The New Criterion

Perhaps the only realistic element in the persona of Blackford Oakes, the protagonist of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s spy novels, is that he’s a Yalie. So far as I am aware, even James Bond did not manage to bed the Queen. As for the rest—startlingly handsome, a gentleman’s sense of gallantry, an eminently likeable personality, a temperament forged by a sound, Judeo-Christian outlook and old-fashioned patriotism—well, the odds of finding them in one man, much less a man whom the CIA might in fact hire, must incline to the galactically improbable.

Except when set against the life of Blackie’s progenitor. Now closing in on his eightieth birthday, Bill Buckley was born to an oilman expelled from Mexico for his counterrevolutionary sympathies, was packed off to a British boarding school on the eve of World War II, flew planes on the side at Yale, was derided as a “fascist” for writing a book about those years shortly after he graduated, founded what would become one of the twentieth century’s most influential journals of opinion before he turned thirty, ran for Mayor of New York, saw a friend who embodied all the ideals of National Review elected President and win the Cold War, all the while attracting additional notoriety for equally public roles as sailor, musician, and TV talk-show host. If Ian Fleming had ever proposed such a fabulous character he would have been laughed out of every publishing house in America.

In Miles Gone By, Bill now offers up the Authorized Version of this life.[1] Strictly speaking, it is not an autobiography at all, but a collection of previously published material “in the nature of a narrative survey” of his life. The official line is that any autobiography would in effect be a matter of paraphrasing material that has come before.

Though I would have enjoyed a more orthodox memoir—one that not only recounted the course of his life but also weighed earlier judgments and actions on a scale of mature reflection—Miles Gone By affords its own advantages. Chief among these is that the material appears more or less as it appeared when he wrote it, to wit, what he thought when he thought it, and not—as with most memoirs—filtering it through what he might prefer to say today.

My personal experience with Bill was limited but telling. In the three years I was on his payroll manning NR’s Washington bureau, I don’t recall Bill’s having once materialized in our offices there. This rather belies what I usually find to be the public image of a political junkie. But Bill’s political temperament inclined more to Cincinnatus than Caesar—especially if one imagines Cincinnatus with a sailboat instead of a plow.

There remain those, some of them Bill’s comrades in arms, who find this hard to reconcile: the sailor who escapes it all with the man who helped give America Ronald Reagan (when I was there, the magazine had matchbooks printed with a picture of President Reagan reading NR under the caption: “I got my job through National Review”). The concern seems to be that enjoying oneself so thoroughly, at a time when So Many Serious Issues Still Threaten The Republic, violates some precept. But that is only true when measured against the nasty calculus of a utilitarian age that forgets what it means to be human. Miles Gone By is a bracing reminder of an essential conservative principle: that the state exists so that we might have private lives, not vice versa.

Consequently, we are presented with a work that only indirectly wades into Buckley’s politics or philosophy. The most overt manifestations come in his chapter on his 1951 book God and Man at Yale, where he recounts “the heated reaction to a book that professes concurrently a concern over the ascendancy of religious skepticism and political statism.” But the impassioned back and forth laid out in that chapter (which illuminates his subsequent decision to found National Review) is the exception rather than the rule. This is a work whose dominant tone is an affection that warms each page: affection for his mother and father, for his friends and colleagues, for his faith and his country, for all that made this life possible.

Let me give an example. In the second chapter Bill speaks of being sent by his father to St. John’s, Beaumont outside London in 1938. It begins with one of those curious happenstances of biography: As Master Buckley was being transported to his new school, his father commanded the driver to pop by the airport—where the Buckley family watched Neville Chamberlain descend from the airplane that had brought him from Munich to announce he’d brought “peace in our time.”

Now, in the best of times one approaches reminiscences about life at a British boarding school—much less one run by Catholic priests—with some trepidation. Leaving aside the standard snickerings over buggery, such memoirs typically include too the standard set pieces about bullying followed by the final settling of scores. It is just here where Miles Gone By is different.

It’s not that St. John’s is some sepia-toned, prewar idyll. To the contrary, Bill makes palpable the “awful homesickness” of a young Buckley “pressing the collar of [his] pajamas” against his mouth lest the others hear him crying out of loneliness. But what bursts through are the occasions of kindliness, and in those places where the emphasis is on wrongs done, they deal with those that a callow young American inflicted on his masters.

In one episode, he accidentally tips over Father Manning’s tin of pipe tobacco. A second later the “majestic” Father Manning was on his hands and knees of the study trying to rescue each little grain of tobacco. “That is my month’s allowance, Billy,” Father Manning tells him. “I cannot afford to let any go unsmoked.” Buckley recalls finding this extraordinary—“that this … seer should have less than all the tobacco he wanted.” Further enquiries about what he might do to alleviate the hardship reveal that Father Manning’s vows extended to precluding him from accepting gifts of tobacco. Today, no doubt, the Jesuit fathers have overcome such hard and fast scruples (along with much else), but the impression they left on a young Buckley says something about their effect.

In another instance, he recounts a privileged day out at the Grand National with the visiting Buckley père, at which he was to bet two shillings given him by Father Sharkey on a horse called Workman. As it turned out, Workman proved triumphant, paying 18–1. But Bill had forgotten to place Father Sharkey’s bet! He didn’t dare tell the senior Buckley, and after “confessing” (no pun intended) to a Father Sharkey who had been happily anticipating his winnings, he went to bed “fearing the obloquy of my schoolmates” once word of his failure leaked out. But the scandal was stillborn, because Father Sharkey had covered for him.

Understandably Miles Gone By features more of the celebrity elbows he’s rubbed up against, from David Niven (“In Niven’s company, no one had a chance to live very long as a wallflower”) and Clare Booth Luce (who “entertained with brilliant charm, wrote for sundry publications, painted, and stared life in the face, including bad personal habits”) to The New Yorker’s William Shawn (who told him, “Mr. Buckley, I really do not think that you know the correct use of the comma”) and colleagues such as Whittaker Chambers, who in National Review was inclined to indulge his “orotund gloom” about the coming collapse of Western civilization, but here is presented as being asked by an earnest nineteen-year-old co-ed what he thought of “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.”

It is a tribute to Bill that not all the events recorded here show him to advantage. Far from using the memoirs to take full credit for Ronald Reagan, whom he first met in 1961, Bill cheerfully concedes that he was “way behind in apprehending his potential.” Even after the Gipper had secured the governorship of California, Bill opined to Nelson Rockefeller “there’s no way a former actor could go for President.” Rockefeller demurred: anyone who won a California election with a million-vote margin, he declared, was definitely presidential material. A pity Rocky is no longer around to read this, for I suspect it is the only recorded public admission from a Reagan Republican ceding superior wisdom to Rockefeller Republicans.

Late-life biographies, of course, are inevitably tinged by melancholy, if only because the more we enjoy the past the more we want to avoid thinking of it as an end-note. But again affection intervenes, especially when he writes of the lesser knowns such as John T. Gaty. Not many histories would mention John Gaty, a man Bill never even met. But in 1967, Bill learned he had been listed in Mr. Gaty’s will as one of nine trustees designated to meet once a year—in Wichita—to dispose of his estate to outfits “which will promote individual liberty and incentive as opposed to socialism and communism.”

Apart from Bill, the list of desginated trustees included Barry Goldwater, John Tower (who confided to him at one of these meetings that Reagan didn’t have the “intellectual ability” to serve as president), Strom Thurmond, Edgar Eisenhower (“the rightwardmost of the three Eisenhower brothers”), and Dean Clarence Manion of the Notre Dame Law School. Over the years a number of fledgling conservative societies survived because of the small grants they received from the Gaty fund, whose benefactor surely would have considered himself repaid beyond his dreams in the election of 1980.

That is not to say that all goes smoothly. Take the time Bill resolved to act on his annual New Year’s resolution to do something about “the Milquetoast” in him. The occasion soon presented itself on a Vermont mountaintop while waiting in line at a ski shop. While one attendant waited upon the woman in front of Bill, his middle-aged co-worker sat on a nearby stool chatting with his workmate and making no motion to serve the other customers.

After a while, Bill broke. “If you are not too busy,” he asked icily, “would you mind handing me a screwdriver?” The man, who had been puffing away on a pipe, looked surprised and apologized—he wasn’t supposed to move because he’d just suffered a heart attack. That was the signal, Bill writes, for “a great whirring noise that descended from heaven” as a helicopter landed, a stretcher was produced, and the man was taken to a nearby hospital. From his description of the aftermath in the ski shop, one is left with the sense that at that point the charitable thing might have been to evacuate Bill on that helicopter too.

There is more, much more—too much for one review. I am unqualified to evaluate Bill’s musical forays. The chapter on his solo performance of Bach’s Concerto in F-minor before the Phoenix Symphony Chamber Orchestra goes into considerable detail about the many months of practice the invitation required. In many ways, however, the enterprise strikes me as not so far removed from his work at National Review, where he presided over an intimidating array of conservative noises: the mournful low notes of the cello (Whittaker Chambers); the clear trumpet (Frank Meyer); the iconoclastic bassoon (Willi Schlamm); the happy, self-deprecating flute (his sister Aloise Buckley Heath); and the steady A of the oboe to which the others are tuned (Jim Burnham). Against the demand to extract some sort of editorial harmony from this crowd, an eight-and-a-half minute Bach concerto must have come as something of a relief.

About the sailing I am even less qualified to judge. Given my own tendencies toward the Sam McGee School of the hardships and forced intimacy of such excursions (“It wasn’t much fun but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee”), such passages do not elicit from me any wish-I-was-there feelings. This has nothing to do with Bill’s writing. To the contrary, there is a good argument to be made that it is precisely when Bill is writing about sailing that he is at his most taut and rhythmic, as in the passage that ends this book:

You have shortened the sail just a little, because you want more steadiness than you get at this speed, the wind up to twenty-two, twenty-four knots, and it is late at night, and there are only two of you in the cockpit. You are moving at racing speed, parting the buttery sea as with a scalpel, and the waters roar by, themselves exuberantly subdued by your powers to command your way through them. Triumphalism … and the stars seem to be singing for joy.

You could say the same thing about the satisfaction that comes from writing a fine paragraph. Or a life that set itself, with astounding success, against most of the prevailing winds of his day.

Come to think of it, I think he just did.

---

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography, by William F. Buckley, Jr.; Regnery, 594 pages, $29.95. Go back to the text.