Roger Lewis - Modernist, Moralist and Wit

by Stephen Masty

Roger Lewis

British author Roger Lewis is adored by a small coterie of true conservative modernists and, it seems, despised by a much larger body of chatterati, mediacrats and the Leftist cultural mafia. Such polar reactions to this literary moralist, innovative biographer and wicked satirist explain much about the UK’s culture wars, so changed since the first half of the twentieth century. Parallels may also be drawn with American media-culture and public values.

Lewis, a 52-year-old Welshman transplanted to England, resembles a Victorian mill producing industrial quantities of good reviews, academic articles, biographies and satire. Most of the works by this former Oxford don, who has first-class degrees and honours from St. Andrews, Magdalen and Wolfson, are hallmarked by his distinctive modernism overlaying a vigorous conservatism, together reminiscent of T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis.

Like both, he is a revolutionary traditionalist who couples modern art-forms with timeless values: a concept understood by imaginative conservatives, not fully comprehended by their hidebound kinsmen who retreat from modernism in any form, and often loathed by what Lenin would today call Brit-culture’s Leftist true-believers, fellow-travellers from the BBC and similar media, and the useful-idiots of the unthinking chattering classes; in other words, much of the UK’s cultural Establishment.

Lewis has single-handedly reinvented the literary and show-business biography with his innovative lives of Sir Laurence Olivier, Peter Sellers, Charles Hawtrey and Anthony Burgess, turning an age-old formula into works of modern art.

The very structure and style of each biography is tailored to his subject, reflecting how modern media figures create their own personae for professional and personal gain, and how, ultimately, the audience’s and the biographer’s perceptions contribute just as much to our understanding of these half-real-half-concocted figures as do the conventional dates and details of their professional and personal lives. A Lewis biography, echoing Yeats, will not “separate the dancer from the dance.”

Thoughts after Lambeth

by T.S. Eliot

[TIC readers, I had the privilege of transcribing Eliot's famous essay, "Thoughts on Lambeth" this week.  Below is a significant part of the essay (roughly  2/3 of it).  I have edited it only down in size; I've not made any other changes.  The formatting of the original piece is quite strange (lots of weird characters, etc), and I've done my best to preserve all of these as well as the English (as in UK) spellings.  I did remove all of the footnotes.  This is some of Eliot's most revealing writing, especially regarding The Waste Land as a personal journey not as a critique of modernity).  It also is deeply rooted in time (early 1930s controversies over birth control) but touches upon transcendent themes.  That Eliot saw the Anglican Church as the true Catholic Church with the Roman Catholic Church being the fundamentalist church and the "free churches" as emotional outlets continues to fascinate me.  What would Eliot say about the current state of Christianity?  Of the Anglican church?  Well, please enjoy].

The Church of England washes its dirty linen in public. It is convenient and brief to begin with this metaphorical statement. In contrast to some other institutions both civil and ecclesiastical, the linen does get washed. To have linen to wash is something; and to assert that one's linen never needed washing would be a suspicious boast. Without some understanding of these habits of the Church, the reader of the Report of the Lambeth Conference (1930) will find it a difficult and in some directions a misleading document. The Report needs to be read in the light of previous Reports; with some knowledge, and with some sympathy for that oddest of institutions, the Church of England.

Comic Book Salvation

by Stratford Caldecott

… Stand up and keep your childishness:

Read all the pedants’ screeds and strictures;

But don’t believe in anything

That can’t be told in coloured pictures.

Chesterton would not have liked many of the stories told in coloured pictures by American comic books, which these days tend to dystopia and sado-eroticism – an all-too predictable reflection of the present state of our culture. But some he would have liked, and I dare to think I could show him my own comic collection without (much) embarrassment.

My personal golden age of comics was in the late 60s and 1970s, when I would roam the streets of London looking for the latest American imports: Batman or Green Lantern,The Fantastic Four or The Mighty Thor, and a dozen other titles, illustrated by such artists as Neal Adams, the Buscema brothers, Jack “King” Kirby, or Jim Steranko. Kirby it was who, in partnership with Stan “the Man” Lee, gave us most of the great Marvel heroes, including the Hulk, Thor, Captain America, and the Silver Surfer, and his heavily emblematic and dynamic style influenced generations of later artists. A quick scurry through Marvel-related entries in Wikipedia will explain what I am talking about, if you don’t already know. You’ll find plenty of coloured pictures, too.

Last Words by T.S. Eliot

by T. S. Eliot

With this number I terminate my editorship of The Criterion. I have been considering this decision for about two years: but I did not wish to come to a conclusion precipitately, because I knew that my retirement would bring The Criterion to an end. During the autumn, however, the prospect of war had involved me in hurried plans for suspending publication; and in the subsequent detente I became convinced that my enthusiasm for continuing the editorial work did not exist.

Sixteen years is a long time for one man to remain editor of a review; for this review, I have sometimes wondered whether it has not been too long. A feeling of staleness has crept over me, and a suspicion that I ought to retire before I was aware that this feeling had communicated itself to the readers. A stale editor cannot do his contributors justice.

I have also felt a growing discontent, in that increase of work in other directions (both inside and outside of Russell Square) has made it less and less possible for me to perform to my own satisfaction a job which might well occupy the whole of one man's time. I am convinced that The Criterion is not the kind of review which can be taken up and continued by one editor after another. Another man might make something better of it, but he would have to make something very different; and in so doing he would be handicapped rather than aided by The Criterion's tradition. If a similar review is needed, then it will be far better for someone else to start a new review with a new title. New conditions will very likely require new methods and somewhat different aims.

The Lost Art of Speaking

by Joe Sobran

Not long ago, I read that Hollywood is worried about a shortage of young male stars who can play big roles. I'm not surprised.

And I think I can give the chief reason in a single word: voices.

Think of the great male stars of the past: Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, John Wayne, Fredric March, Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, William Powell, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Richard Burton, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Gregory Peck, Montgomery Clift. They weren't all pretty boys, though Cooper, Grant, Colman, Olivier, Peck, and Clift were extraordinarily good-looking; but they all had memorable voices. You can't picture them without recalling how they sounded. Nothing conveys personality so fully as the voice.

Exodus, 1877-Style

by Bradley J. Birzer, TIC co-editor

Benjamin "Pap" Singelton

Last night, as I was thinking about falling asleep, I quickly checked my Twitter account. As I almost always do, I found something very interesting from a man I’ve come to respect immensely, though we’ve never actually met—Jamara Newell, who goes by the name of “Sir Geechie,” a South Carolinian trapped in New England.

Last night he tweeted a link to an interesting piece on black nationalism mentioning Pap Singleton. When I was in graduate school, I became very interested in the side of black history rarely taught and began research on Exodusters, Marcus Garvey, Zora Neale Hurston, and Malcolm X. It never went anywhere, really, but I still lecture on what I found at the time.

Though written a very long time ago, here’s a piece (only slightly modified) TIC folks may find of interest. Though I realize it’s a small thing, I dedicate this post to Lord Jamara for often making me laugh and always making me think.

Only Mozart

by Joseph Sobran

Some guys have it and some guys don't. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, now over 250 years old, obviously had it. By age eight he was already writing symphonies you can still hear on the radio. And there is no sign that the Mozart fad will blow over very soon.

A couple of years later he was writing operas, which culminated, for me, in THE MAGIC FLUTE toward the end of his short life. To my mind the saddest fact in musical history is that he died at 35. Nobody can imagine what his inexhaustible imagination would have produced if he'd been granted another five years. If he'd lived to threescore and ten, there would have been no need for Beethoven, whom I also adore.

Actually, if the two men's lives had overlapped more, each might have inspired the other to new heights in a sort of divine rivalry. I can just imagine Mozart's reaction to the Eroica symphony: "Not bad, kid! Not bad at all! But watch this!" And then he would have written an even better symphony under the influence of his younger rival, who, not to be outdone, would have come back with his own miracle, and so on, until all our lives were so full of astonishing sounds that the enraptured world would never go to war again.

Antonio Vivaldi: The Red Priest Rediscovered

by Stephen M. Klugewicz

Inevitably, when one hears the name of Antonio Vivaldi, one thinks of his famous set of four violin concertos, The Four Seasons. By one estimate it is the most played piece of classical music in world history. Though it has made Vivaldi famous for at least the last century or so, The Four Seasons has paradoxically led us to underestimate the Venetian’s true greatness. The first bars of the first concerto in the set, “Spring,” like the openings of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, has been so overplayed that we really cannot hear the music anymore. Like those pieces, The Four Seasons has become a cliché, a piece of kitsch that we hear in muzak form as we shop at the mall, ride in an elevator, or watch a television commercial. At the same time, it has made Vivaldi a one-hit wonder in the concert-going public’s mind, akin to a Carl Orff (of Carmina Burana fame) or a Samuel Barber (he of the funereal Adagio).

Shakespearean Masterpiece

by Joseph Sobran

April 12 is Shakespeare’s birthday. The real Shakespeare, I mean: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. I thought a little celebrating was in order, so I watched one of the best Shakespeare films ever made: Roman Polanski’s 1971 Macbeth.

When I was a kid, that was one of my favorite plays. Still is. The language!

Bring forth men-children only,
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males.

I should have used that one to get dates, but I never seemed to be able to work it into a conversation with the girls in my class. Airheads.

Anyway, I got really hooked on Shakespeare when I saw a televised production with Maurice Evans as Macbeth and Judith Anderson as Lady Macbeth, the role she was most famous for. Talk about undaunted mettle!

Reinvigorating Culture

by Russell Kirk

Anyone who pushes the buttons of a television set nowadays [written in 1994, Ed.] may be tempted to reflect that genuine culture came to an end during the latter half of the twentieth century. The television set is an immense accomplishment of reason and imagination: the victory of technology. But the gross images produced by television are symptoms and causes of our civilization’s decadence: the defeat of humane culture.

The contrast between the success of technology and the failure of social institutions is yet more striking when we look at any large American city. Some time ago I spent a day in Detroit, once styled “the arsenal of democracy,” latterly known as “America’s murder capital.” I have known Detroit ever since I was a small boy, and have observed the stages of the city’s decay over the decades. Except for some financial and political activity, and a little surviving commerce, about the foot of Woodward Avenue near the river, old Detroit is a dangerous wreck. The length of Woodward Avenue, up to Eight Mile Road and beyond, one drives through grim desolation: Beirut in the midst of its troubles might have seemed more cheerful. One passes through Detroit’s “cultural center,” the Institute of Arts on one side of the avenue, the Public Library on the other. Immediately north or south of those splendid buildings, immediately east or west, extends the grimy reality of a broken and dying city. “Culture” has become something locked into an archaic museum.

Pilgrimages and Easter Destinations in the Ghostly Tales of Russell Kirk

by R. Andrew Newman

For Russell Kirk ghost stories were not mere exercises in gore or terror without purpose. A gulag-and-gas-chamber-infested twentieth century provides demonic fright enough. With scary stories he sought to reawaken a sense of a greater reality, of a world that touches the physical, in an age smothered by materialism and the decay of traditional religion and to partake in a bit of eerie fun as well. As for ghosts, Kirk thought them very real and claimed ghostly folk lived right alongside his family at Piety Hill, his ancestral home in Mecosta, Michigan. “Have I ever seen a ghost?” the conservative philosopher and historian asked. “Why, I am one, and so are you – a geist, a spirit, in a mortal envelope.”[1]

The traditional religious imagery - demons, heaven, purgatory - that animates his work is neither window dressing nor a useful convention around which to stretch a yarn. “I venture to suggest that the more orthodox is a writer’s theology,” he maintained, “the more convincing, as symbols and allegories, his uncanny tales will be.” The modern tale that “isolates itself from this authority drifts aimlessly down Styx.”[2] The terror seems more real, after all, if damnation and salvation are real possibilities, if angels and demons inhabit God’s universe, not solely man’s imagination.

The Man of Letters and the Future of Europe

by T. S. Eliot

I wish first to define the sense in which I shall use the term "man of letters." I shall mean the writer for whom his writing is primarily an art, who is as much concerned with style as with content; the understanding of whose writings, therefore, depends as much upon appreciation of style as upon comprehension of content. This is primarily the poet (including the dramatic poet), and the writer of prose fiction. To give emphasis to these two kinds of writer is not to deny the title "man of letters" to writers in many other fields: it is simply a way of isolating the problem of responsibility of the man of letters qua man of letters; and if what I have to say is true for the poet and the novelist, it will also be true for other writers in so far as they are "artists."

The Methodist as Philosopher: Lynn Harold Hough, Irving Babbitt, and Christian Humanism

by Lee Cheek

The First World War and the Great Depression provided myriad challenges to the mission of the Methodist Church. As a nation began to doubt its role in the modern world, one of the country’s most dominant and politically-engaged religious denominations sought to respond to the chaos by reconsidering its own attachment to the historical sources of Christian order. Amidst the crisis, Lynn Harold Hough, Methodist theologian, philosopher, and educator, offered an intellectual framework, guided by hope, and devoid of the messianic tendencies of the emerging ideological movements that had begun to influence many aspects of American Christianity, including Methodism.[1]

Hough was one of the greatest Methodist theologians and preachers of the 20th century;[2] however, his contribution has not received the sustained attention of scholars. For half a century, he published at least a book a year, served as a regular writer for numerous theological journals, was a contributing editor to the Christian Century--and these were his avocational interests.[3] Hough was deeply influenced by the scholarship of his friend and philosophical mentor, Irving Babbitt. It was Babbitt's attempt to renew the notion of humanism that most interested the young pastor, who was deeply embroiled in the religious debates of the 1920s and 1930s. Hough was attracted to the balance of sympathy and selection in Babbitt's presentation of the doctrine. The purpose of this essay will be to present Hough's elucidation and utilization of Babbittian Humanism, and demonstrate how Hough's understanding contributes to some of the important questions of philosophy and religion.

Charles Murray on Coming Apart

Charles Murray on the topic of his new book: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Interesting short video interview with Brian Williams.

Music in the Modern Age

by Peter Kalkavage

Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music, Robert R. Reilly, Washington, D. C.: Morley Books, 2002.

In his generous and beautifully written book, Robert Reilly leads us through the vast, largely unknown territory of twentieth-century music. The title recalls C. S. Lewis's Surprised by Joy and the poem of the same name by William Wordsworth. The hero of the book is beauty. We are surprised by beauty-surprised because beauty in all its forms surpasses expectation and provokes wonder, and because the beautiful in music somehow managed not just to exist, but even to thrive in a century marked by brutal political ideologies and perverse intellectualism.

If the book has a hero, it also has its villain. This is serialism or the twelve-tone theory of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), who exerted a tremendous influence over the minds and works of many modern composers. Schoenberg advocated the emancipation of the dissonance. In a defining document from 1941, he wrote: "A style based on this premise treats dissonances like consonances and renounces a tonal center."[1] Instead of using the traditional diatonic order of whole steps and half steps (the source of the ancient Greek and medieval modes, and of the modern major scale), the serial composer takes as his governing principle a row or series comprising all twelve chromatic tones within the octave.

Catholic Imagination and Contemporary Culture

Barbara Elliott's Presentation on Catholic Imagination and Contemporary Culture to the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. Enjoy.

Taking Note of T.S. Eliot's Notes on Education and Culture

by Robert M. Woods

The end of World War II and our current moment have one thing in common when it comes to educational books. There was then, as there is now, a plethora of books putting forth various theories about education and calling for education reform. After more than sixty years of change, it seems things are more broken than ever. Few at that time, and certainly few, if any, at this time, have a sense of the history of education, let alone a rich philosophy of education. The great poet T.S. Eliot can help us considerably in this regard. In his book Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, he specifically addresses the issue of education and culture.

Beginning with the definition of education, Eliot relates the nature of education to culture as a whole. Specifically on culture Eliot says, "if we mean that Culture is what is passed on by our elementary and secondary schools, or by our preparatory and public schools, then we are asserting that an organ is a whole organism. For the schools can transmit only a part, and they can only transmit this part effectively, if the outside influences, not only of family and environment, but of work and play, of newsprint and spectacles and entertainment and sport, are in harmony with them." It may be here that one should spend a great deal of time for a long pause. Why? Because this is a matter that few educational theorist have thought about when examining education. And the point is this: the relationship between education and the broader culture is so important that one of the reasons modern education receives an "F" is because the culture from which it draws its identity and reason for being receives an "F."

The Music of the Spheres

by Robert R. Reilly 

“[In] sound itself, there is a readiness to be ordered by the spirit and this is seen at its most sublime in music.” 
—Max Picard

Robert R. Reilly

Despite the popular Romantic conception of creative artists as inspired madmen, composers are not idiots savants, distilling their musical inspiration from the ether. Rather, in their creative work they respond and give voice to certain metaphysical visions. Most composers speak explicitly in philosophical terms about the nature of the reality that they try to reflect. When the forms of musical expression change radically, it is always because the underlying metaphysical grasp of reality has changed as well. Music is, in a way, the sound of metaphysics, or metaphysics in sound.

Music in the Western world was shaped by a shared conception of reality so profound that it endured for some twenty-five hundred years. As a result, the means of music remained essentially the same—at least to the extent that what was called music could always have been recognized as such by its forbearers, as much as they might have disapproved of its specific style. But by the early twentieth century, this was no longer true. Music was re-conceptualized so completely that it could no longer be experienced as music, i.e. with melody, harmony, and rhythm. This catastrophic rupture, expressed especially in the works of Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage, is often celebrated as just another change in the techniques of music, a further point along the parade of progress in the arts. It was, however, a reflection of a deeper metaphysical divide that severed the composer from any meaningful contact with external reality. As a result, musical art was reduced to the arbitrary manipulation of fragments of sound.

2 3/4 Cheers for Prejudice

by John Willson

 Prejudice, n. A vagrant opinion without visible means of support. 

--Ambrose Bierce 

A farmer who dwelt in my home town was once arrested on the streets of Rochester, New York, while looking up at a large building which he owned. He was wearing, at the time, knee-high boots with unmistakable traces of the barnyard on them, dirty Oshkosh-by-Goshes over a tattered flannel shirt, and an old railroad engineer’s cap. The charge was vagrancy. His son favored similar clothing. I helped to paint the old farmhouse when I was seventeen or eighteen, and I remember how shocked I was when Dad told me that old Everett could buy the whole town of Phelps with his pocket change. Their name was Mott, and various members of the extended family owned some grape juice, some automobile factories, natural gas, real estate in most major cities, and who knows what all.

One could say that this branch of the Motts, father and son, were “vagrant men with no visible means of support.” And easy, therefore, for a Rochester cop to look upon with a certain amount of “prejudice” as the old man stood on the street spitting tobacco with his thumbs linked through the bib overalls. They both, father and son, were graduates of New England prep schools and Williams College.

Prejudice is not to be mistaken for its verb cousin, “discriminate,” which the redoubtable Bierce defines as “To note the particulars in which one person or thing is, if possible, more objectionable than another.” Prejudice is apparently a rather unobjectionable fellow, compared with the one who discriminates, especially if he also is the black sheep of the family, “Bigot,” who is “obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.”

The Lovely Dragon of Choice: The Freedom Not to Be Free

by Anthony Esolen

The simple knight Percival, on the quest for the Holy Grail, had not been much of a planner. Had he been, he would not have lost the trail of his desired companion, Galahad. He would not have lost both his own horse and the horse he persuaded a stable-boy to lend him. He would not now be sitting, arms across his knees, on a bare cliff overlooking the sea, expectant and hungry and disgusted with himself and his poor fortune.

But all things come to them that wait. Into sight silently draws a ship, draped in black silk, with a maiden of radiant beauty aboard, eager to speak to Percival and to him alone. She asks him the obvious question, “Percival, what are you doing here? Who brought you to this mountain, so lonely that your rescue hangs on a quirk of chance, and so utterly desolate that you will die of hunger and distress before anyone notices your presence?”

It is a rule of the questing life: Beware of maidens in black silk. Those maidens ask reasonable questions like this. Gentle and reasonable are the slopes to eternal loss. It is a broad and well-designed highway that leads to perdition, conveniently banked for the long bends; and precisely because it is apparently so capacious, so easy, so answerable to just what we like, many travel it. One could go down that road in one’s sleep, and many they are that do.