Is the decline of reading the start of a new Dark Ages for Western Civilization? Or are there reasons to be optimistic?

Join Times columnist James Marriott in conversation with Substack writer Henry Oliver for a discussion about the future of literature, literacy, and the fate of the West.

You can book directly at Dr Johnson's House website or on Eventbrite. Tickets have started selling, so book soon…

N.B. I wrote 7th July before, but the event is 8th July.

Sharks pass close to your face out of nowhere, teeth poking out of their jaws. In one tank there is a ray laid out like a rug, and so many turtles and fish they are as crowded as the furniture in the Victorian drawing room. Sitting deadly still are two caimans, so well camouflaged among the tree branches and the water, one feels a chill upon noticing them. In the Amazon section, a macaw ruffles itself right next to the visitors, a scarlet ibis sits proudly in the trees, and almost out of view hangs a sloth.

Baltimore has an art-deco insurance building, trucks so big one expects them to rise up and begin to fight each other, and steam flowing out of manholes into the street. In the harbor are warships, a submarine, a lighthouse boat. A giant former power-plant is now a seafood restaurant and a Hard Rock Cafe. For lunch, you can visit the Italian quarter or find southern classics or go to the indoor market. On a three-mile loop of the downtown area, I saw so many abandoned buildings, drunks falling off the curb, caught the smell of marijuana on the breeze, heard a man hold down the horn for fully thirty seconds at the intersection, and was unable to get inside any churches. One woman walked along muttering to herself, a bin-liner slung over her back. Under the large glass corporate building, on the corner of Baltimore Street, sits a preserved historic building. It is empty now, used only to advertise apartments a few blocks away. Close by is a large building in Greek revival style, locked, with nothing to name it, and signs saying trespassers will be prosecuted.

There is a bookshop full of paperbacks, poetry, European novels, where a classical station plays Mozart, and I feel as if I stepped into England for a moment. On the U.S.S. Constellation, two men climbed the rigging without a harness. It was a Monday and many things were closed, such as the museum with the world’s largest Matisse collection and Edgar Allan Poe’s house. The roads are deleterious everywhere, with pie-dish potholes: in the worst parts, one genuinely worries for damage to the car. You have to go slow enough to swerve the chasms without provoking some hothead to honk you.

We drove home the long way. Police speed past as we keep to the limit. The trees are lush and thick, woods standing deep beside the highway. Neat, elegant, Protestant churches, with clean white spires, stand proud against the changes of time. Strip malls of fast-food go by. In a market dedicated to fresh, healthy food, irritating rock music plays. Nice houses spread back as thickly as the woods; in the wealthy areas trees and shrubs are in profusion, blossom everywhere. This is all very far away from the west side of Baltimore, which is so derelict that on every street at least one home was burned out and boarded up. One building had been abandoned for so long a tree was growing out of the front. That too was in blossom.

As we glide along the smoother roads closer to D.C., the sun is going down, the river shines, and the rising towers of the church and business glow together. We sing along to Nina Simone. There are moments of great beauty on the George Washington Highway. Soon enough, we come out in front of the Pentagon. The diggers are busy extending Arlington cemetery, planes are rising, a new moon waxes in the darkening sky.

There are many wide roads through the graves, which line up in undulating rows, seen at some angles they fan out in triangular patterns, making new sets of neat lines. At many points, you cannot see beyond the waves of headstones.

We walked the hill up Arlington cemetery towards the Robert E. Lee memorial, known as Arlington House, past the eternal flame and the graves of JFK and Jackie and their two-day son and still-born daughter, past the standing pool and the graves of RFK and his wife, past the grave of Robert McNamara, and as we rounded the hill, Congress always coming into view behind the trees, and the Washington monument, and at some angles the Pentagon submerged in the leaves, the bells began to chime mechanically, and a yew tree appeared, standing steady in the strong sun and the chill wind, growing at the end of its youth.

The Lee house looks directly down to Lincoln’s memorial, huge and neoclassical, and there is a row of little gravestones—the first of the Union dead buried at Arlington—right beside. Inside there are the usual things: rich furniture, a carved mantlepiece, glassware, a piano. All the thousand acres here were a slave plantation. That is the land that now holds the graves. This house was slave built. The slave quarters are uncomfortably close. The women of the family broke the law and taught their slaves to read. In the 1850s, a will freed many of them. In this house lived the descendants of George Washington’s step-son. Washington’s step-grandson, George Washington Park Custis, inherited Mount Vernon, and built Arlington House. Robert E. Lee married Custis’s daughter there in 1831. And so the American idea of dynasty began.

We took the winding path down and back up to the tomb of the unknown soldier and saw the changing of the guard. The ceremony is remarkably intricate, almost like something devised by bees, which you watch in awe without knowing what it means. One soldier is marching in front of the tomb. A superior officer appears, followed by another soldier. The officer announces the ceremony will begin. We must be silent. We must stand. Next to me, a man rises from his mobility scooter.

The officer marches to the first soldier. The second soldier leaves, now unseen. The officer marches back. The second soldier reappears. All of this marching is done slowly, with almost dance-like movements—the heel is placed firmly and then a slow step is made, before the next heel is placed. Every pause occasions a turn-flick-snap motion, one heel clicking against the other. The turn-flick-snap is slowly done, with a sense of state, elaborate but restrained. Every turn requires two of these clicks: one at the pause, one at the turn. Various meetings, bows, presenting of arms, clicking of heels are made. In the five minutes of ceremony, some hundreds of individual motions and gestures must have been made. Everything has a very precise manner. When the officer inspects the soldier, he moves his head in the small, distinct gestures one associates with imitations of a robot. Everyone watches in silence. Half the people watch through their phone screens as they film it all.

The cemetery’s classical architecture is completely out of place. Nothing in American landscape justifies Grecian and Roman columns. The most American places are the plain headstones, the eternal flame burning in a metal cylinder, the fact that there is always a tour tram going past, or one of those slow-motion, open-sided tourist buses. All this is utterly American, not the classical imitation.

But read the words of Robert Kennedy carved above the pool, from a speech he delivered the night Martin Luther King was assassinated.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

Down in the tidal basin below the cemetery is the memorial for Martin Luther King, where these words are carved: “darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.” Kennedy’s words are close to the eternal flame at JFK’s grave. Americans often deny the depth and extent of their history. But standing in Arlington cemetery, one cannot find this history anything but remarkable. So much is held in so little ground. The out-of-place classical architecture makes sense in the heart of a modern empire, where Aeschylus’s words live with King’s, where classical ideals still live in new forms, and where the ghosts of injustice are as present as the eternal flame.

In the tidal basin the blossom is over now, the trees are in full leaf, and there are always airplanes taking off and coming in to land.

This volume is the most discursive, both about the question of time and the moral quality of changed persons. Either this is all necessary to the overall structure, or Balle hit a slow patch. I’m going to discuss the issues of time and morality, which suggest this volume is still necessary, if perhaps less interestingly delivered than the others.

First, time, and whether time is independent of us and our actions. On one theory, time is an eternal clock that carries on regardless of what happens. On another theory, time is just something that relates all of our actions together. Rebecca explains the two theories like this:

There are two big standard philosophical theories in this debate. First, some people think that time is independent from change. On this view, time can be thought of as a container. That is, people who hold this view tell us that even if events stopped unfolding — if, instead, somehow everything in the world ‘froze’ — then time would nonetheless continue. The container wouldn’t go away!

…

Some other people think, however, that there cannot be time without change. On this second view, if the kind of ‘freeze’ took place that meant events stopped unfolding, then time would also be frozen.⁸ This view is called relationism, because on this view, time is reduced to relations between events, or between things and events.

You will see that both theories are present in the novel. Tara is in a container of time; Thomas and the others on a loop are in the sort of time that can be paused. Rebecca suggests the novels could be about “quantum theories of time that allow time to pass differently in different parts of the universe, and also allow for time to move beyond linearity.”

The importance of time is how it allows Balle to investigate the obligations we have to each other. As I wrote before: “The question Balle poses is whether Thomas is still a person in the same sense that Tara is a person. If time runs completely differently, how can they be the same sort of being?” In volume IV, these questions are openly discussed.

It’s difficult to know whether we’re still human. It was Sarah who had started having doubts. She laughed, but she meant it: She felt like something else. She didn’t know what exactly—just something else. Not a human being. Not an animal. Not a ghost or a monster or some mythical creature, and then people began suggesting all sorts of things we might be if we were not human: witches and trolls, fairies and nymphs, cherubs, gods and goddesses, devils and vile beasts, miscreations, freaks, homunculi. There was also talk of aliens, cyborgs, clones, androids, that sort of thing, but Sarah said those weren’t it either.

As I wrote before, the characters like Thomas who are stuck in a loop are akin to people with dementia or children—people for whom time is so different than it is for “normal” adult people that we have significantly different obligations towards them. If our experience of time becomes sufficiently distinct from other people’s, we become different types of person, and feel cut off from them. Some unified sense of time is essential to the idea of social bonds. A family shares a sense of time — a sense of the days passing with some unity of both the container they are in (these days together that will end) and of the relation they hold (our time passes as ours).

Think of As You Like It, where we are told both that “there is no clock in the forest” and “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.” These two concepts of time drive the action of the play. As Rawdon Wilson explained in 1975, “There is more than one concept of time present in As You Like It.” In the court, things begin and end. In the forest, time is timeless (even if only as a pastoral ideal). Then there is the relativity of time, the specific time-sense of individuals.

It is the interior, private time of individuals which is, primarily, opposed to the objective time of the public world. This, however, is a multiple, not a single or absolute, opposition.

Wilson thinks the characters move from the time imposed upon them to living on their own time. We can see this same dynamic at play in volume IV.

We’re a cheerful bunch inside a container of time. If time is a container, that is. We gather around the breakfast table in the conservatory, we convene in the drawing room as evening falls. People come and go, and the days race by, faster and faster.

A happy bunch, could one say that? I don’t know. Can you be happy when you’re missing someone? I dice onions and vegetables. If Karna Jeri is tired, I chop wood. I sit at the table in the conservatory. Olga walks in. A little later, Henry D. does too. He is heading out for supplies, so I do get out after all, because I tag along, and of course you can. Be happy. Can you be happy in a house full of friends? Yes, you can. Of course you can.

Can I be happy while Thomas goes around his house? Of course I can. It’s not just me here. There are others to do the missing with. We wait. That’s what people have always done. There has always been someone to miss. Think of that. Think of all the people who miss someone, and who go on living anyway. Day by day is manageable. Think of that. Of course you can be happy in the meantime. I unwrap and pickle and set out plates in the kitchen. Everything is easier when I rinse vegetables in water. When I chop and slice and think of the past. It’s what people have always done when they missed someone.

You can immediately see the problem. This is interesting, but a whole book of this gets old quickly. Joanna Biggs said in the LRB, “On the Calculation of Volume is almost more fun to think with than to read – and for a novel of ideas, that’s no bad thing.” I don’t find that to be true of the first three volumes, but it was true of this one. However, Balle has to establish the timelessness—the lack of concern for public, objective time, as Wilson characterises Arden—of the commune Tara establishes, and of how that changes the way people live, the way they feel obliged to each other and themselves. She does that well enough, it just happens to be rather slow and, for her most interested readers, already established earlier on. Ideally, the end of this volume, which is really splendid, would have occurred about halfway in—but volume V is coming in November, and she has once again left us on a cliff-hanger (which I shall not spoil…) that is both narratively gripping and philosophically interesting.

If Tara is going to leave the forest and return to ordinary time, she will do so as a quester, an Everyman, for whom the old world can never be the same now that she has been to the place where the clock runs differently. Here is how Wilson describes that strange sensation of learning to see time differently, in As You like It.

There is, then, a way to Arden. It is not, surely, the kind of way which Smith had in mind, marked by dusty highroads, worn boots, and all the common perils of travel. But it is there nonetheless. It is the way of the mind’s journey; a mental voyage of discovery which leads to the recognition of self and the importance of feelings. It leads away from property and its appropriate concerns to a new experience of the value of feeling. In some respects it is a process of stripping value from externals, such as property, that might recall the foreshortened voyage of Everyman to the same conclusion.

Along the way to Arden, Time becomes not merely the measurement of motion and change, the necessary context of voyaging, but also the symbolic function of each stage of the journey. And, of course, all, save Jaques’ return to the world of the polity when occasion allows. No one, I trust, except perhaps a Jan Kott, would find this return from Arcadia ironic. One leaves the play certain that life in the polity will never again be the same—convinced that the lessons of Arden have been real.

This is a passage of criticism that I find quite stirring, tapping as it does into one of the fundamental aspects of literature, which Balle, too, has evoked in her novels. We are all questing out of the forest.

Everyone has an opinion about the reading crisis. has the data. In this episode of my new joint podcast for , which I run with , I asked Sunil—who heads up research at the National Endowment of the Arts—what we really know about the reading decline. I found this conversation fascinating: there are so many areas where we just need more and better data. No-one denies there is a decline in reading, but what is actually going on is quite hard to fathom. Sunil was admirably honest and objective, careful to stick to the data, rather than drawing larger conclusions that slip away from the numbers.

OLIVER: We don’t know if social media is taking away from time that would have been TV, right?

IYENGAR: That I don’t know right now.

OLIVER: It always seems to me that if you’re watching short-form videos on Instagram, you would otherwise have been watching Netflix or watching HBO.

IYENGAR: That’s what I want to go back and look at, is when they ask about TV, I can’t imagine it’s sitting in front of a TV set.

OLIVER: I think a lot of is streaming.

IYENGAR: Streaming or it could be in the middle of a social media post. It could be very much intermingled with social media activity. I don’t know how they ask that question. It’s easily discoverable though because it’s on their website and everything.

OLIVER: The basic takeaway from the research you’ve done and that you’ve read is that it’s not so much the internet that killed reading as television and radio?

IYENGAR: I don’t know. You look at the time use survey and you keep seeing this discrepancy of, on the one hand, TV and reading, maybe social media in there. You might conclude that that’s the big bear, TV. I think the reason I’m hesitating a little is because, again, this is all correlational, but when you look at the co-occurrence of this with the rise of social media, and particularly some of these declines happening and being accelerated during a period when social media is even more prolific, I guess we just question whether there’s any kind of relationship there because so many educators and others have attended to perhaps excessive social media usage, especially among the young, eroding certain patterns of cognition. If that’s the case, then we would assume that some of that is bearing out in these reading numbers as well. I don’t have a hard answer for that.

The Pursuit of Liberalism

The Future of Reading in America with Sunil Iyengar

Welcome to the first episode of our new podcast season about Liberalism and the Arts…

Listen now

9 days ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · Henry Oliver, Sunil Iyengar, and The Pursuit of Liberalism

The Honest Broker

With , I talked about everything from the Philistine Supremacy to The Oxford Book of English Verse, with discussions of scholarship and criticism, beauty, modern American novels, and more, in-between. This was the day I had vertigo, and I had to leap out of poor Jared’s car to be ill about half an hour before the recording, which will account for any lapses on my part.

The Honest Broker

How to Be a Serious Reader

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms…

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10 days ago · 213 likes · 8 comments · Jared Henderson

Rasheed Griffith

With my colleague at the Meratus Center, I discussed Submission by Michele Houellebecq. I am perhaps more of a sentimentalist when interpreting Houellebecq. Rasheed writes:

In this podcast episode Rasheed and Henry take Submission seriously as a work of literature, not merely as a provocation. They examine Houellebecq’s use of J.-K. Huysmans as the novel’s hidden key, the meaning of the epigraph from En route, and the book’s larger preoccupation with decadence, desiccation, faith, and civilizational exhaustion. The discussion moves beyond the usual journalistic reading of the novel as a simple warning about Islamization and instead asks whether Islam in the book functions as cause, consequence, mirror, temptation, or verdict.

This episode contains spoilers!

Here are some other thoughts about Submission.

I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

Nobody was there when I saw the raccoon, but neither of us was hell. It shook a squat camellia that has already dropped its flowers, emerging cat-like and subtle, turned on the steps and, standing, looked at me, determined not to go back, not to come forward, however I moved, then walked off casually into its own night, the stripes on its tail still visible under the lamp.

Arlington is full spring. Blossom lines our paths. Redbuds contrast against fresh leaves and white magnolia. Along the path shrubs mound purple, dark pink, light pink, bright pink, mauve, and white. Above the car, a thin-branching tree has bright pink flowers with a white centre that look as sturdy as thick silk. It glows against the redbud and the darkening trees behind. Hostas grow abundantly here, uneaten yet. The birds are always singing the passing time. The cherry has already fallen like old confetti.

I read in the shade, interrupted for coffee and children and to write. Virgil is dying. A passing garbage man talks to Siri. A few leaves fall. Robins run along the grass, territorially alert to each other, sometimes dancing in a spiral fight, and sparrows ruffle solitary in the trees. Early, before the lights are on, or if you catch a quiet moment when no-one is passing through, you can see rabbits occupying the peace. This time I think of Elizabeth Bishop.

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!

Like the raccoon, they keep their own time, moving off as they please, waiting for nobody.

I have just finished Buddenbrooks. How shattering. I kept putting it off, gradually reading less and less, until I was down to just a few chapters. I walked away after the scene with Hanno at school. His teeth, his feebleness, oh it is too awful. And the way he sits silently not playing the piano in the evening, composing in his head. Little red spots like lentils all over him! The whole books ends on a note of insistent optimism, when Madame Weichbrodt defies Tony’s defeatism. It is a clash of the nihilist and the worker, the one who is accustomed to what “life” must be, and one who have faith in “the good fight she has waged all her life against the onslaughts of reason.” It is a faith many more of us will perhaps need to retain in the years to come, rather than succumbing to the all to persuasive reasons why civilization will go smash. I have nothing else to say about Buddenbrooks. How could I? I am simply going to have to get used to it. This is the last scene of Hanno’s life, and I shall think of it often:

…well after midnight, he was sitting in his room by candlelight, at his harmonium and he played it, but only in his mind—noise was not allowed at this hour. Of course he fully intended to get up at half past five and do his most pressing homework.

Normally, I would not give spoilers, but what else is there to do in this case? The book moves so determinedly towards its ending, gripping one with a rising fear of the inevitable. (It works by the expectation of astonishment.)

Here is what I had to say a few days ago, before I reached the end.

Inevitably, whatever else is said about these letters, the usual debates will recur, about whether Bloom was a fraud, a nonsense monger, so crazy that one imagines him, as John Carey once said, convinced that there are death rays coming from the television. Many others have more muted and reasonable objections to Bloom’s avowedly anti-rationalist style. It is for each reader to decide such things—a principle Bloom would have insisted upon throughout his career. Lest you think that subjectivity is inconsistent with Bloom’s insistence upon canonical values, remember that he by no means believed (or ever said, to my current memory) that a true understanding of the best poetry was available to everyone.

Bloom is not available to everyone. Serious readers will continue to disagree about his value. Frank Kermode, for example, in a letter that Rhodri Lewis found in the archives, excoriated Bloom. But there are letters in this book from A.R. Ammons praising Bloom in the highest terms. Northrop Frye admired Bloom until his Anxiety of Influence and Map of Misreading.

That he was a serious reader cannot be doubted, but beyond that it becomes hard to see what Bloom actually was. The debates about his worth stem precisely from this darkness. Writing to A.R. Ammons in 1972, Bloom said, “I’m not an artist or a critic, or a hybrid of the two, but something older and less, a reader.” This became a theme of his public self-professions later on, as did the idea that he was “merely” a teacher. But it is disingenuous.

Through these letters, Bloom is weary. He is often tired of academia, not merely in the way that teachers often become tired as their terms drag on, but tired of being in the shadow world of criticism, not the bright light of poetry itself. In these letters, none of the exhaustion and animosities of academia that characterised Bloom in the culture wars predominate. Instead, we see him turning towards the light. To A. R. Ammons in 1969—

An odd note, this—I came home just now from an exhausting Grad. Seminar in Poetic Influence—exhausting because a waste of spirit somehow—and I sat down—with cigar and scotch and soda—in my deep armchair in the living room—Daniel playing outside—David in the kitchen fingerpainting, Jeanne there too cooking chicken pilaf—and I turned to my downstairs copy of Ammons’ Selected Poems (I’ve got an upstairs copy for reading in my study—every house should have 2 Ammonses) and I read “Bridge”—because the book fell open to it—a poem I hadn’t been open to before—and Arch, it opened to me and found me—immensely beautiful, healing, Archie, as only Wordsworth and Stevens and Ammons can heal. I am very moved, very, very moved. It is a great poem, Archie, and if I had written it—rather than wasting my spirit (such as it is) in tiring seminars and exegeses we don’t need—I would feel blessed, Archie, as you must sometimes feel in spite of yourself.

This tiredness with not being a poet is perhaps essential to understanding Bloom’s own work. The most essential critical dictum is that you must let the poem explain itself, but that merely means recognising the need for some explanation. A poem is never so little as it appears. It is because the poem refuses to be an explanation that we must allow it to explain itself in its own manner. One reason why there is so little genuinely great criticism is that to go beyond the poem is to lose sight of this essential principle. We must enter the dream of the poem. Bloom writes in a similar manner, refusing to explain himself, as Ammons well understood.

Of course you are the greatest critic in the country. Mostly because your work comes from emotional reserve so that you cannot finally put your faith in clarity and definition. You are a meaning man, too. But precisely because you will not spend lengthy pages defining your words, I am seldom to fully know what you are saying. Your words—darkness, for example—are really gigantic, multidisciplinary metaphors and possess just the fuzziness and clarity, inexhaustibility, emotional range, of metaphor. I read you chiefly as I read any other poet, as a poet.

You can take this or leave it, find Bloom to be insufficient to his task, or condemn the whole enterprise of such a mode of criticism, but it is hard to dismiss him, as so many do. Ammons is not the only one to make this point in the book. John Ashbery called one of Bloom’s articles about one of his poems a poem itself.

Bloom belongs to the Longinian mode of criticism, cut with a Johnsonian influence, and mediated by the Emersonian tradition he was trying to discover in American poetry. (See his letters to Ammons in May 1970.) That is hardly the mainstream today, nor was it in his own time. But in his belief that “poetry must help a reader live his life”, Bloom remains constant to the concerns of us all. (I would have used this as the title, but “the man who read everything” is no doubt more provocative to sales.)1 He called that a Stevensian adage, but it is Johnsonian too, and Horatian. In this, Bloom is concerned with the essence of poetry—not, as Johnson rightly says, invention, which the essence of how poetry is made—but the essence of poetry’s effect and quintessential quality: sanctuary, as Ammons writes at the end of ‘Triphammer Bridge’, the poem about which Bloom wrote to him above.

sanctuary, sanctuary, I say it over and over and the
word’s sound is the one place to dwell: that’s it, just
the sound, and the imagination of the sound—a place.

I am one of those who finds some sanctuary in Bloom, and having read this book in two great gulps last night and today, shall be going to the library. I left behind so many volumes of American verse that I collected back in England. Now I shall be returning to them here, reading Bloom alongside. Bloom said he was not certain of his judgement but only of the overwhelming sensation of reading poetry—like Keats, who wrote: “I have never yet been able to perceive how any thing can be known for truth by consequitive reasoning… O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!” It is those sensations which were the preoccupation, style, and subject of his own criticism, as these letters marvellously demonstrate.

Let there be more of them, and soon.

Helen DeWitt is a genius, probably the best living novelist writing in English. It is well known that she has many unfinished manuscripts, that she has lived through periods of depression, and that she has experienced terrible financial insecurity. The publisher of The Last Samurai (a truly great book, which, if you have not read it, you should go and read now instead of reading me) went out of business. But even more recently she has experienced terrible delays and problems with other publishers.

DeWitt is an obvious—painfully obvious—candidate for patronage. As well as writing The Last Samurai, a large, innovative novel that immediately placed her as one of the great writers of her generation, she has written short stories that involved her coding in R and corresponding with Andrew Gelman. Some of her unpublished projects are trying to incorporate data visualisation (which she learned from Edward Tufte) into fiction. Who else has worked on such things? Is this not a unique and exciting experiment in literature, at a time when so many complain that everything has become stale and unprofitable?

DeWitt has been nominated by literary experts as the canonical novelist of our times. And yet, this is not the first time the funding institutions have let her down. MacArthur Fellowship Awards (known as the MacArthur Genius Grant) are given to people of high potential to encourage their work. Today, they are worth $800,000. Unlike Nobel Prizes, which have been shown in a recent study by Andrew Nepomuceno, Hilary Bayer, and John P. A. Ioannidis, to lead to reduced publications and citations, MacArthur Awards lead to increased productivity. This is exactly what DeWitt has needed for many years. It is hard to think of a writer who better meets the Foundation’s criteria of—

exceptional creativity, as demonstrated through a track record of significant achievement, and manifest promise for important future advances. Emphasis is placed on nominees for whom our support would relieve limitations that inhibit them from pursuing their most innovative ideas.

The problem is the selection process. The MacArthur invites selected experts to nominate candidates who are then assessed by a confidential Selection Committee. Importantly, committee members do not speak for their discipline. It is a collective judgement. This is presumably why DeWitt’s immense potential is obvious to everyone apart from the one institution best placed to enable her to increase her productivity.

What is needed now are new ways of funding writers, a return to the old model of patronage and taste, rather than committees and procedures.

Patronage used to be the norm. In the Renaissance, patrons were wealthy, powerful individuals: Popes, Dukes, Medicis. They commissioned sculpted tombs and Vatican wall paintings from Michelangelo, or The Last Supper from Leonardo. So profitable was this work that artists like Titian were said never to pick up their brush without a commission. So important were patrons that they often appeared in the pictures they commissioned. Isabella d’Este, the regent of Mantua, patronised artists like Raphael and Giorgione, and may have been the model for the Mona Lisa. (Another, perhaps more likely candidate, is Lisa del Giocondo, whose silk merchant husband commissioned the portrait.) Jan van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece includes his patron Jodocus Vyd and his wife Lysbette Borluut next to John the Baptist and John the Evangelist.

Patronage markets made fifteenth-century artists far richer than their predecessors. The economist David Galenson has shown that even though it was taboo to talk about money, many artists became cannily commercial. This commerciality became a driving force of art. Far from being a purely idealised profession, after the Renaissance, artists chased gold. This newfound commerciality meant that over time art came to hold a very different relationship with patronage.

A similar story can be told about literature. In 1592 the London theatres closed because of an outbreak of plague. The young Shakespeare was still at the start of his career, not yet making much money. He had to switch, temporarily, from writing plays to writing poetry. And while there was a commercial market for poetry, it wasn’t very large. So he got a patron, the Earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Publishing poetry was far more respectable than stage writing and Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s contemporary, always wrote poetry when he could get patronage, preferring it to the indignity of writing for the theatre. Jonson resented having to earn his living as a playwright because it was socially inferior and associated with immorality.

But there was a growing audience for theatres, caused, at least in part, by a Tudor version of “elite overproduction” after an expansion of the grammar schools, which provided a high-quality audience for writers. This meant that Shakespeare could make money in the theatre without relying on patrons. Unlike Jonson, many writers wanted to be free of the need to scrape and bow to aristocrats. “What hell it is,” wrote the poet Edmund Spenser, “to fawn, to crouch, to wait”. Their escape route to theatre was enabled by another kind of patronage. Theatre became increasingly respectable because of royal patronage. Performing at court legitimised actors, who were still technically vagabonds. The combination of growing commercial markets and innovative forms of patronage allowed for a flourishing literary scene, still regarded as a golden age of English literature.

A similar story is true of music. Colonial America had hardly any provision for the production of music. It was nineteenth century patronage that developed systems of education, venues, and audiences that composers needed to flourish. Andrew Carnegie built concert halls and Henry Lee Higginson financed an orchestra. Others funded composers to travel to Europe and train at the conservatoires.

Patronage has often been the basis of societies. In Ancient Rome, patronage was so pervasive that it didn’t just exist between individuals, but between whole tribes and kingdoms that were the clients of the Roman state. In eighteenth century Britain, patronage was widespread throughout political institutions. It was only in the 1880s that the USA passed the Pendleton Act which meant office positions were given out based on merit, ending the “spoils system” that had dominated until then. Similar reforms were made in Britain throughout the late nineteenth century after the “Northcote-Trevelyan” report.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, patronage became institutional, just as science had in the seventeenth century with the formation of Académie Française (1635), the German National Academy of Science (1652), the Royal Society (1660), and the Académie des Sciences (1666). This was the beginning of the age of codification of knowledge and institutionalisation of expertise. It was institutions like these that began to break the nepotism of the old academy by emphasising the credibility of your work, your experiments and research, rather than your lineage.

Similarly, instead of wealthy, powerful individuals, artists had to rely on artistic Academies. Turner and Constable had to present their work at the Royal Academy in London. In France, artists had to hang their pictures at the Salon. Although this gave artists much more access to consumer markets, there was strict institutional gatekeeping. Finding their work ignored and unappreciated, the Impressionists broke away from the French Academy and presented their work themselves, directly to the public. The critic Théodore Duret said “it is necessary that the public who laughs so loudly over the Impressionists should be even more astonished! — this painting sells.”

As the freedom of the market gave artists to challenge the authority of patrons, institutional or otherwise, a new sort of patron emerged: the intermediary. Artists of the twentieth century, like Picasso, looked to dealers and critics (like Duret) to promote their work, as well as collectors and curators. The patron was no longer commissioning as they had in the Renaissance: the artist was now more free to make what they wanted to make and sell it afterwards. Modern patrons like Peggy Guggenheim were collectors, not commissioners. Her uncle, Solomon R. Guggenheim, who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build the famous Guggenheim museum in Manhattan, collected abstract art. It was when he worked in maintenance at that museum that Jackson Pollock met Peggy Guggenheim: she later gave him his first exhibition and a stipend. The artist was now free from the patron’s control while still able to collect their money. Patronage evolved into a method of supporting artists without directing them.

The same thing happened in American classical music. Betty Freeman who paid a stipend to John Cage or Isabella Stewart Gardner (of the famous Boston museum) who held many recitals in her home. These patrons were supporting artists, not instructing them. When the federal income tax was introduced in 1913, followed by tax exemptions in 1917 and again in 1935, wealthy individuals were incentivised to give away more of their money to artists. This led to the rise of Foundations, and so music patronage became more and more institutionalised. The same is true of literature, where institutions like the National Endowment of the Arts in the USA or the Arts Council in the UK distribute large amounts of money to artists. For those artists unable to go directly to the market, the age of the individual patronage has often given way to the age of the institutional patron.

State-granted funding is the acceptable form of patronage now — and to get money from the Arts Council or a similar body, you must go through an application process. Bureaucracy and transparency criteria all serve to make modern patronage acceptable. In the UK, the Arts Council is currently giving out £445 million each year to 985 organisations. According to a Warwick University analysis of OECD data, EU countries spend an average of 0.74% of GDP on culture. In January 2024, the National Endowment for the Arts in the US awarded 1,288 grants totaling $32,223,055.

To gain such a grant requires an application which goes through a bureaucratic process. Applying to the National Endowment for the Arts, for example, involves three rounds of review. First, a staff review to ensure the application is filled out correctly. Second, a review panel made up of experts and knowledgeable lay people assesses the application against review criteria. (There were 150 such panels this time.) Compiling the panels is complicated, involving far more than artistic knowledge. The NEA says, “To review the applications, we assemble different panels every year, each diverse with regard to geography, race and ethnicity, and artistic points of view.” Each panellist must give a rating to each application, like an elite version of Goodreads. The NEA staff then “reconcile” these decisions against available funds and a third round of review begins, this time at the National Council on the Arts, which uses the panel review to decide which projects to fund.

As well as showing that you as an artist are worthy of funding, and that your project is deserving, it must meet the criteria of “Artistic Merit”. Arts organisations must show: “The value and appropriateness of the project to the organisation’s mission, artistic field, artists, audience, community, and/or constituency.” To get funding as an individual poet, you must show that you have published a book of poems at least 48 pages long or have published 20 poems or pages of poetry in 5 or more journals or other publications which regularly publish poetry.

As the psychologist Adam Mastroianni says, “We apply for everything: scholarships, internships, jobs, promotions, apartments, loans, grants, clubs, conferences, prizes, and even dating apps.” Mastroianni argues that applications provide us with a narrow pool of people to pick from and that we don’t really know if we are doing better than we would by hiring at random. He suggests several alternative approaches, like allowing junior lawyers to challenge senior lawyers, for example, and if they win the challenge they move up a rank.

The advertising mogul David Ogilvy once did this, challenging his much more senior boss to a competitive presentation of their conflicting ideas to the whole company. Despite his inexperience (he had never written an advert at this point) Ogilvy’s huge knowledge of the history of advertising, the latest market research into consumers, and into the way “direct response” advertising worked (i.e. knowing which coupons were clipped out of magazines and posted back most often, allowing for A/B headline testing) meant that he easily beat his boss: and he went on to found one of the most successful agencies of all time, backed by that very same agency. Which was run by his brother.

Before he did that though, Ogilvy left advertising for many years and had three different jobs in the meantime. No-one would have hired Ogilvy to open that agency without knowing him. Old-fashioned individual patronage was his only hope. His application would have been a mess: French chef, Aga salesman, advertising executive (briefly), market researcher (in Hollywood), government intelligence worker, Amish farmer (yes, really). It was the fact of his brother’s knowledge of Ogilvy (both his strengths and weaknesses) that allowed the firm to make a bet on his talents. No application system would have made him so senior in such a new venture.

It was a question not of metrics and transparency but of taste and personal knowledge. Ogilvy’s brother had an eye for talent and the deep knowledge he needed to appoint David to the right job (research director, not creative director or CEO, that came later).

Guidelines are meant to create merit-based, transparent criteria for applications that treat all comers equally. But it is notable that, under these criteria, the young Robert Frost would probably have been ineligible for a poetry grant. There is no role in such systems for someone like Peggy Guggenheim to award stipends and offer support merely on the basis of individual judgement.

But taste is the basis of good patronage. This doesn’t mean good patronage was highly personal, but that it was much more reliant on individual, well-informed judgement. Ezra Pound and John Quinn provided the financial and publishing patronage that was essential to the emergence of modernist writers like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. (Quinn was also crucial to the appreciation of modern art in America.) Ezra Pound was an effective patron because he was an exceptional editor and talent spotter: John Quinn took Pound’s advice about where to put his money, and thus became an effective promoter of the arts, not just a bankroller of his own interests or personal connections. There was, between them, a capacity to fund the most talented writers because of a shared sense of taste: not personal preference, but deep knowledge of the field. No-one knew more about modern poetry than Ezra Pound.

The difference is structural. Ezra Pound was a lone tastemaker. Committees almost never have good taste. It is well known, for example, that literary prizes like the Booker have often been awarded to a “compromise” choice because the leading contenders split the panel. The more people involved in the decision, the more likely it was that a fashionable book — rather than an excellent book — was awarded the considerable prize money. Indeed, a recent study which looked at “the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the National Book Award for Fiction, over the time period 1963–2021” found that a book was more likely to win if it were longer, irrespective of other factors like gender and reader ratings. This is true whether the book is long in absolute terms or the longest book on the shortlist. When committees decide, you don’t get Ezra Pound funding T.S. Eliot, you get an obvious heuristic bias towards books that seem serious.

In a patronage system where people like Ezra Pound and Peggy Guggenheim funded artists of high potential, someone like Helen DeWitt would have found a patron years ago. As it is, the committee based-system of Awards and Foundations has persistently overlooked her, while awards have been given to writers whose work shows nothing like the same sort of potential.

This system exemplifies our bureaucratic, systematic, institutional times which has missed perhaps the greatest, most apparent opportunity to fund a literary genius this century.

But I do not want it to end. So far I have taken it in in great slices, eating it up like the family at Sunday lunch with their ham and cheese and butter. It is a splendid novel of fabrics and foods and the material pleasures of bourgeois life. This is a fine picture of the way things were, like one of those paintings by Vuillard where you feel you could step into the room and enjoy the comfortable chair by the fire and join the conversation. It is quite astonishing to think that old Mrs. Buddenbrooks was the creation of such a young man. He sees it all: the dressing gowns, the boiled eggs held in napkins, the way old Johann’s hair changes as he ages into worry, and he makes symbols out of the ordinary beauties of life, like pretty young Tony’s increasingly ash-blonde hair. That word ash comes back to haunt the reader, a subtle, subversive refrain.

Yes, Buddenbrooks is a book that stays with you. I wake up from my naps and I think about Antonine and the tragic superciliousness of youth. (And I think about Strawson’s Basic Argument, as I do so often when I read a book like this.) I lie in bed and pull a worried disapproving face as the poor girl walks unknowingly into the rest of her life. On the decking, warming up in the splendid spring sunshine, I gasped twice as Mann delivered dramatic news with a ruthless elegance and efficiency. I wish for more of the Christmas singing in the landscape room, more of the foods, the four-poster beds, the lamps being lit as the master sets off in his carriage. And the terrible pain when Thomas’s son adjusts the family record in the Bible. It is sharp to remember it even now.

There is no reading only one chapter of Buddenbrooks. There is no pausing for meals. I feel like I am seventeen, reading The Way We Live Now on a sun lounger, or carting Anna Karenina around on the bus. Only now I know a lot more about life (as Tony would say, O poor poor Tony, if only she could hear herself!) and I see it all rather differently. In his account of Hayek’s ideas of civilization, Erwin Dekker gives a picture of him as a rather conservative thinker, who believes in submitting to the norms, customs, and traditions of society. No experiments in living for him, not without the discipline of the market and the inherited virtues. This is precisely the decline documented by Mann, as the Buddenbrooks family slowly lose their grip on the disciplines that made them great. It is all done with so deft, so light, so precise a touch you wake up from the book after many chapters and wonder where it all went wrong.

There is so much I wish to say, and so much I cannot tell you without spoiling the book. Oh the great scene at Christmas, with the English plum cake, and the almond pudding, and the sack of presents for the little boy! Oh the grandparents’ house at the other end of town! And oh! oh! how well Mann understands business without being in a rush to condemn it! You remember what Henry James said in The Art of Fiction: “Humanity is immense and reality has a myriad forms; the most one can affirm is that some of the flowers of fiction have the odour of it, and others have not.” Buddenbrooks is immense with the odours of life, full of the fragrance of a whole civilization. It is a novel to love and live with, a novel to dwell and pause with.

So many novelists would get the business side of Buddenbrooks flatly wrong. It is not the natural arena of sympathy for fiction writers to go into the counting house, to see the master of a great firm pacing, sighing in his chair, scratching his pen in the ledger, and to really see him, but Mann understands. He has, in fact, quite a Hayekian sympathy with the position the businessman holds.

“A businessman cannot be a bureaucrat,” he told his former schoolchum Stephen Kistenmaker—of Kistenmaker & Sons—who was still Tom’s friend, though hardly his match intellectually, and listened to his every word in order to pass it on as his own opinion. “It takes personality, and that’s my specialty. I don’t think great things can ever be accomplished from behind a desk—at least none that would give me any pleasure. Calculations from behind a desk don’t lead to success. I need to see how things are going with my own eyes, direct them with a gesture, a spoken word, to control them on the spot by dint of my own will, my talent, my luck or whatever you want to call it. Sad to say, that kind of personal involvement by the businessman is going out of fashion. Time marches on, but she leaves the best behind, it seems to me. Markets are easier and easier to open up, we get our price quotes faster and faster. The risks grow less and less—and so do the profits. Yes, it was different in the old days. My grandfather, for instance, a fine old gentleman in a powdered wig and pumps, rode in a coach-and-four to southern Germany as a contractor for the Prussian army. And he turned his charm on everyone, put all his arts to work, and made an incredible profit, Kistenmaker. Ah, I almost fear that as time goes on the businessman’s life will become more and more banal.”

Those were his sentiments, and for just that reason he loved the kind of business that sometimes came his way when he was out for a walk with his family, for instance, and he would drop by a mill for a casual chat with the miller, who felt quite honored by the visit…

Mann fully grasps the importance of local details. There are not just a means of preserving and portraying a slice of middle-class German life, nor are they mere moral markers for the decline and fall of his characters. Every little detail is an emergent piece of information about people’s preferences and choices—and the consequences of their choices. In every little detail about dressing-gowns and fine wines, Mann shows us how “personal involvement” creates the every-emerging world. This passage is Mann pointing the reader towards a way of reading his novel. In the choices we make, we pull upon the strings of the web of society and commerce, and each little tug becomes information discovered, prices adjusted, fortunes rising, falling, fluctuating. There is no separation of work and life, economy and home, in Buddenbrooks. Mann sees that we are all part of the emergent order of society. We all act, and in our actions civilization is, in some small manner, partially determined.

Teach this book in business schools! Recite this passage to every cynical teenager who knows nothing of the personal involvement of the businessman, nor of the local knowledge all entrepreneurial work requires! Pass out copies at Christmas when you see your relatives who spend their sunless days toiling in law firms and consultancies!

Mann keeps all the minor details of life in full view. When Tony overhears her husband arguing with his creditors, she is wandering about the pensee room with her “little brass sprinkling can, watering the black earth of various plants. She loved her palm trees very much, they added a splendid elegance to the house.” When Thomas becomes head of the firm,

… there was a dignity in his face and in his carriage. But he was pale, and his hands in particular were as white as the cuffs visible at the end of his black sleeves, almost frosty white; and his carefully manicured oval fingernails had the bluish tone they sometimes took on when his hands were cold and dry. On one finger could be seen the bright green gemstone of the large signet ring he had now inherited. Sometimes he would unconsciously cramp his hands a little, and at that moment they expressed something indescribable—a dismissive sensibility, an almost anxious reticence, that was somehow ill-suited to him and quite untypical of the effect broad, solid, Buddenbrook hands had always made, even given their long delicate fingers.

If that isn’t enough to send you to the book yourself, there is nothing else I can say, and in any event, I have to go and read some more. Tony’s getting older, Thomas is still possessed by anxious reticence, and the next generation is coming into view, no less to be worried for. Anyway, enough, Buddenbrooks is calling to me.

When I left my earlier post teaching mostly Greek and Latin in Boston for a position at BYU (whose students, though they come from all over the world, are mostly LDS), I immediately noticed how much more enjoyable it was to teach English poetry. I think this has to do in large part to the persistence, in the LDS tradition, of adherence to the King James Version of the Bible, which over the past century has been jettisoned in most other Christian traditions. My LDS students at BYU grow up, both in church and at home, on King James English as effectively a second native language. A significant minority of my students have been brought up in parts of the US with a majority-LDS population: for them, King James English will have remained what I suppose it once was for much of the Anglophone world: the common inheritance of their entire community, an idiom your barber and your doctor could understand.

The result is that not only are they are far more at home than my Bostonian students with Elizabethan and Jacobean English, but that whether we’re reading Herbert or Milton on the one hand, or Eliot or Heaney on the other, they’re far more likely to vibrate, so to speak, with a sense of deep recognition and feeling, when they encounter a word or phrase (”they toil not”) or even a grammatical construction (”greater love hath no man”) that they will have encountered in childhood, often before they could read themselves, as a result of their LDS religious formation. In those little moments it’s as if a chord has been touched that summons deep feelings not only from the reader’s personal past but a deep historical past shared by many generations…

That is from a comment left on Victoria Moul’s recent piece about whether religious poets currently have an advantage.

Ted Hughes had a method of image making that may suit some of you, but that is not quite how things work for me. I believe Helen Vendler memorised all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which I cannot imagine being willing to do. (I think I only know one of them… must correct that.) There’s also a lot of memory advice available in books like Moonwalking with Einstein, which I don’t follow, apart from occasionally, interesting though I found that book.

Below are six things that I find useful. It comes down to repetition and careful noticing. In general, I would distinguish between learning by feel and learning by form (i.e. point 5 below). You will know best what works for you.

If you read this and think it all sounds like too much, try starting with something short and sharp. Probably you can remember this Ogden Nash poem for the rest of your life after seeing it once:

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker

Now try this triplet by Herrick. It takes a little more work, but not much.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Now try this Sappho fragment (trans. Dan Beachy-Quick)

I don’t know where I go
my mind is two minds

Or try this Issa (trans. Robert Hass) (I love this one)

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

Or just pick your favourite lines from Prufrock—”I am old, I am old,/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Or a nursery rhyme! Whatever you like.

Starting like this is useful because developing your ability of recall is the most important part of improving your memory. Imagine if you memorised a line or short poem a day like this. You would soon become a famous rhapsode. (Someone wrote an article about doing exactly that in the Spectator once, performing poems on the street for money. It was a great read, but I cannot recommend it to you as a career choice.)

One word of warning: formal poems are easier to memorise and if you start with someone like Hera Lindsay Bird you might struggle. Rhyme and meter make memorisation easier. You already know this because you probably know a lot of song lyrics off by heart.

If you want to find poems on your phone, (turn that screen-time into memory time!), try Poetry Foundation or Poetry Archive. You can also listen to poets on Poetry Archive.

1. Pick a poem you actually want to learn. This is the most important decision. Sometimes a poem simply has to be memorised. (Just try not memorising this one…) You are learning these poems by heart so you should follow your feelings. Obsession is the first principle of memorisation. If there are poems which stay with you, learn them.

2. Immerse yourself. If you can listen to the poet reading the poem themselves, you should do so. This is how I memorised ‘Filling Station’ and ‘The Mulberry Tree’. I am currently finding it quite easy to memorise ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ which is no doubt because I have heard a recording of Larkin reciting it dozens of times. If a recording is not available, as is the case for most poets, then you will have to say it yourself many times. The more you love the poem, the quicker the immersion works. I know about half a dozen Robert Frost poems and they lodged themselves with me without much worry for exactly that reason.

3. Spaced recall. Spaced recall is the better part of memorization. Say the first line. Say it without the paper in front of you. Say the second line. Say them both without the paper in front of you. Move on once you can say them both together without the paper. Come back later. Repeat. Come back the next day. Repeat. And so on… You do not have to stick to lines. You might do sentences, half lines, images, whatever makes sense. But you should work at intervals. Sometimes to really own the poem, you need to repeat it at longer and longer intervals, until it is really stuck. If you want it to be easy, see 1 (i.e. pick a different poem). Writing the poem out can be helpful but it is by no means necessary in my view. Keeping a commonplace book might help also. But ultimately, you possess the poem by speech alone.

4. Walk around. Poetry is like music. It makes us want to move. So memorize and recall poems as you walk or wash the dishes or plant tulip bulbs or fold socks or whatever. You can do it sitting in a chair or lying in bed, but it needs some movement somewhere in the process. I used to memorise on the train to work. Now I get off the bus early and do it as I walk. Count the beats on your fingers. Tap your foot. Anything.

5. Notice formal features. When I learned ‘My true love hath my heart’ (two lines of which have escaped me and I am now recommitting them—not enough spaced intervals!), I paid a lot of attention to the formal features. It is dense with rhetoric. There’s antimetabole (inverted words), chiasmus (inverted grammar), polyptoton (same word, different grammar), and more. (I can’t name them all. I checked and Claude can list them, but Claude mixed up a chiasmus with an antimetabole, so be careful!) It gets boring doing this sort of naming-of-the-forms stuff. And the point is not to learn rhetorical names but to notice the patterns themselves, which some knowledge of the trope names can help with. (The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth is good for learning them.) You need to see when the words are repeated, transposed, repeated but grammatically changed, structures are inverted or paralleled, and so on. There is so much repetition, of obvious and subtle forms, in this poem. It is a parallel structure overall, within lines, and between lines. The more you see that, the more you will remember it. Here are some examples from the second quatrain.

   His heart in me keeps me and him in one;

   My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides:

   He loves my heart, for once it was his own;

   I cherish his because in me it bides.

   In the first line, we have: His, me, me, him. The next two lines go: My, him, he my. Look at the first words of the lines: his, my, he, I. And the rhymes are very telling: one/own, and guides/bides. These are memorable because they evoke some ambiguity: how possessive is this romance? In the second line, see how “my” is contained by “he” and “his”, and then in the fourth line “his” is contained in “I” and “me”. The whole structure of the poem is repeated again and again within the lines. This is reinforced by the fact that the first and last lines are the same. There’s also alliteration (because, bides) and hendiadys (“thoughts and senses”).1

6. Learn by rhythm. When I recite to camera, I find it quite inhibiting. But as I walk around reciting to myself, I am free to be as expressive as I like. A poem like Herrick’s ‘Daffodils’ or Wilbur’s ‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This World’ relies on lots of rhythm. You must get the feel for this, quite apart from the meaning. It is of course completely bound up with the sense—that is part of what poetry is—but you need to catch it like a kind of tune, so that you can be carried along with it. Look at the second stanza from ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. I have bolded what I take to be the stressed syllables.

   All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept

   For miles inland,

   A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.

   Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and

   Canals with floatings of industrial froth;

   A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped

   And rose: and now and then a smell of grass

   Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth

   Until the next town, new and nondescript,

   Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

   To begin with this is a slow rhythm: you simply cannot rush the first two lines. They have a Tennysonian slowness. (Try reciting ‘Ulysses’ quickly.) It speeds up a little with the farms and the hothouse and the hedges. The strict iambic turn starting with “and now and then” changes the rhythm completely. I thought I had discovered this as I memorized, but you can hear the shift pretty clearly in Larkin’s recording, so perhaps I remembered it. (It is some time since I heard it.) Anyway, the memory works on those rhythms as much as on the words.

I forgot to put the second memorization online, so you can find that here now. Richard Wilbur’s ‘Love Calls us to the Things of this World.’

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.

Transcript

HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to the very splendid Laura Thompson. All of you will know Laura’s Substack. She has also written books about the Mitfords, heiresses, Lord Lucan, many other subjects, and most importantly today, Agatha Christie, who died 50 years ago. And there’s a new book coming from Laura about Agatha Christie’s 1926 disappearance.

Laura, welcome.

LAURA THOMPSON: So lovely to be here, Henry. I’m such a fan of your Substack, as you know.

OLIVER: Well, same. Same. This is a mutual admiration call.

THOMPSON: Well, thank you. Well, that’s what we like.

Christie’s Favorite Writers

OLIVER: Now tell me, what did Agatha Christie like to read?

THOMPSON: Oh, a lot the same as us. I discovered she was a huge fan of Elizabeth Bowen, as we are. And Nancy Mitford, Muriel Spark. But her big love really was Dickens. She absolutely adored Dickens. I mean, she grew up in a house full of books, you know, and she wrote a screenplay of Bleak House for which she was handsomely paid. And it was never—I know, don’t you long to know what that was like? Can you imagine—

OLIVER: We’ve lost it? We don’t have the typescript?

THOMPSON: I’ve never seen it. I mean, maybe—I don’t know whether it exists somewhere. But I just wonder how she tackled it, what she did. But yes, so that happened. And of course, Shakespeare, as we know from her books, which are full of subliminal and—I mean, you kind of notice them, but you don’t have to.

OLIVER: Yes. There’s Shakespeare in every book?

THOMPSON: No, but it’s there, particularly Macbeth, which I suppose figures.

OLIVER: Yeah.

THOMPSON: Like The Pale Horse is completely Macbeth themed. And when I was a kid reading them, I think she really—Tennyson she uses a lot—she affected my reading in a good way.

OLIVER: She sent you back to Shakespeare and the poets?

THOMPSON: Well, sent me to them as a kid, probably. And also, there’s a lot of Bible in her books, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.

OLIVER: Yes. Yes.

THOMPSON: Very easy facility with quoting the Bible.

Christie and Shakespeare

OLIVER: Now, what did she learn from Shakespeare? Because she clearly knows the plays in detail. She sees them a lot. She reads them. She and he are, I think, quite good plotters.

THOMPSON: Is she even better than he is?

OLIVER: Well, let’s not get into that. But there is a sort of, in a funny way, a kind of affinity between them as writers.

THOMPSON: That’s so interesting.

OLIVER: What do you think she learned from him?

THOMPSON: Tell me how you—how you see that.

OLIVER: Well, do you know that Margaret Rutherford adaptation, which probably you don’t like and I do—

THOMPSON: Go on.

OLIVER: It’s called Murder Most Foul, isn’t it?

THOMPSON: Yes.

OLIVER: And there’s something about the way that they can both walk the line between the sort of dark and deadly and the histrionic. Margaret Rutherford can’t walk that line, but Agatha Christie can, right?

THOMPSON: That’s really interesting.

OLIVER: And Miss Marple could come onstage in a couple of the plays. She’s not so far off from being a Queen Margaret or some—in her angry moments maybe, do you think?

THOMPSON: More rational, maybe.

OLIVER: Much more rational.

THOMPSON: Not so mad. Well, she’s not mad, Margaret, is she? But she’s upset.

OLIVER: She starts off as a much sort of nastier character—Murder at the Vicarage, right?

THOMPSON: Yes, she does. She was more acidic and then gradually—

OLIVER: Waspish.

THOMPSON: Waspish, and sort of mellowed. I see what you mean. And almost in the way that she calls herself—although that’s obviously not Shakespeare—calls herself Nemesis.

OLIVER: And the sense of atmosphere.

THOMPSON: Yes, and the way they’re structured. That’s not necessarily just true of Shakespeare, but there is this sort of act three entanglement and this beautiful act five resolution that goes on with a soliloquy, I suppose.

OLIVER: And some people think they both get confused in act four, but that’s obviously not true, that this is the real mess of the plot. I think she might have learned quite a lot from Shakespeare, right?

THOMPSON: That’s really interesting. But, you know, the way she writes about Shakespeare in her letters to her second husband, Max, because when she was living in London during the war and almost at her most productive—I mean, her productivity levels are insane. And hitting every ball for six, really, you know: Towards Zero, Five Little Pigs, a couple of Westmacotts, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. But she spent a lot of time going on her own to see Shakespeare.

She’s very—I hope I’m right in saying this—she’s very sort of Ernest Jones [CB1] in her approach. She doesn’t regard them so much as the products of words on a page; she regards them as rounded characters. Why were Goneril and Regan the way they were? What’s wrong with Ophelia? You feel like saying, “Well, whatever Shakespeare wanted it to be,” but she sees them in that way. And Iago particularly—

OLIVER: Yes.

THOMPSON: —is the one that gets her. Yes. In one of her, I better not say which, but a major, major novel.

And the book that she wrote under the name Mary Westmacott, The Rose and the Yew Tree, which I think might well be her best book of all. I think—well, I’ll just say she wrote these six books under a pseudonym, Mary Westmacott. People call them romantic novels; that’s sort of the last thing they are. And they’re very, very interesting mid-20th-century human condition novels, and they’re full of lots of stuff that she had to distill for the detective fiction. And she talks a lot about Iago in The Rose and the Yew Tree really interestingly, I think.

Christie on Shakespeare?

OLIVER: Now, Max said she should just write a book about Shakespeare, all this Shakespeare all the time. But she didn’t. Why?

THOMPSON: No. I don’t think she ever liked being told what to do.

OLIVER: [laughs]

THOMPSON: His letters to her are quite annoying, aren’t they?

OLIVER: Yes, yes. I’ve only read what’s in your book, but yes, I didn’t warm to him.

THOMPSON: I’m glad because people do. He gets a really good press even though he was unfaithful. But it worked, the marriage, because they both got what they wanted from it. But he said that, yes, and she says, “Oh no, they’re just thoughts for you.” I don’t think she would’ve felt the need, somehow. I think she liked saying things in her own more oblique way.

OLIVER: Save it for the novels.

THOMPSON: Yes, she’s a great mistress of the indirect, I think, really. The way she writes about Macbeth in The Pale Horse, which I think is a really underrated novel, including thoughts on how it should be staged, which are really interesting and very, very good. I think she would’ve preferred to do that and use it to her ends.

And of course, she has an incredibly powerful sense of evil, which I suppose is also in Shakespeare. Hers is a Christian sensibility, I mean, no question. People never talk about that, but it really is.

OLIVER: Was she pro hanging?

THOMPSON: Well, I think she took a kind of utilitarian approach that the innocent must be protected. And she took a view that if you’ve killed once, it becomes very easy to kill again because something in you has shifted, so you become a danger to the community. So I suppose in that sense she was.

I mean, Miss Marple was. She’s quite—“I really feel quite glad to think of him being hanged.”

OLIVER: It’s one of her most striking lines.

THOMPSON: It is, isn’t it?

OLIVER: Yes.

THOMPSON: So I suppose she was. I mean, I suppose she was. You know, she’s very modern, she’s very subtle in her thinking, but at the same time, she is a late Victorian product of her society. Yes.

Dickens and Christie’s Family

OLIVER: Now, you mentioned this Bleak House script. She loved Bleak House. Do we know what she loved about it? It’s obviously the first detective novel. Are there other factors?

THOMPSON: You are going to know—this is when I’m going to start coming across as an idiot. Is it written before The Moonstone? Yes, of course it is.

OLIVER: I think so. Yes. Yes. It’s the first time there’s a police detective in a major English novel.

THOMPSON: Okay. I think she—do you know, this is a really good question. I don’t actually know why she loved Dickens so much. She grew up—she had that rather intriguing upbringing whereby she had two much older siblings, a sister who was 11 years older, a brother who was 10 years older. Father died when she was 11.

So she grew up incredibly close with a really rather intriguing mother, Clara. This is in the house at Torquay. And her mother encouraged her in a way that, it seems to me, quite unusual for the time and for the class to which she belonged. Because it was never deemed that it would interfere with her marrying and leading a more conventional life. But she always wanted to express herself creatively. And I think her mother possibly was a frustrated creative. I don’t know. She had a lot of go in her.

And whether it was just something she read with—I think anything she did at an early age with her mother would’ve made a huge impression on her. I think what you read when you’re that age, you never quite—I never read Dickens at that age, so I’ve never quite got the habit.

OLIVER: But if she’s born in 1890, presumably her mother is just about old enough to have been alive when Dickens was alive. And so she’s got a somewhat direct—

THOMPSON: Yes, she was.

OLIVER: You know, it’s sort of back to the original culture of it, as it were.

THOMPSON: Yes. Isn’t that extraordinary?

OLIVER: Yes. Yes. It’s crazy to think. So she must have taken it in maybe in a more original way, somehow?

THOMPSON: Possibly. Certainly Tennyson, I get that feeling, because her mother wrote this rather leaden sub-Tennysonian poetry. [laughter] It’s like Tennyson on the worst day he ever had, but worse than that.

OLIVER: But worse, yes.

THOMPSON: Yes. And she wrote poetry like that, the mother, which is really rather sweet and touching to read. And obviously she would’ve been alive at the same time as Tennyson. So, yes, I’d never, ever thought of that before. Isn’t that extraordinary? I mean, they went to see Henry Irving.

OLIVER: Yes.

THOMPSON: Yes. And yet she feels—it just amazes me, this—so I’m leaping slightly here, but this 21st-century halo of cool that she has around her, Agatha Christie. [laughter] I know, it’s awful in a way, but the way she can be reinterpreted—that is a bit Shakespearean, in a way.

I don’t mean to make extravagant claims, but there’s a sort of translucent quality to what she writes that means that people can impose and pull it and twang it and know that she won’t let them down, as we are seeing constantly at the moment.

Art and Music

OLIVER: Yes. No, I agree. Other arts—we know about all this, she loves reading. What music did she enjoy, for example? Did she like paintings?

THOMPSON: Yes, she loved paintings. She liked modern art. She was painted by Kokoschka. It’s very good. And she writes about modern art. In Five Little Pigs, the painter in that is a modern artist.

And then music was her grand passion. I mean, music was her original career choice, as you know, of course. She must have had a good voice. She thought she could make a career of it. And she could play the piano. Beautiful piano at Greenway, it’s still there.

And they used to do this thing—I think it’s a lovely idea—as a family. They would fill in what they called the book of confessions, and it would be questions like, “What is your state of mind? If not yourself, who would you be?” And at the age of 63, which is the last time she filled it in, she wrote, “An opera singer.” So that was still what she would’ve dreamed of doing. She loved Wagner very, very deeply.

OLIVER: Okay. Interesting.

THOMPSON: And there’s a Wagner theme in a very late book, Passenger to Frankfurt, the one that everybody hates except me. And music, I mean, as a girl when—so her voice wasn’t strong enough for opera. I think her ultimate—same as I grew up wanting to be a ballet dancer, I think her ultimate would’ve been to sing Isolde at Covent Garden.

And in some of her short stories and in her first Mary Westmacott, which is called Giant’s Bread, which is about a musician—and she really inhabits this character, Vernon, and it’s all about modern music. And somebody who knew about this stuff, which I don’t, told me, “No, she knew. She knew what was going on. She knew about the trends.” This is in the late twenties.

And she always went to Beirut, and that was her real, real, real passion. She was one of those restlessly creative people. And her mother, God bless her, encouraged it.

Christie’s Uniqueness

OLIVER: What is it that distinguishes her from the other detective fiction writers? Because she doesn’t, to me, feel—she’s obviously part of this whole generation, this whole golden age, whatever you want to call it, but she doesn’t feel the same as them somehow.

THOMPSON: No.

OLIVER: What is that?

THOMPSON: Do you think it’s her simplicity, that distilled simplicity that she has? She doesn’t write linear; she writes geometric, I always think.

OLIVER: Tell me what you mean.

THOMPSON: Well, if you think of a book, the one I admire the most, as I constantly go on about, which is Five Little Pigs—you think about the amount of stuff that’s in that book. It’s a meditation on art versus life. The solution is unbelievably intriguing, I think. There’s a whole family psychodrama in there. And every move of the plot, she’s also moving on a—every move of the plot is impelled by a revelation of character. So plot and character are utterly intertwined, distilled together.

I don’t think any of the others can do that. I think Dorothy Sayers would take twice as many pages. And she’d dot every i and cross every t, and she couldn’t bear loose ends or anything, could she? And she liked to reveal her knowledge of other things, almost to—I think the others like you to know that they’re a bit better than the genre, maybe. Their detectives are superhuman, almost; wish-fulfillment man, almost.

She doesn’t do that with Poirot. He’s just pure omniscience, really, plus a few tics and traits and, you know, mustache. I think it’s that distillation and simplicity and the way she inhabits the genre in a way that the others don’t quite do. And at the same time, she’s redefining it from within.

OLIVER: There’s something as well, I think, about—she gets past the kind of Sherlock Holmes model in a different way. They still all have a bit of an overreliance on that, maybe.

THOMPSON: Yes.

OLIVER: Whereas Poirot in, what is it? In something like, is it Murder in the Mews? Very sort of Sherlock and Watson—

THOMPSON: Yes.

OLIVER: —kind of dynamic. But within, I don’t know, two or three novels, that’s gone, and he’s Poirot as we know him, as it were.

THOMPSON: Yes, yes.

OLIVER: And she kind of, as you say, makes it her own thing and goes off in new directions.

Christie and the Theater

THOMPSON: Yes. She’s sort of conceptual and the others aren’t quite, I think. She doesn’t do—she does something completely different with the whole concept of what a solution is, it seems to me. She doesn’t—it’s not Cluedo, is it? It’s not, there’s six of them, and eventually it has to be one of them; however many tergiversations or however you say that word, you sort of know that. Whereas with her, it’s: it’s nobody, or it’s everybody, or it’s the policeman, or it’s a child, or there’s something bigger and bolder going on.

And she writes—I think she writes very theatrically. I think she writes scenically. I think she’s incredibly good at character and action. That scene where you know the girl’s a thief because Poirot leaves out 23 pairs of silk stockings, and he goes back in the room and there’s 19 or something like that, tells you everything. It’s all in there.

OLIVER: The solution to 4.50 from Paddington, which we shan’t reveal, but—

THOMPSON: That’s Cards on the Table. But what I mean is, she’s given us a little scene that tells us all we need to know about that person, really: a sort of timid thief who can’t resist—

OLIVER: Yes, but that’s what I’m saying. At the end of 4.50, the solution is staged.

THOMPSON: Oh, sorry. Yes.

OLIVER: It is literally a little re-creation of the drama, if you see what I mean.

THOMPSON: Yes, I do. Sorry, Henry. Yes, absolutely.

OLIVER: No, no. We’re crossed wires.

THOMPSON: Yes, yes, yes.

OLIVER: But she is very theatrical, yes.

THOMPSON: No, you are absolutely right. That’s a reenactment.

OLIVER: Of something that was seen almost like in a—you know, the whole thing is very—

THOMPSON: Yes, yes. Well, she was a great—I mean, obviously Shakespeare, but she was a great lover of the theater as a medium. And of course, she wrote plays, as we know, which I think are far weaker than her books, myself.

OLIVER: Even The Mousetrap?

THOMPSON: Especially. [laughter] When did you last see it? Or have you not—

OLIVER: I’ve seen it once. I’ve seen it—you know, I don’t know, before I had children, a long time ago. And I thought it was great. It was a lot of fun. The ending of act one, when someone opens a door and they say, “Oh, it’s you.” It’s very dramatic moments. You don’t like it?

THOMPSON: No, I think you’re right. I wouldn’t mind seeing it done really, really well. There’s something strong at the heart of it, that theme that haunts a lot of her books about what happens to children who are unwanted.

OLIVER: Yes.

THOMPSON: Which is in loads of her—no, not loads. It’s in Ordeal by Innocence. It’s in Mrs. McGinty. That’s, I think, because that happened to her mother. Her mother was given away as a child. Her own mother was a poor widow and gave up her daughter to be raised by her rich sister, which is not—it’s not abandonment, but I think—

OLIVER: Well, yes.

THOMPSON: — it’s not great. And I think all these things were absorbed by Agatha as a child. She grew up in what we would today call a house of—I hate this—strong women. I hate that “strong woman” thing, but they were strong women. Her mother was very, you know, as we’ve said, a sort of driving little person. And the rich grandmother, the poor sister, the dynamic there, they both fed into Miss Marple.

And then her older sister, Madge, who was a big personality and actually had a play on in the West End before Agatha did, which I’ve always thought was extraordinary, just to write a play and have it on in the West End in 1924.

And the men were—the father was feckless and charming and a rather grand New Yorker, he grew up as, and then settled in Torquay. And the brother was the Branwell Brontë. [laughter] He ended up a drug addict, which is also a type that feeds into her fiction: the man who could have made something of his life and goes wrong.

The TV Adaptations

OLIVER: So all this theatricality in the books is obviously why she adapts so well to TV, and again, a lot of the others don’t.

THOMPSON: Yes, that’s true.

OLIVER: How famous would she be now without the TV adaptations?

THOMPSON: Well, by 1990, so the centenary, she was a hell of a lot less—and that’s really when the Poirots got going, which she never wanted. She never wanted—she didn’t really want Murder on the Orient Express. It was only because it came via Lord Mountbatten. I don’t know. I don’t know because I think they’re mostly not very good. I don’t know what you think about the adaptations. But maybe that’s deliberate, that they’re less—if they drove you back to the books, you’d probably get quite a pleasant surprise.

OLIVER: It’s hard for me to say because I saw them all more or less after I’d finished reading her.

THOMPSON: What did you think?

OLIVER: I love Joan Aiken—not Joan Aiken, what’s she called?

THOMPSON: Yes, Joan Hickson is marvelous. Yes, absolutely.

OLIVER: Hickson. I think she’s just perfect because as you say, the simplicity, the not overstating. The “Pocketful of Rye” episode where she turns up and quotes the Bible, and the vicious older sister is there, and they have that moment. It’s all so cleanly done.

THOMPSON: Yes, I agree.

OLIVER: David Suchet, I quite like him. I think he has those wonderful moments. “I cannot eat these eggs. They are not the same.” I think that’s very good. It’s very funny, you know, he gets it.

THOMPSON: You prefer him in spats and art deco mode to when he became—he became like a de facto member of the House of Atreus by the end, hadn’t he? It had gone very, very—

OLIVER: I mean, I certainly didn’t watch them all, no, no.

THOMPSON: No. Well, I sort of had to.

OLIVER: Yes, you did.

THOMPSON: But I could never get through those short story ones. I don’t think I’ve ever got—

OLIVER: The moral sort of doom of it all, yes.

THOMPSON: Well, the early ones, when they always had—you could see they’d hired a car for the day. [laughter] And I don’t think I’ve ever got to the end of one of those.

But I think—sorry, going back to your question, I think they probably did make a massive difference. You know, they’re really, really popular. And whether she would have—what you think her—she might be read as much as somebody like Sayers if it weren’t for all those adaptations. But then the fact of all those adaptations tells its own story in a way, because that wouldn’t happen to one of the others, as you rightly said.

Resurgence and Popularity

OLIVER: No, they don’t have that quality. And also, she was bigger than them. That’s why they picked her, because she was bigger than them anyway.

THOMPSON: And simpler. Because when I used to read them at university between the pages of Beowulf or whatever, like porn, [laughter] it was a bit mal vu. You read her for entertainment. But you certainly—I don’t think—she’s always been admired by a certain kind of French intellectual, hasn’t she, for that subtextual quality that she has, that sort of fathomless quality that she has.

But when I researched that biography, which I started in 2003, I can remember going on the radio. And names will not be named, but I was like a figure of fun with a couple of other detective writers, quite well known, who just sort of openly mocked me for taking her seriously and more or less said, “Oh yeah, we love her, but she’s terrible” kind of thing. “Why are you taking her seriously?” I mean, it was regarded as a bit of a joke to take her seriously.

I’m not saying I changed the game or anything like that, but I think there must have been a movement around that time in the early twenty-naughties—whatever the damn thing, decade’s called—to start seeing that she is an interplay of text and subtext, facade and undercurrents, and these powerful foundations that underpin her books. Murder on the Orient Express is, you know, “Does human justice have the right to exert itself when legal justice has let it down?”

There are these very strong—I think this is part of why she’s survived the way she has. We intuit powerful truths underneath the Christie construct, if you like. I always say she’s not real, she’s true. I think she’s incredibly wise about human nature, possibly more than any of them.

You take a book like Evil Under the Sun, and there’s a femme fatale who’s murdered. “Oh, the femme fatale. No man can resist her.” Turns out she can’t resist men. She’s prey; she’s not a predator. And of course, women who are so dependent on their looks and so on, that is what they are. They are prey. They’re not predators. They’re very, very vulnerable. Just a really small thing like that. And I just think, oh, you’re very—there’s so much easy wisdom in there somehow.

And she deploys it perhaps differently—I mean, Ruth Rendell is wise, but it’s very, “I am wise and you’re going to pay attention to me.” You know what I mean? It’s all very, “I’m very dark and very wise and very,” you know. I love her, but everything’s so easy with Agatha. It’s so, to coin a phrase, two tier. You can read them and have fun with them. You can read them and there’s so much stuff going on underneath, and yet she presents this smooth face. I don’t think any of the others are quite that resolved, if you like.

Self-Adaptations

OLIVER: Now, you wrote that her own stage adaptations of The Hollow and Five Little Pigs lack the subtlety of the original books, quote, “almost as if Agatha herself did not realize what made them such good books.” How much of her talent do you think was unconscious in that way?

THOMPSON: Yes. That’s such a good question. I do think that, about those plays, it could have been that she just thought, “That’s not what my audiences are going to want from me. They’re just going to want to be entertained by”—we know she can do the other thing because of her Mary Westmacott books, where everything is laid out. They’re not distilled at all; they’re quite the opposite.

I think they must have been such a pleasure for her to write because she didn’t have to constantly—they’re unresolved; they ask questions that don’t have to be answered. She could have done that with those plays, I’m sure, but I think she would’ve thought people aren’t coming to see them for that. I think she had a very good opinion of herself, in the best possible way.

OLIVER: Hmm.

THOMPSON: Like I said to you earlier, she didn’t take a lot of notice of anything anybody said to her. Because it is like writing this other little book, the one I’ve just done about 1926. She was very acclaimed right from the start. I didn’t emphasize that enough in the biography. And she was really recognized as very special right from the start.

And I think it’s extraordinary to me how—it’s so difficult for us today, isn’t it? We’re so at the mercy of “That won’t sell, don’t do that, blah, blah, blah.” She really did not just plow her own furrow, but create that furrow in a way that you can only compare with, like, Lennon and McCartney. Or whether the time was absolutely right that they let her run, they trusted her to do what she wanted, and because she had the gift of pleasing readers . . .

You do really feel, although those books are very tight and taut, you do feel an instinctive ease in what she’s doing, an instinctive sort of—there’s a kind of liberated—which sounds perverse because they are so controlled, the books. But I always feel she’s doing exactly what she wants to do because she knows what it is and she knows how to do it. Because I think, would she be amazed that you and I are having this conversation now? I don’t know that she would be, really. What do you think?

OLIVER: No, I agree with you. I think she had what Johnson said, the felicity of rating herself properly. I think she knew she was really good.

THOMPSON: You might know he’d say it right.

OLIVER: Yes. [laughs] But there’s a—I think there must have been something about—I think it’s in Poirot’s Christmas, one of those, where someone gets killed in the night in their bedroom, and they go up. And one of the women says, “Who would’ve thought the old man had so much blood in him?”

And the quotation just sort of occurs to—I think there’s quite a lot of that in Christie, right? Things are coming up and it fits. And she’s good enough to run on instinct at times.

THOMPSON: That’s right. That’s it. Exactly. That’s absolutely right. Like the way she quotes from the—yes, I love the bit when she quotes from the Book of Saul in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, which is really quite a profound novel about whether—I mean, it’s terribly timely—whether it’s better to be run by a corrupt capitalist or to let in the radicals. And as I said in the biography, the corrupt capitalist wins on points. But then another element enters, which is what power does to people. And that’s when she quotes from the Book of Saul.

And it’s just like you said, this—an instinctive that she—I do always feel her as an instinctive writer, even though—her notebooks are intriguing because obviously some plots she really has to work away at. And yet they feel felicitous. A coup like The ABC Murders, and she’s really—that went through lots and lots of iterations. But what she’ll often do is scribble down a line of dialogue, a line of “There they are.” It’s the whole—it’s not bullet points, which is a loathsome concept. It reminds me of a bee going from flower to flower and knowing exactly which—and she’s got this gift of knowing what flowers we’re going to need.

I sometimes fear I overdo it. I don’t want be like one of those people who’s writing a PhD on, what was the thing I said on Substack, gynocracy in St. Mary Mead or whatever. It’s not—I do think that’s a bit overdone these days, the rummaging in the subtext, because she’s an interplay. And that’s why I write that chapter in the book called “English Murder,” which is about the facade, you know, “smile and smile and be a villain.” And there’s nothing more interesting. There’s nothing more interesting than murder among classes who are trying to cover things up.

And she does that—that’s at the heart of golden age murder, I suppose. And I just think she does that better than anybody because she’s so all the things we’ve been talking about. She’s so distilled, she’s so simple, she’s so smooth, she’s so instinctive. And she’s doing it the way she wanted to do it because of your wonderful Dr. Johnson quote. She knew not to take notice of other people, including her—

Quick Opinions on Christie

OLIVER: Should we have—

THOMPSON: Yes. Go on.

OLIVER: Sorry, sorry. Should we have a quick-fire round?

THOMPSON: Please.

OLIVER: I will say the name first of a few of her books—

THOMPSON: Oh, god.

OLIVER: —and then a few other detective writers, and you will just give us your unfiltered opinion: good, bad, ugly, indifferent.

THOMPSON: Okay. What fun.

OLIVER: You can “nothing” them if you want to.

THOMPSON: Okay. [laughter]

OLIVER: Hallowe’en Party.

THOMPSON: Underrated. Very interesting on sixties counterculture and the effects of societal breakdown, et cetera. What do you think?

OLIVER: I think it’s a real page turner. I remember reading that for the first time. I loved it. Yes. Nemesis.

THOMPSON: I can’t keep saying the same thing. Underrated. [laughter] Very interesting philosophy of love in that book, I think. I think it harks back to her first marriage. However badly it turns out, it’s better to have experienced it. It’s quite a mournful novel.

OLIVER: The Mr. Quin—

THOMPSON: Oh.

OLIVER: Oh, sorry.

THOMPSON: No, no. Sorry. You carry on. Marvelous. So inventive, don’t you think? Such a clever character.

OLIVER: Why didn’t she do more of him?

THOMPSON: Yes, that would’ve been good. And she was always interested in the commedia dell’arte. She wrote poems about it as a girl. And the concept of Mr. Quin, yes, as this sort of evanescent figure who’s also a moral force, isn’t he really? Or—yes, I wish she’d done more. They’re marvelous.

OLIVER: Towards Zero.

THOMPSON: Oh, top notch, don’t you think?

OLIVER: One of the best.

THOMPSON: Yes, I agree. Frightening motive. Very Ruth Rendell.

OLIVER: It’s very distinct in her. I haven’t read all of her novels, but it’s very distinct.

THOMPSON: But the plot is, again, typical of her because it redefines the word contingent. [laughs] I mean, Dorothy Sayers would be having palpitations. She’s very bold and grand like that. “Oh, there’s a loose end. Oh, who cares?” You know, I mean, it’s so—it just drives along that book, doesn’t it? Yes. But I agree with you, one of her best.

OLIVER: Death on the Nile.

THOMPSON: Quite moving, I think. I think it’s one of those ones from the thirties that, again, is talking about love in a way that—I think it just strikes a personal note to me because she was very in love with her first husband, Archie Christie. And he did fall in love with another woman, and it did cause her extreme pain that some people said to me she never quite got over.

And I feel that a little bit in that book. There’s a shadow of something quite powerful in that book, I think. Again, very, very loose and lovely plot, but powerful. Would you agree? Very good on the place as well, I think, Egypt.

OLIVER: I love it. I think the solution is great.

THOMPSON: Yes.

OLIVER: And it makes a really good film.

THOMPSON: It’s a great film, yes. Wonderful film.

Other Mystery Writers

OLIVER: Yes. Okay. A few other detective writers: Michael Innes.

THOMPSON: You’ve got me. I haven’t read him. Should I?

OLIVER: Oh, I think you will like him. Yes. Try Hamlet, Revenge!

THOMPSON: Okay. Okay. Oh, I like it already.

OLIVER: Yes, yes, yes. Oh, this is exciting. Gladys Mitchell.

THOMPSON: Can’t get into her.

OLIVER: No.

THOMPSON: What do you think? Should I try a bit harder?

OLIVER: I read two. I thought they were good. I was not intrigued.

THOMPSON: No, somebody told—

OLIVER: The ones I read—Spotted Hemlock is a wonderful, like, wow, that’s great.

THOMPSON: Okay. Okay. Somebody said to me, I know she really—no, I didn’t—I read it in a book that she really hadn’t liked Agatha Christie, but you know, who knows? All that Detection Club rivalry, you can imagine. But okay, Spotted Hemlock—if I’m going to read one, try that, yes?

OLIVER: Yes, that’s a great book. Margery Allingham.

THOMPSON: Kind of love her, but I never understand her plots. I always feel I’m in a bit of a fog, but she’s quite a good writer. Do you think? Or what do you think?

OLIVER: She’s good at the fog. She’s good at that sort of whirligig sense that there’s a lot going on—

THOMPSON: Yes, whirligig.

OLIVER: —and you’ve got to get to the end before they do, kind of thing.

THOMPSON: Also, she had a pub in her sitting room. Now, I like a woman who has a pub in their sitting room.

OLIVER: [laughs] E. C. Bentley.

THOMPSON: You’ve got me again, Henry.

OLIVER: Oh, The Blotting Book mystery. You’ll like this.

THOMPSON: Okay. Okay.

OLIVER: The other one is not so good, but you’ll like that a lot.

THOMPSON: Okay.

OLIVER: Edmund Crispin.

THOMPSON: Didn’t get on with him.

OLIVER: Why not?

THOMPSON: Don’t know. Don’t know. It sounds like I don’t read the men, doesn’t it? Which is not the truth at all.

OLIVER: I think that’s fair enough, isn’t it?

THOMPSON: Well, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone’s ever come up with a really good reason why women have shone so brightly in this genre. I don’t know. Why didn’t I—I read that one, the toyshop one [The Moving Toyshop] or whatever. I don’t know. I just didn’t get on with it.

OLIVER: Too glib?

THOMPSON: Possibly.

OLIVER: Bit flippant, bit sort of funny-funny?

THOMPSON: Possibly. I just couldn’t quite get hold of it in some way. I don’t know.

OLIVER: I quite like Edmund Crispin, but I do think he’s got a bit of a “he’s a very clever boy” about him.

THOMPSON: Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe that.

OLIVER: Something, yes. G. K. Chesterton.

THOMPSON: I haven’t read Father Brown. Oh, this is awful, isn’t it? I’m starting to sound like a radical feminist by accident.

OLIVER: [laughs] Maybe that’s what you are, Laura. Maybe you just need to admit it. [laughs]

THOMPSON: No, it does. It sounds really bad because I do really love almost all the women. I just, I don’t know why I haven’t read him.

Christie and Nostalgia

OLIVER: Was Agatha a nostalgia writer?

THOMPSON: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone who was a nostalgia writer would’ve written At Bertram’s Hotel, which is an entire spin on the riff of nostalgia. Really clever. I think that’s such a clever book. The way she traps us in her golden age, you know, this phantasmagoria of the re-created golden age. And then she says, “Ha, really fooled you.”

I’ve written about this. I think she moved with the 20th century far more than is realized. I love those Cold War novels she writes about her dislike of ideologies. I love her postwar books about the fragmentation of the hierarchical society. I think she’s—well, she’s an incidental social historian, as are, I think, P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, but they’re much more underlined about it. Again, I’m intrigued what you think. Do you think she is?

OLIVER: I think there’s definitely some quality, particularly to the Miss Marple stories—as you say, the social history sort of becomes a way of preserving something that’s disappearing. One of them, written in the sixties—you can tell me which one—it opens with that description of all the new houses in the village and the mothers who give their children cereal for breakfast. And what sort of a thing is that to give a child? They should have bacon and eggs. Bacon and eggs is a real—you know, and she does have a real something heartfelt and real sense that this part of England is going, and this new thing is coming in.

THOMPSON: That’s true. That’s absolutely true. That’s The Mirror Crack’d. And it’s—

OLIVER: The Mirror, yes, yes.

THOMPSON: Yes, and that whole thing of Mrs. Bantry’s house has now been bought by a film star and blah, blah, blah. Yes, no, you are absolutely right. I didn’t think hard enough before I answered your question.

OLIVER: But no, what you said is also true. I can’t sort of work out to what extent she regrets it, to what extent it’s just useful material for her, you know?

THOMPSON: Both. I mean, some of her late books, including Endless Night, I think, which is an incredibly modern book—that whole “me, me, me” culture of “I want, therefore I will have now,” which is written when she was quite an old lady. And then a book like Passenger to Frankfurt, which is—it’s a bit sub–Brave New World, but it’s very honest and pessimistic about a future—well, the one we are living in, really—full of fear and uncertainty and almost dystopian.

She was a realist. You know, she is Miss Marple in a lot of ways. She was a realist in a way that I think a lot of us would find it difficult to be. And her American publishers were often—would sort of say, can she tone this down? Can she not have a young person who’s completely evil? Readers want to know, is she going get any therapy? [laughter] And it’s so true. There’s quite a lot of that going on.

She’s very clear-eyed. So if she—I’m a bit nostalgic for Blur, do you know what I mean? I mean, you can’t help it, in a way, like that brilliant example you give at the start of The Mirror Crack’d. But I would say her image is quite at odds with the reality of her in that way. But the image—

OLIVER: And the adaptations don’t help with that.

THOMPSON: No. No. But at the same time, that Christie image, you know, the gentlewoman, the tea or the eternal bridge party, blah, blah, blah, that has a huge power of its own. So just being too iconoclastic about her, I think, is also a lie. Because I think, again, it’s that interplay. She used the image, and the image—I hate the word cozy. I loathe the word cozy, but there’s no denying that any book of that kind does have that quality. So I suppose even that’s nostalgic in a way.

Christie’s Poshness

OLIVER: In a way, yes. How posh was she?

THOMPSON: Good question. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Quite, I would say. Quite grand, with that confidence. Her father really was—as I said, he was a young blade in New York dancing with Jennie Jerome and blah, blah, blah. And then it so happened that he ended up in Torquay, which of course then was very posh. And the fact that when she disappears, she disappears to Harrogate, [laughs] which is like the Torquay of the north.

I remember her grandson saying to me, “She dealt with her literary agent. To her, he was staff.” You know, that kind of thing. Her sister, there is a—well, her sister ended up very grand indeed with a huge house up in Cheshire.

I think she just had that internal confidence, really. She wasn’t—and that there wasn’t much money. I mean, there was very little money when she was growing up, as of course you know, but that didn’t matter. I mean, her voice is insane. Her voice is, [affecting a posh voice] “Oh, it’s lucky it just happens.” [laughter] But yes, there’s a part of her that is real late Victorian upper middle class that, again, underpins her books.

It’s amazing really how broad-minded and cosmopolitan she was. But possibly, I mean, possibly that does—she was—you know, when she disappeared, she was described in foreign newspapers as an Anglo-American, the embodiment of Englishness, and that’s how she was described. And then of course she was genuinely cosmopolitan in her love of travel and her love of other cultures and all that obvious stuff. Yes.

Inspirations for Miss Marple

OLIVER: How much of her grandmothers is in Miss Marple?

THOMPSON: Quite a lot, I would say, particularly the—

OLIVER: Drawn from life?

THOMPSON: Well, in an essential way not, because Miss Marple has no real experience of life in that way. We’re occasionally told about some chap who came calling who wasn’t suitable or whatever, but she’s almost defined by nonexperience of life in a sense, but observation of life. She’s an observer. She’s not an outsider in the way that Poirot is. She has a place within the social hierarchy and whatever, and that village has a reality to it. And the way it changes has a reality to it. But she is defined by being an observer, I would say.

But Margaret Miller, who was the rich grandmother, who is the one who had the big house at Ealing and was—you know, she’s the one who would go to the Army and Navy stores and all that stuff that’s in At Bertram’s Hotel. She was—there’s a lot of her in Miss—I think, as I say in the book, she grew up with the sound of female wisdom in her ears. You know, her grandmother was the sort of—if she’d seen her up in Harrogate, she would’ve known exactly what was going on. You know, one of those kind of women who could spot an affair at a hundred paces, just a wise sort of woman, worldly, worldly woman.

And Miss Marple is worldly in her thinking, but not in her experience, particularly in a book like A Caribbean Mystery, which I think is—she’s a real sophisticate, Agatha. I mean, I’m reading The Hollow again at the moment. And it’s really astounding to me how there’s a love affair at the center of it with a young woman who’s kind of a self-portrait and this married man. And not only, there’s not—it’s not only nonjudgmental; there’s literally no concept of judgment being in the vicinity. It’s really, really sophisticated, grown-up stuff, I think. And again, I think that’s maybe not recognized about her that much.

Nursery Rhymes

OLIVER: What are the importance of nursery rhymes to her?

THOMPSON: Yes, that’s interesting. They’re part of that distilled quality she had, I suppose, that really simple ability to catch hold of something that is simple and familiar in itself and then subvert it. There’s books where she—I don’t think she needs it in Five Little Pigs. I think the book is almost too good for that.

But is it not to do with that—like her titles, which are really, really simple with a faint frisson of the sinister about them. Is it not that ability she has to catch, to take something really, really simple and subvert it for her own ends? What do you think? Do you think that’s right? Or do you think it’s something more than that?

OLIVER: No, I think the simplicity is the point, and I think it probably gives her a way of talking, of showing how fundamental the wickedness is. And as you say, the children can be evil, and it’s part of the darkness in a way, but it gives the appearance of innocence and, oh, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe? You know, children do this. And so it leads you through and makes it worse somehow. [laughs]

THOMPSON: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. But I know I’ve—how many times have I said the word simple? But I really do feel that’s the heart of her. And I also feel it’s the heart of why she was misunderstood when I was growing up reading her because it was mistaken for simplistic.

Wartime Productivity

OLIVER: Why was she so productive during the war? I mean, there were four books one year.

THOMPSON: Yes.

OLIVER: And as you say, they’re some of the best. I mean, what is it about the war that gets her so busy?

THOMPSON: Well, she was on her own, which she had never been, really. Well, obviously she divorced her first husband in 1928. So there’s a couple of very bleak, dead years before she met her second husband and married him in 1930. But she wasn’t completely on her own because she had her friend Charlotte Fisher, who was a sort of secretary-companion, but much more than that—really, really good friend.

But in the war, Max Mallowan was abroad. Her daughter—she had one child—her daughter was married and living in Wales. And she was living in the Isokon building in North London, which I love because that’s like, “You think I’m chintzy and old fashioned. And here I am socializing with the sort of left-wing intelligentsia at the Isokon building.” And there’s something about being in that adorable little flat—they’re so fabulous, those flats—and being alone but not feeling abandoned, as she had after her first marriage.

And I suppose also, you know, war is, you either cower in despair or you think, “Right, well, better get on with it.” War is stimulating in that way. I think it was to quite a few writers, maybe, or quite a few creatives. The shadow of death. But there was something about that solitude but not abandonment, plus the stimulation of not knowing whether it was your last day on earth that did—it did. I mean, it’s absolutely insane how productive she is.

And then she wrote—she had a week off. She was also working as a dispenser at a London hospital, and she had a week off. And she wrote a Mary Westmacott, Absent in the Spring, which is one of her best Westmacotts, I think. I mean, she’s got a week off and she writes a book. I mean, Jesus, there’s a challenge to us, Henry. [laughter]

The Mary Westmacott Novels

OLIVER: What are those Mary Westmacotts like? Because I’ve never read them, but you seem very—

THOMPSON: Oh, have you not?

OLIVER: You’re very up on them. You like them?

THOMPSON: I am. I really am. Well, for a biographer, they were a treasure trove because they’re very revealing. Unfinished Portrait is, I think, as close as you are ever going to come to a true autobiography, as opposed to the actual autobiography, which is charmingly disingenuous.

OLIVER: And also dull. No? I mean, it’s just so dull.

THOMPSON: Do you think? It is a bit.

OLIVER: I couldn’t read it. I couldn’t read it. No, it was so long and so leaden. I felt like she didn’t really want to tell me the story of her life. Just couldn’t.

THOMPSON: Well, I think that’s probably right. It was very heavily edited after her death. And her daughter was very, very protective of her. So, Max Mallowan as well. So maybe there was a much better book in there somewhere. Who knows?

OLIVER: So we should read Mary Westmacott if we want the unfiltered Agatha?

THOMPSON: I would say Unfinished Portrait. It really fascinates me because the worst time you’ve ever gone through in your life—so in 1926, she lost her mother and her husband in the space of four months. And I think an awful lot of people, even writers, would think, “I’m going to put that behind me and get on.” But she had to reopen the wound. She had to go through it all again eight years later. I find that really, in itself, incredibly revealing about her.

Poirot vs. Marple

OLIVER: Why is there so much more Poirot than Marple?

THOMPSON: Yes, I’ve wondered that because there is this little thing that she hated him, which I don’t really think she did. It’s just something people say, isn’t it?

OLIVER: Well, it’s a common thing about artists. They’re supposed to hate their most successful work, but—

THOMPSON: Yes. Yes. All I could come up with was that he was easier to put in different places. He could conceivably be on the Nile or in Mesopotamia or—I mean, it would be a—she does manage to get Miss Marple to the West Indies, but it’s certainly—

OLIVER: There are only so many holidays your nephew can send you on.

THOMPSON: He was really successful, that nephew, wasn’t he? Who do you think he was like? Sort of Ian McEwan or—

OLIVER: [laughs] I know. It was sort of crazy, isn’t it?

THOMPSON: And very kind to her.

OLIVER: It might be to her credit that she doesn’t do a Midsomer Murders thing and just sort of wave away and say, “Oh, we can just have as many of these murders as we want.” She says, “No, we can only fit—” Do you think maybe that’s it?

THOMPSON: I think there might be a bit of that. I mean, her notebooks sort of—some of the books were originally Marples, like Cat Among the Pigeons and Death on the Nile, in fact. And then they became Poirots. I just wonder whether he’s a bit more malleable because she is a more rooted, fixed entity.

And he is—I don’t mean to denigrate David Suchet because he’s a fantastic actor, but he does root him more than I think the written version. I think he is a sketch on the page. And one of her great skills, I think, is how she can sketch, and they’ve got that quality of aliveness on the page, which you just can’t analyze, really. I don’t—well, I can’t. And that’s how I see Poirot. So he was more movable in that sense.

And she’s incredibly good at certain—like Sleeping Murder, there’s no way you could have him in that. And Miss Marple is—her qualities are so perfect for a book like that, which has suddenly reminded me of how she got me into John Webster. I never read John Webster until—

OLIVER: [laughs] That’s great.

THOMPSON: The way she uses The Duchess of Malfi is so clever. Do you think that’s right about Poirot? Do you think there’s something more . . .

Reader Preferences and Sales

OLIVER: I can see that. I wondered if there was some reader’s prejudice involved.

THOMPSON: Oh.

OLIVER: Poirot is the sort of exotic—Sherlock Holmes, one thing that makes him popular is that he’s a bit wacky, you know. And Poirot—he’s always talking about, “You English are so xenophobic. Excuse me, I am Belgian.” And with the eggs and all the little—whereas Miss Marple’s just the kind of old lady that we all wish there were more of. And how much of that will readers take? I don’t know.

THOMPSON: Yes. Although, as I say, she, she did—I mean, I think her publishers did like her to do Poirot, but I don’t know that she would’ve been influenced by that necessarily. I mean, maybe she was—maybe I’m overdoing her—

OLIVER: Well, she had these terrible money problems. Didn’t she have to be a little bit focused on the dollar?

THOMPSON: She did. She did, but she didn’t—well, I mean, the money problems are insane because they were absolutely no fault of her own. They were to do with test cases, and it was just this sort of accumulation of horror that put her in tax problems during the war. And she really never could dig her way out of them and was advised to go bankrupt twice, which is unbelievable, just as a way of clearing it. I mean, it’s terrible.

But I don’t know that she—I think her attitude was a bit more, “Well, why should I even bother if they’re just going to take it away from me?” In 1948 she didn’t write anything at all because I think she thought, “What’s the point?” But then, that wasn’t her way. But I don’t know that she thought of writing as a way of digging out of it necessarily. But I could be—

OLIVER: The Marples, did they make less money? Were they, did they sell less?

THOMPSON: Not really. I think they all sold. Even poor old Passenger to Frankfurt sold hugely, absolutely hugely. I think people—I mean, my parents would—it was like people just wanted them, the Christie for Christmas.

Rereading Christie

OLIVER: How many times have you read these books? Do you ever get bored?

THOMPSON: No.

OLIVER: Really?

THOMPSON: Well, I have them on rotation, and I don’t—as you know, I do interleave them with our beloved Elizabeth Bowen, who’s my passion at the moment, and other people. But they are consolatory, I suppose. They are—there’s bits of—there is this kind of—there’s bits of them that I just know completely off by heart, like the gramophone record in And Then There Were None and all that.

But there’s something—and maybe I should have said this earlier, when I say—I’ve said it on Substack—that they’re fairy tales for adults. There’s something about that. There’s an almost physical sensation of pleasure, really, when the resolution comes. It is a bit like act five of Shakespeare. I’m not going to say she’s quite on that level. Not even I am going to say that.

But there is—and it is like being a child again and reading the end toward the happy-ever-after, even though her happy-ever-afters are sometimes compromised. And there is something almost primal in that pleasure. And it almost sounds borderline mad, me saying it like that, but I do think there’s something in it because the resolution is so—because it’s character based, and at her best, she’s character and plot as one, as in Five Little Pigs or The Hollow or Murder on the Orient Express or blah, blah, blah.

Her resolutions do tell you something about human nature. You do think, “Oh, yes, that is what that would be. Yes, it would be all about money. Yes. Yes, doctors are untrustworthy,” or something on a more profound level than that. There’s something that is a satisfaction, both childlike and I’m experiencing it as an adult. In my defense, P. G. Wodehouse said you can never read them too many times. [laughs] It doesn’t matter if you know who did it. There’s so much pleasure in them.

Thompson’s Career

OLIVER: Now, I want to ask a little bit about your career.

THOMPSON: Mm-hmm.

OLIVER: You were at a sort of stage school, then you studied at Merton, and then you worked at The Times.

THOMPSON: Yes. Very briefly. Yes.

OLIVER: How does one therefore go from all of this to being the biographer?

THOMPSON: Well, I did always think I would have a career in—I wanted to direct plays. I directed Hamlet after university, which is probably the thing I’m still proudest of. But what it was, was that I wrote a couple of books. I won an award when I was quite young.

And then I had an agent who—I said to him, “I want to write a biography of Nancy Mitford.” And he wasn’t very keen on the idea, but I must have written an okay proposal. Again, because I thought Nancy Mitford was a little bit undervalued, that she’s a lot more than just a posh girl. And at the time her reputation was quite low. And so somebody bought into that idea, and it sort of went from there, really.

But it’s a bit—I sometimes look back at the books I’ve written, including a memoir of my publican grandmother, and I think, gosh, this is all quite scatter-gun, but maybe that’s okay. Maybe you should just write the books you really want to write. But it was a passion for Nancy Mitford that sort of started that particular ball rolling.

And then I had the idea of—oh, no. I was down in Devon with a boyfriend, and he said, “You never stop talking about Agatha Christie. Why don’t you try and write her biography?” And that was just a luck of timing because her daughter was still alive. So I met her, and she liked me because I knew the Mary Westmacotts so well, and that sort of happened. I mean, quite often these things are very fortuitous, don’t you think? Did you not find that with your book?

OLIVER: Yes, yes. No, I did. I did. I think some writers, as you say—I don’t think of it as scatter-gun. I think of it, it’s sort of an emergent thing, and you happen to have these different interests, and you just follow your nose, and that’s fine.

THOMPSON: Yes, exactly.

OLIVER: Tell us about this production of Hamlet.

THOMPSON: Oh. Do you know, I think it was not bad. I had a very good Hamlet. I think if you’ve—well, you’re in trouble without—who is now quite a successful actor. And we were all really young, but he was—I saw him in something and said, “Do you want to play Hamlet for me?” And he said, “Okay then.” And it was a room above a pub in Chelsea, and it was very spare and very quick.

And it was about—I can’t bear when people overanalyze the character of Hamlet, and why does he delay? He delays because Shakespeare wants him to, so that he can write all those incredible speeches. That’s a bit simplified, but it was—he was so, he so understood the translucent power of those soliloquies, this actor. So it just sort of worked because we didn’t do too much to it. And it was, yes, it was good. I think it was good. But then I did Macbeth, and that was much less good.

Secretly Reading Christie

OLIVER: And you’ve said here, and I think you said it in your book, that when you were at Merton, you were reading Agatha Christie between the covers of what you were supposed to be reading.

THOMPSON: Yes, yes, I was.

OLIVER: That can’t be—is that a slight exaggeration, or did you really not get on with the syllabus?

THOMPSON: Well, hang on. I was a bit stuck in the first term. Can you imagine coming from a performing arts school—

OLIVER: Yes.

THOMPSON: —and then being told, “Read that bloody, you know.

OLIVER: Yes, yes. No, it’s intense.

THOMPSON: All I knew was French. How I got in is a minor mystery, but there it was. I’ve tried to do it honor ever since by writing as best books I possibly can. But I was okay once I got over that bit. Once I got into my beloved Tennyson and all the people we’ve been talking about, Hardy and blah, blah, blah. Larkin, about whom the best thing I’ve ever read—the best thing I’ve ever read about Larkin is your Substack about him, without a shadow of a doubt.

OLIVER: Oh, thank you.

THOMPSON: Just wonderful. So I sort of winged it a bit, but I had a very nice don. And the autodidact side of me, which is very like Agatha Christie, who barely went to school, and Nancy Mitford—I think it can be a good thing in a way, because you have such a respect for learning and truth. I always try to be truthful in my biographies, which as we know, not everybody is. [laughter]

And I think you carry on wanting to learn and carry on wanting to fill all the gaps because I only had half an education, because in the morning you would do ballet and drama and all that kind of thing. So it is a bit odd, but in some ways I think it’s been a good thing.

OLIVER: Now, the new book is about the 1926 disappearance. When can we expect it to be published?

THOMPSON: It’s only a short book—

OLIVER: Yes.

THOMPSON: —because obviously I covered it a lot in the biography, and it doesn’t—but I have found out a couple of new things. And that will be out in August here and in November in America. And I have come up with a slightly different slant on it, but mainly—and I treat it a little bit like a cold case. And it was—I had to write—I wrote it in five weeks, but it was incredibly good fun. Oh, and I reenacted her journey, which was very interesting, to Harrogate.

But mainly it’s such a pleasure because I, you know, on Substack, and I think, “Oh, you can’t write about Agatha Christie again.” There always seems to be quite a lot to say. I’m intrigued by how you, who I think of as a true intellectual, how you have clear regard for her.

Henry on Agatha Christie

OLIVER: I started reading her when I was about 12, and I just thought she was great, and I went through most of them. But I read them at intervals. So I was reading her into my twenties, thirties. And before this interview I tried to—I thought, “Laura’s always saying Five Little Pigs is the best one. I’m going to read it.” And I just sort of found that I’ve lost the taste, in a way.

THOMPSON: Okay.

OLIVER: Which I was quite, I don’t know, just maybe—I feel like this is my failing. Maybe I should take a week off and sit by the pool and read it properly. But I’ve always thought she’s really, really great, and very few people can do that many very compelling stories without you sort of thinking, “Oh, I’ve read this one. I know. Yes. It’s the same as the other one, isn’t it? Yes. Yes, it was the”—as you say, it’s not Cluedo. Even Dorothy L. Sayers, I don’t think I could read much more by her, frankly. Great, she’s great, but it’s enough. [laughs]

THOMPSON: Well, I quite like her. The whole—most girls who went to Oxford are quite keen on Gaudy Night, and the character of Harriet Vane is quite satisfying, I think.

OLIVER: Indeed, indeed. And Strong Poison is great. And there—but I just mean if she’d written as many books as Agatha, you can’t imagine it would’ve sustained the level of quality.

THOMPSON: No, no. There is that lightness in Agatha and that terrible cliché of, “I wrote a long book because it was too—I didn’t have enough time to write a short book,” and all that kind of thing. The brevity amazes me. When I said at the start, most writers would take twice as many pages to get all that in.

She has style—I don’t know if you can call it a style, but there is something blindingly effective about it that nobody can imitate. And it does—there’s something so fathomless about her, and that’s what continues to compel me. But I think it’s very lovely of you to do this if you are no longer an admirer because you’ve let me sort of—

OLIVER: Well, it’s not that I’m not an admirer. It’s just that I don’t—I had this with P. G. Wodehouse. I read quite a lot of it, and now, I don’t know, somehow I’ve reached a point where it’s—I sort of get it, but it’s just not that funny anymore. I don’t know, just need some time away.

THOMPSON: Well, maybe. Maybe, but you know, I’m a bit—she’s part of my life now. It’s like if somebody said, “You can’t read her anymore,” it would be like, “You can’t listen to the Rolling Stones anymore.” I mean, it’d be like a kind of death. She’s part of my life the same way they’re part of my life. She’s now inseparable from just the way I go on, as is Shakespeare. And if I had to lose one of them, trust me, it would be her, you’ll be reassured to know. [laughter]

OLIVER: Very good. Laura, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you very much.

THOMPSON: Oh, I’ve really enjoyed it. I really have. And I was really looking forward to it, and it’s been even nicer than I thought it would be. So thank you.

OLIVER: Oh, it’s been delightful.

THOMPSON: Thank you so much, Henry.

OLIVER: Thank you.

At this year’s Emergent Ventures unconference (my third, such is my good luck), conversation ranged from death, art, and Mahler, to whether God wishes us to be happy, to the way Substack works (does anyone know?) to the nature of biography, and the future of the universities and the arts. These last two topics were the most unsettled. For some, the future is bound up with practical outcomes—which writers have the money, which universities achieve practical outcomes. For others, the questions are pure: where is our Keats, how will students come to a proper sense of what is good and true?

My thoughts are necessarily limited. I am no scholar and no philosopher. This I know. However many people it will involve, the serious reading of Shakespeare will continue. Yes indeed, students will talk to Claude, listen to podcasts, and so on: but the essential fact of reading remains. Knowing and loving the canon is irreducible. Perhaps it will be monastic, a minority activity. Perhaps the Oxford model will continue to prevail.

Whatever other considerations of signalling, status, and credentials there will be, the question of reading the canon will not die. The necessary innovations need to be made, of course, including the university. But while my respect for the scholars is deep (and my sympathy: they struggle under the yoke of the administrators) I have met English Literature lecturers who have read a mere twelve of Shakespeare’s plays. If the new world sweeps them away, I say Good Riddance. Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

I walked around the Udvar-Hazy Center with , one of my favourite internet people. Zena, of course, is not very online, but I know her work (including her splendid book Lost in Thought) from her Twitter feed. Soon there shall be a podcast available of Zena and me discussing Gulliver’s Travels, one of the very best books. One of my favourite scenes is when Gulliver meets the wizards who can summon anyone from the underworld. He chose Aristotle, Homer, and all of their commentators. There were so many commentators that “hundreds were forced to attend in the court, and outward rooms of the palace.”

I soon discovered that both of them were perfect strangers to the rest of the company, and had never seen or heard of them before; and I had a whisper from a ghost who shall be nameless, “that these commentators always kept in the most distant quarters from their principals, in the lower world, through a consciousness of shame and guilt, because they had so horribly misrepresented the meaning of those authors to posterity.”

It is a paradox of literature that having legions of commentators is part of what makes a writer an ancient, but that those commentators will almost all be so bad they would hide in shame from their author in the underworld.

It may be that middle-age is turning me sentimental, but reading Houellebecq recently has been quite an affecting experience. I have been thinking about Houellebecq because I recorded a podcast with with whom it is always enjoyable to talk Houellebecq, Naipaul, Mahler, and many other topics. I do not find Houellebecq to be either a misogynist or a nihilist, although Serotonin is a boring blowjob fantasy. At his best, Houellebecq has a painful love of simple pleasures and yearns for the hedonism of ordinary life. He is no Bazarov, nor Updike. What seems like the voluntary death of the inner spirit is shown finally to be determined. Civilizations live and die like hedges rising and dipping when seen from a train. So much about his manner and mode is de trop, but he remains a figure of fascination. Will Lloyd recently called him Europe’s only novelist, which is excusable journalistic excess, but there is some quality in Houellebecq beyond misanthropy that justifies the spirit of the excess. Like Naipaul, he has edged the blade of his inexcusability with truth. One feels obliged to listen to his objections. The liberal society cannot shrug off its miserables too swiftly, because, as Houellebecq knows, the death of a civilization comes from within. Those moments in The Elementary Particles (called Atomised in England) and Submission in which some feeling of purity, innocence, genuine affection is achieved cannot be accounted for if Houellebecq is merely unacceptable. He sees what there is to regret in the passing of the old order, which has been passing for hundreds of years. So much of Submission has been prescient. Unlike other dystopias (Atwood, Orwell), the horror comes from the conversion of the protagonist to the idea of submission. P.D. James wrote about a society that loses its own power of regeneration in The Children of Men, but that was a physical failure, and a mystery. Houellebecq believes that anhedonia can be suicidal for a society, but that it can also be inevitable for men to give up in the face of inevitable decline. Some hope is saved from the misery of The Elementary Particles, but the optimism of the ending of Submission is the most chilling thing about it. François’ inner emptiness becomes his submission. The scope of the novel moves from his consciousness to the reestablishment of the Roman empire under the new regime. If the West falls, it will not be overtaken. It will give up from within. We might put the book down feeling reassured that the same contradictions that drive the plot will, in reality, have a centrifugal effect, allowing the society to grow and change, rather than the centripetal depression of Submission, which leads to the collapse and reformation of France, like a dying star, with a new religion, new norms, new moral foundation. In the real liberal society, poly-centric contradictions can be self-sustaining. But the dark core remains. The future of the West relies on the right sort of attention being paid to thinkers like Houellebecq. Houellebecq himself has written about art as an imperfect map of the world, but those are the only maps we have.

Why does Fyodor Dostoevsky keep going viral? Screenshots from the novels of the 19th-century Russian writer circulate constantly online, praised as insights into the human condition. Mostly they are the sorts of aphorisms you might otherwise find on cushions or those wooden signs people keep in their kitchen. “A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offence.” “Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys.”

This sort of thing caused Dostoevsky’s novella White Nights, published by Penguin in its range of chic (and inexpensive) Little Black Classics, to go viral on TikTok in 2024. It happened after an emotional review from Jack Edwards, who calls himself “the internet’s resident librarian” and has more than 800,000 followers on TikTok. White Nights became such a sensation that tens of millions of posts were marked with #Dostoevsky and the book, about a lonely St Petersburg man who falls in love (unrequitedly) with a young woman, became a bestseller. It was the quotable quotes that did it. “And if I’d already loved you for 20 years, I still couldn’t love you more than I do right now.”

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing,” from Crime and Punishment, is another popular one. But what does it mean? Isn’t this all a bit melodramatic or, dare I say, meaningless? The sort of thing you might find in Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life? The mania for White Nights started with a tweet that reads: “You think you know what love is but then you read Dostoevsky’s White Nights.” White Nights isn’t going to help a chronically single generation to find stable, happy relationships. This advice is a trap.

I did not The Friend of the Family very funny. The whole piece is here (seems unpaywalled at the moment…)

Here is an extract.

Unlike so many social scientists, he writes about life in a way that retains the pulse of feeling while describing with a detached eye: “The contempt of risk, and the presumptuous hope of success, are in no period of life more active than at the age at which young people choose their professions.” (WN I.x.b.29) In his explanation of the lottery of fortune for navy men, he writes: “The distant prospect of hazards, from which we can hope to extricate ourselves by courage and address, is not disagreeable to us, and does not raise the wages of labour in any employment.” (WN I.x.b.32)

And despite his work being a descriptive account of economic science, so many of his observations are full of moral feeling: “The most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants.” (WN I.viii.23) He condemns the “cobweb science of Ontology” (WN V.i.f.29) being taught in universities. He wants education to be able to “improve the understanding [and] to mend the heart.” (WN V.i.f.32)

Here is the whole piece, which has some details about the early reception of WON.

Amusingly, when WON was published the publisher was impressed with the sales, which were said “more than I could have expected from a work that requires much thought and reflection (qualities that do not abound among modern readers).” Ah those modern readers, eh? Never quite what we want them to be!

Larkin, of course, disliked the poem.

Elsewhere, he describes it as a “sixteen-year old’s poem about spring” and wonders whether it was possible to “write this sort of poem today?” Elsewhere again he says the first verse is “all right, the rest crap, especially the last line”.

And Jem half agrees…

But it is true that the rest of ‘The Trees’ doesn’t trip off the tongue as easily as the first verse/stanza. There is a kind of rupture, which is deeper than just a break between verses.

And

The ambivalence goes deeper still. The first stanza won’t be so easily forgotten. Like something almost being said is too strong, too leading an image. Even if we forget that early draft, the comparison which the poem originally sets up isn’t between arboreal and human lifespans, but between silence and speech. I can never read the rest of the poem without wondering what that something is. Why is greenness a kind of grief? Whose grief? We’re never told. We can guess.

I have always loved this poem and found Larkin’s dismissal of it startling when I read his letters. (He complains about writing something so mediocre on Thomas Hardy’s birthday, and perhaps one can understand that, when measured against Hardy’s best work, it feels disappointing.) The greenness of grief seems obvious to me, first, as an invocation of Eliot, something of a silent bête noire throughout Larkin, as the poem is presumably “set” as April turns to May; but it also invokes the sense of tears at renewals, such as the “happy funerals” in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. That poem contains a sister image to “something almost being said” in “someone running up to bowl”. Life is an attempt, which seems to come so easily, so naturally, to the tree, but not to us. The rings of grief have no parallel in ‘Whitsun’, which actually leaves out the wedding rings, but perhaps relates to the rain at the end.

what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give

This is part of the ongoing theme of “Earth’s immeasurable surprise” in Larkin, which sometimes takes the form of new lambs and sometimes of the memory of “the strength and pain of being young which cannot come again.” Somehow the trees do find a way of being young each year, though it hurts, like growing pains and the pains of seeing the past “smaller and clearer as the years go by”. Perhaps Jem’s ambivalent feelings about the poem reflect Larkin’s (to my mind) very successful invocation of these pains and “griefs” as “almost” not merely gloomy.

Here is an essay I wrote about Larkin and the strength and pain of being young, one of my favorite pieces of my own work.

Naturally, Victoria Moul has made a very fine selection, and with some unfamiliar poems. The idea is that some of these poems are rarely anthologised. At least two of them, Like to the falling of a star by Henry King and Dazzled thus with height of place by Henry Wotton, are in Gardner, but not in Ricks. (Why Ricks excluded them is a mystery to me, though it’s not his period and it was Gardner’s.) Some of them are in Fowler too. But there are several poems not always available elsewhere and the overall selection has a good balance of the familiar and the unexpected.

Victoria says in her introduction that it was taken for granted in the seventeenth century that a poem “teaches or expresses something that it is helpful to remember as one tries to conduct a decent life.” This is the theme of the pamphlet. Here, in that spirit, is the Henry King.

Like to the falling of a star,
Or as the flights of eagles are,
Or like the fresh spring’s gaudy hue,
Or silver drops of morning dew,
Or like a wind that chafes the flood,
Or bubbles which on water stood:
Even such is man, whose borrowed light
Is straight called in, and paid to night.
The wind blows out, the bubble dies;
The spring entombed in autumn lies;
The dew dries up, the star is shot;
The flight is past, and man forgot.

Hot stuff, and really quite modern. Clive James was writing things like that final couplet in his early days. One can mistake this for mere verse, too simple, too gross to be “great literature.” Well, read it again with a real sense of your own mortality. The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entombed in autumn lies—this is the good stuff. People like to say “this too shall pass” as if that were reassuring. It puts me in mind of verses like this. The bubble dies could almost be the title of an Agatha Christie novel. The idea of borrowed light, as opposed to borrowed time, is much more affecting. The spring entombed makes one think of the roots and bulbs all gone to dark. Shall they come up blind? In its relentless simplicity, the poem refuses the reassurance one inevitably seeks. We are apt to think this sort of thing sentimental but it is immensely moving given the right openness of attitude. One of my favourite poems in this vein (not included in the pamphlet) is Elizabeth Tanfield’s epitaph for her husband.

HERE shadow lie:
Whilst life is sad,
Still hopes to die
To him she had.
In bliss is he
Whom I loved best:
Thrice happy she
With him to rest.
So shall I be
With him I loved,
And he with me
And both us blessed.
Love made me poet,
And this I writ;
My heart did do it,
And not my wit.

I do not know how anyone could read those final lines and not feel them strongly.

My beloved Herrick is included, with his ‘In this world, this isle of dreams’, which shows all his deftness. ‘I sing (and ever shall)’, as he wrote elsewhere, ‘Of heaven and hope to have it after all.’ Campion is included too, with his wonderful lyric, ‘The man of life upright’. O what splendid mellifluous simplicity he can create!

Thus, scorning all the cares
That fate, or fortune brings,
He makes the heaven his book,
His wisdom heavenly things.

Good thoughts his only friends,
His wealth a well-spent age,
The earth his sober inne,
And quiet pilgrimage.

James Shirley is represented with a very period poem (also included in Gardner), that gets those wonderful effects of a formal structure snapping shut.

The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against Fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings

There’s plenty more and I have spent time in the last two evenings leafing through these twenty poems, enjoying the familiar authors and the new. The poems I did not know at all have been the least affecting, but also the ones I have spent most time with. I shall be going back to them. And it keeps getting me to open Fowler, visit Poetry Foundation, and so on. Above all, it reinforces the fact that this was a great, great period of English poetry. There is so much good writing, so much that can sustain many many readings. It is not just learned, crafted writing, but full of strong feeling, honed to a fine and sharp simplicity.

The field is large, the barn at hand,
The reapers quick and wise.
The stubble flames and sinful souls
Lie down and never rise.

The pamphlet is very nicely made and has some useful notes at the back. It would make a good gift. Headless Poet press will be publishing more such pamphlets and I look forward to those too.

If you want to know more about what makes this period the golden age of English poetry, Victoria discussed that in our interview a few months ago.