The Bookshelf: Gifts of Friendship

My oldest friend and I met in school when we were ten years old, over half a century ago. Although it was just seven years later that we moved to different parts of the country thanks to college, grad school, and jobs, we have stayed in touch and seen each other now and then—much too infrequently for the majority of those years. Decades ago, we began our habitual exchange of birthday gifts each spring. Although each of us has occasionally gone for the “gag gift” (in remembrance of our young fanaticism for Monty Python, I once gave him a “Tim the Enchanter” helmet), this usually means the gift of a book.

But it is not always easy to buy books for friends—or even for family. The nature of the relationship one has with another, and the knowledge of the other’s interests and capacities, will affect one’s choices. With my old friend, both distance and the rarity of our being together have frayed but not destroyed the fabric of affection we wove so tightly when we were boys. I know his high intellectual capacities, and the general drift of his interests, well enough to make my annual educated guess at a good book for him. Though our politics, religions, and careers are quite different, I hope I have not disappointed him. His choices for me are consistently good.

Aristotle, in Book 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics, says we love things because they are either “good, pleasant, or useful,” and that these characteristics apply to friendships as well. We are on friendly terms with some people we know—in strictly business transactions, for instance—for the sake of their utility to us. Other people, whom we encounter socially, we may value for their wit, their charm, their beauty, their ready contribution to a pleasant experience each time we meet. In each of these kinds of relationship, the mutual benefit of friend to friend can be very real, yet the friendship remains ultimately disposable if utility and pleasure fade from the experience. “But,” says the philosopher, “those who wish for the good things for their friends, for their friends’ sake, are friends most of all, since they are disposed in this way in themselves and not incidentally. Their friendship continues, then, while they are good, and virtue is a stable thing.”

 

Recall that Aristotle’s tripartite schema applies not just to the persons we call friends but to any of our objects of affection or value—whatever we have reason to “love.” So it is striking but perhaps not surprising that Francis Bacon states essentially parallel criteria for books in his essay “Of Studies”: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.” In the first group we might place manuals and references—eminently useful, but valued only in their parts and not for any integral wholeness. The books we “swallow,” gulping them down, are ephemeral delights—say, popular fiction and true tales of adventure—often pleasantly absorbing while they last, but leaving little mark on our thought and character. In the last group are books demanding “diligence and attention,” worthy of being “read wholly,” for their lasting contribution to our minds and hearts.

It does not follow, of course, that the three kinds of books correspond exactly to the three kinds of friends we have—so that we give useful books to our useful friends, pleasant books to our pleasant friends, and so on. In the case of these less than complete friendships, we may normally give no gifts of any kind, without failing in our mutual esteem or obligations. And with our “true” or “complete” friendships, especially those that persist through thick and thin in a mutual devotion of each to the other’s good, it is good to recall that the other grounds of affection are caught up in the relationship as well. For our true friend is probably also useful to us (for his advice or knowledge) and pleasant to us (for his company and conversation). Hence it is that, in thinking about books to give our friends, we can range across all three grounds of choice: giving useful books, pleasant books, and the best books worth “diligence and attention.”

Books we give (or are given) for their utility would include, for instance, my copy of the third edition (please ignore all those that came later) of William Strunk and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style, which my mother gave me for Christmas in my senior year of college. I think I must have let her read some terrible dashed-off term paper of mine, and the book was her big hint to clean up my act. No, it’s not a perfect book—critics like to carp that its comments on the passive voice are (ahem) a bit wide of the mark—but it is terse, direct, and very useful to young writers in particular.

Cookbooks, about which I’ve written here before, are definitely in the useful category, and for someone learning to cook, or an experienced cook interested in branching out into new cuisines, they make fine gifts. Beware of overwhelming, though. An aunt of mine, a great cook herself, long ago gave me Irma Rombauer’s massive The Joy of Cooking, when I was far from ready for such an enormous compendium of recipes. It was just too encyclopedic, and it has turned out to be the cookbook I use the least of all the ones on my kitchen shelves.

You will notice that these examples in the “utility” class came from members of my family, and my own giving in my family has often fit this category. The affection of our close family members is presumed, and needn’t be proved with books for improving our minds and hearts; what interests them is what they think we need, in practical terms: a dictionary when we go off to college, a home-repair guide when we buy a house, and so on. With students, too, when I have given them books, it is likely to be a writer’s guide like Jacques Barzun’s Simple & Direct, or some essential text in their field of study if they’re off to graduate or law school.

Of books in the pleasure reading category, we have as many choices as our knowledge of our friends’ and loved ones’ tastes and reading history allows. Where those tastes evidently coincide with our own, the gift of a book we ourselves have loved is a fitting sign of our belief that we vibrate on the same frequency as the recipient. “I really enjoyed this and think you will too” is a tribute to a kindred soul who (we believe) shares our favorite pleasures.

 

Sometimes we may find that the expectation of shared enjoyment is frustrated. (“Why did Matt think I’d like that?”) Like people themselves—like, well, their authors—books are distinctive individuals. Our friends are not universally one another’s friends, and the same goes for the books that take our fancy. But if one’s friend likes science fiction, try giving him a classic in the genre that is new to him. She enjoys mysteries? Introduce her to a new (or old but undiscovered) detective. And so on. My old friend has twice given me books by Bill Bryson, a writer who reliably gives pleasure and who is instructive without pretensions to profundity. Such a gift says “here is a good time, and a bit of learning too,” which is thoughtful.

It is in the third category of books, the ones Bacon said must be “chewed and digested . . . with diligence and attention,” that a real challenge arises. It represents the highest expression of Aristotle’s complete friendship—“here is a book I chose for the sake of your virtues”—but for that reason the choice of such a book can be difficult. What am I saying to my friend with this book? That it supplies a deficiency in his intellect or character? One hopes not to give that impression. With fellow members of one’s religion, a devotional book or spiritual classic is a very fitting gift (among Catholics, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ is a good choice). But with some friends this is not an option.

Academic friends are the worst to buy books for, since they already acquire so many books in their central field of interest, and since their interests are so peculiar to themselves. I don’t think I have ever given a truly serious book (as a gift, that is) to a friend who was a professional scholar and peer. If I thought I’d found a first-rate choice that suited his interests, he would either have it if it was old, be planning to get it if it was new, or know of a reason why it was all wrong or useless to him! Besides, the books that scholars like most to give their friends are the ones they’ve written or edited themselves—in which case the special occasion is not on the recipient’s side, as for instance on her birthday, but on the giver’s side, namely the occasion of the book’s publication—which indicates who is really doing the celebrating.

So I am particularly thankful for my old friend’s distant but unsevered presence in my life. Though he is not in the academy, he has a first-rate mind, and interests both deep and wide. I let him take care of the deep ones himself, and try to contribute to his ever-expanding breadth with interesting works of history and philosophy (including two mentioned in this previous column), as well as some books that will simply give him pleasure. A few years ago, to mark fifty years of our friendship, he sent me a copy of Oliver Sacks’s final book, a slender volume of posthumously published essays titled Gratitude. When I opened the package and saw that title, I immediately thought “yes, me too.” Here’s to many more years of mutual enrichment, my friend.

The Bookshelf: The Ministry of Inclusion

In the last month, three news stories out of Britain have seized the attention of book lovers. First, with the approval of the Roald Dahl Story Company, holder of the rights to the late author’s works, the publisher Puffin Books (a Penguin Random House imprint) announced that Dahl’s celebrated children’s books would henceforth be published in revised editions reflecting the changes recommended by “sensitivity readers.” The result would be to eliminate references “to fatness, craziness, ugliness, whiteness (even of bedsheets), blackness (even of tractors) and the great Rudyard Kipling,” among other changes, as Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Christopher Scalia added in the Washington Examiner that “this compulsion not to offend is especially strange regarding Dahl, whose work is distinctively unsettling. His publishers were once proud of that.”

Subsequent reports informed us that purchasers of ebook copies of Dahl’s children’s stories would see these changes made in the copies they had previously bought but that were stored on vendors’ servers—yet another reason to own paper copies of books. Puffin later announced that “classic” editions of Dahl’s books—with unchanged texts—would continue to be available for future purchase. But the bowdlerized editions have not been withdrawn, as they should be.

The second story, which did not get much attention in the United States, was that a similar “sensitivity revision” has been performed on the James Bond books of the late Ian Fleming. The sexism of Agent 007, and his retrograde racial views, were gone over with a fine-tooth comb, with the approval of Ian Fleming Publications. Henceforth James Bond, of all people, will try hard not to disturb the prejudices of a typical humanities professor of 2023. It’s a wonder he’s still licensed to kill.

The third story, which I did not see any U.S. media outlet notice, was that the Research Information and Communications Unit, part of Prevent, itself an arm of the UK’s Home Office charged with enforcing the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, had identified certain books, films, and television shows that were on favored “reading lists” of right-wing terror groups the unit was keeping tabs on. The list included works by Tolkien, Conrad, Kipling (again!), Tennyson, Chesterton, Huxley, Orwell, Milton, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, as well as films such as The Great Escape, Zulu, and The Bridge on the River Kwai, and the Kenneth Clark art history series Civilisation. Suffice it to say one could begin to build a pretty good education on the foundation laid by works the British government is concerned about.

 

Orwell and Huxley would have understood perfectly what’s going on in these stories. Orwell’s Winston Smith, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, works in the Ministry of Truth, which busily rewrites history from day to day, in accordance with what the Party needs people to believe, regardless of whether it is true. Huxley’s Brave New World doesn’t need a daily rewriting of history. Unlike Orwell’s Oceania, Huxley’s World State has no external enemies, and has achieved a complete break with humanity’s distant past. The few remaining copies of “obsolete” and otherwise forgotten books such as the Bible and the works of Shakespeare are locked away in the possession of the elite World Controllers. And in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, books of every kind are simply forbidden, and are immediately burned by the government’s firemen wherever they are found.

These dystopias all feature one form or another of a war on knowledge and truth by those in power. Their victory in that war can only come if the works of the past are revised to suit present needs, or rendered irrelevant and forgotten, or simply banned altogether. It is alarming that the impulse to treat the past as the enemy of the present, rather than as a precious inheritance, is rising to a commanding position at the heights of our culture.

I don’t mean to suggest that the deeply stupid revisions of the works of minor authors such as Dahl and Fleming represent the advent of a dystopian tyranny. In these cases they will only succeed in making the original works more valuable to preserve, while the insipid revisions will not attract the new readers whose “sensitivities” are being catered to. It is the spirit of the revisionists that is repellent and tyrannical, however.

It is the same spirit identified by George Packer in his recent Atlantic article “The Moral Case Against Equity Language,” where he describes the top-down, flattening, and stultifying dictates of various “inclusive” language guides, crafted by busybodies with no appreciation for plain speaking and no ear for metaphor. It’s the spirit of the “new Roundheads” critiqued by Jonathan Sumption, who simultaneously—and without any apparent discomfort caused by holding two incompatible ideas in their heads—believe both that “knowledge and truth are mere social constructs” and that they know their own countries’ histories are a dreary tale of unrelieved evil.

The impulse to censor—to revise the history and literature we inherit, to ban what we think the worst of it, to banish certain ideas—is as natural to human beings as any of the seven deadly sins. In fact, properly understood, censorship is an essential element of education. There are ideas and books that are fit for children, and others fit for adults. Parents, who have the primary and direct responsibility for the rearing of their children, are right to take an interest in what is assigned to them to read, and what is available to them in the school library. The publisher’s revisions of Dahl’s books might be well intended, with the best interests of children in mind. But they do both the author and responsible parents an injustice—the former by converting a talented author’s genius into mush, and the latter by usurping their role of controlling what their children should read. Should children be prepared for a robust, open-minded adulthood, or should certain windows in their minds be permanently obscured by blackout curtains?

The first work in western philosophy to take up the matter of education in the formation of a political community was Plato’s Republic. No sooner does Socrates begin to sketch the education of the “guardians” who defend and rule his perfectly just “city in speech” than he finds it necessary to demand the revision or banishment of much of Greek culture’s poetic inheritance, because it depicts the gods as variously warlike, vicious, and deceitful. The guardians of the best city must be paragons of virtue, and so poetry that might harm the development of their virtue must go. Finally, at the end of the work, returning to this subject, Socrates argues that the great poets—above all, Homer—make false claims to knowledge of the virtues, in contrast to the philosophers, who are the poets’ great rivals. Homer must go; he and his ilk are to be banished for the sake of justice.

My own view of the Republic, which I have taught on and off for four decades, is that Plato is ironically highlighting the impossibility of perfect justice, because it requires (among other absurdities explored in the dialogue) an iron grip on the dissemination of ideas, a grip that no one but omnicompetent authorities could maintain. Plato can no more banish Homer from Greek culture than we can banish Shakespeare; these poets have put an indelible stamp on their civilizations. To say they merit our study and engagement is to state the obvious; to say they loom so large we have no choice but to reckon with them would be more accurate.

Yet the attempt to control thought can do incalculable damage, however doomed it is ultimately. And just as Plato’s guardians are to be kept on the path to virtue by the elimination of all examples of vice, so the self-appointed guardians of contemporary culture have decided that “inclusion” is the virtue of our time, and all literature that might make the path to inclusion a bumpy one must be flattened, bulldozed, paved over. No fat or ugly people in the children’s books of Roald Dahl; no Asian stereotypes in the mind of Ian Fleming’s 007. Readers of Kipling are suspect; Kenneth Clark’s exaltation of Chartres has a whiff of chauvinism about it.

 

A much-noticed piece in The New Yorker recently concerned “The End of the English Major.” Nathan Heller’s lengthy and depressing overview of the decline of student interest in the humanities, literature in particular, only once or twice barely touched upon what may be the most important cause of the malady it richly described. Students’ interest in the humanities has waned for multiple reasons: careerism in a tough economy (but without a corresponding rebound, as in the past, when conditions improve); the impact of the smartphone on reading habits and attention spans; an increasing emphasis by universities themselves on STEM education (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).

But the humanities have neglected the age-old maxim “know thyself.” At one point Heller quotes a Harvard dean and English professor saying, “Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” There speaks, not a student mind genuinely curious about literature, but a young drone—with that “ethics of representation” bushwa—already thoroughly schooled by the Ministry of Inclusion. That is, if anyone is actually saying that to the dean at all, which may be doubted.

Later in the article, for just a moment, other voices “suggest that the humanities’ loss of cultural capital has been hastened by the path of humanities scholarship itself.” But it is not simply that it has become too specialized and obscure, as these voices say. It is the relentless drumbeat, in countless English and other humanities departments, for “representation,” and “inclusion,” and the “interrogation” of literature through a “critical,” ideologically focused lens.

No one becomes a scholar of the humanities—of literature, language, philosophy, history—without first becoming a lover of books. And this passion is fed, not by “representation” and “inclusion” of the reader, or by hacking off the sharp corners of square-pegged works of art to fit them into the round holes of our ideological commitments. It is fed by strangeness—by the encounter with worlds hitherto unknown to us, where we begin by feeling disoriented, groping for a sense of direction, and finally getting our “book legs” under us by patient reading and study.

 

To acquaint students with works great, good, or merely instructive, it is incumbent on teachers not to flatter them with promises of their “inclusion” in the world of ideas, or to assure them that their ideological priors will be built up and reinforced. It is necessary instead to emphasize to them how they will benefit from being taken out of themselves into places where they do not feel at all included or represented, but where by dint of effort they can come to feel they belong after all.

As in the encounter with Roald Dahl’s grotesques, who have simultaneously repelled and fascinated children for sixty years, the future students and scholars of literature must leave behind the comfy confines constructed by the Ministry of Inclusion and begin again with the experience of strangeness.

The Bookshelf: Writing in the Mirror

Several months ago, I devoted this column to the subject of biographies, saying they often presented us with “the beating heart of history.” But the value of a biography rests on its truth, and so the author must have a certain degree of detachment from his subject. Judgments of behavior and character are impossible to avoid, but for the judgments of author and reader alike to be fair ones, they must rest on a factual account that does not tilt for or against the person being judged.

What then of autobiographical writing, in which detachment is impossible because the author is the subject? Whether it is an account of one’s whole life, or a memoir focused on a certain period or aspect of one’s life, or a published journal or diary, the author is too deeply interested (in both senses of that word) to achieve a really critical distance. Can the autobiographer, the memoirist, or the diarist be trusted?

I thought of this when reading Mel Brooks’s memoir, which I quoted here last month. One of the most striking passages in All About Me! comes when Brooks blandly mentions how hard it was to work for nearly a decade on writing fresh material for Sid Caesar’s television show, and says almost as an aside: “that’s probably what led to the end of my first marriage.” In the next paragraph he names his three children by this marriage and says they were “always a source of comfort and happiness.” But here’s the strange thing. It’s the first time he mentions having been married at all. What’s more, neither here nor anywhere else in the book does he tell the reader even the name of his first wife, let alone where and when they were married, or anything else about their relationship. By contrast, his courtship of and marriage to his second wife, the actress Anne Bancroft, is lovingly described.

 

What are we to make of an autobiographer who omits any more account than this of a relationship that was a central part of his life for (according to Wikipedia) about nine years? Can he be trusted? On balance, I think he can. Brooks subtitled his book My Remarkable Life in Show Business, and that’s what readers come to the book wanting to learn about. He clearly has his own reasons for keeping his private life to himself, and it’s not as though he owed it to anyone to spill his guts about his failed first marriage in print. Like every other kind of book, an autobiography is only as good as it is true, but truth is not the same thing as information. All About Me! is true to its purpose, and that is all we have a right to demand.

In the genre of writing about oneself, the granddaddy of them all may be Augustine’s Confessions, a searching examination of the saint’s past—of his restless intellectual and moral wanderings, and his eventual path to God. If it is not the first work of autobiography, it is no doubt the earliest detailed first-person account of a man’s sins, steeped in a sense of shame that makes his ultimate redemption truly powerful. Such an account was bound to inspire imitators—and certainly “inspired” the anti-Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose own Confessions are similarly detailed but shameless, rejecting the Christian doctrines of sin, judgment, and redemption. Augustine famously said to God that “our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Rousseau, in the course of a life that built an icon of himself, remained permanently restless, and may be said in that respect to have become the model for modern secular man.

Sometimes a book ostensibly about another subject can turn out to be a mirror held up to the author; other times a memoir can turn out to be deeply instructive about something other than the author. The first sort, a kind of surprise memoir, is Roger Scruton’s I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine, which is as much an account of Sir Roger’s own life and peregrinations, told through his encounters with wine, as it is about wine itself, though it is this too, with much instruction for the novice oenophile. While Gentle Regrets was explicitly Scruton’s memoir, the twofold “I” in the title I Drink Therefore I Am is a giveaway that this too is one of his most personal books.

For a book that is couched as autobiography but reveals itself to be about much more, one might turn to Alec Guinness’s Blessings in Disguise. Sir Alec was the master of the disappearing act, vanishing so completely into the roles he played that it was hard to say what was the essential Guinness. Perhaps he was all his life in one disguise or another. His authorized biography by Piers Paul Read is positively swimming in personal details, sometimes of unfortunately prurient interest. But Blessings in Disguise, much more reserved when it comes to information, is nonetheless the truer book about its subject. And one of the things about which it is richly true is the craft of acting, for Guinness tells much of the tale of his own life through his encounters with those from whom he learned to act, and those with whom or for whom he performed. Great figures of the stage and screen stride downstage in its pages to take their place in the footlights: Gielgud, Olivier, Richardson; Tyrone Guthrie, Martita Hunt, and Edith Evans; David Lean, Noel Coward, and Carol Reed. Any aspiring actor or director in any medium should read it.

Memoir writing seems now to be a requirement for American men and women in high offices of state. Every presidential administration is followed by piles of books by cabinet officers and vice presidents, not to mention by presidents themselves—all aiming to fix in place a favorable historical account of their actions. Since Harry Truman, practically every president has turned shortly after leaving office to writing (or having ghostwriters write) a full autobiography or at least a memoir of his presidential years. Before Truman, it was fairly uncommon; Herbert Hoover only published his Memoirs almost twenty years after leaving office.

 

Uncommon but not unheard of. Two books by former presidents stand out for particular notice as classics of the genre. The first was one in which the author did not even discuss his presidency: the two-volume Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, apart from some opening chapters about his early life, including his service in the Mexican War, was otherwise entirely taken up by the author’s increasingly important role as a commanding general in the Civil War. Written in order to keep his family from poverty as he died of cancer, Grant’s book has an appealing voice that makes one wish he had lived to write a sequel about his eight years as president.

The other early example, which may be the model for all subsequent presidential memoir-writing, is An Autobiography, by Theodore Roosevelt. TR’s book blazes what is now the conventional path of the full-scale political autobiography: a quick sketch of childhood, accounts of his notable exploits as a young man, and then a march through the story of the author’s life in politics, organized by offices held and elections contested. But Roosevelt—now out of office for keeps, having lost his bid to return to the presidency the year before publishing the Autobiography—is also making an argument, and placing a wager on the office he once held. He famously espouses the view that characterizes what we now call the modern presidency, “regarding the executive as subject only to the people, and, under the Constitution, bound to serve the people affirmatively in cases where the Constitution does not explicitly forbid him to render the service.” This, he avers with more chutzpah than evidence, was the view of the office held by Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. It is certainly the view held by contemporary presidents, with their pens and phones at hand but their copies of the Constitution mislaid. Roosevelt’s wager paid off.

In his bravura presentation of himself, TR resembles the first great American autobiographer, Benjamin Franklin. The sage of Philadelphia, easily the most celebrated American of the eighteenth century (George Washington would be his only rival, but Franklin’s star shone longer), depicts himself in his posthumously published Autobiography in colors that have ever since decorated the American character: energetic, inquisitive, enterprising, inventive, ambitious, civic-minded, charitable, and brimming with a zest for life. As a young man, Franklin reports, “I conceiv’d the bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection.” This required a deliberate plan for cultivating the virtues. Were there already existing systems and doctrines of moral improvement? No matter; he would devise his own. And he would be as ecumenical in himself—not to say religiously indifferent—as he thought our social life should be: “tho’ my Scheme was not wholly without Religion there was in it no Mark of any of the distinguishing Tenets of any particular Sect.”

Of one particular moral pitfall Franklin became keenly aware, and with an impish humor he identified the trap awaiting all those who hold up mirrors to themselves and write their own lives:

In reality there is perhaps no one of our natural Passions so hard to subdue as Pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself. You will see it perhaps often in this History. For even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my Humility.

In these lines Franklin wrote something that could equally have been written by St. Augustine. Whether Franklin’s model church with a single congregant—oneself—is a viable rival in the self-improvement business to the Church that saved Augustine’s soul is another matter entirely.