Good to see you bring your ad-man background to the conversation, Henry—this is strictly a compliment—and, of course, a reference to David Galenson! Seriously, we could use more of your insights in debates about public funding for the arts, and the business of philanthropy.
It sounds like we may need to return to single-donor patronage. There is no shortage of wealthy individuals in our society today — my question is, why aren't they more interested in supporting the literary arts? A lot of them already donate to other causes. Surely there's a multi-millionaire somewhere who would jump at the chance to make history by supporting someone like DeWitt. Is the real problem that not enough people (including multi-millionaires) are reading contemporary literature?
Helen DeWitt has written a genius book, but she is not a genius anymore. She has had twenty-five years of virtually zero production (one novella, some stories, a co-written novel). She ought to get money just because she is elderly and probably doesn’t have much, but I highly doubt that giving her money will lead to more books from her.
When she wrote the last samurai she had no funding. She had nothing. That shows what she can do when she is hungry and incentivized to publish. Now, she doesn’t have that hunger. Instead she has writer’s block. Less friction in her life is not going to increase her desire to write.
Yes but then we come to other point which is that a foundation giving you $175k for just an essay and a video is pretty good. Nobody is going to give someone money without expecting at least some form of reciprocal recognition. I am sure that Lorenzo d’Medici expected Renaissance artists to respect him. It’s impossible to give someone money if even the slightest imposition is too much.
You yourself are funded by a foundation. If you treated Tyler Cowen the way Dewitt treated this foundation, he would kick you to the curb. This 175k deal that Dewitt was getting was the best possible deal. Nothing better than this really exists. (I am sure the MacArthur foundation ALSO expects something from its grantees.)
EV grants are no strings attached quite literally. My job is obvs different. But do think HDW has been an obvious case of “something should be done” for decades and simply outside of what bureaucratic systems can tolerate.
yes my read of the blogpost is just that… this is how people act when they do not actually want your help. She had already arranged her next two years and experienced this offer as an imposition and a threat. That might be stupid, it might be wise—I really don't know because I'm not her friend or her accountant. Whether or not a person wants help often has nothing to do with whether or not they need help. DeWitt has a sense of what she needs and it seems to be "minimal human contact." If she is wrong, she is wrong.
Didn't it take her more than 25 years to write The Last Samurai? Isn't the data consistent with it just taking her an extremely long time to write?
Anyway, the obvious way to settle this dispute is for you and Henry to both write down your own hypothesized Helen DeWitt production functions, which relate her funding level and publicity obligations to her probability of producing a Great Novel within her lifespan.
I don't think it took 25 years to write - that would have had her starting around 1975, which was the year she turned 18. But what's noteworthy is that "Samurai" was supposedly her 50th completed manuscript. This suggests a combination of extreme perfectionism and compulsion to write.
It's also noteworthy that "Samurai" basically disappeared after its first publication in 2000, and didn't reappear until New Directions resurrected it in 2016. This means her first and by far best-known book didn't became easily available to readers until she was almost 60.
You’re saying something I don’t understand, sorry :( I can only say what I think will happen, not the probability it will happen—the latter number is meaningless, because it can’t be falsified. If I say there is a ten percent chance something will happen, and then it does happen, well…you know absolutely nothing in that case about my predictive powers.
she has published four books since the last samurai: a short story collection, a novel (lightening rods), a novella and a co-written 600 page novel, thats about a book every 6 years averaged out which is a regular author rate? Hollinghurst has published 7 books since 1988, Donna Tartt 2 since her debut
Also The Last Samurai features one of my favorite book quotes ever:
"No really it's for a man who's thinking of committing suicide he was held hostage and tortured and it haunts him and I thought maybe just maybe The Importance of Being Ernest would do the trick because when my mother feels depressed it cheers her up to walk on the Wilde side."
Made me burst out laughing and tear up a bit at the same time. Thank you ma'am.
I'm going to push back on Henry's arguments a bit, but in the spirit of the "loyal opposition" who would love to see literature flourish. As a total outsider who has only read a few of her short stories, the Helen DeWitt situation seems strange for two reasons.
First, if so many literary experts love Helen DeWitt so much, why can't they just give her money themselves? Are there not 100 readers of taste willing to chip in $1000 for her? 10 people willing to chip in $10,000 for her? If not, well, how much do they *really* love Helen DeWitt? Revealed preferences and all that! Are her appreciators all horrifically liquidity constrained?
Put that objection aside; assume you need a "wealthy" patron, for some definition of wealthy. It's not like there's no wealthy philanthropists around, so why don't any of them want to give Helen DeWitt money? I think it's fair to say they don't see the value of funding a novelist versus other kinds of charitable giving. Literary experts are going to have to argue that Helen DeWitt novels have real value; comparable to that of, say, spending another $100,000 on mosquito nets. But it seems to me that literary people are either unable or unwilling to argue in these terms! This puts them at a tremendous disadvantage.
“How unusual” is a hotly debated question, isn't it! Over at Mercatus they generally say “quite unusual”, I think. And if there is a market failure, what's the mechanism preventing markets from clearing? Where's the friction?
Heck, maybe you could get a GMU PhD student to work on it.
I feel ashamed to say I was only aware superficially of Helen DeWitt and her work, but your description of her as a genius and the best novelist around has made me just buy her last samurai novel.
I feel huge affection for her just for her actions here. I am on Team Helen.
Thank you for saying this, Henry, & you’ve done some real good. How lovely. This has given me & I suspect lots of people a really happy feeling, which is so welcome at the moment.
She is a treasure. After many years of having Last Samurai on my shelf, I finally read it last year. It was unbelievably inventive and moving and fun and clever and wicked. Her novella The English Understand Wool is also an instant classic in the line of O’Henry and Saki. Someone with money please! give her everything she needs.
Lightning Rods is one of the funniest books I've read, and I've recommend it to almost no one because of what it would look like to recommend that book.
I think Seth meant to say, “maybe if you recommend HDW books more people would buy them and she’d find more publishers and get more money.” If for whatever reason you don’t recommend her, doesn’t that very slightly increase the likelihood she won’t get recognition?
This particular novel is about a CEO who creates a break room for male salesmen featuring holes in the wall and women naked on all fours on the other side so that the men could achieve release midday.
If I am going to recommend that book to anyone I better have a great sense of their personality and reading preferences or else I would seem like a major creep.
Great read. I've recently become aware of Caresse Crosby, who invented the bra (!) and used her vast pile of lingerie money to become the patron to all sorts of people, most notably Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
I also thought Dewitt's post was fascinating, as it really got to the heart of why she couldn't possibly do the promotion they wanted, even though it was (superficially) not that onerous, without her ever sitting down and saying "this is why I can't do this stuff".
I read about half of The Last Samurai 6 months ago, and I’ve never loathed a book or the impression of its author I’ve gleaned from one as much. Dewitt seems to believe that things like the mastery of Ancient Greek (so as to read Homer in the original) or knowledge of Japanese are in themselves remarkable achievements, perversely undervalued by society. The book felt like a thinly-veiled expression of rage and frustration at her own inability to find financial stability and/or success, which, again, she seemed to blame society for.
What was missing was any understanding of why education or learning might be valuable - not to enable the reading of old texts in the original for the sake of doing so, but in order to discover new truths about human life and the world. I felt Dewitt had nothing at all to say about the actual value of education in a deeper sense; all that matters is that one knows lots of stuff, ideally stuff most others don’t.
I really like the book, and I’ll try to explain the feeling that I get from it, and what might be the vibe that other people get from it and relate to as well. But it’s hard to explain. Here goes.
I've read the book a couple times now, and I think the takeaways, for me at least, are that the story is more about potential, individuals having more to them than meets the eye, and the importance of nurturing a love of life, learning, and experience. And I think these takeaways work together to bring forward a worldview of, people should pursue a thing, not for money or for fame, but for the pure enjoyment and curiosity surrounding that thing. Impractical? Yes. Are all people like this? No. Does that matter in the context of this book or do stories have to be practical? Let’s see.
Potential can be found in the least expected of places, like in an intelligent but extremely depressed and low-functioning mother, or in a fatherless child of that same mother.
Potential is deeper than meets the eye in a pastor’s son who is literally encouraged to postpone taking a possibly life-changing academic opportunity. But who also spent his time in between just existing, fucking around until he was turned away and started a business. He maybe thinks about what could have been and blames his father, but was that actually what he even wanted? Did he know what he wanted?
In his wife whose musical talent isn't truly appreciated by her parents, yes, but she had a potential chance and didn’t take it or continue to practice. Was that self-sabotage? Or was she wanting something she thought she should want, rather than for the love of the music? Did she think it was too late? Is the author’s view that there’s a point where it is or isn’t too late? Does she think you should do the thing you love, that life can be too overwhelming to truly do the thing you love? Do you actually love the thing you think you love? There’s more there. And I don’t think there’s a straightforward conclusion.
That same fatherless boy, who yes, was raised to be very intelligent by his mother, proves to be a bit more, even relatable, when you'd expect him to be a purely an insufferable genius. As we progress through the story, we see this kid’s deepest desire is to have some sort of father figure or stable adult around. It’s such a basic and human want. He’s not this cold little prodigy. He’s a real person with real desires.
The "fathers" or "Samurai" Ludo seeks often aren't exactly what they seem to be. They’re successful, but can be cold or inadequate. They can seem heroic from the outside, and maybe even are, but inside they’re battling severe mental health issues and suicidal ideation from their experiences.
I think this just all points to the fact that maybe DeWitt thinks there isn’t necessarily a “goal” or place you can head towards where you’re going to be the most happy or fulfilled. Even the wealthiest or most (supposedly) genius people on the planet can be unfulfilled. Stability, being able to pursue what you love, life, liberty and all that jazz, that’s the point. Ludo kind of takes the bull by the horns and says, “ah, this guy is my biological father, he won’t do, I’m going to find a better one.” Like I think that’s the bravest and most admirable thing about him and the story itself, he pursues that deepest desire because THAT’S what he wants.
Again, is this an impractical worldview? Yes. Obviously people can’t just wander around reading and writing and being little geniuses 24/7 or going on grand life quests. But, I think it’s a story that encourages a look into better social support for society, better policy, better financial stability for people in poverty, a better minimum wage, etc... You can’t pursue the thing that might bring about happiness for you when you’re stressed, working constantly, or suffering from poor mental health. You may never be in the spot where you’re able to realize what that thing even is that you want to pursue. Success is different than usefulness to society or getting a ton of money. Some people just want to be stable enough where they can create or learn or search for their own identity or ethos or whatever you want to call it. And if they’re given that chance, maybe they can create that thing that would be useful. And a book doesn't need to explicitly state, "social support needs to be better, education needs to be better" like you can obviously come to that conclusion on your own after reading it.
I think she's almost talking more to the reader than addressing society as a whole. She wrote a book that encourages you to take a road a bit less traveled, to not be so influenced by expectations or the world around you. Because if that’s what you do, you might reach a point where you realize, “what the fuck was I even doing this all for? What was the point?” And in 2026 especially, I think that’s a great message to follow.
Great comment. Also, one of the themes running through the book is that people have to choose: they can't have it all, they have to focus on one thing or another. One way she brings this out is through the pianist Kenzo Yamamoto. He is distressed by the fact that a piece of music can be played an infinite number of ways, and he tries to do this in one concert, playing the same short piece over and over for hours. In the process boring the audience to death, to the point where almost nobody is left when he has finished.
Yes! I used this quote in another comment, but I think lines where she says things like ...
“I wish you wouldn't say the first thing that comes into your head, Ludo. There is an obvious difference between someone who works within the technical limitations of his time which are beyond his control and someone who accepts without thinking limitations which are entirely within his own power to set aside.”
... definitely push that other side of the coin in taking responsibility, making actual choices, taking more ownership over your path in life, etc... I think the book itself strikes a good balance in societal pressures and external influence, vs forging your own path and taking more of a role in your own destiny.
Thanks for taking the time to share this! I don't think the book makes a great case for swerving away from mainstream norms or expectations, particularly in the way that the main characters do (the characters seem miserable and unfulfilled), but certainly I don't think rigid conformity needs to be our social ethos (or that it IS our social ethos, actually). I also don't think that I get what motivates the view that DeWitt is anything close to the greatest novelist of our time (or even a particularly great novelist) in light of the reading you've presented here (or in light of Scott's reading in his review), but it's at least interesting to have some sense of what others see in the book.
I don't know how to state this without sounding slightly antagonistic, and I don't mean this antagonistically, I promise, just something I've noticed. You have some very hard opinions and conclusions made on a book that you stated above you've only read half of. And you seemed to very much hate things the author has said outside of the book, so I might be jumping to the conclusion of you possibly skim/speed/hate reading at least the last 20-50 pages or so of what you did read.
Alright, that's out of the way.
"I don't think the book makes a great case for swerving away from mainstream norms or expectations." I disagree, Sibylla's parents went with the flow and general expectations placed upon them and were unhappy. A character like Red Devlin, who maybe wasn't influenced by society or family but was societally praised for all he did and probably continued being swayed to do more of that by the outside perception of his career, ended up being very different from the person he was portrayed as at the end, even to his family, and was suicidal. I don't know if DeWitt needs to give us a laundry list of other characters unhappy with how their lives turned out due to outside influence (but you could probably make a case for other characters) because in Sibylla's parents alone I think a lot of people can find them very relatable. Maybe too relatable.
BUT, I don't think she's saying throughout that it's all society's fault. She has lines in the book like, “I wish you wouldn't say the first thing that comes into your head, Ludo. There is an obvious difference between someone who works within the technical limitations of his time which are beyond his control and someone who accepts without thinking limitations which are entirely within his own power to set aside.” I think the cool thing about Sibylla's parents' stories is that, it is half their fault too! They had obstacles yes, but also chances they just didn't take.
Sibylla seems to take a chance studying abroad but even seems to fall a bit into that trap. But, she also has severe, untreated depression which is a whole other can of worms to deal with personally. I think DeWitt does a good job of showing the balance between outside influence and personal responsibility. Especially in Ludo, how I said above, kind of just going "fuck it, I'm gonna find me a dad that I actually like." Like I think it's actually a relatively healthy view, but I suppose her statements outside of her books could lead people to think her views skew more towards the society aspect. And they just might for her but I don't think it's so heavily one-sided in the book.
I do admire people, like the author of the post, who can come out and clearly state, "so and so is the BEST writer of our time." I don't know personally if Helen DeWitt should be considered the greatest novelist of our time. I'm a person who has a hard time picking a favorite anything/successfully ranking things. I think there's just too many good books and writers out there with a lot of different ideas and art to offer. How does one rank that?
But, I will say that I do love Helen DeWitt's writing. And I do love the story, themes, and structure of The Last Samurai. It's one of my personal favorite books. I love how she'll explain and explain something up front to get to that simple conclusion of something like:
"There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom."
I love the way she'll interject what's happening in the moment in spurts when a character is reminiscing on something.
I love how she thinks in terms of endless possibilities and contending with that in real time:
“When you play a piece of music there are so many different ways you could play it. You keep asking yourself what if. You try this and you say what if and you try that. When you buy a CD you get one answer to the question. You never get the what if.”
Or just her clever quips like:
“Here was a man who'd learned to write before he could think, a man who threw out logical fallacies like tacks behind a getaway car, and he always always always got away.”
“No really it's for a man who's thinking of committing suicide he was held hostage and tortured and it haunts him and I thought maybe just maybe The Importance of Being Ernest would do the trick because when my mother feels depressed it cheers her up to walk on the Wilde side.”
I don't know if she's the best, but she is great to a lot of people. And it would be cool if she were able to get some prize money or a patron to freely create another book that's on par with, or even better than, The Last Samurai. I think she has it in her.
I loved the book, and agree with Henry that it's a great or near-great novel. But I understand what you're saying here. I didn't experience the book in the same way, probably because I didn't assume Sibylla was some kind of stand-in for the author (although there are obvious parallels between the two, given what we know of DeWitt's biography).
Yes, what I was able to learn about her own biography, what she writes in her afterword, and what I recall seeing her say in an interview someplace (Paris Review maybe?) gave me the impression that, whether the character is intended as a self-insert or not, the core intended message about the nature of learning/education seemed to be something like “it’s bad/sad that people like Sibylla and Ludo are undervalued by society,” but the book failed (or, really, neglected to even try) to convince me of their value. She may be willing to grant that some aspects of what happens to Ludo/Sibylla are not great, or that their merits are debatable at least, but I think it’s clear that she is not inclined that way.
I found her afterword unconvincing. She seemed to think that all we need to do is reform the educational system, and a plethora of Ludos will blossom. It rubbed me the wrong way because I really didn't think this was a novel about social reform.
Exactly. I agree that the novel can be read in other ways, and it’s far more interesting if you do so, but I get the sense that DeWitt really thinks of it in the way I was describing above. And yes, she wants more Ludos, but that, more than anything, is what bothered me — why should we want more people like Ludo? She seems to take for granted that we should, but I don’t see any clear (let alone persuasive) view of why we should in the book or in her afterword.
I found the second paragraph here a very odd comment - or at least, odd for a comment on this particular blog and this particular book.
The premise of Henry's work is surely that reading great books is a valuable activity in itself - not because it enables you to discover "new truths", but because it gives you access to things of the past that enable you to enlarge your own mind in all sorts of ways. And reading in the original language, where possible, is a major enhancement of that. Reading the Odyssey in Greek is totally unlike reading it in translation, just as reading Dante and Goethe in Italian and German is totally unlike reading them in translation. One can't get anything close to a full sense of these (or other) works in English.
Now, you may fairly say that Ludo in the first half of The Last Samurai does not obtain that depth of understanding of the Odyssey (or of Seven Samurai, come to that): all he does is achieve technical competence in Greek and Japanese and some other things, and he shows off by listing the number of things he's read but compares himself unfavorably with John Stuart Mill who had read so much more at the same age. And you could go away from that thinking that Ludo is just a kind of performing animal, who can do spectacular intellectual feats (He reads the Argonautica in Greek!!) but not really understand them. After all, in the first half of the book he's six years old. How deep an understanding can a six-year-old have of the Odyssey or Seven Samurai?
But that's actually the point of the book! What the book goes on to show is that this kind of mastery is completely inadequate and superficial - it's a talent, not true engagement with the works, and Ludo has to come to understand that: that intellectual ability is not enough. That is what Sibylla is attempting (inadequately) to teach him, but in the second half of the book he gradually comes to that realization himself.
So I do wonder if the fact that (on your own account) you only read the first half of the book meant that you missed that entire dimension. There are quite a lot of hints at it in the early chapters, but it is only in the second half of the book that it comes to the fore.
"The premise of Henry's work is surely that reading great books is a valuable activity in itself - not because it enables you to discover "new truths", but because it gives you access to things of the past that enable you to enlarge your own mind in all sorts of ways. And reading in the original language, where possible, is a major enhancement of that. Reading the Odyssey in Greek is totally unlike reading it in translation, just as reading Dante and Goethe in Italian and German is totally unlike reading them in translation. One can't get anything close to a full sense of these (or other) works in English."
All of what you describe are part of what I meant by new "truths," by which I didn't mean scientific truths or anything of that sort, but rather insight into life, the human condition, history, etc. Learning languages may have some part to play in that, but it is a fairly modest supporting role, I think, rather than the primary one that DeWitt seems to give it.
As someone that has now nearly finished a Ph.D. in history, in the course of which I've learned to read Classical and Mandarin Chinese and a certain amount of Japanese as well, I don't subscribe to the view that reading texts in the original offers much greater depth in and of itself. To the extent that learning a language is accompanied by or encourages an effort to more fully understand the cultural/social/economic contexts in which a work was produced, sure, it can be useful to do so, but most of the value of learning a language in terms of the appreciation of a work is then indirect. Poetry may suffer more in translation, but almost certainly not enough to justify the enormous effort of learning a language to appreciate a corpus slightly better. To describe the experience of reading in the original language as "totally unlike" that of reading in translation strikes me as romantic exaggeration.
And you may well be right that the point of the second half of the book is precisely to suggest that a purely technical approach to learning that goes little deeper is misguided, or even perverse, but, well, DeWitt's afterword certainly does not give the impression that she feels that way.
It sounds like we may just have to disagree about the value of reading literature in the original. I know neither Chinese nor Japanese, so I can't comment on those, but I know quite a lot of other languages (both European and Semitic) which I can comment on, and I simply don't think one gets anything close to the effect of the original in translation. But I don't know how I can prove that except by assertion, which is obviously unconvincing if you don't accept my assertions!!!
(Well, maybe I could prove it by a careful, word by word comparison of some text with its translation, showing how many of the nuances of the original fail to be captured - but that would be a very wearisome and time-consuming exercise.)
As for the afterword, I don't have a copy of it to hand, so I may have misremembered something, but my recollection of it is that it focuses on the question of whether Ludo's education makes him a genius - and argues that it doesn't: that lots of people given the opportunity could do the same thing, and that more people should be given the opportunity. Regardless of whether you think that is either plausible or an appropriate educational program, it surely comes from the premise that there is (or should be) nothing interesting or exceptional about precocious linguistic facility, but also is totally compatible with the idea which is key to the book: that while linguistic facility may be a prerequisite for literary engagement, it is not a substitute for it.
Yes, it seems that we simply disagree about the importance of reading in the original language. I don't doubt that significant nuance is lost in translation — significant nuance is, no doubt, lost to those of us that have to learn languages no longer commonly used or spoken in the present simply through textbooks and the like, or simply through a lack of easy facility with a given time/place/culture in which a given work was produced. Learning a language may help to recover some of that, but simply reading about those things directly in one's native language would get one awfully far, as would reading an annotated edition of a work.
The afterword doesn't quite do what you're saying; it doesn't suggest that Ludo is somehow biologically superior or something (though it leaves that possibility quite open), and floats the notion that essentially anyone with the right resources could achieve what he has, true, but it characterizes that achievement entirely as a mastery of languages and mathematics. She decries an excessive focus on STEM, and criticism of the humanities as impractical, but offers a very STEM-like take on what the humanities consist in: a mastery of technical challenges/puzzles.
Here's the full text of the afterword, taken from the ebook edition: “He said they watched Sesame Street and it was about the right level.”
“At what age?”
“He didn’t say.”
J. S. Mill thought that he had no special aptitude or intelligence, only the advantage of an unusual education; we still don’t know whether he was unduly modest.
“It was not hard to imagine a world where my body stood in this room with something else inside it.” It’s not hard for Ludo to imagine what he might have been with the opportunities Val Peters thought age-appropriate. It’s much harder to imagine what one might have been with better chances, greater challenges. Since there is no age at which the opportunities offered Ludo are the norm, we don’t know whether he was a genius or not—only that he is an oddity in a society with very low expectations.
We clearly don’t live in a society where the question is whether 4 is too early to start Greek—and the rival merits of 7, 8, 9, 10 or 14 are hotly debated. We don’t even live in a society where libraries have, as a matter of course, the sort of collection that might inspire exploration of great literary repertoires outside school. (We don’t generally find even a collection of Oxford Classical Texts, with relevant lexica and grammars, never mind offerings further afield from what is notionally the Western tradition.) We do live in a society where the humanities are increasingly dismissed as impractical, and whatever counts as STEM is A Good Thing because practical. But we don’t live in a society where every schoolchild has Korner’s The Pleasures of Counting, or Steiner’s The Chemistry Maths Book, where every library has a copy of Lang’s Astrophysical Formulae. (I could go endlessly on.) So Ludo looks impressive not only to Val Peters and riders on the Circle Line, but to rather a lot of reviewers. Perhaps he should, perhaps he shouldn’t; perhaps we should really be more interested in the unknown capabilities of the reader.
Individual readers have responded in a way that makes this fragment of a correspondence not unusual:
Dear Elena,
Oh dear, I’m sorry Nico made off with your daughter’s Imagier Franco-Japonais. Still, I think we can agree you got him interested in the subject.”
“It’s not hard to imagine a world where the effect of the book on what has been a coterie of readers is multiplied to the point where general assumptions about what is possible are changed. We have only to imagine a world where Oprah Winfrey picks up The Last Samurai. Or a world where a bookseller presses The Last Samurai upon President Obama. A world where Terry Pratchett is my very dear friend and sees The Last Samurai as a stand-in for Miss Susan. (I could again go endlessly on.)
But it has been 20 years since London editors looked at the manuscript and complained that there was too much Greek and Japanese, there were too many numbers, 17 since Jonathan Burnham of Talk Miramax Books took the book to the Frankfurt Bookfair and caused a sensation. And the assumptions underlying the National Curriculum and Race to the Top remain firmly in place.
A world in which large numbers of small children steal their siblings’ Imagier Franco-Japonais is by no means unflawed, but it looks better than what we have. We should fight for it when and where we can.”
From the afterword: "We have only to imagine a world where [...] a bookseller presses The Last Samurai upon President Obama."
How about a world where a bookseller presses The Last Samurai upon the current president? It would at least make for some good satire.
But I think in general, this shows the weakness of her argument. Making the book a hit among celebs and politicians wouldn't make much of a difference. It's a dense, wacky, challenging literary novel; it's not a combination novel and political tract a la "The Jungle."
I think the core of where we don't quite line up is pointed to in your last sentence: "It's a dense, wacky, challenging literary novel; it's not a combination novel and political tract a la "The Jungle."
I think DeWitt disagrees, and that she very much meant it to be combination novel and political tract. My issue with the book is basically that her political vision, as I understand it, is deeply alienating to me.
Thanks for the historic overview of patronage. There appear to be cyclical waves in patronage — starting w individuals of wealth and taste, which then solidify into stale institutions until some new venue or money flow breaks the status quo.
(The more things change…)
Substack is one of the newer forums for exposure and support, yet it’s also crowded and noisy—so much talent goes unnoticed. And so it goes.
David Ogilvy was fond of quoting Chesterton: "I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees."
I’d earmarked this line from Henry because it made me laugh.
“Committees almost never have good taste.”
Good to see you bring your ad-man background to the conversation, Henry—this is strictly a compliment—and, of course, a reference to David Galenson! Seriously, we could use more of your insights in debates about public funding for the arts, and the business of philanthropy.
Thank you :)
It sounds like we may need to return to single-donor patronage. There is no shortage of wealthy individuals in our society today — my question is, why aren't they more interested in supporting the literary arts? A lot of them already donate to other causes. Surely there's a multi-millionaire somewhere who would jump at the chance to make history by supporting someone like DeWitt. Is the real problem that not enough people (including multi-millionaires) are reading contemporary literature?
Helen DeWitt has written a genius book, but she is not a genius anymore. She has had twenty-five years of virtually zero production (one novella, some stories, a co-written novel). She ought to get money just because she is elderly and probably doesn’t have much, but I highly doubt that giving her money will lead to more books from her.
Who knows what she could / could have done if she had been funded
When she wrote the last samurai she had no funding. She had nothing. That shows what she can do when she is hungry and incentivized to publish. Now, she doesn’t have that hunger. Instead she has writer’s block. Less friction in her life is not going to increase her desire to write.
Various problems have affected her since then but either way the point that she ought to have been funded stands I think
Yes but then we come to other point which is that a foundation giving you $175k for just an essay and a video is pretty good. Nobody is going to give someone money without expecting at least some form of reciprocal recognition. I am sure that Lorenzo d’Medici expected Renaissance artists to respect him. It’s impossible to give someone money if even the slightest imposition is too much.
You yourself are funded by a foundation. If you treated Tyler Cowen the way Dewitt treated this foundation, he would kick you to the curb. This 175k deal that Dewitt was getting was the best possible deal. Nothing better than this really exists. (I am sure the MacArthur foundation ALSO expects something from its grantees.)
EV grants are no strings attached quite literally. My job is obvs different. But do think HDW has been an obvious case of “something should be done” for decades and simply outside of what bureaucratic systems can tolerate.
yes my read of the blogpost is just that… this is how people act when they do not actually want your help. She had already arranged her next two years and experienced this offer as an imposition and a threat. That might be stupid, it might be wise—I really don't know because I'm not her friend or her accountant. Whether or not a person wants help often has nothing to do with whether or not they need help. DeWitt has a sense of what she needs and it seems to be "minimal human contact." If she is wrong, she is wrong.
I agree wit this I just think there should be some more provision for patronage type funding and less for committee type
She is in good company. Anna Sewell, Margaret Mitchell, Harper Lee, Salinger, Emily Brontë, Arundhati Roy,
Didn't it take her more than 25 years to write The Last Samurai? Isn't the data consistent with it just taking her an extremely long time to write?
Anyway, the obvious way to settle this dispute is for you and Henry to both write down your own hypothesized Helen DeWitt production functions, which relate her funding level and publicity obligations to her probability of producing a Great Novel within her lifespan.
I don't think it took 25 years to write - that would have had her starting around 1975, which was the year she turned 18. But what's noteworthy is that "Samurai" was supposedly her 50th completed manuscript. This suggests a combination of extreme perfectionism and compulsion to write.
It's also noteworthy that "Samurai" basically disappeared after its first publication in 2000, and didn't reappear until New Directions resurrected it in 2016. This means her first and by far best-known book didn't became easily available to readers until she was almost 60.
Seems like the data is extremely sparse! How much would it cost to fund a small research project regarding the Helen DeWitt production function?
I don’t think Helen DeWitt will publish another novel before she dies, regardless of how much money she gets.
So you're saying your probability distribution is a point mass at exactly zero? That seems strong relative to the evidence!
You’re saying something I don’t understand, sorry :( I can only say what I think will happen, not the probability it will happen—the latter number is meaningless, because it can’t be falsified. If I say there is a ten percent chance something will happen, and then it does happen, well…you know absolutely nothing in that case about my predictive powers.
Your characterising her as 'elderly' and not hungry enough to write says far more about you than Helen DeWitt.
she has published four books since the last samurai: a short story collection, a novel (lightening rods), a novella and a co-written 600 page novel, thats about a book every 6 years averaged out which is a regular author rate? Hollinghurst has published 7 books since 1988, Donna Tartt 2 since her debut
I have nothing intelligent to add to this thread, but I was at university with Helen and I’m certainly not elderly!
Agreed, Helen is amazing.
Also The Last Samurai features one of my favorite book quotes ever:
"No really it's for a man who's thinking of committing suicide he was held hostage and tortured and it haunts him and I thought maybe just maybe The Importance of Being Ernest would do the trick because when my mother feels depressed it cheers her up to walk on the Wilde side."
Made me burst out laughing and tear up a bit at the same time. Thank you ma'am.
I'm going to push back on Henry's arguments a bit, but in the spirit of the "loyal opposition" who would love to see literature flourish. As a total outsider who has only read a few of her short stories, the Helen DeWitt situation seems strange for two reasons.
First, if so many literary experts love Helen DeWitt so much, why can't they just give her money themselves? Are there not 100 readers of taste willing to chip in $1000 for her? 10 people willing to chip in $10,000 for her? If not, well, how much do they *really* love Helen DeWitt? Revealed preferences and all that! Are her appreciators all horrifically liquidity constrained?
Put that objection aside; assume you need a "wealthy" patron, for some definition of wealthy. It's not like there's no wealthy philanthropists around, so why don't any of them want to give Helen DeWitt money? I think it's fair to say they don't see the value of funding a novelist versus other kinds of charitable giving. Literary experts are going to have to argue that Helen DeWitt novels have real value; comparable to that of, say, spending another $100,000 on mosquito nets. But it seems to me that literary people are either unable or unwilling to argue in these terms! This puts them at a tremendous disadvantage.
Simple market failure? Not so unusual?
“How unusual” is a hotly debated question, isn't it! Over at Mercatus they generally say “quite unusual”, I think. And if there is a market failure, what's the mechanism preventing markets from clearing? Where's the friction?
Heck, maybe you could get a GMU PhD student to work on it.
I feel ashamed to say I was only aware superficially of Helen DeWitt and her work, but your description of her as a genius and the best novelist around has made me just buy her last samurai novel.
I feel huge affection for her just for her actions here. I am on Team Helen.
Victoria and Hilary Menos discussing this very subject, viz. bureaucratic compromise vs. individual taste. https://substack.com/home/post/p-192932100
Thank you for saying this, Henry, & you’ve done some real good. How lovely. This has given me & I suspect lots of people a really happy feeling, which is so welcome at the moment.
She is a treasure. After many years of having Last Samurai on my shelf, I finally read it last year. It was unbelievably inventive and moving and fun and clever and wicked. Her novella The English Understand Wool is also an instant classic in the line of O’Henry and Saki. Someone with money please! give her everything she needs.
https://ko-fi.com/dewitt she does have a ko-fi for what its worth
Thank you! She's a genius and I'm sending her money right now.
Lightning Rods is one of the funniest books I've read, and I've recommend it to almost no one because of what it would look like to recommend that book.
Hahaha yes indeed
Having not read the book, I feel like this comment contains information relevant to the question “why aren’t people give Helen DeWitt money?”
Read the book, but don't read anything about the book first. It's a dark workplace comedy, sort of.
I think Seth meant to say, “maybe if you recommend HDW books more people would buy them and she’d find more publishers and get more money.” If for whatever reason you don’t recommend her, doesn’t that very slightly increase the likelihood she won’t get recognition?
This particular novel is about a CEO who creates a break room for male salesmen featuring holes in the wall and women naked on all fours on the other side so that the men could achieve release midday.
If I am going to recommend that book to anyone I better have a great sense of their personality and reading preferences or else I would seem like a major creep.
Great read. I've recently become aware of Caresse Crosby, who invented the bra (!) and used her vast pile of lingerie money to become the patron to all sorts of people, most notably Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
I also thought Dewitt's post was fascinating, as it really got to the heart of why she couldn't possibly do the promotion they wanted, even though it was (superficially) not that onerous, without her ever sitting down and saying "this is why I can't do this stuff".
Black Sun!
I read about half of The Last Samurai 6 months ago, and I’ve never loathed a book or the impression of its author I’ve gleaned from one as much. Dewitt seems to believe that things like the mastery of Ancient Greek (so as to read Homer in the original) or knowledge of Japanese are in themselves remarkable achievements, perversely undervalued by society. The book felt like a thinly-veiled expression of rage and frustration at her own inability to find financial stability and/or success, which, again, she seemed to blame society for.
What was missing was any understanding of why education or learning might be valuable - not to enable the reading of old texts in the original for the sake of doing so, but in order to discover new truths about human life and the world. I felt Dewitt had nothing at all to say about the actual value of education in a deeper sense; all that matters is that one knows lots of stuff, ideally stuff most others don’t.
I really like the book, and I’ll try to explain the feeling that I get from it, and what might be the vibe that other people get from it and relate to as well. But it’s hard to explain. Here goes.
I've read the book a couple times now, and I think the takeaways, for me at least, are that the story is more about potential, individuals having more to them than meets the eye, and the importance of nurturing a love of life, learning, and experience. And I think these takeaways work together to bring forward a worldview of, people should pursue a thing, not for money or for fame, but for the pure enjoyment and curiosity surrounding that thing. Impractical? Yes. Are all people like this? No. Does that matter in the context of this book or do stories have to be practical? Let’s see.
Potential can be found in the least expected of places, like in an intelligent but extremely depressed and low-functioning mother, or in a fatherless child of that same mother.
Potential is deeper than meets the eye in a pastor’s son who is literally encouraged to postpone taking a possibly life-changing academic opportunity. But who also spent his time in between just existing, fucking around until he was turned away and started a business. He maybe thinks about what could have been and blames his father, but was that actually what he even wanted? Did he know what he wanted?
In his wife whose musical talent isn't truly appreciated by her parents, yes, but she had a potential chance and didn’t take it or continue to practice. Was that self-sabotage? Or was she wanting something she thought she should want, rather than for the love of the music? Did she think it was too late? Is the author’s view that there’s a point where it is or isn’t too late? Does she think you should do the thing you love, that life can be too overwhelming to truly do the thing you love? Do you actually love the thing you think you love? There’s more there. And I don’t think there’s a straightforward conclusion.
That same fatherless boy, who yes, was raised to be very intelligent by his mother, proves to be a bit more, even relatable, when you'd expect him to be a purely an insufferable genius. As we progress through the story, we see this kid’s deepest desire is to have some sort of father figure or stable adult around. It’s such a basic and human want. He’s not this cold little prodigy. He’s a real person with real desires.
The "fathers" or "Samurai" Ludo seeks often aren't exactly what they seem to be. They’re successful, but can be cold or inadequate. They can seem heroic from the outside, and maybe even are, but inside they’re battling severe mental health issues and suicidal ideation from their experiences.
I think this just all points to the fact that maybe DeWitt thinks there isn’t necessarily a “goal” or place you can head towards where you’re going to be the most happy or fulfilled. Even the wealthiest or most (supposedly) genius people on the planet can be unfulfilled. Stability, being able to pursue what you love, life, liberty and all that jazz, that’s the point. Ludo kind of takes the bull by the horns and says, “ah, this guy is my biological father, he won’t do, I’m going to find a better one.” Like I think that’s the bravest and most admirable thing about him and the story itself, he pursues that deepest desire because THAT’S what he wants.
Again, is this an impractical worldview? Yes. Obviously people can’t just wander around reading and writing and being little geniuses 24/7 or going on grand life quests. But, I think it’s a story that encourages a look into better social support for society, better policy, better financial stability for people in poverty, a better minimum wage, etc... You can’t pursue the thing that might bring about happiness for you when you’re stressed, working constantly, or suffering from poor mental health. You may never be in the spot where you’re able to realize what that thing even is that you want to pursue. Success is different than usefulness to society or getting a ton of money. Some people just want to be stable enough where they can create or learn or search for their own identity or ethos or whatever you want to call it. And if they’re given that chance, maybe they can create that thing that would be useful. And a book doesn't need to explicitly state, "social support needs to be better, education needs to be better" like you can obviously come to that conclusion on your own after reading it.
I think she's almost talking more to the reader than addressing society as a whole. She wrote a book that encourages you to take a road a bit less traveled, to not be so influenced by expectations or the world around you. Because if that’s what you do, you might reach a point where you realize, “what the fuck was I even doing this all for? What was the point?” And in 2026 especially, I think that’s a great message to follow.
Great comment. Also, one of the themes running through the book is that people have to choose: they can't have it all, they have to focus on one thing or another. One way she brings this out is through the pianist Kenzo Yamamoto. He is distressed by the fact that a piece of music can be played an infinite number of ways, and he tries to do this in one concert, playing the same short piece over and over for hours. In the process boring the audience to death, to the point where almost nobody is left when he has finished.
Yes! I used this quote in another comment, but I think lines where she says things like ...
“I wish you wouldn't say the first thing that comes into your head, Ludo. There is an obvious difference between someone who works within the technical limitations of his time which are beyond his control and someone who accepts without thinking limitations which are entirely within his own power to set aside.”
... definitely push that other side of the coin in taking responsibility, making actual choices, taking more ownership over your path in life, etc... I think the book itself strikes a good balance in societal pressures and external influence, vs forging your own path and taking more of a role in your own destiny.
Thanks for taking the time to share this! I don't think the book makes a great case for swerving away from mainstream norms or expectations, particularly in the way that the main characters do (the characters seem miserable and unfulfilled), but certainly I don't think rigid conformity needs to be our social ethos (or that it IS our social ethos, actually). I also don't think that I get what motivates the view that DeWitt is anything close to the greatest novelist of our time (or even a particularly great novelist) in light of the reading you've presented here (or in light of Scott's reading in his review), but it's at least interesting to have some sense of what others see in the book.
I don't know how to state this without sounding slightly antagonistic, and I don't mean this antagonistically, I promise, just something I've noticed. You have some very hard opinions and conclusions made on a book that you stated above you've only read half of. And you seemed to very much hate things the author has said outside of the book, so I might be jumping to the conclusion of you possibly skim/speed/hate reading at least the last 20-50 pages or so of what you did read.
Alright, that's out of the way.
"I don't think the book makes a great case for swerving away from mainstream norms or expectations." I disagree, Sibylla's parents went with the flow and general expectations placed upon them and were unhappy. A character like Red Devlin, who maybe wasn't influenced by society or family but was societally praised for all he did and probably continued being swayed to do more of that by the outside perception of his career, ended up being very different from the person he was portrayed as at the end, even to his family, and was suicidal. I don't know if DeWitt needs to give us a laundry list of other characters unhappy with how their lives turned out due to outside influence (but you could probably make a case for other characters) because in Sibylla's parents alone I think a lot of people can find them very relatable. Maybe too relatable.
BUT, I don't think she's saying throughout that it's all society's fault. She has lines in the book like, “I wish you wouldn't say the first thing that comes into your head, Ludo. There is an obvious difference between someone who works within the technical limitations of his time which are beyond his control and someone who accepts without thinking limitations which are entirely within his own power to set aside.” I think the cool thing about Sibylla's parents' stories is that, it is half their fault too! They had obstacles yes, but also chances they just didn't take.
Sibylla seems to take a chance studying abroad but even seems to fall a bit into that trap. But, she also has severe, untreated depression which is a whole other can of worms to deal with personally. I think DeWitt does a good job of showing the balance between outside influence and personal responsibility. Especially in Ludo, how I said above, kind of just going "fuck it, I'm gonna find me a dad that I actually like." Like I think it's actually a relatively healthy view, but I suppose her statements outside of her books could lead people to think her views skew more towards the society aspect. And they just might for her but I don't think it's so heavily one-sided in the book.
I do admire people, like the author of the post, who can come out and clearly state, "so and so is the BEST writer of our time." I don't know personally if Helen DeWitt should be considered the greatest novelist of our time. I'm a person who has a hard time picking a favorite anything/successfully ranking things. I think there's just too many good books and writers out there with a lot of different ideas and art to offer. How does one rank that?
But, I will say that I do love Helen DeWitt's writing. And I do love the story, themes, and structure of The Last Samurai. It's one of my personal favorite books. I love how she'll explain and explain something up front to get to that simple conclusion of something like:
"There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom."
I love the way she'll interject what's happening in the moment in spurts when a character is reminiscing on something.
I love how she thinks in terms of endless possibilities and contending with that in real time:
“When you play a piece of music there are so many different ways you could play it. You keep asking yourself what if. You try this and you say what if and you try that. When you buy a CD you get one answer to the question. You never get the what if.”
Or just her clever quips like:
“Here was a man who'd learned to write before he could think, a man who threw out logical fallacies like tacks behind a getaway car, and he always always always got away.”
“No really it's for a man who's thinking of committing suicide he was held hostage and tortured and it haunts him and I thought maybe just maybe The Importance of Being Ernest would do the trick because when my mother feels depressed it cheers her up to walk on the Wilde side.”
I don't know if she's the best, but she is great to a lot of people. And it would be cool if she were able to get some prize money or a patron to freely create another book that's on par with, or even better than, The Last Samurai. I think she has it in her.
I loved the book, and agree with Henry that it's a great or near-great novel. But I understand what you're saying here. I didn't experience the book in the same way, probably because I didn't assume Sibylla was some kind of stand-in for the author (although there are obvious parallels between the two, given what we know of DeWitt's biography).
I wrote a very positive review of it, but I also gave my own reasons why someone might hate the book: https://lakefrontreview.substack.com/p/the-last-samurai-by-helen-dewitt
Yes, what I was able to learn about her own biography, what she writes in her afterword, and what I recall seeing her say in an interview someplace (Paris Review maybe?) gave me the impression that, whether the character is intended as a self-insert or not, the core intended message about the nature of learning/education seemed to be something like “it’s bad/sad that people like Sibylla and Ludo are undervalued by society,” but the book failed (or, really, neglected to even try) to convince me of their value. She may be willing to grant that some aspects of what happens to Ludo/Sibylla are not great, or that their merits are debatable at least, but I think it’s clear that she is not inclined that way.
I found her afterword unconvincing. She seemed to think that all we need to do is reform the educational system, and a plethora of Ludos will blossom. It rubbed me the wrong way because I really didn't think this was a novel about social reform.
Exactly. I agree that the novel can be read in other ways, and it’s far more interesting if you do so, but I get the sense that DeWitt really thinks of it in the way I was describing above. And yes, she wants more Ludos, but that, more than anything, is what bothered me — why should we want more people like Ludo? She seems to take for granted that we should, but I don’t see any clear (let alone persuasive) view of why we should in the book or in her afterword.
I found the second paragraph here a very odd comment - or at least, odd for a comment on this particular blog and this particular book.
The premise of Henry's work is surely that reading great books is a valuable activity in itself - not because it enables you to discover "new truths", but because it gives you access to things of the past that enable you to enlarge your own mind in all sorts of ways. And reading in the original language, where possible, is a major enhancement of that. Reading the Odyssey in Greek is totally unlike reading it in translation, just as reading Dante and Goethe in Italian and German is totally unlike reading them in translation. One can't get anything close to a full sense of these (or other) works in English.
Now, you may fairly say that Ludo in the first half of The Last Samurai does not obtain that depth of understanding of the Odyssey (or of Seven Samurai, come to that): all he does is achieve technical competence in Greek and Japanese and some other things, and he shows off by listing the number of things he's read but compares himself unfavorably with John Stuart Mill who had read so much more at the same age. And you could go away from that thinking that Ludo is just a kind of performing animal, who can do spectacular intellectual feats (He reads the Argonautica in Greek!!) but not really understand them. After all, in the first half of the book he's six years old. How deep an understanding can a six-year-old have of the Odyssey or Seven Samurai?
But that's actually the point of the book! What the book goes on to show is that this kind of mastery is completely inadequate and superficial - it's a talent, not true engagement with the works, and Ludo has to come to understand that: that intellectual ability is not enough. That is what Sibylla is attempting (inadequately) to teach him, but in the second half of the book he gradually comes to that realization himself.
So I do wonder if the fact that (on your own account) you only read the first half of the book meant that you missed that entire dimension. There are quite a lot of hints at it in the early chapters, but it is only in the second half of the book that it comes to the fore.
"The premise of Henry's work is surely that reading great books is a valuable activity in itself - not because it enables you to discover "new truths", but because it gives you access to things of the past that enable you to enlarge your own mind in all sorts of ways. And reading in the original language, where possible, is a major enhancement of that. Reading the Odyssey in Greek is totally unlike reading it in translation, just as reading Dante and Goethe in Italian and German is totally unlike reading them in translation. One can't get anything close to a full sense of these (or other) works in English."
All of what you describe are part of what I meant by new "truths," by which I didn't mean scientific truths or anything of that sort, but rather insight into life, the human condition, history, etc. Learning languages may have some part to play in that, but it is a fairly modest supporting role, I think, rather than the primary one that DeWitt seems to give it.
As someone that has now nearly finished a Ph.D. in history, in the course of which I've learned to read Classical and Mandarin Chinese and a certain amount of Japanese as well, I don't subscribe to the view that reading texts in the original offers much greater depth in and of itself. To the extent that learning a language is accompanied by or encourages an effort to more fully understand the cultural/social/economic contexts in which a work was produced, sure, it can be useful to do so, but most of the value of learning a language in terms of the appreciation of a work is then indirect. Poetry may suffer more in translation, but almost certainly not enough to justify the enormous effort of learning a language to appreciate a corpus slightly better. To describe the experience of reading in the original language as "totally unlike" that of reading in translation strikes me as romantic exaggeration.
And you may well be right that the point of the second half of the book is precisely to suggest that a purely technical approach to learning that goes little deeper is misguided, or even perverse, but, well, DeWitt's afterword certainly does not give the impression that she feels that way.
It sounds like we may just have to disagree about the value of reading literature in the original. I know neither Chinese nor Japanese, so I can't comment on those, but I know quite a lot of other languages (both European and Semitic) which I can comment on, and I simply don't think one gets anything close to the effect of the original in translation. But I don't know how I can prove that except by assertion, which is obviously unconvincing if you don't accept my assertions!!!
(Well, maybe I could prove it by a careful, word by word comparison of some text with its translation, showing how many of the nuances of the original fail to be captured - but that would be a very wearisome and time-consuming exercise.)
As for the afterword, I don't have a copy of it to hand, so I may have misremembered something, but my recollection of it is that it focuses on the question of whether Ludo's education makes him a genius - and argues that it doesn't: that lots of people given the opportunity could do the same thing, and that more people should be given the opportunity. Regardless of whether you think that is either plausible or an appropriate educational program, it surely comes from the premise that there is (or should be) nothing interesting or exceptional about precocious linguistic facility, but also is totally compatible with the idea which is key to the book: that while linguistic facility may be a prerequisite for literary engagement, it is not a substitute for it.
Yes, it seems that we simply disagree about the importance of reading in the original language. I don't doubt that significant nuance is lost in translation — significant nuance is, no doubt, lost to those of us that have to learn languages no longer commonly used or spoken in the present simply through textbooks and the like, or simply through a lack of easy facility with a given time/place/culture in which a given work was produced. Learning a language may help to recover some of that, but simply reading about those things directly in one's native language would get one awfully far, as would reading an annotated edition of a work.
The afterword doesn't quite do what you're saying; it doesn't suggest that Ludo is somehow biologically superior or something (though it leaves that possibility quite open), and floats the notion that essentially anyone with the right resources could achieve what he has, true, but it characterizes that achievement entirely as a mastery of languages and mathematics. She decries an excessive focus on STEM, and criticism of the humanities as impractical, but offers a very STEM-like take on what the humanities consist in: a mastery of technical challenges/puzzles.
Here's the full text of the afterword, taken from the ebook edition: “He said they watched Sesame Street and it was about the right level.”
“At what age?”
“He didn’t say.”
J. S. Mill thought that he had no special aptitude or intelligence, only the advantage of an unusual education; we still don’t know whether he was unduly modest.
“It was not hard to imagine a world where my body stood in this room with something else inside it.” It’s not hard for Ludo to imagine what he might have been with the opportunities Val Peters thought age-appropriate. It’s much harder to imagine what one might have been with better chances, greater challenges. Since there is no age at which the opportunities offered Ludo are the norm, we don’t know whether he was a genius or not—only that he is an oddity in a society with very low expectations.
We clearly don’t live in a society where the question is whether 4 is too early to start Greek—and the rival merits of 7, 8, 9, 10 or 14 are hotly debated. We don’t even live in a society where libraries have, as a matter of course, the sort of collection that might inspire exploration of great literary repertoires outside school. (We don’t generally find even a collection of Oxford Classical Texts, with relevant lexica and grammars, never mind offerings further afield from what is notionally the Western tradition.) We do live in a society where the humanities are increasingly dismissed as impractical, and whatever counts as STEM is A Good Thing because practical. But we don’t live in a society where every schoolchild has Korner’s The Pleasures of Counting, or Steiner’s The Chemistry Maths Book, where every library has a copy of Lang’s Astrophysical Formulae. (I could go endlessly on.) So Ludo looks impressive not only to Val Peters and riders on the Circle Line, but to rather a lot of reviewers. Perhaps he should, perhaps he shouldn’t; perhaps we should really be more interested in the unknown capabilities of the reader.
Individual readers have responded in a way that makes this fragment of a correspondence not unusual:
Dear Elena,
Oh dear, I’m sorry Nico made off with your daughter’s Imagier Franco-Japonais. Still, I think we can agree you got him interested in the subject.”
“It’s not hard to imagine a world where the effect of the book on what has been a coterie of readers is multiplied to the point where general assumptions about what is possible are changed. We have only to imagine a world where Oprah Winfrey picks up The Last Samurai. Or a world where a bookseller presses The Last Samurai upon President Obama. A world where Terry Pratchett is my very dear friend and sees The Last Samurai as a stand-in for Miss Susan. (I could again go endlessly on.)
But it has been 20 years since London editors looked at the manuscript and complained that there was too much Greek and Japanese, there were too many numbers, 17 since Jonathan Burnham of Talk Miramax Books took the book to the Frankfurt Bookfair and caused a sensation. And the assumptions underlying the National Curriculum and Race to the Top remain firmly in place.
A world in which large numbers of small children steal their siblings’ Imagier Franco-Japonais is by no means unflawed, but it looks better than what we have. We should fight for it when and where we can.”
From the afterword: "We have only to imagine a world where [...] a bookseller presses The Last Samurai upon President Obama."
How about a world where a bookseller presses The Last Samurai upon the current president? It would at least make for some good satire.
But I think in general, this shows the weakness of her argument. Making the book a hit among celebs and politicians wouldn't make much of a difference. It's a dense, wacky, challenging literary novel; it's not a combination novel and political tract a la "The Jungle."
I think the core of where we don't quite line up is pointed to in your last sentence: "It's a dense, wacky, challenging literary novel; it's not a combination novel and political tract a la "The Jungle."
I think DeWitt disagrees, and that she very much meant it to be combination novel and political tract. My issue with the book is basically that her political vision, as I understand it, is deeply alienating to me.
Hear, hear! Down with endless forms and committees determining all of the Arts funding. Some, at least, should be selected by individuals.
Thanks for the historic overview of patronage. There appear to be cyclical waves in patronage — starting w individuals of wealth and taste, which then solidify into stale institutions until some new venue or money flow breaks the status quo.
(The more things change…)
Substack is one of the newer forums for exposure and support, yet it’s also crowded and noisy—so much talent goes unnoticed. And so it goes.
All the best. TC