Write Like Bill
NORDLINGER, JAY
Write Like Bill William F. Buckley, Jr., on Language—Finally! By Jay Nordlinger Once, a reader wrote a wild letter to William E Buckley, Jr., condemning him for all manner of failure, not...
...Some have accused you of grave-robbing," she said...
...Buckley answered tersely: "If you had my syntax, you'd be rich...
...The Wunderkind/Old Man has not lost it, and Buckley: The Right Word is invested with all his hard-won authority...
...Buckley is generous in matters of language, as in others...
...and he is the author of almost 40 books, 11 of them novels...
...It is also his alone...
...has had much to say about language, and certain of his admirers had hoped that, in the twilight of his career, he might find a week or two to produce his Fowler's...
...and on the large ones (What gives English its unequaled expressive power...
...Vaughan has mined the Buckley ceuvre for writings and statements that bear on language, and placed them between hard covers, giving us as vibrant and useful a manual as one that Buckley could have written from scratch...
...Particularly entertaining, and instructive, is a lengthy exchange between Buckley and the critic Hugh Kenner on the following Buckley sentence: Robert F. Kennedy had a way of saying things loosely, and it may be that that is among the reasons why so many people invested so much idealism in him, it being in the idealistic (as distinguished from the analytical) mode to make large and good-sounding generalities, like the generality he spoke on April 5 after the assassination of Martin Luther King, two months exactly before his own assassination...
...In an age of literary homogenization, Buckley is instantly recognizable...
...Hence the hyperbolic flourishes that make otherwise common observations sing...
...Now someone has gone and done it for him...
...In an essay for The American Heritage Dictionary on whether we should defer to our linguistic betters, he writes, "It is not a sign of arrogance for the king to rule...
...That is what he is there for...
...Who else would begin a column, "If you're looking for a handy way to curb the population explosion, try the death penalty for anybody who asks, 'Do the ends justify the means?'" Who else would observe that, when a dull statesman addresses a gathering, "all the birdies stay perched on the trees...
...Years ago on the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, Charlayne Hunter-Gault questioned Buckley about his recent trip in a submersible to the site of the Titanic...
...His second-greatest fear must be that he will bore his readers...
...You glance at a single sentence—a clause, even—and you know that it is Buckley...
...By Jay Nordlinger Once, a reader wrote a wild letter to William E Buckley, Jr., condemning him for all manner of failure, not excluding "lousy syntax...
...Along the way, he Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of The Weekly Standard...
...In Buckley's view, you can write low or you can write high, but you must always write appropriately...
...And even a man known and mocked for an exotic vocabulary finds occasion to write, "We must cut the crap...
...It includes piquant examples of Buckley's speeches, columns, interviews, and correspondence...
...Now, I, personally, would usually rather slit my throat than read about cigars, but so glittering is this essay that I had no choice but to xerox it, to keep as an example of what "the performing writer" (Buckley's words) can do...
...He edited the magazine he founded, National Review, for 35 years...
...For a demonstration of Buckley in stylistic splendor, I invite readers to locate the November 25, 1996, issue of National Review, in which Buckley has a piece on cigars...
...Precision, too, is a holy aim, for words should be counted on to mean tomorrow what they meant yesterday, and communication ought to be less difficult than it is...
...Buckley, now just past 70, has spent a lifetime with words...
...Buckley: The Right Word is the brainchild of Samuel S. Vaughan, Buckley's longtime editor at Double-day...
...The pages of his magazine are "sacred glades...
...he has written a syndicated column since 1962...
...The sentence is not Buckley's best, but he defends it unyieldingly, assuring Kenner that he would not put him "to such inconvenience merely for my own amusement...
...Buckley has often said that his greatest fear in life is that he will be bored...
...The book offers chapters on such subjects as usage, vocabulary, letter-writing, fiction, reviews, and eulogies (a Buckley specialty...
...Buckley himself is rich, and not only because of family money: His syntax is a wonder...
...With an expression both patient and pained, Buckley blinked, pursed his lips, and responded: "Because it's not robbing graves...
...Garry Wills may regard Lillian Hellman as America's foremost woman playwright, but isn't that "on the order of celebrating the tallest building in Wichita, Kansas...
...Why isn't what you did grave-robbing...
...Philistines are not simply philistines, they "speak out from the depths of Philistia...
...And what leads to appropriateness...
...It is engaging on the small questions (Who or whom...
...Who else would write that something is "as well known as that Coca-Cola is the pause that refreshes...
...Ear, chiefly— taste—so that if Buckley writes "irenic" instead of "peaceful," it is not because he wants to show off but because he "desire[s] the extra syllable...
...In a remembrance of New Yorker editor William Shawn, he smarts at Shawn's criticism of his (idiosyncratic) use of the comma, saying, "If Saint Peter had declared me unfit to enter the Kingdom of God, I could not have felt more searingly the reproach . . ." Buckley counsels conservatism in language, but he is far from a fogey: Flexibility within reasonable rules is what gives his prose its musi-cality and range...
...Long live the king...
Vol. 2 • February 1997 • No. 23
