Lord Chesterfield | First Impressions

It might be heresy to say that I found Ta-Nehesi Coates’ BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME – a letter to his son on surviving in America as a black man — overpraised. Toni Morrison found ‘its examinations of the hazards and hopes of black male life as profound as it is revelatory’. I didn’t find anything I didn’t know before, though to be fair, it all needs repeating, particularly at this time. It’s written in a James Baldwin style but whereas in Baldwin the language feels rooted in something biblical where anger and love intermingle in the articulation of injustice with the language of God tempered by an acknowledgment of human frailty, here it seemed to me to be derivative and performative, using a vernacular he is familiar with but outside of. The description of Howard University as a Mecca, a concept he re-utilises throughout, irked me by its all too representative invocation of American exceptionalism and ignorance of cultures, countries and continents outside its own (and don’t get me started on his use of The Dream, which he capitalises and deploys throughout, as his description of American’s self-sabotaging aspirations to Whiteness). Coates underlines his son’s privilege without accounting for his own in what he bears witness to, what he warns about. My model for explorations of racism are of course Baldwin’s essays, which are peerless. My model for books about advice to children in difficult situations is Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son. Since his own son was born out of wedlock, Lord Chesterfield couldn’t bequeath him anything but his wisdom and advice, and since his son was a bastard without fortune, he’d face particular problems in making his way in the world. It’s a wonderful book, full of sage advice on everything from appearance to ethics. Samuel Johnson despised it for, ‘teaching the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master’. It’s what I chose to gift my nephew when he was getting to the age I thought that advice on how to move in the world – something I’ve been particularly unsuccessful at — useful. But Lord Chesterfield wasn’t American and wasn’t black and neither am I. Yet anyone who’s had a black boy in their family will know the fears for them are real and extend beyond the fears any family feels for its young men. Coates’ letter to HIS son describes the racism in all its terrifying levels. How to survive and overcome it remain questions. That said, I did enjoy reading it, and it was fascinating to see the changing referents (here hip-hop, a black president, etc.) to unchanging structures. The book is a decade old now and everything has gotten worse since its publication, with Trump rollbacks of key civil rights legislation, curriculum and DEI restrictions, and so on. I didn’t think it lived up to the hype though I’m glad I read it.

José Arroyo

Though never very good at acquiring or exercising it myself, I’ve always been very interested in power: how to acquire it (Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son), how it’s exercised (Machievelli’s The Prince) how it works (Foucault). My favourite of all these works, which is not directly on the issue but brings it to life better than no other, is the Duc de Saint Simon’s memoirs. It’s in three enormous volumes and one can sink into them for a whole winter. There is no greater chronicler of the last years of Louis XIV, the war of the Spanish succession, and the Regency which followed. Saint Simon is prissy, proud, always venting about order, and precedence and how those lousy bastards are destroying proper seating arrangements in Versailles. He writes with a cool, clear eye of the realities he sees – everyone on the make, fixed on appearances, orbiting around the centres of power, trying to de-center them slightly so as to find a place for themselves — and is lively fun to read. It’s the best chronicle of its time and place; a detailed and precise chronicles of politics at work; a dramatic and personalised rendering of the workings of power in relation to the failings of personality, all beautifully written: Two random expamples :
‘There were many marriages this winter, and amongst them one very strange – a marriage for love, between a brother of Feuquière’s, who had never done much, and the daughter of the celebrated Mignard, first painter of his time. The daughter was still so beautiful that Bloin, chief valet of the King, had kept her for some time, with the knowledge of everyone, and used his influence to make the King sign the marriage-contract.’
And on great Mme de Sévigné, the other great chronicler of the time: ‘so amiable and of such excellent company, died some time after at Grignan, at the house of her daughter, her idol, but who merited little to be so. I was very intimate with the young Marquis de Grignan, her grandson. This woman, by her natural grace, the sweetness of her wit, communicates these qualities to those who had them not; she was beside extremely good, and knew thoroughly many things without ever wishing to appear as though she knew anything.
They’re not really books to dip in, though one can, the work becomes cumulatively greater as it unfolds. I recommend.