Reviews and News:
“Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934) — better known by his pen name F. Anstey — once ranked among England’s most celebrated writers.” Michael Dirda revisits his life and work.
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T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations was published 100 years ago. Ryan L. Masters writes about the real Prufrocks of St. Louis and why Eliot may have used the name in the poem: “William Prufrock immigrated from Germany in 1868, married, established William Prufrock Furniture Company, and had three children. He lived in a middle-class house just east of Tower Grove Park, on Tennessee Avenue. His gravestone at Bellefontaine Cemetery, which he shares with his wife, is a modest slate-gray stone slightly faded with age. A pretty vase adorns its top, bringing it to about the height of an average man. By the time T.S. Eliot was coming across the name in the 1910s, Harry Prufrock had taken over the family business and was spreading the company name through full-page newspaper ads.” (HT: Jonathan McGregor)
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Ben Franklin’s very American faith: “There was a lot more to Franklin’s religion than his self-description as a deist. In fact, Franklin was the pioneer of a uniquely American kind of faith, one which touted the benevolent effects of faith even as it jettisoned virtually all theological beliefs.”
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Michael Bond possessed a “genius for never growing up.”
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Toscanini, a self-made and principled musician: “In 1933, after several extraordinarily successful seasons at the Bayreuth Wagner festival — Toscanini was the first non-German conductor to perform there — he informed Winifred Wagner, Wagner’s English daughter-in-law now in charge (and a close friend of Hitler’s), that given the conditions obtaining in Germany since the Nazis had taken over earlier that year, and despite a flattering personal letter from Hitler himself, he would not be returning. ‘For my peace of mind, for yours, and for everyone’s, it is better not to think any longer about my coming to Bayreuth.’ Nothing could better demonstrate both his unbending loyalty to principle and the astounding position he held on the world stage. In the same spirit, early in 1938, after having triumphed for the third time at the annual Salzburg Festival, he decided that with the Germans poised to overrun Austria, he would not return. Mussolini again had his passport impounded, and again worldwide indignation forced the Duce to change his mind. On the very day that the passport was suddenly returned, the Toscaninis left Milan for America. ‘To flee, to flee — that was the consuming thought!’ he wrote to Ada. ‘To flee in order to breathe freedom, life!’”
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George Lucas’s $1.5 billion Museum of Narrative Art unanimously approved by Los Angeles City Council: “The museum will house and exhibit the filmmaker’s extensive collection of paintings, illustrations and movie memorabilia. It will offer public lectures and workshops and is expected to attract more than 1 million visitors annually.”
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Essay of the Day:
Roger Scruton and Terry Eagleton knew each other at Jesus College, Cambridge. One, a man of the right, and the other, a bad Marxist, they have spurred each other on over the years. They also have more in common, Robert O’Brien argues in Standpoint, than you might realize:
“In 2012, the debating forum Intelligence Squared arranged for the two to discuss their favourite topic. They agreed, in impeccably civilised tones, on some important things — that culture has become regrettably commodified; that universities succumbed to the market in setting up too many courses in business studies, etc; that high culture was not necessarily elitist; and that such things as the literary canon were not fixed entities. Eagleton did not respond to Scruton’s point that Marxists should grasp basic truths of human nature; but then Scruton was disingenuous when, asked if there could be a conservative ideology of culture, he said that it would not involve any Marx-like analysis of economic power — which left his opponent the easy retort that while conservatives certainly have an ideology, they often preferred not to articulate it. Overall, a draw in terms of performance, though Scruton was the wittier.
“Now, each produces a book a year, trying as honestly and searchingly as they can to get to the bottom, or the edge, of things. Each has a publisher in the United States — Princeton for Scruton, Yale for Eagleton. And their relationship has become more complex: both have changed without being false to their past; and for both this has meant a turn towards religious thought. In 2009, Eagleton (who describes his Irish Catholic education amusingly in The Gatekeeper), produced Reason, Faith and Revolution — Reflections on the God Debate, in which he attacked the hard atheism personified in ‘Ditchkens’ (Dawkins and Hitchens), and was hailed by James Wood as ‘its most vigorous critic’. Though God does not ‘exist’ as an entity in the world, he said, there is a less definite kind of faith which is ‘not primarily a belief that someone or something exists, but a commitment and allegiance — faith in something’.
“In what, though, when the Marxist vision is weakening? On Evil (2010) strikes a paradoxical balance between Marxism and Christianity; Culture and the Death of God (2015) argues that religion has left a gaping hole in our culture that neither politics, culture nor sport can fill, but (in the last paragraphs) suggests that Christianity might play its part — for it offers ‘not supernatural support’ but the ‘inconvenient news that our forms of life must undergo radical dissolution . . . the sign of [which] is solidarity with the poor and powerless’. Hope without Optimism (2015) doesn’t build on this, nor does it place much hope in radicalism — indeed Eagleton criticises the Marxist Ernst Bloch for being ‘hospitable to the whole wealth of human culture — but only . . . in order to appropriate it’, something of which he has perhaps been guilty himself. He then analyses how King Lear and Mann’s Doctor Faustus deal with tragic despair, finding that both bleak masterpieces offer a thread of hope which seems connected to neither God nor Marx. Eagleton remains a lapsed Catholic who won’t let go.
“Because of their reciprocity, Scrugletopia is a kind of dialectic, which has been good for Eagleton’s approach and style. He has not in the end sunk into Gallic pretentiousness or German exhaustiveness. Thus in Culture (2016), he takes us on a lucid tour of the Kulturkritiker just as Scruton had done, referring to many of the same writers from Kant through Arnold to Eliot; he doesn’t mention Derrida or Foucault once, but instead devotes pages to the eccentric socialist credo of Oscar Wilde.
“Scruton’s religious commitment is deeper: he seems to be an Anglican Deist — a faithful churchgoer who rejects the Resurrection and afterlife. In The Soul of the World he advocates ‘cognitive dualism’, a willingness to understand what things mean, at the same time as scientifically exploring what they are made of. This approach aims ‘not, as Kant argued, to destroy the claims of reason in order to make room for those of faith, but rather to create the space at the edge of reason where faith can take root and grow’.”
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Photo: Squirrel
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Poem: Devin Johnston, “Annabelle”
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