Florence King (1936–2016)

I'm not sure what marketing genius decided to saddle this book with a pink floral cover. It's unfortunate and misleading.
Once I recommended this book to a soccer-mom type looking for something for her Southern Writers Book Club. I'm not sure what I was thinking. Possibly I was only remembering how hilarious this book is, and how I actually cry with laughing every time I read it (and I'm up to my tenth rereading at this point). Or maybe I remembered the inspirational coming-of-age aspects. I show more think the flowery cover is what put the finishing touches on my argument and sealed the deal.

At any rate, I failed to mention the massive amounts of drinking, swearing, smoking, and sex (lesbian and otherwise), or the fact that Florence King pretty much loathes humanity. It was apparently a little much for the Southern Writers Book Club Ladies, who were, however, too polite to directly complain. They did let me know that they would NOT be taking my recommendations ever again. Alas. show less

I've never laughed more while reading than I did reading this--for the first, the second, the third, the fourth times. You know something's funny when you read it for the fourth time and still laugh out loud. King is a force onto herself, my favorite misanthrope and someone I admire a great deal as a writer and for her honesty. If more political writers were this funny, I might actually pay more attention to what they wrote. Wit adds an edge to reason, whereas strum and drang blunts it.

STET, Damnit: The Misanthrope’s Corner, 1991 to 2002, by Florence King. In the forward to this collection of her columns from The National Review, King admits that she thought seriously about tinkering with the earlier ones – polishing and tightening them up so that they would be a well-crafted as her later columns – but decided against it. She thought it was better to leave them as is for comparison purposes. Not sure if I agree with this, as I find her later columns more readable and show more less risible, but it does make for an interesting exercise in tracking a writer’s progress in her technique.

One of the things I often disliked in her earlier columns (even while enjoying the humor) was her tendency to sweeping generalizations and broad caricatures. She used to defend this as necessary in the service of humor, and believed sensible people knew that and understood what she really meant. I think King finally realized that these practices actually turned what she obviously hoped was a rapier wit into sledgehammer goofiness (still funny, but not what I believe she was aiming at), and that many of her readers took that goofiness seriously. In any case, toning that down improved the quality of her later columns but has the odd effect of making this huge book less quotable than the much smaller “Bent Pin”.

Stop sighing in relief, you’re still getting excerpts. Like this one from June 19, 2000 (columns in this collection are only dated, not named):

On soiled doves in cinema: “I can also think of a starring role that cried out for her [Claire Trevor]: Sadie Thompson in “Rain”. Both Joan Crawford and Rita Hayworth sashayed too much, and neither got the reversion to vice right. Hayworth reacts to the minister’s suicide like an automaton going back to square one, while Crawford oozes complacent snideness, as if the suicide hard merely allowed her to have the last word. Trevor would have infused the moment with sultry flint, taking grim pride in this final proof that she had been the better human being all along.

After the ‘40s, the bad woman fell upon hard times. First, she was demoted to bad girl (Jennifer Jones in “Duel in the Sun”), but all that smoldering and chest-thrusting gave the bad girl a bad name, so she was recycled more sympathetically as the bad girl with problems, a category that broke down into various subgoups: the vulnerable bad girl (Marilyn in “Bus Stop”), the misunderstood bad girl (Liz in “Butterfield 8”), and the sick bad girl (Marilyn in “Niagara”).

In the ‘60s, the sexual revolution took a leaf from Father Flanagan and proclaimed, ‘There’s no such thing as a bad girl,’ and so the bad girl with problems was replaced by the good girl with problems. There was the over-sexed good girl (Julie Andrews in “The Americanization of Emily”), the dumb good girl (Shirley MacLaine in “The Apartment”), and the neurotic good girl (just about everybody in just about everything).

The advent of the neurotic good girl was the final nail in the bad woman’s coffin, because neurotics are always selfish, which automatically rules out a heart of gold.”

[btw, am I the only one who doesn’t remember Marilyn being sick in “Niagara”? I remember her as a floozy, but not sick.]

I was going to spare you anything else, but I just have to include this from her July 15, 2002 column: “I’ve tried to break the journal habit but I can’t; I made my latest entry today: ‘The Salt Lake City kidnapping news is so full of hosannas to wholesome happy families that I had to drop everything and re-read Wuthering Heights.’”

I can’t recommend this one quite as much as “Bent Pin”, at least not to readers who don’t already love Florence King, but I can recommend it. show less

Florence King is a hoot. While the South that she writes about here is probably lost forever, there are enough familiar caricatures, er... characters, portrayed in her sharp-witted, sharper-tongued survey of Southern life to provoke a grin and even outright laughter.

Not for the faint of heart, King pulls no punches. The book is peppered with both profanity and vulgarity aplenty (but if it offends, it must hit home, so...). It's easy to see why her "Misanthope's Corner" was a popular column show more in National Review for years.

Give this slim paperback a try, if you can find a copy. I think you'll find that even we Yankees can recognize more than a few of the types preserved, skewered butterfly-like between the pages. show less