Inveighing We Will Go
Coyne, John R. Jr.
Book Review Inveighing We Will Go by William F. Buckley, Jr. Putnam, $7.95 You get to wondering though, whether, in the old phrase, you're playing horse to other people's Lady Godiva."' Bill...
...They're already forgetting, in fact - and most of them never have admitted it - that Bill Buckley was right and they were wrong...
...There is nothing in any of the scores of journals in which English professors publish their pleonastic little pieces that can touch it...
...This paragraph expresses nothing less than a total world view, profoundly pessimistic in the same sense that Whittaker Chambers was pessimistic when he told us in Witness that he realized leaving Communism for the West meant leaving the winning side for the losing...
...A model of its kind-witty, polished, sophisticated, and above all scholarly, a throwback to the days when the great academicians wrote for all literate men, rather than for promotion...
...sent William C. Bullitt as our first post-Czarist ambassador, Maxim Litinov having promised him that Russia would absolutely honest Injun give up subverting the world...
...There's just enough detail - the traffic and the implied comparison between two civilizations, the perfectly spare metaphorical lesson contained in the quick description of Spaso House...
...But we must be realistic, and in the world as it is we probably won't live to see Bill Buckley's work receive the serious attention it deserves...
...No one likes to admit that the ideology which has shaped his life is not only wrong but positively harmful...
...For years, Buckley did it all by himself...
...Not too long ago I believed Bill Buckley to be the best contemporary non-fiction writer in the country, a belief shared by most of the writing conservatives of my generation...
...Bill Buckley still can seem, on the whole, lighthearted, but he bubbles just a bit less now, and perhaps that is just as well, for it allows those who mistook him for an entertainer to catch a glimpse of what he really is-a deeply sincere man, profoundly concerned for the fate of his nation...
...He journeys to Zagorsk, "the spiritual home of Russia, where one of the three surviving seminaries continues the hapless production of a dozen priests per year, like eyedropping holy water into hell...
...And he made it possible for people to call themselves "conservative" without automatically evoking memories of European fascism...
...His function is to attack those aberrations that cause men to veer from the norm...
...That's what art is all about...
...The wit is still there, perhaps more compact, but as sharp as ever, especially when he makes on-the-scene observations...
...I still remember being bowled over by Up From Liberalism, delighted that we finally had a writer who could take on the social and political absurd-, ities of our time, and take them on with such joy and effervescence...
...But given the violent lurch to the Left of the 1960s, his has become the fashionable spot on which to stand...
...thesis, this narrative gift alone would be worth at least one chapter...
...Bill Buckley now stands pretty much where he stood in 1955...
...and used by us as an official residence ever since F.D.R...
...He established the first and best journal of the responsible American Right...
...Or that Ph.D...
...And were this a Ph.D...
...Why this fawning fascination with a society of dehumanized ants, a society that symbolizes everything antithetical to what Americans supposedly cherish...
...A typical passage, chosen at random, describing his trip from an airport into Moscow: "The drive into Moscow...
...You can string these quotes together endlessly, like popcorn balls for the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree...
...John R. Coyne, Jr...
...Note again the superb imagery here-the "rare combination of satiety and self abuse," the image of depraved sexuality strikingly dramatizing the reaction of the tired and the effete to the vital and the masculine...
...He's been one hell of a horse, and I., doubt we'll soon come up with that Lady Godiva fit to ride him...
...What should not be expected, however, is that American conservatives themselves forget just how much they owe to Bill Buckley...
...Most of us would go on and on, but he does it succinctly, deftly, with the apparent ease possible only to the craftsman who has completely mastered his art...
...But a careful reading of Inveighing We Will Go serves to remind us of what we easily forget-Bill Buckley is a better writer than the whole bunch of us, perhaps better than anyone practicing the craft of non-fiction today...
...It is Sunday, late afternoon, during the equivalent of the Western weekend rush hour...
...Consider just how much literary craftsmanship goes into the construction of such a passage...
...He was our debater and, when necessary, our politician...
...This concern is most eloquently expressed in his description of the China trip...
...When students are finished with defecating in wastebaskets, and when a new Kennedyish golden boy takes us on another great imperialist adventure, the academic types will probably once again begin to lurch leftward...
...Perhaps it's just because Bill Buckley is so good at what he does that his abilities as a writer fail to receive the attention they deserve...
...To Yugoslavia, where he discovers an avuncular Tito (as distinguished from the Tito who not so long ago used to like to tell the lightning bugs when to shine...
...Buckley was an unabashed conservative during those days when it was unfashionable in the extreme to be identified with the Right...
...Into Poland, after Russia, where a visitor can open his window in the morning and feel that he knows now with certitude, what is the difference between Purgatory and Hell...
...and that's something they'll never be able to teach you at the Famous Writers' School...
...I know of no more profound and eloquent passage in the writings of any contemporary author...
...Ours probably reports to the FBI...
...And when they do, there will be just a few men like Bill Buckley holding down that center spot for them until such time as they once more come scurrying back for shelter...
...Inveighing is crammed with quotable passages, laced with that patented Buckley wit...
...Some of that effervescence is gone now, and long-time Buckley admirers must regret its passing, just as we regret what we leave behind as we slide into middle age...
...Mencken...
...But that's to be expected...
...This may all change, of course...
...Today we hear professors at Ivy League universities mouthing sentiments that they would have branded as reactionary a decade ago, sentiments that were being articulated by Bill Buckley in the days when our new-found academic allies were preaching the dogmas that led to the very excesses they now so piously deplore (somehow, I suppose, the world can never be the same to a professor of liberal arts when a student, pursuing that professor's ideas to their logical end, defecates in his wastebasket...
...Satirists tend to make dullards uneasy, and those people in charge of nurturing serious literary reputations-professors of literature and reviewers for most major eastern magazines-tend to be footnote-numoed or ideological dullards...
...First of all the compression-perhaps partially the result of the discipline necessary in writing newspaper columns-the apparent ease with which he carries us on a relatively long trip through a strange countryside in one brief paragraph...
...candidates are grinding out dissertations on - believe it or not - Norman Mailer...
...Travel seems to energize him...
...By contrast the Chinese Communists are not indifferent...
...The satirist, in short, may seem to be having a hell of a lot more fun than the rest of us...
...The tendency is to take him for granted...
...But let's try to remember, just occasionally, that there's probably one hell of a lot of agony just beneath the surface of that laughing mask...
...They are proof against western derision because they know what they want, are utterly outspoken in their consecration to human debasement as a means of achieving Communism, lucid and unswerving in their designs, insouciant to the resentment we used to feel at the corruption of the terms that used to designate our ideals: justice, liberty, individual rights, government as the servant of the people...
...I didn't count, but I am certain we did not see twenty passenger cars along the 25-mile routes...
...Bill Buckley has the answer: "Somehow the generic incantation which instantly used to collapse such analyses-Mussolini made the trains run on time-doesn't have its ancient power to restore instantly the focus...
...Then came the assignment from The Alternative, and I was forced to look more carefully - and to realize how much I'd missed during the past few years...
...At the little gate of Spaso House was the guard supplied by the Soviet Union-by common acknowledgment, he is a member of the KGB...
...In China, after witnessing an anti-western opera: "It was as if at a White House conference of African presidents, we had taken them over to the Kennedy Center to see a ballet of Li'l Black Sambo...
...We tend to forget this now, of course, for the excesses of the sixties brought on a great national change of sentiment, a change that has finally managed to reach even the universities, the inhabitants of which tend to be the people most isolated from the mainstream of American thought and opinion...
...The norm being that which the many of us have decided it is-free-enterprise capitalism in the United States, for instance, democracy - the satirist, although apparently always on the attack, is in a larger sense defending...
...And isn't it indicative of something that a minor-league satirist like Kurt Vonnegut receives more attention in American literature courses than H.L...
...But the point is that Buckley's wit, that quality which enables him to make the seemingly effortless imaginative leap from general observation to precisely the right metaphor to dramatize that observation, is the very essence of art...
...It was the wit, I think, that drew so many of us to Bill Buckley back in the fifties...
...And no matter how you feel about that trip-I, personally, think it was necessary and resulted, among other things, in the end of the Vietnam war-no matter how you feel about it, you must agree that the embarrassing effusiveness of the visitors was painful...
...Those of us who consider ourselves part of that movement have come to take him so much for granted that we tend to forget just how long we've ridden on his shoulders...
...The reason is that the West, so far gone these days in a rare combination of satiety and self-abuse, is indifferent in part to freedom, in whole to the cause of freedom...
...I am confident, however, that we'll not forget how much his writing has meant to us...
...He saluted us through, and I got out into the enormous, oddly-structured town house completed for a Moscow industrialist in 1917 (1917...
...His method, ridicule, suggests lightheartedness, for he is intent on laughing people out of their vices...
...But somewhere along the line-probably when we developed our own styles, acquired our own modest readerships (and along with them a steadily inflating sense of our own abilities) - we began to forget just a bit the man we had all once so desperately attempted to emulate...
...That took about an hour...
...And without getting maudlin, let's remember that that agony grows out of a consistent concern for all of us...
...Underneath that mask of laughter, however, most inevitably lurks a great sadness, for just as the policeman's daily work must inevitably lead him to suspect that men are aberrant wretches, so must the satirist's daily duties tend to persuade him that man seems intent on institutionalizing his vices and destroying his virtues...
...And if he convinces us that he is, then he is a consummate artist...
...Fair enough...
...But look beneath that wit for a second and consider the carefully crafted literary setting that supports it...
...A magazine like Commentary, for instance, aimed at an intellectual liberal readership, now often sounds like the National Review of a decade ago...
...that's what distinguishes the natural writer from the trained journeyman...
...It was a Vlaminck sky, dark gray, white white...
...When I first saw Inveighing We Will Go I skimmed it, read the few pieces I'd missed when they originally appeared in National Review, The New York Times Book Review, or his newspaper columns...
...I know I do...
...And one suspects that were the Red Chinese to practice phrenology or alchemy or baby eating, these enlightened men of the West would have approved them just as uncritically...
...Hardly the types, in other words, to champion the abilities of someone who lampoons the very essence of their ideological dullness...
...They'll forget, of course...
...Bill Buckley says this in a completely different context, but the sentiment could well apply to his role in what we call "the conservative movement...
...Just think of the whole flap over acupuncture, for instance-rationalist western intellectuals turning out reams of copy, with complete suspension of disbelief, on such things as the metaphysical qualities of gold and silver needles and the concepts of ying and yang...
...But despite the compression, nothing significant is omitted...
...The role of the satirist is a peculiar one...
...In a better world, any sensible head of a university department of literature, having read Bill's review in Inveighing of the two-volume edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, would offer him immediately an endowed chair...
Vol. 6 • May 1973 • No. 8
