WindFall
Buckley, William F. Jr.
When I was in graduate school, almost a generation ago, I was assigned the entire Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, the story of Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece. Not so big a deal, you may...
...Two years shy of the quincentenary of Columbus's voyage, and just a week or so after retiring from his editorship of National Review, Buckley set out to follow the same route, more or less, with a few extra stops, quite a few extra gadgets, and a copy of Samuel Eliot Morison's celebrated biography of Columbus...
...His fellow voyagers and crew were mightily inconvenienced, and Buckley ruefully offers a "diagnosis, generally useful to men and boys at sea," of precisely how he went wrong...
...in WindFall...
...Not so big a deal, you may think, except I had to read all 5,835 lines of that lush narrative in the original...
...I heard Pup in New Guinea express the belief after a relatively grueling thirty-day crossing of the Pacific—he said, if I recall, "It doesn't feel this good unless there's some unpleasantness along the way...
...One of the voyagers, Douglas Bemon (a friend of Christopher's and the only liberal Democrat on board), writes in his journal about the older men who are making this "Leg Two" of the passage (Bill Buckley and his Yale buddies Van Galbraith and Bill Draper): Three little boys all grown up and enjoying each other...
...The American Spectator October 1992 63...
...But again, if you live the way Buckley does, taken with what he calls "gladness at living," your own screw-ups become a point of fascination, worth discoursing upon for the benefit of others...
...It is expected to be his last, whence the subtitle "End of the Affair...
...WindFall is Buckley's fourth "sailing book," about another of the transoceanic voyages he has made at five-year intervals since 1975...
...The "blues" are shared by Buckley's son, Christopher, who has joined Buckley and the others at the Canaries for "Leg Two" of the voyage, all 3,800 miles of the transatlantic part...
...But still three little boys...
...It is William F. Buckley, Jr.'s buoyant way of rediscovering that life's truisms are, indeed, true...
...on average, it would take me a full hour to read about twenty-five lines of the Argonautica, a wonderful poem that, in graduate school, I learned to hate...
...When a storm struck the 71-foot ketch on "Leg One" of its month-long (November 1990) transatlantic voyage, somewhere between Lisbon and the Madeira Islands, Captain Buckley, in charge of the Sealestial, forgot to give orders to heave to...
...Besides, apart from the abrasions of intermittent tedium and mishap, Christo pines for the company of his wife and two-year-old daughter, with that pang of absence which is likely to be felt more acutely by a 38-year-old than by a 65year-old...
...At one point in his retrospective on the voyage, Buckley writes of the "in partu blues" that always occur during an excursion of this sort, when the voyage becomes "more trial than adventure...
...Which brings me, a landlubber who has recently learned much about navigating the sea, to my one criticism of the gorgeous book from which I've learned it: Why the hell doesn't Buckley give us John R. Dunlap teaches English at Santa Clara University...
...And the Argonautica, penned as it was by an Alexandrian scholar who liked to show off his knowledge, is packed with mean little critters called hapax legomena, words that occur only once in the extant literature of a given language...
...After all, he does give a schematic of the Sealestial "heaving to": i.e., sailing directly into the wind to avoid dangerous pitching during rough weather...
...Now the ocean voyage, of course, is one of the enduring metaphors by which we ruminate indirectly about life...
...For if you thumb your nose at the elements, in the manner of those whom Admiral Morison dismissed as "nautical bluffers," you will get yourself battered for no purpose...
...a schematic of the Sealestial with a few dozen arrows pointing to the referents of all those nautical terms...
...Cajoling, teasing, tweaking...
...Christo adores his father (the elder Buckley, you will learn in WindFall, needed a crisis in his personal life to discover how deeply he and his son love one another) and has acquired a good deal of his father's taste for the sea...
...So the next time you encounter a squall, don't forget to heave to...
...Random House /296 pages /$25 reviewed by JOHN R. DUNLAP 62 The American Spectator October 1992 sailboat could very reasonably be construed as a damn-fool thing to do...
...The elder Buckley shrugs and quotes Prince Hal in Shakespeare: "If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work...
...but he has acquired as well a good deal more of his father's sense of proportion, which tells him that to undertake a month-long passage across the Atlantic Ocean on a 71-foot two-masted WINDFALL: THE END OF THE AFFAIR William F. Buckley, Jr...
...In 1492 Columbus sailed from the island of Gomera in the Canaries almost directly across the Atlantic to his discovery of (or his "encounter with," if you fancy being politically correct about it) the island now called San Salvador in the Bahamas...
...WindFall is the account of a fortunate man with many gifts—above all gifted with the character to have made good of his fortune...
...Work of a sort, at any rate...
...Playing in a way that only old friends can manage...
...Work is very often the order of the day if you seriously want to follow the route of Columbus across the Atlantic in a small sailboat...
...That second quote is from the journal of Tony Leggett, one of the friends accompanying Buckley...
...Now I recall his beautiful obituary for Malcolm Muggeridge of two weeks ago in which he alluded to Muggeridge's late-in-life Christian conviction that the central experience of life is, and must be, suffering...
...Among the hapax legomena in Apollonius are many nautical terms that advert to ship's rigging and technical details of sailing...
...at least half of WindFall is made up of citations from the seagoing journals of his companions and from the sack of personal correspondence brought on board, which gives occasion for autobiographical reminiscences...
...I have forgotten all those Greek terms, but in a modern setting they would, I guess, correspond to genoa, halyard, floating line, furling line, jib, bilge, companionway, boom, headsail, spreader, mizzen, blooper, backstay, spinnaker, yang . . . in other words, the terms that come so easily to William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Proud of each other's accomplishments, tickled by their own, grateful for good fortune, aware of the chaos and pain of life and despite that, perhaps especially because of the last two, happy to be together...
...No matter how carefully you've cultivated your classical Greek, you can't read Apollonius without being forced to hit the Greek-English lexicon once or twice per line...
...In a journal entry, Christo theorizes about "Pup," the nickname he attaches to his renowned dad: The "no pain, no gain" element...
...And if you live life the way Buckley does, you keep busy and you take risks and, now and then, because of so many preoccupations, you get insouciant just a bit—and thereby screw up...
Vol. 25 • October 1992 • No. 10
