Garry Wills on Life in and Out of Books

“Square,” “colorless,” “stodgy,” “unthreatening.” Those are some of the adjectives that the prolific journalist and historian Garry Wills uses to describe himself in “Outside Looking In,” his pointillistic new memoir.

Off the page, all those things may (or may not) be true. On it, as countless politicians and writers have learned, having Mr. Wills sternly contemplate your work can be like having the Red Baron on your tail. “Unthreatening” is hardly the word. Writing in The New York Review of Books and other journals, he’s sent entire squadrons of shoddy works and ideas down in flames.
Mr. Wills has written some 40 books of his own, from pinwheeling political analysis (“Nixon Agonistes,” published in 1970) to sober inquiry about celebrity (“John Wayne’s America,” published in 1997) to meditations on oratory and language. In 1993 he won a Pulitzer Prize for “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.”
Now 76, Mr. Wills is also among America’s leading, dissenting Roman Catholic intellectuals; in recent years faith has become his abiding preoccupation. In the last decade alone he’s written nearly a dozen books about religion, including “Saint Augustine’s Sin” (2003) and “What the Gospels Meant” (2008), in addition to many on other subjects.
He’s become a publishing machine, issuing a steady drip of erudite but remote volumes from the broad and rectangular plain of his parsonlike forehead. Few of Mr. Wills’s recent books have warmed in your hands. They’ve been easier to admire than to embrace.
The good news about “Outside Looking In” is that it’s the most limber and humane book Mr. Wills has written in years. It’s far from a proper autobiography, although it does detail bits of Mr. Wills’s bookwormish childhood in Michigan and Wisconsin. (His father, a college boxing coach, gambler and instigator of business schemes, once paid him not to read so much. The boy used the money to buy another book.)
It also offers warm set pieces from his life with his wife, Natalie, to whom he has been married for more than 50 years. He met her on an Eastern Airlines flight in 1957 — she was working as a stewardess — when she commented on the book he was reading by the French philosopher Henri Bergson.
“I can scare myself silly,” Mr. Wills writes, “by considering the close calls” that almost made him miss that particular flight.
“Outside Looking In” is, most fundamentally, a series of pointed scenes from a busy life. Its vaguely oxymoronic subtitle (“Adventures of an Observer”) seems misleading. No one who counted William F. Buckley, John Waters, Studs Terkel, Beverly Sills and Murray Kempton among his many friends, and who had close-up views of many of the last century’s signal events, can qualify as a true outsider.
The early chapters of “Outside Looking In” are a Greyhound bus tour through many events Mr. Wills covered as a barnstorming young journalist, writing for Harold Hayes’s Esquire and other publications. He was thrown in jail along with Benjamin Spock, Joe Papp and Judy Collins during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, after agreeing to take part in a protest. He flew into Memphis on the night of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. He visited strip clubs in Dallas in 1966 while writing about Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer, who owned a club called the Carousel.
There is a chapter here on Nixon (Wills landed on his enemies list), as well as on Jimmy Carter, whom he admired, and on the Clintons (he has kinder things to say about Hillary than about Bill, and admires her gifts as a mimic). There are chapters as well on Buckley, who asked the young and unknown Mr. Wills to write theater criticism for National Review, and on Studs Terkel. Mr. Wills also writes fondly about his friendship with the actor and antiwar activist Dick Cusack, the father of the actors John and Joan, and the rest of the busy Cusack clan.
Mr. Wills writes gratefully, and with relish, about the intellectual and spiritual armor he acquired early. “I was blessed by my schooling — Catholic grade school, high school, college (St. Louis University) and graduate school (Xavier of Cincinnati),” he says.
Mr. Wills also has a Ph.D. in classics from Yale, and he is eloquent about why this sort of education matters to anyone who wishes to write and think seriously. “Learning classical Greek is the most economical intellectual investment one can make,” he writes. “On many things that might interest one — law and politics, philosophy, oratory, history, lyric poetry, epic poetry, drama — there will be constant reference back to the founders of those forms in our civilization.”
There are moments when “Outside Looking In” seems like a data dump, as if Mr. Wills were flipping though a trunk of his yellowed magazine clips. There’s more here than is strictly necessary about things like the particulars of Sills’s run as chairwoman of the Metropolitan Opera. And a bit, spread over several pages, about the actor Joseph Fiennes’s behaving like a twerp on a film set that Mr. Wills visited is a waste of this book’s already limited storage capacity.
Other narrative detours are pure labors of love. Mr. Wills’s chapter on his family’s years in Baltimore (he and his wife have three children) includes a long and ardent disquisition on the glories of Johnny Unitas’s passing with the Baltimore Colts, and Raymond Berry’s receiving. Mr. Wills approvingly quotes the sportswriter Frank Deford, who declared: “If there were one game scheduled, Earth versus the Klingons, with the fate of the universe on the line, any person with his wits about him would have Johnny U. calling signals in the huddle.”
Mr. Wills’s politics have never been doctrinaire, but he makes it clear that he arrived at his middle-class conservatism by temperament. He says the rosary daily. He has never smoked pot. He dresses, in his daughter’s words, “like a bum.” He has had sex with only one woman.
“I agree with Hilaire Belloc: ‘it is well to have loved one woman from a child,’ ” he writes.
More than faith, Mr. Wills admires faithfulness. He’s justifiably proud that he’s been true to his wife, to his friends, to the two universities where he’s taught for long stretches over 43 years and to the few literary agents he’s had. For a man who describes himself as one of the least interesting people on the planet, he makes the old virtues sound surprisingly sexy.