the adventure he finds himself longing for, Strether goes home.

But before he went home, he saw life—though that is all he was offered, it was, perhaps, enough. In his preface to The Ambassadors, discussing the passage I quoted, James wrote,

He has accordingly missed too much, though perhaps after all constitutionally qualified for a better part, and he wakes up to it in conditions that press the spring of a terrible question. WOULD there yet perhaps be time for reparation?—reparation, that is, for the injury done his character; for the affront, he is quite ready to say, so stupidly put upon it and in which he has even himself had so clumsy a hand? The answer to which is that he now at all events SEES

It is that seeing—that great awareness of what is happening, that the train is waiting, travelling, whistling, punctuating the distance—that defines Proust’s methods. As John Bayley says, “The secret of Proust’s success is to have seen how to make use of what we all experience, to explore with all the majesty of art the joyful mental possibilities that attend the most ignoble and commonplace and everyday consciousness.”

Any association I find between James and Proust perhaps owes more to my reading of Moncrieff’s translation than the original French. Adam Gopnik explains, in a review of a biography of Moncrieff.

One other, I think significant, aspect of the translation that the biography illuminates is the intertwining, in Moncrieff’s imagination, between the materials of Proust and the related—slightly different, but related—rhythms of Henry James. James’s direct influence on Proust is debated; certainly James disliked what he read of the French writer. But in Moncrieff’s mind Proust and James always seem to come up together, to get twinned

Are we to dismiss this as an invention of Moncrieff’s? What he saw in Proust, which relates to James, is the reversion of the quest inside the mind—the final conquering of the Romance by the novel: not only was the inner reality of Sir Launcelot of little matter to Thomas Malory, but the scenery was barely present, as Eric Auerbach explained in Mimesis. The quest was all—the journey of moral redemption was a tale—then the tale became domesticated—and then it went into the interior. The interior quest is exemplified by Proust, but it was perfected, too, by Henry James. In reading Henry James, I had been learning to read Proust.

Reading Proust in spurts and intervals is like having a recurring dream in which the dream-world is familiar, many of the people and aspects are recognizable, but where the action is perpetually unfolding at the pace and on the terms of the dreamscape, so that there is not only no rush to finish, but no sense of an ending, no compulsion to advance: one simply enters the dream of the book and continues.

Proust imagines the past as a realm of Romance, like a charm that can be cast over us, entered into with its enticements like the glowing lights above the street. This distant world is glimpsed in memory and with a Proustian dedication it can be made into an art, a parallel reality, as in tales of courtly love and chivalry, which exist within a heightened alternative to our lives, but which are clearly about us and contain us.

By reason of the muffling of all sound in the carpets, and of the remoteness of her cosy retreat, the lady of the house, not being apprised of your entry as she is to-day, would continue to read almost until you were standing before her chair, which enhanced still further that sense of the romantic, that charm of a sort of secret discovery, which we find to-day in the memory of those gowns, already out of fashion even then, which Mme. Swann was perhaps alone in not having discarded, and which give us the feeling that the woman who wore them must have been the heroine of a novel because most of us have scarcely set eyes on them outside the pages of certain of Henry Gréville's tales.

Proust finds the entry to this charm and secret most famously in a madeleine, although this is one of those reports from literature that proves to have been inadequate, because the madeleine itself is not the entryway to memory, but rather a spoonful of tea in which there is a crumb of the cake.

She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.

Proust’s entrance to the realm of memory, the dream world of Romance, is, in Moncrieff’s translation at least, remarkably Shakespearean. Sonnet 27 begins,

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired

Here we find Proust’s “pilgrim” (with travel tired), his weariness (in one from a dull day, in the other from toil), and the transposition from the present reality of the body to the journey of the mind—Proust’s quest to the interior. He continues.

I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has called up in me, but does not itself understand, and can only repeat indefinitely with a gradual loss of strength, the same testimony; which I, too, cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call upon the tea for it again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth.

The traditional purpose of the quest is the moral reformation of the hero, who undertakes their journey in order to reorient themselves to their society, to atone for some indiscretion or sin, or to learn a greater awareness of themselves and their relation to the world. There is not only a common sense among questers that they must learn to navigate the world according to their own lights, but that some suffering must be endured in order for the quest to be transfigurative. There are moments when Proust’s narration is close to Dante’s, when he sees other people caught in the dilemma of improvement. Compare this, from Swann’s Way,

And yet this Odette, from whom all this evil sprang, was no less dear to him, was, on the contrary, more precious, as if, in proportion as his sufferings increased, there increased at the same time the price of the sedative, of the antidote which this woman alone possessed.

to this, from Canto VI of the Inferno,

So did we pass across that squalid mixture
of shadows and of rain, our steps slowed down,
talking awhile about the life to come.

At which I said: “And after the great sentence-
o master—will these torments grow, or else
be less, or will they be just as intense?”

And he to me: “Remember now your science,
which says that when a thing has more perfection,
so much the greater is its pain or pleasure.

Though these accursed sinners never shall
attain the true perfection, yet they can
expect to be more perfect then than now.”

The accursed sinners of Proust shall never attain the true perfection either, but the vision of love is held before them, a vision requiring that they pass through suffering. Dante’s dark realms are real—Hell and Purgatory are external to us, places we must spend eternal life if we are unfortunate—whereas Proust’s dark realms are all within. He says, after drinking the second spoonful of tea, ready to examine his own mind,

What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

Dante’s quest took him into the underworld; Proust’s into the inner world; but Proust echoes Dante, because the sensation of being called by a Beatrice, of passing through the realms of darkness, are all part of the experience of life, whether conveyed through Christian belief or personal experience.

At such moments Gilberte’s plaits used to brush my cheek. They seemed to me, in the fineness of their grain, at once natural and supernatural, and in the strength of their constructed tracery, a matchless work of art, in the composition of which had been used the very grass of Paradise.

Likewise, when he goes to Albertine’s room one evening in the hotel at Balbec, he describes his ascent in Dantean terms,

I rang for the lift-boy to take me up to the room which Albertine had engaged, a room that looked over the valley. The slightest movements, such as that of sitting down on the bench in the lift, were satisfying, because they were in direct relation to my heart; I saw in the ropes that drew the cage upwards, in the few steps that I had still to climb, only a materialisation of the machinery, the stages of my joy.

Proust continually turns from the physical world to the imaginative, which is reality-enhancing: “to strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce them to their own dimensions, that is to say to nothing.” Like James, he makes this idea the keynote of his themes: it is in the gap between how we imagine ourselves and our futures and how we actually live that Proust and James find their subject.

We must have imagination, awakened by the uncertainty of being able to attain our object, to create a goal which hides our other goal from us, and by substituting for sensual pleasures the idea of penetrating into a life prevents us from recognising that pleasure, from tasting its true savour, from restricting it to its own range.

By the time of James and Proust, Romance was incredible; we had left Dante’s cosmos, and all the attendant certainties it allowed a poet, even so inventive and radical a poet as Dante, and had entered a new forest, the realm of memory. Proust says the past projects itself before us as a “shadow of itself which we call our future”. This is why James’s characters in the late novels are forever being described as reconsidering current events in the future. Describing the party where Kate meets Densher, James begins: “The beginning—to which she often went back—had been a scene, for our young woman, of supreme brilliancy.” The beginning—to which she often went back… So Proustian, so Dantean. The longer we read, the more resonant such phrases become, as we cannot but be aware that the circles Dante descended have become psychological circles, concentric memories, forever reviewed and revised in light of their outcomes. In The Wings of the Dove, James is not writing about the present, but about the past and the shadow it casts forward onto his characters’ futures.

The day after I found those Modern Library copies in Capitol Hill Books, I opened my Kindle app to finish reading In a Budding Grove. It was raining, so I could not read outside, but the office where I work has a single corridor running around its outer edge, and so I paced, round and round, reading as I walked, with the sudden feeling—despite the new surroundings, the difference of reading on a screen, not in beautiful old books—of having a dream I remembered from months before. Here it all was, just as I now remembered it, as I made my own little daily journey back into Proust. I was re-reading the last quarter of the book, so some of it was familiar, some of it was new. But having read James in the meantime, and having read James as part of a broader project—now abandoned—to write a book about the history of quests in literature, I was reading Proust afresh. I saw it all again in different terms.

Now, Proust was more obviously part of the history of the quest in literature, of the idea that if we want any meaning, any sense, we shall have to find it, create it, for ourselves, just as James wrote about in the Preface to The Ambassadors, and just as I had developed the idea from reading Dante, Shakespeare, Eliot, and many others. Authors have expressed this idea in so many ways that merely to list the relevant quotations could fill a book. But in Within a Budding Grove, the final section at the sea-side, I found a perfect expression of the idea I had been chasing through the Arthurian myths and The Pilgrim’s Progress and the novels of Jane Austen.

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory.

So much is contained here. The word wilderness stands out to me, reminiscent of the opening of Bunyan—As I walked through the wilderness of this world—whose prose rhythms surely, consciously or unconsciously, informed Moncrieff’s translation, just as they influenced Ruskin, who Proust translated into French. Alack for my own paltry efforts: why write criticism about an idea that has not only been implicit and explicit in thousands of years of literature, but which received perfect concise expression in a masterwork? But the ambition to write a book dies easily in the face of the small creeping feeling that one is starting to get a sense of the whole, a view, however incomplete, of some essential part of literature.

George Eliot had said something similar to this in Middlemarch: “We are all of us born in moral stupidity.” Dorothea has to learn her way into wisdom. Even though she has begun to emerge from her stupidity early, when she married Casaubon she thought only of herself: “it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive … that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.” We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves.

Reading is part of that discovery, or it can be; certainly, that is part of what authors intend their books to do for us, if we will let them. The easy strictures that we see offered every day—that reading is improving, develops empathy, makes us into better people—all lack the simple idea required to bring out the real truth of the matter: reading is part of moral formation: it is not easy to be good, to develop the virtues, to become a wise person. Turning pages is insufficient. Discovering wisdom is not a question of reading novels. A letter that Samuel Johnson wrote to his servant Frank Barber comes to mind, written when Frank was sent away to boarding school as a child.

DEAR FRANCIS,

I am at last sat down to write to you, and should very much blame myself for having neglected you so long, if I did not impute that and many other failings to want of health. I hope not to be so long silent again. I am very well satisfied with your progress, if you can really perform the exercises which you are set; and I hope Mr. Ellis does not suffer you to impose on him, or on yourself.

Make my compliments to Mr. Ellis, and to Mrs. Clapp, and Mr. Smith.

Let me know what English books you read for your entertainment. You can never be wise unless you love reading.

Do not imagine that I shall forget or forsake you; for if, when I examine you, I find that you have not lost your time, you shall want no encouragement from

Yours affectionately,

SAM. JOHNSON.

Ah that wonderful line: You can never be wise unless you love reading. Taken alone, it is encouraging, the sort of thing we put on a card, or share online, and that we casually misread as meaning that if we love reading then we shall become wise, whereas all it really says is that in order to be wise we must learn to love reading: these are the conditions for wisdom to become possible, not the tricks to become a wise person. Look at all the things Johnson says around that little phrase: perform the exercises you are set, Frank is told, Johnson will be encouraging if he has not lost his time. But isn’t Proust all about lost time—not merely lost in the sense that it has gone, but in the sense that it was lost to inner speculation—how would Johnson, the great moralist of reading, feel about such a book: does Proust encourage us to undertake a quest for wisdom, or is his book an indulgence? After all, reading a novel, even Proust, is hardly a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us… Still, Johnson asks Frank, Let me know what English books you read for your entertainment. Reading can be part of moral formation, if that is the goal we have in mind. But also, Johnson says, if we learn to love reading.

When we moved to America, we had only eight suitcases, plus carry-on cases; half of my carry-on was filled with hundreds of sheets of yellow paper. These were the notes I had spent over a year making in the London Library. In my hurry to try and write a book about quests in literature, I had made hundreds of pages of notes: some of them were nothing more than copied out quotations and references, some were my own thoughts. These notes became a point of anxiety, for without them, not only would I not be able to write my book, but I would have lost all of that time, having to rely only upon what I could remember.

The notes were only half arranged, and when I got to my new office, one of the things I had to do was sort them into somewhat thematic piles, although that was only possible for some of the notes, because I had followed many references (and my own inclinations) to try and cover as broad an amount of material as possible, which inevitably only made the project longer and more ambitious, leaving me with a greater and greater sense that I was not trying to write a particular book, but was trying to learn as much of the history of literature as I could, a doomed and egotistical task.

The day before I began reading Proust again, I started writing this essay. I had been thinking about it all the time when I was not reading Proust, and sometimes when I was walking around, putting plates in the dishwasher, or staring out of the window, I thought of the first line, which had come into my head a long time ago. Once I had drafted about five thousand words, and read another hundred and fifty pages, I realized I needed my notes. I was making more notes now, highlighting passages on my Kindle, a much less satisfactory experience, and I needed to start keeping everything together, even if it was just with a paperclip. But in all the notes I went through, every thick-plastic London Library bag in which they had been transported to keep them safe from leaks (I am especially cautious after waking up on an aeroplane to find that the person sitting in front of me had leaked their water all over my leather satchel, and that my laptop had escaped damage by the sheerest luck), I could only find two or three pages about Proust. I knew this was wrong. I could see them. I could see the blue and green ink, and the turquoise colour that had been made between cartridges, and the desk that abutted the bed where I lay to read, and I could see the fact that there had been many more notes.

And then a passage from towards the end of Within a Budding Grove gave me one of those memory shocks that recalled to me so much of what I had loved about Swann’s Way. I was lying on the sofa in the middle of the office, in the communal space, reading on the Kindle app, a place where I liked to read at eight in the morning until my colleagues all start to arrive: it was a splendidly quiet time, like those moments in the symphony when the orchestra dips the volume much lower than you expect, and the whole tempo of the experience seems to change, even though the pacing proceeds as before, and when I read this passage it all came back to me.

But at other times, instead of going to a farm, we would climb to the highest point of the cliff, and, when we had reached it and were seated on the grass, would undo our parcel of sandwiches and cakes. My friends preferred the sandwiches, and were surprised to see me eat only a single chocolate cake, sugared with gothic tracery, or an apricot tart. This was because, with the sandwiches of cheese or of green-stuff, a form of food that was novel to me and knew nothing of the past, I had nothing in common. But the cakes understood, the tarts were gossips. There were in the former an insipid taste of cream, in the latter a fresh taste of fruit which knew all about Combray, and about Gilberte, not only the Gilberte of Combray but her too of Paris, at whose tea-parties I had found them again. They reminded me of those cake-plates of the Arabian Nights pattern, the subjects on which were such a distraction to my aunt Léonie when Françoise brought her up, one day, Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp, another day Ali-Baba, or the Sleeper Awakes, or Sinbad the Sailor embarking at Bassorah with all his treasure. I should dearly have liked to see them again, but my grandmother did not know what had become of them, and thought moreover that they were just common plates that had been bought in the village. No matter, in that grey, midland Combray scene they and their pictures were set like many-coloured jewels, as in the dark church were the windows with their shifting radiance, as in the dusk of my bedroom were the projections cast by the magic-lantern, as in the foreground of the view of the railway-station and the little local line the buttercups from the Indies and the Persian lilacs, as were my great-aunt’s shelves of old porcelain in the sombre dwelling of an elderly lady in a country town.

Proust remembers the beginning of the novel here—the railway station—and his mention of the cakes being sugared with gothic tracery had a madeleine-and-tea effect on me, and, as so often happens when I have been reading for ninety minutes, I realized I was ready to write, and everything I had to say for the morning was already known to me, darkly, like the feeling that I was ready to lay an egg, or like I knew whatever it is that a seed knows. I put the coffee machine on while I went to the restroom and found the various extension cables, plugs, noise-cancelling headphones, made sure I had various copies of the novels available to me on Project Gutenberg, and began to type, trusting that I would remember more explicitly things that I had only taken in implicitly before, such as that mention of the train-station.

It was through architecture that Proust’s narrator of Remembrance of Things Past learned to love beauty, architecture and nature together, such as in the two passages from Swann’s Way when he recalls the beauty of the two “ways” of nearby families full of flowers that he remembers so intensely that no real flowers he has seen since ever compare to them in their realness, and in the description of the church at Balbec.

Whether it be that the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or that reality will take shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people shew me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers. The 'Méséglise way' with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its apple-trees, the 'Guermantes way' with its river full of tadpoles, its water-lilies, and its buttercups have constituted for me for all time the picture of the land in which I fain would pass my life, in which my only requirements are that I may go out fishing, drift idly in a boat, see the ruins of a gothic fortress in the grass, and find hidden among the cornfields—as Saint-André-des-Champs lay hidden—an old church, monumental, rustic, and yellow like a mill-stone; and the cornflowers, the hawthorns, the apple-trees which I may happen, when I go walking, to encounter in the fields, because they are situated at the same depth, on the level of my past life, at once establish contact with my heart.

I remembered the feeling of reading this passage more than I remembered the passage itself, which had stayed in my memory, and been invoked by the phrase sugared with gothic tracery, but as soon as I re-found it I knew this was what I had been thinking of—more than anything else about Swann’s Way, I loved the writing about nature and architecture: I have memories of fields and river banks like this, and of gothic ruins and old churches monumental, rustic, and yellow like a mill-stone, and yet Proust writes with such immersive detail that when I read this passage, although I do think of my own memories, I also see something new, something that has not come from my memory, but which I imagine to be similar to what Proust describes. I do not know if the church in the next quoted passage is real, or an imaginative composite, but it seemed to me to be like any number of churches I have visited, in which the architecture is like a jumble of history, with stray parts of different centuries caught together and left behind as time otherwise moved on, an effect which Proust in this passage calls “stored consciousness.”

One day when, at Combray, I had spoken of this coast, this Balbec, before M. Swann, hoping to learn from him whether it was the best point to select for seeing the most violent storms, he had replied: "I should think I did know Balbec! The church at Balbec, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and still half romanesque, is perhaps the most curious example to be found of our Norman gothic, and so exceptional that one is tempted to describe it as Persian in its inspiration." And that region, which, until then, had seemed to me to be nothing else than a part of immemorial nature, that had remained contemporaneous with the great phenomena of geology—and as remote from human history as the Ocean itself, or the Great Bear, with its wild race of fishermen for whom, no more than for their whales, had there been any Middle Ages—it had been a great joy to me to see it suddenly take its place in the order of the centuries, with a stored consciousness of the romanesque epoch, and to know that the gothic trefoil had come to diversify those wild rocks also, at the appointed hour, like those frail but hardy plants which, in the Polar regions, when the spring returns, scatter their stars about the eternal snows. And if gothic art brought to those places and people a classification which, otherwise, they lacked, they too conferred one upon it in return. I tried to form a picture in my mind of how those fishermen had lived, the timid and unsuspected essay towards social intercourse which they had attempted there, clustered upon a promontory of the shores of Hell, at the foot of the cliffs of death; and gothic art seemed to me a more living thing now that, detaching it from the towns in which, until then, I had always imagined it, I could see how, in a particular instance, upon a reef of savage rocks, it had taken root and grown until it flowered in a tapering spire. I was taken to see reproductions of the most famous of the statues at Balbec,—shaggy, blunt-faced Apostles, the Virgin from the porch,—and I could scarcely breathe for joy at the thought that I might myself, one day, see them take a solid form against their eternal background of salt fog. Thereafter, on dear, tempestuous February nights, the wind—breathing into my heart, which it shook no less violently than the chimney of my bedroom, the project of a visit to Balbec—blended in me the desire for gothic architecture with that for a storm upon the sea.

Somewhere, perhaps overlooked on the shelves behind me as I type, or in a cupboard in my house, or left behind inadvertently in a box in England, there are pages of yellow paper with these passages written out upon them, and the collation of notes, alongside this essay, is my own sort of stored consciousness, just as Remembrance of Things Past is Proust’s, which is perhaps why he is such an appealing writer for critics and other writers, and for those readers who accumulated associations between their lives and their reading, and who can recall, as I can with my desk and my notes, places and times of their lives according to what they were reading, and the impressions that reading left, so strongly and deeply, upon them that a little phrase about sugar on a cake can recall it all.

At the end of Within a Budding Grove, I decided to read some Ruskin. Normally, Ruskin would be a pleasure. His beliefs are frequently incredible to me, but his prose is splendid. When young writers asked Evelyn Waugh for advice, he told them to read a page of Ruskin a day. A good many writers today could benefit from such advice, myself not the least. I turned to Ruskin after the mention of clouds in this passage,

To be quite accurate I ought to give a different name to each of the 'me's' who were to think about Albertine in time to come; I ought still more to give a different name to each of the Albertines who appeared before me, never the same, like—called by me simply and for the sake of convenience 'the sea'—those seas that succeeded one another on the beach, in front of which, a nymph likewise, she stood apart. But above all, in the same way as, in telling a story (though to far greater purpose here), one mentions what the weather was like on such and such a day, I ought always to give its name to the belief that, on any given day on which I saw Albertine, was reigning in my soul, creating its atmosphere, the appearance of people like that of seas being dependent on those clouds, themselves barely visible, which change the colour of everything by their concentration, their mobility, their dissemination, their flight—like that cloud which Elstir had rent one evening by not introducing me to these girls, with whom he had stopped to talk, whereupon their forms, as they moved away, had suddenly increased in beauty—a cloud that had formed again a few days later when I did get to know the girls, veiling their brightness, interposing itself frequently between my eyes and them, opaque and soft, like Virgil's Leucothea.

Reading this brought a line from Ruskin’s Edinburgh lectures to mind. I misremembered the wording. I thought of the line as being, “God makes the clouds new for you every day so you may as well look at them.” Obviously, this was my own bastardisation of Ruskin, who would never write in this hopelessly modern idiom. The original line, I find, reads: “does not God vary His clouds for you every morning and every night?” These are the cadences of a certain sort of English prose that is now, more or less, unheard, apart from on occasion. I think of that line often as I watch the clouds when I travel home in the evening. Ruskin said it as part of an argument that architecture had become dull and stale and needed to become a true art once more.

How many Corinthian and Doric columns do you think there are in your banks, and post-offices, institutions, and I know not what else, one exactly like another?—and yet you expect to be interested! Nay, but, you will answer me again, we see sunrises and sunsets, and violets and roses, over and over again, and we do not tire of them. What! did you ever see one sunrise like another? does not God vary His clouds for you every morning and every night? though, indeed, there is enough in the disappearing and appearing of the great orb above the rolling of the world, to interest all of us, one would think, for as many times as we shall see it; and yet the aspect of it is changed for us daily.

Proust’s narrator longs for storms and fog over the sea, just as he yearns for the church at Combray, and this combination of Nature and Architecture is a Ruskinian correspondence; it was what he hoped to see in Balbec, before he was distracted by the girls. The poor narrator was not given storms: instead, “the weather had been so dazzling and so unchanging” that when the curtains were opened “I could always, without once being wrong, expect to see the same patch of sunlight folded in the corner of the outer wall, of an unalterable colour.”

So I went to the Ruskin Proust translated, The Bible of Amiens, written for children to teach them about Christianity, which, although it is much more boring than Within a Budding Grove, has a great fascination because it is so startlingly Proustian. Once you have passed through the dark Preface, written with so much Victorian stiffness one begins to feel, despite its brevity, as if the words themselves are closing in, trapping you, there comes an opening sentence that cannot be read without thinking of the opening of Swann’s Way.

THE intelligent English traveller, in this fortunate age for him, is aware that, half-way between Boulogne and Paris, there is a complex railway-station, into which his train, in its relaxing speed, rolls him with many more than the average number of bangs and bumps prepared, in the access of every important French gare, to startle the drowsy or distrait passenger into a sense of his situation.

So Ruskin, too, structures his book as a quest, and, like Proust, a quest into the past, for which the image of the train makes a convenient opening symbol, representing travel, the opening of a narrative, but also life, which only goes one way, and is, as Philip Larkin wrote in his own poem about a train journey, a frail travelling coincidence. After a few paragraphs of scene-setting, Ruskin invites intelligent Eton boys, or perhaps a thoughtful English girl, to accompany him to consider a “building, and its unshadowed minaret.”

Minaret I have called it, for want of a better English word. Flèche—arrow—is its proper name; vanishing into the air you know not where, by the mere fineness of it.

This is Larkinian too. ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ ends with famous lines,

We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

It is often said, because Larkin said it, that these lines were inspired by a scene in the wartime film of Henry V, with Laurence Olivier, in which the arrows of the archers at Agincourt are sent flying, but I cannot help but hear the echo of Ruskin’s vanishing into the air you know not where, by the mere fineness of it. Proust picks this up more than once, describing, in Swann’s Way, the church of Combray: “the apse, drawn muscularly together and heightened in perspective, seemed to spring upwards with the effort which the steeple made to hurl its spire-point into the heart of heaven.” In the French, Proust uses the word flèche.

l’abside musculeusement ramassée et remontée par la perspective semblât jaillir de l’effort que le clocher faisait pour lancer sa flèche au cœur du ciel

Moncrieff’s “spire-point” began as Ruskin’s “Flèche—arrow—is its proper name; vanishing into the air you know not where, by the mere fineness of it.” Slightly earlier, Proust describes his memories of seeing the spire rising up in the sky

And in the evening, as I came in from my walk and thought of the approaching moment when I must say good night to my mother and see her no more, the steeple was by contrast so kindly, there at the close of day, that I would imagine it as being laid, like a brown velvet cushion, against—as being thrust into the pallid sky which had yielded beneath its pressure, had sunk slightly so as to make room for it, and had correspondingly risen on either side; while the cries of the birds wheeling to and fro about it seemed to intensify its silence, to elongate its spire still further, and to invest it with some quality beyond the power of words.

Strange to hear the echoes of Larkin, Ruskin, and Proust together, but here they are, invested with some quality beyond the power of words.

Proust was trying to write about life, about what it is like to live. I am merely trying to write about reading, about what it is like to read. But can I write about more than reading Proust? This morning I picked up The Guermantes Way as I left early to go to the doctor, and thus all my plans were lost. I arrived at the office shortly after eight, settled my boy with his books and games (he comes with me sometimes, and we end up lying on the sofa reading together), and the next thing I knew, having done my laps of the office and read on the sofa, it had been some two and a half hours, and the comings and goings of my colleagues, their morning conversations, even a few direct interruptions, had all been subsumed by Proust’s narrator describing Françoise’s egotism, her essential servantness, his own secret attempts to catch a glimpse of the Guermantes Duchess, his interpolated essay about cotton-wool in the ears and the effects of silence. To read Proust is to be suspended, to step outside of time, or the awareness of time, and as I rise from the sofa, out of sheer physical necessity, and realise that rather than it being nine a.m. it is long after ten, I remember something Ryan Ruby once wrote about reading Proust,

a frequent experience while reading In Search of Lost Time is to look up half-way through a sentence and stare into the middle distance in a kind of mnemonic reverie or “epiphanic swoon” (as the scholar and translator Christopher Prendergast puts it in his recent study Living and Dying with Marcel Proust), only to find, catching sight of a clock out of the corner of one’s eye, that whole hours have passed.

Oh but I would gladly give up those hours again. I shall never forget the section where Proust explains that “every historic house, in town or country, has its lady or its fairy, as every forest has its spirit.” He has moved, or his family have moved, to the town, away from Combray, and he understands that the magical feeling of suspense which exists in the country, and which we have seen Proust describe in the fields, the spires, the railway, also inheres in the city, which is just as much a place of fantasy and the imagination.

Sometimes, hidden in the heart of its name, the fairy is transformed to suit the life of our imagination by which she lives; thus it was that the atmosphere in which Mme. de Guermantes existed in me, after having been for years no more than the shadow cast by a magic lantern slide or the light falling through a painted window, began to let its colours fade when quite other dreams impregnated it with the bubbling coolness of her flowing streams.

And yet the fairy must perish if we come in contact with the real person to whom her name corresponds, for that person the name then begins to reflect, and she has in her nothing of the fairy…

To touch reality is to break the veil of imagination. I was once sitting outside a London restaurant, the sort of place that allowed only members (and I was waiting for my friend, who was a member) when I looked up from my book and saw, stepping out of a black car of the sort that are used for official purposes, and which one gets used to seeing in London, the Princess Beatrice, who strode right inside the restaurant. I am something of a royalist, and there was, just for a second, a sense of having seen a fairy, one of those strange, proud creatures we are never afforded more than a passing sight of, unless we are unlucky—the idea of the Princess did not perish, for she passed by so swiftly. The same thing happened when I saw the Queen, the great Elizabeth II, shortly afterwards, when I worked in Parliament, and we gathered to wave to her as she left Westminster Hall; she looked over and waved to us before getting into her car, and it was, again, as if the spirit of the hall had come back, briefly, and brought a new life to the history of the place—as if, for a second, one had stepped out of time, as if suspended. It is this sense of being suspended that most characterises what it is like to read Proust.

Some of my favourite lines in Chaucer appear in ‘The Book of the Duchess’.

My windows were shut each one
And through the glass shone the sun
Upon my bed with bright beams,
With many glad gilded streams;
And the heavens too were so fair;
Blue, bright, clear was the air,
And full temperate, forsooth, it was;
For neither too cold nor hot it was,
Nor in all the heavens was a cloud. (A. S. Kline trans.)

Chaucer captures in these lines something slightly magical—the sensation of being in a gilded stream of light. There is something religious about that image, of course, but also something fantastical. One cannot sit in a stream of light. But when I read these lines, I am left with the head-spinning sensation of the narrator almost levitating in the glad gilded streams. Here is a poem called ‘Bath’ by Amy Lowell, which I take to be a response to Chaucer, intentional or not.

The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.

The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.

Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots. The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air.

Although these two descriptions are getting at something very similar, (the experience of lying either in bed or the bath while the sunlight comes in through the window, which changes your experience of the bed and the bath significantly), it is flattening, reductive, and weak-minded to try and summarize or explicate these poems. Poetry, as I am describing it, is not a means of saying something, but a means by which we can become aware of the way that we know the world in more ways than we realise. This is why, as John Carey said, “to reword is to destroy.”

I was reminded of these poems thinking about Proust and the scene in Combray when Proust was drifting idly in a boat, among the flowers, suspended almost, in the manner of Chaucer and Lowell. My friend Klara Feenstra has just published a blog that gets at the same idea. She writes of Kiran Desai, a novelist I love, “Her books create these insane auras that you enter and can’t exit from until you finish the book in its entirety.” Yes, Proust creates an aura you cannot exit from, that is why, despite having to return my copy of Within a Budding Grove to the library, the book was present in my mind all the time, like a door I knew I had left open, and could always see in my peripheral vision. I am living with the same feeling about Sir Charles Grandison, another book I cannot find here, and which I am avoiding putting on my Kindle for the same reason I delayed coming back to Proust.

I have work to do! An essay about Shakespeare and pragmatism is half-written. Another about David Copperfield is waiting for its edits. Soon I will have to start reading books that need reviewing. Work is due in the autumn about Mill and Locke and my notes are untouched on top of books left open, with pages marked. But Proust! Proust! How can I leave Proust!? Describing a scene at the theatre, when the Duchess acknowledges him, Proust’s narrator combines the Dantean mode with a description of suspense that reminds me of Chaucer.

…the Duchess had indeed seen me once with her husband, but could surely have kept no memory of that, and it gave me no pain that she found herself, owing to the place that she occupied in the box, in a position to gaze down upon the nameless, collective madrepores of the public in the stalls, for I had the happy sense that my own personality had been dissolved in theirs, when, at the moment in which, by the force of certain optical laws, there must, I suppose, have come to paint itself on the impassive current of those blue eyes the blurred outline of the protozoon, devoid of any individual existence, which was myself, I saw a ray illumine them; the Duchess, goddess turned woman, and appearing in that moment a thousand times more lovely, raised, pointed in my direction the white-gloved hand which had been resting on the balustrade of the box, waved it at me in token of friendship; my gaze felt itself trapped in the spontaneous incandescence of the flashing eyes of the Princess, who had unconsciously set them ablaze merely by turning her head to see who it might be that her cousin was thus greeting, while the Duchess, who had remembered me, showered upon me the sparkling and celestial torrent of her smile.

Proust is suspended in the light of the Duchess as Chaucer lay in the glad gilded streams, and this is not a bad metaphor for what happens to us when we get immersed in Remembrance of Things Past. To obtain this suspension, we must read the book as it wishes to be read—“it is the really beautiful works that, if we listen to them with sincerity, must disappoint us most keenly, because in the storehouse of our ideas there is none that corresponds to an individual impression”, Proust writes, discussing the performance of an actress—and when I came to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, I was able to learn how to read it as it wishes to be read, whereas his other books, which I have never loved, even when I do manage to read them in that manner, do not open up for me any sense of awe; being able to attune oneself to the tacit awareness of the unspoken that runs through all of James, which is the essence and the subject and the style of The Golden Bowl, is what makes me sense the fairy at the heart of his novel, just as one feels about Proust’s much easier but still labyrinthine sentences. What they both provide us with as readers is the material for an internal quest that feels less like a traditional narrative journey and more like the contemplative experience of memory and anticipation.

A whole morning of reading and writing about Proust left me too tired for any other work, so I replied to emails, (and I would think of the way we call email a hassle when it is in fact a miracle the next day when I read the famous telephone sequence in The Guermantes Way), had lunch, tried to sleep but could not, before going to talk to the office interns, who I like to drop in on without a schedule so that despite them feeling they have only “light touch” management, they also feel that they ought to be ready with answers about how they have been working the next time I come to talk: the simple effect of someone asking if we are making the most of our time is just as effective on them as it would be on me. Then I left the office and went to read by the pool with my family. As I wrote on Notes: “Reading Proust, which is terrible, because it means I am not getting any work done: I just read Proust and write about reading Proust, and then, when I think I am done for the morning, I think about reading Proust some more.”

Reading Proust is like the reading of other great novels—those long mornings when I read in bed for four hours as part of my revision for university finals, which was how I read Tom Jones, a foolish mistake, as it was not a book I had read before, and although it provided me with some progress towards my ambition to have read the canon of English Literature, and gives me, still, some very fine reading memories, like lying in bed with Swann’s Way, it was not sensible exam technique. Last year, sitting in the red Victorian arm-chair my wife bought when I got cancer, one of the low-seated sort known as a nursing chair, which have low arms and a long seat, with plush, velvet buttoned fabric, on the back of which the buttons have long creases running between them that make diamond patterns, I read War & Peace, not allowing myself to do anything else until I had done my morning reading, and in that chair I likewise read the novels of George Eliot, a good deal of Shakespeare during two weeks of the winter when I was crouched in a blanket, with the Jonathan Bate edition heavy on my lap.

At the pool, I think of all the times I spent as a teenager reading on sun-loungers on family holidays—emerging from The Way We Live Now with a hunger so intense I had never known before, or forcing my family to keep the light on late so I could finish The Mayor of Casterbridge, or sitting beside Lake Garda reading Brideshead Revisited three times in a row, unpausingly turning back to the start as soon as I had finished. On my way out of the house that morning, I took The Guermantes Way to the doctor, planning to read it in all the in-between moments in my days: waiting rooms, lunch-time, on the bus; and now, here I was, sitting by the pool as the children played underwater games and the old ladies of the condo sunned themselves in modest attire, reading and re-reading the passage when Saint-Loup encourages Proust’s narrator to tell a funny anecdote that he has already heard, merely to demonstrate to some friends what a charming fellow the narrator is.

If I had made some remark at which, alone in my company, he would merely have smiled, he was afraid that the others might not have seen the point, and put in a “What’s that?” to make me repeat what I had said, to attract attention, and turning at once to his friends and making himself automatically, by facing them with a hearty laugh, the fugleman of their laughter, presented me for the first time with the opinion that he actually held of me and must often have expressed to them. So that I caught sight of myself suddenly from without, like a person who reads his name in a newspaper or sees himself in a mirror.

The reflexivity of reading is like this: I think of passages in Henry James that pre-occupied me on the red-armchair, such as the visit of Charlotte and the Prince to the shop, or those wonderful conversations between Fanny Assingham and her husband, and I think of Tom Jones, or the day I read Absalom and Achitophel sitting with my feet up on the large window in my college room, a long spring day underway outside, and all the calmness and quietness of the college gardens humming in at the window, the gentle movement of wind in the trees and insects on the breeze, and a friend coming in and startling me into awareness, and her telling me how nice it was to really see someone re-discovering the love of their subject, not that I had lost such a love, but that there was more often a sense of cynical or dutiful reading for the sake of essay writing, rather than what she thought she had observed in me, and which I only realised through her commentary, that I was experiencing what Wallace Stevens described: “The house was quiet and the world was calm. / The reader became the book; and summer night / Was like the conscious being of the book.”

These are the sensations of reading Proust, which I notice on my walking loops as another train goes past in The Guermantes Way, and I think, once more, of the opening, the beginning—to which I often went back…: “my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book.” Reading on the sofa, I hear the low-toned hum of the air-conditioning, the drip of the coffee machine, and none of it sounds like passing time, but merely like the noise of the street as I read in London, the construction work and helicopters and book trolleys of the London Library, and outside the sun is bright, the world is passing by, while Proust’s narrator tries to talk to his grandmother on the telephone.

This ought to be appalling; it is not. Perhaps I should not have gone to the aquarium. If wisdom is found in the oscillation between two views of the world, I am not wise but I am oscillating. The zoo was set-up to preserve endangered buffalo. Now there is a species of steppe horse revived from extinction, a type of wolf of which only twenty-five live free, a baby elephant who was rejected by its mother, and turtles who nestle next to alligators, unaware this is not their natural habitat. The last thing I saw was a very small turtle swimming ceaselessly against the glass.

That was the first thing I heard at a conference session I ran about poetry recently. The rest of the conference was not about poetry, at all, and so this session was a respite. No agenda, no rules, nothing official: just poetry. Some people read aloud (including an outstanding recitation by one of my colleagues of Kipling’s ‘The Last of the Light Brigade’), others spoke about their experiences as readers. And one very common experience was summed up in that sentence.

I want to be the sort of person who reads poetry, but I don’t always understand it.

How many people leave school feeling like their education has killed their love of poetry? This was never how I felt. But we must remember to enter the dream of the poem, before we try to analyse it. How many critics have “understood” a poem by stepping out of the dream and reducing art to analysis?

What I said to the lady who struggled to understand poems (and she was by no means the only one who felt that way) was: perhaps that is how you are supposed to feel.

The first time I read ‘Filling Station’ by Elizabeth Bishop—a poem I now have by heart—I almost didn’t understand what was happening, quite literally. I found the poem disorienting, despite its simplicity. Partly, I did not know about taborets, or daisy stitch and marguerites. Partly, I was struggling against the literal meaning—the station is not literally oil-soaked, oil-permeated, like the men’s rags and overalls, is it? The ground is not soaked in oil, nor the pumps. The words “a disturbing, over-all/black translucency” bring some clarity to this, but obliquely. The effect was that of opening a window onto a bright day: I had to read the poem several times just to understand the literal events.

There is humour in the poem, and it took me a few reads to understand that Bishop was writing, to begin with, with something like contempt. In the first two stanzas, “dirty” is repeated three times, and so is “oil”. The filling station is “little” and “disturbing” and the sons are “quick and saucy and greasy”. The poem’s first impression is snobbish. And the humour—Be careful with that match!, (it’s a family filling station)—is also snobbish.

Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Disorientation begins in the opening line. Oh, but it is dirty! Someone is complaining about having to stop at this place. This is the in medias res approach Robert Browning sometimes uses in his dramatic monologues. In ‘The Moose’, Bishop takes four stanzas of description before she tells us what is happening—a bus journeys west. In ‘Filling Station’, we have to infer what is happening.

Who speaks? Is there someone with them, someone lighting a cigarette perhaps? (Be careful with the match! can be heard in the same anxious tone as Oh, but it is dirty! both lines suitably punctuated with an exclamation mark.) With these exclamations, Bishop sets-up a sense of disgust, away from which the poem now moves, towards a greater and greater sympathy. The more she sees of the station, the more she understands that these are people with feelings, loved by someone who has provided furniture, a plant, reading material.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Now she questions things, sees behind the pumps, and finds it incongruent. The dog on the sofa is a simple, immediate image of domesticity, in some ways out of place. The filling station is seen strangely. As she travels, she must learn to know the world, not to see only what she already understands. Thoreau: “That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another’s. We see so much only as we possess.” And: “We are as much as we see.”

The poem closes with more questions, which are answered by explaining that someone loves these people—and that the cars racing past are “high-strung”, just as she was when she arrived. She jokes that the plant she spots behind the filling station might be oiled instead of watered. Humour has become affectionate, but she keeps some observational distance.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)
Somebody embroidered the doily.

Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
esso—so—so—so
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

In this poem, the speaker doesn’t understand what she sees. What she does understand, she doesn’t like. To begin with, she is almost going to retreat from the place which is “all quite thoroughly dirty” without ever really seeing it. But then the sofa and cement porch catch her eye. She looks again. Gradually, she comes to terms with where she is.

This is what it is like to read a poem. As Thoreau said, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” We must let the poem teach us how to read it.

In Prayer (I), George Herbert creates a sonnet out of a series of metaphors for prayer. No explanation is given. The images emerge, disorientingly.

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

I especially like the line The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, as I think it expresses a common feeling of reading poetry—a half-way feeling between experience and understanding. The soul can only be paraphrased. There are no words that fully express the human soul. The heart in prayer is on a journey to God, it cannot be said to have arrived. Poetry is the soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage. It is a common cliché that life is a journey—but it is a cliché because it is true, it has been said for as long as there has been commentary on human life.

As Thoreau said, being a traveller is the history of every one of us.

A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from —— toward ——; it is the history of every one of us.

Poetry is about that traveling. Whether in literal journeys in which we learn to see strangely, as in Bishop, or about spiritual journeys, as in Herbert, travels in our heads and souls, poetry captures the sense of being unsure about the world, but knowing that something is understood. Before we can begin to talk about the specific understanding, we have to be able to enter the dream, and to begin to see the poem as it wishes to be seen. We must read like travelers, coming into a new place, looking for what they can see.

If you don’t understand the poetry you read, you are at the start of the journey. There is nowhere else to begin. As we read, we learn that “No definition of poetry is adequate,” as Thoreau said, “unless it be poetry itself.”

The response from the publisher of Granta, Sigrid Rausing, has essentially been to shrug and say, “Who knows?” We asked Claude, it wasn’t sure, so whatareyagunnado. Anyway maybe it’s racism. A separate statement, this one from the Commonwealth Foundation, said, confusingly, that they would never feed stories to an AI model because then the evil AI would steal the content. Sam Leith, literary editor of The Spectator, agrees with Rausing. Rausing is one of our greatest philanthropists and Leith one of our best critics. I find their attitudes bewilderingly passive.

From , a very nice piece. I wasn’t going to write about the AI story that won the Commonwealth Prize. I wasn’t surprised by what happened. And I have written before everything I would have said. In short: this is what happens when you ignore AI and get your opinions from the newspaper rather than using the models yourself. Asking Claude if the story was AI generated is a giveaway that the people involved don’t quite know what they are doing. Some literary people are at risk of circling around themselves, maintaining a sense of political and moral acceptability.

Obviously that is naive and this prize is only the start of what will happen. But it is also unliterary behaviour! The world is changing and even if you hate the changes and think them wicked that is all the more reason to have some understanding of what is going on. It’s like opposing the internet without ever logging on. Good luck! Perhaps it is a principled stance, and for certain individuals it is surely the right one, but it is not possible to simply avoid AI anymore. More and more submissions will be AI generated. More award committees will be fooled. And more uses of phrases like “AI plagiarism” will be used in the hope that a moral attitude will be insulating against the real world.

Ian repeats one of the platitudes that has become common wisdom recently:

A story that isn’t written by a human has no purpose, and can only offer paltry satisfactions to a reader who knows this to be so.

Maybe! But we are running that experiment and I don’t think we should be so sure. Yes there is a study, but that is based on current AI, not the capabilities of the future. One day, perhaps soon, we will not be able to tell what is written with AI, and some of it might be so good that we will just have to live with the uncertainty. If a human creates a story using AI and that story is never “revealed” as being part AI, or if it is simply too hard to be sure, then we might have to revise our ideas. If the writing is good enough, some people will get over the fact that AI was used. The future is high variation!

When he died, Larkin was discovered to be a monster, and some people said they couldn’t read his poetry anymore. That didn’t last. We know that many famous lines and phrases we love in older poems were “plagiarised” (great artists steal, and all that) and it doesn’t diminish our pleasure. Think of all the readers who didn’t notice or care that the recently cancelled horror novel Shy Girl was AI written, or part AI written.

Right now, we have AI writing that all sounds the same. What happens when a great writer trains their own model? Or when they use a series of prompts that guide the LLM to a new sort of intertextual writing? Or when AI companies train their models to be better writers? Or when a young person no-one has yet heard of emerges with a strange new sort of writing based on their years of AI prompting since their childhood?

It is so easy to say that stories have to be human written. Just like it is easy to say “people love human generated slop too!” But those phrases are also—though not always—part of the “currently sensible and acceptable doctrine”. The really sensible thing is to wait and see. While the literati debate the future without opening an LLM, people like Gwern are writing the future.

Swift’s plainness became his greatest influence on later writers. T. S. Eliot once said the Drapier’s Letters were essential “to anyone who would be well-read in the literature of England.” Adam Smith certainly seems to have admired them. We know he rated Jonathan Swift among the best authors, and this line, taken from the first Letter, is sure to have influenced Smith:

… for my own Part, I am already resolved what to do; I have a pretty good Shop of Irish Stuffs and Silks, and instead of taking Mr WOOD’S bad Copper, I intende to Truck with my Neighbours the Butchers, and Bakers, and Brewers, and the rest…

That is Jonathan Swift in 1724. Adam Smith famously wrote in 1776 about our propensity to truck and barter, and of the butcher, brewer, and baker’s regard to their own self-interest. This little echo is characteristic of Swift’s great influence on those who followed him. It is the small source of a great river. Almost everyone knows some Swift. Most children have seen a picture, if not a film, of Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians. Samuel Johnson, notoriously hostile to Swift (his great rival), said that once you had thought of the little people and the big people all the rest followed naturally. But this is not so.

The great pleasure of reading Swift is that his plainness is by no means simple. As the quotation chosen by that stack boy shows (taken from the 1720 pamphlet A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture), Swift was vicious in a good cause. He loved to let a sentence or paragraph unspool, like a fly making concentric circles above its landing place, before whipping down at the end with a snap. Consider the description of how Lilliputians order their writing on the page:

I shall say but little at present of their learning, which, for many ages, has flourished in all its branches among them: but their manner of writing is very peculiar, being neither from the left to the right, like the Europeans, nor from the right to the left, like the Arabians, nor from up to down, like the Chinese, but aslant, from one corner of the paper to the other, like ladies in England.

Swift is the master of a slow build-up and sudden turn of phrase that turns an innocent list into a vicious twist. The Travels is often discussed as a book of ideas, which it no doubt is, but it is also incredibly funny. The humor is essential to its moral organization.

The first book, the visit to the land of Lilliputian dwarves, is a sublime satire on the machinations of politics. Having worked in the British Parliament for two years, I find it screamingly funny – better than P. G. Wodehouse. Last year, I listened, as an experiment during a dismal train journey, to an audiobook version narrated by David Hyde Pierce (the actor who played Niles Crane in Frasier). Pierce gets the rhythms just right and I was helpless with laughter in Charing Cross Station. Swift benefits from being read aloud and will presumably continue to flourish in this new age of audio and video.

The political humor of the first book is remarkably relevant today. In Lilliput, Gulliver is visited by Reldresal, principal secretary for private affairs, who explains that the country is plagued by political partisanship. He tells Gulliver that “for about seventy moons past there have been two struggling parties in this empire, under the names of Tramecksan and Slamecksan, from the high and low heels of their shoes, by which they distinguish themselves.” It is thought that the king favors the low heels, because “his majesty’s imperial heels are lower at least by a drurr than any of his court (drurr is a measure about the fourteenth part of an inch).”

The best is yet to come. The two parties are so at odds, they cannot even dine together. The high heels have more numbers, but the low heels have all the power. But this might change because the king’s son, the heir to the crown, has “one of his heels … higher than the other, which gives him a hobble in his gait.” The wife of the actual heir to the crown is known to have found this passage hilarious when the Travels were published. Reldresal goes on to relate the terrible religious civil wars Lilliput has experienced, all because of a dispute about whether an egg ought to be cracked at the big end or the little end. The real twist comes when we are told the religious text that inspires this dispute: “that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.”

In each of Gulliver’s first three voyages, this deceptive simplicity creates great pleasure. When the King of Lilliput’s palace catches fire, and Gulliver has the quick-thinking idea of urinating on it, we can conclude, as my old college tutor said, that Swift doesn’t mind pissing on the palace. But the humor becomes darker as we keep traveling. In Brobdingnag, the queen and her dwarf get a good deal of coarse enjoyment from bullying Gulliver (who is a dwarf to them). Several times, while the queen is diverted, Gulliver is in jeopardy. When, in the third voyage, he meets the wizards who can call up any shade of the dead at command, one of the requests Gulliver makes is political.

I desired that the Senate of Rome might appear before me in one large Chamber, and a modern Representative in Counterview, in another. The first seemed to be an Assembly of Heroes and Demy-Gods, the other a Knot of Pedlars, Pick-pockets, Highwaymen, and Bullies.

Now the comic twist at the end is unfunny. To call the English Parliament “a Knot of Pedlars, Pick-pockets, and Highwaymen” is good sport, and the sort of thing that modern so-called satirists still fill their days with. The final addition of “Bullies” has the same effect of bringing a twist to the list, but now it is a sharp turn away from humor. Swift jokes, but he really means it. In a poem written toward the end of his life, Swift says he “lashed the vice.” In passages like this, one chuckles along and then feels the lash at the end.

This is an inversion of the earlier pattern. In the first part of the Travels, what is serious becomes hilarious, whereas more and more in the third part, what is funny becomes grim. On arrival in Laputa, Gulliver observes the practice of flapping. The Laputans are so absorbed in their abstract speculations that unless a servant flaps them in the face with a bladder full of peas, “they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others.” There are many stories from history of the great men of ideas who are unable to complete basic tasks, like J. S. Mill being unable to flag a taxi or find a seat on a train without much dithering and worrying. Swift’s humor takes the Laputans to a great extreme of this comic trope.

And the business of this officer is, when two, three, or more persons are in company, gently to strike with his bladder the mouth of him who is to speak, and the right ear of him or them to whom the speaker addresses himself. This flapper is likewise employed diligently to attend his master in his walks, and upon occasion to give him a soft flap on his eyes; because he is always so wrapped up in cogitation, that he is in manifest danger of falling down every precipice, and bouncing his head against every post; and in the streets, of justling others, or being justled himself into the kennel.

Kennel here means gutter and has the usual Swiftian effect – the humor builds slowly but unrelentingly toward that final image of the “intense speculator” being washed up in the gutter. But the joke cannot last long. Real human misery results from this sort of narrow inwardness. As he tours Laputa, Gulliver meets with a set of horrors.

Their houses are very ill built, the walls bevel, without one right angle in any apartment; and this defect arises from the contempt they bear to practical geometry, which they despise as vulgar and mechanic; those instructions they give being too refined for the intellects of their workmen, which occasions perpetual mistakes. And although they are dexterous enough upon a piece of paper, in the management of the rule, the pencil, and the divider, yet in the common actions and behaviour of life, I have not seen a more clumsy, awkward, and unhandy people, nor so slow and perplexed in their conceptions upon all other subjects, except those of mathematics and music.

And their worries about the heavens given them a perpetual anxiety.

These people are under continual disquietudes, never enjoying a minute’s peace of mind; and their disturbances proceed from causes which very little affect the rest of mortals. Their apprehensions arise from several changes they dread in the celestial bodies: for instance, that the earth, by the continual approaches of the sun towards it, must, in course of time, be absorbed, or swallowed up; that the face of the sun, will, by degrees, be encrusted with its own effluvia, and give no more light to the world; that the earth very narrowly escaped a brush from the tail of the last comet, which would have infallibly reduced it to ashes; and that the next, which they have calculated for one-and-thirty years hence, will probably destroy us.

Swift mocks – but do we laugh? These worries mean the Laputans cannot sleep quietly nor “have any relish for the common pleasures” of life. The first thing they ask each other in the morning is about the sun’s health. They have a deeply irrational appetite for these speculations even though it keeps them in a state of angst. Swift writes: “This conversation they are apt to run into with the same temper that boys discover in delighting to hear terrible stories of spirits and hobgoblins, which they greedily listen to, and dare not go to bed for fear.” Again, this has the quality of a joke, but it is by now getting too dark for us to enjoy it in the same manner as the absurdities of Lilliput. When Gulliver descends from the flying island of Laputa to the town of Lagado below, conditions are truly miserable.

The next morning after my arrival, he took me in his chariot to see the town, which is about half the bigness of London; but the houses very strangely built, and most of them out of repair. The people in the streets walked fast, looked wild, their eyes fixed, and were generally in rags. We passed through one of the town gates, and went about three miles into the country, where I saw many labourers working…. I never knew a soil so unhappily cultivated, houses so ill contrived and so ruinous, or a people whose countenances and habit expressed so much misery and want.

This is all drawn straight from the life of Ireland that Swift observed around him every day. The firm and common-sensical Christianity that lies just under all he writes was profoundly offended by the terrible human misery caused by England’s political domination of Ireland – the British government was like Laputa, hovering over its dominions, threatening to crush them, leaving the people starving, wild, and in rags. Swift is still lashing the vice, and it isn’t funny. His simple prose has become a means of indignation. The problem at hand isn’t complicated and requires no clever writing.

In the final voyage, to the land of the ultra-rational Houyhnhnms, this movement from laughter to horror is brought to a more vicious conclusion than anything else Swift wrote. He is famous today for the viciously satirical pamphlet A Modest Proposal, in which, irate at Ireland being so compliant with English domination, and irked by his own exhortations having no effect, he advises people to eat their babies as a food substitute. A Modest Proposal is wickedly satirical, though there is a serious point being made that few can miss. But in the Travels, the satire gives way to the depiction of wickedness.

When Gulliver arrives in the Houyhnhnm country, he encounters the Yahoos, hairy, filthy creatures, part men, part monkey, who climb up in the trees and defecate all over him. They are base and vile, full of appetites and lacking reason. The Houyhnhnms, in contrast, are creatures of (supposed) pure reason, modeled on the tame horse in Socrates’s image of the soul in the Phaedrus. Gulliver is a gull for the idea that the Yahoos are despicable and the Houyhnhnms are ideal. He falls into a deep error of thinking that the Yahoos are inferior beings who are rightly enslaved. This happens because he knows himself to be something of a Yahoo. The Yahoos so resemble humans that one of them tries to sleep with Gulliver.

In his admiration for the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver loses all sense of morality. After he has lived among them for several years, Gulliver attends a “grand assembly” of the Houyhnhnms, at which they discuss “the only debate that ever happened in their country.” These supposedly rational beings have no word for lie, no concept of opinion, and never try to compel each other. And yet, “The question to be debated was, ‘whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth?’”

The phrase “the face of the earth” echoes biblical references to genocide (Genesis 6:7: “I will destroy man who I have created from the face of the earth”) and the meaning here is unmistakable. Having enslaved the Yahoos, the rational Houyhnhnms also wish to exterminate them. Their rationality has led them to an extraordinary and vile hubris. Gulliver says, a few chapters earlier, that having seen the similarity between himself and the Yahoos, he came to lower his estimation of humankind as against the Houyhnhnms.

I must freely confess, that the many virtues of those excellent quadrupeds, placed in opposite view to human corruptions, had so far opened my eyes and enlarged my understanding, that I began to view the actions and passions of man in a very different light, and to think the honour of my own kind not worth managing.

No such reflection upon himself or the Houyhnhnms is made when he hears of their wish for genocide. Gulliver’s contribution is to suggest castrating the Yahoos rather than killing them outright. He becomes a willing participant in their enslavement and extermination.

I mentioned a custom we had of castrating Houyhnhnms when they were young, in order to render them tame; that the operation was easy and safe; that it was no shame to learn wisdom from brutes, as industry is taught by the ant, and building by the swallow (for so I translate the word lyhannh, although it be a much larger fowl); that this invention might be practised upon the younger Yahoos here, which besides rendering them tractable and fitter for use, would in an age put an end to the whole species, without destroying life.

We end the book feeling pity for Gulliver, rather than repulsion. He is mistaken, naive, irrational, and something of a fool. But at this moment, he is reprehensibly stupid. Swift, of course, speaks to us beyond Gulliver, satirizing the practices of his own society, and critiquing colonialism. What started as a joke has ended as an exhortation. Swift said he wrote the Travels to vex the world and, in his movement from hilarity to genocide, he has created a work of frustrated humor. The more we laugh to begin with, the sharper the turn at the end.

This piece was first published in Plough and is also available on .

PloughStack

Another life is possible. A home for discussion and interaction with Plough editors, writers, and readers. Subscribe to the Magazine: plough.com/subscribe

Had an idea of making an “almost-Great Books” syllabus, which might include things like

• The best expressions of worldviews which ended up losing

• The second-best expressions of worldviews which ended up winning

• Less-known works by canonical authors

• Books that were hugely popular among intellectuals but are no longer read

Some examples might be the Fable of the Bees, Sartor Resartus, Social Statics etc.

What would you put on it?

Here is the original tweet. The other “great books discourse” you can and should safely ignore.

I am not well-read enough to answer this thoroughly, and my list will be personal and partial, not to mention that ChatGPT will do a better job, but a few names that came to mind for me are: Robert Henryson’s Fables and Troilus, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Petrarch’s Secretum, Carlyle’s On Heroes, Guizot’s History of Civilization, Maitland’s History of English Law, Pater Studies in the Renaissance. I find some of the works in this category really quite dull. Sartor Resartus was unreadable. Others that I might like to include like books of Elizabethan madrigals and song lyrics I am not sure would be a priority on such a list. Does Theory of Moral Sentiments count? Or The Golden Ass? Pragmatism? I believe some Great Books programmes read The Canterbury Tales but not Troilus and Criseyde, that is probably the best option I can think of. Vico I found too dull to read, same with Newman, but they must count, and I intend to try again with both. In the English biography tradition, I would like to add Walton’s Lives. And the blessed Aubrey maybe. Herrick might not be substantial enough on his own, but the “silver poets” of the seventeenth century used to be much more popular and could stand to be revived a little. Locke’s Letters of Toleration, Areopagitica, Cato’s Letters, Burke’s minor works, Darwin’s Beagle voyage, some Rabelais, Swift’s pamphlets and related works, DeQuincey, maybe even Bolingbroke all presumably qualify. Presumably Racine and Moliere are already on Great Books reading lists? And Cicero? And what about The Anglo Saxon Chronicle, boring though it may be.

What would you all include?

There is something American about these landscapes but it is hard to say what. There are more pines than England, and the woods are deeper, with a greater sense that the trees are left to their own devices. There is a generic scene of sun-rise over a field, trees and hedge framing the picture, that begins so many historical documentaries, and even without the narrator’s accent or the music one knows it to be American.

It is so peaceful, in this place where thousands of men were killed and injured out of sheer amateurism. The first day’s march from D.C. covered only five mile because of stragglers picking blackberries and filling water canisters. The army marched north to take the Confederacy by surprise and their bayonets glinted in the summer sunlight, giving them away. The gentle landscape is revealed as now a clever location to hide a brigade of men, now an opportune spot for artillery to have the advantage of height but not the problem of being seen from far away. At the intersection in the middle of the battlefield national park, there is a stone house, uninspiring in all but its history as the place where the wounded were treated, in both of the battles at Bull Run.

Now the traffic hardly ceases here. Six miles south, there are hotels, denser housing, the sort of restaurant where you cannot always get parking, and where the cowboy skillet of eggs, mince, and cheese comes with a side of pancakes. You always know you are coming into a town because of the gas stations—six or seven of them at once. There are over forty thousand people in Manassas, and over four hundred thousand in the wider county: a dozen gas stations within a mile of each other isn’t as unreasonable as it seems. We saw a truck on the Interstate with a sticker that read “WE VOTE PRO LIFE” and a Jeep with the licence plate “JEEP CAT”. The truck was twice the height of our saloon: the wing mirror was as high as the roof of our car. The Jeep simply could not keep in its lane. Usually this means the driver is looking down at their phone; sometimes it simply means they don’t care. Later on, two cars tried to pull into the same lane from opposite sides, in full view of each other.

None of this would happen in England—the prom photos, the JEEP CAT, the lax driving, and certainly not the pro-life sticker, which would be an invitation for abuse; but neither would the battle field be so well-kept: the ranger quizzed the children about history, gave them a badge, and had them take a pledge to take an interest in the past, and to help others do so as well. Some children wail and make demands in the museum—some sit quietly on the floor and make notes and drawing from the exhibits. In the last half-hour, people were still arriving there. It was just as difficult to get parking at the battle-field visitor center as it was at the restaurant, but in both places spaces kept opening up.

There is another mirror. Standing across from Runway, Andy sees her old boss, Miranda, the Anna Wintour character. The last thing Miranda told Andy, before she left, was “I see a lot of myself in you.” Andy denied it. Still denies it. But here she is, looking in the mirror. Neither woman will be told what to do. Neither of them is happy to compromise. There is some attempt to make the film into a Cinderella story in which Cinderella becomes not a princess but a worthy girl, a heroine of the little guy, but this does not work. We see Andy at her ease, well dressed now, not back in her old, unfashionable clothes, and able to look Miranda in the eye as an equal. She is not back at the beginning. Her quest has changed her.

In the opening scenes, Andy is in front of a mirror—brushing her teeth. She wears dowdy, worthy, lumpy sweaters. She sees herself “as she really is”. Within a few weeks of working as Miranda’s new assistant, under the tutelage of Emily, the senior assistant who mocks her clothes and weight, she is ambitious, ruthless even. She sold her soul the day Stanley Tucci arrived at her desk and gave her a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes, as Emily tells her. Soon enough, she goes to Paris, having taken Emily’s place. She has discovered her inner resources.

Naturally, the usual concessions are made to the supposed strictures of common morality, to forestall any objections from the inevitably sentimental audience that the worthy young woman has been warped by corporate ambition, heartless power, or material greed. To actually come out and admit that Miranda Priestly is not the devil but a respectable person of high integrity and that Andy’s earlier ambitions were weak and misguided would be like breaching the old Hollywood code about the direct portrayal of sexual behaviour. It would offend the sensibilities of the audience. The women of the 1930s were not supposed to be able to tolerate indiscreet portrayals of romance. And the movie-goers of the Millennial generation were not supposed to be able to accept that Miranda Priestly is an unproblematic heroine, a great mentor, and a true artist. Her name is not ironic: it is indicative of her dedication. She is a priest of her art.

But by the end of the film, Andy sees herself in a different mirror. She goes back to her boyfriend, but the resolution is ambiguous. He will live in Boston and she takes the job in New York anyway. She sits across the table from him and they reconcile. But it is when she and Miranda meet on the street that the film’s resolution arrives. Andy is more confident, has great equanimity now, and it is no thanks to her sulky, selfish, childish boyfriend. There is a crucial moment when he becomes acutely sulky because she missed his birthday due to a last-minute work necessity. He is a supercilious man child and she is well-rid of him. The film knows this and makes only a weak and code-obeying effort to throw them back together in the end. It is Miranda who Andy loves; it is Miranda who she seeks to emulate.

Some people are scared of ambition, whether it is other people’s or their own. Some people wish only for a calm and uncompromised life. Andy’s friends are such people. They have no role in the plot. They are there to make certain members of the audience feel comfortable about the fact that Andy wants to be at Runway. She could have left a lot earlier. She could have refused to go to Paris (ruining Emily’s dreams). She could have refused to sleep with Christian. She walked out at the end in defiance of Miranda because she had learned everything Miranda could teach her. The Devil Wears Prada is The Godfather for the millennial generation: Andy is an innocent who learns her inner steel, but in this film Andy and Miranda represent the virtues. They are self-controlled, judicious about other people’s talents, persevere to maintain standards of excellence, and make prudent decisions based on circumstances.

What they do not do is to make kindness the virtue above all others. It is a peculiar obsession of modern culture that “kindness costs nothing” or that we ought to be nice at all times. All behaviour is a choice, ruling out other behaviours. Sometimes kindness is, indeed, a cost in itself. Sometimes kindness means not being excellent, not being judicious, not being prudential. What Andy’s friends and boyfriend do not realise is that they live in a world they take for granted because of people like Miranda. Everyone loves the scene where Miranda explains how Andy’s cerulean sweater only exists because of designers. But the real moral heart of the film is in the scene when Andy goes to Stanley Tucci in tears because Miranda was mean to her.

You want me to say poor you, Miranda is picking on you? She’s just doing her job. Wake up, Six. You’re working at the place that first published some of the major artists of the century — Halston, De La Renta, Lagerfeld. And what they made is cooler than art, because you live your life in it — I mean, not you, but some people. This is not just a magazine. It’s a shining beacon of hope for, oh, I don’t know, say a young boy growing up in Rhode Island with six brothers, pretending to go to soccer practice when he was actually at sewing class and reading Runway at night under the covers with a flashlight. You have no idea how many legends have walked these halls and what’s worse, you don’t care. Because this is a “stepping stone” for you. This place, that people would die to work, you deign to work. And you want to know why she doesn’t give you a kiss on the forehead and put a gold star on your homework?

Each of her friends has principles like this. It is just that they think their art is more important—the art of cooking, in the boyfriend’s case, and literal art in Lily’s case. Fashion is too lowly for them. It exists in the shadow world—but all art is a little world, into which the initiates must be trained, be it cooking, art, or Runway. It is the corporate friend who keeps surprising them all with his knowledge of, and appreciation of, high fashion. And high is the important word. Vogue, Chanel, and all the rest of it represent a chapter in the history of art. Perhaps it takes an unpretentious corporate type to be comfortable admitting that, yes, fashion is an art. The “real” art friend is happy to take a free handbag, of course, just not to accept what it takes to get the bag. She has no idea how many legends have walked these halls and what’s worse, she doesn’t care. Lily is a concession to the code. Andy closes the door on her just as surely as Michael does to Kay. Michael tells Kay he did not kill his sister’s husband; Andy tells her boyfriend she is going back to “real” journalism. Both dissimulate; both control. Michael has become the Godfather; Andy has become herself.

By the end of the film, though, Andy does know, and she does care, and she understands what it takes to be the best. And she steps out into the streets of New York and decides to be the Miranda Priestly of her own world. All quests require the heroine to leave their world and step into some new relation to society after a period of trial. Andy begins in the little world of lumpy sweaters and cosy ideals and has to leave it for the little world of shoes and scarves. When she returns and has to arrive where she started and know the place for the first time, as T.S. Eliot said. At the end of The Devil Wears Prada, Andy realises that in her end is her new beginning. She keeps the haircut, and the sense of style, and the new slimmer figure, and she goes out to show the world that “beauty’s where you find it”, as the lyrics to Vogue go, the song which is playing when Andy wears her fashionable clothes for the first time with her boyfriend. She is among the initiated now. The audience must choose whether they prefer the security of the code or the allure of ambition, art, the halls where legends walk.

America is good at suburbs, especially the rich suburbs of D.C., where spies and bureaucrats and regulators live. There are roads so long you drive past houses with numbers like 10831. These roads keep running, round bends, over the bulge of a bridge, like a river on the edge of a wood. In many of the suburbs the cars roll along steady and quiet and persistent like sharks. One thinks of those scenes in the movies, Studebakers and station wagons inching along a perfectly boring road. Everything has enough space: the deer and the raccoon and the chipmunk as well as the family of four. The yellow school bus arrives as expectedly as the boy running through the courtyard so as not to be late. Soon the lawyers and lobbyists will be arriving at work.

The George Washington Parkway which runs around the Virginia border of D.C. is frequently beautiful and often semi-unusable, full of lumps, humps, cracks, and holes, but despite its flaws it is always full of minivans and SUVs, the modern equivalent of the station wagon. The Potomac shimmers in the sun, while people picnic by the water, which laps against rocks and driftwood, as children run in the grass and the adults chat lazily in fold-out chairs. Everyone gets a parking space at these nature spots and can bring as much furniture as they need—tremendous portable luxury. Over the river, even the splayed arches of the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge look attractive in the sunlight.

Driving uptown, I missed the turn by the Lincoln Memorial, then took the wrong fork further along, and ended-up in Rock Creek Park, going up Cathedral Street, and saw the trees of the park taller than the roads that run above other roads. Here you find yourself going deadly slowly through streets so quiet you can begin to believe the people in the houses must be asleep or absent or making interrogations. Drive the other way, down to Fountainhead Regional Park, and you pass houses so big they could hold several families. In the strip mall, slow-moving locals stop off for frappuccinos. There is always construction. Zoning laws give the effect of provincialism arriving in an instant as you cross an invisible regulatory line.

Fountainhead is a picture-book American forest—though, of course, it is not out of a picture book, but out of the movies. Long thin trees cluster together as in a hundred films and television shows we used to watch on slow afternoons. Here are the women who walk with poles and backpacks, the middle-aged married couple on a hike, the young man and his headphones, the lady and her dog. Mountain bikers fly up the bumps. Men sit quietly in fishing boats. A vulture circles higher and higher. In the distance, we hear the loud reverberations of a woodpecker. There are bouncy wooden bridges over small streams that become wide rivers. There are hollowed tree stumps, steeply rising paths with hunks of quartz, a crushed beer tin in a tree trunk, a can of corn by the shore.

Now is the time of spring’s coolness. The breeze and shade detain the heat. The trees look fresh and new. But the flowers are falling. The blossom is over and the rhododendrons and azaleas are nearly over. Far away in north D.C., the tulips at Hillwood House are peaking and about to wilt. Here the tiny blue flowers by the path will soon go to seed. As we walk back to the car, we hear an oven bird, whose loud clear song fills the forest from some hidden spot. So much of what we have seen are tropes from American films, and tropes of real American life. The oven bird is familiar from Robert Frost. “He says that leaves are old and that for flowers/Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.”

The sun has begun its decline. One of the fishing boats is gone now. The young man in headphones is sloping back. Bikers are strapping their bikes onto car racks. As we leave the forest, we come back to aggressive American driving, the need to get things done before bed. The late sun sinks behind the trees and lights the undersides of the high-raised roads. Dogwood flowers gleam in the evening glow. We pass the filling stations and see the price of gas is rising, rising. A fire truck goes past. The 24-hour diner sign still shines. There were two dozen cars at the shore when we left—owners and boats were still launched on the Occoquan.

In Washington, there are secrets, heard and unheard, in Congress, the White House, and the Court—at Langley, Rosslyn, the Pentagon— and in all the agencies and institutions and non-profits that fill the grid. Somewhere back in the woods, the oven bird is still singing. “The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing.”

And yet, though I’ve pointed out many features of great art, there is still some mystery to it. This is, I think, the link between art and life. There’s a certain weight to someone having had an experience — or having imagined something — and then having written that down in this way. It’s the type of weight you feel when a grandparent tells you a story that’s important to them, or when someone shares something especially vulnerable that happened to them.¹⁰ This is, ultimately, why I think human art will continue and even improve in the age of AI: AI cannot experience things for you. Art, at its best, is in part about these most spiritually weighty human experiences, and this component of greatness is not reducible to any formal factors, because it is life itself.

has written about “what makes art great” and why AI art is (currently) not great. I don’t disagree with what he says, though I take a different view of how surprise and patterns work, and I suspect Nabeel would too if he was writing at greater length. I want to add a brief thought about the way surprise and pattern interact, and to speculate about AI writing based on that interaction. My thoughts here are a bit loose… because I don’t think this is the sort of topic on which it is possible to be very confident.

If art is “not predictable or obvious” and “contains multiple overlapping layers of echoes” then we discover a conflict. Those echoes are not only internal to the text, they exist between texts. That is part of how a tradition is created. In simple terms, red, white, and blue flowers in Chaucer mean it is spring and someone is going to fall in love because that is what they mean in other poems of that nature. It is a trope.

Art has to conform to these tropes and traditions and work to be original. For many authors, it has been more important to work in imitation than to “discover your own voice”—and for many modern authors who think they are developing their “voice”, it is more true to say they are conforming to some sort of genre or sub-genre. This is just as true in literary fiction as in other sorts of fiction.

Nabeel gives the example of the repetition of ears in Hamlet. Obviously, Hamlet is a play of spies. Claudius says “When sorrows come, they come not single spies / But in battalions”; Polonius hides behind the arras; Hamlet is deceiving multiple people; and so on. The court is full of noises, gossip, and strange rumours. This was not an uncommon trope at the time—whispering poison in someone’s ear was a familiar concept at the Elizabethan court, no doubt, as was the idea of being overheard by spies, personal or governmental. It is common for characters to eavesdrop on the Shakespearean stage. Maybe the audience would have thought of Matthew 13 and the parable of the sower, when Jesus says, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”, a trope found earlier in the Bible.

The “ears” in Hamlet work somewhere between a predictable pattern and a surprising one. It is well known that Shakespeare is the most surprising of writers—he is much less predictable word by word, line by line, than other writers. But he is often surprising with predictable images and tales, as with the ears in Hamlet. There were many versions of Romeo and Juliet. We remember Shakespeare’s. It was surprisingly familiar, and still is. Joyce is remarkably surprising, often about familiar things. This, I think, is Nabeel’s “link between art and life”. Martin Amis liked to say, “it’s life, but is it art?”, when in fact great art usually has to be both in some manner.

All art has some moral purpose—it surprises or familiarises in order to call us to the things of this world. It is that calling, that link with life, that leaves some people to conclude we will never have great AI writing. It has to be written by a person to be interesting. But some of what poetry does is the arrangement of sounds—what Elizabeth Bishop called timing.

In physical life, Bishop explained in an essay about Hopkins, timing means “co-ordination: the correct manipulation of the time, the little duration each phase of the action must take in order that the whole may be perfect.” The time of each of these parts of the action is decided by “the time of the whole, and of the parts before and after.” Bishop gives the example of men rowing a boat, and all the tiny motions going into each stroke, and how they amount to a rhythm. That rhythm, she says, is what is happening in poetry.

Just so in poetry: the syllables, the words, in their actual duration and their duration according to sense-value, set up among themselves a rhythm, which continues to flow over them. And if we find all these things harmonious, if they amalgamate in some strange manner, then the timing has been right. This does not mean that a monotonous, regularly beating meter means good timing—duration of sense and sound each play a part, I believe, nearly equal, and sense is the quality which permits mechanical irregularities while preserving the unique feeling of timeliness in the poem.

We might think of this amalgamation as the essential happening of poetry not just at the level of timing and rhythm but also of meaning and moral intent. It must all hang together. As Bishop says, sense is what permits irregularities in sound. It is this amalgamation that is required to make the link with life live in the poem.

It may be, as some have argued, that AI simply cannot achieve this, or at least, cannot achieve it in any way some readers wish to experience. But we are in the middle of an experiment. ’s poems co-written with LLMs are good enough that, had they been presented in a blind test, they may well have passed.1 I still suspect that AI, left to its own devices, will have its own taste. But the models are getting better. Prompters like Gwern are well-attuned to when a poem is properly amalgamated. Perhaps we are about to see a new type of poet and we will have to change our minds about what it means when we experience great art.

I read this on ’s recommendation and it was fabulous. It is, as Celine says, hugely emotional, and by the end it is quite difficult to take, but all the sadness is balanced out with depth of feeling and the great love of the grandmother narrator. It is surprising to me that Susie Boyt is not more well known among the readers I know. Several of them had not realized she wrote novels, despite her FT column. Loved and Missed is in the tradition of twentieth century writers like Bainbridge, Taylor, Comyns, and if you like them I expect you will like this.

Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, by Andrew Burstein

I simply had to give up on this. Too much folk psychology and speculation dressed up as understanding Jefferson’s heart while mostly retelling a familiar story. Jefferson is tremendously important and interesting, in this of all years, but I didn’t need this book.

Exile’s Return, Malcolm Cowley

Useful and colourful account of the milieu and ideas of one particular group of American writers in the 1920s. A sort of early New Journalism. Reads as quickly as the whole period seems to have passed. Very little of it stayed with me, and I don’t admire e.e. cummings, though I perhaps knew more of it than I anticipated. At the end he says the period itself felt like being in a slightly too crowded room and leaving it felt like stepping out into winter sunlight. I felt the same leaving the book.

Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, Patrick Cottrell

A good example of a “craft” novel, quite compelling, though I do not currently feel like finishing it.

This Dark Night. Emily Brontë, A Life. Deborah Lutz

We can only yearn for Emily Brontë. So many papers were destroyed, her life can only be seen in glimpses, snatches, and context. We know what happened to her; we have what remains of her poems; but an account of her personality could be as short as one of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and remain authentic to the records. English literature’s most intriguing woman—whose pale, proud, scornful, watching face stares out from the back of a family portrait—will always remain a mystery we cannot complete but only contemplate.1

This Dark Night is easy to read and offers a reassuring account of a woman who cannot ever be known; it smoothes her into something ideologically familiar. The book has many virtues, such as the discussion of Emily’s reading habits and context about her intellectual life, but if you love Emily Brontë on her own terms, you will be better off with one of the many books that already fill the shelves.

I am sorry to say I simply gave up reading half-way through.

This Dark Night is too-often typical of a particular sort of modern biography that fills in all the gaps of history with cliches and vapid questions. These questions come up so often, it is reminiscent of those lame school-exercises children are given. Were Emily’s fellow pupils unkind to her, do you think? What must Anne have thought of Emily beating her dog? Can a landscape hold on to an absence?

Lutz also has an ideological slant that becomes, at times, unsustainable. She claims that a “pagan or a mystical impetus” called the poem ‘I’m happiest now when most away’ “to life”.

I’m happiest now when most away
I can tear my soul from its mould of clay,
On a windy night when the moon is bright,
And my eye can wander through worlds of light.

When I am not, and none beside,
Nor earth, nor sea, nor cloudless sky,
But only spirit wandering wide
Through infinite immensity.

What the word pagan is supposed to mean here, one can only speculate. Undoubtedly, Emily Brontë is not a conventionally Christian writer, but to write, as Lutz does, “This isn’t a Christian poem”, is gross simplification. In The Brontës and Religion, Marianne Thormählen explains Brontë’s use of “New Testament topoi relating to the various roles of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer”, as well as the Spirit being presented as wind or breath. In the passages of John’s gospel read at Pentecost (the day when the Holy Spirit descended)

the Spirit is often referred to as the ‘Comforter’ (Jn 14:16). Utilising this topos, Brontë’s poem ‘My Comforter’ (1844) describes a ‘thoughtful Comforter’ who is ‘like a soft air’ or a ‘thaw-wind’, bringing ‘calm’ to the poet. Likewise, the later poem ‘Anticipation’ (1845) describes a ‘Glad comforter’, a ‘thoughtful Spirit’ who teaches the poet how to hope and look forward.

Here are two stanzas of ‘My Comforter’—

So stood I, in Heaven’s glorious sun,
And in the glare of Hell;
My spirit drank a mingled tone,
Of seraph’s song, and demon’s moan;
What my soul bore, my soul alone
Within itself may tell!

Like a soft air, above a sea,
Tossed by the tempest’s stir;
A thaw-wind, melting quietly
The snow-drift, on some wintry lea;
No: what sweet thing resembles thee,
My thoughtful Comforter?

Lutz generally underplays the importance of Christianity to the sisters, no doubt because her feminist reading is more acceptable if it is secular, and thus implicitly political, rather than evangelical and thus historical. Emily may not be especially doctrinally evangelical, but her love of her home life has to be seen within that context, as Lisa Wang demonstrates.

Evangelical families were particularly loyal and devoted, and bonds between parents and children were close and powerful. Emily Brontë was not the only child from an Evangelical home who suffered intense homesickness, even to the point of physical ill-health, when obliged to spend time away from it. Evangelically reared children loved their homes. To mention just one example, young Tom Macaulay was passionately devoted to his, barely surviving school terms and living for the holidays. Pat Jalland has recently emphasised that Evangelical families were often, contrary to modern belief, cheerful families, comfortable and content in their religion. It is no accident that so many sons of Evangelical men wrote affectionate biographies of their fathers.

They were raised by patriarchs who tempered paternal authority with unstinting devotion and frequent jocularity. Though many scions of Evangelical families drifted away from their parents’ religion, the characteristic family affection remained. Unsentimental and undemonstrative as the Brontës were, that emotion pervaded Haworth Parsonage from first to last.

Patrick Brontë’s children were especially fortunate in enjoying this warm domesticity while being spared the dark shadow that haunted many of these otherwise so happy homes. Unlike a large number of Evangelical Christians, the father of the Brontës was not constantly watching his young ones for early signs of evil propensities.

Lutz, instead, writes of the surprise that a “Victorian father of daughters” indulged the girls’ creativity. Lutz is often so generic that at times This Dark Night reads like a narrative for a television special.

So much of the deadweight in the book is composed of ideological cliches to which Lutz tries to fit Emily’s life. The characters in Anne and Emily’s stories are “forceful women who held powerful positions.” Charlotte Brontë, on the publication of Jane Eyre, became the “voice of and for women.” (None of the women who hated Jane Eyre at the time are mentioned, naturally.) As usual, Mrs. Gaskell’s superb biography of Charlotte is dismissed in a sub-clause.

We know Emily went on long walks and took her books with her. She was observed coming back from these walks, book in hand, by local working people, who called the girls “the lasses”. These people are kept safely in the footnotes, even though it would have been more accurate (we often can only know Emily as others saw her) and more interesting (to see her as she was seen in her context) to include them in the narrative. Being a governess or a teacher was indeed a miserable job. But which of these working people would not have gladly swapped lives with the lasses in the parsonage? It is not until Lutz wishes to recount the traditional Engels-based narrative about the miseries of emergent capitalism that working people are brought onto the page.

Lutz speculates that Emily would have supported the Reform Act because she later became a “keen observer of inequality”, which makes her sound like she wrote Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. We are told that in a stream-of-consciousness diary entry (written on a piece of paper the size of a credit card), Emily spelled Robert Peel as Robert peel, before talking about the peeling of potatoes. Thus, Peel, a prominent Tory, was given a “female domestic context.” Lutz also tries to analyse Emily’s early sewing samplers as her first acts of “writing”, as they contain Bible quotations. Lutz may be a scholar, but she is not much of a critic. This sort of thing is what gives the discipline of English Literature a bad name. It is not the ideology itself which is objectionable, but the fact that it is all meaningless.

I should have put this book down sooner.

Here are the extracts about Emily from Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte

My colleague recently published an essay called ‘Jane Austen’s Virtuous Liberalism’. It’s a very nice discussion of the ways in which Austen understand the challenges of character formation.

Virtue, as Austen sees it, faces two tough challenges. First, people whose characters are not yet formed must see how to be virtuous rather than vicious. Then, the virtuous must somehow find a way to succeed in their struggles against the vicious without adopting vicious means.

In this episode, Oliver and I discussed Austen’s ideas of virtue, what that has to do with liberalism, the relationship between philosophy and literature more broadly, as well as poetry and ideas about the Great Books. We also talked about the Keira Knightly Pride and Prejudice. Yes, we both liked it. Here is why Oliver thinks Jane Austen is so popular among philosophers.

TRALDI: And so I do think that even though she’s not making arguments, she’s not laying out philosophical theories, there is a level of precision in her thinking about virtue, which I do think is something that it took me a little aback.

And I think it’s part of why—one person who quote-tweeted my article was Daniel Kodsi, who’s a friend of our colleague John Maier and his coauthor often. And he runs this magazine called The Philosophers’ Magazine, which I had written before. And Daniel quote-tweeted my article with something like, “Add Oliver to the list of all the philosophers who love Austen.”

OLIVER: And it’s a long list.

TRALDI: And I think it’s a long list. And I do think this precision is part of it that she does, that it is—again, it’s not like a philosophy journal article, but it is an intellectual sophistication that is often not present in novelists that we really appreciate.

And here is an extract about Austen, Smith, and the wonderfully fertile period at the end of the eighteen century.

TRALDI: But yes, I think it’s obvious—without knowing the background, I’m sure there are scholarly questions about, how much Smith did Austen read? And they’re both 250th—a lot was happening in 1775 and 1776.

OLIVER: Those were great years. Those were the good old days.

TRALDI: They were great years. In the great books syllabus, you get to the end of the 1700s and suddenly there’s this—you have Smith, you have Kant, you have the American Revolution, you have the French Revolution, you have Burke. Rousseau is right before, Montesquieu is right before. I mean, it was a real—

OLIVER: It’s a great time.

TRALDI: It was a great time. A lot was being done. And obviously, you know, I love the 1800s. I love the Romantics. But you could teach a whole great books course from 1750 to 1800, probably.

OLIVER: You’ve also got all the dictionaries and all that kind of work going on as well. It’s a very, very fertile—explorations.

TRALDI: Yes, yes. There’s all sorts of—yes, it was an amazing time.

OLIVER: So did you, having read these two, Austen and Smith, close together—

TRALDI: Yes, and I should say that my reading of Austen was much more careful than my reading of Smith.

OLIVER: Sure, but you wrote this before you read Smith.

TRALDI: Yes, absolutely.

OLIVER: Or at least you fully conceived it. Do you see a lot of Smith in Austen?

TRALDI: “A lot” might be—

This was my favourite bit.

TRALDI: Yes. But this is one of the great—I know we talked about this, but it’s one of the great—you see this in Smith, you see this in Austen—commerce has its own virtues, and they are very traditional virtues. You have to be trustworthy. You have to be pleasant. You can’t really be wholly self-interested in every moment because people have to be willing to deal with you given your—I mean, think about Yelp reviews or even just word of mouth. “Oh, that person screwed me over.”

OLIVER: There’s a discussion in one of Hayek’s papers, which is—it’s a very Smithian point he makes about, the nature of the knowledge problem means that it’s not so much that I’m trying to get information about the thing you’re trying to sell me, but I’m really trying to get information about you and whether you are someone I should be buying from. Which is exactly the project that the novelists and Smith—there’s a sort of period between Smith and the early novelists, running through Austen to George Eliot, when they’re all working on that problem together.

TRALDI: Yes. I do think in Austen, it’s often—the real puzzle is, how do you make out somebody else’s character?

OLIVER: Exactly.

TRALDI: This is a phrase that Lizzy Bennet does use with regard to Darcy. And how do we actually figure out who the trustworthy and untrustworthy people are?

OLIVER: And if you’re too philosophical about that, in the sort of analytic sense, I think you can end up not paying enough attention to the particulars of that question.

TRALDI: Yes.

OLIVER: Because when you actually try and do it, it’s really, really hard.

TRALDI: Yes. And I think this is the sort of—reading Austen, you get a sense of—and there are very few philosophy papers on things like this. Reading Austen, you get a sense of, what sorts of details in a normal life are the ones that I can extract information from to make out somebody else’s character?

Oliver is an analytical, political philosopher. You can find out more about his work here. Here he is on Twitter. His Substack is . You can watch the episode on YouTube here.

Transcript

HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Oliver Traldi. Oliver is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Toledo in Ohio. He is my colleague on the Emerging Scholars Program at the Mercatus Center, and he’s written a book about political beliefs as well as many other articles for magazines, online.

He’s got a Substack. He’s maybe the most prominent political and epistemological young philosopher of his generation. [laughter] But most importantly for us, he is interested in Jane Austen and the idea of virtue. Oliver, welcome.

OLIVER TRALDI: Thank you so much for having me.

Reading Austen as a Philosopher

OLIVER: Let’s just start—before we get to this article you’ve written, tell me about being a philosopher but reading Jane Austen, because she’s often read and commented on by people who are not philosophers or who are only philosophers by acquaintance or whatever.

TRALDI: Right.

OLIVER: Is it different reading as a philosopher, do you think?

TRALDI: I think yes and no. One thing as a philosopher, there are—contemporary philosophy, we have very exacting standards of rigor and clarity. And when we look for a theory, we want something that’s been improved by hundreds of people and thousands of journal articles.

And so, if you were to simply extract a theory of virtue from a novel and say, “Does this—is this the end-all, be-all of moral thinking?” obviously you’re going to be disappointed. So I think as a philosopher, you have to look for other types of things, other types of sensitivities rather than logical sensitivity.

You have to say, how sensitive is the author to the different types of situations where people’s virtue can be exhibited or challenged? Or how sensitive is the author to the different types of pressures that a character’s convictions can be put under, or the different sorts of compromises that they might have to make, or the different sorts of people who might not be virtuous who they might have to interact with and sort of, you know, contract with or avoid? And what are going to be the impacts of different kinds of choices in those situations?

So the novelists, I think, tend—if they do it well, a novelist who’s interested in morality will understand living morally probably better than a philosopher, while maybe not understanding, say, arguments about whether morality supervenes on reality or vice versa, or what grounds morality, or different theories of meta-ethics or whatever.

OLIVER: I mean, there are obviously some novelists who do have a better appreciation of those things than others, we should say.

TRALDI: Yes, I think that’s absolutely true. And as I wrote in my article, I do think Austen in particular had an appreciation for this issue that you might call moral disarming or unilateral disarming. You know, does the moral person put themselves at a disadvantage relative to the immoral person? And then how do we actually help—how does morality survive?

So that’s a kind of philosophical question, but I tend to think—I taught last year—I think we’ve talked about this a bit. I taught in a great books program at Tulsa.

OLIVER: This is the Jennifer Frey program.

TRALDI: This is the ill-fated Jennifer Frey program. Jennifer—I don’t know if you’ve met her, but she’s an incredibly charismatic person. But somehow the program, despite being enormously successful, did not survive. You know, I was there for a year, and they decided that was long enough.

OLIVER: [laughs] You don’t think your arrival was the—

TRALDI: No, no. I hope not. I most certainly hope not.

OLIVER: No. General problems of higher education prevailed. Yes.

TRALDI: Yes, many, many problems of higher education these days. But yes, so I think—what was I saying?

OLIVER: Well, I think we’re getting to this question of, you are not just a philosopher; you teach the great books.

TRALDI: Right, exactly. The great books. That’s where I was. Yes.

Philosophy and the Great Books

OLIVER: So, one thing I’m interested in is that, you know, reading as a philosopher, you get a slightly different perspective on Austen. When you read other fiction, poetry, whatever, is there a benefit to you as a philosopher? Does it broaden you in some way?

TRALDI: Yes. I think absolutely, it’s broadening, but it’s also focusing in a different way. You know, contemporary philosophy is often described or captured with the word epicycles. So what we mean when we say epicycles is, you have some major theory, which is supposed to answer some big question. And then your career as a philosopher—you’re like three layers deep in the theory, in some sub-debate, and you’re making some really fine-grained distinctions.

And if you can make those distinctions successfully, you’ve had a really great career. But I think it’s easy to forget, why are we doing—you know, what attracted us to philosophy? Why are we doing this to begin with?

And the great novels, great books in general—one example I always use is the Book of Job. It doesn’t really—it’s not doing clear philosophy on the question of why do bad things happen to good people. But when you read it, you feel the question, why do bad things happen to good people? You get it, you know? You get why this is a question that people have worried about for thousands of years. You get why it calls out for an answer.

You know, there’s a lot of truth out there. I’m looking at a set of coat hangers, and I could count the coat hangers. But if you were given the decision, would I rather have an answer to how many coat hangers are across the room from me, or why do bad things happen to good people? You’d probably go with the latter one. There’s somehow some kind of depth or importance to that question, right?

And I think there’s—a great novelist can often generate some vividity to these questions. They can show how these questions are part of a good life, asking these questions, trying to have these questions answered—or a not-so-good life.

Certainly in Austen there are a lot of characters who learn to be more virtuous. Probably Emma is the clearest example. But you might also think of Marianne Dashwood. Really—

OLIVER: Lizzy Bennet.

TRALDI: Lizzy Bennet really learns to be a better person. I actually think her character is rather close to Emma in a lot of ways.

OLIVER: Yes, I think Emma’s sort of a clear rewrite of Lizzy in some—yes, yes.

TRALDI: Yes, and in some ways more evocative, actually. Yes. I mean, we can talk about all these books. But yes, I think there’s these things, even—obviously qua literature, they have other virtues, right? Which much philosophy doesn’t have; very little philosophy has the literary virtues.

But the philosophical virtue that a lot of literature does have is you see, okay, these are the—this is what a life is like. This is what making choices is like. These are the big questions when you decide how to live your life and what kinds of choices to make.

And I think Austen—these questions are all through Austen, even though nobody has to murder anybody in Austen. Nobody has to make decisions about war and peace or about, you know, civilizational decline or civilizational progress or anything like that. These people making these small choices in a lot of ways. But those are the lives that most of us lead. And when you read Austen, you think, “Oh, okay, there’s a virtuous and a vicious way to lead this kind of rather normal life.”

The Good Life

OLIVER: The question of what is a good life, or what is a good life in a commercial society, maybe, is the sort of bedrock of what she’s doing.

TRALDI: Yes, I think so. And that’s why I think Austen—you know, Austen wasn’t on our syllabus at Tulsa, but she was certainly discussed. And the “what is a good life” question—to me, it’s the big question that a great books program for college students should always come back to.

If I didn’t know what else to talk about, I would just say, “Well, we just read this book.” You know, we read these old biographies of Charlemagne from, like, Einhard—Notker the Stammerer and Einhard, his adopted son or whatever. I don’t remember. But this is like 800s. I’m sure you know more about this stuff than I do.

And I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them because what do I know about Charlemagne? So I just said, “Does it seem like Charlemagne lived a good life?” And you know, you’re off to the races. And I think that’s important at that age, because that’s the age at which—

OLIVER: For the undergraduates?

TRALDI: Yes. I think that’s the age at which you’re starting to make your own big decisions about what sort of life to lead. And I think for me, looking back to myself at that age, I think one thing I did wrong—at Tulsa I was in some ways as much a student as a teacher. I was rereading a lot of this stuff for the first time in decades. And some of it I was reading for the first time. As I told you, I was reading a lot of Austen for the first time for this essay.

OLIVER: Right, right.

TRALDI: And yes, it was stuff that I had thought about at a theoretical level, you know, like what are the ins and outs of this theory or this philosophical move or something like that. But you feel the question a bit differently when you’re like, “Okay, I’m an adult. I have to decide whether to live in this way or that way.”

The world is open to you. You could convert to Thomism [laughter] like so many have tried to have me do, or you could become a merchant after reading The Wealth of Nations. Or you could become a revolutionary after reading Marx, or you could become a Nietzschean. You know, there are all these choices open to you.

OLIVER: Please don’t become a Nietzchean.

TRALDI: No, no. That is, I’m a—

OLIVER: Keep your children out of school if that’s going to be the result. [laughs]

TRALDI: Yes. I’m a committed moralist, so I cannot, but he is—he made a comeback, that’s for sure.

Philosophy and Poetry

OLIVER: Now, there’s this obviously sort of long-running question in philosophy about, what is the relationship between philosophy and poetry? Are they antagonists, or are they in some way, you know, twins, and each provides one half of what is needed for a complete way of understanding the world? Do you have a position on this?

TRALDI: Yes, I mean, I think they’re what the kids call twinning.

OLIVER: Twinning? [laughs]

TRALDI: I think they’re twinning. No, no, I think that means something different. I think that means when you’re wearing the same outfit or something like that.

OLIVER: So we’re almost twinning with our stripes—yes, I see.

TRALDI: We’re almost. We actually—we are stripes and blue. Yes, we’re closer than I would’ve expected.

I would say closer to twins. There are a lot of claims that philosophy is at odds somehow with this or that. There’s also this—certain people will say, “Well, ever since Socrates, philosophy has been at odds with politics.” And a big part of philosophy is, how do you survive? Well, I don’t know. Nobody’s trying to kill me. I think of myself as a decently committed philosopher.

OLIVER: It seems to me this changed fundamentally in the Enlightenment and with the Romantics, and they see it all much more joined up. It’s a sort of ancient-and-modern dynamic.

TRALDI: Yes, there may be an ancient-and-modern distinction there. But yes, for me I don’t see any kind of contradiction. Now, there are—and I think this comes out of what I said before—philosophical attempts to understand poetry. And certain kinds of literary and aesthetic devices do sometimes fall a little flat.

The philosophical literature on metaphor, for instance—I think some theories of metaphor really don’t get why people use metaphors. [laughter] So one of the most important theories of metaphor is that they’re all just false, that it’s like everybody who uses a metaphor is lying. This isn’t the full theory. There are bells and whistles added.

OLIVER: Sure, sure.

TRALDI: But yes, so I think there’s no contradiction. But at the same time, they are different modes in some ways, and people who do the one are often trying to do something different than the other.

I do think that the desire for rigor and precision and clarity that philosophers have can be a little maddening to nonphilosophers, who see the pull of philosophical questions like, “What sort of life I should lead?” and then see, what do philosophers actually do?

And we’re doing all this modal logic and all these truth tables and all this very technical stuff that looks like math. And they say, “That can’t possibly be the right way to think about how to live.” And it’s true that there are these studies of—that suggest ethicists aren’t actually very good people and things like that, although you have to wonder what is the background ethical theory that went into evaluating them.

So yes, I don’t think there’s really a contradiction between philosophy and anything else. But certainly, there was a point in my life where I always come back to trying to write poetry and do poorly and then stop. But it was always something where I would say, “Okay, if I’m doing philosophy in the afternoon, I better wait till the evening to write poetry.” You have to sort of reboot and get into a different mode.

OLIVER: Iris Murdoch used to write philosophy in the morning and novels in the afternoon. That kind of thing.

TRALDI: Yes, I think that’s very sensible.

OLIVER: And she was upstairs for the one and downstairs for the other.

TRALDI: Yes. That’s even better, you know?

Favorite Poets

OLIVER: Which poets do you like?

TRALDI: Geez, I guess for an American, I like Wallace Stevens. I wasn’t expecting this question. For a Brit, you know, I actually like Philip Larkin a lot.

OLIVER: Oh, yes?

TRALDI: I know—what is the opinion of Larkin? Is he considered—

OLIVER: Very high.

TRALDI: Very high? Okay.

OLIVER: Some—there are some dissenters, but basically he’s the guy.

TRALDI: He’s the guy, okay. Yes.

OLIVER: Twentieth-century English poetry is like Auden, Larkin, Betjeman.

TRALDI: Yes, Auden is—actually, my friend Jane Cooper just wrote something about Auden.

OLIVER: Yes, Jane is excellent.

TRALDI: Yes, Jane is really great.

OLIVER: That was in the New Statesman if you want to look it up.

TRALDI: That was in the New Statesman. Yes, yes, yes. But Auden, I don’t know quite as well.

I mean, poetry is—I think it’s interesting the way that we receive poetry now. I think you were talking about this a few days ago, about things like poems appearing as inspirational quotes on social media or something like that, and whoever is the most quotable. And you felt like maybe Dostoevsky is very quotable.

OLIVER: Dostoevsky has a sort of screenshot quality.

TRALDI: Yes, yes.

OLIVER: As does Martin Amis.

TRALDI: Yes. So I—

OLIVER: Whereas Philip Larkin in a funny way—you know, he has very short poems. You can get the whole poem on Twitter. Like, Robert Frost has that. But something like “The Whitsun Weddings,” it’s quite hard to just take three lines out. The whole thing works as a—and that, so that poem gets less—

TRALDI: Yes. Which is what you would expect from a good poem, really, that it would form a kind of whole.

OLIVER: Exactly. If it’s a three-page ode, it should have a continuous quality.

TRALDI: Yes, it should have a kind of internal structure. Yes.

OLIVER: There are some one-line things and—but I think it’s notable that a poet like Wordsworth doesn’t seem to get a lot of social media play. And I think probably that’s one reason.

TRALDI: So yes, I think Larkin is somebody who, I did see some shorter references to him, and I thought I’d better just go and look up a ton of poems by this guy. And Stevens was the same way.

Death and Philip Larkin

OLIVER: So, which Larkin do you like?

TRALDI: You’re really putting me on the spot here. [laughter] It has been a little while.

OLIVER: I lied to you and said it would be about Jane Austen.

TRALDI: Yes, now I’m completely screwed. Well, he has a bunch about death. He has one where death is a ship following you. And he has one where death is, like, a fruit that gets picked or something.

OLIVER: Apple?

TRALDI: Might be an apple.

OLIVER: He decides not to throw the apple.

TRALDI: There’s one with sweetbreads in it. And now I’m really—

OLIVER: The ship one, “Next, Please”—that’s excellent.

TRALDI: Yes.

OLIVER: He sees the—it’s like hearing the music coming, and then the ship.

TRALDI: I forgot that that was the title. I forgot that that was the title.

OLIVER: And then as the ship goes past, it leaves nothing in its wake. It’s very sort of—very gloomy.

TRALDI: It’s very gloomy, yes. I think I read Larkin in a gloomy phase; it was like Larkin and Radiohead or something.

OLIVER: But he’s a good example of what you were saying before, that he won’t think propositionally. He’s logical in the sense that he’s sort of orderly, and he goes from one thing to the next. But he’s not being a philosopher.

TRALDI: No, of course. Yes.

OLIVER: But he’s very preoccupied with the sorts of questions that philosophers are probing, but has a sort of very meaningful treatment of them.

TRALDI: Yes.

OLIVER: And I think in a way, the sharp response that you want from the reader in those questions, Larkin is better at provoking than someone like Bertrand Russell or some other contemporary of his.

TRALDI: Yes, yes.

OLIVER: Bertrand Russell’s a bit earlier, but you know what I mean.

TRALDI: No, I think that’s exactly right. And I think that is why I’m a fan of the great books pedagogically and not—I don’t know if Larkin will be called a great, you know, like, who knows? I don’t really understand that designation, but tings like poetry and novels.

OLIVER: The biggest dissenter was Harold Bloom, who said Philip Larkin’s just a period piece. And he doesn’t understand why everyone likes him.

TRALDI: Oh, yes, well, I’m not on board with everything. Oh, I’ve also been—

OLIVER: No, you’re not very Bloomian.

TRALDI: I’m not very Bloomian, I don’t think.

OLIVER: Either Allan or Harold.

TRALDI: Yes. Well, I actually—this is very embarrassing, but I’ve actually never read The Closing of the American Mind, which I know is—

OLIVER: But why should you? I’m not sure it’s retained its—

TRALDI: Well, it’s certainly been received into my circle. But it is like a classic of anti-ideological—

OLIVER: Sure. Have you read Adler, How to Read a Book, that kind of great books stuff?

TRALDI: No. There’s so many things that I haven’t read. I mean, I’m just learning how to read. I learned how to read in Tulsa last year, [laughter] in Oklahoma, which is not where most people would go to learn how to read.

Jane Austen and the Problem of Morality

OLIVER: So let’s move to Jane Austen. Your thesis basically is, many moral theories face this problem that if I believe XYZ theory and you don’t believe it, you can get the advantage of me. Because I’ll always stick to my principles and you can just be a bad guy.

TRALDI: Yes.

OLIVER: So is morality screwed? This is what people say about liberalism. This is what you’re arguing. And you think Jane Austen’s got an answer to that?

TRALDI: Yes, I think she has a kind of answer. And again, one decision I had to make while writing the essay was, am I going to go super—this is a completely philosophically rigorous and respectable answer? Or am I just going to kind of sketch it?

OLIVER: Slum it in literary criticism? [laughter]

TRALDI: Yes, I wouldn’t put it quite that way, but—and I think I went for the latter, where I just wanted to kind of evoke the answer. And I think the answer has something to do with living in a large enough society where—and Austen I think is not the only person to give this answer. But you live in a large enough society where, when people see you acting well and somebody else acting poorly, the disadvantage that you have in that one interaction is outweighed by the advantages you have from the society that you gain from being seen to act well by many others.

So one thing I didn’t mention here, but a connection I made when I was first coming up with this idea, is that it’s actually a lot like what Martin Luther King Jr. says about civil disobedience. So he says, you might think, if you’re out there and the police are coming at you with bats, or the white supremacists are coming at you with bats or whatever, weapons or whatever, you might think, “I’m on the losing end of this interaction.”

But actually what will happen is that this interaction will be seen by many others. And you, by keeping your calm, will be seen to be the virtuous one, and they, by being violent, will be seen to be the vicious ones. And this can only help your political cause. I’m probably abstracting some of the details of King’s presentation.

OLIVER: In a vulgar sense, this is the sort of “be the change you want to see” approach.

TRALDI: Yes, but also, be the change you want other people to see. You know? Because that’s how it gets saved from—and again, one of the ways in which this is not quite philosophically rigorous is because the philosopher can say, “Well, what about an example where nobody’s going to see it? Or what about an example where the situation is set up that in doing the right thing, you’re perceived to have done the wrong thing?” And you get back into tough problems. And that’s why we have philosophy. You know, there’s always going to be these puzzles.

OLIVER: But we don’t get the—I think this is what the novelists are helpful for. We don’t get to set the conditions in our lives. You know, when you’re doing a philosophical problem, you can just say, “Well, these are the conditions. What happens then?” And what Jane Austen is so good at is saying, “I’m going to take her and drop her in this house, and that’s life. And she’s just going to—she won’t even know what the conditions are for a long time.” That’s the novelist’s preoccupation.

TRALDI: Yes. Yes. It’s interesting what you said about not even knowing what the conditions are. It’s one thing I love, which is there in, I think, a lot of Austen—and it’s done by a lot of my favorite novelists. I think Kazuo Ishiguro is really good at this. It’s just novels where you see the characters’ growing awareness of their circumstances and—

OLIVER: Like in Klara and the Sun or something.

TRALDI: Yes, or I think certainly in Never Let Me Go and in Remains of the Day, a lot of the action is in a situation where you understand what’s going on better than the characters do.

Clues and Games

TRALDI: And I think we talked about this the other day. In Austen, Emma, for example, is this sort of, like, halfway detective where she sees a lot of clues that could help her understand the nature of the life she’s leading and the circumstances she’s in, but she always misinterprets the clues. But on the other hand, it’s not like she misses them entirely. She’s kind of on the right track, and at least she’s trying.

OLIVER: And what I think Austen does so well in that book—I think it’s her most important book—is that by putting us, without quite realizing it, with Emma’s blinkers on, as it were, and only allowing our perspective to be her perspective, she makes us the detective.

But whereas in a detective novel, you know, there’s a funny little man and he is a detective, and he says, “Oh, there’s a clue in this novel,” the read of—on the first read very often goes straight past what they must later realize to be a clue. And that is such a normal condition of life, that, “Oh, actually, that was one of the conditions, but you couldn’t have known it. Sorry.” And you can only work it out in retrospect.

TRALDI: Yes. In modern love, these are sometimes called red flags. [laughter] I think it’s not quite a precise analogy, but yes, I think it’s right. And I certainly—I had read Emma years ago and didn’t really notice. As you say, on my first read, I didn’t really notice, even having watched—I think it was the, what is it, the Kate Beckinsale version maybe, from ITV in like 1996 or something.

It was really in reading it for this essay that I noticed that this feature that, starting on page 30 or 40 or so, there’s a—and they’re often in games. The clues are often in games. So very early on, Elton is playing some sort of poem game with Emma.

OLIVER: The riddles, yes.

TRALDI: The riddle game. And you know, Emma already misinterprets his riddles as being about Harriet rather than about her. But then there’s also—the riddles also have some relation to things that happen much later.

OLIVER: Then there’s the anagram game at the end.

TRALDI: There’s the anagram game at the end. Yes, it’s the—and I don’t think there are many games like that in any of the other Austen.

OLIVER: People play games, but we’re not taken into them and have them narrated in that way.

TRALDI: And they’re not word games in general. There’s card games and things like that. And you know, in Pride and Prejudice, Wickham has all these gambling debts and things like that.

OLIVER: Yes.

TRALDI: You know, in—I don’t know if you know Whit Stillman, but for the same magazine a couple years ago I wrote about Whit Stillman, who’s a sort of conservative filmmaker who’s a huge Austen fan and brings in Austenian themes to a lot of his movies, but writes them about characters in the 1960s and ’70s. And one of them was called The Last Days of Disco, for example, about—and some of the broader social themes he talks about are also there in Austen.

So one thing that was just on the edges of my consciousness as I read through the novels for this essay was the question of the noble man versus the working man, which I think is very present in Austen and has something to do with her conception of virtue: that the virtuous person will be engaging in commerce in some way.

OLIVER: Those moments of the noble and the virtuous man or whatever often take place in a shop, like the drapier in Emma or the jewelry shop in Sense and Sensibility.

TRALDI: That’s interesting. That’s interesting.

OLIVER: She’s very careful to take us into a commercial situation and contrast.

TRALDI: See, that is the sort of detail that I think a philosopher—I think we—the mere—the vibe of, “You’re in a shop, and this means something.” I think this is something philosophers are—we can watch for the action; we can judge the characters’ actions. But then there are these questions of atmosphere and milieu. And certain things happen in a shop; certain things happen at the seaside. In Persuasion there’s an injury by the seaside.

OLIVER: Yes. That’s one of the most exciting scenes in Austen. Very dramatic.

TRALDI: Yes, yes. I think actually Persuasion in some ways is quite different than her other books. It has a sort of—you know, in some ways it feels a little more like Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights at points. There’s a little bit of a windblown, dark quality to it at times. It’s a little bit bleaker. It’s a little hard to explain why, but that’s just a feeling that I had reading it that maybe had changed with some of the other literary tastes of the time.

Artlessness in Austen’s Heroines

OLIVER: Now, the quality that you focus on in the heroines, in this question of virtue defending itself against bad actors who break the rules, is artlessness.

TRALDI: Yes. So this is a term Austen uses quite a bit, and almost always, she very much picks and chooses the characters who are going to receive this term. And I thought that this is like—it’s not only her artless characters who face this question about how can morality survive, or how can virtue prevail, but I think they’re the limit point.

Like, if you really are unwilling to use—and I mentioned in the essay, when Darcy describes—I forget what; maybe it’s him describing how he found Lydia and Wickham, or it’s something to do with Wickham—he said, “I had to resort to arts.” So it must be, the “arts” back then means—one of the meanings of the term is dishonesty or subterfuge or something.

OLIVER: Yes, if someone was artful, it could have—

TRALDI: Yes, like the Artful Dodger.

OLIVER: Exactly. Could have negative connotations for sure.

TRALDI: Yes. And so the artless one, you know, they’re missing something.

So it’s the question of, if you view—morality in a way means you’re missing something, right? You’ve taken arts out of your arsenal. You’ve taken tools that could deal with certain situations, and you’ve just decided not to use them. So the question is, how can it be an advantage to have less tools?

You know, we’re here at Mercatus; the economists would tell you it’s never advantageous to have fewer choices, right? There’s no paradox of choice. It’s never advantageous to have fewer choices. And so I think this is the—if morality is a kind of unilateral disarmament, artlessness is the clearest case of that.

OLIVER: And you’re seeing that in Fanny Price, Elinor—

TRALDI: You see that in Fanny Price. You see that in Elinor. Harriet Smith is described as artless over and over again. And then there are these other characters who are described as artful, or other things that are mentioned as arts.

I think Harriet, in a lot of ways, is the one who’s most often described this way. And it’s interesting because you think of Emma changing a lot in Emma, but Knightley actually shifts in his evaluation of Harriet, who he thought of as sort of an unserious person. And Knightley himself comes to recognize her artlessness as a kind of seriousness which makes her a good match, not ultimately for him, but for his dude, Robert.

OLIVER: The farmer.

TRALDI: The farmer, yes.

OLIVER: He doesn’t change his view of her social position, though.

TRALDI: No, certainly not. But he does change his view of her character, basically. You know, her artlessness is not silliness. It has a sort of depth to it.

And yes, certainly Fanny. In the Whit Stillman movie Metropolitan that’s part of what set me on this, there’s this whole discussion of the book Mansfield Park and this old Lionel Trilling essay about it where he says, how is it—there’s this question about how modern people can even like Mansfield Park because we’ve sort of lost the notion of virtue being exciting or something.

One of the most provocative lines to me in Austen was in Sense and Sensibility where it says that Elinor glories in Edward’s integrity, which is an odd thing to glory in. You don’t glory—nobody is on Instagram showing off their integrity, you know?

OLIVER: It’s like that René Gerard quote people like to pass around: “Everyone is on diet pills and nobody wants to be a saint.”

TRALDI: I like that. That is very Instagrammable.

OLIVER: Exactly. Exactly.

TRALDI: That’s very good, actually. I like that. Yes, so there’s something provocative about the notion that virtue can be exciting, and in particular can be romantically exciting.

The Importance of Integrity

OLIVER: Or even less than that. One thing I think is difficult for people interpreting Austen today is that virtue, whether it’s exciting or romantically exciting, or the notion of integrity is of interest for its own sake.

There’s a lot of—you know, we have integrity as an organization. It’s very important for me to have integrity as a professional. But there’s not as much a sense of, just having integrity is the good life. We don’t need to be complicated about this. That’s just—you should just do that. And Austen’s very firm on that all the way through.

And criticism wants to pull her towards sometimes feminism, sometimes discussions of slavery, sometimes various other things. And she’s just constantly sort of resisting that by saying, “I like integrity. I like good people. I don’t think it’s that hard.” It’s a good line you’ve picked up on, I think.

TRALDI: There’s a character in The Wire who says, “A man’s gotta have a code.” I think he’s Omar, who murders the drug dealers and steals from them.

OLIVER: I haven’t seen it.

TRALDI: So he says, “A man’s gotta have a code.” And I think there is a—even in a character who in some ways is bad, we admire the integrity of having a code and sticking to it.

There is this debate, I guess in moral philosophy, or at least on the outskirts of moral philosophy, about, “Well, if your code is wrong, maybe it’s better not to stick to it.” I don’t share that perspective. I think part of the good life is holding yourself to certain standards. And if those standards turn out to be wrong, the holding yourself is still of moral value, right? Not allowing yourself—

OLIVER: It doesn’t mean they’re not adjustable.

TRALDI: Yes, no, of course. If you decide the standards are wrong, and in Austen—

OLIVER: It’s sort of implicit in the idea of having standards that you will be honest and therefore accept when your standards need to be improved or whatever. Right?

TRALDI: Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. And in Austen we certainly see people shifting their standards. And I think one thing that I—of course, modern readers and watchers of Austen do not quite understand some of these things. But I think in Pride and Prejudice in particular, we’re supposed to feel that Lizzy Bennet is quite hard on people and has to learn to improve herself in that way.

OLIVER: We’re delighted with her when she does that because we think it’s sassy.

TRALDI: Yes, exactly. If you go on YouTube, you can see all these, like, “Lizzy Bennet owning people’s lives for 50 minutes,” these compilations of clips from the various movies or whatever. And she’s obviously very, very clever.

But she realizes—after coming to understand who Wickham is and feeling that she might not have another chance with Darcy, she comes to realize that she has had certain prejudices, which have made her blind to the realities of the world and blind to what might be her best options.

So yes, I was saying I believe in integrity; that’s all I was saying. And integrity obviously is adjustable, but I tend to think that it’s better—even if the rule is wrong, it’s better for the person who has it to hold themselves to it, rather than to adjust to try to get an advantage.

And in philosophy, we have all sorts of terminology for these sorts of questions: “Are you an internalist or an externalist about reasons or about rules or whatever?” I think the more literary way to say it would just be that integrity is a virtue. And people should stick to their codes unless they see a good reason to change them.

Austen and Adam Smith

OLIVER: Now, you have recently been reading Adam Smith.

TRALDI: Yes, I did read a lot of Adam Smith for this debate we had last week. Although I did a poor job because I had forgotten that the debate was about whether Smith was a philosopher or an economist. [laughter] I thought it was simply, is he a philosopher or not? So I put myself in the odd position of arguing that Adam Smith is not an economist.

But yes, I think it’s obvious—without knowing the background, I’m sure there are scholarly questions about, how much Smith did Austen read? And they’re both 250th—a lot was happening in 1775 and 1776.

OLIVER: Those were great years. Those were the good old days.

TRALDI: They were great years. In the great books syllabus, you get to the end of the 1700s and suddenly there’s this—you have Smith, you have Kant, you have the American Revolution, you have the French Revolution, you have Burke. Rousseau is right before, Montesquieu is right before. I mean, it was a real—

OLIVER: It’s a great time.

TRALDI: It was a great time. A lot was being done. And obviously, you know, I love the 1800s. I love the Romantics. But you could teach a whole great books course from 1750 to 1800, probably.

OLIVER: You’ve also got all the dictionaries and all that kind of work going on as well. It’s a very, very fertile—explorations.

TRALDI: Yes, yes. There’s all sorts of—yes, it was an amazing time.

OLIVER: So did you, having read these two, Austen and Smith, close together—

TRALDI: Yes, and I should say that my reading of Austen was much more careful than my reading of Smith.

OLIVER: Sure, but you wrote this before you read Smith.

TRALDI: Yes, absolutely.

OLIVER: Or at least you fully conceived it. Do you see a lot of Smith in Austen?

TRALDI: “A lot” might be—

OLIVER: Primarily from Theory of Moral Sentiments.

TRALDI: So I would say that the notion of sympathy as being fundamentally part of how you recognize a good person seems to me to be there in Austen. The characters are—

OLIVER: And this is the thing about awareness of other people and learning from that awareness.

TRALDI: Awareness of other people and learning from other people and feeling other people’s emotions. One thing that is related to sympathy in an odd way—and I think actually Austen and Smith conceive of it a bit differently, but that is there for both of them, in particular in Sense and Sensibility—is this notion of self-control or self-command.

OLIVER: Self command. Yes. Yes.

The Importance of Self-Command

TRALDI: Now, Smith gives a really odd argument about self command, which is that if you don’t have control over your emotions, you will end up feeling or expressing something that other people can’t sympathize with. And this is bad because sympathy is good, or something like that. I actually think it’s a rather confused argument.

OLIVER: I think what he’s saying is that if you display a lack of self-command, then no matter what you are feeling, people find it difficult to deal with that sort of uncontrolled behavior. It’s not the particular expression of feeling; it’s the fact that you are a little unstable or—

TRALDI: Yes, I think that’s right.

OLIVER: —a bit extra.

TRALDI: I think what Smith doesn’t do is explain quite how that’s bad. But what I think is that actually, in Sense and Sensibility, it’s a little bit the reverse, where actually Elinor and their mother, they do sympathize with Marianne. They do feel what she’s feeling after—who’s the other, the w guy in Sense and Sensibility? They’re all w’s.

OLIVER: Oh, Willoughby.

TRALDI: Willoughby, right, right. Not Wickham, Willoughby. When Willoughby—

OLIVER: You can just say “the cad.”

TRALDI: The cad. There’s always a cad. So when the cad leaves, Marianne has all these emotions, and you really feel them. And Marianne also has a lack of self-command when Willoughby is there. There’s this whole episode, which I didn’t quite make the most of but felt very important, where they go to the house of this woman. They just sort of barge into this house, Willoughby and Marianne.

And this is really supposed to show something about the relationship. If you and your partner barge into somebody’s house, it can’t be a good relationship somehow because it’s leading you into bad actions. That’s my sense of what that episode is supposed to show from the highest possible remove.

OLIVER: I think, yes, and I think there are several other instances of that: when they ride in the carriage together, unaccompanied.

TRALDI: Right, right.

OLIVER: And there’s a sort of general consternation about this. And Marianne sort of says, “Oh, well, how can it be a problem?” And they—part of the consternation is, you’re breaking the rules in a very flagrant way, but also that you are assuming that it’s okay because you’ll get married. And this assumption is a very big one.

TRALDI: Yes. And obviously there is this assumption that—she doesn’t recognize quite how—she thinks her position is much more secure than it actually is, which is how it turns out in the book. But I think we’re supposed to think that even if she were right about Willoughby’s affection, which in a sense, she—Willoughby—

OLIVER: No. Even if they do get married, she’s broken the rules in a way that—

TRALDI: She’s broken certain rules in a way that is—but I think what’s different from Smith is, there is sympathy from her family even though she lacks self-command. But that is precisely—so it’s sort of a different theory of why self-command is good. It’s precisely because her emotional state is actually draining for her family.

And then Elinor says—when she learns that Elinor has actually been going through something—

OLIVER: The same.

TRALDI: —very similar, and maybe even rougher, in this whole thing with Lucy Steele telling her about this, you know, blah, blah, blah.

OLIVER: Which is a beautiful name—to steal. I mean, it’s great.

TRALDI: It’s an amazing—honestly, in some ways Sense and Sensibility may have been my favorite. I think it’s just lovely.

OLIVER: If I just wanted to just read one for fun, that’s what I go to. I do, yes.

TRALDI: Yes. And there’s a lot—none of these things are quite perfectly in there. But I think honestly, everything that’s in the other novels has a little part to play in Sense and Sensibility. You know, I think if I were to recommend just one, if somebody was like, “I have time for just one,” I might recommend Sense and Sensibility.

But in the end, Marianne says—again, it’s one of these amazingly evocative lines. Elinor says, “You didn’t act that badly. Do you compare your conduct with Willoughby’s?” And she says, “No, I compare it with—Elinor, I compare it with your conduct. You have this self-command.”

And it’s precisely the fact—it’s not—and I think this is why philosophers do like Austen, because it’s not—it’s still literary, but there is a precision to her moral evaluations. It’s precisely the fact that Elinor knew that her family loved her and didn’t want to burden—it’s all quite conscious. She didn’t want to burden her family with her emotions. But you actually see that Elinor has this family trait of having very strong sentiment, which Marianne does, and simply also has this virtue of self-command.

And that is—there are film adaptations and TV adaptations that demonstrate self-command, but it’s a very hard thing to film. It’s something you feel inside. It’s a very hard—the actors have to be very good for you to see—you see pieces of it in some of the adaptations of Persuasion and some of the adaptations of Sense and Sensibility, but self-command is very hard to find.

Austen Adaptations

OLIVER: Which adaptations do you like the best?

TRALDI: I’m forgetting—I often like the long ones that I think were for the British ITV. So I like the—I think Kate Beckinsale was in the Emma one. Although I think there was one of Persuasion, which was also quite good. I like the one of Northanger Abbey. I don’t think it’s that good, but it’s kind of cute, which I think it’s probably the cutest of her long novels.

Whit Stillman did a very loose adaptation of Lady Susan, which is hilariously funny at times, and also has Kate Beckinsale and some other great actors in it.

OLIVER: Did you see the new Persuasion on Netflix a couple of years ago?

TRALDI: No. No.

OLIVER: It has that—is it Dakota Johnson, the actress, who’s famous for other non-Austenian—Fifty Shades of Grey or whatever.

TRALDI: Yes, and isn’t she one of the Avengers or something like that?

OLIVER: Something like that. But everyone was very upset that it was this terrible adaptation.

TRALDI: Oh, yes.

OLIVER: Didn’t—it sort of killed all of Austen’s words. She looks at the camera; she drinks from the bottle. I actually thought it was quite fun. On the basis that all adaptations are bad—

TRALDI: I think if you allow some looseness, it can be quite fun. So for example, the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, I think if you’re just sort of like, “Well, this is just somebody who was inspired by Pride and Prejudice,” you can have a lot of fun with the movie.

OLIVER: I think as an interpretation of the book, that film is quite bad.

TRALDI: Oh, yes. I think it’s absolutely missing the mark.

OLIVER: But in terms of like, the countryside and the house and the geese and the food, it’s fantastic.

TRALDI: Oh, yes. It’s lovely to look at.

OLIVER: The dresses, right? The clothes are amazing.

TRALDI: And a lot of the—and the cast is honestly like—

OLIVER: Yes, it’s great.

TRALDI: The cast is really, really great. And the parts as they are—

OLIVER: Rosamund Pike is maybe the best Jane on TV.

TRALDI: She’s terrific. And who’s the one who plays Kitty?

OLIVER: Yes.

TRALDI: Who is in—and the father is the guy from The Hunger Games. I forget his name, but I think the father is excellent in that. But of course, it’s not exactly the father from Austen.

OLIVER: No, no, no.

TRALDI: But as a movie itself—but yes, I like a lot of these longer TV versions.

One odd thing—they make these choices. So there is some scholarly apparatus brought to bear on some of them. So I think maybe it’s Persuasion that there were multiple versions of, and some of the adaptations use pieces from the unpublished version, which are interesting. And as I was reading it, I had to Google around a bit and figure out these things.

Austen’s Moral Precision

TRALDI: I was going to say about Austen’s moral precision, the other place where I think this comes in—and I wrote a bit about this in the essay—is near the end of Mansfield Park, when—the names are what I’m worst at—when Edmund, right, is finally disillusioned with—

OLIVER: Mary.

TRALDI: With Mary Crawford?

OLIVER: Mm-hmm.

TRALDI: It’s because there was this affair. There’s always a sibling or a cousin who makes some horrible mistake, you know? So there was this affair, and Mary Crawford can only criticize it by saying that they weren’t very prudent, you know, in prudential terms. They took a big risk. They made a bad decision. You know, they really screwed themselves over.

OLIVER: They could have made it work. Yes.

TRALDI: Yes. And Edmund realizes that she lacks moral fervor because he thinks the appropriate criticism should be a moral one. And as a psychological matter, it shouldn’t even enter your head, I think is the idea. I’m extrapolating a bit, but if you see somebody acting this badly, to then say, “Well, geez, you’re doing something that isn’t in your interest”—for that to be your first thought indicates that your priorities are highly misplaced in a way that, to him, is quite unattractive.

And this also struck me as a moment of—this is something we philosophers talk about. What is the distinction between prudence and morality? They both tell you what you should do, in some sense, but there’s different—the shoulds have different forces, right? So Edmund has a certain moral precision and sensitivity which, actually, Fanny is basically the only person he knows—not that everybody in the house is a bad person; his father is a decent guy, and one of the aunts is okay, I think.

But yes, there’s a real sophistication to this evaluation. And it’s funny to me that she actually used this as the—I mean, I suspect that even at the time there were readers who were just like, “Wait, I really don’t get what the nature of Edmund’s problem is here,” because it’s not like Mary—Mary’s not like, “Oh, yes, I support infidelity.” You know? She’s not like— it’s if you blinked, you might miss it, the mistake that Mary has made.

And so I do think that even though she’s not making arguments, she’s not laying out philosophical theories, there is a level of precision in her thinking about virtue, which I do think is something that it took me a little aback.

And I think it’s part of why—one person who quote-tweeted my article was Daniel Kodsi, who’s a friend of our colleague John Maier and his coauthor often. And he runs this magazine called The Philosophers’ Magazine, which I had written before. And Daniel quote-tweeted my article with something like, “Add Oliver to the list of all the philosophers who love Austen.”

OLIVER: And it’s a long list.

TRALDI: And I think it’s a long list. And I do think this precision is part of it that she does, that it is—again, it’s not like a philosophy journal article, but it is an intellectual sophistication that is often not present in novelists that we really appreciate.

Every Word Matters

OLIVER: I mean, one way people talk about the great books is to say that every word matters. And a lot of novelists will say that about their own. Well, you know, Elizabeth Bowen used to say, “What you’re doing is to make everything count.” Austen is one of the examples where it’s actually true. Every word is being used carefully.

TRALDI: Yes. It’s funny, this bears on another Twitter argument I had recently about this phrase logographic necessity. Basically, every word in a great book is there for a reason. I think that’s right. Although you have to be careful about—if you were to say, “Well, every word in Plato is there for a reason, so you can’t really say he’s wrong about every—” you would be kind of abandoning the philosophical mission.

OLIVER: I mean it in the sense of what you might call the artistic or structural integrity of the book. Not everything has to tell in the meaning sense. But it all holds as a unit for some—

TRALDI: Yes. I think everything is there—there is what we could call an internal reason for everything to be there. Everything is there to hold together—

OLIVER: Like the making of a piece of furniture or something.

TRALDI: And I think you hear—I think this is one thing that—and not all classical music, but I think it’s one thing that distinguishes classical music even from very good contemporary pop music or jazz or rock music, is that you have this sense of, “Yes, every note I hear basically is holding up a larger structure of some sort.”

OLIVER: Yes. And Jane Austen is very Mozart in that way.

TRALDI: Yes, I think that’s right. Yes.

Austen’s Place in Great Books Programs

OLIVER: So should Jane Austen have a bigger place on great books programs, based on all these things you’ve said about her?

TRALDI: Yes, this is—so, there was actually a debate—I did not write the piece in response to this debate, but this is—

OLIVER: Tanner Greer.

TRALDI: Yes, there was—Tanner Greer weighed in on this, and my friend Circe. I think—

OLIVER: I think they’re just desperately wrong.

TRALDI: You think they don’t—that she—

OLIVER: I think Emma is obviously a book that should be on one of these syllabuses. Maybe Sense and Sensibility.

TRALDI: Yes. I think the ones I would consider are Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park. I do think they’re actually longer than I realized, which is always—I mean, there are these very practical concerns with putting together a syllabus.

OLIVER: Sure, sure. Although I want to ask you about that, because my response to a lot of these debates, which is maybe just because of where I studied, but just make them read more. And if they don’t do the reading, that’s their, you know—

TRALDI: That’s true. Well, I don’t want to get into this too much. We already make them read a lot compared to—so for example, a year ago, I had my students read two novels in a week, which is more than most courses make college students read.

OLIVER: But that’s by no means unreasonable.

TRALDI: No, no, of course, of course.

OLIVER: You know.

TRALDI: Well, exigencies of the teenage mind aside—

OLIVER: Because I often think this, when people debate how things should be taught and why it’s so important to keep these programs, and they’ll talk about the importance of writing essays. And then it turns out the students maybe write one essay a semester. And I sort of think, well, who cares? All this rhetoric for one essay.

TRALDI: Yes. I don’t know if I’m really ever going to assign essays again. It just is—the age of AI is upon us.

OLIVER: Sure. But you see what I mean.

TRALDI: No, yes, I know exactly what you mean. And I do think reading a lot is the main part of—and certainly, you know, when I read all seven of these in two weeks, that’s much more reading than I normally do, as well, to write this essay.

OLIVER: But you didn’t have to lie on the sofa afterwards with a cold compress. You were fine.

TRALDI: In a way it was a really good two weeks. If you get to read—I mean, this is why we have good lives, right? If you get to read Jane Austen and you call that work, it’s a nice life.

OLIVER: So yes, will you be putting Emma on your program?

TRALDI: I would definitely consider Emma. I would definitely consider Sense and Sensibility. I would consider Mansfield Park. I think these are the ones that have—the moral element is very prominent. But it’s obviously there in all of her books.

OLIVER: You can have a really good moral discussion about Mansfield Park, which is a bigger, broader thing than Pride and Prejudice, for example.

TRALDI: Yes, I think so. I would definitely consider—in the 1800s there were—obviously the British novel of the 1800s was a big deal, and there’s—

OLIVER: [laughs] We did quite well, yes.

TRALDI: You all did quite well. So the ones we did at Tulsa—we had Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights and The Picture of Dorian Gray. And then we had one Irish, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And I don’t think anybody—if you replaced one of those with Emma or Mansfield Park, I don’t think anybody would say, “Oh, you made a horrible call.”

OLIVER: I think Tanner’s point was that you simply don’t have that many slots for an English novel that deals with these sorts of ideas, and that it should obviously be Middlemarch because that is the bigger novel. It’s about bigger questions of society. It’s about the whole—it’s got more greatness in it, whereas Austen is sort of more about the individual.

TRALDI: So I do think that this question of greatness—I think there are some people who read Austen and they think, “Well, this is—obviously it has all these sorts of themes, but it’s not great. It has this littleness to it. It has this smallness to it.”

OLIVER: It’s domestic.

TRALDI: That is not my reading of it. I think if that’s the question, I don’t feel that way. I think it pulls out these great themes about the nature of virtue and the nature of moral learning, becoming a better person, the nature of love. We read Sappho. We read the Symposium.

To me, you read Wuthering Heights and you say, “Oh, this is a really big book because it’s about society and how trauma gets passed down, and it has these horror elements, and it’s very dark.” But actually, it’s quite hard to figure out, how do we turn Wuthering Heights in a discussion about how to live? With Austen, it’s just completely straightforward.

OLIVER: [laughs] How not to live, maybe.

TRALDI: Yes. In Austen, it’s just completely straightforward. This is the discussion. This is what she had in mind as well, this question of how to live. So to me, Austen is completely—in terms of her successes as an artist, she belongs. In terms of her themes, she belongs. So I would not rule her out. I think she is absolutely a great, and who knows what that means, but I think she would be completely appropriate on any of these syllabi.

Reading Plans

OLIVER: Very good. And what will you read next?

TRALDI: What will I read next? I mean, our—from the beginning, I’m thinking I should read some more poetry. It’s been a while. Actually, speaking of—this is funny. Well, I want to get into William Empson. He had an odd life, which I think somebody should do like a movie about him or something.

OLIVER: Yes, he’d make a great movie.

TRALDI: I think Empson would be a good movie. So that might be—

OLIVER: Are you going to read the poems or the criticism?

TRALDI: Probably a little of both, but that’s for a while from now. I think, you know, at the moment I’m back to reading philosophy. So what novel will I read next? That’s a good question. What should I read next?

OLIVER: If you like Jane Austen?

TRALDI: Yes.

OLIVER: Maybe read one of the people that she admired, like Samuel Richardson or Fanny Burney, someone like that.

TRALDI: You know, I do think—you saying Samuel Richardson reminded me, I’ve read very little Samuel Johnson. I think reading some of the great critics, I think, writing this piece—

OLIVER: Oh, Johnson, yes. You would like Johnson.

TRALDI: I think I would like Johnson. I think I would like Empson. The history of literary criticism is something I have very, very little idea of.

OLIVER: Oh, well, then, Johnson. I mean, he’s the best.

TRALDI: Yes, I think I should, I should definitely read Johnson.

OLIVER: English literary criticism begins and ends with Samuel Johnson.

TRALDI: You know what, this is a little different, but—I might have talked about this with you a little bit—I want to read The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville, because reading about Smith—a lot of the ideas that we think of as Smithian are actually Mandevillian, and he kind of moderated them.

OLIVER: Well, he hated Mandeville.

TRALDI: Yes.

OLIVER: Very hard on him.

TRALDI: Yes. So a lot—like the invisible hand, it’s only a small part of Smith’s thinking, but it was like the entirety of Mandeville’s thinking, this sort of dynamic.

OLIVER: Well, I think it means different things for them. I think Mandeville, in a funny way, is more philosophical in the sense you were saying, and trying to make these propositions. And Smith was saying, “Well, what about feelings? What about all these funny things that we can’t account for? Like, look around. It’s too messy.”

TRALDI: No, that makes sense to me. Yes, I think between Mandeville and Smith, Mandeville is somebody who thought virtue was sort of like a con.

OLIVER: A fool’s game.

TRALDI: Exactly. You’re sort of a sucker if you try to be virtuous.

OLIVER: I think he also just assumed that if you were commercial, you were obviously on the get.

TRALDI: Yes. But this is one of the great—I know we talked about this, but it’s one of the great—you see this in Smith, you see this in Austen—commerce has its own virtues, and they are very traditional virtues. You have to be trustworthy. You have to be pleasant. You can’t really be wholly self-interested in every moment because people have to be willing to deal with you given your—I mean, think about Yelp reviews or even just word of mouth. “Oh, that person screwed me over.”

OLIVER: There’s a discussion in one of Hayek’s papers, which is—it’s a very Smithian point he makes about, the nature of the knowledge problem means that it’s not so much that I’m trying to get information about the thing you’re trying to sell me, but I’m really trying to get information about you and whether you are someone I should be buying from. Which is exactly the project that the novelists and Smith—there’s a sort of period between Smith and the early novelists, running through Austen to George Eliot, when they’re all working on that problem together.

TRALDI: Yes. I do think in Austen, it’s often—the real puzzle is, how do you make out somebody else’s character?

OLIVER: Exactly.

TRALDI: This is a phrase that Lizzy Bennet does use with regard to Darcy. And how do we actually figure out who the trustworthy and untrustworthy people are?

OLIVER: And if you’re too philosophical about that, in the sort of analytic sense, I think you can end up not paying enough attention to the particulars of that question.

TRALDI: Yes.

OLIVER: Because when you actually try and do it, it’s really, really hard.

TRALDI: Yes. And I think this is the sort of—reading Austen, you get a sense of—and there are very few philosophy papers on things like this. Reading Austen, you get a sense of, what sorts of details in a normal life are the ones that I can extract information from to make out somebody else’s character?

In philosophy, we do ask, what is a good character and what is the good action in this sort of situation? What is the bad action in this sort of situation? But it’s not for the philosopher to say, “Okay, in the sorts of situations you’re likely to be in, what do you pay—where do you direct your attention to try to figure out these things about?”

And it’s not—I don’t think Austen—it’s not super subtle either. In Persuasion—I mentioned in the essay—in Persuasion, it starts out by saying Anne really cared about paying off the family’s debts, and the rest of her family didn’t give a shit, you know? And it’s sort of like, okay, so we just immediately are like, Anne’s the sort of person who you might want to have a business transaction with because if she has a debt to you, she might actually pay it. And I forget if that’s the exact detail, but it’s something like that, you know?

OLIVER: And there’s also the novelist—Jane Austen is very good at what you don’t see, which again, is not always something easy for philosophy to handle. But it’s very important, I think, that even though this novel is supposed to be about Anne, she doesn’t appear—she’s mentioned in passing in the first chapter, and she doesn’t actually appear until the next chapter.

And you’re, I think, supposed to become aware of the fact that she’s treated in that way, and she’s seen in that way, through her—and there are a lot of these absences. The carpenter in Mansfield Park who builds the theater stage, he never actually comes onto the page. They mention him, but he’s never in the room.

And there’s a sense of that in Pride and Prejudice with Mary. We’re very aware when she quotes a sermon and everyone laughs, but she’s actually always there, on the margin. And occasionally Austen reminds us, “Oh, poor Mary couldn’t deal with the party, couldn’t—” And I think you’re supposed to try and keep in mind, Poor Mary is here for this scene. And we are forgetting. And this is another interesting way she explores these ideas.

TRALDI: Yes, I definitely felt in the beginning of Persuasion, this is the longest that it takes for a main character to be introduced.

The Fates of the Bennet Sisters

TRALDI: What is your view of Mary? Because they’re making this show called The Other Bennet Sister about Mary.

OLIVER: Oh, yes. [laughs]

TRALDI: I feel like Mary—you are supposed to feel sorry for her, but you’re you’re also not—I don’t think she’s supposed to be thought of as a super virtuous character herself.

OLIVER: No. No, no, no. My view of Austen is that all of her novels are about moral education or the development of virtue, or whatever you want to call it. They’re basically structured as quests. And Austen is engaged with the culture wars of her times, and she’s offering an alternative way of thinking about it.

So rather than the sort of sermons, op-eds, and all this war of pen and ink that’s going on, she’s trying to do something sort of philosophical, but more literary, and to tend to say, “Look, you’ve got to turn away from these arguments and sides. You have to go out into the world and figure it out.”

So Lizzy Bennet never comes to the proper realizations of herself and Darcy and everyone until she gets in her carriage and drives around Derbyshire and talks to a servant and sort of goes on that journey into the unknown. And we’re told very clearly at the end, Lizzy and Jane get married, happy ever after. Lydia is in perpetual “quest,” quote unquote, for security and nice lodging. And she never finds it. They just have to live in perpetual quest. I think that’s very telling.

Kitty goes to live with her elder sisters, and Austen says it does her the world of good. She doesn’t turn out like Lydia after all. She gets brought up properly when she goes away from home. And Mary, because she’s now left on her own, has room to flourish, and she goes out with her mother and she socializes. And she finds it awkward, and her mother’s quite embarrassing, but actually it’s the best thing that ever happened to her.

And just like Smith says, and just like Austen says, you can only learn these things in real life, in practice. That’s what Mary’s missing. And she’s there always as a reminder that the Mr. Collins culture wars approach, that can also happen to you just as a bookish nerd staying at home. It’s what happens to Mr. Bennet. And in a way, there is a novel to be written about her, but it’s picking up from the very—almost on the last page when she tells us—

TRALDI: Yes, that’s interesting. That’s a very—

OLIVER: It’s a great detail.

TRALDI: No, that’s a very compelling interpretation of the fate of the sisters at the end. I think that’s completely convincing.

Commercial Virtues

TRALDI: There was one thing—and I know this is sort of repeating something, and I know you were trying to wrap up, so I’m happy to wrap up whenever. But you talked about Lizzy talking to the servants. I think it’s very important that you see the impression that Lizzy gets from the servants, who are people who Darcy deals with in a commercial way.

These are the people who he has commercial relationships with, but they’re also warm commercial relationships. And this is contrasted with—she learns Wickham has actually built up all these gambling debts, right? You learn these characters, but the characters have something to do with, how do these people deal with the people who they have to transact with?

And I think that sort of resolves the—there’s this question of, should we be transactional? Is Austen telling us to be transactional about love and marriage? In a sense, yes, but that’s not a cold transactionalism. It’s not the way we would—it’s not the negative sense of being transactional that we would normally—

OLIVER: Right, right, right.

TRALDI: These days, if you say, “Well, that woman is transactional about her relationships,” it means the opposite of what people like Smith and Austen think we should be in our commercial relationships, right?

OLIVER: Brings this out beautifully in Sense and Sensibility in the jewelry shop. Do you remember this? Elinor goes in because she has to sell some of her mother’s old jewels to try and eke out their income. And she’s there to bargain. She’s going to try and get a good price because she needs—another 10 pounds is really important to her.

TRALDI: Yes, yes.

OLIVER: Her brother John, because they’re in London, comes in coincidentally and says, “Oh, you’re here. What are you doing here? Woo woo woo,” and just goes up, pays the price, and takes the jewels off to his wife. And it’s almost like Jeeves and Wooster. He’s the idiot, aristocratic, sort of gullible, no commercial sense, no haggling at all.

And then there’s the fussy old man with his toothpick case. “Do I want a pearl inlaid here? Maybe I want the pearl down there.” And Elinor is made to wait for 20 minutes, and Austen says something like, “until the man decided that he could live until next Wednesday when the pearls would be properly embedded.” And I think she’s showing us these Smithian distinctions between ways of being commercial, ways of having transactions.

And Elinor comes out of that very honest, very straightforward, very virtuous in her commerciality, and the other two are sort of greedy, myopic—

TRALDI: I mean, I do think certainly Sense and Sensibility—obviously these families, there’s always something hanging over every family in Austen. And in Sense and Sensibility, it’s the unwillingness of the brother and his wife to support—I mean, I forget the details of the family relationships, but to support Elinor and Marianne.

OLIVER: That’s right. I can’t remember if they’re stepsiblings or half-siblings. So he’s inherited all the money. They’re stepsiblings, I think. And his father said, “Look after the girls.” And the wife talks him down from giving them, I can’t remember, 200 a year to the occasional 10 pounds.

TRALDI: It’s talked down; it gets cut to like 20 percent or something of the original.

OLIVER: Oh, it’s cut to, “Do it at your own discretion.” So the poor women are left on their meager income.

TRALDI: Yes. Yes. And it’s shown that, like Anne, Elinor is really the only one who is sensible enough to deal with these new circumstances.

OLIVER: Has any household economy. Yes. Exactly. So these commercial virtues are in the home. They’re in the shop.

TRALDI: Yes.

OLIVER: Yes, exactly. So Oliver’s essay was published in Fusion. It is called “Jane Austen’s Virtuous Liberalism.” You can go and read it. And Oliver, thank you very much. This was great.

TRALDI: Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun.

What is more strange? That there can still be so much we cannot know after thirteen-hundred pages, or that there seem to have been times when absence was all there was, when there is nothing to know? These vacuums are often what makes the writer who stands second only to Shakespeare in the English canon so interesting not just as a writer, but as a man, as a moral example.

He is famous for his moral essays, provocative conversation, and strict view of discipline and religion. He is interesting for all the ways in which he fails to conform to those ideals.

§

He rarely got out of bed in the morning. When he did, it was often to read a book about depression. He paid a great deal of attention to his belly, not just to keep himself well-fed so he could work without distraction—he concocted, out of his knowledge of medicine and food, his own syrups of figs and orange peel to keep digestion regular. He had no ear for music, and little appreciation of the visual arts, but few could claim to be better read in Latin or in English. He rolled, twitched, gesticulated, squinted, touched himself compulsively; he took religion so seriously he would admonish people fiercely in the middle of conversation; sometimes his political views came out in sulking fits. The woman he is thought to have loved, who said he would have been a hero to his own valet, once rated his personality traits out of twenty: for religion, morality, and general knowledge, he scored twenty; for person and voice, manner, and good humour she gave him zero.

A supporter of women’s education and accomplishments, in an age of patronising patriarchy, he gave Latin lessons to girls and women of his acquaintance, read and complimented (by quoting from memory) the novels of women writers, promoted their work, advised them and helped them get published; but he treated women with the same contempt he treated men, and when Catherine Macaulay published her radical History of England, which was republican, he not only refused to read it, but got into the habit of making toasts in her name, mockingly, when a toast to the King was called for. This was the same King, who he once said, if the people of England could be fairly polled, would be sent out of England, and his adherents hanged.

He so loved the hierarchical order of society, he thought the King—chosen by Parliament, a German Elector, and thus not the direct descendant of James II—was not the true King. It is not known what he was doing in 1745, the year in which a rebellion by James II’s descendants was launched against the throne. He wrote anonymous pamphlets which were sympathetic to the rebels’ cause. Scholars of his work argue bitterly in petty tones about where he might have been, and what he might have been doing. After recording the details of a rant about the recent history of England’s kings, his biographer declines to keep adding details of the expostulation, and instead merely notes, “He roared with prodigious violence against George the Second.”

This man who so loved hierarchy was an abolitionist before the abolitionist movement. He once shocked the company at a university dinner by making his toast to “the next insurrection of Negroes in the West Indies.” He took in a twelve year old boy, a freed slave, and trained him as a servant, eventually leaving him the majority of his estate. This servant, Francis Barber, had gatherings of other free Black Britons at his house.

Married once, widowed for much of his life, he was a lonely figure; tall; gangling; scarred on his face; lank and bony in youth; corporal and portly as he aged. His diary records his masturbations, sometimes three in a morning. He made several remarks about being whipped by women. He once picked up a woman almost starved to death in the streets, carrying her home upon his back, feeding her, housing her, imploring her not to work as a prostitute. He worried for her soul. Despite never being well-off, he frequently dropped change into the laps of the homeless, street beggars; thousands starved to death each year in London, he raged, and few cared enough to disperse pennies.

He was a great drinker, until he became teetotal and turned his addictive drinking onto tea, which he would take cups of all day, sometimes until the early hours of the morning. At Hester Thrale’s house, he sat in the garden, working, until the little girl interrupted him, who he would chat with, giving her sugar mice. They wrote to each other for years afterwards. He talked for victory: it was said that if he missed his shot he turned the pistol round and smacked the butt of it onto your head,—but not with the girl, who he adored. When children were made to perform in public, he moaned. He could talk about his ailments all night, halfway to the dawn. So many legitimate complaints had he, that his doctor once complained that listening to them made him almost suicidal.

He was torrentially productive: poems, reviews, histories, biographies, magazine articles on every subject, volumes of letters, a tragic play, hundreds and hundreds of essays spiritual moral and technical, a short novel, translations, literary criticism, sermons, legal opinions, travel writing, political pamphlets, scientific pamphlets, an edition of Shakespeare, a dictionary. He considered himself to be idle. He wrote for the market, not for patronage. He understood how commercial society worked many years before Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations. Aged seventy-three, nineteen months before his death, he sat and talked on Good Friday morning about how hospitable one should be when rich (making calculations as he spoke), about why people in London collected bones from the street (boiled for wheel grease; used for knife handles; burned, ground, and sold to chemists to line the pots in which they heated compounds), about the collection of orange peel to make a fragrant oil, about the fixed and variable costs of building garden walls and the viability of such a product taking land cost and potential yield into account, about whether priests should admit to their training in oratory, about the process by which language first occurred.

He was thought to be so great a man, so important to England’s literature, the government gave him a pension for life; before that he had been in jail for debt several times. Once the dictionary was written, his fame was secure: gossip columns, cartoons, salons, a nationwide nickname, an honorary doctorate, an audience with the king. Sir Joshua Reynolds, portraitist of the well to do, painted him looking scholarly. His definitions are still quoted today, often for their acerbic wit. He became known for his shabby, shambling, almost squalid appearance. Where once he had sat stimming and muttering in the corner, while people asked if he was a lunatic, his presence now was sought by all the great and good, and the rest. He is the towering, defining figure of his times. He has become a meme.

This vast, incomprehensible, complicated man was not famous for any one aspect of his life or work. The dictionary coincided with the moral essays and the novel; the poetry and journalism had first made his name in literary London; he was revolutionary in the field of biography. His work was gaspingly admired (and sometimes despised as teeth-breakingly difficult) across the country, across the generations. He was never the most famous, the most successful, but he was often recognised as the most significant.

Above all, this man was full of assertions and contradictions. He was so often an outsider who became an insider. About him, there are open questions of masochism and insurrection. He had no degree but became the foremost scholar of his times. He had no wife for much of his life, but wrote powerfully about marriage. He was so genuinely troubled by the thought that he might go insane, that he asked his friend Hester Thrale to lock him in his room all day (he performed mathematical calculations to keep himself occupied). He wrote his own prayers. He worried, more and more darkly as he aged, with an increasingly real terror, that he would go to hell.

He is the most famous and influential moralist in England’s history. He is Samuel Johnson.

§

Johnson is thought to be a man of order. In religion, politics, and literary criticism he is seen as prizing regularity, obedience, traditional form. He disliked the poet John Donne for yoking unrelated ideas violently together. When he left church, he complained loudly that the sermon praised liberty instead of rebuking licence. When Catherine Macaulay’s History of England was anti-monarchical, he embarrassed her by asking if she would invite her footmen to dine with her. He enjoyed the joke so much, he told the story to friends.

But Johnson is not a moralist of the monovocal and the orderly. He knew the power of exclusion, dissent, and failure. As a boy, he skipped church: people looked at him, at his uncontrollable movements. As an unhappily married man, he lay on the bed with another woman, cuddling and feeling her until he sent her away, appalled at himself. In middle-age, he battled depression, long delayed professional success, and his own idleness. His sexual impulses were strong, and somewhat mysterious. His fears of madness don’t seem to have been hypochondriac, but an extension of his dark depressions.

Moral advice is everywhere in Johnson’s work, not just the essays that expressly deal with ethical questions. In an age obsessed with taxonomy, the codification of knowledge, the scientific revolution, with understanding and categorising everything, Johnson was a voice of warning. Knowledge can be ordered. People cannot. He spent his whole life in the struggle for peace of mind. As a moralist, that was what he wrote about. Not the smooth and orderly outcome, but the struggle.

Much of Johnson’s insight captures the worser side of human nature, about which he is obdurately, provocatively truthful. He wants to expose all parts of the human mind to reason, to understanding. He knows about all the little vanities of man.

“Every man has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his native place.”

“No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.”

“It is man’s own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.”

“All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to shew how much he can spare.”

“I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.”

“There are people whom one should like very well to drop, but would not wish to be dropped by.”

“It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.”

Johnson was able to specify any number of human frailties. Many of his sharpest lines come not from his essays, but were delivered to someone’s face. Johnson was not a lurker, a moralist who only let his thoughts out on the page; everywhere he went, Johnson preached. But he was generous, pragmatic, concerned not just to puncture hypocrisy, but to genuinely encourage better living. “I am a great friend to public amusements; for they keep people from vice.” Johnson combined strict ideals with a deep understanding of how hard it was to live up to them. He knew that most of all from personal experience.

§

Johnson contracted to start work on the Dictionary in 1746; he finished in 1755. He was forty-six. The Dictionary is an extraordinary accomplishment of scholarship, composition, and imagination to come from just one mind. But it was not all Johnson did in those years. In 1748 he published his most successful poem The Vanity of Human Wishes. Starting in 1750, he wrote the Rambler, a twice-weekly essay, with topics covering religion, morality, literature, social manners, psychology, marriage, and many other topics. The Rambler was published for over two years, more than two hundred essays in total. From 1758–1760, Johnson wrote the Idler, another set of essays, simpler and more direct than the Rambler. In 1759, he wrote Rasselas, a philosophical novella which has been described as having more wisdom than any other book by multiple writers and critics. All the while, he was often slowly working at his edition of Shakespeare. And there were minor works, too. In 1755, he wrote two pamphlets to promote Zachariah Williams’s theories of longitude.

But around 1760, Johnson came to a halt. After his enormously productive fifteen-year period, Johnson lost his energy. Working on the Dictionary involved reading an enormous number of books to select the one-hundred-and-ten-thousand quotations used to illustrate the meanings of words. This massive input had given Johnson the material to furnish all his other works. Rather than crowding out any other pursuits, the demands of the dictionary seemed to leave Johnson with so much extra material—left over quotations, spill over thoughts—that he had to use up, he produced far more around the time he was writing the Dictionary than in other periods. He had a hot-streak and it came to an abrupt end.

Two friends became large fixtures of the second half of his life—James Boswell who later wrote Johnson’s biography, and Hester Thrale, with who he was probably in love. But he didn’t meet them until 1763 and 1765 respectively. 1763 was also the year when the famous Club was formed, the society of learned men who met once a month and talked about their ideas, covering art, politics, economics, philosophy, music, literature, and affairs of the day. Boswell, Thrale, and The Club gave Johnson a new lease of life involving travel, socialisation, and discussion of ideas. Before them, though, there was a gap in Johnson’s life, the lost years of 1760–1763, perhaps longer.

Although he was famous and respected for his Dictionary, Johnson now lived a lonely, squalid life, with no routine, no work, and seemingly no purpose. When people visited him, they were astonished at the visible dirt in his rooms, the sparse furniture, the small ugly wig that hardly fitted on top of his head. One friend turned up hoping to write a letter and found that the great author had no paper, ink, or pen in his possession. He fasted, on one occasion, for two days.

As one old acquaintance had said of him before the Dictionary, when Johnson was an anonymous figure living in near poverty, Johnson now seemed quite lost to himself and to the world. The difference now was that his fame was secure, his great work was done. But to Johnson, it was a bleak period. So many of the pessimistic things he had written about human life in the last fifteen years seemed to be coming true. He didn’t believe that age would perform the promises of youth, or that the deficiencies of the present day would be supplied by the morrow, as he wrote in Rasselas, but now he had the melancholy indignity of living through his own projections. The wisdom of misery had caught up with him.

And instead of coming out and barking, Johnson sat at home: driven into a corner.

§

Throughout the Rambler, Johnson warns against letting short-term pleasures distract you from long-term happiness. This is a mistake he made a lot during his lost years. The most famous anecdote about his drinking, when he was woken up in the small hours by two young acquaintances and said, what you dogs I’ll go drinking with you, comes from this period. During his marriage, Johnson had become a teetotaller. Now he drank so much, he wrote ruefully about it in his diary. The young William Cowper—who went on to become a famous poet, translator of Homer, hymn writer, and member of the abolition movement—lived opposite Johnson at this time, but neither man had any idea. 1760 was such a slow year that as well as finding no published work, Boswell found no letter sent to any of Johnson’s friends. At Easter 1761, Johnson described himself as “dissipated and useless.”

For three years, the man who is so often quoted as advising friends when depressed to “be not solitary, be not idle” seems to have been just that.

Milne’s ambitions were to write humour for adults—he was one of Punch’s leading humorists—as well as plays. He also produced a very good detective story. But reading Milne’s adult works now is more a chore than a pleasure, done from the interest of knowing more about the man who wrote Winnie-the-Pooh—done indeed in the expectation that such a writer must surely be as enchanting elsewhere as he was in the Hundred Acre Wood. Alas, Milne’s closeted heart only glowed deep in the forest of childhood. His other work now feels mannered, glib, and of period interest. It is the quest of the little bear and his boy that has lived on.

Those years were suffused with golden light for children’s literature. The Railway Children (1906), The Wind in the Willows (1908), The Secret Garden (1911), Peter and Wendy (1911). This world is still greatly alive in our imaginations. We can still step back into its charms, eccentricities, and Arcadian simplicities. Who does not know Ratty and Toad and the Mole? Who does not remember discovering the secret garden? Pooh belongs to this precious collection of stories, a little world away from the world, in which a stuffed bear who loves honey and a timid little pig can toddle off together into the sunset like Adam and Eve taking their solitary way.

Pooh and Piglet now have the immediacy of all great popular art. To look at a drawing by E.H. Shepard, Milne’s Punch colleague and the original illustrator of Pooh, as well as the author of a delightful memoir about his own golden Victorian childhood, is to look through a mirror into the past. Like Edward Ardizzone a generation later, Shepard’s style is a world in-itself as well as an aesthetic of its times—we feel as if we might be able to step through the drawing and be there in the forest. The closed nature of these little worlds came directly from the closed nature of their creators’ lives: not just emotionally, but socially. Shepard was born five minutes away from Milne, though they never met until they both worked at Punch.

It is hard to think of these people as having the conflicted hearts of adults, such is their gift for depicting the timelessness of childhood, but Shepard once stood on E.V. Knox’s doorstep, angry and contorted about the fact that his daughter Mary was going to marry this much older man. Knox was another buttoned-up Englishman of placid demeanour, the editor of Punch and, incidentally, Penelope Fitzgerald’s father; Mary became the illustrator of Mary Poppins. She died the same year as Penelope.

All this was happening while the literary world was undergoing radical change. Milne had not read Henry James when he arrived as a Cambridge undergraduate in 1900. He knew members of the Bloomsbury group and became an acquaintance of Leonard Woolf’s. Thwaite points to their shared love of Hardy and Butler, a parallel puritanism in both men. Like Sydney-Turner, a marginal member of Bloomsbury, Milne became a champion crossword solver as the new puzzle was invented during his lifetime. Milne was a modern, in his own way, but without the intense seriousness of Bloomsbury.

Milne emerges then as a very particular sort of Englishman from a particular period of Englishness. He was hard to read: cagey and aloof are how contemporaries described him. As Thwaite writes, he was not an intellectual but “had a quiet passion for using his brain.” (Eeyore was saying to himself, “This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it.”) He accepted who he was after Westminster and Cambridge and worked to make the best of himself, knowing he could never be more than a minor writer. He was, in many senses, a captive of his class.

Milne’s first interview with his supervisor shows that he was not quite as much in charge of his own fate as he would have wished. The don was a Scot called Gilbert Walker, university lecturer in mathematics and a Fellow of Trinity. Milne was planning to play football every afternoon, and didn’t feel inclined to work immediately afterwards, so proposed to go to Walker in the morning at some hour when he didn’t have a lecture. ‘And will ye come in for the for-r-r-r-noon or the after-r-r-r-noon?’ Walker asked. Milne recorded, ‘My three-quarter English blood boiled at the idea of saying “for-r-r-r-noon”, politeness forbade me to say “morning”. So I went to him in the afternoon and never ceased to regret it.’

Milne then had a fairly conventional life, if a slightly idiosyncratic writing career: he joined Punch in 1906, married in 1913, became a Lieutenant in the First War, and produced a series of well-received plays and a detective novel. In this period he made heaps of money from his plays and lived richly—but safely: he invested his money too. The conventional looking man with a pipe between his teeth that you see in his photograph is indeed what he was. None of the glamour of Noel Coward or Somerset Maugham for Milne.

Then, in 1920, a son arrived. And in 1921 a bear was bought at Harrods. That, of course, is not the bear who became Winnie. It might have been the basis of the story, but the illustration was derived from Shepard’s son’s bear Growler. Milne was famous. He associated with H.G. Wells and met Charlie Chaplin. But it was on a family trip to Sussex that his lasting fame began, when his son fed a swan and called him Pooh. Seeing the cows nearby, Milne thought to himself, “moo rhymes with pooh, surely there is a bit of poetry to be got out of that.”

A bit of poetry is the telling phrase. Milne’s best verses are completely winning. What is the matter with Mary Jane? King John was not a good man. So wherever I am, there's always Pooh. Reading these aloud to children is tremendous fun: they are still as fresh as the day they arrived. But they are bits of poetry. So much of Milne’s work seems to be in bits, as if they formed pieces of a puzzle, needing to be slotted together into some greater arrangement. It was in Pooh that he managed this arranging.

Each of the stories is a bit of writing. Tigger needs to find his breakfast. Pooh gets caught in a flood. Eeyore and Piglet go out in the snow. And so on. But together, they form a succession of the sort of days we remember from childhood, where nothing very much happens but it is all quite momentous and worth the telling, and becomes a sort of formless saga of small events, the bits of our early life. Shepard understood this perfectly well. The two men were very different. Shepard felt one could never get past the facade of Milne. But they were able to work in unison. Neither would be so magnificent without the other. A line of Milne or a small extract of Shepard, and we are off down the path of the Hundred Acre Wood—it only takes a bit.

In the first eight weeks of publication, Milne’s first children’s poems, When We Were Young, sold forty-four thousand copies. Bitty it might be, but it is also a serious moment in the history of light verse. Geoffrey Grigson was surely right to see its influence upon John Betjeman. In a curious way, it is in his children’s poems that Milne achieved his ambition to write for adults. Many of them are more enthusiastic readers of the poems than children. But in that book were also some poems about a little boy and his bear. This is where Milne’s bit started to become a whole.

Grigson made a scathing assessment of the poems, noting that they were written for and about the upper-middle classes who had “lost their cultural nerve”. These poems take place in a world of Westminster school, two universities, and nursery maids. Freud is absent. Nothing nasty. Nothing like Hilaire Belloc.

Here mamas of the middle way, and fathers, and nannies, those distorting reflectors of the parental ethos, could be sure of finding Innocence Up to Date. Little Lord Fauntleroy – here he was, stripped of frills and velvet (as we can tell by the splendid insipidity of the accompanying drawings) for modern, sensible clothes; heir, after all, to no peerage, but still the Eternal Child.

Grigson has a point about the class—and intellectual—restrictions of Milne’s work. Milne’s world of tea and muffins, and little ditty rhymes, and pleasant social concourse is the world of the woods. “Nearly eleven o’clock,” said Pooh happily. “You’re just in time for a little smackerel of something,” and he put his head into the cupboard. “And then we’ll go out, Piglet, and sing my song to Eeyore.”

But so what? Winnie-the-Pooh makes a pastoral out of childhood, but also out of the slow and pensive moments that children experience irrespective of their class.

The sun was so delightfully warm, and the stone, which had been sitting in it for a long time, was so warm, too, that Pooh had almost decided to go on being Pooh in the middle of the stream for the rest of the morning, when he remembered Rabbit.

And Milne is perfectly capable of satirising himself and his milieu. When Piglet meets Eeyore in the forest, and sees the letter ‘A’ made of three sticks on the ground, he does not recognise it.

“Do you know what this is?”

“No,” said Piglet.

“It’s an A.”

“Oh,” said Piglet.

“Not O, A,” said Eeyore severely.

Eeyore reprimands Piglet for not knowing what an ‘A’ is and then gives a speech that ironises the educational assumptions of Milne’s class.

“I’m telling you. People come and go in this Forest, and they say, ‘It’s only Eeyore, so it doesn’t count.’ They walk to and fro saying ‘Ha ha!’ But do they know anything about A? They don’t. It’s just three sticks to them. But to the Educated— mark this, little Piglet—to the Educated, not meaning Poohs and Piglets, it’s a great and glorious A. Not,” he added, “just something that anybody can come and breathe on.”

There is plenty of this sort of thing, but it is more to the point that Milne is writing the Eternal Child, taking us to the forest where all quests originate or pass through, the timeless place of legend and innocence, out of which we must all, sooner or later, emerge, as Christopher Robin does at the end of The House at Pooh Corner, in order that he can go away to prep school. “Any by-and-by Christopher Robin came to an end of the things, and was silent, and he sat there looking out over the world, and wishing it wouldn’t stop.”

There is the sharp and sobering realisation. The little boy in When We Were Young who stands at the gates of Buckingham Palace, Pooh bear hanging down beside him, becomes, by the end of the stories, a boarding-school boy, on his way to Westminster, Cambridge, a job at Punch, and all the rest of it. Journeys abound in Pooh—when they hunt the Heffalump, when Pooh climbs the tree (“It’s like this,” he said. “When you go after honey with a balloon, the great thing is not to let the bees know you’re coming.”), when he floats down the river, when Tigger goes searching for breakfast (and somewhere to live), looking for the Woozle, finding Eeyore’s tail, the search for Small, Piglet going to fetch Christopher Robin in the wind, the journey down the river (“We might go in your umbrella,” said Pooh). All these are quests: journeys of play, pilgrimages of innocence. Preludes to leaving the forest. “Pooh, promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Even when I’m a hundred.”

The Eternal Child, as Grigson almost realised, is a particular boy in a particular place, a real bit of life. And he must therefore be fantasised not with fairies and magic, but with his own stuffed animals, the woods close to his house, and the sort of games a growing lad might discover.

Mr Milne treats his small companion as a sensible being who, indeed, wants to make up things, as is proper, but wants to make them up about real life and not about fairy doodleum. These two go about in the gayest and most whimsical of tempers, but the things that engage their attention are the soldiers at Buckingham Palace, the three little foxes who didn’t wear stockings and didn’t wear sockses, the gardener, the king who asked for no more than a little butter for the royal slice of bread . . . It is all great larks, but I wonder whether the Sterner Critics will realize that it also is a very wholesome contribution to serious literature.

Now that the Queen has visited the Harrods bear in the New York Public Library, a journey I recommend to you all, and the hundredth anniversary of the first book of stories approaches this October, we can restore Pooh bear to that special place in our imaginations reserved for wholesome contributions to literature. It is all over and gone now. Milne’s professional worries, his crossword-puzzle heart (Ask me a riddle and I reply: Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.), Mary’s marriage, Shepard’s dislike of his collaborator, Christopher Robin’s exclusiveness, the lack of engagement with “real” ideas… all that has passed. We are left with something more important: bits of poetry and books of tales that understand the great quest of childhood, the start of the journey of life, as something innocent, reserved, delightful, and worth remembering.

What I would not say, though, is “Ulysses is not hard to read.” Some parts of Ulysses are not hard to read once you catch the rhythm and some parts remain hard to read even once you know what’s going on. And that’s fine. Being easy to read is not the only virtue a book must possess to be enjoyable. If something is not easy to read, that is not a sign that the reader is stupid. Sometimes it is the knowledge that you will need to return to a text over and over that forms the basis of your enjoyment. You are encountering something that cannot be grasped in a single experience.

The idea of “not being grasped in a single experience” is essential to literature.1 That sense of coming to something new in the world, something not quite within your comprehension, or, as writers are always saying, not quite within the capability of language to express, is a significant part of what literature is doing. This idea of tacit awareness is explicitly present in writers like Henry James, and it offers a much more comprehensive account of what literature is “doing” than the idea of defamiliarization (at least in Shklovsky’s initial account: he saw the light later in life). Literature, almost by definition, works at the edge of what we can understand. It puts us in the place where words don’t quite work, where we feel the ache of memory, sensation, desire, tantalising possibilities of understanding, of words making us aware of something previously unthinkable, like Desdemona listening to Othello—she swore ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange.

To some people, that feeling is enticing. To some sub-set of those people, that enticement leads them into raptures about The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove. To others, this is beside the point. (This is similar to Lewis’ arguments about science fiction and fantasy in, I think, An Experiment in Criticism.) I suspect that everyone has some margin at which this feeling is enticing—and The Wings of the Dove is not, on any given day, going to be that margin for the median reader—and that the generalised arguments are off-putting, and pointless, because they don’t get at the fact that everyone has a different level of appreciation for this sort of experience. The woman who rolls her eyes whenever James gets “Jamesian” in Portrait of a Lady (i.e. at the sections he revised—to my mind, almost the only interesting parts) will nonetheless be attracted to, for example, Arthur Waley’s translations of Japanese poetry or the work of Robert Hass.

I mention poetry because it is there that we are most likely to meet “difficulty”. There is no single reading of a poem. We cannot be done with it in a single pass as we might with a novel. (I don’t mean later re-reading, but the initial or single encounter.) Even a joke poem, a limerick, a short form, a couplet, requires more than a single read: it lingers and echoes in memory. Something about itself is always drawing our attention. Most verse is dross because it lacks this quality, not for any merely formal reason. When I first read ‘Filling Station’ I did not understand it in a literal sense. Some barrier existed because it is American and the lingo was obscure; some words needed looking up; some of it is simply difficult, not the sense that it is hard but in the sense that you must mull it before you “get” it. Not all difficulty makes itself known on the surface.

Late James is poetry in this sense. There is this sort of poetry in the heart of Austen, too, whose sentences roll in our minds. Not poetry in the way Dickens drops into pentameter, but in the lilt of her prose that becomes almost like the long lines of the Psalms. The family of Dashwood had long been settled in the country of Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property… We might hear Cowper behind this as well as Addison. We might have to read the novel several times before we think to ask why it matters that the residence is in the centre of their property.

Austen can be read as an easy novelist or as a difficult one, not difficult in the way Joyce is difficult, but not easy in the way Wodehouse is easy. Some novels have their difficulty submerged, like Brideshead, which I read three times through on first encounter. Just as the first time we read a great poem and it will require lots of attention, so we might need to read a novel that looks easy. But the “standard” way of reading a novel is straight through, maybe going back a little, but mostly linear. If we rate literature according to pleasure, the more linear the better. Zing! So when people discuss difficulty, a lot of their arguments might depend on how “poetic” they like their literature.

For some poets, like A.R. Ammons and Wallace Stevens, keeping you in the state of difficulty is almost the point. To reach a full explanation is almost to miss the point—these poets are trying to put something into words that cannot, fully, be expressed. The sense of difficulty should be where we understand that. We will only ever be able to get so close to reality through words. After that, we must accept the sensation of difficulty as the next best thing—the next true thing—

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

I read this in one sitting, out in the sun (it is short), and felt (perhaps for the first time?) that I was reading a modern British novelist who is working in the lineage of Penelope Fitzgerald. (Gwendoline Riley was born the year Fitzgerald’s first novel came out.) Naturally, many others have been weak or insufficient members of that lineage, but here is the real deal. Riley may not be quite what Fitzgerald was, and she is very much her own writer, which is part of what makes her a suitable inheritor, and to compare a page of her to a page of Fitzgerald may not yield any great insights, but the overall method—compression, obliquity, an edge of the surreal in the midst of the ordinary, a sense of nostalgia, something radical subdued, wickedness and suffering that go ignored, or worse, condoned—can be found in both writers. There is a shared sense of humour too, though Riley is more unbuttoned and more able to write vulgarity.

Their mother was still alive. At the funeral, when the priest said, ‘Stephen was the oldest of the Kennaugh boys,’ she shouted out, ‘And the best! And the best!’

At the wake, Owen tried valiantly to reminisce.

‘He did love to pull the rug out,’ he said, frowning. Liz was holding his hand.

‘We went round his a couple of years back. “My turn to host,” he says. Was expecting a bit of a spread – he’d built it up, you know. He served us grilled kidneys. So, OK, I gave them a try. Don’t want to look narrow-minded. When we’d all nearly finished he started smacking his lips at us. “Well done!” he says. “Well done! Can you taste the urine?”’

Of course there is a century of this sort of writing in the English novel, covering writers like R.K. Narayan, Elizabeth Bowen, Ronald Firbank, Evelyn Waugh, Barbara Pym, Jane Gardam, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and others, but there is something Fitzgeraldian in the mutedness of Riley’s hints and suggestions. (The ending of section one is very Gardam too…) Like Fitzgerald, Riley knows what to put in and what to leave out. It reminded me most of Human Voices. Mostly they share an ability to write about people who, in Fitzgerald’s words, “seem to have been born defeated or, even, profoundly lost.” In The Palm House those people don’t lose the day, though, despite not quite winning it either. A combination of incisiveness and steadfast marginality all means that when Riley is most Pymishly funny she is also quite dark. Here is part of a scene where the narrator’s mother has told a Spanish waiter who recognised her that her ex-partner is dead, when in fact he merely left her for another woman.

Lately, I often ask my mother how to say things in Spanish — in lieu of conversation, I suppose. She has all the vocab, now. It’s fun, too. In Spanish she speaks as if summoning dark forces; the language seems to entail for her an element of torque.

‘Soy vegana,’ she might say, warningly. ‘Y trabajo en una revista de cine!’

‘He escrito una novela!’ she said, recently, as if laying a curse.

That night, I sat in the armchair by the window with my bowl in my lap.

‘What did Sally say?’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Just thought it was funny . . .’

‘Está muerto,’ she said, again, and then in a deep voice — her Tarzan-Tonto voice — she said, ‘He dead.’

I pictured her on the island.

I pictured her in her sunglasses, on a dusty terrace.

I will have to find a way to get hold of Riley’s several other books here in the USA without getting a letter from my bank manager. A warning: the first three pages or so are not as interesting as the rest: persevere.

More on Penelope Fitzgerald here

The Heart of American Poetry

Based on A Poet’s Glossary, a book I always enjoyed opening, I impulse-purchased this new critical work by Edward Hirsch. But it is not a book I will finish, though I will keep dipping. The attempt to link poetry to the state of America is far too blunt, the readings are often too anecdotal, and thus the page count is far beyond the actual interest, though the book is not without interest and if some compressed version of this was available in online essays, I would read it. In general, this might be a worthwhile book for someone new to the topic, but it feels old-fashioned to me. If the topic at hand is so important (as I agree with Hirsch that it is) some other way of discussing it must be found. No easy task, and perhaps an unfair criticism, but that is where we are.

The Modern Element

Adam Kirsch’s 2008 book about modern poetry is much more lively, gets to the point, and has Kirsch’s own strongly-held views to sustain it. It is less about “who we are now” or whatever, but has a lot more to say about the poets and the nature of poetry. Kirsch is against “poetry’s neurotic obsession with the modern”. He thinks the “poetics of authenticity” which prevailed after the war, and which finished the job Romanticism started and led to the removal of formal qualities, “has thoroughly failed” and has prevented poets from writing major works. He wishes us to return to the pragmatic tradition of Johnson, Aristotle, Horace, and Arnold. A very worthwhile book.