
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, May 27, 1994                   TAG: 9406020046
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By BOB FISHBURN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE GENTLE REBEL OF FINCASTLE

PAXTON DAVIS didn't take up a great deal of space in this newspaper. As editor of the Book Page for years and as a once-a-week column writer for the Commentary Page until his death last week, he was a kind of village Joseph Addison trying to make some sense, in a few inches of type, of the rapidly passing scene. His influence on readers and colleagues, however, was enormous.

He was the steady, piercing mind viewing the daily pandemonium of events, a swift hawk ready to pounce on the slightest suspicious movement in the undergrowth. And how he pounced - on pretension, hypocrisy, vacuous politicians, dogmatism, jargon, smelly little orthodoxies (as George Orwell put it) and the craven mass sentiments that consume us from time to time.

His column was not adored by everyone, to put it mildly. He generated more letters to the editor, many of them venomous, than any other local writer. The kind, gentle, generous-spirited family man who puttered and muttered among his books donned his curmudgeon cape once a week and pounded out his column on an ancient Royal.

His writing angered because he had something to say and said it without equivocation. His bold assertions became part of his style. And what a style: here simple and pithy, there sinewy and elegant, the kind of ``natural'' writing that can come only from daily toil.

He could also stroke with a gentle brush. His many columns at the deaths of film stars would, if collected, constitute a poignant mini-history of movies.

Pax, in short, had many facets, but was never two-faced. In words that I have used often to describe him to those who never knew him, he was an Edwardian anarchist, a punctilious private man with a broad streak of rebel.

His approach to reading, journalism teaching, writing, family and life was a mixture of high seriousness - leave out the solemnity, please - leavened with humor and irony. The seriousness and sense of purpose in his journalism classes at Washington and Lee produced many solid, and several great, journalists, who dot newspapers and television stations across the land. His humor and loyalty gained him friends everywhere.

If there is one glimpse of Pax in my mind's eye that sums up his remarkable life - the highs and lows of which he laid down admirably in his last three books - it is his sitting in his beloved corner of Fincastle among stacks, piles and mounds of books clacking on his trusty manual typewriter.

The battered Royal was his magnificent nose-thumb at our technological age. He was deeply suspicious of what we unquestioningly call progress because he had a gut feeling that much of our vaunted technology arranges life in such a way that we don't have to experience it. And he wanted to experience every furrow, hill and chasm of life.

The late Sen. Sam Ervin, the famous legislator from North Carolina, gave a commencement address in 1983 in which he said: ``If you will seek truth, keep faith and have courage, life will grant you release from little things and give you peace of mind and heart.''

Peace, my friend. You sought truth and kept faith.

Bob Fishburn is a former editorial writer and Commentary Page editor for this newspaper.

by CNB