Page 2423 – Christianity Today (2024)

I once opened a magazine to an article that began, “Everybody hates an Anglophile,” to which I answered, “No, but everybody does hate a ______.” Still, I understood what the writer meant. For many Americans, England remains the river of myth and history that branches into so many smaller rivers, including our own. We adopt its traditions; we claim a stake in its literary achievements. But some of us haven’t faced facts. If the modern UK bears little resemblance to the country of Masterpiece Theater, and if the queen now hands out CBEs to people like Mick Jagger—well, we Anglophiles have the luxury of being an ocean away.

For the generation that came of age in the Twenties and Thirties, the older Britain was like an elderly relative, still present but fading fast. Novelist Penelope Fitzgerald describes such a world in an autobiographical essay from her posthumous collection The Afterlife. Remembering her childhood in Sussex, Fitzgerald writes,

From time to time Lady Denman, the most important benefactress in the neighborhood, took me out for what was then called a joy ride in her chauffeur-driven motor-car … . To me it was bitterly disappointing. You could see so much from a trap, where you sat high up above the fields and hedges, which seemed to be snatched away from the side of the road as the horse pounded forward. Not quite as good as a trap, but better than kind Lady Denman’s Daimler, was a ride home on the last cow when they were brought in for afternoon milking. You had to sit sideways because a cow’s backbone is as sharp as a rail and the view was limited, but the movement was delightful.

Fitzgerald, born in 1916, was the daughter of humorist and poet Edmund Knox, aka “Evoe” of Punch (he was the editor of the magazine from the Thirties through World War II). Her literary childhood was simultaneously old-fashioned and modern. Both her parents were products of Victorian vicarages, and, once children were born, they settled down into the old domesticity. Poetry, still widely popular in England, was the family trade, along with writing in general; even the Knox children scribbled away, confident of being published. Not far from this “homely” literary atmosphere, however, was the harsher climate of Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury was happy to lift its stock by selling out the icons of the 19th century (Lytton’s Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was to Florence Nightingale as that whoopie cushion was to your 4th grade teacher: unfair but effective). Fitzgerald’s Uncle Dilly was a close friend of Strachey and also Maynard Keynes, but she refers to her mother and father’s world, in contrast, as “Georgian.”

“Georgian” is a mostly forgotten term for a literary movement that was progressive but also romantic and accessible. The writers’ names remain familiar: D.H. Lawrence, Rupert Brooke, and G.K. Chesterton all appeared in the first collection of Georgian poets—a volume that sold an amazing 15,000 copies on publication. The publisher of that book, and patron of British poets generally, was Harold Munro, owner of the famous Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street. Nearly every great modern poet and many now forgotten passed through the Bookshop at some point, including the eccentric Charlotte Mew, whose biography Fitzgerald would later write. Children were also welcome; Christina Knox bought colored rhyme sheets at the Bookshop to decorate the nursery walls. “Although Harold and Alida [Munro] were,” Fitzgerald says, “in their different ways, rather intimidating for a young child … cats, kittens, and dogs were needed as intermediaries; everything they published for children was successful.”

The Poetry Bookshop closed in 1935, and there’s something fascinating in Fitzgerald’s report of a rumor that some “children of a racecourse tough” who lived next door took the rhyme sheets and stamped on them. It sounds so much like a scene from one of her own books, where the most defining element, whether in fiction or biography, is a preoccupation with failure. In prose that is unfailingly bright, spare, and quotable, Fitzgerald writes of characters unlucky and unappreciated, marooned in this world and destined for obscurity, yet still dignified in the ways that count. There’s the would-be bookseller driven out of business by shallow aristocrats in The Bookshop; the young teacher in At Freddie’s who has no skill or purpose except to adore a woman who only pities him; and of course Charlotte Mew, who Thomas Hardy incorrectly predicted would be remembered long after her contemporaries, and who committed suicide by drinking Lysol.

Failure and disgrace were things that Fizgerald knew well from her own lifetime of picturesque and semi-comic troubles. Though we admire her success now, it’s shocking to think that she only began to write seriously at the age of 58, with a biography of Edward Burne-Jones. From then until her death in 2000, at the age of eighty-three, she wasted no time. Her next two decades were prolific in output and critical acclaim, bringing her a Booker Prize (for Offshore, drawing on her experience living with her children on a houseboat at a time when money was scarce) and a National Book Critics Circle Award (for The Blue Flower, a novel that some call her masterpiece, centering on the life of the German poet Novalis).

I confess, I don’t love Fitzgerald’s novels as much as I think they deserve. I see all of their virtues: the craftsmanship, the planning, the unmistakable voice behind nearly every sentence. But that same voice can create a distance, I think, between a narrator and a reader. And there are times when her narrative is so dry and spare (in Human Voices, for instance, where we’re expected to identify characters by their bbc acronyms, which is hilarious but confusing) that the characters seem remote.

But these are matters of taste, and I find plenty to love in Fitzgerald’s other writing, including her insightful and generous criticism, much of which can be found in The Afterlife. Her posthumously published short stories (The Means of Escape) are strangely fascinating, and her recently published letters (And So I Have Thought of You) reveal other sides of her: a young woman who showed great early promise (she was Tolkien’s pupil at Oxford); who became overwhelmed with what Dorothy L. Sayers would have derisively called “personal concerns” (raising children); and who, unlike so many British intellectuals, remained quietly churchgoing and Christian. Though Fitzgerald didn’t write much about her own faith, we can look for the roots of it in the book of hers that I like best: The Knox Brothers, a wonderful composite biography of her father and her three eccentric uncles.

Fitzgerald begins this story of her extended family with her two bishop grandfathers. Her paternal grandfather, Edmund Knox, was the son of evangelical and Quaker parents; Knox was a brilliant classics scholar at Cambridge who later summed up his own evangelicalism as “the conviction that God loved [me] ‘as an actual fact, that must take first place in my life.’ &hellip ; Secondly to look at the Bible as a personal message from God to the individual soul &hellip ; ‘to read it daily with a resolve to hear what God had to say to me that day.’ ” It would be hard, even today, to come up with a better, simpler statement of evangelical faith. While still a tutor at Merton College, Knox married the daughter of Thomas French, an Anglican missionary to India who became the Bishop of Lahore. Bishop French seems to have stepped from the pages of the Book of Acts. At the age of 64, he left his family in England and set out for North Africa, determined to bring the gospel to the Arab peoples. According to Fitzgerald, “He had no authority or backing. His destination was the whole Arab world, simply to tell them, even if no one accepted it, that Christ loved them and had died for them.” After living for a while as an itinerant holy man, he died and was buried at the foot of a cliff by the Bay of Muscat.

It’s the fate of some individuals to act out the history of an era on a small stage, and the fate of their children to see life as a record of vanished joys and melancholy partings—but to be glad for it, all the same.

This is the background that Fitzgerald paints for her readers before she tells the story of Bishop French’s grandsons, the four sons of Edmund Knox, who, as Bishop of Manchester, became widely known for his ministry to the impoverished and working classes. Each of the Knox brothers, born in the 1880s, was expected to carry this family legacy of piety and brilliance into an intense period of cultural, religious, and technological evolution; each, in turn, would have his unique way of dealing with it. For the oldest, Eddie (Fitzgerald’s father), there would be poetry, humor, and affection to carry him into the new century—not so much religion, though it was never his nature to upset his father’s world. For the second brother, Dillwyn (Dilly), the changes created more disruption. Eccentric and brilliant (as a cryptographer, he helped to crack the Nazi Enigma code, shortening World War II), Dilly would have a violent reaction against faith, first at Eton, where he formed a friendship with John Maynard Keynes, and then at Cambridge, where he associated with Lytton Strachey’s Apostles. The rejection of Christianity that came so easily to his friends required more effort—almost an evangelical conviction—for the grandson of Bishop French. Dilly “felt the need,” says Fitzgerald, “to justify his faith—since his refusal to believe was nothing less than a faith by an appeal to reason. His skepticism was not logical; it came to him in the form of blazing indignation, a vision of Christianity as a two-thousand-year old swindle … . Yet more treacherous was the fact that Dilly &hellip ; could not forget or unlearn the words of the Authorized Version of the Bible, which had been interwoven since childhood with his daily life.”

It was left to the younger two brothers to take up their father’s religious vocation, but in ways the Bishop struggled to understand. Wilfred, deeply affected by the poverty of the lower classes, became an Anglo-Catholic (and some would say socialist) priest, eventually helping to form the Oratory of the Good Shepherd, a brotherhood dedicated to living in poverty and service. His high church convictions disturbed his father, but that disturbance was nothing compared to what happened when Ronnie, the youngest and “favorite” son, converted to Roman Catholicism after a bitter internal struggle. Ronnie’s decision put a chill on his relations with the Bishop, but family loyalty endured even that strain, and Monsignor Ronald Knox went on to become a Christian scholar, mystery writer, radio dramatist, and translator of the New Testament. He gave the homily for G.K. Chesterton’s Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral, and no less than Evelyn Waugh would write his biography, following his death in 1957.

A composite biography of such different personalities sounds impossible, but Fitzgerald identifies the one thing the brothers all shared: “a distinctive attitude to life, which made it seem as though, in spite of their differences, they shared one sense of humor, and one mind.” She traces the development of that common attitude to the wild, tribal days of childhood, when the brothers wrestled as one under the nursery tables, memorized Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, wrote to Conan Doyle to point out errors in his Sherlock Holmes stories, and, after the early death of their mother, began “to resemble savages; speaking Greek and Latin.”

“It was a memorable experience to go to Gunter’s teashop with Ronnie and Eddie,” Fitzgerald writes, recalling an afternoon years later with her father and uncle, when Ronnie began to enthuse over Henry Vaughan’s “Peace” while tackling meringue with a fork:

“My soul, there is a country
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a winged sentry
All skillful in the wars …”

Ronnie, chasing the crumbs, objected to the half-rhyme, country and sentry, and to the unlikeliness of one sentry guarding a whole boundary. The text must be wrong. Mightn’t Vaughan have written,

“My soul, there is a fortress
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a winged porteress …”

Eddie immediately rejected the fortress; it was too menacing; why not a teashop?

“My soul, there is a caterer’s
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a Gunter’s waitress …”

At the false rhyme, Ronnie half-rose from his chair in agony. The tea was brought … . Other customers stared in amazement. So much did the words and assonances of the English language mean to the Knox brothers.

It’s the fate of some individuals to act out the history of an era on a small stage, and the fate of their children to see life as a record of vanished joys and melancholy partings—but to be glad for it, all the same. Themes of sadness and loss play through all of Penelope Fitzgerald’s work, but most movingly in The Knox Brothers. “When I was young,” she writes in the forward, “I took my uncles for granted, and it never occurred to me that everyone else in the world was not like them … . I miss them all more than I can say.”

Which is something a great many readers might say about her.

Betty Smartt Carter writes fiction and teaches Latin in Alabama.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“The world is like a drunken peasant. If you lift him into the saddle on one side, he will fall off again on the other side.” Thus Martin Luther in his Table Talk. His words would serve well as a description of the history of Inklings scholarship. The earliest such scholarly studies argued that the Inklings (Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, et al.) were possessed of “a corporate mind” and that their works had a “similar orientation,” “essentially uniform,” “clearly defined.” So claimed John Wain, a junior member of the Inklings, and various others. But this consensus was toppled from the saddle by Humphrey Carpenter, who maintained, by way of contrast, that the Inklings showed “scant resemblance” to one another and “that on nearly every issue they stand far apart.” Carpenter’s view, which he bolstered with evidence from senior Inklings who themselves claimed not to have influenced one another at all, has sat lumpenly in place since he published his study in 1979.

Diana Pavlac Glyer has now toppled the Carpenter view. But rather than allowing the cycle of drunken saddlings and re-saddlings to repeat itself, she has thoughtfully poured buckets of clear cold water over the entire subject. Fully sobered up at last, Inklings scholarship is for the first time able to sit straight, inclining neither to the view that the group was reliably hom*ogeneous, nor to the view that its members were utterly immiscible. Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis. It’s a typical scholarly progression. But how long it has taken!

Glyer’s study brings together in an admirably balanced way all previous work on this hugely significant circle of writers and establishes itself as an indispensable and refreshingly commonsensical guide to the group’s internal workings. She analyses the Inklings using a five-fold grid, assessing how the members of the group served as resonators, opponents, editors, collaborators, and referents.

Superbly researched and crystal clear, this work does the difficult job of assessing just how much the Inklings owed to one another. It demonstrates convincingly that some of the 20th century’s most powerful cultural artifacts would have been significantly different without the input of the group. For instance, Glyer shows that The Lord of the Rings would have been much more like The Silmarillion in structure and style “if it had not been so strongly influenced by the ‘humanizing’ effect of the Inklings.” Given that The Lord of the Rings has repeatedly been voted Book of the Century in public polls, and given the extensive reach of the Peter Jackson film adaptation, this is a much more important point than at first it might seem. How many people have read The Silmarillion? Who can imagine a successful screen version of it? Without the Inklings, Glyer argues, The Lord of the Rings would have lingered in similar obscurity.

Glyer herself recognizes that there are some areas of enquiry that she is leaving unaddressed. For instance, the massively important question of allegory is intentionally left out of account. Certain other large-scale issues, such as myth, sehnsucht, and “semantic unity,” are only handled briefly, and Glyer frankly admits that “a full discussion” of such topics “would require chapters in their own right.” Still, if this study doesn’t explore these big issues of mutual influence, it does explore the big issue of influence itself. This is one of the reasons why the book is so satisfying. After two hundred pages of close analysis and detailed argument, the final chapter swells to a grander theme, one which is treated judiciously and carefully, but now allargando with theological echoes.

Glyer finishes her work with an examination of our whole understanding of interpersonal indebtedness. She points out how, “in many cases, influence is viewed as a watered-down form of plagiarism, and the writer or artist who has ‘succumbed to influence’ is seen as somehow weak, wicked, or wanting.” She traces this valorizing of the “lone genius” to the characteristically Romantic sensibility of the egotistical sublime, highlighting Edward Young’s 1759 work, “Conjectures on Original Composition,” as the strongest critical statement to privilege originality and unfettered, traditionless, spontaneous creativity. Young is the most probable source for our common contemporary association between indebtedness and unimaginativeness.

It would have been helpful here to have had a little more historical consideration of just how innovative this Romantic view was and how opposed to the perspective of earlier times, when artists’ identities were often deliberately hidden under anonymity or pseudonymity or “pious frauds” so as to suppress individuality within a school of artistic tradition. A discussion of the development of professionalism among artists and the legalization of intellectual property with trademarks, copyright, and the like would also have been pertinent here.

But, again, one cannot do everything, and what Glyer does she does very well. Indeed, her steady dissection of the Inklings as a case-study in mutual support and service works beautifully as a sounding-board for her wider observations in this final chapter. I found myself moved as she unemotionally made inescapable the truth that in all walks of life, not just in literary composition, we are endlessly involved with one another. We know, of course, that no man is an island, but rarely is an entire work of nonfiction devoted to demonstrating that fact so subtly. Glyer concludes by pointing out that individuality is itself in part a product of community: “the individual and society are not in a zero-sum situation … a strong group that respects individual differences will strengthen autonomy as well as solidarity.” Her final footnote is a quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr. In an early reflection upon what we would now call “globalization,” King remarked:

When we arise in the morning, we go into the bathroom and reach for a sponge provided for us by a Pacific islander. We reach for soap that is created for us by a European. Then at the table we drink coffee which is provided for us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African. Before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half the world.

The little literary community of the Inklings is a microcosm of a macrocosmic truth. We are all members one of another, and Glyer’s book brings out that truth skilfully and powerfully. It is a fine work and, like the Inklings itself, greater than the sum of its parts.

The interconnectedness of human endeavor provides a suitable segue to the major theme of Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C.S. Lewis, by Matthew Dickerson and David O’Hara. Lewis once wrote that we “who live on a standardized international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine today) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.” Lewis’ point, though he would not have put it like this, is that global trade has spiritual, and therefore ecological, ramifications: before the advent of truly international travel and trade, local communities had to be much more knowledgeable about and respectful of their immediate environment. It was in them and they in it and they knew this. Only in the last few decades has it become evident that our immediate environment is, in fact, the whole earth and not just our little corner of it.

In this useful and interesting, if somewhat labored study, the authors attempt to build “bridges” between the “many active environmentalists [who] view Christians as ‘the enemy'” and the “many Christians [who] are therefore wary of ‘environmentalists,’ ” taking Lewis’ fiction as a model of what they wish to promote. They write: “Although ecology is generally not understood as the primary focus of his fantasy novels, Lewis shows a remarkable, consistent, complex, and healthy ecological vision in his numerous fictional worlds.” They concede that “there is some degree to which we are using Lewis’ writing as a defense of a certain Christian view of ecology,” but on the whole they use it fairly.

Their book is not so careful as Glyer’s. They make a number of factual errors, including dating Lewis’ Christian conversion to his late twenties rather than his early thirties (p. 22; cf. p. 26), having him be tutored by Kirkpatrick in Ireland rather than England (p. 24), and awarding him three degrees, rather than two (pp. 3, 19, 25). But their basic argument is sound, namely that from Lewis’ fiction a number of helpful environmental principles may be deduced, including the importance of story itself in ecological education: stories show that true environmentalism needs to be lived out as part of the totality of life and not just analyzed as an external anthropic problem with regrettable economic costs or divisive political consequences.

This realization is really the whole raison d’etre of the book. The authors say: “Interrelatedness or interdependence is one of the most important ecological principles, but one that is extremely difficult to conceptualize.” Having assessed Narnia and the Ransom Trilogy, they conclude: “Lewis’ stories offer us a vision of the world brimming with life and goodness, full of purpose, rich with value, every part enmeshed in deep and ethical relations with every other part.” In other words, Lewis shows what Dickerson and O’Hara tell.

Michael Ward is the author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford Univ. Press) and the co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis. His website is planetnarnia.com.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The cover of Duncan Wu’s William Hazlitt: the First Modern Man features a portrait of Hazlitt—a self-portrait. It is clearly the work of a significant talent, executed with subtle skill. We see in it a young man in a nondescript coat, a white stock wreathing his neck, who looks directly at the viewer. Light from an unseen window illuminates the right side of his face, but the other side is still discernible. His face is tilted ever so slightly downward so that he seems to be looking from under his brows. His eyes are quite large, his closed lips full; but his chin is short and, one might say, rather weak. The overall impression is of immense intelligence, immense sensitivity, immense vulnerability. These impressions are correct, though they do not tell us all we need to know of the man’s character.

Hazlitt has not come down to us as a painter, and barely even as an essayist, though that was the role he filled for generations: one of the two great English essayists of the Romantic era, the other being Charles Lamb. When Hazlitt is remembered today it is usually as the beleaguered protagonist of a doomed love affair with a serving girl more than twenty years his junior, a story he faithfully recorded in a book called Liber Amoris. Duncan Wu wants to restore Hazlitt to a far higher place in the public estimation, and anyone who has spent much time reading Hazlitt is likely to wish him success in that endeavor. But Wu’s approach—driven by an almost comical determination to justify Hazlitt’s behavior in the countless quarrels that dominated much of his adult life—works against his declared aims. A reader of this biography who was not already well acquainted with Hazlitt’s prose would have little sense of why Wu thinks Hazlitt deserves the highest possible praise for an essayist, “the title of the British Montaigne.” And this is sad, because even so high a claim is plausible. William Hazlitt is a great but largely forgotten genius of English literature.

In July of 1791 in the English city of Birmingham, a mob acting in the name of King and Church sacked and burned the home and laboratory of Joseph Priestley—known to us as a great scientist but to them as an anti-monarchist, Unitarian, and Francophile. (Priestley had aroused their anger by openly celebrating what would later be called Bastille Day.) This treatment of a great man outraged William Hazlitt, who wrote this impassioned defense of Priestley in his local newspaper:

Religious persecution is the bane of all religion; and the friends of persecution are the worst enemies religion has; and of all persecutions, that of calumny is the most intolerable. Any other kind of persecution can affect our outward circ*mstances only, our properties, our lives; but this may affect our characters for ever. And this great man has not only had his goods spoiled, his habitation burned, and his life endangered, but is also calumniated, aspersed with the most malicious reflections, and charged with every thing bad, for which a misrepresentation of the truth and prejudice can give the least pretence.

Hazlitt was thirteen years old at the time.

No wonder his father had high hopes for him. But those hopes focused on the idea that William would like his father become a Unitarian minister, and this was not to be. Two years after the sad affair in Birmingham, Priestley had moved on to the Unitarian New College at Hackney, just outside London, and young Hazlitt followed to study with the great man. But within two further years Hazlitt had become, as he himself put it, an “avowed infidel.” The news broke his father’s heart. Hazlitt loved his father deeply, so much so that this moment was in Wu’s view “the most catastrophic event of his life,” but he never returned to any kind of religious faith.

Instead he turned to philosophy—he developed a theory of what he called moral “disinterestedness” that occupied much of his intellectual energy in his youth—and then to painting, and ultimately to the potent combination of literary ambition and revolutionary politics that he saw exemplified in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Hazlitt met those two poets when he was nineteen and they just a few years older. He was electrified and transfixed, especially by Coleridge’s already near-legendary eloquence, and recorded those early meetings many years later in what would become one of his most famous essays, “My First Acquaintance with Poets.”

But it did not take Hazlitt long to fall out with Wordsworth and Coleridge alike; nor, for that matter, did it take him long to fall out with most of the other literary and artistic figures he met as he was drawn deeper and deeper into London’s intellectual world. Of Coleridge—universally considered one of the very greatest critics of Shakespeare—Hazlitt airily declared that he “isn’t competent to the task of lecturing on Shakespeare, for he is not well-read in him.” Indeed, much of what Coleridge knew he learned from Hazlitt, says Hazlitt. Of Wordsworth he wrote, “He hates all greatness, and all pretensions to it but his own. His egotism is in this respect a madness … . He hates all science and all art; he hates chemistry; … he hates Sir Isaac Newton; … he hates prose, he hates all poetry but his own; he hates Shakespeare; … he hates music, dancing, and painting … . He hates all that others love and admire but himself.”

Byron? “A king is hardly good enough for him to touch: a man of genius is no better than a worm.” Shelley? A “philosophic fanatic”; “though a man in knowledge, he is a child in feeling.” The great political philosopher William Godwin, an early and long-term supporter and encourager of Hazlitt? “He says little, and that little were better left alone, being both dull and nonsensical; his talk is as flat as a pancake, there is no leaven in it, he has not dough enough to make a loaf and a cake.” And what about ordinary people, say, the rural folk of whom Wordsworth wrote so eloquently? “All country-people hate each other.”

The most surprising aspect of Duncan Wu’s biography is his nearly unwavering determination to justify Hazlitt in such denunciations, to declare repeatedly that Hazlitt is morally blameless in these quarrels, and, in some cases, to carry the denunciations a bit further even than Hazlitt did. Wu calls Hazlitt’s dismissal of Coleridge’s critical abilities “a characteristically incisive analysis,” and in another passage adds that “Coleridge was a hopelessly deluded man” who suffered from the “knowledge that Hazlitt would surpass him.” (Note the word “knowledge,” rather than “suspicion” or “fear.” Wu seems to take it for granted that Hazlitt did suspass Coleridge, a judgment which to few others will seem obvious.) After quoting the attack on Wordsworth at greater length than I have done here, Wu simply writes, “All of this was true”—but then adds, as though making a slight qualification, “at least, it was based on Hazlitt’s encounters with Wordsworth.” (There’s a world of wiggle-room in the phrase “based on.”) Wu also informs us that Hazlitt “did know something about country people,” adding that in any case the essay in which he makes his categorical judgment is a “tour de force of invective”—a phrase Wu repeats verbatim when describing a later attack on Coleridge, as though rhetorical flair compensates for all else. Regarding the condemnation on Shelley, Wu writes “Hazlitt was doubtless at fault”—but not for writing what he did, only for failing to realize that others would not treat such matters with the serene intellectual “disinterestedness” with which, Wu assures us, Hazlitt himself always accepted attacks. (He repeats this judgment at least three times in the course of the biography.)

Only the mockery of Godwin—which was followed by a period of several years in which Hazlitt continued to meet Godwin socially, often in Godwin’s own home, without ever telling the old man what he had been saying and writing about him—causes Wu to hesitate for a moment. “Hazlitt should have understood” that Godwin would be unhappy with being pilloried, he acknowledges, which if course is a long way from saying that Hazlitt shouldn’t have written what he wrote. But, as though even that point counts too heavily against Hazlitt, Wu rushes on to say, “these were extreme times”—after all, Hazitt “felt himself to be on the fringes of society,” which surely explains why he would attack a man in whose society he was always welcome as an old and beloved friend. The worst Wu can bring himself to say is that Hazlitt’s smearing of Godwin was a “miscalculation.” And again and again he returns to his summation of Hazlitt’s constant verbal warfare: “No writer was more reviled, and none were less deserving of it.”

There is no question that Hazlitt did receive far more than his share of public criticism. Wu quotes a germane comment made thirty-five years after Hazlitt’s death: “William Hazlitt … was in his day the best abused man in Great Britain; it was dangerous to be his companion, so many stones were always flying about his ears.” Like Kierkegaard in Denmark thirty years later, he became a figure whom many others delighted in mocking—he even brought a libel suit against Blackwood’s Magazine, which was settled out of court but in his favor—and like the attacks on Kierkegaard, the attacks on Hazlitt seem strangely out of proportion to the provocation he afforded. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard quite literally asked for mockery, and Hazlitt didn’t do much less than that: his relentless critiques of public figures, so many of which focus on eccentricities of appearance, speech, and gesture, surely invited responses in kind. He could therefore scarcely have been surprised at a reference to “pimpled Hazlitt’s coxcomb lectures,” and if others had responded as he responded to Blackwood’s, he would have been the object of a few lawsuits himself.

It’s clear, then, that Wu’s summary judgment—that no writer was less deserving than Hazlitt of being reviled—is simply untenable. Wu’s determination to stand by his man in every conceivable circ*mstance not only calls his own reliability as a biographer into question, it also—and this is far more important—obscures what Wu most wants to celebrate: Hazlitt’s greatness as a writer. So entangled does Wu become in his tendentious retellings of these quarrels that he never seriously develops his strange claim that Hazlitt is “the first modern man,” and almost completely neglects to support his views of Hazlitt’s literary stature. I will therefore take up that task myself, if only through hints and implications.

Like many essayists—the greater and the lesser alike—Hazlitt took a long time to discover his métier, and indeed could be said to have created that métier out of spare parts he picked up along the way to getting his bills paid. Paying the pills was always a problem for Hazlitt, especially after his marriage in 1808 to Sarah Stoddart, and the subsequent arrival of their children (only one of whom survived infancy). He had not been able to make his way as a painter, and turned increasingly to odd jobs of writing. He had already published his philosophical treatise, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind, in 1805, and then turned to political pamphlets and miscellaneous tasks of editing and compilation, few of which made as much money as he had hoped for. In 1809 he published A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue; a couple of years after that, in imitation of his former friend Coleridge, he advertised a series of philosophical lectures in London: these drew enough of an audience to keep him afloat, so he repeated the practice a few times.

But gradually he began to build a reputation as a writer for the London weekly newspapers, and then for the most famous periodical of the day, The Edinburgh Review. What did he write about? A better question would be, What didn’t he write about? Consider just a few titles, from the essays only: “On the Love of the Country,” “On Reading Old Books,” “Disappointment,” “Public Opinion,” “On Depth and Superficiality,” and, especially noteworthy in light of the life story we have been exploring, “On the Want of Money” and “On Disagreeable People.”

At this point I begin to have more sympathy for Wu’s difficulties in making a case for Hazlitt’s genius, because it is impossible to convey the distinctive quality of these essays through selective quotation. Hazlitt produces the occasional aphoristic sentence: “He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.” “The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.” “Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room.” But his mastery does not lie in the snippet, rather in the gradual and nearly imperceptible development of profound ideas from disparate experiences. Consider his late essay “On a Sun-Dial,” which begins by noting the motto engraved on a sundial he saw while traveling in Italy, and then, in a few apparently unhurried paragraphs, augments the scope of its concerns to embrace the differences between sundials and clocks, the too-frequent ringing of church chimes in Holland, the purpose of funeral bells, Hazlitt’s own disdain for time-pieces and the curious vocation which allows him such disdain, and—looming over it all—the author’s sense that Time itself is “the most independent of all things. All the sublimity, all the superstition that hang upon this palpable mode of announcing its flight, are chiefly attached to this circ*mstance. Time would lose its abstracted character, if we kept it like a curiosity or a jack-in-a-box: its prophetic warnings would have no effect, if it obviously spoke only at our prompting like a paltry ventriloquism.”

Reading Hazlitt’s essays I am rarely conscious of anything much happening to me. His prose moves in irregular rhythms, but without calling overmuch attention to itself, and in his best work he does not seem even to try to convince me that his subject is important or his treatment distinctive. And yet when I reach the end of any of his finest pieces, I find myself setting the book on my lap and raising my head from the page a while: I feel vibrations in my mind, echoes of ideas that have just been suggested to me, echoes that resonate with one another variously and strangely. No one makes me think quite the way that Hazlitt does.

Throughout his career, Hazlitt’s work was continually disrupted not just by his incessant public spats, but still more by a continually roiling private life. From his teenage years on he was attracted to prostitutes, and even had a tendency to fall in love with them. And once, on something like the whim of a moment, he proposed marriage to Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy. (She told him that she was married to Poetry.) In the early years of his first marriage, when he and his wife Sarah were living in the countryside and not long after she had suffered a miscarriage, he fell so hopelessly in love with a young peasant girl named Sally Baugh that Sarah ordered him to go to London to escape his infatuation. A decade later, when he was forty-one and his marriage had all but collapsed, he became so obsessed with nineteen-year-old Sarah Walker that he could barely eat—his friends were shocked by his appearance—and was utterly incapable of writing. Sarah would tease him so skillfully, arousing him to the point of madness but allowing no near approach to sexual intercourse, that Hazlitt turned once more to prostitutes for relief. (Hazlitt was staying in the inn run by Sarah’s father, and Wu reports that Sarah would escort them to her suitor’s room.) Though he was rapidly falling back into his old poverty, he focused his energies on getting a divorce—in Scotland, where the laws were laxer than in England—so that he could propose to the young woman. But when he finally became “a free man” he discovered that she had attached herself to someone else, a man whom she had previously declared herself to have no interest in.

At this Hazlitt collapsed utterly. He told Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, “I feel much like a man who has been thrown from the top of a house.” He was only able to recover by writing a full account of the experience: the Liber Amoris, published anonymously in 1823—though the authorship was an open secret, and Hazlitt was fully aware that he would be recognized. He was, as he himself commented, merely saying in print what he had been telling everyone who had come within earshot of him for the previous three years. And besides, he desperately needed the money. (A year after publishing it he would marry a widow named Isabella Bridgwater, but that marriage would end just six years later with his death.)

Wu thinks the Liber Amoris a great book because of its “brutal honesty,” its refusal to “pander to vanity or self-regard.” I would say that these may be personal virtues but they are not literary ones; for me the Liber is continually thrown onto the rocks by the sweep of its author’s emotional tides. “My heart is torn out of me, with every feeling for which I wished to live. The whole is like a dream, an effect of enchantment; it torments me, and it drives me mad.” Hazlitt deals out this kind of prose by the bucketful; I think most readers prefer it in teaspoon doses.

And in any case, this interminable outpouring of feeling is not the way of the essay—not the way of Hazlitt at his extraordinary best. Consider “On the Pleasure of Hating,” which derives much of its strength from the slightly detached manner in which it approaches its subject, its initial contentment with philosophical generalization:

Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as possible; so the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud. Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice? But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction.

But this strength is multipled many times over as Hazlitt gradually allows a more passionate impetus to drive him forward, a more personal encounter with the experience of hatred. It’s impossible here to capture the subtle transformation of the meditation’s tone, but these are its last words:

What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others, and ignorance of ourselves,—seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy—mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love;—have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

This is compelling stuff, and its power is generated by the sinuous path Hazlitt follows to reach that agonized conclusion. In the Liber Amoris, though it’s a much longer work, Hazlitt can’t manage to build up the reader’s trust and sympathy. He seems just to want to throw us from the top of a house.

And it must also be said that even in the masterful “On the Pleasure of Hating” we hear the discordant notes of self-justification and self-pity—especially if we have read Duncan Wu’s biography. One would never guess from this account that its author could have betrayed friendships as well as being duped by them; nor is the suspicion entertained that “fools of love” can someimes be deficient in their own powers of loving. That concluding sentence is Hazlitt’s way of saying to Coleridge and Wordsworth and others whom he classed with “the world” that he only regrets having let them off so easily.

Brilliant as “On the Pleasure of Hating” is, then, I retreat a step or two from it. For all Hazlitt’s evident genius, the character of his essays—which, in the nature of the essayistic case, is largely his own nature—can drift far from the ironic, gently self-questioning spirit of Montaigne. Montaigne chose as his motto Que s&ccedit;ay-je?—What do I know?—and one cannot imagine a motto less congenial to the ever-confident Hazlitt.

Do I really want to suggest that we evaluate writers on the basis of their character? Treat every writer thus, and who should ‘scape whipping? And in general I would say that such a scheme is indeed bad policy. But Hemingway’s shortcomings do not touch the Nick Adams stories, nor Byron’s Don Juan, in the way that an essayist’s flaws of character soak into the essays themselves. Montaigne wrote that his book was “consubstantial with its author,” that it was impossible to encounter or judge the one without simultaneously responding to the other. To some extent this is true of all essays, sobering though that truth might be to those of us who write them; and so it is hard for me not to think that Hazlitt, great as he is, would have been still greater had he been a better man.

Alan Jacobs is professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of Original Sin: A Cultural History (HarperOne) and Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life (Eerdmans).

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

This has been a surprising summer for a number of reasons, one of which is how dreadfully dull most of the big popcorn films have been. The other is the extraordinary ability of a handful of tiny, independent films to redeem the season utterly. These films, from Away We Go, (500) Days of Summer and now Adam, are the antidote to the summer blight, delivering smart, hilarious, moving and cosmically life-affirming stories.

For the first time in his life, Adam (Hugh Dancy) is alone. With the recent passing of his father, the sweet-natured, 30-something Adam, who suffers from a developmental disorder called Asperger’s syndrome—a form of autism that, among other things, severally hampers social interaction—suddenly realizes that his well-ordered life comes with an expiration date.

Though he frequently shuns human contact and escapes into his own world—one dominated by the knotty conundrums of astrophysics (there is a particularly nice bit with a space suit)—Adam finds himself unusually drawn to his new neighbor, Beth (Rose Byrne).

The cosmopolitan Beth is everything the sheltered Adam is not, and at first she is unsure how to react to Adam’s stilted, clumsy and sometimes inappropriate overtures. But Beth sees something in Adam she has never found in any man before, and she allows herself—perhaps against her better judgment and most certainly against that of her caring but apprehensive parents (Peter Gallagher and Amy Irving)—to fall in love with the unconventional boy next door, drawing him out of his shell and changing both their lives forever.

Navigating the treacherous waters of romance is difficult enough in the most optimum conditions, let alone in a relationship beset by embarrassing social skills, an inability for emotional empathy, the hazards of miscommunication and, at times, even dangerous unpredictability. Adam cannot fathom basic trivialities but paradoxically can unravel great complexities. He is, in many ways, a child in a grown-up’s body, unable to function properly in an adult world because he lacks the prerequisite skills necessary to grasp the complicated nuances of adult interaction. He is without guile, incapable even of comprehending sarcasm or irony. Like his namesake in the garden before the Fall, he does not possess the knowledge of good and evil. Adam does not know how to be deceptive; he lacks the cognitive reasoning required for duplicity.

But Adam and Beth are proof—cinematic proof anyway—that with a lot of patience and understanding, even something that appears doomed from the start can blossom into something meaningful and extraordinary. One of the things that makes Adam so special is that it in no way tries to duck the incredible obstacles to intimacy that its two leads face, nor the enormous lengths to which two people in their position must go to make so implausible a connection. And the end, which will surprise some but not others, is honest in a way that a film dealing with autism must be.

Adam is, by turns, both funny and touching, a film composed of numerous wispy, gossamer moments of delicate beauty, and statements, both literal and metaphorical, of powerful poignancy. The story, which on its face is a love story, resonates to a greater degree as a life story—the sometimes enigmatic journeys we take to get from here to there, and the often inscrutable hands we hold along the way.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. What did you learn about Asperger’s syndrome from watching this film? Do you know anyone with the disorder? What is it like trying to relate to that person?
2. What can we learn from this film about relationships in general? About relating to someone who is difficult? What does Beth teach us about relating to someone like this? What does Harlan teach us?
3. How has the church in general—and your church in particular—done when it comes to integrating people with mental/emotional disorders? Do they feel loved or left out at your church? What can you do to help that situation?
4. Should we feel sorry for people like Adam, who have Asperger’s or any other mental illness/disorder? Why or why not? If all people are truly made in God’s image, did God make “mistakes” with such people? Discuss.

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Adam is rated PG-13 for thematic material, sexual content and language. Once scene shows the main characters under the covers before and after having sex; nothing explicit is shown. Language is pretty mild throughout, except one brief scene where one of the characters drops the f-bomb twice.

Photos © Fox Searchlight

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Aliens in the Attic is one of those titles that pretty much sums up the entire movie. It’s not some sort of pun or metaphor or literary allusion. This is a film about aliens that invade an attic of a house and wage war (in a not-so-scary way) against the family residing below. It’s a straightforward film geared toward third-graders, a movie with nothing on its mind but some good old-fashioned “let’s shoot paintballs at the bad guys!” kid power. There’s nothing in here for adults to enjoy, but plenty of hijinks and hilarity for anyone born in the 21st century.

The premise of Aliens, directed by John Schultz (Drive Me Crazy), is familiar. An average family takes a vacation at a rental house in Michigan over Independence Day weekend. The Pearson family consists of dad (Kevin Nealon), mom (Gillian Vigman), teenage son Tom (Carter Jenkins), and boy-crazy teenage daughter Bethany (Ashley Tisdale). There are predictable inter-family conflicts. Brother and sister are fighting because brother disapproves of sister’s buffoonish college-aged boyfriend (Robert Hoffman). Father and son are at odds because son has been failing classes at school on purpose; he’s tired of being picked on for being a brainiac nerd. The strained family dynamic is in need of some sort of galvanizing crisis to bring them back together again—something like an alien attack!

At the rental house, the Pearsons are joined by Uncle Nathan (Andy Richter), his three boys, and Nana (Doris Roberts). Bethany’s annoying boyfriend Ricky also shows up and quickly becomes the target of the younger boys’ paintball guns. Before long, a team of cartoony-looking CGI alien scouts drops down into the attic and begin planning for an invasion. The younger cousins discover the aliens—a band of four knee-high creatures that look vaguely amphibious/reptilian—and thus begins a raucous fight to keep these aliens from destroying the world. For the next hour, the kids use every weapon at their disposal—including bubbles, tennis rackets, spud guns, skateboards, Mentos/Diet co*ke bombs, and years of playing Halo—to fend off the aliens and hopefully keep the adults from ever having a clue that a trans-terrestrial battle was going on upstairs.

Aliens is your typical “kids save the world” action film. Adults are not really necessary in the film, aside from being the foils and/or comic playthings of the kids. Conveniently, the kids are immune to the aliens’ secret mind-control/avatar weapon, so they are really the only ones capable of fighting the creatures anyway. The adults—including an unhelpful local policeman (Tim Meadows)—mostly just bumble around wondering why the TV is on the fritz. They’re never made privy to the aliens’ presence, and thus a private fantasy world is preserved in which the kids are free to have their own gnarly adventure that only they are innocent enough to understand and take seriously.

Lest we forget that this is a film meant for kids, we are reminded at nearly every turn that being a kid is, like, way cooler than being old. Whether it is a joke about adult diapers or a snarky declaration that dad’s suggestion to go fishing is “lame,” the film is full of cheapshots at adulthood. One scene in which the kids all pull out their cell phones only to find that they have no reception is particularly funny. They are forced to try to call the police on the landline rotary phone, but you’d think they were monkeys trying to make sense of Ulysses. They’re stumped.

Though a film like this feels familiar (it brings to mind 1970s Disney flicks, or Little Monsters with Fred Savage, or about a dozen other movies I haven’t seen), it also feels like a product of the 21st century, mainly in the way that it plays like a video game. The plot is pretty much the plot/objective of your average Xbox adventure: Find the bad guys, destroy them, experience crazy stuff like “zero gravity weapons,” and then save the world. The kids in this film are conversant in this language already, so they know what to do when extraterrestrial trouble comes knocking. “This isn’t Xbox,” says one of the kid actors at one point. “It’s real. Like Wii!”

An ongoing gag in the film is a technology that the alien invaders bring which allows them to plant chips in humans and control them like zombie avatars. Early in the film, “annoying college boyfriend” Ricky falls victim to this technology and becomes the plaything of both the aliens and the younger kids, who commandeer the controller and make Ricky move and say whatever they want him to. This provides many physical gags and laughs. Later, Nana also falls victim to the technology and for a few scenes becomes the best thing about the movie. Near the end, a Matrix-style kung fu match between Nana and Ricky will doubtless have the kids shrieking in delight.

Aliens isn’t really meant to be anything other than a mindless summertime diversion. Apart from some compulsory subtext of “be comfortable with who you are,” this is not a movie with very many thoughts. If there is a “lesson” in the film, it is that families should stick together, or that being a math-loving nerd is okay (as Tom comes to realize by the end). But mainly the lesson of the film is that everyone should try the Mentos-mixed-with-Diet co*ke trick. It’s pretty awesome.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. Why is Tom feeling down on himself for being a smart kid? Why do kids like him intentionally sabotage their grades in order to be “cool”?
2. How are the family relationships between Tom and Bethany and Tom and Tom’s dad healed by the end of the film?
3. What does the movie teach us about the importance of family?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Aliens in the Attic is rated PG for action violence, some suggestive humor and language. Young kids use such language as “sucks” and “crud.” The opening line of the film is “Oh my God!” Apart from this, the most objectionable content is probably the slight sexual suggestions in the relationship between Bethany and Ricky, including references to spending the night together and a scene of lathering each other up with suntan lotion by the pool. A general attitude of disrespect among the kids toward the parents is also present throughout, though everyone is happy and loving at the end. There is a lot of action, but none especially violent, and there is no blood.

Photos © Twentieth Century Fox

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Relationships are hard. And most of us have at least one person in our lives who can make a relationship especially difficult, but we do the hard work of making it work anyway because it’s a relative, a spouse, a longtime friend—or simply out of unconditional love. Even then, we often need some divine help.

Most of us don’t seek out such relationships, especially if there’s any inkling that there’s going to be a rough road ahead. But that’s just what happens in Adam, a warm and wonderful new romantic comedy now playing in limited release.

The title character, played with remarkable authenticity by Hugh Dancy, is a 30-ish single man with Asperger’s syndrome—an autism spectrum disorder that often includes extreme social disabilities. “Aspies” have difficulty looking people in the eye, reading typical social cues, and having normal conversations. Though they are often quite bright, they often have limited interests and “one-track minds.” They can also be moody.

It can be very difficult for a “neurotypical” to relate to an Aspie—and vice versa. I should know: I’m the parent of a young adult male with the disability (combined with bipolar disorder!), and life is never easy in our home.

But even without that personal connection, I’m sure I would’ve found Adam to be one of the better films of the year, in its depiction not only of a person with the disorder, but of someone who chooses to love him anyway. Beth, played wonderfully by Rose Byrne, is Adam’s new neighbor who falls for him despite his social quirks.

CT Movies recently sat down with Dancy, Byrne, and writer/director Max Mayer to discuss the film and its meaning for viewers.

Dancy (Confessions of a Shopaholic, Beyond the Gates) says that though he didn’t know anything about Asperger’s syndrome, he was drawn to the role because the script “was extremely well-written” and after a conversation with Mayer, “who told me more about the condition and what it would entail for me in trying to create that character.”

Dancy thrived on the challenge: “The more I learned about Asperger’s, the more nervous I was about taking it on. But I knew what I was getting into, I knew the many ways we could mess it up. But Max had done such a good job in allowing for humor in the story without doing at the expense of Adam—or ever suggesting that it was going to be easy.”

He says it’s the hardest role he’s ever played. “It’s the furthest distance I’ve ever had to travel emotionally, in trying to imagine what the character’s life is like. Somebody with Asperger’s is wired differently. They’re constantly having to make up that distance between themselves and other people, to think through that process of, What the hell is going on here? That process never stops for them. I never got to the point where I was comfortable with that, because it’s so counterintuitive to me. The qualities you normally emphasize as an actor—communication and empathy and responsiveness—are the exact opposite of what I was given to work with here. So yeah, it was a stretch.”

Byrne (Knowing, Marie Antoinette, Troy) was “immediately drawn to the script. The writing was just wonderful. I’ve played a lot of characters in genre films, but this was an opportunity to try something really different. It was quite liberating.”

‘What is this about for me?’

Mayer got the idea for the story when he listened to a radio show about a man with Asperger’s: “He was talking about how the world felt to him, and his challenges. I was really moved by what he had to say, and I don’t usually get that moved. I thought, Hmm, I’d better look into this some more. So I started doing some research.”

Mayer says has wasn’t even thinking of making a film at that point, but was “interested in my own response as much as anything: What is this about for me? I think [my interest] has something to do with growing up as an only child and the way I observed the world, and seeing all these other kids who knew who to talk to and what to talk about.

“Also, I was in a marriage which had the best of intentions on both sides, but it was on the rocks. So for me, this story was about these deep communication and trust issues. And the more I learned about Asperger’s, the better metaphor it felt like for human relationships in general.”

When asked what makes Adam different from Rain Man, A Beautiful Mind, Forrest Gump, or any other film about mental illness/disabilities, Mayer replied, “In the Asperger’s community, they say if you know one person with Asperger’s, you know one person with Asperger’s. This is a story about one person with Asperger’s. I wasn’t trying to write about all people with Asperger’s; you can’t do that.

“I love this character. He’s a particular individual with his own set of challenges and his own virtues. There are lots of stories about neurotypicals, and people with Asperger’s or other disabilities are as varied as anyone else.”

Mayer said he took care to write a comedy in such a way that it wasn’t making fun of the character or the disability. “People are funny,” he says. “And one thing that makes relationships possible is a sense of humor. That’s the thing about Beth’s character. She can laugh at herself and at Adam, and she doesn’t discriminate. She’s an equal opportunity humor appreciator. The test for me is, Is it truthful? If the humor felt truthful to the characters, then let the chips fall where they may.”

Researching the syndrome

Dancy says he did a lot of research online about Asperger’s before shooting began, and read books about Aspies called Look Me in the Eye and Born on a Blue Day and some of the writings by Temple Grandin.

“What I was looking for were those voices that stood out and had a sense of humor, something that would take me back to the script and that would trigger my imagination with regard to this story we were creating,” he says. “I also met some Aspies, including some who were similar to Adam on the spectrum. It was helpful to see some more extreme versions of the symptoms as well as seeing people that demonstrated fewer symptoms.”

Byrne, who has a family friend with Asperger’s, says Dancy “did a really remarkable job in how accurately he portrayed the role. It’s such a huge responsibility to play someone with this condition, wanting to do it right and be truthful to the condition.”

As for her own character, Byrne says Beth had to be “a specific type of person who would not run away in terror from these symptoms. When I read it, I totally believed the whole thing. It rang true. The script unfolds very gently, and at one point, you think she won’t get together with Adam. But Beth is very inquisitive and curious, and has a tolerance and patience about her. And she’s a great conduit for the audience to see Adam . . .”

Dancy cuts in: “She’s a great conduit because she doesn’t feel like a conduit. She’s just a character. You don’t feel like, Oh, this is going to be my guide into the world of Asperger’s. You feel like, Here is a person who’s combination of background and experience with other men draws her to this guy. It just feels organic, and you feel like you’re just watching a story of two people rather than a story about the syndrome, which is the way it should be.”

Good relationships take work

Dancy, Byrne and Mayer all said that educating the audience about Asperger’s was not their main goal in making this film, but simply a by-product of telling a good story well. And they also hope that audiences will pick up on the notion that all good relationships—whether with fellow “neurotypicals” or not—require some hard work.

Says Dancy, “If anything, the drive was to tell a story that would resonate way outside of the context of just Asperger’s. Hopefully people will connect with the story but at the same time see something in it that they recognize—something universal about the difficulties of making connections with another human being. And for those with the gift of empathy, or for those to whom it doesn’t come naturally, how we have to force ourselves employ it and exercise it.”

Mayer adds, “I like stories where everybody has a legitimate point of view and they bring it all to the table, and then the audience has to have this conversation about it. I think Beth’s sense of humor—being able to laugh at yourself—is really important in dealing with people in general, but especially with people who are hard to deal with. It’s hard, but it’s worth the effort.”

To read our review, click here. To see the trailer, click here. To learn if Adam is playing near you, click here.

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Evangelical Christianity continues to be a patchwork quilt—a pretty messy one to say the least.

Look at the emergents and the young Reformers and the church-growth gang and the house-church advocates and the ancient-future “priests” and the Pentecostals and the institutional evangelicals (the National Association of Evangelicals, InterVarsity, the Navigators, World Vision, Christianity Today International, and so on), and you’ll see what looks like a school playground—lots of cliques, and not much interaction between them.

We often long to return to the time when evangelicals were of one mind and heart. But such a time never existed. To be sure, the Internet has fractured us to an even greater degree, and has allowed us to coalesce around even more narrow concerns (pro-environment, anti-immigration, high-church, tattooed, left-handed evangelicals unite!), and to argue with un-likeminded evangelicals across the great electronic divide. We talk—no, mostly shout—past one another. Very few places remain in our subculture for us to “reason together” about the great issues we must face.

Hoping against hope, Christianity Today is trying to be such a place, and we have the quixotic notion that this can strengthen the spread of the gospel. We not only try to report on a variety of movements within evangelicalism, we also feature voices from diverse perspectives, from Rob Bell to Chuck Colson, from Jim Wallis to John Piper, from Donald Miller to J.I. Packer.

A number of vital issues divide our movement: gospel priorities, biblical interpretation, social justice priorities, the theology of church, the meaning and manner of evangelism, and so on. These disagreements—some of which are deep and serious—do not go away when we huddle with the likeminded.

Christianity Today strives to be a place, in print and online, where those of us who identify with historic evangelicalism can come and reason together about urgent matters, talking to one another and not past one another, talking charitably and not just to score debating points, talking with mutual respect, and talking with the hope that as a result of the talking, we’ll all be better prepared to live and share the Good News of Jesus Christ in this badly troubled world.

This issue’s cover story is a model of such respectful conversation.

Christianity Today does not have a settled policy on the age when people should marry. We do, however, think it is a subject that needs to be discussed more, so we have invited Mark Regnerus, professor of sociology at the University of Texas, Austin, to articulate what in some circles is a provocative thesis (“The Case for Early Marriage,” page 22). We have also invited three people to respond (page 29). We’ll continue the conversation online. The point is not to determine what the evangelical take on this issue is, but to give us all deeper insight into how American culture shapes our faith (in this case, our sexuality and our family lives) in so many subtle and profound ways.

Look for similar forums in the months ahead.

Next Issue: Timothy George explains why John Calvin, 500 years after his birth, is more relevant than ever; John W. Kennedy covers big changes at the Falwells’ Liberty University; and Sarah Pulliam profiles Joel Hunter’s less political side.

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

This article was posted with “The Case for Early Marriage,” “Restless, Reformed, and Single,” and “Weighing Young Weddings” as part of Christianity Today’s August cover package.

The following article is part of Christianity Today’s cover package on “The Case for Early Marriage.”

The legal age for marriage in most states is 18. I wouldn’t push that any lower. But if Christians want to be in this world but not of it, they might seriously entertain creating a culture in which their children can marry much younger than the current norm. Regnerus makes a laudable argument that penetrates the surface of what is, beneath the numbers, an ocean of sorrow.

Imagine a species that, for the first 5,600 years of recorded history, arranged its cultures so that when youth began to grow the bumps and curves that signaled biological adulthood, the culture said, “You are an adult now,” and welcomed them to adulthood’s responsibilities and freedoms. If you were a boy, you could read in synagogue. Medieval women, for instance, could marry at age 12. Biological maturity signaling cultural adulthood has been the norm for most ages of human history.

Now imagine that species enlightened by the blessings of the Industrial Revolution. Advances in media and technology made a way to achieve longer life spans, lower infant mortality rates, and 2,300-square-foot homes with more tvs than children. With biology the mother of neither necessity nor economic life, it soon lost its role in religious and political life as well.

Born into this vast technopoly, today’s child understands her world primarily through mass media. Thanks to media’s total-disclosure nature, she will be a world-weary 72-year-old by the time she reaches 12, but won’t have the maturity of a medieval 12-year-old until about age 36. Ages 12 to 22 will be spent in mandatory survival training called higher education. Regardless of her primary course of study, her secondary course, undertaken when she is biologically fittest and physically strongest to raise children, will be the ironic but ironclad dogma that she must never consider having a child until she is economically, psychologically, and spiritually a fully realized autonomous self. If, after a decade of ingesting this dogma, she still has the desire to become a mother, she can only have at most two children.

If life’s most meaningful work for couples is raising children, then it’s a cynical system that requires the false choice between having children young, when a large family is physically possible but financially hard, or waiting until they can afford a large family, when fertility has dropped. Technology, it turns out, is a harsher taskmaster than biology, offering a world where the best form of birth control is economics, the best predictor of income is education, and the best deterrent to having children is guilt over failing to give them the very best a consumer society offers.

Meanwhile, the ocean of sorrow continues to fill with the tears of those who are childless or heartbroken by the lie that tells a woman she is free to be anything she wants, so long as she’s a man about it.

Read Mercer Schuchardt, professor of media ecology at Wheaton College, and the father of seven children with his wife, Rachel

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

This article responds to the cover package on “The Case for Early Marriage.“

Previous Christianity Today articles about marriage include:

My Top Five Books on Marriage | By Charles W. Tackett, CEO of PursuingHeart.com (May 7, 2009)

Choosing Celibacy | How to stop thinking of singleness as a problem. (September 12, 2008)

Practicing Chastity | A lifelong spiritual discipline for singles and marrieds. Lauren F. Winner reviews Dawn Eden’s The Thrill of the Chaste. (March 15, 2007)

30 and Single? It’s Your Own Fault | There are more unmarried people in our congregations than ever, and some say that’s just sinful. (June 21, 2006)

Sex in the Body of Christ | Chastity is a spiritual discipline for the whole church. (May 13, 2005)

Reflections: Sex, Love, and Marriage | Quotations to stir the heart and mind (February 1, 2003)

The following article is part of Christianity Today’s cover package on “The Case for Early Marriage.”

The Wheaton College newspaper recently published an article detailing frustrations that married students experience on campus because of their choice to marry young. The article surprised me. From my perspective, Wheaton College, along with much of evangelical culture, seems obsessed with marriage. The number of students desperate for a “ring by spring” and the many marriage seminars at local congregations suggest that marriage remains a high priority.

Despite my different perspective, I feel for these married students. Certainly in our society, where strong marriages are so difficult to maintain, the Christian community should rally around these couples. And as I read through Regnerus’s argument, I found myself agreeing with several of his points. Yes, abstinence rhetoric is problematic, and many singles have difficulty maintaining their purity. And yes, characterizing marriage almost entirely by romance and great sex is dangerous.

But is encouraging early marriage the answer? As Regnerus admits, early marriage is a risky proposition. While some young Christians might be ready, I worry that emphasizing early marriage will hasten the marriages of many who should wait.

I also worry that this solution addresses only one aspect of the problem. What about those who will not marry early—or at all? Many Christian women in particular must face this reality. What do you do if you are the one in three who doesn’t find a spiritually mature man to marry? God can perform miracles, but despite the assurances of many Christian dating books, he doesn’t necessarily provide everyone with a spouse.

What we need, then, is to change not simply how we talk about marriage but also how we talk about singleness. Rather than relying on the old standby of “wait until marriage,” we must consider why God might ask some of us to remain single. What does it mean to live a celibate life even if you haven’t taken a vow of celibacy? Can you live as a full person if you aren’t sexually active? Can celibacy be a witness to the gospel?

In a world where a good sex life is seen as essential, I believe that celibacy can serve as a radical testimony to God’s love and provision. By approaching it as a spiritual discipline that reminds us that our ultimate fulfillment lies in our union with God, we can begin to see singleness as a productive time of serving God rather than a period of simply waiting for the right partner. Is the celibate life easy? No. But by the grace of God, it is possible.

We should support young Christians who decide to marry. But we need to combine that message with another that affirms the value of celibacy and the truth that single adults can live fulfilling lives that reveal God’s goodness: a message that affirms not only older singles who may never marry, but also younger singles who may need to wait before marrying.

Christine A. Colón, associate professor of English at Wheaton College, and coauthor of Singled Out: Why Celibacy Must Be Reinvented in Today’s Church (Brazos, 2009)

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

This article responds to the cover package on “The Case for Early Marriage.“

Previous Christianity Today articles about marriage include:

My Top Five Books on Marriage | By Charles W. Tackett, CEO of PursuingHeart.com (May 7, 2009)

Choosing Celibacy | How to stop thinking of singleness as a problem. (September 12, 2008)

Practicing Chastity | A lifelong spiritual discipline for singles and marrieds. Lauren F. Winner reviews Dawn Eden’s The Thrill of the Chaste. (March 15, 2007)

30 and Single? It’s Your Own Fault | There are more unmarried people in our congregations than ever, and some say that’s just sinful. (June 21, 2006)

Sex in the Body of Christ | Chastity is a spiritual discipline for the whole church. (May 13, 2005)

Reflections: Sex, Love, and Marriage | Quotations to stir the heart and mind (February 1, 2003)

The following article is part of Christianity Today’s cover package on “The Case for Early Marriage.”

Mark Regnerus helps us to face certain unwelcome facts: Evangelical abstinence messaging is not stopping most young evangelicals from having sex; it is creating distorted expectations among Christians about the mind-blowing quality of marital sex. But Regnerus moves beyond these widely acknowledged problems and makes a new connection to our society’s broader demographic reconfiguring. He is correct to note that Christians are joining the rest of the culture in delaying or rejecting marriage, and that in general, we have grown lax in our thinking and practices regarding marriage (and divorce, I would add).

As one who married right out of college at age 22, who has performed dozens of weddings for new college graduates, and whose daughter will marry next year right out of college at age 22, I heartily concur with Regnerus’s thesis. I have seen it work, and I think it is far preferable to the prevailing alternatives.

But I agree with Regnerus that there is much to be done to make such young marriages likely candidates for success. Perhaps the most important practical shift will involve parental economic support for young married couples. It is clear that at least middle-class and upper-middle-class marriages are being delayed in large part because of the need for graduate education to obtain a decent job.

While Jeanie and I worked terribly hard in our early days of marriage to make ends meet while we were both in school, we also received timely financial help from our parents. Parents need to get past the myth that their 22-year-old newlywed children ought to be able to handle all of their expenses on their own.

But Regnerus is also right that, for the relatively young couple to have a chance at lifelong marriage, they must also address less tangible concerns. Extended adolescence and fewer role models mean that fewer 22-year-olds, especially men, are mature enough to even consider getting married. They may be more likely to make a foolish choice based on romantic feelings, sexual attraction, or a misguided sense of God’s will. But Regnerus is right in suggesting that even imperfect motivations or an imperfect choice (for all motivations and partners are imperfect) can be overcome through a recovery of the toweringly important concept of marriage as a binding, sacred covenant before God.

As marriage collapses or is redefined beyond recognition in our culture, marriage as God intended it is becoming a profoundly countercultural reality enjoyed by a relatively small percentage of the American population. They will know we are Christians by our (marital) love.

David Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, and author of Getting Marriage Right (Baker, 2004)

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

This article responds to the cover package on “The Case for Early Marriage.“

Previous Christianity Today articles about marriage include:

My Top Five Books on Marriage | By Charles W. Tackett, CEO of PursuingHeart.com (May 7, 2009)

Choosing Celibacy | How to stop thinking of singleness as a problem. (September 12, 2008)

Practicing Chastity | A lifelong spiritual discipline for singles and marrieds. Lauren F. Winner reviews Dawn Eden’s The Thrill of the Chaste. (March 15, 2007)

30 and Single? It’s Your Own Fault | There are more unmarried people in our congregations than ever, and some say that’s just sinful. (June 21, 2006)

Sex in the Body of Christ | Chastity is a spiritual discipline for the whole church. (May 13, 2005)

Reflections: Sex, Love, and Marriage | Quotations to stir the heart and mind (February 1, 2003)