Books that can be right as well as wrong

 

Peter Thonemann, writing in the TLS, makes a passionate celebration of Moses Finley, the historian: 

More than any other individual, it is Finley we have to thank for shaking ancient history out of its mid-century belletristic torpor and restoring it to a position of respectability among the historical sciences. 

More specifically, Thonemann goes on to describe Finley’s best-known book, The World of Odysseus (1954) and it is very apt (for once) that his review (of a series of essays by academics about Finley) is entitled “Homer for everyone”. When I read Finley, I felt he was not talking down to you; he is writing for a general and a learned readership at the same time.

Interestingly, Thonemann makes the case for the book’s importance not in what it says, but for Finley’s refreshing approach.  Thonemann continues: 

Whether that argument is right or wrong (it is probably wrong) does not matter very much. What gave The World of Odysseus its extraordinary impact was not Finley’s overall thesis, but his uncompromisingly sociological approach. Finley was not interested in Homer’s poetry itself, but in what Homer’s poetry took for granted: the social relations, economic structures and ethical values that underlay the fictive narrative of the Iliad and Odyssey. 

For a reader like me, who had probably read no other books on the classics before reading Finley, the appeal was not just the subject matter. It was that Finley could write, in a straightforward and uncomplicated way, with genuine enthusiasm, about his subject.

 Here is the paradox of many great books. We read books for many different reasons, but unfortunately only rarely with enthusiasm. It is always a great surprise to discover a book that  captures your imagination by a combination of learning and ability to enthuse. And all the more fascinating to discover, years after you read a book for the first time in a fever of excitement, that actually the argument was full of holes – and yet it doesn’t matter, because the author has communicated their thesis with passion. Here are a few examples:

Ernst Panofsky: he carries you along with his astonishing range of visual and literary sources, and his tone so confident that you feel whatever he is saying must be correct, and all other (modern) critics wrong;

Paul Hazard: the French historian of the Enlightenment, who seizes you with enthusiasm, for the eighteenth century, one of the least interesting periods for students of literature; 

George Dangerfield, whose The Strange Death of Liberal England grips you from the title alone. Here are the opening lines of the book: 

The right honorable Herbert Henry Asquith was enjoying a brief holiday on the Admiralty yacht Enchantress, bound for the Mediterranean on some pleasant excuse of business …

Dangerfield’s depiction of the Suffragettes seems to have aged badly; but that doesn’t detract from the novelistic quality of a dry historical narrative.

E P Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Classes; I cannot read the name of some East Anglian towns and villages without remembering the raw injustice of industrialisation foisted on a rural community.

These are writers who write with learning but equally with passion. What Thonemann points out is that they can be wrong in their argument, but right in their passion. Perhaps all education could consist of celebrating “wrong” books. Who cares about the argument when they could write so grippingly?