Henry Regnery: a public private man

John R. Coyne, Jr.

THOSE WHO BLINK FREQUENTLY, irritated by today's ideological mote, may have missed it. But in the trend of its popular thought and culture, in social inclination and political preference, the decade of the Eighties has taken on a decidedly conservative cast,

It's probably not pure enough for some of our more committed comrades. And this may be just as conservative as it gets. Nevertheless, it's here, having blown in with Ronald Reagan and showing some signs of lingering into the Nineties and perhaps beyond.

Where did it come from? Politically, there are numerous sources-Taft, Goldwater, Nixon (much more than we're yet able to admit), the New American Majority, the Old Right, the New Right, the New New Right, the Neoconservatives (perhaps we could call them the Left Right or, eventually, the Left Right Left), all arriving at the same point at about the same time at the end of the Seventies and joining together in the somewhat unlikely phenomenon of Reaganism.

Spiritually also it was fed by a variety of sources, among them a book by Russell Kirk entitled The Conservative Mind, published in Chicago in 1953 by Henry Regnery. According to Regnery, it was Kirk's book that gave the postwar conservative movement "its name and, more important, coherence."

Two years earlier, Regnery had published another book which was to become central to the conservative movement. The book was God and Man at Yale, the author Wm. F. Buckley Jr. It was an expensive book, costing Regnery as it did his contract with the Great Books Foundation. But the investment paid off, for, as Regnery- put it, Bill Buckley "has not only served ever since as an inspiration and a rallying point, particularly to student generations; he has given [the conservative movement] a style and rhetoric of its own, and has done more than anyone else to reconcile potentially conflicting viewpoints into a coherent intellectual force."

It has been the sometimes bewildering variety of "potentially conflicting viewpoints," characteristic of conservative thought, that typifies the books published over four decades by the Henry Regnery Company (now Regnery Gateway, and still publishing). Despite the conflicting viewpoints, however, Regnery's books were all selected, as he puts it, "for being in accord with the traditional values of Western civilization."

Some of the Regnery titles of the early years now awaken only dim and musty memories. There is the matter of immediate postwar German rehabilitation, for instance, a theme running through the works of a number of early Regnery authors, among them Victor Gollancz and Freda Utley. There are also the World War II revisionists, mostly notably William Henry Chamberlin, Charles Callan Tansill, and Admiral Husband Kimmel.

Their works explored such issues as what Holmes Alexander has called "the unconstitutional Atlantic war" and "the Pearl Harbor coverup." True, many of these arguments, postwar manifestations of pre-war positions taken by such groups as the America First Committee, which Henry Regnery's father helped found, are decidedly dated -in fact became dated on the day that Hitler declared war on the United States. However, those books did serve a purpose, one which present-day muckrakers should find laudable. In an article in Reason, Justus D. Doenecke put it this way: "Although few historians today accept Regnery's brand of revisionism, his books did much to crack official history . . . stressed the constitutional limits upon presidential war-making, and pointed out the conscious and calculated deception by the nation's highest leadership."

REGNERY'S CONTRIBUTIONS transcend that of publishing unfashionable authors crowded out by accepted theories of history, however. Even on the Right, causes are not always lost. And during the years of intellectual exile, Regnery played a central role in keeping conservative thought alive, publishing or reissuing, in addition to Kirk and Buckley, the works of James Burnham, Richard Weaver, James Jackson Kilpatrick, Felix Morley, Albert Jay Nock, Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, Wilhelm Roepke, and Whittaker Chambers, to name a few.

Russell Kirk, writing to Regnery in 1952 of a new era in which an "enlightened conservatism" must play a role, had this to say about Regnery's unique contribution: "The struggle will be decided iii the minds of the rising generation-and within that generation, substantially by the minority who have the gift of reason. I do not think we need much fear the decaying 'liberalism' of the retiring generation. . . . But we need to state some certitudes for the benefit of the groping new masters of society. More than anyone else in America you have been doing just this in the books you publish." A most moving and prescient tribute, and one which goes a long way toward explaining the conservative cast of the Eighties. We owe a great deal. to Henry Regnery and his books.

We also owe Henry Regnery a good deal for his bookMemoirs of a Dissident Publisher, published in 1979 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. It is handsomely produced and elegantly written, the style, like Regnery himself, direct, unaffected, deceptively simple, and surprisingly witty. For the most part, reviewers were highly appreciative, with especially intelligent commentaries by Doris Grumbach in the New York Times and Edmund Fuller in the Wall Street Journal.

At some point during the past several decades, nearly every conservative of note has published with or had his works reissued by Regnery. His memoir (still available from Regnery Gateway) summarizes these works, acquaints us with the circumstances of their publication and their reception, and provides us with a number of splendid anecdotes involving most of these authors, all interwoven with the personal account of a life lived in the world of publishing, where in the end the best and most constant companions are ideas.

Perhaps because of this-and also because he is a man who knows precisely who he is-Regnery is remarkably tolerant of the foibles and idiosyncrasies of others. This serves him well in dealing with his fellow conservatives, who among us have come close to cornering the world market on foibles and idiosyncrasies.

It also serves him well in his dealings with writers he has published who are not generally associated with the conservative movement as we have come to think of itamong them T. S. Eliot (who congratulated Regnery on publishing Edgar Guest), Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Allen Tate, John Dos Passos, and Roy Campbell. Regnery first met Campbell when he was roaring drunk (Campbell, not Regnery), and one anecdote captures not only the poet but also Regnery's own essential attitude-slightly ironic detachment, good humor, and good sense.

He had taken Campbell to a poetry reading at a college in downtown Chicago. "The first poet on the program was Robert Lowell, who apologized for preceding such a heroic figure as Roy Campbell, and then went on to read what seemed to me to be rather dreadful poetry about incest and similar subjects. When Campbell's turn came it was as though a fresh breeze had swept into the room; he brought the audience immediately back to life with the imagery and vigor of his poetry, and ended the occasion by singing 'John Brown's Body' in Swahili."

Regnery's book is rich in such anecdotes, telling us a great deal about the people he portrays, and as much about himself as he wants us to know. As Doris Grumbach puts it, "A private man, Henry Regnery tells us his views, his reasons for publishing what he did, and the results, but he gives us very little information about his personal life." Other commentators agree, among them Justus Doenecke, who would like more about Regnery's father and the America First movement and about his "reaction to the varied transformations of the American Right."

I think all of us would agree with Doenecke. However, in the case of the latter-reaction to the transmogrifications of the Right-Regnery would be required to make judgmental analyses of the people involved. And he just doesn't do that-a rare quality on the Right in particular and among literary men in general.

As to the former-personal observations on family members-well, he doesn't do that publicly either. Characteristically, however, in two handsome privately printed books, he pays tribute to his father, whose memory he cherishes, and to his son Henry, killed in 1979 in a

Chicago plane crash.

It is in this moving tribute to his son that Regnery briefly describes his wife, Eleanor Scattergood Regnery, as she gazes at their newborn son, "with the look of serenity and love which was characteristic of her." It still is, one might add, and there is probably no more succinct and accurate way to depict the quality radiated by this Quaker lady who chose to make her life with a dissident publisher.

Like his family relationships, his relationship with God is for the most part publicly treated as a private matter. At one point in his memoir, he recalls a conversation with the German Catholic writer Luise Rinser, who compared the Church to an old family house. Regnery, whose grandfather was Roman Catholic, responds in this way: "Many people, needless to say, have found refuge in that old house, but however much I may at times have wished otherwise, I remain an outsider."

Yet Regnery is also capable of writing the following words, which amount to a brief but fully realized and expressed feeling for God, the world He created, and the place of man in that world: We had no choice, so far as we can know, about the circumstances surrounding our coming into the world, and no matter how hard we may think about it can know nothing about what happens to us when we leave it. . . . We are given life to lead as best we can and in accordance with the gifts and circumstances allotted to us, and those who lead a good life can face death with the composure and confidence of old Bach, who, on his deathbed, asked those around him to sing his last chorale, "Before Thy Throne with This I Come," composed only a few days before, doubtless in preparation for this event. That our Maker feels kindly toward us, His creatures, the music of Bach and Mozart would be for me sufficient evidence, if there were not more. A splendid paragraph, with music the highly appropriate metaphor. Among many public men, music is the language of an intense private life.

But it's the public Regnery we're concerned with here, and the public Regnery is still publishing interesting and unfashionable books.

Kent Barry and I had lunch with Regnery on April 18 at the Wrigley Building Restaurant, like Henry a solid and venerable Chicago institution. (The Wrigley, incidentally, is just across Michigan Avenue from the Chicago Tribune, which for some long-forgotten ideological reason still refuses to give Regnery his due as one of Chicago's primary civic and cultural assets.) It was an ordinary day, high spring in Chicago. A lake-blown snowstorm briefly raged outside, causing a host of golden daffodils to scream primally.

Things were normal with Henry. He'd recently had bypass surgery, and during a visit to his son Alfred had pitched down a flight of stairs. But Henry is only 77, and he stays in condition by working in his shop and garden at Three Oaks, the Regnerys' Michigan home. And so, despite these minor physical annoyances, Henry had already put in his lettuce, potatoes, and peas.

We ate well and talked about a number of things, with Regnery reminiscing about old comrades like John Chamberlain and telling of an encounter between Bill Buckley and Norman Thomas. Kent Barry, a promising young conservative polemicist, devoured all this, and one of the wonders was that after nearly eight decades, Regnery could still find it interesting to talk to an enthusiastic young conservative,

Most of the conversation, however, had to do with the fortunes of Regnery Gateway, which recently moved its editorial offices to Washington and is being run by Alfred Regnery, with Henry providing guidance and counsel. Given the new mood in the country, the business is doing well. In fact, according to Alfred, sales have tripled during the past two years.

The standard works- The Conservative Mind, God and Man at Yale, Suicide of the West, Witness-are still selling healthily (Conservative Mind is now in its seventh edition). There are also a number of new titles that are doing well. Profscam, by Charles Sykes, is an expose of our languid professors which, I am told, provides a 1980s perspective on themes explored two decades ago in The Kumquat Stalement. Reviews of Sykes's book in the New York Times, Washington Post, Detroit News, Miami Herald, and Wall Street Journal have been favorable. The Chicago Tribune is yet to be heard from, although Bill Granger, a noted Chicago novelist, recently wrote a first-rate column for the Tribune Sunday magazine lauding Sykes.

Also doing well are William Casey's Secret War against Hitler and Leo Damore's Senatorial Privilege.- The Chappaquiddick Coverup. (The publication histories of these books-the latter especially-involve amusing anecdotes about large advances from leading publishers like Random House, acute cases of cold feet when the authors delivered what was promised, and Henry Regnery there as backstop to ensure the books weren't buried. But Regnery's been doing that for years, and that's another story.) And also, lest we forget revisionism, which Henry Regnery isn't about to let us do, there's Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship, by Robert Nisbet.

WE TALKED about books for a couple of hours, and then Henry left us to return-on foot, of course to the downtown office which was once the first Playboy headquarters. He seemed a bit slower now, but that was no doubt the gale-force wind and had nothing to do with surgery or pitching down stairs.

However, the thought couldn't help but intrude. He is one of a kind, and perhaps the last. As Edmund Fuller wrote a decade ago, "Mr. Regnery was able to match ftee enterprise with his ideals and ideas, and for this we all owe him a debt . . ."

Indeed we do, for through his efforts he kept something alive. And by keeping that something alive, he helped make a return to the traditional verities in America possible.

The public Henry Regnery would no doubt put all this much less grandly, perhaps preferring to summarize his contributions with the words he used in the last paragraph of his memoir:

The publisher of Milton's Paradise Lost, we are told, paid its author five pounds, and is remembered, if at all, for the miserliness of his payment in comparison to the magnificence of the work he bought. But it should not be forgotten that he probably lost money on the venture, and that his participation in it, although of a quite different order from the author's, was also necessary.

As was Henry Regnery's, and our country is better for it. In fact, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, with a citation reflecting this sentiment, would not be at all out of order.

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