The slip cover shows a dark haired, pleasant looking man, wearing a three buttons at the top shirt you never see now, under the sort of tweed jacket we just don’t wear, holding between two fingers of his right hand, the cigarette which only child-molestation outranks… sitting in front of a typewriter!
It depends on how old you are. I never met Henry Fairlie, but I read him in The Spectator with delight. That was the brilliant Spectator before the young fogies took it over for Powellism and the Most Holy Trinity. When Fairlie called himself a Tory, he was in the company of its then proprietor, Ian Gilmour, a down the line liberal Tory and Thatcher-abominator with a strong dash of Keynes and social democracy whom I did know – and honoured.
Fairlie was the kind of journalist who must write, for whom communicating opinions and fashioning decent prose are a kind of benign possession. He was something else, much better not to be, the man on a newspaper with no notion of financial prudence or, indeed, of prudence itself, a chevalier of the unbuttoned lip, unmindful of the opinion cautious, the conduct amendable, the career beautiful. Alan Watkins, recently lost to us, adored him and, at the brink of his career, wrote of asking his legally qualified self: “Do I want to be Mr Justice Devlin or Henry Fairlie?”
This hero was also a pretty through-going fool. The man, however gifted, who spends the advance provided for an assignment to the 1960 Paris summit – Khrushchev, Eisenhower, de Gaulle and all – upon rounds for all the boys, followed by a grandiose dinner for the same boys, and finds the advance spent and has to beg for more, is outrunning the natural excess of the trade. After the Daily Mail had, soon after, done the obvious letting him go bit, he was a compulsory freelance, out of settled employment for 16 years. A couple of years later he would leave Britain for America, talking about the challenge of Washington, but actually to get away from the low hum of gathering creditors.
And, career-long, he drank on. Not riotously, which gets you taken to your bed by friends or the police, but with steady, sinister, deleterious intent. At the same time, he worked, wrote and wrote, glass at hand, often during the night… and produced the goods. Leon Wieseltier, his editor at the New Republic, affectionately describes the system: “Every morning I measured his production with a glance at the bottle of Bourbon I kept on my desk.” Wieseltier and the New Republic’s proprietor, Martin Peretz, would provide the haven and garner the splendid writings of a thinking journalist for whom bourgeois competence, wife, bank manager, more or less coped with mortgage, modest house, owned or at any rate let, had early predeceased him. His own death in 1990 followed a fall late at night onto the marble floor of the building housing the New Republic. Modest injuries induced an abused, neglected system to surrender.
Bite the Hand That Feeds You, an odd title considering how many feeding hands clutched the dog biscuit to wave him a civil but clenched farewell, gathers 300 pages of his writings, some from London, many more from Washington, others, unrealised fragments too good to lose. One begins as a doing-over of overcrowded, ever-rumbling New York. “Between 3 and 6am the life of the city is civil…” and makes it clear that his compliments are addressed to the well conducted rats. He proceeds to anticipate Ken Livingstone by 20 years. The “urban idiocy of bringing a small room to work and parking it in precious space for eight hours… could be simply eliminated if a swingeing tax were levied on those who drive into the city alone.” Fairlie himself, owing rent on his final apartment, made his strike for urban quiet by living in a single room to the rear of the New Republic’s offices.
In the same spirit, hand to mouth, uninsured and outside the benefit ring, he eloquently denounced the elderly drones of Florida and their lobby run by Congressman Claude Pepper. Listing social security benefits, protection from inflation, the supplemental security income (“guarantees a minimum income”), medicare, tax privileges to protect assets in retirement, he concludes that “the vast industry of sunbelt retirement is ripping off the very government in Washington” which nattering elders reliably denounce over its “giveaway programmes for the undeserving.”
An essential aspect of decent journalism is getting fired. I cherish my own demission from being Cross Bencher on the Sunday Express and the proprietor’s words, swiftly passed to me. “I’ve told them to get rid of him. He’s insufficiently loyal to Mrs Thatcher.” Fairlie could beat that. He was sacked from The Times along with its editor in 1982, Murdoch’s Kristallnacht. One long piece collected here, reviewing Piers Brendon’s The Life and Death of the Press Barons, immediately spots the wiser journalist. “Brendon is extremely sketchy about The Times under Murdoch – and one notices that he sometimes writes for Murdoch’s Sunday Times.” But the brisk bitchery done, he proceeds to a straightforward understanding of the modern press glacier which Murdoch dominates. Brendon had argued that “the corporations putting out The Times, Observer, New York Times and Washington Post can sustain newspapers which have circulations in thousands and losses in millions.”
“Well”, comes the return, “they can sustain products that look like newspapers. But, “for all the talent they employ, we sense throughout the unease of the top journalistic staff at producing a product for the extraneous motives of the conglomerate, as it shifts investments around, explores tax loopholes and seeks to attract capital.” Specifically, in the service of Murdoch, “thinking corporately, managing through a team, writing by committee, The Times today identifies itself with the great industrial and financial institutions of America.”
There is, too, a suitable denunciation of Perrier water, an unfair but elegant attack on George F Will – too Anglophile! – Ronald Reagan, representing Back to the Family, Back to Babies, Back to Religion (but not very clearly, to God); the valiantly independent Randolph Bourne rescued a crippled radical journalist killed by the 1918 influenza epidemic. Evans and Novak are terminally commended – “Sheer malevolence of spirit must have some original value.” He imagines their instinctive take on the Virgin birth at the Nazareth Holiday Inn. These are the practicalities of daily life, and he is sharp and funny about them.
But Fairlie, like anyone who writes about politics beyond the higher dessications of academe, is into conflict, people and, especially, into enemies. One particularly cherished is Irving Kristol, father of the more toxic Bill, ex-Trotskyite turned neo-conservative. He seems, says Fairlie, “to simply shake the past from him like a dog coming out of a river.” Not Kristol’s Marxist past, but the one of affections and loyalties, people you knew and still care for, the foundations of a decent, neo-free, Conservatism.
Kristol wants “the mists of the past,” as conjured by Herder, ‘to fire a new nationalism. Which,” thinks Fairlie, “is why the superpatriot always sets our teeth on edge.” Kristol had proclaimed himself not just an American patriot, but an American nationalist. For the too optimistic Fairlie, nationalism could never have a foreign policy. “It is a popular, demagogic notion for domestic consumption.” This was the optimism of the mid-1980s, before George W spread nationalism onto foreign policy like fish paste. Perhaps nationalism cannot make a successful foreign policy? Not sure about that. Try Bismarck. Even so, this is memorable writing which justifies his affectionate editor Leon Wieseltier’s belief that “when Americans were falling over the fatuities of Alistair Cooke” Henry Fairlie, in explaining their country, “was the heir to James Bryce”.
