Originally published in the Fourth Quarter 1992 edition of Southern Partisan.
I’m always amazed at how wisely good people face death, how perfectly they focus their attention at the end. 1 got a call from Mel Bradford the night before he was to undergo open-heart surgery; and we talked for a few minutes about the huge number of these operations a typical thoracic surgeon performs in an average week, and how routine they arc. We were both trying to put the best face on a grim reality; He weighed 300 pounds; he suffered from rampant diabetes: tests had revealed substantial blockage in two major arteries and three minor ones.
After we had reassured each other, he said in a quieter voice: “If I go out tomorrow. I’ll be ready. In these past few months I’ve lost all rancor. As a matter of fact, I now look on just about everybody with genuine affection.”
On that last evening, he was not thinking about the huge body of literary and social commentary he had produced over a 30-year period, nor the political and philosophical battles that had troubled and enriched his life, nor even of the biography of Donald Davidson he had intended to finish in the months immediately ahead. He was thinking instead about his capacity to love other people and to forgive them—particularly those who had despitefully used him.
There are a good many of these. In the academy— where professors who vote the straight Democratic ticket like to picture themselves as marching to a different drummer—Mel Bradford’s conservatism made him something of an intellectual outcast. Had he been a Marxist, the volume and quality of his writings would have earned him a full professorship at Harvard or Princeton or Yale, with all the attendant financial rewards and literary honors. Because he chose to follow Burke, the anti-federalists, and the Agrarians, he spent his career teaching in small institutions, always eyeing his bank balance with special interest toward the end of the month.
In the Republic of Letters—that mythical land where all ideas are permitted and all opinions tolerated—he was often treated like a second-class citizen, one who violated the immutable and unwritten laws of the intellectual establishment. His commentaries on American history and literature were scandals to a generation of publishers and reviewers who only understood or admitted the comfortable abstractions of the Left. As a consequence, he saw his opinions all too frequently misrepresented or ignored. His books—which were exhaustively researched and brilliantly argued—were published by small conservative houses or regional academic presses.
In the world of practical politics, he was routinely betrayed, not so much by his legitimate opponents, who recognized his integrity and respected it, but by those who called themselves conservatives. An active supporter of Ronald Reagan since 1976, he was denied the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities in favor of William Bennett, a man who had voted in the Democratic primary in 1980 and remained a Democrat well into the Reagan Administration. (The full story of how Bradford’s candidacy was derailed by distortions and outright lies has yet to be told.)
Yet he understood and accepted the limitations of his own commitment to his people and their past. He wouldn’t have taught at Yale or Harvard or Princeton had he been given the opportunity. He knew the University of Dallas had one of the best undergraduate programs in the country, and he was happy with the quality and disposition of his graduate students. Like Davidson and Lytle, two of his former intellectual mentors, he preferred to live and work in the South.
As for his adversaries in the Republic of Letters, he understood and enjoyed their intellectual animosity. He knew that strong opinions vigorously defended always provoked reciprocal hostility. “To them,” he said with a smile, “I’m the beast of the Apocalypse.” Yet some of his strong friendships were with those who disagreed with him. Harry Jaffa, his opponent in several public debates on the character of Abraham Lincoln, remained a friend over the years, as did Eugene Genovese, the brilliant and genial Marxist historian. In fact, both men supported Mel’s candidacy for chairman of the NEH.
As for that bitter and divisive struggle, Mel alone seemed willing to forgive the slights and forget the indignities. He did not personally provoke the ensuing warfare between traditional conservatives and neoconservatives and, insofar as the fighting centered on the NEH controversy, he was never a combatant. If the rest of us harbored grudges, he did not. In this respect he was stubbornly, maddeningly charitable. He confined his own quarrels to legitimate impersonal philosophical debate, though he was never shy in challenging the heresies of Big Government Republicans.
For those who didn’t know him, he was a figure of epic splendor, a warrior who never doubted himself or the cause he served. Yet his close personal friends found in him a surprising humility—a compulsion to subject himself and his work to the harshest intellectual standards. If anything, he underestimated his own talents and achievements, particularly in comparison with those of his friends. “I’m nothing more than a fairly competent explicator of texts,” he once remarked. On another occasion, when he was telling about an honor he was scheduled to receive, he said, “I guess I’ll go and play the Great Man. I have the sinking feeling that I’m becoming unbearably distinguished.” And years after he had played a significant role in the 1972 Wallace campaign, he came across a snapshot of himself, standing on a political platform, eyes bulging, arms waving the air. He looked at the photograph for a moment, shook his head, then cried out: “Give us Barrabas!”
Yet despite such self-effacement, both his friends and adversaries recognized in him the unmistakable signs of greatness. He had one of the best minds of his time. It contained all the essential ingredients: a computer-like capacity to store facts by the trillions of megabytes and to call them up at an instant; the power of analysis, which enabled him to isolate the elements of discourse into discrete ideas and to understand them apart from their rhetorical context; the gift of synthesis, which allowed him to gather fragments of meaning from a wide range of sources and to fit them together into a coherent order that reflected recognizable reality; the ability to criticize, to make qualitative judgments about the world and its literary analogues; and, finally, the rigorous discipline necessary to make sense out of everything he knew and to translate it into language that others could understand—some others.
In this regard, I should note that the hundreds of articles and books he published over a lifetime didn’t come easily. He was not Thomas Wolfe, who wrote 100,000 words at a sitting and tossed the pages over his shoulder, impatient to type the next sentence. Mel wrote everything in longhand with considerable effort. While other literary scholars could produce several glib pages a day, Mel usually wrote no more than a few paragraphs—carefully, thoughtfully constructing compound-complex sentences that contained so many layers of meaning that those with insufficient intelligence (or courage) failed to understand them. Herbert Read once wrote that “style is the ultimate morality of mind.” The morality of Mel Bradford’s mind, like his prose, was complicated, hierarchical, and wide-ranging—not the mind of a simpleton, a Jacobin, or an ideologue.
That he produced an enormous body of work is not so much a tribute to his mind but evidence of his strong character and generosity. He worked every day for years; and after his reputation was secure, he seldom refused the request of an old friend or young admirer to review a book, make a speech, or contribute an article. Only after his health had begun to fail did he reduce the volume of his output and try to concentrate on his Davidson biography.
A number of people have said that his death is a great loss to the intellectual community—and so it is. But for those of us who knew him over the years, it is not his work we miss in the days that remain, but Mel himself, his enormous spirit, too large even for his ample body, and his swift and singular wit. He was a great story teller and a great listener; an undemanding friend, yet always quick to offer help; a repentant sinner who forgave all those who trespassed against him, even those of us who didn’t ask for forgiveness.
And that brings me back to the man, who, lying in a hospital bed in Midland, Texas understood fully what was ultimately important and what was finally irrelevant. The books and articles will be read, probably a hundred years from now. As for the forgiveness and generosity and love, we have it on the best authority that God, in His careful mercy, gathers that part of us into his arms and keeps it alive forever, even as He wipes away all our tears.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.
“ An active supporter of Ronald Reagan since 1976, he was denied the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities in favor of William Bennett, a man who had voted in the Democratic primary in 1980 and remained a Democrat well into the Reagan Administration. (The full story of how Bradford’s candidacy was derailed by distortions and outright lies has yet to be told.) ”
And you have seldom, if ever, heard a word of this from the so-called Republican conservatives of today.
“Mel Bradford’s conservatism made him something of an intellectual outcast. Had he been a Marxist, the volume and quality of his writings would have earned him a full professorship at Harvard or Princeton or Yale, with all the attendant financial rewards and literary honors. Because he chose to follow Burke, the anti-federalists, and the Agrarians, he spent his career teaching in small institutions.”
I’m forever grateful of the work put out by the Abbeville Institute.