Essayists From England

"Through the burgeoning university network, it was suddenly possible to think of oneself as a national poet, even if the nation turned out to consist entirely of English departments."

"Not that there weren't real communists in the labor unions, and real spies in Washington, but these had nothing to do with the show that was being put on for us, which seemed entirely designed to Make Us Take This Thing Seriously. From abroad, where I was for much of the time, it looked as if the United States were trying to act like a superpower by holding its very own show trials."

"As things now stand, the office is a slightly meaner battleground than the home. Male bosses seem to dominate their women underlings as they would never dominate their wives."

"Chicago 1968 taught one how close any civilized country is to berserkness at all times; also how terrorism, even silly terrorism, strengthens the cops more than anyone. Yet already this European-style history lesson has been watered down by consensus into something crazy we did in the sixties, just as we "did" McCarthyism in the fifties. As if a nation changes its nature completely every ten years; as if social forces were as evanescent as hula hoops or skateboards, instead of as remorseless as glaciers."

"As you approach the presidency, no one seems worthy of it, since it wasn't designed for a human in the first place."

"This country is merciless to good small talents. A writer who doesn't take chances and swing for the fences (whether or not he has a prayer of reaching them) is less than a man."

"The one kind of society that the Church cannot adjust to is no society at all, i.e., a setup where community has become so fragmented that a communal religion is a fiction, sustained only by talk and make-news items in the press and television."

"Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America."

"He was truly after an art in which the creator could be as intelligent as he liked, but in which intelligence must be transmuted entirely into form, so that no lumps of thinking are left showing."

"Childhood lays itself out, like a novel, he suggests, complete with central observer, fixed characters, and linear plot. Later, life disperses itself into anecdotes. At twenty-one, it no longer strictly matters whether the author went first to Ireland and then to Spain, or Spain first. And after thirty, he could stitch the pages in backward for all we care."

"It is possible that the malice of writers has been overrated (by myself among others). Reading their ruminations on their craft, one sees why this writer could not possibly like that one, would indeed consider him a menace. Literature is a battleground of conflicting faiths, and nobler passions than envy are involved."

"Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy."

"That is the best story he could find in his life, never mind if it's the truest: an artist's duty is always to tell the best story."

"In modern American style, his job, not his past, defined him."

"The best comedy is always heartless, an alternative to rational emotion."

"Both of them were artists with highly developed personas, and hence unreliable witnesses to their own pasts."

"How does one make a movie about decadence these days? Now that we're allowed to do it, it's too late."

"His interviewing self is, or was, an extra person, like the Holy Ghost, generated by self-contemplation."

"The 1930s — a Golden Age for American humor, mainly because everything else was going so badly. The wisecrack was the basic American sentence because there were so many things that could not be said any other way."

"Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves — all plot and no characters, or made-up characters — Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session."

"It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point."

"I myself have not met a self-confessed liberal since the late fifties (and even then it was a tacky thing to admit, like coming from the middle class or the Middle West, those two gloomy seedbeds of talent), yet hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the "typical liberal" — as it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns."

"The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them."

"For now, I'm supposing that all movements are equal, which they're not, except in this respect: that none of them gives a damn about artists beyond their immediate utility. Good movements will use a writer just as ruthlessly as bad ones; since they all fancy they have better things to do than worry about one man's artistic survival."

"Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing)."

"Happy the man with a book-length grievance — and rare. Each of these books contains one possible magazine article surrounded by more padding than an offensive lineman: every little indignity that ever happened to them, and every two-bit feud, magnified to a Horrible Example to justify a larger printing."

"Today's novelist is not only limited by the thin subject matter of personal experience, but by the pinched clinical conventions of the Health generation. Faced with Othello, say, he would have to divide the man into departments, like a liberal arts course. Race relations — that's still a subject, although of course whites can't write about blacks and vice versa; sexual politics (somehow); Othello's ultimate therapy and decision to endure. Since jealousy is now curable, like TB, we can't have people dying of it anymore. A few rap sessions, some fearless touching, and a new sense of self-worth would have Othello and Iago and Hamlet and Juliet back on their feet in no time; and Fiction struggling."

"The desire not to destroy the palace but to move into it oneself has always been the occupational curse of revolutionaries."

"The bad debater never knows that one explanation is better than five."

"As enviable and unreachable as a face in a train window."

"The rational man may talk a good game about suicide, but reason must give way to obsession and finally squalor before he can actually do it."

"The odds on any intelligent person having an unhappy childhood are better than fair, and the odds on a sad ending are practically off the board."

"On all counts his memory is entitled to our respect. He was a faithful public servant, a sound Tory, the vivid painter of a vivid age."

"I cannot think that the temperate and constitutional language of the royal declarations and answers to the house of commons in 1642, known to have proceeded from the pen of Hyde, and as superior to those on the opposite side in argument as they are in eloquence, was intended for the willing slaves of tyranny."

"Clarendon was a great historian. His profound social insight, tempered by acute penetration in analysing individual character; his lack of illusions, his scepticism, tempered by recognition of the fact of human progress even if he disliked the means which brought it about: all this fitted him to understand the conflicts of his age better than any contemporary, and most later, historians. But above all it is his style that we remember: that style which again reflects the idealised feudal society of his youth. It lacks the conversational urgency and directness, the utilitarian values, of the Parliamentarian pamphlets (especially the Levellers' and Diggers') whose forthright appeal to the man in the street prepared for the prose of Bunyan and Defoe. Clarendon's prose is thoroughly conservative – stately, leisured, opulent, hospitable, with a tang of allusive humour possible because the only readers he envisages are cultured gentlemen certain of their superiority to the common herd. Like the man himself, Clarendon's style is the old world, the world of Sir Thomas Browne and Hooker, looking back to the Middle Ages: the future, in prose as in politics, lay with the ex-Parliamentarian civil servants Samuel Pepys and Andrew Marvell, and with the ex-Cromwellian soldier John Bunyan."

"He stood for strong executive government, exclusive Anglicanism and a pacific foreign policy, since he felt this would make it easier for Charles to bring "his own dominions into that temper of obedience, they ought to be in". But events were greater than the man, and Clarendon was the ironic witness of the war against the Dutch, and associated with its failure. The nation demanded a sacrifice and so did the politicians."

"At the restoration the same virtuous statesman protected the constitution against the blind or interested zeal of excessive loyalty: and, if Monk had the glory of restoring the monarchy of England, to Clarendon is ascribed the merit of re-establishing her laws and liberties. A service no less advantageous to the crown than honourable to himself; but which was numbered among the chief of those offences for which he was afterwards abandoned, sacrificed, and persecuted by his unfeeling, corrupt, and profligate master."

"His soul could never enter into the secrets of enthusiasts, or, indeed, into any region beyond the range of the Thirty-nine Articles. Just as he fails to understand the nature of the Puritans so he fails to understand Puritanism in general, and his History of the Rebellion has the fundamental defect, that it is a history of a religious revolution in which the religious element is omitted."

"If we turn to historians of the more ordinary type, the most notable name is that of Clarendon. His work suggests a comparison with Thucydides, in that he was himself a prominent actor in the events that he describes; and there are, especially in his character-sketches, passages that will bear comparison with the great Athenian master. As with Thucydides, too, banishment from his native country gave him an opportunity for calm and detached contemplation of the events through which he had lived. But there the comparison ends. The inner spirit of the two men is entirely different. Neither his double exile nor advancing years brought philosophic calm or intellectual fairness to Clarendon. He writes now as a partisan of the monarchy, now of the Church, now of his own administration, and the later books are mainly autobiographical. But none the less Clarendon's work is epoch-making in the development of English historical writing. Here the nation's story is told by a man of practical knowledge, in language well suited to the subject, and in a tone of honest conviction. For a century and a half it fixed the ideas of Englishmen with regard to the prominent actors in the great Puritan revolution. Its prestige was destroyed, as by a sledge-hammer, by the publication of Carlyle's Cromwell; but the book remains one of the foremost of English historical classics."

"I am mad in love with my Lord Chancellor, for he do comprehend and speak out well, and with the greatest easiness and authority that ever I saw man in my life. I did never observe how much easier a man do speak, when he knows all the company to be below him, than in him; for, though he spoke, indeed, excellent well, yet his manner and freedom of doing it, as if he played with it, and was informing only all the rest of the company, was mighty pretty."

"Clarendon was unquestionably a lover of truth, and a sincere friend to the free constitution of his country. He defended that constitution in parliament, with zeal and energy, against the encroachments of prerogative, and concurred in the establishment of new securities necessary for its protection. He did indeed, when these had been obtained, oppose with equal determination those continually increasing demands of parliament, which appeared to him to threaten the existence of the monarchy itself: desirous, if possible, to conciliate the maintenance of public liberty with the preservation of domestic peace, and to turn aside from his country all the evils, to which those demands immediately and manifestly tended."

"He was apt to talk very imperiously and unmercifully, so that his manner of dealing with people was as provoking as the hard things themselves were; but upon the whole matter he was a true Englishman and a sincere protestant, and what has passed at court since his disgrace has sufficiently vindicated him from all ill designs. In one thing it appeared that he had changed his mind much; he penned the declaration at Breda, in which the king promised indulgence and ease to tender consciences, and pursuant to that he penned a long declaration concerning ecclesiastical affairs after the king was restored, which was drawn up with that prudence and temper, that by all appearance, if the king had stuck to it, both church and state had been very quickly happy; but it was observed that immediately after the duke's marriage broke out Clarendon changed his measures, and set on his own creatures to arraign that declaration in the house of commons, of which this account was given me: the bishops had stuck to him in the matter of that marriage, by letting the king know, that it could not be broken neither by the laws of God nor man, that he thereupon delivered himself up to their counsels in the affairs of the church and so did whatever they had mind to do."

"The truth is, his behaviour and humour was growne so insupportable to my self, and to all the world else, that I could not longer endure it, and it was impossible for me to live with it and do those things with the Parliament that must be done, or the Government will be lost."

"It is true he was of a jolly temper, after the old English fashion; but France had now the ascendant, and we were become quite another nation."

"[H]e was a man that knew England well, and was lawyer good enough to be an able chancellor, and was certainly a very incorrupt man."

"King and minister held fundamentally different views as to religious policy. Charles II desired to make toleration for Catholics and Nonconformists an integral part of the restoration settlement, partly because it seemed essential to the peace of the nation, and partly because he was a Catholic at heart. In the Church as in the State, Clarendon's one aim was to re-establish the state of things which existed before the war began. The Church was to be restored unconditionally as well as the monarchy. This policy the minister successfully carried out. In a few months, almost before the King realised what was happening, the bishops were in possession of their old power, and the Catholics and Nonconformists were under their feet again... In political as in religious matters Clarendon was more conservative than his master, and this conservatism had been increased by the fourteen years he had passed out of England... He never realised the new conditions the Rebellion had created, or the new forces which had grown up during the Interregnum. And, above all, he failed to appreciate the change which had taken place in the position of the House of Commons."

"He many times cast himself upon the ground, with a desperate and obstinate resolution to rest there till the morning, that he might shift with less torment, what hazard soever he run."

"[H]e spake well, his style had no flaw in it, but had a just mixture of wit and sense, only he spoke too copiously; he had a great pleasantness in his spirit, which carried him sometimes too far into raillery, in which he sometimes shewed more wit than discretion."

"I first read Clarendon at home in an old Boehm edition and then found the majestic folio edition in the public library. Through the long summer of 1927 I read it day after day. It was like wandering in a cathedral – majesty everywhere, not only in the prose but in the thought, in the almost superhuman capacity for empathy and distance which are perhaps Clarendon's greatest qualities both as man and writer."

"Clarendon displayed a political strength and rectitude rare if not unique amongst British statesmen, and by so doing made the Restoration possible... In exile he wrote the History wherein is displayed the true greatness of Clarendon: his astonishing capacity to take an even and magnanimous view of the men of his age – Cromwell as well as Charles I; his deep and equally remarkable sense of the tides and turns of political feeling not only in Parliament but in the nation at large. Few men have possessed larger or better judgments when confronted with critical political issues. Few, if any, can doubt that Clarendon is one of Britain's greatest men."