The American Spectator

p> In Review: br> strong> em>Stet, Damnit! br> The Misanthrope’s Corner, 1991-2002 /em> br> by Florence King br> (National Review Books, 506 pages, $29.95) /strong> /p>

It is daunting to be charged with composing a notice of Stet, Damnit!, the valedictory anthology containing all the columns that Florence King wrote for National Review between 1991 and 2002. For one thing, she is herself a peerless reviewer, as TAS readers well know; for another, you might leave a participle dangling tumescently out there in the ether, and if it reached print she might see it and snicker at you. I’m not sure, but I think I might have been sent the book as a punishment for belittling my editor’s moaning about writer’s block. (“C’mon, isn’t that just a euphemism for laziness?”)

Another problem is that George Will came annoyingly close to saying it all with his oft-reprinted comment that “If Mencken were alive, he would be her.” This captures King’s loathing of human beings in the mass, and usefully calls attention to her unclassifiability. No intelligent human can wear the label “conservative” with complete comfort, except insofar as he has decided that his private definition of the term is the right and proper one. It might be more useful if we spoke in terms of “1833 conservatives” or “1065 conservatives” or “44 B.C. conservatives,” depending on what exact state of human society the referent hopes to conserve.

I’d peg Florence King somewhere around the mid-eighteenth century, perhaps earlier. Her ideal America — an America of baronetcies, male-only suffrage, and public floggings for comma abuse — must strike most as a comic scenario from speculative fiction. If she doesn’t exactly mean all her wildest denunciations of the contemporary Tocquevillian inferno, one can at least sense, rereading a decade’s worth of fortnightly columns, that she is continually looking around in desperation for a good reason not to mean them.

Her own popularity is perhaps the best one. There is a thriving King cult, and her departure from NR’s back page caused muted but strenuous national grieving. Women and fellow writers venerate her particularly keenly, and I would be startled to read a bad review — in a respectable place — of anything she had written. I have personally known female King devotees aged 75 and 25. Anyone with even a hint of literary or comic sensibility who now attempts to parse Southern society has to acknowledge a debt to her books and journalism.