The idea of David Brooks teaching a class on the subject of humility at Yale strikes a lot of people as inherently funny, and making allowances for mean-spiritedness (and I dare say jealousy), the mockers do have a point. Humility, as a virtue, bears the same relation to op-ed columnizing as meekness does to soldiering or hope to the actuarial sciences. David Brooks is not a Cincinnatus or a Celestine V. There are no fingernail marks anywhere marking the site where Bill Keller dragged David Brooks out of seclusion and forced him to start pontificating in public. Pretending to authority you do not possess is right there in an op-ed columnist’s job description, and humility is at best a necessary casualty.

Then again, in deciding on a topic for his seminar, Brooks seems to have asked himself not “On what topic can I be most interesting and impressive” but “What do these particular kids most need to hear?” And that has a ring of humility to it.

His syllabus for the course has now been released, and it is not a promising one. The texts he assigns aren’t bad, they’re just unlikely to produce the effect he intends in the particular minds he will be dealing with. The average Yale student, confronted with these readings, will not become any more convinced that humility is a virtue he lacks—quite the opposite, he will become more convinced that humility is something he already possesses. Brooks plans to devote a week to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, and he summarizes that week’s agenda like this:

Over the past thirty years we have learned a great deal about the operations of the brain. One core finding is that much of our thinking happens below awareness at a cognitive level that is fast, associative, sloppy, and sometimes misleading.

That makes it sound as if the unreliability of the human mind was discovered thirty years ago in a lab, when in fact it has been old news for a long time, even the specific kinds of unreliability Kahneman discusses like the brain’s susceptibility to tricks of framing, flattery, and suggestion. By teaching this lesson the way he does, Brooks is encouraging his students to think that the great minds of the past did not realize just how faulty the human mind is because they did not know modern science. That in turn will make them think that, because they do know modern science, they are more sophisticated thinkers than anyone who lived before the invention of MRI scanners and double-blind psych experiments. Surely Brooks could have found a way to teach cognitive humility without also teaching chronological arrogance.

It is hard to go wrong with Edmund Burke, to whom Brooks devotes Week 8, but a dose of the Reflections won’t do much good if your students fail to see anything of themselves in the French revolutionaries. The average Yale student’s mindset is fundamentally technocratic, which in practice means that they graft the language of “reform not revolution” onto the same old liberal agenda. If Brooks tells his students that the lesson of Burke is that we shouldn’t go too far too fast, or that we should go with what works and not with what abstract ideology dictates, I expect they will nod their heads in full endorsement. But their idea of “too far too fast” and “rigidly ideological” does not include any notable plank of the Democratic party platform over the last sixty years. This is a generation that thinks Obamacare was a commonsense technocratic reform. The fact that they reject Bolshevism’s grand pronouncements about forging a new kind of humanity is not much comfort. (It’s true that this generation will occasionally permit themselves a grand political enthusiasm, as they did when Obama was nominated in 2008. But I hardly think Brooks is the person to get them to dial that back.)

You might think that “The Organization Kid” is the most ironic item on the syllabus because Brooks himself wrote the article. In fact, it is the most ironic item on the syllabus because it is a wildly flattering description of precisely the sort of person who goes to Yale these days. The article pretends to be critical of super-meritocrats, but the main criticisms are that they work too hard, accomplish too much, and complain too little. Imagine if someone had written in the late Sixties that the present generation was too independent, too open-minded, too committed to social change. Would the students of Kingman Brewster’s Yale have taken anything but pride in such a piece? Especially if the author was at pains to say how well-intentioned and fundamentally admirable they were? Even Brooks’s long digression on the pre-WWI generation, which is meant to give some idea of what has been lost, is hemmed in with so many but-of-courses about how racist and sexist and classist everyone was back then that no Organization Kid’s self-satisfaction will be seriously diminished. So what if Hobey Baker’s generation had a grander sense of moral purpose? That’s what post-graduate, pre-career stints in Teach for America are for.

Of course, I could be wrong. Brooks might want to disavow the arguments he made in “The Organization Kid” eleven years ago, in which case its appearance on the syllabus is intended as a meta lesson in humility. That at least would be something this postmodern generation could understand.

The head of the Nigerian Football Supporters’ Club, Rafiu Ladipo, has confessed that for years he has been using juju (traditional local magic) to try to bring the Super Eagles to victory. But no longer: “We came to realize that juju just doesn’t play football.”

“There are no links between football and voodoo. Now we believe only in praying and fasting to help Nigeria win their matches.”

So juju’s loss is prayer’s gain. As someone willing to entertain the possibility that sports are important enough to be on providence’s radar, I’m glad he hasn’t given up on higher-power intervention altogether. Though, if I were a player for the Super Eagles, the last thing I’d want to hear before a match is “I guess there’s nothing left to do but pray.”

The same quality that makes Russian novels so distinctive in world literature can also transform even sensitive Anglophone readers into the boy at the back of English class who keeps asking why Hamlet doesn’t just make up his mind already. It comes down to a certain implausibility in the characters. They tend to oscillate between Dostoevskyan melodrama and inexplicable Chekhovian paralysis, both of which are frustrating to Anglo-Saxon readers for whom pragmatism and emotional continence rank among the four cardinal virtues. I confess that I have sometimes fantasized about jumping through the page and giving Ivan and Nikolai and Mitya and Katya a good shake. So has Woody Allen, if you remember Love and Death.

This frustration is shared by the narrator of Futility, William Gerhardie’s 1922 novel about a very Russian family and their very Russian problems. Our level-headed, kind-hearted English protagonist tries very hard to make the Bursanovs behave sensibly. It would be hard to say which side ends up looking more absurd, the Russian archetypes or the English meddler, which makes the book, among other things, an interesting act of literary criticism from a British novelist. It is also extremely funny—as funny as anything Evelyn Waugh ever wrote, by Waugh’s own admission. He said of Gerhardie, “I have talent, but he has genius.”

Our narrator, probably named Andrew but called “Andrei Andreiech” by everyone, first becomes involved with the Bursanovs when he falls in love with the middle daughter, Nina, while living in St. Petersburg. This quickly entangles him in her complicated family. Patriarch Nikolai is juggling three different women: his wife Magda, the girls’ mother, who lives in Moscow and whom he would like to divorce but doesn’t; his common-law wife Fanny, who would like to marry him legally but can’t; and passionate teenager Zina, whom he would prefer to marry but would be content to have just as a mistress. At the periphery of the family circle are such familiar-seeming characters as Baron Wunderhausen, the dashing German aristocrat who wants to marry the eldest Bursanov daughter, and little Zina’s Uncle Kostia, who is reputed to be a philosopher but never actually publishes anything. None of these people has any money. Everyone lives on hand-outs from patriarch Nikolai, who himself is only borrowing against a far-off Siberian gold mine that he fervently hopes will one day produce gold.

Andrei can’t marry Nina until all this gets sorted out, so during one particularly agonizing night he decides to take action:

I switched on the light over my writing-table and began to write. I wrote down their names in two columns. Then I perceived that the two columns did not serve my purpose; so I drew arrows and circles round the names and endeavored to arrange them in sets and groups according to my own ideas as to how they should be mated. I began by mating Nina with myself. This was easy enough: it was obvious. I consented to make Baron Wunderhausen a present of Sonia. . . . Nikolai must be prevailed upon to marry Fanny. This step would do much to relieve the tension and prevent bad blood between the two. It would secure Fanny’s prestige in her own eyes and would consolidate her position in regard to her relatives in Germany. Now, Fanny having been granted this very liberal concession, which after all was nothing short of her one real great ambition in life, she on her part should not be allowed to impede Zina’s passionate desire to live with Nikolai: a gratification, as a matter of fact, demanded by the overpowering love of two human beings; and Zina, who had always been prepared for anything from suicide upward, would not begrudge Fanny the formal and somewhat hollow superiority of wedlock.

Arrogant

Without wading too deep into any technical lit-crit battles over the so-called death of the author, I think I can safely endorse the rule that, in general, one should not criticize a writer’s work by attacking his personal life. If an author happens to have been an adulterer, a miser, or a scoundrel as well as a literary genius, he should not thereafter have to have his genius hyphenated. John O’Hara was a genius, not a genius-slash-midget-punching-belligerent-drunk. (You can look that one up.) This holds true even when the author’s failings directly contradict his most notable literary accomplishments. Evelyn Waugh was never very good at practicing Christian forgiveness, but he still wrote about it wonderfully.

But this rule only applies up to a point, past which the reader’s sympathy just gives out. Yukio Mishima was enough of a genius that one could excuse his unseemly fascination with nationalism and violence—right up until the moment he and his followers entered the army base at Ichigaya, took its commandant hostage at swordpoint, and tried to stage a military coup. Eccentricity is one thing, active fascism is another.

I don’t have a comprehensive theory of where this line should be drawn, but I think most responsible readers would admit it exists. I call it the Rousseau threshold, because his case is the one I consider the most clear-cut. The way he treated his common-law wife, his children, and his friends makes it impossible for me to take him seriously as a humanitarian thinker. The fact that he abandoned all his children does not make Émile ironic, it makes it worthless.

When I wrote last month that Noah Millman was stupid to suggest that Tolstoy, of all people, could teach modern conservatives a thing or two about what conservatism really means, many readers accused me of committing the very fallacy I just disavowed, confusing the novelist with the man. I agree that well-drawn fictional characters like War and Peace’s Kutuzov (Millman’s Exhibit A) can come to life and break free of their creator’s intentions. But I also think that, in this particular case, Tolstoy went over the Rousseau threshold. I don’t mean that he was a bad man. I just mean that his behavior suggests he was no more able to understand “the conservative temperament” than Rousseau was able to understand brotherly love.

I related a few of the anecdotes that brought me around to that view in my earlier post, but to drive the point home, here is a collection from The Wives: The Women Behind Russia’s Literary Giants by Alexandra Popoff. (Each paragraph is a separate quotation.)

Sophia’s nursing did not go well: she developed mastitis, and a wet nurse had to be engaged. Tolstoy could not hide his disappointment and avoided the nursery with an expression of “morose animosity” on his face. Sophia felt that he blamed her for failing to live up to his Rousseauian ideal of a healthy mother and wife. That summer she noted in her diary, “I am in agonizing pain. Lyova is murderous. … He wants to wipe me from the face of the earth because I am suffering and am not doing my duty, I want not to see him at all because he is not suffering but just goes on writing.”

He wrote his own curriculum and primers, believing that “two generations of all Russian children, from tsars’ to peasants’, will study with the aid of this primer alone.”

He quarreled with his relative Alexandrine, who was stunned by his abuse of Orthodoxy. He called it a bunch of lies; when she protested, he left Petersburg without saying good-bye.

She [Sophia] did not care for humanity as an abstraction, but sympathized with people who were close to her, not only her family. Over the years, she had provided free medical help in Yasnaya. Although she was helping the very poor whom he idealized, Tolstoy ignored her efforts. “In all this I was alone because Lev Nikolaevich rejected medicine; not only did he have little sympathy for my work, he mocked it, which upset me terribly.”

Despite renouncing property, he remained at the estate, which Sophia had to manage as long as he continued to work there.

The anecdotes in my earlier post focused on Tolstoy’s intellectual arrogance, in particular his disturbing conviction that he had gotten Christ’s teachings right where the Orthodox Church and even Christ himself had bungled them up. These highlight his personal arrogance. One of the central aspects of the conservative temperament is humility—before God, before fate, before tradition, before institutions—and at a certain point we have to start wondering whether Tolstoy had any grasp of the concept.

And to those who would point out that Dostoevsky, whom I like, was an insane egotist who pawned his wife’s valuables for gambling money, I would simply say that, unlike Tolstoy, Dostoevsky’s moral failings were exactly in line with his authorial persona. His having been a mad gambler makes The Brothers Karamazov more credible, not less. And anyway he gave up gambling in middle age. Incidentally, Dostoevsky’s last notebook included this assessment of his fellow literary giant: “To what extent man has worshipped himself (Lev Tolstoy).” Sound judgment.

Most of the “rules for blogging” I have come across—like Alan Jacobs’s “Rules for Deportment for Online Discourse”—focus on very basic things like avoiding ad hominem attacks and not arguing in bad faith. These rules seem to me to boil down to a general prohibition against being an idiot, which is essentially futile, because rhetorical precepts cannot cure idiocy. They can only make it less obtrusive. I am not interested in making the opinions of idiots palatable, since the opinions themselves will be worthless either way; if anything, palatability makes them harder to ignore. I am however interested in keeping smart, honest bloggers from tripping over their own bad writing habits and making their valuable insights difficult to digest. These rules, then, are intended to address the writings tics that even good bloggers fall into.

1. Never begin a blog entry with “So-and-so has written a post about X.” This is like starting a news article “So-and-so held a press conference today.” Even now, I can hear my old journalism teacher shouting, “That’s not news! If they’d planned a press conference and then not shown up, that would be news. Otherwise, your first sentence should be about what they said. Specifically, what was interesting about it!” Your opening sentence doesn’t have to grab the reader by the jugular, but it shouldn’t put them to sleep either.

2. Eliminate the phrase “one of the most” from your vocabulary. “One of the most” is one of the most overused phrases on the Internet. People who have data to back their assertions use phrases with real meaning like “the most” or “the third-highest” or “the second-least.” People whose assertions are based on vague impressions say “one of the most.” It’s a sure sign that you don’t know what you’re talking about, and smart readers know it. (Example: “In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, some of the most effective networks of aid came from the remnants of Occupy Wall Street.” That . . . might be true?)

In my experience, the phrase usually pops up when an author wants to write about a topic just because he finds it interesting, but feels like readers won’t care about the topic unless he can convince them it’s somehow important. Listen, if you want to write about Mumford and Sons, write about Mumford and Sons. Don’t feel like you have to introduce them as “Mumford and Sons, one of the most popular bands in America today.” You might think it will convince a casual reader to invest their time in your article if you can persuade them that M & S are a mandatory part of contemporary cultural literacy, but really, the most relevant question in a reader’s mind is not whether the topic is important but whether it is entertaining or enlightening, and whether you have anything entertaining or enlightening to say about it.

3. You don’t have to eliminate weasel words from your vocabulary, but for heaven’s sake think twice before you use them. I am inclined to be concerned about the overuse of equivocatory words and phrases, a practice that, at least in my opinion, is deeply misguided and worth rethinking. What I mean to say is, knock it off. When a blogger obviously has a strong opinion, these hedging phrases come across as condescending. When he doesn’t seem to have a strong opinion, these phrases come across as an attempt to create the appearance of an opinion where none exists. More importantly, promiscuous use of these weasel words corrupts the English language. “Skeptical” is a lovely word with rich connotations. Sometimes it implies that you’re worried your opponent is trying to put something over on you, trying to pull some kind of intellectual con. Sometimes it implies that you half suspect your opponent, while appearing to be a reasonable person, is actually a fanatic, a crank, or a moron. It does not mean “I disagree with you but I’m too chicken to come out and say it,” or “I probably would disagree with you if I knew what you were talking about.” “Misguided” implies that you and your opponent are basically on the same side—and not in the sense that radical liberals and radical conservatives are basically on the same side because they both want to make the world a better place in their own ways. It is not a more tepid synonym for “wrong.”

4. Disregard the haters who denigrate blogging as a medium. Blogging is an amateur’s medium, but there is a lot to be said for amateurs. Bloggers sometimes write about things they know nothing about. Professional journalists often write about things they know nothing about. Academics write about things they know so much about that they no longer have any passion for the subject or any sense of its intrinsic interest, since, for understandable reasons, it is all now very boring to them. So don’t be intimidated by their credentials or put off by your lack of them.

5. Don’t make excuses for the faults of the writers you cite. The sort of remark I have in mind is the kind where, in a post about an unrelated topic, an author feels the need to bring up some moral accusation against the writer he is discussing and make very clear that he, the blogger, is on the right side of that debate. As in, “Admittedly, William F. Buckley wasn’t always right about everything, segregation for example,” or, “Obviously Aaron Sorkin is a colossal misogynist, but let us set that to one side,” or, “I enjoyed John Derbyshire’s book on the Riemann Hypothesis, despite his despicable views on race.” Upon reading that sort of comment, never have I thought to myself how much I admire the moral rectitude of the blogger and the intellectual honesty he is displaying in making his position clear. I have only ever thought: Buddy, you are just covering your ass.

When I ask myself why these comments bother me so much, several reasons come to mind. First, they are cowardly. Second, by passing moral judgment so ostentatiously, the blogger is putting himself above the man he is condemning, and I think you shouldn’t pass judgment on (say) Kingsley Amis’s curmudgeonly prejudices unless you can plausibly claim to have a tenth of his literary talent. (If your article is actually about a writer’s failings—if the whole point of the piece is to ask how a man could be so perceptive in some ways and yet so moronic in others—then that of course is something else entirely.) But mostly I am saddened by writers who feel the need to preempt the objections of people whose objections are not worth taking seriously in the first place. You know the sort of person I mean—those people more interested in an opportunity to assert their own moral superiority than in what either the blogger or the cited author has to say. If you are worried that, under your post about Churchill, someone is going to post a comment chiding you for failing to mention that he was a monstrous racist, the thing to do is to stop worrying and say to hell with anyone who writes that comment.

Good writers don’t make allowances for intellectual idiocy. It would be absurd if you felt the need to write, “The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates. Socrates, of course, was a philosopher in ancient Greece. A philosopher is someone who ponders the big questions that have plagued mankind since the dawn of time. Greece is a country in Europe.” Why should anyone bother catering to moral idiocy? Which is exactly what those snarky comments are.

Too cheerful to translate Dostoevsky well?

I have no idea how Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov came to be regarded as definitive. Let me rephrase that. I know why. Fourteen thousand copies a year, practically indefinitely, is why. There’s a lot of money at stake, for them and for their publisher. What I don’t know is how. Admittedly, their method is a publicist’s dream come true. A husband-and-wife team, Larissa makes a literal translation as close to word-for-word as possible and then Richard tidies up her copy. (He hasn’t mastered the language himself, not even at a conversational level, which is why I feel comfortable criticizing their work so harshly. I may not know Russian—but neither does Richard Pevear.) The result, as you might imagine, is a fairly close replication of the original. The promotional material practically writes itself. No one has ever offered a truer approximation of Dostoevsky’s prose! P & V are like Gillette razors—you just can’t get any closer!

Unfortunately, the result is not something you would want to spend 974 pages with. When I decided to tackle The Brothers Karamazov last month, I chose my translation the obvious way: I pulled up Amazon previews for half a dozen versions and compared the opening pages and tables of contents to see which one grabbed me. Here are a few chapter headings from the Oxford World Classics translation by Ignat Avsey, the one I ended up going with:

Second Marriage, Second Brood

An Unseemly Encounter

A Careerist Seminarian

Here’s what P & V have:

Second Marriage, Second Children

An Inappropriate Gathering

A Seminarist-Careerist

That last one is especially offensive to the ear of a native English speaker. They make a worse blunder in the scene where Mrs. Khokhlakov is explaining to Alyosha that Dmitry might opt for a temporary-insanity plea. “Suppose we have a person who’s perfectly sane, and suddenly he’s suffering from diminished responsibility,” is what Avsey has her say. “Come to think of it, who doesn’t suffer from diminished responsibility these days? Don’t you, don’t I? We all do.” P & V translate the crucial phrase as “fit of passion”—“Who isn’t in a fit of passion these days?” That’s readable (unlike “seminarist-careerist”), but utterly wrong. Elsewhere they have “stupid” where Avsey has “absurd,” “brief” where he has “direct,” and “be healed by you” where he has “be redeemed through you.” (Those three are from the page preceding the famous “Rebellion” chapter, if you would like to check the context.) Gary Saul Morson, a professor of Russian literature at Northwestern, compared this tone-deafness to “someone translating Paradise Lost from English into Russian who had somehow missed that Milton was a Christian.”

Morson’s brutal, unanswerable takedown of P & V, where that quote appeared, was published by Commentary magazine, and I mention the venue because it is enormously important. Commentary’s literary section is top-notch, on par with what you’d find in places like The New Republic or the New York Review of Books, but because it is a conservative magazine, it will always be in some sense marginal to the world of the literary press. That is precisely why they were able to publish Morson’s hatchet job despite the overwhelming publicity push proclaiming P & V the wonder duo that would make all previous Dostoevsky translations obsolete. Conservative outlets are perfectly placed to deflate that sort of manufactured conventional wisdom, because they live at the outskirts of the high-brow world. They are the boy who says the emperor has no clothes, and the mainstream outlets are the courtiers.

When I say that places like NYRB and The New Yorker aren’t likely to step up in this way, I don’t mean to imply that their writers have bad literary judgment or that their editors are in deliberate cahoots with the PR departments of the big publishing houses. The way it usually works is something like this: An editor will publish a piece that takes a negative view of some widely acclaimed work—say, a pan of Les Misérables. For the next week, half the people who engage in small talk with that editor will say “Hey, I saw that review you ran of Les Mis. Thought it was a bit harsh.” This is the kind of small talk editors get, from co-workers as much as acquaintances and strangers. So he commissions (or greenlights) a more positive review—if he can get a big-name author like Adam Gopnik, so much the better—and the effect on the work’s reputation is a wash. Something along these lines happened five years ago with Sam Tanenhaus when P & V’s much-hyped War and Peace came out; that story is here. The galling thing is, most of the people nudging the editor to soften his criticism don’t actually know or care much about the merits of the work in question. They just read somewhere or heard on NPR that it was the hot new thing, and they want a chance to use that penny of cultural currency before it loses its value. Their opinion can usually be traced back to a press release—but then, that’s why good publicity hacks get paid such good money.

This, of course, is what happens when the editor runs a negative review in the first place, which isn’t often. Usually a magazine will only run a hatchet piece contrary to the conventional wisdom if it comes from a big name, and big names don’t typically write hatchet jobs. Those pieces make enemies, and they have too much to lose. And, as Morson points out in his Commentary article, translations of classic works are even more likely to get raves than the average much-hyped critical darling. Most writers who get that sort of assignment are excited for the chance to talk about a classic work that means a great deal to them. They gush about the novel, naturally, and their enthusiasm often embraces the translation along with it.

I harp on the point that conservative magazines are well placed to dissent from this hype-driven feedback loop because, alas, they usually don’t. The conservative press has largely abandoned the field of cultural criticism. Every conservative magazine reaches far more readers online than in print, but almost none of them publish much cultural criticism on their websites—and that includes the ones whose print editions have decent back-of-the-book sections, like The Weekly Standard and Commentary. The most high-brow conservative magazine, The New Criterion, publishes almost no fresh online content at all. (Cross-posts from Roger Kimball’s PJ Media blog don’t count.) Apart from the occasional blog post at The American Conservative, there’s just nothing on fiction, non-fiction, TV, or movies. For comparison, the websites of The New Republic and The Nation have whole sections devoted to books.

Most conservative websites will publish pieces denouncing a film or a novel for liberal bias or applauding it for its conservative moral message, but they run precious few proper reviews. Speaking as a reader of these websites, I say it’s all right for a good writer to say what’s conservative about a piece of art, but it would be so much better to have a conservative writer say what’s good about it.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the bawdy song the innkeeper’s girls sing just before Dmitry’s arrest. It’s a good test for any translation, because one of the rhymes is left unfinished—the narrator breaks off halfway through the second line and simply says, “There followed a most unprintable rhyme.” Even P & V realize that a literal translation won’t do in this case. The English version has to imply how the verse would have ended, leaving the translator no choice but to decide what he thinks the missing text is, using context clues and his own intuition (mostly the latter).

The song is about a series of men who come courting the singers, and their reasons for accepting or rejecting their advances. The gypsy, for example, is a no-go because “He’ll turn out to be a thief / And that, I’m sure, will bring me grief.” The businessman does better: “To the wealthy merchant I’ll be wed / And a queen I’ll lie, all day in bed.”

The unfinished couplet is about a soldier. The original Russian doesn’t give a translator much to go on: Google Translate renders it “Soldiers will pack carry / And I for him . . .”

P & V make a decent attempt, managing to work in a mild profanity:

The soldier boy will pack his kit

And drag me with him through . . .

But we must concede the superiority of the Avsey version, which, unlike P & V’s, makes me laugh:

The soldier will march to seek his luck

And leave me dying for a . . .

There is more fiction than non-fiction on this list, but that’s only because my non-fiction reading this year has been dominated by a succession of esoteric obsessions. I encountered some very good books that way, but the mini-reviews for all of them would have gone something like “A good book if you happen to be interested in Albania/imperial Russia/Japanese fiction/the British Raj/post-colonial Africa.” I have chosen instead to concentrate on books that appeal to the general reader. I have also omitted books already reviewed on this blog, otherwise The Adventures of Sumiyakist Q, Letters from Russia, The Stammering Century, An Ambiguous Adventure, and Mike Hoare’s Congo memoirs all would have made the cut.

NON-FICTION

1. An African in Greenland, Tété-Michel Kpomassie (1981): The main attraction of this book is its remarkable premise: A teenage West African tribesman becomes fixated on Greenland after seeing a picture of it, and through herculean effort makes it there and turns himself into a seal-hunting, husky-driving honorary Inuit. For me there is something perversely funny about just how closely his description of the natives of Greenland resembles some of the most notorious cliches of Western writing about Africa. The natives in the cities live off welfare from their colonizers! They would rather get wasted and screw indiscriminately than do an honest day’s work! The people out in the hinterlands are the only ones who have preserved the nobility of their ancient way of life! Their virtues are all of the peasant variety—honesty, simplicity, hospitality, et cetera! I hate to think what would have befallen the author in the literary press if the races had been reversed.

2. The Bevin Boy, David Day (1975): Beginning in 1943, one in ten British draftees were picked at random to be sent, not to the front, but down t’ mines, coal having become more valuable than soldiers. They were called “Bevin Boys” because the program was the brainchild of Ernest Bevin, the minister of labor, who thought that sending white-collar boys to work the coal face would yield some salutary mixing of the classes. The thesis of this memoir, written by a middle class Bevin boy, is that no such life-long friendships across the classes were formed and no such revelations of their shared humanity were forthcoming. Mostly the classes still avoided each other. If social engineering can’t prevail in such circumstances, when the subjects literally have to go wherever you tell them and do whatever you say, there can’t be much hope for the concept.

3. About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (2000), Ben Yagoda: A charismatic young man of recognized genius launches a totally new kind of magazine, partly by gathering an Arthurian round table of talented writers under its masthead but mostly through sheer force of his own larger-than-life personality. After some illustrious decades under this founder, the magazine passes to a far less charismatic successor who modestly declares himself a mere caretaker, the formula having been perfected in his estimation. In practice this caretaker mentality results in some not entirely welcome changes. Longtime contributors are treated like members of the family, which would be nice if coddling didn’t allow their writing to become lazy in some cases and self-indulgent in others. An overly conscious sense of being heirs to the great tradition pushes the magazine too far into professorial, multi-part-series-on-grain seriousness at the expense of the write-about-anything exuberance that characterized the Golden Age. The atmosphere at the office begins to take its lead from the self-effacing man at the top, becoming a zone of morgue-like silence where once it was full of energy and ferment. This slide into mediocrity has little impact on the bottom line, since subscribers keep coming in on the strength of the name the founder built up, but resentment begins to fester in the hearts of a few employees, one of whom writes a book-length memoir not so subtly blaming the caretaker editor for ruining the franchise. These detractors insist that his shy, almost minimomaniac tendencies are just a cover for Napoleonic ambition. They prophesy purges and rumors of purges. It’s true that when a talented person begins to threaten the EIC’s dominance, that person tends to be expelled to the margins (or further) and replaced by someone with either no talent or no leadership potential. Most tellingly, he has made the organization’s chain of command so fragmented—“the way Algerian terror cells were organized in the Battle of Algiers,” according to one observer—that no one knows what anyone else is doing except himself. His very reticence is deployed too manipulatively to be anything but a passive-aggressive management tactic—so say the carpers, anyway, but then their accusations do rather smell of personal bitterness. (“One of the most manipulative people I’ve ever met, far and away,” says one—really, can that possibly be true?) And indeed, when such complaints are voiced, they are vehemently denied by magazine stalwarts eager to leap to the defense of their leader who, whatever else you can say about him, is certainly skilled at cultivating loyalty. This, of course, is the story of The New Yorker, first under Harold Ross and then William Shawn.

4. Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?, Edward Behr (1978): The memoir of a foreign correspondent who dined with Mao, saw Algeria fall, and covered the civil war in the Congo in the 1960s, which is when he heard a colleague deliver, in all earnestness, the title sentence. It’s a reasonable question in context, sort of. Journalism does to a man’s morals what war does to his nerves. The book was retitled Bearings for its American release by Viking Press, the cowards.

FICTION

5. Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age, Kenzaburo Oe (1983): The novel’s plot (which is autobiographical) is that a writer has a son with brain damage and mental disabilities, and he finally makes emotional sense of their relationship by reading very closely the poetry of William Blake, in particular the prophetic works, which, like his son, tend to be unfairly written off as freaks. Oe has written several autobiographical novels about his disabled son Hikari. A Personal Matter is more harrowing—it deals with the hours after his son’s birth, when our narrator has to decide, first, whether to tell his convalescing wife that there is something wrong with their firstborn son, and second whether to tell the doctors to let the infant die or to go ahead with a risky operation that would leave him brain damaged if it didn’t kill him, as it was highly likely to do. But as someone who knows from experience what an accurate depiction of day-to-day life with a mentally disabled family member looks like—especially from the point of view of someone who, being brainy, is inclined to confuse intelligence with personal worth—I can tell you: this book is better. Oe is one of only two Japanese novelists to have won the Nobel prize.

6. The Radiance of the King, Camara Laye (1955): Most Westerners imagine that African literature consists entirely of straightforwardly written stories about the conflict between tradition and modernity, possibly because their only point of reference is Things Fall Apart. They should read Radiance of the King, which is like Kafka but with human characters. The white narrator comes to Africa to escape a dissolute life, ruins his fresh start by gambling away all his money again, and then pins his hopes on getting an audience with the native king and finagling a job from him. This plan doesn’t quite work out, and he ends up serving as stallion for the harem of a minor chieftain who, for some reason, wants to populate his town with mixed-race children. The author resists the urge to make his white hero a buffoon or a racist.

7. Overqualified, Joey Comeau (2009): The man behind the comic A Softer World wrote a novel, in the form of a series of cover letters. Hilarious and disturbing, and available cheap on Kindle.

8. Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown(1798): The book opens with a spontaneous combustion and ends in murder and madness, and in between there is religious mania, sexual disgrace, and an evil ventriloquist. There are many reasons to think that a nation as pragmatic and businesslike as America could never go in for Gothic fiction. This book refutes them all. On par with Hawthorne’s best. I was amused to learn that the author mailed a copy of the manuscript to Thomas Jefferson during his vice presidency, because arch-rationalists love Gothic fiction, as we all know.

9. The Straight and Narrow Path, Honor Tracy (1956): A satire of rural Irish Catholicism involving a naïve British journalist, an obstinate priest, a devious lawyer with a flair for blarney, and a libel lawsuit over whether the nuns really did prance at midnight. The most interesting character is a local aristocrat from a Protestant Ascendancy family who joins the Catholic faith out of deep conviction but who can’t quite get his head around the locals’ approach to the faith he now shares. Flannery O’Connor found the book hilarious. She also said that if the author was a believing Catholic (she didn’t know whether Honor Tracy was or not), then the book was more serious and more interesting than most people thought. Tracy—whose real name was Lilbush Wingfield—was indeed Catholic, which I suppose makes her the female Evelyn Waugh, considering she’s at least as funny as he is. Terry Teachout chose The Straight and Narrow Path as his book of the year last year.

10. The Hack, Wilfrid Sheed (1963): A writer for Catholic periodicals loses faith in his craft (aren’t I just peddling cheap spirituality to little old ladies?) and half-loses faith in his church. Sheed’s parents owned a publishing house specializing in middle-brow Catholic literature, so he knew what he was talking about. The book gives an especially accurate depiction of the plight of the freelance journalist, who can’t help feeling that however much people might appreciate him (for now), there is no one really looking out for him—he is responsible to, and for, other people, but no one feels any responsibility towards him. I have spent the last eleven months in a similar situation while I look for a proper job, so I know what I am talking about. When I ponder the ruins of my journalism career, and consider the towering successes that some of my peers have built with the most meager starting materials, I am comforted by this line from The Hack: “A million tons of stupid words had to be manufactured every year by somebody; but getting mad at those was like getting mad at New Jersey.” D.G. Myers wrote a good review of this book on his blog in 2009.

Noah Millman thinks he has located the essence of the conservative temperament in the works of Leo Tolstoy, which is hard to believe. Perhaps you know the old joke about the tenure committee’s verdict on Jesus Christ. (“A fine teacher but didn’t publish.”) Tolstoy’s verdict was worse. According to Gorky, Tolstoy “considered Christ naive and worthy of pity,” which is about what you’d expect from a man so arrogant that he first declared his intention to found his own religion at the age of twenty-seven. If the conservative virtues are humility, patience, deference to the past, and awareness of limits, then sweet angels in heaven, why would we look to Tolstoy to elucidate them?

Millman seems about 20 percent as aware of this problem as he ought to be. I give him the 20 percent because he does admit that Tolstoy’s “radical political ideas . . . cannot, I think, be described as ‘prudent.’” But that’s not quite the point. It isn’t Tolstoy’s opinions that make him untrustworthy, but his character. I don’t care that his interpretation of Christ’s teachings led him to anarchism, vegetarianism, and pacifism; I care that he considered himself more qualified to interpret Christ’s teachings than Christ himself. It’s not the conclusions he drew, but the presumption with which he asserted them.

In 1902, Tolstoy sent a letter to Nicholas II (insolently addressing him as “beloved brother”) in which he laid out all the ways the tsar was ruining the country and explaining the radical reforms that would put things right. The tsar ignored the letter, which led Tolstoy to conclude that he was  “a pathetic, weak, and stupid” ruler. A person may advocate the redistribution of land, the abolition of the monarchy, an end to all wars, and the disestablishment of the national church and still have a conservative disposition (at least according to Millman’s definition of it). But what one may not do is dictate policies to a head of state and then sulk when he doesn’t heed your every suggestion. 

Also—and this may be a small thing—Tolstoy hated Shakespeare. Judging from my book of Russian literary anecdotes, he repeated this opinion at every opportunity, phrasing it in the way that most arrogant people phrase their judgments, not as a personal opinion (“I don’t care for him”) but as an objective truth (“Shakespeare was terrible”). I understand that the Bard has not always fared well in translation—the French, I believe, have never understood what all the fuss was about—but in Tolstoy’s case his behavior is hard to excuse. Every intelligent person can think of a few reputed geniuses whose writing they can’t stand, but the sensible thing to do is to keep your mouth shut about it, on the logic that the problem almost certainly lies with you and not with a writer whose worth has been ratified by centuries of admirers. You don’t have to like Shakespeare, but sounding off about it is the equivalent of reveling in your own ignorance.

I could go on listing the ways Tolstoy is the last person to consult on the subject of the conservative temperament, but I’ll give the last word to Anton Chekhov, who knew the sage of Yasnaya Polyana personally. Here he is explaining to a friend why he finds Tolstoy’s arrogance charming (knowing Chekhov, he was probably being slightly dry):

I admire him greatly. What I admire the most in him is that he despises us all; all writers. Perhaps a more accurate description is that he treats us, other writers, as completely empty space. You could argue that from time to time, he praises Maupassant, or Kuprin, or Semenov, or myself. But why does he praise us? It is simple: it’s because he looks at us as if we were children.

Chekhov, incidentally, was almost Tolstoy’s exact opposite. Tolstoy yammered on about humanitarian imperatives; Chekhov quietly endowed schools, libraries, and hospitals with his own money, despite being the not-very-wealthy grandson of a serf. Tolstoy wanted to give away all his possessions in his will, leaving his large family with nothing to live on (his wife talked him out of it); Chekhov supported his impoverished family from the age of sixteen—the need to provide for them was his main reason for going to medical school and for embarking on a writing career in the first place. Tolstoy drove his wife mad with his insistence that she adapt their household to his mad notions; when tuberculosis forced Chekhov to move to Yalta, he insisted that his wife stay in Moscow for her acting career, which she would have had to sacrifice if she had moved to Yalta with him. His visits to her in Moscow, where the weather was bad for his health even in the warmer seasons, were probably what killed him. Chekhov embodied the conservative virtues. Tolstoy, one suspects, was too much of an egotist to even understand them.

Every swinger, wife-swapper, and key-party enthusiast in the Seventies knew all about Margaret Mead and her liberated South Seas islanders, but I bet that not even a dozen had so much as heard of Fanny Wright or John Humphrey Noyes. That seems to be the way it is with people in the grip of a radical idea like free love. They can’t bear to imagine that their revolutionary notions were believed a hundred years ago by people very much like themselves, much less that their predecessors failed spectacularly every time they tried to put their notions into practice. Hippies on communes are the same way. Every one of them thinks he’s an American kibbutznik, and not one realizes he’s more like a modern-day Bronson Alcott.

The radicals aren’t entirely to blame for their own ignorance (and neither are you if you don’t know who Bronson Alcott is, by the way). Very few histories have been written of the nineteenth-century cranks, fanatics, reformers, and revivalists who were the forerunners of today’s polyamorists and back-to-the-landists. And no wonder: Why waste time debunking crackpot ideologies considered irrefutable by their proponents and self-refuting by everyone else? The only people open to being convinced by a minute chronicle of, say, the downfall of the Oneida Community are the ones who are sensible enough that they don’t need to be persuaded of the folly of “complex marriage” in the first place.

This looming sense of the futility of his mission did not afflict Gilbert Seldes when he set out to write The Stammering Century(published in 1928 and rereleased this month by NYRB Classics), his history of the “sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, and religious excitements” that flourished in nineteenth-century America. It dawned on him before he finished it, though. “My original idea was a timid protest against the arrogance of reformers in general,” he writes in the introduction. “I came gradually to want to prove nothing.”

A laugh at Fourier’s expense

I think that Seldes did manage to prove something, but I can see why he thought that it was worth finishing the book just for the sake of describing his intrinsically interesting subjects. They are all like fairy tales brought to life, ridiculous and tragic and somehow strangely plausible. (Almost like that solecism from Plan 9 from Outer Space: “That’s the most fantastic story I’ve ever heard.” “And every word of it’s true, too.” “That’s the fantastic part of it.”) There was one member of Alcott’s vegetarian commune Fruitlands who refused to pull weeds from their vegetable patch because “they had as much right to be there as corn or cucumbers.” I don’t know if I can prove anything from the fact that such a man existed, but I’m glad to know about him. Likewise Alcott’s long-suffering wife, who quietly ignored her husband’s sillier agricultural precepts and without whose pragmatism they all doubtless would have starved. She was the only adult woman in a colony full of useless men; the one other female, a Miss Page, had been expelled for having gone to a neighbor’s house and there eaten fish.

Exiled for eating fish! That’s like something out of a children’s fable, as is the death of the daughter of John Alexander Dowie, who thought he was God. He founded first his own church and then his own town, Zion, forty miles outside of Chicago, where he ruled as both dictator and savior. His daughter was burned to death when her nightgown caught fire from a spirit lamp she had lit to heat some curling irons. She suffered twelve hours of agony before dying of her burns, and no doctor was allowed to see her because Zion did not believe in medicine. In his graveside eulogy, Dowie said, “She was a good girl, but she disobeyed me. I forbade the use of alcohol in any form, she violated my command, and she has been punished for it.” He had in fact banned alcohol only in the Prohibition sense of banning drinking, but he either forgot this fact or didn’t mind rewriting history. If Dowie is in Hell now, I hope the Devil has him next to Tantalus.

John Alexander Dowie

Despite their faults (and in some cases their felonies), Seldes treats his subjects with a certain tenderness, which is only to be expected considering he grew up on a commune himself. His father, George Sergius Seldes, was a Jewish anarchist from Kiev who joined with a hundred other immigrant families to found an agrarian commune in Alliance, New Jersey, in 1882. Financial circumstances eventually forced him to return to his former trade as a pharmacist in Philadelphia, where, according to his son George’s memoirs, “he began wasting a great part of his life selling patent medicines to ignorant strangers with whom he tried to talk Philosophy.” He was hardly a raving crank—he corresponded with Tolstoy and Kropotkin, befriended Big Bill Haywood and Voltairine de Cleyre, and once hosted Gorky as his house guest—but there is still something pathetic about him, which may be why, in Seldes’s portraits, one can hear echoes of filial indulgence. I’ve heard the same tone of voice from highly assimilated sons and daughters talking about their immigrant parents.

Seldes might also have been rendered sympathetic by feelings of nostalgia. Compared with the reformers of his own day—the Prohibitionists and suffragettes and sanctimonious Ladies Bountiful—the eccentrics of the nineteenth century seemed positively harmless. Both types of reformers were motivated by the same social evils—drunkenness, inequality, industrialization, spiritual aimlessness—but somewhere in that genealogy, the radical “who was nearly an anarchist” yielded to the meddler who was, in his soul, an “embittered bureaucrat.” Here Seldes’s libertarian streak begins to show:

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the word “reformer” meant one who wanted to give liberty to others; today it means, briefly, one who wants to take liberty away. The change in meaning is accompanied by a change in method. There is a dislocation of the center of fear. Laws, lobbies, censors, and spies have displaced God as the object of awe and veneration, sometimes even as the object of faith. The great social and religious movements of the middle of the last century were based on the belief that man could be made perfect. The current belief is that machinery, including the machinery of government, can be made perfect. . . .

The typical zealot of 1800 was a man fanatically busy about salvation; in the 1840s he was as fanatically busy about improving himself; later he turned to uplifting his fellowmen and later still to interfering with their pleasures. . . .

Eighty years ago, [a reformer] withdrew from society, founded his own community, and preached Abstention. Today, he passes laws and cries, I forbid.

Seldes thinks he knows what went wrong: “The degradation of radical doctrine is probably due in part to the vast failure of radical movements when they founded communities.” A few dozen families committed to equality of the sexes couldn’t build a gender-neutral commune that would last more than a few years, so later generations of feminists took their movement national. Farms designed to flatter Gaia failed without ever turning a profit, so environmentalists turned to passing laws instead. The temperance movement could not save enough drunkards, so they abolished drink.

Obviously this was an idiotic switch on the reformers’ part. If your idée fixe can’t thrive in the most propitious circumstances, when every human being for a five mile radius is committed heart and soul to the mission, then surely it is your concept that needs refining. There is also a valuable warning in Seldes’s observation that “communist experiments consistently lose the very quality they exalt. The colonies which are meant to exalt beauty, are mean and ugly; the love colonies are peculiarly unhappy as settings for a great passion.” Operating on a nationwide rather than a local scale is hardly going to solve the problem of unintended consequences.

Early reformers liked to compare their causes to abolition, just as modern liberals use “the civil rights movement of our time” as their highest form of praise. The moral of The Stammering Century is that most of the people who make such comparisons are only flattering themselves. For every cause that is denigrated unjustly, there are others that deserve to fail—for, as Seldes says, “two thieves were crucified, and only one Christ.” There was a notorious religious madman in the 1830s called Prophet Matthias, who convinced a modestly wealthy New Yorker to finance his church and then poisoned his sponsor when he threatened to cut him off. In the end, Matthias had only one follower, a black maid named Isabella. That woman later left New York and changed her name to Sojourner Truth, and every schoolchild in America knows the rest of the story. Gullibility and the deepest, noblest conviction coexisted in the same soul, and in all likelihood had their source in the same spiritual longing. If that was true of Sojourner Truth, it is equally true of her successors and the country that produced them all.

My review of Prof. Joseph Crespino’s new biography of Strom Thurmond is in the current edition of National Review:

The black comedian Dick Gregory said in 1971 that race relations in America were easy to understand: “In the North they don’t care how big I get, long as I don’t get too close. Down South, they don’t care how close I get, long as I don’t get too big.” Since his death, Strom Thurmond has been reduced to proof of this joke, if not a joke himself: the arch-segregationist with a black daughter who obviously didn’t mind if “they” got quite close indeed. He was a joke for many years before that, too — the doddering nonagenarian, the notorious flirt who fathered his last child at the age of 74, the southern throwback who patronized female congressional witnesses by saying things like “These are the prettiest witnesses we have had in a long time. I imagine you are all married.” In the world of politics, ancient history is anything that happened more than 25 years ago, and we have to look back much further than that to find a time when Strom Thurmond was not a punchline.

Read the whole thing.