ROY EDROSO

One of the many recent, ridiculous comparisons of GWB's stupefyingly banal rhetoric to that of his betters (Andrew Sullivan, for one, has put Shrub up there with Churchill) has sparked a feud between two Pulitzer Prize winners. It's no Dreiser vs. Lewis--not so evenly matched, for one thing, and no physical blows have as yet been exchanged--but in today's unlettered America, it will have to do.

George F. Will, 1997 Pulitzer winner for his "commentary" (a category which, judging by most winners, is like criticism, only without discernible standards), recently tongue-bathed Bush Junior's stump style thusly: "Bush's terseness is Ernest Hemingway seasoned by John Wesley."

Wesley, the celebrated mystic who sparked the Great Awakening and founded Methodism, is a favorite cite of Will's when he is in the scolding mood. In a 1997 speech at the Hoover Institute, Will suggested that a Wesleyesque religious revival, not government programs, was needed to "ameliorate the social ills" of our time. In a 2000 article on AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, Will projects upon a figure in his story the idea that Africans need "John Wesley. A lot of Wesleys." And I do recall Will bringing up Wesley in a column on Jesse Jackson years ago, and elsewhere.

Will has traditionally found less occasion to bring up Hemingway. In fact, he usually refers to artists sparingly, and is ridiculous when he does. (Propagandists generally are.) He either smacks them down as un-Wesleyesque whippersnappers (as in his famous 1990 discourse on contemporary arts, "America's Slide Into the Sewer"), or tries to leverage their appeal into Republican campaign fodder, as when he praised a 1984 Bruce Springsteen performance as a hymn to the American work ethic.

This lack of feeling for the creative act is so rife among conservative chatterers that one thinks it would do most of them a world of good to take a pottery class or something. But Norman Mailer, a double Pulitzer Prize winner (for fiction and non-fiction) with much more experience of combat (and success with words) than Will, takes things a bit more seriously.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author angrily responded to Will's conflation in a letter to the Boston Globe, which printed it on March 20. Mailer begins:

"Well, one is hardly familiar with John Wesley's sermons, but I do know that to put George W. Bush's prose next to Hemingway is equal to saying that Jackie Susann is right up there with Jane Austen.

"Did a sense of shame ever reside in our Republican toadies? You can't stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves. Will's readiness to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse can be cited as world class sycophancy."

Mailer quotes a passage from Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" on the use of grand language in wartime that ends: "There were many words you could not stand to hear...Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the names of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates."

Such writing, says Mailer, "has a lot more going for it than 'terseness.'"

Mailer closes with a lovely sentence that pretty much sums up the chasm between those who use words to enrich and illuminate our understanding of human experience, and those who use them to obscure it. In deference to a master craftsman, I give him the last word here:

"It is worth reminding ourselves that the life of a democracy may also depend on the good and honorable use of language and not on the scurvy manipulation of such words as 'evil' and 'love' by intellectual striplings of the caliber of our president.