Books

Does anyone today know who Frank Harris was? Are his novels and biographies read at all now? A hundred years ago he was acknowledged ‘by all great men of letters of his time to be . . . greater than his contemporaries because he is a master of life’, or so wrote the critic John Middleton Murry. George Meredith likened his novels to Balzac’s, and Bernard Shaw his short stories to Maupassant’s – high praise which was somewhat deflated by the discovery that one story had actually been lifted from Stendhal. But no one would have been more astonished at his disappearance as a great man of letters than Frank Harris himself. ‘Christ goes deeper than I do,’ he explained, ‘but I have had wider experience.

My first novel, A Dog’s Life, was largely autobiographical. It described my grandparents’ life, my parents’ marital exploits, and my own limping attempts to become a writer. But since I seemed unable to harness these first two subjects to the advancement of the third. Then I suddenly saw how I might carve out the first quarter of this spacious family saga and make it a self-contained novella covering 24 hours of family life. Heinemann offered me an advance on royalties of £500, which was ten times what they had given me for my biography of Lytton Strachey. Roland Gant did not wish to publish A Dog’s Life until the two Strachey volumes were out of the way.

I cannot now remember when I first read Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler (1947). My memory is confused by the fact that I knew the author in old age and was to become his biographer; Trevor-Roper himself told me about the extraordinary circumstances in which he had come to write the book. In September 1945 he had been awaiting discharge from the army so that he could resume his pre-war role as an Oxford don, when he was asked to undertake an urgent investigation into the fate of the Führer. This was then a mystery. In January, as the Allied armies invaded Germany, Hitler had retreated to an underground bunker below the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, to escape Allied bombing; his last months would be spent in these eighteen small and windowless rooms.

Though contemporary Western democracies are clearly marvels by any historical standard, they suffer from one clear, grievous flaw – children cannot vote. Last December the head of politics at Cambridge University invited ridicule when he suggested that this wound required bandages. On his podcast Professor David Runciman mused: ‘I would lower the voting age to six, not 16… it would make elections more fun. It is never going to happen in a million years but as a way of capturing just how structurally unbalanced our democracies have become, seriously, why not? Why not six-year-olds?’ Why not indeed? Why not live in a world where the most effective retail politicians are not Obamas and Trumps, but Barney the Dinosaur and Kermit the Frog?

John Ford’s most moving scene in his best film, The Searchers, is the unloved Ethan Edwards’s final exit from a house of shadows, swinging open the door and walking alone into sunlit oblivion, the community he has saved symbolically closing the door on him. If he is lucky, President Trump may well experience the same self-inflicted fate. By his very excesses, Trump has already lost in conventional terms of being admired or considered presidential, but in his losing he might alone be able to end some things that long ago should have been ended.

Vaccines didn't cause Rachel’s autism. Or Sam’s, or Daniel’s, or anybody else’s for that matter. The reason is simple. Vaccines don’t and can’t cause autism. Peter Hotez ought to know. A certified pediatrician, he's one of the world’s leading vaccine scientists, developing vaccines against ‘neglected tropical diseases.’ He’s also the father of Rachel, an autistic and intellectually challenged young woman. There is no vaccine controversy, just as there is no shape-of-the-earth controversy. Anybody who understands the scientific method knows that there is no link whatsoever between vaccines and autism, just as they know that they can walk as far as they’d like around the world without falling off the edge.

There was a time Classicists feared their subject was endangered because not enough people were taking it up. That fear has now been supplanted by anxieties over its manipulation by far-right groups and individuals with insalubrious intentions, like the white supremacist organization that employs images of the Roman gods and heroes to encourage its followers to ‘protect your heritage’. And this is just the tip of the Zuckerberg. In Not All Dead White Men, Donna Zuckerberg examines the abuse of Classics by by those who, in the political equivalent of the perceptual choice in The Matrix, have taken the ‘Red Pill’. Zuckerberg defines Red Pillers as ‘a group of men connected by common resentments against women, immigrants, people of color, and the liberal elite’.

I’ve Served My Time in Hell By John F. Kelly This memoir by Trump’s resigned White House chief of staff takes its title from the Vietnam-era GI mantra: ‘When I die, I’m going straight to heaven because I’ve served my time in hell.’ The former Marine Corps general likens his tenure at the White House to ‘simultaneous waterboarding and colonoscopy.’ At one point he was so depressed that he tried to hang himself from a chandelier in the East Room, but was interrupted by a tour group. He chafes at criticism that he failed to moderate Trump’s wilder impulses.

A silence descended on the Spectator USA library as our writers composed their Books of Year. It was the silence of deep thought, broken only by the clink of ice in tumblers, the gentle whoosh of the Juul pipe, and snoring from the armchair by the fire. At dawn, the editors unlocked the library doors. Our writers stumbled out, blinking in the bright sunshine. We gathered their shoddily written copy, and watched through the library windows as they gamboled in the snow. They looked like children, only with hip flasks and cigars.   Daniel Akst Any gift can be a burden, and no gift is more potentially burdensome than a book. That’s why any books you give ought to be brief, unexpected and absorbing – the opposite, in other words, of homework.

Liberal commentators on American foreign policy used to say that Islamist terrorism was motivated less by ideology than by gender. The thinking went that young men with no prospects will inevitably become violent and anti-social. Liberals may still believe that about Middle Eastern societies, but the consensus on the left in America today is that young men can be safely denied positions of undeserved authority and, moreover, given no meaningful alternative but to atone quietly for the sins of their fathers. Journalist and critic Wesley Yang’s first book, The Souls of Yellow Folk, is about the possibility that this consensus is mistaken.

Camille Paglia is one of the most interesting and explosive thinkers of our time. She transgresses academic boundaries and blows up media forms. She’s brilliant on politics, art, literature, philosophy, and the culture wars. She’s also very keen on the email Q and A format for interviews. So, after reading her new collection of essays, Provocations, Spectator USA sent her some questions. You’ve been a sharp political prognosticator over the years. So can I start by asking for a prediction. What will happen in 2020 in America? Will Hillary Clinton run again? If the economy continues strong, Trump will be reelected. The Democrats (my party) have been in chaos since the 2016 election and have no coherent message except Trump hatred.

Are product plugs on social media really that influential? Opinions on the matter range between Lord of the Rings star Sean Astin, who got ‘pretty ticked off’ at how no one cared about his endorsement of a pro-climate change candidate, to The Good Place actress Jameela Jamil, who recently wished Cardi B would ‘shit her pants in public’ for promoting detox teas. It’s a debate that’s been reignited this week after President Trump offered his suggestions for which books could serve as stocking fillers for his supporters: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1068264306947411968 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1068266944715878402 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1068271965343862785 https://twitter.

Trudging through heavy snow along the perimeter of the Maple Avenue Cemetery, my steps are punctuated irregularly by shotgun blasts from the deer hunters in the nearby woods. Why did I wear this cervine-tawny jacket? I gaze up into the slate sky of a late November twilight and think… well, my first thought is that I hope these guys are good shots, local boys and not city hunters. My second thought is of Aleksandr Solzhenitysn, the long loneliness of exile, and the sustaining dream of repatriation. ‘Away from home in a country far away Even the springtime sun is gray.’ Or so Solzhenitsyn wrote as he dreamed of his return.

‘After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself within 12 months,’ King George V groused in his last days about his oldest son and heir, David, Prince of Wales. Never a particularly cheery fellow, by 1935 George V was worn down by a lifetime of non-stop smoking. His gloom might have been understandable, but it wasn’t universal, since he had nothing but good things to say about his second son, the stuttering Bertie. In the prescience that kings sometimes display about their successors, George V suspected that he was about to pass the imperial crown into unsteady hands. When the old king died in January of 1936, David, Prince of Wales became King Edward VIII. As Prince of Wales, he had been phenomenally popular, the House of Windsor’s first full-blown celebrity.

When Michelle Obama’s husband left office in 2016, Van Jones summarized eight years of CNN fawning by getting almost teary-eyed when discussing his feelings for her. Every other news outlet save Fox felt the same. The love fest resumes with the publication of her autobiography, Becoming. Given Michelle Obama’s role in Barack Obama’s transformation, and her behavior towards allies and others as First Lady, she does not merit unexamined adulation. Obama emphasizes that her social mobility depended on growing up in an intact working family with parents who prioritized the educational success of their children. Her liberal admirers might apply this insight to their understanding of the persistence of a black underclass.

Great novelists come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing they all share is a status of half-belonging. If they had no foot in the world at all, they could hardly understand it; if they completely belonged, they could hardly understand what was distinctive. One of the pleasures of this excellent biography is fully appreciating the peculiar, liminal, not-quite-successful position Powell wrote from, and described with great exactness. In half a dozen social and professional milieux, he was a tolerated, perhaps useful minor presence, like a spare man at dinner. From the standpoint of a rather failed editor, screenwriter, soldier, socialite, he stood by and watched the world. In each case, one suspects, the subjects hardly realized they were being observed.

A liberal order is not natural. Robert Kagan admits as much in his new book, The Jungle Grows Back, when he writes that the ‘the creation of the liberal order has been an act of defiance against both history and human nature’. Nor is a liberal order an ‘order’, or liberal in nature. It is a sort of hegemonic or imperial peace. Nothing wrong with that, of course; peace, any peace, is important. Unfortunately, it is the liberal part, which causes the problem. An internationalist, utopian worldview, liberalism is full of crusaderly zeal, constantly ‘going abroad in search of monsters to destroy’. Liberal internationalists badly want to shape the world. When given the chance, they do manage to shape the world, very badly indeed.

The socialists behind the immensely successful podcast ‘Chapo Trap House’ have now released a book, The Chapo Guide to Revolution. A satirical attack on liberals and conservatives, as well as a sincere case for democratic socialism, it is often funny and sometimes instructive. The book has good jibes about the foaming rage of right-wing keyboard warriors and the affectations of conservative intellectuals. Chapo satire often flounders on its contradictions, though. The Chapo crew enjoy mocking the appearances of liberal and conservative figures, for example, yet their photographs suggest that if they want such jokes to be effective they should confine themselves to non-visual forms of media.