9, 10, 12, 13 May

Monday 9th

For a few months, my reading has been either serious (The Idiot, Wallace Stevens’s longer poems) or demanding (Natalia Ginzburg’s delightful Sagittario — but in Italian, and without a translation) or both. The other night, at the point of going to bed, I found that I had nothing to read, nothing that I could bear to read. Everything in the pile or on the Kindle was at the same time stimulating and exhausting. My mind churning, I would have to put down whatever I was reading because I couldn’t take any more. Thought provocation was killing me.

I’ve had a rough time getting to sleep lately. Sometimes, Lunesta doesn’t seem to work; either I’ve taken it soon, and the effect has worn off before I’ve climbed into bed, or I’ve ingested something incompatible, such as a chocolate or a cold remedy. Sometimes, I’ve forgotten to take the pill actually; I’ve set it out and then assumed that I’ve swallowed it, only to find it on the nightstand hours later. On Saturday night, I had taken the pill and wanted to go to bed, but I had nothing to read, and the idea of having nothing to read was terrifying. So I sat in my reading chair and let my mind wander. This is something that I have been doing too often, but only after an hour of bedridden sleeplessness. I thought, on Saturday night, that I would do my sitting-in-the-dark before I got into bed. It turned out to be a not-bad idea. I wondered, briefly, if more structured meditations might be helpful.

Meditation is the only thing that makes sense of my first idea of better bedtime reading material: I wondered if reading the Gospels would be good. I’ve been meaning to read the Gospels for some time, but only if I could find a literate translation. The Authorized Version is more about King James’s secretaries and the glories of the English language than it is about Jesus, and modern translations are pap. I wanted something that would bear comparison with the Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament). I had asked one or two friends, but I’d drawn blanks. Last night, I had the brilliant (!) idea of scrolling through Amazon, where, indeed, I found not one but two candidates, and bought them both: renditions, in chapters but without verses, by J B Phillips and Richmond Lattimore. I was able to “look inside” both books, and was electrified to read, in the Phillips, which begins with Matthew, the exhortation of John the Baptist: “You must change your hearts and minds!” I was very sorry not to have a German New Testament, to see how close Luther’s translation was to Rilke’s “Du musst dein Leben ändern.”

But I wanted to read the Gospels in book form, not on the Kindle, and now that I had them (or should have them in a day or two), I realized that they would not make very good bedtime reading, not, in any case, night after night. A new idea appeared, rather blasphemously in juxtaposition: funny. I needed light reading. How about another Penelope Lively, I wondered, leaning over the chair in front of the small wire bookcase in the bedroom in which all of Lively’s novels are lined up. Hmm — Lively is sparkling, but not funny; and her stories certainly have their harrowing moments. My eye wandered a bit, and settled on a thick book, lying on its side: an omnibus volume, the compleat collection. Really, I thought, as if on a dare. I had to pull out four books that were lying atop it, and when I extracted it, I had to keep the row of upright Livelys from tumbling into its space before I could replace the others. I sat down in my chair and opened the book, leafing page by page to the start of — could this work? — E F Benson’s Queen Lucia.

I have not read the Lucia books — or, as they’re better known now that they have been dramatized a couple of times, the Mapp and Lucia books — since the tome in my lap was published, in 1977. I went on to read a lot of other Benson, and then a biography of the writer (and his seemingly all-gay family); then came Geraldine McEwan and Prunella Scales (and Nigel Hawthorne) to sing their way through Donald McWhinnie’s gorgeously costumed production. The idea of re-reading the Lucia books seemed merely laborious. My favorite line appeared very early, on the third page of the omnibus text. Here it is, at the end of a description of the “famous smoking parlor” in Lucia’s Riseholme cottage:

with rushes on the floor, and a dresser ranged with pewter tankards, and leaded lattice windows of glass so antique that it was practically impossible to see out of them. It had a huge open fireplace framed in oak beams with a seat on each side of the iron-backed hearth within the chimney, and a genuine spit hung over the middle of the fire. Here, though in the rest of the house she had for the sake of convenience allowed the installation of electric light, there was no such concession made, and sconces on the walls held dim iron lamps, so that only those of the most acute vision were able to read. Even then reading was difficult, for the bookstand on the table contained nothing but a few crabbed black-letter volumes dating from not later than the early seventeenth century, and you had to be in a frantically Elizabethan frame of mind to be at ease there.

My regard for the last clause is boundless; it encompasses everything from Shakespeare to Victoria (the queen of italics), and not excluding Pope. Trying to conjure a frantically Elizabethan frame of mind is easier, I’ve discovered, if you try to imagine someone else thus afflicted. The whole passage concludes:

But Mrs Lucas often spent some of her rare leisure moments in the smoking parlor, playing on the virginal that stood in the window, or kippering herself in the fumes of the wood fire as with streaming eyes she deciphered an Elzevir Horace rather too late for inclusion under the rule, but an undoubted bargain.

The first time I read this, I had no idea what an Elzevir Horace might be (okay, a very dim one), and I am still ignorant of the “rule,” but the funniness was plain and powerful, and it still knocks me over. Benson’s deployment of fussy phrasing is brilliant; for the most part, his sentences are straightforward and unadorned. It is clear that he does not identify with his heroine; he poses rather as a practical, ordinary man who thinks that windows are for seeing out of. You wouldn’t find him kippering himself with streaming eyes just to read about Postumus and his wine cellar. At the same time, he is alert to Lucia’s imposture, and able to register the hard-headed shrewdness of her apparent flights of fancy with grains of businesslike language, such as “no concession made,” or, in the following line, an almost burlesque interruption:

Though essentially autocratic [pardon the dangler], her subjects were allowed and even encouraged to develop their own minds on their own lines, provided always that those lines met at the junction where she was stationmaster.

There is even a nice touch of Foreign Office calculation:

With the memory of the Welsh attorney in her mind, it seemed clearly wiser to annex rather than to repudiate the Guru.

I hope that these excerpts do more than make you smile (or, better, laugh); I hope that you can see how completely impossible it would be to try to film them. This is humor that can be seen only with the special blindness of the reader. We could drag a camera into a room that met the smoking parlor’s description, but it would just be an old dim closet full of Jacobean tat, a period room in which no person born after 1900 could be expected to spend more than a few cursory minutes, dull minutes completely lacking in occasions for giggling. There is no way to show Lucia acting as a stationmaster, or annexing rather than repudiating. These images are lively on the page but dead to the point of nonentity beyond it. So it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve watched the serializations. Sure, they’re very funny, too; but it’s a different kind of funny, and, relative to Benson’s deft brushwork, incomparably coarse.

As for bedtime reading, the Lucia books might be ideal, precisely because they have been adapted for television. I can drift off to sleep long after my short-term memory has stopped working, but I won’t have to re-read anything when I pick up the book the next night. I know the story. Most of it, anyway; a lot gets left out. Lady Ambermere, for example, the local grandee who has witnessed Lucia’s transformation of a peasant village into an upper middle-class suburb without the slightest interest; to Lady Ambermere, there is not much to distinguish Lucia from her agrarian predecessors, save that none of the latter would dream of imitating Lucia’s “push.” Riseholme as a whole gets cut, because nobody seems to know where it is; while Tilling, as everybody is aware, is a town with Cinque Ports luster on the Sussex Coast; you can go there if you can find “Rye” on the map. (Ray Soleil and Fossil Darling paid a visit, and it is just possible that Ray’s frantically Lucian frame of mind threatened for a while to be permanent.) But even if I can’t remember arriving at the point where I left off, and have to go back a page or two, it’s no trouble, because the only serious thing about the Lucia books is the writing. And it is richly pleasurable, completely undemanding writing.

After a few pages of the omnibus edition, I realized that I must switch to the Kindle. My fear that only the one-volume abridgment of the stories would be available in Kindle format were allayed immediately. Although I figured that the cost of the omnibus had been amply amortized over nearly forty years, I was no less delighted than Lucia would have been to find that the Kindle edition could be had for a mere ninety-nine cents. In no time, I was tucked in with the lights out, already so sleepy that trying not to laugh out loud was no longer much of a problem. I was sure that I should soon be asleep, and soon indeed I was, with nary a twitch.

***

Kathleen and I watched The Big Short on Friday night — Kathleen had not seen it before — and, as the film came to an end, I found myself weighing how much wind the popular resentment of the bank bailout might have put in Donald Trump’s sails. Twenty-four hours later, I had moved completely beyond conventionally political estimations of Trump’s campaign. I had read Mark Danner’s piece in the current New York Review of Books, “The Magic of Donald Trump.” For the moment, I am going to quote only one early passage.

Observe the celebrity known as Donald Trump saunter onto the stage at Boca Raton, twenty minutes after his helicopter swoops in. The slow and ponderous walk, the extended chin, the pursed mouth, the slowly swiveling head, the exaggerated look of knowing authority: with the exception of the red “Make America Great Again” ball cap perched atop his interesting hair the entire passage is quoted from the patented boardroom entrance of The Apprentice, something that does not escape the delirious fans, even if it does most journalists. If when you see that outthrust chin you shiver with intimations of Mussolini, well, you were never a fan.

(“But what about me?” wails Silvio Berlusconi when this is translated for him.)

Danner’s piece made me sit up and recognize the extent of my self-censorship. I try very hard not to talk about “television.” That is, I put a lid on shrieking with alarm about its perniciousness. What would be the point? I should only alienate or bore readers. Every now and then, I say, as simply as I can, Turn It Off. Danner’s piece made me realize how this restraint had prevented my saying what I think, or even knowing what I think, about the Trump campaign, which is that it is proof positive of a mass addiction to the stress and depravity of popular network shows, particularly the ones that go by the modifier “reality.”

As I repeat every year, Kathleen and I watch television only once in any twelve months. We watch the Academy Awards show. Some years the show is more entertaining than others, but we always have a good time, and we always stick it out to the end. The cheesiness of the production, by which I mean not so much the antics on the stage as the camera work and the what-do-you-call-it, the animated doodles that are superimposed on the live images at the end of each segment, together with the voice-overs reminding you that you are watching the Academy Awards show and promising what’s up next, is no more wearying than the more self-indulgent expressions of thanks delivered by shocked, exultant winners. The show itself is relatively harmless.

What I mean by “television” is the stuff in between those doodles and voice-overs. This includes commercials, of course, but it also includes bigger, more complicated doodles and much louder voice-overs. These remind you what network you’re watching, and what shows are coming up. The tone of these reminders is fraught with a furious mental violence that suggests what it must be like to suffer schizophrenic attacks. It is a whirlwind, and it makes me extremely uncomfortable. I get up and leave the room, ostensibly on the usual errands to the bathroom and the kitchen, but mostly to escape the racket. It is not lost on me that this racket is the medium’s ligament. People who watch a lot of television, who sit while one show bleeds into another, are exposed to a lot of this pandemonium, which of course ceases with repetition to be at all disturbing. My hunch is that it also ceases to be negligible: viewers develop a dependency, and addiction.

I have never seen a reality show, but Kathleen has been told by many colleagues and fellow workers about the fun of watching Donald Trump scream at the other people on the show. Some people like it because they’re yelled at themselves, and, like the little girl in Mommie Dearest scolding her dolls, they find relief in passing it on, watching other chumps suffer belittlement. Some people like it because they dream of yelling at their bosses some day — the people who yell at them. The net is that people find a great deal of satisfaction in Trump’s behavior. There is no word for this other than “depraved.” I could not watch The Apprentice for a full minute, but I know that if I were to manage to watch it for several episodes, I’d begin to find it entertaining. So I am not going to watch it “just once,” to “see what it’s all about.” I have conducted that experiment. I was once very dependent on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a night-time soap opera in which almost everything that happened was either ridiculously implausible or profoundly unimportant. I hung on Louise Lasser’s every word, but I hung more on her dropped jaw.

There was a piece in the Times this morning in which data pundits like Nate Silver acknowledged that they’d wrong, again and again, about Trump. Perhaps there was something defective about their polling, such as the absence of young people, untethered by landlines. As I read the piece, I thought, You admit you were wrong but you are still wrong. They’re still wrong because they continue to approach Trump politically. And when they ask their questions of the general public, the general public is prompted to put on its voter gravitas, something that very well might not accompany them into the voting booth on Election Day. In the voting booth, they may be seized by an echo of the delirium that Danner mentions. Their voter’s selves may fall away like horror-film pods, revealing reality-show habitués. Hillary Clinton could well lose by a landslide, and never have seen it coming. But I see it coming.

***

Tuesday 10th

Now that I see Donald Trump’s bid for the Presidency as a “reality show” from the front of my mind, not the back, the spectacle makes sense. As a political figure, Trump is an authoritarian, bullying buffoon. Transcripts of his remarks betray a mind more concerned with sending a miscellany of surreptitious messages than with making consistent sense. The commentariat was right, then, when it began, last summer, to proclaim that he would not go far — as a political figure. In fact, he never went anywhere as a political figure. It wasn’t that he played the political game badly, but rather that he never played it at all, and this, this faithfulness to his bearing as a reality show’s Master of Ceremonies, has assured his supporters that This Time, It’s Different.

The difference ought to have been clear from the moment that the weekend press shows allowed Trump to phone in. I remember those long-ago early days, when Meet the Press was pretty much the only show of its kind, and Lawrence E Spivak was the host. It was the most boring TV show imaginable! That was its certificate of authenticity: it established that television could be serious and adult. But it couldn’t last, because television is a kind of entertainment.

Entertainment occurs when a handful of people do something while a larger and entirely passive audience watches. In a theatre, on or off Broadway, this audience is very much a living thing, breathing, coughing, signaling to the acute ears of actors that certain nuances are favored over others, a favor that may be completely negated by tomorrow night’s audience. Paying constant attention to the deep-forest sounds that rustle from the audience, actors retune their performances accordingly; this is what keeps a play fresh throughout its run. In the early days of television, shows were performed in front of live audiences, but it did not take long to see that the small “live” audience got in the way of the much larger one watching at home, and the laugh track was substituted. This was part of televised entertainment’s slow drift away from the criteria of performance to the absolute numbers of ratings. The complicated response of a live audience was reduced to a single unproblematic factor: on or off. Was the TV set tuned to this broadcast network or to that one? Otherwise, the television audience was passive to an extent never experienced, and I wonder if it hasn’t changed the nature of entertainment, at least within the context of television.

Mr Spivak would never have allowed phone-ins. He wouldn’t have understood why anyone would wish to decline the opportunity to sit in front of the camera and so become “known,” recognizable, to viewers. Donald Trump, however, is already known to viewers. He has no need for further publicity; on the contrary, he publicizes not himself but his fellow entertainers.

Since I have never seen a reality TV show, and am not about to watch one, I can’t pontificate at length. But the old idea, that entertainment is some kind of “pretend,” that men whose real names are Joe and Mary, and who really live in studio apartments with no views, pretend to be people called Marmaduke and Isadora, living in stately homes with vistas replete with hedges and fountains, has given way to something entirely different. Now entertainment is a view of the actual, edited and filtered perhaps, and by no means comprehensive, but a view that has nothing to do with assumed identities. Someone called Donald Trump, a man who lives in an ostentatious apartment on Fifth Avenue, appears on television as himself. In the old, theatrical, model, the audience provided the element of reality. Everyone sitting in the audience was aware of being surrounded by other similarly-situated “real people.” (This assumption could be fiddled with for dramatic surprise, but only very occasionally.) Sitting in the theatre, the audience was taking a break from reality, devoting its attention to a show that was no more real than a dream. Now, however, it is Donald Trump who constitutes the reality. He is really there, more substantially than we who are sitting at home. We can see him, but not the other people in the audience. We cannot be sure that there are other people in the audience. Looking across the street, we may see a television screen that is showing the same show that we are watching, but we cannot be sure that there is anybody in that room across the street. But there is no doubting Donald Trump. His voice will do perfectly well as a substitute for his presence. The voice of Donald Trump is an apotheosis, the voice of a god. He is not participating in a political process but observing it (and guiding it) from on high.

Like the pandemonium that I wrote about yesterday, this reconstitution of reality, this relocation of reality to the other side of the TV screen, is strongly addictive. The pandemonium indicates helplessness, as you, the viewer, endure it for however long it lasts. (And, the longer it lasts, the less desire you have to escape it.) The displacement of reality signifies that you are not as real as what you see on the screen. You already knew that, for you are only you, a nobody, while Donald Trump is a god, or at least a billionaire, or at least someone through whose fingers a great deal of money has passed in various directions. Watching Trump, you are in the presence of reality. How can withdrawal from that reality not be painful?

In politics, the audience is not passive. Members of the audience stand up when the speech — the performance — is over, and ask questions that the speaker is expected to answer. Reality is in the audience. The speaker sketches promises and possibilities; the members of the audiences bring him back down to earth with when and how much. They want to hear the details that were omitted in the speech, and only when they do does the speech become real. Until then, it is hot air.

Donald Trump could not possibly thrive in politics. He has only one answer: trust me. Trust him, because he knows how to get things done. Some day, perhaps some day soon, an exact accounting will be prepared, listing the projects that Trump, having assured us that he knew how to get them done, got done — and the projects that did not. In the meantime, we can only trust him, or not. Politically, we are probably disinclined to trust him. But what if he is not really asking us to trust him? What if he is saying is: watch me. What if he is saying, with his stupendous aplomb, I am who am. What if?

***

On several occasions on this Web site, I have mentioned a movie called Kingsman: The Secret Service. Among the few things that one can say for sure about this movie is that, despite a starring role (or possibly because of it, as those who have seen it will understand) for Colin Firth, it did not “do well.” I venture to suggest that Kingsman was a confusing film. It was not at all difficult to figure out what was going on at any particular moment; the confusion was in the packaging. What kind of film was the audience led to expect, and did the film satisfy that expectation? Whatever the answer to the first question, the answer to the second was “no.” As a result, the film’s varied and inventive scenes of extraordinary violence had a gratuitous air, and were easily dismissed as “gross.” Although I was massively haunted by Kingsman, I never even began to undertake to persuade Kathleen that it was worth watching. For her, it would never be. That is why I am going to write about the nightmare at the heart of Kingsman as best I can, so that nobody will have to watch the movie to understand why I keep coming back to it. To the extent that I succeed, I shall have contributed to the demonstration that it is not a very good movie. And yet I must acknowledge that the scenes of violence that I am not going to paraphrase cannot be paraphrased: they are as unspeakable as they are unforgettable. At such moments, Kingsman becomes an astonishingly powerful film. Please bear that in mind, while I talk about not so much scenes as a concept. Since this concept is my real subject, I am going to dispense with the names of characters and the actors who play them.

Some science fiction is required. Imagine a sociopathic billionaire — easy peasy. This billionaire believes that the human population of Planet Earth must be, at the very least, culled; and he has invented a kewl way to get the population to cull itself, without the use of outside force. Well, there is an outside force. But it is not an army or a bomb. It is a signal. When emitted by a smartphone, this signal blocks all human emotions except hostility and fear. Thus stripped down, people can be counted on to try to kill each other. All the billionaire has to do is press a few buttons.

He presses a few buttons from a mountain fastness, into which he has herded cooperative fellow billionaires and other members of the deserving élite. I am not going to talk about them, except to propose a rebus. (Take the mountain-fastness party scene, and the scene from Being John Malkovich in which everyone looks the same, and the head, complete with its interesting hair, of Donald Trump: the result would make many viewers wickedly happy.) All you need to know is that the Top People are preserved from the cull. (Fat lot of good &c.)

As I said, the fatal signal is delivered via smartphone. This is the key to the nightmare, even if it is not particularly essential to the concept. (The billionaire could just as easily have erected transmission towers, or even co-opted existing ones. The signal effects everyone, not just smartphone owners.) In order to place the necessary operating system in the maximum number of smartphones, the billionaire offers free Internet and phone access to anyone who signs up. So, of course, everyone does.

The corollary to that wise old maxim, You get what you pay for, is that, If you don’t pay for what you sign up for, you don’t know what it is.

Owing to glitches, the signal is never activated for very long. There are a few rather cartoonish scenes of random, insincere-looking violence, ostensibly occurring in major cities around the world. (They bear no resemblance to the blitzing orgy of malevolence that ensues when the signal is given its test run, on a sort of pilot audience as it were, from which only one man emerges alive.) The culling scenes are redolent of laddies half-heartedly throwing each other from rooftops. In a much more engaging parallel thread, a mother who has been warned ahead of time to lock her baby in the loo and slip the key under the door is overtaken by a pathological desire to break down the door and murder her child. (She gets far enough in this endeavor to remind us of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.) What’s going on in the mountain fastness while the signal is activated, or about to be activated, or hobbled by glitches, is far more engrossing than the crowd scenes.

But you do see enough. You see people having fun on the beach, and then turning feral. And you know that this however-awful thing is happening because everybody signed up for the free access.

And, Mr Keefe, this has exactly what to do with Donald Trump and the presidential campaign? Good Lord, do I have to spell it out?

Free access = entertaining politics. Donald Trump is not to be confused, however analogous his position in this argument, with Kingsman‘s sociopathic billionaire. The film’s evil genius depends, after all, on a science fiction trick currently unavailable to the Donald, who would hardly wish to cull his audiences anyway. But it would appear that Trump’s supporters have confused serious political consequences with rejuvenating entertainment. Unlike the movie’s suckers, the Trumpistas ought to have an inkling of the disasters to which their fearless leader’s proposals would almost certainly lead, and certainly, no “almost” about it, in concert.

You won’t get anywhere by dismissing Trumpistas as “stupid.” They are addicted.

***

Thursday 12th

With most books, I know where I stand. I am here, the author is there. We differ to thus and such a degree. Under the impression that I understand what I’m reading, I move along as briskly as possible, noting interesting passages (but never in the book itself; I do not write in books, not even to print my name), and getting through the dull parts as dutifully as possible. Without my paying very much attention, I judge the book page by page. I do not feel that this judgment encompasses myself as well.

Roger Scruton’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture has been unusual in that regard. I don’t know where I stand with relation to the book at all. I agree, strongly, with this; I disagree just as strongly with the following sentence. The confusion owes to the meaning and use of the word “conservative.” I think that it’s fair to say that this word, at least in English, is undergoing a great deal of stress, as people with very different outlooks either lay claim to it or label others with it. I am not the only man to feel that the self-styled conservatives in American politics are anything but; at the same time, I know that my own conservative inclinations do not stretch so far as to cover a good deal of the traditional ground. I am somewhat conservative — and Roger Scruton is somewhat reactionary. Reading the Guide is often an awful muddle.

The difference between a conservative and a reactionary is implied by Tancredi’s famous remark, in The Leopard: everything must change in order for everything to stay the same. That is conservatism. The reactionary simply wants to go back to the way things were — no change! Tancredi’s paradox describes fairly well the course of human history, but for all the massacres and mayhem. But only historians and their students have access to the perspective from which to observe the way in which things really do remain the same by constantly changing.

Roger Scruton is a philosopher, not a historian. He knows about a lot of things that have happened, but he does not see them as a historian does. The historian’s principal struggle is to understand remote events as they might have been understood at the time, by people who did not know what was going to happen next. This is the one universal truth about the history of humanity: the future is never known. Everything else about human history is a matter of local context, about which we can only guess the grosser outlines. People always need to eat, but their ideas about what foods are good to eat, and how they ought to be eaten, and when, and with whom, shift slowly but, over time, distinctively. That’s just one example.

Roger Scruton has an idea about art. He sees art as rooted in religion. I myself do not; I root art in play — play that is eventually ordered and controlled by social authorities. But we won’t go into all that. Scruton’s idea is undeniably familiar. If I disagree, I do so quietly; I can follow his use of this idea to see where it takes him.

Where it takes him is to this:

In no genuinely religious epoch is the high culture separate from the religious rite. Religious art, religious music, and religious literature form the central strand of all societies where a common religious culture hold sway. Moreover, when art and religion begin to diverge — as they have done in Europe since the Renaissance — it is usually because religion is in turmoil or declining. When art and religion are healthy, they are also inseparable. (18)

This familiar indeed — so familiar, in fact, that I discovered, when I read it again yesterday (for I am grappling with Roger Scruton), that I had outgrown vague resistance and developed some sharp objections. Here’s the sharpest: when was religion ever healthy in the European West? Beginning wherever you like — with the conversion of Constantine, say. The conversion of Constantine, you might have thought, ushered in a reign of peace. But that is not what happened. Emerging from persecution like fugitives from a sewer, Christians erupted into a mass of contention. Constantine was so vexed by the Christians’ inability and apparent unwillingness to agree on the basic principles of Christianity that he summoned a conclave of bishops to Nicaea, where, somewhat under imperial duress, a creed was hammered out. It took nearly a century for this creed — a minimal statement about the nature of God — to be generally accepted in the European West. Centuries later, a squabble over the placement of a particle, -que, would lead to a schism between the Roman Catholics of the West and the Orthodox Christians (including Russians and most Balkans, such as Serbians, but not Croatians or Slovenians; I hope that you’re getting the picture) that persists to this day.

Say, then, that the Nicene Creed was generally acknowledged at the beginning of the Fifth Century. Were peace and harmony ushered in then? No. As I see it, peace and harmony have never been ushered in. Christianity, both as to its doctrines and its administration, has always been contentious. Even during the period that Scruton hints at so clearly that he doesn’t see the need to name it.

He is thinking, let us imagine, of the Twelfth Century — the age of the first great cathedrals. It is true that very little remains from this time that does not have some ecclesiastical bearing. Nothing at all survives that could be called “nonreligious art.” Bishops and their agents controlled the production of art to the extent that kings and other secular potentates commissioned nothing lasting that did not belong to a religious context. This was the great Age of Faith, when song was chant and poetry was liturgical.

This was also the time of Abelard, the wildly brilliant but dangerously undisciplined philosopher who wrote a book called Sic et Non, an exercise book designed to teach students how to argue hot questions. For there were hot questions, and the hottest question of all concerned the role to be played by reason in religious matters. We may think that we see an Age of Faith, because the cathedrals are so grand. But the impression derives from extraordinarily widespread illiteracy: aside from the clergy, no one had the training or the platform required for the dissemination of ideas. And the clergy was at war with itself over the hot questions. So dubious is the very idea of an Age of Faith that at its climax, in 1277, there burned, at Oxford and Paris, bonfires of proscribed writings. The most famous author to go up in flames was Thomas Aquinas, who had died a few years before. His work survived destruction and was rehabilitated; he remains the semi-official theologian of the Roman Catholic Church. But the hot question itself was consumed; never again would faith be supported by reason, much less challenged by it, within the Church itself.

Now, you might argue that for a religion to be “healthy,” there must be robust debates about doctrines and practices. But the Church rarely stopped at debates. From the time of Augustine, bishops exploited their extensive temporal powers to enforce their rulings, with violence if necessary. You will recall that some people were burned at the stake. The Reformation of Christianity, largely but not exclusively an event of the Sixteenth Century, did nothing for the cause of peace and harmony. Perhaps Scruton regards the Reformation as a sign of religious decline, since it did take place during the later phases of the Renaissance (and was clearly fueled by Renaissance thought). But I am unable to find a sustained period of “healthy” religion — which, I insist, must be free of secular violence — in all the history of Europe until the rulers of the West imposed religious toleration upon their subjects, over the strenuous objections of churches everywhere. Even then, religious intolerance persisted in many of New England’s colonial settlements, where, as the Chinese might say, the king was far across the sea. I cannot call this “healthy.”

***

Roger Scruton, as I say, is not a historian, or even the follower of historians. This is clear at the beginning of his chapter on “Enlightenment.” He points out in the first paragraph that Kant defined the term in 1784; as in most cases, the movement was given its name as and when it came to an end. This means that most “thinkers of the Enlightenment” were unaware of being any such thing. To be sure, they were aware of advancing new and contrarian positions, often at personal risk. They were conscious of membership in something called “the Republic of Letters.” They knew that an old order was in a critical state of decay, and they called this order “feudal.” The United States, also defined at the end of the “Enlightenment,” was the European West’s first experiment in post-feudal possibilities. But you will have to look very hard and long through the writings of “Enlightenment thinkers” to find anyone who seriously advocated universal, or even majority, suffrage. Upon examination, most of these figures turn out to be no less élitist than the aristocrats whose secular (as distinct from social) power was slipping away.

When Scruton looks back upon the Enlightenment, he is mindful of the consequences of the movement’s philosophy. He knows what happened after 1789, which he regards, as so many people smart enough to know better do, as a culmination of the Enlightenment. Here he would agree with Marx: the bourgeoisie overcame the aristocrats so that a new order could prevail. Again, a very retrospective take on history. The bourgeoisie did not in fact overcome the aristocrats. It had no idea of doing any such thing. Instead, it watched, appalled, as the aristocratic props of the civil order collapsed faster and more violently than anyone had imagined. They collapsed in yet another peasant uprising, only this uprising was the one that could not be put down by royal authority. Royal authority collapsed with the aristocratic power. The habit of spending money that wasn’t there was brought to its inevitable end: just as we can thank the Bourbons for supporting the American cause, so French republicans must thank Americans for providing the occasion on which the Bourbon régime bankrupted itself. It will not, I hope, be argued that the Bourbon régime bankrupted itself to make it possible for the Enlightenment to prevail.

The Enlightenment, as it was lived, was a response to a problem that began no later than at the end of the Fourteenth Century, when the Last Crusade’s cavalry was mowed down by Turkish artillery, at the Battle of Nicopolis, in 1396. From this moment, the aristocracy made no functional — military — sense. More than a few aristocrats would dismount from their horses and direct their troops from the rear, as generals, but most of the actual fighting would be done by career soldiers, ordinary men who knew how to fight on their feet. For four hundred years, European monarchs (Britain aside) struggled with the increasing uselessness of the aristocratic order in which their thrones were inextricably bedded. Four hundred years! The Enlightenment was an aspect of the final stages of this struggle. Its success derived from its statement of the obvious.

What is too often overlooked is the very great feudatory role played by officials of the Roman Catholic Church. Bishops and abbots enjoyed extensive aristocratic powers. What’s more, unlike the secular aristocracy, churchmen acted in concert. Literally owning the schools, the French episcopacy was able to shut down higher education for nearly a century. It is no wonder that public intellectuals like Voltaire would attack the Church, not because it espoused what Voltaire chose to call “superstition,” but because its feudal powers, its secular force, gave these superstitions muscle. In short, the thinkers of the Enlightenment objected to religion because religious authorities interfered in affairs that ought to have been none of their business.

“History” that explains events in terms of their outcomes is not history. It is retrospection, looking back in hindsight, and a childish waste of time.

***

Friday 13th

It is something like a fever — a fever that I’ve read about, but never actually suffered. (Literature can be thicker than life chez moi.) When it rages, I read thirstily from three vaguely-related books: Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx, Edward Crankshaw’s The Shadow of the Winter Palace, and T G Otte’s July Crisis. These are all more or less about the fall of the old régimes that survived the ancien régime after 1789. They tell the end of the story that began in Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society.

When the fever subsides, I have nothing to read. Without the fever, I cannot bear Marx’s obsessions or the soul of Russia or anything to do with Serbia. It’s all just narcissism really. I shuffle through the book pile. The Idiot. I’m halfway through that. Prince Myshkin arouses my sympathies, but everyone else seems ill-mannered. Which reminds me. I was reading about someplace the other day, and it was pointed out that, wherever it was, formality and deference did not characterize social life. The comment suggested that, where you find formality, you will find deference, that there is something hierarchical about good manners. (Good manners and formality are hardly synonymous, but in this case that is what I took “formality” to mean.) I disagree! Good manners have one objective only: to make other people comfortable. To be easygoing, but not sloppy. To take an interest, but without prying. To listen sincerely. That has always been the hardest thing for me. I tried to be a good listener last night. I was talking with someone at a party. He could have been Alan Alda’s brother, and, in addition to this resemblance, he told me that he was a commercial real estate broker specializing in Queens properties. That’s another story. We were standing near the window, and he said what a fine day it had been. Yesterday, he went on, he had to go to a funeral in Newark, and it was nice there, too.

I let a few beats go by. I had to flush an instant response out of my mind: I don’t know anybody, so I never go to funerals. It is true that I have been to very few funerals in my life. Again, another story. When my mind was clear, I asked, “Was it a friend?”

“It was my aunt,” he replied brightly, “and she was 108 years old.” He spoke the number in a jocular manner, “one oh eight,” something like that, so that I was briefly confused. It was a great relief to everyone, he said. The aunt had been in a nursing home for three years, but she had all her marbles — a phrase that is never used except in connection with the lucidity of the very old. His own mother, my interlocutor continued, had suffered some kind of dementia. She would tell a story and then tell it again five minutes later. He mentioned a story about turnips. His mother would tell her story about turnips. Then (he said) the family would sit down to dinner and someone would say, “There are no turnips.” This would prompt his mother to tell her turnip story again. I was wondering if “turnips” actually happened or if “turnips” were something that he had snatched out of the air in order to make his point. Still slightly confused, I found it very easy to remark that I already repeat myself (implying that I was not very old nor yet demented). My companion by the window nodded. “It does get hard to remember things,” he said, with a rueful laugh. “Oh, that’s just a part of it,” I said. “I like my stories. I’m always in the mood to tell my stories.” He laughed more ruefully. I really wanted to ask him what he thought of the film, A Most Violent Year, which, in my mind, I could imagine him in. But the conversation turned to NPR podcasts. He said that he was a big fan. TED talks. Terry Gross. “Oh yes,” I said, non-committally. I mentioned that I used to listen to NPR all the time, but then “the towers fell,” meaning the World Trade Center towers, atop one of which rose a gigantic broadcasting antenna, “and we lost reception for a while.” I got out of the habit of listening to the radio. Actually, I got out of the habit of listening to the radio because I began writing on my Web sites. You cannot write and listen to talk radio at the same time.

At this point, a very old friend whom I hadn’t seen in some time walked up, and I spent the rest of the time at the cocktail party talking to her. Later, after dinner with Kathleen, I found myself in the subsidence phase of my fever. I thought about what to read. There emerged the desire to read a story about someone in New York, not now but a while ago. I thought of Dawn Powell, whom I haven’t read in a while. Then the desire took a sudden lurch, and I set out to find the book with Maeve Brennan’s “Herbert’s Retreat” stories. (I don’t want to spend the rest of the morning perusing old entries, but I did find this in the archive.) I read “The Anachronism” aloud to Kathleen.

“The Anachronism” is a strange construction, probably because the central figure, aside from being an awful person, is slightly difficult to bring into focus. Liza Frye is a thirty-nine year-old married woman, two years older than her husband. The Fryes have been married for seven years. Before that, Liza was “sick with lack of money.” The things that money can buy did not really interest her; it was “position” that she longed for. Having married Tom Frye, she insisted that they move to Herbert’s Retreat, because she had been there once, and all the established women had looked down on her (she felt). By the time the story gets going, Liza is consumed by status anxiety. Everything that her neighbors say or do is a potential slight. This dreadful immaturity is at odds with her age, and I kept slipping into seeing Liza as a young, inexperienced woman. In fact, she is not young, and she is beyond the reach of experience. Oh, and she has her mother living with her.

Liza and Mrs Conroy detested each other, but it suited them to live together — Liza because she enjoyed showing her power, and Mrs Conroy because she was waiting for her day of vengeance.

Then there’s Tom. We’re told early that Tom’s “real life was spent away from home anyway.” But this doesn’t mean what you think. He doesn’t have a great job; he doesn’t have a mistress; he doesn’t even have an eccentric hobby. Tom’s “real life” consists of spending the day at a snooty Fifth Avenue club to which he has belonged since he was twenty-one. His father belonged to the club before him. His grandfather, however, the man who made all the money, did not belong. Every morning, Tom sits in the chair by a window that was formerly occupied by the club member who personally saw to it that Tom’s grandfather was not admitted. Tom reads the papers. Every day, Tom has a two hour lunch by himself. Then he goes back to the chair and looks out the window. At five, he calls for his car and drives home to Liza. Brennan’s point seems to be that there are people whose lives are so dull that they are not worth writing about. Nor does Brennan bother to fold Tom into the story. He disappears after the description of his day at the club, only to be summoned to fetch a housemaid, whom Liza has imported from England, when her liner comes in.

This housemaid, Betty Trim, is supposed to be “the anachronism” — the very incarnation of old world deference. She has been spotted, working in a London hotel, by one of Liza’s neighbors, who then writes her up for the Herbert’s Retreat newsletter. Liza decides that she must have this maid in her otherwise all-modern house. The negotiations between Liza and Betty, concerning salary, length-of-contract, transatlantic passage, bonuses and so on, amount to a pile of “top this!” gestures. They reminded me of something else by Maeve Brennan, a spoof so stupendously funny that I can’t believe I didn’t quote it here last year. (I did summarize it.)

William Maxwell, Brennan’s editor, received a letter from a reader who wanted to know if any more Herbert’s Retreat stories would be appearing in The New Yorker. Brennan got hold of the letter, and Maxwell’s brief reply (“we hope to have something by Maeve Brennan in a forthcoming issue”); she added the following:

I am terribly sorry to have to be the first to tell you that our poor Miss Brennan died. We have her head here in the office, at the top of the stairs, where she was always to be found, smiling right and left and drinking water out of her own little paper cup. She shot herself in the back with the aid of a small handmirror at the foot of the main altar in St Patrick’s Cathedral one Shrove Tuesday. Frank O’Connor was where he usually is in the afternoons, sitting in a confession box pretending to be a priest and giving a penance to some old woman and he heard the shot and he ran out and saw our poor late author stretched out flat and he picked her up and slipped her in the poor box. She was very small. He said she went in easy. Imagine the feelings of the young curate who unlocked the box that same evening and found the deceased curled up in what appeared to be and later turned out truly to be her final slumber. It took six strong parish priests to get her out of the box and then they called us and we all went and got her and carried her back here on the door of her office.

There is a distinctly pickled fragrance to this flow of blarney. (“He said she went in easy.”) But there is a brilliance to its twists. Imagine the feelings of the poor reader who received this letter — which is all that can be done because the reader never received it. This was an “internal use only” document, a highly compressed satire of The New Yorker itself, where heads are mounted at the top of the stairs and writers spend the afternoons impersonating priests. (Well, the implication is, they might as well.) Imagine, too, the response of Maxwell’s and any other editorial eye to the egregious afterthought of “the door of her office.” (Did they take it with them when the priests called? Of course not. Brennan hadn’t thought of it yet.)

Anyway, in the story, Betty Trim and Mrs Conroy come to an understanding. Here’s the story’s end:

In the living room, sitting in sepulchral silence, Tom and Liza were first startled, then appalled, by the sudden screeches of laughter that came at them from the kitchen — screeches of laughter that was rude and unrestrained, and that renewed itself even as it struck and shattered against the walls of the kitchen.

Considered alongside the run of New Yorker stories, this and the other Herbert’s Retreat stories have a recklessly intentional gimcrack quality; there is an inconsequence, a one-thing-not-leading-to-another that I associate with inscrutable old myths. What holds “The Anachronism” together isn’t subtle. It’s the brutal fascination of dreadful Liza. What keeps you reading is the promise of an adroitly-placed banana peel.

***

Our gas crisis got written up in the Times, where the story differs from what we were told. (I didn’t know that our hot-water heater was gas-fired, and that we have Con Ed to thank, seriously, for relenting about that.) I can’t say that I did much cooking this week. I still haven’t used the electric oven — about an inch higher inside than the largest toaster ovens; big enough for roasting a medium-sized piece of meat — for anything but toasting. On Tuesday night, we had a chef’s salad for dinner, and then we went out the next two nights. Tonight, I am going to warm up a quiche. I should like to make a crumb cake. But I’m recovering from Wednesday’s burst of energy.

I went to the storage unit on Wednesday and bought fifteen book boxes in the lobby. Also, a tape gun. I went upstairs to the storage unit but had to go back downstairs to learn how to use the tape gun. The agent at the desk did not find this odd, and she even complimented me for not having gone through a lot of tape trying to figure it out myself. Back upstairs, I taped the bottom of a box. The first book to go in was an extravagantly large folio called The English Florilegium. I expect I bought it cheap at the Strand. It’s a lovely book, but somebody else will appreciate it more. My host last night reminded me of something that I’d completely forgotten, and still don’t remember, doing. At a Christmas party some years back, I piled up books under the tree and instructed guests to take them home. My host had taken the catalogue to the Artemesia Gentileschi show at the Museum. I do remember buying that big book, and the buyer’s remorse that ensued. Tiepolo and Canaletto aside, I am not keen enough on Italian painting to collect catalogues. (Oh, and Veronese.)

Finding a second book to put in the giveaway box was harder. I had made two piles on a shelf, one of keepers and one of discards. But they both had keeper books in them. Didn’t they? As my eyes narrowed, it became clear that there were discards in one of the piles, and then I sort of snapped into realizing that all of the books in that pile were discards. When I filled the first box, I taped a second box. I did not tape the first box shut. Nor, when I finished filling it, the second.

I know that there is a book in the second box that I may retrieve. It is called Darlinghissima, and it contains the correspondence between Janet Flanner and Natalia Danesi Murray. This is another book that I bought cheap at the Strand. When I bought it, I knew who Jannet Flanner was (of course), but nothing about the other woman. Only yesterday, a day after putting Darlinghissima in a giveaway box, I came across a very rosy mention of Murray in Sybille Bedford’s late memoir, Quicksands — which I find myself calling Graveyards, why? I adore correspondences, with the letters of both writers appearing in the same book; and Flanner and Murray must have known a lot of people about whom I know a thing or two, and they might teach me a third.

Nevertheless, the giveaway is underway. When I have packed all fifteen boxes, I’ll summon the handy service that already carried off the plus-sized items that were cluttering up the unit. I’ll have to call them, because fifteen boxes of books will be very much in the way.

I wrote a note to Ray Soleil, to tell him that I had finally gotten started with the boxes, and that I hoped to be out of the unit by the end of the year. He had the cheek to urge me to finish by the fall, “before the weather turns.” Easy for him to say.

Bon week-end à tous!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2016 at 1:28 pm.