Remembering Joe Sobran

Some thoughts from R.J. Stove. To quote:

Reading Joe’s stuff back then became both exhilarating and saddening. Exhilarating, because of the seeming ease with which he eviscerated totalitarians of every hue. Saddening, because one knew that one could never write half as well as he. On the whole, the exhilaration outweighed the sadness, or else I would have ceased to study his output. But if anyone had told me in those days that I would actually come to know Joe in person, I would have responded with some embryonically paleocon remark like “Pull the other one, it plays the Habsburg imperial anthem.” (Protracted exposure to Kuehnelt-Leddihn tends to induce this type of metaphor.)

In Renaissance Tuscany, the term used to denote such writing as Joe’s was sprezzatura, that almost untranslatable noun that can be only approximately rendered in English as “staggering erudition worn with the utmost nonchalance.” I never quite dared to talk of sprezzatura to Joe (because I could imagine his scornful response: “Sprezzatura? I always did hate Italian food!”). Yet that quality was what I most cherished in Joe’s thought. Insofar as I can trace my own authorial evolution to something like a stylist, increasing exposure to Joe’s articles had much to do with the development.

Still, the very effortlessness of Joe’s literary manner seemed to preclude anything like personal acquaintanceship with him. Besides, for the polymathic, unaffectedly devout, and quintessentially Midwestern Joe, my background (that of a non-American nurtured among unbelievers and with the patchiest sort of formal education) surely ticked all the wrong boxes. Of how I originally made contact with him, I no longer recall the details. I think that I was so staggered by the exceptional brilliance of one Sobran column — “Victims of Music” — that I overcame my habitual shyness and wrote to him in care of Universal Press Syndicate, which then syndicated his work, to say that he had surpassed himself with that piece. His response, far from being bearish, encouraged me to write more frequently (it was at his insistence that I started calling him "Joe" rather than "Mr. Sobran"). E-mail proved a means of communication well attuned to his free-wheeling approach. How often of a morning, after a fairly horrid previous day, did I turn on my computer and have my spirits raised by the sight of those welcome boldface words “Joe Sobran” in my inbox.

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