William Buckley's several selves:

...Even in Sharon, Connecticut (and surely if one can't make one's peace there, one simply isn't trying) they seemed, to the neighbors at least, to be too proud to feel at home...

...Since young Bill was not born with a great gift for complexity, Chambers must have come as a godsend, with his melancholy subtleties kept barely above water by rather freakish high spirits...

...Perhaps on that same night or some other like it, this very decent man may, just like that, have wearied of being hated: Lord knows, he had held out long enough...

...Judis rather wants Bill Buckley to return .kicking and gouging to the ring, as certain atheists wish the church to go back to the old ways...

...Perhaps nowadays, young Buckley's rather special brand of polite impertinence would get lost among all the coarser varieties-irreverence is a debased coin-but in the early fifties, Buckley carried, mutatis mutandis, some of the same postwar surprise value as a Marlon Brando or Jack Kerouac: his defense of such hopeless cases as Joe McCarthy and those incredible alumni seemed almost wickedly perverse, not to say deliciously embarrassing, in one so obviously intelligent...

...And then at some point after that (1968 might make a good date for it) Buckley may himself have begun to feel that conservatism had become a little too serious to need a Jersey wrestler shilling for it any more, and Battling Bill, the Eli Phenom, went into a slow fade from which he has never fully recovered, and to hell with the ratings...

...Burnham's sly prudences in particular arrived ready to go and were packed straight into editorial policy...

...And who knows...

...Even the liberal Mr...

...and such are his gifts that he went on to become one of the world's finest listeners, thus launching a mighty second career, as the editor who discovered Garry Wills, John Leonard, and Joan Didion among others, and as an interviewer-debater who allows himself dangerously close to his opponent-subjects' flame...

...Judis's account I would guess that the youthful Bill began, like many of us, myself certainly, as in some sense his mother trying to be his father...

...For all his brashness, Buckley has never resisted education from others, and Mr...

...It's possible, of course, that since all his silences are pointed, Buckley may feel by now that the point on them is all the weapon he needs...

...His thesis, as it came to me secondhand (we didn't exactly read Buckley in my set, we were content to sneer, as he might say, pre-emptively), amounted to perhaps the first full-scale assault launched on what would later be called the secular religion from the angle of those who actually pay for it: namely, in his first brief (God and Man at Yale), the woolly old alumni of Yale, who, as he saw it, were spending good money to have their sons taught that one way or another daddy was all wet (a doctrine that, to this day, never made a professor unpopular...

...As Irish Protestants by ancestry, the family had a long history of outsideness, but also of aboveness, which is not such a bad location if you have the vitality to enjoy it, but only a so-so place to pick up a burning sense of the Public Interest...

...For one thing, the man has surely earned his rest from Commonweal Catholics by now, and for another, there comes a time (quite early these days) in everyone's life when an ancient enemy becomes a more welcome sight than a new ally...

...In such circumstances, catechism morality would demand no less of any of us, even critics the day they find real blood on their typewriters...

...It is now history how, in this semi-comic guise, he stole the liberals' pants and Pied Pipered just enough of their youth away to form his own movement...

...Well, he can always change the subject, but even that tells a tale in a man who has lost all the privileges of inscrutability...

...Will Buckley, Sr., was not, however-and this is important-authoritarian around the house (only his opinions were), but quite a seductive father, the kind you want to please all life long...

...Will had spent his glory years in Mexico, and he may have passed on to his children a sense of being foreigners everywhere, even-and this is what kept them from being just awful-among the rich, their natural allies...

...His wild oats eventually became commitments, as wild oats will, and his disciples expect him to go on leading and inspiring them indefinitely even if he feels like doing something else...

...It was this last quirk that made them truly eccentric, and original...

...Although he has always been a byword in this particular virtue, one always felt up to now that it could be overridden fairly lightly by concerns of state...

...The fact that the oats happened to be conservative ones is neither here nor there...

...There were no satirists in those days (unless you count Bob Hope), no McLaughlin groups, not even a lonely Mike Wallace to puncture the stillness: it was as if we had been put on a bland diet of everything...

...Well, to every man his own Utopia, I suppose...

...Nothing could have sundered the postwar concordat more dramatically...

...Instead they formed their own little renaissance garrison and rejoiced in each other-and Bill still shows the unmistakable signs of a happy childhood...

...And besides, being a radical youth would, in those days as in most, probably have seemed rather too conventional for such a gifted showman...

...Some of his pleasures are expensive, and some are not, but I couldn't swear that he knows the actual list price of anything: if he is celebrating something these days, it is the freedom not to care, and to enjoy one's blessings with a glad, unquestioning heart, as God presumably intended...

...When, in our crabbed times, did you last hear of anyone offering his full cooperation to anyone...

...WILLIAM BUCKLEYS SEVERAL SELVES SOME OF WHICH ARE RATHER SWEET Writing a biography of William F. Buckley is somewhat like trying to play a serious part in a Marx Brothers movie: you're not going to get a lot of attention either way...

...Queer" said Buckley, ' 'crypto-fascist'' said Vidal, and then and there Bill may have decided that this stuff wasn't fun any more...

...Where, then, did the Act come from and where, if it has gone, did it go to...

...Forster and his famous saying vis-a-vis the relative merits of betraying friends and countries (although I've always felt it should be noted some place sometime on old E.M.'s behalf that a Cambridge Communist wouldn't even have seen the point of the distinction: you betrayed whom you were told to...

...But, of course, I can already imagine the old gunfighter rising wearily from his barstool to answer this, and that's the last thing I want at this point...

...It's important, in assessing Buckley, to note that he has been operating under this kind of anxious observation for a long time...

...For instance, as far back as 1956, we find the National Review advising its zealots not to get their Irish up over a U. S. invasion of Hungary: we weren't going to do it, and it was silly to pretend we were-a position I can't remember his airwaves persona urging on anyone...

...This insouciance can produce comic effects...

...But in his magazine and with his own right and left to consider, he became quite early on something of a voice for moderation...

...then again, who needs another guide to it either...

...Although he had invited his readers to chime in after that with their own matching peeves, it seems that none of them really felt up to it, and the series died right there, with Buckley still baying at the harbormaster...

...Everyone knows what to say to a radical youth ("just wait till you're older," of course), but what precisely did you say in those days to a conservative youth, after you'd said "welcome to the bank...

...In whatever kind of peace treaty a nation makes with itself, academic freedom had somehow sneaked its way into being a cornerstone and an absolute...

...And it was at Yale that Buckley the enfant terrible really came into his own, but with the invaluable difference that he now knew pretty much what he was doing...

...Judis reports that on the air Buckley continued for an unseasonably long time to take the most outrageous positions he could think of in order to fill the house, even at the risk of caricaturing his own cause...

...Chambers added much specific gravity to the highflying Buckley, and helped to shade in his private self, if not always his public one...

...Now those concerns might have to be a little more pressing...

...Chesterton was once asked (and I quote from wobbly memory...

...Buckley seems to have entered prep school and the army as a rather lonely young prig, still trying his formidable best to feel superior, but not, in his own gemutlich soul, content to be quite so unhappy about it or so at odds with his new families...

...From Mr...

...which means that he can never quite be himself, because in all his public emanations, he tends to have something more pressing on his mind...

...But in this case, something also tells me that he wouldn't have done the same for Richard Nixon...

...Of this world view, perhaps the first thing to be said is that no Buckley could ever have founded a magazine called Commonweal, because the word itself was too alien...

...Buckley's sheer openness then and now dazzles like a smile, and I was reminded of how little it had changed when I noted in Mr...

...No one who wasn't there can imagine the wave of sheer niceness that swept the country in the wake of World War II, of a kind you might effect for a returned veteran (make sure his room is just as he left it...

...The change, if any, in Buckley would be in the direction of his mentor, Whittaker Chambers, who had once turned his friend Alger Hiss over to the state, but with a heavy, complicated heart...

...If ever he does lose the Faith (a cold day in hell anyway you look at it), it will be because he has simply listened himself out of it, over hundreds of hours with the brightest liberal spokesmen he can round up for his "Firing Line" shows...

...On the face of it, William F. Buckley has lived a very proper conservative life: which is to say, he sowed his intellectual wild oats while young and has since mellowed into a tactician, or statesman, as you prefer...

...On television we watched professional wrestling back then in which contestants willfully set out to be villains so that Americans, in their prison of politeness, would have someone (besides phantom Communists) to hiss, while in college auditoriums, people filed in to watch Buckley: and although, unlike the wrestlers, he usually confounded their wishes by winning his debates, it was all right with us, because he was wrong- wasn't he...

...All of which still leaves him some distance from E.M...

...No,'' said the great man, "he is a vanishing pleasure.'' Mutatis mutandis one more time (no Buckley piece would be complete without it), I couldn't put it better myself...

...As for that alleged book, waiting for it, as I gather some disciples still do (every American is supposed to write one), seems by now rather like waiting for Norman Mailer's Big Novel, or even a Teddy Kennedy presidency...

...Is Bernard Shaw a coming peril...

...and insofar as he occasionally likes to think of the world as the Buckley family writ large, he has a vested interest in believing that this impulse is universal...

...And it's also possible, as one gropes for tortuous raisons d'etat, to imagine him giving his old friend Ron the edge of his tongue in private and leaving it at that, on the principle (quite new to him) that there's no point arguing with ufait accompli, and that his influence may best be exercised in private anyway...

...As the family genius, he had probably enjoyed himself the most, but also absorbed the most, so that by the time he hit the outside world, he was the very quintessence of Buckley, and no compromise was possible...

...So although Buckley's politics were always a sort of anti-politics, aimed at someday releasing mankind from its perennial obsession with legislation, he is as much bound by them as anyone...

...Not that Buckley's conservatism was ever anything but totally sincere...

...Like the Kennedys, whom they resemble in no other important respect except largeness, the Buckleys were not even going to take a chance on being snubbed by older money...

...All of which puts Buckley in the painful position of being an open book to whom people look constantly for guidance...

...It takes tact to perform an autopsy on a live body, but Judis has done his work cleanly, without either breaking any bones or leaving out anything important...

...And this late-blooming mellowness may have added yet another imponderable nudging him to hide his cards, namely a more intense regard for personal loyalty...

...now of course there are scores of them, but even today his imitators never seem to get it quite right (smugness is not enough...

...But if one views him as being at least as much an aesthete as an intellectual, his choice of cause was, to borrow his own words a moment, "insanely felicitous" and, as ever, beautifully timed...

...Never mind how many books he writes celebrating all the things you can do with life besides politics-his friends and his enemies dismiss these books with stern impatience, and demand the Act again, as they might classic Coke...

...And now, of course, he is stuck with them...

...And now, back to Groucho...

...A certain comic pathos ensues in Judis's pages as young Bill brings the family ideal banging against the heads of his new chums: so far so good in the primary grades, where you can barrel right through on hauteur and courage, but strangely painful by midadolescence, when so many things are painful anyway...

...Chambers's influence is more elusive, and probably belongs more properly in a spiritual biography...

...In real life, his unearthly detachment may make him at times an unreliable guide to things like socialism (honestly-who needs it...

...Suppose he does change his mind about, say, Reagan...

...So he began perhaps for the first time to listen to someone besides his father...

...The world is full of major books, but this one, even supposing that Buckley could have written it, would have come at the cost of just too many good sideshows, of a sort that no one else could possibly have staged...

...Upon this self-conscious idyll, this jittery Eden, young Buckley burst like a combination firework and stink bomb, in the grand Irish manner of Wilde or Shaw (and if he seems like an untypical Irishman, so did they...

...In a particularly poignant passage, he once noted that the trouble with the rich was that they weren't as good as they ought to be (or words to that effect), and I remembered thinking, whoever expected them to be...

...But more daring even than this outrageous flirtation with "American boobism" (to use Mencken's old phrase) was his manifest willingness, verging on eagerness, to be hated...

...With such careers as Buckley's or Mailer's, the action may not even be in the main tent anyway: simply sit back and enjoy the circus...

...The controversies on which Buckley feeds are all here, laid out with admirable lucidity and what is more unusual, so is the atmosphere surrounding them...

...The Jesuits had young Bill for a year (1938-9), and as usual probably have a lot to answer for...

...To my mind, the vision implied here of a Daddy Warbucks (or even a Ronald Reagan) world, serene in its benevolence, seems as farfetched as any liberal meliorism: but then Buckley's political philosophy might seem a cold little thing without it...

...Judis's acknowledgments that the subject had offered his complete cooperation to the author, to a stranger, that is, with opposed political views...

...But both would undoubtedly have suffused the major book that Bill never wrote...

...If the old preschool and army brattiness "played" here, he would use it to advance his otherwise very serious beliefs, with an adult's hard-won sense of when to turn it off and charm his way back into favor, and if the crowd wanted Amadeus along with his music (and surely that is what the whole postwar brashness movement, from Brando to Punk Rock, is all about)-well he couldn't quite give them that, but he could give the obnoxiously bright child who asks the obvious questions that everyone has forgotten the answers to...

...Judis records how aptly he put himself to school to the two wise men of the National Review, Chambers (who never quite seemed to land on the magazine, but always hovered), and the foxy James Burnham, exchanging friendship for wisdom back and forth with each in the ancient Greek manner...

...but it also makes him-the virtue that dare not speak its model of personal private generosity for his fellow millionaires to emulate if they ever get round to it...

...And if you found his weird invocations of, say, catechism morality a bit perverse or childish, you were always free to discuss it with him afterward, if you thought you could go three minutes with the Champ...

...So let it be said right off that John B. Judis seems to have done a better job than I would have thought possible at this stage (William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives, Simon and Schuster, $22.95, 528 pp...

...Nobody, one likes to think, could have browbeaten Buckley into sharing that particular world view, or any other, but he could be enticed...

...Before Buckley came along, there was no model for the conservative enfant terrible...

...In the bubbly personal journals that crown Bill's smoking jacket period, he has been accused of enjoying his money just a little too much, but it's my impression that he is barely aware of the stuff...

...I mean those positions were so preposterous...

...If there's one thing about money that he really enjoys it is giving it away...

...Judis stresses the part that circumstance played in the Buckleys' ubiquitous apartness, but in every case, whether as northerners in the South, or as the wrong kind of Catholics in the North (too rich to be Irish, or too Irish to be "accepted," or something), it seems that they actually preferred to stress their differences rather than settle them, as if the differences themselves were some precious source of energy, and nothing to snivel about...

...To put the matter Christianly: if he no longer felt playful about it, and if the faces he was making had turned into real faces, it was time to get out...

...It seems possible that this second side of him might never have developed so satisfactorily if he had gone straight from home to Yale, because at a university an entertainer of his quality can always find admirers, regardless of his likability...

...Buckley is to conservatives roughly what his father, a wildcat oil man, was to the Forbes 500...

...I pick 1968 because that was also the year of his mini-blood bath with Gore Vidal: a curious little replica, staged in an ABC booth, of the hatreds raging outside in the streets during the Democratic Convention that year...

...And Buckley, Sr., rewarded him handsomely with the kind of unreserved approval that might almost make a young man cocky...

...Although offstage a record number of divorces were recorded, you'd never have guessed it from Hollywood, and a ditto of labor strikes, the mass media simply did not register friction...

...I am thinking in particular of President Reagan's recent visit to Moscow which Buckley, unless I missed a column, chose to ignore completely, at least in his Epistles to the Pagans, thus creating a somewhat eerie journalistic vacuum...

...And then-there was the way he said it...

...Aloise Buckley was, it seems, an extremely gemutlich character, endlessly friendly and welcoming, which Bill still is (in fact, he has the personality of a Dickens ending) while father Will was more reserved, ironic, and if it came to it, combative...

...As I recall, he once set out to do some columns on the minor inconveniences of life, and his first one concerned the infernal difficulty of mooring his boat in some country or other...

...For instance, Mr...

...Perhaps as a result of these and similar calculations, Barry Goldwater found himself in 1964 fronting for a conservative movement which had evolved a defiantly bizarre facade all but obscuring a somewhat more solid interior, and he was, of course, hung from the facade...