A Torch Kept Lit Read online

  Why was the grief so intense? Those of us who mourned his death without any marked sense of privation (i.e., those of us who did not feel the call of his music or of his words, did not purchase his albums, nor looked to him for sumptuary or moral guidance) mourned for two reasons. The first and obvious being that his killing was one of those grotesqueries so common in this century, about which we can only say in defense of ourselves that we have not quite got used to them, though this year alone, we have suffered Allard Lowenstein, Sarai Ribicoff, and Michael Halberstam. Beyond this, our grief is derivative. It is saddening to experience so deep a sadness in others. It isn’t very often that people gather together in Central Park in order to weep. And one wonders whether it is even seemly to ask exactly what it was that caused that special bereavement.

  I have a notion about this, and it is based on an entire half day devoted in the winter of 1973 [sic; 1971] to reading a two-part profile on John Lennon published in Rolling Stone. I cannot remember a worse reading experience. In 1971 John Lennon was a convinced egomaniac (his word). He could not utter a sentence without obscenity. His animadversions on his old companions, in particular Paul McCartney, were quite simply unpleasant (Paul was jealous of him, the Beatles’ music was arid and formalistic). His autobiography was right out of Olympia Press: he had been stoned “thousands of times.” His sex orgies had cloyed. The fakir in India to whom he had committed himself turned out to be a commercial old lecher. Everyone was jealous of him. Yoko Ono’s least song was better than the best of the Beatles. At the time, I wrote, “Lennon is greatly talented as a musician. As a philosopher, he is as interesting as Jelly Roll Morton, less so, as a matter of fact. He is interesting only to an anthologist of pieces on ‘How I Wrecked My Own Life and Can Help Wreck Yours.’ ”

  But there followed, not long after, the five years of seclusion. He is said to have spent most of the time with his wife and son. And, unless I am deluded by the pervasive sadness, he achieved something of a nobility of feature. The pictures of him showed: gravitas. No one’s face had more aspects than John Lennon’s. He was the mischievous, theatrical, erotic, iconoclastic playboy.

  Then suddenly he seemed to walk tall. And it was in this posture that he was shot down. And perhaps his own experiences—with drugs, with joyless sex, with enervating solipsism—shrived him, and the generation that turned out to weep for him experienced something of that spiritual emancipation that comes to people who come to see things philosophically. They find this (I take their word for it) in his music and in his lyrics. And they found it in him, for reasons no one at Central Park interviewed by the ubiquitous cameras could quite explain, for the best of reasons, namely that it was unexplainable; is unexplainable, but the grief was real.

  Norman Mailer was one of the most celebrated and vilified writers of the twentieth century. Although he was acclaimed as a novelist, two of his nonfiction works—Armies of the Night (1968), about the Vietnam War, and The Executioner’s Song (1980), about the life and death of a convicted murderer—won the Pulitzer Prize. Brilliant, reckless, and pugnacious—literally: he liked to box and fight and stabbed the second of his six wives—the far-left Mailer made an unlikely friend to WFB. Yet they were friends, starting with a sold-out debate at the Medinah Temple in Chicago in September 1962 before a crowd of 4,000 people. In his opening statement, Buckley declared: “I do not know of anyone whose dismay I personally covet more; because it is clear from reading the works of Mr. Mailer that only demonstrations of human swinishness are truly pleasing to him….Pleasant people, like those of us on the right wing, drive him mad, and leech his genius.” Influenced by WFB’s 1965 run for mayor of New York City, Mailer followed suit four years later. He appeared on Firing Line three times, first in May 1968 to promote Armies, which Buckley called “an extremely interesting and enjoyable book, if that’s the right word for it.” “I wish someone on the right wing would write a book that would be as good,” Mailer replied, “because it would be a great help to us on the Left.” “You wouldn’t notice it if it were written,” WFB shot back. When the historian Kevin M. Schultz published Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties (2015), many critics—this one included—contended that WFB would not have regarded his friendship with Mailer as definitive either in WFB’s own life or in the upheavals of the sixties; however, it is true that WFB, writing near the end of his life, devoted a large effort—more than 1,200 words—to Mailer’s eulogy, noting at the outset that their dealings, years earlier, had been “extensive” and characterizing his departed friend as “a towering figure in American literary life.”

  “Norman Mailer, R.I.P.”

  National Review, December 3, 2007.

  In conversation with the book editor of National Review the subject of Norman Mailer of course came up. Passing by the event (he had died on Saturday) as if it were inconsequential was one alternative, ruled out. The most obvious reason being that Mailer was consequential, as a writer and as a human being. The next question was, Ought I to write about him? A commanding reason for this is, I suppose, that I am, so to speak, the principal obituarist at National Review. Another reason is that years ago I had pretty extensive dealings with Norman Mailer.

  And so here I am, and I begin by acknowledging the truth of much that is being said about him, that he was a towering figure in American literary life for 60 years, almost unique in his search for notoriety and absolutely unrivaled in his coexistence with it. Roger Kimball of The New Criterion has written that Mailer “epitomized a certain species of macho, adolescent radicalism that helped to inure the wider public to displays of violence, anti-American tirades, and sexual braggadocio.”

  But to delve into one’s own little portfolio, Mailer’s career sliced by my own when in September 1962 two entrepreneurs rented the Medinah Temple in Chicago, which held over 4,000 people, having engaged Mailer and me to debate on the nature of the right wing in American politics. They found the hall all but sold out for the affair.

  It happened that everyone in the world who was sports-minded was in Chicago that week—to view the title match between world heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson and challenger Sonny Liston. Pugnacity reigned for those two or three days, and it pleased Mailer, who was complaining widely about his poverty, that Playboy magazine immediately contracted to publish his and my opening statements in their next issue.

  —

  A few years later I had Mailer as a guest on Firing Line. “Seeing Buckley and Mailer on the tube yesterday I can’t get over it,” one critic wrote in the New York Avatar, which was briefly the court circular of the underground press. “The greatest representation of the two extremes I’ve seen in a long time. Conservative meets liberal, right meets left, before meets after. Buckley didn’t know what the f*** Mailer was talking about, it just jammed his computer, he even had to resort to childish insults to try and keep up his end.” (“Norman Mailer decocts matters of the first philosophical magnitude from an examination of his own ordure, and I am not talking about his books,” I had said.)

  “Mailer’s steady stream of reject material,” Mel Lyman went on, “was just too much for Buckley’s computer to take, it started smoking. Computers don’t get mad, they just smoke when they’re overloaded. Buckley is a computer, Mailer is a man. A man can only be categorized and computerized to a certain extent, the greater part of him lies out of definition. Greatness can be recognized only. That is why Buckley went all to pieces when Mailer spoke of the ‘greatness’ he saw in Castro. Buckley could only see the un-American activities accredited to the man, Castro. He could only see him as far as he could define his actions. Mailer could look right at him, like a child, and see a great force, an inner strength, a fearlessness that had nothing to do with right or wrong. This is the sadness of Buckley and all that he represents, it cannot possibly recognize anything greater than itself for it takes all that it sees and reduces it to a lifeless, sterile set of rules and regulations….

  “[Buckley] truly believes he h
as an open mind,” this disciple of Mailer wrote. “He is open, you can say anything to him, but he has only one thing to say to you, and he is a master at finding ways to say it. I love Buckley, but he makes me very sad, he’s completely mastered the art of living in prison but Mailer’s mastered the art of what you do after you get out, and Buckley doesn’t even know there is an out.”

  “It didn’t start out that way,” Roger Kimball wrote. “Mailer was brought up in Brooklyn, ‘a nice Jewish boy’ as he once put it, from a middle-class family of first-generation immigrants. It was a background from which he had long endeavored to escape.” Norman Podhoretz, in his memoir Ex-Friends, observed that “Mailer would spend the rest of his life overcoming the stigma of this reputation as a ‘nice Jewish boy’ by doing as an adult all the hooliganish things he had failed to do in childhood and adolescence.” There was a hint of this struggle in his appearance on Firing Line, where I failed to absorb what the underground press was so eager for me to discover.

  —

  Mailer took two practical steps that bounced off our Chicago exchange. The first was to sue Playboy—on the grounds that, manifestly, his essay was worth more than the $5,000 paid to us. That done, he said he wished to explore with me a string of Buckley-Mailer debates throughout the country, “beginning in Carnegie Hall.”

  This initiative brought him and his wife to our house in Stamford, Conn., and I took him out on my 36-foot sailboat. He could not believe it when I turned the wheel over to him, pointing out a course to the end of the harbor. It was very cold by the time we had finished dinner, but he ordered his wife Jeannie to the back of his motorcycle, and they zoomed off to Brooklyn.

  There were other episodes. There was the night in New York when, after dinner, I said I needed to file a column, but he wasn’t ready to go home, pursuing us to our apartment nearby. Wobbling up the steps, his then-current wife passed out and was placed by my wife in a spare bedroom. Norman climbed upstairs with me to my study, and spoke disparagingly of the column as, paragraph after paragraph, I gave it to him to read. Finally he said it was time to go home, and we walked down the stairs to where his wife had been taken. But rousing her from that sleep defied any resource we were willing to deploy, so Norman announced fatalistically that, never mind, she would eventually rise, go out the street door, and get a cab. “Me, I’m going home, Slugger,” as he called my wife. I helped him find a cab.

  But Norman Mailer is a towering writer! So why this small talk? Perhaps because it no longer seems so very small. I said about Mailer a few years ago that he created the most beautiful metaphors in the language. I reiterate that. But I go further, wondering out loud whether the obituaries are, finally, drawing attention to the phenomenon of Norman Mailer from the appropriate perspective. The newspaper of record says of him, as though such a profile were routine, that he was married six times, that he nearly killed one wife with a penknife, and that he had nine children. What if he had had seven wives, the seventh of them abandoned there in somebody’s bedroom, waiting for a taxi to take her home, any home? Would that have claimed the obituarists’ attention? —WFB

  As if his life weren’t charmed enough, Buckley counted among his fans and regular lunch companions Vladimir Nabokov. Born in Russia and educated at Cambridge, Nabokov vaulted to greatness with Lolita (1957), a satirical novel about the erotic relationship between a twelve-year-old nymphet—a term Nabokov created—and a middle-aged professor. A resident of the United States for two decades before settling down for the last eighteen years of his life in Switzerland, Nabokov was an ardent reader of National Review and carried on a lengthy correspondence with Buckley. When WFB sent Nabokov an Ezra Pound anthology edited by WFB’s dear friend Hugh Kenner, Nabokov replied: “Though I detest Pound and the costume jewelry of his verse, I must say Kenner’s approach is very interesting.” “The National Review has always been a joy to read,” Nabokov wrote WFB on March 26, 1973, from Montreux, “and your articles in the Herald Tribune counteract wonderfully the evil and trash of its general politics.” Spurred by the vastness of the talent he was seeking to capture in portraiture, WFB’s eulogy for Nabokov is one of Buckley’s most literary: Note the seamless shifting back and forth of point of view (“Isn’t that right, Vera?”) and the allusive depiction of Vera Nabokov as a brooding, authoritative presence in her husband’s life and mind.

  “VN—RIP”

  National Review, July 22, 1977.

  [brackets and ellipses in original]

  The cover of this magazine had gone to press when word came in that Vladimir Nabokov was dead. I am sorry—not for the impiety; sorry that VN will not see the cover, or read the verse, which he’d have enjoyed. He’d have seen this issue days ahead of most Americans, because he received National Review by airmail, and had done so for several years. And when we would meet, which was every year, for lunch or dinner, he never failed to express pleasure with the magazine. In February, when I last saw him, he came down in the elevator, big, hunched, with his cane, carefully observed by Vera, white-haired, with the ivory skin and delicate features and beautiful face. VN was carrying a book, which he tendered me with some embarrassment—because it was inscribed. In one of his books, a collection of interviews and random fare, given over not insubstantially to the celebration of his favorite crotchets, he had said that one of the things he never did was inscribe books. Last year, called back unexpectedly to New York, I missed our annual reunion. Since then I had sent him my two most recent books, and about these he now expressed hospitable enthusiasm as we sat down at his table in the corner of the elegant dining room of the most adamantly unchanged hotel in Europe: I cannot imagine, for all its recent architectural modernization, that the Montreux-Palace was any different before the Russian revolution.

  He had been very ill, he said, and was saved by the dogged intervention of his son, Dmitri, who at the hospital ordered ministrations the poor doctors had not thought of—isn’t that right, Vera? Almost right—Vera is a stickler for precision. But he was writing again, back to the old schedule. What was that schedule? (I knew, but knew he liked to tell it.) Up in the morning about six, read the papers and a few journals, then cook breakfast for Vera in the warren of little rooms where they had lived for 17 years. After that he would begin writing, and would write all morning long, usually standing, on the cards he had specially cut to a size that suited him (he wrote on both sides, and collated them finally into books). Then a light lunch, then a walk, then a nap, and, in nimbler days, a little butterfly-chasing or tennis, then back to his writing until dinner time. Seven hours of writing, and he would produce 175 words. [What words!] Then dinner, and book-reading, perhaps a game of Scrabble in Russian. A very dull life, he said chortling with pleasure, and then asking questions about America, deploring the infelicitous Russian prose of Solzhenitsyn, assuring me that I was wrong in saying he had attended the inaugural meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom—he had never attended any organizational meeting of anything—isn’t that right, Vera? This time she nods her head and tells him to get on with the business of ordering from the menu. He describes with a fluent synoptic virtuosity the literary scene, the political scene, inflation, bad French, cupiditous publishers, the exciting breakthrough in his son’s operatic career, and what am I working on now?

  A novel, and you’re in it.

  What was that?

  You and Vera are in it. You have a daughter, and she becomes a Communist agent.

  He is more amused by this than Vera, but not all that amused. Of course I’ll send it to you, I beam. He laughs—much of the time he is laughing. How long will it take you to drive to the airport in Geneva?

  My taxi told me it takes “un petit heure.”

  Une petite heure [he is the professor]: that means fifty minutes. We shall have to eat quickly. He reminisces about his declination of my bid to go on Firing Line. It would have taken me two weeks of preparation, he says almost proudly, reminding me of his well known rule against improvising. Every word he ever spoke
before an audience had been written out and memorized, he assured me—isn’t that right, Vera? Well no, he would answer questions in class extemporaneously. Well obviously! He laughed. He could hardly program his students to ask questions to which he had the answers prepared! I demur: His extemporaneous style is fine, just fine; ah, he says, but before an audience, or before one of those…television…cameras, he would freeze. He ordered a brandy, and in a few minutes we rose, and he and Vera and I walked ever so slowly to the doors. “As long as Western civilization survives,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in the Times last Tuesday, “his reputation is safe. Indeed, he will probably emerge as one of the greatest artists our century has produced.” I said goodbye warmly, embracing Vera, taking his hand, knowing that probably I would never see again—never mind the artist—this wonderful human being. —WFB

  National Review greeted the death of Elvis Presley with a harsh unsigned editorial, two paragraphs long, allowing that he might rate “a footnote or two” in showbiz history. “Presley’s music, even at its best, was obscured by side issues like hair and hips; and the best lasted only a few short years before being overwhelmed by commercialism, white jumpsuits, and avoirdupois.” WFB must have been sailing during that editorial meeting, for he was an Elvis man! Something in Bill Buckley—the romantic subversive, perhaps—identified, very early on, in the fifties, with Elvis Presley and his (televised) revolution. He admired professionally Presley the performer, electrifying and dynamic, while judging his “the most beautiful singing voice of any human being on earth.” This enduring fascination culminated in Elvis in the Morning (2001), a novel that explored an alternative scenario by which Priscilla Beaulieu might have entered the singer’s life. Buckley never wrote a proper eulogy for Elvis, but in the column below, written after he made the pilgrimage to Graceland in 2000, he revealed the roots of his fascination with the Boy from Tupelo whose stage act threw open the doors of race and sex. WFB loved Elvis’s voice—but as a Catholic, he marveled at the divinity that modernity conferred on a secular King.