Interviewed by William F. Meehan III
This interview ran in The University Bookman in 1996 (vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 25-32), when Jeffrey O. Nelson, who was the journal’s editor, expertly turned the lengthy manuscript of my 90-minute interview into a coherent, polished piece. I was a student at Middle Tennessee State University writing my dissertation on prose style in Buckley’s fiction, and my director suggested I inquire about interviewing the author. It was fitting that Buckley was the Bookman’s first interview, as he helped Russell Kirk found this journal in 1960.
Buckley as a novelist is a topic still given little attention by scholars, and reviewers have focused more on the author instead of the work. My hope now is that readers unfamiliar with his Cold War spy fiction and the CIA’s Blackford Oakes will take away an insight or two about Buckley the novelist. Such as? His philosophy of language, his rituals as an author, how he creates a character’s name, and the OSS—which is not about the CIA’s parent organization.
During our meeting at Buckley’s Manhattan office on East 35th Street, I inquired about plans for another spy novel. “No,” Buckley said.“The Cold War is over.” But nine years later he published Last Call for Blackford Oakes, taking Oakes back into deep cover in Moscow during Reagan’s second term. — WFM, April 2025.
I remember when I discovered that among his many talents, William F. Buckley Jr. was a novelist. Browsing the new books area of the University of Delaware library late one afternoon, I noticed Buckley’s The Story of Henri Tod, his fourth novel. I randomly selected a page and began to read. I was hooked.
On this page, Buckley’s humor and wit were on full display. Blackford Oakes—the hero of Buckley’s novels—is describing himself in a note to a lady he meets on a train headed to Vienna in the hope she will dine with him that evening. “I am the love child of the Prince of Wales and Tallulah Bankhead,” he writes. “I was born in 1925, and was kept hidden away on an Aegean island. There I learned to spear wild hogs, fight bulls, track snow leopards, and walk over burning coals. During the summers, my father sent the faculty of Eton to teach me Greek and Latin. . . .”
Buckley’s leading man is the quintessential “Cold Warrior.” He remarked to an audience at the Bohemian Club after completing his sixth novel, See You Later Alligator, that his intent was to show that the CIA “seeks to advance the honorable alternative in the great struggle for the world.” He makes it unmistakably clear that the Americans are the good guys.
I met with Mr. Buckley in his office at National Review late last year to talk about his nearly twenty years as a novelist.
What is the function of the novelist in society?
WFB: The function of the novelist is to depict reality and excite the imagination.
Will you write another Blackford Oakes novel?
WFB: No. The Cold War’s over.
Did the Blackford Oakes novels require the approval of the CIA since you were an employee?
WFB: No. It’s amusing you ask that because when I lectured at the CIA seven or eight years ago, maybe a bit more than that, the director of the CIA teased me that theoretically I should have had approval.
What is Blackford’s most distinguishing feature of character?
WFB: I didn’t intend for any particular one to stand out except his actual loyalty to the United States and the Western cause.
Blackford reads National Review, and he has Up from Liberalism in one of the early books, even mentions your name in several others . . .
WFB: That’s my little cameo.
. . . so in what ways does Blackford exhibit libertarian or conservative values?
WFB: Libertarian only in the sense that he’s generally anti-statist; he reads National Review. He is conservative in the sense that he thinks that the values of the West are worth a nuclear deterrent, and devotes his life to corollary propositions. So, that’s pretty conservative. But it is interesting, he was very attached to Kennedy, personally attached in a couple of those books, and he was absolutely dumbfounded when he couldn’t rescue him from the assassin. So he had a personal attachment to Kennedy. But I can’t remember that in any of the books I had him simply expatiate in general on any political policies. These aren’t political books in the sense that National Review is a political magazine. He has no pine on socialized Medicare of anything.
Is that because spies are supposed to be apolitical?
WFB: Spies traditionally work for whichever government is in power, so in that sense, they are apolitical. But you’re not required to be apolitical. They can be very fervent socialists or very fervent anti-statists, and it wouldn’t theoretically affect their power to exercise their calling.
How did you prepare to write a Blackford Oakes novel?
WFB: What happens is that two or three weeks before going on my annual retreat to Switzerland, I would decide on what the mise-en-scéne would be. I might decide, for instance, it’s going to be [a] Castro novel, and it’s going to feature the Bay of Pigs or whatever. Then I’d get my people here to line me up with two or three books on the subject and take them with me to Switzerland, and then start in.
What are the advantages to writing in Switzerland?
WFB: The advantages are that people don’t call you up every five minutes, which happens here. And there’s some allocation of time. I do my administrative work in the morning, and my column. Then have lunch and go skiing. Then I start writing around 4:15 or 4:30 and write till about 7:15 or 7:30, and do that every single day until the book is finished.
Do you set a time frame to finish the novel?
WFB: Yeah. It’s taken as few as four and as many as six and a half weeks.
Which months of the year do you go there to write a novel?
WFB: February and March.
What about your immediate environment in which you do your writing? What’s around you? Do you look over a lake, a ski slope?
WFB: For twenty-seven years we rented a chateau that belongs to a friend. It’s an enormous twelfth-century place that started out as a monastery. It had a very large room, which had been a children’s playroom with a ping-pong table at one end. And it looks out into the base of a mountain in Gstaad, Switzerland. That’s where I wrote most of my books. There was a fire at one point, in 1973. So for two years, we had to rent individual chalets. The owners sold part of the chateau, so we now have a chalet, up high, that looks over the same mountain next to which I used to be.
When you’re writing your fiction, are there any rituals you follow? Do you listen to music, drink coffee?
WFB: My rituals are that I start around 4:30 after I take my bath and my shower. I work pretty regularly. Sometimes I hear the fax machine working and say, ‘Should I get up and see if it’s urgent?’ Always at exactly seven o’clock, our cook brings me a Kier, which is white wine with a little touch of crème de cassis. I take out one of my little cigars, and I have the most glorious feeling of satisfaction. Sometimes, I might just finish a few paragraphs. But three years ago, I gave up booze at Lent, and Lent, of course, always happens halfway through my novels. And so therefore I had to satisfy myself with grapefruit juice and my cigars. Last year I gave up cigars. So I had to satisfy myself, for Lent I mean, just with my Kier. I might make a deal with God to let my own private Lent begin after the novel. It’s really a wonderful combination. A little Dutch cigar and Kier. I recommend it.
So, regardless of how many words you’ve written or how many pages you stop around seven o’clock?
WFB: 7:00 or 7:15. But I also see how many words I’ve done. It’s got to be 1,500 average.
What do you enjoy most about being a novelist?
WFB: It’s fun to spin a bit of yarn. My books are very meticulously plotted. There’s no sloppiness in the plot. I think I wrote somewhere that when I accepted the commission to write a novel, I bought a book called How to Write a Novel. The only thing I remember about the book is the reader expects only one coincidence, resents more than one. I’ve sort of been guided by that. So there’s always a coincidence in the book, but no more than one coincidence. Anyway, if you bring back a manuscript and people write ‘Gee, that was neat,’ then that gives you a nice feeling.
How do you decide on a character’s name?
WFB: It’s completely improvised, except the Russian names. I’m not good at making up Russian names. So what I got was the index to the Gulag Archipelago, which has fifteen hundred Russian names. I tend to look for names that are slightly euphonious.
How about the title of a novel? How do you decide on that, and when do you normally decide on a title?
WFB: Well, sometimes I know right away. I remember deciding before writing it that I would call a particular book See You Later Alligator, which made a lot of sense to me, especially in the Spanish version of it, Hasta Luego Camián. This story is amusing. I went to a little party that Andy Warhol gave for about twenty people. I didn’t catch the name of the woman on my left, so she turned to me and she said, ‘What are you working on?’ Maybe I’ve written this, I forget. People who ask me that question—I interpret, by the look on their face, whether they want the thirty-second answer, the one-minute answer, or the two-minute answer. This was a two-minute lady, so I gave her the whole works. She said, ‘That’s fascinating. What are you calling it?’ I said, ‘That’s a real problem, because the publisher said if I don’t give it a name by noon tomorrow, they’re going to call it whatever they feel like. She said, ‘Why don’t you call it Stained Glass?’ Weeks later I found out she was Ruth Ford, the actress. So she named that book. Stained Glass. And Stained Glass is a great title for it. It’s a play on words. Stained Glass has two meanings. The word macula is the Latin for sin and stain. It’s nice to have a title with double entendre. And most of mine do.
Do you have a philosophy of language, and if you do, how does that affect your fiction?
WFB: The only philosophy of language that I have is that I won’t, except in very exceptional circumstances, suppress an unusual word if the word flashes to my mind as exactly appropriate. [James Jackson] Kilpatrick will suppress them. If he feels eighty percent of the people who read this don’t know what that word means, he won’t put it in. I will put it in.
Why, because you think we should go look it up?
WFB: Well, the way I rationalize it is that word exists because there was what the economists would call a ‘felt need’ for it, i.e., no other word around did what this particular word does. Therefore, the eventuation of that word enriched the choices you have. So, why do you want to be a party to diminishing the choices that you have, when you’re dealing with a language which you worship for its beauty? Ronald Knox noted that the translator of the King James Bible subsumed seven different Greek words defining different shades of an ethical perception in the word ‘righteous’ in the King James version. As a result, he said ethical exploration was set back by generations because those words had to be rediscovered. I thought it was a fascinating point. So, if you suppress a particular word, let’s say, ‘velleity’—something you desire, but not ardently—if you suppress that word, you diminish the choices by which people can express and distinguish between something that absolutely want and something they would like in the sense they would like an extra sweater. I don’t want to be a party to that.
In your essay, “In Defense of Unusual Words and Foreign Phrases,” you mentioned that you have about a thousand of these kinds of words and phrases as part of your working vocabulary.
WFB: I hadn’t counted them, but subsequently I did. You know why, because my nephew came up with the idea of publishing a calendar of unusual words. The very bright idea he had was to quote my actual use of it. The question was, ‘How many years could I go?’ The answer is three. After three, there weren’t enough unusual words, so they started reprinting them in different formats. Therefore, you’re talking about a thousand words that I routinely use, or have used, which would be unusual enough to engage the attention of people who want to learn. The average buyer of one of these calendars would probably know two-thirds of them, and a third he wouldn’t know. I once, having read the latest Updike book, underlined the words I didn’t know. And at our next editorial meeting, I went around my company of learned associates. Of the twenty-six words I underlined, twenty-four of them were known to somebody. But probably if they had read it, they would have found twenty-six words of which I knew two-thirds. Everybody has a private stock of words, which for some reason stay to the memory, and it’s a different stock of words. The person who uses more unusual words than any human being, alive or dead, is Patrick O’Brian—the guy who writes sailing books. He has the world’s most extensive vocabulary.
What do you think your strengths as a novelist are?
WFB: A clean plot, fast movement, and an eye for humor. There is a leanness in my novels, which some people say is characteristic of my writing when I write novels, i.e., there’s not a lot of time spent describing exteriorities, which some people do beautifully.
How do you place yourself in the tradition of espionage literature or spy novels? Where do you see yourself fitting in there? And how do your novels differ from the others?
WFB: They are not like anybody else’s. Having said that, I’m not quite sure how I would actually distinguish them. They’re much better written than eighty, ninety percent. I’m not as good a writer, in my judgment, as Le Carré. I have certain strengths he doesn’t have, among them brevity. And then, of course, there’s the fact that I’m unambiguous when the time comes to show who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and he’s very ambiguous. But beyond that, I don’t know, I don’t read many of those others. I probably haven’t read more than ten in my life.
Ten spy novels?
WFB: Yeah. I’ve read four or five Bond ones, up until he got surrealistic. Mainly the early Bond, which I enjoyed, but the later Bond got out of this world, sort of Supermanish.
What role does your Catholicism play in your fiction?
WFB: I feel that Catholicism affects human character and that human character affects fiction. In my case—well, in Brothers No More—I put up front a situation in which Caroline asks a priest what she ought to do under certain circumstances. So there’s a little bit of Catholic theology built into that. I think that’s beyond a sort of implicit recognition that some things are right and some things are wrong to do.
Some people might object to the philandering of Blackford. Why do you incorporate that element into your novels?
WFB: Well, in my judgment, when you write a novel post about 1955, there’s got to be a sexual element. I remember one time having dinner with Nabokov in Switzerland, which was a yearly event. I said, ‘You look very pleased with yourself today, Vadim.’ He said, ‘I am, I have finished my OSS.’ ‘What’s OSS?’ ‘Obligatory Sex Scene.’ The people expect it because sex surrounds us more vividly than would have been the case fifty years ago. You don’t go to a movie as a rule without having some sexual element. Most books have a sexual element. There are sex cases in all the newspapers, so it becomes a conventional daily event in the imaginary life. A book that doesn’t have it is a book about which people, not even knowing what it is, tend to feel something’s missing. I recognized this even starting in, and have those two scenes in Saving the Queen, one involving the brother and the other the Queen herself.
Do you have a favorite among the ten novels?
WFB: I think probably Saving the Queen is the most fun. Maybe because it’s my first, maybe because the idea of seducing the Queen is kind of fun—actually, he was seduced. She did the seducing. I guess I’m the proudest of that book. Somebody did a screenplay on Saving the Queen and had this rather novel change, which was okay by me. They made her unmarried, so nobody was committing adultery. And I thought it loses a couple of nice scenes with her stuffy husband, but you can do away with that and have a fairy queen, as in Elizabeth I.
What’s become of the screenplay for Saving the Queen?
WFB: At one point, CBS was interested in the possibility of running a Blackford Oakes movie once a month. All the books, and maybe more plots. They got close enough to get me to Hollywood to talk with them, but then they turned it down. So it stalled. My son said, ‘Well, they didn’t discover Vietnam in the movies for about ten years.’ Then he said to me, ‘You own the Cold War. When the Cold War is rediscovered, Blackford Oakes will be all over the place.’ I hope he’s right.
My experience is that when I mention you as a novelist to my liberal English professors, they automatically dismiss you because of who you are. They know you as the National Review guy.
WFB: That’s right, and they would not read my books.
Right. Is there anything you could say to those kinds of professors who dismiss your novels so readily?
WFB: I could say, ‘Nabokov thinks they’re good.’ Nabokov died just before Stained Glass came out (which won an American Book Award). So he only read Saving the Queen. But he was laudatory about it. And he was a fussy man.
William F. Meehan III is editor of William F. Buckley Jr.: A Bibliography, Conversations with William F. Buckley Jr., and Getting About: Travel Writings of William F. Buckley Jr.
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