Books: The Heart and Head of the Matter

• Share

CONFESSIONS OF A CONSERVATIVE by Garry Wills; Doubleday; 231 pages; $10

Garry Wills calls himself a conservative, out of convenience. He would rather call himself a "convenientist," a citizen always willing to convene with his countrymen for the public good.

Wills, 44, is not an uncomplicated man. He is a Jesuit-trained classics scholar, historian, teacher and journalist with one of the most supple intellects now wrapped around the body politic.

The output of his books, articles and criticism is protean. It began 20 years ago when he was still a student at Xavier University in Cincinnati. William F. Buckley Jr., impressed by a Wills piece on TIME style, offered him reviewing assignments for National Review. He turned in so many that he had to use a pseudonym (William Roman) "to keep from clogging the pages."

Between 1959 and 1963, Wills wrote books on Chesterton, Catholicism and Roman culture, in addition to working on a doctoral dissertation on Aeschylus. During the '60s, his pieces in Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post established him as a journalist of the first rank. His Nixon Ag- onistes (1969) still has the longest shelf-life of any book on the former President. Last year Historian Wills published Inventing America, a fresh look at the roots of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. The work has already won several literary prizes. A few weeks ago, he was holed up in Williamsburg, Va., completing a sequel at the rate of one chapter a day. Wills has also found time to write a suspense novel, At Button's, conduct a weekly seminar for Johns Hopkins students at his home in Baltimore and meet three deadlines a week for his syndicated newspaper column "Outrider."

How far out can a conservative ride? In his Confessions, Wills ranges from Jack Ruby to Cardinal Newman, from Everett Dirksen's Washington to St. Augustine's City of God. The pace is brisk, the intellectual hurdles high, the glimpses of auto-biography charming but scattered.

From the seminary, which he leaves for reasons of "Eros generally, not Eros specifically," Wills slings himself into Bill Buckley's energetic orbit of lively conversation, sailboats and sports cars whose "constant whirrings down, fussy tuggings, and resumed flight seemed a nuisance rather than a luxury." In a holding pattern over New York, Wills falls into conversation with a stewardess. The talk continues during the ride from the airport, but later the young journalist cannot remember her name. A little subterfuge results in a new meeting and a marriage-now past its 20th year. By today's matrimonial standards Wills is practically a radical. His ideas on love and the governing of men are also a departure from the customary lines. Wills' starting point is St. Augustine: "A people is a gathering of many rational individuals united by accord on loved things held in common." What rational individuals love best is peace. It is, says Wills, "the very soul of society" and "the gift of the politicians."