Richard Weaver: Stranger In Paradise

Glancing through the manuscripts for this testimonial back-of-the- book section, I am struck by the number of contributors who were personally acquainted with their subjects. I never knew Richard Weaver—had in fact never heard of him until perhaps a dozen years ago—and even today cannot claim to regret the fact. (How many modern authors would one actually care to know? I can think of maybe three: William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and H. L. Mencken. The rest I am perfectly content to meet only in their shelf lives.) While Weaver’s writings suggest a strong vein of affability and even sweetness of spirit, nevertheless crankiness keeps breaking in: the special brand of cantankerousness that hangs like stale tobacco-smell about middle-aged bachelors who work and live out of residential-hotel rooms, taking their meals at restaurants around the corner or reheating them in Pullman kitchens shared with roaches and illuminated by the neon bar signs across the street. It is, partly, the irritability of a man who has made his choice between writing and living, and stuck with it; also, I suspect, it represents the tempered disgruntlement of one who, while deploring the tendencies of a wayward world, remains wise enough to comprehend that everything has a part and a place in God’s creation.

The truth is that Richard Weaver appears—at least to this reader—to have been one of those men for whom that modicum of balance called Happiness is to be found, intellectually speaking, neither in temperament nor in activity, but in the philosophical and moral process of reconciliation. He considered negativism and despair pusillanimous, yet his fundamental incapacity for worldly optimism would, I imagine, have made Weaver—who died in 1963—a marginally dour and sharp- elbowed presence in the 1980s.

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Glancing through the manuscripts for this testimonial back-of-the- book section, I am struck by the number of contributors who were personally acquainted with their subjects. I never knew Richard Weaver—had in fact never heard of him until perhaps a dozen years ago—and even today cannot claim to regret the fact. (How many modern authors would one actually care to know? I can think of maybe three: William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and H. L. Mencken. The rest I am perfectly content to meet only in their shelf lives.) While Weaver’s writings suggest a strong vein of affability and even sweetness of spirit, nevertheless crankiness keeps breaking in: the special brand of cantankerousness that hangs like stale tobacco-smell about middle-aged bachelors who work and live out of residential-hotel rooms, taking their meals at restaurants around the corner or reheating them in Pullman kitchens shared with roaches and illuminated by the neon bar signs across the street. It is, partly, the irritability of a man who has made his choice between writing and living, and stuck with it; also, I suspect, it represents the tempered disgruntlement of one who, while deploring the tendencies of a wayward world, remains wise enough to comprehend that everything has a part and a place in God’s creation.

The truth is that Richard Weaver appears—at least to this reader—to have been one of those men for whom that modicum of balance called Happiness is to be found, intellectually speaking, neither in temperament nor in activity, but in the philosophical and moral process of reconciliation. He considered negativism and despair pusillanimous, yet his fundamental incapacity for worldly optimism would, I imagine, have made Weaver—who died in 1963—a marginally dour and sharp- elbowed presence in the 1980s.