Two of the three copies of Boswell’s Life of Johnson I own were gifts from my brother. He loved garage sales and thrift shops and had no shame about looking for second-hand bargains. He liked the English expression “jumble sale.” Ken wasn’t cheap but never seemed to have enough money. My final loan to him he never repaid before his death on August 24, 2024. I’m not bitter about that. In fact, I now find it endearing. It is quintessential Ken, one more confirmation of his personality. I’m glad he felt he could ask.  There was a lengthy spell when we stopped talking. Friends tell me this is hardly unusual between siblings, though it never felt comfortable. His daughter Hannah in 2005 (she was then about ten) wrote me a letter saying that both of us ought to grow up. Besides, she wanted to meet her uncle. Ken didn’t fly so I made an annual trip to Cleveland to visit him and his family. A family friend, Rumanian-born Giorgiana Lascu, always known as "George," posted a nice remembrance of my brother:   “Dinner always at 5:30, which nobody ever missed for the good conversation, we never talked about our feelings, but we talked about Philip Larkin or smack to each-other or about the news, or whatever people were reading. Everyone was always reading something. Sometimes dinner was followed by a lively drum circle, conducted on the table top. We were always welcome, though feeding two extra girls during a recession must have been hard.”   The first Boswell Ken gave me was the boxed, three-volume Heritage Press edition from 1963. I remember lugging it through the airport in my suitcase along with other books I had purchased in Cleveland. The other copy is a heavy, one-volume, leather-bound brick of a book. It’s an American reprint of the English edition edited by John Croker in 1831, the one Macaulay famously savaged. It’s an extravagantly ugly book, printed in blindness-inducing small print, and if anyone other than my brother had given it to me, I would have unloaded it long ago. Ken also gave me two hardcover volumes of Boswell’s journals -- yard-sale treasures.   Sadness mingles with a diffuse sense of guilt and the pleasures of memory. Every day I think of something I what to tell Ken that would make him laugh or at least snort. Death resolves little or nothing. Johnson writes in his Rambler essay on September 22, 1750:   "When a friend is carried to his grave, we at once find excuses for every weakness, and palliations of every fault; we recollect a thousand endearments which before glided off our minds without impression, a thousand favors unrepaid, a thousand duties unperformed, and wish, vainly wish for his return, not so much that we may receive, as that we may bestow happiness, and recompense that kindness which before we never understood."

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorithm for the world’s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the nature of creativity, distilling it to a trinity: “an intuitive perception of hidden things,” “immense reasoning faculties,” and the “concentrative faculty” of bringing to any creative endeavor “a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous sources” — that is, intuition, the analytical prowess to evaluate the fruits of intuition, and a rich reservoir of… read article

Notes from the margins of my research.

Robert Penn Warren in Democracy and Poetry (1975):  “The will to change: this is one of the most precious heritages of American democracy. We have the story of the young Washington, who studied surveying and could, by the exercise of his skill, buy ‘Bullskin plantation,’ his first one, at the age of sixteen. Thus far he had merely changed his condition. But he had the will to change himself as well, and with the same furious energy, he studied the Roman Stoics that he might achieve the admirable character he desired.”   This is part of the folklore I grew up with, like the story of young Washington and his cherry tree. I don’t consciously remember learning any of this. The lives and thought of the early presidents were like holy writ, to be studied and emulated. The first book I wrote as a kid was a collection of presidential biographies (through Kennedy), each one-page long, handwritten on lined paper, happily cribbed from encyclopedias. Perhaps this accounts for my enduring sense of patriotism, a devotion to the American ideals, despite all our all-too-human errors. Warren continues:   “So we have the long list of autodidacts, including Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Dreiser — men who, with all their failings and complications, willed a change deeper than that of an objective condition. We admire those autodidacts, but the will to change the self is not now deeply characteristic of our democracy.”   All too true, even half a century ago. The embodiment of the autodidactic approach to life for me is Eric Hoffer (1902-83). He started as a migrant worker in the West, worked as a longshoreman on the docks of San Francisco and wrote The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951), an essential guide to the world we inhabit today. I first encountered him at age fifteen. His “Reflections” column was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped and pasted them in a scrapbook, and moved on to his books. My father was an ironworker and high-school dropout; my mother, a tax clerk. No one in my family had gone to college. I felt an immediate personal identification with Hoffer. He was my first model of autodidacticism, proof that education was up to me.   I’m reading Daniel J. Flynn’s Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America (ISI Books, 2011). Flynn devotes a chapter to Hoffer, calling him “the definitional autodidact.” He wrote prose that got “straight to the point. Efficient and crisp. Hoffer’s words stood out against the opaque, verbose, circuitous style that increasingly characterized the prose of intellectuals. If readers found his style original it was because they had never come across French writers—Pascal, Montaigne, Renan, de la Rochefoucauld—whom he imitated.”   Hoffer was part of the reason I wanted to write and why I became a newspaper reporter. He was no snob. He seemed from the start like the kind of guy I could talk to.

Here’s to the English writer who waited until her ninth decade to finally experience fame in America The post The Patient Penelope Fitzgerald appeared first on The American Scholar.