I’ve just given an interview to a young lady as part of a research project that she is undertaking. I found her questions to be interesting, especially those which allowed me to dream about interviewing some of the giant figures of the past (a heavenly thought!). I thought her questions, and my answers, might interest visitors to the Ink Desk:  

1. What was the academic path you followed to get into your field?(degrees, schools) Was a particular degree required?

My academic path is somewhat singular. I dropped out of formal education at the age of sixteen in order to work full-time for the National Front, a radical extremist political party in England. I launched Bulldog, the magazine of the Young National Front, as a sixteen-year-old and served two prison sentences for “publishing material likely to incite racial hatred”. I spent my twenty-first and twenty-fifth birthdays in prison. As a bibliophile, I discovered the works of writers such as G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, C. S. Lewis, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and eventually the works of Newman and Aquinas. These authors helped me to escape from the ideology of hatred in which I’d become embroiled as a teenager and paved the way for my eventual conversion to Catholicism in 1989, at the age of twenty-eight.

After my conversion I became a full-time writer, publishing a number of books in the UK before moving to the United Startes in 2001 to take up a position as Writer in Residence and Associate Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University. AMU accepted my published works as suitable qualification in lieu of a PhD.

2. What would you consider the highlight of your career?

Getting my first book, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton, published was a very special moment. I think, however, that my meeting with the Nobel Prize winning author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, at his home near Moscow, might be the pinnacle of my career. He had long been a hero of mine and is one of the true giants of the twentieth century. The fact that he agreed to be interviewed by me for my proposed biography of him was a great honour indeed.

3. What is the biggest frustration you run into during the research process? How do you deal with this frustration?

Different types of books require different types and different levels of research. Some are more of a challenge than others. The greatest frustration arises from the obstructions put in the way of researchers by key individuals who refuse to make important primary source material available. In the interests of charity and decorum I’ll refrain from naming these individuals!

4. What advice would you give to students who are interested in going into your field of study?

Literary scholars need to be able to see through much of the modernist and postmodernist nonsense that has afflicted the academic study of literature. The important lesson that they must learn is the necessity of reading a work of literature through the eyes of its author, as far as this is possible. We need to understand the ideas which informed an author’s works, most crucially the author’s philosophical and theological beliefs, which are the concepts that govern our view of ourselves, our neighbours and the world in which we live. A failure to comprehend where the author is coming from will invariably lead to a failure to understand the work at its deepest and most important level. The modern and postmodern academy if full of the pride and prejudice of relativist subjectivism. Such pride and prejudice must be avoided in the service of an objective pursuit of truth.

5. Where do you get your news from/how do you keep up with your area of expertise?

I am an editor of a cultural journal, the St. Austin Review, and series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editons, as well as being executive director of Catholic Courses. These positions, in addition to the research undertaken in pursuit of my writing projects and teaching commitments, keep me abreast of the key ideas in literary and cultural analysis.

6. If you could interview anyone who is no longer living, who would it be and why?
What do you think they would be researching now if they were still living?

This is a huge question. Lots of people come to mind. Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Virgil, St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, St. Thomas More, St. Robert Southwell, Pius IX, St. Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII, Chesterton, Belloc, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien. I think, however, that I would most like to meet Shakespeare. It would be great to interview him about his own life and beliefs and to quesiton him about his plays. This would be a truly celestial experience! If the Bard were alive today, he would no doubt be writing plays that illumined and exposed the faults and follies of our own meretricious age.

7. Some questions have the power to change a person’s thought process. What is the best question you’ve ever asked yourself or someone else?
What is the best question you’ve ever been asked?

The best and most important question that anyone can ask and answer is quid est veritas?, the question which Pontius Pilate addressed to Christ. The asking and answering of this question is axiomatic. The problem is that relativism only asks this question in the spirit of cynical indifference, as a mere rhetorical question that does not have an answer. The failure to ask the question in the spirit of genuine and humble curiosity is at the root of the modern malaise and the reason for society’s descent into a new barbarism.