Willmoore Kendall: The Unassimilable Man

WHEN I THINK of that first NATIONAL review generation, I feel colorless, wimpy even. Russell Kirk walked around New York in a cloak, and some say he carried a sword-cane. Frank Meyer slept all day, and smoked and talked on the phone all night. He had switched from Communist theoretician at Balliol to conservative theoretician at Woodstock. Whittaker Chambers was around the 35th Street offices, still blinking in the unaccustomed sunlight of life above ground, making Dostoyevskian pronouncements about politics, God, and the coming apocalypse. Then there was Max Eastman, courtly, handsome, the face that had launched a thousand women: poet, lover, a reformed but still atheistical disciple of John Dewey. And of course James Burnham, first in his class at Princeton, former Trotskyist and professor of philosophy at NYU, who had organized strikes during the Thirties and been an editor of Partisan Review, another unicorn, bizarre in the relentlessness of his intelligent interest in everything.

When I think of those people, I feel the way George Will looks. We come later in the culture. I have never worn a cloak, or spied for Russia, or advocated nudity and free love. Shall I walk upon the beach?

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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WHEN I THINK of that first NATIONAL review generation, I feel colorless, wimpy even. Russell Kirk walked around New York in a cloak, and some say he carried a sword-cane. Frank Meyer slept all day, and smoked and talked on the phone all night. He had switched from Communist theoretician at Balliol to conservative theoretician at Woodstock. Whittaker Chambers was around the 35th Street offices, still blinking in the unaccustomed sunlight of life above ground, making Dostoyevskian pronouncements about politics, God, and the coming apocalypse. Then there was Max Eastman, courtly, handsome, the face that had launched a thousand women: poet, lover, a reformed but still atheistical disciple of John Dewey. And of course James Burnham, first in his class at Princeton, former Trotskyist and professor of philosophy at NYU, who had organized strikes during the Thirties and been an editor of Partisan Review, another unicorn, bizarre in the relentlessness of his intelligent interest in everything.

When I think of those people, I feel the way George Will looks. We come later in the culture. I have never worn a cloak, or spied for Russia, or advocated nudity and free love. Shall I walk upon the beach?