By Bill Meehan.
As his centennial year comes to a close, I’d like to advocate for a useful way to look back on the life and work of William F. Buckley Jr. Known mostly for his television show Firing Line and his journal of opinion National Review, the American public intellectual might best be appreciated as a literary figure. Producing about 350,000 words for publication yearly at the peak of his career, Buckley was never at a loss for what to say or how to say it. He wrote over 7,000 columns, articles, reviews, introductions, forewords, obituaries, and more, in addition to publishing fifty-seven books, including twenty novels.
One year after graduating from Yale, and while teaching Spanish at the Ivy League school, Buckley in 1951 entered the scene with a flourish as the author of God and Man at Yale, a critique of his alma mater’s socialist and secular curriculum. The book, published by Regnery and still in print, caused a stir among the highbrow crowd whose ad hominem attacks would portend the hullabaloo over Cruising Speed: A Documentary, Buckley’s 1971 colorful description of a week in his life.
After a brief undercover assignment with the C.I.A. and an editorial position at The Freeman, Buckley followed his assessment of the New Haven Ivy League college, with fifteen nonfiction books, the first, in 1954, an examination of McCarthyism co-written with his Yale debating partner and brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr. The following three books—his experience running for mayor of New York City, his year as a delegate to the United Nations, and a documentary of a week in his life—reveal a consistent theme in Buckley’s oeuvre: the entertaining first-person narrative. Up From Liberalism in 1959 and Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century in 1970 remain classics on the conservative intellectual bookshelf.
Eight books comprise collections of articles written for National Review and other periodicals that appeared about every five years, from The Jeweler’s Eye in 1968 up to 1993, when Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist arrived in bookstores. Among the other titles during this time was a compilation of the letters he received from Whittaker Chambers, Odyssey of Friend—a testament to the belief that the former Communist spy was one of the best writers on the National Review masthead.
It wasn’t until 1976, at the age of fifty, that Buckley added novelist to his literary repertoire and attained instant acclaim on the fiction bestseller list with Saving the Queen. The success was due, in part, to the perspective he offered readers of fiction depicting the wilderness of mirrors. Buckley set out in the first of what would be eleven spy novels to “celebrate the Cold War” by filling a void he perceived in American literature and by distinguishing himself from other novelists in the genre. Explains Buckley:
I was determined to avoid one thing and that was the kind of ambiguity for which Graham Greene and to a certain extent Le Carré became famous. There you will find that the agent of the West is, in the first place, almost necessarily unappealing physically. Then, at some dramatic moment there is the conversation or the moment of reflection in which the reader is asked to contemplate the difficulty in asserting that there is a qualitative difference between Them and Us. This I wanted to avoid.
In other words, he knowingly committed literary iconoclasm by “writ[ing] a book in which the good guys and the bad guys were actually distinguishable from one another” and by “resolv[ing] that the good guys would be—the Americans.”
Buckley also leaves no doubt in his debut novel that leading man Blackford Oakes differed from the conventional spy character. A Yale graduate in engineering with “a worldliness that is neither bookish or … anti-intellectual,” Buckley explains in “The Genesis of Blackford Oakes,” Blackford also is “physically handsome,” indeed “startling” good-looking. But there was more to Oakes. “I fancy [Oakes],” Buckley writes, “is distinctively American, and the first feature of the distinctively American male is, I think, spontaneity—a kind of freshness born of curiosity and enterprise and native wit.”
These characteristics are illustrated by the omniscient narrator in Saving the Queen, the first of eleven Cold War spy novels, when England’s Queen Caroline meets Oakes, whose CIA cover was a civil engineer researching British bridge construction, at a dinner she is hosting at Windsor Castle: “The Queen smiled and suddenly her eyes deglazed and she actually looked at the person she was addressing. She found herself most agreeably surprised by a young man of poise, with extraordinarily attractive features, blue eyes, dark blond hair, and an ever-so-slightly mischievous expression.”
It is clear that she pursued Oakes, who a few days later penetrated more than the royal chambers. “There is,” said Buckley in “The Genesis of Blackford Oakes,” “something distinctively, wonderfully American, it struck me, about bedding down a British Queen: a kind of arrant but lovable presumption. But always on the understanding that it is done decorously, and there is no aftertaste of the gigolo in the encounter.” Sales of the book in England were poor, but Saving the Queen was a sensation everywhere else, as was Oakes: “I made Blackford Oakes such a shining perfection to irritate, infuriate the critics. And I scored!”
Whenever the topic of Blackford Oakes arises when I am in gatherings where Buckley is better known as a commentator, someone usually wants to know if Oakes shares his creator’s political leanings. I brought this up with Buckley in my 1996 interview with him:
[Oakes is] libertarian only in the sense that he’s generally antistatist; he reads National Review. He is conservative in the sense that he thinks the values of the West are worth a nuclear deterrent, and devotes his life to corollary propositions . . . . 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.
Perhaps that’s a reason the novels were a hit with readers.
The Blackford Oakes Novels place Buckley into a category with authors better known for their fiction. According to Karen and Barbara Hinckley, in their 1988 American Best Sellers: A Reader’s Guide to Popular Fiction, Buckley, le Carre, Ludlum, and MacInnes “account for more than one-half of the top-selling spy novels.” The Hinckley sisters capture the gist of Buckley’s success as a spy novelist: “Readers of a William Buckley spy novel already know CIA agent Blackford Oakes. They know what to expect from the author’s wit and can look forward to another imaginary conversation between presidents, foreign-policy advisors, and other famous people. The predictability is deliberate in these cases and a large part of the books’ appeal.” Moreover, in a review of Last Call for Blackford Oakes, the eleventh and final in the series, one critic suggests that “Buckley’s career as a fiction writer . . . is one of the most delightful literary flukes in modern publishing history.”
Buckley was not one to shy away from an intellectual challenge, as he demonstrated when he took up writing novels, so he accepted the invitation to adapt for stage performance at the Louisville Actors Theatre his second novel, Stained Glass, which had won the American Book Award for Best Mystery. It became a rewarding experience for the author. “By the time I sat down with the script a couple of months later to look at it again and rewrite it,” Buckley says, “I found I had achieved a perspective that I didn’t have the very first night I started in . . . So it’s fair to say the missing perspective began to crystallize—the idea of communicating with an audience exclusively through spoken words, without the reliance of non-spoken words which all novelists rely on very heavily.”
While Buckley is known for the spy novels, he departed from the genre in Brothers No More, while later creating a children’s novella, The Temptation of Wilfred Malachey in 1985, and fictional accounts of the familiar figures James J. Angleton in Spytime, Elvis Presley in Elvis in the Morning, Joe McCarthy in The Redhunter, and Ayn Rand in Getting It Right. When asked how he chose Presley as the subject for a novel, Buckley explains, “Well, I didn’t set out to write about Elvis Presley. My goal was to chronicle a young American who goes left. In doing so, I wandered into the late ’50s—and Elvis Presley is everywhere. He was an enormous cultural presence.” Similarly, Buckley conveys in an interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez, the faithful editor at National Review, that he thought up Getting It Right, which describes the early days of the libertarian and conservative movements, “Because I wanted to write a story about politics, sex, and legendary American figures.”
Buckley, whose third language is English after Spanish and French, was known for what Joseph Rago, the late opinion editor at The Wall Street Journal, calls his “O.E.D. vocabulary.” If anything annoyed the critics and readers more, it was Buckley’s “big” words. Buckley elaborated on the subject that generated so much ridicule, when I asked him in my 1996 interview if he has a philosophy of language:
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. . . The way I rationalize it is that the 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 enriches the choices that you have.
Each of us, Buckley maintains, has a distinctive working vocabulary. His just happened to contain around 1,000 unusual words, which he listed in The Lexicon in 1998. Buckley is quick to point out, however, that he once passed around at a National Review editorial meeting twenty words from John Updike’s The Coup whose meaning he did not know, while his five colleagues at the table were familiar with all of them.
Buckley furthers this essential point in “Words,” also published in 1996, when he argues that we “should be more respectful and patient with those who exercise lovingly the wonderful opportunities of the language.” He describes going to hear Thelonious Monk in a New York club and hearing some “bizarre chords,” but that it would never have occurred to him to approach Monk and say, “I’m not familiar with that chord you just played. So cut it out please.”
Buckley playfully incorporates asides into the novels through dialogue or the omniscient narrator. Such as the following:
“No no, Anthony. It’s important to size this guy up. . . . He would rather lose the next election than split an infinitive.”
— A Very Private Plot
“I can’t see through Adlai. Nor can most Democrats,” he chortled. “Hey, you know what I just committed?” he said, twisting the wheel. . . .
“What?” she shouted, to overcome the motor noise.
“I said, ‘Do you know what I just committed in that sentence,’ ‘cause if you don’t, I’ll report you to your English teachers, and you won’t get your degree!”
“ . . . you mean the see-through-Adlai bit? You ‘committed,’ as you put it, a zeugma.
— Stained Glass
“Now who’re you picking on?”
“Whom am I picking on.”
“I don’t use the objective whom except after a preposition.”
— Brothers No More
In which case they’d have performed the hara-kiri on you!
Or is hara-kiri a transitive verb? . . . . Can someone perform hara-kiri on someone else? Surely not; it must be a . . . reflexive verb? Or is it a verb at all? A simple noun, surely.
— Who’s on First
When it comes to Buckley’s prose fiction style, the critics generally pan it in ways that approach the ad hominem. For example:
- Newgate Callendar in his review of Who’s on First says, “Buckley’s writing at times can be infuriatingly stilted and artificial.”
- David Haward Bain in his review of Tucker’s Last Stand refers to “passages of leaden prose.”
- Josh Rubins, reviewing A Very Private Plot, recognizes “imperious Buckleyese.”
- Reviewing Saving the Queen, the Library Journal states, “The style is curiously less mandarin than ladylike, with occasional fancy touches.”
- Reviewing Stained Glass—the most critically acclaimed of Buckley’s novels, winning an American Book Award for Best Mystery—the Library Journal believes “his style is amusingly convoluted.”
- In his review of Who’s on First, Peter Stoler believes that the novel “weaves a story only slightly less convoluted than its prose style.”
- In its review of The Story of Henri Tod, Publishers Weekly writes about Buckley’s “gymnastic locutions.”
- In his review of Brothers No More, Joe Queenan refers just to “bad writing.”
- In his favorable review of A Very Private Plot, however, D. Keith Mano suggests,
[Buckley] is a better fiction writer now by leagues than he was in 1976, when Saving the Queen took off. New directness and clarity jumpstart his prose. . . . He is fully a novelist. . . .This prose can counterpunch: unrelenting, resonant, and thoroughly responsive to its subject matter. . . . Mr. Buckley can be indicted as a serious prose stylist. . . . The discipline of fiction . . . has sanitized his prose style. Syntax is more economical. The vocabulary has become less . . . Smithsonian . . . . This is a different writer.
Mano’s remarks aside, the jabs are likely the reason Buckley once said that he should have written the novels under another name. While the criticisms obtain from unreliable impressions, one study applying a linguistic methodology that measures prose style complexity demonstrated otherwise: Buckley’s fiction is comparable in style to Frank Norris’s McTeague, Ellery Queen’s A Fine and Private Place, Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, James Joyce’s A Painful Case, John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover. It is not nearly as complex in style as Graham Greene’s The Basement Room, William Faulkner’s Light in August, Thoreau’s Walden, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Besides the uncommon word, another notable aspect of Buckley’s literary output is the use of foreign words and phrases, which also bothers his critics and readers. “It’s an old complaint, the use of foreign words,” Buckley writes in response to a letter from a National Review subscriber in 1988, later adding that “delicately used, they do bring little piquancies and with them—well, aperçus, which, because they are extra-idiomatic, give you a fresh view of the subject. As if, in a gallery, you could rise—or descend—ten feet, and look at the picture from that fresh perspective.” What is more, he believed foreign words have a “special incantatory sound, suggesting a special, sometimes extra-rational meaning—an abracadabra-special magical authority.”
And therein might be the key to his language. Buckley composes for a refined ear, so the prose is a delightful blend of rhetorical elegance, euphonic vocabulary, idiomatic phrasing, and grammatical solecisms, usually facilitated by an expertise with the comma. “Language is an aesthetic as well as an analytic tool,” he points out, “and to slur language is as painful to the well-tempered ear as to slur music.” In other words, Buckley maintains that “There are kind and less kind ways of treating the ear.”
For all the prose he generated, Buckley did not enjoy writing. He acknowledges his unease on those mornings he awoke knowing he had to produce an article, but he nevertheless turned anxiety into motivation. “If your living depends on writing a piece of journalism every day, and you find writing painful work,” he comments in The Paris Review’s 1996 “The Art of Fiction” interview with Sam Vaughan, “you’re obviously much better off developing the facility to execute it in an hour rather than ten.” Buckley further relates the story of learning out of necessity, at the age of fifteen, to touch type. He describes his penmanship as “sort of malformed,” the reading of which prompted his father to send a typewriter along with the message never again to send home a handwritten letter.
A few years later as chairman of the Yale Daily News, Buckley was still writing by hand a first draft of his articles before typing a second, but by the time he turned “twenty-three it wouldn’t occur to [him] to write anything by hand.” Indeed, Buckley was famous for his speedwriting, known for completing a column in twenty minutes. “I get pleasure out of having written,” he admits to Bookviews in 1978. And to help him complete the task as quickly as possible, Buckley exploited technology for its practicality. “It’s sheer sloth,” he shared in 1994 with Peter Robinson for Forbes ASAP. “If a computer can save me 10 minutes spent on research, so that I can do an editorial exercise in 20 minutes instead of half an hour, then I’m simply jubilant, I am excited to see technology happening. But my own interest is quite utilitarian.” He embraced WordStar in 1981 and, with Quarterdeck’s DesqView instead of Windows, depended on this software the rest of his career, much to the frustration of his staff.
When it came to getting about by train, plane, or boat, few could keep pace with William F. Buckley Jr. Moreover, when it came to describing his travels, few rivaled him. Buckley was a master storyteller who skillfully balanced the devices of fiction with the elements of reporting to create entertaining travel pieces suffused with exuberance and authority. With a flair for literary journalism and passion for fun, the notable jet-setter whose travel writings, published in every major magazine, broaden the scope and deepen the significance of his oeuvre, while perpetuating his legacy in this centenary year of his birth.
Buckley’s travel writings fall into two categories: narratives and commentary. The narratives delight, holding a reader’s attention with fast-paced plots similar to one of Buckley’s best-selling Blackford Oakes spy novels. Typical of the autobiographical nature of travel writing, Buckley is an active participant in the action with a talent for writing himself into the story but not dominating it, all while arranging a mise-en-scène that heightens the lively atmosphere. On the other hand, the commentary, usually one of his thousands of syndicated columns, illustrates Buckley’s witty reviews mainly of the airline and railroad industries or of travel in general about something “that boils the blood of free men.”
The mystique of the sea is a prominent theme in Buckley’s travel writings. He published more articles for periodicals devoted to sailing and yachting than for any other category, and two of his four sailing books registered his best sales. In addition, the longest section of his memoir, Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography, pertains to sailing, a sport he took up at the age of thirteen. Buckley competed in ocean races early in his career, but he preferred recreational cruising, when he insists on BWT, or Buckley Watch Time, which means setting watches one hour ahead so that “cocktail hour comes one hour sooner” and “you get an extra hour of sleep before the sunlight hits you in the eye.”
Life at the helm awakens in Buckley an appreciation for nature, almost poetic in its sentiment, that’s not seen in his other work. It’s no wonder his four sailing books secured for him a faithful fan base beyond his magazine National Review, syndicated column On the Right, and television show Firing Line who were drawn to the leitmotif unifying his favorite topic:
When you are in a harbor, there may be four congenial people around the table, eating and drinking and conversing, listening to music and smoking cigars, the wind and the hail and the temperature outside faced up to and faced down. Here, in your secure little anchorage, is a compound of life’s social pleasures in the womb of nature.
Sailing, to be sure, was a time for Buckley to celebrate the gift of friendship.
Similarly, skiing is a toast to friendship. When Buckley “discovered that skiing was a halfway station between earth and heaven,” he headed, in 1961, to Alta, Utah and, starting in 1978, joined economist Milton Friedman and entrepreneur Lawry Chickering there every January for seventeen years. Buckley compared the “many years of total immersion” over a few days “with night watches on a sailing boat: The intimacy is of the kind that generates true pleasure in one another’s company.” At least once during their vacation, “We complimented ourselves on having found Alta, and the Alta Lodge and, to be frank, ourselves, which is how friendship works.”
Five years after triple majoring with honors at Yale, Buckley in 1955 founded the fortnightly National Review. From that moment on, he seemed never to stop working until he passed away, at home sitting at the computer, in February 2008. He worked at such a remarkable pace because he feared boredom, a trait to which he attributes his fast-moving plots. He shed some light on this characteristic when he appeared on Charlie Rose in 1993.
Rose: How about writing for you, writing novels? I mean, it always amazed me that you were able to create Oakes and be successful at it. What does that say about—does it say that you, a former CIA operative, just had a capacity to tell a story and that’s what made you successful as a spy novelist?
Buckley: Well, I suppose it probably has to do also with an individual threshold of boredom. I get bored very easily.
Rose: So you want to move the pages along for your own—
Buckley: That’s right. So you’re sitting there clacking away, and some people—that lovely Southern lady can write about the wisteria for seven pages …
Rose: Eudora Welty?
Buckley: Yes, and I love her for it, but I can’t do that. I don’t have those skills. So therefore, I’ve got to have action and words.
Buckley shifted from cruising speed to overdrive by organizing his life around deadlines, which he found liberating. “The people I pity,” he states, “are not the people who have deadlines, they’re the people who don’t have deadlines.” Adhering to scheduled timelines allowed Buckley to host for thirty-three years the television show Firing Line, while for four decades to deliver across the country about seventy lectures a year, and write a column for over forty years. The discipline also came in handy when he ventured into writing novels. Instead of abandoning any of his other obligations, Buckley simply arranged his calendar. He set aside February and March, in Switzerland, where he wrote 1,500 words a day from about 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., after devoting the morning to administrative business and the early afternoon to skiing, and before taking part in social engagements usually coordinated by his wife, Pat.
Buckley’s process of revising a manuscript would stretch into the summer. When he returned to New York from Switzerland, he distributed copies of the manuscript to a small unofficial group of trusted readers, including his son Christopher, the accomplished author, and Sam Vaughan, the primary editor of Buckley’s novels and the man who encouraged Buckley to write what became Saving the Queen. In late June or July, he would spread the returned manuscripts out on his desk and make his way page by page through each one, selecting or rejecting suggestions, then handing the manuscript to Tony Savage for retyping. Buckley’s novels, to be sure, never needed “organic rearrangement.” According to Vaughan, “He cuts his own stuff with the joy of a surgeon.”
In his eulogy at the funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City on April 4, 2008, Christopher Buckley mentioned that his father’s papers deposited at Yale’s Sterling Library Archives measure 550 linear feet which, he emphasized, are almost two football fields in length. The enormous trove awaits researchers desiring to examine the life and work of a prolific literary figure.
Tomorrow would be William F. Buckley’s 100th birthday. I plan to honor him with a Kir, the aperitif he enjoyed after completing the daily word count while in Switzerland.
Bill Meehan is editor of Getting About: Travel Writings of William F. Buckley Jr., Conversations with William F. Buckley, and William F. Buckley Jr.: A Bibliography. This essay is a compilation of his work over twenty-five years.
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