A Different Conservative

Garry Wills, an Esquire contributing editor with a gift for wit and lucidity, occasionally writes an article that is absolutely unreadable to most people. There was, for instance, his piece in the American Journal of Philology, "The Sapphic 'Umwertung Alter Werte.' " It began: "The poem differs from other early (i.e., pre-Pindaric) Priameln in two respects. First: the catalogue, which seems to be completed in the first strophe with the climactic iyw 8e, is resumed after an interval of three strophes. Second: the relationship between the catalogued values and the climactic one seems tenuous."

Currently, Wills is assured a larger audience, with a long piece on Richard Nixon in the penultimate Saturday Evening Post and another on Spiro Agnew in Esquire. Both articles will be part of his forthcoming book, Nixon Agonistes, which he works on when he is not writing his book on Sophocles or teaching his graduate-school seminar at Johns Hopkins on the Greek dramatist. Just who does Wills think he is? "I'm a classicist who wants to write journalism," he says. "I see nothing odd about that. I didn't intend to go into journalism until the Classics department said either stop moonlighting or lose your tenure. So now I'm a journalist moonlighting at Hopkins."

To both his callings Wills brings a prodigious intelligence and an education that includes five years in a Jesuit seminary and a Classics Ph.D. from Yale.

At 34, he already has published a book-length literary critique of Chesterton, a theological analysis of Politics and Catholic Freedom, and a collection of translations on Roman Culture. He has expanded Esquire articles into books on Jack Ruby and The Second Civil War, the latter being a rather frightening look at the domestic arms race between police and Negroes.

Assigned to cover last summer's political conventions for National Review, Wills produced accounts that were as perceptive--and, at their best, as evocatively written--as Norman Mailer's. He is not mainly a narrative writer; his stories are propelled by his analytical insights. He can pinpoint the perspectives of a society, such as the South's view of the Rev. Martin Luther King: He was "an Uncle Ben with a degree, a Bill Bailey who came home--and turned the home upside down. In him, they saw their niggers turning a calm new face of power on them." He described

Rockefeller, arriving in Miami, as "black comedy Falstaff, not only disastrous in himself, but the cause of disaster in others. ... He was not only a late starter; he had developed a fascination with the starting gate, and kept circling through it as if it were a revolving door." To the surprise of many readers of William F. Buckley's magazine, he was generally sympathetic to the kids in Chicago, whom he described as soft and supple. He spent days among them, and felt that their behavior was shaped by events, rather than vice versa.

Prolonging Superstitions. Despite this view of the Chicago hippies, he describes himself as a conservative, but he might not be accepted as such by most who wear that label. He does not automatically distrust a strong central government, but sees it as beneficial if it truly reflects the will of the people. More significantly, he thinks free enterprise is no more valid as a foundation for an economy than the notion that, in a free marketplace of ideas, the best ideas will necessarily prevail. No conventional conservative could have written his account of Spiro Agnew, in whom he feels, "America's old dimmed-puritan mixture still works--morals without religion, a peremptory must without a tempering why (inverse of the European formula, religion without morals). Agnew maintains the cult of success as a form of righteousness. America's history revolves around the interconnected superstitions that one must deserve success; that one can (rather easily, by mere decorum) deserve it; and that if one deserves it, it will come. America was built on the symbiosis of Dale Carnegie and Billy Graham. These national superstitions have been prolonged in Agnew beyond their natural life by his blighting prosperity, his deals and millionaire pals, his anachronistic Main Street of steel and neon (replacing the old stone and shingle), his crippling good luck and gods who blind him with blessings."

Wills' conservative heroes must meet high intellectual standards--St. Augustine, Cardinal Newman, John Ruskin and, his greatest hero of all, Samuel Johnson. "There's practically no such thing as a real tradition of conservatism in America," he says. "The right and the left today are just splintered forms of 19th century liberalism. Both the contemporary right and left subscribe to the view of the state founded on justice. But the conservatives conceive of a society based on social affection and concords."

Sophocles and the Colts. It was a scholarly critique of "TIME style" Wills mailed to Bill Buckley from Xavier University in 1957 that started his occasional assignments as a book reviewer for National Review. Buckley was so impressed that he invited Wills to visit him. "I expected some ancient, crusty professor--and in walked this child. It took me several gulps to think of him as having written this very authoritative piece."

His cherubic face, easy grin and mild-mannered, professorial air still conceal his intellect from casual acquaintances. But a discussion of opera--or early Bing Crosby--will set him off, as will any mention of Augustine, Nixon, Sophocles or the Baltimore Colts. With his wife and three children, he is quite happily settled in a modest home in a Baltimore suburb built largely to the postwar specifications of G.I. loans.

Is journalistic writing enough to satisfy his restless intellect? "Well," says Wills, "not in the sense that I'm going to give up writing about the classics. But many of the best writers in English have been journalists: Dickens, Macaulay, Johnson, Mencken, Twain, Mailer. Even today some of the best writing is in journalism--perhaps the best. In a world of specialists, somebody has to be a courier among specialties."

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