The Voice We'll Always Hear
Coyne, John R. Jr.
West. Calm, firm, with ultimate courage, they stood against the Persian host -- and won though they lost. "Our situation is no more desperate, our enemies no more powerful, than the situations...
...Their ways are prepared by trade book representatives who always seem to start out asking if you would like a free copy of their new text on how to write English with pinking shears and conclude by inviting you to become president of their company...
...The Greatest Show on Paper Grooving the Symbol Edited by Richard W. Lid...
...Were not the intellectual establishment in our country monolithically liberal, Frank would have been recog nized as one of the foremost men of American letters and would long ago have been rewarded with a chair at an important university...
...397 pp...
...The Intellectual Establishmen.t (Arlington House, 1972...
...His phone bill was rumored to be just a bit smaller than the national debt...
...The atmosphere was exhilarating, intellectual...
...Thomas Y. Crowell Company...
...The future lies in our determination, in our firmness of principle, in the courage with which we gird our will to rise to our destiny...
...If there is to be that clear-cut victory about which Frank Meyer spoke with such passion at National Review's fifth anniversary, it will be said of him -- and those other men of the West who passed the torch to a younger generation in the last third of the twentieth century -- that be "'won though he lost...
...The madness of the event rested in the indiscriminate and superficial lumping together of disparate items in an effort to stuff America into two hours of commercial television...
...only one team was playing...
...Frank could talk about anything -war, peace, politics, Jane Austen, Dorothy Sayers (Frank was especially fond of Lord Peter Wimsey, Miss Sayers' detective, because Wimsey, like Frank, took his degree at Balliol College, Oxford), Plato, Gibbon, pro football, baseball...
...He was a leading American Communist until his mid-thirties, a cadre Communist responsible for shaping and forever testing Communist elite...
...Once a fortnight promptly after sunset, Frank Meyer rises from his breakfast and prepares to defend the West...
...For the moment I am thinking of last year's Superbowl -- the show more than the game -- and a national product of enormous proportions...
...Raines...
...Eliseo Vivas remarked several weeks after Frank's death, "You young fellows won't have Frank around to give you orders any more...
...Frank Meyer here...
...Frank Meyer was no ideologue...
...These are the seventies, so the subject of the readers is radicalism, contemporary America, contemporary living or any combination...
...His raucous good humor and occasional tippling made him a member in highest standing of the Moon Mullins Study Group and the Indiana Iron Guard (he pestered the keepers of that un-organization for years for initiation, even though he had never resided in Indiana as a conservative -- only as a Communist...
...HIS most recent book is The Impudent Snobs: Agnew vs...
...The program began with a military Honor Guard carrying a colossal American flag, flanked by little American flags, on to the field...
...The Free Press...
...And, God willing, we will have the victory...
...Last week Frank Meyer died of lung cancer in his own bedroom at Woodstock, where he insisted on meeting death...
...Jameson G. Campaigne, Jr., a journalist and businessman residing in Chicago, is an associate of The Alternative...
...Nor was he a deadly serious scold, a Cato or Cassandra...
...You owe me a review...
...And those of us who are procrastinators, as most writers tend to be, will continue to procrastinate...
...Not football...
...He didn't always work, however, and conservatives, especially younger conservatives, looked forward to invitations to one of Frank's "evenings...
...EST, we'll still experience that quick pang of guilt, and the next morning we'll be back at our typewriters, the voice we'll always be able to hear in our minds encouraging us to give our very best...
...Munching on Exstence, which announces that its pur16 The Alternative June--September 1972...
...And when it came time to go off to college -- one to Columbia, the other to Princeton -- both boys, neither of whom had ever sat in a classroom, scored brilliantly on their entrance examinations...
...But what exactly was crazy about it...
...Our situation is no more desperate, our enemies no more powerful, than the situations our spiritual ancestors faced, than the enemies they conquered...
...is an associate of The Alternative and is presently teaching mass communications at Arizona State University...
...Edited by Leonard Wolf...
...The Voice We'll Always Hear In in Our Minds John R. Coyne, Jr...
...Further, he demonstrates with a relentless logic, that against the Communist enterprise "there is no recourse in compromise, reasonableness, peaceful coexistence...
...The legacy of Frank Meyer, "'God willing, will have the victory...
...At half time there was a "tribute" to Louis Armstrong, with Carol Channing, bright as alahastor, riding a float which circled the playing area to the tune of "Hello Dolly," or as it was, "Hello Louis...
...The American Communist Party in the '40s-was not the joke it is today, and defectors routinely met with fatal accidents...
...The method behind this effort rested in the principle that if you assault the public taste with enough pizzazz enough of the time, you will eventually destroy it, after which people will buy what you tell them to buy...
...Edited by Robert Gliner and R.A...
...The book, and the subsequent debate it provoked, had the effect of fusing the disparate, warring strands of conservatism at a critical time in the conservative revival...
...But that wasn't it either...
...The drinks were good, the talk better...
...465 pp...
...Frank was a teacher, especially effective at calming and guiding the younger, often hot-headed members of the American right...
...For the sake of everything he stood for, let us pray that it will be brief...
...Because, however, he was self-consciously a battlefield commander in a war of ideas, he simplified, clarified, reduced, often with a stark result-- if also the desired pragmatic effect...
...But it was a joyous intellectuality that springs from pure love of ideas, the sort of intellectuality that probably once characterized our best universities, before they became factories...
...You're working on your fourth or fifth drink...
...625 pp...
...He was too dedicated to God and country for that...
...But whenever the phone rings around 9-p.m...
...Guy Davenport, reviewing for the New York Times a collection of Frank's columns published m 1969 under the The Alternative June--September 1972 15 title, The Conservative Mainstream, describes Frank at work on a column...
...The President phoned, offering congratulations, conuolences anO strategy for the future...
...It's around 9 p.m., EST...
...The trick is simply to remember to be new and first, as these books have, to claim relevance and urgency, as these books do, and to imply to the college freshman that without the fop lowing collection of essays and interviews, he will not only forfeit instruction in the written word, but that he will be out of things generally, a would-be suicide...
...The day this hook or its equivalent is programmed into the CIA Cold War Computer will mark the day, however desperate the objective situation, when the tide turns against the Communist attack on our civilization...
...Edited by Leo Hamalian and Frederick R. Karl...
...If you teach freshman English or any college writing course, these books hit your desk on the average of two times a week...
...460 pp...
...l N A COUNTRY where every action is labeled a national tendency, every product ks bound to be conceived of as an answer to national desires...
...The Mouldin9 of Communists was followed a year later, in 1962, by In Defense of Freedom, written to foster our understanding of the tradition of Western civilization and the American Republic, our devotion to freedom and to truth, the strength of our will and of our determination to live as free and virtuous men...
...Eliseo Vivas writes in a forthcoming obituary in Modern Age -- a poignant, brilliant picture of Frank Meyer...
...He was not a respectable man...
...And the next morning, full of remorse, you'd write in one hour a good review of that book you hadn't been able to make sense of for a month...
...But it was worth it...
...You're feeling comfortably fuzzy, and you're finally able to rationalize away your failure to produce a decent piece of writing for the past several weeks...
...The gnawing question keeps intruding: what of the rest of us...
...No matter to which obscure corner of the continent you fled, Frank's phone calls sought you out relentlessly...
...Simultaneously a group of Phantom Jets boomed in formation over Tulane Stadium and viewers were asked to say a silent prayer for our P.O.W.s in Southeast Asia...
...Munching on Existence: Contemporary American Society Through Literature...
...Has Frank Meyer transmitted his toughness of character along with his wisdom to the many who travelled to sit in front of the fireplace at Woodstock...
...A broken collar hone...
...Evidently the rewards in this system are so huge that it is worth the publishers' while to turn out fifty misses for a single hit...
...Harper and Row...
...Jameson G. Campaigne, Jr...
...The American Experience: A Radical Reader...
...But he was also much more than that...
...John R. Coyne, Jr...
...Only a greater determination can avail, for Communist man poses two stark alternatives for us: victory or defeat...
...His family has suffered an immeasurable loss, as have his friends, his colleagues and the whole conservative movement...
...If one has a thematic brainstorm, as is the case with our five books here, all one needs is an editor with a couple of months free time...
...And whenever one of his colleagues showed signs of straying from the path of individualistic, humane conservatism that Frank followed, down from Wood stock, New York, where he made his home, would speed like an ideological arrow one of those short, barbed col unms that regularly appeared in Na tignal ReView under the heading Principles and Heresies...
...The allusion to Vietnam was certainly grotesque enough: an idiotic demonstration of fire power, the underlying assumption of which being that people who like contact sports like war...
...The book section of National Review, which Frank edited, is considered in the literary world to be consistently one of the nation's finest...
...In another ceremony, boys age 7-11 engaged in the finals of a national punt and pass competition, indicating by their presence that the show would always go on...
...Time passes, young men must grow up...
...HIS The Moulding of Communists shows how the Communist everywhere is made and in so doing illuminates "his essence from within, so that he may be conceived in his true being, with an understanding that neither underestimates his strength nor ignores his total enmity, his challenge a outrance to our civilization...
...Certainly little energy is required...
...There were brass bands, and commercials for ecology and Fords...
...I open all the packages, usually from the wrong end, because I cannot resist a gift...
...The Free Press...
...McGraw-Hill...
...The Cowboys won...
...You arrived around 8 p.m., had drinks, ate a magnificent dinner, much of which was produced in Elsie Meyer's vegetable garden, and then drank and talked until the sun came up...
...A nervous breakdown...
...There will be a hiatus, while we adjust to his loss...
...You know who it is, and your mind races wildly through a catalogue of respectable excuses...
...Flu...
...It was, of course, insanity of the most dazzling order and were it not for the diversion of the game, would have been recognized as one of the extravaganzas of the decade...
...When the grey puffs of packing material clear, I hold in my hands the brightest colors and the catchiest titles in the western world, and a genuine United States phenomenon...
...Not patriotism, although the particular show of patriotism was garish and ridiculous...
...Nor was it the cheer leaders and children, who were harmless, nor even Carol Channing's tasteless ride in the name of Broadway, jazz and race relations...
...Frank slept by day and worked by night, a habit acquired during the years after his break with the Communist Party when he sat up all night with a gun...
...I come to the matter at hand: five freshman readers, made up primarily of expository prose, largely indistinguishable from each other and from doze~s of such anthologies published every year...
...Today, it could serve as a centripetal agent in a conservative movement grown large and often lacking a center...
...The great tradition of the West is rising again in idea and belief and image...
...If ever there was a book that deserved a rebirth, it is this one: in a mere 172 pages, he winnows the essence of the conservative position from the minutiae of our long history, of the West and of America, stating it with a precision and power of dramatic effect...
...It is that important...
...Frank had a way of coaxing the best out of you, so that at the end of the "evening," when the sun came up, you felt you never before had been quite so brilliant...
...The phone rings, cutting sharply through that fuzzy, complacent cocoon...
...The Radical Vision: Essays for the Seventies...
...The Meyers were an unusually close and happy family...
...Then it happens...
...Finally, you pick up the phone, and as expected it's that voice, slightly hoarse, the phrases clipped and quick...
...You are going to have to start giving them yourselves...
...The weapons with which to fight are in our hands...
...My own favorite, In Defense of Freedom, probably bad more to do with converting members of my generation to conservatism than any other single work...
...604 pp...
...He demanded much of his charges, America's next generation of conservative leadership, but did so with the kindness and subtlety of a Socrates...
...One of the few remaining hookmen who understood the very real relationship between literature and life, Frank Meyer was a great editor...
...The responsibility for this victory is an acutely felt obligation for many of them, what "the conservative movement" is all about...
...What the publishers have in mind for these books is that they must vie with each other like fictional chorus girls for the one big break, which is adoption by a large, and preferably state university...
...The hundreds of thousands who served in Young Americans for Freedom, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Conservative Party of New York, the American Conservative Union, the Philadelphia Society and those readers of National Review, Modern Age and The Exchange who also felt his direct influence, will eventually have to be the makers of that victory...
...The Uses of the Present...
...Edited by Harold Jaffe and John Tytell...
...Elsie, one of the world's most gracious ladies, doubled as Frank's business manager and the teacher of their two sons, Gene and John, both of whom received their grammar school and high school educations at home...
...The hooks he wrote stand as giants of contemporary conservative thou~.ht...
...The material is ready made, and so is the market...
...He was indeed sensitive to the infinite nuances of Being...
...There were girls galore...
...Sick children...
...Many conservative writers have experienced that awful moment of truth...
Vol. 5 • June 1972 • No. 9
