Gravitas

The suggestion that I objected to Richard Mitchell on the ground that he was too sarcastic for my effete tastes rankled so much in my soul it occasioned a persevering and intent pursuit of the practice of sarcasm for a long while after.

I objected to Richard Mitchell because I wanted to displease the person who thought the book interesting enough to assign it to a class for I had not enjoyed the book, so I found reasons. After all, what glory is there in agreeing with every idea a teacher holds? No doubt a great deal of my perennial bafflement with the workings of English grammar and especially the impenetrable mysteries of punctuation exacerbated my hostility. I think I came up with five reasons for disliking Mitchell: he was profane, he was lewd, he was always in a bad mood, his wit was not very light and probably something else. I wish I had kept the book review I wrote; alas, I did not. That it was much the reaction dissidens gets when he is first descried has often struck me and with no little force.

The truth is I was as perverse as I wanted to find Mitchell.

Nevertheless I persevered in reading him, especially under the early and goading intimation that in my fatuity I had not understood him as well as had an unassuming housewife taking the course as an elective for one of the lesser degrees. So I read Less Than Words Can Say again and I read The Graves of Academe, but with little mastery. I knew he knew what he was talking about, of that he left no doubt, but I cannot say even now that I could explain to you the argument of those books. They need to be re-read.

I bought his books when I ran across them and a few years later read through the selections out of the Underground Grammarian collected in The Leaning Tower of Babel. I read these at leisure, during lunch each day, a few at a time. These I relished and I learned to love the wit and to understand his position and the targets at which he aimed.

He may seem snide, taking shots in a way almost indiscriminate at harmless writers of memoranda, yet Mitchell was careful in finding his targets. He stayed away from the women and children, he only put enemy combatants in his sights. The confusion surely came from enemies who were in a war where they expected no retaliation, and it seems they were often enraged when they found one rising out of the landscape they meant to pillage, challenging their right of entry, resisting them by force of intellectual arms. And what force! It must also shock those who are casual about something when they meet with someone who is serious about the same thing. It shocked me.

To wilt under the scorn of Richard Mitchell is to fail to understand the proper importance of language. Ways of speaking are ways of thinking, and if one is careless about the way one thinks, then one deserves the scorn. Reading Mitchell ought to make one want to think as clearly as he did, and it ought to make one strive to do so.

One day, after they had dropped the bomb, a man in Chicago started looking out of his window and wondering how it was that we had come to such a place. The enormity of the thing pushed his thoughts back and back, and he came to the conclusion that it was because of William of Ockham, back in the fourteenth century.

Richard Weaver’s cultural criticism is so profound the most easy and natural thing at first is to dismiss it. That is what I did, at least. No way, I thought, these things are too remote, the very idea of making such connections was preposterous. Still, he had a lot of interesting insights.

Curiously, this was my reaction to the person who introduced me to the book. My heart leapt to hear some of the things he said; he had some very interesting ideas and he was articulating things in a way other teachers I had were not—more clearly, more accurately, with better understanding. He had clearly out-read me, even the authors I thought I was the only person interested in our circles (for more than the predatory purpose of garnering a sermon illustration): from Solzhenitsyn to Sarte, from Postman to Rookmaker, from T.S. Eliot to Dante. It really threw me for a loop when he made Eliot out to be a conservative—for crying out loud, he was a modernist poet! It baffled me when he explained the ending of Shotakoviches Fifth. And when he wanted to argue about what happens under that chestnut tree in Nausea I had to back down claiming I had only read the thing once.

At that time I thought Ockham’s razor was the only way to shave. I repudiated Weaver and his ideas hard and I kept it up, losing ground gradually. When at last I had to capitulate, in order to give nobody the pleasure of a victory or my acknowledged defeat I claimed what happened was that I’d been a Metaphysical Realist all along and only had to realize it.

And in a way it was the truth. More than any of the reading I did, what stayed with me was from the Chronicles of Narnia, those high, remote, medieval glories of nobility, of chivalry, of courage and goodness, of adventurous hope and of humble piety. And then there was Tolkien creating the thirst that draws us reading through so vast a desert of inferior imitation. So much did I long for what Tolkien showed me I tried my hand at the inferior imitation by candlelight and produced a great many maps.

There is a fundamental and ineluctable order that connects all things and demands the proper ordering of all our affections; it demands the putting in place of all our loyalties: some of which have to be realigned, some of which have to be quelled, some of which need to be mortified in cold blood. And it was this order that I had been taught to love before I knew it. I saw it in the vision of an Irishman from England and I glimpsed it in other places. Tolkien opened a high window in a cold tower that stood high in the mountains and looked over the peaks to a green land and the distant sea.

And then one day I was called to order, and forced to come to an understanding which at first was very painful, and still seems unending. I would have considered myself in January of the year 2000, a Nominalist by conviction. But ideas have consequences. One consequence is a tuning of the soul in which books are some of the instruments of tuning, but in which tuning many instruments are used to clean, and realign, and fix until it sounds again in tune with the cosmos.