Welcome to the third episode of our new podcast season about Liberalism and the Arts.
This episode features Christopher Scalia, a literary scholar, essayist, and author of “13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read).” He joins Henry Oliver to discuss Henry Adams’s “Democracy,” a sharp and darkly comic novel about power, corruption, and political life in Washington D.C. They discuss whether democracy can survive cynicism, the moral compromises of politics, the relationship between virtue and government, why good people leave public life, the enduring relevance of 19th-century political fiction, and much more.
New episodes of this podcast season will come out every two weeks. You can find the first two episodes here and here.
TRANSCRIPT
HENRY OLIVER: I am here with Christopher Scalia. He’s a former professor of English. He’s a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s the author of 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read), and he’s here to talk to me about Democracy by Henry Adams.
CHRISTOPHER SCALIA: The novel, not the system of government.
OLIVER: Maybe both. [laughter]
SCALIA: Though we will talk about the system of government a little.
OLIVER: Christopher, hi.
SCALIA: Hello. Thank you for having me.
The Place of Henry Adams in American Literature
OLIVER: You know this novel pretty well.
SCALIA: Pretty well, yes.
OLIVER: You’ve studied it carefully. It’s not a major American classic like Moby-Dick.
SCALIA: It’s not a great novel.
OLIVER: It’s not a great novel.
SCALIA: It’s an interesting novel.
OLIVER: OK.
SCALIA: It’s a novel that’s fun to talk about, but Henry Adams was not a novelist, and you can tell.
OLIVER: What are his main—
SCALIA: He’s best known for The Education of Henry Adams, which was a memoir written in the third person, published after he died. I think it was published in 1918. It is generally considered one of the great autobiographical works published in the 20th century.
OLIVER: Sure.
SCALIA: He also wrote a history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations.
OLIVER: That’s a great book.
SCALIA: I have not read it.
OLIVER: Oh, that’s a great book.
SCALIA: But people say it is a great book. It’s something like eight or nine volumes, and it only covers two presidential administrations, which is impressive.
Then he also wrote a work that people rave about, that I have not read, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. He was a medieval history professor at Harvard, and I think that book grew out of that.
I’m not a Henry Adams expert. I’ve read this novel a couple of times, and I do think it is very interesting. It wasn’t his only novel. He wrote one more a few years after this. He didn’t publish either novel under his name. This one was published anonymously, and the other one he used a pen name.
OLIVER: One reason why we’re interested in it, or why there is interest in it, is that he is one of the Boston Adamses, as you might say.
SCALIA: He is, yes. His great-grandfather was a president. He is of the Adams family [fingers snapping à la The Addams Family], and his grandfather was a president. His father was a congressman and then a diplomat to—
OLIVER: To England.
SCALIA: Yes, it was some minor country like that.
OLIVER: He’s the fifth generation in the John Adams—
SCALIA: That was a little—[laughs]
OLIVER: No, I’m just going to overlook that. If the Americans still feel confident enough to make those jokes, good for you. He’s the fifth generation of the John Adams line.
SCALIA: Yes, that’s right. His mother’s side of the family, they weren’t slouches either, though I don’t remember the details of what they got up to. I mentioned he was a historian. He was also a journalist. His father was Lincoln’s ambassador to the UK, obviously during the Civil War. Adams spent the Civil War abroad, but he was a journalist then. I think he was writing for The New York Times.
OLIVER: That’s when he read John Stuart Mill and became convinced of the importance of virtue and intelligence and high-mindedness in order to make democracy successful. I think a lot of that comes through in this book, right?
SCALIA: Yes, right. Exactly.
OLIVER: Can it be done? Is democracy going to crash? I feel about this book that it’s a very American anxiety. We’re not going to sustain our republican virtues. We’re not going to sustain the morality of the Constitution. You can set up a system, but it’s the culture and it’s the manners that really make it. It’s a great novel to read now because those anxieties are very, very loud.
SCALIA: There’s even election fraud in the novel. It’s relevant for all sorts of reasons. [laughter]
Let’s talk about the novel. Basically, it is about a young woman, 30-year-old, recently widowed woman.
OLIVER: And her child died.
SCALIA: Her child also died. Basically, struggling to find direction and purpose in life. She’d spent time in Boston and New York trying to find meaning. Eventually decides to come to Washington, DC, along with her sister, Sybil. The main character’s name is Madeleine Lighthorse Lee. Her sister is Sybil.
When she arrives in DC, it’s just a few months after the election of a new president. That president had been governor of Indiana. He’s an outsider. He doesn’t have any connections in DC, which is good for the plot because it means there’s a lot of wrangling for positions and jockeying for cabinet positions and things like that.
While in DC, she makes a couple of important friends. They are contrasting figures. One of them is a man named Silas P. Ratcliffe, which is just a great novelistic name. He’s a senator from Illinois who is eventually named secretary of [the] treasury. He’s a Machiavellian figure, unprincipled man who develops a close relationship and romantic relationship with Madeleine and eventually proposes to her.
OLIVER: He wants to marry her because she has money and because she would give him a good image as a presidential candidate. It’s a cynical—
SCALIA: It’s cynical, but also, yes, she seems to be an attractive woman in her own right. But yes, she’d be good for his image.
OLIVER: They’re both cynical. There’s a wonderful moment early on, where she’s taken by her friend to the Senate. She sits in the gallery, and she sees Ratcliffe give a speech. He’s this wonderful orator. She compares him, I think, to Webster and tells him how wonderful he is. Adams says that this is so invigorating to Silas P. Ratcliffe that he “leapt up like a salmon catching a fly and was completely happy for the hook to gorge itself in him.” He just flailed in this beautiful moment. We shouldn’t blame Madeleine for being too cynical. It’s absolutely a marvelous image.
SCALIA: It’s also hilarious that she compares him to Webster. Not hilarious, but comparing him to Webster is interesting because Webster was a great orator. But Webster, in the Compromise of 1850, disappointed a lot of people of Massachusetts for compromising his antislavery principles. If Ratcliffe is an unprincipled character, which he quite clearly is, I think that comparison to Webster does double duty there.
When she quotes a particular line that he says during his speech, she singles out this line: “Our strength lies in this twisted and tangled mass of isolated principles, the hair of the half-sleeping giant of party.” She says it’s quite equal to anything of Webster’s. It doesn’t really seem like an especially good line. It’s ironic, also. He’s emphasizing principles, but of course, he doesn’t have any himself. Yes, it’s a double-edged compliment.
OLIVER: It also reflects badly on her. Adams is careful to tell us that she has not, in fact, read Webster. Her friend has marked the important passages, and she’s just looked at those.
SCALIA: This gets to an important thing about the novel. I’m just going to jump ahead to how people—I haven’t talked about John Carrington yet.
OLIVER: Sure.
Interpreting Democracy
SCALIA: Let me talk about him, and then I’ll talk about how people tend to interpret this novel. Carrington is the anti-Ratcliffe. He’s a Virginian, and he fought for the Confederacy. His family lost its fortune after the Civil War. He is a man of principle, and despite fighting for the Confederacy, he is the moral—Earl Harbert, in his introduction to the Penguin edition, calls him the moral and political hero. The very fact that he fought for the Confederacy undermines that moral, that virtue, which is something that Ratcliffe likes to point out [at] a couple of points over the course of the novel.
He is a good man in the context of the novel, insofar as he tries to warn Madeleine just how unsavory Ratcliffe is. He gives her important information that helps her make the right decision when Ratcliffe proposes to her.
Generally, readers understand Adams as supporting Madeleine’s decisions. A lot of people see similarities between Madeleine’s attitudes, her status as an observer, somebody who’s just trying to learn things, as being very much like Henry Adams’s own positioning of himself in The Education of Henry Adams.
But I think that interpretation overlooks some of the things you were just pointing out. She is not a completely virtuous or intelligent character, and I think readers are supposed to be a lot more skeptical about her decisions.
OLIVER: There’s a wonderful bit. It’s on the first page.
SCALIA: Yes, right away.
OLIVER: When you were talking about how she is trying to find what to do with her life, he talks about how:
She had read philosophy in the original German, and the more she read, the more she was disheartened that so much culture should lead to nothing—nothing. After talking of Herbert Spencer for an entire evening with a very literary transcendental commission-merchant, she could not see that her time had been better employed than when in former days she had passed it in flirting with a very agreeable young stock-broker.
He is satirizing her all the time.
SCALIA: All the time. I think because we root for her, we don’t want her to marry Ratcliffe, that somehow gets confused with the idea that she is—
OLIVER: She’s the goodie.
SCALIA: —she’s the goodie, she’s a virtuous protagonist. She’s a very flawed character. Something else from early on: The narrator tells us Mrs. Lee “certainly knew very little,” and “though not brighter than her neighbors, the world persisted in classing her among clever women.” She has an air of having “read voraciously and promiscuously one subject after another.”
People who compare her to Adams say that she’s always in search of knowledge. She is in search of knowledge, but we learn early on that she goes to DC:
She was bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery of democracy and government. . . . What she wished to see, she thought, was the clash of interests, the interests of forty millions of people and a whole continent.
It goes on for a while, and it all seems very virtuous until the end of the paragraph. The narrator tells us, “What she wanted, was POWER,” and power is in all caps. So she’s not a straightforward, simple heroine. I think that she’s much more complicated than that. That’s important because she makes the right decision in giving up on Ratcliffe. I won’t give away the ending of what she does at the very end of the novel.
OLIVER: No.
SCALIA: We can talk about that later. Most readers interpret that—most critics say, clearly, she made the right decision. I don’t think we’re necessarily supposed to interpret it that way. I think it’s more complicated.
OLIVER: No, not at all. I think one other thing I’ll say in support of this is, Ratcliffe gives himself away. When they go on the picnic to Mount Vernon, he says, in quite plain terms, you have to be immoral for politics to succeed. All this namby-pamby virtue stuff. He’s very hard-nosed. She just chooses not to listen to that.
I think Adams has set it up, we’re to understand, she wants to be involved in the game. She’s hooked a big fish, who she knows is potentially a bit suspect. She does not know the extent to which he means what he says, but she’s happy to take a gamble. I agree with you. The idea that she is Henry Adams is frankly absurd.
SCALIA: That scene at Mount Vernon—I think that’s where she finds out his past corruption. I mentioned this earlier. He committed election fraud when he was senator. He explains that he did so because if the election went the other way, I think Lincoln wouldn’t have won the election. He basically committed fraud so that the Union would win the Civil War. OK, that is a pretty good reason to commit election fraud, but it’s still election fraud.
What’s interesting is that Madeleine has no apparent reaction to it. She doesn’t question the decision. She doesn’t tut-tut. She doesn’t even say what I just did, which is, “OK, I can see why you did that, but you probably shouldn’t have.” She just glosses over it entirely. It’s not until she discovers another selfish act of fraud he commits, or he accepts a bribe later on, that she uses that basically as the excuse to not marry him.
OLIVER: The election fraud, he’s still electable. The bribe, the calculation changes for her, right?
SCALIA: Yes, that’s right. That’s a good point.
OLIVER: I think she’s deeply cynical, actually.
SCALIA: I think that’s right.
The Real-life Inspiration for Democracy
OLIVER: One thing about this book is that it’s very real. Adams was in Washington. He was very disappointed by the Grant administration. All his young ideals of reform hardened into a kind of cynicism. His wife was a great hostess of salons and was well known in Washington, and that seems to have informed the book. Give us some of the details on, to what extent is this novel just Adams venting about his own experiences in politics?
SCALIA: One of the reasons it sold so well is that readers recognized it was a roman à clef. They didn’t know who the author was, but clearly, the author knew what was going on.
OLIVER: Was an insider.
SCALIA: Yes, was an insider. Ratcliffe is believed to have been based on James Blaine, the senator from Maine—I didn’t mean to rhyme that, but rhymes are always welcome [laughter]—who you may know best from Death by Lightning. Did you watch the Netflix—
OLIVER: I haven’t seen it.
SCALIA: It’s pretty good.
OLIVER: It’s good?
SCALIA: Yes.
OLIVER: OK.
SCALIA: Ratcliffe seems to be a combination of Blaine and then a senator named Donald Cameron. Donald Cameron was an old senator who married a much younger woman that Henry Adams seemed to have some interest in himself, so there’s personal intrigue there.
Then some of the scandals that come up in the novel are based on or are variations on scandals from the Grant administration. One of the scandals that upset Adams the most from that administration, which he writes about in The Education of Henry Adams, was a railroad scandal. I think it’s called the Erie Railroad scandal. He adapts that and turns it into a steamboat bribe, which is what Ratcliffe commits, or we learn he commits later in the novel.
OLIVER: Right, but there’s a bigger satire on the Grant administration to do with—there’s that wonderful passage where he says that the president has come to town, he’s newly elected, he’s decided to do everything according to principles, and he’s going to be uncorruptible. Two days later, he’s so overwhelmed by all the patronage that he’s leaving it to other people to decide what offices they can all have.
SCALIA: Right.
OLIVER: It becomes a complete machine when Ratcliffe, I think he leaves one of the salons or the picnic or something, and he’s had enough of other people. He gets to his office, and Adams is very funny, saying there’s one of them hanging off the chair reading the paper, and one of them is chewing tobacco, and one of them is over there. They’re all just waiting to get their claws in.
SCALIA: If you like more of that, you should watch Death by Lightning. That’s an important plot in there. That patronage element is also important in the relationship between Ratcliffe and Carrington. Ratcliffe—essentially, he wants to get Carrington out of the picture, so he offers him a couple of jobs. The first job he offers him is as counsel for the secretary of the treasury, which is his department, and Carrington turns it down. He expected Carrington would turn it down. He knew Carrington wouldn’t accept anything from him. Then he goes behind the scenes and has somebody else in the administration offer Carrington a position, something to do with Mexico.
OLIVER: Which would be to send him away, get him out of town.
SCALIA: Exactly. Get him out so he’s not a rival anymore.
OLIVER: Let’s not have this big reveal of the secret.
SCALIA: Yes. Carrington accepts that one because he doesn’t know Ratcliffe—I think he suspects Ratcliffe is behind it but doesn’t know for sure. And he accepts it.
OLIVER: He feels unable to turn down—
SCALIA: Yes, he’s already turned down one. Because he’s pretty much destitute, he needs to do something for his family. That is a statement on the patronage system, as well as a statement on the relationship between two of those central characters.
OLIVER: This is about the Grant administration, and it’s about the particular experiences Adams had. He wrote a big article when he was young, saying there should be civil service reform, and it’s so important. I think it was in The Edinburgh or The Quarterly Review. Basically, no one read it; no one cared. He had to learn that the world will not take note. To what extent does it become a general satire on politics and political behavior? Do you think it reaches that, or is it too contained?
SCALIA: I think it does become—I don’t know about a satire. It asks serious questions about democracy and how well it works. I should say there are a couple of explicit mentions of civil service reform, but it doesn’t become a novel about that. He’s not novelizing that article, really. There are hints of it, as we just said, but I think it’s—what makes it an interesting read today, it’s really not the romantic plots. The characters are fun, but they’re not really entirely convincing characters. This is worth reading now because of the questions it raises about democracy and about politicians.
For example, Ratcliffe is without principle, and that’s bad, but he also says some things about needing to compromise that aren’t bad. It seems actually entirely reasonable and necessary in a democracy.
Madeleine makes a decision. Madeleine, over the course of the novel—at the beginning, she wants to find out more about democracy. At the end, she leaves DC because, as she puts it—I think her last sentence in the novel is, “I want to go to Egypt. . . . Democracy has shaken my nerves to pieces.” That’s one of the last things she says. So, she leaves the United States.
Now, listeners and viewers, Henry had a book club about this book a few weeks ago. I think you brought this—we talked about this a little bit in the book club.
OLIVER: We did.
Adams on the Question of Democracy’s Survival
SCALIA: There are elements of Austen novels in here with the romantic subplot. I think you pointed out Sense and Sensibility, where the two sisters are—
OLIVER: That’s right.
SCALIA: This reminds me of Pride and Prejudice, where Mrs. Bennet always has shaken nerves. That’s not a good sign. I think this is actually a sign of Madeleine’s weakness. She’s giving up on it. Again and again, characters in the novel are really asking about whether democracy works and whether the American form of democracy can survive. There are so many great lines about it.
OLIVER: We should say, if anyone is thinking of reading it, it’s very quotable. It’s very readable.
SCALIA: Very quotable and readable.
OLIVER: It moves very quickly. You won’t be bored.
SCALIA: No.
OLIVER: The sheer cynicism, and some of the characters really happy to chance it, it’s quite shocking at times. It’s a good read.
SCALIA: It’s worth reading. Absolutely. Here are some of those quotable lines. The narrator says in chapter 2, “Democracy, rightly understood, is government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators.” [laughter] It’s a pretty good line. Of course, the Senate was different then, but I think people still probably like to quote that.
Then also in chapter 2:
To her mind the Senate was a place where people went to recite speeches, and she naively assumed that the speeches were useful and had a purpose, but as they did not interest her she never went again. This is a very common conception of Congress; many Congressmen share it.
[laughter] Then, “Washington more than any other city in the world swarms with simple-minded exhibitions of human nature; men and women curiously out of place, whom it would be cruel to ridicule and ridiculous to weep over.” There are a lot of pretty funny lines about DC and about politics there.
The narrator has more serious meditations about democracy. Here’s one of them:
There may be some mistake about a doctrine which makes the wicked, when a majority, the mouthpiece of God against the virtuous, but the hopes of mankind are staked on it; and if the weak in faith sometimes quail when they see humanity floating in a shoreless ocean, on this plank, which experience and religion long since condemned as rotten, mistake or not, men have thus far floated better by its aid, than the popes ever did with their prettier principle; so that it will be a long time yet before society repents.
That’s a marvelous passage. It’s a version of Winston Churchill’s “the worst form of government, except for everything that’s been tried before.”
OLIVER: That’s right. How cynical is the book? I think that’s a good passage, but does he give us enough of a solution to the problem?
SCALIA: I don’t think he does.
OLIVER: Then that’s really the kind of—
SCALIA: I think that’s one of the shortcomings of the novel. You understand why Madeleine leaves, but again, I think we’re supposed to understand her as making the wrong decision because Carrington’s out of the picture. She leaves. She’s ceding the territory to precisely the kind of people who shouldn’t be running the government.
OLIVER: There’s this very important thing at the end when—we have to give things away—but after Madeleine has left and said, “This has shaken my nerves to pieces,” her sister writes to Carrington. She says that Madeleine has sent her a note saying, “The bitterest part of all this horrid story is that nine out of 10 of our countrymen would say I had made a mistake.”
SCALIA: Which is another great appeal—or I guess not an appeal—condemnation of democracy. “Most people wouldn’t understand I made the right decision.” She thinks she made the right decision. In that case, maybe nine out of 10 people would be correct. In this case, rejecting Ratcliffe and leaving the United States—well, rejecting Ratcliffe was certainly the right decision.
OLIVER: Was it? One thing I’m interested in with this book—
SCALIA: Wow.
OLIVER: I know. I know.
SCALIA: Hot take.
OLIVER: Here’s my thing.
SCALIA: I’m glad I wasn’t drinking water to spit out at the time.
OLIVER: [laughs] One reading of this book is to say, Henry Adams, he was a young idealist. He comes to Washington. He worked for his father when his father was in [the] House of Representatives. He’s not very good at it. He knows he’s not good, right?
SCALIA: Yes.
OLIVER: Henry Adams is just not really good. He is pretty good at the journalism, books, ideas. In this book, he reaches a point of being able to say—do you remember Ratcliffe says something like, “Oh, talking about reforming the government is a whole load of pish. Until you reform the country and reform the culture, reforming the government is just a waste of time.”
SCALIA: “No representative government can long be much better or much worse than the society it represents. Purify society and you purify the government. But try to purify the government artificially and you only aggravate failure.”
OLIVER: Isn’t that, in a way, the moral of the book? Which is to say, the government has to work with the material that it’s got. Ratcliffe did some awful things, but as you say, he got good ends. Carrington was in the wrong army, as it were, but he’s quite moral. Madeleine’s real failure is that she’s not actually prepared to do the dirty work, make the compromises.
SCALIA: I think that’s right.
OLIVER: In a way, what he’s saying is, “No, democracy, it’s awful, and it’s full of all these bad things, but it can be made to work.” The people who are being satirized here are not actually the Ratcliffes and so on. It’s the people like Madeleine, the intellectuals, the aspirationals, the people more like Henry Adams, who should be doing a better job of improving the culture. Right?
SCALIA: I think that’s one of the interesting things about Ratcliffe. I’ve been diminishing Adams’s skill as a novelist, but this is something great novelists do. They have the right ideas expressed by bad characters. He’s right also when they’re at Mount Vernon talking about George Washington. He points out that George Washington wouldn’t make it today. I can’t remember the reasons he gives.
OLIVER: He says he’d have to learn our way of doing politics. It’s all changed.
SCALIA: That’s totally understandable. He’s probably right about that. That doesn’t mean that the way of the present day is better, but he’s almost certainly right about Washington. She knows, she recognizes that politics means getting your hands dirty. I can’t find the passage right now, but there’s a passage where the narrator describes her seeing the machinery of government work and get everybody muddy. She knows that, but yes, it’s too much for her.
We haven’t talked about a minor character named Gore. There’s an important dinner-party conversation about democracy. Gore stands up for it. He is prodemocracy.
Oh, actually, I want to go back to your approving statement of what Ratcliffe says, of my quote about “purify the government artificially, and you’ll aggravate failure.” Tocqueville wrote, “The corruption of men who have casually risen to power has a coarse and vulgar infection in it, which renders it contagious to the multitude.” He’s suggesting the reverse, isn’t he? That the powerful corrupt the people who elect them to office.
I don’t know if we have to choose between Ratcliffe and Tocqueville or if we can find a compromise between them. I think both seem entirely reasonable. Both the people are capable of corrupting politicians and vice versa, but what Ratcliffe says does seem reasonable, absolutely reasonable.
OLIVER: I think it’s reasonable, and I think if we read the news today, we get some sense of the persistent truth of that remark.
SCALIA: I don’t know what you mean. [laughter] Yes, I think that’s right.
Let me find this. OK, here’s the passage I was looking for from Gore. There’s a dinner party. As so often happens at dinner parties in DC, we talk about democracy. Ratcliffe leaves the room, and Madeleine asks this—I think he’s an Irishman named Gore—“What do you think of democracy?” He says, “I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it.” He defends it—there’s a Darwinian strain going through some of the novel.
OLIVER: She reads Darwin.
SCALIA: She does read, yes.
OLIVER: Ratcliffe says, “Do you believe this nonsense?”
SCALIA: Yes, that’s right. I forgot about that.
OLIVER: Very important exchange, yes.
SCALIA: He bases his belief in democracy on human progress. He calls it “the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact that the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilisation aims at this mark.”
He acknowledges that it is what he calls an “experiment,” but “it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking. . . . Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past.” Then he goes on to say, “Be true to our time. . . . If our age is to be beaten, let us die in the ranks. If it is to be victorious, let us be first to lead the column. Anyway, let us not be skulkers or grumblers.”
That’s the closest thing we get to a St. Crispin’s Day speech here, and she does the opposite. As I said, she cedes the territory to the others. She gives up on the project. She gives up on the experiment.
Optimism About Democracy’s Future
OLIVER: Does reading this book make you more or less optimistic about the future of democracy today?
SCALIA: Perversely more optimistic because it reminds you that this is an eternal question of democracy, and obviously it goes on long before this novel, too. Yes, the challenges we face are different, but the general questions, concerns, and problems, they’re not new, and we’ve struggled with them before.
OLIVER: What about the idea that the corruption in this novel is run-of-the-mill, and it seems quaint to us, the things that these people do wrong, in a way. Actually, Ratcliffe can’t become president. There are some limits on how bad morally that person—the actual president, he’s corrupt in a sort of giving out patronage, normal politics, all rising to great places by a winding stair. This is known. Ratcliffe actually does something terribly immoral, and it does block him, whereas do you not feel today that there’s a sense—
SCALIA: Wait, does it block him? Do we know that it blocks him? It blocks him from marrying her, but he could theoretically still be—maybe I’m forgetting something.
OLIVER: I think the novel equivocates on this. I think it sort of says he’s—
SCALIA: The secret is revealed through a letter from Carrington to her, but she doesn’t publicize it, and Carrington doesn’t publicize it beyond the letter, I don’t think.
OLIVER: Oh, so you think he’s still in with a chance?
SCALIA: I think so, yes.
OLIVER: Maybe the point stands that the moral corruption in government in the 20th century—
SCALIA: I think it actually helps your point that he could still be president. It’s that bad. Oh, but you’re saying it’s worse now.
OLIVER: This is nothing compared to Watergate, compared to some of the things that are going on today, compared to—pick your president, right?
SCALIA: Yes.
OLIVER: Does it not give you pause about—Adams was saying, it’s a slippery slope, and if we let too much virtue go out of public life, the rest won’t matter very much.
SCALIA: I know you’re actually baiting me to defend Nixon and Watergate and say this is worse—
OLIVER: Please, go ahead. [laughter]
SCALIA: —but I won’t get into that one. Yes, I guess a lot of the things we deal with today are worse.
OLIVER: People would say Adams was directionally correct.
SCALIA: I don’t know. You had then the complication of what he’s writing about. You have even the most virtuous characters, the characters who have the right intentions, being incredibly morally tainted by having fought for the Confederacy, right, in the case of Carrington.
OLIVER: Yes.
SCALIA: In that regard, we don’t have that in our body politic right now. We’ve got wackos, but we don’t have half the country having fought for slavery. I don’t know. I guess I just don’t think it’s worse today. I don’t think we’re in great shape, but I’ll put it this way: I don’t think the character of our politicians is worse than what we get in Ratcliffe, except insofar as they’re more visible and publicity-seeking than Ratcliffe was. Insofar as they want to be online all the time.
OLIVER: Yes, Ratcliffe with a short-form video.
SCALIA: Yes, exactly.
OLIVER: If we accept that what this novel is telling us is that democracy is actually pretty stable, come what may, does that still hold?
SCALIA: I believe, yes, that still holds. Again, I won’t say that our democracy is especially healthy right now, and I don’t know how we get out of the situation we are in right now, but I’m confident that we will get out of it somehow.
OLIVER: Indeed. We can credit Adams pretty well. He seems to have understood how things work.
SCALIA: I don’t know because he doesn’t offer any solutions. I feel like I sound like him. I don’t know what the solutions are and how we’re going to get them.
OLIVER: Isn’t what the book is saying is that you don’t need a grand solution?
SCALIA: Yes.
OLIVER: The system has its own internal dynamic. It’s a very Smithian or Millian point.
SCALIA: I guess that’s right.
OLIVER: There are incentives and structures and institutions.
SCALIA: Yes, but the only thing you can’t do is leave. There will be no solutions if the moral and virtuous people leave.
OLIVER: Exactly.
SCALIA: Yes, that makes sense.
OLIVER: In a way, we can credit him with really deeply, properly understanding that all this big, theoretical, principle talk is not actually what matters. What matters is working the system to its own best ends.
SCALIA: That’s a discovery that Madeleine makes early. She’s reading about all these—she’s reading American history. It generally depresses her. One of the reasons it depresses her is because these were just practical men solving problems. I don’t know if this is entirely fair of her, but they weren’t men of great principle. They were working out problems, finding solutions. I don’t think that’s an insult.
OLIVER: No.
SCALIA: I think it is important to have principles and ideals, but you also need to be practical about them as well. Politicians who can’t balance those two are not going to be good politicians or successful politicians.
OLIVER: This is coming from Adams as a historian, I think. He really understands the minutiae, the practical implications.
SCALIA: I was really happy when you chose this for the book club and then invited me onto this podcast because I drafted a paper about this novel a few years ago and put it aside, and you’re making me want to go back to it.
OLIVER: Let’s get it published. [laughter]
SCALIA: Let’s do it! One of the things I was thinking about as I wrote the paper was, this is a time when congressmen and senators I admired were leaving politics. I understood why, but it was still frustrating to me. I think, “No! You’re exactly who we need to stay in this. You’re our Madeleine. You’re our Carrington.”
OLIVER: No, and I do think that’s an underdiscussed, undertheorized aspect of the last few years. It’s easy to say, “Oh, that person is a great politician. It’s terrible. It’s a shame that they’re leaving.” What you should really say is, “What the hell are you doing? Get back in. That’s unacceptable.”
SCALIA: Yes, exactly.
OLIVER: “What a letdown.”
SCALIA: That’s somehow more depressing than when they lose in a primary or in a general election, if they step out, out of frustration.
OLIVER: That’s right. OK, so we’re impressed with Henry Adams. We think people should read this novel.
SCALIA: Yes, I think it’s definitely a novel worth reading.
OLIVER: If nothing else, if you live and work in DC, it will be quite funny.
Novels and Their Importance to American Political Thought
SCALIA: Yes. There are not many great novels about DC and about government. There’s Advise and Consent, which I tried reading and didn’t get through, but a lot of people like that. Thomas Mallon has written a lot of novels people like about life in DC. Primary Colors, which I haven’t read, Joe Klein’s book, basically about the Clinton campaign, is not really a DC novel, but about the realities of politics. Then All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren, not set in DC, but a similar novel and a much better novel, but also a much bigger novel, about these kinds of issues. There aren’t a whole lot of great novels about—
OLIVER: American politics.
SCALIA: —novels worth reading about America. If you want to talk about Trollope, that’s something else, but American novels.
OLIVER: We do fine. It’s the Americans who are struggling.
SCALIA: Exactly. You guys are in good shape.
OLIVER: Yes, we’re great, we’re great. You became interested in Henry Adams, or in Democracy, when you researched 13 Novels That Conservatives Will Love—
SCALIA: Correct.
OLIVER: —but you didn’t include him.
SCALIA: I didn’t include it.
OLIVER: Poor Henry Adams.
SCALIA: Poor Henry. I think I mention him in the appendix. The appendix of that book includes basically, “If you liked this book I wrote about, you’ll like this book I didn’t write about.”
In the early stages of research for that book, I asked a lot of people whose taste and knowledge I respected what I should read, just to cover my bases. Andy Ferguson, a colleague of mine at AEI, suggested I check out Democracy. He gave a couple of other really good suggestions. I’m glad I read it, but I didn’t include it because I just didn’t think it was a good enough novel.
OLIVER: Do you think it’s a conservative novel?
SCALIA: I don’t think it’s an especially conservative novel either. I think it will interest conservatives, but I don’t think it necessarily leans right in any way. It just raises important questions that people who care about government are probably thinking about already.
With that book, I wanted to have novels that treat conservative ideas and characters seriously and sympathetically, even if the authors aren’t necessarily conservative themselves. But they also had to be undeniably great novels so that really anybody will appreciate these novels, irrespective of their political opinions.
OLIVER: Now, the other book you didn’t include—Jane Austen aside, because obviously a terrible, terrible omission.
SCALIA: Everybody should read Jane Austen, but nobody needs somebody else telling them to read Jane Austen.
OLIVER: Oh, please, please. I’ll tell them.
SCALIA: I will too, but not in that book.
OLIVER: The other one you didn’t include was Gulliver’s Travels. Why not?
SCALIA: Can we back up?
OLIVER: Sure.
SCALIA: We forgot to talk about Joan Didion. Joan Didion wrote—you could call it a rewriting of this novel, of Adams’s novel. It’s called Democracy. No subtitle. Adams’s is what? His subtitle is “An American novel,” I think. Hers is just Democracy. It deals with a lot of the same issues. It’s not quite as explicit with conversations about the viability of democracy. It’s set in the 1970s or early ’80s. I can’t remember exactly when it was published. It’s about a woman who is married to a senator who had a failed presidential bid. She’s having an affair with a former lover who was involved in the Vietnam War. I haven’t reread it in a few years.
OLIVER: Is it good? [silence] That’s no.
SCALIA: It’s not her best novel, put it that way. I also don’t love Joan Didion’s novels. Again, I think it’s not a waste of time to read it. I think A Book of Common Prayer is generally considered the better novel, but Democracy is interesting, especially if you read it as a reinterpretation or a modernization of the Adams novel.
OLIVER: OK, so if you really enjoy Henry Adams—
SCALIA: Or if you really like Joan Didion, her nonfiction, which a lot of people do. I’m afraid I’m going to get nasty emails complaining to me about not recommending Joan Didion more heartily.
OLIVER: So, Gulliver’s Travels.
SCALIA: I love Gulliver’s Travels.
OLIVER: Is it not a novel for conservatives?
SCALIA: It is. My background as a professor was 18th-century and early 19th-century British literature. I taught Gulliver’s Travels all the time. I could have devoted this entire book to 18th-century fiction and Romantic fiction, but I don’t think many people would have wanted to read that book.
OLIVER: Oh, I was excited. I thought you were going to tell me your next book would be all about Jonathan Swift.
SCALIA: Maybe. Publishers are knocking down my door. [laughter] Tobias Smollett’s Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, I really wanted to include, or Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. But I stuck with two 18th-century novels, Evelina by Frances Burney and Rasselas by Samuel Johnson, which technically isn’t quite a novel. Another reason I didn’t include Swift is because I think people know about Gulliver’s Travels. If they haven’t read it, they at least know the story. I would say they should read it.
OLIVER: Do you think people in DC have read it?
SCALIA: Probably not, let’s face it, but they know about it.
OLIVER: I’m surprised very often if I sit down—you’re at a conference or something, and you sit down next to the political editor of such-and-such magazine. They haven’t read it. I say to them, “Gosh, this is the best book you can read about your job, in a way.”
SCALIA: They know the first book. They know the Voyage to Lilliput. They really miss, what is it, voyage three, when he goes to—
OLIVER: Laputa.
SCALIA: Yes, it’s the spoof of academics. That is the one that’s, I think, most worth reading. Swift was superb, mocking academics there.
OLIVER: Also, in the fourth book with the Houyhnhnms and the discussion of rationality and whether you can order a society on rational principles. That to me seems to be a very foremost question right now, this dispute about how rational we should be. Is there a better discussion of that than Swift?
SCALIA: In specifically rational government, maybe not, but the general idea of a utopian society and the impossibility of that—I include The Blithedale Romance by Hawthorne, which treats that. You could have, again, an entire collection of novels that just treat that issue.
That’s a good point. It’s interesting. Gulliver leaves convinced that the Houyhnhnms get everything right. You remember when he comes home, he basically acts like a horse because the Houyhnhnms have so convinced him that that’s the way to be. Of course, Gulliver is wrong about so many things.
OLIVER: No, I think the satire is on him by that point.
SCALIA: Yes, absolutely, as it is consistently over the course of that book.
OLIVER: If conservatives take your advice and read either the 13 novels you’ve listed or Henry Adams or something else, will it do them any good, or will it just be fun?
SCALIA: I think approaching a novel, reading any literature with the right frame of mind during and after the reading, can actually affect how you see the world and shape how you behave. It can work in the opposite direction, too. If you approach these works with the wrong frame of mind or approach bad works with a certain frame of mind, it can addle your brain. A lot of great novels are about that, like Waverley, which I write about.
OLIVER: By Walter Scott.
SCALIA: By Walter Scott. I love Jane Austen, as I said, but I wish more people read Walter Scott.
OLIVER: This is rage-bait.
SCALIA: For me, it is, yes, and for Austen fans. I think you probably agree with me on this one. What makes great literature worth reading is that it can change how you think of something, or it can clarify something you’ve sensed or understood, which I think a lot of these novels did for me. There are things on Twitter about how—questions like, “What novel changed your life?” That might be overstating it. I don’t know that reading Waverley will change your life, but it will help you understand certain things in a particular way and show you the truth about certain topics.
Politicians Who Loved Fiction
OLIVER: There have been great politicians who were great readers. Harry Truman was a great reader, for example, but they’re not always great fiction readers, are they? They read history, biography, some philosophy, things like that. What is the disconnect between politics and fiction? In England, we have a bit more of it, but it’s patchy. What’s going on?
SCALIA: Boris Johnson was awesome in that regard.
OLIVER: I prefer maybe Harold Macmillan, who was a great reader of Jane Austen.
SCALIA: Is it John Buchan?
OLIVER: Yes.
SCALIA: He was a huge Walter Scott fan.
OLIVER: Yes, he was.
SCALIA: Wrote a couple of biographies of him, and a novelist himself. I think part of it is that our presidents have all been men, and men generally don’t read as much fiction.
OLIVER: Obama read fiction, right?
SCALIA: Obama is the big exception in recent days, or recent years. When Obama talks about fiction—I quote him a couple of times in my book—he’s really good. He even talks about writers he likes with whom he disagrees, like V.S. Naipaul.
OLIVER: Who is one of your selections.
SCALIA: I write about A Bend in the River. That’s the specific novel Obama talks about. I do admire Obama for that. His annual book lists, I always wonder how many of those books he has actually read. But one of the points Obama makes about the importance of fiction is that in a democracy, it is important that you understand other lives, other ways of thinking, that you recognize shades of gray in complex issues.
Fiction—great fiction—is especially good with that. Even the novels I write about, I made a point of not calling them “conservative novels” because while they may land on conservative points, what makes them great is they recognize the strengths and the validity of varying ideas and interpretations.
OLIVER: One of the things I like about your list is that it brings out the great variety of ways of being a conservative. A lot of these books are not actually in particularly close agreement with each other.
SCALIA: Yes, that’s right. There’s absolutely some tension.
OLIVER: Yes, Waugh and Naipaul probably are in closer agreement than any other pair on the list. There’s a great range of ways in which Samuel Johnson and V.S. Naipaul might not see things in the same way.
Is It “Just a Novel”?
SCALIA: Yes, that’s right. I think it’s important, too, that if you don’t agree with a couple of the principles I write about in the book, obviously, it doesn’t mean you’re thrown out of the conservative club. There are certain principles, most of which conservatives have cherished for centuries, at least decades.
Back to your question about presidents, I think it goes back to a broader misconception about fiction in general, which is that it’s really just a luxury, or it’s an entertainment. You don’t read fiction to get real knowledge. You go to history, or you go to self-help or biography. I think that’s wrong. I think even people who love reading novels are insecure about that fact.
Last year, I saw a friend of mine. She and I have sons on the same youth sports team, and she came to one of the games carrying a book. I said, “What book are you reading?” She said, “Oh, it’s just a novel.” You know, I didn’t say, “What do you mean, just a novel?”
OLIVER: “Just a novel”?
SCALIA: Eventually, later on, I said, “Oh, what novel?” We had a great conversation about fiction. It turns out she loves novels. She wrote a college thesis about Joseph Conrad. She has great taste in fiction. She’s read widely, but in the circles she runs in, and I think in most circles in DC, it is “just a novel” because it’s not a source of real information. It’s not a source of facts.
That’s just obviously false. Great fiction is a source of real knowledge that shapes how we approach and understand the world.
Great Novels for Conservatives (and All Readers)
OLIVER: And is there something about conservatives that they will get something particular from novels? Because your book is Novels That Conservatives Will Love.
SCALIA: Yes.
OLIVER: If you’re a Democrat or a libertarian, are there different reasons to read?
SCALIA: I don’t know about different reasons to read, but there would be a different set of novels that would illustrate or dramatize the principles and ideas that they care about and that they hold. Like Handmaid’s Tale, to just give the most obvious example. Or 1984, which liberals and conservatives alike love. I don’t think—
OLIVER: I don’t love that book. I’m tempted to say that the conservatives should read Handmaid’s Tale.
SCALIA: Go on.
OLIVER: Would that not be the more interesting book club? [laughs]
SCALIA: I’m glad you brought this up because I lay this out in my introduction. I certainly don’t think conservatives should only read novels that confirm or develop their previously held political beliefs. Going back to Obama reading Naipaul, there’s a lot of great fiction that you’re going to disagree with, that will present ideas that you don’t agree with, but whose characters are memorable.
We’ve been talking about Waverley. Waverley’s often, and Scott in general often—Russell Kirk considered him the great popularizer of Edmund Burke’s ideas. There’s another great novel around the same time, Caleb Williams.
OLIVER: Godwin.
SCALIA: Godwin, William Godwin, thank you.
OLIVER: Mary Shelley’s father.
SCALIA: Yes. It’s a great novel. It’s crazy, but it’s a counter to the Reflections, as you would imagine. I think conservatives would love that novel, but in a different way than they love these novels.
OLIVER: That’s a great read.
SCALIA: It is. I also like it because I’m a Chicago Bears fan, and Caleb Williams is also the name of our quarterback. [laughter] But it’s just a coincidence.
Discovering Walter Scott
OLIVER: Where should people start with Walter Scott? It’s very curious to me. We’ve had this golden age of historical fiction, Hilary Mantel, several others. It sells quite well. Walter Scott is not getting a big comeback.
SCALIA: No. Going back to Jane Austen, they were writing at the same time. You need footnotes for Austen, but you don’t need as many. It’s helpful to know the details of the class structure then. With Walter Scott, you really need a lot of footnotes for some of the dialogue. A lot of it’s in Scots instead of—
OLIVER: Yes, Rob Roy is quite hard.
SCALIA: Rob Roy and Waverley, too. He was writing about events that happened in the distant past when he was writing. We are much less likely to be familiar with, say, the Jacobite uprising than his original readers would have been. I think Waverley and Ivanhoe are the best places to start. I think it’s a commonly—not everybody agrees with this, but a lot of people think his best novels are the novels that deal with Scotland, so I recommend Waverley and Rob Roy.
Ivanhoe is, in some ways, his best-structured novel, his least flabby novel. It’s set shortly after the Norman invasion. There’s no Scottish element to it, which is why I rank it a little bit lower, but people who don’t care about the Scottish element wouldn’t notice.
OLIVER: I love Ivanhoe.
SCALIA: Oh, good.
OLIVER: I think it’s a tremendous page-turner.
SCALIA: It is.
OLIVER: I was absolutely gripped by it. I am constantly telling people, “This is the best novel that no one will tell you to read.”
SCALIA: Oh, really? That’s great.
OLIVER: Hollis Robbins told me to read it, and I just ripped through it. It was fantastic.
SCALIA: Hollis Robbins is a great defender of—oh, you introduced me to her.
OLIVER: That’s right.
SCALIA: A defender of Scott.
OLIVER: She is. It’s vivid. It’s tightly plotted. You could make movies out of it. It’s got that Netflix potential.
SCALIA: We are in a golden age of shows about tournaments and knighthood. We just had that great HBO series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Then, a few years ago, what was it that—there was a Netflix movie with Ben Affleck. I think Ben Affleck was—I can’t remember, but it included a joust, which was a lot like the joust in Ivanhoe. I don’t know. It’s great.
OLIVER: Oh, my God. The jousting scenes are incredible in Ivanhoe.
SCALIA: It’s kind of hokey because you have Robin Hood in all these disguises that might be hokey.
OLIVER: No, that makes it better. That’s great.
SCALIA: It’s about anti-Semitism. It’s about “toxic masculinity” to a large degree. It’s absolutely relevant. It’s just—
OLIVER: Political corruption.
SCALIA: Yes, political corruption. Absolutely.
OLIVER: In fact, the whole political corruption plot is fantastic.
SCALIA: It is, in large part, about governance.
OLIVER: Scott was holding up a mirror to history, right? He was criticizing his own time by doing all that. I don’t think it would feel out of date or historical to people. I think they would recognize the—
SCALIA: Yes. There are a couple of passages where he has very explicit references to the radical politics of 1819, when he wrote it. Scott was an antiquary. He loved going into great detail about what people were wearing. He could become pedantic. He recognized that. Every novel has a pedantic antiquary-type character. All those characters, he’s making fun of himself.
I think that’s the hardest thing about Ivanhoe. You have to go through a paragraph about what the swineherd is wearing. It helps to understand people cared about that stuff then. They were very interested in those details of history.
OLIVER: They care about it now, right? A lot of fantasy fiction now, Game of Thrones–style, is what you might think of as historical fantasy. There’s slightly less emphasis on magic and dragons and slightly more on Walter Scott–type stuff. I actually think Walter Scott is brilliant at world-building. Not just the clothes and stuff. The way he describes the forest and the light coming through the trees and the outlaws sitting around. He really builds the world of Norman England. It’s absolutely beautiful. I think there probably is a latent audience for Ivanhoe.
SCALIA: I think you’re right. I love hearing that come from somebody not me, [laughter] because I often feel like I’m the only one. Ivanhoe’s also great because—and I think this is true of his fiction in general—Mark Twain, he blamed Walter Scott for the Civil War. I lay this out in my chapter on Waverley. It’s nonsense, of course, but his point was that Southern readers thought that Scott glorified feudalism, and so they used that as a crutch to defend slavery or as a weapon with which to defend slavery.
If that is how Southerners interpreted Scott, and I’m skeptical that it is, that is a misinterpretation because Scott is much more ambiguous. He doesn’t celebrate—Isaiah Berlin is actually bad about this. People, we were talking about Berlin before we started recording. Berlin has a few essays about Romanticism. He says Walter Scott—
OLIVER: Invented the idea of history.
SCALIA: But he also says that Scott celebrates the past at the expense of the present, something along those lines. I don’t think that’s fair. I think he recognizes what’s great about the past and what we lose. He recognizes it’s about tradeoffs, and then the present can be better than the past, but there are still things worth celebrating about the past and things about the past that it is bad to have lost. I think that’s true, for example, in Waverley. It’s critical of the Jacobite uprising, but it also recognizes that there were some elements of clan culture that were worth celebrating.
OLIVER: Isn’t Berlin saying that Scott is not sufficiently appreciative of modernity? It’s not just the idea of the past and the future, but there’s been a watershed in human history, and Scott’s slightly on the wrong side of it. That’s not terribly unfair, is it? Would it be a typical thing for a liberal like Berlin to point out and a conservative to—
SCALIA: That makes sense. I don’t know that’s how Scott would put it. Scott was, especially towards the end of his life, very down on where the UK was going with some of the reforms and the reform bills of the late 1820s, but I don’t know that it’s fair to say that he was down on modernity. There were things about modernity he really liked, like trade. Walter Scott knew Adam Smith. Another essay I have not yet published. In his introductions to his novels, Scott frequently evokes Adam Smith, and, I think, likes Adam Smith, celebrates Adam Smith.
In Waverley and in Rob Roy, those novels are celebrations of trade to a large degree. Recognitions—especially Rob Roy—of the birth of new forms of commerce in Smithian terms. At least in that element of modernity, I don’t remember if Berlin engages with that, but I think it would be wrong to say that Scott is not a fan of that element of modernity.
OLIVER: But Scott’s not a Smithian, in the way that Jane Austen has a Smithian view of society, not just on trade and capital but more broadly. Scott’s much more of a traditionalist. Do you think?
SCALIA: When it comes to property, he’s certainly a traditionalist. But when it comes to commerce—my ideas are not fully formed on this—but my hunch is that, in the context of the publishing industry in particular, he’s a Smithian.
OLIVER: OK.
SCALIA: He recognizes the importance of a division of labor. Especially in his prefaces, he presents these half-serious defenses of Smithian economics. He never presents in an essay a full-throated, unequivocal defense of it. But I think you can get a sense of a defense of Smithian economics in the prefaces, especially as it relates to publishing.
At the same time, there’s one—it’s not quite a preface, but a passage in a collection of short stories and a novella called Chronicles of the Canongate. He has a really funny anecdote about a tour this fictional narrator took in Holyrood Palace. Holyrood Palace is where the Scots royalty used to live, and it’s where the husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, was killed, I think. The legend is that his bloodstain—not husband, adviser and perhaps romantic interest of Mary, Queen of Scots—was killed by her husband’s henchman. The legend was that blood still stained the floor.
In this anecdote, [the] character’s witnessing a tour of Holyrood Palace, and the tour guide is bragging about the bloodstain. “You can still see here, we still have it.” Then this tradesman, salesman from England is there, and he says, “What? Can’t get that bloodstain out? Well, with Mr. Scrub-and-Rub soap, you can get it right out.” He gets on his hands and knees, and he starts scrubbing the stain out, and everybody’s, “No, don’t do that!”
I think that is a hilarious anecdote about how progress can threaten history—the dangers that commercial innovations [and] innovations in general pose to our understanding of the past. It’s not necessarily an economic argument, per se, but I think it’s a fascinating tale in which a couple of his big interests collide there.
SCALIA: I’m a Scottophile.
OLIVER: I’ve been reading The Antiquary, which is kind of boring.
SCALIA: Are you in it right now?
OLIVER: It’s good, but it’s not like—
SCALIA: When you’re done, let’s talk about it. Everybody complains about that because there’s no plot.
OLIVER: Well, that’s fine.
SCALIA: But as a portrait of history and historical study, I think it’s awesome.
Scott vs. Byron
OLIVER: Yes, that’s true. I’ve been reading some of the long poems.
SCALIA: Oh, what do you think?
OLIVER: Some of it I can get into the right mindset, but overall, Jane Austen says somewhere in her letters, is it “Marmedon”? I’ve been reading “Marmedon,” and I really—
SCALIA: “Marmion.”
OLIVER: I really just can’t stand it. I think, “Yes, I know what she means.”
SCALIA: I used to teach “Marmion.” I love “Marmion,” but it’s hard. It’s really hard.
OLIVER: “Lady of the Lake” was great.
SCALIA: His poems are just—that kind of poetry is just so foreign to us now. I think it’s much less accessible, but as you know, that’s what made him famous. He was the most celebrated poet until Byron knocked him off the perch.
OLIVER: I certainly prefer him to Byron.
SCALIA: Do you really?
OLIVER: I can’t stand Byron.
SCALIA: Not even “Don Juan” or—
OLIVER: No, none of it.
SCALIA: “Childe Harold”?
OLIVER: The short lyrics are good. I should have stopped there.
SCALIA: I love Byron as much as I loathe him. I love him.
OLIVER: You love Byron? Oh, my God.
SCALIA: I love “Don Juan.” It’s so much fun. He cracks me up.
OLIVER: Really? Oh, this is terrible.
SCALIA: I would not put him in a book about poets [for] conservatives.
OLIVER: I was going to say, I noticed he didn’t make it into your book.
SCALIA: I love Byron. Hazlitt has a great essay comparing Byron and Scott, about the irony of how Scott was the classic Tory, but in real life—and Byron the prototypical Whig radical. But in their literature, Scott was much more democratic than Byron was. Byron was an elitist snob in a lot of his literature.
I think this is the real—one of the most fascinating things about Scott, and another reason he’s so relevant to our time, I think more relevant than Austen. Scott was a Tory snob, but he wrote about lower classes very well, and with great compassion and sympathy. Every novel features a member of the lower class who’s integral to the course of the novel.
OLIVER: That’s true. Gardeners and people like that—
SCALIA: Yes, exactly.
OLIVER: He does them very well.
SCALIA: Austen doesn’t do that. You’ll have a servant come in in Pride and Prejudice to confirm that, yes, Darcy’s a great guy, but that’s about it.
OLIVER: It’s notable, isn’t it? The carpenter in Mansfield Park is talked about, but he never actually appears.
SCALIA: Yes, exactly. People at the time recognized—that’s not to diminish what Austen did. Scott tried to write like Austen, and he couldn’t. He admired Austen because she could write about what she wrote about in a very hard way that he couldn’t pull off. He called his strain the “big bow wow” strain, huge sweeping historical stories. I think that modern readers would appreciate Scott because he just has a more democratic view and a more sweeping view. He always writes about times of great social turmoil and unrest that I think we might be able to sympathize with.
OLIVER: We might be familiar with?
SCALIA: Yes, exactly.
OLIVER: Christopher Scalia, this was great. Thank you very much.
SCALIA: A lot of fun. Thank you.
