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