In her 2007 biography of Edith Wharton, Hermione Lee describes Charles Du Bos (1882–1939), the French critic and diarist, as “pernickety, vain, snobbish, naive, pompous, and affectionate.” André Gide, with whom Du Bos was an early collaborator, later wrote that Du Bos couldn’t fill his own fountain pen, and that, stumped while translating one of Keats’s letters, Du B (...)
The Last Word
Pernickety
The remainder of this article is only available to paid subscribers. If you’re not currently a Commonweal subscriber in print or online, an online-only subscription costs just $34 a year. Click here for immediate access.
"Pernickety" is the kind of article that prompts me to renew my subscription to Commonweal since I do not read the magazine for anything about Roman Catholicism. The author, Harold Bordwell, is the kind of writer you cannot find elsewhere except perhaps in archived issues of the New Yorker from the Fifties. He makes the abstruse concrete and interesting. He is an essayist certainly worth reading. More Bordwell, I say, and less Dionne.