By Joseph Duggan
WASHINGTON--Robert Novak's new memoir of 50 years in Washington journalism, "The Prince of Darkness," is piled with telling vignettes of politicians drunk on power--or, often, just drunk. More surprisingly, the book reveals that beneath the bilious, brooding, hopelessly uncuddly persona of the columnist resides a lover of poetry, a subtle mind, a soul longing for God, and even a heart of sorts.
Who'da thunk it?
As a high-school student in Joliet, Ill., during the 1940s, Novak worked as a cub reporter for the local paper, entering a boozy, cynical business populated by characters not far removed from the "Front Page." The grandson of East European Jewish immigrants, he attended the University of Illinois and drifted away from religious belief. His classmates and professors found him arrogant.
He majored in English and developed a love for poetry--especially the Modernist work of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. After Army service he went to work in Midwestern bureaus of the Associated Press. He won assignment to Washington at age 26.
A year later, in 1958, Novak met Pound on the day the poet was released from St. Elizabeths mental hospital. Pound asked the young wire-service reporter, "Young man, do you intend to spend your entire life in journalism?" When Novak said yes, Pound continued: "In that case, I have a piece of advice for you. Above all, avoid too much accuracy."
"As I related that advice to colleagues," writes Novak, "they said it validated Pound's insanity. He could have meant the truth would get me in the kind of trouble he had faced. But I thought he was saying I should not let a plethora of little facts get in the way of the greater truth. That difficult injunction for a journalist is one that I have tried to follow, not always successfully."
Novak always has been at core a dissident against clerisies. He fancies himself a successor to Bertrans de Born, a medieval troubadour who also was a political hooligan. Dante places Bertrans--a "stirrer up of strife"--in the Inferno, holding his severed head in his hand. On ground level, it is not difficult to imagine Novak with a Bertrans-class headache many a morning after wild intimacies with Nancy Whisky.
Many of Novak's rowdy friends have settled down-- or crashed mortality's guardrails and hurtled across the Styx. Uninterested in following Bertrans to Hades, Novak has applied for admission to Purgatory. In 1998, he was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church. Novak's prodigious drinking buddy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, quipped, "Now Novak is a Catholic. The question is: When will he become
Novak is elegiac. After several brushes with death, he is limited to one drink a night. "Being old," he says, "is hell." He admits that his cantankerous personality has not changed, but says "my new faith has given me a source of strength in coping with an old age that was to be anything but serene."
Novak works hard to make his money. Individually or with his writing partner, the late Rowland Evans, he has produced about 10,000 newspaper columns and magazine articles and several substantial books. Despite his unsunny personality, he thrives on TV, where he has been an innovator in developing programs as well as a ubiquitous talking head.
A year ago he made a generous gift to nurture his intellectual roots, giving more than $1 million to endow a chair in the Classics Department at the University of Illinois. It may be fitting that a person reviled as a caveman by the Left should be investing in the legacy of Cicero, Quintilian, and other exceedingly old dead white males.
Reading Novak's book, and having read thousands of his columns over the decades, I recall what a critic said of Eliot's The Waste Land: "It is a text in which broken, fragmented, and seemingly unrelated images come together."
The politics of the past half-century have had many attributes of a Waste Land. Novak has tried to contribute some order to the mess, not through the icy analytical method, but through a synthesis of discernment, interpretation, and rhetorical activism.
On the 25th anniversary of the Evans and Novak column, a Washington Post writer got it mostly right in saying the duo had "practiced a form of journalism unlike anyone else's--fact-based and ax-grinding at once, simultaneously far ranging and arcane." True to Ezra Pound's advice, their work was encyclopedic.
Novak's memoir will satisfy the appetites of readers looking for new details of the flaws of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bob Dole, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and others on the long bipartisan list of politicians Novak has known but not loved. But Novak never lets this "plethora of little facts" get in the way of greater truth.
Novak's prolific output has not afforded him the luxury of an elegant style. In sum, though, his integral approach to journalism approaches an ideal like that of Archibald MacLeish's Ars Poetica:
Reporting should not mean
But be.
Joseph Duggan, a former newspaperman, was a speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush.