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Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, with Daniel McInerny · Christians Reading Classics

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: This episode is sponsored by Crossway.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Curated by award-winning hymn writers Keith and Kristen Getty, the Sing Hymnal Personal Edition features timeless hymns without musical notation to help readers meditate on lyrical excellence and biblical truths.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Find it at crossway.org.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: The chapel showed no ill effects of its long neglect.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: The Art Nouveau paint was as fresh and bright as ever.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: The Art Nouveau lamp burned once more before the altar.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: I said a prayer, an ancient, newly learned form of words, and left, turning towards the camp.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: And as I walked back, and the cookhouse bugle sounded ahead of me, I thought, the builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: They made a new house with the stones of the old castle.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: Year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Year by year, the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness, until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: The place was desolate, and the work all brought to nothing.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Komodo said it, sola kiitas.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Vanity of vanities.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: All is vanity.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: So wrote Evelyn Vaugh, the British novelist, towards the very end of his classic novel, Brideshead Revisited.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: I am Nadia Williams, managing editor at Mere Orthodoxy.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: And today it is a delight to talk about Brideshead Revisited with another novelist who is working on his own classics in this day and age.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: So it is a delight to welcome Daniel McKinnerney, philosopher, novelist, professor at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia, a Renaissance scholar of sorts, if you will.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: He has published, for instance, Beauty and Imitation: a philosophical reflection on the arts.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: But also, he is the author of the novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair, a sort of brideshead-inspired classic of its own, to which we'll get later in this conversation.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: So, Daniel, thank you for being here.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you very much.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm very much looking forward to our conversation.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, the way this conversation will proceed, just to orient the readers, we're going to talk about Brideshead Revisited, a classic that deserves a lot of attention today, for reasons we'll kind of delve into.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: But then we'll switch gears and talk about The Good Death of Kate Montclair and the question of can classics still be written today?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, we hope the answer is yes.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: So the first question though, always, what is a classic?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's a great, a great question.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_03: I would I would submit the following.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_03: I think a classic is um going to register on two levels as a classic.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_03: First of all, it's going to communicate, and I assume we're talking about any genre here, theology, philosophy, on one level, it's going to communicate perennial truth, goodness, truth, beauty.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_03: No matter where we are in culture, what culture we're talking about, cultures rise, cultures fall, but the classic endures because it is communicating those perennial truths.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_03: But lots of works communicate perennial truths.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_03: Lots of works have are trying to tell us something about goodness, truth, and beauty.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_03: So I don't think that alone distinguishes the classic.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: I think we need another criterion here.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_03: And here I would I would offer that a classic advances the argument of a tradition in a significant way, in a substantial way.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_03: So let me give you two um two examples, uh, talking about them in a very simplistic way, just to make make the point.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_03: So if you think of a philosophical classic, I'll talk here as a philosopher, Aristotle's Nekomichean ethics is a classic of moral philosophy of ethics.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_03: One of the chief reasons is that it advances beyond where Plato's, Aristotle's teacher, where Plato's ethics takes us.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_03: And more importantly, it resolves the conundrums that arise in Plato's ethics.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_03: So it advances the ancient argument of moral philosophy one big step.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_03: Another example, think of uh think of Jane Austen.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_03: One way we can think of Jane Austen's fiction is as an advancement of the argument of the novel beyond the limitations of romanticism.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_03: And so she is in certain ways trying to capture a classicism or the classical tradition of storytelling, and I would say even the classical tradition of moral thinking in her fiction.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_03: So we have an advance.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_03: Both those authors, Aristotle, Jane Austen, every author we would say is a classic, is going to advance that argument in a work, not just in the simple way I said, but in a whole multitude of ways.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_03: But that multitude adds up to a significant advance to the argument as it has proceeded thus far in that tradition.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: I like this.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think you're adding an important dimension to the conversation.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: So often when we define a classic, we're thinking of judging the work on its merits, which is important, but you're reminding us that no classic lives in a vacuum, that every classic is part of another conversation.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_03: Um and I'll make a plug here as I respond to that.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I've just completed a book on artistic creativity.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_03: It's a sequel of sorts to my book, Beauty and Imitation.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the key themes of that book is that creativity is not just this isolated event where the spark goes off in the artist's mind from the unconscious or from the conscious mind.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_03: That moment of insight, of intuition is important, but it is conditioned by the artist's social uh being, so that the other artists he works with, the time in which he works, the audience that he is trying to address, the tradition again that the artist is working in, all of those factors condition the artist's creativity.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_03: So even the merits of a work, the intrinsic quality of Jane Austen's prose, for example, is is in an important sense not just individual to her, but it comes about in the midst of a conversation about what what the novel is, and even more deeply, what the human person is and what human happiness is.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's beautiful, and it's a reminder that philosophy and literature are very close cousins or siblings, even.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, indeed.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_03: You just uh that that should probably go on my tombstone.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is a good way to approach Evelyn Vaugh and his work.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: So Brideshead Revisited is a novel that is wrestling with tradition and stands as sort of um an end of tradition in some sorts, a weird world right at the end of World War II.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: But also looking back on World War I, would you introduce us?
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: So, someone who might not be familiar with him and with this book, would you introduce us?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what do we absolutely have to know as we open a book?
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_03: What we absolutely have to know about Evelyn Waugh or about Brideshead Revisited or both?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_03: Both, really.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_03: Evelyn Waugh was a 20th-century uh British author of fiction.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, had uh uh a stellar career, was uh much admired uh during his lifetime, uh much uh vilified during during his lifetime.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_03: He was a controversial character in certain respects, as he had a very irascible uh personality.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_03: He began uh writing in um the late 1920s, he began writing uh comic fiction, I don't mean comic books, but but stories that that were very farcical.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um I'm thinking of his first novel, Decline and Fall, and his second Vile Bodies.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_03: Very farcical, but always underlying the farce, a serious moral purpose.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so that connection between uh literature and philosophy was very much alive in Waugh's thinking.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_03: He converted to Catholicism in 1930, but it really wasn't until the Second World War, 1944, when he begins to compose the novel we're talking about, Brideshead Revisited, that he begins to introduce his faith in a very explicit way into his work.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_03: And in fact, uh, in in an essay that he wrote um afterward called Fanfare, he says that in a way, Brideshead uh was a new beginning for his fiction for two reasons.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_03: One, he became more interested in the style of his works, we might talk about that.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_03: But secondly, he became interested in portraying man in his totality, and for wa that meant man in his relationship to God.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_03: So throughout the rest of his fiction, he was uh continually interested in human beings wrestling uh with faith.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_03: And again, Brideshead revisited itself is uh considered by many to be his masterpiece.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_03: Wa himself went back and forth on that question.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_03: I think at the end of the day, he thought his novel about St.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_03: Helena, uh mother of the Emperor Constantine, a historical novel, was his best.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um, others might contend, and I think Wa in other moods himself contended that his uh his World War II trilogy of novels, which together are called the Sword of Honor trilogy, at some points he said that was his masterpiece.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but I think most people know Yvelwa because of Brideshead revisited, and perhaps not least because in the 1980s it was made into um uh what was then a a cultural uh a culture-changing um television miniseries by the BBC.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_03: Waugh died uh just to close the loop, WA died um relatively early in his 60s in 1966.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, having read this novel uh for this conversation, this was actually my first foray into Vaugh, which it was delightful.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I enjoyed it, but I can see why the BBC would have wanted to adapt it into a mini-series.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: This is the level of drama is made for television.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, and it is it is an exempt, it's an exemplary film, television adaptation, because it is practically word for word from the book.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_03: And every actor cast, both the primary uh for the primary characters and the secondary characters, is not just in my opinion, but I think it's almost universally acknowledged, is just perfect for the part.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's hard for me now to read the book without seeing and hearing those actors in my imagination.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's a powerful adaptation.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: So if you haven't seen that, if the audience hasn't seen that, um I highly recommend it.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm not recommending the two-hour feature film adaptation from the 2000s, which um really mutilated uh the work in ways we don't even need to talk about.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but the 80s uh miniseries uh is several episodes.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_03: It might be eight, nine, ten episodes.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_03: It's quite long, quite faithful, and simply excellent.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: Noted.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, the BBC miniseries.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's now jump into the book in earnest.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: So the characters, I want to talk about characters and then I want to talk about style.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: So let's start with the characters because they are memorable.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_03: It's an interesting book because it is written in first person.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_03: So the narrator is a young man named Charles Ryder, R-Y-D-E-R.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_03: And so we're seeing all the action from his first person point of view, and so we are privileged to hear his thoughts and see all the action uh from his point of view.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_03: He never never goes off stage.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_03: We never shift to another point of view.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_03: So we're locked into Charles.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: He's our protagonist, right?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_03: He's our in the literal sense uh from the Greek of the of that word.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_03: He he's he's our our first combatant.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_03: He's the he's the one we are following.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_03: And as in any great story, uh, it is a story of transformation, uh, I would say of moral transformation.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_03: Put that thought another way, it's a story of reversal.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_03: Charles is on one trajectory when we meet him as a young man.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_03: He is a student at Oxford University.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_03: And without spoiling the ending, he's a very different man at the end.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_03: The man, the young man we meet at the beginning, he's uh what we would call a freshman uh in college, is he's he's um he's had the typical education of uh the upper classes of of English life.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_03: He is filled generally with modern ideas.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_03: He has no religious faith to speak of, though we assume that um Anglicanism was part of his upbringing to what to one extent or another.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_03: But he has no real religious faith.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he is a great lover of art and has practiced some, but we're gonna see him develop as an artist as the story goes on, and and art and beauty are key themes in the book.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: But it's we might say in a sentence that the book is about Charles Ryder falling in love.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_03: His best friend at Oxford, uh, a uh a flamboyant young man uh named Sebastian Flight, when Charles first goes to have lunch with him in Sebastian's rooms in Oxford, at his college in Oxford, uh Charles says outright to the reader, I went there looking for love.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_03: And we might see the story as something of a platonic ascent, that ascent that Plato talks about in his dialogues, um, the symposium or the Phaedrus, where we mature in our loves, going from one love to the next until we get to the highest love.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's a good way of describing Charles's adventure in the book.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_03: He he begins with one love and he ascends to other loves through the conflicts of the novel.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it's also um nice to note on in connection with this, the title of the book, the complete title of the book um is Brideshead Revisited The Sacred and Profane Memories of Charles Ryder.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: So that's sacred and profane memories part of it.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um your explanation now is bringing them into fore.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_03: Excellent.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, that indicates reversal, and it indicates another key theme of the book is memory.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I I didn't say this in my overview, is the book has a really interesting structure because it begins more or less in the present day, even as Wall was writing it.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_03: He was writing it in 1944, so right in the midst of World War II.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_03: Charles Ryder is right in the midst of World War II when we meet him on page one of the novel.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: But then his troop is sort of camping out at this grand uh estate in the English countryside, and it turns out to be the home of his old college friend, uh, and we should say lover, Sebastian Flight.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_03: And so he um he goes back in memory to his friendship with Sebastian and how that led him on an adventure.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: So there is a frame around the flashback that is the meat of the book.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: And there are other characters who surround them as well.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: So we have Sebastian, who is uh especially instrumental in the first half or so of the novel.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's almost like um the transfer of the baton once Sebastian passes the baton to his sister Julia, who becomes one of the major protagonists in the second half of the novel.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: So, what do we need to know about Julia, other than the fact that she's almost like the twin, lookalike of Sebastian?
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_03: No, yeah, she is.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_03: And Wam makes a very deliberate point about that, that they are they they almost look like twins.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: They're they're they're both um very attractive people.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_03: We might think of Julia uh as the second rung of the of the platonic ladder I was just describing.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um Charles and Sebastian, it seems evident from the text, are involved in a homosexual affair uh during their time at Oxford.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_03: Sebastian, though, is despite his surface flamboyance, is really struggling with his own abandonment of his faith, his estrangement from his family.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_03: He's a young man fighting with depression, and he ends up using alcohol to fight that depression.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_03: Uh his sister Julia is is um is similar though a little different.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_03: She also, like Sebastian, is not terribly interested in the Catholic faith of their upbringing.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_03: And she's living a kind of conventional life of a young flapper uh in London society.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_03: She's looking for just the right rich and powerful man to marry.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_03: Uh during Charles's Oxford years, he and Julia do not form any sort of significant relationship at all.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_03: But the book, uh, the meat of the book, the flashback of the book, covers 16 years.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_03: So later in his life, when Charles is a successful artist, he's married.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Now uh he has children.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_03: He ends up meeting on a uh a uh a transatlantic uh boat, uh Julia again.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_03: And on on that voyage, they begin uh an affair, and that is the second uh significant love in Charles's life.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: Julia's husband is a minor character in the book, but perhaps one of the most striking.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna read uh a little description that I bookmarked because this was just so punchy.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once that it took me a year of marriage to see.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: He simply wasn't all there.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: He wasn't a complete human being at all.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: He was a tiny bit of one, and naturally developed something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up to date that only this ghastly age could produce.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: This is how Julia describes her husband for a time, Rex Matram.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_03: He's a a buffoonish character, I think as as Waugh himself described him.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_03: A few minutes ago, I said that one of Waugh's chief aims in Brideshead and in his subsequent fiction was to present the human being in all his dimensions.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_03: So um as related to God.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_03: What we have in Rex Matram is a human being that has certainly not the three dimensions.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_03: He doesn't have any relationship to God, um, no faith whatsoever.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_03: He's just kind of obtuse when it comes to the most important questions of life.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_03: He doesn't even seem to have any sort of moral compass whatsoever.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_03: He converts to Catholicism or wants to convert to he does convert to Catholicism when he marries Julia.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and those are probably the most laugh-out loud sections of the book because he has no interest to interest in converting because of the faith itself.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he is just doing it to please Julia and so that they can be married uh by a cardinal of the Catholic Church and have the you know the most um boffo wedding that they can have.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but him trying to learn his catechism and trying to learn sort of the basics of the Catholic faith, it becomes very comical.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_03: And uh Sebastian and Julia's um young sister Cordelia has lots of fun teasing Rex about um Catholic belief.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_03: She even convinces them that there are secret monkeys in the Vatican and all of these strange things.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_03: And uh Wah has has a lot of fun, and it's sort of indicative of his earlier, more farcical comic writing.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_03: But on balance, that's not the tone of the novel.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but but Rex is is one of the characters in the book, not the only one, who's sort of representative of what Wah saw as the modern, as he says in that passage, the modern human being, untethered from God, untethered from significant reality, kind of living this utilitarian, two-dimensional, one-dimensional existence.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: The Center for Christianity and Public Life invites you to their annual summit for the good of the public.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: The summit gathers Christians and public service-minded leaders who want to think deeply and work practically for the health of our public life.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: Coming together from many places and perspectives, these leaders are united by the conviction that Christianity offers essential contributions for the good of our neighbors, our institutions, and our shared future.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: This year's summit will be held on October 5th through 7th in Washington, D.C., featuring speakers such as Judge Patrick Schultz, Mayor Danny Avila, Nazan and Ash, Russell Moore, Jane Kaminsky, Jennifer Hurt, Vince Picote, and many others.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: Learn more and register at ccpublife.org slash summit.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: And you can find that link in the show notes.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: So what is Vaugh's point in telling us this story?
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_03: Of all of Bride's Head?
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_03: Without spoiling the ending.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, without I know.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's like tying your hands, but now.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: But now answer.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_03: I think um, again, I would I would underscore what I what I have said.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's a story about memory, it's a story about reversal transformation.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_03: It's a story about Charles' transformation of his loves.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_03: What is truly lovable?
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_03: What sort of love truly satisfies the human person?
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_03: His first two loves, Sebastian and Julia, um, he is he is completely involved with both for a while, but he finds ultimately that both of them are lacking in significant ways.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_03: And so he has to go on searching um for love.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: So what makes this novel still so relatable?
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: What makes this novel a classic?
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_03: Again, I was being very simplistic at the outset in describing a classic.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_03: Any one work is going to have a wide variety of qualities that make it classic.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_03: It's not just going to be one thing.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but I'll go back to my own two criteria uh that I that I set forth at the beginning.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_03: One, the novel communicates the true, the good, and the beautiful, those perennial truths, and it does it in a very fresh way.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_03: It does it through characters that even in 2026 we might call relatively contemporary.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_03: We recognize these characters, uh, even though we may not be British, we're not in the middle of World War II, uh, we may not be artists, but we recognize these characters.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_03: We are still living in that modern world that Wah described.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_03: And for me, at least, that's what's so captivating.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_03: I feel like I am immersed in the world that I both love and struggle with.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um, they are um there's such variety in the characters.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, even even Sebastian and Julia who look alike, they're so much alike, but they're so different.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um and it's just fascinating to see Charles's transformation is wonderful.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_03: We haven't even talked about some of the of uh of uh the minor characters, uh like Lord Marchmain, Sebastian and Julia's and Cordelia's father, um, Lady Marchmain, uh the wife he divorced.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's um it's just a panoply of great characters, great dialogue.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the style is for Waugh, at least at the time he was writing it, uncharacteristically lush and romantic, at least in portions of the book, uh, especially when he's describing Charles falling in love.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_03: It's a very romantic language.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_03: Waugh's diction, his use of words is extraordinary.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_03: I I think he was the best uh pro-stylish in English in the 20th century.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_03: So all of those reasons.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: But then go to my second criteria.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_03: A classic advances the argument of a given tradition.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_03: I think what Waugh's advance is in Brideshead Revisited is that he shows us in literary terms, in uh in an argument of the imagination about what it means to be a believer in the midst of what he called a pagan world, an unbelieving world.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_03: He's not the first author ever to try that.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but I think he did it right there in the very center of the 20th century.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_03: He showed us what it meant to struggle with belief in the very midst of um the cultural decline of the mid-20th century.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: He really is such a beautiful writer.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: I was struck also by landscape descriptions, whenever there's just kind of the outdoors, any any descriptions of and the homes as well.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: So just very much an artist's eye describing paintings.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it's fitting that Charles Ryder is, in fact, a painter.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: And there we see, I think, one of his intentions of style um being one with the substance of the work.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um uh the lushness of the prose is one kind of with the lushness of the landscape being described, of the love being described, of the house, uh, Brideshead itself, Brightshead Castle being described.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's uh that is uh consummate artistry on Juan's part.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: So this is just a beautiful novel, a beautiful classic, and it's inspiring.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I take it it was one of the many books that inspired you in your own writing, because in addition to being a philosopher and all the other hats you wear regularly, an academic, a husband, a father, a grandfather, but you're also a novelist yourself.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: So we're going to switch gears now and talk about your novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: Which I really enjoyed when I read it earlier this summer.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: But um, how about you introduce us to Kate?
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to hear the backstory.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: How did you uh decide to write this book?
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: Where did you get the idea and just kind of walk us through it?
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um there were two inspirations for the novel, briefly.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_03: One was uh an advertisement that I saw on a bulletin board at a Panera restaurant in near where I lived in northern Virginia several years ago.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, you know, on these bulletin boards, uh people with their business cards and and little ads for whatnot.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_03: But this ad really struck me because it's and I describe it almost exactly as I saw it in the not in my novel.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_03: It had a border, as you know, you can create a border around an eight and a half by eleven sheet.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_03: It was a border of skeletons lined up head to toe.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_03: They made up the border of the sheet, and that that that caught my eye.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_03: And then the the advertisement itself uh also struck me.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_03: It was it was uh inviting people to come to something called the Death Cafe, which, as I learned, is a real thing.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_03: It is um it's kind of, I mean, think of it, it's kind of like a book club, but you don't read books so much as you come together with um strangers.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a very public thing, unlike uh many book clubs.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_03: You go to a coffee shop, you come together with strangers, you um eat tea and cake, which is kind of an interesting kind of Eucharistic symbol, and you talk about death.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_03: You talk about, you know, your fear of death, how you would like to be buried, how you would like your funeral to go, practical things like how to make a will, uh everything having to do with death.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_03: So I was doing some internet research on this.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_03: I realized that this phenomenon started in Europe and has uh migrated to the US.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_03: It um it's been uh profiled in the New York Times, USA Today.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uh it's a thing.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_03: And even in while I was writing the novel, a branch of it uh began meeting at my local public library.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_03: So it it I don't think it's a household name for everybody, but it's out there, it's a thing.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_03: I was fascinated by that.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_03: Why?
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_03: Because I guess as I I like, perhaps like Evelyn Lamois, I like to think about modern culture and uh the challenges of living in modern culture.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_03: And here I saw a group doing something that seemed so sad in a way, but also so human.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_03: And um because it was sad because they had no resources when it came to the question of death.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, presumably they weren't relying on faith uh or uh a family, uh a family set of practices, a church set of practices.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_03: They they had no devices when it came to death.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_03: So they were going to cobble together a culture and they were gonna kind of cooperate in trying to create a culture of their own of how human beings should face death.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_03: I just found that fascinating.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um sad, but also kind of brilliant in its own kind of limited way.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_03: So that was one big inspiration.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_03: And in the book, I changed Death Cafe to Death Symposium.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but but but that phenomenon appears in the novel.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the other inspiration was a failed novel uh that I was writing uh based on my own childhood experience.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_03: Uh my father was a university professor for many years at the University of Notre Dame, and so he had sabbatical leaves.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_03: Uh two of his sabbatical leaves, uh, he took our family to live in Rome, Italy.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_03: And one of those years, I was in eighth grade, so I was about 12, 13 years old, and I was taught in an international school.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_03: So my teachers were almost all Americans.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_03: They were young Americans, they were probably all in their 20s, maybe 30, who were having a big adventure, probably after college.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I loved them at the time, but as I got older, I began when I remembered that time, I always began to wonder what their lives were like.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_03: Like what did they, why did they come to Rome in the first place?
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_03: What did they do on the weekends?
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_03: Were they all friends?
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_03: And so I started a novel about a group of American teachers uh at an international school in Rome.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_03: That novel, as as many novels do, kind of petered out.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't know when, but somehow I just I just mashed up those two inspirations.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so my novel is dual time frame.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_03: Uh it takes place in 2020, uh, in COVID year 2020, and it's the present time frame.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_03: That's when my protagonist, Kate Montclair, uh, receives a grave diagnosis.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_03: She has a brain tumor, only months to live.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_03: And in searching for meaning, she attends uh a death symposium at a coffee shop in Washington, DC.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_03: That leads her on an adventure.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_03: But there's also flashbacks to her younger years when she, right after college, was a teacher at an international school in Rome.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_03: And those two timelines uh meet as the story of the book uh proceeds.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yet again.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yes, indeed.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_03: And in it, that's I you could say that I'm not trying to um compare myself to Wah, um, but I I I'm happy to say I'm inspired by him.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_03: And certainly with Kate Monclair's story, we get both sacred and profane memories.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I guess this was a more direct inspiration.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_03: There's it's also has a framing device, uh, just as Bright's Head Revisited does.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_03: So um we actually begin.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um, it's probably a little later than 2020.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_03: It's probably 2021.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not even sure I ever thought about the exact date.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_03: And then it flashes back to 2020, and then you flash back to about 1986, 87.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like a lot of successful novels have used this kind of framing device with at least like two periods involved.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: Why do you think this works so well?
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: Why do we, as readers, respond so well to this?
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_03: The two big themes.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_03: We love memory, right?
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_03: So the time frame is all about memory.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, we're gonna go back in time.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_03: We start in one time period and we go back into another.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_03: But more significantly, why do we like memory?
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_03: Why do we like to look back?
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_03: Because we hope at least to see reversal transformation, hopefully a positive one.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, sometimes not, though.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_03: And sometimes the memories are quite painful.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but we want to the framing device helps us consider our lives as it as a quest, as an adventure.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_03: Did we succeed in the quest?
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_03: Did we fail in the quest?
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_03: Was it something in between?
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: I can assess that by the long look back and trying to make sense out of my story makes much more sense when you bring together all these elements.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, how much of this, like let me ask you specifically, you know, as a Christian, a Catholic novelist, um, how do you think you approach this writing, these stories, differently than someone who perhaps is writing from a secular standpoint?
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: Because I'm thinking, even as like as God's people, we live in two timelines, right?
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like we live in the present age, but also um every day we proclaim that events that happened uh 2,000 years ago have even more significance for our lives today than anything else that happens like this very moment.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: So we live uh as God's people, we live um multiple timelines as it is.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: So, to what extent does this affect our how we read fiction, or in your case, how you write fiction and tell these stories?
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, it's um I I think you described it wonderfully there.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_03: You're you're constantly um keeping in mind that that um there are two time frames, or there's one frame here in time, and then there's another frame out of time.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_03: And that frame out of time is always, always intimately interacting with the world of time.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_03: And that is what I think any Christian novelist is going to try to depict in images, is um uh I'll quote here from um from Flanner O'Connor, another great uh this time American Christian Catholic author, short story writer, and novelist.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um she described her own work as trying to depict the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil, right?
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_03: So um again, any Christian writer I would think is trying to portray the action of grace, which is invisible, of course, uh in the world of time, which is visible.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_03: And that's a huge challenge.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, O'Connor herself said that's the hardest thing to do in fiction.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_03: It's the hardest thing to make plausible in fiction, is somebody, so a reversal in response to grace.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um you can do it, but to make it believable, uh realistic or convincing, rather, that's really, really hard to do, especially for a reader who doesn't share your faith.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I I there may not be a harder task uh in fiction and probably in art generally than that.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Kate Monclair.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Herself is struggling with her faith.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: So talk about this choice that you chose a character who's specifically like really wrestling.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, and um, because we're talking about Brideshead Revisited as well, I'll make comparisons.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_03: And those are fair.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_03: I don't want to say that was the only influence on my book, um, but there's certainly some fair comparisons to make, uh, at least in structure and character.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um, like Charles Ryder, Kate Montclair is a very modern woman.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, she is an English teacher at kind of a posh secondary school uh in Washington, D.C.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, she's been a career English teacher, um, and she gets her diagnosis.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_03: And like many of our contemporaries, she has no resources.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, she has no faith.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_03: She has no family.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, she had a husband and they were divorced, and then he subsequently got an annulment.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_03: So it was, at least in the eyes of the Catholic Church, it was never, it was never a marriage to begin with, which is very odd.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_03: They had no children.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_03: Um, she is just kind of floating through her existence.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_03: She's um a little more, a lot more self-aware, say, than a Rex Matrum, uh, and maybe even than a Charles Writer, a little more self-aware, at least Charles at the beginning of Brideshead.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but she doesn't know what to do when she receives this diagnosis that she only has months to live.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_03: And because it is a certain sort of brain cancer, it's going to be a very painful death.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_03: As anybody would be, she is shocked, she is terrified, she does not know what to do.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_03: She's not the kind of person who goes to something like the Death Symposium.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_03: That's not her, that's not her scene, but she is desperate enough for meaning, uh, for help, to go to one of these meetings.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_03: And lo and behold, it's being moderated by an old friend that she hasn't seen in years.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, another teacher at the International School in Rome that she taught with uh all those years ago.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_03: And that triggers um the flashbacks and the connections to the earlier time frame.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: I should note that despite the title, this is actually a very encouraging kind of book.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: And perhaps the title is encouraging.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: This is the good death.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, we know from the beginning.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_03: And I and I like to tell people there um there's no um, there's no, I don't call it Hollywood ending.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_03: I she dies.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_03: There's no magic cure, um, no 11th hour operation.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_03: I tell you in the title, there's no mystery to it.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's the good death of Kate Montclair.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_03: But as you um nicely noted, um what a good death is um is is um is happily ambiguous.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um the chief conflict in the book, this doesn't spoil the ending, but the chief conflict in the book is that through the death symposium and through her reunion with her old friend who moderates it, a woman named Adele Schrader, Kate begins to contemplate uh an assisted suicide, euthanasia.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_03: And again, the the the those Greek roots that make up our word euthanasia mean good death.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's her thinking, why should I put up with months of suffering?
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_03: What is the point of that?
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_03: And even though it's against the law of the Commonwealth of Virginia, where the novel is set, um Kate thinks it's a it's a you know, she's gonna risk breaking the law and take her own life.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_03: And that's um that's the central conflict of of the book.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: So how um how did you develop this story?
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm curious.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: Did you know where you were going when you started?
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's a good question.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think the the the the truest, shortest answer is no, I did not know.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um I knew broadly the kind of ending I wanted.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_03: I I don't think I can say more without spoiling, but I I knew the kind very generally though, without any specification.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_03: I knew the kind of ending I wanted.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_03: I knew I I don't think this is a spoiler, uh, because you you've already said it's an encouraging book, a hopeful book.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I thought of it as a comedy throughout.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_03: A comedy in the classical sense of comedy, not that we're always slapping our knees and and howling with laughter, though I think there are some funny bits, I hope, but that it there is a resolution that is um that is happy.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um the conflict is resolved in a way that is that is happy, that is satisfying.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_03: It does not end in tragedy.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I knew I wanted that.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_03: Beyond that, I did not know very much.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think an author needs to know too much before composing.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_03: My chief shortcoming as a writer is that I'm also a philosopher.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe that's one of my advantages.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know, but it doesn't help always to be so analytical.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_03: Um I love structure and note-taking and planning and mapping things out beforehand.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but that can really uh that can really turn into an obstacle to creativity pretty quickly.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_03: You need a general sense of where you're going, so you don't just spin your wheels.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_02: But really, you don't need to know too much.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: Some of it at least has to be uh almost like what the ancients called the inspiration of the muses.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_03: And you've any artist doing any kind of work of art, and you don't even have to be an artist, uh someone cooking dinner, you know, trying a recipe they've never had, or working in a garden, uh really doing anything, um, can have those moments where you have insight, which is an intellectual seeing of reality in a way you had not hitherto seen it.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_03: And I I I have had those moments, certainly in composing.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you have that moment like, oh yes, yes, that's what this character should do at this moment, or that's what he should say, or that's the sort of minor character I need to introduce at this point, or that's just that's the exact word I need to describe this person.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_03: Those are all little moments of creative uh insight that an artist has, but it's in the thick of the work, or in the thick of making the dish in the kitchen, or digging in the so a lot of times one additional quality of a classic is that it's older.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: Usually we think of classic books, certain, I mean, they they've had like fine wine, they've aged maybe 70, 80, 90 or years, or maybe even millennia.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: But um, your book has been described as a contemporary classic.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to hear your thoughts.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: Can classics still be written today?
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_01: And should we just boldly uh hope for that for our own writing?
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's great.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_03: I'll answer the last part first.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, we uh an artist should aspire to greatness, I think, without being hubristic.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_03: You should always try to do your best.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_03: It's a really good question, though.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_03: In everything that an artist makes, should he or she be aspiring to the heights that I again was describing at the very beginning?
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_03: Um, definitely you want to communicate perennial truths and goodness and beauty.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_03: But in every work, are you aspiring to advance the argument of your tradition in a substantial way?
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_03: Isn't it okay just to create a work that's it's it's new, it's different.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um, it's a uh a new kind of murder mystery.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_03: It's a new murder mystery, it's a good murder mystery.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, it might even be a minor masterpiece of a murder mystery, but it doesn't, it doesn't break huge new ground.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's fair to say we can have works that not all works need to be classics, though.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_03: So I guess I'm contradicting what I first said, but over the course of a career, I think an artist should aspire to one or two classics, one or two masterpieces.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_03: Now to the hardier question, can that be done sort of, you know, here in August 2020?
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_03: I was writing this morning uh on my current novel.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um I you know, it would uh it would probably um uh it would probably I would probably grind to a halt if I if I thought too hard, at least about uh masterpiece and classic.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think we need a little bit of time to assess, a little bit of distance to discern whether a work has really uh bec uh added to the conversation of a tradition or substantially redirected it.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_03: I guess sometimes it's very evident, and I think that's why people say use phrases like this is a modern classic.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe it's evident.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_03: I think we at least need, I don't know, a couple, three years to begin to compare it and see what it did.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, a great work of art is going to be complex, it's gonna take some time to absorb.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, that's one thought.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_03: But but again, another thought is some works are so great, you don't need to think a lot.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_03: It's very clear from the outset that the tradition has has taken a bold, new, and very positive direction.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so I won't deny that that's possible, too.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: That is really helpful in thinking.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I appreciate you sharing this from your perspective, both as a philosopher, but also as a novelist writing still.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: Our final question, which kind of continues in that same vein.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_01: What classic do you wish you had written and why?
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, uh, I love that question.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_03: Wonderful question.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's really a question about who are my heroes.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm gonna think of um, I think of myself as a novelist, an artist, even before being a philosopher.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_03: Philosophy kind of comes in as a as a help, uh, uh, as a help to my artistic life.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um so who are my heroes?
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I'll start by telling by mentioning two novels I was tempted to put first, but didn't.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um, one is the novel that we discussed this afternoon, Brideshead Revisited.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, another is a novel by the author I mentioned earlier, Jane Austen.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_03: It would have been great to have written Pride and Prejudice, but I put neither of them absolutely first.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I would put absolutely first what I think is one of the greatest novels by the greatest comic writer of the 20th century, and that's P.G.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_03: Woodhouse.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_03: And I am thinking of his novel, The Code of the Woosters, which is one of his Jeeves and Wooster novels.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm not being flippant when I say that.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_03: I I really wish I I had, I really wish I had Woodhouse's exuberance, his love of writing, his command of the English language, the joy that just exudes from every page of his work, the hilarity.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's it's a very funny, um, unserious novel.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I wish I had the style, the verb, the humor of a P.G.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_03: Woodhouse.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so I'm gonna put his Code of the Woosters as number one.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_03: And in fact, even Lemois himself was a huge fan of P.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_03: G.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_03: Woodhouse and would refer to him as the master with uh capital T, capital M.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_03: And again, he didn't mean that.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_03: That was not just an offhand comment.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_03: He seriously considered him to be an absolute master of English prose, and so do I.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because beautiful writing can also be entertaining and funny.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_03: One would one would hope so, and I think it is.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Daniel McKinnerney, thank you so much.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you, Nadia.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_03: This has been a real delight.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_03: I really appreciate having me on today.