Execution Eve: And Other Contemporary Ballads
Coyne, John R. Jr.
Book Review/John R. Coyne, Jr. For God, for -Country & for Peanut Butter • Most of the columns and articles reprinted here were written between 1972 and 1975, three years which seemed several...
...I recall that in the review of Inveighing We Will Go I wrote for The Alternative a few years ago (when I was working for the Nixon Administration, incidentally), I chided Buckley for not realizing that Nixon's trip helped bring about, among other things, the end of the Vietnam war...
...And they are...
...But it's also a seriouspiece, the subject being God, and how we praise Him and talk to Him...
...This little essay on the liturgy is typical of the best of Buckley...
...For God, for -Country & for Peanut Butter • Most of the columns and articles reprinted here were written between 1972 and 1975, three years which seemed several decades long and left America reeling...
...There isn't a writer around who could meet his standards...
...What do you do about it...
...Even for those of us who were in some way very personally involved, it all has a ghostly, far-off quality, and some of us find ourselves getting together occasionally over drinks just to remind ourselves that things did indeed happen as we remember them—and only a couple of years ago...
...Such personification, he believes, is the fatal flaw in American politics...
...It's about as much fun to probe back into that dismal period as it is to suddenly discover a new cavity...
...And it explains why I think William Buckley is the best writer of nonfiction prose practicing today...
...Richard Nixon...
...What would he be writing about...
...It's a funny piece...
...We live," he writes, "in an age that is greatly tolerant of the notion that one communicates best by tactile contact and that knowledge is communicated by osmotic processes which it is vain to seek to understand, let alone toparse...
...I like, roughly, in the order described, (1) God, (2) my family and friends, (3) my country, (4) J .S...
...But many of us were caught up in a frenetic swirl in those days...
...Tapes...
...Buckley leads into a discussion of proposed changes in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer with these two long opening paragraphs: "As a Catholic, I have abandoned hope for the liturgy, which, in the typical American church, is as ugly and maladroit as if it had been composed by Robert Ingersoll and H.L...
...It is also a satirical piece, of course, for the man of standards in an imperfect world must either surrender to tears or adopt a satirical attitude, and by so doing hope, by mocking their follies, to nudge his brothers back towardthose standards they tend to stray from...
...Yet a re-reading of that material is instructive—at least it is for me...
...in an age that flirts with the suggestion that it is an effrontery to suppose that there are standards to be observed...
...Why, then, bother to write political columns...
...That is not, however, necessarily a flaw...
...Let me try to illustrate what I mean by breaking a long-standing personal reviewing rule and quote from one piece at great length...
...But that doesn't mean that he has to love it...
...Bach, (5) peanut butter, and (6) good English prose...
...and he correctly analyzed the flaws in Nixon's character which would not allow him to do so...
...And it's a tendency that will continue to get us into trouble, he predicts, as he tries to warn us that the amiability that characterizes Gerald Ford as a man has nothing whatsoever to do with the policies of his Administration...
...Life and inspiration in form, standards to be observed...
...Perhaps it did, but today I can't say how, and I don't even have a clue as to 20 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 what I meant when I wrote those words...
...And now we have Gerald Ford's China trip, one of the most meaningless acts of his directionless Administration...
...It's not that he doesn't feel for the people he deals with...
...Another example: Richard Nixon's China trip, which Buckley, almost alone among commentators, viewed with reserve and detachment...
...And such a collection is especially valuable, of course, when the observer is WilExecution Eve: And Other Contemporary Ballads by William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Yet these are in no way emotional pieces...
...Simple...
...In this collection, between bouts with things political, he squeezes in pieces on skiing, sailing, traveling...
...It meets the most exacting literary standards, a perfect wedding of content—or perhaps life—and form...
...Ford's trip is a senseless political act to win votes in '76, just as Nixon's trip, like all those other razzle-dazzle moves—remember controls?—was a demeaning political act, with no thought of the national well-being, taken to win votes in '72...
...Yet how do you do that here...
...It is also a sad piece, for although the man of standards may be happy in himself, he must necessarily grieve at the collapse of those standards in the world around him and at the collapse of those forms that symbolize those standards...
...Now what can you do with that, except to quote it...
...God seems less frequently to bless America (or Americaseems less frequently to acknowledge that blessing), and it becomes less and less the sort of nation family and friends can be comfortable in...
...Buckley is a devout man, and so he prays...
...And he is a literary man, and so he writes political columns...
...Meanwhile, I am practicing yoga so that, at church on Sundays, I can develop the power to tune out everything I hear while attempting, athwart the general calisthenics, to commune with my Maker, and ask Him first to forgive me for my own sins, and implore Him, second, not to forThe Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 21 give too lightly the people who ruined the Mass...
...dissertations ground out on Watergate minutiae to fill one wing of the Library of Congress...
...Historians and political scientists will be pawing over the Nixon Administration for years, and there will undoubtedly be enough Ph.D...
...The intensity of the Nixon years has abated, and suddenly the comparison, stripped of the emotional context, is an obvious one...
...The modern liturgists, incidentally, are doing a remarkably good job, attendance at Catholic Mass on Sunday having dropped sharply in the ten years since a few well meaning cretins got hold of the power to vernacularize the Mass, and the money to scour the corners of the earth in search of the most unmusical men and women to preside over the translation...
...And finally the essay is a construct...
...and it is a source of great consolation to me that, on the occasion, I shall be quite dead, and will not need to listen to the accepted replacement for the noble old Latin liturgy...
...Everything, I suspect...
...that there is life in form, let alone inspiration in it...
...Where do you insert that convenient tool, the ellipsis...
...And then suddenly it was all over and now the ernotions have totally subsided, and perhaps just because it was so intense and so often incredible it's hard to believe that it all really happened...
...Buckley is, of course, a committedconservative partisan, and did at one time see in Nixon the best hope for conservative Republicanism...
...Far better to let it stand whole and speak for itself, a perfect mini-essay, combining humor and high seriousness...
...It's because of (1), (2), and (3), primarily...
...It is a happy piece, because Buckley is a happy man, a man who knows who he is and what he is and where he is going, a man who can laugh at the prospect of his own death, for death is the happy beginning of a true Christian life...
...Spiro Agnew...
...There are occasional flashes of that marvelous narrative gift of his, with its perfect pace, its compression, the use of just the right detail...
...Buckley, who viewed the whole circus coolly and clearly, was as right about China as he was about Watergate...
...As the New Critics used to like to say, form is content...
...All of which is a roundabout way of saying that many of the pieces here—especially the Watergate material—are dated, the subject matter often giving off the ring of ancient history...
...Buckley is above all a man of high standards, and his determination to live up to those standards explains the quality of his work...
...Emotions were intense during those years, each week rolling in with a new shock wave...
...And were he to draw up a list of dislikes, I'm certain that it would begin: (1) politics...
...Many of us are eventually going to have to make up our minds about what happened and why it happened...
...And I hope that before he leaves us he writes his own eulogy...
...It's part of the reviewer's task to explicate, to summarize, to quote economically...
...And there are those RIP' s, the graceful farewells of a devout man to friends (and sometimes to foes, but foes only in the political and ideological sense) whom he expects to meet again one day in a better place...
...The subject is also standards, and the relationships between form and standards, between inspiration and form...
...And it very well may be...
...he was one of the first to advise Nixon to resign with grace, while he had the chance...
...It's just that when he writes about politics he is clearheaded, analytical, and, above all, detached...
...He understands his subject matter better than most of his peers, and he handles it better than all of them...
...Back in the sixties, Buckley put it this way: "Politics, it has been said, is the preoccupation of the quarter-educated, and I do most solidly endorse that observation, and therefore curse this century above all things for its having given all sentient beings very little alternative than to occupy themselves with politics...
...The tendency to anthropomorphize our ideals is an American habit that can get us, indeed has just now gotten us, into deep trouble...
...Several phrases could be dropped, but at the expense of stylistic and substantive subtlety...
...And that is why it is valuable to have between a set of hard covers the observations of a man who commented on the events as they were unfolding...
...Mencken for the purpose of driving people away from the temples...
...Time has proved most of his positions to have been correct: he believed Nixon should have destroyed the tapes...
...But these analyses will be retrospective, and the buzz and the hum of the period in which events occurred will not be recaptured...
...But Buckley's pieces are surprisingly painless...
...L1 22 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976...
...I know of no more serious subject...
...Yet I said earlier that Buckley's observations are remarkably painless...
...Putnam's $9.95 Liam Buckley, who can pack more into a short column than most of us can get into ten chapters...
...Watergate...
...I see only two words which are unessential, but removing even those would damage the rhythms of the sentences in which they occur...
...Politics doesn't rate a mention on Buckley's list of likes...
...Most of us will have already seen the material, in slightly different form, on that trip, an event that now seems just as wildly implausible and unhinged as the other events of that period...
...Why you attempt to set things right, of course, and the only two ways to do so are through prayer and politics...
...And that explains it...
...The next liturgical ceremony conducted primarily for my benefit, since I have no plans to be beatified or remarried, will be my funeral...
...But if the world were a better place, in which.the politicians did just what we hire them to do and no more, and in which Buckley therefore didn't have to write about politics, he would still be writing...
...But he did not, as so many of us did, allow himself to see either Nixon or Agnew as the ultimate personifications of his ideals...
Vol. 9 • February 1976 • No. 5
