A dirge for a good man

An obituary is a memento mori, which is why I seldom read them. Yet I read one this morning.

For P.J. O’Rourke was a factor in my life, especially when I lived in America. There were only two publications I read regularly then: William Buckley’s National Review and P.J.’s National Lampoon – the former mostly for ideas, the latter mostly for style. Mostly his.

Some writers are born, some are made, and then there was P.J. O’Rourke. If there are any scribes who don’t envy him, they should cast a critical eye over their own work to improve self-awareness. That done, they’ll start turning just the right shade of green when reading O’Rourke’s prose.

He could do with a couple of words what most writers can’t do with a paragraph; with a paragraph, what most writers can’t do with a page; with a page, what most writers can’t do at all.

O’Rourke’s verve and wit were such that one hung on to every word even when the subject-matter was uninteresting or his treatment of it facile. His prose was so effortless that only another writer could appreciate how much effort had gone into it.

To Hemingway, all American literature came out of Huckleberry Finn. That doesn’t mean one could draw a direct line of descent from Twain to, say, Faulkner, although I trust literary scholars to draw such lines even in the unlikeliest places.

But it does mean that Twain was the first genuinely American writer. Thanks to him, America stopped being a literary province of England and began to speak in her own voice.  And she spoke her own mind: irreverent, expansive, colourful to the point of being lurid, streetwise, commonsensical, iconoclastic, often anarchic.

I think it was H.L. Mencken who said, “The worst thing you can say about an American is that he believes everything he reads in the papers.” People who don’t believe everything, often anything, they read in the papers end up mocking received opinions, sometimes subtly, at other times savagely.

They submit the world around them to the test of common sense and tragically find it wanting. Some try to delve into the tragedy, others turn it into comedy. They laugh because grown men don’t cry.

“Repudiation of Europe,” the novelist John Dos Passos once wrote, “is, after all, America’s main excuse for being.”

When repudiation of anything becomes a country’s defining characteristic, its literature has to follow suit – first by decrying or mocking the object of repudiation, then by extending that mode of perception into other areas.

Satire thus became a quintessential American genre, glittering with such stellar masters as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, Hunter S. Thompson, Joseph Heller, Tom Wolfe – and P.J. O’Rourke.

It was Thompson who created the style of ‘gonzo’ journalism, with which O’Rourke is usually associated. This largely overlaps with New Journalism of which Tom Wolfe was the most prominent practitioner.

In both, the author creates a protagonist central to every narrative: himself. Of course, one could argue that all writers inject their own personality into their work. Yes, but most do so indirectly, with their own selves refracted through so many facets that only a meticulous analyst could reconstruct the writer behind the writing.

There was nothing indirect about Thomson, Wolfe and O’Rourke. They didn’t even try to feign dispassionate objectivity.

No readers had to work hard reconstructing their personalities. O’Rourke’s was no more hidden in his essays than Huck’s was in Twain’s novel. Extending the analogy, O’Rourke was Huck Finn and Mark Twain rolled into one, both creature and creator.

However, he often pointed out that, while the ‘I’ of his prose is closely related to P.J. O’Rourke, they aren’t identical twins. The ‘I’ either exaggerated O’Rourke’s traits or downplayed them. In fact, those who knew him personally talk about his loving, charitable heart before mentioning his cutting wit.

In his National Lampoon days, O’Rourke was a gag writer who in his mid- to late-twenties retained his rebellious teenage persona. His teenage years were in the 1960s, and O’Rourke was then head to toe immersed in the sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll counterculture.

His writing even 10 years later was that of a clever, talented, naughty boy whose work was funny but devoid of any other than shock value. One could never have guessed there was a conservative trying to break out of that countercultural dungeon.

O’Rourke never wrote too much about his Catholicism, but, judging by his evolution, it was a driving force in his life. Christianity in general, and apostolic Christianity especially, can act as a hoist lifting a sincere believer out of the morass of puerile shenanigans, and with O’Rourke that hoist went into full gear.

He began writing political and social commentary, but without losing either his wit or his youthful ‘gonzo’ style. One didn’t expect original insights from O’Rourke – that wasn’t his métier. He said things one could hear from a clever, conservative stranger in a bar. But no such lonely drinker would ever say them with as much coruscating brilliance.

O’Rourke was an American conservative, which is a very different type from European, especially British, ones. His, typically American, brand of conservatism combined economic libertarianism with social anarchism and fierce patriotism.

As a roving correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine (not a well-known haven for conservatives and libertarians), O’Rourke visited most countries in the world and found them all vastly inferior to his own.

He treated Europe in particular with ironic condescension, thereby vindicating Dos Passos and also carrying on the tradition set in motion by the first travel book in American literature, Twain’s The Innocents Abroad. Yet one could still love O’Rourke’s writing just as one took issue with some of his attitudes.

He was first diagnosed with cancer in 2008 and it got him in the end. Expecting that, O’Rourke wrote: “Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God’s grace. 

“Thus, the next time I glimpse death … well, I’m not going over and introducing myself. I’m not giving the grim reaper fist daps. But I’ll remind myself to try, at least, to thank God for death. And then I’ll thank God, with all my heart, for whiskey.”

It was as if O’Rourke forgot for a second that he was supposed to be an insouciant, irreverent man about town. Yet at the last moment he remembered, got upset with himself and hastily hit the key in which most of his work had been composed.

I’ll miss him, even though I haven’t read much of him for years. But somehow I’ve always felt the world was a better place, and America a better country, for his presence.

God lavished P.J. O’Rourke with gifts throughout his life. I pray that this will continue after his death.