Next time you reflect on the universality of human heartache, reflect also on the life of William F. Buckley Jr. Here was a man who had everything one could desire: money, friendship, fame, wit, talent, distinction, a beautiful and devoted wife, an extraordinary son. Everything he touched turned to gold. Was he happy? Yes, absolutely, he was. As far as I could tell, he did not understand disappointment, much less experience it. Even after he lost his wife, his health, and his will to remain on Earth, he faced death as he had lived life, namely, without regret.
Some may dismiss Buckley’s serenity as a pose, just another aspect of a carefully crafted persona. I personally doubt that a man’s authentic self can be separated from the character he presents to world. Nevertheless, there is some truth in what they say. The world Buckley created was not the real world; it was instead something magical. He had, of course, the sailboats, the limousines, the sojourns in Gstaad, the Lenox Hill maisonette, the view of the Long Island sound, the famous friends, the television program, the celebrated books. None of these things made Buckley so perfect and convincing a gentleman. He wore his striped tie and blazer as shabbily as a Van Renssalaer. He practiced his religion as naturally as others brush their teeth. He spent money on himself and his friends without pausing long enough even to appear profligate. Where did it all come from and who managed it for him? One could never tell. As a wedding gift, Bill and Pat threw us a dinner with a half dozen of our friends; in the midst of dessert, the Yale Whiffenpoofs arrived to sing us good night. The Yale Whiffenpoofs! To us that was an entertainment fit only for kings. Buckley virtually personified sprezzatura—why, even that celebrated notion fails to capture how effortlessly he conceived le mot juste for every occasion. In gazing at photographs of Buckley, it almost becomes possible to believe that moderate Christian gentlemen such as he still helm the ship of civilization.
That magic is gone now. The service yesterday at St. Patrick’s had many fine moments, including a moving eulogy from Henry Kissinger and a splendid performance of Albonini’s Adagio. At the same time, it laid bare how much less interesting a place the world is without Buckley. The priests, leaving the high altar vacant, faced the congregation throughout the eucharist, standing in a semi-circle like aimless druids, muttering light-happiness-and-peace banalities. Would Buckley have approved? I doubt it. Probably his family had no other choice in the matter; the Roman church may or may not have the keys to heaven, but it is determined to act as if it does not. Worse, the priest who delivered the homily chose the occasion to interpret Buckley’s politics. The priest’s theory—that Buckley’s opinions derived from his belief in the need to confront evil—was both implausible and invidious. Buckley spent his whole life being famous for his politics. How wearying it must have been for him; how wearying it is now to hear partisans interpret his beliefs.
The Buckley I knew didn’t care much about politics at all. Those who revere him as a hero or despise him as an enemy have a lot more passion for his politics than he did. His mind was a paradox. On the one hand, he grasped arguments so quickly that he had interlocutors outmaneuvered before they had even finished speaking. Buckley’s one failure in decorum was that he could not hide his boredom. If you were brilliant, that was helpful. If you were buffoonish teller of anecdotes, that was helpful too. He was grateful to anybody who could keep him entertained.
At the same time, Buckley seemed never to concentrate on anything. As everybody knows, he wrote his columns in a matter in minutes, his books in a matter of weeks. He was the furthest thing from a theorist, a scholar, an ideologist or a systematizer. Bill just didn’t have the patience for that sort of thing. Richard Posner—another prolific American—aptly describes him as a bricoleur— “a person who collects information and things and then puts them together in a way that they were not originally designed to do.” Critics have faulted Buckley for not arranging his opinions into a superficially coherent whole. To say that he did not is to say no more than that Buckley was not an ideologue.
Buckley’s impatience had its cost. The summer of his fame was bright indeed, but it is also destined to fade. He leaves no single work of lasting merit. His first and still best known book, God at Man at Yale, displays none of the qualities that later made Buckley famous. A more or less careful report on the decline of Christianity and the rise of leftish economics at Yale, today it is only of historical interest. (You mean people used to argue that Yale should remain a Christian university? Wow! How interesting!) To appreciate Buckley’s genius, you had to see him speak. His written words, as marvelous as they are plentiful, are not enough.
Nor do I think that Buckley reflected much on the future of the movement he founded and to which so many remain so devoted. The net result of his divesting himself of control of National Review was to turn over ownership of the magazine to its employees. Today, Rich Lowry is the editor-owner of National Review to nearly the same extent that Buckley himself was. Lowry is by no means an untalented journalist. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that anybody would have chosen him as the man to control NR for the next fifty years. This result could have been avoided, if Buckley had cared enough to prevent it. As far as I could tell, however, he did not know enough about NR even to begin to have any influence. His ignorance of the affairs of his own magazine at times astonished me. Although Bill congratulated me on my criticisms of movement conservatism and spoke candidly of its failings, its future simply did not concern him.
Buckley now rests with his wife Pat in Sharon, Connecticut. Although he will be remembered for his politics, he will also be remembered, with greater justice, as an American original, a character as colorful as Benjamin Franklin or Mark Twain. If his life in heaven is as sweet as it was on earth, he is blessed indeed.
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