Light Reading for Intellectual Heavyweights

Well, we’d like to welcome several people who usually are

frequently not here. Custis Right. Tells me that she’s just passed her 90
fourth birthday
and we’re very glad to have other people than Jack Peril. Tom Tom Staley
and Joanna Hitchcock, our speaker is Philip Water. And as you
will know, he is a fellow of Merton College. And his book
is called Light Weight Reading Thousand
Five Hundred and Fifty Three Pages Writers, Readers and Reputation’s
Literary Life in Britain. Eighteen seventy two, 1918.
Philip and I have a connection in different ways. He’s a former editor
of the English Historical Review, and he has a connection
also with the history of Oxford University Press. This
is a volume that we edited some six, seven years ago.
And when it went to the press in its final stage, the
Oxford University Press, like all university presses, requires a final
formal reading set out to two readers who sent in critical responses and lets the
delegates know where the book is. A good book, a bad book, whether it should be published or not. So we’ve
got a very, very critical review. And I identified
the author, Philip Lawlor. So we recruited
him and he now has a chapter in the book as a result of having written
the readers report. I wanted to say one of the thing that in the book itself,
the history of Oxford University Press, there is a quotation on lightweight
reading and it’s from Harold Nicholson. And he says that nothing but the
serious but overworked person is not always very intelligent
in the matter of light reading. And so he recommends two categories of
books, detective novels and scholarly study of a subject
unconnected with the readers ordinary profession. So with that, let’s welcome
Philip Lawlor.
That’s extremely generous of you. Did recollecting my part
in the yeah, the university presses self-regarding history
of SFI. I’ve crossed disemboweled myself with my own pen.
As a consequence of having to do that chapter. But
I think you might find it amusing. I appreciate the
generosity of your welcome. You were far too
generous. Therefore, I also feel an impostor. But to
business, an analysis of unsparing Greger
of a major turning point of history is the ideal choice for a seminar
such as this. That was certainly my intent until I remembered
that historians are spoilsports. And the whole purpose of historical
research is to prove that turning points turned less than people suppose
or actually never turn at all. So instead of a great drama,
I’m going to present you a little diversion.
Let me begin by inviting you to exercise your imaginations
and picture an identikit mid-Victorian bearded bloke
looking much like an Old Testament prophet who, after his morning’s
intellectual exertions and a spot of lunch, likes nothing
better than to stretch out on a chaise long in the conservatory,
a cigaret in hand, eyes half closed while his
wife reads to him from Dinham, Muller breaks Agatha’s husband
library. In which the eponymous
heroine is an orphan and an heiress, courtship
occupies most of the first volume in the second.
The plot thickens when her husband Nathaniel discovers
that his brother, a characteristically villainous major, has
embezzled most of Agatha’s fortune. And if there
are any villainous majors here this afternoon, please welcome your mustaches.
Nathaniel determines to keep his dastardly brother’s misdeeds from
Agatha while he sorts things out and his secretiveness
and further misunderstandings. Cool’s husband and wife to suspect each
other of infidelity, whereupon Nathaniel starts acting coldly towards
her, and Agatha ends volume two crying uncontrollably
in Volume 3. The truth is eventually revealed, and Nathaniel and Dagga
fall into each other’s arms, this time amid tears of
joy. So who was the bearded bloke and what’s the moral
of all this? Well, his name was until September 2017,
quite literally a common currency, the face of the British £10
note because he was Charles Darwin, and during the morning he’d been
scribbling away on the Origin of Species. As for the moral of my tale,
it may seem slightly to be stretching the evidence to rank Agatha’s
husband alongside von Humboldt treatises as a seminal
influence on evolutionary theory. Still, it doesn’t seem to have done the great man
any harm. And who knows? This relaxation may even have
provided him with affirmation of his philosophy, of life, of progress
and harmony, not in spite of, but because of the apparent
setbacks and conflicts. Darwin’s favorite reading
was always family sagas of the Agatha’s husband kind,
in which he could fret about the fate of the heroine quite as much as if she
were his own daughter. His son, George, took a dim view of this and was
horrified at the amount of romantic trash his dad consume.
Darwin himself was unrepentant and told friends that he couldn’t abide the
loftiest sort of novelists because, quote, they cheated him of
a happy ending. Now, George Darwin’s embarrassment
about his father’s literary taste leads us naturally to Sue’s
corner, that hallowed burial ground for pretentiousness, which
this year celebrates its golden jubilee in the satirical magazine Private Eye
Intellectual Affectation, is inseparable from the reading
habit. One question that always seems calculated to
incite this is what book Who’s Most Influenced You?
When the novelist Vincent MacDonell was asked about this, he immediately started
to rummage around in his mental attic to come up with a suitable immortal
from the Irish literary pantheon, as would most flatter him as a fellow
Irish scribe. Was it to be James Joyce portrait of an artist
or that tough and not Ulysses tricky? This. But at least MacDonell
recognised he couldn’t get away with saying Finnegans Wake because no one
would believe him, it being completely unreadable. You’ll recall
AJP Taylor observing even the words with gibberish.
Modernist writers like Joyce disintegrated. The traditions of English literature
in the same way that the artillery blasted the landscape in the Great War.
Joyce went right through literature and came out somewhere on the other side.
Poets, of course, have always been allowed to drift off into dreamy intelligibility.
That’s how we expect such unworldly creatures to behave. That is
not to make any sense and to starve accordingly. The whole point
of prose is that it must be understood. During the first
half of the 20th century, the standard of living for the generality of British people
was higher than throughout their entire previous history. It was unforgivable,
therefore, that they were let down by a literary elite producing
incomprehensible or unappetizing stuff just at the point
when books had never been cheaper. It wasn’t a matter of waiting for
ordinary people to catch up with the literary fashion. Most people never
got there because having values of their own, they didn’t want to get there
anyway. Why should the common reader take to modernist authors who showed such
clear contempt for them? Back to Vincent MacDonell. When he
got home and thought again about the question, he realized he’d
been a fraud. It wasn’t an esoteric classic, but
create a cheap, dog eared paperback by Tex Burns
that had most influenced him. Tex Burns was the pseudonym of Louis L’Amour.
You may never have heard of Louis, but perhaps you should, because no less an authority
than John Wayne considered him the world’s most interesting man.
Can you have any finer praise than that? Actually, you
can. Still, still, you might think that Louis L’Amour, such a perfect name for fiction
writing that it was beyond improvement. Yet he twice gave himself
a makeover. A North Dakota vet, animal vet, son
Lewis started out with the surname Lammermoor. He then Frenchified
it in to l’amour. The better to weave his magic. By the 1950s,
Louis was churning out not bodice rippers, but Westerns 250
million worldwide. And when you’re hitching up your chaps and buckling
on your Colt 45 hard bitten Tex Burns rather than heart
rending, Louis L’Amour was the man you wanted to ride out with.
Vincent MacDonell was age 7 when he chanced on the
rustlers of West Fork. His household contained no
books and he didn’t know what a library was. But 40 years on, he
could, quote, still recall the thrill, the excitement and the suspense
of the story. One scene in which Hopalong CASSIDY escaped
over the mountains with a crippled man and his daughter during a blizzard is
still vivid today. It made him want to be a writer.
The craze for asking what books most influenced people
is likely as old as reading itself that it once had religious implications
is obvious because leisure time consumed by mere entertainment was suspect
the devil having plenty of work for idle minds as well as idle hands.
Recreation, in its purest sense meant just that re-creation
a renaissance. The rebirth, the refreshment of the spirit. By God’s grace,
purged of iniquities, the modern age goes in for secular
religions. Of which the foremost cult is socialism.
Hence the interest aroused in nineteen six when the twenty nine
M PS, who comprise the first Labor Party in Westminster, were asked
what books had most influence them. Socialists have their own sacred
texts. Therefore, you might assume that Marx’s gothic thriller
Das Kapital or his Reader’s Digest version, The Communist Manifesto
would top their list. He didn’t. Marx got two mentions,
even devotees such as the clerk and, well, compositor Tommy Jackson, who
became a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920,
reckoned that fewer than 50 people in all Britain had read
Das Capital through to the end. George Bernard Shaw boasted
of being one and declared it, quote, the only book that ever
turned me upside down. He remained in that position, according
to Max, B had been for the rest of his life. Rather than marks
the decisive influences on the 29 labor m.p.’s were Ruskin
with 17 nominations. Dickens with 16. Carlisle. 13.
Walter Scott. Eleven. Shakespeare. Nine. Robbie Burns. A Tennyson
the basis of British socialism was ethical, not
economic. This was confirmed by 14 nominations for the
Bible, eight for bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and four
for the Free Church Minister and Edinborough Professor Henry Drummond,
whose natural law in the spiritual world 1883 is now virtually
forgotten that Methodism shaped the emerging Labor Party more
than Marx did is a familiar thesis. You
might object that the first Labor MP is indeed politicians generally
hardly qualified. The intellect for the intellectual heavyweights of my title.
Most pioneering Labor MP has lacked formal education beyond the board’s
school. Instead, they personified a working class autodidact
culture that gathered strength as the Victorian age progressed.
Then it was that countless ordinary people exhibited unquenchable
appetite for knowledge and read voraciously. Importantly,
orto di DACs were and are unconfined by specialism
and da keen to acquaint themselves with the classics of every field.
Now, it’s a short step from asking what books most influenced people,
telling them what books should most influence them.
The Victorians did not hold back in the finger wagging department.
Its departmental head was Sir John Lubbock, Polly Matic, brain box
and versatile man of action remembered. Now, if at all, is the
originator of bank holidays, the promoter of legislation to preserve
ancient monuments, and does an experimental biologist who played his
violin to be’s to prove their deafness
as president of the Working Men’s College? He lectured there in 1885
about the hundred best books. This was published
in his slim volume, The Pleasures of Life 1887, which
in various guises sold a quarter a million copies and appeared in over
were organized by category religion. Science. Philosophy, ethics.
Logic. History. Political. Economy. Trample. Natural History. Biography.
The Epic Essays. Poetry. Drama. And the novel.
It was a stiff test. By any measure. And Lubbock cheated by smuggling
in as one item. The entire works of his own favorite star.
Authors such as Homer and Walter Scott were as elders. Aristotle
and Plato included were limited to individual tax. Still,
Lubbock’s shunned insularity of any sort. While British
authors predominated and the adequacy of translations was problematic,
he took in not just old Europe headed out east, incorporating
a large slice of the Koran and Persian and Hindu epics
before reaching Confucius. Is Analects this last? He
remarked, magisterial. He didn’t particularly rate, but he included
it because, quote, it was held in the most profound veneration by
the Chinese race containing four hundred thousand million
of our fellow men. Moreover, he added sweetly. It’s quite short.
Lubbock did not otherwise measure up to today’s P.C. standards.
He was emphatic that books, quote, must be read for improvement
rather than for amusement. He conceded that, quote, light
and entertaining books are valuable, just as sugar is an important
article of food, especially for children. But we cannot live
upon it. Furthermore, there are books which are no books
and to read, which is a waste of time. Well, there are others so bad
that we cannot read them without pollution. If they were men, we should
kick them into the street. These hundred therefore comprise only
books that quote no one can read without being the better for them.
But don’t think Lubbock was a Thomas Grant grind dude. Utilitarian.
Literature that made better workers was, he wrote, useful, no
doubt, but by no means the highest use of books, the best books
elevate cells into a region of disinterested thought where
the troubles and anxieties of the world are almost forgotten.
Lubbock had many an imitator. Indeed, pretty well. Every busybody, boor
and humbug in the land tumbled over themselves to issue rival lists
of the best hundred books, and not just the nation’s ordained ministers
of God assumed the mission repossession. So did a religious professor of
history at Cambridge. This was Lord Acton, whose own hundred was,
as you’d expect, even more forbidding than a Lubbock’s. But
to suppose that every Victorian was fitted with a humor bypasses
preposterous. On the contrary, earnest homily inspired
iconoclastic comedy The Hundred Best soporific
X was hailed as a truer depiction of the exercise
and quickest out of the blocks. To poke fun at it all was the author of
The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow in 1886,
a railway clerk trying to scratch a living as a writer. He dedicated
his book to his pipe before pronouncing in a preface.
What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate.
This book wouldn’t elevate a cow. I cannot. I cannot conscientiously
recommend it for any useful purpose, whatever. All I can suggest is
that when you get tired of reading the best hundred books, you may take this
up for an hour. It will be a change. Three years later, the same
writer, Jerome Kay Jerome, penned his masterpiece Three Men in a Boat,
in which the Victorian work ethic was dished once and for all.
I love the work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Did Lubbock’s best hundred have no takers then? It
might seem a chronic exercise in futility and operation
omniscience designed for some priggish model well, citizen of the future.
Except that Routledge is the publisher, brought out all the titles in a series.
And there is evidence if people like Police Sergeant Hewitt,
the Finsbury Park, who considered himself a cut above the artisan class,
regularly ponderings Lubbock’s list. His son noted
wryly that it included nearly all the books one didn’t want to read
or gave up. If one tried books, you’d expect to find in every intelligent
gentlemen’s private library with their leave some cut.
He then disclose the reading his father most relished. These were the best
sellers. Rider Haggard. Mary Carelli, Stanley Weyman, Anthony
Hope, Prisoner UPS, Endor and so forth. And the rising star of the Edwardian period,
Edgar Wallace. This sort of thing was right up J.M.
Barrie’s Quality Street, after all. Barry himself wasn’t
so different, except that he was that most aware of authors
in What Every Woman Knows. 1988, he famously declared There
are few more impressive sites in the world than a Scotsman on the make.
But it was in Alice Sit by the Fire, a three act play of nineteen
five that he took aim at literary namedropping in this delicious
dialog. Alice, are you very studious? Cosmo.
Cosmo My favorite authors are William Shakespeare and William Milton.
They aren’t grand, don’t you think, Alice? I mean, they’re woman. I’m
afraid they sometimes bore me, especially William Milverton.
Cosmo with relief to date. Me too. This brings us back
to our labor m.p.’s. It’s not to impugn the truthfulness
of their responses to the question which books most influence them.
If we suppose they read other things too and enjoyed these other
things are all the more knowing their answers would be published and striving
to make a serious impression. They put on the equivalent of their Sunday suit,
if I may up the language of working class respectability, but it would
transgress the bounds of credulity if they were never entranced by
the bestsellers of their day, such as Whole Kane, who penned the first million
selling novel in Britain, or Nat Gould, who at his death in 1919
had turned out a hundred and thirteen novels all about horse racing
at the rate of five a year, and two clocked up sales of 24 million
or choa. Charles Galvis Arnold Bennett identified him as
the most successful novelist in England who in 1912 13 alone
sold one and three quarter million copies to aren’t the six million
he’d already he’d already sold.
His literary agent said of the sixpenny Galvis
is that they were as plentiful as the leaves of fellow ambrosia,
a delightful simile deployed originally in paradise lost about
the vast number of fallen angels will know whether the author of Paradise
Lost was William or John Milton. I really can never quite remember.
It’s obligatory that every tale must have a twist.
So let me introduce mine by describing two quite similar
scenes. The first is a reception in
the early eighteen seventies at the swanky Regent’s Park, a dress of a
celebrity, a literary couple who were living in sin as
liberal intellectuals are still, I believe, required by law to do
their party. The male host confidentially disclosed to
each check cited guest Celia is going to have a baby.
My second scene takes place 50 years later just after
the Great War, and it’s a packed political meeting of 2000 newly
enfranchised women in Paisley at which a note was
passed up to the platform speaker. This read Will Mrs.
Burnett Smith tell us whether Captain Hannay is going to marry Jean
Adair? Here I’ve given the game away, or perhaps
not, because who now knows that Mrs. Burnett Smith was once a prolific
writer of romances under the pen name Annie Swan.
While the audience was keen to find out was the next episode of her serial story
running in the magazine The People’s Friend. This still leaves UNIDENTIFIED
the celebrity literary couple of Regent’s Park.
He was George Henry Lewes. The positiveness critic, biographer of Gatta
and paramour of Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot,
and the Celia who was going to have a baby was the sister of Dorothea Brooke,
the heroine of Middlemarch, which was then being serialized. Now,
no one will want to argue that George Eliot and Annie Swan
are authors of equal philosophical weight and permanent literary
value. Yet we need to allow that a good story gripped to like
the solutes cerebral select of a literary salon and the humble
housewife at her local newsagents united them too, with fuddy
duddy gossip. Had it that the Dean of King’s College and the
Cambridge University Registrar cut chapel to be the first to discover the denouement
of the hand of the Baskervilles as the last installment of its serialisation
appeared. We should therefore guard against literary snobbery.
And resist the temptation to divide works into high brow and
low brow as a phrenology was an exact science too.
To assume that only the best people read the best books is a literary is
a fantasy. Similarly, we should acknowledge that bestsellers were read by
all. Reading gives an altogether mysterious business.
No two people read the same book in the same way. Likewise, no one
person reads the same book for a second time in the same way when evaluating
the impact of books for far too long literary scholars. Poor Dave the text
and ignored the audience. Reception history is obviously aimed to reverse
that imbalance. Yet it remains true that we can’t easily know
how books are read. What holds or loses a reader’s attention
and what sensations they experience? Readers of George Eliot
might not have been drawn to her for her profound reflections about religion and
devolution, and may well have skipped such passages as the as
there were many. A so-called classic has this in common with
a best seller, a story well told containing a cast of characters
whose deeds and relationships make readers care and whose
rites of passage they follow as closely as if they were members of their own family
by convention and by preference. A good read will contain a roller
coaster ride of emotions and for us quite as much as the Victorians.
This must involve moral tests and struggles before
ideally virtuous, rewarded and vise confounded.
We must also take into account how stories come to us in different forms,
such as through serialisation and abridgment. The journalist
who quizzed the first Labor MP is in 5:41 about the books
that influence them was W.T. Stead, who learned his
trade as a publicist during Gladstone’s Bulgarian Attrocities campaign
in 1876. Ten years later, he courted imprisonment
for exposing child prostitution and white slavery, and he eventually
sank with the Titanic in 1912. His belief that
the dead communicate with the living means that we cannot rule out him one
day sensationally reporting his own drowning. Until
then, I should inform you that Stead had been quick to exploit
the new printing technology and expiry of copyright protection
for many classic authors. In May 1895,
he launched Penny Poets, followed in January 1896
by Penny Novels by October 1897.
His 60 volumes of Penny poets had cleared five and a quarter million
copies and the 90 penny novels about nine million.
These last were condensation of classics cut down to 30
to 40 thousand words. Ditching a huge amount of verbiage and
in the process, bringing the George Eliot’s literature closer
to the any s Swann’s as we reel away in horror
that the philistinism and brutality involved. Let’s remember
that we do the same and worse in adaptations for radio,
television and cinema and theater. Refutations are regularly made
by amputating Shakespeare and dressing what’s left in a frenzy
modern wardrobe. Also, remember that many a classic author
wrote hurriedly and carelessly. The notion that readers should dwell on their
every word is a ridiculous superstition. Sir Walter Scott, scribbling
away furiously to pay off debts himself, recommended, quote, The laudable
practice of skipping exceptional people
in virtually every respect behave like unexceptional
people. Lloyd George When Prime Minister liked to unwind
with what he called shilling shockers, cliff hanging thrillers
and pulsating romance. Is his predecessor Asquith enjoyed thrillers,
too. Otherwise he could be found sitting up in bed translating
Kipling into Greek. Surely that was an effort? Queried
his wife, Margo. Not at all. It’s relaxation, he purred, with all
the effortless superiority of a Balliol grapes man.
The following evening, their last in Downing Street, he read the Bible.
And what part? Inevitably it was the crucifixion. There would be no
political resurrection for Asquith three days later, or any other time yet.
That was after a point he retired to bed. And in whatever condition,
his nickname was Perry ASUU. He never broke the habit of reading
for two hours every night. There’s no space here to pursue
off duty prime ministerial reading, although though it would be neglectful
to disregard Harold Macmillan, who is always keen to go to bed
with a trollop. Recent recent prime
ministers seem more interested in the photo shoot opportunity as
they set off on a holiday with the title of some improving greeting just
accidentally peeping out from under their arm. In this,
they are allies of the chattering classes who are mortified if they
are not seen with the book of the moment. How else to explain? Stephen
Hawking’s A Brief History of Time occupying the bestseller list for a record
busting. Two hundred and thirty seven weeks after publication
in 1988. Similarly, to take this quest abroad
here for a moment, consider the impact of a speech in 2006
by President Hugo Chavez in which he denounced
George W. Bush as the devil and waved in the air. Known
Chomsky’s hegemony or survival? That
was the right or nor should it be the left on Prof’s polemic, of course, against American
foreign policy. Chavez nominated Chomsky as essential reading
for every member of the Venezuelan assembly and for all Americans.
Originally published in 2, 2003 and languishing
get one hundred and sixty thousand seven hundred and seventy second
in the Amazon book charts on the Wednesday. Chavez gave his speech
by the Thursday afternoon. It had been catapulted into the top 10.
Doubtless the coffee tables of Islington and Notting Hill, as well as of Manhattan
and Brentwood. Bel Air groaned under the weight of its radical shake, too.
But if I may tender a little advice to anyone here who is seeking to impress
by leaving lying around in the family drawing room a hardback copy
of the latest hefty nonfiction prize winner.
I suggest it prominently displays a bookmark towards the end
to which you can point and nonchalantly pronounce. The critics loved
it. But it hasn’t done that much for me.
I’ve now strayed into my froufrou. I’ve now strayed from my theme
of light reading for intellectual heavyweights into heavy reading for well,
I won’t press that point, but instead commend to you and Nobita dictum
of Oliver Edwards. So Wiltshire gentlemen son who was up at Oxford
in the late seventeen twenties with Sam Johnson. Dr. Johnson, when they met
by chance some 50 years later, it’s Clemans stains on
the Strand near the law courts, Edwards remarked at the end of their chat.
You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I’ve tried in my time to be a philosopher,
but I don’t know how cheerfulness was always breaking through.
I only hope that the same occurred to Hilary Benn, who, while still
at primary school, was given for a Christmas present in the 1970s by his
father, Tony. The Labor Cabinet Minister,
Isaac Deutsch’s three-volume biography of Trotsky.
If you’re not completely stunned by that, then let me administer the knockout blow
by reciting. The Prime Minister Tony Blair’s carefully calibrated
admission in 2006 that torture’s trilogy, quote, quote,
made a very deep impression on me. In 2017,
he embellished this further, revealing in an interview that as an undergraduate
at St. John’s, Oxford, it transformed him into a bit of a trot.
I picked it up and I literally didn’t stop reading it at all, not all night.
I suddenly thought the world is full of these extraordinary causes and injustices.
And here’s this guy. Trotsky, who was so inspired by all this that
he went out to create a Russian revolution and change the world. It was like a light going
on. Blair, as we know, is a one off novel and beyond caricature.
Therefore, it is not at all contradictory that 20 years before,
in 1996, when he was only the leader of the opposition
and didn’t want to spook Middle England, he forgot all about his one night stand
with Trotsky and instead chose Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe to take
to his desert island on the popular radio program Desert Island
Discs to return to Lloyd George. He
once told a friend, I can’t read novels that end badly.
This is essential when you finish a story. You shouldn’t be left downcast
but uplifted, your fiber strengthens so as to return refreshed
to the serious cares of life. If there is to be a shootout between
realist misery and gossamer romance, my money will be on Mills
and Boon winning gold most every time. Would the American equivalent be Kensington
Books and the Canadian Harlequin? No matter. A couple of final
examples. One involves the Nobel Prize winning poet
W.B. Yates, who used to lap up Dorothy L. Sayers, detective
stories and Zane Gray Westin’s. One can read them while the
mind sleeps. He airily tells Sean O’Casey,
Now this was really being superior and dismissive, and I don’t believe
him. OKC and Yates had had more than one spat about the
plays the Abbey Theater should be putting on, including OKC saying what
happened here was that Yates became flustered when OKC
visiting his Lancaster Gate apartment Espied, saying Gray
and Dorothy Sayers when he lifted up the thick green cloth covering
them. This exposure was damaging to the great man’s self-image
that he should be discovered devouring them rather than, say, toying
with an 800 page philosophical novel by Dostoyevsky or some
other depressed and depressing Russian, all patiently translated by
constant Constance Garlett instead of his mind being switched
off. It’s more believable to suppose it was wide awake with excitement.
A doctoral thesis about the influence on Yates of six shooting gunslingers
and suave Lord Peter Wimsey awaits the aspiring scholar in this
room. I want Lasley to consider the peculiar
case of Isyour Berlin and Jules Verne.
Quite possibly. There are here this afternoon some distinguished veterans.
Why am I looking at Roger, who came across the philosopher Ayssir?
Berlin in Oxford, certainly once encountered,
never forgotten, with his booming imperitive voice and torrential talk
timed at almost 400 words a minute. He was a stenographer’s nightmare
made flesh. It’s almost done in tell. It only mentionable
now. But once upon a time, an Oxford Don was considered a prize catch
for smart social gatherings in the capital. Not just any performing
Oxford done the ISI, Berlin in particular. He
sported all the right credentials, an exotic provenance from
a Russian Latvian emigre family schooled at St. Paul’s, followed
by a double first Oxford and all sales prize fellowship and onwards and upwards
to the presidency of the British Academy, a knighthood and the order of merit.
He gained Churchill’s attention by brilliant dispatches from wartime Washington
on the strength of this. Churchill in 1944 got his secretary to invite
Berlin to lunch. He swiftly grew disenchanted as Berlin
gave dim witted answers to his probing questions about how long
the war would last and whether FDR would be reelected. Churchill
fumed to an aide that Berlin was just a typical civil servant after
all, impressive on paper, but useless face to face.
It turned out he’d been cross examining the petrified songsmith Irving
Berlin, composer of a white Christmas
Ayssir. By contrast, was always dependably scintillating.
We can easily imagine a hostess on the phone to a friend postwar
saying Darling, darling, goom simply must come to supper because we’ve got Ayssir.
He’s frightfully intellectual, of course, but you’re not going to believe it. He can recite
the plot cevo for 50 shoos novels. It’s terribly amusing.
No, this was actually true. So my question is, was this
accomplishment simply a show off party?
Or did Jules Verne mean more to him? Undoubtedly.
Berlin had a capacious and retentive mind, but to rattle off over
and put him in the train spotter collector maniac category.
And yet and yet we learned from mightly name Sheff’s biography
that Berlin first read 20000 Leagues Under the sea. In
Russian translation and later in life, when asked what he had wanted
to be as a boy, replied that crate he used to dream
of being a scientist in a Jules Verne novel undersea watching
the world of nature through a porthole. No chef explains.
This is a philosophical fantasy, quote, exploring the depths
yet remaining immune from their dangers, which is clever stuff, but
I prefer Berlin’s own interpretation. In an essay of his on education,
talking about the importance of popularizes, however imperfect
their rendering, he instanced Voltaire 1738
elements of their philosophy of Newton, and a century and a half later,
how quote those other great vulgar arises. Shuls then
and H.G. Wells, in their own highly imaginative way,
had had, quote, an immensely liberating effect. He
went on to argue that while the academic value of the subject varies according
to the ratio and interplay of ideas to facts, quote,
a gifted expositor can put life into virtually any topic.
One incidental curiosity to note about that
is that while in the English speaking world, an admiration for him will at
best be thought amiably eccentric, in continental
Europe, it’s altogether different. Intellectuals are an endangered
species across most of the globe, but not in Vann’s native Paris,
which remains their natural habitat, Paris says did
Paris, especially where they can sound off and procreate with happy abandon
their families. Still esteemed as a towering figure for
his enduring impact on literary have on guardsman’s Zeman
surrealism in 2017, after President
Macron assumed office and before he became Jupiter,
the elite say palace. Let it be known that Macron, Mr. Shuls, friend,
fan and that the presidential pad or as you would call it, the first dog
was named Nimo in that same essay on
education. Berlin roundly berated academic abstruse HNIs
jargon and windy theorizing quaked pretentious
rhetoric, deliberate or compulsory. It was deliberate or compulsive
obscurity or vagueness, metaphysical patter
studded with irrelevant or misleading allusions to at best half understood
scientific or philosophical theories or to famous names. There’s an old
but at present particularly prevalent device for concealing
poverty of thought or muddle, and sometimes perilously near to a confidence
trick. That was in 1975. In the intervening
But that’s another story anyway. Jane Austen got there first.
She has Katherine Moreland delightfully declare in Northanger Abbey.
I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible
to conclude. Great men and women do not inhabit a different
planet from the rest of us. And there’s no embarrassment in putting your feet
up. We all do have to slog through academic tomes
and articles that are not exactly riveting. Hard labor of this kind
is not just character building in a Victorian manner, but rewarding Gougne
in unexpected ways. Still, it’s seldom you must read every
word, and it’s a part of the intelligent person’s armory to become adept
at gutting such works to establish what’s important and what’s not.
The late nineteenth early twentieth century scholar George S. Spray,
who is a wine connoisseur as well as an omnivorous reader, called it the art of skimming
come skipping. Everyone benefits from time off.
Paradoxically, you may well find yourself reading every word
of light literature because it’s so gripping. This then triggers
all sorts of connections, cross-pollination and constructive ideas which
help in tackling other problems. No need, therefore, to scold yourself or
repeller joys for indulging in a little light entertainment.
The essential thing is to be intellectually honest. But
every sermon should finish with a benediction, mine is simply this. Go
forth and enjoy yourselves. The essential thing
is to be intellectually honest, also to remain fresh and put that another
way. Avoid cliches like the plague.