A Torch Kept Lit Read online

  I don’t remember seeing it myself, but I was told not that it was unsuitable, or unfinished, or unprofessional, but that its meaning was impenetrable. At about that time an associate ten years older reported his (informed) opinion that our intern was going off the deep end. At a collegial staff lunch he once excused himself so abruptly as to provoke the melancholy conclusion that he had needed a quick jolt of whatever drug he was taking. One day he announced that he would be married, and soon brought in an addled flower child dressed as he dressed. One weekend they just faded away. A few years later we received formal invitations to a second marriage, to a South American. He went with his new bride to her country and taught English. In due course he sent us an article submission. It was potentially publishable but needed work, and the managing editor sent it back to him with recommended changes. We did not hear from him again, except after another interval of five years or so, when we learned he had married yet again, this time to a native, and gone off to live in the hills. Question before the house: Is Jerry Garcia in some way responsible for this?

  The issue of Newsweek that put Garcia on the cover quoted in huge type the words of a 21-year-old college student. “It’s a free life when you’re at a show. It’s all about happiness. I’d just take my watch off and want time to stop.” It isn’t easy to rail against anyone who brings happiness, and one has to assume that many, perhaps the majority, of those who heard “shows” by the Grateful Dead achieved their highs without the use of intoxicants. But something unusual accounted for the young Americans, pictures of them reproduced in the days just gone by, exhibiting Dionysiac pleasure in their role as Deadheads. Exuberance finds its forms throughout the world and concentrates its energies on the young. But is the joy unconfined? Ought it to be?

  Jerry Garcia died only a week after leaving the Betty Ford Center. He is quoted as having said two years ago that, really, he needed to do something to restore his health, otherwise he would be dead, like “two years from now.” He went on schedule, and is said to have died with a smile on his face, no doubt because he was a happy man but also because he made so many others happy. But he also killed, if that’s the right word for such as our intern, a lot of people. And although he had a pulsating forum world wide for thirty years and knew from his own experience what his habits were doing to him, he never went public on it, not really. One has to suppose, sadly, that in his case, going public on his problem, extending a truly firm handshake to his legions, would have required the dramatic gesture of retiring from the stage. If he had done so, it would not have been wounding to those of us who were never exposed to Jerry Garcia’s special intoxicant, but, if he had done so, how many would have had better prospects for health, love, and longer lives?

  Vladimir Horowitz was the greatest pianist of the twentieth century. Born in Kiev, he debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1928, demonstrating a thunderous virtuosity, particularly in the Romantic repertoire, that excited audiences around the world and made him one of the best-selling recording artists in the history of classical music. Reportedly a closeted homosexual—which he denied—Horowitz married Wanda Toscanini, daughter of the world-renowned Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini; their lone child, a daughter, died from a drug overdose at age forty-one. Notoriously volatile and difficult, a reported recipient of electroshock therapy, Horowitz punctuated his six decades on the world stage with numerous retirements, retreats, and cancellations, but he returned to form in his eighties, when he recaptured critical acclaim, and the top spot on the classical music charts, with a series of performances in his native Soviet Union, which at that time was experiencing glasnost under Gorbachev. WFB’s eulogy displays his love of classical music, his incurable “worship” of his idols, and his deft comedic gifts, including his ear for foreign accents.

  “Vladimir Horowitz, R.I.P.”

  Syndicated column, November 9, 1989; published in National Review, December 22, 1989.

  Everybody knows that Vladimir Horowitz was (a) a great musician, and (b) a temperamental human being. He was different from his father-in-law Arturo Toscanini (I gather; I did not know Toscanini, though I worshiped him) in that he could be surprisingly affable, even unpredictably so. I met him under the most unexpected circumstances: on the Eastern Shuttle coming up from Washington 15 years ago. He came over and introduced himself and his wife, smiles lighting up the whole of his volatile countenance.

  For a while we were friends. I remember especially an evening at his home in Connecticut when another guest and I conspired (ahead of time, over the telephone) to devise ways to bring him to the keyboard. I mean, why have supper with perhaps the greatest pianist in the world and not get him to play for you?

  What, I asked him, would be his program the following month, when he would appear at the Metropolitan Opera House as the first one-man performer in the history of the house? Well, he said, maybe begin with something by Scarlatti. Then perhaps a sonata by Clementi—I grabbed my cue and gave the eye to my coconspirator.

  “Clementi? You are going to waste your time with Clementi?”

  “Why Clementi?” my friend, his brows furrowed, chimed in provocatively.

  We earned the national actors award, because if we had rehearsed it, it could not have gone better:

  Vladimir Horowitz rose. His voice and countenance were now grave. “You doan lahk Clementi? Clementi wass a JEE-nee-us! Clementi is as goot as the middle Beethoven!”

  “Come on,” I said condescendingly, pushing my luck.

  And he marched to the piano, lifted the lid—and we heard not only Clementi, but the entire, historic two-hour concert he would give two weeks later. He and his wife were redoing the living room in their country house at the time and there was a third guest, their interior decorator, who during an interval while our host was walking his cat and our hostess was off in the kitchen somewhere, confided to us in whispers the great happening of the week before, when the local Italian curtain-maker had come in to quote the cost of the new set of curtains. “It will come to $278,” he said to the decorator. Pause. “Or—for nothing! If Mr. Horowitz will play next Sunday for me and my wife.”

  This was on the order of suggesting in the presence of Cleopatra that, rather than pay to repair her gondola, she might extend her favors to the shipwright. Horowitz froze, and there was a moment of most awful tension. Horowitz then stood up, bowed his head slightly, and said: “I would be honored to play for you and your wife on Sunday.” This was noblesse oblige in marble. It would be either that—Horowitz would accept the alternative—or else Horowitz would pull out a shotgun and end two careers, one musical, the other having to do with curtains.

  He was also a man of considerable polemical shrewdness. Mike Wallace and his cameras were at Horowitz’s New York apartment doing a 60 Minutes segment and Wallace graveled out in his interrogatory-accusatory voice, “Is it true that for 13 years you stayed here without going out?” Horowitz looked at Mike Wallace, the disappointment of a child on his face. “Vot? Vot you mean? You doan like my room here?” The camera did a little tour of the comfortable living room. “Vot you doan like about my room?”

  Poor Mike. What can you say to someone who suggests that questioning his self-enclosure in an apartment for 13 years is the equivalent of finding his living room unattractive?

  Ah, but the time came when the Maestro wrote me off, wrote me off without a cent. The circumstances were: Another invitation by Horowitz to dinner, which we accepted. After dinner, the Great Man disappeared, to walk his cat or whatever. It had been a most awfully long day, and after a half-hour or so, I beckoned to my wife, rose, and bade goodnight to Mrs. Horowitz, who was clearly startled at guests leaving before they were invited to do so. He was a stickler for decorum. Once he showed me a letter from the first lady, the first sentence of which had shocked him. “Jimmy and I are so pleased that you are coming to play for us at the White House on….” The date followed, and the time. “Imagine! She sess ‘Jee-mee’ when she mean zee pressident off the United States! And she says
nothink—NOTHINK!—about Wanda comink with me to the White House!” I clucked my grave Republican shock at Jacksonian manners.

  I never heard from him (or her) again. He was a very great musician, and as long as music is bought and sold, presidents of the United States and curtain-hangers in Ridgefield, Conn., will ask for “the Horowitz recording.”

  In the young WFB’s eyes, Russell Kirk was an idol, a famous man approached with trepidation; in his seventies, WFB looked upon Kirk as the “neglected prince of conservative thought.” With his publication of The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (1953), Kirk presented the scholarly tablets of modern conservatism: an academically rigorous work, acclaimed across the ideological spectrum, that rooted conservatism in Enlightenment traditions and linked it to some of America’s most revered figures. At WFB’s invitation—an event recounted with cinematic hilarity in the eulogy below—Kirk recruited to write a column for National Review, commencing with the inaugural issue in 1955 and ending with the magazine’s silver anniversary. Along the way and beyond, Kirk published several dozen learned works of social history (The Roots of American Order [1974]), biography (Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered [1967]), and literary criticism (Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century [1971]) while also indulging a sweet tooth for fiction and ghost stories. Short, burly, balding, and bespectacled, Kirk made an unlikely Moses and was given to acts of heresy (e.g., voting for Gene McCarthy). Rancor between him and another founding figure of NR, Frank Meyer, who negatively reviewed one of Kirk’s books, was mitigated by the fact that neither reported to the magazine’s New York office, with Kirk remaining in his native Michigan, yet the friction was felt sufficiently for WFB to lament that “one-half of such diplomatic talents as I dispose of were regularly exhausted in editing a magazine that regularly published Frank Meyer and Russell Kirk.” It was a price worth paying. “Russell,” WFB declared in 1980, “I considered indispensable to the health and prestige of National Review, and his name is indissolubly linked to the journal.”

  “Russell Kirk, RIP”

  National Review, May 30, 1994.

  In the next issue of National Review we will pay appropriate tribute to a figure whose death on April 29 left the conservative community desolate. He was omnipresent, coming at us from every direction. He wrote a seminal book and, for many years, a syndicated column. He lectured, gave speeches, wrote ghost stories and histories, and edited anthologies. Through it all he maintained a special presence as ever so faintly bohemian, the orthodox husband of a beautiful wife, father of four daughters, obdurately professorial in demeanor, yet those who noticed never needed to wait too long before catching the wink, in what he said, and did.

  Much of all this in the issue to come, so that here, we pause merely to remark his loss, reach out our hands to one another, expressing our shared grief.

  Our own association with him—and I clutch in here to the personal mode—is older than the life of National Review. I had of course read his important book, but I had not met Russell Kirk. The publication of National Review was now anticipated, to begin about a year later, and the time had come to meet him.

  It was in the fall of 1954; I made the date, and flew to Michigan. I had a single objective, and I greatly feared that I would fail in it. I desired that Professor Kirk would consent, beginning with the opening issue, to contribute a regular column to National Review on doings in the academic world.

  I confess I was very nervous. Although Russell was only a few years older, at 28 I felt that an entire world lay between us, the wide gulf between his learning, and my own. He was then a bachelor, and shortly after I arrived to stay as a guest at his house, Piety Hill, he took me to dinner at a neighborhood restaurant, where he promptly ordered two Tom Collinses. Emboldened by that warm aloofness which was his trademark, I put it to him directly, and his reply was instantaneous: Yes, he would write a regular column for my prospective magazine.

  I was so elated by his spontaneous and generous willingness to associate his august name with that of a wizened ex-schoolboy known mostly for an iconoclastic screed directed at his alma mater, that I took to ordering more Tom Collinses, but in every case, one for each of us. The evening proceeded toward a pitch of such hilarity that, at midnight, I was barely able to drive the car back to Russell’s house. On arriving, he led me to my bedroom, bade me goodnight only one second before I collapsed into my bed, to rise seven hours later and bump into Russell Kirk—only then emerging from his study. He had, in the interval since dinner, written a chapter of his history of St. Andrews University, and would catch a little sleep after he served me breakfast.

  In the ensuing 25 years he never missed a deadline. At his wedding to the woman his readers resigned themselves finally to acknowledging as “the beauteous Annette,” I thought that possibly the most useful gift I might give him would be a honeymoon’s-length moratorium from his column, since he was off to Scotland. I stammered out the proposal to him moments before he ascended to the altar. He acknowledged it by reaching into the pocket of his morning coat and presenting me with—four columns. Perfectly typed. Perfectly edited. Perfectly executed. Not many had more direct, week-by-week knowledge of the extraordinary professionalism of Russell Kirk, which matched that of Samuel Johnson and G. K. Chesterton.

  He served us notice, a few months before our 25th anniversary in 1980, that he would discontinue his column at that point. He gave no reason for doing so, and questions weren’t asked. A. J. Nock had recalled that Thoreau abandoned his pencil factory after he had achieved the exemplary pencil. What was there left to do?

  In the ensuing 14 years Russell Kirk wrote many books and a hundred essays, gave a thousand speeches, and influenced the lives of another half-generation. His last day, he rose, breakfasted, sat down in his armchair, exchanged words with his wife and two of his daughters, closed his eyes, and died. Few have repaid their debt to their family, their country, and their faith so extravagantly. —WFB

  In the quasi-religious movement that was Beatlemania, WFB was an apostate. It wasn’t, he pleaded, that he hated rock ’n’ roll: “When Elvis Presley came along I was consigned to hopeless vulgarity by my discerning friends for suggesting that he was, somehow, worth listening to.” With the Beatles, however, Buckley drew a line—one of his sharpest. “The Beatles are not merely awful,” he declared in a September 1964 column titled “Yeah Yeah Yeah, They Stink”:

  I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic, even as the imposter popes went down in history as “antipopes.”

  That column drew more than 500 letters of protest—“a hundred times as many” as anything else WFB wrote—and is still routinely quoted as a jewel of early philistinism about the band. When John Lennon generated a firestorm by saying the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” WFB chastised Lennon for his “coarse ejaculation” and “nonmusic”—but otherwise agreed that the Beatles’ founder had spoken “the plain truth.”

  The reaction appears to be based on the assumption that Mr. Lennon was comparing not the relative popularity of himself and Jesus, but their related virtues. And this is of course to miscomprehend what Mr. Lennon said, which was certainly untactful, and indubitably accurate….The Beatles…are, however inadvertently, self-anointed substitutes for rather more meaningful objects of adulation.

  Seeing the Beatles retreat to Rishikesh to meditate with the Maharishi, WFB, from London, quipped that the youth of the sixties “will go anywhere to experience spirituality—except next door.” Yet that year also marked one of the greatest reversals in Buckley’s career. “I mean, how can one prevail against them?” WFB wrote in a column titled “How I Came to Rock.” “The answer is: One cannot. And even if they are hard to listen to, there is an exuberance there that is quite unmatched anywhere else in the world.”
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  After Lennon’s murder, Buckley protested his deification. Yoko Ono’s request that the world mark the tenth anniversary of the grim event by singing “Imagine” led to a WFB column dissecting, and rejecting, the song’s lyrics, which envisioned a world without religion, borders, or possessions (“No, thanks, I don’t want to imagine a world in which Yoko doesn’t possess the goods that John left her”). But in December 1980, when a deranged fan leaped from the shadows of the Dakota building and pumped five bullets into Lennon’s body, with Yoko looking on in horror, and the world responded with displays of grief redolent of the Kennedy assassination, WFB set aside his philosophical disagreements.

  “John Lennon”

  Syndicated column, December 18, 1980.

  My son (age 28) said to me the day after, “Imagine how you would have felt if Arturo Toscanini had been killed?” He didn’t have to say more, having fingered my own boyhood hero. I can’t clearly remember whether, in the ’30s, Toscanini was exactly a cult figure. But he was a formidable presence—charismatic, an acknowledged genius, above all a perfectionist. He liked Broadway music.

  My guess is that he would not have been taken by the Beatles; and the general disorder of the Beatles’ audience would not have been tolerated by the conductor who, when he played his famous series for NBC, requested that the programs be made out of silk, lest he be distracted by the noise of paper-flutter. When Toscanini died he was mourned, and they played Verdi’s Requiem and broadcast it. But he was old, and Lennon was young; and Toscanini died of a conventional old man’s disease, and Lennon died of a bullet wound.