Alan Jacobs

Matthew was a charismatic man who could lead without being bossy and was ruthless without cruelty. He had glamour, charm and class. Careless and virtuous, he knew how to behave with everyone. He loved restaurants, booze, gossip, fast cars, good talk, politics and filth. He was louche, moody, good-looking and he wore fine shoes and suits, and with a fetching naivety was always keen to open his jacket and show you the label. He played cricket and was sexy like a movie star, with a shy side and great body, which is something you won’t hear said about many publishers. People in the office, and all over London, were in love with him, and wanted to sleep with him, though some of them were disappointed.

— Hanif Kureishi. Everything about this memorial is wonderful, but “some of them were disappointed” is writerly perfection.

[caption id=“attachment_16157” align=“aligncenter” width=“518”] designer and illustrator Travis Bone[/caption]

A Department of Justice study revealed that a whopping 84 percent of police officers report that they’ve seen colleagues use excessive force on civilians, and 61 percent admit they don’t always report “even serious criminal violations that involve abuse of authority by fellow officers.”

This self-reporting moves us well beyond anecdote into the realm of data: Police brutality is a pervasive problem, exacerbated by systemic failures to curb it. That’s not to say that every officer is ill-intentioned or abusive, but it is to suggest that the common assumption that police are generally using their authority in a trustworthy manner merits serious reconsideration. As John Adams wrote to Jefferson, “Power always thinks it has a great soul,” and it cannot be trusted if left unchecked.

— Bonnie Kristian, in 2014

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“540”] Proust proofs[/caption]

Here we are again — seems it was only yesterday … Oh, right, it was. Yesterday’s prayer is today’s prayer, must be, can’t not be.

I have written a good bit in the past few years about the erosion of religious liberty in America, and that erosion continues, indeed accelerates. Religious liberty has never has an enemy as powerful and relentless as the Obama administration, and the situation is unlikely to improve when Hillary Clinton takes office. But as bad as the outlook is for freedom of conscience, it’s even worse for people in America who just happen to be black and therefore are utterly vulnerable to being stopped by the police for any reason or none — and shot for any reason or none. People who in effect have no rights, only good luck or bad luck. Alton Sterling’s luck was bad. Philando Castile’s luck was bad. And they had nothing to rely on except luck.

I think it may be time for me, and perhaps for others, to put the religious-freedom issue on the back burner for a while — not to ignore it, not to pretend that it doesn’t matter, not to cease to care — but to recognize that there are needs greater than ours, that require more of our immediate attention than we’ve been giving them. I don’t know; I’m not sure what to do, how to do triage here, how to weigh the dangers of a slow avalanche versus a fast one. But I am feeling very strongly that I have neighbors for whom I have not done enough.

In the meantime, my fellow white Christians, as we think and pray, let’s spend some time immersing ourselves imaginatively in the world of black America. Perhaps we might start by reading the essays in this collection edited by Jesmyn Ward, which is coming out in a few weeks. I’ve read one essay in it, by my friend Garnette Cadogan: it’s called “Black and Blue” and you can read about it here. It’s electrifying and depressing and … well, just read it, please.

And think. And pray. And act.

Alton Sterling was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A great many things will happen on social media in the next few days, almost all of them predictable, few of them encouraging.

One of the predictable things is that Christians will offer “thoughts and prayers”; another is that atheists will rage at them for doing so. We’ll hear a lot about the uselessness of thoughts and prayers, mainly from people who think deploying Twitter hashtags counts as genuine activism.

Christians are commanded to pray. We are told to pray without ceasing; we are told to pray for our enemies; we are told to pray even when we do not know what to pray for, because in such cases the Holy Spirit will intercede for us. I would ask my fellow Christians to offer prayer in the aftermath of Alton Sterling’s killing; but I would also ask them to remember that typing the words “sending thoughts and prayers” is not praying.

We can and should do better than that. For starters, we could say what we are praying for. We pray for God to receive Alton Sterling into His presence and comfort him and wipe away every tear. We pray that God will comfort the friends and family of Alton Sterling — and all the people of Baton Rouge, and all the people of color in this land who live every day in fear — and give them peace in their spirits and hope for better days in this world as well as that eternal hope that transcends all others.

We pray, Lord, that you will turn the hearts of those who kill to peaceableness; that you will lead them to repentance; that you will make justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Further: May we remember that prayer ought to be the fuel of the spirit, the fuel that gives us the strength and the hope that alone can sustain work for justice and peace. “Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace” — make me an instrument. Set me to work. In these dark days let me at least light a candle.

Hear my prayer, O Lord; and let my cry come unto thee.

I was just chatting on Twitter with my friend Chad Wellmon about our favorite restaurant, Highlands Bar and Grill in my home town of Birmingham, Alabama. (Chad’s wife is from Birmingham.) I’ve written before about my devotion to Highlands, where I first ate in either late 1982 or early 1983 — within a few months of its opening, anyway. Since then Highlands and its chef-owner Frank Stitt have just gone from strength to strength. If you can ever find a way to have a meal there, you absolutely should. You’ll remember it. (If you want commendations from less partisan judges, they aren’t hard to find, but you could start with this one.)

My wife and I don’t get to return to Highlands nearly as often as I would like, but whenever we do one thing always amazes us: how many familiar faces there are among the staff. Everybody’s favorite waiter, Goren Avery (known to customers just as Red), and Stitt’s genius of a pastry chef, Dolester Miles, have been with Highlands since the beginning, thirty-four years ago. And that’s really remarkable. There are some lessons here for business owners who’d like to learn them.

The poet Geoffrey Hill has died, age 84. As a token of my esteem for him, I’m posting here a review I wrote in 2004 for Books and Culture of his collection of essays, Style and Faith. 

A. N. Wilson has written, “I think Geoffrey Hill is probably the best writer alive, in prose or rhyme, in the English language.” Michael Dirda confines his judgment to the realm of verse, but disdains qualification: “Geoffrey Hill is the greatest living English poet.” And Peter Levi adds to Dirda’s assertion a jutting insistence: “Geoffrey Hill must by now be indisputably the best living poet in English and perhaps in the world.”

At least Levi‘s “perhaps” gives us room to dissent from the global judgment. But “indisputably” was surely unwise – what word could better guarantee dispute? Indeed, it is the nature of such claims to invite demurrals, counter-claims, refutations. But they also command attention, and perhaps that is what Wilson, Dirda, and Levi wanted above all, since many otherwise quite literate people do not know the work of Geoffrey Hill.

Hill was born in England in 1932, but has lived for fifteen years now in this country, where he is Professor of Literature and Religion at Boston University. Between 1959 and 1992 he published five slender volumes of verse, plus a New and Collected Poems (the new ones being rather few), and an extraordinary collection of essays, The Lords of Limit. Especially in his first four books, Hill’s poems are rather consistent in their tone and their resources: they combine a fascination for the Latinate with a deep, deep immersion in the early centuries of the Anglo-Saxon Christian world. (Of a set of poems called “Funeral Music,” Hill wrote, “In this sequence I was attempting a florid grim music broken by grunts and shrieks.”) One of Hill’s finest achievements is surely the sequence of prose poems called Mercian Hymns (1971), which call forth the long-forgotten eighth-century world of King Offa of Mercia — a kingdom in what we now call the English Midlands, including Hill’s native Worcestershire. Hill’s writing is always difficult to understand — it has often been called obscure — and it seems meticulously wrought, which may explain how little there was of it, until recently.

It was, by and large, this rather slight harvest of four decades’ labor that prompted the lavish praise noted above. But in the last seven years Hill has produced four volumes of verse that have stunned his readers not only by their bulk but also by their sometimes quite dramatic differences from the earlier work — differences in tone, style, and often theme. It is difficult to imagine the pre-1990’s Hill composing a poem about someone like Diana, Princess of Wales – and utterly impossible to imagine him writing, as he does in Speech! Speech! (2000), of bringing forth his memorial “wreath to the vulgar gates.” Reading these poems, one familiar with Hill’s idiom is unsurprised to find words like “vitrine” or “pellitory,” but doesn’t know what to make of “RAPMASTER” and “BEEN THERE DONE THAT,” even when they appear in big caps like newspaper headlines. Only Auden, among the major English poets, remade his verse more thoroughly that Hill has. And so soon after the remaking, it would be reckless now to say that Hill is “indisputably” anything. At the moment, I don’t like the recent poems at all. But from my studies of Auden I have learned at least this: to wait until the dust has well settled before attempting a serious judgment.

In the meantime, it is impossible not to think of Hill’s new book, Style and Faith, as a possible source for clues to this transformation. It contains but seven essays, all previously published, comprising 159 pages in all (the remainder being notes and apparatus). The first links Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Oxford English Dictionary, while the last considers T. S. Eliot; but in between Hill meditates on major figures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Tyndale, Donne, Richard Hooker, Robert Burton, Henry Vaughan, the historian Lord Clarendon, and (sneaking into the next century) Isaac Watts and the Wesleys.

A straightforward reading of Style and Faith – and not, I think, a superficial one – would lead to the conclusion that Hill cares a good deal more about style than about faith. On matters of style, or more generally of language, he is always quick to state a conviction: that the revised O.E.D. does ill to include “tofu” while neglecting Hopkins’s coinage “unchancelling”; that David Daniell was unwise to modernize the spelling of his edition of Tyndale’s New Testament; that Isabel Rivers’s critical study Reason, Grace and Sentiment “is oblivious to its own compliance with the prevailing jargon of modern communication.” But when considering matters of faith Hill assumes the dispassionate voice of a historian: he will demonstrate that the various styles of Burton, Hooker, and Donne incarnate equally various modes of faith, but he will refrain from stating a preference. He will explore with great sensitivity and nuance a single pivotal word in a poem by Vaughan, noting its spiritual resonances but judging them not.

Such a habit leads the reader – or leads me, anyway – to wonder if some of Hill’s critical statements are not cloaked self-revelations: “Clarendon’s style, therefore, however firmly it adheres to the principle of integrity and comeliness, in practice is bound to show signs of strain, of badly resolved perplexity, partly realized contradiction, and implicit self-contradiction.” (Does this suggest Hill’s dissatisfaction with his own long-honed style, and a resulting need for change?) Or this comment about the tension between theology and artifice in the Wesleys’ hymns: “I think it entirely possible for a hymn to be, at one and the same time, joyful and ‘unhappy’; that kind of oxymoron is inherent in the creative matter, the ganglion of language and circumstance from which the piece of divine poetry is created.” (An explanation of the deep sobriety and sadness of much of Hill’s verse?)

These are the merest of speculations, and could scarcely be anything else. But one passage is clearly more than that, and truly illuminates Hill’s thinking. Near the end of his essay on Vaughan, he stresses the need to conceive of language as “something other than a mere ancillary of ‘vision’ or ‘experience’. Language is a vital factor of experience, and, as ‘sensory material’, may be religiously apprehended.” That affirmation links Hill not only to Vaughan but also to the poets who bookend this volume, Hopkins and Eliot. As different as they may have been stylistically, both sought to achieve a fully “religious” apprehension of language and were continually (even agonizingly) aware of the forces in self and world that set themselves recalcitrantly against poetry’s hopes for catching the transcendent. In these essays – as in his previous essays – Hill situates himself in their company. We should preserve Hopkins’s inscrutable “unchancelling,” however few people will care about it, and even if our concern for such words leads us to neglect “tofu.” After all, did not Eliot remind poets that their task is to “purify the dialect of the tribe”? That style matters is, for Hill, an article of faith – as it was, he says, for John Donne: “With Donne, style is faith.”

Whether Hill’s joining of style and faith has anything to do with actual Christian belief – as it certainly has for Donne and Hopkins and Eliot – I cannot say. Adam Hirsch, writing in The New Republic about Hill’s most recent book of poems, The Orchards of Syon (2002), points to a passage in which Hill writes, “But the Psalms — they remain,” and suggests that they offer “if not wisdom, then something / that approaches it nearly. And if not faith, / then something through which it is / made possible to give credence.” Hirsch notes the “evasion” of this passage, its refusal to make a straightforward avowal of wisdom or faith. And the same evasion is present in this volume: Hill concludes his preface by noting that “in most instances style and faith remain obdurately apart. In some cases, despite the presence of well-intentioned labour, style betrays a fundamental idleness which it is impossible to reconcile with the workings of good faith.” Reading which I think, “good faith”? Bona fides? Oh, I thought you were talking about faith.”

In any case, “style is faith” is what Hill has always believed. So if we ask what these essays do to explain or illuminate the dramatic change in Hill’s recent poetry, the answer, I’m afraid, must be “Nothing.” The essays were published between 1989 and 1999, the very period in which Hill was reinventing his verse, and in that light what is most surprising about them is how much they resemble his earlier essays. The gusts of idiomatic currency that have blown through Hill’s last several years of poems are undetectable here, at least to me. The knowledge that, sometime in the 1990s, Hill began taking medication for depression could well be more helpful in interpreting these new poems than anything in Style and Faith – scrupulous, learned, and sometimes wise though those essays be. All of his essays share with his earlier poems an emphasis on the forces that can and should restrain and correct the poetic imagination: language, history, all the forms of context – in a word, limit. (“Lords of Limit” is a phrase from Auden, who shared this emphasis.) Geoffrey Hill’s recent poetry remains formally strict and meticulously structured, but in its diction at least — and diction means much to Hill — it exceeds the limits its author, for thirty years or more, set for it. Whether this is a development to mourn or to celebrate time alone will tell. Style and Faith doesn’t.

[caption id=“attachment_16134” align=“aligncenter” width=“650”] NICE, FRANCE - JUNE 25: Dejection for England fans at full time during the UEFA Euro 2016 Round of 16 match between England and Iceland at Allianz Riviera Stadium on June 27 in Nice, France. (Photo by Craig Mercer/CameraSport via Getty Images)[/caption]

Since ancient times, philosophers have tried to devise systems to try to balance the strengths of majority rule against the need to ensure that informed parties get a larger say in critical decisions, not to mention that minority voices are heard. In the Spartan assemblies of ancient Greece, votes were cast by acclamation. People could modulate their voice to reflect the intensity of their preferences, with a presiding officer carefully listening and then declaring the outcome. It was imperfect, but maybe better than what just happened in the UK.

By some accounts, Sparta’s sister state, Athens, had implemented the purest historical example of democracy. All classes were given equal votes (albeit only males). Ultimately, though, after some catastrophic war decisions, Athenians saw a need to give more power to independent bodies.