What friendship is worth-the BBC's "Martin Chuzzlewit"

Just finished watching "Martin Chuzzlewit", the 1994 BBC treatment of the Dickens novel, on DVD. Highly recommended. Paul Scofield stars as Old Martin Chuzzlewit. If you've seen other BBC productions you'll recognize Pete Postlethwaite as Mr. Montague/Mr. Tigg. You might also recognize Graham Stark, who played Clouseau's underling in "A Shot in the Dark".

The story centers on Old Martin Chuzzlewit's vast fortune, his disinherited grandson of the same name, and the conniving attempts of others, including the boundlesly hypocritical Mr. Pecksniff, to win that fortune. Since it's Dickens, most of the characters are either pretty much all good or all bad. Two exceptions are Pecksniff's mostly good daughters Mercy and Charity, who are unwitting victims of their father's plot to get the loot.

Also, since it's Dickens, and since it's the 19th Century, friendship is at least as important a theme as romantic love, and this tale's focus on greed. In fact, friendship among the various male characters is more central to the story than who will marry whom. This was an era when men would write letters to each other and mention their love for each other, and nobody looked askance at it. (Actual homosexuals would've been more discreet-remember what happened to Oscar Wilde).


And so the hero of the story is Tom Pinch, who (spoiler alerts) is loyal to a fault (quite literally) to his friends, but who doesn't get the girl (Mary) he loves in the end-she marries young Martin Chuzzlewit. Who gets most of the money.


Major tear-jerker scene at the end, as Tom's sister comforts him, but he says to her that his getting Mary would have been how things work in books-the "justice", as he puts it, of real life is different.

Chesterton on not taking yourself too seriously

SERIOUSNESS is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally, but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.


From "Orthodoxy".


As an aside I used to read Punch, the great British humor magazine which expired a few years ago, when I was in high school. I already loved British sports cars, and was coming to love British writing. Later I got into GK Chesterton, Agatha Christie, CS Lewis, and PG Wodehouse. Thus an Irish Catholic became an Anglophile.

The Search

Nothing beautiful can be fully understood. Our hearts crave mysterious Truth. So much of the beauty is in the mystery, itself. And so the search continues.

Walker Percy, a member of that interesting category, the Southern Catholic writer, often wrote of the search. Percy is the only author I've ever read who prompted the thought, "This guy thinks like me". I'm not sure if that says much for Percy, in itself, but he was certainly one of the 20th century's finest novelists.

Will Barrett, the protagonist of The Second Coming, is a widower who has reached a point in his depression where he essentially dares God to kill him. God doesn't. Will ends up meeting Allison, a zany mental hospital escapee living in a greenhouse, whose love redeems him. Almost sounds trite to describe, but Percy uses a light touch to show how gratitude can lead to faith.


Percy's books are all about the alienation of modern man, who struggles with, as Arnold Stocker (the Catholic Romanian psychoanalyst) put it, "A false suggestion and a true intuition". The false suggestion, to put it simply, is that what we strive for-career, relationships, wealth, power-are all we need. The world tells modern man this, and in his secularized understanding of his meaning and purpose, he "accepts" it.

The true intuition is the sense that we need more, that the "sensus divinitatis" that Calvin spoke of. It is the instinctive sense each of us has that God is real and our lives are not our own. As CS Lewis wrote,  we desire things, and God provides them-food, sex. Similarly God plants in each of us a desire for Himself, that only He can fulfill.


Our alienation, our anger, comes from the usually unconscious recognition that our strivings, even when achieved, do not really satisfy. How many Hollywood types do we see who have, most improbably, gotten all their wished for-fame and money and power and creative success-who still are miserable?

This world cannot satisfy us.


Much of the above comes from ideas drawn from Swiss physician Paul Tournier's work, such as The Whole Person in a Broken World.  

A noble putdown

"[thou] shalt stand in fire up to the navel and in ice up to th' heart, and there the offending part burns and the deceiving part freezes."

The Two Noble Kinsmen. Shakespeare knew how to insult people.

A few good links

Some worthwhile reads:

Lynn on enjoying the eclipse, and also enjoying things that we see every day. Which makes me think of this: click it! (TY Dustbury.)

Ann Althouse on the outrageous Trump. 


Terry Teachout names his favorite big band tracks. Well, there are no tracks by Maynard Ferguson, Don Ellis, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Buddy Rich, or Thad Jones-Mel Lewis, but it's still a nice grouping.

Edward Feser and Joe Bessette present the Catholic case for capital punishment. It's impossible to argue, from a Catholic perspective, that CP is intrinsically wrong, like abortion or euthanasia.


Megan McArdle-"As a woman in tech, I realized these are not my people". Reflections on the Google memo.

Cartoons can be useful. 

"God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another"-Hamlet. The Bard might wonder at some current lunacies, like presto-chango sexes.


Father Mitch Pacwa, no longer SJ, is tossed out of the Jesuits after being caught with a Catechism.



538 has the Dodgers getting to 114 wins, two shy of the record.

Chesterton on voting with your whole self

Apt thoughts from GK Chesterton in a year when the choices seem especially distasteful:

THE average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it should creep into his vote. If he has ever heard splendid songs, they should be in his ears when he makes the mystical cross. But as it is, the difficulty with English democracy at all elections is that it is something less than itself. The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.


'Tremendous Trifles.'

A few links

The Father Brown in the URL is Chesterton's fictional detective. Sort of a proto-Columbo.

Really hoping this is true: Trump "is nowhere near the presumptive nominee".


Glad to know I'm not the only one who feels this way: "Neil deGrasse Tyson is a black hole sucking the fun out of the universe".

This science story includes the heading, "Cats are difficult to tame".

Abuse of power: The IRS scandal, Day 1085.