Of Nisbets, ISBNs and Has-Beens

Continuing a previous post on Karl Popper that started as an email thread:

Okay, just one more, which I shall great-grandfather in after having name-checked Robert Nisbet in closing my lead letter in the TLS for June 26; file the age-synced obits below under "What a difference thirty-five years do not make" or perhaps an expansion of the old Benny Hill/pub joke ending with "twenty-two today!" by sixty more:

Obituary, The New York Times, 1961: 

ROBERT NISBET, 82, PAINTER, RIFLEMAN*

Obituary, The New York Times, 1996: 

Robert Nisbet 82, Sociologist and Conservative Champion

*Over to you, Chuck "The Rifleman" Connors, another "conservative champion" with "Second Amendment Solutions" all your own, in this ammo-amplified case at YouTube far too many to count ...

Tying the non-gunslinger Robert Nisbet back to my earlier subject Karl Popper, I recalled that back in January 1983 in The New Republic, then in the first of its two Hendrik "Rick" Hertzberg editorships (alternating with two under Mike Kinsley, 1977-1991 combined), a young Charles Krauthammer, not long after writing speeches for Walter Mondale, reviewed Nisbet's Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (practically Jonah Goldberg's Enchiridion, so he says in, inter alia, this 2017 Popper-like self-"interview") under the mock-Popperian headline "The Poverty of Ahistoricism."

Just browsing the Contents pages of those old TNR books sections forty-plus years on is enough to send this old then-collegian bookman into Proustian sugar shock, or what Joe Strummer would call "a little jump of electrical shockers", e.g., Walter Laqueur, (who had appeared in the inaugural issue of Encounter thirty years earlier as "Mark Alexander", while based in Jerusalem, in the interest of protecting intimates in sensitive regions) reviewing Noam Chomsky (headlined, harhar, "The Politics of Adolescence" - speaking of which, anybody seen my Che, I mean Murray Rothbard, T-shirt?) and the second memoir of Henry Kissinger  (reminding me of Chomsky's review of K's first one, 1500+ pp., two years earlier, in the Koch-funded, Cato-adjacent biweekly INQUIRY, "best of the right-wing rags" per Hendrik Hertzberg then). Or how about TIME culture vulture Stefan Kanfer reviewing the novel, branded odious by one critical contingent, in which

George Steiner applied his patented "ventriloquism" (per Edward Said in the Nation, 1985) of divers figures to the special pleading in his own defense of a jungle-captured Hitler, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., under the headline, "The Perversity of G.S."?

I suppose, as they say, "I could write a book" on this stuff, though I shall probably have to rest content on the laurels (and, harhar, hardys) of "my" (90+% of my original 20x expansions still surviving) two li'l contest-awarded Wiki articles from 2012-2013, on the Spender-Kristol-Lasky Encounter, and Dwight Macdonald's politics.

Speaking of contact buzzes, books recently/almost ordered via Abebooks and eBay at c. $4-8 postpaid (commences shortening URLs from 1000+ characters each down to their verbal roots); tip: can't find your bibliophilic Holy Grail at a decent price - or anywhere? Try The Internet Archive and maybe, just maybe, read it for free:

Noel Annan, Our Age: English Intellectuals Between the World Wars: A Group Portrait

Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives

Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales

Willa Cather, Collected Stories

John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life Since 1800

Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804

John Keats, a yet to be determined combination of the Poems and the Selected Letters (perhaps even John Keats: A New Life by Nicholas Roe, a steal in VG cond. at $3.88 postpaid), both, I have it on 200+ years of good authority, among the finest in all the annals of English and world literature, the better to justify my constantly quoting, e.g., "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" ("Much have I traveled in the realms of gold" ... "Silent, upon a peak in Darien." - or, in my adjacent Cheever-country high-school case almost fifty years ago, Wilton ...)

Ferdinand Mount, Jem (and Sam)

Update, August 15:

I think I might swap out the first volume of Richard Holmes's Coleridge, above, for the pioneering Life of William Blake that was published in 1863, two years after the death of its author, Alexander Gilchrist, and reissued in 2005 (free at The Internet Archive) as part of a series, edited by Richard Holmes for Harper Perennial, of historic literary biographies; and that old well-illustrated hardy perennial on William Blake that the pre-eminent Prince-promoted Perennialist (that word again) Platonist poet (can you play the audio versions of her works on what Alex, in the record store in A Clockwork Orange, would have called your "pitiful portable picnic players"?) Kathleen Raine, first published back in 1970 in the Thames & Hudson World of Art series. From her 2003 obituary in the Telegraph (Top Tip, as they used to say in Viz: refresh the loaded and presumably paywalled page, before quickly halting the refreshing to retain the article in your browser):

"Having left her children with friends in the North, she then returned to London in the middle of the war, and through Sonia Brownell* (who lived in the adjoining room in her boarding house) had a number of articles accepted by Horizon.

"She soon came to know the extraordinary James Meary Tambimuttu, the bohemian Ceylonese publisher known by his friends as Tambi, by his foes as Tuttifrutti. In 1943 his imprint Poetry London published her first volume of verse, Stone and Flower, and in 1945 her second, Living in Time. These, and The Pythoness (1949), were widely praised; Yeats, on Eliot's advice, read and admired the poems.**

"By now Kathleen Raine had established herself in Paultons Square, off the King's Road in Chelsea. There in 1949, through Tambimuttu, she met the man who was to be the love of her life, Gavin Maxwell.

"Although later celebrated as the author of Ring of Bright Water, in 1949 Maxwell was a struggling painter and failed shark farmer ..."

Things did not turn out well for the two: those shark farmers - the failed ones anyway - will get you every time.

*You may recall Sonia Brownell, whose surname contains almost in sequence the letters of that in the pen name George Orwell, whose Wife No. 2 she became in Nineteen Eight-, I mean Forty-Nine, a year before he died.

**An implied anachronism with the insertion of Yeats within the 1943-1949 sequence of Raine's early poetry collections - given his death in 1939.