Just can’t get enough of cutthroat politics? Find yourself on YouTube, replaying the meaner jabs from the Republican primary debates? You might want to add the 1990s BBC miniseries House of Cards to your Netflix queue. Based on a novel by a onetime Chief of Staff to Britain’s Conservative Party, House of Cardstracks the legal and illegal intrigues of Francis Urquhart, a Machiavellian party operative who wrangles his way up the rungs of power in post-Thatcher Great Britain. Urquhart (Ian Richardson) uses the press and the ambitions and paranoia of statesmen to his own advantage, but he hides his ruthlessness beneath a polite and even grandfatherly exterior. “You might very well think that: I couldn’t possibly comment,” he primly responds, whenever he has cunningly planted an idea in the mind of a reporter or colleague.

Manipulating journalists, tangling with the monarchy, destroying lives and careers with relish,  Urquhart is a charming and seductive antihero, and his schemes and deceptions make for an engrossing soap opera. But it’s the theatrical trappings that really distinguish House of Cards and its sequels, To Play the King and The Final Cut. The scheming Urquhart is a Shakespearean figure—part Richard III, part Iago and a very large part Macbeth, and the scriptwriters highlight these resonances with Shakespearean quotes and allusions. The spirit of Macbeth, in particular, haunts the story: Egged on by his equally ambitious and amoral wife (Diane Fletcher), Urquhart eventually racks up so many misdeeds that he might easily say, with Shakespeare’s thane-turned-king, “I am in blood/Stepped in so far that should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

Even more striking are the impishly self-satisfied remarks that Urquhart periodically delivers straight to us, the audience: In the middle of a scene, he will turn his head, look straight into the camera and share an unnervingly honest confession or observation, while the folks around him carry on, oblivious. These break-the-fourth-wall moments are like miniature Shakespearean monologues, and they underscore an all-too-familiar truth: that politics is, to a large extent, theatrics.

It will be interesting to see whether a forthcoming remake of House of Cardsmanages to be as interesting and sly: Director David Fincher (Fight Club, the Hollywood adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.) is an executive producer of the forthcoming remake, which will be a Netflix original series and will star Kevin Spacey.

In his 1941 poem “At the Grave of Henry James,” W. H. Auden expressed his hope that writers would be judged not by their lives, but by their works:

All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,

Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;

Because there are many whose works

Are in better taste than their lives; because there is no end

To the vanity of our calling: make intercession

For the treason of all clerks.

In a recent review in Harper’s (subscription required), Giles Harvey addresses just this question—how to understand the writer’s work in relation to the writer’s life—by considering the case of Philip Larkin. Larkin is probably the most celebrated British poet of the post-World War II era; as his posthumously published letters have made clear, he’s also probably the nastiest. His letters are sprinkled with casual (and not so casual) misogyny, with racial insensitivity, with snobbery, with self-pity, with a grouchiness that borders on the pathological. Harvey quotes several particularly nasty bits, but the worst—worst because the simplest and most symptomatic—is this throwaway: “all women are stupid beings.” And there’s lots more where that came from. (Which is a shame for all the obvious reasons, but also because, if you can ignore the foul bits—which of course you can’t—Larkin’s letters are a remarkable read.) Read the rest of this entry »

It’s official: America has Downton Abbey fever. You can’t open a newspaper or visit a culture/books website without reading about how Downton Abbey is revitalizing PBS, or affecting the publishing industry, or reflecting poorly on our “class-stratified” military. This interest is all for the good. I agree with Emily Nussbaum, who writes in the New Yorker that Downton Abbey “is situated precisely on the Venn diagram where ‘prestige’ meets ‘guilty pleasure’: it’s as much cake as it is bread.” (Though I have to disagree with Nussbaum’s adoration of Lady Edith, who not only is the show’s weakest link, but is generally acknowledged to be so by characters within the show itself.)

I want to talk briefly about a different British TV show, however, one that has gotten some publicity in the U. S. but hasn’t captured the popular imagination in the way that Downton Abbey has. If Downton Abbey allows us to figuratively travel to a different time, then the show I’m talking about features literal time travel; if the posh characters of Downton Abbey seem alien to us nowadays, then the show I’m talking about has actual aliens from faraway planets; if Downton Abbey straddles the line between high and low culture, then the show I’m talking about obliterates this line altogether, showing that the most condescended-to of genres, science fiction/fantasy, can create lasting, affecting stories. I’m talking about Doctor Who. Read the rest of this entry »

“A ‘canon’ so established in practice serves not so much to enshrine a hundred books as to help students to develop their own standards of evaluation. The canon (if such it be) and the questioning of it go together. There must be questioning, and there must be something of value that has stood the test of time worth questioning” (38). – Wm. Theodore de Bary, Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics.

In describing one of his teachers, a friend once said that the professor was able to teach his own ideas through teaching Hegel. That is to say, the professor had so thoroughly apprenticed himself to Hegel that it was impossible to tell where Hegel stopped and the professor’s  interpretation began. I think the best teachers do that. In talking with Herbert McCabe and reading his work, for example, it was always difficult to figure out where Thomas Aquinas ended and McCabe began. The same can be said about Ralph McInerney, even though he came to quite different conclusions about Thomas than McCabe did. And the fact that both could be such devoted students of Thomas says more about Thomas’s breadth than it does about these scholars fine interpretations of him. Great texts, to borrow a phrase from Whitman, contain multitudes. Great teachers help us to navigate those multitudes.

In my last post, I discussed Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence, and I noted how Bloom hoped that he could help his readers get lost in great literature. But often when we read, especially when we encounter a new body of literature, we want someone to help us find our way. And if you want to find your way among the classic texts of East Asia, there is no better guide than Wm. Theodore de Bary. His latest book, an edited collection entitled Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics, is the perfect map for beginners to navigate the vast territory that is East Asian languages and cultures. The book is the fruit of more than 60 years of research and teaching. Read the rest of this entry »

At one point in Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel Freedom, Walter and Patty Berglund, the married couple at the center of the narrative, discuss Patty’s recent visit to their lake house in Minnesota. They don’t talk about the most consequential thing that happened during Patty’s lakeside idyll: Patty slept with Richard Katz, a dark, sexy musician who also happens to be Walter’s best friend of many years. What they do talk about is Patty’s fevered reading, for the first time, of War and Peace.

“I’ve been reading a ton,” she said. “I think War and Peace is actually the best book I’ve ever read.”

“I’m jealous,” Walter said.

“Ah?”

“Getting to read that book for the first time. Having whole days to do it.”

“It was great. I feel kind of altered by it.”

“You seem a little altered, actually.”

“Not in a bad way, I hope.”

“No. Just different.”

This is meant to be painfully funny, of course. Having just cheated on her husband, Patty is in fact altered. (And her marriage with her.) But Franzen is also getting at something else in this passage: the strange, exhilarating, unrepeatable nature of reading a great work of literature for the first time.

I’m a firm believer in re-reading—I’ve probably read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead at least ten times—but this doesn’t blind me to the fact that the first reading of a book is a special reading. It’s that first reading that allows you to approach a text with a sense of wonder, with an openness that allows the text to work on you even while you work on it; it’s that first reading that can cause you to exclaim with delight, “What a world that such books exist in it!” Upon subsequent readings, these thoughts and feelings can come to seem naïve, even sentimental. But that doesn’t make this initial sense of exhilaration any less real.

Over Christmas break, I read War and Peace for the first time, and I find myself agreeing with Patty: it’s actually the best book I’ve ever read. In part this is because it’s perhaps the most encompassing book I’ve ever read. It contains fully embodied characters, intense historical and philosophical speculation, and precise, beautiful sensual details. Marilynne Robinson has written that great books are “witnesses to the strangeness and brilliance of human experience.” By this standard, War and Peace is a masterpiece. I constantly found myself thinking, “Yes! That’s exactly how life is!”

As I type these words, I see how they might seem naïve, even sentimental. War and Peace isn’t life, after all, but Tolstoy’s rendering of it. Now that I’m no longer under the novel’s trance, I recognize that there’s a bit too much romanticizing of the Russian soul for my taste, and that the concluding section, in which Tolstoy offers his philosophy of history and free will, might strike other readers as dull, though I loved it. I’m not sure if I will stand by my (and Patty’s) judgment of the novel a year from now; I suspect I will, but I can’t be sure. I do know, however, that my thrilling first reading won’t be recovered. It’s why we’re so often sad to close the final pages of a great book: not just because we don’t want the book to end, but because we don’t want our experience of reading the book to end, either.

I do feel as though I am lowering the tone of this enterprise by writing once again about crime.  Robert Lewis’s The Bank of the Black Sheep is set in the gray, damp, cold of a Welsh winter, a variation on the theme of the feckless private detective.  It’s a dark read that deftly combines bleakness with hilarity.  The cast of characters–almost all losers–have enough quirky humanity to matter.  That quirkiness, and the edgy excellence of the writing, kept me interested to the end.

Robin Llewelyn awakens handcuffed to a bed in the Howell Harris Hospice with no memory of his identity or why he is there.  He is on a morphine drip, apparently because he is dying of cancer.  Doctors have told him that enough morphine would erase his memory, but only temporarily.  The handcuffs, and a visit from a couple of unpleasant fellows from the local constabulary, lead Llewelyn to think that he has perhaps committed a crime or is suspected of having done so.  His handcuffs are removed and he asks to be taken off the drip so he can attempt to find out who he is, and what he may have done.

Llewelyn sneaks out of the hospice at night into the nearby market town of Llandovery.  At the bar of the White Hall Hotel, he orders a Watkins Ale and is so transfixed by its amber beauty that he cannot drink it.  Nothing much happens  until an oafish local farmer named Gerald blows through the door.  He spies Llewelyn and lumbers over to his table, behaving as though they knew each other well.   Llewelyn questions him about it, but Ger justs laughs.  Soon after their meeting, a parcel is delivered to Llewelyn’s room at the hospice.  It contains several thousand pounds in twenty-pound notes, a sawed-off shotgun, and a cryptic message.

The money means opportunity for Llewelyn.  He has no  friends at the hospice except for a brief acquaintance with the gentle Hilary Price.  She brings a breath of civility into his life–they attend a concert of Schubert’s music together–and he feels that she deserves a kinder fate than to end her days at Howell Harris. “Better, surely, that the sound outside your bedroom door is the soft tread of a husband or a daughter on the landing, and not the boots of nighttime security or foreign nurses.”   But Hilary dies, and Gerald’s money enables Llewelyn to escape the hospice altogether.

It is not entirely plausible that a man dying of lung cancer could survive the feats of physical endurance and abuse that Robin Llewelyn does, but he is a man driven to find out who he is  before death gathers him.  He pays a call on Gerald at his family farm only to find that Gerald has fled.  Poking around the barn Llewelyn makes two discoveries, one of which terrifies him and one which excites him.  He also finds a photograph of a young couple with a baby that tugs at his memory.

At this point the story becomes more of a caper, perhaps a noir-ish Big Deal On Madonna Street, with a hodge-podge of bad guys, less bad guys, and almost-good guys warily circling each other.  It begins to dawn on Llewelyn that he knows the bad guys fairly well, and it does not cheer him up.  One of them, Tomos Blethyn, accuses him of betraying them all, spitting out the words that stun him: “Even your own son.”

The pieces of Robin Llewelyn’s puzzle fall slowly into place.  The circle of felons, actual and potential, expands and contracts in various unpleasant ways.  Two bent coppers are disposed of.  Of himself and his small band of new friends, Llewelyn observes: “You should never underestimate the criminal who can consider himself a half-honest man.”  The author’s sly affection for this odd group of characters gives them life.  His attitude toward the caper that changes their lives is implicit in the quotation from Brecht which opens the book: “What’s breaking into a bank compared with founding one?”