Monday, September 21, 2009

Irving Kristol (1920-2009)


I wrote about Malcolm de Chazal here. When W.H. Auden tried to sell some translations of Chazal to Encounter, Irving Kristol wrote, privately, that 'Wystan, of course, can get blood from a stone. I find this gibberish, of a peculiarly French kind. I remember Chazal now; I once bought several of his books, which the reviews made sound interesting. They, too, I found gibberish. This kind of mystagogy just can’t live in an English climate.' No sense of fun, some people.

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