The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener
Nolte, William H.
When a book is a good one and worth the price asked for it by the book selling banditti, the best thing for the reviewer to do is to say so in plain words and have done. Any attempt to enlarge...
...The night he met Diana Caldwell, who was then newly wed to Sir John Henry ("Jock") Delves Broughton, his first words to her when they were alone were, "Well, who's going to tell Jock...
...Even so...
...The much more interesting question is the one Fox never asks...
...I particularly enjoyed the following passage since it corroborates my own conviction: "With fear and trembling I con.fess that I have yet to find a poem by Ezra Pound or William Carlos Williams that I consider great, though I have done my best over the decades to read both men sympathetically...
...Why would a man of Erroll's charm, position, and influence have insisted on making public spectacles of his sexual indiscretions...
...Like the engagingly disreputable characters of Waugh's novels, these were rogues who went their own way "careless of consequence...
...Peirce, Plato, Russell, Santayana, and, perhaps most of all, Unamuno, whose fideism most nearly resembles his own attitude toward faith...
...To see if I agreed that Numbers 31 was the "most infamous" chapter of the Bible, hardly to be matched by any other sacred book, I had to read it...
...The book is an utter delight, and if its reception locally is any indicator it will be widely read...
...Like Kierkegaard and Unamuno, he may help some in sustaining their faith, but he will certainly not convert many to his position...
...up a list of possible murderers painstakingly reviewing their motives...
...One cannot help wondering why...
...Which of them killed Erroll...
...Lewis, John Stuart Mill, C.S...
...Although Gardner constructs his book of essays on a foundation of negatives--telling us why he is not that or this, why (to list chapter headings) he is not a solipsist, a pragmatist, a paranormalist, an aesthetic (or an ethical) relativist, a determinist, an anarchist, a Smithian, a Marxist, etc.--he takes great pains to show how it is possible to be any of the things he is not and still pass muster as an intelligent being...
...The repetitive pattern of his affairs invites speculation...
...Wells's Ann Veronica an extraordinary novel...
...I agree with Vladimir Nabokov that Ezra Pound was a 'total fake.' I much prefer T.S...
...The conflict between t h e s e men seems a perfect instance of the hostility that divided the generations on either side of the First World War...
...Using this and his o)vn previous findings, together with another round of interviews with everyone, colonial or native, who was in any way involved with the case, he has reconstructed the story and drawn George P. McCartney teaches English at St...
...Though properly respectful of those artists whose works have enduredneven of those whom he cannot appreciate--Gardner does not hesitate to reject certain contemporaries who are much in favor, knowing that Time has a way of correcting our critical mistakes...
...Finally arriving at the lovers' camp, the furious cuckold chased Erroll through the bush laying about him with a rhino whip...
...I quote Mencken for the simple reason that he perfectly describes my present quandary--to wit, the hopeless job of somehow revealing my delight in Martin Gardner's The Whys o f a Philosophical Scrivener without appearing to be delirious or drunk...
...In a dozen or more places-and particularly in the chapter on why he is not an atheist and in the three chapters on immortalitynhe insists that one must rely on faith rather than reason to find philosophical and religious truths...
...Though I found Gardner's discussion of worldly matters more invigorating than his confession of faith, I much enjoyed his company all the way along...
...Eliot (despised by Williams) to Pound (Williams's friend and mentor), but even Eliot seems to me overrated...
...In addition, he discovers that his processes of ratiocination, usually so fluent and accurate, are impeded by his novel emotions...
...Peter V. Sampo Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack, NH 03054 Please send me information about this program...
...And the Bible...
...As a compulsive and arrogant womanizer, Erroll had acquired more than his share of enemies among his jilted mistresses and their cuckolded husbands...
...Although the Somalis knew exactly where Erroll had gone, they misled their master as long as they could "apparently out of flawless discretion and because this was, after all, how Bwanas chose to spend their time," Fox explains in one of his marvelously understated asides...
...Calling them a "community of English squires established on the Equator," even the professionally unflappable Evelyn Waugh was impressed by this band of desperadoes who inhabited a world of eighteenth-century licentiousness...
...most were clearly dalliances of the moment...
...Far from encouraging prudence, these episodes only served to spur Erroll on to even more adulterous effrontery...
...Erroll, however, was not to be deterred...
...On another occasion, with someone else's wife, he insisted on "having his way" with her on the local hotel's billiard table where, he must have realized, their sport was sure to be observed and duly reported...
...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as seen through the eyes of the Christian humanist...
...It doesn't require a course in Freudian analysis to suspect that Erroll might have been driven by an Oedipal compulsion to subvert paternal authority by humiliating older men...
...Were he thirty years younger I doubt that he would be so high on the work of G.K...
...Take my word for it, the enterprise is one of staggering difficulties...
...Name Address City State Zip Telephone ! - I In Amerir Phone Number AS I THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 43...
...The manager of the bookstore where I purchased my copy tells me he has had to re-order four times already in large lots, palpable evidence, it seems to me, that all is not yet lost...
...Why did Erroll make so much trouble for himself...
...Born in 1901, Erroll was too young to fight in the war but old enough to feel its demoralizing consequences...
...Without God, as he says, there can be no immortality...
...In one instance he helped himself to a colonial rancher's wife and two of his Buicks (this seems to have been the colonial car of choice) and set out for a romantic safari...
...Whys reveals in the most charming manner an incisive mind at play in the earnest world of ideas...
...From the number of references (that is, approving references), I would guess that Gardner has learned most, in a general sense, from (in alphabetical order) Aristotle, Lewis Carroll (Gardner did The Annotated A l i c e about ten years ago), Hume, William James, Kant (especially Kant), C.S...
...Wells...
...The customary vocabulary of his art fails him, for it is made up almost entirely of terms derogatory and infuriate, and when he seeks to make use of the ordinary phrases of praise he finds them flat to the taste...
...In telling us what he believes and why he believes it, Gardner constantly refers to his enormous filing cabinet or index which contains the notes, quotations, memorabilia, and intellectual keepsakes of whatever kind gathered during a lifetime of reading in every topic under the sun...
...Indeed, the quoted material is alone worth the price of admission, and I found myself again and again pausing to consult works sacred and profane, clerical and lay...
...Still, he makes both these writers seem worth remembering--for vastly different reasons, of course...
...1910 by way of girding his loins for the task before him--the task, incidentally, of showing why he considered H.G...
...Although Diana Caldwell, unlike his other married mistresses, was younger than Erroll, her husband was eighteen years his senior...
...Chesterton and H.G...
...At that time they turned up a good deal of new evidence, but were unable to determine conclusively who murdered Erroll...
...This kind of personal theology dispenses with argument and hence can be neither proved nor refuted...
...That is to say, his skepticism is pure: He admits to being without answers to most of the questions man has been posing since he began strutting about the globe, assessing both the seen and the unseen of the world and what might reside behind that world...
...cultivating scandal quite another...
...As a result it came to be populated by a knockabout lot of "aristocratic fugitives" intent on pursuing their various pleasures undisturbed by their tamer stay-at-home countrymen...
...On returning, for example, to Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding I discovered all over again what a magnificent work it is...
...Thus "did H.L...
...Like many another imperial outpost, Kenya was a place for those with something to hide...
...It wasn't as though these connections were grand passions...
...As readers of Gardner's many books on science and philosophy know, he is most adept at exposing the fraudulent and deflating the pompous...
...ergo, he opts for belief in God...
...Even when he fires on sitting ducks he performs a public service: "Take away the fantasies and errors of psychoanalysis, and what is left is so close to the common heritage of pre-Freudian psychiatry that there is no need to keep calling it Freudian...
...Though by no means a Christian since he does not believe in miracles and is repelled by the belief in hell, Gardner knows the Bible well and is fond of regaling his reader with some of its most outrageous chapters and sections, particularly those of the Old Testament, which, as he notes, is now read only by orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Protestants...
...The skeptic Gardner, a fideist...
...Disgusted with the pieties with which their fathers excused their complicity in a grotesquely wasteful war, convinced Western civilization was in precipitous decline, THE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...
...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS For Catalogue and Brochure Write To: Dr...
...His last affair certainly supports this interpretation...
...For that reason, and because such biblical debunkers as Robert Ingersoll are hard to come by, he informs us of various of Jehovah's doingswand had me reading the two books of Kings, among others...
...Any attempt to enlarge upon that bald verdict is not only gratuitous and useless, but also extremely fatiguing to the reviewer...
...The list is quite long...
...His guess that Ernest Lawrence Thayer's famous piece of doggerel, "Casey at the Bat," will outlast the entire poetic output of Pound will surely provoke gasps of disbelief from various academics, some of them learned and honorable, but I would bet coin of the realm that he's right--except that I won't be around to collect...
...He belonged to the interwar generation Waugh named the Bright Young People...
...As l say, Whys teems with quotations, some of which show Gardner to be a man of his age...
...Whether or not one takes the leap depends solely on one's temperament...
...But then their seemingly "permanent feast of dissipation and sensuous pleasure" was violently interrupted on January 24, 1941 when their leading reveler, Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll, High Constable of Scotland, and Kenya's foremost adulterer, was found shot through the skull in his overturned Buick a few miles outside Nairobi...
...The rancher was bound to discover his losses and when he did, he went after them with his Somali servants...
...Fox attributes Erroll's behavior to a "professional contempt for husbands," but this seems hardly adequate to explain the older women and Erroll's need to affront their spouses, some of whom were old enough to be his father...
...His liaisons were almost always with married women older than himself (Fox accounts for at least five) and he conducted these affairs in such a fashion that the husbands were always sure to find out...
...Mencken begin his Smart Set book article for February William H. Nolte is C. Wallace Martin Professor o f English at the University o f South Carolina...
...I also find it disturbing that he should found his theism on a desire for immortality-or for that matter that he should found his belief in anything on so fragile a basis...
...B y ' the 1920s Kenya had become t h e colony of choice for those members of the British upper class who were shiftless, bankrupt, alcoholic, larcenous, addicted to drugs, given to irregular sexual habits, or otherwise indisposed for polite company at home...
...That is, belief in a personal God, an 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 anthropomorphic God...
...It makes all the violent denunciations of Jehovah by such writers as Swinburne and Stephen Crane seem temperate and just...
...John's University...
...In the final chapters of Whys, devoted to the problem of evil and to the possibility of immortality, Gardner's arguments are less than convincing since they depend on feeling or hope rather than on reason or demonstrable evidence...
...Womanizing is one thing...
...You or I?" There's little doubt Erroll enjoyed the melodramatic scandals he instigated...
...Upon his death, Connolly left Fox his research...
...Or: "As for the form Marxism has taken in Russia, China, and other countries that call themselves communist, the failure of those countries to escape from a tyranny indistinguishable from fascism except in its mythology has long been apparent to everyone who, is not a victim of what a friend likes to call cerebral dormitosis...
...It is indeed infamous...
...James Fox first became involved with the Erroll murder case in 1969 when he worked with Cyril Connolly on a lengthy article about it for the London Sunday Times...
...nay, it is monstrous...
...No doubt the question is of interest but at this date it's hardly the most important question to be raised, nor is it nearly as difficult to answer as Fox would have us believe...
...The party would never be the same...
...In view of this fact, Susan Sontag's famous mea culpa speech in 1982 at Town Hall in Manhattan, in which she announced her stunning discovery that communism is a bad thing, struck me as the funniest event on the radical front since Eldridge Cleaver discovered J e s u s . " By judicious quotation Gardner sometimes allows his victim to destroy himselfwas in the case of art critic Hilton Kramer, whose rhapsodic boosting of Jasper Johns makes one wince almost as much as his vilification of realism, and in particular his attacks on Andrew Wyeth, whose landscapes reveal (in Kramer's words) a "hidden scatological obsession...
...He is in the impossible position of a man trying to read Kant in the vestry room while waiting for his bride to arrive at t h e church, or of a woman trying to recite the Lord's Prayer with a mouse nibbling at her ankle...
...Evidently Erroll did not consider an affair fully successful unless it included an enraged husband in the wings...
Vol. 17 • January 1984 • No. 1
