The
Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST
Really Good Books, Part I
People
are always asking me what my favorite books are. I’ve held off listing them
because it seems self-indulgent. But, with summer almost here, I thought I
might spend a couple columns recommending eight books that have been pivotal in
my life.
“A Collection of Essays,” by George
Orwell. If
you want to learn how to write, the best way to start is by imitating C.S.
Lewis and George Orwell. These two Englishmen, born five years apart, never
used a pompous word if a short and plain one would do. Orwell was a master of
the welcoming first sentence. He wrote an essay called “England Your England”
while sheltering from German bombs during World War II. Here is his opening:
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill
me.”
Here’s the first
sentence of his essay on Gandhi: “Saints should always be judged guilty until
they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are
not, of course, the same in all cases.”
Here’s how he opened an
essay on his schoolboy days, “Soon after I arrived at Crossgates (not
immediately, but after a week or two, just when I seemed to be settling into
the routine of school life) I began wetting my bed.”
There’s a disarming
rhythm to each of those sentences; reality is odd, and it takes a few shimmies
to get it right. Orwell was famous for sticking close to reality, for facing
unpleasant facts, for describing ideas not ideologically but as they actually
played out in concrete circumstances. Imperialism wasn’t an idea; it was a lone
official haplessly shooting an elephant.
His other lesson for
writers, even opinion writers, is that it’s a mistake to think you are an
activist, championing some movement. That’s the path to mental stagnation. The
job is just to try to understand what’s going on.
“Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy. This is a novel
about characters who are not quite in control of themselves. Kitty goes to the
ball in a perfect dress. Even the strip of velvet around her neck fits just so.
She is swept up in a sort of ecstasy of movement until a glance at the man she
thinks is her beau crushes her in an instant.
Levin falls in love in a
way he didn’t plan. He experiences unexpected transcendence cutting grass, of
all things. He cannot account for his own happiness, which is in excess of what
he deserves, and still has to hide the noose at dark moments for fear he might
use it.
Anna is a magnetic
person propelled by a love that is ardent and unexpected but also headlong and
unpredictable. She’s ultimately unable to surmount the consequences of her
actions or even live with the moral injuries she causes. Was Anna right to
follow her heart? Should she have settled for a mediocre life in line with
convention? This is a foxlike love story, with many angles, which does not lead
to easy answers.
“Rationalism
in Politics” by Michael Oakeshott. This essay dismantles a common form of
contemporary hubris — the belief that it is possible to solve political
problems as if they were engineering problems, with rational planning.
Oakeshott distinguishes between technical knowledge and practical knowledge.
Technical knowledge is the sort of information that can be put in a recipe in a
cookbook. Practical knowledge is the rest of what the master chef actually
knows: the habits, skills, intuitions and traditions of the craft. Practical
knowledge exists only in use; it can be imparted but not taught. Technocrats
and ideologues possess abstract technical knowledge and think that is all there
is. Their prefab plans come apart because they simplify reality, and don’t
understand how society works and the rest of what we know.
“All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn
Warren. This
is nominally a novel about Huey Long. But it is also a novel about irony, the
way good can come from bad, and bad can come from good, the way people march
into public life imagining they are white lambs only to be turned into guilty
goats. The main characters are tainted and mottled, part admirable, part
noxious. The book asks if in politics you have to sell your soul in order to
have the power to serve the poor.
It’s written in an
elegiac tone that I’m a sucker for. “The Great Gatsby,” “Brideshead Revisited”
and Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier” are also written in this tone. The
narrator of “All the King’s Men” has to lose his innocence to understand the
multiplicity and sadness of the truth.
Most of today’s books
are about limitation — about being propelled by passions we can’t control into
a complex world we can’t understand. For Tuesday, I’ll find some books that are
more self-assured.
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