The American mind

The historian Garry Wills has written better than anybody else about modern America

by Sam Tanenhaus / March 11, 2013 / Leave a comment

Published in March 2013 issue of Prospect Magazine

Wills is an outsider: a practising Catholic, a proud midwesterner, a cheerful iconoclast who has infuriated friends on both the left and right © Gasper Tringale

Sooner or later, anyone who writes about America must reckon with Garry Wills. Not that it’s easy to do. The books are demanding enough—not the prose, which is graceful and elegant—but the arguments, which are unfailingly original, often provocative, occasionally subversive and, now and again, utterly perverse, yet stamped every time with the finality of the last word.

In his 50 or so books, a handful of them masterpieces, Wills has ranged further than any other American writer of his time, covering much of the western tradition, ancient and contemporary, sacred and profane. His subjects include Jesus, Paul and Augustine, American presidents old and new (Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Reagan, the second Bush), Shakespeare and Verdi, the outrages of American militarism, the glories and delinquencies of his beloved-despised Catholicism and—why not?—John Wayne (Wills is a devotee of John Ford’s Westerns.) For diversion, Wills extrudes densely learned articles in the New York Review of Books, the august journal that since the 1970s has been the main stage of his brutal dismantlings of inferior—that is to say, other—minds. To be reviewed by Wills, I can attest, is to feel like a vagrant caught urinating in the master’s hedges: after the initial panic, one experiences a strange, penitential relief. God, or at least one of His retainers, really is watching.

On a dour Sunday morning in December, I visited Wills, who is nearing 79 but looks 20 years younger, at his large three-storey house in Evanston, a prosperous suburb to the north of C…

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Comments

nietky
March 12, 2013 at 05:54
The cartoon mentioned at the end is here: http://www.harpweek.com/09Cartoon/BrowseByDateCartoon.asp?Month=August&Date=19
Paul
March 12, 2013 at 06:35
Wills is an intellectual who helped bring my inchoate beliefs into form. It was an aha! moment when I found his work. Love him. Thanks.
Luke Lea
March 12, 2013 at 14:51
Time for me to read Nixon Agonistes I guess. I'd like to know what Will's thoughts are about the future of America, the contest between republic and empire. Has he already written about it.
kent kaufman
March 12, 2013 at 15:48
The book on Venice was an overreach. Virtually unreadable. Everything is choice.
BLARG
March 12, 2013 at 16:19
I don't know his earlier work, but nothing he's written in the last ten years or so has been particularly interesting or original. Of course, you could say the same for Tanenhaus.
Bill Marvel
March 12, 2013 at 20:36
When my conscience needs to be challenged, I return again and again to Wills.
John Hilton
March 16, 2013 at 02:30
Thanks for a good read about an American original. To pick a geographical nit, while the northernmost point of Lake Michigan is indeed about 500 km north of Wills' home, Canada lies 150 km or so farther north--via Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Lake Superior.
Phil Balla
March 17, 2013 at 03:08
Love Sam Tannenhaus' writing here -- but have one quibble. At one point he quotes the National Catholic Reporter as calling Wills, "perhaps the most distinguished Catholic intellectual in America over the last 50 years.” The arithmetic is off just a bit. given that Thomas Merton's death, in December of 1968, is still only 45 years past.
Mike
March 18, 2013 at 19:31
So much nonsense in this article. The University of Chicago doesn't hire dissidents or "singular" minds? How many "mad 'Bible Belt' campaigns" are attempting to ban the teaching of evolution in schools? Most just ask that the arguments of intelligent design be presented alongside evolution in the classroom. And how does Obama's withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan by 2014 "vindicate" Wills' prediction that if he sends more troops, he'll "never get out"? That was the plan all along!
Bob Lipton
March 21, 2013 at 21:07
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Mark Twain, although born in Missouri, was not raised on the banks of the river that shares the state's name. Hannibal is on the Mississippi. And while someone who tinkles on the piano may make a mess, someone who tinkers on it is making small repairs.
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