The American Spectator : Books for the Winter Cold

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Books for the Winter Cold

By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. on 1.20.11 @ 6:08AM

In training for a C-SPAN marathon.

WASHINGTON -- The other day I received a call from a very agreeable lady at C-SPAN, asking me to do a show with them called "In Depth." It will take a lot of time, as they want to interview me on all the books I have written. Also, it will last three hours! That is a marathon. I can hardly listen for three hours, much less talk. Yet I have been a fan of C-SPAN for years so I could hardly say no. Also I am an advocate of the printed word. I want it to survive. It seems to me the printed word has been under assault for decades. The Internet is the latest threat against it. First there was the camera. Then came TV. Now there is the Internet on which everyone writes and no one reads. In a world where everyone is a writer and no one a reader how long can the printed word last? We live in a blizzard of words, but no one is reading seriously.

The first question I have been asked before appearing on C-SPAN's "Book TV" on February 6 was what my favorite books might be. They have changed over the years, but I think today there are at least a score of dozen books that I return to every few years. Let me share them with you.

About anything by Evelyn Waugh pleases me, though he was a ghastly man. For that matter, a lot of writers strike me as insufferable, but I run the risk of committing the genetic fallacy here so let me just say I like his books. I am glad he never signed any for me. Also anything written by V.S. Naipaul fetches my interest, beginning with A Bend in the River. For me, Naipaul gives us an inkling of the international terrorist that was to come.

Mencken and Nathan have always charmed me, Nathan being underpraised, Mencken overpraised. I reread regularly Malcolm Muggeridge, whom I knew, and Luigi Barzini, also a great friend--both were stupendous journalists and stylists. Tom Wolfe's short pieces, for instance, "Radical Chic" and "Mau-Mauing the Flack Catchers," are perceptive and elegant glimpses into lives that have affected our era. They are alive with wicked wit and joviality. Tom is also a very good novelist, as can be seen from The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full. Of all the writers writing today, Wolfe has influenced me the most.

As for the past, I am a 1920s gent, socially and literarily. The 1920s was abundant with good writing, journalistically and literarily. I have already mentioned Mencken and Nathan. As for the more timeless work, I read Hemingway, particularly A Farwell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. I would not spend fifteen minutes with him, if he were alive today, but he could write. His short stories are also very fine. So could Fitzgerald, and I reread The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night from time to time. Faulkner is sublime: The Bear, As I Lay Dying, Intruder in the Dust, Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury are all masterworks. Also Sinclair Lewis was an amazingly good novelist if a deficient thinker. I read him from time to time.

Among the Europeans I favor The Brothers Karamazov and anything by Conrad. I especially like Under Western Eyes. The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal is superb, especially the opening scene on horseback at Waterloo. I have read Shakespeare with relish, especially the comedies and the histories, and I reread Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales every decade at least and Cervantes' Don Quixote too. It would be very lax of me not to include the poetry of W.B. Yeats, though I shall leave his stuff about spiritualism and the monkey glands out of consideration. Mencken thought poetry was mostly nonsense, but he was up to his old tricks. Yeats is always worth reading and let me heave in T.S. Eliot.

I read Gibbon, Macaulay, and Churchill, and an especially illuminating book about Churchill and the post-war period is In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War by David Reynolds. Martin Gilbert's biography of the great man is marvelous--I dipped into it frequently during The American Spectator's jolly war with the Clintons. Martin has actually improved over the years. Paul Johnson's Modern Times, The Birth of the Modern, and A History of the American People are splendid efforts at revisionist history, but if one wants the conventional reading I urge Arthur Schlesinger on almost anything. He is a conventional Liberal, but an elegant writer.

For social science I have found Edward Banfield, particularly The Unheavenly City, extremely useful. His analysis is a bracing antidote to our statist friends. Milton Friedman is the final word on the subject. A collection of his journalism would be useful, but a handy guide to his thought is Capitalism and Freedom. Let me finish with a philosophical work, the works of Aristotle, particularly the Politics.

The lady from C-SPAN also wanted to know what I am reading now. That would be Ron Chernow's Washington: A Life. It is a great book about a great man. And before I go let me recommend Solar by Ian McEwan. It is a send-up of the environmental movement almost as effective as this frigid winter.

About the Author

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is the founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is the author of the forthcoming The Death of Liberalism, published by Thomas Nelson Inc. His previous books include the New York Times bestseller Boy Clinton: the Political Biography; The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton; The Liberal Crack-Up; The Conservative Crack-Up; Public Nuisances; The Future that Doesn't Work: Social Democracy's Failure in Britain; Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House; The Clinton Crack-Up; and After the Hangover: The Conservatives' Road to Recovery.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (40) | Leave a comment

Kelly Staples| 1.20.11 @ 7:48AM

Menchen is an American original. His "Treatise On The Gods" is a delightful exposition of mankind's boundless capacity for credulity. I'm looking forward to February 6th already.

grant1863| 1.20.11 @ 7:57AM

Thanks for your column, I see my own reading list is in the right direction. Please let us know when you will be on Book TV. I thought Booknotes was a great program and Lamb a great interviewer. Alas some things must come to an end.

Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 1.20.11 @ 8:00AM

Let me mention Ayn Rand, in particular Atlas Shrugged. The Fountainhead is an artful description of 20th century America. I also like Moby Dick, in my opinion one of the finest books in the English language. Don't forget Ludwig Von Mises. He's all you need to understand for economics.

mames| 1.20.11 @ 8:14PM

Rand was a great proponent of secular objecdtivism but her writing was quite preachy in nature and often came off as speechifyin' rather than great prose. The money speech given by Francisco was the high point of her books.

PJ| 1.20.11 @ 8:38AM

What a great selection. But, you need a few French authors to complete it, such as Flaubert or Rousseau. If I'm not mistaken, it was the French who invented or perfected the novel.

JP| 1.20.11 @ 10:19AM

I must agree. Flaubert's Madame Bovary is probably the most elegant novel ever written. And his message wasn't hidden behind abstract symbolism and messy prose.

Stormzeye| 1.20.11 @ 8:57AM

All great literature. Though I was shocked to find Ian McEwan mentioned after that long list of required high school reading from the sixties. Glad to hear you're exploring some contemporary fiction. Lighten up with a little Billy Collins for poetry...it'll put a smile on your face.

RAMIII| 1.20.11 @ 9:30AM

Ayn Rand, Aldous Huxley, Kipling, and let me not forget Bleak House and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens with his keen insight into human nature (both the highs and the lows).
http://www.online-literature.com/

moviegoer| 1.20.11 @ 9:32AM

A pretentious twit trowels it on especially thickly today.

The Big Kahuna| 1.20.11 @ 9:33AM

Remment, is too modest. He does have problems listening for three hours but he has no problems talking for three hours or even more.

owyheewine| 1.20.11 @ 9:38AM

I'd add Robert Penn Warren, Solzhenitzyn , and Thomas Sowell.

Laurey| 1.20.11 @ 3:15PM

I second the Robert Penn Warren vote.

Christopher| 1.20.11 @ 10:23AM

Balzac, Iganzio Silone, Donald Westlake, Loren Estelman Ralph McInerney, John MacDonald, Peter Kreeft

David T| 1.20.11 @ 10:37AM

No list of good reading would be complete without something (anything) by Flannery O'Connor.

a.g.| 1.20.11 @ 2:49PM

Absolutely--"A Good Man is Hard to Find"--never have I forgotten the chill it left even after the first two sentences. She is a fave. I have to put in a word for Jane Austen and her 20th c. doppelganger Barbara Pym. Ralph McInerny is totally elegant and funny! I do not understand how Paul Johnson History of American People is revisionist...can we explain ?

Joe R| 1.20.11 @ 10:41AM

You would have to mention Faulkner, the most overrated writer in American history. A monkey hitting the typewriter keys at random could churn out better stories than that drunken clod from Mississippi.

Andy Texan| 1.20.11 @ 10:42PM

You are the most deficient blogger on this website.

Dixie Pixie| 1.20.11 @ 11:23AM

May I respectfully disagree Mr. Tyrrell.
With a a bountiful harvest of wheat one also gets a lot of chaff and straw.
So is it the literary world.

Now that anyone with a computer system and printer can be his own publisher, there naturally arises a profusion of literary works both good and bad.
Unfortunately the ratio of good writers to bad greatly favors the bad.
Perhaps it is the seeming endless flood of bad writing that is so disagreeable to you.

Hence my disagreement.
I think we are in a bountiful harvest of literary delights unprecedented in history.
By every quantitative measurement the volume in every literary category has exploded.
Even the literary distribution channels have greatly increased as proven by Ken (Old Texican) and Booger.

My conclusion is that we are seeing a unique flowering of American Literary Art.
There has never been such a profusion of great works on the market that it is impossible to sample them all.
Even more frustrating, one has to sift a mountain of chaff and straw to get to really good literary grains.

Also consider that any art is so subjectively judged, that one man's horrible writing is another ones delight.
So even the profusion of bad art is good.
Also remember it is time that is the sleeve through all art is filtered into great art.
Today is just the start of the process, not the conclusion.

PS.... Have you updated your list of great books that a Conservative must know?
Will the readers of TAS Online be seeing such a article in the near future?

Petronius| 1.20.11 @ 11:24AM

Here's to you Bob
My sister gave me two vintage copies of Mencken's Prejudices, #'s 5 and 6 for Christmas to go with #4 from last year. I will be searching the antiquarian book sellers for to acquire the first three. I own a shelf of his work. If only he were still with us and writing today...
But do add Barry Goldwater to the list. Like Churchill, to read him is to hear him. And so with Kippling and Twain. The pages are voices. For a wondrous diversion, try Nicholas Basbane's A Gentle Madness, and his other books about books, bibliophiles, great libraries and their collections. I met the man when A Splendor of Letters came out and he spoke for 45 minutes of one of the most horrible crimes of cultural vandalism; bookbreaking and selling off of pages of works long out of print for greater profit than if the volumes had been sold whole.
There's snow on the ground here. And reading to be enjoyed along with a Dvorak symphony and a dram of 15 year old Balvenie, very neat.

Bill| 1.20.11 @ 12:06PM

What's a score of dozen of books? Do you mean 240 books?

Bill| 1.20.11 @ 12:07PM

I mean a "score of dozen books."

Natural Born Texican| 1.20.11 @ 12:17PM

I must add C. S. Lewis and Tolkien. And Leon Uris.

Tim the Enchanter| 1.20.11 @ 12:58PM

Have to add G. K. Chesterton. How could so many of you posting here not mention him? Mr. Tyrrell considers himself a 1920's man- that was when Chesterton was at his best.

JShizzle| 1.20.11 @ 1:14PM

Ahhh, I love Mencken and Hemingway, or at least their writings. I agree with others on the addition of C.S. Lewis. I would like to add Vonnegut to the mix, albeit a bit more modern than the great Dickens.

The Cheerful Oncologist| 1.20.11 @ 1:56PM

There are some books that, once read, provide a lifetime of introspection without having to know every last detail of the author's life or read the collected works, the annotated works, the letters, and the grocery lists left to history.

Example: The Spoon River Anthology.

Richard Baker| 1.20.11 @ 2:04PM

Churchill, Twain, and Kipling. Churchill for the warm butter in the mind sensation of his language, Twain for his sheer American-ness, and Kipling for his ability to explain the Soldier better than any other. Oh, and Tom Wolfe for his ability to entertainingly describe a time in history.

JP| 1.20.11 @ 2:34PM

I would like to add that old Man of Letters, Edmund Wilson, as well as Saul Bellow. IMHO Bellow was the best American novelist of the 20th Century.

Who Knows?| 1.20.11 @ 2:51PM

If you were going to die in ten minutes, and you knew it, what book(s) would you consider to be essential to those precious few seconds remaining to you?

Just by going on and on about all those authors who one has enjoyed over a longish life, as RET does, is fine and dandy. But, it seems like there’s something profound missing.

How about these radical writers, likely most of whom are not well known, or even known at all by most people---

Franklin Jones aka Bubba Free John aka Da Free John aka Da Love Ananda?

Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Huang Po, Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu, Ramana Maharshi, Paramahansa Yogananda, Brother Lawrence, Krishnamurti, Gary Zukov, Arthur M. Young, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Fritjof Capra, Jane Roberts, G. Spencer Brown, Rainer Maria Rilke, Martin Heidegger, Ken Wilber, Herman Hesse, Stephen Hawking, Nietzsche, Richard Bach,

One book I’d say ought to be read and absorbed by anyone who expects to die, is ---

“Easy Death”, by Da Free John, from 1983

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D., the most famous writer who penned “On Death and Dying”, wrote this---

“’Easy Death’ is an exciting, stimulating, and thought-provoking book that adds immensely to the ever-increasing literature on the phenomena of life and death. But, more important, perhaps, is a confirmation that a life filled with love instead of fear can lead to ultimate meaningful life and death.

Thank you for this masterpiece.”

ncatty| 1.20.11 @ 5:29PM

George McDonald Fraser.

Steve in Pittsburgh| 1.20.11 @ 6:41PM

I wish I were not the typical gen-x-er, a graduate of the schools of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. I never really had a the attention span, for the most part, to read a novel beginning to end. Maybe if I get a Kindle...

Still, I did read a few classics in high school...classics by recent standards. Night, by Elie Wiesel. To Kill a Mockingbird. The Pearl. Three by Stephen King (his worst, probably), Cujo, Firestarter and...I forget, released in the early 80s, though. Jurassic Park. Generation X, by Douglas Coupland (shallow but an interesting trek through gen-x land). And selected short stories, here and there, in Playboy and a few others by Stephen King.

And a few audio books.

So, if you have the patience, be grateful you have it. I wish I did.

mames| 1.20.11 @ 8:18PM

Just for the sheer skill of their writing and not necessarily for their view points it is hard to beat john Irving, Vonnegut, Wolfe, Twain, Updike, Dickens....... so little time

Dave Trapped in NYC| 1.20.11 @ 9:31PM

Charles McCarry Tears of Autumn

Christopher| 1.21.11 @ 10:44AM

try Lucky Bastard by McCarry.

Anton| 1.20.11 @ 10:00PM

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

Vern Crisler| 1.21.11 @ 1:10AM

If you want to while away some time, and have a good laugh, too, try Twain's *Roughing It*.

Michael Kohlman| 1.21.11 @ 7:34AM

Be VERY careful who they set you up with for 3 hours. They ambushed Dinesh D'Souza a few months ago with the Left Wing hack Jonathan Altar who did nothing but browbeat him and interrupt him the whole time. Accusing him of lying and at one point saying, "This is MY interview!" [shut up]. It was abominably rude. It might make for good TV, but I didn't see Jonah Goldberg hosting Noam Chomsky. Make sure you are not being set up. Just sayin'.

kingsmill| 1.21.11 @ 1:52PM

Muggeridge's "The Thirties", "The Earnest Atheist" and "Winter in Moscow" deserve special mention.

Two largely forgotten Englishman, once renowned,are antidotes to consensus thinking.-Hugh Kingsmill and Wyndham Lewis (though born in the Noeth Atlantic off Maine).