In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton

Slipping this in a little late for a Sunday. I have a few other books I could add to my review list of other books on witchcraft, though I don’t happen to have any of them to hand at the moment. Possible notes for a future set of reviews, once I clear out a bit more of my existing backlog.

In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton

Mention ‘Salem’ nowadays, and the first thing that tends to come to mind is ‘witchcraft’. In the early months of 1692 (actually the later months of 1691, by the old Julian calendar), a small group of girls and young women in the Massachusetts Bay Colony settlement at Salem Village fell ill with a number of strange ailments. When the local physician was called in to look at them, he speculated that the illnesses were not natural and might have been caused by bewitchment…a diagnosis that was later to prove fatal for the 14 women and 5 men who would be hanged for maleficium, the practice of diabolic magic intended to bring harm to others. Several other accused witches died in prison without ever coming to trial, dozens of men and women (and even children as young as four or five) were arrested or fled the colony to avoid arrest, and still more bowed to outside pressure and confessed to being witches, implicating neighbours and family members in the process. Not even the wealthy and powerful of the colony were completely immune to being ‘cried out on’ as witches, a most unusual circumstance in the days when the most commonly accepted profile of a possible witch was a poor to middling older woman who had neither the friends nor the financial wherewithal to preserve her good name. The Salem outbreak was the largest of its kind in New England, and the records kept on the accusations and trials have been relatively well-preserved, making the study of the Salem witchcraft cases both popular and constantly open to new, revisionist perspectives — most of which attempt to make sense of why a few random accusations spread into a full-on outbreak.

Mary Beth Norton approaches the trials from a slightly different angle than previous works. Most books about the trials tend to focus on social aspects of the accusers, the accused and the accusations; why certain people were accused and others not, why certain people confessed or refused to confess, why the most powerful people in the colony were so willing to believe that Satan could be thoroughly bent on the destruction of the Massachusetts colony. Norton’s premise is less centred on social history than it is on politicial and military history. She argues that the Salem witch-trials cannot be studied without extensive reference to the ongoing wars between the settlers and the Indian population of New England, particularly the Wabanaki tribe of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In her closely-argued book, she draws connections between the Indian wars and the effect the wars had on many of the key players in the trials. The connections might be a little hard to follow (or credit) at first, but as Norton lays out and piles up the evidence, her conclusions seem very reasonable. What’s more, they take social history to a new level by showing how closely-knit the communities of settlers were, and how children and younger adults were often easily manipulated to settle long-standing grudges between their elders.

One important caveat, first and foremost: To get the most out of Norton’s research, it helps to have at least a passing familiarity with some of the primary participants in the Salem witch trials. Anyone who has read or seen Arthur Miller’s The Crucible will know of condemned witches John and Elizabeth Proctor, Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey, as well as the awful death of Martha’s husband Giles Corey, who refused to consent to a trial and was pressed to death with heavy weights in accordance with current English law. The names of Abigail Williams, Ann Puttnam and Mercy Lewis — three of the ‘afflicted girls’ — also appear frequently in the text, for they and their relatives were instrumental in the spread of accusations. There are several good general books on the trials that would work as an introduction, and reading one or two of those before looking at Norton’s work is likely to make Norton’s analysis and conclusions a good deal easier to follow. (I consider myself fairly well-acquainted with the standard literature on the trials, and I still had to stop and go back in a few places to ensure that I hadn’t missed something crucial in Norton’s dense narrative.)

That said, Norton’s book is a superb addition to the existing literature, exploring a side of the trials that has only been vaguely considered in the past. Granted, there are times when some of her arguments seem a little too tenuous, and she has a habit of making conjectures which she feels are warranted but which I feel make for awkward reading. But In the Devil’s Snare is one of the better books available about the Salem outbreak and the history of witchcraft in colonial New England, if nothing else for the extensive footnotes and solid historiography that underpins the text.

Coalition: The Politics and Personalities of Coalition Governments Since 1850 by Mark Oaten

I suppose I ought to make the obligatory joke about a well-hung parliament, but considering that I’m about to take out the knives for this review, perhaps naughty humour isn’t entirely suitable for the situation.

Coalition: The Politics and Personalities of Coalition Governments Since 1850 by Mark Oaten

Ever since the British political system began to settle into the particular alignment of factions and interests that we now recognise as the forerunners of modern political parties, voters have come to expect that a specific political party will be able to win a majority of seats and form a government. On the rare occasions when no one party has an outright majority — most often known as a ‘hung parliament’ — politicians and political parties have to scramble to find a solution and settle on an agreement that will be acceptable to the denizens of the Westminster village and (to a lesser exent) to the country as a whole. In other countries, this agreement takes the form of coalition governments, often given catchy names based on the identifying colours of the political parties involved — ‘traffic light coalition’ (from the German Ampelkoalition) or ‘purple coalition’ (the social-democrat-and-liberal coalition that governed the Netherlands throughout most of the 1990s). Yet coalitions are a rarity in British political history, found only in times of extreme stress on the existing political system. As Benjamin Disraeli observed, back in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘This too I know, that England does not love coalitions‘. With that statement in mind, Liberal Democrat MP Mark Oaten has taken it upon himself to examine the history of flawed and failed coalitions in British politics, attempting to determine whether Britain can embrace coalition government as an alternative to the ‘Punch and Judy’ tactics of combative government that have steadily lost favour in the polls.

Here, this review must pause for a moment, and attempt to separate the opinions of the copyeditor from the opinions of the political historian. All questions of content and analysis aside, I have never seen a professionally published book contain so many glaring punctuation, stylistic, and contextual errors. If I had left so many mistakes in a text that had passed through my hands, I would go to my supervisor and ask to be fired on the spot. There are simply no good or even mediocre excuses for some of the errors in this text. On the first page, readers are informed that the Corn Laws were repealed in 1946 (a full century off), and later on in the book a reference is made to the July 2004 London bombings (a year too early). There are sentences that simply do not make sense with the words given, as if someone was working from a taped transcription without bothering to actually check the text for context and word use. My copy of the book is the standard Harriman House hardback edition — not even a first printing or a proof copy, in which these mistakes might be understandable if not forgivable. But even without trying to look deeper into the text, readers first have to fight to actually read it from start to finish without becoming mired down in the words on the page.

That said, the analysis in itself is seems superficial at times. True, the history is there, but it wavers between being too simplistic for those who know the politics of various coalition governments and being too obscure for those who have never studied the subject before. More than a few conclusions are drawn without much of a solid argument to support them. Case in point, and symptomatic of a broader trend: Oaten believes that the established convention of hung parliaments that allows the ruling Prime Minister to attempt to form a government should be scrapped in favour of automatically giving the leader of the largest political party in the House the first crack at government-forming — he claims that existing conventions are not ‘fair’ to the party that wins the most seats. Setting aside the question of fairness in politics, the arithmetic of seats and votes do not always add up to make that the most advantageous choice for maintaining a stable government after an election, and he seldom brings in other opinions to back up his own.

Among the good aspects of Coalition are the brief chapter on the semi-successful coalition in the Scottish Parliament and the number of personal interviews which Oaten conducted and from which he was able to quote to illustrate the thinking of those who participated in two of the most recent attempts at coalition government in Britain: the Lib-Lab pact of the mid-1970s and the Joint Cabinet Committee between Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the late 1990s. The quotes included provide some interesting insight into recent political history. Yet even this recently published book has been overtaken by events — the structure of the last chapter hangs very heavily on how Sir Menzies Campbell might react as Liberal Democrat leader in a hung parliament, yet that task will fall to Nick Clegg now (or to whoever is Lib Dem leader at the time of the next election). In general, Oaten seems to conclude that a coalition government would be ever-so lovely but probably not that feasible, and that the Liberal Democrats will decide the balance of power at the next General Election. Disraeli could have told him the first, and the second is not nearly as cut-and-dried as the honourable member for Winchester might like to think.

C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (edited by Lesley Walmsley)

Since the book is so large, there really isn’t a good way to review all of its contents without going on for pages. More’s the pity, in a way.

C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (edited by Lesley Walmsley)

Clocking in at just over 1000 pages, this fairly impressive tome represents just about all of C.S. Lewis’s religious essays and sermons, various short academic pieces, and other stories and story fragments. The Amazon.co.uk review of this edition lists the writings that were not included in this book, and it is disappointing to know that so far it is still not possible to obtain a complete collection of Lewis’s writings — not in the same way that it is theoretically possible to obtain the full twenty-volume set of George Orwell’s books, essays, journalistic works and letters (edited by Peter Davison), for example. But now that the third and final volume of Lewis’s collected letters has been released, it’s worth mentioning this essay collection as a fairly useful attempt at compiling many writings that have been scattered across a number of different books and their reorganised reprints.

The essay collection is organised in eleven sections by general topic: ‘Aspects of Faith’, ‘English and Literature’, ‘The Art of Writing and the Gifts of Writers’, ‘Letters’, and others. There’s a section devoted to several of Lewis’s short stories, including the manuscript pages of ‘The Dark Tower’, an unfinished science-fiction/fantasy piece featuring Edwin Ransom of Lewis’s Space Trilogy. I found the section on writing and other writers quite interesting, because it includes Lewis’s thoughts on the work of his contemporaries — J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, for instance, as well as short pieces about George Orwell, Dorothy L. Sayers and Charles Williams. Lewis’s poems ought to have been included as well; it isn’t as if they would take up that much more room, and they would have been a welcome addition to this collection. But for the most part, the essay collection serves as an impressive display of Lewis’s prolific output over the years.

Anyone who is interested in looking for a nice solid edition of the general bulk of Lewis’s non-fiction and collected shorter fiction works would welcome this volume. It is by no means fully comprehensive, as mentioned above, but it is certainly more comprehensive than just about any other edition currently available on the market. And because Lewis’s writings have been printed and reprinted and shuffled between new compilations over the years, it’s nice to have the better part of his writings available in one hefty volume — at least, until someone actually does us all the favour of producing a more complete compilation.

Witchcraft in Europe 400-1700: A Documentary History (2nd ed.), edited by Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters

One of my side interests in history is the history of witchcraft persecutions in Europe and North America. I have a few other books that I may end up re-reading and reviewing, but at the moment they don’t quite justify a separate category for this blog. Perhaps they will, one day.

Witchcraft in Europe 400-1700: A Documentary History (2nd ed.), edited by Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters

The first edition of Witchcraft in Europe was a collection of translated primary sources dating from A.D. 1100 to 1600, the span of time which saw the rise of executions for heresy and witchcraft by Europe’s church-based inquisitors and secular authorities. The second edition greatly expands on the first one, including not only new documents from a wider range of sources but also relevant bibliographical citations from contemporary historical scholarship on the witch-craze. And the result is a very hefty volume, chock-full of snippets from both religious and secular authors — all of which form an interesting picture of how the ‘authorities’ regarded the strange phenomenon of ordinary men and women who appeared to be in league with the Devil.

The texts one might expect to find in a book like this are, of course, included. There is a long set of passages from Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), one of the ‘classic’ instructional texts used by the authorities who presided over the trials. Other familiar works, like Cotton Mather’s ‘A Discourse on Witches’ and Nicholas Remy’s Demonaltry present contemporary opinions on witches and their practices, often in lurid detail. There are accounts of trials and confessions and executions, extensive scholarly debates on what exactly constituted ‘witchcraft’ and what distinguished witches from heretics, and several illustrations of paintings and woodblock prints that show popular conceptions of the diabolical pacts made by fallen women. Yet Witchcraft in Europe also shows the other side of the argument, with selections from works like Johann Weyer’s De praestigiis daemonum (On the Illusions of the Demons), Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft and Fredrich Spee’s Cautio criminalis, which illustrate the strong doubts and misgivings that more than a few individuals had about whether witches even existed. And conveniently, every single text in the book has a short editorial passage before it that explains the context of the text and gives some useful biographical or historical information about its author.

I know that this book is used as a base text in many university courses that spend some time discussing witchcraft, and it’s fairly easy to see why. As a comprehensive selection of texts, I can’t think of a better individual book. If Witchcraft in Europe ever goes into a third edition, I have a feeling I’ll probably end up buying it as well.

The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

Doubling up on two of Freud’s works here. It’s quite interesting to read the full text of these works after having read bits and selections of them in various school texts over the years. (Even if some people think Freud is an utter miseryguts no matter what work of his you happen to be reading.)

The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion) in 1927, after he had spent several years considering the idea of religion from a psychoanalytic perspective. He had examined religion from a more anthropological perspective in his work Totem and Taboo (1913), looking at possible connections between the beliefs of aboriginal socities and the influence that these beliefs may have had on the construction of religious ideas in the history of human civilisation. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud turns his earlier thoughts into a more systemic study of the role of religion in human behaviour and shaping the human experience, particularly with regard to how religious belief influences and regulates human behaviour.

Freud describes religion as an ‘illusion’ — in other words, a belief that is grounded in personal wish and desire. (Illusions are not necessarily false, he points out, but they are nonetheless grounded in wish and intended to fulfil a personal need.) As Freud sees it, ‘It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.‘ He regards the illusion of religion as a creation of man’s unconscious desire for a protecting, guiding father-figure and as a social construct designed to curb the destructive instincts that would make civilised society untenable (such as cannibalism and incest). And though Freud does not advocate an absolute, wholesale jettisoning of the entire structure of the civilisation that currently rests upon a religious base, he claims that human beings are nonetheless capable of moving beyond this infantile kind of wish-fulfilment and towards a more mature and scientific understand of the universe and our place within it.

The Future of an Illusion is a very Freudian book; that is, it is very much a piece of self-analysis, a little like listening to someone who is a bit too fond of the sound of his or her own voice. He contradicts several of his own initial assertions, particularly towards the end of the book, and even someone who isn’t especially ‘religious’ (as Freud would define it) would be quick to point out Freud’s analysis is based more in his anthropological studies and his experience with psychoanalysing patients whose internal struggles with religious beliefs might have contributed to their troubled mental and emotional states. As a book, it is a very good indication of Freud’s personal opinions on religion and its role as the illusion that helps to underpin civilisation. As a treatise in favour of atheism and scientific rationalism…well, I can think of a few other authors I’d rather read on this subject. (Bertrand Russell, for one.)

Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

The title of Sigmund Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur is a little tricky to translate idiomatically from German. A more literal translation of the title might be “The Uneasiness in Culture” or “The Discomfort in Culture”, but flipping the order of the words places more of the emphasis on the source of the uneasiness — culture, or as it might also be translated, civilisation.

Civilization and Its Discontents is Freud’s attempt to address the tensions that he sees between the instincts and impulses of the individual and the greater conformity required by civilisation. One of the most basic instincts present in human beings is aggression, an instinct that by its very nature is destabilising and impulsive and (in a word) antisocial. Coping with, controlling, or redirecting this aggressive instinct is vital to forming relationships with other human beings — indeed, doing so mitigates one of the three aspects of the human condition that Freud believes prevent individuals from being happy (the other two being exposure to the external world [i.e., weather and nature] and the fraility of the human body against aging, injury, and disease). The individual connection to this civilising force is not always very strong — as evidenced, for instance, by the number of people who will violate society’s norms if they think they can get away with it. Yet the human mind has come up with a means of internally enforcing civilisation: the power of guilt, which is controlled by an aspect of personality that Freud calls the super-ego.

According to Freud, the constant conflict between instinct and the super-ego is responsible for much of the discontent in man’s relationship to civilisation. One of the greatest societal tensions, he says, comes from civilisation’s deeply misguided commandment to ‘love your brother as you love yourself’ — a demand that not only contradicts our fundamental instincts of aggression, but also tends to be extremely difficult to put into actual practice. And when the super-ego chides us for failing to live up to these internalised expectations…well, Freud based quite a lot of his psychology on what can happen when individuals are unwilling or unable to reconcile instinct with the demands of society.

There are other side arguments in Civilization and Its Discontents, further thoughts on the often strained relationship between the individual and society. It is worth remembering that Freud wrote this book in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a time of great social instability in the wake of the Great War that would eventually lead to the series of historical events that ended with Freud fleeing his native Austria for England in mid-1938, where he died in September 1939. Even if Freud’s primarily psychological and rather pessimistic interpretation is no longer as influential as it was in his day, Civilization and Its Discontents provides a fairly concise summary of Freud’s thinking on the relationship between individual and society and the relative thinness of the veneer that provides the gloss we call modern civilisation.

Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 by Peter Earle

A few months ago, I was doing a bit of reading on the shaky financial status of British East India Company in the years leading up to the American Revolution. Intriguing subject, but somewhat out of my usual areas of research interest, and so I was glad to have this book to look to when I needed to check a few day-to-day details about what it meant to be involved in merchant shipping in that particular time period.

Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 by Peter Earle

From what I can tell, most of the fictional accounts of life on the seas in the Age of Sail tends to focus on two perspectives: pirates and navies. The careers of Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey make for good sea-tales, as do the adventure stories of pirates and privateers on the high seas, where everyone is out for a good fight and a well-taken prize. Merchant shipping, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to have as much of the romance and glamour associated with navies and pirates. As such, a history book that focuses specifically on merchant shipping — whether of one or two ships owned by a single small-businessman to the vast fleets operated and administered by the powerful Dutch, French, and British East India Companies — doesn’t seem as easy to come by. Merchant shipping shared many aspects of lifestyle with the different navies or famous pirates, but there were also some noted and notable differences to consider. In this case, Peter Earle’s brief but detailed Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 provides a sound introduction to the workaday life of the men who all but created the concept of international trade.

The book covers the many different facets of a typical merchant sailor’s life, with chapters that examine the routine (the daily workload and general prospects for advancement) and the basic financial (possessions and general wealth) aspects to the more extraordinary situations (shipwrecks, punishments, mutinies, and court trials) that a sailor might face. Earle draws mostly on the primary sources of trial records from the Admiralty courts, as well as various logs and journals and accounts of the day. One such set of accounts is the Lloyd’s List, by now one of the world’s oldest continuously-running journals (dating back to 1734), which features shipping news and other market information of interest to the merchants, traders, brokers, and insurance underwriters who frequented Lloyd’s Coffee House in the City of London. As such, Earle is able to examine the relationships amongst members of the crew and between the crew and the officers — mainly because important and enlightening information tends to come out in the middle of court case testimonies. The chapters are short and straightforward, generally free of nautical slang and jargon and quite accessible even to those who have only a basic knowledge of seafaring life.

One aspect of this book that I found particularly interesting but rather understated was the differences between general trading ships and slaving ships. I think Earle could possibly have looked into slaving ships in more depth, perhaps even devoting a specific chapter just to the social history of life aboard a slaving ship during the various stages of its route. The history of merchant shipping in the late seventeeth and early to mid-eighteenth centuries really can’t be studied without looking at the slave trade, and I think Earle’s book is at a bit of a disadvantage for not devoting more time or page-space to looking at it. It isn’t a disadvantage that truly detracts from the book, but I do think that the book really would have benefitted from a study of that particular aspect of trade in human cargo. In general, though, Sailors does just what it sets out to do, and the information within on the social history of English merchant shipping might easily appeal to anyone interested in a more rounded picture of life at sea the Age of Sail.

Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking by D.Q. McInerny

I consider myself a fairly logical person on the whole, more used to reasoning out solutions and situations than using any intuitive parts of my brain. I studied some simple logic in my mathematics classes in school, and I used to love doing those grid-style logic problems they sell in large thick puzzle books. Yet I never studied ‘formal’ logic, the kind that they teach entire university-level courses about. So when I came upon a very slim book titled Being Logical, it seemed a worthwhile purchase.

Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking by D.Q. McInerny

Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking explains the origins and basics of formal logical thinking, along with common fallacies and logical failings that people tend to fall into, knowingly or unknowingly. McInerny is able to explain the logic process without using the often-confusing symbol shorthand, and breaks down different arguments — conditional arguments, syllogisms, the difference between statements of fact and statements of value — into easily readable, bize-sized pieces. And yet it’s not at all dumbed down. I had to go back through more than a few of the short sections and reread them to make sure I understood the points, but because the sections were so short it wasn’t very difficult to keep my train of thought going even when the arguments were fairly complex.

By far the best part of the book, in my opinion, is the section nearest the end where McInery goes through the sources and forms of illogical thinking. He draws a very good distinction between an ‘argument’ and a ‘quarrel’ — they’re often used interchangeably, but in the logical context they couldn’t be more different. As he puts it, an argument is meant to ‘get at’ the truth, while a quarrel is intended to ‘get at’ other people. Nicely said, I think. He also covers other forms of illogical thinking and poor reasoning like begging the question (actually used in the right context!), creating a straw man, and the conspiracy theorist’s favourite reply: ‘You can’t disprove it, so therefore it’s proved to be true!’ That section also points out common tricks used by clever and unscrupulous debaters to conceal shoddy logic or distract the listener from a poorly laid-out argument. So all in all, Being Logical is more than able to pack in a crash course in logic and logical thinking into just over 125 pages. Now that I’ve finally managed to get around to reading it, I wish I’d read it sooner.

The Hands of History: Parliamentary Sketches 1997-2007 by Simon Hoggart

Slipping in an extra review this week to make up for the paucity of postings last month. I have other reviews still to finish, but this one seemed to come out most easily.

The Hands of History: Parliamentary Sketches 1997-2007 by Simon Hoggart

Based on an earlier review of Playing to the Gallery, Simon Hoggart’s collection of Guardian parliamentary sketches from the early Blair years, it may come as little surprise to learn that I eagerly picked up a copy of The Hands of History, Hoggart’s more recently published collection of sketches spanning the Blair decade. The index at the back of the book is not quite as funny as the previous one, but it gives readers a good idea of what to expect within. John Prescott, master of the unintelligible and angry speech for any occasion, from party conferences to PMQs. Sir Peter Tapsell MP (Louth and Horncastle), one of the last of the old Tory knights of the shires, whose oratorical style almost demands that the Hansard editors cast his words in bronze. Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) and his collection of wigs. More inane New Labour jargon, more Conservative party leadership circuses contests, more of Tony Blair’s verb-free sentences…all of the old friends and foes are back.

Much of what I said earlier about the humour of Hoggart’s parliamentary sketch-writing still holds true, though seeing a much broader range of sketches reveals a few small weaknesses that are common to anyone who writes on regular subject on a regular basis. The most notable one is that Hoggart has quite a few standard jokes, several of which are mentioned above, and seeing them repeated in successive sketches grows a little tiring over time. (Though in one of his editorial notes, he mentions that some readers will write in to complain if he hasn’t made one of his usual references in a while.) The Hands of History does manage to catch the highlights of the Blair decade, sticking mostly to the well-known incidents and leaving out much of the day-to-day petty dramas. (I wish he’d included this sketch from mid-February 2006, if only for the amusement value, but space in the book was at a premium and the incident itself has almost certainly been forgotten.) Hoggart often has a fine gift for picking out the metaphors from the reality, as in this description from the time in May 2004 when Fathers4Justice protestors threw flour-filled condoms at Blair during his Question Time:

What an amazing shot by the protestor, throwing from hundreds of feet along a downward trajectory! And how marvellously apt! It had been aimed at Blair but it had exploded all over Brown. The protestors had thrown Britain’s finest political metaphor.

Like Hoggart’s previous book, The Hands of History knows its intended readership. If a collection of parliamentary sketches about the past ten years sounds like it would be entertaining reading, then it is not likely to disappoint — even if the politicians mentioned within do, more often than not.

The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Armand M. Nicholi Jr.

Today’s reviewed book ended up as a four-hour series on U.S. public television a few years ago. I don’t know if it’s been rebroadcast since then, though anyone with enough interest in seeing it should be able to purchase it without much difficulty.

The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Armand M. Nicholi Jr.

Harvard professor Armand Nicholi has been teaching a class about Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis for the past decade or two. In his class, he compares the lives and philosophies of the two men, focusing in particular on their very different perspectives on religion, sex, love, friendship, and other overarching questions of life. In The Question of God, Nicholi has turned his class notes into a book, one which uses Lewis and Freud’s writings to look at how these two men approached belief, disbelief, and everything in between.

Nicholi has certainly done his homework for this class. The book looks at both Freud and Lewis’s public and private writings, incorporating published works and letters in an attempt to examine how their personal philosophies shaped their attitudes towards family members, friends, colleagues, and the general public. It’s fascinating and quite insightful to see the two men’s opinions on various aspects of life laid out side by side, and Nicholi finds a number of interesting parallels between them. Both Freud and Lewis had poor relationships with their fathers and with their fathers’ ideas of religion, and suffered deep personal losses early in their childhoods that seriously affected their outlooks on life from a young age. Freud ended up rejecting religious belief entirely, and Lewis himself admits that he was essentially dragged into Christianity kicking and screaming (in a metaphysical sense). Nicholi puts together a good narrative for their stories. Yet by the end of the book, I realised that Nicholi’s thesis could be boiled down to a single sentence — ‘Freud was a depressed and depressing old chain-smoking misanthrope, and he makes Lewis (and, by extension, Lewis’s answer to the question of God) seem the very embodiment of happiness and personal fulfilment by comparison’.

Even if Nicholi tries not to sound biased towards either Lewis or Freud, the very method of his comparison paints Freud and his opinions in an almost unrelentingly dismal light. Nicholi clearly finds Lewis to be the more compelling figure of the two, and he takes pains to compare Lewis’s conversion experience with his own studies into the conversion experiences of young adults. By contrasting Lewis’s deep, long-lasting friendships and late if happy marriage with Freud’s penchant for alienating and disowning his colleagues and the puritanical froideur of his marital life…well, it is little wonder that Lewis and his philosophies on life seem to come out the better for it. Nicholi never openly says that Lewis’s world-view is the better, but from the evidence he has assembled, he doesn’t exactly need to. So even though the book is written well and seems to stem from an interesting and original premise, fans of both Lewis and Freud would be wise to read it with a skeptical eye.

Collected Poems by John Betjeman

I ended up rewriting this review from scratch…which was hardly a loss, as it meant I had a much better chance to go back and revisit some of my favourites out of this collection.

Collected Poems by John Betjeman

John Betjeman (1906-1984) is one of those poets whose works are either loved or loathed. I’m fond of many of his poems, but I can see how other people would find them twee or overly sentimental — they tend to call upon a romanticised version of an England of the past, redolent of Ovaltine at bedtime and bicycles on country lanes and salt-stained lodging houses along the seaside. But there’s a faded sort of sadness to many of his poems, a sense that even this romantic past is seldom as lovely as we would like it be.

I believe that Betjeman himself spoke of his Collected Poems as being more ‘verse’ than ‘poetry’, and it is not difficult to see why. He has an ear for rhythm and rhyme that at times is more suited to a music hall than a formal poetry recitation, often bordering on outright doggerel. His personal tastes come through quite clearly, as in this excerpt from ‘May-Day Song for North Oxford’ which highlights his longstanding dislike of former tutor C.S. Lewis:

Oh! well-bound Wells and Bridges! Oh! earnest ethical search!
For the wide high-table λογος of St. C.S. Lewis’s Church!
This diamond-eyed Spring morning my soul soars up the slope
Of a right good rough-cast buttress on the housewall of my hope.

Betjeman’s distaste for redevelopment and modern planning show up in many poems in this collection, such as his semi-notorious call for ‘friendly bombs’ to fall on Slough and his sharp parodies of young executives and bureaucrats. Yet mixed in with the doses of vitriol are some of his brighter poems, such as the bouncing joy of ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’, and more sombre pieces like ‘Devonshire Street W.1′. The Collected Poems show off the range of Betjeman’s work, the silly and the sad together, and provide a fine single volume of most of the best-known poems of this popular Poet Laureate.

On my recent research trip, I stopped by the newly renovated St Pancras Station to take a photograph of the Betjeman statue that has a place of honour inside the station hall. Betjeman fought to preserve the station from being torn down in the mid-1960s, and the statue attempts to capture him, with a heavy bag in hand and his coat caught in the breeze from a passing train, as he stops to look up at the great vaulted ceiling of the station. I think my photograph came out rather nicely.