Neil McCaffrey, RIP.

NATIONAL REVIEW was only two or three years old when the letter came in from Neil McCaffrey (he did not like to use the telephone). He had concluded, he wrote, that the success of our magazine was indispensable to his ambitions for his God, his country, and his family, and he was therefore willing to do what he could to promote our interests; it happened, he went on, that he was something of a wizard in the direct-promotion field and his services were henceforward available to us in return for zero compensation.

Letters offering life & limb for NATIONAL REVIEW are certainly not frequent, but Neil's was not unique. As a rule, generous impulses of that character go hand in hand with proffered services not terribly useful to a magazine whose concerns are simply to get quality copy and to pay the printer. But Neil's letter was itself testimony to vital skills and soon he was our primary promotion consultant, working hand in hand with our own Jim McFadden.

In due course Neil left Doubleday and founded his own companies, most notably the Conservative Book Club, which thrives to this day; and Arlington House, a publishing house that lasted for a dozen years, but suffered finally from the success of the fight it waged: conservatism became increasingly acceptable and other publishers, better capitalized, were willing to take on authors up until then tolerated only by Arlington House and of course, pre-eminently, the Regnery Company. McCaffrey's enthusiasms included jazz music. In 1968 he founded the Nostalgia Book Club, himself editing the four-volume Roger Kinkle's Complete Encyclopedia of Popular Music and Jazz 1900-1950. He launched the club with an ad in the New York Times characteristic of his style: "Kids Under 35: This Ad Is Not for You."

Neil's sense of who did not belong to his inner cultural-ideological-theological circle was, to put it generously, narrowly prescribed. The Pope only just survived, and only because as the descendant of Peter, he was just beyond Neil's excommunicative authority.

He was the most generous friend. In an early book done for Arlington House Garry Wills wrote, "This book was his [McCaffrey's] idea.... He worked with me and against me, while insisting that I call my work what is only partly mine. The best is his. The idea is his. I hope I have not spoiled it." And he was the sternest critic of any turn he deemed deviationist. His letters, so vibrant and amusing, were also classics of withering scorn. From time to time their effect (they had the sound of an executioner's song), if not always their purpose, was to bring about a break in personal relations. Some friends felt permanently cut off, and this was high-octane sadness for those who so much enjoyed his company, social and epistolary. Those who were lucky had working professional interests in common, in which case they hung on to transactable relations, and had the pleasure of reading more letters composed by a man with the temper of Evelyn Waugh, and a talent not entirely dissimilar.

It had been several months since the word got out, lung cancer. His wife, so widely beloved, was of course with him, as also his six children. What proved the final day came suddenly, and now he was completely silent, and there was only the music he loved so much. But then his wife thought in mid afternoon to substitute from Neil's musical library a softer-sounding record in place of the disk specified in the long-since-established roster. He heard the alien sound and raised his hand. Joan approached him and Neil managed to emit: "Same order!" His last words, and they incorporated his feelings about his church, the Constitution, and the primacy of his devoted family.