'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. 

'The Only Information I am Seriously Interested In'

I’ve met three or four people who might accurately be described, even by others, as extremely “well-informed.” Most were journalists, whose jobs depend on keeping up with things, a virtue I have never possessed. These were men who had not only absorbed vast quantities of information – and that’s all “news” ever is – but were able to access it, articulate its essence and render an analysis instantaneously. An admission that they might have to “look up” something would have embarrassed them. 

Knowing stuff was a moral obligation for them, though what they knew tended to be current and thus tinged with provinciality. The present, after all, is a historical backwater. These men were smart and could readily think on their feet but had little historical knowledge of anything that had happened before, to be tactful, 1914. A winningly cynical editor I knew referred generically to such an exhaustive and exhausting approach to journalism as “a five-part series on the economy of Bulgaria” – and this was pre-1989.

 

In the Winter 1995 issue of The American Scholar, Joseph Epstein, then the journal’s editor, published the essay “An Extremely Well-informed SOB,” in which he shares my sense of ignorance. Epstein, of course, is a notably well-read man:

 

“Given all this reading--maybe it adds up to four or five hours a day--you might think me an extremely well-informed SOB. Funny, but I don’t in the least feel well-informed. If anything, I feel less and less informed as the years go by. Once upon a time, and not so long ago as all that, one could posit what an educated man or woman ought to know: what languages, what historical narratives, what works of philosophy, literature, music, and art.”

 

I once suggested to a young reporter during Desert Storm that if he wanted insight into the first Iraqi war he ought to read Homer’s Iliad. Naturally, he thought I was kidding. Everyone has a right to a hobby, whether collecting scrimshaw or baseball cards. Following the news is a benign hobby at least until it becomes fodder for argument. Seldom voiced is the notion that obsessively following current events is a form of egotism (not that dissenters from this camp are paragons of humility). Epstein continues:

 

“What, really, is the point of being well-informed? Perhaps the first answer to that question is that it relieves one of the embarrassment of seeming ignorant. Having information, knowing the score, the true gen (as Hemingway called it), the real lowdown, brings a thrill of its own special kind. Not only does it separate one from the ignoranti--cognoscenti 48, ignoranti 0--but it gives one the feeling that one is living the life of one's time.”

 

Some of us prefer living the life of Dr. Johnson’s or Emily Dickinson's time. Epstein offers a convincing explanation for why people want to amass reams of stuff that will soon be irrelevant and forgotten: “I suppose one of the reasons for being well-informed on everything is so that one can have an opinion on everything. The culture seems very opinionated just now.” And that was thirty years ago, an era that seems from our vantage almost humble and blissfully uninformed. Perhaps it comes down to knowing how to distinguish the important from the trivial – a gift that seems increasingly rare. Here is Epstein’s conclusion:

 

“With the information revolution closing in, I ask myself whether it isn’t possible to live deeper down, at some more genuine, less superficial level of life than that promised by an endless flow of still more and then yet again even more information. It has taken me a good while to understand this, but it turns out that the only information I am seriously interested in is that about the human heart, and this I cannot find any easy way to access, not even with the best of modems, fiber-optic cable, or digital technology. Pity, though, to have to miss out on another revolution.”

 

[Epstein’s essay is collected in Narcissus Leaves the Pool: Familiar Essays (1999).]

'Nor a Single Thing That Belongs to Us'

“The atmosphere in Lwów, in November, December . . . A city that had lost its beauty, a city besieged by fear.” 

The Polish poet Aleksander Wat is speaking with his friend Czesław Miłosz in a series of interviews later published as My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual (trans. Richard Lourie, 1988), recalling the days before the start of World War II.

 

“Did you know Lwów before the war? Lwów was one of the loveliest Polish cities in the sense that it was a merry city. Not so much the people, but the city itself. Very colorful, very exotic, it had none of the grayness of Warsaw, or even Poznań. Its exoticism made it a very European city.”

 

On August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin had agreed to the secret non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Nazis invaded Poland from the west nine days later. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. The battle was over, Poland subdued, by October 6. The Soviets were driven out of Poland by the Germans in 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later. Lwów is located in East Galicia, now part of Ukraine.

 

“Lwów was a bit more like the Vienna of operetta, the Vienna of joie de vivre. Like some of the Italian cities. Not all of them though—some Italian cities are dismal as well. Lwów was like Marseilles. Well, the Soviets had barely arrived, and all at once everything was covered in mud (of course, it was fall), dirty, gray, shabby. People began cringing and slinking down the streets. Right away, people started wearing ragged clothes, obviously they were afraid to be seen in their better clothes.”

 

Depending on its most recent conqueror, Lwów has been known as Lviv (the current designation), Lvov, Lemberg, Lwihorod and Leopolis. When Zbigniew Herbert was born there in 1924, it was part of the Second Polish Republic. Other natives include Emanuel Ax, Martin Buber, Stanisław Lem, Leopold Staff and Simon Wiesenthal.

 

Three days ago, on December 6, the Russians launched a massive drone and missile strike on Ukraine’s power generation infrastructure. This followed a similar attack on November 28-29. Power was interrupted in Lviv, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Odessa, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv. In “Mr Cogito Considers a Return to His Native Town” (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter) Herbert writes:

 

“If I went back there

I would probably not find

A single shadow of my old home

Nor the trees of childhood

Nor a cross with an iron plaque

A bench on which I murmured incantations

Nor a single thing that belongs to us.”

'A Certain Self-Knowledge'

For the sheer pleasure of it, here is a freely translated excerpt from the English poet-critic C.H. Sisson’s version of Horace’s Epistle II.3, “Ars Poetica,” published in 1974: 

“The man who can actually tell when a verse is lifeless

Will know when it doesn’t sound right; he will point to stragglers,

And equally put his pen through elaboration;

He will even force you to give up your favourite obscurities,

Tell you what isn’t clear and what has got to be changed,

Like Dr. Johnson himself. There will be no nonsense

About it not being worth causing trouble for trifles.

Trifles like that amount in the end to disaster,

Derisory writing and meaning misunderstood.”

 

Sisson’s translation is cantankerous, amusing and very un-Nabokovian. It is also among the most valuable sources of writerly know-how published during my lifetime. The work consists of a ten-page overview titled “The Ars Poetica in English Literature,” the 467-line translation and twelve pages of notes. There’s nothing stuffy about any of it:

 

“One may recommend the use of Johnson’s dictionary, as an ordinary working tool, to the apprentice writer—an expression which includes all writers worth their salt.”

 

This practical advice from the notes to lines 40-78, in which Horace (via Sisson) commends the use of new coinages, saying that “new-made words can flower, if they come from good roots.” The pun is tartly precise. He adds that neologisms should “not be allowed to run wild.”  Characteristically, Sisson urges tradition-minded novelty, moving forward while ever looking back:

 

“For why should the reader

Allow to Sterne what he will refuse to Joyce?

And why should I not add something, however little,

To the language which Chaucer and Shakespeare made more pointed?”

 

Among writers, masters are few. Most of us remain apprentices, a few are promoted to journeyman but the learning and hard work never cease. There is no graduation. Even the more gifted among us remain perpetual beginners. Implicit in apprenticeship is knowledge handed down. We study under those who excelled before us even if they died, like Horace, two millennia ago, or Johnson, more than two centuries ago. Of course, there are no guarantees. Perseverance doesn’t necessarily forgo failure. Here is Johnson’s definition of apprentice: “One that is bound by covenant, to serve another man of trade, upon condition that the tradesman shall, in the mean time, endeavor to instruct him in his art.” And here is Sisson in his notes to Horace:

 

“Find what you can write about and you have solved your problem. Of course the aspiring writer has to face the possibility that the answer may be, Nothing. At any rate the beginning, as the continuation, of literary capacity involves a certain self-knowledge. Nothing is further from it, therefore, than the intoxications of publicity and reputation.”

 

I recommend Horace: Poet on a Volcano by Peter Stothard (Yale University Press, 2025) and Horace in English: Poets in Translation (Penguin, 1996), edited by R.S. Carne-Ross and Kenneth Haynes. Quintas Horatius Flaccus was born on this date, December 8, in 65 B.C. and died in 8 B.C. at age fifty-six.

'I Think We Forget Too Easily'

Two of my stories were published on Page One of The Bellevue Gazette on December 7, 1981. The banner carries the headline “Proposal drafted for sheriff services,” accompanied by a photo I had taken of the mayor at his desk with the safety-service director standing beside him.

The other story, played on the lower left, has one headline, “Bellevue survivor remembers Pearl Harbor,” with a another beneath it printed in larger type: “They did their job well,” and a photo I took of a man in late middle age standing by pictures and framed medals hanging on a wall. The lede:

“Bellevue’s Thomas Stark was pressing a suit of whites, preparing to go ashore on liberty, when the first Japanese bombs were landing.”

Stark was the first Pearl Harbor survivor I met and interviewed. I no longer remember how I found him. Bellevue is a small town in north central Ohio. The population in 2020 was about 8,200. Bellevue was a railroad hub earlier in the century. An outfielder for the Chicago Cubs was born there. The town historian was my barber.

Stark was twenty-one when the Japanese attacked, a Second-Class Quartermaster serving on the USS Pelias, a submarine tender. He had joined the Navy in November 1936, not long after graduating from Bellevue Senior High School. He was up at 7 that morning and expected to spend the day in Oahu. “Which I didn’t quite make,” he told me. The Pelias was docked about a mile from Battleship Row. The first bomb fell at 7:55 a.m. and within two or three minutes the Pelias crew was at its battle stations. It was armed with two five-inch guns and an assortment of .30- and .45-caliber machine guns. The Pelias crew and a submarine crew got credit for downing one Japanese plane. “Our anti-aircraft guns were pitiful, obsolete,” Stark said. “They were worthless against their high-altitude bombers.”

Several men aboard the Pelias were wounded but none was killed. The all-clear sounded at 9:45. On a motor launch from the battleship USS California, Stark served as the signalman for a rescue party that ventured over to the USS West Virginia. There’s a famous photograph of the burning ship. In the background of the grainy picture, the crippled giant billows thick, black smoke. In the foreground, a motor launch is dwarfed by the sheer bulk of the ship. Discernable as a white smudge on the bow of the motor launch is a sailor reaching over the side of the boat, pulling another sailor from the water. “That’s me,” Stark said.

Stark remained stationed at Pearl Harbor until April 1942. He stayed in the Navy until 1946 and served the rest of the war in the Pacific, finishing at Iwo Jima. Stark’s wartime animosity against the Japanese had faded. “You can’t hold a grudge forever,” he said. “You can’t hold it against them for doing their duty.” Stark revisited Pearl Harbor in 1976. He was a member of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association and wore its ring on his right hand. Around a blue sapphire, representing the blue skies of Hawaii, was the group’s motto: “Remember Pearl Harbor – Keep America Alert.” He told me: “I think we forget too easily.”

Stark died in Bellevue in 1988 at age sixty-nine.

'Quaffs, crams, and guttles'

A new word discovered while reading John Dryden’s translation of the Sixth Satire of the Roman poet Persius: 

“He sprinkles pepper with a sparing hand.

His jolly brother, opposite in sense,

Laughs at his thrift; and, lavish of expence,

Quaffs, crams, and guttles, in his own defence.”

 

Guttle is defined by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary as “to feed luxuriously; to gormandise. A low word.” The OED is a little less dismissive. As an intransitive verb it gives “to eat voraciously; to gormandize.” In the transitive form: “to devour or swallow greedily.” The dictionary also includes guttlesome and guttler. For the latter it cites Robert Browning in “Fust and His Friends: An Epilogue” (Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day, 1887):

 

“’Tis said, in debauchery’s guild

Admitted prime guttler and guzzler — O swine! –

To honor thy headship, those tosspots so swille

That out of their table there sprouted a vine . . .”

 

The OED offers an uncertain etymology in gut, a word borrowed from German meaning, in English, “a particular portion of the lower alimentary canal between the pylorus and the anus.” In modern demotic English, an ample belly.

 

Just the other day I witnessed an unashamed public act of guttling. I stopped for a cup of coffee at a convenience store where I saw a man, large and middle-aged, seated at a table and cramming an entire breakfast sandwich into his mouth, like some kind of frat stunt. I feared choking, and mentally reviewed my Heimlich technique, but he chewed away, suggesting he had a lot of practice. He swallowed the first sandwich and was unwrapping the second when I left. He reminded me of a snake eating an improbably large snack. Of course, snakes have no intermaxillary bone, unlike most humans, and can readily swallow a mere breakfast sandwich.

'The Greeks Knew What They Were Talking About'

Age is dreaded for the supposedly inevitable loss of memory. We lose the past and dwell in a timeless, featureless present as blank as a movieless movie screen in a theater. Contemporaries grow tedious when they forget who recorded “One Toke Over the Line” in 1970 and interpret their forgetfulness as a symptom of impending idiocy. (How interesting that memory is associated with and perhaps identical to the essential self.)  I don’t recall my parents or their friends ever fretting about such things, and suspect it is yet another era-specific indication of narcissism. 

Clara Claiborne Park (1923-2010) was a marvelous writer, a long-time teacher at Williams College who wrote movingly about her autistic daughter. She was also an essayist and reviewer, and I remember reading “The Mother of the Muses: In Praise of Memory” in the Winter 1981 issue of The American Scholar. Park reminds us:

 

“To call on the Muses is a way of talking about what are, if not actual presences, still realities which poets take utterly seriously--as must any of us who have found words taking shape in our heads, and wondered where on earth (on earth?) they were coming from.”

 

In modern parlance, the Muses represent Inspiration or Creativity – that mysterious human capacity familiar to every honest writer and other artists. Where did that good idea come from? Park also reminds us of the Muses’ pedigree:

 

“And the Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne, Memory. It is my antique conviction that the Greeks knew what they were talking about--that to make the Muses the daughters of Memory is to express a fundamental perception of the way in which Creativity operates.”

 

Park asks a good question and supplies us with a homely answer (Park is nothing if not pragmatic and matter-of-fact):

 

“Well, what can they do for us, on the rare occasions when we ask their assistance? How do we remember the number of days in the months? ‘Thirty days hath September, / April, June, and November,’ the rhymes and strong fourfold beat combining to give us instant recall of needed facts we otherwise would have to figure out on our knuckles?”

 

And this:

 

“Schliemann went where he went and dug where he dug because the Muses told him to, and but for their testimony the gold of Mycenae, and the shaft graves, and the burned city of Troy VII would still be underground.”

 

Some of my sentences come automatically, and I sense they’re drawn from a higher brain function. Call it rationalism, not unlike solving a differential equation. But others, often the more interesting ones (to me, if not the reader) are mysterious. They seem to appear ab nihilo, from nowhere, like a magician pulling a coin from my ear. I recommend reading all of Park’s essay. After more than forty years I remembered how good it was and how much it moved me. Here is the conclusion to Park’s essay, a marvelous coda to her thinking:

   

“The mind is the greatest of computers, and it works its marvels best when well stored- with facts: names, dates, places, events, sequences--and also with language: words, phrases, sentences, the tongues of men and of angels. Perhaps language is the most important of all. We all notice the contraction in the range of reference of the young. But facts can be looked up, that's true, and if we get a grant, our servants can do that for us. What’s harder to acquire—in adulthood hard indeed--is that intimacy with language, that sense for different ways of using it, which grows naturally when we carry Shakespeare and the Bible, Jefferson and Lincoln, Eliot and Yeats, Edward Lear and P. G. Wodehouse in our heads. In our heads or, better, in another part of the body, there where we ‘learn by heart’--there in the unconscious, where the Muses sing to us darkling, and all the richness of what we know and value can come together in unexpected, unheard-of combinations. Memory is not the enemy of Inspiration, or of thought either. Today, as always, it is the essential prerequisite of both.”

 

[See this cover version of “One Toke Over the Line.”]