Let Us Talk of Many Things
By William F. Buckley Jr.
Prima Lifestyles, 2000.
Hardcover, 544 pages, $30.00.
Reviewed by Bill Meehan.
William F. Buckley Jr., friend of Russell Kirk, circulated The University Bookman to National Review subscribers for a number of years. On the centenary year of Buckley’s birth, the Bookman is running reviews, old and new, of Buckley’s books in memory of the great man of letters.
Not long after I had reviewed Let Us Talk of Many Things: The Collected Speeches for this journal in 2003, I asked William F. Buckley Jr. which of his books was the favorite. We were sitting in his office at National Review on the eleventh floor at 215 Lexington Avenue, a polished upgrade from the magazine’s original home two blocks away. Buckley just happened to be in the city that December morning when I was gathering material for an addendum to his bibliography. Since I did not have a game plan other than to say “hello,” speaking with him was an unexpected opportunity to pop the question. “It has to be the book of my speeches,” he answered. “It covers fifty years of my life. No other of my books does that.” Apropos of that fun fact, and this being the centennial of Buckley’s birth, I have taken a fresh look at my review to more clearly express my impression of themes unifying the collection.
Most of the audiences who flocked to hear William F. Buckley Jr. over the years most likely heard his standard address, called “Reflections on Current Contentions.” It’s a template he used successfully for decades and, in a New Yorker essay titled “Notes from the Lecture Circuit,” which is reprinted as an introduction to this collection, he explains its usefulness:
The advantages are manifest. There are always current contentions, and pundits always reflect on them—indeed, as in the troubles of Mr. Clinton, revel in them. Every weekend during the two lecture seasons (fall and spring—I do not lecture in the summer), I pull out last week’s speech and go over it line by line—search out anachronisms; insert fresh material; add or subtract a proposition; decide which contentions to analyze at a college, which at a business meeting or civic association. It makes for a busy few hours on Saturday or Sunday, but then you have in hand a speech that, as far as the audience is concerned, might have sprung full blown from your imagination that very morning.
The go-to speech, loaded with smart analysis and timely commentary, does not fit into the book, however, because Let Us Talk of Many Things talks about things that are, mostly, timeless.
These are ninety-two addresses by the prolific public intellectual who blew reveille for the popular conservative movement in America. Short descriptions provide useful and interesting background on context as well as content for each speech. Arranged chronologically by decade, the selections open with the June 1950 Class Day Oration at Yale, “Today We are Educated Men,” and close with the October 1999 lecture to the Heritage Foundation, “Preserving the Heritage.” Several entries are what Buckley calls “full-blown” speeches that deserve scholarly attention. More, the Buckley wit sprinkled here and there always dazzles, and his prose, aesthetic and rhetorical, always delights, writing as he does for the refined ear.
While Buckley is wonderfully open about much of his personal life, what we take away from these speeches is a certainty in the propositions that should quicken the hearts and minds of humans in a free society. In “We Will Bury Him,” a reasoned protest of Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in 1959, Buckley assures us that “in the West there lie, however encysted, the ultimate resources, which are moral in nature. . . . Even out of the depths of despair, we take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep we fall, for there is always hope.” In “On the Perspective of an Eighteen-Year-Old,” he convinces that “There is nothing to match the sensation of discovering one’s own powers, of feeling some of the magic excitement that generated the very idea of America, of feeling a little of the spiritual consolation that comes with the knowledge that we are not alone, that the Lord of Hosts is with us yet.” In “The Duty of the Educated Catholic,” he emphasizes that it is time “to recognize that all that we have learned in the super-sophisticated years of our intellectual maturity is of minor consequence alongside what is revealed to us in the homilies of our faith.” Moreover, in “The Aimlessness of American Education,” he explains:
If education can endow students with the powers of ethical and rational discrimination by which to discern and give their allegiance to the great certitudes of the West, we shall have a breed of men who will discharge truly the responsibilities that face them as the result of changing conditions.
Buckley unifies these concepts in “Who Cares if Homer Nods,” his favorite speech:
By documenting an imperfection in the excellent Homer, we are reminded of the comparative magnitude of our own errancy. A knowledge of individual fallibility nudges us on to accept the probability of collective fallibility, and—indulge me, please my glide pattern—our mind then turns to such safeguards as government by laws, not men; checks and balances; human rights. And one is prompted to reflect that the knowledge of human fallibility may orient us to hunger after infallibility, which surely gives rise to the religious instinct. And this instinct acknowledges what some of us insist on calling “eternal verities.”
Readers will notice that a Buckley speech is often an exercise in humility and gratitude. He frequently suggests to his audiences, particularly students, that they should be thankful for their loved ones, to whom they can direct acts of kindness. Buckley’s appreciation for his own dear friends is evident in the numerous testimonials and tributes included in the book. Buckley exhibits a remarkable flair for praising others without the exaggerated sentiment. The eulogies, in particular, are lyrical expressions of friendship. His tender remembrance of Clare Booth Luce is a fine example of his unique gift for the obituary. So, too, is the gentleness permeating his remarks about Time editor and sailing companion Richard M. Clurman, a “non-practicing Jew” in whom Buckley found “the total Christian.” In all, Buckley demonstrates what he meant when, again in “On the Perspective of an Eighteen-Year-Old,” he said that we must acknowledge “other individuals’ superiority to ourselves. . . . It gives us the vantage point whence, simultaneously, to judge our own limitations, our own potentialities, and the acutest needs of the world we live in.”
Buckley’s appearance on a campus or at a professional association meeting was a magical event. In the book’s Foreword, David Brooks writes, “For all Buckley’s contributions to conservative ideas, his most striking contribution is to the conservative personality. He made being conservative attractive and even glamorous. One suspects that more people were inspired by his presence at these events than were converted by the power of mere logic.” Buckley, however, was not a fire-and-brimstone speaker given to theatrics. Rather, there was a quiet refinement in his public speaking demeanor. Think of a distinguished professor from a bygone era giving a formal lecture to a scholarly society meeting. There was no swagger, no bravado, no joking around.
Buckley cleverly winds his way from point to point in his speeches, asking the audience “that if they exhibit the curiosity and the attentiveness to hear you out, their favors in attending will match yours in appearing; and both parties will leave the hall with a sense that neither wasted its time.” (Still, along with David Brooks, I wonder if I could have followed along.) When it came to the Q&A sessions, where he “can hold my own,” Buckley was the charming and skilled debater conversant with a deep command of the issues.
Buckley refers to the “pursuit of my apostleship” and to “passing along the Word” as a circuit rider, but this should not be construed to mean that he sermonized. Buckley knows the reality of his tour of duty: “I assume that my experiences, over the forty years I have been on the circuit, are fairly typical, though there is of course this difference: as a conservative controversialist, I could not reasonably expect to be greeted onstage as, say, Jacques Cousteau would have been.”
Buckley has a few of what he calls “off-beat” speeches, such as “The Genesis of Blackford Oakes,” where he introduces the protagonist of his espionage novels and explains the underlying premise of these Cold War thrillers: the Americans are, unambiguously, “the good guys.” But that is just one of the enjoyable features of the novels. Another, and perhaps more important, one is that Buckley fashions Oakes as a “distinctively American male.” Buckley’s central male character is “an American, with Christian American predilections; and he knows that, like the clothes he wears so casually, the ideals and even most of the practices, of his country, fit him.” Oakes is worth getting to know.
Buckley’s ride on the circuit consisted of about seventy speeches a year for a half-century, until April 11, 2000, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, before a group at the Allen County Lincoln Day dinner when he announced that he had just delivered his last. But we have this significant collection because, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s walrus, there always comes the time to talk of many things.
Bill Meehan is the 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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