On Easter, an anonymous reader sent a comment to Anecdotal Evidence in which he called me “fascist” and “elitist,” the tired epithets du jour. I’ve posted almost every comment I’ve received since this blog started more than two years ago, even a few that were obscene and so sloppy and ungrammatical as to be incoherent. If a reader takes the time to read my blog and takes additional time to respond to something I’ve written, he or she deserves the courtesy of being acknowledged. Sunday’s gift I deleted without posting because it managed to be inaccurate (not a crime), badly written (should be a crime) and monstrously lengthy (definitely a crime).
When the fan mail arrived, I was browsing in Guy Davenport’s third essay collection, The Hunter Gracchus (1996), and several of his sentences seem pertinent. In “Journal II,” Davenport, the most gentlemanly and least political of writers, observes:
“High-minded principles and intolerance are twins. The word liberal has over the past fifty years come to mean illiberal. Not only illiberal: puritanical, narrow-minded, mean.”
My unhappy reader expressed particular displeasure with something I had written long ago (thus flattering me with his attentiveness) about the supreme English short story writer, Rudyard Kipling. Davenport writes in “Journal I”:
“What got Kipling a bad name among liberals is his intelligence, humor, and affection. These they cannot tolerate in anybody.”
1 comment:
I am a liberal, and not particularly gentlemanly (or gentile, for that matter), and I have to say that what got Rudyard Kipling a bad name among liberals was his support for racist policies that were detrimental to both his countrymen in England and most of the people in the Empire. I doubt that anybody would say I dislike Kipling because of his intelligence, humor and affection; if you insist that they are all lying or deluded, well, then you naturally leave yourself open to accusations of elitism.
That said, most of my liberal friends (most of whom call themselves progressive rather than liberal, for a variety of reasons) seem to like Mr. Kipling's writing quite a bit, and appreciate a certain ... nuance, if I can call it that, in his depiction of the Burden and the White Man. In other words, what got Mr. Kipling a good name among liberals (of my acquaintance) is his writing.
Well. Monstrous length. Still, I'll add my condolences over the anonymous nastiness. Please, though, don't judge us all by the worst among us (or even according to our deserts, or who should 'scape whipping?).
Thanks,
-V.
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