• Charles’ website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. It’s a tough job to manage a household. Things need to be regularly fixed, maintained, and clean. How do you stay on top of these tasks in order to keep your home in tiptop shape? My guest knows his way all around this issue and has some field tested insider advice to offer. Charles MacPherson spent two decades as the majordomo or chief butler of a grand household. He’s also the founder of North America’s only registered school for butler’s and household managers, and the author of several books drawn from his butlering experience, including The Butler Speaks: A Return to Proper Etiquette, Stylish Entertaining, and the Art of Good Housekeeping. In the first part of our conversation, Charles charts the history of domestic service and describes why the practices of having servants like a butler made ebbed in the mid 20th century, but has made a comeback today.

We then turn to what average folks who don’t have a household staff can do to better manage their homes. Charles recommends keeping something called a butler’s book to stay on top of household schedules and maintenance checklists. We then discuss how to clean your home more logically and efficiently. Charles shares his golden rules of house cleaning, the cleaning task you probably neglected. Hint, go take a look at the side of the door of your dishwasher, his apprising choice or best product to use to clean your shower, how often you should change your bedsheets and much more. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/butler. All right, Charles MacPherson, welcome to the show.

Charles MacPherson: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Brett McKay: So you have served as a professional butler for over two decades, and you now run an organization that trains butlers and other professional domestic staff. And I think most people when they think of butlers, they think of butlers as men who served English aristocrats and American robber barons, the 19th and early 20th centuries. But butlering is still alive and well today. And I wanna talk about what it looks like today. But before we do, can you kind of give us a brief history of domestic service? What was it like 100 years ago? When did it reach its peak, etcetera?

Charles MacPherson: So that’s a great question because I think understanding history allows us to really understand where we are today. So let’s very briefly, let’s start back 150 years ago or so, we’re in the Victorian era, Queen Victoria’s on the throne, and there is a huge amount of domestic staff. In fact, it’s the second largest employer, if you will, in the United Kingdom compared to farming, right after farming, which is number one. And so these people are required that the amount of domestic staff are required because the homes of the day didn’t have rain water, didn’t have electricity. And so for the wealthy to live, as we all know, when we watch PBS and watching Agatha Christie and so on, that took a mountain of people to be able to undertake. And so that’s the height of the most number of domestic people. And then we go Queen Victoria dies, her son King Edward, so we go into the Edwardian era, World War I, and now for the first time in history, we have people leaving domestic service.

And so all of a sudden, this is when men start to leave domestic service really. And so now this is where women are starting to really become prominent in domestic service and they’re now serving at the dining room table, which society is shocked by to see a woman in the front of the house. And then all of a sudden we go through World War II, now we’re into the 1950s and all of a sudden the world has changed. And there is now the modern conveniences based on the war. So we have clothing that’s available, we have food that’s available, we can go to grocery stores.

And so being a domestic service is a dying art. And as we go into the 60s, into the 70s, there is no one going into domestic service. It’s really has come to an end and it’s just the very few that are left. But then we get into 1980 and Ronald Reagan becomes President, Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister, and we have Reaganomics. And now all of a sudden, we have a huge amount of wealth that’s being created by a very small group of people. And so as they acquire their wealth and they start to acquire toys of homes and boats and airplanes, they want to live comfortably. And so all of a sudden there’s, well, let’s hire a butler, but there really are no butlers except some old timers.

And so all of a sudden there’s this demand for butlering and people start to go back into private service. And so all of a sudden as we get into 2000 and up, all of a sudden there’s a huge amount of demand for private service because the wealthy continue to be wealthy and to generate money. And so it’s incredible the career that it’s become. And so now it’s really a career where you can make a lot of money and where it’s no longer being in servitude like you were 150 years ago, but being in domestic service today is actually an honorable career. And so it’s really interesting how it went from the height to almost being extinct in the 60s and early 70s. And now all of a sudden here we back are at 2024 and there is more demand for domestic service than can actually meet. So the supply, we just don’t have the supply.

Brett McKay: That’s interesting. So at its peak when in the Victorian era when you had just a household of staff, if anyone’s seen Downton Abbey, they’ve probably…

Charles MacPherson: Exactly.

Brett McKay: That’s what people typically think of domestic service. Like how many people did a typical aristocrat have in their home?

Charles MacPherson: Well, so when you think about it, it really comes down to what was the size of the house. But some people could have 20, 30, 40, 50, or 100, so it was all… Remember, farming was all done by hand, so there was a huge amount of people on the estate just in dealing with the farms, which generated income for the estate. But to run the inside of the household, there’s no microwave, there’s no fridge, there’s no electric mixer. So just in the kitchen alone, to be able to produce the meals they did, you needed an army of people. And then the washing of all the dishes and all that stuff was done by hand, of course ’cause there were no dishwashers, there’s no electricity. And so those houses often had 20, 30, sometimes 40 people because that’s how much staff it took to be able to make all that happen.

Brett McKay: And the butler at that time, like his job was just to oversee that, manage all that?

Charles MacPherson: So the butler at the time… So if we go in the 1800s, the butler at that period is really… Yes, he’s running the household and he’s the one who serves that table and he’s the lead, but he’s really running the front of the house. So he’s running everything that the guests and the family see. And it’s the head housekeeper who runs the back of the house, who is dealing with the housekeepers and the laundry and all that kind of stuff. And then chef was responsible for the kitchen. And if you were really fancy back then, you had a French chef that was de rigueur of the time. So butler really is front of the house, head housekeeper is back of the house, then chef is the kitchen. So it’s still interesting that there’s still three very senior positions, but the butler ultimately was responsible for overall everything.

Brett McKay: And then you highlight in this history that you did of domestic service, that in the 19th century and early 20th century, there’s all these really detailed guides written by butlers and other domestic servants on how to do what they do with the professionalism. Like they really took their job seriously.

Charles MacPherson: Yes, absolutely. And I think that, well, what’s interesting is that when Mrs. Beeton wrote her book on Household Management in 1861, that’s considered the first self-help book to ever be written. And that was as we’ve gone through and we get the first industrial revolution, we’re getting into the second industrial revolution in the 1870s, so all of a sudden we have the birth of this middle class, and so they want to live, but the problem is they don’t know how to live. And so Isabella Beeton writes this book on household management, teaching the middle class how to run a home, and if they are lucky enough to have a servant or two, how to manage them and so on. So it’s actually quite interesting. So as that first book kind of takes popularity and is still in print today, which is quite interesting, and that is then we have other people who see that and everyone kind of jumps on the bandwagon and everyone says, well, if she can write a book, I can write a book. And so that’s where you have all these books being written in the late 1800s, early 1900s.

Brett McKay: But I think it’s interesting speaking of how domestic service started to wane in the 20th century. I think it’s interesting that whenever I read biographies or histories of famous people who were… They weren’t rich, they were probably solidly middle class, maybe upper middle class, even in the early 20th century, they would usually have a maid and a cook. And you rarely see that today.

Charles MacPherson: Well, when you think about it, again, those homes were hard to manage. They didn’t necessarily have running hot water. A lot of things were still oil lamps or candles at nighttime, so all that had to be taken care of into the dust and the soot, which is actually how spring cleaning came to be ’cause everything was closed up all winter. And so you had all this dust in the house from your lighting implements. But if you were middle class, you usually at least had a housekeeper or I should say a maid. A housekeeper is different from a maid. They’re two different things.

Brett McKay: What’s the difference?

Charles MacPherson: So a housekeeper is truly a professional who is able to manage the household, if you will, employees can report to her. Where a maid is just the worker bee, if you will. The maid isn’t in management position. So the management position is really the housekeeper or the head housekeeper.

Brett McKay: Okay. And so yeah, through the mid 20th century, many upper middle class families had that, but then eventually it went away.

Charles MacPherson: Well, it went away because the world is changing and first of all the cost is becoming prohibitive. But what’s fascinating is that during World War I, world War II, we were able to mass produce to be able to keep the war machines going. When the war comes to an end, there’s this excess of capacity for production. And so that’s why all of a sudden foods and clothing and everything become so readily available after World War II because the capacity of these factories is there and they have nothing else to do. And so they start producing for the mass markets. And as we get the burst of the middle class that continues to grow in the 1950s, it allowed you to be able to function without staff.

Brett McKay: ‘Cause you have washing machines, dryers, vacuum cleaners, all that stuff.

Charles MacPherson: Exactly. All those things are starting to come in. And so those appliances that are saving time. At the time, when you think about it, particularly in America, the dream was 2.2 kids and a dog and a white picket fence and mom stayed home and took care of the house while dad worked. And so she kind of fairly or unfairly becomes the maid and takes over, but at least she has the appliances to be able to make it easier. It’s not easy, but to make it easier.

Brett McKay: Okay. So domestic service started going down throughout the 60s and 70s, but then in the 80s you started to see the revival of it.

Charles MacPherson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: How did you get involved in butlering, and then how did you learn how to be a butler when it kind of became a lost art?

Charles MacPherson: So what’s fascinating is that in the 1990s, I was in the catering business. I was in the off-premise catering business. And one of my clients was one of Canada’s wealthiest families that every Canadian knows and loves. And I had mentioned to the lady of the house one day just in conversation, I was thinking of maybe leaving the catering world and to do something else. And she said, oh my God, what are you gonna do? And I said, I haven’t figured it out. And she said, well, Rick, my butler is going to be leaving soon, so why don’t you come and work for me? And so I said, well, let me think about it. And I told my mother. My mother said, absolutely not. I don’t want you to be a servant. I said, well, I think it’s a good job. And I thought about it, and of course I did the opposite of what my mother recommended, and I took the job.

And so it was the lady of the house who taught me how to butle. And so that is a verb that you can use correctly. And so every week she would give me lessons on how do you drive the car so the person in the backseat isn’t nauseous? Or how do you get the grass stains out of her children’s t-shirts and jeans? What’s the difference between a breakfast table, a luncheon table, a dinner table? Where does the oyster fort go? How do you open the door for someone? How do you take their coat? How do you put their coat back on? How do you walk with someone with an umbrella? It was quite fascinating. So after a year, I was the majordomo for the household. The family had three homes. I had up to 30 full-time staff that were reporting to me throughout the year. And it was really an incredible opportunity.

And I call it my Shirley MacLaine moment, you don’t know if there really is reincarnation, but if there is such a thing, if I am fortunate enough to be reincarnated from a previous life, I was very lucky I was either a butler or a nobleman who had a butler because this career just seems so logical to me and so evident of just what to do. It was never a mystery. As I was learning, I realized that what my job was about was logic and just to think about, well, what’s logical? And that’s really how my education became, was because of this lady and just continuing to learn on my own and meeting others.

Brett McKay: So back 150 years ago, the duties of a butler was to take care of the front of the house. What are the duties of a butler in 2024? What’s a typical?

Charles MacPherson: So in 2024, the butler is now an expensive commodity, but the butler is actually managing the household. And so some households, the butler may be in the front of the house for serving. In some households, the butler doesn’t serve, the butler is purely an administrative position. But when you think about it, the butler is actually managing the household from a perspective of that the average household spends more money and has as many or more employees than very small businesses in the US. So you’re really a business person taking care of a business. And so you’re taking care of everything from, whether it’s staff management, whether it’s putting together operational manuals of how the household’s going to run, when are things cleaned and when are things maintained, taking care of accounts, when plumbers are coming or electricians to fix things because things always break down in those homes.

Making sure that those bills are authorized for payment and that that work’s been completed. Making sure that the household is running. And so the butler today really is trying to be at least one or two steps ahead of their employer to always be thinking and anticipating what’s going to happen, what needs to happen for the family. And so it’s quite fascinating actually, but it’s not as much of a service role, but it is a very detailed role that keeps you really busy. When you think of these large homes, they’re actually commercial facilities with the amount of when you’re talking about 10, 20, 30, 40,000 square feet, we’re talking about commercial cooling units and commercial kitchens. And so it becomes complicated. It’s not just the little furnace that you and I grew up with and probably still have in our homes today.

Brett McKay: So it sounds like a butler today is like a chief operations Officer.

Charles MacPherson: [laughter] That’s a great way to put it. Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Does domestic staff still live with homeowners like they did a century ago?

Charles MacPherson: Oh, great question. And so the answer is no. Domestic staff today have a life. They have a family and so they don’t live in, and in fact, it’s hard to find people who want to live in and if you’re going to live in, you actually can make more money than if you live out ’cause that’s considered a premium to be able to live in versus live out.

Brett McKay: Okay. And the way you’ve made it sound like is that being a butler or being on domestic staff like this could be a lucrative, very fulfilling career.

Charles MacPherson: Oh, absolutely. Where can you go to butler school, which is 4, 6, 8 weeks and you walk out with a job starting at 65, $70,000 a year, and a good butler by the time they’re within 5 years with the right experience, they’re at a 100, 125,000 plus benefits, full benefits and the retirement plan. And we have butlers that are making anywhere from a quarter of a million to $350,000 a year based on the home that they’re managing and the work that they do. So you can make a lot of money if you’re good at it, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of. I think it’s an honorable career to be able to manage a household. And what I love is as I jokingly say, but it’s you’re kind of seeing history happen from being a fly on the wall and watching the movie stars or the captains of industry or the politicians that are coming to the household for your family and seeing what’s happening and knowing what’s gonna happen before the rest of the world knows what’s happening. And I think it’s pretty fascinating. I think it’s a really great career and I think a lot of people don’t actually think of it as a genuine career.

Brett McKay: So you’ve written several books based on your insights and experience as a butler that can help the average person who might not be able to afford a butler, how they can improve different facets of their lives. And I wanna focus on this conversation today on what we can learn from butlers about managing a home and making it not only a place that runs efficiently, but it’s pleasant to spend your time in. And I start off, you talk about that butler’s traditionally had this thing called the butler’s book. What’s the butler’s book? What sort of information does a butler keep in a butler’s book?

Charles MacPherson: So the butler’s book is really the bible for the butler of how the household run and it keeps track of everything. So whether it’s contractors telephone numbers or how do you use the remote control to go from the DVD player to the satellite dish to regular cable television so that you’ve got the kinda like the cheat sheets in there, or you’ve got household schedules of when employees are working, you have things like inventory. So for example, in my butler book, one of the things that I used to keep was all the inventories of the different Chinas so that when we were entertaining and when I’d be sitting with Mrs in a meeting and the chef and we’d be discussing about a party that would be coming up and everyone would say, well it would be nice to use the green dishes for that thing.

And then I’d be able to look in my butler’s book and say, well, there’s 36 people coming for dinner and we have 35 dinner plates, so we’re short of plates, so either we have to change to a different service, or I have to go buy some more of this green service if I can find it kind of scenario. So you keep cheat sheets like that that are there for you or master things on when are you taking care of certain inventories or mechanical things around the household or what are the spring cleaning projects and all that kind of stuff. So all that’s in the butler’s book. So the butler’s book really is the Bible. It’s the one place when you need something that’s where you go.

Brett McKay: And I can see this being useful for just anybody who has a house.

Charles MacPherson: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Yeah. My wife and I run into that experience where we’re hosting a party and we think, well, do we have this thing? And we’re like, well, I don’t know, we kind of, we have to spend 30 minutes looking for it. And we’re like, well, we can’t find us, let’s go buy another one. So you buy another one and then after the party happens, like, oh, here’s this thing that we were looking for, we just waste of money.

Charles MacPherson: Exactly, exactly. No, but I think the butler’s book would be able to tell you the kind of thing where you keep those things and as long as you put them back where you’re supposed to, then you’re in good shape. But the butler’s book is really this tool that makes you more efficient and more successful at doing what you want to do.

Brett McKay: So what sorts of information do you think just a lay person should keep in their own butler’s book for their household?

Charles MacPherson: I think that just keeping simple things like all your telephone numbers for the plumber, the electrician, where is the electrical boxes if you have more than one in your household, and where’s the main disconnect to turn the power off? And when do you open your pool if you have a swimming pool, and when do you close it? So kind of keeping a calendar. Or when do you wanna clean the eavestroughs? When do you wanna be able to deal with certain things in the yard or when do you wanna clean the windows or put the storm windows on, or take the storm windows off? When do you wanna do a bit of a deep clean inside the house? And so what’s interesting is that when you start to look at all these projects, when you look at the calendar, it allows you to be able to spread it out throughout over the years so that there isn’t one month where you have nothing to do and in the following month you can barely keep up.

So that’s what’s great about the calendar within the butler’s book is that it allows you to plan things, so that way you can plan things ahead of time so you know that you wanna have your windows washed in April, and so in January or February as you’re just kind of looking ahead of things that you wanna do, you say, oh, let’s schedule the window cleaner now and let’s get it done so that at least they’re scheduled. So it’s not the last minute when you’re trying to get ahold of them when everyone else is. And so the butler’s book is really there as the tool to help you plan and just to remind you of what needs to be done.

Brett McKay: Where do you recommend keeping your butler’s book? Is this in a physical book that you keep around?

Charles MacPherson: Well, traditionally the butler’s book was always kept in the butler’s pantry, which is between the kitchen and off the dining room kind of scenario. But most of us don’t have butler’s pantries today. So I always love it in the kitchen somewhere because I think that’s where everyone can find it. And I’m also a really firm believer that the butler’s book is a living, breathing document. And so you shouldn’t be afraid to write in it when something changes or when you learn of something. And so maybe it’s something that just is always kind of handwritten or maybe once a year you sit down and you type out all the changes and then you just print off a clean copy. But I think that the butler’s book needs to be in a place where everyone knows where it is, everyone has access to it and where you’re not afraid to write in it, to update information.

Brett McKay: And I was doing some research before this conversation about modern butler’s book. There’s actually software that modern butlers can use these days where they basically create a butler’s book, but it’s in the cloud. So I know a lot of butlers for really affluent families who have maybe two, three, four homes, they have to know what’s going on in all these different homes. So they have all this stuff just on the internet.

Charles MacPherson: Yes, but I’m not a firm believer in things becoming overly computerized in a household. I think that it becomes overly complicated and you end up being a data entry person versus a manager. And so I’m actually a real firm believer that the butler’s book, as an example, should just be in a three ring binder that’s in a place where everyone knows where it is. Now you can keep the master document in a word file, for example, that’s in the cloud so that you can check it from wherever you are if you need to look something up. But I’m not a firm believer that everything should be in the cloud because if the power goes out or you can’t turn the computer on for whatever reason, how are we gonna access this information in the cloud while we’re in this emergency kind of scenario? I think the theory is always really great and this great fantasy, but I don’t think it actually works in reality. And so I think it’s much easier to be able to have it printed where you can take the book with you to the mechanical room that’s telling you how to do something so you can follow the steps. I think just makes it easier.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned one of the things you can keep in a butler’s book is a calendar of home maintenance. I know it’s gonna vary from location to location and home to home, but generally what sort of home maintenance regimen do you recommend people keep to keep their home running in tip top shape?

Charles MacPherson: So I think you need to first of all think about where you’re located. So for example, if you’re gonna be, for example, in Florida or you’re gonna be somewhere warm, you’re gonna have obviously very many different requirements than if you are going to be up in the north where there’s snow, for example. So first of all, based on your physical location, where there’s snow, which is where I happen to be right now, the butler’s book would say to me in October, for example, okay, so you need to get ready because winter’s coming. So do you have salt? Do you have sand? Do you have a good brush to take the snow off the car? Do you have enough windshield washer fluid? So it kind of gives you those checklists of things to do as you get ready so that once you have that first snowfall, it’s not a panic kind of scenario of not being ready for it. Or you’re going to the hardware store to go and get sand or salt or whatever, and it’s all sold out because everyone’s thinking at the last minute.

And then when you’re down south, simple things like how do you get your house ready for hurricane season if you’re in Florida, for example? Or what do you need to think about if you’re in Arizona from a temperature perspective from the outside of the physical house? What are you gonna do for the air conditioning unit? Does it need an overhaul once a year? And if so, what time of the year are you gonna do that? So I think you start with the location of where your house is, and then the kind of home you have. Whether it’s an apartment or whether it’s a physical house or a townhouse or whatever, everything needs some kind of maintenance. And so the other thing, the reason I like the binder concept is that as you put your calendar in the butler’s book, you might not think of everything right away.

And so you can start to fill it in over the year as you go through the life in your household. And so when it’s the first day of that first snowfall and you’re not ready, you think, okay, now I know I need to get ready. And so now you make a note in your book of what you need and to get ready for that particular item. Or when are you gonna open the pool if your pool closes in the winter because you’re in the north? And when do you open it again kind of thing? Or when do you wanna be able to fertilize or do what you need to do to your roses that are in your garden? So I think there’s always something. And I think it comes to you really easily as you go throughout the year in the life of living within your household.

Brett McKay: Okay, so your household maintenance routine, it’s very seasonal. And as you say, it’s gonna vary by where you live. But you have a good annual list in the book that can apply to most everyone. So for example, in winter, you have things like vacuum your fridge coils, flip the mattresses. Spring, change batteries on smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors, wash the outside of the windows, have AC inspected, get your outdoor grill ready. Summer, you’ve got clean out and organize your garage, wash out garbage and recycle bins. And then fall, you’ve got have chimney cleaned and expected and then clean the dryer vent. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Something else I’m curious about, one of the things I’ve had problems with with managing my own home is finding good contractors and maintenance workers. Do you have any advice on that?

Charles MacPherson: So finding a good person, they’re worth their weight in gold, if you can find them. But once you do, you need to be able to stay in touch. So that’s… First of all, when you are looking for a trades person, go to your neighbors, go to people you trust, read reviews online, but you need to be able to be clear about what are you looking for so that when you actually speak to the trade person, you can actually ask them intelligent questions. ‘Cause you’ve thought about what do you need or why something needs to be fixed or repaired or why you wanna build something. It doesn’t matter what the situation, but you need to have a clear plan of what do I need this person to do so that you can be clear to them so that they understand what your needs are, so you can compare.

And I think that when you interview two or three people, you kind of get a gut feeling right away, who’s the good one and who’s not. And listen to your gut instinct, and then make a note of things in your butler’s book of okay, so we tried John the electrician, he was really good, but he wasn’t really clean. So the next time he comes, I need to make sure he knows to take his boots off before he comes in my house and so on and so forth because the work is good, but he just was a bit messy. And so just to remind yourselves that the next time John comes over, you can say, okay, John, remember I need you to take your boots off. Oh yeah, yeah. Okay, no problem. So I think that being clear about what you’re looking for is really important ’cause I think that’s where the relationship breaks down is that both parties aren’t communicating well with each other.

Brett McKay: Okay. And yes, if you find a good one, make sure you put that in your butler book for…

Charles MacPherson: Put in the butler book, but also, for example, pay them on time because then they’ll want to come back kind of scenario. So you gotta think of things like that too, and be nice to them and offering them a glass of water on a hot day or a cup of coffee. I remember as the butler, what we used to do is we used to make muffins and coffee for every trade that would come to the house every day. And so we became the popular house because they all wanted to come to us first thing in the morning to get their coffee and their muffin for free. That’s how I kept the trades happy. And so being nice to trades, you get it back tenfold. First of all, you should just be a nice person, and they’re doing a job that you need. But second of all, if you keep them happy, they’re gonna be more willing to come back the next time you need them.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about managing the inventory in our home. So we mentioned dishes or things for parties. But I was actually having this conversation with a friend the other day, and he wanted to know, he was like, how much toilet paper do I really need to keep? And how do I know when I need to restock ’cause I’m tired of having to when I need it the most, it’s all gone? So any advice there on managing just household inventories. Could be dishes, cleaning supplies, paper towels, toilet paper, et cetera.

Charles MacPherson: So you’re talking about two different inventories. And so if we’re gonna talk about furniture, fixtures and equipment, which we call FF&E, that stuff like dishes and furniture and art and all those kinds of things. So that’s one kind of inventory that you’re keeping. So usually we do a picture of it, and then we record how many of that item there are in inventory and where it is in the household. But the inventory that your friend is talking about is what we call a consumables inventory. And so what we’re actually consuming, so everything within the kitchen, whether it’s a spice or a meat or anything that’s in the freezer, but then that’s also cleaning supplies. And there’ll also be toiletries, it’ll also be makeup and shaving cream and all that kind of stuff. So those are all consumables. And so the easiest thing to do, first of all, so let’s take the toilet paper, let’s answer the question to your friend, how much toilet paper do I need? So first of all, you need to figure out, how many bathrooms do you have? So you have two bathrooms or three bathrooms. So right away, that’s gonna be one roll in each of those bathrooms. And then you wanna have potentially a couple of rolls that are there for a change underneath the counter.

So if we have three bathrooms, we had three rolls plus we have two extra. So that’s nine rolls already just to keep the bathrooms full. And then on average, you’re going through, for the sake of the argument, you’re going through a roll a week. And so you’ll know at the end of the month kind of how much you’re consuming and how much you need, or you’re using two, three or four a week or a month. And so what we do is we do what’s called a minimum-maximum inventory number. So what’s the minimum number? We know we never wanna have less than nine rolls of toilet paper, but we never really need more than 24. And so once a month or every two months, you count the toilet paper. And when you get down to nine, then you know you need to order the balance to get you back up to 24. So you need to order 16 kind of thing. So it’s actually simpler than you think. Once you come up with the minimum-maximum, then you just set an inventory date and maybe it’s once every three months kind of scenario.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I thought that was really interesting. You mentioned the FFE, the furniture, fixtures, and equipment inventory.

Charles MacPherson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: This would be good for any household to do ’cause this is important for insurance purposes, right? You wanna know if you have art or furniture, you wanna have a picture of it and like value of it ’cause if your house God forbid burns down, you’ll be able to have a reference to your property. You say, here’s what I had and you start making claims.

Charles MacPherson: So what’s interesting is that most people are underinsured, and the insurance companies will tell you. And so nobody really wants to spend their weekend doing a household inventory. But let me tell you, God forbid you should ever need it, you’ll be the happiest person in the world to have that. Because if God forbid something happens to your house and you need to make an insurance claim, they’re gonna wanna see all that kind of stuff. And what’s interesting is the insurance company, if you’re insured for the sake of the argument for $100,000, the insurance company doesn’t just write you a check for $100,000, you have to actually go and buy the stuff and the insurance company reimburses you. So that’s I think important to know right there. And second of all, maybe you’re insured for $100,000, but maybe you have 150,000 worth of stuff that you didn’t think about. And so now all of a sudden you have less than when you started. So do you have a stamp collection or do you have China or silverware or jewelry? Do you have books kind of stuff? What kind of art do you have? What kind of household tools do you have? All that kind of stuff is important. And so doing an inventory really helps you understand what kind of insurance coverage you need and then what you have in case of an emergency.

Brett McKay: Okay. We talked about home maintenance, talked about managing toilet paper inventory, talked about managing your big inventory in your house. Let’s talk about keeping our homes clean. First question is, what do you think are the pros and cons of cleaning your own house versus hiring someone to clean it for you?

Charles MacPherson: I think the main thing is if you’re gonna do it yourself is do you have the time to do it properly? And if you do and if you want to do it on your own, then I think that’s great. Then go for it. But if you don’t have the time and you want to hire someone, that’s okay too. But the biggest mistake is that people aren’t clear about what they want. And so a cleaning person will come in and do what they think needs to be done and then you’re upset. Well, I can’t believe they didn’t clean the chandelier, da da, da, da. I was like, well they only had three hours to be in your house, they can’t do everything. Or they didn’t iron the sheets. Well, are they supposed to? Did you talk about that before you hired them? And so most people don’t have a proper job description in place. And that’s I think where things fall apart the most is that the expectations are one thing and the deliverables are another and no one’s speaking to each other about what they’re going to do and so people are disappointed. So I think being clear about what your needs are, if you’re going to hire someone, but I think that whether you hire someone or you do it yourself, I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way. I think it just comes down to time and if you can afford that.

Brett McKay: Yeah. In the book, you make a distinction between house cleaning, housekeeping and deep cleaning. What are the differences between the three?

Charles MacPherson: Yeah. So deep cleaning is really when you’re pulling something apart. So you’re cleaning the chandeliers, you’re wiping the baseboards, you’re lifting the carpets, you’re taking the pillows and off the couch and you’re vacuuming inside the couch and underneath the couch. And so you’re really pulling the room apart is a deep cleaning. House cleaning is really just taking care of the house on a weekly basis, usually, or twice weekly where you’re vacuuming, you’re dusting, but you’re just keeping things going, you’re not doing the deep cleaning. And then housekeeping is really making a house a home and making it feel inviting that things are where they should be and that you need. So the housekeeping is everything overall, how do you feel within that space? House cleaning is what we do on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, or twice weekly. And then deep cleaning is those special projects. When we flip the mattresses, when we turn carpets around so that they wear evenly in every direction. So those are always the big jobs.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about just house cleaning. You have these golden rules of house cleaning. What are some of those golden rules of house cleaning?

Charles MacPherson: Well, the golden rules of housekeeping or cleaning are really about making sure that you’re organized and that you have the right tools, that you have the right chemicals, and that you’re working methodically throughout the household. And you’re starting in one place and you’re working towards another so that you know where you are at any one point. And so the golden rules are making sure that we don’t cross contaminate. And so making sure that we understand that we have different cloths for different locations. And so we’re not using the bathroom cloths in the kitchen or in the bedroom and so on and so forth. And one of the golden rules that we remember also is remember that when you’re cleaning from a room, you always start from the top and you work your way down because dust of course falls. So that’s why you don’t wanna work from the bottom up. And so the golden rules are just about being logical about what we need to do.

Brett McKay: So one of the ways you recommend being logical and efficient about cleaning your house is to have a cleaning list. So just as your butler’s book should have a maintenance list for your home, you have different cleaning lists broken down by daily, weekly, and monthly. So here in the book, you got daily cleaning on the list, tidy clutter, wipe down counters and stove tops. Weekly, you wanna give each room in the house a good cleaning, dust all the surfaces, vacuum all the floors, clean the bathroom, that includes cleaning the shower, toilet and counters, replace the sheets on your bed. And a point you make on the weekly cleaning is that you don’t have to do all this in one day, you can break it up throughout the week. So one day you do the bathrooms, another day you do the bedrooms, and the next day you do the kitchen. And then for the monthly list, you have things like scrub shower grout, descale showerheads, clean doorknobs and handles, and dust vents.

Charles MacPherson: So to your point, it’s weekly, monthly, yearly kind of scenario, whatever, but it’s about what do I need to do every week in my bathroom? So I know every week I’m gonna need to be able to clean the shower and the sink and the counter, and I’m going to need to clean the toilet and the floor. But I don’t need to every week pull the medicine cabinet apart, or I don’t need to take the shower curtain off if it’s cloth and wash it kind of scenario. I don’t need to wash the walls down every week because the humidity actually captures dirt or the light fixture above the sink doesn’t need to be cleaned necessarily every week. You might give it a dust with a duster, but you’re not pulling it apart and really cleaning it that thoroughly every week. And so that’s what you’re really kind of keeping track of is every week, what do we need to do? Every month, what do we need to do? And then what are the special projects that we wanna do? And sometimes there’s no special project for that particular room.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. And one job I saw on these checklists that people probably don’t think about a lot is clean the dishwasher.

Charles MacPherson: So what’s interesting is that you think to yourself, well, what do you mean I need to clean my dishwasher? But that to me would be something that I would put on my quarterly list. I would say, okay, it’s March. I do it every three months, it’s time to clean the dishwasher. And so the side of the door, so when you open the door and the door is open, there’s the edge that runs on the three sides, the top and the two sides, that gets really dirty because as you’re putting dirty dishes into the dishwasher, food product falls in that area and it doesn’t get washed when the dishwasher door is closed. So you actually need to clean that. You need to… If you have filters in the dishwasher, in the bottom of the dishwasher, sometimes they need to be emptied and cleaned out. Sometimes if you have a very fancy dishwasher, it’ll do it by itself, but you need to keep an eye on all that kind of stuff. I’m not a really big believer that you need to run a chemical through your dishwasher, although there are those that are available, but you need to actually clean the filter if it is necessary and you need to actually clean the door, the sides of the door.

Brett McKay: Okay. So for your weekly cleaning, so this is when you’re kind of, it’s not a deep clean, but just sort of the maintenance cleaning you’re doing to make sure everything looks nice. You recommend to be efficient with this, to have a butler’s caddy. What’s a butler’s caddy and what do you keep in it?

Charles MacPherson: So a butler’s caddy is the caddy that you’re gonna carry around. So what are you going to have when you’re cleaning throughout the house? And so the caddy is gonna have your cleaning cloths in it. It’s going to have whatever chemicals that you happen to be using, your tools. So for example, do you need soaps or do you need any sprays to disinfect something? Or do you need a squeegee? Do you need paper towel? Do you need baking soda? Do you need like a cream cleaner for certain ceramic things that you’re cleaning? So it’s about thinking about where are you going to be cleaning and what are the things that you need? Because the worst thing is, is that as you’re cleaning, you’re kind of carrying everything in your hand and then you realize you’ve forgotten something and you don’t really wanna go back to to the closet, wherever you keep all your cleaning supplies or under the sink or wherever it happens to be.

And so you don’t really do it, you just kind of, I’ll do it next time. And you just kind of forget about it again. So the caddy just makes it easy. If everything’s in there, then no matter where you are in the house, you have what you need. Even for example, like the different color cloths. So I always have said blue for poo and pink for the sink in the kitchen so that we don’t have cross contamination. So that we’re using blue cloths in the bathroom and pink cloths in the kitchen and then a different color cloth everywhere else in the house. All that’s just in the caddy. And so it makes it really easy as you’re moving around the house that you have the right tools.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned about cleaning a room effectively and efficiently. One thing you mentioned is you clean from top to bottom. Any other tips on cleaning a room effectively and efficiently?

Charles MacPherson: So the most important thing is, as you’ve said, is to start from the top and to work your way down, but then you always wanna work in a circular direction. Now, it doesn’t matter if you go clockwise or counterclockwise, but you need to be in a circular direction because at some point you may need to stop so you know exactly where you were in that process, so where to go. But if you’re doing what I call the zigzag method where you’re just kind of moving all over the room, you tend to forget something because it’s not logical. But when you’re going in a circle, you know exactly where you are and what you’re doing. And I find that very helpful.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. Do you dust first then vacuum?

Charles MacPherson: So it depends on what kind of vacuum you have because some vacuums actually put dust out. So you have to think about it. So sometimes you’re gonna wanna vacuum first and then dust, sometimes you’re dusting and vacuuming. In my house, for example, I have a central vacuum. So for me, I would dust the room and then I would vacuum the room as I kind of work my way out of the room. So that’s how I do it. But you need to have a good vacuum to make sure it’s not putting dust in the air. What do you want is a good filter on your vacuum.

Brett McKay: Any tips on dusting?

Charles MacPherson: So dusting, the biggest mistake that people make is that they use too much water. You don’t need a chemical, you just need to have a really good cotton cloth. Cotton t-shirts as they wear out in your house are great to be able to cut up for dusting cloths. And so what you do is you wet your hands under the running sink, you give them one shake and then you dry them off in that cloth. And then that cloth at that point is the perfect humidity level to be able to dust ’cause you just want it to be able to grab the dust. But I think that we tend to use too much water, which actually does more damage than good.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about bed making. How often should you change the sheets on your bed? I know it is a contentious…

Charles MacPherson: Oh, my God, it is such a contentious issue. And so there’s surveys, for example, in the UK where the average man changes his sheets every three to four months.

Brett McKay: Holly cow.

Charles MacPherson: Exactly. And that kind of shocked the nation when those surveys came out last year, but you need to do it at least once a week. And the reason you need to do it at least once a week, even if you are the only person sleeping in that bed, is the average person sweats give or take a liter of fluid throughout the night. And so we’ve got this liquid that’s going into the bed, first of all, and you just have skin that this falling off. We all have natural skin, dead skin that’s falling off. It’s not because you’re not healthy or sick, it’s just as normal. So we have that dead skin that’s falling in the bed, we have the humidity that’s in the bed and we all drool at night. We don’t like to think that we do, but we do. So all this kind of stuff is important. And so minimum once a week is when you should be doing your bed.

Brett McKay: Any advice on making a bed?

Charles MacPherson: Well, I wouldn’t make my bed as a kid. My mother and I fought about that bitterly until finally my mother said to me one year, she said, oh, I’m going to give you a present. I said, you are. She said, yes, I’m going to buy you a new duvet for your bed. So let’s go shopping. So I was all excited and I went and I picked out some new sheets with my mother and my mother changed the bed recipe for me. And so what she did is she put a fitted sheet on the bed and she gave me a duvet that had a duvet cover on it. And that was it. And I was told every morning if I wanted to come down for breakfast, I had to just give the duvet a flick so that my bed was made. And it was so simple, I actually did it. So I think it’s about being smart about the bed recipe versus maybe parents wanna have a more complicated bed. So maybe you have a fitted sheet and a flat sheet and a blanket and a duvet. All that’s really great, it’s just a lot more work. And there’s not one right or wrong way to do I, they’re just different. So I think it’s about thinking about the application of who sleeps in the bed, who has to make the bed and who has the time and ultimately what do you want?

Brett McKay: Do you recommend letting the bed air out a little bit before you make it?

Charles MacPherson: Oh, absolutely. For that exact reason that because of the humidity that’s in the bed, the bed needs to be able to air out. And bed bugs and bugs, they love that moisture and they love that humidity and they love that warmth. So if you make the bed right away, that humidity stays trapped in the bed, which is something you don’t want.

Brett McKay: Okay, I’m gonna ask you. This is a greedy question. This is for me.

Charles MacPherson: Okay.

Brett McKay: I clean the showers in our home, so I’m always looking for advice on how to do this job better. Any advice on the best way to clean a shower?

Charles MacPherson: So I think the best way is, first of all, is to have a squeegee in the shower and not the one that you buy for showers ’cause they’re not good generally. What I have in my shower is I actually have a squeegee that you buy at the hardware store for windows. So it’s got a proper black rubber tip on the end so that it squeegees perfectly. So first of all, I think you need a professional squeegee. But second of all, if you have the ability to somewhere either under the bathroom sink or somewhere to be able to keep some soap and a brush so that you can actually brush down the shower on a regular basis and then rinse it and then squeegee it. It becomes really easy because the more often you do it, the easier it is to do and the faster it becomes. The mistake that people do is that they wait too long and then the buildup starts and then it becomes really difficult to clean and then you resent it and then you don’t want to clean it. So having the ability to rinse down the shower, having the squeegee right there, that’s a good one for windows, allows you to squeegee whether you’re doing tiles or you’re doing a glass shower door or glass shower wall, which is what I do. It makes it really easy so that A, the bathroom always looks good, but B, I never get enough buildup that I never really resent that once a week when I use the soap or twice a week when I use the soap because it’s really not hard, it’s just a quick rub down.

Brett McKay: So you recommend squeegeeing after every use?

Charles MacPherson: Absolutely, because the problem is, the water marks go onto the glass and they don’t necessarily come off when it gets wet again. And so that just makes it harder to clean. And the problem is, of course, nobody ever wants to squeegee after you shower, everyone likes the ability to be able to just have a shower and thank you goodbye. And so that’s what you need to think about. Are you prepared to squeegee your shower or if not, maybe a shower curtain is the way to go.

Brett McKay: Best product for cleaning a shower?

Charles MacPherson: Well, I think the issue is that you need a soap. And so I’m a really firm believer in dish soap because it’s got a low pH balance, so it doesn’t really affect anything. It works fine on metal surfaces. It works really well on tiles and tubs and all that kind of stuff. So a dish soap actually is a great cleaner. But if you need a bit of a chemical, Pine-Sol is very good at getting rid of water stains. It is a great way to go. I’m not really a believer that you need to bleach the shower because there’s no bacteria per se in the shower unless you’ve got buildup that’s been there for years and years and then you’ve got mold and bacteria. But if you’re doing it regularly, there really generally isn’t a need to be able to use a harsh chemical. And so the most important thing is making sure that the bathroom airs out, that the door is open. And if you have a window, that the window’s open every once in a while to let the air and the humidity escape.

Brett McKay: One tip that I picked up recently that’s been a game changer for cleaning the glass, at least in the shower, vinegar seems to be really awesome, like a vinegar mixture.

Charles MacPherson: Vinegar and water is a great mixture for certain things. Absolutely. And there’s pros and cons to what they call green cleaning products, which in this particular case would be the water and the vinegar. So I think that, again, then it would be having a squeegee bottle with the vinegar and the water already mixed in it, that’s somewhere handy so you can grab it quickly, give it a little bit of a quick spray, and then you can rinse it and use your squeegee. So again, it’s about the easier you make it for yourself, then the more likely you are to do it. And the more often you do it, the easier the job becomes.

Brett McKay: So final question, in The Butler Speaks, you wrote that being a butler is about giving people the little luxuries in life. So after you’ve taken care of the big stuff of keeping a house, right? You’re doing the maintenance, the cleaning, managing inventory. What are some of the little luxuries people can give themselves to make their home a joy to live in?

Charles MacPherson: I think it’s about thinking of anticipating. So, for example, if you like to have a cup of tea in the afternoon, then that cup of tea can be a real pleasure if you have a nice teacup and you have a nice little teapot. You have some of your favorite tea, so that becomes a pleasure. So whether you’re making it for someone else or you’re making it for yourself, that becomes something really enjoyable. Or, for example, my mother, she likes to have a glass of wine in the evening. She uses a nice glass. She uses one of her crystal glasses from the dining room, not because she’s trying to be particularly fancy, but she just really enjoys that glass. And she says, well, I have to wash the glass by hand no matter what glass it is. So whether it’s just an everyday glass or a crystal glass, it’s the same thing. And so she gets more pleasure out of using the crystal glass. Or a simple pleasure can just be, for example, just having your bed made so when you come home and you crawl into bed, there’s nothing I think nicer than crawling into a freshly made bed. So to me, those are the little things that are enjoyable to try to think about.

Brett McKay: So this has been a great conversation, Charles. Where can people go to learn more about the books and your work?

Charles MacPherson: So the books, you can go to Amazon, which is anywhere in the world, and the books are available there. And you can go onto our website at charlesmacpherson.com. And that’s where you can find out about a lot of things there too.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Charles MacPherson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Charles MacPherson: The pleasure has been all mine. Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest here is Charles MacPherson. He’s the author of several books, including the book, The butler Speaks. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, charlesmacpherson.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/butler, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to get us reviewed on Apple podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

• Joseph’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When people think of JR Tolkien and CS Lewis, they often picture tweedy Oxford professors and beloved fantasy authors. But their writing wasn’t drawn only from the bucolic days teaching at Oxford and walking in the English countryside, it had a darker, deeper backdrop: the trenches of World War I and the cataclysm of World War II. Lewis and Tolkien weren’t just fantasy writers, they were war veterans, cultural critics, and men with firsthand knowledge of evil, heroism and sacrifice. 

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Joseph Loconte, returning to the show to discuss his latest book, The War for Middle-earth. We explore how both world wars shaped perspectives of Tolkien and Lewis found their way into works like The Lord in the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, and infuse their literary masterpieces with moral weight, spiritual depth, timeless themes of resistance, friendship, and redemption. We also talk about the legendary friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, the creation of the inklings and how the men demonstrated the countercultural power of imaginative storytelling. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/warformiddleearth.

All right, Joseph Loconte, welcome back to the show.

Joseph Loconte:

Brett, it’s great to be with you. Thanks so much for having me.

Brett McKay:

So you got a new book out called The War for Middle-earth, and this is where you explore how both World War I and World War II shaped the writing of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. Why did you decide to do a deep dive into how these wars affected these guys?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, I think particularly the Second World War, as I began reading more and researching more, it became obvious, Brett, that the real action is the Second World War. Both men were affected profoundly by World War I — impossible not to be affected if you fought it, if both those men did and they survived. It was a traumatic experience for both, and I think it helped to shape their imaginations. But the Second World War is where the action is because now they are living through a cataclysmic event. It’s an existential crisis for Great Britain from 1939 to about 1945 really. And that’s when they’re writing their most important works, the works that we associate with these men. The Lord of the Rings, The Screw Tape Letters, The Great Divorce, and then the idea for The Chronicles of Narnia. All that is going on in those nightmare years between 1939 and 1945.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so to understand these works, you have to understand World War II.

Joseph Loconte:

That’s exactly right. And you have to understand, I think Brett is also from the British perspective, not the American perspective, because as my British friends like to remind me, we showed up late to that war.

Brett McKay:

And I mean, they saw it firsthand during the Blitz as getting bombed day in and day out. It was brutal.

Joseph Loconte:

Think about it, Brett. Let’s just take the London Blitz for a second. 76 consecutive nights save one of aerial bombardment on the city of London, and within a few days it’s millions, literally millions of people, women and children mostly evacuated from London into the countryside. And this is the way that CS Lewis gets the idea for The Chronicles of Narnia. Think about how it starts about children sent away because of the air raids into an old house with an old professor out in the countryside. He writes in the opening lines to The Chronicles of Narnia in 1939. So the war becomes a spark for their imagination.

Brett McKay:

Well, you mentioned World War I had a big impact on them and their experience in World War I carried over to their experience of World War II. Both of these men fought in World War I. What were the respective experiences like?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, both of them served as a second lieutenant in the British expeditionary force. They served in France. Tolkien was sent to the SOM in 1916 and the opening day, the Battle of July 1st, 1916, is still the single bloodiest day in British military history. Nearly 20,000 soldiers killed on the opening day. Tolkien will arrive a few days later, but the battle of the P song will rage on for months. And he lost most of his closest friends in that war, as did CS Lewis who arrives on the western front in France on his 19th birthday, happy Birthday, CS Lewis. And here you are with bullets flying a mortar shell will go off close to Lewis. It obliterates his sergeant and fragments of it strike him in the chest, the hand he thinks he’s going to die. And so it’s a profoundly difficult grief stricken moment for both of these men. And there’s no question in my mind that you carry not just the physical wounds of physical scars, but the emotional scars of that into your adult life.

Brett McKay:

Are there any instances in their later writings where you can see the influence of their experience in World War I show up?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, I think, and other authors have looked into this. John Garth, for example, who’s written a wonderful book on Tolkien and the Great War, lemme read you a few lines just from The Hobbit here, Brett, which Tolkien published in 1937. He wrote The Hobbit in 33, publishes it in 37. Here’s a few lines. He’s describing the goblins. “The goblins are cruel, wicked, bad hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones hammers and swords, daggers, pick-axes, tongs they make very well. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once for wheels and engines and explosions, always delighted them.”Now what does that sound like? It sounds like the diary of a guy who served in the mechanized slaughter of the First World War, doesn’t it?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And you also see the influence of World War I and Tolkien’s writing. The way he describes Mordor. Mordor is just sort of this desolate hot, gray, ugly place. And during World War I, that’s what a lot of Europe looked like.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And he says explicitly in a couple of places in his letters that the advanced to Mordor with Frodo and Sam when they go into the dead marshes and the line from Sam is there are dead things, dead things in the water. And Martin Gilbert, who wrote one of the definitive books on the Battle of the Somme, says Tolkien is describing exactly what a soldier would’ve experienced in with these craters created by the mortars filling up with water, men, soldiers would slip into them die, and they’d be there for days or weeks on end. So it’s a vivid, explicit memory from the First World War.

Brett McKay:

And what about Lewis? Because he’s known for his Christian apologetics, but it seems like World War I kind of entrenched his atheism that he had then.

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, I mean, think about the poetry he’s writing in 1917 to 1919 his book of poems. This is an atheist raging against what seems to be an unjust universe. And if there is a God, he’s a sadist. Let us curse our master air, we die, the good is dead. I mean, it’s pretty grim stuff. I think it does deepen his atheism. But at the same time, I think it helps to launch him on a spiritual quest because he’ll begin to figure out that his materialism is unsatisfying. Because Lewis can’t get away from the fact that he has these profound experiences of joy and experience of beauty. And he can’t, at the end of the day conclude that it means nothing, that there’s nothing behind it. And so that’s part of his spiritual question. Tolkien, of course, will play a huge role in his conversion to Christianity.

Brett McKay:

You spent a lot of time in the book discussing the cultural mood that overtook the West after World War I. We typically think of it as an age of cynicism and disillusionment, the lost generation. And you do that because you argue, and a lot of other historians argue the aftermath of World War I planted the seeds for World War II. Tell us more about the cultural mood of that time period and how did CS Lewis and Tolkien respond to that?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, it’s a big question, Brett. Lemme take a stab at it. Barbara Tuchman, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Guns of August, she describes the mood by the end of the First World War. She puts it in one word, disillusionment. Disillusionment. And what are people disillusioned with? They’re disillusioned with the ideals of Western civilization, the political and religious ideals. So democracy, liberal democracy, capitalism, the ethics and the principles of religion, the idea that individuals matter and have dignity. I mean, it was hard to maintain this concept of the heroic individual men and women making individual decisions that matter. The whole concept of virtue. All of that seemed to just vanish into the killing fields of 1914 to 1918. So disillusionment. And of course that just creates a vacuum. People still have a yearning to believe, a yearning for the transcendent. And instead of reaching for the old faiths, the great historic faiths, they’re reaching for what you might call political religions. So it’s no coincidence, Brett, that what do you see being launched in the 1920s and thirties in terms of political and social movements? Well, eugenics, think about that. The movement of eugenics, the pseudo pseudoscientific idea of eugenics takes hold in Europe and in the United States as well. Fascism, Naziism and communism, they all take flight in the light of the carnage of that first world war. And Lewis and Tolkien have a ringside seat to that in Great Britain.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And you also talk about psycho-analysis really rose to prominence during this period too, because people were looking for meaning because they didn’t see any. And they said, well, maybe the best we can do is lay on a couch and talk about our childhoods.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And Freud of course, really comes into his own in the 1920s, is booked the future of an illusion. He goes after religion as a psychosis, and that becomes a dominant view. And that influenced CS Lewis when he was an atheist in a profound way because he thought, well, religions are just wish fulfillments, wish fulfillments. That’s Freud. And Lewis has to shake himself loose of that thinking. And he does in his first kind of spiritual autobiography, the Pilgrim’s Regress, which he published in 1933, a couple of years after he became a Christian, he goes after Sigmund Freud with an ax, rhetorically speaking. He realizes this is all kind of begging the question with Freud, what is it that we truly wish for? So yeah, there’s a real influence of psychoanalysis. Think about the ideologies, the forces that are pressing on these guys as they’re starting to write their epic work spread. And this is what’s so deeply encouraging to me. I think that they are deliberately pushing back against these ideologies, the totalitarian state, the idea that the individual doesn’t matter, religion as a psychosis, the idea that there is nothing heroic about human life and think about what they’re writing, the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, the Space trilogy, the Chronicles of Narnia. They are deliberately pushing back against the cultural literary establishment of the day.

Brett McKay:

Well, and you talk about Tolkien started this pushback even before he wrote The Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings as a professor at Oxford. What people often forget about Tolkien was that besides being a fantastic fantasy writer, he was a first rate scholar and one of his expertise was in Beowulf.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes, that’s exactly right. I think that was probably the most important work for him professionally and personally, this Scandinavian hero from the sixth century who takes on grendel these monsters, Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon. And he translated that work. He taught on it for decades, and it clearly influenced his imagination about the idea of the heroic, the individual who goes out to meet danger and doesn’t flinch. And he’s doing it not for his own personal glory, but he’s doing it because there’s a deep need to protect the innocent from great harm. And you see how Beowulf just works its way through his great imaginative works. You’re absolutely right. And that’s a deliberate pushback though. He’s trying to retrieve. I think Brett Tolkien and Lewis both are trying to retrieve the concept of the epic hero, but they’re reinventing him for the modern mind in the 20th century, and that’s part of their great achievement.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. You talk about Tolkien got that idea from Norse mythology besides Beowulf, he devoured, he loved the myths of the North, but this idea of the tragic hero, like you stand up for something because it’s right, even though you know there’s a good chance you’re going to fail.

Joseph Loconte:

That’s right. There’s something about the idea of your back is to the wall, but you’re not going to back down. You’re going to die on your feet. And that appeals to both these men. The thing about Lewis, he said himself, outside of the Bible, the most important work on his professional life piece of literature would’ve been Virgil’s aad. And what’s the aad? Anas is this heroic figure who takes on this great calling, this great task, the founding of Rome. It’s the founding myth of ancient Rome. He’s kind of a reluctant hero and he has to face all kinds of dangers. So both these men were drawn to these epic stories of the heroic quest, and that’s what drew them together in friendship. One of the huge threads in their friendship.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, we’ll talk about how they met because that was really interesting. But yeah, so Tolkien, he was a devout Catholic. He was using Beowulf professionally, but also personally on this mission. I’m going to push back against all this stuff I’m seeing during this time in the interwar period, CS Lewis, as you said, he was an atheist, but you describe how his love of classics and of myths, that’s the thing that eventually led him to his conversion to Christianity.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And I think one person we have to mention in this journey is George McDonald, the Scottish author, 19th century Scottish author who in his fiction, he imbues fiction with a sense of, I don’t know how else to say it except a transcendent. There’s something enchanting about McDonald and what Lewis said about McDonald. He first picked him up, fantastic, his fictional work in 1916 in the middle of the first World War. And Lewis said, when he read that book, he said, I knew after a few hours that I had crossed a great frontier. And that when McDonald had done was he had helped to baptize his imagination. Lewis’s phrase. Now, I’m not sure I know exactly what that means, Brett, the baptize your imagination. But Lewis went on further to say it helped him to learn to love goodness, this skeptical atheist, learning to love goodness through this author of imaginative fantasy. So that was a template in some ways, I think for Lewis, profound influence on his literary life.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean he talks later on about the role of myth, like Nor Smith Greek myths and his conversion. So the McDonald work helped him become a theist, but then he talks about his conversion to Christianity with that famous Addison’s walk with Tolkien where he had this conversation. He’s like, yeah, I can actually say I’m a Christian now. But Lewis talks about this idea of the true myth.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

Tell us about that. What does he mean by the true myth?

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And this is the conversation in Addison’s walk with Hugo Dyson, a JRO, Tolkien and CS Lewis After dinner, they’re walking and Lewis’s great hangup. And this kind of went back to Freud was Christianity. It’s just like all the other pagan myths. That’s what he’s thinking more or less up until that moment. It doesn’t have any truth value. It’s a nice story. It’s an inspiring story. Tolkien challenges him because Tolkien’s understanding of myth was, there’s the great story, the Christian story. God becomes a man. The God man dies for our sin rises from the dead. The person of Jesus. That’s the great myth. Myth meaning, not that it’s not true, but it has this sort of epic feel, heroic feel. It expresses our deepest aspirations and longings in that sense, it’s mythic. But what Tolkien helps Lewis to see is Christianity. It’s a myth that became fact. And the reason CS Lewis was so drawn to these other pagan myths is because they were derivative of the great myth. They were splintered fragments of the true light as Tolkien put it. And that’s the intellectual breakthrough Brett, for CS Lewis on Addison’s walk when he begins to grasp for the first time, wait a minute, Christianity has the ring of truth, the myth that became fact, that’s the breakthrough. And within a matter of days, he becomes a Christian.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Well, let’s talk about 1926, because that’s the year Lewis and Tolkien met.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

What was that initial meeting like and how did they meet?

Joseph Loconte:

It didn’t go well. I’ve served the different colleges and faculties faculty meetings. They’re in a faculty meeting and they’re arguing over the curriculum. And we won’t get into the weeds here, but they’re just debating what should be taught, what should be emphasized. The older languages, the older literature or more medieval literature, they’re on different sides of this debate. And so they are circling each other like tigers in the wild. But that initial tension and opposition, it turns into friendship. I think a huge step was when Tolkien invites CS Lewis, this probably within a matter of months, I think, to join a reading club. And Brett, the reading club was Icelandic sagas. Only Oxford Dawns would do this, right? They get together to read Icelandic sagas in their original Icelandic and Tolkien invites Louis, and they discover this common love of these epic stories and also a love of language. And that’s the beginning I think, of the friendship in a huge way.

Brett McKay:

So they started off being part of this book club, this book group. When did they start critiquing and workshopping each other’s writing?

Joseph Loconte:

That’s a great question. There’s another turning point in the friendship, and I think this was in around 1931, I think it was just before this Lewis’s conversion, that Tolkien shares with CS Lewis, the story of Baron and Lutheran, the Elvis Princess and the Mortal Man. And he wrote this really during the first World War, modeled on his relationship with his wife Edith. It was the story that Tolkien said was closest to his heart, and he’s got a draft of it and he sends it to CS Lewis to get his feedback. Now you think about that. This is a deeply personal kind of story. Emotionally Tolkien is really invested in it. He sends it to Lewis to see what he’s going to do with it. Does he have any advice? And what he does is so crucial to the relationship. He writes Tolkien back, he says, I’ve never had such a pleasant evening reading a story like this.

I’m paraphrasing now, and I’m going to send you pages of critique. Quibbles will follow. He sends off I think about 10 pages of critique of the story to improve it. And Tolkien will incorporate many of Lewis’s suggestions. But the point here, Brett, is that that’s a moment of vulnerability because authors, being an author myself, I don’t like sending manuscripts that are not done really completed to anybody to read. This is an uncompleted manuscript. He sends it to his friend, it’s close to his heart, and his friend responds beautifully. And if he had not, I think the relationship would’ve collapsed. But instead, it’s a window into both their hearts, and it’s the beginning of what’s going to become a really profoundly important and transformative friendship for both of them.

Brett McKay:

I think it’s a good lesson on friendship. If you want friends, you have to be vulnerable sometimes. Yes. And what made their friendship so unique was that they could both give and receive criticism. And that’s hard to do. And they could talk about everything too, like their writing, their spiritual stuff, intellectual stuff. And as you said, it became a transformative friendship for both of them. Tolkien, he wrote this in his diary talking about Lewis. He said, this friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good. And something else that brought them together that you talk about in the book was that they started what you call a conspiracy of Don’s at Oxford. What do you mean by that?

Joseph Loconte:

The conspiracy of Dons? Well, there were different things they were doing. They had this little club of they’re going to push back against bad trends in the curriculum. So they have these Dons like-minded Dons who are trying to hold on really to the classical medieval Christian tradition and making sure that that is upfront and center in the curriculum. So that’s part of the conspiracy. But then what that kind of evolves into with Tolkien and Lewis as the anchor is of course the inklings. And these are like-minded Christian authors who decide, look, we’ve got to be engaged in this cultural fight against the modernist movement in literature, which is so dehumanizing, the disintegration of human personality, anti heroic. We’re going to push back against that. So the inklings come together right around in an early 1930s after Lewis’s conversion, and they’re meeting in Lewis’s rooms at Malin College every Thursday night. They move to Friday later on. But every week for something like, I don’t know, 15 years almost without fail, Brett, these ink links with Lewis and Tolkien as the anchor will meet every week to share their latest literary creations, a portion of it, read it out loud, and then to be critiqued by these other authors in the room. Pretty scary stuff if you’re an author.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And you talk about CS Lewis in a letter to Tolkien, he even wrote, he says, look, the world, they’re not writing the kind of books we like to read, like the inspiring Noble books. And so he says, we’re going to have to write them ourselves.

Joseph Loconte:

That’s right. That’s exactly right. In 1936, this conversation tos, we’re going to have to write them ourselves. So what happens? They have a pact. You could argue this is part of the conspiracy of the Dons to push back against the establishment. They make a pact. Tolkien is supposed to write a time travel story. Lewis is supposed to write a space travel story. Tolkien doesn’t ever finish his time travel story. He starts and doesn’t finish it. But then he’ll publish The Hobbit in 1937 and almost immediately starts writing the Lord of the Rings. Lewis publishes out of the Silent Planet, the first of the Space trilogy. And what that story, what trilogy does, Brett, we can get into it more, is it’s retelling really the story of the fall, the biblical story of the fall. And it’s using this mythic literature and the genre of science fiction to do it. It’s a profound reflection on the nature of evil and the tragedy of the human condition.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about The Hobbit. So Tolken finished that first draft in 1933, world War ii. You could start seeing, something’s going to happen here soon with The Hobbit. We typically think of it as a children’s story. Did he write it primarily as a child story or was he trying to do something bigger with it?

Joseph Loconte:

Well, he writes it primarily as a child story because he was telling it to his children. He just loved to read stories to his kids and make up stories and share them with his children. So that really was aimed at children. But because of Tolkiens, just sensitivity, his maturity, his depth as an adult, you read that story and it’s speaking to adults as much as it’s speaking to children. So he had high expectations, let’s put it this way, high expectations for what his children could and should learn. And Lewis is the same way. Even as they’re writing for children, they want to expose them to the realities of this life, the tragedy, the darkness of evil, but also the capacity for individuals to fight against the darkness. They want to introduce him to the problem of dragons, the problem of evil, but also to heroes who know how to slay dragons. So it’s speaking to two audiences at the same time. I think Brett is safe to say.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And Tolkien said that this idea of battling dragons, battling evil, that can be done by regular people. And I think he even said that he patterned the hobbits after the ordinary working class people he fought with during World War I.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. He literally says in one of his letters that his Sam Gaji is indeed based on the English soldier with whom I served in the first World War and considered so far superior to myself. That’s how he describes it. So one of the most beloved characters in all of modern fiction, the Hobbit is based on the English soldier in a trench.

That’s fascinating, isn’t it? That’s fascinating. But dragons, both these men really saw the dragon as the embodiment of radical evil. There’s a wonderful speech, an address that Tolkien gave in January of 1938 as the storm clouds are gathering in Europe. Brett, the Gathering storm, the totalitarian states, Italian fascism, German Nazism, and of course the Soviet Union. He delivers this talk in 1938. It’s supposed to be a talk to children, young children about dragons. And he gets into some pretty serious stuff about the nature of the dragon, the embodiment of evil. And there’s a line there that I love in this speech. He says, dragons are the final test of heroes, the final test of heroes. We are called to engage against the darkness. And he’s delivering this message to kids. Amazing.

Brett McKay:

So he started the Lord of the Rings in 1937. Then he worked on it sporadically throughout World War ii. Can you see instances in that book you can point to and say, yeah, this was definitely influenced by World War II right here?

Joseph Loconte:

Well, that is a fabulous question, and I’ve dealt with it some in my book and more dissertations need to be written about this. If you think about the Battle of ER fields, for example, I think what’s going on there, this defiance, let me read you a few lines from the Battle of Peller fields, and I’m going to connect it to the war moment. Stern now is ER’s mood and his mind clear again. He let blow the horns to rally all men to his banner that could come hither for he thought to make a great shield wall at the last and stand and fight there on foot till all fell and do deeds of song on the fields of Lenor. If you think about what Britain is doing from 1939, particularly up until about 1942, Britain is alone. Britain is hanging by a thread, an existential thread.

The Battle of Britain, the Blitz on London, all of Europe, Western and central Europe is occupied by the Nazi. The United States is nowhere near to joining this war. The Soviet Union is up to its mischief. France has fallen. They’re alone. And what Winston Churchill does as the Prime Minister is he delivers speeches like that. I have nothing to offer for blood toil, tears and sweat. We will fight them on the beaches. And that rhetoric, that oratory is in the air and justice Churchill is helping to inspire the British people to stand against the darkness of fascism. You have to imagine that that British spirit is also working its way on Tolkien’s imagination as he’s writing out some of these passages in the Lord of the Rings.

Brett McKay:

I don’t know if you came across, I don’t remember reading this in the book, but did you come across any instances where Tolkien or Churchill cross paths, or where Churchill commented on Tolkiens work at all? Cause it seemed like they were kind of like Tolkien and CS Lewis. They were romantics like Churchill.

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, yeah. An appreciation for the great epic hero. They’re all in that place. I have not yet found any example of where the two of them ever met. The closest thing I can think of is when and around 1939 or so, the British government reaches out to Tolkien because they want to give him training to be a codebreaker, a code breaker for the foreign service and to work at Bletchley Park. And he gets several days of training and code breaking because he’s a language guy and they think, Hey, this guy could probably help us. And the end of the day, they won’t need his services. But if he had become a codebreaker, he may well have met Churchill in that context.

Brett McKay:

Well, that’s a good thing to point out about both these men during the war, they write these big epic books, particularly Tolkien, but CS Lewis is very prolific during this time. But this wasn’t their full-time job. They were professors and they had really heavy schedules with that. And then they were also contributing to the war cause Tolkien did that code breaking training, and Lewis did civil defense stuff. He was an air raid warden for the Home Guard.

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, that’s one of the reasons. This is such an encouraging story to me, Brett, and challenging story, because with all these responsibilities and having served as a professor myself, knowing what’s involved in that, if you care about your students, you’re grading papers, you’re going to faculty meetings, you’re doing academic research, you’re doing extra war work as well. So when exactly are they writing these great epic stories that at least initially they’re not getting paid for? Well, they’re stealing away time from other things. They’re writing in the evenings, they’re writing on weekends. And what does that tell us, Brett? It tells us they have to write. There’s something in them. It’s part of their sense of calling. I think as Christian scholars and writers, they can’t not write. It’s part of what they have to do. And I think also their sense that their own culture, their civilization needs these stories Right now at this moment of cultural crisis, the language that Winston Churchill used in one of his speeches after the disastrous Munich Pact, giving Hitler Czechoslovakia, effectively, Churchill talks about the need to recover Marshall Vigor moral strength and Marshall vigor. Well, there’s a political element to that, but there’s a cultural element, and I think these guys sensed Britain. It needs stories of heroism, of valor, of sacrifice for a noble cause at this moment of existential crisis.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned the inklings, the stated purpose was, okay, we’re going to get together, critique each other’s work writing. But it sounds like a lot of the meetings, it started off like that, but then it would just kind of wander or they’d just start discussing other stuff. When did they start going beyond their stated purpose? What kind of things did they discuss there?

Joseph Loconte:

We don’t really have any transcribed notes from this. We can only speculate a little bit from the letters from Tolkien and Lewis. There’s one letter from Lewis describing the inklings to a friend. He says, we gather the talk about literature, but always we talk about something better. I love that phrase, Brett, and you just wonder what it was these guys were talking about, I suspect, because most of them, members of the inklings had served in the First World War, their combat veterans. And I think there was some of that discussion about the Great War and what came out of that. So I think that’s some of it. They also had just a wonderful sense of humor. I spoke to various people, interviewed here for the book, and Owen Barfield was one of the members of the inklings and his grandson also named Owen Barfield, who’s done a lot of thinking about the inklings shared with me. These guys just, yeah, they loved a good pint of beer and they had a great sense of humor. So who knows what they were talking about in some of those sessions, but boy, do have been a fly on the wall.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Lewis even said about that idea of laughter and humor. He said, there’s no sound I like better than adult male. Laughter.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. Yes. The chapter in his wonderful book, the Four Loves the chapter on Friendship, which I think is one of the most magnificent pieces of writings, reflections on male friendship that you’re ever going to find. It is drawn from his experience with the inklings and the idea that we find ourselves amongst our betters. We don’t deserve to be in this amazing circle of people and with our drinks on our elbows and the fire is blazing and something opens up in our minds, something even beyond the walls of this world. And he goes on to just talk about what an amazing gift it is. Who could have deserved this kind of fellowship that’s coming out of the inklings that’s in the chapter in the Four Loves. But of course, the theme of Friendship, Brett, it is central if you think about it to the Lord of the Rings and to the Chronicles and Narnia. And that is not accidental, the intense camaraderie that these men felt when they fought in the First World War with their comrades. I think they wanted to recapture something like that. And so they were always forming these reading groups. And then the inklings became the great haven of sanity, a beachhead of resistance, I like to call it, against the cultural darkness and madness and rage of the day.

Brett McKay:

And I was impressed. They kept it up even during the darkest moments of World War ii. I mean, they could have said, look, there’s some bigger more important things going on. London’s getting bombed every night. Do we really need to get together in a writing group and drink beer? But they’re like, no, we have to do that.

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, I think that’s right. It’s like they felt that it was essential probably for them in their own emotional, intellectual, spiritual lives, but I think they thought there’s something necessary here in the writing that we’re going to do. They couldn’t have possibly imagined the impact that their writing was going to have. But let me read you a few lines from one of the students. It speaks to your point here, Brett, one of the students of Tolkien and Louis describing the impact that these men had on her generation as they’re teaching in the classroom, as they’re going back to these great classic works, a Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, the need to reintroduce these concepts in the modern era for the modern mind. Here’s a few lines from Helen Wheeler. She says this, what this meant for my generation of English language and literature undergraduates was what happened in the Great Books was of equal significance to what happened in life.

Indeed, they were the same. Now, think about that. What a profound thing to say from this young woman. What happened in the Great Books was of equal significance to what happened in real life. In other words, the Great books are great books because they embody the human condition. They teach us great truths about human life and human experience, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and those ideals, the highest ideals that are expressed in those great books. They were needed at that moment of crisis. That’s what I think Helen Wheeler is understanding. We needed to be reminded of these incredible struggles and virtues at this moment of existential crisis.

Brett McKay:

Another quote that stands out to me from CS Lewis talking about why you should just keep doing normal things when everything else around you just seems like it’s going crazy. This is shortly after the atomic bomb was dropped, and everyone’s kind of freaking out about nuclear apocalypse. CS Lewis said this, if we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things, praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts, not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. Wow, that’s a beautiful line. And it was so consistent in his life, Brett, and he lived that way. And the only way we can understand his incredible productivity, particularly during the Second World War, which I’m trying to emphasize in the book, is the sense of urgency. It’s not fatalism, but it is a sense of urgency. They’ve got to get on with their callings in the worst possible circumstances. And you’re probably familiar, Brett, with that incredible sermon that he delivered learning in wartime. This is within a few weeks after Germany invades Poland and the beginning of the Second World War, and they’re expecting a German invasion at any moment. And he speaks to these very anxious undergraduates in church. And learning in wartime has a very similar theme that if we wait for the conditions to be ideal before we get down to our work, we’ll never get to it. Conditions are never ideal. We got to do our best and leave the results to God. It’s a profound reflection on calling on Christian calling echoed in the passage you read as well, Brett.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think that’s good advice for us now, because a lot of people are anxious these days. They kind of put their life on hold because they feel stymied by uncertainty. But you can’t let that defeat you. You have to keep getting on with life. You have to keep doing those human things. You have to keep doing those things you feel called to.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And also think about this for Lewis, he’s had this profound sense of the need to communicate the truths of Christianity to as broad an audience as possible. So when he’s approached by the religious programming director at the BBC, and they ask him, look, give us an explanation and a defense of Christianity in a series of radio broadcasts. We’ll give you 15 minutes at a time. Lewis doesn’t even listen to the radio. He’s completely out of his comfort zone. He’s an academic, right? He’s an egghead. He has no necessary skill writing for radio, but he agrees. And so he travels down from Oxford by train into London, and that was not without risk. The city still being bombed, the BBC had been bombed. And he starts delivering these incredible addresses, unpacking the meaning and significance of the Christian faith. And do you know the first line in the first broadcast, which became the first line in mere Christianity, the broadcast became the book Mere Christianity, but the opening line, you know what it was, Brett?

What was it? Everyone has heard people quarreling. Everyone has heard people quarreling. Now, why does he start there In Anglican, England in 1941, when people quarrel Brett, they’re arguing over a standard of behavior that the other guy has violated. You took something that didn’t belong to you, you cut me off in line. That wasn’t fair. That wasn’t right. We’re always appealing to a standard outside of ourselves, and we violate those standards ourselves. Lewis’s point is that is the clue to the meaning of the universe. This is the moral law that we all know, a moral law that presses down upon us that we can’t escape, that we know we ought to obey, and yet we violate it. That’s the clue to the meaning of the universe. So what is he doing? He’s reintroducing moral truth and a moral law at a time when moral absolutes and the moral disintegration of Western civilization, it’s all up in the air. It’s all up for grabs right now, it seems, Brett. But he is pushing back as best he can. So he starts there with the moral law. He will take the audience ultimately to Jesus as the great Savior, but he doesn’t start there. He starts with the universal moral law.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, he called it the Dao. The Dao. Yes. Yeah. Well, so you mentioned speaking of CS Lewis and how the war influenced these guys works that we wouldn’t have the line, the witch and the wardrobe if it weren’t for the London Blitz. So tell us about that. What was Lewis’s connection to the evacuees during the London Blitz?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, I mean, within days of the evacuation, four girls show up in his house. He lives there with his brother Warney and Mrs. Moore that he’s taking care of. And these four girls come into the home and immediately his life is turned upside down. And he writes to his friend’s sister Penelope and says, I never paid much attention to children, don’t really even like them. But now the war has brought them to me. And not only do they have a profound influence on Lewis, I mean, think about it. He will then go on to write one of the most beloved series of children’s books that has ever been produced. A confirmed bachelor who doesn’t like the company of children, learns to somehow get into their world and to empathize with them and to help them to understand here’s what it means to be a good and decent and virtuous person, even a person of faith. That’s a transformation in Lewis’ life. And that ability to communicate to children about children, to get into their emotional worlds. That would not have happened without the Blitz because children are not just showing up in the first weeks. They’re staying with them for weeks at a time, and then another batch of children would come in when the first batch is ready to go. It’s amazing.

Brett McKay:

So that people talk about the difference between Tolkien and Lewis and how they approach using myth fantasy stories to teach virtue. Lewis is a little bit on the nose about it. You can read the Chronicles and Narnia and like, okay, Aslan, that’s Jesus obviously. Tolkien was a little bit more subtle about his symbolism in his work.

Joseph Loconte:

Much more. Brett, and I think I can speculate a bit at the reasons for this. Part of it I think was Tolkien had been a Catholic for really all of his adult life. There wasn’t a dramatic conversion to Catholicism for him. And he was a profoundly serious believing Catholic. And it just shaped him in so many ways, his outlook, it’s embedded in his outlook. CS Lewis has a dramatic conversion from atheism into Christianity. So there’s more of the apologist, maybe not so much the evangelist, or you could use that word, but certainly the defender of the faith, the man who wants to communicate this truth because he knows what it’s like to be in the darkness. It’s very vivid to him passing from that darkness into the light of the gospel. And so I think Lewis was more willing and ready to use imagery that would more clearly suggest a Christian truths.

Christian symbolism and Tolkien didn’t feel the need to do that, but Lewis did, I think, because of his conversion experience. That’s a little bit of speculation there, but I think it’s probably right now, I will say this Tolkien, when he published the Lord of the Rings, it comes out in the 1950s finally. And as the atomic bomb is out and about, as we say, and a lot of people assume that the ring is just an allegory. The whole thing is an allegory for a warning against the atomic bomb, and Tolkien sets them right. He says, of course, my story is not an allegory of atomic power, but of power, exerted for domination. Power exerted for domination. That is one of the central themes, of course, in the Lord of the Rings, if you go to the Council of Elron, it is a morally complex, rich, thick discussion about the nature of power and the corrupting influence of the temptation to power. And that is deeply embedded, I would argue, in Tolkien’s Catholic Christian faith.

Brett McKay:

So another thing that Tolkien worked on during World War II besides the Lord of the Rings, this was for his family, for his children, is these Father Christmas stories. And you could see World War II pop up in these Father Christmas stories. Tell us about that. And I think these are available, these are published now. I think you can buy these now and read these stories.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. Yeah. There’s an entire collection. I think his granddaughter, one of his granddaughters, had pulled this together. It’s a lovely collection illustrated Tolkien would early on when he had his children, he wrote these Christmas letters, father Christmas and illustrated them, put them in the mailbox, and the kids are thinking they’re getting a letter from Father Christmas, and they’re very whimsical throughout the 1920s, these whimsical stories of Father Christmas and the polar bear and their mischievous adventures and all this. And then they take a turn, even as early as 1933, the year that Hitler comes to power, they take a turn where the appearance of goblins and the goblins, of course, these are wicked creatures. They’ll have a role to play in the Lord of the Rings, but they’re these dark, wicked creatures now entering the scene of Father Christmas. And so by the time you get to the letters, I think from 1941, Christmas 1941, Tolkien writes to his daughter, Priscilla, the youngest father, Christmas again. And he’s talking about how there’s been incredible battle and many people have been killed, and half the world is no longer in the right place because so many people have been displaced. And Father Christmas can’t deliver presents the way he used to because half the world is in the wrong place. Well, he’s describing exactly what has been happening, of course, in Europe with the mass evacuations, the evacuees by the millions. So he can’t escape the war, even in a Father Christmas letter to his daughter, Priscilla. Wow.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And so we’ve talked about some examples of how World War II was influencing Tolkiens and Lewis’ work. So Tolkien, he wrote a lot of the Lord of the Rings during the war. I mean, he was influenced by this epic clash of good and evil and the heroism that was called upon during the war. And then the first in that Lord of the Rings series would be published in the 1950s.

And then you got CS Lewis, he’s doing his apologetics, his lectures, his broadcast, the B BBC asked him to do for morale. He’s doing that during the war. And those lectures and those broadcasts would eventually become mere Christianity. And that was published in the 1950s. And then during this time, Lewis is also writing the Chronicles of Narnia, and he was inspired by the kids who came to live with him during the Blitz. So these works that both men were famous for in the post-war period, the foundations for them were really laid during World War II. And what I think is interesting about these guys, when you talk about them, they both have firsthand experience with war, and they were influenced by it in their creative work, but they were also really appalled by it.

Tolkien talks about not just the human destruction, but the environmental destruction. I think that’s something that Tolkien really focuses on and is overlooked in his work. He’s really appalled by the destruction that war does to our natural environment.

Joseph Loconte:

Exactly right.

Brett McKay:

So they saw war firsthand, but they still thought that violence was sometimes necessary to defend the good and the true. How do they walk that tension in their work?

Joseph Loconte:

Boy, that is a fabulous question, Brett, because they are not holy warriors. There’s no triumphalism in their works. Their heroes are reluctant heroes quite often, and they’re filled with anxiety and self-doubt. Bilbo Baggins is a modern hero, isn’t he? In some ways? Does he help the company or does he find a way of escape? And again, it’s not an accident that Lewis chooses children as the protagonist and includes a mouse named Rey Cheap. So the whole concept of the heroic, they are reinventing as well. It’s, boy, what can we say there, Brett? It’s so counter-cultural what they’re doing that they want to hang on to this concept of the heroic, but they know that triumphalism is just, it’s not tenable. No one’s going to buy this. And in their own experience, they can’t either from their own experience in the First World War, and I think from their religious perspective.

So there’s a realism about human frailty, but there’s also a realism about the nature of evil and the existence of radical evil and the idea of a just war. Even though though Will’s words are not used in their writings, they really are representing the just war tradition. In other words, the use of lethal force to protect the innocent from great harm. That is one of the key themes, isn’t it, in both their works. And I think having a ringside seat, as they did in Great Britain from 1939 to 1945, pacifism and neutrality was simply not an option because they could see what was happening to those nations that supposedly claim neutrality and then were overrun by the Nazis within a matter of months.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s a tough tension to walk, to find war appalling, but also feel that sometimes it’s necessary.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And I think it really is expressed in the characters, in their reluctance to engage in this great battle. But then the conscience, they can’t escape their conscience and the need of the hour. And so Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia, he’s got these children, he calls these children, summons them into a battle. He doesn’t leave them on their own, but he summons them into this battle. And as you read the text, this is what’s so profoundly striking about the Chronicles and Arnie, the battle scenes, they’re vivid. They’re not inappropriate for young people necessarily, but they’re vivid. It’s what it would’ve been like to be in a hand to hand kind of combat. And Lewis wants to give that realism and the anxiety and the struggle and the fear, all of that is mixed in their writings. Tolkien and Lewis, both. They don’t shy away from the horror of combat one bit, and yet they want to insist that wait a minute, evil has to be challenged. We see that in Beowulf. We see it in the Aeneid. We see it in the great works of the classical Christian tradition.

Brett McKay:

So both these men, Tolkien and CS Lewis, they basically laid the groundwork for fantasy novels in the 20th and 21st century.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

But how did their wartime experiences, both World War I and World War ii, how did that make their fantasy stories different from the modern fantasy novels that kids might be reading today?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, that is a fabulous question. I mean, one of the criticisms that you sometimes hear about these guys is that they were writing escapist literature. If it’s fantasy, it must be escapist, escape, the difficult problems and challenges of life. And what Tolkien, and Lewis both said in different ways, both in their writings and even in some of their letters, this isn’t escapism. This is the opposite of escapism. Because what these stories do is they expose the darkness of the human condition, and they point us toward the virtues, the values and ideals that are required to meet the darkness that we encounter in life. And that is not escapism. I’ll give you a personal example of this, Brett. I didn’t start reading the Lord of the Rings until I was in my forties. I was working on my doctoral dissertation on John Locke studying in the UK there in London, reading Locke during the day, and then reading Tolkien at night.

And in English Pub, it doesn’t get any better than that, right? So here I am in my mid forties and I’m reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time, and I’m finding myself morally invigorated, invigorated, wanting to take on the challenges of the day of my life with a new kind of courage and strength and resilience. If you’re thinking about the ideas of virtue and honesty and sacrifice for a noble cause. Well, this is not escapism. This is what makes life meaningful. This speaks to our deepest aspirations as men and women, as people with a soul. And so it’s the opposite of escapism, and I think that’s part of what they’re doing in an amazing time. When on the one hand there might’ve been a kind of militarism, utopianism on one side or just defeatism, we can’t face this horror, and they’re saying, no, there’s this middle way. There’s this middle way. It’s a kind of Christian realism about life and how to meet it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think one thing you wrote in the book, a lot of modern fantasy novels today, they’re about self-discovery, but the novels that Tolkien and Lewis wrote, they’re more about you have to just rise up to the occasion so you can protect others and lift up others.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. That’s where, again, Brett, I want to emphasize this. They’re combining the best of the classical world, those ancient myths, a Greek Roman mythology, the medieval world, Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Beowulf, they’re building on that foundation, but then they are very deliberately giving it a Christian emphasis, imbuing it with Christian values, so that what these heroes want is not personal glory. They are willing to sacrifice for this greater cause. So think about the whole story of the ring itself. The hobbits are not on a quest to gain something of great value, some great treasure chest. The whole point of the quest is to destroy it, to destroy the ring of power. In other words, renunciation. And if you think about the time period, the 1940s, the second World War, when the combatants on both sides are trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, that’s the mood of the hour. And here’s Tolkien writing a story about renunciation sacrifice for others, humility. Now that’s that’s going against the establishment in a huge way.

Brett McKay:

So these books were written in a time that’s pretty different from ours in 2025, but their stories still resonate with audiences today. Why do you think that is?

Joseph Loconte:

That is a wonderful question. I’m still mulling that in my head because here we are talking about them 80 plus years later. I think there’s several reasons. There’s not a single answer to this, Brett, but I think there’s several reasons. Let me quote you from a line that Lewis wrote. I think it helps to give an answer maybe after Tolkien completed the Lord of the Rings, Lewis has it now in manuscript form, and he writes to Tolkien and he tells him how delighted he is to have it. He’ll be going to read it and reread it, and then he says this to Tolkien in the letter about the Lord of the Rings, the impact of it. So much of your whole life, so much of our joint life, so much of the war, so much that seemed to be slipping away without a trace into the past is now in a sort made permanent.

I think what Lewis is saying that somehow what Tolkien has done in the Lord of the Rings, he’s captured their common journey through life with all of its struggles and its joys. He’s captured some of that. He’s captured the war experience, and it’s hidden in the pages of the Lord of the Rings. So it’s a profoundly human story, profoundly human. It’s so accessible. And at the same time, it also speaks to these universal transcendent themes, and that’s what they do in the best of their works. They’re accessible. Their characters are like us. They’re not the superheroes that we create now in Marvel comics. They’re hobbits. It’s a mouse named Repe Cheap. It’s children in a Wardrobe. They’re utterly accessible, but they’re engaged in a real struggle in the forces of light, the forces of darkness, and there’s something profoundly moving and transcendent about their works. It just speaks across cultures, across generations, doesn’t it?

Brett McKay:

Well, Joseph, this has been a great conversation. Where could people go to learn more about the book in your work?

Joseph Loconte:

Well go to my website. That’d be the best place to go. www.josephloconte.com. You’ll see where you can buy the book. You’ll see also my YouTube history channel history, and the Human Story, and we’re releasing some videos on Tolkien and Lewis and other things that we’re working on. So love to have you check out the site.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Joseph Loconte, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Joseph Loconte:

Thank you, Brett. So good being with you.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Joseph Loconte. He’s the author of the book, The War for Middle-earth. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, josephloconte.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/warformiddleearth where you’ll find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our free Art of Manliness newsletter. We have a daily option and a weekly option. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at Art of Manliness. 

And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a rating on your favorite podcast player. It helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think with something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.