Oxford Years: The Letters of Willmoore Kendall to His Father.

Oxford Years: The Letters of Willmoore Kendall to His Father, edited by Yvona Kendall Mason

(Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Bryn Mawr, Pa., 527 pp., $14.95)

READERS of the early issues of NATIONAL REVIEW will instantly recognize the name of Willmoore Kendall. A brilliant political theorist and platform debater, an editor of NR from its rounding until 1963, a mentor of William F. Buckley Jr. at Yale, Professor Kendall became one of the pre-eminent conservative intellectuals of the mid twentieth century. Argumentative, even quarrelsome, he often exasperated friend and foe alike, all the while turning out some of the most provocative political-science writings of his time.

Kendall was a child prodigy who learned to read at the age of 2. After graduating from high school at 13, he entered Northwestern University as the youngest college student in the country.

What is less well known is that Kendall's father had also been a child prodigy. Essentially blind from birth, the elder Kendall nevertheless graduated from college (and as valedictorian, besides) at the age of 15, and from a noted seminary (again as valedictorian) a few years later. A gifted orator, in 1907 he entered the Southern Methodist ministry in Oklahoma, where he served as a distinguished pastor for more than 30 years.

Between the blind preacher and his first-born son there developed a remarkable bond. By age 10 young Willmoore was driving his father in an automobile to commitments around the state. More significantly, the precocious boy read books aloud to his father and shared a variety of interests with him. One index of the two Kendalls' intimacy was the vast correspondence between them--more than six thousand pages of it, mostly typed and single-spaced--stretching from Willmoore's boyhood until his father's death in 1942.

Despite his early intellectual stardom, young Kendall's teenage years and early twenties were troubled by recurrent uncertainty--and tension with his father--about the choice of a career. Nothing seemed fully to engage the prodigy's soul. Then, in 1931, while a graduate student in Romance languages at the University of Illinois, Willmoore won a Rhodes Scholarship. From 1932 to 1935 he studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University, an experience that transformed his life.

In Oxford Years Kendall's sister Yvona has published the voluminous correspondence between father and son during this pivotal period. Willmoore's letters were filled with accounts of his readings, travels, and encounters with eminent personalities. In one notable missive, he described the notorious Oxford Union debate of 1933 in which the house resolved "in no circumstances [to] fight for King and Country." For his part, the elder Kendall regularly apprised his son of the deepening devastation of the Great Depression back home. On one occasion he reported that "Mama and I haven't a dollar cash between us." The merits and demerits of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal became a repeated topic of epistolary contention between father and son.

Contention, for by 1935--to his father's great chagrin--Willmoore had become a vehement Marxist. Another source of anguish was Willmoore's oft-changing career plans. Conceding that he was a "hopeless splasher," Willmoore initially intended to study at Oxford to become another Walter Lippmann--a model his father enthusiastically held high. Then Willmoore decided to become a foreign correspondent. Shortly before leaving Oxford for a journalist's job in Madrid, he announced that his "purpose in life" was "to become a great Socialist publicist."

The elder Kendall did not try to dictate his son's choice. But, acutely mindful of the economic catastrophe back home, he implored his son to be practical and to take every advantage of his extraordinary opportunity. Despite his popularity as a pastor, the blind Reverend Kendall seems to have felt profoundly frustrated by his own station in life. He warned Willmoore that taking a certain job would doom him to "a very narrow and limited life as did my taking the idiotic vows of a novitiate in the Methodist ministry in my twentieth year." The elder Kendall did not want his son similarly to squander his gifts.

Willmoore, now in his mid twenties, did not always take kindly to his father's counsel. In letter after letter the two debated the wisdom of the Rhodes Scholar's course. At times the son could be acerbic to the point of impertinence, as when he offered his father some "fatherly" advice.

It is hard to know how seriously to take this incessant jousting. Both father and son clearly loved to argue. When together, they would sometimes debate an issue heatedly until one or the other would storm out of the room. Later they would resume just as heatedly--on opposite sides of the same question. In one of his Oxford letters, Willmoore called his father "a master of dialectic." On the basis of these letters, one can say that the son became a master himself.

Still, in Willmoore's checkered quest for a calling, one can detect a clue to his intellectual development. In the 1930s the elder Kendall was a liberal both in politics and in religion. Perhaps for this very reason, Willmoore was not. Endowed with an iconoclastic temperament and formidable analytic skills--as well as a need, perhaps, to break away--he never accepted, then or later, the New Deal liberalism personified by his father.

But at some level the father's influence persisted. In 1936 Willmoore returned to America and embarked upon an academic career. Long after Reverend Kendall's death, the restless preacher's son finally blended journalism and politics--not as another Walter Lippmann but as a contributor to NATIONAL REVIEW.

With commendable perseverance and skill Yvona Kendall Mason has edited this unusual record of two most unusual men. Professor George Carey, a later collaborator with Kendall in scholarly endeavors, has contributed an excellent prologue and epilogue. Readers of this volume will not find therein any expression of Willmoore Kendall's mature conservative thought. That came later. But they will find an intriguing tale of two prodigies--a story to be read as much for its abundant human interest as for its intellectual significance.

Mr. Nash's first book was The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945.