Robert Novak: A Washington life

Date published: 9/8/2007

By Joseph Duggan

WASHINGTON--Robert Novak's new memoir of 50 years in Washington journalism, "The Prince of Darkness," is piled with telling vignettes of politicians drunk on power--or, often, just drunk. More surprisingly, the book reveals that beneath the bilious, brooding, hopelessly uncuddly persona of the columnist resides a lover of poetry, a subtle mind, a soul longing for God, and even a heart of sorts.

Who'da thunk it?

As a high-school student in Joliet, Ill., during the 1940s, Novak worked as a cub reporter for the local paper, entering a boozy, cynical business populated by characters not far removed from the "Front Page." The grandson of East European Jewish immigrants, he attended the University of Illinois and drifted away from religious belief. His classmates and professors found him arrogant.

He majored in English and developed a love for poetry--especially the Modernist work of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. After Army service he went to work in Midwestern bureaus of the Associated Press. He won assignment to Washington at age 26.

A year later, in 1958, Novak met Pound on the day the poet was released from St. Elizabeths mental hospital. Pound asked the young wire-service reporter, "Young man, do you intend to spend your entire life in journalism?" When Novak said yes, Pound continued: "In that case, I have a piece of advice for you. Above all, avoid too much accuracy."

"As I related that advice to colleagues," writes Novak, "they said it validated Pound's insanity. He could have meant the truth would get me in the kind of trouble he had faced. But I thought he was saying I should not let a plethora of little facts get in the way of the greater truth. That difficult injunction for a journalist is one that I have tried to follow, not always successfully."

Novak always has been at core a dissident against clerisies. He fancies himself a successor to Bertrans de Born, a medieval troubadour who also was a political hooligan. Dante places Bertrans--a "stirrer up of strife"--in the Inferno, holding his severed head in his hand. On ground level, it is not difficult to imagine Novak with a Bertrans-class headache many a morning after wild intimacies with Nancy Whisky.

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Date published: 9/8/2007