Unlike the woman mentioned earlier who each morning arises to say “shit” because she’s still here, I wake grateful that I am and hope my visit can be extended. I still like it here, still find much to amuse, and a few things yet to charm, me. I understand the longing for death at the close of a long life, especially if the end is accompanied by pain, or even if it is accompanied by disappointment or fatigue. I do not ignore the supreme fact of death, and I can easily imagine a world without my insignificant presence in it. The utter nullity after death, though, I find difficult to grasp. I envy people with strong religious faith, for whom the death question has been put to rest, but have never myself been able, and now expect ever, to find it.
I have few hopes of being remembered beyond the lifespans of my three grandchildren. I have left instructions not to have a memorial after I vacate the premises, having attended too many where the wrong people arrange to speak and, in their remarks, get the recently dead person impressively out of focus. I have left instructions to be cremated, my ashes buried in a plot next to my parents, a simple gravestone, like theirs, setting out my name, birth, and death dates.
I have friends in their mid- and late-80s, and even a few in their early 90s, who still find much pleasure in life and bring pleasure to others. With the continued support of the Knock-Wood Insurance Company and modern medicine, I hope to emulate them. I realize that I may be served an eviction notice at any time. I suppose I am as prepared as any normally disorderly fellow can be, though one thing I haven’t taken care of, if my death turns out to be a peaceful one, is the matter of last words. Goethe has already taken “More light.” Beethoven has used up “Applaud, my friends, the comedy is finished.” I prefer something more in the mode of Lope de Vega (1562–1635), the Spanish playwright and poet, who on his deathbed asked his physician if he thought he would make it through the night, and when told he was unlikely to do so, remarked, “Very well, then, Dante’s a bore.” As for myself, thus far the best I have been able to come up with is, “I should have ordered the Mongolian beef.”
A perhaps too relentless self-chronicler, I seem to have written essays on turning 50 (“An Older Dude”), 60 (“Will You Still Feed Me?”), 70 (“Kid Turns Seventy”), and now this. If only I can get to 130 or 140—who knows, there just might be a book in it.
* * *
§Translation by David Grene.
Original Publication Information for Essays in this Book
Part One :The Culture
“The Ideal of Culture,” originally published as “The Cultured Life,” the Weekly Standard, March 20, 2017.
“From Parent to Parenthood,” originally published as “From Parent to Parenting,” Commentary, May 1, 2015.
“Death Takes No Holiday,” Commentary, June 1, 2014.
“Wit,” originally published as “From Wit to Twit(ter),” Commentary, January 1, 2015.
“Genius,” originally published as “I Dream of Genius,” Commentary, September 1, 2013.
“Cowardice,” originally published as “Who You Calling a Coward?,” Commentary, April 1, 2015.
“Old Age and Other Laughs,” Commentary, March 1, 2012.
“What’s So Funny?,” originally published as “Notes on What’s So Damn Funny,” Commentary, September 1, 2014.
“The Fall of the WASPs,” originally published as “The Late, Great American WASP,” the Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2013.
“The Virtue of Victims,” originally published as “The Unassailable Virtue of Victims,” the Weekly Standard, May 18, 2015.
“Cool,” originally published as “How Cool Was That?,” the Weekly Standard, May 17, 2017.
“The Sixties,” originally published as “Hope I Die Before I Get Young,” Commentary, January 13, 2017.
“University of Chicago Days,” Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2017.
Part Two: Literary
“Erich Auerbach,” originally published as “An Uncommon Reader, the Weekly Standard, June 16, 2014.
“Kafka,” originally published as “Is Franz Kafka Overrated?,” the Atlantic, July/August 2013.
“Orwell” originally published as “The Big O: The Reputation of George Orwell,” the New Criterion, May 1990.
“Proust,” originally published as “The Proustian Solution,” the Weekly Standard, May 28, 2012.
“C. K. Scott Moncrieff,” originally published as “A Proustian Character,” the Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2015.
“The Young T. S. Eliot,” originally published as “From Tom to T. S.,” Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2015.
“Philip Larkin,” originally published as “The Real Philip Larkin,” the Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2014.
“Willa Cather,” originally published as “The Heart of the Heartland,” the American Spectator, September 2013.
“George Kennan,” originally published as “The Cracked Vessel,” the American Spectator, April 2014.
“Isaiah Berlin,” originally published as “A Thinker, I Suppose,” Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2016.
“Michael Oakeshott,” originally published as “The Conversationalist,” the Weekly Standard, June 15, 2015.
“John O’Hara,” originally published as “A Rage to Write,” the Weekly Standard, December 12, 2016.
“F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Most Successful Failure,” originally published as “A Most Successful Failure,” the Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2017.
“Wolcott Gibbs,” originally published as “There at the New Yorker,” the Weekly Standard, December 12, 2011.
“Evelyn Waugh,” originally published as “White Mischief,” Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2017.
“J. F. Powers,” originally published as “A Writer’s Daily Bread,” the Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2013.
“Edward Gibbon,” originally published as “The Best of Scribblers,” Commentary, September 1, 2015.
“Herodotus,” originally published as “Father of History,” the Weekly Standard, October 20, 2014.
“Tacitus,” originally published as “Tacitus the Great,” the Weekly Standard, January 11, 2016.
“Encyclopaedia Britannica—The Eleventh,” originally published as “Wisdom on the Installment Plan, the Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2016.
“Grammar,” originally published as “Gwynne’s Grammar by N. M. Gwynne & The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker,” the Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2014.
“Clichés,” originally published as “Sound Familiar?,” the Weekly Standard, January 26, 2015.
“Literary Rivals,” originally published as “‘You Stink,’ He Explained,” Commentary, December 1, 2015.
“Why Read Biography,” originally published as “Life Within Lives,” the Weekly Standard, April 11, 2016.
Part Three: Jewish
“Sholem Aleichem,” originally published as “The Jewish Sholem Aleichem,” Commentary, January 1, 2014.
“Jokes A Genre of Thought,” Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2017.
“Jews on the Loose,” Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2016.
“Jewish Pugs,” Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2016.
“Harry Golden,” originally published as “The First Talking Head,” the Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2015.”
“Gershom Scholem,” originally published as “Gershom Scholem: Modern Mystic,” the Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2017.
“Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas,” originally published as “I’m Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas: Celebrating a Day You Don’t Really Share,” in Jonathan V. Last, ed., The Christmas Virtues: A Treasury of Conservative Tales for the Holidays (West Conshohocken, PA, 2015).
Part Four: Masterpieces
“The Brothers Ashkenazi,” originally published as “A Yiddish Novel with Tolstoyan Sweep,” the Wall Street Journal, February 7, 2009.
“Civiliz
ation of the Renaissance,” originally published as “Mankind Turns to Understanding Himself,” the Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2013.
“Montesquieu,” originally published as “In Montesquieu a Historian Blended With a Political Philosopher,” the Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2016.
“Machiavelli,” originally published as “Machiavelli Explains What Makes Republics Tick,” the Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2016.
“Gogol,” originally published as “Surveying the Surging Immensity of Life,” the Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2013.
“Speak, Memory,” originally published as “Nabokov Looks Back at Life Before ‘Lolita,’” the Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2014.
“Epictetus,” originally published as “Virtue As Its Own Reward,” the Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2016.
“H. W. Fowler,” originally published as “Parsing the Weightiness of Words,” the Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2017.
“As a Driven Leaf,” originally published as “Balancing Faith and Reason,” the Wall Street Journal, January 2, 2015.
“Joseph and His Brothers,” originally published as “Putting Literary Flesh on Biblical Bones,” the Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2012.
“Life and Fate,” originally published as “Tolstoy’s Heir,” the Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2007.
“Memoirs of Hadrian,” originally published as “Portrait of Power Embodied in a Roman Emperor,” the Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2010.
“Charnwood’s Lincoln,” originally published as “The Biography He Deserved,” the Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2014.
“Book of the Courtier,” originally published as “The Prince’s Man,” the Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2013.
“Ronald Syme,” originally published as “A Short Step to Dictatorship,” the Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2016.
“Quest for Corvo,” originally published as “A Biography Like No Other,” the Wall Street Journal, December 4, 2009.
“The Old Bunch,” originally published as “Destiny’s Children,” the Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2012.
“Life of Johnson,” originally published as “A Biography as Great as Its Subject,” the Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2015.
Part Five: Hitting Eighty
“Hitting Eighty,” the Weekly Standard, January 2, 2017.
Index
A
Abraham Lincoln (Charnwood) 501–504
Accardo, Tony “Big Tuna” 421
Acheson, Dean 228
Acton, Harold 193, 288, 335, 457
Adams, Clover 102
Adams, Franklin Pierce 51
Adams, Henry 102, 473
on the effects of power and publicity 233
Addams, Charles 94
Addison, Joseph 52, 62
Adler, Jacob 387
Adler, Mortimer 278, 337
Advocate 203
After Strange Gods (Eliot) 416
Agee, James 171
Age of Constantine the Great (Burckhardt) 457
aging 77–87, 210, 399, 527–540
“A Hanging” (Orwell) 168
Akhmatova, Anna 237, 493
Alexander the Great 59, 368, 477, 507
Alfred Kazin’s Journal 364
Allende, Isabel 400
Allen, Steve 431
Allen, Walter 297
Allen, Woody 98, 403, 412, 415, 460
All What Jazz (Larkin) 214
Alsop, Joseph 104, 228, 238
Alter, Robert 438
Alvarez, A. 211
Amboy Dukes, The (Shulman) 138
Amelia (Fielding) 360
American Civil War 502
American Commonwealth, The (Tocqueville) 501
American Scholar 141, 364, 372, 533, 534, 536
“America’s ‘Exceptional’ Conservatism” (Kristol) 249
Amis, Kingsley 50, 172
Larkin and 213–214, 359, 362, 371
Amis, Martin 357, 359, 537
Anatomy Lesson, The (Roth) 357
Anatomy of Cinematic Humor, The (Jordan) 412
Anatomy of Disgust, The (Miller) 82
Anglesey, Shirley 245, 248
Animal Crackers 411
Animal Farm (Orwell) 168, 171–173, 182
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) 359
Annals (Tacitus) 323–324, 328–329
Annan, Noel 240, 247
Antonius, Marcus 367, 510–511, 530
Apollinaire, Guillaume 15
Appointment in Samarra (O’Hara) 263–265
Aquinas, Thomas 61, 158, 257
Arc of Boxing, The (Silver) 428
Arendt, Hannah 10, 243, 278
Berlin on 243
Scholem on 438
Shils on 145, 396
Aristotle 14, 55, 59, 62, 143–144, 146, 249, 255, 257, 306, 313, 459, 477, 507
Armstrong, Louis 213
Arnold, Matthew 333, 374
on high culture 8–9, 13, 21
Arnold, Tony 428
Arno, Peter 94
Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (Kennan) 226, 230, 233
Arrian 477
Artaud, Antonin 412–413
Arum, Bob 428
As a Driven Leaf (Steinberg) 485–488
“Assistant, The” (O’Hara) 266
Atheneum (Murry) 206
Atkinson, Brooks 411
Auchincloss, Eve 1
Auchincloss, Louis 106
Auden, W. H. 17, 112, 213, 405
on love and death 34
on Orwell 182
Auerbach, Erich 151–160
on Dante 158–159
on Don Quixote 158
on In Search of Lost Time 154
on Montaigne 155–156
on realism 153, 156, 158–159
on the task of philology 153
Augustine, St. 61, 157, 310
Augustus Caesar 59, 61
Aurelius, Marcus 300, 396, 477–478, 497
Axios Press 3
Ayer, A. J. 248
B
Babbitt, Irving 203
Babel, Issac 493–494
Bach, Johann Sebastian 59, 447
Backward Glance, A (Wharton) 142, 202
Backward the Sentences (Gibbs) 277
Bacon, Francis 31, 62, 254
Baez, Joan 72, 129
Baldwin, James 129, 278, 297, 357, 373, 435
Balenchine, George 7, 59
Balliett, Whitney 119
Balzac, Honoré de 33, 159, 167, 219, 247, 519
Banks, Jody 3
Barnes, Julian 537
Barrie, J. M. 222
Barth, Belle 95
Barzun, Jacques 15
Basic Judaism (Steinberg) 485
Bauer, Felice 165
Beard, Mary 396
Beaton, Cecil 287
Beats, the 121, 123
Beckett, Samuel 120, 123
Bedford, Sybille 536
Beebe, Lucius 276
Beerbohm, Max 176, 277, 285
Beethoven, Ludwig van 21, 59, 62, 188, 540
Begley, Louis 164
Bell, Charles Moberly 333–334
Belloc, Hilaire 195, 289
Bellow, Saul 278, 290, 375, 434
joke told by 397–398
literary rivals and 357
wit of 52
Bells of St. Mary’s, The 445
Benchley, Robert 51, 274, 409
Bend Sinister (Nabokov) 361
Benedict, Ruth 142
Benjamin, Walter 12
on Kafka 162, 164
Scholem and 438–441
Benson, E. F. 368
Benson, Godfrey Rathbone 501
Benson, Robert Hughes 514
Benton, William 336–337
Berdiaev, Nicolai 61
Bergson, Henri 90, 203
Berlin, Irving 51, 270, 411, 447
Berlin, Isaiah 1, 182, 235–249, 291, 336, 465, 531, 536
intellectual celebrity of 237–238
negative and positive liberty of 236
on student unrest in the sixties 128
pluralism of 236
Best of Sholem Aleichem (Aleichem, Howe) 383
Bevin, Ernest 242
Bezos, Jeff 58
Big Book of Jewish Humor (Novak, Waldoks) 399
Binet, Alfred 64
biography 270, 365–376, 515, 521
Blacks, The (Genet) 123
Blast 205
Blazing Saddles 97
Bloom, Allan 143
Bloom, Claire 357
Bloom, Harold 438
Bloomsbury Group 16, 205, 240, 241
Bogart, Humphrey 118, 119, 123, 417
Boissier, Gaston 366–368
Bombeck, Erma 52
Bonaparte, Napoleon 59, 62, 104, 322, 455, 494
“Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered, The” (James) 355
Book of the Courtier, The (Castiglione) 505–508
Book World 1
Booth, James 213–214, 363, 371
Boswell, James 299, 360, 374, 521–524
Boswell’s Presumptuous Task (Sisman) 521
Bowen, Elizabeth 239, 248
Bowra, Maurice 237, 238, 348
Berlin on 240
wit of 50
Boyles, Denis 332–336
Boys Town 445
Bradford, Richard 357–363
Bradley, F. H. 204, 251
Brando, Marlon 118, 122–123
Brand, Russell 51–52
Brann, Eva 10–11
Bratton, Johnny 420–421
Brave New World (Huxley) 169
Brennan, Maeve 213
Brideshead Revisited (Waugh) 284–285, 288, 290–291
Brokaw, Tom 69
Brombert, Victor 38–40, 152