Arthur Krystal

In the title essay Krystal whines about the diminishing market for essays, though Yale published his first collection in 2002 and Godine published this one. Krystal writes about the history of typewriters, about the classification of sins, about Tom Molineaux, the black American boxer who almost beat England’s champion Tom Cribb, about beauty (18th-century philosophers, Steven Pinker, once over lightly), and about his keeping his distance from the Holocaust industry. The title comes from Goethe’s remark: “Experience is only half of experience.” Krystal writes, in “Boxers and Writers,” about A.J. Liebling, Joyce Carol Oates, Pierce Egan, Norman Mailer (he finds few of the connections Mailer suggests between writing and boxing) and others who have written on boxing. A review of the Library of America volume of Raymond Chandler’s works gives Chandler limited marks as a writer. Other subjects include physiognomy and phrenology, the reviews Barzun, Trilling and Auden did for the Readers’ Subscription Book Club magazine, and Paul Valéry’s Notebooks. The last essay is about laziness, and Krystal is pretty hard on himself about this trait, which historically got transmuted (as one of the deadly sins) from the original melancholy to the later sloth… (mehr)