Loving the Book is not the Same as Liking the Author

Mark Helprin, I love his books, hate his politics

 My two favorite living authors are very different men. I have read all of the novels of each man and re-read my favorite novel by each. I plan to re-read more and, of course, read anything else they write. C.S. Lewis said “Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.” He also cautioned that a reader who loves an author’s work should not believe he would like the company of the author.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Noble Prize in Literature, 2017

I started reading Kazuo Ishiguro in 2014 on the recommendation of a good friend. The first novel I read by him was “Remains of the Day.” In January of this year I finished “The Unconsoled,” making my reading of Ishiguro complete. Two years ago I re-read Remains of the Day, still my favorite, although “TheBuried Giant” is a close second. The Buried Giant was published in March 2015. Two months later Ishiguro spoke at the Free Library of Philadelphia.  After hearing Ishiguro speak, I was quite convinced I would love to have a drink with him. His Nobel Prize address last year made me even more sure I would love to hang out with him if the opportunity ever presented itself. That address is moving, brilliant and sad, the common threads in everything Ishiguro writes.

In February 1983, when I was still in graduate school, I first read Mark Helprin in the New Yorker magazine.  I read the story “Jesse Honey Mountain Guide” in the last issue of the month.  The story was a chapter in his second novel “A Winter’s Tale” published the following September. I was hooked.  I read his first novel and two short story collections published to that point. In the years since I read every other novel as each published. I have re-read Winters Tale and plan to re-read Helprin’s most recent novel “Paris in the Present Tense” this year or next year. “Paris in the Present Tense” is now my favorite.

I was so taken with Jesse Honey, I wrote paper in grad school about Helprin’s precise use of exaggeration in the story, comparing to the Walter Mitty stories by James Thurber.  

Over the years I read Helprin’s editorials in the Wall Street Journal and other essays. He is a conservative, so I never imagined we could have a totally friendly conversation, but in 2015 and 2016 Helprin spoke out against Trump and seemed to be a Never-Trump conservative.  Maybe we could have a drink?

Alas, that was in 2016. After Nazis marched in Charlottesville in 2017, Helprin wrote in Trump’s defense in The Claremont Review of Books. Next month Helprin is speaking in New York. I have never heard Helprin speak, and I would like to, but I won’t be attending the event.  He is the featured guest at “Socrates in the City” an occasional gathering organized by author and total Trumpian Eric Metaxas. In 2011, Metaxas wrote a biography of a martyr to the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Despite writing about a victim of the Nazis, Metaxas is a full-throated supporter of a man whose campaign was built on the Birther form of racism and spread to every other non-white group as soon as the campaign began.

So I won’t be paying Metaxas to hear Helprin speak. In addition to Helprin, the event is a launch party for a new Children’s book by Metaxas “Donald Drains the Swamp.” Metaxas is a very funny guy. He is one of the creators of the “Veggie Tales” series. But, sadly, in his new book he is not ironical. Metaxas really sees Trump as the savior of the western world. The irony runs the other way though: no one in Washington has ever been more corrupt than the Swamp-Creature-in-Chief. 

When I think of Veggie Tales now, I imagine Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber being thrown into a Black Car driven by the Veggie Gestapo. Bob and Larry plead that wanted to salute The Orange Fuhrer, weakly protesting, “But we don’t have arms!”

Larry and Bob

I will keep reading Helprin, because the things he writes, like all creations, are from, not of, the person who created them.  And 70-year-old conservatives can become cranky—at least that’s what I’ve heard. 

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