'The Most Corrupt Writer Who Ever Lived'

If I were to ask you to name a “corrupt” writer, who comes to mind first? Consider the adjective. From the Latin and French, the original fourteenth-century English borrowing, according to the OED, meant “putrid, rotten or rotting; infected or defiled by that which causes decay.” In other words, a biochemical process, a dissolution of living tissue. The word mutated into its more familiar figurative sense almost immediately: “debased in character; infected with evil; depraved; perverted; evil, wicked.” Thus, it becomes a common modifier of politicians and political behavior, as in “corrupt Congressman.” 

As to corrupt writers, the description applies to those who do not necessarily write ineptly or have little fondness for linguistic felicity. Rather, it suggests dishonesty and an advocacy of stupid, vulgar, self-indulgent or hateful ideas. Lots of candidates come to mind, of course. My first nominee is Norman Mailer. It must be difficult for young people to comprehend how embarrassingly awful Mailer’s thinking and prose could be (Marilyn, anyone? Ancient Evenings? Tough Guys Don’t Dance?), and how seriously he was taken by critics and readers. I remember reading The Naked and the Dead as a teenager and wondering what all the fuss was about. I had already read U.S.A. by Dos Passos, and Mailer was clearly manipulating some of the same narrative devices as his predecessor. A tone of strident preaching and dangerously elevated levels of machismo were already discernable.

 

Michael Oakeshott suggests an even more consequential example of writerly corruption in a 1967 entry in his Notebooks, 1922-86 (Imprint Academic, 2014):

 

“Karl Marx is a remarkable writer. No other can turn possible truths into superstitions so rapidly & so conclusively. Every truth that came to him he turned into a falsehood. He is, possibly, the most corrupt writer who ever lived. It is not, therefore, surprising that he became the apostle of the illiterate masses of the world – by ‘illiterate’ I mean those who can accept nothing but what has been endowed with the quality of superstition.”

 

For the unconvinced I suggest reading the three-volume history of Marxist philosophy, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution (1976; trans. P.S. Falla, 1978) by Leszek Kolakowski, who describes Marxism as “the greatest fantasy of the twentieth century.” Later in his Notebooks Oakeshott writes:

 

“It was not Marx who portended the new, deadly uniformity; it was Francis Bacon & St Simon, the Faustian progenitors of a world where everything is organized. The world where law has ceased to be lore.”

 

Oakeshott was born on this date, December 11, in 1901, and died in 1990 at age eighty-nine.