The Scrapbook has a weakness for hardcover collections of essays and columns. Not many people like them, judging by how well they sell, but we boast several shelves full of collections by William F. Buckley, Joseph Epstein, George Will, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Christopher Hitchens, and many others.
Some months ago we heard that a second collection by the late Charles Krauthammer was in the works, and now it has arrived. The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors, edited by the author’s son Daniel, is, unsurprisingly, superb. The book assembles many of his best columns and includes several longer essays and addresses on a dizzying array of topics. Among these is a heretofore unpublished work titled “The Authoritarian Temptation” in which Krauthammer reassesses what 25 years ago looked like the final victory of liberal democracy.
The columns, even those dating from the 1980s and reflecting on political topics of the day, read wonderfully well. Krauthammer had an unequaled gift for using relentless logic and just a few efficient words to realign or clarify the reader’s murky thoughts about a complicated topic. Among the best pieces, for us, is an essay originally published in the New Republic in 1980—here titled “Suicide ad Absurdum”—on the documentary Choosing Suicide, about the slow, deliberate self-slaying of New York artist Jo Roman. The subject’s decision to kill herself as a final work of “art,” her final weeks surrounded by friends and film crew, offended Krauthammer, and the result is a little masterpiece of a scathing review.
Jo has other reasons for suicide besides art. She and her flock coo responsively about how all this has brought them closer together, put them in touch with their own feelings, given them a profound “learning experience.” In an interview taped 12 days after Jo’s death, husband Mel, looking grave and lost, reflects on how the whole year leading up to Jo’s death caused him great pain and suffering. But it has been worthwhile, he says, because he has learned a lot about himself. I found this a particularly sad sight: a grown man in his bereavement seeking solace in the shallowest cliché of adolescent solipsism—the world as an instrument of one’s own education. It marked the moment in the show when the banality finally transcended the pathos.
The Point of It All is full of such little masterpieces. It is the fitting final work of a great and virtuous mind.
