Queen Mary I killed scores of Protestants. Queen Elizabeth I killed scores of Catholics. The two were mirror images of each other. No, they weren’t, argues Peter Hitchens in First Things.
Robert N. Hall died six months ago. He was one of the most influential inventors of the 20th century, but only a few people took note of his passing: “Robert N. Hall’s legacy can be found at almost every checkout counter — that little red blinking laser scanner that reads bar codes on milk cartons, boxes of light bulbs, price tags dangling from a new jacket and just about everything else that can be bought in a store. A product of his inventive labor can also be found in most kitchens nowadays: the microwave oven. Yet for all the widespread familiarity of what Dr. Hall wrought as a remarkably ingenious physicist, his death, at 96, on Nov. 7, 2016, gained little notice. An announcement paid for by his family appeared in two upstate New York newspapers — The Times Union of Albany and The Daily Gazette of Schenectady — and General Electric, in a company publication, published a remembrance a month later. But otherwise the news of Dr. Hall’s death did not travel very far.”
The lawsuit over the stage production of To Kill a Mockingbird has been settled, and the play is again headed to Broadway. But what sort of Atticus Finch will it present? “Ms. Lee had agreed to allow Mr. Sorkin to write a new stage adaptation before her death in 2016, and sold Mr. Rudin the stage rights. But in March, her estate filed a suit in Alabama over a draft script, arguing that it deviated too much from the novel by altering the character of Atticus, as well as his children Jem and Scout and the Finch family housekeeper, Calpurnia, who had a much larger role in the play’s draft script. The complaint cited comments that Mr. Sorkin made to New York magazine about how his adaptation would speak to today’s social climate, and how Atticus Finch would undergo a gradual moral evolution: ‘As far as Atticus and his virtue goes, this is a different take on Mockingbird than Harper Lee’s or Horton Foote’s,’ Mr. Sorkin had said.”
Gerald J. Russello reviews The Letters of Russell Kirk: “Kirk was famously rooted in Michigan “stump country,” and his devotion to his family’s ancestral town of Mecosta is evident throughout this collection. This was more than a mere emotional attachment, or even a matter of intellectual conviction (though it was that); Kirk was showing by example how to lead a conservative life.”
Junot Díaz steps down as Pulitzer chairman amid misconduct allegations: “After confronting the writer at a Sydney Writers’ festival event last week, the author Zinzi Clemmons tweeted that Díaz forcibly kissed her several years ago. Other female writers also shared their encounters with Diaz on social media. MIT, where Díaz is a professor, is also looking into the allegations.”
Roger Scruton’s Britain: “For those of us who have followed Roger Scruton over the years as perhaps the most prominent conservative philosopher in the English-speaking world, his latest book is an eagerly awaited one. In it, he turns his immense learning and considerable powers of reflection to this matter of Brexit—perhaps the most consequential political change in the Anglo-American world since that community of nations came together to fight and win the Second World War.”
Reading a William Trevor story is like encountering “a frieze of 3-D figures.” Too bad his last collection is flat in comparison to the rest of his work.
Essay of the Day:
Patrick Leigh Fermor is perhaps the best travel writer of the 20th century. In this week’s Standard, Dominic Green retraces the writer’s steps in Crete and takes stock of his work:
“How many English literary writers from the early 20th century remain genuinely popular? Wodehouse and Waugh, certainly. Maugham, though, is almost forgotten, and Conrad is more respected than read. Leigh Fermor produced six full-length books in his 96 years. A Caribbean travelogue, The Traveller’s Tree (1950), which Ian Fleming used as a source for Live and Let Die, was followed by a missable novel, The Violins of St. Jacques (1953). Next came a pair on Leigh Fermor’s visions of Greece, Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966). Then, with production slowing to a book per decade, Leigh Fermor wrote A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), two of the projected three volumes describing his ‘Great Walk’—or ‘Great Trudge,’ as he sometimes called it—across Europe in 1934. To fend off his publisher, he also wrote a couple of etiolated memoirs, one on living silently in French monasteries, the other on traveling garrulously in the Andes. Like his correspondence, the short books are the fruit of the most arduous evasion in the field of letters, procrastination by substitution.
“Though relatively small, this output suffices to confirm Leigh Fermor as the 20th century’s finest exponent of a genre that the English invented: travel writing. It is a pack mule among literary genres, prone to digression and indulgence but also capable of carrying considerable weight when properly distributed. Leigh Fermor’s picaresques are weighted not just with historical anecdotage, heraldic speculation, and more purple streaks than a sunset at Collioure. They also carry the freight of his generation. When Wodehouse (born 1881) was confronted with the enormities of World War II, he persisted with his Edwardian fantasies and got himself into trouble accordingly. To Waugh (born 1903), the Nazi-Soviet Pact revealed the enemy ‘plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off . . . the Modern Age in arms.’ When the Soviet Union changed from enemy to ally, Waugh knew that, one way or another, the Modern Age would win. Leigh Fermor was born in 1915. The precocious literary pedestrian was formed by a war that he did not expect to survive.”
Photo: Zhangjiajie
Poem: Jennifer Reeser, “Mission to Texas”
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