Thinking in categories revisited

One of Cormac McCarthy’s last works, completed in the long period between The Road and the release of the duology The Passenger and Stella Maris just before his death in 2023, is the screenplay The Counselor. It was filmed by Ridley Scott, one of several directors who have tried to adapt Blood Meridian for the screen, and had a stellar cast. It tanked at the box office when released in 2013 and didn’t get good reviews. (For a characteristic but animated response, see Mark Kermode’s review here.)

In his new biography, Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited, Tracy Daugherty cites a failure to meet the expectations of an audience hyped up for more from the author of No Country for Old Men as a problem, as well as the oddity of the poetic, philosophical, and unusually talky screenplay. But he spends the most time—over a full page of the book’s three pages on The Counselor—blaming “the film’s misogynistic streak.”

The Counselor has two central female characters: the Counselor’s fiancée Laura, a devoted woman unsuspectingly drawn into his criminal activities, and Malinka, an omnivorous predator who turns out to be the brains behind the criminal operation that ultimately wrecks the Counselor’s plans. Laura ends up kidnapped and beheaded by a cartel and Malinka gets away with her crimes. Continuing a thread developed throughout the biography’s previous 390 pages, Daugherty writes that “[t]he screenplay seemed the work of a man both angry (‘Women . . . just want to be entertained’) and regretful (‘I always liked smart women. But it’s been an expensive hobby’).”

He is on firmer artistic footing when concluding that McCarthy, in the screenplay, had simply overindulged some of his preoccupations (crime, cars, jewelry, expensive clothing, philosophical maundering) and “lost his grip.”

Others have gone further. After finishing Daugherty’s book, I read further on the film and eventually found this video essay* on it and why it failed artistically. In an entire section dedicated to “sexual politics,” the essayist asserts that “every woman in the film is either a seductress or an angel whose head gets ripped off. . . . Whatever Cormac McCarthy is trying to say about women is not good.”

“[A]bout women.” A few years ago I wrote about “thinking in categories” in regard to criticism of Dr No’s Honeychile Rider. Her goals in the novel—make enough money to flee Jamaica and have corrective surgery on her nose—are presented as shallow, revealing only “what Fleming thought of women.” Women, in the abstract. The video essayist above makes the same mistake.

The ill-fated Laura and the villainous Malinka are not Women, categorically, in the abstract. They are two specific women in the specific circumstances of The Counselor’s story. One is an innocent doomed by her fiancé's sins and the other is a manipulator with a long history of greed and cunning.** They are themselves first, just as the story must be enjoyed and understood on its own terms before any lesson—even the overt ones spoken by the characters—can or should be derived from it.

Tellingly, no one does this to the other characters. Does The Counselor reveal what McCarthy thinks about lawyers—all lawyers? Or club owners with bad haircuts? Or—to take Malinka and focus on some other character trait—people who own exotic big cats as pets? Extrapolating something like that from these examples is manifestly absurd, and yet asserting that this can be done about Women, not coincidentally a politically sensitive category, is treated with po-faced earnestness.

Like Daugherty, the video essayist almost accidentally offers a better, more concrete artistic critique: “Then again, [McCarthy] never writes women outside of superfluous characters.” This is factually wrong—Carla Jean Moss, among others, would like a word—but arguing about a writer’s abilities and limitations would be better than imputing statements about Women to him on the basis of two fictional characters. Similarly, Daugherty’s argument that the film’s long opening scene of the Counselor and Laura in bed, which McCarthy explicitly intended to depict a healthy relationship, “did not play the way McCarthy thought it did,” and claims it is instead a fantasy of “male prowess.” I disagree, but again, whether a scene works the way the writer meant it to and, if not, why not is a more fruitful line of argument than simply calling out the misogyny bloodhounds.

Particularity is crucial to fiction, whether writing it or critiquing it. Per Philip Roth, in a line I’ve quoted before, “politics is the great generalizer and literature is the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship with one another—they are in an antagonistic relationship.”

I can’t find it now, but I once watched a clip of a comedian—an older comic who works clean in a somewhat old-timey “take my wife, please” vein—responding to objections to his frequent (obviously affectionate) jokes about his wife. They didn’t like that he jokes “about women.” He said that he actually jokes about “a woman.” The same comedian also has entire routines about the differences between men and women, categorically, in the abstract. An important distinction, and if a comedian can point it out, critics and biographers have no excuse.

* It’s a measure of The Counselor’s failure that it has sunk almost without a trace in the crowded field of YouTube video essays. Maybe it’s due a reevaluation, but I wouldn’t count on it.

** I also feel obliged to point out that women like this can and have actually existed.

A Defence of Skeletons

A recent tempest in the social media teapot brewed up over Halloween decorations. An angry dad, disturbed on behalf of his young daughters, complained on Substack about the excessive and grotesque decorations in his neighbors’ yards—in addition to cobwebs and tombstones, one featured things like animatronic zombies and demons and skeletons in bloodstained cloaks. It got shared and restacked many, many times and a lot of people shared opinions, usually in a tone of “Chill out and grow up” on both sides. It was pretty unseemly, but not as unseemly as those yard decorations.

I could understand the dad’s original complaint, but mainly on grounds of taste. A lot of Halloween decor is tacky and reveals mere grossness of mind, not least in its effort to shock. I saw a few people in the controversy suggesting a gentle middle way, of decorating with non-threatening pumpkins, bats, black cats, and so forth. I don’t actually agree with that. While the lurid and needlessly grotesque is one extreme, rendering the spooky toothless is also a mistake. I don’t object to skulls, bones, or whole skeletons on principle.

Chesterton’s “Defence of Skeletons” is not specifically about Halloween, but I think it has something to offer when thinking about a holiday in which death becomes decor, in which we are likely to confront an image of what we’ll all look like just a few years after we’re gone. Skeletons can teach us something.

Opening with the image of leafless winter trees, Chesterton mentions the embarrassment with which the locals were apologizing for the bare branches. He doesn’t understand it. A leafless forest is still—or even especially—beautiful: “So far from the line of the tree when it is bare appearing harsh and severe, it is luxuriantly indefinable to an unusual degree; the fringe of the forest melts away like a vignette.”

This embarrassment reminds Chesterton of the “horror” people commonly have of skeletons. They find something unsettling about the revelation of hidden structure. “This is felt dimly in the skeleton of the tree: it is felt profoundly in the skeleton of the man.” But why? He wonders about this in his signature style:

Without claiming for the human skeleton a wholly conventional beauty, we may assert that he is certainly not uglier than a bull-dog, whose popularity never wanes, and that he has a vastly more cheerful and ingratiating expression. But just as man is mysteriously ashamed of the skeletons of the trees in winter, so he is mysteriously ashamed of the skeleton of himself in death. It is a singular thing altogether, this horror of the architecture of things. One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.

I should note that this is a funny essay, even by the standards of Chesterton generally and The Defendant specifically.

Interestingly, Chesterton argues that this shame or horror of the skeleton is only superficially about reminders of death. It actually stems from the skeleton’s condition of being exposed: “It is man's eccentric glory that he has not, generally speaking, any objection to being dead, but has a very serious objection to being undignified.” Skeletons make us uncomfortable because we fear not death but embarrassment.

The skeleton is a state of nakedness more total than that of leafless trees or unclothed humans, and it is “shamelessly grotesque.” Really think about the shapes of the bones under all of our flesh sometime: ribs, hips, tailbones, kneecaps, the jaw. But being uncomfortable with this indignity, Chesterton says, doesn’t make much sense. The world is full of strange, awkward, grotesque things and it is worth celebrating the gloriously ugly—the oinking of a pig, the cawing of rooks—because it is so innocent, honest, and full of life. Skeletons are good for us because they remind us of our place in this glorious grotesque world, of its goodness, and that everything, even ourselves, is funny.

That mankind is made uncomfortable by the sight of the thing that gives every one of us our shape is a mark of our pride. The strange appearance of bones should make us laugh and give up our cheap dignity, especially the cheap but insistent dignity of youth and beauty. Of the Renaissance types tempted to stand on this dignity in the face of death and for whom the artistic motif of the skeleton could “freezing the pride out of all earthly pomps and the fragrance out of all fleeting pleasures,” which “almost assuredly did more good than harm,” the fact

[t]hat the whole structure of their existence was as wholesomely ridiculous as that of a pig or a parrot they could not be expected to realize; that birth was humorous, coming of age humorous, drinking and fighting humorous, they were far too young and solemn to know. But at least they were taught that death was humorous.

It is through this, and not abject fear of death, that skeletons humble us.

At least, if we are willing to be humbled. But here the skeleton plays a final great joke on us, because “however much my face clouds with sombre vanity, or vulgar vengeance, or contemptible contempt, the bones of my skull beneath it are laughing for ever.”

A good note to end this foreshortened Chestertober on. Happy Halloween!

The Wendigo

Every Christmas we get the kids new calendars for their rooms. Typically we pick national parks or historic sites, but last year we thought the boys would enjoy a worldwide cryptids calendar—Bigfoot, Nessie, the Kraken, the Chupacabra, and the like. The boys greatly enjoyed it until this summer, when we turned to a new month and a new image: the Wendigo, giant, antlered, and skull-faced, lumbering through a dark forest on warped legs. One of the twins hated it so much we ended up turning to the next month weeks ahead of time (Fairies, for some reason assigned to Germany), meaning they had almost two months of August.

A silly thing, but it piqued my interest in the monster and I sought out the story that introduced this fixture of some Indian folklore to a mass audience, Algernon Blackwood’s 1910 novella The Wendigo.

Set among the dense forests and mazes of rivers and lakes in northwestern Ontario, The Wendigo is related secondhand, the unnamed narrator retelling a story told him by Dr Cathcart. A Scottish expert in the still-new field of psychology, Dr Cathcart has taken his nephew Simpson to Canada on a hunting trip. With two Canadian guides and an Indian cook the Scots work their way deep into the wilderness hunting moose only to be disappointed. The hunting is bad that year, and after considering their options, Dr Cathcart and Simpson decide to split up for a few days.

Leaving Punk, the Indian cook, at the camp, Dr Cathcart heads off in one direction with one of their guides. Simpson, fresh out of seminary and visiting Canada for the first time, travels with the other, the French Canadian Défago, an “imaginative and melancholy” man who knows the area, its hunting, and its lore well. They cross long lakes by canoe and travel inland through dense forest for days. Simpson is a novice woodsman and relies entirely on Défago, and so when they make camp one night and Défago, who senses and intuits far more than Simpson can perceive, catches a strange, foul scent on the breeze, his reaction terrifies Simpson.

Défago turns sullen and silent, refusing to discuss what the smell means or indicates to him. After the two bed down in their tent for the night, Simpson awakes to find Défago in a panic, trembling and muttering. Something is outside the tent, something enormous, something with an indescribable “singular odour,” something that bellows out a long, loud, terrible sound before calling Défago’s name.

Défago flees the tent. Simpson, barely resisting his panic, follows his tracks until the oppressive darkness and the gigantic, unidentifiable tracks alongside Défago’s send him back to the tent in terror. Unfortunately for him, the night and his trials have just begun.

I don’t want to describe any more of the story, but it involves voices in the sky, deformed feet, a long vigil by the campfire, and a visit from someone who looks like a friend. Only when Simpson, using what little knowledge of camping and trailblazing Défago had imparted to him, returns to the group’s camp after trekking alone for days does Défago’s fate become clear.

Or does it? The Wendigo exploits to the fullest the ambiguity of both Simpson’s experiences and his uncle’s narration. Dr Cathcart, remember, is a psychologist, and the narrator pointedly mentions that he wrote a book on shared hallucinations. But Dr Cathcart, who saw fit to tell this story to our narrator, also left this story out of his book and confesses near the end, when Simpson is pressing him to explain what had happened to him, that smells are less commonly hallucinated than sights and sounds. What to make of that?

“I make as much, or as little, probably, as you do yourself,” Dr Cathcart says, which our narrator follows with “He was not quite so glib as usual with his explanations.” As in so many weird stories and gothic tales, the man of science rushes to the limit of his knowledge and is forced to stop.

This ambiguity and the frame tale—another gothic staple—are a key part of the story’s effect, but the real power of the story is in its atmosphere. Blackwood, who spent years in Canada before returning to Britain, evokes the loneliness and potential terror of a night in the remote northern woods exceptionally well. The sensory detail—that “singular odour” on a cold light wind, the sunlight on the vast lakes, the snow, the crashing of something huge through the branches of the trees and the thumping of its feet as it approaches through the night—build into a suffocating sense of danger made all the worse by the fact that, whatever is out there, Simpson never sees it. It’s wonderfully done, one of the creepiest stories I’ve read in a long while.

But this being the age of Themes, I have to refute something I saw on Wikipedia. The article on the wendigo cites a literary scholar’s argument that The Wendigo, through Blackwood’s “subtly-demonizing rhetoric[,] transforms the Wendigo from a native myth into a descriptive template for the Indian savage.” That is, The Wendigo is about the inferiority of Native Americans, and guilty of cultural appropriation to boot. This is stupid for three reasons: first, because the concept of cultural appropriation is ideological brainrot and inimical to all art and culture. Second, because Punk, the only Indian character in the story, is steady, capable, and also the only character with the good sense to leave when it becomes clear the Wendigo is nearby.

But finally and most importantly, the point of the story is to get a spook. It’s scary entertainment rooted in real places and folklore, and is “about” an ill-fated hunting trip. Expertly crafted and beautifully written, with a clear feel for the woods and how unsettling they can be, the story leaves the reader with enough questions to remain unsettled. Blackwood meant to entertain the reader and succeeded. Check your seminar table theory at the door—this story is for enjoyment.

The Wendigo is an enjoyable novella that offers creepy atmosphere, a weighty sense of dread—always a more powerful emotion to me than horror or the gross-out—and an imaginative, surprising story. It’s a worthwhile Halloween read and I’m glad to have finally gotten to it. I hope y’all will check it out. Our kids won’t be anytime soon.

Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy is almost certainly Chesterton’s most famous book. The only other serious contenders may be fiction like The Man Who was Thursday or—just maybe, and mostly thanks to TV now—the Father Brown stories. But for many who come to know Chesterton as more than a source of pithy quotations, Orthodoxy serves as their introduction and guide. That is certainly true of me.

Chesterton wrote Orthodoxy as a follow-up to Heretics, which I covered here last week. Heretics offers a strong dose of Chesterton’s emerging worldview, albeit in diffuse form and somewhat less accessible a hundred and twenty years on. Orthodoxy, though a sequel, is better remembered thanks to offering a positively stated vision rather than responding to a string of false doctrines and—I think this is key—because of the form in which Chesterton wrote it.

Because Orthodoxy is highly personal. Those familiar with Chesterton’s discursive, topsy-turvy style and his use of metaphor, simile, and paradox will find that here, but—in a phrase from his later book The Everlasting Man—viewed from “the inside.” Rather than simply opining on a subject in his signature style, Orthodoxy more than any of Chesterton’s other books takes the reader directly into his mind. Though he wrote an Autobiography just before he died, Orthodoxy remains the definitive testament to his growth, conversion, and imagination. All it lacks to make it a memoir is names and dates.

Briefly, Orthodoxy tells the story of Chesterton’s growth away from a comfortable “paganism.” His journey is marked at every step by self-examination, examination of what others have told him, and a turn in another direction. His attitude is a cheerful version of Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse,” refusing to comply with fashionable ideas or accept fashionable attitudes and rebelling against the complacent. Guided both by intuition and rigorous, complex questioning (“My own case for Christianity is rational;” he writes near the end, “but it is not simple”), he works his way into philosophical positions that he always finds preempted by Christianity: having tried “to found a heresy of my own,” he found, “when I had put the last touches to it, . . . that it was orthodoxy.”

Like all of Chesterton’s non-fiction, Orthodoxy reads smoothly but proves hard to summarize, the curlicues of Chesterton’s thinking always feeling right and leading to the right place but also surprising. Having slaved over this review more than any other Chestertober post, I can’t claim to do the book justice here. I’ll have to content myself with a illuminating a few connected points and suggesting the larger shape of the book.

Having begun as an uncatechized pagan or agnostic, he moves, through the process mentioned above, toward religious faith and finally to Christianity itself. Along the way Chesterton integrates the critiques of progressivism, materialism, scientism, sentimental humanism, racialism, rationalism, pessimism, cynicism, and other persistent -isms from Heretics into a coherent argument and makes his case for Christianity as the answer to all of them, the only complete picture of the world.

The rational part of Chesterton’s approach is strongly historical. Told that Christianity was responsible for the misery of the Dark Ages, Chesterton “read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations.” He noticed contradictions, criticisms that Christianity was both unmanly and too warlike, denigrating to women but only of interest to women, forcing people into families and tearing families apart to put people in monasteries, emphasizing poverty and humility too much but also too full of “pomp” and “ritualism,” of being too sexually repressed and too reproductively fruitful, and on and on. Tempted to conclude that Christianity was more monstrous than he had at first assumed, he realized instead that “[i]t looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with.” There is a dimension of apologetic work in which reason, fact, and study are appropriate, and this is it.

The other aspect of his approach, on the other hand, is observational, intuitive, and even aesthetic. In reviewing Heretics I noted Chesterton’s artistic background and sensibilities, and the gut feeling that something in the world is out of true, out of proportion, both begins his investigations and guides them. The truth of Christianity is encoded in the real world, perceptible to the senses and internalized both through doctrine and the prevailing Christian culture of his day—the starkest difference between his original audience and ourselves, to which we’ll return—as well as through impressions gained from fairy tales, observation, and inference and analogy. This is where Chesterton most often invokes common sense and tradition, “the democracy of the dead.” These are arguments, too, but not the kind amenable to the spreadsheet.

Taken together, these two “truth-detectors,” as Peter Kreeft has called them, give the honest seeker complementary pictures of the truth. The task is rightly perceiving, followed by synthesis. As Chesterton himself points out, the opportunities for mistakes are infinite. Only Christianity has avoided them all.

As I mentioned, Orthodoxy is an intensely personal and interior book, taking the reader through years of intellectual workings to reach Chesterton’s destination. The memoir-like format, the warm confessional tone—unlike the polemics of Heretics, which are jovial but still polemics—and especially the imaginative appeal of his reasoning unify the many threads of thought before they are brought together in the final chapters. These must also account for much of the book’s success, then and since.

Chesterton’s book is a personal story, so here’s mine, parts of which I have related previously. Like many others, I came to Chesterton by swimming upstream from CS Lewis’s work. I had heard Chesterton was an influence on Lewis, and when I stumbled upon a copy of Orthodoxy in Barnes & Noble one day, I bought it.

Orthodoxy surprised, challenged, and encouraged me. I was intensely interested in apologetics and debate at the time and was used to an icy logical approach. Chesterton’s combination of reasoning with art and instinct was surprising but spoke powerfully to me. Like Lewis, he didn’t just focus on splitting hairs and debating points of fact, but targeted the heart, the imagination, and all of existence. It spoke powerfully to me, and of course it was loaded from front to back with quotable lines. And this was at a time before you could encounter all the Chesterton quotations you could stand online.

As simple as parts of it are, it also suggested the need for frequent rereading—and that I would want to read more from Chesterton. I did. Scarcely a year has gone by over the last twenty when I haven’t read something by him, and this book in particular has grown with me. As a college student I appreciated the reinforcement as well as testing my assumptions about what faith and apologetics were. Rereads over the years have impressed me with his insight into human nature and his fierce arguments for joy and humor against melancholy and despair—a theme I’ve written on recently. During my most recent reading I noticed and appreciated Chesterton’s tireless refusal to accept fashionable consensus. Told about the Dark Ages, “I read a little history.” Told a lot of tall tales about Jesus, Jesus’s character, and what Jesus would do about this or that issue (remember that the man who first asked “What would Jesus do?” was a contemporary of Chesterton, and a socialist), “[i]nstead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament.”

Chesterton is always suspicious of accepted polite opinion, always ready to look into a thing, and always ready to be surprised. His openness and intellectual honesty—agree with him or not—are winsome and have kept him appealing.

To return from the personal to more of a review, however, (“clos[ing],” as Chesterton says in the book’s final paragraph, “this chaotic volume”), I have to wonder about the strengths of Orthodoxy’s arguments in our own age. As people as diverse as David Bentley Hart in Atheist Delusions, Richard Dawkins in various interviews, and especially Tom Holland in Dominion have pointed out, Christianity has invisibly undergirded our civilization for centuries. Our assumptions have been Christian assumptions. Chesterton could bank on that and argue from it.

But in the more than century since, those assumptions have been shaken—partly by complacency and Christian self-sabotage, partly by deliberate philosophical warfare by the descendants of Chesterton’s heretics, partly by the unintended consequences of the kind of amoral sentimental do-gooders Chesterton sought to expose. Just this year Carl Trueman ably outlined the changed assumptions in anthropology and their consequences. Could Orthodoxy, which assumes much of the worldview Chesterton shared even with his opponents, still make Chesterton’s case?

I think so. The cultural foundation of his Edwardian world has been fatally compromised but, just as with the worldviews attacked in Heretics, many of the problems are the same. Christianity is mocked, derided, and libeled in just the ways Chesterton outlines. Fashionable opinion still hews to notions of steady progress, materialist evolution, and, in ethics, an airy, inconsistent humanitarian impulse apparently rooted in nothing. Further, and more positively, apologists like Alister McGrath have argued that the strict logic-chopping arguments of the previous century will be inadequate for rising generations. An unintended consequence of postmodernism and other such schools of thought has been openness to the intuitive and imaginative as avenues of argument—just Chesterton’s specialty.

That leaves only superficial hurdles to encountering and arguing—but not quarreling—with Chesterton. As much as it pains me to say it, in the words of Matthew Lee Anderson, quoted in the foreword to a recent edition of Orthodoxy, “it is a dated work.” The language and structure may pose problems for readers who, we are constantly reminded now, have been so badly served by the educational system and a culture that militates against reading, attention, and thought. I don’t personally find Chesterton forbidding, but for those who do, Simon Vance’s audiobook recording is an easy entry point thanks to Chesterton’s conversational tone, and Broadman & Holman’s 2022 hardback of Orthodoxy edited by Trevin Wax has had the long paragraphs broken up, topical headers inserted to better illuminate the structure of the book, and unfamiliar names and terms annotated.

I’m not usually a fan of this kind of formatting, but the goal is to ease modern readers into Chesterton’s thought and the words remain unchanged. If that means more people can meet Chesterton through Orthodoxy and be challenged and changed by his work, I can embrace that.

To return to that line from Anderson quoted above, though dated in some ways, Orthodoxy “comes nearer to timelessness than anything we have today.” A Chesterton-worthy paradox. Orthodoxy is still the best place to encounter Chesterton, the purest dose of his personality, and a challenging introduction to discovering the world as it has already been revealed.

On bookmarks

Someone on Substack recently posted an open question about bookmarks—why and how do we use them? When? What do we use for bookmarks? It was a neat bit of engagement farming that I avoided replying to, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about bookmarks and wanted to jot a few notes about mine for this commonplace book.

The history: I used to pride myself on not needing bookmarks. I could pick up a book I was reading and find my place right away, down to the word in the paragraph where I’d left off. (A mostly idle boast: I pathologically avoid stopping mid-anything, preferring not to stop until I’ve at least finished a paragraph—preferably a chapter.) I maintained this attitude through high school and into college, but at some point during undergrad I started marking my place more often. I suspect this was out of convenience and because of the number of books I was reading at any given time, not to mention the number of books I’d be using to research a paper.

Since then I’ve habitually used bookmarks. Found them indispensable, really.

The what: It started with receipts from Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, the campus bookstore—wherever I’d bought a book. I still enjoy running across these, as they record a long-ago selection I’ve forgotten. Sometimes I would use an unrelated receipt, something within grabbing distance. I’ve found the receipts for DVDs purchased at Walmart twenty years ago inside old books. Sometimes I’d buy an actual bookmark, usually something Lord of the Rings-related with a tassel and some kind of gewgaw like a fake One Ring dangling from it. I never got used to these, as the tassel tended to get in the way, and ended up throwing most of the tassels away. The Rings passed out of all knowledge.

I still occasionally use a receipt, but I now have a large stock of purpose-made bookmarks. An literal drawer-full of them.

Some are gifts or souvenirs. I have a prized one from the Mark Twain House in Connecticut, which Sarah and I visited when we were dating, so the bookmark itself signifies more than it might seem. Another is from Librairie Galignani on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris, the oldest English-language bookshop on the Continent. I keep this one inside the Penguin Classics edition of A Tale of Two Cities I bought there.

A few are from old magazines, some I didn’t even subscribe to but which rightly thought a free bookmark would be a good promo. I have a few novelty bookmarks, too, like an all-metal gilt-edged Robert E Lee with a crimson tassel. I don’t think I’ve ever put it in a book.

My favorite right now was a Father’s Day gift from my wife this year: a cartoon T-rex skeleton on rugged transparent plastic. Cheers me up just to look at it.

But a lot—a big, colorful majority in my nightstand drawer—are from bookstores. Mr K’s Used Books has free bookmarks by the register, and I usually grab one when I check out. A few have lasted for years, stained, faded, and soft and fibrous at the edges.

I also have a promo bookmark or two for my own books from Local Author Expos past, a Lost-themed promo for a friend’s senior art show twenty years ago, a laminated birth announcement for my eldest son that ran in my hometown newspaper and, from the same paper, a laminated obituary for my grandmother. I almost never use those two.

Two significant categories are bookmarks drawn and colored by my kids and bookmarks from defunct bookstores: Bentley’s Bookshop in Greenville, The Book Mark in St Simons, and Prater’s Main Steet Books in my hometown. I prize these because they are personal in some way. The shuttered stores, even the ones I didn’t spend that much time in, like Bank Square Books in Mystic, Connecticut, which I visited twice years and years ago, are parts of the past that I can’t go back to.

The bookmarks from my kids mean even more, naturally. My daughter made bookmarks for everyone she knew a few years ago. Those she gave me are both adorable (one shows a caterpillar reading one of the Squirrel Diaries books my daughter wrote and illustrated with the legend “Be a bookworm!” while another shows a peaceful bike ride through the woods with “Take a good book with you everywhere!”) and creations of love. She still writes and draws, but not quite the same way or with the same pure passion to share. Her story isn’t over, but neither of us can fully return to that past.

The result: Picking up a book and either grabbing a bookmark from my stash or opening the book to see the one I left inside stirs all kinds of memories, often briefly, but just as often with great emotion.

Also: I’m getting older, and I appreciate the help.

A Defence of Slang

John Gardner begins his posthumously published On Becoming a Novelist with a consideration of the things that constitute “the writer’s nature.” The first item on his list is “verbal sensitivity.” This is not, Gardner points out, the same thing as grammatical accuracy: “Good grades in English may or may not go with verbal sensitivity, that is, with the writer’s gift for, and interest in, understanding how language works.” On either side of the verbally sensitive lie the dangers of the “tin ear” and the prescriptivist “stickler,” whom it is easy to imagine as a schoolteacher with a ready red pen:

given this distaste for linguistic change, or perhaps distaste for certain classes of humanity, the sophisticated stickler may dismiss without thought an ingenious and sensitive use of the suspect word or phrase. The true artist's verbal sensitivity may well be different, in other words, from that of the usual “writer of good English.” Black street kids playing “The Dozens”—piling up ingenious metaphorical insults of one another’s mothers, not all of the metaphors grammatical or unmixed—may in fact be showing more verbal sensitivity than the speechwriters who helped create the image of John Kennedy.

A point that has stuck with me since first reading this twenty years ago. And eighty years before Gardner, Chesterton made much the same argument in “A Defence of Slang.”

Consideration of class is only an aside in Gardner, but Chesterton’s starting point. The upper classes of his day, he asserts, have abandoned their duty to be vivacious and interesting. By comparison with their medieval forbears, who “could not write three legible letters, but . . . could sometimes speak literature,” their talk is lifeless and limited: “it is like the formless cries of animals, dimly indicating certain broad, well-understood states of mind. ‘Bored,’ ‘cut up,’ ‘jolly,’ ‘rotten,’ and so on, are like the words of some tribe of savages whose vocabulary has only twenty of them.”

The duty and privilege of bold and poetic language has, according to Chesterton, passed to the lower class. Where the wealthy might speak in “a mere string of set phrases,” the working man, “being filled with the Muse,” might “burst out into a solid literary effort”:

“You’re a gen’leman, aren’t yer… yer boots is a lot brighter than yer ‘ed... there’s precious little of yer, and that’s clothes... that’s right, put yer cigar in yer mouth ‘cos I can’t see yer be’ind it... . . .” and so on. It is evident that this mode of speech is not only literary, but literary in a very ornate and almost artificial sense. Keats never put into a sonnet so many remote metaphors as a coster puts into a curse.

One thinks of the elaborate facility with swearing of the military man. Watch the boot camp scenes from Full Metal Jacket again sometime and keep track of the rhetorical devices Gunnery Sergeant Hartman uses: irony, simile, synecdoche, anaphora, parallelism, and especially hyperbole, all with vivid, concrete images that both register immediately and are remembered. The endless invention of slang—often effortless and energetic, and the more energetic the more effortless—is art. To return to Gardner’s example, it’s not hard to imagine Chesterton enjoying the verbal play of “The Dozens,” especially the classic: “Your mama’s so fat, when she sits around the house she really sits around the house.”

Chesterton’s one serious point in “A Defence of Slang”—that the aristocracy lost its color when it ceased being a warrior class, and the lower classes now have have become colorful because they “live in a state of war”—is something of a truism. Affluence and artificiality sap the vitality of a society. Its manners, enjoyments, and its language degrade, and as I argued when writing about Heretics over the weekend, Chesterton loved the organic, the intuitive rather than the purely rational, and the lively. While highbrow poetry would enter a permanent state of recursive self-awareness not long after Chesterton wrote, the poetic instinct survived elsewhere: “The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.”

I’ve mentioned that I reread A Farewell to Arms for the first time since high school this summer. Consider this passage from the opening of Chapter XXI, which features a bit of slang that has, amusingly, come back into currency:

A British major at the club told me the Italians had lost one hundred and fifty thousand men on the Bainsizza plateau and on San Gabriele. He said they had lost forty thousand on the Carso besides. We had a drink and he talked. He said the fighting was over for the year down here and that the Italians had bitten off more than they could chew. He said the offensive in Flanders was going to the bad. If they killed men as they did this fall the Allies would be cooked in another year. He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war. We had another drink. Was I on somebody’s staff? No. He was. It was all balls. We were alone in the club sitting back in one of the big leather sofas. His boots were smoothly polished dull leather. They were beautiful boots. He said it was all balls. They thought only in divisions and man-power. They all squabbled about divisions and only killed them when they got them. They were all cooked. The Germans won the victories. By God they were soldiers. The old Hun was a soldier. But they were cooked too. We were all cooked. I asked about Russia. He said they were cooked already. I’d soon see they were cooked. Then the Austrians were cooked too. If they got some Hun divisions they could do it. Did he think they would attack this fall? Of course they would. The Italians were cooked. Everybody knew they were cooked. The old Hun would come down through the Trentino and cut the railway at Vicenza and then where would the Italians be? They tried that in ’sixteen, I said. Not with Germans. Yes, I said. But they probably wouldn’t do that, he said. It was too simple. They’d try something complicated and get royally cooked.

Henry and this British major are discussing immensely complicated matters and yet one slang word, cooked, with minor poetic variations (royally cooked), covers all of it with more immediate gut-level clarity than any strategic or diplomatic jargon.

Not that all slang is wholesome—far from it. And perhaps the starkest difference between Chesterton’s world and our own is the degraded, unimaginative quality of slang at all levels of society. Even the operatic constructions of Gunny Hartman have given way to pervasive use of monosyllables.

But “[a]ll slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry,” and, like penny dreadfuls, the crude slang of the lower classes of Chesterton’s day and—where it survives—in the present meets a human need:

It is unfortunate that the poetry which is developed by this process should be purely a grotesque poetry. But as the higher orders of society have entirely abdicated their right to speak with a heroic eloquence, it is no wonder that the language should develop by itself in the direction of a rowdy eloquence. The essential point is that somebody must be at work adding new symbols and new circumlocutions to a language.

As Chesterton famously wrote elsewhere, “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” You could even take that line as the belated thesis statement of The Defendant.

This particular essay is mostly Chesterton having fun, praising the lower classes for their “light, living, and flexible slang” and calling on our betters—either by birth or by presumption—to get over themselves and be more interesting, but his perceptiveness and insight also reflect well on himself as the appreciator of just such slang. As Gardner would write eighty years later, “though some great writers may at times write awkwardly, it is nevertheless the case that one sign of the born writer is his gift for finding or (sometimes) inventing authentically interesting language.”

Not a bad description of Chesterton, and this essay is good evidence for it.

Heretics

Critics and even some fans of Chesterton have tried to fault him with many defects in the ninety years since he died, but I’ve never seen anyone call him a coward. The early nonfiction work with which this abbreviated Chestertober continues today, Heretics, published when he was only thirty-one, offers an excellent sample of his willingness to disagree, to argue, and to name names.

Heretics is a bold title. The Edwardian world, Chesterton thought, was beset with harmful doctrines embraced by the powerful and influential. These are not merely differences of opinion but heresies, partial apprehensions of the truth that prove more damaging than indifference to it. Chesterton attacks many of these by focusing on the work and views of their most prominent spokesmen or on their manifestations in popular culture like painting and novels.

There are twenty essays, and they range widely. Among the heretics are names that remain famous like Rudyard Kipling, HG Wells, James McNeill Whistler, and George Bernard Shaw, and many more that have been forgotten to most of us: George Moore, Joseph McCabe, Olive Schreiner, Lowes Dickinson. Among their heresies: a deracinating globalism, a Nietzschean worship of power and will, journalism that substitutes cheap sensationalism for the real sensationalism of telling the truth, praising the metaphorical “youth” of “young nations” that already show signs of decay, the prideful assumptions of anthropology, novelists toadying to the rich, novelists presuming to represent the poor, scientific reductivism, pragmatism, militarism, nationalism, neopaganism, atheism, lack of a sense of humor, pride.

Heretics is much too complex and diffuse to summarize easily. A chapter-by-chapter breakdown, especially if including asides and subordinate arguments, would run to thousands of words. But what all of Chesterton’s critiques have in common regardless of target is an objection to the simplifying tendency of ideologies. Each view, whether the scientism of Wells or the art-for-art’s-sake amorality of Whistler, offers to make sense of the world according to some easy-to-use heuristic, and each fails either because it is founded on a misapprehension of the truth that warps one’s entire perception, or because it forces fragments of the truth to stand in for the whole.

And so those trying, in Chesterton’s day, to revive a pagan ethic do so out of a belief that ancient pagans were unencumbered with the guilt imposed by Christianity and “were continually crowning themselves with flowers and dancing about in an irresponsible state.” Actual paganism was diffuse, devoted to inscrutable gods, and sad, the pagans ironically being “praised as disobedient when they had only one great virtue—civic obedience” and “envied and admired as shamelessly happy when they had only one great sin—despair.” Remove religion and ethics from the question and focus on genetics and race, and one has the jingoist ethno-nationalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “that silly Teutonism which knows as little about England as it does about anthropology, but which is always talking about Vikings.”

Sometimes the heresies seem to be opposites—a point Chesterton does not draw attention to, but which would go on to be an important part of his argument in the sequel to Heretics, Orthodoxy. In two interesting chapters on the fiction of his day, Chesterton criticizes novelists who flatter the pretentions of millionaires and aristocrats by making them sharp, witty, and urbane and their seeming opposites, novelists who explore the plight of the lower classes and depict them as degraded, helpless, even monstrous. Chesterton will abide neither obsequiousness to the rich nor condescension to the poor, neither of which is democratic in the sense of men conceiving of themselves as equals or brothers. Even “hereditary despotism” is to be preferred to managerialism under such types, “because with that you have the ordinary man misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect for him at all.”

In addition to being untrue, these heresies also—as the above examples demonstrate—tend to make their adherents pretentious. This comes across clearly in perhaps the most entertaining and purely Chestertonian essay, “On Mr McCabe and the Divine Frivolity.” Former Catholic priest turned freethinking gadabout Joseph McCabe had, in an aside in one book, reproached Chesterton for writing about serious subjects lightheartedly. Chesterton’s opening salvo is still laugh-out-loud funny:

It is quite useless to talk about profane jesting. All jesting is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so very solemn after all. . . . It is not I; it is not even a particular class of journalists or jesters who make jokes about the matters which are of most awful import; it is the whole human race. If there is one thing more than another which any one will admit who has the smallest knowledge of the world, it is that men are always speaking gravely and earnestly and with the utmost possible care about the things that are not important, but always talking frivolously about the things that are. Men talk for hours with the faces of a college of cardinals about things like golf, or tobacco, or waistcoats, or party politics.

Tellingly, it is humorlessness and pride that provoke Chesterton’s sharpest jabs. He respects all the other heretics in this book—and names them because he respects them as sincere men—but the puffed up, he implies, lack the honesty and humility to argue with him, or be saved.

First published in the summer of 1905, Heretics was assembled from some of Chesterton’s columns for the London Daily News. They vary greatly in length and detail and the subject changes sometimes dramatically from chapter to chapter. What keeps them from becoming a hodgepodge, a mere collection of essays, is Chesterton’s inimitable cheery tone, consistent conceptual overlap and recurring themes between chapters, and his already coherent worldview.

Chesterton’s highest formal schooling before becoming a journalist was the Slade School of Art, which is worth remembering because his sensibilities are above all artistic. He knew the marriage of hard work and pure enjoyment that sets the artist apart from the dabbler (“[t]he artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs”) and hates the squandering of natural talent on self-serious intellectual projects—as when he praises the “violent vision” of Wells’s early science fiction novels before tracing his descent into drab works of “scientific” history and social theory—and the blinkered imagination of the ideologue. Where Chesterton critiques the abstractly rational, the scientific, and the calculated, he favors the humble and common sense and argues for the organic, traditional, and intuitive, all of which are neighbors to the mystical.

Again, these points prefigure key elements of Orthodoxy.

The joy of his personality is key in a book like this, which in other hands would be twenty chapters of invective. Chesterton is charitable toward his “heretics” throughout, even to the humorless, and does not attribute base motives to them or suggest they are part of a conspiracy to bring down Western Civilization. A true happy warrior, he weighs them case-by-case, praises them where they deserve it and criticizes in a spirit of friendly correction. Their errors have helped him see the truth, and he wants to share.

Heretics is a lively critique and a perceptive survey of informed, fashionable opinion in Chesterton’s time. Though not straightforwardly an apologetic work, its arguments against the heretics and their heresies suggest the outline of an alternative, which he names in the introductory and concluding chapters: orthodoxy.

Heretics was well-received in its time even if, 120 years later, we agree with Chesterton biographer Ian Ker that it is a “major, if not great work.” What keeps it from being among the shortlist of Chesterton’s greatest hits and what poses the book’s biggest obstacle for the latter-day reader is precisely his strength as a journalist and a critic of his peers—his topicality. Kipling, Shaw, and Wells may still be familiar names to modern readers, but their social and philosophical ideas are likely to be less well-known. Lesser lights like McCabe or Moore or Dickinson, the politicians Chesterton namedrops (of whom probably only Arthur Balfour may now ring a bell, and likely not for good reasons), or those, like Whistler, known purely for images, are mostly forgotten.

I last read Heretics during grad school at Clemson sixteen or seventeen years ago. Many of the names were unfamiliar then but I got the gist. Rereading it now I know much more about Chesterton’s world, but there were still many names that sent me to Google for more detail. To get the most out of Heretics, one needs an annotated edition—with the disruption to the flow of Chesterton’s argument that that potentially entails—or preexisting knowledge of the period.

And yet—no matter what, Chesterton’s wit and fundamental arguments shine through. A modern reader may not know or remember much about Teutonism or Celticism now, but they’ll recognize the simplifying impulse of racial or class or gender essentialism of all kinds and all political stripes. A modern reader may not recognize the trend of novels about witty aristocrats, but they’ll know movies and books that flatter a certain kind of knowing irony or cynical, unsmiling flippancy, especially among our present elites—office drones, politicians, techbros. Try to read the following without thinking of Aaron Sorkin’s characters:

This new frivolity is inadequate because there is in it no strong sense of an unuttered joy. The men and women who exchange the repartees may not only be hating each other, but hating even themselves. Any one of them might be bankrupt that day, or sentenced to be shot the next. They are joking, not because they are merry, but because they are not; out of the emptiness of the heart the mouth speaketh.

The heretics have changed but the heresies haven’t. As Michael Ffinch argues in his biography of Chesterton, the book is “at its best . . . not so much when he was attacking the ideas of men like Shaw,” whom readers may or may not know much about, “but more when he was attacking some of the fads of the time, and in as much as some of these have remained fads until our time, Chesterton’s comments are still relevant.”

Heretics seems an unlikely book to remain relevant, but it’s true. It is also, like all of Chesterton’s books, immensely quotable. I’ve tried to avoid quoting the most famous passages here, but one in particular suggests itself for the end of this review:

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and, eclipse. . . . For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

A paradox worth remembering both in Chesterton’s age of heretics and ours.

The uses of pedantry

Here’s a bizarre video from a literature YouTuber whose work I usually like. The thesis (as near as I can tell): through some murky combination of commercialism and progressivist malice, what we’ve been sold as “classics” is undermining both the real classics—the foundational literature of the Greeks and Romans—and Western Civilization. The title is literally conspiratorial: “‘The Classics’ Are a Plot to Destroy Western Culture.”

There are a lot of problems with the video, not least its confused potted history of classics publishers; its ad hominem attacks (generally on people who deserve it, like André Gide, but still irrelevant to the subject); a few unexplained asides that aroused some uncomfortable suspicions (why go out of your way to point out that the oldest current member of the Académie Française is related to the Rothschild family?); its presentist and whiggish assumptions about what the ancients thought their literature was for; its apparent lack of understanding of translation work; its strange attack on Penguin Classics for starting its eighty-year run with the Odyssey; its even stranger and contradictory arguments (at the midpoint) that classics publishers have erred in making ancient literature accessible and (at the end) that what they should have been doing is making literature accessible; and its pervasive attitude of suspicion bordering on paranoia.

But the biggest problem, which bothered me through the entire first half of the video, is its insistence on an extremely narrow meaning of the word “classics.” The clearest definition provided in the video is still vague in application: “the body of work that serves as a foundation of Western civilization, the archive of a people, the blood of a culture.” Functionally, judging by the examples used throughout, this means only Greek and Roman literature.

Certainly anything new is pointedly declared “not a classic.” 19th-century novels? Austen and the Brontës? Not classics. 20th-century novels? Get real. Even CS Lewis’s essay “On the Reading of Old Books” is singled out for talking merely of “old books” instead of sticking to our YouTuber’s preferred understanding of classics.

I’d recommend caution when preparing to cross swords with CS Lewis over any literary topic. You’re unlikely to win.

I spent the first half of the video thinking this was a needlessly pedantic argument, insisting on a needlessly pedantic definition of classics and going on at needlessly pedantic length. But then I realized that the problem—well, the main problem—with the video and its argument is not that it’s pedantic, but that it isn’t pedantic enough.

To be pedantic, then: classics and the classics are two separate things. A classic according to any dictionary is a preeminent, respected, and therefore influential example of its kind, whatever it is: a classic sci-fi novel, a classic Scots ballad, a classic ghost story. This is clearly what publishers like Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics have in mind, which is why they distinguish themselves as Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics. The classics—with a definite article and perhaps even a capital C—or classical literature is Greek and Roman literature, literature in the classical languages, Greek and Latin. That’s everything from Homer and Hesiod to Bede and the Byzantines.

Our YouTuber could have avoided a lot of annoyance and effort simply by observing this obvious distinction. Not every classic is one of the classics.

Being pedantic can have its uses, but drink deep, or taste not. A classic insight.

A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls

It’s been a busy fall, and despite my best hopes for a revived Chestertober the month is already two-thirds over. I nevertheless hope to put out at least a few posts on some of Chesterton’s non-fiction, including a few of his earliest essays and one of his most famous books. Here’s the down payment.

* * * * *

Recently on Substack a post from someone who has made a career out of lamenting the state of modern literature accused the culture of a “seriousness crisis.” We are not all reading Dostoevsky in our leisure time, you see. It seems sublimely appropriate, then, that the first essay in GK Chesterton’s first published volume of essays is so writerly, so populist in attitude, and—in keeping with Chesterton’s well-earned reputation as a prophet—still so relevant.

When Chesterton wrote “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” he was responding to much the same criticism. The penny dreadful, cheap exciting fiction for the masses, but especially young men and boys, was a wildly popular medium in the late Victorian period and prefigured the rise of pulp fiction. Critics scoffed at the novels’ vulgarity and sentimentality, decried their simplistic artistry and bad writing, and warned that their romanticized, action-packed stories of bandits, swordsmen, knights, cowboys, and other adventurers promoted violence and immorality.

Chesterton defends the penny dreadful with an appropriate tu quoque. “Bad story writing is not a crime,” he argues, pointing out that Hall Caine, a well-regarded novelist whose books trafficked in socially conscious moralizing, “walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax.” More damningly, he argues that fears of penny dreadfuls leading to crime—an accusation familiar to us in arguments about video games—are overwrought and misplaced. The heroes of both highly praised modern novels and the classics do the same things, and more:

Among these stories there are a certain number which deal sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates, which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely the same thing as Scott’s Ivanhoe, Scott’s Rob Roy, Scott’s Lady of the Lake, Byron’s Corsair, Wordsworth’s ‘Rob Roy’s Grave,’ Stevenson’s Macaire, Mr. Max Pemberton’s Iron Pirate, and a thousand more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents. Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in Ivanhoe will lead a boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; no one thinks that the incautious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will set him up for life as a blackmailer.

A lot of this worry, as belied by the frequent accusation that penny dreadfuls are “vulgar,” is simple class bias. A businessman, lawyer, or aristocrat thrilling to Sir Walter Scott in his drawing room is acceptable but a delivery boy enjoying a cowboy novel during his lunch break is cause for concern.

It is easy to point out this kind of hypocrisy but Chesterton does not stop at rubbishing the critics’ arguments. Although frankly admitting their lack of artistry—they embrace hero and villain cliches, stock situations, and adventure tropes—Chesterton asserts that they meet human needs. Two, in fact.

First, the stories in penny dreadfuls, despite centering on bandits and pirates and other dodgy sorts, presented characters adhering to and living according to codes of honor, acting as though life were precious and worth living, and believing in right and wrong. Their thieves were more careful about morality than the protagonists—definitely not heroes—of tasteful realistic fiction:

It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables. . . . And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German Professors) whether morality is valid at all.

For all their airs of seriousness, it is the highbrows who are the moral threat and the lowbrows who are embracing and reinforcing morality, in however backward a fashion. As Chesterton would put it a few years later in Orthodoxy, “The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal.” This moral aspect is what keeps Chesterton’s defense of popular fiction from devolving into the tired “At least they’re reading!” argument. We’ll return to that.

Second, and more deeply rooted in human nature: regardless of the artistry or content of the penny dreadfuls, that they excite and stir the reader at all is worthwhile. “[P]eople must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories,” he writes. “The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important.” Decry the cheap novel’s poor writing and simplistic plot and characters all you want, but “it is not vulgar intrinsically—it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.”

“A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls” is one of my favorite Chesterton essays, not least for the reminder in that last line quoted above—which actually comes from the first paragraph of the essay. (Chesterton, patron saint of topsy-turvydom, was turning everything on its head right from the beginning.) Seriousness is not the only reason to read fiction, or even the strongest one. Chesterton offers an excellent answer to the kind of po-faced critic I began this post with, the kind of person who thinks their tastes are serious and that everyone else is goofing off, but it is also worth considering what has changed since Chesterton’s day.

Of the two crucial points in the essay, the second is best and remains truest. We are storytelling creatures, understanding and remembering our lives as stories. We need stories to make sense of the world, and meeting this need is more vital to the mind and soul than good taste. After all, taste changes with the age. (Who among us doesn’t encounter the name Hall Caine and have to look him up?) Chesterton suggests that the imagination is fundamental, not an artifact, and we must attend to it—especially now, when our imaginations are continuously threatened with dullness by screens, passive entertainment, and machines that aim to take over what little bit of our thinking is left to us.

It’s Chesterton’s first point that requires emendation. Whatever fumes of morality the boys of Chesterton’s examples picked up from the “vulgar” examples of Dick Deadshot or Robin Hood is long gone from popular fiction. The excitement of the bestselling fiction today is not provided through action, danger, and suspense but through pornographic titillation—blunt, artless, explicit, and geared toward self-absorption and self-indulgence if not self-abuse—and in increasingly extreme forms. Vulgarity ain’t what it used to be.

While the culture pays lip service to the imagination and the appetite for stories is alive and being fed, we cannot trust even vulgar literature to excite it in helpful ways anymore. As CS Lewis, a noted Chesterton fan, would write later, “spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

The threat of technologies that compete for control of the imagination—addicting it and then dulling it—means the task of storytelling is as important as ever, with the added pressure that the culture has turned against the morality even cheap fiction used to instill. The burden writers today must shoulder is not to feed the storytelling instinct but to shape it well, and to worry less about seriousness or elite taste and more about setting imaginations aflame.

Not quite a confession

Item: At First Things, George Weigel writes about a certain right-wing* podcaster and her thriving traffic in anti-Semitic conspiracism.

Item: At WSJ Free Expression on Substack, Jack Butler writes about the small but vocal and perverting presence in the Republican Party of the Groypers, who also traffic in anti-Semitism.

My first year teaching, a brand-new adjunct and newly married, I volunteered to emcee the Holocaust Remembrance Day event organized by the Humanities department at the college where I was working. I introduced a panel of History instructors who did a good job providing broad coverage of everything from the Einsatzgruppen (the “Holocaust by bullets”), the Wannsee Conference, and the extermination camps, and a few instructors from other fields covering things like the debt Hitler owed to Nietzsche.

The event was well-attended and informative and—with the exception of the Nietzsche talk, which was confusing even to me and during which I heard a lot of shifting in seats—engrossing and moving. Afterward, I stood talking with two of the senior History instructors. I felt proud to have contributed even a little bit to the event’s success, and was glad to see a lot of my students present for it.

But as we stood talking, a middle-aged man approached us. I don’t remember an introduction or a greeting, though I doubt he would have been rude to us, but I clearly remember his agitated gestures and the way he fought to control the tone of his voice.

“I just have to say, this was very good,” he said, “but you’re treating this all as if it’s ancient history, as if it’s over. I still get hate mail, anonymous letters saying ‘Die, Jew!’”

He talked quite a bit more, but that’s all I remember. One of the other instructors simply nodded along and thanked him for his feedback. I recall the man walking away but, thirteen years later, nothing else from the rest of that night.

I remember it because it was awkward, but also because I struggled with what he said. I was sorry he had had such experiences, and I didn’t doubt that there were still benighted people out there who would give him a hard time because he was Jewish, but I felt our historical presentation had to be just that—historical—and couldn’t address an outlier like one Jewish man living in 2013 frustrated by a handful of racists.

That’s how I thought of it for a long time: an outlier, something that should be avoided. Should be, which implies that it could be.

I’m sure that man would have disagreed. I’ve come to see that I was wrong and he was right.

I learned about the Holocaust at a young age—I recall hearing stories about it from my Mom in second or third grade—and anti-Semitism has never been part of my life. That prejudice simply didn’t exist in my family or church. It was wrong, simpliciter. Anti-Semitism was something Hitler and the Klan did, but Hitler was long dead and the Klan was irrelevant, the one suspected Klansman in our area being a feeble old man more pitied or mocked than feared.

As I got older and developed an interest in conspiracism, I ran into anti-Semitism everywhere. At first it piqued my interest in historiography, Holocaust denial being a historiographic non-starter but an instructive example of bad research and argument. Then I started to realize the Satanic role anti-Semitism played. A conspiracist could be an amusing nutter no matter how many theories they swallowed, but introduce even a hint of anti-Semitism—maybe a little “international bankers” here, a little “Zionist plot” there—and things turned darker and much more obsessive quickly.** The Truther friend urging you to “follow the money trail” during an uncomfortable lunch could be something much more wicked the next time you saw him.

And yet these were still fringe beliefs as far as I was concerned. Weirdos on the internet ranted about them, and half the time it seemed like a joke. But after the last few years, and especially since the perverse response to October 7—which has proven genuinely bipartisan—I have no such illusions. I regret ever thinking even a little bit badly of that man at the Remembrance Day event.

In a short reflection this summer I quoted Walker Percy with regard to the sinking feeling I get when I discover that yet another person I know, have merely met, have interacted with online, or simply observed, is infected with this kind of thing. If it is true—and I strongly suspect it is—that, as Weigel says, anti-Semitism is “always a sure sign of cultural decay,” the frequency with which I am disappointed is more disheartening to me than any electoral outcome or culture war battle or fearmongering headline.

* I try to avoid right-left labels, but I won’t say “conservative” in this case.

** When I did a podcast on Jack Chick with Danny Anderson years ago, the one kudos we could agree to give Chick—the anti-Catholic, anti-Mason, Satanic Panic paranoiac par excellence—was that despite everything he never went down the anti-Semitic rabbit hole.