Henry Regnery, RIP - Notes & Asides - Column - Obituary

National Review, July 15, 1996 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

THE obituaries acknowledge Henry Regnery as a pivotal figure in American publishing. His aim was to find fresh voices that would argue the continuing cogency of the old ideals, and to re-expose the giant figures of the recent past and of the longtime past to those curious to examine the canon of what we now call conservative thought. He once wrote me, early in 1970, that we had "inherited a great and noble tradition, and it is worth fighting for." He did, right up to his death at 84.

The son of a successful textile merchant, he had graduated from MIT and had done postgraduate work in Germany, and at Harvard. His curiosity was not satisfied, his concerns were ignored or insufficiently dealt with, and so in 1947 he founded his publishing house and accosted the contemporary world. He was interested in conservative journalism (he helped to found Human Events), but mostly he was concerned with book-length inquiries into the awful modernisms that were overwhelming the academies and, derivatively, the modern culture.

My first contact with him was by mail (Henry always preferred the letter). He "had heard" that I was writing a book on tendencies in higher education (agnostic as to religion, collectivist as to politics). He would like to see the manuscript; which, six months later, he published and survived, even though it left his firm a little out of breath when the University of Chicago, to declare its solidarity with the academic establishment, canceled a publishing program it had consummated with the firm of Henry Regnery, Chicago.

He was a man of formal habits, but his warmth and humor generated a conviviality that, in the experience of several of his authors, quite simply took over. I reminisced on this aspect of dealing with Henry Regnery, Inc., at a modest testimonial given to him many years ago. Publication by Regnery was a breath-catching experience, an entirely different scene from the bureaucratic book-publishing life elsewhere. When I traveled to Chicago to meet Mr. Regnery and discuss such matters as jacket design it was automatically assumed that I would stay at his big house in Hinsdale, where, over the course of several years, I, and later my wife and I, spent many evenings.

I pause to recall that there was a certain risk in those days in spending the night with the Regnerys. It was during the years of the Regnerys' martial Quakerism. Henry's beautiful wife, Eleanor, had been raised a Friend. Translated, that meant: No booze. This posed a quite awesome prospect for a young author only a few months away from Fraternity Row at Yale University. But a friendly Providence has a way of stringing out its little lifesavers in strategically opportune ways, and sure enough it transpired that across the street from Henry, in another big house, lived a most informal and exuberant gentleman, an artist named Kenneth, who had befriended Henry and, by the expansiveness of his temperament, any friend of Henry, known or unknown, ex officio. So that at approximately six o'clock in the afternoon, Kenneth would throw open his shutters and, at the top of his lungs, cry out, "If Henry has any guests staying with him, Thee-all can come over for a drink." That disposed of that problem.

Henry's artistic passion was for music (he was chairman of the Chicago Conservatory of Music), and with his five children he had something like a string quartet. He read omnivorously, translated important works from the German, founded the academic quarterly Modern Age, and published in it essays on Theodore Dreiser and Richard Strauss ("When I heard Figaro in Munich before the war," he wrote me, "it was conducted by Richard Strauss, and was performed in the small, beautiful baroque opera house where Mozart had once conducted") and other figures who caught his interest (Marcel Reich-Ranicki). He published an autobiography, Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher, in 1979. And of course it was Henry Regnery who published Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, a seminal event in the evolution of contemporary conservative thought. In thirty years he published James Burnham, Freda Utley, Wilhelm Ropke, Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis, Whittaker Chambers, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Jackson Kilpatrick, among others.

THERE was travail in his life, professional and personal. In 1977, he briefly altered the character of his house. "Although I like to think a publisher will be judged by the quality of his books rather than by his financial success, he must operate at a profit to stay in business, and this I was never able to do, which is the reason my old firm is now known as Contemporary Books and publishes auto-repair manuals and sports books rather than Russell Kirk and Thomas Aquinas." And I remember the peak event. I was watching the television news in 1979. It reported the crash of an American Airlines jet, everyone on board dead. The report scrolled down a list of the victims and I saw "Henry Regnery." It was his younger son, an executive in his father's company, bound for Los Angeles for a book convention. In due course Henry Sr. turned his company over to his gifted son Alfred, who moved it to Washington in 1979.