As this is written at the end of October you know more than I do
— about the elections, I mean. So I turn to my old friend Joe
Sobran, who died on September 30, age 64. He was the best man at my
wedding. He worked for 20 years for William F. Buckley at
National Review, wrote a syndicated column for years, and
authored a lesser known but sometimes outstanding column for the
Wanderer, a Catholic weekly.
His death caused a stir in conservative circles because in 1993
he wrote a Wanderer column attacking Buckley and was
fired. There has been a lot of comment on Sobran’s hostility to
Israel, discussions of his alleged anti-Semitism (“contextual”
anti-Semitism, as Buckley put it), and Joe’s countercharge that
Buckley kowtowed to the “Israeli lobby.” I don’t want to enter that
war zone right now, although I plan to write something about it
later. Meanwhile I will confine myself to recommending Matthew
Scully’s article in National Review, “Bard of the Right.”
It is surely the best thing ever written about Joe. Among opinion
journalists, Joe was “the greatest of his time,” Scully wrote. I
agree.
I first met Joe Sobran in 1980. For most of that decade his
literary ability, his originality, his learning, eloquence, and the
sheer speed with which he could produce articles reached the level
of what I can only call genius. That was the way it struck me. I
never saw anything like it. I once tested him on his claim to know
the whole of Shakespeare by heart. He had a volume of the collected
works in his junk-filled car, the backseat crammed full of
newspapers and God knows what covering the rear window. I flipped
through the volume, taking care not to let him see the particular
play. I would read a line at random, and his task was to say the
next line. I did it five or six times and he got it right every
time.
Sometimes, in his rented house in Arlington, I would see him
produce a newspaper column in half an hour on an electric
typewriter perched on a wobbly Formica-topped table. The entire
ground floor of the house would be ankle-deep in what an admirer
once called “landfill.” His column would materialize with no
corrections needed. “Order from chaos,” as Matthew Scully said.
He did learn to use a computer — with Bill Buckley’s
encouragement and assistance — and the new machine was helpful
enough to give Joe the burst of energy he needed to complete
Alias Shakespeare, his one book-length work. Otherwise I
believe all his columns and articles were written in a single
sitting. If he had to return to something, he would inevitably have
lost the first draft somewhere in the landfill, so he would start
over from the beginning.
I’m told he joined NR on 9/11/71. Some old hands at the
magazine have good stories to tell about Joe in those years. I
believe that in learning his Shakespeare he never had to work very
hard at it. It just stayed with him once he read it. We tend to
call such rare people geniuses. But the updated and more realistic
definition of genius is “an infinite capacity to take pains.” That
was not Joe!
Well, we can see where this is going. His great gift began to
fade. At that point he had to make big efforts to do what he once
did effortlessly. He was the intellectual equivalent of a natural
athlete who can reach Olympic standards with no training. Then
later, as he puts on a few years and a few pounds, he loses it.
Then he has no discipline or good habits to fall back on. And that
is what happened to Joe, more or less.
I also think that more convincingly accounts for his sad decline
than any explanation that invokes the withdrawal of Bill Buckley’s
support or the enmity of the neoconservatives.
Quite a number of people recognized Joe’s exceptional talent.
Instinctively, they also knew that rare people like that are
incapable of prudence and even of self-preservation. So friends
were happy to give Joe money and they did so. I believe Bill
Buckley (even after the breakup) was among them. No one could
accuse WFB of a lack of generosity. But Joe’s financial
irresponsibility beggared belief.
If you thought to yourself, “Poor Joe,” and gave him a thousand
dollars, the money would be gone in a couple of days. He would go
straight to Borders or Barnes & Noble, buy great sacks of books
and CDs, cart them home in plastic bags, throw them down in a
corner of his house, and forget about them. He treated the dollar
as though he lived in Weimar Germany. (I’m glad to say that most of
his books, including an outstanding Shakespeare collection, ended
up at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia.)
It was the same with his health and personal welfare generally.
He had diabetes (adult onset), a controllable condition. But as his
son Kent told me: “He was the worst person in the world to have
diabetes.” He disregarded advice from doctors, no matter how often
repeated, and over the last years of his life he was gradually
defeated by inertia and depression. He became at first unwilling
and then unable to do anything for himself.
In the end the medics told him that he needed kidney dialysis to
survive. But he refused it, and meant it. His long-suffering helper
Fran Griffin made persistent attempts to resist Joe’s
self-destructive impulses and to revive his own pro-life
principles. Ann Coulter, a great admirer of Joe’s writings, said
she guessed Joe “never took to heart the admonition that your body
is a temple.” Howard Phillips, head of the Conservative Caucus,
lived nearby and went to see Joe in Vienna, Virginia, two or three
times in the last week of his life. Howie recommended to Joe that
he take the dialysis. But he refused. “My time is past,” he
said.
In his last days Joe, by now on a diet of morphine, sank into
unconsciousness. At the end his daughter Vanessa was at his bedside
along with Fran Griffin’s assistant. They noticed first that his
color had changed, then that he had stopped breathing. Joe
sometimes told me that the liberal goal in life is a painless
death. And that is what the hospice people arranged for Joe — with
his cooperation.
IT’S NO MERE CLICHÉ to say that Joe was his own worst enemy. He
was. When the Human Life Review’s Jim McFadden reprinted
Joe’s essays as a book, Single Issues, Joe was furious.
Jim was “exploiting” him, he decided. He had planned to “rewrite”
those essays. Jim knew that would never happen. National
Review was on the verge of reprinting Joe’s best pieces as a
book to entice new subscribers. Just before that happened, Joe
wrote his column attacking Buckley. It really did seem that he
wanted to prevent his own articles from appearing between hard
covers. Sometimes he seemed to have little understanding of the
quality of his writing at its best. It’s as though he was a mere
conduit through which it passed and he quickly forgot about it.
An old friend of Joe’s, a sweet guy from Michigan called Bob
Mayday, who since died, used to come to Washington and go
book-hunting with Joe. He once said that Joe “won’t be appreciated
until he’s been dead for a while.” That was perceptive. At its
best, Joe’s writing was I think superior to G. K. Chesterton’s
because it was better organized. Meanwhile Fran Griffin has the
rights to reprint those pieces by Joe. Let’s encourage her to do
so. I’m sure they won’t seem out of date when they reappear. And
the good news is that Joe won’t be able to object to their
publication.
R.I.P., Joe. We miss you.
