In Review:
Stet, Damnit!
The Misanthrope’s Corner, 1991-2002
by Florence King
(National Review Books, 506 pages, $29.95)
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.
STILL, SHE IS OUT OF PLACE even in the chivalric underbelly of the
American republic, as she knows. That fine-tuned ear for dialect
and cant is, and could only be, an outsider’s. When King is written
of, much is often made of certain intriguing facts of her
biography: reviewers have often burbled, for instance, about the
presence of a “bisexual” in NR’s rumble seat, which only
goes to show what sort of person typically makes a living reviewing
books.
The real biographical key to King’s writing, if there is one, is
that her father was an Englishman. Far be it from me to contradict
conventional wisdom about an “Anglosphere” held together with
sinews of iron, but literature proves the geographic truth that
Great Britain is more than a brisk swim from Maine. Try naming
another American writer who can be placed in the “Tory anarchist”
line to which Florence King belongs. (Max Beerbohm coined the term;
Orwell used it of himself, and of Jonathan Swift; Auberon Waugh
adopted it, and it suits his father as well.)
Mencken? I revere Mencken, but his brain got rather spongy in
the presence of his Teuton household gods — scientists, composers,
Nietzsche. You can take the German out of Germany, but you can’t
take the reflexive earnestness out of the German. In the field of
the comic novel, you won’t find an American who is as plain mean as
King. The acknowledged masters are huggy types like John Irving or
Kurt Vonnegut who wouldn’t slap a horsefly.
Among her rival print columnists, there are few left who believe
anything but that the prescription for society’s ills is voting for
the Good Guys, whoever they may be, next time around. King’s own
treatment would probably involve great quantities of benzene and a
Zippo. Anyway, the very job of freewheeling “culture commentator”
is dying out: as she never quite gets around to asking in Stet,
Damnit!, how can you have a culture commentator without a
culture? King will remain, I think, a lonely bluestockinged bird
perched on her own crag.
ALL THAT REALLY NEEDS to be said of Stet, Damnit! is to
reiterate that it contains the complete “Misanthrope’s Corner,”
and, hence, is a required purchase. It is a tour de force,
a book to be saved for the grandkids. You will find, once you own
it, that it is a particularly useful chronicle of the Boy Clinton
years, though it is a bit surprising in retrospect how little fun
King actually had at his particular expense. One would have thought
Clinton was exactly the yeasty sort of material for which her
scalpel had been whetted, and occasionally it flashes: “I knew
there was something familiar about Bill Clinton. The moment Paula
Jones said ‘hotel’ and ‘convention’ my youth came back to me. The
Prez reminds me of the Man on the Plane, the ubiquitous middle-aged
businessman with husband written all over him who lives
for out-of-town flings.”
But these moments of personal violence are rare. She was more
interested in recording the vapid climate of effeminacy and
sensitivity that begat President Pantyremover and shaped his
destiny. Stet, Damnit! establishes Clinton’s place in
history as a helpless, lumbering Blakean emanation of the Nineties.
We are reminded, to take one example, that then Cincinnati Reds
manager Jack McKeon ordered his pitchers not to work around Mark
McGwire when he was sitting at 59 home runs, on the verge of a
record, in the fall of 1998. Clinton was being impeached, and
McKeon wanted to do something nice for “all those people that have
been calling my voice mail wanting me to heal the country.” O
tempora!
Really it’s no wonder she quit. Ten years is an awful long time
to urge logic and clarity on a country that issues hunting licenses
to the blind, devises lightweight hand grenades for female combat
soldiers, and puts warning labels on balls of string.
