It's Always Fairlie Weather

The fact that the Fourth of July weekend news cycle wound up being dominated by Sarah Palin is fairly amusing. And by "fairly amusing", I of course mean that it's completely fucking disgusting. The day itself is now long gone and the weekend nearly over, but before both disappear into the distant past, I'd like to lift a glass to Henry Fairlie, as great an American patriot as a British citizen is likely to have been. I grew up reading Fairlie's essays in The New Republic back during that magazine's glory period in the 1980s; he arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1966 and died in 1990, at the age of 66, from complications that sprang up while he wasting away in the hospital after breaking his hip in a fall. Fairlie published a few books in his lifetime, most notably The Kennedy Promise and The Seven Deadly Sins Today, but his famously awaited memoir of his career as a writer and reporter was either lost or never fully completed, and the new collection Bite the Hand That Feeds You, edited by Jeremy McCarter, is the first published collection of his magazine work. He was a first-rate thinker and excellent writer and a heroic example to others in his profession. If he knew about the title I have selected for this post, he would come back and beat me to death with a brick.

I had been in the country about eight years, and was living in Houston, when a Texas friend asked me one evening: "Why do you like living in America? I don't mean why you find it interesting--why you want to write about it--but why you like living here so much." After only a moment's reflection, I replied, "It's the first time I've felt free." One spring day, shortly after my arrival in America, I was walking down the long, broad street of a suburb, with its sweeping front lawns (all that space), its tall trees (all that sky), and its clumps of azaleas (all that color). The only other person on the street was a small boy on a tricycle. As I passed him, he said, "Hi!"--just like that. No four-year-old boy had ever addressed me without an introduction before. Yet here was this one, with his cheerful "Hi!" Recovering from the culture shock, I tried to look down stonily at his flaxen head, but instead, involuntarily, I found myself saying in return: "Well--hi!" He pedaled off, apparently satisfied. He had begun my Americanization.

"Hi!" As I often say--for Americans do not realize it--the word is a democracy. (I come from a country where one can tell someone's class by how they say "Hallo!" or "Hello!" or "Hullo," or whether they say it at all.) But anyone can say "Hi!" Anyone does. Shortly after my encounter with the boy, I called on the then Suffragan Bishop of Washington. Did he greet me as the Archbishop of Canterbury would have done? No. He said, "Hi, Henry!" I put it down to an aberration, an excess of Episcopalian latitudinarianism. But what about my first meeting with Lyndon B. Johnson, the President of the United States, the Emperor of the Free World, before whom, like a Burgher of Calais, a halter round my neck, I would have sunk to my knees, pleading for a loan for my country? He held out the largest hand in Christendom, and said, "Hi, Henry!"

--"My America!", 1983

As a clear-eyed enthusiast of what was best about America, Fairlie was a welcome corrective to those English journalists who dazzle Americans with their ability to spit venom in a superior, lofty style that passes for wit. (The New York Times, having its little joke, passed the new book off to the anti-Fairlie, Christopher Hitchens for review. His performance does not disappoint: he warms up by quoting from the book's introduction to make the point that Fairlie was a drunk and a sponging deadbeat who enjoyed the company of women, and then sneering that "It was more than something of an achievement, then, that the general tenor of his essays was able to sustain such a high moral tone." He regrets that "Fairlie said, of the Republican convention delegates, that “the Reaganites on the floor were exactly those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy.” His hasty show of references to H. L. Mencken and Randolph Bourne — about whom he wrote passionately and well in other contexts — cannot conceal the straining for effect and the feigning of outrage that are so sadly evident here." He signs off with the thrilling news that, towards the end of Fairlie's life, "I caught him out making a slanderous allegation in print that was backed up, when challenged, only by an unimpressive piece of bluffing and blustering," then regretfully notes that the lying windbag died soon afterwards and so was unable to apologize to Hitchens for having stolen his brilliant, one-of-a-kind idea to write a piece making fun of Perrier drinkers. A man will have to be dead a lot longer than nineteen years before he can be forgiven for having written work of more lasting value than Christopher Hitchens.)

The America that Europe fears is the America of the Reaganites. The America once of the Scopes trial; the America of Prohibition; the America of ignorant isolationism. The America then of "better dead than Red"; the America of McCarthyism; the America of the last fundamentalists of the 1950s. The America now of the new evangelicals; the America of the Moral Majority; the America of a now ignorant interventionism; the America which can see homosexuals as a conspiracy; feminists as a conspiracy; perhaps even women as a conspiracy. The America of fear . For it is in fear that the ungoverned and the unfree are doomed to live...It is time that we reminded ourselves, and said aloud and more often, that it is from these people that nastiness comes."

--"Mencken's Booboisie in Control of GOP", 1980

Fairlie arrived in the United States from England as a self-described Tory, and this turned out to be an excellent position from which to separate what, in his time here, was inspiring about America and what was ominous and unsettling and ugly. He saw himself as classically conservative, but he got to witness the early stages of American conservatives' abandonment of true conservatism for the strange new gods of neo-conservatism and base Republicanism. Fairlie, who wrote movingly about the consoling power of FDR's voice over the radio during World War II, never wavered in his belief that government was a force for good that had a responsibility to set a certain level of civilized existence below which the most unfortunate citizen should not be left to fall below, an idea that by the time of his death had all but been officially redefined as heresy by the forces in politics and the media that shape conventional wisdom.

Because he cared about what words mean and where ideas come from, he was especially well equipped to dismantle George Will, who back in the '80s--he might still be at it, I honestly don't know--enjoyed labeling himself as a "Tory", with the understanding that, so far as both he and his readers were concerned, the term just meant a Republican who had declared himself classier than the Dennis Hasterts of the world by virtue of his knowing a British term and dressing like a member of the Nation of Islam. The review of Will included here is perhaps the best example of what a mean mouth Fairlie had on him and how smartly he could back it up. (If I have a major complaint about the book, it's that McCarter, eager to show Fairlie in a bug-hearted light, has seriously undersold how good he could be at his most acidic, and so left a number of deserving classics--his lacerating essays on the '80s reboot of Vanity Fair, of Alexander Cockburn and Pamela Harriman, a tremendously unfair and very funny screed about Ted Kennedy called "Hamalot"--in the back issues section. Their absence from the present volume is a major disappointment, but much will be forgiven if we are in line for a follow-up titled Biting Every Hand in Sight.)

I hardly read newspapers anymore...I think they are poor reading for a journalist. They are one reason journalists go on saying the same things.

--"Migration", 1984

There was no subject on which Fairlie was more vituperative or prescient than the decline of mainstream journalism in his time. The piece on Will is partly the reaction of someone who had seen promise in the bow-tied hustler and was saddened to see the little fellow sell out like so many others. Will threw his promise as a writer over the side in exchange for the celebrity that constant TV appearances bring and the riches that come from the subsequent bookings one can attract on the lecture circuit. Although he succumbed to the moral failings noted by Christopher "Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine" Hitchens, Fairlie himself abstained from the siren song of remunerative media whoring. (It is amusing--again, in the Sarah Palin sense--that Fairlie did so much railing against the dire influence of TV while writing for a magazine then owned by Martin Peretz, the unapologetic racist nutjob whose hobby used to be writing angry pieces in the back of his weekly journal protesting the fact that, because of an unfair media blacklist against unapologetic racist nutjobs, he was never invited to appear on TV to share his expert opinion on the Palestinian issue.)

I never knew anything about Fairlie's life besides what he chose to share in his writing, and so it was from the introduction to the new book that I learned that, in his last years, he actually lost his apartment and, living hand to mouth, spent his dotage living in the New Republic offices until the accident that caused him to retire to a hospital bed. He died homeless, alone, and dead broke, none of which seems to have affected his writing for the worse. Considering how much more entertaining he probably would have been on the air or at the lectern than such TNR colleagues as Fred Barnes and Morton "Gump" Kondracke, his preference for sleeping on the floor to hiring an agent and ordering the bastard to get cracking might just be taken as the act of a man of principle. As someone who's slept on a few floors himself, I can agree with those who would point to the housing arrangements he was forced to make at the end of his life as reason for other writers to see him as a cautionary example. Of course, if you're talking about the quality of one's work versus the quality of one's life, it's the likes of Will and Hitchens and Barnes and Kondracke who are the cautionary examples. You pays your money and you takes your chances.