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The Literary Life Podcast
Episode 271: The Literary Life of Peter Hitchens
01:22:06
On The Literary Life Podcast today we bring you a special “Literary Life of…” episode featuring author and journalist Peter Hitchens. After sharing their commonplace quotes, Angelina and Thomas dive into the interview with Mr. Hitchens, first...
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- [00:19]
Cindy Rollins
This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The literary life is for everyone, because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast.
- [01:28]
Angelina Stanford
Hello and welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and with me, as always, my faithful sidekick, Thomas Banks. Indeed, today we have a very special guest on the podcast. And before I introduce him, I should just say, in case we have some new listeners, what this podcast is all about. Mr. Banks and I are both literature teachers and English teachers, and this podcast is devoted to, just like its name says, helping people with their literary lives. We talk about books, we read books together, we try to get back to an older way of thinking about books. And we also like to feature different kinds of readers on this podcast in our very popular series, the Literary Life of. Because it can be extremely helpful to see what does a reading life look like in real life for all different kinds of people. And so to that end, we have a guest we are very excited about today that Mr. Banks has been dying to get on this podcast and I'm gonna let you introduce him.
- [02:33]
Thomas Banks
So today Our guest is Mr. Peter Hitchens. Peter Hitchens writes regularly for the Mail on Sunday, and his writing has appeared in many other newspapers and periodicals as well. Among his published books are the Abolition of Britain, A Brief History of Crime, the Rage Against God, the Phony Victory, and Short Breaks in Mordor. He is the winner of the Orwell Prize in Political journalism, and his writing has been characterized as quote, firm, polished, and potentially lethal as a guardsman's boot. Mr. Hitchens, welcome.
- [03:12]
Peter Hitchens
It's a pleasure to be with you. I hope we can keep up the electronic communication.
- [03:17]
Angelina Stanford
Yes, yes, let's hope the techno gods work with us today. Well, one of the things we like to do on this podcast is we like to start off with sharing a quote from our commonplace books, a quote from anything that we are reading. Mr. Banks, would you like to go first?
- [03:34]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. So my quote of the day is from the Irish journalist and literary critic Robert Linda, who was kind of a Big name in the history of the English essay in the early to mid 20th century. And this is from his book the Art of Letters. He writes, we require in literature both the authority of tradition and the liberty of genius to seek new conquests. Unfortunately, we cannot agree as to the proportions in which each of them is required.
- [04:10]
Angelina Stanford
That's a great quote. That's a great quote. Mr. Hitchens, would you like to go next? Do you have a quote from something you've been reading?
- [04:16]
Peter Hitchens
I don't think I can really do that, I'm afraid. If asked to quote anything, I usually reach for a snatch of poetry.
- [04:24]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, that's perfect.
- [04:25]
Peter Hitchens
Well, I will rise and go now and go to Innisfree. A small cabin builder of clay and wattles made. Nine bean rows will I have there and the hive for the honey bee and live alone in the be glade. I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, dropping with the veils of the morning where the cricket sings, where sunsets all a glimmer and noon a purple glow, an evening full of the linnet's wings. So I shall rise and go now for always night and day I hear lake water lapping and low sounds by the shore. I hear it in the roadway and on the pavements gray. I hear it in the deep heart's core.
- [05:14]
Thomas Banks
Oh, that was wonderful.
- [05:16]
Angelina Stanford
That was wonderful. That is a favorite poem of a lot of our listeners. Is there any special reason?
- [05:21]
Peter Hitchens
The thing which you probably don't know is that it was actually written in London by a man who was, as it were, trapped in Fleet Street, a street where I used to spend a lot of my time. And the pavements grew gray and the roadway are those of Fleet street in London, EC4. And that's where he was thinking of the lake Isle of. In his free.
- [05:41]
Thomas Banks
Ah, I didn't know that.
- [05:44]
Angelina Stanford
I didn't either. Oh, I like that.
- [05:47]
Peter Hitchens
National Library of Ireland has a beautiful recording of him actually reading it himself, saying it himself, which is also worth hearing.
- [05:54]
Thomas Banks
As a very old man, I think he has kind of a quavery voice in the reading, as I recall. I think I know the recording you speak of.
- [06:03]
Angelina Stanford
Well, for my quote, I've got a quote from. I've been working on the research for a talk I'm going to be giving at a conference in the spring about why words matter. And that has, of course, led me to George Orwell essays, and I thought I would share a quote from an essay that he wrote in 1946. Politics and the English language and these kinds of quotes. Always fascinate me because writers like Orwell or C.S. lewis or Dorothy Sayers, even in the 1940s are all complaining about education has degenerated. The English language is degenerating, and this is so terrible. And the reason that these quotes fascinate me is because, well, because we live in a time where the voices champion educational reform all seem to be pointing to the mid 20th century as some golden age that we should be trying to get back to. And these guys are all saying, no, no, no, it was already really bad right here. So here's a. Here's a short quote from that essay. Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes. It is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer, but an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on, indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish. But the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits, one can think more clearly. And to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
- [08:16]
Thomas Banks
Well, shall we dive into it?
- [08:19]
Angelina Stanford
Let's. Let's dive into it. And we like these conversations. We have some questions here to guide us, but we I'm always most interested in the rabbit trail, so feel free to follow whatever trails you want to that are inspired by these questions because our listeners are going to be so curious about what your reading life looks like.
- [08:37]
Thomas Banks
So our first question is, do you recall books as a regular part of life in your childhood? Was yours a bookish family?
- [08:47]
Peter Hitchens
My family was not particularly bookish, no, their books were normal. And I suppose I must have read a lot of the then children's class Black Beauty and things of that kind. The one that I treasured and read over and over again and still am very much moved by is the Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham, which struck a particular chord with me and still does. And I live not all that far from the setting of it. And also not all that far from the very sad cemetery where Kenneth Graham and his son are buried. A long and sad story I won't trouble you with. But this part of the world where I live, one of the reasons why I live here, and it's exceptional, it's not like most of the rest of Britain. It's a sort of paradise of the past in many ways, is that it's so full of this kind of thing. Alice of Alice in Wonderland and Alice of Looking Glass is almost permanently present here. You can't turn a corner without half expecting to see her or the White Rabbit or Tweedledum and Tweedledee or some other character from these. These books. And I know where the Treacle Wells are or were, and a number of other things that make it come alive for me. And when I read of the description of the great boat journey that led to that book being read, which I also, along with the Wind in the Willows, continue to treasure, there's a particular description of a bend on the river where they disappear into the distance. And I know where that bend is. I know exactly which bend and I river is meant by it. It's not just a work of the imagination for me. It's a. It's a description of a place where I live.
- [10:29]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, I know all of our listeners are completely jealous because we can only visit those places in our minds. So you live in Oxford? Around Oxford, I presume?
- [10:36]
Peter Hitchens
I live in this. In the. In the British. The ugly British suburbs of Oxford, condemned, I think, by Gerard Manley Hopkins and others. But there it is. They're there. I didn't. I didn't build them like that. And it enables me to be quite close to the actual original city.
- [10:53]
Thomas Banks
So was there a moment in your reading life in adolescence, perhaps, where you started to value books more than just, say, more than just a momentary entertainment or something to pass a dull hour with?
- [11:09]
Peter Hitchens
Oh, I've always valued books very highly as a child, and it's never ceased. And I continue to do the same thing as an adolescent and as an adult. For me, books are a world to be instantly explored, particularly when the world which surrounds me is unsatisfactory or dull. One of the greatest books I've read in my adult life is all the King's Men by Robert Pen Warren. And I read it completely by accident. I wasn't aware it existed. And I was stuck in Moscow on a very snowy night, waiting for an interview that never happened in the National Hotel of Red Square. And I had nothing to read, and I Knew I had nothing to read and hours to go. And I went to the Foreign Languages bookshop and there it was. The, the Soviets loved Robert Pen Warren because they reckoned that his book was denunciation of capitalist wickedness. And so there was this wonderful edition of the book which I've now lost with the most fantastic Marxist learner's footnotes. And I started to read it in my ancient dingy room in the National Hotel which had once been the great luxury hotel of Tsarist Moscow and was still full of atmosphere. And I began to read it in this great sagging armchair and I carried on reading it all night. I remember pausing for a moment at about 4:00 in the morning and looking out of the window and seeing what was then Gorky street full of snow and the amazing efficiency, which is quite unexpected of the Soviet snow clearing operation of these bulldozers running in phalanxes with five or six and passing the snow one to another across the street and then watching that for a few minutes and then going back to the book and reading it till daylight. And I've read it perhaps four or five times since, but I always remember that I read it as an escape from the boredom of solitude and waiting.
- [13:02]
Thomas Banks
I confess I've not opened that book in many years. Is that the principal character, the politician, is loosely based on Huey P. Long?
- [13:11]
Peter Hitchens
Yes, I was about to say that Willie Stark. Not that loosely based, I think.
- [13:16]
Angelina Stanford
Yes, I am from Louisiana, Huey P. Long.
- [13:20]
Peter Hitchens
Then it's, I just find it's just so complete. And within the book there is another book which is tremendously powerful and not never, I've never fully cracked the explanation of it. But there is a book within the book which, which is also deeply fascinating and very disturbing and upsetting. But the whole thing is, I think, and it, it opens up like a flower to you. As I've read it many times, I, I, I come to the conclusion it's one of the greatest books of the 20th century, if not of all time. It's also a poem. I think in many ways it's a very, very long poem.
- [13:58]
Angelina Stanford
Well, I'm going to be chuckling for a long time. I think that this was so popular in communist Russia because Huey P. Long is the closest America ever got to having a socialist president.
- [14:13]
Thomas Banks
Actually, I think that H.G. wells, who, in the 1930s, he was writing something about our political system, some journalistic peace, and he was absolutely fascinated with Huey P. Long and saw him as a kind of a modern Caesar and he described him as a Winston Churchill without any of the handicapping customs or civilizations that keep Churchill from true greatness or some comment like that. But yeah, he was a figure of almost kind of international stature for a bit.
- [14:50]
Peter Hitchens
Welles was given to a certain amount of hero worship. And the great thing about all the King's menace is absolutely not the Huey Long figure. Willy Stark is actually very human. And there is a wonderful moment where he understands that he's being used by others and bursts out of the destiny which has been given to him. But there's also tremendous moments where he goes back to visit his family in the distance, which is his power. And his success is placed between himself. The family is beautifully, beautifully portrayed, but there's also an undercurrent in this, of. Of betrayal and dishonesty in. In the family of the narrator, which. Which grows and grows. And when, say, when you write it for about the third or fourth time, you realize just how significant it is. It's just a tremendous, many layered book which happens to concern a. An actual historical moment.
- [15:45]
Angelina Stanford
I am so delighted to hear you. Well, first of all, your quote at the beginning was a poem and to hear you quoting all of these beloved literary titles because I think sometimes we can be tempted to think that, you know, well, you're a journalist and you write nonfiction and you write commentary, so surely you must always have your nose and that kind of book.
- [16:06]
Peter Hitchens
Well, no, I don't think that necessarily follows. I mean, I was probably the least likely person to actually be a newspaper journalist. Journalist. And it's. It amazes me that I've survived so long in the world of newspaper journalism because I am in. In many ways so bad at it. I don't think I was ever a particularly good news reporter. And looking back on. On some of my escapades doing that, I do wonder a bit why I wasn't fired. But I wasn't. And if you go into newspapers to write, then you're probably making a mistake. But my great good fortune has been that I ended up in a position where I could. Right. And go a bit further than the. Than the very excellent and worthwhile discipline of reporting news. There's nothing wrong with it. I don't any way to cry it, but I know a lot of people who do it better than I do. But the great test. There you are. Some enormous story has developed. And in the days before computers, what you had to do was rush to a telephone, find one that was working, which they often weren't because your rivals had disabled it, and then shout down the telephone to what we call the copy taker who then typed out what you wrote. And actually much of the best work I ever did was done like that. Because the greatest test of any prose is reading it aloud. And if the first thing you do is speak it aloud to somebody who's listening. And often these copy takers were very clever and astute people and they would put you right on things and slow you down and tell you you'd repeated yourself, would end up in the paper exactly as you dictated it, because it often had to, because there's no time to do anything else. And it lasts surprisingly well. But the, the business of writing, say, long descriptions or analyses and things like that is quite different from the business of reporting. And I'm not even sure that they're, they're compatible. Which is to say why I won't say happy, but ready to admit that I wasn't very good at the reporting side of it.
- [18:09]
Angelina Stanford
Well, we argue on this podcast constantly that literature is a valuable part of being a human being. You need to have that part of yourself nurtured and engaged with. And especially, especially now. I, I think so. I'm just delighted. And I know that you were or are not were are a big fan of Lord of the Rings and you regularly read that and you recently had an essay come out where you talked about the Chronicles of Narnia and how you. We have this in common. I also did not read them as a child and only read them as an adult. And you talked about in that essay how your, your views over those, those books have changed over the years. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about your thoughts about the Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia? Because we have some.
- [18:53]
Peter Hitchens
Well, again, it's extreme piece of good fortune. When I was at a boarding school which I attended between the ages of about 9 and about 13 in the lovely West country of England, beautiful 18th century house surrounded by woods and fields. We did a lot of reading there. My favorite resort would have been the library. But a friend of mine at school had it must have been through his parents had come across the Tolkien books which were then nothing like as widely known as they are now. And he encouraged me to read them and lent them to me. And as a result, they made an impact upon me, which they couldn't have done if I'd just been reading what everybody else was reading. And I thought at the time that this was something extremely potent and special. It's taken me years again to begin to understand, first of all, you're simply swept up by the narrative because it is so beautifully done. And the great thing about reading above all things is that it is done through the imagination. And the imagination is something which it's terrifying to me. In many of today's young, they don't really have a chance to develop imagination. It's atrophied because they spend so much time having it replaced by other people's ideas. But the imagination of that book, having never seen it on film or in cartoon or anything of that kind, just the sweeping up of it, has been a benefit to me for the rest of my life and will continue to be. But the more times I've read it, the more of course I've understood the very, very strong moral message which it contains, which is about power and the immense dangers of it and of the misuse of it. And the great thing which was once said to me by an Anglican parson and my acquaintance, love is the opposite of power. And this is seldom better demonstrated than in the Lord of the Rings, where the whole struggle for the ring ends up in a struggle to destroy it, because the power it contains is so appalling and will do nothing but harm to those who hold it. And the films which were made to some extent did actually understand that which made them very tolerable to me.
- [21:22]
Thomas Banks
That's a very good answer. And you are the recipient of the Orwell Prize for Political Journalism for the year 2010, if I remember rightly. At the risk of sounding deliberately contrarian, does George Orwell suffer from being too well known for animal farm in 1984 to the exclusion of his other writings? And here I'm thinking especially of lesser known novels like Coming up for Air and A Clergyman's Daughter.
- [21:50]
Peter Hitchens
Well, I think Orwell is undoubtedly a good thing, even if an awful lot of people think they've read him. Who haven't? I think Animal Farm is one of those books like the Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men, which is so short that people genuinely have read it or been made to read it. In school I constantly encounter people who contend to me that they have read 1984. But when I make the most basic tests in conversation to discover whether they hold it, they obviously haven't. I think it's much, much more praised than read, which is the face of many authors. I think if anybody ever discovered the difference between the number of books sold and the number of books read, it would be so devastating to the reputations and amour proper of so many authors that it would immediately be suppressed. Books are not read People don't read them. So I think Orwell's fundamental contribution has been to alert people to a constant menace to liberty, and that's good knowledge of the rest of his work. I don't know. It's scary. My great good fortune, again, was a teacher who introduced me at the age of 15 to Orwell's essays in a very small volume with not many of them in it, called Inside the Whale. And shortly after that, this was again, I caught a wave because the British major, British softcover publisher Penguin, began to bring out this, what was then considered to be the definitive edition of his essays, journalism and letters. And that's me. And I read the lot when I was 15, 16, 17, 18, and they had the most enormous impact on me and still do. That, to me, is his real work. And 1984 is obviously, is a classic and Animal Farm. And some of his novels are agreeable, particularly like Coming up for Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, but they're not really of the same power. Of course, the point about Orwell is his journalism. And then the other, the great book, probably the one which again bears most rereading and is quite surprising when we read Homage to Catalonia, which at the last time I read it, was actually in Barcelona, and therefore was able to set all the events that he described in their places, which I recommend because it's fascinating. Again, as is so often the case, places which you imagine as being gigantic are actually quite small and intimate. And the Rambla in Barcelona is surprisingly small and narrow. And to see this while you're reading it is particularly fascinating. There's another place where this strange, surprising difference between the size of the place and the size of the event has been very striking. I went to Dallas and obviously went to the Schoolbook Depository and looked out over Dealey Plaza. And it's so small, given the size of the event which took place to it. But this is a digression. I think that Homage to Catalonia was the origin of both Animal farm and of 1984. The realization of the readiness of official communism to betray and crush dissent without either mercy or any kind of embarrassment was there, revealed to him in a way that stayed with him for the rest of his life. And was not, was not. He didn't. He strove to get people to understand just how devastatingly cynical the official communism of that era was. And I think that was part of that thing which you see in Hoist. Catalonia is then hardened and extended in 1984.
- [25:53]
Thomas Banks
Since you brought up Homage to Catalonia, I wanted to ask the adage that history is written by the victors. Do you think that the common kind of picture that we have of the Spanish Civil War, the sort of half remembered vision of the Spanish Civil War which Orwell does something to shape and Hemingway to. Isn't that, doesn't that kind of give the lie to that adage? Because we tend to see that war, I think from the point of view of the losers.
- [26:22]
Peter Hitchens
Yes. And there's the great Tom leroy line, isn't it, where she says they won all of the battles and we had all the good songs. But yes, I think in the case of Spanish Civil War, the losers have, have. Have successfully managed to decide what we think about it.
- [26:47]
Thomas Banks
I don't know if that's how true that is in, in Britain, but I think in the United States very much, almost certainly, yeah.
- [26:55]
Peter Hitchens
I mean I, I've known two people who actually fought in the Spanish Civil War. One a very brave and dedicated communist who wounded at the Ebro and British International Brigades and was continued to maintain the Stalinist position over the war for the rest of his life. And it was hard to gains. But the other one was my wife's uncle who'd fought his Swiss national had fought again in the International Brigades and he concluded that it was a jolly good thing that the Republic had lost because if they'd won they'd have come under the thumb of Stalin and would have behaved appallingly in 1940 and quite possibly as a result brought about the victory of Hitler in the Second World War. So these assume people had a right to speak about it. So. But it is, it's a, it's an immensely. The Spanish World War is so complicated that after you've begun to understand it, you begin to. You then realize that you don't at all. If you read Hugh Thomas's great work on it, which is beautiful book, full of wonders at the end of it, I think you find you're as confused as you were before you read it. Only it's a war that should confuse.
- [28:13]
Thomas Banks
Us though because we tend to have kind of a. Well, I mean, maybe this is true with every modern war to a certain extent, but yeah, I think a lot of people bring to a kind of simplistic and romantic ideas and yes, I don't remember finishing Hugh Thomas's book, but the chapters I do remember, yeah, kind of threw me for a bit of a loop. And he was sympathetic to the Republic but not uncritical of it, as I recall.
- [28:38]
Peter Hitchens
Well, yeah, I think that's one way of putting it. But he tried to be sympathetic to individuals even though he didn't like their politics. And it was. One point that he stresses very strongly is nobody can in any way impugn the valor of those who fought on either side. They both were extremely hard and with considerable bravery. There's a moment in. I reread After a Very, Very Long Absence for Whom the Bell Tolls a couple of years ago, and there's a very interesting passage in it about the stupidity of one particular. He isn't named, but anybody who knew who he was talking about recognized him. The stupidity of one particular high communist official whose idiocy in the night of the great battle almost certainly cost the Republic a victory, which I hadn't noticed the first time around. But Hemingway was more critical than you might expect. And I also found that it was a much better book than I expected it to be because I'd gone off Hemingway as one does. I read an enormous amount of Hemingway in my late teens and early twenties and associated with the sort of adolescent idea of the world and expected to dislike it, but in fact I was. I was quite impressed by it. I commend it after a long break. It's just as Wagner is not as bad as it sounds.
- [30:07]
Thomas Banks
Oh, sure.
- [30:08]
Angelina Stanford
No, no, I am going to take that advice.
- [30:11]
Peter Hitchens
It's not as bad as you've been told it is.
- [30:14]
Angelina Stanford
Right. I read a fair amount of Hemingway when I was 19 and got off him, as you say, like that was enough. But maybe now, maybe now that I'm in my 50s, I can revisit. I can safely revisit Hemingway.
- [30:28]
Peter Hitchens
Some of it, I mean, some of it is and some of it isn't. And that's the case with. So some of the early short stories are tremendous, and I remember going to the Hemingway Museum in Chicago and having my interest rekindled. But a lot of the early stuff is quite. Is quite startling. Be good. But I. I just think that there. There has been a. He's gone out of fashion. And as a result, he's. He's wrongly neglected in some cases, in some cases, rightly neglected.
- [30:57]
Angelina Stanford
I am fascinated, of course, by the. The authors you've mentioned and the role that especially imaginative literature had in your. In your childhood and upbringing. I'm wondering, in your life, has there been an author or authors, plural, that you've encountered that you've just thought, wow, they are masters of the English language. I want to write like that.
- [31:17]
Peter Hitchens
Yes. Even more, I think, has to be the greatest writer of English Prose, of the 20th century and the one who's probably had more effects on me, though I am. Increasingly, because I've read it so much and so often repeatedly, I've become more critical of it. I still think that Brideshead Revisited is the most astoundingly powerful book, even though the plot is fundamentally ludicrous. It doesn't matter that it's ludicrous because it's so beautifully done. I think that his Sword of Honor trilogy about the Second World War is great. Though I would add here because it's important that I'm now certain that Olivia Manning's Balkan and and Levant trilogies are a better account of the war, a better account of the war than Evelyn Waugh's book. And I think actually that Olivia Manning's Balkan trilogy is one of the greatest, again, pieces of literature of the 20th century and certainly rivals Evening Moore in its power. It's quite interesting that both her trilogy and his are mainly set at the important parts, mainly set at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Have a central character called Guy. One of those coincidences that is completely meaningless.
- [32:42]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. Oh.
- [32:44]
Peter Hitchens
Are you familiar with Olivia Manning? I don't know. She's tremendously underestimated. Author.
- [32:49]
Thomas Banks
The Fortunes of War is one of those. I think I used to have a copy and never got around to reading it. Here's the thing. I've read several histories of World War II. I've read a number of biographies of leading figures. I can't say I've read a lot of fiction set in World War II. I have read the sort of honor.
- [33:09]
Peter Hitchens
Olivia Manning's Bulkhead trilogy is not really fiction. It's autobiography, thinly disguised. She and her husband, who was a communist and fellow traveler, went to Bucharest just before the start of the Second World War. One of the interesting thing about Bucharest is that actually, in some ways, the war was fought in Bucharest without weapons. The decline, the rapid decline of British power and influences as we were defeated militarily in the other part of Europe became horribly evident to the British people who were to some extent trapped in this very strange and exotic city where I've spent some time. And there are all kinds of currents in this, and some of them personal and some of them are historical. But it portrays that era and it portrays the growing power of Germany and the sheer terror which must have visited himself on people who were living within reach of the German Reich at the time. Very potently, as I say, drawn from the life. And then eventually she and her husband get out and escape through Greece to Egypt, and then Find themselves in the Middle east surrounded by another not very encouraging piece of war. But they are beautifully written and very cleverly and thoughtfully written and I do commend them to you.
- [34:45]
Thomas Banks
Well, you've mentioned, let me see, Robert Pen Warren and Hemingway and you need not answer in the affirmative here but are there any other American writers, living or dead whose work you particularly admire?
- [35:01]
Peter Hitchens
Yeah, I had a long period when I read a lot of John O'Hara Butterfield 8.
- [35:08]
Thomas Banks
Yes, I know that one.
- [35:12]
Peter Hitchens
And what is the other one? 10 North Frederick and Appointment in Samara. I think very accomplished books. Also Alistair Cook once pointed out the cadence of them is wholly different from English literature at the time.
- [35:29]
Thomas Banks
Oh very, yeah.
- [35:31]
Peter Hitchens
But they do, I think they do portray a part of American life extremely well in a particular era.
- [35:42]
Thomas Banks
And I captures the steadiness, the seediness of a certain type of what I guess the American maybe demimond, I suppose in mid century.
- [35:54]
Peter Hitchens
I think I really particularly was fond of Sen. North Frederick. The story of a man who was nearly president and wasn't. Betrayal of city life. I'm very taken with John Steinbeck, though not all his work. I think that east of Eden is. Is. Is a masterpiece.
- [36:14]
Angelina Stanford
Oh yes, I do too.
- [36:16]
Peter Hitchens
I never make up my mind whether it's superior to the Grapes of the Roth or not. I'm. I can't. I can't quite get on with. With Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. I constantly wonder whether I'm being taken for a ride. Here are some beautiful passages in it, but I don't. It doesn't. I can't. I've never managed to finish Tender as the Night, for instance. Which is no doubt my fault. I have problems with some books which I'm supposed to read. I've tried and tried, for instance, to read Pride and Prejudice. I remember one evening I was on holiday in Canada. The children were asleep. It was a beautiful evening by a lake. I was sitting in a room looking over the lake with the sun shining through the leaves. And a bottle of wine at my elbow and Janos in. In front of me. And within about five minutes of trying to read the book. I was reading the details of the contents of the wine on the wine bottle label because I was so bored.
- [37:22]
Thomas Banks
That one hurts.
- [37:23]
Angelina Stanford
No, that one hurts. I think I've read pride and prejudice 26 times like that. That one hurts.
- [37:31]
Peter Hitchens
It makes a very good film, I have to say. I've seen films of it which I greatly enjoy. But as a book I just can't stand it. It just bores me to tears and I have the same problem. People keep telling me that. That the Great Gatsby is the most tremendous book and it says all this and that there are wonderful passages in it, but there's a whole. I just. It just leaves me frozen. I once visited his grave in Rockville, Maryland to see if it would inspire me to greater enthusiasm. But it didn't succeed. That's how I know his full name, because it's inscribed on his.
- [38:07]
Angelina Stanford
That's right.
- [38:07]
Thomas Banks
That's right. You said his full name.
- [38:09]
Peter Hitchens
He's.
- [38:09]
Thomas Banks
He's distantly related to the fellow who wrote the Star Spangled Banner. Francis.
- [38:15]
Peter Hitchens
Wonderful anti British song. Yes.
- [38:17]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
- [38:18]
Thomas Banks
If you read all the lyrics. Yeah. It's.
- [38:20]
Peter Hitchens
Well, my favorite phrasing is their foul footsteps Pollution, which is of course referring to our lot.
- [38:26]
Thomas Banks
Right, right. Yeah.
- [38:28]
Angelina Stanford
You see, it's very interesting because we are Americans who don't really like American literature. We both greatly prefer English literature. This is an interesting conversation. I'm not gonna defend any of that.
- [38:42]
Thomas Banks
Not to sound unpatriotic, because I think that our contributions to music and film in the great era of Hollywoods are probably. That's probably the American arts, that they're most representative.
- [38:53]
Peter Hitchens
I must mention one other American author, immensely variable in a way, but I find has had a great effect on me is Herman Woke, which is a pronunciation which is probably not designed for current times, but I think the Caine Mutiny is a superb book and I think that his great. It was made into miniseries. His great historical sweep, the Winds of War, War and Remembrance are not, I think, literature and I don't think he intended them to be, but as an introduction to the history of the period are unmatched and also they're plainly works of a very intelligent person indeed. I think he's underestimated because he was not of the left. There are certain passages in the Winds of War and War and Remembrance which make it plain that he's not a man of the left. And I think that may have handicapped his literary ambitions. He wrote a number of other books which I haven't taken to so much. But I think anybody who has not read the Caine Mutiny has missed something.
- [40:03]
Angelina Stanford
You have mentioned quite a few 20th century authors in our conversation here and a lot of them, well, you've mentioned some well known ones and some less well knowns. And you have also written a lot about more of the lesser well known 20th century authors like Hugh Walpole, JP Priestley, CP Snow. You have any thoughts about why. Why do we overlook these guys? Why are you drawn to them and why do we overlook them?
- [40:30]
Peter Hitchens
Walpole is overlooked, I think, because he wasn't actually very good. Some of his books are good and still to some extent read. There's a series about a schoolboy called Jeremy which caused, I think, an awful lot of English boys of my generation to be called Jeremy. I wasn't one of them, but one of my cousins was, and he moved heaven and earth to have his name changed because he hated Jeremy.
- [40:54]
Thomas Banks
If I could cut interject here before we get too far, I think I own probably 20 of his books or so, and I think that his. Oh, for instance, the Cathedral, if you.
- [41:04]
Peter Hitchens
Know that I was going to mention the Cathedral.
- [41:07]
Thomas Banks
Very fine. Kind of Anthony Trollop, sort of generation later, but a very fine.
- [41:12]
Peter Hitchens
Better than that. There's a wonderful moment where I think. I think, is it the dean? But something goes wrong with his son's life and he's confronted by somebody of the lower orders who said, well, now you're just like us. There's a lot of. I think Walpole, because he was a secret homosexual, was himself always concerned about sudden and catastrophic falls from status. There are some strange passages in his books about white faces looking out of windows and things like that which suggest a more nervous person than he likes to give the impression of. But that passage in the cathedral sticks in my mind also. I always imagine it taking place in a city I know quite well, which is Durham, which is dominated wholly by itself. Powerful cathedral.
- [42:05]
Thomas Banks
That's right. It's set in a fictional. It's Polchester, which is a fictional town, is that right?
- [42:11]
Peter Hitchens
It is. It is fictional, but it's part. It's said to be partly Durham and partly Truro in Cornwall. I'm not sure, but certainly the cathedral, whenever I imagine it, is that of Durham.
- [42:24]
Angelina Stanford
What's the name of the Walpole novel.
- [42:26]
Thomas Banks
With the doppelganger, the Killer and the slain.
- [42:28]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, yeah, that. That one was really good.
- [42:30]
Peter Hitchens
I haven't read that, I confess.
- [42:33]
Thomas Banks
If you enjoy Jekyll and Hyde, I would say that it is a worthy successor. Maybe not quite on the level of Jekyll and Hyde, but it's a very fine. Yeah. Sort of psychological thriller.
- [42:45]
Peter Hitchens
Yeah. I think it's fascinating that he had such a high reputation and then it just collapsed overnight.
- [42:53]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. With his. When he died in 1940 and it seems. Yeah, he was.
- [42:56]
Peter Hitchens
Yeah. I don't know why. I mean, it may have had something to do with Somerset Moore makes a great attack on him in Cakes and Ale. Cakes and Ale, in which is quite placed Alroy Keir. Is that's another writer who's now wrongly neglected and I always loved the way that Somerset Maugham said that he knew perfectly well that he wasn't a writer of the first rank, but he was very much in the front portion of the second rank, which I completely agree with. I think again, anybody who hasn't read Cakes and Ale or the Moon and Sixpence or of Human Bondage has missed extremely important experiences. But he goes in and a lot of his short stories are masterpieces of the art. I don't like short stories very much but I'll generally make an exception for more. But again, he's unfashionable because he's deemed to be imperialistic or something. Fascinating thing is, as far as I know he was brought up largely as a friend but speaking French and it was very, very Francophile and that may be one of the reasons why he writes English in such a particular and interesting way.
- [44:10]
Thomas Banks
Very pellucid, clear, not a whole lot of rhetoric and yeah, there is something kind of French about his style, you're.
- [44:19]
Peter Hitchens
Right, yes, but there's also very, very penetrating Insurgents. Yeah. He had a brother who was Lord Chancellor of England, I think and the.
- [44:29]
Thomas Banks
Legal family, I think the father was high up in the. Was his father a diplomat or a lawyer?
- [44:35]
I don't recall.
- [44:36]
Peter Hitchens
I think his father's a lawyer, I think, but I think his brother was, as it were, the head of the English legal system. The Second World War they were noticeable family of some intellect. I think he probably got away without writing all those books, but he did and as An Autobiography of Human Bondage is terrific. It's a tremendous. In explaining what a late Victorian Edwardian England would really like to live in, which it conveys that far better than almost anything else I've ever read.
- [45:12]
Thomas Banks
And real quickly, C.P. snow, I know that he is a novelist that you have written about somewhere but give us a little bit of a primer on him if you don't mind.
- [45:22]
Peter Hitchens
Well, Snow genuinely came from extremely humble lower middle class background and rose to be a government minister and a noted intellectual figure and in demand speaker. He's much sneered at now as pedestrian, all kinds of other things. But I think that his Strangers and Brothers sequence, which varies in quality, is particularly because it is autobiographical. Again, Concealed is the story of a young man who desperately wants not to be nobody, who wants to be someone and rise to the top is. Is actually rather moving. I also like because I'm really the many references to Cambridge which he makes which are extremely evocative but I'm annoyed that he's been pushed into the background. Also, he wrote a rather fine essay for the Godkin Lectures at Harvard on the British bombing of Germany during the Second World War, which I think is an enduringly powerful condemnation of a very stupid policy which is worth anybody's time to read. So I think I'm crossed that he's become obscure. I think he deserves it and it may be he's inaccessible to an American reader who isn't familiar with provincial England. But one of his books, particularly the Sleep of Reason, which is about a horrific trial of. Of two child murders based on a.
- [47:04]
Thomas Banks
Real crime, I think. Is that right?
- [47:06]
Peter Hitchens
It is based on a real crime because his wife, Pamela Hansford Johnson attended the trial of. This is of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady who hideously murdered a number of children in the Manchester area in the 1960s. So he had some knowledge of what had happened at the actual trial. But as a book containing a trial and a description of a trial, it's one of the best I've ever read. But it's also. It contains. Because he was. He had been a sexual libertarian in the 1930s and had gotten mixed up with people who believed that liberation of mankind was coming through sex. And there's a great sense of regret in this book that maybe they'd gone too far, which you don't often hear from self styled progressives. It is. I think it's a very good book and it has an excellent subplot as well about the. An attempt to discipline students at a new university which again makes great sense to me because I was at such a university myself around about the same time. I think he's underestimated and people should not be put off by the sneering.
- [48:11]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, the sneering I know began in his own day. There was a famous spat between him and FR Leavis, or FR Leavis attacked him as a philistine and kind of a middlebrow hack.
- [48:20]
Angelina Stanford
Didn't FR Leavis have a bet with.
- [48:22]
Peter Hitchens
Yeah, well, but I mean, honestly, what's so bad about being middlebrow there?
- [48:30]
Angelina Stanford
I don't know.
- [48:30]
Thomas Banks
I mean it's kind of like you mentioned Malm Somerset Malm saying that he was in the front rank of the Second Raiders. When I say something is second rate, I'm not necessarily disparaging it because there are so many rates theoretically below second that one could belong to. So yeah, I guess middlebrow would be another one of those words. Maybe.
- [48:49]
Peter Hitchens
Yeah, well, maybe it would. I just think, well, so what to Say that something's first rate is to make a claim for it which you're going to have to have held against you for decades or even centuries to come. This is another author I might mention, the brilliant writer of detective stories, Josephine Tey. Her book the Daughter of Time, which. Which I read as a schoolboy waiting and waiting for the Daughter of Time, who I rather fancied in, in theory, to appear. And she never did. And it was only later that I realized the title was. Which was not mentioned in my copy of the book. The origin of the title is. Oh, who was the great. The great thinker who said it? And it'll come to me after this is over. But he said, truth is the daughter of time, not of authority. And that was the point about the book. Truth is the daughter of time. And saying somebody is first rate might get you into all kinds of trouble. If they're saying they're second rate, you can probably. No one's ever going to reproach you for that.
- [50:03]
Angelina Stanford
Exactly. No. I love Josephine Tey and I am a great lover of golden age detective novels. And Mr. Banks has not read a ton of those. And that was. That was a hill for me. I pushed that Josephine Te book on him for the longest time and finally just bought him his own copy. And you read it and loved it. Richard iii, the Daughter of Time.
- [50:24]
Peter Hitchens
There are a couple of others which are. Which are astoundingly. They're not. They're not really detective stories in my view, though there is some detection in them.
- [50:33]
Angelina Stanford
Right.
- [50:33]
Peter Hitchens
Right. Another is Brat Farrer. And as with the Daughter of Time, there's a moment in it, probably 10 words long, when the whole story turns over, hundreds of tons of story turns over, like a sinking ship. And the whole everything you previously thought has just turned into something else. And another one called the Franchise Affair, which will mean if you, once you've read it, you will never again take on trust. Any criminal case against anybody. You will never believe anything that's been said, because here is an accusation against some people which is open and shut, obviously guilty. And yet they're not. And the discovery of how they're not is beautifully done. Those three. There are others, but those three are. They're not just detective stories.
- [51:33]
Angelina Stanford
Agreed.
- [51:34]
Thomas Banks
Agreed.
- [51:34]
Peter Hitchens
They're moral. Worked.
- [51:36]
Thomas Banks
You post on Twitter under the handle clarkmica, which is an allusion to an historical novel by Arthur Conan Doyle. Could you describe this book for our listeners who may not be familiar?
- [51:46]
Peter Hitchens
Yes, I can.
- [51:47]
Thomas Banks
Any Conan Doyle, aside from Holmes, Conan.
- [51:50]
Peter Hitchens
Doyle, as you possibly know, wanted to be remembered for his historical novels. He was sick and tired of Sherlock Holmes tried to kill him and then was forced to revive him by public demand after the Reidenbach Falls and by his publishers. Yes, he was never the same again when he was resurrected as said. But the historical novels were the things which he really wanted to be remembered for. And there were the two really, the original ones, the White Company and Sir Nigel, set in time of the Hundred Years War, which I read as a child and can still read with a great deal of pleasure. They're often very funny, but they're also extremely crammed with understanding and knowledge of a world which we can no longer see. But M. Clark is about the Monmouth Rebellion, a rather pathetic, almost peasants revolts against the growing tyranny of King James II In, I think, 1685, not long before the Glorious Revolution, which changed our history, which also vindicated the defeated men of Sedgemoor. Micah himself comes from a family in Portsmouth. It was a favorite book of my father's, who grew up himself in Portsmouth in a household headed by a rather tyrannical and Calvinistic father who was rather distinguished teacher and a much gentler, more Anglican latitudinarian mother. And the couple who raised Michael Clark are very similar to that and live not far away from where they lived. And Portsmouth doesn't change much because the shoreline doesn't move. And so that brings it out for me. But there are a number of characters. Micah himself and then this companion he finds who's a soldier of fortune from the wars of the Low Countries who joins this hopeless rebel band on their march down to doom at Sedgemoor. And it's full of. There's a wonderful description which sticks with me of what to do if you have untrained soldiers and you face a charged by professional cavalry. And if ever it happens to me, I shall know what to do, which may not be much use. There's a marvelous scene in which the Puritans sack the cathedral at Wells and try to destroy all the images and the glass in it and then prevent it by others, which is a rather poignant description of the endless battle between the Protestant and the slightly less Protestant part of the English Reformation. And then there's this battle of Sedgemoor itself and the. The tragedy and horror which follow it. But it's full also of very intelligent discussion of religion and politics. Anybody who read it would be a better person at the end than he or she was at the beginning, but neglected. And it has a beautiful. How does it go? It's the story of Michael Clark as told to his grandchildren in the the hard winter of 1721. It's told as an old man remembering the most important events of his youth to his own grandchildren. Can't recommend it highly enough.
- [55:24]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, no, it should be brought back in print. I mean, it seems I have an old copy of it, but it's probably from 1900 or so and I've never seen something like.
- [55:33]
Peter Hitchens
That's when most of them are still from it. I think you can get most books now on print on demand, can't you? But it shouldn't be too difficult. But it's easy to find online. It's often quite funny. It mocks quite a lot some of the ultra Protestant divines who had a habit of pronouncing the word lord as lard. And you can imagine how much fun you can have with that. But CanonJoya was a. Was again an extremely clever and witty and. And well read man. And it. I think that may be one of his best.
- [56:09]
Angelina Stanford
Best examples of the White Company is one of the favorite books of the third host we have on this podcast, Cindy.
- [56:15]
Peter Hitchens
She.
- [56:15]
Angelina Stanford
She's read that out loud to her kids many times.
- [56:18]
Peter Hitchens
That's a very serious. How did they get on with it? I found my children got no resonance from it. They didn't. For me it was.
- [56:26]
Angelina Stanford
Well, she has eight boys and they loved it.
- [56:30]
Peter Hitchens
Maybe that's it. I don't know. I must obviously have to try to get on grandchildren. But I. I had some difficulty in. In passing on my enthusiasm.
- [56:41]
Thomas Banks
You mentioned the Battle of Sedgemoor. You may know this. I think a young Daniel Defoe was on the. On Monmouth side in that battle as probably.
- [56:51]
Peter Hitchens
I don't know. I didn't know. I wouldn't be surprised.
- [56:53]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [56:54]
Peter Hitchens
I hope he got well. He obviously got away.
- [56:56]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, he did.
- [56:57]
Peter Hitchens
Unfortunately, it wasn't very nice to be on the losing side at Sedgemoor.
- [57:01]
Thomas Banks
No, I dare say not.
- [57:02]
Peter Hitchens
Well, it was particularly not nice because that was then followed by the. The Trials. Bloody Size Judge Jeffrey. There's another thing we could mention which is the great ghost story writer, Mr. James.
- [57:13]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, okay. Tell us about him.
- [57:15]
Peter Hitchens
Well, he is two ghost stories. What? Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle detective stories. He is the great classic writer. There are no ghost stories better than Monty James ghost stories. But the reason he came to mind is one particular called Martin's Close, which is a description of a fictional trial under the direction of Judge Jeffries, who features in it as a judge in a trial of a man who's murdered a Woman. The unfortunate thing for the man who's murdered the woman is that his victim is not wholly dead. I won't trouble you with the details, but there's a wonderful. The trial takes place in London and it's strangely dark and they say candles having to be brought into the courtroom, though no fog in the town and still early in the year. So something that darkness gathers in the courtroom. It's this awful case is heard. But you must. You must have come across the classics. O Whistle and I'll come to you.
- [58:19]
Thomas Banks
My Lad or the Met. Yeah, I've read a number of Awful.
- [58:24]
Peter Hitchens
Face of Crumpled Linen and Count Magnus, the terrifying Swedish nobleman who continues to haunt his state forests long after he's dead. Monty James's ghosts are not just figments and they're never explained afterwards as mistakes. They're real and they're malevolent and they have the power to harm. But the thing is that they always happen to nice furry academic people investigating the.
- [59:00]
Thomas Banks
Like Mr. James himself.
- [59:03]
Peter Hitchens
Yes, but they're too. They're just that little bit too curious. One of them is called a warning to the curious. They go too far, they find out too much and things then happen. They're superb. I can't again recommend, if you. If you like ghost stories, or even if you don't, actually, they are the best. There aren't that many of them, but they are. They're unmatched.
- [59:26]
Thomas Banks
You know, I. I first came across Mr. James, not in his capacity as a ghostwriter, but it was in an old college library, came across a volume of New Testament apocrypha that he had.
- [59:40]
Peter Hitchens
He remains the great expert on that subject, I think.
- [59:43]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, he's kind of a definitive.
- [59:45]
Peter Hitchens
Yeah, he was a major academic mind. Again, the academic, artistic and literary, liturgical and biblical references in his books are all absolute spot on. He knows what he's on about. He was provost of both Eton College and of King's College, Cambridge, major academic figure. This is not some joker. And when asked whether he himself believed in ghosts, he said, I don't know. I'm not giving a definitive answer on that. Brings to mind another English author I should mention, I would say Graham Green, though I find myself struggling sometimes with him now. I loved him again when I was young, but I'm not so sure now. But actually Kingsley Amis, who became known unfortunately later in life as the Father of Martin, which I think is a shame, because he's in. In many cases a superior writer. And some of his books, though oddly not usually the ones which are most praised it seems to me worth keeping alive for future generations. One in particular called the Green man, is again a very, very good story, but also an extremely powerful piece of literature. And it's another one which I find lingers very much in the mind, is called Girl 20. Again, a very serious book about the moral decline of a major. He's described as a musician, but in fact, apparently the main character is based on a major philosopher who Amos knew, who couldn't keep his control of himself in the sexual world. But the disaster which happens because of. Because of this failure restraint, which is mixed up with the book was written in the late 1960s, mixed up with the general moral deterioration. And in some ways the central tragedy of the book is the destruction of the Stradivarius violin by thugs which will make you weep. And then another called Russian Hide and Seek, which was stupidly. It was the first book I ever read in Ban proof before I'd seen any reviews of it. And I remember thinking when the reviews came out, you fools, you've completely misunderstood this book and not recognized it. It's supposedly about a Britain after about 100 years of Soviet occupation. Actually it's a satire on the moral and cultural decay of Britain without a Soviet occupation. And it has again some very powerful descriptions of how the people, after long enough of this occupation, can no longer understand Shakespeare or the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer. They've simply been robbed of their entire literary heritage. There's a semi comic, semi tragic moment where the occupational authorities are trying to re establish English culture and they stage a production of Romeo and Juliet and it's a catastrophe. It has to be read to know how much of a catastrophe it is. And then later on there's an attempt to hold a service in church according to the Book of Common Prayer, which is also a catastrophe. In the moment at which one of the characters who remembers the times before finally despairs. It's very. And the thing which I've written about in one of my books, the Abolition of Britain, a description of a garden party and the drink was sour, the glasses dirty, the sandwich is stale, the waiter's jackets scrubby, the lawn unmown, the gravel unraked, the tennis courts decaying, but nobody noticed because they'd never known anything better. Again, it's funny and sad. Beautiful piece of explaining how it is that cultural revolutions have their effect and that nobody noticed because nobody knew anything better. One of his best and a brilliant short story called Dear Illusion about a poet. I think it's a subject because he was Very great friends with Philip Larkin. So there's some extent it's about him, about a poet who's completely. Knows he's completely lost his ability to write poetry, but who is granted, is given an award which he knows he doesn't deserve, for a book of poems he knows to be rubbish, which again, is very severe satire. And I often wonder because Amos gotten. Finally got a prize for a very poor book, I think, called Jake's Thing. Late in life, I think he knew it was rubbish and was angry that he. He only got a prize for a book that he knew was rubbish and had nothing, no recognition of that kind, for the books which he knew were good.
- [65:02]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, I remember. Maybe this is one of the bits of his that everyone remembers. He has the most wonderful description of a hangover in Lucky Jim, which begins with consciousness was upon him before he got out of the way. He resolved, having done it once, never to open his eyeballs again. And I can't.
- [65:25]
Peter Hitchens
I couldn't do some furry creature been nesting in his mouth and he'd been expertly beaten by secret police. Yeah, yeah. It is actually one of the enlivening moments of a book I don't really much like. I've always thought it's overrated first novel stuff, but doesn't really stand up. It's not. I don't think it's the best way. Thomas, what would I know? But I just pointed out Thomas is.
- [65:50]
Angelina Stanford
A great lover of Kingsley Amos. And a couple of Christmas ago I dug up a volume of Kingsley Amos that I knew he had not written. And I wondered if you knew about it. Kingsley Amos wrote an academic study of the James Bond books.
- [66:05]
Thomas Banks
It takes them very seriously. Yeah.
- [66:07]
Peter Hitchens
He wrote a James Bond book?
- [66:09]
Angelina Stanford
Yes, yes. And he wrote an academic study of it, son.
- [66:13]
Peter Hitchens
Yeah, well, okay. I mean. I mean, it's all a good laugh, isn't it? I once had a lovely volume of essays by him which. Which was entitled Whatever Happened to Jane Austen? And it. All the essays in it were beautiful. And I've now lost it. I can't find it anywhere it is and keep me trying to find it again.
- [66:35]
Angelina Stanford
That does sound fascinating.
- [66:37]
Peter Hitchens
Well, a lot of his essays are really, really, really good. Sometimes he broadcasts on the BBC and there's a particular book the BBC run called A Good Read, in which authors discuss the books of others with other authors. And the sheer educated intellectual power of Kingsley Amis compared with almost any author writing today in this broadcast is heartbreaking. You realize just how much better educated, as someone who'd been through his sort of education was than those we have today. And, and also how much more articulate as a result, and how many references he could summon from nowhere at the click of a finger. That's gone in our society. It's, it's tragic to listen to.
- [67:27]
Angelina Stanford
I. I want to circle. I want to piggyback on what you just said and circle back to something you said earlier when you talked about losing our literary tradition, our literary heritage. As English speakers. Our lives are devoted to this. But I am so curious. What would your argument be to somebody? Why should I read a bunch of old books? You know, this is the world of computers. What value do you see?
- [67:50]
Peter Hitchens
I think storytelling is the most fundamental way in which we communicate ideas to each other. And the most important part of the Gospels are the parables. And they are the way in which Christ, who was God, attempted to explain what he meant to people who really had, up till then had no idea. And they're the enduring things. The things anybody who reads the Gospels remembers most are the parables, the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son. They're the ones that find their way into the stained glass windows as well, because people both remember them and are moved by, by them and are brought to understanding. So stories themselves are probably the best way of communicating ideas, memory, tradition that there is. Then there is a simple fact that reading is an act of the imagination. It is in the imagination that we can work out with our consciences what we can and cannot and should and shouldn't do. And if our imaginations are not stretched and educated, then we won't really have affection, collective consciences. So I think literature is essential for civilization for those reasons. I mean, I'm not against non fiction and history. I love history. I love McCawley particularly. It's so rewarding and so powerful, even though it's often wrong. But storytelling is the way in which in many ways, civilization perpetuates itself. And if you, if you cut yourself off from the great tradition of storytelling, then you cut yourself off from civilization.
- [69:27]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. Here, here. Yes.
- [69:30]
Thomas Banks
You have occasionally written in defense of the Authorized Version of the Bible for its literary and other superiorities to most of its modern challengers. Would you briefly describe your preference for the King James as opposed to any of the other English Bibles we regularly find on the shelves of Barnes and Noble or Waterstones?
- [69:49]
Peter Hitchens
Yes. It's beautiful. It's poetic. One of its principal authors was a man called Lancelot Andrews. And everybody who knows any literature is familiar with Lancelot Andrews because TS Eliot who normally acknowledged his borrowings, pillaged a sermon that Andrews gave about the Epiphany. And that whole section, occult coming. We had of it the ways deep, et cetera. That's Lancelot Andrews. He wrote huge parts of the Authorized Version. It was written in a period before mass literacy so that it could be read aloud. And its intention was to read it aloud. And I think I may have mentioned this before, but if the test of all good literature is that it can be read aloud, it was designed to be read aloud. It has cadences which are, if you can sometimes be. It still holds on in some churches at Christmas time. Almost all English churches has been abolished. But at Christmas time, when they have the service of nine lessons and carols, there will often be one lesson which a child is asked to read and you can. The child is utterly unfamiliar with this language and has never seen it before, but you can see it run through him or her like fire. And this happens to almost anybody. This is the, the. The desire of Tyndale was that every plowboy should, should, should know the Bible better than any priest. And he again was a huge influence on it. He wrote it for that purpose, that it should be known that it should be readable in public. And here's the third thing, that it should be memorable and that let there be light. It's not. People think that completely stupidly that 17th century English is flowery and full of long words and long clauses. It's not. The Authorized Version is full of short words. And people say, well, there are parts of it which are obscure. And I say, indeed there are. But if you go and check the same passages in the modern baby talk Bibles, they're just as obscure. I don't know how anybody could make St. Paul anything but obscure myself, but there it is. He. He's obscure in any version you care to name where it's not obscure, it's so not obscure. Here we have the prophet Micah. What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God? I think not a word with more than two syllables and the whole essence of the book explained. And people don't understand because they're not taught it anymore. They don't know if I say, for instance, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, or the mantle of Elijah, or any of these people. People don't know these references because they haven't been taught them, as I, very fortunately for me, was just at the very end. And I'm just astounded when I see the pitiful paraphrases which are now substituted. I'm astounded that anybody who knows that this thing exists can bear to be confronted with the other thing. But the other point about this, it's not just the Bible, which. Which has been removed from the church. It's also the prayers. So the traditional prayers of the Church of England have been bowdlerized and bowdlerized to make them less ferocious, less penitential, and actually fundamentally more reassuring and less frightening. Well, I'm not sure that's what people want. It certainly is frightening. What. But when you go to a frightening place, you need a good map.
- [74:08]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, well said. Well, okay. So we have. We have a lot of students who are very, very in love with literature and books and words, and a lot of them are aspiring writers and do write and ask us all kinds of questions about how does. How does one become a writer? How does one learn one's craft? So what would your thoughts be? For some of our students who.
- [74:33]
Peter Hitchens
It'S much more what is it you want to write about? Writing. It's not just a tool. It's shaped by what you want to write about and what your passions are, what you wish to communicate. So I think that's probably a more important thing to wonder about. The. There are some very good. Well, I think you alluded to the beginning. The politics of the English language is a wonderful set of warnings about basically how not to write, which everybody should read not just once, but probably every three months, because we all slip into these terrible habits very quickly. I always remember the examples of what happens when people ceased to pay any attention to what they're writing. The as go the. The fascist octopus has sung it swan song. The jackboot is thrown into the melting pot, and people write all kinds of rubbish when they're not thinking and also when there is no picture in their mind of what they're writing. And that the warnings that essay gives are so good. And so you get it by heart, if you can, because it's. It is. It's not. It won't make you a good writer, but it might stop you being a terrible one.
- [75:56]
Angelina Stanford
What's that Flannery O'Connor quote about writing programs in college? She says something about that the problem with writing programs is they don't keep enough people from becoming writers.
- [76:07]
Peter Hitchens
Well, yes, there is that. And the old everyone. It may be true everyone has a book in them, but in many cases it should stay there. There.
- [76:14]
Thomas Banks
Right.
- [76:17]
Peter Hitchens
I didn't. That's not my invention.
- [76:22]
Thomas Banks
All right. Yeah, I guess that's a good place to to leave.
- [76:26]
Angelina Stanford
I think it is. Thank you so much, very much.
- [76:29]
Thomas Banks
This has been a pleasure.
- [76:30]
Angelina Stanford
This has been a delightful.
- [76:31]
Peter Hitchens
I'm so glad we we conquered the technology because I was very worried it wouldn't work.
- [76:35]
Angelina Stanford
I was worried too, but we did it and thank you so much. This was a delightful conversation and we will enjoyed.
- [76:41]
Peter Hitchens
It usually means I've been boring my head off, but if it's any use to you, I'm glad.
- [76:48]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, I think our audience is going to very much enjoy this.
- [76:51]
Peter Hitchens
Okay, well, thanks a lot.
- [76:53]
Angelina Stanford
Well, thank you so much, Mr. Hitchens. This has been a delightful conversation and I'm sure you guys at home have delighted in it just as much as we have. Next week we're going to start our Best of Series, a repeat of our series on Elizabeth von Orman's the Enchanted April April, which is one of our favorite books. And we're excited to revisit that with you in this month of April. It's also not too late to sign up for our spring conference on Living language, why Words Matter. You're definitely going to want to get your ticket for that@houseofhumaneletters.com and the the whole topic is going to fit very well in with some of the things we talked about today and I will be quoting extensively from George Orwell on this matter, as you can imagine. So that's again live or later and you can get the ticket@houseofhumaneletters.com well, until next time, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world.
- [78:00]
Cindy Rollins
Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with Cindy@morningtimeformoms.com Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. And check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.
- [78:45]
Thomas Banks
Terence, this is stupid stuff by A.E. housman. Terence this is stupid stuff. You eat your victuals fast enough there can't be much amiss. Tis clear to see the rate you drink your beer but oh good Lord, the verse you make it gives a Chap the belly ache.
- [79:04]
The cow. The old cow. She is dead.
- [79:07]
It sleeps well the hornd head. We poor lads. Tis our turn now to hear such tunes as Killed the Cow. Pretty friendship. Tis to rhyme your friends to death before their time. Moping melancholy mad. Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad. Why, if it's dancing, you would be. There's brisker pipes than poetry. Say, for what were hop yards meant? Or why was Burton built on Trent? Oh, many a peer of England brews livelier liquor than the muse. And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man. Ale, man. Ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think. Look into the pewter pot to see the world as the world's not. And faith. Tis pleasant till tis past. The mischief is that twill not last. Oh, I have been to Ludlow fair and left my necktie God knows where and carried half way home or near Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer. Then the world seemed none so bad and I myself a sterling lady and now in lovely muck I've lain happy Till I woke again. Then I saw the morning sky. Heigh ho. The tale was all a lie. The world, it was the old World. Yet I was I. My things were wet and nothing now remained to do but begin the game anew. Therefore, since the world has still much good but much less good than ill and while the sun and moon endure Luck's at chance but trouble's sure I'd face it as a wise man would and train for ill and not for good. Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale Is not so brisk a brew as ale out of a stem that scored the hand I wrung it in a weary land. But take it, if the smack is sour the better for the embittered hour it should do good to heart and head when your soul is in my soul's stead and I will friend you if I may. In the dark and cloudy day There was a king reigned in the east There when kings will sit to feast they get their fill before they think. With poisoned meat and poisoned drink he gathered all that springs to birth from the many venomed earth. First a little thence to more. He sampled all her killing store and easy smiling season sound sate the king when healths went round they put arsenic in his meat and stared aghast to watch him eat they poured strychnine in his cup and shook to see him drink it up they shook, they stared as whites their shirt them it was their poison hurt? I tell the tale that I heard told Mithridates. He died old.