Tory! Tory! Tory!
Praise for Florence King’s Masterpiece
Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady
and a Brief Lament

by Bob Odom

Like American cars, American misanthropy does not age well.

After a few warm-up books in the 1970s, Florence King in 1985 came out with a volume of autobiography, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. On the ten-best comic novels list of any reader with at least a half-functioning sense of humor, Southern Lady would have to rank near the top. It’s the rare page that won’t have you laughing out loud. And beware the occasional series of pages that may produce guffaws, tears, and loss of bodily equilibrium.

Yes. It’s that good, good enough that it can withstand my saying it’s that good. Aperçus, mots, aphorisms litter King’s carefully crafted pages.

Now and then King halts the action and favors us with brief remarks on important elements of the Southern lady’s behavior:

"Silver is the Southern woman’s proudest possession and highest priority as well as the subject of much of her conversation. The night before her daughter’s wedding, a Southern mother will sit on the bed and talk intimately about silver. Every decent woman goes to her husband with twelve "covers," and if the knives have hollow handles he’ll be running with other women before the year is out, you wait and see. No man respects a woman with hollow handles."

Well-crafted sentences, careful choice of words, and dead-on sense of timing. Comic writing doesn’t get any better.

Like all autobiographies this one too is a well-crafted fiction as we watch Florence grow up in her "shabby genteel" Tidewater Virginia family consisting of Granny (who originally came into the household "for a while" and wound up staying 30 years), Florence’s mother (who "turns the air blue" whenever she opens her mouth), and her father, a ne-er-do-well English jazz musician. Granny, having failed completely in molding her daughter into a Southern Lady, focuses now on her headstrong granddaughter. It’s the cross-generation, cross-cultural tension that, filtered through Florence’s dead-on reproduction of tribal mores, gives the book its energy and endless humor.

You can do much worse than to stop here, buy and read the book. In spite of your aching sides, you will then re-read it, and you will buy additional copies to give to friends.

Why stop here? Because now we come to the "but".

Jump ahead a decade from the appearance of her masterpiece and we find Ms. King writing a column for William Buckley’s National Review. Our brilliant misanthropic lesbian skewerer of pretension has thrown herself into the arms of the privileged class and become that which she once most feared becoming: a Southern lady who just happens to be able to construct perfect and often very funny English sentences.

For all of King’s barbed wit, she has become so genteel that even her grammar has perfect manners. Amidst the barbaric brambles of rampant Republicanism, her syntax slides from one period to the next as effortlessly and magically as Scarlett glided down those red-carpeted stairs at Tara.

Whatever her intended target these days, her burgeoning vitriol spoils her aim and she winds up shooting only herself, and in the foot at that.

Florence King apparently has fallen victim to the greatest danger of early successful misanthropy. Like Mencken and even Twain and Swift, the jaundiced eye that remains jaundiced eventually becomes myopic.

If the successful but aging misanthrope glimpses suffering at all in the masses, it only provides further proof for the rightness of her distanced stance. The myopia becomes so severe that even goodness itself disappears from her perceived world.

But maybe I’m gullibly misreading her late career. Could the National Review columns be a guerrilla action, an infiltration of the very heart of the enemy empire to slowly and wittily help the richly misguided see the error of their oh-so-mannerly ways? Florence King, Army Rangerette, subversively bringing truth and light to the truly benighted? However much I want to believe, I don’t. (The National Review maintains an archive of the columns; go read some and decide for yourself.)

Someone once asked King, "Why do you hate people?" To which she replied, "Who else is there?"

This is of course Scrooge without hope. Humbug without Tiny Tim. Which, to the practiced and practicing misanthrope, is as it should be. The world is a place of bleak, selfish, pointless suffering. Reading the saddening, bereft columns in the National Review one comes away feeling that one has just encountered Hobbes in modern-day, well, Southern Lady dress, scanning a world that is indeed bloody in tooth and claw. Only fools dream of happiness. The most you can hope for is respite behind the prophylactic protection of money and the monied classes.

Like those stunted, warped trees in Big Sur, cruelly shaped by incessant Pacific winds, it’s a not a pretty sight, this business of a misanthrope at the end of her tether.

Still, for all that acid, amid the ruin and destruction, the bitterness, the fear, the anger, there is that book that a younger King managed. Maybe the rest doesn’t matter, or at least doesn’t matter much.

Certainly Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady will continue to speak and help those to laugh who above all need to laugh. Perhaps it is the greater world’s gentle revenge on the misanthrope that her book will not only bring laughter to those in the future who are in pain but will also help them to become—such irony, Ms. King—BETTER PERSONS.

Consider, in closing, this anecdote posted by one female reader and admirer who spotted another reader of the pink-jacketed Southern Lady: