The literary critic Edmund Wilson was ambivalent about the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, but he didn't doubt Lincoln's genius as a writing man. "Alone among American Presidents," Wilson wrote, "it is possible to imagine Lincoln, grown up in a different milieu, becoming a distinguished writer of a not merely political kind."
We writers of a political kind won't like that patronizing "merely," apt though it is, but Wilson's judgment is true and righteous altogether. The same point can be made about Antonin Scalia, alone among American public servants of recent memory. At his death (I wonder what he would make of the now-universal genteelism "passing" to avoid the plainer word?) even his detractors were happy to concede the largeness of his writerly gifts. Anyone who has spent pleasant hours with his judicial opinions will find it possible to imagine Scalia, in another milieu, becoming a distinguished writer of almost any kind.
Scalia's writing could swing in an instant from steely argument to wild lampoon and then combine the two and never lose its ease and gracefulness. Such a style can only be the product of exertions unseen by the reader. It requires unblinking attention and pitiless self-corrections made on the fly. The rest of us got a hint of what was involved in 2003, when William Safire, the language columnist for the New York Times — yes, my little ones, there once was such a person — asked the justice to explain a turn of phrase from a recent opinion.
The Supreme Court had issued a sweeping decision, and Scalia had written a stinging dissent. He was always doing this, according to the popular press. For thirty years the Court swept, Scalia stung. When a Scalia dissent wasn't "stinging," reporters and headline writers insisted it was "blistering," and if not "blistering" then "scathing." My best sources (thanks, Nexis!) tell me that Scalia had been a justice for scarcely a single term before the Times declared one of his opinions "blistering." It took another two years for him to work up to "stinging." The violence only accelerated. In the last five years alone the Times has noted (if not read) five "scathing" dissents — a pace of one a year. The violence of his dissents was wildly overstated, of course. I don't think journalists knew how else to approach them. Scalia could dismember an argument so quickly and thoroughly that a wide-eyed reporter, arriving late to the scene and finding the field littered with broken fallacies and red herrings, could only assume that violence had been done. We have delicate sensibilities.
In his "stinging dissent" from the sodomy case called Lawrence v. Texas, Safire noted that Scalia had erroneously neglected to use a possessive apostrophe after the word homosexuals in this sentence: "I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means." Among other things, the absence of the apostrophe allowed the Associated Press to shorten the sentence to make Scalia look condescending: "I have nothing against homosexuals."
Scalia pled guilty to the grammatical offense, but said it was committed with benevolence aforethought.