Buckley: The Right Word
Buckley, William F. Jr. & ed., Samuel S. Vaughan
BOOKS IN REVIEW Buckley the Trend Buckley: The Right Word William F. Buckley, Edited by Samuel S. Vaughan Random House 524 pages / $28 REVIEWED BY Stuart Reid E nglish is not William F....
...Look at Hollywood (liberal, capitalist, free), or go into any bookstore or K-Mart— or, for that matter, into almost any church—and you will see what Burke meant when he said: "But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue...
...But it also reminds us that Buckley has gone the way of many great men and spawned a Cult...
...Joyce may be all right for you and me, but in impressionable hands he is lethal...
...No two words in the political lexicon are more misused than "liberal" and "conservative...
...No such indignity is ever likely to befall Buckley...
...Social liberals (the left) worked for the abandonment of traditional values and liberal capitalists (the right) gratified the tastes thus awakened (for torture, rape, murder, sentimentality, and so on...
...Vaughan, who was for many years Buckley's editor at Doubleday, is now Leader of the Cult...
...It's easy to mock Buckley for his love of cruel and unusual words, but he can STUART REID is associate editor for comment at London's Sunday Telegraph...
...To that extent his position is conservative...
...What Buckley and others describe as "economic conservatism" is of course liberal capitalism...
...He struck some really, sure-enough bizarre chords, but you know, it would never have occurred to me to walk over and say, Thelonius, I am not familiar with that chord you have just played...
...He is a guru all right, but he travels first class and can afford air-conditioned accommodation...
...As every schoolboy knows, but I didn't until I checked the reference, Ab asino lanam means "wool from an ass," and is employed (like "getting blood from a stone") to suggest an impossible task...
...This book is devoted to language, more or less (though see below), and Buckley really socks it to the word-wimps...
...Propitious had a special devotion to penance and mortification, and always helped her mother, the Queen, with the dishes...
...It was after reading the sermon on hell in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that young Thomas Merton decided to become a monk, and look how he ended up: a guru in blue jeans electrocuted by a fan in a Bangkok hotel room...
...So cut it out please...
...One picks the right word for the job, he says, and too bad (though here I paraphrase) if the word means zilch to National Review readers who live west of the Hudson and drive pick-up trucks with "Big Bubba Is Watching You" stickers on their bumpers...
...The point is to show not [Buckley's] politics but his language in action...
...On the other hand, sometimes a word is unfamiliar to us because it really is unfamiliar...
...He says the book is largely apolitical...
...Ugh...
...I bet that didn't play well in Peoria...
...Not one of them knew its meaning...
...The problem here is one of definition...
...If that is the point, it might have been better to delete the following sentence from an essay on the Latin Mass: My faith, I note on their taking from us even the canon of the mass in that mysterious universal which soothed and inspired the low and the mighty, a part of the mass—as Evelyn Waugh recalled — "for whose restoration the Elizabethan martyrs had gone to the scaffold [and in which] St...
...Now—she points to you and says, "Buckey"....You may be interested in the company you keep...
...Send the kids inside to watch Roseanne Barr, Geraldo Rivera, or Oprah Winfrey...
...Thomas a Becket, St...
...But the conflict was more apparent than real...
...The liturgical revolution was not the work of simpletons, well-meaning or not...
...and Ab asino lanam...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW Buckley the Trend Buckley: The Right Word William F. Buckley, Edited by Samuel S. Vaughan Random House 524 pages / $28 REVIEWED BY Stuart Reid E nglish is not William F. Buckley, Jr.'s first language, and sometimes it shows...
...Swinburne certainly did...
...and it is relentlessly political...
...This will never do...
...to "express orgasmic delight in one of his vapulatory fantasies...
...Whatever Vaughan may have intended, The Right Word is more about faith—and attitude—than it is about language...
...On page 19 we find the eternally vigilant Buckley gently rebuking James Jackson Kilpatrick for using the expression to communicate disgust...
...Look what 507 pages of Bill Buckley can do to a chap...
...44 It is, as you would expect, a monument to William F. Buckley's charm, wit, erudition, and courtesy...
...For Buckley, no doubt, the problem would be whom to shoot...
...Yet elsewhere he suggests that the destruction of the ancient liturgy— a far greater act of vandalism than any undertaken by the Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—was the work of a "few well-meaning cretins" who "got hold of the power to vernacularize the mass...
...Well, okay, sure...
...Take your pick...
...Long may he continue to make a public nuance of himself...
...it was between two branches of liberalism: one left, one right...
...Oh no...
...but vapulatory fantasies...
...Go buy the book...
...Mother of God...
...It means to flog or to be flogged, depending on whether it is used transitively or intransitively...
...You won't find "vapulatory" in the Collins English Dictionary or in The Oxford Reference Dictionary, or even in the loo-page lexicon of Buckley's favorite words at the end of this book, but you will find "vapulate" in the Chambers zoth Century Dictionary (the one used by the National Scrabble Club of Great Britain...
...04 The American Spectator • August 1997 71...
...perhaps even liberal...
...Buckley: Several months ago on a Saturday morning I began introducing my (then) eighteen-month-old daughter to various public figures [on television...
...Perhaps the long, stalling subordinate clause has something to do with the fact that Buckley knew Spanish before he knew English and that he writes quickly (as many as 800 words in half an hour, which, on a good day, is a day's work for some of us...
...Is he, though, a conservative...
...The Cult has warped Vaughan's judgment...
...is the Thelonius Monk of journalism...
...In fact, being too kind for his own good, or maybe too good for his own kind, he spared them both, and included the letter in his Notes & Asides column, whence it found its way into this book...
...Read it by the pool this summer...
...His tone is hagiographical...
...Bill Buckley...seldom uses or resorts to z z 70 August 1997 • The American Spectator profanity, much less vulgarity," he writes in an introductory note...
...The first two entries in the index to this collection of essays, reviews, and letters are aargh...
...B limey...
...Kennedy) for my wife, who is more liberal than I, she does not have a clue to the identity of Roseanne Barr, Geraldo Rivera, or Oprah Winfrey...
...Thomas More, Challoner and Newman would have been perfectly at their ease among us," is secure...
...Put that in the past tense, change the name, and you have something from The Children's Bedtime Book of Saints: "St...
...She also identifies, with much zeal, Jesus and Moses: the latter name sometimes being given mistakenly to Robert Bork...
...On literature and entertainment too Buckley is reasonable, sane, balanced...
...He is against dirty books and dirty movies (as are we all, as are we all) and gives Playboy a nicely judged kick in the balls: its philosophy, he writes, is that "philandering is good because anything that feels good is good—except maybe lynching uppity niggers...
...In the passage above about the Mass he defends the old liturgy and customs against the new...
...at his second best the J. S. Bach...
...The right word for disgust is "ugh," says Buckley...
...Here (hot and sticky from page 133) is a letter from a not-sosecret admirer: Dear Mr...
...Obviously, Kilpatrick had forgotten his Swinbume, for, as Buckley reminds us, Swinbume used aargh...
...But Buckley's faith (subject) is (verb) secure (complement...
...Aargh...
...It is the greatest of all possible evils...
...Much as I revere Buckley—life without him would be a bitch, not to say a vapulatory nightmare— I find it hard to take this book as seriously as, to judge from the cod eighteenth-century typography of its cover, it takes itself It is, as you would expect, a monument to Buckley's charm, wit, erudition, and courtesy...
...I t is not Buckley's fault, however, that Buckley: The Right Word sometimes strikes the wrong note...
...Yet he can take moderation too far...
...When Buckley says that "we tend to believe that a word is unfamiliar because it is unfamiliar to us," he speaks a great truth...
...is rather less straightforward...
...Many of us would find it difficult to know who to shoot: the kid or her father...
...Throughout the ReaganfThatcher years the political conflict was not between liberalism and conservatism...
...Buckley is being far too generous here...
...look after himself...
...Augustine, St...
...Or maybe aargh...
...At his best William F. Buckley, Jr...
...The immemorial rite was consigned to the trash can of history by Rome...
...Bill Buckley's faith and attitude are admirable...
...His finest writing, as in the passage above, is delicately wrought and finely nuanced...
...Lest he sound immoderate, however, Buckley insists that "no literary convention is defensible that would exclude the circulation of the works of James Joyce...
...for it is folly, vice and madness without tuition or restraint...
...She quickly, and first, mastered your name...
...I checked "vapulatory" with a Fellow of Gonville and Caius (Cambridge), a Fellow of All Souls (Oxford), and with Dot Wordsworth, who writes "Mind your language" in the (London) Spectator...
...The results stare us insolently in the face...
...Enjoy Buckley at his humane best as he tells us to respect the unfamiliar: I went downtown a dozen years ago to hear a black pianist about whom the word had trickled in that here was something really cool and ear-catching, besides which his name rolled about the tongue releasing intrigue and wry amusement, and so I heard Thelonius Monk...
...Although she will sometimes identify "Kenney" (J.F...
...At a time when the right is becoming increasingly paranoid and angry, his voice is refreshingly sane and moderate...
...The blame lies with Samuel S. Vaughan, the man who collected, assembled, and edited these pieces, and whom you will find in the index between Vatican II and velleity...
...Work on your tan, as you turn its elegant pages (set in a version of Garamond, Vaughan tells us primly, "modeled on a 1592 specimen sheet from the EgenolffBerher foundry, which was produced from types assumed to have been brought to Frankfurt by the punch cutter Jacques Sabon, d. 1580...
Vol. 30 • August 1997 • No. 8
