1. For those who are familiar with him, certain biographical details were probably the source of initial interest--the homelessness when at the height of his fame, most prominently. Fairlie's brilliance as a political journalist was surpassed, possibly, by his irresponsibility with money. Evicted from his Washington apartment, he took to sleeping on the couch in his office at The New Republic. He had no other place to go. Elsewhere in the office complex there was a shower he could sometimes use. Whatever the effect on his hygiene, his productivity did not suffer. Colleagues stopping in the office during off hours were frequently surprised to hear the clickety-clack of his typewriter in the middle of the night--and, peering in, startled to discover Fairlie, looking either very rumpled or too undressed to qualify, so lost in the act of composition as to be oblivious of his visitor. Thus the recurrence of "raffish" in the testimony of his peers. The boozing and apparently eventful love life didn't hurt, either.
2. A Brit and a staunch Tory, Fairlie emigrated to the United States in the mid-60s, when he was fortyish. He loved his new country but regarded with aversion its conservative political party. Perusing the Table of Contents in Bite the Hand That Feeds You, the posthumously collected collection of essays that stole its name from Fairlie's working title for his unfinished memoir, the eye falls on not only "Mencken's Booboisie in Control of GOP" and "If Pooh Were President: A Tory's Riposte to Reaganism," but also on "In Defense of Big Government" and "The Voice of Hope: Franklin D. Roosevelt."
3. The most enjoyable essay in Bite the Hand is called "Tory Days: George F. Will." It qualifies as an exercise in expert vituperation, but one can hear between the lines, I think, the indignation of the boy who's done his homework and is distressed to find the objects of his loving study worn like baubles by a hooker. It's as good a place as any to dip in for a sample of his prose style:
Still, the most bizarre genealogical claim for his ideas appears in Statecraft, a slim book that we are nonetheless entitled to take--since he so presents it--as his testament. "When a kind reader calls me unpredictable, I am tempted to respond: to anyone sufficiently familiar with the minds of the Oxford Movement, circa 1842, all my conclusions are predictable." Of course few Americans, even if Will were among them, are "sufficiently familiar" with the Oxford Movement to know what he is talking about. We can only ponder, not to his credit, why the claim is made. There is no explanation. It is thrown in. Nothing follows from it.
[Snip]
With these lists, with the individual names he is always tossing out, in, and over his shoulder, we come to Will's famous use of quotations. His critics are usually satisfied to call it intellectual and cultural name dropping. But Will's practice suggests a far more serious disorder. At times explicitly, but also implicitly in his whole posture, Will puts himself forward as an almost lone defender of our Western cultural heritage (but with support from William J Bennet). And yet he rummages among its thought and literature like a bag lady. . . . [T]he parentheses are unforgivably tawdry: "Santayana and Plato, both of them clever fellows." "Dostoevsky (who knew something about crime and punishment) . . . ."
[Snip]
What is absent from Will's list of names, from his entire papier-mache model of Western culture, is a recognition of struggle--of the struggle of idea against idea in the civilization as a whole, of the strenuous and tormented struggle between the individual thinkers and artists he so lightly robs, like a pick-pocket. . . . In this he reflects a persistent shallowness in American conservatism, not least in the alleged "revival" of conservative thought in recent years. There is no quest in it.
And the rest are mainly booboisies.
4. Of particular local interest is an excerpt from the never-published Journey Into America, a sprawling account of Fairlie's grand tour through our country, taking in the sights and talking to its citizens. This endeavor brought him one night to the Shamrock, a bar in Mankato, Minnesota, where he met a man named Hooter, the subject of "An Evening with Hooter" in Bite the Hand.
Comments