now adjourned. [inaudible conversations] >> welcome to c-span2's booktv. every weekend we bring you 48 hours of books on history, biographies and public affairs by nonfiction authors. ..

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that range from ice cream to winston churchill. it's a little over an hour. >> tonight it's my pleasure to introduce simon schama according a genius of storytelling. author of several books including the embarrassment of riches, citizens, a chronicle of the french revolution and national book critic circle award winner rough crossings simon schama is a professor of art history and history at columbia university. he's also a cultural essayist from the new yorker and has presented modern 30ly critically acclaimed documentary for the bbc and pbs including a history of britain, the power of art and the american future. schama's newest book "scribble, scribble, scribble" publisher's weekly raves, schama turns his

warm prose to a fast away of topics. he approaches every subject with gusto and amusement and always has smart thing to say. it's truly a pleasure to have him tonight with us. ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming simon schama. [applause] >> welcome. i didn't drink any of your water. [applause] >> you're thinking what is the hell he's doing texting? did the kind sheldon tell you to turn your cell phones off? my favorite play in the world was spamalot because somebody comes to the throne and says, ladies and gentlemen, i would like you to turn all your cell

phones on because the show is complete crap. [laughter] >> the reason i'm looking at this, everyone, is that it has on it right now the best thing ever written about spring. and you, class, are going to told me who wrote it or else. and it's not me. but it's someone who is my kind of god of essay-writing. before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snow drop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground where he has lain buried since the previous autumn and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest patch of water. something, some kind of shudder in the earth or perhaps a rise of few degrees in the temperature tell him it's time

to wake up although a few toads appear to sleep a clock around and miss out from time to time. this period after his long fast the toad has a very spiritual look. like a strict angelo catholic towards the end of lent. his movement to language and purposeful, his body has shrunken and by contrast his eyes are abnormally large this allows one to notice what one might not that a todd has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. it is like gold, morelyn-it's like the sem precious gold that one sees in signet rings. who wrote that?

who? >> no. it's a brit, i have to say. [inaudible] >> no, it is a bit nashy. yeah, and it's the iconic cleverness that's slipping. it's believe it or not george orwell. absolutely right. good class, on the ball. [laughter] >> it is so lyrical. it's so startling lyrical who one thinks of is the kind of, you know, prince of sort of sheer disparity, of someone who seldom moved out from a kind of polemical position taking but that would be really to misdescribe orwell, isn't it. those who may have read -- when we were kid we got animal farm, great book, 1984.

but it was precisely it was because 1984 appeared to be a weapon in the cold war especially when it was core curricula in the united states during the cold war and it was an attack of totalitarianism but not a repentant but a concerned socialist and orwell never got over being a concerned socialist but he was a social democrat. but because of that orwell's novels were very often thought to be in particular fictionalizations essentially of political positions which, you know, they weren't not that, it's true, but 1984 has extraordinary moments of memory rapture of an extremely poignant kind particularly you remember this woman throwing out her

washing whistling a tune that he barely remembers. totalitarian exists and, therefore, they made them extreme deep bites on the young schama who must have read when he was 12 years old because totalitarianism exists to erase history. in two respects to erase the inconvenience of memory and also to erase the contentious of argument, it's an argument without an end, the great dutch historian once said and it was unacceptable in the orwellian managed state. now, orwell was a problem for me until i read the toad and other things like it in this kind of vein of orwell with his, you know -- his shock collar undone and not much on. because he was held up in the 1950s not just is a polemicist

not just who he was but for whom english writing should be as transparent as a clean lained window payne. it should privilege the clear, the unfussy, the unadjectival and it was hard to make the hard schama, and the old schama unadjectival, alas. [laughter] >> and so orwell was really a hard template actually for us to be commanded to follow as our model of pure english style, our kind of genius or something. and it's particularly difficult for me because i had a dekenzian childhood in every possible way which would be too complicated and lengthy to tell you about

it. i would say my father was enamored of dickens which is an unimaginable thing. my father would read a lot at my sister a lot of dickens a lot of was frightening. it scared the hell out of me and with the dickens philosophy as the policemen attitude of life of the importance somehow of containing within impossibly broken massively python-like in their -- in the appetite of the sentence to engorge itself with more pictures and words. dickens did all of that and my father, who was a super abundant figure himself in many he enjoyed it but he believed the english had this extraordinary kind of -- i don't want to mix my snake metaphors here but a

civil serpentine arabesque quality. it's actually been commented that english art that there's been essay-length book now derided as utterly and intellectually and morally bankrupt of the great do ien of the architect of the 1950s and 1960s called the englishness of english art. there was one point at least that was made and that was he got it at looking at grotesques on english architecture and in carves and, you know, those men who sometimes are on the bosses of supporting columns who have vegetation coming out of their puffed cheeks and from that he quite rightly, i think, thought of when what might be called sort of some strange of vernacular art representation emerged which can't possibly be

earlier than hogarth, i think, because most english before that had been imported either as instructed from the italian renaissance or very severe wannabe conclusively of the kind represented by hogarth's father-in-law, james thorn hill whom he wanted to emulate as a history painter and it's hogarth's kind of appetite for caricature, for figure rations, for story, above all for story, for narrative. hogarth is an extraordinary storyteller. he's too wordy either directly or simply all of the following the story line of all those modern morality towns but he made the point which was wonderfully taken and it may have been made before, i don't know where. that the actual formal design of hogarthian prince in particular, graphic art to some extent in some of the paintings with its

we would now say pretentiously in intellectual circles, a kind of formation that eats itself, collapsing, things collapse constantly in hogarth. men fall off their sedan chair. a drunken mother loses her baby down a cellar horrifying. things are constantly falling apart and it was said well, if you look at design, it actually disobeys all the instructions of classical art education. it is above all serpentine and it was to design itself in its great wheeling bounding somersaulting motions inside the work of art to contain a story line to contain a kind of twist and turn, a moment of the unexpected. and whether or not hogarth's closeness to which he was

responsible for that, the kind of insistedibility that really english art particularly for content makes england by extension britain but it is an english thing above all, i think, but it's certainly an english thing that the purists of abstraction expressionism, literally the abstraction of formal design out of the earthy nature of storytelling is extremely biologically alien to english painting, i think. think about aggressively modern painters like francis bacon, for example. hogarthi hogarthian snake rise.

that was the kind of writing i liked. and it did, as i say it had its terrors -- my sister and i became so accustomed to these kenzian readings. when we got an age we were given parts to play as it were and my father had such an unpredictable and unusually successful business career that my mother hitaxpayer cal of commercial and financial fiasco would know things had gone wrong. we lived in a kosher home, a jewish home. and if it was a friday night when my father would come home and rather bizarrely start toying with his chicken noodles, my sister and i -- he would do this. he would sort of hold them and he wouldn't whirl them around his head, almost, it was one of the few occasions my sister and i saw him drunk because he was too frightened to explained to my mother how serious the problem was and we would roll

our eyes and get our suitcases and pack again and my mother would say, we're all going to the work house. now, house fire 9-year-old simon this was not a literary illusion, or a figurative story and i thought we were going to the work house and i remember what's going to my father and saying, dad, what's gruel. [laughter] >> the stinker, he said, you won't like it, sonny. a rotten thing today. we loved him. avenues wonderful man in many ways. but we had that sense of writing, he loved balzak, dickens, the more accessible joyce of the dublin and portrait of the young man. he loved dylan thomas. he loved this cream performative theatrical super abundant kind of writing and what then i had to go to school is try to be the extremely unabundant orwell and moreover we were taught by a

generation of the so-called new critics who learned their criticism at the hands of -- the work of ts elliott which was extremely dogmatic and stringent point of view and you skipped milton, please, absolutely out of the question. milton is this horrifying latin mutated form. it's not even worth thinking about. pompous, total failure to understand cadence except kind of this parody and then you skip romantics except complete joke. we allowed one dickens book "hard times" the most boring thing he ever wrote. and so we were -- those are all known as -- these were known, you know, areas we were not allowed to enter. and i discovered this messianic

fluffy white hair and sort of fantastically, you know -- i realized at some point actually that the sense of his own dress it was never varied. it was white shirt open neck extremely i have hiked on the highlands but to the complexion it was the dh lawrence guide to dressing really this fake proletarian savon and he penitentiary all his time as saying dickens was worthily self-indulgence mockery of a worker and he gave a famous lecture of atonement of the canal -- the cambridge parliament and he got up and he had a lot to talk about my severely and he also talked about tolstoy whom he waxed

severely. and a woman got up, so in your entire life you've been telling us really that we shouldn't go anywhere near charles dickens and what do you have to say for yourself. it's all very well, whoops, i have second thoughts and he was bad tempered and hair trigger line of temper, well, i should be able to say to you, my good lady, i'm frightfully frightfully sorry about all this. i turned to the person next to me and said, who is that woman. it was mrs. levis. true. [laughter] >> i always get you to repent. so discover the orwell of the

toad was kind of a liberation, you know, the relaxed orwell, the lyrical orwell, the sensuous orwell, which is there is a lot. and another thing i discovered in orwell and it made me want to be an essayist and it made me feel i wanted to develop different kind of literary voices if i could, i was a journalist sort of instinctively really as well as i hope this historian from the time i was a child, really, school magazine, very bad. found the university newspaper but always worse and i wanted to have that -- i sincerely dedicate of books of essay most of it is journalism not all of it, to my editors because i actually -- you know, you write in a different way or you try to without being deliberately comenial light. i've been called that. but you write in a different way, you know, a vogue column than you would a new york quickly turn-around art piece,

the new word again for a gatheredian political column, for example. and it's the mastery of different moments, different audiences and now, you know, contribute can to the financial times and i do all sorts of things from interviews. i like those different -- slight different styles of literary attack. but i guess the essay, other than the toad of orwells which i particularly, you know, felt, wow, there's something really extraordinary about the great essay is an essay again for those who really haven't read it really must called leo-tolstoy and the fool and it's one of the greatest things ever written in any form in english and it's so extraordinarily cunning. it made me realize that the great essay is actually kind of a nonfiction short story that it has actually you would say a follows the narratives but not rules but it's not simply just a set of arguments turned together

in vivid, you know, rebuffed clear prose. on the contrary, when you're going for higher stakes you really do kind of control the pace of reading in a great essay. that's what, you know, one of the very greatest essayists of orwell that might be greater than orwell and that's william if you don't know the works of him, i can't remember them to you highly. he flourished 1800s, to 1820 was sort of the puppy drug dog who trodded behind the romantics who tesupervised him for his admiration. he did everything. he was the ferrari great sports writer. he wrote amazingly on boxing and amazingly on horse racing but boxing was his big thing. he was a parliamentary writer. he wrote brilliantly about art. and he wrote just about an incredible essay my students love on the pleasure of hating which has a certain kind of

ferocious candor to it. another wonderful essay so-called on actors in boxes which is absolutely wonderful. it has complaining that he's bad enough to people like overacting in the parts. you have to tolerate them coming to the theater and standing in their -- in special boxes to take the cheers of the audience in plays in which they were not even taking part themselves. so you realize when you -- as you go on from haslet that you're actually reading him on the birth of celebrity culture and it's really kind of an extraordinary piece of sharp -- very, very sharp exhilaration, really, an incredible piece of sharp. so leo tolstoy in the fool has what haslet has as i say kind of a grammarturgy and its asks one great question of orwell's and

the question is why did tolstoy despise shakespeare? why did he think shakespeare was the most overrated writer heavier why was he incredible -- he couldn't understand what people saw in shakespeare particularly the greater the claims made for shakespeare theaters and julius sees injure and above all king lear? he really could only just see a kind of worthlessly histrionic talent expended on nothing in particular. and tolstoy had an intelligence the size of the planet. we had misperception and it's an odd bee to have in his bonnet but tolstoy could have weird bees in his bonnet. this is not orwell's -- i would comment about the story of tolstoy that occurs to me that what -- and it really worked 'cause some of you, at least two you can go and read this essay.

i hope so, philadelphia, you must. and it would spoil it 'cause the essay really does have a punch line and what orwell does is drops clues as the essay runs along like a great crime story as to why, in fact, tolstoy might have this view of shakespeare and particularly might have it of king lear. and when the answer is delivered, it's of a kind of brow-smacking accord which is the same thing when you discover that it was the gardener's 9-year-old who actually cut off the granny with a pair of garden sheers and you should have seen it coming all along. no, but it's just absolutely amazing. and then, you know, after the kind of twist hits you the per fundity of what's being said of what's been said. berlin who i write about in "scribble scribble" told me this story. you know, it's true, but tolstoy

at the end of his life -- any of you saw the last station. isn't a wonderful film. christopher plumber and tolstoy is given to liberating powerful moral advice to the young. and makes it known that he would always be available to young people who wanted to put these deep questions and there's one point two students match all the way from one miserable kind of, you know, pink hole somewhere in the caucuses and they would go all the way and they'd stock on the door and the servant answers and they say well, excuse us could you see nikolai because we have questions about him and he sees he will be responsible to anybody. and tolstoy is rocking back and forth and he's lighting his pipe

and, i'm not in. too tired. and so the servant goes to the door i'm tremendously sorry but the master -- that moment before i can finish the sentence tolstoy, his beard flowing like mad white flames. he says young man, i am here. i have sinned. i've sinned but i'm here. tell me what the question you want to put to me is. and the young man understands well, you preach that it is wrong to resist evil with violence. but what if a tiger sprang from the jungle at you and tolstoy looks at him and he says, your men such things very seldom happen. goodbye. [laughter] >> such are the mightily literary minds. [laughter] >> so i, you know, developed this notion in journalism, long

form journalism you could actually make a craft out of it, and i have to say i teach a course -- how am i doing, timekeeper? i've already gone over. i'm fine? all right. that -- i teach a course on essay at columbia university and there's some gold-plate students and some okay students and i don't know i realize that that i'm not a luddite at all about the web. but i do think there is some sort of zero-sum game. no, it's not fair. there's some issue with the blog. and the thing about the blog is that essentially a staggeringly gorgeous forms, until a you diderly self-indulgence.

it presupposes that anything you might have to say in any order that might occur to you about anything is going to be of some interest to some sorry soul out there somewhere, actually. [laughter] >> and that all of the kind of wonderful spiny harshness of the essay's form that makes it a glory in humane culture is for the most part -- it's not true of all blogs who do think of themselves as crafted in an essayist way in the shakespeare or tolstoyist way. half the kind of, you know, raw self-confidence of the entirely eck tomas -- ectoplasmic way.

[laughter] >> but there's the kind of problem. but essays are still crafted and then i discovered actually -- discovered, you know, as i tried to write them myself, as i say different voices and different genre all of which, you know, are slightly different. i lo i love him at his best and he's not always at his best, it depends how much his illicit substances he has taken. we all have our favorites. i love lester bang's rock 'n roll journalism. really an extraordinary voice. david foster wallace, all the kids want to be like david foster wallace.

you have to be david foster wallace to be like david foster wallace. and food writing and i have a monthly column which is essays with recipes in a british magazine. and food-writing is a genre i have incredible respect for it shares with art-writing actually a problem of translation, by which i mean again, i was talking about this at dinner. my hosts were kind enough to let me sit out a bit earlier. there's some way in which wordiness is incommen -- the sa as the senses of what you're saying and the distribution of that immediate process into thought processes, memories, pleasure, receptive and so on. and it's very difficult without

embarrassment to actually find forms of record. i mean, i prefaced my book on rembrandt where i thought about it a lot and this book is like a million pages long and i got over my problems over with words but i did preface by paul valerie's remark that one should apologize about one's painting. the case with food-writing, too, i think, does food-writing has more ambitions to be more simply than what you can buy at the green market and how to cook it which is a good kind of food-writing but if it has more ambitions and actually to do a certain issue of food-writing because, you know, our olfactory being our incredible organ of preserved writing. it has this quality of trying to translate sensation of taste, of

texture, of what happens on our palate into speech or writing. the essay called mouthing off which i haven't published anywhere actually about those two things we do with our mouth, speech and taste. and the two don't fit together really without, you know, a particular set of calculations coming into play. and very often it's some of the most poetic writers the dangers are of overreach. what most -- not all but most wine-writing there is a writer in england who's almost a poet of wine-writing which takes refuge in the kind of fake lexography that you have these phrases that matched with certain things. you know, a faint hint of cigar stub or, you know, a memory of

wet burrberry and if you're just having your bulgarian merlot and you have no idea what they're talking about black beret. it's really annoying but it's just really kind of a bizarre and completely artificial idea. and great food-writing does have bad poetry, sort of dull mechanical formulaic fake poetry but there are some writers who are real poets, prose poets and the greatest of all in my view, easily, although i do have a lot of time for elizabeth david but the greatest of all again is lots of you read it is msk fisher and he's not -- in a way i hate to call her a food writer because that's why she never became famous, really and it's like saying, you know, why haven't we heard this writer scott fitzgerald someone must have heard them. she's that good. she's not the greatest not just women writers either. she's one of the great american

20th century writers. but she wrote entirely in essay form. and one of the essays i realized -- the recipes are actually not great as a matter of fact for the particular period. there's a wonderful book how to cook a wolf which is actually about surviving the depression. about how the surviving the hard times, the wolf coming through the door. and i remember the way i suddenly decided to rethink orwell was an essay which begins the first thing i cooked was pure poison. and it's something she cooks as a child for her mother who's just had a baby of which the young mary frann sis kennedy fisher is incredibly jealous and she decides to make for her mother and the mother gratifying bursts out immediately with an allergic reaction in violent welts and she made this extraordinarilily breath-like

milk pudding. and to improve it she said she ran out and indeed got some blackberries and scattered it around like horrifying oreloa like breast pudding. it's very funny, it's very knowing and it's extraordinary and she writes about life, desire, disappointment and tragedy and i'll just finish -- and it's nice to read to you. i hope you will read my stuff as well but i'll read -- can i finish my two short readings? here's me with sort of mary frann sis k. fisher and she's one of the few writers i wish i'd known -- she died she was an old tarter as an old lady and i wish i was on the other end of her tongue. she died in napa valley. with her very much in mind but not trying to be like her but trying to find the kind of child's voice.

this is the beginning of my essay on ice cream, which is one of the nicer pieces in the book, i hope. and i'll read you a little bit from that. not because it's about milk and then i'll read you a little bit from one of her -- which i have in one of my own essays in the end which is an amazing one. here's the ice cream bit. summer, 1956, angela edin then prime minister is dreaming dangerous egyptian dreams which in the following autumn will send what little remains of the british empire up the creek aka the suez canal and we don't know about that and we don't kay. it's the last day of the school. we seal off the 11 plus that's an elementary school exam and out there in pebbled ash london and the gritty playground of our primary school beyond the black spiked railings hung with bind reed there's a siren chiming,

bing-bong and we're called and we want what he's got. we want a 99 toxic kind of ice cream god, how we want it. that haggy chocolate stick plunged into a mind of air pumped chalky glop which would not called vanilla were it not to deform the dark bean but then we won't to organic not in 56 so we charge out for the rusting green gates and break into our version of ladonna immobile. my name antonio and i sell ice creamio, down back your alley-o, the delirium of ice cream is undoubtable glee and to get your tongue around an dollop is to be

instantaneous child-like again whatever your age to cop a mouthful of lusciouslily that magically matters opposites, fruits and dairy, tart and voluptuous, a shot of excitement meets a scoop of all's well. yes, doctor we know it makes us blist out babes again tripping down memory lane slurp luck suck even on occasions drool and slobber but it is more complicated than milky regression. and here's -- here's msk fisher, young msk fisher with her first husband, al fisher who has been assigned to a teaching job just before the war in strasburg and she's alone and a bit for loan and grumpy and here's what she does about it. in the morning in the soft sultry chamber in the sweaty

overradiated room, sitting in the window peeling tangerines, peel them gently, do not bruise them as you watch soldiers pass and pass the corner and over the canal over to the washed rin. if you find the kiss the section section save it for al, her husband. listen to the chamber maid thumping up the pillows and murmuring encouragement of the tails while she mutters the seduction and bicyclists who ride more than wheels, tear delicately from the soft pile of affections, each velvet string. you know, those white pulpie strings pull them off be careful. the sections of the tangerine are gone and i can not tell you why they are so magical.

perhaps it's one little shell sheer of eunanimous until on a chinese bowl but crackles so tinny or crackles under your teeth or perhaps it's the rush of gold pulp underneath it or the perfume. i cannot tell. there must be someone, though, who knows what i mean. probably everyone does because of his own secret eatings. they don't do that kind of thing in blogs. thank you. [applause] >> the way it works if you raise your hand we'll get a microphone to you and i think given the breadth of topics in "scribble scribble" i think we can ask anything from art to ice cream to the royal.

>> i don't do automotive repair, i don't think i will. we were talking about cars but i wouldn't know a carburetor if it hit me. >> and all the way back, michelle, about three rows back. >> hi. i'd like to know with respect to the royal wedding coming up at the end of the week what your thoughts are on the role of the relevance of the monarchy in the 21st century? >> the role of the monarchy, you want the role and the relevance of the 21st century? >> well, it's a sort of, you know, relatively innocuous fourth god to which we jenflex that we take our mind off the power which the monarchy isn't power in which it consumes money really in particular. but the reason why -- did you read the piece in the "new york times" yesterday called "the

tarnished crown"? that was one of the worst pieces from a really great journalist. it was nonsensical. it used very revealingly the writer who definitely will be nameless, he used the word many, as in many britains feel that the monarchy because of the collapsed charles and diana's, you know, and the mishaps of the befallen and crimes and misdemeanors i-worthless not to be gone. but actually, it is true that some people -- some would have been a more accurate word. the opinion polls whatever anyone feels about this is unequivocal. it's about 75% of britains, britains not just the english really wants it to stay and then there are some -- there will probably be a lot more people than the mere 20% or something who are actively hostile in the monarchy who will not be interested on friday but what he does is kind of -- it's an

anthropological event essentially, an event in ant -- society and the royal family is emblem which tries to do two things at once. it's not -- but walter badger is no longer really a reliable source to think about the monarchy because it all -- he presupposes that the monarchy was effective insofar it was distant but actually a large part of queen victoria's appeal was that she queued a bourgeois family, a bourgeois family that went wrong in the shape of her older son the prince of wales and edward the vii and that was the strength for the royal family. if you're going to have oh, they're just like us but in some deep peculiar strange way, they're incredibly not like us, then it's a tricky act to do. and, you know, we'll see how

well the -- you know, the beneficiaries of the nuptials to that actually. there's more and more writing that notice that kate middleton, katherine, really has never really held down a job, much less than diana, actually, who did a nice steady job in her nursery in kindergarten. but kate middleton has not really done very much like that. it's essentially -- you can say you're a marxist but that's a republican that the monarchy exists to enslave britain into a forced consciousness. it's not entirely wrong but it's really to this state. and i think sort of especially in hard times really the britains are better or worse are apt to really want something which represents uncontroversial path-free zone of emblem attic

charis charisma. i was lucky to get, you know, a gong, a sort of -- a thing, which made me absurdly commander of the british empire. i don't really have a lot to command. and -- but this brought me into very close contact with the queen, i mean, really close, you know? almost kind of clinch close because you have to bend your head as she puts the thing -- the gong around you. and then you raise this sort of -- and you're confused for a minute because what you're seeing the wax works which appears animatronicly to be saying things to you. [laughter] >> and i just finished -- this is why i got the gong for the history of britain series and the anna -- animatronic voice, i assume you got the video.

and i remember a dull light bulb, would you have seen it, not yet. and i realized i'd been panhandled in buckingham palace and i should send my mom, that would be nice so i did a lot, you know. funny royals, yes. >> you sound like john cleese of the queen of england. a little further back. >> my question may be -- my question may be an oxymoron, but as an american you have a favorite american author either living or dead? and could you give the reason? >> wow, my favorite american wow, there are just so -- again, it's a weedy thing.

there are different reasons to be passionate about different writers. i am a big melvillian. as i say, i was talking about him at dinner both in gargantion and big form and in the kind of form really. it's the sheer kind of mad throw it out the window and see how it stands, you know, melville attempts. it was a catastrophic failure actually in terms of the public eye that i find really extraordinary. i think he does really does change the language a bit in that way. we were just talking about prose. we were talking about poetry as well? i do have a deep feeling for robert loel who's historically rich and seems to go against everything i've said as it were me being sort of dickens-like,

dekenzian temper but i do rather love robert lowell. and i do love robert frost very well very much. and everything written about robert frost he's not a nature poet and he's brewing about life and death and everything in between. and you should get on the neocon broad life and things about robert frost. i did love but i knew him -- i knew him quite well. we became friends. i did love joseph hallow very much. maybe he's one book but i think -- there's at least one other book which is wonderful but i thought catch-22 was an extraordinary kind of burlesque black masterpiece and i'll tell you something else, i think of

books rather than, you know, complete -- i'm not indifferent to fitzgerald at all. i love fitzgerald deeply, actually. not fitzgerald of gatsby but fitzgerald of tender of the night which is a hopeless mess of some way and a staggering masterpiece in others, i think. the book i was really stunned to realize how extraordinarily it was is the naked nadette. he was 22 which is just absolutely extraordinary. i'm not sure including -- hell, i'm not sure anything as great will ever be written certainly about american war ever, ever again and now and since the form of the book seems a cliche because it's a buddy book, the back-stories of each member of a particular chronic platoon but

it has this kind of epic, extraordinary epic tragic greek tragic quality to it and i think the sharpness, the visualization of the young mahler and it has been forgotten because of the cumberness of mahler's book, i think. that's an example, his i do love faulkner. i hope it's not a brushoff but this is the subject we sort of came up at supper and what i said we were given a lot of american writing to read in england in the 1950s which is a wonderful thing and we were given -- i'm always grateful for that and we would give them as we would give them the least acceptable but not the difficult backs but the books that sounded least like charlotte bron at a and jane austen and when you read scatter letter, it was -- what is this? or, you know, you read bartelby,

and you read salinger and the scratcher in the rye it was a pungent incomprehensiblity of american prose with its weird exalted voice, you know, whitman i loved whitman for its madness. we used to go round really. and we would say things to each other or words to that effect and the whitman way. so we love -- i loved all that and i still do like sort of extreme american writing, i would say. i love extreme raw uncompromising. there is a writer who's really been forgotten but once -- he has a name and you forget it and he's very, very dark.

and murderous and indeed trot himself one after following a short stories which is most tragic. his name is pancake and he lives as you might expect in the appalachians. have any of you actually read of him or heard in hhim. he's a remarkable remarkable american writer absolutely a tragic demeanor. they all seem to kill themselves. and one of the great out of control extreme american comic novels. he wrote the neon bible when he was 18 and which is almost as remarkable. and i like extreme american writing. >> shall we continue, the lady in the fourth row. >> i read anything that you or

tony used to write. and in terms of tony stayed in one area of politics. now, are you -- >> politics you're saying? >> the political discourse, basically. and you have peace and trust is it because you hold your writing skills and keep them sharp by going from, you know, the extremes of writing? >> different styles, yeah. >> yes. >> i'm just curious. >> you know, i get interested in things and the things i'm interested being interested in so much else. i sort of run around in that way, i suppose. i'm not -- i don't think i do it. it is a test. it is a test, you know -- do you think of readership when you write for the "new york times" or the new yorker. i don't really try to classify a demographic or something like that. but the remarks i was making i hope not entirely facetiously

the untranslatebly of food writing of prose and of paint writing and i do some things about paint and there would have been some pieces in there but the buddy have translate to great lyrics but those the issues as well. i think it's sort of a sense of life is short. you want to try your hand, actually, at different idioms. i suppose, it's a way an actor might not want to be, you know, stuck with a comic or a tragedy role or something. you really want to kind of push the language really in different directions rather than have a single consistent voice. it may make you flip a bit. it may make you in the end i don't know compromise. i do have -- if you want to look at, you know, there is a particular voice where i'm trying to present as clearly and as accessibly as possible a quite complicated argument. there are at least two pieces

and which were of lectures which i have worked on to be on a lecture both on victor uns and one on thomas carlisle and they have a wonderful voice but certainly the voices one designed for bundling together the ant lit cal arguments about the narrative about those who are -- who are making them, i think. it's very interesting you mentioned tony. tony and i knew each other for a long time. we were students together at cambridge in the '60s and we had lots of differences. political and other methodological but they were all above-board differences. we did have sort of quite -- i mean, not serious arguments but some differences. but i think we admired each other. i certainly admired him and i thought the book called

"postwar" which is a masterpiece about the war and you have read the memory chalet. you haven't. you have a treat. it's a collection of pieces he wrote as he was dying. he died of lou gehrig's disease one of the most terrible ways you can die because just last year, i think, last august, yeah. and because, you know, your brain never goes. it's the last thing to go so you observe your increasing incapacity day by day, hour-by-hour, minute by minute and he was the most -- he was the bravest most uncomplaining and he wrote this -- he was writing these essays about memory as he was dying. and it's a very short book. and it's arguably the greatest thing he did, actually, and i sort of -- i'm rather distressed -- well, not distressed. it doesn't matter, he was dead. i wish i could have told him how extraordinary book it was.

it's about childhood, it's the space of 50 pages. it's called the memory chalet. it's a hard edge unsentimental intelligence. so those of you who we're talking about. the tame is judt, tony judt. read it. it will change your life. it really will, i think, actually. >> we have a podcast on our website. >> good, good. >> one more question the gentleman in the back there. on your right. >> uh-huh. >> thank you. please share your thoughts on putting together the power of art, both the book and the outstanding videos and now that -- they complement each other and how that thought process worked. >> oh, thank you very much. that's very kind. those of you don't know it was television series. it was conceived of always a

television series but i knew, as i do, with the books that are -- i hate the word several companion books i never wanted to deposit scripts for each film and make the book and the chapters are a much more elaborate. there's only so much you can do in an hour of television, a long period, though, that is. i'll tell you why that book happened actually and thank you for asking it. there are some art historians among you here tonight and you will know very well that -- that so-called contextualism is really a de rigor and it's almost a militant contextualism as a result of mystery theory, and it's late already we don't need to talk about that very much. the notion was that there was these great men in the gallery. there are the