No Liberals Need Apply Here

To anyone who has seen the mini-hit film Metropolitan, the setting will be instantly familiar. This large, chastely furnished library, in a town house on Manhattan's Upper East Side, was where the callow preppies of "Sally Fowler's rat pack" were filmed during their postdance gabfests. On a Wednesday evening the place is filled with grownup baby boomers, many of them huddled at a small bar near the door. But the talk, for the most part, isn't about Hamptons and debentures. A petite blond writer in an electric red dress speculates for a guest about what might happen at National Review now that Bill Buckley has retired. A tweedy editor of the critical monthly New Criterion has some delicious gossip about faculty problems at Duke. A lanky novelist asks if anyone else plans to catch the lecture on Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain at the Opus Dei center next door.

Welcome to the Vile Body, an informal collective of youngish (25 to 40) conservative and libertarian intellectuals; liberals need not apply. Anywhere from 20 to 60 or more of these best and rightest meet for cocktails once a month at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, to schmooze, network and, above all, exchange ideas and witticisms. The name of the group, proposed by Metropolitan's writer-director Whit Stillman, echoes the title of a brittle comedy by Evelyn Waugh, an author much admired by many Vile Body regulars. Says Terry Teachout, 34, who writes editorials for the New York Daily News: "Waugh was effective in imposing himself on a hostile ethos -- very much of an in-your-face attitude."

The Vile Body is largely the creation of Teachout, a Missouri-born polymath who plays jazz piano, reviews records and ballet, and is gearing up to write a biography of H.L. Mencken. When he moved to New York from the Midwest three years ago, Teachout was dismayed to discover that the city was, as he puts it, "hostile to civilized friendship." There was little opportunity for people of his age and ideology to coalesce for intellectual sustenance. "Conservatives and libertarians exist in an adversary culture," he explains. "You need a community where you don't have to be arguing first causes all the time." Teachout and George Sim Johnston, 38, who has quit investment banking to be a writer full time, decided to set up a kind of salon, in the European sense, where they could meet with like-minded friends on a regular basis.

The Vile Body has no dues and no agenda, and it does more than just promote chat and nurture. Views and attitudes of 15 of its adherents are on display in a new anthology of essays called Beyond the Boom (Poseidon Press; $18.95), edited by Teachout and with a sprightly introduction by Tom Wolfe. The book is not so much a group manifesto as what Teachout calls a "core sample" of opinions by these right-of-center urban yuppies. Beyond the Boom's contributors can boast of having 14 books produced or in the works.