It has long been a commonplace that contemporary popular culture is mired in reboots, remakes, sequels, prequels, spin-offs and the rest ad nauseam, in spite of the newest iterations so often proving not only artistically stale but commercially less viable than their predecessors. Indeed, many claim that movie and TV production are not just trading on old, washed-out brands and ideas in their recent offerings to an unprecedented and wearisome degree, but making new movies and shows in spite of their having little prospect of making money simply to sustain the presence and salability of the more popular works that came before them--shoring up the "back catalog" value of the earlier, more successful, installments in some franchise with new material which is commercially marginal, or even a "loss leader," rather than attempt to MAKE SOMETHING NEW FOR A CHANGE!
I do not dispute this reading of the situation--and do not deny that it is a very, very sad state of affairs. Still, it can also seem the case that, lamentable as the decisions that make for it are, all as those who make the relevant decisions never miss a chance to display their crassness, vulgarity, stupidity and never-take-responsibility-for-anything moral cowardice before the public, it does seem only fair to acknowledge that there are commercial factors that make new hits on the scale of the old--something as big as James Bond was in the '60s, or Star Wars in the '70s, or the Transformers or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the '80s--genuinely elusive, even should the Suits give a worthy artist their support, with three factors seeming to me to be of particular consequence here.
1. The Market is Unprecedentedly Fragmented and Saturated.
Consider the pop cultural world in which, for example, we saw the sensations made by so many children's cartoons of the '80s like The Transformers, G.I. Joe, Masters of the Universe. It was rather a smaller world, with fewer viewing options, and more people accordingly likely to be looking in the same direction at the same time. It was also a world of higher turnover, because if old movies and reruns of old shows comprised a larger part of people's entertainment media diet, this had its limitations. When, for example, those '80s-era cartoons were edged out of the weekday afternoon or Saturday morning line-up, fans of a particular cartoon may have retained their affections, but not easily accessed the show again, unless they had gone to the considerable trouble of getting it all on VHS. It was effectively unavailable--and as a result its fans found it that much easier to embrace something new in its stead, such that by the time Ghostbusters II hit theaters in 1989 it already looked dated in the kids at the birthday party where two down-on-their-luck former Ghostbusters appear as the entertainment wanting to see He-Man instead. (Already by 1987 the enthusiasm for He-Man had passed its peak, as the disappointing receipts for the live-action feature film version showed, while by 1989 the young had already moved on to other crazes, like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.)
However, the number of options was surging (as cable packages offered more channels, and increasingly "on demand" services as well), and as new media technologies made the old more enduring (for accessing old TV shows DVD was far handier than VHS), with the combination of choice and convenience pointedly including older fare hitting a new peak in the era of streaming (far handier than "physical media" ever was for the purpose). Even single free services like Tubi afford what not long ago would have seemed a superabundance of choices, as even this pales next to what can be had if one pays for even a handful of premium streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, etc., etc.). The collective content of those services includes the great bulk of the old stuff, in many cases carried by multiple services at once, not infrequently including a free option of some kind (perhaps in the listings of shows you can watch any time, perhaps in a channel looping the entire run of the series over and over and over again). Those '80s-era He-Man episodes? The fan can see them whenever they want for the relatively modest price of a subscription. They can at least as easily see the '80s-era incarnation of the Turtles too, all as the enduring presence of those cartoons only encourages the Suits in their obsessive remaking of everything, with the Turtles as good an example of that as any. (In the twenty-nine years since the first Turtles cartoon went off the air we have had four animated series that have so far run for a combined fifteen seasons--a new animated series airing for about half that period as a whole, all as additional specials, and live-action shows and films, were also there to sustain the franchise's presence.) Amid all that it is very, very hard to make an impression on any great number of people, the more in as they are not just consuming the barrage of more recent stuff, but older stuff also has any claim on their affections. Indeed, it can be very hard even to get noticed amid the cacophony.
2. It is Not Just Particular Franchises, but Whole Genres, That Hollywood Has Exhausted.
I first joined the argument over whether genres tend to follow a life cycle two decades ago. In doing so I took the side that holds the answer to be "Yes," and since then have not seen a single thing to make me change my mind about that, with, indeed, this seeming to me relevant enough to spell out the version of the cycle that I go by here. This begins with someone doing something new, and people becoming excited by the newness, especially insofar as it is a deep and meaningful newness--a new subject matter or new way of dealing with old subject matter, giving them a new way of looking at the world, a new pleasure, something that people may feel like they "always wanted" but just didn't know it. Artists get interested, and see what can be done with it. They realize a good many possibilities amid what may very well be a remarkable creative efflorescence, but over time there is less originality about, newer works increasingly a reworking of an increasingly recognizable set of themes and formulas and devices that come to seem the "usual" ones as these go from being familiar to being overfamiliar--for wax romantic all you like about the boundlessness of human creativity, what the human imagination is likely to come up within the bounds of a single kind of story, in a given span of years, that a very large number of people would find to be really worthwhile, is apt to be pretty finite, and the effort produce "diminishing marginal returns" before long, with nostalgia and in-joke and parody becoming increasingly prominent because "telling the story straight" just isn't all that interesting anymore a giveaway in such situations. Thus a genre that had risen and flourished declines. It may not be completely and eternally finished, it may still have its fans, but the old fecundity and inventiveness and excitement just aren't there--and on the whole people move on.
It is that vibrant period in the genre's history that gives you franchises, precisely because there is that crucial measure of discovery and novelty and excitement. Alas, considering the kinds of movies Hollywood makes franchises out of these days it seems that just about all of them are from genres that seem very far into the decadent phase of that trajectory. Certainly no one can dispute that Hollywood has been mining the action movie and science fiction movie, the space opera, the superhero tale, spy-fi, etc., etc. very intensively for a very long time. The result is a very small chance of their giving the public something it hasn't seen before through them, even the nostalgia and in-joke and parody pretty well exhausted, and accordingly that their potential for Really Big New Franchises does not seem terribly great. All of this seems that much bigger a problem in a milieu where big money is involved, and where the audiences one must interest are accordingly huge, this lowering the tolerance for risk, and raising the pressure on everyone to play it safe. (Hollywood doesn't make superhero movies looking to realize the full narrative potentials of the superhero genre. It does so to make a profit on a megabuck budget, a fact meaning that the superhero craze can be exhausted even as a lot of potentially very interesting, potentially great, superhero movies remain unmade.)
Of course, as genres decline other genres are born, aren't they? Certainly that is what happened in the past, with, for example, a Hollywood that had long had boffo b.o. from musicals and costume drama epics but found them becoming less salable finding potential in the action movie, the science fiction movie, etc. and producing a new era of blockbusters in the 1970s. (Hollywood may have been surprisingly slow to realize that potential. It took a young George Lucas to make them see what was painfully obvious to any non-idiot. But it happened.) Alas, there doesn't seem anything to compare with that these days, those hits which seem fresher--an Oppenheimer, for instance--generally not looking as if they have the makings of a formula that could be used to generate commercial successes for decades, with this underlined by how those of us attentive to such things keep hearing about the "graying" of fandom (in the sense of if you go to a fan convention you literally see a lot of gray heads). But as the situation implies the problem would seem far, far bigger than Hollywood.
After all, consider one line of thought about why genres emerge in the first place--how it is that artists come to be doing that something new to which others respond, namely that life itself changes, suggesting new possibilities. Compared with a period like the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--not coincidentally, the period in which we saw the technologies and genres of contemporary popular culture as we know it emerge (from the motion picture to the comic book to the paperback, from the crime thriller to the outer space adventure)--recent decades just did not see life change quite so much. Sneer all you like about the expectations of flying cars, protest all you like that your phone is the eighth wonder of the world, the fact remains that the change in human life entailed by the shift from an agrarian, rural civilization to an industrialized, urban one, the dawning of mass production, mass consumption and mass everything else, the electrification and mechanization of everyday life, etc., etc. has had no parallel since, as one sees comparing, for instance, the changes wrought in the Western world in the 1875-1925 period with the changes of the 1975-2025 period a hundred years later. Period, end of story, no room for argument. And if it is indeed the case that new artistic genres emerge because of gaps in culture that they fill--that they offer us new subjects because there are new subjects, show us a new way of looking at the world because a change in the world prompted such a way--well, there are apt to be a lot less gaps to fill in a static era than in a time of dramatic change. This may be all the more the case in as that era has been a time of intellectual stultification rather than ferment, exemplified by that stupidly self-satisfied postmodernist attitude which takes everything "ironically" so that nothing ever means anything.
Still, it seems possible, even probable, that along with the stagnation of a whole society in most ways there is also the matter of one of the few things that has changed (yes, it does relate to your phone), namely the way that people in general "process media"--and that this has had important consequences for the media business.
3. The Decline of Print Culture.
Consider how a half century ago the pleasures of "high concept" audiovisual media were a novelty, enjoyed by people whose mentalities had been shaped, and for some time after went on being shaped, by a considerably more print-based culture, and how this interaction with high concept material reflected that. If image came ahead of story in such a film, the audience was still accustomed to think in terms of story, and if already engaging with images more than conventional elements of narrative still had some capacity to become fascinated with the bigger saga, the bigger world, the characters--for instance, building up what they have around the relatively slight presence that Boba Fett was in the original Star Wars trilogy--all as they went on to wolf down the books of an Expanded Universe. (Would you believe that when it hit the market Heir to the Empire made the New York Times hardcover list for 18 weeks?) That way of approaching such material seems less plausible in a later, more thoroughly high concept world, to the disadvantage of anyone trying to build up a big new franchise now, not only because the audience is so accustomed to such fare that it less easily makes an impression on them, but because of how it relates to "content." The young especially watch distractedly rather than absorbedly--a difference exemplified by the distance between the old-time theatrical experience and watching a movie on a cell phone screen as one sits on the bus. They are habituated to snippets of content. They react to images rather than stories. It is all a far cry from what built up old-style fan enthusiasm--while it seems symbolic of the situation that fans watched movies and wrote fan fiction. By contrast, even if the media generally pushes the "Young people love reading and writing as much as ever!" line in a spirit of mindless boosterism there is every reason to think that they actually write a whole lot less.
Meanwhile that same removal from print has meant that print media have suffered generally, publishing itself become more stagnant, closed off, less likely to present audiences with anything original, and less likely to reach much of an audience when it does--with all that means for its long hugely important role in not just creating franchises to be filmed, but furnishing makers of movies with material to render into images more broadly. (Returning to Star Wars it is worth remembering that if Lucas filmed an original script, he also drew on a half century old heritage of space operatic adventure in generating that story and its images, as one is likely to be reminded when reading a tale like Edmond Hamilton's classic "Crashing Suns.") I would say that this decline of print even carries over to the comic book, an industry which--even if standing partway between the written word and visual media, and itself dependent on print fiction (as we see when we remember how much classic DC superheroes like Batman and the Green Lantern were developments of pulp antecedents like the Shadow and the Lensmen)--has also seen far better days, with all that means for whatever potential the times may have had for generating new genres and new franchises. Indeed, one may say that in audiovisual media "killing" print culture it also killed a principal source of its own nourishment, and we are seeing some of the effects in the failure of new fandoms to materialize.
Altogether this has made for a thoroughly changed pop cultural world--one in which, I think, it is unreasonable for the media-industrial complex to try and aim for colossal hits in the "put up a tentpole and they will come" fashion to which its executives are addicted. Instead, as I have already said many a time, they would do better to aim at turning a profit on the possibility of the existence of small but enthusiastic audiences for particular movies--the carefully "targeted" success--such that if they can occasionally do well with a Deadpool & Wolverine they would do better most of the time to aim for an It Ends With Us, spending just a little money at a time but getting a very good return on it, certainly a lot better than they got on an Indiana Jones 5 or Captain Marvel 2. As the films named imply those making the decisions will do well to pay attention to what's out there, and occasionally take a risk--the more in as if they are very, very lucky they will in this period in which new ideas of any kind, and especially new ideas that can be used again and again, are very, very elusive, turn up exactly that hit that has the makings of that new genre that they so very sorely need.
Do I think Hollywood is likely to take this path to any great degree? Of course not, because what I am talking about means playing a risky, demanding game with intelligence and daring, two qualities never much in evidence there, and especially not these days, with the outlook the bleaker given that whatever talent may exist in the C-suites is subordinate to the demands of the same "shareholder value"-singing folks who have turned icons of American industrial might like General Electric and Boeing (and even Red Lobster!) into what they are now and thought it was just dandy, because, hey, they got theirs. Indeed, it seems that the industry's state of denial about the post-pandemic cinematic market endures and the ways in which it may have changed the "rules of the game" endures, the industry doubling down on its old, failing, way of doing things as it at best tweaks that way of doing things--taking advantage of the fact that a generation that grew up on video games will flock to theaters to enjoy movies that may not be very good cinema but exploit its love for those games all the same (this seems to sum up the Minecraft phenomenon), while trying to save a buck when it can as it presses ahead with its conventional blockbuster-making.
Thursday, August 28, 2025
Notes on a High Concept Version of Pride & Prejudice
When admirers of literary classics speak it is a commonplace, even a cliché, of their rhetoric for them to speak of such vast and widespread love existing for them (across generations, across the world, etc.) that listening to them one may imagine that their own admiration is the "normal," universal sentiment of every thinking and feeling human being--which, of course, is not usually the case.
For my part I do not think those admirers deliberately offering "mere" rhetoric. Rather I think it an occasion on which the Frasier Cranes of the world show themselves utterly oblivious to the actual tastes and opinions and knowledge of the vast public, contact with which tends to be a rude shock, no matter how many times it happens. Indeed, those who remember Frasier Crane's first television show may recall how in electing to read to his friends at Cheers Charles Dickens' classic A Tale of Two Cities he found himself obliged to take certain "liberties" with the tale in order to hold their interest (such that the finale recalls David Morell much more than it does Dickens.)
So does it go with the work of one of these literary greats of the past whose "cult" is supposed to be vast in that way, Jane Austen--a pretense given away by the reality of the adaptations of her work that we get, with the comparatively successful (commercially, at any rate) 2005 Pride & Prejudice exemplary. A piece of "high concept" Jane Austen befitting its marketing as "From the people who brought you Bridget Jones Diary (!)" it had the actress who had just become a global superstar because of Pirates of the Caribbean in the lead (NOT a complaint, just pointing out), emphasized the romance between the two leads over the broader "comedy of manners" Austen offered in a fashion consistent with the elevator pitch mentality, and was consistently far more striking in its deployment of the camera to present us with striking images than tell the story in that pictures-trump-narrative way, down to the particular choices of image with which they presented the viewer. (Many of the landscapes, the interiors, are beautiful paintings and arresting as such, while the much-criticized "mud and pigs" so characteristic of the scenes shot at the Bennets' home forming a contrast with it in exactly that manner of juxtaposing lush, lifestyle fantasy-inspiring scenes of luxury with grittier imagery Justin Wyatt explained in his book as central to the high concept approach.)
The makers of the movie were also not at all squeamish about sacrificing even plot points bearing importantly on "the romance" itself to make their tale more pleasing to the public. Thus does it go, for example, in the treatment of the Bennet family's behavior at the Netherfield Ball, where almost every member of the family disgraces themselves--all while Mr. D'Arcy is present, and because of their "unsuitable" behavior advises his friend Mr. Bingley against marrying Jane Bennet (producing a crisis for Jane, and a significant obstacle to the development of Elizbaeth's relationship with D'Arcy). Reading the scene in the book we get a sense of Elizabeth Bennet's claustrophobic horror as everywhere she looks there is a sibling or parent making some scene right in front of D'Arcy. ("Elizabeth blushed and blushed again with shame and vexation. She could not regard her mother, or her sisters, without pain. Mr. Darcy was silent, but she could not help feeling that he was observing them with critical attention.") In the movie we still get to see the lot disgracing themselves, but the camera roams all over it in a spirit of "What an amusing spectacle!"--all as Elizabeth, far too busy ducking Mr. Collins to notice, or worry about, what her immediate family is doing, is part of the spectacle herself.
I thought the filmmakers' opting for this sort of comedy over the not uncomedic (but far more narratively important, dramatic tension-raising) original a very poor trade indeed given what was to come later, but in its way the handling of another incident of the story seems still more significant, and telling, namely the crisis caused for the family by Lydia Bennet's running off with Wickham. In my paperback edition of the book this goes on for about fifty pages--fifteen percent or so of the not terribly short narrative, the equivalent of about twenty minutes of screen time in a movie of the length of the 2005 version. Here it passes so quickly, and in such a music video way, that it almost seems a background detail--all as I wouldn't be surprised to find that many scarcely noticed it.
One can chalk this up to the desire to keep the focus of the audience on the Elizabeth-D'Arcy romance, and the tone light--and the pace brisk. Twenty minutes of the Bennets agonizing over the worst decision of Lydia's life would not have been consistent with that--even though this, again, means slighting what D'Arcy's having gone to the trouble and expense of personally resolving the crisis meant for the Bennets, and for Elizabeth, and for their relationship, the ability to appreciate which is worth some remark here. Simply put, much as people today speak of "family values" they have little clue as to just how much the family, not the individual, was the fundamental social unit in pre-modern, even into early modern, times, certainly for the "respectable" classes of which the Bennets were a part (however marginally)--all as the magnitude of the disaster of a Lydia running off in that manner is not something they understand, or for that matter even want to understand, while the filmmakers were certainly not going to challenge the audience by trying to get them to understand the very different (and for modern people, far less attractive) social world they are looking at, which would also have meant compromising the imagery-first approach that prevailed through the film. (Pictures can be worth a thousand words, but sometimes you can say in ten words what you can't say with a good many pictures.) Such is the filming of a "comedy of manners" for a general audience in an age in which even the word "manners" has lost its old meaning--the comprehension of a whole culture in the term reduced to a synonym for "etiquette," such that for the untutored today the term "comedy of manners" probably conjures up something quite different indeed.
For my part I do not think those admirers deliberately offering "mere" rhetoric. Rather I think it an occasion on which the Frasier Cranes of the world show themselves utterly oblivious to the actual tastes and opinions and knowledge of the vast public, contact with which tends to be a rude shock, no matter how many times it happens. Indeed, those who remember Frasier Crane's first television show may recall how in electing to read to his friends at Cheers Charles Dickens' classic A Tale of Two Cities he found himself obliged to take certain "liberties" with the tale in order to hold their interest (such that the finale recalls David Morell much more than it does Dickens.)
So does it go with the work of one of these literary greats of the past whose "cult" is supposed to be vast in that way, Jane Austen--a pretense given away by the reality of the adaptations of her work that we get, with the comparatively successful (commercially, at any rate) 2005 Pride & Prejudice exemplary. A piece of "high concept" Jane Austen befitting its marketing as "From the people who brought you Bridget Jones Diary (!)" it had the actress who had just become a global superstar because of Pirates of the Caribbean in the lead (NOT a complaint, just pointing out), emphasized the romance between the two leads over the broader "comedy of manners" Austen offered in a fashion consistent with the elevator pitch mentality, and was consistently far more striking in its deployment of the camera to present us with striking images than tell the story in that pictures-trump-narrative way, down to the particular choices of image with which they presented the viewer. (Many of the landscapes, the interiors, are beautiful paintings and arresting as such, while the much-criticized "mud and pigs" so characteristic of the scenes shot at the Bennets' home forming a contrast with it in exactly that manner of juxtaposing lush, lifestyle fantasy-inspiring scenes of luxury with grittier imagery Justin Wyatt explained in his book as central to the high concept approach.)
The makers of the movie were also not at all squeamish about sacrificing even plot points bearing importantly on "the romance" itself to make their tale more pleasing to the public. Thus does it go, for example, in the treatment of the Bennet family's behavior at the Netherfield Ball, where almost every member of the family disgraces themselves--all while Mr. D'Arcy is present, and because of their "unsuitable" behavior advises his friend Mr. Bingley against marrying Jane Bennet (producing a crisis for Jane, and a significant obstacle to the development of Elizbaeth's relationship with D'Arcy). Reading the scene in the book we get a sense of Elizabeth Bennet's claustrophobic horror as everywhere she looks there is a sibling or parent making some scene right in front of D'Arcy. ("Elizabeth blushed and blushed again with shame and vexation. She could not regard her mother, or her sisters, without pain. Mr. Darcy was silent, but she could not help feeling that he was observing them with critical attention.") In the movie we still get to see the lot disgracing themselves, but the camera roams all over it in a spirit of "What an amusing spectacle!"--all as Elizabeth, far too busy ducking Mr. Collins to notice, or worry about, what her immediate family is doing, is part of the spectacle herself.
I thought the filmmakers' opting for this sort of comedy over the not uncomedic (but far more narratively important, dramatic tension-raising) original a very poor trade indeed given what was to come later, but in its way the handling of another incident of the story seems still more significant, and telling, namely the crisis caused for the family by Lydia Bennet's running off with Wickham. In my paperback edition of the book this goes on for about fifty pages--fifteen percent or so of the not terribly short narrative, the equivalent of about twenty minutes of screen time in a movie of the length of the 2005 version. Here it passes so quickly, and in such a music video way, that it almost seems a background detail--all as I wouldn't be surprised to find that many scarcely noticed it.
One can chalk this up to the desire to keep the focus of the audience on the Elizabeth-D'Arcy romance, and the tone light--and the pace brisk. Twenty minutes of the Bennets agonizing over the worst decision of Lydia's life would not have been consistent with that--even though this, again, means slighting what D'Arcy's having gone to the trouble and expense of personally resolving the crisis meant for the Bennets, and for Elizabeth, and for their relationship, the ability to appreciate which is worth some remark here. Simply put, much as people today speak of "family values" they have little clue as to just how much the family, not the individual, was the fundamental social unit in pre-modern, even into early modern, times, certainly for the "respectable" classes of which the Bennets were a part (however marginally)--all as the magnitude of the disaster of a Lydia running off in that manner is not something they understand, or for that matter even want to understand, while the filmmakers were certainly not going to challenge the audience by trying to get them to understand the very different (and for modern people, far less attractive) social world they are looking at, which would also have meant compromising the imagery-first approach that prevailed through the film. (Pictures can be worth a thousand words, but sometimes you can say in ten words what you can't say with a good many pictures.) Such is the filming of a "comedy of manners" for a general audience in an age in which even the word "manners" has lost its old meaning--the comprehension of a whole culture in the term reduced to a synonym for "etiquette," such that for the untutored today the term "comedy of manners" probably conjures up something quite different indeed.
Did the Audience Understand the Bit About Lydia Running Off with Wickham in 2005's Pride & Prejudice?
I recently remarked the extreme truncation of the subplot about Lydia Bennet's running off with Wickham in the 2005 Pride & Prejudice. Whatever one thinks of the filmmakers' decision from the standpoint of Austen "purism," or any other artistic grounds, their commercial instincts were probably totally sound on this particular point.
Simply put, in the still far from thoroughly modern world Jane Austen presented in her novels what people thought of one's family mattered enormously to that individual's prospects--while in turn what an individual did affected the standing of their whole family, with this most certainly going for those matters of chastity, "virtue," "honor" and reputation at stake when a young woman runs off with a man. (Lydia's dishonor would have been the family's dishonor--and ended not just Lydia but her sisters' hopes of a decent marriage, social acceptance, their holding on to or bettering that bare minimum of gentility the Bennets had, and in general anything for which they might ever have hoped.) It meant so much that it would probably not have been difficult for Austen to hold the readers of her time in suspense through the whole, long, stretch of the novel devoted to it (fifty pages in my paperback edition of the book).
But what about holding the attention of today's audience?
Some people tell me they think the audience would "get it." However, I have to admit myself skeptical of that. My experience is that the public isn't terribly literate historically. This is not only a matter of its not knowing facts in that way with which those who want to scandalize the school systems in the name of privatization efforts and kulturkampf love to make headlines doing. ("Half of Britons don't know what the Battle of Britain was!" they tell us.) It is also a matter of their lacking any grasp of how the past is not the present, and however one explains them, the differences in lifeways between the people of their immediate circle, and their not too distant countrymen. (Teaching, for example, Guy du Maupassant's "The Necklace" you are likely to hear the students ask of the socially frustrated Mathilde Loisel "Why doesn't she just get a job in order to get what she wants?"--betraying not only a profound obliviousness to the lifeways and realities of nineteenth century France, but a profound misunderstanding of the way the economy they were being prepared to enter works and their chances of realizing their own ambitions in it, for you don't get the kind of wealth, luxury, leisure of which Mathilde dreamed by "getting a job" and "working hard," and by virtue of working certainly don't get to enjoy the leisure that is so much a part of it.)
That may go especially for such sensitive matters as "reputation," which in such a context may be just a word to them. Seeing Lydia's action and her parents and sisters suffering in the aftermath they would just see a family aggrieved that one of their daughters had run off with a rake--a terrible thing to be sure, but a far cry from the virtually irreparable catastrophe that it would have been for a whole family like the Bennets in those times. To make it "work" within their movie the filmmakers would have had to not just explain all this to the audience, but make them feel the weight of the situation, all of which would have been entirely contrary to the spirit of the light, brisk, romantic (and visually beautiful) storytelling they preferred to present, as they unavoidably deviated from the source material in some manner in explaining what Austen's contemporaries all understood "without saying," and in the process given the audience a history lesson about a very un-romantic side of the past, to which they would have likely been less than open. Especially insofar as they belong to a generation raised on that anti-historical blend of feminism and Orientalism that prefers to identify an eternal "West" with individualistic personal freedom and respect for the rights of women in eternal conflict with an eternal "East" eternally standing for the opposite, they likely equate a concern for "honor" with countries of "brown" people that for all their purported "wokeness" they see in the same terms as a Lothrop Stoddard, and which they prefer to go on equating with them as they cleave to their stereotypes. (Emmanuel Todd has argued the issue is not a "clash of civilizations" but a clash of traditional lifeways with a modernity spreading unevenly throughout the world, but spreading nonetheless. Mainstream opinion makers do not encourage their listening.) Indeed, it does not seem unreasonable to say that they prefer their Jane Austen adaptations have the same cultural politics as that movie that just a little while before this one was filmed helped put this film's Elizabeth Bennet on the map, the "empowerment"-minded Bend it Like Beckham--all as the expectation seems to prevail that those espousing "progressive" contemporary mores manifest themselves not in a critical stance toward the past, but rather bowdlerizing that past into something more comfortable for the mainstream viewer in that fashion taken to its logical conclusion in that much more recent piece of . . . Regency romance, Shonda Rhimes' Bridgerton, the past made over as "feel-good" entertainment for the bourgeois of today, spared anything that would interfere with the self-satisfaction as much as ever a defining trait of the type.
Simply put, in the still far from thoroughly modern world Jane Austen presented in her novels what people thought of one's family mattered enormously to that individual's prospects--while in turn what an individual did affected the standing of their whole family, with this most certainly going for those matters of chastity, "virtue," "honor" and reputation at stake when a young woman runs off with a man. (Lydia's dishonor would have been the family's dishonor--and ended not just Lydia but her sisters' hopes of a decent marriage, social acceptance, their holding on to or bettering that bare minimum of gentility the Bennets had, and in general anything for which they might ever have hoped.) It meant so much that it would probably not have been difficult for Austen to hold the readers of her time in suspense through the whole, long, stretch of the novel devoted to it (fifty pages in my paperback edition of the book).
But what about holding the attention of today's audience?
Some people tell me they think the audience would "get it." However, I have to admit myself skeptical of that. My experience is that the public isn't terribly literate historically. This is not only a matter of its not knowing facts in that way with which those who want to scandalize the school systems in the name of privatization efforts and kulturkampf love to make headlines doing. ("Half of Britons don't know what the Battle of Britain was!" they tell us.) It is also a matter of their lacking any grasp of how the past is not the present, and however one explains them, the differences in lifeways between the people of their immediate circle, and their not too distant countrymen. (Teaching, for example, Guy du Maupassant's "The Necklace" you are likely to hear the students ask of the socially frustrated Mathilde Loisel "Why doesn't she just get a job in order to get what she wants?"--betraying not only a profound obliviousness to the lifeways and realities of nineteenth century France, but a profound misunderstanding of the way the economy they were being prepared to enter works and their chances of realizing their own ambitions in it, for you don't get the kind of wealth, luxury, leisure of which Mathilde dreamed by "getting a job" and "working hard," and by virtue of working certainly don't get to enjoy the leisure that is so much a part of it.)
That may go especially for such sensitive matters as "reputation," which in such a context may be just a word to them. Seeing Lydia's action and her parents and sisters suffering in the aftermath they would just see a family aggrieved that one of their daughters had run off with a rake--a terrible thing to be sure, but a far cry from the virtually irreparable catastrophe that it would have been for a whole family like the Bennets in those times. To make it "work" within their movie the filmmakers would have had to not just explain all this to the audience, but make them feel the weight of the situation, all of which would have been entirely contrary to the spirit of the light, brisk, romantic (and visually beautiful) storytelling they preferred to present, as they unavoidably deviated from the source material in some manner in explaining what Austen's contemporaries all understood "without saying," and in the process given the audience a history lesson about a very un-romantic side of the past, to which they would have likely been less than open. Especially insofar as they belong to a generation raised on that anti-historical blend of feminism and Orientalism that prefers to identify an eternal "West" with individualistic personal freedom and respect for the rights of women in eternal conflict with an eternal "East" eternally standing for the opposite, they likely equate a concern for "honor" with countries of "brown" people that for all their purported "wokeness" they see in the same terms as a Lothrop Stoddard, and which they prefer to go on equating with them as they cleave to their stereotypes. (Emmanuel Todd has argued the issue is not a "clash of civilizations" but a clash of traditional lifeways with a modernity spreading unevenly throughout the world, but spreading nonetheless. Mainstream opinion makers do not encourage their listening.) Indeed, it does not seem unreasonable to say that they prefer their Jane Austen adaptations have the same cultural politics as that movie that just a little while before this one was filmed helped put this film's Elizabeth Bennet on the map, the "empowerment"-minded Bend it Like Beckham--all as the expectation seems to prevail that those espousing "progressive" contemporary mores manifest themselves not in a critical stance toward the past, but rather bowdlerizing that past into something more comfortable for the mainstream viewer in that fashion taken to its logical conclusion in that much more recent piece of . . . Regency romance, Shonda Rhimes' Bridgerton, the past made over as "feel-good" entertainment for the bourgeois of today, spared anything that would interfere with the self-satisfaction as much as ever a defining trait of the type.
This is a House of Cultured Doctors
One long enduring pop cultural stereotype of the medical doctor is their presentation as connoisseurs of "higher culture"--the doctor as one with great time for the symphony and opera and wine-tasting, for example, exemplified by that TV doctor whose presence on our screens is now extending into its fifth decade, Kelsey Grammer's Frasier Crane.
In pointing out that it is a stereotype I certainly do not mean to suggest that doctors are cultureless, that no one who wears a white coat has ever had any interest outside of medicine, etc.. Yet it should seem strange to anyone with the least understanding of what a doctor's life is likely to be like that the hacks who slap together the crapola smeared on our screens insist on portraying doctors as so much able to enjoy these particular examples of "the finer things." After all, we all know the long, hard, road to becoming a doctor--the often gratuitous brutality of a med school education and a residency, and then when they are in their late twenties' the struggle to get properly started in a career as they try to dig themselves out from under the mountain of debt they are likely to have amassed in getting to that point, and maybe the beginnings of a life generally.
Moreover, a doctor's life doesn't necessarily get easier after that, with some long-ago remarks of an acquaintance of mine whose parents were both doctors seeming relevant. Granted, some doctors do much better than others financially, but all the same, they were well-established in their jobs at a hospital that has been listed as among the "best" in the entire United States, and so likely far from the bottom of their high-status, high-income profession. Discussing some of his parents' stresses with a lack of discretion I suspect they would not have appreciated, he spoke of their combined household income, which a check of the statistical tables showed put them not far outside the top "one percent," still left them struggling, maybe overwhelmed, as they wondered how they were going to put two sons through school as they took care of their aging parents--very commonplace concerns that still left these relatively "successful" people badly strained. I don't remember what I thought of the picture he drew of their situation at the time, but I have thought of it often since as the kind of story that Vautrin could well have used as an illustration in his "offer no one would refuse" speech of the hard trials, uncertainty and limited rewards of the conventional bourgeois path--which leave one with very little of the disposable time, income, security, comfort, necessary for the pleasures of connoisseurship, while one would imagine the gap between even doctors' situations and the costs of access to such pleasures to have widened since. (Consider just how much more expensive the requisites of a middle class life have become relative to wages--ownership of a house and car, tuition for school, health insurance, etc.. If doctors do better than most it seems plausible that many doctors have seen their positions erode as well, all as those doctors who make the most tend to live in areas where the cost of living is the highest, like those cost-of-living nightmares that are California's Bay Area and New York.)
Given such realities, where does the image of the "cultured" doctor come from? I suspect it is partly a matter of the hacks who slap together the aforementioned crapola being prone to equate intelligence and education with "the leisure class" to which such pleasures are most accessible--often, without realizing it. It seems partly, too, a matter of their outrageous flattery and glamorization of the professional classes, among which medicine stands near the top, to the point that even if a doctor, whatever their origin, is by virtue of being a doctor a working person rather than a gentleman of leisure, all this is rather confused together in the minds of these people, the practitioner of medicine somehow being effectively leisure class after they go home for the day, the disposable time and money there. As a practical matter "success" in the professions does tend to bring one a higher standard of consumption than the work force at large, but rarely so high as that, while again time and ease and security are not simply purchasable with money so long as they go on working (all as very few have much hope of "early" retirement"). The result is that in the end it comes down to Hollywood hacks flogging clichés describable as the "stupid person's smart person," all as, as to some extent they do with characters of all backgrounds, they endow them with an exaggerated amount of time and money on their hands so that, in contrast with the viewers at home leading their stiflingly limited lives, they can have a wacky adventure each week.
In pointing out that it is a stereotype I certainly do not mean to suggest that doctors are cultureless, that no one who wears a white coat has ever had any interest outside of medicine, etc.. Yet it should seem strange to anyone with the least understanding of what a doctor's life is likely to be like that the hacks who slap together the crapola smeared on our screens insist on portraying doctors as so much able to enjoy these particular examples of "the finer things." After all, we all know the long, hard, road to becoming a doctor--the often gratuitous brutality of a med school education and a residency, and then when they are in their late twenties' the struggle to get properly started in a career as they try to dig themselves out from under the mountain of debt they are likely to have amassed in getting to that point, and maybe the beginnings of a life generally.
Moreover, a doctor's life doesn't necessarily get easier after that, with some long-ago remarks of an acquaintance of mine whose parents were both doctors seeming relevant. Granted, some doctors do much better than others financially, but all the same, they were well-established in their jobs at a hospital that has been listed as among the "best" in the entire United States, and so likely far from the bottom of their high-status, high-income profession. Discussing some of his parents' stresses with a lack of discretion I suspect they would not have appreciated, he spoke of their combined household income, which a check of the statistical tables showed put them not far outside the top "one percent," still left them struggling, maybe overwhelmed, as they wondered how they were going to put two sons through school as they took care of their aging parents--very commonplace concerns that still left these relatively "successful" people badly strained. I don't remember what I thought of the picture he drew of their situation at the time, but I have thought of it often since as the kind of story that Vautrin could well have used as an illustration in his "offer no one would refuse" speech of the hard trials, uncertainty and limited rewards of the conventional bourgeois path--which leave one with very little of the disposable time, income, security, comfort, necessary for the pleasures of connoisseurship, while one would imagine the gap between even doctors' situations and the costs of access to such pleasures to have widened since. (Consider just how much more expensive the requisites of a middle class life have become relative to wages--ownership of a house and car, tuition for school, health insurance, etc.. If doctors do better than most it seems plausible that many doctors have seen their positions erode as well, all as those doctors who make the most tend to live in areas where the cost of living is the highest, like those cost-of-living nightmares that are California's Bay Area and New York.)
Given such realities, where does the image of the "cultured" doctor come from? I suspect it is partly a matter of the hacks who slap together the aforementioned crapola being prone to equate intelligence and education with "the leisure class" to which such pleasures are most accessible--often, without realizing it. It seems partly, too, a matter of their outrageous flattery and glamorization of the professional classes, among which medicine stands near the top, to the point that even if a doctor, whatever their origin, is by virtue of being a doctor a working person rather than a gentleman of leisure, all this is rather confused together in the minds of these people, the practitioner of medicine somehow being effectively leisure class after they go home for the day, the disposable time and money there. As a practical matter "success" in the professions does tend to bring one a higher standard of consumption than the work force at large, but rarely so high as that, while again time and ease and security are not simply purchasable with money so long as they go on working (all as very few have much hope of "early" retirement"). The result is that in the end it comes down to Hollywood hacks flogging clichés describable as the "stupid person's smart person," all as, as to some extent they do with characters of all backgrounds, they endow them with an exaggerated amount of time and money on their hands so that, in contrast with the viewers at home leading their stiflingly limited lives, they can have a wacky adventure each week.
The Rise of Tech Was Never the Revenge of the Nerds
One of the more asinine aspects of the media's propaganda for "tech" has been its cultivation of the asinine "revenge of the nerds" narrative about it--the rise of the Silicon Valley billionaire a tale of the smart, hard-working kids their peers failed to treat with respect ending up the winners in the end as the jocks who bullied them wash their cars and mow their lawns and clean their pools (figuratively, perhaps literally).
The reality is that the fortunes were the revenge not of the nerds but of the rich who, never reconciled to their concessions to working people in the era of the New Deal, got their own back in the neoliberal era, when they shifted the tax burden away from themselves and onto said working people, got the regulators off their backs, broke the unions, and embarked upon an orgy of "making money from money" as "real" economic activity proved incidental and usually slight (bubbles of enterprise on a whirlpool of speculation, rather than a steady stream of enterprise carrying some bubbles of speculation in John Maynard Keynes' image). Silicon Valley was but one part of it, indeed a part whose flourishing, as James Kenneth Galbraith pointed out, cannot be understood separately from the "greed is good" triumphalism of Wall Street, all as the mega-profits of real estate, Big Oil, the health sector and the rest part of the same pack.
The talk of Tech's rise as anything else was the same old game of equating wealth with service to society, and superior wealth to superior service, with superior service enabled by superior mental gifts--by superior intelligence--diverting attention from how economies really work and how great wealth is really made, while being a little conformist-aspirationalist homily telling those who have not "made it" that his toil will pay off, his sufferings be redeemed--the better to keep them striving to be useful to those who really have the power, by virtue of money and not brains, with this version in particular "For the nerds."
Of course, this is not to deny that there have been prominent tech industry figures who in some way or other seemed to correspond to the "nerd" stereotype, which lent the narrative some credibility that it would otherwise not have had with the public. Indeed, it mattered that the man who was for so long the face of the industry, Bill Gates, might be characterizable as "looking like Central Casting's idea of a nerd," especially as it seems that no one downplayed this. Where the media, in its shameless flattery of the rich and powerful, is likely to call such persons "handsome" when they would not do so if they looked exactly the same way but had no money, no one bothered to do so in the case of Mr. Gates. Even in an age in which the largest fortunes exploded he managed to be the richest man on Earth for nearly a generation according to the listings, making him so rich that no one needed to pretend he was anything but what he was physically. Indeed, the frankness about the matter was itself an homage of sorts to his extreme wealth, while one may add that his being characterized as "handsome" would have been at odds with the "tech genius" image that was so important to his personal image as the "founder of Microsoft," the supreme icon of the tech world, and the revenge of the nerds narrative the media pushed about it because it was so very effective in distracting a credulous public from the reality that even those who prospered in Silicon Valley who seemed classifiable as nerds had other advantages far, far more important to their "success." One may see this as underlined by how those nerds who were not born to wealthy and privileged families affording capital and connections, with nothing but their brains, toil for them, proles of the digital age yielding up their labor to the Lords of Capital until it suits said Lords to replace them with others in their turn, very likely without their ever finding themselves in the "right place at the right time" to become Lords themselves. Instead they simply move on to other jobs, often in other lines of work, perhaps not infrequently less well-paid and less glamorous--the nerds themselves possibly washing cars and mowing lawns and cleaning pools, possibly for jocks who did a better job of picking their parents, as they are reminded that for most nerds there is no happy ending where "smarts" and hard work pay off, just more cruelty all the way up to the end of the tale.
The reality is that the fortunes were the revenge not of the nerds but of the rich who, never reconciled to their concessions to working people in the era of the New Deal, got their own back in the neoliberal era, when they shifted the tax burden away from themselves and onto said working people, got the regulators off their backs, broke the unions, and embarked upon an orgy of "making money from money" as "real" economic activity proved incidental and usually slight (bubbles of enterprise on a whirlpool of speculation, rather than a steady stream of enterprise carrying some bubbles of speculation in John Maynard Keynes' image). Silicon Valley was but one part of it, indeed a part whose flourishing, as James Kenneth Galbraith pointed out, cannot be understood separately from the "greed is good" triumphalism of Wall Street, all as the mega-profits of real estate, Big Oil, the health sector and the rest part of the same pack.
The talk of Tech's rise as anything else was the same old game of equating wealth with service to society, and superior wealth to superior service, with superior service enabled by superior mental gifts--by superior intelligence--diverting attention from how economies really work and how great wealth is really made, while being a little conformist-aspirationalist homily telling those who have not "made it" that his toil will pay off, his sufferings be redeemed--the better to keep them striving to be useful to those who really have the power, by virtue of money and not brains, with this version in particular "For the nerds."
Of course, this is not to deny that there have been prominent tech industry figures who in some way or other seemed to correspond to the "nerd" stereotype, which lent the narrative some credibility that it would otherwise not have had with the public. Indeed, it mattered that the man who was for so long the face of the industry, Bill Gates, might be characterizable as "looking like Central Casting's idea of a nerd," especially as it seems that no one downplayed this. Where the media, in its shameless flattery of the rich and powerful, is likely to call such persons "handsome" when they would not do so if they looked exactly the same way but had no money, no one bothered to do so in the case of Mr. Gates. Even in an age in which the largest fortunes exploded he managed to be the richest man on Earth for nearly a generation according to the listings, making him so rich that no one needed to pretend he was anything but what he was physically. Indeed, the frankness about the matter was itself an homage of sorts to his extreme wealth, while one may add that his being characterized as "handsome" would have been at odds with the "tech genius" image that was so important to his personal image as the "founder of Microsoft," the supreme icon of the tech world, and the revenge of the nerds narrative the media pushed about it because it was so very effective in distracting a credulous public from the reality that even those who prospered in Silicon Valley who seemed classifiable as nerds had other advantages far, far more important to their "success." One may see this as underlined by how those nerds who were not born to wealthy and privileged families affording capital and connections, with nothing but their brains, toil for them, proles of the digital age yielding up their labor to the Lords of Capital until it suits said Lords to replace them with others in their turn, very likely without their ever finding themselves in the "right place at the right time" to become Lords themselves. Instead they simply move on to other jobs, often in other lines of work, perhaps not infrequently less well-paid and less glamorous--the nerds themselves possibly washing cars and mowing lawns and cleaning pools, possibly for jocks who did a better job of picking their parents, as they are reminded that for most nerds there is no happy ending where "smarts" and hard work pay off, just more cruelty all the way up to the end of the tale.
The Cargo Cult of "Hard Work"
The term "cargo cult" has been used to refer to "complexes of ritual" among indigenous peoples of the southwestern Pacific intended to bring material goods from the skies--with a stereotyped version of this an extremely isolated people who had had no contact with the modern world happening to see a cargo plane drop some package, finding goods in it which are perhaps useful or at least fascinating, and then performing rituals intended to make the plane come back and drop more of those goods upon them.
I will pass no judgment on whether the writing about "cargo cults" was or was not good social science that provided an accurate representation of what went on in the societies it described. However, the idea that people go about comparable behavior--engaging in acts whose leading to material gain can only seem based on "magical thinking"--seems well-evidentiated in the modern world. Thus is it ever with the self-help quackery, and the fascination with the minutiae of the behavior of the "successful," invariably bound up with a spirit of emulation.
"That guy on the cover of Forbes drinks five Cokes a day? I'd better start doing that right now!" thinks a certain kind of idiot. And so does it also go with the rhetoric of "hard work." Whatever else one may say about the importance of such work popular parlance, and especially the exhortations to the young or simply the dissatisfied to advance themselves, invariably use those two little words in a magical, non-rational way rather than as part of any sort of rational explanation of how value might be created, or, the different and not entirely synonymous thing they really care about, how individuals have become rich.
I will pass no judgment on whether the writing about "cargo cults" was or was not good social science that provided an accurate representation of what went on in the societies it described. However, the idea that people go about comparable behavior--engaging in acts whose leading to material gain can only seem based on "magical thinking"--seems well-evidentiated in the modern world. Thus is it ever with the self-help quackery, and the fascination with the minutiae of the behavior of the "successful," invariably bound up with a spirit of emulation.
"That guy on the cover of Forbes drinks five Cokes a day? I'd better start doing that right now!" thinks a certain kind of idiot. And so does it also go with the rhetoric of "hard work." Whatever else one may say about the importance of such work popular parlance, and especially the exhortations to the young or simply the dissatisfied to advance themselves, invariably use those two little words in a magical, non-rational way rather than as part of any sort of rational explanation of how value might be created, or, the different and not entirely synonymous thing they really care about, how individuals have become rich.
The Stupidity of "Einstein vs. Von Neumann"
I have on occasion run into arguments in online fora in which people argue over whether Edward von Neumann was not in fact a "greater" scientist than Albert Einstein.
The discussion struck me as exceedingly inane--more so than a discussion of whether Superman or Batman would win in a fight. Most obviously there is the fact that the two scientists differ greatly in field, work, achievement. Einstein was a theoretical physicist who, principally on the basis of youthful work outside the physics establishment, authored a number of papers which conventional wisdom holds to be important contributions to the theoretical foundations of contemporary physics. By contrast Neumann was a mathematician who, working with a very long list of collaborators, coauthored a great many papers in a range of fields--computing, nuclear physics, etc.--that were individually not of the same kind of fundamental importance to basic science, but in the aggregate seemingly staggering in the number and diversity of their contributions.
However, even were the work not so obviously different as to leave comparisons of this nature with little meaning, there is the fundamental matter of the reality of scientific work as a collective, cumulative, collaborative process in which individual contributions are much, much trickier to assess than most realize, even with that highly specialized study which is a prerequisite for saying anything meaningful about them at all--and harder all the time in the era Brian Keating describes in Losing the Nobel, apparently to no more effect on the conventional wisdom about science than any of those who have tried to explain the matter before, because the message is so incomprehensible to persons of conventional mind. The ethic that prevails in society at large is a snarling individualism with the far from innocent agenda of justifying the prevailing extremes of inequality in wealth and power, which is an outlook greatly at odds with the hard realities of scientific work (which sociologist Robert Merton flatly described as having for its ethos "communism"), and how scientific progress happens--all as the former refuses any concession to the latter. Thus rather than adapting the individualistic understanding to the complex reality, it forces the complex facts to the individualistic understanding--everything conveniently, tidily, attributable to a single personality, a single name. The result is that like primitives unable to understand the natural world around them they make of scientific progress a myth in which demigod-like "geniuses" possessed of apparently transcendent abilities create everything in a seemingly magical fashion, and pseudo-educated persons waste their time arguing over which was the greater demigod.
The discussion struck me as exceedingly inane--more so than a discussion of whether Superman or Batman would win in a fight. Most obviously there is the fact that the two scientists differ greatly in field, work, achievement. Einstein was a theoretical physicist who, principally on the basis of youthful work outside the physics establishment, authored a number of papers which conventional wisdom holds to be important contributions to the theoretical foundations of contemporary physics. By contrast Neumann was a mathematician who, working with a very long list of collaborators, coauthored a great many papers in a range of fields--computing, nuclear physics, etc.--that were individually not of the same kind of fundamental importance to basic science, but in the aggregate seemingly staggering in the number and diversity of their contributions.
However, even were the work not so obviously different as to leave comparisons of this nature with little meaning, there is the fundamental matter of the reality of scientific work as a collective, cumulative, collaborative process in which individual contributions are much, much trickier to assess than most realize, even with that highly specialized study which is a prerequisite for saying anything meaningful about them at all--and harder all the time in the era Brian Keating describes in Losing the Nobel, apparently to no more effect on the conventional wisdom about science than any of those who have tried to explain the matter before, because the message is so incomprehensible to persons of conventional mind. The ethic that prevails in society at large is a snarling individualism with the far from innocent agenda of justifying the prevailing extremes of inequality in wealth and power, which is an outlook greatly at odds with the hard realities of scientific work (which sociologist Robert Merton flatly described as having for its ethos "communism"), and how scientific progress happens--all as the former refuses any concession to the latter. Thus rather than adapting the individualistic understanding to the complex reality, it forces the complex facts to the individualistic understanding--everything conveniently, tidily, attributable to a single personality, a single name. The result is that like primitives unable to understand the natural world around them they make of scientific progress a myth in which demigod-like "geniuses" possessed of apparently transcendent abilities create everything in a seemingly magical fashion, and pseudo-educated persons waste their time arguing over which was the greater demigod.
Sir Nigel Irvine, the Anti-George Smiley?
In the discussion of the works of John le Carré it is something of a cliché to discuss the principal protagonist of his first two decades as a writer--the short, fat, academic, cerebral, emotionally complex and frequently conflicted (and much-betrayed by his glamorous wife) George Smiley as an "Anti-Bond," all the way down the line the opposite of the most famous of fictional spies. However, recently revisiting the works of Frederick Forsyth I was surprised to find in his creation Sir Nigel Irvine an "Anti-Smiley."
Like Smiley Sir Nigel is a British intelligence officer of brilliance who eventually rises to the post of head of the Service. Like Smiley he did not seem much of a "catch" in his youth, but nevertheless ended up marrying a sought-after aristocratic beauty. However, in contrast with Smiley Forsyth stressed the young Nigel Irvine's physical heroism, telling of how as an eighteen year old soldier he was wounded at Monte Cassino and pleaded to return to the frontline when his superiors reassigned him to intelligence. In contrast with Smiley his marriage to a glamorous woman who would ordinarily never have chosen him is, if not unmarred by tragedy, a happy one--Lady Penelope as devoted to Nigel as he is to her a half century on. In contrast with a Smiley capable of flinching from success at the moment of a great triumph for his knowing all too well the lives he has destroyed, Sir Nigel suffers no doubts or pangs of conscience as he manipulates other people, and even precipitates violence on a mass scale, ever the ruthless master puppeteer. (After all, as one actor who played Sir Nigel on the screen remarked in another role that is more responsible than any other for his measure of fame, "If you will the end, you must will the means.") And in contrast with Smiley, who is the central figure in a tale of an Establishment out of its time as its class, social order, Empire and the whole way of living and thinking associated with them decline, Sir Nigel represents an elite quite confident of its still mattering in the world, certainly to go by his continued importance in the affairs of the world even long into retirement, and comfort in such company as the "Council of Lincoln."
Looking back this seems very much a reflection of the outlooks of the two authors, and the modes in which they worked. Both men had been involved with British intelligence during the Cold War, and both made their literary names writing about it--but a le Carré was interested first and foremost in a class of people, the British elite from which its Establishment was drawn, a group the oddities of le Carré's background made him in but not quite of, with the subject of espionage a way to approach them as a subject, and the treatment, accordingly, not making it into the action-adventure stuff of a Fleming, but grappling with the changes in British life in the post-war era through its less glamorous reality in a way rather more in the tradition of a Conrad or a Maugham. By contrast Forsyth was a writer of much more conventional thrillers of nationalistic sensibility who eagerly embraced the Thatcherite vision of the country as in its fashion still a superpower led by an elite more than a match for any other in the world--and indeed in telling his tales stressed the "big picture" so much that I suspect that many of those reading what I call his "security state epics" scarcely took notice of Nigel amid all the goings-on, especially before his much more central positioning in Icon. Still, should they have done so they would have seen Forsyth explicitly clarifying that he had been even more thoroughly the master of the situation than the reader was led to believe during the course of the story, as Forsyth took great satisfaction in not just the cunning but the ruthlessness of his answer to Smiley.
Of course, both these writers' heyday is long past--and those of you reading this post probably ran across it at least in part because so few bother with the thrillers of a few decades ago (the "half-life" of the genre very short indeed). Still, my guess is that if Philip Roth is wrong about novel-reading going the way of "reading Latin poetry in the original," it is le Carré's books that will prove the more enduring, the grasp after life and truth after all continuing to engage even after tastes in popular entertainment have changed.
Like Smiley Sir Nigel is a British intelligence officer of brilliance who eventually rises to the post of head of the Service. Like Smiley he did not seem much of a "catch" in his youth, but nevertheless ended up marrying a sought-after aristocratic beauty. However, in contrast with Smiley Forsyth stressed the young Nigel Irvine's physical heroism, telling of how as an eighteen year old soldier he was wounded at Monte Cassino and pleaded to return to the frontline when his superiors reassigned him to intelligence. In contrast with Smiley his marriage to a glamorous woman who would ordinarily never have chosen him is, if not unmarred by tragedy, a happy one--Lady Penelope as devoted to Nigel as he is to her a half century on. In contrast with a Smiley capable of flinching from success at the moment of a great triumph for his knowing all too well the lives he has destroyed, Sir Nigel suffers no doubts or pangs of conscience as he manipulates other people, and even precipitates violence on a mass scale, ever the ruthless master puppeteer. (After all, as one actor who played Sir Nigel on the screen remarked in another role that is more responsible than any other for his measure of fame, "If you will the end, you must will the means.") And in contrast with Smiley, who is the central figure in a tale of an Establishment out of its time as its class, social order, Empire and the whole way of living and thinking associated with them decline, Sir Nigel represents an elite quite confident of its still mattering in the world, certainly to go by his continued importance in the affairs of the world even long into retirement, and comfort in such company as the "Council of Lincoln."
Looking back this seems very much a reflection of the outlooks of the two authors, and the modes in which they worked. Both men had been involved with British intelligence during the Cold War, and both made their literary names writing about it--but a le Carré was interested first and foremost in a class of people, the British elite from which its Establishment was drawn, a group the oddities of le Carré's background made him in but not quite of, with the subject of espionage a way to approach them as a subject, and the treatment, accordingly, not making it into the action-adventure stuff of a Fleming, but grappling with the changes in British life in the post-war era through its less glamorous reality in a way rather more in the tradition of a Conrad or a Maugham. By contrast Forsyth was a writer of much more conventional thrillers of nationalistic sensibility who eagerly embraced the Thatcherite vision of the country as in its fashion still a superpower led by an elite more than a match for any other in the world--and indeed in telling his tales stressed the "big picture" so much that I suspect that many of those reading what I call his "security state epics" scarcely took notice of Nigel amid all the goings-on, especially before his much more central positioning in Icon. Still, should they have done so they would have seen Forsyth explicitly clarifying that he had been even more thoroughly the master of the situation than the reader was led to believe during the course of the story, as Forsyth took great satisfaction in not just the cunning but the ruthlessness of his answer to Smiley.
Of course, both these writers' heyday is long past--and those of you reading this post probably ran across it at least in part because so few bother with the thrillers of a few decades ago (the "half-life" of the genre very short indeed). Still, my guess is that if Philip Roth is wrong about novel-reading going the way of "reading Latin poetry in the original," it is le Carré's books that will prove the more enduring, the grasp after life and truth after all continuing to engage even after tastes in popular entertainment have changed.
Book Review: Icon, by Frederick Forsyth
In The Fist of God Frederick Forsyth presented his first really post-Cold War thriller, in which he gave the 1991 Gulf War the Day of the Jackal treatment by mixing fact and fiction to produce an apparent reconstruction of a "secret history" of a recent event. (In this case it was that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein intended to use the "supergun" that Gerald Bull built for his government to launch the one atomic weapon his nuclear program had managed to produce at the massed ground forces of the Allies on the eve of Desert Storm's land offensive--a scenario that also let Forsyth treat the event in the fashion of a Tom Clancy-style techno-thriller as the protagonists raced to stop the danger.) With his next, Icon, Forsyth took a similar approach, also blending fact and fiction to produce a secret history of recent events--Forsyth specifically combining a dramatization of Aldrich Ames' betrayal of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the spies it was running inside the Soviet Union with those of Forsyth's protagonist, CIA case officer Jason Monck. However, this is only part of the story, and indeed a prelude to the main plot, namely events in a near-future Russia where the continued, calamitous course of the economy, the rising power of the Mafia and the susceptibility of a traumatized and suffering nation to extremist appeals has a Russian ultranationalist on his way to the Kremlin where, going by his leaked secret intentions, he threatens to be nothing less than the Russian Hitler produced by the "Russian Weimar" that was its '90s-era experience (hyperinflation and all by 1999, with the price of a small loaf of bread running to a million rubles). As all this gone on the Secret Service, hands tied by politics, turns to the retired former chief of the organization from The Fourth Protocol, Sir Nigel Irvine, and asks him to do what they cannot--a task that sees him personally enlist the now similarly retired Monck for the job of trading on his old skills to infiltrate Russia as he had repeatedly managed to do during his CIA career to do his bit to stop the would-be Russian Hitler from taking over and threatening world-historical catastrophe.
The blending of fiction and fact, past and present, in the protagonist's side of the story in the first part of the book predictably proves a significant strength. Forsyth displays his usual deftness in the combination (Ames was real, Monck wasn't, but one isn't quite sure where fact leaves off and fiction begins), while the intercutting between Monck's late Cold War career and the development of events in 1999 helps sustain pace and interest. Moreover, if the "brilliant maverick" Monck is less successful as a character than a type (just like Sam McCready in The Deceiver and especially Quinn in The Negotiator, down to his taste for an outdoorsy post-career life far removed from his old career, and his "This time, it's personal" motivation for his return to do the job), Forsyth's taking the trouble to dramatize his past makes his development more than usually substantial. (That dramatization means that we have more than an author's usual and not very meaningful assurance that the "brilliant maverick" is a "brilliant maverick," while we get to see just why "This time, it's personal"--the brutal torture and murder of four of the agents Monck ran inside Russia, people he made promises to and who trusted him as he used them and in the end failed to protect them by a KGB officer who is now the would-be Russian Hitler's right-hand man, Anatoli Grishin.) All of this works again to Forsyth's advantage in Part Two of the book as, displaying his usual command of thriller mechanics (with his economy with prose and use of changes of scene in particular helping him to keep the pace brisk and the course suitably filled with twists and menace), Monck calls in an old debt to position himself to outmaneuver his foes. Forsyth has most of it play out in relatively grounded fashion, but Forsyth also does not disappoint where the more melodramatic requirements of a "This time, it's personal" story are concerned, not least in the action-packed finale.
Unfortunately the development of the crisis in Russia that is the occasion for Monck's mission, Forsyth's explanation of which is central to his maneuverings, is rather less impressive. Those who write about Forsyth are much more apt to commend his research than fault it, especially where his world-view is at issue. However, Forsyth's world-view certainly does matter to his fiction, if in some stories more than others, with Forsyth's particularly nasty treatment of the protests against the nuclear arms race and the British left more generally as Soviet dupes or worse certainly relevant to The Fourth Protocol. It is if anything even more the case here, given that this is a story not of stopping an assassination or a bombing, but an attempt to, faced with a profound crisis of society and state, manipulate events in that society to achieve a particular outcome.
In treating of the Soviet Union and the Russia which emerged from it what Forsyth has been prone to the one-dimensional Cold Warrior view of these matters (expressed with particular stridency, I might add). Consistent with this, in considering Russia's '90s-era situation Forsyth holds that this was a matter of the combination of Communism's inherent extreme decrepitude, the virulence of the Mafia that was the only thing in the system that displayed any efficiency--he can seem here to echo his fellow rabid Cold Warrior Edward Luttwak's silly suggestion of a Nobel Prize in Economics for the Russian Mafia--and the way it completely took over the country afterward. (The combination of rapacity and ideological insanity of the nomenklatura during a bungled reform process that from the top down devastated the sick but still massive industry the Soviets managed to build up, the role of brutal and criminal oligarchs far outside the circles ordinarily characterized as "Mafia," and how the prices of Russian export commodities the more important to the economy with industry being devastated were in the toilet--Forsyth acknowledges none of this as part of the story when lecturing the reader on the situation.) The problem being quite as simple as that it is easy enough for a suitable Russian leader to deal with it, all as Forsyth's Old Tory convictions run into overdrive where getting such a leader is concerned. Thus Sir Nigel, obliged to work outside government channels but not Establishment channels (Forsyth has great faith in the latter even when he has little in the former), turns to his fellow "elder statesmen" in the Anglo-American "Council of Lincoln" (Forsyth does not hesitate to name-drop here, mentioning among others, George H.W. Bush, James Baker, Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher and Evelyn de Rothschild) to get their sanction for the organization of a reactionary counter-revolution to stop the fascist counter-revolution in which they persuade the conservative elements in Russian society (the church, the army, the bankers) to back a restoration of throne and altar, with a certain Prince of the House of Windsor as the new Czar of All the Russias providing a symbol for the country to unite behind (implicitly, Prince Michael of Kent, ironic as this may seem today), because if they can do that somehow all the rest will fall into place.
It is telling that what most would consider the stuff of conspiracy theory--ex-Presidents and Prime Ministers sitting together with the head of a certain legendary banking family and like business figures in their luxurious private club to decide the government of the "lesser breeds"--is just dandy in Forsyth's view, and indeed he presents it as a principled defense of "democracy" in the world (for of course, such people have never had any other motive in all their lives of Public Service, perish the thought), all while brushing off any possibility that a person of genuinely democratic sentiment might see an "issue" in a tale of secret elite groups imposing monarchy on a country through covert action that will eventually involve a lot of killing of people who never had a say in the matter in democracy's name, then when it is all done sitting back in self-satisfaction at how they pulled the strings. (Indeed, remembering Forsyth's seeming to channel Robert Ludlum for a while back in The Negotiator I could not help remembering that this was the sort of thing villainous organizations like Genessee and Inver Brass do in his books, not the good guys.)
The big picture in Icon all pretty much pure wish-fulfillment for Forsyth the Right-Wing Ideologue, it makes quite the contrast with the realities of this "It's the Economy, Stupid" world we live in, such that where in many a prior book one didn't have to buy into Forsyth's view of the world to find his storytelling gripping them this one became increasingly flimsy as the outline of the scheme became clearer. And if anything the results have probably come to look weaker with time, for, far from us now reading it and feeling as if we could be looking at a piece of "secret history" the way we might when reading The Deceiver, we know full well that not only did matters not work out that way, but that their ever having done so is exceedingly unlikely. (After all, if Russia, and the world, seem very far from any sort of "Happily ever after" to the tale of the Cold War's end, the country's stabilization happened on very different lines--resurgent commodity prices, and the measure of success the Russian government had in using them, giving the country a respite, all before this unhappy century proved to have still more troubles in store for the eight billion of us walking the surface of this third rock from the sun.) Indeed, by the time the inevitable adaptation of the book happened (in the TV movie version made by a then-very different Hallmark Channel with Michael York as Sir Nigel, and Patrick Swayze as Jason Monck), the story already seemed badly dated, way back in 2005, to such a degree that the original plot is almost unrecognizable in the goings-on.
The blending of fiction and fact, past and present, in the protagonist's side of the story in the first part of the book predictably proves a significant strength. Forsyth displays his usual deftness in the combination (Ames was real, Monck wasn't, but one isn't quite sure where fact leaves off and fiction begins), while the intercutting between Monck's late Cold War career and the development of events in 1999 helps sustain pace and interest. Moreover, if the "brilliant maverick" Monck is less successful as a character than a type (just like Sam McCready in The Deceiver and especially Quinn in The Negotiator, down to his taste for an outdoorsy post-career life far removed from his old career, and his "This time, it's personal" motivation for his return to do the job), Forsyth's taking the trouble to dramatize his past makes his development more than usually substantial. (That dramatization means that we have more than an author's usual and not very meaningful assurance that the "brilliant maverick" is a "brilliant maverick," while we get to see just why "This time, it's personal"--the brutal torture and murder of four of the agents Monck ran inside Russia, people he made promises to and who trusted him as he used them and in the end failed to protect them by a KGB officer who is now the would-be Russian Hitler's right-hand man, Anatoli Grishin.) All of this works again to Forsyth's advantage in Part Two of the book as, displaying his usual command of thriller mechanics (with his economy with prose and use of changes of scene in particular helping him to keep the pace brisk and the course suitably filled with twists and menace), Monck calls in an old debt to position himself to outmaneuver his foes. Forsyth has most of it play out in relatively grounded fashion, but Forsyth also does not disappoint where the more melodramatic requirements of a "This time, it's personal" story are concerned, not least in the action-packed finale.
Unfortunately the development of the crisis in Russia that is the occasion for Monck's mission, Forsyth's explanation of which is central to his maneuverings, is rather less impressive. Those who write about Forsyth are much more apt to commend his research than fault it, especially where his world-view is at issue. However, Forsyth's world-view certainly does matter to his fiction, if in some stories more than others, with Forsyth's particularly nasty treatment of the protests against the nuclear arms race and the British left more generally as Soviet dupes or worse certainly relevant to The Fourth Protocol. It is if anything even more the case here, given that this is a story not of stopping an assassination or a bombing, but an attempt to, faced with a profound crisis of society and state, manipulate events in that society to achieve a particular outcome.
In treating of the Soviet Union and the Russia which emerged from it what Forsyth has been prone to the one-dimensional Cold Warrior view of these matters (expressed with particular stridency, I might add). Consistent with this, in considering Russia's '90s-era situation Forsyth holds that this was a matter of the combination of Communism's inherent extreme decrepitude, the virulence of the Mafia that was the only thing in the system that displayed any efficiency--he can seem here to echo his fellow rabid Cold Warrior Edward Luttwak's silly suggestion of a Nobel Prize in Economics for the Russian Mafia--and the way it completely took over the country afterward. (The combination of rapacity and ideological insanity of the nomenklatura during a bungled reform process that from the top down devastated the sick but still massive industry the Soviets managed to build up, the role of brutal and criminal oligarchs far outside the circles ordinarily characterized as "Mafia," and how the prices of Russian export commodities the more important to the economy with industry being devastated were in the toilet--Forsyth acknowledges none of this as part of the story when lecturing the reader on the situation.) The problem being quite as simple as that it is easy enough for a suitable Russian leader to deal with it, all as Forsyth's Old Tory convictions run into overdrive where getting such a leader is concerned. Thus Sir Nigel, obliged to work outside government channels but not Establishment channels (Forsyth has great faith in the latter even when he has little in the former), turns to his fellow "elder statesmen" in the Anglo-American "Council of Lincoln" (Forsyth does not hesitate to name-drop here, mentioning among others, George H.W. Bush, James Baker, Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher and Evelyn de Rothschild) to get their sanction for the organization of a reactionary counter-revolution to stop the fascist counter-revolution in which they persuade the conservative elements in Russian society (the church, the army, the bankers) to back a restoration of throne and altar, with a certain Prince of the House of Windsor as the new Czar of All the Russias providing a symbol for the country to unite behind (implicitly, Prince Michael of Kent, ironic as this may seem today), because if they can do that somehow all the rest will fall into place.
It is telling that what most would consider the stuff of conspiracy theory--ex-Presidents and Prime Ministers sitting together with the head of a certain legendary banking family and like business figures in their luxurious private club to decide the government of the "lesser breeds"--is just dandy in Forsyth's view, and indeed he presents it as a principled defense of "democracy" in the world (for of course, such people have never had any other motive in all their lives of Public Service, perish the thought), all while brushing off any possibility that a person of genuinely democratic sentiment might see an "issue" in a tale of secret elite groups imposing monarchy on a country through covert action that will eventually involve a lot of killing of people who never had a say in the matter in democracy's name, then when it is all done sitting back in self-satisfaction at how they pulled the strings. (Indeed, remembering Forsyth's seeming to channel Robert Ludlum for a while back in The Negotiator I could not help remembering that this was the sort of thing villainous organizations like Genessee and Inver Brass do in his books, not the good guys.)
The big picture in Icon all pretty much pure wish-fulfillment for Forsyth the Right-Wing Ideologue, it makes quite the contrast with the realities of this "It's the Economy, Stupid" world we live in, such that where in many a prior book one didn't have to buy into Forsyth's view of the world to find his storytelling gripping them this one became increasingly flimsy as the outline of the scheme became clearer. And if anything the results have probably come to look weaker with time, for, far from us now reading it and feeling as if we could be looking at a piece of "secret history" the way we might when reading The Deceiver, we know full well that not only did matters not work out that way, but that their ever having done so is exceedingly unlikely. (After all, if Russia, and the world, seem very far from any sort of "Happily ever after" to the tale of the Cold War's end, the country's stabilization happened on very different lines--resurgent commodity prices, and the measure of success the Russian government had in using them, giving the country a respite, all before this unhappy century proved to have still more troubles in store for the eight billion of us walking the surface of this third rock from the sun.) Indeed, by the time the inevitable adaptation of the book happened (in the TV movie version made by a then-very different Hallmark Channel with Michael York as Sir Nigel, and Patrick Swayze as Jason Monck), the story already seemed badly dated, way back in 2005, to such a degree that the original plot is almost unrecognizable in the goings-on.
Book Review: The Deceiver, by Frederick Forsyth
As the Cold War drew to a close many a thriller writer sensed that both the Cold War and the spy story which so flourished on the strength of its tensions, had more past than future--and cast their gaze backward rather than forward as they told stories of that past. So did it go with John le Carré's recounting of the career of "Ned" in 1990's The Secret Pilgrim (this stress on past, perhaps, why in this book George Smiley put in his only appearance in le Carré's novels in the four decade span between Smiley's People and the similarly backward-looking A Legacy of Spies). So did it also go with Frederick Forsyth's novel of the following year, The Deceiver--like Pilgrim a "novel" comprised of a succession of episodes out of its protagonist's career in Britain's Secret Service that recalled for me that classic structuring of a spy novel in such a manner, W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden.
As those who know these three authors would guess, le Carré's is the more Ashenden-like. After all, in contrast with Maugham and le Carré Forsyth is a plain and simple thriller writer, such that where they tended to use the usually banal and often morally ambiguous realities of espionage as the context of the human drama that was their principal interest, with Forsyth espionage, or at least that version of espionage suited to thrillers, was the interest of the story, with Forsyth distinguishing himself with "big picture" views of the game and attention to its mechanics as he worked out his often sprawling plots in detail in that fashion I have been prone to describe as "the security state epic." There is, too, the reality that Forsyth, unlike his colleagues Maugham and le Carré, is an old Tory who has never been shy about beating the reader over the head with his politics, lionizes Britain's secret services throughout for what he presents as their unmatched cunning, efficiency and ruthlessness in a struggle against enemies (the Soviets, the Irish Republican Army, etc.) he treats as villains in black and white and even stereotyped terms, with wrestling with life's complexities not to be found here, even when they stare us in the face. (Thus can Forsyth in the same tale both be smug about Britain's being much more democratic than some countries, but also how, in the face of a threat to "national security," said democracy will "make exceptions," without seeming aware of any possible dissonances.) Indeed, the form in which Forsyth presents the stories is a hearing by senior security state functionaries to determine whether the day of men like the titular "deceiver," Sam McCready, head of the desk of "Deception, Disinformation and Psychological Operations," is over and the time come to him put him out to pasture, giving McCready's deputy the chance to make his case for why not on the basis of his past triumphs--with no one likely to be in any doubt about what Forsyth's answer to that question will be (and not very much more doubt about what those conducting the hearing are going to decide in the end, given that, admiring of "the Establishment" as Forsyth is, this is one where the "brilliant maverick" is up against "stupid bureaucrats" in a time when budgetary axes are falling). Additionally, in contrast with the numerous small episodes Maugham and le Carré used in their books here Forsyth presents just four episodes, each a novella rather than a short story, and all from the latter part of McCready's tenure at said desk (1983 to 1991), rather than McCready's whole career.
How does it all read? As it happens, Forsyth's novellas, because of their smaller size having less room for the sweep and intricacy that was his hallmark, deprive him of the chance to do what made his books stand out. Along with Forsyth's decision to keep things grounded (there are no Devil's Alternative-type extravagances here)—this may have worked against his plots from rising above standard spy stuff (Is that Soviet defector leveling with us? How do we stop that arms shipment to that terrorist group?) in the essentials of the premises and their working out. As compared with his prior The Negotiator there is also less sense of Forsyth trying to do "something different," the Maugham-like touch in most cases just a twist toward the end, often a relatively minor one that--as was not the case with Maugham--consistently sees the irony come down on the head of someone other than the unfailingly masterly McCready (the Cousins across the Pond who failed to heed the advice of their wise British counterparts, or those that a McCready has been prepared to, in line with the aforementioned ruthlessness, use and then throw away). And if Forsyth has the ability to make a story whose ending we know suspenseful (everyone likely to be reading the book back when it came out knew that Charles de Gaulle did not die in 1963, but he kept many a reader turning the pages all the way down to the end of The Day of the Jackal), the fact that we all know in advance that the stories ended in the kind of triumph for McCready that his advocate will use to justify his job in the face of a presumably hostile officialdom works against any such effect. The result is that altogether two of the four novellas are essentially workman-like Cold War tales. Of the other two one is helped by the book's only really successful Ashenden-ish bit of drama (concerning one of McCready's exploits turning on the delusions of a middle-aged man with an unhappy home life's love for a prostitute and its tragic end for both), the other in its still very late into the narrative reading like a Death in Paradise episode complete with an unpersonable veteran detective from the London Metropolitan Police packed off to the Caribbean for the first time and not much liking the experience holding center stage for most of a story that takes its time bringing McCready into events, and unearthing more than ordinary criminal motivations behind the murder of a high-profile individual. (Indeed, our not so intrepid detective finds himself still wondering fairly late in the game if it was not after all a wife fed up with her husband's adulteries who "did it." It isn't much of a spoiler to say that it wasn't anything so simple, for why else would McCready's deputy be telling the tale right now?)
Altogether the result is that the individual novels only rarely rise above the ordinary, while the grouping of the novellas together does not make them more than the sum of its parts to anything like the degree we saw in Ashenden and The Secret Pilgrim (on the whole the kind of richer works that can only come from a more nuanced view than Forsyth offers here), while the effort is not helped by how rather than making an epic out of McCready's long career, his limiting the selection of episodes to incidents from his later years in his very senior position, and for that matter, their being so self-contained that one could read each of them quite separately without enjoying them the less. (Indeed, one might imagine that after Forsyth's earlier short story collection No Comebacks failed to become a blockbuster on par with his novels--short story collections generally don't, even when by as big a name as a Forsyth--he found himself producing shorter material, but was careful to tie them together to produce at least the semblance of a novel for marketing purposes.) Still, even where Forsyth's work here is run-of-the-mill in premise and incident and the structure of the whole is not all that it might be, the individual pieces remain competent nonetheless, benefiting from his clean, crisp, straightforward prose, his usual brisk pacing, and his careful usage of "the details" of the activities and scenes he describes (which, I imagine, had at least a few of his readers checking the map for the location of a certain Caribbean archipelago and then being surprised to find that it didn't actually exist). The result is that if I would not rank The Deceiver with Forsyth's best I still found it a diverting enough read--all as it also has the intrinsic interest of capping off the Cold War phase of the career of one of the last really significant innovators and truly Big Names the field ever produced.
As those who know these three authors would guess, le Carré's is the more Ashenden-like. After all, in contrast with Maugham and le Carré Forsyth is a plain and simple thriller writer, such that where they tended to use the usually banal and often morally ambiguous realities of espionage as the context of the human drama that was their principal interest, with Forsyth espionage, or at least that version of espionage suited to thrillers, was the interest of the story, with Forsyth distinguishing himself with "big picture" views of the game and attention to its mechanics as he worked out his often sprawling plots in detail in that fashion I have been prone to describe as "the security state epic." There is, too, the reality that Forsyth, unlike his colleagues Maugham and le Carré, is an old Tory who has never been shy about beating the reader over the head with his politics, lionizes Britain's secret services throughout for what he presents as their unmatched cunning, efficiency and ruthlessness in a struggle against enemies (the Soviets, the Irish Republican Army, etc.) he treats as villains in black and white and even stereotyped terms, with wrestling with life's complexities not to be found here, even when they stare us in the face. (Thus can Forsyth in the same tale both be smug about Britain's being much more democratic than some countries, but also how, in the face of a threat to "national security," said democracy will "make exceptions," without seeming aware of any possible dissonances.) Indeed, the form in which Forsyth presents the stories is a hearing by senior security state functionaries to determine whether the day of men like the titular "deceiver," Sam McCready, head of the desk of "Deception, Disinformation and Psychological Operations," is over and the time come to him put him out to pasture, giving McCready's deputy the chance to make his case for why not on the basis of his past triumphs--with no one likely to be in any doubt about what Forsyth's answer to that question will be (and not very much more doubt about what those conducting the hearing are going to decide in the end, given that, admiring of "the Establishment" as Forsyth is, this is one where the "brilliant maverick" is up against "stupid bureaucrats" in a time when budgetary axes are falling). Additionally, in contrast with the numerous small episodes Maugham and le Carré used in their books here Forsyth presents just four episodes, each a novella rather than a short story, and all from the latter part of McCready's tenure at said desk (1983 to 1991), rather than McCready's whole career.
How does it all read? As it happens, Forsyth's novellas, because of their smaller size having less room for the sweep and intricacy that was his hallmark, deprive him of the chance to do what made his books stand out. Along with Forsyth's decision to keep things grounded (there are no Devil's Alternative-type extravagances here)—this may have worked against his plots from rising above standard spy stuff (Is that Soviet defector leveling with us? How do we stop that arms shipment to that terrorist group?) in the essentials of the premises and their working out. As compared with his prior The Negotiator there is also less sense of Forsyth trying to do "something different," the Maugham-like touch in most cases just a twist toward the end, often a relatively minor one that--as was not the case with Maugham--consistently sees the irony come down on the head of someone other than the unfailingly masterly McCready (the Cousins across the Pond who failed to heed the advice of their wise British counterparts, or those that a McCready has been prepared to, in line with the aforementioned ruthlessness, use and then throw away). And if Forsyth has the ability to make a story whose ending we know suspenseful (everyone likely to be reading the book back when it came out knew that Charles de Gaulle did not die in 1963, but he kept many a reader turning the pages all the way down to the end of The Day of the Jackal), the fact that we all know in advance that the stories ended in the kind of triumph for McCready that his advocate will use to justify his job in the face of a presumably hostile officialdom works against any such effect. The result is that altogether two of the four novellas are essentially workman-like Cold War tales. Of the other two one is helped by the book's only really successful Ashenden-ish bit of drama (concerning one of McCready's exploits turning on the delusions of a middle-aged man with an unhappy home life's love for a prostitute and its tragic end for both), the other in its still very late into the narrative reading like a Death in Paradise episode complete with an unpersonable veteran detective from the London Metropolitan Police packed off to the Caribbean for the first time and not much liking the experience holding center stage for most of a story that takes its time bringing McCready into events, and unearthing more than ordinary criminal motivations behind the murder of a high-profile individual. (Indeed, our not so intrepid detective finds himself still wondering fairly late in the game if it was not after all a wife fed up with her husband's adulteries who "did it." It isn't much of a spoiler to say that it wasn't anything so simple, for why else would McCready's deputy be telling the tale right now?)
Altogether the result is that the individual novels only rarely rise above the ordinary, while the grouping of the novellas together does not make them more than the sum of its parts to anything like the degree we saw in Ashenden and The Secret Pilgrim (on the whole the kind of richer works that can only come from a more nuanced view than Forsyth offers here), while the effort is not helped by how rather than making an epic out of McCready's long career, his limiting the selection of episodes to incidents from his later years in his very senior position, and for that matter, their being so self-contained that one could read each of them quite separately without enjoying them the less. (Indeed, one might imagine that after Forsyth's earlier short story collection No Comebacks failed to become a blockbuster on par with his novels--short story collections generally don't, even when by as big a name as a Forsyth--he found himself producing shorter material, but was careful to tie them together to produce at least the semblance of a novel for marketing purposes.) Still, even where Forsyth's work here is run-of-the-mill in premise and incident and the structure of the whole is not all that it might be, the individual pieces remain competent nonetheless, benefiting from his clean, crisp, straightforward prose, his usual brisk pacing, and his careful usage of "the details" of the activities and scenes he describes (which, I imagine, had at least a few of his readers checking the map for the location of a certain Caribbean archipelago and then being surprised to find that it didn't actually exist). The result is that if I would not rank The Deceiver with Forsyth's best I still found it a diverting enough read--all as it also has the intrinsic interest of capping off the Cold War phase of the career of one of the last really significant innovators and truly Big Names the field ever produced.
Book Review: The Negotiator, by Frederick Forsyth
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
Reading Frederick Forsyth's The Negotiator I quickly found myself in mind of that author's '70s-era novels, particularly The Day of the Jackal, and The Odessa File. Jackal was a sprawling "security state epic" of the kind Forsyth made his name helping to popularize--a tale ranging widely as it "reconstructs" for us in journalistic fashion a fictional (or is it?) national security crisis with an eye to giving us the big picture of the situation and its unfolding rather than following a protagonist through their personal story arc. (Indeed, the character we would conventionally regard as the hero of the piece, the detective put in charge of the hunt for the Jackal, doesn't even show until the middle of the book.) By contrast Odessa was a more conventional thriller, much more tightly focused on its hero's quest (which by story's end proves very personal indeed).
Meanwhile, just like Forsyth's two preceding international thrillers, The Devil's Alternative and The Fourth Protocol, The Negotiator is a Jackal-type national security epic staged at a global level for its first eighty pages (I'm going by the pagination in my paperback edition) as it ranges from Washington to Moscow and beyond in following the U.S. President's effort to sign an historic arms control treaty with the Soviet Union, and the elements on both sides of the Iron Curtain which, seeing in the treaty a threat to their interests, mobilize to prevent that treaty from ever being inked. After page eighty, following a kidnapping implicitly connected with these machinations, and the enlistment of the titular "negotiator" who is supposed to secure the kidnap victim's release, the man we know as Quinn, the story turns a lot more like Odessa--centering on the activity of the protagonist as Forsyth shoves the big geopolitical maneuverings into the background, and afterward offers only brief glimpses of them, mostly from the margins for quite a while as the security state epic turns into a police procedural. After the key twist at the midpoint of the book shifts mode yet again, so that the results felt less like Forsyth, and more like Robert Ludlum, especially after the crucial twist midway through that shortly gives us an American in bad odor with the authorities who, looking to clear his name by unmasking the conspirators into whose affairs he had unknowingly been drawn, travels Western Europe looking for answers to his questions from people who, every so often, are dead before he gets to them, as other people take shots at him as well. (And just as in Ludlum, yes, the trail will lead back to very powerful figures in his own country, all as during Quinn's foray into the mountains of Corsica I practically had to check the name on the cover to make sure of which author's book I was reading.)
The shifts from epic treatment of international intrigue to police procedural to Ludlumesque adventure make for a less ingeniously constructed and less fluid read than its predecessors. Indeed, Forsyth's abruptly ceasing to follow the higher-level action in the early part of the book made me impatient (during a prior read, to the point of putting the book down and coming to it only a long time after), the more in as this phase of the tale is a slow starter, Forsyth taking another eighty pages before the negotiator even makes contact with the kidnappers to do any negotiating. At the same time the more focused, protagonist-centered narrative makes more problematic the fact that characterization is neither Forsyth's interest nor forte--it seems relevant that his first, most famous, arguably most influential thriller had for its titular anti-hero a cipher--and indeed, Quinn rather an action hero cliché. (Of course the specialist is a "brilliant maverick" who insists on "doing things his way" leading to endless annoyances with the jobbing cops, and a relationship of mutual disrespect between them. Of course when "not on assignment" the ex-special forces man leads a bucolic existence in a locale where he has plenty of tough guy friends who can watch his back. And so forth.) Moreover, at the level of the plot Forsyth's usage of a small group-staged security incident as the key to a superpower-level crisis here proves less clever and less tension-filled than his linking of the hijacking of a supertanker to a looming threat of World War III in The Devil's Alternative (with, indeed, the revelation of the villains' rationale for employing the kidnapping as a tool for achieving their ends in this case underwhelming).
Still, if the story is an unlikely blend of elements that are in at least some cases repetitions of past successes, or simply derivative, and the tale's interest sags for a stretch early on, Forsyth's mechanics are on the whole sufficiently competent to make the book work, with his propensity for short scenes, plain and economical prose and sense of pace helping carry the narrative--with his channeling Ludlum working surprisingly well. This also wasn't the only surprise the book had to offer, with Forsyth's numbering American oil men, arms manufacturers and intelligence veterans among the conspirators an unexpected move given his prior efforts, and well-known politics (which have him pausing in his storytelling to put in an entirely gratuitous good word for an unnamed female Prime Minister we all know to be Margaret Thatcher). Indeed, Forsyth turns a satirical eye on the particular "flavor" of right-wing represented by a racist religious megalomaniac like Cyrus Miller or a Senator Bennett Hapgood who equate their private interests (and fanaticisms) with the "national interest," while making their ex-CIA henchman a sadistic pervert whose association with the Phoenix program and the covert war in Nicaragua in the '80s puts neither of those campaigns in a good light here--all of which makes Forsyth's hero's working with the Soviet system's saner elements to stop the conspirators threatening the world with disaster the more striking a choice. Meanwhile, if the political premise of this near-the-end-of-the-Cold War tale by Forsyth was quickly overtaken by the rapidly unfolding changes of those days (in the 1989 novel the Soviet bloc is not just a going concern but still intact in 1991-1992), there can seem to be something of the post-Cold War in the collision of geopolitics and oil at the heart of the book's plot--and some, I imagine, will incline to the view that history has unfolded in a manner not too different from how it would have had the villains in the book succeeded.
Reading Frederick Forsyth's The Negotiator I quickly found myself in mind of that author's '70s-era novels, particularly The Day of the Jackal, and The Odessa File. Jackal was a sprawling "security state epic" of the kind Forsyth made his name helping to popularize--a tale ranging widely as it "reconstructs" for us in journalistic fashion a fictional (or is it?) national security crisis with an eye to giving us the big picture of the situation and its unfolding rather than following a protagonist through their personal story arc. (Indeed, the character we would conventionally regard as the hero of the piece, the detective put in charge of the hunt for the Jackal, doesn't even show until the middle of the book.) By contrast Odessa was a more conventional thriller, much more tightly focused on its hero's quest (which by story's end proves very personal indeed).
Meanwhile, just like Forsyth's two preceding international thrillers, The Devil's Alternative and The Fourth Protocol, The Negotiator is a Jackal-type national security epic staged at a global level for its first eighty pages (I'm going by the pagination in my paperback edition) as it ranges from Washington to Moscow and beyond in following the U.S. President's effort to sign an historic arms control treaty with the Soviet Union, and the elements on both sides of the Iron Curtain which, seeing in the treaty a threat to their interests, mobilize to prevent that treaty from ever being inked. After page eighty, following a kidnapping implicitly connected with these machinations, and the enlistment of the titular "negotiator" who is supposed to secure the kidnap victim's release, the man we know as Quinn, the story turns a lot more like Odessa--centering on the activity of the protagonist as Forsyth shoves the big geopolitical maneuverings into the background, and afterward offers only brief glimpses of them, mostly from the margins for quite a while as the security state epic turns into a police procedural. After the key twist at the midpoint of the book shifts mode yet again, so that the results felt less like Forsyth, and more like Robert Ludlum, especially after the crucial twist midway through that shortly gives us an American in bad odor with the authorities who, looking to clear his name by unmasking the conspirators into whose affairs he had unknowingly been drawn, travels Western Europe looking for answers to his questions from people who, every so often, are dead before he gets to them, as other people take shots at him as well. (And just as in Ludlum, yes, the trail will lead back to very powerful figures in his own country, all as during Quinn's foray into the mountains of Corsica I practically had to check the name on the cover to make sure of which author's book I was reading.)
The shifts from epic treatment of international intrigue to police procedural to Ludlumesque adventure make for a less ingeniously constructed and less fluid read than its predecessors. Indeed, Forsyth's abruptly ceasing to follow the higher-level action in the early part of the book made me impatient (during a prior read, to the point of putting the book down and coming to it only a long time after), the more in as this phase of the tale is a slow starter, Forsyth taking another eighty pages before the negotiator even makes contact with the kidnappers to do any negotiating. At the same time the more focused, protagonist-centered narrative makes more problematic the fact that characterization is neither Forsyth's interest nor forte--it seems relevant that his first, most famous, arguably most influential thriller had for its titular anti-hero a cipher--and indeed, Quinn rather an action hero cliché. (Of course the specialist is a "brilliant maverick" who insists on "doing things his way" leading to endless annoyances with the jobbing cops, and a relationship of mutual disrespect between them. Of course when "not on assignment" the ex-special forces man leads a bucolic existence in a locale where he has plenty of tough guy friends who can watch his back. And so forth.) Moreover, at the level of the plot Forsyth's usage of a small group-staged security incident as the key to a superpower-level crisis here proves less clever and less tension-filled than his linking of the hijacking of a supertanker to a looming threat of World War III in The Devil's Alternative (with, indeed, the revelation of the villains' rationale for employing the kidnapping as a tool for achieving their ends in this case underwhelming).
Still, if the story is an unlikely blend of elements that are in at least some cases repetitions of past successes, or simply derivative, and the tale's interest sags for a stretch early on, Forsyth's mechanics are on the whole sufficiently competent to make the book work, with his propensity for short scenes, plain and economical prose and sense of pace helping carry the narrative--with his channeling Ludlum working surprisingly well. This also wasn't the only surprise the book had to offer, with Forsyth's numbering American oil men, arms manufacturers and intelligence veterans among the conspirators an unexpected move given his prior efforts, and well-known politics (which have him pausing in his storytelling to put in an entirely gratuitous good word for an unnamed female Prime Minister we all know to be Margaret Thatcher). Indeed, Forsyth turns a satirical eye on the particular "flavor" of right-wing represented by a racist religious megalomaniac like Cyrus Miller or a Senator Bennett Hapgood who equate their private interests (and fanaticisms) with the "national interest," while making their ex-CIA henchman a sadistic pervert whose association with the Phoenix program and the covert war in Nicaragua in the '80s puts neither of those campaigns in a good light here--all of which makes Forsyth's hero's working with the Soviet system's saner elements to stop the conspirators threatening the world with disaster the more striking a choice. Meanwhile, if the political premise of this near-the-end-of-the-Cold War tale by Forsyth was quickly overtaken by the rapidly unfolding changes of those days (in the 1989 novel the Soviet bloc is not just a going concern but still intact in 1991-1992), there can seem to be something of the post-Cold War in the collision of geopolitics and oil at the heart of the book's plot--and some, I imagine, will incline to the view that history has unfolded in a manner not too different from how it would have had the villains in the book succeeded.
Political Psychologism
Psychology is definable as a science of the mind and behavior, especially the mind and behavior of humans.
Psychologism is the explanation of everything humans do through psychology--a tendency that, given what psychology covers but also does not cover, may be considered misuse and abuse of psychology, a form of misuse and abuse of which we have long seen much in the political realm.
Those who incline to psychologism in this way, faced with any sort of discontent, relentlessly change the issue from objective reality to some inner trouble of the person who points out anything troubling in their conditions, or those of society at large. Those taking this tack tell those who lack food and shelter that they aren't really suffering from the fact that they are starving and homeless, rather their troubles are psychological--that they only feel deprived because others have more. They tell the poor who feel that the system isn't working for them and taking an interest in political figures challenging the status quo that they aren't suffering from material hardships and desirous for their redress, but that they are the mental wreckage of modern life, desirous of relief from the burdens of their individuality via flight into a Mass Movement in which that individuality will be dissolved, a flight not to but from freedom . . .
Such maneuvers, as one recent analyst of the political scene had it, "dissolv[e] conflicts of power, interest, and ideas in a bath of psychological analysis," and in so doing dismiss and discredit any questioning of the world, any protest, any dissent, and pretty misanthropically too, pathologizing as they do anything and everything humans do, think, feel in the manner of a Medieval theologian seeing sin and evil in everything, and reducing their subject to a pathetic, rather ugly, mass of neuroses--which is why people of a certain ideological background love it so much, and have worked so hard to promulgate it among the credulous, especially those among them who reflexively mistake what is merely counterintuitive and obscure for what is profound and true.
Psychologism is the explanation of everything humans do through psychology--a tendency that, given what psychology covers but also does not cover, may be considered misuse and abuse of psychology, a form of misuse and abuse of which we have long seen much in the political realm.
Those who incline to psychologism in this way, faced with any sort of discontent, relentlessly change the issue from objective reality to some inner trouble of the person who points out anything troubling in their conditions, or those of society at large. Those taking this tack tell those who lack food and shelter that they aren't really suffering from the fact that they are starving and homeless, rather their troubles are psychological--that they only feel deprived because others have more. They tell the poor who feel that the system isn't working for them and taking an interest in political figures challenging the status quo that they aren't suffering from material hardships and desirous for their redress, but that they are the mental wreckage of modern life, desirous of relief from the burdens of their individuality via flight into a Mass Movement in which that individuality will be dissolved, a flight not to but from freedom . . .
Such maneuvers, as one recent analyst of the political scene had it, "dissolv[e] conflicts of power, interest, and ideas in a bath of psychological analysis," and in so doing dismiss and discredit any questioning of the world, any protest, any dissent, and pretty misanthropically too, pathologizing as they do anything and everything humans do, think, feel in the manner of a Medieval theologian seeing sin and evil in everything, and reducing their subject to a pathetic, rather ugly, mass of neuroses--which is why people of a certain ideological background love it so much, and have worked so hard to promulgate it among the credulous, especially those among them who reflexively mistake what is merely counterintuitive and obscure for what is profound and true.
The Artistic Sensibility Confronts Poverty
Looking into the matter of why artists so readily incline to the glorification of the established and powerful one has an obvious answer in the fact of the allotment of opportunities and rewards by which artists must work and live by self-serving and vainglorious elites--these paying the piper and so also the ones calling the tune. However, looking a little more deeply at the matter they see that while the realities of power in society encourage this few artists really "sell out" in delivering what the powerful want, instead serving their masters willingly. One argument has it that this is because the propaganda on the side of the status quo is at all times so great, and the artist, because of their "artistic sensitivity," particularly susceptible to it, with the result that they are easily propagandized, with this turning them into natural propagandizers themselves--the more in as they are even more than most affected by luxury and esteem and its graces, and repulsed by the opposite. Indeed, E.M. Forster's remark in Howard's End that "the very poor . . . are unthinkable," and indeed "to be approached by the statistician or the poet" seems telling of the mentality. After all, to consider the "very poor" lengthily and deeply, acquiring the mastery of the minutiae of their misery such as a realist novelist would require in order to make a genuine success of their work, seemed to Forster more than a person possessed of an artistic sensibility could bear--and perhaps many another, the statistician protected by dealing impersonally in vast numbers, the poet by their offering only a brief verse on the basis of a brief exposure rather than writing any epic poems of life in the slums, and of course, the same going for the "middle class or higher" readership to which Forster addressed his remarks.
Of course, many artists have looked, and looked hard, at the life of the very poor a Forster considers unthinkable--a Charles Dickens, an Emile Zola, a Stephen Crane, an Upton Sinclair, to name but a very few, and created extraordinary work thereby. However, it says something of the artistic outlook and its limitations, as reflected in Forster, that such are so few--and that in line with the prejudices of those who would rather not have anyone write of poverty and its realities at all, they join in the sneering dismissal of those writers who did what they could not and did not as not really artists at all.
Of course, many artists have looked, and looked hard, at the life of the very poor a Forster considers unthinkable--a Charles Dickens, an Emile Zola, a Stephen Crane, an Upton Sinclair, to name but a very few, and created extraordinary work thereby. However, it says something of the artistic outlook and its limitations, as reflected in Forster, that such are so few--and that in line with the prejudices of those who would rather not have anyone write of poverty and its realities at all, they join in the sneering dismissal of those writers who did what they could not and did not as not really artists at all.
The Western Media and Russia in the'90s
Back in the '90s, looking at the Soviet system in ruins, the Western media displayed immense gratification at the condition of the "defeated" enemy; professed endless "optimism" about the process of economic reform initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin (the greater, I suppose, amid the general bullishness about neoliberal capitalism at its '90s-era peak); and derived a voyeuristic, in respects burlesque, pleasure in the images of the criminality and the hedonism so evident in the capital, which in the '20s had represented World Revolution now representing what Chicago did in the same years, the reign of the gangster.
Looking back from 2025 it seems pretty clear that few if any scholars, journalists, artists or other members of the misnamed intelligentsia displayed any desire whatsoever to take advantage of the chances the Iron Curtain's being down to work to better understand the Soviet past and Russian present and the whole history of our times so bound up with them. Rather the media's coverage reflected its characteristic prejudices, its superficiality, and its extreme ignorance about human societies, if anything more conspicuous when it looks at societies besides its own; its thoroughly Establishment "confirmation bias," Schadenfreude and irony toward a country and a people it could never forgive for 1917, and to which sensibility the image of Russia's turmoil was so gratifying, while that sensibility was equally evident in its breathless hucksterism about the supposed cure for what ailed the country; and its reveling in vulgar spectacle, its fawning respect for oligarchs and kleptocrats and kakistocrats, its callousness toward if not contempt for the ordinary people as they died by the millions under their heels as a result of the "reforms" they so celebrated.
All this was not a great help in understanding Russia at the time, or where the country was going--and from everything I see of that media now, far from having got better it has only got worse in the decades since.
Looking back from 2025 it seems pretty clear that few if any scholars, journalists, artists or other members of the misnamed intelligentsia displayed any desire whatsoever to take advantage of the chances the Iron Curtain's being down to work to better understand the Soviet past and Russian present and the whole history of our times so bound up with them. Rather the media's coverage reflected its characteristic prejudices, its superficiality, and its extreme ignorance about human societies, if anything more conspicuous when it looks at societies besides its own; its thoroughly Establishment "confirmation bias," Schadenfreude and irony toward a country and a people it could never forgive for 1917, and to which sensibility the image of Russia's turmoil was so gratifying, while that sensibility was equally evident in its breathless hucksterism about the supposed cure for what ailed the country; and its reveling in vulgar spectacle, its fawning respect for oligarchs and kleptocrats and kakistocrats, its callousness toward if not contempt for the ordinary people as they died by the millions under their heels as a result of the "reforms" they so celebrated.
All this was not a great help in understanding Russia at the time, or where the country was going--and from everything I see of that media now, far from having got better it has only got worse in the decades since.
Why are The Federalist Papers So Hard to Read?
It is a common refrain among those who read The Federalist Papers (rather than just mouthing about them) that they are a very turgid read. Considering that reaction I recently found myself reading the Papers with an eye to form rather than content.
Were the Papers simply badly written? No, the pieces are generally tightly focused and well-structured--and indeed, hold up well when judged by the exacting standard the typical composition textbook sets for essay writing. Time and again when scrutinizing a selected Number I found that the authors make clear at the outset what their subject matter is and what their position on it is going to be, while typically spelling out how are they going to go about explaining themselves (previewing for us the rest); proceed to elucidate their argument in an orderly and logical succession of "point-first" paragraphs; and eschew digressions and unnecessary repetitions down to the end, where they tidily wrap up what they had to say. I will add that if the language tends to be elevated (what unlettered persons are apt to complain of as "big words," as well as complex sentences) I do not remember having to look up the definitions of any of the words they used, and I never had to go back and puzzle out what they said due to some passage having been convoluted the way I might have expected given the charge. In fact, I failed to catch any sign of pretension as such--precision and economy instead more plausible motivations for the prose. (Here is a simple test for the doubtful: take those "difficult" sentences and see if you can say the same thing, with all its exactness and nuances, at similar length, without using "big words" and complex sentence arrangements yourself.) The same goes for the authors' citation of fact. If they make historical references that can seem obscure, they do not make so many of them as one may imagine from the complaints, and never in a show-offy way, consistently explaining their relevance and even their nature so that if a reader does not know them they get the picture, if they bother to keep reading. That still leaves it far from being light reading, but it also means that the writing as such is far from explaining why so many have such a hard time with it.
It is also the case that not only are the individual Numbers well-structured, but so is the collection of those eighty-five Numbers when one takes them as a whole. They begin with an argument for the importance of Union among the thirteen states (to avoid conflicts among themselves, better deal with foreign powers, etc.), proceed to criticism of the Articles of Confederation under which those states were living and the need for a more capable Federal government than the one they had from the standpoint of the country's needs as they had identified them, and then successively discuss various aspects of the proposed Constitution (the balance between state and Federal power, the separation of powers and checks and balances at the Federal level, the functioning of its legislative, executive and judicial branches successively, and finally the protection it extended to individual liberties). Indeed, many of the essay sequences comprise a single discussion (with some fifty of the 85 essays in fact identifiable as parts of longer arguments, going by how many pieces are titled "The Same Subject Continued" or some variation thereof). It thus seems that the arrangement of the Numbers does not account for the difficulty either.
Rather what makes the numbers a demanding read has instead to do with the content the authors present, and how we tend to take it today. The Federalist Papers are, in spite of their lucid organization, still not a tidy laying out of the Constitution's workings and argument on their behalf. Instead they are one side of a national dialogue--Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay under the jointly used pseudonym Publius responding to various charges the opponents of ratification of the new Constitution were laying against it. That we are getting just one side of the dialogue makes it harder to follow than it might be otherwise, given that we are unlikely to have even heard of many of the charges they defend the Constitution against, or even imagined them previously, with the authors of the Papers themselves telling us that they are the result of misreadings of the Constitution's text that Hamilton and company repeatedly deride as "absurd." (In a footnote to Number 81, for instance, Hamilton tells us that some critics of the proposed Constitution claimed that the Supreme Court's power to establish "inferior courts" bespoke an intent to abolish the county courts in all the states, a concern unlikely to occur to anyone today.)
As all this implies, within that very sound overall structure, presented within those very well-structured individual pieces, we get a hodgepodge of argument and counter-argument, sometimes dealing with rather small and implausible-seeming issues, with all that means for the unity and flow of the work, while the way the authors (to some extent, unavoidably) respond to the charges not making it easier to follow. The discussion is heavy on the general, the abstract, the hypothetical (typically the vaguely sketched hypothetical, like "What if the President tried appointing his unfit cronies to important posts?")--all of which people generally have a hard time processing for any length of time, or even just staying interested in for long, by comparison with a discussion of concrete particulars. As if that were not enough when the discussion shifts from the more pragmatic arguments for Union (the principal theme of the first dozen Numbers after the Introduction) to the Constitution's finer points about the middle of the set (No. 37 is the point of transition), we get an increasing amount of close-reading of the Constitution, often with explicit attention to the proprieties of legal construction such as one would expect in legal scholarship (and the more technical passages in such scholarship at that) rather than anything we would today expect to see produced for popular consumption. The Federalist Papers' authors also tend to be both meticulous and exhaustive as they go about all this (counting the Numbers directly addressing the Constitution, we get some 120,000 words--regarding a Constitution that, in its then unamended state, ran to about four thousand words), with the result predictably that much denser. Meanwhile even those who can follow the arguments perfectly well may find the discussions testing their patience precisely because of their drawn-out treatment of points in which they have little interest, and frankly, sometimes because people today are likely to find at least some of the arguments the authors of these papers made objectionable. (Thus may many react reading Federalist No. 54, in which it is generally presumed to be Madison, owner of a hundred slaves at his Virginia estate, defending the notorious "Three-Fifths Compromise" while--behind that pseudonym Publius—and speaking of "our Southern brethren" as if he were not himself a Southerner and representative of the South in the Convention, and so too No. 84, where he dismisses the demands that some were making for the a Bill of Rights that was only added after ratification.)
None of this makes for high readability, and the results are predictable here, while the way in which we are likely to read the Numbers matters. The relatively short individual pieces were originally published separately over a period of about seven months (from late October 1787 to late May 1788), Publius' contemporaries chewing all this over a little at a time. By contrast most of us picking up The Federalist Papers probably expect to sit down and polish it off as we would any other book, perhaps in just a couple of days if we can make the time (not unreasonably, again, given the extent to which the whole is more than the sum of its parts), with the result that we try to take in two hundred thousand words of meticulous, exhaustive, often highly legalistic rebuttals of what can feel like a grab bag, frankly an immense grab bag, of often minute and often unfamiliar and "absurd" charges in now long dead arguments (again, in that elevated language and essay-by-essay structure that may not be the principal problems but also do not make it easier), and unsurprisingly find it tedious going, if not overwhelming, even when we are accustomed to relatively demanding material.
For all that I thought my time in the end well-spent in continuing all the way up to the end, because of what the Papers offer--the publicly stated understandings of two of the most active and consequential participants at the Constitutional Convention, including "father of the Constitution" Madison himself, and what the public thought they were voting for at the time, as well as the light it shed on the period broadly. Certainly I learned a lot about the Articles of Confederation that today we seem so prone to marginalize in our discussion of American history today (perhaps because the Confederation's failure sits uneasily with that type of history that presents the Founding Fathers as all-seeing and all-knowing demigods who unswervingly led the nation from triumph to triumph--and what is for many the uncomfortable thought that the reminder that constitutions have failed in the past and needed to be replaced).
Reading the Papers was also a reminder of just how far removed the authors of the Constitution were from the world of a quarter of a millennium later, and its application of the Constitution to problems they had scarcely imagined, reflecting as they did the concerns of a relatively small, agrarian, country in a pre-industrial, pre-digital world, where it seemed plausible to worry about the (relatively modest) physical distance of the capital from other parts of the then much smaller Union from the standpoint of transport and communication, when Big Business and Big Government were scarcely notions and the machinery of parties and media and other levers of political power we know today were no more so, and the mental toolkit for considering such matters--what we had of history, and economics, and social science--was so primitive next to what it would be not just in our time, but even just a hundred years later. I might also remark that because of all this one would be wrong to think that the Papers are of interest solely to those some deride as "Constitution-worshippers" convinced that the art and science of human governance attained perfection in the eighteenth century. More leftward thinkers have long been impressed by the Papers as an "economic interpretation of politics"--in the view of Charles Beard, the "finest study" of such kind "in any language"--with Beard inaugurating particular and longstanding attention to Federalist No. 10 as such, with all that it had to say about "factions," and in doing so what it said about the class character of both American society, and the government the Constitutional Convention proposed to give it, in his classic An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.
Still, the Papers must be accounted only part of a much larger picture where the Constitution's making and meaning are concerned, and indeed even just the debate over the Constitution's ratification. (There was not only "Publius," but also "Cato," arguing before the public.) In fact I wouldn't recommend that anyone pick up this book without having a fair amount of background in the subject beforehand, and the determination to bear with what can be a more grueling task than they may be led to believe by those insistent on a direct and full knowledge of The Federalist Papers as a prerequisite for expressing an opinion about current events in public in the United States.
Were the Papers simply badly written? No, the pieces are generally tightly focused and well-structured--and indeed, hold up well when judged by the exacting standard the typical composition textbook sets for essay writing. Time and again when scrutinizing a selected Number I found that the authors make clear at the outset what their subject matter is and what their position on it is going to be, while typically spelling out how are they going to go about explaining themselves (previewing for us the rest); proceed to elucidate their argument in an orderly and logical succession of "point-first" paragraphs; and eschew digressions and unnecessary repetitions down to the end, where they tidily wrap up what they had to say. I will add that if the language tends to be elevated (what unlettered persons are apt to complain of as "big words," as well as complex sentences) I do not remember having to look up the definitions of any of the words they used, and I never had to go back and puzzle out what they said due to some passage having been convoluted the way I might have expected given the charge. In fact, I failed to catch any sign of pretension as such--precision and economy instead more plausible motivations for the prose. (Here is a simple test for the doubtful: take those "difficult" sentences and see if you can say the same thing, with all its exactness and nuances, at similar length, without using "big words" and complex sentence arrangements yourself.) The same goes for the authors' citation of fact. If they make historical references that can seem obscure, they do not make so many of them as one may imagine from the complaints, and never in a show-offy way, consistently explaining their relevance and even their nature so that if a reader does not know them they get the picture, if they bother to keep reading. That still leaves it far from being light reading, but it also means that the writing as such is far from explaining why so many have such a hard time with it.
It is also the case that not only are the individual Numbers well-structured, but so is the collection of those eighty-five Numbers when one takes them as a whole. They begin with an argument for the importance of Union among the thirteen states (to avoid conflicts among themselves, better deal with foreign powers, etc.), proceed to criticism of the Articles of Confederation under which those states were living and the need for a more capable Federal government than the one they had from the standpoint of the country's needs as they had identified them, and then successively discuss various aspects of the proposed Constitution (the balance between state and Federal power, the separation of powers and checks and balances at the Federal level, the functioning of its legislative, executive and judicial branches successively, and finally the protection it extended to individual liberties). Indeed, many of the essay sequences comprise a single discussion (with some fifty of the 85 essays in fact identifiable as parts of longer arguments, going by how many pieces are titled "The Same Subject Continued" or some variation thereof). It thus seems that the arrangement of the Numbers does not account for the difficulty either.
Rather what makes the numbers a demanding read has instead to do with the content the authors present, and how we tend to take it today. The Federalist Papers are, in spite of their lucid organization, still not a tidy laying out of the Constitution's workings and argument on their behalf. Instead they are one side of a national dialogue--Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay under the jointly used pseudonym Publius responding to various charges the opponents of ratification of the new Constitution were laying against it. That we are getting just one side of the dialogue makes it harder to follow than it might be otherwise, given that we are unlikely to have even heard of many of the charges they defend the Constitution against, or even imagined them previously, with the authors of the Papers themselves telling us that they are the result of misreadings of the Constitution's text that Hamilton and company repeatedly deride as "absurd." (In a footnote to Number 81, for instance, Hamilton tells us that some critics of the proposed Constitution claimed that the Supreme Court's power to establish "inferior courts" bespoke an intent to abolish the county courts in all the states, a concern unlikely to occur to anyone today.)
As all this implies, within that very sound overall structure, presented within those very well-structured individual pieces, we get a hodgepodge of argument and counter-argument, sometimes dealing with rather small and implausible-seeming issues, with all that means for the unity and flow of the work, while the way the authors (to some extent, unavoidably) respond to the charges not making it easier to follow. The discussion is heavy on the general, the abstract, the hypothetical (typically the vaguely sketched hypothetical, like "What if the President tried appointing his unfit cronies to important posts?")--all of which people generally have a hard time processing for any length of time, or even just staying interested in for long, by comparison with a discussion of concrete particulars. As if that were not enough when the discussion shifts from the more pragmatic arguments for Union (the principal theme of the first dozen Numbers after the Introduction) to the Constitution's finer points about the middle of the set (No. 37 is the point of transition), we get an increasing amount of close-reading of the Constitution, often with explicit attention to the proprieties of legal construction such as one would expect in legal scholarship (and the more technical passages in such scholarship at that) rather than anything we would today expect to see produced for popular consumption. The Federalist Papers' authors also tend to be both meticulous and exhaustive as they go about all this (counting the Numbers directly addressing the Constitution, we get some 120,000 words--regarding a Constitution that, in its then unamended state, ran to about four thousand words), with the result predictably that much denser. Meanwhile even those who can follow the arguments perfectly well may find the discussions testing their patience precisely because of their drawn-out treatment of points in which they have little interest, and frankly, sometimes because people today are likely to find at least some of the arguments the authors of these papers made objectionable. (Thus may many react reading Federalist No. 54, in which it is generally presumed to be Madison, owner of a hundred slaves at his Virginia estate, defending the notorious "Three-Fifths Compromise" while--behind that pseudonym Publius—and speaking of "our Southern brethren" as if he were not himself a Southerner and representative of the South in the Convention, and so too No. 84, where he dismisses the demands that some were making for the a Bill of Rights that was only added after ratification.)
None of this makes for high readability, and the results are predictable here, while the way in which we are likely to read the Numbers matters. The relatively short individual pieces were originally published separately over a period of about seven months (from late October 1787 to late May 1788), Publius' contemporaries chewing all this over a little at a time. By contrast most of us picking up The Federalist Papers probably expect to sit down and polish it off as we would any other book, perhaps in just a couple of days if we can make the time (not unreasonably, again, given the extent to which the whole is more than the sum of its parts), with the result that we try to take in two hundred thousand words of meticulous, exhaustive, often highly legalistic rebuttals of what can feel like a grab bag, frankly an immense grab bag, of often minute and often unfamiliar and "absurd" charges in now long dead arguments (again, in that elevated language and essay-by-essay structure that may not be the principal problems but also do not make it easier), and unsurprisingly find it tedious going, if not overwhelming, even when we are accustomed to relatively demanding material.
For all that I thought my time in the end well-spent in continuing all the way up to the end, because of what the Papers offer--the publicly stated understandings of two of the most active and consequential participants at the Constitutional Convention, including "father of the Constitution" Madison himself, and what the public thought they were voting for at the time, as well as the light it shed on the period broadly. Certainly I learned a lot about the Articles of Confederation that today we seem so prone to marginalize in our discussion of American history today (perhaps because the Confederation's failure sits uneasily with that type of history that presents the Founding Fathers as all-seeing and all-knowing demigods who unswervingly led the nation from triumph to triumph--and what is for many the uncomfortable thought that the reminder that constitutions have failed in the past and needed to be replaced).
Reading the Papers was also a reminder of just how far removed the authors of the Constitution were from the world of a quarter of a millennium later, and its application of the Constitution to problems they had scarcely imagined, reflecting as they did the concerns of a relatively small, agrarian, country in a pre-industrial, pre-digital world, where it seemed plausible to worry about the (relatively modest) physical distance of the capital from other parts of the then much smaller Union from the standpoint of transport and communication, when Big Business and Big Government were scarcely notions and the machinery of parties and media and other levers of political power we know today were no more so, and the mental toolkit for considering such matters--what we had of history, and economics, and social science--was so primitive next to what it would be not just in our time, but even just a hundred years later. I might also remark that because of all this one would be wrong to think that the Papers are of interest solely to those some deride as "Constitution-worshippers" convinced that the art and science of human governance attained perfection in the eighteenth century. More leftward thinkers have long been impressed by the Papers as an "economic interpretation of politics"--in the view of Charles Beard, the "finest study" of such kind "in any language"--with Beard inaugurating particular and longstanding attention to Federalist No. 10 as such, with all that it had to say about "factions," and in doing so what it said about the class character of both American society, and the government the Constitutional Convention proposed to give it, in his classic An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.
Still, the Papers must be accounted only part of a much larger picture where the Constitution's making and meaning are concerned, and indeed even just the debate over the Constitution's ratification. (There was not only "Publius," but also "Cato," arguing before the public.) In fact I wouldn't recommend that anyone pick up this book without having a fair amount of background in the subject beforehand, and the determination to bear with what can be a more grueling task than they may be led to believe by those insistent on a direct and full knowledge of The Federalist Papers as a prerequisite for expressing an opinion about current events in public in the United States.
Review: An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles Beard
New York: Macmillan, 1914
As reconstructed by Charles Beard in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States the state legislatures of the United States of America in the period of the "Congress of the Confederation," struggling with an unsatisfactory "first" American constitution, elected by a very limited franchise, appointed delegates--delegates overwhelmingly from urban, coastal and moneyed backgrounds, lawyers and businessmen in the main, and nearly all born well-to-do rather than "self-made men"--to a Convention to amend the Articles of Confederation. Instead, rather dramatically exceeding their mandate, they produced a whole new Constitution, they got it ratified not by the aforementioned state legislatures but going around them by turning over the vote to conventions they set up in each state. The terms of those conventions made it, as Beard explains, "highly probable that not more than one-fourth or one-fifth of the adult white males took part in the election of delegates to the state conventions" (indeed, he thinks that estimate high) while even so getting the "right" results from this limited part of a limited franchise took some strongarming to secure rather narrow wins--with the last two states, North Carolina and Rhode Island, compelled by the hard realities of power to accede to the new Constitution after it went into force.
Hardly a triumph of popular sovereignty, Beard quotes John Burgess' remark that "had such acts been performed by Julius [Caesar] or Napoleon, they would have been pronounced coups d'etat"--by, again, the economic elite of the country, in the service of their economic interests. Those invested in public securities, Western lands, manufacturing and money-landing wanted a stable government that would redeem the paper they held at face value, make sure their claims on the frontier were legally secure and militarily protected, defend American industry with a national market walled off with a national tariff and a navy to protect the trade on which it relied, and see that debtors did not get out of paying their debts or slipping out from their obligations to their creditors with "funny money" paper currency schemes (James Madison, in the famous Federalist No. 10, holding "[a] rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts," along with a proto-Communist "equal division of property" to be an "improper or wicked project"). They were also quite happy to make concessions to a plantocracy less interested in these areas than in safeguarding its interest in slavery. Of course, the Constitution they got did indeed correspond to this, by its declaring for Federal responsibility for the public debts in question; its authorization of an army and navy; its denying the states the right to institute tariffs, issue paper money or otherwise come to the relief of debtors, reserving those powers to Congress. (Thus does Section 10 of Article I, "Powers Denied the States," declare that "No state shall . . . coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any . . . Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts," or "without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing . . . inspection Laws.") And while it put a twenty year limit on the slave trade, it left the Peculiar Institution as such intact. Meanwhile, through an elaborate separation of powers, combined with a heavy reliance on indirect election and appointments (thus were Senators appointed by state legislatures for six year terms, to check the more popularly accessible House), it made amendment of the document exceedingly difficult (the more in as, declining to eliminate state-level restrictions on the franchise using property qualifications) the country still fell far short of universal manhood suffrage (and upheld slavery).
Beard's case, breaking with the tradition of, when not merely piling up facts in a "scientific" fashion, treating American history as a story of Providential or racial (Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic) triumph, in favor of an "economic interpretation" of events, made this very book a major moment of intellectual life in the Progressive era. If it undeniably outraged some, it was also an inspiration to others, who found it far more illuminating of past and present realities than the schoolbook stuff longer on inculcating patriotism than historical understanding. However, there was a rather predictable assault on it in the 1950s, just as there was an assault on so much of what the Progressive era produced, and in a few years' time Beard's work was treated as, if having any interest at all, being interesting only as a discredited relic from another time.
From what I have seen of the attacks (criticisms of some of Beard's calculations about the weight of financial and landed interest in the country, as if the distribution of power and play of interests and manipulation of the levers of power were no more complex than that) they were less intellectually overpowering than many pretended them to be--the more in as Beard, for all the vast biographical and statistical evidence he assembled in this volume, was himself so emphatic about his book being merely the beginning of a line of inquiry, rather than the last word on the subject. Rather than any scholarly failings on Beard's part it seems that just as literary critics heaped scorn upon novelists such as Upton Sinclair or Sinclair Lewis for having written socially critical works, so did historians of this era attack the socially critical historiography of the earlier part of the century--historians who noticed the existence of class and elite self-interest (Rich people use politics to defend their interests? Heavens no!), especially in relation to anything so foundational as the Constitution, no longer stomached with conflict out and "consensus" in, while the chilling effects of the Cold War on such historiography endured long afterward (just as, broadly, Anti-Communism never really ceased to be the "national religion"), with the result that Beard's reputation, just like that of Sinclair or Lewis, never really recovered. Still, for all that it has been a touchstone for scholars down to the present, with Andrew Bacevich relying on Beard in his critical (if by no means leftist) vision of American history. More recently, seeing the heavy attention to the concerns of creditors in the era of the Constitution's making (not least as reflected in the work of Madison and company) had me thinking again and again of the work of Michael Hudson and David Graeber regarding the importance of the old struggle of creditor and debtor, and how completely the interests of the creditor have tended to prevail in modern times--not only at the level of policy, but even the understanding of morality. However much orthodox ideologues may dislike it, Beard's relevance may have outlasted the reputation they were so desperate to wreck.
As reconstructed by Charles Beard in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States the state legislatures of the United States of America in the period of the "Congress of the Confederation," struggling with an unsatisfactory "first" American constitution, elected by a very limited franchise, appointed delegates--delegates overwhelmingly from urban, coastal and moneyed backgrounds, lawyers and businessmen in the main, and nearly all born well-to-do rather than "self-made men"--to a Convention to amend the Articles of Confederation. Instead, rather dramatically exceeding their mandate, they produced a whole new Constitution, they got it ratified not by the aforementioned state legislatures but going around them by turning over the vote to conventions they set up in each state. The terms of those conventions made it, as Beard explains, "highly probable that not more than one-fourth or one-fifth of the adult white males took part in the election of delegates to the state conventions" (indeed, he thinks that estimate high) while even so getting the "right" results from this limited part of a limited franchise took some strongarming to secure rather narrow wins--with the last two states, North Carolina and Rhode Island, compelled by the hard realities of power to accede to the new Constitution after it went into force.
Hardly a triumph of popular sovereignty, Beard quotes John Burgess' remark that "had such acts been performed by Julius [Caesar] or Napoleon, they would have been pronounced coups d'etat"--by, again, the economic elite of the country, in the service of their economic interests. Those invested in public securities, Western lands, manufacturing and money-landing wanted a stable government that would redeem the paper they held at face value, make sure their claims on the frontier were legally secure and militarily protected, defend American industry with a national market walled off with a national tariff and a navy to protect the trade on which it relied, and see that debtors did not get out of paying their debts or slipping out from their obligations to their creditors with "funny money" paper currency schemes (James Madison, in the famous Federalist No. 10, holding "[a] rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts," along with a proto-Communist "equal division of property" to be an "improper or wicked project"). They were also quite happy to make concessions to a plantocracy less interested in these areas than in safeguarding its interest in slavery. Of course, the Constitution they got did indeed correspond to this, by its declaring for Federal responsibility for the public debts in question; its authorization of an army and navy; its denying the states the right to institute tariffs, issue paper money or otherwise come to the relief of debtors, reserving those powers to Congress. (Thus does Section 10 of Article I, "Powers Denied the States," declare that "No state shall . . . coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any . . . Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts," or "without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing . . . inspection Laws.") And while it put a twenty year limit on the slave trade, it left the Peculiar Institution as such intact. Meanwhile, through an elaborate separation of powers, combined with a heavy reliance on indirect election and appointments (thus were Senators appointed by state legislatures for six year terms, to check the more popularly accessible House), it made amendment of the document exceedingly difficult (the more in as, declining to eliminate state-level restrictions on the franchise using property qualifications) the country still fell far short of universal manhood suffrage (and upheld slavery).
Beard's case, breaking with the tradition of, when not merely piling up facts in a "scientific" fashion, treating American history as a story of Providential or racial (Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic) triumph, in favor of an "economic interpretation" of events, made this very book a major moment of intellectual life in the Progressive era. If it undeniably outraged some, it was also an inspiration to others, who found it far more illuminating of past and present realities than the schoolbook stuff longer on inculcating patriotism than historical understanding. However, there was a rather predictable assault on it in the 1950s, just as there was an assault on so much of what the Progressive era produced, and in a few years' time Beard's work was treated as, if having any interest at all, being interesting only as a discredited relic from another time.
From what I have seen of the attacks (criticisms of some of Beard's calculations about the weight of financial and landed interest in the country, as if the distribution of power and play of interests and manipulation of the levers of power were no more complex than that) they were less intellectually overpowering than many pretended them to be--the more in as Beard, for all the vast biographical and statistical evidence he assembled in this volume, was himself so emphatic about his book being merely the beginning of a line of inquiry, rather than the last word on the subject. Rather than any scholarly failings on Beard's part it seems that just as literary critics heaped scorn upon novelists such as Upton Sinclair or Sinclair Lewis for having written socially critical works, so did historians of this era attack the socially critical historiography of the earlier part of the century--historians who noticed the existence of class and elite self-interest (Rich people use politics to defend their interests? Heavens no!), especially in relation to anything so foundational as the Constitution, no longer stomached with conflict out and "consensus" in, while the chilling effects of the Cold War on such historiography endured long afterward (just as, broadly, Anti-Communism never really ceased to be the "national religion"), with the result that Beard's reputation, just like that of Sinclair or Lewis, never really recovered. Still, for all that it has been a touchstone for scholars down to the present, with Andrew Bacevich relying on Beard in his critical (if by no means leftist) vision of American history. More recently, seeing the heavy attention to the concerns of creditors in the era of the Constitution's making (not least as reflected in the work of Madison and company) had me thinking again and again of the work of Michael Hudson and David Graeber regarding the importance of the old struggle of creditor and debtor, and how completely the interests of the creditor have tended to prevail in modern times--not only at the level of policy, but even the understanding of morality. However much orthodox ideologues may dislike it, Beard's relevance may have outlasted the reputation they were so desperate to wreck.
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