MARK TWAIN VS. GARRISON KEILLOR

by William H. Benson

February 19, 2011

     Mark Twain is a bestseller—number 4 last week on the New York Times Book Review list—for the publication of the first volume of his autobiography. He would be proud, for that work has never been one of his readers’ favorites. It is a muddled mess, a tangled hodgepodge, without structure, and written in a stream-of-consciousness style. Writers have attempted to organize it over the past 100 years, ever since his passing, but now the University of California has published it, just as he wrote it.

     Readers beware.

     Last month, an Alabama-based publisher, NewSouth Books, announced that they would publish the best of Twain’s books, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but a revised, censored, and expurgated version, one without the derogatory slurs, the one published on February 18, 1885.

     I would suggest that some author should rework the last quarter of the book, for once Mark Twain placed Huck Finn and the runaway slave Jim on their makeshift raft and let them sail down the Mississippi River into the Old South, he did not know how to retrieve them.

     A good question: How does one extricate themselves from as feudalistic and as vicious a society as was the Old South prior to the Civil War, once you have floated unwittingly into it? The book delivers a poor answer to the question and thus the ending is weak, but, who knows, perhaps Mark Twain may boast of two books on the bestseller list this year, one as he wrote it and the other as he should have.

     Mark Twain’s autobiography reveals a human being, a man, one filled to the brim with energy: a riverboat pilot, a silver miner, a journalist, a comedian, a writer of several literary genre, and a publisher. One critic said that “his energy was so ferocious in its effect on people and events as to distort the best-willed observer’s perspective.”

     But he had a dark side, a side that came out too frequently after he buried first his son, then his wife, and two of his three daughters. Late in life, he was bent and twisted into a greedy, lonely, brooding, and suspicious old man, at war with God, and wildly angry at having to live life. In such a state, he existed, a mixture of “rage and gentleness, of malice and affection, of creative genius and financial idiocy.”

     He was too human, all to human.   

     Switching gears, it was on February 17, 1979 that Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, his live musical radio show premiered for the first time on National Public Radio. Keillor had begun the show in July of 1974 on Minnesota Public Radio, and with the introduction of his comic monologues featuring the news from Lake Wobegon, his mythical hometown, the show became wildly popular and gained a well-deserved national reputation.

     I disregard Keillor’s music and his silly ads for local businesses, such as those for Bertha Kitty’s Boutique and the Chatterbox Cafe, for the heart and soul of Keillor’s radio program is the “News from Lake Wobegone.” Every week Garrison Keillor tells a story involving fictional citizens of this small Minnesota town, such as Einar Tingovld, Florian Krebsbach, or Wally (“Old Hard Hands”) Bunsen. The stories are warm, humorous, and so ordinarily human.

     He ends them the same every week: “And that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, my hometown out there on the prairie, a place where the women are so very strong, the men are so good-looking, and the children are way above average.” The listener knows that it cannot be true but appreciates it the same.

     In 1985, he tied together some of these comic monologues and published them as Lake Wobegone Days, and his reputation as a writer of serious / humorous fiction was assured. In the book’s preface, Keillor wrote, “Somehow the radio show kept going, perhaps because I had no illusion that I was good at it, and I brought in Lake Wobegon as the home of a weekly monologue. . . . It has been a good run and I’m a very lucky man, I think. One pretty good idea for gainful employment is still my livelihood.”   

     Certain of his later books, though, are in need of an expurgation, of a censor, for his steep slide into vulgarity distracts from the story itself.

     Mark Twain and Garrison Keillor, their best books are separated by exactly a hundred years. Both mined deep into their childhood experiences: one from the banks of the Mississippi River at Hannibal, Missouri, and the other from the small town of Anoka, Minnesota, just north of the twin cities. Twain was of the river, and Keillor was of the northern prairie, but each instinctively knew how to create vivid scenes with a multiplicity of sensory details, both verbally and on paper, and the overall effect is that audiences and readers will, invariably and without hesitation, laugh.

     Yes, we still laugh at Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer and their antics, but especially we laugh at Mark Twain, the man whom Samuel Clemens never could have been. We laugh at Garrison Keillor’s Leonard Tollefson and Pastor Tommerdahl, all trying to do their best while living “in Lake Wobegon, where smart doesn’t count for so much.” Perhaps Keillor too has a dark side, but if so he certainly keeps it well hidden.

ROGER WILLIAMS

by William H. Benson

February 3, 2011

     Roger Williams, the English Puritan clergyman, arrived in New England on February 5, 1631, just months after the colony’s inception. He was twenty-eight years old, educated at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and married for a year. Jonathan Winthrop, the Puritans’ chief official, warmly welcomed Roger and his wife Mary into Boston, and asked him to serve as the colony’s minister and teacher.  

     Winthrop and the other Puritans were shocked when Roger turned down their generous job offer. Roger explained that he could not worship with them because they had not separated from the Church of England and furthermore they had not repented of their former attachment to the Church of England. Yes, they wanted to “purify” that church, which, for Roger, was not enough: he wanted separation.

     Jonathan Winthrop failed to understand Roger’s extreme form of Separatism. Quarrels erupted, and finally the Massachusetts Bay Colony governing officials banished Roger from their colony, forcing him to flee to the Narragansett Bay, and there, with the help of the Natives, he established his own colony, Rhode Island. He insisted that in his colony, “freedom of conscience” was the rule.

     Roger wrestled with questions concerning the relationship of the church to the state over the next four decades, and the contours of his thinking pushed the boundaries of Puritanism and Separatism to what Winthrop and the other Puritans believed were unsupportable conclusions.

     Roger was in a constant search for the pure church and never found it. He believed that no unregenerate or unsaved individual should be allowed to attend a worship service with the holy, the elect, the regenerate. This ferocious brand of separatism of Roger’s led to an exclusiveness that was absurd. The historian Edmund Morgan wrote that “Williams had clearly pushed the principle of separation to the point where the church was threatened with extinction for lack of suitable members.”

     He would create a church, such as with the Baptists, and then withdraw from it. He ended up late in his life in a sect with exactly one member, himself, even going so far, it was rumored, as to withdraw from taking communion with his wife, Mary, suspecting her of indiscretions. Harold Bloom, the Yale scholar, wrote that, “If there is any trace at all of this formidable individual left, it has to be his genius for schism.” Roger drew the line and separated himself from all that he perceived was unholy.

     Once a person starts walking down the path of Separatism, where does he or she stop?

     Roger further argued that the government should not participate in any of the several acts of worship, for those should be reserved for a church’s exclusive use. Taking an oath, such as that administered to a witness before testifying in a court, was an act of worship. Prayer conducted in a courtroom or before a legislative body begins its proceedings was also an act of worship. These acts of worship, Roger argued, should only be conducted within a church and among the elect, not in a courtroom, a town meeting, or a congressional body.

     His Puritan colleagues thought him mad, headstrong, exceedingly difficult, filled with strange opinions, calling him “a polemical porcupine.” Cotton Mather compared him to “a Dutch windmill so violently turned round in a storm that the stones themselves caught fire.”

     What is startling is that he ended up with the principle of separating the church from the state: he called for “a wall of separation” between the two. But it was not because he was an eighteenth-century citizen of the Enlightenment, like Thomas Jefferson or James Madison, open to and tolerant of all religions, and believing none of them. One legal scholar wrote, “Williams did not advocate religious liberty out of a personal lack of faith but out of an exuberance of it.” The primary bent of this man’s mind was invariably steered toward religion.

     Williams thought deeply about four questions: “Why is religious persecution evil? What harm does it inflict on its victims and its perpetrators? Why should government not supervise religion? Does a stable society require some measure of religious homogeneity?” Unlike his contemporaries, he answered each of those four questions with a modern answer. One historian wrote, “The gods were pleased to have their jest with Roger Williams by sending him to earth before his time.”

     The First Amendment, written a century after Williams’s demise, echoed Roger’s arguments, and it established a wall of separation between the government and the church, and the controversies surrounding that Amendment still challenge us to maintain it today.    

     Perry Miller, the American colonial historian, wrote that Roger Williams possesses for American history, “one indubitable importance, that he stands at the beginning of it.” Indeed, how fortunate it was to have as profound a thinker on the issue of liberty of conscience, as was Roger Williams, at the very beginning point of America’s history.

IKE

by William H. Benson

January 20, 2011

     On January 20, 1953, on the steps of the Capitol, General Dwight David Eisenhower, or “Ike” took the oath of office and was sworn in as our nation’s thirty-fourth President. Before delivering his Inaugural Address, he broke tradition and read a brief prayer—something that no other President had done—that he had composed that same morning, asking God to “make full and complete our dedication to the service of the people in this throng, and their fellow citizens everywhere.”

     In attendance that day was the newly-elected Vice-President Richard Nixon, Nixon and Ike’s personal friend Billy Graham, and the retiring thirty-third President, Harry Truman, who did not hide his displeasure for Eisenhower. Truman predicted, “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”

     One of Ike’s first actions once installed in the White House was to select and then join a church, the National Presbyterian Church in Washington D. C. The pastor, Ed Elson, instructed Ike for one hour a day for five days and then on Sunday, February 1, at the church, Ike was baptized and brought into membership of the church, the first time a president had been baptized after taking office.

     Ike quickly grew comfortable making decisions from the Oval Office, unlike what Truman had forecast. Ike had served his country well as a general, devised the idea and executed the plan for D-Day during the dark days of World War II, and had said then, “I hate war, but I hate the Nazis worse.”

     After one day in office, Ike wrote in his diary: “My first day at the president’s desk. Plenty of worries and difficult problems. But such has been my portion for a long time—the result in that this just seems (today) like a continuation of all I’ve been doing since July 1941—even before that.”

     Ike dealt with at least six problems throughout his presidency: taxes, a balanced budget, ending the war in Korea, which he would accomplish, reigning in defense spending, foreign aid, and world peace.

     Because Ike was the first Republican President elected since Hoover left the White House in disgrace in March of 1933, twenty years before, Congress’s Republicans were very anxious to slice the Democrats’ onerous tax rates, but Ike would not hear of a tax cut until he and Congress worked toward balancing the budget. The Republicans in Congress reluctantly agreed to leave tax rates alone, mainly because of Ike’s promise to bring down federal spending, especially that of military spending.

     Eisenhower’s eight years in the White House quickly passed, and it was remarkable that due largely to his judgment and decisions on the issues, there were no wars, no riots, no inflation, just peace and prosperity. Certain things that did not happen that should have, included greater progress in school desegregation, reducing tensions with the Russians, and disarming the nuclear arsenal.

     Suddenly, it was time for Ike to leave the White House, but before leaving he decided to issue a Farewell Address. On January 17 at 8:30 P. M., he spoke on television and radio and said:

     “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry in new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplace power exists and will persist.”

     Ike’s words fell on deaf ears, for Americans were not prepared to listen to a General say negative things and issue warnings about their powerful military, and they still are not willing to listen. His pointed words in his Farewell Address were those most remembered and quoted from his Presidency.

     On January 20, 1961, fifty years ago today, John F. Kennedy, the President-elect, arrived at the White House dressed in a black top hat, and he and President Eisenhower rode together to the Capitol. “The oldest man ever to serve as President, to that date, gave way to the youngest man elected to the office.” Billy Graham was there, and so was Richard Nixon, and together with Ike they watched as Chief Justice Earl Warren administered the oath of office to JFK and then listened as he spoke:

     “My fellow Americans: ask now what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

     Eisenhower was at last free of his duties, after a lifetime of service in the Army and in the Oval Office, and so he and his wife Mamie returned to his beloved farm outside of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for a well-deserved retirement.

     In 1967 shortly before Ike’s passing, he was meeting with another general who told him, “Herodutus said this about the Peloponnesian War, ‘You cannot be an armchair general 28 miles from the front.’” Ike replied, “Well, that’s interesting. Herodutus? The Peloponnesian War?” Later, someone qizzed Ike about the quote, and Ike replied, “It wasn’t Herodutus. It was Aemilius Paullus, and it wasn’t the Peloponnesian War. It was the Punic Wars with Carthage.”

     When asked why he had not corrected the general, Ike replied, “I got where I did by knowing when to hide my ego and when to hide my intelligence.”

TRUE GRIT

by William H. Benson

January 6, 2011

     I am not a fan of the Western. One book by Zane Gray, Riders of the Purple Sage, and one by Louis L’Amour, Sitka, are the only two Westerns I have ever finished. I have started others but invariably found something missing: either the plots were juvenile—lacking an ounce of motivation, or the characters were stereotypical—cut from cardboard, or the dialogue was contrived—cowboys talking like cowboys are presumed to talk. 

     Then, over the holidays, I went to the movies and saw True Grit, and came away so impressed that I purchased a copy of the book by the same name by Charles Portis and read it to the end.

     The plot is straightforward: Mattie Ross a fourteen-year-old girl from Dardenelle, Arkansas, Yell County, has arrived in Fort Smith, Arkansas to claim the body of her deceased father, Frank Ross. The Ross’s hired man, Tom Chaney, had gone with Frank to Fort Smith to help him bring back some ponies, but Chaney, in a drunken stupor one night, had shot and killed Ross, stole his horse named Judy, as well as $150 in cash and two gold pieces, and lit out for the Indian Territory, Oklahoma.

     Mattie stares down at her departed father and said to herself, “What a waste! Tom Chaney would pay for this! I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!” After reading that, I thought, “there is enough motivation to keep this story going to the last page.”

     At a negotiated price of $100, she hires a one-eyed Marshall, named Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn—described as “a greasy vagabond,” who “loves to pull a cork,”—to find Chaney and bring him back to Fort Smith to hang for the murder of her father. Mattie insists that she go with Rooster.

    The third character in this unlikely posse is LaBoeuf, pronounced “LaBeef,” a solitary Texas Ranger, a dandy filled with a mountain of self-importance, who has been chasing Chaney across several states for a crime committed back in Texas. LaBoeuf suggests to Mattie that he “throw in with Rooster,” which he does, but then, on the morning of their scheduled departure, the two men try to slip away without her. Undeterred, she crosses a creek on her pony, Little Blackie, and catches up with them. The three ride into the Indian Territory in search of Tom Chaney.

     One critic named Donna Tartt said that the two men adjust to Mattie’s presence. “Finally, when they cannot get Mattie to turn back, they accept her: first, in anger, as a worrisome tag-along; then, grudgingly, as a mascot and equal of sorts; and at last—as she stands among them and proves herself—a relentless force in her own right.”

     Charles Portis, the author, avoided the stereotypical, and instead, carefully drew each of these three characters and then balanced them. At one point Rooster says, “I am getting old. I am undone by a harpy in trousers and a nincompoop.” Then, the three of them are set in opposition to a gang of cutthroats, for they discover that Tom Chaney has fallen in with a band of robbers headed by Lucky Ned Pepper. The story gallops along with such vivid and colorful characters.

     But what really impresses the reader is the precision of the language, for this story is a monologue, spoken by Mattie Ross, but written as a recollection later in her life, of that winter she rode in hot pursuit of Tom Chaney held up in the Winding Stair Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma.

     Her first sentence leaps out at the reader. “People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.”

     Mattie is sharp-tongued, filled with opinions, but deadpan in her delivery, prim, resourceful, naïve, hard-headed, blasé about hangings and gunfights, without a shred of doubt or hesitation, and her religion is of the Old Testament variety. On occasion, she will quote scriptures to justify her opinion, but normally she just gives it without any support.

     Seeing Rooster’s thirst for alcohol, she says, “I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.” Seeing his slovenliness, she says, “Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.”

     Mattie Ross is made of a sterner fabric than was Huckleberry Finn, also fourteen-years-old, and that which drives Mattie—justice, if not revenge—is of a heavier quality than that which drove Dorothy, who only wants to see the Wizard of Oz so that he can return her to Kansas. Instead, Mattie wants to go to Oklahoma, and she would ignore a wizard, for he lacked “sand in his craw” and had little “true grit.”

     Portis published his book in 1968, and the movie came out the following year, and starred John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, Kim Darby as Mattie Ross, and Glen Campbell, the Country and Western singer originally from Arkansas, as La Bouef. John Wayne won his first and only best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Rooster. In the 2010 version, Jeff Bridges plays Rooster, Hallie Steinfeld is Mattie, and Matt Damon is LaBouef.

     Which is better, the book or the movie? Take your pick, for both feature Mattie Ross, an original in American fiction.

COMEDY, HISTORY, OR TRAGEDY

by William H. Benson

December 23, 2010

     Steve Allen was a fixture upon American television for fifty years, from the day his first show, The Steve Allen Show, premiered, which was on Christmas Day of 1950, the day before he turned twenty-nine, until his passing on October 30, 2000. Although the network canceled that first show after only two years, numerous others followed, including his pioneering work as the first host of the Tonight Show, which was first broadcast on September 27, 1954.

     It was Steve Allen who introduced to television audiences the innovative concept of a television talk show, in which he, the host, would begin with a comic monologue, and then introduce a series of guests and comedians who would perform briefly and then seat themselves on a couch and visit with the host, who sat behind a desk. Audiences loved the format, a guaranteed spot of humor at the end of a long day, and it is still on the air today after fifty-six years.

     The Tonight Show—comedy.

     On January 23, 1968, a U. S. Naval research vessel called the Pueblo and commanded by Lloyd Bucher, was attacked and taken hostage by the North Koreans. For the next eleven months, the crew was starved, beaten, and tortured, and Commander Bucher was put through a mock firing squad. The Johnson administration finally issued a written apology and admitted that the Pueblo was on a spying mission. On December 23, 1968, the American crew, 82 men, carrying one deceased sailor, was then released when they were marched across the Bridge of No Return, which connected the two Koreas.

     The North Korean Communist government, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, still holds the Pueblo yet today, even though it is still a commissioned vessel of the U. S. Navy. It is positioned on the Taedong River, and is now a tourist attraction for the North Koreans.

     The Pueblo—history.

     On December 8, at 5:00 P. M. John Lennon, the one-time Beatle, with his wife Yoko Ono beside him, left his home at the the Dakota apartment building, located at 1 West 72nd Street, across from Central Park. Outside he met a young man, then only twenty-five, named Mark David Chapman, who held up a copy of Lennon’s most recent album, Double Fantasy. Lennon took it, autographed it, and handed it back to Chapman. A photographer happened to take a picture of Lennon standing next to Chapman. Lennon and Yoko Ono then slipped into their limousine and headed to a recording session.

     At 10:50 P. M. the couple returned to the Dakota, walked past Chapman, who was still waiting there, and as they were about to step inside, Chapman fired five shots directly at Lennon’s back. Four struck him. He was taken to Roosevelt Hospital and pronounced dead minutes later.

     The assassination of John Lennon—tragedy.

     There we have Shakespeare’s three art forms—comedy, history, and tragedy. Like most human beings, I enjoy wholesome comedy, and I thrive on history, but I shrink away from tragedy.

     There are those individuals, those who are inherently dramatic, who would categorize life’s events into one of those three forms; they are the literary types. Other people see life as little more than a warmup before that final judgment that will determine all people’s eternal fate; they are the religious ones. Others see life as a struggle, a battlefield, a bitter fight to vanquish the enemy and achieve preeminence; these are the workaholics and the power-crazed executives.

     Others are so sated and dulled by entertainment—football, basketball, baseball, movies, and television—that they have given up. They are the proverbial potatoes on the couch. Others are legalistic, paying homage to the statutes, the tax code, or the religious documents and covenants; they are the ones who can quote verbatim from some governmental or sacrosanct document.

     That philosophy of life that runs, like an artery, throughout our minds can, if we let it, determine the outcomes of our lives. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “The years teach us things that the days never knew.” Indeed, the lessons of our lives we learn daily, but together those lessons eventually build into principles, unchanging maxims, such as: “Kindness begets kindness.” “Rudeness begets trouble.” “Arrogance and pride are eventually brought low.” “What goes around comes around.”

     Human nature has not changed for thousands of years. We are, above all else, emotional beings, filled with an astonishing aggressive streak as well as rank passivity, along with anger, greed, and lust, and when you mix life’s lessons, with its core principles, and with those hot human emotions, life  transcends into something unpredictable, a volatile mixture that yields comedy, history, and tragedy.

     The year 2010 is drawing to a close. The Christmas season is upon us, and what will the new year bring? The cynic will say, “More of the same,” meaning more laughter on the Tonight Show, more trouble with the North Koreans, and more tragedy: a series of earthquakes, epidemics, wars and assassinations. Yet, hope springs eternal in the hearts of men, especially the optimistic, and perhaps something magnificent will happen in 2011: a war might end, a cure for all cancers might be discovered, and an epidemic might be conquered. May it be so. “Peace on earth and goodwill toward all men.” Have a great Christmas!

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

by William H. Benson

December 9, 2010

     In The Element’s of Style, the authors, William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, presented Rule Number 14: “Avoid fancy words. Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able. Anglo Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo Saxon words.”

     Ammon Shea, a columnist for the New York Times Magazine, offered similar advice: “Brandishing  unfamiliar words unnecessarily will mark you as a blowhard, not an effective communicator. You should apparently take care to sound smart, but not too smart.”

     The stylists often point to Winston Churchill, who, at the moment of England’s crisis, spoke of “blood, sweat, toil, and tears,” rather than vermeil, sudorification, moiling, and delacrimation.

     However, not every writer dutifully obeys those stylists who legislate the laws of prose. An excellent example is William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of the National Review. He repeatedly broke Rule Number 14, for he was the champion and defender of the unfamiliar English word.

     One critic complained that to read Buckley’s columns, a person was forced to refer repeatedly to a dictionary in order to understand his meaning, and so he called Buckley “a lexicographical snob.”

     The critic wrote, “First he gives us synecdoche, a figure of speech in which the whole is used for the part or the part for the whole. Then, adumbrated, to darken or conceal partly; to overshadow; this was followed by velleity, a mere wish with no effort to obtain it. From there he takes us to maieutic, the Socratic mode of inquiry, bringing out ideas latent in the mind. Then, on to provenance, the location of a beginning such as where a painting was painted or a book written. Finally, he unloads pasquinade on us, a publicly posted lampoon or satire or ridicule.”

     Buckley justified his style. “Have you noticed that the use of an unusual word sometimes irritates the reader to such a point that he will accuse the user of affectation, of which there is no more heinous crime in the American republic? I raise the problem because I am often accused of an inordinate reliance on unusual words. There is a sort of phony democratic bias against the use of unusual words.”

     “I said,” he continued, “that I have a private theory, a theory so simple, so rudimentary, that it almost embarrasses me to trot it out. But think it over. It is that we tend to believe that a word is unfamiliar because it is unfamiliar to us. Concede, of course, that there are words neither you nor I know. Should those words be quarantined?”

     In 1955, when he was just thirty, his father gave him $100,000, with which he started his magazine, the National Review, a politically conservative publication. Between 1962 and 2008 Buckley wrote some 5600 columns, plus he published more than 50 books, and in all those works, he refused to quarantine any word, regardless of its degree of familiarity. He paraded before his readers a string of words located well outside the boundaries of the common vocabulary of the American people.

      Buckley was easily recognizable with his arched eyebrows, an expansive and toothy FDR-like grin, and his wispy blonde hair. He was urbane, cordial, erudite, but above all else he was humorous, with a sparkling wit that manifested itself on his television show, Firing Line, that aired for over thirty years.

     Alistair Cooke once referred to Buckley as the “lover of the last word,” but Buckley admitted that on occasion he would leave the television studio “with much on my mind, en esprit d’escalier, a wonderful French term describing what you wish you had said by way of devastating retort: typically a sunburst that hits you as you reach the bottom of the staircase.” 

     And so Buckley broke another of Strunk and White’s rule’s, Number 20: Avoid foreign languages.

     He was the quintessential sesquipedalian, a user of long words, and he relied upon a pleonastic writing style, using more words than necessary to communicate meaning. It was his style of prose, he was most comfortable with it, it brought him much success, and he ignored Strunk and White’s rules.

     William F. Buckley, Jr. passed away on February 27, 2008 at the age of 82, while seated at his desk in his home in Stamford, Connecticut and when writing yet another column, and not avoiding “the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute.”