Thus Spake David E.: The Collected Wit and Wisdom of the Most Influential Automotive Journalist of Our Time

by David E. Davis Jr., P.J. O'Rourke (Contributor)

Essays from "Car & Driver" and "Automobile magazine" share the author's driving experiences, evaluations of cars, and insights into the automobile industry

Genres: Cars

379 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1999

About the author

David E. Davis Jr. was considered for the last several decades of his life to be the Dean of automotive journalism. He was the founder of 'Automobile', and was Editor & Publisher of 'Car and Driver' for many years. He was also a contributing writer to many other publications, and was the author of at least one book. A true non-conformist, famous for his brilliance and erudite journalistic style, Mr. Davis also affected a sartorial elegance which immediately marked him as a unique and powerful personality...

Reviews

[Liam · Rating 4 out of 5]

The late David E. Davis Jr. was one of my childhood heroes; he is still something of a role model for me, both for his writing and his approach to life generally. I used to see him occasionally during the late 1980s & early 1990s, as he walked into or out of the 'Automobile' magazine office on East Liberty Street in downtown Ann Arbor. His office was directly across the street from what all of us punk rock kids used to call "the Skate Park" (actually a sort of sunken patio garden), despite several large "No Skateboarding" signs mounted around its perimeter. I actually gathered up my courage to ask him for a job once- he told me to get back to him after I finished high school, which to my regret I never did. At the time, I figured it was simply a nice way for him to get rid of me, but in retrospect he was quite possibly serious. I never knew until his death in 2011 that his birthday was only two days away from mine, which fact goes a long way toward explaining his legendary eccentricity. I've never met anyone born during the first two weeks of November who could be regarded as "normal", never mind "boring". I have no idea why it is that we are all such non-conformists, but obviously all that zodiac bullshit has some sort of basis in fact...

Mr. Davis was born on 7 November, 1930; arguably perfect timing to experience what some consider the greatest era in automotive history. By the time I was born in 1970 he was a well-known automotive journalist and had already been Editor of 'Car and Driver' magazine (eventually he was Publisher as well) for several years, so I literally grew up reading his work. Partially because my father was somewhat interested, but also because I was a bit precocious, I became fascinated with automobiles myself at a fairly young age. My father's tastes ran to the Morgan Plus 4, MG TD, and several other mostly British sports cars; as a young U.S. Army officer in 1969, he had driven a rented Austin-Healey "bugeye" Sprite across Australia while on his extension leave during the war in Viet Nam. When I was about three years old, he bought me the little Tootsie-Toy MG TD & Jaguar D-Type, and explained what those cars were. My father has never owned any cars like those, although he did have a '71 AMC Javelin and a '72 Dodge Demon during my childhood (I didn't much care for the Javelin, but the Demon was pretty damn cool!). Several years after that he had an ‘89 Eagle Premier (the original version with the exterior by Giorgetto Giugiaro's Italdesign, before it was ruined, and with the PRV V6 engine), which I still think was a really nice ride. I’d love to have that car now. There were a lot of extremely cool and/or beautiful cars on the road during the 1970s & 1980s, and it was a lot of fun for my father, myself and my brothers to look for them wherever we went in those days. At some point during the early 1970s, we happened to see a Jaguar XK120 ("British Racing Green" with black interior), and like many others before me (including both my father and Mr. Davis, not to mention Jay Leno) I was instantly smitten. I spent hours after that digging through boxes of old car magazines in used bookstores, until I found a nice two-page colour photo of an XK120 flying down a narrow ribbon of black-top out in the country somewhere, which I immediately tacked up on my bedroom wall. I still like XK120s a lot, but some time during the early 1980s I was walking down Liberty Street past the Michigan Theater, on my way to Schoolkids Records and the Dawn Treader Book Shop, and parked there was a bright red (with black interior) 1968 Jaguar E-Type. It was so beautiful that I completely lost the power of speech, if only for a few moments, and from that point on the E-Type has remained right up at the top of my favourite cars list. A photograph of an identical car went up on my wall soon afterwards, and as the years went by it was joined by photos of an Austin-Healey 100-6, a Ferrari 275 GTB/4 (and a Ferrari 400 GT, which I actually liked even though many people didn't), a Lamborghini 400 GT and a Lamborghini Miura S. Most of those photographs were thrown away a long time ago, but that big XK120 photo stayed up on my bedroom wall through several moves, until it got stashed somewhere while moving between apartments when I was in my early twenties, and I lost track of it. It may still be around here somewhere; some of my boxes haven't been opened in nearly two decades. At any rate, I was a full-on automobile enthusiast from an extremely early age. Oddly enough, most people with whom I've been acquainted over the years are completely unaware of this. Most know of my life-long immersion in music, as both listener and performer, and the corollary interest in guitars, amplifiers and such that is common among musicians. Those who know me a little better than that (and/or are among my Goodreads friends) are aware that I spend an inordinate amount of time reading military history. Few, however, would guess how much time I have spent drooling over books about European sports cars (or American muscle cars), watching YouTube videos about cars, scheming up ways by which to get my hands on a '79 Plymouth Volaré Wagon (with a 225 Slant Six), or a '63 Dodge Polara Convertible, or a '68 Dodge Coronet wagon, or a '64 Studebaker GT Hawk, or a '64 Imperial LeBaron, or a '71 Dodge 3700 GT, or a '72 Volvo P1800 ES, or a '72 Citroën SM... I could go on for a while, hahaha!

As I said, I literally grew up reading all the articles and columns written by David E. Davis Jr. that I could get my hands on, and around 1983 I subscribed to 'Car and Driver'. By the time Mr. Davis left that publication in 1985 my subscription had run out, so when I saw the thin first issue of 'Automobile' in a downriver suburban 7-11 in the Spring of 1986 I had no idea he was involved. I picked it up off the magazine rack just because it looked interesting. When I saw that not only was Mr. Davis the Editor & Publisher, but that he had also managed to bring every other 'Car and Driver' contributor who I thought was worth a damn, I was hooked. I was also broke, and I seriously considered shop-lifting the magazine, but I ended up just ripping off the subscription card when the clerk wasn't looking. So I became one of the initial subscribers, from Volume 1-Issue 2 on, and I enjoyed every single issue for the next two years. For many years, I kept the first several, as well as assorted later issues, in one of two old cardboard file-boxes, the twin of which held an assortment of music magazines of similar vintage: ‘Rip’, ‘Option’, ‘Rage’ and ‘B-Side’, among others. Unfortunately, while I still have the latter file-box, the one with the copies of ‘Automobile’ disappeared at some point during the last twenty-five years. That sucks, but at least ‘Automobile’, unlike most of the music magazines, is still being published; the bookmark I used while reading this book was one of the current subscription cards, and I’ve been thinking about subscribing once again*. The only reason I haven’t already done so is that ‘Automobile’ was for all intents and purposes an extension of Mr. Davis’s personality and tastes, as well as those of his like-minded cohorts. Now that he is gone, and even his younger collaborators have largely reached an age where they are either partially or completely retired, I am afraid that much of what I enjoyed so much about reading the magazine in years past may well have been lost along the way. You see, it wasn’t so much a magazine about cars as such, but rather a magazine about living one’s life with style and having as much fun as possible, with cars as the catalyst. Just as importantly, the interesting and talented people having so much fun, and writing about it with such erudition and flair (always accompanied by beautifully shot photographs) were for the most part people who lived otherwise relatively normal middle class lives in various communities around the Detroit/Ann Arbor area. In other words, they were not multi-millionaires living in mansions in gated communities somewhere far, far away. Because this was the case, not only was it easy to imagine having a career as a writer or photographer for a national or international publication (something that was, in those days before the internet, vaguely imagined as the sort of career that required one to live in New York, or Los Angeles, or London, or Paris- i.e. some impossibly glamorous place so far from the south-eastern corner of Michigan as to be nearly mythical). Not only that, and perhaps more importantly, David E. Davis Jr. and his colleagues exemplified a way of living on one’s own terms, while also living well and enjoying themselves a great deal. They proved on a daily basis, year after year, that any teen-age kid could aspire to someday have taste and style, sartorial elegance, artistry and erudition; and that those aspirations were entirely separate from and absolutely not contingent on the possession of great wealth. I will grant that things looked very different during the late 1980s & early 1990s, a time when, for example, a pristine 1964 Jaguar E-Type coupé could be had for $5500.00 or thereabouts, a slightly worn but still serviceable 1964 Fender Jazz Bass for around $500.00, and a beautifully maintained 1975 Triumph Bonneville motorcycle for $2000.00 or less- and the average income in the U.S. was only about 12% less than it is now, nearly thirty years later ($54,621 in 1990, $61,372 in 2017). The principal, however, still remains the same. If you are a young person nowadays, and you make the effort to educate yourself (far easier now than in those days due to the internet) so as to develop your own individual tastes and style, figure out what makes you happy and prioritise accordingly, you can just as easily follow the example of Mr. Davis as could have anyone older. There are ways and means, shortcuts and loopholes, and always personal connections and pure chance to help you along- you only have to watch for your chance and take it as it appears. Also, the one great advantage of youth over age is time- you have far more of it when you are young, for obvious reasons! The thing is, while conquering the world (and/or becoming a legend in one’s own time as Mr. Davis did) may be the goal to start with, ultimately most of us can consider ourselves fortunate if we are able simply to arrange for an enjoyable life by the time we reach middle age. To use myself as an example for one aspect of this, my wife and I for many years regularly received compliments for the way we dressed, usually quickly followed by questions like “where did you buy those boots/that jacket/that shirt/that hat?”. At first we would tell the truth, but eventually we realized that most people didn’t really want the truth, and that simply not answering the question was the better option. The truth was that we bought almost all our clothes from two places: either military surplus stores, or charity resale shops like those run by the Salvation Army or the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. Of course, we supplemented those sources occasionally with a few slightly higher-class resale shops (several generations of Detroit-area musicians, including ours, bought clothes at Showtime Clothing and/or Penny Pincher), and also the same sort of stores at which everyone else shopped; black Levis and Converse All-Stars are the same no matter where you buy them. The key things that made it possible for us to dress with considerably more style than many people who had the ability to spend vastly greater amounts of money on clothes was that starting when we were both children, we had put a great deal of effort into learning about style- then, as young adults, we put just as much effort, as well as time, into finding places to buy clothing that was not exactly like what everyone else wore. It is much more a matter of priorities and effort than of how much money you have. One beautifully tailored suit (or dress) made of high-end materials is much better than several that are cheap, shoddy and off the rack- in the same way, four pints of Guinness Extra Stout (or a six-pack of Dragon Stout) is always better than a 12-pack of Bud, and one bottle of Vino de Eyzaguirre Cabernet Sauvignon is always going to be better than whatever over-priced California swill is trendy at the moment! I am once again using my personal tastes as an example, but the point is that if you do the work, your own individual taste will get better and better, as will, concurrently, your ability to find high quality at a reasonable price. This whole idea is something I learned, at least in part, from observing people like David E. Davis Jr. when I was a child. I don’t dress very much like Mr. Davis did (although I do own one bespoke tweed sport-jacket much like the ones he used to wear), and aside from automobiles, our respective tastes are probably quite different. I mentioned above that I had subscribed to both ‘Car and Driver’ and ‘Automobile’ during the 1980s (I subscribed to ‘Automobile’ a second time around 1995-96); aside from that, the only magazines to which I have ever subscribed were ‘American Photographer’, which is long since defunct, and ‘Elle Décor’ which I still read occasionally. Leaving aside ‘Car and Driver’, the other three publications have in common the fact that they each represent a different aspect of “aspirational life-style”; in other words, most of us don’t get to drive gorgeous vintage Ferraris, or jet to Paris from the latest war zone in a silk suit stuffed with banknotes, a Leica III around our necks and a Chesterfield King dangling from the corners of our mouths, leaving a trail of hot fashion models drying their tears in our wake, or spend a million dollars decorating our homes as if money grew on trees. The whole point of this type of magazine is to give talented writers and photographers the venue to let us live vicariously through their opportunities to do things that, under normal circumstances, only extremely wealthy people get to do. The cars, cameras and castles/condos are merely catalysts for the stories that are written and the photographs taken. David E. Davis Jr. ran this sort of magazine better than just about anyone. I am sure that I’m not the only one who learned a great deal from him over the years about the art of living well. He was a larger-than-life character whose existence enriched us all, and the world (particularly the tiny little corner thereof known as south-eastern Michigan) is a much less interesting and enjoyable place without him…


*(2 March 2021) Sadly, 'Automobile' ceased publication only a few months after I wrote this review; the last issue was dated February 2020. I had been wondering why I had not seen it lately on the magazine rack at the grocery store, and this evening I somewhat belatedly discovered the reason...

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

David E. Davis died recently, and that's a pity. He practically invented automotive journalism and introduced me to the hilarious novels of Thorne Smith. He also gave the world P.J. O'Rourke. Fortunately, he still lives in this compendium of his often brilliant, always entertaining editorials from Car and Driver, and Automobile (a magazine he founded). His writing was never just about cars. He wrote about food, wine, literature, history, dogs, women, great men, and a lot of very funny things he'd seen and heard in his varied and remarkable life, and cars. "Thus Spake David E." is the kind of book that makes you wish you had known the author.

[Bonnie Folster · Rating 5 out of 5]

David E was a friend and mentor. I got the book down to share with a friend and started reading some of the columns again. His writing is so vivid, evocative and uniquely David E. For people who love cars, life, interesting characters, legends and more— this is gratifying to read. And again.