In 1966, William F. Buckley published a memoir about his quixotic run for mayor of New York the previous year. Among the people to whom he gave the book as a gift was his sometimes friendly, sometimes not-so-friendly antagonist Norman Mailer. In the back-of-the-book index to that copy, next to Mailer’s name and the numbers of the two pages on which it appeared, Buckley had written a message in red ink: “Hi!”
“It’s a good joke,” writes Dennis Duncan in “Index, A History of the.” “Buckley knows that the very first thing Mailer will do on receiving the book will be to turn to the back, to the index, and look up all the references to himself. It’s a wink at his friend’s narcissism, another dig in the two men’s scrappy, irascible friendship.”
It is a good joke. But it’s characteristic of Mr. Duncan’s own gracefully learned, often witty and enlightening, but sometimes trying book that he takes a jaw-dropping four-and-a-half pages to recount it, including a 238-word reconstruction of how Buckley might have handed Mailer the volume at a party, followed by a sort of “Oh, never mind, he probably mailed it.”
I attribute the Buckley-Mailer bloat in part to a phenomenon I believe most writers have experienced and which I call “prophylactic prolixity.” It’s a reaction to the fear one might not have quite enough material to complete the book—article, book review, whatever—and the resulting tendency to overwrite until it’s clear the required length can be reached. Ideally, you then go back and trim.
If Mr. Duncan had done so in this and other cases, he would have had room to consider how Mailer’s presumed search for himself became a cultural phenomenon with its own name. The website wordspy.com dates that name to a line in a 1985 Newsweek article: “There was the usual jesting about the ‘Washington read,’ which consists of a flip through the index in search of one’s name. ‘I always thought what I’d do was list people in the index but not put them in the book,’ said former [Jimmy] Carter press secretary turned political columnist Jody Powell.”
There is a whole sub-history of writers trying to defy the Washington read, including Richard Ben Cramer, whose classic account of the 1988 presidential election, “What It Takes,” has no index. “For years,” Cramer said in an interview after its publication, “I watched all these Washington jerks, all these Capitol Hill, executive-branch, agency wise guys and reporters go into, say, Trover bookstore, take a political book off the shelf, look up their names, glance at the page and put the book back. Washington reads by index, and I wanted those people to read the damn thing.”