Alan Jacobs

Terry Eagleton's tribute to Alasdair MacIntyre is the best I've read so far:

All this makes MacIntyre one of the great moral philosophers of the 20th century. He was a radical Scottish puritan, austere and high-minded, who ended up supporting the revival of monasticism and switched his sympathies from the Bolsheviks to St Benedict. His dissent from the priorities of the modern age took an incongruous variety of forms but remained wholly self-consistent. If he turned back to Aristotle and Aquinas, it was in order to move beyond what he saw as the scepticism and subjectivism of the present. His work showed up the limits of rationalism, but was deeply averse to the irrational. It could win praise from both Leftists and conservatives, but gave no comfort to neoliberalism. MacIntyre refused to subscribe to the view that the individual was at the centre of the universe; that reason is timeless and independent of practical social life; and that relations are primarily contractual and actions chiefly instrumental. In contrast with a mean-spirited utilitarianism, he saw society not as a means of individual self-promotion but as a good in itself. He was interested in practices like playing chess or writing poetry whose goods, as he would say, were “internal” to themselves rather than external goals to be pursued.

When Busman’s Honeymoon, the play co-written by Sayers and Muriel St Clare Byrne, opened in London it did so at the Comedy Theatre … which reminds me that decades later that venue would stage many Harold Pinter plays, and Pinter became its major patron. After a while he started hinting that the place should change its name to the Pinter Theatre. When management resisted, Tom Stoppard wrote to Pinter with a suggestion for resolving the impasse: “Have you considered changing your name to Harold Comedy?” (Lo and behold, the name was changed to the Harold Pinter Theatre, but only after the poor man’s death.) 

Sometime in September 1935 Sayers finished Gaudy Night and sent it to her publisher, Gollancz. Victor Gollancz wired Sayers on 26 September to say that he very much liked the book. It was immediately copyedited, typeset, and printed, and hit the bookstores on 4 November. To any writer today that sounds impossible: Surely it was published in November 1936?? Nope: it went from submission to publication in little over a month. 

In late 1936 the publishers Hodder & Stoughton asked Dorothy L. Sayers to complete the novel Dickens left unfinished at his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Sayers firmly declined, saying “nothing could induce” her to try that. But of the many people who have completed the novel, none of them were as well-suited to the task she she was. I regret her decision. 

My dear mother-in-law, Margaret Collins, is one hundred and one years old. Here’s the email she just sent me — the general context being my wife Teri’s frequent visits home to Alabama to help her brother and sister-in-law care for her mother: 

Dear Alan, 

We are looking forward to seeing you and Wesley next week. Maybe we'll have some dry weather by then. Teri said you had rain there, which I hear is prized in Waco.

Alan, for some time I have wanted to tell you how much I have appreciated your being so gracious and generous concerning Teri's visits. She is such a joy and very helpful. It gives Lynn and Anne a little break from the care of this old lady, too.

I am so proud of you and your many accomplishments. You don't just have them handed to you — it takes much hard work and “staying the course.” I believe your best days are still ahead.

May God bless, guide and reveal His love for you in all the years ahead.

I love you and keep you in my prayers,

Mama C 

Is that not adorable? I’ve written in the past about being welcomed into the Collins family. 

I have a quite distinct memory of writing a long post, at some point fifteen years ago or so, on Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels. But I can’t find anything, on my hard drive or via web search: not turning up on Kagi or Google or DuckDuckGo or the Wayback Machine. Very strange. But I do have the consolation of this from Google: 

Yes. Those are precisely the traits I am known for.