Praise for Library Booksales!

One of the spring highlights in southern Manitoba is the local library booksale. Books of all kinds find their way onto the sales tables and then for virtually pennies a volume, one can indulge in purchasing a feast of literary delights. While circumstances did not allow me to go in person this year, my son, having heard me wax rhapsodic over a new "favourite author" earlier this year, found several recent works by Tony Judt, University Professor and Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University: Ill Fares the Land and Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century.

I first came across Judt's name in one of my infrequent purchases of the New York Review of Books where I read one of his essays now collected in his book Ill Fares the Land. Once sympathetic to Marxism but now a social democrat by political conviction, Judt writes with a passion and hope about the return to a civil and meaningful discourse which, in his view,  is needed now. He writes in his introduction: "Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them." This book is an extended essay on how that might happen and what this conversation could look like.

The second book, Reappraisals, is a series of essays on significant actors of the twentieth century political and philosophical stage. Reviews of Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Louis Althusser, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Primo Levi and others provide a wonderful entry into the intellectual world of Western democracy. I found myself comparing Judt not infrequently to Terry Eagleton, the famed Irish literary theorist currently buttering his bread in England at the University of Lancaster. Eagleton has also written extensively on twentieth century intellectual history and seems to take almost perverse delight in skewering anyone and everyone just because he can. But whereas Eagleton loves the sound of his own voice and cynically revels in the pleasure of demolishing anyone who disagrees with him, Judt exudes a sense of melancholic hope and imagines the possibilities of a new way forward in our collective lives. I like hope more than cynicism.

The urgency of Judt's voice and the passionate plea for a return to a more civil and productive conversation between Right and Left, young and old, franchised and disenfranchised, have their roots in Judt's own life experience. Born in a secular Jewish setting, his immediate family escaped Europe before the rise of Nazi Germany. But the Holocaust did not spare others from his more extended family. Judt's working class upbringing, his success at Cambridge University, his transition from Great Britain to New York,  and his illness and eventual death from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease) add to his stature as a compelling figure. Many of these vignettes are found in his last book The Memory Chalet, conceived in the last stages of his illness, dictated to a friend and then published as a book. It is a book of tenderness and insight; it is also a book of courage and tenacity.

So read, learn, and enjoy!

The Gatekeeper - Terry Eagleton

One of my guilty pleasures is the reading of memoirs, especially those of theologians or philosophers. Occasionally some of them take themselves so seriously that they cannot offer any sense of humanity or tension in their lives. Either they never made a mistake and therefore have nothing "interesting" or human to share, or, they have such a carefully guarded "mystique" or reputation to maintain that they take care to brush out anything that would resemble a character flaw or error in judgment. Others have no such qualms and unabashedly highlight their shortcomings. Terry Eagleton, the enfant terrible of English letters and renowned literary critic, is  a little of both. He gives and he keeps in equal measure. His relatively short memoir, The Gatekeeper, is a witty and caustic view of his early years through to his student days at Cambridge and early tenure at Oxford. Born in the northwest of England to poor Irish parents and the only surviving child of three, he writes bitingly of his childhood years in a chapter called "Losers." Raised a Catholic and for a time an altar server in the local Carmelite convent chapel, he was required to be in attendance when the young novice now finally took the veil and disappeared into the convent for good; thus "the gatekeeper" of the title.

Eagleton's book is a fascinating interplay between his religious upbringing, his political awakening and his intellectual development. What is clear is that each facet of his life informed the other and that Eagleton has lost all reverence for any firmly held belief or position. What comes through, however, is a certain wistfulness which may be interpreted as a wish for more or even a wish for "truth." Wanting to admire his father, he finds it nearly impossible. "What I remember most of my father is silence. He was silent because he was agonizingly inarticulate, and deeply ashamed of it. One failure of speech thus overlaid another. He was cut off from communication, lacking language to excess. Perhaps I have compensated enough for that in my time. I am still not sure whether his silence was a rock or an abyss, strength or indifference. He was painfully shy and unsociable, yet also practical, rational, reliable and infinitely patient. ...He did not think much of artistic types like me. (p. 121) Eagleton's own experience in the role of the public intellectual borders on pure farce. "To be a public lecturer is to occupy a symbolic role rather than a real-life one, and almost nothing you can do can shake this identification. You could ostentatiously don a false red nose and start to pull on a pair of sponge-rubber trousers while being talked at by some mildly obsessive type after a lecture, but it would almost certainly be blocked out. And there are also the genuinely disturbed, who describe to you the messages they are receiving on the radio which the CIA have installed somewhere between their liver and lower intestine." Eagleton's account of his Cambridge tutor is hilarious although sad at the same time as it describes a man incapable of empathy or developing healthy relationships. Unfortunately, the caricature is often far too close to the truth in real life.

But it is Eagleton's love/hate relationship with religion that is fascinating because, no matter how caustic and cynical he becomes in his frequent and varied diatribes, he cannot let his faith go. Both extremist in its demands and mundane in its practice, Christianity both succeeded and failed gloriously in the attempt to convince the young Eagleton. As he says early on in the book, "In the end, I refused co-optation, but only just." Eagleton's body of work has ranked him among the most influential of the literary critics of the English-speaking world. His willingness to take on popular positions and personalities equally larger-than-life have led him to speak and write against the so-called exponents of "The New Atheism", Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, because as he would argue, they show an appalling ignorance of religion. St. Terry to the rescue? No, but he is fun and outrageous and just sometimes you feel that he wishes that he could overcome that "little" hurdle called belief.

The Gatekeeper is a fascinating read.  I look forward to the next stage of Eagleton's journey.