The Truth and Beauty dives into Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—born from her 1816 Lake Geneva storm, where Percy Shelley abandoned his wife (who later drowned), and Byron dared them to write horror—her half-sleep vision of a fatherless creation critiquing absent motherhood. The speaker ties this to modern "woke" movements, calling transhumanism and "birthing people" language a war on traditional womanhood, mirroring dystopias like The Terminator, where femininity resists mechanization. Virginia school board battles become proxy wars over maternal influence versus ideological control, with the book framed as a poetic counter to what’s called a "Soviet-style machine world." [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, this is Andrew Clavin talking to my son Spencer Clavin, the host of the Young Heretics podcast about my new book, The Truth and Beauty.
This book is incredibly important to me, and I'm hoping I'll be able to convince you to pre-order it because that will let the company, the publisher, Zondervan, know that people are interested in it.
Its subtitle is How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus.
And one of the reasons I want to talk to Spencer about it is because he's one of the few people who's read it.
I know.
I feel very privileged.
I mean, honestly, this is a special book.
You know, you should feel really proud of this book.
I've read a lot of books, and I've read a lot of your books, and I think even among your excellent corpus, this is a particularly important book for our times.
And one of the things that I thought was especially gripping that really spoke into this moment is this section in your book about women.
It's about, specifically it's about Mary Shelley, it's about Frankenstein, but you really show how it's about so much more than that.
And womanhood is such a crucial issue right now.
It almost is so crucial that we don't notice how constantly it's under assault.
But all these, you know, this terrible language that we read all the time of menstruators and birthing persons, this dehumanizing language, the reduction of women's importance in the home.
You show in the book, I think, that there's something much, much deeper beneath all of that than just politics.
You know, these guys, these romantic writers, mostly I deal with poets, but Mary Shelley is the one novelist I deal with.
And they were dealing with problems that were very much like the problems we're facing now, and the role of women was one of them.
And Mary Shelley, she called herself Mary Shelley, but at this moment in time, she wasn't actually married to the poet Shelley.
She had run away with him and they had run off to Europe together.
And she was a young girl.
She was like not quite 19.
And she grew up with a radical father, William Godwin.
And her mother, who died giving her birth, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a radical, kind of the first feminist, a proto-feminist.
Everyone around her hated marriage and thought people should have free love.
Shelley, who she ran off with, a very beautiful looking, great poet and very handsome man, free love.
He tried to talk her into having free love.
But Mary was this kind of devoted, sweet, feminine person who had made a god out of her father and then turned that and made a god out of Shelley.
And they ended up living with the most famous poet in Britain, Lord Byron, who was a rascal and was slept with everything male and female that came his way, in this mansion at Lake Geneva in this summer that was just a stormy, lightning-lit summer.
And they would get together.
And while Mary would sit very quietly and kind of awestruck by these two great minds, Byron and Shelley would just have these incredibly intense conversations.
And they would talk about electricity and whether electricity could bring somebody back to life and what was the nature of life and would we be able to create life.
And one day, these lightning is out there.
And all the while, there's all these affairs going on.
And Shelley has left his wife and she kills herself and throws her into the serpentine.
And Mary Shelley has lost a baby and her heart is broken and nobody will take her seriously.
And she's got this new baby that she's nursing.
And there's this lightning storm and they start reading ghost stories.
And they're reading this French book of ghost stories.
And Byron, who was always very commanding present, says, let us all write a ghost story.
We're all going to, each one of us will write a ghost story and we'll read them together.
So two of the greatest poets who ever lived go off to write a ghost story and they fail.
They don't do it.
And there's another guy there who ultimately does write a story, but it takes him forever.
And Mary Shelley can't think of anything.
And one day she's lying in bed, kind of half asleep, and she has this image in her head of a guy in a laboratory.
She says he's huddling over unholy arts.
And she gets the idea for the novel Frankenstein.
And she invents the science fiction genre.
There's some stories that they say are science fiction, but the first real science fiction novel is Frankenstein.
And a lot of people, including Mary, say, well, it's really about a man who, by creating life, Frankenstein's monster, he's taking the place of God.
But the thing is, people create life all the time.
We all, you know, people create life out of the materials we're given.
What Frankenstein does is he creates life without a woman.
And so she's invented a genre in which women have been eliminated as mothers and as a presence altogether.
And the horror of that, which imbues all through the story, the horror of a life without women is written throughout the story, is really what this first science fiction novel and many of the science fiction novels that come after it are actually all about.
Wow, it's remarkable.
I hadn't thought of it as the first science fiction novel until you pointed this out.
But it's very poignant, the story of the creation, which could be its own book.
I mean, all of these stories that you tell in the book of the different interactions between these big personalities.
But it speaks to something that I see a lot in modern times, which is young women who feel a deep yearning to live out their nature as women.
That is to start a home, raise a family, be taken care of by a man so that they can take care of a child.
I mean, all these things are deeply in the hearts of many young women.
And yet the world around them is so, it has crumbled so entirely that there are no men there to do this for them, which is basically, as you're saying, that's what this is about.
And the role of women as mothers has been eliminated.
People say, oh, she's just a homemaker.
She's just a stay-at-home mother.
This is the center of the world.
I mean, this is the creation.
One of the things that the poets, especially Wordsworth, talked about was the way mothers don't just create physical life, they create soul life.
The interaction between a mother and her baby creates soul life as well.
I mean, that is an essential spiritual part of life.
And that's why the anti-spiritualists, the materialists, the ultra-capitalists, and the socialists all don't want there to be women.
You know, if you look at science fiction, especially dystopian science fiction, the first thing that happens is women's creative function and motherhood function is eliminated.
Brave New World is like that.
One of the best examples is one of my favorite action movies, The Terminator.
Forget about all the sequels, because the great idea of The Terminator is in that first movie.
Machines have taken over the world.
Humans are under attack and under extermination.
There's a single hero who's fighting back.
So what do they do?
They go back in time to kill his mother.
Not him.
They go back in time to kill his mother.
And who is his mother?
Before the sequels, before the feminists get to the story, she's just a girl.
She just cares about her hair and going out and having fun.
And she's just a girly girl.
And that is her power.
That's her superpower.
The power of femininity is the power of humanity.
It's the power to stop men from turning the world into a machine.
Machines vs. Motherhood00:01:10
Absolutely.
I mean, you see this going on all the time now in, and it passes over the news, you know, oh, in Virginia, you know, the schools, the school boards are suffering some attacks from evil right wingers.
It's not evil right wingers, it's mothers, right?
Mothers who make the world go round.
And underneath all of the transhumanism, the chest feeders, the birthing people, all of this woke nonsense, underneath it is this profound truth that the only thing standing in the way between the left and a kind of dystopian Soviet-style machine world is womanhood.
And no wonder they wanted women to leave the home because when they're at home, they see what's going on and they get ticked off.
It's just amazing.
All of the issues we're dealing with were dealt with by these genius writers.
And as you say, this book is not just about looking at the text.
It's also looking at their huge lives, the lives they live, the great stories about them that I just loved telling.
Please pre-order The Truth and Beauty, How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus.