Literature

"Oxford I do not enjoy,” wrote T.S. Eliot to Conrad Aiken in February 1915. “The food and the climate are execrable, I suffer indigestion, constipation, and colds constantly.” The poet was clearly having one of his bad days. Since arriving at the university the previous October, he had found himself in and out of love with the place, which was hardly surprising, given the timing. Most of the undergraduates at Oxford had either left or were on the verge of leaving to fight for their country, meaning that the lecture and tutorial rooms were almost empty, the sports fields green through lack of use, and the centuries-old traditions stalling like motor cars on the long stretch of the High.

I first encountered P.J. O’Rourke’s writings as a teenager in a copy of Modern Manners my father encouraged me to buy while we were browsing the secondhand offerings of an offbeat little bookstore (looking back, I can’t imagine who in their right mind would part with such a book). “You should get that, he’s funny,” dad said. That evening, I read some G-rated excerpts to my traditionalist parents, who laughed out loud. For me, it was love at first quip. I finished the rest of Modern Manners in one sitting, completely taken by a style of writing I found blended the best qualities of a person. It was smart, perceptive, clever, sensitive and, of course, good-humored. Reading P.J. O’Rourke inspired me to want to write in a way that informs and entertains.

Some fiction, regardless of how intimately tethered to a time and place, is timeless. And the work of Agatha Christie certainly seems that way. Christie's novel Death on the Nile is now receiving renewed cinematic treatment under the expert hand of Kenneth Branagh, with the film scheduled for release on February 11. This follows the success of Branagh’s 2017 adaption of Murder on the Orient Express, which grossed $351 million against a production budget of $55 million. “Rest assured," says Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in Christie’s novel Five Little Pigs. "I am the best!” The same might be said of Christie herself, the world’s all-time bestselling fiction author.

When Carmen Mola won Spain’s Planeta literary prize for her crime thriller, The Beast, it was widely assumed that she was a female professor with a hardboiled literary style. Think again, mis amigas. Mola was the pseudonymous literary creation of three men: Jorge Diaz, Antonio Mercero and Agustin Martinez. The three scriptwriters smirkingly accepted the million-euro prize at a ceremony in October, and the literary world, home of uppity puritans and shrill wokesters, immediately found itself enmeshed in a scandal highlighting issues relating to authenticity and authorial freedom.

Evelyn Waugh is popularly known today as a comic author, despite the fact that Brideshead Revisited, made famous by the eponymous 1981 television series, is certainly not a comedy. Not everyone agrees. Years ago, a well-read friend of mine remarked to me that he was not fond of Waugh’s work. When I asked why, he replied, ‘Because I don’t think he’s that funny.’ I answered that the way to appreciate the exquisite wit of Evelyn Waugh is to approach him in the expectation of something other than humor, in which case the absurd incongruities, outrageous juxtapositions and ludicrous extremes that occur throughout the novels are in fact supremely funny. Waugh never set out to write comedic stories in the manner of P.G.

I was introduced to Tom Wolfe in the late 1970s, a year or two after I had begun my journalistic career as the literary editor at National Review, by Timothy Dickinson — an Oxford man working for Lewis Lapham, then editor of Harper’s — who was (as he doubtless remains) the sole ambulatory compendium of the British Museum. As Wolfe was fond of Middle Eastern cuisine, we met for lunch at a Lebanese place in Manhattan’s Garment District. While saying goodbye on the sidewalk out front of the restaurant after the meal, Timothy dropped his walking stick which was headless; only the screw that had once fastened the missing head in place protruding from the top of the shaft.