It is unfortunate that Paul Greenberg’s appreciation of Walker Percy in these pages (November 1990) should have been marred by his misreading of The Moviegoer. Greenberg has fallen into the common critical error of reading that novel as if it were somehow radically different from . . . . Continue Reading »
In the course of a very long life, Malcolm Muggeridge made many enemies, but he surely made more friends, among whom it is one of the great pleasures of my life to have been included. His enemies could be found both to the left and to the right. Those on the left are easy to account for: by . . . . Continue Reading »
I have got materials toward a treatise,” Jonathan Swift wrote to Alexander Pope in September 1725, “proving the falsity of that definition of animal rationale, and to show it would be only rationis capax.” The “treatise,” published a year later, was Gulliver’s . . . . Continue Reading »
It is tedious when a speaker begins by protesting modestly that he is inadequate to the task before him, or that he is the last person who should have been asked to discuss the theme of his address. We are apt to dismiss such wincing disclaimers as belonging to what Goldsmith called “the decorums . . . . Continue Reading »
Conversations with Tom Wolfe edited by dorothy scura university press of mississippi, 296 pages, $29.95 Conversations with John Gardner edited by allan chavkin university press of mississippi, 310 pages, $29.95Because Tom Wolfe is a celebrity, there is every reason for him to agree to as many . . . . Continue Reading »
Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit by peter bien princeton university press, 318 pages, $29.95 By the time he died in 1957, the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis had established himself as one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. His extension of the Homerian epic. The . . . . Continue Reading »
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