alpo

I was saddened a few days ago to read that the British automotive journalist Leonard John Kensell Setright died on September 7.

Setright was a personal hero for me---a proud generalist in a sea of specialists. He was an exponent of an earlier generation of journalists, and people in general, for whom a broad education in the liberal arts was not just a prerequisite to membership in civilization but a given. He was a polymath, with no formal training in engineering or science but able to write clearly and debate forcefully on the most arcane details of engine, suspension, and tire design. Most of all, his writing displayed an attitude almost extinct now in our age of occupational hyperspecialization: that technical subjects are worth understanding less for their own sake than for the very human impacts their development may have---computers on music, for instance, via digital recording and synthesis; or cars on American family structure, via the sexual revolution and the growth of the suburbs.

His writing was learned but never pedantic, sophisticated but never condescending, witty but never snide. He seasoned his prose with literary allusions without ever seeming heavy-handed. His closest stylistic relation was, I think, P.G. Wodehouse (although I suppose the number of people who are familiar with both is pretty small!).

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So much of Setright's prose was of such a high standard, compared to most of what passes for genre journalism now, that it's hard for me to single out favorite quotations. When I read that he was dead, I pulled down all his books from my shelves and started flipping through them. There's something worth savoring---for humor, clarity of expression, simple elegance, or all three---on almost every page, but here are a few almost-arbitrary excerpts:

(From Mercedes-Benz SL and SLC, 1979)
"The car exhibits such awesome solidity that, far from fearing for one's own safety in an accident, one dreads the thought of how much destruction it might wreak wherever it struck."

"One could remain comfortable in the SLC for twenty-four hours at a stretch, and in that time one could, but for the necessary restoration of fluid balances, go a very long way."

"Always thorough, Daimler-Benz put a secondary oil pump in the automatic transmission so that the 450 could be towed, making it surely the first car designed to be reliable even in the broken-down state."

"Decadence is a fascinating process: like so many supposed vices it offers much that is attractive. It is even so in motoring: the trouble with all these modern monstrosities, corrupted by agitators and legislators to the point where one sometimes wonders whether the design engineers should not retire altogether and leave the job to the politicians, is that so often they are much nicer to drive than their predecessors."

(From Motorcycles, 1976)
"As Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, `Who overcomes by force has overcome but half his foe': and what the Norton lacked in sheer power and consequent speed it made up for in a new roadworthiness..."

(From Rolls-Royce: An Illustrated History, 1971)
"The handling of the Shadow is such as to make earnest high-speed driving on give-and-take roads a more realistic undertaking than in any previous Rolls-Royce, but it is still a little intimidating. The very light and low-geared steering can be twirled without much misgiving, for the basic steering characteristic is strong understeer accompanied by considerable roll. Push the car to its cornering limit and it settles down to a steady widening of its line as the rear tyres cling tenaciously and the front ones drift outwards---though at the very ultimate extreme, the tail begins to come around and neutralise things. Never is there any feeling of impending sudden breakaway or control reversal; rather, it feels as though the car is looking after you and saving you from the consequences of anything rash that you might do."

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An obituary and an interview in Granta last year: read the latter if nothing else to get a feel for what a unique character the man was.