Down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass

I can’t honestly remember whether I have read Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels before. I think I may have read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland when I was about ten or so, but I have never returned to it: it wasn’t among my childhood favourites, as were, say, Treasure Island or The Hound of the Baskervilles. And Through the Looking Glass, I don’t think I have read at all. But these are books one thinks one has read, even when one hasn’t. One recognises the scenes and characters – the Cheshire Cat whose grin remains after it has disappeared; the Mad Hatter’s tea party; Humpty Dumpty explaining the meaning of “portmanteau words”; and so on: these are all iconic. The poems – “Jabberwocky”, “The White Knight’s Song” – are standards in just about every anthology of English verse, and rightly so. One even recognises the allusions: when Eliot writes of “the door we never opened into the rose garden”, it is inevitably Lewis Carroll who comes to mind. (Well, my mid, at least.) When so much about these books is so well known, we frankly can’t help wondering whether they need to be read at all.

Well, in the recent heat, with the mind too hot and bothered to be focussing on books that stretch the brain further than it is willing to be stretched these days, I thought I’d give them a try. And I am glad I did. They did not surprise: I found them every bit as charming, as funny, and as delightful as their reputation would suggest. I was surprised also at the depiction of Alice herself: stereotypes might suggest that a seven-year-old girl, intended to be delightful in English novels written in the 1860s and 70s, would be sweet, gentle, well-mannered, and respectful of her elders and betters; but Carroll presents instead a girl with a mind very much of her own, who is capable of losing her temper, who can at times be obstinate, who has not always paid the greatest of attention to her lessons, and who is prepared to talk back … in brief, a girl well short of the standards of what a Good Well-Behaved Girl should be. And best of all, while she finds what she sees distinctly odd, she never seems unduly put out by anything: she takes it all within her confident stride.

And yes, it is very funny. At least, I laughed a lot. Carroll was himself a mathematician, and well versed, presumably, in the rules of logic, and the ingenuity with which logic is constantly turned on its head is delightful. When the Red Queen speaks of having seen hills “compared to which that is a valley”, we know there is something not quite rational about this, but it is not entirely easy to explain where precisely the absurdity lies.

Carroll touches on a great many philosophical conundrums, but he is careful always to remain playful: never is the narrative in any danger of becoming heavy-handed. For, whatever delight an adult reader may take in these books, they are written for children, and Carroll never forgets this. But can a descriptive feature of a subject exist independently of the subject itself? The Cheshire Cat’s grin remains for a while when the Cat itself has gone, and the fact of a grin, Carroll insists, remains meaningful even in the absence of the grinner. In Through a Looking Glass, Alice at one point wanders into a wood in which she forgets the name of things – including her own name. And with this forgetting of names, she forgets what everything is – her own self included. Does existence itself depend upon our ability to identify, and to classify?

And so on. I am sure those versed in philosophy would have a whale of a time identifying all those allusions to various philosophical problems. But those of us who, like myself, are not versed in these matters, can still find themselves intrigued by the subtle questions implicit in all the absurdity and the nonsense. And never for a moment does Carroll lose his lightness of touch: these books are primarily intended for children, and whatever delight generations of adults may have taken in them, it is by its ability to delight children that they stand or fall.

Like every great comic writer, Carroll has a fine ear for the rhythms of language. A stand-up comedian can get laughs with the timing, but in writing, the timing is more up to the reader than the writer: what a comic writer must have is mastery over the rhythms of prose. All great comic writers – Austen, Dickens, Wodehouse – had this mastery, and Carroll certainly does not disappoint. For instance:

`Once upon a time there were three little sisters,’ the Dormouse began in a great hurry; `and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well–‘

`What did they live on?’ said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking.

`They lived on treacle,’ said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two.

`They couldn’t have done that, you know,’ Alice gently remarked; `they’d have been ill.’

`So they were,’ said the Dormouse; `very ill.’

Now, there’s nothing particularly comic about the content of that: three sisters live down a well, they eat only treacle, and are very ill: not, frankly, the greatest flight of comic fancy. But Carroll’s phrasing is so perfect, his ear for the rhythm of the language so sharp, that he gets a laugh even where, one might have thought, there isn’t one.

Throughout these books, we are challenged to interpret, but even to make the attempt is folly. Carroll’s primary interest seems to me language, and what it signifies. There are games with language throughout. Words are signifiers: they exist as labels for things that are not words. A “chair” is, after all, simply a monosyllabic sound, consisting of five letters when written: but we use this sound to signify the piece of furniture we sit on. The word itself is a symbol for something other than itself, and we are happy with this kind of symbolism, because it works, and serves our purpose. But Carroll was neither the first nor the last to detect something slippery about words, and, throughout, he exploits this slippery quality, forcing words to signify all kinds of unexpected things. In the famous virtuoso poem “Jabberwocky”, he uses nonsense words – word that are utter gibberish – to tell a story that we can nonetheless understand.

Humpty Dumpty knows all about words: he explains at one point the various possible meanings of the word “impenetrability”, and when Alice comments “That’s a great deal to make one word mean”, the words suddenly become real entities in themselves:

“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I pay it extra.”

And soon, he is describing words coming round to him on Saturday night to get paid.

He then proceeds to interpret the opening lines of the poem “Jabberwocky”, and it makes sense … of sorts. And that in itself is worrying …

I am not sure why it took me so long to get round to reading these iconic books (if, indeed, I haven’t read them before: I can’t quite remember), but it was a sheer pleasure. And part of the pleasure too were John Tenniel’s illustrations: others have illustrated these books since, and often very well, but none has superseded Tenniel.

Possibly, Carroll runs out of steam a bit towards the end of Through the Looking Glass: the chapter about the Lion and the Unicorn isn’t among the most memorable, and while the White Knight’s Song is a masterpiece, the running gag about the White Knight constantly falling off his horse seems a bit forced and uninspired given the brilliant flights of comic fantasy in the rest of this work. But it’s wrong to cavil. These two books deserve all the praise that has been heaped on them over the years.

“The Pillars of Society” by Henrik Ibsen

All quoted passages are taken from the translation by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik, published by Penguin Classics

After the soaring poetry and the mythic imagery of Brand and Peer Gynt, the scrupulously realistic portrayal of citizens of a small provincial town seems inevitably a bit of an anti-climax. Not that The Pillars of Society had come immediately after these two verse dramas: Ibsen had taken a curious route from those earlier heights of poetic imagination to this doggedly earthbound depiction of ordinary people living their everyday lives. He had written that vast and exotic two part historic drama Emperor and Galilean, and also a comedy, The League of Youth, the latter generally judged by posterity (correctly, I think) as being diverting, but, perhaps, a bit slight. The Pillars of Society is, however, far from exotic, and, despite its focus on the quotidian, far from slight. It is the first of a sequence of twelve plays that Ibsen, nearly twenty-five years later, referred to as a “cycle”. It seems, however, highly unlikely that Ibsen had any thought of composing a cycle of plays when he embarked on this: if cycle it is, then its cyclical elements, at least to begin with, were accidental. But accidental or not, the thematic connections linking these twelve plays seem to me apparent, despite Ibsen’s stylistic development over the years during which these plays were written, and despite also the often radical new directions in which he took his art. And similarly apparent are the thematic connections with Brand and with Peer Gynt: the break with those earlier poetic dramas was not as thorough as it might seem.

But whatever poetic instincts Ibsen had – from the evidence of Brand and Peer Gynt, and also of his later plays, they were substantial – seem almost deliberately suppressed here. The scene here is not the high mountains and ice-vaulted crevices we see in Brand, nor the mythic, phantasmagoric landscapes of the mind that we find in Peer Gynt: it is, instead, a small, provincial town, all too real and too solid, all too subject to the hard laws of business and of economics: it is a thriving shipping port. And the characters populating this drama do not have the stature and the larger-than-life presence of Brand or of Peer Gynt: these are all, in comparison, small people, and their poetic vision, should they exist, are well hidden away beneath the unexciting pressure of earning a daily living. At the centre of the drama, but by no means dominating it (as it is in essence an ensemble piece), is Karsten Bernick, solid and respectable, the chief pillar of this society. He owns the shipyard on which the prosperity of the entire town depends. He runs it with a ruthless efficiency characteristic of capitalism untrammelled by considerations of social conscience: and yet, at the same time, his ruthless efficiency has brought wealth and stability to a kind of society that, as we had seen in Brand, used regularly to suffer from famine. As the drama progresses, we see Bernick as, morally, a most reprehensible character: his standing and his reputation, both public and private, are built on lies; his entire existence, his status as a pillar of society, is one of utter hypocrisy. The very base on which this society is built is morally rotten. And, on one level, this drama may be seen as an exposure of this moral rottenness, a demand – such as Brand might have made – that we face the truth and confess it, whatever the cost. But, at a deeper and somewhat subtler level, I don’t think things are quite so easy.

But before we try to plumb its depths, the surface demands exploration, as it is fascinating in itself. In many ways, it corresponds to the popular image of Ibsen: here is Ibsen the social reformer, hitting out at the lies and hypocrisies on which respectable society is built, pointing at us the finger of moral indignation: this is Ibsen as dramatist for social change. Somerset Maugham once mischievously characterised the plots of Ibsen’s plays as, essentially, an outsider entering a stuffy room, opening the window, and everyone, as a consequence, dying of cold. This is no doubt unfair, but there is some truth in this caricature, and nowhere is this caricature more apparent than in The Pillars of Society. The society depicted in the first act is indeed unbearably stuffy, and the air is heavy with hypocrisy and with moral self-righteousness; an outsider does indeed enter, and, at the end of the act, literally opens a window. But this literal act is also, very obviously, a symbolic act, and the symbolic cold air let in proves devastating.

The play deals explicitly with what was, at the time, a theme of burning topical relevance. Ships allowed to sail even when known not to be seaworthy was a notorious scandal of the time, especially in a seafaring nation such as Norway. As Michael Meyer says in his introduction to his own translation, British Member of Parliament Samuel Plimsoll had been fighting for years against “the cold-blooded and unscrupulous sacrifice of human life by sending men to sea in rotten ships”, merely to allow the owners collecting on the insurance afterwards. In British Parliament, Plimsoll openly called these owners “murderers”. A number of such instances of this occurred in Norway also, and they were much publicised. But that a play dealing explicitly with so topical a theme can still even now triumphantly hold the stage does indicate that there is more to this play than merely a Drama of Social Reform. And if we wish to discover what more there is, we need to look a bit deeper. And once we do, we discover Peer Gynt enjoined by Brand to acknowledge the Truth – the Truth, at all costs.

For, from Brand’s perspective, it is only when one acknowledges the Truth and lives by it that one can find one’s inner self – that same inner self that Peer Gynt discovered at the end he does not possess. But acknowledging the Truth is painful in the extreme; and, what is more, it does not guarantee us happiness. For Brand, such a consideration is irrelevant: Truth must be acknowledged for its own sake, for it is an end in itself. But for the Peer Gynts among us, this is far from obvious.

Bernick is, effectively, Peer Gynt in the real world: that is, the “real world”, as opposed to the world of the poetic imagination that Ibsen had previously given us. The lies in which Bernick has become entangled, and on which his entire life, both public and private, is now based, had not come about out of an evil nature: they had merely been the easiest way of getting what he wanted. When obstacles had come his way, he simply, like Peer, went around. But that is all in the past now, and he is a success. And on his success has depended the success of the entire town: he is indeed a pillar of society. In the very first scene, Bernick’s chief clerk tells Aune, the shipyard foreman:

You are first and foremost foreman of Consul Bernick’s shipyard. You have first and foremost a duty towards the community which is Consul Bernick’s company; because it’s what we live by.

Whatever the lies and the hypocrisy, the community is Consul Bernick’s company. If the company falls, the community falls. Exposing the lies may be morally the correct thing to do: it is what Brand would have insisted upon – not as a means to some end, but because the Truth is not something that may be compromised. But for us ordinary mortals, the dilemma is real.

In a stage of brilliantly staged scenes, the lies upon which Bernick’s reputation has been built, and also upon which his company has been built – which, we are reminded, is what the entire community lives by – are brought to light. But what should Bernick do? On the surface, it is clear-cut: he should tell the truth. But below the surface, the moral waters are murkier. It may be said, with justification, that when Bernick talks of the good of the community, he is only making excuses. But even if that were true, if Bernick’s company goes under, the entire community would go under too. Is Truth really worth so great a price? Are the moral demands of Brand at all reasonable?

But then, if we reject Brand’s moral imperatives, what are we left with? Bernick at one point considers allowing a ship to sail he knows not to be shipworthy, because the man who could bring down his entire business kingdom would, he knew, be on it. In short, he contemplates murder – and mass-murder at that. And he tries to justify even this – seemingly to the schoolmaster Rørlund, but, ultimately, to his own troubled conscience:

Bernick: When one stands at the threshold of a far-reaching enterprise which aims at the improved well-being of thousands – , if this thing were to require one single sacrifice – ?

Rørlund: In what way, sir?

Bernick: Suppose, for example, that a man is considering building a large factory. He knows for certain – since experience has taught him this – that sooner or later during the running of this factory human life will be lost.

Rørlund: Yes, that is only too probable.

Bernick: Or a man embarks on a mining business. He takes family men and youngsters in the prime of life into his service. It can be said with absolute certainty, can it not, that they won’t all come out of it alive?

Rørlund: Yes, unfortunately, that’s probably so.

Bernick: Well. Such a man knows beforehand, then, that the enterprise he wants to set in motion will undoubtedly cost human lives at some point. But this enterprise is for the common good; for every human life it costs, it will just as undoubtedly further the welfare of hundreds.

Whatever Bernick’s motivation, this is true. Even if the Truth may be discerned (and Ibsen was to question even this in later plays), is it necessarily desirable? It is this terrible question that creates a terrible and terrifying undercurrent beneath the seemingly simple confrontation on the surface between Truth and Falsehood. And it is because of this undercurrent that the play remains still so a thrilling a piece of drama: without this undercurrent, it would merely be a call for social reform which, once the reform is implemented, ceases to be of any but historical interest.

But what had been Bernick’s motivation in setting up his business kingdom in the first place? It seems unlikely that he had been motivated by the welfare of the town’s citizens: that had been, at best, a by-product. Bernick himself says that he had tried to salvage his family business, which, when he was a young man, had been in danger of going under. He had saved that business, and, as a consequence, had saved the entire community of which he is now so estimable a pillar. And as we see him break less than entirely honest deals, it seems clear that his true motivation had been power – power not merely among his fellow-citizens, but power also over Nature itself, which he feels he can harness:

Imagine what a powerful lever [the railway will] represent for our entire community. Think of the enormous tracts of forest that’ll be made accessible; think of rich seams of ore that can be worked; think of the river with one waterfall after the other. Just imagine all the industry that can be established there.

In a much later play, John Gabriel Borkman, Borkman too had been entranced by the possibility of subduing Nature to his will, but Borkman, in his single-mindedness, had more resembled Brand: Bernick, for all his desire, remains Peer Gynt, for ever seeking the easy way around. But now, the man who had sought power, who had sought to harness Nature itself, becomes fully aware of the moral depths he has sunk to as a consequence of pursuing his desires. He realises a curse is upon him, and hopes his son will one day grow up to redeem, and to lift the curse:

The inheritance I am giving him is a thousand times worse than you know. But the curse must lift some day surely. Then again – Perhaps –

Such a figure recalls another figure from that era: Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the last instalment of the mighty Ring Cycle, had been premiered in 1866, just one year before the premier of The Pillars of Society, and it is not too far-fetched, I think, to draw parallels between Ibsen’s Bernick and Wagner’s Wotan. Ibsen would certainly have known of the Ring Cycle: his friend and compatriot, Edvard Grieg, tried to persuade him to go and see it at Bayreuth, but Ibsen, who never cared much for music, had resisted. But it seems to me unlikely that Ibsen would have found his themes from what he had known of Wagner’s work: we should not really be too surprised when major artists living through the same times hit upon similar themes. This was, after all, the Age of Capital: faster than ever before, Nature and its resources were being harnessed to enhance human power. It would be surprising indeed for intelligent and perceptive artists not to wonder at what the consequences of all this may be. But their foci were different: where Wagner was concerned – amongst other things – with the question of redemption, Ibsen’s focus was on the nature of Truth, and of the all too human compromises we make with it.

This play ends, seemingly, on a moral triumph: after his own son is found to be in imminent danger, Bernick relents, publicly confesses, and all, apparently, ends well. But while the play itself ends on a bright major key, far too many issues remain unresolved. Bernick doesn’t, after all, reveal the whole truth: the most incriminating part of it, including the attempted murder, he holds back. Will that ever come out, we wonder? Will he have the moral courage? And even if he does, should he? Would not his company fall, and the entire community with it?

The play is rounded off satisfactorily as far as the dramatic presentation was concerned, but there remain too many unresolved questions. Possibly because these questions cannot be resolved satisfactorily. Ibsen was to return to these questions with even deeper vision in subsequent plays of the cycle. Indeed, many of the themes broached here return. Among the subsidiary themes in this play, for instance, is the position of women – intelligent people, but whose aspirations and energies are crushed under society’s structure: in A Doll’s House, the very next play in the cycle, Ibsen focuses on this. The theme of the past haunting the present, with terrifying consequence, returns in Ghosts; and in the next play, An Enemy of the People, Ibsen again returns to te theme of the Truth, and public good.

In A Wild Duck, he questions the extent to which we may live with the Truth; while in Rosmersholm, he explores our ability even to recognise it. And so on. With The Pillars of Society, we are only at the beginning.

“The Optimist’s Daughter” by Eudora Welty

What can we do but enumerate old themes? Love, loss, death, remembrance, and the passage of time that allows us fresh glimpses into these familiar things … It is hard to imagine a time when serious artists won’t want to address such matters. No hankering for novelty can remove these things from the centre of our lives. What is there to be said on these matters that is new? Has not all that can be said already been said?

Perhaps the answer to that question is that it is not a matter of saying anything new about them. Or, indeed, a matter of saying anything at all. For no-one addressing these themes do so because they wish to impart some sort of message: any message capable of being expressed on these matters is, almost inevitably, too superficial. But we can contemplate. Not contemplate to arrive at some sort of answer, or even to arrive at some sort of resolution, but contemplate simply because we cannot help ourselves. And each contemplation is new, because each perspective is personal, individual. We live, we love, and then we die, and those remaining remember. We know ‘tis common – all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity – but there is little point asking why it seems so particular with us. We know not “seems”.

These old themes are unapologetically at the centre of The Optimist’s Daughter, a short novel, and Eudora Welty’s last, published in the 1970s in her old age. In its concentration, it is almost a short story. Its principal character, Laurel, now living in Chicago, returns to her homeland in the South: her aged father is ill. At first, it does not seem very serious: a standard eye operation. But he fails to recover. His second wife, the vulgar, frivolous, and self-obsessed Fay, much younger than her frail husband, has little sympathy with death; but although she may think that she is on the side of life, she isn’t: life can mean but little if the significance of death fails to inspire awe, or even, as in this instance, adequate acknowledgement. She urges her husband to live – not for his own sake, but for her own. Possibly, she is responsible, in her thoughtlessness, for hastening her husband’s end. But it all means little to her: she is incapable of contemplation, and cannot even begin to understand why it all seems so particular with others. However, for Laurel, the last link with her past is now gone. Her mother had died years earlier; and her husband had died in the war. Though but middle-aged, no-one is now left alive with whom she retains any strong emotional tie: all whom she had loved are now dead. What can she do but remember?

Her remembering is largely left till the closing parts of the novel. The earlier parts of the novel describe, with all the economy of a great writer of short stories, Laurel’s father’s last illness, and the network of relationships between the old man and his young wife, and between father and daughter. The events move swiftly, as the old man fails to recover from what had appeared initially a routine operation; and as the wife, impatient with thoughts of death, and resentful that her feelings (she had felt the operation unnecessary) were being ignored, unwittingly and thoughtlessly hastens his end. At the funeral, Laurel meets again with her old neighbours, and old family friends, but finds herself feeling distant from it all. Her childhood home will now be passing on to Fay. The past is receding quickly. And, unexpectedly, Fay’s redneck family, turn up. She had said previously that she had no family, and it is not hard to conjecture why: even with her limited intelligence, she knew that they would not be approved of.

The resolution of the novel comes when, towards the end, Laurel is left on her own for a while in the old house that she knows she must soon leave for ever. And it is here that all that had gone previously, all that may have seemed fragmentary, fall into place, and we see them in proper focus. Here, at last, Laurel can think about a past that has left nothing behind, that can now exist only in her memory. Now she can re-evaluate.

Re-evaluation of the past, contemplating on why things have turned out as they have, understanding the ground we have occupied in relation to those whom we have loved, are the themes also of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night; but the past there had been turbulent. The past here seems, in contrast, placid and happy. But, as in O’Neill’s play, love and hatred are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps all loves contain some element of hatred.

A new character, only mentioned in passing earlier in the novel, now emerges in the foreground: Laurel’s dead mother. As Laurel’s mind shifts back and forth between the present and various times from the past, she remembers how she had reacted to her mother’s long illness and eventual death; and she remembers also how her mother had reacted to her parents’ death. A chain emerges, a human chain, of departing and of remembering, stretching back over time, across generations.

Her mother, like her father, had also lost her sight towards the end (vision, and lack of it, are among the recurring images of this novel), but, unlike her father’s, her mother’s illness had been a long one. She had, one suspects, never quite managed to tear herself away emotionally from her strong attachment to her family home in West Virginia – “up home”: for all her closeness to her husband, the home he offered in Mississippi never quite matched up to what she left behind, and the breaking, one by one, of her ties with her past – the death of her father, of her mother – had been for her particularly traumatic. And during her own long, final illness, her mind had deteriorated – or, as Fay puts it, “she died a crazy”. Laurel’s mother had been, towards the end, in despair, and her husband, though loving her, could not acknowledge the nature of the tragedy they were living through:

He loved his wife. Whatever she did that she couldn’t help doing was all right. Whatever she was driven to say was all right. But it was not all right! Her trouble was that very desperation. And no-one had any power to cause that except the one she desperately loved, who refused to consider that she was desperate. It was betrayal on betrayal.

Her loving husband, Laurel’s loving father, is an “optimist”: his nature is such that he cannot even bring himself to believe that certain things are beyond the reach merely of our loving; he could not bring himself to acknowledge the essential tragedy of our lives – the losses, the pains, the passing through nature to eternity.

As Laurel goes through her mother’s things, destroying all which she does not wish to come into Fay’s possession, her mind travels back and forth in time, remembering, interpreting, trying to understand. All the while, a storm is coming; and a bird that has flown down the chimney is trapped inside the house. Symbols, certainly, but to try to pin down these symbols is reductive: better, I think, to take these pieces of imagery at face value, and allow them to resonate in our minds. The course of Laurel’s thoughts may seem random, but they are carefully structured. And finally, her mind turns to her husband, Phil, killed at war:

If Phil could have lived –

But Phil was lost. Nothing of their life together remained except in her own memory; love was sealed away into its perfection, and had remained there.

What might have been, what might have emerged from their love, cannot disrupt that perfection in which it is now sealed.

There remains only a final confrontation with Fay before Laurel leaves for ever her childhood home. Laurel had wanted to hurt Fay, but when the time comes, it doesn’t seem worth it:

She had been ready to hurt Fay. She had wanted to hurt her, and had known herself capable of doing it. But such is the strangeness of her mind, it had been the memory of the child Wendell that had prevented her.

Wendell was a child who had been with Fay’s ghastly family that had descended so unexpectedly on the funeral. And he, at least, was blameless. Laurel does not know why the memory of that child should now prevent her from hurting Fay: she puts it down vaguely to “strangeness of her mind”.

Fay ends, as she thinks, triumphant: “I belong to the future,” she declares. And Laurel lets her have her moment of triumph because she knows this is not true.

Memory lived not in initial possession, but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams.

These are all old, old themes. Welty’s perspective is quiet and unassuming. She meditates, as Laurel does, on the nature of loss, and of memory, that fragile and delicate thing that is nonetheless the sole remaining link to that which has been lost. But Welty is also utterly unsentimental: she is well aware of the deep resentment and hatred that can reside even within the most selfless and devoted love; and how even the most buoyant of optimism can be a denial of our lives’ tragedies – a denial almost of life itself. Love does not conquer all, and it is mere foolishness imagining otherwise.

This is a quite exquisite novel from one of the century’s finest writers.