Florence King passed away this week and National Review’s Jack Fowler has written a lovely and touching obituary. What’s especially touching is that Fowler does not whitewash King’s eccentricities. He recounts what a difficult writer she was to deal with and even talks about how her unbelief seemed to fray at the end. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
But even more, I recommend that readers go back and spend some time with King’s work. It should not be missed.
Because King’s work came primarily in the form of books published between 1975 and 1985, and magazine columns published in the three decades immediately preceding the internet, it seems an unhappy possibility that her greatness will be lost. If you’re under the age of 30 (or 40, even) and never subscribed to the print edition of National Review, then there’s a chance that you never read much of her. Even if you worked in journalism. In fact, I suspect that this morning just about everyone working at Buzzfeed and Vice looked up and asked, “Florence who?” But this is neither a reflection on King’s work nor an indictment of the whippersnappers. It’s simply an accident of technology and timing.
King didn’t establish her work long before the internet, the way, say, Joan Didion did. Her columns for National Review would have been incredibly Internet-friendly, a la Mark Steyn, but they appeared in the print magazine in the years before Internet really took off. And even though King wrote almost until the very end, she didn’t do television and unlike, say, Joyce Carol Oates, wisely never lowered herself to Twitter, Facebook, or the rest of the social nonsense.
So if you’re one of those who missed out on King the first time around this is a wonderful opportunity to treat yourself to her writing. There are the books—Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady is a modern classic. Or the brilliantly titled With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy.
King was one of a handful of people in human history who could claim to having been a professional misanthrope. Her column from National Review was titled the “Misanthrope’s Corner” and you can find those essays collected in STET, Damnit!
But while you’re waiting for Amazon to deliver, you can get a jump start by heading over to her archive page at National Review. Here’s King on the petty-vindictiveness of recycling; on Helen Gurley Brown; on doing her own minor-surgery on a ingrown toenail; doing a parodic mash-up of Ayn Rand and the Clintons: “BILL CLINTON laughed. He stood naked on a soft muddy hill. It swelled out around him, the body of the hill and the body of the man blending and merging into a triumph of man over nature. He was softer than the hill.”
And here’s an obituary of her own, that King wrote for the film star Alice Faye: “There were two Alice Fayes but the first was before my time. When she arrived in Hollywood in 1934 they made her a Jean Harlow clone with platinum blonde hair but the effect was all wrong. Harlow was the bad girl with a heart of gold but Faye suggested an intriguing contradiction at once less and more: a good girl with a heart of gold. As balancing acts go, this one is almost impossible to manage without becoming cloying or ridiculous, as Doris Day would later prove, yet it was the elusive essence of Alice Faye: she was the girl men could imagine themselves respecting in the morning.”
King was a clear thinker and a dazzling stylist. And like most great writers she was also thoroughly original. There will never be another Florence King, so we ought to appreciate the one we had.
