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The doom-and-gloom squad is at it again. No one is reading anymore, they tell us. Not reading books, not reading magazines, not even cereal boxes. What medicine is prescribed? One popular remedy is to get everyone in a particular "community" reading One Book.
If I told you—really told you—how much I loathe such campaigns, you'd think I was cracked. Ucchh. The mere thought fills me with bile. One Book? An unholy union of groupthink and state-of-the-art marketing, overlaid with a frosting of pure kitsch.
But if a reporter or a Christian radio person called me today and asked, What book should all Thinking Evangelicals be reading, what book should be distributed at the next convention or forum or summit? (for instance, the midwinter gathering of my own denomination, the Evangelical Covenant Church, or the latest confab of the emerging Emergents, even if they disdain the "evangelical" label, or Gabe Lyons' Fermi Project), I would propose a little book by Denis Donoghue, just published by Yale University Press, On Eloquence.
Donoghue is a literary critic, wide-ranging, "distinguished," as they say. His book Warrenpoint, about his Catholic boyhood and youth in Ireland and his police sergeant father, is one of the finest memoirs I've read in the past quarter-century. (I've wondered if this book was one small influence among many others that led our daughter Mary to Rome.) Published by Knopf in 1990, it is available second-hand via Amazon for prices starting at 21 cents.
Edward Said talked about "late style." Donoghue's last several books—Speaking of Beauty, American Classics, and now On Eloquence—fit that rubric. They are powerfully idiosyncratic, enormously learned, allusive, at once concentrated and ruminative. In fact, they are eloquent:
Eloquence does not vex its own creation. Delighting in difference, it opposes—but without argument—the otherwise omnivorous culture of the same. We value it as a sign of such freedom as we are likely to enjoy.
In the same vein Donoghue speaks of "the exuberance with which a word, a phrase, or a line of verse presents itself as if it had broken free from its setting and declared its independence," offering then a selection of instances from his "failing memory." (His book is a jewel box of marvelous quotations.) There is a blessed superfluity to eloquence.
Very well, you say, but why on earth would you recommend this highfalutin stuff to any larger circle of readers? Donoghue himself points the way: "It has occurred to me, during the past several years as a teacher of English, Irish, and American literature at New York University, that the qualities of writing I care about are increasingly hard to expound." He finds among his students—students who have chosen to study literature—and in "departments of English" more generally a suspicion of or indifference toward the merely "aesthetic" and a preoccupation with moralizing. At the same time, like many academics of his generation, he laments "the premature concentration, even in general education, on the knowledge and capacities necessary for professional careers."
What's interesting, for our purposes, is that in addressing this indifference to eloquence, Donoghue helps us—if we pay attention—to recognize a pervasive tendency in evangelicalism: an overweening earnestness. There is, of course, a time to be earnest, and much that is good in the evangelical tradition reflects this imperative. But how dreary, how deadly, when earnestness loses all sense of proportion.
Donoghue might remark, with some irony, that this earnest outlook appeals to an impeccable authority:
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