Books

The 20th-century French writer Albert Camus remains a living author, a permanent contemporary, in a way that the far more dogmatic and ideological Jean-Paul Sartre does not. The latter provided a caricature of “existentialism,” nihilism dressed up as absolute freedom, beholden to no limits and no enduring truths. In contrast, the author of The Stranger and The Plague rejected Sartre’s facile nihilism, as well as his repellant accommodation with murderous messianism, typically conveyed in fashionable leftist nostrums. The more hopeful side of Camus comes through in his recently re-released Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World.

The arc of Gustav Mahler’s career was staggering. Born in 1860 to a poor Jewish family in Bohemia, through tenacity and talent he climbed to dizzying heights, nabbing the conductorship of the Vienna Hofoper, New York’s Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. He became a celebrity, hounded by paparazzi as he zipped back and forth across the Atlantic by steamer, a forerunner of today’s globetrotting conductors with their NetJet commutes.  Yet Mahler was plagued throughout his life by nagging existential fears, serious illness and marital strife. He poured this angst into his composing. “Why have you lived?” Mahler wrote in a letter to a friend. “Why have you suffered? Is it all some huge, awful joke?

I don’t think anyone has ever come up with a word to describe an authorized author. It’s not quite a tautology. The writer, who has been invited to write a novel continuing the body of work of another, might, possibly, be an example of literary parthenogenesis. Or, more pejoratively, karaoke. Who knows? But either way, it’s a growth industry. You will have seen the new authorized James Bond novels, the recently crafted Miss Marple and George Smiley outings that have appeared on the bookstore shelves over the past few years to some fanfare – despite the fact that those characters’ creators are very much pushing up the daisies.

To speak of Mark Twain is to speak of the American psyche laid bare: forever restless, with an insatiable appetite for reinvention and biting commentary. Twain was not just a novelist or humorist: he was, in many respects, the nation’s most accurate mirror. He wrote the truth and then laughed at it. He carved his stories out of riverbanks and war zones, courtrooms and campfires. In his storytelling, Twain blurred the lines between truth and falsehoods, rage and laughter, freedom and fate. He gave us some of the greatest figures in American fiction. But Twain (1835-1910) was a creation more vivid, more volatile and more enduring than any character he put on the page. The “father of American literature,” as William Faulkner called him, didn’t hide behind his fiction.

Wonks are a useful sort to have around; no governing class should be without them. A wonk is someone who makes technical improvements to the existing order of things while remaining obedient to its premises. No social order can run entirely on its own propaganda. There does, somewhere, need to be some group of sober and dutiful people applying themselves to secular problems. For 21st-century America, this has been the “juicebox mafia,” a group of liberal bloggers who came of age in the early 2000s. Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitsas and Noah Smith were self-conscious wonks – the first, indeed, to treat wonkery as a personal credo. They called their articles “explainers” rather than op-eds.

In the middle of the 18th century, on the north side of the Palais Royal gardens in Paris, there stood a magnificent chestnut tree called the Tree of Cracow. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 2000, Robert Darnton explained that the name Cracow probably derived from the heated debates that took place in Paris during the War of the Polish Succession, but also from the French verb craquer: to tell dubious stories. News-mongers or nouvellistes de bouche, agents for foreign diplomats and curious members of the public gathered round the tree, which was at the heart of Paris’s news network, a nerve center for transmitting information, gossip and rumors.

So, Joe Biden spent a great deal of his term in office suffering from what might politely be called senile dementia, and those who enabled him led the Democrats to one of their most humiliating electoral defeats off the back of this subterfuge. This cannot in all honesty be called a revelation.When I first read the breathless headlines that came about from the publication of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s exposé of the Biden regime, Original Sin, I was reminded of Horatio’s words in Hamlet: “There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave, to tell us this.” And although Biden himself may not be in the grave, the (suspiciously timed) announcement of his late-stage prostate cancer may mean that this book functions as an epitaph of sorts for him.

I used to run into Salman Rushdie at London literary parties a couple of decades ago, before he became a US citizen in 2016 and largely made his life there afterwards. He was always charming and likable company, during the brief conversations that we had, and the worst that I would say of him is that he was all too aware of his own fame and reputation. Certainly, I was not the only one in a long line of admirers and acolytes wishing for a couple of moments with the great man, and Rushdie certainly paid rather more attention to the attractive women or girls than he did to the rather gauche young men who had read Midnight’s Children or The Satanic Verses.

What more can be said of the American conservative commentator, novelist, musician, sailor, talk-show host and tireless public intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008), that he or his previous biographers haven’t already said or written? After all, this is an individual who in 1983 wrote a 90,000-word book, called Overdrive, covering the events of a single week of his life. Plenty more, it turns out, as Sam Tanenhaus proves in his thousand-page biography Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. Buckley was blessed with a voice that sounded like he let it marinate in a cask of port between appearances Buckley was 58 when he wrote Overdrive, and kept to a schedule that would have taxed the energy of a man half his age.