Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English

17:53Tyler Cowen:If I can just interrupt, that already is sounding a bit like she had sex with him.

17:56Henry Oliver:But what she's doing there is re-speaking Claudio's lines from earlier in the play when he says she has a prone and speechless dialect in her youth that is the, you know, this was what will tempt Angelo. And there's a huge amount of confusion about what that means. Does it mean that she will speak in a way that will be persuasive or does it mean that without her knowing, without her having any awareness of it, her presence will sort of inflame Angelo into taking her side? and this I think I don't know I think you'd be interested in this as an economist Tyler this goes back to all the coinage imagery sure is it the is it the metal or is it the face stamped

18:33Tyler Cowen:on the metal that gives it the value which is a metaphor used in the play itself but I think it's a double meaning and we're supposed to wonder if she is not in fact a highly effective seducer

18:42Henry Oliver:we're supposed to wonder but Shakespeare is giving her the opportunity to rephrase it all I mean I don't think Shakespeare at this point is using prayed and kneeled to mean anything other than what is literally being said. I think she is an image of virtue. This is what the Duke said, if you can't take your virtue forth like a light, there's no point having it. That's what she's done the whole play. The vile conclusion I now begin with grief and shame to utter. He would not but by gift of my chaste body to his concupiscable intemperate lust release my brother. And after much debatement, my sisterly remorse confutes my nonna and I did yield to him.

19:18Henry Oliver:That is a reference to the argument that they were having. When he backed her into a corner and she had to admit that there was an inconsistency in her position, I think that's act two, scene two. And she had to yield the premise of his argument. I don't think there's any sense in which Shakespeare has done anything other than lead us to believe that, you know.

19:38Tyler Cowen:What follows though is the word but. But the next morning, dot, dot, dot, he sends a warrant for my poor brother's head. So she's implying she did her part of the trade. Again, I admit it's not clear.

19:49Henry Oliver:But she and the Duke arranged that she would do that in order to then substitute Mariana. For your reading to work, these lines would have to mean everyone thinks it was Mariana, including you, who's going to use that as leverage to get Angelo married. But we both secretly know and won't tell anyone else that it wasn't married. I mean, that can't work, can it?

20:06Tyler Cowen:No, I think it's that he got both, both women.

20:09Henry Oliver:It reads too cleanly into the known details of the plot for me to go along with that.

20:14Tyler Cowen:Well, I told you it was a non-literal reading.

20:17Henry Oliver:Indeed. Indeed.

20:18Tyler Cowen:How does this relate to James I?

20:21Henry Oliver:This is put on for his court, right? We know it was performed for him at court. We know it wasn't otherwise hugely popular because there was no quarto. So it was perhaps written with him in mind more than in other ways. The idea of measuring yourself that I mentioned earlier, that's quite a common idea in Shakespeare's England. There's a morality play, for example, where Mercy says, measure yourself ever, beware of excess. And obviously the Puritans love to measure themselves. But self-judgment can't be the basis of public policy. and then we have this king now who's very interested in these ideas of justice and law and there was a sermon delivered when James became king and there's a section in the sermon about the duties of a prince who represents God and one of them is the execution of just judgment by which all must be measured.

21:12Henry Oliver:And so I think Shakespeare is taking up a theme that is current at court and which we know James is interested in, how to deal with religious tension, how to deal with sexual behavior south of the river. And I think he's basically saying, you know, at the end of the day, the king is going to come in and impose the law, and that's just how it should be. That's a plausible reading which the king could take away from it during a performance, right?

21:35Tyler Cowen:There's a line in Measure for Measure that suggests the duke maybe is not inclined toward women, which is possibly a reference to James, who had an affair with the Duke of Buckingham, in addition to possible other affairs with men.

21:48Henry Oliver:Maybe. Maybe.

21:49Tyler Cowen:Maybe. But the notion of the Duke not wanting to appear in public, James, some people suggest, did not much enjoy appearing in public.

21:57Henry Oliver:I think that's quite disputed now.

21:59Tyler Cowen:It's disputed. But what James wrote about an ideal ruler, some of the Duke's views, there are some loose parallels between the two.

22:06Henry Oliver:Certainly James' ideas of justice and government are not unfamiliar to this play. And I would not be surprised if this play was at least in a sort of, you know, the way you watch it and interpret it in quick succession was somewhat flattering to James. Yes. These other things, I think there's often a lot of attempt to say, you know, to link Shakespeare's work to current events of his day. And it's always a bit, well, it's sort of this and it's sort of similar. And, you know, it can't be sustained, can it? Shakespeare's cleverer than that.

22:38Tyler Cowen:But this is being shown at the court of James. James might have been there. I'm not sure if we know, in 1604. And if you're Shakespeare, no matter what you intended, you're a smart fellow, right? And James is sitting there possibly listening. And even if you intended no connection, James would have to be an idiot not to think there might be a connection. So you can't escape the thought that you're making the connection whether you initially intended it or not.

23:05Henry Oliver:But the personal ideas about is this a reference to James' secret homosexuality or whatever, that's too speculative for me.

23:12Tyler Cowen:But why have the Duke not be inclined toward women, at least according to one speculation in the play?

23:18Henry Oliver:No, yeah. It's said more than once.

23:21Tyler Cowen:There's no other reason to put it in.

23:23Henry Oliver:I think there is. I think that he and Isabel are clearly mirrors of each other. He's justice and she's mercy. He's temperance and she's passion. They both, it turns out, are happy to be deceitful in the cause of justice. They hate lying and they hate wrongdoing, but they're happy to do it in a good cause. So they share a kind of pragmatism. And they get married because, in a funny way, they're the least sexualized characters. I think it's all done to make them a pair. And in a funny way, like not a badly matched pair. If you had to force Isabella to marry someone in this play, it would be the Duke.

23:59Tyler Cowen:And at least she gets to be wife of the Duke, which on a personal side may not be wonderful. But in the standards of living side is what she's going to do.

24:08Henry Oliver:That's what I mean. like going into a corrupt nunnery, submitting to Angelo, possibly dying or marrying the Duke. Shakespeare's saying this is the best we can hope for for her. That may be not what we want, and we may sort of rail against it, but that's not a bad ending. It looks like an unhappy ending, but it's not a bad ending.

24:26Tyler Cowen:Now, it's sometimes suggested that Measure for Measure is a play that shows Shakespeare actually was a Catholic or he wrote it with Catholic themes in mind. What's your view on that?

24:35Henry Oliver:No. Explain.

24:37Tyler Cowen:Just no. I agree with the no answer, but give me your view.

24:41Henry Oliver:I don't think we have the evidence for it. I think it's not good enough to go around talking about friars and pre-Reformation this and setting it in particular country or whatever. Obviously, Shakespeare is always writing about the Reformation and he's always writing about the tension between pre - and post-Reformation culture. Not the least in terms of that, you know, there's now an official policy. But everyone remembers what it was like and they sort of miss, you know, ordinary life in pre-Reformation times. And they – you know, their mothers did things differently and there's a cultural problem there.

25:16Henry Oliver:He's always writing about that. Hamlet's about that, right? That is not a basis for saying, oh, Shakespeare is a secret Catholic and this play is really trying to be popish or whatever. I mean to me that's a bit like, you know, using numerical analysis in the Bible to start saying we know when the day of judgment is coming. I mean it just doesn't – it doesn't hold water.

25:34Tyler Cowen:I read it as slightly anti-Catholic, not as a major theme, but Shakespeare saying, here's Vienna, they have friars, they have nuns, they have whatever. It doesn't avoid any of these problems. The problems there may be a bit worse. Those systems are corrupt also.

25:48Henry Oliver:It's a totally normal thing in English literature to point up the abuses and the corruption of Catholic institutions and, you know, as Isabella going to the nunnery, right? So I don't buy the Catholic thing at all. The whole effort to tell us that Shakespeare was Catholic, I don't buy, partly because I just don't think you're ever going to get the necessary evidence.

26:11Tyler Cowen:Is this a Girardian play?

26:13Henry Oliver:I didn't actually go and look at what Girard said and it's a long time since I read him. There's a lot of substitution. Right. And doubles. Well, isn't the whole point of the substitution that they're not doubles? No one actually is substituted properly.

26:28Tyler Cowen:There is no... But that can be Girardian too.

26:30Henry Oliver:Can it?

26:31Tyler Cowen:Yes, it can.

26:31Henry Oliver:I just, I feel like the Girardian analysis is stretched and stretched like bread dough and it never quite snaps, but it's been stretched so far at this point. Measure for Measure is not like Midsummer Night's Dream. Midsummer Night's Dream is a perfectly Girardian play. and he has a very, very clean analysis. And he points out that the lovers had switched their allegiances before the play begins and we're told that in the text, right? And then in Troilus and Crusade, he has a very good reading of that, which is contemporaneous with this play. Crusade says, I won't sleep with you because, you know, at that point you'll lose all interest in me.

27:05Henry Oliver:And that's what happens. Troilus never wants to go to war until he's slept with Crusade and then he gets up and says, right, but again, tell the boys about this. and it's only when he realizes that the Greeks are going to try and take crusade for their own that he becomes interested in her again. Perfectly Girardian. But in this play, I think everyone is strongly motivated by their own inner desires. I think of this almost as anti-Girardian. Isabella is not mimetic in any way. She has to be made to kneel at the end and it's only because she is adhering to her own inner consistency that Angelo can talk her around into those difficult positions.

27:43Henry Oliver:The whole point of the substitutions is to show us you can't measure your brother against yourself. It doesn't, the substitutions have to be obviously fake to work. Do you have a favorite line or two from this play? I should have been able to quit it off the top of my head. I love the bit when Isabella says to him, but man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, hardly knowing what he does, can do such things as make the angels weep. And periodically those lines become very relevant again.

28:12Tyler Cowen:One of my favorites, not that poetic, but when Angelo simply says, we must not make a scarecrow of the law. And then when the Duke says, the baby beats the nurse and quite a thwart goes all decorum.

28:25Henry Oliver:Yeah, those are great lines. And those work really well in performance. They're very dramatic moments.

28:31Tyler Cowen:And also the Duke S. Ryer when he says, for thou dost fear the soft and tender fork of the poor worm. Of course, talking about death.

28:39Henry Oliver:That's right. That's right.

28:41Tyler Cowen:Shakespeare has often had his peak when talking about death.

28:43Henry Oliver:Talking about death, but also being slightly surreal. We don't think of him as surreal, but some of those lines you've quoted, they're slightly absurd. It's a bit like in The Merchant of Venice when Shylock famously says, had that ring of Leo and I was a bachelor, I would not have traded it for a wilderness of monkeys. Or in The Taming of the Shrew, one of the maids is described as having gone down the garden to get some parsley as a maid and come back as a married woman. And she was getting the parsley to stuff a rabbit. And the whole image is just sort of slightly absurd of this woman getting married while she's stuffing a rabbit full of parsley.

29:14Henry Oliver:But Shakespeare somehow is very good at that kind of thing.

29:17Tyler Cowen:Now, I hold the strange view that the ideal version of a Shakespeare play is to read it to yourself, not even aloud, but silently, and that any theatrical performance is a kind of dilution or corruption. It seems unlikely that's what Shakespeare would have thought, but what's your take?

29:34Henry Oliver:I don't entirely agree, but I agree a lot more than some other people might. Shakespeare did write to be read. The idea that he wrote to be performed is only part of the truth. For one thing, he knew that there were anthologies being made, and he knew that people came to the playhouse and copied down the good bits to pirate them in the anthologies. So he was well aware that he was being read and he was writing – those bits in the play when you think, oh, this character is suddenly giving an anthology speech. Well, yes, they are because Shakespeare knew that he needed one. He also knew – he knew that his books would be printed and sold.

30:07Henry Oliver:Not – he didn't know about the folio necessarily but he knew the quartos. But I think a third or a half of the plays came out in quarto. So he wants to be read, right? And he has a very, very divided audience. On the one hand, they're paying a penny in the pit. And on the other hand, there's a kind of elite overproduction from grammar schools. And there are all these clever young men who want the pun in Latin. They want these things they can pick up on and boast about. The guys at the ins of court will come and see this play and they'll debate the law elements long into the night. So he knows that he's got that audience and that audience persists today.

30:42Henry Oliver:It is true that a lot of modern productions are just terrible and will kind of give you a bad idea of Shakespeare. And the directors, I think, are too interventionist. They come up with these crazy schemes and metaphors and it just – it distracts. The one good production of this I've seen was done by amateurs, students at RADA in London. And it was directed by Jonathan Miller, the famous opera director. And I said to one of them afterwards, this was really good. I didn't mean to be rude saying like, how were you guys this good? But it was really good. What did Jonathan Miller do? And they said, oh, he came in and he just said, no, no, no, we shan't bother with anything else.

31:17Henry Oliver:I'll just make sure you know what the words mean and then you can get on with it. And I actually think that can be a great performance, right? Hamlet's often done like that, just a dark stage and everyone saying the words properly. And then it's very dramatic. But in general, I agree with you that reading is better than watching.

31:32Tyler Cowen:Is there a good movie treatment of measure for measure?

31:35Henry Oliver:Not that I'm aware of, but I haven't yet seen the BBC version from the 80s. They are often quite good, and I believe Helen Mirren is in that version of Measure for Measure. I can see that she would make a great Isabella. What do you think is the best movie treatment of any Shakespeare play? Probably the ones that are least Shakespearean, like Orson Welles and things like that.

31:55Tyler Cowen:That would be my pick. Chimes at Midnight if I had to pick one of the Welles, but all of the Welles ones.

31:59Henry Oliver:Yeah, yeah, stuff like that. Some of the BBC ones from the 80s are pretty good. There's a new Henry IV. The whole sequence of four plays was done on the BBC a few years ago with Tom Hiddleston. I thought that was pretty good. But I don't watch a lot of them because I don't always like them. I do like it when they film it at the Globe and you can watch those online. Some of those are excellent, particularly Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry in Twelfth Night. That's a very, very good production.

32:26Tyler Cowen:To get to some of the rest of your work, what did Jane Austen take from Adam Smith?

32:30Henry Oliver:Almost everything. Jane Austen is interested in the question of how to be good in a commercial society and she is clearly drawing on Smith's ideas not just for the moral content of her work but for the way she uses narrative techniques and the – how she positions the camera as it were. Whose head are we in? What information are we being given? It's all done in the service of showing us that we have to create our own impartial spectator inside ourselves and we have to be the ones who develop our own sense of moral judgment. And I think that's a very, very Smithian idea.

33:03Tyler Cowen:What did Jane Austen take from Shakespeare?

33:06Henry Oliver:Well, Jane Austen loved going to see Shakespeare, but I think she probably loved going to see Mrs. Siddons and things like that. And she had a great sense of the dramatic and the theatrical, which is why Mansfield Park works so well in those scenes. She's clearly read Shakespeare and she's clearly absorbed a lot of his language. But in a funny way, she's one of the least Shakespearean of the English novelists. And I think that's much to her credit because she is so distinguished as very much her own writer and her own sort of thinker.

33:36Tyler Cowen:Is the Scottish Enlightenment or Smith taking much from Shakespeare?

33:41Henry Oliver:Smith is clearly taking a lot from the novelists of the 18th century. He loves Gulliver's Travels. He loves Samuel Richardson. There's no longer a current academic but an academic called Shannon Chamberlain who did a wonderful thesis on a lot of the details of those novels. that end up in Smith's work. And he ends up using these same examples as the novelists do to inform how he talks about a moral problem.

34:06Tyler Cowen:So what's coming from Gulliver's travels, say?

34:08Henry Oliver:A lot of the objects that Gulliver's have in his pockets, the watches and things. You know, Smith talks about the triviality of these objects, but also their use and benefit. I think he's clearly interested in that. He, surprisingly for such a liberal-minded person, he endorses Richardson and says, Richardson is a good novelist to read to learn morals. It may be the most surprising thing he says in a moral and literary context. I don't know how much he took directly from Shakespeare. To me, he seems more interested in some of the later writers.

34:41Tyler Cowen:By what mechanism does reading fiction change beliefs?

34:45Henry Oliver:Well, by the same mechanism that reading anything else changes beliefs. We sometimes talk about fiction as if it has a kind of magical quality. It will give you empathy. It will make you a nice person. It will show you how the people think. But of course, you can get that in nonfiction or in conversation or in a movie or TV or something. But if you're not doing the hard work of actually absorbing that, thinking about what it means, testing your opinions against it in the Smithian sense, it will just pass straight through you as a nice story. So I'm very persuaded that empathy works in a Smithian way and that we should talk about it in a more Smithian way.

35:21Henry Oliver:but that the basic conclusion of that is to say, well, it's really, really hard and it won't work a lot of the time and it takes a lot of reading and a lot of work. In the same way that we know that most moral philosophers, they've done all this moral philosophy and they've published great work. It doesn't seem to have changed their personal morality very much, right? I think something similar is at work in fiction.

35:44Tyler Cowen:So you've read Gulliver's Travels many times. You've studied it. How did it change your views and on what?

35:51Henry Oliver:I found it very useful to have read that book before I worked in politics. And I was often startled. I was a very low-level, bag carrier sort of person. So I would occasionally overhear interesting things, but I was never doing anything interesting. But I was often startled by how much Swift understood about the day-to-day life of politics, the way people interact. There's what you might call the sociology of politics. And the most helpful thing it did was it was one of the many factors that made me think I shouldn't be working there anymore.

36:21Tyler Cowen:Why do you think Swift is the smartest of all English language writers? Shakespeare possibly accepted.

36:26Henry Oliver:Well, Swift has a very different sort of intelligence to Shakespeare. And I think he can deal with a practical question, you know, to do with coinage, to do with government, to do with composition of politics, to do with the conduct of a war or something. in both a fictional and a non-fictional manner. And he can make those arguments either with the kind of directness and polemicism that we associate with his pamphlets or with the incredible ambivalence of Gulliver's Travels, a book in which he manages not to express his own opinions. Shakespeare didn't, as far as we know, do any of the non-fiction arguing.

37:02Henry Oliver:So Swift, I think, has the balance there, noting that Shakespeare far exceeds him on the fictional side, even though Gulliver's Travels must be one of the very few great books ever written in English.

37:14Tyler Cowen:And if someone wants to read some Swift in addition to Gulliver's Travels, where should they go and why?

37:20Henry Oliver:I would get a small selection of the poetry because you'll see just how vicious and sharp and wicked he can be and how much he enjoys berating prostitutes. And you see a little bit of the double-edgedness of what he's doing. And then I would maybe read the journal to Stella because it's very lively and very, very good observation. And it's – I love that book. And then, you know, the normal pamphlets that people read. Everyone's going to tell you to read the one about eating the babies. But there's a lot of other good pamphlets. Drapier's letters, some of the best work he ever did, right?

37:53Tyler Cowen:Yes. Now, when two readers disagree about what a novel means or how good it is, you could take the two of us. Our worldviews are not diametrically opposed, right, as people go in the broader universe. What's your theory of what accounts for that difference? And you can reference me specifically just to give this some bite. So we disagree about something in Swift or Shakespeare or Jane Austen. What's likely at the root of that disagreement?

38:18Henry Oliver:Well, one thing is that fiction is intentionally ambivalent, by which I mean Swift in Gulliver's Travels does not want to express his own opinions. He wants to set out a kind of polyphonic set of different views. And you can take a few natural readings from it. But he also is giving you room to get it wrong. And he's doing that on purpose. And most of the novelists are doing that most of the time. The second thing is that we lose context for these books so quickly. And we very often are reading them so far out of their context that we can't help but bring ourselves to it. And the third thing, Tyler, is that some readers want to find more controversial readings.

38:58Henry Oliver:than others. And I suspect you might be like that.

39:01Tyler Cowen:I am like that. I think a lot of the differences in readings come from temperament. Yeah. That one is born with, essentially.

39:07Henry Oliver:Or, well, born with, developed. Developed, but 60 % you're born with it. Yeah, yeah, I'll go with that. Would be my guess. And I think temperament is important because that's what informs the creation of the book originally, right? Jane Austen's temperament is clearly fundamentally different to Swift's, even though they might agree on certain issues. And so we're reacting to her temperament. We're not just reacting to her content.

39:29Tyler Cowen:Now, before doing your current work, you were in advertising for almost a decade. How do you feel that work in advertising has shaped how you read literature?

39:40Henry Oliver:I try to keep them very separate. I try not to let advertising pollute my readings of literature.

39:45Tyler Cowen:Why is it a pollution?

39:47Henry Oliver:Because advertising is not a great art. And to apply the principles of advertising to literature would be a diminishment.

39:53Tyler Cowen:But you don't have to apply the principles. Advertising gives you insight into what people value, how people respond. And that's also a part of literature.

40:03Henry Oliver:It is. And if you take advertising not to mean headlines and banner ads and things like that, but to mean calling of attention to some particular thing of importance, you can see that a lot of the great writers were very good advertisers of their own work, of their own ideas. Swift in particular. Swift is very, very good at advertising. If you wanted to be obtuse, you could reframe his whole career as an exercise in lobbying and PR and realize that no one's ever been as good at it as he was, right?

40:31Tyler Cowen:So your favorite authors are the ones who are best at advertising is what you're now telling us.

40:35Henry Oliver:I have a very Catholic view of literature, and I admire those writers who are practical and can do a lot of different things. So I love Samuel Johnson. And one reason is that he can write a sermon, a legal opinion, an advert, almost anything you want. And I think the literary talent can often be turned to those multiple uses.

40:55Tyler Cowen:Why isn't there more creativity in advertising? So much of it to me seems stupid and boring.

41:00Henry Oliver:Yes.

41:00Tyler Cowen:You would think, well, if they had a clever ad that people would talk about, it would be better. But that doesn't happen. Is it a market failure or it's actually more or less optimal? I don't think it's optimal.

41:10Henry Oliver:I think advertising, we don't know how well advertising works. And we're still impeded in that because of the laws about who you can and cannot target on the internet. So I think most people would actually be surprised if they went into an advertising agency to learn just how poorly we can target people. Everyone thinks they're being targeted all the time, but being followed by a toaster advert is really quite basic. And everyone uses the same toaster example because everyone's being followed by the same bloody toaster. That's not targeting. I think they've been taken over by bad ideas. There are sort of two competing schools of advertising.

41:43Henry Oliver:One of them is the hard sell where you put a lot of information and facts and you name the product a lot. Buy this aspirin. It cures headaches three times quicker than other brands. We did a study. 38 % of people, right? And you just hammer it all the time. The other advertising school is the sort of image-based, right? So Arthur Rubicam wrote those wonderful Steinway adverts, the instrument of the immortals. Have you brought great music into your home? The woman in the dress at the piano, you're sort of buying a whole mood, right, or a vibe. The peak of that is like the tiger on the frosty cereal packet.

42:17Henry Oliver:You don't need words or the Marlboro Man. You buy these cigarettes, you're going to look like that cowboy in that shirt and you're going to smoke and you're going to feel like a man and it's just going to be like great, right? Cause Light does that now. Then there was this terrible, terrible thing called the creative revolution in the 1960s where supposedly – this is like the modernism of advertising. I like modernism. I like modernism too but it made some terrible mistakes. And what they did was they said, we're going to get rid of all this hard sell stuff. It's boring. The adverts, you know, no one wants to look at them.

42:48Henry Oliver:And we're going to be new all the time. We're going to be unexpected all the time. And everyone can point to a handful of adverts like Think Small, where they instead of selling you a big car, they got bigger every year with lots of features. They sell you the little Beetle. It's counterintuitive and it's clever and it's funny. But really, the Beetle would have sold itself. And some of the people who wrote those adverts actually say that in their memos. why are we riding this carousel itself? And it led to this kind of advertising that was very prevalent when I was growing up in the 90s and the 80s.

43:19Henry Oliver:Do you remember that Levi's advert? It's set in like the 50s maybe and he goes to buy a condom in a tin and the grumpy old man behind the desk looks very disapproving and then he goes to like get his girlfriend and she's the minister's daughter and they run off together on a train.

43:35Tyler Cowen:This was in America? I can't remember where it was. It sounds very British to me.

43:39Henry Oliver:But and then so that's like it's like a little little short film and it's this story about rebellion and whatever. And then at the end, it says, you know, Levi's and obviously they show you the pocket of the jeans in the ad. Maybe that's a good ad. I don't necessarily think so. But it's indicative of the way things have gone that in pursuit of that mood or that vibe, you just get this kind of short entertainment. And at the end, you're like, I don't know what I was being advertised. I don't know what product it was. No one showed me anything useful. The real creative revolution happened in the 50s under David Ogilvie.

44:10Henry Oliver:And he joined the hard sell with the image. And that's when advertising still works. Those are the adverts you remember. Those are the adverts that make you want to buy things, right? You're actually quite good at advertising. You do it on your podcast. You do it on your blog. And you do a little bit of the hard sell, a little bit of the image. And I think everyone knows that that's what works. But they want to be cool. They want to do the creative revolution. and, you know, we just get these adverts that suck.

44:37Tyler Cowen:Are you up for a round of overrated versus underrated? Always. Here's some easy ones. John Milton's Paradise Lost, overrated or underrated?

44:46Henry Oliver:Underrated. Why? Oh, it's easily one of the best poems in English and it's not read enough.

44:51Tyler Cowen:But Samuel Johnson said, no man ever wished it was longer. Do you agree?

44:57Henry Oliver:I do happen to agree with that particular statement. Johnson's allowed to be wrong a couple of times and that's one of his clunkers.

45:05Tyler Cowen:Spencer's Fairy Queen

45:07Henry Oliver:seriously underrated you know this

45:09Tyler Cowen:that to me is a top 10 work of all time and basically no one reads it

45:12Henry Oliver:of course because it's very very long but they don't read

45:16Tyler Cowen:you could read bits of it and they don't do that either

45:18Henry Oliver:I yeah and I do think if you even if you just read the bits of Spencer that are in the Oxford book of English verse you will feel the great power of his writing the great magic of what he can do and you will want a little bit more of it yeah

45:31Tyler Cowen:so now we're advertising for Edmund Spencer That's right. I'm delighted. That's right. Galsworthy, Forsyth Chronicles, the book.

45:38Henry Oliver:Oh, overrated. They're even worse than you think. They're so boring. Absolutely crushingly dull.

45:43Tyler Cowen:I think they're good melodrama. Oh, Tyler. They were made into a TV series, which is a kind of downgrade, but it tells you something about them, that they can be made into a TV series that many people will watch. Did you read all four? Yeah.

45:56Henry Oliver:Oh, my God.

45:57Tyler Cowen:I didn't think they were great literature, but I thought they were quite good, and I never regretted reading them.

46:02Henry Oliver:I was so bored I couldn't finish. D.H. Lawrence. The short stories are truly phenomenal. Really wild, strange, compelling. I mean, I thought I didn't like Lawrence and I went back and read the short tales and I was completely consumed by them. Dickens' Bleak House. I will say underrated in the sense that I know a lot of literary bookish, well-read people who haven't yet read it. I think it's one of the top works. I think it's the best novel in English. I mean, it's really just extraordinary piece of writing.

46:31Tyler Cowen:I think that with Spencer are the two most underrated great works. Yeah. If I had to say. I can go with that, yeah. Tolkien. And I mean Lord of the Rings.

46:39Henry Oliver:Yeah, no, sure, sure, sure. Lord of the Rings plus The Hobbit, right?

46:42Tyler Cowen:Yeah.

46:43Henry Oliver:I will say properly rated by the fans and underrated by, you know, the highbrows who dismiss it or the ones who haven't read it, which is some of them who dismiss it have not read it. And that is a known thing or secretly known thing. But it's clearly one of the great novels of the 20th century. Harry Potter. I'm going to have to say appropriately rated. I can't get through them. I feel it's my fault. I'm not down on them. But they just don't interest me somehow. But why should they? They're not written for adults.

47:10Tyler Cowen:There are other things in children's literature that I find easier.

47:15Henry Oliver:Yes, yes. But a lot of adults quite like them also, right? They're overrating it. The general idea that these are really, really good children's books and they should be read for fun and it's all very exciting. That's great. I used to buy them on the day they came out. I was young when they came out and just, you know, read straight through them and then never think about them again, but sort of say these were really good. That's to me the right rating. Dressing up and going to King's Cross Station without any children I find to be an act of overrating the books. But they are really, really good.

47:47Henry Oliver:And this Harold Bloom thing about, oh, they're full of cliches and it's deadening young minds and stuff, that's just rubbish.

47:54Tyler Cowen:What is there in American fiction that you think is quite underrated and would like to give an advert for?

47:59Henry Oliver:I have not read enough American fiction, and I'm trying to read more. I just read Democracy by Henry Adams that I actually thought was really good.

48:07Tyler Cowen:Agree.

48:08Henry Oliver:And I think a lot of people in Washington would find it instructive and amusing to read that novel.

48:14Tyler Cowen:And it's quite short. Overrated in American fiction? Presumably underrated. No, no, I'm saying what do you find overrated in American fiction?

48:22Henry Oliver:A lot of the 20th century stuff that I've tried to read, I have not got very far with. And I don't know whether that's because my temperament is wrong or whether they're overrated. But I'm suspicious of some of these big white male writers that people want to revive at the moment.

48:38Tyler Cowen:I think if you're a wealthy country with a lot of people and you dominate academia, many of your writers will end up overrated. Yeah, yeah. And the country has the New York Times, right?

48:49Henry Oliver:Numerous other outlets. It's going to take another generation to properly shake out what's going to last from that period, I think.

48:56Tyler Cowen:But do you think it's also true that many British writers are overrated? Because your country punches above its weight. Well, it has the TLS, it has the London Review, it has many of the best bookshops in the world, a highly literate population. Who of your writers ends up overrated because of that?

49:13Henry Oliver:Are you thinking of like the Barbara Pym's? For instance. Yeah. I actually, I quite like Barbara Pym. And one thing that's surprising is that I think it's Persephone Books, the lady who runs that, who has republished many, many interesting 20th century women writers. They don't do Barbara Pym because she doesn't like her. So I think maybe there's more division of opinion on some of those novels than you might think. I like reading everything. I like middle brow. I like low brow. I like trash. I like Shakespeare. I think that's the true literary life, right? So I would say Barbara Pym is properly rated by me.

49:47Henry Oliver:Whether she's too popular and people should read a little bit more Edmund Spencer, yeah, maybe, maybe. Science fiction? Another thing that I'm trying to read more of because it's kind of a gap for me. I was not one of those children who read a lot of science fiction.

50:02Tyler Cowen:They of the Triffids is from your people and that's quite good.

50:04Henry Oliver:I read that at school and I did like it. I just read, is it Mortal Engines by Stanislaw Lem, The Robot Fairy Tales? Yes. Those were pretty interesting. It's not Solaris, but it was good. And I'm watching Pluribus because I feel like if I'm doing sci-fi, I have to do some TV as well, right?

50:21Tyler Cowen:And movies. How do you understand Pluribus, which is a show I'm watching now as well?

50:25Henry Oliver:Yeah, I've only seen the first two episodes, so I feel like I don't quite understand it. I don't really understand how an RNA can join everyone's minds together. Well, that's silly, right? But that's just a premise. I'm just supposed to assume that there's some, like, crazy physics that we're not going to tell you or something.

50:41Tyler Cowen:You're allowed to assume that the world of Star Wars exists, right? Yeah. As long as the rest of the story is consistent.

50:48Henry Oliver:Yeah. But so far, I really like it. And I think the idea of people, some of the people want to join what's been called the hive mind. I don't think that's the right phrase, really. But some of them want to join and some of them don't. And I think that's the right dynamic to focus on.

51:02Tyler Cowen:What's the best portrait of mental illness in English fiction? It might be Swift in Tale of a Tub.

51:09Henry Oliver:Bob. I don't think I have a good answer for that. I don't think we're very good at mental illness in English fiction. Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway. Is anyone good at it?

51:19Tyler Cowen:Are the Russians good at it?

51:21Henry Oliver:Yeah, Gogol. Gogol's really good at it.

51:24Tyler Cowen:Your book on late bloomers, it's called Second Act. Why did it do so well? What chord did it strike with its readers and the public?

51:32Henry Oliver:Maybe it didn't do as well as you think.

51:34Tyler Cowen:The fact that we're talking about it means it did well would be my...

51:38Henry Oliver:I think a lot of people want to be a late bloomer and that it was – I mean I explicitly argued against this but it was always implicitly selling the idea that you might be a late bloomer. If only, if only, right? And I think a lot of people want a serious answer to that question. And so far the other things that have been written about late bloomers tend to be sort of – here are some people who did really well and they had resilience and they had stamina and you can do it too and never give up. And I think a lot of people want a real answer to the question, not that kind of thing. So when late bloomers do bloom late, what is it that has changed to make it suddenly work?

52:13Henry Oliver:There are several examples when something very dramatic happens in the external life of the person. Someone shoots themselves. They get caught in a hotel fire, something like that. And they turn around after that event and say, OK, I simply have to change everything. This cannot carry on. And there is another category of late bloomers where there isn't – there's sort of an external crisis or it's not very – it's not such a sharp moment of crisis. But they kind of become their own interruption. And I think those people are very interesting. They can look at themselves in the mirror and say, really?

52:48Henry Oliver:You're going to die without doing it? You know, you're not getting any younger. Let's go. Let's go do it now. And that attitude is worth a lot.

52:56Tyler Cowen:There's a Grandma Moses exhibit on right now in Washington, D.C. Oh, I'll have to go. At the American Museum.

53:01Henry Oliver:I will have to go. I love her paintings.

53:03Tyler Cowen:And she blooms very late, right? Oh, like in her 70s.

53:07Henry Oliver:Very, very late.

53:08Tyler Cowen:And what do you think clicked in her?

53:10Henry Oliver:She's a great example of external circumstances. She was working as a house servant, I think, at the age of 12 or 14. And then she married a farmer. And, you know, they were in the fields all day, every day. and she had children and she lived at a time without the convenience of white goods in the home and she did not really have the ability to sit down and do painting. And it was when she retired, she started making, she would stitch her pictures. And I think it was her sister-in-law who brought her some art materials and said, these stitchings are very good, but you should paint. And she had done arts and crafts as a child, but it had been cut off by going to work.

53:51Henry Oliver:So she's a really good example of someone where once she has the time back, it can flourish again.

53:57Tyler Cowen:Will fiction be able to deal seriously again with religion? I mean, presumably. Well, it hasn't done so for a while. Marilynne Robinson arguably has. She was a guest on the show. But most of the examples you think of are quite a bit earlier.

54:13Henry Oliver:When do you think the last time?

54:15Tyler Cowen:Evelyn Woe, Willa Cather, maybe Dostoevsky for that matter. I don't like Dostoevsky. But he dealt seriously with religion, right?

54:25Henry Oliver:Yeah, sure, sure, sure. I'm hesitating because I know that there are writers on Substack who are more religious than I am who would point to various modern novels. I don't think they would say they are great novels, but they would say that there is fiction out there that's dealing with it now. When will we get another Graham Greene or Muriel Spark for that matter?

54:48Tyler Cowen:I don't know. I don't think it would be too long.

54:50Henry Oliver:There are a lot of religious young people now and fiction will give them an outlet for that. Haven't there been a lot of atheist writers? And isn't that a sort of, like the Martin Amis obsession with being an atheist, sort of a way of dealing with it?

55:04Tyler Cowen:It's been bad for literature on that.

55:05Henry Oliver:Oh, agreed. But it's a way of dealing with religion, right? Sure. So I'm not sure how much it ever left, but I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, 20 years. Maybe a late bloomer will do it. No, I think it'll be a young person. Young person. And I suspect it will largely be converts.

55:21Tyler Cowen:Do you think late bloomers enjoy their success more or less?

55:24Henry Oliver:More. Why? Because you can leave behind the bad thing and move forward into something new. Men who have multiple careers are to be envied, said David Ogilvie. It's the ultimate anti-boredom.

55:36Tyler Cowen:Is Ayn Rand a late bloomer?

55:39Henry Oliver:Maybe. I haven't read enough of her books to make a good judgment. But if we accept that Atlas Shrugged is singular, then yeah, she's a late bloomer. And I think that's an extraordinarily good novel. I loved reading that book. What made it interesting to you? Well, Hollis Robbins told me to read it. And I had always not read it because I had met actual Randians, like fully paid up objectivists. And I just thought, get me away from this party. I've got to leave. And of course, she's famous for being nasty and having bad ideas and all that kind of thing. So when Hollis recommended it, I thought, OK, this is a totally different kind of recommendation.

56:14Henry Oliver:So I will definitely take this. and it was just so exciting on the plot level. Like it's maybe the best genre novel ever written and then you get all this like first-rate B-movie dialogue. Humphrey Bogart, if Humphrey Bogart had been in the film of Atlas Shrugged, it would have been brilliant. And then, you know, it is actually interesting. Some people I think are blocked from enjoying it because they're so anti her philosophy but it is actually interesting to see how unclunky her handling of ideas is in the best moments of the novel, right? the party scenes, some of the arguments about the train.

56:47Henry Oliver:Obviously, the three-hour speech is quite wearing for anyone. But at other times, I think she's more subtle than she's given credit for.

56:54Tyler Cowen:The villains are remarkably true to current life, I find.

56:58Henry Oliver:Yeah. The villains were a revelation to me.

57:01Tyler Cowen:What is your best child-rearing advice?

57:06Henry Oliver:I worked in a school a long time ago, and I was told, I think I was told the way to deal with boys is fun, firm, and fair. But I think that's boys and girls. And I think, you know, you should be involved, but not too involved. Give them their own space. Let them be children.

57:24Tyler Cowen:Last two questions. First, let's say we have listeners who now want to read Measure for Measure, or they want to reread it. What advice or insight would you give them to make this a more fruitful reading or rereading, or to make it more accessible or more interesting, whatever. Some people want footnotes and some people don't.

57:45Henry Oliver:So don't let me tell you, you must read every footnote in the Arden edition and understand every little thing if you just want to get to the end and find out what happened and then go back and look at it more closely. And I think some people, some people in my experience, I've run Shakespeare book clubs online, they don't want the painful blow by blow, but some people really do. So make that decision for yourself.

58:09Tyler Cowen:Final question. What will you do next?

58:12Henry Oliver:I'm tempted to keep it a secret.

58:14Tyler Cowen:That's fine.

58:15Henry Oliver:So all I'll say is I have a lot of things in my draft folder, and maybe some of them will get published somewhere.

58:20Tyler Cowen:To close, I'll just recommend again Henry's book, Second Act About Late Bloomers, Henry's Substack, just Google Henry Oliver Substack, and Henry's New Joint Substack with Rebecca Lowe. Henry Oliver, thank you very much.

58:34Henry Oliver:Thank you, Tyler. This was a lot of fun.

58:38Tyler Cowen:Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowen, and the show is at Cowen Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.

59:05Thank you.