Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations

All Too Human: The Rise and Fall of Henry Fairlie

When I first set foot in Fleet Street forty years ago, it still wore an air of romance, and it still existed as more than a street sign. We sometimes say "Fleet Street" as synecdoche for the London press even now that newspaper offices have been scattered from the Daily Telegraph on the distant Isle of Dogs to the Daily Mail on Kensington High Street, but in those days most of the papers were actually published in or around "The Street of Adventure." I can't claim to have read Sir Philip Hamilton Gibbs's book of that name, but various newspaper novels were informative as well as enjoyable, from Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh, to Towards the End of the Morning, by Michael Frayn.

As those books correctly suggested, much of the life of "the Street" was spent not in newsrooms but in pubs and bars. The King and Keys was the Telegraph pub, "Poppins" was the haunt of the Daily Express, and what Lord Beaverbrook sardonically called "El Vino's public house" was the wine bar where the leading lights congregated, along with the shades of the glorious departed. One man had departed the land but not the living, and when I came to know a group of older writers that included Peregrine Worsthorne, who became editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Anthony Howard, later editor of The New Statesman, and the radical-now-turned-conservative Paul Johnson, I often heard the name "Henry."

For a little more than ten years, Henry Fairlie had dazzled Fleet Street as a stunning and beguiling political commentator. Then, in 1966, just into his forties, he left our shores abruptly and in lurid circumstances, never to return, spending the twenty-four years he had left in American exile. He combined brilliance as a writer with self-destructive profligacy as a man to a degree unusual even among his journalistic contemporaries, and he left behind a wreckage of debts and lawsuits, of broken contracts and hearts -- but he left fond memories too. After a first Fairlie cult had flourished in London, a new cult was born in Washington, D.C., where The New Republic offered him a home, eventually in the most literal sense of the word.

He was singular for having a transatlantic career, or two separate careers, in the Old World and then in the New, and he might be said to have blazed a trail followed since by other English journalists, not least by showing how susceptible Americans can be to a certain kind of insolent swagger and the affectation of superior learning. Wit and bravura apart, Fairlie was also unusual in terms of his political position. Although he made his name in The Spectator in the 1950s by mocking politicians, he did so not from the left but rather as a romantic tory attached to history and tradition. When he crossed the Atlantic, he parlayed this toryism into a new career as a conservative critic of American conservatism -- an original and provocative thing to be during the right-wing ascendancy of the 1970s and '80s. Presenting himself as a champion of true conservatism against the decayed American version, Fairlie picked fights with William F. Buckley and George F. Will, and he derided Ronald Reagan as a "slippered pantaloon."

Very high claims have been made for Fairlie by his devotees. At the time of his death, in 1990, at the age of sixty-six, a London paper wrote that he had once been the most influential journalist in the country, and for Worsthorne he was "quite simply the best political journalist, writing in English, in the last fifty years." American tributes have been just as fulsome, with Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic describing him as "the most independent spirit I have so far encountered in the highlands of journalism" and Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker ranking him as a political essayist alongside George Orwell and Dwight Macdonald, which for some of us is illustrious company indeed.

Now, nearly forty-five years since Fairlie left London and nearly twenty since his death, a collection of his writing has appeared as Bite the Hand That Feeds You, a title he thought of using for his memoirs. This fascinating book allows us to judge how far his admirers were justified. It might also prompt some reflections on the nature of conservatism, of journalism, and of our trade's equivalent of the poète maudit: the myth of the heroic but doomed scribbler.

Before I first met Fairlie, in 1976, I had pieced together some of his story, which Jeremy McCarter fleshes out in an excellent introductory essay to this book. Henry Jones Fairlie was born in 1924, the son of a small farmer who had left what Henry grandiloquently called their patrimony on some of the richest lands in Scotland in order to make a career as a journalist in London, where Henry grew up. A weak heart precluded military service, so Henry spent the later war years at Oxford, before finding instantaneous success as a newspaperman. Hired by the Manchester Evening News at twenty-one, he moved rapidly on to the Observer and then the Times.

He recalls the good old days in Printing House Square, when Times editorial writers sat in a carpeted room with a coal fire and were served tea by waitresses in starched aprons. But he wanted to be more than an anonymous editorialist, and he joined The Spectator in 1954 to write a weekly political column, by way of pseudonymity: his commentary was at first signed "Trimmer," the sobriquet of the grandly skeptical seventeenth-century politico Lord Halifax. (These were the last years of allusive pen names: Bernard Levin began writing a political column in the same paper soon after as "Taper," the cynical backstairs wheeler-dealer in Benjamin Disraeli's novel Coningsby.) But before long, "Henry Fairlie" was a byline to conjure with.

One article in 1955 became famous overnight. "What I call the 'Establishment' in this country is today more powerful than ever before," Fairlie wrote. "By the 'Establishment' I do not only mean the centres of official power -- though they are certainly part of it -- but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations with which power is exercised." As he acknowledged, the word -- ecclesiastical in origin, from the Church of England "by law established" -- had been used in this same sense by A.J.P. Taylor a couple of years earlier, but it was made more inflammatory by Fairlie's context: the "missing diplomats" Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had turned out to be Soviet agents after they fled England at dead of night, and Fairlie implied that they had been protected by this "Establishment."

Soon he was lured away from The Spectator by the right-wing populist Daily Mail, and then approached by the Daily Express, the Mail's direct rival (think of the Daily Beast and the Daily Brute in Scoop). Bidden to meet the owner of the Express, Lord Beaverbrook, a malevolent mischief-maker who liked to buy journalists, Fairlie claims to have told him to his face that he would "kill my work." Fairlie also says that when he was writing for the Daily Mail he dined with Lord Rothermere, its proprietor ("mediocre, arrogant, full of sly malice"), and not only criticized the paper's political line at the time but "attacked the Mail's support of Fascism under his father" in the 1930s.

If that little tale is true, which ain't necessarily so, one could almost sympathize with Rothermere. In any case, it's an old story for a journalist who has made his name at a smaller magazine to be seduced by the fat checks of the Beast or the Brute. The trouble is that writing well and honestly is much harder in mass-circulation papers (the idea that anyone's work might still be "killed" after he had already joined the Daily Mail is quaint), and the writer will find that the colleagues and friends whose esteem he truly craves aren't reading him so much anymore, or at any rate not with so much pleasure.

By then Fairlie was living high on the hog, or maybe the hog was riding him. Although he had married young and had had three children, matrimony in no way cramped his style as an indefatigable philanderer, whose outrageous amorous adventures were still recounted long after he left London. Like others such, he would claim that he was at heart a romantic. "The fault of the promiscuous as well as the Puritans," Fairlie said years later, most unconvincingly, "is that they think there can be sex without love. Bullshit!...You form a love, if you hold someone even once, and it never dies, even if that person is never seen again."

However self-deceiving this was, not all his passions were transient. In 1956, Fairlie and Hilly Amis -- first wife of Kingsley and mother of Martin -- began an intense liaison, and they nearly left their respective families for each other. This episode can be followed more closely through Kingsley Amis's letters, published when both men were dead, and they give a more revealing picture of young Fairlie than anything Fairlie himself ever wrote.

"Having one's wife fucked is one thing," Amis philosophically observed to his friend Philip Larkin. "Having her taken away from you, plus your children, is another, I find. And old Henry, though a most charming lad, is a rather emotional and unreliable one, really, and not quite the kind of chap one wants to see in loco parentis to one's kids." Amis also sent Fairlie a man-to-man letter, which it had been "no fun" writing. Other players in the drama were bound to suffer more than any anguish a self-dramatizing adventurer like Henry affected to feel, Amis wrote, especially if he was "already selfish and ruthless by nature, as I think you are." And the fact that Fairlie was prepared to leave his own wife and young children was merely "a sign of the irresponsibility and greed of which you are capable." (Those who knew Kingsley might think he was a fine one to preach about selflessness and marital fidelity, but that's another matter.)

If anything, Fairlie managed to be even more reckless financially than sexually. Around the time of the great Hilly affair, he spent a week in prison, pursued by his creditors, and his money troubles went from bad to worse to worst of all, however much he was earning. Brian Inglis, a sometime editor of The Spectator, later said drily that "Henry leaves Fleet Street a poorer place," words as easily understood as they were relished. On one occasion, Fairlie was asked to cover a summit meeting in Paris, collected a thick wad of advance cash expenses -- his own term for it was "a brick" -- and set off for the airport by way of El Vino's. Before the night was out, what he hadn't spent on drinks for all his friends was spent on buying them dinner, and he never made it to the summit.

Then one evening in 1965 he appeared on a television talk show and bizarrely denounced Lady Antonia Fraser, whom he had known well, for "corrupting the young," which is how news reports put it at the time. The ensuing libel case awarded Lady Antonia large damages from the television company and precipitated Fairlie's flight to America. I once asked Perry Worsthorne what on earth that had all been about, since Fairlie's conduct wasn't so much reckless as appalling, or just plain mad, to which Perry said with a shrug, "Henry was mad."

After settling in Washington, Fairlie first summoned his family and then sent them packing back home, roamed the country, and fashioned a new career. His earliest work in The Spectator, reprinted in Bite the Hand That Feeds You, shows that he was a marvelous writer, blessed with a gift for fluent, readable prose that most journalists can never acquire. He has been compared with his contemporary Kenneth Tynan, who also rose like a rocket and fell to earth but whose best theater criticism is still exhilarating to read when all the players are long dead. So it is with Fairlie's descriptions of distant parliamentary occasions -- sharp, stylish, and lightly sprinkled with historical allusions, even if the footnotes - McCarter provides are now essential. (What political historian, let alone ordinary reader, anymore remembers Florence Horsburgh, Maurice Edelman -- "the blue-blazer-and-brass-button boy of the Labour Party" -- or Woodrow Wyatt?)

And Fairlie's American writing could be most entertaining, too. Along with a column for the Washington Post, he wrote magazine essays. "If Pooh Were President: A Tory's Riposte to Reaganism" appeared in this magazine in 1984, its title taken from Fairlie's conceit that Winnie the Pooh was a natural tory: suspicious of grand schemes, this "Bear of Very Little Brain" nevertheless "had wisdom," a quality that, in Fairlie's view, was notably lacking among American conservatives.

When I found myself working for The Spectator in my turn, I visited Washington, at last met this almost mythical figure, and got on with him very well. We asked him to write for his old paper from his new country, and enlivening he was, even if he repeated an earlier mistake by letting the wish father the thought. In 1959 he had been nursing an antipathy toward Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, and predicted in print that Labour would win the general election. Two decades later, Fairlie would again allow animus to color his reporting, and he insisted all the way until November 1980 that Reagan would lose, following his heart rather than what his head should have told him might happen. (Macmillan and the Tories beat Labour by a popular-vote margin of 49.4 to 43.8 percent, and Reagan trounced Carter 50.7 to 41 percent.)

For Fairlie, Reagan was Mencken's Homo boobus "elevated to be a sovereign," with the G.O.P. representing "the America of fear." Not only did Fairlie find Reagan's followers "ungenerous, envious, intolerant . . . trivially moral, falsely patriotic"; he went on to complain that Republicans lacked the true tory's "steady, unvolatile, almost unconscious confidence in the resources and resilience of his country," that American conservatism "has barely even a whispering of aristocratic sentiment," and that Nixon and Reagan "simply are vulgar."

And yet his hostility to American conservatism was sometimes imperceptive. What was both most un-conservative and most damaging in Reaganism, Fairlie claimed, was "a false picture of the past and a false reading of the present." But was Fairlie's own picture of the past much truer? When he extols the grand traditions of English toryism, anyone who actually knows our damp little island will smile. A true tory, Fairlie tells us, "despises 'trade' and those in it. When John F. Kennedy became president, you could hear tories all over London murmur gruffly over their drinks that if he was put up for their club, he would be blackballed by every member worth his salt. By Jove, sir, how did his father make his money?"

This is claptrap. The Kennedys had grown up in the shadow of old Back Bay, whose Brahmin elite viewed Irish Catholics with almost racist contempt. Far from being snubbed in England, they found -upper-class English society in the 1930s liberating by contrast: they were welcomed here by the brightest of young things as another bunch of Yanks, but rich and attractive ones, and JFK could have joined any London club he wanted. Had Fairlie really forgotten that Jack's sister Kick married Billy Hartington, the son and heir of that grandest of grandees, the Duke of Devonshire?

"English conservatism primarily was a protest against the Industrial Revolution," Fairlie writes. But the whole story of nineteenth-century England was an accommodation between old landed oligarchy and new commercial and industrial wealth, an accommodation that found political form in the Conservative Party, although it was social and dynastic as well: as Marx put it, in France the bourgeois cut off their aristocrats' heads, in England they married their daughters. Modern English conservatism has been more accurately characterized as an alliance between the City and the mob, high finance and low populism, though that more realistic appraisal would not suit Fairlie's purpose. For someone who made a parade of his historical knowledge, he could be altogether wayward with facts and phrases. He has Edward Heath denouncing "the ugly face of capitalism," rather than capitalism's "unacceptable face"; he attributes the description of the Conservatives as "the stupid party" to Walter Bagehot, rather than to John Stuart Mill; and he refers to "the leadership crisis in the Conservative party in 1964," when he must mean 1963.

If Fairlie didn't quite become a self-hating Englishman, his habit of telling the Americans how wonderful they were went beyond mere gratitude. He wrote about a land where for "the first time I've felt free," without wondering whether all Americans had always felt quite so free; he recognized that "America is an empire" but saw nothing wrong with this, and said so in terms that today seem painfully ironical: by now it's superfluous to demand, as Fairlie did, "American soldiers in far-flung provinces of the world." That was written during a Vietnam War that Fairlie supported, and to say that "above all, there is the achievement of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara" makes us wince today, though perhaps not as much as Fairlie's admiring assertion that "to employ force abroad without the declaration of war is, in fact, the first attribute of empire."

When he chose to, Fairlie could offer a most exalted view of The Life of Politics, as he called his 1968 book, which is still worth reading. He often wrote about the press, taking against other journalists with rather wearisome polemics directed at newspapers such as the Washington Post and columnists such as David Broder and Anthony Lewis. When, in 1976, he wrote that he had "not reported politics for all those years in all those countries without being certain that politicians as such, however many individuals amongst them are venal or stupid, are the most hopeful messengers of a society's will to improve," the words were credulous enough; since the age, which Fairlie didn't live to see, of Bush the Younger and an historic "employment of force without the declaration of war," of Dick Cheney and "enhanced interrogation," of Tony Blair and his "dodgy dossier" about Saddam's weaponry, and of the extraordinary scandal over corrupt parliamentary expenses that has swept England, Fairlie's words look absurd.

By contrast, it's a pleasure to turn to an essay on Randolph Bourne and be reminded what a splendid writer Fairlie was at his best. That astonishing visionary radical, gravely crippled and disfigured since birth, who died in 1918 at only -thirty-two, was closely associated with The New Republic in its earliest incarnation. Bourne poured scorn on "a war made deliberately by intellectuals," which that magazine had acclaimed, and Fairlie notes that he indicted his own intellectual generation for its betrayal "of its vocation and its responsibility to American society." Fairlie revered Bourne, in terms that suggest he was wistfully thinking of himself: "A radical who believed in America more than any Rotary speaker or sponger off the media," a man who never fell "into the trap of a conservatism that is just one long grouch at the twentieth century." As fine as his tribute to Bourne is, mightn't Fairlie have applied his words to later intellectual generations, and to other wars?

All this is written with a tinge of regret. I came greatly to like Henry the man (without illusions) and to admire Fairlie the writer (with reservations). But journalism is a funny thing. It is, after all, journalier, or ephemeral, so that what seems best on the day it appears will often not last, and vice versa. Even Orwell, rightly revered as one of the great journalists of his time, could write poor stuff when he tried his hand at regulation political commentary (see his "London Letters" for Partisan Review); it's when he turned to something as unlikely as boys' comics or vulgar postcards that his essays transcend the quotidian and enter the realms of literature. However much he delighted his contemporaries, Fairlie wrote too little on that level.

And in the end it's hard to escape the sheer sadness of his story. As he entered his sixties, Fairlie staggered further downhill, drinking in those bars that would still let him run a tab, living on loans, and finally sleeping in the office of The New Republic when he was kicked out of his apartment for never paying the rent. One pleasant Washington evening not long before the end, we were nursing our drinks outside the Palm when a jogger ran by. Henry pointed at him and said derisively, "You know what? That man's going to die one day, too, but he won't die of anything!" Henry died of something. That weak heart wasn't a good start, and Wieseltier touchingly describes the end, hastened by a dogged consumption of cigarettes and booze.

Saddest of all is to compare those last years with his succes fou so long before. He coulda been a contender. In fact he was one, once upon a time. By his early thirties, plenty of people saw Fairlie as another great journalist in the making. Jeremy McCarter quotes Alan Watkins, who has now been writing an estimable political column for the best part of fifty years indirectly thanks to Fairlie. In 1955, when Watkins was studying to be a barrister, he read The Spectator, asked himself whether he wanted to be a famous jurist or Henry Fairlie, and answered, "I would rather be Mr. Fairlie." Up until the last time I saw Henry he remained an independent spirit and a most charming lad. But would anyone reading this book rather have been him?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft's books include The Controversy of Zion, which won a National Jewish book award, The Strange Death of Tory England, and Yo, Blair! He is writing a book about Winston Churchill's reputation and influence.

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