We asked Hadley Arkes, the Edward N. Ney Professor in American Institutions, what he had been reading recently. Here’s what he told us:
As I tried to look with detachment over what I have been reading lately, I realized that certain reflexes, setting in when I was a student, had taken a deep hold. When a term had ended, I used to think, “Ah, I’ve been taken up with reading prescribed by other people; now I can read whatever I want to read.” And it came home to me just now that it’s still the same way. One thing I really wanted to do this summer was to work through two massive volumes in Martin Gilbert’s epic eight-volume biography of Winston Churchill. These books run about 1,200 to 1,400 pages, as Gilbert virtually traces the story from day to day, with the vast record of Churchill’s papers, along with the diaries and memoirs of others. The first choice, for me, was the last volume, Never Despair, 1945-65. This book takes into account the end of the war, with Churchill able to see the victory over Hitler in Europe, and his sudden thrust from power, in the election of 1945, before he would see victory in the Pacific. The book covers, of course, his return to power in 1951, and carries through to the end of his life. The point of interest for me was in Churchill out of power. Churchill had never settled in easily with the Tories, and during the war he probably drew his most reliable support from his coalition partners in the Labor Party. He was an enduring friend of the welfare state. But with the onset of nationalization and the continuation of rationing, Churchill was moved to his most penetrating critiques of socialism and his defense of a free economy.
To read of the lion in winter is to be beckoned back to the story of Churchill during the darkest days of the war, when everything was hanging by a thread, and when he, and he distinctly, made the decisive difference. He had been the one thing needful. I returned, then, to the volume covering 1939-40 (Their Finest Hour), and it’s the kind of experience that is not only riveting, but also sobering and illuminating. As we review the unfolding of the crisis day by day, with the collapse of France and Western Europe and the detachment of the United States, we see also some of the leading members of the political class in Britain quite open to a settlement with the Nazis. It becomes chillingly clear that Churchill was the main factor that kept Britain in the war, and kept the Atlantic from becoming a German lake. The chilling part is that neither I nor my family would have survived this state of affairs, would not be alive today and living in a free regime, were it not for the statecraft and character of Churchill.
In that last volume, there was a letter from Churchill to C. S. Forester, the author of the famous series of naval yarns on Horatio Hornblower. “I read Lord Hornblower during 24 hours,” Churchill wrote. “I have only one complaint to make about it; it is too short. This is the fault which … belongs in my opinion to all your writings on this inspiring topic.” Well, that was irresistible. I didn’t know these books, and so I had to find this volume. And once I had read it, I had to start working through the series. Forester was not exactly a master of the erotic, but in his knowledge of the minutiae of ships and the life of ships in the Royal Navy—to say nothing of his knowledge of diplomacy and war in the late 18th and early 19th centuries—he was evidently a master. I wondered how these stories compared to Patrick O’Brian’s recent, popular series. And so I dipped back into O’Brian: Treason’s Harbour and The Letter of Marque. To my mild surprise, Forester did not emerge from the comparison any less impressive or compelling.
But then obligation stirred again: A former student of mine at Princeton recommended Scott Soames’s two new volumes for Princeton Press on analytic philosophy in the 20th century. I read with profit the first volume (The Dawn of Analysis). Along the way, I also read the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Khrushchev by William Taubman, the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science. Bill wrote with his usual fluency and deftness as he wove in sources. The chapter on the Cuban missile crisis contained more detail than I had seen in any other study, apart from Donald Kagan’s synthesis in On the Origins of War. As Bill showed, the Russian military had been utterly clear that if the United States had moved to dislodge Castro and his regime in 1961, it could have been done in a matter of days, and there was really nothing the Russians could do about it. Hence the astonishment when Kennedy did not follow through on the invasion in the Bay of Pigs.
Years ago, I used to do some occasional pieces in the voice of Damon Runyon, in The Wall Street Journal and other places. I would strike off a version of how the current political scene might be viewed by some of the denizens of Runyon’s Broadway, like Sam the Gonoph or Little Isadore. I was tempted, as Runyon would say, “more than somewhat” by the target of John Kerry, and so I went back happily to my collection of Runyon just for a bit of tuning up. I read again, with deep pleasure, some of my favorites, like “A Light in France,” “A Story Goes With It” and “The Melancholy Dane.”
The business of tuning brought me back to Henry James. I keep at home the full collection of his short stories, along with some of the novels. I dip back into things like “The Coxon Fund” or “The Real Thing” for lines like the one in the “The Coxon Fund” where the narrator remarks on a woman who professes to have forgotten about her former husband, and who still seems willing to offer rather precise, extended critiques of the man to anyone with the remotest interest in the subject: “If, as she had declared, she had washed her hands of him, she had carefully preserved the water of this ablution, and she handed it about for inspection.”
A young woman I know, a writer in Washington, had been a partisan of “abortion rights” as a student at Yale. Her father had been a clerk on the Supreme Court at the time of Roe v. Wade and had claimed a certain effect in shaping that opinion. The daughter, at Yale, attended a pro-life meeting for the sake of scoffing and picking up material. Instead, she became intrigued, and then persuaded, by the pro-life argument, eventually becoming an activist on the other side. I asked her about any writings that might have been especially important in her conversion. She said that the writer truly stirring and decisive for her had been St. Anselm, in letters such as “The Incarnation of the Word,” or in the book Why God Became A Man. I read them this summer, and found them interesting, but I couldn’t quite see why they should have had, for her, an effect quite so arresting and decisive.
I was drawn then to the recent book of my friend Robert Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought. Wilken is the scholar at every turn, and he weaves that scholarship gracefully as he writes on the most critical strands of argument that have shaped Christian teaching. This is a book I’ve already had the chance to draw upon in my own talks this fall, including a recent meeting at Princeton that dealt with the enduring question of religion in the public square, or the freedom of people to engage, in the political arena, with a moral sensibility shaped by the Jewish and Christian traditions. In closing that set of discussions, I recalled Bob Wilken drawing, in turn, on St. Augustine. With the hurts and abrasions of the recent political season, we may still find something at once summoning and consoling in those lines: “[W]henever you are as certain about something as I am, go forward with me; whenever you hesitate, seek with me; whenever you discover that you have gone wrong come back to me; or if I have gone wrong, call me back to you. In this way we will travel along the street of love together as we make our way toward him of whom it is said, ‘Seek his face always.’”