Darkness Risible
James Wolcott at the top of his game with a 5980-word review of Selected Letters of William Styron, checking every last marquee name from the postwar literary cocktail circuit to comic effect. The bit at the top about Alfred Kazin
Discount Kazin’s weary, load-bearing sigh in this characteristic entry from his journals, which record him enduring party after party, decade after decade, as if it were his suffering duty, a Calvary of cocktails and canapes. Had Kazin not been invited, he would have been even sorer, nursing a fine, bitter grudge, his other favourite hobby.
recalls "My Correct Views on Everything," Leszek Kolakowski's epic reply to E.P. Thompson's "An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski" in 1974 in the Socialist Register:
Your letter contains some personal grievances and some arguments on general questions. I will start with a minor personal grievance. Oddly enough, you seem to feel offended by not having been invited to the Reading conference and you state that if you had been invited you would have refused to attend anyway, on serious moral grounds. I presume, consequently, that if you had been invited, you would have felt offended as well and so, no way out of hurting you was open to the organizers.
Discount Kazin’s weary, load-bearing sigh in this characteristic entry from his journals, which record him enduring party after party, decade after decade, as if it were his suffering duty, a Calvary of cocktails and canapes. Had Kazin not been invited, he would have been even sorer, nursing a fine, bitter grudge, his other favourite hobby.
recalls "My Correct Views on Everything," Leszek Kolakowski's epic reply to E.P. Thompson's "An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski" in 1974 in the Socialist Register:
Your letter contains some personal grievances and some arguments on general questions. I will start with a minor personal grievance. Oddly enough, you seem to feel offended by not having been invited to the Reading conference and you state that if you had been invited you would have refused to attend anyway, on serious moral grounds. I presume, consequently, that if you had been invited, you would have felt offended as well and so, no way out of hurting you was open to the organizers.
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