Page 41 - American Conservative September/October 2015
P. 41

This view of war appears in Bill’s first novel, And Wait for the Night, which begins with a long section on the siege of Vicksburg. If there’s a theme common to Bill’s fiction on the subject, it’s pride in a soldier’s duty combined with sensitivity to the horrors of war.
He hesitated to “presume to enunciate a ‘Southern view’ of foreign policy” but noted that “there remain a few antique verities stretching from President Washington’s Farewell Address to the Monroe Doc- trine.” These verities had to be “reviewed” and “re- interpreted” in light of what
was then the most pressing
threat abroad: “the rise of a
Russian empire bound to-
gether by force.”
one thing to live one’s life under the necessity of empiri- cal events long past; it is quite another to be forced to genuflect to them.” But Bradford’s supporters did not prevail, and the NEH nomination went to a rival candi- date, William J. Bennett.
Corrington was one of those conservatives Will de- cried for having a too favorable view of the Confeder- acy. He once dashed off a missive to Charles Bukowski that referred to Robert E. Lee as “the greatest man who ever lived,” and he later asked to be buried with a Con-
The policy of containment
that was a shibboleth for pol-
icy experts during the Reagan
years was for Corrington a
waste of time. “I do not recall
that our liberal predecessors argued for the ‘contain- ment’ of National Socialism as it ravaged Europe in the late 1930s and ’40s,” he said. That did not mean he cate- gorically favored military intervention. “Obviously,” he qualified, “direct military force to attain specific goals is not among our options.”
Then what was? Corrington’s answer was unhelp- fully obvious: “political economics.” He anticipated that the Soviet Union would “find itself pressing the last drop of economic usefulness out of the poor be- fuddled bodies of its subjects,” if the West quit sup- plying the Soviets with “western technology, western food, and vast sums of western credit.”
Corrington’s dislike of George Will arose from the controversy over the proposed nomination of Mel Bradford, a fellow Southern literary scholar, as chair- man of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1981. Will had taken to his Washington Post col- umn to decry Bradford’s attachment to the “nostalgic Confederate remnant within the conservative move- ment.” Among Bradford’s offenses was proposing that Lincoln was a “Gnostic” in the sense that Voegelin used the term, a philosophical radical seeking to “im- manentize the eschaton.” Corrington himself had a more concrete complaint about the 16th president: as he put it in a 1964 letter to Anthony Blond, the Brit- ish editor who had published And Wait for the Night, Lincolnstood“inrelationtotheSouthverymuchas Khrushchev did to Hungary, as the United Nations apparatchiks did to Katanga.”
“Will’s stance,” Corrington announced with typical bravado, “comes close to requiring a loyalty oath to the Great Emancipator, and I for one will not have it. It is
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
federate flag in his coffin. A statue of General Sherman on a horse inspired—or rather, provoked—Bill’s book of poems Lines to the South. The literary critic Robert B. Heilman observed that 75 percent of Corrington’s short stories involved the Civil War. Asked whether he was a Southern writer, Bill quipped, “If nobody else wants to be, that’s fine; then we would have only one: me.”
Corrington defied simple classification. He informed Bukowski, for instance, that as a poet he had taken up the sonnet just to throw “dirt in the eyes of those who would love to put some label on my ass.” But he may have paid a price for accepting the label of Southern con- servative. Shortly after discovering Voegelin, Corrington began to read Russell Kirk, and Bruce Herschensohn— then a producer with a Los Angeles television station— commissioned him to write a screenplay of Kirk’s his- tory textbook, The Roots of American Order. Corrington drew up the script, but it was never produced.
Kirk entrusted the script to his friend Richard Bishirjian, who later intimated that the documenta- ry’s failure had to do with “the new political appoin- tees at NEH that Bennett recruited.” These appoin- tees, Bishirjian said, were “ideologues for whom John Locke, the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln, and Harry Jaffa define America.”
Corrington’s outline for conservatism—unlike Reagan’s, Will’s, and Buckley’s—involved what he called “traditional Southern thought and senti- ment”: to wit, the land, the community, and a foreign policy of “decency and common sense,” which is to say, a “realistic, non-ideological orientation toward the rest of the world.”
He was unable to put his finger on what irked him
THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 41
Corrington’s outline for conservatism—unlike Reagan’s, Will’s, and Buckley’s—involved the land, the community, and a foreign policy of “decency and common sense.”


































































































   39   40   41   42   43