Arguably: Selected Essays (116 page)

At some media-pol event in Washington after the invasion of Afghanistan, I was told by an eyewitness that Al Franken attempted an ironic congratulation of Paul Wolfowitz, saying that Bush had won by using Clinton’s armed forces. “Fuck off,” was the considered riposte of the deputy defense secretary.

If things go on like this—which in a way I sometimes hope they do—we will reach the point where newspapers will report exchanges deadpan, like this:

“ ‘Fuck off,’ he shot back.”
“ ‘Fuck off,’ he suggested.”
“ ‘Fuck off,’ he opined.”
“ ‘Fuck off,’ he advised.”
“ ‘Fuck off,’ he averred.”
“ ‘Fuck off,’ he joked.”
Or even, “ ‘Fuck off,’ he quipped.”

The spreading of this tremendous rejoinder by means of the British Empire or its surrogates cannot be doubted. In London, older men of Greek Cypriot descent can be heard to say, as they rise from the card game or the restaurant table,
“Thakono
fuck off,” by which they mean, “I shall now take my leave”; or, “It really is high time that I returned to the bosom of my family”; or perhaps, phrased more tersely and in the modern vernacular, “I am out of here.”

A friend of mine was once a junior officer in Her Majesty’s forces in the Egyptian Suez Canal Zone. One of his duties was the procuring of fresh fruit for those under his command. On a certain morning, an Egyptian merchant called upon him and announced that he could furnish a regular supply of bananas. “Just the thing,” replied my friend, “that we are looking for.” The man then spoiled the whole effect by stating, in poor but unmistakable English, that of course in the event of an agreement Captain Lewis could expect 5 percent on top. Peter—I call him this because it is his name—thereupon became incensed. He stated that such a suggestion was an unpardonable one and added that he was sure he could find another banana merchant and that, whatever the case might be, such a banana supplier would emphatically not be the man who had just made such an outrageous proposition to a British serving officer. Sensing his own lapse in taste, the Egyptian made a courteous bow and replied with perfect gravity: “Okay,
effendi
. I fuck off now.” It was plain that he had acquired his basic English from loitering around the barracks gate.

Let us not forget, in other words, the implied etiquette of the term. If shouted at a follower or supporter of another soccer team, in a moment of heat, it may connote “please go away” or even “go away in any case.” But if used of oneself—dare one say passively—it may simply express the settled determination to be elsewhere. (I once heard the late Sir Kingsley Amis, describing the end of an evening of revelry, saying, “So then—off I fucked.”)

“Fuck you” or “Go fuck yourself”—the popular American form—lacks this transitive/intransitive element to some degree. At points, it even seems to confuse the act of sexual intercourse with an act of aggression: a regrettable overlap to be sure. Anglo-Americanism in Iraq may turn out to be the crucible of this difference. I know from experience that older Iraqis, who remember the British period with mingled affection and resentment, are aware of the full declensions of the “fuck” verb. But to judge by their gestures, some of the younger Iraqis are a bit coarser. “Fuck off,” some of them seem to be yelling at coalition forces. A lot hinges on the appropriate military response. “Fuck you” might be risky. “Okay, off we fuck, then” might buy some valuable time.

(
Slate
, July 6, 2004)

Prisoner of Shelves

I
N BRUCE CHATWIN’S NOVEL
UTZ
, the eponymous character becomes the captive of his porcelain collection—and eventually loses his life because he cannot move without it. From this book, I learned that a word actually exists—
Porzellankrankheit
—for the mania for porcelain acquisition. I also learned that the root of the word is the same as that for “pig,” because poured trays of molten porcelain looked so pink and fat and shiny.

I’m pretty sure of my facts here. And if I could only put my hands on the book, I could be absolutely sure. But is it shelved under U for
Utz
, or perhaps under C for Chatwin? Or is it in that unsorted pile on top of the radiator? Or the heap of volumes that migrated from the living room to the dining room? I am certain that I didn’t lend it to anyone: I am utterly miserly about letting any of my books out of my sight. Yet my books don’t seem to reciprocate by remaining within view, let alone within easy reach.

I live in a fairly spacious apartment in Washington, D.C. True, the apartment is also my office (though that’s no excuse for piling books on the stove). But for some reason, the available shelf space, which is considerable, continues to be outrun by the appearance of new books. It used to be such a pleasure to get one of those padded envelopes in the mail, containing a brand-new book with the publisher’s compliments. Now, as I collect my daily heap of these packages from my building’s concierge, I receive a pitying look.

It ought to be easy to deal with this excess, at least with the superfluous new arrivals: Give them away to friends or take them to a secondhand bookseller. But the thing is, you never know. Two new histories of the Crusades have appeared in the past year, for instance, and I already have several books on those momentous events. How often, really, do I need to mention the Crusades in a column or a review? Not that often—but then, it suddenly occurs to me, not that seldom either. Best be on the safe side. Should all these books sit on the same shelf? Or should they be indexed by author? (“Index” is good: It suggests that I have a system.) Currently, I pile the Crusades books near titles on the Middle East—an unsatisfactory arrangement, but I have no “History” section as such, because then I would have to decide whether to arrange it chronologically or geographically.

Bibliomania cripples my social life. In order to have a dinner party, I must clear all the so-far-unsorted books off the dining-room table. Either that, or invite half the originally planned number of people and just push the books temporarily down to one end of it. In the spring, my wife and I host the
Vanity Fair
party that follows the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and this means that I can get professional help with rearranging the furniture and the books. This past year, the magazine’s omnicompetent social organizer, Sara Marks, gave me some ingenious vertical shelf units, allowing me to stack books on their sides. Alas, there wasn’t time before the festivities to sort these useful display units by author or subject, so I’ve only been able to alter the shape of my problem, not solve it.

The units also make it easier to read the titles on the spines and thus to suffer reproach for their randomness. And let’s say I did decide to organize these books: Should I start with A for Kingsley Amis? But wait, here’s a nonfiction work by Amis, on language. Shouldn’t it go on the reference shelf with the lexicons and dictionaries? And what about the new biography, and the correspondence between Kingsley and Philip Larkin?

Some kind friends argue for a cull, to create more space and to provide an incentive to organize. All right, but I can’t throw out a book that has been with me for any length of time and thus acquired sentimental value, or that has been written by a friend, or that has been signed or inscribed by its author. I also can’t part with one that might conceivably come in handy as a work of reference, however obscure. All of which provokes newfound sympathy for poor Kaspar Utz.

(
City Journal
, Winter 2008)

1.
Review of
Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers
, by Brooke Allen.

2.
Review of
Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello
, by Andrew Burstein.

3.
Review of
Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present
, by Michael Oren.

4.
Review of
Benjamin Franklin Unmasked
, by Jerry Weinberger.

5.
Review of
John Brown, Abolitionist
, by David S. Reynolds.

6.
Review of
Abraham Lincoln: A Life
, by Michael Burlingame.

7.
Review of
The Singular Mark Twain
, by Fred Kaplan.

8.
Review of
The Jungle
, by Upton Sinclair.

9.
Review of
An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963
, by Robert Dallek.

10.
Review of Saul Bellow’s
Novels 1944–1953: Dangling Man, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March
; and
Novels 1956–1964: Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog
.

11.
Review of
Lolita
, by Vladimir Nabokov; and
The Annotated Lolita
, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr.

12.
Review of
Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism
, by John Updike.

13.
Review of
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900
, by Andrew Roberts.

14.
Review of
Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy
, by Matthew Scully.

15.
Review of
Wolf Hall
, by Hilary Mantel.

16.
Review of
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, by Edmund Burke, edited by Frank W. Turner.

17.
Review of
Samuel Johnson: A Biography
, by Peter Martin.

18.
Review of
Bouvard and Pecuchet
, by Gustave Flaubert, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti.

19.
Review of
Charles Dickens
, by Michael Slater.

20.
Review of
Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx
, edited by James Ledbetter, with a foreword by Francis Wheen.

21.
Review of
Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. I, 1885–1920
, by A. David Moody.

22.
Review of
Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford
, edited by Peter Y. Sussman.

23.
Review of
Somerset Maugham: A Life
, by Jeffrey Meyers.

24.
Review of
Wodehouse: A Life
, by Robert McCrum.

25.
Review of
To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell
.

26.
Review of
John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier
, by Andrew Lownie.

27.
Review of
The Life of Graham Greene, Vol. II 1955–1991
, by Norman Sherry.

28.
Review of
Letters to Monica
, by Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite.

29.
Review of
Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography
, by John Sutherland.

30.
Review of
C. L. R. James: Cricket, the Caribbean and the World Revolution
, by Farrukh Dhondy.

31.
Review of
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard
.