Atlantic High

...Before long he escapes with the Mayor for a briefer second excursion in Rocinante...

...Doubleday / $22.50 LuigiBarzini There is also a limit to possible descriptions of the open sea...

...There is, for instance, the ecstatic moment when a good breeze rises...

...Sudden deafening silence envelops the boat, broken only by the sound of water rushing by, what the French onomatopoetically call clapotis...

...He went from St...

...You long to be once again surrounded by water, facing the incertitude of every hour...

...If you try, he looks at you as if you were mad...

...To dedicate two books to two similar crossings, as William F. Buckley, J r . has done (Airborne and now Atlantic High), is downright temerarious...

...The bunks are narrow and hard, the intimacy with other people, their habits and mannerisms increasingly irritating, the menus forcedly monotonous (atthough Buckley is believed to manage gastronomic feats and a choice of the world's best wines on his voyagesy...

...He asked each one to keep a diary and the excerpts from each, which he selected and incorporated in his personal narrative, make enticing reading...

...Or there is the sudden storm...

...You recognize it from far away from the different color of the sea...

...There is little fresh water...

...As its title suggests, it also has connections with Cervantes's masterpiece...

...for the Mayor it means Marx and Lenin...

...Fortunately, both assumptions were premature...

...Hatches are tightly shut...

...with the late twentieth-century literature of exhaustion that uses parody in a more or less successful effort to hide poverty of imagination...

...Little repairs are done...

...His THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983 33...

...The boat lists against the water and gradually takes on Speed...

...This time he is wounded as he attempts to disrupt a desecratory festival for the Virgin, after which, pursued by the police, the two of them speed off precariously to the haven of a Trappist monastery...

...O~O . . . . . I O O 0 0 Q I O O l l O O O O ~ U J Q O O O O O O O O ~ Q Q O O O O O Q O Q Q . . . . . . D U O 0 ~ O . . . . . QO . . . . g o g ~ Q ~ O O I Q O 0 o O O 0 O o ~ 0 0 I 0 0 o i I D O 0 o g o I Q 0 0 0 O o m ~ Q Q 0 j Q 0 ~ o ~ g O ~ 0 0 Q t U ~ i O 0 j O O O 9 0 Q Q ~ 0 0 0 o 0 0 D Q ~ B 0 0 K R E V I E W S . . . . . . . . . . . . . o . . , . . . . . . . . . . o . . . . . o o o . . o , . o o . . . . . . . . • . ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 To dedicate one thick book to one Atlantic crossing on a sailboat with guests and crew is, for many reasons, a foolhardy enterprise...

...The fanatics milk the radio all day for weather reports~ or pinpoint the boat's position On the chart with the help of all the necessary instruments, traditional or electronic...

...The book is filled with witticisms, bits of fascinating conversation, reflections, memories of other voyages, anecdotes, and souvenirs of life on land...

...They fall in with a robber who steals the Monsignor's shoes and forces them to drive him to his destination...

...As the two friends proceed on their way arguing about their respective faiths, their quixotic conduct quickly attracts the attention of the police...

...This is because there is practically nothing much to write about a long and well-organized sea voyage on a capacious yacht...

...Nor are there long doldrums to survive (during which the sailors of old built miniature clippers inside bottles or braided lines into small bathroom mats...

...In the Valley of the Fallen they visit the tomb of Franco and in Salamanca the tomb of Unamuno, the Mayor's old teacher who still haunts his memory...

...You see it coming (a dark wall of clouds on the horizon...

...Buckley himself admits that it is almost everywhere the same...

...His latest book, The Europeans, will be published this year by Simon and Schuster...

...The second difficulty is that such crossings are boring for everybody except fanatic lovers of sailing cruises, like Buckley and me...

...With a good knowledge of the meteorological conditions ahead they can usually be avoided...

...No danger is lurking...

...It is also practically impossible to convey the immense pleasure of such long distance voyages or cruises to a layman...

...They embark on their adventures in the Monsignor's Rocinante, an ancient and not too reliable Seat 600, taking with them a supply of the local wine and their books of chivalry...

...In his Prologue to Don Quixote, Cervantes represents himself as uncertain how to tell his story until a At the end of his excellent Ways of Escape Graham Greene writes that having finished The Human Factor he assumed, as he had assumed twenty years before after finishing The Burnt-Out Case, that his novelwriting days were over...

...While Rocinante is being repaired, they attend a movie which the Monsignor expects to be religious but which turns out to be pornographic...

...The technical moments of difficulty do not take up many pages...

...That first Spanish novel (no longer listed among his published works) was based on a teen-ager's one-day acquaintance with the country...

...For the Monsignor this means Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Francis de Sales, and the German moral theologian Father Heribert Jone...

...He comes to the aid of a stranded Italian bishop who, impressed with the simple priest's combination of goodness and practical ability, not only directs him to "go forth like your ancestor Don Quixote on the high roads of the world" but sees to it that he is properly knighted for the excursion (and at the same time overqualified for further service in his beloved parish) by causing him to be commissioned a monsignor...

...this second one has that intimate sense of place we tong ago came to associate with Greene's fiction...

...Tanks are filled with fresh water and fuel...

...He also gives brief character sketches of each friend...

...There are seldom typhoons to describe...

...You hold the wheel bravely, waiting for the impact...

...Nothing much happened during the voyage, thank God, and Buckley was not obliged to force on the reader a series of incomprehensible mishaps explained in sailor's jargon...

...Luigi Barzini, the distinguished Italian journalist, is author of The Italians...

...But, after a few days, you become impatient, and want to get on with the job, get out of the pestiferous little tourist town, and sail away toward one's goal...

...On Christmas Day in Switzerland, at age 75, Dr...

...It would be an oversimplification to say that it is a witty replay of Don Quixote in contemporary terms, as if it belongs John P. Sisk is Arnold Professor of the Humanities at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington...

...To sail away across the Ocean on somebody e l s e ' s boat, owned furthermore by a man one does not know at all well and who lives far from the sea (in Detroit, as was the case of the owner of the Sealestial), on a boat one has not examined inside and out in a boatyard, is a very courageous e n t e r p r i s e , almost a gamble...

...It hits the sails and fills them...

...You have the same reassuring sensation as when, watching an adventure film, you see the most expensive star risk his life in the first reel...

...He had gathered a group of companions, young and middle-aged, all of them agreeable...

...There are days and days when one endures the lack of many elementary comforts...

...The engine takes care of the windless days...

...You know nothing can happen to him that early...

...ATLANTIC HIGH William F. Buckley, Jr...

...Evidently the author has survived the ordeal, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to write what we read...

...Everybody who is not in charge lolls about and reads cheap thrillers...

...Your clothes and the boat's sheets, towels, tablecloths, and napkins are laundered...

...One of its side effects is to make you want to reread that text, preferably in the Cohen translation, which is the one Greene favors...

...To elude the police they overnight in a Salamanca bawdyhouse where the Monsignor reads The Communist Manifesto, finding therein an unexpectedly usable Marx...

...You go to a luxury hotel, to bask in the momentary solitude, enjoy a hot bath, a few wonderful meals with fresh vegetables and fruit, a wide and comfortable bed...

...That Buckley has managed to do it and to do it very well deserves high praise indeed...

...An ensuing accident leaves the Monsignor mortally wounded and out of his mind...

...one might even say that it is a Midrash-type commentary on a primary text, designed to make available to subsequent readers meanings of crucial importance...

...The engine is then turned off...

...It is, nevertheless, in analogy with Don Quixote...

...Thomas in the Virgin Islands via Bermuda and the Azores to Marbella in southern Spain, in June 1980 on a 71-foot ketch...

...Inevitably the Monsignor is apprehended by order of his disturbed bishop, taken back to El Toboso, confined in quarters as a madman, and forbidden to say Mass...

...There are few of them, the stays that really absorb the force of the wind, the spots where the stays are attached to the body of the boat, the metal plate under the floors on which the lead keel is secured with nuts and bolts...

...The first is the lack of suspense...

...Since Buckley has had a rich and many faceted life, his store of memories and experiences is vast, the number of interesting friends extensive, his expertise in many field enviable and unique (music, politics, painting, skiing, Catholic theology, wines, food, debating techniques), the result is a book that anyone can read from cover to cover with pleasure...

...Your companions become once more simpatici...

...The stores of food and wine are replenished...

...The most adventurous moments were caused by his irrepressible progressivism, his American trust in improved gadgets that went often out of whack and seldom delivered what the ads and instruction books promised...

...He writes: "A scene of a sailboat between the Azores and Gibraltar would, coeteris paribus, be identical with a scene of a sailboat in Block Island Sound or between Tasmania and New Zealand...

...The boat is still...

...Then you reach a port...

...The principal difficulty for a writer is the practical impossibility to communicate by cold words on paper the ineffable beatitude sailing imparts to the aficionado...

...In this condition he rejoins his great ancestor after celebrating an imaginary Latin Mass during which the Mayor receives an imaginary Host...

...Such voyages are, for most people, like war, long gtretches of boredom interrupted by short intervals of drama and nail-biting worry, if not outright danger...

...There are many reasons why such literary efforts are forbidding...

...Buckley has managed to convey the charm of the crossing in Atlantic High so effectively that landlubbers might be enticed to try the expe32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983 rience...

...The incidents that can be written up on the logbook and recalled in tranquiility in later months are usually small matters, difficult to explain to the uninitiated...

...But he is enough of an old-fashioned sailor to make do, in a pinch, very well if reluctantly, with ancient and well-tried instruments, those most non-Americans still use...

...For it consists of this: the passionate anxiety to reach port when one is out at sea and the passionate anxiety to go out to sea when one is in port...

...Fischer of Geneva came without warning into his mind, and now at age 78 he has given us this delightful new novelnas if in proof of his own words: "a writer's imagination, like the body, fights against all reason against death.'" Monsignor Quixote has in common with Greene's third novel, Rumour at Nightfall, a setting in Spain...

...Oh, the precious moment when, in the darkness of the night, you finally sight a distant lighthouse and, checking in the books, find it is the proper one, the one you were aiming at and not another, and that you have not made a mistake charting the course and currents have not made your boat drift too far...

...The conversation on good days is usually centered on what might be eaten at lunch or dinner and with what wine...

...If the boat is your own (which was not the case of the Sealestial, on which Buckley made his second crossing) and not very new, you pass in mental review all the vital parts which you had carefully checked or replaced during the winter, to reassure yourself...

...Everybody, wearing yellow slickers, comes on deck to tie reefs and shorten the mainsail...

...MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE Graham Greene/Simon and Schuster/$12.95 John P. Sisk Sancho is the former Communist mayor of El Toboso, recently voted out of office by the forces of the Right...

...The hero of the novel begins as Father Quixote, pastor of a poor parish in [] Toboso and descendant of a fictional character in a novel that, his unsympathetic bishop says scornfully, would not have passed the censor in the days of'Franco...