Books I Have Loved

By Carl Wells

Some oldthinkers still read books . . .

Carl Wells has been one of them.
Some of those books have made a huge impression on him.
Books I Have Loved gives us Wells' response to 46 books (by 41 authors) encountered through a longish life mostly spent (misspent?) reading books.
His only regret is that he didn't spend more time reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781665576406

Carl Wells

Carl Wells enjoys living in Southern Indiana, in what might be described as Flyover Country, except that almost nobody flies over.

Book preview

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1.The Catcher in the Rye—by J. D. Salinger

Chapter 2.A Man of Letters—by Thomas Sowell

Chapter 3.The Breakdown of Nations—by Leopold Kohr

Chapter 4.Bomba the Jungle Boy on the Underground River—by Roy Rockwood

Chapter 5.Crime and Punishment—by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Chapter 6.Understood Betsy—by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Chapter 7.War Without Garlands—by Robert J. Kershaw

Chapter 8.Leftism—by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Chapter 9.Cress Delahanty—by Jessamyn West

Chapter 10.Penrod—by Booth Tarkington

Chapter 11.Miss Mapp—by E. F. Benson

Chapter 12.As I Was Young and Easy—by Clancy Carlile

Chapter 13.The Law—by Frédéric Bastiat

Chapter 14.The Cancer Ward—by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Chapter 15.True Grit—by Charles Portis

Chapter 16.The Green Stick—by Malcolm Muggeridge

Chapter 17.The Rookie Fights Back—by Burgess Leonard

Chapter 18.Life Is Life—by Zack (Gwendoline Keats)

Chapter 19.The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—by Mark Twain

Chapter 20.The Tenant of Wildfell Hall—by Anne Brontë

Chapter 21.The Gulag Archipelago—by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Chapter 22.Jane Eyre—by Charlotte Brontë

Chapter 23.Persuasion—by Jane Austen

Chapter 24.Politics of Guilt and Pity—by Rousas John Rushdoony

Chapter 25.Tammy Out of Time—by Cid Ricketts Sumner

Chapter 26.Sam Small Flies Again—by Eric Knight

Chapter 27.Treasure Island—by Robert Louis Stevenson

Chapter 28.David Copperfield—by Charles Dickens

Chapter 29.The Old Curiosity Shop—by Charles Dickens

Chapter 30.King—of the Khyber Rifles—by Talbot Mundy

Chapter 31.Pride and Prejudice—by Jane Austen

Chapter 32.Tom Sawyer Abroad—by Mark Twain

Chapter 33.Life at the Bottom—by Theodore Dalrymple

Chapter 34.Apache Gold—by Joseph A. Altsheler

Chapter 35.A Master of Craft—by W. W. Jacobs

Chapter 36.Tarzan the Terrible—by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Chapter 37.Anne of Green Gable—by L. M. Montgomery

Chapter 38.The Code of the Woosters—by P. G. Wodehouse

Chapter 39.Watership Down—by Richard Adams

Chapter 40.The Wind in the Willows—by Kenneth Grahame

Chapter 41.That Hideous Strength—by C. S. Lewis

Chapter 42.1984—by George Orwell

Chapter 43.Ain’t My America—by Bill Kauffman

Chapter 44.The Last Chronicle of Barset—by Anthony Trollope

Chapter 45.The Agony of the Church—by Nikolaj Velimirovic

Chapter 46.Pollyanna—by Eleanor H. Porter

Chapter 47.Summing Up

Appendix I.A Prayer

Appendix II.Three Iron Laws

Appendix III.Goodreads on the Books I Have Loved

Other Books by the Author

Introduction

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.¹

Book lists never satisfy me. Other people admire books I don’t particularly care about. Or don’t mention books I do care about. Or say things with which I disagree. Or something else. I’m glad to see that other people like reading enough to give us their recommendations, but their recommendations end up disappointing me.

So I’m pretty sure my list of books I have loved will disappoint you. And that in turn will disappoint me, because these books have meant a lot to me. If you roll your eyes, or sneer, or if you just shrug, you will be rolling your eyes or sneering or shrugging at me personally. So don’t tell me about your unfavorable response; I don’t need the aggravation. Make your own durn list.

Let’s look on the optimistic side, however. There is a strong possibility that at least a few of these books would find favor with you. Some of them you’ve never heard of, while some of them you’ve heard of but just never got around to reading. So consider this an encouragement to you to try something new and potentially enjoyable. At least one person—me—has found these books to be life-enhancing. You might have a similar response to at least a handful of them. My descriptions of them hopefully will let you know which books might interest you, and which of them you want to run screaming from as if from the plague.

My own love of reading began early in life. I can distinctly remember, at about age six or so, seeing my parents read a lot, and wanting to be like my parents. So I tried to be like them, and it worked out well for me. Reading came naturally to me. I’ve always read a lot, from childhood onward. I have several excellent legacies from my parents, and the love of reading is far from the smallest.

The reading has always been much more than a pleasant hobby for me. Reading is what I do, and really have to do.

The reading has not led to me becoming successful and wealthy. I am not famous for being learned or wise. I’m just a guy who read a lot, and enjoyed doing so.

Reading books did not lift me to eminence. The books, I suppose, helped me to hang on.

For most people, life is challenging and difficult. We might lead lives of quiet desperation, or of noisy self-deception, but one way or another most of us manage to make a mess of our lives. This is just as true of the outwardly successful as it is of the rest of us. I know lots of outwardly successful people—and so do you—who are examples to be shunned.

The fact that my life has been unsuccessful has been a result of my own poor character, of course. If character is fate, I chose my own fate by the way I exercised my character. In this I suppose I join many teeming millions. To explain is not to excuse.

So: I’m just a guy hanging on. Don’t blame the books! Through this unimpressive life, reading has been one of the great mitigating blessings. Reading was a gift from God, given to me for reasons—generosity of spirit surely among them, I would guess—of His own.

Reading was not my only gift from God. The greatest gift He gave me was to allow me to become a beginning Christian in my mid to late twenties. That marked the start of a long, slow slog toward semi-sanity. I think the books have helped immensely on that long journey.

Should I have invested much more of my time in things other than reading? Perhaps. But also perhaps not. I am a one-trick pony: I write books. Because I have read many books, eventually I became able to write books, although it took me a long time to get to the publishing part—publishing at my own expense, at that—and although the books have not been successful.

All I did was read books, and write books nobody read. I am completely unrepentant. I remind myself of the famous outlaw Frank James. Late in his life, decades removed from his bloody criminal past, a reporter asked

if Frank thought what he had done with his life had been worthwhile.

Frank paused for a moment, as if his mind was racing over the scenes of his past: foolhardy charges, smoking revolvers, bloody corpses, the faces of Quantrill, Bloody Bill, Cole, Jesse, his mother—and Joseph Lee Heywood, stumbling to his death.

Finally, Frank answered: If you’re not a quitter, anything you’ve done has got to be worthwhile. You can make it worthwhile. I guess, if I had it all to do over, and had the choice, and had to make the choice as a young man, I’d rather have all the pain and danger and trouble than to be just a plain farmer. If I had an old man’s head, I would choose different. . . .²

Hilarious. Looking back, Frank James is glad he chose to be a criminal as a young man. It is only with his ‘old man’s head’ that he would choose different.

Well, I’m worse even than Frank James. Even with my old man’s head, I would still choose to do the reading/writing all over again. I would just do it more and better. If I had an opportunity to do it all over, I’d buy and read even more books, and I would self-publish earlier and more.

Reading offers such immense pleasures! By now I should be cynically hardened to any behavior of mankind, but I confess I continue to be astonished that countless intelligent people refuse to read good books. What person of normal intelligence would not take delight in Pride and Prejudice?

But the sad fact remains that books that would please and benefit millions (probably billions) are read only by thousands. The epigraph to this Introduction says it very well.

While reading has been very good to me, I have not been as good to reading as I could have been. I have some regrets. The first regret is minor, but still frustrating.

1/In my mid-20s I began keeping a record of my book reading. That included making a mark inside the front cover (on books I owned) each time I read a book, as well as writing down each book read in a notebook. This has been a very enjoyable task. My regret is that I did not do this recording from childhood on. So I have no record of my early reading, which disappoints me. This also means that I (usually) have no accurate record of how many times I read a lot of books. There are books I read as a young person and which remained important to me as an adult, and which I continued to read, but I have to guess how many times I read them. I wish I had an accurate count.

The other two regrets are more serious.

2/I regret that I did not read even more. I wasted a lot of time; I could have been reading, instead. I don’t think my life should have been devoted only to reading. But reading was the most useful thing I did, and I should have done a lot more of it. Budgeting time wisely is a crucial job for all of us. We all know we’re going to die after 70 or 80 or 90 years (or often less). So we ought to be very intentional about how we spend our brief time on earth. I wasted far too much time which could have been better spent reading. My gift was reading, and I made only a partial good use of my gift. I could have and should have read, at a guess, at least twice as much as I did. Perhaps three times as much. Hindsight vision is, proverbially, 20/20. But I really should have understood my need to read more, at a much younger age. I’ve noticed that I can be a bit slow on the uptake, and this was one example.

3/My other serious regret is that I was not as adventurous in my reading as I could have been. I don’t regret at all that I read my favorite books over and over. Doing that was necessary to me both psychologically and intellectually. I don’t regret having read Crime and Punishment eleven times. I probably should have read it sixteen times. But I do regret that I did not make as serious an effort as I could have to try to search out other potentially good writers.

I did not do horribly in that category. I sometimes made a conscious effort to try new writers. When I did, the results were good. In one case, the results were spectacular. (More on this case when I discuss one of the books I have loved.) But I have been far too slow to make a conscious effort to try writers of potential interest to me. Here again I have made only a very partial good use of the gift God has given me to be a reader.

If you are a reader, learn from my mistakes, and don’t repeat them in your own life.

Both fiction and non-fiction have been important to me. But fiction has been more important, and I am far more likely to reread fiction books than I am non-fiction. Represented here are 35 fiction books, 11 non-fiction.

In most Christian circles fiction is looked upon as relatively unimportant. This is a grave error. Fiction is crucial to us. Some truths are best conveyed by fiction. Fiction helps us to evaluate possibilities. Jesus Christ understood this. That is why He gave us so many fiction stories. The parables were fiction and understood to be fiction by His hearers. We as a Christian civilization have grappled with those fiction stories ever since He spoke them. As a Christian civilization we are blessed with many fiction stories by human authors. They will continue to be vital to us as the years unfold. That so many Christians are not reading great (and good, and moderately good) fiction is one of the sad and unsung tragedies of our time (and no doubt of any time).

There are of course lots more than 46 books which have been important to me. These 46 gave me a special jolt, perhaps, at least in most cases. In some cases a book is representative of an author who was vital to me, rather than representing a book that gave me a special jolt. Here are two examples. One writer, Frédéric Bastiat, is important to me because of his personality as well as his ideas. I picked The Law to reread rather than one of his three longer works. No one of his books stands out as best of all, but collectively Frédéric Bastiat was a jolt in my life. Example two, W. W. Jacobs was a jolt in my life. His A Master of Craft was memorable, but it was his body of work as a whole which jolted me, not necessarily any one particular book.

Where to stop in listing books I have loved? Many authors have been important to me, but fell perhaps slightly short of having given me a jolt. I respect and admire and love many books that didn’t quite make the list. I will mention some of them in passing, as this book unfolds. But this book has enough pages!

A few authors are represented by two books on my list: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mark Twain. That doesn’t mean that they gave me only two jolts. And if authors are listed only once it doesn’t mean they gave me only one jolt.

To refresh my mind about these books, I have reread all of them or almost all of them, since I began this project.

The books are presented in the following order: randomly. I listed the books I wanted to write about, put their titles in a hat, and pulled them out one by one. One title didn’t get in the hat—don’t ask—so I had to make a midstream correction. Then later on I thought of other books that should have been in the hat but weren’t, so I tacked some on at the end. One book was substituted for another, rather late in the project. Then I thought I was done, but reread Pollyanna and found that I could not in good conscience leave the book out. So it was slightly a comedy of errors, and the list is random.

I am not trying to rate the 46 books from 1 to 46, any more than King Solomon ever tried to rate his 700 wives and 300 concubines in order of preference (1 Kgs. 11:3). If he had a few favorites, he was careful with that information. I will be careful too, but you will note that a few special favorites may appear. No doubt Solomon had a similar experience.

I need to eat and drink. I need clothing. I need shelter. I am blessed to have a few people who put up with me in a kindly fashion, and I need that human interaction as much as the next person. I need my eyesight, which God has so far preserved into my increasing codgerhood.

I also need books. If the choice were between financial wealth and books, the decision would not be difficult. $10,000,000.00 tax free with a yearly guaranteed 5% tax free income ($500,000.00 per year) but I wouldn’t be permitted to read? I wouldn’t even be tempted. I’ll take the books, with my relative (quite comfortable) poverty. Because I have books, I am one of the wealthiest people in the world. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, eat your hearts out. I’m not trying to be a smart aleck, guys, but I’m far wealthier than you are.

The organization of the book is pretty straightforward. I try to quote as accurately as possible. If italics are in the original, I quote the italics. If there are no italics in the original, I don’t add them. I try to make clear when an ellipsis is added by me, and when it occurs in the text I am quoting. As stated above, the books are discussed in random order. Footnotes will appear at the end of each chapter. A select bibliography will appear at the end of the chapter, for each author, or at least after the first book of his/hers which I discuss. When I say select, I mean select. I won’t list every book by the author, or every book I have read by him (her). I’ll list a few books for possible further reading, including biographies of authors discussed. There is a summary chapter at the end of the book. Then come three appendixes, and a final section listing my other books available for purchase.

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Warning!

As I discuss the fiction books below, almost invariably I will give away significant portions of the plots. This disturbs me, because one of my goals in writing Books I Have Loved is to encourage you to try some of these books for yourself. And I really don’t want to spoil your enjoyment of the books by giving the plots away. There is no real good solution to this problem, perhaps. All I can think of is this: when you begin to read each chapter, be on the lookout for books that immediately sound as if they might be of interest to you. Stop reading that chapter! Go read the book under discussion for yourself. Then come back and finish the chapter. That will slow how quickly you get through Books I Have Loved, but it will allow you to come to promising books with the plot unknown to you—the way the authors wrote them for you.

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¹  Unconfirmed quote from Mark Twain. If he didn’t say it, he should have.

²  Mark Lee Gardner, Shot All to Hell: Jesse James, the Northfield Raid, and the Wild West’s Greatest Escape, New York, New York, HarperCollins, 2013, p. 241. The ellipsis is Mr. Gardner’s. This is a very informative and entertaining book.

Chapter 1

The Catcher in the Rye

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy."

Old Phoebe didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, when she said something, all she said was, Daddy’s going to kill you.³

At our home my parents had one wall of the largish living room lined with bookshelves filled with books, to the ceiling. My parents read a lot, but these were mostly books they had obtained by occasional bulk purchases.

Most of my own reading came from the school library or the public library, but I was always conscious of the bookshelves at home. Mostly I just looked at the books rather than tried to read them.

So I was aware of the existence of a book entitled The Catcher in the Rye; I had seen it on the bookshelves. I don’t think I had any awareness that it was a famous book.

One fateful day I opened the book and began to read the first page.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They’re nice and all—I’m not saying that—but they’re also touchy as hell. (p. 3)

So wrote Holden Caulfield, the narrator of his own story.

I had to read on, of course. If you can resist that opening, ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din,’ as Rudyard Kipling wrote in the poem about Gunga Din.

I didn’t resist, and read on.

I must have been in my early or middle teens. If memory holds—and I think it might in this case—my father and I drove north to visit his mother and brother (my grandmother and uncle) that weekend. I have a distinct memory of me giggling as I read part of the The Catcher in the Rye at their home.

I wasn’t the only person to be captivated. The Catcher in the Rye has sold over 65,000,000 copies, and often shows up on lists of the greatest novels of all time.

While Salinger’s/Holden’s phrasing was frequently humorous, often in a vulgar way, the book was much more than just funny.

Holden was a sixteen-year-old who was flunking out of Pencey Prep, a prestigious private school. Lack of intelligence clearly was not his problem. He had failed to apply himself; it had happened at one or more other schools previously.

Holden is having a difficult time with life. He sees phoniness all around him, and he hates it. Holden is in love with justice, kindness, purity, innocence—but the world offers too little of those things, and too much of their opposites. Holden is struggling to find what he should be doing in this difficult world.

Holden may be flunking out of Pencey Prep, but he is an extremely observant person. He makes countless insightful comments about life. He tells us things we could have noticed for ourselves, but didn’t.

Moreover, he takes us into his confidence. The world may be full of phonies, but he confides in us because . . . why? I’m not sure. Percentage-wise, what are the odds that we his readers will be worthy of the truth? Probably not good. Perhaps we all, including Holden, have to live in hope. Holden has to assume that we will understand what he means. Or at least we will try, and listen, as his beloved nine-year-old sister Phoebe tried and listened.

I’m not too sure old Phoebe knew what the hell I was talking about. I mean she’s only a little child and all. But she was listening, at least. If somebody at least listens, it’s not too bad. (p. 224)

Holden, despite his young age, is already a heavy smoker and drinker. He takes God’s name in vain. He is vulgar. He lacks courage in some situations and considers himself yellow (pp. 115-117) He lies constantly—reminding us perhaps of Huckleberry Finn. He can be a jerk in the way he treats people, as when he tells his date Sally Hayes that she gives him a ‘royal pain in the a--’ (p. 173; my dashes; definitely not Holden’s).

A key person in the book is one we never directly see: Jane Gallagher. We hear about her, but we don’t meet her directly. She is a girl about Holden’s age, with whom he had a friendship two summers ago. Clearly Jane is a person Holden admires and respects, probably loves.

So when Holden’s sophisticated and sexually active roommate Ward Stradlater has a date scheduled with Jane Gallagher, the warning bells go off immediately for Holden. When Stradlater returns from his date with Jane Gallagher, Holden is worried that he has seduced her.

What’d you do? I said. Give her the time in Ed Banky’s g----- car? My voice was shaking something awful.

What a thing to say. Want me to wash your mouth out with soap?

"Did you?"

That’s a professional secret, buddy.

This next part I don’t remember so hot. All I know is I got up from the bed, like I was going down to the can or something, and then I tried to sock him, with all my might, right smack in the toothbrush, so it would split his g----- throat open. (p. 56; the dashes are mine)

Stradlater responds aggressively and emerges triumphant from this physical encounter, with his knees on Holden’s chest. When finally let up off the floor, Holden persists in calling Stradlater a moron, which results in a solid punch which puts Holden back on the floor (pp. 56-58).

Holden loves purity and hates the idea of his beloved Jane possibly giving up her sexual innocence to Stradlater. But of course there is a complication. While Holden is still a virgin, he is not exactly pure himself. He hires a prostitute in the course of the story (p. 119). Although the sexual encounter doesn’t come off—a depressing scene (pp. 122-128) followed by an even more depressing follow-up scene (pp. 131-136)—it might have. He has read a book about a man who played women’s bodies as if they were violins, and Holden wouldn’t mind being pretty good at that stuff. (p. 121). We also hear of past sexual near misses, as for example when he had been removing a girl’s bra (p. 122) and almost had sexual intercourse with her.

So how can he love innocence and purity when his own behavior is so compromised?

He can do that because he is a human being tempted by sexual sin, and he is without firm principles. Instinctively he know promiscuity is wrong. Instinctively he loves purity. But he is not anchored in a religious faith—hint: Christianity—that would encourage him always to act with purity in his relationships with the opposite sex.

Join the crowd. Isn’t this a key element of our time? A biblical Christian faith encourages us to protect the purity of others, but how serious is our Christian faith? Not very, which is why sexual immorality is rampant among us.

The tension between purity and lust is obvious in Holden’s life. We are not too surprised to hear that the same tension existed in J. D. Salinger’s life. When we read how his life unfolded, we see a man who faced the same questions that Holden faced.

And, like Holden, Salinger did not have a principled Christian faith to guide his behavior. The way he lived his life showed it.

To a very large extent, the tragedy of our dying Christian faith was replicated in the life of J. D. Salinger. He was intermittently interested in Christianity, as we can tell from reading his books and also from what we read about his life, but Christianity never took a firm place in his life. He, like Holden—who calls himself sort of an atheist (p. 130)—is living in a kind of limbo land. Salinger spent his life in that land.

But he and Holden have also instinctively given us a vision of purity and innocence. Those qualities may be threatened and often defeated, but they are also real.

Perhaps the most moving part of the book comes near the end, when we hear of Holden’s interactions with his nine-year-old sister Phoebe (pp. 206-233; 266-275). The love between the two is palpable.

It is there that we hear Holden tell Phoebe that all he really wants to be is the catcher in the rye (see epigraph). He—the only big person around—wants to keep children from disaster caused by their potentially falling over the cliff. He will catch them from falling and will save them. He says he knows it’s crazy.

His idea may be impractical as a job description, but we know what he is getting at. Holden is yearning after innocence and purity, and yearning after a life of service. This is the best of Holden.

All his time with Phoebe is wonderful. In the second of their two times together, Phoebe tries to persuade Holden to let her join him in his plan to go to Colorado. He responds angrily to her request, even says I thought I was going to smack her for a second (p. 267), but eventually he makes peace with her, gives up his not very coherent plan to go away, and says he is staying. He really did go home later. Now, he watches her ride the carrousel.

Boy, it began to rain like a b------. In buckets, I swear to God. All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carrousel, so they wouldn’t get soaked to the skin or anything, but I stuck around on the bench for quite a while. I got pretty soaking wet, especially my neck and my pants. My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked anyway. I didn’t care, though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there. (p. 275; my dashes)

Here he goes again, assuming that you and I are worthy to have been present at this moment of innocence and beauty.

Holden, we were there, thanks to you and J. D. Salinger. If we’re not worthy yet, maybe we will be some day.

Two pages later, Holden ends his narrative. He doesn’t know what he will do in the future.

When I was in the early stages of this book project, the topic of The Catcher in the Rye came up during a gathering of friends. One Christian friend mentioned how many sad incidents there are in Catcher. I had noticed exactly the same thing in my most recent reading of the book. I appreciated the confirmation of my opinion.

There is sadness, there is humor, there is hope. The book is brilliantly written, unfolding with a sort of inevitability. I could have done that, we almost think, but of course we know we couldn’t. Only Holden and Salinger could have pulled it off.

I was dazzled as a young person. A note in the book tells me that I had read The Catcher in the Rye five times before I reached the age of 21. The pace of my readings slowed down after that. I have read it only four more times. But on the ninth reading not long ago, I was still dazzled. I was touched, I was grateful, was perhaps more appreciative than ever. This is a book I loved early in my life. It is vastly easy to continue to love and to respect this remarkable book.

I tried to communicate with J. D. Salinger three times in the early part of my life. You will not be shocked to learn that I got no responses from Salinger, who became famously reclusive for much of his life.

The first time I wrote him I think I asked to be permitted to visit him. No response, of course. It is no doubt a great blessing that such a meeting didn’t take place.

I’m not sure of the order of the next two attempts. Once I mailed him a copy of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. The idea being that here was a very good writer of whom he might never have heard because she wasn’t tremendously famous. The package came back unopened.

My third attempt was when I mailed him a letter including an invoice from a company called Seymour Glass. Why? Well, Seymour Glass is a key character in several books by J. D. Salinger. Here was a business just down the road from me with the name Seymour Glass. I thought he would find that interesting. The letter probably came back—it’s been a long time—but in any case it elicited no response.

I faithfully read his other books, Franny and Zooey four times, Nine Stories and Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenter and Seymour: An Introduction, more than once. They were often dazzling as well.

Salinger stopped publishing after 1965. He lived many more years—(b. Jan. 1, 1919-d. Jan. 27, 2010)—dying at age 91, but no more books came out. Did he stop writing entirely?

No, as one might have expected, he kept writing. He just didn’t publish any more while he was living. A writer writes. Salinger was a writer. Apparently there is a hefty body of unpublished work, which the surviving family plans to shepherd through to publication. Perhaps in this decade.

At one time I formulated a theory that part of the reason that Salinger stopped publishing after 1965, was that he had written and thought himself into a corner the way a cartoon character, paintbrush in hand, has painted himself into a corner with no egress. Salinger’s beloved Seymour Glass commits suicide in A Perfect Day for Bananafish. Seymour is supposedly a life-affirming person. Life is good and Seymour is good. Yet he commits suicide?

So life is good and a way to express that is to have one of your beloved characters kill himself? It doesn’t compute. Result: Salinger with a paintbrush in the corner.

However, I doubt if that theory ever had a chance of being true. Few people are consistent in their thinking. Salinger was never among the few. A dead Seymour Glass would not have stopped him from writing. And in fact the evidence seems clear that he kept on writing, although he stopped publishing. Eventually we may find ourselves sifting through a significant handful of new Salinger novels and stories. I suspect Seymour Glass, pre-suicide, will figure prominently.

Margaret A. Salinger is J. D. Salinger’s daughter. She has written Dream Catcher: A Memoir. Her younger brother has contested the accuracy of her portrayal of life in the Salinger household, so proceed at your own risk, but the book rings true to me.

She paints a picture of two profoundly flawed parents, eventually divorced. She is not whining, but she is trying to tell the truth, which is often painful. As she ends her portrayal, she says I am able to see a talented man who, like the rest of us, is neither all good nor all bad.⁴ She is an excellent writer—the acorn didn’t fall very far from the tree—albeit occasionally self-absorbed. She has scars, some of them definitely self-inflicted, but some of them thanks to two very irresponsible parents. Anyone wanting to understand J. D. Salinger should consider reading his daughter’s memoir.

The Catcher in the Rye is one of the most famous novels in world history, and in my opinion deservedly so. In astonishingly brilliant prose, Holden and Salinger challenge us to think about sincerity and phoniness, purity and its opposite, service and self-absorption, the clean innocence of children threatened by a dangerous world. Holden struggles, but he gives us hope.

Reading about J. D. Salinger’s life, we may often want to strangle him. He, like the rest of us, is going to need lots of God’s mercy. I hope he found it. May he rest in peace.

Select bibliography

Hamilton, Ian. In Search of J. D. Salinger (1988).

Salinger, J. D. Franny and Zooey (1961).

Salinger, J. D. Nine Stories (1953).

Salinger, J. D. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).

Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

Salinger, Margaret A. Dream Catcher: A Memoir (2000).

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³  J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Boston, Massachusetts, Little, Brown and Company, 1951, pp. 224-225. The hardcover edition my parents owned was the twenty-sixth printing. It featured a picture of J. D. Salinger on the back of the dust cover. Later on Salinger decided he didn’t want his picture on the dust cover—I own one of those Salinger-less dust covers too—but this version still had his picture. By the way, when I say, I own I mean of course that the book, dust cover and all, became my possession by right of conquest. I appropriated the book as my own, with I am sure no complaint from my parents.

⁴  Margaret A. Salinger, Dream Catcher: A Memoir, New York, New York, Washington Square Press, 2000, p. 431.

Chapter 2

A Man of Letters

During the conference, when Kenneth Clark learned that my project was doing research on race and IQ, he tried privately to dissuade me from doing such research, ostensibly on grounds that to do so would dignify the theories of Arthur Jensen, but I suspected that it was because he was afraid of what that research would find. In any event, stifling research was hardly the sign of someone with intellectual integrity. I did not share Kenneth Clark’s fears but, even in the unlikely event that the research ended up confirming Jensen’s theory of a racial basis for differences in average IQ, was I supposed to suppress the results? Wherever black people were going, and wherever we wished to go, we had to get there from where we were—which meant that we had to know where we were, not where we wished we were or where we wished others to think we were. The same principle applied well beyond the subject of IQs. Too many people were preoccupied with protecting the image of blacks in the eyes of whites, rather than with knowing what the facts were, as a basis for whatever was to be done to make things better.⁵

Thomas Sowell (b. June 30, 1930) is a black scholar of considerable fame. His primary field of study has been economics, but his work covers a broad range of topics, including economics, culture, social policy, philosophy (dust cover, A Man of Letters).

He has written more than 30 books, of which I have read only nine. Those of us who love free market economics—I plead guilty as charged—have admired Thomas Sowell for a long time.

While I appreciate all his books that I have read, the book of his that I have loved the most is A Man of Letters.

Dr. Sowell was born with a silver spoon in his mouth—not. He was born in the Jim Crow South. His father died before his birth. His mother later died giving birth to his younger brother. His early family had no electricity, no central heating or hot running water (p. v). The quality of his early education was poor. His move to Harlem just prior to his ninth birthday led to mixed results in school. For details, see Thomas Sowell’s A Personal Odyssey. There you can also find details about early jobs and his service in the Marines.

His adult academic career did not move swiftly at first—in terms of outward success, and also in terms of his understanding of economics.

It is shocking to read that in 1960 when he began his second quarter as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Ideologically, I was a Marxist (p. 3). What! Still a Marxist at age 29 ½! He was still a Marxist after a year at Chicago. But his experience of seeing government at work from the inside and at a professional level (p. 5) started him rethinking (p. 5) lots of things about what the government could and should do.

From there on, as I learned more and more from both experience and research, my adherence to the visions and doctrines of the left began to erode rapidly with the passage of time. But because this was an erosion rather than a sudden road to Damascus conversion, I was spared the shock that some others went through in disengaging from the left. (p. 5)

The title A Man of Letters fits the book perfectly. What Thomas Sowell did, from at least 1960 onward, was to keep copies of his letters to people. Remember carbon copies? Thank heaven for them, because they allowed Dr. Sowell to keep a record of his outward correspondence from early on in his academic and intellectual life.

Most of the letters in the book are from Dr. Sowell, but a handful are letters which came to him from other people. Thankfully he had the common sense to keep letters he received.

We are living in a time in which the intellectual dishonesty of much of the academic world, and of black race hustlers (supported by liberal white fellow travelers) is astonishing.

Dr. Sowell’s book is a reminder that all this is not new. It has been going on for at least sixty years. (Guessing: probably much longer.) The more things change, the more they stay the same seems to fit here. Things may be measurably worse now, but intellectual dishonesty is often the default position of people—whether of high or low degree, whether black or white.

As always in world history, telling the truth is hard to do, and brings costs—as well as bringing benefits in terms of peace of mind and a clear conscience.

Accepting the costs of telling the truth seems to be something Dr. Sowell has done willingly, and for which nature (and nature’s God) fitted him from birth. He clearly is a strong and courageous man. He loves his black people, and wants the best for them. But loving his people includes loving the truth and speaking the truth. If race hustlers can’t or won’t face the truth, too bad.

I first read A Man of Letters in 2008. There were so many brilliant insights—in both his original letters and in his explanatory comments circa 2007. I found myself underlining or otherwise marking numerous passages.

At the time I was teaching Sunday School—fifth and sixth graders. It was often my habit to begin SS with a thought-provoking quote from a writer. For my last quarter of teaching I began each class with a quote or two from A Man of Letters.

Dr. Sowell, as far as I can tell, makes no claim to be a Christian. Part of the point of quoting him to my students was to encourage them to realize that we can learn from non-Christians. Dr. Sowell was saying many true and insightful things. He was able to do so despite not being a Christian. If someone says something true, we can learn from him and appreciate him even if he is not a Christian believer.

I had marked or underlined lots of things in 2008. The second reading, in 2019, brought to light many additional passages which earned the same treatment. A few examples follow.

To me the psychology of the Negro is the biggest single obstacle to racial progress. It isn’t fashionable to say this, and it certainly isn’t pleasant, but truth does not depend on these considerations. With all due respect to the courage and dedication of the various civil rights groups, I think that when all the laws have been passed and all the gates flung open, the net result will be one tremendous anticlimax unless there is a drastic change of attitude among Negroes. The current pleas for preferential treatment are a symptom of the attitude that needs changing and such treatment would be a big obstacle to the necessary change. (pp. 41-42)

He wrote a letter to an official who was promoting affirmative action in a program preparing students for medical school.

What sort of grotesque situation have we talked ourselves into when promising pre-med students are passed over in favor of high risk students? The term high risk has particularly grim overtones in a field where today’s student will tomorrow have lives in his hands. Would you want your children to be operated on by the people you are accepting or the people you are rejecting for having outstanding qualifications? (p. 107)

In those few words he showed how evil is affirmative action. Whoever invented affirmative action must truly despise black people. Not only does affirmative action say, Black people cannot compete on a level playing field. It also causes us to doubt the qualifications and ability of every black person who rises to a position of responsibility. Many can and do succeed, on their own merit. But how can the rest of us be sure whether the black person has succeeded on his own merit or has been the beneficiary (victim, really) of a system in which lowering standards has passed him forward through the ranks unwisely (p. 106)? Affirmative action is a truly satanic invention, and has set back race relations by many decades.

In 1976 Dr. Sowell sent a brief letter of resignation to withdraw from a nomination concerning which he had been grossly misled (p. 129). His 2007 comment on that brief letter brings a rueful smile to our faces.

The fact that my letters of resignation were getting shorter over the years reflected my growing conviction that it was a waste of time to explain or justify to people who couldn’t care less about the truth. (p. 129)

This is biblical thinking, whether he knows it or not. Jesus Christ tells us, ‘Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces’ (Matt. 7:6). Dr. Sowell had learned not to cast pearls before swine. There is no need to write something long to people who couldn’t care less about the truth.

In a 1978 letter to a senator, he pointed out how a minimum wage can be deadly to black young people. Part of the letter reads:

The steep decline in unemployment rates among black youths between their late teens and mid-to-late twenties suggest an enormous value to early job experience, even in so-called dead end jobs. This seems far less likely to be due to skills, as ordinarily conceived, than to acquiring the necessary work habits—the discipline of a schedule, the ability to work with others, and the general shedding of immaturity. As one who was once part of those black teenage unemployment statistics —thank God, in the 1940s when it wasn’t so bad—I know how painful the adjustment can be for both young workers and for the employer. In retrospect, it is easy enough to see that it would never have paid an employer to hire me at a reasonable wage for an experienced adult. (p. 149)

The minimum wage is another knife in the back for people needing a first job. Dr. Sowell understands a job is not just about earning money. Even a ‘dead end’ job gives the beginning worker a chance to acquire the necessary work habits—the discipline of a schedule, the ability to work with others, and the general shedding of immaturity. In the same letter he adds, Much of the special problems of the black youngster is due precisely to his having been passed through schools without any real standards (p. 150).

A longish 1986 letter to a government official returned to the topic of affirmative action. I am old-fashioned enough to be against it simply because it is wrong (p. 212-213). Affirmative action is a dangerous social madness, in addition to being immoral (p. 213). He comments in 2007 that his protests were all in vain (p. 216). Here we are in 2022, and the wrong social madness continues.

His friend Clarence Thomas was accused of various crimes by Anita Hill. Dr. Sowell’s "theory is that Clarence’s problem arose precisely because he did not sexually harass Anita Hill" (p. 233).

Now that Clarence Thomas was under attack before the Senate Judiciary Committee and in the media, I reversed myself on giving media interviews and agreed to talk to virtually anybody at any time, hoping to add whatever small weight I had on his side of the scales. What carried far more weight than anything I said, however, and what may well have been what saved his nomination, was the parade of women he had worked with over the years who appeared in the televised hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee and gave him their strongest endorsement, with at least one of these women also adding her devastating account of what she had observed of Anita Hill when both of them were working at E.E.O.C.

Some of these were women I recognized from having seen them in passing when visiting Clarence when he was head of E.E.O.C. Now their testimony on his behalf brought me to the verge of tears as I realized how people who once seemed to be just part of the background had become crucial to his fate and his reputation. This was also a fitting repayment for the considerate way he treated people.

One of the things I had always admired about Clarence Thomas was his human touch and his respect for other people, in whatever walk of life they might be. His chauffeur at E.E.O.C. was an elderly black man whom the staffers called by his first name before Clarence became chairman. But after Clarence arrived and began addressing his chauffeur as Mr. Randall, the staffers began to address him in the same fashion. When riding in the car with the two of them, I was struck by their considerate politeness toward each other. To listen to the way they spoke to one another, you would have no clue as to who was the chauffeur and who was the head of the agency. (pp. 233-234)

A letter he wrote at age 73 looks back on his past in words that move us.

Your concern about family characteristics as a factor in academic achievement is one that hits home with me especially. I was adopted and raised in a family where no one before me had reached the seventh grade. In fact, I was quite surprised by what a big to-do they made when I reached that level, telling me, You have gone further than any of us. As with many other things, however, family characteristics cannot be restricted to things on which sociological statistics can be collected. Some years ago, I interviewed a number of black professionals for a book that was never written, but the most striking thing to me was how many of them credited illiterate or semi-literate parents for pointing them—and sometimes pushing them—in the direction of higher education.

In my own case, looking back I am amazed at how much my family gave me in this regard, and others, considering how little they had. I was taught to read before ever setting foot in a school. Moreover, even before I moved to New York at age eight, family members who were already living in Harlem had picked out a boy from a well-educated family that they wanted me to meet, since he could tell me things that they could not. You can’t buy that and you can’t measure it in statistics. Much later, when I had children of my own, I asked one of the family members how old I was when I started walking. Oh, nobody knows when you could walk, Tommy, she said. Somebody was always carrying you. You can’t buy that either. People on welfare today have a higher standard of living than we did. But what good does that do them?

None of this is peculiar to blacks. Many of the immigrant children who came out of places like the lower east side of New York and went on to have professional careers likewise came from families with poorly educated parents, some of whom could barely speak English. None of this is meant to denigrate statistics. I have been guilty of collecting statistics myself. (pp. 332-334)

He noted near the end of the book that his 2005 book Black Rednecks and White Liberals had tremendous sales success, selling 50,000 copies in less than a year. But the book garnered very few reviews (pp. 337-338).

In retrospect, I should not have been surprised by any of this. Many of my controversial writings over the years have received little or no real criticism, as distinguished from whatever name-calling they might provoke. People with a vested interest in certain beliefs were following their best strategy for preserving the influence of those beliefs, when they could not answer what I said, by simply acting as if I had never said it and continuing to repeat their own message. It was, however, odd that most leading conservative, as well as liberal, publications did not review Black Rednecks, maybe because it was too explosive. Still, I could not complain about the sales or the royalties, though it was sobering to realize how the marketplace of ideas had contracted over the years. (p.338)

Yes, that is always the strategy of the left toward ideas which contradict their worldview: they were simply acting as if I had never said it and continuing to repeat their own message. Truth is not the goal for these people. Manipulation is the goal. Better, believe the leftists, to ignore ideas which might be true and hence dangerous to the leftist worldview.

Note, however, that most leading conservative publications were also silent. This is a telling commentary on mainstream conservatism. Indeed, the marketplace for ideas had contracted over the years. Dr. Sowell’s hint is subtle, but true. Mainstream conservatives are a sad bunch.

His concluding letter is to his friend and colleague, the black free market economist Walter Williams. Dr. Sowell mentioned the book which would become A Man of Letters.

Among other things, these letters show that, back in earlier years, you and I were both pretty pessimistic as to whether what we were writing would make any impact—especially since the two of us seemed to be the only ones saying what we were saying. Today at least we know that there are lots of other blacks writing and saying similar things—more than I can keep track of, in fact—and many of them are sufficiently younger that we know there will be good people carrying on the fight after we are gone. (pp. 338-339)

This is a lovely way to end, and gives us hope. As mentioned above, we are living in an age which seems characterized by intellectual dishonesty. The bigger picture should give us hope. Those trying to tell the truth—black, white, or polka dot—may seem to be few, due to the constant noise which surrounds us, but there may be a lot more of the truth-lovers than is first apparent. Dr. Sowell, after sixty years of battle, feels certain that he and Dr. Williams are no longer almost alone in trying to promote good ideas which help their black people, and which help the rest of us as well.

We can be pretty sure that Dr. Thomas Sowell is not always correct in his ideas. I have a vague memory of reading something of his on U.S. foreign policy, a decade or two ago, and disagreeing completely. (Candor requires me to admit that anyone who disagrees with me is pretty likely to be wrong.) He is a human being, not God, and he can be wrong. But when we view his career as a whole, we see a man fighting