William F. Buckley, Jr.: Non-Fiction Collections

"Buckley luxuriates in his amenities a bit too much and one hears in his prose the happy sigh of a man sinking into a hot bath. So his enemies try to dismiss him as Marie Antoinette in a pimpmobile. They portray him as, among other things, a terrible, terminal snob. 

To make the accusation is to misunderstand both WFBJR and the nature of snobbery. Buckley is an expansive character who is almost indiscriminately democratic in the range of his friends and interests. He glows with intimidating self-assurance. The true snob sometimes has an air of pugnacious, overbearing self-satisfaction, but it is usually mere front. 

The snob is frequently a grand porch with no mansion attached, a Potemkin affair. The essence of snobbery is not real self-assurance but its opposite, a deep apprehension that the jungles of vulgarity are too close, that they will creep up and reclaim the soul and drag it back down into its native squalor, back to the Velveeta and the double-knits.” 

– Lance Morrow

 

Somewhere over the past five years, I became a fan of opera, Bert Kaempfer, and William F. Buckley, Jr. If approached by my younger self – hell, my older self of only five years ago – I wouldn’t know what to do with any of this information. 

In Buckley’s case – back to “Bill” momentarily; it just doesn’t feel right writing “Buckley” over and over – the attraction is what it usually is for me: the writing. Clear and wonderful sentences that just happen to elucidate a perspective, politically and culturally, I find appealing. Moreover, he has damn good taste; I’ve learned a lot just from reading or listening to the people he brings up admiringly, both left and right. 

This is not to say I always agree with him or that the appeal is in the agreement. We part hard on some things, culturally and generationally, and he's a bit too Catholic for me. (I grew up a non-churchgoing Protestant in a town filled with French Catholics. Which I mention only to put my comment in perspective; I've no insider baseball when it comes to the Mother Church.) A brilliant resource for the last five decades of political life in the twentieth century, for left, right, up, down, and indifferent. What a reviewer wrote of Overdrive goes for Bill's work in general: “rambling, idiosyncratic, amused, cranky, occasionally flamboyant – (his) observations and recollections are most enjoyable testaments to a vital life.” Hear, hear.

I’ve written on the Blackford Oakes books and the sailing and peripherals but wanted to devote one post to the collections of his columns, etc. Let's look at them all-too-briefly in chronological order of publication.

~

(1963)

 

In 1951 Buckley published God and Man at Yale, and in 1955 founded National Review. These are selected works from that period through 1963.

A great deal of the appeal of these collections is the recreation of political and cultural atmosphere of the media of the years surveyed. Primarily its magazine and television media – the two mediums through which Bill moved. There are a great many people and events discussed here that are no longer household names. I’m generally pretty up on these things – not because I’m something special but because I immerse myself in a lot of old media, primarily – weirdly, I know – old radio news of the 40s through the 70s. That said I really strained to make certain connections; things made more sense when I started looking up anyone I didn't recognize. 

Reading this (and this is not unique to it; any collection, of any era, often demonstrates the same) reminds me that news cycles change, that we forget history and then live it again. Even, maybe especially, the closer eras to our own. National Review was founded in a climate of hostility to establishment positions – be they the kind represented by Eisenhower (a Republican and ostensibly “right wing”) or Jack Paar and Gore Vidal.

Speaking of both, they get a lot of ink spilled here. There's also the entirety of Bill’s opening remarks in a debate with Norman Mailer on the meaning of the right-wing (the definition of which  then as is now a source of much contention). There’s also a nice piece on sailing and life on the Panic and racing. The Panic was Bill’s boat that sank in a hurricane while tied to the dock, the loss of which precipitated getting … Suzy Wong? I can’t believe I forgot the order, not because this is either vital or conventional info, simply because I’ve been reading so much of Bill’s stuff lately. I could (and should) look it up.

(OTR sounds of footsteps and closing doors, to and fro.)

Answer, indeed it was:

"(After the Panic sank) I now had the insurance money. I very quickly bought, sight unseen, a forty-foot Sparkman & Stephens yawl of illustrious design from its four owners in Miami. The owners were sailors who had served together in the Army in Japan and, aged twenty to twenty-two, had dreamed of owning a sailboat and taking it around the world. They could put together only enough money to buy the bare boat and engine from the American boat company in Hong Kong. It was all teak—teakwood was cheap in that part of the world. They flew there joyfully upon their discharge, men with varied skills learned as civilians and in the Army. They sanded and painted the hull, mounted the rigging, installed the plumbing and electrical systems, and finished the deck. Two months later the boat was ready, and they set out, westward, for Miami, arriving eighteen months later, flat broke and happy. They calculated that they had spent $l.75 per person per day. That updates to about six dollars. I paid them $30,000 for the Suzy Wong, and sailed her for sixteen years, some weekdays, most summer weekends, here and there cruising on blue water, running two races to Bermuda and one to Halifax, very contented until I found the Cyrano, a sixty-foot schooner with an eighteen-foot bowsprit—a big upgrade, though bought for the same $30,000 I realized on selling the Suzy."

Favorites: “Will Formosa Liberate the USA?” and “Outside Politics”

 

~

(1968)

Re: “A Book of Irresistible Political Reflections” This and the title itself (referring to a question a reviewer asked him once) are just jokes, of course. One would hope the back cover would make it plain, but it doesn't always work like that.

Given the year of publication, you’d be forgiven for assuming this to be a collection of tumultuous events, but most of the things we think of 60s stuff happens in the next collection. This one contains eulogies to his father (WFBSR - 1881 to 1958. 1881! Bill’s Dad was in his thirties when World War One broke out and in his forties when Bill (sixth of tent children) was born. No wonder Bill, Sr. sent all the kids packing to boarding school by the time he was in his fifties.)  Evelyn Waugh, Herbert Hoover (on the strength of this one, I picked up (title), his sister Maureen (died of a cerebral hemorrhage age 31), and Aloise Buckley Heath (Bill's older sister and frequent contributor of its early years.) 

Edgar Smith, Ruben Carter, Beatles, Malcolm X, MLK, Playboy, Gays – he sounds, well, like a dude born in the 1920s. Most of the time he’s spot-on about a lot of stuff, but there are occasions (most of the aforementioned) where I feel the distance in our ages. I trust that would go double for most of my friends, but unhinged RWNJ-ism this is not. Such things are generally exaggerated or misrepresented where they are not clearly contextualized or self-evident.

 

~

 

(1970)

Upping the ante, now, with that subtitle!

This was the first of Bill's I ever read. Looking through it now reminds me of those first few months of my son’s life. We had the bassinet by the couch and I’d sit there with him while my wife showered and then push it all into the bedroom (“The Owen Express”). Good times. I talk as if Bill was there with me. He wasn’t – thankfully, as that would be supernatural and creepy.

This is a fantastic collection. There's the famous Gore Vidal piece for starters. All the topics (Sirhan Sirhan, RFK, Frank Sinatra, Six Day War, riots, Gore Vidal, campus unrest, Black Panthers, all the uncomfortable highways and byways of Civil Rights in the Sixties, LBJ, Apollo missions, the Apollo Theater, Apollo the god, Rhodesia, Biafra, all of it. I wish there was a book like Byron Farwell's Great War in Africa, just for the Cold War, especially covering those countries that took (or continue to take) the communist road of liberation. As James Michener once said of communism/ post-colonialism in the Far East: "It's nationalism first and communism second, but the first so quickly becomes the second that it's hard to differentiate between the two."

 

~

(1972)

The book is dedicated to Van and Bootsie's daughter Julie Helene, who died tragically young (1965 to 1972.) ‘Elle est venue, elle a souri, elle partie.’ (She came, she smiled, she left.) 

There are some sagas that stretch over all the books. Two of them are the prison sentences and appeals and overturns (and reincarcerations) of Ruben Carter and Edgar Smith. Ruben Carter you may have heard of, but Edgar Smith has dropped out of conventional circulation. For some reason the Edgar Smith one seems to get pushed to the top of results a lot. 

(Three more you’ll always hear about and from: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Patrick Moynihan, and Kenneth Galbraith. The latter is Van’s father so they have that kind of relationship as well as two independent challengers in the intellectual arena of the twentieth century. Pat Moynihan, in addition to being a fellow Millbrook alum, was the guy who unseated Bill’s brother as the junior senator from New York. (Hilary Clinton succeeded him.) Despite being a lifelong Democrat, he had the good manners (and sense) to write Bill in the 90s and tell him he was right about everything he predicted about the social welfare programs of the 60s. This endears me to him. Moynihan was always an interesting presence on the cable news of my own political-awakening years, and (like Kissinger and so many others) Bill’s affection for him endears him to me all the more. As his constant pranking and getting one over on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. does as well.

This will always makes me laugh. Seeing that Mailer quote reminds me; they were buddies, too.
Nice tribute here. 

This is the book where you’ll find all the good 60s stuff. Some amazingly clear-eyed views on Vietnam, 60s radicalism, and William Kuntsler. His review of Jerry Rubin’s Do It! Is hilarious. Views from Switzerland, Rome, and Antarctica, also his Playboy interview. (Likewise, his on-again / off-again relationship with Hugh Hefner and Playboy evolves over the books as well.) There is also the indispensable piece on Nixon’s visit to China. (Bill was there, after all.)

 

~

(1975)

We return to China with Nixon (also indispensable.) Speaking of Nixon, why no Watergate? It’s explained in the intro: not only was Bill an impartial party (as Howard Hunt's old friend and the executor of his estate), he had advance knowledge of it. Advance of the conventional media, that is, not of the crime itself. He had to play dumb for a good six or seven months until the media began catching up on things. This is not to say he had a scoop that he sat on or anything, only that he came to the knowledge through his then-clandestine employment with the CIA. He was no longer with the company after the 50s, but he was sworn to secrecy, until such things became public knowledge later in the 70s. 

For all of these reasons, I’d love to hear Bill’s thoughts on Ted Shackley or on James Michener’s Legacy. (I’m sure he’d have agreed with me on both.) Sheesh: why didn’t Michener ever go on Firing Line? That's annoying. 

All great stuff here as well. You can’t swing a cat in the 70s without hitting something interesting. He reflects on certain repetitive patterns themselves in our political process (the scientific prediction of landslide victories by professional pundit classes in elections that go the other way, the remarks and warnings after said victory – the Shlesinger/ Galbraith Entrail-Reading Service.) Everything he discusses is true of subsequent political elections, as well. Also here, some fantastic essays on Vietnam (“What is Morality”), an African sojourn getting saved by the Coast Guard, and (I believe) the first “Cancel Your Own Goddamn Subscription.”

Also meant to get a picture of that but no luck. Someone wrote into National Review in an insulting manner and ended with the conventional “Cancel my subscription.” Bill responded curtly with the above, later a title of other published Notes and Asides of Bill’s. (All worth reading – Bill was a funny bastard, especially when provoked.)

 

~

(1978)

This is the book in the aftermath of brother Jim Buckley’s election loss to Moynihan. While we’re here, I have Jim's If Men Were Angels and look forward to reading it. It’s not in this collection, but there’s a funny angry-letter-to-the-editor that Jim forwards to Bill with the note “I believe you want to speak to my brother, who is the actual publisher of National Review.” To which Bill responds that his brother is a prankster and HE is the actual senator, and it’s just a game they play with the world.)

The People and characters portion of this is astonishingly good, as are the commentaries on (more!) unfolding events in Africa (from Rhodesia to Egypt) more on Edgar Smith and Ruben Carter, the Selling of Your Own Books (an excellent glimpse into the realities of 70s publishing), a sobering piece on Pol Pot, Election '76, and Bicentennial thoughts.

 

~

(1985)

 

If there was a peak, it’s probably here, with a charter subscriber in the White House and a board member as ambassador to France. 

This volume contains the indispensable “Human Rights and Foreign Policy” (illustrating something still very much in effect today, and beyond the UN/ Soviet Union, re: the UN’s charter to reform members’ less-than-jake policies, i.e. the rise of manipulating the human rights dimension as an aspect of foreign policy.” Contrasted to the USA, or any democratic government, always on the defensive, learning only a new Realpolitik, “an inchoate disjunction between the power to affirm and the power to dispose.” (Also that a “crisis” as in “crisis management” means “anything that might cause serious discomfort to the Soviet Union.”)

Speaking of human rights, Bill refers to Jonestown as the supreme rebuke of our civilization, a sort of hold-my-beer to the Mansons. (Elsewhere he refers to China's Cultural Revolution as the Jonestown of Maoism - both of these insights are fantastic.) 

Also included: a panel he did with the producers of Deep Throat and others causes him to reflect on an insightful passage from Hilliard Belloc. “We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him. In the long stretches of peace we are not afraid, We are tickled his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us.  But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there is no smile.”

Some wonderful and moving requiems, those starting to rack those up, an unfortunate side effect of moving into one’s sixth decade of life. His mother (Aloise Steiner Buckley – 1985), David Niven, John Lennon.

“I have always assumed that I had things to say that were worth listening to. To claim otherwise, given the life I lead, would be to engage in imposture on a very grand scale. But I have incurable stylistic and intellectual mannerisms I wouldn’t want others to imitate – assuming the inconceivable, namely that anyone would be tempted to do so. I am attracted to varieties of anomalous thought which, expressed by more prudent men, would be taken as contumacious.”

 

 

~

(1993)

Interesting to see Bill describe himself as a libertarian journalist. It’s not untrue, just not how he is often characterized.

Another superb collection that covers (pretty much) the Bush years, which means reading it for me is like revisiting the SNL Weekend Updates of my high school years. There’s good stuff on Leonard Bernstein, a visit to Cambodia, diving in a submersible to the Titanic, the dangers of memorializing evil men (Idi Amin), some (unfortunately prescient) remarks on what the Biden/Clarence Thomas Supreme Court back and forth might portend for the future, as well as the “disturbing willingness of normal people to incorporate into their own vocabulary the distorted terminology of the Soviet Union.” 

There’s an essay on Columbus which I assumed would reproduce a lot of stuff from Windfall. It didn’t, though – this is a great quality in a writer, to be able to expound on topics without reproducing the same lecture/ range of impressions. 

He speaks often of his speeches – as I imagine he should.

 

They are, after all, like little books he wrote, as well. I have not made my way through these, although the one reproduced in Cruising Speed is great.

 

~

And that’s all she wrote on that. This isn’t the extent of Bill’s non-fiction or anything, just the collected columns et al. Let’s say you were looking for one to pick up; which one would I recommend? This would depend on several things.

If you have ever argued about the differences between Adlai Stevenson and Harry S. Truman, maybe Rumbles Left and Right is for you. If the 60s and 70s are more your thing, maybe Execution Eve or Inveighing We Will Go. If the events and personalities of the Reagan/Bush era is more your jam, either of the last two.

Or get any/ all of it - you can't go wrong.

As for Bill, to paraphrase Dr. Westphall, there was a time, inconceivable as it seems, when he did not exist. Corporeally, that time has come again. But in libraries and on bookshelves and on YouTube and in the hearts of all who knew him – or that come to know him through his writing – it feels like he’s still around a little while longer. Luckily! We need him. But need him or not, we can still enjoy him.

(1925 – 2008) 

Personal Adventures At Sea and On Land: Coda

A side effect of reading the sailing books (and to an extent Cruising Speed and Overdrive as well) was wanting to know a bit more about the other passengers. I picked up the below pursuant to this and wanted to leave a few notes on what I call “the peripherals”, although this should not be taken as a statement of their quality or secondary importance.

In the order I read them:

~

(1983)

“I visited Central Casting and after an agonizing wait of several days, was finally accepted and enrolled as “Anglo Saxon Type Number 2008. Such is the efficiency of Central Casting that the first call I got to work as a professional actor was as a Mexican.”

One of David’s two memoirs – the other one is inexplicably pricey. (Note: in the month or two since I wrote that, the price has become more reasonable.) As you might imagine it’s wonderful. I don’t think he had a co-author, here, either, so doubly impressive. The arc of Niven’s life from WW1 orphan to British officer to Hollywood dilettante back to Britain for the war (and getting fleeced by Her Majesty's Government on his way back to the States) through all the Hollywood and Switzerland adventures is singular, charmingly told, and full of unexpected (by me) pathos and insights. 

Some bulletpoints:

-  POSH – Did you know this stood for ‘port out starboard home?’ I’ve been reading books on the sea for decades (and lived through the Spice Girls) and never came across this before. Niven recounts the snobbery of his shipmates whose supreme status symbol was a cabin on the shady side of the ship.

-  When starting out as an actor in Hollywood, he had a bit part in Mutiny on the Bounty, filming off the coast of California near Catalina. The night before he got wrecked with some old friends aboard the HMS Norfolk and ended up missing the ferry back to the shore. They were kind enough to drop him off on "set" the next day, so David Niven got to make a hell of an entrance climbing down the side of a county-class heavy cruiser before hopping onto the set of the Bounty.

-  When heading back to Britain to re-enlist for WW2, he took the Queen Mary to America with the 101st. So next time you watch that first episode of Band of Brothers, see if you can find him in the background.

“Live television, during its reign, proved one thing – that many actors are masochists. Without exception, the most ghastly torture ever invented for people in my profession, it incorporated all the worst features of films, radio and the legitimate theater. Before an unseen audience of millions, over-dressed and under-rehearsed actors struggled with badly written scripts in front of cameras which collided with sickening regularity and scenery that wobbled and often collapsed while the whole mess was directed by egomaniac directors, drunk with power in front of consoles studded with switches and buttons.”

I know Niven primarily – almost exclusively – as Dick Charleston in Murder By Death and James Bond in Casino Royale. (Not his finest work, the latter, although I’ve been using the “We’ve reached the time of the day reserved for Chopin” line for years. Like most lines I use for years, I'm probably getting it wrong.) And The Pink Panther, of course, although I’m not as much of a fan of the 60s PPs – really, the only two I need are TPPSB and in distant but respectable second TROTPP, neither of which star Niven. Anyway, I watched Wuthering Heights (a role he had to be tricked into taking by director William Wyler) as a result of reading this; I liked it – had never seen it before and had only ever heard a radio adaptation. (Although Niven was right when he wrote it's a thankless role.)

~

(2005)

As a result of the "How To Navigate" chapter in Airborne (and similar instruction in yachting magazines) Bennett Maritime commissioned Bill to do a home video version.

I couldn’t really follow it – I hate to say it, but Bill’s voice can drive me nuts sometimes, I’d much rather read him - but I’m glad I have it. It’s like sitting in a colorful class conducted in another language. What could they be talking about, you wonder, as numbers and graphics drift by like shoreline seen from a boat cruising along at twenty knots.

~

(1993)

Bill mentions reading the first draft of this in Racing Through Paradise and it not being very good, but a later draft is much improved. I wondered a few times while reading this if I somehow ended up with the first draft.

I grew to like Van a lot through the other books - I suspect there's more than a little of Van in and was really looking forward to this one. But it just doesn’t flow very well. A sort of “typical month in the life of the French ambassador” is cobbled together, but it just doesn’t flow very well. A more straightforward memoir – perhaps one where he leaned on Bill or Christo or any of the Buckleys for some editorializing – might’ve been better. The ending reproduces, randomly, some other press. It feels like what it likely was intended as: a placeholder/ prelude to a political career that (due to illness and other circumstance) never materialized.

 

~

As Watergate and the Church Committee fade from memory, folks might need a refresher on Howard Hunt (once, like Oliver North, a household name.) Once upon a time, he was Bill’s boss at the CIA (in Mexico in the 1950s). A lifelong friendship ensued, with Bill named as executor of Hunt’s estate and godfather to his children. Bill stood by his friend through his well-publicized travails but was privately admonishing of his old friend’s “moral flexibility.”

Hunt was also a prolific author of spy novels and thrillers. I’ve read House Dick and the one up there. (A quick bitch about Blogger/ Microsoft Edge - so, if you use Edge, and Duck-Duck-Go, you don't download jpegs, apparently, you download something like 'jfifs.' You don't see these as 'jfif' in Windows Explorer; they look exactly like their jpeg equivalents. You only discover this when you go to upload the picture into Blogger, thus necessitating several extra steps. All of which is to say: I had some pics from House Dick for you but screw you, Authors of The Avoidable Miseries Aforementioned.) 

Definitely credible entries in the genre: sleazy, dangerous twists, breezy read. I imagine thriller-paperback audiences of the future will puzzle over the other aspects of author biography if they ever get there.

~

(2019)

Christopher Little was, if you recall, the sailing-books’ official photographer, hired in Atlantic High and having befriended all the principals, signed on for each subsequent journey. When looking up whatever happened to the other crewmembers, I was surprised to discover he’d written a murder mystery – and only published in 2019, to boot. 

I was ever-so-pleasantly more surprised to discover hey, this really is an excellent police procedural, steeped in the sort of details, characters, psychology, and twists that make the genre so enduring. It loses a step at the very end, maybe, but it holds together remarkably. It’s depressing to think a book of this quality can exist out there and then ask you in the ending (as the author does) to help him promote it. Sign of the times, but sheesh: the publishing industry is such a nightmare right now. Here’s a guy who hobnobbed with a lot of worldly and famous people over his career, so I imagine he has (or has access to) all those folks already. It deserves more eloquent acclaim and attention, not to mention a TV adaptation.

I hope that’s what happens. If there’s an agent out there that wants to make a lot of money, write him care of www.honeysucklepublishing.com or www.christopherlittle.com. He encourages such in the author's afterward. 

~ 

(1990)

By the mid- and late 1980s, after historic libel suits, with the press knocking off presidential candidates and Supreme Court nominees, unraveling the Reagan presidency, and in a position to overwhelm any individual or institution, a new era in press-public tension had arisen from the depths of America's civic religion: fair play. Why is the press accused of being so negative, so biased, so left-wing, so anti-establishment? Whenever people read or see something they know about, why is it so often wrong, naive, unfair, or all of the above? Why do the media arrogantly try to tell people what to think? Is there no line between privacy and the people's "right to know"? How can the public and government answer back after the media have spoken? 

Using the Westmoreland v. CBS and the Sharon v. Time trials as emblematic of how things go wrong, the author draws graphic lessons for improved press conduct and wiser public perception. This is an insider's look at what is right and what is wrong with the media's attitudes toward their work played against public and government expectations.

So says the publisher's description. Are these two cases still the last word on these topics? I suspect they are not and that there’s need for an updated edition with commentary from a (hopefully libertarian-minded) legal expert.  

This is an excellent work, and Dick – like Van – is someone you grow to love over the course of the sailing books. The revolutionary corporate shake-ups of the last decades of the twentieth century re-shaped the world as much as the end of WW2 did - the downstream effect of this on things like the fair play/ mission statements of independent news organizations was not popularly understood at the time. Maybe not even now.

It's funny to think of the exasperation of Dick in 1990 or of audience in the mid-70s (Rollerball, Network) and think of how exponentially worse things have gotten. By my reckoning, things accelerated from where Dick is warning us about to a new hyperspeed lane in 2008, then doubled in 2016 and proliferated unto infinity in 2020. The alarm bells rung in works like Beyond Malice can scarcely be heard over the canned applause, chryons, and other alarms ringing in unison. But worth tuning in to.

~

(1981)

I can see why someone like Bill got a lot more out of it than I did. I felt more politely interested than driven to finish it and skimmed a bit here and there. I should’ve just gone with those excerpts in Racing Through Paradise, which I greatly enjoyed – not so much the whole thing. Not that it’s not worth it, just a bit too much for me. 

~

The last time I lived in RI I had ambitions to charter a boat and have someone take me all around the inner harbor, maybe just to camp out on one of those islands out there. I think it might even be legal to do so and hell, I’ve got a tent. It never came to pass, but I can see the appeal of gunkholing, both around a harbor like Narragansett or up the New England and Canadian coast.

This is a pretty cool comprehensive guide that I picked up to see if any of Bill’s adventures (particularly the one with the angel of Craig’s Point relayed last time) made the rounds, but I think I got the wrong edition for that. The one I purchased looks like it spent some time at sea, from the water damage to the binding. Not that it’s falling apart – I mean, it will, but such is the fate of all things. I like that this edition was used for the purpose it was designed. I only wish the previous owner had left a list of places visited on the inside cover, or a treasure map or otherwise-cryptic note.

A few fascinating sidenotes on Gardiner’s Island, which reminded me of South County (RI) parties of yesteryear, partying out on the rocks amidst the lobster traps and looking out across the Sound. Block Island, Point Judith, Galilee, Jerusalem Harbor – all my old stomping grounds. A seascape sorely missed. Apponaug Cove even gets name-checked, Pawtuxet Cove as well - the stories I could tell you!

Apologies for the personal reverie. If you ever get a chance to cruise up and down the coast of anywhere, I say, take it; if it’s New England, all the better.

 

~

Liz Wheeler is the chef on a few of the sailing adventures. I was always intrigued by this. I wish she’d kept a journal, too, to be included in Bill’s books. 

What a great job this sounds like, though. Provided you don't get seasick or claustrophobic. You can get your own part of the ship with your own facilities and all you have to do is make dinner, and someone else washes the dishes? And you get to go around the world on fancy yachts? Holy moley. Of course, you have to have culinary flair adapted to maritime conditions: a unique combination. Plenty of people with one or the other - even more with neither – hello! Welcome to my world. I’d probably have made a good chef's assistant back in the scurvy days. 

On land or at sea, all of these dishes sound delicious - and none look too difficult to boot.  

And finally:

~

(2009)

This is Christopher Buckley’s very moving memoir - never iconoclastic, never hagiographic, always sincere and relatable, despite the rather remarkable family circumstances - of the year he lost both his parents. Filled to the brim with too many wonderful anecdotes, details and well-chosen references to count. 

The first part is the death of Patricia Buckley, including the awkward multi-state taxi ride back to Connecticut upon hearing the news and sharing fast food with the cabbie along the way. His memories of his mother include many well-chosen examples of her fiery personality (especially after the "supernumerary martini") and the chip on her shoulder for not graduating from Vassar. I never matriculated there, but I spent a lot of time there in the nineties. A lot of the caste-based issues we are taught to ignore are felt most keenly by folks who spend a lot of time at Ivy League schools without graduating from there, I’ve found. Not that it's a condemnation of any kind, merely sketching a portrait of his mother as he knew and loved her. And we can by extension. R.I.P.

From there it moves into Bill’s unfortunate deterioration. Like a lot of sons who have lost their fathers, what starts as bad quickly moves to worse then falls off a cliff. Bill called the slow march to death “point of diminishing returns” and suffered much. Emphysema (progressive and incurable), diabetes, sleep apnea, skin cancer, heart disease, prostate afflictions, etc. Suicide comes up more than once, which “if it wasn’t for the religious thing…” his voice trailing off. 

In many of Christopher’s books, emphysema plays an conspicuous role. It was (and is, I suppose) a Buckley family affliction, no doubt accelerated by all the cigars and secondhand smoke. A very smelly and hard-to-breathe place, the past was. In this book, that “cold, sweaty panic of reaching for a lungful of air that isn’t there” is felt almost to the point of readerly discomfort. Especially this reader - I haven't breathed right for years and have panic attacks about this kind of stuff.

The sailing books chart some of the ebbs and flows of father/son relationship, and in this last year of Bill’s life all facades fell to one side. “Watching him suffer had made my lingering resentments seem trivial and beside the point.” I got a chill reading one passage where Van comes by along with old friend and neighbor Jimmy Edgerton, for Bill’s eighty-second (and last) birthday:

“When (we) arrived he greeted us in the garage and said, sadly, that he was too ill to make (their yearly trip to the family estate in Sharon, CT.) So we had Thanksgiving in Stamford, along with his best friend Van Galbraith. Van, once bulldog-athletic, had undergone thirty radiation treatments for cancer in the previous month. He could barely walk. Pup, Van, and Jimmy, handsome Yalies all. Within six months, they would all be dead.”

I had about a half-dozen passages I meant to reproduce here, but it’s all much better read there. I’ll finish with just a couple:

-  “'I miss your urine reports,' he said in his rumbly Teutonic baritone.” He being Henry Kissinger. That’s a hell of a phone call, right there. Reading the Buckleys has rehabbed Henry Kissinger, the CFR, and Bohemian Grove for me. If ever approached by younger versions of myself, the first three words out of my mouth will be ‘I Can Explain.’

-  After a lifetime of typewriters, Bill reluctantly installed WordStar in the 80s and kept re-installing it on subsequent computers despite the program no longer being made. Christopher describes the agony of this amusingly and that floor-dropping feeling when (after many travails) you go to hit save on something (the manuscript he was helping his father transcribe Flying High, about Barry Goldwater) and realize you’ve lost it all. To Christopher’s amazement, Bill patiently recreated – from memory – the entire text. “His mind was still a brightly burning fire deep within the wreckage of his body (…) Hardly any self-corrections, the words came out punctuated and in paragraphs.”

And finally:

“He taught me how to navigate by the sun and stars with a sextant. It’s a skill that today in the age of satellite navigation, fewer fathers impart to their songs. As I look back, it seems to me one of the most fundamental skills a father can teach a son: finding out where you are, using the tools of your ancestors.

“Since then I’ve taught my own son to sail. I remember the first time I placed his small hands, along with mine, on the tiller and taught him the feel of the boat and the wind and the sea. I thought back to when my father had first taken my small hand in his and taught me the rudiments of the same art. Now I was imparting to my son what my father had passed along to me: something elemental, thrilling, and joyous.”

I've loved a lot of Christopher's writing over the years, particularly his first novel Steaming to Bamboola, all the excerpts in the sailing books, and several of his nonfiction pieces, like this. The majority of his novels are satire, and some of that ages better than others. Not covering it here, though, is not a statement of any kind. 

 ~

So ends this readthrough of the above plus:

I collected a couple more memorials to Bill that I couldn't find a way to wedge into the above, but you can read a nice eulogy here and a piece from Bill reflecting on the end within sight (when he gave up Patito, I suspect this is shortly after the section recounted in Losing Mum and Pup). There'll be one more WFBJR post coming down the pike. 

As I write this it is December 23rd – I hope you’re all having a Merry Christmas out there if you celebrate, and a warm and gratifying week either way. Hug your loved ones and raise a toast to those loved ones gone; let us remember the lessons of Scrooge, McClane, and the manger not just this season but in all the ones to come. Happy Birthday, Jesus.