Happy Days Were Here Again

In Lazarus, André Malraux told his doctor: “Modern man has been fashioned on the basis of exemplary stereotypes: saint, chevalier, caballero, gentleman, bolshevik, and so on.” From this catalogue, the French swashbuckler omitted ... Buckley.

A Buckley—part Magus, prestidigitating supply-side whoopee, and part matador, goring liberal bulls—is in perpetual motion. He edits magazines, proliferates newspaper columns, anchors television programs, skis, sails, and speechifies. In and around these activities, on the keyboard of his Toshiba laptop, from the backseat command module of his customized-in-Texarkana Cadillac limousine, or from the Gstaad chalet, where he oil-paints with Nivens and slide-slips with Galbraiths, or at the helm of his ketch, Sealestial, somewhere between the Galapagos and Byzantium, like G. K. Chesterton and Moses Herzog, a Buckley writes letters to the world.

The word zest comes to mind, and so does savor. Yet all these Buckley motions are accomplished with an oddly sleepy sort of Robert Mitchum look. He was once asked, on Laugh-In, “Mr. Buckley I notice that on your own program you’re always sitting down. Is this because you can’t think on your feet?” He hesitated for a masterly moment; then replied: “It is hard ... to stand up ... under the weight ... of all that I know.” But sitting down, he also lists ... leaning away from a Noam Chomsky or an Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., somehow parenthetical, as if in a hurry to write another column. A section of this Malleus Maleficarum is devoted to his body English. I am reminded of Richard Weaver’s definition of conservatism: “a paradigm of essences toward which the phenomenology of the world is in continuing approximation.”

Buckley! Think of another revolutionary pamphleteer, Tom Paine, except that Tom Paine didn’t eat Red Wing peanut butter, make jokes, or play the harpsichord. It seems to me that if the culture insists on celebrity ideologues, we are better off with a Buckley performing a Bach concerto for the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra than we are with a Lillian Hellman in Blackgama mink or an Andrew Sullivan in a Gap ad. But I am often wrong, as Buckley has patiently pointed out, for the last thirty-five years, in many letters, to none of which I’ve ever replied, being shy.

Buckley in 1958: “I don’t suppose you are at all conservative?” Me, hedging: “Not very.” Buckley: “One hundred dollars a week.” Me: “I’ll have to consult my fiancée.” Buckley: Where is she?” Me: “Radcliffe.” Buckley: “Tell her it’s The New Republic.”

And so, long before he was an exemplary stereotype, I went to work for Buckley as an editorial assistant at National Review. I ferried copy to the printer in Connecticut. I monitored the left-wing press. I wrote letters to the NR editor criticizing everything in the magazine, to prime a very dry correspondence pump. I was sent to Cuba shortly after Castro’s revolution. I went to lunch with Whittaker Chambers, which was like going to lunch with the Brothers Karamazov. I was taught, by Publisher Bill Rusher, how to eat with a fork. I was taught, by Editor Bill Buckley, how to assemble and fly a kite. I was taught, by Managing Editor Priscilla Buckley, how to assemble and fly a paragraph. To this day, the only two important matters I’m certain we agree on are that Bill’s sister, Priscilla, and his composer, Bach, are unexcelled in God’s creation.

But after a season, I went away: to California, novel-writing, and eventually The New York Times. Like so many other young writers he took off the street and published in his pages in the early NR days—Carry Wills, Joan Didion, Renata Adler, Arlene Croce—I ended up a liberal. “For a while,” Buckley wrote in Overdrive, “I thought we were running a finishing school for apostates....” As if to compensate, he finally hired George Will, and I hope he’s happy. But what about the rest of us? Why, staring at him on the other side of the barricades, don’t we bare our fangs? Where’s the Oedipal revolt, so surpassingly expressed in the Cultural Revolution of the Red Guards in China’s Guangzi province, when they cannibalized their high school principals?

To be sure, I wrote an article about National Review for a satirical magazine in 1963, a parody of Whittaker Chambers’s letter to his children in Witness. Buckley’s response? Four years later, when the Times was deciding whether to hire me, he sent them a copy of this article just to prove, as he said, that I wasn’t “right-bitten.” In Life magazine in 1971, in a critique of Firing Line, I made fun of his promiscuous analogies, invidious juxtapositions and preemptive obfuscations, in deploying words like “nugatory,” “usufruct,” “enthymematic,” “asymptotic,” “propaedeutic,” and “endogamous.” So he invited me on Firing Line. Much later on, reviewing one of his Blackford Oakes novels, I quoted a passage in which the hero ransacks a refrigerator: “There was chicken, ham, cheese, white wine. He put together a plate with slabs of each....” I said this sounded to me like a wet plate. So I was invited, not only to a Christmas party, but to Moscow and Leningrad, with the NR staff, where Keith Mano shook his fist at the Winter Palace, reminding me of what Herzen said to Bakunin: “One must open men’s eyes, not tear them out.”

In Cruising Speed, he told us: “I can understand the occasional necessity to execute people, but never to hurt their feelings....” This explains, in part, why he puts up with so many of us—Murray Kempton, Wilfrid Sheed, Allard Lowenstein—who had disappointed him with our disorderly politics and chaotic lives; and why, in turn, we cherish him no matter what he says, and he says plenty here, about John Lennon, Jesse Jackson, Jimmy Breslin, Martin Scorcese, democracy, the Koran, and ... women, whose “primary responsibility,” he says, is “the care of the child,” while men are primarily responsible “for the care of the woman.”

To speak, however, of the friend is to neglect the exemplar. You may have noticed that even his “apostates” tend to be political, noisy, and trouble-making, as if the world were a wound about which, on our bandages, in our blood, it is necessary constantly to scribble. What is the lesson? To be a serious character in your own life, in your own century. But also to send up ideas like kites, to eat some peanut butter, and to hear some music.

I have paused to quarrel, or to smile, at every other paragraph in these wind-blown pages. There are again the suspect analogies and juxtapositions, and the fancy words—“lucubrations,” “eldritch,” “fissiparous,” “dysgenically,” “eristic,” “objurgatory,” “querencia”—but a lovely essay also defending the writer’s working vocabulary, the very jazz of composition. If there are predictable enthusiasms (capital punishment, Evelyn Waugh, Chartres cathedral, Star Wars, and the Titanic) and predictable bêtes noires (abortion, Lowell Weicker, the Democratic Party, drug dealers, Dartmouth College), there are also surprises: That he went to see Mapplethorpe’s dirty pictures, although not Scorcese’s Last Temptation. That he opposes a government bailout of the failed S&Ls, would internationalize Jerusalem, has never gone to a baseball game, nor watched Oprah. That he approves of Head Start, and disapproves of the Inquisition.

Most astonishing is what he says about the continuing soap of the Windsors: “There is, to begin with, the absolutely chimerical quality of Princess Diana. If a more beautiful woman ever existed, she was never photographed.” Lauren Bacall? Lena Horne? Daw Aung San Suu Kyi? This, perhaps, explains what possessed Blackie in Saving the Queen. For remedial reading, may I suggest the Texas newspaper columnist Molly Ivins: “Dan Quayle looks exactly like Princess Di, while Mrs. Quayle looks exactly like Prince Charles. What more could any woman want?”

But this is churlish. What we have here is vintage Buckley on Nathaniel Hawthorne and Malcolm Forbes, Edmund Burke and Dan Rather, free trade and Tiananmen Square, Jack Kemp, Clarence Thomas, Meir Kahane and original sin, not to neglect his favorite composer, on whom he quotes biologist Lewis Thomas, who was asked what we should send up in a rocket to speak on our behalf to whatever alien civilizations there might be in outer space. “I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach,” said Thomas. Pause: “But that would be boasting.”

We could do worse than send some Citizen Buckley, too.