Debating the burning issues of our times

In my continuing if still fruitless attempt to come to terms with world madness I within the last week attended a couple of lectures offered by speakers with dramatically differing points of view. The first was Daniel Ellsberg, a senescent professional liberal once intergalactically famous for leaking the "Pentagon Papers." He has now written, and is vigorously flogging, a book about how he was intergalactically famous. The other was Dan Flynn, a boyish professional conservative who directs something called "Accuracy in Academia" and has recently published "Why the Left Hates America." Ellsberg lamented the fact that our government is being run by people who think like Flynn, who thinks that guys like Ellsberg show up too often on college campuses. What they share in common is the apparent belief that it is acceptable behavior to pick up a hefty honorarium for standing at a podium excerpting — or in Ellsberg's case actually reading from — a published book in print and available in public libraries. The commercial "book tour" has apparently now become a medium of serious intellectual discourse at Princeton. Naked egotism can generate a certain amount of forensic power, and I should have to judge Ellsberg the better speaker; but Flynn actually had the more compelling personal narrative, since he could report that his book had been burned in Berkeley — which happens to be Ellsberg's home town.

Perhaps I ought to read the book. Certainly a number of the thinkers and writers I most admire have had their books burnt. This circumstance must offer a writer a real rush, especially on those comparatively happy occasions when the conflagration has not included the author along with his offending thesis. Only some such manner of gratification could explain the notable biblical precedent (Acts 19.19) in which the magicians of Ephesus got together and burned up their own books, to the value of fifty thousand pieces of silver! "So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed," as the author puts it, that the Church quite quickly moved from the role of encouraging bystander to that of active instigator, from merely fanning the flames to igniting the pyre.

.....The spread of the technology of movable type during the so-called Rebirth of Learning, or Renaissance, was of course a great stimulus to the burning of books; now there were so many books to be burned that the Church had to publish a thick catalogue of them. It was called the "Index Librorum Prohibitorum." For a couple of centuries there you were nobody as a thinker unless your book was on the "Index," the flagrant quarto pages of which of course on more than one occasion provided the fuel for barbecues thrown by Protestants, Freemasons, and philosophes.

Book-burning appears to have declined in the nineteenth century, and offhand I can recall only a couple of Victorian examples, both of them typically eccentric. John Stuart Mill's housemaid burned up the unique manuscript copy of Carlyle's "French Revolution," which he had entrusted to his friend, before presenting it to a publisher, in hope of getting a little of what we now call "feedback." He didn't even get the ashes; all he got were apologies. This incineration was an accident, though some have judged it a clairvoyant one. The housemaid mistook the manuscript for trash. The "French Revolution," which in his stubborn Presbyterian fashion Carlyle then proceeded to reconstruct from memory, is a book of more than 300,000 words. In longhand on foolscap that would have made quite a bonfire. The other instance that comes to mind saw John Ruskin raise mere vandalism to an art form. He was so offended by the "Caprichos" of Goya that he bought a copy to torch on the front steps of the bookseller, Quaritch. We are back to where we began, since a complete "Caprichos" probably fetches about fifty thousand pieces of silver these days.

Until the rise of National Socialism in the Germany of the 1930s brought book-burning back big time, deviant thinkers had to content themselves with the pale opprobrium of being "banned in Boston." Being banned in Boston was for a couple of decades the necessary though in itself insufficient prerequisite of bestsellerdom.

What can a poor 'Prince' columnist hope for? While Ellsberg's tales of persecution by the government leave me with a bad case of subpoena envy, what I really yearn for is Flynn's affirmation of having my writing burned. But I have only the cold comfort of having been snowed out. All the copies of my last column — and take my word for it, it was "a gem of purest ray serene" — lie sogging and undistributed beneath some avalanche. But, then Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Perhaps someone will pay me to give it as a lecture.

John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English.