ART

"Seven Days in the Art World is a time capsule of a remarkable period in the history of art. During the past eight years, the contemporary art market has boomed, museum attendance has surged, and more people than ever were able to abandon their day jobs and call themselves artists. The art world both expanded and started to spin faster; it became hotter, hipper, and more expensive."
Since Sarah Thornton wrote these words, and Granta published them late last year, the international market for contemporary works of art has, like every other, been shrinking, and getting slower, colder and much poorer. The comparatively small, interlocking communities of professional artists, critics, auctioneers, dealers, collectors, scholars and curators who are more or less tied to that market now face hard times. So reading this tour d’horizon of what the author more often describes as “the art world” than more accurately “the contemporary art world” is rather like leafing through Country Life in the trenches at Passchendaele, or contemplating high-end millinery on Iwo Jima.
So excessive and so improbable are the phenomena that she describes – “the nebulous and often contradictory hierarchies of fame, credibility, imagined historical importance, institutional affiliation, education, perceived intelligence, wealth, and attributes such as the size of one’s collection” – that you cannot quite believe that this is the environment in which those of us whom Thornton describes as “insiders” have been dwelling for so long, and until so recently.
To some extent you find yourself questioning the accuracy of the picture she sketches, since, as she admits, “the art world is so diverse, opaque, and downright secretive, it is difficult to generalize about it and impossible to be truly comprehensive. What is more, access is rarely easy”. Her solution: a sequence of gossipy, fly-on-the-wall, in-depth, behind-the-scenes, cat-on-the-prowl, day-in-the-life narratives set in six cities in five countries in Europe, the United States and Japan. The “ethnographic” technique she describes awkwardly as “participant observation” (meaning observation), augmented by interviews and reportage, is said to be “curious and interactive but not threatening. Occasionally intrusive, but easily ignored”. Thornton’s seven days, liberally punctuated by chatty, journalistic datelines such as “8:00 P.M. Less than an hour to go before the fair closes”, are in fact spaced between November 2004 and June 2007.
The first chapter describes a boom-time art auction sale at Christie’s in New York. That occasion and its various participants serve to block in the economic background, taking in, among much else, the three “Ds” which generally flush works of art on to the open market (debt, divorce and death), the “wow factor”, as Thornton calls it, and the current primacy of Andy Warhol, “a globally recognized brand with a fair distribution”, with whom for many younger specialist scholars the history of art now seems to begin – Marcel Duchamp playing the role of Giotto to Warhol’s Michelangelo. She shadows Christopher Burge, Honorary Chairman of Christie’s, who conducts the sale at Rockefeller Plaza. She shares fish carpaccio and sparkling water with Philippe Ségalot, an art consultant who boasts that he has on occasion bid for certain wealthy private clients up to twice as much as they originally agreed to pay. She chats with an elderly private collector who attends auction sales to get a sense of which way the wind of taste is blowing. She talks to a couple of journalists, one of whom says he hates this particular saleroom because “you can’t see the [telephone] bidders”. And in the process she questions the relationship between aesthetic and monetary values. “It’s not fully correlative”, is one answer, a blinding glimpse of the obvious cheerfully furnished by a member of Christie's staff. Meanwhile, Warhol’s “Mustard Race Riot” (1963) goes under the hammer for $13.5 million.
In the second chapter, which is intended to be antithetical, the author sits in on a “crit”, “a seminar in which art students present their work for collective critique”, at the post-studio, anti-craft, periphery-embracing California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. The cast of characters here includes the monkish, wise-owl conceptual artist-professor, and the three MFA students who are there to be “critted”: gloomy, bearded Josh, who identifies with hip hop more than klezmer culture; Fiona, who looks like Frida Kahlo, and sees her practice as schizophrenic because although she does “dry sociopolitical work”, she always has and says she always will paint; and, finally, tomboy Hobbs, who sleeps on the floor of her studio, and says she trusts the “corporeal and crass language of humour and stereotype”, and liberally deploys it in her photographs. Between sessions in classroom F200, and a side trip to Whole Foods, Thornton ponders the question: who or what is a professional artist? She also nudges us towards some reflections on the nature, purpose and limitations of current higher art education.
Thence she brings us to Art Basel, the art fair, rubbing shoulders with the self-appointed crème de la crème, VIP passholders, wealthy art collectors being coy about their shopping habits, and dealers complaining about the location of their stands, and doing their best to talk up the artists. There are a few walk-on celebrity appearances, such as that of the veteran New York dealer Barbara Gladstone, whom one collector sees as “one of my compass points. There is north, south, east, and Barbara”. Her booth is front and centre. “Gladstone admits that her agenda is ‘more complicated than it used to be, now that we take sales for granted’”, meaning that until recently she and other distinguished gallery proprietors were to some extent able to “place” works of art in suitable, desirable, prestigious, or in some other sense advantageous spots, rather than to sell them to the person who happens to be standing at the front of the queue. At its most admirable level, this stratagem was designed to protect the long-term interest of the gallery’s stable of artists, but it is naturally far harder to achieve when times are tough. “Dealers are editors and conspirators”, says Jeff Poe. “We help determine what gets shown and how it gets shown, and we help put art in production.”
From Basel, and the magical realism of retail, we shift to Tate Britain, the judging of the Turner Prize, and the canonization process that is often said to be the special province of the art museum – more and more these days the dedicated museum of modern and contemporary art. Or is that process, in fact, more effectively steered by the opinions of contributors to the prestigious journal of art criticism Artforum International in New York – whose Editor-in-Chief is anxious not to be portrayed as “the toothpaste salesman for a counterculture” – or, indeed, by some sort of consensus that is forged among scholars and teachers of contemporary art practice at the annual meeting of the College Art Association, at which Thornton seeks some illumination in Midtown Manhattan? What are the roles played by curators and critics? “Art criticism is to artists as ornithology is to birds”, answers one wag, while others (apparently more artists than dealers and collectors) question the concept of “a good eye”, because it “evokes a connoisseur with a monocle, or a Cyclops with infallible instincts”. The book carries us ahead to an extended visit to the three-campus studio and design establishments of Takashi Murakami in Saitama and Tokyo, a twenty-first-century Japanese refinement of Warhol’s factory, with a chillingly enormous marketing and publicity apparatus. “Every morning, I upset people”, says the barefoot artist, who is evidently “an unrelenting aesthetic micromanager”. Murakami's assistants agree: “He is always angry”, says one with a shrug. “The atmosphere is usually tense.”
On the seventh day, conspicuously not given over to rest, the author brings us kicking and screaming into the “he’s C-List, she's B-list, Nick Serota is A-List” awfulness of the ceremonies surrounding the launch of the fifty-second Biennale di Venezia, and some ruminations, while doing laps of the Cipriani pool (front crawl), on the nature of the collision at this enormous event of many members of the author’s carefully accumulated dramatis personae.
The book is so sprinkled with picturesque detail – Ricola lozenges, Agnès B here, Prada there, Moët, “HOT DELICIOUS PIZZA”, air-kissing, Bellinis, cell phones and BlackBerries, “the smoky scent of Lapsang Souchong”, “big guns”, private planes, free booze, cigarettes – that as an analysis of how judgements of taste and quality in respect of new works of art are formulated, and by whom, either as a product of consensus, or effective advocacy, or manipulation, popularity, or even good fortune, it too often relies on the concept of complicit insider versus naive outsider, the drifting uninitiated perpetually shut out. Among the author’s many thumbnail sketches there is also a tendency towards caricature. The southern Californian art students tend to be incoherent; certain artists mad or eccentric, and so it is also with creepy curators, scary dealers, soigné auctioneers, and complacent collectors, shuttling between London, New York and various art-posts. The driver of Murakami’s seven-seat Tokyo Toyota is “a cool dude in a fedora and vintage fifties glasses”.
It is among the most anomalous aspects of the contemporary art scene that the more it has prospered lately, the more outrageous has been the hostility and philistinism directed towards it in many places by the mainstream print and electronic media. To some extent, those of us who work in art museums have only ourselves to blame, as we have become steadily greedier for public attention. I was reminded of the media hype surrounding the award of the 2001 Turner Prize to Martin Creed for his conceptual “Work No. 227: The lights going on and off”. When interviewed on television, the stunned artist was inclined to say no more than that the work simply was what it was: the lights going on and off. Cut to Sir Nicholas Serota, whose highly articulate interpretative gloss eventually brought in vestigial recollections of the Holocaust, and, through devious editing, appeared to stray so close to self-parody that it would be hard to invent a more biting satire. Fortunately, however, Thornton seems to take conceptual art seriously, as indeed she respects the bona fide work of all the artists she encounters, and she also resists the temptation to take the kind of cheap shots that are routinely made in the press. In this respect her book performs a valuable service by separating the real from the nonsensical.
Yet the real in Thornton consists entirely of “big ticket” contemporary artists and their work, not the thousands of professional artists who now labour under the rubrics of “craft” (ceramics, textiles, metalwork, jewellery, and so on) or graphic and other, innumerable branches of design, nor indeed traditional art-makers in many parts of the world who are not at all the focus of the international contemporary art trade.
Perhaps one might better see the processes which, until recently, gave forward propulsion to the Saatchi end of that business as taking place within a rather complicated Venn diagram, each element of which consists of concentric circles that define many different degrees of influence, speculation and professional involvement, both good and bad, because, as far as this reviewer is concerned, very few of the scenes that make up Seven Days in the Art World seem at all familiar. This may be due to the fact that there is no longer any such readily definable thing as “the art world”, rather than an endless skein of more or less precarious reputations, a short supply of money, much status anxiety among the rich, and tens of thousands of young artists graduating every summer from hundreds of art schools all over the world.
Ninety-five years ago, in his consistently under-appreciated book simply entitled Art, Clive Bell wrote:
"I have a friend blessed with an intellect as keen as a drill, who, though he takes an interest in aesthetics, has never during a life of almost forty years been guilty of an aesthetic emotion. So, having no faculty for distinguishing a work of art from a handsaw, he is apt to rear up a pyramid of irrefragable argument on the hypothesis that a handsaw is a work of art. This defect robs his perspicuous and subtle reasoning of much of its value; for it has ever been a maxim that faultless logic can win but little credit for conclusions that are based on premises notoriously false."
Something of the same shortage of “aesthetic emotion” seems to have characterized the artistic and art-critical climate of New York and London in recent years, and it may be a happy product of the difficult period we now face that, with fewer vernissages, less Moët, tighter budgets and more time to think and look hard, we may hope to encounter better, cheaper contemporary art, in less outlandishly Neronian surroundings. None of which will be of any comfort to artists, the vast majority of whom are banished to the very bottom of this particular food chain, and will no doubt suffer more than anyone in the lean years ahead. Sarah Thornton’s exhausting seven-day excursion, meanwhile, will serve to remind those of us who were ever fortunate enough to do so what it was once like to dance on the brink of a volcano.

Sarah Thornton SEVEN DAYS IN THE ART WORLD 274pp. Granta Books. £15.99.

OBITS

The Obit Section
Everyone has a story that's fit to print.

The traditional obituary is an exercise in curtness. It is an art form nasty, brutish, and short, taking the scrambled up, complicated thing that is a human life and smashing it into a tidy, coherent narrative. Take, for example, the 1897 obituary of Margie Zellner in the Allentown, Pennsylvania Morning Call:
Margie, the adopted daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John Rupp. She died of typhoid fever. She was ill over a week. Daughter of James F. ZELLNER and Daniella ZELLNER and at the death of her Mother, which occurred when the deceased was a babe, she was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Rupp. Burial at West End Cemetery, Allentown, Pa. On Friday, January 8, 1897. She was 12 years, 11 months and 24 days of age. She lived with the Rupps at 524 Walnut Street.And that’s the story of Margie. She was born, she was adopted, she got typhoid, she lived on Walnut Street, she died, the end. No mention of what kind of games she liked to play, if she wore ribbons in her hair, if anyone was sad that she was gone. Her obituary serves as witness. It was written, and therefore she existed.
In a letter penned to the grieving Elizabeth Hubbart, his brother John’s stepdaughter, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “A man is not completely born until he is dead.” He was trying to make her feel better about the death of her stepfather by saying that, as a soul now freed from his body, he was just getting started. What Elizabeth thought of as a life completed, Franklin portrayed as a mere rehearsal for the “real life” that is immortality. God gives bodies to all of us wandering souls for a little while, to experience pleasure, learn some tricks. Eventually, these bodies become painful or sad or just too gross to maintain, and are shuffled off while we get back to the business of being eternal. For Franklin, then, life is never done.
I can see how this sentiment might be comforting to a believer, but for those of us living on the other side of faith, the question of what constitutes a completed life is still an open one. Aristotle thought of life as a sum of its total actions that couldn’t be judged until those actions came to an end. This might be reassuring to those hovering about the frustrated middle of their lives, harshly judging their progress. Not to worry, says Aristotle — it ain’t over till it’s over. And it isn’t really over until you’ve been judged by other people at a point when you can no longer prepare a defense, be reformed, pay restitution, be rehabilitated. Judgment completes life.
A classic obituary like Margie’s above is a great example of this Aristotelian view. In essence, you’re not really dead unless you’ve been the subject of an obituary. It doesn’t have to be fancy — a eulogy written by your mom, a notice in the paper, a headstone with dates that say “he was born, he lived, and then he died.” These will all do. Without an obituary, it’s almost as if you never existed.
The obituary seems to be experiencing a renaissance. In her 2006 book The Dead Beat, Marilyn Johnson reveals a worldwide ring of rabid obituary enthusiasts—members of the Church of Obituaries, she calls them. They flip past the Sports and Business sections eager to read the day’s death roll. They “surf the dead beat” poring over blogs and newspapers searching for fascinating facts about Antoinette K-Doe, who turned a nightclub into a public shrine to her husband, or the guy who invented sea monkeys. Obituaries aren’t dirty little secrets as much as they used to be, lurking in hidden corners and ready to terrify those who cross their path. They are public, normal, interesting, fun. There’s howtowriteanobituary.com which involves everyday people in the writing process, and patrickswayzeobituary.com, a forum writing the demise of the movie star even as he lives. There’s even a glossy online magazine with the snappy name Obit.
But the real change is with the obituary writers. Once shamed to the backs of periodicals to deliver dour, Margie Zellner-style obituaries, many are now part of this new movement to “out” death by making it more accessible and “natural.” They are reconsidering the obituary not as the final judgment, but as a way death can be presented as a sum total of its stories. Everyone has stories, everyone dies, and in writing about death, death and life become more of a circle. The obituary is not the period on the sentence of existence, but a mere interpretation.
A career obituary writer herself, Marilyn Johnson removes the power of judgment completely from obituaries. “…Obits are,” she says, “at their best, a form of literature…"
Across the U.S., a hybrid obituary, a cross between short stories and obits, celebrates the life of local characters, the extraordinary in the ordinary person. The school lunch lady, who spent her evenings as a ballroom hostess. The man who could hypnotize lobsters and stand them on their heads….
Take this USA Today obit about Herbert Hamrol. Herbert Hamrol, by all definition, was just a guy who worked and lived a regular life. But his obituary, grabbing the tidbit that he was one of the last survivors of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, makes an otherwise simple life into one including drama, daring, and, most importantly, history:
Herbert Hamrol was 3 years old when his mother carried him to safety from their crumbling apartment building at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906. "She carried me in her left arm and used her right hand to grab the stair rail," Hamrol told The Associated Press on the earthquake's 99th anniversary. "That's all I remember."
Even the Obituary section in The New York Times — once the paragon of the obituary-as-final-dirt-on-the-grave — is now one of the most widely read sections of any periodical anywhere due to its embrace of the obituary as story.
For an example of the transformation, take this obituary from September 29, 1891, tucked into the lower half of a column with the day’s death notices. It consists of a few lines about some guy named Herman Melville:
Herman Melville died yesterday at his residence, 104 East Twenty-sixth Street, this city, of heart failure, aged seventy-two. He was the author of Typee, Omoo, Mobie Dick, and other sea-faring tales, written in earlier years. He leaves a wife and two daughters, Mrs. M. B. Thomas and Miss Melville.
I would say that’s a pretty fair assessment of Melville’s life, wouldn’t you? Lived in Chelsea, wrote some seafaring tales (did they really misspell Moby Dick?), was married, had a couple of kids, and died in Chelsea. Hey, it’s more than most of us do, plenty enough for a complete life.
Now read this obituary in The New York Times written this past month by Margalit Fox (another change in the obit industry, the honor and agency of the authors) about “Richard Topus, a Pigeon Trainer in World War II.” This is an obituary Melville could only have dreamed of — a heroic tale of one man’s expert bird-handling and his later success as an executive dairy salesman:
To the thousands of American men and boys who raced homing pigeons, a popular sport in the early 20th century and afterward, the government’s message was clear: Uncle Sam Wants Your Birds. Richard Topus was one of those boys. He had no birds of his own to give, but he had another, unassailable asset: he was from Brooklyn, where pigeon racing had long held the status of a secular religion. His already vast experience with pigeons — long, ardent hours spent tending and racing them after school and on weekends — qualified him, when he was still a teenager, to train American spies and other military personnel in the swift, silent use of the birds in wartime.
It goes on to describe his childhood in Brooklyn, where he fell in love with the pigeons his neighbors kept on the roof, and a brief history of the role of pigeons in defeating the Nazis. It’s inspiring, really.
It’s also quite a departure from the Aristotelian view of obituary-as-completion. Rather, it presents life and death as a continuum. Today’s obituaries are more like the optimistic Ben Franklin notion of life as a neverending story. Like literature, an obituary has the power to completely reimagine a life in examining it, for as long as anyone is interested. Life in this view always has potential, as long as we‘re engaged with the past.
In fact, we have no idea what death really is. But obituaries aren’t interesting because of what they say about death. They’re interesting because of the funny and pathetic way they purport to deal with the unfathomable. Obituaries are little fairytales we tell ourselves, while imagining our own lives as one day complete enough to write about. An obituary, any obituary, transforms lives into stories, with interesting characters, a cohesive plot, and most importantly, a good ending. This is what we’ve got as humans — not the ability to understand or be at one with death, but the ability to generate lots of stupid crap to fill in the empty space of the unknown. Obituaries can do that as much as anything, and maybe we can think of them both in the Franklinian and Aristotelian sense: They might not complete life nor make it eternal, but they can make us feel better about living in the constant and terrifying presence of death.
At the end of his letter penned to the grieving Elizabeth Hubbart, Ben Franklin writes “Our friend and we are invited abroad on a party of pleasure — that is to last forever. His chair was first ready and he is gone before us — we could not all conveniently start together, and why should you and I be grieved at this, since we are soon to follow, and we know where to find him.” I like this way of thinking of death as an everlasting ship or maybe a party boat, taking passengers abroad. Many good stories have been inspired by ships. Maybe if we just keep writing them, we can cheat death a little after all.

America

Sociologists do not always write with clarity, let alone with grace. A friend of mine studying sociology once showed me some of the writing of the late Talcott Parsons, a longtime professor at Harvard, and I thought that anyone who waded through its obscurities deserved a degree for effort and determination alone, though not for wisdom and judgment.
Paul Hollander is not one of those sociologists who disdains to make his meaning clear to the average man, or at least to the average educated man. Though English was not his mother tongue, he writes with force, clarity, and even elegance. More important still, he does not treat human beings as if they were iron filings in a magnetic field. He knows that the search for meaning is one of man’s most salient characteristics, and he is capable of taking a comparatively small phenomenon and extracting the deeper significance from it.
Hollander is preeminently what one might call a sociologist of ideology, or perhaps a psychosociologist of ideology, because the history of individual intellectuals, of which he has accumulated an encyclopedic knowledge, interests him as much as that of groups. He is best known for his now-classic book Political Pilgrims, which examined the phenomenon of twentieth-century Western intellectuals who allowed themselves to be seduced and duped by radical revolutionary regimes of the most patent despotism and brutality. How and why did so many intelligent, cultivated, and educated people come to believe such obvious nonsense? Pilgrims was a tragicomic study of how the cherished ideas of the self-important can so easily overwhelm their common sense, and how education can serve to blind as well as to enlighten.
His most recent book, a collection of mainly short pieces, takes its title from Hollander’s acute observations of anti-Americanism, both foreign and domestic. America, he notes in The Only Superpower, is seen as the most modern of all countries, in the vanguard of almost everything, so all the discontents and disappointments of modernity—which are many, serious, and often contradictory—are laid at its door. For Hollander, anti-Americanism is a form of inverted utopianism: if it weren’t for America, mankind would be living in a latter-day Garden of Eden.
Other essays offer insight into the life of our societies. Hollander can find social significance in the apparently trivial detail, like the phrase uttered by all of his retired friends and colleagues: “Busier than ever.” (I have used it myself, often, since I retired from hospital practice.) Why should the elderly in our society be busier than ever rather than, say, contemplative, as they are in other societies? Secularization has led to the general belief that human life has no transcendent meaning beyond itself; it is necessary, therefore, to pack as much into it as possible, to prolong it as long as possible, and to ward off disturbing thoughts of dissolution. Ceaseless activity will accomplish these things. The hyperactivity of American retirees suggests that religious belief is much less rooted in American life than is commonly believed. Americans, and modern Europeans, have no answer to Dryden’s question:
Hast thou not, yet, propos’d some certain endTo which thy life, thy every act may tend?
Another small phenomenon that Hollander analyzes with wit and compassion is the personal ads in the New York Review of Books. He finds them significant for two reasons. First, they suggest a degree of social isolation: substantial numbers of intelligent and educated people are unable to find partners by the customary routes of work, friendship, community, and so forth. There is an underlying melancholy in this.
Second, the self-descriptions of the people who place the personal ads are revealing of the tastes, worldview, and ideals of a sector of the population that is important well beyond its demographic size. Readers of the Review are, of course, likely to be members of the liberal intelligentsia. Their ads give a powerful impression not so much of hypocrisy as of lack of self-knowledge. The ads’ authors claim to be profoundly individual, yet there is an underlying uniformity and conventionality to everything that they say about themselves. Their desire to escape convention is deeply conventional. Their opinions are democratic, but their tastes are exclusive: Tuscany and good claret mean more to them than beach resorts and the Boston Red Sox. They think of themselves as funny and demand humor in others, but they succeed in conveying only earnestness and the impression of deadening solemnity. (Demanding that someone be funny is a bit like demanding that he be natural for the camera.) Contented with, and even complacent about, their position in the world, they somehow see themselves as enemies of the status quo. They are ideologically egalitarian, but psychologically elitist: Lord, make everyone equal, but not just yet.
With their memories of the sixties, when to be young was very heaven, they still believe that an oppositional stance in pursuit of perfection is virtuous in itself—indeed, is the prime or sole content of virtue. And it is this belief that renders them interesting to Hollander, for it makes genuine moral reflection about the nature of various governments and policies impossible. It transforms merely personal discontents into matters of supposedly great general importance.
Near the end of the book, Hollander provides an understated account of his own intellectual development. Born in 1932 a bourgeois, assimilated Jew in Hungary, he escaped death toward the end of World War II by successfully posing as a Gentile. The Communist regime installed in Hungary after the war was less life-threatening than the Nazi occupiers had been, but still horribly despotic, economically disastrous, and suspicious of his family because of its bourgeois past. Having witnessed slaughter in the streets in the 1940s, he saw it again in 1956, the year he managed to escape to the West.
These experiences were surely enough to make anyone distrust totalizing ideologies of whatever stripe; but studying in England, Hollander also came under the influence of Isaiah Berlin, who taught that human desires and desiderata are permanently in conflict with one another. (Hollander’s piece on travel in this volume illustrates how educated, prosperous, but slightly dissatisfied Westerners roam the world in search of self-contradictory gratifications; I blushed to see myself portrayed in this way.)
His background makes clear why Hollander has always been interested in evil, and why he sees the avoidance of evil as politically even more important than the quest for the good. Man is permanently dissatisfied with his lot because he wants contradictory things simultaneously: excitement and security, anonymity and community, routine and variety, and so on. No political arrangements will ever satisfy him entirely; this does not mean that hell on earth is unavoidable, though it has been often enough produced by those who believe they can reconcile the irreconcilable by means of absolute power.
It is a pleasure to read a sociologist who can distinguish so clearly and with wit the less than perfect from the evil; who understands the benefits of environmental conservation without turning such conservation into a quasi-totalitarian ideology; who can see the frivolity, vulgarity, and worthlessness of industrially produced popular culture while appreciating just how quickly dislike of such culture can mutate into contempt for the people who consume it; who, in short, keeps the limits of human possibilities constantly before him. Paul Hollander’s work is an example of the dialectic between lived experience and abstract reflection, of which all work in the humanities should—but alas, seldom does—partake.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Reading

Against Readings

By MARK EDMUNDSON

If I could make one wish for the members of my profession, college and university professors of literature, I would wish that for one year, two, three, or five, we would give up readings. By a reading, I mean the application of an analytical vocabulary — Marx's, Freud's, Foucault's, Derrida's, or whoever's — to describe and (usually) to judge a work of literary art. I wish that we'd declare a moratorium on readings. I wish that we'd give readings a rest.
This wish will strike most academic literary critics and perhaps others as well as — let me put it politely — counterintuitive. Readings, many think, are what we do. Readings are what literary criticism is all about. They are the bread and butter of the profession. Through readings we write our books; through readings we teach our students. And if there were no more readings, what would we have left to do? Wouldn't we have to close our classroom doors, shut down our office computers, and go home? The end of readings, presumably, would mean the end of our profession.
So let me try to explain what I have in mind. For it seems to me that if we kicked our addiction to readings, our profession would actually be stronger and more influential, our teaching would improve, and there would be more good books of literary criticism to be written and accordingly more to be read.
In my view — a view informed by, among others, William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Matthew Arnold — the best way to think of a literary education is as a great second chance. We all get socialized once. We spend the first years of our lives learning the usages of our families, our neighborhoods, our religions, our schools, and our nations. We come to an understanding of what's expected: We come to see what the world takes to be good and bad, right and wrong. We figure out ways to square the ethics of our church with the ethics of our neighborhood — they aren't always the same, but one reason that religions survive and thrive is that they can enter into productive commerce with the values present in other spheres of life. Kids go to primary school so that they can learn their ABC's and math facts, certainly. But they also go to be socialized: They go to acquire a set of more or less public values. Then it's up to them (and their parents) to square those values with the home truths they've acquired in their families. Socialization isn't a simple process, but when it works well, it can produce individuals who thrive in themselves and either do no harm to others or make a genuine contribution to society at large.
But primary socialization doesn't work for everyone. There are always people — how many it's tough to know, but surely a minority — who don't see their own natures fully reflected in the values that they're supposed to inherit or assume. They feel out of joint with their times. The gay kid grows up in a family that thinks homosexuality is a sin. The young guy with a potent individualistic streak can't bear the drippy collectivism foisted on him by his ex-hippie parents and his purportedly progressive school. The girl who is supposed to be a chip off the old legal block and sit some day on the Court only wants to draw and paint; the guy destined (in his mom's heart) for Princeton is born to be a carpenter and has no real worldly ambitions, no matter how often he's upbraided.
To be young is often to know, or to sense, what others have in mind for you and not to like it. But what is harder for a person who has gone unhappily through the first rites of passage into the tribe is to know how to replace the values she's had imposed on her with something better. She's learned a lot of socially sanctioned languages, and still none of them are hers. But are there any that truly might be? Is there something she might be or do in the world that's truly in keeping with the insistent, but often speechless, self that presses forward internally?
This, I think, is where literature can come in — as can all of the other arts and in some measure the sciences, too. By venturing into what Arnold memorably called "the best that has been known and thought," a young person has the chance to discover new vital possibilities. Such a person sees that there are other ways of looking at the world and other ways of being in the world than the ones that she's inherited from her family and culture. She sees, with Emily Dickinson, that a complex, often frayed, often humorous dialogue with God must be at the center of her life; she sees, with Charles Dickens, that humane decency is the highest of human values and understands that her happiness will come from shrewdly serving others; she likes the sound of Blake and — I don't know — forms a better rock band than the ones we've been hearing for the last decade and more; he seconds Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke and becomes a conservative, in his way twice wiser than NPR-addicted, Prius-proselytizing Mom and Dad.
In short, the student reads and feels that sensation that Emerson describes so well at the beginning of "Self-Reliance": "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." The truth of what we're best fit to do is latent in all of us, Emerson suggests, and I think this to be right. But it's also true that we, and society, too, have plenty of tricks for keeping that most important kind of knowledge out of reach. Society seems to have a vested interest in telling us what we should do and be. But often its interpretation of us — fed through teachers and guidance officers and priests and ministers and even through our loving parents — is simply wrong. When we feel, as Longinus said we will in the presence of the sublime, that we have created what in fact we've only heard, then it's time to hearken with particular attention and see how this startling utterance might be beckoning us to think, or speak, or even to live differently.
Everyone who teaches literature has probably had at least one such golden moment. I mean the moment where, reading casually or reading intently, being lazy or being responsive, one is shocked into recognition. "Yes," one says, "that's the way it really is." Then often, a rather antinomian utterance comes: "They say it's not so, but I know it is. I always have."
One of my own such moments occurred reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. It didn't really figure: That shouldn't have been the book (as it was at least for a little while) for a white, Irish-Catholic kid growing up outside of Boston. What Malcolm had to say about race resonated with me: There was a low-grade race war on in my school at the time, and he changed my thoughts about it pretty directly. In sum, I began to see how scary it must be to be black in America, and to be in real danger much of the time from white officials and white cops and white kids (kids not altogether unlike me and my pals).
But what really struck me in that book, oddly enough, was Malcolm's hunger for learning. By now, nearly everyone knows the story of how Malcolm, in prison, found himself unfit for the arguments that proliferated in the prison yard (or at least one quadrant of it) and took in all subjects under the moon and sun: race, sex, politics, history. He had opinions, but he couldn't back them up. He had almost no facts in his mental files. The answer was simple: He needed to start reading. So he loaded his cell with meaty works from the prison library. But of course, smart as the then Malcolm Little was, he hadn't had much formal education, and the books were loaded with words he didn't understand, placed like landmines in every paragraph. He looked them up in the dictionary, but there were simply too many of them. In the process of running around in the dictionary, he'd forget what the paragraph at hand was supposed to be about.
But this didn't induce him to give up. Instead, Malcolm sat down with a dictionary and a notebook and began copying down the dictionary — starting maybe with aardvark and moving on down the line. It took a while and it wasn't the most scintillating of pastimes, but when it was over, Malcolm Little could read.
And he read ferociously. The whole world of thought came into being for him: history, philosophy, literature, and science. He vowed then that he would be a reader for the rest of his life, a learner; and in time he would vow to use his book-won knowledge, along with a considerable quotient of street-smarts, to help himself through life and to do what he could for his people. In the beginning, doing what he could for black people meant bedeviling the white man; in time, it meant doing his part to serve all of humanity.
I was thrilled to read this. It turned out that I — despite being about as impatient with formal schooling as Malcolm was — had some intellectual aspirations, too. I was curious about things, after my fashion. Malcolm was black, I was white. Still, my 17-year-old self saw him as someone I could, in certain regards, try to emulate. I could read to satisfy my thirst for knowledge; I could use what I learned to make my life a little better, and maybe help some other people along the way. It was an unlikely conversion experience, maybe. But ultimately that's what it was.
I suspect that virtually everyone who teaches literature has had such an experience and maybe more than one. They've read Emerson or Orwell or Derrida or Woolf, and been moved to change the way they do what they do — or they've chosen another way of life altogether. And even if they don't change, they've had the chance to have their fundamental values challenged. Sometimes a true literary education appears to leave a student where he was at the beginning. But that state is only apparent. Confronted by the best that's been thought and said, he's gotten to reconsider his values and views. What was once flat dogma turns into lively commitment and conviction.
I think that the experience of change is at the heart of literary education. How does it come about? For me, it had a long foreground, to be sure, but most immediately I was guided by a teacher. He told me that I — I in particular — might get something worth keeping out of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. And I suspect that's how many of us teachers found the books that have made us who we are. Teachers who've been inspired by great works have been moved to pass the gift on. "What we have loved, others will love," says Wordsworth, addressing his friend Coleridge in The Prelude, "and we will teach them how."
I think that the highest objective for someone trying to provide a literary education to students is to make such moments of transformation possible. Teachers set the scene for secular conversion. These conversions may be large scale — like the one that Whitman seems to have undergone when he read Emerson's "The Poet," and realized that though Emerson could not himself become the American poet prophesied in the essay, he, Walt Whitman, actually could. But the changes that literary art brings can be relatively minor, too. Reading a book may make a person more receptive to beauty than he otherwise would have been; might make him more sensitive to injustice; more prone to be self-reliant. Granted, books can have negative effects, too. One has read Don Quixote; one has read Madame Bovary. But a prerequisite for sharing literary art with young people should be the belief that, over all, its influence can be salutary; it can aid in growth. No one would teach history, after all, if he believed that all, or most, forms of historical knowledge were destructive deceptions; one would not teach music if one felt, as Plato did, that most of it disrupts the harmony of the soul.
I said that transformation was the highest goal of literary education. The best purpose of all art is to inspire, said Emerson, and that seems right to me. But that does not mean that literary study can't have other beneficial effects. It can help people learn to read more sensitively; help them learn to express themselves; it can teach them more about the world at large. But the proper business of teaching is change — for the teacher (who is herself a work in progress) and (pre-eminently) for the student.
Nor do I think that everyone who picks up a book must seek the sublime moment of unexpected but inevitable connection. People read for diversion; for relaxation; to inform themselves; to stave off anxiety in airplanes, when the flight attendant is out of wine and beer. A book can make a good door stop; and if you find yourself especially angry at the cat, have a good throwing arm, and a good angle — well, there's no end of uses for a book. But if you're going to take a book into a room, where the objective is to educate people — education being from the Latin educere, meaning "lead out of" and then presumably toward something — then you should consider using the book to help lead those who want to go out from their own lives into another, if only a few steps.
If this is what you want to do, then readings will only get in your way. When you launch, say, a Marxist reading of William Blake, you effectively use Marx as a tool of analysis and judgment. To the degree that Blake anticipates Marx, Blake is prescient and to be praised. Thus the Marxist reading approves of Blake for his hatred of injustice; his polemic against imperialism; his suspicion of the gentry; his critique of bourgeois art as practiced by the likes of Sir Joshua Reynolds. But Blake, being Blake, also diverges from Marx. He is, presumably, too committed to something akin to liberal individualism; he doesn't understand the revolutionary potential latent in the proletariat; he is, perhaps, an idealist, who believes that liberation of consciousness matters more, or at least must precede, material liberation; he has no clear theory of class conflict. Thus Blake, admirable as he may be, needs to be read with skepticism; he requires a corrective, and the name of that corrective is Karl Marx. Just so, the corrective could be called Jacques Derrida (who would illuminate Blake the logocentrist); Foucault (who would demonstrate Blake's immersion in and implicit endorsement of an imprisoning society); Kristeva (who would be attuned to Blake's imperfections on the score of gender politics), and so on down the line. The current sophisticated critic would be unlikely to pick one master to illuminate the work at hand — he would mix and match as the occasion required. But to enact a reading means to submit one text to the terms of another; to allow one text to interrogate another — then often to try, sentence, and summarily execute it.
The problem with the Marxist reading of Blake is that it robs us of some splendid opportunities. We never take the time to arrive at a Blakean reading of Blake, and we never get to ask whether Blake's vision might be true — by which I mean, following William James, whether it's good in the way of belief. The moment when the student in the classroom, or the reader perusing the work can pause and say: "Yes, that's how it is; Blake's got it exactly right," disappears. There's no chance for the instant that Emerson and Longinus evoke, when one feels that he's written what he's only read, uttered what he's only heard.
Nor, it's worth pointing out, does Marx get much real opportunity here either. He's assumed to be a superior figure: There are in fact any number of Marxist readings of Blake out there; I know of no Blakean readings of Marx. But the student who has heard the teacher unfold a Marxist reading of a work probably doesn't get to study Marx per se. He never gets to have a potential moment of revelation reading The Manifesto or The Grundrisse. Marx too disappears from the scene, becoming part of a technological apparatus for processing other works. No one asks: "Is what Marx is saying true?" "Is Foucault onto something?" "Is what Derrida believes actually the case?" They're simply applied like paint to the side of a barn; the paint can go on roughly or it can go on adroitly, with subtle variations of mood and texture. But paint is what it is.
It should be clear here that my objection isn't to theoretical texts per se. If a fellow professor thinks that Marx or Foucault or Kristeva provides a contribution to the best that has been thought and said, then by all means read and study the text. (I've worked on these figures with students and not without profit.) But the teacher who studies, say, Foucault probably needs to ask what kind of life Foucault commends. Is it one outside of all institutions? Is it one that rebels against all authority? Can that life be in any way compatible with life as a professor or a student? These are questions that are rarely asked about what are conceived of as the more radical thinkers of the era. It is not difficult to guess why this is so.
I've said that the teacher's job is to offer a Blakean reading of Blake, or an Eliotic reading of Eliot, and that's a remark that can't help but raise questions. The standard for the kind of interpretation I have in mind is actually rather straightforward. When a teacher admires an author enough to teach his work, then it stands to reason that the teacher's initial objective ought to be framing a reading that the author would approve. The teacher, to begin with, represents the author: He analyzes the text sympathetically, he treats the words with care and caution and with due respect. He works hard with the students to develop a vision of what the world is and how to live that rises from the author's work and that, ultimately, the author, were he present in the room, would endorse. Northrop Frye does something very much like this in his book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry; George Orwell achieves something similar in his famous essay on Dickens. In both cases, the critic's objective is to read the author with humane sensitivity, then synthesize a view of life that's based on that reading. Schopenhauer tells us that all major artists ask and in their fashion answer a single commanding question: "What is life?" The critic works to show how the author frames that query and how he answers it. Critics are necessary for this work because the answers that most artists give to major questions are indirect. Artists move forward through intuition and inference: They feel their way to their sense of things. The critic, at his best, makes explicit what is implicit in the work.
This kind of criticism is itself something of an art, not a science. You cannot tell that you have compounded a valid reading of Dickens any more than that you have compounded a valid novel or a valid play. When others find your Dickensian endorsement of Dickens to be of use to them, humanly, intellectually, spiritually, then your endorsement is a success. The desire to turn the art of reading into a science is part of what draws the profession to the application of sterile concepts.
Perhaps an analogy will be helpful. Let us say that a friend of ours has been seriously ill, or gone through a bad divorce, or has fallen wildly, unexpectedly in love. The friend tells us all about it, from beginning to end, with all the sensitivity she can muster. The story is long and complex, and laced with nuance. We listen patiently and take it in. Later on we're faced with explaining this situation to a third person, a mutual friend of us both. Our confiding friend, our first one, wants this to happen: She wants her friends to know the story. How do we proceed? Surely we proceed as sensitively and humanely as possible. We honor our first friend's way of understanding the illness or the love affair. If we are a good friend, we tell the story such that, were the first friend there in the room, she would nod with approval and gratitude.
We may not believe the first friend's entire sense of the story. We may have a different idea of what happened and why. But we honor our first friend by keeping true to her insofar as we can. We do not, say, begin with a Freudian or Marxist reinterpretation of what it is she has told us. If we do, we are no friend at all. We have not given someone we care about due consideration.
Just so, we need to befriend the texts that we choose to teach. They too are the testaments of human beings who have lived and suffered in the world. They too deserve honor and respect. If you have a friend whose every significant utterance you need to translate into another idiom — whose two is not the real two, as Emerson says — then that is a friend you need to jettison. If there are texts that you cannot befriend, then leave them to the worms of time — or to the kinder ministrations of others.

Graham Greene's Letters

Nobody, as the literary scholar Samuel Hynes once observed, has ever wanted to be a Graham Greene character.
His men and women are murderers, traitors, unhappy adulterous lovers, sinners of every stripe--and he doesn't glamorize their seediness, their misery, or their desperation. Evelyn Waugh bluntly called them "charmless." Nearly all of them dwell in a shadowy fictive world of hunter and hunted, where love itself leads mainly to anguish and loss. Nonetheless, even Greene's "entertainments," such as This Gun for Hire and The Third Man, are more than just tautly written thrillers of revenge or pursuit: In the distance one can usually make out the baying of Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven: I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; / I fled Him, down the arches of the years; / I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways / Of my own mind

After the death of Henry James, according to Greene, "the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act." Consequently, Greene's own work--especially the major books of what one might call his middle period: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair--sought to reinvest contemporary fiction with moral seriousness, to depict solid and real people trapped in life-or-death ethical dilemmas and racked by guilt and despair.
Anyone needing a quick summary of the Greenean view of the world need only look to the first and last sentences of The Third Man. It opens: "One never knows when the blow will fall," and closes: "Poor Crabbin. Poor all of us, when you come to think of it." To this gloomy assessment of our fragile human condition the only possible counterweight lies in what the priest of Brighton Rock calls "the awful strangeness of the mercy of God."
For more than half a century Graham Greene (1904-1991) supplied disquieting reports and updates from this bleakly desolate "Greeneland," wherever it might be temporarily located on the map: Mexico (The Power and the Glory), Africa (The Heart of the Matter), Southeast Asia (The Quiet American), Cuba (Our Man in Havana), South America (The Honorary Consul). Yet while the troubled locales might vary, the quality of Greene's artistry remained uniformly high. Even a relatively late novel, The Human Factor (1978), has been ranked by a standard study of the espionage thriller as the greatest spy story of modern times; Travels with My Aunt revealed its author as a master of black humor.
Over the years Graham Greene's many books have sold more than 20 million copies, and movies, often very fine movies, have been made from virtually all of them. One can even point to a latter-day "school of Greene," whose members have included such distinguished writers as Anthony Burgess, V.S. Naipaul, John le Carré, and Paul Theroux, all of them having worked variations on the Master's signature theme: the intersection of erotic, spiritual, and political treachery.
The Master? Greene, I suspect, would be honestly pleased by the comparison to Henry James, whose work he revered. After all, both writers repeatedly depicted innocence deceived and burnt-out cases and the high cost of illusions. Yet there's still another likeness between them. In one of his later essays Cyril Connolly--that moody epicurean of letters--confessed that he had attained a stage in life when he would rather read about Henry James than actually read or reread any of Henry James's fiction. Something similar seems to be happening to Greene: We've grown obsessed with the man himself.
Norman Sherry's massive three- volume biography--not a slice but a slab of life, almost a marble slab--piles on the details, going so far as to include the title of the child care book that Greene's mother consulted during the writer's infancy. Michael Shelden's The Enemy Within notoriously accuses, or at least suspects, Greene of every sort of perfidy, from sacrilege (sex in churches) to murder. William Cash's The Third Woman offers a detailed account of Greene's long-sustained passion for the married Catherine Walston, a pantherine beauty hungry for much more than what Sarah, in The End of the Affair, calls "ordinary corrupt human love." There have been other biographical accounts, too (by Anthony Mockler, for instance) and memoirs by friends, including one by Greene's confessor, Fr. Leopoldo Duran.
The publication of such personalia actually started even before Greene's death. Besides his three volumes of reminiscence (A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape, and Reflections) Greene himself brought out--it was his last book--a descriptive "diary" of his dreams called A World of My Own. Just a few years previous, Yours, Etc. offered the best of Greene's many letters to the press (invaluably annotated by editor Christopher Hawtree). Along with serious statements about human rights and censorship, that selection included Greene's several prize-winning entries to various New Statesman competitions asking for parodies of--Graham Greene. Consider just one priceless line: "The nursery maid of the day (our mother changed them with the frequency of young girls in a Grand Bassa brothel) crunched by on the gravel, her thighs sleek as a cat's."
From these letters one can also learn the histories of the tongue-in-cheek Anglo-Texan Society and the even more outrageous John Gordon Society, ostensibly dedicated to combating pornography in English literature and culture. Greene, for all his dourness and melancholy, had a taste for practical jokes.
And now comes Graham Greene: A Life in Letters. The novelist once estimated that he wrote 2,000 letters every year. Out of such plenty editor Richard Greene (no relation to his subject) has picked several hundred of the best and added commentary and footnotes to create a kind of potted biography. The result is an enjoyable book that any admirer of Greene's work will want to read. And yet it's not a wholly satisfactory volume: As a biography it simply skims over too much to be more than a précis of a life.
More seriously, Greene simply isn't all that good a letter-writer. In the novels his prose has always been somewhat drab, befitting his often doleful subject matter, but that plainness can be readily overlooked because of the cinematic vividness of his scene-setting and the lived intensity of his characters. In correspondence, where Greene can't rely on such compensations, he often sounds tired or anemic. He's certainly not in the class of the witty Evelyn Waugh or the provocative George Orwell.
That doesn't mean these pages lack interest. For instance, even a subtle analyst of eros and agape can write soppy nonsense in his love letters. Here's the opening of one from 1934 to his wife Vivien: "Darling best dearest most adored Puss Willow. I do hope you are having a nice time & seeing plenty of people & things. Your Wuffle misses you." Despite (or perhaps because of) such Pooh-like affection, Greene generally preferred his sex outside the home: He not only frequented brothels on his travels but also entered into long-term liaisons with a half-dozen women. Life was kept strictly compartmentalized until the day that Vivien accidentally intercepted a letter intended for Catherine Walston. Greene tried to explain himself with this honest, if also self-serving, apologia:
The fact that has to be faced, dear, is that by my nature, my selfishness, even in some degree by my profession, I should always, & with anyone, have been a bad husband. I think, you see, my restlessness, moods, melancholia, even my outside relationships, are symptoms of a disease & not the disease itself, & the disease, which has been going on ever since my childhood & was only temporarily alleviated by psycho-analysis, lies in a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life. Unfortunately the disease is also one's material. Cure the disease & I doubt whether a writer would remain. So you see I really feel the hopelessness of sharing a life with anyone without causing them unhappiness & disillusion--if they have any illusions.
Little wonder that Greene repeatedly extolled "the virtue of disloyalty." A writer, he believed, should be everywhere and always a naysayer and a gadfly, the devil's advocate, proffering allegiance only to truth and art. Greene himself almost relished pointing out the shortcomings in his own work, remarking of The End of the Affair: "I know what's wrong, but the book's finished & I can't bring myself to write new scenes." His first two novels, he insists, were "of a badness beyond the power of criticism properly to evoke." Even what is widely viewed as his masterpiece was liable to disparagement. Speaking of Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo's Silence, Greene wrote: "A marvelous book--so much better than my own Power and the Glory."
While Greene's first novel was published in 1929, he didn't really begin to make any money from his fiction until 1938 when he brought out Brighton Rock, the story of a punk gang leader named Pinkie. Throughout the 1930s and '40s he kept busy as a literary roustabout. He was a regular movie reviewer for various publications including the New Yorker-like Night and Day, and it was in its pages that he asserted that certain middle-aged men and clergymen "responded" to Shirley Temple's "well-shaped and desirable little body." (An expensive lawsuit followed.)
For many years he also turned out film scripts for producer Alexander Korda and director Carol Reed, most famously The Third Man, later claiming that its success was due to the zither music and acknowledging that Orson Welles came up with the famous "cuckoo-clock" speech. Throughout the 1950s he wrote plays--once slamming his star, Ralph Richardson, for overacting in Carving a Statue--and frequently took on assignments from magazines. But no matter where he traveled or how chaotic his private life, Greene would produce 500 words of fiction a day, or more. He sometimes wondered how people who weren't writers managed to get through all the storms and sorrows of life.
Yet, as these letters remind us, Greene also found refuge in one other lifelong passion. While he opened his most celebrated essay, "The Lost Childhood," by claiming that "perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives," Greene himself never lost his enthusiasm for reading and book collecting. Few modern novelists have been such ardent bookmen.
In 1936 he writes to his brother Hugh: "A thousand thanks for the Book Token. I collected a shelf-ful of books this Christmas. A very nice old collection of Gibbon in 12 volumes and the new Boswell from Vivien--oh, and Bryant's anthology of Restoration letters, Frost's poems and Dylan Thomas's, and Rare Poems of the 17th century, and the Letters of Byron." While working as an intelligence officer in Sierra Leone in 1942 he notes, "I'm leaving The Eustace Diamonds till my railway journey. I ration myself to one Trollope a month which will take me through November."
When, in 1950, Waugh presents him with a deluxe edition of his novel Helena, Greene writes back: "I shall now have to buy a reading copy though because one can't mark a limited edition," noting that he uses vertical lines in the margin to indicate approval and wavy lines for disapproval. That same year he sends a fan letter to Sir Osbert Sitwell about Sitwell's five-volume autobiography, Right Hand, Left Hand!--"Thank you so much for completing a set which I value more, I think, than any other book of my time--Proust is before my time!"--and in 1964 he writes to Kurt Vonnegut: "I first read Cat's Cradle when it was published over here by Gollancz and then searched second-hand booksellers' catalogues to find two other of your books, Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan. I've enjoyed them all immensely."
In 1979 he informs Muriel Spark that Territorial Rights is "your best, your very best. I thought you'd never top Memento Mori, but you have," and in 1985 he compliments Roald Dahl on his memoir Boy, adding how much he looks forward to the sequel.
As is well known, Greene championed the fiction of the Indian writer R.K. Narayan and the Irish novelist Brian Moore. But he also enjoyed Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason mysteries; in one letter to Waugh it is clear that the two friends have been speculating about Perry Mason's sex life. Greene always loved shockers and mysteries, eventually gathering a notable collection of Victorian detective fiction (with the help of fellow fan, and longtime mistress, Dorothy Glover). Characteristically, after agreeing to introduce a mammoth bibliography describing everything that Arthur Conan Doyle ever published, Greene declares, "One point I would like to make is how good a writer he was apart from the Sherlock Holmes works. I can reread him as I find myself unable to reread Virginia Woolf and Forster, but then I am not a literary man."
Really? Do unliterary men produce Lord Rochester's Monkey, a life of the scandalous 17th-century poet, the Earl of Rochester? And do they reread as much as Greene? He tells us that he's enjoyed Waugh's Decline and Fall a half-dozen times, and continually returns to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. He mentions being "under the influence of Moby Dick, which I never thought to read twice." In 1959 he writes to Catherine Walston that he's "started rereading David Copperfield. My goodness, the first two chapters are perfect. I don't believe there's been anything better in the novel--& that includes Proust & Tolstoy. One dreads the moment of failure, for Dickens always sooner or later fails."
That last sentence indicates real critical acumen. When working as an editor of Eyre and Spottiswoode, Greene scrupulously hammers Mervyn Peake for the facetiousness, prolixity, and overwriting in the original manuscript of Titus Groan. Peake, after reeling from the shock, reworked his book, now regarded as one of the summits of modern fantasy.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to capture the truth about any man, let alone so elusive and multifaceted a one as Graham Greene. Still, I suspect that Greene would identify, at least partially, with his own summing-up of a writer he deeply admired, Ford Madox Ford:
I don't suppose failure disturbed him much: he had never really believed in human happiness, his middle life had been made miserable by passion, and he had come through--with his humour intact, his stock of unreliable anecdotes, the kind of enemies a man ought to have, and a half-belief in a posterity which would care for good writing.

Michael Dirda is the author, most recently, of Classics for Pleasure.

A Silly, Very Cultured Club

By Ingrid D. Rowland

Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England
by Bruce Redford

J. Paul Getty Museum/Getty Research Institute, 220 pp., $49.95

Bruce Redford's Dilettanti is not itself a dilettantish work, for the book's succinctness and lightness of touch reflect skill of the highest order. Still, there is an evident link between Redford's fine-tuned scholarship and the sense of sheer delight (Italian diletto ) that gave its name to the Society of Dilettanti, devoted to the study of ancient Greek and Roman art, when it was formed in 1734. That link is distilled in the motto of this peculiarly English gentlemen's club, Seria Ludo; the paradoxical Latin phrase meant that in their playfulness, ludo, they also addressed serious matters, seria.[1]
True to their creed, the Dilettanti pursued both kinds of delight, serious as well as ludicrous, with maniacal dedication. Redford's often amusing, handsomely illustrated account (flanked last summer by a delectable exhibition at the Getty Villa in Malibu, curated by Redford and Claire L. Lyons) traces the range of their activities through three generations, from the society's founding to its ignominious performance in the debate about the Elgin Marbles that took place in the spring of 1816.
The first Dilettanti gathered together in a London tavern in the bleak December of 1734, to relive their experiences of the Grand Tour—hence the society's Italianate name and its emphasis on the complementary pleasures of culture, especially the visual arts, and drink. Drowning the miseries of English winter in wine-soaked memories of Italian sunshine, the founding Dilettanti dressed in exotic costumes, bantered about sex, and exchanged the refined opinions about art that they had acquired during their sojourns in Rome, Florence, Naples, and Venice.

Theirs was an era in which clubs and clubmen dominated the social scene: several Dilettanti also belonged to the ultra-serious Royal Society for Promoting Natural Knowledge or the Royal Academy of the Arts. But their own gatherings usually bore a closer resemblance to those of less sober organizations, like the Kit-Cat Club (named for the mutton pies baked by Christopher "Kit" Cat, keeper of the Cat and Fiddle tavern where the Kit-Cats met) or the shadowy, notorious Hell-Fire Club.[2] Like the Kit-Cats, the Dilettanti would maintain a close relationship with the world of publishing, but whereas the Kit-Cats mixed aristocrats with working professionals and favored Whig politics, the Dilettanti membership leaned more heavily, at least at first, toward gentlemen of leisure—these were the people who could afford a Grand Tour in the first place.
Many of the founding Dilettanti were also accomplished rakes, their skills burnished by Venetian courtesans, all part of the Grand Tour's preparation for fathering Albion's next generation in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense. They pursued their various delights in a London of periwigs, libertines, and Enlightenment, of new gathering places devoted to the consumption of exotic global novelties like coffee, tea, chocolate, and ice cream, of new faces from the provinces and from Ireland, including men of humble background who had been superbly educated thanks to an expanding system of grammar schools and university scholarships.
Education for women still lagged far behind, and there was as yet little place to "remember the ladies" in the clubmen's world, except as partners in what these former Grand Tourists were wont to call "the worship of Venus." The women who made their way in the London of the 1740s were more likely to be actresses, singers, and courtesans than women of letters. Although there were already professional writers like Aphra Behn and cultured figures like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, bluestockings were a phenomenon of the future. The city itself, at half a million people, was one of the most populous and sophisticated on earth, matched in Europe only by Paris and Naples, both of them, of course, staunchly Catholic—slaves, as the Dilettanti might have said, to Popery.
The silly side of the Dilettanti, that purely English Monty Python zaniness that combines sublime wit with the donning of ridiculous outfits, emerges in the first generation's official portraits. After 1741, each new member of the society paid a sum of "face money" if the official "limner," George Knapton, had not yet provided the society with a clever, allusive image of the Dilettante couched in some kind of fancy dress. Redford has an unerring eye for the telling details of pose, props, and background that assign each member of the founding generation a distinct place within the club, at the same time according Knapton himself an honorable place as a painter within the Grand Tour's history of art.
Italy dominates the limner's artistic memory as thoroughly as it dominated the personal memories of the Dilettanti who sat for him in their outlandish getups. Appropriately, his portraits pay homage not only to Anthony Van Dyck and the great Venetians Titian and Veronese, but also to a peculiar gem of the Medici collection in Florence, Raphael's portrait of his fat, walleyed friend Tommaso Inghirami, a brilliant actor and orator whom Raphael presents, because he can, with one eye fixed on heaven and one on earth, the very picture of inspiration. Another of Raphael's images of Inghirami, from the Vatican fresco The School of Athens, shows the divine Tommaso dressed as Epicurus, head wreathed with ivy, preoccupied with a book, the compleat ancestor of the Dilettanti if ever there was one.
Knapton, who was in fact an extremely accomplished painter, created a rogues' gallery that includes milordi like John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich (the very one who first put meat between slices of bread to avoid wasting precious gambling time by sitting down to normal meals) in a Turkish turban, gazing lovingly, and not quite soberly, at a glass of wine (of course it is a beautifully blown Venetian glass). Sir Bourchier Wrey (the names of the Dilettanti are often as colorful as their outfits) dips into a porcelain punch bowl; the window behind him reveals that he, and implicitly we, are inside a ship's cabin on a vigorously bounding main. The ceramic vessel's rim bears the inscription "Dulce est Desipere in Loco"; "it is sweet to act like a fool in the appropriate place." The whole composition rolls and heaves along with the ship and its tipsy toastmaster; the texture of paint evokes hot flesh, supple fabric, cool china, ripe fruit, the wine-dark sea, and a sea of golden wine.
The Dilettanti not only acted like fools in the appropriate places; they could also be downright blasphemous, especially with regard to the Catholicism they had encountered in Italy. Knapton painted Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord LeDespencer, decked out as a Franciscan friar, tonsure and all, lofting a gilt chalice inscribed "MATRI SANCTORUM" (to the mother of the saints), but Dashwood's wide eyes are fixed on what he might have called the "charms" of a classical Venus, whose hand, which should have been poised to shield her celestial nudity, has conveniently broken off (see illustration on page 34).
The seriousness of the Dilettanti's Seria Ludo emerged for the first time when two of their number, James Stuart (soon to be known as "Athenian" Stuart) and Nicholas Revett, set out for Athens on a mission to measure and to record the state of its ancient monuments. Stuart and Revett both belonged to the set of Dilettanti who, like their Kit-Cat counterparts, came from the professions; in the case of the Dilettanti, these professionals were artists who could mingle, thanks to the society, with potential and actual patrons, providing their talents and expertise in exchange for sponsorship. Stuart and Revett's immediate inspiration for their project came, as Redford demonstrates, from Paris, where Antoine Desgodetz had published in 1682 his Édifices antiques de Rome for the King, but it also reflected sixteenth-century projects like Raphael's to draw up a plan of Rome at the time of Constantine, or Pirro Ligorio's reconstruction of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli.
In a literal sense, therefore, the Dilettanti aimed to become Renaissance men, but Renaissance men in the service of Protestant reason: they saw Rome, whether ancient or modern, as an eternal symbol of Popery, and Greek antiquity as a contrasting, less contaminated version of the classical ethos. Somehow, therefore, the Greeks were transformed into the natural Protestants of the ancient world, and many of the comments made by the Dilettanti about the Greeks in those years had little to do with the Greeks at all, and much to do with different flavors of Christianity.
The final result of Stuart and Revett's expedition was itself a great monument, The Antiquities of Athens, three immense volumes of etched and engraved plates with written commentaries. This extraordinary publication is still an important source of information for archaeologists and historians as well as a complex, majestic work of the publisher's art. Redford shows how Stuart and Revett's original drawings, highlighted by colorful splashes of gouache, aimed for accuracy rather than picturesque effect, yet they attained great beauty all the same. No less remarkably, the two devoted as much attention to modern Athens, with its Greek and Ottoman citizens, as they did to what Vergil called virum monumenta priorum, "monuments of earlier men." Neither scorched-earth archaeologists in search of Grecian purity nor Orientalists in search of exotic adventure, they show the Dilettantis' capacity for delight in its most intelligent, capacious form. Like most of their images, in which real people go about their business among the ruins, Stuart's drawing of the Erechtheion on the Athenian Acropolis includes a portrait of the Ottoman aga who had his residence in this august place. The text that accompanies the published plate focuses on the people and animals as much as the building itself:
The Turkish Gentleman smoaking a long pipe, is the Disdár-Agá, he leans on the shoulder of his son-in-law, Ibrahim Agá, and is looking at our labourers, who are digging to discover the Base, and the steps under the Caryatides.... The two Turks...were placed there by him to watch our proceedings; and give him an account of our discoveries. The little girl leading a lamb, and attended by a negro slave, is the daughter of Ibrahim Agá. The lamb is fatted to be eaten at the feast of the Beiram, which was not far off at the time this view was taken.[3]
Stuart also shows himself sketching in the foreground. Tellingly, however, he portrays the ancient temple not from the angle where we see him planted with his sketchbook, but as we first see it on entering the Acropolis from the Propylaea: at an angle that presents the building's south and west sides entire, while projecting porches allow us to intuit the look of the north and east façades. In effect, then, we are able to see all four very different sides of this uniquely asymmetrical temple at once, and Stuart is on to the genius of the trick (whose most probable author is the fifth-century sculptor Pheidias, whom Pericles put in charge of the whole building program of the Acropolis; Pheidias was also what we would call the architect of the Parthenon, rather than Iktinos, whose position as architekton put him in the role of chief building contractor).
Stuart was a terrible procrastinator, who bought out Revett's share of their joint enterprise and then spent decades preparing their work for the press. The first volume of The Antiquities of Athens came out in 1762 (almost ten years after their expedition), volume two in 1790, volume three in 1794. As a result, some of the plates for the third volume introduce a startling new note in the work of a young engraver named William Blake, whose swirls of short-stroked cross-hatching create brooding skies worthy of Piranesi, and pop the carving of a white marble frieze into a complex play of luminous marble set against equally luminous shadows. It might seem strange to think of the mystical Blake engaged in this most deliberately scientific of enterprises, but Greece clearly exerted a mystical pull on Stuart and Revett as well: the antiquarian diletto of these Dilettanti, like the drunken diletto of their comrades, never entirely submitted to the rule of pure reason.
In 1762, the Dilettanti set their sights on sponsoring an expedition to the Levant, to visit the magnificent ruins of Asia Minor, and proceed onward to the glorious colonnaded streets and precociously Baroque exuberance of Palmyra and Baalbek. Redford shows how Stuart's Antiquities of Athens exerted a powerful influence on the expedition's designated artist, William Pars, although Pars soon developed a landscape style of his own. The society published Ionian Antiquities in 1769, guided by the chairman of the sponsoring committee, Robert Wood.
Wood appears more conspicuously as author in The Ruins of Palmyra of 1753 and The Ruins of Balbec of 1757, both on the title pages and in the extensive descriptive texts. Each of these volumes, in its own way, is as marvelous as the volumes of Stuart and Revett, but with significant differences. Eighteenth-century Athens was still a real city, but the engraved plates of these Levantine works scan vast unpopulated landscapes where the isolation of the ancient ruins exudes the same melancholy air as Piranesi's weed-grown Roman Forum, albeit in a more crisply linear, neoclassical artistic style.
Not every Dilettante maintained this same standard of austere detachment from the objects of his research. In Italy, the Dilettanti William Hamilton and Richard Payne Knight could not help noticing the persistence of ancient beliefs in the gestures, superstitions, and rituals of contemporary Italy, relentlessly centered, like some of the society's own rites, on phallic symbols of every size, shape, and composition. Hamilton amassed a considerable collection of modern peasant offerings in the form of what an ancient gynecological treatise called "wax similitudes." Knight produced a learned study on the worship of the ancient phallic god, Priapus, An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus, that allowed him to bring in lubricious comparative material from Pompeii and Hindu temples.
On the face of it, he was an exceedingly unlikely prospect for such a line of research; with his large upturned nose, receding chins (two of them), red, pendulous lips, and watery eyes, he could hardly have been attractive as a potential lover. He is homely even in Thomas Lawrence's valiant attempt at a flattering portrait, which cleverly evokes Raphael's old trick of having the sitter look "upward, outward, and inward" (as Redford evocatively puts it). James Gillray's wicked caricature, The Charm of Virtù, probably comes closer to the truth; here a leering Knight peers, prurient and purblind, through a looking glass at a statue of a satyr.
As for Hamilton, British envoy in Naples from 1764 to 1801, he has become legendary, both for his antiquarian interests and for his exuberant second wife Emma, the plump, pretty redhead who struck elaborate "Attitudes" at their parties and carried on an open affair with Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, the battered hero of Trafalgar. Gillray skewers all three components of the ménage à trois: A Cognoscenti shows a bent, wizened Hamilton peering through the wrong end of his spectacles at a bust of the courtesan Thais, surrounded by vases, statues, matching portraits of Nelson and Emma as Antony and Cleopatra, and a view of Vesuvius vigorously erupting (the only vigorous thing about Hamilton is the growth of hair in his nostrils).
Another Gillray cartoon features a blimp-shaped Emma bewailing Nelson's departure in the attitude of a modern-day Dido. Gillray always provides Emma with a bottle near to hand; the Dilettanti might drink themselves into a stupor, with paunches, chins, and bulldog jowls to show for it, but respectable women were to feel no appetites at all. Lusty Emma's capacity for delight, which ushered her into a plump, bibulous middle age, revealed her lower-class origins as surely as the lusts of the Dilettanti revealed them as gentlemen of taste and breeding.
Hamilton and Knight belonged to the generation of Dilettanti who met in the Star and Garter tavern, and who were immortalized as a group by the society's third official limner, Sir Joshua Reynolds—the second in line, after George Knapton, had been "Athenian" Stuart, whose work on TheAntiquities of Athens meant that he never got around to executing a single portrait on the society's behalf. Reynolds himself was admitted to the club in 1766, and got around the hurdle of paying face money by submitting his own self-portrait, done in a palette of muted browns and heightened pinks, and with a softness reminiscent of the sublime Federico Barocci. He became limner in 1769. The group portraits that Reynolds painted for two facing walls in a room at the Star and Garter were conceived in 1777, the year following Hamilton's admission to the Dilettanti. In their own way, despite their dark, sober colors, they are as ribald as Knapton's individual images, with less emphasis than Knapton on fancy dress and more on suggestive finger-signs; the group that examines gems is as obscene in its own way as Knapton's rendering of Sir Francis Dashwood as a follower of Saint Francis.
Redford's discussion of the Star and Garter pictures treats his readers to a side excursion through Reynolds's other portraits of the Dilettanti and their friends, contrasting them with the delightfully theatrical "swagger portraits" that Grand Tourists ordered when in Rome from the painter Pompeo Batoni—the most outré of which shows red-haired Colonel William Gordon of Fyvie striking a virile pose in front of the Colosseum, clad in kilt and scarlet military jacket, his tartan cloak flung togalike around his shoulders (for, as both Batoni and Colonel Gordon knew, Roman soldiers also wore skirts). This dashing Scotsman has entirely absorbed the Italian spirit of sprezzatura—and so much for tartans being an invention of the nineteenth century.
William Hamilton appears in the Star and Garter portrait that is devoted to drink and to Hamilton's Greek vases, the reason for his admission into the society. Initially he had collected them because they were cheaper than statues or paintings by Correggio, and as a cadet member of his aristocratic family he was perpetually short of money. But the vases richly rewarded his scrutiny; he learned to love their graceful shapes and their distinctive, infinitely variable painted decoration, at the same time turning that love into a marketing tool. Together with a slippery Frenchman born Pierre Hugues and become Baron d'Hancarville (Redford's capsule biography at the end of Dilettanti describes the man as "French polymath, pornographer, and con man"), Hamilton devised a plan to illustrate and publish his collection. L'Antiquités Etrusques, Grecques, et Romaines eventually emerged in four volumes from 1767 through the 1770s, with stunning engraved plates in the red-black color scheme of ancient Athenian pottery.[4]
A report from Pliny the Elder that a ceramic vessel had once sold in antiquity for an astonishing sum of money was basis enough for Hamilton and D'Hancarville to insist that ancient pots had all been treasures of great price, but in fact, those miniature images of ancient life and myth exerted a magical pull on their own, and treasures they were in a real sense. The best Greek vases were monumental works of art, and many of the smaller ones were perfect miniatures (there were also a great many less stellar works, but they are so old, and so real, that even these have their charm). The English potter Josiah Wedgwood set out to make modern pots on similar aesthetic lines, in the workshop he called Etruria—for initially Hamilton thought that the ancient Greek vases were Etruscan. The result of that collective enterprise has shaped generations of taste in museums and around the dinner table.
From their Neapolitan palazzo (still a bright yellow presence near the fashionable Piazza dei Martiri), Hamilton and Emma could see the towering cone of Vesuvius, already split by a recent eruption into the two peaks we see today, and intermittently active throughout the eighteenth century. No wonder the envoy wrote a book about the geology of the Bay of Naples, and no wonder the result was as spectacular as his books about antiquities, with smoking Vesuvius, the bubbling mud of the Solfatara, the deep, dark crater (and reputed Hell-mouth) of Lake Avernus, the heaving ground beneath Pozzuoli, and the gorgeously dramatic volcanic crags of Naples itself. Hamilton's Campi Phlegraei came out in 1776, the same year as the third and fourth volumes of the Antiquités—when he was admitted to the Dilettanti that year, the British envoy had already produced a series of illustrated books to do the Dilettanti proud.
It is sad, therefore, to see the shining light of this often silly but reliably cultured club come to such embarrassment in the nineteenth century, first over Napoleon in Naples—in whose wake Hamilton, Nelson, and Emma governed the city briefly and brutally from a ship in the harbor—and then over the Elgin Marbles, the sculptural decoration supervised by Pheidias for Pericles more than four centuries before the Christian era, recently pried right off the Parthenon and sold to an English earl by a grasping Ottoman official. For two days in 1816, on March 4 and 5, a committee of Parliament heard testimony
to inquire whether it be expedient that the Collection mentioned in the Earl of Elgin's Petition...should be purchased on behalf of The Public, and if so, what Price it may be reasonable to allow for the same.
The first day of hearings belonged to the artists of the Royal Academy, including John Flaxman, and they, like their Italian counterpart Antonio Canova, were eloquent in the Marbles' praise (on seeing them, Canova, the most magisterial—and most insightful—of all neoclassical sculptors, cried, "If only I could begin again!"). The next day belonged to the Dilettanti, three of them, and their opinions varied from the enthusiasm of Sir Thomas Lawrence, by then the official limner of the society, to the supercilious disapprobation expressed by Richard Payne Knight, whose pomposity had grown along with his girth over the decades. Worst of all for his own reputation, he was convinced that the marbles dated mostly from the time of the emperor Hadrian, a discrepancy of nearly six hundred years.
Knight had a reputation to defend. As guiding spirit of the society's Specimens of Antient Sculpture...selected from Different Collections in Great Britain, published in 1809, he had attempted to establish a definitive history of ancient art along the lines laid down by the German connoisseur Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Specimens of Antient Sculpture, following Pliny the Elder and Winckelmann, traced the development of ancient technique from the Etruscans and archaic Greece through the sophisticated international styles of Alexandria and then Rome.
Knight's examples, illustrated by William Agar in a style that perfectly captured the glossy sheen of polished marble and chased bronze, were all drawn from the collections of his friends and fellow Dilettanti. As Canova himself recognized with such grace, the Elgin Marbles threw a shoe into the whole elaborate works; what Europeans had come to know as Grecian style was evidently something else altogether. Canova capitulated at the discovery of this strange new aesthetic world, excited at the prospects it offered for an artistic rebirth; Knight kicked back and said that the Elgin Marbles were of scant account, their surfaces ruined beyond repair.
Parliament, of course, purchased the Elgin Marbles. Just as significantly, the professional artists, both of the Royal Academy and among the Dilettanti, were shown by their testimony and its results to have assumed an authority over matters of taste that had once been deferred exclusively to gentlemen. By 1816, it was no longer the amateurs of instinct and breeding who governed the world of culture and ideas: it was that group of achievers, from William Shakespeare to Jonathan Swift, to Dr. Johnson, to Oliver Goldsmith, to Benjamin West (the American painter who became president of the Royal Academy), to Sir Joshua Reynolds, to Sir Thomas Lawrence, the men (along with a growing number of the women the Dilettanti excluded) who had taken advantage of the opportunities for education and free expression offered by British society and made London perhaps the most exciting city in the world. As Redford concludes:
It is no quaint nostalgia, therefore, to resurrect seria ludo and to remember that "when you know ancient things, you will clearly know new things."
There is nothing remote or dusty about either the Dilettanti or his book.

Notes

[1]As Redford notes, the phrase echoes two poems from the age of Augustus, a satire by Horace and an eclogue of Vergil, and in each of these contexts the two words seria and ludo take on slightly different meanings. Both poems, however, like the two-word motto itself, claim that in play, ludo, it is possible to address serious matters, seria.
[2]On these groups, see Ophelia Field, The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation (London: Harper, 2008), and Evelyn Lord, The Hell-Fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies (Yale University Press, 2008).3James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, TheAntiquities of Athens, Vol. 2 (1790), Chapter 2, Plate 2, cited by Redford, p. 69.4The late Enzo Crea published a study of the Antiquités that is, typically for this great publisher, a work of art in itself: Pascal Griener, Le Antichità Etrusche, Greche, e Romane, 1766–1776, di Pierre Hugues d'Hancarville, with a preface by Francis Haskell (Rome: Edizioni dell'Elefante, 1992). The Antiquités are now available in facsimile with an introduction by Sebastian Schütze (Taschen, 2006).
[3]James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, The Antiquities of Athens, Vol. 2 (1790), Chapter 2, Plate 2, cited by Redford, p. 69.
[4]The late Enzo Crea published a study of the Antiquités that is, typically for this great publisher, a work of art in itself: Pascal Griener, Le Antichità Etrusche, Greche, e Romane, 1766–1776, di Pierre Hugues d'Hancarville, with a preface by Francis Haskell (Rome: Edizioni dell'Elefante, 1992). The Antiquités are now available in facsimile with an introduction by Sebastian Schütze (Taschen, 2006).

Losing God

There are many great books about finding God. But there are far fewer books, great or otherwise, about finding and then losing God. So “Losing My Religion,” by William Lobdell, a former religion writer for The Los Angeles Times, feels powerfully fresh. It is the tale of being born again in his adulthood, then almost 20 years later deciding that Christianity is untrue. Today Lobdell prefers the God of Jefferson or Einstein, “a deity that can be seen in the miracles of nature.” While Lobdell never entirely rejects belief in the supernatural, his humane, even-tempered book does more to advance the cause of irreligion than the bilious atheist tracts by Christopher Hitchens and others that have become so common. And Lobdell’s self-deprecating memoir is far more fun to read.
“By age 27,” Lobdell, now in his late 40s, writes at the outset, “I had screwed up my life. I had married my volatile high school sweetheart five years earlier, mostly because it seemed easier than breaking up.” Rather than divorcing her, Lobdell just left, and before long he got his new girlfriend pregnant. His journalism career was “stalled at a local minor-league magazine,” and — insult to injury — he had acne. Lobdell was so filled with self-loathing that he had trouble looking at himself in the mirror. “When I turned 28, I could barely admit it was my birthday,” he writes. “I couldn’t stand the person I had become. I found no reason to celebrate my life.”
The turnaround began when Taylor, Lobdell’s first son, was born. A month later, Lobdell married Taylor’s mother, at a wedding chapel in Las Vegas (baby steps toward Jesus, one might say); afterward, they watched Tony Orlando and Dawn sing in a half-empty casino concert hall. Lobdell adored his son, and like many new fathers he resolved to grow up fast. But he was skeptical that his marriage, born of imperfect circumstances, would last, and in most respects he still felt pretty desperate. Soon after his wedding, “on an especially low day,” Lobdell confessed his pain to a good friend. “You need God,” the friend told him. “That’s what’s missing in your life.”
Lobdell had no desire to return to the indifferent Episcopalianism of his youth, and his friend suggested Mari­ners Church, a nondenominational mega­church in Newport Beach, Calif. At Mariners, Lobdell heard Pastor Kenton Beshore preach about a friendly, intensely personal God. “This God loved me perfectly,” Lobdell writes. “I eagerly lapped up the unconditional love. He was a rock upon which I could build my life.” The Bible, as Beshore preached it, was a little instruction book, containing common sense about avoiding debt and gossip, helping the poor and honoring your wife. This Jesus, this book, this church — for Lobdell, they all worked.
ttending church, Lobdell noticed improvements in his life — new friends, a calmer marriage, a better job, even less acne — and attributed them to God. In 1992, two years after he began attending church, Lobdell was finally born again, at a men’s retreat in the San Bernardino Mountains. At the climactic service, when a student pastor invited the unsaved to come to Jesus, Lobdell fell into the Lord’s arms at last. It’s an extraordinarily moving scene, especially because the decision is a difficult one. Despite his newfound happiness, Lobdell is terrified of the baggage that could come with being “saved.” “I didn’t want to be looked at as a freak,” he writes. Would he have to wave “John 3:16” signs on camera at football games? Give up all material possessions? Millions of Christians will recognize that ambivalence about converting, an ambivalence that can shade into terror. They’ll also recognize some version of what happened when Lobdell finally silenced his doubts: “When I repeated the line ‘I invite Jesus into my heart,’ I experienced what I can only call a vision. Time slowed. In my mind’s eye, my heart opened into halves, and a warm, glowing light flowed right in.”
Lobdell never denies the power of his original conversion experience, and he never ceases to be grateful to the loving evangelicals who turned his life around. But after seven years at Mariners, he begins to find the self-help pieties simplistic and anti-intellectual. He leaves for a Presbyterian Church, and from there moves toward Roman Catholicism — fatefully, as it turns out, because his studies for conversion to Catholicism begin just as American Catholics are about to be confronted with the most heartbreaking news they have ever had to face. And Lobdell, by now a religion reporter for The Los Angeles Times, is not at liberty to look away.
I left the daily religion beat (for The Hartford Courant) in 2001, just as journalists from Boston to Los Angeles were about to expose a horrendous pattern of thousands of American priests’ molesting young children, and their superiors’ covering it up, over many decades. I have often wondered how I would have slept if I’d had to do what Lobdell did from 2001 to 2004: talk to traumatized survivors; watch indifferent bishops try to brush the abuse under the rug; and, perhaps worst of all, see the victims pilloried as bad Catholics, and the priests defended in the face of all evidence. “I’ve watched Catholics yell at and even spit on victims who picketed outside a parish,” Lobdell writes. “I’ve seen congregants offer molesting priests jobs and even raise their bail.” Lobdell’s faith had already been tested by other articles he’d written, about charlatan faith healers and adulterous televangelists; but those people could be dismissed as rare malefactors. By contrast, thousands of Catholic clergy­men were tainted by this evil. Many were direct perpetrators, many more were cowardly and silent.
To Lobdell, it began to seem not just that religious institutions were no better than secular ones, but that sometimes they were much worse. After all, school systems and Little Leagues don’t defend molesters as tenaciously as the Catholic Church did, and parents aren’t as reluctant to believe the worst about teachers and coaches. It was precisely the cultivation of religious awe — with its traditions, rituals and ceremonies — that made priests seem holy, and thus allowed so much evil to go unreported or disbelieved. At times, Lobdell’s homely, down-to-earth prose and intellectual modesty obscure the import of what he’s saying. His explication of religion’s capacity for evil is far subtler than the simplistic atheist line that “religions cause wars,” but he doesn’t seem to know it.
Fortunately, “Losing My Religion” is not a grim book. It is leavened by absurdity, as when, after Lobdell reports that Paul Crouch, a founder of Trinity Broadcasting Network, had paid a former gay lover to keep quiet, Crouch uses the mainstream media’s satanic attack on him to help raise even more money. And while Lobdell’s break with Christianity is poign­ant, his story ends well. Everything that matters, including his career and his family, survives the loss. Lobdell concludes with the cheerful freedoms that irreligion has brought him — to follow his intellect wherever it takes him, to shrug and accept that some mysteries are inexplicable. “I do miss my faith,” he writes, “as I’d miss any longtime love.” But “I like my life on this unexplored shore. It’s new, exciting and full of possibilities.” Lobdell is quite a rarity: an unembittered divorcé, grateful for the marriage and just as grateful for what lies ahead.