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Clare Carlisle’s biography of George Eliot, The Marriage Question, is one of my favourite modern biographies, so I was really pleased to interview Clare. We talked about George Eliot as a feminist, the imperfections of her “marriage” to George Henry Lewes, what she learned from Spinoza, having sympathy for Casaubon, contradictions in Eliot’s narrative method, her use of negatives, psychoanalysis, Middlemarch, and more. We also talked about biographies of philosophers, Kierkegaard, and Somerset Maugham. I was especially pleased by Clare’s answer about the reported decline in student attention spans. Overall I thought this was a great discussion. Many thanks to Clare!
Full transcript below. Here is an extract from our discussion about Eliot’s narrative ideas.
Clare: Yes, that's right. The didactic thing, George Eliot is sometimes criticized for this didacticism because what's most effective in the novel is not the narrator coming and telling us we should actually feel sorry for Casaubon and we should sympathize with him. We'd be better people if we sympathize with Casaubon. There's a moralizing lecture about, you should feel sympathy for this unlikable person. What is more effective is the subtle way she portrays this character and, as I say, lets us into his vulnerabilities in some obvious ways, as you say, by pointing things out, but also in some more subtle ways of drawing his character and hinting at, as I say, his vulnerabilities.
Henry: Doesn't she know, though, that a lot of readers won't actually be very moved by the subtle things and that she does need to put in a lecture to say, "I should tell you that I am very personally sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon and that if you leave this novel hating him, that's not--"? Isn't that why she does it? Because she knows that a lot of readers will say, "I don't care. He's a baddie."
Clare: Yes I don't know, that's a good question.
Henry: I'm interested because, in The Natural History of German Life, she goes to all these efforts to say abstract arguments and philosophy and statistics and such, these things don't change the world. Stories change the world. A picture of life from a great artist. Then when she's doing her picture of life from a great artist she constantly butts in with her philosophical abstractions because it's, she can't quite trust that the reader will get it right as it were.
Clare: Yes, I suppose that's one way of looking at it. You could say that or maybe does she have enough confidence in her ability to make us feel with these characters. That would be another way of looking at it. Whether her lack of confidence and lack of trust is in the reader or in her own power as an artist is probably an open question.
Transcript
Henry: Today I am talking to Clare Carlisle, a philosopher at King's College London and a biographer. I am a big fan of George Eliot's Double Life: The Marriage Question. I've said the title backwards, but I'm sure you'll find the book either way. Clare, welcome.
Clare Carlisle: Hi, Henry. Nice to be here.
Henry: Is George Eliot a disappointing feminist?
Clare: Obviously disappointment is relative to expectations, isn't it? It depends on what we expect of feminism, and in particular, a 19th-century woman. I personally don't find her a disappointing feminist. Other readers have done, and I can understand why that's the case for all sorts of reasons. She took on a male identity in order to be an artist, be a philosopher in a way that she thought was to her advantage, and she's sometimes been criticized for creating heroines who have quite a conventional sort of fulfillment. Not all of them, but Dorothea in Middlemarch, for example, at the end of the novel, we look back on her life as a wife and a mother with some sort of poignancy.
Yes, she's been criticized for, in a way, giving her heroines and therefore offering other women a more conventional feminine ideal than the life she managed to create and carve out for herself as obviously a very remarkable thinker and artist. I also think you can read in the novels a really bracing critique of patriarchy, actually, and a very nuanced exploration of power dynamics between men and women, which isn't simplistic. Eliot is aware that women can oppress men, just as men can oppress women. Particularly in Middlemarch, actually, there's an exploration of marital violence that overcomes the more gendered portrayal of it, perhaps in Eliot's own earlier works where, in a couple of her earlier stories, she portrayed abused wives who were victims of their husband's betrayal, violence, and so on.
Whereas in Middlemarch, it's interestingly, the women are as controlling, not necessarily in a nasty way, but just that that's the way human beings navigate their relations with each other. It seems to be part of what she's exploring in Middlemarch. No, I don't find her a disappointing feminist. We should be careful about the kind of expectations we, in the 21st century project onto Eliot.
Henry: Was George Henry Lewes too controlling?
Clare: I think one of the claims of this book is that there was more darkness in that relationship than has been acknowledged by other biographers, let's put it that way. When I set out to write the book, I'd read two or three other biographies of Eliot by this point. One thing that's really striking is this very wonderfully supportive husbands that, in the form of Lewes, George Eliot has, and a very cheerful account of that relationship and how marvelous he was. A real celebration of this relationship where the husband is, in many ways, putting his wife's career before his own, supporting her.
Lewes acted as her agent, as her editor informally. He opened her mail for her. He really put himself at the service of her work in ways that are undoubtedly admirable. Actually, when I embarked on writing this book, I just accepted that narrative myself and was interested in this very positive portrayal of the relationship, found it attractive, as other writers have obviously done. Then, as I wrote the book, I was obviously reading more of the primary sources, the letters Eliot was writing and diary entries. I started to just have a bit of a feeling about this relationship, that it was light and dark, it wasn't just light.
The ambiguity there was what really interested me, of, how do you draw the line between a husband or a wife who's protective, even sheltering the spouse from things that might upset them and supportive of their career and helpful in practical ways. How do you draw the line between that and someone who's being controlling? I think there were points where Lewes crossed that line. In a way, what's more interesting is, how do you draw that line. How do partners draw that line together? Not only how would we draw the line as spectators on that relationship, obviously only seeing glimpses of the inner life between the two people, but how do the partners themselves both draw those lines and then navigate them?
Yes, I do suggest in the book that Lewes could be controlling and in ways that I think Eliot herself felt ambivalent about. I think she partly enjoyed that feeling of being protected. Actually, there was something about the conventional gendered roles of that, that made her feel more feminine and wifely and submissive, In a way, to some extent, I think she bought into that ideal, but also she felt its difficulties and its tensions. I also think for Lewes, this is a man who is himself conditioned by patriarchal norms with the expectation that the husband should be the successful one, the husband should be the provider, the one who's earning the money.
He had to navigate a situation. That was the situation when they first got together. When they first got together, he was more successful writer. He was the man of the world who was supporting Eliot, who was more at the beginning of her career to some extent and helping her make connections. He had that role at the beginning. Then, within a few years, it had shifted and suddenly he had this celebrated best-selling novelist on his hands, which was, even though he supported her success, partly for his own financial interests, it wasn't necessarily what he'd bargained for when he got into the relationship.
I think we can also see Lewes navigating the difficulties of that role, of being, to some extent, maybe even disempowered in that relationship and possibly reacting to that vulnerability with some controlling behavior. It's maybe something we also see in the Dorothea-Casaubon relationship where they get together. Not that I think that at all Casaubon was modeled on Lewes, not at all, but something of the dynamic there where they get together and the young woman is in awe of this learned man and she's quite subservient to him and looking up to him and wanting him to help her make her way in the world and teach her things.
Then it turns out that his insecurity about his own work starts to come through. He reacts, and the marriage brings out his own insecurity about his work. Then he becomes quite controlling of Dorothea, perhaps again as a reaction to his own sense of vulnerability and insecurity. The point of my interpretation is not to portray Lewes as some villain, but rather to see these dynamics and as I say, ambivalences, ambiguities that play themselves out in couples, between couples.
Henry: I came away from the book feeling like it was a great study of talent management in a way, and that the both of them were very lucky to find someone who was so well-matched to their particular sorts of talents. There are very few literary marriages where that is the case, or where that is successfully the case. The other one, the closest parallel I came up with was the Woolfs. Leonard is often said he's too controlling, which I find a very unsympathetic reading of a man who looked after a woman who nearly died. I think he was doing what he felt she required. In a way, I agree, Lewes clearly steps over the line several times. In a way, he was doing what she required to become George Eliot, as it were.
Clare: Yes, absolutely.
Henry: Which is quite remarkable in a way.
Clare: Yes. I don't think Mary Ann Evans would have become George Eliot without that partnership with Lewes. I think that's quite clear. That's not because he did the work, but just that there was something about that, the partnership between them, that enabled that creativity…
Henry: He knew all the people and he knew the literary society and all the editors, and therefore he knew how to take her into that world without it overwhelming her, giving her crippling headaches, sending her into a depression.
Clare: Yes.
Henry: In a way, I came away more impressed with them from the traditional, isn't it angelic and blah, blah, blah.
Clare: Oh, that's good.
Henry: What did George Eliot learn from Spinoza?
Clare: I think she learned an awful lot from Spinoza. She translated Spinoza in the 1850s. She translated Spinoza's Ethics, which is Spinoza's philosophical masterpiece. That's really the last major project that Eliot did before she started to write fiction. It has, I think, quite an important place in her career. It's there at that pivotal point, just before she becomes an artist, as she puts it, as a fiction writer. Because she didn't just read The Ethics, but she translated it, she read it very, very closely, and I think was really quite deeply formed by a particular Spinozist ethical vision.
Spinoza thinks that human beings are not self-sufficient. He puts that in very metaphysical terms. A more traditional philosophical view is to say that individual things are substances. I'm a substance, you're a substance. What it means to be a substance is to be self-sufficient, independent. For example, I would be a substance, but my feeling of happiness on this sunny morning would be a more accidental feature of my being.
Henry: Sure.
Clare: Something that depends on my substance, and then these other features come and go. They're passing, they're just modes of substance, like a passing mood or whatever, or some kind of characteristic I might have. That's the more traditional view, whereas Spinoza said that there's only one substance, and that's God or nature, which is just this infinite totality. We're all modes of that one substance. That means that we don't have ontological independence, self-sufficiency. We're more like a wave on the ocean that's passing through. One ethical consequence of that way of thinking is that we are interconnected.
We're all interconnected. We're not substances that then become connected and related to other substances, rather we emerge as beings through this, our place in this wider whole. That interconnectedness of all things and the idea that individuals are really constituted by their relations is, I think, a Spinoza's insight that George Eliot drew on very deeply and dramatized in her fiction. I think it's there all through her fiction, but it becomes quite explicit in Middlemarch where she talks about, she has this master metaphor of the web.
Henry: The web. Right.
Clare: In Middlemarch, where everything is part of a web. You put pressure on a bit of it and something changes in another part of the web. That interconnectedness can be understood on multiple levels. Biologically, the idea that tissues are formed in this organic holistic way, rather than we're not composed of parts, like machines, but we're these organic holes. There's a biological idea of the web, which she explores. Also, the economic system of exchange that holds a community together. Then I suppose, perhaps most interestingly, the more emotional and moral features of the web, the way one person's life is bound up with and shaped by their encounters with all the other lives that it comes into contact with.
In a way, it's a way of thinking that really, it questions any idea of self-sufficiency, but it also questions traditional ideas of what it is to be an individual. You could see a counterpart to this way of thinking in a prominent 19th-century view of history, which sees history as made by heroic men, basically. There's this book by Carlyle, Thomas Carlyle, called The Heroic in History, or something like that.
Henry: Sure. On heroes and the heroic, yes.
Clare: Yes. That's a really great example of this way of thinking about history as made by heroes. Emerson wrote this book called Representative Men. These books were published, I think, in the early 1850s. Representative Men. Again, he identifies these certain men, these heroic figures, which represent history in a way. Then a final example of this is Auguste Comte's Positivist Calendar, which, he's a humanist, secularist thinker who wants to basically recreate culture and replace our calendar with this lunar calendar, which, anyway, it's a different calendar, has 13 months.
Each month is named after a great man. There's Shakespeare, and there's Dante, and there's-- I don't know, I can't remember. Anyway, there's this parade of heroic men. Napoleon. Anyway, that's the view of history that Eliot grew up with. She was reading, she was really influenced by Carlisle and Emerson and Comte. In that landscape, she is creating this alternative Spinozist vision of what an exemplar can be like and who gets to be an exemplar. Dorothea was a really interesting exemplar because she's unhistoric. At the very end of Middlemarch, she describes Dorothea's unhistoric life that comes to rest in an unvisited tomb.
She's obscure. She's not visible on the world stage. She's forgotten once she dies. She's obscure. She's ordinary. She's a provincial woman, upper middle-class provincial woman, who makes some bad choices. She has high ideals but ends up living a life that from the outside is not really an extraordinary life at all. Also, she is constituted by her relations with others in both directions. Her own life is really shaped by her milieu, by her relationships with the people. Also, at the end of the novel, Eliot leaves us with a vision of the way Dorothea's life has touched other lives and in ways that can't be calculated, can't really be recognized. Yet, she has these effects that are diffused.
She uses this word, diffusion or diffuseness. The diffuseness of the effects of Dorothea's life, which seep into the world. Of course, she's a woman. She's not a great hero in this Carlyle or Emerson sense. In all these ways, I think this is a very different way of thinking about individuality, but also history and the way the world is made, that history and the world is made by, in this more Spinozist kind of way, rather than by these heroic representative men who stand on the world stage. That's not Spinoza's, that's Eliot's original thinking. She's taking a Spinozist ontology, a Spinozist metaphysics, but really she's creating her own vision with that, that's, of course, located in that 19th-century context.
Henry: How sympathetic should we be to Mr. Casaubon?
Clare: I feel very sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon because he is so vulnerable. He's a really very vulnerable person. Of course, in the novel, we are encouraged to look at it from Dorothea's point of view, and so when we look at it from Dorothea's point of view, Casaubon is a bad thing. The best way to think about it is the view of Dorothea's sister Celia, her younger sister, who is a very clear-eyed observer, who knows that Dorothea is making a terrible mistake in marrying this man. She's quite disdainful of Casaubon's, well, his unattractive looks.
He's only about 40, but he's portrayed as this dried-up, pale-faced scholar, academic, who is incapable of genuine emotional connection with another person, which is quite tragic, really. The hints are that he's not able to have a sexual relationship. He's so buttoned up and repressed, in a way. When we look at it from Dorothea's perspective, we say, "No, he's terrible, he's bad for you, he's not going to be good for you," which of course is right. I think Eliot herself had a lot of sympathy for Casaubon. There's an anecdote which said that when someone asked who Casaubon was based on, she pointed to herself.
I think she saw something of herself in him. On an emotional level, I think he's just a fascinating character, isn't he, in a way, from an aesthetic point of view? The point is not do we like Casaubon or do we not like him? I think we are encouraged to feel sympathy with him, even as, on the one, it's so clever because we're taken along, we're encouraged to feel as Celia feels, where we dislike him, we don't sympathize with him. Then Eliot is also showing us how that view is quite limited, I think, because we do occasionally see the world from Casaubon's point of view and see how fearful Casaubon is.
Henry: She's also explicit and didactic about the need to sympathize with him, right? It's often in asides, but at one point, she gives over most of a chapter to saying, "Poor Mr. Casaubon. He didn't think he'd end up like this." Things have actually gone very badly for him as well.
Clare: Yes, that's right. The didactic thing, George Eliot is sometimes criticized for this didacticism because what's most effective in the novel is not the narrator coming and telling us we should actually feel sorry for Casaubon and we should sympathize with him. We'd be better people if we sympathize with Casaubon. There's a moralizing lecture about, you should feel sympathy for this unlikable person. What is more effective is the subtle way she portrays this character and, as I say, lets us into his vulnerabilities in some obvious ways, as you say, by pointing things out, but also in some more subtle ways of drawing his character and hinting at, as I say, his vulnerabilities.
Henry: Doesn't she know, though, that a lot of readers won't actually be very moved by the subtle things and that she does need to put in a lecture to say, "I should tell you that I am very personally sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon and that if you leave this novel hating him, that's not--"? Isn't that why she does it? Because she knows that a lot of readers will say, "I don't care. He's a baddie."
Clare: Yes I don't know, that's a good question.
Henry: I'm interested because, in The Natural History of German Life, she goes to all these efforts to say abstract arguments and philosophy and statistics and such, these things don't change the world. Stories change the world. A picture of life from a great artist. Then when she's doing her picture of life from a great artist she constantly butts in with her philosophical abstractions because it's, she can't quite trust that the reader will get it right as it were.
Clare: Yes, I suppose that's one way of looking at it. You could say that or maybe does she have enough confidence in her ability to make us feel with these characters. That would be another way of looking at it. Whether her lack of confidence and lack of trust is in the reader or in her own power as an artist is probably an open question.
Henry: There's a good book by Debra Gettelman about the way that novelists like Eliot knew what readers expected because they were all reading so many cheap romance novels and circulating library novels. There are a lot of negations and arguments with the reader to say, "I know what you want this story to do and I know how you want this character to turn out, but I'm not going to do that. You must go with me with what I'm doing.
Clare: Yes. You mean this new book that's come out called Imagining Otherwise?
Henry: That's right, yes.
Clare: I've actually not read it yet, I've ordered it, but funnily enough, as you said at the beginning, I'm a philosopher so I'm not trained at all as a reader of literary texts or as a literary scholar by any means, and so I perhaps foolishly embarked on this book on George Eliot thinking, "Oh, next I'm going to write a book about George Eliot." Anyway, I ended up going to a couple of conferences on George Eliot, which was interestingly like stepping into a different world. The academic world of literary studies is really different from the world of academic philosophy, interestingly.
It's run by women for a start. You go to a conference and it's very female-dominated. There's all these very eminent senior women or at least at this conference I went to there was these distinguished women who were running the show. Then there were a few men in that mix, which is the inverse of often what it can be like in a philosophy conference, which is still quite a male-dominated discipline. The etiquette is different. Philosophers like to criticize each other's arguments. That's the way we show love is to criticize and take down another philosopher's argument.
Whereas the academics at this George Eliot conference were much more into acknowledging what they'd learned from other people's work and referencing. Anyway, it's really interestingly different. Debra Gettelman was at this conference.
Henry: Oh, great.
Clare: She had a book on Middlemarch. I think it was 2019 because it was the bicentenary of Eliot's birth, that's why there was this big conference. Debra, who I'd never met before or heard of, as I just didn't really know this world, gave this amazing talk on Middlemarch and on these negations in Middlemarch. It really influenced me, it really inspired me. The way she did these close readings of the sentences, this is what literary scholars are trained to do, but I haven't had that training and the close reading of the sentences, which didn't just yield interesting insights into the way George Eliot uses language but yielded this really interesting philosophical work where Eliot is using forms of the sentence to explore ontological questions about negation and possibility and modality.
This was just so fascinating and really, it was a small paper in one of those parallel sessions. It wasn't one of the big presentations at the conference, but it was that talk that most inspired me at the conference. It's a lot of the insights that I got from Debra Gettelman I ended up drawing on in my own chapter on Middlemarch. I situated it a bit more in the history of philosophy and thinking about negation as a theme.
Henry: This is where you link it to Hegel.
Clare: Yes, to Hegel, exactly. I was so pleased to see that the book is out because I think I must have gone up to her after the talk and said, "Oh, it's really amazing." Was like, "Oh, thank you." I was like, "Is it published? Can I cite it?" She said, "No. I'm working on this project." It seemed like she felt like it was going to be a long time in the making. Then a few weeks ago, I saw a review of the book in the TLS. I thought, "Oh, amazing, the book is out. It just sounds brilliant." I can't wait to read that book. Yes, she talks about Eliot alongside, I think, Dickens and another.
Henry: And Jane Austen.
Clare: Jane Austen, amazing. Yes. I think it's to do with, as you say, writing in response to readerly expectation and forming readerly expectations. Partly thanks to Debra Gettelman, I can see how Eliot does that. It'd be really interesting to learn how she sees Jane Austen and Dickens also doing that.
Henry: It's a brilliant book. You're in for a treat.
Clare: Yes, I'm sure it is. That doesn't surprise me at all.
Henry: Now, you say more than once in your book, that Eliot anticipates some of the insights of psychotherapy.
Clare: Psychoanalysis.
Henry: Yes. What do you think she would have made of Freud or of our general therapy culture? I think you're right, but she has very different aims and understandings of these things. What would she make of it now?
Clare: It seems that Freud was probably influenced by Eliot. That's a historical question. He certainly read and admired Eliot. I suspect, yes, was influenced by some of her insights, which in turn, she's drawing on other stuff. What do you have in mind? Your question suggests that you think she might have disapproved of therapy culture.
Henry: I think novelists in general are quite ambivalent about psychoanalysis and therapy. Yes.
Clare: For what reason?
Henry: If you read someone like Iris Murdoch, who's quite Eliotic in many ways, she would say, "Do these therapists ever actually help anyone?"
Clare: Ah.
Henry: A lot of her characters are sent on these slightly dizzying journeys. They're often given advice from therapists or priests or philosophers, and obviously, Murdoch Is a philosopher. The advice from the therapists and the philosophers always ends these characters up in appalling situations. It's art and literature. As you were saying before, a more diffusive understanding and a way of integrating yourself with other things rather than looking back into your head and dwelling on it.
Clare: Of course. Yes.
Henry: I see more continuity between Eliot and that kind of thinking. I wonder if you felt that the talking cure that you identified at the end of Middlemarch is quite sound common sense and no-nonsense. It's not lie on the couch and tell me how you feel, is it?
Clare: I don't know. That's one way to look at it, I suppose. Another way to look at it would be to see Eliot and Freud is located in this broadly Socratic tradition of one, the idea that if you understand yourself better, then that is a route to a certain qualified kind of happiness or fulfillment or liberation. The best kind of human life there could be is one where we gain insight into our own natures. We bring to light what is hidden from us, whether those are desires that are hidden away in the shadows and they're actually motivating our behavior, but we don't realize it, and so we are therefore enslaved to them.
That's a very old idea that you find in ancient philosophy. Then the question is, by what methods do we bring these things to light? Is it through Socratic questioning? Is it through art? Eliot's art is an art that I think encourages us to see ourselves in the characters. As we come to understand the characters, and in particular to go back to what I said before about Spinozism, to see their embeddedness and their interconnectedness in these wider webs, but also in a sense of that embeddedness in psychic forces that they're not fully aware of. Part of what you could argue is being exposed there, and this would be a Spinozist insight, is the delusion of free will.
The idea that we act freely with these autonomous agents who have access to and control over our desires, and we pick the thing that's in our interest and we act on that. That's a view that I think Spinoza is very critical. He famously denies free will. He says we're determined, we just don't understand how we're determined. When we understand better how we're determined, then perhaps paradoxically we actually do become relatively empowered through our understanding. I think there's something of that in Eliot too, and arguably there's something of that in Freud as well. I know you weren't actually so much asking about Freud's theory and practice, and more about a therapy culture.
Henry: All of it.
Clare: You're also asking about that. As I say, the difference would be the method for accomplishing this process of a kind of enlightenment. Of course, Freud's techniques medicalizes that project basically. It's the patient and the doctor in dialogue, and depends a lot on the skills of the doctor, doesn't it? How successful, and who is also a human being, who is also another human being, who isn't of course outside of the web, but is themselves in it, and ideally has themselves already undergone this process of making themselves more transparent to their own understanding, but of course, is going to be liable to their own blind spots, and so on.
Henry: Which of her novels do you love the most? Just on a personal level, it doesn't have to be which one you think is the most impressive or whatever.
Clare: I'm trying to think how to answer that question. I was thinking if I had to reread one of them next week, which one would I choose? If I was going on holiday and I wanted a beach read for pure enjoyment, which of the novels would I pick up? Probably Middlemarch. I think it's probably the most enjoyable, the most fun to read of her novels, basically.
Henry: Sure.
Clare: There'd be other reasons for picking other books. I really think Daniel Deronda is amazing because of what she's trying to do in that book. Its ambition, it doesn't always succeed in giving us the reading experience that is the most enjoyable. In terms of just the staggering philosophical and artistic achievement, what she's attempting to do, and what she does to a large extent achieve in that book, I think is just incredible. As a friend of Eliot, I have a real love for Daniel Deronda because I just think that what an amazing thing she did in writing that book. Then I've got a soft spot for Silas Marner, which is short and sweet.
Henry: I think I'd take The Mill on the Floss. That's my favorite.
Clare: Oh, would you?
Henry: I love that book.
Clare: That also did pop into my mind as another contender. Yes, because it's so personal in a way, The Mill on the Floss. It's personal to her, it's also personal to me in that, it's the first book by Eliot I read because I studied it for A-Level. I remember thinking when we were at the beginning of that two-year period when I'd chosen my English literature A-Level and we got the list of texts we were going to read, I remember seeing The Mill on the Floss and thinking, "Oh God, that sounds so boring." The title, something about the title, it just sounded awful. I remember being a bit disappointed that it wasn't a Jane Austen or something more fun.
I thought, "Oh, The Mill on the Floss." Then I don't have a very strong memory of the book, but I remember thinking, actually, it was better than I expected. I did think, actually, it wasn't as awful and boring as I thought it would be. It's a personal book to Eliot. I think that exploring the life of a mind of a young woman who has no access to proper education, very limited access to art and culture, she's stuck in this little village near a provincial town full of narrow-minded conservative people. That's Eliot's experience herself. It was a bit my experience, too, as, again, not that I even would have seen it this way at the time, but a girl with intellectual appetites and not finding those appetites very easily satisfied in, again, a provincial, ordinary family and the world and so on.
Henry: What sort of reader were you at school?
Clare: What sort of reader?
Henry: Were you reading lots of Plato, lots of novels?
Clare: No. I'm always really surprised when I meet people who say things like they were reading Kierkegaard and Plato when they were 15 or 16. No, not at all. No, I loved reading, so I just read lots and lots of novels. I loved Jane Eyre. That was probably one of the first proper novels, as with many people, that I remember reading that when I was about 12 and partly feeling quite proud of myself for having read this grown-up book, but also really loving the book. I reread that probably several times before I was 25. Jane Austen and just reading.
Then also I used to go to the library, just completely gripped by some boredom and restlessness and finding something to read. I read a lot and scanning the shelves and picking things out. That way I read more contemporary fiction. Just things like, I don't know, Julian Barnes or, Armistead Maupin, or just finding stuff on the shelves of the library that looked interesting, or Anita Brookner or Somerset Maugham. I really love Somerset Maugham.
Henry: Which ones do you like?
Clare: I remember reading, I think I read The Razor's Edge first.
Henry: That's a great book.
Clare: Yes, and just knowing nothing about it, just picking it off the shelf and thinking, "Oh, this looks interesting." I've always liked a nice short, small paperback. That would always appeal. Then once I found a book I liked, I'd then obviously read other stuff by that writer. I then read, so The Razor's Edge and-- Oh, I can't remember.
Henry: The Moon and Sixpence, maybe?
Clare: Yes, The Moon and Sixpence, and-
Henry: Painted Veils?
Clare: -Human Bondage.
Henry: Of Human Bondage, right.
Clare: Human Bondage, which is, actually, he took the title from Spinoza's Ethics. That's the title. Cluelessly, as a teenager, I was like, "Ooh, this book is interesting." Actually, when I look back, I can see that those writers, like Maugham, for example, he was really interested in philosophy. He was really interested in art and philosophy, and travel, and culture, and religion, all the things I am actually interested in. I wouldn't have known that that was why I loved the book. I just liked the book and found it gripping. It spoke to me, and I wanted to just read more other stuff like that.
I was the first person in my family to go to university, so we didn't have a lot of books in the house. We had one bookcase. There were a few decent things in there along with the Jeffrey Archers in there. I read everything on that bookshelf. I read the Jeffrey Archers, I read the True Crime, I read the In Cold Blood, just this somewhat random-- I think there was probably a couple of George Eliots on there. A few classics, I would, again, grip by boredom on a Sunday afternoon, just stare at this shelf and think, "Oh, is there anything?" Maybe I'll end up with a Thomas Hardy or something. It was quite limited. I didn't really know anything about philosophy. I didn't think of doing philosophy at university, for example. I actually decided to do history.
I went to Cambridge to do history. Then, after a couple of weeks, just happened to meet someone who was doing philosophy. I was like, "Oh, that's what I want to do." I only recognized it when I saw it. I hadn't really seen it because I went to the local state school, it wasn't full of teachers who knew about philosophy and stuff like that.
Henry: You graduated in theology and philosophy, is that right?
Clare: Yes. Cambridge, the degrees are in two parts. I did Part 1, theology, and then I did Part 2, philosophy. I graduated in philosophy, but I studied theology in my first year at Cambridge.
Henry: What are your favorite Victorian biographies?
Clare: You mean biographies of Victorians?
Henry: Of Victorians, by Victorians, whatever.
Clare: I don't really read many biographies.
Henry: Oh, really?
Clare: [laughs] The first biography I wrote was a biography of Kierkegaard. I remember thinking, when I started to write the book, "I'd better read some biographies." I always tend to read fiction. I'm not a big reader of history, which is so ironic. I don't know what possessed me to go and study history at university. These are not books I read for pleasure. I suppose I am quite hedonistic in my choice of reading, I like to read for pleasure.
Henry: Sure. Of course.
Clare: I don't tend to read nonfiction. Obviously, I do sometimes read nonfiction for pleasure, but it's not the thing I'm most drawn to. Anyway. I remember asking my editor, I probably didn't mention that I didn't know very much about biography, but I did ask him to recommend some. I'd already got the book contract. I said, "What do you think is a really good biography that I should read?" He recommended, I think, who is it who wrote The Life of Gibbon? Really famous biography of Gibbon.
Henry: I don't know.
Clare: That one. I read it. It is really good. My mind is going blank. I read many biographies of George Eliot before I wrote mine.
Henry: They're not all wonderful, are they?
Clare: I really liked Catherine Hughes's book because it brought her down from her pedestal.
Henry: Exactly. Yes.
Clare: Talking about hedonism, I would read anything that Catherine Hughes writes just for enjoyment because she's such a good writer. She's a very intellectual woman, but she's also very entertaining. She writes to entertain, which I like and appreciate as a reader. There's a couple of big archival biographies of George Eliot by Gordon Haight and by Rosemary Ashton, for example, which are both just invaluable. One of the great things about that kind of book is that it frees you to write a different kind of biography that can be more interpretive and more selective. Once those kinds of books have been published, there's no point doing another one. You can do something more creative, potentially, or more partial.
I really like Catherine Hughes's. She was good at seeing through Eliot sometimes, and making fun of her, even though it's still a very respectful book. There's also this brilliant book about Eliot by Rosemary Bodenheimer called The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans. It's a biographical book, but it's written through the letters. She sees Eliot's life through her letters. Again, it's really good at seeing through Eliot. What Eliot says is not always what she means. She can be quite defensive and boastful. These are things that really come out in her letters. Anyway, that's a brilliant book, which again, really helped me to read Eliot critically. Not unsympathetically, but critically, because I tend to fall in love with thinkers that I'm reading. I'm not instinctively critical. I want to just show how amazing they are, but of course, you also need to be critical. Those books were--
Henry: Or realistic.
Clare: Yes, realistic and just like, "This is a human being," and having a sense of humor about it as well. That's what's great about Catherine Hughes's book, is that she's got a really good sense of humor. That makes for a fun reading experience.
Henry: Why do you think more philosophers don't write biographies? It's an unphilosophical activity, isn't it?
Clare: That's a very interesting question. Just a week or so ago, I was talking to Clare Mac Cumhaill I'm not quite sure how you pronounce her name, but anyway, so there's--
Henry: Oh, who did the four women in Oxford?
Clare: Yes. Exactly.
Henry: That was a great book.
Clare: Yes. Clare MacCumhaill co-wrote this book with Rachael Wiseman. They're both philosophers. They wrote this group biography of Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley. I happened to be having dinner with a group of philosophers and sitting opposite her. Had never met her before. It was just a delight to talk to another philosopher who'd written biography. We both felt that there was a real philosophical potential in biography, that thinking about a shape of a human life, what it is to know another person, the connection between a person's life and their philosophy. Even to put it that way implies that philosophy is something that isn't part of life, that you've got philosophy over here and you've got life over there. Then you think about the connection between them.
That, when you think about it, is quite a questionable way of looking at philosophy as if it's somehow separate from life or detachment life. We had a really interesting conversation about this. There's Ray Monk's brilliant biography of Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius. He's another philosopher who's written biography, and then went on to reflect, interestingly, on the relationship between philosophy and biography.
I think on the one hand, I'd want to question the idea that biography and philosophy are two different things or that a person's life and their thought are two separate questions. On the other hand, we've got these two different literary forms. One of them is a narrative form of writing, and one of them- I don't know what the technical term for it would be- but a more systematic writing where with systematic writing, it's not pinned to a location or a time, and the structure of the text is conceptual rather than narrative. It's not ordered according to events and chronology, and things happening, you've just got a more analytic style of writing.
Those two styles of writing are very, very different ways of writing. They're two different literary forms. Contemporary academic philosophers tend to write, almost always-- probably are pretty much forced to write in the systematic analytic style because as soon as you would write a narrative, the critique will be, "Well, that's not philosophy. That's history," or "That's biography," or, "That's anecdote." You might get little bits of narrative in some thought experiment, but by definition, the thought experiment is never pinned to a particular time, place, or context. "Let's imagine a man standing on a bridge. There's a fat man tied to the railway line [crosstalk]." Those are like little narratives, but they're not pinned. There is a sequencing, so I suppose they are narratives. Anyway, as you can tell, they're quite abstracted little narratives.
That interests me. Why is it that narrative is seen as unphilosophical? Particularly when you think about the history of philosophy, and we think about Plato's dialogues, which tend to have a narrative form, and the philosophical conversation is often situated within a narrative. The Phaedo, for example, at the beginning of the book, Socrates is sitting in prison, and he's about to drink his poisoned hemlock. He's awaiting execution. His friends, students, and disciples are gathered around him. They're talking about death and how Socrates feels about dying. Then, at the end of the book, he dies, and his friends are upset about it.
Think about, I know, Descartes' Meditations, where we begin in the philosopher's study, and he's describing--
Henry: With the fire.
Clare: He's by the fire, but he's also saying, "I've reached a point in my life where I thought, actually, it's time to question some assumptions." He's sitting by the fire, but he's also locating the scene in his own life trajectory. He's reached a certain point in life. Of course, that may be a rhetorical device. Some readers might want to say, "Well, that's mere ornamentation. We extract the arguments from that. That's where the philosophy is." I think it's interesting to think about why philosophers might choose narrative as a form.
Spinoza, certainly not in the Ethics, which is about as un-narrative as you can get, but in some of his other, he experimented with an earlier version of the Ethics, which is actually like Descartes' meditation. He begins by saying, "After experience had taught me to question all the values I'd been taught to pursue, I started to wonder whether there was some other genuine good that was eternal," and so on. He then goes on to narrate his experiments with a different kind of life, giving up certain things and pursuing other things.
Then you come to George Eliot. I think these are philosophical books.
Henry: Yes.
Clare: The challenge lies in saying, "Well, how are they philosophical?" Are they philosophical because there are certain ideas in the books that you could pick out and say, "Oh, here, she's critiquing utilitarianism. These are her claims." You can do that with Eliot's books. There are arguments embedded in the books. I wouldn't want to say that that's where their philosophical interest is exhausted by the fact that you can extract non-narrative arguments from them, but rather there's also something philosophical in her exploration of what a human life is like and how choices get made and how those choices, whether they're free or unfree, shape a life, shape other lives. What human happiness can we realistically hope for? What does a good life look like? What does a bad life look like? Why is the virtue of humility important?
These are also, I think, philosophical themes that can perhaps only be treated in a long-form, i.e., in a narrative that doesn't just set a particular scene from a person's life, but that follows the trajectory of a life. That was a very long answer to your question.
Henry: No, it was a good answer. I like it.
Clare: Just to come back to what you said about biography. When I wrote my first biography on Kierkegaard, I really enjoyed working in this medium of narrative for the first time. I like writing. I'd enjoyed writing my earlier books which were in that more analytic conceptual style where the structure was determined by themes and by concepts rather than by any chronology. I happily worked in that way. I had to learn how to do it. I had to learn how to write. How do you write a narrative?
To come back to the Metaphysical Animals, the group biography, writing a narrative about one person's life is complicated enough, but writing a narrative of four lives, it's a real-- from a technical point of view-- Even if you only have one life, lives are not linear. If you think about a particular period in your subject's life, people have lots of different things going on at once that have different timeframes. You're going through a certain period in your relationship, you're working on a book, someone close to you dies, you're reading Hegel. All that stuff is going on. The narrative is not going to be, "Well, on Tuesday this happened, and then on Wednesday--" You can't use pure chronology to structure a narrative. It's not just one thing following another.
It's not like, "Well, first I'll talk about the relationship," which is an issue that was maybe stretching over a three-month period. Then in this one week, she was reading Hegel and making these notes that were really important. Then, in the background to this is Carlisle's view of history. You've got these different temporal periods that are all bearing on a single narrative. The challenge to create a narrative from all that, that's difficult, as any biographer knows. To do that with four subjects at once is-- Anyway, they did an amazing job in that book.
Henry: It never gets boring, that book.
Clare: No. I guess the problem with a biography is often you're stuck with this one person through the whole--
Henry: I think the problem with a biography of philosophers is that it can get very boring. They kept the interest for four thinkers. I thought that was very impressive, really.
Clare: Yes, absolutely. Yes. There's a really nice balance between the philosophy and the-- I like to hear about Philippa Foot's taste in cushions. Maybe some readers would say, "Oh, no, that's frivolous." It's not the view I would take. For me, it's those apparently frivolous details that really help you to connect with a person. They will deliver a sense of the person that nothing else will. There's no substitute for that.
In my book about Kierkegaard, it was reviewed by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books. It was generally quite a positive review. He was a bit sneering about the fact that it had what he calls "domestic flourishes" in the book. I'd mentioned that Kierkegaard's favorite flower was the lily of the valley. He's like, "Huh." He saw these as frivolities, whereas for me, the fact that Kierkegaard had a favorite flower tells us something about the kind of man he was.
Henry: Absolutely.
Clare: Actually, his favorite flower had all sorts of symbolism attached to it, Kierkegaard, it had 10 different layers of meaning. It's never straightforward. There's interesting value judgments that get made. There's partly the view that anything biographical is not philosophical. It is in some way frivolous or incidental. That would be perhaps a very austere, purest philosophical on a certain conception of philosophy view.
Then you might also have views about what is and isn't interesting, what is and isn't significant. Actually, that's a really interesting question. What is significant about a person's life, and what isn't? Actually, to come back to Eliot, that's a question she is, I think, absolutely preoccupied with, most of all in Middlemarch and in Daniel Deronda. This question about what is trivial and what is significant. Dorothea is frustrated because she feels that her life is trivial. She thinks that Casaubon is preoccupied with really significant questions, the key to all mythologies, and so on.
Henry: [chuckles]
Clare: There's really a deep irony there because that view of what's significant is really challenged in the novel. Casaubon's project comes to seem really futile, petty, and insignificant. In Daniel Deronda, you've got this amazing question where she shows her heroine, Gwendolyn, who's this selfish 20-year-old girl who's pursuing her own self-interest in a pretty narrow way, about flirting and thinking about her own romantic prospects.
Henry: Her income.
Clare: She's got this inner world, which is the average preoccupation of a silly 20-year-old girl.
Henry: Yes. [laughs]
Clare: Then Eliot's narrator asks, "Is there a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl who's preoccupied with how to make her own life pleasant?" The question she's asking is-- Well, I think she wants to tell us that slender thread of the girl's consciousness is part of the universe, basically. It's integral. It belongs to a great drama of the struggle between good and evil, which is this mythical, cosmic, religious, archetypal drama that gets played out on the scale of the universe, but also, in this silly girl's consciousness.
I think she's got to a point where she was very explicitly thematizing that distinction between the significant and the insignificant and playing with that distinction. It comes back to Dorothea's unhistoric life. It's unhistoric, it's insignificant. Yet, by the end of Middlemarch, by the time we get to that description of Dorothea's unhistoric life, this life has become important to us. We care about Dorothea and how her life turned out. It has this grandeur to it that I think Eliot exposes. It's not the grandeur of historic importance, it's some other human grandeur that I think she wants to find in the silly girls as much as in the great men.
Henry: I always find remarks like that quite extraordinary. One of the things I want a biography to tell me is, "How did they come to believe these things?" and, "How did they get the work done?" The flowers that he likes, that's part of that, right? It's like Bertrand Russell going off on his bicycle all the time. That's part of how it all happened. I remember Elizabeth Anscombe in the book about the four philosophers, this question of, "How does she do it all when she's got these six children?" There's this wonderful image of her standing in the doorway to her house smoking. The six children are tumbling around everywhere. The whole place is filthy. I think they don't own a Hoover or she doesn't use it. You just get this wonderful sense of, "This is how she gets it done."
Clare: That's how you do it.
Henry: Yes. The idea that this is some minor domestic trivial; no, this is very important to understanding Elizabeth Anscombe, right?
Clare: Yes, of course.
Henry: I want all of this.
Clare: Yes. One of the things I really like about her is that she unashamedly brings that domesticity into her philosophical work. She'll use examples like, "I go to buy some potatoes from the grocer's." She'll use that example, whereas that's not the thing that-- Oxford dons don't need to buy any potatoes because they have these quasi-monastic lives where they get cooked for and cleaned for. I like the way she chooses those. Of course, she's not a housewife, but she chooses these housewifely examples to illustrate her philosophy.
I don't know enough about Anscombe, but I can imagine that that's a deliberate choice. That's a choice she's making. There's so many different examples she could have thought of. She's choosing that example, which is an example, it shows a woman doing philosophy, basically. Of course, men can buy potatoes too, but in that culture, the buying of the potatoes would be the woman's work.
Henry: Yes. She wasn't going to run into AJ Ayre at the grocer's.
Clare: Probably not, no.
Henry: No. Are you religious in any sense?
Clare: I think I am in some sense. Yes, "religious," I think it's a really problematic concept. I've written a bit about this concept of religion and what it might mean. I wrote a book on Spinoza called Spinoza's Religion. Part of what I learned through writing the book was that in order to decide whether or not Spinoza was religious, we have to rethink the very concept of religion, or we have to see that that's what Spinoza was doing.
I don't know. Some people are straightforwardly religious and I guess could answer that question, say, "Oh yes, I've always been a Christian," or whatever. My answer is a yes and no answer, where I didn't have a religious upbringing, and I don't have a strong religious affiliation. Sorry, I'm being very evasive.
Henry: What do you think of the idea that we're about to live through or we are living through a religious revival? More people going to church, more young people interested in it. Do you see that, or do you think that's a blip?
Clare: That's probably a question for the social scientists, isn't it? It just totally depends where you are and what community you're--
Henry: Your students, you are not seeing students who are suddenly more religious?
Clare: Well, no, but my students are students who've chosen to do philosophy. Some of them are religious and some of them are not. It will be too small a sample to be able to diagnose. I can say that my students are much more likely to be questioning. Many of them are questioning their gender, thinking about how to inhabit gender roles differently.
That's something I perceive as a change from 20 years ago, just in the way that my students will dress and present themselves. That's a discernible difference. I can remark on that, but I can't remark on whether they're more religious.
Just actually just been teaching a course on philosophy of religion at King's. Some students in the course of having discussions would mention that they were Muslim, Christian, or really into contemplative practices and meditation. Some of the students shared those interests. Others would say, "Oh, well, I'm an atheist, so this is--" There's just a range-
Henry: A full range.
Clare: -of different religious backgrounds and different interests. There's always been that range. I don't know whether there's an increased interest in religion among those students in particular, but I guess, yes, maybe on a national or global level, statistically-- I don't know. You tell me.
Henry: What do you think about all these reports that undergraduates today-- "They have no attention span, they can't read a book, everything is TikTok," do you see this or are you just seeing like, "No, my students are fine actually. This is obviously happening somewhere else"?
Clare: Again, it's difficult to say because I see them when they're in their classes, I see them in their seminars, I see them in the lectures. I don't know what their attention spans are like in their--
Henry: Some of the other people I've interviewed will say things like, "I'll set reading, and they won't do it, even though it's just not very much reading,"-
Clare: Oh, I see. Oh, yes.
Henry: -or, "They're on the phone in the--" You know what I mean?
Clare: Yes.
Henry: The whole experience from 10, 20 years ago, these are just different.
Clare: I'm also more distracted by my phone than I was 20 years ago. I didn't have a phone 20 years ago.
Henry: Sure.
Clare: Having a phone and being on the internet is constantly disrupting my reading and my writing. That's something that I think many of us battle with a bit. I'm sure most of us are addicted to our phones. I wouldn't draw a distinction between myself and my students in that respect. I've been really impressed by my students, pleasantly surprised by the fact they've done their reading because it can be difficult to do reading, I think.
Henry: You're not one of these people who says, "Oh students today, it's really very different than it was 20 years ago. You can't get them to do anything. The whole thing is--" Some people are apocalyptic about-- Actually, you're saying no, your students are good?
Clare: I like my students. Whether they do the reading or not, I'm not going to sit here and complain about them.
Henry: No, sure, sure. I think that's good. What are you working on next?
Clare: I've just written a book. It came out of a series of lectures I gave on life writing and philosophy, actually. Connected to what we were talking about earlier. Having written the biographies, I started to reflect a bit more on biography and how it may or may not be a philosophical enterprise, and questions about the shape of a life and what one life can transmit to another life. Something about the devotional labor of the biographer when you're living with this person and you're-- It's devotional, but it's also potentially exploitative because often you're using your subjects, of course, without their consent because they're dead. You're presenting their life to public view and you're selling books, so it's devotional and exploitative. I think that's an interesting pairing.
Anyway, so I gave these lectures last year in St Andrews and they're going to be published in September.
Henry: Great.
Clare: I've finished those really.
Henry: That's what's coming.
Clare: That's what's coming. Then I've just been writing again about Kierkegaard, actually. I haven't really worked on Kierkegaard for quite a few years. As often happens with these things, I got invited to speak on Kierkegaard and death at a conference in New York in November. My initial thought was like, "Oh, I wish it was Spinoza, I don't want to--" I think I got to the point where I'd worked a lot on Kierkegaard and wanted to do other things. I was a bit like, "Oh, if only I was doing Spinoza, that would be more up my street." I wanted to go to the conference, so I said yes to this invitation. I was really glad I did because I went back and read what Kierkegaard has written about death, which is very interesting because Kierkegaard's this quintessentially death-fixated philosopher, that's his reputation. It's his reputation, he's really about death. His name means churchyard. He's doomy and gloomy. There's the caricature.
Then, to actually look at what he says about death and how he approaches the subject, which I'd forgotten or hadn't even read closely in the first place, those particular texts. That turned out to be really interesting, so I'm writing-- It's not a book or anything, it's just an article.
Henry: You're not going to do a George Eliot and produce a novel?
Clare: No. I'm not a novelist or a writer of fiction. I don't think I have enough imagination to create characters. What I love about biography is that you get given the characters and you get given the plots. Then, of course, it is a creative task to then turn that into a narrative, as I said before. The kinds of biography I like to write are quite creative, they're not just purely about facts. I think facts can be quite boring. Well, they become interesting in the context of questions about meaning interpretations by themselves. Again, probably why I was right to give up on the history degree. For me, facts are not where my heart is.
That amount of creativity I think suits me well, but to create a world as you do when you're a novelist and create characters and plots, and so, that doesn't come naturally to me. I guess I like thinking about philosophical questions through real-life stories. It's one way for philosophy to be connected to real life. Philosophy can also be connected to life through fiction, of course, but it's not my own thing. I like to read other people's fiction. I'm not so bothered about reading other biographies.
Henry: No. No, no.
[laughter]
Clare: I'll write the biographies, and I'll read the fiction.
Henry: That's probably the best way. Clare Carlisle, author of The Marriage Question, thank you very much.
Clare: Oh, thanks, Henry. It's been very fun to talk to you.
Henry: Yes. It was a real pleasure.
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Interview with Matt Yglesias about reading classic novels, like Middlemarch, and some discussion of his favourite movies.
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The Shakespeare Book Club meets tonight to talk about A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Zoom link here for paid subscribers.
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Katherine Dee Interview
When we have strong feelings about literary characters, isn’t that somewhat the same as ficto-romantics—people who fall in love with fictional people and create part of the identity around that relationship? This is the sort of question you can talk about with Katherine Dee.
I am a long-time fan so I was delighted to be able to ask her about the way AI is changing writing, fandom in culture, role play writing, fan fiction, ficto-romance, internet culture, and the way technology is changing what we read, how AI is changing Katherine’s writing, and how she uses ChatGPT to discuss her emotional life (she says it is pretty good!).
Katherine is one of the most interesting Substackers, writing at default.blog, as well as writing for other publications. You might remember her piece called “No. Culture isn’t stuck”. I find her case-studies especially interesting (this is the one we talked about in the interview). Katherine is not judgemental: she simply tires to understand. Here is her Twitter.
Here’s what Katherine told me about fandom in modern culture.
Henry: Why is there so much fandom in modern culture? We've got LARPing, people having AI boyfriends and girlfriends, fictoromance. You're writing about all these things all the time. Why is this such a big part of culture?
Katherine: That's a great question. I think that the foundational reason is our culture is oriented around consuming media. And this is, you know, like, the subculture of media consumption is always going to be a fandom. But also, like, other things have eroded, right? Like, you know, it almost feels cliche to bring up, but everything from, like, third places to organized religion, you know, to national identity, you know, all of these things, right? What remains in its status is fandom. And so, you know, the marriage of the erosion of these other sort of cultural cornerstones, plus the importance of consuming media and the way we communicate, it creates this perfect storm. And I've even argued that, like, fandom is, in a way, like, you know, the main way that we know how to organize at this point. It's the chief way we express ourselves. You know, politics tend to, like, devolve into fandom. But the question is, like, well, what else do we have, really?
And here’s part of our discussion about ficto-romance.
Henry: Now, about ficto romance. I find this, like, really fascinating and I've been reading your case studies avidly. But I also am confused, like, people have always had strong feelings for characters in novels, right? So I read an essay, a 19th century essay about Pride and Prejudice recently. And I mean, this made me laugh. Some people don't like it. But the critic was like, these are the five most attractive heroines in 19th century English fiction and had, like, robust views about what made these fictional women attractive. What is different or what feels different about ficto romance today?
Katherine: You know, I don't think it is that different is the thing. I think a lot of stuff maybe feels different because it's somehow like more lowbrow or we don't respect the expression as much. I also think the role of art has changed. Like, we don't see, you know, like I talk to a lot of I actually posted an interview today with a guy who identifies as fictoromantic and his fictive other, which is the term they use instead of like significant other, is from Homestuck, which is a web comic that was really popular on Tumblr and is still very popular on Tumblr. And I think, like, ordinary people don't consider that art. Right. And so, like, it's difficult. Like, you see someone who maybe has this, like, devotion to, you know, someone in a great novel or maybe to, like, you know, Aphrodite or Venus or something like that. And they're producing what we're already primed to think of as great art in service of this love. And because the media properties that many of these people are emotionally attached to feel lowbrow, we take it less seriously and we think they're crazy. But if you actually talk to them, they're not crazy at all. I mean, it's a spectrum of expression. But I've never spoken to someone who feels like they're in active psychosis or something. It feels very familiar. Like I brought up in this interview that I posted today, you know, the way this young man was talking about this Homestuck character. And this is going to sound, I mean, this is going to sound crazy, maybe, but it reminded me of Mirabai, who I don't know if I'm pronouncing her name correctly, but she is this Hindu poet who had this great devotion for Krishna. And it was it felt very similar to me. It's just that it's reskinned in this way that is there's some dissonance.
There’s a complete transcript of the interview below.
Transcript (AI generated so there may be errors)
[00:00:00] Henry Today, I'm talking with Katherine Dee, the internet culture writer and the author of the default friend, Substack. Katherine, welcome.
[00:00:11] Katherine: Hey, thanks for having me.
[00:00:15] Henry: So how is AI changing writing right now and how is it going to change it in the next, say, couple of years?
[00:00:22] Katherine: In the next couple of years, I'm not sure. But right now, I've noticed a lot of people who write news are using AI. AI is interesting because it's like, you know, if you read a lot of fan fiction, for example, there's like a fan fiction register. And so if you then go and read like a mass market paperback, you know, a lot of these people start off in fan fiction, you can kind of tell like who's who, right, because there's certain phrases that are common, certain slang. And the same is similar with AI, right? And so I can, I've, I use AI so much as like a chat companion, that there's like certain phrases that I know, are very specific to AI. So I've picked up from like, talking to it and, you know, it being sort of like a friend of mine, for lack of a better word, that people who write news and write digests, use AI a lot. And I've also noticed that people do like, polish on their writing, like they will fix the grammar, or what have you, which I think is less, less scandalous. But I do think that there's also a backlash, right? There is this, people want to sound human. And it's, it's opening up like, more space somehow, right, somehow, more, even more space for like, messy confessional writing. And maybe just, you know, validating that our, our, our long love for it, is never, is never going away.
[00:02:03] Henry: Yeah, just when you thought there couldn't be any more personal essays, right, here they come.
[00:02:07] Katherine: There's even, Substack really like, created an explosion of them. I thought, I thought it was over, but it absolutely is not.
[00:02:17] Henry: I was amazed the other day, because I've been writing like, I would say quite a balanced view of AI, but people take it to be highly positive. And someone who was writing against it, actually said in their piece, oh, that last sentence was written by AI, by the way. And I was like, it's insane to me that that would happen. If you're so against it, but also that people don't realize that if he hadn't mentioned that, you wouldn't have said, oh, that was an AI sentence.
[00:02:46] Katherine: Well, you don't know that it, I do think, and I went, I can't quite figure out what, what is the tell for AI writing when there's certain words that I could list, but there is a register, right? So if you're using it a lot, like, I use, I use like deep research all the time to find like, contact information for people. If I have a problem in my life, it's like, I asked chat GPT first, right? So there's like words like, you know, people have pointed out that it uses an em dash a lot. It uses the word crucial a lot. The word realm, weirdly, I've noticed, right? So you kind of internalize it, right? But there's also a register that is very like, AI specific. And I think, all this to say, I think people can tell.
[00:03:38] Henry: You said you're talking to it a lot, like every day. What are you talking to it about?
[00:03:45] Katherine: Like, you know, if I get anxiety about something that feels silly, or like, if I get upset about something, sometimes, like, I can't, because I'm online so much, like, very susceptible to getting this sort of, like, internet tunnel vision, where I don't know if I'm like, if my reaction is really to scale, I try not to get into, like, fights on the timeline or anything. But it doesn't mean I don't have the reaction, right? So I'll ask AI, like, I had, you know, this back and forth with someone on Twitter, and I feel like, pretty upset about it, am I overreacting? And it's not always actually, like, a good tool for that. But even just the process of me, like slowing down to ask, has made me, I think, a little bit more rational.
[00:04:35] Henry: Do you think you're better at seeing when something's written with AI, because you've got this background in fan fiction and online writing, so you're, like, in a way, very highly trained on different internet registers? Whereas to some of us, it's like, people are just doing internet speak, and we don't have that kind of discrimination between the types?
[00:04:55] Katherine: No, I think that if you read a lot of anything, you sort of, you pick up, you become fluent in the tone. People who, you know, there's an academic register, right? Like people who are in STEM speak in a particular way and write in a particular way. And it's not necessarily that the topics that they're talking about, it's certain phrases. People who are the humanities, there's similar things. And I think we're not conscious of being able to detect these different tones or registers, but everyone is capable of doing this.
[00:05:34] Henry: How many people, how many, like, prominent people or people who are known for their voice do you think are using AI without telling us?
[00:05:43] Katherine: I can only think of one who I would bet money that they're doing it. They mostly send out, like, a news digest. So it might be, you know, I haven't noticed it in their, like, opinion pieces. But in, like, their news digests, definitely, right? There's all sorts of tells. But there's, I mean, there has to be more, right? Because there's so many people who have interesting ideas, but aren't necessarily articulate. And there's probably a lot of people who collaborate with AI, right? So it's, they will have the, you know, Chachapiti or Claude or whatever, structure their piece. And then they will go in and edit it and put it in their voice. Or even the reverse, like, they'll structure it, and then they'll have it be polished or fix the grammar or put it in the tone that they want, and then they'll do minor tweaks. I think that is probably super common. But, like, wholesale, yeah, I've only picked up on this one person.
[00:06:48] Henry: How close are we to a time when writers are going to feel obliged to put a little disclaimer saying this is what I do and don't use AI for in my writing? Or will that not come?
[00:06:59] Katherine: Some people already do that. I don't want to skip ahead to mention our conversation, but I know we're going to be talking a little bit about fan fiction. And on fan fiction sites, there is, like, an AI-generated tag. And then in some digital magazines, they'll be like, this piece was generated with AI or, you know, was edited with AI or something like that. But I think there's probably a lot of shame around it. And people don't want to feel like they're not a real writer. We don't really know where to place or how to conceive of these tools. And it's complicated, right? And you see these conversations playing out in fandom quite a bit. And you see just how complex it is. I don't think there are easy answers.
[00:07:53] Henry: Why is there so much fandom in modern culture? We've got LARPing, people having AI boyfriends and girlfriends, fictoromance. You're writing about all these things all the time. Why is this such a big part of culture?
[00:08:06] Katherine: That's a great question. I think that the foundational reason is our culture is oriented around consuming media. And this is, you know, like, the subculture of media consumption is always going to be a fandom. But also, like, other things have eroded, right? Like, you know, it almost feels cliche to bring up, but everything from, like, third places to organized religion, you know, to national identity, you know, all of these things, right? What remains in its status is fandom. And so, you know, the marriage of the erosion of these other sort of cultural cornerstones, plus the importance of consuming media and the way we communicate, it creates this perfect storm. And I've even argued that, like, fandom is, in a way, like, you know, the main way that we know how to organize at this point. It's the chief way we express ourselves. You know, politics tend to, like, devolve into fandom. But the question is, like, well, what else do we have, really?
[00:09:22] Henry: Right. Fandom, but also anti-fandom, right? I think that's a big part of culture.
[00:09:25] Speaker 3: It's like. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:09:28] Henry: Now, about ficto romance. I find this, like, really fascinating and I've been reading your case studies avidly. But I also am confused, like, people have always had strong feelings for characters in novels, right? So I read an essay, a 19th century essay about Pride and Prejudice recently. And I mean, this made me laugh. Some people don't like it. But the critic was like, these are the five most attractive heroines in 19th century English fiction and had, like, robust views about what made these fictional women attractive. What is different or what feels different about ficto romance today?
[00:10:14] Katherine: You know, I don't think it is that different is the thing. I think a lot of stuff maybe feels different because it's somehow like more lowbrow or we don't respect the expression as much. I also think the role of art has changed. Like, we don't see, you know, like I talk to a lot of I actually posted an interview today with a guy who identifies as fictoromantic and his fictive other, which is the term they use instead of like significant other, is from Homestuck, which is a web comic that was really popular on Tumblr and is still very popular on Tumblr. And I think, like, ordinary people don't consider that art. Right. And so, like, it's difficult. Like, you see someone who maybe has this, like, devotion to, you know, someone in a great novel or maybe to, like, you know, Aphrodite or Venus or something like that. And they're producing what we're already primed to think of as great art in service of this love. And because the media properties that many of these people are emotionally attached to feel lowbrow, we take it less seriously and we think they're crazy. But if you actually talk to them, they're not crazy at all. I mean, it's a spectrum of expression. But I've never spoken to someone who feels like they're in active psychosis or something. It feels very familiar. Like I brought up in this interview that I posted today, you know, the way this young man was talking about this Homestuck character. And this is going to sound, I mean, this is going to sound crazy, maybe, but it reminded me of Mirabai, who I don't know if I'm pronouncing her name correctly, but she is this Hindu poet who had this great devotion for Krishna. And it was it felt very similar to me. It's just that it's reskinned in this way that is there's some dissonance.
[00:12:35] Henry: So you don't think, because I read that interview and I thought it was great. Do you don't think like the behavior that the person you interviewed, like it's actively living with this fictoromantic partner and there's lots of like daily behavior involved. Right. And it's part of the structure of this person's life. Whereas, you know, in the past, like Diana Wynne-Jones used to say that she got a lot of letters about Hal's moving castle from, I think, basically teenage girls who fell in love with Hal. But that would be like. Almost entirely in their imagination, maybe if they wouldn't structure their life around it, is there some kind of difference there?
[00:13:18] Katherine: What is different is I feel like because everything's commercialized, there's maybe more of an opportunity to buy products associated with the character that they're attached to. But if you look at the way people, most people, not all of them are expressing these relationships, like I ask these people, what does your relationship look like? It looks like creating art. And, you know, in another time, maybe they wouldn't have become a famous artist or whatever. But like I think it would have been more socially acceptable somehow. The student we used was Puppet, which is sort of maybe a little silly. But Puppet, who's the young man I interviewed, when I asked him, what does your relationship with Ro Strider look like? He said that he writes, he draws, he fantasizes. There is also, you know, there was also like a commercial component, like buying the body pillow. And that's maybe a little different. But to me, it reminds me of just any sort of creative expression. It's just phrased in a slightly different way.
[00:14:36] Henry: Right, right. And one thing I liked about that interview was that I don't do the creative activities that this person does, but I was like, well, I speak pretty intensely about fictional characters. It made me sort of I was sort of forced to think, like, how different am I from this guy? Like I'm I have very strong feelings about people in books.
[00:14:59] Katherine: I think a lot of us do.
[00:15:02] Henry: Or movies, right? For a lot of people, it's movie characters, right?
[00:15:04] Katherine: Yeah. I mean, that's that's the beauty of like dramatic structure, right? Like it you it allows us to suspend our disbelief and we feel like we're within the world of the narrative. And if you really like it, you want to take that feeling with you after the show has ended or the book has ended.
[00:15:23] Henry: So I guess you're saying that this what it looks very weird to a lot of people, but it's not really so different from the way people grieve about like when Matthew Perry died and people were just completely distraught. It's kind of a similar thing because they had this strong identification with his character.
[00:15:42] Katherine: Yeah, I mean, it's more intense, but like there were probably people who felt a really strong connection to Matthew Perry or to any celebrity. And again, it applies also to fictional characters, of course.
[00:16:03] Henry: So what are people getting from fan fiction that they're not getting from other sorts of art? Like why is fan fiction so big now?
[00:16:13] Katherine: It's playing in the space of a media property and an established world that you already have an attachment to. You know, people bring up a lot like there's, you know, there's certain stories that are like retold over and over and over again. Right. There's certain characters that reappear throughout novels through centuries. Right. And it's a similar idea. Right. It's like you enjoy the world of the story and you want to make it your own. Fan fiction is incredibly diverse. Right. There's some fan fiction that is that moves away from the canon so much you almost wonder, like, why, you know, why aren't you just creating an original work? But there's something that lies in there. And I also think part of it is the types of media that people are consuming are they already have these fandoms set up. Right. So it's it's it's it almost invites that form of expression.
[00:17:21] Henry: Do you mean like you read Harry Potter and then you realize that there's already a massive Harry Potter fan fiction ecosystem so you can… it is to us what a theme park was to the 80s or whatever.
[00:17:35] Katherine: Yeah, there's there's already this there's already somewhere to go and to meet people.
[00:17:41] Henry: I was researching it earlier because I like I know nothing about it. And obviously I was asking deep research. And as I was reading all the stuff it gave me, I was like, people are trying to create almost like folktales based on this, you know, whatever the the original sources in this collectivizing impulse, whereas you say like it diverges, it has these repetitive tropes that they almost want to turn it into these kind of fairy tales or a collection of stories like that. So it seemed it seemed quite interesting to me. Now, you personally, you wrote on your sub stack, you said my lineage isn't literature, it's text based online role playing. Yes. Tell me what that what is that?
[00:18:28] Katherine: So I so I always wanted to be a writer, but I wanted to be a writer because I would role play and role play, role playing the way I did it is is like playing, you know, it's like imaginative play that children do, like with Barbies or, you know, even just themselves. But it's it's translated to text because it's it's mediated. And so I would do, you know, I would role play all the time. And it wasn't like I was a voracious reader. I never was. And I don't think I am now. And I think it's it's actually reflected in my writing, actually, but it was because I was like role playing all the time. And I think a lot of people are like this, right? Like I didn't even really write fan fiction. I preferred role playing, which is a little bit more dramatic than than just than just writing. But I but at the time I thought, oh, because I'm I am literally writing something down that I am a writer. But really, it's more like theater, if anything.
[00:19:28] Henry: So tell me what's happening, like you would be logging on to some kind of forum and you would be writing as if you were a particular person or character in this in the scenario and other people would be responding.
[00:19:43] Katherine: Yeah, it's it's like acting, but through text, so you could do when I started, you could either do it in a chat room, there is text based role playing games, which I didn't actually participate in, like mod some multi user dungeons. I didn't I didn't even know those existed at the time. And then there was forums where and so there would be a theme and the theme could either be from a fandom like Harry Potter, for example, or it could just be a setting. So like high school or the beach or, you know, like an apartment complex and you would design a character and then you would it was it sort of looked like a collaborative story. But really, it was like you were you were just you could only control your own character. So you would just write a description of like, you know, someone says the setting is the beach and then character one comes in and describes what character one is doing and then character two comes in. And, you know, sometimes you would be ignored. Sometimes people would start a fight with you. All sorts of things could happen. And I it's I spent most of my time doing this for like over a decade.
[00:20:53] Henry: So are there certain areas where this doesn't does not happen? Like, is there Jane Austen role playing or is it is that not the sort of premise?
[00:21:02] Katherine: No, there's role playing for everything. There's like historical role plays. There's, you know, any novel under the sun. You could probably find someone, you know, more like Jane Austen. There's like a there's a rich role playing tradition. People love Jane Austen novels. Something I would do very often is if I was learning about a particular historical period in school, I would get like I would have I would develop these sort of like parasocial attachments with certain historical figures or even settings very similar to the way people feel about fandom. And then I would go home and role play the historical setting and I would read a lot about, you know, whatever it was, ancient Rome or whatever. And it would help me in school because I would be like acting it out online.
[00:21:49] Henry: Yeah. You're working on fan fiction and A.I. at the moment. And I'm interested in this because I have this feeling everyone's like A.I. is only going to produce slop. It's not going to do anything new. But I've seen people. I've saw an interesting essay on Substack about someone writing their own fan fiction with A.I. And I sort of I wonder if the confluence of these two things is going to start leading to lots of very new types of fiction and potentially even I don't I mean, this is like a long term speculation, but even some kind of new type of literature. Tell us what you're working on with that.
[00:22:32] Katherine: So I was curious the way I was curious, like how people were using A.I. in fandom spaces. And right now it looks it looks like there's this prohibition against using A.I. like people do you do create A.I. generated fan fics, but there's something about like the process and the love that you put into writing your fan fiction that people are very precious about. And they feel that A.I. infringes on this. And part of it is they're very concerned about like, where is the data coming from? Right. Is it somehow unethical because of the data that these LLMs are trained on? But where you see a real difference is people who use A.I. to role play. And that's where it's it seems like people are more open to it. It the feeling the feelings and reactions are a bit more mixed, but there does seem to be like a debate in different fandom spaces. Like some people argue like A.I. is an accessibility issue, like some people aren't good at writing. Maybe English isn't their first language. And this opens up a lot of space for them. And they feel like they're they're collaborating with this tool. Other people say that it's it's unethical and that since they're taking away the process, it is it's harming the work.
[00:24:04] Henry: If they could be convinced or, you know, to their own satisfaction that it's not unethical, the data, the data sets and everything like it would be fine. Would they still just not want to do it? It would be fine. Would they still just not want to do it? Because this is the wrong phrase, but like it ruins the game. It's not the point.
[00:24:25] Katherine: I think for some people. Yeah, I think the the ethical dimension is is extremely significant for a lot of people. But but for some, it's like, you know, they're not doing it to produce work for its own sake. Right. To go back to the example I gave about the writer who I suspect is using AI to create these news digests, like that person has committed to producing these digests, you know, X number of times a month as part of their livelihood. And so you can sort of see like, well, them using AI is a little bit more sympathetic. But if it's something you're doing for free, for fun, as an expression of love, I can I can see where people are like, well, you're farming it out. But I also am very sympathetic to the other side of that, where it's like maybe, you know, your writing skills aren't as strong and it does open doors and they are your ideas. And it's helping you speak more clearly in a situation where you couldn't otherwise.
[00:25:32] Henry: Is it because the way people do this online together, it's a form of communicating, like it's all very oblique and indirect, but it's really just a form of people socializing and they feel like if the AI is there, then they're not getting what they need from it in that sense.
[00:25:49] Katherine: Um, it is a form of communication. But I also think there is really a value placed on the like the personal dimension of it. Like, um, like bad fan art, right? Like if you know someone, someone's really trying their best, they really are committed to a fandom. They really love it. But their drawing isn't great and they share it. Of course, there will be people who are mean and who shame them. And there's all sorts of weird, like, you know, labyrinthine dramas that occur in these spaces. But there will also be people who are like, this is beautiful because you tried, because it was coming from a real place of love. And that that that devotion is a very important piece of the puzzle. Again, there there are gatekeepers, there is shaming that occurs. And you know, there's a lot of people who feel like they're not good enough. Like you constantly see this in forums on Reddit, on Wattpad, on AO3, like on all these spaces, people who are like self deprecating, they feel like their work isn't good enough. But there's again, like this, this sense of like, I did it because I love the property. I love the character. Which I guess sort of ties back to the thing about ficto romance, where it's just this extreme expression of, you know, a pulse that's already moving through the space.
[00:27:12] Henry: The piece I read on Substack, it wasn't written by the person writing the book. It was written by her roommate. And she was saying, you know, to begin with, like, oh my God, I thought this was dreadful. But actually, the more I saw what was going on, she was like, I can see my roommate has written like 20,000 words in a week. And she's working really hard at it. And she's, you know, prompting and reprompting. And she knows what she likes. She really knows what she's doing and what she wants and how to get it to change its output. And she kind of, she didn't come around to saying, oh, this is a good thing. But I think she mellowed on the idea. And she could see that there was a certain amount of, there's something new happening, right? Some new kind of fiction is coming out of it.
[00:27:55] Katherine: I totally agree too, that like, prompting and reprompting is in itself a creative expression. And this is something I tried to argue about AI art, where there is like, you know, not everyone is going to be able to produce the same thing. Like the writing the prompt is in it of itself a skill. And also there's your own taste, which informs the prompt and informs what you include. Like, I'm very proud of the images that I've produced with Mid Journey. Not, you know, not the same way I would be if I had, you know, painted it myself. But like, I do feel like it's informed by my unique experience and taste. And this particular combination of things is unique to me. And that's a type of art, even if it's involves different things than, you know, again, if I were myself painting it. And I think that applies to fan fiction as well. What I have been worried about, I mean, this is a tangent, is like, what happens to the generation that is like, all they know is prompting and AI, and they don't have that space to develop their own taste and their own perception. Like, I think that like, if you start out too fresh, if you started too green, and you haven't had time to develop taste, and that's where I see these platforms being a little bit more dangerous.
[00:29:23] Henry: But couldn't we say that about you in the role-playing forums? Like, when they develop taste through like, deep immersive experiences with the AI?
[00:29:36] Katherine: Well, no, because with the role-playing, it has to come from myself and from other people, right? And there's nothing like limiting it, right? Like, it's purely through my eyes. Like, maybe there's an issue here where like, the actual writing product would have been better if I was, you know, if I read more, right? Or if I watched different films, but it's only filtered through myself and through other people. Whereas, you don't know how you're gonna get walled in with the AI, especially if you go in too fresh, and you don't know how to prompt it.
[00:30:17] Henry: Weren't those people more likely to be, aren't they more likely to get bored?
[00:30:24] Katherine: I don't know. I don't know if they're more likely to get bored. I think they might get stuck. I mean, the flip side is maybe they'll innovate more because they're coming from a completely different perspective.
[00:30:37] Henry: Right, that's true. I had this interesting experience recently where I saw a whole load of young people that I'm related to. They range from like eight to 16 or something. And some of them just could, they could not not be holding their phone. And some of them, they're like, they don't like the phone. They're reading Jane Austen. So there's a diversity in that sense. But they were all just against AI. Like it's a bad thing. People use it to cheat, all the usual stuff. And I was fascinated. I was like, guys, you should all be using AI. Let me tell you what the good models are. So I wonder if we'll see this bigger diversity within that generation where some of them, a bit like in our generation, right? Some people were online a lot. Some people weren't. And some people are still.
[00:31:24] Katherine: I've noticed that there's a very strong anti-tech sentiment among younger generation. And it seems like bifurcated. In the same way you described, people who are so online that they're just like these internet creatures, right? Like if the internet is a forest, like they're like natives of it. And then the other side of it is people who feel like it stole a lot from them. It took a lot from their childhoods. And they're moving away from it. And as a statement, they're either getting like dumb phones or they don't have social media. Or if they do have social media, it's like very sparse. And they tend to have like two very different outlooks. The ones who are more online seem to be more chaotic, a little more nihilistic. And the ones who are more offline, like they seem to be like looking for something more. Like they're more obviously searching for meaning.
[00:32:24] Henry: Are we gonna see more like book reading among the offline people?
[00:32:30] Katherine: I mean, I would hope so. Who knows, right? Like who knows how much of it is a performance and how much of it is really happening. But I mean, I would imagine so. It does seem also that like a lot of digital outlets feel like something is changing. And I've noticed a lot more like physical media seems to be coming back. I'm interested in seeing how this develops in fan spaces. Early in fandom, like in the... And I guess like early is like right when it was like really starting to grow. So not at the origins, but it's sort of this like... Fandom exponentially grew in the late 70s. And the way people communicated with each other and like a very important mode of expression was a physical fanzine. And this was because first there was no internet and then the internet was confined to certain populations and not everyone had it. And I wonder if fanzines will come back or like handwritten letters. Even I have a couple of books that are collections of letters that these sisters wrote to a particular fandom. And it was just like, it was just a huge part of that particular world. And I thought that was really interesting as a way to keep in touch with people and to keep the community together.
[00:34:01] Henry: Yeah, that sounds like a fascinating book.
[00:34:05] Katherine: Yeah, it's a collection of... It's called like elf magic letters or something. It's really interesting. And it's also interesting because it's like not something that you can easily read because it's so specific to the time and the place. Like it really was for the people it was for, right? It's not, it doesn't stand the test of time in the same way.
[00:34:28] Henry: So is there not much sense of tradition in fandom? Like are people going back to read the fanzines and stuff?
[00:34:37] Katherine: There is a sense of tradition for sure. Some of these fanzines are hard to find. It depends on which fandom you're in. Fans love whatever property it is they're fans of. So there's always archivists and people who are curating these things and making these things available. I just wonder if it'll become more popular to return to physical media. And it probably is in certain spaces. I'm just not personally aware of them. Okay.
[00:35:09] Henry: Do you think, like, how do you think fan fiction is going to change significantly with AI? Beyond questions of like register and stuff that you were talking about before. Are we going to see, is this going to be like a significant step change in the evolution of the form? Or is it just going to be what people are saying? Like lots of slots in the form of slot content, nothing new as it were.
[00:35:33] Katherine: I'm not sure. There's a lot of fan art that's generated with AI that I feel like at first people were really skeptical of. And now they really like it. And it's sort of proven itself. I mean, there's still people who are fiercely against it. But with writing, it's a little bit trickier. And again, the reactions are like very mixed, mostly negative. Again, where I think you will see the most change is with role-playing. You know, AI is always on. You can say whatever you like without feeling embarrassed. Something that I've noticed in reading transcripts of people who, like, on some of these sites where people role-play with bots, you could publish the role-play. You could publish the transcript. And there's just completely disinhibited. Like, they're just really just saying whatever, right? Not in a way that they're trolling or trying to break the bot. But it's like, you know, there's a certain etiquette when you role-play. And they're really just going for it. And I'll just be honest. This is particularly obvious with sexual role-plays, right? They'll just get straight to it. If the person is there to role-play sex, they'll just jump straight to the point. And you don't have to worry about that. You don't have to worry about being embarrassed. If it doesn't work out or, you know, you don't get the response you want, you start it over, you reprompt it, or you go to another bot. So I think it might take away from that social aspect. Not everybody likes role-playing with bots, but I think a lot of people do.
[00:37:21] Henry: To me, this is like prime material for people to write novels about. But I don't see, I don't yet see a lot of people taking that up. Do you think, like, how likely is it, do you think, that some people from within this space will end up, in whatever way this looks like in the future, writing and publishing something like, you know, a straightforward literary, whatever the word is, novel, about this subculture and about these ways of existing? Do you think some people will, like, prompt themselves into being novelists, as it were?
[00:38:00] Katherine: I mean, I definitely think that people will write about AI companions and chat bots. I think we're already seeing that to some degree. I think, you know, it seems that everyone is fascinated by emotional attachment to chat bots. And there's, like, just explosions of big pieces about this, because it's so new. And what's surprising to me is, like, there's very little judgment. You know, there's very few people who are like, this is dystopian, right? You see some of that, but most of it is like, well, it is real love, you know? That's been very surprising to me. Something that I could foresee is, and I think would be very ethically tricky and might cause some controversies, people trying to publish their role-playing transcripts. Which, you know, some fan fiction is, like, downstream of role-playing transcripts, and it'll be, like, a collaborative work, right? But it would be, like, very controversial if, you know, like, you and I had a Pride and Prejudice roleplay. And, you know, so we were sending emails back and forth or something, and then I collated all of that and published it as my own story, like, you know, with some edits or whatever. Like, that would be stealing your work. What I could see happening is someone having, like, a really good roleplay and wanting to save the transcript and then, you know, cleaning it up, maybe running it through AI, and the prompt is, you know, turn this into a story and, like, remove redundancies or, you know, whatever. And then it'd be, like, is that their work, right? Like, how much of that belongs to them?
[00:39:38] Henry: But I can see something happening where it's, like, you know, in the 19th century, things that were supposed to be cheap and lowbrow, like crime stories and things like that, became a whole new genre of literature, right? And by the end of the 19th century, you've got detective fiction, science fiction, fantasy fiction. They're all flourishing. They've all had decades of really interesting work, and it becomes, like, maybe even the dominant form of fiction in the 20th century. Do you think there's scope for, like, you know, a weird novelist like Muriel Spark, a new one of her to come along and, like, turn this, whatever this is happening with these role plays and everything, turn that into some kind of new kind of fiction, whether it's created with the AI or not with the AI, like, you'll get both, right? Is this, like, everyone thinks the literary novel is exhausted, is this the way out? I don't know.
[00:40:37] Katherine: I think that they, like, maybe, maybe, like, a new type of, like, pulp novel or something, you know, something that's, like, considered, like, something that's considered lowbrow, right, and maybe isn't always treated that way. But I'm curious, like, how, like, I'm imagining, you know, people printing, like, paper books or creating EPUBs, but do you mean, like, an interactive form of a novel, maybe, or, like, are you talking about people, like, I mean, what are you imagining, I guess, is my question? I think, so I think it could be, I think in terms of format, it could be all of those.
[00:41:25] Henry: What I really want to see is how this interacts with audiobooks, because I think audiobooks have become, like, quietly very dominant in the reading habits of people who are typically reading, like, highbrow nonfiction, literary fiction, whatever. And I can sort of imagine a scenario where, I don't know how long this takes, but, like, a new kind of pulp fiction has been created, it's drawing on fandom, roleplay, AI, so we've got this new kind of sub-genre, and then that gets morphed, a bit like genre fiction in the 19th century, into something much more, quote-unquote, literary, and that could be, like, a boring, typical old book, or it could be some kind of audio thing where, like, you're interacting with it, and you're picking the route and whatever, or you could interact with it through your LLM. You see what I mean?There's all these different ways, right?
[00:42:26] Katherine: So I think this stuff already exists. Oh, okay. Oh, so that, I think that maybe what I was confusing was, you know, like, imagining, like, a new style, or, you know?
[00:42:37] Katherine: But all of these, so all of these things, so I don't know if they're books, I mean, that's actually a good question, like, is it a form of literature? Like, are these bots that people are roleplaying with, is that literature, right? Because there's set parameters, and when you create these characters, you can, you have a lot of control over designing them, what their world is, what the person talking to them will receive back, right? And there's audio versions of that. So it is, like, stepping into a pre-created world where there's, like, some kind of collaboration. And then on the other hand, there's been lots of novels that started off as fan fiction, and this is actually pretty common, a lot of these, you know, like, teen romances or whatever that get popular on TikTok, a lot of those come from people who had been writing fan fiction smut, right? And turned it into original work. And you can see the traces of whatever fandom they were operating in, in the work, whether it's, like, an allusion to a pre-existing character in another property, or it's just the style of writing, or, like, the way they express romantic intimacy. So both things exist in different forms. I wish I had asked a clarified question earlier, because I feel like we were talking in circles a little bit, so I wasn't quite sure what you were envisioning. But yeah, there's a lot of, I wondered also, like, how will reading change as these bots become more sophisticated? Right now, it's a lot of, like, it's a lot of, like, just, you know, like, teenagers messing around in their fandoms, or people doing erotic role-playing, right? But what is the literary version of that? And that's a very exciting question, and, like, interesting realm of inquiry.
[00:44:38] Henry: It's a good, it's currently a very good, like, footnotes-on-demand service, right?
[00:44:44] Katherine: Yeah.
[00:44:45] Henry: Yeah, like, what the hell is this kind of carriage that they're talking about, or whatever? Do you think it'll, you think it's going to develop beyond that kind of thing?
[00:44:53] Katherine: Um, yeah, I do. I mean, something really interesting, I don't know if you've heard about this, it's not literature, but the website Every, so they have, like, several different tech newsletters, and they have a service where they'll take all the research for a given article, and you can talk to an LLM about the stuff they didn't include in the piece. But, so, here's even another idea, like, let's say, you know, you take, like, Harry Potter or something, and then there's, like, a Harry Potter LLM, and you can ask questions about the book, or, like, you know, what's in the store that didn't, you know, that we didn't open, right? Metaphorically, you know, what's behind the scenes and all this stuff we don't see in the actual text? And ordinarily, that's where fandom steps in, and fans will fill in that white space for themselves with their headcanon, so the decisions they make about the whatever narrative universe they're choosing to step into. But maybe in AI, you know, the author can say, all right, these are all my notes, and this is all the, this is the whole world that I couldn't fit into the actual story.
[00:46:07] Henry: How is AI changing the way you write?
[00:46:12] Katherine: All right, so I correct my grammar a lot. My grammar is, like, atrocious, or at least it is in my own opinion. Maybe it's actually not, but so I'll check for grammatical errors, and then I use it all the time as, like, a search engine. So I love, like, the deep research function on chat GPT. It's, like, I never use Google anymore. So if I have, like, questions about something, or if I'm not sure that an argument makes sense, either I'll, like, run it by, you're like, all right, I'm arguing, you know, like, this, this, and this. Like, does this make sense in my own head, or does this actually make sense? So that's a common DF question to chat GPT.
[00:47:05] Henry: But, like, are you thinking about, you know, are you going to be a different sort of writer? Are you going to write more or less of certain things? Are you thinking about how people will be reading less? You know, you're competing with the AIs, you've got to write for the AIs. Is it affecting you like that, or do you feel like what you do is reasonably immune?
[00:47:26] Katherine: Um, no, you know, I don't feel like I'm competing with AI. I feel like I'm competing with other people, but I'm not competing with AI. And I'm not, I'm not writing for it. I, you know, I remember that, that Tyler Cowen quote, and I wasn't totally sure what he meant by that. I mean, like, I don't know. I'm definitely not writing, writing for it. I mean, does he mean, like, as the AI, like, learns about each person and learns that, you know, each, each writer is contributing to the conversation, you want to make sure it's easily parsable. So you could, you could be included in history or something as AI starts to write our history. Actually, I guess that's a good point, if that doesn't end up happening. But no, I don't, I don't consider either of those things.
[00:48:17] Henry: Um, you wrote about, you wrote a short response to the Machine in the Garden essay that was famous on Substack a few months ago. You said, if you don't have copycats, then you're doing something wrong. Just make sure people don't forget you're the original article. How, how do you do that? How do you, how does that affect the way you organize your writing?
[00:48:43] Katherine: Oh, man, I publish a lot. If I feel like something is my unique idea, I repeat it over and over and over again. Yeah, I mean, that's, I guess it also, I mean, a question I don't have the answer to is like, you know, people worry about being plagiarized from or copycats, but what happens, you know, what happens with AI, right? Like, how does AI change that equation? I don't know. But, you know, you just hope for the best, you know, that humanity, you know, just the fact of being human is enough.
[00:49:26] Henry: Do you think that the internet and social media are making things worse in the culture generally, the way that people like Ted Gioia argue, or are you more optimistic?
[00:49:39] Katherine: Um, I'm slightly more optimistic. I think Ted Gioia is as much too dismissive of technology to the extent that I feel like I've, I've almost like taken a contrarian position, you know, and I, I've been a little bit I've been a little bit more techno-optimist than I would have been normally, because I just like, can't all be bad, right? There's a lot of really good things about the internet and about social media. I think that we really undervalue the friendships people make. And then people will say, well, like, well, look at, you know, how so-and-so got screwed over, you know, whatever famous drama. It's like, those people will f**k you over in real life, you know, in the physical world, right? That's a human problem. That's not a technology problem. I think we also, I, particularly people like Ted Gioia and John Height and Freya India, I mean, and I like all these people. I'm not, you know, but I think they also are, like, I don't know where Ted Gioia lives, but John Height's in New York and Freya is in London, as far as I know. When they talk about going like phone-free or like using the internet less or screen-based childhoods, you know, I, like, I agree. Like, look, like, I don't want my son attached to a phone or something. But I also live in Chicago. There's like a ton of stuff going on. And every single day, no matter what the weather is, he can go, one, see other children and two, go do something really fun. And so can I, right? And that's because I live in Chicago. But if I lived in a small town in Texas, like I did, you know, 10 years ago, like I need the, I, like the internet was my lifeline. Then it's how I made friends. It's how I entertain myself. And it sucks that it was like that. But like, not everyone has the privilege of a rich culture in their immediate environment. You don't have, you know, like, it doesn't mean you have to be online 24 seven, but for social media is like very important for people in those situations. And it's, I think there's this weird binary in the discourse where it's like, you're either online all the time, you know, rotting your brain with just like, you know, nonstop live leak videos, right? Or you have no phone at all, right? But I think there's even like high volume usage that isn't, you know, what I just described, that it's beneficial for certain people in certain situations.
[00:52:12] Henry: What is it that you like about Mirabi's poetry? You mentioned this earlier, but I wanted to ask you specifically.
[00:52:18] Katherine: Yeah, so I discovered her in my senior year of college. And I didn't know what ecstatic love was. Like I had never, I was completely unfamiliar with that concept. So even on the conceptual level, I was like, so struck by this ability to feel love for a deity, feel love for something non-physical.
[00:52:54] Henry: Do you admire other poets in that tradition like Rumi?
[00:52:59] Katherine: I'm not as familiar with other poets in that tradition.
[00:53:02] Henry: Okay. After fan fiction and AI, what will you do next?
[00:53:08] Katherine: I'm working on a whole bunch of stuff. Another piece I'm working on is about techno-animism. So this idea of like, I don't believe that technology is literally insoled, but I think that it's maybe not a bad thing to treat it as if it was. And if we're going to be in such like a technologically rich environment, like maybe if we did see a little bit of life in it, it would be better for us psychologically, which is like kind of a hard thing to argue because I think it turns people off like immediately. And I think there's like a lot of fear around it, but it's a very sad and sterile world, right? If we think that we're around all this lifelessness. And I think that's why I'm so attracted to writing about ficto-sexuals and ficto-romance because I love this idea of being able to see life in something where other people don't see it.
[00:54:15] Henry: Katherine Dee, thank you very much.
[00:54:18] Katherine: Thank you for having me.
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After enjoying her new book Open Socrates so much (and having written about her previous book Aspiration in Second Act), I was delighted to talk to Agnes Callard, not least because, as she discusses in Open Socrates, she is a big Tolstoy admirer. We talked about Master and Man, one of my favourite Tolstoy stories, but also about the value of reading fiction, the relationship between fiction and a thought experiment, and other topics of related interest. George Eliot makes an appearance too. In the discussion about the use of fiction in philosophy classes, I was slightly shocked to hear about how much (or how little) reading her undergraduates are prepared to do, but I was interested that they love Pessoa.
Agnes has previously written that the purpose of art is to show us evil. Here is Agnes on Twitter.
Transcript below, may contain errors!
I found this especially interesting.
Exactly, and I mean, 10 seconds, that’s a wild exaggeration. So do you know what the actual number is? No. On average. Okay, the average amount of time that you're allowed to wait before responding to something I say is two tenths of a second, which, it's crazy, isn’t it? Which, that amount of time is not enough time for, that is a one second pause is an awkward pause, okay? So two tenths of a second is not long enough time for the signal that comes at the end of my talking, so the last sound I make, let’s say, to reach your ears and then get into your brain and be processed, and then you figure out what you want to say. It’s not enough time, which means you're making a prediction. That’s what you're doing when I’m talking. You're making a prediction about when I'm going to stop talking, and you're so good at it that you're on almost every time. You're a little worse over Zoom. Zoom screws us up a little bit, right? But this is like what our brains are built to do. This is what we’re super good at, is kind of like interacting, and I think it's really important that it be a genuine interaction. That’s what I’m coming to see, is that we learn best from each other when we can interact, and it’s not obvious that there are those same interaction possibilities by way of text at the moment, right? I’m not saying there couldn’t be, but at the moment, we rely on the fact that we have all these channels open to us. Interestingly, it’s the lag time on the phone, like if we were talking just by phone, is about the same. So we’re so good at this, we don’t need the visual information. That’s why I said phone is also face-to-face. I think phone’s okay, even though a lot of our informational stream is being cut. We’re on target in terms of the quick responses, and there’s some way in which what happens in that circumstance is we become a unit. We become a unit of thinking together, and if we’re texting each other and each of us gets to ponder our response and all that, it becomes dissociated.
Transcript (AI generated)
Henry: Today, I am talking to Agnes Callard, professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, author of Aspiration, and now most recently, Open Socrates. But to begin with, we are going to talk about Tolstoy. Hello, Agnes: .
Agnes: Hello.
Henry: Shall we talk about Master of Man first?
Agnes: Yeah, absolutely.
Henry: So this is one of Tolstoy's late stories. I think it's from 1895. So he's quite old. He's working on What is Art? He's in what some people think is his crazy period. And I thought it would be interesting to talk about because you write a lot in Open Socrates about Tolstoy's midlife crisis, for want of a better word. Yeah. So what did you think?
Agnes: So I think it's sort of a novel, a story about almost like a kind of fantasy of how a midlife crisis could go if it all went perfectly. Namely, there's this guy, Brekhunov, is that his name? And he is, you know, a landowner and he's well off and aristocratic. And he is selfish and only cares about his money. And the story is just, he takes this, you know, servant of his out to, he wants to go buy a forest and he wants to get there first before anyone else. And so he insists on going into this blizzard and he gets these opportunities to opt out of this plan. And he keeps turning them down. And eventually, you know, they end up kind of in the middle of the blizzard. And at kind of the last moment, when his servant is about to freeze to death, he throws himself on top of the servant and sacrifices himself for the servant. And the reason why it seems like a fantasy is it's like, it's like a guy whose life has a lacuna in it where, you know, where meaning is supposed to be. And he starts to get an inkling of the sort of terror of that as they're spending more and more time in the storm. And his initial response is like to try to basically abandon the servant and go out and continue to get to this forest. But eventually he like, it's like he achieves, he achieves the conquest of meaning through this heroic act of self-sacrifice that is itself kind of like an epiphany, like a fully fulfilling epiphany. He's like in tears and he's happy. He dies happy in this act of self-sacrifice. And the fantasy part of it is like, none of it ever has to get examined too carefully. It doesn't like, his thought doesn't need to be subjected to philosophical scrutiny because it's just this, this one momentary glorious kind of profusion of love. And then it all ends.
Henry: So the difficult question is answered the moment it is asked. Exactly, exactly, right?
Agnes: It's sort of, it's, I see it as like a counterpart to the death of Ivan Ilyich.
Henry: Tell me, tell me more.
Agnes: Well, in the death of Ivan Ilyich, the questions surface for even, you know, when death shows up for him. And he suddenly starts to realize, wait a minute, I've lived my whole life basically in the way that Brekhunov did. Basically in the way that Brekhunov does as, you know, pursuing money, trying to be a socially successful person. What was the point of all that? And he finds himself unable to answer it. And he finds himself, it's the exact opposite. He becomes very alienated from his wife and his daughter, I think.
Henry: Yeah.
Agnes: And the absence of an answer manifests as this absence of connection to anyone, except an old manservant who like lifts up his legs and that's the one relief that he gets. And, you know, it's mostly in the gesture of like someone who will sacrifice themselves for another. Right, that's once again where sort of meaning will show up for a Tolstoy, if it ever will show up in a kind of direct and unashamed way.
Henry: Right, the exercise of human compassion is like a running theme for him. Like if you can get to that, things are going great. Otherwise you've really screwed up.
Agnes: Yeah, that's like Tolstoy's deus ex machina is the sudden act of compassion.
Henry: Right, right. But you think this is unphilosophical?
Agnes: I think it's got its toe in philosophical waters and sort of not much more than that. And it's in a way that makes it quite philosophical in the sense that there's a kind of awareness of like a deep puzzle that is kind of like at the heart of existence. Like there's a sensitivity to that in Tolstoy that's part of what makes him a great writer. But there's not much faith in the prospect of sort of working that through rationally. It's mostly something we just got a gesture at.
Henry: But he does think the question can be answered. Like this is what he shares with you, right? He does think that when you're confronted with the question, he's like, it's okay. There is an answer and it is a true answer. We don't just have to make some, he's like, I've had the truth for you.
Agnes: Yes, I think that that's right. But I think that like the true answer that he comes to is it's compassion and it's sort of religiously flavored compassion, right? I mean, that it's important. It's not just. Yeah, it's a very Christian conclusion. Right, but the part that's important there in a way, even if it's not being Christian, but that it's being religious in the sense of, yes, this is the answer. But if you ask for too much explanation as to what the answer is, it's not going to be the right answer. But if you ask for too much explanation as to why it's the answer, you're going the wrong way. That is, it's gotta, part of the way in which it's the answer is by faith.
Henry: Or revelation.
Agnes: Or, right, faith, exactly. But like, but it's not your task to search and use your rational faculties to find the answer.
Henry: I wonder though, because one of the things Tolstoy is doing is he's putting us in the position of the searcher. So I read this, I'm trying to go through like all of Tolstoy at the moment, which is obviously not, it's not currently happening, but I'm doing a lot of it. And I think basically everything in Tolstoy is the quest for death, right? Literature is always about quests. And he's saying these characters are all on a quest to have a good death. And they come very early or very late to this. So Pierre comes very early to this realization, right? Which is why he's like the great Tolstoy hero, master of man, Ivan Ilyich, they come very, and Tolstoy is like, wow, they really get in under the wire. They nearly missed, this is terrible. And all the way through this story, Tolstoy is giving us the means to see what's really going on in the symbolism and in all the biblical references, which maybe is harder for us because we don't know our Bible, like we're not all hearing our Bible every week, whereas for Tolstoy's readers, it's different. But I think he's putting us in the position of the searcher all the time. And he is staging two sides of the argument through these two characters. And when they get to the village and Vasily, he meets the horse thief and the horse thief's like, oh, my friend. And then they go and see the family and the family mirrors them. And Tolstoy's like, he's like, as soon as you can see this, as soon as you can work this out, you can find the truth. But if you're just reading the story for a story, I'm going to have to catch you at the end. And you're going to have to have the revelation and be like, oh my God, it's a whole, oh, it's a whole thing. Okay, I thought they were just having a journey in the snow. And I think he does that a lot, right? That's, I think that's why people love War and Peace because we go on Pierre's journey so much. And we can recognize that like, people's lives have, a lot of people's lives happen like that. Like Pierre's always like half thinking the question through and then half like, oh, there's another question. And then thinking that one through and then, oh, no, wait, there's another question. And I think maybe Tolstoy is very pragmatic. Like that's as philosophical as most people are going to get. Pierre is in some ways the realistic ideal.
Agnes: I mean, Pierre is very similar to Tolstoy just in this respect that there's a specific like moment or two in his life where, he basically has Tolstoy's crisis. That is he confronts these big questions and Tolstoy describes it as like, there was a screw in his head that had got loose and he kept turning it, but it kept, it was like stripped. And so no matter when you turned it, it didn't go. It didn't grab into anything. And what happens eventually is like, oh, he learns to have a good conventional home life. Like, and like not, don't ask yourself these hard questions. They'll screw you up. And I mean, it's not exactly compassion, but it's something close to that. The way things sort of work out in War and Peace. And I guess I think that you're sort of right that Tolstoy is having us figure something out for ourselves. And in that way, you could say we're on a journey. There's a question, why? Why does he have us do that? Why not just tell us? Why have it figured out for ourselves? And one reason might be because he doesn't know, that he doesn't know what he wants to tell us. And so you got to have them figure out for themselves. And I think that that is actually part of the answer here. And it's even maybe part of what it is to be a genius as a writer is to be able to write from this place of not really having the answers, but still be able to help other people find them.
Henry: You don't think it's, he wants to tell us to be Christians and to believe in God and to take this like.
Agnes: Absolutely, he wants to tell us that. And in spite of that, he's a great writer. If that were all he was achieving, he'd be boring like other writers who just want to do that and just do that.
Henry: But you're saying there's something additional than that, that is even mysterious to Tolstoy maybe.
Agnes: Yeah.
Henry: Did you find that additional mystery in Master in Man or do you see that more in the big novels?
Agnes: I see it the most in Death of Ivan Ilyich. But I think it's true, like in Anna Karenina, I can feel Tolstoy being pulled back and forth between on the one hand, just a straight out moralistic condemnation of Anna. And of, there are the good guys in this story, Levine and Kitty, and then there's this like evil woman. And then actually being seduced by her charms at certain moments. And it's the fact that he is still susceptible to her and to the seductions of her charms, even though that's not the moral of the story, it's not the official lesson. There's like, he can't help but say more than what the official lesson is supposed to be. And yeah, I think if he were just, I think he makes the same estimation of himself that I am making in terms of saying, look, he finds most of his own art wanting, right? In what is art? Because it's insufficiently moralistic basically, or it's doing too much else besides being, he's still pretty moralistic. I mean, even War and Peace, even Anna Karenina, he's moralistic even in those texts, but his artistry outstrips his moralism. And that's why we're attracted to him, I think. If he were able to control himself as a writer and to be the novelist that he describes as his ideal in what is art, I don't think we would be so interested in reading it.
Henry: And where do you see, you said you saw it in Ivan Ilyich as well.
Agnes: Yes, so I think in Ivan Ilyich, it is in the fact that there actually is no deus ex machina in Ivan Ilyich. It's not resolved. I mean, you get this little bit of relation to the servant, but basically Ivan Ilyich is like the closest that Tolstoy comes to just like full confrontation with the potential meaninglessness of human existence. There's something incredibly courageous about it as a text.
Henry: So what do you think about the bit at the end where he says he was looking for his earlier accustomed fear of death, but he couldn't find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear whatsoever because there was no death. Instead of death, there was light. Suddenly he said, oh, that's it, oh bliss.
Agnes: Okay, fair enough. I'd like forgotten that.
Henry: Oh, okay. Well, so my feeling is that like you're more right. So my official thing is like, I don't agree with that, but I actually think you're more right than I think because to me that feels a bit at the end like he saw the light and he, okay, we got him right under the line, it's fine. And actually the bulk of the story just isn't, it's leading up to that. And it's the very Christian in all its imagery and symbolism, but it's interesting that this, when it's, this is adapted into films like Ikiru and there was a British one recently, there's just nothing about God. There's nothing about seeing the light. They're just very, very secular. They strip this into something totally different. And I'm a little bit of a grumpy. I'm like, well, that's not what Tolstoy was doing, but also it is what he was doing. I mean, you can't deny it, right? The interpreters are, they're seeing something and maybe he was so uncomfortable with that. That's why he wrote what is art.
Agnes: Yeah, and that's the, I like that. I like that hypothesis. And right, I think it's like, I sort of ignore those last few lines because I'm like, ah, he copped out at the very end, but he's done the important, he's done the important, the important work, I think, is for instance, the scene with, even on his wife, where they part on the worst possible terms with just hatred, you know, like just pure hatred for the fact that she's forcing him to pretend that he isn't dying. Like that is like the profound moment.
Henry: What I always remember is they're playing cards in the other room. And he's sitting there, he's lying there thinking about like the office politics and curtain, like what curtain fabrics we have to pick out and the like, his intense hatred of the triviality of life. And I love this because I think there's something, like a midlife crisis is a bit like being an adolescent in that you go through all these weird changes and you start to wonder like, who am I? What is my life? When you're an adolescent, you're told that's great. You should go ahead and you should, yes, lean into that. And when you're like in your forties, people are going, well, try and just put a lid on that. That's not a good idea. Whereas Tolstoy has the adolescent fury of like curtains and cards. Oh my, you know, you can feel the rage of his midlife crisis in some of that seemingly mundane description. Yeah. I think that's what we respond to, right? That like his hatred in a way.
Agnes: Yeah. I mean, maybe we, many of us just have trouble taking ourselves as seriously as Tolstoy was able to, you know? And that's something, there's something glorious about that, that anyone else would listen to the people around them telling him, hey, don't worry, you're a great guy. Look, you wrote these important novels. You're a hero of the Russian people. You've got this wife, you're an aristocrat. You've got this family, you've got your affairs. I mean, come on, you've got everything a man could want. Just be happy with it all, you know? Many of us might be like, yeah, okay, I'm being silly. And Tolstoy is like, no one's going to tell me that I'm silly. Like I'm the one who's going to tell myself, if anything. And that kind of confidence is, you know, why he's sort of not willing to dismiss this thought.
Henry: Yeah, yeah, interesting. So how do you think of Master and Man in relation to all the others? Because you know Tolstoy pretty well. You teach him a lot. How do you place it? Like how good do you think it is?
Agnes: I don't teach him a lot. I'm trying to think if I ever taught Tolstoy.
Henry: Oh, I'm sorry. I thought I read that you had.
Agnes: I've taught The Death of Ivan Ilyich. That's the one, I have taught that one. I wish, I mean, I would love to teach. I just can't imagine assigning any of these novels in a philosophy, my students wouldn't read it.
Henry: They wouldn't read it?
Agnes: No.
Henry: Why?
Agnes: It's pretty hard to get people to read long texts. And I mean, some of them certainly would, okay, for sure. But if I'm, you know, in a philosophy class where you'd have to kind of have pretty high numbers of page assignments per class, if we're going to, I mean, you know, forget War and Peace. I mean, even like Ivan Ilyich is going to be pushing it to assign it for one class. I've learned to shorten my reading assignments because students more and more, they're not in the habit of reading. And so I got to think, okay, what is the minimum that I can assign them that where I can predict that they will do it? Anyway, I'm going to be pushing that next year in a class I'm teaching. I normally, you know, I assign fiction in some of my classes but that's very much not a thing that most philosophers do. And I have to sign it alongside, you know, but so it's not only the fiction they're reading, they're also reading philosophical texts. And anyway, yeah, no, so I have not done much, but I have done in a class on death, I did assign Ivan Ilyich. I don't tend to think very much about the question, what is the level of quality of a work of art?
Henry: Well, as in, all I mean is like, how does it compare for you to the other Tolstoy you've read?
Agnes: I, so the question that I tend to ask myself is like, what can I learn from it or how much can I learn? Not, it's not because I don't think the question of, the other one is a good one. I just think I trust other people's judgment more than mine unlike artistic quality. And I guess I think it's not as good as Death of Ivan Ilyich and I kind of can't see, like, it's like, what do I learn from it that I don't learn from Death of Ivan Ilyich? Which is like a question that I ask myself. And, there's a way in which that like that little final move, maybe when I'm reading Death of Ivan Ilyich, I can ignore that little final bit and here I can't ignore it. Tolstoy made it impossible for me to ignore in this story. So that's maybe the advantage of this story. Tolstoy makes his move more overt and more dominating of the narrative.
Henry: Yeah, I think also, I've known people who read Ivan Ilyich and not really see that it's very Christian. Yeah, oh yeah.
Agnes: I don't think I- Much less.
Henry: Yeah.
Agnes: That's what I'm doing. I'm erasing that from the story.
Henry: But that's like much less possible with this one. I agree.
Agnes: Right, exactly. That's sort of what I mean is that- Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, here the message is more overt. And so therefore I think it's actually a pretty important story in that way. Like, let's say for understanding Tolstoy. That is, if you were to try to take your view of Tolstoy and base it on Death of Ivan Ilyich, which sometimes I do in my own head, because it's occupied such an important place for me, then this is a good way to temper that.
Henry: Yeah, they make a nice pairing. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Let's pick up on this question about philosophers and fiction because you write about that in Open Socrates. You say, great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from. So it makes questions askable, but then you say only in relation to fictional characters, which you think is a limitation. Are you drawing too hard of a line between fictional characters and real people? Like if someone said, oh, we found out, we were in the archives, Ivan Ilyich, he didn't, it's not fiction. He was just a friend, just happened to a friend, basically word for word. He just did the work to make it kind of look okay for a novel, but basically it's just real. Would that really change very much?
Agnes: I think it wouldn't, no. So it might change a little bit, but not that much. So maybe the point, maybe a better thing I could have said there is other people. That is one thing that fictional people are is resolutely other. There's no chance you're going to meet them. And like they are, part of what it is for them to be fictional is that, there isn't even a possible world in which you meet them because metaphysically what they are is the kind of thing that can't ever interact with you. And, like the possible world in which I run into Ivan and Ivan Ilyich is the world in which he's not a Tolstoy character anymore. He's not a character in a novel, obviously, because we're both real people. So I think it's that there's a kind of safety in proving the life of somebody who is not in any way a part of your life.
Henry: The counter argument, which novelists would make is that if you gave some kind of philosophical propositional argument about death, about what it means to die, a lot of people just wouldn't, they'd like, maybe they'd understand what you're saying, but it just wouldn't affect them very much. Whereas if they've read Ivan Ilyich, this will actually affect them. I don't want to say it'll resonate with them, but you know what I mean. It will catch them in some way and they're more likely then to see something in their own life and be like, oh my God, I'm appreciating what Ivan Ilyich was telling me. Whereas, this is the argument, right? The statistics of social science, the propositions of philosophy, this just never gets through to people.
Agnes: Yeah, so one way to put this is, novelists are fans of epiphanies. I mean, some novelists, like Tolstoy, it's quite explicit. You just get these epiphanies, right? Like in this story, epiphany. James Joyce, I mean, he's like master of every story in Dubliners, epiphany. Novelists have this fantasy that people's lives are changed in a sudden moment when they have a passionate, oh, I just read this story and I'm so happy about it. And I don't actually doubt that these things happen, these epiphanies, that is people have these passionate realizations. I don't know how stable they are. Like they may have a passionate realization and then, maybe it's a little bit the novelist's fantasy to say you have the passionate realization and everything is changed. In this story, we get around that problem because he dies, right? So, that, I don't know. I somehow am now James Joyce. I don't know. I somehow am now James Joyce is in my head. The final story in Dubliners is the dead. And there's this like, amazing, I don't know who read the story.
Henry: Yeah, yeah. Also with snow, right?
Agnes: Yeah, exactly.You know, and it's this amazing where this guy is realizing his wife, their relationship is not what he thought it was, whatever. But then the story ends, does he really change? Like, do they just go on and have the same marriage after that point? We don't know. I mean, Joyce avoids that question by having the story end. But, so you might say, you know, novelists like epiphanies and they're good at writing epiphanies and producing epiphanies and imagining that their readers will have epiphanies. And then there's a question, okay, how valuable is the epiphany? And I think, not nothing. I wouldn't put it at zero, but you might say, okay, but let's compare the epiphany and the argument, right? So, what philosophers and the social scientists have, what we have is arguments. And who's ever been changed by an argument? And I think I would say all of human history has been changed by arguments and it's pretty much the only thing that's ever done anything to stably change us is arguments. If you think about, like, what are the things we've moved on? What are the things we've come around on? You know, human rights, there's a big one. That's not a thing in antiquity. And it's a thing now. And I think it's a thing because of arguments. Some of those arguments, you know, are starting to come in their own in religious authors, but then really come in, the flourishing is really the enlightenment. And so you might think, well, maybe an argument is not the kind of thing that can change very easily an adult who was already pretty set in their ways and who is not going to devote much of their time to philosophizing. It isn't going to give them the kind of passionate feeling of your life has suddenly been turned around by an epiphany, but it might well be that if we keep arguing with each other, that is how humanity changes.
Henry: I think a lot of the arguments were put into story form. So like the thing that changed things the most before the enlightenment maybe was the gospels. Which is just lots of stories. I know there are arguments in there, but basically everything is done through stories. Or metaphor, there's a lot of metaphor. I also think philosophers are curiously good at telling stories. So like some of the best, you know, there's this thing of micro fiction, which is like very, very short story. I think some of the best micro fiction is short stories. Is a thought experiment, sorry. Yeah. So people like Judith Jarvis Thompson, or well, his name has escaped my head, Reasons and Persons, you know who I mean? Derek Parfit, right. They write great short stories. Like you can sit around and argue about long-termism with just propositions, and people are going to be either like, this makes total sense or this is weird. And you see this when you try and do this with people. If you tell them Parfit's thought experiment that you drop a piece of glass in the woods, and a hundred years later, a little girl comes in and she cuts up. Okay, everyone's a long-termist in some way now. To some extent, everyone is just like, of course. Okay, fine. The story is good. The famous thought experiment about the child drowning in the pond. And then, okay, the pond is like 3000. Again, everyone's like, okay, I get it. I'm with you. Philosophers constantly resort to stories because they know that the argument is, you have to have to agree with you. You've got to have the argument. The argument's the fundamental thing. But when you put it in a story, it will actually, somehow it will then do its work.
Agnes: I think it's really interesting to ask, and I never asked myself this question, like what is the relationship between a thought experiment and a story? And I think that, I'm fine with a thought experiment with saying it's a kind of story, but I think that, so one feature of a thought experiment is that the person who is listening to it is given often a kind of agency. Like, which way do you push the trolley? Or do you care that you left this piece of glass there? Or are you, suppose that the pond was so many miles away but there was a very long hand that reached from here and you put a coin in the machine and at the other end, the hand will pull the child out of the water. Do you put the coin in, right? So like you're given these choices. It's like a choose your own adventure story, right? And that's really not what Tolstoy wrote. He really did not write choose your own adventure stories. There's a, I think he is-
Henry: But the philosopher always comes in at the end and says, by the way, this is the correct answer. I'm giving you this experiment so that you can see that, like, I'm proving my point. Peter Singer is not like, it's okay if you don't want to jump into the pond. This is your story, you can pick. He's like, no, you have to jump in. This is why I'm telling you the story.
Agnes: That's right, but I can't tell it to you without, in effect, your participation in the story, without you seeing yourself as part of the story and as having like agency in the story. It's by way of your agency that I'm making your point. Part of why this is important is that otherwise philosophers become preachers, which is what Tolstoy is when he's kind of at his worst. That is, you know, the philosopher doesn't just want to like tell you what to think. The philosopher wants to show you that you're already committed to certain conclusions and he's just showing you the way between the premises you already accept and the conclusion that follows from your premises. And that's quite-
Henry: No, philosophers want to tell you the particular, most philosophers create a thought experiment to be like, you should be a virtue ethicist or you should give money away. Like they're preaching.
Agnes: I don't think that is preaching. So I think that, and like, I think that this is why so many philosophical thought experiments are sort of meant to rely on what people call intuitions. Like, oh, but don't you have the intuition that? What is the intuition? The intuition is supposed to be somehow the kind of visceral and inchoate grasp that you already have of the thing I am trying to teach you. You already think the thing I'm telling you. I'm just making it clear to you what you think. And, you know, like there's like, I want to go back to the gospels. Like, I think it's a real question I have. I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but I feel like something I sometimes think about Jesus and I say this as a non-Christian, is that Jesus was clearly a really exceptional, really extraordinary human being. And maybe he just never met his Plato. You know, he got these guys who are like telling stories about him. But like, I feel like he had some really interesting thoughts that we haven't accessed. Imagine, imagine if Socrates only ever had Xenophon. You know, if Socrates had never met Plato. We might just have this story about Socrates. Oh, he's kind of like a hero. He was very self-sacrificing. He asked everyone to care about everybody else. And he might like actually look quite a bit like Jesus on a sort of like, let's say simplistic picture of him. And it's like, maybe it's a real shame that Jesus didn't have a philosopher as one of the people who would tell a story about him. And that if we had that, there would be some amazing arguments that we've missed out on.
Henry: Is Paul not the closest thing to that?
Agnes: What does he give us?
Henry: What are the arguments? Well, all the, you know, Paulian theology is huge. I mean, all the epistles, they're full of, maybe, I don't know if they're arguments more than declarations, but he's a great expounder of this is what Jesus meant, you should do this, right? And it's not quite what you're saying.
Agnes: It's conclusions, right?
Henry: Yes, yes.
Agnes: So I think it's like, you could sort of imagine if we only had the end of the Gorgias, where Socrates lists some of his sayings, right? Yes, exactly, yes. You know, it's better to have injustice done to you than to do injustice. It's better to be just than to appear just. Oratories should, you should never flatter anyone under any circumstances. Like, you know, there's others in other dialogues. Everyone desires the good. There's no such thing as weakness of will, et cetera. There are these sort of sayings, right? And you could sort of imagine a version of someone who's telling the story of Socrates who gives you those sayings. And yeah, I just think, well, we'd be missing a lot if we didn't hear the arguments for the sayings.
Henry: Yeah, I feel stumped. So the next thing you say about novelists, novelists give us a view onto the promised land, but not more. And this relates to what you're saying, everything you've just been saying. I want to bring in a George Eliot argument where she says, she kind of says, that's the point. She says, I'm not a teacher, I'm a companion in the struggle of thought. So I think a lot of the time, some of the differences we're discussing here are to do with the readers more than the authors. So Tolstoy and George Eliot, Jane Austen, novelists of their type and their caliber. It's like, if you're coming to think, if you're involved in the struggle of thought, I'm putting these ideas in and I'm going to really shake you up with what's happening to these people and you're going to go away and think about it and Pierre's going to stay with you and it's really going to open things up. If you're just going to read the story, sure, yeah, sure. And at the end, we'll have the big revelation and that's whoopee. And that's the same as just having the sayings from Socrates and whatever. But if you really read Middlemarch, one piece, whatever, Adam Bede is always the one that stays with me. Like you will have to think about it. Like if you've read Adam Bede and you know what happens to Hetty at the end, this has the, oh, well, I'm not going to spoil it because you have to read it because it's insane. It's really an exceptional book, but it has some of those qualities of the thought experiment. She really does put you, George Eliot's very good at this. She does put you in the position of saying like, what actually went right and wrong here? Like she's really going to confront you with the situation but with the difficulty of just saying, oh, you know, that's easy. This is what happened. This is the bad thing. Well, there were several different things and she's really putting it up close to you and saying, well, this is how life is. You need to think about that.
Agnes: So that last bit, I mean, I think that this is how life is part. Yeah. Really do think that that's something you get out of novels. It's not, so here's how you should live it or so here's why it makes sense, or here are the answers. It's none of the answers, I think. It's just that there's a kind of, it's like, you might've thought that given that we all live lives, we live in a constant contact with reality but I think we don't. We live in a bubble of what it's, the information that's useful to me to take in at any given moment and what do I need in order to make it to the next step? And there's a way in which the novel like confronts you with like the whole of life as like a spectacle or something like that, as something to be examined and understood. But typically I think without much guidance as to how you should examine or understand it, at least that's my own experience of it is that often it's like posing a problem to me and not really telling me how to solve it. But the problem is one that I often, under other circumstances, I'm inclined to look away from and the novelist sort of forces me to look at it.
Henry: Does that mean philosophers should be assigning more fiction?
Agnes: I, you know, I am in general pretty wary of judgments of that kind just because I find it hard to know what anyone should do. I mean, even myself, let alone all other philosophers.
Henry: But you're the philosopher. You should be telling us.
Agnes: No, I actually just don't think that is what philosophers do. So like, it was like a clear disagreement about, you know, is the, like George Eliot's like, I'm not a teacher, but the philosopher also says I'm not a teacher. I mean, Tolstoy was like, I am a teacher.
Henry: Yeah, I'm a teacher.
Agnes: I'm ready to guide you all.
Henry: You should take notes.
Agnes: But I think it's right that, yeah. So I think it's like, you know, maybe they have some other way of forcing that confrontation with reality. But I, my own feeling is that philosophers, when they use examples, including some of the thought experiments, it's sort of the opposite of what you said. It's kind of like they're writing very bad fiction. And so they'll come up with these, like I am philosophy. We have to, we're forced to sort of come up with examples. And, you know, I discuss one in my aspiration book of, oh, once upon a time, there was a guy. And when he was young, he wanted to be a clown, but his family convinced him that he should be an investment banker and make money. And so he did that. But then when he was older, he finally recovered this long lost desire. And then he became a clown and then he was happy. It's a story in an article by a philosopher I respect. Okay, I like her very much. And I haven't read it in a long time. So I'm hoping I'm summarizing it correctly. But my point is like, and this is supposed to be a story about how sort of self-creation and self-realization and how you can discover your authentic self by contrast with like the social forces that are trying to make you into a certain kind of person. But it's also, it's just a very bad piece of fiction. And I'm like, well, you know, if I'm say teaching a class on self-creation as I do sometimes, I'm like, well, we can read some novelists who write about this process and they write about it in a way that really shows it to us, that really forces us to confront the reality of it. And that story was not the reality. So if you have some other way to do that as a philosopher, then great. I'm very instrumental about my use of fiction, but I haven't found another way.
Henry: Which other fiction do you use in the self-creation class?
Agnes: So in that class, we read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend. And we also read some Fernando Pessoa.
Henry: Pessoa, what do your students think of Pessoa?
Agnes: They love it. So when I first assigned it, I'm like, I don't know what you guys are going to make of this. It's kind of weird. We're reading like just, you know, 20 pages of excerpts I like from the Book of Disquiet. I mean, it's like my own text I'm creating, basically. I figure with that text, you can do a choose your own adventure. And they like it a lot. And I think that it really, that, you know, the thing that really resonates with them is this stuff where he talks. So there are two passages in particular. So one of them is, one where he talks about how he's like, yeah, he meets his friend. And he can't really listen to what his friend is saying, but he can remember with photographic precision the lines on the face when he's smiling, or like, it's like what he's saying is, I'm paying attention to the wrong thing. Like I'm paying attention to the facial expressions and not to the content. And that I'm somebody who's in a world where my organization of my own experience is not following the rules that are sort of being dictated to me about how my experience is supposed to be organized. And that's sort of his predicament. So that's a thing that they like. And then there's a wonderful passage about how I keep trying to free myself from the social forces oppressing me. And I take away this noose that's around my neck. And as I'm doing it, I realize my hand is attached to a noose and it's pulling me. Like I'm the one who's doing, I'm the one who's suffocating myself all along when I'm trying to free myself from social forces, it's me who's doing the oppressing. Anyway, so those are some passages that we talk about that they like. They like it a lot. They have a lot less trouble making something of it than I had expected that they would.
Henry: Is this because he, is he well-suited to the age of social media and phones and fragmented personalities and you're always 16 different people? Is it that kind of thing?
Agnes: Partly it's the short texts. I mean, as I said, meeting a problem, right? And so, yeah. So like they like Nietzsche too, probably for the same reason, right? I mean, anything where the-
Henry: The aphorism.
Agnes: Yeah, exactly. Like no joke. You know, it's not the era for War and Peace. It's the era for the Nietzschean aphorism.
Henry: This is so depressing. I thought this wasn't true.
Agnes: Yeah, I think it's true. I like, I had a conversation with a student in my office yesterday about this and about how like just his own struggles with reading and how all his friends have the same problem. And, you know, I have made some suggestions and I think maybe I need to push them harder in terms of, you know, just university creating device-free spaces and then people having like, I think we have to view it the way we view exercise. Like none of us would exercise if we didn't force ourselves to exercise. And we use strategies to do it. Like, you know, you have a friend and you're going to go together or, you know, you make a habit of it or whatever. I mean, like, I think we just have to approach reading the same way. Just let's accept that we're in an environment that's hostile to reading and make it a priority and organize things to make it possible rather than just like pretending that there isn't a problem. But yeah, there is. And it's hard for us to see. So you're not as old as me, but I'm old enough that all of my reading habits were formed in a world without all of this, right? So of course it's way easier for me. Even I get distracted, but, you know, for me spending a couple of hours in the evening reading, that's like a thing I can do. But like a lot of people, okay, I was at a like tech, in a little tech world conference in California. And it was early in the morning and my husband wasn't awake yet. So I was just, and it was one of these conferences where there's like a little group room and then you have your own, like we had like a hotel room type room, but like then I would had to be in the room with my husband who was sleeping. I couldn't turn the light on. So it was early. I woke up at four. So I went to the group room just to read. And I'm sitting there reading and someone came up to me and they were like, I can't believe you're just sitting there like reading. I don't think I've seen someone read a book in, you know, he's like ever or something, maybe. I mean, he's a half my age. Like he's like, that's just not a thing that people do. And it was like, he's like, it's so on brand that you're reading, you know? But it's like, it's, I think it's just, it's much harder for people who have grown up with all of this stuff that is in some way hostile to the world of reading. Yeah, it's much harder for them than for us. And we should be reorganizing things to make it easier.
Henry: Yeah, I get that. I'm just, I'm alarmed that they can't read, like the depth of Ivan Ilyich. It's like, I don't know, it's like 50 pages or.
Agnes: Yeah, for one class, no.
Henry: It's very short. It's very short.
Agnes: That's not short. 50 pages is not short.
Henry: It's an hour or two hours of reading.
Agnes: It's like, yeah, between two and three. They also read slower because they don't read as much.
Henry: Okay, but you know what I'm like…
Agnes: Yeah, right, three hours of reading is a lot to assign for a class. Especially if, in my case, I always also assign philosophy. So it's not the only thing I'm assigning.
Henry: Sure, sure, but they read the philosophy.
Agnes: Same problem. I mean, it's not like some different problem, right? Same problem, and in fact, they are a little bit more inclined to read the fiction than the philosophy, but the point is the total number of pages is kind of what matters. And from that point of view, philosophy is at an advantage because we compress a lot into very few pages. So, but you know, and again, it's like, it's a matter of like, it's probably not of the level. So I can, you know, I can be more sure that in an upper level class, students will do the reading, but I'm also a little bit more inclined to assign literature in the lower level classes because I'm warming people up to philosophy. So, yeah, I mean, but I think it is alarming, like it should be alarming.
Henry: Now, one of the exciting things about Open Socrates, which most people listening to this would have read my review, so you know that I strongly recommend that you all read it now, but it is all about dialogue, like real dialogue. And can we find some, you know, I don't want to say like, oh, can we find some optimism? But like, people are just going to be reading less, more phones, all this talk about we're going back to an oral culture. I don't think that's the right way to phrase it or frame it or whatever, but there's much more opportunity for dialogue these days like this than there used to be. How can Open Socrates, how can people use that book as a way of saying, I want more, you know, intellectual life, but I don't want to read long books? I don't want to turn this into like, give us your five bullet points, self-help Socrates summary, but what can we, this is a very timely book in that sense.
Agnes: Yeah, I kind of had thought about it that way, but yeah, I mean, it's a book that says, intellectual life in its sort of most foundational and fundamental form is social, it's a social life, because the kinds of intellectual inquiries that are the most important to us are ones that we can't really conduct on our own. I do think that, I think that some, there is some way in which, like as you're saying, novels can help us a little bit sort of simulate that kind of interaction, at least some of the time, or at least put a question on the table. I sort of agree that that's possible. I think that in terms of social encounters doing it, there are also other difficulties though. Like, so it's, we're not that close to a Socratic world, just giving up on reading doesn't immediately put us into a Socratic world, let's put it that way. And for one thing, I think that there really is a difference between face-to-face interaction, on the one hand, where let's even include Zoom, okay, or phone as face-to-face in an extended sense, and then texting, on the other hand, where text interaction, where like texting back and forth would be, fall under texting, so would social media, Twitter, et cetera, that's sort of- Email. Email, exactly. And I'm becoming more, when I first started working on this book, I thought, well, look, the thing that Socrates cares about is like, when he says that philosophy is like, you know, when he rejects written texts, and he's like, no, what I want to talk back, I'm like, well, the crucial thing is that they can respond, whether they respond by writing you something down or whether they respond by making a sound doesn't matter. And I agree that it doesn't matter whether they make a sound, like for instance, if they respond in sign language, that would be fine. But I think it matters that there is very little lag time between the responses, and you never get really short lag time in anything but what I'm calling face-to-face interaction.
Henry: Right, there's always the possibility of what to forestall on text. Yeah. Whereas I can only sit here for like 10 seconds before I just have to like speak.
Agnes: Exactly, and I mean, 10 seconds, that's a wild exaggeration. So do you know what the actual number is? No. On average. Okay, the average amount of time that you're allowed to wait before responding to something I say is two tenths of a second, which, it's crazy, isn't it? Which, that amount of time is not enough time for, that is a one second pause is an awkward pause, okay? So two tenths of a second is not long enough time for the signal that comes at the end of my talking, so the last sound I make, let's say, to reach your ears and then get into your brain and be processed, and then you figure out what you want to say. It's not enough time, which means you're making a prediction. That's what you're doing when I'm talking. You're making a prediction about when I'm going to stop talking, and you're so good at it that you're on almost every time. You're a little worse over Zoom. Zoom screws us up a little bit, right? But this is like what our brains are built to do. This is what we're super good at, is kind of like interacting, and I think it's really important that it be a genuine interaction. That's what I'm coming to see, is that we learn best from each other when we can interact, and it's not obvious that there are those same interaction possibilities by way of text at the moment, right? I'm not saying there couldn't be, but at the moment, we rely on the fact that we have all these channels open to us. Interestingly, it's the lag time on the phone, like if we were talking just by phone, is about the same. So we're so good at this, we don't need the visual information. That's why I said phone is also face-to-face. I think phone's okay, even though a lot of our informational stream is being cut. We're on target in terms of the quick responses, and there's some way in which what happens in that circumstance is we become a unit. We become a unit of thinking together, and if we're texting each other and each of us gets to ponder our response and all that, it becomes dissociated.
Henry: So this, I do have a really, I'm really interested in this point. Your book doesn't contain scientific information, sociological studies. It's good old-fashioned philosophy, which I loved, but if you had turned it into more of a, this is the things you're telling me now, right? Oh, scientists have said this, and sociologists have said that. It could have been a different sort of book and maybe been, in some shallow way, more persuasive to more people, right? So you clearly made a choice about what you wanted to do. Talk me through why.
Agnes: I think that it's maybe the answer here is less deep than you would want. I think that my book was based on the reading I was doing in order to write it, and I wasn't, at the time, asking myself the kinds of questions that scientists could answer. Coming off of the writing of it, I started to ask myself this question. So for instance, that's why I did all this reading in sociology, psychology, that's what I'm doing now is trying to learn. Why is it that we're not having philosophical conversations all the time? It's a real question for me. Why are we not having the conversations that I want us to be having? That's an empirical question, at least in part, because it's like, well, what kinds of conversations are we having? And then I have to sort of read up on that and learn about how conversation works. And it's surprising to me, like the amount of stuff we know, and that it's not what I thought. And so I'm not, maybe I'm a little bit less hostile than most philosophers, just as I'm less hostile to fiction, but I'm also less hostile to sort of empirical work. I mean, there's plenty of philosophers who are very open to the very specific kind of empirical work that is the overlap with their specialization. But for me, it's more like, well, depending on what question I ask, there's just like, who is ready with answers to the question? And I will like, you know, kind of like a mercenary, I will go to those people. And I mean, one thing I was surprised to learn, I'm very interested in conversation and in how it works and in what are the goals of conversation. And of course I started with philosophical stuff on it, you know, Grice and Searle, speech act theory, et cetera. And what I found is that that literature does not even realize that it's not about conversation. I mean, Grice, like the theory of conversational implicature and you know, Grice's logic on conversation, it's like if you thought that making a public service announcement was a kind of conversation, then it would be a theory of conversation. But the way that philosophers fundamentally understand speech is that like, you know, speakers issue utterances and then somebody has to interpret that utterance. The fact that that second person gets to talk too is not like part of the picture. It's not essential to the picture. But if you ask a sociologist, what is the smallest unit of conversation? They are not going to say an assertion. They're going to say something like greeting, greeting or question answer or command obeying or, right? Conversation is like, there's two people who get to talk, not just one person. That seems like the most obvious thing, but it's not really represented in the philosophical literature. So I'm like, okay, I guess I got to say goodbye philosophers. Let me go to the people who are actually talking about conversation. You know, I of course then read, my immediate thought was to read in psychology, which I did. Psychology is a bit shallow. They just don't get to theorize. It's very accessible. It's got lots of data, but it's kind of shallow. And then I'm like, okay, the people who really are grappling with the kind of deep structure of conversation are sociologists. And so that's what I've been reading a lot of in the past, like whatever, two months or so. But I just wasn't asking myself these questions when I wrote the book. And I think the kinds of questions that I was asking were in fact, the kinds of questions that get answered or at least get addressed in philosophical texts. And so those were the texts that I refer to.
Henry: So all the sociology you've read, is it, how is it changing what you think about this? Is it giving you some kind of answer?
Agnes: It's not changing any, my view, but any of the claims in the book, that is the exact reason that you brought out. But it is making me, it's making me realize how little I understand in a sort of concrete way, what like our modern predicament is. That is, where are we right now? Like what's happening right now? Is the question I ask myself. And I get a lot of, especially in interviews about this book, I get a lot of like, well, given where things are right now, is Socrates very timely? Or how can Socrates help or whatever? And I'm like, I don't think we know where things are right now. That is that given that, where is it? Where is it that we are? And so part of what this kind of sociology stuff is making me realize is like, that's a much harder question than it appears. And even where do we draw the lines? Like, when did now start happening? Like my instinct is like, one answer is like around 1900 is when now started happening. And, and so like, so I guess I'm interested both at the very micro level, how does the conversational interaction work? What are the ways in which I am deciding in this very conversation, I'm deciding what's allowed to be in and what's not allowed to be in the conversation, right? By the moves I'm making, and you're doing the same. How are we doing that? How are we orchestrating, manipulating this conversation so as to dictate what's in it and what's out of it in ways that are like below the surface that we're not noticing, that we either that we are doing it or that we're doing it ourselves. Neither of us is noticing, but we're doing that. So that's at the micro level. And then at the macro level is the question about when did now start happening? And what are the big shifts in like the human experience? And, are we at a point somehow in human history where culture like as a mechanism of coordination is a little bit falling apart and then what's going to come next? That's like a kind of question that I have to put in that kind of vague way. So maybe the right thing to say is that reading all these sociology texts has like, has given me a sets of questions to ask. And maybe what I'm trying to do is, it's like, what my book does is it describes a kind of ideal. And it describes that ideal, you know, using the power of reason to see what would it take to sort of set us straight? What is the straightened version of the crooked thing that we're already doing? And I think that that's right, but that's not at all the same thing as asking the question like, what's our next step? How do we get there from here? That's the question I'm asking now. But part of trying to answer the question, how do we get there from here is like, where are we now? And where are we both very, very locally in an interaction, what are we doing? And then in a big picture way, where are we? What is the big, what is like, you know, in the Taylor Swift sense, what era are we in? And, you know, I guess I still feel like we are, we are living in the world of Fernando Pessoa, Robert Musso, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Hermann Bruch, Franz Kafka, like that set of writers, like around 1900-ish set of writers who didn't all know each other or anything, didn't coordinate, but they all, there was this like primal scream moment where they were like, what the hell is going on? What has happened to humanity? Where are the rules? Like, who are we supposed to be? I mean, of all of those, I would pull out Musso as like the paradigm example. So this is me, I guess, taking inspiration from literature again, where I feel like, okay, there's something there about we're lost. There's an expression of, there's a thought we're lost. And I'm trying to understand, okay, how did we get lost? And are we still in that state of being lost? I think yes. And let's get a clear, once we get very clear on how lost we are, we'll already start to be found. Cause that's sort of what it is to, you know, once you understand why you're lost, like that's situating yourself.
Henry: Those writers are a long time ago.
Agnes: Yeah, I said around 1900.
Henry: Yeah, but you don't, you don't, but there's nothing more recent that like expresses, like that's a very long now.
Agnes: Yeah. Well, yes, I agree. So I say, when did now start happening? I think it started happening around 1900. So I think-
Henry: So are we stuck?
Agnes: Yeah, kind of. I think, so here's like a very, he's like a very simple part of history that must be too simple because history is not, is like, it's very mildly not my strong suit. I can't really understand history. But it's like, there is this set of writers and they don't really tell stories. It's not their thing, right? They're not into plot, but they are issuing this warning or proclamation or crisis, like flashing thing. And then what happens? What happens after that? Well, World War I happens, right? And then, you know, not very long after that, we got World War II and especially World War II, the result of that is kind of, oh no, actually we know what good and bad are. It's like fighting Nazis, that's bad. And, you know, so we got it all settled. And, but it's like, it's like we push something under the rug, I guess. And I think we haven't dealt with it. We haven't dealt with this crisis moment. And so, you know, I think I could say something very similar about Knausgaard or something that is, I think he's kind of saying the same thing and his novel has a novel, whatever you want to call it, the, you know, I'm talking about the later one. That's the kind of weird sort of horror quadrilogy or something. It has this feeling of like trying to express a sense of being lost. So there's more recent stuff that, a lot of it's autofiction, the genre of autofiction has that same character. So yeah, like maybe there is some big progress that's been made since then, but if there is, then it has passed me by.
Henry: Agnes: Callard, thank you very much.
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In this episode, James Marriott and I discuss who we think are the best twenty English poets. This is not the best poets who wrote in English, but the best British poets (though James snuck Sylvia Plath onto his list…). We did it like that to make it easier, not least so we could base a lot of our discussion on extracts in The Oxford Book of English Verse (Ricks edition). Most of what we read out is from there. We read Wordsworth, Keats, Hardy, Milton, and Pope. We both love Pope! (He should be regarded as one of the very best English poets, like Milton.) There are also readings of Herrick, Bronte, Cowper, and MacNiece. I plan to record the whole of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ at some point soon.
Here are our lists and below is the transcript (which may have more errors than usual, sorry!)
HO
God Tier
* Shakespeare
“if not first, in the very first line”
* Chaucer
* Spenser
* Milton
* Wordsworth
* Eliot
—argue for Pope here, not usually included
Second Tier
* Donne
* Herbert
* Keats
* Dryden
* Gawain poet
* Tom O’Bedlam poet
Third Tier
* Yeats
* Tennyson
* Hopkins
* Coleridge
* Auden
* Shelley
* Marvell
JM
ShakespeareTier
* Shakespeare
Tier 1
* Chaucer
* Milton
* Wordsworth
Tier 2
* Donne
* Eliot
* Keats
* Tennyson
* Spencer
* Marvell
* Pope
Tier 3
* Yeats
* Hopkins
* Blake
* Coleridge
* Auden
* Shelley
* Thomas Hardy
* Larkin
* Plath
Henry: Today I'm talking to James Marriott, Times columnist, and more importantly, the writer of the Substack Cultural Capital. And we are going to argue about who are the best poets in the English language. James, welcome.
James: Thanks very much for having me. I feel I should preface my appearance so that I don't bring your podcast and disrepute saying that I'm maybe here less as an expert of poetry and more as somebody who's willing to have strong and potentially species opinions. I'm more of a lover of poetry than I would claim to be any kind of academic expert, just in case anybody thinks that I'm trying to produce any definitive answer to the question that we're tackling.
Henry: Yeah, no, I mean that's the same for me. We're not professors, we're just very opinionated boys. So we have lists.
James: We do.
Henry: And we're going to debate our lists, but what we do agree is that if we're having a top 20 English poets, Shakespeare is automatically in the God Tier and there's nothing to discuss.
James: Yeah, he's in a category of his own. I think the way of, because I guess the plan we've gone for is to rather than to rank them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 into sort of, what is it, three or four broad categories that we're competing over.
Henry: Yes, yes. Tiers
James: I think is a more kind of reasonable way to approach it rather than trying to argue exactly why it should be one place above Shelly or I don't know, whatever.
Henry: It's also just an excuse to talk about poets.
James: Yes.
Henry: Good. So then we have a sort of top tier, if not the first, in the very first line as it were, and you've got different people. To me, you've got Chaucer, Milton, and Wordsworth. I would also add Spenser and T.S. Eliot. So what's your problem with Spenser?
James: Well, my problem is ignorance in that it's a while since I've read the Fairy Queen, which I did at university. Partly is just that looking back through it now and from what I remember of university, I mean it is not so much that I have anything against Spenser. It's quite how much I have in favour of Milton and Wordsworth and Chaucer, and I'm totally willing to be argued against on this, but I just can't think that Spenser is in quite the same league as lovely as many passages of the Fairy Queen are.
Henry: So my case for Spenser is firstly, if you go through something like the Oxford Book of English Verse or some other comparable anthology, he's getting a similar page count to Shakespeare and Milton, he is important in that way. Second, it's not just the fairy queen, there's the Shepherd's Calendar, the sonnets, the wedding poems, and they're all highly accomplished. The Shepherd's Calendar particularly is really, really brilliant work. I think I enjoyed that more as an undergraduate, actually, much as I love the Fairy Queen. And the third thing is that the Fairy Queen is a very, very great epic. I mean, it's a tremendous accomplishment. There were lots of other epics knocking around in the 16th century that nobody wants to read now or I mean, obviously specialists want to read, but if we could persuade a few more people, a few more ordinary readers to pick up the fairy queen, they would love it.
James: Yes, and I was rereading before he came on air, the Bower of Bliss episode, which I think is from the second book, which is just a beautifully lush passage, passage of writing. It was really, I mean, you can see why Keats was so much influenced by it. The point about Spenser's breadth is an interesting one because Milton is in my top category below Shakespeare, but I think I'm placing him there pretty much only on the basis of Paradise Lost. I think if we didn't have Paradise Lost, Milton may not even be in this competition at all for me, very little. I know. I don’t know if this is a heresy, I've got much less time for Milton's minor works. There's Samuel Johnson pretty much summed up my feelings on Lycidas when he said there was nothing new. Whatever images it can supply are long ago, exhausted, and I do feel there's a certain sort of dryness to Milton's minor stuff. I mean, I can find things like Il Penseroso and L’Allegro pretty enough, but I mean, I think really the central achievement is Paradise Lost, whereas Spenser might be in contention, as you say, from if you didn't have the Fairy Queen, you've got Shepherd's Calendar, and all this other sort of other stuff, but Paradise Lost is just so massive for me.
Henry: But if someone just tomorrow came out and said, oh, we found a whole book of minor poetry by Virgil and it's all pretty average, you wouldn't say, oh, well Virgil's less of a great poet.
James: No, absolutely, and that's why I've stuck Milton right at the top. It's just sort of interesting how unbelievably good Paradise Lost is and how, in my opinion, how much less inspiring the stuff that comes after it is Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained I really much pleasure out of at all and how, I mean the early I think slightly dry Milton is unbelievably accomplished, but Samuel Johnson seems to say in that quote is a very accomplished use of ancient slightly worn out tropes, and he's of putting together these old ideas in a brilliant manner and he has this sort of, I mean I guess he's one of your late bloomers. I can't quite remember how old he is when he publishes Paradise Lost.
Henry: Oh, he is. Oh, writing it in his fifties. Yeah.
James: Yeah, this just extraordinary thing that's totally unlike anything else in English literature and of all the poems that we're going to talk about, I think is the one that has probably given me most pleasure in my life and the one that I probably return to most often if not to read all the way through then to just go over my favourite bits and pieces of it.
Henry: A lot of people will think Milton is heavy and full of weird references to the ancient world and learned and biblical and not very readable for want of a better word. Can you talk us out of that? To be one of the great poets, they do have to have some readability, right?
James: Yeah, I think so, and it's certainly how I felt. I mean I think it's not a trivial objection to have to Milton. It's certainly how I found him. He was my special author paper at university and I totally didn't get on with him. There was something about his massive brilliance that I felt. I remember feeling like trying to write about Paradise Lost was trying to kind of scratch a huge block of marble with your nails. There's no way to get a handle on it. I just couldn't work out what to get ahold of, and it's only I think later in adulthood maybe reading him under a little less pressure that I've come to really love him. I mean, the thing I would always say to people to look out for in Milton, but it's his most immediate pleasure and the thing that still is what sends shivers done my spine about him is the kind of cosmic scale of Paradise Lost, and it's almost got this sort of sci-fi massiveness to it. One of my very favourite passages, which I may inflict on you, we did agree that we could inflict poetry on one another.
Henry: Please, please
James: It’s a detail from the first book of Paradise Lost. Milton's talking about Satan's architect in hell Mulciber, and this is a little explanation of who or part of his explanation of who Mulciber is, and he says,
Nor was his name unheard or unadoredIn ancient Greece; and in Ausonian landMen called him Mulciber; and how he fellFrom Heaven they fabled, thrown by angry JoveSheer o’er the crystal battlements: from mornTo noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,A summer’s day, and with the setting sunDropt from the zenith, like a falling star,On Lemnos, th’ Aegaean isle. Thus they relate,Erring
I just think it's the sort of total massiveness of that universe that “from the zenith to like a falling star”. I just can't think of any other poet in English or that I've ever read in any language, frankly, even in translation, who has that sort of scale about it, and I think that's what can most give immediate pleasure. The other thing I love about that passage is this is part of the kind of grandeur of Milton is that you get this extraordinary passage about an angel falling from heaven down to th’ Aegean Isle who's then going to go to hell and the little parenthetic remark at the end, the perm just rolls on, thus they relate erring and paradise lost is such this massive grand thing that it can contain this enormous cosmic tragedy as a kind of little parenthetical thing. I also think the crystal battlements are lovely, so wonderful kind of sci-fi detail.
Henry: Yes, I think that's right, and I think it's under appreciated that Milton was a hugely important influence on Charles Darwin who was a bit like you always rereading it when he was young, especially on the beagle voyage. He took it with him and quotes it in his letters sometimes, and it is not insignificant the way that paradise loss affects him in terms of when he writes his own epic thinking at this level, thinking at this scale, thinking at the level of the whole universe, how does the whole thing fit together? What's the order behind the little movements of everything? So Milton's reach I think is actually quite far into the culture even beyond the poets.
James: That's fascinating. Do you have a particular favourite bit of Paradise Lost?
Henry: I do, but I don't have it with me because I disorganised and couldn't find my copy.
James: That's fair.
Henry: What I want to do is to read one of the sonnets because I do think he's a very, very good sonnet writer, even if I'm going to let the Lycidas thing go, because I'm not going to publicly argue against Samuel Johnson.
When I consider how my light is spent,Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,And that one Talent which is death to hideLodged with me useless, though my Soul more bentTo serve therewith my Maker, and presentMy true account, lest he returning chide;“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”I fondly ask. But patience, to preventThat murmur, soon replies, “God doth not needEither man’s work or his own gifts; who bestBear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His stateIs Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speedAnd post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:They also serve who only stand and wait.”
I think that's great.
James: Yeah. Okay. It is good.
Henry: Yeah. I think the minor poems are very uneven, but there are lots of gems.
James: Yeah, I mean he is a genius. It would be very weird if all the minor poems were s**t, which is not really what I'm trying… I guess I have a sort of slightly austere category too. I just do Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth, but we are agreed on Wordsworth, aren't we? That he belongs here.
Henry: So my feeling is that the story of English poetry is something like Chaucer Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot create a kind of spine. These are the great innovators. They're writing the major works, they're the most influential. All the cliches are true. Chaucer invented iambic pentameter. Shakespeare didn't single handedly invent modern English, but he did more than all the rest of them put together. Milton is the English Homer. Wordsworth is the English Homer, but of the speech of the ordinary man. All these old things, these are all true and these are all colossal achievements and I don't really feel that we should be picking between them. I think Spenser wrote an epic that stands alongside the works of Shakespeare and Milton in words with T.S. Eliot whose poetry, frankly I do not love in the way that I love some of the other great English writers cannot be denied his position as one of the great inventors.
James: Yeah, I completely agree. It's funny, I think, I mean I really do love T.S. Eliot. Someone else had spent a lot of time rereading. I'm not quite sure why he hasn't gone into quite my top category, but I think I had this—
Henry: Is it because he didn't like Milton and you're not having it?
James: Maybe that's part of it. I think my thought something went more along the lines of if I cut, I don't quite feel like I'm going to put John Donne in the same league as Milton, but then it seems weird to put Eliot above Donne and then I don't know that, I mean there's not a very particularly fleshed out thought, but on Wordsworth, why is Wordsworth there for you? What do you think, what do you think are the perms that make the argument for Wordsworth having his place at the very top?
Henry: Well, I think the Lyrical Ballads, Poems in Two Volumes and the Prelude are all of it, aren't they? I'm not a lover of the rest, and I think the preface to the Lyrical Ballads is one of the great works of literary criticism, which is another coin in his jar if you like, but in a funny way, he's much more revolutionary than T.S. Eliot. We think of modernism as the great revolution and the great sort of bringing of all the newness, but modernism relies on Wordsworth so much, relies on the idea that tradition can be subsumed into ordinary voice, ordinary speech, the passage in the Wasteland where he has all of them talking in the bar. Closing time please, closing time please. You can't have that without Wordsworth and—
James: I think I completely agree with what you're saying.
Henry: Yeah, so I think that's for me is the basis of it that he might be the great innovator of English poetry.
James: Yeah, I think you're right because I've got, I mean again, waiting someone out of my depth here, but I can't think of anybody else who had sort of specifically and perhaps even ideologically set out to write a kind of high poetry that sounded like ordinary speech, I guess. I mean, Wordsworth again is somebody who I didn't particularly like at university and I think it's precisely about plainness that can make him initially off-putting. There's a Matthew Arnold quote where he says of Wordsworth something like He has no style.
Henry: Such a Matthew Arnold thing to say.
James: I mean think it's the beginning of an appreciation, but there's a real blankness to words with I think again can almost mislead you into thinking there's nothing there when you first encounter him. But yeah, I think for me, Tintern Abbey is maybe the best poem in the English language.
Henry: Tintern Abbey is great. The Intimations of Immortality Ode is superb. Again, I don't have it with me, but the Poems in Two Volumes. There are so many wonderful things in there. I had a real, when I was an undergraduate, I had read some Wordsworth, but I hadn't really read a lot and I thought of I as you do as the daffodils poet, and so I read Lyrical Ballads and Poems in Two Volumes, and I had one of these electrical conversion moments like, oh, the daffodils, that is nothing. The worst possible thing for Wordsworth is that he's remembered as this daffodils poet. When you read the Intimations of Immortality, do you just think of all the things he could have been remembered for? It's diminishing.
James: It's so easy to get into him wrong because the other slightly wrong way in is through, I mean maybe this is a prejudice that isn't widely shared, but the stuff that I've never particularly managed to really enjoy is all the slightly worthy stuff about beggars and deformed people and maimed soldiers. Wandering around on roads in the lake district has always been less appealing to me, and that was maybe why I didn't totally get on with 'em at first, and I mean, there's some bad words with poetry. I was looking up the infamous lines from the form that were mocked even at the time where you know the lines that go,
You see a little muddy pond Of water never dry. I've measured it from side to side, ’Tis three feet long and two feet wide,
and the sort of plainness condescend into banality at Wordsworth's worst moments, which come more frequently later in his career.
Henry: Yes, yes. I'm going to read a little bit of the Intimations ode because I want to share some of this so-called plainness at its best. This is the third section. They're all very short
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,And while the young lambs boundAs to the tabor's sound,To me alone there came a thought of grief:A timely utterance gave that thought relief,And I again am strong:The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,And all the earth is gay;Land and seaGive themselves up to jollity,And with the heart of MayDoth every Beast keep holiday;—Thou Child of Joy,Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.
And I think it's unthinkable that someone would write like this today. It would be cringe, but we're going to have a new sincerity. It's coming. It's in some ways it's already here and I think Wordsworth will maybe get a different sort of attention when that happens because that's a really high level of writing to be able to do that without it descending into what you just read. In the late Wordsworth there's a lot of that really bad stuff.
James: Yeah, I mean the fact that he wrote some of that bad stuff I guess is a sign of quite how carefully the early stuff is treading that knife edge of tripping into banality. Can I read you my favourite bit of Tintern Abbey?
Henry: Oh yes. That is one of the great poems.
James: Yeah, I just think one of mean I, the most profound poem ever, probably for me. So this is him looking out over the landscape of Tinton Abbey. I mean these are unbelievably famous lines, so I'm sure everybody listening will know them, but they are so good
And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. Therefore am I stillA lover of the meadows and the woodsAnd mountains; and of all that we beholdFrom this green earth; of all the mighty worldOf eye, and ear,—both what they half create,And what perceive; well pleased to recogniseIn nature and the language of the senseThe anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soulOf all my moral being.
I mean in a poem, it's just that is mind blowingly good to me?
Henry: Yeah. I'm going to look up another section from the Prelude, which used to be in the Oxford Book, but it isn't in the Ricks edition and I don't really know why
James: He doesn't have much of the Prelude does he?
Henry: I don't think he has any…
James: Yeah.
Henry: So this is from an early section when the young Wordsworth is a young boy and he's going off, I think he's sneaking out at night to row on the lake as you do when you with Wordsworth, and the initial description is of a mountain.
She was an elfin pinnace; lustilyI dipped my oars into the silent lake,And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boatWent heaving through the water like a swan;When, from behind that craggy steep till thenThe horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,As if with voluntary power instinct,Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,And growing still in stature the grim shapeTowered up between me and the stars, and still,For so it seemed, with purpose of its ownAnd measured motion like a living thing,Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,And through the silent water stole my wayBack to the covert of the willow tree;
It's so much like that in Wordsworth. It's just,
James: Yeah, I mean, yeah, the Prelude is full of things like that. I think that is probably one of the best moments, possibly the best moments of the prelude. But yeah, I mean it's just total genius isn't it?
Henry: I think he's very, very important and yeah, much more important than T.S. Eliot who is, I put him in the same category, but I can see why you didn't.
James: You do have a little note saying Pope, question mark or something I think, don't you, in the document.
Henry: So the six I gave as the spine of English literature and everything, that's an uncontroversial view. I think Pope should be one of those people. I think we should see Pope as being on a level with Milton and Wordsworth, and I think he's got a very mixed reputation, but I think he was just as inventive, just as important. I think you are a Pope fan, just as clever, just as moving, and it baffles me that he's not more commonly regarded as part of this great spine running through the history of English literature and between Milton and Wordsworth. If you don't have Pope, I think it's a missing link if you like.
James: I mean, I wouldn't maybe go as far as you, I love Pope. Pope was really the first perch I ever loved. I remember finding a little volume of Pope in a box of books. My school library was chucking out, and that was the first book of poetry I read and took seriously. I guess he sort of suffers by the fact that we are seeing all of this through the lens of the romantics. All our taste about Shakespeare and Milton and Spenser has been formed by the romantics and hope's way of writing the Satires. This sort of society poetry I think is just totally doesn't conform to our idea of what poetry should be doing or what poetry is. Is there absolutely or virtually nobody reads Dryden nowadays. It's just not what we think poetry is for that whole Augustine 18th century idea that poetry is for writing epistles to people to explain philosophical concepts to them or to diss your enemies and rivals or to write a kind of Duncia explaining why everyone you know is a moron. That's just really, I guess Byron is the last major, is the only of figure who is in that tradition who would be a popular figure nowadays with things like English bards and scotch reviewers. But that whole idea of poetry I think was really alien to us. And I mean I'm probably formed by that prejudice because I really do love Pope, but I don't love him as much as the other people we've discussed.
Henry: I think part of his problem is that he's clever and rational and we want our poems always to be about moods, which may be, I think why George Herbert, who we've both got reasonably high is also quite underrated. He's very clever. He's always think George Herbert's always thinking, and when someone like Shakespeare or Milton is thinking, they do it in such a way that you might not notice and that you might just carry on with the story. And if you do see that they're thinking you can enjoy that as well. Whereas Pope is just explicitly always thinking and maybe lecturing, hectoring, being very grand with you and as you say, calling you an idiot. But there are so many excellent bits of Pope and I just think technically he can sustain a thought or an argument over half a dozen or a dozen lines and keep the rhyme scheme moving and it's never forced, and he never has to do that thing where he puts the words in a stupid order just to make the rhyme work. He's got such an elegance and a balance of composition, which again, as you say, we live under romantic ideals, not classical ones. But that doesn't mean we should be blind to the level of his accomplishment, which is really, really very high. I mean, Samuel Johnson basically thought that Alexander Pope had finished English poetry. We have the end of history. He had the end of English poetry. Pope, he's brought us to the mightiest of the heroic couplers and he's done it. It's all over.
James: The other thing about Pope that I think makes us underrate him is that he's very charming. And I think charm is a quality we're not big on is that sort of, but I think some of Pope's charm is so moving. One of my favourite poems of his is, do you know the Epistle to Miss Blount on going into the country? The poem to the young girl who's been having a fashionable season in London then is sent to the boring countryside to stay with an aunt. And it's this, it's not like a romantic love poem, it's not distraught or hectic. It's just a sort of wonderful act of sympathy with this potentially slightly airheaded young girl who's been sent to the countryside, which you'd rather go to operas and plays and flirt with people. And there's a real sort of delicate in it that isn't overblown and isn't dramatic, but is extremely charming. And I think that's again, another quality that perhaps we're prone not to totally appreciate in the 21st century. It's almost the kind of highest form of politeness and sympathy
Henry: And the prevailing quality in Pope is wit: “True wit is nature to advantage dressed/ What often was thought, but ne’er so well expressed”. And I think wit can be quite alienating for an audience because it is a kind of superior form of literary art. This is why people don't read as much Swift as he deserves because he's so witty and so scornful that a lot of people will read him and think, well, I don't like you.
James: And that point about what oft was thought and ne’er so well expressed again, is a very classical idea. The poet who puts not quite conventional wisdom, but something that's been thought before in the best possible words, really suffers with the romantic idea of originality. The poet has to say something utterly new. Whereas for Pope, the sort of ideas that he express, some of the philosophical ideas are not as profound in original perhaps as words with, but he's very elegant proponent of them.
Henry: And we love b******g people in our culture, and I feel like the Dunciad should be more popular because it is just, I can't remember who said this, but someone said it's probably the most under appreciated great poem in English, and that's got to be true. It's full of absolute zingers. There's one moment where he's described the whole crowd of them or all these poets who he considers to be deeply inferior, and it turns out he was right because no one reads them anymore. And you need footnotes to know who they are. I mean, no one cares. And he says, “equal your merits, equal is your din”. This kind of abuse is a really high art, and we ought to love that. We love that on Twitter. And I think things like the Rape of the Lock also could be more popular.
James: I love the Rape of the Lock . I mean, I think anybody is not reading Pope and is looking for a way in, I think the Rape of the Lock is the way in, isn't it? Because it's just such a charming, lovely, funny poem.
Henry: It is. And probably it suffers because the whole idea of mock heroic now is lost to us. But it's a bit like it's the literary equivalent of people writing a sort of mini epic about someone like Elon Musk or some other very prominent figure in the culture and using lots of heroic imagery from the great epics of Homer and Virgil and from the Bible and all these things, but putting them into a very diminished state. So instead of being grand, it becomes comic. It's like turning a God into a cartoon. And Pope is easily the best writer that we have for that kind of thing. Dryden, but he's the genius on it.
James: Yeah, no, he totally is. I guess it's another reason he's under appreciated is that our culture is just much less worshipful of epic than the 18th century culture was. The 18th century was obsessed with trying to write epics and trying to imitate epics. I mean, I think to a lot of Pope's contemporaries, the achievement they might've been expecting people to talk about in 300 years time would be his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the other stuff might've seen more minor in comparison, whereas it's the mock epic that we're remembering him for, which again is perhaps another symptom of our sort of post romantic perspective.
Henry: I think this is why Spenser suffers as well, because everything in Spenser is magical. The knights are fairies, not the little fairies that live in buttercups, but big human sized fairies or even bigger than that. And there are magical women and saucers and the whole thing is a sort of hodgepodge of romance and fairy tale and legend and all this stuff. And it's often said, oh, he was old fashioned in his own time. But those things still had a lot of currency in the 16th century. And a lot of those things are in Shakespeare, for example.
But to us, that's like a fantasy novel. Now, I love fantasy and I read fantasy, and I think some of it's a very high accomplishment, but to a lot of people, fantasy just means kind of trash. Why am I going to read something with fairies and a wizard? And I think a lot of people just see Spenser and they're like, what is this? This is so weird. They don't realise how Protestant they're being, but they're like, this is so weird.
James: And Pope has a little, I mean, the Rape of the Lock even has a little of the same because the rape of the lock has this attendant army of good spirits called selfs and evil spirits called gnomes. I mean, I find that just totally funny and charming. I really love it.
Henry: I'm going to read, there's an extract from the Rape of the Lock in the Oxford Book, and I'm going to read a few lines to give people an idea of how he can be at once mocking something but also quite charming about it. It's quite a difficult line to draw. The Rape of the Lock is all about a scandalous incident where a young man took a lock of a lady's hair. Rape doesn't mean what we think it means. It means an offence. And so because he stole a lock of her hair, it'd become obviously this huge problem and everyone's in a flurry. And to sort of calm everyone down, Pope took it so seriously that he made it into a tremendous joke. So here he is describing the sort of dressing table if you like.
And now, unveil'd, the Toilet stands display'd,Each silver Vase in mystic order laid.First, rob'd in white, the Nymph intent adores,With head uncover'd, the Cosmetic pow'rs.A heav'nly image in the glass appears,To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears;Th' inferior Priestess, at her altar's side,Trembling begins the sacred rites of Pride.
What a way to describe someone putting on their makeup. It's fantastic.
James: It's funny. I can continue that because the little passage of Pope I picked to read begins exactly where yours ended. It only gets better as it goes on, I think. So after trembling begins the sacred rites of pride,
Unnumber'd treasures ope at once, and hereThe various off'rings of the world appear;From each she nicely culls with curious toil,And decks the Goddess with the glitt'ring spoil.This casket India's glowing gems unlocks,And all Arabia breathes from yonder box.The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,Transformed to combs, the speckled, and the white.Here files of pins extend their shining rows,Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.
It's just so lovely. I love a thing about the tortoise and the elephant unite because you've got a tortoise shell and an ivory comb. And the stuff about India's glowing gems and Arabia breathing from yonder box, I mean that's a, realistic is not quite the word, but that's a reference to Milton because Milton is continually having all the stones of Arabia and India's pearls and things all screwed through paradise lost. Yeah, it's just so lovely, isn't it?
Henry: And for someone who's so classical and composed and elegant, there's something very Dickensian about things like the toilet, the tortoise and the elephant here unite, transform to combs. There's something a little bit surreal and the puffs, powders, patches, bibles, it has that sort of slightly hectic, frantic,
James: That's sort of Victorian materialism, wealth of material objects,
Henry: But also that famous thing that was said of Dickens, that the people are furniture and the furniture's like people. He can bring to life all the little bits and bobs of the ordinary day and turn it into something not quite ridiculous, not quite charming.
James: And there is a kind of charm in the fact that it wasn't the sort of thing that poets would necessarily expect to pay attention to the 18th century. I don't think the sort of powders and ointments on a woman's dressing table. And there's something very sort of charming in his condescension to notice or what might've once seemed his condescension to notice those things, to find a new thing to take seriously, which is what poetry or not quite to take seriously, but to pay attention to, which I guess is one of the things that great perch should always be doing.
Henry: When Swift, who was Pope's great friend, wrote about this, he wrote a poem called A Beautiful Young Lady Going to Bed, which is not as good, and I would love to claim Swift on our list, but I really can't.
James: It's quite a horrible perm as well, that one, isn't it?
Henry: It is. But it shows you how other people would treat the idea of the woman in front of her toilet, her mirror. And Swift uses an opportunity, as he said, to “lash the vice” because he hated all this adornment and what he would think of as the fakery of a woman painting herself. And so he talks about Corina pride of Drury Lane, which is obviously an ironic reference to her being a Lady of the Night, coming back and there's no drunken rake with her.
Returning at the midnight hour;Four stories climbing to her bow’r;Then, seated on a three-legged chair,Takes off her artificial hair:Now, picking out a crystal eye,She wipes it clean, and lays it by.Her eye-brows from a mouse’s hide,Stuck on with art on either side,Pulls off with care, and first displays ’em,Then in a play-book smoothly lays ’em.Now dexterously her plumpers draws,That serve to fill her hollow jaws.
And it goes on like this. I mean, line after this is sort of raw doll quality to it, Pope, I think in contrast, it only illuminates him more to see where others are taking this kind of crude, very, very funny and witty, but very crude approach. He's able to really have the classical art of balance.
James: Yes. And it's precisely his charm that he can mock it and sympathise and love it at the same time, which I think is just a more sort of complex suite of poetic emotions to have about that thing.
Henry: So we want more people to read Pope and to love Pope.
James: Yes. Even if I'm not letting him into my top.
Henry: You are locking him out of the garden. Now, for the second tier, I want to argue for two anonymous poets. One of the things we did when we were talking about this was we asked chatGPT to see if it could give us a good answer. And if you use o1 or o1 Pro, it gives you a pretty good answer as to who the best poets in English are. But it has to be told that it's forgotten about the anonymous poets. And then it says, oh, that was stupid. There are quite a lot of good anonymous poets in English, but I suspect a lot of us, a lot of non artificial intelligence when thinking about this question overlook the anonymous poets. But I would think the Gawain poet and the Tom O’ Bedlam poet deserve to be in here. I don’t know what you think about that.
James: I'm not competent to provide an opinion. I'm purely here to be educated on the subject of these anonymous poets.
Henry: The Gawain poet, he's a mediaeval, assume it's a he, a mediaeval writer, obviously may well not be a man, a mediaeval writer. And he wrote Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, which is, if you haven't read it, you should really read it in translation first, I think because it's written at the same time as Chaucer. But Chaucer was written in a kind of London dialect, which is what became the English we speak. And so you can read quite a lot of Chaucer and the words look pretty similar and sometimes you need the footnotes, but when you read Gawain and The Green Knight, it's in a Northwestern dialect, which very much did not become modern day English. And so it's a bit more baffling, but it is a poem of tremendous imaginative power and weirdness. It's a very compelling story. We have a children's version here written by Selena Hastings who's a very accomplished biographer. And every now and then my son remembers it and he just reads it again and again and again. It's one of the best tales of King Arthur in his knights. And there's a wonderful book by John Burrow. It's a very short book, but that is such a loving piece of criticism that explicates the way in which that poem promotes virtue and all the nightly goodness that you would expect, but also is a very strange and unreal piece of work. And I think it has all the qualities of great poetry, but because it's written in this weird dialect, I remember as an undergraduate thinking, why is this so bloody difficult to read? But it is just marvellous. And I see people on Twitter, the few people who've read it, they read it again and they just say, God, it's so good. And I think there was a film of it a couple of years ago, but we will gloss lightly over that and not encourage you to do the film instead of the book.
James: Yeah, you're now triggering a memory that I was at least set to read and perhaps did at least read part of Gawain and the Green Knight at University, but has not stuck to any brain cells at all.
Henry: Well, you must try it again and tell me what you think. I mean, I find it easily to be one of the best poems in English.
James: Yeah, no, I should. I had a little Chaucer kick recently actually, so maybe I'm prepared to rediscover mediaeval per after years of neglect since my degree,
Henry: And it's quite short, which I always think is worth knowing. And then the Tom Bedlam is an anonymous poem from I think the 17th century, and it's one of the mad songs, so it's a bit like the Fool from King Lear. And again, it is a very mysterious, very strange and weird piece of work. Try and find it in and read the first few lines. And I think because it's anonymous, it's got slightly less of a reputation because it can't get picked up with some big name, but it is full of tremendous power. And again, I think it would be sad if it wasn't more well known.
From the hag and hungry goblinThat into rags would rend ye,The spirit that stands by the naked manIn the Book of Moons defend ye,That of your five sound sensesYou never be forsaken,Nor wander from your selves with TomAbroad to beg your bacon,While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,Feeding, drink, or clothing;Come dame or maid, be not afraid,Poor Tom will injure nothing.
Anyway, so you get the sense of it and it's got many stanzas and it's full of this kind of energy and it's again, very accomplished. It can carry the thought across these long lines and these long stanzas.
James: When was it written? I'm aware of only if there's a name in the back of my mind.
Henry: Oh, it's from the 17th century. So it's not from such a different time as King Lear, but it's written in the voice of a madman. And again, you think of that as the sort of thing a romantic poet would do. And it's strange to find it almost strange to find it displaced. There were these other mad songs. But I think because it's anonymous, it gets less well known, it gets less attention. It's not part of a bigger body of work, but it's absolutely, I think it's wonderful.
James: I shall read it.
Henry: So who have you got? Who else? Who are you putting in instead of these two?
James: Hang on. So we're down to tier two now.
Henry: Tier two.
James: Yeah. So my tier two is: Donne, Elliot, Keats, Tennyson. I've put Spenser in tier two, Marvell and Pope, who we've already discussed. I mean, I think Eliot, we've talked about, I mean Donne just speaks for himself and there's probably a case that some people would make to bump him up a tier.
Henry: Anybody can read that case in Katherine Rudell’s book. We don't need to…
James: Yes, exactly. If anybody's punching perhaps in tier two, it's Tennyson who I wasn't totally sure belonged there. Putting Tenon in the same tier as Donne and Spenser and Keets. I wonder if that's a little ambitious. I think that might raise eyebrows because there is a school of thought, which I'm not totally unsympathetic to this. What's the Auden quote about Tennyson? I really like it. I expressed very harshly, but I sort of get what he means. Auden said that Tennyson “had the finest ear perhaps of any English poet who was also undoubtedly the stupidest. There was little that he didn't know. There was little else that he did.” Which is far too harsh. But I mentioned to you earlier that I think was earlier this year, a friend and I had a project where we were going to memorise a perva week was a plan. We ended up basically getting, I think three quarters of the way through.
And if there's a criticism of Tennyson that you could make, it's that the word music and the sheer lushness of phrases sometimes becomes its own momentum. And you can end up with these extremely lovely but sometimes slightly empty beautiful phrases, which is what I ended up feeling about Tithonus. And I sort of slightly felt I was memorising this unbelievably beautiful but ever so slightly hollow thing. And that was slightly why the project fell apart, I should say. Of course, they absolutely love Tennyson. He's one of my all time favourite poets, which is why my personal favouritism has bumped him up into that category. But I can see there's a case, and I think to a lot of people, he's just the kind of Victorian establishment gloom man, which is totally unfair, but there's not no case against Tennyson.
Henry: Yeah, the common thing is that he has no ideas. I don't know if that's true or not. I'm also, I'm not sure how desperately important it is. It should be possible to be a great poet without ideas being at the centre of your work. If you accept the idea that the essence of poetry is invention, i.e. to say old things in a fantastically new way, then I think he qualifies very well as a great poet.
James: Yes..
Henry: Well, very well. I think Auden said what he said because he was anxious that it was true of himself.
James: Yeah, I mean there's a strong argument that Auden had far too many ideas and the sorts of mad schemes and fantastical theories about history that Auden spent his spare time chasing after is certainly a kind of argument that poets maybe shouldn't have as many ideas, although it's just reading. Seamus Perry's got a very good little book on Tennyson, and the opening chapter is all about arguments about people who have tended to dislike Tennyson. And there are all kinds of embarrassing anecdotes about the elderly Tennyson trying to sort of go around dinner parties saying profound and sage-like things and totally putting his foot in it and saying things are completely banal. I should have made a note that this was sort of slightly, again, intensifying my alarm about is there occasionally a tinsely hollowness about Tennyson. I'm now being way too harsh about one of my favourite poets—
Henry: I think it depends what you mean by ideas. He is more than just a poet of moods. He gives great expression, deep and strongly felt expression to a whole way of being and a whole way of conceiving of things. And it really was a huge part of why people became interested in the middle ages in the 19th century. I think there's Walter Scott and there's Tennyson who are really leading that work, and that became a dominant cultural force and it became something that meant a lot to people. And whether or not, I don't know whether it's the sort of idea that we're talking about, but I think that sort of thing, I think that qualifies as having ideas and think again, I think he's one of the best writers about the Arthurian legend. Now that work doesn't get into the Oxford Book of English Verse, maybe that's fair. But I think it was very important and I love it. I love it. And I find Tennyson easy to memorise, which is another point in his favour.
James: Yeah.
Henry: I'm going to read a little bit of Ulysses, which everyone knows the last five or six lines of that poem because it gets put into James Bond films and other such things. I'm going to read it from a little bit from earlier on.
I am become a name;For always roaming with a hungry heartMuch have I seen and known; cities of menAnd manners, climates, councils, governments,Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;And drunk delight of battle with my peers,Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.I am a part of all that I have met;Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fadesFor ever and for ever when I move.
I think that's amazing. And he can do that. He can do lots and lots and lots of that.
James: Yeah, he really can. It's stunning. “Far on the ringing planes of windy Troy” is such an unbelievably evocative phrase.
Henry: And that's what I mean. He's got this ability to bring back a sort of a whole mood of history. It's not just personal mood poetry. He can take you into these places and that is in the space of a line. In the space of a line. I think Matthew Arnold said of the last bit of what I just read is that he had this ability in Ulysses to make the lines seem very long and slow and to give them this kind of epic quality that far goes far beyond the actual length of that poem. Ulysses feels like this huge poem that's capturing so much of Homer and it's a few dozen lines.
James: Yeah, no, I completely agree. Can I read a little bit of slightly more domestic Tennyson, from In Memoriam, I think his best poem and one of my all time favourite poems and it's got, there are many sort of famous lines on grief and things, but there's little sort of passage of natural description I think quite near the beginning that I've always really loved and I've always just thought was a stunning piece of poetry in terms of its sound and the way that the sound has patented and an unbelievably attentive description natural world, which is kind of the reason that even though I think Keats is a better poet, I do prefer reading Tennyson to Keats, so this is from the beginning of In Memoriam.
Calm is the morn without a sound,Calm as to suit a calmer grief,And only thro’ the faded leafThe chesnut pattering to the ground:
Calm and deep peace on this high wold,And on these dews that drench the furze,And all the silvery gossamersThat twinkle into green and gold:
Calm and still light on yon great plainThat sweeps with all its autumn bowers,And crowded farms and lessening towers,To mingle with the bounding main:
And I just think that's an amazing piece of writing that takes you from that very close up image that it begins with of the “chestnut patterning to the ground” through the faded leaves of the tree, which is again, a really attentive little bit of natural description. I think anyone can picture the way that a chestnut might fall through the leaves of a chestnut tree, and it's just an amazing thing to notice. And I think the chestnut pattern to the ground does all the kind of wonderful, slightly onomatopoeic, Tennyson stuff so well, but by the end, you're kind of looking out over the English countryside, you've seen dew on the firs, and then you're just looking out across the plane to the sea, and it's this sort of, I just think it's one of those bits of poetry that anybody who stood in a slightly wet and romantic day in the English countryside knows exactly the feeling that he's evoking. And I mean there's no bit of—all of In Memoriam is pretty much that good. That's not a particularly celebrated passage I don't think. It's just wonderful everywhere.
Henry: Yes. In Memoriam a bit like the Dunciad—under appreciated relative to its huge merits.
James: Yeah, I think it sounds, I mean guess by the end of his life, Tennyson had that reputation as the establishment sage of Victorian England, queen of Victoria's favourite poet, which is a pretty off-putting reputation for to have. And I think In Memoriam is supposed to be this slightly cobwebby, musty masterpiece of Victorian grief. But there was just so much, I mean, gorgeous, beautiful sensuous poetry in it.
Henry: Yeah, lots of very intense feelings. No, I agree. I have Tennyson my third tier because I had to have the Gawain poet, but I agree that he's very, very great.
James: Yeah, I think the case for third tier is I'm very open to that case for the reasons that I said.
Henry: Keats, we both have Keats much higher than Shelly. I think Byron's not on anyone's list because who cares about Byron. Overrated, badly behaved. Terrible jokes. Terrible jokes.
James: I think people often think Byron's a better pert without having read an awful lot of the poetry of Byron. But I think anybody who's tried to wade through long swathes of Don Juan or—
Henry: My God,
James: Childe Harold, has amazing, amazing, beautiful moments. But yeah, there's an awful lot of stuff that you don't enjoy. I think.
Henry: So to make the case for Keats, I want to talk about The Eve of St. Agnes, which I don’t know about you, but I love The Eve of St. Agnes. I go back to it all the time. I find it absolutely electric.
James: I'm going to say that Keats is a poet, which is kind of weird for somebody is sent to us and obviously beautiful as Keats. I sort of feel like I admire more than I love. I get why he's brilliant. It's very hard not to see why he's brilliant, but he's someone I would very rarely sit down and read for fun and somebody got an awful lot of feeling or excitement out of, but that's clearly a me problem, not a Keats problem.
Henry: When I was a teenager, I knew so much Keats by heart. I knew the whole of the Ode to a Nightingale. I mean, I was absolutely steeped in it morning, noon and night. I couldn't get over it. And now I don’t know if I could get back to that point. He was a very young poet and he writes in a very young way. But I'm going to read—The Eve of St. Agnes is great. It's a narrative poem, which I think is a good way to get into this stuff because the story is fantastic. And he had read Spenser, he was part of this kind of the beginning of this mediaeval revival. And he's very interested in going back to those old images, those old stories. And this is the bit, I think everything we're reading is from the Oxford Book of English Verse, so that if people at home want to read along they can.
This is when the heroine of the poem is Madeline is making her escape basically. And I think this is very, very exciting.
Her falt'ring hand upon the balustrade,Old Angela was feeling for the stair,When Madeline, St. Agnes' charmed maid,Rose, like a mission'd spirit, unaware:With silver taper's light, and pious care,She turn'd, and down the aged gossip ledTo a safe level matting. Now prepare,Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed;She comes, she comes again, like ring-dove fray'd and fled.
Out went the taper as she hurried in;Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died:She clos'd the door, she panted, all akinTo spirits of the air, and visions wide:No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!But to her heart, her heart was voluble,Paining with eloquence her balmy side;As though a tongueless nightingale should swellHer throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.
A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,All garlanded with carven imag'riesOf fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,And diamonded with panes of quaint device,Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.
I mean, so much atmosphere, so much tension, so many wonderful images just coming one after the other. The rapidity of it, the tumbling nature of it. And people often quote the Ode to autumn, which has a lot of that.
James: I have to say, I found that totally enchanting. And perhaps my problem is that I need you to read it all to me. You can make an audio book that I can listen to.
Henry: I honestly, I actually might read the whole of the E and put it out as audio on Substack because
James: I would actually listen to that.
Henry: I love it so much. And I feel like it gets, when we talk about Keats, we talk about, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer and Bright Star and La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and these are great, great poems and they're poems that we do at school Ode to a Nightingale because I think The Great Gatsby has a big debt to Ode to a Nightingale, doesn't it? And obviously everyone quotes the Ode to Autumn. I mean, as far as I can tell, the 1st of October every year is the whole world sharing the first stands of the Ode to Autumn.
James: Yeah. He may be one of the people who suffers from over familiarity perhaps. And I think also because it sounds so much what poetry is supposed to sound like, because so much of our idea of poetry derives from Keats. Maybe that's something I've slightly need to get past a little bit.
Henry: But if you can get into the complete works, there are many, the bit I just read is I think quite representative.
James: I loved it. I thought it was completely beautiful and I would never have thought to ever, I probably can't have read that poem for years. I wouldn't have thought to read it. Since university, I don't think
Henry: He's one of those people. All of my copies of him are sort of frayed and the spines are breaking, but the book is wearing out. I should just commit it to memory and be done. But somehow I love going back to it. So Keats is very high in my estimation, and we've both put him higher than Shelly and Coleridge.
James: Yeah.
Henry: Tell me why. Because those would typically, I think, be considered the superior poets.
James: Do you think Shelly? I think Keats would be considered the superior poet
Henry: To Shelly?
James: Certainly, yes. I think to Shelly and Coleridge, that's where current fashion would place them. I mean, I have to say Coleridge is one of my all time favourite poets. In terms of people who had just every so often think, I'd love to read a poem, I'd love to read Frost at Midnight. I'd love to read the Aeolian Harp. I'd love to read This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison. I'd love to read Kubla Khan. Outside Milton, Coleridge is probably the person that I read most, but I think, I guess there's a case that Coleridge's output is pretty slight. What his reputation rest on is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, the conversation poems, which a lot of people think are kind of plagiarised Wordsworth, at least in their style and tone, and then maybe not much else. Does anybody particularly read Cristabel and get much out of it nowadays? Dejection an Ode people like: it’s never done an awful lot for me, so I sort of, in my personal Pantheon Coleridge is at the top and he's such an immensely sympathetic personality as well and such a curious person. But I think he's a little slight, and there's probably nothing in Coleridge that can match that gorgeous passage of Keats that you read. I think.
Henry: Yeah, that's probably true. He's got more ideas, I guess. I don't think it matters that he's slight. Robert Frost said something about his ambition had been to lodge five or six poems in the English language, and if he'd done that, he would've achieved greatness. And obviously Frost very much did do that and is probably the most quotable and well-known poet. But I think Coleridge easily meets those criteria with the poems you described. And if all we had was the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I would think it to be like Tom O’ Bedlam, like the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, one of those great, great, great poems that on its own terms, deserves to be on this list.
James: Yeah, and I guess another point in his favour is a great poet is they're all pretty unalike. I think if given Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a conversation poem and Kubla Khan and said, guess whether these are three separate poets or the same guy, you would say, oh, there's a totally different poems. They're three different people. One's a kind of creepy gothic horror ballad. Another one is a philosophical reflection. Another is the sort of Mad Opium dream. I mean, Kubla Khan is just without a doubt, one of the top handful of purposes in English language, I think.
Henry: Oh yeah, yeah. And it has that quality of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard that so many of the lines are so quotable in the sense that they could be, in the case of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, a lot of novels did get their titles from it. I think it was James Lees Milne. Every volume of his diaries, which there are obviously quite a few, had its title from Kubla Khan. Ancient as the Hills and so on. It's one of those poems. It just provides us with so much wonderful language in the space of what a page.
James: Sort of goes all over the place. Romantic chasms, Abyssinian made with dulcimer, icy pleasure dome with caves of ice. It just such a—it's so mysterious. I mean, there's nothing else remotely like it at all in English literature that I can think of, and its kind strangeness and virtuosity. I really love that poem.
Henry: Now, should we say a word for Shelly? Because everyone knows Ozymandias, which is one of those internet poems that goes around a lot, but I don't know how well known the rest of his body of work is beyond that. I fell in love with him when I read a very short lyric called “To—”
Music, when soft voices die,Vibrates in the memory—Odours, when sweet violets sicken,Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,Love itself shall slumber on.
I found that to be one of those poems that was once read and immediately memorised. But he has this very, again, broad body of work. He can write about philosophical ideas, he can write about moods, he can write narrative. He wrote Julian and Maddalo, which is a dialogue poem about visiting a madman and taking sympathy with him and asking the question, who's really mad here? Very Swiftian question. He can write about the sublime in Mont Blanc. I mean, he has got huge intellectual power along with the beauty. He's what people want Tennyson to be, I guess.
James: Yeah. Or what people think Byron might be. I think Shelly is great. I don't quite get that Byron is so much more famous. Shelly has just a dramatic and, well, maybe not quite just as, but an incredibly dramatic and exciting life to go along with it,
Henry: I think some of the short lyrics from Byron have got much more purchase in day-to-day life, like She Walks in Beauty.
James: Yeah. I think you have to maybe get Shelly a little more length, don't you? I mean, even there's something like Ode to the West Wind is you have to take the whole thing to love it, perhaps.
Henry: Yes. And again, I think he's a bit like George Herbert. He's always thinking you really have to pay attention and think with him. Whereas Byron has got lots of lines you can copy out and give to a girl that you like on the bus or something.
James: Yes. No, that's true.
Henry: I don't mean that in quite as rude a way as it sounds. I do think that's a good thing. But Shelly's, I think, much more of a thinker, and I agree with you Childe Harold and so forth. It's all crashing bore. I might to try it again, but awful.
James: I don't want move past Coledridge without inflicting little Coledridge on you. Can I?
Henry: Oh, yes. No, sorry. We didn't read Coledridge, right?
James: Are just, I mean, what to read from Coledridge? I mean, I could read the whole of Kubla Khan, but that would be maybe a bit boring. I mean, again, these are pretty famous and obvious lines from Frost at Midnight, which is Coledridge sitting up late at night in his cottage with his baby in its cradle, and he sort of addressing it and thinking about it. And I just think these lines are so, well, everything we've said about Coledridge, philosophical, thoughtful, beautiful, in a sort of totally knockout, undeniable way. So it goes, he's talking to his young son, I think.
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heartWith tender gladness, thus to look at thee,And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,And in far other scenes! For I was rearedIn the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breezeBy lakes and sandy shores, beneath the cragsOf ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,Which image in their bulk both lakes and shoresAnd mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hearThe lovely shapes and sounds intelligibleOf that eternal language, which thy GodUtters, who from eternity doth teachHimself in all, and all things in himself.
Which is just—what aren't those lines of poetry doing? And with such kind of confidence, the way you get from talking to your baby and its cradle about what kind of upbringing you hope it will have to those flashes of, I mean quite Wordsworthian beauty, and then the sort of philosophical tone at the end. It's just such a stunning, lovely poem. Yeah, I love it.
Henry: Now we both got Yeats and Hopkins. And Hopkins I think is really, really a tremendous poet, but neither of us has put Browning, which a lot of other people maybe would. Can we have a go at Browning for a minute? Can we leave him in shreds?
James: Oh God. I mean, you're going to be a better advocate of Browning than I am. I've never—
Henry: Don't advocate for him. No, no, no.
James: We we're sticking him out.
Henry: We're sticking him.
James: I wonder if I even feel qualified to do that. I mean, I read quite a bit of Browning at university, found it hard to get on with sometimes. I think I found a little affected and pretentious about him and a little kind of needlessly difficult in a sort of off-puttingly Victorian way. But then I was reading, I reviewed a couple of years ago, John Carey has an excellent introduction to English poetry. I think it's called A Little History of Poetry in which he described Browning's incredibly long poem, The Ring in the Book as one of the all time wonders of verbal art. This thing is, I think it's like 700 or 800 pages long poem in the Penguin edition, which has always given me pause for thought and made me think that I've dismissed Browning out of hand because if John Carey's telling me that, then I must be wrong.
But I think I have had very little pleasure out of Browning, and I mean by the end of the 19th century, there was a bit of a sort of Victorian cult of Browning, which I think was influential. And people liked him because he was a living celebrity who'd been anointed as a great poet, and people liked to go and worship at his feet and stuff. I do kind of wonder whether he's lasted, I don't think many people read him for pleasure, and I wonder if that maybe tells its own story. What's your case against Browning?
Henry: No, much the same. I think he's very accomplished and very, he probably, he deserves a place on the list, but I can't enjoy him and I don't really know why. But to me, he's very clever and very good, but as you say, a bit dull.
James: Yeah, I totally agree. I'm willing. It must be our failing, I'm sure. Yeah, no, I'm sure. I'm willing to believe they're all, if this podcast is listened to by scholars of Victorian poetry, they're cringing and holding their head in their hands at this—
Henry: They've turned off already. Well, if you read The Ring and the Book, you can come back on and tell us about it.
James: Oh God, yeah. I mean, in about 20 years time.
Henry: I think we both have Auden, but you said something you said, “does Auden have an edge of fraudulence?”
James: Yeah, I mean, again, I feel like I'm being really rude about a lot of poets that I really love. I don't really know why doesn't think, realising that people consider to be a little bit weak makes you appreciate their best stuff even more I guess. I mean, it's hard to make that argument without reading a bit of Auden. I wonder what bit gets it across. I haven't gotten any ready. What would you say about Auden?
Henry: I love Auden. I think he was the best poet of the 20th century maybe. I mean, I have to sort of begrudgingly accept T.S. Eliot beside, I think he can do everything from, he can do songs, light lyrics, comic verse, he can do occasional poetry, obituaries. He was a political poet. He wrote in every form, I think almost literally that might be true. Every type of stanza, different lines. He was just structurally remarkable. I suspect he'll end up a bit like Pope once the culture has turned away from that style or that sort of broad type of writing. He'll be looked at admiringly, but people won't be rushing to read him. Whereas at the moment, he's in Four Weddings and a Funeral, isn't he?
James: Yeah.
Henry: And again, one of those, it's a bit like Wordsworth and the daffodils. It's a very good poem and I'm really glad it's in the movie, but it's not a perfectly representative piece of Auden. I mean, he did adverts. He wrote a poem for an advert for the GPO. He could really do anything in poetry, it sometimes feels like.
James: Yeah, I mean, I wonder if that might be the slight edge of weakness to him is that he can turn it on so easily. So I mean, I absolutely love Auden. He's my favourite 20th century poet. But yet again, I, I'm disparaging somebody I love, which is that I think when you've read a lot of him, you begin to notice there are certain tricks and phrases and tones that he deploys perhaps a little bit too easily. There's a recurring word that I remember thinking was popping up all over the place in all of them, which is describing slightly unexpected things as public. So there's I think a reference to the ribbons around the necks to the public doves is a line somewhere, something about public statues. And what I began to feel was that this was a slightly easy way of making poetry seem a little bit more political and a little bit more, I guess, obviously public than it perhaps seemed at first sight and was way of adding this sort of slight little dusting of profundity to it.
That seemed a bit too easy. I guess the other thing that struck me was the way that he was so easily imitated by a lot of other poets during the thirties, I mean right up until the forties as well, Kingsley and Philip Larkin. A lot of their early poetry just sounds exactly like Bad Auden. And that to me is maybe a sign that Auden was proceeding by these sort of strategies and tricks that could be learned sometimes. I also think another problem with him is that some of the early poetry, and I should be backing, backing this up with evidence, becomes complicated and incomprehensible slightly without justification. And he is perhaps somebody else—and I think this might be why he was rude about Tennyson and said that Tennyson wasn't really thinking and he was just sounding beautiful—is that I think Auden could fall that way himself. And I do think that T.S .Eliot never did. Everything in T.S. Eliot really feels hewn out of total originality. T.S .Eliot never had anybody who was easily able to sound like T.S. Eliot because that's impossible. What would an invitation of T.S .Eliot even sound like, I think. But yeah, I mean I also do just completely love him and every time I read Auden, I think he's good in a way that I just didn't even think about last time I read him.
Henry: Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think at his worst he slips into this kind of rhythmic, melodic, beautiful nonsense profundity, but at his best, he really earns his place in the top 20 at his best.
James: Or would you read to justify that?
Henry: Well, I do think the Musee des Beaux Arts, which everyone knows, it's one of those examples of everyone knows it for a reason, but some of the longer poems, I don't have them in the Oxford Book. Some of the longer poems are very good as well. And the Achilles Shield, the Fall of Rome, I mean, I think there's quite a lot there.
James: I had a real moment a couple of months ago with Spain, one of the Revolutionary poems, and it's just so full of, I mean, it was a poem that he eventually disowned because he thought it was dishonest, but it's just full of these stunningly beautiful little details. So in one line, Spain is that arid square that fragment nipped off from hot Africa soldered so crudely to inventive Europe that tableland scored by rivers and I mean, it's just—Spain, the arid square fragment nipped off from Hot Africa soldered so crudely to inventive Europe is just sort of, I think is a beautiful passage of description. Although I would say that adjective inventive Europe for me is that slight Auden phoniness you sometimes get where an adjective is maybe liking to seem like it's doing a little more than it really is. I think it's kind of gesturing to a sort of knowledge or thought about Europe that Auden wants you to believe he has, but perhaps he doesn't really. And the famous last lines of Spain, which is a poem about revolution, which he eventually really disowned, but I think is so powerful and rhetorical and beautiful,
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, andHistory to the defeatedMay say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
And again, he's one of those people, he can just do that anytime. He's full of stunning rhetorical moments like that.
Henry: He called that a wicked doctrine.
James: Yes, all sort because all about blowing people up and how that's justified for political end, which I didn't, that matters. I think the argument for that per
Henry: No, I think it matters.
James: I think the argument for that poem is that it's not Auden saying this is exactly what I mean about revolution. This is Auden producing a poem that expresses very convincingly and compellingly and rhetorically a point of view. It's possible to have in the world. But I don't think a poem has to be a final political statement. And I can't even believe the Auden wrote it, meaning it to be a final political statement. I think he allowed himself to inhabit a mood in a way of what it would be like to see the world. And the poem is an expression of that rather than being a political pamphlet,
Henry: I suppose. But I don't think you'd catch Milton being quite so free and easy with difficult ideas like that. And I think that's why he recanted it.
James: Yes. And I think that's part of the weakness that we're perhaps talking about or not.
Henry: He had the same argument, the September poem. The outbreak of war, which no one ever wanted him to change the last line, “we must love one another or die.” He wanted to change it to “we must love one another and die.” And he was constantly in later life people saying, no, no, no, you shouldn't change it. It's very good. And he had to say, no, you must allow me to tell you I am the poet. And of course we can love one another. It won't stop us dying. And I think he became a little bit horrified with the idea that he'd allowed the beauty of his rhetoric to slip him into this in a way obvious nonsense.
James: Yes. And I think actually perhaps subconsciously what the older Auden was worried about the younger Auden wasn't necessarily that his politics were detestable. I think what he was perhaps getting at somewhere in himself was the idea that he was able to say very fine and grand sounding things without perhaps totally meaning them or just saying things because they sounded good, which is perhaps an occasional weakness of his poems. And I wondered if the political qualms slightly concealed the fact that somewhere within himself has understood that this was a bit of a problem with him.
Henry: I do think so. The poems we're talking about are from a book called Another Time. I think if you want to read all them, just buy that book and read it. Every page is wonderful. It’s his best collection. It's probably the best collection of the 20th century. And that is the only weakness in that poem where spending all this time talking about it, it is exceptionally good. The elegy to Sigmund Freud is exceptionally good. William Butler Yates elegy in there as well.
James: That's a stunningly good poem. The very best.
Henry: Yes. And then the second half of the book is light lyrics and comic songs, and the comedy is quite dark, but working with Benjamin Britain, it is the full range of poetic art in a way that I think would be rare to see him now. Go on.
James: No, go on. No, I was going to move on to another poet, but I feel like you're the mc.
Henry: Well, I was going to say, why don't we talk a little bit about the poets who didn't get into the list, but who we love and who maybe could jostle in on for the next, if we're having these tiers, the next tier, I want to talk about Cowper and Emily Bronte. I think we both Herrick for this.
James: Yeah.
Henry: Who else? Do you have any others that you want to add? Charlotte Mew?
James: No, I'm not a particular fan. I might make a case with somebody who I've put in my, I might use this opportunity to make the case. Someone I've put in my tier three who doesn't make on list at all, which is Thomas Hardy, who I think is one of the two or three great 20th century poets, I think sometimes isn't quite thought of in that way. I think people think he's more minor than he is, but I've, I've got a case to make for Thomas Hardy who I actually have put in my list. He's not someone who should be there, the nerd over him, but I could do Hardy. And then you can tell me about perhaps the people that you
Henry: Talk us into Hardy then.
James: Well, I think Hardy when you, because I did the same thing. I asked chat GPT, who's your list of the top 20 poets? He didn't make it. And I think that does reflect a general perception about him, which I think partly comes from the fact that he's better known as a novelist. People forget the novelist can also be a great poet. People can't get their heads around the idea that he was one of the great novelists of the 19th century, one of the great poets, the 20th century. And I think his poetry sometimes has a kind of wilful awkwardness about it that makes it look more minor than it really is. The style can be quite demonic sometimes. He's often deliberately aping the slightly awkward speech of rural England in a way that's extremely effective, but I think can lull people into thinking that that's because he's an awkward writer, which it never is.
And I just think his scope as a poet is amazing. I mean, there are so many different sides to Hardy, the poet, the most famous side of the beautiful poems he wrote about his dead wife, Emma, who he had a very stormy and happy marriage with, and then felt enormously guilty when she died. And he wrote a series of stunning poems, stunning lyrics about his regret over her. There are poems about loss of faith, which I think are kind of on that theme. He's talking about tennis and not having ideas. I think hard is someone who has ideas. And there are all kinds of fantastic long hardy perms, which you think are immensely profound about the Victorian crisis of faith. Things like God's Funeral. There's a wonderful Hardy poem, which I think is totally underrated, called God Forgotten, which is this sort of fantasy and Hardy sometimes of the earth sending a messenger to God to say, why is everything so terrible down here on Earth?
And God sort of apologises in this kind of benign way and says, I've completely forgotten I ever created, you see, I'm amazed it's still going. It seems so terrible. When I created it, it seemed like such a botch job. I just left it to itself and I thought it would burst into flames or something. I can't believe you're still going down there, but I'm really sorry to hear that everything's going wrong. And it's funny, and I think it's an amazingly profound poem about faith in Victorian England. And those are just two sides of Hardy. Can I read one Hardy? This is one of my, I think this is a pretty easy, Hardy poem to love. And this is one of his poems about his dead wife, Emma, and it's called Beeny Cliff. And the fact that it is called Beeny Cliff is one of those slightly sort of unfortunate, awkward Hardyisms that I think can sometimes make him seem awkward or absurd in a way that that he shouldn't.
But this again, is another of my all time favourite poems. I think it's so easy to love and it's so beautiful and sad, and it’s a memory of his wife and him walking by the sea.
O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea, And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.
The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away seagulls called In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say, engrossed - absorbedAs we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day. aloft – high above
A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain, irised - rainbow-colouredAnd the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain, levels – surface; misshaped And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main. adorned the sea
Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky, rises in its huge mass And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh, And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?
What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore, looms - appearsThe woman now is – elsewhere - whom the ambling pony bore, ambling – at a slow pace And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there nevermore.
One of my favourite poems. I love it.
Henry: That's fantastic.
James: It's so good. There's a good recording of Dylan Thomas somewhere reads a lot of poems. There's an album you can get on Spotify where he reads some of his poems and some of the people's poems, including some Thomas Hardy poems. And Dylan Thomas says, I've got a great big collection of Thomas Hardy's poems, the Complete Hardy. And he says, you can open it on any page, any page you like, and there's something good in it. Thomas Hardy is also the who most reliably moves me to tears. I almost feel like I open him anywhere and all that sort of nostalgia and regret, which his great themes I will instantly find moving somewhere.
Henry: Okay, so we've got Thomas Hardy in our top 20, I think.
James: Yeah, you've got a couple of people who you think are out cases.
Henry: I don't know that I can argue them into the list the way we have with Hardy. But the three that I feel most strongly about are William Cowper, Emily Bronte, and Herrick. And I will start with Emily Bronte because again, the novel gets a lot more of the attention, but she is really, really, really a great poet and she has quite a few in the Oxford Book. She gets quite a few in there. It's all of the mood that you would expect. She's not a surprisingly cheerful poet or anything, but I think hugely accomplished. And I'm going to read, I'm going to read one or two short lyrics.
I know not how it falls on me,This summer evening, hushed and lone;Yet the faint wind comes soothinglyWith something of an olden tone.
Forgive me if I've shunned so longYour gentle greeting, earth and air!But sorrow withers e'en the strong,And who can fight against despair?
And then this one I think is maybe more famous.
The night is darkening round me,The wild winds coldly blow;But a tyrant spell has bound me,And I cannot, cannot go.
The giant trees are bendingTheir bare boughs weighed with snow;The storm is fast descending,And yet I cannot go.
Clouds beyond clouds above me,Wastes beyond wastes below;But nothing drear can move me;I will not, cannot go.
So much compression so much. Yeah,
James: That's wonderful.
Henry: And again, there's a lot more of it and it's all really, really good. And then Cowper is a sort of pre romantic. He's a late 18th century poet. He wrote hymns, he wrote with Newton who wrote Amazing Grace, the great abolitionist. Cowper was a great abolitionist.
James: Jane Austen's favourite poet,
Henry: Jane Austen's favourite poet, very good. And in those days almost everyone's favourite poet. He was read by everyone up until the early 20th century, his epic, it was a sort of domestic epic about a drawing room shorter than most epics. And it has a wonderful section about a winter walk in it. Up until the time of say E.M. Forster, I think Forster said, everyone used to read Cowper and I don’t know what happened, but now they've all stopped. So he sort of disappeared around that time maybe because I think he was just pre the Romantics and he wasn't as modern. But this, I love this poem.
The Poplars are fell’d, farewell to the shade And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade, The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves, Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.
Twelve years have elapsed since I last took a view Of my favourite field and the bank where they grew, And now in the grass behold they are laid, And the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade.
The black-bird has fled to another retreat Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat, And the scene where his melody charm’d me before, Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more.
My fugitive years are all hasting away, And I must e’er long lie as lowly as they, With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head E’er another such grove shall arise in its stead.
’Tis a sight to engage me if any thing can To muse on the perishing pleasures of Man; Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see, Have a Being less durable even than he.
So you can see that he's somewhere between Pope and Wordsworth, which is maybe an unfortunate position if you want to be a great poet. Remembered for all time. But it produced some really good stuff.
James: Yeah, Thomas Grey, I guess in a similar place,
Henry: Thomas Grey. Exactly. A similar place, no sort of similar time I suppose. At least with Grey it used to be the case that every school child knew eulogy written in a country churchyard
There’s this wonderful bit in Alan Lascelles diaries who was private secretary to King George V. And he's complaining that George the V has got absolutely no education at all. And I think he says this about George, he worked for George VI in the War. I think he says just the same as his father doesn't know a damn thing. And he says to the extent that they've never even heard of the eulogy in a country church yard, what were they doing in the school room? Because to Alan Lascelles it was like, everyone just read that at school and memorised it and knew it and it's another marvellous piece. So those are my two main ones. And Herrick, I think you are a Herrick fan.
James: Yeah, no, I totally am. Herrick again was from the very first poets I loved. I remember my gold DofE expedition at school, the Duke of Edinburgh thing. We went on to go into the countryside. I took a small cloth band volume of Herrick that I'd pretentiously discovered in a secondhand bookshop with me in my pocket so I could repose various countryside points and read it. I mean it's pretty obvious why he's not in the top 20 because the poems are lovely. He's not a particularly profound poet, but he's sort of like a kind of happier, more frivolous Thomas Hardy. I think a lot of the beauty of the poms derives from the idea that everything's passing and everybody will eventually die. I mean, the famous one is “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may/ Old time is still a flying”, that sort of furtive, fugitive pleasure stuff. He's just so lovely. I mean I have a real weakness for loveliness and poetry and he's lovely everywhere. I don’t know, did you have a particular one to read?
Henry: Well, I think the one you quoted “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time” That's a good one. It's worth remembering that he's sort of early 17th century, so there's a lot of wit but also a lot of disguised sex and gather ye rosebuds, It is I think innocent and frivolous, but it also, as the title suggests, means time's running out and rather than sitting around being gloomy like a Thomas Hardy character, we should make sure we use that virginity before we don't have the chance. And I think a lot of the pleasure of Herrick comes from that sort of the slightly submerged meaning and the wittiness that he brings on it. There's one, a very famous one called Upon Julia's Clothes
Whenas in silks my Julia goes, Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows The liquefaction of her clothes!
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see That brave vibration each way free, —O how that glittering taketh me!
It’s a bit like John Donne of his other contemporaries able to sort of fully participate in the physicality of a brief moment and spin something intense out of it.
James: I used to think that the fact that the word liquefaction takes up about what a quarter or a third of that poem I just see. So that was the cleverest thing I'd ever read. I mean I don't quite believe that now, but it is wonderful. The longer poem, Corinna’s Gone a Maying, which is him encouraging a girl called Corina to get out of bed and go and enjoy the May sunshine is lovely. Can I give you the final stanza?
Henry: Yes, please.
James: I was rediscovering, this used to my big thing, my university thesis, which was a slightly doomed enterprise was going to argue, and in fact, did unsuccessfully argue that various poets of the 17th century had been underrated, I think and unfairly judged minor. I think I was basically wrong and I was arguing for much more obscure people like Francis Kinon. But Herrick, I really do, I really do think is good. This is the sort of slight melancholy not in him. This is the last time to the poem,
Come, let us go, while we are in our prime, And take the harmless folly of the time! We shall grow old apace, and die Before we know our liberty. Our life is short, and our days run As fast away as does the sun. And, as a vapour or a drop of rain, Once lost, can ne'er be found again, So when or you or I are made A fable, song, or fleeting shade, All love, all liking, all delight Lies drown'd with us in endless night. Then, while time serves, and we are but decaying, Come, my Corinna, come, let's go a-Maying.
Which I just find lovely. I mean it's maybe a little conventional. It is not the newest idea ever expressed in English poetry, but I do think it's totally lovely.
Henry: It's not the newest idea, but Johnson was a fan of Herrick for good reason, which is that he has the essence of invention, right? He's saying all these things in new ways. I think he's delightful. There's one called to Daffodils. I love it.
James: Yeah.
Henry: Robert Frost was a really big fan of this poem and advised people to read it carefully and study it and so forth. I'll read that because it's not in the Oxford Book, but actually it ought to be. It's one of those rare moments where you think you're going to disagree with Christopher Ricks.
Fair Daffodils, we weep to seeYou haste away so soon;As yet the early-rising sunHas not attain'd his noon.Stay, stay,Until the hasting dayHas runBut to the even-song;And, having pray'd together, weWill go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you,We have as short a spring;As quick a growth to meet decay,As you, or anything.We dieAs your hours do, and dryAway,Like to the summer's rain;Or as the pearls of morning's dew,Ne'er to be found again.
Absolutely. I mean devastating, but really marvellous.
James: Yeah. I really, really love Herrick. You are almost admit, I mean, he shouldn't be in the top 20, but if I was doing my favourite poets, he would be.
Henry: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And what I sometimes have done on book clubs on my Substack, we've talked about Herrick and people have said, I'm so glad I've discovered Robert Herrick. What an amazing, people just love discovering this.
James: And he's one of those people. There's a lot more where that came from
Henry: And it's all very good. Right? He's consistently good. He obviously had a very strong talent.
James: Yeah, no, I totally agree.
Henry: I was very lucky. I once went to the Samuel Johnson house in Gough Square and because they knew that I was a mild Johnson obsessive and was officially doing some research for my book, they let me hold some of Johnson's own books and one of them was his copy of Herrick, which was a very exciting moment. He was a big Herrick admirer and it had a ring stain from where Johnson had left a tankard or a cup or something, which I thought was a lovely thing, partly because Johnson was such a mess and it was a lovely little sign of that, but partly because he obviously loved that book and lived with it in a very ordinary way. He wasn't fussy about it. He just had to have his herrick around, which I can fully understand. There are some other names. Christina Rosetti, Robert Graves, Louis McNee. Is there anyone you want to make a final call for?
James: No, I don't think so. I mean, I had Blake in my list, but I don't think, unless you want me to, I don't feel like I have to make a particular case for Blake. I can read you a poem if you want, but
Henry: Yeah, read and Blake. I'm not a Blake lover, so
James: I wasn't until recently and I started reading Poems of Innocence and Poems of Experience again and they really did it for me. Hang on, you're going to have to, I'm going have one second. As I find the poem,
Henry: I'll read out a Louis MacNeice poem while you do that. It's called Charon. MacNeice is a very, very good poet. I don't think I can argue him into the top 20, but I would like him to be known. Some people know the poem, Snow or the Autumn Journal. This is called Charon, who is obviously the man who rose the boat in the underworld. So having heard Herrick and his daffodils, this is a suitable closing poem for me before you give us something from Blake,
The conductor’s hands were black with money:Hold on to your ticket, he said, the inspector’sMind is black with suspicion, and hold on toThat dissolving map. We moved through London,We could see the pigeons through the glass but failedTo hear their rumours of wars, we could seeThe lost dog barking but never knewThat his bark was as shrill as a cock crowing,We just jogged on, at each requestStop there was a crowd of aggressively vacantFaces, we just jogged on, eternityGave itself airs in revolving lightsAnd then we came to the Thames and allThe bridges were down, the further shoreWas lost in fog, so we asked the conductorWhat we should do. He said: Take the ferryFaute de mieux. We flicked the flashlightAnd there was the ferryman just as VirgilAnd Dante had seen him. He looked at us coldlyAnd his eyes were dead and his hands on the oarWere black with obols and varicose veinsMarbled his calves and he said to us coldly:If you want to die you will have to pay for it.
I think it's great.
James: Yeah, that is fantastic. I love that. I was unfamiliar with it too.
Henry: Yes. Yeah, under appreciated. Right. So you're going to give us some Blake to close?
James: Yeah. I mean this is again, a famous poem by Blake. Some of Blake is I think, hard to appreciate because of, it’s sort of, I think what strikes people as a kind of faux on affected naivety that's hard to get round or the later stuff in the professed books is just completely mad and incomprehensible. You have to know all these mad characters like Zen are and what they mean and what Blake thought about 18th century politics. But this, while it doubtless has meanings that I maybe don't grasp. I think it's just a great poem. It's called Hear the Voice of the Bard. I think it's the first poem in Songs of Experience.
Hear the voice of the Bard!Who Present, Past, & Future seesWhose ears have heard,The Holy Word,That walk'd among the ancient trees.
Calling the lapsed SoulAnd weeping in the evening dew:That might controll,The starry pole;And fallen fallen light renew!
O Earth O Earth return!Arise from out the dewy grass;Night is worn,And the mornRises from the slumberous mass.
Turn away no more:Why wilt thou turn awayThe starry floorThe watry shoreIs giv'n thee till the break of day.
Henry: Well, that's wonderful.
James: Is great. I can't say that. I can explain it to you line by line and whatever, but I do love it.
Henry: Yeah. Very.
James: Yeah.
Henry: Okay, wonderful. James, this has been a delight. Thank you so much. Yeah,
James: I far too much fun. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.
Henry: We'll do it again sometime.
James: Yeah, I'd love to.
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I was gripped by a. natasha joukovsky’s novel The Portrait of a Mirror, which I went through in almost one sitting (life gets in the way, alas). And I am enjoying her series of analyses of Austen’s men. Natasha works at Accenture, so we talked about what is it like to be a novelist working in consulting, as well as discussing her love of Austen, which began when she was ten-years-old and her father read the novels aloud to her (at her insistence). Few novelists writing today have very much corporate experience and I was pleased to discuss these topics with Natasha. She has also come to Girardian conclusions prior to reading Girard. I am anticipating her next novel, which is about probability, very much. Here is her website. And her Substack, quite useless.
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Atlas Shrugged seems to be everywhere today. Randian villains are in the news. Rand remains influential on the right, from the Reagan era to the modern libertarian movement. Perhaps most significantly, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen who are moving into government with DOGE, have been influenced by Rand, and, fascinatingly, Andreessen only read the novel four years ago.
Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) and I talked about how Atlas Shrugged is in conversation with the great novels of the past, Rand’s greats skills of plotting, drama, and character, and what makes Atlas Shrugged a serious novel, not just a vehicle for ideology.
Love it or loathe it, Atlas Shrugged is having a moment. Everyone brings a preconception of Ayn Rand, but she has been opposed by the right and the left ever since she first published. Other than Jennifer Burns’ biography, academic study has largely declined to notice Rand. But Rand deserves our serious attention, both as a novelist, and as an influence on the modern world.
Here are a couple of excerpts.
We talk a lot these days about, “how can I be my best self?” That’s what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it’s not about earning money, it’s not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It’s about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they’re in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?
Also this.
What would Ayn Rand think about the influencer economy? Oh, she’d despise it. She would despise it… all these little girls wanting to grow up to be influencers, they’re caught in some algorithm, which is awful. Why would you want to spend your life influencing others? Go create something. It’s a hard medicine.
And.
Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she’s perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it’s important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that’s it.
Transcript
Henry: Today, I am talking with Hollis Robbins, former dean of the humanities at Utah University and special advisor on the humanities and AI. We are talking about Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Hollis, hello.
Hollis Robbins: Hello. I'm really glad to have this conversation with you. We've known each other for some years and follow each other's work. I was trained as a scholar of 19th-century American, Victorian, and African-American literature, mostly novels, and love having conversations with you about big, deep novels. When I suggested that we read this book, I was hoping you would be enthusiastic about it, so I'm really happy to be having this conversation. It's hard to know who's interviewing you or what conversation this is, but for you coming at this middle-aged. Not quite middle-aged, what are you?
Henry: I'm middle enough. No. This is not going to be an interview as such. We are going to have a conversation about Atlas Shrugged, and we're going to, as you say, talk about it as a novel. It always gets talked about as an ideology. We are very interested in it as a novel and as two people who love the great novels of the 19th century. I've been excited to do this as well. I think that's why it's going to be good. Why don't we start with, why are we doing this?
Hollis: I wanted to gesture to that. You are one of the leading public voices on the importance of reading literature and the importance of reading novels particularly, though I saw today, Matt Yglesias had a blog post about Middlemarch, which I think he just recently read. I can credit you with that, or us, or those of us who are telling people read the big novels.
My life trajectory was that I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead before I read Dickens, before I read Jane Austen, before I read Harriet Beecher Stowe or Melville or the Brontës. For me, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were foundational novels as novels. I wondered what it would be like to talk to somebody whose experience was flipped.
Henry: Right, I'm 38 and I'd never read this book. I was coming at it partly having read all those other books, but partly for my whole life, people have said, "Oh, that's really a bad book. That's so badly written. That book is no good." The number one thing I can say to people is this book is fun.
Hollis: It's really fun. I was going to say usually what I forget to do in talking about books is give the summary. I'm going to hold up my copy, which is my dog-eared copy from high school, which is hilarious. It's got the tiniest print, which I couldn't possibly read now. No underlining, which is interesting. I read this book before I understood that you were supposed to underline when you liked passages in the book.
It was interesting to me. I'd probably read it five or six times in my youth and didn't underline anything. The story is--- You can help me fill in the blanks. For readers who haven't read it, there's this young woman, Dagny Taggart, who's the heiress of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad fortune. She's a woman. This takes place in about, I think, the '40s, '50s. Her older brother, Jim Taggart, is CEO. She's COO, so she's the operations person. It is in some ways the story of her-- It's not quite a bildungsroman. This is the way I tell the story. It's the story of her coming to the realization of how the world works. There's many ways to come at this story. She has multiple boyfriends, which is excellent. Her first boyfriend, his name is Francisco d'Anconia. He's the head of d'Anconia Copper. He too is an heir of this longstanding copper fortune. Her second is a metals magnate, Hank Rearden, who invents this great metal, Rearden metal.
Really, it's also the story of the decline of America, and the ways that, in this Randian universe, these villainous group of people who run the country are always taking and extracting from producers. As she's creating and building this great railroad and doing wonderful things and using Rearden metal to do it, something is pulling all the producers out of society, and she's like, "What is going on?"
It turns out there's this person, John Galt, who is saying, "I don't like the way the country is run. I don't like this extractive philosophy. I am going to take all the producers and lure them voluntarily to a--" It's a hero's lair. It's not like a James Bond villain lair. It's a hero lair in Colorado called Galt's Gulch. He is John Galt. It ends up being a battle between who is right in a wrong world. Is it the ethical person, Dagny Taggart, who continues to strive and try to be a producer and hold on to her ethics in this corrupt world, or is it somebody saying, "To hell with this. I am going on strike. You guys come with me and let the world collapse." How's that for summary?
Henry: No, I think that's great. I couldn't have done a better job. One thing that we can say is that the role of reason, of being a rational person, of making reason the sole arbiter of how you make choices, be they practical, ethical, financial, whatever, that's at the heart of the book, right?
Hollis: That's the philosophy. We could go there in a second. I think the plot of the book is that she demonstrates this.
Henry: What she has to learn, like what is the big lesson for Dagny, is at the beginning, she hasn't fully understood that the good guys use reason and the bad guys do not, as it were.
Hollis: Right. I think that's right. I like thinking about this as a bildungsroman. You said that the book is fun. Her part of the book is fun, but not really fun. The fun part of the book, and you can tell me because every time you kept texting me, "Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart."--
Henry: These guys are so awful. [laughs]
Hollis: They're so awful. The fun parts of the book, the Rand villains are the government entities and the cabals of business leaders who she calls looters and second-handers who run the country and all they do is extract value. Marc Andreessen was on a podcast recently and was all about these Rand villains and these looters. I think, again, to get back to why are we doing this and why are we doing this now, Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged is in the air with the second Trump administration.
Henry: Yes. In a way, we're doing this because the question is, is this the novel of the future? Right? What we're seeing is it's very influential on the right. Rand's ideas have long been a libertarian inspiration. Elon Musk's read her. You mentioned Andreessen, Peter Thiel, all these people. It goes back to the Reagan days. People in the Republican Party have been quoting Ayn Rand. Then more broadly, we see all these worries about social collapse today. What happens in the plot of Atlas Shrugged is that society does slowly collapse.
Dagny has to realize it's because of these people who are not using their reason and they're nationalizing things and taking resource away from proficient entrepreneurs and stuff. It's all about infrastructure, energy, people doing exploitation in the name of the common good, ineffective political leaders, people covering up lies and misdemeanors, people being accepting of what is obviously criminal behavior because it's in the cause of the greater good. We have free speech, all these topics, energy production. We're seeing this in the headlines. When I was reading this book, I was like, "Oh my God, how did she know?"
Hollis: How did she know?
Henry: How did she know.
Hollis: I think the bildungsroman aspect of this as a novel. It's hard to read it as a novel. I think it's hard. By the way, I have to really I applaud you for not, until you got almost to the end of the book, texting me about this person or that person, or how it's political. I admire you for looking at the book and coming to the book as an expert in novels.
What she comes to terms with, and it's a real slowly-- It's not even scales falling from her eyes. She doesn't sit and say, "Oh my God, the world is corrupt." She just is like, "That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them. That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them." She just keeps going, but she doesn't ever accept with a fatalism that she's living in this world where every single person who's in charge is going to let her down.
Henry: It's also interesting to me that she doesn't complain.
Hollis: No.
Henry: Now, that reminded me of I wrote about Margaret Thatcher in my book. She was another big one for however hard it was, however difficult it was, why would you complain? Let's just go to work. A lot of people found her difficult for that reason. When I was reading this, I was like, "Ayn Rand clearly has the same idea. You can nationalize every last inch of the economy. I'm going to get up and go to work and try and beat you. I'm not going to sit around and complain." It's a very stern attitude in a way. She's very strict with herself. I found the book to be-- I know Rand is very atheist, but a very Protestant book.
Hollis: Yes, it really is.
Henry: Intensely Protestant, yes.
Hollis: That's a nice way to think about it. A certain kind of Protestant, a Weberian Protestant.
Henry: Sure.
Hollis: Not a Southern Baptist Protestant who believes in the absence of reason. I was thinking I was teaching in Mississippi years ago. I was teaching a course on Wordsworth and had to do a unit on Voltaire because you can't really understand Wordsworth unless you understand Voltaire. There was a woman in my class. She was a version of Presbyterian who doesn't believe in reason, believes that in the fall, man lost their reason.
Therefore, she asked if she could be excused from class because I was talking about Voltaire and the importance of reason. She said, "This is against my religion. If you believe that man has reason, you are actually going about it wrong, so may I be excused?" Which in all the years I've had people ask for excuses to miss class, that was a memorable one.
Henry: That's unique. [laughs]
Hollis: It's interesting because, again, I should get back to the novel, the opposition from Rand is as strong on the religious right as it is on the left. In fact, very strong. When Atlas Shrugged came out, William F. Buckley famously had Whittaker Chambers write the review. He hated her. He despised her. He despised the fact that she put reason first.
Henry: Yes. I think that's worth emphasizing that some people listening will think, "I'm Rand. These nasty ideas, she's on the right." She's been ideologically described in that way so many times. Deirdre McCloskey in the Literary Review has just in the most recent edition written an absolutely scathing article about Rand. That's libertarian opposition to Rand.
McCloskey is saying Hayek is the real thing here and Rand would have hated everything that Hayek did. She got everything wrong. I think the opposition to her, as you say, it's on both sides. One thing that's interesting about this novel is that because she created her own philosophy, which people will have different views on how well that went, but there isn't anyone else like this. All the other people like this are her followers.
Hollis: Exactly.
Henry: She's outside of the other systems of thought in a way.
Hollis: We should talk about Rand. I'm going to quote a little bit from this book on feminist interpretation of Ayn Rand. Let's talk a little bit, if we can, about Dagny as the heroine of a novel, or a hero, because one of the really interesting things about reading Rand at this moment is that she's got one pronoun, he, him, man. She is in this era where man means man and women. That there isn't men and women, he and she, and now it's he, she, and them. She is like, "There's one pronoun." Even she talks about the rights of man or man believes. She means everybody, but she only means man too. It's interesting.
I was very much part of the first pronoun wars in the 1980s when women scholars were like, "He and she." Now we're thrown out the window with that binary. Again, we don't need to talk about pronouns, but it's really important to understanding Rand and reading this novel, how much she embraces men and the male pronoun, even while she is using it both ways, and even while her story is led by this woman. She's beautiful. She's beautiful in a very specific way. She's tall, she's slender, she's got great cheekbones, she's got great shoulders, she's got long legs.
Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she’s perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it’s important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that’s it.
Henry: I want to be Dagny.
Hollis: I want to be Dagny. I want to have capes, right?
Henry: There's a very important scene, it's not too much of a plot spoiler, where Hank Rearden has invented this new metal. It's very exciting because it's much more efficient and it's much stronger and you can build new bridges for the trains and everything. He makes a bracelet of his new metal. It's a new steel alloy, I think, and gives it to his wife. His wife basically doesn't care.
She's not really interested in what it takes to earn the money, she just wants to have the money. You get the strong impression throughout the book that some of the people that Rand is most scathingly disapproving of are wives who don't work. None of those people come out well. When Dagny goes to a party at the Rearden house and she is romantically involved with Hank Rearden, she sees the bracelet.
Hollis: She isn't then, right? Isn't she not then?
Henry: No, but they have feelings for each other
Hollis: Right. Reasonable feelings for each other.
Henry: That's right, reasonable feelings, but they're not currently acting on those feelings. She sees the bracelet and she exchanges her, I think, diamonds-
Hollis: Diamond bracelet.
Henry: -for the Rearden metal bracelet with the wife. It's this wonderful moment where these two opposite ideals of womanhood that Rand is presenting. It's a great moment of heroism for Dagny because she is saying, "Who cares about glittering diamonds when you have a new steel alloy that can make this incredible bridge?" It sounds crazy, but this is 1957. Dagny is very much what you might call one of the new women.
Hollis: Right.
Henry: I think in some ways, Rand-- I don't like the phrase she's ahead of her time. I've read a lot of 1950s fiction. This is not the typical woman.
Hollis: No, this is not Cheever. This is not a bored suburban housewife at a time when the way the '50s are taught, certainly in America, it's like women could work during the war, then they were suburban housewives, there was bored, there were key parties and all sorts of Cheever sorts of things. This is not that. I read this first. I was only 15 years after it was published, I think, in the '60s, early '70s reading it.
This, to me, seemed perfectly normal and everything else seemed regressive and strange and whiny. There's a lot to be said for reading this novel first. I think if we can talk a little bit about these set pieces because I think for me reading it as a novel and hearing you talk about it as a novel, that novels, whether we're thinking about-- I want to see if you want to compare her to Dorothea or just to any other Victorian women novel that you can think of. That's the closest, right? Is there anybody that's closest to Dorothea from Middlemarch? Is that there are these set pieces. People think that Rand-- the idea is that she's not a great writer. She is a great writer. She started in Hollywood. Her first book, The Fountainhead, was made into a movie. She understands plotting and keeping the reader's attention. We go forward, we go backwards. There's her relationship with Francisco d'Anconia that we see her now, years after, then we have flashbacks to growing up and how they became lovers.
There are big meeting set pieces where everybody's in the room, and we have all the backstories of the people in the room, what is going to happen. There are these big party scenes, as you say. For example, this big, glorious, glamorous party at the Rearden house, Francisco is there. Francisco and Hank Rearden get in a conversation, and she's like, "I want to go see what my old boyfriend is talking to the guy I like about."
There are these moments where you're not supposed to come at the book that way in this serious philosophical way. Then later on when there's this wonderful scene where Francisco comes to see Dagny. This is much later. Hank and Dagny are lovers, so he has a key to her apartment. He walks in and everybody sees immediately what's going on. It's as good as any other farce moment of somebody hiding behind a curtain, right?
Henry: Yes.
Hollis: Everything is revealed all at once. She's very good at scenes like that.
Henry: Yes, very good. She's very good at high drama. One of the phrases that kept coming back to me was that this book is a melodrama of ideas.
Hollis: Yes.
Henry: Right? It's not a novel of ideas as such, it's a melodrama of ideas. I think one thing that people who think she's a bad writer will say is it's melodrama, the characters are flat, the prose is not lyrical, all these different things. Whereas when I read it, I was like, "She's so good at melodrama." I feel like, in some ways, it does not feel like a 1950s novel because there's so much excitement about technology, so much feminism, just so many things that I do not associate--
Maybe I'm being too English, but I don't read John Cheever, for example, and think, "Oh, he loves the train." Whereas this book is very, very exciting as a story about inventing a new kind of train that goes really fast," which sounds silly, but that's a really Dickensian theme, that's in Middlemarch. Actually, that's what Matt Yglesias was talking about in his excellent piece today. What does feel very 1950s is you've got the Hollywood influence. The dialogue, I think, is not always great, but it is often great.
I often would read pages and think, "This would actually be really good in, not an A++ movie, but in a decent crime movie or something. This would be quite good dialogue." There's a comic book aesthetic to it in the way that the scenes play out. Just a lot of these '50s aesthetics actually are present in the book. I'm going to read one paragraph. It's from part one. I think we should read out loud a few bits to give people a sense.
Hollis: Yes.
Henry: This is when Dagny has built a new train line using grid and metal to make the bridge so that it can go over a valley. I think that's right. The train can do 100 miles an hour. It's this very, very exciting new development. It means that energy can be supplied to factories, and so it's a huge, big deal. This is when she's on the train going at 100 miles an hour and she just can't believe it's happening.
"Things streaked past a water tank, a tree, a shanty, a grain silo. They had a windshield wiper motion. They were rising, describing a curve, and dropping back. The telegraph wires ran a race with the train, rising and falling from pole to pole, in an even rhythm like the cardiograph record of a steady heartbeat written across the sky. She looked ahead at the haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster."
"She wondered why she felt safer than she had ever felt in a car behind the engine. Safer here where it seemed as if should an obstacle rise, her breast and the glass shield would be the first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping the answer. It was the security of being first with full sight and full knowledge of one's own course, not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead."
That's not MFA prose or whatever, but it turns the pages. I think she's very good at relating we're on the train and it's going very fast to how Dagny is thinking through the philosophical conundrum that is basically going to drive the whole plot forwards. I was reminded again and again of what Virginia Woolf said about Walter Scott, where she compared Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson. She said that Stevenson had beautiful sentences and dapper little adjectives. It was all jeweled and carefully done. You could marvel over each sentence.
She said, "Whereas Scott, it's just page after page and no sentence is beautiful," but she says, "He writes at the level of the page. He's not like Stevenson. He's not writing at the level of the sentence. You have to step into the world." You can say, 'Oh, that wasn't a very good sentence,' but my goodness, the pages keep turning and you're there in the world, right?
Hollis: Exactly.
Henry: I think she made a really important point there and we just undervalue that so much when we say, oh, so-and-so is not a good writer. What we mean is they're not a Robert Louis Stevenson, they're a Walter Scott. It's like, sure, but Walter Scott was great at what he did. Ayn Rand is in the Walter Scott inheritance in the sense that it's a romance, it's not strictly realistic novel. You have to step into the world. You can't spend your whole time going, "Was that a great sentence? Do I really agree with what she just--" It's like, no, you have to go into this utopian sci-fi universe and you have to keep turning the pages. You get caught up and you go, "Wow, this is this is working for me."
Hollis: Let me push back on that-
Henry: Yes, good.
Hollis: -because I think that was a beautiful passage, one of my favorite passages in this book, which is hard to say because it's a really, really big book. It’s a memorable passage because here she is in a place at this moment. She is questioning herself. Isn't she questioning why? Why do I feel safe? Then it strikes her. In this moment, all interior while all this stuff is happening. This whole Rearden metal train bridge set piece is one of the highlights of at least the first half of the book. You come away, even if we've had our entire life up to her, understanding her as a philosophical this woman. How is that different from Dorothea or from Elizabeth Bennet? Yes, Elizabeth Bennet, right?
Henry: Oh, no, I agree. My point was purely about prose style, which was to say if you say, "Oh, she writes like a Walter Scott, not like a Robert Louis Stevenson," you're going to deny yourself seeing what you've just said, which is that actually, yes, she has the ability to write philosophical characters.
Hollis: When I first read Pride and Prejudice, I read it through the lens of Rand. Now, clearly, these heroines had fewer choices. Dorothea marries Casaubon, I don't know how you pronounce it, because she thinks he's a Randian expert, somebody who's got this grand idea. She's like, "Whoa, I want to be part of this endeavor, the key to all mythologies." Then she's so let down. In the Randian sense, you can see why she would have wanted him.
Henry: That's right. I think George Eliot would have strongly disagreed with Rand philosophically. The heroines, as you say, what they're doing in the novel is having to realize that there are social conventions I have to understand and there are things I have to learn how to do, but actually, the key to working all that out is more at the moral philosophical level. This is what happens to Dagny. I think it's on the next page from what I just read. There's another passage where it says that she's in the train and she's enjoying. It's working and she's thrilled that her train is working. She was trying not to think, but she couldn't help herself.
She said, "Who made the train. Is it the brute force of muscle? Who can make all the dials and the levers? How is it possible that this thing has even been put together?" Then she starts thinking to herself, "We've got a government who's saying it's wrong to do this, you're taking resources, you're not doing it for the common good." She says, "How can they regard this as evil? How can they believe that this is ignoble to have created this incredible thing?"
She says she wants to be able to toss the subject out of the window and let it get shattered somewhere along the track. She wants the thoughts to go past like the telegraph poles, but obviously, she can't. She has this moment of realization that this can't be wrong. This type of human accomplishment can't be against the common good. It can't be considered to be ignoble. I think that is like the Victorian heroines.
To me, it was more like Fanny Price, which is that someone turns up into a relatively closed system of ideas and keeps their own counsel for a long time, and has to admit sometimes when they haven't got it right or whatever. Basically, in the end, they are vindicated on fairly straightforward grounds. Dagny comes to realize that, "I was right. I was using my reason. I was working hard. I was being productive. Yes, I was right about that." Fanny, it's more like a Christian insight into good behavior, but I felt the pattern was the same.
Hollis: Sure. I'll also bring up Jane Eyre here, right?
Henry: Yes.
Hollis: Jane Eyre, her relationship, there's a lot to be said of both Mr. Darcy and Mr. Rochester with Hank Rearden because Hank Rearden has to come to his sense. He's married. He doesn't like his wife. He doesn't like this whole system that he's in. He wants to be with a woman that's a meeting of the mind, but he's got all this social convention he has to deal with. Rochester has to struggle, and of course, Bertha Mason has to die in that book. He ends up leaving his wife, but too late. If we're going to look at this novel as a novel, we can see that there are these moments that I think have some resonance. I know you don't seem to want to go to the Mr. Darcy part of it.
Henry: No. I had also thought about Jane Eyre. My thought was that, obviously, other than being secular because Jane Eyre is very Christian, the difference is that Hank Rearden and Dagny basically agree that we can't conduct our relationship in a way that would be morally compromising to her. They go through this very difficult process of reasoning like, "How can we do this in a good way?"
They're a little bit self-sacrificing about it because they don't want to upset the moral balance. Whereas Mr. Rochester, at least for the first part of the book, has an attitude that's more like, "Yes, but she's in the attic. Why does it matter if we get married?" He doesn't really see the problem of morally compromising Jane, and so Jane has to run away.
Hollis: Right.
Henry: One of the interesting things about Rand, what is different from like Austen and the Brontës and whatever, is that Dagny and Hank are not in opposition before they get together. They have actually this unusual thing in romance and literature, which is that they have a meeting of minds. What gets in the way is that the way their minds agree is contra mundum and the world has made this problem for them.
Hollis: I think in a way, that's the central relationship in--
Henry: Yes. That was how I read it, yes.
Hollis: Yes. The fact as we think about what the complications are in reading this novel as a novel is that here is this great central romance and they've got obstacles. She's got an old boyfriend, he's married. They've got all these things that are classic obstacles to a love story. Rand understands that enough to build it, that that will keep a lot of readers’ interest, but then it's like, "That's actually not the point of my book," which is how the second half or the last third of the novel just gets really wiggy." Again, spoiler alert, but Hank is blackmailed to be, as the society is collapsing, as things are collapsing--
Henry: We should say that the government has taken over in a nationalizing program by this point.
Hollis: Right, because as John Galt is pulling all the thought leaders and the industrialists and all the movers of the world into his lair, things are getting harder and harder and harder, things are getting nationalized. Some of these big meetings in Washington where these horrible people are deciding how to redistribute wealth, again, which is part of the reason somebody like Congressman Paul Ryan would give out copies of Atlas Shrugged to all of his staffers. He's like, "You've got to read this book because we can't go to Washington and be like this. The Trumpian idea is we've got to get rid of people who are covering up and not doing the right thing."
They've blackmailed Hank Rearden into giving up Rearden Metal by saying, "We know you've been sleeping with Dagny Taggart." It's a very dramatic point. How is this going to go down?
Henry: Right. I think that's interesting. What I loved about the way she handled that romance was that romance is clearly part of what she sees as important to a flourishing life. She has to constantly yoke it to this idea that reason is everything, so human passion has to be conducted on the basis that it's logically reasonable, but that it therefore becomes self-sacrificing. There is something really sad and a little bit tragic about Hank being blackmailed like that, right?
Hollis: Yes. I have to say their first road trip together, it's like, "Let's just get out of here and go have a road trip and stay in hotels and have sex and it'll be awesome." That their road trip is like, "Let's go also see some abandoned factories and see what treasures we might find there." To turn this love road trip into also the plot twist that gets them closer to John Galt is a magnificent piece of plot.
Henry: Yes. I loved that. I know you want to talk about the big John Galt speech later, but I'm going to quote one line because this all relates to what I think is one of the most central lines of the book. "The damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to know yet chose to blank out reality." A lot of the time, like in Brontë or whatever, there are characters like Rochester's like that. The center of their romance is that they will never do that to each other because that's what they believe philosophically, ethically. It's how they conduct themselves at business. It's how they expect other people to conduct themselves. They will never sacrifice that for each other.
That for them is a really high form of love and it's what enables huge mutual respect. Again, it's one of those things I'm amazed-- I used to work in Westminster. I knew I was a bit of a libertarian. I knew lots of Rand adjacent or just very, very Randian people. I thought they were all insane, but that's because no one would ever say this. No one would ever say she took an idea like that and turned it into a huge romance across hundreds of pages. Who else has done that in the novel? I think that's great.
Hollis: It really is hard. It really is a hard book. The thing that people say about the book, as you say, and the reason you hadn't read it up until now, is it's like, "Oh, yes, I toyed with Rand as a teenager and then I put that aside." I put away my childish things, right? That's what everybody says on the left, on the right. You have to think about it's actually really hard. My theory would be that people put it away because it's really, really hard, what she tried is hard. Whether she succeeded or not is also hard. As we were just, before we jumped on, talking about Rand's appearance on Johnny Carson, a full half hour segment of him taking her very seriously, this is a woman who clearly succeeded. I recently read Jennifer Burn's biography of her, which is great. Shout out to Jennifer.
What I came away with is this is a woman who made her living as a writer, which is hard to do. That is a hard thing to do, is to make your living as a writer, as a woman in the time difference between 1942, The Fountainhead, which was huge, and 57, Atlas Shrugged. She was blogging, she had newsletters, she had a media operation that's really, really impressive. This whole package doesn't really get looked at, she as a novelist. Again, let me also say it was later on when I came to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who is another extraordinary woman novelist in America who wrote this groundbreaking book, which is filled--
I particularly want to shout out to George Harris, the slave inventor who carried himself like a Rand hero as a minor character and escapes. His wife is Eliza, who famously runs across the ice flows in a brave Randian heroine escape to freedom where nobody's going to tell them what to do. These women who changed literature in many ways who have a really vexed relationship or a vexed place in academia. Certainly Stowe is studied.
Some 20 years ago, I was at an event with the great Elaine Showalter, who was coming out with an anthology of American women writers. I was in the audience and I raised my hand, I said, "Where's Ayn Rand?" She was like, "Ha, ha, ha." Of course, what a question is that? There is no good reason that Ayn Rand should not be studied in academia. There is no good reason. These are influential novels that actually, as we've talked about here, can be talked about in the context of other novels.
Henry: I think one relevant comparison is let's say you study English 19th-century literature on a course, a state-of-the-nation novel or the novel of ideas would be included as routine, I think very few people would say, "Oh, those novels are aesthetically excellent. We read them because they're beautifully written, and they're as fun as Dickens." No one's saying that. Some of them are good, some of them are not good. They're important because of what they are and the barrier to saying why Rand is important for what she is because, I think, people believe her ideas are evil, basically.
One central idea is she thinks selfishness is good, but I think we've slightly dealt with the fact that Dagny and Hank actually aren't selfish some of the time, and that they are forced by their ethical system into not being selfish. The other thing that people say is that it's all free-market billionaire stuff, basically. I'm going to read out a passage from-- It's a speech by Francisco in the second part. It's a long speech, so I'm not going to read all eight pages. I'm going to read this speech because I think this theme that I'm about to read out, it's a motif, it's again and again and again.
Hollis: Is this where he's speaking to Hank or to Dagny?
Henry: I think when he's speaking to Dagny and he says this.
"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he want. Money will not give him a code of values if he has evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose if he has evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent.
"The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him with his money replacing his judgment ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered, that no man may be smaller than his money."
Hollis: That's a good--
Henry: Right? It's a great paragraph. I feel like she says that in dozens of ways throughout the book, and she wants you to be very clear when you leave that this book is not a creed in the name of just make money and have free market capitalism so you can be rich. That paragraph and so many others, it's almost biblical in the way she writes it. She's really hammering the rhythms, and the tones, and the parallels. She's also, I think, trying to appropriate some of the way the Bible talks about money and turn it into her own secular pseudo-Aristotelian idea, right?
Hollis: Yes.
Henry: We talk a lot these days about, how can I be my best self? That's what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it's not about earning money, it's not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It's about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they're in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?
Hollis: Right.
Henry: The book does not end in a rich utopia, it's important to say.
Hollis: It's interesting. A couple of things. I want to get this back since we're still in the novel. Let me say when we get to Galt's great speech, which is bizarre. He says a similar thing that I'll bring in now. He says, "The mother who buys milk for her baby instead of a hat is not sacrificing because her values are feeding the baby. The woman who sacrifices the hat to feed her baby, but really wants the hat and is only feeding the baby out of duty is sacrificing." That's bad. She's saying get your values in order. Understand what it is you want and do that thing, but don't do it because somebody says you have to. She says this over and over in many ways, or the book says this.
Henry: We should say, that example of the mother is incidental. The point she's always making is you must think this through for yourself, you must not do it because you've been told to do it.
Hollis: Right, exactly. To get back to the love story aspects of the book because they don't sit and say they love each other, even all the great romances. It's not like, "I love you. I love you." It's straight to sex or looks and meetings of the minds. It's interesting. We should deal with the fact that from The Fountainhead and a little bit in this book, the sex is a little rapey. It's a difficult thing to talk about. It's certainly one of the reasons that feminists, women writers don't approve of her. In the book, it's consensual. Whatever one wants to think about the ways that people have sex, it is consensual in the book. Also in The Fountainhead.
I'm sure I'll get hate mail for even saying that, but in her universe, that's where it is. What's interesting, Francisco as a character is so interesting. He's conflicted, he's charming, he's her first lover. He's utterly good in every way. He ends up without her. Hank is good. Hank goes through his struggles and learning curve about women prioritizing. If you don't like your wife, don't be married to your wife. It's like he goes through his own what are my values and how do I live them.
I know you think that this is bizarre, but there's a lot of writing about the relationship of Hank and Francisco because they find themselves in the same room a lot. They happen to have both been Dagny's lovers or ex-lovers, and they really, really like each other. There's a way that that bonding-- Homosexuality does not exist in her novels, whatever, but that's a relationship of two people that really are hot for one another. There is a lot of writing. There are queer readings of Rand that make a lot of that relationship.
Again, this isn't my particular lens of criticism, but I do see that the energy, which is why I asked you which speech you were reading because some of Francisco's best speeches are for Hank because he's trying to woo Hank to happy valley. Toward the end when they're all hanging out together in Galt's Gulch, there's clearly a relationship there.
Henry: Oh, yes. No, once you pointed out to me, I was like, "That makes sense of so many passages." That's clearly there. What I don't understand is why she did that. I feel like, and this is quite an accomplishment because it's a big novel with a lot of moving parts, everything else is resolved both in terms of the plot, but also in terms of how it fits her philosophical idea. That, I think, is pretty much the only thing where you're left wondering, "Why was that in there? She hasn't made a point about it. They haven't done anything about it." This I don't understand. That's my query.
Hollis: Getting ready to have this conversation, I spent a lot of time on some Reddit threads. I ran Atlas Shrugged Reddit threads where there's some fantastic conversations.
Henry: Yes, there is.
Hollis: One of them is about, how come Francisco didn't end up with anybody? That's just too bad. He's such a great character and he ends up alone. I would say he doesn't end up alone, he ends up with his boyfriend Hank, whatever that looks like. Two guys that believe in the same things, they can have whatever life they want. Go on.
Henry: Are you saying that now that they're in the valley, they will be more free to pursue that relationship?
Hollis: There's a lot of things that she has said about men's and women's bodies. She said in other places, "I don't think there'll ever be a woman president because why would a woman want to be president? What a woman really wants is a great man, and we can't have a president who's looking for a great man. She has to be a president." She's got a lot of lunacy about women. Whatever. I don't understand. Someplace I've read that she understands male homosexuality, but not female homosexuality. Again, I am not a Rand scholar. Having read and seen some of that in the ether, I see it in the book, and I can see how her novel would invite that analysis.
I do want to say, let's spend a few seconds on some of the minor characters. There are some really wonderful minor characters. One of them is Cherryl Taggart, this shop girl that evil Jim Taggart meets one night in a rainstorm, and she's like, "Oh, you're so awesome," and they get married. It's like he's got all this praise for marrying the shop girl. It's a funny Eliza Doolittle situation because she is brought into this very wealthy society, which we have been told and we have been shown is corrupt, is evil, everybody's lying all the time, it's pretentious, Dagny hates it.
Here's the Cherryl Taggart who's brought into this. In the beginning, she hates Dagny because she's told by everybody, "Hate Dagny, she's horrible." Then she comes to her own mini understanding of the corruption that we understand because Dagny's shown it in the novel, has shown it to us this entire time. She comes to it and she's like, "Oh my God," and she goes to Dagny. Dagny's so wonderful to her like, "Yes. You had to come to this on your own, I wasn't going to tell you, but you were 100% right." That's the end of her.
Henry: Right. When she meets Taggart, there's this really interesting speech she has where she says, "I want to make something of myself and get somewhere." He's like, "What? What do you want to do?" Red flag. "What? Where?" She says, "I don't know, but people do things in this world. I've seen pictures of New York," and she's pointing at like the skyscrapers, right? Whatever. "I know that someone's built that. They didn't sit around and whine, but like the kitchen was filthy and the roof was leaking." She gets very emotional at this point. She says to him, "We were stinking poor and we didn't give a damn. I've dragged myself here, and I'm going to do something."
Her story is very sad because she then gets mired in the corruption of Taggart's. He's basically bit lazy and a bit of a thief, and he will throw anyone under the bus for his own self-advancement. He is revealed to be a really sinister guy. I was absolutely hissing about him most of the time. Then, let's just do the plot spoiler and say what happens to Cherryl, right? Because it's important. When she has this realization and Taggart turns on her and reveals himself as this snake, and he's like, "Well, what did you expect, you idiot? This is the way the world is."
Hollis: Oh, it's a horrible fight. It's the worst fight.
Henry: Right? This is where the melodrama is so good. She goes running out into the streets, and it's the night and there are shadows. She's in the alleyway. Rand, I don't have the page marked, but it's like a noir film. She's so good at that atmosphere. Then it gets a little bit gothic as well. She's running through the street, and she's like, "I've got to go somewhere, anywhere. I'll work. I'll pick up trash. I'll work in a shop. I'll do anything. I've just got to get out of this."
Hollis: Go work at the Panda Express.
Henry: Yes. She's like, "I've got to get out of this system," because she's realized how morally corrupting it is. By this time, this is very late. Society is in a-- it's like Great Depression style economic collapse by this point. There really isn't a lot that she could do. She literally runs into a social worker and the social-- Rand makes this leering dramatic moment where the social worker reaches out to grab her and Cherryl thinks, "Oh, my God, I'm going to be taken prisoner in. I'm going back into the system," so she jumps off the bridge.
This was the moment when I was like, I've had this lurking feeling about how Russian this novel is. At this point, I was like, "That could be a short story by Gogol," right? The way she set that up. That is very often the trap that a Gogol character or maybe a Dostoevsky character finds themselves in, right? That you suddenly see that the world is against you. Maybe you're crazy and paranoid. Maybe you're not. Depends which story we're reading. You run around trying to get out and you realize, "Oh, my God, I'm more trapped than I thought. Actually, maybe there is no way out." Cherryl does not get a lot of pages. She is, as you say, quite a minor character, but she illustrates the whole story so, so well, so dramatically.
Hollis: Oh, wow.
Henry: When it happens, you just, "Oh, Cherryl, oh, my goodness."
Hollis: Thank you for reading that. Yes, you could tell from the very beginning that the seeds of what could have been a really good person were there. Thank you for reading that.
Henry: When she died, I went back and I was like, "Oh, my God, I knew it."
Hollis: How can you say Rand is a bad writer, right? That is careful, careful plotting, because she's just a shop girl in the rain. You've got this, the gun on the wall in that act. You know she's going to end up being good. Is she going to be rewarded for it? Let me just say, as an aside, I know we don't have time to talk about it here. My field, as I said, is 19th century African American novels, primarily now.
This, usually, a woman, enslaved woman, the character who's like, "I can't deal with this," and jumps off a bridge and drowns herself is a fairly common and character. That is the only thing to do. One also sees Rand heroes. Stowe's Dred, for example, is very much, "I would rather live in the woods with a knife and then, be on the plantation and be a slave." When you think about, even the sort of into the 20th century, the Malcolm X figure, that, "I'm going to throw out all of this and be on my own," is very Randian, which I will also say very Byronic, too, Rand didn't invent this figure, but she put it front and center in these novels, and so when you think about how Atlas Shrugged could be brought into a curriculum in a network of other novels, how many of we've discussed so far, she's there, she's influenced by and continues to influence. Let's talk about your favorite minor character, the Wet Nurse.
Henry: This is another great death scene.
Hollis: Let's say who he is, so the government sends this young man to work at the Rearden Mills to keep an eye on Hank Rearden.
Henry: Once they nationalize him, he's the bureaucrat reporting back, and Rearden calls him the Wet Nurse as an insult.
Hollis: Right, and his job, he's the Communist Party person that's in every factory to make sure that everything is--
Henry: That's right, he's the petty bureaucrat reporting back and making sure everyone's complying.
Hollis: He's a young recent college graduate that, Hank, I think, early on, if it's possible even to find the Wet Nurse early scene, you could tell in the beginning, too, he's bright and sparkly right out of college, and this is, it seems like a good job for him. He's like, "Woohoo, I get to be here, and I get to be--" Yes, go ahead.
Henry: What happens to him is, similarly to Cherryl, he has a conversion, but his conversion is not away from the corruption of the system he's been in, he is converted by what he sees in the Rearden plant, the hard work, the dedication, the idealism, the deep focus on making the metal, and he starts to see that if we don't make stuff, then all the other arguments downstream of that about how to appropriate, how to redistribute, whatever, are secondary, and so he becomes, he goes native, as it were. He becomes a Reardenite, and then at the end, when there's a crowd storming the place, and this crowd has been sent by the government, it's a fake thing to sort of--
Hollis: Also, a very good scene, very dramatic.
Henry: She's very good at mobs, very good at mobs, and they kill, they kill the Wet Nurse, they throw him over. He has a couple of speeches in dialogue with Rearden while he's dying, and he says--
Hollis: You have to say, they throw him, they leave him on this pile of slag. He crawls up to the street where Rearden happens to be driving by, and car stops, and so that finding the Wet Nurse there and carrying him in his arms, yes.
Henry: That's right, it's very dramatic, and then they have this dialogue, and he says,
"I'd like to live, Mr. Rearden, God, how I'd like to, not because I'm dying, but because I've just discovered tonight what it means to be alive, and it's funny, do when I discovered it? In the office, when I stuck my neck out, when I told the bastards to go to hell, there's so many things I wish I'd known sooner, but it's no use crying over spilt milk,"
and then Rearden, he goes,
"Listen, kid, said Rearden sternly, I want you to do me a favor." "Now, Mr. Rearden?" "Yes, now." "Of course, Mr. Rearden, if I can," and Rearden says, "You were willing to die to save my mills, will you try and live for me?"
I think this is one of those great moments where, okay, maybe this isn't like George Eliot style dialogue, but you could put that straight in a movie, that would work really well, that would be great, right? I can hear Humphrey Bogart saying these things. It would work, wouldn't it?
She knows that, and that's why she's doing that, she's got that technique. He's another minor character, and Rand is saying, the system is eating people up. We are setting people up for a spiritual destruction that then leads to physical destruction. This point, again, about it's not just about the material world. It's about your inner life and your own mind.
I find it very moving.
Hollis: These minor characters are fantastic. Then let's talk a little bit about Eddie Willers, because I think a lot about Eddie Willers. Eddie Willers, the childhood three, there were three young people, we keep going back to this childhood. We have Dagny, Francisco, because their parents were friends, and then Eddie Willers, who's like a neighborhood kid, right?
Henry: He's down the street.
Hollis: He lives down the street. He's like the neighborhood kid. I don't know about you. We had a neighborhood kid. There's always neighborhood kids, right? You end up spending time with this-- Eddie's just sort of always there. Then when they turn 15, 16, 17, and when there's clearly something going on between Dagny and Francisco, Eddie does take a step back, and he doesn't want to see.
There's the class issues, the status issues aren't really-- they're present but not discussed by Rand. Here we have these two children heirs, and they don't say like, "You're not one of us, Eddie, because you're not an heir or an heiress." He's there, and he's got a pretty good position as Dagny's right-hand man in Taggart Transcontinental. We don't know where he went to college. We don't know what he does, but we know that he's super loyal, right?
Then when she goes and takes a break for a bit, he steps in to be COO. James is like, "Eddie Willers, how can Eddie Willers be a COO?" She's like, "It's really going to be me, but he's going to be fine." We're not really supposed to identify with Eddie, but Eddie's there. Eddie has, all through the novel, all through the big old novel, Eddie eats lunch in the cafeteria. There's always this one guy he's having lunch with. This is, I don't know, like a Greek chorus thing, I don't quite know, but there's Eddie's conversations with this unknown person in the cafeteria give us a sense, maybe it's a narrator voice, like, "Meanwhile, this is going on in the world." We have these conversations. This guy he's having lunch with asks a lot of questions and starts asking a lot of personal questions about Dagny. Then we have to talk to-- I know we've gone for over an hour and 15 minutes, we've got to talk about Galt's Speech, right? When John Galt, toward the end, takes over the airwaves and gives this big three-hour speech, the big three-hour podcast as I tweeted the other day, Eddie is with Dagny.
Henry: He's in the radio studio.
Hollis: He's in the studio along with one of John Galt's former professors. We hear this voice. Rand says, or the narrator says, three people in the room recognize that voice. I don't know about you, did you guess that it was Galt before that moment that Eddie was having lunch with in the cafeteria?
Henry: No, no, no, I didn't.
Hollis: Okay, so you knew at that moment.
Henry: That was when I was like, "Oh, Eddie was talking, right?" It took me a minute.
Hollis: Okay, were you excited? Was that like a moment? Was that a big reveal?
Henry: It was a reveal, but it made me-- Eddie's whole character puzzles me because, to me, he feels like a Watson.
Hollis: Yes, that's nice, that's good.
Henry: He's met Galt, who's been under their noses the whole time. He's been going through an almost Socratic method with Galt, right? If only he could have paid a little bit more attention, he would have realized what was going on. He doesn't, why is this guy so interested in Dagny, like all these things. Even after Galt's big speech, I don't think Eddie quite takes the lesson. He also comes to a more ambiguous but a bad end.
Hollis: Eddie's been right there, the most loyal person. The Reddit threads on Eddie Willers, if anybody's interested, are really interesting.
Henry: Yes, they are, they're so good.
Hollis: Clearly, Eddie recognizes greatness, and he recognizes production, and he recognizes that Dagny is better than Jim. He recognizes Galt. They've been having these conversations for 12 years in the cafeteria. Every time he goes to the cafeteria, he's like, "Where's my friend, where's my friend?" When his friend disappears, but he also tells Galt a few things about Dagny that are personal and private. When everybody in the world, all the great people in the world, this is a big spoiler, go to Galt's Gulch at the end.
Henry: He's not there.
Hollis: He doesn't get to go. Is it because of the compromises he made along the way? Rand had the power to reward everybody. Hank's secretary gets to go, right?
Henry: Yes.
Hollis: She's gone throughout the whole thing.
Henry: Eddie never thinks for himself. I think that's the-- He's a very, I think, maybe one of the more tragic victims of the whole thing because-- sorry. In a way, because, Cherryl and the Wet Nurse, they try and do the right thing and they end up dying. That's like a more normal tragedy in the sense that they made a mistake. At the moment of realization, they got toppled.
Eddie, in a way, is more upsetting because he never makes a mistake and he never has a moment of realization. Rand is, I think this is maybe one of the cruelest parts of the book where she's almost saying, "This guy's never going to think for himself, and he hasn't got a hope." In a novel, if this was like a realistic novel, and she was saying, "Such is the cruelty of the world, what can we do for this person?" That would be one thing. In a novel that's like ending in a utopia or in a sort of utopia, it's one of the points where she's really harsh.
Hollis: She's really harsh. I'd love to go and look at her notes at some point in time when I have an idle hour, which I won't, to say like, did she sit around? It's like, "What should I do with Eddie?" To have him die, probably, in the desert with a broken down Taggart transcontinental engine, screaming in terror and crying.
Henry: Even at that stage, he can't think for himself and see that the system isn't worth supporting.
Hollis: Right. He's just going to be a company man to the end.
Henry: It's as cruel as those fables we tell children, like the grasshopper and the ants. He will freeze to death in the winter. There's nothing you can do about it. There are times when she gets really, really tough. I think is why people hate her.
Hollis: We were talking about this, about Dickens and minor characters and coming to redemption and Dickens, except Jo. Jo and Jo All Alones, there are people who have redemption and die. Again, I don't know.
Henry: There's Cherryl and the Wet Nurse are like Jo. They're tragic victims of the system. She's doing it to say, "Look how bad this is. Look how bad things are." To me, Eddie is more like Mr. Micawber. He's hopeless. It's a little bit comic. It's not a bad thing. Whereas Dickens, at the end, will just say, "Oh, screw the integrity of the plot and the morals. Let's just let Mr. Micawber-- let's find a way out for him." Everyone wants this guy to do well. Rand is like, "No, I'm sticking to my principles. He's dead in the desert, man. He's going to he's going to burn to death." He's like, "Wow, that's okay."
Hollis: The funny thing is poor John Galt doesn't even care about him. John Galt has been a bad guy. John Galt is a complicated figure. Let's spend a bit on him.
Henry: Before we do that, I actually want to do a very short segment contextualizing her in the 50s because then what you say about Galt will be against this background of what are some of the other ideas in the 50s, right?
Hollis: Got it.
Henry: I think sometimes the Galt stuff is held up as what's wrong with this novel. When you abstract it and just say it, maybe that's an easier case to make. I think once you understand that this is 1957, she's been writing the book for what, 12 years, I think, or 15 years, the Galt speech takes her 3 years to write, I think. This is, I think the most important label we can give the novel is it's a Cold War novel. She's Russian. What she's doing, in some ways, is saying to America, "This is what will happen to us if we adopt the system of our Cold War enemies." It's like, "This is animal farm, but in America with real people with trains and energy plants and industry, no pigs. This is real life." We've had books like that in our own time. The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver said, that book said, "If the 2008 crash had actually gone really badly wrong and society collapsed, how would it go?" I think that's what she's reacting to. The year before it was published, there was a sociology book called The Organization Man.
Hollis: Oh, yes. William Whyte.
Henry: A great book. Everyone should read that book. He is worrying, the whole book is basically him saying, "I've surveyed all these people in corporate America. They're losing the Protestant work ethic. They're losing the entrepreneurial spirit. They're losing their individual drive. Instead of wanting to make a name for themselves and invent something and do great things," he says, "they've all got this managerial spirit. All the young men coming from college, they're like, 'Everything's been done. We just need to manage it now.'" He's like, "America is collapsing." Yes, he thinks it's this awful. Obviously, that problem got solved.
That, I think, that gives some sense of why, at that moment, is Ayn Rand writing the Galt speech? Because this is the background. We're in the Cold War, and there's this looming sense of the cold, dead hand of bureaucracy and managerialism is. Other people are saying, "Actually, this might be a serious problem."
Hollis: I think that's right. Thank you for bringing up Whyte. I think there's so much in the background. There's so much that she's in conversation with. There's so much about this speech, so that when you ask somebody on the street-- Again, let me say this, make the comparison again to Uncle Tom's Cabin, people go through life feeling like they know Uncle Tom's Cabin, Simon Legree, Eliza Crossing the Ice, without having ever read it.
Not to name drop a bit, but when I did my annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, this big, huge book, and it got reviewed by John Updike in The New Yorker, and I was like, "This is freaking John Updike." He's like, "I never read it. I never read it." Henry Louis Gates and then whoever this young grad student was, Hollis Robbins, are writing this book, I guess I'll read it. It was interesting to me, when I talk about Uncle Tom's Cabin, "I've never read it," because it's a book you know about without reading. A lot of people know about Atlas Shrugged without having read it. I think Marc Andreessen said-- didn't he say on this podcast that he only recently read it?
Henry: I was fascinated by this. He read it four years ago.
Hollis: Right, during COVID.
Henry: In the bibliography for the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and I assumed he was one of those people, he was like you, he'd read it as a teenager, it had been informative. No, he came to it very recently. Something's happening with this book, right?
Hollis: Huge things are happening, but the people who know about it, there's certain things that you know, you know it's long, you know that the sex is perhaps not what you would have wanted. You know that there's this big, really long thing called John Galt's Speech, and that it's like the whaling chapters in Moby-Dick. People read Moby-Dick, you're like, "Oh, yes, but I skipped all the chapters on cetology." That's the thing that you say, right? The thing that you say is like, "Yes, but I skipped all the John Galt's Speech." I was very interested when we were texting over the last month or so, what you would say when you got to John Galt's Speech. As on cue, one day, I get this text and it's like, "Oh, my God, this speech is really long." I'm like, "Yes, you are the perfect reader."
Henry: I was like, "Hollis, this might be where I drop out of the book."
Hollis: I'm like, "Yes, you and the world, okay?" This is why you're an excellent reader of this book, because it is a frigging slog. Just because I'm having eye issues these days, I had decided instead of rereading my copy, and I do have a newer copy than this tiny print thing, I decided to listen on audiobook. It was 62 hours or whatever, it was 45 hours, because I listen at 1.4. The speech is awesome listening to it. It, at 1.4, it's not quite 3 hours. It's really good. In the last few days, I was listening to it again, okay? I really wanted to understand somebody who's such a good plotter, and somebody who really understands how to keep people's interest, why are you doing this, Rand? Why are you doing this, Ms. Rand? I love the fact that she's always called Miss. Rand, because Miss., that is a term that we don't use at all today, that feminists fought not to use. We've got Ms, all sorts of other pronouns. The fact that she always was referred to as Miss. Rand is such a lovely point. Here, why are you doing this? I came to this understanding that it's like the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution, like everything else that we haven't given to the states are to the states, right? It's a catch-all where she is saying, "Look, this book is about all the choices that people need to make." Here, I've had all these thousands of pages of, or 1,800 pages, I think, at that point in time. It comes at about page 2,000 or whatever it is. I forget on what page it is.
Henry: In my edition, it's like page 934.
Hollis: Okay, whatever it is, it comes pretty deep into it. She's like, "I've shown you and demonstrated through my characters choices that you might have to make and what the right one is and what the wrong one is and why." Obviously, the entire world is out there. How is this going to be applied? John Galt's Speech, so John Galt, things are going badly, and John Galt decides he's going to take to the airwaves. We've already seen that he's the super-duper inventor who has new kinds of engines and new kinds of fangled things that are just going to change the world. It's going to be awesome. He's withdrawn them from the market because he will not participate in this corrupt system, right?
We believe that he's a technological whiz kid. He's about your age, I think, toward the end when he does this. He's in his 37. I think I figured out that they're all about 37 toward the end. They're in their 20s. He's your age. He's got this brain.
Henry: I am John Galt.
Hollis: You are John Galt, too. We believe this, in the universe of the novel, that he is the technological know-how to shut down all radio stations in the entire world. I do love that it's usually radio. It's not TV. It's almost always radio. Then he's like, "I am John Galt." Then it goes on for three hours. This is where he says the thing like, "A mother who doesn't have a hat so she can feed her child, that's not a sacrifice." He goes through example after example about this. If you help your friend, it is not a sacrifice if it is your values to help your friend.
By the end of this speech, because I did re-listen to it, it's like, okay, I can see myself there. The plot line that the book doesn't get to, that the novel doesn't get to, gets addressed in this speech. Not all of it, but that is the point. At the very end, you could say, "Okay, where is mother and children? Where is what you owe your wife? What are these various manifestations of life that you're going to need to make a Randian choice?" Or as him, it's a Galtian choice.
It's worth reading for understanding that what it does is it explodes the pages of the novel to include everything, just as a matter of technique. While it doesn't work as a matter of plot because you slog through it, it does work because it is the place that allows you when you're applying the lessons of the novel to your life, it allows you to find your problem will probably be in Galt's Speech.
I thought there was a couple of things that are worth reading. Just if we can spend a second before we close off how the book ends, so everybody knows, is what Rand would think of Silicon Valley today, right? Because I think it's important with Elon Musk spending time in Washington, with somebody like Marc Andreessen reading it, with Peter Thiel, getting this Atlas Award a few years ago. You've got these Rand admirers.
Henry: His FT piece had some very Randian passages, right, Thiel, this week?
Hollis: Yes, exactly. Rand is in the ether, right? She's going to be brought up. What would she think? You could say there's a couple of places in Galt's Speech that give us some sense because her book is so Adams, not bits. She does not live in a software world. You could see that she would love Elon Musk. Absolutely love Elon Musk.
Henry: Well, for the SpaceX stuff, not for the Twitter stuff.
Hollis: Well, yes, she would have loved Tesla, SpaceX, new designs, the Neuralink, whatever, because that's all it has. Apparently, lots of people thought of Steve Jobs as a kind of Rand hero. Building these new computers, new shapes, blah, blah, blah. The real question is what would be her views on software, social media? That so much of this billionaire economy is about extracting value from data mining and aligning your ads and your software as a service and your sales force and all this stuff is extracting value to make the consumer experience more efficient.
She spent this entire novel on production and producers, not consumers. Given so much of our economy is about selling and personalizing or social media, understanding everything about you so that we can deliver ads that are going to be for you, so I can extract. I think she'd be horrified by that, absolutely horrified. There's a couple of places in Galt's Speech I'm going to read, "Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is value if obtained by fraud, that an attempt to gain value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality. Where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness becomes the enemies you have to dread and flee. That you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidities of others, or as a fool whose sources of values is the fool he succeeds in fooling."
I think that, again, I'm not going to indict so much that goes on in social media, thinking about influencers or a bunch of crypto scams. That she would be saying, somebody like Sam Bankman-Fried or a lot of that, is that you are a slave to the stupidity of others. You are a slave to the foolishness of others. I think she would be horrified at business models that depend on the idiocies of others.
A little later she says, "I have nothing to gain from fools or cowards. I have no benefits to seek from human vices, from stupidity, dishonesty, and fear." Sure, she would probably be a fan of Stripe of different kinds of payment systems, that's fine.
Henry: That's infrastructure, right?
Hollis: That's infrastructure. If your job is making people buy things that they don't want or don't need. I think I've told you I'm writing a piece for Luke Burgis on comparing Girard and mimetic theory to Rand. I think mimetic theory and Facebook and Peter Thiel's investment in Facebook, because he understood that you could make tons of money on people wanting to copy other things. This is not Randian. When you think about how exactly, if people start reading Atlas Shrugged again, how they are going to, how somebody who literally is making their living fooling others if they read Galt's Speech, what will they recognize?
Henry: I thought there was a great line, "Accept as your moral ideal the task of becoming a man." I think what you're saying is relevant to that on the other side, I think she would be one of these people who hates the algorithm.
Hollis: Yes.
Henry: Why are you letting them tell you what you are going to read and watch and listen to, accept as your moral ideal the task of becoming a man. This is the persistent motif, you have to will yourself into existence. You have to choose who you will be. There's another line.
Hollis: I was going to say right there, Cherryl and the Wet Nurse, victims of the algorithm.
Henry: Exactly. That's exactly it. Galt says elsewhere, "Yourself is your mind. Renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow." That's exactly what you're saying. There's a third passage. This is a little longer.
Hollis: Go ahead.
Henry: This was a moment when I was like, "Okay, I'm all in on the Galt Speech I'm going to look at the first half again. I'm going to take it seriously. It's working for me now," because I think some of what she says in what I'm about to read out, some of what Galt says is not so far away from some criticisms that exist about people like Steve Jobs. These aren't necessarily my criticisms, but I think I've heard other people saying things like this.
Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims, as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force. He finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and simultaneously considers precarious. Reason to him is a means of deception. He feels that men possess some power more potent than reason and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked.
Hollis: That's a good bit.
Henry: I think that's a great bit. It goes on for like the rest of the page.
Hollis: Of course it goes on.
Henry: Nothing ever ends. There are other good bits. I read that and I was like, partly, I think that is what people say about Steve Jobs, the way he would be the mystic, put on that act. Again, it's not necessarily what I think, but there are so many people not in Silicon Valley but in the mindfulness, well-being, all these related, minimalism, all these related areas. It's all adjacent to self-help. Maybe one generation ago, we would have called it new age. There's a very mystic quality to it. There's a real lack of reason. There's a total, "You just have to do it. This is the way." I think there are so many of these forces in modern culture that she would just say, "What are you all doing? Get a grip, think for yourself." She would be so cross.
Hollis: She would be so cross. I think that's right. I think the crypto is-- I think a lot about this. On the one hand, you see these crypto advocates, whatever, making the case like, "The money system is controlled by corrupt Washington and blah, blah." Even we should, by the way, talk about the fact that Alan Greenspan, who was head of the Federal Reserve for so long was a-
Henry: He was a Randian, right?
Hollis: Right. The idea is you've got this corrupt banking system, and therefore, we need crypto to free ourselves in a Randian sense, to free ourselves from the shackles of this corruption. At the same time, then she would look and she'd be like, "What are NFTs and bored apes and all of that sort of-- are you buying crypto just to buy cryptocurrency? What is data mining? What would Hank Rearden think of Bitcoin," This doesn't make any sense to me.
I think it would be actually an interesting conversation for somebody who knows more about this than I do to explain to me how Bitcoin is rational or FDX is rational in a Randian sense. I think that there's a surface reading and you can see why Rand is hated by-- or in this case, why she might have been hated because she was such a frigging purist. When she would see people using her theories or trying to use them and coming to different ends, she was like, "You're nuts."
There's a beautiful essay that she has that I reread the other day. I don't know if I sent it to you. When she was invited to go see one of the first Apollo launches, I guess the one that reached the moon. She went down to Florida, and it was hot. This essay about watching this is beautiful, about the hot weather and about the sitting in the stands and about this thing. She goes full-on beautiful prose, some of her best writing, and maybe we can link to it later, of this incredible joy and admiration for man's achievement in this launch.
She got hell for it. She got hell for it because NASA's government. "Are you telling us, your readers, that now you believe in government science, isn't this a Stadler thing, Stadler from Atlas Shrugged? How can you be praising NASA? How? How? You're letting all your readers down." She was just like, "Yes, in a perfect world, there wouldn't be NASA. All of these engineers and scientists want to be there and are using their best minds to have done this achievement for mankind." Yes, maybe someday there'll be Elon Musk and SpaceX. She didn't say that. She says, "Yes, maybe someday there will be private spaceflight. There isn't now. Let us celebrate this achievement for mankind now. You fool."
She was always yelling at her supporters.
Henry: The proper reading of that is that that's like building the new train that Dagny built. That no one thought it could be done and here we are, we're going to the moon. Everyone's saying, "Will it not work?" That's, yes, it's the most Randian thing ever, right?
Hollis: Right. Also, one of the most Randian things is the fact that the group that she had sometimes the least admiration for were her own supporters who were getting it a little bit wrong. She's like, "If you're going to follow me, follow me."
Henry: Yes. I think there are other areas in modern culture where that would be true. I think, politically, she would be a little disapproving of all sides, right? It's not a left-right thing. I think she'd have problems with everyone. There's a great line. It's Dr. Akston talking to Dagny. I think he is John Galt's philosophy tutor, right?
Hollis: Right. So again, in the structure of this novel, John Galt, Francisco D'Anconio and this pirate. We didn't even talk about the pirate, Ragnar Danneskjöld, right? All three went to college together, and they had these two professors, Akston and Stadler, physics and philosophy, which is what she thinks everybody should study. Stadler gets corrupt, Akston, no, but these three that went to college together-- It's interesting that Francisco is part of both of these threesomes. These threesome that went to college and then the threesome with Eddie Willers and Dagny that grow up, right? He's a central figure that brings everybody together, which is why he ends up alone. The philosophy professor ends up not compromising his principles. Go ahead.
Henry: That's right. That shows you that this line is coming from a figure who is considered to be a source of a lot of the good ideas in the book. This is, I think, where she is maybe the closest to being Girardian in a way. "It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world's doctrines." When I read that, I was like, "That's very Randian." That has been said by many people in many schools of thought, in many traditions, that is ancient wisdom.
It's interesting to see her putting that to use in her work. We've been talking about Silicon Valley, her own supporters, algorithm, all these well-being people, politics. Again, she would apply that phrase, that line to all of these areas now and say to people, "Come on, the world's influences are strong on you. You've got to think for yourself."
Hollis: That's interesting. And so a little known fact, but I looked it up yesterday because I have a PDF copy of the book. Influence appears 14 times in the novel. Almost all of them, except for that one, are in the context of James Taggart wanting to get influence in Washington.
Henry: Interesting, because he's a real worm trying to get him in with the political people.
Hollis: Yes. It's interesting, because the other thing I was thinking of is what would Ayn Rand think about the influencer economy? Oh, she'd despise it. She would despise it. All these, speaking of like Cherryl Taggart, all these little girls wanting to grow up to be influencers, they're caught in some algorithm, which is awful. Why would you want to spend your life influencing others? Go create something. It's a hard medicine.
Henry: It's a hard medicine, but it's a perfect way to move to our conclusion, because I think everyone thinks she's about money and free markets and everything, but what we're trying to say is, no, this is what she's about. This is the important thing. Let's sum up, what are your overall thoughts?
Hollis: I'm going back to the notes that we made that I have not looked at.
Henry: My overall feeling is I'm really glad I read it. It's much less crazy than the actual Randians I have met in the world. It's not the book I was told it was. If you're interested, you should read it. I have a very Catholic approach to what we should read. I'm not going to say, "She's got scary, nasty ideas, I won't read it." There are boring bits. Let's just be honest, there are boring bits. It's too long. That is true of a lot of novels.
I never actually wanted to drop out. A lot of boring novels, you say, "Yes, you know what? I'm not doing another 300 pages of this or whatever." I think everything we've discussed, it's good as a novel, but it's also just so interesting now with the new politics that we have, the new cultural influences, so many of the people who are coming into positions of influence have read it. I just kept seeing it again and again. We have the Rotherham scandal in the UK at the moment. There are Randian villains all over that horrible story. It is a very, very interesting book to read on its own terms but also for the world today. That's my takeaway.
Hollis: First of all, I love that. I love that. I figured that just in our discussions about various things, I assumed that you would find value in it as a novel. I grew up reading this. My parents were Rand supporting libertarian, whatever. They got the Objectivist Newsletter, which is her sort of media empire. I even noted in the book that I had has a ad for the Objectivist Newsletter. We had a whole shelf full of these growing up. I read a lot of them.
I did not know I would end up being an English professor. Coming back to the novel after being steeped in literature, I was surprised at how much my training in literary criticism, in high theory, Foucault, Derrida, Girard and all these things allowed me to see some things that I saw beforehand. To put a name to it, the sort of free indirect discourse even, the ways that you had said in the train, the ways that every word that came out of everybody's mouth was an instantiation of that person's philosophy and values.
There's a remarkable consistency in being able to do that with the minor characters, with the major characters. We don't know some of the crazy people that are around Stadler, and there all those sort of Tinky Holloway, there's these weird people that just say things that are Dickensian, that they don't exist as characters.
Anybody with good speaking, with enough presence, the consistency that everything that they say, you believe they said, and that everything said will tell you something about that character. There's nothing unreal. Weird and metal is unreal, right?
Henry: It's a sci-fi novel. Yes.
Hollis: Yes, it's a sci-fi novel. She takes pains to understand the radio waves and how it is that Galt is able to do certain things, that it's not too sci-fi, it's believable enough. The other thing is I hadn't spent enough time on the end and the fact that the world is going to hell. When you look at the 1960s disaster novels, even such as like Planet of the Apes, you could imagine Atlas Shrugged being a prequel.
Henry: Yes. Totally.
Hollis: You can see when the world went to pot, when you have these dystopian post-nuclear whatever. What happened? You can imagine picking up Ayn Rand and says, "Well, this is how we got to this point." I see it fitting into the network of so many things that I had read that my irritation, that it isn't taken seriously in the academy is greater than it has ever been. Which is to say, there are really-- This book, Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand is fine. There's a nice bit by Camille Paglia, who also said she didn't read it until late in life when everybody kept comparing her to Rand, and she's like, "Okay, I'm going to read it." She said one of her critiques is that Rand doesn't have any sense of humor. I'm like, "No, actually, it's really funny. There are some really funny bits. She could have more."
I think I came away agreeing that it is a good and worthy novel, that it's gotten a bad rap. I would say that about Uncle Tom's Cabin, too, which Langston Hughes famously said is the most cussed and discussed novel of all time. We could say that about Atlas Shrugged. You've got the bigger platform, I would urge your readers to pick it up.
Henry: Yes, it's definitely worth, you should be curious about it, for sure. Hollis, thank you for suggesting this. Thank you for getting me to read it, and thank you for a great conversation.
Hollis: Thank you for a great conversation. I suspected we weren't going to just go for an hour, so this is great.
Henry: It's Ayn Rand, how can we only go for one hour?
Hollis: No, I'm really glad. I don't think I could have imagined a better interlocutor as a first reader of this novel, because you're very generous as a person and as an intellect, and to be able to say candidly what the flaws are at the same time having arguments. We should make sure we keep our text exchanges about Jim Taggart and Cherryl.
Henry: Oh, that's true. Those were fun, I liked that, yes.
Hollis: Thank you.
Henry: Okay, let's do this again sometime.
Hollis: Indeed.
Henry: All right. Thanks, Hollis.
Hollis: Thank you.
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Tyler and I spoke about view quakes from fiction, Proust, Bleak House, the uses of fiction for economists, the problems with historical fiction, about about drama in interviews, which classics are less read, why Jane Austen is so interesting today, Patrick Collison, Lord of the Rings… but mostly we talked about Shakespeare. We talked about Shakespeare as a thinker, how Romeo doesn’t love Juliet, Girard, the development of individualism, the importance and interest of the seventeenth century, Trump and Shakespeare’s fools, why Julius Cesar is over rated, the most under rated Shakespeare play, prejudice in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare as an economic thinker. We covered a lot of ground and it was interesting for me throughout.
Here are some excerpts. Full transcript below.
Henry Some of the people around Trump now, they’re trying to do DOGE and deregulation and other things. Are there Shakespearean lessons that they should be bearing in mind? Should we send them to see the Henriad before they get started?
Tyler Send them to read the Henriad before they get started. The complicated nature of power: that the king never has the power that he needs to claim he does is quite significant. The ways in which power cannot be delegated, Shakespeare is extremely wise on. And yes, the DOGE people absolutely need to learn those lessons.
Henry The other thing I’d take from the Henriad is time moves way quicker than anyone thinks it does. Even the people who are trying to move quite quickly in the play, they get taken over very rapidly by just changing-
Tyler Yes. Once things start, it's like, oh my goodness, they just keep on running and no one's really in control. And that's a Shakespearean point as well.
And.
Henry Let’s say we read Shakespeare in a modern English version, how much are we getting?
Tyler It’ll be terrible. It’ll be a negative. It will poison your brain. So this, to me, will be highly unfortunate. Better to learn German and read the Schlegel than to read someone turning Shakespeare into current English. The only people who could do it maybe would be like the Trinidadians, who still have a marvelous English, and it would be a completely different work. But at least it might be something you could be proud of.
Transcript (prepared by AI)
Henry Today, I am talking to Tyler Cowen, the economist, blogger, columnist, and author. Tyler works at George Mason University. He writes Marginal Revolution. He is a columnist at Bloomberg, and he has written books like In Praise of Commercial Culture and The Age of the Infovore. We are going to talk about literature and Shakespeare. Tyler, welcome.
Tyler Good to chat with you, Henry.
Henry So have you ever had a view quake from reading fiction?
Tyler Reading fiction has an impact on you that accumulates over time. It's not the same as reading economics or philosophy, where there's a single, discrete idea that changes how you view the world. So I think reading the great classics in its entirety has been a view quake for me. But it's not that you wake up one morning and say, oh, I turned to page 74 in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, and now I realize that, dot, dot, dot. That's a yes and a no for an answer.
Henry So you've never read Bleak House and thought, actually, I do see things slightly differently about Victorian London or the history of the –?
Tyler Well, that's not a view quake. Certainly, that happens all the time, right? Slightly differently how you see Victorian London. But your overall vision of the world, maybe fiction is one of the three or four most important inputs. And again, I think it's more about the entirety of it and the diversity of perspectives. I think reading Proust maybe had the single biggest impact on me of any single work of fiction if I had to select one. And then when I was younger, science fiction had a quite significant impact on me. But I don't think it was the fictional side of science fiction that mattered, if that makes sense to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was the models embodied in the stories, like, oh, the three laws of robotics. Well, I thought, well, what should those laws be like? I thought about that a good deal. So that would be another part of the qualified answer.
Henry And what was it with Proust? The idea that people only care about what other people think or sexuality or consciousness?
Tyler The richness of the internal life, the importance of both expectation and memory, the evanescence of actual events, a sense of humor.
Henry It showed you just how significant these things are.
Tyler And how deeply they can be felt and expressed. That's right. And there were specific pages early on in Swan's Way where it just hit me. So that's what I would say. Bleak House, I don't think, changed my views at all. It's one of my three or four favorite novels. I think it's one of the great, great, greats, as you have written yourself. But the notion that, well, the law is highly complex and reality is murky and there are all these deep mysteries, that all felt very familiar to me. And I had already read some number of newer sort of pseudo-Victorian novels that maybe do those themes in a more superficial way, but they introduce those themes to you. So you read Bleak House and you just say, well, I've imbibed this already, but here's the much better version of it.
Henry One of the things I got from Bleak House, which it took me a couple of reads to get to, was how comfortable Dickens was with being quite a rational critic of the legal system and quite a credulous believer in spontaneous combustion and other things.
Tyler Did Dickens actually believe in spontaneous combustion or is that a plot device? Like Gene Roddenberry doesn't actually believe in the transporter or didn't, as far as we
Henry know. No, I think he believed. Yeah. Yeah. He defends it in the preface. Yeah.
Tyler So it's not so confusing that there's not going to be a single behavioral model that captures deviations from rationality. So you end up thinking you ought to travel more, you ought to take in a lot of diverse different sources about our human beings behave, including from sociology, from anthropology. That makes it harder to be an economist, I would say it scatters your attention. You probably end up with a richer understanding of reality, but I'm not sure it's good for your research. It's probably bad for it.
Henry It's not a good career move.
Tyler It's not good for focus, but focus maybe can be a bit overrated.
Henry Why are you more interested in fiction than other sort of people of a broadly rational disposition?
Tyler Well, I might challenge the view that I'm of a broadly rational disposition. It's possible that all humans are roughly equally irrational, madmen aside, but if you mean the rationality community as one finds it in San Francisco, I think they're very mono in their approach to reasoning and that tends to limit the interests of many of them, not all, in fiction and travel. People are regional thinkers and in that region, San Francisco, there is incredible talent. It's maybe the most talented place in the world, but there's not the same kind of diversity of talents that you would find in London or New York and that somehow spreads to the broader ethos and it doesn't get people interested in fiction or for that matter, the visual arts very much.
Henry But even in London, if I meet someone who's an economist or has an economics degree or whatever, the odds that they've read Bleak House or something are just so small.
Tyler Bleak House is not that well read anymore, but I think an economist in London is likely to be much more well read than an economist in the Bay Area. That would be my prediction. You would know better than I would.
Henry How important has imaginative literature been to you relative to other significant writers like philosophers or theoretical economists or something?
Tyler Well, I'm not sure what you mean by imaginative literature. I think when I was 17, I read Olaf Stapleton, a great British author and Hegelian philosopher, and he was the first and first man and star maker, and that had a significant impact on me. Just how many visions you could put into a single book and have at least most of them cohere and make sense and inspire. That's one of the most imaginative works I've ever read, but people mean different things by that term.
Henry How objectively can we talk about art?
Tyler I think that becomes a discussion about words rather than about art. I would say I believe in the objective when it comes to aesthetics, but simply because we have no real choice not to. People actually, to some extent, trust their aesthetic judgments, so why not admit that you do and then fight about them? Trying to interject some form of extreme relativism, I think it's just playing a game. It's not really useful. Now, is art truly objective in the final metaphysical sense, in the final theory of the universe? I'm not sure that question has an answer or is even well-formulated, but I would just say let's just be objectivists when it comes to art. Why not?
Henry What is wrong with historical fiction?
Tyler Most of it bores me. For instance, I don't love Hilary Mantel and many very intelligent people think it's wonderful. I would just rather read the history. It feels like an in-between thing to me. It's not quite history. It's not quite fiction. I don't like biopics either when I go to the cinema. Yeah, I think you can build your own combination of extremes from history and fiction and get something better.
Henry You don't have any historical fiction that you like, Penelope Fitzgerald, Tolstoy?
Tyler Any is a strong word. I don't consider Tolstoy historical fiction. There's a historical element in it, as there is with say Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate or actually Dickens for that matter, but it's not driven by the history. I think it's driven by the characters and the story. Grossman comes somewhat closer to being historical fiction, but even there, I wouldn't say that it is.
Henry It was written so close to the events though, right?
Tyler Sure. It's about how people deal with things and what humanity means in extreme circumstances and the situations. I mean, while they're more than just a trapping, I never feel one is plodding through what happened in the Battle of Stalingrad when I read Grossman, say.
Henry Yeah. Are there diminishing returns to reading fiction or what are the diminishing returns?
Tyler It depends what you're doing in life. There's diminishing returns to most things in the sense that what you imbibe from your teen years through, say, your 30s will have a bigger impact on you than most of what you do later. I think that's very, very hard to avoid, unless you're an extreme late bloomer, to borrow a concept from you. As you get older, rereading gets better, I would say much better. You learn there are more things you want to read and you fill in the nooks and crannies of your understanding. That's highly rewarding in a way where what you read when you were 23 could not have been. I'm okay with that bargain. I wouldn't say it's diminishing returns. I would say it's altering returns. I think also when you're in very strange historical periods, reading fiction is more valuable. During the Obama years, it felt to me that reading fiction was somewhat less interesting. During what you might call the Trump years, and many other strange things are going on with AI, people trying to strive for immortality, reading fiction is much more valuable because it's more limited what nonfiction can tell you or teach you. I think right now we're in a time where the returns to reading more fiction are rapidly rising in a good way. I'm not saying it's good for the world, but it's good for reading fiction.
Henry Do you cluster read your fiction?
Tyler Sometimes, but not in general. If I'm cluster reading my fiction, it might be because I'm cluster reading my nonfiction and the fiction is an accompaniment to that. Say, Soviet Russia, I did some reading when I was prepping for Stephen Kotkin and for Russ Roberts and Vasili Grossman, but I don't, when it comes to fiction per se, cluster read it. No, I don't think you need to.
Henry You're not going to do like, I'm reading Bleak House, so I'll do three other 1852 novels or three other Dickens novels or something like that.
Tyler I don't do it, but I suspect it's counterproductive. The other Dickens novels will bore you more and they'll seem worse, is my intuition. I think the question is how you sequence works of very, very high quality. Say you just finished Bleak House, what do you pick up next? It should be a work of nonfiction, but I think you've got to wait a while or maybe something quite different, sort of in a way not different, like a detective story or something that won't challenge what has been cemented into your mind from Bleak House.
Henry Has there been a decline of reading the classics?
Tyler What I observe is a big superstar effect. I think a few authors, such as Jane Austen and Shakespeare, are more popular. I'm not completely sure they're more read, but they're more focal and more vivid. There are more adaptations of them. Maybe people ask GPT about them more. Really quite a few other works are much less read than would have been the case, say as recently as the 1970s or 1980s. My guess is, on the whole, the great works of fiction are much less read, but a few of them achieve this oversized reputation.
Henry Why do you think that is?
Tyler Attention is more scarce, perhaps, and social clustering effects are stronger through the internet. That would just be a guess.
Henry It's not that we're all much more Jane Austen than we used to be?
Tyler No, if anything, the contrary. Maybe because we're less Jane Austen, it's more interesting, because in, say, a Jane Austen novel, there will be sources of romantic tension not available to us through contemporary TV shows. The question, why don't they just sleep together, well, there's a potential answer in a Jane Austen story. In the Israeli TV show, Srugim, which is about modern Orthodox Jews, there's also an answer, but in most Hollywood TV, there's no answer. They're just going to sleep together, and it can become very boring quite rapidly.
Henry Here's a reader question. Why is the market for classics so good, but nobody reads them? I think what they're saying is a lot of people aren't actually reading Shakespeare, but they still agree he's the best, so how can that be?
Tyler A lot of that is just social conformity bias, but I see more and more people, and I mean intellectuals here, challenging the quality of Shakespeare. On the internet, every possible opinion will be expressed, is one way to put it. I think the market for classics is highly efficient in the following sense, that if you asked, say, GPT or Claude, which are the most important classics to read, that literally everything listed would be a great book. You could have it select 500 works, and every one of them would really be very good and interesting. If you look at Harold Bloom's list at the back of the Western canon, I think really just about every one of those is quite worthwhile, and that we got to that point is, to me, one of the great achievements of the contemporary world, and it's somewhat under-praised, because you go back in earlier points of time, and I think it's much less efficient, the market for criticism, if you would call it that.
Henry Someone was WhatsAppping me the other day that GPT's list of 50 best English poets was just awful, and I said, well, you're using GPT4, o1 gives you the right list.
Tyler Yeah, and o1 Pro may give you a slightly better list yet, or maybe the prompt has to be better, but it's interesting to me how many people, they love to attack literary criticism as the greatest of all villains, oh, they're all frustrated writers, they're all post-modernists, they're all extreme left-wingers. All those things might even be true to some extent, but the system as a whole, I would say completely has delivered, and especially people on the political and intellectual right, they often don't realize that. Just any work you want to read, if you put in a wee bit of time and go to a shelf of a good academic library, you can read fantastic criticism of it that will make your understanding of the work much better.
Henry I used to believe, when I was young, I did sort of believe that the whole thing, oh, the Western canon's dying and everyone's given up on it, and I'm just so amazed now that the opposite has happened. It's very, very strong.
Tyler I'm not sure how strong it is. I agree its force in discourse is strong, so something like, well, how often is it mentioned in my group chats? That's strongly rising, and that delights me, but that's a little different from it being strong, and I'm not sure how strong it is.
Henry In an interview about your book Talent, you said this, “just get people talking about drama. I feel you learn a lot. It's not something they can prepare for. They can't really fake it. If they don't understand the topic, you can just switch to something else.”
Tyler Yeah, that's great advice. You see how they think about how people relate to each other. It doesn't have to be fiction. I ask people a lot about Star Wars, Star Trek, whatever it is they might know that I have some familiarity with. Who makes the best decisions in Star Wars? Who gives the best advice? Yoda, Obi-Wan, Luke, Darth Vader, the Emperor?
Henry It's a tough question.
Tyler Yeah, yeah.
Henry I don't know Star Wars, so I couldn't even answer that.
Tyler You understand that you can't fake it. You can't prepare for it. It does show how the person thinks about advice and also drama.
Henry Right. Now, you're a Shakespeare fan.
Tyler Well, fan is maybe an understatement. He's better. He deserves better than fans.
Henry How much of time, how much of your life have you spent reading and watching this work?
Tyler I would say most of the plays from, say, like 1598 or 99 and after, I've read four to five times on average, some a bit more, some like maybe only three times. There's quite a few I've only read once and didn't like. Those typically are the earlier ones. When it comes to watching Shakespeare, I have to confess, I don't and can't understand it, so I'm really not able to watch it either on the stage or in a movie and profit from it. I think I partially have an auditory processing disorder that if I hear Shakespeare, you know, say at Folger in DC, I just literally cannot understand the words. It's like listening to Estonian, so I've gone some number of times. I cannot enjoy what you would call classic Shakespeare movies like Kenneth Branagh, Henry V, which gets great reviews, intelligent people love it. It doesn't click for me at all. I can't understand what's going on. The amount of time I've put into listening to it, watching it is very low and it will stay low. The only Shakespeare movies I like are the weird ones like Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight or Baz Luhrmann's Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. I think they're fantastic, but they're not obsessed with reciting the text.
Henry So, you're reading with notes and you're piecing it together as you go.
Tyler I feel the versions in my head are better than anything I see on the screen also, so that's another reason. I just think they're to be read. I fully understand that's not how Shakespeare seemed to view them, but that's a way in which we readers, in a funny way, can improve on Shakespeare's time.
Henry No, I agree with you. The thing I get the most pushback about with Shakespeare is when I say that he was a great thinker.
Tyler He's maybe the best thinker.
Henry Right. But tell us what you mean by that.
Tyler I don't feel I can articulate it. It's a bit like when o3 Pro gives you an answer so good you don't quite appreciate it yourself. Shakespeare is like o7 Pro or something. But the best of the plays seem to communicate the entirety of human existence in a way that I feel I can barely comprehend and I find in very, very little else. Even looking at other very great works such as Bleak House, I don't find it. Not all of the plays. There's very, very good plays that don't do that. Just say Macbeth and Othello. I don't feel do that at all. Not a complaint, but something like Hamlet or King Lear or Tempest or some of the comedies. It's just somehow all laid out there and all inside it at the same time. I don't know any other way of putting it.
Henry A lot of people think that Shakespeare is overrated. We only read him because it's a status game. We've internalized these snobbish values. We see this stated a lot. What's your response to these people?
Tyler Well, I feel sorry for them. But look, there's plenty of things I can't understand. I just told you if I go to see the plays, I'm completely lost. I know the fault is mine, so to speak. I don't blame Shakespeare or the production, at least not necessarily. Those are people who are in a similar position, but somehow don't have enough metarationality to realize the fault is on them. I think that's sad. But there's other great stuff they can do and probably they're doing it. That's fine.
Henry Should everyone read Shakespeare at school?
Tyler If you say everyone, I resist. But it certainly should be in the curriculum. But the real question is who can teach it? But yeah, it's better than not doing it. When I was in high school, we did Taming of the Shrew, which I actually don't like very much, and it put me off a bit. We did Macbeth, which is a much better play. But in a way, it's easy to teach. Macbeth, to me, is like a perfect two-minute punk rock song. It does something. It delivers. But it's not the Shakespeare that puts everything on the table, and the plot is easy to follow. You can imagine even a mediocre teacher leading students through it. It's to me still a little underwhelming if that's what we teach them. Then finally, my last year, we did Hamlet, and I'm like, whoa, okay, now I get it. Probably we do it wrong in a lot of cases, would be my guess. What's wrong with the Taming of the Shrew? It's a lot of yelling and screaming and ordinary. To me, it's not that witty. There's different views, like is it offensive to women, offensive to men? That's not my main worry. But those questions, I feel, also don't help the play, and I just don't think Shakespeare was fully mature when he wrote it. What was the year on that? Do you know offhand?
Henry It's very early.
Tyler It's very early. Very early, yeah. So if you look at the other plays that surround it, they're also not as top works. So why should we expect that one to be?
Henry What can arts funding learn from the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres?
Tyler Current arts funding? I don't think that much. I think the situation right now is so different, and what we should do so depends on the country, the state, the province, the region. Elizabethan times do show that market support at art can be truly wonderful. We have plenty of that today. But if you're just, say, appointed to be chair of the NEA and you've got to make decisions, I'm not sure how knowing about Elizabethan theatre would help you in any direct way.
Henry What do you think of the idea that the long history of arts funding is a move away from a small group, an individual patronage where taste was very important, towards a kind of institutional patronage, which became much more bureaucratic? And so one reason why we keep arguing about arts funding now is that a lot of it exhibits bad taste because the committee has to sort of agree on various things. And if we could reallocate somewhat towards individual patronage, we'd do better.
Tyler I would agree with the latter two-thirds of that. How you describe earlier arts funding I think is more complicated than what you said. A lot of it is just people doing things voluntarily at zero pecuniary cost, like singing songs, songs around the campfire, or hymns in church, rather than it being part of a patronage model. But I think it's way overly bureaucratized. The early National Endowment for the Arts in the 1960s just let smart people make decisions with a minimum of fuss. And of course we should go back to that. Of course we won't. We send half the money to the state's arts agencies, which can be mediocre or just interested in economic development and a new arts center, as opposed to actually stimulating creativity per se. More over time is spent on staff. There are all these pressures from Congress, things you can't fund. It's just become far less effective, even though it spends somewhat more money. So that's a problem in many, many countries.
Henry What Shakespeare critics do you like reading?
Tyler For all his flaws, I still think Harold Bloom is worthwhile. I know he's gotten worse and worse as a critic and as a Shakespeare critic. Especially if you're younger, you need to put aside the Harold Bloom you might think you know and just go to some earlier Bloom. Those short little books he edited, where for a given Shakespeare play he'll collect maybe a dozen essays and write eight or ten pages at the front, those are wonderful. But Bradley, William Hazlitt, the two Goddard volumes, older works, I think are excellent. But again, if you just go, if you can, to a university library, go to the part on the shelf where there's criticism on a particular play and just pull down five to ten titles and don't even select for them and just bring those home. I think you'll learn a lot.
Henry So you don't like The Invention of the Human by Bloom?
Tyler Its peaks are very good, but there's a lot in it that's embarrassing. I definitely recommend it, but you need to recommend it with the caveat that a lot of it is over the top or bad. It doesn't bother me. But if someone professional or academic tells me they're totally put off by the book, I don't try to talk them out of that impression. I just figure they're a bit hopelessly stuck on judging works by their worst qualities.
Henry In 2018, you wrote this, “Shakespeare, by the way, is Girard's most important precursor. Also throw in the New Testament, Hobbes, Tocqueville, and maybe Montaigne.” Tell us what you mean by that.
Tyler That was pretty good for me to have written that. Well, in Shakespeare, you have rivalrous behavior. You have mimetic desire. You have the importance of twinning. There's ritual sacrifice in so many of the plays, including the political ones. Girard's title, Violence and the Sacred, also comes from Shakespeare. As you well know, the best Gerard book, Theater of Envy, is fully about Shakespeare. All of Girard is drenched with Shakespeare.
Henry I actually only find Girard persuasive on Shakespeare. The further I get away from that, the more I'm like, this is super overstated. I just don't think this is how humans ... I think this is too mono-explanation of humans. When I read the Shakespeare book, I think, wow, I never understood Midsummer Night's Dream until I read Girard.
Tyler I think it's a bit like Harold Bloom. There's plenty in Girard you can point to as over the top. I think also for understanding Christianity, he has something quite unique and special and mostly correct. Then on other topics, it's anthropologically very questionable, but still quite stimulating. I would defend it on that basis, as I would Harold Girard.
Henry No, I like Gerard, but I feel like the Shakespeare book gets less attention than the others.
Tyler That's right. It's the best one and it's also the soundest one. It's the truly essential one.
Henry How important was Shakespeare in the development of individualism?
Tyler Probably not at all, is my sense. Others know more about the history than I do, but if I think of 17th century England, where some strands of individualist thought come from, well, part of it is coming from the French Huguenots and not from Shakespeare. A lot of it is coming from the Bible and not from Shakespeare. The levelers, John Locke, some of that is coming from English common law and not from Shakespeare. Then there's the ancient world. I don't quite see a strong connection to Shakespeare, but I'd love it if you could talk me into one.
Henry My feeling is that the 1570s are the time when diaries begin to become personal records rather than professional records. What you get is a kind of Puritan self-examination. They'll write down, I said this, I did this, and then in the margin they'll put, come back and look at this and make sure you don't do this again. This new process of overhearing yourself is a central part of what Shakespeare's doing in his drawing. I think this is the thing that Bloom gets right, is that as you go through the plays in order, you see the very strong development of the idea that a stock character or someone who's drawing on a tradition of stock characters will suddenly say, oh, I just heard myself say that I'm a villain. Am I a villain? I'm sort of a villain. Maybe I'm not a villain. He develops this great art of self-referential self-development. I think that's one of the reasons why Shakespeare became so important to being a well-educated English person, is that you couldn't really get that in imaginative literature.
Tyler I agree with all that, but I'm not sure the 17th century would have been all that different without Shakespeare, in literary terms, yes, but it seemed to me the currents of individualism were well underway. Other forces sweeping down from Europe, from the further north, competition across nations requiring individualism as a way of getting more wealth, the beginnings of economic thought which became individualistic and gave people a different kind of individualistic way of viewing the world. It seems so over-determined. Causally, I wouldn't ascribe much of a role to Shakespeare, but I agree with every sentence you said and what you said.
Henry Sure, but you don't think the role of imaginative literature is somehow a fundamental transmission mechanism for all of this?
Tyler Well, the Bible, I think, was quite fundamental as literature, not just as theology. So I would claim that, but keep in mind the publication and folio history of Shakespeare, which you probably know better than I do, it's not always well-known at every point in time by everyone.
Henry I think it's always well-known by the English.
Tyler I don't know, but I don't think it's dominant in the way that, say, Pilgrim's Progress was dominant for a long time.
Henry Sure, sure, sure. And you wouldn't then, what would you say about later on, that modern European liberalism is basically the culture of novel reading and that we live in a society that's shaped by that? Do you have the same thing, like it's not causal?
Tyler I don't know. That's a tricky question. The true 19th century novel I think of as somewhat historicist, often nationalist, slightly collectivist, certainly not Marxist, but in some ways illiberal. And so many of the truly great novel writers were not so liberal. And the real liberal novels, like Mancini's The Betrothed, which I quite enjoy, but it's somewhat of a slight work, right? And it might be a slight work because it is happy and liberal and open-minded. There's something about the greatest of creators, they tend to be pessimistic or a bit nasty or there's some John Lennon in them, there's Jonathan Swift, Swift, it's complicated. In some ways he's illiberal, but he's considered a Tory and in many ways he's quite an extreme reactionary. And the great age of the novel I don't think of is so closely tied to liberalism.
Henry One of the arguments that gets made is like, you only end up with modern European liberalism through a culture where people are just spending a lot of time reading novels and imagining what it is like to be someone else, seeing from multiple different perspectives. And therefore it's less about what is the quote unquote message of the story and more about the habitual practice of thinking pluralistically.
Tyler I think I would be much more inclined to ascribe that to reading newspapers and pamphlets than novels. I think of novels as modestly reactionary in their net impact, at least in the 19th century. I think another case in point, not just Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, one of the great novelists, had bad politics, right, was through Germany in the first world war. So if you look at the very greatest novels, there's something a bit problematic about many of their creators. They're not Nazis, they're not Stalinists, but they're not where I'm at either.
Henry Now in 2017, a lot of people were complaining about Donald Trump as Julius Caesar and there was some farce about a production, I think it was put on in New York or DC maybe. And you said, no, no, no, he's not Caesar. He's more like a Shakespearean fool because he's the truth teller. What do you think of that view now?
Tyler That was a Bloomberg column I wrote, I think in 2017. And I think that's held up quite well. So there's many criticisms of Trump that he's some kind of fascist. I don't think those have held up very well. He is a remarkable orator, coiner of phrase, coiner of insults, teller of truths, combined with a lot of nonsense and just nonsense talk, like the Covfefe tweet or whatever it was. And there's something tragic about Trump that he may well fail even by his own standards. He has a phenomenal sense of humor. I think people have realized that more and more. The fact that his popularity has persisted has forced a lot of people to reexamine just Trump as an individual and to see what a truly unique talent he is, whether you like him as your president or not. And that, I think, is all Shakespearean.
Henry Some of the people around Trump now, they're trying to do DOGE and deregulation and other things. Are there Shakespearean lessons that they should be bearing in mind? Should we send them to see the Henriad before they get started?
Tyler Send them to read the Henriad before they get started. The complicated nature of power: that the king never has the power that he needs to claim he does is quite significant. The ways in which power cannot be delegated, Shakespeare is extremely wise on. And yes, the DOGE people absolutely need to learn those lessons.
Henry The other thing I'd take from the Henriad is time moves way quicker than anyone thinks it does. Even the people who are trying to move quite quickly in the play, they get taken over very rapidly by just changing-
Tyler Yes. Once things start, it's like, oh my goodness, they just keep on running and no one's really in control. And that's a Shakespearean point as well.
Henry Yeah. Here's another quote from the Bloomberg column, “given Shakespeare's brilliance in dramatizing the irrational, one of my biggest fears is that Shakespeare is indeed still a thinker for our times.” Has that come more true in recent years?
Tyler I think more true. So from my point of view, the world is getting weirder in some very good ways and in some very bad ways. The arbitrary exercise of power has become more thinkable. You see this from Putin. We may see it from China. In the Middle East, it's happened as well. So the notion also that rulers can be their own worst enemies or human beings can be their own worst enemies. I think we see more when the world is volatile than when the world is stable, almost definitionally.
Henry You once said Julius Caesar was an overrated play. Tell us why.
Tyler You know, I read it again after I wrote that and it went up in my eyes. But I suppose I still think it's a bit overrated by people who love it. It's one of these mono plays like Macbeth or Othello. It does one thing very, very well. I think the mystical elements in it I had underappreciated on earlier readings and the complexity of the characters I had underappreciated. So I feel I was a little harsh on it. But I just wouldn't put it in the underrated category. Julius Caesar is such a well-known historical figure. It's so easy for that play to become focal. And Brutus and, you know, the stabbing, the betrayal, it's a little too easy for it to become famous. And I guess that's why I think within the world of Shakespeare fans, it still might be a little overrated.
Henry It's written at a similar time to Hamlet and Twelfth Night, and I think it gets caught up in the idea that this was a great pivotal moment for Shakespeare. But actually I agree, over the years I've come to think it's really just not the equal of the other plays it's surrounded by.
Tyler Yeah, that's still my view. Absolutely. Not the equal of those two, certainly.
Henry What is the most underrated play?
Tyler I'm not sure how they're all rated. So I used to think Winter's Tale, clearly. But I've heard so many people say it's the most underrated, including you, I think. I don't know if I can believe that anymore. So I think I have to go with The Henriad, because to me that's the greatest thing Shakespeare ever did. And I don't think it's commonly recognized as such. I mean, Hamlet or King Lear would typically be nominated. And those are top, top, top, top. But I'll still go with The Henriad.
Henry You are saying Henriad above Hamlet, above Lear, above Twelfth Night.
Tyler Maybe it's not fair because you have multiple plays, right? What if, you know, there were three Hamlets? Maybe that would be better. But still, if I have to pick, no one of The Henriad comes close to Hamlet. But if you can consider it as a whole in the evolution of the story, for me it's a clear winner. And it's what I've learned the most from. And a problem with Hamlet, not Shakespeare's fault, but Hamlet became so popular you hear lesser versions of themes and ideas from Hamlet your whole life. It's a bit like seeing Mondrian on the shopping bag. That does not happen, really, with The Henriad. So that has hurt Hamlet, but without meaning it's, you know, a lesser play. King Lear, you have less of that. It's so bleak and tragic. It's harder to put on the shopping bag, so to speak. In that sense, King Lear has held up a bit better than Hamlet has.
Henry Why do you admire The Winter's Tale so much? What do you like about it?
Tyler There's some mysterious sense of beauty in it that even in other Shakespearean plays I don't feel. And a sense of miracle and wonder, also betrayal and how that is mixed in with the miracle and wonder. Somehow he makes it work. It's quite an unlikely play. And the jealousy and the charge of infidelity I take much more seriously than other readers of the play do. I don't think you can say there's a Straussian reading where she clearly fooled around on the king. But he's not just crazy, either. And there are plenty of hints that something might have happened. It's still probably better to infer it didn't happen. But it's a more ambiguous play than it is typically read as.
Henry Yes, someone said to me, ask if he thinks Hermione has an affair. And you're saying maybe.
Tyler Again, in a prediction market, I'll bet no, but we're supposed to wonder. We're not supposed to just think the king is crazy.
Henry I know you don't like to see it, but my view is that because we believe in this sudden jealousy theory, it's often not staged very well. And that's one reason why it's less popular than it ought to be.
Tyler I've only seen it once. I suspect that was true. I saw it, in fact, last year. And the second half of the play was just awful. The first half, you could question. But it was a painful experience. It was just offensively stupid. One of the great regrets of my life is I did not drive up to New York City to see Bergman present his version of Winter's Tale in Swedish. And I'm quite sure that would have been magnificent and that he would have understood it very deeply and very well. That was just stupid of me. This was, I think, in the early 90s. I forget exactly when.
Henry I think that's right. And there's a theater library where if you want to go and sit in the archive, you can see it.
Tyler I will do that at some point. Part of my worry is I don't believe their promise. I know you can read that promise on the internet, but when you actually try to find the person who can track it down for you and give you access, I have my doubts. If I knew I could do it, I would have done it by now.
Henry I'll give you the email because I think I actually found that person. Does Romeo actually love Juliet?
Tyler Of course not. It's a play about perversion and obsession and family obligation and rebellion. And there's no love between the two at all. And if you read it with that in mind, once you see that, you can't unsee it. So that's an underrated play. People think, oh, star-crossed teen romance, tragic ending, boo-hoo. That's a terrible reading. It's just a superficial work of art if that's what you think it is.
Henry I agree with you, but there are eminent Shakespeare professors who take that opinion.
Tyler Well maybe we're smarter than they are. Maybe we know more about other things. You shouldn't let yourself be intimidated by critics. They're highly useful. We shouldn't trash them. We shouldn't think they're all crummy left-wing post-modernists. But at the end of the day, I don't think you should defer to them that much either.
Henry Sure. So you're saying Juliet doesn't love Romeo?
Tyler Neither loves the other.
Henry Okay. Because my reading is that Romeo has a very strong death drive or dark side or whatever.
Tyler That's the strong motive in the play is the death drive, yeah.
Henry And what that means is that it's not his tragedy, it's her tragedy. She actually is an innocent young girl. Okay, maybe she doesn't love him, it's a crush or it's whatever, but she actually is swept up in the idea of this handsome stranger. She can get out of her family. She's super rebellious. There's that wonderful scene where she plays all sweetness and light to her nurse and then she says, I'm just lying to you all and I'm going to get out of here. Whereas he actually is, he doesn't have any romantic feeling for her. He's really quite a sinister guy.
Tyler Those are good points. I fully agree. I still would interpret that as she not loving him, but I think those are all good insights.
Henry You've never seen it staged in this way? You've never seen any one?
Tyler The best staging is that Baz Luhrmann movie I mentioned, which has an intense set of references to Haitian voodoo in Romeo and Juliet when you watch the movie. The death drive is quite clear. That's the best staging I know of, but I've never seen it on the stage ever. I've seen the Zeffirelli movie, I think another film instance of it, but no, it's the Haitian voodoo version that I like.
Henry He makes it seem like they love each other, right?
Tyler In a teenage way. I don't feel that he gets it right, but I feel he creates a convincing universe through which the play usefully can be viewed.
Henry The Mercutio death, I think, is never going to be better than in that film. What do you like about Antonin Cleopatra?
Tyler It's been a long time since I've read that. What a strong character she is. The sway people can exercise over each other. The lines are very good. It's not a top Shakespeare favorite of mine, but again, if anyone else had done it, you would just say this is one of the greatest plays ever, and it is.
Henry I think it's going to be much more of a play for our times because many people in the Trump administration are going to have that. They're torn between Rome and Egypt, as it were, and the personal conflicts are going to start getting serious for them, if you like.
Tyler There's no better writer or thinker on personal conflict than Shakespeare, right?
Henry Yes. Now, you do like Measure for Measure, but you're less keen on All's Well That Ends Well. Is that right?
Tyler I love Measure for Measure. To me, it's still somewhat underrated. I think it's risen in status. All's Well That Ends Well, I suspect you need to be good at listening to Shakespeare, which as I've already said, I'm not. It's probably much better than I realize it is for that reason. I'm not sure on the printed page it works all that well.
Henry Yeah. That's right. I think it's one of the most important plays. Why? Because I think there are two or three basic factors about Shakespeare's drama, which is like the story could often branch off in different directions. You often get the sense that he could swerve into a different genre. The point Samuel Johnson made about whenever someone's running off to the tavern, someone else is being buried, right? And a lot of the time he comes again and again to the same types of situations, the same types of characters, the same types of family set up. And he ends the plays in different ways and he makes it fall out differently. And I think Helena is very representative of a lot of these facets. Everyone thinks she's dead, but she's not dead. Sometimes it looks like it's going badly for her when actually it's going well. No one in the play ever really has an honest insight into her motives. And there comes a point, I think, when just the overall message of Shakespeare's work collectively is things go very wrong very quickly. And if you can get to some sort of happy ending, you should take it. You should be pragmatic and say, OK, this isn't the perfect marriage. This isn't the perfect king. But you know what? We could be in a civil war. Everyone could be dead. All's well that ends well. That's good advice. Let's take it.
Tyler I should reread it. Number one in my reread pile right now is Richard II, which I haven't read in a long time. And there's a new biography out about Richard II. And I'm going to read the play and the biography more or less in conjunction. And there's a filming of Richard II that I probably won't enjoy, but I'll try. And I'm just going to do that all together, probably sometime over this break. But I'll have all's well that ends well is next on my reread list. You should always have a Shakespeare to reread list, right?
Henry Always. Oh, of course. Is Shakespeare a good economic thinker?
Tyler Well, he's a great thinker. I would say he's better than a good economic thinker. He understands the motive of money, but it's never just the motive of money. And Shakespeare lowers the status of economic thinking, I would say, overall, in a good way. He's better than us.
Henry What are your thoughts on The Merchant of Venice?
Tyler Quite underrated. People have trouble with it because it is very plausibly anti-Semitic. And everyone has to preface any praise they give it with some kind of disavowal or whatever. The way I read the play, which could be wrong, but it's actually more anti-anti-Semitic than it is anti-Semitic. So the real cruel mean people are those who torment the Jew. I'm not saying Shakespeare was not in some ways prejudiced against Jews and maybe other groups, but actually reading it properly should make people more tolerant, not because they're reacting against Shakespeare's anti-Semitism, but because the proper message of the play understood at a deeper level is toleration.
Henry You teach a law and literature class, I think.
Tyler Well, I did for 20 years, but I don't anymore.
Henry Did you teach Merchant of Venice?
Tyler I taught it two or three times, yes.
Henry How did your students react to it?
Tyler Whenever I taught them Shakespeare, which was actually not that much, they always liked it, but they didn't love it. And there's some version of Shakespeare you see on the screen when it's a decent but not great filmed adaptation where there's the mechanics of the plot and you're held in suspense and then there's an ending. And I found many of them read Shakespeare in those terms and they quite enjoyed it, but somehow they didn't get it. And I think that was true for Merchant of Venice as well. I didn't feel people got hung up on the anti-Semitism point. They could put that aside and just treat it as a play, but still I didn't feel that people got it.
Henry Should we read Shakespeare in translation?
Tyler Well, many people have to. I've read some of the Schlegel translations. I think they're amazing. My wife, Natasha, who grew up in the Soviet Union, tells me there are very good Russian language translations, which I certainly believe her. The Schlegels are different works. They're more German romantic, as you might expect, but that's fine, especially if you know the original. My guess is there are some other very good translations. So in that qualified way, the translations, a few of them can be quite valuable. I worry that at some point we'll all need to read it in some sort of translation, as Chaucer is mostly already true for Chaucer. You probably don't have to read Chaucer in translation, but I do.
Henry I feel like I shouldn't read it in translation, I think.
Tyler But you do, right? Or you don't?
Henry No, I read the original. I make myself do the original.
Tyler I just can't understand the original well enough.
Henry But I put the time in when I was young, and I think you retain a sense of it. Do you think, though, if we read, let's say we read Shakespeare in a modern English version, how much are we getting?
Tyler It'll be terrible. It'll be a negative. It will poison your brain. So this, to me, will be highly unfortunate. Better to learn German and read the Schlegel than to read someone turning Shakespeare into current English. The only people who could do it maybe would be like the Trinidadians, who still have a marvelous English, and it would be a completely different work. But at least it might be something you could be proud of.
Henry I'd like to read some of that. That would be quite an exciting project.
Tyler Maybe it's been done. I don't know. But just an Americanized Hollywood version, like, no, that's just a negative. It's destructive.
Henry Now, you're very interested in the 17th century, which I think is when we first get steady economic growth, East India Company, England is settling in America.
Tyler Political parties. Some notion of the rule of law. A certain theory of property rights. Very explicit individualism. Social contract theories. You get Hobbes, Isaac Newton, calculus. We could go on. Some people would say, well, Westphalia, you get the modern nation state. That to me is a vaguer date to pin that on. But again, it's a claim you can make of a phenomenal century. People aren't that interested in it anymore, I think.
Henry How does Shakespeare fit into this picture?
Tyler Well, if you think of the years, if you think of the best ones, they start, like what, 1598, 1599. And then by 1600, they're almost all just wonderful. He's a herald. I don't think he's that causal. But he's a sign, the first totally clear sign that all the pieces have fallen into place. And we know the 17th century gave us our greatest thinker. And in terms of birth, not composition, it gave us our greatest composer, Bach.
Henry So we can't have Shakespeare without all of this economic and philosophic and political activity. He's sort of, those things are necessary conditions for what he's doing.
Tyler He needed the 16th century, and there's some very good recent books on how important the 16th century was for the 17th century. So I think more and more, as I read more, I'll come to see the roots of the 17th and the 16th century. And Shakespeare is reflecting that by bridging the two.
Henry What are the recent books that you recommend about the 16th century?
Tyler Oh, I forget the title, but there's this book about Elizabethan England, came out maybe three or four years ago, written by a woman. And it just talks about markets and commerce and creativity, surging during that time. In a way, obvious points, but she put them together better than anyone else had. And there's this other new German book about the 16th century. It's in my best of the year list that I put up on Marginal Revolution, and I forget the exact title, but I've been reading that slowly. And that's very good. So I expect to make further intellectual moves in that direction.
Henry Was Shakespeare anti-woke?
Tyler I don't know what that means in his context. He certainly understands the real truths are deeper, but to pin the word anti on him is to make him smaller. And like Harold Bloom, I will refuse to do that.
Henry You don't see some sense in which ... A lot of people have compared wokeness to the Reformation, right? I mean, it's a kind of weak comparison.
Tyler Yes, but only some strands of it. You wouldn't say Luther was woke, right?
Henry But you don't see some way in which Shakespeare is, not in an anti way, in a complicated way, but like a reaction against some of these forces in the way that Swift would be a reaction against certain forces in his time.
Tyler Well I'm not even sure what Shakespeare's religion was. Some people claim he was Catholic. To me that's plausible, but I don't know of any clear evidence. He does not strike me as very religious. He might be a lapsed Catholic if I had to say. I think he simply was always concerned with trying to view and present things in a deeper manner and there were so many forces he could have been reacting against with that one. I don't know exactly what it was in the England of his time that specifically he was reacting against. If someone says, oh, it was the strand of Protestant thought, I would say fine, it might have been that. A la Peter Thiel, couldn't you say it's over determined and name 47 other different things as well?
Henry Now, if you were talking to rationalists, effective altruists, people from Silicon Valley, all these kinds of groups, would you say to them, you should read Shakespeare, you should read fiction, or would you just say, you're doing great, don't worry that you're missing out on this?
Tyler Well, I'm a little reluctant to just tell people you should do X. I think what I've tried to do is to be an example of doing X and hope that example is somewhat contagious. Other people are contagious on me, as for instance, you have been. That's what I like to do. Now, it's a question, if someone needs a particular contagion, does that mean it's high marginal value or does it mean, in some sense, they're immue from the bug and you can't actually get them interested? It can go either way. Am I glad that Peter Singer has specialized in being Peter Singer, even though I disagree with much of it? I would say yes. Peter had his own homecoming. As far as I know, it was not Shakespearean, but when he wrote that book about the history of Vienna and his own family background, that was in a sense Peter doing his version of turning Shakespearean. It was a good book and it deepened his thought, but at the end of the day, I also see he's still Peter Singer, so I don't know. I think the Shakespearean perspective itself militates a bit against telling people they should read Shakespeare.
Henry Sure. Patrick Collison today has tweeted about, I think, 10 of the great novels that he read this year. It's a big, long tweet with all of his novels.
Tyler Yeah, it's wonderful.
Henry Yeah, it's great. At the end, he basically says the reason to read them is just that they're great. Appreciation of excellence is a good thing for its own sake. You're not going to wrench a utilitarian benefit out of this stuff. Is that basically your view?
Tyler I fully agree with that, but he might slightly be underrating the utilitarian benefits. If you read a particular thing, whatever it is, it's a good way of matching with other people who will deepen you. If it's Shakespeare, or if it's science fiction, or if it's economics, I think there's this big practical benefit from the better matching. I think, actually, Patrick himself, over time in his life, he will have a different set of friends, somewhat, because he wrote that post, and that will be good.
Henry There's a utilitarian benefit that we both love Bleak House, therefore we can talk about it. This just opens up a lot of conversation and things for us that we wouldn't otherwise get.
Tyler We're better friends, and we're more inclined to chat with each other, do this podcast, because we share that. That's clearly true in our case. I could name hundreds of similar cases, myself, people I know. That's important. So much of life is a matching problem, which includes matching to books, but also, most importantly, matching to people.
Henry You're what? You're going to get better matching with better books, because Bleak House is such a great book. You're going to get better opportunities for matching.
Tyler Of course, you'll understand other books better. There's something circular in that. I get it. A lot of value is circular, and the circle is how you cash in, not leaving the circle, so that's fine.
Henry You don't think there's a ... I mean, some of the utilitarian benefits that are claimed like it gives you empathy, it improves your EQ or whatever, I think this is all complete rubbish.
Tyler I'd love to see the RCTs, but in the prediction markets, I'll bet no. But again, I have an open mind. If someone had evidence, they could sway me, but I doubt it. I don't see it.
Henry But I do think literature is underrated as a way of thinking.
Tyler Yes, absolutely, especially by people we are likely to know.
Henry Right. And that is quite a utilitarian benefit, right? If you can get yourself into that mindset, that is directly useful.
Tyler I agree. The kind of career I've had, which is too complicated to describe for those of you who don't know it, but I feel I could not have had it without having read a lot of fiction.
Henry Right. And I think that would be true for a lot of people, even if they don't recognize it directly in their own lives, right?
Tyler Yes. In Silicon Valley, you see this huge influence of Lord of the Rings. Yes. And that's real, I think. It's not feigned, and that's also a great book.
Henry One of the best of the 20th century, no doubt.
Tyler Absolutely. And the impact it has had on people still has. It's an example of some classics get extremely elevated, like Shakespeare, Austen, and also Tolkien. It's one of them that just keeps on rising.
Henry Ayn Rand is quite influential.
Tyler Increasingly so. And that has held up better than I ever would have thought. Depends on the book. It's complicated, but yes, you have to say, held up better than one ever would have thought.
Henry Are you going to go and do a reread?
Tyler I don't think I can. I feel the newspaper is my reread of Atlas Shrugged, that suffices.
Henry Is GPT good at Shakespeare, or LLMs generally?
Tyler They're very useful for fiction, I've found. It was fantastic for reading Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate. I have never used them for Shakespeare, not once. That's an interesting challenge, because it's an earlier English. There's a depth in Shakespeare that might exceed current models. I'd love to see a project at some point in time to train AI for Shakespeare the way some people are doing it for Math Olympiads. But finding the human graders would be tough, though not impossible. You should be one of them. I would love that. I hope some philanthropist makes that happen.
Henry Agreed. We're here, and we're ready.
Tyler Yes, very ready.
Henry What do you think about Shakespeare's women?
Tyler The best women in all of fiction. They're marvelous, and they're attractive, and they're petulant, and they're romantic, and they're difficult, and they're stubborn, or whatever you want, it's in there. Just phenomenal. It's a way in which Shakespeare, again, I don't want to say anti-woke, but he just gives you a much deeper, better vision than the wokes would give you. Each one is such a distinctive voice. Yeah, fantastic. In a funny way, he embodies a lot of woke insights. The ways in which gender becomes malleable in different parts of stories is very advanced for his time.
Henry It's believable also. The thing that puzzles me, so believable. What puzzles me is he's so polyphonic, and he represents that way of thinking so well, but I get the sense that John Stuart Mill, who wrote the Bentham essay and everything, just wasn't that interested in Shakespeare relative to the other things he was reading.
Tyler He did write a little bit on Shakespeare, didn't he? But not much. But it wasn't wonderful. It was fine, but not like the Bentham Coleridge.
Henry I think I've seen it in letters where he's like, oh, Shakespeare, pretty good. This, to me, is a really weird gap in the history of literature.
Tyler But this does get to my point, where I don't think Shakespeare was that important for liberalism or individualism. The people who were obsessed with Shakespeare, as you know, were the German romantics, with variants, but were mostly illiberal or non-liberal. That also, to me, makes sense.
Henry That's a good point. That's a good challenge. My last question is, you do a lot of talent spotting and talent assessing. How do you think about Shakespeare's career?
Tyler I feel he is someone I would not have spotted very well. I feel bad about that. We don't know that much about him. As you well know, people still question if Shakespeare was Shakespeare. That's not my view. I'm pretty orthodox on the matter. But what the signs would have been in those early plays that he would have, say, by so far have exceeded Marlowe or even equaled Marlowe, I definitely feel I would have had a Zoom call with him and said, well, send me a draft, and read the early work, and concluded he would be like second-tier Marlowe, and maybe given him a grant for networking reasons, totally missed the boat. That's how I assess, how I would have assessed Shakespeare at the time, and that's humbling.
Henry Would you have been good at assessing other writers of any period? Do you think there are other times when you would have?
Tyler If I had met young Thomas Mann, I think there's a much greater chance I would have been thrilled. If I had met young Johann Sebastian Bach, I think there's a strong chance I would have been thrilled. Now, music is different. It's like chess. You can excel at quite a young age. But there's something about the development of Shakespeare where I think it is hard to see where it's headed early on. And it's the other question, how would I have perceived Shakespeare's work ethic? There's different ways you could interpret the biography here. But the biography of Bach, or like McCartney, clearly just obsessed with work ethic. You could not have missed it if you met young Bach, I strongly suspect. But Shakespeare, it's not clear to me you would see the work ethic early on or even later on.
Henry No, no. I agree with that, actually.
Tyler Same with Goethe. If I met early Goethe, my guess is I would have felt, well, here's the next Klopstock, which is fine, worthy of a grand. But Goethe was far more than that. And he always had these unfinished works. And you would, oh, come on, you're going to finish this one. Like you'd see Werther. OK, you made a big splash. But is your second novel just going to bomb? I think those would have been my hesitations. But I definitely would have funded Goethe as the next Klopstock, but been totally wrong and off base.
Henry Right. And I think the thing I took away from the A.N. Wilson biography, which you also enjoyed recently, was I was amazed just how much time Goethe didn't spend working. Like I knew he wasn't always working, but there was so much wasted time in his life.
Tyler Yes, but I do wonder with that or any biography, and I don't mean this as a criticism of Wilson, I think we know much less than we think we do about earlier times in general. So he could have been doing things that don't turn up in any paperwork. Sure, sure, sure. So I'm not sure how lazy he was, but I would just say, unlike Bach or say Paul McCartney, it's not evident that he was the world's hardest worker.
Henry And Mozart, would you have? How do you feel about Mozart's early career?
Tyler Well, Mozart is so exceptional, so young, it's just very easy to spot. I don't I don't even think there's a puzzle there unless you're blind. Now, I don't love Mozart before, I don't know, like the K-330s maybe, but still as a player, even just as a lower quality composer, I think you would bet the house on Mozart at any age where you could have met him and talked to him.
Henry So you think K-100s, you can see the beginnings of the great symphonies, the great concertos?
Tyler Well, I would just apply the Cowen test at how young in age was this person trying at all? And that would just dominate and I wouldn't worry too much about how good it was. And if I heard Piano Concerto No. 9, which is before K-330, I'm pretty sure that's phenomenal. But even if I hadn't heard that, it's like this guy's trying. He's going to be on this amazing curve. Bet the house on Mozart. It's a no-brainer. If you don't do that, you just shouldn't be doing talent at all. He's an easy case. He's one of the easiest cases you can think of.
Henry Tyler Cowen, this was great. Thank you very much.
Tyler Thank you very much, Henry.
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Who else in literature today could be more interesting to interview than Brandon Taylor, the author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and The Late Americans, as well as the author of popular reviews and the sweater weather Substack? We talked about so much, including: Chopin and who plays him best; why there isn’t more tennis in fiction; writing fiction on a lab bench; being a scientific critic; what he has learned working as a publisher; negative reviews; boring novels; Jane Austen. You’ll also get Brandon’s quick takes on Iris Murdoch, Jonathan Franzen, Lionel Trilling, György Lukács, and a few others; the modern critics he likes reading; and the dead critics he likes reading.
Brandon also talked about how his new novel is going to be different from his previous novels. He told me:
I no longer really want to be starting my books, quote unquote, in media res. I want my books to feel like books. I don’t want my books to feel like movies. And I don't want them to feel like treatments for film. And so I want to sort of bring back all of what a novel can do in terms of its structure and in terms of its form and stuff like that. And so it means starting books, you know, with this sort of Dickensian voice of God speaking from on high, sort of summing up an era. And I think also sort of allowing the narrators in my work to dare to sum up, allowing characters in my work to have ideologies and to argue about those ideologies. I feel like that is a thing that was sort of denuded from the American novel for a lot of millennials and just sort of like trying to put back some of that old fashioned machinery that was like stripped out of the novel. And seeing what of it can still function, seeing, trying to figure out if there's any juice left in these modes of representation.
I have enjoyed Brandon’s fiction (several people I recommend him to have loved Real Life) and I think he’s one of the best critics working today. I was delighted to interview him.
Oh, and he’s a Dickens fan!
Transcript (AI produced, lightly formatted by me)
Henry: Today I am talking to Brandon Taylor, the author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and The Late Americans. Brandon is also a notable book reviewer and of course he writes a sub stack called Sweater Weather. Brandon, welcome.
Brandon: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Henry: What did you think of the newly discovered Chopin waltz?
Brandon: Um, I thought, I mean, I remember very vividly waking up that day and there being a new waltz, but it was played by Lang Lang, which I did not. I don't know that, like, he's my go-to Chopin interpreter. But I don't know, I was, I was excited by it. Um, I don't know, it was in a world sort of dominated by this ethos of like nothing new under the sun. It felt wonderfully novel. I don't know that it's like one of Chopin's like major, I don't know that it's like major. Um, it's sort of definitively like middle of the road, middle tier Chopin, I think. But I enjoyed it. I played it like 20 times in a row.
Henry: I like those moments because I like, I like it when people get surprised into realizing that like, it's not fixed what we know about the world and you can even actually get new Chopin, right?
Brandon: I mean, it felt a little bit like when Beyonce did her first big surprise drop. It was like new Chopin just dropped. Oh my God. All my sort of classical music nerd group texts were buzzing. It felt like a real moment, actually.
Henry: And I think it gives people a sense of what art was like in the past. You can go, oh my God, new Chopin. Like, yes, those feelings are not just about modern culture, right? That used to happen with like, oh my God, a new Jane Austen book is here.
Brandon: Oh, I know. Well, I mean, I was like reading a lot of Emile Zola up until I guess late last year. And at some point I discovered that he was like an avid amateur photographer. And in like the French Ministry of Culture is like digitized a lot of his glass plate negatives. And one of them is like a picture that Zola has taken of Manet's portrait of him. And it's just like on a floor somewhere. Like he's like sort of taken this like very rickety early camera machinery to this place where this portrait is and like taken a picture of it. It's like, wow. Like you can imagine that like Manet's like, here's this painting I did of you. And Zola's like, ah, yes, I'm going to take a picture to commemorate it. And so I sort of love that.
Henry: What other of his photos do you like?
Brandon: Well, there's one of him on a bike riding toward the camera. That's really delightful to me because it like that impulse is so recognizable to me. There are all these photos that he took of his mistress that were also just like, you can like, there are also photographs of his children and of his family. And again, those feel so like recognizable to me. He's not even like a very good photographer. It's just that he was taking pictures of his like daily life, except for his kind of stunt photos where he's riding the bike. And it's like, ah, yes, Zola, he would have been great with an iPhone camera.
Henry: Which pianists do you like for Chopin?
Brandon: Which pianists do I love for Chopin? I like Pollini a lot. Pollini is amazing. Pollini the elder, not Pollini the younger. The younger is not my favorite. And he died recently, Maurizio Pollini. He died very recently. Maybe he's my favorite. I love, I love Horowitz. Horowitz is wonderful at Chopin. But it's obviously it's like not his, you know, you don't sort of go to Horowitz for Chopin, I guess. But I love his Chopin. And sometimes Trifonov. Trifonov has a couple Chopin recordings that I really, really like. I tend not to love Trifonov as much.
Henry: Really?
Brandon: I know it's controversial. It's very controversial. I know. Tell me why. I, I don't know. He's just a bit of a banger to me. Like, like he's sort of, I don't know, his playing is so flashy. And he feels a bit like a, like a, like a keyboard basher to me sometimes.
Henry: But like, do you like his Bach?
Brandon: You know, I haven't done a deep dive. Maybe I should do a sort of more rigorous engagement with Trifonov. But yeah, I don't, he's just not, he doesn't make my heart sing. I think he's very good at Bach.
Henry: What about a Martha Argerich?
Brandon: Oh, I mean, she's incredible. She's incredible. I bought that sort of big orange box out of like all of her, her sort of like masterwork recordings. And she's incredible. She has such feel for Chopin. But she doesn't, I think sometimes people can make Chopin feel a little like, like treacly, like, like a little too sweet. And she has this perfect understanding of his like rhythm and his like inner nuances and like the crispness in his compositions. Like she really pulls all of that out. And I love her. She has such, obviously great dexterity, but like a real sort of exquisite sensitivity to the rhythmic structures of Chopin.
Henry: You listen on CD?
Brandon: No, I listen on vinyl and I listen on streaming, but mostly vinyl. Mostly vinyl? Yeah, mostly vinyl. I know it's very annoying. No, no, no, no, no.
Henry: Which, what are the good speakers?
Brandon: I forget where I bought these speakers from, but I sort of did some Googling during the pandemic of like best speakers to use. I have a U-Turn Audio, U-Turn Orbital record player. And so I was just looking for good speakers that were compatible and like wouldn't take up a ton of space in my apartment because I was moving to New York and had a very tiny, tiny apartment. So they're just from sort of standard, I forget the brand, but they've served me well these past few years.
Henry: And do you like Ólafsson? He's done some Chopin.
Brandon: Who?
Henry: Víkingur Ólafsson. He did the Goldbergs this year, but he's done some Chopin before. I think he's quite good.
Brandon: Oh, that Icelandic guy?
Henry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the glasses? That's right. And the very neat hair.
Brandon: Yes. Oh, he's so chic. He's so chic. I don't know his Chopin. I know his, there's another series that he did somewhat recently that I'm more familiar with. But he is really good. He has good Beethoven, Víkingur.
Henry: Yeah.
Brandon: And normally I don't love Beethoven, but like—
Henry: Really? Why? Why? What's wrong with Beethoven? All these controversial opinions about music.
Brandon: I'm not trying to have controversial opinions. I think I'm, well, I'm such a, I'm such, I mean, I'm just like a dumb person. And so like, I don't, I don't have a really, I feel like I don't have the robust understanding to like fully appreciate Beethoven and all of his sort of like majesty. And so maybe I've just not heard good Beethoven and I need to sort of go back and sort of get a real understanding of it. But I just tend not to like it. It feels like, I don't know, like grandma's living room music to me sometimes.
Henry: What other composers do you enjoy?
Brandon: Oh, of course.
Henry: Or other music generally, right?
Brandon: Rachmaninoff is so amazing to me. There was, of course, Bach. Brahms. Oh, I love Brahms, but like specifically the intermezzi. I love the intermezzi. I recently fell in love with, oh, his name is escaping me now, but he, I went to a concert and they sort of did a Brahms intermezzi. And they also played this, I think he was an Austrian composer. And his music was like, it wasn't experimental, but it was like quite, I had a lot of dissonance in it. And I found it like really interesting and like really moving actually. And so I did a sort of listening to that constantly. Oh, I forget his name. But Brahms, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, love Rachmaninoff. I have a friend who says that Rachmaninoff writes Negro spirituals. And I love that theory that Rachmaninoff's music is like the music of the slaves. It just, I don't know. I really, that really resonates with me spiritually. Which pieces, which Rachmaninoff symphonies, concertos? Yeah, the concertos. But like specifically, like I have a friend who said that Rach II sounded to her like the sort of spiritual cry of like the slaves. And we were at like a hangout with like mostly Black people. And she like stopped playing like Juvenile, like the rapper. And she put on Rach II. And we just like sat there and listened. And it did feel like something powerful had entered the room. Yeah, but he's my guy. I secretly really, really love him. I like Liszt, but like it really depends on the day and the time for him. He makes good folk music, Liszt. I love his folky, his folk era.
Henry: What is it that you enjoy about tennis?
Brandon: What do I enjoy about tennis? I love the, I love not thinking. I love being able to hit the ball for hours on end and like not think. And like, it's the one part of my life. It's the one time in my life where my experience is like totally unstructured. And so like this morning, I went to a 7am drill and play class where you do drills for an hour. Then you play doubles for an hour. And during that first hour of drills, I was just like hitting the ball. I was at the mercy of the guy feeding us the ball. And I didn't have a single thought about books or literature or like the status of my soul or like the nature of American democracy. It was just like, did I hit that ball? Well, did I hit it kind of off center? Were there tingles in my wrist? Yes or no. Like it was just very, very grounding in the moment. And I think that is what I love about it. Do you like to watch tennis? Oh, yeah, constantly. Sometimes when I'm in a work meeting, the Zoom is here and the tennis is like playing in the background. Love tennis, love to watch, love to play, love to think about, to ponder. Who are the best players for you? Oh, well, the best players, my favorite players are Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Stanislas Wawrinka, love Wawrinka. And I was a really big Davydenko head back in the day. Nikolai Davydenko was this Russian player who had, he was like a metronome. He just like would not miss. Yeah, those are my favorites. Right now, the guy I'm sort of rooting for who's still active is Kasper Rud, who's this Norwegian guy. And I love him because he just looks like some guy. Like he just looks like he should be in a seminary somewhere. I love it. I love, I love his normalness. He just looks like an NPC. And I'm drawn to that in a tennis player.
Henry: It's hard to think of tennis in novels. Why is that?
Brandon: Well, I think a lot of people don't, well, I think part of it is a lot of novelists. Part of it is a lot of novelists don't play sports. I think that they, at least Americans, I can't speak for other parts of the world, but in America, a lot of novelists are not doing sports. So that's one. And I think two, like, you know, like with anything, I think that tennis has not been subjected to the same schemes of narrativization that like other things are. And so like it's, a lot of novelists just like don't see a sort of readily dramatizable thing in tennis. Even though if you like watch tennis and like listen to tennis commentary, they are always erecting narratives. They're like, oh yeah, she's been on a 19 match losing streak. Is this where she turns it around? And to me, tennis is like a very literary sport because tennis is one of those sports where it's all about the matchup. It's like your forehand to my backhand, like no matter how well I play against everyone else, like it's you and me locked in the struggle. And like that to me feels incredibly literary. And it is so tied to your individual psychology as well. Like, I don't know, I endlessly am fascinated by it. And indeed, I got an idea for a tennis novel the other day that I'm hopefully going to write in three to five years. We'll see.
Henry: Very good. How did working in a lab influence your writing?
Brandon: Well, somewhat directly and materially in the case of my first book, because I wrote it while I was working in the lab and it gave me weirdly like time and structure to do that work where I would be pipetting. And then while I was waiting for an assay or a experiment to run or finish, I would have 30 minutes to sit down and write.
Henry: So you were writing like at the lab bench?
Brandon: Oh, yeah, absolutely. One thousand percent. I would like put on Philip Glass's score for the hours and then just like type while my while the centrifuge was running or whatever. And and so like there's that impression sort of baked into the first couple books. And then I think more, I guess, like spiritually or broadly, it influenced my work because it taught me how to think and how to organize time and how to organize thoughts and how to sort of pursue long term, open ended projects whose results may or may not, you know, fail because of something that you did or maybe you didn't do. And that's just the nature of things. Who knows? But yeah, I think also just like discipline, the discipline to sort of clock in every day. And to sort of go to the coalface and do the work. And that's not a thing that is, you know. That you just get by working in a lab, but it's certainly something that I acquired working in a lab.
Henry: Do you think it's affected your interest in criticism? Because there's there are certain types of critic who seem to come from a scientific background like Helen Vendler. And there's something something about the sort of the precision and, you know, that certain critics will refuse to use critical waffle, like the human condition. And they won't make these big, vague gestures to like how this can change the way we view society. They're like, give me real details. Give me real like empirical criticism. Do you think this is — are you one of these people?
Brandon: Yeah, yeah, I think I'm, you know, I'm all about what's on the page. I'm all about the I'm not gonna go rooting in your biography for not gonna go. I'm not I'm not doing that. It's like what you brought to me on the page is what you've brought to me. And that is what I will be sort of coming over. I mean, I think so. I mean, very often when critics write about my work, or when people respond to my work, they sort of describe it as being put under a microscope. And I do think like, that is how I approach literature. It's how I approach life. If there's ever a problem or a question put to me, I just sort of dissect it and try to get down to its core bits and its core parts. And and so yeah, I mean, if that is a scientific way of doing things, that's certainly how I but also I don't know any other way to think like that's sort of that's sort of how I was trained to think about stuff. You've been to London. I have. What did you think of it? The first time I didn't love it. The second and third times I had a good time, but I felt like London didn't love me back. London is the only place on earth I've ever been where people have had a hard time understanding me like I like it's the only place where I've like attempted to order food or a drink or something in a store or a cafe or a restaurant. And the waiters like turned to my like British hosts and asked them to translate. And that is an entirely foreign experience for me. And so London and I have like a very contentious relationship, I would say.
Henry: Now, you've just published four classic novels.
Brandon: Yes.
Henry: George Gissing, Edith Wharton, Victor Hugo and Sarah Orne Jewett. Why did you choose those four writers, those four titles?
Brandon: Oh, well, once we decided that we were going to do a classics imprint, you know, then it's like, well, what are we going to do? And I'm a big Edith Wharton fan. And there are all of these Edith Wharton novels that Americans don't really know about. They know Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence. And if they are an English major, they maybe know her for The House of Mirth. Or like maybe they know her for The Custom of the Country if they're like really into reading. But then they sort of think of her as a novelist of the 19th century. And she's writing all of these books set in the 1920s and about the 1920s. And so it felt important to show people like, oh, this is a writer who died a lot later than you think that she did. And whose creative output was, you know, pretty, who was like a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald in a lot of ways. Like, these books are being published around the same time as The Great Gatsby. And to sort of, you know, bring attention to a part of her over that, like, people don't know about. And like, that's really exciting to me. And Sarah Orne Jewett, I mean, I just really love The Country of the Pointed Furs. I love that book. And I found it in like in a 10 cents bin at a flea market one time. And it's a book that people have tried to bring back. And there have been editions of it. But it just felt like if we could get two people who are really cool to talk about why they love that book, we could sort of have like a real moment. And Sarah Orne Jewett was like a pretty big American writer. Like she was a pretty significant writer. And she was like really plugged in and she's not really read or thought about now. And so that felt like a cool opportunity as well to sort of create a very handsome edition of this book and to sort of talk about a bit why she matters. And the guessing of it all is we were going to do New Grub Street. And then my co-editor thought, well, The Odd Women, I think, is perhaps more relevant to our current moment than New Grub Street necessarily. And it would sort of differentiate us from the people, from the presses that are doing reissues of New Grub Street, because there's just been a new edition of that book. And nobody in America really knows The Odd Women. And it's a really wonderful novel. It's both funny and also like really biting in its satire and commentary. So we thought, oh, it'll be fun to bring this writer to Americans who they've never heard of in a way that will speak to them in a lot of ways. And the Victor Hugo, I mean, you know, there are Hugos that people know all about. And then there are Hugos that no one knows about. And Toilers of the Sea was a passion project for my co-editor. She'd read it in Guernsey. That's where she first discovered that book. And it really meant a lot to her. And I read it and really loved it. I mean, it was like Hugo at his most Hugo. Like, it's a very, it's a very, like, it's a very abundant book. And it's so wild and strange and changeful. And so I was like, oh, that seems cool. Let's do it. Let's put out Toilers of the Sea. So that's a bit of why we picked each one.
Henry: And what have you learned from being on the other side of things now that you're the publisher?
Brandon: So much. I've learned so much. And indeed, I just, I was just asked by my editor to do the author questionnaire for the novel that I have coming out next. And I thought, yes, I will do this. And I will do it immediately. Because now I know, I know how important these are. And I know how early and how far in advance these things need to be locked in to make everyone's life easier. I think I've learned a bit about the sometimes panicked scramble that happens to get a book published. I've learned about how hard it is to wrangle blurbs. And so I think I'm a little more forgiving of my publishers. But they've always been really great to me. But now I'm like, oh, my gosh, what can I do for you? How can I help you make this publication more of a success?
Henry: Do you think that among literary people generally, there's a lack of appreciation of what business really involves in some of the senses you're talking about? I feel like I see a lot of either indifferent or hostile attitudes towards business or commerce or capitalism, late stage capitalism or whatever. And I sometimes look at it and I'm like, I don't think you guys really know what it takes to just like get stuff done. You know what I mean? Like, it's a lot of grind. I don't think it's a big nasty thing. It's just a lot of hard work, right?
Brandon: Yeah, I mean, 1000%. Or if it's not a sort of misunderstanding, but a sort of like disinterest in like, right, like a sort of high minded, like, oh, that's just the sort of petty grimy commerce of it all. I care about the beauty and the art. And it's just like, friend, we need booksellers to like, sell this. I mean, to me, the part of it that is most to me, like the most illustrative example of this in my own life is that when I first heard how my editor was going to be describing my book, I was like, that's disgusting. That's horrible. Why are you talking about my race? Why are you talking about like my sexuality? Like, this is horrible. Why can't you just like talk about the plot of the book? Like, what is the matter with you? And then I had, you know, I acquired and edited this book called Henry Henry, which is a queer contemporary retelling of the Henry ad. And it's a wonderful novel. It's so delightful. And I had to go into our sales conference where we are talking to the people whose job it is to sell that book into bookstores to get bookstores to take that book up. And I had to write this incredibly craven description of this novel. And as I was writing it, I was like, I hope Alan, the author, I hope Alan never sees this. He never needs to hear how I'm talking about this book. And as I was doing it, I was like, I will never hold it against my editor again for writing this like, cheesy, cringy copy. Because it's like you, like, you so believe in the art of that book, so much that you want it to give it every fighting chance in the marketplace. And you need to arm your sales team with every weapon of commerce they need to get that book to succeed so that when readers pick it up, they can appreciate all of the beautiful and glorious art of it. And I do think that people, you know, like, people don't really kind of, people don't really understand that. And I do think that part of that is publishing's fault, because they are, they've been rather quick to elide the distinctions between art and commerce. And so like publishing has done a not great job of sort of giving people a lot of faith in its understanding that there's a difference between art and commerce. But yeah, I think, I think there's a lot of misapprehension out there about like, what goes into getting bookstores to acquire that book.
Henry: What are the virtues of negative book reviews?
Brandon: I was just on a panel about this. I mean, I mean, hopefully a negative book review, like a positive review, or like any review, will allow a reader or the audience to understand the book in a new way, or to create a desire in the reader to pick up the book and see if they agree or disagree or that they, that they have something to argue with or push against as they're reading. You know, when I'm writing a negative review, when I'm writing a review that I feel is trending toward negative, I should say, I always try to like, I don't know, I try to always remember that like, this is just me presenting my experience of the book and my take of the book. And hopefully that will be productive or useful for whoever reads the review. And hopefully that my review won't be the only thing that they read and that they will in fact, go pick up the book and see if they agree or disagree. It's hopefully it creates interesting and potentially divergent dialogues or discourses around the text. And fundamentally, I think not every critic feels this way. Not every piece of criticism is like this. But the criticism I write, I'm trying to create the conditions that will refer the reader always back to the text, be it through quotation, be it through, they're so incensed by my argument that they're going to go read the book themselves and then like, yell at me. Like, I think that that's wonderful, but like, always keeping the book at the center. But I think a negative review can, you know, it can start a conversation. It can get people talking about books, which in this culture, this phase of history feels like a win. And hopefully it can sort of be a corrective sometimes to less genuine or perceived less genuine discourses that are existing around the book.
Henry: I think even whether or not it's a question of genuine, it's for me, it's just a question of if you tell people this book is good and they give up their time and money and they discover that it's trash, you've done a really bad thing to that person. And like, there might be dozens of them compared to this one author who you've been impolite to or whatever. And it's just a question of don't lie in book, right?
Brandon: Well, yeah. I mean, hopefully people are honest, but I do feel sometimes that there is, there's like a lack of honesty. And look, I think that being like, well, I mean, maybe you'll love this. I don't love it, you know, but at least present your opinion in that way. At least be like, you know, there are many interpretations of this thing. Here's my interpretation. Maybe you'll feel differently or something like that. But I do think that people feel that there have been a great number of dishonest book reviews. Maybe there have been, maybe there have not been. I certainly have read some reviews I felt were dishonest about books that I have read. And I think that the negative book review does feel a bit like a corrective in a lot of ways, both, you know, justified or unjustified. People are like, finally, someone's being honest about this thing. But yeah, I think it's interesting. I think it's all really, I think it's all fascinating. I do think that there are some reviews though, that are negative and that are trying to be about the book, but are really about the author. There are some reviews that I have read that have been ostensibly about reviewing a text, but which have really been about, you don't like that person and you have decided to sort of like take an axe to them. And that to me feels not super productive. I wouldn't do it, but other people find it useful.
Henry: As in, you can tell that from the review or you know that from background information?
Brandon: I mean, this is all projection, of course, but like there have been some reviews where I've read, like, for example, some of the Lauren Oyler reviews, I think some of the Lauren Oyler reviews were negative and were exclusively about the text. And they sort of took the text apart and sort of dissected it and came to conclusions, some of which I agreed with, some of which I didn't agree with, but they were fundamentally about the text. And like all the criticisms referred back to the text. And then there were some that were like projecting attitudes onto the author that were more about creating this sort of vaporous shape of Lauren Oyler and then sort of poking holes in her literary celebrity or her stature as a critic or what have you. And that to me felt less productive as like a book review.
Henry: Yes. Who are your favorite reviewers?
Brandon: Ooh, my favorite reviewers. I really love Christian Lawrence. And he does my, of the critics who try to do the sort of like mini historiography of like a thing. He's my favorite because he teaches me a lot. He sort of is so good at summing up an era or summing up a phase of literary production without being like so cringe or so socialist about it. I really love, I love it when he sort of distills and dissects an era. I really like Hermione Hobie. I think she's really interesting. And she writes about books with a lot of feeling and a lot of energy. And I really love her mind. And of course, like Patricia Lockwood, of course, everyone, perhaps not everyone, but I enjoy Patricia Lockwood's criticism. You don't?
Henry: Not really.
Brandon: Oh, is it because it's too chatty? Is it too, is it too selfie?
Henry: A little bit. I think, I think that kind of criticism can work really well. But I think, I think it's too much. I think basically she's very, she's a very stylized writer and a lot of her judgments get, it gets to the point where it's like, this is the logical conclusion of what you're trying to do stylistically. And there are some zingers in here and some great lines and whatever, but we're no longer, this is no longer really a book review.
Brandon: Yeah.
Henry: Like by the, by the end of the paragraph, this, like, we didn't want to let the style go. We didn't want to lose the opportunity to cap that off. And it leads her into, I think, glibness a lot of the time.
Brandon: Yeah. I could see that. I mean, I mean, I enjoy reading her pieces, but do I understand like what's important to her at a sort of literary level? I don't know. I don't, and in that sense, like, are they, is it criticism or is it closer to like personal essay, humorous essay? I don't know. Maybe that's true. I enjoy reading them, but I get why people are like, this is a very, very strong flavor for sure.
Henry: Now you've been reading a lot of literary criticism.
Brandon: Oh yeah.
Henry: Not of the LRB variety, but of the, the old books in libraries variety. Yes. How did that start? How did, how did you come to this?
Brandon: Somewhat like ham-fistedly. I, in 2021, I had a really bad case of writer's block and I thought maybe part of the reason I had writer's block was that I didn't know anything about writing or I didn't know anything about like literature or like writing. I'd been writing, I'd published a novel. I was working on another novel. I'd published a book of stories, but like, I just like truly didn't know anything about literature really. And I thought I need some big boy ideas. I need, I need to find out what adults think about literature. And so I went to my buddy, Christian Lorenzen, and I was like, you write criticism. What is it? And what should I read? And he gave me a sort of starter list of criticism. And it was like the liberal imagination by Lionel Trilling and Guy Davenport and Alfred Kazin who wrote On Native Grounds, which is this great book on the American literary tradition and Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. And I, and then Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle. And I read all of those. And then as each one would sort of refer to a different text or person, I sort of like followed the footnotes down into this rabbit hole of like literary criticism. And now it's been a sort of ongoing project of the last few years of like reading. I always try to have a book of criticism on the go. And then earlier this year, I read Jameson's The Antimonies of Realism. And he kept talking about this Georg Lukács guy. And I was like, I guess I should go read Lukács. And so then I started reading Lukács so that I could get back to Jameson. And I've been reading Lukács ever since. I am like deep down the Lukács rabbit hole. But I'm not reading any of the socialism stuff. I told myself that I wouldn't read any of the socialism stuff and I would only read the literary criticism stuff, which makes me very different from a lot of the socialist literary critics I really enjoy because they're like Lukács, don't read in that literary criticism stuff, just read his socialism stuff. So I'm reading all the wrong stuff from Lukács, but I really, I really love it. But yeah, it sort of started because I thought I needed grown up ideas about literature. And it's been, I don't know, I've really enjoyed it. I really, really enjoy it. It's given me perhaps terrible ideas about what novels should be or do. But, you know, that's one of the side effects to reading.
Henry: Has it made, like, what specific ways has it changed how you've written since you've acquired a set of critical principles or ideas?
Brandon: Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is, part of it has to do with Lukács' idea of the totality. And, you know, I think that the sort of most direct way that it shows up in a sort of really practical way in my novel writing is that I no longer really want to be starting my books, quote unquote, in media res. Like, I don't want, I want my books to feel like books. I don't want my books to feel like movies. And I don't want them to feel like treatments for film. And so I want to sort of bring back all of what a novel can do in terms of its structure and in terms of its form and stuff like that. And so it means starting books, you know, with this sort of Dickensian voice of God speaking from on high, sort of summing up an era. And I think also sort of allowing the narrators in my work to dare to sum up, allowing characters in my work to have ideologies and to argue about those ideologies. I feel like that is a thing that was sort of denuded from the American novel for a lot of millennials and just sort of like trying to put back some of that old fashioned machinery that was like stripped out of the novel. And seeing what of it can still function, seeing, trying to figure out if there's any juice left in these modes of representation and stuff like that. And so like that, that's sort of, that's sort of abstract, but like in a concrete way, like what I'm kind of trying to resolve in my novel writing these days.
Henry: You mentioned Dickens.
Brandon: Oh, yes.
Henry: Which Dickens novels do you like?
Brandon: Now I'm afraid I'm going to say something else controversial. We love controversial. Which Dickens? I love Bleak House. I love Bleak House. I love Tale of Two Cities. It is one of the best openings ever, ever, ever, ever in the sweep of that book at once personal and universal anyway. Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities. And I also, I read Great Expectations as like a high school student and didn't like it, hated it. It was so boring. But now coming back to it, I think it, honestly, it might be the novel of our time. I think it might accidentally be a novel. I mean, it's a novel of scammers, a novel of like, interpersonal beef taken to the level of like, spiritual conflict, like it's about thieves and class, like it just feels like like that novel could have been written today about people today, like that book just feels so alive to today's concerns, which perhaps, I don't know, says something really evil about this cultural stagnation under capitalism, perhaps, but I don't know, love, love Great Expectations now.
Henry: Why are so many modern novels boring?
Brandon: Well, depends on what you mean by boring, Henry, what do you mean? Why?
Henry: I mean, you said this.
Brandon: Oh.
Henry: I mean, I happen to agree, but this is, I'm quoting you.
Brandon: Oh, yes. I remember that. I remember that review.
Henry: I mean, I can tell you why I think they're boring.
Brandon: Oh, yes, please.
Henry: So I think, I think what you said before is true. They all read like movies. And I think I very often I go in, I pick up six or seven books on the new book table. And I'm like, these openings are all just the same. You're all thinking you can all see Netflix in your head. This is not really a novel. And so the dialogue is really boring, because you kind of you can hear some actor or actress saying it. But I can't hear that because I'm the idiot stuck in the bookshop reading your Netflix script. Whereas, you know, I think you're right that a lot of those traditional forms of storytelling, they like pull you in to the to the novel. And they and they like by the end of the first few pages, you sort of feel like I'm in this funny place now. And to do in media res, like, someone needs to get shot, or something, something weird needs to be said, like, you can't just do another, another standard opening. So I think that's a big, that's a big point.
Brandon: Well, as Lukasz tells us, bourgeois realism has a, an unholy fondness for the, the average, the merely average, as opposed to the typical. And I think, yeah, a lot of it, a lot of why I think it's boring echoes you, I think that for me, what I find boring, and a lot of them is that it feels like novelists have abandoned any desire to, to have their characters or the novels themselves integrate the sort of disparate experiences within the novel into any kind of meaningful hole. And so there isn't this like sense of like things advancing toward a grander understanding. And I think a lot of it is because they've, they are writing under the assumption that like the question of why can never be answered. There can never be like a why, there can never be a sort of significance to anything. And so everything is sort of like evacuated of significance or meaning. And so you have what I've taken to calling like reality TV fiction, where the characters are just like going places and doing things, and there are no thoughts, there are no thoughts about their lives, or no thoughts about the things that they are doing, there are no thoughts about their experiences. And it's just a lot of like, like lowercase e events in their lives, but like no attempt to organize those events into any sort of meaningful hole. And I think also just like, what leads to a lot of dead writing is writers who are deeply aware that they're writing about themes, they're writing about themes instead of people. And they're working from generalities instead of particularities and specificities. And they have no understanding of the relationship between the universal and the particular. And so like, everything is just like, like beans in a can that they're shaking around. And I think that that's really boring. I think it's really tedious. Like, like, sure, we can we can find something really profound in the mundane, but like, you have to be really smart to do that. So like the average novelist is like better off like, starting with a gunshot or something like do something big.
Henry: If you're not Virginia Woolf, it is in fact just mundane.
Brandon: Indeed. Yeah.
Henry: Is there too much emphasis on craft? In the way, in the way, in like what's valued among writers, in the way writers are taught, I feel like everything I see is about craft. And I'm like, craft is good, but that can just be like how you make a table rather than like how you make a house. Craft is not the guarantor of anything. And I see a lot of books where I think this person knows some craft. But as you say, they don't really have an application for it. And they don't. No one actually said to them, all style has a moral purpose, whether you're aware of it or not. And so they default to this like pointless use of the craft. And someone should say to them, like, you need to know history. You need to know tennis. You need to know business. You need to know like whatever, you know. And I feel like the novels I don't like are reflections of the discourse bubble that the novelist lives in. And I feel like it's often the continuation of Twitter by other means. So in the Rachel Kong novel that I think it came out this year, there's a character, a billionaire character who comes in near the end. And everything that he says or that is said about him is literally just meme. It's online billionaire meme because billionaires are bad because of all the things we all know from being on Twitter. And I was like, so you just we literally have him a character as meme. And this is the most representative thing to me, because that's maybe there's craft in that. Right. But what you've chosen to craft is like 28 tweets. That's pointless.
Brandon: 28 tweets be a great title for a book, though, you have to admit, I would buy that book off the new book table. 28 tweets. I would. I would buy that. Yeah, I do think. Well, I think it goes both ways. I think it goes both ways. I somewhat famously said this about Sally Rooney that like she her books have no craft. The craft is bad. And I do think like there are writers who only have craft, who are able to sort of create these wonderfully structured books and to sort of deploy these beautiful techniques. And those books are absolutely dead. There's just like nothing in them because they have nothing to say. There's just like nothing to be said about any of that. And on the other hand, you have these books that are full of feelings that like would be better had someone taught that person about structure or form or had they sort of had like a rigorous thing. And I would say that like both of those are probably bad, like depending on who you are, you find one more like, like easier to deal with than the other. I do think that like part of why there's such an emphasis on craft is because not to sort of bring capitalism back in but you can monetize craft, you know what I mean? Like, craft is one of those things that is like readily monetizable. Like, if I'm a writer, and I would like to make money, and I can't sell a novel, I can tell people like, oh, how to craft a perfect opening, how to create a novel opening that will make agents pick it up and that will make editors say yes, but like what the sort of promise of craft is that you can finish a thing, but not that it is good, as you say, there's no guarantor. Whereas you know, like it's harder to monetize someone's soul, or like, it's harder to monetize like the sort of random happenstance of just like a writer's voice sort of emerging from from whatever, like you can't turn that into profit. But you can turn into profit, let me help you craft your voice. So it's very grind set, I think craft has a tendency to sort of skew toward the grind set and toward people trying to make money from, from writing when they can't sell a book, you know.
Henry: Let's play a game.
Brandon: Oh dear.
Henry: I say the name of a writer. You give us like the 30 second Brandon Taylor opinion of that writer.
Brandon: Okay. Yeah.
Henry: Jonathan Franzen.
Brandon: Thomas Mann, but like, slightly more boring, I think.
Henry: Iris Murdoch.
Brandon: A friend of mine calls her a modern calls her the sort of pre Sally Rooney, Sally Rooney. And I agree with that.
Henry: When I'm at parties, I try and sell her to people where I say she's post-war Sally Rooney.
Brandon: Yes, yes. And like, and like all that that entails, and so many delightful, I read all these like incredible sort of mid century reviews of her novels, and like the men, the male critics, like the Bernard Breganzis of the world being like, why is there so much sex in this book? It's amazing. Please go look up those like mid-century reviews of Iris Murdoch. They were losing their minds.
Henry: Chekhov.
Brandon: Perfect, iconic, baby girl, angel, legend. Can't get enough. 10 out of 10.
Henry: Evelyn Waugh.
Brandon: So Catholic, real Catholic vibes. But like, scabrously funny. And like, perhaps the last writer to write about life as though it had meaning. Hot take, but I'll, I stand by it.
Henry: Yeah, well, him and Murdoch. But yeah, no, I think I think there's a lot in that. C.V. Wedgwood.
Brandon: Oh, my gosh. The best, a titan, a master of history. Like, oh, my God. I would not be the same without Wedgwood.
Henry: Tell us which one we should read.
Brandon: Oh, the 30 Years War. What are you talking about?
Henry: Well, I think her books on the English Civil War… I'm a parochial Brit.
Brandon: Oh, see, I don't, not that I don't, I will go read those. But her book on the 30 Years War is so incredible. It's, it's amazing. It's second to like, Froissart’s Chronicles for like, sort of history, history books for me.
Henry: Northrop Frye.
Brandon: My father. I, Northrop Frye taught me so much about how to see and how to think. Just amazing, a true thinker in a mind.
Henry: Which book?
Brandon: Oh, Anatomy of Criticism is fantastic. But Fearful Symmetry is just, it will blow your head off. Just amazing. But if you're looking for like, to have your, your mind gently remapped, then Anatomy of Criticism.
Henry: Emma Cline.
Brandon: A throwback. I think she's, I think she's Anne Beattie meets John Cheever for a new era. And I think she's amazing. She's perfect. Don't love her first novel. I think her stories are better. She's a short story writer. And she should stay that way.
Henry: Okay, now I want you to rank Jane Austen's novels.
Brandon: Wait, okay. So like, by my preference, or by like, what I think is the best?
Henry: You can do both.
Brandon: Okay. So in terms, my favorite, Persuasion. Then Mansfield Park. Sense and Sensibility. Pride and Prejudice. And then Emma, then Northanger Abbey. Okay.
Henry: Now, how about for which ones are the best?
Brandon: Persuasion. Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park. Emma,.Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey.
Henry: Why do people not like Fanny Price? And what is wrong with them?
Brandon: Fanny Price is perfect. Fanny Price, I was just talking to someone about this last night at dinner. Fanny Price, she's perfect. First of all, she is, I don't know why people don't like her. She's like a chronically ill girl who's hot for her cousin and like, has deep thoughts. It seems like she would be the icon of literary Twitter for like a certain kind of person, you know? And I don't know why they don't like her. I think I'm, I am becoming the loudest Mansfield Park apologist on the internet. I think that people don't like Fanny because she's less vivacious than Mary Crawford. And I think that people are afraid to see themselves in Fanny because she seems like she's unfun or whatever. But what they don't realize is that like Fanny Price, Fanny Price has like a moral intelligence and like a moral consciousness. And like Fanny Price is one of the few Austen characters who actually argues directly and literally about the way the world is. Like with multiple people, like the whole, the whole novel is her sort of arguing about, well, cities are this and the country is this. And like, we need Parsons as much as we need party boys. Like, like she's arguing not just about, not just about these things like through the lens of like marriage or like the sort of marriage economy, but like in literal terms, I mean, she is so, she's like a moral philosopher. I love Fanny Price and she's so smart and so sensitive and so, and I guess like maybe it's just that people don't like a character who's kind of at the mercy of others and they view her as passive. When in fact, like a young woman arguing about the way the world should be, like Mary Crawford's, Mary Crawford's like kind of doing the above, not really, not like Fanny. But yeah, I love her. She's amazing. I love Fanny Price. And I also think that people love Margaret Hale from North and South. And I think that when people are saying they hate Fanny Price, what they're picturing is actually how Margaret Hale is. Margaret Hale is one of the worst heroines of a novel. She's so insufferable. She's so rude. She's so condescending. And like, she does get her comeuppance and like Gaskell does sort of bring about a transformation where she's actually able to sort of like see poor people as people first and not like subjects of sympathy. But Margaret is what people imagine Fanny is, I think. And we should, we should start a Fanny Price, like booster club. Henry, should we? Let's do it. It begins here. I just feel so strongly about her. I feel, I love, I love Fanny.
Henry: She's my favorite of Austen's characters. And I think she is the most representative Austen character. She's the most Austen of all of them, right?
Brandon: Yeah, I mean, that makes great deal of sense to me. She's just so wonderful. Like she's so funny and so observant. And she's like this quiet little girl who's like kind of sickly and people don't really like her. And she's kind of maybe I'm just like, maybe I just like see myself in her. And I don't mind being a sort of annoying little person who's going around the world.
Henry: What are some good principles for naming literary characters?
Brandon: Ooh, I have a lot of strong feelings about this. I think that names should be memorable. They should have like, like an aura of sort of literariness about them. I don't mean, I mean, taken to like hilarious extremes. It's like Henry James. Catherine Goodwood, Isabelle Archer, Ralph Touchett, like, you know, Henry had a stack pole. So like, not like that. But I mean, that could be fun in a modern way. But I think there's like an aura of like, it's a name that you might hear in real life, but it sort of add or remove, it's sort of charged and elevated, sort of like with dialogue. And that it's like a memorable thing that sort of like, you know, it's like, you know, memorable thing that sort of sticks in the reader's mind. It is both a name, a literary, a good literary name is both a part of this world and not of this world, I think. And, yeah, and I love that. I think like, don't give your character a name like you hear all the time. Like, Tyler is a terrible literary name. Like, no novel has ever, no good novel has ever had a really important character named Tyler in it. It just hasn't. Ryan? What makes a good sentence? Well, my sort of like, live and let live answer is that a good sentence is a sentence that is perfectly suited to the purpose it has. But I don't know, I like a clear sentence, regardless of length or lyric intensity, but just like a clear sentence that articulates something. I like a sentence with motion, a sense of rhythm, a sense of feel without any bad words in it. And I don't mean like curse words, I mean like words that shouldn't be in literature. Like, there's some words that just like don't belong in novels.
Henry: Like what?
Brandon: Squelch. Like, I don't think the word squelch should be in a novel. That's a gross word and it doesn't sound literary to me. I don't want to see it.
Henry: I wouldn't be surprised if it was in Ulysses.
Brandon: Well, yes.
Henry: I have no idea, but I'm sure, I'm sure.
Brandon: But so few of us are James Joyce. And that novel is like a thousand bodily functions per page. But don't love it. Don't love it.
Henry: You don't love Ulysses?
Brandon: No, I don't… Listen, I don't have a strong opinion, but you're not going to get me cancelled about Ulysses. I'm not Virginia Woolf.
Henry: We're happy to have opinions of that nature here. That's fine.
Brandon: You know, I don't have a strong feeling about it, actually. Some parts of it that I've read are really wonderful. And some parts of it that I have read are really dense and confusing to me. I haven't sort of given it the time it needs or deserves. What did you learn from reading Toni Morris? What did I learn? I think I learned a lot about the moral force of melodrama. I think that she shows us a lot about the uses of melodrama and how it isn't just like a lesion of realism, that it isn't just a sort of malfunctioning realism, but that there are certain experiences and certain lives and certain things that require and necessitate melodrama. And when deployed, it's not tacky or distasteful that it actually is like deeply necessary. And also just like the joy of access and language, like the sort of... Her language is so towering. I don't know, whenever I'm being really shy about a sentence being too vivid or too much, I'm like, well, Toni Morrison would just go for it. And I am not Toni Morrison, but she has given me the courage to try.
Henry: What did you like about the Annette Benning film of The Seagull?
Brandon: The moment when Annette Benning sings Dark Eyes is so good. It's so good. I think about it all the time. And indeed, I stole that moment for a short story that I wrote. And I liked that part of it. I liked the set design. I think also Saoirse Ronan, when she gives that speech as Nina, where she's like, you know, where the guy's like, what do you want from, you know, what do you want? Why do you want to be an actress? And she's like, I want fame. You know, like, I want to be totally adored. And I'm just like, yeah, that's so real. That's so, that is so real. Like Chekhov has understood something so deep, so deep about the nature of commerce and art there. And I think Saoirse is really wonderful in that movie. It's a not, it's not a good movie. It's maybe not even a good adaptation of The Seagull. But I really enjoyed it. I saw it like five times in a theater in Iowa City.
Henry: I don't know if it's a bad adaptation of The Seagull, because it's one of the, it's one of the Chekhov's I've seen that actually understands that, like, the tragic and the and the comic are not meant to be easily distinguishable in his work. And it does have all this lightheartedness. And it is quite funny. And I was like, well, at least someone's doing that because I'm so sick of, like, gloomy Chekhov. You know what I mean? Like, oh, the clouds and the misery. Like, no, he wants you, he wants you to laugh and then be like, I shouldn't laugh because it's kind of tragic, but it's also just funny.
Brandon: Yeah. Yes, I mean, all the moments were like, like Annette Bening's characters, like endless stories, like she's just like constantly unfurling a story and a story and a story and a story. Every scene kind of was like, she's in the middle of telling another interminable anecdote. And of course, the sort of big tragic turn at the end is like, where like, Kostya kills himself. And she's like, in the middle of like, another really long anecdote while they're in the other room playing cards. Like, it's so, it's so good. So I love that. I enjoy watching that movie. I still think it's maybe not. It's a little wooden, like as a movie, like it's a little, it's a little rickety.
Henry: Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. But for someone looking to like, get a handle on Chekhov, it's actually a good place to go. What is the best make of Fountain Pen?
Brandon: That's a really good, that's a really, really, really good question. Like, what's your Desert Island Fountain Pen? My Desert Island Fountain Pen. Right now, it's an Esterbrook Estee with a needlepoint nib. It's like, so, I can use that pen for hours and hours and hours and hours. I think my favorite Fountain Pen, though, is probably the Pilot Custom 743. It's a really good pen, not too big, not too small. It can hold a ton of ink, really wonderful. I use, I think, like a Soft Fine nib, incredible nib, so smooth. Like, I, you could cap it and then uncap it a month later, and it just like starts immediately. It's amazing. And it's not too expensive.
Henry: Brandon Taylor, thank you very much.
Brandon: Thanks for having me.
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I’ve been a big Zena Hitz fan since I read Lost in Thought in 2020, a book I am still recommending to people nearly five years later. We talked about Shakespeare, children’s books, St John’s College, the Catherine Project, whether you should read secondary literature, Tolkien, nuns, and we had a giggle while we did so. Zena is one of the best public intellectuals who remains deeply committed to reading the Great Books and I was very pleased to record this conversation with her.
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I spoke to Samuel Arbesman about late bloomers. He asked many splendid questions no-one has asked before. With Mark Crowley I discussed some practical aspects of late blooming.
On December 5th I am talking to professor Stephen Greenblatt and psychoanalyst Adam Philips about their new book Second Chances, which combines Shakespeare and late blooming. What more could I ask for?
I was delighted to talk to Marion Turner, the J.R.R. Tolkien professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford. We talked about how the printing press affected the English language, the effect of science and technology on Chaucer’s poetry, how Chaucer influenced Shakespeare, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and plenty more. I could have kept asking questions for another hour! Marion recommends translations of Chaucer (Wright or Coghill), talks about the invention of the iambic pentameter, and discusses Chaucer and the question of influence. I recommend Marion’s book Chaucer: A European Life to you all.
Remember, you can read a transcript on the webpage version.
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It was a delight to talk to Naomi Kanakia who writes the Woman of Letters Substack. We talked about the homogeneity of modern fiction, whether the Great Books are really great (and which ones she found boring), as well as economics and fiction. I enjoy Naomi’s literary criticism on Substack very much and I am anticipating her new book about the Great Books.
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I was delighted to talk to the novelist Catherine Lacey, whose book Biography of X I admired very much indeed. We talked about personal websites, how she learned to code in HTML, 9 Beet Stretch, her writing on Substack (Untitled Thought Project), biography as a genre, modern novels, figurative art, Derek Parfit, MFAs, fiction and non-fiction, short stories, Merve Emre, W.S. Merwin, television, and plenty more.
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There’s a profile about me and Second Act in the New Zealand Listener. It’s very good so if you’re in NZ and have a subscription (it’s paywalled) do take a look. I chuckled at this line: “Speaking by Zoom from London, Oliver is a serious fellow, and has the manner of someone older.” This was nice too: “He also has a strong sense of his own mortality. For someone still in their 30s, this seems surprising until he talks about his penchant for poetry… Our interview is peppered with quotes from poems.” My thanks to Sarah Catherall for a lovely write up!
When I asked to interview Nabeel, he asked to interview me. How could I refuse? Nabeel is a well-read literary enthusiast so of course we had a good time covering many topics such as favourite books, autofiction, Harold Bloom, modernism, subjectivity culture post-1945, Anthony Powell, The Englishness of Robert Frost, modern novels, George Eliot, viewquakes, novels about older people, and being self-authorised. And then I turned it round and ask Nabeel questions about tech reading lists, entertainment and learning, the utilitarian value of Shakespeare, and whether AI will be good for literature. He’s a visiting fellow in AI at the Mercatus Centre, with a background in tech companies, so his answers are well-considered and interesting. And I got a book recommendation!
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I always enjoy corresponding with Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) and was therefore delighted to talk to her about poetry and literature. It’s a wonderful conversation that ranges across so many books and ideas. We covered why there is no crisis in the humanities, why you should read Walter Scott, our favourite modern poets (Hollis: Terrance Hayes; Henry: Sally Read—I like her book Day Hospital very much), Regency video games, the role of AI in teaching, AI and poetry, how Hollis would change the way literature is taught, memorising poetry, Shakespeare, why the 1850s was such a remarkable literary decade, and so so much more! Her peroration at the end about literature and education is especially exciting.
The two Utah poets Hollis mentions are Jacqueline Osherow and Craig Dworkin. Osherow had a sonnet in the New Yorker recently. Hollis is here on Substack where she has been writing interestingly about academia and Bridgerton, and why English majors should become plumbers. She has a deep knowledge of poetry and I hope she’ll be writing about that too.
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What a delight to talk to James Marriott, the Times columnist who writes about literature, culture, and being a millennial. James is very well-read and we covered the ground from Iris Murdoch to Harry Potter, from why men should read novels to whether the crisis of modernity is actually modern. You can read James’s columns at the Times or see his Twitter feed here. I found James’ comments on the important of being pretentious interesting and they reminded me of what the philosopher Agnes Callard has written about aspiration, which I discussed in Second Act.
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NB The first two or three minutes have some audio glitches but the rest of the recording is much better quality.
I was delighted to talk to A.N. Wilson, novelist, journalist, biographer, and historian, whose books on Iris Murdoch, Dante, and Prince Albert I very much admire, as well as his memoir Confessions. Wilson’s new book Goethe. His Faustian Life comes out in September (December in the USA) and is a splendid account of Goethe’s lifelong work on Faust. In this interview we talk about Goethe’s work as a scientist, his influence on psychotherapy, and his extraordinary drinking, as well as covering a range of literary topics from Professor Helen Gardner to Elizabeth Jenkins and Charles Dickens. (We agree: Dickens is the best. I’ve written about: David Copperfield, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, and Bleak House.)
You can (and should) subscribe to Andrew’s excellent Substack here.
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In Tyler Cowen’s new book there is a whole chapter about John Stuart Mill, and I think Tyler really gets Mill, and draws on many of the key sources, both primary and secondary. So I’m pleased to offer you this conversation about Mill and biography, economics ideas where Mill remains relevant, how to read Mill properly, why Mill isn’t so influential today, whether Mill was a coherent thinker, the gap in the intellectual heritage of Effective Altruism, when the different arts peaked, why you should read Mill’s Bentham and Coleridge, and more. Several of you how got in touch to tell me that you read Mill’s Autobiography and hopefully this conversation will encourage you to explore further.
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Writing ElsewhereRecently I have written for The Critic about how to find somewhere to live in London, solving the problem of modern architecture, and in praise of stupid politicians. I also produced some epigrams framed as advice for young people.
Noah Smith is an economics blogger with his own Substack (highly recommended). We talked about late bloomers, motivation, modelling effects, peer effects, culture, and Anime. I’ll leave you to decide what you believe about the disagreement half way through about whether we are morally obliged to work hard and use our abilities.
Henry Oliver: Well, thanks for joining me. I appreciate your time and your willingness.
Noah Smith: Absolutely.
Henry Oliver: What I am interested in, I'm writing about late bloomers, so I'm interested in ideas to do with, your intelligence is flexible, it's not determined at birth, and you have lots of margin to improve yourself. And I saw your tweet, is he called June? Is it Huh, June Huh, the mathematician?
Noah Smith: I don't know. I don't know who that is.
Henry Oliver: Yeah, he won the Fields Medal, he dropped out of high school.
Noah Smith: Oh, right. That's right, that guy.
Henry Oliver: He wanted to be a poet and he didn't like maths. And then it was like six years into college, he went to a maths class and he got into it and then he got really obsessed with it and he dropped poetry and he got really... He only ate pizzas, 'cause he was just sitting there doing maths all the time. And then he wins the Fields Medal, so he's like a total late starter, and it defies all the stereotypes that you have to be good at maths when you're young. And he's everything that you're not supposed to be.
Noah Smith: Right. Right.
Henry Oliver: So what I'm interested in is your views on this whole area. Sorry.
Noah Smith: Well, it's hard to say. You can definitely pick out lots of anecdotes like this, of people who come late to a subject and then just go really far in it. And then you're gonna get this infinite debate between people who say, "Well, he always had the talent, he just didn't wanna do it before." And people who say, "Well, you really... You can do anything you set your mind to." And blah, blah, blah. And there's no way you can really prove that. But I think that the better... It's cool to have a guy who dropped out of school to be a poet and then eventually became a Fields Medalist. That's eye-catching and neat, but I think the better examples are the more prosaic examples of people who are just middling students who go on to be math professors. And so for example, I had two classmates.
When I was in school, we knew who the very best math people were. I was one of them. And but there were a handful. There were three or four kids each year who were the best people at math and who would go to the top schools and do technical subjects and blah, blah, blah. And one of those did become a math professor, but I think most of them just went to... Eventually became software engineers at Google or whatever, or just blew up their life and became an economics pundit like me. So almost none of them actually went into the field. And then when I look at the couple of people I know from my high school who became math professors, they were both fairly middling in math in high school. They didn't win the competitions. They weren't on the math team.
Actually, so when I was in high school, what I liked was not math but physics. That's what I really liked. But I wasn't that interested in math because I felt like it wasn't real, physics felt more real to me. But then when I got to college, I started to really love math proofs, and so I started to like math a lot more in college. The people who ended up becoming math professors, they were on that sort of journey magnified several fold. And so now, they're teaching at some, at a college. And so I guess the point is that...
Henry Oliver: What happens to them?
Noah Smith: They get interested. Motivation is everything. When we talk about late bloomers, we have to talk about motivation, because kids aren't born motivated. And when kids are young, their parents provide them with motivation. Their parents hug them and tell them they're great, and then insist that in order to keep getting that approval, they've got to ace a bunch of math tests. Or some parents take a more harsh approach where they say, "If you don't ace your math test, I'll beat you with this belt."
[laughter]
But I think that's kind of going out, that approach, which is definitely what my grandmother had to deal with, with her immigrant parents immigrating from what's now Ukraine. If she didn't get perfect scores on math, they would hit her with a belt.
And that is just... That seems very harsh. It is very harsh. It's a world... [laughter] That's the world of the depression and the World Wars, and that old world that was very harsh, and you still get a few immigrant parents who try to take that extremely harsh attack. But I think that in America, we're moving away from that toward something that can be just as emotionally damaging, which is, "You had better get 100 on this math test or I won't love you." And that's the alternative way. But then when people are young, they get all this motivation from their parents, and the people that we call nerds are really just people who are closer to their parents. People who are less close to their parents, we don't call nerds. And no matter how much they are talented at math or good at math...
One of my best friends was incredibly smart as a kid. He could ace the SAT as a little kid or whatever and could do a bunch of math stuff. He didn't care at all. He just wanted to play rock music, play rock guitar, and... I don't know, play Dungeons & Dragons, and hook up with girls, and get in fights. And he was very good at all of those things.
[laughter]
And now he's a physicist in Europe. His parents are both math professors. If there's any natural talent to be had, he obviously had it. And then he just... When he was ready, he just effortlessly went and became a physicist. And so you could argue that there's both talent and motivation here, but the motivation component was key. He had to feel like he no longer felt like... He would go and get in bare-knuckled boxing competitions in Germany or something, which he won. [chuckle] And then... Or just do the craziest combinations of drugs you'd ever not wanna do. And he just did that kind of stuff, and then when he felt like, "Oh, I guess it's time for me to get a job," he just went and did physics. And then he got interested in it, and he got really interested in the physics that he was doing. And it became this... Just like when he was a kid, he used to pour over Dungeons & Dragons manuals, crafting the perfect adventure, he would now just pour over physics, like experiments, and he worked at CERN, and etcetera.
And so that's an interesting journey right there. Because motivation changes over life, he was not a nerd as a kid, but he got motivated later in life. And I think that with a lot of nerds, with a lot of the kids that you see who are very close to their parents, and who are motivated by parental involvement, you see burnout, because then those kids are like, "Yeah, I do what my parents want." Blah, blah, blah. And then they get to age 17, 18, and they're like, "Wait a second, why am I not getting laid? Why am I not partying with the other party kids?" And then when they get to college, when they get out of their... Out from under their mother's wing, out to the world where you live in a dorm and you're around all the other young people and no one's really supervising you. I seen... I went to a fancy school and saw this happen again and again and again and again. And so these people just... These people lose motivation and they run off the rails. And they say, "Why did I not get to party?" And often, they regain motivation later in life. The most common pattern is that they party, they figure out how to hook up with people, they find romance, they get married. And then they get their motivation back to be really serious, and then they...
So I have a friend who's a mathematician who when he was in college, he was just very down because he had always been so motivated by his parents, and now he was away from them. And now he was like, "Why do I not have a social life?" And we were his friends and always trying to promote him to get a social life. And then he started working out, dating girls, whatever. I went to his wedding, his wedding was a math wedding where a bunch of math people came and made really elaborate esoteric math puns on PowerPoint at his wedding. [laughter] And it was a great wedding.
Henry Oliver: That's a good wedding. Yeah.
Noah Smith: It was a really good wedding, it was great. And then we all played board games and stuff like that. Now he’s a mathematician, but anyway, but the point is that he went through that period where he lost motivation, and some people never get it back. Some people really... And so I think motivation is the key, life motivation. Yeah.
Henry Oliver: Right. And then some people talk about... Some people are very fixated on the prefrontal cortex doesn't mature until you're 25, and so you don't get executive making decision abilities. And that's why people in their 20s run around and they don't work hard, and then in your mid-20s, you kind of get your life together. But that seems like a very pat... It's like a Just So story like, “Don't worry when you're 25, it'll just happen and you'll just wake up and your prefrontal cortex will have turned on.” That's a very inadequate explanation. What is motivation? Where can we get it? How can we explain this to people?
Noah Smith: I can tell you what I think, and I can pull in various psychology papers to support this thesis. But I can tell you my thesis, that it's all about human approval, it’s all about... Motivation is social, there is some intrinsic motivation that you get from nothing, just from curiosity. And we over emphasize this. It's fun to tinker with stuff, and it's fun to play with stuff. There’s certainly, like mathematicians out there like Terence Tao, who just from a very early age, were just intrinsically motivated by the fun of tinkering with stuff and have never stopped. That's real, that's a thing that exists. But I think that for most people in most cases, motivation is social. It has to do with the people around you saying attaboy, attagirl, atta non-binary person, [laughter] and patting you on the back and saying... What do you say for atta with a non-binary person? I don't know that. But anyway, so then the point is that people give you congratulations and approval and they say, “You done did good kid.” [chuckle] And that’s really what it is, it’s... I don’t know what the British idioms are here. What do you tell someone you did something good?
Henry Oliver: We would just say, “Well done.”
Noah Smith: Oh, got that.
Henry Oliver: You don’t wanna over do it. You say, “Well done.” That's pretty big, right?
Noah Smith: Yes, well done.
Henry Oliver: If they speak, that's approval. Speaking is approval.
[laughter]
Noah Smith: Got it, got it. [laughter] That reminds me of a guy, the software engineer in Japan, who was very briefly my roommate for two months. And then we took him to a tattoo piercing bar, which freaked him out so much that he moved out of our apartment. [laughter] He was very... [laughter] Alright, but that's where motivation is, it's social and parental motivation is important, but it doesn't last forever.
Henry Oliver: So you’re saying it’s like status seeking, you want to be seen in a positive way by your peers, you want to have the status of someone who’s done whatever these things are, and if we took that away, you would lose interest in the thing itself, the substance.
Noah Smith: Well, maybe... So I would be a little more subtle than that. So status, I think, which we pronounce with a short A, sorry. But yeah, status is like...
Henry Oliver: No, it’s good. It’s good.
Noah Smith: It’s a public thing, it’s a public facing thing, like you get the top score in the competition, so your name is up on a board, or you get a medal or something. It’s something that everyone... It’s something of common knowledge that everyone can see, that everyone else can see, but approval is more general. So that is one sort of approval, yes. But approval can also just be your friend saying, I think you did a good job, and then no one sees. And that's not status, you don’t actually get status for having one friend who likes you, and yet that one friend who likes you can often be more important approval. And I think that the most important form of approval for most people is romantic, it’s your romantic partner is who gives you the most important approval in your life. That’s the person whose approval you seek the most, in fact, achieving romance itself is a form of approval for people, like, “I was good enough that this person liked me and wanted to exclusively dedicate there, whatever to me.” Blah, blah, blah. And so I think that in itself is a powerful form of approval for people who want to... I don't wanna be crude here, but for people who wanna go around and get laid. The getting of laid, it is approval from someone. It’s not status necessarily. You can go brag about how much you get laid, but people just don’t like you when you do that. Unless they’re on a sports team or something. But generally, people don’t like that, but you get the approval privately from someone… you know you are attractive. You know you could attract people. And to be honest, I think that’s a bigger motivation for a lot of people than the actual enjoyment of sex, is just the knowledge that you're attractive, the... I’m asexual, so I can observe this from an outside vantage point. Yeah, so people get that approval and then romance is that magnifier, because someone approves of you not just to spend a night with you, but to actually dedicate their life to you, or at least some large portion of their life. And so that's an important part of approval. So romance, friends, parents, community. The community approval is status, but it’s only one type.
Henry Oliver: How far can we take this?
Noah Smith: Colleagues….
Henry Oliver: But in some ways, this sounds a bit like you’re saying people do difficult work for the same reason that the peacock grows a heavy tail, because people will look at that work and go, “I like you. That’s a nice tail. Maybe I'll sleep with you.”
Noah Smith: [laughter] Well, I don't know about that. I don’t think people would...
Henry Oliver: Have like...
Noah Smith: I don't know about that. But some people are doing that.
Henry Oliver: There must be more to it. There must be more to it than, “I want people to like me, so I will study Physics.” Studying Physics is hard. There are other ways to get people to say, “Dude, good job.”
Noah Smith: Well, okay, studying Physics isn't always hard.
Henry Oliver: No, but you see my point, like you could...
Noah Smith: It was a lot easier for me than Computer Science. And then I can’t...
Henry Oliver: But you could paint the fence and someone would say, “That was really good. Well done.” You don't have to get a... You don’t have... People do some impressive things, especially late bloomers. Late bloomers often, it’s like, “I haven't done this thing with my life, I'm gonna bloody well go and do it.”
Noah Smith: Right. But so it gets pretty subtle because I think that some people have internalized... So here, there is a lot of psych research, actually. My dad's a psychologist, so I learned about a lot of this. But people have internalized motivation that comes from sort of imagining modeling of the people who might approve them. So you think even if your mom is long dead, you might think, “What would... My mom would be so proud that I did this.” Or even if your mom doesn't actually care or even is alive, but just doesn't give a s**t. You could imagine that.
And so often, this sort of imagined approval from this ghost of someone hovering over your shoulder is so subtle that you don't even think about it unless you stop to think about it, like, “Why do I think that getting married by 28 is important? Why do I think that?” Someone thinks like, this is a conversation I had with someone the other day, “Why do I think getting married is important?” Their mom never actually called them up and gave them the sort of call, which every female lead gets at the beginning of every rom-com of the mom calling you at your... You wake up in your urban apartment and in your sloppy bed and then your mom calls you and your mom's like, “Why haven't you gotten married and settled down?”
Henry Oliver: “Where are my grandchildren?” Yes.
Noah Smith: “Where are my grandchildren?” It’s like the beginning of every rom-com. I don't know, Bridget Jones or whatever. And so then that scene is just again and again, and so... [laughter] Yeah, so basically, your mom doesn't actually have to call you up. You have an imaginary emulation of your mom in your mind, that may or may not be accurate, that tells you... That calls you up in your mind and tells you need to get married by 28 or whatever, or that you need to succeed in some career. So maybe you choose a career out of interest, or you choose a career out of aptitude or both, but then what drives you to succeed in that career instead of just sitting around and tinkering around. So often...
Interestingly, often we think of people who are on the autism spectrum as people who are more intrinsically motivated by curiosity and stuff like that. Those people don't always end up being very high achievers, because I know a guy who’s definitely on the autism spectrum who is a professor who just likes to just do his research and never worry about self-promotion or prestige. And so didn't get that prestigious until later in life when people started urging him to become more prestigious and then he started sort of promoting... He’s like, “Oh, maybe I should.” And started promoting his stuff, and then got very well known. But for many years, he just wanted to do his own thing in his own lab.
And so, intrinsic motivation doesn't always lead to what... To “success.” Because remember, when we’re talking about success, there’s an automatic selection bias filter there, because we, the public, have decided what is success. So when you’re asking what causes success, you're asking what causes people to do things that the public recognizes as success? And so, it’s not just public recognition, but the fact that we’re filtering by public recognition when we’re looking for a thing to explain means that we start out with the kind of thing that could get recognition. You know, we... Like, Fields Medal instead of just, “What if you just did math because you were really into anime and you sat around figuring out all the different ways you could re-watch your favorite show?” Someone did that and he proved...
[laughter]
He got the core of a very important math result on hyper-permutations from sitting around figuring out how many ways he could re-watch The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which is a boring cartoon, sorry, [chuckle] that you can re-watch a bunch of different ways? And so, he was figuring out like, “How many ways could I re-watch this?” And so he was posting about it in some forum, and someone relayed it to the sci-fi author, Greg Egan, who also works as a mathematician. And so, Greg Egan came in and partnered with this guy and they published this important paper, but the anime guy just wanted to watch some dumb cartoons. [laughter] That's all he wanted to do and he came up with this result. So...
Henry Oliver: What is your best guess for how many people like...
Noah Smith: It's just he did it by accident.
Henry Oliver: Like how many people are there, like the anime guy, where if we could pair them up with someone or if we could discover them or if we could be like, “Dude, lift your head up and look at the world for 10 minutes, you're actually doing something.” Like, how much talent could we uncover like that? Or are there just not that... Most of them are just watching cartoons, they're not that many of them?
Noah Smith: Well, okay, there's not that many of them, but more importantly, if you did discover them, why would they care? How would you get them to care?
Henry Oliver: Well, how did Greg Egan do it? I mean, he got this guy to publish a paper.
Noah Smith: Well, Greg Egan published the paper.
Henry Oliver: Okay.
Noah Smith: He’s a mathematician who cared. [chuckle] Like, he... He took... This guy would never have published the paper. So, you know, another... The most famous example of this is Grigori Perelman, right? Do you know who that is?
Henry Oliver: No.
Noah Smith: He’s a wacky Russian mathematician who... I hope he’s okay now. He’s very... Anyway, he came to the United States and was studying, and then while he was here, he figured out how to solve the Poincaré conjecture, which was one of the older, more difficult open problems in mathematics. He figured that out. He wrote it up in a very sloppy way, he just enjoyed it, he wrote it up in a sloppy way and just posted it on the archive. And then he just posted this pre-print and then people are like, “Oh, hey, this guy solved the Poincaré conjecture,” and then some other mathematicians from Princeton went through it and they're like, “Okay, yes, this works.” [chuckle] And so, then... But then they were like, “Okay, publish this paper,” and he was like, “No, I don’t wanna publish the paper,” and they were like, “Come on, you're gonna be famous, you’re gonna be so important and famous of a mathematician, blah, blah, blah,” and he disliked it so much that he moved away.
Moved to St. Petersburg, moved back to Russia to live with his mom, on his mom's pension instead of having a job. He could have gotten a job at any university. And then the Clay Mathematics Institute offered him a million dollar prize for solving this open problem, ’cause they had a million dollar prize for this, he turned the million dollars down, didn't take it. He got a Fields Medal, he refused the Fields Medal.
[laughter]
Henry Oliver: Oh my God.
Noah Smith: He refused... Look up Grigori Perelman, he refused the Fields Medal. This guy’s nuts, he just like... He has a beard that looks like a 19th century Russian guy beard, really. And he like... What he likes to do is... His pastimes apparently include breaking into the opera to watch from the janitor seats or whatever, and hopping rooftops...
Henry Oliver: Okay.
Noah Smith: In St. Petersburg, he lives on his mother’s pension. And so this guy solved one of the most important problems in math, obviously has a lot of talent, what is he doing? [laughter] Like, he didn't even care. He was like, “No,” he just... “I quit”, and he's never done any math again, because the social... The stress of getting so much attention kinda broke him. And so, that’s... And so the question is...
Henry Oliver: But yeah.
Noah Smith: Would the anime guy or this guy, who's like anime guy times 20, would [chuckle] they actually want that. When we look at... If you talk to VCs a lot, I think they just generally will tell you that Founder is a personality type, and you’re not gonna change people’s personality types by discovering hidden talent, they’re gonna have the same personality. So you can harvest their ideas, but turning them into the person who wants to be an Elon Musk type...
Henry Oliver: Right.
Noah Smith: Or a Jeff Bezos type, is just not going to happen. And so I think that we have to understand that there are people whose personality types... So, I think that it’s more important to discover the people with the right motivations directing it in the wrong directions, than it is to discover the people with the hidden talent. Somewhere, there is a guy who is extremely good at organizing people and at improving operations and at incorporating new technological ideas, blah, blah, blah, who is using that to sell drugs, and who is basically part of a mafia, drug cartel kind of thing, who is a respected gang leader, and who is using his talents to sell drugs and organize a drug gang, right? And then find that guy and tell that guy, “Why don’t you start a tech company instead, it’s like a drug gang, but nobody gets shot, hopefully.”
[laughter]
Unless it’s Anduril, in which case somebody gets shot. [laughter] But then like... Yeah, so then nobody... Why don't you start a company instead of a drug gang? And so, there’s people who are just... Whose motivations are pointed in the wrong direction. If you want people to apply their motivation to creating value in the corporate world, you should find people who have the motivation to build organizations, to implement new technologies to solve problems, to get money, etcetera. Find those people. Those are the missing entrepreneurs, the people who are leading drug gangs instead of being entrepreneurs.
Henry Oliver: How can we change someone’s motivation? That seems like the most difficult thing.
Noah Smith: Different friends, different romantic partner: that’s how you change someone’s motivation.
Henry Oliver: Right, but anyone who’s got a friend who’s in a bad friendship group or who knows someone who's made a bad choice of romantic partner or... Like, this is a cliche thing, right? You can’t... There’s nothing you can do once someone gets into that, like, there’s nothing you can do.
Noah Smith: Yes, you can, different friends. Go find them, invite them to some hangouts. You don’t tell them to stop hanging out with your hoodlum friends or whatever, you don’t do that, you don't police who they currently hang out with, you just give them an alternative, you introduce them to some new people and then they can get approval from the new people. And so, I will give you an example.
Henry Oliver: Okay.
Noah Smith: The example is my brother-in-law, who gave me permission to use this example.
[chuckle]
Henry Oliver: Okay.
Noah Smith: My brother-in-law has never met his father, his mother had him when she was 16, he grew up in a trailer park, very classic. No one in his family had ever been to college. His sister was pregnant at 15, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Henry Oliver: Yeah. Yeah.
Noah Smith: Zero people in his family had ever been to college, but he liked Japanese cartoons, he liked anime, and so he went in the high school anime club where he met my sister. They ended up getting married. She convinced him to go to college. He went to a mediocre college. He's like, “Okay, fine, I’ll... My family aren't the college type.” [chuckle] But she convinced him to do that and he was like, “Oh, you know, it was okay, I met some nice people. That was kind of fun.” And then they moved to DC where she’s a lawyer. And then she just kept telling him about the work that she did and introducing him to her lawyer friends, you know, and then he met... He started hanging out with all the lawyer friends because his own motivation... Like, his own impulse would just be to like, make friends with a bunch of like, bums he knew from high school who like to play table-top role playing games and watch anime, and yet she's here introducing him to all these lawyers. And he’s like, “Well, there’s all this cool stuff,” you know? And so he decided to go get a law degree and he got into a top law school. [chuckle] And then he...
Henry Oliver: Wow.
Noah Smith: Yeah, and so then... Now he just graduated from the top law school and now he's like... He’s not a practicing lawyer, he does like, legal consulting work or whatever, but then... But yeah, he graduated from a top law school, and then, no one in his family had ever been to college. They were just hanging out in a trailer park getting pregnant too early. And what happened... No one harshly said, “Don't hang out with the trailer park people, no more of that. Cut off those people.” No one did that. He just met a group of people who inculcated him with this different perspective, you know? He realized he could do different things, he got interested in law, but it wasn't just that... I mean, yes, he got intrinsically motivated, he thought law is cool, right? But also the people around him, his friends who were my sister’s friends, were people who did law, and he could get engaged in interesting discussions by talking about legal stuff with them and turned out to be just as naturally smart as any of they were... As any of them were.
But then he never would have been discovered by the system had he not met my sister in the Anime Club. So, I guess my real answer to this question of how do we discover the hidden gems of talent is Anime.
[chuckle]
Henry Oliver: There’s a report today in the New York Times of a Raj Chetty study, I think, showing that people of lower socioeconomic status families, the people who move into a higher income bracket, I think tend to have made friends across class divides. So the areas of the country where there are more people making friends across class divides tend to have this... This is exactly what you're describing, that they...
Noah Smith: Oh wow, so... Well, I was b**********g based on anecdote, Raj Chetty was doing the systematic study, so that’s why Raj Chetty is the greatest.
Henry Oliver: He’s got a big... Yeah, he’s got a big scatter plot that I think suggests what you’re saying.
Noah Smith: Hold on. So actually, yeah, send me that. I know he’s done work on Lost Einstein’s modeling effects, neighbourhood effects, things like that. This is a follow-up to that. This is great.
Henry Oliver: I believe so.
Noah Smith: I love that. Raj Chetty is so good, and anyway...
Henry Oliver: Yeah, no, it’s very interesting. It’s very interesting.
Noah Smith: Yeah.
Henry Oliver: So you’re saying we need to leverage that a lot more, that’s the way we match smart people with better motivations, better, better incentives.
Noah Smith: Right. Right. Find the people and find something that doesn’t require them to immediately jump into Math competition or do a bunch of hard work in the service of something...
Henry Oliver: Right.
Noah Smith: That they've never been interested in. So that's... You know what, I just invented the Anime theory of motivation. Anime theory of talent discovery. [laughter] How about that?
Henry Oliver: So here’s my follow-up...
Noah Smith: Why Anime? Because it is something that engages your mind a little bit, but it’s 99 parts fun, one part thinking about stuff.
Henry Oliver: So low barriers to entry.
Noah Smith: It’s low barrier to entry. That’s why a person who is a bum, which is... I use the word bum and it’s pejorative, but I think it’s absolutely fine to be a bum, if you wanna just sit around and play Dungeons & Dragons, and work in McDonalds your whole life, do that! Fine, I don't need you to work hard for the nation, be a McDonalds Dungeons & Dragons bum, but if you’d also like some... [chuckle] If you’d also like to graduate from a top law school, cool. Okay. So really... So Anime and Dungeons & Dragons, those things are things that... Dungeons & Dragons engages your mind a little more than Anime because you have to calculate a few probabilities and you don’t know that's what you’re doing, you're like, how likely it is that I’m gonna be able to make this role in Dungeons & Dragons?
You’re calculating a probability from a uniform distribution, but you don’t know that. Also, you just learn a little baby statistics just playing D&D by accident. You learn about fat-tailed versus thin-tailed distributions too, because fat-tailed distributions are the ones that make you die a lot. [chuckle] And so, anyway...
Henry Oliver: So we should have Dungeons & Dragons in every school.
Noah Smith: We should have Dungeons & Dragons in every school, we should have Anime in every school.
Henry Oliver: Okay.
Noah Smith: And so... Or the option to do this, and we should have a club where people watch Anime and then write essays about it or something. I don’t know, I just made that up, but Dungeons & Dragons should be an extra-curricular activity because it teaches creativity better than anything else. All the Asian countries that are trying to revamp their educational system to teach creativity, should have Dungeons & Dragons classes, and then they’re there, that’s it, that’s all you do. Anyway...
Henry Oliver: Okay. I want to follow up on the thing about your brother-in-law.
Noah Smith: Yeah. Very cool dude.
Henry Oliver: He is a very cool dude, and that’s a great story and it’s a great outcome, but it’s very contingent, because he met your sister, he ended up being a lawyer, if he’d met someone else’s sister, he might have done something else.
Noah Smith: Correct. He could be an engineer, entrepreneur, who knows.
Henry Oliver: Who knows, right? Because smart people can do this whole range of stuff.
Noah Smith: Right.
Henry Oliver: Is there a problem of like, a lot of people who are smart and who come from a middle class family and they go to university and then they do all become lawyers and consultants and whatevers. And actually, if we’re gonna start pulling other people in and re-motivating them, we don't need more lawyers, like, we’re fine for consultants, we would prefer you to be engineers and computer scientists and poets and whatever, how does that work?
Noah Smith: That’s at the policy level. So that’s... The government is what does that. And you change the incentives. You can do in a stupid way, like Xi Jinping, where you just basically take people who are doing all the stuff you don’t wanna do and then just find them and arrest them. [chuckle] That is stupid and that will fail, because... [chuckle] But instead, we use positive promotion. So, right now we’re finding a need to do this with semiconductor engineers...
Henry Oliver: Right.
Noah Smith: Which China also does, ’cause we’re in this race of semiconductors, right? And so China is doing it by basically kicking your ass if you do anything but semiconductors and that’s not gonna work. It’s gonna work, but not well. But then what we can do is we can promote, we can, of course, subsidize money because people do care about money. Money matters, especially if you have kids. Kids are very expensive. Kids are a huge source of motivation for people to make money.
Henry Oliver: Oh, you don't need to tell me.
Noah Smith: Oh, you have kids?
Henry Oliver: Yeah.
Noah Smith: Nice. And so, there is pressure on you to always get some money.
Henry Oliver: Yeah. [laughter] Yeah.
Noah Smith: Whereas me, there’s no pressure on me to get money except to just like, buy my... Like I’ve bought my rabbits like all the treats that money can buy, and now it’s just like, more money just means like line go up for me, right?
Henry Oliver: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Noah Smith: But if you have kids, then you need the money. And so, yeah, of course, if you’re like super rich, if you’re like Elon Musk, then you’re back to line go up, because you don't need that money or [chuckle] any of that. You know? You just wanna make the line go up, but then, so... That's government policy. We can promote STEM through stuff in school where we like do... I don’t know, MacArthur Genius, blah, blah, blah. I don’t even know what that is.
Henry Oliver: Yeah, yeah.
Noah Smith: And then we can pay money so that Intel will go out and hire a million people and they’ll do a job fair and they’ll do like, summer internships and they’ll be like, “Hey, college kid, how would you like to come do an internship at Intel?” And they’re all like, “Oh, sure.” [laughter] And then like, nerd goes and does his internship at Intel and then, “Wow, like that’s cool. I’d like to do that after I graduate,” or whatever. Although I guess they mostly hire PhDs. But anyway, you can do that. And so, policy can put their thumb on the scale for whether people become lawyers. In fact, there’s been a big sort of crash in the legal field. My brother-in-law went into it, but in fact, the number of people going to law school is like way down.
Henry Oliver: Oh, really?
Noah Smith: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And the sort of billable hour model collapsed, so basically like, lawyer ran to the end of its... The lawyer boom ran to the end of its life.
Henry Oliver: Okay.
Noah Smith: There was a big lawyer boom for various reasons. Their underlying drivers were things like the changes in patent law that allow you to patent business process and software drove a need for IP lawyers, which drove up the wages for other lawyers. There was like expanding federal regulation in a number of areas, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. My sister’s a human rights lawyer. She works for the Equal Opportunity Employer Commission, so like, she’s not in that world. But there was just a general expansion, kind of like business school expansion drove the demand for Economics profs and raised salaries even in traditional Econ. departments. You get the supply... Or, I’m sorry, demand affect bleeds through the whole industry. And you had that in law for about, I don’t know, like half a century, and then it just ended one day [chuckle] in the 2010s, it ended.
And then like... And to be perfectly honest, I think this is one of many causes of increased unrest in the 2010s is the fact that the legal profession became much more closed off as a sort of like a high-earning kind of out for people who study the humanities. I’m gonna write about that soon. How the drying up of opportunities for humanities majors led to a bunch of pissed off humanities majors who instead were like... They're like, "Now I'm a socialist. I'm gonna rebel. Marxism!" And like... Really it's just because no one would let you be like a fancy lawyer that you expected to be, because we need fewer fancy lawyers. So like, demand plays a huge role here and the government can put its thumb on the scale for demand. And finance can too. You know, like VC...
When the second tech boom drew... When finance crashed on the East Coast, a second tech boom, like suddenly everybody was giving their money to Andres and Horowitz and whoever or... I don't know, Soft, I think. Tiger Global. These people were just showering money on entrepreneurs, and so all these smart people who used to go into investment banking, trading, hedge funds, whatever, flowed to the west, and they all started starting companies, tech companies. And so, for a few years in the 2010s, the VCs really had their pick of all this talent because of this massive amount of money they were throwing at it. And I think the recent crash is kind of the end of that rainbow. There's still gonna be some of that going on, but I think that the days of easy money are temporarily over.
Henry Oliver: One of the questions on policy that I think is relevant here is like... It’s kind of about policy, but it starts with, “What is the status of stuff like STEM generally in the culture?” And one of the problems I think we have... We certainly have this problem in Britain, I think you have it in America, is that to be a scientist is just not cool enough relative to like the number of people we need to study like Physics or Maths at A level. But if you look at Eastern Europe... So this is one reason given why fewer women study STEM subjects. And if you look at Eastern Europe, there’s a much higher percentage enrollment of women in STEM subjects. And one of the main explanations for this is that under Communism like you had to be a scientist to help the country and this, “Why would you wanna do something else? We need these scientists. Get on with it.” And so this has left them with a culture that says, “Well, of course, it’s good to be a scientist. Why shouldn’t you be a scientist?” Whereas in the West, it’s more like, “Science, that’s hard. You’re a nerd. It’s boring.” So policy... Policy that’s not...
Noah Smith: Maybe so...
Henry Oliver: As far as China has gone, but that worked better than our thing worked. So how can we split the difference on this?
Noah Smith: Well, and I think that it’s just role modeling effects are important here. With women in science, I think what you’re interestingly seeing is that in Bioscience fields, the women are kind of taking over, and that’s really interesting. So if you look at... And I don’t wanna attribute it to a modeling effect but you can note that, who are the most popular biologists. The most famous popular biologists of the last like decade, that would be Katalin Karikó who invented mRNA vaccines, and Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, who were the discoverers of CRISPR. And so those people have really gotten... And you’ve got a lot of... And there’s a lot of other very prestigious like role models for women in Bioscience right here. And it was just... I don’t know if there's any deep reason. People are gonna look for deep reasons why electrical engineering is still like the most male-dominated thing in biosciences, like getting increasingly... Not female-dominated, the top tenured professors because that takes many decades to filter through.
Henry Oliver: Yeah, sure.
Noah Smith: But in terms of who’s going to grad school and who’s getting, etcetera, that's... Women are just surging and I predict will eventually take over like they did in psychology. And so when you look at these fields, you ask why women in this one field, people come up with all these ridiculous Ev. Psych. explanations, like, “Women like things that are alive.” I'm like, “Come on.” [laughter] They’re like a f*****g bacterium or a piece of RNA versus flow of electrons in a device that’s... One’s not more alive. You can’t pet it. It’s not a cute little bunny. That’s b******t. It’s like... And I know because I spend most of my day petting cute little bunnies. But... [laughter] So, no, what’s really happening is that you happen to get some women in the bioscience field first and they provided the modeling effects for other women to look at them and be like, “Oh well, that famous scientist is a woman, I could be a women too. And... “ I can be a woman too? I could be a woman, no, I could be scientist too. That’s something else. [laughter] Then I can be a scientist too, and put on a lab coat and be just like this person. And I think that you see another thing in the theoretical fields, you see that Theoretical Physics is still extremely male-dominated, but you see that Math...
A lot more women are going into Math, and certain segments of Math are getting a whole lot of women, like certain sub-fields of Math are getting a whole lot of women, and Math majors are now about half women. And so Math, I would argue that the skill set required to Math and versus Theoretical Physics is not so incredibly different. It’s a little different, Physics has a little more intuition in some areas, and Math a little more rigor, but it’s not so different. And the fact that women are going a lot into one field and not into the other field, don’t b******t me with some Ev. Psych. explanation of why women like Math instead of Theoretical Physics. Shut up! To the imaginary Ev. Psych. person who's gonna yell at me on Twitter. No, no, it’s not. It’s modeling effects. It’s founder effects and modeling effects, it’s like... You get some... And like TV, I’m sure has to do with this, there’s probably some effects of media, like media shows women, some famous woman doing bioscience stuff, but not electrical engineering stuff. I don’t know. And there’s probably that, I don’t know, I can’t prove that, I don’t have any evidence.
Henry Oliver: Do we prioritize too young, getting people to sort themselves and decide what they’re gonna do, and therefore cut off like range and sampling? And one of the reasons why being a late bloomer is kind of like a slightly weird thing is because we say to people, “Well, you gotta pick something and you gotta go and do it”, and we don't let them just... We don't encourage this thing where actually you might just bum around for a bit and try different stuff and...
Noah Smith: Honestly, no. America is really good about that. Other countries do that, and they’re trying to do it less. So for example, the most famous example I know of this is a guy named Kim Ung-yong in South Korea, who was... He had the highest IQ ever measured, blah, blah, blah. And they were like, “Well, you've got to...” I don’t know, there was this whole national thing where, “He’s this great genius, and we’ve gotta make him...” And the most genius-y thing they thought they can make him do is go work for NASA. They were like “NASA!” And then he was just like, “You know what? I don't wanna do this, I just wanna be a middle manager at like some company and just have a job and have a life, I don’t really wanna do hard intellectual stuff. I have like a 210 IQ or whatever, like off the charts.” That's... 210 means nothing. It means our test isn’t good enough to measure how well you do these things. And so then he's just like, “I’m just gonna go do my thing.” And so now he’s just like some middle manager somewhere and everyone was, got real upset at him, they were like, “You were supposed to be this ass-kicker”, he’s a baby boomer, I think, and he’s just like, “Yeah, no. I wanna have a life, I just wanna have some kids.”
And the other famous example of this is a guy named William Sidis, who was an American guy who had the other highest IQ ever measured, similar kind of situation, who like everyone in the early 20th century just went crazy over this kid, they're like, “Ah! Smartest kid ever.” Blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, “No, what I wanna be is a Communist.” [chuckle] And so he became like a revolutionary, he just went to protests and stuff like that, and I think ended up getting killed or something. But I actually don't remember what happened to that guy, so don't quote me on that, but William Sidis was this guy's name. He was just the earlier version of Kim Ung-yong. And so now I think if you look at how society treated Kim Ung-yong, pushing him into this thing, versus how it treated Joon Hu, the poet guy, just letting him do something first in Korea, then in America, you see a big evolution, you see this evolution toward letting people discover what they’re gonna do. And I think we do let people have time to play around and discover what they wanna do.
I think there’s more we could do on this front, and I think that... I don’t wanna go on a tangent, but I think that the most important thing we could do to provide people with a perspective that we don't currently do is pay Americans, especially, to go on overseas trips when they’re young to get some perspective by actually seeing another country, ’cause Americans really get out of their country, especially disadvantaged kids. Imagine you take some disadvantaged kid who's never been more than 20 miles from where he grew up, and suddenly he’s doing three months in Vietnam. That’d be pretty cool. That would be a big perspective expander. But, so anyway, I think that would be a big one. But in the old days, how would you... If you just grew up on the farm and never left your hometown, how would you get out, see the world, and meet new kinds of people? Well, the army. It would be the army. What do they say? “Meet fascinating new people from foreign cultures, and shoot them.” [chuckle] “Join the army!” But, I...
Henry Oliver: That’s kind of what happened to Chris Gardner. Do you know him? The guy... He’s a stock broker. He wrote a really good book called The Pursuit of Happyness, that Will Smith turned into a movie.
Noah Smith: Oh, I didn't know that.
Henry Oliver: He basically had a really bad childhood, lived with a violent step-father, his mother went to jail because of social services problems, and he got out by joining the Navy, and the Navy was the only educational credential he really had. So he's a smart guy, but he didn't have the degree and whatever, and ended up selling medical equipment, and working all the time, and he had... Single father and it was just not working, and he sees a guy with a Ferrari and he's like, “Dude, I need to get me a Ferrari. What do I do?” And got an interview at a stock brokers firm and just... He’s like 27, he’s African American, he has no degree, he’s none of the things that the 1980s stockbrokers firms are looking for.
Noah Smith: That were looking for, right.
Henry Oliver: Right. But he’s been in the Navy and he’s obviously like, he’s obviously got some smarts and some perspective, and he just claws his way up and now he owns his own firm and he is a multi-millionaire and he’s a big success.
Noah Smith: Perspective, so I would say that motivation is really important, and motivation comes from friends, friend groups, and then I would say that... And by the way, the person to really talk about this is... But insufferably in a French way is René Girard. He talks about mimetic desire, and this is just the approval thing I’m talking about, but said in a Frenchier way, and... But it is good, it’s good, it’s good, you should read it. But, yes, like venture capitalists and people in the tech world love to talk about, "Girardian and blah, blah, blah," and yes, okay. [chuckle] So then... Yeah, so motivation is one, but perspective is the other, perspective is exposing your mind to things that you had never thought of before, because when people optimize, they optimize within the choice set that they’re aware of, expand that choice set and they will land on some other optimum, they’ll find it...
Henry Oliver: Do we have to send people abroad though, could we not just give them more anime, more novels, more movies, like different... ’Cause western movies are kind of bad, but if you gave them...
Noah Smith: It’s worth trying all these things, I think of anime and Dungeons and Dragons, the fantasy geek, the discovery method, I think of that as more about bringing people together, a social... That’s a social thing. So you... The DnD group that you play with will be a bunch of nerds, the anime group that you watch with will be a bunch of nerds, and then it’ll be nerds reinforcing nerds, so that’s more about... Even if other times you’re going out and getting into fights and stealing cars or whatever people do now, I guess you can’t steal cars anymore, because of new technology, but you can do other... I don’t know. I don’t know how people steal things anymore, but then... I don’t keep up with these things, I’m old. How do hoodlum kids hoodlum now? But the point is that not that you squash that, you give people like this nerd land that they can then... And there’s more things than just anime, and Dungeons and Dragons, there’s like a million things like that, but basically get nucleus-es of where nerds will pat you on the back for being nerdy, in someway.
Henry Oliver: You've said a couple of times that like you don’t... If you wanna work at McDonald's, that’s fine, you don't have to work hard for the nation, and, but is that true? If someone has a talent or an aptitude, or someone is smart, is there not some sort of moral obligation to use... Like people used to say, “God gave you, God gave you your head, you should use it. It’s wrong not to use it.” Is there not something in that? Otherwise, what would happen to us all?
Noah Smith: Look, God also gave us prostates that enlarge at age like 55. So God can just shut up, I don’t know. [laughter]
Henry Oliver: But you know what I'm saying?
Noah Smith: No, no.
Henry Oliver: If you’re born lucky enough to be good at something, you’re somewhat obliged to practice what you’re good at.
Noah Smith: Not at all.
Henry Oliver: Why?
Noah Smith: Not at all, because the simplest answer is because if your heart isn’t in it, you won’t be good at it. That’s the simple answer, if your heart isn’t in it, then all the talent in the world won't make a damn bit of difference because motivation is the key.
Henry Oliver: Are you not worried that the easiness of Netflix and all the other stuff that Netflix is, the whole Netflix culture, means that this has become a very different problem now, because... It’s... The motivation is too easily...
Noah Smith: Leisure is just so fun, that no one wants to work hard anymore.
Henry Oliver: It’s so easy... It’s more than it’s so easy to turn it on and so easy to then just not turn it off. It used to be, if you had to go to the movies, you had to get up, you had to go there, you had to get to yourself home, whatever. Now you get home, you turn on Netflix and the next thing you know, it’s bed time and nothing’s happened. Right?
Noah Smith: I don't know, when I was a kid, all I did was pick up a fantasy book, it’s like, it’s low tech, but I could just escape all day.
Henry Oliver: But that's reading. That's different.
Noah Smith: I know. Well, is it? My parents were like, and they said, “Don’t play video games, don't watch TV, period.” They'd only allow me to watch Star Trek, and they’d allow me to play video games like just like four hours a week, and this is the same... I think four hours a week is the same amount allowed by Xi Jinping, so you’re, basically, right now, you’re recapitulating ideas of Xi Jinping, who is cracking down... Is limiting the amount that kids can play video games by federal government law. He is cracking down on fandoms, he's saying you can't be part of these pop fandoms, cracking down on pop idols, cracking down on all these fun things that kids do, so that kids won't have fun things to do, so they will use their abilities for the national geopolitical martial power of the great Chinese nation state. The only reason for us to do the same thing is if it would somehow help us compete with Xi Jinping, because Xi Jinping has a giant army, backed by massive amounts of industry and whatever, and if we are just sitting around watching Netflix while they take over the world, then we’re not gonna be able to watch Netflix for long.
Henry Oliver: Right, and I'm not saying that so much, I’m asking...
Noah Smith: And war is a real motivation, war is a thing.
Henry Oliver: We have a lot of people... We have a lot of people who are smart, but maybe less aspirational than they should be given how smart they are, or how capable they are. It’s not just smartness. And do we have a cultural problem where we’re not encouraged to be as aspirational as we could be, and we’re two lax with ourselves about, “Well, you did your seven hours today, don’t worry about it,” whereas we should say, “Look, let’s all use the talents we've got, because this is... It’s immoral to just spend your life on the surface...”
Noah Smith: So okay, so about the moral obligation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I just like, That's a matter of opinion, as David Hume would say, This is like a, this is just a matter of opinion. He’d say it better than that. But that's the point of it.
Henry Oliver: Yeah, but he would also work quite hard. [chuckle] He didn’t waste his talents.
Noah Smith: No, but he wanted to, but he would also go and hang out with Andrew Lord Kames, and get drunk as hell and...
Henry Oliver: I’m not... No, yeah, I’m not against fun, I’m just, I’m asking if we reached a cultural point where...
Noah Smith: We have Netflix. They had alcohol. Right? When you went to Lord Kames's dinners, you would be called either a one-bottle man, or a two-bottle man, which represented the number of bottles of wine you would consume in one dinner.
Henry Oliver: Sure.
Noah Smith: That's just nuts. In terms of leisure, that's like nuts. That’s so much more leisure than we now have. With the time people work hard, the time people really put their nose to the grindstone and work, work, work, work, work, is during rapid industrialization. If you look at any rapidly developing country, rapidly industrializing nation, then you see this pattern of extreme work, and there’s a very good reason for that, because of the opportunities, because instead of living in a shack, your kids could... The opportunities are just wide open, and every, it’s a scramble. But scrambles don't last forever. We’re not gonna be scrambling forever. And if we had only one country in the world, that country would get rich, and then we’d watch Netflix, and then we'd think, “Wait, should we be doing something more important? No, because our ancestors scrambled and struggled, and starved, and blah, blah, blah, so that we could watch Netflix.” If we had only one country in the world and it just got rich, and then we would be like, “Party time! Thanks, Gramps. Thank you for working hard, now we get to party and watch Netflix all the time.”
And so that’s the one country thing, and so when we talk about economic growth, we're like, “Well, we’re rich and happy, why did our grandparents work so hard, except for us to be rich and happy? They... Why did all this stuff... Why did my grandfather walk to work with cardboard in the soles of his shoes that he couldn't afford to replace for like, I don't know, cents per hour? A few cents an hour, whatever he made in the Depression. Why did he do that? Why did my grandparents make sure to always turn off the lights whenever they left every room to save on their electricity bill, and blah, blah, blah? Why did my great-grandfather beat my grandmother with a belt if she didn't get A’s on her test, if she didn’t perfect her Math tests? Why did he do that? Why do they do all that horrible stuff, except so that I can watch Netflix? They did that for me. They did that, well, I mean they did that for my mom, but they did that for... But they did this for me, and my parents didn't like...
Weren’t really poor, but they... But we grew up in a one bathroom house with no garage, and we... And my parents worked hard. And why did they do that if not for me? Why... If we just had one country and we didn't have the possibility of war, then I think that that would be the end of it. It would just be like, “Leisure is the goal. Now have fun.” Dr. Seuss in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, wrote the most profound line, the fundamental statement of utilitarianism when he said, “If you have not tried these things, you should. These things are fun, and fun is good.” But then, so that’s just utilitarianism. That's just like, “Kick back and enjoy it, man. Consumption, leisure, complementarities,” as we say in economics. But...
Henry Oliver: It's difficult to think of any prominent utilitarians who have just kicked back and enjoyed it, though, isn't it?
Noah Smith: Well, but they did what they liked. Like Jeremy Bentham, or whoever was like, he was writing stuff, because he liked writing. Like I do my hobby. Actually, I’m a perfect kind of example of this, because now I’m doing my hobby as a job. I wrote, I blogged every day, because I liked it. Before I got paid for it, and then when I needed some extra money, I started charging people for it, and now I can just do that as a job and it works pretty well, as a job. And yeah, and so that's great, right? But Jeremy Bentham could have gone to work at some industrial corporation. He didn’t. He did what he wanted.
Obviously, in a leisure, in a rich leisure society, you’re not gonna be able to motivate people to work as hard. And but I would argue that the only problem with that, that there’s no moral problem with that at all. There’s no increased wealth is not its own justification. That’s just line go up, that’s just making a line go up. There’s no reason to make that line go up. The reason is the consumption that you get, and this is deeply baked into the philosophy of economics, right? Working your whole life and slaving away your whole life and socking away your pennies, and never consuming anything, and leaving your kids with millions and millions of dollars, as I have a great uncle who did that. He made a bunch of money but never spent a dime. Then died and left it to his kids, who then, of course, wasted it all, at being complete bums. He did this. That’s not morality, that is obsessive compulsive order. The only reason you do that, is OCD. OCD with anxiety, that is why you save all your money and make all the money and never spend any of it, you do it because you’re anxious, you’re...
Henry Oliver: And are you saying under the framework you’re lining out that those people who spent that inheritance, and just like blow through it, you’re saying there’s nothing wrong with that, that’s fine.
Noah Smith: I might think those people are losers, as I do, those people are losers, they could have done a lot more stuff, they...
Henry Oliver: But that’s what I’m saying, I’m saying people should... We should be careful about this culture that says, “It’s okay to kick back,” because actually people could do more stuff. What’s the difference... What’s the real difference between blowing through an inheritance and working at McDonald’s...
Noah Smith: But who am I to tell people to do stuff? Who am I? I am just some blogger. Who am I to tell my loser...
Henry Oliver: Bloggers are the people who tell other people what to do.
Noah Smith: I know, but I’m saying like, my loser cousins are just wasting all their inherited money, and I'm just like, “Okay, you do you. I’m not gonna make you stop that,” like do I want you to build some rich dynasty? No, give your money to someone else, let someone else do something with that money.
Henry Oliver: Okay. If there are... No, it’s good. If there are people, like there’s some way through their life, they're in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s, whatever, and they feel like they haven't reached their potential, they haven’t done what they want to do, they took the wrong track, like whatever, these things happen.
Noah Smith: Right.
Henry Oliver: They think they could be a late bloomer, right? What’s your best advice for these people?
Noah Smith: Meet people, it's all about the people that you meet. Meet people who are the kind of people who do the kind of things you wanna do. Then you will do it too, and if you don’t know what you wanna do, which is a lot of people, meet interesting people, meet people who do kind of neat stuff that you don’t know what you'd wanna do, meet scientists, meet coders, meet lawyers, like my brother-in-law did, meet people who... Like if you’re thinking, you know what, I had fun, I partied, I did a bunch of drugs, I rode a motorcycle around... Yeah, that reminds me of my other friend who he led a dissipate youth, rode with motorcycle gangs, did a bunch of drugs, I don’t know, dated European models or something like that, and that was his deal. And then went to Berkeley, naturally smart guy, but then some time in his 20s, he decided, you know what, enough with that, I’m gonna get serious and I’m gonna become a movie director, now he directs documentaries, that’s his thing, he’s really good at it. Yeah, he just sort of... He gave up drugs, gave up motorcycle whatever-ing.
And then now he’s just super into it, he’s very artistic guy, but, anyway, he does some great movies. He just released a movie about Cuba, that’s like a documentary about the opening of Cuba. It is very cool. Which is just called, Cuba, you can look it up.
Henry Oliver: Yeah, yeah.
Noah Smith: But yeah, anyway, so then he's just another example, he’s like, he wanted to party, and then he decided he wanted to do something else, but social connections are the thing. He knew people in the movie world that worked on films, social connections are the key, that friendship connections are the magical elixir through which everything else happens.
Henry Oliver: Okay, so people need to sample the world.
Noah Smith: Sample the world, get that perspective, get those friend groups.
Henry Oliver: Can they do this online, or do they have to go out and actually, and actually find these people in real life?
Noah Smith: That's an incredibly important good question that I have no idea about the answer to, and that I would like to know the answer to it, ’Cause that's one I don't have an answer to...
Henry Oliver: ’Cause I have known people, like I knew a woman who was a really, or is a really good social media manager, and she came to this career in her own words because she said she had no friends as a child, and she made friends on the internet, and then by doing this, she kind of spiraled up into being a proficient social media curator and whatever else, it’s not really my thing, and it’s like she developed not only like a life and some friends and whatever, but she developed a career out of this, quite unexpectedly. Like how viable do you... If you wanna be a lawyer or physicist or a poet or a director, is it viable or do you have to be in the room? Do you have to see that person, not only for you to get inspired, but for them to take you seriously.
Noah Smith: I don’t know.
Henry Oliver: Okay. All right.
Noah Smith: Yeah, I don’t, I honestly don’t know the answer to that, and that’s an, but that's an important question, the question of how much offline can substitute for online, that’s a question for Raj Chetty.
Henry Oliver: Great. Noah Smith. Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't?
Noah Smith: What's the best Anime on TV right now?
Henry Oliver: [laughter] What is the best Anime?
Noah Smith: Spy X Family.
Henry Oliver: Okay. It’s on Netflix?
Noah Smith: It's not on Netflix. You have to look somewhere else to... It’ll be on Crunchyroll after it’s run finishes, but it’s still airing, if you didn’t wanna settle down and have a family before you watched this anime, I think now you will.
Henry Oliver: Okay, great, thank you very much.
Noah Smith: Absolutely.
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Anna Gát was a showbiz child in Budapest. She converted to Catholicism aged twelve under her own initiative. After an exciting but then dispiriting youth in Hungary at the time of EU accession, she emigrated to London which was a dreary and disappointing experience. In her thirites, she got a job in a startup. Then she read an article by Sam Altman: “I didn't know that startups were a philosophy.” From here, her life started to change. She gave up playwriting and scriptwriting and became the founder of InterIntellect. Her entry into the start-up world changed her life, unrecognisably. This interview is a brief account of Anna’s life so far. You can read Anna’s writing here. This is the InterIntellect site.
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