On Intellectuals: Notes On Paul Johnson & Frank Furedi
Welcome to Feuilleton Friday!
My upbringing was one of extremes. I was exposed to both European heritage (Slavic in particular along with Rudolf Steiner thought) and American heritage. (Western in particular) I was a White kid in a Black neighborhood. I was in a poor/lower middle-class home in one of the greatest university towns in the country. And in keeping with this third disparity, I was - at least in the first part - placed in the public education prison industrial complex on one hand in the 90s, when the serious and systematic dumbing down of Americans had begun in earnest; and exposed to UC Berkeley intellect on the other. The latter came in the form of my father’s aspiring Ph.D. in biology (zoology in particular) and the accompanying dinner and wine parties with slide shows of research trips. They were not ideological affairs from what I remember.
Perhaps because those dinner parties were one of the more pleasant occurrences of life, it seems the path I’ve taken has been a more intellectual one. I’ve been described that way in person with the adjective, if not the noun. Dictionary.com gives two definitions of intellectual as a noun:
1) a person of superior intellect, and 2) a person who places a high value on or pursues things of interest to the intellect or the more complex forms and fields of knowledge, as aesthetic or philosophical matters, especially on an abstract and general level.
It is worth noting that no university degree is required to become an intellectual. Although without a doubt people take you more seriously if you do. Dictionary definitions do have their limitations.
I think number two describes me fairly well. I will let the biographers decide if number one is an accurate descriptor once I’m dead. Suffice to say there is little reason for someone like me, writing on Substack as I do, to question the term. When writing posts like this, I am engaging in intellectual activity. Including the pursuit of that oh-so-dirty little word: truth. For as Czech author Vlastimil Vondruška wrote: “Insubordination marked the life of the knight and prelate just as much as courage and piety did.”
That’s if I keep things simple, however. The meaning of intellectual beyond mere dictionary definition has proven to be tricky. And things get hairier where legacy is involved: while I was not exposed to this extremity where I grew up - Berkeley loves its intellectuals, even if a university/town rivalry exists - there are those who think intellectuals are the greatest; while there are those who consider intellectuals to have been the greatest scumbags, especially in recent history. Mao Zedong most of all.
Both are true to varying degrees. The Annatar Spectrum I coined recently is in some sense a reflection of intellectual benevolence vs. scumbaggery where writers are concerned. But as I’ve recently discovered, there are even those who consider an intellectual in the classical sense to be an anachronism.
Because writers can be intellectuals - though they don’t have to be - I felt it necessary to share my thoughts on this topic. So far I have read two books on the nature of intellectuals: Intellectuals, by Paul Johnson. And, most recently, Frank Furedi’s Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone? Both have provided enough insight to have my first crack at this compelling question.
But first: I think there are five types of intellectuals, generally speaking:
1) public intellectuals (think the atheist horsemen, Jonathan Haidt, etc.)
2) scholars who are important to ordinary people (think Thomas Sowell or Leszek Kołakowski)
3) public philosophers (think Slavoj Žižek, Bernard Henri-Levy and Yuval Noah Harari)
4) literary intellectuals (writers who directly engage with ideas through essays, like Milan Kundera; or a novelist of ideas, like Ayn Rand)
5) activist intellectuals (think Adam Michnik in Poland, or Saul Alinsky in the US)
Some intellectuals can, of course, occupy more than one of these. Milton Friedman, for instance, is famous for having been both 1 and 2. Kołakowski, similarly, would occupy both 2 and 3. Czech philosopher Jan Patocka would have occupied the unusual position of being both 3 and 5. And whether people like it or not, Ayn Rand would occupy both 3 and 4.
The way I see it: someone like, say, Italo Calvino is first and foremost an artist. His artistry is expressed in his fiction, and with it a kind of intellectual artistry. There are ideas there, but not of the intellectual sort. Calvino did, however, also write essays. One such collection is called Why Read The Classics? (A fantastic collection, I recommend it!) Here, Calvino is being an intellectual. In his fiction he is not. The way literature interacts with truth is like that of a cloud in the greater scheme of climate: while a cloud can provide shade on a hot day, the cloud is still at a distance. Even so, clouds can also manifest as a blanket of fog. While smog it also not unrelated to the manifestation of cloud-like phenomena.
The best fiction must be a cloud. Or it risks being something else. There is no shame in being a cloud: for clouds can still influence the weather even if they may not have the primal authority vested in, say, the sun and the moon.
Part 1: What Paul Johnson Says
The first book I read on this topic was Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, by conservative historian Paul Johnson. I read it years ago, so I apologize in advance if I misremember anything. Intellectuals is both a history and a critique of what we might call ‘the intellectual phenomenon,’ which in turn has its roots in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
The critique is done in case-by-case observations of a selection of the most influential intellectuals, starting with alpha-intellectual Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Much as the term ‘scientist’ would replace ‘natural scientist’ in the early 1800s, so too would ‘intellectual’ and, later, ‘academic’ replace ‘scholar.’
There is a reason for this. But the basic question the book is meant to convey to the reader is: why do we venerate intellectuals so much when the lives of many of the best have been screwy at best, horrid and repulsive at worst? It’s a reasonable question.
On British Amazon, one commenter named Paul Marks left what I thought an ideal summary of the book (I corrected one error where ‘world’ should be ‘word’):
“A lot of people denounce Paul Johnson for showing just how repulsive many influential thinkers were - pointing out that there are scandals in his own life (which there are). However, given the hero worship that people like Karl Marx get from their followers (and even from some of their opponents - who bend over backwards to say that X was a good person but....., when X was not a good person at all) it is worth having the side of these people that their followers hide, exposed to public view. Also Johnson shows that this is not just a matter of private bad behaviour - the vileness (the word is not too strong) of many of the "great intellectuals" directly influenced what they taught.”
The importance of Johnson’s book also lies in another truth, and one that - as this comment illustrates - is important to the public: to be an intellectual is synonymous with being in a strong, moral position. They are inseparable in the minds of the public, even if certain swaths of the public only hold this view insofar as it is conducive to their ideological agenda. And yet…let us not lie to ourselves. What is our reaction toward the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby if not that exact moralistic assertion that a public figure must have impeccable morals? (Of course, the problem here is that foul as these people’s actions may have been, a mob is dictating moral submission and not cultural norms.)
The section on Karl Marx is the best. With Marx, it is certainly true that the enormity of his thought is intrinsically tied to unsavory elements found in his character. As a “welfare recipient” from his bourgeois friend Friedrich Engels who inherited his father’s business, it is only natural that Marx would want the same thing from society. Just as his rabid antisemitism foresaw the very logical utilization of it by Joseph Stalin and other Communist leaders. Marxism - and Communism by default - is first and foremost the most convenient political system for Marx himself. It is the product of blatant selfishness. Marxism as a body of thought does not transcend the thinker. This is why Stalin is the archetypal Marxist: he was both Marx and Marxist at the same time. He knew how to do both where Lenin did not.
Johnson is also at his best in the section about Rousseau. Like the scientist replacing the “natural sciences scholar,” the intellectual is an Enlightenment creation. Johnson, in Intellectuals, is as much assaulting a particular post-Revolution genealogy of intellectual tradition as he is critiquing their influence in general; this being why he includes Leo Tolstoy.
Where I differ from Johnson is his inclusion of literary artists whose status as intellectual is questionable at best. In particular, his inclusion of Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen and Ernest Hemingway give me pause. To be sure, Tolstoy did become a kind of public theologian-intellectual later in life. But Johnson does not restrict his assessment of Tolstoy to just that period or to analyzing A Confession. Johnson dwells, for instance, on how Tolstoy was an outlier in the eyes of Turgenev and other Russian Golden Age authors socially. But so what if he was? The merit of literary work has nothing to do with how diligently writers act like Mr. Smiley Smile to each other and for how long.
The infamous strange character of writers is well worth defending, even if it’s currently receding from the Overton Window spotlight; in part because of the hyper-moralism of a Woke post-West, but also due to academia’s adamant directive to deconstruct the writer’s mythos to guarantee that no one ever reads good literature again.
Literature is one of the few true homes for outsiders: attacking the strangeness of writers is the same as bulldozing an oasis and chopping down all the date trees and then saying that because the oasis is surrounded by desert, the oasis must become like the desert because we say so; and who cares that dates produce fruit, the trees provide shade and oases have wells. Those who launch these attacks want societal outsiders - many of whom didn’t ask to be that way - to suffer needlessly in the desert, blindly driven by a tabula rasa and human-mechanization and reprogramming philosophy that doesn’t recognize the reality of inherent individuality because x, y and z postmodern talking points. (Not to mention the unique organicity of the oasis as an ecosystem) Those people are also social engineers who do not accept that people are people. If everyone isn’t a facsimile of Agent Smith, then to them society is problematic.
But also: authorial strangeness on the whole hasn’t hurt that many people.1 At least no one who wasn’t willing to hurt in return due to the peculiarity of the company writers keep. In all the authorial biographies I’ve read, almost everything that involves strange behavior runs in both ways like a phone call: it almost always has something to do with the other person as much as it does the writer. And usually it’s just that: the unique behavior generated by the social chemistry of two particular individuals interacting with each other, accompanied by misunderstandings here and there.
Also known as life.
This, of course, stands apart from where writers have been genuinely vile: defending Communist dictatorships, for instance, like Pablo Neruda; shitting on the peasants who saved him from Nazis, like Jerzy Kosinski; or being Stalinist informants like Andrzej Szczypiorski. The kinds of things my recently coined Annatar Spectrum is designed to judge. If we’re talking about this kind of thing, then Johnson missed a golden opportunity. W.E.B. DuBois and nazgul poet Pablo Neruda (who did some intellectual activity) would have been fabulous inclusions: a lot of people have no idea what a raging, diabolical Marxist DuBois became in the second half of his life. While New York City will do everything it can to make sure no one knows the intensity with which Neruda willingly sold his soul to Stalin.
While I don’t think Johnson is misrepresenting their strange behavior, I didn’t get the sense that Ibsen’s ideas in his plays had all that much to do with his own personal views in the way that, say, Marx’s wickedness objectively does with Communism. I’ve discovered in recent times that conservatives detest Ibsen; and they are welcome to do so all they like. Certainly, some of Ibsen’s ideas in his plays are disagreeable to conservative values and conservatives don’t have to like or agree with them. But the differences between Ibsen’s sexual relationships and, say, the message expressed in The Doll’s House strikes me as being less about hypocrisy and more about a well-established tendency on the part of authors to express an opposite side of themselves: the haunted, melancholic writers who are comedic, for instance. I always think of Herge who was intensely complicated in contrast to his creation, Tintin. There is nothing wrong whatsoever with a writer expressing an opposite side of themselves in artistic fashion. And because of this, Johnson’s depiction of Ibsen comes off as an understandable yet pointless disagreement with how he lived his life.
As for Hemingway: I find it difficult to believe he was an intellectual. While he wrote journalism, all that means is that he was a journalist.2 He didn’t write essays like many other authors. And I don’t think one can even argue that his novels express a worldview that can be called “intellectual.” What’s endearing about Hemingway is the purity of his artistry, and this is true no matter how many academics clasp their pearls about Papa, his antics and the “construct” that is the writers mythos.
On the contrary: if any vision can be extrapolated from Hemingway, it would be the exact opposite vision. Advocating for bullfighting when intellectuals would soon become queasy about them; advocating for manliness when a positive regard for femininity at the expense of an increasingly straw-manned masculinity had been a staple of literary humanism for some time; and writing stories where, if there are any intellectual characters, it never seemed to matter whether they were or not. Perhaps Carlos Baker will hold a few surprises in store when I read his famous biography one of these days. But Hemingway’s appeal to readers and Americans is that of the artist, not the intellectual. It’s unsurprising that a Czech professor of American literature said he didn’t understand why Americans like Hemingway so much. I think he’d have no problem understanding if he wasn’t a professor.
To be sure: Hemingway was willingly co-opted by the Comintern when he was in Spain. New York City has tried to cover this up for a long time now, which is why they hate Stephen Koch’s book The Breaking Point and tried - and failed - to attack its sourcing when the author taught at Columbia University. This skeleton in the closet is one of the ways we know that NYC still, decades later, holds its 1930s pro-Commie, pro-Stalin views with nostalgic sentiment at the least, if not the actual views themselves. Though they will deny it to the grave.
What most Communists fear more than anything else is exposure: so infatuated are they with the succubus of deception. They fear that on Hemingway’s behalf, so much so they throw John Dos Passos under the bus as willingly as Hemingway did when Dos Passos - naive as he was politically - was a loyal friend and one of American literature’s greatest experimentalists. Manhattan Transfer, for all its other faults, is one of the few moments when American literature got closer to the kind of artistry Europeans take for granted than it ever had before.
With all that being said: much as I am disappointed with Hemingway for having followed that path, this does not make Hemingway an intellectual. At best, this made him the very kind of trophy he sought while hunting and fishing. History, as many have noted, has been known to relish its own juicy form of irony.
A writer can be an intellectual. But to possess an intellect is not the same as being an artist. This is all too often misconstrued nowadays, but mostly by leftists for whom everything is political. While the uniquely conservative questioning of the role of the intellectual should be welcome to every free thinker, mistakes like this verge on the elementary. And Johnson should have known better. For even if relatively few literary artists are conservative, their need for them is just as strong as the leftist need.3 And the conservatives need to stop deluding themselves about this for their own good. And visit the fiction section of their local bookshop as soon as possible.
Part 2: What Frank Furedi Says
Frank Furedi is a British public intellectual and a recent discovery on my part. His 2004 book Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone? Confronting 21st Century Philistinism is, like Johnson’s book, another one with insight on what it means to be an intellectual. But where Johnson is content with merely questioning their moral authority, Furedi answers a more pressing question that ultimately forces Johnson’s point to be put on hold. While Furedi’s book is regrettably a tad bit dry in its language (a characteristic I hope his other interesting-sounding books don’t share) Furedi is much more successful at defining an intellectual, explaining why they’re gone and showing why we need them today more than ever. Thankfully, the reader acclimatizes to his dryness when there are few distractions in the room.
Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone?, true to its title, seeks to answer just that. But to Furedi, intellectuals aren’t an endangered species who followed the yeti into the Himalayas. Rather, the demise of the intellectual is intrinsically tied to postmodern society’s direct and blatant attempt to disregard the pursuit of truth, foisting its intellectual fast food upon a West too war-weary to resist.
I have spoken much about how the interests of writers - the best writers, anyway - have been largely at odds with academia. Writers are artists: they can be intellectuals, as mentioned earlier, but that’s secondary. Academics are, in practice at least, bureaucrats who have inherited some of the practices of scholars and intellectuals. That worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the demands of the artists. It is what it is.
In previous posts, I think I came off as harsh on academia in large part because of their ideological corruption as well as their shackling of the art of literature to its own directives. But it’s worth recollecting that the academy is fighting its own fronts in the greater war of civilizational collapse.
over at has mentioned in the past how nowadays, some universities exist only to serve their sports program. (Furedi credits the changes in American academia to “market pressures,” vs. a top-to-bottom centralization that sets the British changes apart) At my alma mater - the American University of Paris - I was fortunate to get my MA in cultural translation when I did. The program was phased out only a year after I started: AUP, like all the others, wanted to become a flashy business school that churned out moneymakers who watched CNN in airports and got rich off the utopian world of globalization.Coming as it did less than ten years after The Paris Review left Paris, I felt like I was at the tail end of the true decline of Paris as the great literary city. You’d think a lot of people would want to study literature in the City of Lights. Maybe they do: the university begged to differ. In any case, I was fortunate.
In Furedi’s view, the vanishing of the intellectual comes in tandem with the dumbing down of society. (Note I didn’t put the term dumbing down in quotes) Furedi takes the dumbing down of society seriously in contrast to the US where public intellectuals have to become TV personalities and Idiocracy is, apparently, just a cult movie with no relation whatsoever to the present day. A strategy that, understandable as it is, only makes the problem worse. Furedi summarizes one end goal succinctly in the following manner:
“In an era of the infantilization of culture, treating people as grown-ups has become one of the principal duties of the humanist4 intellectual.”
Today’s society, for all its intellectual virtue signaling, is fundamentally hostile to the intellectual as we used to understand the term. The “classic intellectual,” if you will. I know for a fact how offended some people get by the word “truth.” Of course I’ve since learned that their antagonism toward “truth” is due to it being a threat to “my truth.”
The death of the “classic intellectual,” in Furedi’s view - and a view he successfully substantiates in my opinion - is due to the following processes:
Forsaking the quest for truth, and the relegation of the classic quest for truth into something dirty. If not outright Hitlerian.
The trivialization of intellectual pursuits in general. To give an example from where I grew up: the world-changing, Nietzschean-level debate over whether “nigger” is perfectly fine to use if it’s spelled “nigga” instead. Very deep and intellectually challenging, I know. If only Newton, Huxley, Emerson and Zera Jacob could have given their input.
The subjectivization of the pursuit of knowledge (truth or otherwise) in general, and the institutionalization of ideological mandates such as “diversity” and - the buzzword in Britain when Furedi wrote this - “inclusion.” And in order to be “inclusive,” education has to be watered down. (Those who call for this in America, by the way, tend to be textbook definition racists)
Anti-elitist elitism; where the elites stab their traditional elitism in the back (at least in some public charade) to virtue signal their need for change. And how it is elites, more than working-class people or even the middle class, who call for this and establish this without anything approximating a democratic mandate or the will of the people.
The aforementioned need for institutions - particularly universities - to become appendages of the country as an economic zone, rather than a nation-state; and in doing so, forsake the traditional quest for knowledge in search of a quest for Sugar GDP Mountain.
Though Furedi doesn’t really use this kind of language to describe it, he basically refers to the postmodern desire to “be cool” as a factor, albeit a surface-level one meant to make the changes taking place digestible to ordinary people. An example being: turn a venerable museum into an interactive amusement park of some kind when no one asked for such a change.
By removing intellectual development as a societal norm in general, education - including at the undergraduate level - becomes an unending Groundhog Day of kindergarten “circle time.” By “dealing the pupa”5 in this collectivist fashion, students - rather than developing their own intellectual integrity - are caught in this murky, subjective thought collective that has since been replicated across society. (This last part being my own observation but built upon what Furedi has written about) Milan Kundera refers to something similar in The Book of Laughter & Forgetting in his sublime and unforgettable section on the executioners of Záviš Kalandra engaging in an ideological circle dance. But a circle dance, at the least, can be danced by adults in adult fashion. Kalandra, incidentally, was also an intellectual: an historian of Slavic studies, a theater critic and a literary theorist.
The basic human emotion of envy toward the successful, its systematization keeping people from aspiring toward intellectual excellence and achievement. When Furedi wrote the book - and this is still true today, if less common than being called a “racist,” “White supremacist” or “fascist” - the word “elitist” was being used in Britain to make sure no one left the cerebral reservation of what Furedi calls “the celebration of ordinariness.” Which, I might add, is what the American book and publishing world has become from top to bottom. No wonder people are so antagonistic toward the writer’s mythos: it reminds them how ordinary they are.
The celebration of ordinariness is in part a means to create what Furedi calls “the culture of flattery.” A validation-producing culture that, in the 90s, was represented by the “everyone’s special” mantra taught to my generation to bolster our feelings of entitlement. Phenomena that have emerged since 2004 - safe spaces in universities, the transformation of the university experience into that of a very expensive summer camp and the rise of the digital culture of validation through likes and all that paraphernalia - all stem from this cultural impulse to create a society where, instead of making students go through that oh so hard process of actually becoming smart and educated, they must be flattered and validated. Or - to reference Jonathan Haidt’s famous book - coddled.
Spoonfeeding is a prominent symbol for Furedi, especially in the second half of the book. Rather than engaging with thought, knowledge is simply spoonfed to people. Ever wonder why our world is filled with so many people who can work in a fairly skilled profession, neni problem, but when out of the workplace they turn into the most clueless and uneducated person ever on basic topics of being? Chances are, they weren’t “educated” in any meaningful sense of the word and were simply spoonfed knowledge of which they had no idea how to use, except for the job training. While their naive parents thought the school would take care of all that. And it’s such a mystery why so many people want to see the public school system blown off the face of the earth! (With no harm to the kids, of course)
I probably missed one or two ingredients here. But I think you, my dear subscribers, see the greater point Furedi is making. All of these things together compound in a manner that - socially and institutionally and even, to a certain degree, existentially - makes it impossible for a “classic intellectual” to thrive in post-1989 society. Conditions that have driven the intellectual to extinction. That, at least, is one thing it has in common with the yeti. If not much else.
Today, we do not have classic intellectuals. Or even intellectuals for that matter, apart from a few old-timers and public figures who in some form fit the profile of “public intellectual.” I believe that these reasons are also having the same effect on writers, even if their aims are different from classic intellectuals. The reason writers and classic intellectuals overlap so neatly is because both are comprised of remarkable people who are out of place in the Great, Post-1989 Celebration of Ordinariness.
But hope is not lost. We have experts. Unlike intellectuals who engage with thought, experts know everything already and just spoonfeed what they deem the populace should know so that the thorny issue of thinking and engaging is bypassed altogether. (While reminding people that they worked somewhere for thirty years, so they know everything better than everyone else) In a world where a cherished value is convenience, the rise of the “expert” is, as Mr. Spock would say, “highly logical.”
We also have academics who, as I mentioned, are often (not all) more like bureaucrats in praxis than intellectuals. That’s not to say they aren’t smart, or that they don’t have knowledge to provide. Just that they are not intellectuals by definition; more often than not they manage information, rather than pursue truth through information. Nor should they be called intellectuals. They are academics. We have words for a reason.
One last note on this: my oh my, am I glad to see podcasts becoming as successful as they’ve become! For all my early life in the California bubble, I only ever heard about how dumb Americans were. Because the system had become what Furedi describes, it was easy to believe that uncritically and think it was some kind of inherent fault of the people, rather than vice versa.
(Because Felix: if there’s ever a problem, it’s always your fault for not acclimatizing to society and never the poor, innocent system’s fault. So shut up and fix your own damn problems before you destroy our carefully-constructed ostrich holes we’ve worked so hard to construct!)
The thirst for podcasts - including those with genuine, high-level information - is beautiful in how it rips the stereotype of the stupid American to shreds. I mean it when I say it’s genuinely moving: it is one of the few genuinely pro-humanist phenomena of our time. Podcasts are interesting because facts aren’t just spoonfed, though they can be: people in the podcasts engage with ideas, sometimes for hours on end.
In other words: intellectual activity is returning at a grassroots level. It isn’t what it was before the demise of the classic intellectual. But it’s unmistakably there. And it’s here to stay.
Those who like the system and defend it hate that people are educating themselves with podcasts. They also fear them. It’s a refutation of the system Furedi describes. A refutation of a system that has intentionally tried to destroy the collective intelligence of the populace by turning it to mush because x, y and z banal postmodern talking points. I don’t think those who defend the system understand just how discredited they are in the eyes of those who feel betrayed in this manner; because defenders of the system continue to behave as if all is normal, as if the cat isn’t out of the bag. When the cat has not only left the bag; but has been romping around the backyard for a good while now chasing the mice.
Now don’t get me wrong: I prefer people educate themselves with books. Podcasts are vertical and in the moment; books are horizontal and endure beyond the moment. But those who defend the system should, instead of assuming everyone who criticizes the system is up to some kind of evil, do better to understand just how discredited the system they defend has become. And recognize that if those who have the power to change things like this don’t recreate the conditions necessary to bring back the classic intellectual, it is they who will be f’ed in the a by a new class of homegrown intellects who will only find systematic academics and punditting experts who don’t stand a chance against the beautiful and terrible power of an intellectually liberated and self-realized human mind.
Conclusion
I will certainly read more books about what it means to be an intellectual. Does that make me an “evil conservative?” What can I say? It’s not my fault that conservatives are by and large interested in this and leftists and centrists are not. Just as it’s not my fault that leftists write more about trade unions while the right is uniquely invested in the decline of civilization. Every “side” has their blind spot: this is clearly one of them.
Furedi’s book, thankfully, has a gold mine of a bibliography that’ll guarantee I have no shortage of books on this topic. If you found this post interesting, let me know if you’d like me to continue sharing my thoughts on this topic. And let me know in the comments what you think of all this. Do we need classic intellectuals today, or are experts, academics and influencers enough?
For now, I will say this: I don’t give a rat’s ass if anyone thinks I’m an elitist on this topic. Someone has to aspire to that old height: and if nobody else will do it, I guess someone like me has to if only because I’m sick of the symptoms of this idiocracy that has been forced down the throat of my generation while Boomers and some Xers play dumb. The benefit in my case is that unlike others, I won’t melt into a puddle on the floor if my own social circles or professional class thinks I made a boo boo in circle time.
We need classic intellectuals the way the kids in Lord of the Flies needed the adult soldier at the end. Only now, we don’t need just one soldier: we need a whole platoon.
An exception being Norman Mailer, who shot his wife; and also Hungarian author Geza Csath who committed suicide and took his wife with him.
Two books I’m familiar with - Hemingway on Fishing, and Hemingway on War - are titled to suggest essay collections but are in fact selections from his fiction and journalism.
Most astounding of all: Tolstoy was much more of a conservative author than a left-wing one. Religious, patriotic/nationalistic, Slavophilic, etc. He was an unconventional conservative, certainly. But this is yet another reason why conservatives keep bungling on the topic of literature when they need it. And they need it bad.
This is not the humanism I refer to when I use the term “literary humanism.” I’ll think about addressing this in another post since the wishy-washy utilization of that word makes simple summarizing difficult.
Read Ferdydurke, by Witold Gombrowicz: you won’t regret it!
Great stuff. I always liked Paul Johnson. I might have to read this a second time. You packed a lot in here.