Alan Jacobs's Blog

An essay I have long meant to write bears (will bear, might bear) the following thesis: The last great masterpieces of the modernist epic are an anthropologist’s memoir and a work of literary criticism: Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955) and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). 

Kenner thought about that book for several years before writing it, and I discover from his correspondence with Guy Davenport that his ambitions for it were quite large indeed, and artful: 

I still walk round the unwritten Pound Era, craning my neck to study its structural geometry, and occasionally doing a study of some ornamentation. Quite Frank Lloyd Wright. I see that book like a Wright house. He counterpointed his great structural thrusts with magnificent detailing, a lamp post, a flower pot, integrally so. [I:328] 

He was always talking through ideas for the book with Davenport, and when he realized that a stray comment from his friend — “Thought is a labyrinth” — would make an excellent final sentence of his book, so it became. Davenport’s June 1963 visit to the house Pound had grown up in, in Wyncote PA, led to a conversation with the then-current owner of the house, who recalled that five years earlier, when Pound had just been released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, he came there and slept in the house one last time, waking at dawn and walking barefoot down the street. “For a long time he sat on the steps of the Presbyterian church a block away” (I:355). When Kenner read this account from Davenport, he immediately realized that it would make a beautiful ending to the book he had not yet written (I:358). And so it became. 

For some time Davenport tried to get Kenner to read a favorite book of his: The Lord of the Rings. (That someone with as intricately Mardarin a sensibility as Davenport loved LOTR is fascinating.) Finally, later in the year of Davenport’s visit to Wyncote — when the Kenner family were living in Charlottesville, Virginia and the scholar’s wife was dying of cancer — Kenner picked up the first volume from the University of Virginia’s library. On 16 October he wrote to Davenport, prefacing the letter with a quotation: 

… But I will say this: the rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come.

Then: 

Dear Guy:

What do you think of the above as general epigraph to The Pound Era? On a page by itself, written without attribution, exact credit left to notes in back of book. [I:428] 

This was not to be so: The Pound Era does not have an epigraph, only a dedication in memory of Kenner’s wife. And I think Kenner was probably right not to use it: it would not really have fit the tone and mood of the book. But the triangulation of these three works of epic scope – Pound’s Cantos, Tolkien’s novel, and Kenner’s own masterpiece — is an interesting one to reflect on. Certainly Davenport saw that: “Great! the epigraph. It pulls together EP as wizard, transmuter, translator, transmitter of tradition; Gondor as the “city in the mind,” Wagadu, the holy mountain, besieged Ithaka” (I:435). 

“Wagadu” — a word embedded in the name of the city now known as Ouagadougou — is the great empire of Ghana. Pound had read about its repeated destruction and rebuilding in Leo Frobenius: in Canto LXXIV he says it is “now in the mind indestructible.” Davenport’s essay “Pound and Frobenius” is brilliant on all this. Davenport may have linked Wagadu to Gondor only thematically, but I wonder if the connection to Africa may have come to him because of the Ethiopian city of Gondar. Leo Frobenius spent some time in Ethiopia…. 

Hugh Kenner to Guy Davenport, 27 April 1962 (I:99):

Yes, machines evolve, as Disney knows. His art utterly germane to a machine biology. The clue to decline of silent film was switch for 24 f.p.s., with introduction of sound. Before that, projection speed was 16 f.p.s., and camera speed was whatever the cameraman cranked at. Result was funny flicker, mechanizing human form. The men become machines. Note that Sennett comedies always show them contending with machines, notably cars. That was the art form cinema briefly created, a flicker-world where men & machines meet on equal terms, but machines, being normal denizens, have all the advantage. Killed, as usual, by misunderstanding of the form’s nature; people thought it was meant to be verisimilitude, and standardizing speeds made for same, for smoothness. That accursed word “photoplay.” The movies were full of Stoic Comedians, for a brief period. I think Ulysses owes much to silent film. The animated cartoon retains that allimportant flicker, because the successive frames, even when their number is correct for completing the action in a natural time, are each of them sharp; whereas in live movie the “moving” frames (swing of arm or leg between extreme positions) are blurred.

Davenport to Kenner, days later (I:101):

World’s first photo (Niépce) looks exactly like a De Chirico. I think “technology” may have anticipated (in Siegfried Giedion’s sense) a great deal of the style of modern art. Then the first movie is merely a length of film showing the arrival of a locomotive in a station. For Muybridge motion was the human body flowing from attitude to attitude, and nude — last logical nude (dismissing the academic houri of Matisse’s and Picasso’s dream-visions) to appear in art. Modern industrial man is definitely a clothed critter. Isn’t it Premier amour where the hero can’t think for any reason for taking off his hat? For the true arrival of the motion picture motion meant a steam locomotive. That locomotive (dinosaur to the horse’s tyrannosaurus, other way around I believe) has been in the movies ever since.

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Kenner to Davenport, 3 May 1962 (I:103):

You are profound on motion and movies. You are in fact very often profound, merely for private eyes, and I cannot escape the reflection that there are potential aficionados … who are deprived of something. That paragraph ought to be an essay! In fact you should consider a John Pairman Brown-sized book on 19th century visual, so organized as to permit sequence of miniatures, interspersed with illustrations. Not a flowing & bloated treatise, but something that wd. use Muybridge, parts catalogues, locomotives, movies, Degas vs. Leica, etc., in ideogram.

Davenport to Kenner, 8 May 1962 (I:108):

I like the idea of a neat little book on motion, machines, metaphors, painting, photography, the nude, or

JOHN RUSKIN’S VELOCIPEDE

Ten Illustrated Lectures

Chap. I: Mr Babbage’s Stomach Pump and Herbert Spencer’s Utilitarian Suit of Clothes. Chapt. II: PreRaphaelite Surfaces and the Seascapes of William Holman Hunt as Index of the Age.

I’m not wholly facetious. No one has ever encouraged me to do anything, and it makes me dizzy to think that anyone would. Harry Levin’s attitude was to keep me from writing anything. [Levin was Davenport’s dissertation advisor at Harvard.]

More on the “little book” as seed sprouts dicotyledonously in the mind.

Kenner to Davenport, 10 May 1962 (I:111):

Yes yes, JOHN RUSKIN’S VELOCIPEDE. You are right, lightning strike disclosing the most prominent object (hitherto overlooked): MOTION is the 19th century theme. Everybody has thought it was morals, but that was their stasis. Our views of the age are greyly sociological; Dark Satanic Mills, etc. Babbage takes child labor for granted. IF one can simply take such things for granted, as we take slavery for granted when we consider Greece, then we can see the technological/aesthetic exhilaration. I remember the revelation in 1956 of seeing some pre-Raphaelite paintings in the original, after years of sepia reproductions: color juicy & exultant. N.B.: NO OTHER ART REPRODUCES SO BADLY. Think out why that should have been so, when all minds were on problems of reproduction, and you will have hit on the central dialectic. Old Man Mose has spoken. I do not know the answer, I merely know that that is the problem or a way of posing the problem.

Davenport to Kenner, 15 May 1962 (I.119):

For years I’ve wanted access to the gr-r-reat Muybridge study of the human body in motion (that kept Degas and Meissonier up all night, looking). I have the Dover edition: incomplete and miserably reproduced. Harvard has none. I had planned to go look at Penn’s this summer. Well, last night I was wandering about our library — elephant folder! Muybridge’s Animals in Motion! The other half of the great undertaking! I lugged it to my office, cleared the desk, and opened it. Bless Gawd, some 1887 benefactor of knowledge had bought the Human Body in Motion, disguised it as the animaux, and snuck it into our pious, clean library. I wonder if anybody has ever looked at it in all these years. I haven’t told anybody, as the depraved students will no doubt snitch the plates of surrealistic ladies, stark nekkid, taking tea, raking, washing bébé, walking upstairs. A treasure, and discovery. Since Muybridge’s name was Muggeridge (and Eadweard, Edward), I suspect him of being as great a crank and splendid genius as Babbage.

Davenport to Kenner, 24 May 1962 (I:129):

Now Disney and Babbage belong to you. I’ve picked your pockets enough, but only when you spread the contents onto a printed page. Stealing from you, though, is like dipping water from the sea. As the curious “motion book” shapes itself, I shall place all Kenner-hatched material before you, so you can object. In the matinal notes I’ve made thus far, I think I shall start with Eakins, Muybridge, and Ives. I wouldn’t venture that statement to anybody but you. I need a broad base of activity to which I can point and say, See! your ideas about the corrosive spirit of the Machine Age are whacky. Eakins & Muybridge, the first to analyse motion, gave Disney his starting place. They took apart, showing him how to put together. Eakins perceived nothing but the intelligent mind at its skill: surgeons, athletes, mathematicians: the whole oeuvre which fits together without a seam. At the Paris Exposition Eakins took no interest in the Impressionists (on view in a shed by the main gallery) but was ecstatic over the great American locomotive. Ives will be my Babbage, and my musical knowledge will have to be got up. I’ll go into all this later.

The adjective for what I want to isolate and expose can only be Counterpreraphaelite: the kind of word that Frank Meyer has been upset over lately.

If I can work with two themes, fine:

MACHINE

MOTION

Then I have a web in which I can weave Muybridge and Butler, Darwin and Birdwhistell, Morris and Ruskin, photography and Cubism, Stein and Carlos Williams. Shall try to be informative about transmutations of subjects as they pass from mind to mind.

Kenner to Davenport, 26 May 1962 (I:131):

Dear Guy:

There is no property in the things of the mind; and if Babbage and even Disney are part of your subject for heaven’s sakes use them. I will with equal aplomb use anything handy that I pick up from you. I suspect you will need Babbage before you are finished. All rot, as you say, the corrosive influence of the machine. The machine is homeopathic therapy for the Cartesian poison. The story of technology since the 18th century is the story of Locke’s and Descartes’ metaphors being realized in hardware. Camera, tape recorder, data file. Analysis of motion (leading via Muybridge to the ciné camera) is already there in Geulinex (vide quotes in my Beckett). ENIAC, MANIAC, UNIVAC, the IBM world, all this is to the adding machine as Bach’s D Minor Toccata & Fugue is to the solo recorder; and the adding machine was excogitated by Pascal. The romantics who thought they hated machines, and gave us the cant phrases of hate, hated Locke their father. (One of the decisive gestures in i canti is the substitution of gold for the machine as counter-symbol, old Ez American enough to know that the steam-engine ain’t never done a poet no harm.)

Eakins, Muybridge, Ives — an utterly fresh beginning. On with it!

I don’t know what’s happening elsewhere, but in the Honors College here at Baylor — or rather among those of us who teach the humanities — it’s been fun to see what we’re doing to banish the LLM demons. Most of us are incorporating a lot of handwriting into our teaching: several colleagues have been doing blue-book exams, a couple have bought their students cheap composition books from Walmart and are making them create commonplace books, and I am regularly handing out passages from the texts we’re reading, printed out with very wide margins, and asking students to annotate them. I tell them I want their pages to look like Balzac’s galley proofs.

We’re not just going back to the pre-PC era, we’re going back to the pre-typing era. 

And the students almost to a person think it’s cool! They know that they’re being protected from temptations that they couldn’t resist.

From my biography of C. S. Lewis, The Narnian:

There was a bright spot in the Lewis home during at least part of the war: her name was June Flewett, and she was one of the many thousands of children who were evacuated from London and housed elsewhere as soon as the war began. The Kilns had taken in four schoolgirls the day after the Germans invaded Poland; they and others would come and go throughout the war. But June, who came to live with the Lewises in the summer of 1943, was different. She was certainly a saint, perhaps an angel of mercy. Sixteen when she arrived, she was a devout Catholic and an aspiring actress, and her favorite writer was C. S. Lewis, but she had no idea that the “Jack” whose house she was living in was the same man. It is not even clear that she knew his last name was Lewis, since it was Mrs. Moore to whom she was first introduced, and Jack and Warnie, as far as June knew, were just Mrs. Moore’s sons. Only after she had been around long enough to develop what she later called “a tremendous crush” on Lewis — “Of course I fell madly in love with him” — did she discover his identity. It was quite a shock. (Significantly, the first thing that attracted June to Lewis was his unfailing kindness to Minto, and she also saw very clearly that Minto nearly worshiped Lewis. The relationship had become very difficult, but much love was still in it — though obviously of a very different kind than that with which their relationship began.)

The two years that June lived at the Kilns were the best of the decade in that household. Everyone adored her, and she managed to keep Minto happier than anyone else could. There were … two maids working in the house at this time, but both of them were in their different ways mentally unstable, and in any case they could not achieve the standards of housekeeping that Minto thought necessary. Only June could mediate these conflicts, and when it became clear in late 1944 that at the turn of the new year she would be leaving — to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London — the whole household was devastated. Warnie’s tribute to her, in his diary, is really astonishing:

I have met no one of any age further advanced in the Christian way of life. From seven in the morning till nine at night, shut off from people of her own age, almost grudged the time for her religious duties, she has slaved at the Kilns, for a fractional wage; I have never seen her other than gay, eager to anticipate exigent demands, never complaining, always self-accusing in the frequent crises of that dreary house. Her reaction to the meanest ingratitude was to seek its cause in her own faults. She is one of those rare people to whom one can venture to apply the word “saintly.”

Lewis too — habitually more precise in his language than Warnie, who tended to exaggerate — called her “a perfectly saintly girl” in a letter to Sister Penelope, and to her parents said that “she is, without exception, the most selfless person I have ever known.”

A difficult moment for Lewis had arisen when June’s parents wrote to ask him whether she should leave the Kilns to enroll in the Royal Academy, where she had already been accepted. Though acting was her passion and lifelong dream, the difficulty had arisen because, as Lewis told her parents, “June’s own view is simply and definitively that she won’t leave here of her own free will.” Lewis — and clearly this took an extraordinary effort of will — replied that “June ought, in her own best interests, to go to the Academy this coming term.” The conventions of such a situation required that he go on to say how much they would all miss her, but he did not, and he told the Flewetts why: “I don’t like thinking of it.” However, he had already spilled the beans: earlier in the letter he had written that “when June goes the only bright spot in our prospect goes with her.”

June Flewett acted under the name Jill Raymond. In 1950 she married Clement Freud — grandson of Sigmund Freud, a radio and TV personality and later a Liberal member of Parliament — and when Freud was knighted she became Lady Jill Freud. It is often said that she was the model for Lucy Pevensie in the Narnia books, though I do not recall any real evidence for that claim. There may be something that I have forgotten.

She has now died at the age of 98. Rest in peace.

The Museo Mario Praz in Rome is the home of the great art historian and critic named, you guessed it, Mario Praz (1896-1982). Though Praz took degrees from Bologna and Florence, he was born in Rome, died there, and in between was a constant figure in the city’s social world. In graduate school I read his 1930 book The Romantic Agony and was quite taken with it, though I realized, with regret, that I couldn’t actually use it — the day of its idiom had passed. (I would have been quite surprised to know that he was still alive at the time.) Praz was very much a Romantic himself, a figure marked by a powerful artistic sensibility, which much of his criticism was intended to document.

The most interesting fact about Praz is this: his fellow Romans believed him to have the Evil Eye. Most of them did not think that he used it intentionally — though some have said that he would sometimes, as a kind of party trick, shatter light bulbs by looking at them. Generally, it seems, mild calamities would accompany him, like small dogs.

Muriel Spark, who lived in Rome for a time in the late Sixties, wrote soon after his death,

On one special evening when Montserrat Caballe was singing in a Bellini opera, the rain started coming through the roof. Now, a well-known Roman of that time was the late Mario Praz, a critic and scholar of English literature (he wrote The Romantic Agony). He was said to have the Evil Eye and was known as the Malocchio. This nickname wasn’t attributed with any repugnance, but rather as an affectionately recorded and realistic fact (for such people are regarded as carriers rather than operators of the Evil Eye). Naturally, everyone noticed when Mario Praz was present at a party, and waited for the disaster. There was usually a stolen car at the end of the evening, or someone called away because his uncle had died. Well, when I saw the rain coming in the roof at the Opera, and heard the commotion behind me, I looked round instinctively for Mario Praz. Sure enough, there was our dear Malocchio sitting under the afflicted spot. He died recently and was mourned on a national scale. (The Italians put their artists and people of letters on a higher level than anywhere else I have known.) Before his house could be unsealed for his heirs, robbers got in and looted his lifetime collection of museum pieces and memorabilia.

It seems that the thieves managed to steal around 200 pieces — a disturbing number, but over a thousand remained. The official tourism site for Rome says of the Museo Mario Praz that

every single piece [in the museum] had been bought by the collector in the European antiquarian market for more than sixty years and carefully set in the buildings where he lived in Rome, at the beginning in the great apartment of Palazzo Ricci in Via Giulia and then in 1969 at Palazzo Primoli, where he remained before passing.

Praz is perhaps best known today for his writings on interior design — this has been so since late in his life — and Guy Davenport once speculated that Praz became so attentive to interiors because his possession of the Evil Eye made him reluctant to go out in public. That’s certainly a romantic idea, and therefore one tempting to associate with Praz, but so many Romans talked about seeing him at parties and concerts that it simply cannot be true.

I want to visit the Museo Mario Praz one day, but I wonder if in doing so I’ll lose my wallet or sprain my ankle on the steps.

When I’m trying to decide whether I want to watch a movie, my first step is to ask this question: Do I want to watch a movie that looks like that? I know from long experience that I have strong responses to the visual Gestalt of a film, so strong that if that Gestalt alienates me I will not enjoy the movie, no matter how strong the story and the acting. For example: I watched the trailer for del Toro’s Frankenstein and said: Nope. Not for me. Frankenstein is one of the essential myths and del Toro is at least a semi-genius, but I simply do not want to watch a movie that looks like that. 

It’s true that I generally prefer film to digital, but some of the most beautiful movies I know (e.g. Malick’s A Hidden Life) were filmed digitally. So it’s not digital photography as such that alienates me, though perhaps certain practices of filmmaking strongly associated with digital technologies do. That’s pretty vague, I know — maybe this brief video by Patrick Tomasso alongside this one will flesh things out. 

(A number of people seem to like this much longer video on the same subject, but I dunno, anyone who holds up the Avatar movies as paragons of cinematic excellence is not on my wavelength. I couldn’t even get through the trailers of those things.) 

What goes into the making a beautiful visual Gestalt? So many things: directors and DPs have to be sensitive to — and this is an incomplete list —   

color exposure light and shadow grain depth of fieldcamera placementcamera movementpace of cutting 

And there are no fixed rules to any of these things. Terrence Malick and Emmanuel Lubezki developed The Dogma, but the final item on the list is “Accept the exception to the dogma” — in much the same way that Orwell, having made a list of rules of good writing, makes this the last one: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” 

So I might in general prefer a still camera, à la Ozu, but the way that Max Ophüls moves his camera is one of the great joys of movie-watching: take a look at this scene, for example. Or this justly famous scene from Taxi Driver: still, moving, still. Or any Malick movie — but let’s remember the astonishing crane shots from The Thin Red Line. 

I don’t really have a Dogma; I just know that some movies’ visual worlds draw me in and and those of others drive me away, alienate my sensibility. And though I can’t tell everything about a film’s visual world from a trailer — for instance, trailers tell you little about how a movie is cut — I can tell enough. So hooray for trailers: they save me a lot of money. 

In one of my classes we’re about halfway through The Brothers Karamazov, and we had an interesting conversation yesterday in which we tried to sort through what Ivan means when he says he has a “Euclidean mind.” One of my students rightly pointed out that my own explanation of the phrase did not seem to fit all his uses of it. So I came home and wrote up some thoughts that I emailed to the class. This is what I wrote to them.

Here’s how Ivan introduces the concept of a “Euclidean” mind:

… it is not for me to understand about God. I humbly confess that I do not have any ability to resolve such questions, I have a Euclidean mind, an earthly mind, and therefore it is not for us to resolve things that are not of this world. And I advise you never to think about it, Alyosha my friend, and most especially about whether God exists or not. All such questions are completely unsuitable to a mind created with a concept of only three dimensions. And so, I accept God, not only willingly, but moreover I also accept his wisdom and his purpose, which are completely unknown to us….

That is: because our minds are earthly we cannot understand anything about God, since God is by definition trans-earthly. Therefore the only option is accept, by an act of will I suppose, what we cannot possibly understand.

So Ivan says

“I accept God” “I also accept his wisdom and purpose” “I do not accept this world of God’s”

Now, at first this seems nonsensical to me. If you do not accept the world that God created then how can you claim to accept “his wisdom and purpose”? But I think he means this: I know that God is God and I am not, I agree in principle that He is infinitely good and in comparison with him I am just a bedbug, but still, with my Euclidean mind — the mind God gave me, by the way — I look at the way children suffer in this world and I say: No thanks. I can’t accept that and I don’t want to accept that.

Then, at the end of his discourse, he comes back to the “Euclidean” theme and reaffirms some of his points made earlier — but adds some confusing ones:

I am a bedbug, and I confess in all humility that I can understand nothing of why it’s all arranged as it is. So people themselves are to blame: they were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven, knowing that they would become unhappy — so why pity them? Oh, with my pathetic, earthly, Euclidean mind, I know only that there is suffering, that none are to blame, that all things follow simply and directly one from another, that everything flows and finds its level — but that is all just Euclidean gibberish, of course I know that, and of course I cannot consent to live by it! What do I care that none are to blame and that I know it — I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself.

He goes on for some time in this way. The more I think about it the more confused I get. Some of it I can make no sense of at all: I have no idea what he means when he says “everything flows and finds its level.” But as far as I can tell he’s saying three chief things here:

Christianity teaches that “people themselves are to blame” for rebelling against God; But with his Euclidean mind he can only see that, thanks to the way God chose to make the world, “there is suffering” for which “none [that is, none of us human beings] are to blame”; Nevertheless, even if no human being is to blame, “I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself.”

So who will be the object of his retribution? We find out in the story he goes on to tell, the story of the Grand Inquisitor: the Son of God will be the one he punishes.

Ivan has a very complicated relationship to what he thinks Catholicism is: he believes it to be a power-hungry politically-motivated corruption of the Gospel, a network of manipulators using the appeal of Christianity to accomplish their own ends — but that’s precisely what he would do in the same circumstances, because he wants retribution here and now, not in some imagined hereafter. If Ivan could have been anything he wanted to be, he probably would have been a great Renaissance Pope: corrupt by the standards of the Gospel, but effective in worldly terms.

What Ivan tries to avoid seeing, what he can’t quite face or reckon with, is what we learn from Alyosha and Zosima: that God explicitly offers Himself to be the object of our retribution. “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again; this charge I have received from my Father” (John 10:18). 

Dorothy L. Sayers had written ”Kings in Judaea,” the first play of a series she had been asked to write for the BBC Children’s Service, in the autumn of 1940, the project fell apart when Sayers refused to make changes demanded of her by the Children’s Service staff. But the Rev. James Welch, the BBC’s director of religious broadcasting, who had originated the idea, was unwilling to let it drop and eventually managed to get Sayers writing again, with the Children’s Service no longer involved. In late 1941, then, she resumed writing the plays that would become The Man Born to Be King, and would work on them through the middle of the next year. (A play was performed every four weeks between December of 1941 and October of 1942.) 

You may read more about this contentious and often comical situation in this excerpt from Kathryn Wehr’s outstanding critical edition of the sequence — which includes James Welch’s own preface to the original publication of the plays in book form. 

Curiously enough, at the same time in 1941 that Sayers resumed work on her plays, W. H. Auden began writing what could become For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio — a task he would complete in the late spring of 1942. 

Two gifted Christian writers, then, asking themselves at the same time the same question: How might one portray, for a 20th-century audience, the life (or part of the life) of Jesus Christ in a manner that is artistically and religiously serious? 

In an introduction to the published version of the plays, Sayers writes incisively and shrewdly about the challenges she faced: 

This process is not, of course, the same thing as “doing the Gospel story in a modern setting.” It was at a particular point in history that the Timeless irrupted into time. The technique is to keep the ancient setting, and to give the modern equivalent of the contemporary speech and manners. Thus we may, for example, represent the Sanhedrin as “passing resolutions” and “making entries in the minute-book,” for every official assembly since officialdom began has had some machinery for “agreeing together” and recording the result. We may make a Roman officer address his squad with modern military words of command, since some similar verbal technique must always and everywhere have been used to start and turn and stop bodies of soldiery, or to inspect their kit and parade-order. We may make a military policeman or a tax-collector lard his speech with scraps of American slang; for the local speech must have been full of catch-phrases picked up from the foreign soldiers and merchants who swarmed along the great trade-routes of the Empire; and for these bits and pieces of vulgar Latin, bastard Greek, and Syriac dialects the language of Hollywood is the modern equivalent. 

The American cultural imperium!

These changes were necessary, she felt, precisely because the story was so well-known to many BBC listeners in the lovely cadences of the Authorized Version: 

It is this misty, pleasant, picturesque obscurity which people miss when they complain, in the words of one correspondent, that in the modern presentation “the atmosphere created seems so different from that of the original story ….. where it is all so impressively and wonderfully told.” So it is. The question is, are we at this time of day sufficiently wondering and impressed? Above all, are we sufficiently disturbed by this extremely disturbing story? Sometimes the blunt new word will impress us more than the beautiful and old. “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man,” said Jesus — and then, seeing perhaps that the reaction to this statement was less vigorous than it might have been, He repeated it, but this time using a strong and rather vulgar word, meaning “to eat noisily, like an animal” chew? Munch? Crunch? Champ? Chump? (But in the end, I was pusillanimous, and left it at “eat” not liking to offend the ears of the faithful with what Christ actually said.)

Thus far, then, concerning the language. I should add that no attempt has been made at a niggling antiquarian accuracy in trifles. The general effect aimed at has been rather that of a Renaissance painting, where figures in their modern habits mingle familiarly with others whose dress and behavior are sufficiently orientalised to give a flavor of the time and place and conform with the requirements of the story. 

Auden was faced with few of the challenges that beset Sayers: no grumpy listeners writing under the impression that “the original story” was made by King James’s translators, no Protestant Truth Society denouncing the plays before they even had been written. But when he sent his oratorio to his father — a physician and a learned man, but not especially literary — he received much the same kind of criticism. 

Auden replied on 13 October 1942 — as it happens, five days before the final play of Sayers’s sequence, “The King Comes to His Own,” was broadcast — with gentle firmness: 

Sorry you are puzzled by the oratorio. Perhaps you were expecting a purely historical account as one might give of the battle of Waterloo, whereas I was trying to treat it as a religious event which eternally recurs every time it is accepted. Thus the historical fact that the shepherds were shepherds is religiously accidental — the religious fact is that they were the poor and humble of this world for whom at this moment the historical expression is the city-proletariat, and so on with all the other figures. What we know of Herod, for instance, is that he was a Hellenised-Jew and a political ruler. Accordingly I have made him express the intellectual’s eternal objection to Christianity — that it replaces objectivity with subjectivity — and the politician’s eternal objection that it regards the state as having only a negative role. (See Marcus Aurelius.) . . .

I am not the first to treat the Christian data in this way, until the 18th Cent. it was always done, in the Mystery Plays for instance or any Italian paintings. It is only in the last two centuries that religion has been “humanized,” and therefore treated historically as something that happened a long time ago, hence the nursery picture of Jesus in a nightgown and a Parsifal beard.

If a return to the older method now seems startling it is partly because of the acceleration in the rate of historical change due to industrialization — there is a far greater difference between the accidents of life in 1600 AD and in 1942 than between those of 30 AD and 1600. 

That last point is a very shrewd one, and an explanation of why Auden makes such a point of modernizing his narrative: he rarely misses the opportunity to introduce a chronological incongruity, and is not afraid to relish the resulting humor. Here, for instance, is King Herod reflecting on his reign in Judaea: 

Barges are unloading soil fertiliser at the river wharves. Soft drinks and sandwiches may be had in the inns at reasonable prices. Allotment gardening has become popular. The highway to the coast goes straight up over the mountains and the truck-drivers no longer carry guns. Things are beginning to take shape. It is a long time since anyone stole the park benches or murdered the swans. There are children in this province who have never seen a louse, shopkeepers who have never handled a counterfeit coin, women of forty who have never hidden in a ditch except for fun. Yes, in twenty years I have managed to do a little. Not enough, of course. There are villages only a few miles from here where they still believe in witches.There isn’t a single town where a good bookshop would pay. One could count on the fingers of one hand the people capable of solving the problem of Achilles and the Tortoise. Still it is a beginning. In twenty years the darkness has been pushed back a few inches. 

Sayers could not have done this, even if she had wanted to — and she was unlikely to have wanted to. She was tasked with sticking closely to a narrative shape clearly recognizable from the Gospels, and I think she enjoyed that challenge. Auden’s (self-chosen) job was a very different one. But both of them were moved to reflect, and reflect very intelligently, on the ways that the Gospel story demands that we understand it both historically and contemporaneously. It is Then and it is Now. 

Dorothy L. Sayers had written ”Kings in Judaea,” the first play of a series she had been asked to write for the BBC Children’s Service, in the autumn of 1940, the project fell apart when Sayers refused to make changes demanded of her by the Children’s Service staff. But the Rev. James Welch, the BBC’s director of religious broadcasting, who had originated the idea, was unwilling to let it drop and eventually managed to get Sayers writing again, with the Children’s Service no longer involved. In late 1941, then, she resumed writing the plays that would become The Man Born to Be King, and would work on them through the middle of the next year. (A play was performed every four weeks between December of 1941 and October of 1942.) 

You may read more about this contentious and often comical situation in this excerpt from Kathryn Wehr’s outstanding critical edition of the sequence — which includes James Welch’s own preface to the original publication of the plays in book form. 

Curiously enough, at the same time in 1941 that Sayers resumed work on her plays, W. H. Auden began writing what could become For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio — a task he would complete in the lats spring of 1942. 

Two gifted Christian writers, then, asking themselves at the same time the same question: How might one portray, for a 20th-century audience, the life (or part of the life) of Jesus Christ in a manner that is artistically and religiously serious? 

In an introduction to the published version of the plays, Sayers writes incisively and shrewdly about the challenges she faced: 

This process is not, of course, the same thing as “doing the Gospel story in a modern setting.” It was at a particular point in history that the Timeless irrupted into time. The technique is to keep the ancient setting, and to give the modern equivalent of the contemporary speech and manners. Thus we may, for example, represent the Sanhedrin as “passing resolutions” and “making entries in the minute-book,” for every official assembly since officialdom began has had some machinery for “agreeing together” and recording the result. We may make a Roman officer address his squad with modern military words of command, since some similar verbal technique must always and everywhere have been used to start and turn and stop bodies of soldiery, or to inspect their kit and parade-order. We may make a military policeman or a tax-collector lard his speech with scraps of American slang; for the local speech must have been full of catch-phrases picked up from the foreign soldiers and merchants who swarmed along the great trade-routes of the Empire; and for these bits and pieces of vulgar Latin, bastard Greek, and Syriac dialects the language of Hollywood is the modern equivalent. 

These changes were necessary, she felt, precisely because the story was so well-known to many BBC listeners in the lovely cadences of the Authorized Version: 

It is this misty, pleasant, picturesque obscurity which people miss when they complain, in the words of one correspondent, that in the modern presentation “the atmosphere created seems so different from that of the original story ….. where it is all so impressively and wonderfully told.” So it is. The question is, are we at this time of day sufficiently wondering and impressed? Above all, are we sufficiently disturbed by this extremely disturbing story? Sometimes the blunt new word will impress us more than the beautiful and old. “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man,” said Jesus — and then, seeing perhaps that the reaction to this statement was less vigorous than it might have been, He repeated it, but this time using a strong and rather vulgar word, meaning “to eat noisily, like an animal” chew? Munch? Crunch? Champ? Chump? (But in the end, I was pusillanimous, and left it at “eat” not liking to offend the ears of the faithful with what Christ actually said.)

Thus far, then, concerning the language. I should add that no attempt has been made at a niggling antiquarian accuracy in trifles. The general effect aimed at has been rather that of a Renaissance painting, where figures in their modern habits mingle familiarly with others whose dress and behavior are sufficiently orientalised to give a flavor of the time and place and conform with the requirements of the story. 

Auden was faced with few of the challenges that beset Sayers: no grumpy listeners writing under the impression that “the original story” was made by King James’s translators, no Protestant Truth Society denouncing the plays before they even had been written. But when he sent his oratorio to his father — a physician and a learned man, but not especially literary — he received much the same kind of criticism. 

Auden replied on 13 October 1942 — as it happens, five days before the final play of Sayers’s sequence, “The King Comes to His Own,” was broadcast — with gentle firmness: 

Sorry you are puzzled by the oratorio. Perhaps you were expecting a purely historical account as one might give of the battle of Waterloo, whereas I was trying to treat it as a religious event which eternally recurs every time it is accepted. Thus the historical fact that the shepherds were shepherds is religiously accidental — the religious fact is that they were the poor and humble of this world for whom at this moment the historical expression is the city-proletariat, and so on with all the other figures. What we know of Herod, for instance, is that he was a Hellenised-Jew and a political ruler. Accordingly I have made him express the intellectual’s eternal objection to Christianity — that it replaces objectivity with subjectivity — and the politician’s eternal objection that it regards the state as having only a negative role. (See Marcus Aurelius.) . . .

I am not the first to treat the Christian data in this way, until the 18th Cent. it was always done, in the Mystery Plays for instance or any Italian paintings. It is only in the last two centuries that religion has been “humanized,” and therefore treated historically as something that happened a long time ago, hence the nursery picture of Jesus in a nightgown and a Parsifal beard.

If a return to the older method now seems startling it is partly because of the acceleration in the rate of historical change due to industrialization — there is a far greater difference between the accidents of life in 1600 AD and in 1942 than between those of 30 AD and 1600. 

That last point is a very shrewd one, and an explanation of why Auden makes such a point of modernizing his narrative: he rarely misses the opportunity to introduce a chronological incongruity, and is not afraid to relish the resulting humor. Here, for instance, is King Herod reflecting on his reign in Judaea: 

Barges are unloading soil fertiliser at the river wharves. Soft drinks and sandwiches may be had in the inns at reasonable prices. Allotment gardening has become popular. The highway to the coast goes straight up over the mountains and the truck-drivers no longer carry guns. Things are beginning to take shape. It is a long time since anyone stole the park benches or murdered the swans. There are children in this province who have never seen a louse, shopkeepers who have never handled a counterfeit coin, women of forty who have never hidden in a ditch except for fun. Yes, in twenty years I have managed to do a little. Not enough, of course. There are villages only a few miles from here where they still believe in witches.There isn’t a single town where a good bookshop would pay. One could count on the fingers of one hand the people capable of solving the problem of Achilles and the Tortoise. Still it is a beginning. In twenty years the darkness has been pushed back a few
inches. 

Sayers could not have done this, even if she had wanted to — and she was unlikely to have wanted to. She was tasked with sticking closely to a narrative shape clearly recognizable from the Gospels, and I think she enjoyed that challenge. Auden’s (self-chosen) task was a very different one. But both of them were moved to reflect, and reflect very intelligently, on the ways that the Gospel story demands that we understand it both historically and contemporaneously. It is Then and it is Now. 

Forty years ago, I attended a conference of literature professors at Christian liberal-arts colleges in which the keynote speaker was an esteemed Christian journalist, tasked with giving us advice, I guess. Whatever his task was, he lectured us about our narrow-mindedness, our parochial attitudes, our failure to introduce our students to the most challenging literary masterpieces. Instead of teaching them … well, whatever we did teach them, we should dare to assign Dostoevsky! 

As this harangue went on, the woman sitting next to me — my department chair, as it happened, Beatrice Batson, an impressive Southern lady of the old school who (inexplicably) spoke with the kind of mid-Atlantic accent I associate with Irene Dunne — was steaming. When the lecture finally ended and there was a Q&A session, she stood up and informed the journalist (Sir, pronounced “Suh”) that every student at Wheaton College was required to read The Brothers Karamazov. 

“Oh,” he replied. 

It was true. In the two-course introduction to literature that all Wheaton students were required to take, a teacher could assign either the Iliad or the Odyssey, and the Greek tragedy of one’s choice; and you needed to do some of the Aeneid and the Divine Comedy but not necessarily all of either. But when the nineteenth-century novel rolled around, one had no options: The Brothers Karamazov ended up being the only work of literature that every Wheaton College student, regardless of major, was required to read from cover to cover. 

That edict remained in force for the first twenty years of my Wheaton teaching career, and in those two decades I taught Karamazov at least once each year and sometimes twice. There was a time I knew it better than any book in the world. I began by using this edition: 

(Despite the testimony of this cover image, the brothers in the novel are not in their fifties.) But when the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation came out and was clearly the Cool New Thing, I switched to that. And that’s the one I know best. The curriculum had changed and my teaching assignments had changed by the time the great Gary Saul Morson’s fierce critique of their work appeared, so I never taught any alternative to P-V. 

When I decided earlier this year that I would teach the book one last time, I thought long and hard about whether to go back to Constance Garnett’s version, which Morson likes, or whether to try a newer translation … but in the end I decided to stick with P-V, in large part because that allowed me to use the greatly-worn, much-annotated copy that I used all those years ago. 

However, I did not realize that a revised version of the translation had appeared in 2021 — and that’s the one the bookstore ordered for my students. If the text had remained the same, I probably would’ve used my old version and identified the page numbers of the key passages for the new edition. But sometimes the actual words are different, dadgummit. (For example, where in the previous version old Karamazov claimed to love his own “wickedness,” in this one he claims to love his own “filth.” I do wonder how many of the changes are responses to Morson’s critique.) So now I’m having to transfer all my annotations and highlights from the old copy to the new, which is tiresome but probably good for me. 

The book is as electrifying as ever, and I am delighted to be immersed in its strange world again. Reports from my journey will be forthcoming over the next few weeks.