From The Wall Street Journal:

‘The stupid, the lowborn, the gullible; slaves, women, and children.” For the second-century pagan writer Celsus, it was easy to sneer at the adherents of the new Christian faith as a basket of deplorables. Still, insults often contain a grain of truth. In his point-by-point rebuttal of Celsus’ anti-Christian polemic a century or so later, the theologian Origen doesn’t dispute this particular charge. Yes, the lowborn, the uneducated, the marginalized were indeed at the core of the Christian mission: That was the point. Today, most theologians would accept that Celsus was right to foreground the crucial role of women in shaping the early church. In “God’s Ghostwriters,” Candida Moss attempts to make a similar case for the role of enslaved people. It is hard to imagine a reader who wouldn’t find this a thrilling, if at times infuriating, book.

Ms. Moss, a professor of theology at the University of Birmingham, is the author of several spiky and provocative revisionist studies of the early church. In “The Myth of Persecution” (2013), she argues that early Christian martyrdom was an overwhelmingly fictional phenomenon; the magnificent “Divine Bodies” (2019) is an exploration of the concept of bodily resurrection. In “God’s Ghostwriters,” she sets out to recover the contributions made by enslaved men and women to the development of the church in (roughly) the first two centuries after Christ.

In fact, “God’s Ghostwriters” is by far the best account we have of the roles played by enslaved people in supporting the high literary culture of the ancient world more broadly. Famously, Pliny the Elder died in A.D. 79 while composing an eyewitness account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius; less famously, Ms. Moss conjectures, at least one enslaved shorthand writer must have perished at his side (no self-respecting Roman carried his own notebook). Throughout antiquity, every stage of literary composition, dissemination and reception was facilitated by enslaved letter-carriers, copyists and readers. As Ms. Moss reminds us, even reading a book generally meant listening to an enslaved person, who was himself reading from a scroll copied out by another enslaved person.

“God’s Ghostwriters” makes a more radical and specific claim: that enslaved people were integral to the formation of the New Testament. Ms. Moss’s key concept is that of co-authorship. When an author dictated his or her ideas to an enslaved scribe, the scribe, she argues, was much more than an animate dictaphone: “Their interpretative work,” she argues, “gave shape to the thoughts and words of the speaker and made them an indispensable part of the compositional process.”

In a mundane sense, that is obviously true. The tricky question is how far we can legitimately stretch this idea of giving “shape.” Ms. Moss is admirably keen to engage in a project of “ethical reading that is reparative as it listens to neglected voices . . . to read with erased collaborators and to attend to invisible actors.” The trouble with invisible actors is precisely their invisibility. How can we tell if we are “attending” to the muffled voices of enslaved scribes, or simply imagining them? When does “ethical reading” tip into wishful thinking?

Take the epistles of Paul. Several of his letters (Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians, Philemon) were demonstrably written from prison. The vivid narrative of Acts shows that he was imprisoned multiple times—at Philippi, Caesarea and Rome. Many scholars think, for good reasons, that the “prison epistles” were in fact written during a further imprisonment at Ephesus.

Ms. Moss begins by imagining what Paul’s hypothetical Ephesian prison might have been like: “damp, moldy, and bitterly cold . . . almost entirely dark, with the only natural light in the room entering through a small lunate opening close to the ceiling.” How could Paul have written his epistles in this ghastly place? “We might imagine,” Ms. Moss argues, “that someone—perhaps the secretary of one of Paul’s wealthier followers, or perhaps a street-corner scribe hired for the day—squatted next to the window with stylus in hand and wax tablet balanced on his thigh, ready to take dictation.”

All well and good, but once this hypothetical street-corner scribe finished noting down the text of Philippians (say), what then? “He read the letter back to Paul, but there may not have been an opportunity for the prisoner to review the final draft for errors or ambiguities. The secretary, therefore, had considerable influence over the text. . . . Many scribes were used to improving the style of their customers.” Ms. Moss reminds us that Paul himself claimed to be no great shakes as a public speaker: “It is impossible to prove that Paul’s secretaries came up with the turns of phrase, rhetorical flourishes, or intellectual arguments for which the Pauline epistles are known, but there are hints that they might have.”

No one can disprove any link in this fragile chain of hypotheticals. Yes, in theory, Philippians might have been dictated through a prison window to an enslaved scribe—though a spoilsport might note that no moldy dungeons featured in Paul’s imprisonments at Caesarea and Rome: Both were rather sociable and comfortable spells of house arrest. Yes, in theory, an enslaved scribe might have inserted words or phrases or “intellectual arguments” of his own. Yes, after his release from prison, Paul might never have gotten around to removing the enslaved scribe’s surreptitious contributions to the text of Philippians. Or then again . . .

Where I really started fidgeting was when Ms. Moss went in search of specific passages contributed by “might-have” scribes of this kind. Few Pauline images are better known than the haunting passage of 1 Thessalonians 5, which likens the coming of the Day of the Lord to a thief in the night: “Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober.” Ms. Moss, quite correctly, notes that night watchmen in antiquity were often enslaved people. How did Paul—or, as Ms. Moss would have it, “Paul and his collaborator”—come up with the beautiful image of the watcher in the night? “Arguably,” she suggests, “the idea comes from an enslaved scribe who themselves may have spent some exhausting nights awake.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Wall Street Journal:

From the first arresting moment in Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography “Ian Fleming: The Complete Man” it is clear that we are in good hands. At a hastily arranged funeral in a village church, Fleming’s widow arrives late, accompanying his coffin, causing the ceremony to be restarted and thereby demonstrating that, “as in life, so in death, a strong woman had played a defining role.” Eager to learn more, we gladly enter a monumental edifice of a book that at first glance seems somewhat daunting.

What lies ahead could, after all, be the literary equivalent of a country-house tour that winds through room after room of arcane objects, past portraits of the rich and reprehensible. For Fleming’s life, though relatively short (he died in 1964 at the age of 56), was crammed not only with stuff—the handmade cigarettes, the gold-plated typewriter—but also with personages. He knew everybody, from Winston Churchill and JFK to Claudette Colbert and Truman Capote, not to mention a host of military men and secret agents. Depending on whom you believe, Fleming also played a vital undercover role in World War II as well as the Cold War. Then he created James Bond and became an industry himself.

Fleming was “the son of wealth, but the grandson of poverty,” as Mr. Shakespeare tells it, his grandfather Robert having come from nothing to become, by 1928, a merchant banker controlling “maybe a trillion pounds” in today’s money. And Robert Fleming is wonderfully described here in all his canniness and thrift, keeping silver in one trouser pocket and pennies in the other for fear of overtipping. Fleming’s childhood was a fairly typical one of social privilege and emotional deprivation, shadowed by the tragedy of his father’s death when Ian was 9 and presided over by a willful, narcissistic mother. His peerless father, Val, having been killed in World War I (Churchill penned his obituary) and his older brother, Peter, being a famous explorer and writer, young Ian had more than one legend against which to measure himself.

Educated (and sadistically flogged) at Dunford and then, at the age of 13, at Eton, the academically lazy but athletically talented boy was molded to enter not only elite British society but also the shadowy world of espionage. “It was a spy network already in the making,” Mr. Shakespeare writes of Eton, “a class of English men raised to rule the Empire . . . all known to one another from boyhood.” Even in his Moscow exile, the disgraced “Cambridge Five” spy Guy Burgess still wore his old school tie.

Fleming attended Sandhurst military academy but left prematurely in 1927, having become ill with gonorrhea. Dispatched to an academy-sanatorium in Germany, he considered the enlightened theories of the Viennese psychoanalyst Alfred Adler and dallied with women. (“His general taste,” a friend observed some years later, “was for tarts who looked like nice girls.”) A love of literature was also engendered, even though Fleming was being officially trained for a career in the British foreign service. By 1930 the unruly youth had a temporary job at the League of Nations in Geneva, where “he went to work at 8.30 a.m., walking around an old dog that lay on the steps at the entrance.” Drowsy Europe too lies on the threshold of disaster.

In 1931, however, thanks to his mother’s social connections, Fleming traded diplomacy for journalism, initially working at Reuters, where his early assignments included “sport, motor-racing, business, obituaries, and politics.” The next career step was both inevitable and timely. In 1939 Fleming was recruited to be the new assistant to the head of the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division, and his role in confounding both Nazi and Soviet intelligence networks emerges here as vital. Mr. Shakespeare finds intrigue of all kinds to untangle—personal and political, domestic and international—when his subject becomes first an espionage professional and later a novelist courted by the likes of John F. Kennedy, who turned to Fleming for assassination tips.

. . . .

Bond’s first outing, “Casino Royale,” was published on April 15, 1953, and though reviews were positive (“Ian Fleming has discovered the secret of narrative art. The reader has to go on reading”), sales were slim. “My profits from Casino will just about keep Ann in asparagus over Coronation week,” Fleming groused. Further volumes followed, but it was the Suez Crisis of 1956 that, in Mr. Shakespeare’s words, “saved Bond.” When the ailing British Prime Minister Anthony Eden decided to convalesce at Goldeneye, Fleming’s Jamaican estate, it created a sensation. Book sales of the series soared and the fictional spy’s future was assured. “Peter Pan with a gun,” as Mr. Shakespeare calls him, would never grow old. Whether airborne or underwater, trading blows or banter, the suave Bond was forever Britain as it wished itself to be.

Much of the factual detail of Fleming’s life has been examined by previous biographers, notably John Pearson (“The Life of Ian Fleming,” 1966) and Andrew Lycett (“Ian Fleming,” 1995), whose work and assistance Mr. Shakespeare acknowledges. He also lists “other excellent, if partial accounts,” including Ben Macintyre’s 2008 “For Your Eyes Only.” Given these previous exhumations, Mr. Shakespeare was cautious about conducting another. When invited to do so by the Fleming estate, however, he was gratified to unearth a fresh specimen. Not, he writes, the “prickly, self-centred bounder” he imagined but “another, more luminous person.” A Fleming of many contradictions consequently emerges: loving yet cruel, arrogant yet insecure, spiteful yet generous.

In the end he could afford to be; success made Fleming rich. In Mr. Shakespeare’s astute opinion, the inimitable Bond also retrieved for his creator “the epoch in which he had thrived, young, single and free,” while repairing the damage inflicted on the British psyche by the 1951 defection of Burgess and fellow spy Donald Maclean.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Wall Street Journal:

Many years ago, at a dinner party attended by some of the ex-radicals turned Cold Warriors known as the New York intellectuals, the table talk turned to denigrating writers reputed to be soft on communism and praising the “hard” anticommunists who were fighting for democracy and freedom. Before the guests could become too complacent, however, the literary critic Diana Trilling stood up and declared: “None of you men are hard enough for me!”

In “Write Like a Man,” Ronnie A. Grinberg recounts this scene to illustrate how members of this “testosterone-driven literary circle,” as she calls it, “came to espouse a secular Jewish machismo” as they reinvented both themselves and liberalism to meet the exigencies of Cold War politics. When old anxieties were magnified by new ideological challenges, Ms. Grinberg writes, “a masculinity centered on strength, toughness, and virility” became a defining feature of New York intellectual life.

Ms. Grinberg, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma, briefly takes up American Jewish novelists who were eager to defy stereotypes—of the timid schlemiel or bookish Talmudic scholar—and to overcome what Norman Mailer called “the softness of a man early accustomed to motherlove.” But her real focus is on a group of intellectuals—men and women both—who “prized verbal combativeness, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation.”

The principal figure here is Diana Trilling, a brilliant essayist and the wife of the celebrated cultural critic Lionel Trilling. Diana, “the more abrasive of the two,” Ms. Grinberg writes, balanced her husband’s checkbook and deftly edited his drafts. But when she offered similar editorial help to various male friends, they took it (as she herself reported) “as an assault on their masculinity.” According to the novelist and memoirist Ann Birstein, many men in this milieu “feared losing their manhood to literary women.” She noted that “reviews of my books still referred to me in parenthesis as Mrs. Alfred Kazin, as if that were a career in itself.”

Like other “literary wives”—Zelda Fitzgerald, Veza Canetti and, in this book, the essayist Pearl Kazin Bell come to mind—Diana struggled to emerge from the shadow of her husband’s reputation and establish herself in her own right. “I wanted as much for him as he wanted for himself,” she said of Lionel, the first Jew granted tenure at Columbia University’s English department, “and more than I wanted for myself.”

By the time of his death in 1975, she had published a single collection of essays. But along with other doyennes who held their own in this crowd—including the political theorist Hannah Arendt and the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb—Diana showed herself to be a vigorous and productive thinker. She earned a place at the table with her devotion to what she called “the life of significant contention” and to what Ms. Grinberg calls the determination to “write like a man.”

In her criticism and cultural portraiture, Diana Trilling delivered sharp polemical thrusts aimed at all sorts of targets, including male writers from her own milieu. She said that Saul Bellow’s debut novel, “Dangling Man” (1944), was among the “small novels of sterility.” She boasted that “a Viennese novelist, a refugee from Nazi Austria, was said to have remarked that he had lost his country, his home, his language, but that he had at least one good fortune: he has not been reviewed by me.” Such sharpness could cut both ways. On reading her attack on the student takeover of Columbia in 1968, the poet Robert Lowell (a fan of the students, to say the least) dismissed her as “some housekeeping goddess of reason.”

The agitation of the 1960s brought other intellectual polemicists to the fore, not least Norman Podhoretz (longtime editor of Commentary) and Midge Decter, who argued that the left needed to do some housekeeping of its own—by rejecting a political outlook that favored appeasement and opposed the muscular exercise of American power. Together the couple helped define what came to be called “neoconservatism.” Decter in particular found herself at odds with the ascendant women’s liberation movement and the ways it undermined traditional standards—moral and aesthetic both. In a chapter called “the first lady of neoconservatism,” Ms. Grinberg argues that this antipathy was at the very heart of a sensibility Decter shared with other women in this group, including Arendt, Himmelfarb and Susan Sontag. “Despite the sexism they encountered,” Ms. Grinberg writes, they “disparaged feminists.” They expected real writers to address “serious topics with masculine drive and ruthlessness. . . . In their view, feminists did not meet this standard.”

Ms. Grinberg rounds out the group portrait with Irving Howe, the anthologizer of Yiddish literature, author of the magisterial “World of Our Fathers” (1976), and presiding sage of Dissent, the magazine he launched in 1954. Unlike others in this cohort who found themselves “mugged by reality” and moving from left to right, Howe kept his socialist allegiances. But like the neoconservatives, he had little patience for either the strident “desperadoes” of the New Left or the grievances of the feminists. In a piece Decter commissioned him to write for Harper’s, Howe skewered the feminist Kate Millett as a “figment of the Zeitgeist” and scorned her bestseller, “Sexual Politics” (1970), as “intellectual goulash.”

In his essays “The Lost Young Intellectual” and “The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle and a Critique,” Howe recognized that, despite the internecine quarrels carried out in the pages of Partisan Review, Commentary and Dissent, these Americanized writers striving to “make it” shared two states of mind. First, profound guilt over the helplessness that they or their families felt as they watched, from safe perches on the banks of the Hudson, the destruction of Europe’s Jews during the Shoah. Second, filial impiety: They often saw their immigrant fathers as failed breadwinners, as men who were, Ms. Grinberg writes, “in their own sons’ eyes, emasculated.” Howe’s father, an immigrant to the Bronx from the Russian Pale of Settlement, had gone bankrupt during the Depression. For others, the failure might be less literal, but the judgment seemed broadly to apply.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Economist:

While applying to Yale University (pictured) in 2014, Rob Henderson visited New Haven for the first time. He stayed with a friend of a friend, whose cat was called Learned Claw (an obscure, pretentious allusion to an American judge of the mid-20th century who went by the name of Learned Hand). Mr Henderson did not get the reference. When he arrived at Yale more cultural mysteries awaited. Everyone raved about “The West Wing”, a television show he had never watched, and “Hamilton”, a musical he could not afford to see.

More Yale students come from families in the top 1% of income than from the bottom 60%. Mr Henderson was among the less-affluent minority. He had been removed from his drug-addicted mother when he was three years old and lived with nine different foster families before his eighth birthday. Scared, insecure and angry, he soon began to drink, take drugs and get into fights.

At the age of 17, as his peers started going to prison, he signed up to the armed forces on a whim. Mr Henderson thrived in the structured, disciplined system and spent seven years in the us Air Force. It became clear he was highly intelligent, so he was encouraged to apply to college through the GI Bill. (He has recently finished a doctorate at Cambridge University.)

“Troubled” is the compelling story of his chaotic childhood, his time at Yale and what it all made him think about divisions in America. As a result of his experience, Mr Henderson has coined the concept of “luxury beliefs”, which he describes as “a set of beliefs that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while inflicting costs upon the lower classes”.

In the past, people displayed their membership of the upper class either by doing things “like golf or beagling” that no working person would have time to do, or through their material accoutrements. But today, leisure time and luxury goods are more accessible to everyone, so it has become harder for the elites to separate themselves from the hoi polloi. Their solution? “The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.”

Mr Henderson gives the example of support for defunding the police. The idea gained traction in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and has been championed by many affluent people. However, it is an unpopular policy among poor people—exactly those who the well-meaning college kids say they are trying to help—and leads to higher homicide rates.

“Troubled” is more than a fascinating memoir, as it analyses the controversial belief systems that have gripped American universities. But it does so without being an angry culture-war screed. Mr Henderson makes no statement of political affiliation. Lots of what he writes is simply common sense. It is what much of middle America believes.

Mr Henderson exposes the stupidity of what now passes for orthodoxy, such as the way the luxury-belief class claims that the unhappiness associated with substance abuse or obesity, for instance, “primarily stems from the negative social judgments they elicit, rather than the behaviours and choices themselves”. The well-off “validate and affirm the behaviours, decisions, and attitudes of marginalised and deprived kids” in a way “that they would never accept for themselves or their own children”. One classmate argues that monogamy is “outdated” but admits that she was raised by two parents and intends to have a monogamous marriage herself.

Link to the rest at The Economist