James E Hartley

Writing With Style

The first sentence I ever wrote has never been reproduced in a book demonstrating the highest points to which the English Language can attain when deployed by a Master of the Pen. The second sentence I ever wrote suffered the same fate. Total oblivion. Even I don’t remember these sentences. Presumably they were not very good. Presumably not even my kind teacher was inspired by them.

Learning to put words on paper is a remarkable achievement. Let us not minimize how extraordinary it is that squiggly black marks on a page enable meaning to be conveyed between two minds. (“Squiggly” is a technical term.) Writing as a Civilizational Advance is worthy of Great Praise and perhaps an Epic Poem or Two. Writing as practiced by the bulk of humanity? Using another technical term: Ugh.

Consider my first sentence. Presumably something like “The ball is red.” Efficient, to be sure. But, you might not want to read 500 pages written like that. So, once the idea of writing is mastered, a growing child is taught style. As it turns out, the untutored write remarkably poorly. Nouns, verbs, conjunctions, gerunds, tenses, vocabulary, all must become part of the writer’s toolkit. The process of stocking said toolkit is painful. You remember those days. You are not fond of them.

Then, a remarkable thing happens. Stocked with these things, the child, now a teenager, begins to deploy them indiscriminately. Long, impressive sounding words are thrown forth as if from a trebuchet. Yeah, like that. “Trebuchet” looks impressive, right? Sentences end up wandering off into the void that has no name but the darkness induces a somnolescence in the grader who will hopefully fail to be aware that the string of words misses a verb or said object has no connecting tissue. The mind lulls. What was I saying?

Eventually, along comes those hideous “grammar books.” They contain The Rules. You resented those rules. They cramped your style. And, as we know, your style was the Most Impressive Style Ever. The fact that you used words improperly, your sentences lack cohesion, your paragraphs did not cohere, your essay was merely a stream of consciousness which ended merely because you hit the minimum number of words for the assignment, well, none of that mattered because it was Your Style. Your benighted teacher gave you a low grade because your foolish teacher just didn’t like the way you wrote. Writing is a matter of personal taste. You like run-on rambling streams of consciousness! Well, as long as you are the author. Obviously when other people try it out, you cannot understand what they are saying.

If you are lucky, at some point your teacher handed you a copy of Strunk and White. Or Orwell. They had style rules. Simple and direct ones. Use short words. Use active voice. Delete unnecessary words. If you did this, your prose became good. Efficient. All that use of flowery ornamentation to mask the substance (of lack thereof) in your sentences was eschewed. Instead, a reader could understand what you wrote. Win.

I have heard tell that students used to learn how to write well in high school. That era predates me. Now, most students do not write well. They need Strunk and White. They need those rules. But, before we start complaining about the young’ins, let us note that their Elders are even worse. Pick up an academic journal sometime and admire the utterly abysmal nature of the prose therein. Current professors are among the worst writers ever.

But, imagine you are someone who has mastered those rules. You are someone who understands why active voice and short words are good. You know how to convey meaning in an efficient manner. What do you do now? You have a choice. You can continue to write efficiently, conveying meaning directly. This is not a bad option; the world needs more people who can do this. But, you could also buy a copy of Farnsworth’s Classical English Style and be amazed at the possibilities.

This book should come with a warning label: Not for those who have not learned to write efficiently. In the wrong hands, it would inevitably lead to even more of the overwritten prose beloved by the “Look at all the Big Words I am using” crowd. But, in the right hands, it will teach someone how to write like Lincoln or Churchill.

Great English Style is born of learning how and when to break the rules. The tension of this fracture of the rules is capable of lifting prose into a work of art. You can’t break the rules at random to pull off this feat. You must break them just so. Farnsworth’s book is a compendium of Just Sos. (That looks weird. But, so does “Just Soes.” What is the plural of “Just So”?)

Consider the short versus long word debate. Short words tend to have Saxon origins. Usually one syllable and brutally direct with harsh consonants. Longer words tend to be Latinate. Mellifluous and multisyllabic. If you have to pick one and always use it, go with Saxon. Your prose will improve.

But, what happens when you mix Latinate and Saxon words? Here is where Farnsworth comes in. Imagine a sentence that begins with Latinate words but has a Saxon finish. The idea begins in the ethereal realms, your mind dwells in those lofty plains, then it crashes to earth. Example? Lincoln: “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” The contrast of sharpness of the end after the lightness of the beginning gives it force.

Go the other way now. Start short and end in a beautiful panorama of vibrant vocabulary. It releases the tension built by the first part of the sentence, lifting it up. It is particularly effective at describing the good in short direct words, and then the villains in haughty terms. Lincoln again: “Did we brave all to falter now—now, when that same enemy is wavering, disserved, and belligerent?”

Once you start seeing the patterns, you can deploy them to great effect. Lincoln: “To meet and overthrow the power of that dynasty is the work now before all those who would prevent that consummation. That is what we have to do.” Or Churchill, who loved to mock his opponents with Latinate flourishes “He did not run away, he executed a strategic movement to the rear,” or “At 4 o’clock this morning, Hitler attacked and invaded Russia. All his usual formalities of perfidy were observed with scrupulous technique.” Brilliant.

To take another example from Farnsworth, consider sentences. Style guides like moderate sentence length, straightforward structure, and active voice. The result? A sentence designed to be as efficient at conveying meaning as possible. It creates an easy-to-read sentence which the reader can follow without too much effort.

If you want to see a really good example of this, start a blog and get the Yoast add-on that evaluates your prose for Search Engine Optimization (SEO for the obsessed blogger). It is cute. You get a green light when the search engines will like your post, a yellow light when it gets a bit frustrated, and a red light when your prose is too awful for the search engine to want to bother figuring out what it is that you are trying to communicate. It really likes simple structure, few subordinate clauses, short paragraphs and a relatively conventional vocabulary. The idea here is that people reading things online (and many people only read things on-line) have short attention spans and thus need prose that is simple, direct, easy on the eye, and not too difficult to follow. Long wandering sentences with ornate style are verboten.

Now contrast that to Great Prose. Farnsworth has a fascinating graph comparing the sentence length deployed by Oliver Wendell Holmes and William Rehnquist. The average sentence length is the same. The variance? Rehnquist’s are all roughly the same length. Holmes has both much longer and much shorter sentences. That contrast, a very long sentence followed by a short sentence or the other way around, has a remarkable effect on the prose. You notice it. It is a way of drawing attention to what is being said.

Similarly, while active voice makes a sentence forceful and direct, at times, you want attention drawn to something other than the actor. Jefferson knew this when writing the Declaration of Independence. “All men are created equal” and so on draws attention to people. That is the point. “God created all men equal” would draw attention away from those declaring independence, muting the forcefulness of the declaration.

A post like this could go on and on. The book is 145 pages of examples of all sorts of rhetorical devices. Things I never knew had a name—Anacoluthon being one which is much overused in this here space. Or this supremely excellent piece of advice: when you use hyperbole, exaggerate boldly.

I picked up this book because I saw multiple mentions of it when it first came out as being a most amazing book of style. The reviewers were right. I have never enjoyed reading a book on writing more. Indeed, it makes me want to go read other books of style, which is both high praise and I am afraid will inevitably lead to some rather disappointing reading in my future. Your future is brighter. You can click on the picture of the book cover above and buy a copy of Farnsworth’s book. If you care about writing, you will love it.

Master of Dialect

You don’t know about me, without you have read a bit of this here blog, but that ain’t no matter. The blog was written by me, and I told the truth, mainly. There was things which I stretched, but mainly I told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe the Long-Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator.

Mark Twain pulled that off for the entire length of Huckleberry Finn. I managed a paragraph…well, truth be told (as we know, always a Noble Thing to be done)…I managed to rip off Twain’s opening paragraph and change a few words. I was sorely tempted to write this whole post like that, but that would have quickly turned into an intolerable wrestle with words and meaning, and, let’s be honest, even if I spent a month on this one blog post, I would fail.

Twain, on the other hand, not only pulled it off for a whole book, but managed to work in seven variants of the dialect as assorted characters stroll onto the stage. Twain is a better writer than me.

Or should that be “Twain is a better writer than I”? See what I mean? I have a hard time with Standard English, let alone mastering a dialect—though I guess writing like Huck wouldn’t entail spending time worrying about whether “than” should be followed by “me” or “I.” I, however, just spent 15 minutes examining the matter, knowing full well that Huck still doesn’t care. Merriam-Webster, a fine example of the type of schoolmaster who never corrects your faults, would allow either “Me” or “I.” H.W. and F.G. Fowler, who wrote the strict manual, The King’s English, insist on “I.” Ah, but H.W. also wrote Modern English Usage (without F.W. looking over his shoulder), providing this helpful bit of advice:

But the prepositional use of than is now so common colloquially (He is older than me; they travelled much faster than us) that the bare subjective pronoun in such a position strikes the reader as pedantic, and it is better either to give it a more natural appearance by supplying it with a verb or to dodge the difficulty by not using an inflective pronoun at all.

And so, ahem: Twain is a better writer than I am.

Now you, Dear Reader, may think this is all an aside to the Main Point which was presumably to discuss the Greatness of Huckleberry Finn. You would be wrong. While this is a discussion of the Greatness of Said Book, the grammatical aside points to one of the reasons Huckleberry Finn is so Great.

The Background: I read Huckleberry Finn with one of my reading groups last year. The discussion took place on Slack, which is, as it should come as no surprise to anyone, not as desirable a platform for discussions as Live In Person, which was the O.G. But, when Live In Person went down as part of The Great College Shutdown of 2020, we, Noble Readers All, adapted.

The discussion was wide ranging, and life was chaotic, so I didn’t get around to writing up a blog post about Huckleberry Finn. The book lingered on my “To Be Reviewed” pile, a Daily Note of Sadness. Huckleberry Finn is my answer of choice to the Eternal Parlor Game Question: What is the Great American Novel. (You said The Great Gatsby? Please. Don’t make me Laugh.) The problem: there is just So Much Goodness in this book. Normally for a book of this scope I would have picked up the themes from a wide-ranging two hour discussion with my reading group, but Slack discussions don’t really develop very well, so arguments just don’t get sharpened.

Then came the fateful moment. The other day I was chastised by a former member of this Dignified Reading Group for the lack of a blog post on Huckleberry Finn. I replied with the lament above that I knew not what to write. Her reply: “I think you should write about dialect and communication for Huck Finn. That is literally the only redeemable part of the book.”

Egads! I was about to write that my former student is a philistine, dismissing the Great American Novel in such a manner, but that would stretch a stretcher to the breaking point, and while a stretcher or two might be permissible for anyone other than Aunt Polly, a Lie Outright is not allowed. Said former student is not a philistine. She is merely totally irrational when Huckleberry Finn is mentioned.

So while it is not true that the language and dialect of Huckleberry Finn is the only redeemable part of the book, it is certainly an object meriting much admiration. When you start the book, the dialect seems like a high hurdle to jump; the book is most certainly not Easy Reading. But persist, and with a dozen pages, there you are strolling along with Huck, just as natural as can be. The cadence drives the story. You move along at the speed of a raft on a river, lazily idling away.

The brilliance of this prose has two interesting effects. First, it is easy to miss the deep waters into which this book is sailing. Consider the end of the novel, one of the subjects which was discussed on Slack. Jim has been set free, Tom Sawyer knows Jim has been set free, but Tom goes through an over-the-top elaborate ritual of freeing Jim, imposing all manner of indignities on Jim, rather than just telling everyone that Jim is no longer a slave. Jim endures the barrage of toils and troubles with an admirable stoicism.

What is the Reader to Think in all of this? Because of the style of the writing, it is easy to be lulled into seeing this as just some childish prank. We can laugh when Tom seriously suggests filling the shed in which Jim is imprisoned with poisonous snakes. We can smile at Tom dismissing all manner of suggestions because they are too easy to pull off. The escape has to be difficult to fit Tom’s Romantic Fantasies. But, if you pause and think of Poor Jim, you suddenly realize that the whole rescue plan is just cruel. Suddenly, you might want to scream that Mark Twain is exhibiting the same callous cruelty toward Jim that apologists for slavery habitually demonstrated.

At the point you start thinking that, however, Twain has you right where he wants you. You care about Jim? You think Tom is being cruel? You stopped laughing and think Jim deserves to be treated better? Congratulations! You just internalized the point of Huckleberry Finn. Huck’s laconic style discussing Tom’s bewildering array of requirements to effect a proper rescue means it takes a while for your sympathies for Jim to build. Had Tom just announced that Jim was free, you might never have built up such an impassioned distaste for the horrors of slavery. Had the rescue attempt been delivered in straightforward prose, Twain’s subterfuge of building sympathy for Jim would have quickly failed. Twain wants you to realize that Jim is not a slave and he is not going to be an ex-slave, but rather Jim is a Man and deserves to be treated like a Man.

The second effect of Twain’s brilliant use of dialect is that that book is too easily confused with a children’s book. Tom Sawyer could easily be read by children with great pleasure. Huckleberry Finn? Don’t even think about it. I know this from personal experience; I tried reading it when I was in elementary school; I had no idea what was going on. None. But, reading it as an adult, because it is so easy to read the prose once your mind adapts itself to the speed of the prose, it is hard to remember that this book is not an easy book for an untrained 11 year old mind to read.

Stripped of the dialect, Huckleberry Finn is undoubtedly still a good book. Maybe it is even still a Great Book; hard to say. With the dialect, the book is incandescent. Marvelous prose, memorable characters, and a theme which will never become dated. Then, on top of all that, it captures the Great American Idea of heading out past the Frontiers in search of that God-given right to pursue Liberty.

Tom’s most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.

Cane

Jean Toomer’s Cane presents a problem for people who like to lump books into categories of comparable writers. It firmly sits in the realm of Great Books broadly defined, probably not in a narrow set of Great Books, though.

But, if you like finer gradations, you have two options.

First option: it belongs in the camp with people like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Langston Hughes. The book is included in, for example, the Library of America’s Harlem Renaissance: Five Novels of the 1920s. It has the same sorts of themes as those writers have in their works.

Second option: It belongs it the camp with people like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. It has the same sort of style used by those writers.

Rephrase the question this way: Imagine you had two required courses in English Literature and you want to put this book in one or the other. It can’t be in both courses because students will be taking both courses. The two courses are: “Early 20^th Century Modernism” and “Early 20^th Century African-American Literature.” Where do you put this book?

Jean Toomer would have hated that question, by the way. Convincing us to stop asking questions like that is exactly why he wrote the book.

The book is a collection of short pieces, largely unrelated to one another. Lots of poems and short vignettes (calling them short stories would stretch the definition of “story” to the breaking point). Three sections. The first is all bits about the South; the second is the North; the third moves back to the South with a single long story. Everything in the book is episodic, akin to snapshots of people. What unites these people?

The obvious answer is that they are united by their skin color. So, if you want, you can think about all these people as examples of people with a particular skin pigmentation. But, just as you are about to make that categorization, Toomer drops this poem into the book. The title is “Prayer,” which indicates exactly how you should read it.

My body is opaque to the soul.
Driven of the spirit, long have I sought to temper it unto the spirit’s longing,
But my mind, too, is opaque to the soul.
O Spirits of whom my soul is but a little finger,
Direct it to the lid of its flesh-eye.
I am weak with much giving.
I am weak the desire to give more.
(How strong a thing is the little finger!)
So weak that I have confused the body with the soul,
And the body with its little finger.
(How frail is the little finger.)
My voice could not carry to you did you dwell in stars,
O spirits of whom my soul is but a little finger…

Do you too confuse the body, the visible body, with the soul? Is the soul even cognizant of the body? “My body is opaque to the soul.” So is the mind. When you see the characters in this book, when you identify them by their skin color, you are looking at the body, not the soul. In fact, you are really only looking at a small part of the body. You are just noticing the little finger, or perhaps something else, as small a matter as the little finger.

The final, longest section is “Kabnis.” Toward the end, Kabnis explains the book you just read.

ORATORS. Born one an I’ll die one. You understand me, Lewis. (He turns to Halsey and begins shaking his finger in his face.) An as f you, youre all right f choppin things from blocks of wood. I was good at that th day I ducked th cradle. An since then, I’ve been shapin words after a design that branded here. Know whats here? M soul. Ever heard o that? Th hell y have. Been shapin words t fit m soul. Never told y that before, did I? Thought I couldnt talk. I’ll tell y. I’ve been shapin words; ah, but sometimes theyre beautiful an golden an have a taste that makes them fine t roll over with y tongue. (sic throughout)

Shaping words to fit his soul. Not to his body, not to the part of his body which you noticed about Kabnis. His soul. The whole of Cane is the attempt to shape words to fit the souls of the people being described. These aren’t bodies and minds you have been seeing in the vignettes and poems. These are human souls.

The souls you have been seeing are beautiful. Well, some of them. Some of them are not. As Kabnis goes on:

Th form thats burned int my soul is some twisted awful thing that crept in from a dream, a godam nightmare, an wont stay still unless I feed it. An it lives on words. Not beautiful words. God Almighty no. Misshapen, split-gut, tortured, twisted words

That is why Toomer’s book doesn’t get the attention it merits. This is not a collection of snapshots of beautiful people we can celebrate and makes us feel good. It is not a collection of ugly people either, people we can vilify and to whom we can feel morally superior. It is just a collection of people. Some people like you, some people not like you. Just people.

That was a radial concept in 1923. A book of stories about the souls of people who were primarily viewed as bodies of a particular skin color. The book is screaming: stop noticing the body; start noticing the soul. Kabnis again: “Mind me, th only sin is whats done against th soul.”

That idea was indeed radical in 1923. And, it seems, it is still radical in 2020.

Haunted Minds

Haunted Houses.

Did a chill go down your spine or did you yawn? The world seems to divide neatly between those who seek out ghostly tales of horror and those who most definitely do not. I am in the latter camp.

So, why did I just read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House? According to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, it is a truth widely acknowledge that this is the haunted house story par excellence. Not my normal cup of tea.

But, one of my former students recommended it to me, and because her recommendations over the (many) years have never led me astray, I read it having no idea what it was. Perhaps the title should have tipped me off. OK, so I did know there was a Netflix series that was supposed to be scary, but I assumed there was but a loose connection between the Netflix series and the book. (It turns out that I was overestimating the connection between the TV show and the book—some of the names are the same, but that is about it.) After all, I figured, said former student is not the type who would send me off to Stephen King…who, by the way, thinks Jackson’s book is excellent.

It does not take long to discover that The Haunting of Hill House is, mirabile dictu, about a Haunted House. You learn that in the widely, and justly, celebrated opening paragraph:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

The plot: John Montague, an academic anthropologist (is that redundant? Are there any other kinds of anthropologists?), decides to make his claim to fame by investigating a haunted house. Because this is science (insert hushed tone), Montague tracks down people who experienced psychic events and invites them to spend a summer with him in an old house, which he does not say is haunted because that would, you know, taint the scientific nature of these experiments. The most unrealistic event (in, recall, a story about a haunted house) is when two young women show up at the house on the appointed day to be assistants to Dr. Montague. Add in a handsome young man who is the heir of the estate, and you have a cozy summer romp all set up. There are even two elderly servants present to add comic relief.

All the players assembled, the game begins! Weird things happen! Everyone is scared! Even more weird things happen! Even more terror!

I suppose some people get scared reading things like this, but it is honestly hard to see how. Sure, if you were in a room at night in a creepy old house and something started pounding on your bedroom door causing the door to buckle inward as the pounding continued, presumably you might be a bit terrified. Similarly, if you walked into your room and saw a giant message scrawled in what could only be blood across your ceiling, maybe it might give you some second thoughts. Of course, you, being a normal human being, would get in a car and leave, but then you aren’t in a horror story, are you? And therein lies the problem. You are not in a horror story. Why are you frightened reading a fictional book about fictional occurrences?

So, is the book a silly bit of horror fiction? Not at all. While the haunted house gets the title and all the glory, there is a vastly more interesting story here than the ghosts in the night.

Which is more terrifying: a haunted house or a haunted mind? The Haunting of Hill House has both. The house is a red herring, a distraction from the real haunting.

Eleanor, one of Montague’s volunteer assistants, has recently come out into the world after spending years taking care of her invalid mother. In what might be one of the most perfect introductions of a character in literature, here are the two sentences which introduce her:

Eleanor Vane was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House. The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister.

Perfect. As we find out later in the book, Eleanor may have ignored her mother’s cries for help on the night her mother died. So, start with a guilty conscience. Now add in a vivid fantasy life where she is the center of attention in a world of people who adore her. Then add in a prickly sensitivity to slights, real or imagined, from real people in the real world. Mix together, toss that person into a haunted house, and what do you get? A very haunted mind.

Opinions vary on the existence of haunted houses. I am a skeptic, but I believe in enough entities with non-corporeal forms that I can’t very well mock those whose spirit world has different denizens than mine. But, one thing upon which we can all agree is that haunted minds exist. And that is scary.

Watching Eleanor’s mind as it swirls around in an ever narrowing radius is terrifying. Other than the opening and closing of the book, the story is told from her perspective, so we do not witness this terror third hand. She cannot escape her thoughts and eventually she loses control of where they lead. Over time, it is no longer clear whether what she is seeing is real or not.

Were it not for that opening paragraph and the repetition of those remarks at the close, we would have reason to wonder if any of this story is real. Jackson is remarkably clever, though; we know that the house is indeed haunted no matter which parts, if any, of this narrative were experienced by anyone else.

This is not the story of a descent into madness. This is the story of the madness that is already there in the mind of Eleanor. Reading it, the real terror comes when you start to wonder how much you are like Eleanor. How can you tell whether you are like her or not? You know all those strange things that happen, those bizarre coincidences and unexplained events? Did they really happen?

Equal Rights

It is easy to imagine Friedrich Nietzsche sitting in his study, writing away, merrily imagining the look of horror which will cross the faces of his readers when they come across the line he just penned. He obviously liked to shock people; the bigger the shock, the happier he was. But, alas, unlike his contemporary creator of scandalous bon mots, Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche was not popular in the salons of the day. People never knew what the guy was mumbling about over there in the corner.

Having never read a biography of Nietzsche, I have no idea if that portrait is correct. But, it sure feels right. How else to explain bits like this:

This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps not one of them is even living yet…
The conditions under which I am understood, and then of necessity—I know them only too well. One must be honest in matters of the spirit to the point of hardness before one can even endure my seriousness and my passion. One must be skilled in living on mountains—seeing the wretched ephemeral babble of politics and national self-seeking beneath oneself. One must have become indifferent; one must never ask if the truth is useful or if it may prove our undoing. The predilection of strength for questions for which no one today has the courage; the courage for the forbidden; the predestination to the labyrinth

That is from the Preface to a book Nietzsche wrote in 1888, shortly before he went insane. It wasn’t published for another 7 years because, well, the Publisher (quite understandably) was a bit leery. The title of the book: The Antichrist. Yep. Nietzsche put on his most malicious grin and pulled out all the stops in this one.

The quick summary: Christians are really bad. The longer version: Christians are really really bad.

The book is a mess if you want a nice linear dispassionate argument. Then again, all of Nietzsche’s books are a mess on those grounds, which, not coincidentally, is what makes him fun to read. Would you rather read a long dry explanation of the failures of Christianity or witticisms like this: “What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and the weak: Christianity.”

Be careful before you agree with that witticism, however. Do you really think pity is a vice?

Quite in general, pity crosses the law of development, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is right for destruction; it defends those who have been disinherited and condemned by life; and by the abundance of the failures of all kinds which it keeps alive, it gives life itself a gloomy and questionable aspect.

This is the same issue with which Darwin struggles in The Descent of Man. If you have a passel of pigs (also known as a bunch of pigs), and one of them is sickly and weak, you don’t take pity on it and let it spend its days breeding and bearing offspring. You kill it off to preserve the passel. (Yes, really!, a group of pigs called a passel. I am not making this up! There is, incidentally, also a “Sounder of Swine” and a “Singular of Boars.”)

Where did we get this crazy idea that we should have pity on the weak? Yeah, that is a Christian idea. Nietzsche explains that it is part of the slave revolt, the rise of the priest, whom Nietzsche recognizes “for what he is, the most dangerous kind of parasite, the real poison-spider of life.” Again, be careful before you agree that priests are really that evil.

If you are a Christian, can you really take offense? Nietzsche is, after all, right. You do take pity of the weak, you do think they should be loved and helped. And, if you are honest with yourself, you also know you would not prosper in Nietzsche’s preferred playground.

Nietzsche may seem like he is all merry fun if you like the idea of mocking Christians. If you like the frisson of shocking religious types, a book like The Antichrist seems like the perfect tome. Well, until you hit this sort of passage:

Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker’s sense of satisfaction with his small existence—who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of “equal” rights.
What is bad? But I have said this already: all that is born a weakness, of envy, of revenge. The anarchist and the Christian have the same origin.

What’s worse than a Christian? A socialist! An anarchist! Anyone who thinks that all people are equal. People like you.

The poison of the doctrine of “equal rights for all”—it was Christianity that spread it most fundamentally. Out of the most secret nooks of bad instincts, Christianity has waged war unto death against all sense of respect and feeling of distance between man and man, that is to say, against the presupposition of every elevation, of every growth of culture…
And let us not underestimate the calamity which crept out of Christianity into politics. Today nobody has the courage any longer for privileges, for masters’ rights, for a sense of respect for oneself and one’s peers—for a pathos of distance. Our politics is sick from this lack of courage.
The aristocratic outlook was undermined from the deepest underworld through the lie of the equality of souls…

Are you still agreeing with Nietzsche about the evils of Christianity?

Nietzsche is entirely right about this: Christianity is the source of the belief that everyone deserves equal respect. As Paul notes in his letter to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” That is a very radical claim. We have still not perfected the idea of living like that. Truth be told, we will never be able to perfect that life as long as we are all stamped with sin. But the idea that this is something to which we should all aspire is powerful. How powerful? It is powerful enough that you can hear it echo in the arguments of people today who believe they have completely rejected Christianity.

You want an honest and total rejection of Christianity? See Nietzsche. But, if you want to talk about equal rights, then perhaps you should acknowledge your debt to the New Testament.

The Ministry of Fear

Graham Greene once announced he wrote two types of novels: Literary and Entertainments. The latter was his name for spy novels or mysteries, pleasant ways to pass some time when you want a break from the usual contemplation of the struggles of existence, not wanting to become mired in a book helping you ruminate about such matters.

To help in your book selection process, Greene’s The Ministry of Fear has a helpful subtitle: An Entertainment. When an author writes in two genres, these sorts of subtle clues are quite helpful. Wouldn’t want to pick up one of those literary books when all you wanted was to be entertained.

As an entertainment, the novel works well enough if you like the sort of spy novel with well-crafted sentences, very little gunplay, and few moments of high tension. Our protagonist, Everyman Arthur Rowe, unwittingly finds himself in the midst of a game of espionage. You can feel his bewilderment as things go from bad to worse. Not a bad story in the genre.

But, Green is a clever writer; the subtitle is itself a bit of fiction. The book starts out as a stock-in-trade spy novel. Suddenly, twenty pages before the end, Rowe and the Reader come to a startling realization.

He was bewildered: he didn’t know what to do. He was learning the lesson most people learn very young, that things never work out in the expected way. This wasn’t an exciting adventure, and he wasn’t a hero, and it was even possible that this was not a tragedy.

The book then wraps up in a nicely conventional way, so if you didn’t want to be awakened from the entertainment, it is entirely possible that a passage like that just strolled through your consciousness without disturbing the scenery. But the passage does function like that mysterious stranger in a spy story slipping a note to the protagonist (in this case the Reader) saying, “All is not what it seems.”

All by itself that warning wouldn’t tip off the game but it does prep the Reader for the last two pages of the novel. As everything is quietly returning to normal after the excitement of the story, there is a casual reference to a throwaway conversation from the middle of the book which mentioned the Ministry of Fear.

Greene was clearly having a bit of fun with title of his book. The title hands you the clue to the fact that this is the type of book Greene calls literary, while the subtitle denies that is what he has written. What is this Ministry of Fear?

“I was just reading the questions in Parliament….They suggest there’s another kind of Fifth Column. People who are blackmailed.”
“The Germans are wonderfully thorough,” Johns said. “They did that in their own country. Card-indexed all the so-called leaders, socialites, diplomats, politicians, labour leaders, priests—and then presented the ultimatum. Everything forgiven and forgotten, or the Public Prosecutor. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve done the same thing over here. They formed, you know, a kind of Ministry of Fear—with the most efficient undersecretaries.”

There you have it, the entire role of the Ministry of Fear in the novel. There isn’t an actual Ministry of Fear, there are no agents of the Ministry doing nefarious deeds which Rowe bravely uncovers. After this conversation, the whole idea vanishes. If it weren’t for the title of the book, you’d never even recall the passage.

Then it shows up again at the end:

A phrase of Johns’s came back to mind about a Ministry of Fear. He felt now that he had joined its permanent staff. But it wasn’t the small ministry to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war or changing a constitution. It was a ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged. If one loved one feared

What is the problem? Rowe is on the verge of building a life with his newly found love. Happy ending, right? Ah, but there is a problem. Rowe, you see, has a secret. He murdered his first wife. It was a mercy killing, but he did the killing. He was tried for murder and acquitted, but the semblances of guilt remain.

Rowe has never talked about this secret with the women he loves. The problem: Rowe found out that that his new love knows that he killed his wife. And now (follow closely) he knows she knows. She has never said that she knows, so she obviously doesn’t want him to know she knows, and presumably she does not know if he knows that she knows. And (follow really closely) he does not know if she knows that he knows that she knows.

So there they are in this relationship, locked into the code of silence, never really knowing what the other one knows.

They had to tread carefully for a lifetime, never speak without thinking twice; they must watch each other like enemies because they loved each other so much. They would never know what it was not to be afraid of being found out. It occurred to him that perhaps after all one could atone even to the dead if one suffered for the living enough.

A lifetime of suffering in the hope, undoubtedly futile, of atoning for your sins. Imagine living like that. Imagine living your whole life afraid that others will discover your secret, that once discovered it will have to be discussed, and that there is no forgiveness for your sin. What would a life like that be like? The final paragraph of The Ministry of Fear:

He tried tentatively a phrase, “My dear, my dear, I am so happy,” and heard with infinite tenderness her prompt and guarded reply, “Me too.” It seem to him that after all one could exaggerate the value of happiness…

You have to admire ending the novel with an ellipses.

As an entertainment, the ending to The Ministry of Fear is merely a coda to the Story Proper. But of course, Greene wasn’t writing an entertainment. He was writing a story of the mysteries of sin and repentance and atonement. The spy story is merely the setting for this literary exploration of a problem we all face.

You have things in your life you don’t want anyone else to know. We all do. You have things you have done for which you have never forgiven yourself. We all do. You are terrified that if those things came to light, you would not be forgiven by anyone, and most importantly by those you love. Is happiness possible living a life like that?

Now it sure would be nice if there was some mechanism to permanently atone for your sins, some way to relieve yourself of guilt and the worry that others know about those things you have thought and done and left undone. But, the problem is actually even worse for those who do believe that such an atonement is real and has happened: why then do you still fear? Why is the Ministry of Fear still a very real thing in your mind?