I never save anything—or rather I save lots of stuff that I don’t want while I throw away an equivalent amount of stuff that someday I will. Improbably I’ve saved a sheaf of letters I got from Florence King, the great journalist and memoirist, and when I heard the other evening that she’d died, at the age of 80, I went and hunted them up, from the back of a drawer in an old file cabinet that otherwise serves as a tomb of useless leavings.
Almost all the letters date from the 1990s, when she and I shared duties as alternating columnists for the back page of the biweekly National Review—she wrote for one issue, I wrote for the next. The column amounted to about 800 words a month, for which we were paid pretty good dough. I found the chore difficult, not to say excruciating, and made sure my stablemate knew it. Florence always said she sympathized, but she didn’t really. She put sentences on the page the way a gifted gymnast swings her body over a pommel horse or along the parallel bars: invisible effort in service of sheer delight.
“The only thing worse than writing is not writing,” she wrote me, hoping to buck me up after some self-pitying complaint of mine. A word of praise from her was enough to keep me going. We corresponded by fax, supplemented by monthly telephone gabbles. Hard as it is to believe, many people back then thought the fax machine would revive the dying art of letter-writing. Instead the fax went away and we got Twitter, also Instagram and Gchat. I wonder what Florence thought of Gchat.
I don’t know, because our correspondence, robust as it was, didn’t last into the new millennium. The letters survive on the shiny paper that unspooled from my fax machine 20 years ago. My machine would go off in the middle of the night—Florence was a nocturnal animal and her imagination took flight after sunset, when the town was quiet and the bottle of Dewar’s near to hand. Suddenly in the dark I’d hear the gears of the fax hitch up, and the scratchy noise of the telephone line would sound, and then the juddering of the paper as each page was pumped out from the paten. No matter the hour, I got up to fetch the letter, usually many pages long. I could never wait till morning to see what she had to say, or whether she’d liked something I’d written.
Looking over those letters now I hoped to find passages to quote, to show the range and wildness of her humor, but I’m startled at how salacious they are, how stuffed with unrepeatable gossip and outlandish conspiracy mongering, all of it written in response to my own offerings of the same. There’s not much to share with a wider audience. I challenged her euphemisms for Bill Clinton’s penis, then much in the news, with euphemisms of my own, and no one, without reading the entire correspondence, can tell whose were bigger.
The best of Florence is in her books anyway, particularly Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, one of the most exquisitely controlled pieces of writing I know of, seamlessly hilarious, nostalgic, ironic, and wise. It tells of an only child growing up in an eccentric family in the 1940s and ’50s, and it will last as long as Americans want to know the tactile reality of one part of their past, what it felt like to be someone many years before they were born. Maybe it won’t last so very long, after all.
I intend this tribute to be about Florence and not about me, of course, but I will close with a note that complicates the sadness at her death. I loved Florence King. I loved her writing, I relied on her kindness, and I treasured her friendship. It didn’t last, though. She was famously changeable. I can trace the arc through my sheaf of old faxes. Some time around 1999, she failed to answer one of my letters. In a week or so I sent another, sliding the pages into the maw of the fax machine and listening for the scratchy sound that meant the fax had gone through. I waited a day and nothing came back. I tried again. After a month I faxed a new letter, full of gossip and jokes, and when I didn’t hear from her I phoned her and left a message on her machine. She didn’t answer.
Several years later I published a book, and out of nowhere—I was told this long after the fact—she approached the editor of another magazine, an acquaintance of mine, and asked to review it. She wrote a rave, to use a term she liked. It was the kind of implausible praise a writer dreams someone will someday write about him, and I never heard from her again, and I never knew why.
