Shelf Life: Laughter and Remembering.('The Morality of Laughter,' 'Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life' and other books)(Book Review)(Brief Article)

'Laughter," wrote poet Galway Kinnell, "is our stuttering / in a language we can't speak yet." And he was on to something: Laughter is the advent of a language of transcendence, a language in which human beings reject the limits placed on them by power and circumstance. F. H. Buckley, a law professor at George Mason University, offers a fascinating philosophical exposition of laughter in his new book, The Morality of Laughter (University of Michigan, 240 pp., $29.95). "Laughter," he writes, "might be likened to the Gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1-4), the special grace that provides an earthly substitute for the Gift of Eternal Life (Romans 6:23)."

In what he describes as a "very conservative" project, Buckley outlines the role of laughter in strengthening the virtues, and also in correcting vices (including the overreaches of fashionable intellectuals). In the course of his discussion, he offers examples of jokes ranging from Freud's ("This girl reminds me of Dreyfus. The army does not believe in her innocence") to those of the wonderful old Canadian comedy team of Wayne and Shuster (the ancient Roman orders a martinus, and then insists that if he wanted two he'd ask for two).

-- Millions of ordinary Americans -- by which I mean, non-military- history buffs -- were captivated by the soft-spoken historian-novelist Shelby Foote when he was featured prominently in Ken Burns's monumental TV epic, The Civil War. Many of them even went on to tackle Foote's massive three-volume history of that war. Now comes C. Stuart Chapman with a readable biography of the man behind the impressive volumes. In Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life (Mississippi, 317 pp., $30), we get the portrait of a complex figure who "hated the injustices of the South, but . . . still longed to be a part of the culture's elite, as had been his millionaire grandfathers before him." But Foote is first and foremost a man of literature:

For his seventeenth birthday, his mother gave him [Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel] Proust, and the experience of reading [it] was "what, if anything, made me an author." . . . Foote was mesmerized by the rich language of Proust, the "Shakespeare of our time," as Foote frequently called the French writer. . . . In the future he would reserve [reading] Remembrance of Things Past as a "prize" for finishing a book.

In later years, Foote was delighted that his Civil War trilogy was even longer than Proust's masterpiece; he loved the process of writing. Chapman quotes a comment Foote made to his close friend Walker Percy: "Prayer may bring a man in touch with the angels; I don't know. But I do know that the closest to God I ever come is when I'm at my work." It is a pleasure, through this biography, to spend some time in this particular man's company.

-- George Orwell is a greater presence on the intellectual scene today than he was in his lifetime. In Scenes from an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell (ISI, 350 pp., $25), Orwell scholar John Rodden examines the fate of the great man's reputation since his death in 1950. Some viewed "the quixotic Orwell [as] an 'authentic' rebel, a modern existential hero"; others saw him as a proto-neo-conservative; still others, accepting the last characterization as correct but viewing it negatively, cast him as a traitor against socialism.

One of the highlights of Rodden's book is an authorial excursion into the former East Germany, in which life truly had imitated Orwell's art: Ex-dissident interviewees tell of slogans -- "Who has the youth, has the future!" and "You need only to school people properly -- then they'll live right!" -- that uncannily echo the deadening Newspeak of Nineteen Eighty-Four. East Germany was a socialist society in which merely possessing a ...