Buckley on Buckley
Buckley, William F. Jr.
Buckley on Buckley Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography by William F. Buckley Jr. (Regnery Publishing, 594 pages, $29.95) Reviewed by Alfred S. Regnery WHEN GOD AND MAN AT YALE WAS PUBLISHED...
...A section is included in Miles Gone By on ten of Buckley's good friends who are also public figures—pieces originally commissioned in 2000 by Buckley's son Christopher, who was then the editor ofForbesFYL If you can judge a person by his friends, you can get a good sense of Bill Buckley from his brief profiles of David Niven, Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Clare Boothe Luce, Tom Wolfe, Vladimir Horowitz, Roger Moore, Alistair Cooke, Grace Kelly, and John Kenneth Galbraith...
...When you add this all up it is hard to imagine anybody, save possibly the President of the United States or the Pope, who has argued his cause to more people...
...There is no pretension here...
...A man of many talents, Buckley has never relied on them alone or, for that matter, on his privileged station in life for his success...
...A steady course defines Buckley's 50 years in pursuit of his cause...
...colorful descriptions of the sea and harbors visited, the adventure, and the great friends who accompanied him: Have you ever experienced the cockpit of a sailing ship, sails set, propelling you at eight knots, the water parting, poutful but, at the margin, submissive, as you charge along all but noiselessly—with only the sound of water hissing to get out of your way...
...Buckley adopted a set of ideals sometime in his early years—probably before he was at Yale (he graduated in 1950)—and has stuck with them ever since, espousing them wherever he went and whenever he got the chance...
...These years are well chronicled in Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography...
...through his countless lectures and debates—he claims to have done some 70 engagements a year, from one end of the country to the other and not a few overseas, for 40 years...
...through his thrice-weekly column for nearly as long, and countless introductions, obituaries, articles, blurbs, and every other form of written and spoken communication known to man...
...But not so Buckley...
...So it has always been...
...Miles Gone By is the last of nine collections of Buckley's writings...
...In fact, one can surmise that each of those ten friends was probably at least as pleased that Buckley was their friend as he is that they were his...
...In these you may get the best sense of Buckley the man and Buckley the fine writer...
...An inveterate sailor, Buckley includes a section on his many sailing adventures—four Atlantic crossings, one trip across the Pacific, races from Newport to Bermuda, Caribbean trips, and many others...
...Instead, he has been indefatigable in his pursuit of what he stood for...
...Regnery Publishing, 594 pages, $29.95) Reviewed by Alfred S. Regnery WHEN GOD AND MAN AT YALE WAS PUBLISHED ill he fall of 1951 its author, a 24-year-old recent graduate of Yale, was so far outside the mainstream of public opinion as to have been a virtual apostate...
...A half century later, if Bill Buckley is not in the mainstream he is very close to it...
...The book launched the career of one of the most influential critics of our time...
...through National Review, which he founded in 1955 and has edited, and which has been published, every other week since...
...Or else the moon isn't up...
...Relentless in his opinions and fearsome as a debater, writer, and lecturer, Buckley has spent the past 50 years infuriating his protagonists while charming them all the while...
...He always worked tirelessly, whether he was writing, sailing, lecturing, skiing, editing his National Review, playing the harpsichord, practicing his faith, or whatever else...
...And it is safe to say that he has had a great deal to do with the change of the course of that stream, from left to right...
...to saythat the book caused a most fearful row, as its author subsequently wrote, may come closer to the mark...
...And he got the chance often—through his 50 or so books, each, in one way or another, advocating the conservative cause and which, in the aggregate, have been purchased by at least a couple million people...
...Nobody has been a more principled advocate for conservative ideals, nor has anybody had the profound impact on those ideals, than the author of Miles Gone By, a book that will be an inspiration to its readers...
...through his Firing Line, the longest-running television show in history on which he appeared weekly for nearly 40 years...
...BOOKS IN REVIE,,V me—I was then the president and publisher of Regnery), he did not think of it as an autobiography, which only occurred to him as he assembled the contents...
...To say that the reviewers were apoplectic is an understatement...
...Many autobiographers use others' names to build themselves up— a sort of literary name-dropping,if you will...
...when Buckley first proposed the book to his publisher (that was Alfred S. Regnery is publisher of The American Spectator...
...As he explains in his introduction, this time he brings together scenes and essays in which he figures directly...
...it is black-black, but the tiny, dim red light in your compass confirms, when you look down at it, that you are on a steady course...
...As mentioned in a passage describing his preparation to play a Bach concerto with the Phoenix Symphony, "I wake up every day and, roughly speaking, work until I go to bed—there is never any time just left over...
...The moon is out and you see shafts of silver lighting up a third of all the globe you can see, all the globe that matters...
...Few of even the most prolific writers could simply assemble previously published essays into a cohesive and quite comprehensive memoir, but that is exactly what Buckley has done...
...The result is a most readable account of a many-faceted and charmed life, by someone always espousing the conservative cause, ever in the manner of a gentleman and always with good humor and much wit...
Vol. 37 • September 2004 • No. 7
