Tremendous Trifles, August 29, 2023
Barbie! Mencken! C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot!
It’s Always Time to Read Mencken
Is there a greater non-fiction prose stylist than H.L. Mencken? “The Sage of Baltimore” was a journalist in the early 20th century and regularly turned out some of the most impeccable prose ever written. Indeed, every time I read him, I frequently pause to marvel at how he achieved his desired effect. There are obviously others whose prose is wonderful (Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion), but page for page, I think Mencken beats them all.
He was also rather curmudgeonly and spared nobody in his grouses. Yet, he was always cheerful. In short, he has long been one of my role models! There is no bit of prose I reflect on more often when I contemplate the foibles of Mount Holyoke, than this:
Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, why do you live here?
A: Why do men go to zoos?
Beginning September 12, I am leading a Liberty Fund virtual reading group on Mencken. Tuesdays from 3-4 (Eastern) for four weeks. We'll be reading Mencken's remarks on democracy and government, the nature of a commercial society, education and culture, and a set of some of his best essays which don’t fit those categories.
Here is the official blurb:
“We live in a land of abounding quackeries, and if we do not learn how to laugh we succumb to the melancholy disease which afflicts the race of viewers-with-alarm.” H.L. Mencken, arguably the greatest prose stylist of the 20th century, was one of the most well-known essayists a century ago. Few escaped his withering pen. He wrote widely on politics, economics, education, and culture. This VRG explores a selection of essays from Mencken’s own collection of his best work. How perceptive was his evaluation of the United States? Is there an underlying philosophy in his writings or was he simply a curmudgeon or a misanthrope?
There is still some space in the reading group. It makes no difference if you have ever read Mencken before or not; the whole point of the Liberty Fund virtual reading groups is to get a cross-section of people and have a marvelous conversation. Hope you’ll join us. It’s not only free to join, but if you come to all four weeks, they send you an Amazon gift card! Get paid to read Mencken! What could be better? You can sign up here.
The Mirror of Barbie
Mencken's review of Barbie, the cultural event of the moment, would have been extremely entertaining. Fortunately, it isn't necessary to have his review to be amused by the commentaries on Barbie.
I saw the movie with the family. One of the offspring was extremely eager to see it, and she dragooned her sister and even, mirabile dictu, The Long Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator along. (Your Humble Narrator presented no obstacle to be persuaded to attend this family gathering; I like going to the movies!) Oddly, the offspring who most wanted to see the movie was the one who liked it the least. She felt really bad for poor Ken. Barbie was not very nice to Ken.
My take: On the level of a summer popcorn movie, it was fun. Lots of clever jokes and amusing moments. The 2001 bit had me laughing from the starting gun. But the dominant impression I had walking out of the theater was that when it came to a presentation of The Message, the movie was a muddled mess. What in the world was the movie trying to say? It was obviously trying to make a grander point about the world in which we live, but no matter what Message I tried to fit into the movie, it was painfully easy to see how the movie undermined The Message.
Then I started to read the reviews. If you just read one review, you can determine what the author thinks was The Message. The problem is when you read more than one review. It quickly becomes apparent that the reviews can be divided into Absolute Adoration and Complete Condemnation. I have yet to see a Neutral review.
But, why do the Adorers Adore and the Haters Hate? This is where it gets fascinating. When you look at people who are praising the movie, there is zero consistency in what is being praised. The positive reviewers find very different messages in the movie. Then when you turn to the negative reviews, there is even more examples of The Message.
Want examples? Micah Mattix in his Prufrock column runs through a bunch of the reviews:
Helen Andrews, American Conservative: Barbie is about the gift of growing old.
Pravina Rudra, The New Statesman: Barbie is about making feminism more feminine.
Katha Pollitt, The Nation: Barbie shows girls can do anything, as long as they are gorgeous while doing it.
Grace Segers, The New Republic: Barbie shows how we ignore the cultural context of the plastic representatives of different groups.
Louise Perry, Maiden Mother Matriarch: Barbie is about the crisis of men in the modern world.
Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker: Barbie is about the crisis of motherhood.
Kay S. Hymowitz, City Journal: Barbie is a giant marketing ploy.
On top of those, here are a couple of other takes:
Elayne Allen, Public Discourse: Barbie is a rebuke of transhumanism.
Titus Techera, Acton Institute: Barbie is a paean to the anti-erotic world in which we live.
It slowly dawned on me. The genius of Barbie, the reason it has been a smash hit, is that The Message of the movie is whatever you want it to be. Barbie is a mirror. What I saw as incoherence is part of the design; the movie is packed with possible meanings and whatever you go into the movie wanting to find, there it is. That is true for both the positive and the negative reviewers. If you go in wanting to hate the movie, it gives you an angle to see in the movie exactly what you most hate about modern society.
That explanation for the myriad of Messages people find in the movie applies to Your Humble Narrator too, by the way. When I look out at society, I see a jumbled mess of people with incompletely worked-out philosophies all involved in a brawl over whose platitudes are best. Meanwhile, I step back and am constantly amused. Lo and behold, that is exactly what Barbie was to me. It is, truth be told, always a bit disconcerting when you realize your explanation of why others responded to a movie the way they did also applies to yourself.
All of which raises a wonderful future course of action. If you want to quickly discover a person’s core beliefs, all you have to do is ask the person, “What was The Message of Barbie?”
[And, by the way, if you are one of those people who are proud that you have not yet seen Barbie, your reaction too is a perfect example of The Message. Do you really think the Barbie Phenomenon (a shallow movie about a toy doll becoming all the rage) is a demonstration of the shallowness of modern society?]
C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot
Speaking of polarizing figures, let's talk about C.S. Lewis, the patron saint of Modern Evangelicals. To say Lewis was a cantankerous guy is an understatement. Humphrey Carpenter (in The Inklings) describes Lewis’ relationship with students:
For every one of them who (like John Wain) managed to enjoy and ape Lewis’s forceful logic, there were at least as many who were alarmed and cowed by the heavy-handedness of his manner, combined with his general refusal to put his relationship with his pupils on anything like a personal footing. A few lapped it up, but some very nearly ran away. “If you think that way about Keats, you needn't come here again!” Lewis once roared down the stairs to a departing pupil. And on another occasion, when an Australian student professed that he could never read Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, and refused to admit its good qualities even after Lewis had chanted a hundred lines of it at him, Lewis declared, “The sword must settle it!” and reached for a broadsword and a rapier which (according to J.A.W. Bennett, who was there) were inexplicably in the corner of the room. They fenced—Lewis, of course, choosing the broadsword—and, said Bennett, “Lewis actually drew blood—a slight nick.”
Egads! Lewis's feuds were not just with students. He was merciless toward colleagues too. And then there is his feud with T.S. Eliot.
On many occasions, Lewis crafted opportunities to make slyly negative remarks about Eliot. My favorite: when Lewis took a job at Cambridge, he gave a very prominent inaugural lecture discussing the societal differences between the Medieval Era and the 20th Century. When he needed an example of the problems of the modern era, he naturally turned to Eliot:
I do not see in any of these the slightest parallel to the state of affairs disclosed by a recent symposium on Mr. Eliot's ‘Cooking Egg.’ Here we find seven adults (two of them Cambridge men) whose lives had been specially devoted to the study of poetry discussing a very short poem which has been before the world for thirty-odd years; and there is not the slightest agreement among them as to what, in any sense of the word, it means.
Now, Lewis is most definitely right about the poem; if you doubt that conclusion, you should really read (or reread) the poem and try to explain it. But, what is fascinating is that of all the mid-20th century poets, Lewis picked Eliot to be his example of the problem. Why? After all, Lewis and Eliot were largely fighting on the same side of the cultural battles in the mid-20th century. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Lewis saw himself competing with Eliot for popularity.
An always alert reader of Tremendous Trifles recently sent me a pair of Substack posts written by Joel Miller. The first describes the strained relationship between Lewis and Eliot, and then notes that they actually did reconcile at the end of their lives. It cheered me up to read the happy ending. It was Miller's second essay that truly surprised me, though. It was much more than a casual reconciliation.
After his wife died, Lewis started a sort of a diary documenting how he was doing. Eventually, Lewis decided he should publish the work in case it might be helpful to others experiencing grief. But, the pain was still too raw for Lewis to want the book published under his own name, so he explored publishing it under a pen name. He sent the manuscript to Faber and Faber, where Eliot was a director. Eliot discovered the manuscript was written by Lewis because one of the other directors at the firm was a former student of Lewis and recognized his handwriting.
Eliot decided to publish the book (A Grief Observed), which was a gamble because the book would not appear with Lewis' name on the cover. Eliot then wrote a rather effusive blurb about it:
It consists of a series of reflections forming a coherent whole, by a husband upon the death of his wife. A man of mature mind, a Christian, has seen a wife to whom he was deeply attached approach death by the way of a slow, painful, and incurable malady. Now that she is gone, he probes his own feelings and reveals his thoughts with relentless honesty.
Several of us have read this meditation and immediately recognized it as the work of a man of exceptional intellect, exceptional sensibility, and an exceptional gift of expression. The fact that we choose to publish so brief a record of sorrow is evidence enough of our belief in its value. The book will find a grateful and appreciative audience among many men and women and, in particular, among those who have suffered in this way and have thought, as well as felt, while they suffered.
We should all rejoice that sometimes literary feuds have extremely happy endings.
Book Giveaway
Now is the time for all good readers of Tremendous Trifles to come to the rescue of my bookshelves by signing up for the chance to get one or more of the following books. I am ever grateful to everyone who provides a good home to these books. If you, or someone you know, would like any of the below, please don’t hesitate to sign up by clicking the nice purple buttons.
First up: F. Scott Fitzgerald. In addition to writing one of the candidates for the Great American Novel, Fitzgerald wrote many outstanding short stories. Babylon Revisited and Other Stories has some of his best. “The Ice Palace,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “May Day,” and more. Paperback copy in great shape.
Next: one of the biggest hurdles in learning to read the Great Books for pleasure is the woeful state of the history classes most of us took in school. It took me many years of floundering before I discovered interesting histories of Western Civilization that started putting everything into place. Richard Tarnas’ The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View is a book of that type. Joseph Campbell said it was “the most lucid and concise presentation I have ever read.” Huston Smith: “The best intellectual history of the West in one volume I have ever seen.” In other words, if you are looking for a one-stop place to find out how all the Great Book and Ideas are connected, you’ll like this book.
Finally, some lighter fare. A steady diet of Great Books can sometimes lead to the moment when your brain says, “Can we please have a lighter meal this time?” And that is where detective novels come in. There is something relaxing and fun about settling in for a grand process of discovery. Here is a set of three by some of the masters of the craft: Rex Stout (of Nero Wolfe Fame), Henning Mankell (of Kurt Wallander fame), and Robert Ludlum (of heroes who always seem like how Ludlum fantasizes about himself fame). If you want some nice reading for a lazy evening, these will be great.
Why it is Not Yet Time to Fear AI
Prompt: Barbie looking into a mirror:
Evil Queen Barbie??
Prompt: terrified college student running down the stairs, in style of early Disney movie
Is she going upstairs or downstairs?
