An Uncommon Reader

Since 1978 Michael Dirda has been a reviewer and columnist for Sunday's Washington Post Book World, winning a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1993. A modest man, he tends to find the term critic a bit pretentious, preferring to think of himself as an entertainer for readers primarily interested in news who stumble, to their surprise, across his literary essays while sipping their Sunday morning coffee. Dirda takes as his authority H. L. Mencken, who insisted that "a book reviewer, first and foremost, must be entertaining." This means, as another editor impressed on Dirda, "reading that isn't fun to read doesn't get read."

It would be a mistake to think of Dirda as shallow. Before he became a literary journalist at the fairly advanced age of thirty he had been one of those seemingly permanent students. He earned a B.A. at Oberlin College, concentrating on English and French literature and European history prior to 1900. He took a year off to work at a French lycée in Marseilles and then back to school, spending four years at Cornell with a leaning toward medieval studies. After a dissertation on Stendhal earned him a Ph.D., he turned down "a few rather dull academic jobs," preferring to "reinvent myself as a freelance editor, translator, and technical writer for a small computer company." Could there be a more exotic road to book reviewing?

In the process of entertaining his audience, Dirda voices his hope that reading decent books can also "enlarge our minds." While believing that all of life is a form of play he aspires, in a happy phrase of Henry James, to be "one on whom nothing is lost." A contradiction? Maybe. But that seems natural to Dirda, who relishes contradiction and even paradox as a sign of accuracy, as opposed to the habit of justifying one all-embracing theory or another. He cites the Bible as a "source of unending paradox." He personally favors reason over faith, quoting with approval Trollope's sardonic comment: "A strong interest in religion is a prelude to insanity."

Rather than being a fancy stylist, Dirda is a pane-of-glass writer, endorsing the example of William Tyndale, who was determined "to put nothing in the way of being understood."

Not surprisingly for a man who thinks of himself as an entertainer, Dirda loves comedians: P. G. Wodehouse ("the preeminent comic novelist of the twentieth century"); Cyril Connolly ("the moody, introspective English man of letters, celebrated for his wit"); Max Beerbohm ("rightly revered" as the "incomparable Max"); and, perhaps above all, Ronald Firbank, who flourished in the 1920s, before most of Dirda's readers were born ("the archetypal 'camp' novelist . . . who freed English prose from fustian heartiness and gave it lightness and air").

At the end of his book Dirda arrives at an unexpected conclusion about himself: "Despite all these hours of turning pages," he confesses, "I don't regard myself as a bookworm." He points out, "I've also fallen in love and married, spent Saturdays ferrying noisy offspring to soccer games, mowed grass, folded laundry." In short "there's more to life than reading." And what reader—grateful as he or she might feel for Dirda—would not agree?