An aesthete of controversy. Who was William F. Buckley?

The new Tanenhaus biography

One cannot understand William F. Buckley Jr. without watching him on television. So much of his performance was audible, physical, flickering. He stretched and moved like a grasshopper, now lounging, now alert. His long body folded and unfolded as his questions obtained their purchase on the guest. At the start, he was still, just for a second, so the show began almost with a startlement as he rose into the introduction. His eyes were often dipped, until his eyelids pulled up like a moment of alarm, the whites suddenly shining out; sometimes this was combined with broad amusement in his face. In the little pauses of his speech (between the acceleration of unexpected phrases which are almost swallowed with the slur of an English aristocrat, without ever losing his not-quite-Southern drawl) his tongue flicks, wiper-like, behind his teeth. Sometimes, like Kenneth Clark (capitalism) he stressed unusual parts of a word (upbringing, with a small additional stress on the “ing”, all of it said rather more swiftly than is normal).

Most striking of all, perhaps, about the man who not only led but is often credited with creating (one part of) the modern conservative movement—the man who took decades to ameliorate his views on racial matters away from his old Southern prejudices, who disdained all sex outside marriage, who was writing columns in the 1980s proposing, in very sincere and unSwift-like terms, that gay men with AIDS should be tattooed—is that he took drugs. When marijuana was being widely discussed, he sailed into international waters to try it. He once took LSD and went to see a sex film, but, under the influence of a martini, he fell asleep. And so, this complicated man, who wished both to stop the world but also to see it all, would have such exchanges as this, from the opening of his interview with Allen Ginsberg.

Buckley: I should like to begin by asking Mr. Ginsberg whether he considers that the hippies are an intimation of the new order.

Ginsberg. Hm. New order. Hoping it will be orderly and gentle, yes. Hippies is kind of a stereotype—

Buckley: Yeeaah (low drawl)

Ginsberg: —generally a newspaper stereotype. So that it’s hard to generalise, except to the extent that what is called the hippie movement involves what is called an alternation of consciousness towards some greater awareness and greater individuality, which you might even sympathise with—

Buckley: Yeeaah (low drawl)

Buckley was something of a chameleon, able to talk amiably with Ginsberg about “censoring” swear words on the television (“you can overcome this with the process of love, can’t you… you love is in part a consideration… and therefore if it would be offensive to some people to hear those words spoken then you would presumably—uh,uh—assume the burden) and to pose the same argument to Groucho Marx in reverse, asking him whether racial jokes ought not to be acceptable.

So much of Buckley’s handling of himself and his guests was visual: as the exchange with Ginsberg goes on, he opens his whole face into a bright creased toothy smile and lets it fall closed up and frowning, cupped in his hand, fingers closed over his mouth as he blinks bewildered. He was a thoroughly parliamentary performer, akin to Benjamin Disraeli leisurely removing a handkerchief and dabbing his face, slowly raising his monocle to check the clock, while his opponent spoke. So it was that Buckley sat back, calm, inquiring, and Ginsberg sat forward, darkly attending. Buckley then neatly summarises Ginsberg’s position after some ten minutes of discussion, but he does so swiftly. The audience is allowed into the conversation, but it is not quite performed for them. There are many jokes. Some of them good natured, some of them hinting at homophobic attitudes. Sometimes when Buckley’s eyes open up he looks not joyful but almost glaring. Watch this section for a minute or so and see how he banters and parries.

He can boast to Ginsberg that he has read everything, before admitting to not having read a series of authors, and he can listen to Mailer tell him Mailer’s opposition to Communism is more serious than Buckley’s because Mailer actually knows something about it—and he doesn’t wince or contradict, he just continues. Not only would no-one of Buckley’s political persuasion be able to conduct such interviews today (Tucker Carlson and Allen Ginsberg?), they would lack the natural charisma to sit with their hands folded atop their head, or to let themselves loll heavily while Norman Mailer incanted.

Buckley simply cannot be known without video.

This is the great weakness of Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus. Not only is it trapped on paper, while its subject is iridescently available on YouTube, but it makes too little attempt to really express the vital oddness and flexibility of Buckley’s presence. It lacks a sense of person. After more than eight hundred pages, one comes away feeling like the details of the period and the movement and the culture and of what Buckley did were all splendidly and readably established, without feeling like the main injunction under which the biographer works has been heeded: show me the man.

How was it that Buckley managed to persuade so many prominent writers to contribute to the first issue of National Review? We know, in broad terms, that he was charismatic and charming and articulate about the conservative movement he was trying to inspire. But: “I am a rotten salesman,” Buckley said. Well then—how did it happen? When he took those drugs, was there no more information than could fill one short paragraph? Perhaps Tanenhaus was hampered by a lack of material, a lack in the files of what Virginia Woolf called “the fertile fact; the creative fact”. There is no great description of what Buckley was like as a skier, though we know he was a good and enthusiastic one. There are some bon mots, but the book lacks Buckley’s rapidity, his play, his flair.

Tanenhaus has been thorough. He has written what should more properly be called a “Life and Times”, and has given a great account of the American right in the twentieth century. A huge amount of context is presented incredibly well in his pages. Tyler Cowen says you can read this book to learn the history of the American twentieth century right wing. Very true. But where is the personality? I wanted Tanenhaus to do more to make us feel what it was like to be in the presence of a man who is simultaneously famous for being both uptight and idiosyncratic, an unbending man of the old order who was widely assumed to be gay by homosexuals who watched him on television—the Catholic moralist who took LSD.

Tanenhaus has the biographer’s art of knifing his subject politely, so that Buckley’s slow reading, idle and unscholarly habits, and retrograde views, are made clear without the book becoming a torment. Tanenhaus keeps the difficult balance of praising Buckley’s good qualities and describing his weak qualities.

In one place Buckley wrote, “Is not the whole of the Liberal ideology agglutinated by semantical raids on substantive ideals?” “I had to read this several times before I was sure exactly what you meant,” Horne reported to Buckley… Bill didn’t quite know either, or he would have found a better way to say it.

Often the anecdotes provide a fuller sense of Buckley. He was one of the only people to write a bad review of a bad novel called By Love Possessed, which was inexplicably praised by many others. “In later years, Buckley’s disappointed friends and admirers would speak, in almost mythic terms, of the “big book” he was supposed to write.” His book Up From Liberalism took its title from Booker T. Washington with no acknowledgment or explanation. When he wasn’t working, he sometimes seemed bored by politics. He was a great admirer of Boris Pasternak. Even such a small collection as this shows you how ungraspable and eclectic Buckley is.

Sometimes, Tanenhaus has a killer phrase. Buckley was “an aesthete of controversy rather than a theorist”. He paid almost “predatory attention” to guests on Firing Line. Some passages stand out as illuminating Buckley’s life, such as his friendships with authors like Mailer, Styron, and Capote, or the way he had to sit down, sobbing, half way through a speech at a family gathering because of the way his sister’s life had gone so badly wrong. But there is too little time for these aspects of Buckley to be fully developed. I would read much more about those literary friendships, perhaps a short book. But Tanenhaus’s aim was to write a history of the movement Buckley created, more than a deep character portrait. These sections, often a page or two long, are arresting. This, after all, is real life. They make a great contrast with the explications of Watergate. Though it should be said that Buckley’s marginal involvement in Watergate is indeed fascinating.

Tanenhaus handles Buckley’s absurd defence of a sex-maniac murderer very well, showing us the great mystery of this man all the more clearly. And the long section about the infamous incident when Buckley called Gore Vidal a “queer” live on television is among the most interesting in the book when it comes to trying to understand Buckley’s personality. Suddenly, the contradictions and problems are shown from many angles. Tanenhaus stops narrating the movement and starts unfolding the unfathomable Buckley.

It is when the book gets away from politics, per se, and into these more cultural questions that Buckley is most alive on the page. Buckley wrote best-selling thrillers which were composed in a few weeks, something he liked to ham up. When a journalist asked how long it took him to write the novels, in the presence of his wife, the response went like this.

“Five or six weeks.”
“Ducky, you do not”” cried Pat.
“Well, Ducky, I’m not going to pretend I spend 100 weeks on them when I don’t… Johnson wrote Rasselas in nine days. I’m fast but I’m by no means world-class.”

In that little joke is the whole nub of Buckley’s talent. Fast but by no means world-class. Able to make a joke out of it. Brilliant, but having, as Johnson said of Pope, the felicity to rate himself at his real value. Other than the opening manifesto for National Review (standing athwart the world yelling stop) and his famous comment that “I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2000 people on the faculty of Harvard University” Buckley may not have written anything that will be remembered. Those phrases alone are enough to make him memorable, of course, but the curious thing about this man who is supposed to have created the modern conservative movement is that he lacked intellect, he lacks quotable phrases. Kenneth Galbraith told him to quit journalism and become an academic. More absurd advice cannot be imagined. Buckley did it all as a force, a charisma, a presence, a flow. He was expert at knowing what information to emphasise and what to ignore, in order to create the whole mood of the new conservative movement that aimed to preserve the old conservative order. He was visibly, tonally, a man of God, Communism, and the free market; he was also the man who made racist remarks during a debate with James Baldwin and entertained ideas of Black separatism, and who, when running for Mayor of New York in 1965, endorsed affirmative action—yet in 1957 he wrote “Why the South Must Prevail”, a vision of white superiority. He embodied the conservative struggle to come to terms with the new world of the twentieth century. What matters most about his mind are its twists and turns, its acceptances and compromises. He forced his part of the conservative movement to disavow their old prejudices, and distanced National Review from the anti-Semitic parts of the right. He didn’t, actually, keep yelling stop athwart the world. He changed his mind. That is what mattered most about him. On that subject, Tanenhaus does a splendid job.

Tanenhaus’s careful method means that Buckley often gives himself away, as in that anecdote, without Tanenhaus having to do it for him. It also allows Tanenhaus to catalogue Buckley’s real skills—hiring all the best writing talent (including the young Joan Didion), persuading investors, cultivating an unforgettable public speaking style, simply being the main energy around his movement, travelling and meeting people, writing in haste without quite seeming like a bullshitter. This book is a wonderful product of research, chronology, and accumulation. It is well written, thorough, interesting to the end. It focusses on the rise of Buckley more than reiterating his glory days under Reagan for too long. And in all of those choices, Tanenhaus shows us that Buckley was a representative of his movement. It is quite an accomplishment to write such a credible and thoughtful book about a subject who lacked major ideas of his own.

Still, I feel like I know a lot more about what Buckley did, but not how he did it, not what it really was that made him such a dynamo. Perhaps no book can ever hope to capture that about such a man. Perhaps the old-fashioned structure of this biography—revelation of the familial and cultural mores that raised Buckley (domineering bully of a father, anti-Semitism, lots of siblings, many of whom lived somewhat sad lives), birth to death narrative, context and quotations to show how his views evolved, close adherence to public facts, and so on and so forth (imagine those last six words slipping out in one sinking breath in Buckley’s drawl) — is the best explanation we are going to get of William F. Buckley Jr.

But now that we have a first rate volume that documents Buckley, there must be room for another book, one that tries to imagine him, to conjure up something of his peculiar charms, to present in illustrious compression the camp menace, the literary proclivity, the rapid not-quite-shallow talent, the fact that what drove his movement was almost entirely his personality. He entertained his way to being the obvious leader of the movement that enabled Ronald Reagan to win the Presidency (despite writing a column that Reagan should drop out of the primaries in 1976). That essential fact still retains some of its essential mystery. Maybe Buckley simply was what he was: a performer, a pragmatist, enough of a protean figure to keep shape shifting so that his movement could find its place in the world without thinking it had given up the essential conservative mission. If so, Tanenhaus has given us a full picture.