Category: Culture

Virginia Woolf. Portrait by George Charles Beresford, 1902. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

We live in an era in which privilege and wealth are squandered on obscene levels of consumption and on domination and destruction — of institutions, of norms of justice and fairness, of ecosystems, of all the fragile things that we all hold in common. Things have not always been that way. Once upon a time, privilege could be used to build and sustain a shared culture, not to strip-mine it or to burn it all down, to strengthen institutions rather than to reduce them to instruments of profit and power.

What happened?

Watching the 2022 film “Benediction” left me very curious about the life of English poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967). That curiosity led me to a long biography of Sassoon (526 pages) by Jean Moorcroft Wilson published in 2003. I had expected that this book would become more a reference than something to read cover to cover, because the biography is a who’s who of an important period in English literature.

That’s the period of the Bloomsbury Group — Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes. Even more important (to me) than the Bloomsbury Group were the Inklings, of which J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were core members.

I find that I have continued to work my way through this biography of Siegfried Sassoon because so much of what’s intriguing is how these privileged people, who didn’t have to work, used their time. It was very different from how privileged people use their time today. Back then, privilege could be used to buy time, learning, and the freedom to take intellectual and moral risks.

Yes, much of that time was used for a constant, and sometimes exhausting, stream of socializing, some of it superficial. But it also meant that they met a great many people, and sometimes lasting friendships developed — Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster and Roger Fry, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. That kind of time and friendship did not exist in a vacuum. It was protected and made possible by institutions, especially the universities.

Another factor that stands out is how the privileged today and the privileged then used the great universities. Today the privileged use the universities to leverage their privilege to gain more money and more power — finance, law, and tech. Back then, two universities in particular — Oxford and Cambridge — were like engines that converted privilege into culture. Today, degrees in the humanities are at risk of going extinct, while universities are increasingly pushed toward creating wealth.

These failures amplify one another.

At the same time as the privileged few have become cultural toxins rather than cultural creators, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has grown ever greater. Back then, a D.H. Lawrence, who was the son of a coal miner, could find a path to recognition through hard-won education and patronage. Today, millions of families can’t afford to feed their children, let alone educate them or give them the time and the tools to develop their human potential. While the privileged run wild, the unprivileged never have much chance of coming to understand the causes of their condition or learning how to work together to do something about it. Nor do the privileged want them to understand the causes of their condition or to learn how to work together to do something about it.

For all their anger and discontent, the writers and artists of the early twentieth century still imagined better worlds, whereas our own moment seems preoccupied with just avoiding catastrophe. Dystopias make good literature (and movies) today, and for good reason.

I ask myself where the connections are between privilege (and the lack of it) and creating dystopias versus creating a better world. The only idea I can come up with is that the wrong people are running the world to suit themselves, while the rest of us are just trying to get by.

Yes, the writers of the early 20th century were privileged. But they also were builders, and they were on the top layer of their society. They foreshadowed and helped shape the precious few decades of human progress after World War II. Today’s elites are not cultural builders because the systems that reward them no longer value the things that an E.M. Forster, a John Maynard Keynes, or a J.R.R. Tolkien valued.

Privilege once made world-building possible. It was possible to very much like those privileged, world-building artists. Today, the privileged are all about owning the world and making the world better only for themselves. And they don’t have to care whether we like them.

Jack Lowden as Siegfried Sassoon in “Benediction,” 2022

From Oscar Wilde to the present, there has been a continuous line of gay writers, all of them considered to be degenerate criminals until relatively recently, and all of them now vindicated as bravely many years ahead of their times — impeccably civilized in their subversiveness. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was one of the lesser known of these writers. The 2022 film “Benediction” has given Sassoon some of the attention he deserves.

The Scottish actor Jack Lowden, of course, is River Cartwright in the brilliant and ever-so-entertaining series “Slow Horses,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

Many of these writers knew each other. Gay writers living today are only a few degrees of separation from Oscar Wilde. These early 20th Century gay writers lived in dangerous times. Wilde’s trial started a dark cultural shift that lasted for sixty years. Scholars estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 men were charged with crimes up until decriminalization in 1967. There was surveillance, entrapment, trials, prison, exile, and suicide. Alan Turing, who was charged with “gross indecency,” the same charge that was used against Oscar Wilde, was only one of these. E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice was not published until 1979, nine years after his death.

Armistead Maupin and poet Gavin Geoffrey Dillard knew Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood and W.H. Auden were lifelong friends. Isherwood knew E.M. Forster. Siegfried Sassoon knew Robbie Ross (who was a loyal friend to Oscar Wilde until the very end). Siegfried Sassoon never met Isherwood, but he certainly knew of him. As a war poet during World War I, Sassoon was critical of Isherwood because he thought Isherwood was avoiding military service by remaining in the United States. Isherwood knew Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams.

Though almost all them were born to great privilege, they were not all of equal character. Lord Alfred Douglas, who betrayed Oscar Wilde, became an even greater jerk after Wilde’s death. E.M. Forster, on the other hand, would qualify as a saint, were it not for the Catholic church’s clock running about six thousand years slow. Christopher Isherwood was no saint — as is clear if you read Christopher and His Kind or watch the film “Cabaret” — though Isherwood lived a very different life after he came to the U.S. in 1939.

Christopher Isherwood (left) and W.H. Auden, 1939. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

After watching “Benediction,” I bought a copy of a 2003 biography of Sasson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches. I doubt that I will read the entire book; it’s a very detailed 526 pages. But it’s an excellent reference with a valuable index and large set of notes. “Benediction” doesn’t flinch at the gloom and embarrassing failures of Sassoon’s later years. I found it interesting, by the way, that my copy of the book, which I ordered from the U.K., had a previous life in the Hobson Library of the Joint Services Command and Staff College, which trains members of the British military.

I have known poet Gavin Geoffrey Dillard for more than fifty years. He is my oldest friend. Gavin lived in Hollywood for a good many years. Isherwood lived in Santa Monica. Isherwood was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981 and died of it in 1986. Below are two photos that Gavin took while visiting Isherwood during Isherwood’s last years.

⬆︎ Christopher Isherwood, Santa Monica, California, c. 1984. Photo by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard.

⬆︎ Christopher Isherwood and Don Bacardi, Santa Monica, California, c. 1984. Photo by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard.

⬆︎ Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, Bethania, North Carolina, c. 1979. Photo by David Dalton. (For years, Gavin and I preferred twin-lens reflex cameras such as Yashicas and the Mamiya C330, which use square 620 film.)

For Gabriel

When you were an angel and I was a god,
Earthly-fair were the paths that we trod;
You, from your heaven of Saints at the Throne,
Banished, to wander, gold-haired and alone;
And I, from my pagan Paradise hurled,
Thro’ sun-shot cities of cloud to the world.

Humble you came, with your calm, clear eyes,
And parted lips; but your spirit was wise
With raptures of music and light that you’d lost …
So we loved and were happy, nor counted the cost.
For the gates were barred, and the way was hard
Up to the bastions of Heaven proud-starred;
And I was a god no more. But you sprang
To the peace of my arms … and an angel sang.

Unpublished poem by Siegfried Sassoon, dated 20 November 1918, included in Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches, 2003.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Witch Wood. John Buchan, first published 1927.

Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples. Francis Young, Cambridge University Press, 2025. 432 pages.

The history of witch-burning in Scotland is horrifying. Between 4,000 and 6,000 people were tried for witchcraft in Scotland, far more than in England. The trials continued into the late 1600s, but the panic over witches had pretty much subsided by 1707.

How in the world do we understand how a century of witch trials in Scotland was so quickly followed — in the very same Scotland! — by a century of the Enlightenment? How was it that these prominent elements of Scottish history were mirrored so quickly in America?

I am no historian, and I don’t have any thorough answers for these questions. For one, the history of Scotland is bafflingly complicated. By comparison, it seems to me that the histories of England and America are much easier to get one’s head around. But I do think I can see just a glimmer of how the sudden transition from witch trials to the Enlightenment unfolded in Scotland.

I often read two books at once, one fiction and one nonfiction. By coincidence, I was reading John Buchan’s Witch Wood at the same time I arrived at Chapter 4 of Silence of the Gods. (A hat tip here to Chenda, for recommending this book.) That chapter is about the 17th Century, with the title “Antiquarians and Witch-Hunters.”

Silence of the Gods limits itself to places farther north and more remote than Scotland. But it’s clear that, though Scotland excelled at burning witches, the witch panic was everywhere in Christendom during the 17th Century. But it’s only in Scotland where a particular zeal for witch-burning was immediately followed by the work of the Enlightenment. Surely one set the stage for the other, in some strange way?

I had a long discussion with ChatGPT about this. ChatGPT’s bottom line was: Religious zealotry built the roads that the Enlightenment ran on.

There are a couple of key points to understanding this. The first is that, during the 17th Century, Scotland’s kirk had far too much civil power. That is, as we Americans would understand it, there was very little separation between church and state. Scotland was divided by religious conflict and was in great turmoil. In ways that I don’t understand very well, the deposition of James VII, followed by William III and Mary II (1689) set the stage for important changes in how Scotland was governed. The Settlement of 1690 preserved the church but handed civil power in Scotland back to civil authorities.

Americans learned an important lesson from this. To quote ChatGPT: “Seventeenth-century Scotland showed what happens when a church (whether presbyterian or episcopal) fuses with state power—persecution, ‘enthusiasm,’ and civil strife. Scots-Irish Presbyterians who emigrated carried that memory and became key allies of Baptists in the push for disestablishment in the states (notably in Virginia).”

John Buchan’s Witch Wood is a fictional account of what village life was like in Scotland in 1644. Buchan knew this history. At the time he was writing Witch Wood, he also was writing a biography of James Graham, the 1st Marquess of Montrose, who figured prominently in Scotland’s religious conflicts of the 17th Century.

Buchan probably expected his readers of a hundred years ago to know much more about Scottish history than most of us do today. That lack of knowledge of Scottish history makes Witch Wood harder to appreciate. One thing that strikes me about Witch Wood, though, is Buchan’s harsh treatment of the kirk, its theologies, and the zeal of the men who held power in the church. To put it coarsely, Buchan did not find it necessary to kiss the church’s feet, which makes me think that by 1927 Scotland was well along in losing its religion. That draws our attention to yet another mystery about the problems of America: How was it that England, Scotland, and even Ireland lost their religion, while Americans are now dealing with an attempted takeover by Christian nationalists? In disturbingly many ways, what’s happening in America today resembles what happened in Scotland in the 17th Century (bitter, even violent division with the empowerment of fanatics), fused with some political innovations developed in Germany in the 1930s.

I’m only halfway through Silence of the Gods, but one thing is perfectly clear. The Christianization of the far north — Norway, Sweden, Finland, parts of Russia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania — was just as violent and ugly as what happened to the south.

All of this is horrifyingly relevant today, because it’s still going on, in America at least. What will it take for people to remember that to be governed by zealots is to be governed by the devil?

Witch Wood, Chapter 2. Click here for high-resolution version.