Most people aren’t going to read The Golden Bowl. Henry James’s last completed novel is long and difficult, exemplifying his late style, in which his sentences can become discombobulatingly convoluted. It is the sort of thing that gets James a bad name as a stultified hippopotamus of a writer, expounding and confounding his readers with sentences that seem as impenetrable and interminable as the rambling conversation of a dull and supercilious old man. Earlier James novels and stories—such as, Washington Square, Daisy Miller, and The Portrait of a Lady—are more focussed on action and events, and are written in a plainer, more “readable,” style. Next to these, The Golden Bowl can feel like it was written by a different person—, a more pompous, irascible writer.

So why am I writing about The Golden Bowl? Because Literature is read in the spirit of ambition, not acceptance. And The Golden Bowl, is quite simply one of the best novels written in English. It is, as Gore Vidal says, “ambitiously divine.” It is about as close an examination of the psychology and inner lives of four people as it is possible for a novel to make. The action is not so much greater than that of an ordinary novel, but the amount of unfolding of the characters’ inner lives is very much greater. One of the characters in Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You called it a “juicy” book, which is exactly right. The Golden Bowl provides us with an extraordinary amount of information about what everyone thinks and feels, consciously and unconsciously, about the events of the book.

There is a strange and splendid beauty to James’s difficult prose. Ezra Pound was right to say that James’s late, elaborate style was in fact concise. James’s closeness to his characters, and the great precision of his style means, as Pound says, that he says more in a page than many other more “direct” writers would get into a chapter. It is frequently marvellous what James can make a sentence do. One must read The Golden Bowl slowly.

All of this means that James can turn a simple story of love and betrayal,—a story of how rich people who collect nice objects have a distorted view of human relationships, which is a theme he had handled many times before—into an odyssean story, a great quest of the psychological and romantic lives of four ordinary people. The Golden Bowl is full of questing references, from the Golden Isles (the Elysian Fields of Greek mythology) to people who are looking for each other at a moment of high tension being described as going in quest of each other.

It might seem flatly obtuse to call the The Golden Bowl a quest. These people walk the park and stroll the grounds and pace the drawing room. But The Golden Bowl has the quality of a High Romance, in which his coiled prose creates a shimmering effect, as if we are reading a novel that aims not at verisimilitude, but a marvellous tale.

The rest is not online yet but will be quite soon (I think), or you can order an issue for $7.95.

Ever since its rather dull beginning on Robinson Crusoe’s island, the British novel has been a means of holding up the mirror not to nature but to the British idea of civilization. That is why Jane Austen is beloved the world over. She is as English as blushing roses and clotted cream—exemplary of Englishness. She knows how civilization works in the drawing room and the drapier, what ideas and beliefs it relies upon, what pains and pity it takes to raise a young woman of good morals as well as good manners. As much as the philosophers and economists, theoretical thinkers of civilization, Austen saw the usually unseen mechanisms of social life.

So did all the great novelists. From the emotive nationalism of Walter Scott to the romping picaresque of Henry Fielding to the austere psychology of Henry James, the novelists have shown us what it takes to create and preserve a culture. This is one of the primary functions of literature in a great civilization. The Greeks had Homer, the Romans Virgil. For many years, the English had their poets. It was once unthinkable that the scions of English national life had not got Shakespeare close in their heart. Alas, no more. But they still, just about, read novels. A great nation cannot long survive without a vision of greatness and a vision of itself. It is largely from the novelists that we get that vision now, to whatever extent that we do still get it from literature.

We might think that our elites are less dedicated novel readers than once they were. The days of Harold MacMillan and Alec Guinness reading Trollope with monastic devotion are gone. Instead, we have the proud philistinism of Truss and Starmer. But it is not so long since the days when John Major spoke feelingly of his love of Trollope. Tony Blair loved Ivanhoe. The archetypal literary MP, long associated with figures like Michael Foot and Enoch Powell, has more recently been alive in Frank Field, Alan Johnson, Rory Stewart. I have seen Michael Gove light up in discussions about fiction. Nicola Sturgeon is now a fiction reviewer. On Desert Island Discs Kemi Badenoch chose Vanity Fair, Ed Miliband chose The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Theresa May chose Pride and Prejudice.

We are long past the days when every home had, as well as a Bible and a Shakespeare, editions of English classics like Johnson and Addison. But are we past the days when the novelists are still afforded their corner of the house? Visit the homes of even the least literary lawyers and civil servants and you are still likely to see at least a few novels on the shelves. I was once friends with an old lady who broke out into great smiles when she talked about Surtees. A friend recently told me about her grandmother (who left school at fourteen) who remembers Jane Austen’s birthday every year. No-one needs to be told about the popularity of Middlemarch. P.G. Wodehouse remains untouchably popular with readers of all stripes. The good old London Library has a wealth of novels—and it was not unusual to find that obscure titles had been checked out. During the pandemic, sales of the great novels were reportedly high. Watching Netflix has taken over from fiction-reading, but not entirely.

There is a long history of this affection for novel reading. People went simply wild for Pamela and Clarissa, in a way that we cannot quite conceive without referring to Sally Rooney. Writers like Dickens and Trollope became newly popular during the Second World War. Night after night, as the bombs fell on London, the King’s Private Secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, separated from his evacuated family, sat in Buckingham Palace reading the Chronicles of Barsetshire and Palliser. (And indeed all of Trollope’s other novels, which he owned in pocket editions.) Jane Austen’s fame grew in the nineteenth century as readers declared that her books made them feel they really had spent time with the characters. Many of Dickens’ early readers were illiterate listeners. Jonathan Rose has documented working-class movements that organised themselves to read classic literature. Long gone are the days of the Boots Lending Library or the naming of towns and roads after Walter Scott’s novels, but this sense of affection remains, as seen in the continued success of the Persephone, Virago, and Penguin classics series, the many film and television adaptations of Victorian writers, and podcasts like Backlisted.

Above all, what displaced the novel from the heart of English life was radio and television, and then the internet. In the 1860s J.S. Mill, advising a young woman on her ambitions to read the great works told her to work to a set number of pages of the hard stuff (philosophy) in the mornings when her mind was fresh, and to pursue the “lighter literature” of novels in the evenings, not merely for pleasure, but to keep her reading stamina well trained, and to become conversant with the history of manners and culture. A good deal of that young lady’s time would now be given to Netflix and HBO. To bring up a child as a reader today requires hard limits on screen-time of all descriptions.

And the novelists are adapting to the screen, which is the global home of Jane Austen. I sat next to a data center programme manager on a flight to New York recently. After we discussed data centers, he asked me what I do. Oh I love Jane Austen he told me. And he knows her through the movies. His favourite is Laurence Olivier. Just as The Odyssey recently sold a million copies because of the new Christopher Nolan film, so many of the British novelists will be known around the world because of adaptations. New technology took away the mass audience for reading—the novel will never be central to our culture again; we cannot go back to 1852—but it is also a new way for novels to find audiences. The novelists’ influence is still strong.

The novel is sometimes imagined as a bulwark against that sort of cultural change, a refuge from (or resistance to) the dominance of commerce and technology. One of the pleasures of Philip Hensher’s new A History of the Novel in Britain is his alertness to the role of economics in the development of the novel. As well as the expected history of novelists and their work, Hensher provides an account of the commercial factors that changed the form and content of novels, such as the role of cheap printing in serialization and magazines in the golden age of genre stories. Chief among the “patrons” who, according to Hensher, have done more harm than good, was Charles Mudie, who set-up Mudie’s Lending Library in 1842, and was, largely, responsible for phenomena such as the three-volume novel and sexual censoriousness that shaped the novel for the rest of the century. Of course, a lot of this comes down to public taste. Kingsley Amis records in his memoirs being told to tone-down a swear word in his second novel, otherwise he would lose the Boots Lending Library purchase of 2,000 copies. Amis made the correction. That was in 1955, a long time after Mudie. The British public had reticent taste, not just the “patrons”. The British idea of civilization was not only created by the novelists, but recorded by them in form and content, in absence as well as presence.

As a novelist himself, Hensher is especially alert to the way writers record modern speech. My favourite example, perhaps because it is so much of my own time, comes right at the end, when he quotes Zadie Smith (who he rightly calls “a gifted listener”): “Jones give it a rest. I’m having a fucking debate. Hifan, what school you at now, mate?” People did speak like that when I was young. Reading that line now, I can hear the intonations of year 2000. Hensher’s whole history is full of these little noticings; quotation is the primary critical faculty, and in the hands of an astute novelist, it works slightly differently than it does for a critic, though in what precise way is hard to say: Hensher has a professional respect for many of the writers he discusses here, and that gives the book a singular pleasure.

Hensher is enjoyably provocative and idiosyncratic. These really are his own opinions, based on a tremendous amount of reading and a long-developed critical faculty. Amelia is said to be a very good novel (a proposition which I find extraordinary). He is very hard on Walter Scott, regarding him as more or less a bad writer and not much more. (But who cannot love Ivanhoe?) Surtees is praised to the hills. The Sacred Fount is claimed as the most difficult novel in the language, ahead of Finnegans Wake (an intriguing claim). Wodehouse is proposed as Modernism’s greatest legacy, perhaps the most enjoyable section of the book. Agatha Christie gets light, but critically astute, praise.

Christie is one of Hensher’s blind spots. Christie is a bizarre author to disdain. He isn’t crass about it, but it cannot be right to say that her novels are “a pure game, with strict rules” in which “Psychological investigation is reduced to nothing.” It is true that “a room in an English country house is plunged into impenetrable darkness at 6.30 p.m. during British Summer Time by the lights being turned off” but Jane Austen put apple blossom on the trees at the wrong time of year and Shakespeare allowed Romans to wear spectacles. Hensher slips into the mistake of judging her as the sort of novelist she is not. I no longer find it possible to read Christie, having inhaled so many of them in earlier years, but a great deal of respect ought to be owed to her achievements, both as a writer and commercially. She is one of the most read, most loved, and most accomplished British writers, even if what she wrote was not literature.

In general, though, Hensher brings a liberal and catholic attitude to his project. This is the novel in Britain, not the British novel, and so writers like Christine Brooke-Rose are included, and attention is given to the post-war writers in Britain who worked in other languages. (I have not read Brooke-Rose.) The history of the novel includes diversity of genre as well as social status, gender, or ethnicity of the writer. In true liberal fashion, Hensher puts this diversity to no political end, but merely uses it as a methodology for his narrative. It also allows him to poke some of the shibboleths of literary attitudes.

In a splendid passage about Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf, Hensher points out how absurd it is that Woolf—daughter of perhaps the most influential editor of his day who was related to Thackeray and a Duchess—is often called an “outsider”, while Arnold Bennett, who never lost his provincial accent, is thought of as “establishment”. Woolf, Hensher points out, believed champagne was opened with a corkscrew, whereas Bennett made and spent an awful lot of money. (Woolf relied on a small private income, before her books and the Hogarth Press started earning.) Still, Hensher is able to offer high praise to Woolf’s fiction (though he hates The Waves), and sees her merits, while also seeing the strength of Carey’s argument in The Intellectuals and the Masses. So many critics play the game of equanimity in order to be able to revert to the pre-ordained political conclusion all the more plausibly. Hensher declines this sort of bluster and makes authentic judgements.

This is a plausible approach because Hensher has read an awful lot and he is careful not to cite novels he hasn’t read, or to footnote what he has and has not read. (The bibliography is fifty pages long.) This is a vast history of the British novel, not a popular account of the canon with some context. Alice Thomas Ellis is a familiar name to even a moderately well-read person in the British novel, but Lady Florence Dixie is not. He has endured more Charlotte Yonge than I was able to, and more Margaret Oliphant than I thought was humanly possible. Writers like Eliza Haywood are given sensible treatment, as are Victorian writers who only attract minority followings like George Meredith. He spans the sentimental novels of the eighteenth century to the work of John le Carré.

The strength of Hensher’s interests and the fact of his knowledge coming from his life as a writer makes the book compelling on its own terms. He has an assured and simple tone, which is flexible enough to sustain such a large project without ever going stale or lapsing into critical complacency. Both in his novels and his Spectator criticism, Hensher shows a more conservative disposition than many other writers, and this is put to witty effect at several moments.

Just as a modern-day prize committee would never reward a novel that chose to inhabit the point of view of a Brexit supporter, or even a Conservative voter, with any sympathy, so the mere fact of Mudie’s regime of patronage warned publishers away from novels that fell short of an ideal standard of morality.

He is, unlike some of the scholarly histories of the novel, capable of being direct and succinct. “Austen’s characters speak in astonishingly direct ways”, he tells us, arguing that her “virtuosity in rendering speech” is the key to her great superiority above the other writers of her time. It is in his constant antagonism to the novel and its enemies—be they overbearing patrons or fussy moralists who fretted that novels were degrading—that Hensher’s clipped judgements are most enjoyable.

An analysis of the contents of ten very humble lending libraries in London in 1838 is of great interest, not just for the analysis of what ordinary readers were borrowing and reading, but for the attitudes of the statisticians. In declining numbers of copies (from 1,008 per category to 10), they run:

Novels of the lowest character, being chiefly imitations of Fashionable novels… Fashionable novels…Novels by Walter Scott, and novels in imitation of him…Novels by Captain Marryat, Cooper, Washington Irving… Miscellaneous Old Books… Romances, Castle of Otranto…Voyages, Travels…Novels by Miss Edgeworth, and Moral and Religious Novels… Novels by Theodore Hook, Lytton Bulwer… Lord Byron’s works, Smollet’s d[itt]o, Fielding’s d[itt]o… Works of Good Character, Dr Johnson, Goldsmith… Books decidedly bad.

We will not waste time on these commentators, except to note they have registered one of the great moments in literary culture, from consumption by an elite with money and time, to a universal culture of considerable sophistication. As this culture of universal consumption took hold, and anyone could find a novel they could enjoy, it created one of the most glorious phenomena in world history: the British novel from the 1830s to the First World War.

You will notice that Hensher is not afraid to draw the line at a provocative point. It would be no fun were he not willing to draw such lines. It is not quite as provoking as when Elizabeth Jenkins wrote that the great age of the English novel came to an end in 1870, with the death of Dickens, which excludes Middlemarch and Thomas Hardy. But both views represent the sort of idiosyncratic taste that is essential to a working novelist. What motivates Hensher is what has motivated so many readers and writers of novels. Jonathan Rose has documented the ways Victorian readers responded to literature: valuable and fascinating as his work is, the novelists themselves are another source of that information, as in this extract from Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour.

Lily went flicking through one book after another, but listlessly; for the choosing of the book brought the thought of the quiet evening when she would read it. The books themselves with their thick greasy boards sickened her, but gave escape into the land of the living. ‘Audley Court’, she read, ‘lay low down in a hollow, rich with fine, old timber and fertile pastures.’ In the spell of these words she sank deeply as if under an anaesthetic, away from empty and makeshift reality: she went down willingly and pleasurably, relinquishing with eagerness the gritty irritations of the harbour streets, the smell of fish, the dusty shops with their cast off clothes and furniture.1

Taylor is, unsurprisingly, one of the novelists Hensher admires, and a sign that his tastes, while they may not be exactly those of most readers, will be sympathetic with many modern novel readers, among whom Taylor, and her ilk, remain remarkably popular. It would be unfair to compare her to other novelists, or to lump her in with the “feminine middlebrow”, a category that under-describes all its contents, especially Taylor. Hensher provides a characteristically succinct and insightful summation:

They are novels of consistent classical purity of expression, taking immense care with the establishment of character, setting, motive, and plausible psychology; something of the same quality can be seen in other novels of the period, such as Elizabeth Jenkins’ fine The Tortoise and the Hare (1954), but Taylor’s work sustains that to an unusual extent. Like other novelists of decorum, she found chaotic and subversive presences very useful; she is probably the last serious novelist in English to be actively and consistently interested in the views of servants…

Naturally, I am prejudiced in favour of Hensher as he can see the value of Jenkins, which even specialists in this period almost never do, but he is certainly right to point out how “central to the literature of her time” Taylor was, much more so than was realised at the time by her publishers, though surely a whole book could be made of the anecdotes behind publishers’ misapprehensions, such as Muriel Spark’s comment that she didn’t think her publisher, Harold MacMillan, understood her books.

What I missed most was the presence of ideas. You will not get much in the Ian Watt line. Everything Hensher writes is perfectly sensible, but to my sensibility it leaves an absence. When he does draw parallels they are intriguing. The emergence of Richardson from the conduct books of the early eighteenth century is well-handled, for example, but the first thing I shall read on Hensher’s recommendation is probably Class by Jilly Cooper, which Hensher says is essential to read along side Alice Thomas Ellis. He also calls Cooper “the sort of excellent novelist that Q. D. Leavis taught the aspiring intelligentsia to despise.” So perhaps I shall try Riders.

Every novel is a novel of ideas, not in the sense of being a novel that explicates and sermonises but in the deeper, broader sense that nothing can be written that is not founded on some belief, some worldview, some ideology, or some instinctive understanding. Hensher did not need to expand his view to the relationship between Jane Austen and the Enlightenment or Charles Dickens and the utilitarians to give this vision of the novel its due place. He might have given more space to the Ruskinian and Christian ideas in Penelope Fitzgerald (an author who I would have given more space and more praise) for example. I proposed this vision of the novel as inherently a form of ideas to Hensher at a Civic Future event this summer and we disagreed quite straightforwardly. To my mind, to conceive of The Portrait of a Lady as a novel without a set of ideas at its heart is hardly to conceive of it at all. To Hensher, my perspective was unthinkable. Ideas are not as absent from this account. He identifies Wells’ “principle… that the impossible fact convinces if it is surrounded by a mass of objectively plausible, even banal, properties.” But overall it felt to me like some of the most exciting aspects of fiction—its ability to work not just as a means of examining moral problems but intellectual and social problems of all sorts, as a partner to philosophy—were given less space than they deserve.

As I said before, what makes this book worthwhile and fascinating is Hensher’s personal approach, wide reading, and professional novelist’s disposition. It will surely remain as the standard popular account for a long time to come. The novel is not only the major literary form of modern times, it is practically the only form many readers now care about, including professional readers, and as it continues to adapt to its relegated but important position, Hensher’s book will be a provocative and useful guide to anyone who wants to know more.

The heart of Hensher’s account is that the novel is adaptable, constantly trying new things in response to changes in copyright law, book pricing, implicit censorship, swelling and shrinking audiences, fashionable beliefs among the literary elite (this is why he thinks so many novels in the late twentieth century were so short), and, most of all, reactions to the novels of the immediate past.

As the screen gives way to AI, we will be living through a new period of change akin to the radio or the printing press, a whole new set of mediums will emerge, a new way of spending time, a wholly different balance of modes of entertainment and intellectual engagement will become normal. Shakespeare required indoor theatre. Dickens needed serial publishing. Hollywood needed celluloid. Likewise, whatever new conditions AI provides may lead to new forms of cultural creation. This may or may not lead to a new burst of life for the novel, but it need not be the death of the novel. Whether AI becomes a new medium of fiction, a spur to new innovations in human writing, takes the place of “conduct books” and philosophical inspiration, or is merely the foil against which many writers define themselves, we do not yet know. But we can be sure the novel has a future.

That is why, although it was sensible of Hensher to stop his account in the year 2000, claiming the usual critical difficulty of not being able to properly assess modern work, a long essay with his views of the modern (and future) novel would be a suitable epilogue—perhaps he shall publish one elsewhere. It is still the case that writers like Emma Cline, Sally Rooney, and Kiran Desai achieve large readerships and occupy a significant place in modern culture. Perhaps it is less true of British writers, or of writers in Britain, but the cultural commotion caused by writers like Houellebecq is not yet a dead force in the world.

It is more and more true that what we all thought was normal life is gone and never coming back. Whether that drives us to read once a year or once a day, whether we read for pleasure, escape, intellectual stimulation, cultural and historical curiosity, or all of those things, whether we read novels the way we go to the gym or the way we eat cake, they will still be an irreplaceable, incommensurable, irreducible part of living. Just this week, I saw a video go viral of a young woman finishing a novel as an airplane landed. She was sobbing. Nothing works quite like a novel.

Philip Hensher’s new A History of the Novel in Britain

Copenhagen is an excellent city for this sort of architectural pleasure. There are wonderful Dutch gables all over the place here. (The Dutch gable originated in Flanders but is the work of this whole region.) I won’t rank them, but the one I loved the most was on Kronburg Castle in Helsingør, about an hour north of Copenhagen. I am only an amateur architecture enthusiast, so I can offer little more than pictures and enthusiasm. But look at the finials, scrolls, the way the gable banks the left tower, the constant musical patter of squares and pediments, shrinking and expanding across the building. Doesn’t it just send your imagination spinning?

And he is a close-by view of a small two-sided gable.

In the town, we found this pair of stepped gables. The one on the left has obvious parallels with the style of Grundtvig’s Church. (I went back there today: pictures of the inside of the church below.)

Here’s another example of the same style.

And here is the train station.

I love the plainness of this one. So many buildings are designed to look nice as part of a street, but the lovely plain design here makes it a beautiful accompaniment to the sky.

Back in Copenhagen, you can see this sort of thing on the old Stock Exchange,

on churches,

and on homes.

Alas, much of central Copenhagen is littered with truly ugly buildings. You can see here how the vertical-line style has been bastardized into something international and intimidating. It’s like a villainous headquarters. But this is a good place to see clearly the continuities and discontinuities between modernism and the past.

The decline is painfully obvious where old commercial architecture is seen next to its modern inheritors.

So many shared features, so little shared beauty. Same below.

They even had the audacity to put this

opposite this!

Ghastly. They tell me they all quite like this one, but really—come on… it’s an affront.

Compared to this? Be serious.

Sometimes the contrast is so obvious it hurts.

All the architects will tell me I am wrong, but if that black box is architecture, I’m a banana. This is beauty.

And this.

And this. (Ah! I really love this one.)

And this.

Do we need to continue? Like, do we prefer this?

or this?

This tower is superb.

Here are the plainest gables I enjoyed.

And here’s an elephant.

And a three-story square bay, for those who enjoy such things.

I’ll finish with my favourite place here, the interior of Grundtvig’s Church. This was perhaps my most intense architectural experience since going to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Annunciation Orthodox Greek Church.

What makes this more attractive than most Modernism (especially of the International School variety) is the use of bricks. This is an expressionist building and retains a lot of the liveliness that modernism is felt to lack. This combination of new style and old form, of new ideas in old materials, is, I think, the secret to the future of aesthetics. We cannot go back to art deco or neo-classical or Queen Anne Style or whatever other period we find attractive. We cannot undo the modern. But we can make the new old and old new.

The church is set in the middle of a quadrangle of houses. Copenhagen is generally a lovely city for looking at Dutch gables and the stepped arches of the church are very nicely echoed around the courtyard.

The circular window here not only parallels the arches but it links back to the bricked-in rose window on the west front of the church.

Which itself works with the concentric arches and the horn-spiral door handles. And see how the bricks of the arch resolve into the diagonals of the door. From the bottom to the top, this church is reaching upwards and outwards, and the bricks are part of that reaching. The material is not surface style: it is integral to the idea of the building.

Grundtvig’s Church reminds me of the Minster Building in London, which is modern gothic in polished granite. As I wrote for The Critic a few years ago,

Something must be done about the future. We cannot carry on as we are. We can’t keep everything and we can’t go back. Architecture has declined from the controversial to the ignorable. The modern box style that is now perpetrated everywhere like an unstoppable glitch is good for building nothing more than cheap hotels. Our skyscrapers are a pathetic exercise in using silly shapes. But rather than ask for revivals of styles past and wish away the modern, as if architecture were a fairytale and the past weren’t as mishmashed as the present, I contemplate the Minster Building, whose jagged gothic points arise in polished postmodern granite. It marries old and modern to make something strangely compelling; it is curiously in keeping with the madcap gabled gothic office round the corner on Eastcheap. Unlike the boxes, the Minster Building has style. Like St Mary Aldermary, those fantastic towers keep an almost musical presence in my imagination.

The idea of a building has to live in its materials and Minster’s granite is as enchanting as Aldermary’s white stone. (How much more sympathetic would we find the Barbican if it was faced in Portland stone?) What we find attractive in the buildings of the past is the proper unity between the idea of the building and its materials, whereas so much of modernism is dominated by the materials. It takes someone like Frank Lloyd Wright to use concrete with real imagination. Plenty of buildings that looked modern without looking modernist are good examples of this marriage of idea and material, like the Weston Library. It’s also why the extension to the National Gallery looks so splendid (Mies van der Rohe glass wall aside, yeugh).

The new aesthetics doesn’t have to be a new Bauhaus. It could be a new modernist gothic, a new way of putting the new-old idea into the right new-old material.

Humans are also part of nature as well as separate from nature, and literature is also part of life as well as relational to it. This is obvious in the case of realism. David Copperfield blacked bottles just as Charles Dickens did. It is obvious in the view of poetry as “overheard” expression. George Herbert’s poems are George Herbert’s prayers. It is obvious too in the performance of literature: in theatres and courts and sitting rooms. Even when literature “lies” it is part of life as well as relational to it: we live the poem and the prayer as we read them. When literature represents it does so as part of the flow of life, like a photograph on a wall, or the ornaments that we live with.

Is there some third thing that literature is that is not universal or particular but simply part of life? Literature might be always mingled, not universal through particularity, but universal and particular simultaneously: a compound not a mirror.

If so, literature is part of the compound, not just in the receipt but in the making. Homer, Beowulf, Cervantes all had a quality of being drawn from life and simultaneously part of how living happened.

We do not ask, while we are living, whether we are living particularly or universally. The question “Is the love I am feeling right now particular or universal or both?” makes no sense. Not because love is obviously both, but because as soon as we ask the question we are no longer in the feeling but making commentary about it, the way Samuel Pepys had to stop living to write his diary, but also had to live always partially distracted so that he could write his diary afterward. Likewise to some novelists everything is copy. Boswell is unthinkable without this realisation.

To read, then, is not to receive commentary; it is not to see art as a mirror of the world or the lamp of a soul. It is to live. It is another way of living, just as walking and eating and loving and talking are. It is criticism that makes literature into commentary, particular or universal. Criticism is also part of life, but in a smaller niche within literature.

George Steiner commented that the most profound lines in Homer were at the end of the Iliad when Priam and Achilles agree that despite their grief they must eat. That is the perfect example: not universal or particular, but life: life as we find it in the restaurants and ballrooms of Anna Karenina, the taverns and chambers of Shakespeare, the mud and shades of Dante, the fire and ice in Robert Frost.

Think of life as a game we have to play. To play is to continue (or modify) the game. Literature is a new move in the game, a new way of living. Literature is always part of the game, part of life. We either adapt it to the rules of our ongoing games, or we join in with the original sport as best we can.

The only thing I have seen like this is the opening scene of The Love Bug (a film I feel that I saw dozens of times as a child) which features cars bang, smash, clang, and boom into each other against a soundtrack that has elements of pageant, waltz, and a day at the races. When you see cars constantly colliding and overturning to the tune of the Die Fledermaus Overture, you cannot fail to feel giddy. It is like the great joy of watching Tom and Jerry making sword-play with conductor’s batons. Farce is part of the beauty of life.

Naturally, the music that opened the demolition derby in Prince William County (which someone told me is the largest demolition derby in Virginia), was the American National Anthem, sung by the Miss Congeniality of the Pageant, complete with her sash. We all stood. Most put their hands on their hearts. She belted it out very nicely indeed and I felt the power of that place and that crowd and the spirit of American patriotism. Damn right this is the land of the free. Long may it remain so.

For the derby itself, no music was needed. Under the beautiful spacious sky, the only accompaniment we required was the smell of the gasoline and the roar of the crowd. Before the cars started, the volunteer firefighters got into their fireproof clothing and laid out their car cutters and extinguishers. The bleachers had been filling up for half-an-hour. Many of the attendees were carrying what looked like half-gallon containers of Pepsi and pints of lemonade.

They were as attentive and well-behaved as a theatre crowd. More so, in fact, because they only cheered and applauded the really worthwhile smash, not like those villains in the modern theatre stalls who give every mediocre performance from a television star a standing ovation. They ought to come down to a derby and see how a real audience behaves. These people were waiting for the really good stuff before they cheered.

The mood of the country often seems rather dour and anxious in the newspapers. Here were the Americans who know how to have a good time. If one driver bent another’s front wheel, boy did the crowd make him feel like a king. And quite right too. It’s a muddy and narrow arena. You have to time that hit quite carefully.

During the round for young drivers (so young they have to have their father with them in the car: it was funny watching the dads jabbing their fingers, hurrying their boys to make a hit), the crowd gave them every bit of enthusiasm they gave to the others. And well deserved too. Those lads made some great strikes.

Eight drivers entered the last round. There were smashed bonnets, lost bumpers. Tires came off. Suspension springs were pronging out of the open backs of cars. Flames came out of the exhaust pipe that sticks up out of the engine. At one point, after a particularly good smash, a bonnet bumped open as a cloud of steam came billowing out of an engine. And on a beautiful warm summer evening, the air was full of the hot smell of gasoline and burning engine.

It would be easy to see this as crass, aggressive, part of the culture that serves to encourage the worst traits of this country. Certainly it is noisy and smelly. What I saw was organized sport: red flags, judicious oversight, warnings of penalties for dangerous hits, and a crowd that wanted to see a really well-targeted whack on the front axle or a sharp bit of reversing to throw the other fellow off track.

I was going to make a joke about how apt a contest like this is, given the state of American driving. But why joke? I wouldn’t be brave enough to take part.

As the defeated cars were carried off by fork-lifts, the gentle crowd applauded the tournament fighters. Decency accompanied the danger and aggression. It might have elements of farce and vulgarity, but the demolition derby is a part of what makes America civilized. I shall go again.

But his proposal goes further. If the music of Vaughan Williams and Britten could continue generating royalties to support our arts scene in perpetuity, why not apply the same treatment to other British cultural giants whose copyrights expire in the next couple of decades? He cites as examples such figures as CS Lewis (out of copyright in 2034), Ian Fleming (2035), Noël Coward (2044), JRR Tolkien (2044) and Agatha Christie (2047).

If the policy was extended to these authors, the royalties under discussion would, of course, be quite large. Britten’s estate generates slightly less than £2 million a year for the Britten Pears Arts charity. Amazon paid $250 million for the most recent adaptation of Tolkien. Under the proposal, this money would be given to an “independently governed ‘cultural endowment fund’”.

The perpetual copyright of Peter Pan is given as precedent. And Peter Pan is the best argument in favour of this sort of policy. A permanent funding arrangement for the Great Ormond Street hospital is clearly a public good. (Although even school productions need a licence and/or have to fundraise for the hospital.) But this is a unique case: the copyright is on a single, not a whole body of work. It is not obvious that things will work the same way when the rules are extended. And not every charity is as worthy as a children’s hospital.

Also, J.M. Barrie gifted Great Ormond Street Hospital the copyright thanks to the play’s obvious relevance to their work. In this proposal, it is author’s estates and bureaucrats who make the decisions, not authors themselves, which raises a moral problem: who are we to take this work for our own purposes, rather than allowing it to become public?

It is not clear whether Njoku-Goodwin is proposing a Peter Pan-type revenue-entitlement or a more general copyright with veto power. In either one, there would be negative secondary consequences, either higher costs to producers or a right of veto over further use. Both would be a tax on future creativity. Even under the Peter Pan model, the new bureaucracies will be incentivised to increase their revenue. Open the door once, and the issue is open forever…

Morrison’s endorsement leaves these economic problems aside. No mention is made of the problems of incentives, efficiency, deadweight loss, or distortionary effects. And it is assumed that the bureaucracy and charities involved will all make the best use of the money.

Copyright is supposed to provide an incentive for creation. If an author can be ripped-off within weeks or months of publishing, it disincentivizes writing. We are long past that point. Copyright is now often controlled by grandchildren, trusts, publishers, or estates, who did nothing to create the work. Copyright held by them does not help to create any new works of art. That won’t change by adding bureaucrats to the list.

Profit motive is an important motive for the distribution of art. Expired copyright allowed many cheap editions like Dover Thrift, and websites like Project Gutenberg, to exist. Readers have a choice of editions thanks to the expiration of copyright. Sherlock Holmes has become a whole culture, from Basil Rathbone movies to the Enola Holmes books and adaptations. Under this proposal, less work of that nature would exist as it would be controlled by the “fund”.

Instead, people will have to go to the works that are allowed to go into the public domain, as the protected work will be more expensive to produce. This means fewer performances at higher prices. Getting the new extended copyright status will involve lobbying and politics. Unlike the open market, where competition between different recordings and editions takes place, it will be a closed-door process. Charities will want to secure this revenue, and will lobby for it.

Worst of all, the costs of this scheme are divorced from the people involved. Morrison says that the estates will surely opt-in because they would lose revenue anyway. Good for them! It is the future publishers, film-makers, and orchestras who will be paying the extra costs. And that means the readers, listeners, and watchers—you and me. The idea that this “cost taxpayers nothing” is a selective and misleading perspective. When a work of art enters the public domain it is exactly that, public. And it is the public that pays when the work comes at a higher cost.

Morrison calls the idea of the public domain a “gentlemanly notion.” Like so many journalists, he sees this from the perspective of companies: “A striking feature of Njoku-Goodwin’s scheme is that copyright would be deployed for the public good, rather than to line corporate or private pockets.” But why is it better for that money to go to the bureaucrats who will work for this ‘cultural endowment fund’? In 2024, the Financial Times reported that “the median salary of a chief executive at the largest 100 UK charities was £175,000.” Does that count as “pocket-lining”? The real question is about the best way to fund charities and incentivize artistic production, which is not answered by these accusations.

Better charitable funding in the UK can be achieved without creating problems for the arts. Changes to the tax system would be a better solution. The Times recently published an article about how this can be done. They report that charitable donations get more generous tax-breaks in the USA than in the UK. And “public donations make up 2 per cent of GDP in the US, but about 0.6 to 0.8 per cent in the UK”. A simple change to the tax system—less GiftAid, more income tax deductibility—would increase the amount Brits give to charity with less bureaucracy and without distorting the culture market.

Schemes like this make everyone involved feel good. Who wants to write articles against the idea of charitable giving? But the UK has far too much of this sort of thing in the first place. Instead of setting up new schemes and organisations, it would be better for everyone to simplify the system instead. We need copyright that works for the real-world, not for Neverland.

Some notes from @patrickc talk on New Aesthetics yesterday with @lukeburgis:

- People miss that many architectural movements post-1930 had the stated goal of destroying beauty
- Beauty is a bearer asset. It's not a layer or a facade
- There are degrees of objective beauty. Most would agree Toledo, Spain > Toledo, Ohio
- One measure of how beauty has lagged...there used to be far more agreement across social classes about what's beautiful. The disparity today is huge
- The Brown Decades post civil war were underrated for beauty. Despite the depressive backdrop, great work got made ie. Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park
- From 1870-1920, the US undisputedly produced the best architecture in the world
- Like all tortured philosophers of our time, he's too become conspiratorial around the question, "WTF happened in 1971?"
- International architecture might be the first legible form of the new aesthetics. Iranian brick movement, Scandinavian revival, work coming out of Latin America and Spain
- Loss of the sacred is one reason progress in the world of atoms is so slow
- "Can anyone name a great piece of artwork made by AI yet?" *ducks*
- Germany is an interesting case study on aesthetics. They invented the discipline itself (Baumgarten coined "aesthetics" in 1750), dominated classical music and philosophy, gave us the Bauhaus, Braun, and the Dieter Rams design language. But they've never produced great food. Why? Maybe they simply have never cared enough. Maybe it was never the priority.
- As Stripe has increased its emphasis on beauty (Stripe Press and other initiatives) and it's become a cultural value the team rises to maintain
- THERE IS SO MUCH LATENT DEMAND FOR BEAUTY. IT'S TIME TO UNCORK IT.

Pecan pie, served hot, à la mode, in a diner that looks older than my grandmother—that’s luxury, that’s life in the movies, that’s America. Apple crumble is for weekends, Sunday lunch, something you make at home. Whoever heard of a restaurant serving apple crumble like the ladies of the village used to make it? By contrast, pecan pie is for everyone, every day, whenever you feel like it. No Englishman ever asked a friend if they wanted to go for a serving of crumble the way Americans go out for coffee and a slice of pie.

We were in a diner in Bethesda, complete with the original fixtures and fittings, surrounded by people eating country fried steak, chicken tenders, and pancakes for lunch, with a jukebox at the table that no longer plays, and those Maxwell House coffee pots that are found in the old diners that have seen generations come and go. The wooden booths are reminiscent of the origins of fast food and diners: the railway carriage restaurant. They are reminiscent, too, of church pews. All along 16th Street NW, which you drive out of DC to get up to this corner of Maryland, there are the sort of churches that made America: large, level, open, well-lit, from the Protestant tradition where everyone is on a level. Diners are still, just about, America’s secular churches. Every man is a success in a diner: equal among eaters.

When I went to New York for work, and regretted the lack of time to do anything real, I got up early, went to a quiet diner run by a wizened old man on Second Avenue, and read the New York Times with my refill. In Boston, more than a decade ago, we walked through the ice-cold air to find the diner we were recommended. Police officers were eating muffins and everyone had those characteristic blue-and-white coffee cups. In Wisconsin, I travelled from Milwaukee to Madison to Taliesin, and whenever I could, I went to a diner. Whatever else we remember of America, we will always remember the Gettysburg Family Restaurant.

If there is a “real America” (though why Manhattan and the DMV are not always considered to be the “real America” is beyond me: if these are not the heart of a certain idea of America, with their (what?) twenty-million people, I cannot think what is), you will find it in these diners. Blue jeans, tattoos, happy children, friendly-busy waiters and waitresses, laminated menus, eggs any way you like ’em, a waffle on the side, families out for lunch, locals, road trippers, everything all day, the dignity of a booth no matter how little you have to spend, coffee you don’t have to wait for, period crockery, the hum of conversation and the clang of the kitchen, paying the cashier at the register, blueberry pie, peanut soup, maple bacon, the good old American hamburger, side salads, fried cheese, baked chicken, any combination you want, daily specials, and everything just like mother used to make it. America the way we remember her, the way we imagine her, the way she still sometimes can be.

And hot pecan pie, à la mode: a small plate of delight for anyone with $4.

Bowen’s solemn attentiveness to things is almost religious, but on the other hand she’s wry and realistic, full of the comedy and irony of those same things. In its stretch of expression and penetration of thought, Bowen’s writing seems to me as rare as Henry James’s; the ambition of her novels and stories is like his too. As with James, her intelligence can’t be separated from her sensuous apprehension. Her work reassures the reader that life is as intricate, and amusing, and profound, as she makes it out in her sentences.

From this piece by Tessa Hadley in The Times. Perhaps we should say she’s as good as James at his best. When he is dull, he is very very dull, but when he is good he’s extraordinary.

I have to ask: what’s so important about likeability? What’s the problem with reading about fictional people who have done fictional bad things, or had problematic fictional thoughts?

He thinks that doing unlikable things is what gives a novel drama. What would Middlemarch be, he asks, if everyone were as pious as Dorothea? (Yes, he notes her own problematic thoughts.) He does avoid blaming social media and Goodreads for what he takes to be the trend of judging books based on whether you like the characters. (His 62-year-old mother thinks this way.) But he sees a professional/non-professional divide.

On the issue of likeability, non-professional online reviewers depart sharply from their professional counterparts published in mainstream literary publications. Even though professional reviews usually discuss characters’ actions while summarising a book’s plot, the judgments of likeable or not almost never feature.

Calder assumes this is because students are taught to approach literature as a “text” but falls into the familiar trap of wishing away critical complexity, saying:

the idea that fiction might just simply and entertainingly try to explore how other people live their lives and comport themselves under interesting ethical circumstances goes out the window in favour of an interrogative mode of reading that instead treats the novel primarily as an object of analysis.

No-one denies that we read for pleasure. But the idea that Austen, Eliot, Dickens, and James were “just simply and entertainingly try to explore how other people live their lives” is silly in its own right. However, that is beside the point Calder is making. (He cannot have it both ways!)

The distinction between liking the characters and judging the book critically does not need to be so sharp. If, as Calder claims, professional critics relegate their feelings about characters’ likeability to judgements of craft (oh that dreaded word), style, and its place in the canon, they are a modern exception to the general rule. It seems to me that if this is a critical predilection, while it surely does have something to do with the idea of books as texts and all that desiccated approach, it is also grounded more sensibly in the distinction between feeling and judgement. Critics who exclude their feelings about the characters are doing so out of a sense of the importance of proper judgement, but they are missing a trick nonetheless.

Critics used to write about liking and not liking characters all the time. Read the early reviews of the Brontes! It was common for readers in the nineteenth century to talk about knowing the characters and for that to be part of the pleasure of reading. And George Henry Lewes, who Carlyle called “the prince of journalists”, wasn’t above writing about his own deep feelings for Austen’s characters.

Miss Austen is like Shakespeare: she makes her very noodles inexhaustibly amusing, yet accurately real. We never tire of her characters. They become equal to actual experiences. They live with us, and form perpetual topics of comment. We have so personal a dislike to Mrs Elton and Mrs Norris, that it would gratify our savage feeling to hear of some calamity befalling them. We think of Mr Collins and John Thorpe with such a mixture of ludicrous enjoyment and angry contempt, that we alternately long and dread to make their personal acquaintance. The heroines—at least Elizabeth, Emma, and Catherine Morland—are truly lovable, flesh-and-blood young women…

Truly lovable! Ludicrous enjoyment! Lewes of course was a true man of letters, unworried by the possibility of being thought middlebrow. The closest thing we have to such a person today is A.N. Wilson, another great critic who is unafraid to weep and laugh on the page. Lewes was not imposing his feelings onto Austen. She wrote intentionally to provoke this sort of reaction. He was reading her as she ought to have been read. Likeability was part-and-parcel of judgement, for both critic and novelist.

Calder’s mother and all those readers on Goodreads are reacting in exactly the way they ought to—in exactly the way novelists like Austen and Eliot knew they would, as the scholar Debra Gettelman showed. wrote today about the way she wrote her recent novel (which I am also waiting to read). Rather than writing “with any idea that the novel might be read, nor that those readers might bring their own opinions about gender and art to the text”, she wrote about what interested her: a complicated man. This is quite different to the way the nineteenth century novelists thought about the problem.

Kinsella and Calder are writing against the idea of what one scholar called “wish-fulfillment” literature—books with lots of likeability and less moral complexity. That’s the sort of thing Austen and Eliot were writing directly against. Those novelists knew that they had to join readers in their reactions of likeability, if only to go beyond them.

I am so in sympathy with Lewes’s approach that I am affronted that he does not love Fanny Price, who is Austen’s greatest and most admirable heroine. Indeed, a good deal of critical commentary, starting in Austen’s own time, and including Kingsley Amis and recently Lauren Groff, has struggled to love Mansfield Park because readers have struggled to love, or even to accept, poor old Fanny. They might take a leaf out of George Saintsbury’s book, who wrote in his 1894 Preface to Pride and Prejudice that there were five heroines of the novels of the last hundred years with who “no man of taste and spirit” could resist falling in love.

Their names are, in chronological order, Elizabeth Bennet, Diana Vernon, Argemone Lavington, Beatrix Esmond, and Barbara Grant. I should have been most in love with Beatrix and Argemone; I should, I think, for mere occasional companionship, have preferred Diana and Barbara. But to live with and to marry, I do not know that any one of the four can come into competition with Elizabeth.

Many professional critics would now recoil from this sort of thing, not just on feminist grounds, but because they find it excruciating and cringe-worthy. That’s why they find the character-based criticism of the great A.C. Bradley to be so mockable. More fool them. Samuel Johnson was happy to judge Shakespeare’s characters on this basis, writing of Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well, “I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram, a man noble without generosity, and young without truth.”

Isn’t that a splendid phrase for so serious a critic to use? I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram. This was, and presumably still is for most people, a perfectly normal reaction to Shakespeare. In 1632, Charles I inscribed the names “Benedicte and Betteris” next to the title of Much Ado About Nothing in his copy of Shakespeare. I thought of this the other day when my colleague Ben Brophy told me he was reading Much Ado. Ben was full of delight about the “merry war” between Benedict and Beatrice. Falstaff was so popular that in a 1930s book which recorded all references made to Shakespeare in other literature, the index listed Falstaff at the top, saying “for the purpose of this index Falstaff shall be referred to as a work.” There were more entries for Falstaff than for the rest of Shakespeare’s works put together. One reason Harold Bloom was so popular was that he would share in this enthusiasm for character.

Johnson’s comment put me in mind of what Calder said about modern attitudes to likeability:

I searched the words “likeable” and “unlikeable” in the online reviews of some of my favourite novels. On the lower end, I discovered that any of the following offences were enough to make a character unlikeable to some readers: being privileged; having an affair, or imagining having an affair; initiating a divorce; lying; being a social outcast; being indecisive; being an alcoholic.

Well, yes indeed. Having an affair might well make someone unlikable. Just imagine extending this argument to the screen. Can we watch The Godfather without thinking about the question of likeability? What about The Sopranos or Succession? Isn’t likeability one of the main ways a writer has to engage a reader or watcher? The whole point of recent movies like The Drama and The Invite was to do with the likeability of the characters and how morally complex that can become.

So when Calder says that he doesn’t find the question of likeability to be important, I wonder what he can possibly mean. To say that “it feels beside the point to pass judgment” on a character is surely wrong. How could we read Emma or The Great Gatsby like that? What could we possibly make of Jonathan Franzen or Sally Rooney if we were so aloof? (Those are two novelists, by the way, where professional critics often make their feelings about the characters quite clear, intentionally or otherwise.) Calder claims that:

I have an allergic reaction when people start opining on the “point” of literature — especially if that “point” has anything to do with learning or self-development — but it’s clear that some form of moral engagement is part of the basic expectation that many readers bring to works of fiction.

It is also clear that this is one of the basic expectations of the books themselves. It simply isn’t possible to read most of the great novels otherwise. Without “moral engagement” there would be no V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, or Helen deWitt. Likeability is not the be-all-and-end-all, but it is the inevitable starting place.

The novel as a genre was intended to play upon the readers’ feelings about the characters, to confront them, and hope to modulate or change them. In Johnson’s comment that he could not reconcile his heart to Bertram, he acknowledges this role of literature. We should not confuse our instinctive feelings about a character with a critical judgement. For a long time, I could not finish Emma because I hated Emma. That’s fine as a personal reaction, but inadequate as a critical one. But that doesn’t oblige the modern critic (or God forbid, the modern novelist) to forgo the idea of likeability. Literature so often works by instinct and intuition. That should be a starting point for judgement, not something we keep hidden or presume to dislike.

For a long time, it was possible to be both a highbrow and a lowbrow when appreciating literature. It was normal for the groundlings to stop cracking their nuts so they could hear Falstaff’s lewd jokes. The middlebrow pleasure Lewes got from Austen’s characters didn’t prevent him writing the sort of criticism Johnson would have approved of, in which “opinion is improved into knowledge.” I would have thought Calder was one of these. He writes,

Many of us are interested in seeing dilemmas of moral complexity played out in novels, and some want to see not only that, but also characters resolving those dilemmas while behaving in aspirational ways.

Yes indeed. But if we wish for novels that play out and resolve moral dilemmas without feelings of likeability being involved, one wonders why we would want to read novels at all…

Here’s one extract.

Manuel: Last one: we might have a reading crisis, or maybe not a crisis, but some kind of decline. Is there something we —writers, critics, academics— should do?

Henry: Stop making bad arguments about the second order effects; stop being newspaper philosophers; stop using survey data to draw large (unjustified) conclusions; stop, in short, all the opinion-talk. Just do all the usual things that one would expect. Have children and teach them to read. Read yourself. Talk about the books you enjoyed. Remember that you catch more flies with honey. It might be true that the end of the Gutenberg Parenthesis comes with many risks for democracy, high culture, and some of the ways of life we have taken for granted. Are we going to make it all go away by writing impassioned social media posts? Do we know enough to justify our opinions? Do we understand the hidden incentives? Are we joining a moral panic with other people who already agree with us? How often do you see someone say something that is going to be interesting to the people who already disagree?

Curva de aprendizaje

Henry Oliver is not interested in my moral panic | In English

Henry Oliver is an English writer who runs the popular Substack The Common Reader and a podcast with the same name. He is a Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. And recently he started the project The Pursuit of Liberalism…

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24 days ago · 19 likes · 6 comments · Manuel M. Novillo and Henry Oliver

There are wonderful accounts of writers like Matthew Arnold and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Power is a keen explicator of Logue’s techniques not just of “imagism” but of his use of camera language, quotations from popular culture, instructions, the addition of words like “consider” and “imagine” to Homeric images. He quotes very nicely, and has a knack for telling a story without letting the book get dragged under by the modern impulse for all narrative non-fiction to become a chain of anecdotes that cannot bear the weight of their conclusions.

The most surprising part of this book, for me, was discovering the sheer weird variety of translations undertaken by Victorians, who produced: an Anglo-Saxon-style Homer, one in Spenserian stanzas, one as an Icelandic saga, and a version that was cast in the language of the King James Bible. Here is the extract of the Saxon Homer that Power quotes:

Thus saying gallant Hector stretched  his arms towards the infant.
But back into the bosom of  the nurse with dapper girdle
The child recoiled with wailing, scared  by his dear father’s aspect,
In terror dazzled to behold  the brass, and crest of horsehair,
Which from the helmet’s topmost ridge  terrific o’er him nodded.
Then did his tender father laugh,  and laughed his queenly mother

And here is a passage in which Power explicates some of the borrowings in Pope’s translation of the Iliad when all the men are lined up on the beach outside Troy. (The passage in question is in the footnote, very good stuff.)1

What Pope doesn’t mention is how many poets he has drawn on to translate the nightpiece. Here are just a few of the poems in Pope’s patchwork: The conscious swains have wandered over from Pope’s earlier poem, ‘Windsor Forest’. Tip with silver recalls the moment when Romeo swears to Juliet ‘by yonder blessed moon . . . /That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops’. The arms of the Trojan warriors, umbered by the fire, recall the scene around the campfires on the night before Agincourt, as described in Henry V: ‘Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames/Each battle sees the other’s umbered face.’ Heaven’s clear azure is taken from the first book of Paradise Lost, where Satan’s feet move ‘Over the burning marl, not like those steps/On heaven’s azure’. The strange use of the deep serene glances back to Milton’s famous description of his blindness: ‘So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs.’ Pope heard thousands of voices in Homer, and he lets us hear them in his translation. To read it is to be surrounded by echoes of Shakespeare and Milton, and of hundreds of poets whose names are barely remembered now, but whose words survive here. All the fruits gathered on Pope’s childhood reading-rambles are preserved in these translations, just as the Homeric poems themselves preserve the songs and experiences of a whole culture. Samuel Johnson wrote admiringly that Pope had bequeathed ‘a treasure of poetical elegances to posterity’ in his Homer.

Power is at his best when he gets into literary details like this, such as when he explains this passage from Middlemarch:

“You will say anything, Fred, to gain your point.”
“Well, tell me whether it is slang or poetry to call an ox a leg-plaiter.”
“Of course you can call it poetry if you like.”
“Aha, Miss Rosy, you don’t know Homer from slang. I shall invent a new game; I shall write bits of slang and poetry on slips, and give them to you to separate.”

The joke is that Homer often describes cattle as eilipous (“circling in their gait”) and that “leg-plaiter” was Midlands slang for the way oxen put one leg in front of the other. Power’s love of the details of ordinary life in the nineteenth century novel is well-linked to the Homeric concern with such details.

The last third of the book is given to poets of the twentieth century. Some of these, like H.D., are highly deserving of this interest. I had not known of her Homeric writing and hope now to read it. But the overall balance felt strange to me when there is no chapter for Chaucer, Henryson, or Shakespeare. No doubt, they are not translators of Homer, but Power takes (persuasively) a capacious view of “translation”, which comes alive in his discussion of how the epic impulse lived more in novels than in poetry in the nineteenth century. There might be room to discuss the way that non-fiction took over from epic poetry, too. Carlyle and Darwin were the English epic writers after Milton and Wordsworth. These are quibbles, but good books are the ones most worth the quibbling.

Power is at his worst in the small moments when modern orthodoxies are preached, not for any purpose of illustrating Homer, or advancing Power’s own argument, but merely to recite the acceptable doctrine of his milieu. He ought to have remained more purely literary. Sometimes this is just Power signaling to the right people that he is the right person. That is fair enough, though why he needs to make feminist commentary about traditional rituals on a Greek island at a wedding he attended, or to signal that he does not share his grandfather’s imperial ideas, is unclear. Likewise, H.D.’s account of meeting Ezra Pound has to be doubted. To say “she allows his overbearing nature to shine through” her account of their meeting is, in turn, to allow modern ideology to cast its shadow on the story. We might simply try believing her!

Some of this is trivial, such as when Power dissects Samuel Johnson’s impersonation of a kangaroo to illustrate what a “strictly delineated” view of his own culture Johnson had, linking this to his views about Scotland. Perhaps Scotland was just as “marginal” to Johnson as Borneo. But he lived in a very different set of conditions to us! There is something equally parochial in Power’s inability to read Johnson’s impression of a kangaroo without interpolating these judgements. Sometimes an impersonation of a kangaroo is just an impersonation of a kangaroo.

Some of it is less trivial. Insisting on the fact that Balboa did not “discover” the Pacific because thousands of others had seen it before him presents things backwardly. The fact of colonization—and of Keats’s poem—requires discovery of an existing world by strangers. To the stranger, these ancient places will be new. Power’s story is about those discoveries. (No-one requires to be told that Keats was not the first person to discover Homer or Chapman!) He ought to stay inside that perspective, unless by stepping aside he can better help us understand it. As it is, these asides have the bathos of a health and safety announcement.

Notably, he does not feel required to do the same thing when it comes to Pope’s religion: in that case the stated facts are enough. Catholic rights are no longer a live issue, and so Power doesn’t need to comment. Perhaps this is the price of doing business. Perhaps Power believes these things so deeply that they animate his work. But no conclusion is drawn, no argument made. He is, no doubt, to be congratulated on his liberalism. But it matters not to the reader who wishes to learn about Homer and his translators. Some readers might reasonably object that they signed up for a lecture on Homer in English poetry, not whatever other lectures Power wishes to deliver.

To call the teaching of English poetry in the Empire a tool of conquest is relevant in the chapter on Derek Walcott, as it relates directly to Walcott’s poetry. But the uncomplicated statement that Homer seems to anticipate Locke’s “justification of colonialism” is simply too simple. In the Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke writes of Native Americans:

neither Pagans there, nor any dissenting Christians here, can, with any right, be deprived of their worldly goods by the predominating faction of a court-church

Indeed, there is a whole scholarship on this question. David Armitage points out that Locke has no hierarchy of peoples (he does not see Europeans as superior), and that others like Grotius were explicitly defending imperial institutions (as Locke was not), and that in the Essay he made “greater use of ethnographic information than any other philosopher in Britain before the eighteenth century.” Locke said different things at different times, but he was one of the few thinkers who actually spoke to Native Americans and wrote of their “quick rationall parts.”2

That Walcott was reacting against a particular view of imperial history matters a great deal. That it was the version of history Power was taught in school in the 1980s does not. Homer Haunted suffers from these moments of bluntness in which the book’s perspective becomes narrow, acceptable, and potentially misleading. Power is wonderful at explicating the poetry, but he is much less interesting when he falls into moralising about history. However, Homer Haunted is well worth reading, whatever you think of these digressions.

More significant than all of these changes, which might have worked well with another director, is the fact that this is not a great movie. Nor a good one. It is a sub-HBO, three-hour TV special. It feels more like a mini-series than a film. Nolan’s cinematography has no elegance or beauty: he is a crude cameraman. The camera frequently cuts after one or two seconds, sometimes after as long as seven seconds—and for no appreciable gain in tension or atmosphere or narrative. Shots sit wide and empty without capturing the scale of the epic.

The space is filled with familiar scenes and furnishings: Calypso has wavy netting and beach-house style clothes; Circe is a TV witch; the suitors fill up the screen like the feasting scenes in Game of Thrones; Agamemnon strides around in black armour like Darth Vader. To compensate for the lack of anything visually memorable or striking, the music is always spooky or dramatic. In Hades it sounds like lasers (and is so loud you cannot hear Teiresias’ prophecy). At the end, when Odysseus kills the suitors, it gets faster and faster and faster for so long that it simply loses its scare factor.

The overall effect is flattening. The killing of the suitors is a prolonged argy-bargy of throat-slashing and sword-swinging; the war at Troy, is a constant barrage of women screaming while their throats are cut, soldiers spinning to their death (after getting their throat cut), towers belching fire before collapsing (three times, or four?). It is so relentless that the final third feels like a lot of squelch, crunch, splotch, snap, interspersed with shots of Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway looking at each other meaningfully.

And this.

There are Iliad people and Odyssey people, but the modern world is Odyssean: great migrations, gap years, road trips; we have lived with Odyssean technology for centuries: trains, planes, and automobiles; we all have careers, which means ‘journey through life’; our highest aspiration is still to undertake the new quest in space. The basic idea of the Odyssey is inescapable. People talk about their side-quests and being the hero of their own life, just as Elizabeth Barrett Browning once joked that she put on her bonnet just as knights used to put on their helms. Odysseus echoes in every advert where the father comes home and his children run to greet him. To be an individual is to be Odyssean, even if our journeys are small, infrequent, and domestic. We all quest, no matter the scale of our lives.

Nolan’s warning is that we risk living in the Iliad, that we are going to become more and more tribal, more distant from “Zeus’s law”, that we are going to put our own civilisation at risk. As this film implicitly acknowledges, nothing Nolan can do will alter that. We will forget the past. Reading the news, it seems apparent that we already have. We are, alas, midway on the waves. Nolan’s conversion of the Odyssey into an action film did not smother the underlying story, but it fits the pattern he warns against all too well. If Troy is going to burn again, watching this film will be little more than a distraction while the ships set sail. If Nolan really wanted to issue a warning, he might have made a film about our own civilisation, a song that will be all they have to remember us, a song of all the promises we failed to keep.

The piece was edited and one thing that got cut was the phrase “grim-dark”, which is what most of the fighting seems to be aiming at. You can read the full piece here.

A study conducted by the Federación de Gremios de Editores de España earlier this year, however, paints a starkly different picture of readership in Spain. According to the study, the percentage of the overall Spanish population that reads for pleasure has increased every year since 2017, reaching 66% in 2025, the highest level ever recorded. Meanwhile, the percentage of the population between 15 and 24 that reads for pleasure rose to just over 76%, a rate that (in the words of the authors of the study) “helps dispel one of the false myths that persists in our [Spanish] society, which holds that young people do not read.” Spanish readers are not immune to the transformations associated with the literacy crisis: the rise of social media platforms, the proliferation of video and audio content, the advent of generative AI. And from speaking to academic friends in Madrid, my sense is that the deterioration of some of the skill sets that Horowitch identifies in her piece can also be detected in Spanish universities. Neverthless, the evidence suggests that, at the least for now, Spain has not only staved off the decline in reading that we’ve seen in the United States but modestly increased readership across the generational divide.^[2]

From a longer piece by . Surely this raises some important questions. How can phones have killed Anglo reading but not Spanish? Is this linked to Anglo pessimism? In Spain, even the young people read. This is from the report Jeffrey quotes:

The data shatters the myth that young people don’t read. 75.3% of the population between 14 and 24 years old reads books in their free time.

Good news for . Democracy is safe in Spain!

Summarising the Odyssey, Aristotle wrote:

Thus the story of the Odyssey can be stated briefly. A certain man is absent from home for many years; he is jealously watched by Poseidon, and left desolate. Meanwhile his home is in a wretched plight—suitors are wasting his substance and plotting against his son. At length, tempest-tost, he himself arrives; he makes certain persons acquainted with him; he attacks the suitors with his own hand, and is himself preserved while he destroys them. This is the essence of the plot; the rest is episode.

This is all well and good as far as it goes; but it is missing the most important thing about the Odyssey: it is a quest in which sons go in search of their fathers. Peter Leithart, summarising Ulysses, an Odyssean novel, says this:

Stephen is looking for a father, and Bloom has lost his son. That broken paternal-filial setting comes from the Homeric background, with Stephen playing the role of Telemachus mourning an absent father. Throughout this book, this is overlaid with constant references to Hamlet. Stephen is a brooding Hamlet at the beginning of the story. He has lost his mother rather than his father, and sees her ghost. Stephen’s family situation continues the story of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Stephen’s search for a father, the rupture and reconciliation with a father is a key to his artistic development.

Joyce understands. The Odyssey is about the fact that, in Athena’s words, (in Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation),

Few are the sons and heirs who can measure up to their fathers;
Most are worse by far, and few are those who can best them.

We think of the Odyssey as the tale of Odysseus’s thwarted journey home. We think of him as the figure of the Tennyson poem,

For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And 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.

This complicated man: he must love the journey. One reason he doesn’t go back to Penelope more quickly, is because he is also going back to Laertes, his father. Once he has killed the suitors occupying his home, Odysseus continues his journey to Laertes.

Meanwhile, Odysseus
Drew close to the flourishing vineyard as he continued his search.
But as he went down to the great orchard he failed to find Dolios
Or his sons, or a single slave—it turned out they had gone off
To gather up stones from the field for a wall that would enclose
The orchard, and the old man was leading the way for them.
But he did find his father, alone…

His father, alone. Before going to look for his father, Odysseus tells his companions, “I will go and put my father to the test/ To see if he’ll recognise me…” Odysseus finds Laertes, a former king, old and bent, wearing protective clothes while he gardens. This is one of the most moving passages in the whole poem. I shall quote first Samuel Butler’s version

He had on a dirty old shirt, patched and very shabby; his legs were bound round with thongs of oxhide to save him from the brambles, and he also wore sleeves of leather; he had a goat skin cap on his head, and was looking very woe-begone. When Ulysses saw him so worn, so old and full of sorrow, he stood still under a tall pear tree and began to weep. He doubted whether to embrace him, kiss him, and tell him all about his having come home, or whether he should first question him and see what he would say. In the end he deemed it best to be crafty with him…

There is a plangent beauty to the plainness of this translation: to save him, woe-begone, so old and full of sorrow. But this scene can work, too, in a more highly wrought manner. Here is Pope.

But all alone the hoary king he found;
His habit coarse, but warmly wrapp’d around;
His head, that bow’d with many a pensive care,
Fenced with a double cap of goatskin hair:
His buskins old, in former service torn,
But well repair’d; and gloves against the thorn.
In this array the kingly gardener stood,
And clear’d a plant, encumber’d with its wood.

Beneath a neighbouring tree, the chief divine
Gazed o’er his sire, retracing every line,
The ruins of himself, now worn away
With age, yet still majestic in decay!
Sudden his eyes released their watery store;
The much-enduring man could bear no more.
Doubtful he stood, if instant to embrace
His aged limbs, to kiss his reverend face,
With eager transport to disclose the whole,
And pour at once the torrent of his soul.—
Not so: his judgment takes the winding way
Of question distant, and of soft essay;
More gentle methods on weak age employs:
And moves the sorrows to enhance the joys.

Hardly Pope’s best work: but oh how moving! Odysseus plays a trick on Laertes, pretending to be someone else, and Laertes does not quite recognise him at first, due to all the time that has passed. Laertes asks this traveller if he has news of his son, and, hearing that he may be dead “the father, with a father’s fears” says,

That hapless guest, alas! for ever gone!
Wretch that he was! and that I am! my son!
If ever man to misery was born,
’Twas his to suffer, and ’tis mine to mourn!

Poor Laertes! If only the ingrate Odysseus knew what he was putting his father through! My favourite translation, E.V. Rieu shows the scene thus:

When Laertes heard this, a black cloud of misery enveloped him. Groaning heavily, he picked the black dust up in both his hands and poured it over his grey head. Odysseus’ heart was touched, and suddenly, as he watched his dear father, a sharp spasm of pain shot through his nostrils. He rushed forward, flung his arms round his neck, and kissed him. ‘Father,’ he cried, ‘here I am, the very man you asked about, home in my own land after twenty years. But no more tears and lamentation, for I have news to tell you, and there is need for haste.’

Odysseus has come home, seen his wife, established himself, and now, after his final honourable task—the killing of the suitors who are parasites on his house—he has come back to his father, the model of honour and kingship. Just as Telemachus looks to Odysseus, looks for Odysseus, so Odysseus ends up looking to Laertes. His pity is evoked because he suddenly sees himself in his father. Look again at these four lines from Pope.

Beneath a neighbouring tree, the chief divine
Gazed o’er his sire, retracing every line,
The ruins of himself, now worn away
With age, yet still majestic in decay!

See what Pope is saying: “retracing every line,/ The ruins of himself”. Himself is presumably Laertes, a reference back to “sire”; but it can also be read as a reference to Odysseus, seeing himself in his ageing father. All the time that has passed is suddenly witnessed in the majestic decay of the old man. In Laertes ageing, Odysseus sees his own ageing. This ambiguity is missing from Butler, and from Mendelsohn, in their plain translations. Mendelsohn has:

Thus, when the noble Odysseus, who’d endured so much, saw him
Worn down by old age, his mind weighed down by grief,
He went and stood by a lofty pear tree as his tears began to flow.

Pope may not have intended the ambiguity, but it is surely there; even though Mendelsohn provides a standard account, it is missing this crucial element. The rest may be accurate to the passage, but Pope is true to the spirit of the whole poem.

Tennyson’s Ulysses says, of Telemachus, “He works his work, I mine.” But in fact, one of the final things written in the Odyssey is of the reunion of Odysseus, Laertes, and Telemachus, fighting together, as honour dictates.

They were now joined by Athene, Daughter of Zeus, who had assumed Mentor’s appearance and voice. The patient, good Odysseus was overjoyed to see her. He turned at once to his dear son and said: ‘Telemachus, when you find yourself in the thick of battle, where the best men prove their mettle, you will soon learn how not to disgrace your father’s house. In all the world there has been none like ours for courage and manliness.’

And the thoughtful Telemachus replied: ‘If you care to, father, you will see me in my present mood by no means disgracing my father’s house, as you put it.’

Laertes was delighted. ‘Dear gods!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a day this is to warm my heart! My son and grandson competing in valour!’

Fathers and sons are the predominant relationships of the Odyssey. The Odyssey begins with Telemachus deciding to go on a journey to find his father; indeed this is the subject of the first five books; and it ends with Odysseus coming home to discover his father, and all three of them united in valour. The first four books are full of discussion about Telemachus finding his father. At the end, when Odysseus tells Penelope the tale of his adventures — Kikones, Lotus Eaters, Cyclops, Aiolos— he says that “fate would not yet let him reach/The beloved land of his forefathers”. When they fight the suitors, there is a small sequence that re-enacts in miniature this idea that the journey is towards the father:

Amphinomos then burst out at glorious Odysseus.
Darting in front of him, he pulled out his sharpened sword,
Hoping to get Odysseus away from the door. But Telemakhos
Was too quick: he dealt him a blow from behind with his bronze-tipped spear,
Right between the shoulders, driving it straight through his chest.
With a thunderous thud he fell, flat on his face, to the ground.
Telemakhos sprang back up, leaving his long-shadowed spear
Right there, inside Amphinomos—for he was terrified: what if
Some Achaean came out of nowhere and ran him through with a sword
As he pulled out the long-shadowed spear, or struck him down as he stopped there?
So he started to run, and swiftly reached his beloved father.

In his Introduction, Mendelsohn lists the other father-son relationships: Poseidon makes trouble for Odysseus because the Cyclops is his son; in Hades, Achilles asks Odysseus whether his son Neoptolemos has lived up to his expectations: “Did he follow me into the war as the foremost fighter, or not?” The final scene includes the fathers of the slain suitors, asking for justice. Mendelsohn calls this patriarchal, and perhaps it is; but that has been too much discussed in recent years; of course it is patriarchal: criticism wishes for knowledge that inhabits the poem, as well as taxonomising judgement.

The Odyssey’s many quests are one of literature’s earliest instances of the great theme: the pursuit of happiness. And that pursuit is centred on what, from Athene’s perspective in the first few books, is the whole impetus for the tale, and thus the aim of the poem: “To learn something of your father”.

As with all quests, the hero must come home, and see it all again as if for the first time, and know himself and it to be the same but also changed. He must see himself in his father and learn something of them both.

To get an Uber to go 1.2 miles through Farringdon would have cost £27, which is about $36. I tried the bus, one of the new ones with usb chargers, but the air conditioning was so inadequate that it was hotter than the street. There is air conditioning in most restaurants and hotels (telling that you need it there with no talk of turning it off because of climate change) but not in pubs.

At the Dr. Johnson House, James Marriott and I discussed the future of civilization. He worries that the decline of reading means the end of democracy. I think we are facing a disruption to which we will need to adapt. Just because we have not yet had democracy without mass literacy, doesn’t mean we can’t. More concerning to me than whether adults read novels is the fact that children are not being brought up to read enough. The schools are what most need reforming. James has written a polemical book (coming in September, I enjoyed it, and anyone who enjoyed his Substack post about it will enjoy the book) but he is a genial, affable, quietly insistent person, and he makes his case without any bluster or alarm. The best part of the evening was when we were shown an original copy of the Dictionary and a lock of the great man’s hair.

To the Duke of York Theatre (where Peter Pan first played) to see the new production of Arcadia. This is a great play, worth hearing, but alas this is a mediocre production. Many of the jokes fell flat. A lot of the dialogue lacked feeling. Some actors over egged the pudding (Benedict), some underbaked it (Hannah), and some simply weren’t enough for the role (Septimus). My worries that the London theatre has entered a decline were not assuaged. Perhaps I am too nostalgic for the days of Maggie Smith and Penelope Keith, but seeing a second-rate production like this makes me wish I had been there to see Felicity Kendal in the original. Modern actors often lack true theatrical skills.

The production is designed to feel like a streaming show. The actors have microphones, flattening the tone of their voices. The play is staged in the round (a mistake in my view: the house requires to be seen and felt as a house, with gardens, furniture, and so on, not an open, empty space), and each scene begins with a series of characters striking a pose, with some opening-credits-esque music, while a weird light show rotates above them. It is an obvious attempt to make it look like Netflix. As is so often the case, the very final moments of the play depart from the stage directions as printed, to little effect.

Arcadia’s real theme, beyond all the science-and-art together stuff, is the unknowability of history. Anyone who has been involved in real world events that people online tried to understand by reading the tea leaves of the internet—or indeed who has heard gossip about a mutual acquaintance, about who you know the facts—knows that there is no real history. Stoppard’s genius is to make both comedy and tragedy out of that fact. That is what makes Thomasina’s waltz at the end so sad, and it is why the corny final moments of this production, in which she stands on a chair and reaches towards the lights above the stage (an attempt to represent “science vibes”—look! atoms!) are so corny and against the spirit of the text.

And yet there was, from about a third of the audience, a standing ovation. Nonsense! Sit down! Have some respect for art!

Like Miracle Woman, Citizen Kane is a masterpiece of the Golden Age. Here is all the magnificence and munificence of the good old days of Hollywood. Here is the art of making real movies about real people and setting it all in a kind of fairyland. In everything, Citizen Kane is mighty: the scale, the scenery, the conceit, the careful arrangement of the pieces, the use of news-reels, flash-backs, real-time over-the-shoulder camera moves, the Alice in Wonderland quality of the distorted perspectives, the still moments that hang like paintings with a whole other story behind them.

My God, what a film.

For a long time, I assumed this was not a film I was very interested to see. It gets talked up as being about a newspaper magnate, as if it were a film of social importance, as if that were the criterion for art. Pah. Give me The Chimes of Midnight! Give me Sunset Boulevard, Notorious, Stagecoach! It was naïve of me to believe them, I know. And boy was I awoken in a mostly-empty movie theatre in Arlington when I experienced one of the great works of film that tells the story not only of a whole and complex and heart-breaking man, but of the way no-one around him—a newspaper magnate!—ever knew the real story.

From the first moment to the last Citizen Kane draws us down, down into its swirling world. This film is as expansive as Dickens. It has so much visual enchantment—the house, the great collection, the fireplaces! And so much sheer ingenuity. The way Welles keeps shape-shifting, the way the camera cuts so unmercifully onto Kane, the deep, deep shadows. The way the plot is put together with those little repetitions. The unexpected comic sequence that opens up into the whole second half of the story, the better part of the tragedy. The way it knows exactly where it’s going as a story while all the time doubting its own moral. The way it makes itself a Xanadu. The montages, the dancing girls, the failing marriages, the young bucks at the newspaper, the canny old men, the stifled women, the clothes. My God, what a film. Who could think of this as being primarily political when it is so human, so full of failure. So sad. So damn sad.

Welles’ fairyland carried me along perfectly. I had anticipated something of the ending, but not the exact details. The final shot! Oh my God, that final shot. Some art consoles; some devastates. Citizen Kane left me shattered. I wanted to holler. PLAY IT AGAIN. But I was too choked up even to whisper. I shuffled out into the lobby, the parking lot, the real world. What? Am I supposed to just go about my life now? I have to drive myself home? There is so much I wish to say, but that would give away the ending for any other lucky novices out there who might one day go and see this film on the big screen, unsuspecting, for the first time.

My God, what a film. Play it again. PLAY IT AGAIN.

…the future I’m describing here is one of extreme cognitive polarization. Some people will use AI to think more. Other people, maybe most people, will use AI to think less. If you thought that economic inequality or political polarization were bad, cognitive polarization will be truly terrible, dividing society into what might begin to look like two different species. The high-need-for-cognition people will get more and more productive, happier and happier; the rest will fall into a kind of mental underclass.

…

The crucial task before us is to cultivate people’s desire to seek out cognitive complexity. Not to go all Joseph Campbell on you, but the essential challenge is: How do we train people to see their life as a hero’s journey in which they take on difficult missions that they may fail at and that will certainly involve pain and suffering? How do we form people so they have an explorer’s heart, a willingness to endure, an ability to struggle on, even when their body and mind are telling them to give up, to reach new destinations and figure stuff out?

From the Bible and Homer to Virginia Woolf and Helen deWitt, the quest is the fundamental mode of literature. The rise of the novel was the rise of realism, but also the adaptation of the old romance to the new idea of individualism. We might be leaving behind the culture in which novel reading was central to ordinary life, but we are not leaving behind the need to understand our lives as journeys, nor the ability of literature to cultivate “cognitive complexity.”

Brooks takes an institutional and psychological approach to this challenge: autonomy, competence, and relatedness are essential to motivation; schools and apprenticeships can be restructured for those ends; AI can’t “hunger for things”.

I don’t disagree, but as well as “help[ing] people learn to want more, hunger more” we need to enhance their ability to imagine themselves. Motivation relies on imagination. An individual is an imagined person: we are imagined by ourselves and by others and the gap between those two is often formative. We have all been surprised (or appalled) to learn what other people think of us, most especially when they are correct. Isn’t it odd that they can know us better than we know ourselves? They don’t have access to our inner thoughts and feelings. All they can do is imagine us.

Imagination is central to the way people understand themselves and each other. The novelists knew this, and they worked in tandem with philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith to elaborate a huge body of work that demonstrates and investigates what it means to be an imagined individual. If we want people to understand the quest of their lives, the journey of life as something they imagine themselves undertaking, we could do worse than to encourage them to read Swift, Richardson, Austen, Eliot, and James. In his latest book, Tyler Cowen notes that William Stanley Jevons, one of the first economists to theorise the idea of marginal gains, was directly influenced by Charles Dickens. The same is true of Darwin and Milton, Tesla and Goethe, along with many others.

Being able to change the world, act effectively in the world, relies on your mental model of the world—and of yourself. Those models can be significantly affected by the works of imagination you read, watch, and listen to. Those works give you new models all the time, new ways of connecting the inner and the outer life, new explanations for why people are the way they are, and new maps for the journey you might take. Imagination is essential to our notions of identity, language, and thought. That is part of Locke’s revolution in 1690. And those ideas gave the novelists their starting point.

If the continued improvement of AI means there will be cognitive polarisation, I suspect that imagination will be key to the divide. Rather than relying on a large simple model of the quest like Joseph Campbell, this gives us impetus to return to the great writers of quests, from all areas of literature—Dante and Beowulf as well as Dickens and Tolstoy.

It might just be the case that the future belongs to those who can imagine it.

So off we went on a chase to see these alien things, streaking and swirling across the sky above D.C. As we drove along the interstate to the Carillon, which stands next to the Marines Memorial, which takes the form of a large statue of Iwo Jima, they were right above us. Then one of them did a loop-the-loop. It was too late to park, so we changed course and headed to the Cemetery. But we couldn’t face the walk to the top in the heat (with children in tow).

As we drove out, another jet was holding itself vertical over the river before it dipped down and swung away. We followed it across the Memorial Bridge, full of the thrill of the display, and saw it whoosh over the Lincoln Memorial. There were people everywhere. Some of them were set-up under umbrellas on the bridge. Some sat up on the memorial, safe in the shade. Never have we enjoyed the D.C. traffic so much. Just as we crawled round the Lincoln Memorial Circle, the whole fly-past flew past: stealth bombers, fighter planes, and the terribly exciting Thunderbirds, who keep tight formations and make smoke patterns in the sky.

D.C. was jubilant. Sometimes, the first thing we knew about approaching planes was the whoops and skirls of people on the street. Roads were closed with army trucks parked across them, and soldiers stood baking in the sky, scratching their chin and yawning, waving kindly to children. They stopped and gaped too. Back in Arlington, we saw the Thunderbirds howling down Wilson Boulevard, pulling up steeply and making a circle back, before they flew right over us. The whole thing was truly extraordinary.

This is America at its best: confident, performative, high-tech, talented, patriotic, unafraid of its own character. Everywhere we went, we saw Americans full of the basic pride and happy energy that makes this country great. For the last few days, the hotel lobbies and streets have been full of that familiar American archetype: the traveller. They wear baseball caps inside, prefer sneakers and traveling slacks, and usually sport a polo shirt. When the traffic is stuck, they get out of the car, open the boot, stride off to see what can be seen. This is a land of magnificence and they are here to see it and enjoy it.

This is not the way everyone feels. When my wife walked down to see the planes, she ran into a journalist who asked her if she wasn’t upset by all this rampant militarism. This is not an uncommon attitude. Not in the particulars, but simply in the dislike of what is happening. So many people are just unable to enjoy the anniversary. The celebration feels decidedly muted. Where is all the jubilation? Where are the people dressed up as Ben Franklin? Where are the parades?

Perhaps it seems like this because I live in D.C. To me, this attitude is inexplicable. The world’s most successful revolution has worked and still works! We have democracy, liberty, and prosperity! It’s time to get out the flags! Let there be cakes and ale! (Or, indeed, hot dogs and beer.)

So often I hear and read laments about this Independence Day. Rather than celebrating that America has made it to a quarter millennium, so many Americans are worried that this is (almost) the low point for the whole history of the Republic. I find this attitude baffling. However bad things are right now (and yes, I find many aspects of American politics today truly lamentable; so much is so awful), they are simply not as bad as what has happened here in the past. Slavery. The failures of Reconstruction. The Trail of Tears. Japanese Internment. Lord knows, this country isn’t perfect. But if we cannot celebrate the progress we have made, we will make it all the more difficult to make any more. Justice and improvement are motivated by feelings of inadequacy, but the long work of betterment is done by people who believe in their country.

Some believe that America might not be America for much longer. They think the Constitution is under threat. Perhaps. But elections have been held. The court has not always decided in favour of the executive. The system may not be deciding everything as it ought to, but it is functioning much as it has always done.

All the Europeans who have fallen in love with America as they visited for the World Cup have been surprised to see beyond the headlines. The news is all about politics, injustice, incompetence, cruelty. No-one can deny the wickedness of the world. No-one can deny the tremendous failures: citizens have been shot by their government, wars have been started, a dismal rhetoric has become normal. But as the football fans drive around America, they see beyond the failures. They see that this country is more than its politics. Much more. They see the tremendous character of the nation. This is a country of hard work, high standards, and huge ambition. It is also a country that has to choose its own future. The choice might not be between two sides of a political argument, but between two cultures—one that believes in itself and its future, and one that increasingly struggles to see beyond the dismay.

As I look back to the UK—where we have political and economic failure too (and worse, God knows), but where we don’t have the same economic dynamism that might still save America yet—it makes me want to shake some Americans by the shoulders, and say, wake up! look around! this is God’s own country! and if you lose sight of that, you’ll only add to the problem!

However bad the problems are—and they are bad—the same spirit that animated the founding is still alive today. Get out your flags and cook some hot dogs. This country is still the world’s last best hope. If there is work to be done to rebuild America, to repair the damage and to renew the ideals of the Declaration and the Constitution in the coming years, that work will be done best in the spirit of belief in this vast country. Renewal starts with America loving itself again.