"I believe life should be savored rather than lengthened, and I am ready to fight the misanthropes among us who are trying to make me switch." --Florence King, January 5, 1936 to January 6, 2016
On hearing of the death of a favorite writer, the immediate impulse is to yell STOP THE PRESSES! and rush into print with a lot of gush. Then it occurs to me that there really is no need to hurry, for the dearly beloved will surely be dead for some time. Which is just the kind of observation Miss King herself would have made, for she was a woman of finite jest and a joy for 10 minutes, which is about all it took to read one of her eagerly awaited essays, book reviews, columns, or anything else.
Concise, biting, wry, she was always our own Miss King. In her youth, in need of every penny she was paid by the anonymous word, she had written novels and even sank to writing a romance novel, The Barbarian Princess. Miss King, who called herself a Failed Southern Lady, was many things: careful adherent of the propriety learned from her English father and Southern grandmother, occasional lesbian, and ordinary broad, but never without her jaundiced eye. A social critic equal to H.L. Mencken or Thorstein Veblen, there was not a trace of their teutonic solemnity in her work. For she sliced through our media-induced coma like an Arkansas toothpick, better known as the Bowie knife.
It was a source of great satisfaction to see a second-rater like Molly Ivins caught plagiarizing our Miss King, yet you had to admire Ms. Ivins' good taste in what she chose to steal.
Miss King's specialty was the good review of a bad book. It would be nigh impossible to top the opening paragraph of one such review: "Back in the Cold War, whenever I had to review an unreadable book, I always comforted myself with the thought, 'Maybe the Russians will drop the Bomb and I won't have to finish reading this.' Those were the days. This time, stuck with A Pilgrim's Way: The Personal Story of the Episcopal Bishop Charged with Heresy for Ordaining a Gay Man Who Was in a Committed Relationship, by the Rt. Rev. Walter C. Righter, author of the longest subtitle in publishing history, all I could hope for was an asteroid."
Or consider the opening words of her review of The Sibling Society by Robert Bly: "Robert Bly is known as 'the woods man,' 'the tom-tom man,' or simply 'the man man' thanks to the movement he founded to help men rediscover what he calls the 'mythopoetic' roots of masculinity through reenactments of primitive male-group rituals. It involves campfires, animal skins, reverence for the tribal elder (Bly), and enough spears for round-the-clock performances of Aida in the major opera houses of the world." Bly is "an incorrigible romantic in the Jean-Jacques Rousseau mold, [who] periodically slips over the line into metaphorical hysteria." She skewers his prose: "Whether from an excess of testosterone or simply a tin ear, his comparisons read like a clash of titans: 'Why should desire disappear, like the red wolf, the passenger pigeon, and the Irish elk, into extinction?' Like heroism, sacrifice, and charity? The sentence requires three emotions, or three ethics. To go from desire to elks conjures a bellowing rut."
Or her review of The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw, titled "Like a Brokaw Record: The Most Banal Generalizations," which begins: "Once upon a time, the human race was divided into writers and talkers, a sensible arrangement that, like so many other sensible arrangements, America has completely demolished. Having no real grasp of either literary style or brilliant conversation, we assume that introspective writers can yak it up on television, and expect the writer to turn as subtle and reflective on paper the moment they are alone with their thoughts. Unless you have just returned from a Tibetan retreat you are already familiar with [the contents of Brokaw's book] because Brokaw has been telling stories from it, quoting himself in almost word-for-word approximations of the text, on every talk show that will have him--which is to say, all of them. The stories are quite effective in spoken form, but to meet them in print is to know with Socratic certainty that unexamined words are not worth reading."
That's just a taste of Miss King's ability to smash banalities to pieces. Whether taking on organ transplants, the idolization of children, or the squishy platitudes of women's lib, she leaves no sacred cow unslaughtered, no cliché undemolished. She always leaves us with a sense of freedom from the throbbing idiocies that bear down upon us and demand our attention. . . .
As she said, "I believe that life is to be savored rather than lengthened." That's our Miss King.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 01/20/2016