An Interview With Henry Oliver

In Which We Speak With Substack's Most British Man

Dear Republic,

Can there really be a LitStack without Henry Oliver? Probably not. As long as ROL has been on Substack, Henry has been there, writing learned, classy articles on literary and cultural themes, being as impeccably British as anybody this side of Aled Maclean-Jones, and in general making us all jealous.

-ROL

AN INTERVIEW WITH HENRY OLIVER

1.Talk us through your career trajectory. You’ve been a parliamentary assistant, advertising researcher, London tour guide. How does all of that connect?

It doesn’t! My career happened that way because of a combination of diverse interests, misplaced energy, and a general lassitude. I also spent a decade in advertising, worked as a teaching assistant, went to law school… it was a whole mess. Many of those domains are still reflected as my interests on The Common Reader, of course. Obviously there’s a strong aesthetic thread through all of this, and a love of history and philosophy, but essentially I have been, and still am, quite a diffuse, or generalist, person.

2.And you seem to have this very deep — I assume life-long — love of reading. Was that love of reading always there? How did that develop?

I don’t remember it developing. As long as I have been aware of myself, I have been like this. My father told me once that I just arrived like that. Wherever my mother took me, she took me with a stack of books. I don’t even really think of it as a “love” of reading. This is just what I am.

3.When I first became aware of you, you had about 20,000 subscribers and were clearly one of Substack’s class acts. How did you build that following?

Wouldn’t I like to know! All I can do is point to a cluster of factors that seem important in hindsight. First, I got external links from important places. I sent some things I wrote to Tyler Cowen and a link from Marginal Revolution is no small thing. That led to places like The Browser and The Atlantic linking to me as well. Second, Substack went through a huge growth phase, potentially now hitting a plateau (let’s see how this new algorithm plays out…). Third, I think what I do is quite well defined, not in the sense that it would be easy to actually define it, but in the sense that you “know it when you see it”. I am who I am and that comes across in what I write. It is easy to want to sign up or to leave and not come back I guess.

4.What would you say are your aesthetic values? What are you looking to promote in your writing?

Well, when I was young and reactionary I felt like simply having aesthetic values was significant. And it is still the case that a lot of people are interested in art for what I consider to be non-artistic reasons. I’m much less reactionary now, and probably you can just think of me as a traditionalist who grew out of his (mild) young fogeyism. As Evelyn Waugh once said, you can appreciate architecture without dressing up in silly outfits. Am I looking to promote anything? Why must I promote? I did write a “what I believe” piece, that might be a better answer.

5.Let’s talk about Second Act. Where did the idea for it come from? How did it percolate for you?

I was off work for several months for chemotherapy treatment (I’m fine) and heard Tyler Cowen talk about “people who haven’t done anything yet but maybe they will” as one category of talented people. It occurred to me that I knew a lot about those people both from a literary/historical perspective and from my work in advertising (which was all to do with recruitment). It was one way to bring together my diverse interests (politics, business, architecture, literature, economics, etc etc). And of course I wanted very much to be a writer and this was something I could write.

6.Are you a late bloomer?

We shall find out…

7.I want to push back a little on the idea of the book. Often, it seems like when you write about ‘late bloomers’ you’re writing about somebody who got lucky. You write movingly about Katharine Graham finding herself. But it wasn’t really as if she painstakingly worked her way up the ladder. She, essentially, inherited The Washington Post and it so happened that she did a good job with it. Where’s the line between lucking your way into success and being an According-to-Hoyle “late bloomer”?

Luck is an important part of all blooming. A good deal of the book is dedicated to thinking about how lucky most luck really is. To say that Graham “so happened” to do a good job is to elide all of her many impressive personal qualities without much basis, in my view. In the counterfactual where her husband remains in charge it seems plausible that things don’t work out as well as they did, at all.

8.You’re an Eisenhower man, I’m an Eisenhower man. How in the world did you get interested in Dwight Eisenhower?

I don’t know if I am an “Eisenhower man”. Obviously, I admire him hugely, and his story is fascinating, but his politics are not exactly mine. If I had to pick Presidents from the first part of the twentieth century (before the 1960s, say) I would go with Truman and Coolidge. My interest is just the result of my long-standing interest in politics. Also he is an exemplary late bloomer!

9.You’re on a desert island with Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, and William Shakespeare. In what order do you kill and eat them?

No comment.

10.Let’s take that question a little more slowly. How did you get impassioned about Austen? How did she kind of come into your life? What are some of the things — maybe the less-than-obvious-things — that people should appreciate about her?

Very late! I enjoyed P&P and S&S at school, S&S particularly, but otherwise was quite anti-Austen in the way of a lot of egotistical, opinionated boys. I found Emma unbearable and failed to finish it several times. (I mean I found Emma herself unbearable). But when I wrote my MA dissertation about the novelist Elizabeth Jenkins I was obliged to take Austen seriously (Jenkins wrote the first proper biography of Austen) and found that I saw it all again in different terms. I wrote about “learning to become a Janeite” here. What changed everything for me was Mansfield Park, a very great novel that I had never tried to read before. I also think that once you are middle-aged (38, middle enough) and have children you become much better at reading about the sort of things Austen wrote about in her late novels. The main way in which criticism works is to read a lot and compare it all, and once you have read enough Austen’s genius becomes undeniable, however you happened to have felt about her when you were young.

11.Johnson is probably the most unexpected of your obsessions. Same question with him. How did he come to be so important for you? What should people appreciate about him?

Why unexpected? Johnson is the great English critic. For someone of my conservative literary temperament, he seems like the natural choice. I read him as an undergraduate, having spent some time with the Dictionary at school. Who can discover Rasselas and the Life of Pope without wonder?

12.And Shakespeare is the most obvious. Is there a way that you primarily read Shakespeare? What can we most learn from him?

When I was young, I cared much, much more about poetry than prose. I read so much poetry. I knew so much of it, including Ode to a Nightingale by heart (no longer, alas). Shakespeare was a big part of that. I performed in Shakespeare, I took him with me on the bus, I went to see it at the theatre. There’s a pervasive idea that literature is about novels, and in the last two or three hundred years that has been true, but the essence of great literature is poetry, and the essence of English poetry is Shakespeare. Who was it who said that after God, Shakespeare has created most? Many Shakespeareans will tell you that you cannot “learn” from Shakespeare, that he is not a teacher. True in some sense. But clearly he is a great thinker, one of the greatest.

13.You’re really an advocate for returning to the classics and to great literature over and over again. In a word, what’s the value of doing that?

Pleasure. Beauty. Excellence. Ideas. Human life is a wide affair and requires all faculties of our minds to be comprehended. Frank Kermode said that poets help us make sense of our lives, critics only attempt to make sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.

14.And then you’ve written very movingly about how we’re in a writing golden age. What’s the strongest case for that? Because of course there are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about the future of reading and literacy.

We can barely agree about what is happening now, let alone start extrapolating confidently from those disagreements! The simple fact is that while literature as a whole is significantly less relevant to society, there are still many excellent works being produced. The fact that there is also a lot of dross isn’t very relevant to that fact. Diamonds are discovered in coal mines.

15.We had an exchange recently about AI. I was so surprised to see you advocating for AI because I associate you with a kind of great books traditionalism. Without recapping the whole exchange, why do you think AI is ok for art? Because for you great art is also paired with technological innovation?

Why should literary traditionalism be opposed to AI? These are not inevitable conclusions, merely associative moods one is used to meeting in the English faculty, or among what Henry Begler amusingly described as the “besweatered and bespectacled young men on YouTube and Substack telling you about the Western Canon”. For all I know, he is talking about me. And indeed, I am interested in “dusty tomes for their own sake”, which he claims not to be (I don’t believe him: literature is both an end and a means). As I said earlier, I don’t make this “part of my identity” or whatever. I am not running with the literary pack (if there is such a thing) in a political or philosophical sense. I hated television and phones even before we got smartphones and TikTok. But I am not going to dismiss one of the most significant technological changes for many decades for such flimsy reasons. Something significant is happening. Pay attention! If you are interested in the world, you have to be interested in the current period of history. We are living through remarkable times.

16.You’re in the US now for a fellowship. What’s that like? What is most surprising / interesting to you in the US?

America is weird, but I love it. And I always have. It is exciting for me just to be here. The idea of America is so special to me. America is the only country I know of that is premised on the future. I also have first rate colleagues with whom I discuss my work and that is invaluable.

17.What’s your feeling on the current state of Substack / on your approach to Substack? Is Substack part of that writing renaissance you describe?

I don’t know. Many people who write on Substack are part of the current wave of quality, but whether Substack itself can be so described isn’t clear to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if the growth phase was over. But I don’t understand it very well and I don’t think you should pay attention to me on this topic. In fact, I don’t think anyone understands it very well. If the people running it do understand it, I imagine they are keeping most of what they know to themselves, quite reasonably. Certainly, people write differently here, and I am able to interact with a wide-ranging audience. I have, and I would say this, but I really think I have the best audience you will find for literary topics. Professors, dedicated individuals, teachers, people who are incredibly well-read, deep enthusiasts, all sorts of people, they are always in the comments, pointing out interesting ideas, adding useful thoughts. I have philosophers, STEM people, Silicon Valley types, journalists, you name it. It’s a great privilege and a real benefit to being a reader of the blog. Substack helped me find them all, which is what I think it is best at. The humanities help us find the people we want to know.