“He was the very model of a grand old man: punctilious, unbellicose, evenhanded, coasting with evident enjoyment down the waning rim of his life and into—well, posterity?”
Who is the subject of this
enviably generous summing-up? When I read it again this week nearly fifty years
after it was written, I was struck by how the virtues singled out by the author
may no longer be judged virtues by many readers and writers. Punctilious? How
bourgeois. How anal-retentive. How boring. Unbellicose? With patriarchies to
smash? Running dogs to euthanize? Life is war. Evenhanded? Fairness is unfair.
Enjoying life into old age? A privilege of the privileged.
In his foreword to a new
edition of F.L. Lucas’ Style, originally published in 1955, Joseph
Epstein writes:
“For Lucas, style `is
personality clothed in words, character embodied in speech.’ He adds: `If you
wish your writing to seem good, your character must seem at least partly so.
And since in the long run deception is likely to be found out, your character
had better not only seem good, but be it.’ He notes that before Napoleon
appointed anyone to an important post he first asked whether he had written
anything, and if so he wanted to read it so that he could see its style.”
[Guesses as to the
identity of the writer described at the top and the author of the description
are welcome.]
[ADDENDUM: In the passage at the top, L.E. Sissman is writing about W.H. Auden in “Auden” (Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s, 1975).]
6 comments:
E. M. Forster?
George Sanrayana?
I remember reading an enjoyable book of portraits by Frederick Prokosh (sic). This reminds me of what I remember of Santayana.
This captures Oliver Wendell Holmes in his later years. Learned Hand, once his law clerk, tells of walking the aged Holmes to the courthouse mutely one day and, feeling he should talk,wittily bade Holmes good morning with ,” Well justice: do justice.” As the satisfied Hand departed Holmes summoned him back with: “ Young man. My job is not to ‘do justice’ but to see that justice is done.”
When, as a very young man, Max Beerbohm was invited to pay a visit to the home of Algernon Swinburne, he (Max) peered around at the artifacts of pre-Raphaelitism on the walls, and thought himself "an intruder from posterity". Max's old age in Rapallo Italy was as "punctilious, unbellicose, and evenhanded" as could be.
When the correct answer is “ Auden” and my guess was “Oliver Wendell Holmes” I can hear the umpire loudly intoning “swing and a miss! “
Post a Comment