The Common Reader

What a lot of fun I had talking to Zena Hitz about Gulliver’s Travels. As well as discussing Swift, slavery, genocide, rationality, Christianity, and science, Zena told me that good philosophy is like a box of cake mix and that a liberal education requires you to be freed of false expertise. I also took Zena on a detour to discuss Iris Murdoch, the Catherine Project, and modern philosophy.
TRANSCRIPT
HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Zena Hitz. Zena is a tutor at St. John’s College. She is a philosopher, the author of Lost in Thought. She runs the Catherine Project. She’s famous on Twitter. We don’t know how she does it all. Zena, welcome.
ZENA HITZ: Thank you, Henry. It’s great to be here.
OLIVER: And we’re talking about Gulliver’s Travels because it is 300 years since it was published, and it’s a book that you love.
HITZ: A book that I’ve loved for a long time.
First Encounter with Gulliver’s Travels
OLIVER: So tell me, when did you first read it?
HITZ: Well, it was an important moment for me. I was in high school, and I was admitted to a scholarship summer program which offered college courses at different campuses. There were some normal-looking college courses at normal-looking colleges. And then there was this course at St. John’s called Science as Literature, Literature as Science. [laughs] It had this description that was just unbelievable. And I thought to myself, “This is the one, obviously the one to go to.”
So I went, and we read books that no one in their right mind would assign to high school students now, and maybe not then. The fragments of Parmenides, Plato’s Timaeus, selections from Aristotle’s Physics, Gulliver’s Travels. After reading a number of—preface to Ptolemy’s Almagest, geocentric astronomy. And we read Gulliver’s Travels after reading selections from Hooke’s Micrographia, so the inventor of the microscope, and Galileo’s Starry Messenger, which is one of the great first uses of the telescope to discover the nature of the moon and the satellites of Jupiter.
So then we read Gulliver’s Travels. We also read Emma and Flannery O’Connor and various other things. And one of the faculty who was running it said at one point, “Well, we thought we’d throw a bunch of things together and see what you could do, what you could make of it. We didn’t actually have an idea of how these all fit together,” which I think was probably true.
At any rate, I think I came to Gulliver’s Travels thinking about these scientists who were looking at very large things and very small things, and thinking in general about the follies of human perception, whether that was shown in literature or philosophy or what have you, the ways in which human perception and knowledge don’t work very well. And I think Swift is still one of the best people to—Gulliver’s Travels is still one of the best books about that because it’s in the mode of a travel diary, an eyewitness account.
Gulliver is trained as a surgeon, by his own account. He at one point says he was a bit of a projector in his younger days, someone who undertook scientific projects. And he’s a terrible observer, the worst imaginable observer, and Swift so brilliantly lets us see through his eyes, lets us see all the things he doesn’t see. And I think it’s not just about seeing and knowing. It has a very profound, I think, moral and political set of commitments. So it’s a very humane book. It’s social criticism, but from a point of view of a very deep humanity. So I’ve always loved the book for these reasons since then.
I came back to it more recently because it is part of the curriculum at St. John’s. So when I came back to teach there, I began to reread it. The other experience I had was that I wrote a long essay on it when I was an undergraduate. So those are my—I’m not any kind of expert. My knowledge of the historical context of the book is limited. It’s not zero, but it’s limited. But I have always loved it as an account of human understanding and its failures and the way that might impact how we live and how happy we can be.
The Houyhnhnm Problem
OLIVER: Have you changed how you think about it as you’ve taught it?
HITZ: I have not really changed the way I think about it. It gets more—like all of these books, the more you read them, the more comes out of them, the more details come up. Hilarious. The more jokes you get, the more . . .
I think the one more recent insight I had was, I hadn’t understood the full horror of the Houyhnhnms in the last book until relatively recently. I think that took me some time to really take on. It’s one of the cases where Gulliver’s misperceptions are a bit harder to see, and I think many readers just assume that Swift is endorsing the praise of the Houyhnhnms in some sense or other.
OLIVER: There are some very serious critics in the past who have called them Swift’s ideal beings. Which at this point in history seems unthinkable, but it has been a belief among serious readers.
HITZ: Yes, yes. And also common among students. Yes, it’s absolutely one of the wrongest opinions you could have about anything, I think.
OLIVER: Why does Swift allow us to make that mistake? Are we bad readers out of the context, or has he made too good a job of his diversions and concealments and ironies?
HITZ: That’s a great question, and I’ll just take a stab at it. I think that he has hit on a mode of misperception which is very deep to us, and it’s something that we’re much more guilty of. We could imagine that if we were in a place where everyone was small or everyone was large, we might make mistakes like Gulliver makes. But we all live, I think, in communities that are a bit like the Houyhnhnms. And so we are all very subject to these kinds of deceptions, and I think that’s how he gets us.
That’s not to really excuse the bad readings because, you know, Gulliver does leave the land of the Houyhnhnms with a boat made out of human skin, which should—I think that moment should make you realize, if you haven’t yet, that something is very seriously wrong with Gulliver. Gulliver has been kind of destroyed as a person by his travels, and especially by this last trip. But if you pass over that little detail, maybe you think, “Oh, wow, he found some very simple beings.”
OLIVER: Well, there’s also the great council where they debate the genocide of the Yahoos.
HITZ: [laughs] Yes.
OLIVER: And it directly contradicts several things Gulliver has come to believe about the Houyhnhnms, about the Yahoos, and about himself. And he’s completely unaware of these contradictions and so in awe of the Houyhnhnms that he doesn’t quite understand, I think, that he’s accounting a genocide.
HITZ: That’s right. That’s right.
OLIVER: Even though he uses a phrase from Genesis that’s very unmistakable. It’s a sort of remarkable moment of—particularly to us, having had the 20th century. I think that’s why Swift came back into favor in a way, because people used to say, Swift’s unbearable view of human nature . . .
This is a great bit in Boswell’s Life of Johnson where, when they’re traveling through Scotland, they’re with a lady, and she says to Johnson, “Is any man naturally good?” And Johnson says, “No, no more than a wolf.” And Boswell says, “Well, sir, what about ladies?” And Johnson says, “God, no, absolutely not.” And this woman says, “Oh my God, this is worse than Swift,” utterly horrific view of human nature.
But of course, we can actually say, did he go far enough? [laughter] I mean, Swift clearly understands something very real and deep. The council of genocide is horrifyingly familiar to us. And I think that’s much to Swift’s credit that he can see that, and to show that Gulliver would blind himself to it. And people still blind themselves to it, right?
HITZ: That’s right. And I wonder—you would know more about this than me because it is a bit of a historical question, but my understanding is that quite a lot of the savagery, the worst parts of rule over men that we see in Gulliver’s Travels are pictures of Ireland in the 17th, 18th centuries. And I wonder if that took some time to reveal itself to the British, and in some ways it’s still not really as known as it might be. We think of the colonial project as being something that was directed at India and Africa—
OLIVER: Faraway countries.
HITZ: —faraway countries where people looked really different. And we’re not as familiar with the kinds of things that were done to the cuddly Irish with their nice music, and who we don’t think of as being people that you would savagely oppress like that. So I think—
OLIVER: So, I think partly the English are not interested in their own history in the way that they are expected to be. And partly the English interest in Irish history has become very focused on the more recent events. And it’s very hard to get back past that. And it all becomes very complicated, and it’s a sort of different country. So there’s some of that, but I think generally we don’t want to know what we did, yes.
HITZ: Well, and I think in anglophone countries in general, there’s going to be a history of something like that. To attribute it to the British is not to say that—I mean, Americans have chattel slavery and the genocide of the natives, and the Australians have their own situation. All of the anglophone countries have something like this on their conscience.
I think that obscures the meaning of that final book. I think we don’t recognize—and that’s really to Swift’s credit, to have a social critique that is so real and so deep that you may not even recognize yourself in the picture.
Slavery in Gulliver’s Travels
OLIVER: Yes. When I read it again—I read it as an undergraduate, but I really was actually more interested in the other parts of Swift’s work. And I thought it was brilliant, and then I read it again. And it was more recently that—I didn’t understand how I couldn’t have seen it, but it’s basically a book about slavery, as I come back to it.
And in each of the books there is enslavement of a different sort. So, to begin with, Gulliver is the one being kept in a box or kept in a house, or he’s chained up by the Lilliputians or Glumdalclitch.
HITZ: Right. That’s right.
OLIVER: She’s a very nice sort of master, as it were, [laughter] but he has that box that can be sealed, and the dwarf has him swiping at the wasps. And then the enslavement that the flying island has of the country below is like England and Ireland. And then in the final book, you know, the Houyhnhnms are whipping the Yahoos.
HITZ: That’s right.
OLIVER: The slavery thing gets worse and worse as the book goes on. And one of the things that’s clever is that it’s funny when Gulliver is enslaved, right? When the wasps are let out and he has to—and Swift sort of does that clever thing where he undermines things by making it a joke at the end. By the book of the Houyhnhnms, there is really very little humor. And the twist at the end is always dark.
Gulliver can’t see that—he can see that he’s a bit like the Yahoos. But he can’t see that they’ve been enslaved in the way that he—the farmer wanted to take him around the kingdom and show him off, and he says, “I couldn’t possibly have had children in that condition because I couldn’t have it on my conscience that I had begotten a slave, someone born into slavery. I couldn’t do that.”
HITZ: Right.
OLIVER: Then he’s in the Houyhnhnms and he can’t—it’s quite remarkable.
HITZ: [laughs] Yes. I don’t think it’s quite true that in the end there’s no humor. I read it with some Catherine Project group a couple of years ago, and one of the readers pointed out that it’s not obvious Gulliver isn’t leaving his home and sitting out in the ocean and always landing on England every single time; just every time, he lands there.
And there’s something hilarious about an Englishman that discovers a place where there’s all horses, [laughter] and his love of horses overwhelms him, and he becomes persuaded that they’re the only rational beings that there are. I mean, that is funny.
OLIVER: Yes, I agree. There’s a lot of irony and stuff. But I think it’s in Lilliput when he describes their manner of writing. And he says they don’t write from left to right as we do in England, or from right to left, or up-down like the Chinese, but from one corner to the other, as the ladies do in England. This is very funny, dry humor, and that sort of thing is gone. And the things that surprise you at the end of a sentence or a paragraph are more like, “Oh, and of course I used Yahoo skin to cover the boat.” And you’re like, oh my God, this is not a joke anymore.
You know, in A Modest Proposal, he makes real humor out of those kind of horrors. And with the Houyhnhnms, I think he actually refuses the joke to make you feel the disgust, in a way.
HITZ: Yes, that might be right. That might be right.
Swift and Philosophy
OLIVER: What do you think about the idea that the Houyhnhnms are drawn from the Phaedrus and Socrates’s idea of the soul with the two horses? And there’s the good, rational horse and the vulgar, passionate horse, and the Yahoos are the other horse. You see what I mean?
HITZ: Yes, yes.
OLIVER: Is Swift showing us the two sides, and Gulliver’s mistake is to prefer the one and not the—
HITZ: Right, I think I have heard something like this before. I’m a bit skeptical. Swift doesn’t strike me as someone who uses philosophy in quite that way. I think he’s much more interested in Gulliver’s—the Houyhnhnms’ self-deception about the kinds of beings they are. They do not say “the thing which is not,” yet Gulliver’s master hides from him this conversation about the genocide for quite some time. And maybe we don’t know if he tells him quite the whole truth about it. So there’s—
OLIVER: And he also conceals the fact that the others don’t like Gulliver because he’s a partial—a reasonable Yahoo, as it were.
HITZ: Right. So their self-deception, Gulliver’s being taken in by their self-deception, the ways in which they—this is one of the ways that I think it’s profound about the nature of slavery. And to cheer us all up, I’ll make a Holocaust analogy, as you also did.
When I was traveling in Germany some years ago, in one of their Holocaust museums, there was an image from a Nazi-era German newspaper of Jewish people living in complete squalor in the ghetto. And of course, they had forced them into squalor. But somehow they forced them into squalor, and then this reinforces the sense that they’re these rat-like beings.
And there’s something very similar that the Houyhnhnms do to the Yahoos. They force them into this animal state, and then they say, “Oh God, look, these people are disgusting. They just don’t know how to act.” That seems to me the kind of level at which Swift is working. He is interested in the nature of a human being, but not in the abstract Platonic sense, I don’t think.
He strikes me as someone who believes in common sense, common decency, basic freedom, and basic use of reason. And he finds in his time that there’s distorting teachings, distorting ways of behavior that have gotten people far off track. To me, that’s what it feels like it comes from. It doesn’t feel like Plato is in the background to me.
OLIVER: Is there an extent to which, though, it’s a work of sort of anti-philosophy? As you say, Swift, he likes common sense. He likes ordinary reason, and he likes what he would call the revealed truth of Christianity. So he talks, in his sermons about people, it comes to you from God like a light. It’s revealed to you. And he doesn’t like this idea that the philosophers can work it all out.
And in a way, that’s the same sort of mistake that the scientists think they can discover all this stuff, and they go in these crazy ways. And the Houyhnhnms are a bit like that. If you had philosopher-kings, they would end up being perverted examples of rationality because they’re ignoring the—so do you think it’s anti-philosophy in a way? The book is saying, “No, no, I don’t want philosophers”?
Criticizing Elite Intellectual Culture
HITZ: That’s definitely a plausible reading. But it’s hard to tell whether it’s anti-philosophy or anti a particular style of thinking. It’s worth pointing out, in that light, that Gulliver, when he arrives in the land of the Houyhnhnms, before he even meets a horse, he sees a Yahoo who, from what I can tell from the text, is trying to wave at him and say hello, who recognizes him. And he’s horrified. He sees him instantly as a monster.
So I think immediately upon landing, he sees the Yahoos as monstrous, and that tells me that he must already be off kilter. So he’s not just corrupted by the Houyhnhnms; he’s been somehow led off track, away from the capacity to recognize fellow human beings before that.
And he’s come from this—the third book is all about various kinds of inquiry, scientific endeavors, practical endeavors, talking to the greats of the past, necromancy, and various kinds of inquiry into wisdom or things like wisdom. And somehow that’s the thing that seems to push him to the point where he can no longer tell what a human being is.
OLIVER: One of my favorite parts is when he’s with the wizards, and he asks to be shown Homer and Aristotle and all their commentators. And he says that there were vast rooms full of these commentators, endless numbers of them. But Homer and Aristotle didn’t recognize any of them because they were all so ashamed of the terrible things they’d said about these great men’s works that they kept themselves forever in a different part of the underworld. They couldn’t bear the shame of being revealed to having told lies and said second-rate things.
It’s very, very funny. And I think that’s another sort of angle on which the book says, “You’re so tempted to make a comment and have an idea and be a philosopher, and you should just accept the revealed truth of what is known. Just stop it. Just stop it.” [laughter]
HITZ: Well, I suppose maybe I would also put it this way, that Swift sees the condition of 18th-century Ireland, which is quite poor, very bad. And it’s ruled in a savage way by the English, who have a quite flourishing intellectual culture, as it happens, at this time.
So I think what he might be is not a critic of philosophy so much as a critic of intellectual culture. Because intellectual culture seems to not only not help with existential concerns like slavery and oppression and savage poverty, but even serves to mask and hide and create illusions behind it.
So that’s, I guess, how it strikes me, as a book that’s hostile to what you’d now call elite intellectual culture. And I don’t know how fundamental that critique is, in light of its inability to solve problems for real human beings or to obscure the causes of what’s going on with real human beings.
OLIVER: I think it’s quite fundamental because outside of Gulliver’s—I think this comes into Gulliver’s Travels, but what he might have said more explicitly elsewhere is, there are people starving in the streets of Dublin. And we’ve got corrupt politicians and intellectuals saying all these things, but you know, here she is starving. You don’t need to work that out. [laughter] There’s no question—the reveal—just be a Christian and, like, for goodness’ sake . . .
HITZ: Yes.
OLIVER: And when, for example, he talks to the king of Brobdingnag, and there’s that wonderful satire of the English government and everything. And he says, “Those people understood mathematics and poetry and whatever, but I could never drive into their head any sense of the abstract or any of these speculative—they simply didn’t know what that was. They didn’t know what I was saying.” [laughter]
And so in a way, his ideal government is anti-philosophical because it would just look at the human problem in front of it. It wouldn’t do speculative science. It wouldn’t think of itself as rational, all this Platonic stuff. It would just—she’s in rags, she has bare feet, you know?
HITZ: Yes, that’s right.
OLIVER: What do we need a philosopher-king? Like, what are you talking about?
HITZ: Exactly.
OLIVER: The priest understands this because he’s there in the city doing it. And is there something of that in the book, that constant resistance of the cleverness of people who cannot see daily life?
HITZ: I think that’s absolutely true, and I think it’s probably one of the things I love about the book, because I think this somehow gets to something in my own heart. Even though I’m a professional intellectual—I have been my whole life—the distance between the concerns of professional intellectuals and the concerns of living, real people in various parts of the world is very large.
And it’s even worse when, as it was when I was coming up in grad school, there’s a ton of explicit concern and various operations underway to improve life for others, which have zero connection with anything that anyone actually does. So I think the Laputans, which is the beginning of the third book, when Gulliver—
OLIVER: The flying island.
HITZ: Yes, when Gulliver visits the people on the flying island, who have one eye towards the heavens and one eye pointed inward. And they study music and mathematics, and they live in a giant flying saucer, which has the—
OLIVER: And the flappers.
HITZ: That’s right. [laughter] When someone needs to talk to them, someone flaps their ears so that they pay attention. And their wives all run off with working people because they can’t bear to be treated the way they are by men like this. And the flying saucer is not just distant. It also has the power to crush the towns underneath it if it judges them to be rebellious.
This image will stick with you for the rest of your life. I mean, it’s absolutely perfect, and the perfect image of bad government of a kind when intellectual culture is prized. And it’s hinted early on in the book in Lilliput, when the rulers in Lilliput have to do these elaborate dances with ropes.
OLIVER: Oh, with the king and the chief minister hold the pole, funny angles, and if you get under it, you get a green ribbon or a red ribbon.
HITZ: Exactly. [laughter] And they have these athletic contests of grace and various colored ribbons, and that determine how far you get in the halls of power.
OLIVER: Yes. Are you a cabinet minister or a junior minister? Yes, yes.
HITZ: Exactly. So there, it’s all just a funny joke. But it develops, I think, into the Laputans, people who have kinds of expertise that are actually hostile to them doing any kind of humane governing. So yes, that seems right to me.
Christianity in Gulliver
OLIVER: To what extent is it a Christian book?
HITZ: That’s an interesting question. I’ve never found a strong Christian element in it myself. There are satires of religious wars, both in Lilliput, where Lilliput’s at war with its neighboring city. Oh, wait a second, there’s two different disputes in Lilliput. One is about what side you cut your egg on.
OLIVER: There are the Little-Endians and the Big-Endians,
HITZ: Right. And then there’s also one about heel size. So there’s two different kinds of disputes.
OLIVER: With the marvelous image that the king is a Short-Heeler. But they think that the heir to the throne might be favorable to the High-Heelers because he has one heel slightly higher than the other, and he walks with a wobbly gait.
HITZ: [laughs] That’s right. This, again, in Lilliput is just utterly hilarious, outrageous, very silly, obviously a parody of religious wars between different kinds of Christians. But it resurfaces towards the end. It’s the Houyhnhnms, where he talks to the Master Horse—
OLIVER: And the horse sort of pretends to this great rationality, simply can’t understand that men would kill each other over the question of whether flesh is bread or bread is flesh.
HITZ: That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. So there’s definitely disparaging remarks about religious wars. And as you’re talking about it, where along with Swift’s praise of common sense, there’s a kind of basic Christian morality, which is that the poor and the suffering need attention. That all strikes me as Christian. Apart from that, I’m not sure. If you have a religious take, I’d be interested to hear it.
OLIVER: I find it very interesting that Swift had quite strict beliefs. He was not in favor of Catholics. He thought Dissenters should be tolerated, but he wanted the Test Act. He was very particular about all these things. And in his other works, he’s quite direct about that. But in this book, he achieves a kind of high ambivalence. And he’s not a Little-Ender or a Big-Ender.
HITZ: That’s right.
OLIVER: And he says the religious text on which this is based simply says that you must break the egg at the most convenient end.
HITZ: [laughs] That’s right.
OLIVER: Now, of course, in reality, he’s a Little-Ender, and he’s very committed to the Reformation, and he thinks it’s all terrible that they’re not. And it’s interesting that someone with such angry, insistent beliefs on the Anglican Church would take this ambivalent position.
And he satirizes so much. But the anti-slavery stuff, the description of the Laputans bringing the island down, and then he says, “I’ve never seen so much want and misery, and there’s a wild look in their eyes, and they’re wearing rags.” I mean, this is Dublin, right? This is just, along with the slavery, this basic Christian concern for the oppressed, the poor, the suffering.
HITZ: Yes, that’s right.
OLIVER: And so I don’t quite know. It’s almost like the book is saying, again with this anti-intellectual thing, all these doctrinal disputes and which church this and who believes that. And here we have slaves and poor people and beggars and starving people.
HITZ: Right.
OLIVER: Christianity should deal with that first. So is the implicit criticism of his fellow Christians, in a way, that they’re more interested in these disputes than in the fact that there are enslaved people and suffering people and—you see what I mean?
HITZ: Yes, that’s right.
OLIVER: And Gulliver—the Houyhnhnms are highly rational but not Christian, which is a significant omission. And by the end, are you supposed to wonder if Gulliver actually isn’t very much of a Christian? Because he can see this suffering and not respond to it at all.
HITZ: Right, when maybe the—is the best person in the book the King of Brobdingnag? Does that seem right? The person with the—at least who says the best things?
OLIVER: He says the best things. I think the best person is Glumdalclitch. She shows real charity and real love towards him.
HITZ: What about the Houyhnhnm, the one who likes him, who says, “Fare thee well, gentle Yahoo”? It’s tear-jerking—
OLIVER: Oh, the sorrel nag.
HITZ: The sorrel nag. I can literally weep at that moment when she says, “Fare thee well, gentle Yahoo.”
OLIVER: That’s true. That’s true. She and Glumdalclitch are maybe more similar characters. Yes, yes, yes.
HITZ: They’re similar characters. Okay.
OLIVER: And they have that basic, you don’t need to call it Christian. You don’t need—it doesn’t need theology.
HITZ: Humane. I would call it humane. Yes.
OLIVER: They have that basic love of their fellow. You know, Glumdalclitch doesn’t say, “Oh, how amusing this little man is, or how entertaining, or I can make—” She says, “He must be cared for. He looks a bit like me. He must be cared for.”
HITZ: Right.
OLIVER: And the sorrel nag, again, has the love of the fellow creature.
HITZ: That’s right. That’s right.
OLIVER: So I think Swift might be bringing in this, what he thinks of as the revealed truth of Christianity. Like, you shouldn’t need telling, you shouldn’t need to argue. It’s there.
HITZ: Right. This is just me making things up, which is what I’m here for. We’re podcasting. Yes.
OLIVER: Yes, of course. Also, is that not what the philosophers would do? That’s what Swift would say.
HITZ: But if I was going to make something up, what I would say is something like this: that Swift to me, from the testimony of Gulliver’s Travels, which is the book of his I really know the best. I don’t know much about the rest of it. He has a level of self-awareness and sophistication. So, he knows that that religious difference is being used as a pretext. He knows that it is obscuring the suffering of these people. So, for the purposes of the book, he says, “Look, if you’re a smart person, if you’re a smart ruler, if you’re an actually humane, intelligent, commonsensical ruler, you know that the fact that they have the wrong religious views is not a reason for them to be enslaved and oppressed and starved.” So that would be my suspicion.
And that’s why I think, to me, the religion is so light, because it’s not really a religious problem. It’s actually just a human problem and a political problem that is, how do you run your country so that these subject peoples are allowed to be free and develop themselves and be full human beings? That would be my made-up guess.
Students’ Views of Gulliver
OLIVER: What do undergraduates think? What is it that they find interesting in the book, and what do they like or dislike?
HITZ: It’s been a couple of years. I think they like this idea that—we all think travel is very broadening, a great way to think about the world. You know, you can learn so much about one’s fellow human beings. And whatever else is going on in Gulliver’s Travels, travel does not necessarily produce enlightenment.
So I think they like the attention to the ways in which, even when we are trying to learn, we fail to learn. And the ways in which structures of learning, like traveling or studying science, might actually make you worse and not better, things like that. But it’s not a book—I think it’s fair to say it’s not one of the favorite books of the undergraduates.
OLIVER: Okay.
HITZ: I think they find it a little bit distant, and I’m not sure why that is.
OLIVER: Is it because it sort of looks like a novel, but it’s not what we have come to expect a novel to be? And it sort of has that—
HITZ: I think that’s right.
OLIVER: The pre–Jane Austen novel is kind of weird to us now.
HITZ: Well, they love Don Quixote.
OLIVER: Okay.
HITZ: And that is a challenge of a similar kind. It’s a novel which doesn’t quite read like a novel, and the humor is kind of old. I mean, it’s also true—undergraduates, in my experience, in general—I hope they’ll forgive me for saying this on a podcast—they’re not always good at comedy. They tend to think that serious things must be tragic.
OLIVER: You can’t get an A by making a joke.
HITZ: Well, more that they have a sense that an intellectual life is something serious. It’s serious.
OLIVER: Oh, yes. Okay. And the syllabus slightly reinforces that, doesn’t it?
HITZ: Well, it’s sort of self-reinforcing because we used to read more Aristophanes. We used to read Rabelais.
OLIVER: If you do Shakespeare, it’ll be the tragedies.
HITZ: No, no, we do Shakespeare comedies.
OLIVER: Oh, you do? Okay.
HITZ: Yes. We have As You Like It and The Tempest. And do we have more tragedies? Maybe one more tragedy than comedy, but not a terrible imbalance.
OLIVER: Well, that’s good.
HITZ: It’s not Shakespeare-type comedy that’s—maybe, correct me if I’m wrong, a Shakespeare comedy is something that ends in a marriage, more or less.
OLIVER: More or less.
HITZ: It’s things that are funny—they don’t necessarily think that humor is a way of thinking.
OLIVER: Do they struggle with irony?
HITZ: No, not usually. As long as it’s serious irony, Anyway, I’m not sure why. I think I’m making things—I’m going too far out of the grounds for drawing conclusions.
Favorite Parts of the Book
OLIVER: Sure. Do you have a favorite passage?
HITZ: One of my favorites is the part—is it Balnibarbi where they have people who try to speak with objects?
OLIVER: Oh, yes, yes, yes.
HITZ: And they have to carry around wagons full of things because they never know what you might want to talk about. [laughter] That’s so weird. Because I think I spent a lot of time studying with philosophers, there’s a bit of—something’s on the nose about this.
OLIVER: Yes.
HITZ: You know, it’s like, “No, you’ve got to say exactly—no, that’s too imprecise. You have to say exactly what you mean.” Bernard Williams, the great philosopher, has something complaining about how contemporary philosophers are very controlling of their readers. They don’t want anyone to make the slightest mistake about what they mean by a particular word. That’s how the people who speak by objects strike me.
OLIVER: Do you think that is a problem of contemporary philosophy?
HITZ: Oh, sure. Yes, absolutely. Yes. The way Williams puts it is that when you write something, it should be like a cake mix, and the reader should be able to put their own egg and bake the cake themselves.
OLIVER: Oh, I see. You mean like a box of mix, yes.
HITZ: Yes, yes, exactly. It’s like a box of cake mix. Whereas making the cake painstakingly and force-feeding it bite by bite to the reader is not actually an—
OLIVER: Telling them how it tastes.
HITZ: Telling them how it tastes is not an educational endeavor.
OLIVER: When does this become too dominant in philosophy?
HITZ: It’s a feature of 20th-century analytic philosophy to be very careful with the meanings of words. And it’s by no means universal; it’s just a natural vice to the territory.
Iris Murdoch
OLIVER: Is this a problem for someone like Iris Murdoch, or is it more the A. J. Ayer type?
HITZ: No, it’s the A. J. Ayer type, not Iris Murdoch. No, Iris Murdoch is heterodox outside of the—
OLIVER: Do you like her philosophy?
HITZ: I do, yes.
OLIVER: What do you like about it? Platonic?
HITZ: Now, see, I came here to talk about Swift. [laughter]
OLIVER: I know, but you made such a good point about the satire of philosophers.
HITZ: I like her writing for a more general educated audience, her not making assumptions about the philosophical training of her readers, and her use of Plato for sure, which is quite interesting and creative. She sort of ingests Plato and does something with it that I think is very interesting.
OLIVER: Is she properly appreciated as a Platonist, or do you think there’s more attention to be paid?
HITZ: There’s probably more attention to be paid, but she gets some attention. She gets some attention. I also don’t think it was particularly helpful, these two books that came out a couple of years ago about Murdoch, Foot, Midgley, and Anscombe.
OLIVER: Oh, yes, yes, yes. I only read one of those. It was quite good.
HITZ: It might be quite good, but those four women are quite different from one another. So it’s an example of where attention to identity could obscure as much as it—
OLIVER: Well, one of the books was more about the ideas—they were both obviously about the ideas—and one of them was more about the fact that they were together in Oxford. And that they benefited from hanging out, talking, doing different sorts of work, sleeping with each other’s husbands, et cetera.
HITZ: Yes, all the good stuff.
OLIVER: And from the more sociological point of view, it was very interesting to see that, actually, a lot of what Murdoch did was bound up with her friendships and relationships, in that the argument basically is, A. J. Ayer and the others get sent away because of the war. So these four women are actually—they’ve been banned from this seminar and told they’re not allowed.
Well, now they can sit around and do what they want to do. And it worked, and they all produced very interesting things. So from that point of view, I think it was—but I agree with you, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch are not the same. [laughter]
HITZ: Not even particularly similar. I also feel like I’ve read enough of Murdoch’s novels to have a sense of what the sociological situation was like.
OLIVER: You like the novels?
HITZ: I do like them, yes.
OLIVER: Do you have favorites?
HITZ: I can’t remember the name of my favorite because I haven’t read them for years. It’s one of the things I read years ago, the one—I’d remember it if I saw the title. There’s an LSD trip at the beginning of it.
OLIVER: Oh, The Good Apprentice. I love that book.
HITZ: The Good Apprentice, yes. I think that was my favorite. But I never fell in love with it. I just liked it, and I found it interesting, and I found the sociology interesting. Okay, this is what academics at this time period were doing.
What to Pair with Swift
OLIVER: We got diverted.
HITZ: “We” got diverted. [laughs]
OLIVER: We did. If Swift is on a great books syllabus, what is it good to pair him with? If people are reading Swift, on or off a syllabus, do you think there are other—Hooker, you said, which I think would be interesting.
HITZ: No, Hooke. It’s Hooke.
OLIVER: Hooke. Hooke. That’s a very good point.
HITZ: The guy who wrote Micrographia, who has the enormous picture of the flea.
OLIVER: Yes, yes, yes. So that would be good. But any other? Is it worth reading Plato alongside him?
HITZ: Well, I like to—he’s on the list for something we called Life of the Mind Seminar at Catherine Project, which is our introduction to the life of the mind.
OLIVER: And just to tell people, the Catherine Project—this is not a university. Anyone can join a seminar.
HITZ: That’s right. It’s an open online readers community. Consists of small, high-quality conversations, mostly on Zoom, some in person.
OLIVER: You could be some kid, an accountant, a dentist, whatever, and you come and do a—you’ve got a PhD running a seminar, and you get that experience.
HITZ: Right. Some of them are peer led, so they’re not necessarily PhDs running them. The reading groups are not necessarily run by PhDs. But the core program in which the Life of the Mind Seminar is—either a PhD or an ABD [all but degree] or someone with some academic experience is usually leading that. We have it there, and we have it there with a set of books that are meant to disorient rather than to orient.
So one of the difficulties with reading great books with more or less random selections of adults is that people feel uncertain, out of place. And they bring expertise, real or fake, to the table, which makes it very difficult to have a conversation. It’s usually fake expertise, for what it’s worth.
OLIVER: Give us an example of what you mean by fake expertise.
HITZ: Well, so someone will have—we’ll be, say, reading Hamlet. Someone will have taken a class on Shakespeare in college, and they’ll say, “Actually, we’re asking this question. But what I learned, my professor told me, is that Hamlet actually symbolizes—he has an Oedipus complex and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then this is what this means, and this is what that means.” And then your conversation’s over, because you need to focus just on the text that’s shared between the—
OLIVER: It’s not a crossword puzzle.
HITZ: Exactly. It’s not a crossword puzzle, and it’s not something where—or the other—people often, again, they feel a bit on their back feet. So they’ll google a bunch of stuff about the author, and they’ll start tossing out random facts about the book or about the author, about the context. And again, you don’t get really into the meat of the book that way.
So, Gulliver’s Travels is there to help us think about ways in which we might not be expert in things we’re expert. Ways in which we might think we understand something and not understand it. And ways in which people who, with every appearance of seriousness and scientific principle, can just say unbelievably stupid things.
So it’s a very, very good book for that, where in that sense, it’s I think very good for any liberal education program. It’s liberating that way. One of the things we need to be liberated from is false expertise.
OLIVER: You’re talking really about these secondhand opinions that you haven’t interrogated and come to understand yourself.
HITZ: Exactly. Exactly, exactly, exactly.
OLIVER: This is what Mill says. Everything is new to someone, and the real genius is that you find it out.
HITZ: Exactly.
OLIVER: You don’t get taught it. Yes, yes.
HITZ: Exactly, exactly. So real learning is things you find for yourself. Anyway, that’s what I like it with. As for pairing it, yes, I think it would just depend on what you were—I don’t have a clear thought about that. I think it’d be good to pair it with Galileo’s Starry Messenger and preface to Hooke’s Micrographia.
But you could also pair it with Emma. Be quite good, actually, because Emma is also about someone who really doesn’t know what they’re doing and has no idea. Thinks they know what’s going on; they really have no idea what’s going on.
OLIVER: Yes. Hamlet as well, in fact.
HITZ: I guess so. Does he not know what’s going on?
OLIVER: Who’s diverting now? [laughter] Well, there’s an interesting question, isn’t there, about whether Hamlet has legitimate doubts. So he says, “This ghost could be a demon. I should be careful. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m going to pretend to be mad. I’m going to find out.” Or whether he just doesn’t want to see the truth in front of him, and he quote-unquote “delays” because of that. I don’t know if you have a view.
HITZ: I don’t think he’s deluded. I think the problem is something different, but I haven’t thought enough about it recently to know what his volitional obstacle is. But I don’t think he’s deluded. I think he sees what’s going on, but there’s something about acting that doesn’t work for him.
OLIVER: An internal—
HITZ: Something internal. Something internal. In a way, I find the play very hard. I don’t know what, for instance, what does that obstacle have to do with Ophelia? What’s going on with that? Anyway, he’s very mysterious, but I don’t—yes, that’d be my sense, is that he’s not—
OLIVER: Do you buy this idea that he’s a nihilist?
HITZ: No, although he’s definitely faced with something like nihilism. He has to look at it. And of course, the play does end with everyone dead, [laughs] so it’s not obvious that he’s wrong.
Sympathy for Gulliver
OLIVER: This question hangs over Gulliver as well. Is the problem by the end that he’s basically become a nihilist? His response to the Yahoos is to deny meaning, deny the possibility of meaning, to shut himself away.
HITZ: He is a true misanthrope. He hates human beings and refuses to interact with them and in that sense, in some way, removes himself from any further mistakes. In another way, the mistake that he’s in is so massive that that hardly seems like a consolation. But yes, he’s definitely stuck, and he’s stuck in a place where who he is—because he’s a human being. We have to remember that.
So he’s in a place of total self-hatred and the hatred of his neighbor, what you’d call from the Christian perspective a total loss of charity. Is that nihilist? I don’t know, but it’s definitely bad. It’s not a good state to be in. Maybe I don’t know what you mean by nihilism exactly.
OLIVER: Are we supposed to disapprove of him at the end or sympathize with him?
HITZ: Disapprove, I think.
OLIVER: Yes? You don’t feel sorry for him?
HITZ: I do a bit.
OLIVER: But not much.
HITZ: Well, should I?
OLIVER: I have come to believe—yes, this is what I’ve come to feel in subsequent readings, is that Gulliver, as you say, is very mistaken. He thinks he understands things that he does not understand. He has the sort of pretense of rationality, but he lacks any sort of meta rationality to see what his limits are.
And he becomes, therefore—he doesn’t advocate genocide, and he doesn’t take any pleasure in using Yahoo skin, but he’s just completely null to it. There’s a sort of void there where human feeling ought to be. And it’s tragic for him. It’s a tragic ending that he is so isolated. And we can’t sympathize with him, as it were, but we can feel sort of awful that he’s shriveled into this state rather than judging or blame.
I think one of the persistent themes of the book is, as I say, this kind of basic love of fellow creature, the Glumdalclitch or the sorrel. And if you take that from the book, you will wish you could bring Gulliver back.
HITZ: Right. What you’re saying reminds me that there is an interesting parallel in Plato’s dialogues that I hadn’t thought of before, Plato’s Parmenides, which is perhaps the most difficult Plato’s dialogue. So it’s a conversation between young Socrates and the philosopher Parmenides. The first third of it is relatively clear, some arguments against what people think of as Plato’s theory of forms.
Then there’s an extensive, insane dialectical process where various theses about the connection between being and oneness are both argued for and then refuted, and argued for and then refuted, pages and pages and pages and pages of it. So this seems to be—it’s Parmenides and Zeno who are running Socrates through this ringer.
And the person at the very beginning of the dialogue who they have to go find, to tell him the story of how Socrates met Parmenides, used to study philosophy. But now he just trains horses. [laughs] One of my teachers pointed this out to me, and I’ve never been able to get over it, that he spent this time doing philosophy, and he’s like, “You know what? I’m going to work with horses for the rest of my life. If I never hear another human voice, that’s fine with me.”
So I think that is an interesting parallel. And I think it is not really that uncommon to see people who are totally disillusioned with relating to humans, who then relate to animals instead, like they devote themselves to animals.
OLIVER: But on that reading, it might be a disillusionment with philosophical humanity. It might be philosophy that’s killed Gulliver’s human feeling.
HITZ: That’s right. Well, I think that’s one possibility, one very strong possibility. That’s why I think the Houyhnhnms come after the Laputans. Going to the furthest reaches of his intellectual interests just destroys his humanity.
But it doesn’t seem like exhaustion in the same way that whoever, I can’t remember his name, the character who relates the Parmenides, where you just think he must be exhausted from having heard more than one conversation like this. [laughter] And just in the stable with the horses eating oats, I mean, it’s just delightful. It’s just so peaceful, you know?
OLIVER: Bucolic, pastoral, yes.
HITZ: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Maybe you’re right that we should be more sympathetic to someone in that situation.
OLIVER: Well, next time you read it, you can tell me if you change your mind.
HITZ: All right. I will tell you if I change my mind.
OLIVER: Very good. Zena Hitz, thank you very much.
HITZ: Thank you very much, Henry Oliver.


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My colleague Oliver Traldi recently published an essay called ‘Jane Austen’s Virtuous Liberalism’. It’s a very nice discussion of the ways in which Austen understand the challenges of character formation.
Virtue, as Austen sees it, faces two tough challenges. First, people whose characters are not yet formed must see how to be virtuous rather than vicious. Then, the virtuous must somehow find a way to succeed in their struggles against the vicious without adopting vicious means.
In this episode, Oliver and I discussed Austen’s ideas of virtue, what that has to do with liberalism, the relationship between philosophy and literature more broadly, as well as poetry and ideas about the Great Books. We also talked about the Keira Knightly Pride and Prejudice. Yes, we both liked it. Here is why Oliver thinks Jane Austen is so popular among philosophers.
TRALDI: And so I do think that even though she’s not making arguments, she’s not laying out philosophical theories, there is a level of precision in her thinking about virtue, which I do think is something that it took me a little aback.
And I think it’s part of why—one person who quote-tweeted my article was Daniel Kodsi, who’s a friend of our colleague John Maier and his coauthor often. And he runs this magazine called The Philosophers’ Magazine, which I had written before. And Daniel quote-tweeted my article with something like, “Add Oliver to the list of all the philosophers who love Austen.”
OLIVER: And it’s a long list.
TRALDI: And I think it’s a long list. And I do think this precision is part of it that she does, that it is—again, it’s not like a philosophy journal article, but it is an intellectual sophistication that is often not present in novelists that we really appreciate.
And here is an extract about Austen, Smith, and the wonderfully fertile period at the end of the eighteen century.
TRALDI: But yes, I think it’s obvious—without knowing the background, I’m sure there are scholarly questions about, how much Smith did Austen read? And they’re both 250th—a lot was happening in 1775 and 1776.
OLIVER: Those were great years. Those were the good old days.
TRALDI: They were great years. In the great books syllabus, you get to the end of the 1700s and suddenly there’s this—you have Smith, you have Kant, you have the American Revolution, you have the French Revolution, you have Burke. Rousseau is right before, Montesquieu is right before. I mean, it was a real—
OLIVER: It’s a great time.
TRALDI: It was a great time. A lot was being done. And obviously, you know, I love the 1800s. I love the Romantics. But you could teach a whole great books course from 1750 to 1800, probably.
OLIVER: You’ve also got all the dictionaries and all that kind of work going on as well. It’s a very, very fertile—explorations.
TRALDI: Yes, yes. There’s all sorts of—yes, it was an amazing time.
OLIVER: So did you, having read these two, Austen and Smith, close together—
TRALDI: Yes, and I should say that my reading of Austen was much more careful than my reading of Smith.
OLIVER: Sure, but you wrote this before you read Smith.
TRALDI: Yes, absolutely.
OLIVER: Or at least you fully conceived it. Do you see a lot of Smith in Austen?
TRALDI: “A lot” might be—
This was my favourite bit.
TRALDI: Yes. But this is one of the great—I know we talked about this, but it’s one of the great—you see this in Smith, you see this in Austen—commerce has its own virtues, and they are very traditional virtues. You have to be trustworthy. You have to be pleasant. You can’t really be wholly self-interested in every moment because people have to be willing to deal with you given your—I mean, think about Yelp reviews or even just word of mouth. “Oh, that person screwed me over.”
OLIVER: There’s a discussion in one of Hayek’s papers, which is—it’s a very Smithian point he makes about, the nature of the knowledge problem means that it’s not so much that I’m trying to get information about the thing you’re trying to sell me, but I’m really trying to get information about you and whether you are someone I should be buying from. Which is exactly the project that the novelists and Smith—there’s a sort of period between Smith and the early novelists, running through Austen to George Eliot, when they’re all working on that problem together.
TRALDI: Yes. I do think in Austen, it’s often—the real puzzle is, how do you make out somebody else’s character?
OLIVER: Exactly.
TRALDI: This is a phrase that Lizzy Bennet does use with regard to Darcy. And how do we actually figure out who the trustworthy and untrustworthy people are?
OLIVER: And if you’re too philosophical about that, in the sort of analytic sense, I think you can end up not paying enough attention to the particulars of that question.
TRALDI: Yes.
OLIVER: Because when you actually try and do it, it’s really, really hard.
TRALDI: Yes. And I think this is the sort of—reading Austen, you get a sense of—and there are very few philosophy papers on things like this. Reading Austen, you get a sense of, what sorts of details in a normal life are the ones that I can extract information from to make out somebody else’s character?
Oliver is an analytical, political philosopher. You can find out more about his work here. Here he is on Twitter. His Substack is orting. You can watch the episode on YouTube here.
Transcript
HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Oliver Traldi. Oliver is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Toledo in Ohio. He is my colleague on the Emerging Scholars Program at the Mercatus Center, and he’s written a book about political beliefs as well as many other articles for magazines, online.
He’s got a Substack. He’s maybe the most prominent political and epistemological young philosopher of his generation. [laughter] But most importantly for us, he is interested in Jane Austen and the idea of virtue. Oliver, welcome.
OLIVER TRALDI: Thank you so much for having me.
Reading Austen as a Philosopher
OLIVER: Let’s just start—before we get to this article you’ve written, tell me about being a philosopher but reading Jane Austen, because she’s often read and commented on by people who are not philosophers or who are only philosophers by acquaintance or whatever.
TRALDI: Right.
OLIVER: Is it different reading as a philosopher, do you think?
TRALDI: I think yes and no. One thing as a philosopher, there are—contemporary philosophy, we have very exacting standards of rigor and clarity. And when we look for a theory, we want something that’s been improved by hundreds of people and thousands of journal articles.
And so, if you were to simply extract a theory of virtue from a novel and say, “Does this—is this the end-all, be-all of moral thinking?” obviously you’re going to be disappointed. So I think as a philosopher, you have to look for other types of things, other types of sensitivities rather than logical sensitivity.
You have to say, how sensitive is the author to the different types of situations where people’s virtue can be exhibited or challenged? Or how sensitive is the author to the different types of pressures that a character’s convictions can be put under, or the different sorts of compromises that they might have to make, or the different sorts of people who might not be virtuous who they might have to interact with and sort of, you know, contract with or avoid? And what are going to be the impacts of different kinds of choices in those situations?
So the novelists, I think, tend—if they do it well, a novelist who’s interested in morality will understand living morally probably better than a philosopher, while maybe not understanding, say, arguments about whether morality supervenes on reality or vice versa, or what grounds morality, or different theories of meta-ethics or whatever.
OLIVER: I mean, there are obviously some novelists who do have a better appreciation of those things than others, we should say.
TRALDI: Yes, I think that’s absolutely true. And as I wrote in my article, I do think Austen in particular had an appreciation for this issue that you might call moral disarming or unilateral disarming. You know, does the moral person put themselves at a disadvantage relative to the immoral person? And then how do we actually help—how does morality survive?
So that’s a kind of philosophical question, but I tend to think—I taught last year—I think we’ve talked about this a bit. I taught in a great books program at Tulsa.
OLIVER: This is the Jennifer Frey program.
TRALDI: This is the ill-fated Jennifer Frey program. Jennifer—I don’t know if you’ve met her, but she’s an incredibly charismatic person. But somehow the program, despite being enormously successful, did not survive. You know, I was there for a year, and they decided that was long enough.
OLIVER: [laughs] You don’t think your arrival was the—
TRALDI: No, no. I hope not. I most certainly hope not.
OLIVER: No. General problems of higher education prevailed. Yes.
TRALDI: Yes, many, many problems of higher education these days. But yes, so I think—what was I saying?
OLIVER: Well, I think we’re getting to this question of, you are not just a philosopher; you teach the great books.
TRALDI: Right, exactly. The great books. That’s where I was. Yes.
Philosophy and the Great Books
OLIVER: So, one thing I’m interested in is that, you know, reading as a philosopher, you get a slightly different perspective on Austen. When you read other fiction, poetry, whatever, is there a benefit to you as a philosopher? Does it broaden you in some way?
TRALDI: Yes. I think absolutely, it’s broadening, but it’s also focusing in a different way. You know, contemporary philosophy is often described or captured with the word epicycles. So what we mean when we say epicycles is, you have some major theory, which is supposed to answer some big question. And then your career as a philosopher—you’re like three layers deep in the theory, in some sub-debate, and you’re making some really fine-grained distinctions.
And if you can make those distinctions successfully, you’ve had a really great career. But I think it’s easy to forget, why are we doing—you know, what attracted us to philosophy? Why are we doing this to begin with?
And the great novels, great books in general—one example I always use is the Book of Job. It doesn’t really—it’s not doing clear philosophy on the question of why do bad things happen to good people. But when you read it, you feel the question, why do bad things happen to good people? You get it, you know? You get why this is a question that people have worried about for thousands of years. You get why it calls out for an answer.
You know, there’s a lot of truth out there. I’m looking at a set of coat hangers, and I could count the coat hangers. But if you were given the decision, would I rather have an answer to how many coat hangers are across the room from me, or why do bad things happen to good people? You’d probably go with the latter one. There’s somehow some kind of depth or importance to that question, right?
And I think there’s—a great novelist can often generate some vividity to these questions. They can show how these questions are part of a good life, asking these questions, trying to have these questions answered—or a not-so-good life.
Certainly in Austen there are a lot of characters who learn to be more virtuous. Probably Emma is the clearest example. But you might also think of Marianne Dashwood. Really—
OLIVER: Lizzy Bennet.
TRALDI: Lizzy Bennet really learns to be a better person. I actually think her character is rather close to Emma in a lot of ways.
OLIVER: Yes, I think Emma’s sort of a clear rewrite of Lizzy in some—yes, yes.
TRALDI: Yes, and in some ways more evocative, actually. Yes. I mean, we can talk about all these books. But yes, I think there’s these things, even—obviously qua literature, they have other virtues, right? Which much philosophy doesn’t have; very little philosophy has the literary virtues.
But the philosophical virtue that a lot of literature does have is you see, okay, these are the—this is what a life is like. This is what making choices is like. These are the big questions when you decide how to live your life and what kinds of choices to make.
And I think Austen—these questions are all through Austen, even though nobody has to murder anybody in Austen. Nobody has to make decisions about war and peace or about, you know, civilizational decline or civilizational progress or anything like that. These people making these small choices in a lot of ways. But those are the lives that most of us lead. And when you read Austen, you think, “Oh, okay, there’s a virtuous and a vicious way to lead this kind of rather normal life.”
The Good Life
OLIVER: The question of what is a good life, or what is a good life in a commercial society, maybe, is the sort of bedrock of what she’s doing.
TRALDI: Yes, I think so. And that’s why I think Austen—you know, Austen wasn’t on our syllabus at Tulsa, but she was certainly discussed. And the “what is a good life” question—to me, it’s the big question that a great books program for college students should always come back to.
If I didn’t know what else to talk about, I would just say, “Well, we just read this book.” You know, we read these old biographies of Charlemagne from, like, Einhard—Notker the Stammerer and Einhard, his adopted son or whatever. I don’t remember. But this is like 800s. I’m sure you know more about this stuff than I do.
And I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them because what do I know about Charlemagne? So I just said, “Does it seem like Charlemagne lived a good life?” And you know, you’re off to the races. And I think that’s important at that age, because that’s the age at which—
OLIVER: For the undergraduates?
TRALDI: Yes. I think that’s the age at which you’re starting to make your own big decisions about what sort of life to lead. And I think for me, looking back to myself at that age, I think one thing I did wrong—at Tulsa I was in some ways as much a student as a teacher. I was rereading a lot of this stuff for the first time in decades. And some of it I was reading for the first time. As I told you, I was reading a lot of Austen for the first time for this essay.
OLIVER: Right, right.
TRALDI: And yes, it was stuff that I had thought about at a theoretical level, you know, like what are the ins and outs of this theory or this philosophical move or something like that. But you feel the question a bit differently when you’re like, “Okay, I’m an adult. I have to decide whether to live in this way or that way.”
The world is open to you. You could convert to Thomism [laughter] like so many have tried to have me do, or you could become a merchant after reading The Wealth of Nations. Or you could become a revolutionary after reading Marx, or you could become a Nietzschean. You know, there are all these choices open to you.
OLIVER: Please don’t become a Nietzchean.
TRALDI: No, no. That is, I’m a—
OLIVER: Keep your children out of school if that’s going to be the result. [laughs]
TRALDI: Yes. I’m a committed moralist, so I cannot, but he is—he made a comeback, that’s for sure.
Philosophy and Poetry
OLIVER: Now, there’s this obviously sort of long-running question in philosophy about, what is the relationship between philosophy and poetry? Are they antagonists, or are they in some way, you know, twins, and each provides one half of what is needed for a complete way of understanding the world? Do you have a position on this?
TRALDI: Yes, I mean, I think they’re what the kids call twinning.
OLIVER: Twinning? [laughs]
TRALDI: I think they’re twinning. No, no, I think that means something different. I think that means when you’re wearing the same outfit or something like that.
OLIVER: So we’re almost twinning with our stripes—yes, I see.
TRALDI: We’re almost. We actually—we are stripes and blue. Yes, we’re closer than I would’ve expected.
I would say closer to twins. There are a lot of claims that philosophy is at odds somehow with this or that. There’s also this—certain people will say, “Well, ever since Socrates, philosophy has been at odds with politics.” And a big part of philosophy is, how do you survive? Well, I don’t know. Nobody’s trying to kill me. I think of myself as a decently committed philosopher.
OLIVER: It seems to me this changed fundamentally in the Enlightenment and with the Romantics, and they see it all much more joined up. It’s a sort of ancient-and-modern dynamic.
TRALDI: Yes, there may be an ancient-and-modern distinction there. But yes, for me I don’t see any kind of contradiction. Now, there are—and I think this comes out of what I said before—philosophical attempts to understand poetry. And certain kinds of literary and aesthetic devices do sometimes fall a little flat.
The philosophical literature on metaphor, for instance—I think some theories of metaphor really don’t get why people use metaphors. [laughter] So one of the most important theories of metaphor is that they’re all just false, that it’s like everybody who uses a metaphor is lying. This isn’t the full theory. There are bells and whistles added.
OLIVER: Sure, sure.
TRALDI: But yes, so I think there’s no contradiction. But at the same time, they are different modes in some ways, and people who do the one are often trying to do something different than the other.
I do think that the desire for rigor and precision and clarity that philosophers have can be a little maddening to nonphilosophers, who see the pull of philosophical questions like, “What sort of life I should lead?” and then see, what do philosophers actually do?
And we’re doing all this modal logic and all these truth tables and all this very technical stuff that looks like math. And they say, “That can’t possibly be the right way to think about how to live.” And it’s true that there are these studies of—that suggest ethicists aren’t actually very good people and things like that, although you have to wonder what is the background ethical theory that went into evaluating them.
So yes, I don’t think there’s really a contradiction between philosophy and anything else. But certainly, there was a point in my life where I always come back to trying to write poetry and do poorly and then stop. But it was always something where I would say, “Okay, if I’m doing philosophy in the afternoon, I better wait till the evening to write poetry.” You have to sort of reboot and get into a different mode.
OLIVER: Iris Murdoch used to write philosophy in the morning and novels in the afternoon. That kind of thing.
TRALDI: Yes, I think that’s very sensible.
OLIVER: And she was upstairs for the one and downstairs for the other.
TRALDI: Yes. That’s even better, you know?
Favorite Poets
OLIVER: Which poets do you like?
TRALDI: Geez, I guess for an American, I like Wallace Stevens. I wasn’t expecting this question. For a Brit, you know, I actually like Philip Larkin a lot.
OLIVER: Oh, yes?
TRALDI: I know—what is the opinion of Larkin? Is he considered—
OLIVER: Very high.
TRALDI: Very high? Okay.
OLIVER: Some—there are some dissenters, but basically he’s the guy.
TRALDI: He’s the guy, okay. Yes.
OLIVER: Twentieth-century English poetry is like Auden, Larkin, Betjeman.
TRALDI: Yes, Auden is—actually, my friend Jane Cooper just wrote something about Auden.
OLIVER: Yes, Jane is excellent.
TRALDI: Yes, Jane is really great.
OLIVER: That was in the New Statesman if you want to look it up.
TRALDI: That was in the New Statesman. Yes, yes, yes. But Auden, I don’t know quite as well.
I mean, poetry is—I think it’s interesting the way that we receive poetry now. I think you were talking about this a few days ago, about things like poems appearing as inspirational quotes on social media or something like that, and whoever is the most quotable. And you felt like maybe Dostoevsky is very quotable.
OLIVER: Dostoevsky has a sort of screenshot quality.
TRALDI: Yes, yes.
OLIVER: As does Martin Amis.
TRALDI: Yes. So I—
OLIVER: Whereas Philip Larkin in a funny way—you know, he has very short poems. You can get the whole poem on Twitter. Like, Robert Frost has that. But something like “The Whitsun Weddings,” it’s quite hard to just take three lines out. The whole thing works as a—and that, so that poem gets less—
TRALDI: Yes. Which is what you would expect from a good poem, really, that it would form a kind of whole.
OLIVER: Exactly. If it’s a three-page ode, it should have a continuous quality.
TRALDI: Yes, it should have a kind of internal structure. Yes.
OLIVER: There are some one-line things and—but I think it’s notable that a poet like Wordsworth doesn’t seem to get a lot of social media play. And I think probably that’s one reason.
TRALDI: So yes, I think Larkin is somebody who, I did see some shorter references to him, and I thought I’d better just go and look up a ton of poems by this guy. And Stevens was the same way.
Death and Philip Larkin
OLIVER: So, which Larkin do you like?
TRALDI: You’re really putting me on the spot here. [laughter] It has been a little while.
OLIVER: I lied to you and said it would be about Jane Austen.
TRALDI: Yes, now I’m completely screwed. Well, he has a bunch about death. He has one where death is a ship following you. And he has one where death is, like, a fruit that gets picked or something.
OLIVER: Apple?
TRALDI: Might be an apple.
OLIVER: He decides not to throw the apple.
TRALDI: There’s one with sweetbreads in it. And now I’m really—
OLIVER: The ship one, “Next, Please”—that’s excellent.
TRALDI: Yes.
OLIVER: He sees the—it’s like hearing the music coming, and then the ship.
TRALDI: I forgot that that was the title. I forgot that that was the title.
OLIVER: And then as the ship goes past, it leaves nothing in its wake. It’s very sort of—very gloomy.
TRALDI: It’s very gloomy, yes. I think I read Larkin in a gloomy phase; it was like Larkin and Radiohead or something.
OLIVER: But he’s a good example of what you were saying before, that he won’t think propositionally. He’s logical in the sense that he’s sort of orderly, and he goes from one thing to the next. But he’s not being a philosopher.
TRALDI: No, of course. Yes.
OLIVER: But he’s very preoccupied with the sorts of questions that philosophers are probing, but has a sort of very meaningful treatment of them.
TRALDI: Yes.
OLIVER: And I think in a way, the sharp response that you want from the reader in those questions, Larkin is better at provoking than someone like Bertrand Russell or some other contemporary of his.
TRALDI: Yes, yes.
OLIVER: Bertrand Russell’s a bit earlier, but you know what I mean.
TRALDI: No, I think that’s exactly right. And I think that is why I’m a fan of the great books pedagogically and not—I don’t know if Larkin will be called a great, you know, like, who knows? I don’t really understand that designation, but tings like poetry and novels.
OLIVER: The biggest dissenter was Harold Bloom, who said Philip Larkin’s just a period piece. And he doesn’t understand why everyone likes him.
TRALDI: Oh, yes, well, I’m not on board with everything. Oh, I’ve also been—
OLIVER: No, you’re not very Bloomian.
TRALDI: I’m not very Bloomian, I don’t think.
OLIVER: Either Allan or Harold.
TRALDI: Yes. Well, I actually—this is very embarrassing, but I’ve actually never read The Closing of the American Mind, which I know is—
OLIVER: But why should you? I’m not sure it’s retained its—
TRALDI: Well, it’s certainly been received into my circle. But it is like a classic of anti-ideological—
OLIVER: Sure. Have you read Adler, How to Read a Book, that kind of great books stuff?
TRALDI: No. There’s so many things that I haven’t read. I mean, I’m just learning how to read. I learned how to read in Tulsa last year, [laughter] in Oklahoma, which is not where most people would go to learn how to read.
Jane Austen and the Problem of Morality
OLIVER: So let’s move to Jane Austen. Your thesis basically is, many moral theories face this problem that if I believe XYZ theory and you don’t believe it, you can get the advantage of me. Because I’ll always stick to my principles and you can just be a bad guy.
TRALDI: Yes.
OLIVER: So is morality screwed? This is what people say about liberalism. This is what you’re arguing. And you think Jane Austen’s got an answer to that?
TRALDI: Yes, I think she has a kind of answer. And again, one decision I had to make while writing the essay was, am I going to go super—this is a completely philosophically rigorous and respectable answer? Or am I just going to kind of sketch it?
OLIVER: Slum it in literary criticism? [laughter]
TRALDI: Yes, I wouldn’t put it quite that way, but—and I think I went for the latter, where I just wanted to kind of evoke the answer. And I think the answer has something to do with living in a large enough society where—and Austen I think is not the only person to give this answer. But you live in a large enough society where, when people see you acting well and somebody else acting poorly, the disadvantage that you have in that one interaction is outweighed by the advantages you have from the society that you gain from being seen to act well by many others.
So one thing I didn’t mention here, but a connection I made when I was first coming up with this idea, is that it’s actually a lot like what Martin Luther King Jr. says about civil disobedience. So he says, you might think, if you’re out there and the police are coming at you with bats, or the white supremacists are coming at you with bats or whatever, weapons or whatever, you might think, “I’m on the losing end of this interaction.”
But actually what will happen is that this interaction will be seen by many others. And you, by keeping your calm, will be seen to be the virtuous one, and they, by being violent, will be seen to be the vicious ones. And this can only help your political cause. I’m probably abstracting some of the details of King’s presentation.
OLIVER: In a vulgar sense, this is the sort of “be the change you want to see” approach.
TRALDI: Yes, but also, be the change you want other people to see. You know? Because that’s how it gets saved from—and again, one of the ways in which this is not quite philosophically rigorous is because the philosopher can say, “Well, what about an example where nobody’s going to see it? Or what about an example where the situation is set up that in doing the right thing, you’re perceived to have done the wrong thing?” And you get back into tough problems. And that’s why we have philosophy. You know, there’s always going to be these puzzles.
OLIVER: But we don’t get the—I think this is what the novelists are helpful for. We don’t get to set the conditions in our lives. You know, when you’re doing a philosophical problem, you can just say, “Well, these are the conditions. What happens then?” And what Jane Austen is so good at is saying, “I’m going to take her and drop her in this house, and that’s life. And she’s just going to—she won’t even know what the conditions are for a long time.” That’s the novelist’s preoccupation.
TRALDI: Yes. Yes. It’s interesting what you said about not even knowing what the conditions are. It’s one thing I love, which is there in, I think, a lot of Austen—and it’s done by a lot of my favorite novelists. I think Kazuo Ishiguro is really good at this. It’s just novels where you see the characters’ growing awareness of their circumstances and—
OLIVER: Like in Klara and the Sun or something.
TRALDI: Yes, or I think certainly in Never Let Me Go and in Remains of the Day, a lot of the action is in a situation where you understand what’s going on better than the characters do.
Clues and Games
TRALDI: And I think we talked about this the other day. In Austen, Emma, for example, is this sort of, like, halfway detective where she sees a lot of clues that could help her understand the nature of the life she’s leading and the circumstances she’s in, but she always misinterprets the clues. But on the other hand, it’s not like she misses them entirely. She’s kind of on the right track, and at least she’s trying.
OLIVER: And what I think Austen does so well in that book—I think it’s her most important book—is that by putting us, without quite realizing it, with Emma’s blinkers on, as it were, and only allowing our perspective to be her perspective, she makes us the detective.
But whereas in a detective novel, you know, there’s a funny little man and he is a detective, and he says, “Oh, there’s a clue in this novel,” the read of—on the first read very often goes straight past what they must later realize to be a clue. And that is such a normal condition of life, that, “Oh, actually, that was one of the conditions, but you couldn’t have known it. Sorry.” And you can only work it out in retrospect.
TRALDI: Yes. In modern love, these are sometimes called red flags. [laughter] I think it’s not quite a precise analogy, but yes, I think it’s right. And I certainly—I had read Emma years ago and didn’t really notice. As you say, on my first read, I didn’t really notice, even having watched—I think it was the, what is it, the Kate Beckinsale version maybe, from ITV in like 1996 or something.
It was really in reading it for this essay that I noticed that this feature that, starting on page 30 or 40 or so, there’s a—and they’re often in games. The clues are often in games. So very early on, Elton is playing some sort of poem game with Emma.
OLIVER: The riddles, yes.
TRALDI: The riddle game. And you know, Emma already misinterprets his riddles as being about Harriet rather than about her. But then there’s also—the riddles also have some relation to things that happen much later.
OLIVER: Then there’s the anagram game at the end.
TRALDI: There’s the anagram game at the end. Yes, it’s the—and I don’t think there are many games like that in any of the other Austen.
OLIVER: People play games, but we’re not taken into them and have them narrated in that way.
TRALDI: And they’re not word games in general. There’s card games and things like that. And you know, in Pride and Prejudice, Wickham has all these gambling debts and things like that.
OLIVER: Yes.
TRALDI: You know, in—I don’t know if you know Whit Stillman, but for the same magazine a couple years ago I wrote about Whit Stillman, who’s a sort of conservative filmmaker who’s a huge Austen fan and brings in Austenian themes to a lot of his movies, but writes them about characters in the 1960s and ’70s. And one of them was called The Last Days of Disco, for example, about—and some of the broader social themes he talks about are also there in Austen.
So one thing that was just on the edges of my consciousness as I read through the novels for this essay was the question of the noble man versus the working man, which I think is very present in Austen and has something to do with her conception of virtue: that the virtuous person will be engaging in commerce in some way.
OLIVER: Those moments of the noble and the virtuous man or whatever often take place in a shop, like the drapier in Emma or the jewelry shop in Sense and Sensibility.
TRALDI: That’s interesting. That’s interesting.
OLIVER: She’s very careful to take us into a commercial situation and contrast.
TRALDI: See, that is the sort of detail that I think a philosopher—I think we—the mere—the vibe of, “You’re in a shop, and this means something.” I think this is something philosophers are—we can watch for the action; we can judge the characters’ actions. But then there are these questions of atmosphere and milieu. And certain things happen in a shop; certain things happen at the seaside. In Persuasion there’s an injury by the seaside.
OLIVER: Yes. That’s one of the most exciting scenes in Austen. Very dramatic.
TRALDI: Yes, yes. I think actually Persuasion in some ways is quite different than her other books. It has a sort of—you know, in some ways it feels a little more like Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights at points. There’s a little bit of a windblown, dark quality to it at times. It’s a little bit bleaker. It’s a little hard to explain why, but that’s just a feeling that I had reading it that maybe had changed with some of the other literary tastes of the time.
Artlessness in Austen’s Heroines
OLIVER: Now, the quality that you focus on in the heroines, in this question of virtue defending itself against bad actors who break the rules, is artlessness.
TRALDI: Yes. So this is a term Austen uses quite a bit, and almost always, she very much picks and chooses the characters who are going to receive this term. And I thought that this is like—it’s not only her artless characters who face this question about how can morality survive, or how can virtue prevail, but I think they’re the limit point.
Like, if you really are unwilling to use—and I mentioned in the essay, when Darcy describes—I forget what; maybe it’s him describing how he found Lydia and Wickham, or it’s something to do with Wickham—he said, “I had to resort to arts.” So it must be, the “arts” back then means—one of the meanings of the term is dishonesty or subterfuge or something.
OLIVER: Yes, if someone was artful, it could have—
TRALDI: Yes, like the Artful Dodger.
OLIVER: Exactly. Could have negative connotations for sure.
TRALDI: Yes. And so the artless one, you know, they’re missing something.
So it’s the question of, if you view—morality in a way means you’re missing something, right? You’ve taken arts out of your arsenal. You’ve taken tools that could deal with certain situations, and you’ve just decided not to use them. So the question is, how can it be an advantage to have less tools?
You know, we’re here at Mercatus; the economists would tell you it’s never advantageous to have fewer choices, right? There’s no paradox of choice. It’s never advantageous to have fewer choices. And so I think this is the—if morality is a kind of unilateral disarmament, artlessness is the clearest case of that.
OLIVER: And you’re seeing that in Fanny Price, Elinor—
TRALDI: You see that in Fanny Price. You see that in Elinor. Harriet Smith is described as artless over and over again. And then there are these other characters who are described as artful, or other things that are mentioned as arts.
I think Harriet, in a lot of ways, is the one who’s most often described this way. And it’s interesting because you think of Emma changing a lot in Emma, but Knightley actually shifts in his evaluation of Harriet, who he thought of as sort of an unserious person. And Knightley himself comes to recognize her artlessness as a kind of seriousness which makes her a good match, not ultimately for him, but for his dude, Robert.
OLIVER: The farmer.
TRALDI: The farmer, yes.
OLIVER: He doesn’t change his view of her social position, though.
TRALDI: No, certainly not. But he does change his view of her character, basically. You know, her artlessness is not silliness. It has a sort of depth to it.
And yes, certainly Fanny. In the Whit Stillman movie Metropolitan that’s part of what set me on this, there’s this whole discussion of the book Mansfield Park and this old Lionel Trilling essay about it where he says, how is it—there’s this question about how modern people can even like Mansfield Park because we’ve sort of lost the notion of virtue being exciting or something.
One of the most provocative lines to me in Austen was in Sense and Sensibility where it says that Elinor glories in Edward’s integrity, which is an odd thing to glory in. You don’t glory—nobody is on Instagram showing off their integrity, you know?
OLIVER: It’s like that René Gerard quote people like to pass around: “Everyone is on diet pills and nobody wants to be a saint.”
TRALDI: I like that. That is very Instagrammable.
OLIVER: Exactly. Exactly.
TRALDI: That’s very good, actually. I like that. Yes, so there’s something provocative about the notion that virtue can be exciting, and in particular can be romantically exciting.
The Importance of Integrity
OLIVER: Or even less than that. One thing I think is difficult for people interpreting Austen today is that virtue, whether it’s exciting or romantically exciting, or the notion of integrity is of interest for its own sake.
There’s a lot of—you know, we have integrity as an organization. It’s very important for me to have integrity as a professional. But there’s not as much a sense of, just having integrity is the good life. We don’t need to be complicated about this. That’s just—you should just do that. And Austen’s very firm on that all the way through.
And criticism wants to pull her towards sometimes feminism, sometimes discussions of slavery, sometimes various other things. And she’s just constantly sort of resisting that by saying, “I like integrity. I like good people. I don’t think it’s that hard.” It’s a good line you’ve picked up on, I think.
TRALDI: There’s a character in The Wire who says, “A man’s gotta have a code.” I think he’s Omar, who murders the drug dealers and steals from them.
OLIVER: I haven’t seen it.
TRALDI: So he says, “A man’s gotta have a code.” And I think there is a—even in a character who in some ways is bad, we admire the integrity of having a code and sticking to it.
There is this debate, I guess in moral philosophy, or at least on the outskirts of moral philosophy, about, “Well, if your code is wrong, maybe it’s better not to stick to it.” I don’t share that perspective. I think part of the good life is holding yourself to certain standards. And if those standards turn out to be wrong, the holding yourself is still of moral value, right? Not allowing yourself—
OLIVER: It doesn’t mean they’re not adjustable.
TRALDI: Yes, no, of course. If you decide the standards are wrong, and in Austen—
OLIVER: It’s sort of implicit in the idea of having standards that you will be honest and therefore accept when your standards need to be improved or whatever. Right?
TRALDI: Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. And in Austen we certainly see people shifting their standards. And I think one thing that I—of course, modern readers and watchers of Austen do not quite understand some of these things. But I think in Pride and Prejudice in particular, we’re supposed to feel that Lizzy Bennet is quite hard on people and has to learn to improve herself in that way.
OLIVER: We’re delighted with her when she does that because we think it’s sassy.
TRALDI: Yes, exactly. If you go on YouTube, you can see all these, like, “Lizzy Bennet owning people’s lives for 50 minutes,” these compilations of clips from the various movies or whatever. And she’s obviously very, very clever.
But she realizes—after coming to understand who Wickham is and feeling that she might not have another chance with Darcy, she comes to realize that she has had certain prejudices, which have made her blind to the realities of the world and blind to what might be her best options.
So yes, I was saying I believe in integrity; that’s all I was saying. And integrity obviously is adjustable, but I tend to think that it’s better—even if the rule is wrong, it’s better for the person who has it to hold themselves to it, rather than to adjust to try to get an advantage.
And in philosophy, we have all sorts of terminology for these sorts of questions: “Are you an internalist or an externalist about reasons or about rules or whatever?” I think the more literary way to say it would just be that integrity is a virtue. And people should stick to their codes unless they see a good reason to change them.
Austen and Adam Smith
OLIVER: Now, you have recently been reading Adam Smith.
TRALDI: Yes, I did read a lot of Adam Smith for this debate we had last week. Although I did a poor job because I had forgotten that the debate was about whether Smith was a philosopher or an economist. [laughter] I thought it was simply, is he a philosopher or not? So I put myself in the odd position of arguing that Adam Smith is not an economist.
But yes, I think it’s obvious—without knowing the background, I’m sure there are scholarly questions about, how much Smith did Austen read? And they’re both 250th—a lot was happening in 1775 and 1776.
OLIVER: Those were great years. Those were the good old days.
TRALDI: They were great years. In the great books syllabus, you get to the end of the 1700s and suddenly there’s this—you have Smith, you have Kant, you have the American Revolution, you have the French Revolution, you have Burke. Rousseau is right before, Montesquieu is right before. I mean, it was a real—
OLIVER: It’s a great time.
TRALDI: It was a great time. A lot was being done. And obviously, you know, I love the 1800s. I love the Romantics. But you could teach a whole great books course from 1750 to 1800, probably.
OLIVER: You’ve also got all the dictionaries and all that kind of work going on as well. It’s a very, very fertile—explorations.
TRALDI: Yes, yes. There’s all sorts of—yes, it was an amazing time.
OLIVER: So did you, having read these two, Austen and Smith, close together—
TRALDI: Yes, and I should say that my reading of Austen was much more careful than my reading of Smith.
OLIVER: Sure, but you wrote this before you read Smith.
TRALDI: Yes, absolutely.
OLIVER: Or at least you fully conceived it. Do you see a lot of Smith in Austen?
TRALDI: “A lot” might be—
OLIVER: Primarily from Theory of Moral Sentiments.
TRALDI: So I would say that the notion of sympathy as being fundamentally part of how you recognize a good person seems to me to be there in Austen. The characters are—
OLIVER: And this is the thing about awareness of other people and learning from that awareness.
TRALDI: Awareness of other people and learning from other people and feeling other people’s emotions. One thing that is related to sympathy in an odd way—and I think actually Austen and Smith conceive of it a bit differently, but that is there for both of them, in particular in Sense and Sensibility—is this notion of self-control or self-command.
OLIVER: Self command. Yes. Yes.
The Importance of Self-Command
TRALDI: Now, Smith gives a really odd argument about self command, which is that if you don’t have control over your emotions, you will end up feeling or expressing something that other people can’t sympathize with. And this is bad because sympathy is good, or something like that. I actually think it’s a rather confused argument.
OLIVER: I think what he’s saying is that if you display a lack of self-command, then no matter what you are feeling, people find it difficult to deal with that sort of uncontrolled behavior. It’s not the particular expression of feeling; it’s the fact that you are a little unstable or—
TRALDI: Yes, I think that’s right.
OLIVER: —a bit extra.
TRALDI: I think what Smith doesn’t do is explain quite how that’s bad. But what I think is that actually, in Sense and Sensibility, it’s a little bit the reverse, where actually Elinor and their mother, they do sympathize with Marianne. They do feel what she’s feeling after—who’s the other, the w guy in Sense and Sensibility? They’re all w’s.
OLIVER: Oh, Willoughby.
TRALDI: Willoughby, right, right. Not Wickham, Willoughby. When Willoughby—
OLIVER: You can just say “the cad.”
TRALDI: The cad. There’s always a cad. So when the cad leaves, Marianne has all these emotions, and you really feel them. And Marianne also has a lack of self-command when Willoughby is there. There’s this whole episode, which I didn’t quite make the most of but felt very important, where they go to the house of this woman. They just sort of barge into this house, Willoughby and Marianne.
And this is really supposed to show something about the relationship. If you and your partner barge into somebody’s house, it can’t be a good relationship somehow because it’s leading you into bad actions. That’s my sense of what that episode is supposed to show from the highest possible remove.
OLIVER: I think, yes, and I think there are several other instances of that: when they ride in the carriage together, unaccompanied.
TRALDI: Right, right.
OLIVER: And there’s a sort of general consternation about this. And Marianne sort of says, “Oh, well, how can it be a problem?” And they—part of the consternation is, you’re breaking the rules in a very flagrant way, but also that you are assuming that it’s okay because you’ll get married. And this assumption is a very big one.
TRALDI: Yes. And obviously there is this assumption that—she doesn’t recognize quite how—she thinks her position is much more secure than it actually is, which is how it turns out in the book. But I think we’re supposed to think that even if she were right about Willoughby’s affection, which in a sense, she—Willoughby—
OLIVER: No. Even if they do get married, she’s broken the rules in a way that—
TRALDI: She’s broken certain rules in a way that is—but I think what’s different from Smith is, there is sympathy from her family even though she lacks self-command. But that is precisely—so it’s sort of a different theory of why self-command is good. It’s precisely because her emotional state is actually draining for her family.
And then Elinor says—when she learns that Elinor has actually been going through something—
OLIVER: The same.
TRALDI: —very similar, and maybe even rougher, in this whole thing with Lucy Steele telling her about this, you know, blah, blah, blah.
OLIVER: Which is a beautiful name—to steal. I mean, it’s great.
TRALDI: It’s an amazing—honestly, in some ways Sense and Sensibility may have been my favorite. I think it’s just lovely.
OLIVER: If I just wanted to just read one for fun, that’s what I go to. I do, yes.
TRALDI: Yes. And there’s a lot—none of these things are quite perfectly in there. But I think honestly, everything that’s in the other novels has a little part to play in Sense and Sensibility. You know, I think if I were to recommend just one, if somebody was like, “I have time for just one,” I might recommend Sense and Sensibility.
But in the end, Marianne says—again, it’s one of these amazingly evocative lines. Elinor says, “You didn’t act that badly. Do you compare your conduct with Willoughby’s?” And she says, “No, I compare it with—Elinor, I compare it with your conduct. You have this self-command.”
And it’s precisely the fact—it’s not—and I think this is why philosophers do like Austen, because it’s not—it’s still literary, but there is a precision to her moral evaluations. It’s precisely the fact that Elinor knew that her family loved her and didn’t want to burden—it’s all quite conscious. She didn’t want to burden her family with her emotions. But you actually see that Elinor has this family trait of having very strong sentiment, which Marianne does, and simply also has this virtue of self-command.
And that is—there are film adaptations and TV adaptations that demonstrate self-command, but it’s a very hard thing to film. It’s something you feel inside. It’s a very hard—the actors have to be very good for you to see—you see pieces of it in some of the adaptations of Persuasion and some of the adaptations of Sense and Sensibility, but self-command is very hard to find.
Austen Adaptations
OLIVER: Which adaptations do you like the best?
TRALDI: I’m forgetting—I often like the long ones that I think were for the British ITV. So I like the—I think Kate Beckinsale was in the Emma one. Although I think there was one of Persuasion, which was also quite good. I like the one of Northanger Abbey. I don’t think it’s that good, but it’s kind of cute, which I think it’s probably the cutest of her long novels.
Whit Stillman did a very loose adaptation of Lady Susan, which is hilariously funny at times, and also has Kate Beckinsale and some other great actors in it.
OLIVER: Did you see the new Persuasion on Netflix a couple of years ago?
TRALDI: No. No.
OLIVER: It has that—is it Dakota Johnson, the actress, who’s famous for other non-Austenian—Fifty Shades of Grey or whatever.
TRALDI: Yes, and isn’t she one of the Avengers or something like that?
OLIVER: Something like that. But everyone was very upset that it was this terrible adaptation.
TRALDI: Oh, yes.
OLIVER: Didn’t—it sort of killed all of Austen’s words. She looks at the camera; she drinks from the bottle. I actually thought it was quite fun. On the basis that all adaptations are bad—
TRALDI: I think if you allow some looseness, it can be quite fun. So for example, the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, I think if you’re just sort of like, “Well, this is just somebody who was inspired by Pride and Prejudice,” you can have a lot of fun with the movie.
OLIVER: I think as an interpretation of the book, that film is quite bad.
TRALDI: Oh, yes. I think it’s absolutely missing the mark.
OLIVER: But in terms of like, the countryside and the house and the geese and the food, it’s fantastic.
TRALDI: Oh, yes. It’s lovely to look at.
OLIVER: The dresses, right? The clothes are amazing.
TRALDI: And a lot of the—and the cast is honestly like—
OLIVER: Yes, it’s great.
TRALDI: The cast is really, really great. And the parts as they are—
OLIVER: Rosamund Pike is maybe the best Jane on TV.
TRALDI: She’s terrific. And who’s the one who plays Kitty?
OLIVER: Yes.
TRALDI: Who is in—and the father is the guy from The Hunger Games. I forget his name, but I think the father is excellent in that. But of course, it’s not exactly the father from Austen.
OLIVER: No, no, no.
TRALDI: But as a movie itself—but yes, I like a lot of these longer TV versions.
One odd thing—they make these choices. So there is some scholarly apparatus brought to bear on some of them. So I think maybe it’s Persuasion that there were multiple versions of, and some of the adaptations use pieces from the unpublished version, which are interesting. And as I was reading it, I had to Google around a bit and figure out these things.
Austen’s Moral Precision
TRALDI: I was going to say about Austen’s moral precision, the other place where I think this comes in—and I wrote a bit about this in the essay—is near the end of Mansfield Park, when—the names are what I’m worst at—when Edmund, right, is finally disillusioned with—
OLIVER: Mary.
TRALDI: With Mary Crawford?
OLIVER: Mm-hmm.
TRALDI: It’s because there was this affair. There’s always a sibling or a cousin who makes some horrible mistake, you know? So there was this affair, and Mary Crawford can only criticize it by saying that they weren’t very prudent, you know, in prudential terms. They took a big risk. They made a bad decision. You know, they really screwed themselves over.
OLIVER: They could have made it work. Yes.
TRALDI: Yes. And Edmund realizes that she lacks moral fervor because he thinks the appropriate criticism should be a moral one. And as a psychological matter, it shouldn’t even enter your head, I think is the idea. I’m extrapolating a bit, but if you see somebody acting this badly, to then say, “Well, geez, you’re doing something that isn’t in your interest”—for that to be your first thought indicates that your priorities are highly misplaced in a way that, to him, is quite unattractive.
And this also struck me as a moment of—this is something we philosophers talk about. What is the distinction between prudence and morality? They both tell you what you should do, in some sense, but there’s different—the shoulds have different forces, right? So Edmund has a certain moral precision and sensitivity which, actually, Fanny is basically the only person he knows—not that everybody in the house is a bad person; his father is a decent guy, and one of the aunts is okay, I think.
But yes, there’s a real sophistication to this evaluation. And it’s funny to me that she actually used this as the—I mean, I suspect that even at the time there were readers who were just like, “Wait, I really don’t get what the nature of Edmund’s problem is here,” because it’s not like Mary—Mary’s not like, “Oh, yes, I support infidelity.” You know? She’s not like— it’s if you blinked, you might miss it, the mistake that Mary has made.
And so I do think that even though she’s not making arguments, she’s not laying out philosophical theories, there is a level of precision in her thinking about virtue, which I do think is something that it took me a little aback.
And I think it’s part of why—one person who quote-tweeted my article was Daniel Kodsi, who’s a friend of our colleague John Maier and his coauthor often. And he runs this magazine called The Philosophers’ Magazine, which I had written before. And Daniel quote-tweeted my article with something like, “Add Oliver to the list of all the philosophers who love Austen.”
OLIVER: And it’s a long list.
TRALDI: And I think it’s a long list. And I do think this precision is part of it that she does, that it is—again, it’s not like a philosophy journal article, but it is an intellectual sophistication that is often not present in novelists that we really appreciate.
Every Word Matters
OLIVER: I mean, one way people talk about the great books is to say that every word matters. And a lot of novelists will say that about their own. Well, you know, Elizabeth Bowen used to say, “What you’re doing is to make everything count.” Austen is one of the examples where it’s actually true. Every word is being used carefully.
TRALDI: Yes. It’s funny, this bears on another Twitter argument I had recently about this phrase logographic necessity. Basically, every word in a great book is there for a reason. I think that’s right. Although you have to be careful about—if you were to say, “Well, every word in Plato is there for a reason, so you can’t really say he’s wrong about every—” you would be kind of abandoning the philosophical mission.
OLIVER: I mean it in the sense of what you might call the artistic or structural integrity of the book. Not everything has to tell in the meaning sense. But it all holds as a unit for some—
TRALDI: Yes. I think everything is there—there is what we could call an internal reason for everything to be there. Everything is there to hold together—
OLIVER: Like the making of a piece of furniture or something.
TRALDI: And I think you hear—I think this is one thing that—and not all classical music, but I think it’s one thing that distinguishes classical music even from very good contemporary pop music or jazz or rock music, is that you have this sense of, “Yes, every note I hear basically is holding up a larger structure of some sort.”
OLIVER: Yes. And Jane Austen is very Mozart in that way.
TRALDI: Yes, I think that’s right. Yes.
Austen’s Place in Great Books Programs
OLIVER: So should Jane Austen have a bigger place on great books programs, based on all these things you’ve said about her?
TRALDI: Yes, this is—so, there was actually a debate—I did not write the piece in response to this debate, but this is—
OLIVER: Tanner Greer.
TRALDI: Yes, there was—Tanner Greer weighed in on this, and my friend Circe. I think—
OLIVER: I think they’re just desperately wrong.
TRALDI: You think they don’t—that she—
OLIVER: I think Emma is obviously a book that should be on one of these syllabuses. Maybe Sense and Sensibility.
TRALDI: Yes. I think the ones I would consider are Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park. I do think they’re actually longer than I realized, which is always—I mean, there are these very practical concerns with putting together a syllabus.
OLIVER: Sure, sure. Although I want to ask you about that, because my response to a lot of these debates, which is maybe just because of where I studied, but just make them read more. And if they don’t do the reading, that’s their, you know—
TRALDI: That’s true. Well, I don’t want to get into this too much. We already make them read a lot compared to—so for example, a year ago, I had my students read two novels in a week, which is more than most courses make college students read.
OLIVER: But that’s by no means unreasonable.
TRALDI: No, no, of course, of course.
OLIVER: You know.
TRALDI: Well, exigencies of the teenage mind aside—
OLIVER: Because I often think this, when people debate how things should be taught and why it’s so important to keep these programs, and they’ll talk about the importance of writing essays. And then it turns out the students maybe write one essay a semester. And I sort of think, well, who cares? All this rhetoric for one essay.
TRALDI: Yes. I don’t know if I’m really ever going to assign essays again. It just is—the age of AI is upon us.
OLIVER: Sure. But you see what I mean.
TRALDI: No, yes, I know exactly what you mean. And I do think reading a lot is the main part of—and certainly, you know, when I read all seven of these in two weeks, that’s much more reading than I normally do, as well, to write this essay.
OLIVER: But you didn’t have to lie on the sofa afterwards with a cold compress. You were fine.
TRALDI: In a way it was a really good two weeks. If you get to read—I mean, this is why we have good lives, right? If you get to read Jane Austen and you call that work, it’s a nice life.
OLIVER: So yes, will you be putting Emma on your program?
TRALDI: I would definitely consider Emma. I would definitely consider Sense and Sensibility. I would consider Mansfield Park. I think these are the ones that have—the moral element is very prominent. But it’s obviously there in all of her books.
OLIVER: You can have a really good moral discussion about Mansfield Park, which is a bigger, broader thing than Pride and Prejudice, for example.
TRALDI: Yes, I think so. I would definitely consider—in the 1800s there were—obviously the British novel of the 1800s was a big deal, and there’s—
OLIVER: [laughs] We did quite well, yes.
TRALDI: You all did quite well. So the ones we did at Tulsa—we had Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights and The Picture of Dorian Gray. And then we had one Irish, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And I don’t think anybody—if you replaced one of those with Emma or Mansfield Park, I don’t think anybody would say, “Oh, you made a horrible call.”
OLIVER: I think Tanner’s point was that you simply don’t have that many slots for an English novel that deals with these sorts of ideas, and that it should obviously be Middlemarch because that is the bigger novel. It’s about bigger questions of society. It’s about the whole—it’s got more greatness in it, whereas Austen is sort of more about the individual.
TRALDI: So I do think that this question of greatness—I think there are some people who read Austen and they think, “Well, this is—obviously it has all these sorts of themes, but it’s not great. It has this littleness to it. It has this smallness to it.”
OLIVER: It’s domestic.
TRALDI: That is not my reading of it. I think if that’s the question, I don’t feel that way. I think it pulls out these great themes about the nature of virtue and the nature of moral learning, becoming a better person, the nature of love. We read Sappho. We read the Symposium.
To me, you read Wuthering Heights and you say, “Oh, this is a really big book because it’s about society and how trauma gets passed down, and it has these horror elements, and it’s very dark.” But actually, it’s quite hard to figure out, how do we turn Wuthering Heights in a discussion about how to live? With Austen, it’s just completely straightforward.
OLIVER: [laughs] How not to live, maybe.
TRALDI: Yes. In Austen, it’s just completely straightforward. This is the discussion. This is what she had in mind as well, this question of how to live. So to me, Austen is completely—in terms of her successes as an artist, she belongs. In terms of her themes, she belongs. So I would not rule her out. I think she is absolutely a great, and who knows what that means, but I think she would be completely appropriate on any of these syllabi.
Reading Plans
OLIVER: Very good. And what will you read next?
TRALDI: What will I read next? I mean, our—from the beginning, I’m thinking I should read some more poetry. It’s been a while. Actually, speaking of—this is funny. Well, I want to get into William Empson. He had an odd life, which I think somebody should do like a movie about him or something.
OLIVER: Yes, he’d make a great movie.
TRALDI: I think Empson would be a good movie. So that might be—
OLIVER: Are you going to read the poems or the criticism?
TRALDI: Probably a little of both, but that’s for a while from now. I think, you know, at the moment I’m back to reading philosophy. So what novel will I read next? That’s a good question. What should I read next?
OLIVER: If you like Jane Austen?
TRALDI: Yes.
OLIVER: Maybe read one of the people that she admired, like Samuel Richardson or Fanny Burney, someone like that.
TRALDI: You know, I do think—you saying Samuel Richardson reminded me, I’ve read very little Samuel Johnson. I think reading some of the great critics, I think, writing this piece—
OLIVER: Oh, Johnson, yes. You would like Johnson.
TRALDI: I think I would like Johnson. I think I would like Empson. The history of literary criticism is something I have very, very little idea of.
OLIVER: Oh, well, then, Johnson. I mean, he’s the best.
TRALDI: Yes, I think I should, I should definitely read Johnson.
OLIVER: English literary criticism begins and ends with Samuel Johnson.
TRALDI: You know what, this is a little different, but—I might have talked about this with you a little bit—I want to read The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville, because reading about Smith—a lot of the ideas that we think of as Smithian are actually Mandevillian, and he kind of moderated them.
OLIVER: Well, he hated Mandeville.
TRALDI: Yes.
OLIVER: Very hard on him.
TRALDI: Yes. So a lot—like the invisible hand, it’s only a small part of Smith’s thinking, but it was like the entirety of Mandeville’s thinking, this sort of dynamic.
OLIVER: Well, I think it means different things for them. I think Mandeville, in a funny way, is more philosophical in the sense you were saying, and trying to make these propositions. And Smith was saying, “Well, what about feelings? What about all these funny things that we can’t account for? Like, look around. It’s too messy.”
TRALDI: No, that makes sense to me. Yes, I think between Mandeville and Smith, Mandeville is somebody who thought virtue was sort of like a con.
OLIVER: A fool’s game.
TRALDI: Exactly. You’re sort of a sucker if you try to be virtuous.
OLIVER: I think he also just assumed that if you were commercial, you were obviously on the get.
TRALDI: Yes. But this is one of the great—I know we talked about this, but it’s one of the great—you see this in Smith, you see this in Austen—commerce has its own virtues, and they are very traditional virtues. You have to be trustworthy. You have to be pleasant. You can’t really be wholly self-interested in every moment because people have to be willing to deal with you given your—I mean, think about Yelp reviews or even just word of mouth. “Oh, that person screwed me over.”
OLIVER: There’s a discussion in one of Hayek’s papers, which is—it’s a very Smithian point he makes about, the nature of the knowledge problem means that it’s not so much that I’m trying to get information about the thing you’re trying to sell me, but I’m really trying to get information about you and whether you are someone I should be buying from. Which is exactly the project that the novelists and Smith—there’s a sort of period between Smith and the early novelists, running through Austen to George Eliot, when they’re all working on that problem together.
TRALDI: Yes. I do think in Austen, it’s often—the real puzzle is, how do you make out somebody else’s character?
OLIVER: Exactly.
TRALDI: This is a phrase that Lizzy Bennet does use with regard to Darcy. And how do we actually figure out who the trustworthy and untrustworthy people are?
OLIVER: And if you’re too philosophical about that, in the sort of analytic sense, I think you can end up not paying enough attention to the particulars of that question.
TRALDI: Yes.
OLIVER: Because when you actually try and do it, it’s really, really hard.
TRALDI: Yes. And I think this is the sort of—reading Austen, you get a sense of—and there are very few philosophy papers on things like this. Reading Austen, you get a sense of, what sorts of details in a normal life are the ones that I can extract information from to make out somebody else’s character?
In philosophy, we do ask, what is a good character and what is the good action in this sort of situation? What is the bad action in this sort of situation? But it’s not for the philosopher to say, “Okay, in the sorts of situations you’re likely to be in, what do you pay—where do you direct your attention to try to figure out these things about?”
And it’s not—I don’t think Austen—it’s not super subtle either. In Persuasion—I mentioned in the essay—in Persuasion, it starts out by saying Anne really cared about paying off the family’s debts, and the rest of her family didn’t give a s**t, you know? And it’s sort of like, okay, so we just immediately are like, Anne’s the sort of person who you might want to have a business transaction with because if she has a debt to you, she might actually pay it. And I forget if that’s the exact detail, but it’s something like that, you know?
OLIVER: And there’s also the novelist—Jane Austen is very good at what you don’t see, which again, is not always something easy for philosophy to handle. But it’s very important, I think, that even though this novel is supposed to be about Anne, she doesn’t appear—she’s mentioned in passing in the first chapter, and she doesn’t actually appear until the next chapter.
And you’re, I think, supposed to become aware of the fact that she’s treated in that way, and she’s seen in that way, through her—and there are a lot of these absences. The carpenter in Mansfield Park who builds the theater stage, he never actually comes onto the page. They mention him, but he’s never in the room.
And there’s a sense of that in Pride and Prejudice with Mary. We’re very aware when she quotes a sermon and everyone laughs, but she’s actually always there, on the margin. And occasionally Austen reminds us, “Oh, poor Mary couldn’t deal with the party, couldn’t—” And I think you’re supposed to try and keep in mind, Poor Mary is here for this scene. And we are forgetting. And this is another interesting way she explores these ideas.
TRALDI: Yes, I definitely felt in the beginning of Persuasion, this is the longest that it takes for a main character to be introduced.
The Fates of the Bennet Sisters
TRALDI: What is your view of Mary? Because they’re making this show called The Other Bennet Sister about Mary.
OLIVER: Oh, yes. [laughs]
TRALDI: I feel like Mary—you are supposed to feel sorry for her, but you’re you’re also not—I don’t think she’s supposed to be thought of as a super virtuous character herself.
OLIVER: No. No, no, no. My view of Austen is that all of her novels are about moral education or the development of virtue, or whatever you want to call it. They’re basically structured as quests. And Austen is engaged with the culture wars of her times, and she’s offering an alternative way of thinking about it.
So rather than the sort of sermons, op-eds, and all this war of pen and ink that’s going on, she’s trying to do something sort of philosophical, but more literary, and to tend to say, “Look, you’ve got to turn away from these arguments and sides. You have to go out into the world and figure it out.”
So Lizzy Bennet never comes to the proper realizations of herself and Darcy and everyone until she gets in her carriage and drives around Derbyshire and talks to a servant and sort of goes on that journey into the unknown. And we’re told very clearly at the end, Lizzy and Jane get married, happy ever after. Lydia is in perpetual “quest,” quote unquote, for security and nice lodging. And she never finds it. They just have to live in perpetual quest. I think that’s very telling.
Kitty goes to live with her elder sisters, and Austen says it does her the world of good. She doesn’t turn out like Lydia after all. She gets brought up properly when she goes away from home. And Mary, because she’s now left on her own, has room to flourish, and she goes out with her mother and she socializes. And she finds it awkward, and her mother’s quite embarrassing, but actually it’s the best thing that ever happened to her.
And just like Smith says, and just like Austen says, you can only learn these things in real life, in practice. That’s what Mary’s missing. And she’s there always as a reminder that the Mr. Collins culture wars approach, that can also happen to you just as a bookish nerd staying at home. It’s what happens to Mr. Bennet. And in a way, there is a novel to be written about her, but it’s picking up from the very—almost on the last page when she tells us—
TRALDI: Yes, that’s interesting. That’s a very—
OLIVER: It’s a great detail.
TRALDI: No, that’s a very compelling interpretation of the fate of the sisters at the end. I think that’s completely convincing.
Commercial Virtues
TRALDI: There was one thing—and I know this is sort of repeating something, and I know you were trying to wrap up, so I’m happy to wrap up whenever. But you talked about Lizzy talking to the servants. I think it’s very important that you see the impression that Lizzy gets from the servants, who are people who Darcy deals with in a commercial way.
These are the people who he has commercial relationships with, but they’re also warm commercial relationships. And this is contrasted with—she learns Wickham has actually built up all these gambling debts, right? You learn these characters, but the characters have something to do with, how do these people deal with the people who they have to transact with?
And I think that sort of resolves the—there’s this question of, should we be transactional? Is Austen telling us to be transactional about love and marriage? In a sense, yes, but that’s not a cold transactionalism. It’s not the way we would—it’s not the negative sense of being transactional that we would normally—
OLIVER: Right, right, right.
TRALDI: These days, if you say, “Well, that woman is transactional about her relationships,” it means the opposite of what people like Smith and Austen think we should be in our commercial relationships, right?
OLIVER: Brings this out beautifully in Sense and Sensibility in the jewelry shop. Do you remember this? Elinor goes in because she has to sell some of her mother’s old jewels to try and eke out their income. And she’s there to bargain. She’s going to try and get a good price because she needs—another 10 pounds is really important to her.
TRALDI: Yes, yes.
OLIVER: Her brother John, because they’re in London, comes in coincidentally and says, “Oh, you’re here. What are you doing here? Woo woo woo,” and just goes up, pays the price, and takes the jewels off to his wife. And it’s almost like Jeeves and Wooster. He’s the idiot, aristocratic, sort of gullible, no commercial sense, no haggling at all.
And then there’s the fussy old man with his toothpick case. “Do I want a pearl inlaid here? Maybe I want the pearl down there.” And Elinor is made to wait for 20 minutes, and Austen says something like, “until the man decided that he could live until next Wednesday when the pearls would be properly embedded.” And I think she’s showing us these Smithian distinctions between ways of being commercial, ways of having transactions.
And Elinor comes out of that very honest, very straightforward, very virtuous in her commerciality, and the other two are sort of greedy, myopic—
TRALDI: I mean, I do think certainly Sense and Sensibility—obviously these families, there’s always something hanging over every family in Austen. And in Sense and Sensibility, it’s the unwillingness of the brother and his wife to support—I mean, I forget the details of the family relationships, but to support Elinor and Marianne.
OLIVER: That’s right. I can’t remember if they’re stepsiblings or half-siblings. So he’s inherited all the money. They’re stepsiblings, I think. And his father said, “Look after the girls.” And the wife talks him down from giving them, I can’t remember, 200 a year to the occasional 10 pounds.
TRALDI: It’s talked down; it gets cut to like 20 percent or something of the original.
OLIVER: Oh, it’s cut to, “Do it at your own discretion.” So the poor women are left on their meager income.
TRALDI: Yes. Yes. And it’s shown that, like Anne, Elinor is really the only one who is sensible enough to deal with these new circumstances.
OLIVER: Has any household economy. Yes. Exactly. So these commercial virtues are in the home. They’re in the shop.
TRALDI: Yes.
OLIVER: Yes, exactly. So Oliver’s essay was published in Fusion. It is called “Jane Austen’s Virtuous Liberalism.” You can go and read it. And Oliver, thank you very much. This was great.
TRALDI: Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun.


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What a delight to talk to laura thompson about Agatha Christie. Above all, this episode was fun. Laura really does know more than anyone about Agatha and we covered a lot. What did Agatha Christie read? What did she love about Shakespeare? Was she pro-hanging? Why so much more Poirot than Marple? Why was she so productive during the war? We also talked Wagner, modern art, the other Golden Age writers, nursery rhymes, TV adaptations, poshness, nostalgia, Mary Westmacott, and plenty more.
Transcript
HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to the very splendid Laura Thompson. All of you will know Laura’s Substack. She has also written books about the Mitfords, heiresses, Lord Lucan, many other subjects, and most importantly today, Agatha Christie, who died 50 years ago. And there’s a new book coming from Laura about Agatha Christie’s 1926 disappearance.
Laura, welcome.
LAURA THOMPSON: So lovely to be here, Henry. I’m such a fan of your Substack, as you know.
OLIVER: Well, same. Same. This is a mutual admiration call.
THOMPSON: Well, thank you. Well, that’s what we like.
Christie’s Favorite Writers
OLIVER: Now tell me, what did Agatha Christie like to read?
THOMPSON: Oh, a lot the same as us. I discovered she was a huge fan of Elizabeth Bowen, as we are. And Nancy Mitford, Muriel Spark. But her big love really was Dickens. She absolutely adored Dickens. I mean, she grew up in a house full of books, you know, and she wrote a screenplay of Bleak House for which she was handsomely paid. And it was never—I know, don’t you long to know what that was like? Can you imagine—
OLIVER: We’ve lost it? We don’t have the typescript?
THOMPSON: I’ve never seen it. I mean, maybe—I don’t know whether it exists somewhere. But I just wonder how she tackled it, what she did. But yes, so that happened. And of course, Shakespeare, as we know from her books, which are full of subliminal and—I mean, you kind of notice them, but you don’t have to.
OLIVER: Yes. There’s Shakespeare in every book?
THOMPSON: No, but it’s there, particularly Macbeth, which I suppose figures.
OLIVER: Yeah.
THOMPSON: Like The Pale Horse is completely Macbeth themed. And when I was a kid reading them, I think she really—Tennyson she uses a lot—she affected my reading in a good way.
OLIVER: She sent you back to Shakespeare and the poets?
THOMPSON: Well, sent me to them as a kid, probably. And also, there’s a lot of Bible in her books, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.
OLIVER: Yes. Yes.
THOMPSON: Very easy facility with quoting the Bible.
Christie and Shakespeare
OLIVER: Now, what did she learn from Shakespeare? Because she clearly knows the plays in detail. She sees them a lot. She reads them. She and he are, I think, quite good plotters.
THOMPSON: Is she even better than he is?
OLIVER: Well, let’s not get into that. But there is a sort of, in a funny way, a kind of affinity between them as writers.
THOMPSON: That’s so interesting.
OLIVER: What do you think she learned from him?
THOMPSON: Tell me how you—how you see that.
OLIVER: Well, do you know that Margaret Rutherford adaptation, which probably you don’t like and I do—
THOMPSON: Go on.
OLIVER: It’s called Murder Most Foul, isn’t it?
THOMPSON: Yes.
OLIVER: And there’s something about the way that they can both walk the line between the sort of dark and deadly and the histrionic. Margaret Rutherford can’t walk that line, but Agatha Christie can, right?
THOMPSON: That’s really interesting.
OLIVER: And Miss Marple could come onstage in a couple of the plays. She’s not so far off from being a Queen Margaret or some—in her angry moments maybe, do you think?
THOMPSON: More rational, maybe.
OLIVER: Much more rational.
THOMPSON: Not so mad. Well, she’s not mad, Margaret, is she? But she’s upset.
OLIVER: She starts off as a much sort of nastier character—Murder at the Vicarage, right?
THOMPSON: Yes, she does. She was more acidic and then gradually—
OLIVER: Waspish.
THOMPSON: Waspish, and sort of mellowed. I see what you mean. And almost in the way that she calls herself—although that’s obviously not Shakespeare—calls herself Nemesis.
OLIVER: And the sense of atmosphere.
THOMPSON: Yes, and the way they’re structured. That’s not necessarily just true of Shakespeare, but there is this sort of act three entanglement and this beautiful act five resolution that goes on with a soliloquy, I suppose.
OLIVER: And some people think they both get confused in act four, but that’s obviously not true, that this is the real mess of the plot. I think she might have learned quite a lot from Shakespeare, right?
THOMPSON: That’s really interesting. But, you know, the way she writes about Shakespeare in her letters to her second husband, Max, because when she was living in London during the war and almost at her most productive—I mean, her productivity levels are insane. And hitting every ball for six, really, you know: Towards Zero, Five Little Pigs, a couple of Westmacotts, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. But she spent a lot of time going on her own to see Shakespeare.
She’s very—I hope I’m right in saying this—she’s very sort of Ernest Jones [CB1] in her approach. She doesn’t regard them so much as the products of words on a page; she regards them as rounded characters. Why were Goneril and Regan the way they were? What’s wrong with Ophelia? You feel like saying, “Well, whatever Shakespeare wanted it to be,” but she sees them in that way. And Iago particularly—
OLIVER: Yes.
THOMPSON: —is the one that gets her. Yes. In one of her, I better not say which, but a major, major novel.
And the book that she wrote under the name Mary Westmacott, The Rose and the Yew Tree, which I think might well be her best book of all. I think—well, I’ll just say she wrote these six books under a pseudonym, Mary Westmacott. People call them romantic novels; that’s sort of the last thing they are. And they’re very, very interesting mid-20th-century human condition novels, and they’re full of lots of stuff that she had to distill for the detective fiction. And she talks a lot about Iago in The Rose and the Yew Tree really interestingly, I think.
Christie on Shakespeare?
OLIVER: Now, Max said she should just write a book about Shakespeare, all this Shakespeare all the time. But she didn’t. Why?
THOMPSON: No. I don’t think she ever liked being told what to do.
OLIVER: [laughs]
THOMPSON: His letters to her are quite annoying, aren’t they?
OLIVER: Yes, yes. I’ve only read what’s in your book, but yes, I didn’t warm to him.
THOMPSON: I’m glad because people do. He gets a really good press even though he was unfaithful. But it worked, the marriage, because they both got what they wanted from it. But he said that, yes, and she says, “Oh no, they’re just thoughts for you.” I don’t think she would’ve felt the need, somehow. I think she liked saying things in her own more oblique way.
OLIVER: Save it for the novels.
THOMPSON: Yes, she’s a great mistress of the indirect, I think, really. The way she writes about Macbeth in The Pale Horse, which I think is a really underrated novel, including thoughts on how it should be staged, which are really interesting and very, very good. I think she would’ve preferred to do that and use it to her ends.
And of course, she has an incredibly powerful sense of evil, which I suppose is also in Shakespeare. Hers is a Christian sensibility, I mean, no question. People never talk about that, but it really is.
OLIVER: Was she pro hanging?
THOMPSON: Well, I think she took a kind of utilitarian approach that the innocent must be protected. And she took a view that if you’ve killed once, it becomes very easy to kill again because something in you has shifted, so you become a danger to the community. So I suppose in that sense she was.
I mean, Miss Marple was. She’s quite—“I really feel quite glad to think of him being hanged.”
OLIVER: It’s one of her most striking lines.
THOMPSON: It is, isn’t it?
OLIVER: Yes.
THOMPSON: So I suppose she was. I mean, I suppose she was. You know, she’s very modern, she’s very subtle in her thinking, but at the same time, she is a late Victorian product of her society. Yes.
Dickens and Christie’s Family
OLIVER: Now, you mentioned this Bleak House script. She loved Bleak House. Do we know what she loved about it? It’s obviously the first detective novel. Are there other factors?
THOMPSON: You are going to know—this is when I’m going to start coming across as an idiot. Is it written before The Moonstone? Yes, of course it is.
OLIVER: I think so. Yes. Yes. It’s the first time there’s a police detective in a major English novel.
THOMPSON: Okay. I think she—do you know, this is a really good question. I don’t actually know why she loved Dickens so much. She grew up—she had that rather intriguing upbringing whereby she had two much older siblings, a sister who was 11 years older, a brother who was 10 years older. Father died when she was 11.
So she grew up incredibly close with a really rather intriguing mother, Clara. This is in the house at Torquay. And her mother encouraged her in a way that, it seems to me, quite unusual for the time and for the class to which she belonged. Because it was never deemed that it would interfere with her marrying and leading a more conventional life. But she always wanted to express herself creatively. And I think her mother possibly was a frustrated creative. I don’t know. She had a lot of go in her.
And whether it was just something she read with—I think anything she did at an early age with her mother would’ve made a huge impression on her. I think what you read when you’re that age, you never quite—I never read Dickens at that age, so I’ve never quite got the habit.
OLIVER: But if she’s born in 1890, presumably her mother is just about old enough to have been alive when Dickens was alive. And so she’s got a somewhat direct—
THOMPSON: Yes, she was.
OLIVER: You know, it’s sort of back to the original culture of it, as it were.
THOMPSON: Yes. Isn’t that extraordinary?
OLIVER: Yes. Yes. It’s crazy to think. So she must have taken it in maybe in a more original way, somehow?
THOMPSON: Possibly. Certainly Tennyson, I get that feeling, because her mother wrote this rather leaden sub-Tennysonian poetry. [laughter] It’s like Tennyson on the worst day he ever had, but worse than that.
OLIVER: But worse, yes.
THOMPSON: Yes. And she wrote poetry like that, the mother, which is really rather sweet and touching to read. And obviously she would’ve been alive at the same time as Tennyson. So, yes, I’d never, ever thought of that before. Isn’t that extraordinary? I mean, they went to see Henry Irving.
OLIVER: Yes.
THOMPSON: Yes. And yet she feels—it just amazes me, this—so I’m leaping slightly here, but this 21st-century halo of cool that she has around her, Agatha Christie. [laughter] I know, it’s awful in a way, but the way she can be reinterpreted—that is a bit Shakespearean, in a way.
I don’t mean to make extravagant claims, but there’s a sort of translucent quality to what she writes that means that people can impose and pull it and twang it and know that she won’t let them down, as we are seeing constantly at the moment.
Art and Music
OLIVER: Yes. No, I agree. Other arts—we know about all this, she loves reading. What music did she enjoy, for example? Did she like paintings?
THOMPSON: Yes, she loved paintings. She liked modern art. She was painted by Kokoschka. It’s very good. And she writes about modern art. In Five Little Pigs, the painter in that is a modern artist.
And then music was her grand passion. I mean, music was her original career choice, as you know, of course. She must have had a good voice. She thought she could make a career of it. And she could play the piano. Beautiful piano at Greenway, it’s still there.
And they used to do this thing—I think it’s a lovely idea—as a family. They would fill in what they called the book of confessions, and it would be questions like, “What is your state of mind? If not yourself, who would you be?” And at the age of 63, which is the last time she filled it in, she wrote, “An opera singer.” So that was still what she would’ve dreamed of doing. She loved Wagner very, very deeply.
OLIVER: Okay. Interesting.
THOMPSON: And there’s a Wagner theme in a very late book, Passenger to Frankfurt, the one that everybody hates except me. And music, I mean, as a girl when—so her voice wasn’t strong enough for opera. I think her ultimate—same as I grew up wanting to be a ballet dancer, I think her ultimate would’ve been to sing Isolde at Covent Garden.
And in some of her short stories and in her first Mary Westmacott, which is called Giant’s Bread, which is about a musician—and she really inhabits this character, Vernon, and it’s all about modern music. And somebody who knew about this stuff, which I don’t, told me, “No, she knew. She knew what was going on. She knew about the trends.” This is in the late twenties.
And she always went to Beirut, and that was her real, real, real passion. She was one of those restlessly creative people. And her mother, God bless her, encouraged it.
Christie’s Uniqueness
OLIVER: What is it that distinguishes her from the other detective fiction writers? Because she doesn’t, to me, feel—she’s obviously part of this whole generation, this whole golden age, whatever you want to call it, but she doesn’t feel the same as them somehow.
THOMPSON: No.
OLIVER: What is that?
THOMPSON: Do you think it’s her simplicity, that distilled simplicity that she has? She doesn’t write linear; she writes geometric, I always think.
OLIVER: Tell me what you mean.
THOMPSON: Well, if you think of a book, the one I admire the most, as I constantly go on about, which is Five Little Pigs—you think about the amount of stuff that’s in that book. It’s a meditation on art versus life. The solution is unbelievably intriguing, I think. There’s a whole family psychodrama in there. And every move of the plot, she’s also moving on a—every move of the plot is impelled by a revelation of character. So plot and character are utterly intertwined, distilled together.
I don’t think any of the others can do that. I think Dorothy Sayers would take twice as many pages. And she’d dot every i and cross every t, and she couldn’t bear loose ends or anything, could she? And she liked to reveal her knowledge of other things, almost to—I think the others like you to know that they’re a bit better than the genre, maybe. Their detectives are superhuman, almost; wish-fulfillment man, almost.
She doesn’t do that with Poirot. He’s just pure omniscience, really, plus a few tics and traits and, you know, mustache. I think it’s that distillation and simplicity and the way she inhabits the genre in a way that the others don’t quite do. And at the same time, she’s redefining it from within.
OLIVER: There’s something as well, I think, about—she gets past the kind of Sherlock Holmes model in a different way. They still all have a bit of an overreliance on that, maybe.
THOMPSON: Yes.
OLIVER: Whereas Poirot in, what is it? In something like, is it Murder in the Mews? Very sort of Sherlock and Watson—
THOMPSON: Yes.
OLIVER: —kind of dynamic. But within, I don’t know, two or three novels, that’s gone, and he’s Poirot as we know him, as it were.
THOMPSON: Yes, yes.
OLIVER: And she kind of, as you say, makes it her own thing and goes off in new directions.
Christie and the Theater
THOMPSON: Yes. She’s sort of conceptual and the others aren’t quite, I think. She doesn’t do—she does something completely different with the whole concept of what a solution is, it seems to me. She doesn’t—it’s not Cluedo, is it? It’s not, there’s six of them, and eventually it has to be one of them; however many tergiversations or however you say that word, you sort of know that. Whereas with her, it’s: it’s nobody, or it’s everybody, or it’s the policeman, or it’s a child, or there’s something bigger and bolder going on.
And she writes—I think she writes very theatrically. I think she writes scenically. I think she’s incredibly good at character and action. That scene where you know the girl’s a thief because Poirot leaves out 23 pairs of silk stockings, and he goes back in the room and there’s 19 or something like that, tells you everything. It’s all in there.
OLIVER: The solution to 4.50 from Paddington, which we shan’t reveal, but—
THOMPSON: That’s Cards on the Table. But what I mean is, she’s given us a little scene that tells us all we need to know about that person, really: a sort of timid thief who can’t resist—
OLIVER: Yes, but that’s what I’m saying. At the end of 4.50, the solution is staged.
THOMPSON: Oh, sorry. Yes.
OLIVER: It is literally a little re-creation of the drama, if you see what I mean.
THOMPSON: Yes, I do. Sorry, Henry. Yes, absolutely.
OLIVER: No, no. We’re crossed wires.
THOMPSON: Yes, yes, yes.
OLIVER: But she is very theatrical, yes.
THOMPSON: No, you are absolutely right. That’s a reenactment.
OLIVER: Of something that was seen almost like in a—you know, the whole thing is very—
THOMPSON: Yes, yes. Well, she was a great—I mean, obviously Shakespeare, but she was a great lover of the theater as a medium. And of course, she wrote plays, as we know, which I think are far weaker than her books, myself.
OLIVER: Even The Mousetrap?
THOMPSON: Especially. [laughter] When did you last see it? Or have you not—
OLIVER: I’ve seen it once. I’ve seen it—you know, I don’t know, before I had children, a long time ago. And I thought it was great. It was a lot of fun. The ending of act one, when someone opens a door and they say, “Oh, it’s you.” It’s very dramatic moments. You don’t like it?
THOMPSON: No, I think you’re right. I wouldn’t mind seeing it done really, really well. There’s something strong at the heart of it, that theme that haunts a lot of her books about what happens to children who are unwanted.
OLIVER: Yes.
THOMPSON: Which is in loads of her—no, not loads. It’s in Ordeal by Innocence. It’s in Mrs. McGinty. That’s, I think, because that happened to her mother. Her mother was given away as a child. Her own mother was a poor widow and gave up her daughter to be raised by her rich sister, which is not—it’s not abandonment, but I think—
OLIVER: Well, yes.
THOMPSON: — it’s not great. And I think all these things were absorbed by Agatha as a child. She grew up in what we would today call a house of—I hate this—strong women. I hate that “strong woman” thing, but they were strong women. Her mother was very, you know, as we’ve said, a sort of driving little person. And the rich grandmother, the poor sister, the dynamic there, they both fed into Miss Marple.
And then her older sister, Madge, who was a big personality and actually had a play on in the West End before Agatha did, which I’ve always thought was extraordinary, just to write a play and have it on in the West End in 1924.
And the men were—the father was feckless and charming and a rather grand New Yorker, he grew up as, and then settled in Torquay. And the brother was the Branwell Brontë. [laughter] He ended up a drug addict, which is also a type that feeds into her fiction: the man who could have made something of his life and goes wrong.
The TV Adaptations
OLIVER: So all this theatricality in the books is obviously why she adapts so well to TV, and again, a lot of the others don’t.
THOMPSON: Yes, that’s true.
OLIVER: How famous would she be now without the TV adaptations?
THOMPSON: Well, by 1990, so the centenary, she was a hell of a lot less—and that’s really when the Poirots got going, which she never wanted. She never wanted—she didn’t really want Murder on the Orient Express. It was only because it came via Lord Mountbatten. I don’t know. I don’t know because I think they’re mostly not very good. I don’t know what you think about the adaptations. But maybe that’s deliberate, that they’re less—if they drove you back to the books, you’d probably get quite a pleasant surprise.
OLIVER: It’s hard for me to say because I saw them all more or less after I’d finished reading her.
THOMPSON: What did you think?
OLIVER: I love Joan Aiken—not Joan Aiken, what’s she called?
THOMPSON: Yes, Joan Hickson is marvelous. Yes, absolutely.
OLIVER: Hickson. I think she’s just perfect because as you say, the simplicity, the not overstating. The “Pocketful of Rye” episode where she turns up and quotes the Bible, and the vicious older sister is there, and they have that moment. It’s all so cleanly done.
THOMPSON: Yes, I agree.
OLIVER: David Suchet, I quite like him. I think he has those wonderful moments. “I cannot eat these eggs. They are not the same.” I think that’s very good. It’s very funny, you know, he gets it.
THOMPSON: You prefer him in spats and art deco mode to when he became—he became like a de facto member of the House of Atreus by the end, hadn’t he? It had gone very, very—
OLIVER: I mean, I certainly didn’t watch them all, no, no.
THOMPSON: No. Well, I sort of had to.
OLIVER: Yes, you did.
THOMPSON: But I could never get through those short story ones. I don’t think I’ve ever got—
OLIVER: The moral sort of doom of it all, yes.
THOMPSON: Well, the early ones, when they always had—you could see they’d hired a car for the day. [laughter] And I don’t think I’ve ever got to the end of one of those.
But I think—sorry, going back to your question, I think they probably did make a massive difference. You know, they’re really, really popular. And whether she would have—what you think her—she might be read as much as somebody like Sayers if it weren’t for all those adaptations. But then the fact of all those adaptations tells its own story in a way, because that wouldn’t happen to one of the others, as you rightly said.
Resurgence and Popularity
OLIVER: No, they don’t have that quality. And also, she was bigger than them. That’s why they picked her, because she was bigger than them anyway.
THOMPSON: And simpler. Because when I used to read them at university between the pages of Beowulf or whatever, like porn, [laughter] it was a bit mal vu. You read her for entertainment. But you certainly—I don’t think—she’s always been admired by a certain kind of French intellectual, hasn’t she, for that subtextual quality that she has, that sort of fathomless quality that she has.
But when I researched that biography, which I started in 2003, I can remember going on the radio. And names will not be named, but I was like a figure of fun with a couple of other detective writers, quite well known, who just sort of openly mocked me for taking her seriously and more or less said, “Oh yeah, we love her, but she’s terrible” kind of thing. “Why are you taking her seriously?” I mean, it was regarded as a bit of a joke to take her seriously.
I’m not saying I changed the game or anything like that, but I think there must have been a movement around that time in the early twenty-naughties—whatever the damn thing, decade’s called—to start seeing that she is an interplay of text and subtext, facade and undercurrents, and these powerful foundations that underpin her books. Murder on the Orient Express is, you know, “Does human justice have the right to exert itself when legal justice has let it down?”
There are these very strong—I think this is part of why she’s survived the way she has. We intuit powerful truths underneath the Christie construct, if you like. I always say she’s not real, she’s true. I think she’s incredibly wise about human nature, possibly more than any of them.
You take a book like Evil Under the Sun, and there’s a femme fatale who’s murdered. “Oh, the femme fatale. No man can resist her.” Turns out she can’t resist men. She’s prey; she’s not a predator. And of course, women who are so dependent on their looks and so on, that is what they are. They are prey. They’re not predators. They’re very, very vulnerable. Just a really small thing like that. And I just think, oh, you’re very—there’s so much easy wisdom in there somehow.
And she deploys it perhaps differently—I mean, Ruth Rendell is wise, but it’s very, “I am wise and you’re going to pay attention to me.” You know what I mean? It’s all very, “I’m very dark and very wise and very,” you know. I love her, but everything’s so easy with Agatha. It’s so, to coin a phrase, two tier. You can read them and have fun with them. You can read them and there’s so much stuff going on underneath, and yet she presents this smooth face. I don’t think any of the others are quite that resolved, if you like.
Self-Adaptations
OLIVER: Now, you wrote that her own stage adaptations of The Hollow and Five Little Pigs lack the subtlety of the original books, quote, “almost as if Agatha herself did not realize what made them such good books.” How much of her talent do you think was unconscious in that way?
THOMPSON: Yes. That’s such a good question. I do think that, about those plays, it could have been that she just thought, “That’s not what my audiences are going to want from me. They’re just going to want to be entertained by”—we know she can do the other thing because of her Mary Westmacott books, where everything is laid out. They’re not distilled at all; they’re quite the opposite.
I think they must have been such a pleasure for her to write because she didn’t have to constantly—they’re unresolved; they ask questions that don’t have to be answered. She could have done that with those plays, I’m sure, but I think she would’ve thought people aren’t coming to see them for that. I think she had a very good opinion of herself, in the best possible way.
OLIVER: Hmm.
THOMPSON: Like I said to you earlier, she didn’t take a lot of notice of anything anybody said to her. Because it is like writing this other little book, the one I’ve just done about 1926. She was very acclaimed right from the start. I didn’t emphasize that enough in the biography. And she was really recognized as very special right from the start.
And I think it’s extraordinary to me how—it’s so difficult for us today, isn’t it? We’re so at the mercy of “That won’t sell, don’t do that, blah, blah, blah.” She really did not just plow her own furrow, but create that furrow in a way that you can only compare with, like, Lennon and McCartney. Or whether the time was absolutely right that they let her run, they trusted her to do what she wanted, and because she had the gift of pleasing readers . . .
You do really feel, although those books are very tight and taut, you do feel an instinctive ease in what she’s doing, an instinctive sort of—there’s a kind of liberated—which sounds perverse because they are so controlled, the books. But I always feel she’s doing exactly what she wants to do because she knows what it is and she knows how to do it. Because I think, would she be amazed that you and I are having this conversation now? I don’t know that she would be, really. What do you think?
OLIVER: No, I agree with you. I think she had what Johnson said, the felicity of rating herself properly. I think she knew she was really good.
THOMPSON: You might know he’d say it right.
OLIVER: Yes. [laughs] But there’s a—I think there must have been something about—I think it’s in Poirot’s Christmas, one of those, where someone gets killed in the night in their bedroom, and they go up. And one of the women says, “Who would’ve thought the old man had so much blood in him?”
And the quotation just sort of occurs to—I think there’s quite a lot of that in Christie, right? Things are coming up and it fits. And she’s good enough to run on instinct at times.
THOMPSON: That’s right. That’s it. Exactly. That’s absolutely right. Like the way she quotes from the—yes, I love the bit when she quotes from the Book of Saul in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, which is really quite a profound novel about whether—I mean, it’s terribly timely—whether it’s better to be run by a corrupt capitalist or to let in the radicals. And as I said in the biography, the corrupt capitalist wins on points. But then another element enters, which is what power does to people. And that’s when she quotes from the Book of Saul.
And it’s just like you said, this—an instinctive that she—I do always feel her as an instinctive writer, even though—her notebooks are intriguing because obviously some plots she really has to work away at. And yet they feel felicitous. A coup like The ABC Murders, and she’s really—that went through lots and lots of iterations. But what she’ll often do is scribble down a line of dialogue, a line of “There they are.” It’s the whole—it’s not bullet points, which is a loathsome concept. It reminds me of a bee going from flower to flower and knowing exactly which—and she’s got this gift of knowing what flowers we’re going to need.
I sometimes fear I overdo it. I don’t want be like one of those people who’s writing a PhD on, what was the thing I said on Substack, gynocracy in St. Mary Mead or whatever. It’s not—I do think that’s a bit overdone these days, the rummaging in the subtext, because she’s an interplay. And that’s why I write that chapter in the book called “English Murder,” which is about the facade, you know, “smile and smile and be a villain.” And there’s nothing more interesting. There’s nothing more interesting than murder among classes who are trying to cover things up.
And she does that—that’s at the heart of golden age murder, I suppose. And I just think she does that better than anybody because she’s so all the things we’ve been talking about. She’s so distilled, she’s so simple, she’s so smooth, she’s so instinctive. And she’s doing it the way she wanted to do it because of your wonderful Dr. Johnson quote. She knew not to take notice of other people, including her—
Quick Opinions on Christie
OLIVER: Should we have—
THOMPSON: Yes. Go on.
OLIVER: Sorry, sorry. Should we have a quick-fire round?
THOMPSON: Please.
OLIVER: I will say the name first of a few of her books—
THOMPSON: Oh, god.
OLIVER: —and then a few other detective writers, and you will just give us your unfiltered opinion: good, bad, ugly, indifferent.
THOMPSON: Okay. What fun.
OLIVER: You can “nothing” them if you want to.
THOMPSON: Okay. [laughter]
OLIVER: Hallowe’en Party.
THOMPSON: Underrated. Very interesting on sixties counterculture and the effects of societal breakdown, et cetera. What do you think?
OLIVER: I think it’s a real page turner. I remember reading that for the first time. I loved it. Yes. Nemesis.
THOMPSON: I can’t keep saying the same thing. Underrated. [laughter] Very interesting philosophy of love in that book, I think. I think it harks back to her first marriage. However badly it turns out, it’s better to have experienced it. It’s quite a mournful novel.
OLIVER: The Mr. Quin—
THOMPSON: Oh.
OLIVER: Oh, sorry.
THOMPSON: No, no. Sorry. You carry on. Marvelous. So inventive, don’t you think? Such a clever character.
OLIVER: Why didn’t she do more of him?
THOMPSON: Yes, that would’ve been good. And she was always interested in the commedia dell’arte. She wrote poems about it as a girl. And the concept of Mr. Quin, yes, as this sort of evanescent figure who’s also a moral force, isn’t he really? Or—yes, I wish she’d done more. They’re marvelous.
OLIVER: Towards Zero.
THOMPSON: Oh, top notch, don’t you think?
OLIVER: One of the best.
THOMPSON: Yes, I agree. Frightening motive. Very Ruth Rendell.
OLIVER: It’s very distinct in her. I haven’t read all of her novels, but it’s very distinct.
THOMPSON: But the plot is, again, typical of her because it redefines the word contingent. [laughs] I mean, Dorothy Sayers would be having palpitations. She’s very bold and grand like that. “Oh, there’s a loose end. Oh, who cares?” You know, I mean, it’s so—it just drives along that book, doesn’t it? Yes. But I agree with you, one of her best.
OLIVER: Death on the Nile.
THOMPSON: Quite moving, I think. I think it’s one of those ones from the thirties that, again, is talking about love in a way that—I think it just strikes a personal note to me because she was very in love with her first husband, Archie Christie. And he did fall in love with another woman, and it did cause her extreme pain that some people said to me she never quite got over.
And I feel that a little bit in that book. There’s a shadow of something quite powerful in that book, I think. Again, very, very loose and lovely plot, but powerful. Would you agree? Very good on the place as well, I think, Egypt.
OLIVER: I love it. I think the solution is great.
THOMPSON: Yes.
OLIVER: And it makes a really good film.
THOMPSON: It’s a great film, yes. Wonderful film.
Other Mystery Writers
OLIVER: Yes. Okay. A few other detective writers: Michael Innes.
THOMPSON: You’ve got me. I haven’t read him. Should I?
OLIVER: Oh, I think you will like him. Yes. Try Hamlet, Revenge!
THOMPSON: Okay. Okay. Oh, I like it already.
OLIVER: Yes, yes, yes. Oh, this is exciting. Gladys Mitchell.
THOMPSON: Can’t get into her.
OLIVER: No.
THOMPSON: What do you think? Should I try a bit harder?
OLIVER: I read two. I thought they were good. I was not intrigued.
THOMPSON: No, somebody told—
OLIVER: The ones I read—Spotted Hemlock is a wonderful, like, wow, that’s great.
THOMPSON: Okay. Okay. Somebody said to me, I know she really—no, I didn’t—I read it in a book that she really hadn’t liked Agatha Christie, but you know, who knows? All that Detection Club rivalry, you can imagine. But okay, Spotted Hemlock—if I’m going to read one, try that, yes?
OLIVER: Yes, that’s a great book. Margery Allingham.
THOMPSON: Kind of love her, but I never understand her plots. I always feel I’m in a bit of a fog, but she’s quite a good writer. Do you think? Or what do you think?
OLIVER: She’s good at the fog. She’s good at that sort of whirligig sense that there’s a lot going on—
THOMPSON: Yes, whirligig.
OLIVER: —and you’ve got to get to the end before they do, kind of thing.
THOMPSON: Also, she had a pub in her sitting room. Now, I like a woman who has a pub in their sitting room.
OLIVER: [laughs] E. C. Bentley.
THOMPSON: You’ve got me again, Henry.
OLIVER: Oh, The Blotting Book mystery. You’ll like this.
THOMPSON: Okay. Okay.
OLIVER: The other one is not so good, but you’ll like that a lot.
THOMPSON: Okay.
OLIVER: Edmund Crispin.
THOMPSON: Didn’t get on with him.
OLIVER: Why not?
THOMPSON: Don’t know. Don’t know. It sounds like I don’t read the men, doesn’t it? Which is not the truth at all.
OLIVER: I think that’s fair enough, isn’t it?
THOMPSON: Well, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone’s ever come up with a really good reason why women have shone so brightly in this genre. I don’t know. Why didn’t I—I read that one, the toyshop one [The Moving Toyshop] or whatever. I don’t know. I just didn’t get on with it.
OLIVER: Too glib?
THOMPSON: Possibly.
OLIVER: Bit flippant, bit sort of funny-funny?
THOMPSON: Possibly. I just couldn’t quite get hold of it in some way. I don’t know.
OLIVER: I quite like Edmund Crispin, but I do think he’s got a bit of a “he’s a very clever boy” about him.
THOMPSON: Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe that.
OLIVER: Something, yes. G. K. Chesterton.
THOMPSON: I haven’t read Father Brown. Oh, this is awful, isn’t it? I’m starting to sound like a radical feminist by accident.
OLIVER: [laughs] Maybe that’s what you are, Laura. Maybe you just need to admit it. [laughs]
THOMPSON: No, it does. It sounds really bad because I do really love almost all the women. I just, I don’t know why I haven’t read him.
Christie and Nostalgia
OLIVER: Was Agatha a nostalgia writer?
THOMPSON: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone who was a nostalgia writer would’ve written At Bertram’s Hotel, which is an entire spin on the riff of nostalgia. Really clever. I think that’s such a clever book. The way she traps us in her golden age, you know, this phantasmagoria of the re-created golden age. And then she says, “Ha, really fooled you.”
I’ve written about this. I think she moved with the 20th century far more than is realized. I love those Cold War novels she writes about her dislike of ideologies. I love her postwar books about the fragmentation of the hierarchical society. I think she’s—well, she’s an incidental social historian, as are, I think, P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, but they’re much more underlined about it. Again, I’m intrigued what you think. Do you think she is?
OLIVER: I think there’s definitely some quality, particularly to the Miss Marple stories—as you say, the social history sort of becomes a way of preserving something that’s disappearing. One of them, written in the sixties—you can tell me which one—it opens with that description of all the new houses in the village and the mothers who give their children cereal for breakfast. And what sort of a thing is that to give a child? They should have bacon and eggs. Bacon and eggs is a real—you know, and she does have a real something heartfelt and real sense that this part of England is going, and this new thing is coming in.
THOMPSON: That’s true. That’s absolutely true. That’s The Mirror Crack’d. And it’s—
OLIVER: The Mirror, yes, yes.
THOMPSON: Yes, and that whole thing of Mrs. Bantry’s house has now been bought by a film star and blah, blah, blah. Yes, no, you are absolutely right. I didn’t think hard enough before I answered your question.
OLIVER: But no, what you said is also true. I can’t sort of work out to what extent she regrets it, to what extent it’s just useful material for her, you know?
THOMPSON: Both. I mean, some of her late books, including Endless Night, I think, which is an incredibly modern book—that whole “me, me, me” culture of “I want, therefore I will have now,” which is written when she was quite an old lady. And then a book like Passenger to Frankfurt, which is—it’s a bit sub–Brave New World, but it’s very honest and pessimistic about a future—well, the one we are living in, really—full of fear and uncertainty and almost dystopian.
She was a realist. You know, she is Miss Marple in a lot of ways. She was a realist in a way that I think a lot of us would find it difficult to be. And her American publishers were often—would sort of say, can she tone this down? Can she not have a young person who’s completely evil? Readers want to know, is she going get any therapy? [laughter] And it’s so true. There’s quite a lot of that going on.
She’s very clear-eyed. So if she—I’m a bit nostalgic for Blur, do you know what I mean? I mean, you can’t help it, in a way, like that brilliant example you give at the start of The Mirror Crack’d. But I would say her image is quite at odds with the reality of her in that way. But the image—
OLIVER: And the adaptations don’t help with that.
THOMPSON: No. No. But at the same time, that Christie image, you know, the gentlewoman, the tea or the eternal bridge party, blah, blah, blah, that has a huge power of its own. So just being too iconoclastic about her, I think, is also a lie. Because I think, again, it’s that interplay. She used the image, and the image—I hate the word cozy. I loathe the word cozy, but there’s no denying that any book of that kind does have that quality. So I suppose even that’s nostalgic in a way.
Christie’s Poshness
OLIVER: In a way, yes. How posh was she?
THOMPSON: Good question. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Quite, I would say. Quite grand, with that confidence. Her father really was—as I said, he was a young blade in New York dancing with Jennie Jerome and blah, blah, blah. And then it so happened that he ended up in Torquay, which of course then was very posh. And the fact that when she disappears, she disappears to Harrogate, [laughs] which is like the Torquay of the north.
I remember her grandson saying to me, “She dealt with her literary agent. To her, he was staff.” You know, that kind of thing. Her sister, there is a—well, her sister ended up very grand indeed with a huge house up in Cheshire.
I think she just had that internal confidence, really. She wasn’t—and that there wasn’t much money. I mean, there was very little money when she was growing up, as of course you know, but that didn’t matter. I mean, her voice is insane. Her voice is, [affecting a posh voice] “Oh, it’s lucky it just happens.” [laughter] But yes, there’s a part of her that is real late Victorian upper middle class that, again, underpins her books.
It’s amazing really how broad-minded and cosmopolitan she was. But possibly, I mean, possibly that does—she was—you know, when she disappeared, she was described in foreign newspapers as an Anglo-American, the embodiment of Englishness, and that’s how she was described. And then of course she was genuinely cosmopolitan in her love of travel and her love of other cultures and all that obvious stuff. Yes.
Inspirations for Miss Marple
OLIVER: How much of her grandmothers is in Miss Marple?
THOMPSON: Quite a lot, I would say, particularly the—
OLIVER: Drawn from life?
THOMPSON: Well, in an essential way not, because Miss Marple has no real experience of life in that way. We’re occasionally told about some chap who came calling who wasn’t suitable or whatever, but she’s almost defined by nonexperience of life in a sense, but observation of life. She’s an observer. She’s not an outsider in the way that Poirot is. She has a place within the social hierarchy and whatever, and that village has a reality to it. And the way it changes has a reality to it. But she is defined by being an observer, I would say.
But Margaret Miller, who was the rich grandmother, who is the one who had the big house at Ealing and was—you know, she’s the one who would go to the Army and Navy stores and all that stuff that’s in At Bertram’s Hotel. She was—there’s a lot of her in Miss—I think, as I say in the book, she grew up with the sound of female wisdom in her ears. You know, her grandmother was the sort of—if she’d seen her up in Harrogate, she would’ve known exactly what was going on. You know, one of those kind of women who could spot an affair at a hundred paces, just a wise sort of woman, worldly, worldly woman.
And Miss Marple is worldly in her thinking, but not in her experience, particularly in a book like A Caribbean Mystery, which I think is—she’s a real sophisticate, Agatha. I mean, I’m reading The Hollow again at the moment. And it’s really astounding to me how there’s a love affair at the center of it with a young woman who’s kind of a self-portrait and this married man. And not only, there’s not—it’s not only nonjudgmental; there’s literally no concept of judgment being in the vicinity. It’s really, really sophisticated, grown-up stuff, I think. And again, I think that’s maybe not recognized about her that much.
Nursery Rhymes
OLIVER: What are the importance of nursery rhymes to her?
THOMPSON: Yes, that’s interesting. They’re part of that distilled quality she had, I suppose, that really simple ability to catch hold of something that is simple and familiar in itself and then subvert it. There’s books where she—I don’t think she needs it in Five Little Pigs. I think the book is almost too good for that.
But is it not to do with that—like her titles, which are really, really simple with a faint frisson of the sinister about them. Is it not that ability she has to catch, to take something really, really simple and subvert it for her own ends? What do you think? Do you think that’s right? Or do you think it’s something more than that?
OLIVER: No, I think the simplicity is the point, and I think it probably gives her a way of talking, of showing how fundamental the wickedness is. And as you say, the children can be evil, and it’s part of the darkness in a way, but it gives the appearance of innocence and, oh, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe? You know, children do this. And so it leads you through and makes it worse somehow. [laughs]
THOMPSON: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. But I know I’ve—how many times have I said the word simple? But I really do feel that’s the heart of her. And I also feel it’s the heart of why she was misunderstood when I was growing up reading her because it was mistaken for simplistic.
Wartime Productivity
OLIVER: Why was she so productive during the war? I mean, there were four books one year.
THOMPSON: Yes.
OLIVER: And as you say, they’re some of the best. I mean, what is it about the war that gets her so busy?
THOMPSON: Well, she was on her own, which she had never been, really. Well, obviously she divorced her first husband in 1928. So there’s a couple of very bleak, dead years before she met her second husband and married him in 1930. But she wasn’t completely on her own because she had her friend Charlotte Fisher, who was a sort of secretary-companion, but much more than that—really, really good friend.
But in the war, Max Mallowan was abroad. Her daughter—she had one child—her daughter was married and living in Wales. And she was living in the Isokon building in North London, which I love because that’s like, “You think I’m chintzy and old fashioned. And here I am socializing with the sort of left-wing intelligentsia at the Isokon building.” And there’s something about being in that adorable little flat—they’re so fabulous, those flats—and being alone but not feeling abandoned, as she had after her first marriage.
And I suppose also, you know, war is, you either cower in despair or you think, “Right, well, better get on with it.” War is stimulating in that way. I think it was to quite a few writers, maybe, or quite a few creatives. The shadow of death. But there was something about that solitude but not abandonment, plus the stimulation of not knowing whether it was your last day on earth that did—it did. I mean, it’s absolutely insane how productive she is.
And then she wrote—she had a week off. She was also working as a dispenser at a London hospital, and she had a week off. And she wrote a Mary Westmacott, Absent in the Spring, which is one of her best Westmacotts, I think. I mean, she’s got a week off and she writes a book. I mean, Jesus, there’s a challenge to us, Henry. [laughter]
The Mary Westmacott Novels
OLIVER: What are those Mary Westmacotts like? Because I’ve never read them, but you seem very—
THOMPSON: Oh, have you not?
OLIVER: You’re very up on them. You like them?
THOMPSON: I am. I really am. Well, for a biographer, they were a treasure trove because they’re very revealing. Unfinished Portrait is, I think, as close as you are ever going to come to a true autobiography, as opposed to the actual autobiography, which is charmingly disingenuous.
OLIVER: And also dull. No? I mean, it’s just so dull.
THOMPSON: Do you think? It is a bit.
OLIVER: I couldn’t read it. I couldn’t read it. No, it was so long and so leaden. I felt like she didn’t really want to tell me the story of her life. Just couldn’t.
THOMPSON: Well, I think that’s probably right. It was very heavily edited after her death. And her daughter was very, very protective of her. So, Max Mallowan as well. So maybe there was a much better book in there somewhere. Who knows?
OLIVER: So we should read Mary Westmacott if we want the unfiltered Agatha?
THOMPSON: I would say Unfinished Portrait. It really fascinates me because the worst time you’ve ever gone through in your life—so in 1926, she lost her mother and her husband in the space of four months. And I think an awful lot of people, even writers, would think, “I’m going to put that behind me and get on.” But she had to reopen the wound. She had to go through it all again eight years later. I find that really, in itself, incredibly revealing about her.
Poirot vs. Marple
OLIVER: Why is there so much more Poirot than Marple?
THOMPSON: Yes, I’ve wondered that because there is this little thing that she hated him, which I don’t really think she did. It’s just something people say, isn’t it?
OLIVER: Well, it’s a common thing about artists. They’re supposed to hate their most successful work, but—
THOMPSON: Yes. Yes. All I could come up with was that he was easier to put in different places. He could conceivably be on the Nile or in Mesopotamia or—I mean, it would be a—she does manage to get Miss Marple to the West Indies, but it’s certainly—
OLIVER: There are only so many holidays your nephew can send you on.
THOMPSON: He was really successful, that nephew, wasn’t he? Who do you think he was like? Sort of Ian McEwan or—
OLIVER: [laughs] I know. It was sort of crazy, isn’t it?
THOMPSON: And very kind to her.
OLIVER: It might be to her credit that she doesn’t do a Midsomer Murders thing and just sort of wave away and say, “Oh, we can just have as many of these murders as we want.” She says, “No, we can only fit—” Do you think maybe that’s it?
THOMPSON: I think there might be a bit of that. I mean, her notebooks sort of—some of the books were originally Marples, like Cat Among the Pigeons and Death on the Nile, in fact. And then they became Poirots. I just wonder whether he’s a bit more malleable because she is a more rooted, fixed entity.
And he is—I don’t mean to denigrate David Suchet because he’s a fantastic actor, but he does root him more than I think the written version. I think he is a sketch on the page. And one of her great skills, I think, is how she can sketch, and they’ve got that quality of aliveness on the page, which you just can’t analyze, really. I don’t—well, I can’t. And that’s how I see Poirot. So he was more movable in that sense.
And she’s incredibly good at certain—like Sleeping Murder, there’s no way you could have him in that. And Miss Marple is—her qualities are so perfect for a book like that, which has suddenly reminded me of how she got me into John Webster. I never read John Webster until—
OLIVER: [laughs] That’s great.
THOMPSON: The way she uses The Duchess of Malfi is so clever. Do you think that’s right about Poirot? Do you think there’s something more . . .
Reader Preferences and Sales
OLIVER: I can see that. I wondered if there was some reader’s prejudice involved.
THOMPSON: Oh.
OLIVER: Poirot is the sort of exotic—Sherlock Holmes, one thing that makes him popular is that he’s a bit wacky, you know. And Poirot—he’s always talking about, “You English are so xenophobic. Excuse me, I am Belgian.” And with the eggs and all the little—whereas Miss Marple’s just the kind of old lady that we all wish there were more of. And how much of that will readers take? I don’t know.
THOMPSON: Yes. Although, as I say, she, she did—I mean, I think her publishers did like her to do Poirot, but I don’t know that she would’ve been influenced by that necessarily. I mean, maybe she was—maybe I’m overdoing her—
OLIVER: Well, she had these terrible money problems. Didn’t she have to be a little bit focused on the dollar?
THOMPSON: She did. She did, but she didn’t—well, I mean, the money problems are insane because they were absolutely no fault of her own. They were to do with test cases, and it was just this sort of accumulation of horror that put her in tax problems during the war. And she really never could dig her way out of them and was advised to go bankrupt twice, which is unbelievable, just as a way of clearing it. I mean, it’s terrible.
But I don’t know that she—I think her attitude was a bit more, “Well, why should I even bother if they’re just going to take it away from me?” In 1948 she didn’t write anything at all because I think she thought, “What’s the point?” But then, that wasn’t her way. But I don’t know that she thought of writing as a way of digging out of it necessarily. But I could be—
OLIVER: The Marples, did they make less money? Were they, did they sell less?
THOMPSON: Not really. I think they all sold. Even poor old Passenger to Frankfurt sold hugely, absolutely hugely. I think people—I mean, my parents would—it was like people just wanted them, the Christie for Christmas.
Rereading Christie
OLIVER: How many times have you read these books? Do you ever get bored?
THOMPSON: No.
OLIVER: Really?
THOMPSON: Well, I have them on rotation, and I don’t—as you know, I do interleave them with our beloved Elizabeth Bowen, who’s my passion at the moment, and other people. But they are consolatory, I suppose. They are—there’s bits of—there is this kind of—there’s bits of them that I just know completely off by heart, like the gramophone record in And Then There Were None and all that.
But there’s something—and maybe I should have said this earlier, when I say—I’ve said it on Substack—that they’re fairy tales for adults. There’s something about that. There’s an almost physical sensation of pleasure, really, when the resolution comes. It is a bit like act five of Shakespeare. I’m not going to say she’s quite on that level. Not even I am going to say that.
But there is—and it is like being a child again and reading the end toward the happy-ever-after, even though her happy-ever-afters are sometimes compromised. And there is something almost primal in that pleasure. And it almost sounds borderline mad, me saying it like that, but I do think there’s something in it because the resolution is so—because it’s character based, and at her best, she’s character and plot as one, as in Five Little Pigs or The Hollow or Murder on the Orient Express or blah, blah, blah.
Her resolutions do tell you something about human nature. You do think, “Oh, yes, that is what that would be. Yes, it would be all about money. Yes. Yes, doctors are untrustworthy,” or something on a more profound level than that. There’s something that is a satisfaction, both childlike and I’m experiencing it as an adult. In my defense, P. G. Wodehouse said you can never read them too many times. [laughs] It doesn’t matter if you know who did it. There’s so much pleasure in them.
Thompson’s Career
OLIVER: Now, I want to ask a little bit about your career.
THOMPSON: Mm-hmm.
OLIVER: You were at a sort of stage school, then you studied at Merton, and then you worked at The Times.
THOMPSON: Yes. Very briefly. Yes.
OLIVER: How does one therefore go from all of this to being the biographer?
THOMPSON: Well, I did always think I would have a career in—I wanted to direct plays. I directed Hamlet after university, which is probably the thing I’m still proudest of. But what it was, was that I wrote a couple of books. I won an award when I was quite young.
And then I had an agent who—I said to him, “I want to write a biography of Nancy Mitford.” And he wasn’t very keen on the idea, but I must have written an okay proposal. Again, because I thought Nancy Mitford was a little bit undervalued, that she’s a lot more than just a posh girl. And at the time her reputation was quite low. And so somebody bought into that idea, and it sort of went from there, really.
But it’s a bit—I sometimes look back at the books I’ve written, including a memoir of my publican grandmother, and I think, gosh, this is all quite scatter-gun, but maybe that’s okay. Maybe you should just write the books you really want to write. But it was a passion for Nancy Mitford that sort of started that particular ball rolling.
And then I had the idea of—oh, no. I was down in Devon with a boyfriend, and he said, “You never stop talking about Agatha Christie. Why don’t you try and write her biography?” And that was just a luck of timing because her daughter was still alive. So I met her, and she liked me because I knew the Mary Westmacotts so well, and that sort of happened. I mean, quite often these things are very fortuitous, don’t you think? Did you not find that with your book?
OLIVER: Yes, yes. No, I did. I did. I think some writers, as you say—I don’t think of it as scatter-gun. I think of it, it’s sort of an emergent thing, and you happen to have these different interests, and you just follow your nose, and that’s fine.
THOMPSON: Yes, exactly.
OLIVER: Tell us about this production of Hamlet.
THOMPSON: Oh. Do you know, I think it was not bad. I had a very good Hamlet. I think if you’ve—well, you’re in trouble without—who is now quite a successful actor. And we were all really young, but he was—I saw him in something and said, “Do you want to play Hamlet for me?” And he said, “Okay then.” And it was a room above a pub in Chelsea, and it was very spare and very quick.
And it was about—I can’t bear when people overanalyze the character of Hamlet, and why does he delay? He delays because Shakespeare wants him to, so that he can write all those incredible speeches. That’s a bit simplified, but it was—he was so, he so understood the translucent power of those soliloquies, this actor. So it just sort of worked because we didn’t do too much to it. And it was, yes, it was good. I think it was good. But then I did Macbeth, and that was much less good.
Secretly Reading Christie
OLIVER: And you’ve said here, and I think you said it in your book, that when you were at Merton, you were reading Agatha Christie between the covers of what you were supposed to be reading.
THOMPSON: Yes, yes, I was.
OLIVER: That can’t be—is that a slight exaggeration, or did you really not get on with the syllabus?
THOMPSON: Well, hang on. I was a bit stuck in the first term. Can you imagine coming from a performing arts school—
OLIVER: Yes.
THOMPSON: —and then being told, “Read that bloody, you know.
OLIVER: Yes, yes. No, it’s intense.
THOMPSON: All I knew was French. How I got in is a minor mystery, but there it was. I’ve tried to do it honor ever since by writing as best books I possibly can. But I was okay once I got over that bit. Once I got into my beloved Tennyson and all the people we’ve been talking about, Hardy and blah, blah, blah. Larkin, about whom the best thing I’ve ever read—the best thing I’ve ever read about Larkin is your Substack about him, without a shadow of a doubt.
OLIVER: Oh, thank you.
THOMPSON: Just wonderful. So I sort of winged it a bit, but I had a very nice don. And the autodidact side of me, which is very like Agatha Christie, who barely went to school, and Nancy Mitford—I think it can be a good thing in a way, because you have such a respect for learning and truth. I always try to be truthful in my biographies, which as we know, not everybody is. [laughter]
And I think you carry on wanting to learn and carry on wanting to fill all the gaps because I only had half an education, because in the morning you would do ballet and drama and all that kind of thing. So it is a bit odd, but in some ways I think it’s been a good thing.
OLIVER: Now, the new book is about the 1926 disappearance. When can we expect it to be published?
THOMPSON: It’s only a short book—
OLIVER: Yes.
THOMPSON: —because obviously I covered it a lot in the biography, and it doesn’t—but I have found out a couple of new things. And that will be out in August here and in November in America. And I have come up with a slightly different slant on it, but mainly—and I treat it a little bit like a cold case. And it was—I had to write—I wrote it in five weeks, but it was incredibly good fun. Oh, and I reenacted her journey, which was very interesting, to Harrogate.
But mainly it’s such a pleasure because I, you know, on Substack, and I think, “Oh, you can’t write about Agatha Christie again.” There always seems to be quite a lot to say. I’m intrigued by how you, who I think of as a true intellectual, how you have clear regard for her.
Henry on Agatha Christie
OLIVER: I started reading her when I was about 12, and I just thought she was great, and I went through most of them. But I read them at intervals. So I was reading her into my twenties, thirties. And before this interview I tried to—I thought, “Laura’s always saying Five Little Pigs is the best one. I’m going to read it.” And I just sort of found that I’ve lost the taste, in a way.
THOMPSON: Okay.
OLIVER: Which I was quite, I don’t know, just maybe—I feel like this is my failing. Maybe I should take a week off and sit by the pool and read it properly. But I’ve always thought she’s really, really great, and very few people can do that many very compelling stories without you sort of thinking, “Oh, I’ve read this one. I know. Yes. It’s the same as the other one, isn’t it? Yes. Yes, it was the”—as you say, it’s not Cluedo. Even Dorothy L. Sayers, I don’t think I could read much more by her, frankly. Great, she’s great, but it’s enough. [laughs]
THOMPSON: Well, I quite like her. The whole—most girls who went to Oxford are quite keen on Gaudy Night, and the character of Harriet Vane is quite satisfying, I think.
OLIVER: Indeed, indeed. And Strong Poison is great. And there—but I just mean if she’d written as many books as Agatha, you can’t imagine it would’ve sustained the level of quality.
THOMPSON: No, no. There is that lightness in Agatha and that terrible cliché of, “I wrote a long book because it was too—I didn’t have enough time to write a short book,” and all that kind of thing. The brevity amazes me. When I said at the start, most writers would take twice as many pages to get all that in.
She has style—I don’t know if you can call it a style, but there is something blindingly effective about it that nobody can imitate. And it does—there’s something so fathomless about her, and that’s what continues to compel me. But I think it’s very lovely of you to do this if you are no longer an admirer because you’ve let me sort of—
OLIVER: Well, it’s not that I’m not an admirer. It’s just that I don’t—I had this with P. G. Wodehouse. I read quite a lot of it, and now, I don’t know, somehow I’ve reached a point where it’s—I sort of get it, but it’s just not that funny anymore. I don’t know, just need some time away.
THOMPSON: Well, maybe. Maybe, but you know, I’m a bit—she’s part of my life now. It’s like if somebody said, “You can’t read her anymore,” it would be like, “You can’t listen to the Rolling Stones anymore.” I mean, it’d be like a kind of death. She’s part of my life the same way they’re part of my life. She’s now inseparable from just the way I go on, as is Shakespeare. And if I had to lose one of them, trust me, it would be her, you’ll be reassured to know. [laughter]
OLIVER: Very good. Laura, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you very much.
THOMPSON: Oh, I’ve really enjoyed it. I really have. And I was really looking forward to it, and it’s been even nicer than I thought it would be. So thank you.
OLIVER: Oh, it’s been delightful.
THOMPSON: Thank you so much, Henry.
OLIVER: Thank you.


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What a pleasure it was to talk to Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey: My Own Life, about the great man himself, who was born four hundred years ago this month. Aubrey is best know for his splendid Brief Lives but he preserved a huge amount of knowledge which historians still rely on. There are many things we only know because of Aubrey—things about people Hobbes and Hooke, Stonehenge, architectural history. We also talked about Janet Malcom, the genre of biography, and modern fiction.
HENRY OLIVER: Today I’m talking to Ruth Scurr. Ruth is a fellow of Gonville and Caius College in the University of Cambridge, where she specializes in the history of political thought. But more importantly, she is the biographer of John Aubrey, one of my favorite writers, who is celebrating 400 years of his birth this year. Ruth, hello.
RUTH SCURR: Hi, Henry.
OLIVER: Can you begin by giving us a brief life of John Aubrey?
SCURR: So born in 1626, 17th-century antiquarian, collector, early fellow at the Royal Society. Well connected to scientific and the literary circles of his day. Someone who sees himself more as a whetstone: a person who could help sharpen other people’s ideas. As a recorder, someone who treasured the details, the minutiae of the lives he encountered, and pass those details on to posterity.
He’s nonjudgmental, witty, kind, inventive. Very, very sociable. Very good friend. But he’s hopeless at self-advancement. Begins his life as a gentleman, but he inherits debts from his father and he can never really achieve financial stability.
Never marries, ends up homeless and worried about being arrested for his debts. And he has to sell his precious collection of books periodically through his life to raise some much-needed cash, but he keeps his manuscripts safe. And he does this at the end of his life by putting them into the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, afterwards known as the Bodleian, and where they still are today.
OLIVER: So how many manuscripts did he save for us?
SCURR: Of his own manuscripts or other people’s manuscripts?
OLIVER: Other people’s. Because he was collecting all sorts of precious things.
SCURR: Oh, absolutely. He was the person who, when someone died, would go round if he could to their house and ask what was happening about the manuscripts. He’s particularly concerned, obviously, with his friends. So he had a close relationship with Robert Hooke and he wanted to make sure that Hooke’s many inventions and scientific contributions were recorded.
And he has this wonderful line in the life of Hooke where he says, “It’s so hard to get people to do right by themselves.” And in his childhood, he had seen the fallout from the dissolution of the monasteries. He’d become very troubled by the habit of using manuscript pages which had been displaced in the dissolution. He saw them being used in schools to cover textbooks. He saw them being used to—or he heard about them at least being used—to wrap up gloves or to create stoppers in bottles. And this really troubled him from, from a very early age.
And I think he has another beautiful line where he says after the dissolution of the monasteries, whereas these manuscripts had been kept safe, they flew around like butterflies. And he wanted to catch them and preserve them and to stop people letting the papers and the precious manuscripts of their relatives do the same. So he was very instrumental in rescuing manuscripts, other people’s manuscripts. And then fortunately with his own, he knew Ashmole and they had the shared astrology interest.
Ashmole was a very different sort of person who basically said to Oxford, look, I’ll give you my collections, but there has to be a museum for them. And luckily Aubrey was able to use that museum as a safe place for his own manuscripts.
OLIVER: So we know things about Robert Hooke and Thomas Hobbes and all these other luminaries of the 17th century, thanks to Aubrey. What else do we know, thanks to him?
SCURR: We know what Stonehenge looked like in his day because he was a very good draftsman. He drew pictures of Stonehenge. He’d grown up in Wiltshire, he’d known those stones from childhood. He understood that Avebury nearby was a comparable monument, and he took Charles II to see it, and persuaded the king to get the locals to stop breaking up the stones, to reuse the stones, which was the practice.
He also made drawings of windows because he was possibly the first person as a historian of architecture to realize that you could date buildings by the style of their windows. So we have those drawings. He was also interested in the history of costume. He did a survey of Surrey, of Wiltshire.
So these are all sort of focuses in his manuscripts and people who’ve used them come to really appreciate how pioneering Aubrey was. But of course he doesn’t finish them. He doesn’t publish those manuscripts. So it’s very easy really to overlook the innovation and the contribution and the wonderful imagination that he had.
OLIVER: You mean if he’d published a book, he would have a much bigger reputation?
SCURR: Well, I think there’s two things. Yes, but in a sense, you know, the Brief Lives have been published after his death in various forms. But I think one of the most engaging things about Aubrey is that he’s a modest and self-effacing person. And I already mentioned the idea he had of himself as a whetstone to other people’s talents.
There aren’t that many people—certainly not in my life, maybe there are in yours—but who would effortlessly describe themselves as a whetstone to other people’s talents. Most people want to be at the center. They’re happy to have clever and literary friends, but they want a place there at the table as well.
And Aubrey really was very, very invested in helping other people to do right by themselves, as he said about Hooke. And he very movingly—this is one of the inspirations really for my book that I wrote about him—he spent all that time collating the information about other people’s lives. And for his own life, he puts down a few lines, a couple of facts and everything.
He says, well, this could be used as the binding of a book. You know, it’s sort of waste paper really. So he doesn’t write his own life. Other people’s lives he’s going to convey to posterity. He doesn’t see his own life as really being at that level of needing the attention that he gave, for example, to Milton or to Harvey or Hobbes, as you mentioned.
OLIVER: He’s born the year after Charles I comes to the throne. So he obviously lives through a fairly terrible period of history and very tumultuous, changeable in lots of different ways. The new world, the new learning, new religion, new politics, everything is changing. And he’s obsessed with the old ways. How did these historical events—is he reacting against his time? Is he just born in a lucky time in a way?
SCURR: So he was a student in Oxford during the Civil War. And you are right. The upheaval is very disturbing for his generation. It means he gets called back from Oxford by his father because it’s dangerous to be there. And he’s really, really upset by that because, it’s like us, when we were students or our students today. You finally get away from your family and there you are in this place with all these exciting peers and access to books that you’ve never had before or at least to that extent, libraries, et cetera.
And suddenly there’s a war on and you’ve got to go home. So there’s that disturbance. Then there is the fact that actually he was close to Hobbes. Hobbes actually was a Malmesbury man, so Wiltshire, very near Aubrey. And had come back to visit the school where Hobbes had been, which was where Aubrey was at school. And so they had met in Aubrey’s childhood, and then he would’ve been aware of Hobbes having to go into exile. And then Hobbes coming back, of course. And that’s a very important time in his life.
And it’s not an accident that Hobbes asks Aubrey to write his life because Hobbes knows how careful Aubrey is. And he knows that Aubrey has information that he can convey in the life. So that is really the first life that he writes. And it’s different from the others. There’s a different sort of origin. And it’s after he’s done that, that he starts to think, well, actually, you know, I can think of at least 50, 55 other people’s lives. And now I’ve got my hand in, I might start on those as well.
So in that period of upheaval there are wonderful stories. Maybe we’ll look at some of the Brief Lives, but there’s this amazing story that he captures in the life of William Harvey, which is a description of Harvey having been at the battlefield in Edgehill and recording one of the people who had been fighting and wounded, surviving by having the good sense to pull a dead body on top of himself, to keep himself warm on the battlefield. Things like that, which make the war very much alive. This is brutal, this civil war. It’s a long time ago and we think we passed over it, but the really brutal reality of war is captured in the Brief Lives through the anecdotes and the stories of that generation that Aubrey preserves.
OLIVER: How English is he?
SCURR: Well, as opposed to what?
OLIVER: Welsh.
SCURR: Okay. Well he goes to Wales often and is very interested in Wales. I think he sees himself as English. I think he’s very invested in English customs and stories and people. He’s not nationalistic in any sense like that. What he’s interested in is the inherited ways of living.
And he’s very interested in language and different dialects. That’s one of the other things; he starts to collect different words. He was very aware of the Cornish dialect, for example. So I’d say it’s a very decentered England that’s rooted in customs, traditions, inherited stories.
And there’s a big place there for both the future and the past. Huge excitement about The Royal Society, English science, what can be achieved through the sharing of knowledge. But again, Aubrey’s not an insular person in that respect. So, he wished he could go on the Grand Tour when he was a student. He would really have loved to have done that. It’s one of the things that he actually talked to Harvey about, going and traveling as his contemporaries, for example, John Evelyn did.
But Aubrey actually says—this is very typical of Aubrey—that his mother persuaded him out of it. His mother didn’t want him going off on the Grand Tour. She was afraid for him. And he regretted it later in life. But it’s so typical of Aubrey that he would pay attention to his mother and her anxieties.
OLIVER: This interest in the present and the past—so he loves all the history, but he’s in the Royal Society. One thing I like in your book is the way he talks about, oh, my grandfather still dresses in the old ways, like he’s an Elizabethan, but at the same time he’s doing a very sort of Baconian project. He’s influenced by Bacon. Is Aubrey a sort of paradox? Does this make sense in a way?
SCURR: Only in so far as lots of other people are as well. I was just looking at the Harvey life, and there’s a story there about how when Harvey was a student he was meant to be setting sail with some friends. And he’s stopped and told, “No, you can’t get on this boat. You have to wait.” And he says, “Well, what have I done wrong? Why can’t I get on this boat?” He said, “No, honestly, we need to have a word with you. You are not going on the boat.” And then the boat sinks, everyone dies. And this is apparently because the guy who stopped him had a dream that he needed to stop Harvey going. Harvey told Aubrey that story.
Harvey also is—as Aubrey sort of slightly inaccurately puts it, is the inventor of the circulation of the blood. And you think, well, that’s going a little bit far, perhaps not actually the inventor, but certainly the first person to discover, to understand about circulating blood.
So there’s another example of someone’s life includes, I wouldn’t be alive unless somebody had had this premonition and dream that I was about to die. Which is from a completely different world, from the rational, scientific understanding of the body or the other scientific advances that are going on at the time.
OLIVER: And Aubrey’s happy to just sort of coexist with both of those because of his interest in astrology?
SCURR: And not just astrology. He’s very interested in astrology and nativities, as he called it. In some of the Brief Lives, you see the sort of recording of the information that would be needed to cast an astrological shape for the life.
But he is also interested in the fact that people believe in fairies and ghosts. He doesn’t look down on those beliefs. Nor does he say that he necessarily believes in the presence of fairies or the interventions of the supernatural. But he’s got a very open mind in relation to that. And certainly being simultaneously interested in early astronomy and astrology together is, to us, very striking. But then I think it was much more normal.
OLIVER: Why do you think he resisted ordination?
SCURR: Because he said the cassock stinks. He considered ordination several times because he knew it would be a living, it would be a way of being able to have some income, probably not very onerous duties. Some of his friends say to him, “Come on, Aubrey, it really won’t be that much work. You’ll just get a curate who’ll do it all, and you’ll get the living, and then you won’t have to be worrying all the time about your paycheck. You haven’t got a paycheck. It would be a living coming to you.”
And on one occasion, one of the reasons he gives for not doing that is he thinks well, what if there’s another religious upheaval and I have to change sides again? What if Roman Catholicism comes back and I ended up on the wrong side of it?
And, again, would it really have been that difficult to go with the flow? But I think, in his own way, he had found his way of living, which was intensely sociable. And perhaps he didn’t want that constraint of being a member of the clergy around him.
OLIVER: Do you think he was a nonbeliever?
SCURR: Well. I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think so at all. I think he probably was a straightforward Christian believer. I think perhaps he’d seen enough of the religious conflicts and wars to be afraid of fanaticism on both sides. And that would fit certainly with his relationship with Hobbes.
I don’t have any reason to think he’s an atheist. He’s got a beautiful way of writing about death and there’s this wonderful line he has when he says, “God bless you and me in our in and out world.” So the fact that we refer to his works as the Brief Lives because they’re short, but everybody’s life is brief.
And even those who live, as he did, into his 70s, it feels brief. And there’s these very moving descriptions of him at funerals. I was thinking about this the other day because he often records where someone’s buried. And I recently wrote my first entry for the Dictionary of National Biography. I did the one for Hilary Mantel, which was a great honor and extremely interesting.
And when I came back to the Brief Lives, I thought, gosh, I wish I’d put at the end of that DNB entry where she’s actually buried, that would’ve made sense to do that. And I didn’t do it because the DNB is quite formalized; they’ve got their formula and you need to stick to it.
But maybe I’ll add it in. Because it seems to me very moving to record where people are actually buried. That would fit I think with her religious sensibility, with a regard for the afterlife, and with the rites of passage at the end of life.
OLIVER: What is it that makes Aubrey such a good biographer?
SCURR: So I think the modesty that is in his spirit, the noticing, the minutiae that he both notices and values and his wit. He has a sensitivity to these funny and revealing quirky stories about the people that he knows. Or he finds them in the stories he’s told by people who did know them.
There’s an eyewitness account aspect to it as well. Or at least it’s an oral history. “I was told this by . . .” He’s extremely precise. He’ll try to assemble the facts so far as he can, and then he’ll tell you what people’s close friends said about them, and he will do so very, very carefully so that you know this is a story that he’s been told that he’s passing on.
And then he doesn’t pass moral judgment. He doesn’t adjudicate. And finally, he thinks of himself as doing all of this for posterity and that posterity, i.e. us or the people who come after us, will find things there and he’s not going to tell them what to find. He’s not going to shape the life and say, this is what you should think about it.
He will give you the raw materials, he’ll give you the stories, he’ll give you a flavor of the details of the life, and then posterity can look there and can see, for example, the disagreements between Hobbes and Isaac Newton. There are people who’ve written lives of Hooke and Newton. And there are people who’ve written lives and you can be team Newton or team Hooke. Interestingly, Aubrey is team Hooke. He doesn’t write a life of Newton. And he wants, as I said, to do well by Hooke. But his way of doing that isn’t to say Mr.
Hooke was fantastic and Newton robbed him of lots of his ideas. He says, let me show you, let me assemble and make a catalog, if I can, of all these hundreds of contributions that Hooke made.
OLIVER: When did you discover Aubrey?
SCURR: So I discovered Aubrey because I was reviewing for the LRB, The Biographer’s Tale, and I had come across a really interesting—and it’s still in the introduction to my book—a really interesting reflection on the difference between Aubrey and Lytton Strachey, a reflection made by Anthony Powell, and I had quoted it or alluded to it in my review. And I had gone and started to read Aubrey as a result of that. So I was led to it through reviewing, via Anthony Powell, and then into the Brief Lives.
But then another very strange thing happened, which is I met for the very first time, Janet Malcolm, who is someone who became very important in my life. And because she knew or had been told that I’d written this review, she read the review before we met. And she said to me, she said, “Ruth, I read your review”—and I doubt Janet Malcolm was a massive fan of A.S. Byatt, to be absolutely honest. We never really discussed that further, but she said, “I read your review and I was really interested in this Aubrey. I was so interested in what you quoted about Aubrey and the difference between his biographical approach and Lytton Strachey.”
And then it sort of stuck in my mind and suddenly as I was coming toward the end of my first book, which was a totally different book on Robespierre and the French Revolution, I just knew I wanted to write about Aubrey. And I think at the time my then-husband really thought I’d gone mad actually, because you’re not supposed to do that, are you?
I mean, you’re supposed to stick in your period and certainly build on it. So, you know, a book on Marra or even Napoleon would’ve been okay, that would’ve made sense. But to circle back to the 17th century and write about Aubrey seemed extremely eccentric.
OLIVER: Well, what was Janet Malcolm like?
SCURR: Oh, Janet was absolutely wonderful. She has this reputation of being sort of terrifying. And, of course, I was extremely interested in her forensic examination of biography which we had very interesting conversations about. She was a deeply kind person, extremely nurturing of younger writers, and extremely funny as well.
That’s the other thing that you don’t associate with her sometimes from this sort of public image of a very austere interviewer, The Journalist and the Murderer, In the Freud Archives, et cetera. Actually, she was a really warm and extremely witty person.
OLIVER: A lot of historians don’t think biography is real history. Why do you take biography seriously?
SCURR: Well, Michael Holroyd writes Works on Paper—and I love Michael Holroyd so much. And he has this wonderful line—I won’t remember it exactly—but it’s about biography being the b*****d offspring of history and the novel, and both are ashamed of it.
And I think some of those distinctions actually have broken down. I know lots of historians who are very interested in biographical writing. I think it depends. There are certain historical schools that maybe are not so interested in lives.
And to be fair, the history of ideas is—which I belong to, and in a sense I’m a rebel from—is one of those. I remember there coming a point where I had spent so much time thinking about the constitutional ideas for the representative republic in the middle of the French Revolution, that actually the French Revolution could have been happening on Mars for all it mattered about the actual sequence of events. What mattered was the structure of the ideas.
And it’s difficult because the school I belong to in Cambridge wants to put the ideas into context all the time. But again, by context you don’t really mean people’s lives; more the discourses and the conversations and the ideas of the time that are the landscape, the intellectual landscape, if you like.
So I rebelled at a certain point and I was like, well, you know, I’m actually going to go through the revolution day by day because that period is short. And I think it really matters, the lived experience there. I think many, many history books quote Aubrey with enormous respect and say, “as Aubrey says,” or, “according to Aubrey,” and pull those details forwards.
I suppose some history is quite instrumental in its use of biography, so it wants to draw the reader in with a few anecdotes and a little bit of what does somebody wear on their head? And who was their first love, that kind of thing. But it’s perhaps not very engaged with the real work of trying to capture the shape or the feel of a life.
OLIVER: And of a temperament, right? I think one thing biography gives us is that sense that a lot of these big decisions or events in history are quite temperamental. As well as being based in ideas and events.
SCURR: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
OLIVER: Your life of Aubrey, at one point you tried to write as a novel.
SCURR: Yeah. I had to stop that quite fast.
OLIVER: Why?
SCURR: Because Aubrey is too important. I didn’t want to make up things for him. As someone who’s come right up to that line of the history and the novel, I do think it’s very clear to be on one side or the other. And again, going back to Hilary Mantel, she wrote those wonderful Reith Lectures on historical fiction.
And, like her, I think that it’s not about ignoring the facts or embellishing the facts. It is about the gaps. It’s about imagining what isn’t in the record and should have been, and trying to reconstruct that inside the novel. But at the time, I felt that the gaps with Aubrey didn’t actually matter that much.
There was so much there that I could pull together to give a sense of him and his sensibility. Now actually, scholars in this field will all be very, very keen to advance our knowledge of those gaps. And that’s wonderful. You know, what exactly was Aubrey doing when he visited France? You know, at the time I wrote my book that seemed very unclear.
I think my colleague in Oxford, Kate Bennett, knows that now and will write her own biography. And she will fill in many of these gaps that I sort of happily included in the form that I’d found for his life because giving him that first person voice, I was able to focus on the evidence that I thought had been very underused at that point.
OLIVER: Now Kate Bennett did a wonderful edition of the Brief Lives with lots of excellent footnotes and investigations. And you wrote that it gave us a new understanding of Aubrey.
SCURR: Absolutely. And of the lives themselves. And Kate and I got to know each other and became friends while we were both writing our books. And people we knew before we met were very keen to sort of set us against each other. So they would wind us up. I would meet someone and they’d say, “Ruth, there you are. You’ve written a book about the French Revolution and now you are going to write a book about Aubrey. But don’t you know there is a scholar in Oxford who spent her entire academic life working on Aubrey?” And it built up a picture of fear that you shouldn’t trespass on somebody else’s ground.
And then people would do a sort of reverse thing to her that they would say, “Oh, Kate, gosh, you’ve been working a long time on Aubrey and where is your Clarendon edition after all? And did you know there’s somebody in Cambridge who’s going to write this popular book about Aubrey?”
Anyway, finally we met at a conference and we really actually just liked each other and we decided it’s fine. I was doing my thing. She’s doing something very different. And we became friends, and I see that as a triumph over a sort of more traditional, maybe even dare I say, male and territorial approach to academic life and to knowledge in general actually.
OLIVER: Yeah. Because the two books are great complements to each other. They’re not rivalrous in that sense.
SCURR: Absolutely not. Kate’s book, it’s not just an addition. It’s as much as you can ever do. It’s a reconstruction of the manuscript as Aubrey left it and intended it with all the gaps and the notes to himself to fill this in. And his changes of mind and his deletions and all of that. And so it’s an astonishing thing. Because it’s not just a copy of it. It takes you in, it helps you understand what he was intending with those collections, as you called them, my pretty collections.
And so that edition that she had been working on for a very long time came out in 2015, the same year as my book came out. And it felt like an amazing year for Aubrey. And now, we’ll be celebrating the 400th anniversary of his birth. But that year, 2015, was a very special, obviously for us, but I think for Aubrey more broadly.
OLIVER: How much of an influence has Aubrey had on English biography?
SCURR: As we know, there’s the huge influence in terms of “Aubrey says.” Open any book on the 17th century, and it will be “Aubrey says,” “according to Aubrey,” et cetera. So a huge influence in that respect. With regard to the actual form, I think it’s very, very pervasive and important, and we have to look at it very carefully.
I mentioned earlier the very important difference between what Aubrey does and what Lytton Strachey did. There are some similarities in so far as Strachey will go for the vivid detail. He give you these powerful anecdotes. But actually he spins them as well.
And that’s what Anthony Powell so brilliantly showed. And the example was of Francis Bacon, the life of Francis Bacon who Aubrey has a description of Bacon right at the end of his life, the circumstances leading up to Bacon’s death where he is on Highgate Hill and he decides to conduct an experiment to see if snow will preserve a chicken or a hen as well as salt. So he is stuffing this carcass of the hen with snow. Catches a cold, ends up having to stay with a friend, sleeps in a bed that hasn’t been aired for a long time, and dies. And that’s the end of Lord Bacon.
So Aubrey gives us all this, and then along comes Lytton Strachey. And he takes it, and he says an old man disgraced, shattered, alone on Highgate Hill, stuffing a dead foul with snow, which makes it sound like he’s lost his mind at the end of his life. And then Anthony Powell examined that and he said, look, the story of stuffing the hen with snow is Aubrey’s.
Bacon was certainly an old man at the time of the incident. He was disgraced. He may have been shattered. No doubt at times he was alone. But Aubrey’s story of stuffing the foul on Highgate Hill shows Bacon accompanied by the king’s physician, conducting a serious experiment to test the preservative properties of snow and, on becoming indisposed, finding accommodation in the house of the Earl of Arundel.
And so you take that same story and, as Anthony Powell says, you combine the story, the fragment preserved by Aubrey with some epithets, and you convey an oblique point. It’s a biographical method for actually building up a picture of the person. And it really matters what you do with those fragments.
So I think the fact that Aubrey is pretty pure about this, he gives you the fragments and another biographer might come along and think, okay, what’s going on here with Venetia Stanley and dying in her bed after drinking Viper wine? Let’s build up a story about that. And there was a rumor at the time that her husband had murdered her, et cetera. Aubrey doesn’t comment. He just gives you the fragment. And I think afterwards, people have not only used the fragments in their own work, but they’ve also developed a technique of working up those fragments into whatever picture you decide as a biographer you are going to draw.
OLIVER: Now as well as a historian, you are a literary critic. You review novels. You are a Hilary Mantel admirer. Who else among the modern fiction writers do you admire?
SCURR: Amongst the modern fiction writers? I’m getting quite old, Henry. Lots of my people are dead now. Alice Monroe is someone I’m extremely interested in. Hilary Manel, obviously, Beryl Bainbridge, Penelope Fitzgerald. And I love the fact Penelope Fitzgerald was a biographer simultaneously with becoming a novelist.
And I was thinking back to this actually, that Charlotte Mew and Her Friends—that’s the title. And then the Anthony Powell is John Aubrey and His Friends. And I was thinking, is there something about these people who have a lot of friends and the biographical genre? It’s interesting.
In terms of younger people writing, I just read a wonderful short story by Gwendoline Riley in the latest Paris Review. “A–Z” it’s called—very disturbing. Very, very good story. And Gwendoline has a novel coming out later this year, which I shall read with enormous interest. It’s going to be called Palm House. I absolutely revered George Saunders, although I haven’t yet read Vigil. I’m only on Substack for George Saunders and you Henry. That’s it, basically.
OLIVER: That shows very good taste.
SCURR: Very good taste. Yeah. And a couple of others. My friend Danielle Allen’s The Renovator, I also subscribe to, but very few. But George Saunders wrote a wonderful post on his Substack about maybe a year and a half, maybe more even ago, about how he found the solution to the beginning of Lincoln in the Bardo. And he wanted to find a way to tell the story of the death of Lincoln’s son. It’s so typical of him—and I love this—he said he didn’t want the ghosts. He knew it was going to be narrated by the ghosts in the morgue. And he couldn’t have them coming home one evening saying, “Oh, you know, I just popped over the wall and had a look in through the White House window. And guess what I saw?” So how was he going to get the voices in?
And then he said he’d got these extracts from the letters and from the literature that he needed. And he ended up putting them all on the floor and thinking, what order shall I put them in? And that reminded me of when I was struggling to find a way to write about Aubrey. I suddenly had the idea that I could just put them as diary entries without comment.
I would sort of curate these entries and things like that. So, that was a very interesting moment for me about sort of the construction and the choices that go in both to writing a novel and to writing, in my case, a sort of experimental biography.
OLIVER: So Hilary Mantel, Lincoln in the Bardo, Penelope Fitzgerald, Beryl Bainbridge—there’s a lot of historical fiction here. This is the genre you most enjoy. It’s been a sort of golden age for historical fiction.
SCURR: But those people aren’t just historical fiction writers. It’s very important. They have all written historical fiction, but actually they write other novels as well. It doesn’t matter the order in their careers, they go in and out of it. So I would say that actually it’s those people as writers and sensibilities that attract me.
Anita Brookner is another example. I love Anita Brookner’s novels. I also love her book on David, the revolutionary painter, that she wrote—Jacques-Louis David—that’s a fantastic book. So there’s a sense in which I see them as writers and the genre of historical fiction, you are right, it does cut across, but I don’t think that’s what I’m following. I think I’m following what I find on the page from a particular sensibility and of course a command of language, which is in all of those cases, absolutely extraordinary.
OLIVER: Because they’re all quite innovative as historical novelists as well. And it’s not the main part of what is recognized as their achievement in a way.
SCURR: No, no.
OLIVER: It’s been quietly a second great period of the historical novel. It seems crazy to say Hilary Mantel is our Walter Scott, but that is quite high praise.
SCURR: So I think you deal much more definitely than I do with these sort of epoch-defining ideas. I think I’m just more intermittently focused on particular things that I like. I used to do an enormous amount of reviewing. I’ve had to stop it because—talk about being the whetstone.
I was constantly reviewing when I was in my 30s and much of my 40s actually. And I don’t regret it in the least. And one of the reasons I don’t regret it, especially with novels, was because I would never have read all those novels if I hadn’t been reviewing them.
And even some of the nonfiction, I wouldn’t. But here’s an example: Because I’d been reviewing so much, I ended up quite early 2007, becoming a Booker judge. And part of that process is that anyone who’s been on the list before they automatically get entered by the publisher—McEwen and Barnes, et cetera. Fine.
And then the publisher can put forward two books they choose and they can be anything. And then they assemble a list of so-called call-ins. And those are the books where the publisher says, “Oh, please, please call this in. I mean, we didn’t make it one of our two, but we think it’s absolutely amazing and you must read it.” And you think, well, if it’s so amazing, what were you doing not making it one of your two. But anyway, whatever, we call it in. And on that call-in list there was actually, Anne Enright’s novel, The Gathering, and that ended up winning the year I was a judge.
And I knew Anne Enright’s writing because I had reviewed several of her earlier books, especially one called What Are You Like?, which is quite obscure. It’s not the book people think of when they think about Anne Enright. But I knew because I’d done all that time in the reviewing trenches, as it were, how extraordinary Anne Enright is as a writer. And we were able to say, well, absolutely go ahead and call this in. And then sure enough it won.
OLIVER: What about biography? Modern biography? You like Michael Holroyd?
SCURR: Well, we’ve already talked about Janet Malcolm. She’s a sort of anti-biographer in some respect, sort of subversive of the entire genre. I very much like and respect Antonia Fraser’s historical biographies and especially her one of Marie Antoinette which, again, came out very close to when my Robespierre book came out. And it’s like seeing the other side of the story and that was absolutely extraordinary.
And one of the biographies I go back to over and over again I’m extremely interested in Virginia Woolf. You are obviously a fan with The Common Reader. I was looking at it, preparing for this, that she’s got this absolutely hilarious short biography of John Evelyn, and it is called Rambling Round Evelyn. Do you know it?
OLIVER: Yes.
SCURR: It’s so beautifully constructed. It’s got the butterflies landing on the dahlias pretty much throughout the actual text of the short biography. But then it’s got this brilliant bit where she sort of makes fun of John Evelyn. And she says, the difference between then and now is, if we saw a red admiral, we would admire it, but we wouldn’t—and this is very mean of her—we wouldn’t rush into the kitchen and get a kitchen knife in order to dissect the red admiral’s head. Right? It’s so ridiculous and it so makes fun of Evelyn.
I was listening to the podcast you made with Hermione Lee. And Hermione was saying that she thought what made Woolf such a good critic was that she was very empathetic. But I also think she’s capable of that kind of sharp, wicked distance as well, where she goes, I see you, John Evelyn, you are so proud of your garden, and you’re actually—looked at from my point of view—a bit of an idiot in some respects as well.
OLIVER: I like her because she’s so judgmental, which is not a very popular thing to say, but she is. She is really capable of saying that, you know, as long as prose will be read, Addison will be read. But on the other hand, he’s boring and rambling and not very good in many ways. Absolutely cutting.
SCURR: No, totally, totally. Yeah.
OLIVER: What about some of the sort of big names: Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin?
SCURR: Yeah. Oh, Claire, absolutely. I mean, goodness, they’ve been such influences on me, both of them. Absolutely Richard and his Footsteps and then of course, and those other books, The Ratters of Lightning Ridge and then The Age of Wonder. That’s so important, so wonderful.
Claire, I revere, I loved and still recommend to my students her book on Mary Wollstonecraft. I also, by the way, love Virginia Woolf’s essay on Mary Wollstonecraft. I think that’s a different sort of thing where Woolf describes Mary Wollstonecraft pursuing her lover like a dolphin. She won’t let him go. He thought he’d hooked a minnow. He wasn’t expecting a dolphin to come after him. It was Mary Wollstonecraft. So, Claire Tomalin, her Peyps, Hardy, absolutely hugely important books and deeply, deeply humane actually.
And that’s the other thing, I think biography, by definition, you do get the sharpness of Woolf or Strachey, but I think to put someone else’s life at the center of your book, that’s a humane act. It’s to say, no, I’m going to spend this number years of my life preserving and communicating this other person’s life. And that’s a very wonderful thing to do.
OLIVER: What do you think of the sort of standard criticism of biography, that it’s just not accurate enough? So, for example, Austen Scholars will point to various things in the Tomalin biography where she’s deleted the facts or said things to make the narrative flow, but it’s just not really accurate enough. The novelistic tendency overwhelms the historical one or whatever. You’ve obviously avoided that with various decisions you made in the Aubrey book, but as a genre.
SCURR: I’d never say that. That would be a real hostage to fortune, wouldn’t it?
OLIVER: Well, you know what I mean?
SCURR: And saying, look at, look at this—
OLIVER: Page 28.
SCURR: —at this piece of nonsense you introduced. Well, accuracy is extremely important. What I think about that is it all contributes to knowledge. If someone comes along and finds a mistake or wants to bring in some other evidence—
And actually Kate Bennett, she does this with Aubrey as well. She says that, oh, Aubrey’s really got this wrong, or he’s gotten in a muddle about that. She’s not saying, and therefore let’s just chuck it out because it’s inaccurate. You need to see this as well as that. So I think of it more as a collaborative relationship about adding to knowledge and if somebody corrects a previous book or previous claim or something, or point something, then that’s fine actually.
Again, going back to Holroyd, he thought that that biography was an art form constrained by the facts. So he’s got a place for art in it. And I know what he means by that. And I think ultimately that’s probably why I couldn’t write a novel about a biographical subject because of being constrained by the facts. And yet Hilary Mantel has written many historical novels that are absolutely constrained by the facts. It’s just what they’re doing besides the facts, alongside the facts. So perhaps some people are going to come along and contribute other information and other people will come along and contribute some imaginative answer to the whole. And both are fine. I think we should be liberal broad church here.
OLIVER: Is the genre dying?
SCURR: Not so far as I’m aware. We are always doing this about genres dying, aren’t we? Those things are always dying.
OLIVER: People talk about biography dying a lot.
SCURR: Well, perhaps they do. I haven’t been listening to that. Why do they say it’s dying?
OLIVER: Because you can’t sell these 700-page lives of people.
SCURR: We can’t sell most books. I mean, if we’re going to go buy sales . . .
OLIVER: This, yeah. Well, this story in The Times recently as well, that all the nonfiction that sells now is trash and that the serious books aren’t there. And the whole civilization’s dying routine.
SCURR: Well if it is, we just have to carry on doing what we are doing.
OLIVER: Yeah. What do you think is going to be the future of biography? Because I think more than a lot of other nonfiction genres, it’s so changeable, it’s so flexible. If you look at any decade, you see so much variety in structure and form. What do you think is coming next?
SCURR: I’m like Aubrey; I think that’s going to be for posterity to decide. As long as there are human beings, we will tell stories and we will want to tell stories about ourselves, and we will want to tell stories about the people we have loved and or hated, or the people who we think matter, for whatever reason, in science, in art, in literature. There will always be a need for the story of the human life.
I think it will inevitably change enormously in ways that we couldn’t possibly imagine. Just as Aubrey knew that he couldn’t possibly imagine what posterity was going to make of the information that he had collected, and he didn’t think that was something that he should be constrained by. He thought it was about passing it on.
OLIVER: And what will Ruth Scurr do next?
SCURR: I’ll ask her. I think she’s supposed to be writing about Rousseau and is very excited about that, but has been massively distracted by the Royal Society of Literature and becoming chair of that. So, I’m trying to pull myself back into my project. And I was very excited actually, because again, when I was looking at The Common Reader I saw Woolf refer to the Montaigne, Pepys, and Rousseau as people who had provided these spectacular portraits of themselves. And I was very excited by that. So I’m going to write a book about Rousseau and his time in England.
OLIVER: Very exciting. I look forward to it. Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey: My Own Life, thank you very much.
SCURR: Thank you, Henry.


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Ahead of her new book What’s So Great About the Great Books? coming out in April, Naomi Kanakia and I talked about literature from Herodotus to Tony Tulathimutte. We touched on Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Scott Alexander, Shakespeare, William James, Helen deWitt, Marx and Engels, Walter Scott, Les Miserables, Jhootha Sach, the Mahabharata, and more. Naomi also talked about some of her working habits and the history and future of the Great Books movement. Naomi, of course, writes Woman of Letters here on Substack.
Transcript
Henry Oliver: Today, I am talking with Naomi Kanakia. Naomi is a novelist, a literary critic, and most importantly she writes a Substack called Woman of Letters, and she has a new book coming out, What’s So Great About the Great Books? Naomi, welcome.
Naomi Kanakia: Thanks for having me on.
Oliver: How is the internet changing the way that literature gets discussed and criticized, and what is that going to mean for the future of the Great Books?
Kanakia: How is the internet changing it? I can really speak to only how it has changed it for me. I started off as a writer of young adult novels and science fiction, and there’s these very active online fan cultures for those two things.
I was reading the Great Books all through that time. I started in 2010 through today. In the 2010s, it really felt like there was not a lot of online discussion of classic literature. Maybe that was just me and I wasn’t finding it, but it didn’t necessarily feel like there was that community.
I think because there are so many strong, public-facing institutions that discuss classic literature, like the NYRB, London Review of Books, a lot of journals, and universities, too. But now on Substack, there are a number of blogs—yours, mine, a number of other ones—that are devoted to classic literature. All of those have these commenters, a community of commenters. I also follow bloggers who have relatively small followings who are reading Tolstoy, reading Middlemarch, reading even much more esoteric things.
I know that for me, becoming involved in this online culture has given me much more of an awareness that there are many people who are reading the classics on their own. I think that was always true, but now it does feel like it’s more of a community.
Oliver: We are recording this the day after the Washington Post book section has been removed. You don’t see some sort of relationship between the way these literary institutions are changing online and the way the Great Books are going to be conceived of in the future? Because the Great Books came out of a an old-fashioned, saving-the-institutions kind of radical approach to university education. We’re now moving into a world where all those old things seem to be going.
Kanakia: Yes. I agree. The Great Books began in the University of Chicago and Columbia University. If you look into the history of the movement, it really was about university education and the idea that you would have a common core and all undergraduates would read these books. The idea that the Great Books were for the ordinary person was really an afterthought, at least for Mortimer Adler and those original Great Books guys. Now, the Great Books in the university have had a resurgence that we can discuss, but I do think there’s a lot more life and vitality in the kind of public-facing humanities than there has been.
I talked to Irina Dumitrescu, who writes for TLS (The Times Literary Supplement), LRB (The London Review of Books), a lot of these places, and she also said the same thing—that a lot of these journals are going into podcasts, and they’re noticing a huge interest in the humanities and in the classics even at the same time as big institutions are really scaling back on those things. Humanities majors are dropping, classics majors are getting cut, book coverage at major periodicals is going down. It does seem like there are signals that are conflicting. I don’t really know totally what to make of it. I do think there is some relation between those two things.
Ted Gioia on Substack is always talking about how culture is stagnant, basically, and one of the symptoms of that is that “back list” really outsells “front list” for books. Even in 2010, 50 percent of the books that were sold were front-list titles, books that had been released in the last 18 months. Now it’s something like only 35 percent of books or something like that are front-list titles. These could be completely wrong, but there’s been a trend.
I think the decrease in interest in front-list books is really what drives the loss of these book-review pages because they mostly review front-list books. So, I think that does imply that there’s a lot of interest in old books. That’s what our stagnant culture means.
Oliver: Why do you think your own blog is popular with the rationalists?
Kanakia: I don’t know for certain. There was a story I wrote that was a joke. There are all these pop nonfiction books that aim to prove something that seems counterintuitive, so I wrote a parody of one of those where I aim to prove that reading is bad for you. This book has many scientific studies that show the more you read, the worse it is because it makes you very rigid.
Scott Alexander, who is the archrationalist, really liked that, and he added me to his blog roll. Because of that, I got a thousand rationalist subscribers. I have found that rationalists at least somewhat interested in the classics. I think they are definitely interested in enduring sources of value. I’ve observed a fair amount of interest.
Oliver: How much of a lay reader are you really? Because you read scholarship and critics and you can just quote John Gilroy in the middle of a piece or something.
Kanakia: Yeah. That is a good question. I have definitely gotten more interested in secondary literature. In my book, I really talk about being a lay reader and personally having a nonacademic approach to literature. I do think that, over 15 years of being a lay reader, I have developed a lot of knowledge.
I’ve also learned the kind of secondary literature that is really important. I think having historical context adds a lot and is invaluable. Right now I’m rereading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. When I first read it in 2010, I hardly knew anything about French history. I was even talking online with someone about how most people who read Les Miserables think it’s set in the French Revolution. That’s basically because Americans don’t really know anything about French history.
Everything makes just a lot more sense the more you know about the time because it was written for people in it. For people in 1860s France, who knew everything about their own recent history, that really adds a lot to it. I still don’t tend to go that much into interpretive literature, literature that tries to do readings of the stories or tell me the meaning of the stories. I feel like I haven’t really gotten that much out of that.
Oliver: How long have you been learning Anglo-Saxon?
Kanakia: I went through a big Anglo-Saxon phase. That was in 2010. It started because I started reading The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. There is a great app online called General Prologue created by one of your countrymen, Terry Richardson [NB it is Terry Jones], who loved Middle English. In this app, he recites the Middle English of the General Prologue. I started listening to this app, and I thought, I just really love the rhythms and the sounds of Middle English. And it’s quite easy to learn. So then, I got really into that.
And then I thought, but what about Anglo-Saxon? I’m very bad at languages. I studied Latin for seven years in middle school and high school. I never really got very far, but I thought, Anglo-Saxon has to be the easiest foreign language you can learn, right? So, I got into it.
I cannot sight read Anglo-Saxon, but I really got into Anglo-Saxon poetry. I really liked the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Most people probably would not like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle because it’s very repetitive, but that makes it great if you’re a language learner because every entry is in this very repetitive structure. I just felt such a connection. I get in trouble when I say this kind of stuff, because I’m never quiet sure if it’s 100 percent true. But it’s certainly one of the oldest vernacular literatures in Europe. It’s just so much older than most of the other medieval literature I’ve read. And it just was such a window into a different part of history I never knew about.
Oliver: And you particularly like “The Dream of the Rood”?
Kanakia: Yeah, “The Dream of the Rood” is my favorite Anglo-Saxon poem. “The Dream of the Rood” is a poem that is told from the point of view of Christ’s cross. A man is having a dream. In this dream he encounters Christ’s cross, and Christ’s cross starts reciting to him basically the story of the crucifixion. At the end, the cross is buried. I don’t know, it was just so haunting and powerful. Yeah, it was one of my favorites.
Oliver: Why do you think Byron is a better poet than Alexander Pope?
Kanakia: This is an argument I cannot get into. I think this is coming up because T. S. Eliot felt that Alexander Pope was a great poet because he really exemplified the spirit of the age. I don’t know. I’ve tried to read Pope. It just doesn’t do it for me. Whereas with Byron, I read Don Juan and found it entertaining. I enjoyed it. Then, his lyric poetry is just more entertaining to read. With Alexander Pope, I’m learning a lot about what kind of poetry people wrote in the 18th century, but the joy is not there.
Oliver: Okay. Can we do a quick fire round where I say the name of a book and you just say what you think of it, whatever you think of it?
Kanakia: Sure.
Oliver: Okay. The Odyssey.
Kanakia: The Odyssey. Oh, I love The Odyssey. It has a very strange structure, where it starts with Telemachus and then there’s this flashback in the middle of it. It is much more readable than The Iliad; I’ll say that.
Oliver: Herodotus.
Kanakia: Herodotus is wild. Going into Herodotus, I really thought it was about the Persian war, which it is, but it’s mostly a general overview of everything that Herodotus knew, about anything. It’s been a long time since I read it. I really appreciate the voice of Herodotus, how human it is, and the accumulation of facts. It was great.
Oliver: I love the first half actually. The bit about the Persian war I’m less interested in, but the first half I think is fantastic. I particularly love the Egypt book.
Kanakia: Oh yeah, the Egypt book is really good.
Oliver: All those like giant beetles that are made of fire or whatever; I can’t remember the details, but it’s completely…
Kanakia: The Greeks are also so fascinated by Egypt. They go down there like what is going on out there? Then, most of what we know about Egypt comes from this Hellenistic period, when the Greeks went to Egypt. Our Egyptian kings list comes from the Hellenistic period where some scholar decided to sort out what everybody was up to and put it all into order. That’s why we have such an orderly story about Egypt. That’s the story that the Greeks tried to tell themselves.
Oliver: Marcus Aurelius.
Kanakia: Marcus Aurelius. When I first read The Meditations, which I loved, obviously, I thought, “being the Roman emperor cannot be this hard.” It really was a black pill moment because I thought, “if the emperor of Rome is so unhappy, maybe human power really doesn’t do it.”
Knowing more about Marcus Aurelius, he did have quite a difficult life. He was at war for most of his—just stuck in the region in Germany for ages. He had various troubles, but yeah, it really was very stoic. It was, oh, I just have to do my duty. Very “heavy is the head that wears the crown” kind of stuff. I thought, “okay, I guess being Roman emperor is not so great.”
Oliver: Omar Khayyam.
Kanakia: Omar Khayyam. Okay, I’ve only read The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald, which I loved, but I cannot formulate a strong opinion right now.
Oliver: As You Like It.
Kanakia: No opinions.
Oliver: Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.
Kanakia: Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. I do have an opinion about this, which is that they should make a redacted version of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. I normally am not a big believer in abridgements because I feel like whatever is there is there. But, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, first of all, has a long portion before Boswell even meets Johnson. That portion drags; it’s not that great. Then it has all these like letters that Johnson wrote, which also are not that great. What’s really good is when Boswell just reports everything Johnson ever said, which is about half the book. You get a sense of Johnson’s conversation and his personality, and that is very gripping. I’ve definitely thought that with a different presentation, this could still be popular. People would still read this.
Oliver: The Communist Manifesto.
Kanakia: The Communist Manifesto. It’s very stirring. I love The Communist Manifesto. It has very haunting, powerful lines. I won’t try to quote from it because I’ll misquote them.
Oliver: But it is remarkably well written.
Kanakia: Oh yeah, it is a great work of literature.
Oliver: Yeah.
Kanakia: I read Capital [Das Kapital], which is not a great work of literature, and I would venture to say that it is not necessarily worth reading. It really feels like Marx’s reputation is built on other political writings like The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and works like that, which really seem to have a lot more meat on the bone than Capital.
Oliver: Pragmatism by William James.
Kanakia: Pragmatism. I mean, I’ve mentioned that in my book. I love William James in general. I think William James was writing in this 19th-century environment where it seemed like some form of skepticism was the only rational solution. You couldn’t have any source of value, and he really tried to cut through that with Pragmatism and was like, let’s just believe the things that are good to believe. It is definitely at least useful to think, although someone else can always argue with you about what is useful to believe. But, as a personal guide for belief, I think it is still useful.
Oliver: Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw.
Kanakia: No strong opinions. It was a long time ago that I read Major Barbara.
Oliver: Tell me what you like about James Fenimore Cooper.
Kanakia: James Fenimore Cooper. Oh, this is great. I have basically a list of Great Books that I want to read, but four or five years ago, I thought, “what’s in all the other books that I know the names of but that are not reputed, are not the kind of books you still read?”
That was when I read Walter Scott, who I really love. And I just started reading all kinds of books that were kind of well known but have kind of fallen into literary disfavor. In almost every case, I felt like I got a lot out of these books. So, nowadays when I approach any realm of literature, I always look for those books.
In 19th-century American literature, the biggest no-longer-read book is The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, which was America’s first bestseller. He was the first American novelist that had a high reputation in Europe. The Last of the Mohicans is kind of a historical romance, à la Walter Scott, but much more tightly written and much more tightly plotted.
Cooper has written five novels, the Leatherstocking Tales, that are all centered around this very virtuous, rough-hewn frontiersman, Natty Bumppo. He has his best friend, Chingachgook, who is the last of the Mohicans. He’s the last of his tribe. And the two of these guys are basically very sad and stoic. Chingachgook is distanced from his tribe. Chingachgook has a tribe of Native Americans that he hates—I want to say it’s the Huron. He’s always like, “they’re the bad ones,” and he’s always fighting them. Then, Natty Bumppo doesn’t really love settled civilization. He’s not precisely at war with it, but he does not like the settlers. They’re kind of stuck in the middle. They have various adventures, and I just thought it was so haunting and powerful.
I’ve been reading a lot of other 19th-century American literature, and virtually none of it treats Native Americans with this kind of respect. There’s a lot of diversity in the Native American characters; there’s really an attempt to show how their society works and the various ways that leadership and chiefship works among them. There’s this very haunting moment in The Last of the Mohicans, where this aged chief, Tamenund, comes out and starts speaking. This is a chief who, in American mythology, was famous for being a friend to the white people. But, James Fenimore Cooper writing in the 1820s has Tamenund come out at 80 years old and say, “we have to fight; we have to fight the white people. That’s our only option.” It was just such a powerful moment and such a powerful book.
I was really, really enthused. I read all of these Leatherstocking Tales. It was also a very strange experience to read these books that are generally supposed to be very turgid and boring, and then I read them and was like, “I understand. I’m so transported.” I understand exactly why readers in the 1820s loved this.
Oliver: Which Walter Scott books do you like?
Kanakia: I love all the Walter Scott books I’ve read, but the one I liked best was Kenilworth. Have you ever read Kenilworth?
Oliver: I don’t know that one.
Kanakia: Yeah, it’s about Elizabeth I, who had a romantic relationship with one of her courtiers.
Oliver: The Earl of Essex?
Kanakia: Yeah. She really thought they were going to get married, but then it turned out he was secretly married. Basically, I guess the implication is that he killed his wife in order to marry Queen Elizabeth I. It’s a novel all about him and that situation, and it just felt very tightly plotted. I really enjoyed it.
Oliver: What did you think of Rejection?
Kanakia: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte? Initially when I read this book, I enjoyed it, but I was like, “life cannot possibly be this sad.” It’s five or six stories about these people who just have nothing going on. Their lives are so miserable, they can’t find anyone to sleep with, and they’re just doomed to be alone forever. I was like, “life can’t be this bad.” But now thinking back over it, it is one of the most memorable books I’ve read in the last year. It really sticks with you. I feel like my opinion of this book has gone up a lot in retrospect.
Oliver: How antisemitic is the House of Mirth?
Kanakia: That is a hotly debated question, which I mentioned in my book. I think there has been a good case made that Edith Wharton, the author of House of Mirth, who was from an old New York family, was herself fairly antisemitic and did not personally like Jewish people. What she portrays in this book is that this old New York society also was highly suspicious of Jewish people and was organized to keep Jewish people out.
In this book there is a rich Jewish man, Simon Rosedale, and there’s a poor woman, Lily Bart. Lily Bart’s main thing is whether she’s going to marry the poor guy, Lawrence Selden, or the rich guy, Percy Gryce. She can’t choose. She doesn’t want to be poor, but she also is always bored by the rich guys. Meanwhile, through the whole book, there’s Simon Rosedale, who’s always like, “you should marry me.” He’s the rich Jewish guy. He’s like, “you should marry me. I will give you lots of money. You can do whatever you want.”
Everybody else kind of just sees her as a woman and as a wife; he really sees her as an ally in his social climbing. That’s his main motivation. The book is relatively clear that he has a kind of respect for her that nobody else does. Then, over the course of the book, she also gains a lot more respect for him. Basically, late in the book, she decides to marry him, but she has fallen a lot in the world. He’s like, “that particular deal is not available anymore,” but he does offer her another deal that—although she finds it not to her taste—is still pretty good.
He basically is like, “I’ll give you some money, you’ll figure out how to rehabilitate your reputation, and later down the line, we can figure something out.” So, I think with a great author like Edith Wharton, there’s power in these portrayals. I felt it hard to come away from it feeling like the book is like a really antisemitic book.
Oliver: Now, you note that the Great Books movement started out as something quite socially aspirational. Do you think it’s still like that?
Kanakia: I do think so. Yeah. For me, that’s 100 percent what it was because I majored in econ. I always felt kind of inadequate as a writer against people who had majored in English. Then I started off as a science fiction writer, young adult writer, and I was like, “I’m going to read all these Great Books and then I’ll have read the books that everybody else has read.” In my mind, that’s also what it was—that there was some upper crust or literary society that was reading all these Great Books.
That’s really what did it. I do think there’s still an element of aspiration to it because it’s a club that you can join, that anyone can join. It’s very straightforward to be a Great Books reader, and so I think there’s still something there. I think because the Great Books movement has such a democratic quality to it, it actually doesn’t get you to the top socially, which has always been the true, always been the case. But, that’s okay. As long as you end up higher than where you started, that’s fine.
Oliver: What makes a book great?
Kanakia: I talk about it this in the book, and I go through many different authors’ conceptions of what makes a book great or what constitutes a classic. I don’t know that anyone has come up with a really satisfying answer. The Horatian formulation from Horace—that a book is great or an author is great if it has lasted for a hundred years—is the one that seems to be the most accurate. Like, any book that’s still being read a hundred years after it was written has a greatness.
I do think that T. S. Eliott’s formulation—that a civilization at its height produces certain literature and that literature partakes of the greatness of the civilization and summarizes the greatness of the civilization—does seem to have some kind of truth to it.
But it’s hard, right? Because the greatest French novel is In Search of Lost Time, but I don’t know that anyone would say that the France in the 1920s was at its height. It’s not a prescriptive thing, but it does seem like the way we read many of these Great Books, like Moby Dick, it feels like you’re like communing with the entire society that produced it. So, maybe there’s something there.
Oliver: Now, you’ve used a list from Clifton Fadiman.
Kanakia: Yes.
Oliver: Rather than from Mortimer Adler or Harold Bloom or several others. Why this list?
Kanakia: Well, the best reason is that it’s actually the list I’ve just been using for the last 15 years. I went to a science fiction convention in 2009, Readercon, and at this science fiction convention was Michael Dirda, who was a Washington Post book critic. He had recently come out with his book, Classics for Pleasure, which I also bought and liked. But he said that the list he had always used was this Clifton Fadiman book. And so when I decided to start reading the Great Books, I went and got that book. I have perused many other lists over time, but that was always the list that seemed best to me.
It seemed to have like the best mix. There’s considerable variation amongst these lists, but there’s also a lot of overlap. So any of these lists is going to have Dickens on it, and Tolstoy, and stuff like that. So really, you’re just thinking about, “aside from Dickens and Tolstoy and George Eliot and Walt Whitman and all these people, who are the other 50 authors that you’re going be reading?”
The Mortimer Adler list is very heavy on philosophy. It has Plotinus on it. It has all these scientific works. I don’t know, it didn’t speak to me as much. Whereas, this Clifton Fadiman and John Major list has all these Eastern works on it. It has The Tale of Genji, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Story of the Stone, and that just spoke to me a little bit more.
Oliver: What modern books will be on a future Great Books list, whether it’s from someone alive or someone since the war.
Kanakia: Have you ever heard of Robert Caro?
Oliver: Sure.
Kanakia: Yeah. I think his Lyndon Johnson books are great books. They have changed the field of biography. They’re so complete, they seem to summarize an entire era, epoch. They’re highly rated, but I feel like they’re underrated as literature.
What else? I was actually a little bit surprised in this Clifton Fadiman-John Major book, which came out in 1999, that there are not more African Americans in their list. Like, Invisible Man definitely seemed like a huge missed work. You know, it’s hard. You would definitely want a book that has undergone enough critical evaluation that people are pretty certain that it is great. A lot of things that are more recent have not undergone that evaluation yet, but Invisible Man has, as have some works by Martin Luther King.
Oliver: What about The Autobiography of Malcolm X?
Kanakia: I would have to reread. I feel like it hasn’t been evaluated much as a literary document.
Oliver: Helen DeWitt?
Kanakia: It’s hard to say. It’s so idiosyncratic, The Last Samurai, but it is certainly one of the best novels of the last 25 years.
Oliver: Yeah.
Kanakia: It is hard to say, because there’s nothing else quite like it. But I would love if The Last Samurai was on a list like this; that would be amazing.
Oliver: If someone wants to try the Great Books, but they think that those sort of classic 19th-century novels are too difficult—because they’re long and the sentences are weird or whatever—what else should they do? Where else should they start?
Kanakia: Well, it depends on what they’re into, or it depends on their personality type. I think like there are people who like very, very difficult literature. There are people who are very into James Joyce and Proust. I think for some people the cost-benefit is better. If they’re going to be pouring over some book for a long time, they would prefer if it was overtly difficult.
If they’re not like that, then I would say, there are many Great Books that are more accessible. Hemingway is a good one and Grapes of Wrath is wonderful. The 19th-century American books tend to be written in a very different register than the English books. If you read Moby Dick, it feels like it’s written in a completely different language than Charles Dickens, even though they’re writing essentially at the same time.
Oliver: Is there too much Freud on the list that you’ve used?
Kanakia: Maybe. I know that Interpretation of Dreams is on that list, which I’ve tried to read and have decided life is too short. I didn’t really buy it, but I have read a fair amount of Freud. My impression of Freud was always that I would read Freud and somehow it would just seem completely fanciful or far out, like wouldn’t ring true. But then when I started reading Freud, it was more the opposite. I was like, oh yeah, this seems very, very true.
Like this battle between like the id and the ego and the super ego, and this feeling that like the psyche is at war with itself. Human beings really desire to be singular and exceptional, but then you’re constantly under assault by the reality principle, which is that you’re insignificant. That all seemed completely true. But then he tries to cure this somehow, which does not seem a curable problem. And he also situates the problem in some early sexual development, which also did not necessarily ring true. But no, I wouldn’t say there’s too much. Freud is a lot of fun. People should read Freud.
Oliver: Which of the Great Books have you really not liked?
Kanakia: I do get asked this quite a bit. I would say the Great Book that I really felt like—at least in translation—was not that rewarding in an unabridged version was Don Quixote. Because at least half the length of Don Quixote is these like interpolated novellas that are really long and tedious. I felt Don Quixote was a big slog. But maybe someday I’ll go back and reread it and love it. Who knows?
Oliver: Now you wrote that the question of biography is totally divorced from the question of what art is and how it operates. What do you think of George Orwell’s supposition that if Shakespeare came back tomorrow, and we found out he used to rape children that we should—we would not say, you know, it’s fine to carry on to doing that because he might write another King Lear.
Kanakia: Well, if we discovered that Shakespeare was raping children, he should go to prison for that. No. It’s totally divorced in both senses. You don’t get any credit in the court of law because you are the writer of King Lear. If I murdered someone and then I was hauled in front of a judge and they were like, oh, Naomi’s a genius, I wouldn’t get off for murder. Nor should I get off for murder.
So in terms of like whether we would punish Shakespeare for his crime of raping children, I don’t think King Lear should count at all, but it’s never used that way. It’s never should someone go to prison or not for their crimes, because they’re a genius. It’s always used the other way, which is should we read King Lear knowing that the author raped children, but I also feel like that is immaterial. If you read King Lear, you’re not enabling someone to rape children.
Oliver: There’s an almost endless amount of discussion these days about the Great Books and education and the value of the humanities, and what’s the future of it all. What is your short opinion on that?
Kanakia: My short opinion is that the Great Books at least are going to be fine. The Great Books will continue to be read, and they would even survive the university. All these books predate the university and they will survive the university. I feel like the university has stewarded literature in its own way for a while now and has made certain choices in that stewardship. I think if that stewardship was given up to more voluntary associations that had less financial support, then I think the choices would probably be very different. But I still think the greatest works would survive.
Oliver: Now this is a quote from the book: “I am glad that reactionaries love the Great Books. They’ve invited a Trojan horse into their own camp.” Tell us what you mean by that.
Kanakia: Let’s say you believed in Christian theocracy, that you thought America should be organized on explicitly Christian principles. And because you believe in Christian theocracy, you organize a school that teaches the Great Books. Many of these schools that are Christian schools that have Great Books programs will also teach Nietzsche. They definitely put some kind of spin on Nietzsche. But they will teach anti-Christ, and that is a counterpoint to Christian morality and Christian theology. There are many things that you’ll read in the Great Books that are corrosive to various kinds of certainties.
If someone who I think is bad starts educating themselves in the Great Books, I don’t think that the Great Books are going to make them worse from my perspective. So it’s good.
Oliver: How did reading the Mahabharata change you?
Kanakia: Oh yeah, so the Mahabharata is a Hindu epic from, let’s say, the first century AD. I’m Indian and most Indians are familiar with the basic outline of the Mahabharata story because it’s told in various retellings, and there’s a TV serial that my parents would rent from the Indian store growing up and we would watch it tape by tape. So I’m very familiar with it. Like there’s never been a time I have not known this story.
But I was also familiar with the idea that there is a written version in Sanskrit that’s extremely long. It is 10 times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. This Mahabharata story is not that long. I’ve read a version of it that’s about 800 pages long. So how could something that’s 10 times this long be the same? A new unabridged translation came out 10 years ago. So I started reading it, and it basically contains the entire Sanskrit Vedic worldview in it.
I had never been exposed to this very coherently laid-out version of what I would call Hindu cosmology and ethics. Hindus don’t really get taught those things in a very organized way. The book is basically about dharma, the principle of rightness and how this principle of rightness orders the universe and how it basically results in everybody getting their just deserts in various ways. As I was reading the book, I was like, this seems very true that there is some cosmic rebalancing here, and that everything does turn out more or less the way it should, which is not something that I can defend on a rational level.
But just reading the book, it just made me feel like, yes, that is true. There is justice, the universe is organized by justice. It took me about a year to read the whole thing. I started waking up at 5:00 a.m. and reading for an hour each morning, and it just was a really magical, profound experience that brought me a lot closer to my grandmother’s religious beliefs.
Oliver: Is it ever possible to persuade someone with arguments that they should read literature, or is it just something that they have to have an inclination toward and then follow someone’s example? Because I feel like we have so many columns and op-eds and “books are good because of X reason, and it’s very important because of Y reason.” And like, who cares? No one cares. If you are persuaded, you take all that very seriously and you argue about what exactly are the precise reasons we should say. And if you’re not persuaded, you don’t even know this is happening.
And what really persuades you is like, oh, Naomi sounds pretty compelling about the Mahabharata. That sounds cool. I’ll try that. It’s much more of a temperamental, feelingsy kind of thing. Is it possible to argue people into thinking about this differently? Or should we just be doing what we do and setting an example and hoping that people will follow.
Kanakia: As to whether it’s possible or not, I do not know. But I do think these columns are too ambitious. A thousand-word column and the imagined audience for this column is somebody who doesn’t read books at all, who doesn’t care about literature at all. And then in a thousand-word column, you’re going to persuade them to care about literature. This is no good. It’s so unnecessary.
Whereas there’s a much broader range of people who love to read books, but have never picked up Moby Dick or have never picked up Middlemarch, or who like maybe loved Middlemarch, but never thought maybe I should then go on and read Jane Austen and George Eliot.
I think trying to shift people from “I don’t read books at all; reading books is not something I do,” to being a Great Books card-carrying lover of literature is a lot. I really aim for a much lower result than that, which is to whatever extent people are interested in literature, they should pursue that interest. And as the rationalists would say, there’s a lot of alpha in that; there’s a lot to be gained from converting people who are somewhat interested into people who are very interested.
Oliver: If there was a more widespread practice of humanism in education and the general culture, would that make America into a more liberal country in any way?
Kanakia: What do you mean by humanism?
Oliver: You know, the old-fashioned liberal arts approach, the revival of the literary journal culture, the sort of depolitical approach to literature, the way things used to be, as it were.
Kanakia: It couldn’t hurt. It couldn’t hurt is my answer to that question.
Oliver: Okay.
Kanakia: What you’re describing is basically the way I was educated. I went to Catholic school in DC at St. Anselm’s Abbey School, in Northeast, DC, grade school. Highly recommend sending your little boys there. No complaints about the school. They talked about humanism all the time and all these civic virtues. I thought it was great. I don’t know what people in other schools learn, but I really feel like it was a superior way of teaching.
Now, you know, it was Catholic school, so a lot of people who graduated from my school are conservatives and don’t really have the beliefs that I have, but that’s okay.
Oliver: Tell us about your reading habits.
Kanakia: I read mostly ebooks. I really love ebooks because you can make the type bigger. I just read all the time. They vary. I don’t wake up at 5:00 a.m. to read anymore. Sometimes if I feel like I’m not reading enough—because I write this blog, and the blog doesn’t get written unless I’m reading. That’s the engine, and so sometimes I set aside a day each week to read. But generally, the reading mostly takes care of itself.
What I tend to get is very into a particular thing, and then I’ll start reading more and more in that area. Recently, I was reading a lot of New Yorker stories. So I started reading more and more of these storywriters that have been published in the New Yorker and old anthologies of New Yorker stories. And then eventually I am done. I’m tired. It’s time to move on.
Oliver: But do you read several books at once? Do you make notes? Do you abandon books? How many hours a day do you read?
Kanakia: Hours a day: Because my e-reader keeps these stats, I’d say 15 or 20 hours a week of reading. Nowadays because I write for the blog, I often think as I’m reading how I would frame a post about this. So I look for quotes, like what quote I would look at. I take different kinds of notes. I’ll make more notes if I’m more confused by what is going on. Especially with nonfiction books, I’ll try sometimes to make notes just to iron out what exactly I think is happening or what I think the argument is. But no, not much of a note taker.
Oliver: What will you read next?
Kanakia: What will I read next? Well, I’ve been thinking about getting back into Indian literature. Right now I’m reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. But there’s an Indian novel called Jhootha Sach, which is a partition novel that is originally in Hindi. And it’s also a thousand pages long, and is frequently compared to Les Miserables and War and Peace. So I’m thinking about tackling that finally.
Oliver: Naomi Kanakia, thank you very much.
Kanakia: Thanks for having me.


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